The Fool's Progress

I just observed the amazing moment when the falling sky turns to snow. One of the most mesmerizing experiences of my life was experiencing a cold heavy rain switch over to huge, wet snowflakes while hiking in California redwoods. Earlier this morning, in the barely graying Kansas dawn, I heard the first tiny impacts of sleet on the windows. A resolute, or desperate, meadowlark was calling outside my backdoor but, as the sleet grew heavier, he gave up.

This is a magical morning; the reason why I came home to Kansas, as the boys and I watch and listen to the storm hit on the first day of spring, their eyes full of wonder, and mine, contentment.

Now that I am done with these paragraphs, the snow has given way to heavy sleet and the boys came and hid behind my legs as a type, hiding from the sleet pounding on the windows.

There is much ‘heavy-lifting’ in reading Peirce, but much of what he wrote, including his celebrated Popular Science Monthly pieces were for the common reader, and in these he is very accessible. I’ve also found out that his name is pronounced ‘purse’, not ‘pierce’, from a Peirce-dedicated website. Pronunciation is the scourge of the autodidact.

The beginning of The Order of Nature:

Any proposition whatever concerning the order of Nature must touch more or less on religion. In our day, belief, even in these matters, depends more and more upon the observation of facts. If a remarkable and universal orderliness be found in the universe, there must be some cause for this regularity, and science has to consider what hypotheses might account for the phenomenon. One way of accounting for it, certainly, would be to suppose that the world is ordered by a superior power. But it there is nothing in the universal subjection of phenomena of laws, nor in the character of those laws themselves (as being benevolent, beautiful, economical, etc.), which goes to prove the existence of a governor of the universe, it is hardly to be anticipated that any other sort of evidence will be found to weigh very much with minds emancipated from the tyranny of tradition.

Later on, in what could be right out of Dennett:

It seems incontestable, therefore, that the mind of man is strongly adapted to the comprehension of the world; at least, so far as this goes, that certain conceptions, highly important for such a comprehension, naturally arise in his mind; and, without such a tendency, the mind could never have had any development at all.

The closing page could be mistaken for Dennett’s Breaking the Spell:

There are minds to whom every prejudice, every presumption, seems unfair. It is easy to say what minds these are. They are those who never have known what it is to draw a well-grounded induction, and who imagine that other people’s knowledge is as nebulous as their own. That all science rolls upon presumption (not of a formal but of a real kind) is no argument with them, because they cannot imagine that there is anything solid in human knowledge. These are the people who waste their time and money upon perpetual motions and other such rubbish.

But there are better minds who take up mystical theories (by which I mean all those which have no possibility of being mechanically explained). These are persons who are strongly prejudiced in favor of such theories. We all have natural tendencies to believe in such things; our education often strengthens this tendency; and the result is, that to many minds nothing so antecedently probable as a theory of this kind. Such persons find evidence enough in favor of their views, and in the absence of any recognized logic of induction they cannot be driven from their belief.

But to the mind of a physicist there ought to be a strong presumption against every mystical theory; and therefore it seems to me that those scientific men who have sought to make out that science was not hostile to theology have not been so clear-sighted as their opponents.

It would be extravagant to say that science can at present disprove religion; but it does seem to me that the spirit of science is hostile to any religion except such a one as that of M. Vacherot. Our appointed teachers inform us that Buddhism is a miserable and atheistical faith, shorn of the most glorious and needful attributes of a religion; that its priests can be of no use to agriculture for praying for rain, nor to war by commanding the sun to stand still. We also hear the remonstrances of those who warn us that to shake the general belief in the living God would be to shake the general morals, public and private. This, too, must be admitted; such a revolution of thought could no more be accomplished without waste and desolation than a plantation of trees could be transferred to new ground, however wholesome in itself, without all of them languishing for a time, and many of them dying. Nor is it, by-the-way, a thing to be presumed that a man would have taken part in a movement having a possible atheistical issue without having taken serious and adequate counsel in regard to that responsibility. But, let the consequences of such a belief be as dire as they may, one thing is certain: that the state of facts, whatever it may be, will surely get found out, and no human prudence can long arrest the triumphal car of truth – no not if the discovery were such as to drive every individual of our race to suicide!

