These two incidents came back to me often in the four or five years that I traveled in the Arctic. The one, timeless and full of light, reminded me of sublime innocence, of the innate beauty of undisturbed relationships. The other, a dream gone awry, reminded me of the long human struggle, mental and physical, to come to terms with the Far North. As I traveled, I came to believe that people’s desires and aspirations were as much a part of the land as the wind, solitary animals, and the bright fields of stone and tundra. And, too, that the land itself existed quite apart from these.
The physical landscape is baffling in its ability to transcend whatever we would make of it. It is as subtle in its expression as turns of the mind, and larger than our grasp; and yet it is still knowable. The mind, full of curiosity and analysis, disassembles a landscape and then reassembles the pieces—the nod of a flower, the color of the night sky, the murmur of an animal—trying to fathom its geography. At the same time the mind is trying to find its place within the land, to discover a way to dispel its own sense of estrangement. […]
Human beings dwell in the same biological systems that contain the other creatures but, to put the thought bluntly, they are not governed by the same laws of evolution. With the development of various technologies—hunting weapons, protective clothing, and fire-making tools; and then agriculture and herding—mankind has not only been able to take over the specific niches of other animals but has been able to move into regions that were formerly unavailable to him. The animals he found already occupying niches in these other areas he, again, either displaced or elinminated. The other creatures have had no choice. They are confined to certain niches—places of food (stored solar energy), water, and shelter—which they cannot leave without either speciating or developing tools. To finish the thought, the same technological advances and the enormous increase in his food base have largely exempted man from the effect of natural controls on the size of his population. Outside of some virulent disease, another ice age, or his own weapons technology, the only thing that promises to stem the continued increase in his population and the expansion of his food base (which now includes oil, exotic minerals, fossil ground water, huge tracts of forest, and so on, and entails the continuing, concomitant loss of species) is human wisdom.
Walking across the tundra, meeting the stare of a lemming, or coming on the tracks of a wolverine, it would be the frailty of our wisdom that would confound me. The pattern of our exploitation of the Arctic, our increasing utilization of its natural resources, our very desire to “put it to use,” is clear. What is it that is missing, or tentative, in us, I would wonder, to make me so uncomfortable walking out here in a region of chirping birds, distant caribou, and redoubtable lemmings? It is restraint.
Because mankind can circumvent evolutionary law, it is incumbent upon him, say evolutionary biologists, to develop another law to abide by if he wishes to survive, to not outstrip his foodbase. He must learn restraint. He must derive some other, wiser way of behaving toward the land. He must be more attentive to the biological imperatives of the system of sun-driven protoplasm upon which he, too, is still dependent. Not because he must, because he lacks inventiveness, but because herein is the accomplishment of the wisdom that for centuries he has aspired to. Having taken on his own destiny, he must now think with critical intelligence about where to defer.
“And what the hill’s suddenness resists, win so”
There are some charlatans who admit of no doubts. We know nothing of first principles. It is surely very presumptuous to define God, the angels, spirits, and to pretend to know precisely why God made the world, when we do not know why we can move our arms at our pleasure.
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
Those who say they believe in God and yet neither love nor fear him, do not in fact believe in him but in those who have taught them that God exists, and those in their turn often enough do not believe in him either. Those who believe that they believe in God, but without any passion in their heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God-Idea, not in God Himself.
So which is more compatible with faith—doubt or certainty? I’m going to vote for doubt. I believe doubt and faith need each other, whereas certainty does not need faith at all. If I am certain of something—no possibility of being wrong—then why do I need faith? And even if I only have certitude—the psychological feeling of certainty—that feeling is going to greatly diminish any sense of risk that is inherently part of the concept of faith. I may speak of “my faith in God,” but if I require it to be certain, then I am really speaking more of my certitude about God than of either certainty or faith.
