John C. Wright's Blog, page 171

Parable of the Filth Pit

Should the fact that those of us who believe in God and love Him want very badly to believe in Him raise a skeptical question in our minds? Should we not, as men of reason, be unwilling to trust our own observations and conclusions as we would be in a case where we have no bias toward one particular conclusion or another?

Should we not be utterly impartial when looking at the evidence for an against God, and listen to all arguments with equal candor and patience?

This question may be making what philosopher’s call a categorization error. The question categorizes the belief in God as if it were a scientific theory, rather than a love story.

Suppose, Dear Reader, that there were a beautiful blushing virgin whom you had just asked to marry you. Surely it would be somewhat heedless of her to reply, “I am strongly moved by passionate and erotic love for you, my handsome and strong suitor, to accept your proposal, except that I fear I am biased toward you. I want very badly to wed you, to be swept off my feet and carried away to the bridal bed: but, surely I should only decide to accept a proposal from a man I do not love, because then I will be able to trust my own observations, and I will have no bias one way or the other.”

Would not this be an odd and wrongheaded reply to hear from any girl’s lips? Who told her that decisions about love in her heart should be made on the basis of loveless observations about things not in her heart?

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On the Hidden Face of God

Why God is hidden from Man? Why not, since all things are possible with God, paint the Ten Commandments on the Moon in letters from the language before the Tower of Babel, which, all men seeing each night and being unable to misread or misunderstand, would give sufficient evidence even to the skeptic that God was real, and that there was only one?

I was just listening to a lecture by the philosopher and theologian Peter Kreeft on this topic (Because good scholars always go to the primary sources, let me point you to where I found this lecture: http://www.peterkreeft.com/audio.htm) Dr. Kreeft proposes that there is only two ways possible for a God to make himself known to man.

Possible Way Number One is by direct evidence that will convince the brain. Intellectuals like myself (and any academics teaching our young in modern and secular institutions) claim and claim loudly that when evidence is presented, we shall, upon our honor, change our opinions and beliefs and ways of life to confirm to what the cold hard facts of reality command.

This claim is not to be believed. I read of case of a prominent atheist in England, A.J. Ayer, who in 1988 had a near-death experience, an experience as obvious and unusual as the vision encountered by St. Paul on the Road to Damascus. Dr. Jeremy George, his physician, reports that Ayer had confided to him: “I saw a Divine Being. I’m afraid I’m going to have to revise all my books and opinions.”

But then he publicly reaffirmed his atheism, steadfastly ignored the evidence, and talked himself into believing that his memory and his senses were faulty. He concluded that he had seen nothing, that his sense and his senses were faulty, on the premise that his speculations could not be faulty. He was also a leader of the Humanist movement, and a public reverse of his beliefs would have inconvenienced or embarrassed him.

If this tale is true, A.J. Ayer is a worm.  Philosophers are supposed to face changes of fortune and the opinions of the world philosophically, hence the name.

On the other hand, how can we fail to pity weakness? This type of repellent intellectual cowardice is not unusual; it is the human condition.

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Best SF Film of the Decade

The fine fellows over at SfSignal asked me to participate in one of their Mind Melds, where science fiction writers and fans are asked to hold forth on issues great and small. This time round, the question was to name the top Science Fiction films of the Decade.

Here is the link

http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2010/12/mind-meld-the-top-sff-films-of-the-decade/

Unfortunately, I read the question wrong, and thought I was being asked to name the best science fiction film (singular) of the decade, and so I had to eliminate, or pass over unmentioned, a very long list of very good flicks.

The Honorable Atheist

I don’t think it is necessary to defend the idea that there are honest and virtuous atheists. Unlike Leftists, there is nothing innately wicked or innately dishonest in their core values or basic assumptions which require them necessarily to support and defend wickedness, lies, indecency and cruelty.

Indeed, many of them are atheists because they conclude it is the rational position, and, if they are serious, they will hold that same standard of reason in other arenas when facing other questions, and may well live honorable and honest lives, because virtue is life lived according to right reason.

However, I think an atheist society (that is, a society whose basic values and virtues reflected in its institutions and laws are atheist and anti-Christian) cannot be honorable or honest for long. We cannot conclude merely from the fact that an atheist living in a primarily Christian society can be a decent man that the creation of atheist laws will create just laws, or atheist institutions will be decent institutions.

Atheists, even very honest atheists such as I once was, cannot be quite honest about history: either they ignore it altogether (a type of dishonesty) or they believe a self-congratulatory Victorian myth about how the modern world rose from the cesspool of the Dark Ages lead by that archenemy of the Church, winged Science with her Shining Sword of Truth, and in triumphant march overturned all the obscurantist superstitions of ignorant churchmen like  Copernicus and advanced, singing with glory, to the clear-thinking Scientific Achievement of men like Karl Marx and Ayn Rand, cured polio, fired rockets to the moon, split the atom, and we even now hover on the brink of one last final step upward to Utopia.

One would have thought the Great War would have put paid to this myth, but it is as current among atheists now as it was in the days of H.G. Wells. We Christians do not expect Utopia to appear on this Earth at any point before Doomsday, but there are good societies and bad, and pre-Christian and post-Christian societies are much more vulnerable to the temptation to be bad.

