Knowledge

We still know very little about the shooting in Minneapolis, yet there is jumping to conclusions.  Admirably, Grim is not.  I'm a bit of a broken record - I recall saying this about Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin as well. But that's rather the point, because those are two incidents where the public still believes untrue versions which they picked up in the first few minutes of hearing about it. 

It seems to all of us that social media has made these leaps more likely, yet I wonder if that is actually true.  Human nature abhors an explanatory vacuum, and that is likely true throughout history and prehistory. I doubt that we lived less by rumors and lies a century or a millennium ago. 

Sinners In The Hands of An Angry God

People remember Sinners In The Hands of An Angry God because it's a cool title, not like anything that we would preach today. I'm guessing that less than half the people who recognise it know that it was Jonathan Edwards, and less than half of those would pin it to some Great Awakening, without knowing there were three of four. A fair number might guess it was Puritan, New England, and 16-1700, because that's the stereotype for that group (not without reason). 

Yet it is a touch odd that that's the one remembered.  It wouldn't be what he was known for in his own day.  It would be as if a century from now, all that anyone remembered that some group, maybe the Rolling Stones but probably the Beatles, sang Sympathy For The Devil at Woodstock, and decided that was the most informative example of rock music. Well, no; you missed the story.  

Edwards was known as a vivid preacher, not a particularly condemnatory nor emotional one. He kept up with natural science and was knowledgeable about philosophy, he studied for hours daily. He preached quietly, but was known for fresh analogies and descriptions. Perhaps that is what made him powerful, for the territory of most of the sermon was fairly typical for the time. For all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God. Basic Calvinism, heard not only Sundays but at weekday dinner tables and taverns. In this sermon, as with many of his others, Edwards stressed that this pull of this weight, dragging the sinner to Hell, was inexorable. You were going there unavoidably unless something were done about it. This is close to the reverse of what most Americans, including many Christians believe today.  It is a foundational, almost unquestioned belief that while we may not be completely innocent, we are mostly so, only needing a bit of instruction and encouragement. 

In his own day, Jonathan Edwards was known for his emphasis on grace, on the amazing love that God had shown - that for no reason other than his lovingkindness, God interfered with the inevitable torment we were sliding toward. In the imaging of a later writer, that we are not Jacob Marley, doomed to drag weights around in misery for eternity, but Ebeneezer Scrooge, miraculously given "time for amendment of life." Today we have a tendency to go back one step earlier and shift the blame off ourselves.  How/why did God get us in this mess to begin with?

Fertility Crisis

 I have found the cause.

 

Storm Prep

"Why are we buying bread and milk? 

Get wine. And chocolate cake. Maybe some Oreos. Do this winter storm right."

 

Our snowfall numbers keep going up.  Monitoring whether the inches are trending upward or downward is my general rule for whether we are going to get hit hard or it will blow over. It's not a great time to have blown out a rotator cuff.

We'll see. At least I'll have all the time I want to clear it away.

Cea Weaver's Comments

Rob Henderson recommended Oliver Traldi's essay at City Journal Cea Weaver's Comments Were Shocking.  They Used to be Normal.  He detects a change from even a few years ago what is not allowed to be said about white people.  I guess that is true, but I wouldn't trust it. He notes some ironies, that even anti-wokeness attacks whites now, especially if they are liberal women. Left antisemitism is associated with anti-whiteness; right antisemitism is associated with anti South Asians and East Asians.

He advocates that we should feel pity for this sorry lot instead.  I think my mother used to say this when I was a boy, that I should feel sorry for people who were mean to me. I think that is an obstacle to actual forgiveness, because it makes excuses for them, and breeds condescension in us. The poor dears just can't help it. Not like us.

Christian Alphabet

Many Bible teachers of all stripes will tell you "It's as easy as A,B,C"  while hitting a few texts hard to prove a point.  I am not entirely unsympathetic. Some things about the Bible actually are simple, but people try to evade them with complications. You may run with a crowd like that, as Lewis did.

But generally, people who try to shut you down with A, B, C don't like it when you bring up D, E, and F, never mind the rest of the alphabet. There are puzzling things like Ecclesiastes and Job, which are sort of the Q and X of the biblical alphabet.

Come to think of it, A, B, and C are not simple letters themselves.  A comes in long and short forms, sounds different before R, is silent in some words, and is frequently a schwa. B looks simple at first but is deeply related to P, Bh, and even V. Let's not get too deep in the weeds with C. It can be sounded as "s," "k," "ch," or "sh," and the history of the letter teaches you lots of other history.  A highschooler could wow an English teacher with a paper on the letter C. "As easy as A,B,C" indeed. We would do better to say that the Bible is as complicated as A, B, C. The road goes ever on.

