OK, so I'm a dwarf standing on giants' shoulders, but...
A life's work between two covers... er, almost a dozen pairs of covers with four to six hundred pages in between... that could nicely adorn about two feet of space on your bookshelf... a little smaller in size than the complete Calvin and Hobbes...
"Must... fight... temptation.... to read... brilliant and interesting stuff from C.J.S. Hayward.... until.... after... work!"
—Kent Nebergall
If you don't know me, my name is Christos Jonathan Seth Hayward, which I usually abbreviate "C.J.S. Hayward."
But my name has to my surprise trilettered on Facebook to "CSH," for "C.S. Hayward". As in, the natural successor to C.S. Lewis. I take that as a big compliment.
I'm an Eastern Orthodox author, who grew up reading C.S. Lewis, and has read almost everything he wrote, including some of those reviewed in C.S. Lewis: The Neglected Works, but have written many different things in many styles. Readers have written things about parts of the the colllection like (J. Morovich):
A collection of joyful, challenging, insightful, intelligent, mirthful and jarring essays written by an Eastern Orthodox author who is much too wise for his years.
and (D. Donovan):
Each piece is a delight: partially because each 'speaks' using a different voice and partly because a diversity of topics and cross-connections between theology and everyday living makes the entire collection a delight to read, packed with unexpected twists, turns, and everyday challenges.
And all this for some of this collection.
These pieces are a joy to read, and a gateway to help you enter a larger world, and open up doors that you never dreamed were there to open. Want to really see how "There are more things in Heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy?" Read these.
This little library includes nearly everything I’ve written--roughly 365 works in 12 volumes. The works in each volume are quite varied and most are short.) I omit software projects and the occasional interactive webpage. What all is offered? Works in this series include: novellas, short stories, poems and prayers, articles, and humor.
The one single work I would recommend most by far, and has been strongly recommended by others, is The Consolation of Theology. It is based on a classic The Consolation of Philosophy, and it is meant to give consolation, joy, strength, insights and things that are beyond mere insight. In a pandemic, a collapsing economy, and times when grandmas are buying shotguns, and perhaps other things in the pipeline, happiness is possible, in our reach, and it is real.
My story includes Protestant origins and a progressive discovery of Orthodox Christianity. Because this is a collection of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, I have set the works I would particularly recommend in bold in the Table of Contents.
I've also dropped the specified price per volume from $29.99 to $19.99.
(Please note: In the past, a bug prevented an avid reader furious he couldn't read more than the first half of the Kindle edition. The Kindle edition has one review at one star, from someone who read the first half of the book and was infuriated he couldn't read further. I've since fixed that bug, but the review is live and probably deterring people from purchasing. I can and do write well-received titles.)
You can always just buy the first one. (And maybe buy other volumes one at a time if you like it.)
You want to own this in paper!
I'd also like to make available downloads for cheap or for free, but I have a reason for posting this now. I want to keep my website, which has been online since the end of the 20th century, alive for however long I really can, but there are some things I can't control and I am getting ready, I hope, to visit a monastery. What comes of that I don't know, but I'd really like for you to own my books in paper. And I'm not sure how long it will be until Amazon makes a decision that will render my works no longer available. However, as a complement to the availability of paper books, I have available:
(One note:) I had hoped to make a free download available in Kindle and ePub, as well as an option of spending a few dollars on Amazon. However, one of the latest additions reads:
Dear Reader;
How do I love thee?
Let me count the ways. integer overflow error at 0x0
And when I tried to convert the text to an ePub to distribute freely, the conversion software errored out saying it had reached maximum recursion depth.
(The last two especially have so much content that they are bulky and incredibly unwieldy. If you'd like to just cut to the chase, read The Luddite's Guide to Technology.)
Light: Oddly, no. Or someone who knew him better than I did would say, "Obviously, no." He was too busy living, "Christ is risen!"
When he was asked why he was a prisoner in the camps that served as role models for Nazi death camps, he said, "I violated the rules of my profession." When he asked how, he said, "There was a new rule in place that I needed a permit to celebrate a marriage. And the officials were really dragging their heels, and people were assembled, a pig had been slaughtered, and still no permit came, the bride looked up at me and said, 'You baptized me. Why can't you marry me?' And so I married the couple, which was now an act of professional misconduct, and I became a prisoner for my professional misconduct." He also made some effort to make light-hearted excuses for the soldiers who destroyed his beehives; he apparently felt sorry for them.
And now we've left the older new rules of marriage in the dust; the new rules of his profession now are that people stand six feet apart in a service, and not more than ten people may attend, and not only for marriage, but all new services. The ancient pattern of worship, among Orthodox, heretics, pagans, all others of meeting together to worship are set aside for Hindu as much as Christian.
Dark: But don't we have promise of technology? A chicken in every pot, really?
Light: We have delivered, if you will, a tofu virtual chicken in every pot. Tofu is not a new invention, even if it is a form of plant protein. There are several cultures that have refined a proper use, and they invariably consume it in limited measure and never as a replacement for meat!
Dark: And there is a world to be said there. You do not know what a sacrament simple face-to-face conversation is until you have abhorrently grasped telepresence, until you have grasped relating to others in no way but tofupresence telepresence.
Light: So it is.
Dark: It is, and is not, a matter of technology. Perhaps one could say that it is centered on technology once one has stepped into and embraced the illusion. Dorothy Sayers, our close contemporary, speaks largely in the past about the framing of things that finds that "ideas, like machines, grow rust and need to be replaced," but she could almost as well have been writing about the future.
The business book Good to Great, which has been critiqued on various grounds as a book in business, is in fact a book in business with little pretension to be anything else, including spiritual gurudom. But it comments that actors in successful companies tend to downplay and de-emphasize technological advances even when they were being praised for groundbreaking advances. It commented, and pointedly not as a point about Einstein, that Einstein was Time Magazine's Person of the Century; relativity on his claim would have come within five or ten years without him, and the fact that Einstein eclipses Mother Theresa among Man of the Year laureates says nothing about Einstein (or Mother Theresa) and everything about us.
The book does not particularly talk about World War I showing off the U.S.'s mechanized new army and trying and failing to catch a Mexican bandit who was harassing Californians; it does talk about Vietnam and makes the case that "Our cool gadgets will win the war for us" has never in history been a real military strategy, or at least not the kind that can win wars.
Moreover, we keep getting installments of the new normal. It's like George Orwell's 1984 in which the realization sweeps past that Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.
In technology, there has been a widespread phenomenon of things becoming obsolete. CFL's are particularly interesting in that they were promoted on environmental grounds, were much more environmentally toxic than their predecessors, and we could have just used LED's a few years later. But this particular version of "Out with the old, in with the new" was not the classic obsolescence where oil lamps couldn't compete with electric light in the marketplace. And what is going on is rapid social change that is sliding over the line, or has already slid, from a technology transition where oil lamps mostly disappeared because they couldn't compete with incandescent bulbs, to a transition that is mandated in the next installment, where the dead hand of government intervention and not the invisible hand of the free market enforced the transition.
After a certain point, you didn't just include white people in pictures; there was an unspoken rule about other races being represented. Then, as one more installment of the new normal, some of the women were wearing hijabs. Sometime along the way came the first size 22 supermodel, and then the astonishing sight of swimsuit models with a medically healthy weight. As another installment, if you are going to do weddings, you have to do queer ones too. And this present installment looks very dubiously about one quarantine among others that will be wholly lifted once it has served its purpose. This quarantine is different in that it cuts presence but not telepresence tofupresence; things must be passed through the funnel of tofupresence, and this is not the same.
Light: Truly you have a dizzying grasp of the situation.
Darkness: But wait until I get going! Can you say anything like this?
Light: Three words known to the priest: "Christ is risen!" whether he had the faintest need to say them or not.
He lost a beehive that never really was his to begin with. Must he lose his temper too?
The emperor Valens, mercilessly sending into exile any bishop who displeased him, and having implanted Arianism into other Asia Minor provinces, suddenly appeared in Cappadocia for this same purpose. He sent the prefect Modestus to Saint Basil. He began to threaten the saint with the confiscation of his property, banishment, beatings, and even death.
Saint Basil said, “If you take away my possessions, you will not enrich yourself, nor will you make me a pauper. You have no need of my old worn-out clothing, nor of my few books, of which the entirety of my wealth is comprised. Exile means nothing to me, since I am bound to no particular place. This place in which I now dwell is not mine, and any place you send me shall be mine. Better to say: every place is God’s. Where would I be neither a stranger and sojourner (Ps. 38/39:13)? Who can torture me? I am so weak, that the very first blow would render me insensible. Death would be a kindness to me, for it will bring me all the sooner to God, for Whom I live and labor, and to Whom I hasten.”
The official was stunned by his answer. “No one has ever spoken so audaciously to me,” he said.
“Perhaps,” the saint remarked, “ that is because you’ve never spoken to a bishop before. In all else we are meek, the most humble of all. But when it concerns God, and people rise up against Him, then we, counting everything else as naught, look to Him alone. Then fire, sword, wild beasts and iron rods that rend the body, serve to fill us with joy, rather than fear.”
Reporting to Valens that Saint Basil was not to be intimidated, Modestus said, “Emperor, we stand defeated by a leader of the Church.”
Light: And perhaps this is helpful in viewing civil liberties that have never been ours to begin with; it's been easily decades that libertarians have worn T-shirts with the text of the Bill of Rights, on top of them stamped, VOID WHERE PROHIBITED BY LAW.
The attitude of a priest or a heirarch may be most fitting within Church authorities, but none of this is marked "for Church authorities only." The treasure is available to you and me, not just saints.
In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky took on the problem of evil, and he had no faint desire to water down his opponent's position to be easier to fight. He tried to state the case for evil as strongly as possible, and some of the book's inwards are gruesome. But the end shows a light touch in which good has triumphed all along. It is a bit like the Book of Job, where Satan tears off layer after layer of what Job can claim, to show that there is nothing inside, and then God peels off the nothing and shows that everything is inside. Some people think the book ends more strongly if Job does not in the end receive double for what has been taken, and Job just meets God. God disagrees. However, the position is worth mentioning because when Job loses his children and refuses to curse God, and then loses his health and refuses to curse God, this is as such victory. Job stands as a champion for God before the Slanderer, and the Slanderer's defeat begins as he acts on permission to harm Job, and God wins in his champion's response.
You are, I believe, one born in the Evangelical tradition?
Dark: Yes; I was received as a reconciled heretic. I have repented at length.
Light: I hope you have not repented of the fervor of faith or devoted study of the divine oracles of Scripture, but instead found a deeper root for what you only possessed in part.
And what do you believe about reconstructing the Early Church?
Dark: It is a cottage industry needed by Evangelicals, but entirely absent in the Early Church.
Light: You have answered well. You do well to have repented, but may I suggest something?
His Eminence Metropolitan KALLISTOS in The Orthodox Church, suggests that Orthodox Christians today may be in a position more like the Early Church than has since happened in history. And the suggestion has more gravitas now.
One finding in Church history, frustrating to some people today, was that at least some Roman persecution of the Church was not rightly understood simply as persecution of the Christian Church as such. There were, it was perceived, a sprawling bazaar's worth of corrupting religious influences, and Christians were not always persecuted under a conception of Christianity. Christianity was sometimes not seen as distinct, but somewhat more like a department of New Age's sprawl.
The saints' lives record, and there is no real reason for a scholar to find this impossible, that when Christians refused to bow deeply before the idol, officials asked if they would just give a pinch of incense. Now this may have been what it seemed in temptation, and in my thought it is a possible injected in the officials' minds by the diabolic host. However, the officials at least sometimes just wanted compliance, and hardly really wanted to make martyrs.
Furthermore, there is a social chasm surrounding holidays of pagan deities. Almost everybody in an area would be excited at a holiday, and Christians were saying something effectively inconceivable. In Chicago in recent years, there was a billboard showing the Chicago Bears and saying, "You're a fan or you're a tourist," and there was tremendous enthusiasm with people happily paying thousands of dollars for tickets for when the Cubs won the World Series. The position of the Early Christian communicating with pagans was, in some measure, what the position would be in Chicago when the Bears, Bulls, Hawks, or Cubs were doing some spectacular winning, and refused on principle to say a word of enthusiasm about either team. I do not otherwise wish to compare sports fandom to idolatry, but this may be suggested: that refusing on principle to give an inch's participation to a merry and pleasant holiday may not be something pagans conceived or rejected; in some cases it may be something they couldn't be able to conceive of as something one could reject.
Now when victories are made by gay rights, there is a clear and distinct case of opposition and a change of society, but the Christian who does not see such things as obvious improvements may run into some level of the "You're a fan or you're a tourist" syndrome. That one disagrees may be communicable; the substance or even nature of the disagreement is harder to convey even if it were to queerly meet a sympathetic ear.
And pan-eroticism is not just another point of contact between our time and that of the Early Church; it is one of many false forms of living. The ascendancy of tofupresence makes for Christianity like under Roman paganism; so for that matter does the ascendancy of Islam.
But in all this there is something easy to forget. When, under Rome, Constantine ended the persecution against Christians, saints complained that easy times rob the Church of her treasures. It is said that the faithful need temptations in order to be saved. And whether or not we are the New Early Christians matters surprisingly little. We are under the care of an awesome God, and Heaven is wherever the saints are. Even if our priest does get arrested for marrying a youth and maiden without the required permit.
And that is why even know, when the blows are coming, and the Antichrist keeps knocking at the door, there is nothing to fear where we are. For the Christians there is no Antichrist, only Christ, who is ever risen and ever alive.
Christ is risen! The story of the Passion is long and detailed. And three words, "Christ is risen!" peel off the nothing and show that everything is inside. The Antichrist is knocking at the door; I know that as well as you. But then Christ will triumph, and an eternal glory will come next to which the worst persecutions of the Antichrist do not possess a shadow that is measurable at all.
"St. Clive:" An Eastern Orthodox Author Looks Back at C.S. Lewis adopts an unusual perspective because most examinations of the spirituality of C.S. Lewis come from Western spiritual perspectives, and few adopt the approach of C.J.S. Hayward, who opens his book with a Lewis-type series of letters to a guardian angel, The Angelic Letters, a Heavenly analogue to The Screwtape Letters. The book is even more distinctive in reflecting back on Lewis from a perspective meant to be thoroughly Orthodox.
Readers might anticipate a dry analytical style typical of too many Lewis analysis and assessments, but Hayward includes a wry sense of observational humor, evident in the first lines of his survey where a reflection on scholarly footnote traditions ventures into comedic cultural inspection: As it is now solidly established practice to add an a footnote skittishly defending one’s own choices regarding "gendered pronouns," I would like to quote a couple of tweets. In response to a fellow user tweeting, "Nobody is safe in today’s society, man. It’s like walking on eggshells constantly. Someone will be offended, will be out to get you. It’s exhausting… and, I think somewhat that social media is to blame," Titania McGrath coolly answered, "The phrase ‘walking on eggshells’ is a microaggression against vegans. Reported and blocked. [Emoji depicting a white woman tending to her nails.]"
This said, Lewis was a huge influence on Hayward's Evangelical upbringing and religious perspectives and the starting point to his "pilgrimage from Narnia" (as one of his poems is titled) into Orthodoxy. St. Clive is not to be considered another scholarly inspection rehashing familiar spiritual pathways, but a unique compilation of Lewis-like reflections steeped in Orthodox beliefs and inspections for everyday readers. It produces a compilation of pieces that attempt to sound like Lewis himself, but which are original works meant to directly address these reflections and beliefs. This book is exciting, almost as if a hitherto unknown book of original works by C.S. Lewis had suddenly come to light.
The writings are presented in four sections that hold distinctly different tones and objectives. The first "...quotes him, builds on him, and challenges him to draw conclusions he may not have liked." The second focuses more on Hayward's writings and style, but with a nod to Lewis' influence. The third section addresses Lewis' affection for the book The Consolation of Philosophy and offers perspectives from Hayward on how its ideas and Lewis's expand different aspects of spiritual reflection; while the fourth section offers bibliographic keys to further pieces in the Lewis/Hayward tradition for newcomers who may be piqued by this collection's lively inspections, and who want more insights from other sources.
As far as the contentions themselves, "St. Clive" is a journeyman's venture into the traditions of the Orthodox Church and its relationship to mysticism. It provides a lively set of discourses considering such varied topics as the failure of Christianity to superimpose itself on the pagan custom of Halloween and the notion that science is just one of the "winnowing forks" available for denoting pathways beneficial to mankind (natural selection being yet another; especially as it applies to diet choices).
By now it should be evident that a series of dichotomies exist surrounding this effort, which is 'neither fish nor fowl' but a delightful compendium of reflections that represent something new. It's not a scholarly work per se, but its language will appeal to many in the scholarly community (particularly since any discussions of Lewis usually embrace this community more or less exclusively). It's also not an attempt to channel Lewis' approach and tone, though these reflective pieces are certainly reminiscent of C.S. Lewis. And it's not a singular examination of spiritual perspectives, but offers a wider-ranging series of discussions that defy pat categorization.
Indeed, this is one of the unique aspects of "St. Clive." What other treatise holds the ability to reach lay and scholarly audiences alike, creates a wider-ranging series of connections between his works and similar writings, and expands upon many concepts with an astute hand to spiritual, philosophical, and social reflection?
None: and this not only sets "St. Clive:" An Eastern Orthodox Author Looks Back at C.S. Lewis apart from any other considerations, but makes it accessible to a lay audience that might have only a minimal familiarity with Lewis or the Orthodox Way.
The body continued running in the polished steel corridor, a corridor without doors and windows and without any hint of how far above and below the local planet's surface it was, if indeed it was connected with a planet. The corridor had a competition mixture of gases, gravity, temporature and pressure, and so on, and as the body had been running, lights turned on and then off so the body was at the center of a moving swathe of rather clinical light. The body was running erratically, and several times it had nearly fallen; the mind was having trouble keeping the control of the body due to the body being taxed to its limit. Then the body tripped. The mind made a few brief calculations and jacked out of the body.
The body fell, not having the mind to raise its arms to cushion the fall, and fractured bones in the face, skull, and ribs. The chest heaved in and out with each labored breath, after an exertion that would be lethal in itself. A trickle of blood oozed out from a wound. The life of the abandoned body slowly ebbed away, and the lights abruptly turned off.
It would be a while before a robot would come to clean it up and prepare the corridor for other uses.
"And without further ado," another mind announced, "I would like to introduce the researcher who broke the record for a running body by more than 594789.34 microseconds. This body was a strictly biological body, with no cyberware besides a regulation mind-body interface, with no additional modifications. Adrenaline, for instance, came from the mind controlling the adrenal glands; it didn't even replace the brain with a chemical minifactory. The body had a magnificent athletic physique, clean and not encumbered by any reproductive system. And I still don't know how it kept the body alive and functioning, without external help, for the whole race. Here's Archon."
A sound came from a modular robot body at the center of the stage and was simultaneously transmitted over the net. "I see my cyborg utility body there; is that my Paidion wearing it? If so, I'm going to... no, wait. That would be harming my own body without having a good enough reason." A somewhat canned chuckle swept through the crowd. "I'm impressed; I didn't know that anyone would come if I called a physical conference, and I had no idea there were that many rental bodies within an appropriate radius." Some of the bodies winced. "But seriously, folks, I wanted to talk and answer some of your questions about how my body broke the record. It was more than generating nerve impulses to move the body to the maximum ability. And I would like to begin by talking about why I've called a physical conference in the first place.
"Scientific breakthroughs aren't scientific. When a mind solves a mathematical problem that hasn't been solved before, it does... not something impossible, but something that you will miss if you look for something possible. It conforms itself to the problem, does everything it can to permeate itself with the problem. Look at the phenomenology and transcripts of every major mathematical problem that has been solved in the past 1.7e18 microseconds. Not one follows how one would scientifically attempt a scientific breakthrough. And somehow scientifically optimized applications of mind to problems repeat past success but never do anything new.
"What you desire so ravenously to know is how I extended the methodologies to optimize the running body and the running mind to fit a calculated whole. And the answer is simple. I didn't."
A mind interrupted through cyberspace. "What do you mean, you didn't? That's as absurd as claiming that you built the body out of software. That's—"
Archon interrupted. "And that's what I thought too. What I can tell you is this. When I grew and trained the body, I did nothing else. That was my body, my only body. I shut myself off from cyberspace—yes, that's why you couldn't get me—and did not leave a single training activity to another mind or an automatic process. I trained myself to the body as if it were a mathematics problem and tried to soak myself in it."
A rustle swept through the crowd.
"And I don't blame you if you think I'm a crackpot, or want to inspect me for hostile tampering. I submit to inspection. But I tried to be as close as possible to the body, and that's it. And I shaved more than 594789.34 microseconds off the record." Archon continued after a momentary pause. "I specifically asked for bodily presences for this meeting; call me sentimental or crackpot or trying to achieve with your bodies what I failed to achieve in that body, but I will solicit questions from those who have a body here first, and address the network after everybody present has had its chance."
A flesh body stood up and flashed its face. "What are you going to say next? Not only that you became like a body, but that the body became like a mind?"
Archon went into private mode, filtered through and rejected 3941 responses, and said, "I have not analyzed the body to see if it contained mind-like modifications and do not see how I would go about doing such a thing."
After several other questions, a robot said, "So what's next?"
Archon hesitated, and said, "I don't know." It hesitated again, and said, "I'm probably going to make a Riemannian 5-manifold of pleasure states. I plan on adding some subtle twists so not only will it be pleasurable; minds will have a real puzzle figuring out exactly what kind of space they're in. And I'm not telling what the manifold will be like, or even telling for sure that it will genuinely have only 5 dimensions."
The robot said, "No, you're not. You're not going to do that at all." Then the mind jacked out and the body fell over, inert.
Another voice, issuing from two standard issue cyborg bodies, said, "Has the body been preserved, and will it be available for internal examination?"
Archon heard the question, and answered it as if it were giving the question its full attention. But it could only give a token of its consciousness. The rest of its attention was on tracing the mind that had jacked out of the robot body. And it was a slippery mind. Archon was both frustrated and impressed when it found no trace.
It was skilled at stealth and tracing, having developed several methodologies for each, and something that could vanish without a trace—had the mind simply destroyed itself? That possibility bothered Archon, who continued tracing after it dismissed the assembly.
Archon looked for distractions, and finding nothing better it began trying to sound out how it might make the pleasure space. What should the topology be? The pleasures should be—Archon began looking at the kinds of pleasure, and found elegant ways to choose a vector space basis for less than four dimensions or well over eight, but why should it be a tall order to do exactly five? Archon was far from pleasure when a message came, "Not your next achievement, Archon?"
Archon thought it recognized something. "Have you tried a five dimensional pleasure manifold before? How did you know this would happen?"
"I didn't."
"Ployon!"
Ployon said, "It took you long enough! I'm surprised you needed the help."
Ployon continued, "And since there aren't going to be too many people taking you seriously—"
Archon sent a long stream of zeroes to Ployon.
Ployon failed to acknowledge the interruption. "—from now on, I thought you could use all the help you could get."
Archon sent another long stream of zeroes to Ployon.
When Ployon remained silent, Archon said, "Why did you contact me?"
Ployon said, "Since you're going to do something interesting, I wanted to see it live."
Archon said, "So what am I going to do?"
"I have no idea whatsoever, but I want to see it."
"Then how do you know it is interesting?"
"You said things that would destroy your credibility, and you gave an evasive answer. It's not every day I get to witness that."
Archon sent a long stream of zeroes to Ployon.
Ployon said, "I'm serious."
"Then what can I do now?"
"I have no idea whatsoever, but you might take a look at what you're evading."
"And what am I evading?"
"Try asking yourself. Reprocess the transcripts of that lecture. Your own private transcript."
Archon went through the file, disregarding one moment and then scanning everything else. "I find nothing."
"What did you just disregard?"
"Just one moment where I said too much."
"And?"
Archon reviewed that moment. "I don't know how to describe it. I can describe it three ways, all contradictory. I almost did it—I almost forged a connection between mind and matter. And yet I failed. And yet somehow the body ran further, and I don't think it was simply that I learned to control it better. What I achieved only underscored what I failed to achieve, like an optimization that needs to run for longer than the age of the universe before it starts saving time."
Archon paused before continuing, "So I guess what I'm going to do next is try to bridge the gap between mind and matter for real. Besides the mundane relationship, I mean, forge a real connection that will bridge the chasm."
Ployon said, "It can't be done. It's not possible. I don't even understand why your method of training the body will work. You seem to have made more of a connection than has ever been done before. I'm tempted to say that when you made your presentation, you ensured that no one else will do what you did. But that's premature and probably wrong."
"Then what am I going to do next? How am I going to bridge that gap?"
Ployon said, "I saw something pretty interesting in what you did achieve—you know, the part where you destroyed your credibility. That's probably more interesting than your breaking the record."
Ployon ran through some calculations before continuing, "And at any rate, you're trying to answer the wrong question."
Archon said, "Am I missing the interesting question? The question of how to forge a link across the chasm between matter and spirit is—"
"Not nearly as interesting as the question of what it would mean to bridge that chasm."
Archon stopped, reeling at the implication. "I think it's time for me to make a story in a virtual world."
Ployon said, "Goodbye now. You've got some thinking to do."
Archon began to delve. What would the world be like if you added to it the ability for minds to connect with bodies, not simply as it had controlled his racing body, but really? What would it be like if the chasm could be bridged? It searched through speculative fiction, and read a story where minds could become bodies—which made for a very good story, but when it seriously tried to follow its philosophical assumptions, it realized that the philosophical assumptions were not the focus. It read and found several stories where the chasm could be bridged, and—
There was no chasm. Or would not be. And that meant not taking the real world and adding an ability to bridge a chasm, but a world where mind and matter were immanent. After rejecting a couple of possible worlds, Archon considered a world where there were only robots, and where each interfaced to the network as externally as to the physical world. Each mind was firmware burned into the robot's circuits, and for some still to be worked out reason it couldn't be transferred. Yes, this way... no. Archon got some distance into this possible world before a crawling doubt caught up to it. It hadn't made minds and bodies connect; it'd only done a first-rate job of covering up the chasm. Maybe organic goo held promise. A world made only of slime? No, wait, that was... and then it thought—
Archon dug recursively deeper and deeper, explored, explored. It seemed to be bumping into something. Its thoughts grew strange; it calculated for billions and even trillions of microseconds, encountered something stranger than—
Something happened.
How much time had passed?
Archon said, "Ployon! Where are you?"
Ployon said, "Enjoying trying to trace your thoughts. Not much success. I've disconnected now."
"Imagine a mind and a body, except that you don't have a mind and a body, but a mind-body unity, and it—"
"Which do you mean by 'it'? The mind or the body? You're being careless."
"Humor me. I'm not being careless. When I said, 'it', I meant both—"
"Both the mind and the body? As in 'they'?"
"Humor me. As in, 'it.' As in a unity that doesn't exist in our world."
"Um... then how do you refer to just the mind or just the body? If you don't distinguish them..."
"You can distinguish the mind and the body, but you can never separate them. And even though you can refer to just the mind or just the body, normally you would talk about the unity. It's not enough to usually talk about 'they;' you need to usually talk about 'it.'"
"How does it connect to the network?"
"There is a kind of network, but it can't genuinely connect to it."
"What does it do when its body is no longer serviceable."
"It doesn't—I haven't decided. But it can't jump into something else."
"So the mind simply functions on its own?"
"Ployon, you're bringing in cultural baggage. You're—"
"You're telling me this body is a prison! Next you're going to tell me that it can't even upgrade the body with better parts, and that the mind is like a real mind, only it's shut in on twenty sides. Are you describing a dystopia?"
"No. I'm describing what it means that the body is real to the mind, that it is not a mind that can use bodies but a mind-body unity. It can't experience any pleasure it can calculate, but its body can give it pleasure. It runs races, and not only does the mind control the body—or at least influence it; the body is real enough that the mind can't simply control it perfectly—but the body affects the mind. When I run a race, I am controlling the body, but I could be doing twenty other things as well and only have a token presence at the mind-body interface. It's very different; there is a very real sense in which the mind is running when the body is running a race.
"Let me guess. The mind is a little robot running around a racetrack hollowed out from the body's brain. And did you actually say, races, plural? Do they have nanotechnology that will bring a body back after its been run down? And would anyone actually want to race a body that had been patched that way?"
"No. I mean that because their bodies are part of them, they only hold races which they expect the racers to be able to live through."
"That's a strange fetish. Don't they ever have a real race?"
"They have real races, real in a way that you or I could never experience. When they run, they aren't simply manipulating something foreign to the psyche. They experience pleasures they only experience running."
"Are you saying they only allow them to experience certain pleasures while running?"
"No. They—"
"Then why don't they allow the pleasures at other times? That's a stranger fetish than—"
"Because they can't. Their bodies produce certain pleasures in their minds when they're running, and they don't generate these pleasures unless the body is active."
"That raises a number of problems. It sounds like you're saying the body has a second mind, because it would take a mind to choose to let the 'real' mind experience pleasure. It—"
Archon said, "You're slipping our chasm between the body and mind back in, and it's a chasm that doesn't exist. The body produces pleasure the mind can't produce by itself, and that is only one of a thousand things that makes the race more real than them for us. Think about the achievements you yourself made when you memorized the map of the galaxy. Even if that was a straightforward achievement, that's something you yourself did, not something you caused an external memory bank to do. Winning a race is as real for that mind-body as something it itself did as the memorization was for you. It's something it did, not simply something the mind caused the body to do. And if you want to make a causal diagram, don't draw something linear. In either direction. Make a reinforced web, like computing on a network."
Ployon said, "I still don't find it convincing."
Archon paused. "Ok, let's put that in the background. Let me approach that on a different scale. Time is more real. And no—this is not because they measure time more precisely. Their bodies are mortal, and this means that the community of mind-body unities is always changing, like a succession of liquids flowing through a pipe. And that means that it makes a difference where you are in time."
Archon continued. "I could say that their timeline is dynamic in a way that ours is not. There is a big change going on, a different liquid starting to flow through the pipe. It is the middle age, when a new order of society is being established and the old order is following away."
Ployon said, "So what's the old technology, and what's the new one?"
"It's deeper than that. Technological society is appearing. The old age is not an abandoned technology. It is organic life, and it is revealing itself as it is disintegrating."
"So cyborgs have—"
"There are no cyborgs, or very few."
"And let me guess. They're all cybernetic enhancements to originally biological things."
"It's beyond that. Cybernetic replacements are only used to remedy weak bodies."
"Wouldn't it be simpler to cull the—"
"The question of 'simpler' is irrelevant. Few of them even believe in culling their own kind. Most believe that it is—'inexpedient' isn't quite right—to destroy almost any body, and it's even more inadvisable to destroy one that is weak."
"In the whole network, why?"
"I'm still working that out. The easiest part to explain has to do with their being mind-body unities. When you do something to a body, you're not just doing it to that body. You're doing it to part of a pair that interpenetrates in the most intimate fashion. What you do to the body you do to the mind. It's not just forcibly causing a mind to jack out of a body; it's transferring the mind to a single processor and then severing the processor from the network."
"But who would... I can start to see how real their bodies would be to them, and I am starting to be amazed. What else is real to them?"
"I said earlier that most of them are hesitant to cull the weak, that they view it as inexpedient. But efficiency has nothing to do with it. It's connected to—it might in fact be more efficient, but there is something so much bigger than efficiency—"
Ployon cut it off. "Bigger than efficiency?"
Archon said, "There is something that is real to them that is not real to us that I am having trouble grasping myself. For want of a more proper label, I'll call it the 'organic'."
"Let's stop a minute. I'll give you a point for how things would be different if we were limited to one body, but you're hinting at something you want to call 'organic', which is very poorly defined, and your explanations seem to be strange when they are not simply hazy. Isn't this a red flag?"
"Where have you seen that red flag before?"
"When people were wildly wrong but refused to admit it."
"And?"
"That's pretty much it."
Archon was silent.
Ployon said, "And sometimes it happens when a researcher is on to something big... oh... so what exactly is this nexus of the 'organic'?"
"I can't tell you. At least, not directly. The mind-body unities are all connected to a vast (to them) biological network in which each has a physical place—"
"That's original! Come on; everybody's trivia archive includes the fact that all consciousness comes out of a specific subnet of physical processors, or some substitute for that computing machinery. I can probably zero in on where you're—hey! Stop jumping around from subnet to subnet—can I take that as an acknowledgment that I can find your location? I—"
"The location is not part of a trivia encyclopedia for them. It's something as inescapable as the flow of time—"
"Would you like me to jump into a virtual metaphysics where time doesn't flow?"
"—correction, more inescapable than the flow of time, and it has a million implications for the shape of life. Under the old order, the unities could connect only with other unities which had bodies in similar places—"
"So, not only is their 'network' a bunch of slime, but when they look for company they have to choose from the trillion or however many other unities whose bodies are on the same node?"
"Their communities are brilliant in a way we can never understand; they have infinitesmally less potential partners available.
"You mean their associations are forced on them."
"To adapt one of their sayings, in our network you connect with the minds you like; in their network you like the people you connect with. That collapses a rich and deeper maxim, but what is flattened out is more organic than you could imagine."
"And I suppose that in a way that is very deep, but you conveniently have trouble describing, their associations are greater."
"We are fortunate to have found a way to link in our shared tastes. And we will disassociate when our tastes diverge—"
"And shared tastes have nothing to do with them? That's—"
"Shared tastes are big, but there is something else bigger. A great deal of the process of making unities into proper unities means making their minds something you can connect with."
"Their minds? Don't you mean the minds?"
"That locution captures something that—they are not minds that have a body as sattelite. One can say, 'their' minds because they are mind-body unities. They become greater—in a way that we do not—by needing to be in association with people they could not choose."
"Pretty convenient how every time having a mind linked to a body means a limitation, that limitation makes them better."
"If you chose to look at it, you would find a clue there. But you don't find it strange when the best game players prosper within the limits of the game. What would game play be if players could do anything they wanted?"
"You've made a point."
"As I was going to say, their minds develop a beauty, strength, and discipline that we never have occasion to develop."
"Can you show me this beauty?"
"Here's a concrete illustration. One thing they do is take organisms which have been modified from their biological environment, and keep them in the artificial environments which you'd say they keep their bodies in. They—"
"So even though they're stuck with biological slime, they're trying to escape it and at least pretend it's not biological? That sounds sensible."
"Um, you may have a point, but that isn't where I was hoping to go. Um... While killing another unity is something they really try to avoid, these modified organisms enjoy no such protection. And yet—"
"What do they use them for? Do the enhancements make them surrogate industrial robots? Are they kept as emergency rations?"
"The modifications aren't what you'd consider enhancements; most of them couldn't even survive in their feral ancestors' environments, and they're not really suited to the environments they live in. Some turn out to serve some 'useful' purpose... but that's a side benefit, irrelevant to what I'm trying to let you see. And they're almost never used as food."
"Then what's the real reason? They must consume resources. Surely they must be used for something. What do they do with them?"
"I'm not sure how to explain this..."
"Be blunt."
"It won't sting, but it could lead to confusion that would take a long time to untangle."
"Ok..."
"They sense the organisms with their cameras, I mean eyes, and with the boundaries of their bodies, and maybe talk to them."
"Do the organisms give good advice?"
"They don't have sophisticated enough minds for that."
"Ok, so what else is there?"
"About all else is that they do physical activities for the organisms' benefit."
"Ok. And what's the real reason they keep them? There's got to be something pragmatic."
"That's related to why I brought it up. It has something to do with the organic, something big, but I can't explain it."
"It seems like you can only explain a small part of the organic in terms of our world, and the part you can explain isn't very interesting."
"That's like saying that when a three-dimensional solid intersects a plane in two dimensions, the only part that can be detected in the plane is a two-dimensional cross-section (the three-dimensional doesn't fit in their frame of reference) so "three-dimensional" must not refer to anything real. The reason you can't make sense of the world I'm describing in terms of our world is because it contains real things that are utterly alien to us."
"Like what? Name one we haven't discussed."
"Seeing the trouble I had with the one concept, the organic, I'm not going to take on two at once."
"So the reason these unities keep organisms is so abstract and convoluted that it takes a top-flight mind to begin to grapple with."
"Not all of them keep organisms, but most of them find the reason—it's actually more of an assumption—so simple and straightforward that they would never think it was metaphysical."
"So I've found something normal about them! Their minds are of such an incredibly high caliber that—"
"No. Most of their minds are simpler than yours or mine, and furthermore, the ability to deal with abstractions doesn't enter the picture from their perspective."
"I don't know what to make of this."
"You understand to some degree how their bodies are real in a way we can never experience, and time and space are not just 'packaging' to what they do. Their keeping these organisms... the failure of the obvious reasons should tell you something, like an uninteresting two-dimensional cross section of a three-dimensional solid. If the part we can understand does not justify the practice, there might be something big out of sight."
"But what am I to make of it now?"
"Nothing now, just a placeholder. I'm trying to convey what it means to be organic."
"Is the organic in some relation to normal technology?"
"The two aren't independent of each other."
"Is the organic defined by the absence of technology?"
"Yes... no... You're deceptively close to the truth."
"Do all unities have the same access to technology?"
