Typhus

Indeed the Hyundai ad was blasphemous; but the real blasphemy is what we have allowed soccer to become.

Over here in Italy we call support for a soccer team tifo, i.e. "typhus", a contagious sickness that gives very high fever.

I don't know whether the same fanaticism, often violent, that is unleashed in connection with soccer matches in Italy or in England and elsewhere, is aroused by any of the preferred American national sports (football, baseball, basket ball …) .

I would have liked to expand on this, and perhaps I'll do it in another post. For now just one comment:

When we abandon the true God, inevitably we fall prey of idols.

HP

Not other

Perhaps my previous post was a bit sibylline. Let me add some gloss, hopefully less sibylline.

I'll start from this:

An eminent philosopher theologian of the XV century, by the name of Nicholas of Kues or Cusanus, wrote a book entitled Non Aliud, "The not other": meaning God.

Interesting, considering that we tend rather to speak of Him as "The wholly other" – actually so other, that we are tempted to consider Him inaccessible to us, to the point of falling into agnosticism.

A Jesuit friend of mine once gave me a clue to understanding Cusanus with this maxim:

I am other than God; God, is not other than me.

Whao. Then all my being is in God, is God's being!

The same exclamation came from a student of mine, lost after Nieztsche, but with enough esteem of me to ask me what I thought about it.

I tried to explain to him, against the grain of our current culture, that we are "social animals", and what this implies. I used to do it, the set theory today widely used to teach mathematics. Society, I said, isn't anything empirical. Empirical are the subsets of society, all the different definable groups to which we happen to belong; while society, well, is the most encompassing set, that we can name but not define (there is nothing in fact to which we could oppose it, so to define it): like being.

My student got the point, and exclaimed: you mean then that we are in God?!

Well, yes.

Not just us, but everything. Of which we have knowledge because in society we transcend anything definable, hence corporeal.

A corollary concerning science:

There are sciences of bodily things, but what makes them sciences is our capability to look at things defined in the light of the indefinable – shed on us, I repeat, because we enter the world in society.

Here you have the science I asked for (without which there is no science): the science capable of accounting for the knowledge professed by, and in favor of, the practitioners of all other subordinate sciences, so called; as well as, moreover, for the knowledge professed by all peoples who equally bear witness of what knowing means.

Because of the kind of evidence you could call it cultural anthropology.

Because it concerns noantri (literally "us other"), they would say here in Rome, meaning who we are in comparison we all the rest of us, so as to be able to give each his due, you could call it political science, or, more classically, episteme politike.

Because it involves the Non Aliud, call it simply theology.

HP

Absence of science

I have a fixed idea: that our western world is plagued by a very serious sickness. It is like the virus HIV, that makes the organism incapable to defend itself.

Let's call it lack of rationality, absence of science.

How can you say that? Don't you know that ours is eminently the world of science?

May be, but I have a question: apart from having given to a certain kind of research practices the name of science, do we have cogent rational arguments for so calling it, with a name that just means knowledge? as if outside of it there were nothing of the kind: no knowledge but simply opinions?

I can hear the appalled answer: of course there are! And it stops at that. May be adding a few platitudes, explaining how rational science is in opposition, say, to magic or religion.

Fine, I retort. But you didn't really answer my question. You keep on assuming which research practices are science, while my question was why we should grant only to them the name of knowledge.

There are, as a matter of fact, people claiming that the only harbinger of knowledge is religious experience. Appeal to science, so called, is of no avail with them.

If you can't justify your giving the name of science, then there is no science (QED).

Science is lost for our social discourse, if we aren't able of giving reasons for it. And we end ailing for lack of any reason, if we leave out what matters most to us: let's call it religion.

HP

A clarification

To be clear, I actually didn't deny that there is something like common sense, but only observed that it is not legitimate to use it as an argument.