How much more than Job are we bound, who know him in his Son as Love, to trust God in all the troubling questions that force themselves upon us concerning the motions and results of things! …
In the confusion of Job’s thoughts—how could they be other than confused, in the presence of the awful contradiction of two such facts staring each other in the face, that God was just, yet punishing a righteous man as if he were wicked?—while he was not yet able to generate, or to receive the thought, that approving love itself might be inflicting or allowing the torture—that such suffering as his was granted only to a righteous man, that he might be made perfect—I can well imagine that at times, as the one moment he doubted God’s righteousness, and the next cried aloud, ‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him,’ there must in the chaos have mingled some element of doubt as to the existence of God. Let not such doubt be supposed a yet further stage in unbelief. To deny the existence of God may, paradoxical as the statement will at first seem to some, involve less unbelief than the smallest yielding to doubt of his goodness. I say yielding; for a man may be haunted with doubts, and only grow thereby in faith. Doubts are the messengers of the Living One to rouse the honest. They are the first knock at our door of things that are not yet, but have to be, understood; and theirs in general is the inhospitable reception of angels that do not come in their own likeness. Doubt must precede every deeper assurance; for uncertainties are what we first see when we look into a region hitherto unknown, unexplored, unannexed. In all Job’s begging and longing to see God, then, may well be supposed to mingle the mighty desire to be assured of God’s being. To acknowledge is not to be sure of God. One great point in the poem is—that when Job hears the voice of God, though it utters no word of explanation, it is enough to him to hear it: he knows that God is, and that he hears the cry of his creature. That he is there, knowing all about him, and what had befallen him, is enough; he needs no more to reconcile seeming contradictions, and the worst ills of outer life become endurable.
the grand canyon and incarnational epistemology
If this does not open a door to understanding incarnational thought and practice—albeit via negativa—I don’t know what could. From Walker Percy’s essay “The Loss of the Creature”:
It is assumed that since the Grand Canyon has the fixed interest value P, tours can be organized for any number of people. A man in Boston decides to spend his vacation at the Grand Canyon. He visits his travel bureau, looks at the folder, signs up for a two-week tour. He and his family take the tour, see the Grand Canyon, and return to Boston. May we say that this man has seen the Grand Canyon? Possibly he has. But it is more likely that what he has done is the one sure way not to see the canyon.
Why is it almost impossible to gaze directly at the Grand Canyon under these circumstances and see it for what it is—as one picks up a strange object from one’s back yard and gazes directly at it? It is almost impossible because the Grand Canyon, the thing as it is, has been appropriated by the symbolic complex which has already been formed in the sightseer’s mind. Seeing the canyon under approved circumstances is seeing the symbolic complex head on. The thing is no longer the thing as it confronted the Spaniard; it is rather that which has already been formulated—by picture postcard, geography book, tourist folders, and the words Grand Canyon. As a result of this preformulation, the source of the sightseer’s pleasure undergoes a shift. Where the wonder and delight of the Spaniard arose from his penetration of the thing itself, from a progressive discovery of depths, patterns, colors, shadows, etc., now the sightseer measures his satisfaction by the degree to which the canyon conforms to the preformed complex. If it does so, if it looks just like the postcard, he is pleased; he might even say, “Why it is every bit as beautiful as a picture postcard!” He feels he has not been cheated. But if it does not conform, if the colors are somber, he will not be able to see it directly; he will only be conscious of the disparity between what it is and what it is supposed to be. He will say later that he was unlucky in not being there at the right time. The highest point, the term of the sightseer’s satisfaction, is not the sovereign discovery of the thing before him; it is rather the measuring up of the thing to the criterion of the preformed symbolic complex.
no water tap is an island
Debbie Chachra at Comment (emphasis added):
At the city water treatment plant, I learned that someone comes in each and every day of the year to take bacterial plates out of an incubator and verify that there are no pathogens in the drinking water. Then they prepare another set to be read the next day. And the next, and the next. Water treatment plants are a physical instantiation of the idea that politics are the structures we create when we are in a sustained relationship with other people. They’re more than just the technological systems. They’re also a connection to the expertise, labour, and care of all the people that make sure that the water is safe to drink, and a recognition by the city’s residents that they are connected to each other through the landscape and the human-made watershed of pipes that are laid on top of it (or buried beneath). In the rainy northeastern United States, municipal water and sewage systems function as the smallest-scale proof of concept for the value of building out collective systems to provide for our bodily needs—not for nothing is “indoor plumbing” still a metonym for “civilization.” And it’s just one of many infrastructural systems that we rely on.
