Stephen Roney's Blog, page 47

The Potter's Hands

 

Elon Musk predicts that soon, AI will replace all human jobs. He says this does not mean we all go on Universal Basic Income—rather, on Universal High Income. “There will be no shortage of goods and services.”

I have some trouble getting my head around how this can work. And just because Musk is the world’s proven leading expert on technological futures does not mean his prediction is right. Experts are usually wrong about the future. But if he is right, what will people actually end up doing all day?

It seems to me there is one area of human endeavour that AI cannot ever automate. Create genuine art. Sure, it can create commercial art, Hallmark card level “art,” doggerel. But AI cannot, after all, be inspired. All it is every doing is recycling what has already been done by someone somewhere. In writing terms, it will always be boilerplate and cliché. One way to understand art and the aesthetic experience is that it is a direct Vulcan mind tap, a revelation that one is listening to a fellow intelligent soul. You’re never going to get that, and anyone with a functioning sense of beauty will find this apparent. You will get only the soulless suburbs. You will get endless Star Wars sequels. You will get formula. You will get mere prettiness or, at best, mere entertainment.

That said, it is also true that very few real people can generate genuine art either.

Be that as it may, given the apparent fact that everything else can do can be done as well by machines, it seems to follow that the reason we are here on Earth, the reason God created man, is to create art, to produce beauty. Or at least to all do our best to do so. To sit on the clouds or hilltops with our harps or lyres, and sing. It is fairly obvious that this is just what Jesus and the Bible says:

“You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.”

That “city on a hill” is the New Jerusalem:

“The city shone like a precious stone, like a jasper, clear as crystal. … The city was perfectly square, as wide as it was long. … The wall was made of jasper, and the city itself was made of pure gold, as clear as glass. 19 The foundation stones of the city wall were adorned with all kinds of precious stones. The first foundation stone was jasper, the second sapphire, the third agate, the fourth emerald, 20 the fifth onyx, the sixth carnelian, the seventh yellow quartz, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth chalcedony, the eleventh turquoise, the twelfth amethyst. 21 The twelve gates were twelve pearls; each gate was made from a single pearl. The street of the city was of pure gold, transparent as glass.”

The completed cosmos is a vast and perfect work of art. God has given us nature, and the potter’s wheel, our minds. We are to perfect it as co-creators, and that is what art is.

If we can’t do it, we can at least try.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

The Single Bullet

 

Because humans are herd animals, like dogs, our instinct is to defer to authority, and assume that those in power are smarter and more honest than we are. We see this in the Stockholm syndrome when people are kidnapped. Of course it also applies to authorities and governments in general.

Every now and then, the curtain gets ripped away.

It was torn badly in 1963 when JFK was assassinated. Just about everyone felt it did not smell right. Conspiracy theories abounded. The young at least briefly adopted the slogan “question authority.” And widely bucked the call to fight in Vietnam. Trust was lost.

Over time, this settled down, at least to a large extent. In Sixties terms, we all sold out. For one thing, Oliver Stone’s movie “JFK” came along, and was so unconvincing in its claims that, intentionally or not, the entire enterprise of questioning the Warren Commission findings was discredited. The cool kids weren’t supposed to believe in “conspiracy theories” any more. Blaming the CIA for anything domestic was “tinfoil hat” stuff, compelling evidence of mental illness.

That alone should make us suspicious—whenever a given position is ruled out of public or polite discourse, it is probably because it is inconveniently true.

Now even the JFK assassination is hot again. Now people are again asking questions. Because recent events have caused another collapse in trust in the government and in authorities generally. I think a bigger one than we saw in the Sixties.

In light of the draconian Covid lockdowns, the fixing of the primary process in the US, the Chinese election interference in Canada, the Epstein affair, the lies about the vaccine, the attempts to silence free speech, to shut down truckers and farmers, the lawfare against Trump and the obvious persecution of protesters on January 6 in the US and the Freedom Convoy in Canada, the charge that the “Deep State” actually staged a silent coup in 1963 sounds plausible, even likely. 

We all know nefarious things are going on. How far do they extend?