I looked back at what one of my preferred authors - little known in America but one of the greatest Christian thinkers of the last two centuries, the blessed Antonio Rosmini, who lived in the first half of the 1800 - says on this regard. He defined common sense as the faculty of first principles, something like what previously used to be named synderesis. But a simple appeal to it risks of losing the strength of the "common", to make it sound as an absolutization of our own ways of thinking and living.

That was the zest of my post. As human beings we are educated, and education makes the first principles reflexive, but, alas, con also deviate from them. That's why I oppose two styles of education, a kind of ivy league one, where the sense of tradition is lost into an empty universalism, and another, may be apparently less sophisticated, but better rooted in a tradition of wisdom.

I claim that only by starting from the second it is possible, in deep humility, to reach the higher learning that allows to really comprehend common sense, the knowledge and wisdom by which all men can come to know themselves as naturally participating of society, and, by way of society, of God.

Those who think to do without God, have actually taken themselves out of society, save wanting to reconstitute it by way of what is for them common sense. Too bad, for them and for us, that it is far from being common. Actually, in wanting to do away with God, they just fall prey to idols.

HP

Uncommon sense

I've been absent from this page for a while, and I feel in debt at least of a few lines. Just a short thought.

Some conservatives like to describe their preferred characters as endowed of common sense, over against liberals' claim of knowing better because better educated.

Well, if it is put it in such simple terms, I must disagree. It might be true, but to explain why would require a ling discourse, and I wanted to be short.

To this end, the only thing I can do is to overturn that description: things stand the other way around, and it is the reverse to be actually true.

It is liberal education that, dropped all reference to tradition, doesn't have anything to ground itself upon other than the alleged evidences of the common sense of the last three centuries. On the other side, then, there isn't common sense, but genuine education, grounded in the tradition and rationality of millenia.

For now, this paradox is enough.

HP

Individualists

In a web article denouncing the administration's failure to recognize the meaning of what happened in Fort Hood, I read this sentence: "Conservatives are individualists", prefacing an invitation "to do something unusual: organize, organize, organize. Local and national. And even international".

A good project, but I don't agree with the premise from which it was drawn.

In the States "conservatives" like to style themselves as "individualists", to mean that they are against an invasive government styled as "socialist".

To do so, however, weakens their case. It allows their adversaries to make it sound like "we don't give a shit about our neighbors", or any such maligning.

Actually the real "individualists", who care just for themselves, are the smart people for whom everyone should be able to do anything he pleases, with the State to take care of everybody, assuring to each the freedom of doing so.

In other words: big government is only the other face of individualism.

It would seem, then, that we have "individualists" from the left and "individualists" from the right.

How confusing: the same word would apply to both the opposite sides. We need some way to distinguish between them.

Individualist is not the right word for people capable of caring: for their neighbors, for their community.

I don't know a word that could be idiomatic enough in English to take its place, so to make the distinction immediately understandable. It should be a word apt to convey the sense of a man of virtue, capable, on his own, of taking responsibility for the surrounding world of neighbors and community.

Any suggestion is welcomed.

HP

Embarassment

I feel a strong embarassment in reading Gaudium et spes. It is true that it is classified as a "pastoral constitution", not "dogmatic", and this frees me of any concern about being in line with Church teaching.

And though, simply for its being a Council's document it should carry a certain authority for me. But what it says actually doesn't.

Nothing to object to the specifically theological side of it. Too bad that it is purporting to provide a description of the state of the world it is addressing with an appeal to dialogue. And here I find it weak.

To the point of perceiving in it a certain demise of intellectual authority.

Just one short example. It speaks, almost at the outset, of the weight granted in our world to the mathematical, physical and human sciences. Over again it returns to the latter, up to the point of speaking of the great progresses made in psychology, sociology and philosophy. And here I am astounded.

OK, physical sciences are well enough established to allow to speak for them as "science" without much ado, in spite of the fact that what is scientific in them was then, and still is today, open to question. I cannot pretend that it enters into such epistemological disputes.