“the deformed consequences of our love”
Rhina P. Espaillat, on the poetry of Anthony Hecht:
More important than bringing indictments against specific institutions, what Anthony Hecht does in much of his work is to warn, convincingly and justly – which is to say, with love – of those elements in religion that allow it to degenerate into zealotry or cant, and make possible behavior that runs counter to the avowed intent of religious faith. To deny that such dangerous elements exist, even today, in institutions we may value – and even deep in the impulses that gave rise to them – is to deny that fire is capable of burning, disfiguring and destroying what it touches, on the grounds that we are disloyal and ungrateful to find fault in what warms us so well when we are cold.
No poem or prose, however good, is going to bring about a change in human nature that will do away with injustice, cruelty, or cynicism, whatever its source. But excellent writing can sharpen the senses, challenge the intellect, kindle the imagination, and encourage the reader to generous thought. And great writing – like that of Anthony Hecht, which so qualifies on all counts, aesthetic, moral, and intellectual – can do more. It can teach us to confess doubt, to acknowledge the moral ambiguities inherent in every human impulse, and to guard against self-satisfied overconfidence in ourselves and in those institutions we have created in our image.
Percy’s Acedia
Jeff Reimer, on the novels of Walker Percy:
A wily demon, acedia is difficult to pin down. It’s a trickster, a shapeshifter, a boggart. It goes out of focus when you try to look directly at it. The term itself defies translation: despondency, sloth, lassitude, ennui, melancholy—each displays an aspect, none the full image.
…Evagrius had a theoretical bent and began cataloging the modes and patterns of failure he and his fellow monks encountered. Eventually he placed acedia at the center of a spectrum comprising the “eight thoughts,” the fountainhead of the seven-deadly-sins tradition. On the one side of the spectrum, he said, lie our animal or material vices; on the other, the vices of the intellect. Acedia, he said, is “the complex thought” because it stands at the center of the spectrum and thus assimilates aspects of both the material and the intellectual into itself.
…The habit of acedia terminates in the failure of all hope. Acedia in extremis eventuates in despair and in some cases suicide. Thomas Aquinas says acedia pulls apart the constituent parts of the human being and then causes us to mistake the physical, transitory part of human existence for the whole. He calls this mistake “animal beatitude.” […]
As the ultimate antidote to acedia, Thomas Aquinas recommends nothing less than the Incarnation itself. Acedia is a malady that pulls apart the animal and rational parts of our nature and pits them against each other. As the archetype of humanity, the incarnate Christ, fully God and fully man, not only perfectly joins body and mind and thus heals our deformed, schizoid human nature but also bears in himself the fullness of God’s sacramental presence in creation. […]
Percy believed that the world is strewn with such signs, if only we are looking for them, and know where to look. It is all too easy to miss—or even blind ourselves to—the signs of the transcendent shot through the world of the everyday, and therefore to miss everything. But it is exactly in that world that we find Walker Percy, a voice in the wilderness crying out like a prophet, “He that hath ears to hear let him hear.”