And how, short of revolution, do we re-establish social trust?

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Catholicism and the Bible

 

A friend of mine who is a Protestant minister put a post critical of Catholicism up on Facebook a few days ago. It has now disappeared from her feed. It listed a series of Catholic dogmas which were purportedly “not in the Bible.” 

I assume she got some pushback from Catholics, or even from fellow Protestant ministers, and thought better of it. 

Catholic teaching is always Biblical, in the sense that the Bible is the primary evidence for the teaching. It is always an inference from the text. One can, no doubt, have other interpretations. But if your interpretation is different, you need to make your argument.

But there is a more fundamental problem with this charge: it assumes the doctrine of “sola scriptura,” that all truth comes from scripture. This is a Protestant tenet, not a Catholic one. It is from Martin Luther. So even if you could establish that some Catholic teaching is not “in the Bible,” you have only proven that Catholicism is not Protestantism. Science is also not Protestantism. This does not prove that it is wrong.  

And, for Protestants, from whence comes the assurance that the Bible as we have it is complete, accurate, and authoritative? What gives them such assurance? Private revelation?

The Catholic answer is that its accuracy is certified by the Catholic Church, which selected and preserved this canon. Jesus gave his mandate to the church, not to a book of writings. “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” (Granted, this itself is recorded in the Bible) So the Bible cannot logically disprove Catholicism; Catholicism proves the Bible.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

The Real Genocide

 

In a recent article, unfortunately behind a paywall, Greg Piasetzki, himself legally considered Metis, writes for the Epoch Times that a federal government commission back in 1944, and again in 1948, wanted to close the Indian residential schools. “Wherever and whenever possible Indian children should be educated in association with other children.”

The federal government had never wanted the schools: they were expensive. They were, in the first place, required by treaty. The Indians wanted them. Since some Indian families were transient, and some loving in extremely remote locations, boarding was often necessary.

However, they soon realized they could not close the schools for an additional reason—because too many Indian children had nowhere else to go. The residential schools were in effect orphanages for kids whose parents were unable or unwilling to care for them. “A census taken by Indian Affairs in 1953 found that 43 percent of the 10,112 indigenous children in residential schools nationwide were listed as neglected or living in homes that were unfit because of parental problems.” For others, their parents could not feed them as well as the schools would. The Truth and Reconciliation report cites this as a consideration: if the schools did not feed the children better than at home, the parents would not send them.

The Epoch Times article also notes that there was no drive to force Indian families to send their children to a residential school. School attendance became compulsory for non-native children in Ontario in 1871. It became compulsory for Indian children only in 1920, and even then the law was rarely enforced. “About half of all students who attended between the 1880s and 1950s dropped out after Grade 1, and few students made it as far as Grade 5.” Obviously, they were not being compelled to attend, and if they or their families did not find conditions satisfactory, they left. Those who stayed were largely those who had no place else to go.

The Epoch Times traces the problems of the Indian family to alcoholism and fetal alcohol syndrome (FASD), which the recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report admits is still an epidemic on reserves. “Studies suggest FASD occurs among indigenous children on and off reserves at rates between 10 and 100 times greater than in the rest of Canada.” “Tragically, these problems follow them into adult life and are reflected in high rates of family violence (including spousal and sexual abuse), suicide, and addiction, and often repeat down through subsequent generations.”

Alcoholism is not the real problem, though. It is a symptom. This is due to a general collapse of morale, a shared depression due to culture shock. Charles Darwin recognized in the nineteenth century that whenever Europeans came into contact with a significantly more primitive culture, the primitive culture tends to collapse into a sense of pointlessness, very much like depression on an individual level. Men stopped working; women stopped looking after the children.

The cure, as everyone knows who has gone through culture shock, is to get out there and assimilate. Learn what your new surroundings have to offer. This is now being discouraged as “cultural genocide.” And the, better, ultimate cure is to get a new grounding in the eternal verities and the ultimate purpose of life. In other words, to get religion. And this option too is being systematically removed from the reserves and from modern Indian life, with churches actually being burned down.

