I love belonging to a politically subversive movement...

Progressives seem really threatened by Thomism.

Wikileaks lets us listen in on the anti-Catholic bigotry of the Progressives.

//From:jhalpin@americanprogress.org To: JPalmieri@americanprogress.org, john.podesta@gmail.com  Date: 2011-04-11 21:10

Subject: Re: Conservative Catholicism
   
 Excellent point. They can throw around "Thomistic" thought and "subsidiarity" and sound sophisticated because no one knows what the hell they're talking about.

Jennifer Palmieri wrote:  I imagine they think it is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion. Their rich friends wouldn't understand if they became evangelicals.

  ----- Original Message ----- From: John Halpin To: John Podesta ; Jennifer Palmieri Sent: Mon Apr 11 18:55:59 2011 Subject: Conservative Catholicism  

Ken Auletta's latest piece on Murdoch in the New Yorker starts off with the aside that both Murdoch and Robert Thompson, managing editor of the WSJ, are raising their kids Catholic. Friggin' Murdoch baptized his kids in Jordan where John the Baptist baptized Jesus.  Many of the most powerful elements of the conservative movement are all Catholic (many converts) from the SC and think tanks to the media and social groups.  It's an amazing bastardization of the faith. They must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations and must be totally unaware of Christian democracy. //

This is what the "wedge strategy of 2012" and questions about contraceptives was always about.

Merry Cosmos - 

Notice how Sagan emphasizes the incredible and incomprehensible vastness and immensity of the universe?  And how he offers a prophetic insight that "the sky is calling?"

Atheist though he was, he was also - as a rational human being - what a Thomist would call an "intellector of being." Therefore, he was an "intellector of the good" since "good" and "being" are interchangeable.

As the human mind expands up to contemplate the very large or down to contemplate the very small, particular beings dissolve and the mind begins to obtain a concept of Being itself, which is Goodness, which is the reason that we feel a giddy euphoria from contemplating the large, whether it is "billions and billions of stars" or the Cosmos or God.

Sagan couldn't help himself from scratching on the door of theology.  He, like all of us, are wired that way.

It is just so obvious when it's put that way.

From reading Aquinas' commentaries on de Anima and the Nichomachean Ethics, I knew that the intellect is prior to the will in that the intellect "tees up" the options for the will to choose, but it takes Thomistic Sci-Fi author Mike Flynn to summarize the idea in this understandable way:

On the free will front, I explained the Aristotelian position: the will is an appetite for the products of the intellect, and the intellect is therefore prior to the will.

"For the products of the intellect."  Good stuff.  The intellect "gets busy" and outlines the pros and cons of a decision, but the will has to choose by an act of "appetite" what will be done.

Flynn continues:

I gave the parallel with the perceptions of the senses and the emotions (or sensitive appetites). The will is necessarily free because the intellect does not know perfectly. I asked how many wanted world peace. Most raised their hands, causing some worry regarding the others. But when questioned, most admitted they did not know what world peace would look like or how it would be achieved. Since you cannot desire what you do not know, the will is free to choose various means to the end. That's all free will means, after all. It doesn't mean muscular motions, or random choices, or unpredictable choices. For more detail see a previous essay.

If people don't have Aquinas, they will follow any idiot who comes along.

Science Fiction author and Thomist Mike Flynn does a great job of dismantling yet another bullshit claim that humans are just machines.  The proximate cause of Flynn's essay is a Telegraph article entitled "Neuroscience, free will and determinism: 'I'm just a machine' - Our bodies can be controlled by outside forces in the universe, discovers Tom Chivers. So where does that leave free will?"

Actually, the subtitle gives away the show.  Our bodies can be controlled by outside forces in the universe?  Has Tom Chivers never fallen down, been wrestled to the ground or drunk?

In this case, though, the gosh-wow thrust of the story is a magnetic wand that can cause a subject's hand to flinch, which is no different in principle than causing the hand to flinch by holding a lit match under it, and, yet, no one starts describing the brain as a machine without free will when that happens.

Flynn writes:

 We might start with a few things free will [volition] does not mean.


It does not mean a random choice.

It does not mean a successful choice.

It does not mean an unpredictable choice.

It does not mean an unforeseeable choice.

It does not mean a surprising choice.

It does not mean an unreasoned choice.

It does not mean an unmotivated choice.

It does not mean indifference to the ends chosen.

It does not mean a deliberated choice.