surprise redemption
From Jennifer Frey, reviewing Phil Klay’s Missionaries and Christopher Beha’s The Index of Self-Destructive Acts:
Many reviews of Klay’s novel have focused on what it reveals about the unjust economic and political order that drives globalized combat. But these systems, while undoubtedly corrupt, are symptoms of the deeper issues that interest Klay. His novel suggests that the human story will always take shape in response to our wounds. For each of Klay’s characters, as for us, trauma and the possibility of transcendence, suffering and redemption, are mysteriously and irrevocably intertwined. […]
If Beha’s novel explores two competing philosophical pictures of human freedom—Frank’s liberal humanism and Sam’s reductive naturalism—in the end the reader is left to wonder whether we need a third option, one that is adequate to the mystery of our nature. For it is in our choices that we experience the limits of our self-understanding and the pressures of our unchosen circumstances. We are forced to make our decisions within the liminal space between the generality of what we know and want and the particular demands of our circumstances. It is a shadowy realm, between the possible and actual, and it is here that human freedom becomes both real and burdensome. It is the place where we feel most deeply our helplessness—and our need for outside illumination or aid.
In the end, it seems that Frank points us to the possibility of a third way. For Frank recognizes that our actions are meaningless without others to interpret them; he affirms, with Wittgenstein, that the “sense of the world must lie outside the world.” Frank sees, in a way that Sam does not, the need for transcendence, because the contradictions of human life cannot be resolved from within it. To see and accept this truth is to catch a glimpse of what true freedom might be.
While Klay’s novel is more explicitly theological in its vision and Beha’s more philosophical, both deal with the reality of the woundedness of human nature, and both connect this woundedness to our struggle to make sense of our own lives and to attain even a modicum of self-knowledge. Each novel suggests that we cannot heal or fix ourselves, and that if our longed-for redemption ever comes, it will not be at our own hands, or of our own design.
“the ability to bear a negative self-relation”
Alexa Hazel on the Pomodoro Technique:
Beneath videos explaining the PT, people will often comment that they have been unwittingly using the method for years — Taylor’s logic endures, but its mechanism has shifted. For many, what was once an external system of control has been internalized. Factory managers discipline the bodies of their employees; white-collar workers now discipline their own souls. In Nikil Saval’s neat formulation, “the arc of scientific management is long, but it bends toward self-Taylorizing.” [Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, 1911]
In 2020, “self-Taylorizing” is not about optimizing paid work, but about optimizing everything, including one’s method for optimization. The influential political theorist Wendy Brown calls this contemporary subject Homo oeconomicus. All human activity, regardless of whether it bears the potential for financial profit, is modeled on the market. We understand ourselves as human capital. We self-enhance to “attract investors” and “strengthen competitive positioning.” Before COVID-19, Homo oeconomicus spent his long weekend in Peru for a course on leadership development and posted pictures from Machu Picchu to Instagram. Or, he criticized the course, skipped it, accumulated social capital as a renegade, and still posted pics from Machu Picchu. All returns on self-investment ought to be optimized. And because optimization cannot be established without data, all human conduct must also be quantified. A body that measures calories, steps, heartrate, Pomodoros, sexual potency, sleep, swipes, likes, content output, and optionality is a perfectible body. What’s quantifiable is certifiable and comparable. Humanity’s coarse incommensurability is smoothed into a universal language of winners and losers. For a fee of 325€, it’s possible to become an official Pomodoro Technique Certified Practitioner. The user need only demonstrate how the tomato allowed her to “[overcome] a personal challenge.”
Honestly, the essay could end, full stop, with the next line.
No one should be surprised by what psychologically follows.
It goes on, and it’s fascinating, true, and necessary to say, but also easily summed up:
Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man would come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever would save his life shall lose it: and whosoever shall lose his life for my sake shall find it.
P.S. This paragraph:
It may seem strange that we need scaffolds in the realm of freedom, but life-defining activity isn’t necessarily fun or easy. It’s often stressful and boring. Let’s say, for example, that you identify as a writer. Hägglund reminds us that being a writer consists in the daily struggle to be a writer. The daily struggle to be a writer often looks appalling. “Precisely because [writing] is so important to me, I can become paralyzed by anxiety over the stakes and do something else instead.” To have writer’s block does not mean that you no longer care about writing. Just the opposite: writing is so important that the risk of failing to write or failing to write well is almost inarticulable. It’s easier to write for an hour today than to write your novel today, and there’s a difference between the fruit of a practical identity and its everyday experience. Tedium, however, resists representation, which is why it’s easy to forget that unremarkable hours are at the heart of every breakthrough. A little rule can help you step outside of a vicious loop and begin.