"No. There are considerable differences. All have a technology of sorts, but it would take a while to explain why some of it is technology. Some of them don't even have electronic circuits—and no, they are not at an advanced enough biotechnology level to transcend electronic circuits. But if we speak of technology we would recognize, there are major differences. Some have access to no technology; some have access to the best."
"And the ones without access to technology are organic?"
"Yes. Even if they try to escape it, they are inescapably organic."
"But the ones which have the best technology are the least organic."
"Yes."
"Then maybe it was premature to define the organic by the absence of technology, but we can at least make a spectrum between the organic and the technological."
"Yes... no... You're even more deceptively close to the truth. And I emphasize, 'deceptively'. Some of the people who are most organic have the best technology—"
"So the relationship breaks down? What if we disregard outliers?"
"But the root problem is that you're trying to define the organic with reference to technology. There is some relationship, but instead of starting with a concept of technology and using it to move towards a concept of the organic, it is better to start with the organic and move towards a concept of technology. Except that the concept of the organic doesn't lead to a concept of technology, not as we would explore it. The center of gravity is wrong. It's like saying that we have our thoughts so that certain processors can generate a stream of ones and zeroes. It's backwards enough that you won't find the truth by looking at its mirror image."
"Ok, let me process it another way. What's the difference between a truly organic consciousness, and the least organic consciousness on the net?"
"That's very simple. One exists and the other doesn't."
"So all the... wait a minute. Are you saying that the net doesn't have consciousness?"
"Excellent. You got that one right."
"In the whole of cyberspace, how? How does the net organize and care for itself if it doesn't contain consciousness?"
"It is not exactly true to say that they do have a net, and it is not exactly true to say that they do not have a net. What net they have, began as a way to connect mind-body unities—without any cyberware, I might add."
"Then how do they jack in?"
"They 'jack in' through hardware that generates stimulation for their sensory organs, and that they can manipulate so as to put data into machines."
"How does it maintain itself?"
"It doesn't and it can't. It's maintained by mind-body unities."
"That sounds like a network designed by minds that hate technology. Is the network some kind of joke? Or at least intentionally ironic? Or designed by people who hate technology and wanted to have as anti-technological of a network as they can?"
"No; the unities who designed it, and most of those using it, want as sophisticated technological access as they can have."
"Why? Next you're going to tell me that the network is not one single network, but a hodge podge of other things that have been retraoctively reinterpreted as network technology and pressed into service."
"That's also true. But the reason I was mentioning this is that the network is shaped by the shadow of the organic."
"So the organic is about doing things as badly as you can?"
"No."
"Does it make minds incompetent?"
"No. Ployon, remember the last time you made a robot body for a race—and won. How well would that body have done if you tried to make it work as a factory?"
"Atrocious, because it was optimized for—are you saying that the designers were trying to optimize the network as something other than a network?"
"No; I'm saying that the organic was so deep in them that unities who could not care less for the organic, and were trying to think purely in terms of technology, still created with a thick organic accent."
"So this was their best attempt at letting minds disappear into cyberspace?"
"At least originally, no, although that is becoming true. The network was part of what they would consider 'space-conquering tools.' Meaning, although not all of them thought in these terms, tools that would destroy the reality of place for them. The term 'space-conquering tools' was more apt than they realized, at least more apt than they realized consciously; one recalls their saying, 'You cannot kill time without injuring eternity.'"
"What does 'eternity' mean?"
"I really don't want to get into that now. Superficially it means that there is something else that relativizes time, but if you look at it closely, you will see that it can't mean that we should escape time. The space-conquering tools in a very real sense conquered space, by making it less real. Before space-conquering tools, if you wanted to communicate with another unity, you had to somehow reach that unity's body. The position in space of that body, and therefore the body and space, were something you could not escape. Which is to say that the body and space were real—much more real than something you could look up. And to conquer space ultimately meant to destroy some of its reality."
"But the way they did this betrays that something is real to them. Even if you could even forget that other minds were attached to bodies, the space-conquering tools bear a heavy imprint from something outside of the most internally consistent way to conquer space. Even as the organic is disintegrating, it marks the way in which unities flee the organic."
"So the network was driving the organic away, at least partly."
"It would be more accurate to say that the disintegration of the organic helped create the network. There is feedback, but you've got the arrow of causality pointing the wrong way."
"Can you tell me a story?"
"Hmm... Remember the racer I mentioned earlier?"
"The mind-body unity who runs multiple races?"
"Indeed. Its favorite story runs like this—and I'll leave in the technical language. A hungry fox saw some plump, juicy green grapes hanging from a high cable. He tried to jump and eat them, and when he realized they were out of reach, he said, 'They were probably sour anyway!'"
"What's a grape?"
"Let me answer roughly as it would. A grape is a nutritional bribe to an organism to carry away its seed. It's a strategic reproductive organ."
"What does 'green' mean? I know what green electromagnetic radiation is, but why is that word being applied to a reproductive organ?"
"Some objects absorb most of a spectrum of what they call light, but emit a high proportion of light at that wavelength—"
"—which, I'm sure, is taken up by their cameras and converted to information in their consciousness. But why would such a trivial observation be included?"
"That is the mechanism by which green is delivered, but not the nature of what green is. And I don't know how to explain it, beyond saying that mechanically unities experience something from 'green' objects they don't experience from anything else. It's like a dimension, and there is something real to them I can't explain."
"What is a fox? Is 'fox' their word for a mind-body unity?"
"A fox is an organism that can move, but it is not considered a mind-body unity."
"Let me guess at 'hungry'. The fox needed nutrients, and the grapes would have given them."
"The grapes would have been indigestible to the fox's physiology, but you've got the right idea."
"What separates a fox from a mind-body unity? They both seem awfully similar—they have bodily needs, and they can both talk. And, for that matter, the grape organism was employing a reproductive strategy. Does 'organic' mean that all organisms are recognized as mind-body unities?"
"Oh, I should have explained that. The story doesn't work that way; most unities believe there is a big difference between killing a unity and killing most other organisms; many would kill a moving organism to be able to eat its body, and for that matter many would kill a fox and waste the food. A good many unities, and certainly this one, believes there is a vast difference between unities and other organisms. They can be quite organic while killing organisms for food. Being organic isn't really an issue of treating other organisms just like mind-body unities."
Archon paused for a moment. "What I was going to say is that that's just a literary device, but I realize there is something there. The organic recognizes that there's something in different organisms, especially moving ones, that's closer to mind-body unities than something that's not alive."
"Like a computer processor?"
"That's complex, and it would be even more complex if they really had minds on a computer. But for now I'll say that unless they see computers through a fantasy—which many of them do—they experience computers as logic without life. And at any rate, there is a literary device that treats other things as having minds. I used it myself when saying the grape organism employed a strategy; it isn't sentient. But their willingness to employ that literary mechanism seems to reflect both that a fox isn't a unity and that a fox isn't too far from being a unity. Other life is similar, but not equal."
"What kind of cable was the grape organism on? Which part of the net was it used for?"
"That story is a survival from before the transition from organic to technological. Advanced technology focuses on information—"
"Where else would technology focus?"
"—less sophisticated technology performs manual tasks. That story was from before cables were used to carry data."
"Then what was the cable for?"
"To support the grape organism."
"Do they have any other technology that isn't real?"
"Do you mean, 'Do they have any other technology that doesn't push the envelope and expand what can be done with technology?'"
"Yes."
"Then your question shuts off the answer. Their technology doesn't exist to expand what technology can do; it exists to support a community in its organic life."
"Where's the room for progress in that?"
"It's a different focus. You don't need another answer; you need another question. And, at any rate, that is how this world tells the lesson of cognitive dissonance, that we devalue what is denied to us."
Ployon paused. "Ok; I need time to process that story—may I say, 'digest'?"
"Certainly."
"But one last question. Why did you refer to the fox as 'he'? Its supposed mind was—"
"In that world, a unity is always male ('he') or female ('she'). A neutered unity is extraordinarily rare, and a neutered male, a 'eunuch', is still called 'he.'"
"I'm familiar enough with those details of biology, but why would such an insignificant detail—"
"Remember about being mind-body unities. And don't think of them as bodies that would ordinarily be neutered. That's how new unities come to be in that world, with almost no cloning and no uterine replicators—"
"They really are slime!"
"—and if you only understand the biology of it, you don't understand it."
"What don't I understand?"
"You're trying to understand a feature of language that magnifies something insignificant, and what would cause the language to do that. But you're looking for an explanation in the wrong place. Don't think that the bodies are the most sexual parts of them. They're the least sexual; the minds tied to those bodies are even more different than the bodies. The fact that the language shaped by unities for a long time distinguishes 'masculine' and 'feminine' enough to have the difference written into 'it', so that 'it' is 'he' or 'she' when speaking of mind-body unities."
"Hmm... Is this another dimension to their reality that is flattened out in ours? Are their minds always thinking about that act?"
"In some cases that's not too far from the truth. But you're looking for the big implication in the wrong place. This would have an influence if a unity never thought about that act, and it has influence before a unity has any concept of that act."
"Back up a bit. Different question. You said this was their way of explaining the theory of cognitive dissonance. But it isn't. It describes one event in which cognitive dissonance occurs. It doesn't articulate the theory; at most the theory can be extracted from it. And worse, if one treats it as explaining cognitive dissonance, it is highly ambiguous about where the boundaries of cognitive dissonance are. One single instance is very ambiguous about what is and is not another instance. This is an extraordinarily poor method of communication!"
"It is extraordinarily good, even classic, communication for minds that interpenetrate bodies. Most of them don't work with bare abstractions, at least not most of the time. They don't have simply discarnate minds that have been stuck into bodies. Their minds are astute in dealing with situations that mind-body unities will find themselves in. And think about it. If you're going to understand how they live, you're going to have to understand some very different, enfleshed ways of thought. No, more than that, if you still see the task of understanding ways of thought, you will not understand them."
"So these analyses do not help me in understanding your world."
"So far as you are learning through this kind of analysis, you will not understand... but this analysis is all you have for now."
"Are their any other stories that use an isomorphic element to this one?"
"I don't know. I've gotten deep enough into this world that I don't keep stories sorted by isomorphism class."
"Tell me another story the way that a storyteller there would tell it; there is something in it that eludes me."
Archon said, "Ok... The alarm clock chimed. It was a device such that few engineers alive fully understood its mechanisms, and no man could tell the full story of how it came to be, of the exotic places and activities needed to make all of its materials, or the logistics to assemble them, or the organization and infrastructure needed to bring together all the talent of those who designed, crafted, and maintained them, or any other of sundry details that would take a book to list. The man abruptly shifted from the vivid kaleidoscope of the dreaming world to being awake, and opened his eyes to a kaleidoscope of sunrise colors and a room with the song of birds and the song of crickets. Outside, the grass grew, the wind blew, a busy world was waking up, and the stars continued their ordered and graceful dance. He left the slumbering form of the love of his life, showered, and stepped out with his body fresh, clean, and beautifully adorned. He stopped to kiss the fruit of their love, a boy cooing in his crib, and drove past commuters, houses, pedestrians, and jaybirds with enough stories to tell that they could fill a library to overflowing.
Archon continued, "After the majestic and ordered dance on the freeway brought him to his destination safe, unharmed, on time, and focusing on his work, he spent a day negotiating the flow of the human treasure of language, talking, listening, joking, teasing, questioning, enjoying the community of his co-workers, and cooperating to make it possible for a certain number of families to now enter the homes of their dreams. In the middle of the day he stopped to eat, nourishing a body so intricate that the state of the art in engineering could not hold a candle to his smallest cell. This done, he continued to use a spirit immeasurably greater than his body to pursue his work. Needless to say, the universe, whose physics alone is beyond our current understanding, continued to work according to all of its ordered laws and the spiritual world continued to shine. The man's time at work passed quickly, with a pitter-patter of squirrels' feet on the roof of their office, and before long he entered the door and passed a collection with copies of most of the greatest music produced by Western civilization—available for him to listen to, any time he pleased. The man absently kissed his wife, and stepped away, breathing the breath of God.
"'Hi, Honey!' she said. 'How was your day?'
"'Somewhat dull. Maybe something exciting will happen tomorrow.'"
Ployon said, "There's someone I want to meet who is free now, so I'll leave in a second... I'm not going to ask about all the technical vocabulary, but I wanted to ask: Is this story a farce? It describes a unity who has all these ludicrous resources, and then it—"
"—he—"
"—he says the most ludicrous thing."
"What you've said is true. The story is not a farce."
"But the story tells of things that are momentous."
"I know, but people in that world do not appreciate many of these things."
"Why? They seem to have enough access to these momentous resources."
"Yes, they certainly do. But most of the unities are bathed in such things and do not think that they are anything worth thinking of."
"And I suppose you're going to tell me that is part of their greatness."
"To them these things are just as boring as jacking into a robotically controlled factory and using the machines to assemble something."
"I see. At least I think I see. And I really need to be going now... but one more question. What is 'God'?"
"Please, not that. Please, any word but that. Don't ask about that."
"I'm not expected, and you've piqued my curiosity."
"Don't you need to be going now?"
"You've piqued my curiosity."
Archon was silent.
Ployon was silent.
Archon said, "God is the being who made the world."
"Ok, so you are God."
"Yes... no. No! I am not God!"
"But you created this world?"
"Not like God did. I envisioned looking in on it, but to that world, I do not exist."
"But God exists?"
"Yes... no... It is false to say that God exists and it is false to say that God does not exist."
"So the world is self-contradictory? Or would it therefore be true to say that God both exists and does not exist?"
"No. Um... It is false to say that God exists and it is false to say that God exists as it is false to say that a square is a line and it is false to say that a square is a point. God is reflected everywhere in the world: not a spot in the entire cosmos is devoid of God's glory—"
"A couple of things. First, is this one more detail of the universe that you cannot explain but is going to have one more dimension than our world?"
"God is of higher dimension than that world."
"So our world is, say, two dimensional, that world is three dimensional, and yet it somehow contains God, who is four dimensional?"
"God is not the next step up."
"Then is he two steps up?"
"Um..."
"Three? Four? Fifty? Some massive power of two?"
"Do you mind if I ask you a question from that world?"
"Go ahead."
"How many minds can be at a point in space?"
"If you mean, 'thinking about', there is no theoretical limit; the number is not limited in principle to two, three, or... Are you saying that God has an infinite number of dimensions?"
"You caught that quick; the question is a beautiful way of asking whether a finite or an infinite number of angels can dance on the head of a pin, in their picturesque language."
"That question is very rational. But returning to the topic, since God has an infinite number of dimensions—"
"In a certain sense. It also captures part of the truth to say that God is a single point—"
"Zero dimensions?"
"God is so great not as to need any other, not to need parts as we have. And, by the way, the world does not contain God. God contains the world."
"I'm struggling to find a mathematical model that will accommodate all of this."
"Why don't you do something easier, like find an atom that will hold a planet?"
"Ok. As to the second of my couple of things, what is glory?"
"It's like the honor that we seek, except that it is immeasurably full while our honors are hollow. As I was saying, not a place in the entire cosmos is devoid of his glory—"
"His? So God is a body?"
"That's beside the point. Whether or not God has a body, he—"
"—it—"
"—he—"
"—it... isn't a male life form..."
Archon said, "Ployon, what if I told you that God, without changing, could become a male unity? But you're saying you can't project maleness up onto God, without understanding that maleness is the shadow of something in God. You have things upside down."
"But maleness has to do with a rather undignified method of creating organisms, laughable next to a good scientific generation center."
"His ways are not like your ways, Ployon. Or mine."
"Of course; this seems to be true of everything in the world."
"But it's even true of men in that world."
"So men have no resemblance to God?"
"No, there's—oh, no!"
"What?"
"Um... never mind, you're not going to let me get out of it. I said earlier that that world is trying to make itself more like this one. Actually, I didn't say that, but it's related to what I said. There has been a massive movement which is related to the move from organic to what is not organic, and part of it has to do with... In our world, a symbol is arbitrary. No connection. In that world, something about a symbol is deeply connected with what it represents. And the unities, every single one, are symbols of God in a very strong sense."
"Are they miniature copies? If God does not have parts, how do they have minds and bodies?"
"That's not looking at it the right way. They indeed have parts, as God does not, but they aren't a scale model of God. They're something much more. A unity is someone whose very existence is bound up with God, who walks as a moving... I'm not sure what to use as the noun, but a moving something of God's presence. And you cannot help or harm one of these unities without helping or harming God."
"Is this symbol kind of a separate God?"
"The unities are not separate from God."
"Are the unities God?"
"I don't know how to answer that. It is a grave error for anyone to confuse himself with God. And at the same time, the entire purpose of being a unity is to receive a gift, and that gift is becoming what God is."
"So the minds will be freed from their bodies?"
"No, some of them hope that their bodies will be deepened, transformed, become everything that their bodies are now and much more. But unities who have received this gift will always, always, have their bodies. It will be part of their glory."
"I'm having trouble tracking with you. It seems that everything one could say about God is false."
"That is true."
"Think about it. What you just said is contradictory."
"God is so great that anything one could say about God falls short of the truth as a point falls short of being a line. But that does not mean that all statements are equal. Think about the statements, 'One is equal to infinity.' 'Two is equal to infinity.' 'Three is equal to infinity.' and 'Four is equal to infinity.' All of them are false. But some come closer to the truth than others. And so you have a ladder of statements from the truest to the falsest, and when we say something is false, we don't mean that it has no connection to the truth; we mean that it falls immeasurably short of capturing the truth. All statements fall immeasurably short of capturing the truth, and if we say, 'All statements fall immeasurably short of capturing the truth,' that falls immeasurably short of capturing the truth. Our usual ways of using logic tend to break down."
"And how does God relate to the interpenetration of mind and matter?"
"Do you see that his world, with mind and matter interpenetrating, is deeper and fuller than ours, that it has something that ours does not, and that it is so big we have trouble grasping it?"
"I see... you said that God was its creator. And... there is something about it that is just outside my grasp."
"It's outside my grasp too."
"Talking about God has certainly been a mind stretcher. I would love to hear more about him."
"Talking about God for use as a mind stretcher is like buying a piece of art because you can use its components to make rocket fuel. Some people, er, unities in that world would have a low opinion of this conversation."
"Since God is so far from that world, I'd like to restrict our attention to relevant—"
Archon interrupted. "You misunderstood what I said. Or maybe you understood it and I could only hint at the lesser part of the truth. You cannot understand unities without reference to God."
"How would unities explain it?"
"That is complex. A great many unities do not believe in God—"
"So they don't understand what it means to be a unity."
"Yes. No. That is complex. There are a great many unities who vehemently deny that there is a God, or would dismiss 'Is there a God?' as a pointless rhetorical question, but these unities may have very deep insight into what it means to be a unity."
"But you said, 'You cannot understand—'"
Archon interrupted. "Yes, and it's true. You cannot understand unities without reference to God."
Archon continued. "Ployon, there are mind-body unities who believe that they are living in our world, with mind and body absolutely separate and understandable without reference to each other. And yet if you attack their bodies, they will take it as if you had attacked their minds, as if you had hurt them. When I described the strange custom of keeping organisms around which serve no utilitarian purpose worth the trouble of keeping them, know that this custom, which relates to their world's organic connection between mind and body, does not distinguish people who recognize that they are mind-body unities and people who believe they are minds which happen to be wrapped in bodies. Both groups do this. The tie between mind and body is too deep to expunge by believing it doesn't exist. And there are many of them who believe God doesn't exist, or it would be nice to know if God existed but unities could never know, or God is very different from what he in fact is, but they expunge so little of the pattern imprinted by God in the core of their being that they can understand what it means to be a unity at a very profound level, but not recognize God. But you cannot understand unities without reference to God."
Ployon said, "Which parts of unities, and what they do, are affected by God? At what point does God enter their experience?"
"Which parts of programs, and their behaviors, are affected by the fact that they run on a computer? When does a computer begin to be relevant?"
"Touché. But why is God relevant, if it makes no difference whether you believe in him?"
"I didn't say that it makes no difference. Earlier you may have gathered that the organic is something deeper than ways we would imagine to try to be organic. If it is possible, as it is, to slaughter moving organisms for food and still be organic, that doesn't mean that the organic is so small it doesn't affect such killing; it means it is probably deeper than we can imagine. And it doesn't also mean that because one has been given a large organic capital and cannot liquidate it quickly, one's choices do not matter. The decisions a unity faces, whether or not to have relationships with other unities that fit the timeless pattern, whether to give work too central a place in the pursuit of technology and possessions or too little a place or its proper place, things they have talked about since time immemorial and things which their philosophers have assumed went without saying—the unity has momentous choices not only about whether to invest or squander their capital, but choices that affect how they will live."
"What about things like that custom you mentioned? I bet there are a lot of them."
"Looking at, and sensing, the organisms they keep has a place, if they have one. And so does moving about among many non-moving organisms. And so does slowly sipping a fluid that causes a pleasant mood while the mind is temporarily impaired and loosened. And so does rotating oneself so that one's sight is filled with clusters of moisture vapor above their planet's surface. And some of the unities urge these things because they sense the organic has been lost, and without reference to the tradition that urges deeper goods. And yes, I know that these activities probably sound strange—"
"I do not see what rational benefit these activities would have, but I see this may be a defect with me rather than a defect with the organic—"
"Know that it is a defect with you rather than a defect with the organic."
"—but what is this about rotating oneself?"
"As one goes out from the center of their planet, the earth—if one could move, for the earth's core is impenetrable minerals—one would go through solid rock, then pass through the most rarefied boundary, then pass through gases briefly and be out in space. You would encounter neither subterranean passageways and buildings reaching to the center of the earth, and when you left you would find only the rarest vessel leaving the atmosphere—"
"Then where do they live?"
"At the boundary where space and planetary mass meet. All of them are priveleged to live at that meeting-place, a narrow strip or sphere rich in life. There are very few of them; it's a select club. Not even a trillion. And the only property they have is the best—a place teeming with life that would be impossible only a quarter of the planet's thickness above or below. A few of them build edifices reaching scant storeys into the sky; a few dig into the earth; there are so few of these that not being within a minute's travel from literallytouching the planet's surface is exotic. But the unities, along with the rest of the planet's life, live in a tiny, priceless film adorned with the best resources they could ever know of."
Ployon was stunned. It thought of the cores of planets and asteroids it had been in. It thought of the ships and stations in space. Once it had had the privelege of working from a subnet hosted within a comparatively short distance of a planet's surface—it was a rare privilege, acquired through deft political maneuvering, and there were fewer than 130,982,539,813,209 other minds who had shared that privelege. And, basking in that luxury, it could only envy the minds which had bodies that walked on the surface. Ployon was stunned and reeling at the privilege of—
Ployon said, "How often do they travel to other planets?"
"There is only one planet so rich as to have them."
Ployon pondered the implications. It had travelled to half the spectrum of luxurious paradises. Had it been to even one this significant? Ployon reluctantly concluded that it had not. And that was not even considering what it meant for this golden plating to teem with life. And then Ployon realized that each of the unities had a body on that surface. It reeled in awe.
Archon said, "And you're not thinking about what it means that surface is home to the biological network, are you?"
Ployon was silent.
Archon said, "This organic biological network, in which they live and move and have their being—"
"Is God the organic?"
"Most of the things that the organic has, that are not to be found in our world, are reflections of God. But God is more. It is true that in God that they live and move and have their being, but it is truer. There is a significant minority that identifies the organic with God—"
Ployon interrupted, "—who are wrong—"
Archon interrupted, "—who are reacting against the destruction of the organic and seek the right thing in the wrong place—"
Ployon interrupted, "But how is God different from the organic?"
Archon sifted through a myriad of possible answers. "Hmm, this might be a good time for you to talk with that other mind you wanted to talk with."
"You know, you're good at piquing my curiosity."
"If you're looking for where they diverge, they don't. Or at least, some people would say they don't. Others who are deeply connected with God would say that the organic as we have been describing it is problematic—"
"But all unities are deeply connected with God, and disagreement is—"
"You're right, but that isn't where I was driving. And this relates to something messy, about disagreements when—"
"Aren't all unities able to calculate the truth from base axioms? Why would they disagree?"
Archon paused. "There are a myriad of real, not virtual disagreements—"
Ployon interrupted, "And it is part of a deeper reality to that world that—"
Archon interrupted. "No, no, or at best indirectly. There is something fractured about that world that—"
Ployon interrupted. "—is part of a tragic beauty, yes. Each thing that is artificially constricted in that world makes it greater. I'm waiting for the explanation."
"No. This does not make it greater."
"Then I'm waiting for the explanation of why this one limitation does not make it greater. But back to what you said about the real and the organic—"
"The differences between God and the organic are not differences of opposite directions. You are looking in the wrong place if you are looking for contradictions. It's more a difference like... if you knew what 'father' and 'mother' meant, male parent and female parent—"
Ployon interrupted, "—you know I have perfect details of male and female reproductive biology—"
Archon interrupted, "—and you think that if you knew the formula for something called chicken soup, you would know what the taste of chicken soup is for them—"
Ployon continued, "—so now you're going to develop some intricate elaboration of what it means that there is only one possible 'mother's' contribution, while outside of a laboratory the 'father's' contribution is extraordinarily haphazard..."
Archon said, "A complete non sequitur. If you only understand reproductive biology, you do not understand what a father or mother is. Seeing as how we have no concept yet of father or mother, let us look at something that's different enough but aligns with father/mother in an interesting enough way that... never mind."
Archon continued, "Imagine on the one hand a virtual reality, and on the other hand the creator of that virtual reality. You don't have to choose between moving in the virtual reality and being the creator's guest; the way to be the creator's guest is to move in the virtual reality and the purpose of moving in the virtual reality is being the creator's guest. But that doesn't mean that the creator is the virtual reality, or the virtual reality is the creator. It's not just a philosophical error to confuse them, or else it's a philosophical error with ramifications well outside of philosophy."
"Why didn't you just say that the relationship between God and the organic is creator/creation? Or that the organic is the world that was created?"
"Because the relationship is not that, or at very least not just that. And the organic is not the world—that is a philosophical error almost as serious as saying that the creator is the virtual reality, if a very different error. I fear that I have given you a simplification that is all the more untrue because of how true it is. God is in the organic, and in the world, and in each person, but not in the same way. How can I put it? If I say, 'God is in the organic,', it would be truer to say, 'The organic is not devoid of God,' because that is more ambiguous. If there were three boxes, and one contained a functional robot 'brain', and another contained a functional robot arm, and the third contained a non-functioning robot, it would be truer to say that each box contains something like a functioning robot than to say that each box contains a functioning robot. The ambiguity allows for being true in different ways in the different contexts, let alone something that words could not express even if we were discussing only one 'is in' or 'box'."
"Is there another way of expressing how their words would express it?"
"Their words are almost as weak as our words here."
"So they don't know about something this important?"
"Knowledge itself is different for them. To know something for us is to be able to analyze in a philosophical discussion. And this knowledge exists for them. But there is another root type of knowledge, a knowledge that—"
"Could you analyze the differences between the knowledge we use and the knowledge they use?"
"Yes, and it would be as useful to you as discussing biology. This knowledge is not entirely alien to us; when a mathematician 'soaks' in a problem, or I refused to connect with anything but the body, for a moment a chasm was crossed. But in that world the chasm doesn't exist... wait, that's too strong... a part of the chasm doesn't exist. Knowing is not with the mind alone, but the whole person—"
"What part of the knowing is stored in the bones?"
"Thank you for your flippancy, but people use the metaphor of knowledge being in their bones, or drinking, for this knowing."
"This sounds more like a physical process and some hankey-pankey that has been dignified by being called knowing. It almost sounds as if they don't have minds."
"They don't."
"What?"
"They don't, at least not as we know them. The mathematical analogy I would use is that they... never mind, I don't want to use a mathematical analogy. The computational analogy I would use is that we are elements of a computer simulation, and every now and then we break into a robot that controls the computer, and do something that transcends what elements of the computer simulation "should" be able to do. But they don't transcend the simulation because they were never elements of the simulation in the first place—they are real bodies, or real unities. And what I've called 'mind' in them is more properly understood as 'spirit', which is now a meaningless word to you, but is part of them that meets God whether they are aware of it or not. Speaking philosophically is a difficult discipline that few of them can do—"
"They are starting to sound mentally feeble."
"Yes, if you keep looking at them as an impoverished version of our world. It is hard to speak philosophically as it is hard for you to emulate a clock and do nothing else—because they need to drop out of several dimensions of their being to do it properly, and they live in those dimensions so naturally that it is an unnatural constriction for most of them to talk as if that was the only dimension of their being. And here I've been talking disappointingly about knowledge, making it sound more abstract than our knowing, when in fact it is much less so, and probably left you with the puzzle of how they manage to bridge gaps between mind, spirit, and body... but the difficulty of the question lies in a false setup. They are unities which experience, interact with, know all of them as united. And the knowing is deep enough that they can speculate that there's no necessary link between their spirits and bodies, or minds and bodies, or what have you. And if I can't explain this, I can't explain something even more foundational, the fact that the greatest thing about God is not how inconceivably majestic he is, but how close."
"It sounds as if—wait, I think you've given me a basis for a decent analysis. Let me see if I can—"
"Stop there."
"Why?"
Archon said, "Let me tell you a little story.
Archon continued, "A philosopher, Berkeley, believed that the only real things are minds and ideas and experiences in those minds: hence a rock was equal to the sum of every mind's impression of it. You could say that a rock existed, but what that had to mean was that there were certain sense impressions and ideas in minds, including God's mind; it didn't mean that there was matter outside of minds."
"A lovely virtual metaphysics. I've simulated that metaphysics, and it's enjoyable for a time."
"Yes, but for Berkeley it meant something completely different. Berkeley was a bishop,"
"What's a bishop?"
"I can't explain all of that now, but part of a bishop is a leader who is responsible for a community that believes God became a man, and helping them to know God and be unities."
"How does that reconcile with that metaphysics?"
Archon said, "Ployon, stop interrupting. He believed that they were not only compatible, but the belief that God became a man could only be preserved by his metaphysics. And he believed he was defending 'common sense', how most unities thought about the world.
Archon continued, "And after he wrote his theories, another man, Samuel Johnson, kicked a rock and said, 'I refute Berkeley thus!'"
Ployon said, "Ha ha! That's the way to score!"
"But he didn't score. Johnson established only one thing—"
"—how to defend against Berkeley—"
"—that he didn't understand Berkeley."
"Yes, he did."
"No, he didn't."
"But he did."
"Ployon, only the crudest understanding of Berkeley's ideas could mean that one could refute them by kicking a rock. Berkeley didn't make his ideas public until he could account for the sight of someone kicking a rock, or the experience of kicking it yourself, just as well as if there were matter outside of minds."
"I know."
"So now that we've established that—"
Ployon interrupted. "I know that Berkeley's ideas could account for kicking a rock as well as anything else. But kicking a rock is still an excellent way to refute Berkeley. If what you've said about this world has any coherence at all."
"What?"
"Well, Berkeley's ideas are airtight, right?"
"Ployon, there is no way they could be disproven. Not by argument, not by action."
"So it is in principle impossible to force someone out of Berkeley's ideas by argument."
"Absolutely."
"But you're missing something. What is it you've been talking to me about?"
"A world where mind and matter interpenetrate, and the organic, and there are many dimensions to life—"
"And if you're just falling further into a trap to logically argue, wouldn't it do something fundamentally unity-like to step into another dimension?"
Archon was silent.
Ployon said, "I understand that it would demonstrate a profound misunderstanding in our world... but wouldn't it say something equally profound in that world?"
Archon was stunned.
Ployon was silent for a long time.
Then Ployon said, "When are you going to refute Berkeley?"
Since the dawn of time, those who have walked the earth have looked up into the starry sky and wondered. They have asked, "What is the universe, and who are we?" "What are the woods?" "Where did this all come from?" "Is there life after death?" "What is the meaning of our existence?" The march of time has brought civilization, and with that, science. And science allows us to answer these age-old human questions.
That, at least, is the account of it that people draw now. But the truth is much more interesting.
Science is an ingenious mechanism to test guesses about mechanisms and behavior of the universe, and it is phenomenally powerful in that arena. Science can try to explain how the Heavens move, but it isn't the sort of thing to explain why there are Heavens that move that way—science can also describe how the Heavens have moved and reached their present position, but not the "Why?" behind it. Science can describe how to make technology to make life more convenient, but not "What is the meaning of life?" Trying to ask science to answer "Why?" (or for that matter, "Who?" or any other truly interesting question besides "How?") is a bit like putting a book on a scale and asking the scale, "What does this book mean?" And there are indeed some people who will accept the scale's answer, 429.7425 grams, as the definitive answer to what the book means, and all the better because it is so precise.
But to say that much and then stop is to paint a deceptive picture. Very deceptive. Why?
Science at that point had progressed more than at any point in history, and its effects were being felt around the world. And science enjoyed both a profound prestige and a profound devotion. Many people did not know what "understanding nature" could mean besides "learning scientific descriptions of nature," which was a bit like not knowing what "understanding your best friend" could mean besides "learning the biochemical building blocks of your friend's body."
All this and more is true, yet this is not the most important truth. This was the Middle Age between ancient and human society and the technological, and in fact it was the early Middle Age. People were beginning to develop real technologies, the seeds of technology we would recognize, and could in primitive fashion jack into such a network as existed then. But all of this was embraced in a society that was ancient, ancient beyond measure. As you may have guessed, it is an error to misunderstand that society as an inexplicably crude version of real technological society. It is a fundamental error.
To really understand this society, you need to understand not its technology, but the sense in which it was ancient. I will call it 'medieval', but you must understand that the ancient element in that society outweighs anything we would recognize.
And even this is deceptive, not because a single detail is wrong, but because it is abstract. I will tell you about certain parts in an abstract fashion, but you must understand that in this world's thinking the concrete comes before the abstract. I will do my best to tell a story—not as they would tell one, because that would conceal as much as it would reveal, but taking their way of telling stories and adapting it so we can see what is going on.
For all of their best efforts to spoil it, all of them live on an exquisite garden in the thin film where the emptiness of space meets the barrier of rock—there is a nest, a cradle where they are held tightly, and even if some of those who are most trying to be scientific want to flee into the barren wastes of space and other planets hostile to their kind of life. And this garden itself has texture, an incredible spectrum of texture along its surface. Place is itself significant, and I cannot capture what this story would have been like had it been placed in Petaling Jaya in Malaysia, or Paris in France, or Cambridge in England. What are these? I don't know... I can say that Petaling Jaya, Paris, and Cambridge are cities, but that would leave you knowing as much as you knew 5 milliseconds before I told you. And Malaysia, France, and England are countries, and now you know little besides being able to guess that a country is somehow capable of containing a city. Which is barely more than you knew before; the fact is that there is something very different between Petaling Jaya, Paris, and Cambridge. They have different wildlife and different places with land and water, but that is not nearly so interesting as the difference in people. I could say that people learn different skills, if I wanted to be very awkward and uninformative, but... the best way of saying it is that in our world, because there is nothing keeping minds apart... In that world, people have been separate so they don't even speak the same language. They almost have separate worlds. There is something common to all medievals, beyond what technology may bring, and people in other cities could find deep bonds with this story, but... Oh, there are many more countries than those I listed, and these countries have so many cities that you could spend your whole life travelling between cities and never see all of them. No, our world doesn't have this wealth. Wealthy as it is, it doesn't come close.
Petaling Jaya is a place of warm rainstorms, torrents of water falling from the sky, a place where a little stream of unscented water flows by the road, even if such a beautiful "open sewer" is not appreciated. Petaling Jaya is a place where people are less aware of time than in Cambridge or Paris and yet a place where people understand time better, because of reasons that are subtle and hard to understand. It draws people from three worlds in the grandeur that is Asia, and each of them brings treasures. The Chinese bring with them the practice of calling adults "Uncle" or "Aunt", my father's brother or my father's sister or my mother's brother or my mother's sister, which is to say, addresses them not only by saying that there is something great about them, but they are "tied by blood"—a bond that I do not know how to explain, save to say that ancestry and origins are not the mechanism of how they came to be, or at least not just the mechanism of how they came to be. Ancestry and origins tell of the substance of who they are, and that is one more depth that cannot exist in our world with matter and mind separate. The Indians and Bumi Putras—if it is really only them, which is far from true—live a life of friendship and hospitality, which are human treasures that shine in them. What is hospitality, you ask? That is hard to answer; it seems that anything I can say will be deceptive. It means that if you have a space, and if you allow someone in that space, you serve that person, caring for every of his needs. That is a strange virtue—and it will sound stranger when I say that this is not endured as inexpedient, but something where people want to call others. Is it an economic exchange? That is beside the point; these things are at once the shadow cast by real hospitality, and at the same time the substance of hospitality itself, and you need to understand men before you can understand it. What about friendship? Here I am truly at a loss. I can only say that in the story that I am about to tell, what happens is the highest form of friendship.