The testament of history makes it all too clear that such abominations as ritual sodomy, temple prostitution, child sacrifice rule the ancient pre-Christian world, and sacred sodomy, pornography, “one-child policies” and abortion rule the modern post-Christian world, with gulags and holocausts the accompanying the more vehemently anti-Christian societies, and political correctness and thought police accompanying the more benign strains of the disease.

Let us not mistake a belief in virtuous pagans, exceptional men like Trajan, Aristotle or Confucius, with the belief that a pagan society would be honorable or just or tolerable.

Let us also make a distinction between the morality that a rational and honorable atheist can reach and that which a Christian saint can reach. A rational atheist can find perfectly sound reasons to be just, temperate, moderate, and courageous, because these are examples of the reason ruling the unruly and selfish passions and tempers. However, no rational atheist can understand or justify the mystical love of chivalry, of charity to the poor, of self-sacrifice, or any of the Christian virtues of Faith, Hope, or Love. Loving your enemies simply is not rational and no non-Christian can see any reason to do it. At least, not rational by what the material world counts as reason.

Even a rational atheist, such as I was, is and must be a snob, because he must regard ninety-nine percent of all humans who have ever lived, and all the wisest and best men who ever wrote, as either chumps of a massive con game, or fools addicted to folly in the one area that most concerned them.

All atheists are snobs, and snobbery is no basis for an egalitarian society, or one that treats the poor and downtrodden with charity and generosity, or one that treat women with chivalry.

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Sound and Fury of the Sexual Revolt

I wonder at the concept of sex being the new god, the new absolute for the modern age, the one thing that justifies and sanctifies any sin and crime, natural or unnatural. The one exception to our sex and pornography drenched culture is found when it comes to children. Child pornography and pederasty is still disdained, even abhorred. It is almost as if our society retains some dim hunch that innocence is a good thing, and so we seek to remove children from the sweat-stained meat locker of anything-goes orgiastic sex-selling that constitutes our modern culture.

Of course, unborn children are murdered by the millions, far outnumbering the Jews killed in the Holocaust, or human sacrifices killed by Aztecs or Carthaginians, and killed, not by Nazis and enemies, but by their own mothers.  It considered butchery, not murder, because of a legal absurdity that holds children of humans are not human: this, from a culture that smugly regards itself both as enlightened and scientific.

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Catholic Girls are Sexier than Objectivist Girls

I was having a discussion with an Objectivist about adultery, divorce, and masturbation (which he, to my amusement, malaproped as a ‘Sin of Odin’). The discussion shipwrecked because the assumption that self-control was impossible, and undesirable if it were possible, in sexual matters but in no other matters of life, is one I could not countenance. I could not live up to the cool standards of a philosopher and discuss the matter soberly, because the subject matter was too disgusting and too personal. Blame me for a failure of patience.

Part of my impatience was provoked because he and I were discussing Objectivism, a philosophy that claims to be logical, and which is logical, granting its naturalistic premises, in all areas but this one.

Objectivism proceeds by little mental leaps over blind-spots where Ayn Rand simply “blanks out” the concept or the fact she does not want to face, or she papers over the blank spot with fierce and high-flown rhetoric. For her, true love is an expression of one’s highest values and deepest virtues: the heroic man is attracted to queenly and accomplished women, and the wretched man is attracted to whorish and loathsome women. Accomplishment and loathsomeness is measured by the woman’s loyalty to heroic (that is, Objectivist) values. All this is an interesting, if simplistic, theory of the psychological roots of love, but it is used in her writings, both fiction and nonfiction, and in her life, to justify adultery and divorce.

Coming from a  philosophy grounded firmly on the principle that reason and the vision of man as an heroic being must command all aspects of life (except, by sudden exception, this one) I found this sleazy excuse for utter wretchedness too ugly and too ungainly to dignify with further discussion.

From the axiom that man is an heroic being, Rand reaches the conclusion that man (in this one area) can act like the lowest sex-addicted traitor and philanderer, liar and craven oathbreaker?

From the axiom that man is a rational animal who must order his life via reason, Rand reaches the conclusion that man (in this one area) can follow his lowest animal instinct, break the bonds of civil concord and domestic love, and merely act howsoever one’s overactive sexual organs direct?

Oh, for shame. For shame.

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Quote of the Day: The New Absolute

This is a quote from a talk by philosopher and theologian Peter Kreeft, from his talk, Christ’s Concept of Happiness Versus the World’s which can be found here.

Sex is, quite simply, our society’s new god; our new Absolute. Anything is done, tolerated, sacrificed, justified, sanctified, glorified for this god.

A third of our mothers murder their unborn babies in sacrifice to this god. Of course abortion is about sex. The only reason for abortion is to have sex without babies. Abortion is backup contraception.

Or, look at the acceptance of divorce. Families, the one absolutely necessary building block of all societies are destroyed for this god. Half of American citizens commit suicide for this god; for Divorce is suicide of the ‘one flesh’ that love has created.