However, what about human sciences? Did psychology and sociology, let alone philosophy, exist then, or do they exist today, as unitary disciplines, save for University departments that go under their name?

The answer is no! There are as many psychologies and sociologies, let alone philosophies, as there are schools. And they say everything and its opposite. So, what is Gaudium and spes talking about? Some schools are rationally true, and in accord with Christian teaching, some are rationally false, and enemy to it.

Nothing of all this in our Council's document.

HP

Regalo

There is an Italian word that should alert on who is a king.

But, before telling it, I must remind the reader of one of the main contributions of cultural anthropology to social thinking: the rediscovery of the importance of gift giving as a socio-cultural constant, to be found among all people.

We give and receive gifts, and any accepted gift obliges to reciprocate, so to give thanks for the good things we were given. We don't need to give back to the same people from whom we received, but we can pass on the good received to others, who in turn will pass it on, with the hope that eventually what we have given will return to us.

So, the good we receive can be seen as a return for the good we gave, and vice versa, the good we give as a return for that we received.

Now, in Italian the most used word for gift is regalo: from the same root of rex, it makes of any gift something royal.

That's because the king is at the center of a generalized circulation of goods. Ideally, he doesn't retain anything for himself, but lets all goods flow from him; on the other side, all people honor him as king by bringing back to him their gifts in thanks for what they received. So the goods scattered from him are again recollected in him, and so on, again scattered and recollected in an unceasing cycle.

In gift exchange any man is like a king, at the center of the give and take that makes him a pole of attraction and distribution of good – and of life.

Which do you pick?

Pertinent for religion in the public place.

There are two ways of understanding America, as two different modes of the presence of Europe in America.

It's the same as saying that there are two wys of understanding democracy.

By democracy we can mean that there are no kings, or, instead, that everybody is called to be king.

Which do you pick?

Let's call it "a letter on tolerance"

Excusatio non petita, accusatio manifesta. The wisdom of this Latin saying, for which apologies that are not asked for are equivalent to self accusation, holds me from giving in to the temptation of forwarding with an apology the theme I am going to tackle.

I restrain myself and take a start.

Newsweek of July 27, had the cover article denouncing "The myth of Eurabia", i.e. "the false fears of a Muslim take over".

It seems according to it that the far right in Europe suffers of a paranoid fear of a Muslim take over.

I am not sure whether I qualify as far right, but I am convinced that some reasons of preoccupation do exist. And if it is so, how does the article's author qualify: far left?

Nonsense.

An apology therefore is in order. Such an article touches me in my honor of philosopher-theologian and cultural anthropologist.

I'll quote to this end the famous French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss – I hope the Newsweek journalist knows whom I am talking about, otherwise all my apology is in vain.

Or perhaps not.

Back in the fifties of last century, in a beautiful book of his entitled Tristes Tropiques Lévi-Strauss made himself known as defender of little tribal societies of South America. Now he is too old to be still speaking about anything, but in his latest public statements he rather came to the defense of European civilization, because, he said, he sees it at risk of extinction.

May be he has turned far right.

How about saying that he is just an intelligent and wise author, who knows where the problems lie?

A little more down to earth: several years ago, it must have been in the middle Nineties, a friend of mine, teacher of Latin and Greek in high school and a good catholic, reported an experience that alerted her on a threat.

She had been, together with other fellow teachers, at a seminar organized by the Roman church school office on the theme of multiculturalism. As the well meaning teachers that they were, they all felt obliged to express a generic approval of the importance of keeping open to other cultures. But there was also a guest speaker, a Muslim engineer I don't remember from where, who had been living in Italy for some twenty years. When it came his turn, he left them all flabbergasted. "For you, tolerance is a value", he said, "for us it isn't. You don't make children, we do. Draw the consequences by yourself."