In order to shut down the residential schools, officials turned to adoption for at-risk Indian children: the “Sixties scoop.” This is now condemned as another attempt at “cultural genocide.” Still today, “Nationwide, according to the 2021 Census, native children under 14 account for 53.8 percent of children in care, despite representing less than 8 percent of children that age in Canada.” They are simply now no longer adopted, but must remain in long-term care.

And we pretend to wonder why there are suicide pacts among young people on reserves. And why there are so many “missing and murdered (young) indigenous women.”

We have systematically prevented and then punished any efforts to help them.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

The Loss of Beauty

 

“In evangelization,” Bishop Baron has said, “start with beauty.”

There is a problem with this. Bishop Barron is assuming that beauty, unlike ethics, is accessible to everyone. Many people do not get beauty. Perhaps as many as do not get ethics.

Attending a writers’ meet last evening, I was disappointed that nobody else pointed out the beautiful turns of phrase the featured writer used. “Warmoon.” “None of man, none of nonsense.” “Only the steel husk of empires.” 

“He really ought to be a poet,” I observed.

“Why? You can have beautiful language in prose.” 

You can, up to a point, but then what is the difference between prose and poetry? Poetry is, definitively, beautiful language: “the best words in the best order,” per Coleridge. If the beauty of the language is the focus, that is poetry, not prose.

I gather that poetry was invisible to those present, because beauty in language was invisible to those present—none of them, after all, noticed it in the passage. To them, although writers, writing was apparently about entertainment—an exciting and captivating plot.

One can, of course, have an exciting or captivating plot in either poetry or prose. See Beowulf, or the Odyssey. But put it in beautiful language, and it is poetry.

Even in a supposed poetry group I attended a week ago, a group of published poets, I found no sensitivity to beauty of language. All were to submit a poem on the theme, “on Earth we are all briefly gorgeous.” All submitted, with no special elegance, an expression of some trauma they experienced personally; as if poetry was about venting emotions or grievances. It was only a matter of “my suffering is greater than your suffering.”

This is psychotherapy, not poetry. 

Worse, psychotherapy doesn’t work. It leads only to narcissism.

When I remarked to a well-intentioned friend that I found a particular woman unutterably beautiful, he assumed I wanted to hook up with her. Despite being married. 

We seem to commonly associate beauty with mere sexual attractiveness. With a physical rather than a spiritual pleasure.

Most people say they get a sunset. I wonder… do they? Or do they just know they are supposed to?

Most people seem to like music. But are they reacting only to some physical sensation, like the urge to move your body and feel the healthy stretch of muscles and deep breathing?

Entire religions seem not to get beauty: Islam, with its iconoclasm, banning visual representations. Protestantism, wanting once to ban dancing, the theatre, and celebrations like Christmas. Such things were, according to the Puritans, if not idolatrous, sinfully frivolous. 

This is disturbing, because beauty is one of the three transcendentals, along with the true and the good, from which value itself comes. God himself is definitely, as St. Augustine formulated it, perfect beauty, perfect truth or being, and perfect good.

“Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you!”

To be insensitive to beauty is to turn away from God. 

And I think we are losing our sense of beauty in recent years. The world is getting uglier. The arts seem moribund. 

Perhaps Bishop Barron is right, however. Jesus did not come for everyone; he makes this clear in the Beatitudes. Perhaps sensitivity to beauty is the sign that you are of his flock.

Cultures differ widely in their ability to appreciate beauty. The English, Germans, and Americans have no sense of beauty. The Romance nations, France, Spain, Italy, are good at it. So are the Slavs, and the Celts. The Koreans are much better at it than the Japanese or Chinese. 

In Canada, it is easy to see the difference. Toronto has little beauty. Even the people are slovenly in dress. In Montreal or Quebec City, there is beauty around every corner. The beauty in Ontario is only in small towns settled by the Irish or Scots: Westport, Perth, Elora. Saint John, heavily settled by the Irish, is awash in beauty, the houses brightly coloured.