Fangorn is Tolkien's representative for Owen Barfield's theory of the preservation of historical meaning, found in Poetic Diction. "My name is growing all the time, and I've lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of things they belong to in my language."

Links from 2013

 Word as Sacrament  I had said versions of this before, but my readers thought I may have gotten out over my skis on this one. Good comments

Where Thomas Nagel Went Wrong   The second internal link does not work, so I include a different one for What Is It Like to be a Bat?

Tallis Canon

One of the Higher Spiritual Gifts  

And so...

Reminder 

More Guitars 

Analogy

Don Lemon's excuse for the disruption of worship services in Minneapolis is that Jesus flipped over tables in the Temple - the anti-ICE protestors are just following Jesus.

It's an inaccurate analogy. Jesus flipping the tables of the moneychangers would be more like ripping out the card scanners for a private valet service in the church parking lot. It is part of a larger poor analogy that Jesus was disruptive/protested the culture/opposed the authorities, therefore whenever we do those things we are being like Jesus. Jesus's example in these things is no more than a declaration that such protest techniques are permissible, not that they confer blanket permission.  This is obvious enough that I have to suspect people of bad faith and deceptiveness.  However, we all have such remarkable abilities to deceive ourselves, and they may not be attempting deceit. 

I used to have paranoid patients who claimed to be prophets or the Second Coming who would point out that Jesus was persecuted and disbelieved, they are persecuted and disbelieved, therefore their message is validated*. 

There are competing sets of subtle manipulations in the discussions about whether people are being called Minnesotans** or Americans, whether they are being called Moms/Dads vs Parents, and a host of tricks of video perspective and what is left out of stories.  I'm not happy with much of anyone on this and am not entering that discussion at present. There are manipulations that bother me more than others, but I have not done an Examen on that and better not get ahead of myself.

*Their "message" was nearly always the same, that they were a prophet.  If pressed, the manics would say that "people should love each other," schizophrenics would say that "judgement is coming." That would be about it. 

**Walz, Frey, Smith, Omar, Ellison, Good - none are Minnesotans, BTW. 

Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev

Elie Wiesel's Souls on Fire had a profound effect on me, the only non-Christian book I can think of that I would say that about. Even after learning that Night is fiction, and known to be so when it was first published, I was still fascinated by what Wiesel had to say about the Hasidic masters. I have given the book as a gift several times, but I don't think it has affected any I gave it to very much.

One episode in particular has reoccurred to me many times, the year that Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev went silent. He had been sociable, humorous, and a great advocate on behalf of the Jewish people to God Himself. He argued on behalf of both individuals and Jews as a whole without rest, imploring God to forgive, because they also had many fair accusations against Him!

The rabbi returned to his previous personality overnight, and the incident is not mentioned anywhere else I can find. Wiesel states in his text it is barely mentioned since, as if no one could bear to think that R. Levi-Yitzchak could be downcast, even for a moment. Today we would simply call it endogenous Depression that remitted on its own and not look too hard for deeper explanations if none presented themselves. The Hasidim are not like that. Still, there are no stories.  Did Wiesel make this up as well? I would be on the far end of the continuum that says that such things should not be done. When we are speaking of the encounters between God and Man even small details might be critical and should not be played with. Yet with the stories of the Hasidic masters there are already porous boundaries between this world and any others. Time, distance, causality, motive - all of these are flexible.

I have always taken comfort in that unexplained year of the rabbi's. Silence strikes, but it ends.  It may have twenty explanations or no explanation. Day follows night. 

Be at peace whatever your lot. This too has been noticed. 

Will Ye No Come Back Again?

It is not only romantic loves that are unrequited

 

Fewer Bus Stops & Walkability

 Why America Needs Fewer Bus Stops at Works in Progress.

Bus stop balancing involves strategically increasing the distance between stops from 700–800 feet (roughly 210–240 meters; there are 3.2 feet in a meter), common in older American cities or in London, to 1,300 feet, closer to the typical spacing in Western Europe, such as in Hanover, Germany. Unlike many transit improvements, stop balancing can be implemented quickly, cheaply, and independently by transit agencies. By removing signs and updating schedules, transit agencies can deliver faster service, better reliability, and more service with the same resources.

In Northeastern cities especially, most people can get to a bus stop within a hundred meters, because different routes can take you to similar destinations. Four blocks feels like a mile to a tourist, but to a resident it's a comfortable distance that does not involve going up and down flights of stair and escalators for a subway.