But it would be folly to suppose that any metaphysical theory in regard to the mode of being of the perfect is to destroy that aspiration toward the perfect which constitutes the essence of religion. It is true that, if the priests of any particular form of religion succeed in making it generally believed that religion cannot exist without the acceptance of certain formulas, or if they succeed in so interweaving certain dogmas with the popular religion that the people can see no essential analogy between a religion which accepts these points of faith and one which rejects them, the results may very well be to render those who cannot believe these things irreligious. Nor can we ever hope that any body of priests should consider themselves more teachers of religion in general than of any particular system of theology advocated by their own party. But no man need be excluded from participation in the common feelings, nor from so much of the public expression of them as is open to all the laity, by the unphilosophical narrowness of those who guard the mysteries of worship. Am I to be prevented from joining in that common joy at the revelation of enlightened principles of religion, which we celebrate at Easter and Christmas, because I think that certain scientific, logical, and metaphysical ideas which have been mixed up with these principles are untenable? No; to do so would be to estimate those errors as of more consequence than the truth – an opinion which few would admit. People who do not believe what are really the fundamental principles of Christianity are rare to find, and all but these few ought to feel at home in the churches.

I’ve also stumbled upon a fabulous word here, cerebration. According to my two volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, cerebrate is a verb, defined as subject to or produced by brain action, cogitate. Cerebration is the working of the brain, especially (in full unconscious cerebration) the action of the brain in producing results without conscious thought. In other words, cerebration occurs when a fully formed idea ‘pops’ into one’s head. I get my best writing ideas this way; connections not thought of seem clear, or paths suddenly certain. Thanks, Charles.

I have finished Breaking the Spell and am now working on Charles Sanders Peirce. The first essay is still fuzzy after two readings, but the writing is livelier than I expected. This excerpt is from Some Consequences of Four Incapacities (1868):

"… It is sufficient to say there is no element whatever of man’s consciousness which has not something corresponding to it in the word; and the reason is obvious. It is that the word or sign which man uses is the man himself. For, as the fact that every thought is a sign, taken in conjunction with the fact that life is a train of thought, proves that man is a sign; so, that every thought is an external sign, proves that man is an external sign. That is to say, the man and the external sign are identical, in the same sense in which the words homo and man are identical. Thus my language is the sum total of myself; for the man is the thought.
It is hard for man to understand this, because he persists in identifying himself with his will, his power over the animal organism, with brute force. Now the organism is only an instrument of thought. But the identity of a man consists in the consistency of what he does and thinks, and consistency is the intellectual character of a thing; that is, is its expressing something. "

All italics from the original. Speak carefully.

Hey Poncho, nice outfit, are you going to eat that chicken?

The Faith section of last Saturday’s Kansas City Star had a puff-piece on the importance of faith in the life of Danni Boatwright, Tonganoxie native and Survivor winner.

I am not a theologian, but it is apparent Ms. Boatwright enjoys an easy faith. She believes in a loving, fatherly God that directly intervenes in our lives, and answers prayers. It is difficult to square these beliefs with any kind of introspection, but easy to spread the word to others with a million bucks in one’s pocket. How hard is it to give God credit when things go right?

In analyzing her win, Boatwright, a sportscaster and former international model, said she is convinced God was in the plan because her plan didn’t work.
“I had to get rid of my strategy and let the Lord lead me in the right direction and let God take control.”

The problem with a God that intervenes directly in human affairs on a daily basis is that we lose Free Will in the deal. If ‘Everything happens for a reason’ than that reason is not ours, but belongs to something else, a higher power. If humans cede the ability to cause the outcome of any event, then we no longer have self-agency, or any abilities to act. A God that holds us into account for our shortcomings while denying us the will to act otherwise is a monster. Ms. Boatwright needs to think her suppositions through. Christianity relies upon a believer’s Free Will, conscious choices good or bad. The thieves on the crosses next to Jesus had to be there because of their own agency, or the fatherly image of God loses some of its luster. One could argue God allows us to fail if we give in to various urges, but why would an omnipotent being do that, to be cruel? If He is our ultimate designer, than who is responsible for our faults? Likewise, we fallible humans attempt to excuse God his shortcomings:

That’s not to say her life has been rosy. Her birth father was shot while on the job as a police officer, schoolmates teased her for being “tall and skinny, and she has had to overcome attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and dyslexia and a divorce after four years of marriage.