The Newsweek article deftly dismisses the second, demographic point made by that engineer in still non suspect years: long it takes before Muslim become a majority in Europe. Besides, they are not so unanimous in their views: many, perhaps the majority of them want to integrate.

Does this mean that even the first point is voided? And that there is no threat? I wouldn't say so. Many incidents, even horrid ones, seem rather to point to the contrary.

How grave is it? Well, that's something that requires discussion.

My answer is: the gravity of the threat depends on its being or not being perceived. In other words: I see the threat coming not so much from Muslims, as from insipient Europeans who don't understand the nature of the problem.

Or, for that matter, insipient Americans.

It is not a question of right or left, but of knowledge of human affairs. And here an anthropologist like Lévi-Strauss can come handy, teaching us that human nature does not change.

Nobody, anywhere, ever likes to be tolerated.

At least since John Locke's famous letter, in our society we keep on extolling tolerance. That's because we never stop and think of converting the noun into the verb.

Now, try to say to somebody: I tolerate you. And imagine his or her reaction.

In our society we wanted for some reason to be, on principle, tolerant; so we made space to people, many of whom found our tolerance unpleasing... and reacted with their intolerance.

The reason is that we don't even know what we are called to tolerate. Having we rejected or at least put aside our knowledge of the alternative in Christianity, which inspired the universal recognition of the equal dignity of any man (and of course woman) we rightly hold as natural, we don't have anything left to offer for it except lurid tolerance.

Am I preaching intolerance? Certainly not! I am just saying that tolerance, if it can work on the legal level, doesn't work as a civic virtue apt to promote good will in social relations.

I don't care how many of the Muslim immigrants are against us, what matters is that they are the most vociferous in a Europe that is highly deculturalized.

A Lesson in Rhetoric for the POTUS

Much hay is being made in conservative corners of the blogosphere this morning regarding the following statement from President Obama:

I'm always worried about using the word 'victory,' because, you know, it invokes this notion of Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender to MacArthur.

Taken out of context, the remark is outrageous.

In context, however, it is merely unhappy.

The President goes on to say:

We're not dealing with nation states at this point. We're concerned with Al Qaeda and the Taliban, Al Qaeda's allies," he said. "So when you have a non-state actor, a shadowy operation like Al Qaeda, our goal is to make sure they can't attack the United States.

In context, the POTUS is simply reminding us that we cannot expect there to be a single moment, a particular action on the part of the erstwhile belligerents, reestablishing peace, with all the attendant consequences.

Fine.

I will go so far as to say I agree with the President's limited view of our war objectives: while we are not at war with the people of Afghanistan, neither do we owe them in justice what we owe the people of Iraq, i.e. a real chance at securing for themselves ordered liberty in civil society under good government. That the best angels of our nature do inspire us to work for the betterment of the Afghani people's lot even as we continue to prosecute the war against our enemies operating on their soil, is a sign of the magnanimity of the American people, and laudable as such. We do not owe it to them.

I will even allow the President's lapse in historical memory to go uncriticized - after all, the Japanese Foreign Minister was acting as the Emperor's attorney on the deck of the USS Missouri.

I will, however, allow myself to offer an alternative to the President's infelicitous incipit.

If I were the POTUS, I would have said:

"Of course, our goal in Afghanistan is victory. We do not employ American military might with any other goal in sight; we do not spend our war treasure for any other end; to no other purpose, but that of absolute and total victory, do we put our sons and daughters in harm's way. We cannot, however, expect the moment of victory to come upon us as it has in the past - with a formal surrender and a conclusion of peace. Our enemy is not the Reich, or the Empire of Japan. Our enemy is creeping and lawless; he hides in the shadows, he slithers in and out of caves in the darkest and most desolate regions of the world, preying on those unfortunates, who with great invention make those places their home; he lurks, and he cowers, ever vigilant, for he would not lose a single opportunity to destroy innocent life, to steal another's legitimate property and bend it to sinister purpose, to reduce to servitude the one who would only be his neighbor. As long as such as these are able in Afghanistan to harm our people and our interests, and to impede those people on whom they prey for daily subsistence, as those people seek to better themselves and secure a brighter future for their children, so long shall American arms be employed in Afghanistan."