No one justifies lying, cheating, betraying, promise-breaking, devastating and harming strangers; but we justify, we expect, we tolerating doing this to the one person we promised most seriously to be faithful to forever. We justify divorce.

No one justifies child abuse, except for sex. Divorce is child abuse for the sake of sex.

Even all the churches justify divorce, except one: the one that does not claim the authority to correct Christ–and she is accused of being authoritarian.

Good News!

One of the rare pleasures of being a published author, a pleasure than plumbers and physicians and highwaymen cannot share, is the thrill of seeing the cover art for your next book.

Well, friends, that just happened to me this very hour. The art department at Tor books just showed me what the cover for my next book, COUNT TO A TRILLION will look like. Naturally they are going to put the title and name on the cover, as well as, in a prominent location, the price. This is merely the initial art.

While it is true that some authors grouse and gripe about mistakes in the cover art, it is my policy never to complain. The editor sent me cover art in strictest secrecy, merely to ask if there are any inaccuracies, for example, in the hair color or cup size of my heroine, Space Princess Voluptua, or whether the polearm held by the Vampire-Bride of the Samurai Nosferatu of Kyoto is a naginata or a glaive-guisarme (the difference of course is that glaive-guisarmes have a hook on the dorsal blade, whereas naginata are smooth: readers notice this crucial details.)

Let us examine the cover art together, shall we?

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Onewordworld

In discussing bad (and good) titles for science fiction and fantasy tales, the question came up as to whether one-word titles can make up in brevity and ‘punch’ for their lack of informativeness or poetry or whatever it is that long titles have that short titles lack: TIME CONSIDERED AS A HELIX OF SEMIPRECIOUS STONES or REPENT HARLEQUIN! SAID THE TICKTOCKMAN versus DUNE or FOUNDATION or CHTHON.

I submit that there is an easy way to make any title into a science fictional title, make it evocative, and yet keep the brevity that fits on the spine of the book. I call it, the ‘Rule of World’! Any word can be made as if by magic into a perfectly serviceable science fiction title merely by tacking the word “world” to the end.

Let us attempt the experiment!

Ringworld (Niven)
Deathworld (Harrison)
Discworld (Pratchett)
Wheelworld (Harrison)
Westworld (film)
Waterworld (bad film)
Showboat World (Vance)
Eyes of the Overworld (also by Vance)
Shadow World (role playing game)
Riverworld (Farmer)
Rocheworld (Forward)
Well World (Chalker)
Witch World (Norton)
Computerworld (van Vogt)
Rimmerworld (from RED DWARF)
Warworld (from DC Comics)
Ghostworld (a comic by Clowes or a film by Zwigoff)

So far, the experiment is a success. Nearly any name can be added to the word world to make an instant science fictional title!

Darkworld
Stormworld
Dreamworld
Otherworld
Autumn World
Naziworld
Techworld
Vengeance of the Nosferatu Samurai Brides of Mars

See how easy it is! What about more ordinary words? Any word will do! You do not need any artistic judgment. Merely tack the word on the end!

Noseworld
Washerwomanworld
Pumbingworld
Dogshowworld
Woadwoldworld — a world where many wolds contain woad.
Woadwoldroadworld — a world where many wolds to which roads run contain woad.

Uh. Okay maybe you still have to use a little judgment as to what to pick for a title.

Quote for Today

Simone Weil: “Literature and morality. Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating. Therefore, ‘imaginative literature’ is either boring or immoral (or a mixture of both). It only escapes from this alternative if in some way it passes over to the side of reality through the power of art – and only genius can do that.”

I agree that imaginary goodness is boring. There is nothing I would rather do than spend a quiet night at home with my lovely wife and loud children, petting the cat, slippers on the grate, fire in the fireplace, television tuned to a black and white movie. One cannot make that scene exciting or dramatic, except by throwing the cat into the fireplace.

Drama is about adventure; adventure is about solving problems, preferably terrible problems that force horrific dilemmas which in turn call upon unexpected reserves of stoic heroism, courage in the face of disaster and death; happiness is about rest and satisfaction. May heaven spare me from adventures!

We cannot imagine heaven because we cannot imagine a perfect contentment or lasting ecstasy that would not either burden us with boredom or burn us up. All false pleasures wear away with time, all things that seem perfect in this world turn out to be false: and yet the hunger for perfection cannot be drowned out from the human heart, no matter in what deep and unlit well of cynicism we try.

I also agree that real life evil is boring. Nazis wore snappy uniforms, it is true, but Maoists wear drab pajamas. Most crime is not committed by James Bond arch-villains but by tattooed yobs and druggies beating girlfriends or committing petty larceny on persons weaker and poorer than themselves. Even more boringly, most crime is poor-on-poor, and there is no change in social conditions that will change it; a matter of a blackened eye or a stolen purse rather than a daring crime involving millions, or a murder cunningly concealed. In real life, most detectives are overweight, and most criminals are turned in by their friends or confess under questioning, or as part of a plea bargain.

Is Simon Weil right? Does portraying evil as it truly is, and goodness as it truly is, without losing the audience, take genius?