I talked with the LD about a possible post, on a recent dreadful event that saw the killing of a poor young Italian fellow, who thought of working for the good along lines I don't agree with. The LD dissuaded me, rightly arguing that it could sound like hitting a dead man. The purpose of our blog is not so much to pass judgments on things and people, as to reason on how we pass judgments. We humbly hope this might help to increase in a however minimal degree the awareness of what judging things requires.
We definitely have our ideas, hence our liking and disliking, which run against opposite liking and disliking. But what use would be to bang our head against those holding them? Not much, and therefore it isn't much the use of mentioning and discussing facts, if we don't agree about what kind of facts they are.
I give you as example an observation my mother made when, as school teacher, she realized that facts changed in the course of time with the changing of text books.
Everybody makes history as he likes, she observed. Take Robespierre. It used to be, in older text books, that they unequivocally spoke about him as having turned the French Revolution into terror. Now I read that he saved it, because he brought order in a country in disarray.
The very nature of the fact changes by the way we tell it.
The most necessary thing, therefore, is to promote the awareness of the criteria by which we judge facts. Without such an awareness it isn't possible to inquire into them, in order to see whether an agreement on them could be possible.
HP
A lot of things are pressing my mind.
First of all the book I am writing, which kept me away from blogging. I am at a crucial point, where I am trying to explain to a possible reader, which means essentially to myself by putting myself in the place of a possible reader, the main tenet of Christianity: that funny doctrine which says that the divine ground of all things we call God is at the same time one and three. By a possible reader I don't mean a Christian believer, but any man who, if he just recognizes to be educated, should also recognize to be believer in some authority. Because of this I try to explain to myself through him why to believe in Christ leads us to that funny doctrine of three in one, which is the most translucent account of reality ever given (consonant with the best of science). And therefore that to believe in Christ is the most rational thing any man could do.
This leads me to the other things that press my mind, which on the contrary pull me toward blogging to get rid of the turmoil in which they keep it (I won't say how otherwise this turmoil risks to annoy my wife, forced to listen to me).
Europe, once the land of Christianity, in the last centuries has been progressively turning away from it, a turn which has taken in recent decades a sudden acceleration. The academic, media, and political elites not only act as if indifferent top Christianity, which isn't a novelty, but take a stance toward it that in the best of cases tends simply to erase it from history, in the worst they openly fight it as backward and oppressive.
Does this sound familiar to the American reader of this blog?
Christianity is a belief, a belief is an opinion, and opinions, however they may seems to motivate people's actions, are not fit for a scientific understanding of them. So the point goes. That's why people who think this way hardly will become readers of my book, even though I am writing it for them too. They feel exempt, in fact, from knowing what Christianity is about, and for that matter any other of those beliefs equally called religion. Deemed supernatural, they have no pertinence for those who want to attain themselves to nature. Because, lucky them, they look as if they knew what nature is. (Being so, I'd like to ask them what Einstein's theory of relativity says. As for me, not being a mathematician, I was helped to understand it by the study of the "savage mind", i. e. the thought of archaic or primitive peoples.)
In America, this way of thinking, let's call it "liberal", is also widespread in the "main stream" media, academia, and politics (let's think, alas, of the present administration). Luckily, though, there is in America a more powerful "conservative" resistance to it that in Europe.
Still another thing that presses my mind: the international situation. And to say this means largely the state of the Muslim world. It means Islam, with its home consequences in the Western world.
The peculiar thing that liberals don't seem to realize, is that their way of thinking involves them in an blatant contradiction.
It shows it well their loathing of the foreign policy doctrine of "exporting democracy". Odd thing, if one thinks that they wouldn't let go an inch of their right to do as they like, without an outcry of "oppression", "Nazism", or the like! But when other peoples live under oppressive and nazi-like regimes, they don't seem to be moved.