Why is there a rush to credit God for winning a million bucks, but a willingness to allow Ms. Boatwright credit for overcoming the bad breaks in her own life? Isn’t it also God’s will that she lost her father, stuck out among other kids, had a learning disability, and failed in her first marriage? Can I divorce my wife tomorrow and call that adversity two years from now? Why does she get credit in the article for challenging the will of God, who apparently wanted her fatherless, friendless, unlearned, and single?

In one episode Boatwright and two of the remaining four finalists ate a chicken that Mayan Indians had sacrificed to their gods. Boatwright said she didn’t see eating the meat as being disrespectful to their faith. . She said that was a practical matter of survival because the only food the group had was maggot-infested corn.

This quote is most galling. My wife and I wheeled out the TV cart and watched the penultimate episode, because of the local ties – we live a few miles from Tonganoxie. I could not believe it when they ate the sacrificed chicken. This came after an elaborate ceremony at the temple the contestants camped, complete with costumed priests and feathered waving of incense smoke. After the ceremony, three of the four Survivors left ate the bird despite a priest warning them not to. A thunderstorm followed, so to follow Ms. Boatwright’s lead, the Mayan Gods were not amused. It should also be noted, contrary to Ms. Boatwright’s defense, that one contestant, the red haired guy she ultimately dumped for the finals (Raef?) did not eat the chicken. It was humanly possible to resist that temptation, and survive. I guess God did not want Raef to have any chicken that day, since Ms. Boatwright apparently can read His mind. This ignorance and disrespect of other faiths runs rampant through Christianity, Islam, and probably every other monotheistic faith. Why should we, in an article on faith, take Ms. Boatwright seriously when it is obvious she doesn’t give a lick about other people’s faith? The irony is mind-bending. It is probably too much to expect the Star to call her on her obtuseness, and instead the article is a how-not-to guide to faith.

I am certain Ms. Boatwright is sincere in her beliefs, inconsistent as they are. Sincerity does not trump reality, however much we may wish it otherwise.

God's Grace is an odd little novel I’ve had on my ‘active shelf’ for a while. I no longer remember why I picked it up, if it was due to a chance encounter or from a review.

The shortest possible review is Lord of the Flies with apes. A nuclear exchange and resulting flood again kills humanity for God, but He misses one. A Jewish research scientist deep under the Pacific in a submersible during the exchange survives (What about the rest of the underwater denizens? Oh well…) When he comes up, God speaks to Calvin and apologizes for the error but refuses to reconsider. This time humanity is done in for good, no rainbows, or olive branches. The only other living entity on the vessel is a colleague’s pet chimp. It comes about that the chimp can talk, and they find an island on which to wash ashore. More chimps show up, and a gorilla. The other chimps also learn to talk. There is one breeding-age female to go with all the males, so of course she is the major point of contention. The Jewish guy attempts to educate the chimps on where humanity went wrong, trying to reinvent and perfect man via chimp. When the female first comes into estrus, she hides from all the pursuing males, waiting for her Romeo, who turns out to be the human (He had read Romeo and Juliet to the chimps). He convinces himself he is reinventing men in more ways than one. The other chimps turn on him, killing a half-breed infant and eventually sacrificing the man as Isaac, Abraham’s son: an offering to God. Thus imperfection continues.

As with my earlier review of Moby Dick, the trick for this reader is to feel moved by the author while willing to grant the central premise, that absent civilization, we humans are mere nasty little brutes. Using chimpanzees to help illustrate the point is a nifty move. I think the greatest error Malamud makes is that chimps are even nastier than we are, and Calvin the human would not have lasted nearly as long as he does in the novel.

Law in America is a short history that is introductory. Precocious high schoolers who paid attention in Government class will not learn anything here. Friedman charts the changes in society that led to changes in legal interpretations. The book has odd, repetitive moments where notes or ghostwriters were confused. The author never notes that his interpretation of Constitutional history is, especially in our present political moment, highly controversial in some circles. Robert Bork or the Heritage Foundation would not be amused and in fact have their own constitutional histories out. The fact that I don’t share their points of view does not mean they do not exist.
There is an entire series of these introductory pieces, the Modern Library Chronicles. Several look interesting, but I have read too much for this example to be appealing. No stars.