There are those who say I was born in the wrong century.

Perhaps they are right.

I hope they are wrong.

Let's read what Benedict says

I have always felt somewhat ill at ease with economic theory. Probably because my training in social things comes, together with classical political philosophy, from sociology and social-cultural anthropology.

I mean a teaching that views people as essentially "social animals", zooi politikoi in Greek. Now the encyclical Caritas in veritate sounds to me in line with the way I have learned to think about and understand human being and human things, generally.

Following his main stress of continuity in the Catholic tradition, the encyclical takes its start from underlining what is enduring in the message of Paul VI' Populorum Progressio. It is like Pope Benedict wanted to say: now I tell you the truth about it.

Populorum Progressio seemed to suffer of an inconsistency common in anthropological thinking about "underdeveloped" peoples: on one hand calling for their vocation to become participant in world commerce, on the other laying all the responsibility for their state on rich countries, so viewing them as mainly passive subjects of events on which they have no control whatsoever. That's why the new encyclical brings development back to vocation and responsibility.

Actually, with that acceleration of communication that we call globalization, each people is called to find in itself the cultural and spiritual resources to face commerce with other peoples. And many are at pains in doing so: not only among poorer countries, often falling in the area of Islam, but also among the richer ones, e.g. in Europe, which seems no longer to know why it exists.

But this is another story, which the Pope addressed in his previous encyclical. Today Europe seems to have nothing to say to anybody - unless it be to squeak and squeal an apology every so often, as it wallows in sentiments of guilt over its past wrongs.

I don't want to say that there were no such wrongs, mind you - and Africa has been the main victim of them. African nations' large and apparent inability to exploit their vast natural and human resources for their own advancement and the advancement of their peoples, is largely traceable to the circumstances and mode of European powers' abandonment of their colonial enterprises on the continent.

In their arrival, and again in their departure, Europeans destroyed African social structures, especially political ones (even as African Americans under the yoke of their three hundred years' servitude suffered not only the breakup of their families, but the near total disintegration of their family structures).

The nineteenth century division of Africa among European powers was the utmost of shame. It stopped the development of the African kingdoms toward political units capable of taking part in world commerce, scattering them into myriad little societies under a glass dome. And when the colonial dominion was no longer convenient, the same colonial powers washed their hands of it with decolonization, which left Africa cut into a series of States artificially defined by the old borders of colonial administration.

Caritas in veritate's view of this situation is anthropologically more accurate than that of Pope Paul's encyclical. The French sociologist Serge Latouche pointed out years ago that there is a solidarity still at work in Africa based on an economy of gift exchanges that allows people to survive, of which the official market economy doesn't take cognizance. This ethnographic reality is at the basis of the wish expressed in chapter III for an integration of the gift economy with the market economy. Framed, however, in the context of an embracing theory of gift that accounts also for market.

It is like saying: from society we can understand economics, from economics we cannot understand society. And because society makes sense only in the light of gift theory, that sense is eminently theological.

This should be kept in mind by Catholics prone to fall for the presidential rhetoric. With Obama they stay within the limits of homo oeconomicus, and of its inevitable counterpart, call it homo gubernativus, just slightly tempered by the slick theological charm of the President.

After all, to make abortion a matter of choice, is to make life a matter of economy under the aegis of government.

Listening to a sunday homily.

Listening to sunday homily at mass, at a certain point I thoght: that's it.

There it is what I hinted to in some previous posts: natural law isn't but charitas.

The priest was explaining the meaning of charitas with words that didn't have any specifically christian about them. Because there isn't anything specifically christian in love.

English is rather poor on this regard. It doesn't know other word than love, other declaration but I love you.