Why the difference? To some extent, no doubt, religion—the difference between Catholic and Protestant—has its influence. But it also seems to me that the ability to appreciate beauty is related in some mysterious way to the experience of suffering. Jesus more or less says this in the Beatitudes. 

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Fallacies We Live By

 

I have special difficulty explaining to students the ad populum fallacy and the ad temperantiam fallacy. The problem is that public discourse as a whole is largely currently founded on these two fallacies. Pointing them out causes major cognitive dissonance. They tend to do a double take, and at first be incredulous. 

This is precisely why it is vital to teach them. The fact that we do not teach the logical fallacies in every school is profoundly sinister. It allows us to be manipulated.

The “ad populum” fallacy is the notion that truth is a majority mandate. If everyone thinks something is true, that proves it is true: “everybody knows.” This is the very premise of “constructivism,” the currently dominant educational philosophy. Constructivism holds that all truth is “socially constructed.” Truth is whatever the majority of any given social group says it is, and accordingly varies between cultures. Which is why we get “cultural relativism” and the insistence that all cultures must be accepted to be equal. It is also why we get transsexualism: according to constructivism, if an interest group can just get everyone to agree that a man can become a woman, it is a fact. For this very reason, dissent cannot be tolerated.

This is why classroom teachers always want to break into small groups. They cannot teach; the group must decide. The current Vatican synod on synodality seems to be based on the same dynamic: there is no truth other than whatever the people in the pews want to hear. We all get to vote on whether the sun goes around the earth, or vice versa. In fact, until the time of Copernicus, according to this theory, the sun DID go around the earth. Galileo was dead wrong. Einstein was a lunatic. Slavery was perfectly moral in the US South until those meddling Yankees got involved. 

Interestingly, based on constructivism, a bridge built in India by Scottish engineers, would probably collapse. Scottish mathematics and physics cannot work in India.

The “ad temperantiam” fallacy holds that, whenever there are two opposing views, the truth must lie in the middle. A popular view, as old as Delphi, but also already exploded in ancient times. This fallacy is implicit whenever people object to “extremists”; as if holding a view strongly proves it is wrong. This is perfectly illogical. 

The “ad temperantiam” fallacy is also implied when people demand an immediate ceasefire and a negotiated settlement for, say, the war in Gaza or the war in Ukraine. As though the problem is always a refusal of both or either side to compromise.

If two people hold opposing views strongly, there is no reason to think that a position in the middle between the two, which perhaps no one holds or would argue, is more correct than either of them. If some people think the sky is blue, and some people think the sky is red, this is not proof that the sky is purple. If teacher thinks 2 + 2 = 4, and little Johnny thinks 2 + 2 = 7, this does not prove that 2 + 2 = 5.5. If some people believe the sun goes around the earth, and others that the earth goes around the sun, it does not follow that the heavenly bodies dance around each other. If one country invades another, it does not prove that they have a legitimate grievance, and their opponent is equally responsible for the war in pig-headedly defending themselves.

In the natural course of things, if there is a disagreement between two parties or two positions, one position is probably wrong, in error, and the other correct.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Don't Mention It

 

Whatever you are not allowed to say must be the truth. Nobody needs to ban lies, generally speaking, because they can be disproven.

This is the secret to the “walking on eggshells” experience in the typical dysfunctional family: there is an elephant in the room, and nobody is allowed to notice it.

When speech is restricted in this way, it is a sure sign that a narcissist is involved, and up to no good.

One must not question global warming, or climate change; or else you are a “climate denier.” Because the case for global warming is obviously thin. But the premise is useful for expanding government control.

This is why you must not propose any “conspiracy theories”: because there is at least one monstrous conspiracy afoot. We can now see this much. The deep state is out to get Trump. Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself. 

One is not allowed to say the 2020 election was stolen. Nobody objected much about anyone saying an election was stolen in the US before 2020. This is itself proof that the 2020 election was stolen.

This is why you must not “misgender” anyone: because a man of course cannot become a woman, or a woman a man. No real, sane man ever took serious offense at being mistaken for a woman, or vice versa. 

