Yes, I'm Alive

But rather busy and wondering why a good non-linear curve fitting scheme is so troublesome to implement.

I'm reading John Crowley's, Aegypt at the moment, one of the sleeper classics of our era. Every once in a while, some curmudgeonly cultural conservative will ask whether anything will be remembered of the art and literature of our iconoclastic era. I think this particular book will remain. Harold Bloom agrees with me. It's one of the few works of recent provenance that he suggests should be included in the Western Canon.

Why is it so important? Because after all, it's not particularly grand in scope. Most of it is set in New York City and somewhere in northern New Jersey or southern New York. The characters don't do much but think and write and raise sheep and generally ignore the grand problems of our era: the inequities of our globalized human society and the coincident environmental degradation. Frankly, it's a book with a lot of Boomers being obsessed by pseudoscience and living their lives poorly.

But despite the vapidity of its setting, indeed because of it, Aegypt already is looking to be a powerful novel of ideas: an exposition of modern critical realism and the failure of the Enlightenment Project in a surprisingly readable though fairly secular package.

Huh? Failure of the Enlightenment Project? What? Critical realism? Well, they didn't teach me this kind of stuff in school, I'll tell you. Well, they dropped hints every once in a while. And Crowley is absolutely wonderful in connecting a few ideas I saw in McGrath's epitome, the Science of God . He is wonderful, because he goes back to the era where the western intellectual world went marvelously off track, 1600 or so.

In that era, there were two kinds of new men: the scientific magicians and the early scientists. And the funny thing is that they weren't two different groups. For instance, I read an article in the Australian yesterday about a woman in Mercersburg, PA, who shares a surprisingly common belief that Barack Obama is the Antichrist. We laugh at this today. But Isaac Newton would consider this idea worthy of as serious inquiry as gravity. And in fact, the idea of gravity began as an alchemical idea. Scientists today try to disprove that crystals heal or that power lines cause cancer, but they only are disproving ideas that would seem far closer to axiomatic among the progenitors of the modern natural sciences.

Where this all went wrong is the rebirth of skepticism. Eventually, some came to believe first that the scientific method has no axiomatic basis, that it is completely founded on unaided human reason, and second that it was universally applicable, thereby creating standards for art, literature, and mores that might be completely divorced from the irrational beliefs of our forebears. Many scientists will tell you that the first idea is ridiculous, usually citing the so-called central dogma of physics, "The laws of nature are the same everywhere." Gravity works the same on Earth as it does in the Jovian system and so forth. And indeed each branch of science has its symbola no less influential than the Creeds for Christians. There is doctrinal evolution, though. Geologists used to consider it dogmatic that the continents didn't move (even on very long timescales). However, that doctrine violated more fundamental doctrines such as: that the Earth does not have multiple dipole magnetic fields at any one time. As I'm sure McGrath would agree, there's a lesson in such stories.

As for the second point, a few young scientists are enamored of Aristotle's argument in the Poetics that language may be mathematically tuned to beauty and effect on the listener and there is an entire field of computational linguistics. But attempts to create perfect music on mathematical principles only work when something different is added to the equation. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier is a good example.

Well, the end result of these two bad ideas, Europeans generally came up with universal standards for things that really reflected majoritarian views or elitist prejudices. And so since at least the time of Einstein and Barthes, the Enlightenment is slowly being destroyed. Just as physics or mathematics has no authoritative reference frame might go the argument, so there are no authoritative reference frames in art, literature, or mores. Hence, relativism. And because the skeptics really vexed the religious, some asserted that the universal standard was their particular interpretation of pre-Enlightenment sacred literature, hence fundamentalism, which some think is a pretty good response to relativism, too. There's a guy named Chris Hedges, who has written a book claiming the New Atheists are really fundamentalists. I think it's a fair argument. If you can turn Genesis into a science textbook, there are ways of turning one's interpretation of the scientific literature into a religion of some sort.