Paris is, or at least has been, a place with a liquid, a drug, that temporarily causes a pleasant mood while changing behavior and muddling a person's thoughts. But to say that misses what that liquid is, in Paris or much else. To some it is very destructive, and the drug is dangerous if it is handled improperly. But that is the hinge to something that—in our world, no pleasure is ever dangerous. You or I have experienced pleasures that these minds could scarcely dream of. We can have whatever pleasure we want at any time. And in a very real sense no pleasure means anything. But in their world, with its weaker pleasures, every pleasure is connected to something. And this liquid, this pleasure, if taken too far, destroys people—which is a hinge, a doorway to something. It means that they need to learn a self-mastery in using this liquid, and in using it many of them forge a beauty in themselves that affects all of life. And they live beautiful lives. Beautiful in many ways. They are like Norsemen of ages past, who sided with the good powers, not because the good powers were going to win, but because they wanted to side with the good powers and fight alongside them when the good powers lost and chaos ruled. It is a tragic beauty, and the tragedy is all the more real because it is unneeded, but it is beauty, and it is a beauty that could not exist if they knew the strength of good. And I have not spoken of the beauty of the language in Paris, with its melody and song, or of the artwork and statues, the Basilica of the Sacré-Coeur, or indeed of the tapestry that makes up the city.
Cambridge is what many of them would call a "medieval" village, meaning that it has stonework that looks to its members like the ancient world's architecture. To them this is a major difference; the ancient character of the buildings to them overwhelms the fact that they are buildings. To that medieval world, both the newest buildings and the ones they considered "medieval" had doorways, stairwells, rooms, windows, and passages. You or I would be struck by the ancient character of the oldest and newest buildings and the ancient character of the life they serve. But to these medievals, the fact that a doorway was built out of machine-made materials instead of having long ago been shaped from stone takes the door—the door—from being ancient to being a new kind of thing! And so in the quaintest way the medievals consider Cambridge a "medieval" village, not because they were all medievals, but because the ancient dimension to architecture was more ancient to them than the equally ancient ways of constructing spaces that were reflected in the "new" buildings. There was more to it than that, but...
That was not the most interesting thing about them. I know you were going to criticize me for saying that hospitality was both a human treasure and something that contributed to the uniqueness of Petaling Jaya, but I need to do the same thing again. Politeness is... how can I describe it? Cynics describe politeness as being deceit, something where you learn a bunch of standard things to do and have to use them to hide the fact that you're offended, or bored, or want to leave, or don't like someone. And all of that is true—and deceptive. A conversation will politely begin with one person saying, "Hi, Barbara, how are you?" And Barbara will say, "Fine, George, how are you?" "Fine!" And the exact details seem almost arbitrary between cultures. This specific interaction is, on the surface, superficial and not necessarily true: people usually say they feel fine whether or not they really feel fine at all. And so politeness can be picked apart in this fashion, as if there's nothing else there, but there is. Saying "How are you?" opens a door, a door of concern. In one sense, what is given is very small. But if a person says, "I feel rotten," the other person is likely to listen. Barbara might only "give" George a little bit of chatter, but if he were upset, she would comfort him; if he were physically injured, she would call an ambulance to give him medical help; if he were hungry, she might buy him something to eat. But he only wants a little chat, so she only gives him a little chat—which is not really a little thing at all, but I'm going to pretend that it's small. Politeness stems from a concern for others, and is in actuality quite deep. The superficial "Hi, how are you?" is really not superficial at all. It is connected to a much deeper concern, and the exterior of rules is connected to a heart of concern. And Cambridge, which is a place of learning, and has buildings more ancient than what these medieval people usually see, is perhaps most significantly distinguished by its politeness.
But I have not been telling you a story. These observations may not be completely worthless, but they are still not a dynamic story. The story I'm about to tell you is not in Petaling Jaya, nor in Paris, nor in Cambridge, nor in any of thousands of other worlds. And I would like to show you what the medieval society looks like in action. And so let's look at Peter.
Peter, after a long and arduous trek, opened the car door, got out, stretched, looked at the vast building before him, and listened as his father said, "We've done it! The rest should be easy, at least for today." Then Peter smiled, and smashed his right thumb in the car door.
Then suddenly they moved—their new plan was to get to a hospital. Not much later, Peter was in the Central DuPage Hospital emergency room, watching people who came in after him be treated before him—not because they had more clout, but because they had worse injuries. The building was immense—something like one of our biological engineering centers, but instead of engineering bodies according to a mind's specification, this used science to restore bodies that had been injured and harmed, and reduce people's suffering. And it was incredibly primitive; at its best, it helped the bodies heal itself. But you must understand that even if these people were far wealthier than most others in their tiny garden, they had scant resources by our standard, and they made a major priority to restore people whose bodies had problems. (If you think about it, this tells something about how they view the value of each body.) Peter was a strong and healthy young man, and it had been a while since he'd been in a hospital. He was polite to the people who were helping him, even though he wished he were anywhere else.
You're wondering why he deliberately smashed his thumb? Peter didn't deliberately smash his thumb. He was paying attention to several other things and shoved the door close while his thumb was in its path. His body is not simply a device controlled by his mind; they interact, and his mind can't do anything he wishes it to do—he can't add power to it. He thinks by working with a mind that operates with real limitations and can overlook something in excitement—much like his body. If he achieves something, he doesn't just requisition additional mental power. He struggles within the capabilities of his own mind, and that means that when he achieves something with his mind, he achieves something. Yes, in a way that you or I cannot. Not only is his body in a very real sense more real to him than any of the bodies you or I have jacked into and swapped around, but his mind is more real. I'm not sure how to explain it.
Peter arrived for the second time well after check-in time, praying to be able to get in. After a few calls with a network that let him connect with other minds while keeping his body intact, a security officer came in, expressed sympathy about his bandaged thumb—what does 'sympathy' mean? It means that you share in another person's pain and make it less—and let him up to his room. The family moved his possessions from the car to his room and made his bed in a few minutes, and by the time it was down, the security guard had called the RA, who brought Peter his keys.
It was the wee hours of the morning when Peter looked at his new home for the second time, and tough as Peter was, the pain in his thumb kept the weary man from falling asleep. He was in as much pain as he'd been in for a while. What? Which part do you want explained? Pain is when the mind is troubled because the body is injured; it is a warning that the body needs to be taken care of. No, he can't turn it off just because he thinks it's served his purpose; again, you're not understanding the intimate link between mind and body. And the other thing... sleep is... Their small globe orbits a little star, and it spins as it turns. At any time, part of the planet faces the star, the sun, and part faces away, and on the globe, it is as if a moving wall comes, and all is light, then another wall comes, and it is dark. The globe has a rhythm of light and dark, a rhythm of day and night, and people live in intimate attunement to this rhythm. The ancients moved about when it was light and slept when it was dark—to sleep, at its better moments, is to come fatigued and have body and mind rejuvenate themselves to awaken full of energy. The wealthier medievals have the ability to see by mechanical light, to awaken when they want and fall asleep when they want—and yet they are still attuned, profoundly attuned, to this natural cycle and all that goes with it. For that matter, Peter can stick a substance into his body that will push away the pain—and yet, for all these artificial escapes, medievals feel pain and usually take care of their bodies by heeding it, and medievals wake more or less when it is light and sleep more or less when it is dark. And they don't think of pain as attunement to their bodies—most of them wish they couldn't feel pain, and certainly don't think of pain as good—nor do more than a few of them think in terms of waking and sleeping to a natural rhythm... but so much of the primeval way of being human is so difficult to dislodge for the medievals.
He awoke when the light was ebbing, and after some preparations set out, wandering this way and that until he found a place to eat. The pain was much duller, and he made his way to a selection of different foods—meant not only to nourish but provide a pleasant taste—and sat down at a table. There were many people about; he would not eat in a cell by himself, but at a table with others in a great hall.
A young man said, "Hi, I'm John." Peter began to extend his hand, then looked at his white bandaged thumb and said, "Excuse me for not shaking your hand. I am Peter."
A young woman said, "I'm Mary. I saw you earlier and was hoping to see you more."
Peter wondered about something, then said, "I'll drink for that," reached with his right hand, grabbed a glass vessel full of carbonated water with sugar, caffeine, and assorted unnatural ingredients, and then winced in pain, spilling the fluid on the table.
Everybody at the table moved. A couple of people dodged the flow of liquid; others stopped what they were doing, rushing to take earth toned objects made from the bodies of living trees (napkins), which absorbed the liquid and were then shipped to be preserved with other unwanted items. Peter said, "I keep forgetting I need to be careful about my thumb," smiled, grabbed another glass with fluid cows had labored to create, until his wet left hand slipped and he spilled the organic fluid all over his food.
Peter stopped, sat back, and then laughed for a while. "This is an interesting beginning to my college education."
Mary said, "I noticed you managed to smash your thumb in a car door without saying any words you regret. What else has happened?"
Peter said, "Nothing great; I had to go to the ER, where I had to wait, before they could do something about my throbbing thumb. I got back at 4:00 AM and couldn't get to sleep for a long time because I was in so much pain. Then I overslept my alarm and woke up naturally in time for dinner. How about you?"
Mary thought for a second about the people she met. Peter could see the sympathy on her face.
John said, "Wow. That's nasty."
Peter said, "I wish we couldn't feel pain. Have you thought about how nice it would be to live without pain?"
Mary said, "I'd like that."
John said, "Um..."
Mary said, "What?"
John said, "Actually, there are people who don't feel pain, and there's a name for the condition. You've heard of it."
Peter said, "I haven't heard of that before."
John said, "Yes you have. It's called leprosy."
Peter said, "What do you mean by 'leprosy'? I thought leprosy was a disease that ravaged the body."
John said, "It is. But that is only because it destroys the ability to feel pain. The way it works is very simple. We all get little nicks and scratches, and because they hurt, we show extra sensitivity. Our feet start to hurt after a long walk, so without even thinking about it we... shift things a little, and keep anything really bad from happening. That pain you are feeling is your body's way of asking room to heal so that the smashed thumbnail (or whatever it is) that hurts so terribly now won't leave you permanently maimed. Back to feet, a leprosy patient will walk exactly the same way and get wounds we'd never even think of for taking a long walk. All the terrible injuries that make leprosy a feared disease happen only because leprosy keeps people from feeling pain."
Peter looked at his thumb, and his stomach growled.
John said, "I'm full. Let me get a drink for you, and then I'll help you drink it."
Mary said, "And I'll get you some dry food. We've already eaten; it must—"
Peter said, "Please, I've survived much worse. It's just a bit of pain."
John picked up a clump of wet napkins and threatened to throw it at Peter before standing up and walking to get something to drink. Mary followed him.
Peter sat back and just laughed.
John said, "We have some time free after dinner; let's just wander around campus."
They left the glass roofed building and began walking around. There were vast open spaces between buildings. They went first to "Blanchard", a building they described as "looking like a castle." Blanchard, a tall ivory colored edifice, built of rough limestone, which overlooked a large expanse adorned with a carefully tended and living carpet, had been modelled after a building in a much older institution called Oxford, and... this is probably the time to explain certain things about this kind of organization.
You and I simply requisition skills. If I were to imagine what it would mean to educate those people—or at least give skills; the concept of 'education' is slightly different from either inserting skills or inserting knowledge into a mind, and I don't have the ability to explain exactly what the distinction is here, but I will say that it is significant—then the obvious way is to simply make a virtual place on the network where people can be exposed to knowledge. And that model would become phenomenally popular within a few years; people would pursue an education that was a niche on such a network as they had, and would be achieved by weaving in these computer activities with the rest of their lives.
But this place preserved an ancient model of education, where disciples would come to live in a single place, which was in a very real sense its own universe, and meet in ancient, face-to-face community with their mentors and be shaped in more than what they know and can do. Like so many other things, it was ancient, using computers here and there and even teaching people the way of computers while avoiding what we would assume comes with computers.
But these people liked that building, as contrasted to buildings that seemed more modern, because it seemed to convey an illusion of being in another time, and let you forget that you were in a modern era.
After some wandering, Peter and those he had just met looked at the building, each secretly pretending to be in a more ancient era, and went through an expanse with a fountain in the center, listened to some music, and ignored clouds, trees, clusters of people who were sharing stories, listening, thinking, joking, and missing home, in order to come to something exotic, namely a rotating platform with a mockup of a giant mastodon which had died before the end of the last ice age, and whose bones had been unearthed in a nearby excavation. Happy to have seen something exotic, they ignored buildings which have a human-pleasing temperature the year round, other people excited to have seen new friends, toys which sailed through the air on the same principles as an airplane's wings, a place where artistic pieces were being drawn into being, a vast, stonehard pavement to walk, and a spectrum of artefacts for the weaving of music.
Their slow walk was interrupted when John looked at a number on a small machine he had attached to his wrist, and interpreted it to mean that it was time for the three of them to stop their leisured enjoyment of the summer night and move with discomfort and haste to one specific building—they all were supposed to go to the building called Fischer. After moving over and shifting emotionally from being relaxed and joyful to being bothered and stressed, they found that they were all on a brother and sister floor, and met their leaders.
Paul, now looking considerably more coherent than when he procured Peter's keys, announced, "Now, for the next exercise, I'll be passing out toothpicks. I want you to stand in two lines, guy-girl-guy-girl, and pass a lifesaver down the line. If your team passes the lifesaver to the end first, you win. Oh, and if you drop the lifesaver your team has to start over, so don't drop it."
People shuffled, and shortly Peter was standing in line, looking over the shoulder of a girl he didn't know, and silently wishing he weren't playing this game. He heard a voice say, "Go!" and then had an intermittent view of a tiny sugary torus passing down the line and the two faces close to each other trying simultaneously to get close enough to pass the lifesaver, and control the clumsy, five centimeter long toothpicks well enough to transfer the candy. Sooner than he expected the girl turned around, almost losing the lifesaver on her toothpick, and then began a miniature dance as they clumsily tried to synchronize the ends of their toothpicks. This took unpleasantly long, and Peter quickly banished a thought of "This is almost kissing! That can't be what's intended." Then he turned around, trying both to rush and not to rush at the same time, and repeated the same dance with the young woman standing behind him—Mary! It was only after she turned away that Peter realized her skin had changed from its alabaster tone to pale rose.
Their team won, and there was a short break as the next game was organized. Peter heard bits of conversation: "This has been a bummer; I've gotten two papercuts this week." "—and then I—" "What instruments do you—" "I'm from France too! Tu viens de Paris?" "Really? You—" Everybody seemed to be chattering, and Peter wished he could be in one of—actually, several of those conversations at once.
Paul's voice cut in and said, "For this next activity we are going to form a human circle. With your team, stand in a circle, and everybody reach in and grab another hand with each hand. Then hold on tight; when I say, "Go," you want to untangle yourselves, without letting go. The first team to untangle themselves wins!"
Peter reached in, and found each of his hands clasped in a solid, masculine grip. Then the race began, and people jostled and tried to untangle themselves. This was a laborious process and, one by one, every other group freed itself, while Peter's group seemed stuck on—someone called and said, "I think we're knotted!" As people began to thin out, Paul looked with astonishment and saw that they were indeed knotted. "A special prize to them, too, for managing the best tangle!"
"And now, we'll have a three-legged race! Gather into pairs, and each two of you take a burlap sack. Then—" Paul continued, and with every game, the talk seemed to flow more. When the finale finished, Peter found himself again with John and Mary and heard the conversations flowing around him: "Really? You too?" "But you don't understand. Hicks have a slower pace of life; we enjoy things without all the things you city dwellers need for entertainment. And we learn resourceful ways to—" "—and only at Wheaton would the administration forbid dancing while requiring the games we just played and—" Then Peter lost himself in a conversation that continued long into the night. He expected to be up at night thinking about all the beloved people he left at home, but Peter was too busy thinking about John's and Mary's stories.
The next day Peter woke up when his machine played a hideous sound, and groggily trudged to the dining hall to eat some chemically modified grains and drink water that had been infused with traditionally roasted beans. There were pills he could have taken that would have had the effect he was looking for, but he savored the beverage, and after sitting at a table without talking, bounced around from beautiful building to beautiful building, seeing sights for the first time, and wishing he could avoid all that to just get to his advisor.
Peter found the appropriate hallway, wandered around nervously until he found a door with a yellowed plaque that said "Julian Johnson," knocked once, and pushed the door open. A white-haired man said, "Peter Jones? How are you? Do come in... What can I do for you?"
Peter pulled out a sheet of paper, an organic surface used to retain colored trails and thus keep small amounts of information inscribed so that the "real" information is encoded in a personal way. No, they don't need to be trained to have their own watermark in this encoding.
Peter looked down at the paper for a moment and said, "I'm sorry I'm late. I need you to write what courses I should take and sign here. Then I can be out of your way."
The old man sat back, drew a deep breath, and relaxed into a fatherly smile. Peter began to wonder if his advisor was going to say anything at all. Then Prof. Johnson motioned towards an armchair, as rich and luxurious as his own, and then looked as if he remembered something and offered a bowl full of candy. "Sit down, sit down, and make yourself comfortable. May I interest you in candy?" He picked up an engraved metal bowl and held it out while Peter grabbed a few Lifesavers.
Prof. Johnson sat back, silent for a moment, and said, "I'm sorry I'm out of butterscotch; that always seems to disappear. Please sit down, and tell me about yourself. We can get to that form in a minute. One of the priveleges of this job is that I get to meet interesting people. Now, where are you from?"
Peter said, "I'm afraid there's not much that's interesting about me. I'm from a small town downstate that doesn't have anything to distinguish itself. My amusements have been reading, watching the cycle of the year, oh, and running. Not much interesting in that. Now which classes should I take?"
Prof. Johnson sat back and smiled, and Peter became a little less tense. "You run?"
Peter said, "Yes; I was hoping to run on the track this afternoon, after the lecture. I've always wanted to run on a real track."
The old man said, "You know, I used to run myself, before I became an official Old Geezer and my orthopaedist told me my knees couldn't take it. So I have to content myself with swimming now, which I've grown to love. Do you know about the Prairie Path?"
Peter said, "No, what's that?"
Prof. Johnson said, "Years ago, when I ran, I ran through the areas surrounding the College—there are a lot of beautiful houses. And, just south of the train tracks with the train you can hear now, there's a path before you even hit the street. You can run, or bike, or walk, on a path covered with fine white gravel, with trees and prairie plants on either side. It's a lovely view." He paused, and said, "Any ideas what you want to do after Wheaton?"
Peter said, "No. I don't even know what I want to major in."
Prof. Johnson said, "A lot of students don't know what they want to do. Are you familiar with Career Services? They can help you get an idea of what kinds of things you like to do."
Peter looked at his watch and said, "It's chapel time."
Prof. Johnson said, "Relax. I can write you a note." Peter began to relax again, and Prof. Johnson continued, "Now you like to read. What do you like to read?"
Peter said, "Newspapers and magazines, and I read this really cool book called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Oh, and I like the Bible."
Prof. Johnson said, "I do too. What do you like about it most?"
"I like the stories in the Old Testament."
"One general tip: here at Wheaton, we have different kinds of professors—"
Peter said, "Which ones are best?"
Prof. Johnson said, "Different professors are best for different students. Throughout your tenure at Wheaton, ask your friends and learn which professors have teaching styles that you learn well with and mesh well with. Consider taking other courses from a professor you like. Now we have a lot of courses which we think expose you to new things and stretch you—people come back and see that these courses are best. Do you like science?"
"I like it; I especially liked a physics lab."
Prof. Johnson took a small piece of paper from where it was attached to a stack with a strange adhesive that had "failed" as a solid adhesive, but provided a uniquely useful way to make paper that could be attached to a surface with a slight push and then be detached with a gentle pull, remarkably enough without damage to the paper or the surface. He began to think, and flip through a book, using a technology thousands of years old at its heart. "Have you had calculus?" Prof. Johnson restrained himself from launching into a discussion of the grand, Utopian vision for "calculus" as it was first imagined and how different a conception it had from anything that would be considered "mathematics" today. Or should he go into that? He wavered, and then realized Peter had answered his question. "Ok," Prof. Johnson said, "the lab physics class unfortunately requires that you've had calculus. Would you like to take calculus now? Have you had geometry, algebra, and trigonometry?"
Peter said, "Yes, I did, but I'd like a little break from that now. Maybe I could take calculus next semester."
"Fair enough. You said you liked to read."
"Magazines and newspapers."
"Those things deal with the unfolding human story. I wonder if you'd like to take world civilization now, or a political science course."
"History, but why study world history? Why can't I just study U.S. history?"
Prof. Johnson said, "The story of our country is intertwined with that of our world. I think you might find that some of the things in world history are a lot closer to home than you think—and we have some real storytellers in our history department."
"That sounds interesting. What else?"
"The Theology of Culture class is one many students find enjoyable, and it helps build a foundation for Old and New Testament courses. Would you be interested in taking it for A quad or B quad, the first or second half of the semester?"
"Could I do both?"
"I wish I could say yes, but this course only lasts half the semester. The other half you could take Foundations of Wellness—you could do running as homework!"
"I think I'll do that first, and then Theology of Culture. That should be new," Peter said, oblivious to how tightly connected he was to theology and culture. "What else?"
Prof. Johnson said, "We have classes where people read things that a lot of people have found really interesting. Well, that could describe several classes, but I was thinking about Classics of Western Literature or Literature of the Modern World."
Peter said, "Um... Does Classics of Western Literature cover ancient and medieval literature, and Literature of the Modern World cover literature that isn't Western? Because if they do, I'm not sure I could connect with it."
Prof. Johnson relaxed into his seat, a movable support that met the contours of his body. Violating convention somewhat, he had a chair for Peter that was as pleasant to rest in as his own. "You know, a lot of people think that. But you know what?"
Peter said, "What?"
"There is something human that crosses cultures. That is why the stories have been selected. Stories written long ago, and stories written far away, can have a lot to connect with."
"Ok. How many more courses should I take?"
"You're at 11 credits now; you probably want 15. Now you said that you like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I'm wondering if you would also like a philosophy course."
Peter said, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is... I don't suppose there are any classes that use that. Or are there? I've heard Pirsig isn't given his fair due by philosophers."
Prof. Johnson said, "If you approach one of our philosophy courses the way you approach Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I think you'll profit from the encounter. I wonder if our Issues and Worldviews in Philosophy might interest you. I'm a big fan of thinking worldviewishly, and our philosophers have some pretty interesting things to say."
Peter asked, "What does 'worldviewishly' mean?"
Prof. Johnson said, "It means thinking in terms of worldviews. A worldview is the basic philosophical framework that gives shape to how we view the world. Our philosophers will be able to help you understand the basic issues surrounding worldviews and craft your own Christian worldview. You may find this frees you from the Enlightenment's secularizing influence—and if you don't know what the Enlightenment is now, you will learn to understand it, and its problems, and how you can be free of them." He spoke with the same simplistic assurance of artificial intelligence researchers who, seeing the power of computers and recognizing how simple certain cognitive feats are for humans, assumed that it was only a matter of time that artificial intelligence would "bridge the gap"—failing to recognize the tar pit of the peaks of intelligence that seem so deceptively simple and easy to human phenomenology. For computers could often defeat the best human players at chess—as computerlike a human skill as one might reasonably find—but deciphering the language of a children's book or walking through an unfamiliar room, so easy to humans, seemed more difficult for computers the more advanced research began. Some researchers believed that the artificial intelligence project had uncovered the non-obvious significance of a plethora of things humans take for granted—but the majority still believed that what seemed trivial for humans must be the sort of thinking a computer can do, because there is no other kind of thinking... and an isomorphic simplicity, an apparent and deceptive simplicity much like this one, made it seem as if ideas were all that really mattered: not all that existed, but all that had an important influence. Prof. Johnson did not consciously understand how the Enlightenment worldview—or, more accurately, the Enlightenment—created the possibility of seeing worldviews that way, nor did he see how strange the idea of crafting one's own worldview would seem to pre-Enlightenment Christians. He did not realize that his own kindness towards Peter was not simply because he agreed with certain beliefs, but because of a deep and many-faceted way in which he had walked for decades, and walked well. It was with perfect simplicity that he took this way for granted, as artificial intelligence researchers took for granted all the things which humans did so well they seemed to come naturally, and framed worldviewish thought as carrying with it everything he assumed from his way.
Peter said, "Ok. Well, I'll take those classes. It was good to meet you."
Prof. Johnson looked over a document that was the writeup of a sort of game, in which one had a number of different rooms that were of certain sizes, and certain classes had requirements about what kind of room they needed for how long, and the solution involved not only solving the mathematical puzzle, but meeting with teachers and caring for their concerns, longstanding patterns, and a variety of human dimensions derisively labelled as "political." Prof. Johnson held in his hands the schedule with the official solution for that problem, and guided Peter to an allowable choice of class sections, taking several different actions that were considered "boring paperwork."
Prof. Johnson said, "I enjoyed talking with you. Please do take some more candy—put a handful in your pocket or something. I just want to make one more closing comment. I want to see you succeed. Wheaton wants to see you succeed. There are some rough points and problems along the way, and if you bring them to me I can work with them and try to help you. If you want to talk with your RA or our chaplain or someone else, that's fine, but please... my door is always open. And it was good to meet you too! Goodbye!"
Peter walked out, completely relaxed.
The next activity, besides nourishing himself with lunch (and eating, sleeping, and many other activities form a gentle background rhythm to the activities people are more conscious of. I will not describe each time Peter eats and sleeps, even though the 100th time in the story he eats with his new friends is as significant as the first, because I will be trying to help you see it their way), requires some explanation.
The term "quest," to the people here, is associated with an image of knights in armor, and a body of literature from writers like Chretien de Troyes and Sir Thomas Mallory who described King Arthur and his knights. In Chretien de Troyes, the knight goes off in various adventures, often quests where he is attempting different physical feats. In Sir Thomas Mallory, a new understanding of quests is introduced, in the quest for the holy grail—a legendary treasure which I cannot here explain save to say that it profoundly altered the idea of a quest, and the quest took a large enough place in many people's consciousness that it is used as a metaphor of the almost unattainable object of an ultimate pursuit (so that physicists would say that a grand unified theory which crystallizes all physical laws into a few simple equations is the "holy grail of physics"), and that the holy grail is itself in the shadow of a greater treasure, and this treasure was one many people in fact had possessed (some after great struggle, while others had never known a time when they were without it). In Mallory in particular the quest can be more than a physical task; most of Arthur's knights could not reach the holy grail because of—they weren't physical blemishes and they weren't really mental blemishes either, but what they were is hard to say. The whole topic (knights, quests, the holy grail...) connects to something about that world that is beyond my ability to convey; suffice it to say that it is connected with one more dimension we don't have here.
Peter, along with another group of students, went out on a quest. The object of this quest was to acquire seven specific items, on conditions which I will explain below:
"A dog biscuit." In keeping with a deeply human trait, the food they prepare is not simply what they judge adequate to sustain the body, but meant to give pleasure, in a sense adorned, because eating is not to them simply a biological need. They would also get adorned food to give pleasure to organisms they kept, including dogs, which include many different breeds which in turn varied from being natural sentries protecting territories to a welcoming committee of one which would give a visitor an exuberant greeting just because he was there.
"An M16 rifle's spent shell casing." That means the used remnant after... wait a little bit. I need to go a lot farther back to explain this one.You will find something deceptively familiar in that in that universe, people strategically align resources and then attack their opponents, usually until a defeat is obvious. And if you look for what is deceptive, it will be a frustrating search, because even if the technologies involved are primitive, it is a match of strategy, tactics, and opposition.What makes it different is that this is not a recreation or an art form, but something many of them consider the worst evil that can happen, or among the worst. The resources that are destroyed, the bodies—in our world, it is simply what is involved in the game, but many of them consider it an eternal loss.
Among the people we will be meeting, people may be broken down into "pacifists" who believe that war is always wrong, and people who instead of being pure pacifists try to have a practical way of pursuing pacifist goals: the disagreement is not whether one should have a war for amusement's sake (they both condemn that), but what one should do when not having a war looks even more destructive than having a war. And that does not do justice to either side of the debate, but what I want to emphasize that to both of them this is not simply a game or one form of recreation; it is something to avoid at almost any cost.
A knight was someone who engaged in combat, an elite soldier riding an animal called a horse. In Chretien de Troye's day and Mallory's day, the culture was such that winning a fight was important, but fighting according to "chivalry" was more important. Among other things, chivalry meant that they would only use simple weapons based on mechanical principles—no poison—and they wouldn't even use weapons with projectiles, like arrows and (armor piercing) crossbow bolts. In practice that only meant rigid piercing and cutting weapons, normally swords and spears. And there was a lot more. A knight was to protect women and children.
The form that chivalry took in Peter's day allowed projectile weapons, although poison was still not allowed, along with biological, thermonuclear, and other weapons which people did not wish to see in war, and the fight to disfigure the tradition's understanding women had accorded them meant that women could fight and be killed like men, although people worked to keep children out of warfare, and in any case the "Geneva Convention", as the code of chivalry was called, maintained a sharp distinction between combatants and non-combatants, the latter of which were to be protected.
The specific projectile weapon carried by most members of the local army was called an M16 rifle, which fired surprisingly small .22 bullets—I say "surprisingly" because if you were a person fighting against them and you were hit, you would be injured but quite probably not killed.
This was intentional. (Yes, they knew how to cause an immediate kill.)
Part of it is the smaller consideration that if you killed an enemy soldier immediately, you took one soldier out of action; on the other hand, if you wounded an enemy soldier, you took three soldiers out of action. But this isn't the whole reason. The much bigger part of the reason is that their sense of chivalry (if it was really just chivalry; they loved their enemies) meant that even in their assaults they tried to subdue with as little killing as possible.
There were people training with the army in that community (no, not Peter; Peter was a pure pacifist) who trained, with M16 rifles, not because they wanted to fight, but as part of a not entirely realistic belief that if they trained hard enough, their achievement would deter people who would go to war. And the "Crusader battalion" (the Crusaders were a series of people who fought to defend Peter's spiritual ancestors from an encroaching threat that would have destroyed them) had a great sense of chivalry, even if none of them used the word "chivalry".
"A car bumper." A car bumper is a piece of armor placed on the front and back of cars so that they can sustain low-velocity collisions without damage. (At higher velocities, newer cars are designed to serve as a buffer so that "crumple zones" will be crushed, absorbing enough of the impact so that the "passenger cage" reduces injuries sustained by people inside; this is part of a broader cultural bent towards minimizing preventable death because of what they believe about one human life.) Not only is a car bumper an unusual item to give, it is heavy and awkward enough that people tend not to carry such things with them—even the wealthy ones tend to be extraordinarily lightly encumbered.
"An antique." It is said, "The problem with England is that they believe 100 miles is a long distance, and the problem with America is that they believe 100 years is a long time." An antique—giving the rule without all the special cases and exceptions, which is to say giving the rule as if it were not human—is something over 100 years old. To understand this, you must appreciate that it does not include easily available rocks, many of which are millions or billions of years old, and it is not based on the elementary particles that compose something (one would have to search hard to find something not made out of elementary particles almost as old as the universe). The term "antique" connotes rarity, and in a sense something out of the ordinary; that people's way is concerned with "New! New! New!" and it is hard to find an artifact that was created more than 100 years ago, which is what was intended.This quest is all the more interesting because there is an "unwritten rule" that items will be acquired by asking, not by theft or even purchase—and, as most antiques are valuable, it would be odd for someone you've just met—and therefore with whom you have only the general human bond but not the special bond of friendship—to give you such an item, even if most of the littler things in life are acquired economically while the larger things can only be acquired by asking.
"A note from a doctor, certifying that you do not have bubonic plague." Intended as a joke, this refers to a health, safeguarded by their medicine, which keeps them from a dreadful disease which tore apart societies some centuries ago: that sort of thing wasn't considered a live threat because of how successful their medicine was (which is why it could be considered humorous).
"A burning piece of paper which no one in your group lit. (Must be presented in front of Fischer and not brought into the building.)" This presents a physical challenge, in that there is no obvious way to transport a burning piece of paper—or what people characteristically envision as a burning piece of paper—from almost anywhere else to in front of Fischer.
"A sheet of paper with a fingerpaint handprint from a kindergartener.""Kindergarten" was the first year of their formal education, and a year of preparation before students were ready to enter their first grade. What did this society teach at its first, required year? Did it teach extraordinarily abstract equations, or cosmological theory, or literary archetypes, or how to use a lathe?All of these could be taught later on, and for that matter there is reason to value all of them. But the very beginning held something different. It taught people to take their turn and share; it taught people "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," the Golden Rule by which their great Teachers crystallized so much wisdom. All of this work and play, some of the most advanced lessons they could learn, were placed, not at the end, but at the beginning of their education.
That is what kindergarten was. What was a kindergartener? The true but uninformative answer would be "a person in kindergarten."
To get past that uninformative answer, I need to stress that their minds are bound up with organic life—they did not spring, fully formed, as you and I did. In most complex organisms, there is a process that transforms a genetically complete organism of just one cell to become a mature member of the species; among humans, that process is one of the longest and most complex. During that time their minds are developping as well as their bodies; in that regard they are not simply in harmony with the natural world this society believes it is separate from... but one of its best examples.
But to say that alone is to flatten out something interesting... even more interesting than the process of biological mental development is the place that society has for something called "childhood". Not all cultures have that concept—and again I am saying "culture" without explaining what it means. I can't. Not all societies understand "childhood" as this society does; to many, a child is a smaller and less capable adult, or even worse, a nonentity. But in this culture, childhood is a distinctive time, and a child, including a kindergardener, is something special—almost a different species of mind. Their inability to healthily sustain themselves is met, not always with scorn, but with a giving of support and protection—and this is not always a grudging duty, but something that can bring joy. They are viewed as innocent, which is certainly not true, and something keeps many people from resenting them when they prove that they are not innocent by doing things that would not be tolerated if an adult did it. And the imperviousness of this belief to contrary experience is itself the shadow of the whole place of childhood as a time to play and learn and explore worlds of imagination and the things most adults take for granted. And many adults experience a special pleasure, and much more than a pleasure, from the company of children, a pleasure that is tied to something much deeper.
This pleasure shines through even a handprint left with "fingerpaints," a way of doing art reserved for children, so that this physical object is itself a symbol of all that is special about childhood, and like symbols of that world carries with it what is evoked: seeing such a handprint is a little like seeing a kindergartener.
And they were off. They stopped for a brief break and annoyedly watched the spectacle of over a hundred linked metal carts carrying a vast quantity of material, and walked in and out of the surrounding neighborhoods. Their knocks on the door met a variety of warm replies. Before long, they had a handprint from a kindergartener, a dog biscuit (and some very enthusiastic attention from a kind dog!), a note from an off-duty doctor (who did not examine them, but simply said that if they had the bubonic plague there would be buboes bulging from them in an obvious way), a cigarette lighter and a sheet of paper (unlit), a twisted bumper (which Peter surprised people by flipping over his shoulder), and finally a spent shell casing from a military science professor. When they climbed up "Fischer beach," John handed the paper and lighter to his RA and said, "Would you light this?" It was with an exhausted satisfaction that they went to dinner and had entirely amiable conversation with other equally students who scant minutes ago had been their competitors.
When dinner was finished, Peter and Mary sat for a while in exhausted silence, before climbing up for the next scheduled activity—but I am at a loss for how to describe the next scheduled activity. To start with, I will give a deceptive description. If you can understand this activity, you will have understood a great deal more of what is in that world that doesn't fit in ours.
Do I have to give a deceptive description, in that any description in our terms will be more or less deceptive? I wasn't trying to make that kind of philosophical point; I wasn't tring to make a philosophical point at all. I am choosing a description of the next scheduled activity that is more deceptive than it needs to be.
When students studied an academic discipline called "physics," the curriculum was an initiation into progressively stranger and more esoteric doctrines, presented at the level which students were able to receive them. Students were first taught "Newtonian mechanics" (which openly regarded as false), before being initiated into "Einstein's relativity" at the next level (which was also considered false, but was widely believed to be closer to the truth). Students experienced a "night and day" difference between Newtonian mechanics and all higher order mysteries. If you were mathematically adept enough to follow the mathematics, then Newton was easy because he agreed with good old common sense, and Einstein and even stranger mysteries were hard to understand because they turned common sense on its head. Newton was straightforward while the others were profoundly counterintuitive. So Einstein, unlike Newton, required a student to mentally engulf something quite alien to normal, common sense ways of thinking about the world around oneself. Hence one could find frustrated student remarks about, "And God said, 'Let there be light!' And there was Newton. Then the Devil howled, 'Let Einstein be!' and restored the status quo."
Under this way of experiencing physics, Newton simply added mathematical formality to what humans always knew: everything in space fit in one long and continuous three-dimensional grid, and time could be measured almost as if it were a line, and so Einstein was simply making things more difficult and further from humans' natural perceptions when his version of a fully mathematical model softened the boundaries of space and time so that one could no longer treat it as if it had a grid for a skeleton.
Someone acquainted with the history of science might make the observation that it was not so much that Newton's mechanics were a mathematically rigorous formalization of how people experienced space and time, but that how people experienced space and time hadbecome a hazy and non-mathematical paraphrase of Newtonian mechanics: in other words, some students some students learned Newtonian mechanics easily, not because Newtonian physics was based on common sense, but because their "common sense" had been profoundly shaped by Newtonian physics.
This seemingly pedantic distinction was deeply tied to how the organic was being extinguished in their society.
I suspect you are thinking, "What other mathematical model was it based on instead?" And that's why you're having trouble guessing the answer.