This is also why, to tiptoe through a minefield, any criticism of homosexual behaviour is dismissed as “homophobia”: because there is a legitimate case to be raised against homosexual behavior. So it must not be raised. 

And one must not criticize Islam for current violence without being called “Islamophobic,” because there is an obvious case that Islam is inherently violent, and has something to do with the terrorism we are seeing.

This is again the truth behind the common perversion of Godwin’s Law: that the first person to make a comparison to Hitler loses the argument. This proves some people are doing things they know are comparable to Hitler. Be wary of the first person in any discussion who appeals to “Godwin’s Law.”

The one apparent outlier is “Holocaust denial.” I am in no position to deny the reality of the Nazi Holocaust. I believe it is real; I know virulent antisemitism is real; but have not done the research. Perhaps in this case, perhaps in some others, the prohibition is indirect: the ban is to discourage research in the area. It is an attempt to close the book, because some of the guilty parties are still in control and do not want their guilt exposed. And some of the purported victims were actually among the perpetrators.

Just go down the list of prohibited speech to discover truth.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

The Meaning of Life

 

“Anyone who loves his life loses it; anyone who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” John 12:25

This was in the gospel reading for last Sunday. It puts paid, in one verse, to the “happy happy joy joy” Hallmark Cards perverted mock Christianity. Life in this world is not about happiness. This world is, as Keats said, the vale of soulmaking.

It is impossible in this world to be intelligent, good, and happy. You can, at best, choose two. 

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

The Laugh Test

 

In a recent Club Random interview, John Cleese and Bill Maher make the important observation that psychopaths have no sense of humour. Nor do sociopaths or narcissists—I suspect it is all the same ball of wax. This is not exactly true; a psychopath will laugh at someone slipping on a banana peel. But they are utterly literal-minded, and so cannot get irony, satire, or even puns.

Then Bill Maher ruins it by citing Donald Trump as an example of this.

It is true that I have never seen Trump laugh in public. But then, try to think of any other prominent politician you have seen laughing. I can’t, with one exception. Kamala Harris.

And she gets raked over the coals for it. People cite it as unlikeable. This may be a perfectly adequate explanation why politicians do not laugh in public. I guess people see it as frivolous, when there are important issues on the table; and perhaps as being out of control of oneself; not wanted in a leader.

Even aside from this, it is reasonably possible to fake a laugh or titter when one really does not get the joke. Accordingly, we cannot use laughing as a measure.

 But there is another, better measure: can they tell a joke, especially extemporaneously? This is a surer test. Even a canned joke, to work, has to have the right timing; being able to judge that shows a sense of humour. And, confounding the original laugh test, the best comedians often do not laugh on stage. It generally spoils the joke, by pointing out the irony and telegraphing it.

By this measure, Trump scores especially high. He can do a two-hour standup routine without notes. Pierre Poilievre seems pretty funny off the cuff.

Those who hate Trump, on the other hand, inevitably do not get his jokes. They always take him absurdly literally. They are the narcissists.

Who is conspicuously not funny, especially off script? I say Justin Trudeau, Joe Biden. Biden’s idea of a joke seems to be a mere insult: “lying dog-faced pony soldier.” And he prefaces every lie with the phrase “not a joke”—implying that he does not understand what a joke is. He thinks it is the same as a lie. 

I cannot picture Trudeau ever attempting a joke. I don’t think he could do it even scripted.

QED.

Narcissists and psychopaths are literal-minded, Cleese and Maher go one to agree, because they are nervous; nervous people are afraid of anything unexpected. They jump at shadows. They will therefore fear, resist, and deny the reversal of expectations that is every joke’s premise and punch line. 

“What an elephant was doing in my pyjamas, I’ll never know.”

That they fear the unexpected disproves the claim of current psychology that a psychopath has no conscience. What else do they fear? Truth being told and being exposed is what they fear; they would not fear it if they did not know they were lying and doing wrong. 

This is a life lesson worth remembering: beware people who do not laugh, except at slapstick, and are not witty.

And definitely do not elect them to high office.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Everybody's Going Christian?

 

Benny Johnson is also noticing the ground shifting:

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.