Relatedly, the desire for walkability in neighborhoods is up against more friction that it used to be.  Houses and properties are larger but have fewer people in them, reducing the density that a retail store might need to stay operative. "Corner stores," similar to what we would call convenience stores now were ubiquitous in small cities when I was young, as were barber shops, churches, schools, music teachers, tenement apartments, and postal dropboxes. It was all walkable not only because we expected to walk more, but because the density allowed it. This remained true even in suburbs built around small-town centers, as many up here were. Not many in the neighborhood I lived in until 2020 walked the mile into town for milk or to have a beer, but I did. Online ordering means fewer customers on foot as well. We want contradictory things in our lives.

Social Justice in Medicine

I read Sally Satel's PC/MD over 20 years ago, during the height of political controversies affecting me professionally, and found her to be a breath of fresh air. She has a new piece at the American Enterprise Institute's publication Medicine in  the Age of Social Justice.

 One effort to dismantle racism was undertaken in late 2020 by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). As you remember, at first, we had to ration the vaccine. It was clear that people over 65 were undeniably the highest-risk group for getting COVID morbidity and mortality. Almost every country gave them high priority. Yet ACIP told the CDC that it should not prioritize age. Why? Because, the 65-and-over cohort in America was whiter than the general population...

ACIP’s decision was anomalous. Racial politics is not an accepted method of rationing scarce treatment resources. Public health has used various other options, such as basing distribution on who has the best prognosis—that’s classic battlefield triage—or who is the sickest, or on a first-come, first-served basis. (That’s how kidneys are allocated when you need a transplant.)

Remarkably, ACIP did its own calculation and found that overall, more Americans would die, between 0.5 percent and 6.5 percent, if the equity approach were implemented. Older Black people would be among them.

Most of us would call "more people dying" a big deal in medicine.  From personal experience I will tell you that doctors know a lot of bad sociology and believe it. It does influence some decisions.

European Cognitive Abilities, Medieval and Modern

Cognitive Evolution in Western Europe, by Peter Frost at Aporia 

As average cognitive ability increased, so did the numbers of the highly intelligent. They were becoming a class of their own... Progress is driven not only by individuals but also by communities that can fully appreciate new ideas and put them to good use. Otherwise, new ideas are left to rot on the vine. For example, the printing press wasn’t really invented by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440 — this was when it became commercially viable. 

He places the inflection point around 1350, which naturally suggests a change in culture and thus selection at the time of the Black Death. If you think you would have just killed it as a thinker before then, likely not. Unless you found one of the few niches you could exploit, your knowledge of the solar system, germ theory, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics would not help you much. The larger monasteries in strong networks would be about the only place you would find people who could follow your reasoning after a few minutes, and those would um, at least reduce your chances of passing on your superior genetics. Hanging out with Jews for knowledge of medicine and accounting might have helped, but you would have acquired extra physical risks for that.

Tangent: He quotes a now-standard estimate of 30-60% of Europe's population dying from plague at that timed.  When I was in school "as much as one-third" was the usual phrasing, which crept up gradually to 40 and 50%. The numbers stopped rising about fifteen years ago, when I would read occasional 60 or 70% estimates. I had a brief conversation then with an historical researcher while we were on vacation who lowered his voice and said in not only towns but small regions the numbers reached 80% death, according to cemetery studies. At that point the towns simply folded, no further bodies were buried there, and the survivors moved to functioning communities, disguising the population decreases there. That is getting into the range of New World death from European (and in western South America, Oriental*) diseases.

Extra controversies are dropped in along the way because well, Peter Frost . 

*Pacific silver trade, similar diseases to Atlantic seaboard 

Wally Ballou

 

No Wrong Answers

Someone said this morning WRT a particular question (not truth in general) "There are no wrong answers." It was meant as an encouragement to not be afraid to speak. I took the point, but that was not what he quite wanted to say.

Because sure there are.  I was reminded of a related line "There may not be True Truth, but there is certainly arrant nonsense." Truth may be hard for mortal man to find, and confidence that we have it quite right may forever elude us, but wrongness often leaps out at us.

Similarly, Meaning may be hard for mortal man to find and confidence that we have it quite right may forever elude us, but pettiness often moves in and takes up all the available space.  I know people who are smart and well-read, but are increasingly posting politically insulting silliness. No, silliness isn't the word I want here.  Silliness has a purpose of refreshment, of giving perspective and even joy. Stupid insults make us ever more stupid ourselves and slowly drain wisdom from those around us.