Perhaps they think that living under political-religious regimes of the Iranian kind is what people there like, and, because what anybody likes has to be granted, we shouldn't interfere. Or they rather think that democracy, while good for us, would be disruptive in other peoples' lives. So, while enjoying the benefits of democracy, they ask who are we to tell others how to live. Too bad that when it concerns us they are quite ready to do it.
We? How can you say that? To us, who are all for tolerance? There you have it. Tolerance. You decide what to tolerate and what not. I actually know that you find the Tea Party quite intolerable. Why don't you find equally intolerable Muslims?
The point worth to notice, with tolerance, is that if you grant a right to somebody, you obligate others. Who might not like it. But have to swallow it.
As for me, I always thought that, either democracy is good also for others, or that it is no good even for us. Of course, this means to find a notion of democracy that could be shared.
Of one thing I am sure: it can't be defined on the basis of tolerance. Should we do it, we would turn democracy into a most oppressive system.
Here I close, because the things that press my mind are so heavy loaded that they would require a book to exhaust them. Ah, I forgot, I am writing it.
HP
The few readers who might have followed our blog probably remember one of my fixed ideas: that we live a creeping civil war. That's why we called the blog "Chronicles from the front".
I am not sure how clear I have made who the sides of this war really are.
Of course there are external enemies, who eventually one day hijack some airplanes and go to crush themselves against New York skyscrapers and the Pentagon. But they wouldn't be so strong, if we weren't so divided.
Reading news of the day I feel therefore continuously pressed to come back to my painful fixation.
The Church is under attack because of the sins of her ordained members. By whom?
Well, I'd say by the servants of the Emperor: i.e. by the state's governing bodies, whether legislative, judiciary and executive.
Our history teaching never makes clear enough why the roman emperors were against Christians. And yet the answer should be pretty simple: because they refused to deify the human community to which they willingly belonged, because they thought that there was a higher community of all men in God to whom it went their full allegiance.
Thus Christianity became the warrant of men's freedom, our freedom, against the self-divinization of the state, pretending to exhaust the full compass of human life.
Was the Church always up to it? Of course not, because the distinction of church and state is not a severing of men in two halves, so Christians are at the same time members of the one and of the other, always tempted into making of the Church a state, or of the State a church. The story of this distinction, with all that it involved, is that of Western history.
Men are always again tempted into making their world into the world. It happens therefore that in the name of an "open society" (cfr. K. Popper, The open society and its enemies) society is actually closed in the confines of a state: the worldly state of public things (status rei publicae: hence simply the state) in the western world of the last centuries.
To this the Church opposed herself. Until it came a time when it was said: we Christians have to learn to dialogue with the world, learn again to address it.
This was the hopeful message communicated by the Vatican II. Which leaves me with a paradox to account for: while the last Ecumenical Council announced itself as a recasting of the Church's eternal truths in a new language more apt to modern times, her capability to address people of these same modern times appears to be weakened.
Was it perhaps because it wasn't made explicit enough that there is a creeping civil was always going on, i.e., to say with Saint Augustine, between the "city of God" and the "city of men"?
HP
To write a post is, at least for me, a demanding thing.
To write, period, is for me demanding.
Why? you might ask.
Simple, because of the creeping civil war.
The easiest thing is to take side, and to write for one's own side. But it is equally easy, by so doing, to fall into the traps laid by the other side, and accept its premises.
A widely accepted premise, is that sexual matters concern morality, and that morality is tied to religion, and that religion is out of discussion – meaning that it is something about which no discussion is possible, being a matter of personal opinion and not of truth.
Only remains to distinguish right and wrong, according to this premise, the law. It also follows that the only limit the law can put to people's right to do what they want, is there being consent among the parties involved. Which have to be, therefore, on an equal footing.
It is hard, when that basic premise is granted, to argue otherwise. If one tries to do it, claiming that there are not negotiable moral values, he can be easily silenced with the accusation of wanting to thwart people's rights. And he can be singled out for public disapproval if some of his associates have indulged in practices that violate the requirement of consent, as the only criterion for judging of right and wrong
Am I defending them? No way, I am only trying to understand why the present debate goes the way it does.