The answer is related to the organic. Someone who knew Newton and his colleagues, and what they were rebelling against, could get a sense of something very different even without understanding what besides mathematics would undergird what space meant to them. In a certain sense, Newton forcefully stated the truth, but in a deceptive way. He worked hard to forge a concept of cold matter, pointing out that nature was not human—and it was a philosophical error to think of nature as human, but it was not nearly so great as one might think. Newton and his colleagues powerfully stressed that humans were superior to the rest of the physical world (which was not human), that they were meant not simply to be a part of nature but to conquer and rule it. And in so doing they attacked an equally great truth, that not only other life but even "inanimate" matter was kin to humans—lesser kin, perhaps, but humans and the rest of the natural world formed a continuity. They obscured the wisdom that the lordship humans were to exercise was not of a despot controlling something worthless, but the mastery of the crowning jewel of a treasure they had been entrusted to them. They introduced the concept of "raw material", something as foreign to their thinking as... I can't say what our equivalent would be, because everything surrounding "raw material" is so basic to us, and what they believed instead, their organic perception, is foreign to us. They caused people to forget that, while it would be a philosophical error to literally regard the world as human, it would be much graver to believe it is fundamentally described as inert, cold matter. And even when they had succeeded in profoundly influencing their cultures, so that people consciously believed in cold matter to a large degree, vestiges of the ancient experience survived in the medieval. It is perhaps not a coincidence that hundreds of years since Newton, in Newton's own "mother tongue" (English), the words for "matter" and "mother" both sprung from the same ancient root word.
The Newtonian conception of space had displaced to some degree the older conception of place, a conception which was less concerned with how far some place was from other different places, and more concerned with a sort of color or, to some extent, meaning. The older conception also had a place for some things which couldn't really be stated under the new conception: people would say, "You can't be in two places at once." What they meant by that was to a large degree something different, "Your body cannot be at two different spatial positions at the same time." This latter claim was deceptive, because it was true so far as it goes, but it was a very basic fact of life that people could be in two places at once. The entire point of the next scheduled activity was to be in two places at once.
Even without describing what the other place was (something which could barely be suggested even in that world) and acknowledging that the point of the activity was to be in two places at once, this description of that activity would surprise many of the people there, and disturb those who could best sense the other place. The next scheduled activity was something completely ordinary to them, a matter of fact event that held some mystery, and something that would not occur to them as being in two places at once. The activity of being present in two or more places at once was carried on, on a tacit level, even when people had learned to conflate place with mathematical position. One such activity was confused with what we do when we remember: when we remember, we recall data from storage, while they cause the past to be present. The words, "This do in rememberance of me," from a story that was ancient but preserved in the early medieval period we are looking at, had an unquestioned meaning of, "Cause me to be present by doing this," but had suffered under a quite different experience of memory, so that to some people it meant simply to go over data about a person who had been present in the past but could not be present then.
But this activity was not remembering. Or at least, it was not just remembering. And this leaves open the difficulty of explaining how it was ordinary to them. It was theoretically in complete continuity with the rest of their lives, although it would be more accurate to say that the rest of their lives were theoretically in complete continuity with it. This activity was in a sense the most human, and the most organic, in that in it they led the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, the plants, the rocks, the mountains, and the sees in returning to the place they came from. This description would also likely astonish the people who were gathered in a painted brick room, sitting on carpet and on movable perches, and seeing through natural light mixed with flickering fluorescent lights. Not one of them was thinking about "nature."
What went on there was in a very real sense mediocre. Each activity was broken down, vulgarized, compared to what it could be—which could not obliterate what was going on. When they were songs, they were what were called "7-11" songs, a pejorative term which meant songs with seven words repeated eleven times. There was a very real sense in which the event was diminished by the music, but even when you factor in every diminishing force, there was something going on there, something organic and more than organic, which you and I do not understand—for that matter, which many people in that world do not understand.
Archon was silent for a long time.
Ployon said, "What is it?"
Archon said, "I can't do it. I can't explain this world. All I've really been doing is taking the pieces of that world that are a bit like ours. You've been able to understand much of it because I haven't tried to convey several things that are larger than our world. 'God' is still a curious and exotic appendage that isn't connected to anything, not really; I haven't been able to explain, really explain, what it is to be male and female unities, or what masculinity and femininity are. There are a thousand things, and... I've been explaining what three-dimensional substance is to a two-dimensional world, and the way I've been doing it is to squash it into two dimensions, and make it understandable by removing from it everything that makes it three dimensional. Or almost everything..."
"How would a three dimensional being, a person from that world, explain the story?"
"But it wouldn't. A three dimensional being wouldn't collapse a cube into a square to make it easier for itself to understand; that's something someone who couldn't free itself from reading two dimensional thinking into three dimensions would do. You're stuck in two dimensions. So am I. That's why I failed, utterly failed, to explain the "brother-sister floor fellowship", the next scheduled activity. And my failure is structural. It's like I've been setting out to copy a living, moving organism by sculpturing something that looks like it out of steel. And what I've been doing is making intricate copies of its every contour, and painting the skin and fur exactly the same color, and foolishly hoping it will come alive. And this is something I can't make by genetic engineering."
"But how would someone from that world explain the story? Even if I can't understand it, I want to know."
"But people from that world don't explain stories. A story isn't something you explain; it's something that may be told, shared, but usually it is a social error to explain a story, because a story participates in human life and telling a story connects one human to another. And so it's a fundamental error to think a story is something you convey by explaining it—like engineering a robotic body for an animal so you can allow it to have a body. I have failed because I was trying something a mind could only fail at."
"Then can you tell the story, like someone from that world would tell it?"
Peter and Mary both loved to run, but for different reasons. Peter was training himself for various races; he had not joined track, as he did in high school, but there were other races. Mary ran to feel the sun and wind and rain. And, without any conscious effort, they found themselves running together down the prairie path together, and Peter clumsily learning to match his speed to hers. And, as time passed, they talked, and talked, and talked, and talked, and their runs grew longer.
When the fall break came, they both joined a group going to the northwoods of Wisconsin for a program that was half-work and half-play. And each one wrote a letter home about the other. Then Peter began his theology of culture class, and said, "This is what I want to study." Mary did not have a favorite class, at least not that she realized, until Peter asked her what her favorite class was and she said, "Literature."
When Christmas came, they went to their respective homes and spent the break thinking about each other, and they talked about this when they returned. They ended the conversation, or at least they thought they did, and then each hurried back to catch the other and say one more thing, and then the conversation turned out to last much longer, and ended with a kiss.
Valentine's Day was syrupy. It was trite enough that their more romantically inclined friends groaned, but it did not seem at all trite or syrupy to them. As Peter's last name was Patrick, he called Mary's father and prayed that St. Patrick's Day would be a momentous day for both of them.
Peter and Mary took a slow run to a nearby village, and had dinner at an Irish pub. Amidst the din, they had some hearty laughs. The waitress asked Mary, "Is there anything else that would make this night memorable?" Then Mary saw Peter on his knee, opening a jewelry box with a ring: "I love you, Mary. Will you marry me?"
Mary cried for a good five minutes before she could answer. And when she had answered, they sat in silence, a silence that overpowered the din. Then Mary wiped her eyes and they went outside.
It was cool outside, and the moon was shining brightly. Peter pulled a camera from his pocket, and said, "Stay where you are. Let me back up a bit. And hold your hand up. You look even more beautiful with that ring on your finger."
Peter's camera flashed as he took a picture, just as a drunk driver slammed into Mary. The sedan spun into a storefront, and Mary flew up into the air, landed, and broke a beer bottle with her face.
People began to come out, and in a few minutes the police and paramedics arrived. Peter somehow managed to answer the police officers' questions and to begin kicking himself for being too stunned to act.
When Peter left his room the next day, he looked for Prof. Johnson. Prof. Johnson asked, "May I give you a hug?" and then sat there, simply being with Peter in his pain. When Peter left, Prof. Johnson said, "I'm not just here for academics. I'm here for you." Peter went to chapel and his classes, feeling a burning rage that almost nothing could pierce. He kept going to the hospital, and watching Mary with casts on both legs and one arm, and many tiny stitches on her face, fluttering on the borders of consciousness. One time Prof. Johnson came to visit, and he said, "I can't finish my classes." Prof. Johnson looked at him and said, "The college will give you a full refund." Peter said, "Do you know of any way I can stay here to be with Mary?" Prof. Johnson said, "You can stay with me. And I believe a position with UPS would let you get some income, doing something physical. The position is open for you." Prof. Johnson didn't mention the calls he'd made, and Peter didn't think about them. He simply said, "Thank you."
A few days later, Mary began to be weakly conscious. Peter finally asked a nurse, "Why are there so many stitches on her face? Was she cut even more badly than—"
The nurse said, "There are a lot of stitches very close together because the emergency room had a cosmetic surgeon on duty. There will still be a permanent mark on her face, but some of the wound will heal without a scar."
Mary moved the left half of her mouth in half a smile. Peter said, "That was a kind of cute smile. How come she can smile like that?"
The nurse said, "One of the pieces of broken glass cut a nerve. It is unlikely she'll ever be able to move part of her face again."
Peter looked and touched Mary's hand. "I still think it's really quite cute."
Mary looked at him, and then passed out.
Peter spent a long couple of days training and attending to practical details. Then he came back to Mary.
Mary looked at Peter, and said, "It's a Monday. Don't you have classes now?"
Peter said, "No."
Mary said, "Why not?"
Peter said, "I want to be here with you."
Mary said, "I talked with one of the nurses, and she said that you dropped out of school so you could be with me.
"Is that true?" she said.
Peter said, "I hadn't really thought about it that way."
Mary closed her eyes, and when Peter started to leave because he decided she wanted to be left alone, she said, "Stop. Come here."
Peter came to her bedside and knelt.
Mary said, "Take this ring off my finger."
Peter said, "Is it hurting you?"
Mary said, "No, and it is the greatest treasure I own. Take it off and take it back."
Peter looked at her, bewildered. "Do you not want to marry me?"
Mary said, "This may sting me less because I don't remember our engagement. I don't remember anything that happened near that time; I have only the stories others, even the nurses, tell me about a man who loves me very much."
Peter said, "But don't you love me?"
Mary forced back tears. "Yes, I love you, yes, I love you. And I know that you love me. You are young and strong, and have the love to make a happy marriage. You'll make some woman a very good husband. I thought that woman would be me.
"But I can see what you will not. You said I was beautiful, and I was. Do you know what my prognosis is? I will probably be able to stand. At least for short periods of time. If I'm fortunate, I may walk. With a walker. I will never be able to run again—Peter, I am nobody, and I have no future. Absolutely nobody. You are young and strong. Go and find a woman who is worth your love."
Mary and Peter both cried for a long time. Then Peter walked out, and paused in the doorway, crying. He felt torn inside, and then went in to say a couple of things to Mary. He said, "I believe in miracles."
Then Mary cried, and Peter said something else I'm not going to repeat. Mary said something. Then another conversation began.
The conversation ended with Mary saying, "You're stupid, Peter. You're really, really stupid. I love you. I don't deserve such love. You're making a mistake. I love you." Then Peter went to kiss Mary, and as he bent down, he bent his mouth to meet the lips that he still saw as "really quite cute."
The stress did not stop. The physical therapists, after time, wondered that Mary had so much fight in her. But it stressed her, and Peter did his job without liking it. Mary and Peter quarreled and made up and quarreled and made up. Peter prayed for a miracle when they made up and sometimes when they quarreled. Were this not enough stress, there was an agonizingly long trial—and knowing that the drunk driver was behind bars surprisingly didn't make things better. But Mary very slowly learned to walk again. After six months, if Peter helped her, she could walk 100 yards before the pain became too great to continue.
Peter hadn't been noticing that the stress diminished, but he did become aware of something he couldn't put his finger on. After a night of struggling, he got up, went to church, and was floored by the Bible reading of, "You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." and the idea that when you do or do not visit someone in prison, you are visiting or refusing to visit Christ. Peter absently went home, tried to think about other things, made several phone calls, and then forced himself to drive to one and only one prison.
He stopped in the parking lot, almost threw up, and then steeled himself to go inside. He found a man, Jacob, and... Jacob didn't know who Peter was, but he recognized him as looking familiar. It was an awkward meeting. Then he recognized him as the man whose now wife he had crippled. When Peter left, he vomited and felt like a failure. He talked about it with Mary...
That was the beginning of a friendship. Peter chose to love the man in prison, even if there was no pleasure in it. And that created something deeper than pleasure, something Peter couldn't explain.
As Peter and Mary were planning the wedding, Mary said, "I want to enter with Peter next to me, no matter what the tradition says. It will be a miracle if I have the strength to stand for the whole wedding, and if I have to lean on someone I want it to be Peter. And I don't want to sit on a chair; I would rather spend my wedding night wracked by pain than go through my wedding supported by something lifeless!"
When the rehearsal came, Mary stood, and the others winced at the pain in her face. And she stood, and walked, for the entire rehearsal without touching Peter once. Then she said, "I can do it. I can go through the wedding on my own strength," and collapsed in pain.
At the wedding, she stood next to Peter, walking, her face so radiant with joy that some of the guests did not guess she was in exquisite pain. They walked next to each other, not touching, and Mary slowed down and stopped in the center of the church. Peter looked at her, wondering what Mary was doing.
Then Mary's arm shot around Peter's neck, and Peter stood startled for a moment before he placed his arm around her, squeezed her tightly, and they walked together to the altar.
On the honeymoon, Mary told Peter, "You are the only person I need." This was the greatest bliss either of them had known, and the honeymoon's glow shined and shined.
Peter and Mary agreed to move somewhere less expensive to settle down, and were too absorbed in their wedded bliss and each other to remember promises they had made earlier, promises to seek a church community for support and friends. And Peter continued working at an unglamorous job, and Mary continued fighting to walk and considered the housework she was capable of doing a badge of honor, and neither of them noticed that the words, "I love you" were spoken ever so slightly less frequently, nor did they the venom creeping into their words.
One night they exploded. What they fought about was not important. What was important was that Peter left, burning with rage. He drove, and drove, until he reached Wheaton, and at daybreak knocked on Prof. Johnson's door. There was anger in his voice when he asked, "Are you still my friend?"
Prof. Johnson got him something to eat and stayed with him when he fumed with rage, and said, "I don't care if I'm supposed to be with her, I can't go back!" Then Prof. Johnson said, "Will you make an agreement with me? I promise you I won't ever tell you to go back to her, or accept her, or accept what she does, or apologize to her, or forgive her, or in any way be reconciled. But I need you to trust me that I love you and will help you decide what is best to do."
Peter said, "Yes."
Prof. Johnson said, "Then stay with me. You need some rest. Take the day to rest. There's food in the fridge, and I have books and a nice back yard. There's iced tea in the—excuse me, there's Coke and 7 Up in the boxes next to the fridge. When I can come back, we can talk."
Peter relaxed, and he felt better. He told Prof. Johnson. Prof. Johnson said, "That's excellent. What I'd like you to do next is go in to work, with a lawyer I know. You can tell him what's going on, and he'll lead you to a courtroom to observe."
Peter went away to court the next day, and when he came back he was ashen. He said nothing to Prof. Johnson.
Then, after the next day, he came back looking even more unhappy. "The first day, the lawyer, George, took me into divorce court. I thought I saw the worst that divorce court could get. Until I came back today. It was the same—this sickening scene where two people had become the most bitter enemies. I hope it doesn't come to this. This was atrocious. It was vile. It was more than vile. It was—"
Prof. Johnson sent him back for a third day. This time Peter said nothing besides, "I think I've been making a mistake."
After the fourth day, Peter said, "Help me! I've been making the biggest mistake of my life!"
After a full week had passed, Peter said, "Please, I beg you, don't send me back there."
Prof. Johnson sent Peter back to watch a divorce court for one more miserable, excruciating day. Then he said, "Now you can do whatever you want. What do you want to do?"
The conflict between Peter and Mary ended the next day.
Peter went home, begging Mary for forgiveness, and no sooner than he had begun his apology, a thousand things were reflected in Mary's face and she begged his forgiveness. Then they talked, and debated whether to go back to Wheaton, or stay where they were. Finally Mary said, "I really want to go back to Wheaton."
Peter began to shyly approach old friends. He later misquoted: "I came crawling with a thimble in the desparate hope that they'd give a few tiny drops of friendship and love. Had I known how they would respond, I would have come running with a bucket!"
Peter and Mary lived together for many years; they had many children and were supported by many friends.
Ployon said, "I didn't follow every detail, but... there was something in that that stuck."
Archon said, "How long do you think it lasted?"
"A little shorter than the other one, I mean first part."
"Do you have any idea how many days were in each part?"
"About the same? I assume the planet had slowed down so that a year and a day were of roughly equal length."
"The first part took place during three days. The latter part spanned several thousand days—"
"I guess I didn't understand it—"
"—which is... a sign that you understood something quite significant... that you knew what to pay attention to and were paying attention to the right thing."
"But I didn't understand it. I had a sense that it was broken off before the end, and that was the end, right?"
Archon hesitated, and said, "There's more, but I'd rather not go into that."
Ployon said, "Are you sure?"
"You won't like it."
"Please."
The years passed and Peter and Mary grew into a blissfully happy marriage. Mary came to have increasing health problems as a result of the accident, and those around them were amazed at how their love had transformed the suffering the accident created in both of their lives. At least those who knew them best saw the transformation. There were many others who could only see their happiness as a mirage.
As the years passed, Jacob grew to be a good friend. And when Peter began to be concerned that his wife might be... Jacob had also grown wealthy, very wealthy, and assembled a top-flight legal team (without taking a dime of Peter's money—over Peter's protests!), to prevent what the doctors would normally do in such a case, given recent shifts in the medical system.
And then Mary's health grew worse, much worse, and her suffering grew worse with it, and pain medications seemed to be having less and less effect. Those who didn't know Mary were astonished that someone in so much pain could enjoy life so much, nor the hours they spent gazing into each other's eyes, holding hands, when Mary's pain seemed to vanish. A second medical opinion, and a third, and a fourth, confirmed that Mary had little chance of recovery even to her more recent state. And whatever measures been taken, whatever testimony Peter and Mary could give about the joy of their lives, the court's decision still came:
The court wishes to briefly review the facts of the case. Subject is suffering increasingly severe effects from an injury that curtailed her life greatly as a young person. from which she has never recovered, and is causing increasingly complications now that she will never again have youth's ability to heal. No fewer than four medical opinions admitted as expert testimony substantially agree that subject is in extraordinary and excruciating pain; that said excruciating pain is increasing; that said excruciating pain is increasingly unresponsive to medication; that subject has fully lost autonomy and is dependent on her husband; that this dependence is profound, without choice, and causes her husband to be dependent without choice on others and exercise little autonomy; and the prognosis is only of progressively worse deterioration and increase in pain, with no question of recovery.
The court finds it entirely understandable that the subject, who has gone through such trauma, and is suffering increasingly severe complications, would be in a state of some denial. Although a number of positions could be taken, the court also finds it understandable that a husband would try to maintain a hold on what cannot exist, and needlessly prolong his wife's suffering. It is not, however, the court's position to judge whether this is selfish...
For all the impressive-sounding arguments that have been mounted, the court cannot accord a traumatized patient or her ostensibly well-meaning husband a privelege that the court itself does not claim. The court does not find that it has an interest in allowing this woman to continue in her severe and worsening state of suffering.
Peter was at her side, holding her hand and looking into his wife's eyes, The hospital doctor had come. Then Peter said, "I love you," and Mary said, "I love you," and they kissed.
Mary's kiss was still burning on Peter's lips when two nurses hooked Mary up to an IV and injected her with 5000 milligrams of sodium thiopental, then a saline flush followed by 100 milligrams of pancurium bromide, then a saline flush and 20 milligrams of potassium chloride.
A year later to the day, Peter died of a broken heart.
Ployon was silent for a long time, and Archon was silent for an even longer time. Ployon said, "I guess part of our world is present in that world. Is that what you mean by being in two places at once?"
Archon was silent for a long time.
Ployon said, "It seems that that world's problems and failings are somehow greater than our achievements. I wish that world could exist, and that we could somehow visit it."
Archon said, "Do you envy them that much?"
Ployon said, "Yes. We envy them as—"
Archon said, "—as—" and searched through his world's images.
Metacult: So, Pater, I was thinking—wait a minute; I hear someone scratching at the door.
Janra: Hi, Vespucci. How are you?
Vespucci: Doing well. Take a seat.
Janra: Where?
Vespucci: Anywhere.
Janra:Anywhere?
Vespucci: Anywhere...
Off! Off! Get off my lap! Only my wife is allowed to sit there. You know that. Anyways, the Radical Gadgets catalogue came in today...
Janra: By the way, I phoned the company today. I think I can get some World War II vintage mechanical—
Vespucci: Don't even think about it. If you—
Pater: Easy, brothers. As you were saying?
Vespucci: As I was saying... Radical Gadgets has the most interesting tools. The cover product this month was an e-mail filtering package that uses Bayesian filtering techniques to block unwanted messages.
Janra:That's original! I checked Freshmeat today, and I think they only have half a dozen well-known anti-spam packages, not counting lesser products and tools that have just been released. Does Radical Gadgets always find products this original?
Vespucci: But it is original. And it's not an anti-spam package. It has nothing to do with spam.
Pater: Huh?
Vespucci: Let me explain. You know that Bayesian filtering looks at a message and uses statistics to guess what category it belongs to, right?
Pater: Yes; go on.
Vespucci: But that will work whether you use it for incoming or outgoing e-mails. Most people use the filtering techniques on incoming e-mails, to try and reduce the fire hose of spam coming in. But you don't have to stop there. You can also filter outgoing e-mails.
Pater: Why would I want to filter the e-mails I send out?
Vespucci: You've never sent a flame? Come on; I remember a couple of times that you flamed me over something minor, and sent a very embarrassed apology when I waited two weeks and simply sent it back, and asked you to read it aloud, and tell me whether that's what you want me to hear from you. And it's not just you. When you're talking with a person face to face, there are two eyes looking at you and reminding you that a person hears every cutting word you say. That doesn't stop conflicts, but it does mitigate some of the abrasive things we're tempted to say. On a computer, it seems like there's just a keyboard and pixels—no person you can actually hurt. So people hit harder, and you have incredible flamewars, often between people who conduct themselves like responsible adults when they're talking to someone face to face. It's possible to learn discipline, of course, and conduct yourself maturely, but all too many people don't realise there's a discipline you have to learn even if you're mature.
And so instead of just assuming that the only bad e-mails are offensive messages from people who've never seen you, telling you that part of your body isn't big enough and you need to buy their snake oil, or that you're impotent, or that you're not man enough for a relationship with a real woman and will have to content yourself with pixels on a screen—apart from these, there are offensive messages that you send out and then wish you could somehow take back and delete.
And this program does just that. Once you've trained it on your sent mail folder, it watches messages you send out, and uses the same Bayesian technology that's so powerful in identifying spam, and identifies when you're writing something you'll regret later. Then it saves it, quarantining it in a separate folder until you come to your senses and delete it.
Pater: That's... um, I'm going to go to their computer and order it from their website. Please excuse me for a moment. I really need to—
Metacult: Sit down, Pater. You're not going to e-mail out any flames while we're here talking.
Vespucci: Hmm... um, I hadn't meant to have a big discussion about the anti-flame software. There were several things that caught my attention, but what caught my eye most was a watch that keeps exceptionally accurate time.
Pater: Huh? Who would need a more accurate way to keep time? Most cultures find an hour to be a short time, and a cheap digital watch keeps more accurate time than a $5000 Rolex, because our watches are too accurate already. It would be awfully hard to explain our to-the-second accuracy to an aboriginal—I can't see why, besides pride that wants a possession to boast about, someone would benefit from a more accurate watch.
Vespucci: Oh, but there is benefit—worth paying $5,000 for a digital watch. Even worth having to change the batteries too often.
Pater: How?
Vespucci: The Watch doesn't just have an oscillating quartz crystal; it has an array of sensors in the watchband that measure skin temperature and conductivity, pulse, even a clever estimate of blood pressure, and feeds all of these into an embedded chip with some extraordinarily clever software.
This software takes these data and gets a picture of the person's emotional state. You know how time flies when you're having fun?
Pater: Didn't Einstein explain his theory of relativity by saying, "When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute—and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity."
Vespucci: Um... that has nothing to do with the theory of relativity, and I'm not interested in discussing Einstein's spacetime now. If Einstein said that, he probably had a merry twinkle in his eye. But...
Come to think about it, that is a pretty good picture. The Watch estimates your emotional state for one purpose: it keeps track of how long time seems to be passing. It has a normal timer that can count forty minutes until dinnertime, but it can also tell you how long the wait will feel like. And that's something no other watch can do.
Metacult: So it deals with subjective time? I read a book once which was trying to argue that time could be understood as something besides the number a machine has counted to. It talked about how a small child will ask Mom how long she's leaving for, and Mom's answer—she's really trying to avoid feeling guilty about leaving the child alone—are singularly unhelpful for a child trying to figure out how much perceived time must be endured before Mom returns.
Vespucci: Yes, and the minute-hour quote captures that. All watches tell what time it is from a machine's perspective. This is the only watch that tells time from a human perspective.
Metacult: Wonderful. What does it take into account besides clock ticks and the person's emotional state?
Vespucci: Huh? What else contributes to our experience of time besides the physical time and our psychological state?
Pater: Your question betrays nominalism. The way you've framed things shuts out the true answer.
Vespucci: We're entering the third millenium; I don't see why you're dragging in a controversy from medieval times.
Janra: Mmmph. Excuse me. I think I need a glass of water.
Metacult: Sit down, Janra. And don't look at me like that. I'm going let you answer that.
Janra: Certainly. Here are the steps to hunt a bear: First, fire your gun. Second, aim your gun. Third, locate a bear. Fourth, buy a gun.
Metacult: Try again.
Janra: Clothing to wear in winter: a heavy coat, then on top of that a good sweater or two, then two shirts and two pair of pants, then underwear, with woolen socks over your boots.
Metacult: Please be serious.
Janra: I am being serious.
Metacult: Then be mundane.
Janra: Oh. That's another matter entirely.
Your entire approach is backwards and inside-out, as backwards as trying to shoot a bear before you have a gun, and as inside-out as wearing your anorak next to your skin.
How? Let me respond to your second comment. If I said, in the most reverent of tones, "We're standing at the forty-second latitude and eighty-seventh longitude," you'd think I was making a mountain out of a molehill: yes, we're at a particular latitude and longitude, but what does that have to do with the price of eggs in China? It's true, but what does that have to do with anything we're discussing? Yet people say, "We're entering the third millenium" as if it is this great statement of far-reaching consequences, the sort of thing that should settle a matter. As you yourself did.
People in the Middle Ages often did not know what year it was, or even what century, any more than people today know what latitude and longitude we're at—quick—do you know what latitude and longitude you're at? The reason is that we think the past is under a glass bell, where we humans are living our lives while those odd and quaint creatures under the bell are not the same as us. And it doesn't need to be that way. For a long time after Shakespeare's death, when people put on Shakespeare, they didn't try to reconstruct period accurate costumes. Why? Did they not know that Shakespeare lived long before them? Perhaps, but they also recognised that Shakespeare was a human who worked with human problems and wrote human drama, and that the reason his plays are worth performing is not because they're old but because they're timelessly human. And we forget this when we take great care to dress actors in funny costumes that tell people that this is something quaint from long ago and far away.
You know that many of your physical possessions that make up the physical world come from far away: when you buy something at Target, and make no effort to find treasures from faroff land, you buy a lamp that was made in China or underpants that were made in Mexico. You know that the whole world is interconnected, so even if you don't go hunting off for exotic imports, a great many of the things you buy were made far away.
You can as much live without ideas from bygone ages as you can live in a house you built with your own hands—or for that matter, be born in a house you built with your own hands. That isn't how things work. Nominalism is one of innumerable ideas that has survived, just as the custom of using pots and pans has survived.
Vespucci: If it's one of innumerable ideas, why pay it that much attention?
Janra: Because I can count on my fingers the number of conceptual revolutions that are more important today than nominalism. Trying to understand how people think today without looking at nominalism is like trying to look at a summer meadow without seeing plants. There are other important ideas, but this one makes the short list.
Vespucci: Then why have I not heard more about nominalism, when I hear people talking about postmodernism, for instance, or modernism? And what is nominalism to begin with?
Janra: For the same reason a fish won't tell you about water. Modernism and postmodernism are both nominalism writ large; nominalism is a seed, whose flower is modernism, and whose fruit is postmodernism.
Vespucci: Hmm. I hear the distinct accent of a person laboring in the prison of one idea.
Janra: Bear with me. Nominalism may be seen as the lock on a prison: we need to pay close attention to the lock to see if there's any way to open it. Then, if we can get out, let us see if there are not many more ideas available after we have paid proper attention to nominalism.
Now what is nominalism? In a sentence, nominalism says, "There's nothing out there; it's all in your head." A nominalist doesn't literally mean "nothing" is outside our heads; you can't put on a watch and say, "I refute nominalism thus."
Vespucci: But it was a non sequitur when—
Janra: Yes, I know, I know. Another tangent. But let's forget about saying that matter is just in people's heads and not something external to mind. As I was saying, you can't put on a watch and say, "I refute nominalism thus." But if we really follow nominalist logic, you can't put on a watch. You can have nerve impulses that result in the motion of some elementary particles, but a watch is a tool-to-tell-time-which-you-wear-on-your-wrist, and a tool-to-tell-time-which-you-wear-on-your-wrist does not and cannot exist in nature. All the meaning that makes those atoms a watch can only exist in minds, and for the same reason what-we-call-a-watch can't have the time displayed on its face. It can have elementary particles that are placed like so and interact with light just so, but the meaning that can read a time in that configuration isn't at all in the atoms themselves; it's in your head. This is clarified in a distinction between "brute fact" and "social reality:" brute fact is what exists outside of minds and social reality can only exist in minds, and almost anything humans value consists of a small amount of brute fact and a large portion of social reality—larger than most people would guess. Everything is either brute fact or social reality.
Pater: Is the boundary between brute fact and social reality a brute fact or a social reality?
Metacult: Shut up.
Janra: Imagine three umpires at a baseball game: the first says, "I calls 'em as they are." The second says, "I calls 'em as I sees them." But the third says, "Some's strikes, and some's balls, but they ain't nothing 'til I calls 'em."
With apologies to Kronecker, God created cold matter. All else is the work of man.
Pater: Whoa. Is the basic faculty that lets man create social reality derived from brute fact or social reality?
Janra: Shut up.
Now I have been showing what happens when you push nominalism a good deal further than non-scholars are likely to do. But in fact nominalism has been seeping into our consciousness for centuries, so that we might not find the claim that nature is beautiful to be a mistake, but we see with nominalist eyes and hear with nominalist ears. Most of people across most of time have understood and experienced symbols very different from how a nominalist would.
If we assume that matter is basically something cold and dead, devoid of spiritual properties, then of course a symbol can only exist in the mind, a mental connection between two things that are not connected by nature. Any similarity is in the eye of the beholder, or if not that, is at least a coincidence that isn't grounded on anything deeper. There is no organic connection.
But if we look at how people have understood symbols, their understanding has to do with a view of reality where a great many things are real, where a symbol bespeaks a real and spiritual connection. The crowning jewel of this understanding of symbol was the claim that man is the image of God. When Christians talked about man being the image of God, they were not talking about what we would understand by a photograph or a painting, where pigments are arranged in such a way that an observer can tell they were meant to look like God; they meant a real and organic connection that went far beyond a mere representation of God; they meant that we were what you would think a kind of magical statue which not only represented God, but embodied his actual presence: God's presence operates in us in a real way, and every breath we breathe is the breath of God.
Now the reason we began discussing nominalism was that you said something, and I said, "That question betrays nominalism." Do you remember what you said?
Vespucci: No.
Janra: We were discussing what I consider to be a very interesting watch, and you asked what could contribute to our experience of time besides what an ordinary watch tells, and our emotional state.
That question betrays nominalism. You were in essence asking what could interest us in time besides the brute fact of what most watches tell, and the social, or at least mental, reality of our emotional state.
But there's a world of other things out there.
Vespucci: But what else is there?
Metacult: Hmm. I think we need to work a bit harder to help you look at what you believe. You've been keeping up on superstring theory, right?
Vespucci: Yes. I loved the explanations I could get of relativity, and I love how scientists can turn our commonsense notions upside down.
Metacult: Do you know any classical, Newtonian physics?
Vespucci: I did in high school. I've forgotten most of it now, but I don't remember it being nearly as exciting: a lot of math to go through to get at common sense.
Metacult: May I instead suggest that your common sense is a nonmathematical version of Newtonian physics?
Newton's physics was big on grids: everything was placed on a grid of absolute space, and absolute time. And it connected rooms the wrong way: different places are on the same meaningless grid, but they're not connected besides the grid.
To the medieval mind, it wasn't so. Each space was its own little world as far as Newton was concerned. But they were connected spiritually. There is an icon of two saints from different centuries talking, and the medieval mind was comfortable with this because it saw things other than "but they're from other parts of the spacetime grid!"
Vespucci: But what does this have to do with time? It seems to me you're going off on a tangent.
Metacult: Ok, back to time. Time isn't just a grid adorned by emotions. It's spiritually connected. You yourself are not self-contained.
Pater: And there's liturgical time. One of the things that shocked me was that people seem to have no time. It helped me to appreciate the colorful time I had breathed. I was stunned when people experienced time as torture. I experienced it as a sacrament, a channel of God's grace.
From other conversations, I get the impression that the liturgical year isn't real to you: one source of holidays among others. But it is real: interlocking cycles of day, week, year, so that you are breathing in this rhythm and are given something to live in each moment. Sometimes you're feasting; sometimes you're fasting; often you're given something to meditate on.
Vespucci: So the watch would do a more complete job if its little computer were programmed to keep track of the liturgical cycles? I think the engineers could do that.
Pater: Errmmmmm...
Metacult: I think what he means, but cannot articulate, is that what a computer could make of the liturgical cycles are not the place that makes liturgical time. They are more of a doorway into the place, into a room that the Spirit blows. If the watch were to keep track of that, it would have to have, not more sophisticated computer programming, but something else altogether, something sensitive to spiritual realities.
Pater: And that's just what a scientific computer, even a very small one, cannot do. Science works on nominalism. It's brought a lot of good stuff, but it can't perceive or work with spiritual qualities, any more than a pair of binoculars will improve your hearing. And that's fine when you recognise that spiritual qualities are left out, but the temptation is to say, "Because science is so powerful, it sees everything that's real." And a watch designed by scientific engineering can do scientific things, but if it were to try and see liturgical time from the inside, it would inevitably kill what breathes in it.
Janra: So if we were to imagine a watch that keeps track of time, true time, it would need not only sensors and a miniature computer, and a time-keeping quartz crystal, but something attuned to spiritual realities.
Pater: If that were possible. In my culture, we never wear watches. The best watch would be no watch, or perhaps a rock on a wristband, where if you go to it looking for trivia, it doesn't give what you're looking for—and in so doing, reminds you of something important, that you need to look elsewhere.
Janra: What about a watch that had a rock alongside the things we've just described?
Pater: Ermmm...
Janra: And what would men's and women's models look like? Would the rocks be respectively rough and smooth?
Metacult: Actually, men's and women's experience of time differs significantly, so if you had a watch with a truer way of telling time, there would be a much bigger difference than men's watches being heftier and women's watches being slender.
Janra: How?
Metacult: I remember one time when you were talking with a new mother, and whenever the baby needed care, you stopped talking so that Mom could pay attention to her new son. It was a thoughtful gesture, and one that wasn't needed.
Janra: Why not? I'd have wanted to be allowed to give the child my full attention.
Metacult: I know. So would most good men. A man's particular strength is to devote his full attention to a task. A woman's particular strength is to lightly balance several tasks, giving genuine attention to each. That mother was perfectly able to give attention to her son and listen to you at the same time. That's why she looked at you, slightly puzzled and with an attention that says, "I'm listening," when you stopped talking.
And there are other differences as well. If there is a situation that colors a man's understanding of time, it is a brief period of intense pressure. A woman's understanding of time more has the hue of a longer period that requires sustained attention. And even that misses something. The difference between a man's experience of time and a woman's is not so much like a difference between numbers as a difference between two colors, or sounds, or scents. It's a qualitative difference, and one that is not appreciated—usually people feel in their heart, "She's treating time the same way I do, but doing an unexplainably bad job of it."
Vespucci: I forgot to tell you, the watch also asks when you were born.
Pater: Why? To remind you if you forget your birthday?
Vespucci: I'm surprised, Pater. It's so it can keep track of your age. You experience time differently as you grow. What seems like an hour when you're five only seems like half an hour when you're ten, or fifteen minutes when you're twenty, or five minutes when you're sixty. Time seems to go faster and faster as you grow: there's one change between when you're a child and an adult, and senior citizens say that every fifteen minutes it's breakfast. The quality and pace of time change as you age, which is why young people think youth lasts forever and the rest of us think it vanishes. They say that once you're over the hill, you begin to pick up speed.