“a simple job for simple people”
Mike Rose at The American Scholar:
Our culture—in Cartesian fashion—separates the body from the mind, so that, for example, we assume that the use of a tool does not involve abstraction. We reinforce this notion by defining intelligence solely on grades in school and numbers on IQ tests. And we employ social biases pertaining to a person’s place on the occupational ladder. The distinctions among blue, pink, and white collars carry with them attributions of character, motivation, and intelligence. Although we rightly acknowledge and amply compensate the play of mind in white-collar and professional work, we diminish or erase it in considerations about other endeavors—physical and service work particularly. We also often ignore the experience of everyday work in administrative deliberations and policymaking. […]
True, many uses of writing are abbreviated, routine, and repetitive, and they infrequently require interpretation or analysis. But analytic moments can be part of routine activities, and seemingly basic reading and writing can be cognitively rich. Because workplace language is used in the flow of other activities, we can overlook the remarkable coordination of words, numbers, and drawings required to initiate and direct action.
If we believe everyday work to be mindless, then that will affect the work we create in the future. When we devalue the full range of everyday cognition, we offer limited educational opportunities and fail to make fresh and meaningful instructional connections among disparate kinds of skill and knowledge. If we think that whole categories of people—identified by class or occupation—are not that bright, then we reinforce social separations and cripple our ability to talk across cultural divides.
Affirmation of diverse intelligence is not a retreat to a softhearted definition of the mind. To acknowledge a broader range of intellectual capacity is to take seriously the concept of cognitive variability, to appreciate in all the Rosies and Joes the thought that drives their accomplishments and defines who they are. This is a model of the mind that is worthy of a democratic society.
“A Thousand Mozarts”
The entirety of the system of global governance and the ‘laws’ of classical economics, based as they are on notions of humans as rational actors weighing up their enlightened self-interest and deciding accordingly between Pepsi and Coke, is also holed below the waterline. Liberal modernity, in short, is doomed.
If this is true, then another conclusion also suggests itself: that older ways of seeing and speaking – mythology, oral storytelling, folk cultures and the mystical underpinnings of religious faith – might have been onto something after all. What we are seeing now, I think, is that the standard choices presented to us – reason versus superstition; progress versus barbarism; past versus future; Earth versus space; growth versus stasis – were always chimeras. The choice is not between ‘going forward’ or ‘going back’, but between working with the complexity of human and natural realities, in all their organic messiness, or attempting to supersede them with abstractions which can never hope to contain them.
Perhaps this is why artists, saints, poets, mystics and storytellers often have a better handle on what reality actually looks like than those who sing the praises of Science or Reason. The English painter Cecil Collins, for example, explained his view on the matter in a beautiful mid-twentieth century passage which is worth quoting in full:
Rationalists are very fond of saying that without reason the universe would be a mad place; but of course it is a mad place even with reason. Any artist, or poet, or really alive person, knows it is mad. It is a horrible and terrifying place full of a bitter cruelty and obscenity. It is a place full of wonderful, profound beauty, and the tenderness of vast mysterious sacrifices. What it is not is a nice little rational puzzle that works out in the end.
No, the universe of experience is a different matter. It is a deep abyss, full of voices, some whispering, some shouting, the voices of frustration, the voices of unfulfilled longings, the voices of mysterious lusts, of mystical desires that can find no place in the world, the voices of deep, buried wrongs that cry out from an abyss of world desolation, the voices of misfits, neurotics, failures, the weak, an abyss full of the ecstasy of the poet, the glow of the praise of life, full of an incomprehensible love and an incomprehensible destructiveness.
All these voices are centred in man’s consciousness and in order to escape from them he builds in his mind a prison of rationality, and then tries by the aid of the official world, to shut them out.