It goes in a way that the real premises on which agreement fails remain actually hidden.
Disagreement is not about morals – not at least if morality is understood as described above. It concerns our self-understanding as "men": let's say, bodily beings conscious of their being such.
There is then one side, that keeps on speaking of spiritual matters, where actually our bodily being is looked at as important for what we are and for how we should relate to each other. There is another side, agnostic in spiritual matters if not utterly negative toward them, that actually looks at our bodily being as irrelevant, just a sort of property of which we can dispose at our will.
Do you find this obscure?
If you do, I wouldn't be surprised, because it is so far from our contemporary culture, dominated as it is by a mind-body or spirit and matter dualism. That's why writing is, as I said, a hard and demanding thing.
HP
LD and I were looking forward to a nice blogging conversation on a rather metaphysical topic like feasting and fasting, but have been kept from it by events of the day. First, I had to commemorate a man to whom am indebted for what his books taught me concerning men's acting and thinking in society; but that didn't really take me away from the topic, because feasts come as moments of human exchange in which people come together to celebrate. But now…
An Army major, and a psychiatrist at that, picked up guns and shot thirteen people dead and thirty wounded at Fort Hood. And this, given the identity of that major, would require some comment.
The House voted a text of health care reform, in whose favor there is at least to be said that it is acceptable for anti-abortionist. Whether it also suits the general public's demand for the best possible health care system, to be made accessible to the greatest number of people, it is another story, also worthy discussing.
Events of the day are pressing on the front, while metaphysical conversations go more to the heart of the war being fought.
I'll try, to my best, to keep them together.
I'll keep away from the second issue, on which I am no expert. (I can only say that here in Italy, where there is health care directly run by government, people are not particularly happy with it. People, when they want to have a speedy and fairly reliable treatment, tend to resort to the private sector. Not to speak of the waste and the corruption to which the government run health care system lends itself.)
I revert then to the shooting spree at Fort Hood.
Lévi-Strauss helped me to understand human exchanges, by recognition of the principle that rules them: reciprocity. However, as we have positive reciprocity, so we have negative reciprocity.
There is discussion on the press and in TV whether major Nidal Malik Hasan's deed ought to be considered as an act of jihad. This risks being an hair splitting question on the definition of what makes jihad.
I prefer to ask the question: why so many leading newspapers and TV channels seem so preoccupied to find justifications, so to speak, for major Hasan's deed, that minimize the import of his quite strong Islamic faith?
In more general terms: why so many smart people tend to be so over respectful of Islam, when not in outright sympathy with it?
It is actually strange, considering that Islam goes against everything that they otherwise say to cherish: one thing for all, women's equality and emancipation.
A short and (relatively) simple answer could be: because of a lack of understanding the reciprocity required by communication among people – in order not to have positive reciprocity turn into negative reciprocity.
Another anthropologist, the American Marshal Sahlins, stressed the unilateral character of what he called "the mystique of western superiority". Remarkable is that he used this expression not to stigmatize nineteenth century colonialism, but while commenting on the widespread idea that contact with western civilization brought disruption into the life of natives all over the world, as if, before, people were living everywhere in some kind of earthly paradise without any history of peaceful or warlike communication.
The same sense of superiority turns from self affirmation into self negation: if Arabs, then, and in general Islamic people, show such anger against us, it must be because we have victimized them.
The most vociferous Arabs or Islamics do actually feel victimized, whether it is true or not. Thus they mirror their western sympathizers. With no greater understanding of reciprocity than these have, they show to know just negative reciprocity. Such appears to be the case for jihadists: they feel other people as negating them, so they negate those people in turn.
It would be metaphysically worthy pursuing further the point, to ask whether there is something intrinsic to Islam as such that goes in this direction. Also in the other event mentioned, however, we could easily find a metaphysical side worthy discussing, to make thus possible the prudential judgment LD advocates.
HP
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