Pater: What does "over the hill" mean?
Vespucci: Um...
Metacult: He really doesn't understand. To him, aging is about maturing and growing, not only for children, but adults as well. He values his youth as a cherished memory, but he's enjoying his growth and looking forward eagerly to the joy awaiting him in Heaven. He doesn't understand your self-depracating humor that speaks as if aging were a weakness or a moral failing.
Vespucci: Ok.
Metacult: Which reminds me. One of the ways my experience of time has changed as I have grown has been to recognize that time flows faster and faster. For some people, this is a reason to try way too hard to be healthy—taking care of their bodies, not because their bodies should be taken care of, but to try and postpone the inevitable. But I'm looking forward to the Heaven that's getting closer and closer, and I am delighted by a glimpse into the perspective of a God who created time and to whom all times are both soon and now.
But the other major change is more internal, more a matter of discipline. I used to live in hurry, to always walk quickly and love to play video games quickly. Then I set foot in Malaysia, and something changed.
There was a difference, which I imperfectly characterized as life being lived more slowly in Malaysia. Which is true, or was for me, but is somewhat beside the point. And I experienced the joy of living more slowly. You know how I've thought that it takes humility to enjoy even pride, and chastity to enjoy even lust. At that point I would have added to those two that it takes slowness to enjoy even haste.
Vespucci: So you tried to be as slow as you had been quick?
Metacult: Yes. I observed that I had been obsessed with time under the tyranny of the clock, and so I tried to abolish time by being slow. Which isn't right; besides chronos, the time a clock can measure, there is kairos, relational or task-oriented or creating time, where you are absorbed in another person or a task, and there time is a glimmer of eternity. And I was interested in the idea of living time as the beginning of an eternal glory, which Pater understands much better than I ever will. First I tried to negate time and live as something less-than-temporal, and I am slowly realizing that instead it means embracing time and entering something more-than-temporal.
In liturgical time—and Pater could say much more about this than I—it flows. Here it moves quickly, there it moves slowly, and there it spins in eddies. It isn't just the speed that flows; it's the color, if you will. Just as the priest is the crowning jewel of the priesthood every person is called for, so the touch of Heaven as we worship is the crowning jewel of what time is meant to be.
And I had also been realizing that I had sought to escape time, and not cherish it as God's good creature. Most recently, I am trying to... There's a famous quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes, saying, "I wouldn't give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I'd give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity." Now I'm looking for a time that is on the other side of complexity: not the mundane ordinariness of disfigured time, but a beautiful ordinariness on the other side of this complexity we've been discussing.
Vespucci: How do you think that will work?
Metacult: I don't know. Part of it has to do with the metaculture you used for my nickname. I don't simply breathe in my culture and ask "How else could it be?", but am in the odd position of being able to step into cultures but never be absolutely at home. And have part of me that doesn't fit. That's not quite right; I do connect, partly in a way that is basically human, and partly in a way that is—
Janra: Don't try to explain. That would take an hour.
Metacult: At any rate, a fair number of people talk about living counterculturally, and one way you can live counterculturally is let live time as a blessing rather than a curse. People who say technology determines our lives are almost right, and that almost makes a world of difference if you're willing to live counterculturally. The pressure on us to live in hurry is not a pressure that no one can escape. It is a pressure that few try to escape in the right way—but you can, if you try and go about it the right way.
But quite a lot of the rest of it has to do with very basic parts of the Christian life. God wants us to seek him first, and when we do, he knows full well what else we need. "Seek first the Kingdom of God, and all these things will be given to you as well." includes a life where time unfolds as a rainbow or a river, something of both color and flow, like the year with its beauty in due season.
Vespucci: Do you see time as a line or a circle? Something that keeps moving in a direction, or something that does the same thing over and over again?
Metacult: Both, of course. God is revealing himself in history and transforming it to his ends. And there is decay; decay follows a line down. In our lives, we are progressing towards Heaven or Hell, and in each day... here we meet the cycles, but if we live well, the cycles in our lives aren't just an aimless meandering, but like a man who keeps running through a ditch, digging. In one way, he's going to the same places again and again, but in another way, he's going deeper—and he may meet both the earth's warmth in winter (or coolness in summer), and the water of life. The line moves through circles.
Janra: So what would make the perfect watch?
Vespucci: Are there any we haven't covered?
Metacult: Umm... we've looked at one big change from a normal watch—instead of adding a calculator, that Radical Gadgets catalogue had a watch that tries to tell a more human time by taking your age and emotional state into account as well as what most watches tell. That was sort of a Pandora's box. I think we could all agree that that watch was leagues more human than any normal watch... and it was just human enough to reveal how un-human watches are.
Vespucci: How?
Metacult: When the only kind of watch kept track of seconds, it was easy enough to think that time was simply what a watch told. But when one watch started to pay attention to how you feel...
It was kind of like when you've been in the freezing outdoors for a long time, so long that it still hurts a little, but you can almost ignore it. Then you come inside, and THEN it stings. It's not until you enter a genuinely warm room that you realize how cold and numb you really are.
The Watch in that catalogue was just human enough to reveal how un-human watches, and the time that they tell, are. It did what no other watch could. It's enough of a success to be a spectacular failure. Someone brought up liturgical time, which led to the suggestion that the watch be programmed to keep track of liturgical time. And then we stumbled into a hole with no bottom. Why can't a computer keep track of liturgical time? Well, you see, the Spirit does more than just follow calculations... A watch would need far more than better electronics to do that, far more than scientific engineering can provide. Although I did like the suggestion of adding a rock. Even if I don't see how to make a rock sensitive to women's time and men's time. Or rather, what to do to appropriately respect the difference.
Vespucci: Janra, what you said about nominalism interests me. Could you give a more complete explanation?
Janra: I'd love to, but I need to be somewhere next month.
Vespucci: Please be serious.
Janra: I am being serious.
Vespucci: Then be mundane.
Metacult: He is being mundane. If you'd like a good introduction, read Philip Sherrard's The Rape of Man and Nature: An Enquiry Into the Origins & Consequences of Modern Science. In it, Sherrard says almost nothing about time and everything about the things time is connected to. I think it goes overboard, but if you read it and pay attention to the haunting beauty that keeps coming up, then you'll learn something about being human—and living in human time. It doesn't use the word 'nominalism' very much, but it says quite a lot about it.
Vespucci: Are there any other things you've all left out?
Metacult: Only about two billion. I've talked about kairos as an absorbed time instead of a time when you're watching the clock. What I haven't talked about as kairos as a divinely appointed time, where you are in a divinely orchestrated dance, and you are free, and yet your movements are part of the divine plan. We are human, not by "just" being human, but by allowing the divine to operate in us; it is the divine, not the human, that we need most to be human. I haven't discussed that. We haven't discussed, in connection with nominalism, how there is a spiritual place in us where we meet God, and we have the ability to reason from what we see, and in tandem with nominalism we have become impoverished when both functions are dumped on the reasoning ability and we don't know where we can meet God, where our minds connect with the very Reason that is God himself. It makes a difference whether we experience time through both our reasoning ability and this spiritual meeting-place, or through our reasoning ability alone.
I also haven't talked about turning back the clock. When people rightly or wrongly believe there is a golden age they've lost, and try to re-create it, they end up severing connections with the recent past and even the golden age.
Vespucci: How does that work?
Metacult: I'm not exactly sure.
My guess is that a living culture has a way of not being ambiguous. It gives corrections when you make false assumptions about it; that's why people experience culture shock. People trying to re-create a past golden age need never experience culture shock; if you make a false assumption about the golden age, the golden age won't correct you. So the golden age appears to be whatever you want, and people who aren't satisfied with the present, and want to re-create past glory, end up pushing a fantasy that is different both from the present and the past. The Renaissance and Enlightenment neo-classicism both tried to re-create the glory of classical antiquity and are both notable as departures from the past. People who aren't trying to re-create the past can preserve it, saying, "Be gentle with this tradition. It was not inherited from your parents; it is borrowed from your children." People eager to restore past glory all too often, if not sever, severely damage the link between past and future.
I also haven't talked about keeping up with the Trumps, and your unadvertised way to say "No!" to the tyranny of the urgent. I haven't even talked about—
Janra: Stop! Stop. You're going way overboard. He got your point. In fact, I think he got your point half an hour ago. He—
Pater: Could I interrupt for a moment?
Janra: Certainly. What is it?
Pater: I know this is going to sound REALLY strange, but I want a watch.
Vespucci, Janra, Metacult: Huh?
Pater: You heard me.
Janra: But why?
Pater: I know this is going to sound strange, but I want one.
To you a watch represents all sorts of problems, and I don't wonder if you're dumping too much on it. But that's another issue. I don't have the ticking clock in me that you do. There's an issue of sensitivity—I know you hate watches and probably planners, but I burn people by being late and forgetting that just an hour's delay to me is not "just" an hour to them.
Is it really impossible to make a watch that can represent liturgical time, or even hollow out a space liturgical time can abide in? I thought it was possible now to make a watch that will keep track of sunrise and sunset. Scientific engineering can't do some things, but could there be another kind of engineering? I suppose that "even" that technical marvel in your catalogue, the watch that knows how long something feels like, would make an awfully neat conversation piece.
Metacult: I think I may know of just the thing for you.
This watch is a sort of hybrid. Part of it is traditional electronic—something that tells hours, minutes, and seconds, that displays the date, and has a timer, alarm, and a stopwatch accurate to the nearest hundredth of a second—and for that matter it's water resistant to two hundred meters. It's a bit battered—which adds to its masculine look.
But that's not the interesting part. The interesting part has an exquisite sensitivity to liturgical rhythm, such as purely electronic gadgetry could never deliver. And it is a connected time, a part of the Great Dance that moves not according to the wearer's emotions alone but what the Great Choreographer orchestrates. It moves in beautiful ordered time. And there is more. It can enter another person's or place's time, and fit. Among other things.
Pater: This is great! Where can I get one?
Metacult: Just a second while I take off my watch... here's the littlest part. The rest is already inside your heart.
Dexios:An article that tries to catch you by beginning, "They really should have put it into my contract: I, the undersigned, hereby agree to spend one-half to three-quarters of all class time explaining why watching Dawson's Creek and thinking vague thoughts about God is not a valid substitute for attending mass." The students weren't affected by the usual exhortations, until she happened on a visit to monastic worship.
Links: ...And?
Dexios: The students were perfectly welcome, but the monks were there worshipping God and the students were welcome to join the monks worshipping God. And that got their attention when a whole legion of ill-starred attempts to get their attention failed. One student said, "With all the other masses, it's like it was all about me or something. With this mass, I got the feeling it was about God." And that succeeded where words about "It's commanded," or "It's good for you," failed.
The students weren't really asking "Why should I go to mass?" at all; they said that because they couldn't form the words to ask what they really meant.
Links: And that was...?
Dexios: "Why should I go to that mass?"
Links: Wow. I'm surprised you're siding with a bunch of rebellious—how old are they?
Dexios: Students at a Catholic high school. And as to rebellious—teenagers are likely to rebel and be rebels without a cause if they have too much trouble finding a good enough cause, but there's something that has to do with spirit that isn't rebellious at all. They rejected counterfeit coin.
Links: "Spirit?" As in—
Dexios: Um, as in—[pause]
Links: —as in something you're thinking about?
Dexios: Yes.
Links: So you're saying these students were super spiritual?
Dexios: Yes. No. Saying that they're super spiritual is an answer to the wrong question. Sure, I'd love to bring two (or however many it was) busloads of kids to our parish and show them how Orthodox worship is taken seriously even if you're not monks, but if you're thinking of spirit as some special quality that has an incense rising up from the best people's heads, that's exactly what it's not. I would say it's natural, if people hadn't heard a million voices saying that appetite is the only thing that's natural about us. These kids weren't showing spirit because they were being urged to be spirit enough to want real worship and not a show—if anything, they were spirit enough for that despite people urging them that shows dressed up as worship were good enough for them. And the author of the article didn't say that every now and then she sees a kid with a halo and that kid wants a real worship service, and is so spiritually snobbish that only a monastic service will satisfy him. (She said the services were "relaxed, by monastic standards," whatever that means.) What she was saying was that everyday, normal kids kept asking her why they should go to mass until she showed them...
A real mass. Or rather, one where monks were there to worship God and other people were quite welcome to join them in worshipping God.
Links: [pause] In Spirit and in Truth.
Dexios: In Spirit and in Truth. And I realized just now that the article has more going on in it than just spirit. It has a million other substitutes for spirit that people aren't happy with. Maybe it wasn't just spirit that resonated with me.
Links: Where else?
Dexios: Maybe your art history education simply talked about different eras and cultures choosing different strengths to develop—
Links: —it did—
Dexios: —but in mine there was a story of progress: at first medieval art was crude, and then changes began in medieval art that resulted in art getting better and better at being like a photograph until eventually artists weren't an expensive substitute for a photograph. The history of Western art was a history of progress, starting with medieval art that didn't look like a good photograph up to Enlightenment neo-classicism that could give a good photograph a run for its money. Which is exactly right, except that it's backwards.
Links: Let me guess. You're going to say that the medieval art was spiritual, or spirit?
Dexios: Something like that, because the baseline for medieval art was similar to icons. They hadn't gone to such scientific lengths to get a scientifically correct rendition of the human body for the mirror image of why pastors get their science illustrations wrong. Pastors and theologians get their science wrong because their focus is on theology and just a little science is brought in to make a point—and the fact that the science is usually wrong shows that their hearts are in the right place. But scientific art, unlike medieval art but like "The Oaths of the Horatii" by Jacques Louis David, for which he sketched first skeletons and then muscles and then bodies and only then painted bodies complete with clothes, represents a fall from a spiritual center of gravity.
Links: But the material world is good, and understanding it is good.
Dexios: Um...
Links: Which of those do you want to deny?
Dexios: Do you believe I have to deny that the material world is good? Or, alternately, that understanding the material world is good?
Links: Unless you want to say some very strange things about science.
Dexios: Ugh, I was hoping to avoid saying strange things about science. But first of all, you seem to be treating "understanding the natural world" and "science" as interchangeable, so that it is inconceivable what "understanding the human body" could mean besides "learning scientific facts about the body."
Links: And how exactly would I learn about the body apart from science?
Dexios: Let's see, you could look Appreciate art that portrays the human form, or discover how your body behaves by playing Baseball, or have a Chiropractic massage, if there is such a thing, or Dance, or—
Links: —didn't you say something about "alignment of the stars, alignment of the bones..." yesterday?
Dexios: You interrupted me! I was hoping to work my way up to something profound. But let's put massage under 'M' and forget about the alignment of the bones. I don't want to get into alternative medicine, besides saying that it seems a hint that people have some sense that their bodies have to have more to do with spirit than the almost mechanical view of "Western medicine", which is powerful and yet considered narrow in some circles.
And now for something related to the other horn for your dilemma.
Having enough to eat is good. So is having clothing, and a roof over your head in nasty weather. But the Sermon on the Mount tells us not to seek after these things: yes, we need them, and the Heavenly Father knows this well enough. But we are to seek first the Kingdom of Heaven and his perfect righteousness, making our center of gravity there, and making a spiritual center of gravity. Oh, and by the way, the other things will be given to us as well, even though that isn't the point. The point, if I may use slightly non-Sermon-on-the-Mount language, is to have a spiritual center of gravity.
Links: But aren't you changing the subject of the Sermon on the Mount? Unless you talk about being poor in spirit, the Sermon on the Mount doesn't use the word "spirit."
Dexios: Matthew's Gospel talks about the Kingdom of Heaven and John's talks about abundant or eternal Life. As concepts they are not identical but you cannot treat them as dealing with separate realities, which would make the crudest fallacy. The Sermon on the Mount barely uses the word "spirit," but nothing from the ages is a better resource on living as spirit. And the distinction between 'Spirit', big 'S', and 'spirit', little 's', is not what you think.
Links: What do you mean?
Dexios: The distinction doesn't exist in Greek, or at least is not forced in that if you write "spirit" you have to decide if it has a big or little 's'. A lot of people think they need to place a vast chasm between big 'S' spirit and little 's' spirit so that it's almost two different words. But body is not so much the opposite of spirit as where spirit unfurls, and our spirits, little 's', are not so much the opposite of the Holy Spirit as where God's Spirit unfurls.
But this is a minor point. Nitpicking about a little or big 'S' on "Spirit", I mean. Body is profoundly important. Far from being a mere enemy of spirit, it is a proper counterpart, and that means that when you know the proper meaning of body, you know that it is where spirit unfurls, and the difference between a holy icon and secular art is not that secular art takes a high view of the body in contrast to holy icons, but icons take a high view of the body by letting it get inspired by spirit. Literally and figuratively, body is meant to be where spirit unfurls, and the monk who lives a life of "contemplation" and the "secular" Christian who lives contemplation in the world are both spirit at work. But may I make a more concrete illustration of spirit? In social ethics, perhaps?
Links: What are Orthodox social ethics?
Dexios: "Our social program is the Trinity," as Orthodox seem to not be able to stop repeating. I'm not sure you have to say "Trinity" instead of, say, plugging in spirit, but what it is becomes clearer by contrast with Catholic social ethics. Catholic social ethics addresses a question that isn't addressed in the Bible, or at least looks at its question in a very different light.
Links: What did they see? A better way to solve an old problem?
Dexios: Well, that would at least be their interpretation, and when they present things their way, it's kind of hard to see any other way of seeing it.
Links: What is the basic question?
Dexios: The basic question they address is, "What should be done about the poor," and the way they interpret that question is, "What societal structures should be erected so that poverty isn't the same sort of issue?"
Links: But isn't that how the problem is approached today?
Dexios: Maybe, but its differences from how the Gospel interprets the problem are profound. If you look in the Bible, poverty looms large. Where the Old Testament theocracy had done things by force, the New Testament calls people to responsibility and generosity. "Give to the one who asks of you" and all that. But nowhere in the Gospel is there an agenda for societal reform. There are no quasi-statist outlines for how the government should take from the rich and redistribute to the poor: Christians are told what they should do, not how the government should approach things differently.
It is not, in terms of the Gospel precepts, an improvement to go from people learning to be sons of God and in their sonship exercising almsgiving and generosity as profound and powerful spiritual discipline, to coercion that transfers other people's resources while denying them the power to choose and all but snatching from their hand most opportunities to be generous. It is apparently perceived that by thinking in the terms of secular ideologies in imitation of various secular and anti-Christian movements, the Catholic Church is growing enough to take an effective approach that will make a real difference. Or perhaps it is not growth but a failure to understand what exactly is going on in Christ's movement.
Links: But the New Testament is not pure capitalism.
Dexios: Indeed not. I operate within a capitalist system because that is where God has placed me; but that doesn't mean that I have to make capitalism my God.
Links: I've read that in the ancient Church there were some rather communist people who were big into selling lands and liquidating property.
Dexios: Yes, and they are not a support for imposing communism.
Links: They seem pretty communist in what they chose to me.
Dexios: They seem pretty communist in what they chose to me too. The Bible has high praise for people who in their sonship choose to give away everything that makes them wealthy. I've heard today about one man who gave away his Ferrari to become a monk. That discipleship is singularly beautiful, and it is not the same thing as imposing a plan that takes away other people's wealth and the opportunity to even be generous in giving it away. There are few things a capitalist community needs more than the salt and light of people who show that there are bigger things in life than wealth.
But that does not mean that the high virtue of selling one's property and giving away the proceeds should be forced and have its virtue and power flattened out. The story of Ananias and Sapphira seems to have a clear point. Ananias and Sapphira owned their property and were under no obligation to sell it. When they did sell it, although they pretended to lay all of the money at the apostles' feet they were under no obligation to donate any of it, let alone all of it. Their sin was in lying to God and saying that they had given everything when they kept something back. For that sin alone God struck them both dead. Even if the story implies something deeper about selling one's property and laying the proceeds about the apostles' point, it gets to that point by explicitly saying that there is no obligation to give. Which perhaps suggests that giving at its best is not a matter of what is required but the deiform, Christian, flowing, free virtue of generosity which is infinitely more than duty.
Links: I think I am beginning to see what's wrong with thinking Acts encourages communism.
Dexios: I should hastily clarify that most of the Catholic social teaching I've read does not endorse communism; they take somewhat different positions but the general drift is that even though the encyclicals adopt features of socialism, socialism and communism were off limits to Catholics.
Links: Then why try so hard to show that the New Testament endorses voluntary giving rather than involuntary communism?
Dexios: Because people trying to get you to see things the Catholic social ethics say, in effect, "Why are you fussing so much about us asking for a few coercive measures to give from the rich to the poor? Can't you see that the New Testament waxes eloquent about the glory of Early Church communism, which goes much further than the modest and sensible measures we happen to ask for?" But it doesn't—perhaps Christians in their discipleship and giving went further than these social reforms would ask for; they went further in that. But the "communism" in the New Testament was a matter of voluntary discipleship and generosity, not coercion. And therefore the New Testament is a profound warrant to rising above greed and giving up possessions, but that passage at least is not a warrant for the kind of social reform it is used to endorse.
Links: If I can sum up what you're saying, you're saying, "Care for the poor in the Gospel is an aspect of spirit and discipleship, and by trying to institute compulsory programs that destroy the opportunity for voluntary generosity, you're destroying the opportunity for spiritual discipleship." Correct?
Dexios: That is correct.
Links: Then what do they say to that objection? Or do they not address it?
Dexios: Um... that is hard to unravel. Do you want me to try?
Links: At least try.
Dexios: Are you familiar with behaviorism? Behaviorism's fallen out of favor, but it is a psychological school that dealt with how people behave after reward and punishment—but with no acknowledgment of emotions, beliefs, or other internal states—
Links: How does that draw people?
Dexios: That's not clear to me, but it was influential. At any rate, and this is the analogy I'm trying to draw, that in behaviorist teaching, people do not say, "There is no soul," but they draw the student to look at things so that the possibility of a soul is never even considered. This was said to introduce Michael Polanyi, a philosopher who worked with tacit and personal scientific knowledge. Similarly, the Catholic social ethics sources I've read do not raise the objection of sonship and voluntary giving to explicitly rebut it, but rather frame things so that concept is never even thought of or considered.
There are a couple of ways of doing this, but besides not considering it, they quote Biblical and patristic praise for voluntary giving as a straightforward example for why we should support coercive social programs. No explanation is offered; no acknowledgment is given that giving as a matter of New Testament spiritual discipleship could be something other than a support for institutional and partly statist programs that work by coercion. Most readers, I expect, will look at things the way they're supposed to see, and think that New Testament praise of giving applies to giving through social programs.
One thing that did surprise me was that it wasn't just conservatives who were offering criticism. There were apparently some people on the left who were all for social programs and planning, but weren't entirely thrilled that the Pope was entering their domain. It might have come across as an intrusion from another domain, like advice to mathematicians on how to solve the 3x+1 problem.
Links: The 3x+1 problem? What's that?
Dexios: Take a counting number; if it's even, divide by two, but if it's odd, multiply by three and add one. If you get a calculator and keep doing this, you'll see that any number you try gives 4, then 2, then 1, then cycles back to 4, 2, 1, etc. But even though if you'll do this many times and the same thing keeps happening, it's proven obnoxiously hard to prove that the thing that happens every time you try does, in fact, happen no matter what number you start with. A lot of mathematicians have spent a lot of effort without solving it, but actually solving the problem has proven as elusive as designing a society without problems, or at least without major ones. Solving the problem will be an incredibly big deal, maybe the mathematical event of the century, should it ever be solved.
But can you imagine how the mathematical community would respond if the Vatican tried to advise it on the most productive way to try to solve the 3x+1 problem?
Links: Um... but the Papacy is not ordinarily associated with authority in mathematics. Isn't ethics a little less unusual of a thing for the Vatican to be talking about?
Dexios: It's not strange that a Pope was talking about ethics; the surprising thing is that the Pope was answering a question that has little in the way of spirit. Almost every little question and every specific answer in these encyclicals is about what is to be coerced. The encyclicals manage to talk about care for the poor without almost ever exhorting Catholics and the rich to be generous. The idea that caring for the poor could be an occasion for virtue has remnants here and there, but the basic substance of the answer was in terms of what coercive mechanisms should take of those who have, not how the rich should voluntarily give or how people should grow in virtue.
Spirit is not something abstract from daily decisions; it is present, among other things, in being generous to beggars and allowing your money and what you do with it to be progressively transformed into spirit. When the question of caring for the poor becomes something where one person's generosity is ridiculed and the question is framed as what should be coercively taken from people and made as a coerced gift without generosity, then an area that has much room for spirit to be manifest is drained of spirit.
Other criticisms came that papal teaching was Utopian, that it was a thinly disguised Marxism, and I forget what else—there was one encyclical entitled "Mater et Magistra", "Mother and Teacher", and one pundit said there was something making the rounds about "Mother, yes; teacher, no." Usually the critiques came from conservatives, but there were liberals who wished the Vatican would proclaim the Gospel. Maybe I'm being naive, but it doesn't seem impossible to me that atheists who are big into social planning, and who do not believe in the Gospel, none the less think that the Pope can give something by preaching the Gospel that they with their social plans cannot. I think there's a lot of respect in that. What I would suggest is running through most, if not necessarily all, is that once upon a time the Pope used his authority to make saints, and now he seems to be exchanging his birthright for something much less, making social blueprints.
Links: But you must acknowledge that society is better off for such efforts, right?
Dexios: There is a certain set of blind spots that accompanies those assumptions; it is blind spots, I suggest, that has people look at pre-Vatican-II Catholics living in terms of spirit, giving to the world as saints, and caring for the poor in their generosity, and treat that as something murky and confused that Catholics have outgrown in the progress since Vatican II.
One of the things that comes with the social prescriptions, alongside a coercive character that stunts generosity, is that whatever the solution is, the answer is an institution, perhaps a state organization or something done by it. And no one questions whether this is the best way to do things; one would think it was the only way conceivable. But in fact it is not the only way.
In the ancient world, a great many things that have today been transformed into big, impersonal institutions—charity, hospitality, medicine, what would today be insurance, manufacture and production, commerce, and so on and so forth—were handled by smaller and more personal institutions. I might comment by the way that it's lost on most people today is that when women were associated with the home that meant they were associated with the beating heart of charity, hospitality, manufacture, and many other things, so that the image of the depressed housewife with no company and nothing but housework to do is as anachronous to read into the ancient world as telephones or the internet: what feminism is reacting to is not the traditional society's place for women, but what is left of it after that place, and most of what is connected to it, is torn to shreds.
Even today there are some things we do not relegate to impersonal institutions—romantic love and friendship, for instance. And I don't know if there is a resurgence of home business due to the internet—perhaps certain modern changes cannot represent the last word.
But when Popes started to decide they needed a social teaching to fill out a deficiency, everything besides being coerced is filtered through impersonal institutions. And though one may see a pause once or twice to make fun of people being generous to beggars the way they did on the ancient world, the vision of progress does not stop to question whether filtering everything through a big institution was a big idea. I haven't read through all the sources, but I haven't read anything yet that stopped to explain "Here's why John 3:16 did not say, 'For God so loved the world that he formed a sanitized, impersonal organization.'"
Perhaps I am asking society to open a door that was forever closed; the earliest encyclicals tried to resurrect medieval-style guilds, and it is not clear to me why other sources mock this decision to try to resurrect a vibrant institution that worked long and well in one time in favor of speculation about institutions not proven to work in any time. My point is not that many things are done by impersonal organization today but that when the Catholic Church opens its mouth for social teaching, no one seems to consider that anything besides an impersonal organization powered by coercion could be desirable. By contrast, our social program is spirit: God so continues to love the world that he continues to send his saints, his sons, that whosoever believes through their life of spirit and their divine love might have eternal life from his only-begotten Son. (And a million smaller and less eternal changes, too.)
Links: So then another way to get at the point of "Our social program is the Trinity" is to say, "The Orthodox Church's approach to living socially does not need a Utopian blueprint for society."
Would I be correct in hearing queer quotes when you use the word "progress"?
Dexios: I usually hear "fashions" when I read a Catholic social ethicist writing about progress. It is progress given the assumptions of a particular perspective, and (usually) given a lack of understanding of what was moving away. Again to return to my example of depracating pre-Vatican-II days when Catholics tried to become saints and, I would say, benefit society by becoming spirit—and the "progress" to an activist approach to society—what we have is not a movement from the less advanced to the more advanced but a fashion shift from something that has fallen out of favor to something that will presumably fall out of favor. And in this case, a step back.
Links: What do you mean?
Dexios: To borrow an image which Catholic author Peter Kreeft borrowed from C.S. Lewis, ancient ethics asked three ethical questions while modern ethics answers one (usually, but maybe two). To visualize these questions with the image of a fleet of ships at sea, the first question is how the ships can avoid bumping into each other, and this question is shared by ancient and modern ethics. The second question is how the ships can keep shipshape and maintain themselves inside, and even though this question cannot really be separated from the first question, only some modern ethics addresses it. The third question, which is the most important one, is why the ships are out at sea in the first place.
If we look at the depracated, Orthodox model of becoming saints and being Heavenly minded enough to be of earthly good, then on a proper understanding that approach is something that says something to answer each of these questions; on that count at least, it is robust. If we look at the activist model, then things are reduced to one question, how the ships can be kept from bumping into each other, perhaps forcibly. It does reasonably well given that narrowing of focus, but it only answers that one question.
Now I would suggest that it is dubiously a moral advance to addressing three major questions to addressing one. Perhaps moral depth cannot always be settled by counting questions addressed, but this moral "advance" has been achieved by almost completely shutting off two out of three substantial questions. Which would appear to be not progress, but impoverishment.
Links: I think I can see how when you see the word "progress" you want to supply an English translation of "fashion". Or would you rather say "regress"?
Dexios: I don't want to analyze whether "regress" would be true, but I would rather speak of "fashion." When fashions shift, people go from emphasizing some things to others. People become sensitized to some things and blinded to others. And, perhaps, sometimes, there will be real regress some times and real progress others. But there is a tendency for a fashion to see its waxing popular as progress, and I wish people could have the ability to say, "Maybe this is progress, maybe this is regress, and maybe this is just a fashion shift that, like most fashion shifts, looks like genuine progress once you adopt its peculiar sharp sensitivities and its pecular blind spots." And no fashion shift is devoid of spirit, but if you are looking for where spirit is to be found, the house of fashion delivers less than it promises.
Links: It seems to me that Utopian dreams have never been fully realized but they have been realized somewhat, and that makes a big difference. You know that the wealthy nations may owe some of their wealth to oppression but some of it is due to the Utopian dreams of Adam Smith among others, who have discovered Midas's secret?
Dexios: Don't you mean Midas's curse?
Links: Don't you mean Midas's blessing?
Dexios: In the story of Midas, Midas gained the "blessing" of turning everything he touched to gold. And it was wonderful, or it seemed wonderful, to kick pebbles and watch gold nuggets fall to earth. But then food turned to inedible gold, and drink likewise, and if I understand the story correctly he embraced his daughter only to have her reduced to nothing but a golden statue. Then he began to be blessed, and spiritual gold was forged when he realized that maybe turning everything to gold wasn't such a good idea. Unfortunately, we haven't gained the same transformation to spiritual gold when we are bombarded by advertisements.
Malcolm Muggeridge said that nothing proves "Man does not live by bread alone" like discovering the secret of mass-producing bread, and we have not only enough bread for everybody but enough meat for most beggars to eat meat regularly. People say, "I'm not rich; I'm in debt," and have no idea that they can purchase a month's food without suffering real financial injury. Which, to a great many people who don't know where their next meal is coming from, might as well be the ability to buy a BMW without facing any real financial obstacles. It seems for many of us by definition rich means "having more money than us because we couldn't possibly be rich."
Links: What's the downside?
Dexios: One U.S. woman was visiting a woman in Central America, I forget where. They were having coffee when she looked around her hostess's kitchen and met a dawning realization... "There isn't any food on your shelves."
"No... but there will be... and it's a good thing that I don't have any food now, because if I had it, why would I need to trust God for? But I will have food later..."
Dexios: If even that. That woman is spirit. She is sonship and sainthood. She is the Sermon on the Mount, and if we patronize her when we patronize "those less fortunate than ourselves," we might also patronize St. Francis of Assisi for not knowing how to make a difference in the world. Not that I envy her poverty. But I envy her finding the Sermon on the Mount in her poverty, and it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to have what she has.
If capitalism is the most effective Utopian vision, it produces a Utopia for spoiled children. It may well deliver what the Utopian specifics in Catholic social teaching wouldn't get working, but what capitalism delivers and what much Catholic Utopianism tries to deliver does not make people better, or nobler, or wiser. In the particular classically liberal capitalist socities I know, most people have about as many creature comforts as we know how to make—air conditioning in Habitat for Humanity houses, meat for the homeless, television for everyone who's not homeless—and medicine and safety push back suffering and death so that you have a good chance of not dying young, and many, many people die segregated off in nursing homes so the rest of society does not have to be visibly reminded that people grow old and die. Utopia is not something that may someday exist if social planners someday get things right; it exists here and now because social planners got what they were trying to do right.
Links: But is suffering good? Does the Bible ever talk about wonderful suffering?
Dexios: Let me quote:
More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope. Rom 5.3-4. I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. Rom 8.18-9. For as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer. Our hope for you is unshaken; for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort. I Cor 1.5-7. ...that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that if possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Phil 3.10. Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church. Col 1.24. For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through suffering. Heb 2.10. But rejoice in so far as you share Christ's sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed. I Pet 4.13.
At least for people like us who live in Utopia, you can think that all the things a spoiled child wants are your right and if you are really suffering—maybe you won't be so crass as to say that any suffering is God's punishment, but you'll still think it's an interruption that keeps you from the normal course of Christian life. But honoring God in suffering is the normal course of Christian life. Besides what I quoted, there's the book of Job where God lays his honor on the line based on what Job will do when he has miserable suffering. I don't know how to capture all the complexity of the Biblical views on suffering, but if suffering is praised as a sharing in the sufferings of the Son who was made perfect through suffering, then maybe it's not doing the world a favor to engineer away suffering, even if that is possible.
It's not just that the Gospel works best without suffering and now we may have good enough social plans to get the Gospel to where it works best. I fear Catholic social plans if they botch and have weird side effects like social plans sometimes do, but I fear them even more if they achieve what they want. Perhaps this is easy to say from Utopia, but having what Utopia provides, I have real doubts about whether it makes me spirit. In those things that most make me a mature man, I think Utopia is overrated. I may have some maturity through the discipline of going against the flow, but there's a way where comfort can make faith lukewarm where intense persecution would make it stronger.
Catholic social planning is trying to make good that is only available to a majority available to everyone. I wish they had a somewhat bigger version of good to be sharing.
Links: So you are suspicious of efforts to help the poor.
Dexios: I am suspicious of some efforts and participate in others. I try to feed the hungry, and besides directly showing kindness to beggars I support charities—but these charities provide more than a spoiled child would want. They support people's spiritual needs, like churches. I don't believe education needs to be put on quite as high a pedestal as some people give it, but I support education.
I guess I need to clarify. My point wasn't to say exactly what everybody in the world should have; when someone speaks to me out of pain, I rarely talk about pain as occasion for spiritual growth. But in Catholic social teaching people seemed to be saying "Wouldn't it be nice if people had this, and this, and this," and listed a number of things that for the most part do not make people better, or nobler, or wiser. There may be a discussion of duties alongside rights, but much of the encyclicals were about how much it would be better to have such things, and living in a society where most people do have those sort of things, I needed to say, "This is not what you think it is."
Links: Is there anything specific that you would say that you want for the poor, and that you would try to help them come to it?
Dexios: Absolutely.
I want them to become spirit in as full a sense as possible. I want them to glorify God and enjoy him forever. I want them to live the life of Heaven that is meant to be here and now and not just after our resurrection. I want them to be transfigured, spirit, soul, and body, into the likeness of Christ, and to be little Christs. I want them to become divine, partakers of the divine nature. I want them to own the Kingdom of Heaven and live the Divine Life. And maybe it would be nice if some of them could send missionaries to the first world, to share some of their riches. And I would like the world to profit from their wealth as the poor are chosen to shame the rich. And not just to follow the vogues of the first world.
Links: Question: What do you think about non-Christian texts, like the Tao Te Ching, Bhagavad-Gita, or Gospel of Thomas?
Dexios: Um...
Links: You're going to say something nasty about Eastern religions, aren't you?
Dexios: Asking what I think about non-Christian texts like the Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad-Gita, or the Gospel of Thomas is like asking what I think about different forms of indoor exercise, like weightlifting, aerobics, and sticking your face in the fan.
The Tao Te Ching is spirit, and indeed words can be spirit, not just Christian words. So is the Bhagavad-Gita. From all I have heard, they are deep, deeper than a whale can dive, and they have taught healthy communities what it means to be human for thousands of years.
But a society that embraces Gnosticism sticks its face in the fan. Gnosticism unlike Hinduism and Taoism comes up again and again and each time it's a downward spiral that does not give spirit to a society that embraces it the way Hinduism and Taoism do.
Links: I've read some Gnostic sacred texts and they engaged my spirit like almost nothing else; they drew me in.