In Italian, besides ti amo, of use among lovers in the tecnhical sense of the word, we have also the more generic ti voglio bene: literally, "I want good to you".

It could work as a definition of love. But it also says everything there is to know about natural law.

To declare our love to someone is a rather paradoxical affair. When we do it, we make known how much we care for him or her, even how much we are in need of that person, that as a matter of fact we cannot do without her. But woe to us if we say it. We have to say the opposite: I don't think of my good, but of yours. Why so?

There is a simple fact about human nature to keep in mind: we cannot give ourselves our own good . I don't exemplify. Just think of it.

That's all there is to your great discovery? you might ask. It looks more like discovering hot water.

Mind me, I said "give", not "take".

What sets man apart from the remaing animal world, is that, being endowed with reason, he knows his needs are addressed to others like him, equally in need. Neither can take, but they con only wait to receive, provided that they are reciprocally well disposed. Nobody can force giving, without changing it into taking: meaning, by violence.

Of course we can always buy what we need. Provided it can be sold. And even then, we must be able to rely on the seller. There must be trust among us. Call it bonam fidem: necessary condition according to Roman jurists for the validity of contracts. Unless we think an adequate substitute fear of punishment, i.e. violence, coming from the one sovreign to whom we have granted the right to keep us in line: a police State.

This is then man's nature, and therefore the law governing relations among men and women: either they live together in liberty as friends, or are potential enemies kept together by fear.

Christian fides is there to remind us of what is just: the friendship natural to us.

Prudence

I am in debt of an explanation: why did I say that Justice Marshall's reading of the Massachusset's constitution doesn't fall under the label of juris prudentia?

The simplest explanation, true but too short, it is that she is ignorant: there can't be no prudence without learning.

On the other side, I could bore you with learned explanations of what was prudentia, in Latin, or phronesis, in Greek. But I'll spare you.

I'll ask: what's the use of learning, I mean, wide ranged erudition?

The answer is simple: to learn how to play.

Can you imagine a musician knowing just one score? And playing always that?

Hardly.

Simplifying, the beauty of music comes from the combination of seven notes, and all the variations and tranformations to which it lends itself. Just knowing the notes and the rules of their combination is not enough to become a musician. You must have learned many scores to know how to play.

Still, simple musical erudition is not enough. Exspecially if you need to be able to improvise, as in the jam sessions typical of American jazz. You need an extra factor, a sensibility for music, which can be cultivated but not taught by training in the rules underlying the scores.

You need musical intgelligence, to be music-wise, or, if I may say so, music-prudent.

I have no idea of Justice Marshall's legal erudition. But the sentence to which she gave her words sounded like coming from nowhere, just based on a definition of the elements of society and the law to rule their interaction. No precedents, no backgraound of variantions on the themes of social life. Of life, period.

After all, what else is required save to obey to the rules which the state makes, by way of legislators, or of judges taking their place if they think them too prone to grant people an intelligent understanding of what they want?

Who needs music, who needs all the stories of old which used to teach how to play life?

Who needs prudence?

Natural law and jurisprudence

Natual law: twice I named it in this blog. But: how does it stand in relation to positive law?

That's the nth million dollar question.

I don't have millions of dollars, so I will try to answer it for myself... and for those who happen to read me.

When in the 6th century AC the emperor Justinian brought to completion his Corpus Juris, he threw anathema against those who there to dare to subject it to interpretation.

Luckily, when in the 12th century the Corpus Juris was rediscovered by Bolognese jurists, they didn't obey the proscription of interpretation by the long dead emperor, and quietly went on to inteprete it to adapt to their times.

So it was born the tradition of common law which dominated throuout Europe up to a few century ago. It was all based on jurisprudence, the conjoined work of scholars and judges.
The Corpus Juris gave them some authoritative texts, let's say a positive law, to refer to. Their prudent understanding made it alive in their time.

This raises a question: what is prudent?