Follow the link for a chuckle.

I'm dialed in to the first Royals spring training broadcast, tossing down leftover peanuts from last year, and enjoying the fine work of the Boston Beer Company. The three-year old and I are taking turns drawing tractors, and the 20 month old is napping.

Ahhh, I can feel it in my veins now. If my wife wanted to do an intervention, I'd go along with it.

Two funny things about the game so far 1) the (idiot) announcers went on and on in the top of the first about how greatly improved the Royals defense was going to be this year. New 2B Grudzielanek has two errors in the first three innings.
2) In the bottom of the first David Dellucci left early on a hit-and-run, and Mark Redman threw to first. Denny Matthews, the Royals play-by-play guy since their inception, called it thusly: "Dellucci is picked off and breaks for second! Mienkiewicz throws to Grudzielanek who tosses it back to Mienkiewicz for the out. Well, I'm loose."

That is a perfect example of Denny Matthews humor. Understated, and if you are not listening, you miss it.

As I alternate between reading Dennett and Dawkins, getting the evolutionary full press, I see that Judith Rich Harris has a new book coming: No Two Alike. I found The Nuture Assumption via a review in The Wilson Quarterly. It was a book I read with my jaw dropped in amazement from front to back. Ms. Harris pointed out that nearly every parenting and educating study did not control for heredity. That is, the so-called educational and and psychological experts assigned 'nuture' 100% of human behavior and 'nature' 0%, by default, for decades. Most still do. A quote from the new book in a review in the New York Sun puts the point nicely:

The developmentalists found that the children's behavior was correlated with the parent's behavior and attributed the correlation to the effects of the home environment. Though they realized that heredity might account for some of the correlation, they never considered the possibility that heredity might account for all of it. But that is exactly how it turned out. Once the effects of genetic similarities were estimated and skimmed off, the correlation declined to zero. The putative effects of the home environment disappeared.

The new book looks at the obvious test case, identical twins. Identical twins raised in the same household have the same nuture and nature inputs. Do they have identical personalities? Of course not, but why? Ms. Harris answers decisively: peers. We find a role amongst our friends, and assume it.

Fascinating stuff, I can't wait to read the book.

Being Logical is subtitled ‘A guide to good thinking.’ How quaint in this era of truthiness. The author sets out his task early, by explicitly seeking to emulate The Elements of Style, but for logic.

That may be setting the bar a bit high, but this is a good book nonetheless. The first chapter relates general terms to logic, and is an introduction to logical thought. The second and third chapters are the meat and potatoes of logical thinking, including notation and arguments. Most interesting to me were the last two chapters, which are guides to avoid illogical arguments. The fourth chapter explores sources of illogical thinking, and the last chapter the illogical arguments themselves. Somewhere I have a copy of The Art of Always Being Rights (from the UK) by Schopenhauer; perhaps I should bookend the logic with some jawboning rhetoric.

Seriously, the chapters on illogic are worth the purchase price of this slim little volume alone. Anyone wanting to write seriously should read and re-read those chapters.

I wrote this two weeks ago. I'm trying to get back into the habit.



Like geese moving north, or Maypoles and baskets, there are cues we look to for the changing seasons. One of the cues for fall is the line of old people on the local news waiting for their flu shots. I have always been hostile to the idea of flu shots, no doubt thanks to the US Navy. I received flu shots every year without fail, as a healthy young male lion aged 19 and 20, in flu hotspots like Orlando and Honolulu. I was more likely to see a mermaid then a baby or old person, in the prime of my life, yet the Navy still saw to it that I’d feel lousy for an afternoon after receiving one of their blankety-blank shots. I turned them down with a sneer when offered by my doctor and sons’ pediatrician.

Until I got the flu. If you are a person who believes in an old-testament style angry and vengeful God, then rest assured He didn’t like the KC Star column last week, as I came down sick the Thurs before it appeared and am still suffering now. I first went to the doctor Monday and was two quarts low, receiving two liters of fluids right in his office. I was too late for Tamiflu or anything that would do me any good however. Now I’m just sick, for perhaps another week. Thank goodness for sick time. And grandparents, who have been helping my wife and I immensely as we are both sick.