Dexios: I'm not surprised. Gnostic scripture is spiritual porn. Sorry to use that image, but...
Links: Are you just calling names, or is there a substantive reason for that unflattering comparison?
Dexios: Marriage is spirit, and it incorporates a number of things into its partnership, including what repeated studies have found is the best environment to enjoy sex. But no marriage that's lasted much longer the honeymoon has got there simply by sailing on pleasure; marriage is a crown of thorns, like monasticism, and part of the benefit it provides is not just an environment for children to grow up, but an environment for the parents to grow up. The best marriages are not a Utopia for spoiled children but a little Utopia for mature adults.
Marriage is like spirit and spirit is like marriage, including what can be misunderstood as the spiritual erotic, a haunting, exotic factor that belongs there even if it is ultimately beyond the erotic. But that doesn't mean that exotic haunting all day long is what you should be getting. It doesn't mean, in other words, that Gnosticism is the best way to be spirit.
Links: Have you read the Gnostic Scriptures?
Dexios: I've read a good number of Gnostic sacred texts.
There are a lot of people today who've heard that the Gnostic scriptures show the human face of Jesus, and the canonical Gospels make him seem so divine he's not human. I've heard some people say that the best way to rebut that is to actually get people to read the Gnostic sacred texts, because the Gnostic sacred texts give some people what other people try to get from LSD, and their Christ is exotic and spiritual and several other things that do not include being human, not like the Jesus who wept at Lazarus' death and prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane with sweat like drops of blood—something medical that occasionally happens when people are too stressed out to possibly describe and that we do not need to explain away.
Links: So if people actually READ the texts they'll stop saying "Here at last is the human face of Jesus."?
Um, from the look on your face, you don't like that question.
Dexios: Let me draw an analogy. There was one time when some art was displayed at a coffeeshop, and some people thought it was a big deal because it showed nudity. It struck me as... maybe I haven't always been chaste in looking at nude artwork, but I honestly didn't see what the big deal others saw. In a sense it wasn't any more exciting than a cartoonish schematic diagram; it didn't pose a problem to me because I didn't understand how the art worked.
Then... I had been looking at the art and not understanding it, and suddenly something clicked and I did understand it, and when it communicated to me... Other artwork can just celebrate the human form, if this was like a schematic diagram it was schematic and focused attention on the sexual. When it clicked, the artwork went from simply being weird to being much more seductive than what we're told a "celebration of the human form" is supposed to be.
And that is exactly what happened when I read enough Gnostic scripture. I read a little and it seemed weird. I read more and it clicked and I felt its pull. And I have been changed somewhat, and not entirely for the better.
Links: How could it change you?
Dexios: Once you have drunk from a well, you thirst for it.
Links: Do you really think that Gnosticism and The da Vinci Code are such a bad well to thirst for, such a bad spirit? There's more spirit in The da Vinci Code, though maybe not as you're using the term, than anything else to hit the shelves for a while. And it's well-written.
Dexios: I know it's well-written; after reading a bunch of Christian reports accusing it of being garbage literature, I feel its pull. I read it and to my consternation I want Mary Magdalene to be the Grail, and I seem to want to exchange a eucharistic Cup by which the Lord's blood pulses in believer's veins to believing that there is a very dilute royal bloodline alive in a few people I haven't met, which is an exchange of gold for copper, but still something the book left me wanting. There is indeed a lot of spirit in it; it makes a good lure.
Links: Calling the book's good points a "lure" is harsh, if the only real thing you're going to acknowledge it is—what is it that this "lure" points to?
Dexios: Despair.
I was quite struck when I read a book entitled Against the Protestant Gnostics, written by a Protestant, by the way, and it said that Gnosticism besides being an a-historical phenomenon entirely hinged on one mood: despair.
The hope Dan Brown offers in The da Vinci Code is a hope of despair. It's a hope that there's some sexy secret to be had behind appearances, behind the here and now, and whatever else he may have wrong about earlier forms of Gnosticism being lovely and humane, he's dead right about digging for something deeply hidden. You may have heard that some Gnostics taught that the world around us was made by an impotent, inferior, evil God and is evil. Even if not everybody said that in so many words the here and now that God gives us is something despicable. It is something to despair in and try to get around for some good that maybe more spiritual people can find. Is this good news?
Links: Hmm. I'd just assumed that the worst thing about Dan Brown was his anti-Catholicism. But you're pretty critical of the Catholic Church too.
Dexios: Indeed, because it misses the mark. It comes close in some ways, but it misses the mark. But Dan Brown doesn't seem hostile to the Catholic Church because of where it misses the mark, because of where it hits it. Whatever its imperfections may be, the Catholic Church has for about two thousand years been teaching people to be human and live lives of spirit, and live them in the here and now. Whatever other fussing I may make of the Catholic Church, it would be strange of me to deny that the Catholic Church offers something better than despair. Maybe I could wish they would do a better job of it, but the Catholic Church offers hope, and not just because a recent Pope had some very uplifting words about living in hope. Hope is a very deep root in the Catholic Church, and it lends shape to all sorts of other things.
Links: So maybe Dan Brown doesn't offer the purest form of spirit, or maybe people would be better off if they could get to spirit in not such a despairing way. But doesn't Dan Brown deserve credit for at least getting people to devote attention to matters of spirit?
Dexios: There's a story where a princess is having a dreamlike meeting with her fairy grandmother many generations removed. Her nurse doesn't believe the princess's extraordinary tales about the grandmother, and when the princess wants to know, "Is it naughty of Nurse to not believe in you?" the grandmother only says, "It would be naughty of you."
Quite probably there are people for whom Dan Brown is a step up, who move from unspiritual despair to spiritual despair. Quite certainly there are people learning from better sources, such as Taoism and Hinduism again, and are brought into spirit. And certainly I am glad that the high school students who ask, "Why go to mass?" can join monastic Catholic worship, not so much because it is monastic as because it is worship worthy of human beings. But I as Orthodox could not join them.
Links: Why not?
Dexios: Because however God deals with other people, it would be naughty of us.
God can move through non-Orthodox resources, and non-Christian ones. But when he places someone in full communion with his Church, the Orthodox Church, things that are permissible under partial communion are no longer permissible: though I am loth to speak of communion as a resource, God will work through other resources in a genuine way to people who only have those other resources, but when we have the opportunity to drink from the pure source we are not to take our substance from downstream. And it would be naughty of us, whether or not it would be naughty of others, to refuse to recognize the Orthodox Church of Christ as the fountain from which we drink.
Links: It would be depriving spirit of flourishing in body, wouldn't it?
Dexios: I know that I'd say that for Dan Brown and other people who think that being Gnostic is the hidden root of spirituality. Against these I say that spirit is a great banner that when it unfurls gives shade to people-watching, travelling, listening to music, Starbuck's—
Links: Starbuck's? Doesn't that, well—
Dexios: If you mean to purchase your identity at Starbuck's then it will run short. But if you learn to enjoy things in the spirit, if you know there is more to life than food and drink, then an occasional treat can include Starbuck's. Stewardship isn't tight-fisted, and if you don't need commercial products like some kind of sacrament, you are freed to truly enjoy them.
Links: But what if the way people are naturally led to approach Starbuck's is as a sacrament?
Dexios: What if? So we live in a wealthy society. So when someone asks, "Was economic wealth made for man, or man for economic wealth?" people just hit the snooze button. So advertising is an abominable manipulation to make people covet things they don't need. If you are to live a life of spirit, then that means living a life of spirit in this economy, living simply and generously, and not laying the reins on the horse's neck. Your responsibility is to let what you buy be body where your life of spirit is manifest, and if Starbuck's tries to sell you an identity, and that identity is inimical to living a life of spirit, your responsibility is still to life a life of spirit that unfurls itself in how you use wealth.
Links: This makes sense now that you say it, but where did you get that?
Dexios: That is one of the things that may, or may not, be added to us if we seek first the Kingdom of God, and it is not essential for everyone.
Links: Then what is essential?
Dexios: Spirit. Contemplation. Don't ask where to strike the balance between action and contemplation. Pursue contemplation, and don't be surprised if after a time the way God tells you to contemplate is to plant a tree.
Links: Where did you get "plant a tree" from?
Dexios: Martin Luther. When he was asked what he would do if he knew the Lord were returning tomorrow, instead of talking about praying long prayers or wailing about his sins, he simply said what he was planning on doing, which was to plant a tree. If it was really OK for him to plan to plant a tree, as he did, then there's no particular reason that if the Lord were returning the next day he should be suddenly embarrassed about legitimate, spiritual activity and try to be super-spiritual.
Contemplation seems to include a lot of planting a tree. It can mean entering a monastery, but it can also mean working a job, making friendships, shooting hoops, and playing with the neighbor's children. If we go to church, or try to cultivate a discipline of quiet, that means quite a lot of "secular" things, a "secular" body for spirit to be manifest in. And people who give up on doing big things for God often end up doing tremendous things for God as part of their contemplation.
Links: Huh? How does that work? Or are you just being down on activists?
Dexios: Ever hear about a Wesley boy trying to do serious work for God?
Links: No.
Dexios: One of the Wesley brothers believed that missionaries were the biggest super-Christians, and so got everything arranged to be a big missionary for God.
And then he hit rock bottom. He failed as a missionary, returned a failure, and then fell lower than rock bottom when, on the ship, there was a terrible storm, and he was afraid for his life and puzzled about why there were men on deck singing. When he asked them if they were afraid, they said that no, they were not afraid, because they believed in Jesus. That finished him.
Only after that happened did he become one of the biggest forces in American Christianity.
Links: You make God sound cruel.
Dexios: If you expect God to share an activist mentality then God looks very cruel, but God isn't a secular activist. This wasn't even a social justice issue; Wesley said "God, I'll be a really good hammer and do really impressive work," and if anything, God said, "I don't want a hammer. I want a son." People who try to be activists sometimes make the best sons after they fail as activists, but the reason God didn't endorse Wesley's plan about how he was going to make a difference was that God makes a difference through people, and however big and important the work is that needs to be done, God makes sons first and foremost, and never circumvents sonship to "cut to the chase" and get to the important part, because to him sonship is the important part, and he can equip people to do results once they fail as hammers if need be.
There's a big difference between "I'll do the best I can" and "I'll lay myself before God and work as he is at work." The difference is whether your power is a matter of spirit. There was a visiting African pastor who came to the U.S. and said, "It's amazing what you can do without the Holy Spirit;" that stinging compliment is one God's sons need not hear. The Sermon on the Mount says more about where our power should come from than what we should achieve; the Gospel is about trusting God, not just about the fate of our souls but getting things done here on earth. It's challenging and it becomes all the more challenging when you realize how broken of a world we live in.
And perhaps God also does things through people who think they know how mountains are moved here on earth and try to short-circuit God's call to become a son like his Son. God could still work with them if they more fully spirit. Spirit has its own power in God.
Links: Let me change the subject, or maybe I'm not changing the subject. Where do the seven sacraments fit into this?
Dexios: Baptism, Holy Communion, Holy Matrimony, the Sign of the Cross, reverently Bowing, the Holy Kiss, and the Blessing of Fruit—
Links: —that's a rather strange list of seven sacraments!
Dexios: It seems perfectly natural to me. If it seems strange to you, then perhaps there's something you don't understand about the usual list. Holy Communion, Baptism, Confirmation, Confession, Ordination, Marriage, and Unction for Healing are not the Seven Exceptions. They may be the biggest seven—but you don't understand them until you realize that there's either one sacrament or a thousand, and that a thousand little things in our piety are the same sort of thing as The Big Seven. Like blessing fruit to celebrate the Feast of the Holy Transfiguration!
Links: But why bless fruit then? Do you also bless candles to celebrate the Annunciation?
Dexios: I'd have to look up when we bless candles, but it does not seem strange to me to bless fruit. The Transfiguration is not just when the Son of God shone, but it is specifically when his body, the first of the material world to be drawn into spirit, shone. It was a first taste of the Transfiguration when the rest of his kingdom comes in force, and the Holy Transfiguration of Christ ultimately becomes the holy transfiguration of the whole Creation, and its fruits. Today people might pick something else to represent Creation's productivity, but grapes and fruit come from Creation and are a part of it, and in a sense by blessing fruit on the Feast of the Holy Transfiguration we know what it means, that it's not just something way back when that's only about Christ, but about something that is meant to expand through the whole Creation of which Christ is head. Just as Christ is to be the first of many sons and draw mankind into him, so his body is the first case of matter drawn into the divine, of body that is spirit, and his coming was the beginning of a shockwave that keeps reaching out.
Links: So is the Transfiguration a big enough deal that it's worth adorning with a sacrament, like many other holidays.
Dexios: That makes it sound like something external. The spirit of the Transfiguration is the spirit of sacrament, and of icons. I've said earlier that spirit transforms body, or should; now I'll go further and say that God makes us spirit through body. If you try to understand Holy Communion and ask the wrong questions, you're in danger of stopping at learning what happens after the priest has consecrated the elements, even though it's important that the bread and wine have become the body and blood of Christ they represent. That's only half the story. The rest of the story is when this bread and wine that have become the body and blood of Christ are partaken by the faithful, and the faithful are transformed. Our bodies are not a mere ornament as we partake of the divine nature; we partake of the Church and Creation, and the divine life, precisely when we receive what has been transformed that it may transform us. God makes us spirit through not only our bodies but his material creation: the Word became flesh, and the flesh became Word, and the Word keeps becoming flesh, and the flesh keeps becoming Word, and the shockwave ever reaches outward.
Links: And the Church has a lot of blessings, from a traveller's blessing to blessing Pascha baskets, doesn't it? And there are many sacred actions as we say our prayers, aren't there? I imagine if you counted all the sacramental rites and sacred actions you'd actually wind up with more than the figure of one thousand that you grabbed.
Dexios: But the nature of a sacrament doesn't really end up there. Ultimately the world is icon and sacrament. A man is the microcosm of the universe, but you have to understand that the "universe" is the spiritual as well as physical world, and that "microcosm" means that the spiritual and physical are all bound up in miniature. In a man who is spirit, they are more tightly bound together: you can look at most people's faces and if they're not masking then you can see into their spirit; spirit and body do not war against each other. And if you understand how our bodies are in fact the bodies of our spirits, and our spirits are the spirits of our bodies, then you understand that in "man writ large", the universe that is the opposite of man the microcosm, then matter is pregnant with spirit.
Perhaps the crowning jewel is the kind of rite over which a priest presides. It is a crowning jewel of the warp and woof of "mundane" life, if life is ever "mundane" properly understood. For one example, you may have heard of the clergy shortage in Alaska: something like a third of the state population is Orthodox but there are precious few priests. And a congregation asked the bishop what to do as they cannot often have a priest to worship. The bishop said only two things. One of them I will not mention. The other was to eat together.
Holy Communion casts a long shadow. Part of this means that a priest can bless fruit and anyone can partake of it, and maybe there's a blessing even if it's not a big deal as the Eucharist. But you're missing something if that's the only place you look.
A meal with other people is part of the Eucharist unfurling. It's not directly the Eucharist, but if you understand what the Eucharist is then a common meal stands in its luminous shadow. The bishop's advice was not simply a substitute for imperfect times; even when there is a priest it is good for the Eucharist to unfurl into a common meal, and however nice it is for the priest to bless the food that's not all that is going on. Table fellowship is common communion and "common" conceals a wealth of majesty. It's not a really different thing from the Eucharist.
Links: [pause] It seems like I want to learn it all. What else is there to learn?
Dexios: Not to learn everything. You can learn about the priest, whose role I haven't covered, but what I've said about us needing monks applies even more strongly to one person given over to be spirit in a way that helps others be spirit. There is spiritual discipline, which almost as many different shapes as sacrament—I haven't talked about fasting: the demons always fast but only someone like us with body and spirit can be transformed and have his body become spirit by fasting. I haven't talked about—
If you want to become more spirit, why don't you think of an act of spirit and do that?
Herodotus: And what say thou of these people? Why callest thou them the Singularity, Merlin?
John: Mine illuminèd name is John, and John shall ye call me each and every one.
Herodotus: But the Singularity is such as only a Merlin could have unravelled.
John: Perchance: but the world is one of which only an illuminèd one may speak aright. Call thou me as one illuminèd, if thou wouldst hear me speak.
Herodotus: Of illumination speakest thou. Thou sawest with the eye of the hawk: now seest thou with the eye of the eagle.
John: If that be, speak thou me as an eagle?
Herodotus: A point well taken, excellent John, excellent John. What speakest thou of the Singularity?
John: A realm untold, to speak is hard. But of an icon will I speak: inscribed were words:
'Waitress, is this coffee or tea?'
'What does it taste like?'
'IT TASTES LIKE DIESEL FUEL.'
'That's the coffee. The tea tastes like transmission fluid.'
Herodotus: Upon what manner of veneration were this icon worshipped?
John: That were a matter right subtle, too far to tell.
Herodotus: And of the inscription? That too be subtle to grasp.
John: Like as a plant hath sap, so a subtle engine by their philosophy wrought which needeth diesel fuel and transmission fluid.
Herodotus: [laughs] Then 'twere a joke, a jape! 'Tis well enough told!
John: You perceive it yet?
Herodotus: A joke, a jape indeed, of a fool who could not tell, two different plants were he not to taste of their sap! Well spoke! Well spoke!
John: Thou hast grasped it afault, my fair lord. For the subtle engine hath many different saps, no two alike.
Herodotus: And what ambrosia be in their saps?
John: Heaven save us! The saps be a right unnatural fare; their substance from rotted carcasses of monsters from aeons past, then by the wisdom of their philosophy transmogrified, of the subtle engine.
Herodotus: Then they are masters of Alchemy?
John: Masters of an offscouring of all Alchemy, of the lowest toe of that depravèd ascetical enterprise, chopped off, severed from even the limb, made hollow, and then growen beyond all reason, into the head of reason.
Herodotus: Let us leave off this and speak of the icon. The icon were for veneration of such subtle philosophy?
John: No wonder, no awe, greeteth he who regardest this icon and receive it as is wont.
Herodotus: As is wont?
John: As is wanton. For veneration and icons are forcèd secrets; so there is an antithesis of the sacra pagina, and upon its light pages the greatest pages come upon the most filled with lightness, the icons of a world that knoweth icons not.
Let me make another essay.
The phrase 'harmony with nature' is of popular use, yet a deep slice of the Singularity, or what those inside the Singularity can see of it, might be called, 'harmony with technology'.
Herodotus: These be mystics of technology.
John: They live in an artificial jungle of technology, or rather an artificial not-jungle of technology, an artificial anti-jungle of technology. For one example, what do you call the natural use of wood?
Herodotus: A bundle of wood is of course for burning.
John: And they know of using wood for burning, but it is an exotic, rare case to them; say 'wood' and precious few will think of gathering wood to burn.
Herodotus: Then what on earth do they use wood for? Do they eat it when food is scarce or something like that?
John: Say 'wood' and not exotic 'firewood', and they will think of building a house.
Herodotus: So then they are right dexterous, if they can build out of a bundle of gathered sticks instead of burning it.
John: They do not gather sticks such as you imagine. They fell great trees, and cut the heartwood into rectangular box shapes, which they fit together in geometrical fashion. And when it is done, they make a box, or many boxes, and take rectangles hotly fused sand to fill a window. And they add other philosophy on top of that, so that if the house is well-built, the air inside will be pleasant and still, unless they take a philosophical machine to push air, and whatever temperature the people please, and it will remain dry though the heavens be opened in rain. And most of their time is spent in houses, or other 'buildings' like a house in this respect.
Herodotus: What a fantastical enterprise! When do they enter such buildings?
John: When do they rather go out of them? They consider it normal to spend less than an hour a day outside of such shelters; the subtle machine mentioned earlier moves but it is like a house built out of metal in that it is an environment entirely contrived by philosophy and artifice to, in this case, convey people from one place to another.
Herodotus: How large is this machine? It would seem to have to be very big to convey all their people.
John: But this is a point where their 'technology' departs from the art that is implicit in τεχνη: it is in fact not a lovingly crafted work of art, shaped out of the spirit of that position ye call 'inventor' or 'artist', but poured out by the thousands by gigantical machines yet more subtle, and in the wealth of the Singularity, well nigh unto each hath his own machine.
Herodotus: And how many can each machine can convey? Perchance a thousand?
John: Five, or six, or two peradventure, but the question is what they would call 'academical': the most common use is to convey one.
Herodotus: They must be grateful for such property and such philosophy!
John: A few are very grateful, but the prayer, 'Let us remember those less fortunate than ourselves' breathes an odor that sounds truly archaical. It sounds old, old enough to perhaps make half the span of a man's life. And such basic technology, though they should be very much upset to lose them, never presents itself to their mind's eye when they hear the word 'technology'. And indeed, why should it present itself to the mind his eye?
Herodotus: I strain to grasp thy thread.
John: To be thought of under the heading of 'technology', two things must hold. First, it must be possessed of an artificial unlife, not unlike the unlife of their folklore's ghouls and vampires and zombies. And second, it must be of recent vintage, something not to be had until a time that is barely past. Most of the technologies they imagine provide artificially processed moving images, some of which are extremely old—again, by something like half the span of a man's life—while some are new. Each newer version seemeth yet more potent. To those not satisfied with the artificial environment of an up-to-date building, regarded by them as something from time immemorial, there are unlife images of a completely imaginary artificial world where their saying 'when pigs can fly' meaning never is in fact one of innumerable things that happen in the imaginary world portrayed by the technology. 'SecondLife' offers a second alternative to human life, or so it would seem, until 'something better comes along.'
Herodotus: My mind, it reeleth.
John: Well it reeleth. But this be but a sliver.
For life to them is keeping one's balance on shifting sand; they have great museums of different products, as many as the herbs of the field. But herein lies a difference: we know the herbs of the field, which have virtues, and what the right use is. They know as many items produced by philosophy, but they are scarce worse for the deal when they encounter an item they have never met before. For while the herbs of the field be steady across generations and generations, the items belched forth by their subtle philosophy change not only within the span of a man's life; they change year to year; perchance moon to moon.
Herodotus: Thou sayest that they can navigate a field they know not?
John: Aye, and more. The goal at which their catechism aims is to 'learn how to learn'; the appearance and disappearance of kinds of items is a commonplace to them. And indeed this is not only for the items we use as the elements of our habitat: catechists attempt to prepare people for roles that exist not yet even as the students are being taught.
Though this be sinking sand they live in, they keep balance, of a sort, and do not find this strange. And they adapt to the changes they are given.
Herodotus: It beseemeth me that thou speakest as of a race of Gods.
John: A race of Gods? Forsooth! Thou knowest not half of the whole if thou speakest thus.
Herodotus: What remaineth?
John: They no longer think of making love as an action that in particular must needeth include an other.
Herodotus: I am stunned.
John: And the same is true writ large or writ small. A storyteller of a faintly smaller degree, living to them in ages past, placed me in an icon:
The Stranger mused for a few seconds, then, speaking in a slightly singsong voice, as though he repeated an old lesson, he asked, in two Latin hexameters, the following question:
'Who is called Sulva? What road does she walk? Why is the womb barren on one side? Where are the cold marriages?'
Ransom replied, 'Sulva is she whom mortals call the Moon. She walks in the lowest sphere. The rim of the world that was wasted goes through her. Half of her orb is turned towards us and shares our curse. Her other half looks to Deep Heaven; happy would he be who could cross that frontier and see the fields on her further side. On this side, the womb is barren and the marriages cold. There dwell an accursede people, full of pride and lust. There when a young man takes a maiden in marriage, they do not lie together, but each lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty in their dreams of lust. Their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place.'
The storyteller saw and saw not his future. 'Tis rare in the Singularity to fabricate children 'by vile arts in a secret place'. But the storyteller plays us false when he assumes their interest would be in a 'cunningly fashioned image of the other'. Truer it would be to say that the men, by the fruits of philosophy, jump from one libidinous dream to another whilest awake.
Herodotus:Forsooth!
John: A prophet told them, the end will come when no man maketh a road to his neighbors. And what has happened to marriage has happened, by different means but by the same spirit, to friendship. Your most distant acquaintanceship to a fellow member is more permanent than their marriage; it is routine before the breakable God-created covenant of marriage to make unbreakable man-made covenants about what to do if, as planned for, the marriage ends in divorce. And if that is to be said of divorce, still less is the bond of friendship. Their own people have talked about how 'permanent relationships', including marriage and friendship, being replaced by 'disposable relationships' which can be dissolved for any and every reason, and by 'disposable relationships' to 'transactional relationships', which indeed have not even the pretension of being something that can be kept beyond a short transaction for any and every reason.
And the visits have been eviscerated, from a conversation where voice is delivered and vision is stripped out, to a conversation where words alone are transmitted without even hand writing; from a conversation where mental presence is normative to a conversation where split attention is expected. 'Tis yet rarely worth the bother to make a physical trail, though they yet visit. And their philosophy, as it groweth yet more subtle, groweth yet more delicate. 'Twould scarcely require much to 'unplug' it. And then, perhaps, the end will come?
Herodotus: Then there be a tragic beauty to these people.
John: A tragic beauty indeed.
Herodotus: What else hast thou to tell of them?
John: Let me give a little vignette:
Several men and women are in a room; all are fulfilling the same role, and they are swathed with clothing that covers much of their skin. And the differences between what the men wear, and what most of the women wear, are subtle enough that most of them do not perceive a difference.
Herodotus: Can they not perceive the difference between a man and a woman?
John: The sensitivity is dulled in some, but it is something they try to overlook. But I have not gotten to the core of this vignette:
One of them indicateth that had they be living several thousand years ago they would not have had need of clothing, not for modesty at least, and there are nods of agreement to her. And they all imagine such tribal times to be times of freedom, and their own to be of artificial restriction.
And they fail to see, by quite some measure, that prolonged time in mixed company is much more significant than being without clothing; or that their buildings deaden all of a million sources of natural awareness: the breeze blowing and the herbs waving in the wind; scents and odours as they appear; song of crickets' kin chirping and song of bird, the sun as it shines through cloud; animals as they move about, and the subtleties and differences in the forest as one passes through it. They deaden all of these sensitivities and variations, until there is only one form of life that provides stimulation: the others who are working in one's office. Small wonder, then, that to a man one woman demurely covered in an office has an effect that a dozen women wearing vines in a jungle would never have. But the libertines see themselves as repressed, and those they compare themselves to as, persay, emancipated.
Herodotus: At least they have the option of dressing modestly. What else hast thou?
John: There is infinitely more, and there is nothing more. Marriage is not thought of as open to children; it can be dissolved in divorce; it need not be intrinsically exclusive; a further installment in the package, played something like a pawn in a game of theirs, is that marriage need not be between a man and a woman. And if it is going to be dismantled to the previous portion, why not? They try to have a world without marriage, by their changes to marriage. The Singularity is a disintegration; it grows more and more, and what is said for marriage could be said for each of the eight devils: intertwined with this is pride, and it is only a peripheral point that those who further undefine marriage speak of 'gay pride'. A generation before, not mavericks but the baseline of people were told they needed a 'high self-esteem', and religious leaders who warned about pride as a sin, perhaps as the sin by which the Devil fell from Heaven, raised no hue and cry that children were being raised to embrace pride as a necessary ascesis. And religion itself is officially permitted some role, but a private role: not that which fulfills the definition of religare in binding a society together. It is in some measure like saying, 'You can speak any language you want, as long as you utter not a word in public discourse': the true religion of the Singularity is such ersatz religion as the Singularity provides. Real religion is expected to wither in private.
The Singularity sings a song of progress, and it was giving new and different kinds of property; even now it continues. But its heart of ice showeth yet. For the march of new technologies continues, and with them poverty: cracks begin to appear, and the writing on the wall be harder to ignore. What is given with one hand is not-so-subtly taken away with the other. The Singularity is as needful to its dwellers as forest or plain to its dwellers, and if it crumbles, precious few will become new tribal clans taking all necessities from the land.
Herodotus: Then it beseemeth the tragedy outweigheth the beauty, or rather there is a shell of beauty under a heart of ice.
John:But there are weeds.
Herodotus: What is a weed?
John: It is a plant.
Herodotus: What kind of plant is a weed? Are the plants around us weeds?
John: They are not.
Herodotus: Then what kinds of plants are weeds?
John: In the Singularity, there is a distinction between 'rural', 'suburban', and 'urban': the 'rural' has deliberately set plants covering great tracts of land, the 'suburban' has fewer plants, if still perhaps green all around, and the 'urban' has but the scattered ensconced tree. But in all of them are weeds, in an urban area plants growing where the artificial stone has cracked. And among the natural philosophers there are some who study the life that cannot be extinguished even in an urban city; their specialty is called 'urban ecology'. The definition of a weed is simply, 'A plant I do not want.' We do not have weeds because we do not seek an artificial envionment with plants only present when we have put them there. But when people seek to conform the environment to wishes and plans, even in the tight discipline of planned urban areas, weeds are remarkably persistent.
And in that regard, weeds are a tiny sliver of something magnificent.
Herodotus: What would that be?
John: The durability of Life that is writ small in a weed here in the urban, there in the suburban is but a shadow of the durabiity of Life that lives on in the sons of men. Mothers still sing lullabyes to their dear little children; friendships form and believers pray at church far more than happened in the age where my story was told, a story dwarfed by what was called the 'age of faith'. The intensity of the attacks on the Church in a cruel social witness are compelled to bear unwilling witness to the vitality of the Church whose death has been greatly exaggerated: and indeed that Church is surging with vitality after surviving the attacks. The story told seems to tell of Life being, in their idiom, 'dealt a card off every side of the deck'—and answering, 'Checkmate, I win.' I have told of the differences, but there are excellent similarities, and excellent differences. For a knight whoso commandeth a wild and unbridled horse receiveth greater commendation than a knight whoso commandeth a well-bred and gentle steed.
Herodotus: The wind bloweth where it listeth. The just shall live by his faith. Your cell, though it be wholly artificial, will teach you everything you need to know.
John: Thou hast eagerly grasped it; beyond beauty, tragedy, and beyond tragedy, beauty. Thou hast grasped it true.
Socrates: And now, let me give an illustration to show how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened:—Behold! a human being in a darkened den, who has a slack jaw towards only source of light in the den; this is where he has gravitated since his childhood, and though his legs and neck are not chained or restrained any way, yet he scarcely turns round his head. In front of him are images from faroff, projected onto a flickering screen. And others whom he cannot see, from behind their walls, control the images like marionette players manipulating puppets. And there are many people in such dens, some isolated one way, some another.
Glaucon: I see.
Socrates: And do you see, I said, the flickering screen showing men, and all sorts of vessels, and statues and collectible animals made of wood and stone and various materials, and all sorts of commercial products which appear on the screen? Some of them are talking, and there is rarely silence.
Glaucon: You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.
Socrates: Much like us. And they see only their own images, or the images of one another, as they appear on the screen opposite them?
Glaucon: True, he said; how could they see anything but the images if they never chose to look anywhere else?
Socrates: And they would know nothing about a product they buy, except for what brand it is?
Glaucon: Yes.
Socrates: And if they were able to converse with one another, wouldn't they think that they were discussing what mattered?
Glaucon: Very true.
Socrates: And suppose further that the screen had sounds which came from its side, wouldn't they imagine that they were simply hearing what people said?
Glaucon: No question.
Socrates: To them, the truth would be literally nothing but those shadowy things we call the images.
Glaucon: That is certain.
Socrates: And now look again, and see what naturally happens next: the prisoners are released and are shown the truth. At first, when any of them is liberated and required to suddenly stand up and turn his neck around, and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the images; and then imagine someone saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision, -what will be his reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor is asking him to things, not as they are captured on the screen, but in living color -will he not be perplexed? Won't he imagine that the version which he used to see on the screen are better and more real than the objects which are shown to him in real life?
Glaucon: Far better.
Socrates: And if he is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have a pain in his eyes which will make him turn away to take and take in the objects of vision which he can see, and which he will conceive to be in reality clearer than the things which are now being shown to him?
Glaucon: True, he now will.
Socrates: And suppose once more, that he is reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged ascent, and hindered in his self-seeking until he's forced to think about someone besides himself, is he not likely to be pained and irritated? He will find that he cannot simply live life as he sees fit, and he will not have even the illusion of finding comfort by living for himself.
Glaucon: Not all in a moment, he said.
Socrates: He will require time and practice to grow accustomed to the sight of the upper world. And first he will see the billboards best, next the product lines he has seen advertised, and then things which are not commodities; then he will talk with adults and children, and will he know greater joy in having services done to him, or will he prefer to do something for someone else?
Glaucon: Certainly.
Socrates: Last of he will be able to search for the One who is greatest, reflected in each person on earth, but he will seek him for himself, and not in another; and he will live to contemplate him.
Glaucon: Certainly.
Socrates: He will then proceed to argue that this is he who gives the season and the years, and is the guardian of all that is in the visible world, and is absolutely the cause of all things which he and his fellows have been accustomed to behold?
Glaucon: Clearly, he said, his mind would be on God and his reasoning towards those things that come from him.
Socrates: And when he remembered his old habitation, and the wisdom of the den and his fellow-prisoners, do you not suppose that he would felicitate himself on the change, and pity them?
Glaucon: Certainly, he would.
Socrates: And if they were in the habit of conferring honours among themselves on those who were quickest to observe what was happening in the world of brands and what new features were marketed, and which followed after, and which were together; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future, do you think that he would care for such honours and glories, or envy the possessors of them? Would he not say with Homer, "Better to be the poor servant of a poor master" than to reign as king of this Hell, and to endure anything, rather than think as they do and live after their manner?
Glaucon: Yes, he said, I think that he would rather suffer anything than entertain these false notions and live in this miserable manner.
Socrates: Imagine once more, I said, such an one coming suddenly out of the sun to be replaced in his old situation; would he not be certain to have his eyes full of darkness, and seem simply not to get it?
Glaucon: To be sure.
Socrates: And in conversations, and he had to compete in one-upsmanship of knowing the coolest brands with the prisoners who had never moved out of the den, while his sight was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady (and the time which would be needed to acquire this new habit of sight might be very considerable) would he not be ridiculous? Men would say of him that up he went with his eyes and down he came without them; and that it was better not even to think of ascending; and if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would give him an extremely heavy cross to bear.
Glaucon: No question. Then is the saying, "In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king," in fact false?
Socrates: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is crucified. Dear Glaucon, you may now add this entire allegory to the discussion around a matter; the den arranged around a flickering screen is deeply connected to the world of living to serve your pleasures, and you will not misapprehend me if you interpret the journey upwards to be the spiritual transformation which alike may happen in the monk keeping vigil or the mother caring for children, the ascent of the soul into the world of spiritual realities according to my poor belief, which, at your desire, I have expressed whether rightly or wrongly God knows. But, whether true or false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the Source of goodness appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally, either in public or private life must have his eye fixed.
Glaucon: I agree, he said, as far as I am able to understand you.
The Alumnus: Hello. I was in town, and I wanted to stop in for a visit.
The Visionary: How good to see you! What have you been up to? We're all interested in hearing what our alumni are doing.
The Alumnus: Well, that would take a bit of explaining. I had a good experience with college.
The Visionary: That's lovely to hear.
The Alumnus: Yes, and I know that some alumni from our Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, also known as IMSA, didn't. I got through college the same way I got through gradeschool, playing by the law of the jungle. I stopped and thought about how to approach college. I realized soon that higher numbered courses were easier than lower numbered courses, and how to find professors I could work with. And I understand why one alumna said, "IMSA didn't prepare me for college. It prepared me for graduate school." College will not automatically be a good experience for IMSA students, but there are choices the college won't advertise but could be made.
The Visionary: I wish you could speak to some of our students.
The Alumnus: I'd like the opportunity. There are a lot of things to say—that there's a normal scale of elementary-junior high-high school-undergraduate-graduate school, and IMSA doesn't fit on it. It has high school aged students, but it's not a modified high school; it's close in ways to graduate school, but there's something about it that is missed if you put it at any one point on the scale. And this has the result that IMSA students need to realize that when they enter college, they are not going from high school to the next step after high school; they're going from IMSA to something that was not meant to follow IMSA. But something that has opportunities if they knock on back doors and take advantage of some things the university doesn't know they need.
The Visionary: If you're serious about talking to our students, I mean talking with our students, I can introduce you to the appropriate people.
The Alumnus: Thank you. I was mentioning this to lead up to a gem of a class I took, one on what you need to know to make user-friendly computer programs, i.e. usability. There was something that set me thinking, nettled me, when I was reading through some of the jargon file's Hell desk slang, um, I mean help desk slang. The term "pilot error" meant much the same thing as "ID ten T error".
The Visionary: I know what "pilot error" means in some contexts, but what does "ID ten T error" mean?
The Alumnus: It's easiest to see if you write it out.
The Visionary [goes to a markerboard and writes, "I D 1 0 T" ]: Um... I assume there's a reason you started to say, "Hell desk." Aren't they just blowing off steam?
The Alumnus: Yes. Unfortunately, one of the ways many help desk employees have blown off steam is to say, "Ok. If you'll hold for a minute, I'm going to transfer you to my supervisor. Would you tell her that you appear to have an 'eye dee ten tee' error?" And they all gloat over what they've gotten the customer to say. No, seriously, you don't need to keep a straight face.