But before I try to answer let'me go on with the story.

In England common law based on jurisprudence survived the time of kingly absolutism. In the continent, the consolidation of absolute monarchies led slowly to the widespread codification of law. Law came to be understood from then on almost exclusively as written, statutory law: the product of law making by a state power. The famous separation of powers of the English constitution admired by Montsquieu and source of ispiration for the American founding fathers, doesn't change the fact of the law being thus made a product of the state: sovereign, absolute state.

Coming to America: the founding fathers thought to preserve society by the invasiveness of the state by writing a constitution. But this is a bit like the snake biting its tail. By the sheer fact of its being written, the state becomes the guarantor of society.

Not only, but being written the constituzion need to be intepreted. And this takes us right back to Justinian, and to what he wanted to avoid by proscribing interpretation.

With the famous Roe versus Wade the supreme courte could draw from the constitution the right of women to have, if they wanted, an abortion. Which to my modest view was a juridical monster. Again, the supreme court of Masschussets could declare, in the sentence written by the honorable Justice Catherin Marshall, that equality of human beings extends to the point of effacing any difference between man and woman, thus allowing marriage among all people, neutrally. Should I add what a juridical monster that was? With no regard anymore for the constitution to which it appealed (exspecially considering that it had been written by John Adams, exemplar with his wife Abigail of what marriage is).

There you have the question: written law should preserve from the arbitrariness of judgments. But in spite of all the Justinians of this world written law is unavoidably in need of interpretation. And it can be thus turned into a simple authorization to the (constitutional) judge to make it say what he wants: by asserting that, instead of sticking to the letter of what its original authors meant, he conforms to the "living constitution".

Of course, this happens if the judges lack prudence.

What makes jurisprudence prudent is the capability of interpreting positive law in the light of the understanding it represents of what is constant in human affairs: that which imakes possible to talk of natural law.

But someone objected to me: isn't that precisely what Justice Marshall did?

The answer is no.

And for now I leave it at that. If the reader of this post wants to know why, and asks more about prudence, he will have to wait until next. Hopefully.

The strategy of dissimulation

I said that Obama's speech in Cairo was excellent, because he said to Muslims what it was right to say to them, whatever their historical and doctrinal accuracy.

It's a question, I tried to explain, of rhetoric. But rhetoric becomes quizzical when we are all aware of it. And what I said requires further analysis of the complexities of the game.

An American friend of mine simply said that that speech was full of shit. More elegantly, in the face of the president's claim to be a student of history, Victor Davies Hanson pointed out all the historical mestakes his speach contained. Equally Ann Coulter had easy game to joke about the absurdity of some of the president's statements, like his trying to assuage his audience on the question of their treatment of women, by saying that even in American life the struggle to warrant them equality is in many ways still going on.

I could say, incidentally, that there are indeed enduring problems, in America as well in Europe, in men-women relations, but that they don't come from not enough equality, but rather from the opposite: that we don't recognize enough how different men and women are. Still when I was young we were taught to be courteus with women. Which was also a way to keep hold of out male animal spirits. Now we are told that women are equal, and as such we treat them, with all our testosteroneous aggressiveness.

But this is beside the point. The silliness of positions echoed by the president in his statements is not what concerns me here.

What concerns me here, is what happens to what he says when it is received by a Muslim audience.

If I were a Muslim with enough knowledge of western things, I would recognize that the blunders in the president's speech are so great that they could be easily regarded as an effort at dissimulation. Unless I took from ganted the lip service the president paid to Muslims, but in that case I wouln't be very astute.

Now, you have to know that in Islam dissimulation has been explicitly theorized as a way to deal with non Muslims, if not simply with people foreign to one's own tribe or clan or whatever.

What happens then when one recognizes the other's dissimulation? That's the question raised by the president's speech in the light of that theorizing.