A philosophical school called critical realism is trying to come up with an alternative solution to this potential "St. Jean Vianney of the western mind." Crowley, I think is borrowing from this school, to create a sort of somewhat overlapping magisteria (as opposed to Gould's non-overlapping magisteria) in which we admit that the natural sciences are an excellent form of inquiry into particular aspects of the world, particularly those connected to our senses directly or indirectly through experimentation and quantitative analogy. An example might be the kinetic theory of gases, in which the sensation of heat is understood as a set of very small balls bouncing together vigorously. But we also can admit there's a part of the world that cannot be understood by these methods: the very kinds of things that Socrates used to ask people about in the Athenian Agora: truth, beauty, justice, and virtue. Crowley's contribution is to have his protagonist posit that there is "more than one history of the world." One of my college professors studied late antiquity and used to say that he read a lot of accounts of monks having visions during disasters, but he grew to think that while there is a way of seeing history in which monks hallucinate during earthquakes and floods, there's also a way in which the monks actually are seeing something going on not directly accessible to the senses.

Well, it's a good book (and there are apparently three more). So if I finish them and like them, I'll update you.

Whoever Isn't Against You is For You

Just a quick note. I just endured a three hour meeting and spent another hour and a half finishing up a difficult statistical issue in paper/research I'm doing at the moment. So I'm going to share some thoughts and then go home and watch some miniseries on Elizabeth I I'm supposed to get from Netflix this evening.


This morning, I was friended on Facebook by a stranger. This happens every once in a while. Lately, the friend requests have been getting so strange as to be spammy. So I've generally been rejecting them. This request was from what I might describe as a High Church Pentecostal with Anglican leanings. Clergy-in-training, interested in liturgy, studying for a Ph.D. In other words, the exact kind of person I usually socialize with by Internet ;)

And this man was the kind of person not easily classified in the liberal theological kind of box I worship in on Sundays, where traditional Christianity is the tool of the capitalist, imperalist oppressor. The kind of person interested in loose denominational structures and fighting racism and economic disenfranchisement in the inner city, but clearly has connections among those bogeymen denounced at the pulpit most Sundays including folks at conservative Episcopal seminaries from familiar countries with familiar surnames.

Well, I sent him a message asking him if I actually knew him. He replied that he didn't, but he saw that we had lived in some common places, had some common interests, and (since I was an Episcopalian), he just wanted to connect with fellow Anglicans. I friended him immediately. Maybe, I'll run into him in real life soon. I hope so.

It's a common story in Laodicea. To go from liberal to conservative Anglicanism here (and not just wishy-washy varieties either, but true centers of thought and action), you need only to cross the street. It's called Las Robles, and I know people who do so and have done so.

Laodicea is in this way amazing, and I'm fairly sure God brought me here for two reasons: (1) to provide Martian weather services and (2) to see the split in Anglicanism across a gulf of 200 m. I'm also suspecting there's a third reason that may combine the two somehow, but the Lord remains vague on the issue.

I tell this story as an introduction to my feelings about what went on in San Joaquin last weekend, which are mixed to say the least. What can you say about a Diocese in which the Bishop subverted the letter and the spirit of the discipline of this Church unto perpetual scandal and a Presiding Bishop who pretty much did likewise to relieve the uncertainty and fear of those bereaved and scandalized? Say what you may about Fr. Martins of Carioca Confessions, but he's right that the Presiding Bishop can't call Special Conventions by fiat and dismiss a Standing Committee by edict. The Presiding Bishop and her Chancellor seem to be operating on that great elastic principle of American constitutional law: that the Constitution of the General Convention is not a suicide pact. I don't know if the Presiding Bishop has a coat of arms, but I'd put as her motto now, et ultra viros et ultra vires .

But I wasn't unmoved by the reports at Fr. Jake's place. People asking basic questions about Integrity. I think I've known about Integrity since I was knee high. People out under the shadow of a bullying hierarch longing for new life. It's a Diocese whose renaissance I pray for several times a week. I can't be unsympathetic.

But I also can't be unsympathetic to a Standing Committee illegally ejected, despite their standing on a tacet, nolit consentire. In a church where we sometimes show surprising mercy to those guilty of crime and immorality, we seem to have little care for those caught in an echo chamber, in a grex clericorum of enablers, who allow a few legal machinations to pass by them. And when they see the horror and ridiculousness of what they've allowed, they indicate their willingness to proceed by canonical process, only to see canonical process thrown out of the window by the +Squid and the Ale.

I think this travesty will pass over, no matter what. But to people my age who look on these events in later years, I can tell you that it will be hard to pass beyond the power games on one side of the Anglican wars when the power games on the other side are this striking.