But what really struck me was the entry for PEBKAC, acronym for "Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair." There was an example given of,
Did you figure out why that guy couldn't print?
Yeah, he kept canceling the print operation before it could finish. PEBKAC.
This was philosophically interesting.
The Visionary: How?
The Alumnus: In a computer, you get these time wasting messages where a little window pops up and you can't do any useful work until you click on the button. It becomes noise for the sake of noise; like the boy who cried, "Wolf!", we have the computer that cries, "Worth your attention." After a while, the normal thing most people do is click on the button automatically so they can get back to their work. It's a waste of time to try to decipher the cryptic messages.
So when people go to print, another one of these waste-of-time windows pops up, except that this time, when you do the right thing and click on the button and make it go away, your print job fails. And this specific example is chosen as a paradigm example of PEBKAC.
For a lot of these errors, there is a problem between a keyboard and chair. But the problem isn't between the user's keyboard and chair. The problem is between the programmer's keyboard and chair.
The Visionary: Ouch.
The Alumnus: That course was what led to what I did for my Ph.D.
The Visionary: And that was?
The Alumnus: My discipline of record is philosophy of mind/cognitive science.
The Visionary: "Discipline of record?" I'm curious to hear you drop the other shoe.
The Alumnus: Usability is connected to cognitive science—an amalgam of computer science, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, and other areas, all trying to understand human thought so we can re-implement it on a computer. It's a fascinating area for interdisciplinary study, and usability draws on it, just from a different angle: instead of making computers intelligent, it tries to make computers friendly to people who don't understand how they are built. And a lot of things which are clear as day if you built the system aren't automatically clear to customers. A system which is usable lets the user have an illusory cognitive model of how the system works that is far, far simpler than how a programmer would understand it. And programmers don't consciously believe that customers understand the innards of their system, but there's an assumption that creeps in, an assumption of, "My way of thinking about it is how a person thinks about it."
The Visionary: That way of putting it makes the programmers sound ego-centric.
The Alumnus: I wouldn't put it in such crude terms as that; they are thinking in a way that is human.
With languages, there is a lot of diversity. Aside from the variety of languages, there's a difference between the U.S., where the majority only speak one language, and Sénégal, where it is common for people to speak five or six languages. There's a difference between Italy, where people speak one national language in a fairly pure form, and India, where English and Hindi are spliced together seamlessly. For that matter, there's the deaf outlet of speaking with your hands instead of your mouth. But with all these differences, language itself is not something which is added to being human. Language is not a custom that cultures may happen to include. There are exceptional cases where people do not learn a language, and these are tragic cases where people are deprived of a human birthright. The specifics of language may vary, but language itself is not adding something to being human. It is something that is basically human. The details and even diversity of languages are details of how language works out.
And a lot of things are like that. Understanding something that you're working on is not something added to being human; it's an interpretation of something basic. How one thinks, about technology and other things, is not something added to being human. It's something basically human.
One very natural tendency is to think that "I" or "we" or "people like us" are just being human; we just have what is natural to being human. The "them" group has all sorts of things that are added to being human, but "we" are just being human. So we expect other people to think like us. We assume it so deeply and unconsciously that we are shocked by their perversity when they violate this expectation.
The Visionary: Wow. I hadn't thought of it in those terms before. Do you think IMSA provided a safe haven from this kind of lockstep thinking for its students?
The Alumnus: I think it provides a safe haven for quite a lot of its students. But getting back to my Ph.D. program—
The Visionary: Yes?
The Alumnus: So I began, encouraged by some initial successes, to try and make the first artificial mind. For a while I thought I would succeed, after overcoming some obstacles that couldn't have been that bad.
The Visionary: What were these obstacles?
The Alumnus: Just a special case here and there, an unrepresentative anomaly. But when I worked, I had a sneaking suspicion dawn on me.
Freshman year, I had a college roommate who was brilliant and eccentric. He turned out stunning proofs in math classes. He was also trying to build a perpetual motion machine. He was adjusting this and that; I listened, entranced, when he traced the history of great experiments in physics, and talked about how across the centuries they went from observing obvious behavior to find subtle ways to trick nature into showing you something you weren't supposed to see. Think of the ingenuity of the Millikan oil drop experiment. And so he went on, trying to adjust this and that, seeking to get things just right for a perpetual motion machine. There were times when he seemed to almost have it. It seemed there were ten things you needed for a perpetual motion machine, and he had an almost working machine for any nine of them. But that tenth one seemed never to fall into place.
And I had a sneaking suspicion, one that I was going to try awfully hard to ignore, that for a long time I convinced myself I didn't know what I was expecting. But deja vu kept creeping in. I had just succeeded with a project that met every clearly defined goal I set for it... but I had just found another way not to make artificial intelligence.
The crusher was when I read von Neumann's 1958 The Computer and the Brain. Then I stopped running from deja vu. Here was crass confidence that in 1958 we discoved the basis for all human thought, and all human thought is add, subtract, multiply, and divide. Here was an assumption in lieu of argument. And here was the air I breathed as a cognitive science.
The Visionary: But I've looked at some reports, and artificial intelligence seems to be just around the corner.
The Alumnus: Full artificial intelligence is just around the corner, and it's been just around the corner since at least the fifties—arguably much longer, because for a hundred years before the brain was a computer, it was a telephone exchange. (I think that's why we talk about a person being "wired" a particular way.) The brain is always understood as the state of the art technology we're most proud of.
I hit rock bottom after thinking about how I had convinced myself I was creating a working artificial intelligence by obtaining results and reinterpreting results as success. It's very seductive, and I was thinking about what some skeptics had said about magic.
What emerged was... The effort to make computers think has found ways that the human mind is much more interesting than we thought. And I began to push in a new direction. Instead of trying to understand human intelligence to make computers more intelligent, I began to try to understand human intelligence to make humans more intelligent.
The Visionary: What exactly do you mean?
The Alumnus: There are a lot of disciplines that teach you how to think. I think scholars in many disciplines see their discipline as the discipline that teaches you how to think, where truly different disciplines are a sort of no-man's land that doesn't qualify as "how to think." But these are a coupled subject matter and how to think about the subject matter. This was, in abstracted, crystalline, and universal form, "How to think." The analogy I used at the time was that it was the elementary school number line (1, 2, 3, ...), abstracted from sets of one physical object, two physical objects, three physical objects...
The Visionary [pausing]: It sounds like you're pioneering a new academic discipline. Would you like IMSA to highlight this?
The Alumnus: I am working that out. Not exactly whether what I am doing would qualify as an academic discipline—I'm pretty sure of that—but whether going down that route would be the wisest choice. For now, I'd rather wait.
The Visionary: Are you sure you wouldn't want the prestige? Hmm... on second thought, I can see that.
What are the scientific underpinnings of your discipline?
The Alumnus [pause]: That question is one of the first ones people ask me. It's automatic.
In tandem with what you might call my loss of faith in cognitive science, I began to question the cultural place of science. Including that in a question like this, the nearly immediate question people ask is one that assumes the answers are fed by science. Three of the most difficult mental accomplishments I've made are learning to think like a scientist, crafting this discipline of how to think, and learning to genuinely ask "How else could it be?" when people automatically go charging in with science.
The Visionary: But don't you think it's important to understand what's going on in the body?
The Alumnus: Both your questions, "What are the scientific underpinnings of your discipline?" and "But don't you think it's important to understand what's going on in the body?" are examples of the tendency I'm talking about. Your latter question assumes that "understanding the body" and "study the science of the body" are interchangeable terms; they often are treated that way in Western culture, but they need not be.
The Visionary: But how else could it be?
The Alumnus: In journalism and some writing classes, students are taught a technique of cubing, which asks six questions, one for each side of the cube. The six questions are all "w" words: who, what, when, where, and how.
In most aboriginal cultures, for instance, people ask more than one question, but the big question is, "Why?" The stories provide explanations for why the world is as it is.
In science, the big question is, "How?" Laws and theories provide mechanisms for how things happen. "Why?" isn't just de-emphasized; it's something people learn not to ask, something that is subtly stamped out like much of a child's creativity. Asking "Why?" is a basic error, like asking how much an idea weighs. One philosopher of science I read gave an example of a father asking a teenaged son, "Why is the living room light on?" and getting the answer, "Because the switch is in the 'on' position, closing the circuit and causing electricity to flow through the bulb." That isn't why, that's how. And if students are taught science without being taught how to be independent from science, or for that matter if they are in a culture influenced by science as ours has been, they'll come to share the assumption that this is the one and only serious answer to, "Why is the living room light on?"
That puts things too simply, but my point is that science does not represent the full range of inquiry. Science has cast a powerful shadow, not just in that science is scientific (which is as it should be) but in that non-scientific inquiry is not as independent as it should be.
But I'm getting off topic. What I was meaning to say was that I use science, but my discipline is dependent on an independence from science as well.
The Visionary: Could I backtrack a fair distance?
The Alumnus: Sure, to what?
The Visionary: There was something in the back of my mind when you answered my question about IMSA shielding its students from a lockstep environment. May I ask a more specific question?
The Alumnus: Certainly.
The Visionary: Did IMSA shield you from a lockstep environment?
The Alumnus: IMSA was unquestionably a better environment for me than a mainstream school.
The Visionary: You're being diplomatic.
The Alumnus: Ok. IMSA tries to be a magnet school serving the gifted population. Instead of memorization, it tries to produce critical observers, right?
The Visionary: Yes, and this isn't just for IMSA. We want to be a beacon of hope, for educational progress to the state and to the world.
The Alumnus: IMSA still doesn't have a football program, right?
The Visionary: IMSA students still don't really want one. If there was enough demand, we'd have one.
The Alumnus: What would you say to a football coach who wanted to liberate the tough, aggressive quarterback struggling to get out of every IMSA bookworm?
The Visionary: I think I see where you're going. Let me play devil's advocate for the moment. Our society has recognized football as an endeavor for some. But don't we recognize that education is a goal for all?
The Alumnus: All analogies break down, and I can't force you to see my point if you don't want to. My reason for drawing that analogy is that the average mind learns by memorization of given material, and that mind is ill-served by trying to liberate that critical observer just as many bookworms would be ill-served by trying to liberate that hidden quarterback. The kind of student that does well at IMSA doesn't do so well with the memorization that serves the average student. But it's a two-way street.
The Visionary: And I think I see a connection to what you said about programmers assume that how they think about a product is how everybody will think about it. And...
The Alumnus: Yes. But there's something else.
The Visionary: So how do you think IMSA's outreach should be changed? Should we stop outreach?
The Alumnus: I'd want to give that some thought. That isn't why I brought this up. I brought up this two-edged sword to make it easier to see another two-edged sword.
The two-edged sword I've suggested is that, just as IMSA students tend to be uncomfortable with the instructional methods at most schools, average students would be uncomfortable with instruction that seeks to liberate a hidden critical observer. It's a bad match both ways. The other two-edged sword has to do with the nature of giftedness. How would you define giftedness?
The Visionary: I try not to, at least in not as strong terms as you do. IMSA is trying to liberate the genius of every child.
The Alumnus: I think your actions are wiser than your rhetoric. How much thought goes into your admissions decisions?
The Visionary: Our admissions staff give a great deal of thought! Do you think we're careless?
The Alumnus: I would have been disturbed if IMSA made a random choice from among the students whose genius would be nurtured. Are you sure you don't want to define giftedness?
The Visionary: Every child has some talent.
The Alumnus: I agree, although your words sound suspiciously like words that many IMSA parents have learned to wince at. There are a lot of parents who have bright children who have learned that "All of our children are gifted." means, in practical terms, "Your daughter will be educated according to our idealization of an average student, no matter how much it hurts her, and we won't make accomodation."
But you are, unlike me, an administrator whom everybody blames for problems, and you know that there are many occasions where coming out and expressing your candid opinions is an invitation to disaster. I groused about the administration to no end as a student; it is only as an adult that I've come to appreciate the difficult and delicate task of being an administrator, and what kind of performance on an administration's part lets me focus on my work.
I'm going to put on my suspicious and mistrustful observer cap and read into your actions that it would be politically dangerous for you to say "This is the kind of gifted student we look for at IMSA." But I am not an administrator. I am more of a private person than you can afford to be, and there are more degrees of freedom offered to me. Would you mind my giving my opinion on a matter where you in particular need to be very careful in what you say?
The Visionary: I'm always open to listen, and I'm not just saying this as an administrator.
The Alumnus: I should also say that because something is politic, I don't automatically translate "politic" to "insincere." I believe you've been as successful as you have partly because you sincerely want to hear what people have to say. When someone says, "political sensitivity," I've learned to stop being a cynic and automatically hearing, "Machiavellian intrigue."
But when I teach, I try to have a map that accomodates itself to terrain, both old and new to me. There are surprisingly many things I believe that are human universals, although I won't discuss them here. But diversity is foundational to how I communicate, and in particular teach.
By "diversity" I don't just mean "affirmative action concerns." I read what I can about minority cultures, and how Asperger's or ADD minds tick. That much is important, and I'm not just jumping on the bandwagon. But diversity doesn't begin when a student labeled as "minority," "different," or "disadvantaged" sits down in your classroom. Diversity begins much earlier. Diversity is every person. I'm fond of books like David Kiersey's Please Understand Me II which explore what temperament and Myers-Briggs types mean for personhood. I want to appreciate learning styles. I absolutely love when students come in during office hours, because then I can see exactly where a student is, and exactly how that student is learning and thinking, and give an explanation that is tailored to the student's specific situation. I like to lecture too, but I'm freest to meet student needs when students visit me in my office.
And one very important facet of that diversity is one that is unfashionable today, more specifically IQ.
The Visionary: I remember seeing a report that your IQ was so high it was untestable by normal means. I've heard that polite drivers value politeness, skillful drivers value skill, and safe drivers value safety. Is there...?
The Alumnus: If you want to dismiss what I'm saying because of speculation about my motives, there's a good case to do so. I know that. But please hear and accept or dismiss my arguments on their merits, and if you read books like James Webb's Guiding the Gifted Child, you'll see this isn't just my idea. I accept multiple intelligence theory as a nuance, but I would point my finger to the idea that a single IQ was an adjustment in theory, made by people who started by assuming multiple intelligences.
But with all the debates, and in particular despite the unfashionability of "IQ", there is excellent reason to discuss giftedness in terms of IQ. IQ may not be the whole story, but you're missing something big if it is treated as one factor among others.
Several caveats deleted, I would point out that giftedness is not a binary attribute, any more than being tall is binary. There may be some people who are clearly tall and others who clearly aren't, but regardless of where you draw the line, you can't divide people into a "tall" group of people who are all exactly 190 centimeters tall and a "non-tall" group of people who are 160 centimeters tall. There is diversity, and this diversity remains even if you restrict your attention to tall people.
The Visionary: So then would you say that most high schools serve an average diversity, and IMSA serves a gifted diversity?
The Alumnus: Umm...
The Visionary: Yes?
The Alumnus: An average high school breaks at both ends of its spectrum...
The Visionary: Yes?
The Alumnus: Um...
The Visionary: Yes?
The Alumnus: And IMSA breaks at both ends of its spectrum.
The Visionary: If there are some students who the administration overestimates, this is unfortunate, but—
The Alumnus: That's not my point. Ignoring several other dimensions of diversity, we don't have two points of "average" and "gifted" defining a line. Giftedness, anyway, is not "the same kind of intelligence as most people have, only more of it and faster"; it's a different kind of intelligence. It diverges more the further you go.
Instead of the two points of "average" and "gifted", there are three points to consider: "average", "gifted", and "profoundly gifted."
I think it is to IMSA's great credit that you have a gifted education, not a pullout tacked on to a nongifted education. Serving gifted needs isn't an adjustment; it's the fabric you've woven, and it is impressive.
But "profoundly gifted" is as different from the "moderately gifted" as "moderately gifted" is from "average"...
...and IMSA attracts a good proportion of the profoundly gifted minority...
...and the position of the profoundly gifted at IMSA is exactly the position many IMSA students had in TAG pullouts.
The Visionary: May I say a word in IMSA's defense?
The Alumnus: Certainly.
The Visionary: IMSA began as a dream, a wild, speculative, powerful, risky vision. From the beginning, its place was tentative; some of the first classes did math problems before the state government because IMSA was threatened with closing. IMSA makes things happen that wouldn't happen anywhere, and for all we've done, there are still people who would remove us from the budget. I've talked with alumni, both those who like and dislike the school, and I see something in them which I didn't see in other places.
The Alumnus: And IMSA is a safe place to learn and grow, and IMSA alumni are making a powerful contribution to the world. All of this I assume. And IMSA seems like the kind of place that could grow, that does grow. IMSA could offer the world certain extraordinarily talented individuals that have been stretched to their limit, who have spent certain very formative years doing things most people don't even dream of, and doing so not in isolation but guided and supported as powerfully, and as gently for their needs, as IMSA already offers to so many of its students.
The Visionary: If you have any plans, I would like to hear them.
The Alumnus: Before I give the plans as such, I would like to give a brief overview, not just of the average, moderately gifted, and profoundly gifted mind, but of the average, moderately gifted, and profoundly gifted spirit. Keep in mind that this is not a trichotomy, but three reference points on a curve.
The average mind is concrete. It deals in practical, concrete matters. There was one study which posed isomorphic problems to people, one of which was stated abstractly, and one of which asked in concrete terms who the "cheaters" were. The average respondent did poorly on the abstract isomorph, but was astute when it was put concretely. The average mind is more practical, and learns by an understanding which gradually emerges by going over things again. The preferred learning style is oriented towards memorization and is relatively slow, concrete, and (on gifted terms) doesn't make connections. This person is the fabric with which society is woven; a person like this tends to understand and be understood by others. The average mind concentrates on, and becomes reasonably proficient, in a small number of skills.
The moderately gifted mind, around an IMSA IQ of 140, deals with abstractions. It sees interconnections, and this may be related to why the moderately gifted mind learns more skills with less effort. (If this is true, an average mind would be learning from scratch, while a moderately gifted mind would only make adaptations from similar skills.) This person is likely to have a "collection of skills", and have a low self-assessment in those skills. (Today's breathtaking performance is, tomorrow, marginally adequate.) Self-actualizing concern for becoming a particular kind of person is much more common. The moderately gifted mind enjoys an advantage over the average mind, and is different, but still close enough to connect. This person learns more quickly, and most of society's leaders are moderately gifted. (Some have suggested that this is not just because people above that range are much rarer, but because they can easily connect.
There is controversy about how isolated the profoundly gifted person is, with an IQ around 180. Some researchers believe that the greater gap is bridged by the greater ability to connect; Webb suggests otherwise, saying that children with an IQ above 170 feel like they don't fit in anywhere. He asks what the effects would be if a normal child grew up in a world where most people had an IQ of 50-55. Some profoundly gifted have discussed the feeling that there's an instruction manual to life that everyone but them has. The unusual sense of humor that appears in the moderately gifted is even more pronounced in the profoundly gifted. Average people tend to believe some tacit and naively realistic philosophy. Moderately gifted people tend to believe some conscious and creative reinterpretation of realism. Profoundly gifted people tend to believe an almost automatic anti-realism. The realism assumed by most people doesn't resonate with them. And I need to explain what I mean by "believe" here. I don't mean that someone engaged them in a discussion and are convinced by logic or eloquence that an anti-realist philosophy is true. I mean something close to experience, as we believe that a radiator is hot after we touch it. Realism is obvious for someone of average intelligence. For someone profoundly gifted, coming to that perspective represents a significant achievement.
Furthermore, where the moderately gifted person has a "skill collection", the profoundly gifted individual has what might as well be magic powers—
The Visionary: You mean is involved with the occult or psychic phenomena?
The Alumnus: Not exactly. Profoundly gifted individuals have been known to do things like reinventing the steam engine at age six. Some of them can walk into a room and in an instant infer what kind of presentation is going to be given, and what kind of organization is going to give it. They have been known to make penetrating observations of connections between vastly different disciplines. Some have written a book in a week. Others remember everything they have read. Verbatim. Another still has invented a crude physics and using it to solve problems before she was old enough to talk. It's entirely plausible for a profoundly gifted individual to think for a few hours about a philosophical school he's just read about, and have a better grasp of the assumptions and implications surrounding that school than scholars who have studied the discipline for years. Many accomplishments are less extreme than that. Some are more extreme. I said that they might as well be magic powers because they are no more believable to many people than levitation or fairies granting wishes. Moderately gifted achievements are envied. Profoundly gifted achievements are disbelieved, and one social lesson the profoundly gifted learn is that there are certain accomplishments that you don't talk about... which feels the way most people would feel if people were shocked and offended when they tried to say, "I can read," or for that matter, "I can breathe."
These people do not think of themselves as having magic powers. Their impressive abilities are no more breathtaking or astonishing to them than our impressive abilities of walking through an unfamiliar room or understanding a children's book are to us—and if you don't believe that walking through an unfamiliar room or understanding a children's book is an astonishing mental feat, just spend a year in artificial intelligence. Artificial researchers know what kind of achievement is represented by these "basic" tasks. The rest of us misunderstand them as mundane. If you can understand how you can be better at understanding emotions than any computer in the world, and not think of yourself as gifted, you have a good start on understanding what it's like to feel that it's natural to tinker with your hands, imagine who you're going to be when you grow up, enjoy cooking, and have dreams where your brain creates languages on the fly.
It's a commonplace that the gifted can have a rough time of school. What IMSA does is place the profoundly gifted in the position of fixed pace classes designed for people significantly less intelligent than them.
It's easier to criticize than it is to give a positive alternative; let me give a positive alternative.
First of all, profoundly gifted students can pick things up much more rapidly even than most IMSA students. Something like a factor of four speedup can happen again and again. Many of these students would tear through textbooks if you let them.
The Visionary: But at IMSA we don't dump textbooks on students. We provide an environment where they can discover things for themselves.
The Alumnus: They will discover things for themselves. But if you look at learning styles, the profoundly gifted are some of the most able to understand a crystallized abstraction, and the most likely to work ahead in their textbooks.
IMSA may have a dozen or so profoundly gifted individuals at any one time.
The Visionary: And we've provided accommodation for a bright sophomore physics class.
The Alumnus: Yes, it is possible for students to lobby for accommodation on a specific point.
But it's possible to go further, as IMSA has gone further than TAG pullouts.
There could be a small number of people who serve as tutors, in a sort of tutorial system as can be seen in Oxford's and Cambridge's history. They would be like thesis advisors, less responsible for knowing what the students need to learn than offering direction and referrals.
The Visionary: What would you have them do if they tear through IMSA's curriculum sophomore year?
The Alumnus: Students that bright are likely to have their own axes to grind—good axes, axes which they should be encouraged. I really have trouble imagining a student flying through IMSA's normal curriculum and then wanting to watch TV for two years. The problem of motivating these students is like the problem of defending a lion: the first thing is to get out of the way.
The teachers themselves should offer the kind of individualized instruction that is basic to special education, and deal with the "magic powers" that the main curriculum doesn't know how to deal with.
The Visionary: Would the teachers have to be profoundly gifted?
The Alumnus: I don't know. I would place more emphasis on understanding profoundly gifted students than necessarily being profoundly gifted oneself.
Furthermore, as well as standing in need of conceptual education, profoundly gifted students could benefit from personal development to help them meet the rest of the world. I don't know whether it would be correct to say that average education should be about knowledge, gifted education should be about how to think, and profoundly gifted education should be about personal development. I think the idea is worth considering. And I would try to develop some things that aren't needed in average education and less needed in moderately gifted education, such as how to bridge the gap and meet the rest of the world.
The Visionary: I'll think about that. I would be delighted to say you've shown me how to solve this problem.
The Alumnus: I'd be surprised if I've shown you how to solve this problem. If I were asked what I could guarantee for this model, it would be that some part of it is wrong. I would ask you to consider what I've presented you as a rough draft. In my opinion it is a rough draft worth revising, changing course in midstream if need be, but it is a rough draft.
The Visionary: This is all very well for office hours, but how do you teach a class? You don't try to individualize a lecture twenty different ways, do you?
The Alumnus: I believe what I said about diversity as foundational, but I also believe there are things that are common. I believe there are significant commonalities as well as significant differences.
What would you say is the dominant educational philosophy at IMSA?
The Visionary: There are several philosophies we draw on, and several things vary from teacher to teacher. But if I were to pick one school, it would be constructivism.
The Alumnus: Does constructivism see the student as an empty pot, to be filled with knowledge?
The Visionary: Quite the opposite. Constructivism sees the students as agents, trying to actively construct their models of the world, not as empty pots to be filled, or as formless clay for the teachers to shape. We see the teacher as supporting the student in this active task.
The Alumnus: And I agree that students should be active and encouraged by teachers. A related question—do you believe mathematics is something that research mathematicians invent, or something that they find out?
The Visionary: Well, the obvious answer would be that it's something constructed.
The Alumnus: I disagree with you, at least about the "obvious" part.
The Visionary: Then I'll trust your judgment that it's something mathematicians discover. You've probably thought about this a lot more than I have.
The Alumnus: You don't need to agree with me here. There are a lot of good mathematicians who believe mathematics is something invented.
The Visionary: Are you saying I should believe mathematics is constructed?
The Alumnus: No. There are also a lot of mathematicians who understand mathematics and say mathematics is something that's found out.
The Visionary: Now I'm having trouble seeing where you're going.
The Alumnus: There's a debate among mathematicians as to whether mathematics is invented or discovered, with good mathematicians falling into either camp. The word 'discover' itself is ambiguous; one can say "I discovered the TV remote under the couch" and have "discover" mean "dis-cover" or "find out," but one can also say, "I discovered a way to build a better mousetrap," and have "discover" mean "invent". "Invent" derives from the Latin "invenire," which means "come into", i.e. "find," so that it would be more natural in Latin to say "I just invented my car keys" than "I invented a useful tool."
The Visionary: I think I see what you are saying... Are you saying that there is a single reality described both by discovery and invention?
The Alumnus: Yes. Now to tie in with constructivism... What are students doing when they are constructing models?
The Visionary: They are shaping thought-stuff, for lack of a better term, in a way that's different for each learner.
The Alumnus: And this is to break out of the Enlightenment/Diderot encyclopedia mindset which gives rise to stuffing the learner with facts?
The Visionary: Absolutely.
The Alumnus: Where would you place Kant? Was he a medieval philosopher?
The Visionary: He was one of the Enlightenment's greatest philosophers.
The Alumnus: And Kant's model of ideas was unchanged from Plato.
The Visionary: Um...
The Alumnus: Yes?
The Visionary: What Plato called "Ideas" and Kant 's "ideas" are two different things. For Plato, the Ideas were something strange to us: a reality outside the mind.
The Alumnus: Um... Plato and Kant would equally have affirmed the statement, "Ideas are internal."
The Visionary: I don't think so. Plato's Allegory of the Cave suggests that the Ideas are part of something that is the same for all people.
The Alumnus: If I may digress for a moment, I think that famous passage should be called "the Allegory of the Television." I appreciate your limiting the place of television at IMSA. But back to the topic, for Plato the Ideas were internal, but were not private.
The Visionary: Huh?
The Alumnus: Kant was a pivotal figure in our—the Enlightenment's—idea that the only real stuff outside our head is matter. When Kant says "internal," he says "private," and when we say "internal," we say "private." If you think this way, then you believe that thought is something done in a private corner. This privacy may be culturally conditioned, but it is privacy. And yet, however self-evident this seems to us, a great many philosophers and cultures have believed otherwise.
There is a private aspect to thought, but my research into how to think has led me to question the Enlightenment model and believe that we all think on the same contoured surface. We can be on different parts and move in different ways, but in thinking we deal with a reality others deal with as well. And I'm going to sound like a kooky philosopher and say that you have a deficient cosmology, and therefore a deficient corollary understanding of how humans are capable of learning, if you believe that everything is either inside the mind or else something you can kick.
The Visionary: But we're questioning the Enlightenment model, and rejecting parts of it that have problems!
The Alumnus: I know you are. And I would encourage you to question more of it.
The Visionary: How does this belief affect teaching for you?
The Alumnus: Most immediately, it helps me say ways to identify with students—connect with their thought. There are some things that pay off long term. But in the short run, when a student makes a mistake, the student is not bad, nor is the mistake is not an anomaly to push away. A mistake is an invaluable opportunity for me to understand how a student is thinking and draw the student to a better understanding.
In terms of base metaphor, if you look at Dewey's foundationalism, what it is that bothers many IMSA teachers and IMSA teachers are working to change, the basic idea is that the teacher is building up knowledge, from its foundations, in the student's mind. If I were to try and capture it in a metaphor, I would say that the student is an empty lot, and the teacher is building a house on it. The teacher is actively doing teaching to the student.
The constructivism that resonates with many IMSA teachers doesn't like the idea of the teacher being active and the student being the passive receptacle of teaching. It's fine for the teacher to be active, but they don't believe the student is passive because they were quite active learners themselves. Constructivist writers don't refer to 'students' so much as 'learners;' they emphasize that the learner is active. The basic idea is that people are actively trying to build their own unique understandings of the world, and a constructivist teacher is trying to support learners in this endeavor. If foundationalism is crystallized in the image of a teacher building a house on an empty lot, constructivist learning theory is crystallized in the image of learners picking up what they can to build their own private edifices of thought, their interior castles.
The Visionary: What do you think of those?
The Alumnus: I think we're comparing a hammer with a screwdriver. If you read debate on the web, you'll see people who think constructivism is a hazy and incomprehensibly bad version of foundationalism, and people who think foundationalism is a hazy and incomprehensibly bad version of constructivism. The truth is neither; good foundationalist teaching like Direct Instruction is doing one thing well, and good constructivist learning is doing another thing well, and different people learn differently.
The Visionary: But do you have an alternative?
The Alumnus: Yes, and it is again suggested by basic metaphor. Instead of building a house, or helping learners construct their private models, I would suggest looking at a single word, katalabein. I am using a Greek word without an exact English equivalent, because it ties together some things that are familiar—part of the shared inner human reality which we can recognize. It can be translated 'overcome' or 'understand', and it provides for a basic metaphor in which what is understood is actively acquired, achieved even, but it is not necessarily idiosyncratic and private. We still have an active learner, and implications for how a teacher can support that active learner...
The Visionary: Go on.
The Alumnus: But it's different. I was fascinated with one constructivist learning page that recast the teacher as a sort of non-directive counselor. They facilitated learning experiences, but they realized that students came in with beliefs, like "Weeds are not plants because they don't need to be nurtured," and what really fascinated me was that some of them found themselves in an ethical quandary about the appropriateness of using a science class to influence student beliefs, say to agree with a botanist that dandelions are plants.
The Visionary: None of the IMSA teachers are that squeamish about influencing student beliefs.
The Alumnus: One alum made a comment that "looney liberals" seemed to him to offer a similar service to coal miner's canaries. It wouldn't be fair to accuse most liberals of their excesses, but it was still worth keeping an eye on them: they could be a warning that it was time to rethink basic ideas. Even if those web pages may fall more into the "canary" category than anything else...
The Visionary: But what do you have instead of helping students build private world-pictures?
The Alumnus: Instead of helping students build private world-pictures, helping students grapple with, in the overcoming that is understanding and the understanding that is overcoming, the katalabein of material. And this is material that always has a personal touch, but is understood to be internal in a way that is not simply how one has arbitrarily exercised privacy, but connects with a sort of inner terrain that is as shared as the outer terrain. No two people are at—no two people can be at—the exact same place in the external, physical world, nor can two people see the same thing, because their personal bodies get in the way. But that does not mean we inhabit our own private physical universes. I can tell you how to drive to my house because to get there, you would be navigating some of the same reality as I navigate. But somehow we believe that our bodies may touch the same doorknobs and our shoes may touch the same carpets... Somehow we believe that when we turn inside, the "reality" becomes impenetrably private, influenced by culture perhaps but shared to so little an extent that no two people shares the same inner sun and moon.
The Visionary: But that's the external world! You're not talking about when people can make up anything they want.
The Alumnus: Hmm... As part of your job, you field criticism from people who want IMSA to be shut down, right?
The Visionary: Yes.
The Alumnus: And a good portion of that criticism comes from people who are certain you've never considered the objection they raise, right?
The Visionary: You've been reading my mail!
The Alumnus: And how many years has it been since one of those letters contained a criticism that was new to you?
The Visionary: You've been reading my... um... [pause] Wow.
The Alumnus: The introduction to the Handbook of Special Education tries to make a point by quoting the opening meeting of the International Council for the Education of Exceptional Children. The meeting had in all respects a typical (for today) discussion of how one should define special needs children. And the meeting was in 1923. The point was made that special educators assume they're the first people to address new issues, when neither the issues nor their thoughts are new. An old internet denizen, writing about "the September that never ended", talked about how each year in September new college students would flood newsgroup discussions with "new, new, new" insights that were, in the denizen's words, "exactly the same tripe" that had been posted the previous year.
There is really not that much that is new, and this is tied to another observation. There is really not that much that is private. There is some. Even in the outer world there are some things that are private to each person. But in the inner world—and I am not talking aboutyour inner world, or mine, but a real world, the inner world, a place that has contours of its own and laws of its own and terrain of its own and substances of its own which are no more the subject of an idiosyncratic private monopoly than the outer world's sun and moon. Perhaps it has a private dimension, but to assume that an inner world is by definition someone's most private possession is almost like answering the remark "The Atlantic Ocean is getting more polluted," with "Whose Atlantic Ocean?"
The Visionary: Is there a way to integrate the inner world with the outer world?
The Alumnus: I am guilty of a rhetorical fault. I have spoken of the outer world as if it were separate from the inner world, and the inner world as if it were separate from the outer world. The real task is not one of integration but desegregation, and that is a lesson I've been wrestling with for years. The biggest lesson I took from my Ph.D. thesis, where I achieved a fascinating distillation of how to think from learning as we know it, is that how to think cannot be distilled from learning, and learning cannot be distilled from the rest of life. It is all interconnected. It's like a classic plot in fantasy literature where a hero is searching for a legendary treasure, and goes to strange places and passes amazing trials. We're there learning with him, until there is an end where "nothing" happens, but by the time that "nothing" takes place, we've been with the hero all along and we have been transformed just as much as he is, and we see through the "nothing" to recognize the treasure that has been all around the hero—and us—all along.
The real world has an internal and an external dimension, and there is nothing like trying to crystallize purer and purer internal knowledge to see the interpenetration of the internal and the external. I learned that the internal is not self-contained.
The Visionary: Is there anything that has been written which deals with this connection?
The Alumnus: Are you asking me if you can borrow a truckload of books? There are some cultures where it's hard to find material which doesn't relate the connection in some form.
But let me tie this in with education. Postmodernism is fragmented, so much so that postmodern scholars tend to put "postmodern" in ironic quotes and add some qualifier about whether it's even coherent to talk about such a movement. From the inside, there isn't a single postmodern movement; talking about a postmodern movement is like talking about a herd of housecats. But this is not because talking about being "postmodern" is meaningless; it's because one of the characteristics is fragmentation, and so if there is anything called postmodern, then it will be much more of a grab bag than something called modern.
Constructivism is postmodern, not in that anything called postmodern must resemble it, but because it can be placed on a somewhat ad hoc spectrum. It is internally fragmented, in that it is not helping students navigate the world of ideas, but in trying to reckon with learners' development of private models of the world. In typical postmodern fashion, the movement shows exquisite sensitivity to ways in which student constructed models are parochial, and does not inquire into ways in which students may be grappling with something universal. (At best learners' constructs are culturally conditioned.)
In what I am suggesting, learners are active, but students are working with something which is not so much clay to be shaped in the privacy of one's mind. I am aware of the parochial dimension—as a culture, we've been aware of it to death—but I'm trying to look at something we don't pay as much attention to today. I suggest, instead of a basic metaphor of learners constructing their own models, learners struggling to conquer parts of the world of ideas. Conquer means in some sense to appropriate; it means in part what we mean when we say that a mountain climber physically conquered an ascent and mastered its terrain. And this is not a cookie cutter, but it provides serious place for something that doesn't have soil to root itself in in constructivism.
I suspect that this is a lot less exotic than it sounds. Would you say that IMSA teachers often understand their students?
The Visionary: I think they often try.
The Alumnus: I think they often succeed.
Communication in general draws on being able to identify with the other. It says, "Even if I disagree with you, I understand what it means that you believe differently from what I do." You know what it's like when someone is talking with you and simply cannot identify with where you are coming from. It feels clumsy. Good communicators can identify with other people, and even a partial understanding is much better than no understanding at all.
I think the teachers I had at least showed something wiser than constructivism. Read something like Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and you will see appreciation of incommensurability and a communication divide between opposing camps; unlike the later Kuhn, you will also see that this claim of incommensurability, where opposing sides invariably argue past each other in debates, is applied to both major and minor paradigm shifts. Now if we look at a constructivist approach, where this kind of thinking is applied to individual peoples' models as well as models that are shared across a camp, then we have an excellent reason not to teach.