I suppose that among Muslims dissimulation is taken as a rhetorical devise admitted by the rules of a game, which consists then in outwitting each other: like in a hide and seek game, one has to be able to make the other uncover himself, and so pin him to his word.

It is early to say who is wittier: whether the president, or the Muslims gathering for his speech.

He tried to pin them to the acceptance of certain "human rights". Try to negate that they are really such, and then you'll bely the noble tradition I grant to be yours - he seems to be challenging them.

Will this rhetorical strategy sort the intended effects? There are reasons to doubt it.

Keep in mind that the game takes place in the presence of a larger audience: a mixed audience. How the challenge is taken depends then on the regard in which are kept the different components of that larger audience.

Before silly Europeans and Obama's American supporters, the Muslims he addressed might again resort to dissimulation, feigning to accept his description of themselves, with all the challenge implied.

But before other Muslims, less of a minoriy than Obama feigns to think, probably they couln't care less of that challenge.

Luckily the president also reminded everybody, Muslims and non, that if need be, he won't shy away from using military force. And that is perhaps the only argument that defeats dissimulation.

Further clarification on rhetoric: granting the meaning of words.

My young friend the Lazy Disciple is right in noticing the fact we commonly use certain words in a meaningless way.

He pointed out saeculum.

I need to point out a couple of heavier ones: religion and faith.

People might think that I am presumptuous. But I am actually amazed by how even the great majority of good Catholics use these words as if there were no problem at all.

Two are the cases:
1) They use them by meaning the right thing, without realizing that those who listen understand them in a totally different way. And I mean listeners who very often are not precisely friendly toward what they want to say by those words.
2) They end by using them in the meaning become current, which is that of their opponents.

Granting or not granting the meaning of words is, as I previously said, a question of rhetoric. We see it when we read Plato's dialogues, where Socrates, to face the self-styled sophists, teachers of the art of persuation, i.e. rhetoric, plays their same game. You claim you know what is knowledge, virtue, justice..., Socrates says; very well, tel me what you mean by them, give me your thesis, a definition to take as basis of discussion, and I'll see if I can grant it. In any given defintion, then, he picks up another word, about whose meaning he enquires, and so on and so forth; until he comes to the point in which they say something in contradiction with the original thesis, which was finally to be abandoned.

So we should beware not to fall into our opponents' traps by granting what we don's need to grant.

I often hear for example faith defined ad "belief in something". Are we sure that it is that what it means? I am rather sure of the contrary. As I am sure that by granting such a definition we put ourselves in the impossibility of giving reasons for what we believe.

The latin fides, from which faith comes, means something eminently interpersonal: the "credit" someone enjoys near somebody else.

Only in a derivative sense faith becomes the credit that we grant to what he says, and finally belief in this.

Even in this case, belief doesn't means anything extraordinary: just the persuasion of the truth of something. I can say for example that I believe in the theory of relativity or in quantum mechanics.

It is in no other way that I say that I believe in the Church's teachings.

As far as religion goes, I'll have to come back to it. The word has become in fact one of the main stumbling blocks to "true religion".

President Obama and human rights

President Obama delivered in Cairo an excellent speech. He said to Muslims what was right to say to them, whatever the historical and doctrinal accuracy of it. He was at his best when he reminded that the possibility to say what one thinks, confidence in the rule of law fair administration of justice, transparency of a government that doesn't steal from people, and finally freedom to live as one chooses, are not only American ideas, but human rights.

All fine and dandy.

It is like to say that they are not based on religion but on natural law. But, did anybody ever inform him that also not killing unborn babies is so based? If he, or someone for him, replies that it is not so, being the full human nature of such babies a question of religious belief, I could easily retort: so it is also for not killing born babies, or for that matter grown people who do not belong to the in-group of true men.

Cultural anthropology should teach us this much: that we cannot assign to human rights what we want, according to our ideas and conveniences. Does this mean that we cannot appeal to natural law? No, we can do it. But we need to know how to do it.