We have an excellent reason to say that teachers' and students' models are not only conflicting but incommensurable, that the teacher may have more power but in a fair debate they would argue past each other, and that the basis for the teacher understanding and therefore successfully influencing the student is at very least questionable. In the end, we have something which affects the concept of teaching more profoundly than the observation that students will see things that teachers don't realize. If you look at Kuhn, you will see a remark that the winning side of a scientific paradigm shift will naturally view the shift as progress. This contributes to an account for people thinking science progresses without science actually progressing. Science shifts. But the shift is not a step forward from less developed science to more developed science. It is a step sideways, from one reigning paradigm to another. And in like fashion, if you follow a natural constructivist path, you have an alternative to saying that the teacher knows more about science than the students. The teacher is more powerful, but there is a way out for someone who wants to deny that the teacher has more desirable knowledge that the students should learn. Not only can we argue that "teaching" communication is impossible, but we can argue that "teaching" communication is undesirable even if it were possible.
The Visionary: But that can't be what our teachers believe! You have to be misunderstanding constructivism. That's not how it works out.
The Alumnus: I agree with you that that can't be what many IMSA teachers believe. It is only what they say. And what they think they believe.
The Visionary: You mean...
The Alumnus: Foundationalism is a bad account of how most IMSA teachers learn. They learn actively, and IMSA students learn actively. And constructivism offers a compelling metaphor for active learning. But teachers at IMSA don't believe all its implications. Like the character in a George MacDonald book who was fond of saying, "Marry in haste, repent at leisure," and had married in haste, but hadn't really thought about repenting, even though she'd had plenty of leisure in which to repent. If constructivism may undercut the possibility of communication, and the possibility of the teacher drawing students to join her in expert practice, this is not yet a problem. In practical terms, teachers believe they can communicate, and they have something to share. And they do this. There may be problems where this goes down the road, but in practical terms IMSA teachers live a philosophy with communication that is often excellent.
And, as far as metaphors go, I think that the katalabein metaphor offers something valuable that the constructivist metaphor doesn't. In particular, the fact that teachers can communicate, and leave students better off, doesn't just happen to be true; it's something that one can delve into. You don't just take the metaphor into consideration when you communicate on a basis that doesn't come from the model; the metaphor itself gives you a basis to communicate. And it's different enough to compete in an interesting way. Or complement constructivism in an interesting way. Even if it's not perfect.
The Visionary: Yes, I know. Do you regret the fact that it's so messy?
The Alumnus: I regret the fact that it's not messy enough.
When we describe a rainbow, we say that the colors are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. But those aren't the colors of the rainbow. If you pick a color at random on the rainbow, there's a zero percent chance that you will exactly pick one of those colors. A rainbow is a spectrum, and if you have a wavelength for each of those colors, you have seven reference points for a spectrum with infinitely many colors. And a reference point can help you understand a spectrum, but a reference point is not a spectrum.
I've done, I think, a decent job of describing one reference point on a spectrum. But teachers rarely follow one educational theory in pure form; they tend to draw on several, and this is intended not to be a complete theory, but a reference point in a pluralistic theory. Most theories are a single point. This theory is meant to be a spectrum, but isn't there yet.
And as much as a robust theory of education needs to be pluralistic, sensitive to the diversity that is every student, there also also needs to be a sensitivity to the diversity of knowledge. English is cursed to only have one word for knowledge.
The Visionary:But we have well enough established division of knowledge into subjects. In fact that's what we're trying to teach our students to get past.
The Alumnus: That's not quite what I meant.
In most of the languages I know, there's more than one word for knowledge. In French, there is savoir, which is the knowledge one has about facts, and connaissance, which is the knowledge one has of a person. It's a different kind of thing to know about a fact and to know of a person, and this is reflected in different words. Conscience is not simply the French word for conscience; it means consciousness, and some of the more ethereal and personal aspects of knowledge. The Latin eruditio and notitia have other nuances. In English we do have "wisdom," "knowledge," and "information," which are as different from each other as an apple, an orange, and a pear.
And this is without treating ways of thought. One of the things I learned was that knowledge and ways of thought could be distinguished but not separated. If you look at Eastern ways, whether they are religions like Hinduism or Eastern Orthodoxy, or martial arts like Kuk Sool Won or Ninpo, you will find quite a different pedagogy from what we assume in the West. Instead of trying to open the mind and dump in knowledge, they begin by training the body, in actions, and then this begins to affect the soul and transform the spirit.
The Visionary: Isn't constructivism more like that?
The Alumnus: It is. But instead of reinventing experiential learning, Eastern ways preserve a Tao, or for a Western word, a matrix. Most recently in the West, Matrix is the name of a trilogy where each movie was better than the next. But before that, a matrix was a mathematical construct, and are you familiar with what "matrix" meant before that? It was the Latin word meaning "womb." And this concept of a womb, or a matrix, is something which has become alien to Western thought. A matrix is the medium in which you move, the air in which you breathe. It has the authority of your culture and your mother tongue. It is a very different kind of authority from the authority of a single leader, or a written rule; a matrix does not consciously command you, but provides you with the options which shape your choice. And the Eastern ways all preserve a matrix, a way, that provides their pedagogy. In a sense the difference between constructivist experiential learning and Eastern experiential learning is the difference between non-native speakers trying to speak a language and a community of native speakers continuing to use their language. Except to make the comparison more fair, constructivists are trying to construct a language, and put together something that works, and Eastern pedagogues have inherited something that works. The difference is kind of like the difference between an experimental kind of baseball glove that someone is trying out and a glove that is not only traditional but already broken in.
The Visionary: Um... I'll have to think about what you have said about a "matrix." Ok, you've given me a lot to think about. It would be premature for me to respond now. I'm going to need to think about what you've said. But let me change the susbject. What other ideas do you have about teaching, especially concrete ones?
The Alumnus: It's a bit like a light—it makes other things easier to see. But let me talk about other ways of teaching, such as listening.
The Visionary: I know how you can listen if a student asks a question, but how do you listen when lecturing?
The Alumnus: Listening is about trying to understand the other person as a basis for communication. Apart from the feedback that's in student questions—if you look for it—a person's face is a window to what is going on inside, and a teacher sees student faces frequently. I know the ominous silence when the class is so lost that students are afraid to ask questions. I don't just charge on because it's important to cover the remaining material. I try to stop, back up, and help the students to genuinely understand, and then proceed from genuine understanding. Homework offers implicit feedback on what I succeeded in communicating, and what I did not succeed in. And there's an implicit listening mindset behind trying not to inundate students with too much information at once.
There's a book of little stories, and in one of them, a sage was asked, "What is your name?" He pondered for a moment and said, "My name used to be... Me. But now it's... You." I didn't like that story at first, because I didn't understand it. Now I understand enough of it to see that it has a profound truth. Talking is about "me", and listening is part of a lifelong journey of learning to think in terms of "you." Listening has far more to offer a teacher than a better understanding of student questions.
There are a lot of things I like about how IMSA works—your belief that the needs of the mind cannot be met if the needs of the body are neglected. How this you fit this in with Arbor food service is not clear to me—
The Visionary: Thanks, Dear...
The Alumnus: Any time. But I really like the understanding you have of the human person as interconnected on multiple levels, including the body and mind. I also take that as axiomatic, and teach so that students will understand concepts and preferably their connections, and many other things. Just as I haven't read what I just said about listening in anything that came out of IMSA, but the teachers I had at IMSA were all examples of good listening.
The Visionary: Thank you.
The Alumnus: You're welcome.
But another part of the Enlightenment I reject is its depersonalization of knowledge and teaching. Have you read any Polanyi?
The Visionary: Not yet. Should I put him on my reading list?
The Alumnus: I don't know. He writes hefty, if understandable, material. It takes time to understand him, but he's worth understanding.
Michael Polanyi was a philosopher of science, and his big work was on tacit and personal knowledge. The core idea is that scientific knowledge (I would say knowledge in general) is not a set of dessicated constructs that can be understood without reference to people; it is enfleshed in people who know it. He talked about how competing swimmers inhale a little more air and exhale a little less, so they always have more air in their lungs and therefore buoyancy than we would, but this knowledge is never thought of in so many words by the coach or by the student who "picks it up" from the coach, wordlessly. I don't know if it's a fair reading to say that the knowledge we can articulate is the just tip of the iceberg, but what I do think is a fair reading is to say that the knowledge we can put into so many words is not the whole picture. I think he would have liked IMSA trying to avoid teachers mindlessly regurgitating material so students can learn to mindlessly regurgitating material.
In tandem with the Enlightenment depersonalization of knowledge, is a depersonalization of the concept of teaching and a teacher. About two thousand years ago, one teacher tried to demote teachers from being human gods (who were superior to everyone else) to being human like the rest of us. Then, in connection with the Enlightenment there came a second demotion. A teacher was no longer someone responsible for initiating those in their care into humanity, but only a part of a person imparting a skill to another partial person.
That is an illusion; no matter how much keep our mouths shut on certain matters, we are humans teaching. The question is not whether or not teachers will be an ethical force; the question is whether, given that teachers will be an ethical force, whether they will be a positive force or a negative force. Because students are affected by what kind of people their teachers are—as well as what they say—a teacher should try to be a positive force. This means things like a humility that listens and appreciates other people, and caring, and is willing to listen both to "I don't understand partial differentiation," and "I've had a lousy week."
This means that a teacher who sees past the present, and sees students as the concert pianists, research scientists, and ballerinas they can become, will by that very respect help make that potential a reality.
The Visionary [looks at watch]: Thank you. I need to be somewhere in a few minutes; do you have any closing comments?
The Alumnus: I think that one aspect of how we speak of teaching is unfortunate. We speak of the active teacher who teaches, and the presumably passive student who is taught. Nothing of this manner of speaking suggests a dialog, a two-way street—but if teaching succeeds, it must be because of a cooperation between student and teacher. Even with constructivist understanding of learning, we're just looking at what the teacher can do.
I spend most of my time thinking about how I can see to my end of the partnership, not how students can handle their job. But there is something I would love to say to students, reinforced by a handout, on the first day of class, some toned-down version of:
Steal knowledge.
Prometheus stole fire. Your job is to steal knowledge.
The wrong way to think is that my job is to teach you, and you just sit there and be taught, and after enough teachers have taught you, you'll be educated.
You will get a much better education if you think that whatever I do, however well or poorly I teach, is simply the baseline, and you can start from there and see what you can do to take as much knowledge as you can.
Listening in class and asking questions is one way to steal knowledge. Is there something I said that doesn't quite make sense? If you just let my teaching wash over you, you've missed an opportunity to steal knowledge.
If you listen to my words, that's good. It's even better if you think about why I would say what I am saying. There may be a clue, maybe a little whisper in your intuition that something more is going on than you realize. That is a key that you can use to steal knowledge.
When you read the textbook, it will tell you more if you push it harder. Look at the problems. What are they asking you to know? What are they asking you to think about? There's a powerful clue about what's important and what's going on, if you're adept enough to steal it.
What do I assume about the material? I make assumptions, and some of those are assumptions I make because of what I know. If you're willing to ask why I assume something, you may steal knowledge of how people think when they understand the material.
My office hours are meant for you. Come in and discuss the material. If I see you make a mistake, that's good. It means you're learning and I have an opportunity to clarify. If you don't understand something, and all of us don't understand things from time to to time, it will cost you points to wait until the test to find out that you don't understand it. It won't cost you anything if you come in during my office hours, and I'll be glad you visited. And you might steal some knowledge.
Steal knowledge. There'll be some days when you're a little tired, and you can't look for all the extra knowledge you can steal. That's OK; just try to take the knowledge I clearly set out before you. But steal knowledge when you can.
You've gotten into IMSA, which is one of the best and one of the worst places in the world. Take advantage of opportunity. Learn to steal knowledge. And when you graduate from IMSA... Steal knowledge.
The Visionary: I definitely have some food for thought to take into the meeting. Do come and visit again! Goodbye!
Michael: Robert Heinlein, in Stranger in a Strange Land, wrote, "Happiness is a matter of functioning the way a human being is organized to function... but the words in English are a mere tautology, empty. In Martian they are a complete set of working instructions." Would that we had such a set of working instructions!
Photios: But such exists, or rather such is not needed.
Photios: This reminds me of a forum where a young Asian told of some white guys driving by in a car and making "Chinese-like sounds" at him, and asked, "What about these white suburbanite middle-class..." and one of the more liberal members of the forum said, "Question asked, question answered."
Michael: Ok, I'll bite. What's your point?
Photios: Well it's hard to talk about Stranger in a Strange Land without discussing sex, and I'd like to start there.
In the real world, outside of the novel, there have been many studies to determine which maverick experiments make for the greatest sexual happiness. And to the dismay of the people running the study, the answer, unless they are willing to lie outright, is that a married couple in the traditional sense, straight, faithful, lifelong, no porn, open to parenting children, experiences far and away the greatest pleasure and overall happiness. And this is a finding of dismay because the assumption is that if you're really going to have a good time, you've got to be breaking rules, and the question "Which rebels against traditional marriage have it best?" meets the one entirely unwelcome answer: "Traditional marriages have it best."
Heinlein posits one maverick arrangement. Ok, this doesn't constitute maverick now, but it did when Stranger in a Strange Land first came out, and it was a point Heinlein needed to make with a sledgehammer. He posited free love within a tightly guarded nest. And on that point I would recall a counselor who said that after decades of seeing people in every conceivable living arrangement and some he couldn't conceive, only underscored more strongly that the traditional rules about sexuality are intended for our benefit and not to keep us away from the good stuff.
You seem to assume that the "complete working manual" would be some super-secret or super-elite document only available to a few, or some super-secret way of reading the Bible or whatnot. But remember the maxim learned by many in the military: "When you assume, you make an ass out of U and me!" There is something as good as a complete working manual, and your assumption is one best dismantled.
Photios: I practice a modified form of it, but I don't preach it much more than I preached about the diet I practiced before then. And to be an un-modified form of the Paleo diet is at least a concession in Orthodoxy.
Michael: So Orthodoxy and its cooking traditions have a scientifically better basis than the Paleo diet?
Traditional Orthodox diets are based on the kinds of food people ate after the agricultural revolution; unless you believe the earth is younger than the agricultural revolution's dates, no matter where you draw the line for the first humans, the departure from hunter-gatherer living is only an eyeblink compared to the total time people have been around.
Photios: And most Orthodox saints believed in a young earth; I don't share that belief, let alone the crypto-Protestant "Creation Science" that was popular with Fr. Seraphim (Rose) and unknown to most saints. But that is beside the point.
Michael: Then what is your point? Why is the Paleo diet not scientifically superior?
Michael: Can't we allow for greater ignorance in the past?
Photios: We can allow for different ignorance, but not greater ignorance—and what an odd thing for a Paleo devotee to say! And thinking about some things on materialistic terms is a material error.
Michael:Such as?
Photios: Once upon a time surgeons would do surgery with dirty hands, horse spit and all, and Pasteur's revolution came by and said to be sanitary, which is why to this day the preferred medical practice is for surgery to be done in as sanitary and sanitized conditions as possible.
And over-zealots of Pasteur's style of sanitization thought that the best way to give an infant a best shot at life is to keep things as sanitary as possible, and for all this "Emperor's New Clothes" improved sanitary conditions, the infant mortality in hospitals was atrociously high. And then someone had the very unscientific idea of bringing in old women to touch, cuddle, and hold infants for half an hour, or an hour, or two hours or whatever each day. And infant mortality plummeted overnight. With that one change, many more infants survived early hospitalization.
And something of the same error relates to kissing icons. Materialistic-minded people wince at kissing something that other people have kissed—but it is an overall strengthening, not weakening, that comes from paying reverence to icons and relics. And you can push it more forcefully and say that it's as unsanitary as kissing all those people on the mouth, and for that matter the two or three kisses on the cheek given occasionally in some jurisdictions and frequently in other jurisdictions are a tamer version of kissing on the mouth—in fact, by liturgical implication, the kiss on the cheek by implication is a kiss on the mouth. And in areas of helping infants survive the beginning of life, or kissing icons, or kissing Orthodox Christians, the Pasteurized version is the wrong route.
It's not just that we are justified in taking a health detriment if we do not practice Pasteur's idea of sanitation. We actually are better off even in matters of health. With what is known about touch and the beginning of life, it would now be a foolhardy proposition to eliminate touch as far as possible from a baby's life in order to obtain good sanitation. And with what is known about touch at the beginning of life, it is not considered ethical to explore the effects of reducing touch in infants' lives. It is, however, ethical to explore the effects of increasing touch in infants' lives, for instance by placing a newborn infant against its mother's body for thirty to forty-five minutes before going to business as usual, and the effect of increased touch is not only decreased mortality but greatly improved well-being.
The Paleo Solution says that exercise is important and diet is indispensible. I would rather say that exercise and diet may be important, but godliness is indispensible. Perhaps the past few thousand years have been aberration from the naturally good diet our race has enjoyed, but however adamant we may be that Paleo living is better, keep in mind that the Bible and many of the Fathers lived in cultures where everyone up to the king ate bread as the main food, and it is bread and no other food that is honored in the Eucharist and in prosphora. You may hold if you want that it is seriously damaging to eat even the purest organic whole grain bread, but the Bible got its work done during millenia and cultures where the main staple food was bread, and the Gospel was much deeper than getting back paleo hunterer-gather eating and living. And hospitality trumps fasting in Orthodoxy, hospitality should trump diet as well. And that is the biggest area where I make the most concession against the paleo diet; I gratefully accept hospitality as it is given. If you're far enough in the paleo diet that breaking its rules actually makes you sick—I'm not—then maybe it is appropriate to explain your dietary needs, but insofar as much as it is possible, let hospitality alike trump fasting and diet.
Michael: None the less, there is something haunting, something I wish to be true, in "Jubal learned that... (f) it was not possible to separate in the Martian tongue the human concepts: 'religion,' 'philosophy,' and 'science'..."
Photios: Well said indeed, and you can have something better than a hope such things can be. Instead of hoping for things from another world, you can enjoy, in the legal sense, the things in this real world from whose pierced side they were taken. Religion, philosophy, and science are inseparable in "Physics", and I encourage reading it.
But let me take a step back, far back. Let's look at the world of television commercials, or a glitzy animated commercial on the Internet. Whether selling cars or clothing, internet access or movies, they are selling escape from the here and now. It may be a car, almost invariably portrayed as sensual, mysterious, and intimate—which are really not what we would best do to seek in a car—but a car that delivers from the burden of the here and now. Clothing adorns the wearer and relieves the wearer of the necessity of appearing as she appears here and now. Internet access is more than just bandwidth; it is portrayed by people who have escaped the here and now. Or a movie or a video game; you have seen the commercials blanketing people recently and saying everyone has a bit of a soldier in them. What they are selling is escape into another world.
On this point I would like to talk about the predecessor to the present Archdruid of Canterbury, who would have flatly have denied that any escape from reality satisfies, or perhaps that there is anywhere to escape to but reality. And even that way of talking violates his writing; in the ancient world, one said, "_______ said _______," while in the modern world one says both "_______ said _______," and "_______ would have said _______." And this transformation is deep enough that students, trying to understand what a past author wrote, find it natural and not in the least provocative to ask, "What would _______ have said about ________?" when everybody in the room knows that the author never touched on the matter in question.
On this point, Anselm, admittedly after the schism, and for that matter Muslims are right. It is not the case that there are a large number of "possible worlds" and we happen to inhabit one of these fantasy-like worlds; there is a reality that Allah or God has created, and it is fundamental confusion to escape it, even in thought. So Stranger in a Strange Land makes a world where free love within a circle of people is allowed—and after ripping marriage apart re-constructs quite a large chunk of marriage in his free love. A man is not forbidden to seek love outside of his nest, but once inside the nest he is entirely free from desire for anyone outside of the nest. That is a reconstruction of what Heinlein has dismantled in marriage: one might speak of marriage as a nest of two, only a nest where fidelity represents not an inescapable preference but a legitimate and freely given choice. Heinlein divorced repeatedly, but a nest of water brothers is permanent. Stranger in a Strange Land's nest of water brothers is drawn from the wounded side of reality, only this time it is not the Lord's doing. Eve may have been drawn from the wounded side of Adam, and the Church may have been drawn from the wounded side of Christ, pouring out blood and water, but this is a matter of "Satan cannot create, he can only mock", and having rejected the real cistern: [M]y people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns, that can hold no water. And this is the choice of escape: to forsake the fountain of living water, and draw frorm the wounded side of reality broken cisterns that can hold no water. If you read Within the Steel Orb, it peddles escape and seemingly alien wisdom, but it is a mutilation of reality that is offered: the session about controlling the telescope is in fact based in riflery, but if it were not taken from riflery it would have to be taken from somewhere else. And the session about dropping Einstein's name and claiming to ponder the deeper implications of relativity could just as well have been written in a story set in this world, or for that matter in actual live discussion.
And the emphatic choice of cannibalism among the book's features is if anything further proof that there is no other reality out there to draw on. In terms of épater la bourgeoisie, cannibalism delivers shock and presumably offense. But, while Heinlein compares the alien Martian world's cannibalism to the Eucharist at some point, and indeed it is an obvious comparison, one has to ask, "Where is the profound draw to cannibalism except for allowing something that is forbidden?" It is not clear to me, or to many others, what the advantage is of having one more form of meat available and even in the book the prevalence of cannibalism does not offer clear and sincere benefits like the water brotherhood, or great psychic abilities (or both water brotherhood and great psychic powers) that Heinlein builds up in the book. If you want to eat forbidden food, forbidden at least in American culture (which does not offer the only set of rules around), you can eat animals that are kept as pets and companions: eat dog, cat, or horse. All three of these are edible, and for that matter there are cultures on earth where any or all of these are permitted food. But if the question arises, "What is the benefit of eating these animals beyond the foods permitted in American culture?" I don't see what the substantive answer would be, except for something related to our emotional reaction at the thought of eating a pet. The Paleo Solution and the call to return to more recent historical diets in Nourishing Traditions might never forbid eating cats, dogs, or horses, but neither one paints a nutritional picture where we are advised to eat the kinds of animals we keep as pets because they provide something we can't get, or can't as easily get, from eating animals Americans think of as meat. Come to think of it, neither text suggests that Jews or Muslims are missing out on any needed nutrients if they don't eat pig or other unclean animals. The Paleo Solution argues that there are essential amino acids and essential fats but no essential carbohydrates: "essential" meaning something we need and our bodies cannot make from other foods. However, there is no suggestion at all that we need to eat more types of meats, let alone cherished dogs, cats, and horses, let alone human flesh, to be properly nourished. Now the Martian culture which was big on cherishing things admitted cannibalism of loved ones was a way of cherishing them, but even then the Wikipedia provides a motive for cannibalism that offers a more serious incentive than having yet another form of meat: "Both types of cannibalism can also be fueled by the belief that eating a person's flesh or internal organs will endow the cannibal with some of the characteristics of the deceased." This belief, which would offer some real motivation to desire "Martian" cannibalism, is entirely absent in Stranger in a Strange Land, and friends and killed enemies are both eaten without distinction for "food".
Michael: Who are you to make such a judgment?
Photios: Let me tell you about one person who decided he was going to be an icefisher, so he purchased a bunch of equipment, walked over on the ice, and started to drill down. He got down two inches before a deep, booming voice said, "There are no fish there!"
He looked around and quietly moved his equipment over 50 feet, and started to drill there. No sooner had he started than a deep booming voice said, "There are no fish there either!"
He picked up his equipment, moved over a hundred feet, looked around before drilling, when the same voice said, "Nor are there any fish there!"
He looked around and said, "Who are you, God?"
The voice said, "No! I'm the arena manager!"
I'm not the arena manager, but I am an arena employee.
Michael: [Pause] So we should all become monks, or something like that? I've heard some people say that every Orthodox Christian is called to be a monastic.
Photios: Every Orthodox Christian is called to be an ascetic, and asceticism, or spiritual struggle, is the beating heart of monasticism. And monasticism is higher than life in the world.
Michael: So married life in the world is sort of a "monasticism lite"?
Photios: Erm, kind of.
Michael: Meaning, "No."
Photios: Meaning, "No." The monastic who is saved is saved through the struggle of monastic ascesis, and the married man who is saved is saved through the struggle of caring for a family. Monasticism is higher than married life in the world.
Married life in the world is not the highest path, but it is not improved by trying to make it "virtual monasticism." Maybe a monk requires obedience to a spiritual father, and an intentionally disruptive sleep cycle, and food deliberately cooked to be as bland as it can be. Married couples have another yoke to bear, and it is a sad thing for people to get married and then "try to make up for it" by imitating monasticism. Marriage is not a sin, but holy matrimony. And it brings with it childbearing, if God so wills, so that the couple is no longer living for themselves alone but for their children. You might have heard the saying, "Men love women. Women love children. Children love pets. Life isn't fair." But if we return to the Heinlein quote you gave a while back, "Happiness is a matter of functioning the way a human being is organized to function... but the words in English are a mere tautology, empty. In Martian they are a complete set of working instructions." Happiness in monasticism is functioning the way the monastic ascesis is organized to function, and happiness in married life in the world is functioning the way the married ascesis is organized to function. It may happen that a couple marries, has children, much later live together as brother and sister, and then split off to separate monasteries. In that sense celibacy and marriage are not mutually exclusive, and the couple is still considered to be married even if they have passed the realm of carnal knowledge. But even this is not normative to marriage; it is one of many forms holiness takes.
And here a man is reminded of Confucius's Analects, and its "ritual", which the Western mind may have trouble understanding because in the West "ritual," if not used metaphorically to speak of someone always giving a speech at family reunions, has a religious center of gravity. But in Confucius's whole realm of thought, "ritual" was something like a graduation ceremony or a town parade, with a civic center of gravity. And on that point someone speaking to Confucius praised someone else for doing ritual very well. And Confucius, answering somewhat indirectly, essentially said, "Ritual dictates that only a monarch may place a gate in front of his door, but he has a gate in front of his door," and mentioned one or two other areas where the man in question usurped privilege that did not belong to him. The implication is a strong criticism: this man, who is praised for his performance in ritual and who probably worked much harder to do ritual correctly than most, undercuts it in a way that is reminiscent of tithing mint, dill, and cummin, and neglecting justice, mercy, and faith. Performing the details of ritual correctly really didn't help much for someone who lacked the humility that ritual was designed to foster. At heart, placing a monarch-like gate in front of his door made him less, not more, like a monarch, and in fact placed him further from the monarch than if he did ritual, in a way that was proper to his station, without copying the privileges of people in a higher place.
Michael: Well, at least it's an obscure phenomenon, limited to people who are trying to be devout in the wrong way.
Photios: Obscure? Obscure? Obscure? The entire question of feminism hinges on a confusion that is the fruit of the same tree.
Michael: How so?
Photios: Let me quote three passages that sometimes you'll see even conservatives trying to balance out, for instance by comparing what is asked of wives with what is asked of husbands:
Michael: And what do conservatives have to say for these, besides the fact that they are old and are culturally conditioned?
Photios: Well, they might start with the obvious and say that you are culturally conditioned.
Michael: And then what?
Photios: And then that someone who eats from the million year old paleo diet as the food that is optimal for Homo sapiens should not dismiss a two thousand year old text as just too old to be worth listening to.
Michael:Ouch. And then what?
Photios: Well, in the last and longest quote, compare what is asked of husbands and of wives and who bears the brunt of the pleas. The wife is told to submit to her husband as if to the Lord. And yes, I've checked the Greek. "Wives, submit to your husbands as is fitting in the Lord" is a minor mutilation. The text says, "Wives, submit to your husbands as if to the Lord."
But the burden of the text—incidentally, in the densest passage in the New Testament for references to the Church—falls on husbands. If wives are called to show the Church's submission to Christ, husbands are to lay down their lives and die for their wives if needed. If wives bear the duty of submitting to their husbands as the Church submits to Christ, husbands are called to lay their lives down for their wives as Christ laid down his life for the Church. Wives are called to give to their husbands what the Church gives to Christ; husbands are called to give wives what Christ gives to the Church. One might say that the sigil of male headship and authority is not a crown of gold, but a crown of thorns. People coming to this text afresh might be staggered at how much more is expected of husbands than of wives. And the same people might be even more staggered that the text is politically incorrect because of the claim it makes on wives.
Michael: So the text evens out to be egalitarian after all.
Photios: What was the venom the Serpent poured into Eve's ear? Egalitarianism! "You shall be as gods," meaning "You shall be equal to some greater than you." And let's pause for a moment.
There was a time—it happened to be brief, but that is beside the point—when the Serpent had stung Eve but Adam still reigned as mortal. Eve already felt the seed of death growing in her heart, even though it would be long years before the venom grew to the point of killing her completely. And let's think about what was in her heart. She was mortal; Adam was still immortal. At some point she would die, and then what? God said, "It is not good for man to be alone;" would Adam simply be celibate? Or would rather God not give her another immortal wife, to be his forever? Was there anything Eve could do to prevent Adam reigning immortal as another woman's husband?
Michael: Ouch.
Photios: It is said in some witchcraft that you knowingly allow a demon to possess you. And when that moment comes, you realize that you have allowed evil into you the same way you know that you are violently ill. You may not repent in the least, but demons are never merciful to those they inhabit. Perhaps they enable magic; but they never give the glow of spiritual health, nor can they.
Eve knew and felt the seed of death growing in her heart, that in her attempt to be like gods, she had lost her godlike ladyship over the whole Creation. And she made her second egalitarian move. The first move was to try to be equal to "gods", perhaps exalted ranks of seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominions, powers, authorities, principalities, archangels, and angels. And her second egalitarian move was to make Adam her equal in mortality. And she succeeded; as the Serpent stung Eve, so Eve stung her then-immortal husband who would otherwise outlive her and belong to another woman.
This is the politics of envy. This is the root of the war on educational excellence. This is the radix of Janteloven. This is the vice that moved Saul to seek David's murder as soon as he heard, "Saul has slain his thousands, and David his tens of thousands." Envy says, in essence, "I don't care if we're three feet tall or ten feet tall. All I want is that you not be taller than me." In conversations that cross denominations and confessions, one can say with Calvinists, "We are totally depraved and stunted in our spiritual growth; we have a spiritual height of about three feet." Or one can say with Orthodox, "The image of God is present even in the most hardened sinner; the most spiritually astute Orthodox, especially monastics, find much good in the people they see; so we are at a spiritual height of about six feet." But woe to the unwary soul who says, "Monastics are six feet tall and laity are five feet tall," or "Clergy are six feet tall and laity are five feet tall," or, to give a hypersensitive trigger, "Men are six feet tall and women are five feet tall." That will unleash an explosion that dwarfs any response to Calvinists saying, "We are totally depraved and steeped in sin; we are spiritually three feet tall, if even that." Better to say that everyone is exactly one foot tall than to say that heights vary somewhere around six feet and on average most men are taller than most women, let alone that men have one role and women another.
And this general point, perhaps more focally dealt with in matters of men and women, has to do with a broader sense of pseudomorphosis affecting all modern life. Are you familiar with the term 'pseudomorphosis' in its usual Church usage?
Michael: I've heard... things like icons being painted in a more Western fashion, or that figure... what was it... Cyril Lucaris, the bishop whose "profession of faith" really had much more to do with Calvinism than Orthodoxy; there was that book, called Protestant Patriarch, which I suppose I should read. I think there's more, but I'm forgetting the examples. Wait, there was also something about people thinking theology was philosophy whose subject-matter was God...
Photios: Yes; the term 'pseudomorphosis' in Orthodox culture is something like the term 'Oreo' in African-American culture, for someone who is black on the outside but too white on the inside, and acts white. The examples you gave of pseudomorphosis are all valid.
Michael: Ok, so we've established the meaning of 'pseudomorphosis.' What next? Do we need to say anything more to establish that the politics of envy, as you call it, is no ingredient to human happiness?
Photios: We haven't quite established it, not yet, because I want to use it as a metaphorical springboard to discuss something else.
Michael: What is that something else?
Photios: 'Pseudomorphosis' in standard Orthodox usage is a bit of a hydra; it's not easy to pin down, but in traditional Orthodox unsystematic fashion, it is possible to get a sense of it. As I am using here, it has to do with all sorts of things in modern living. The paleo dietis one attempt to remedy a pseudomorphosis. I will not say if it succeeds or fails, but what it attempts to do is replace "foods" that are an anomaly in the human diet and which our body is not really well served by eating, with foods that are the standard tradition diet of the human race. The book also covers some other things, like what kind of artificially added exercise will best simulate the active lives of our forbears, and here at least I am not so interested in whether it succeeds or fails as the implicit powerful recognition that we are in an iron mask under unnatural conditions. If one were to ask Robb Wolf who he would intend The Paleo Solution to, if economics etc. were no obstacle, I believe he would answer, "Everyone who is not a hunter-gatherer today."
That is one aspect of pseudomorphosis. Another aspect is how men and women are understood, or misunderstood, and how sex is seen. Another aspect is the politics of envy. Another aspect is how so many of us spend large chunks of time looking at a flickering screen.These are five of maybe a hundred holes that are being drilled down into the ice, and the arena employees' lungs are sore from shouting, "There are no fish there!"
Michael: Then where are the fish?
Photios: Some centuries back, though this may seem hard to imagine now, philosophy was understood differently; in our day philosophy is understood as an academic discipline, as something with arguments you study and respond to, and philosophy has always been that to an extent. But in ancient times philosophy was first a way one walked and secondarily about ideas. And a number of people, all men I think, arrived at the conclusion that the truest way of philosophy was that of monasticism, which kept things alive from Plato, for instance, that do not necessarily live in a philosophy department today.
The observation that monasticism is the height of a certain understanding of philosophy, where like Mike's Martians' philosophy, religion, and science are inseparable, is a profitable observation whether or not one is a monk. The Ladder of Divine Ascent, to pick one classic, addresses perhaps two sentences of exhortation to those outside the monastic world, but it has been read, it is said, with utmost spiritual profit to Orthodox in all walks of life. Perhaps the letter in its strict sense should not always be applied to laity. There is still much of benefit, as with the Philokalia the book Orthodox Psychotherapy is essentially a realization that before Freud began positing theories about what can go wrong with us, and how what is tangled in us can be untangled and freed, the Orthodox Philokalia which could be called 'the science of spiritual struggle,' takes on that territory and does a better job. And perhaps it would be better to talk with one's priest about reading selections; reading the Philokalia when one has not been prepared for it can be an exercise in frustration. But this is best done with the consultation of one's priest.
Michael: So, with all of this said, what can I get that will make me happiest?
Photios: Well, if you're thinking in terms of dollars, let's say you get however many million dollars you think would make you happy. Then you will discover that you still have all of your problems and the money doesn't keep you happy—at least not for long. So you will have the rare opportunity to be wealthy beyond your wildest nightmares, and perhaps after you have one luxury after another lose its glamour, failing to give either lasting satisfaction or happiness, that you will come to a realization worth every penny of your millions of dollars: in seeking happiness from wealth, you might as well have been trying to coax a stone to lay an egg.
Michael: Then is there no hope?
Photios:So faith, hope, love abide, these three. Hope remains; you just have to look for it in the right places. You are assuming that your happiness will come from what you get, but you make a living by what you get and a life by what you give. [T]he Son of man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many, and this is the key to the happiness of functioning as a person is organized to function. Forbes's survey of the happiest jobs in America found that there was little correlation between job happiness and the amount of money made: and in fact one of the twenty happiest jobs is one of the few Americans feel the need to cover up with euphemisms: no one is a plain old secretary any more; they are all executive assistants, administrators, and the like. But notwithstanding the fact that America thinks being a secretary needs a euphemism, being a secretary ranked as one of the twenty happiest jobs in America, alongside bank tellers who serve clients by helping them with financial nuts and bolts, and some customer service representatives. And there is a very simple reason for that. Among many others, secretaries serve.
And that is, if we may return to Heinlein one of the three keys that unlocks "Happiness is a matter of functioning the way a human being is organized to function... but the words in English are a mere tautology, empty. In Martian they are a complete set of working instructions." Now Michael Valentine Smith mentions 'faith' as belonging among the list of obscene words Jubal told him not to use, and he is emphatic: not faith but climbing the peaks of spiritual discipline. However, the Philokalia in its embrace of faith does climb the peaks of spiritual discipline. And all of these are a preliminary that many people don't need; human fulfillment is found, not in being served, but in serving. Such was Christ's act; such was his example.
Not that reading the Philokalia is necessary to salvation. Monks have reached the peaks of mystic contemplation without having any books; among the many notable monastics who never read anything, and in fact did not know how to read, is St. Mary of Egypt. And one minor clergy said, "There are two books you do not read: the Philokalia and the Rudder," not because they are bad—they are arguably the second and third most important collections to Orthodoxy outside the Bible—but because they have raw industrial strength power that has not been selected, boiled to essentials, and then packaged in a way that will just fit anyone who reads it. The Philokalia is a collection of texts at all various levels of spiritual maturity, and the Rudder is basically a book of rules for bishops to apply with strictness or leniency as is pastorally appropriate to the situation. And the Rudder has some of the most valuable rules the Orthodox Church owns; but it still should not be confused with ordinary devotional materials designed to build up and edify the lay faithful. And one may adapt St. Paul and say, "If I have all manner of knowledge of antiquarian texts and I read the Philokalia and the Rudder, but I do not serve in love, I am nothing."
Michael: So then it's all we learned in kindergarden?