It need not mean a conscious choice.

And it does not mean that the will is unencumbered by habit, error, mental or physical illness, or other impairment -- including magnetic wands. It only means that it is not determined by external forces. Someone could seize hold of Prof. Haggard's finger and twitch it mechanically, but the fact that an external force can also move his finger does not demonstrate that in the common course of nature Prof. Haggard cannot normally choose to do so.

The last bullet needs a comment: If the human subconscious is real, it is as much a part of the mind as any other; so subconscious choices are also encompassed by free will.

Part of the problem is the blindness of modern science to formal and final causation. These two causes are making a quiet re-appearance under new names like "emergent property"/"self-organizing system" and "attractor basins," but they have been banished from our thinking of causation for several hundred years. Therefore, Haggard and others misunderstand both "will" and "free."

The electrochemical reactions in the brain are simply the material cause of the choice. They are not the formal or final causes.

Read the whole thing to get an understanding of how lost so much of science is without Aristotelianism.

Thomas v. Darwin.

A debate that only a nerd could love.

Can a person be moral without God?

Mike Flynn's Thomistic approach is better than anything I've heard in a bunch of debates on the subject.

Mark Shea offers this gloss:

In the course of it, we discover a) that Fundamentalist Christians who imagine that morality is impossible for an atheist simple do not know what they are talking about. However, we also discover that atheist moralists (aka "New Atheists") have not thought deeply at all about the untenableness of their own position. Real atheists are actually the ones who argue the most strenuously that morality is a subjective illusion, that there is no answer to the question "Why not be cruel?" without smuggling in a transcendent code of ethics reflecting the Will of You Know Who, and so forth. So the problem is not that atheists are immoral. The problem is that atheists are theives who constantly borrow Greatest Hits from a transcendent worldview rooted in Theism, while lying to everybody (including themselves) that their favorite "self-evident" truths are just artifacts of evolution or "practical" or some other lame naturalist piece of bafflegab while ignoring the fact that they are privileging their own favorite moral precepts as Transcendent.

First Principles

From Just Thomism:

-I read a rational account of why an (obvious) evil is evil, and thought "when you get to the point of having to having to reason about this, you’re doomed." You can know who has power by seeing [who is] allowed to get angry in public, and who doesn’t have to establish the first principles he’s arguing from.

Is Google making us stupid? The failure of memory, the starvation of imagination, the ennervation of reason.

Well, yes, according to this Antlantic essay. Disengagement from reading is one example:

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

As the author Nicholas Carr points out, hyperlinks propel us to new text, and novelty is interesting and keeps the attention, making the process of sticking with the original text harder work.

I read a piece in the Daily Law Journal last week by an instructor in legal writing who says that he is hearing from law firms that the writing ability of new lawyers has declined markedly over the last 7 years. This claim probably ought to be taken with a large grain of salt; I doubt that there has ever been a seven year period when older lawyers haven't perceived a marked decline in the writing ability of young lawers. Memory is flexible that way; we are always - and always were - better than the "younger generation."

But assuming the truth of the claim, and the fact that law school admission criteria haven't declined and that legal writing is being taught, the answer according to the instructor was the effect of e-mails. Writing is difficult. It requires perseverence and that means that when a tricky bit of thought has to be thought out and put on paper, the person ought to be doing that, rather than looking at e-mails or other attention distractors.

As Carr points out in the Atlantic essay, the internet medium channels the way we think in a direction that is not conducive to the hard work of ordering one's thought. We can skip around capriciously, from thought to thought, and at the end of the day have nothing to show for it.

The exercise of memory is another thing that may be declining. I now expect to know things that I previously would have had to wait until I got to a library. For example, when was the Battle of Lepanto? Did Sigourney Weaver star in "Holes"? When did Tom Seaver pitch for the Mets? These questions once might have vexed and frustrated me, but now I expect the magic of Google to pull them up in seconds.

In studying Aquinas, I have slowly come to marvel at his prodigious memory. St. Thomas quotes everyone - Aristotle, Averroe, Pseudo-Dionysius, Plato, Boethius, Augustine, the Bible, Abelard, etc., etc. He must have been doing it largely from memory inasmuch as texts could not hav been all that available and there was hardly an indexing system worthy of the name. I've recently confirmed my suspicion in a book that details the memory techniques that Aquinas himself suggested be used. (See S.T. II-II, q. 49, a. 1, ad 2 and this post. )

Thomas' memory techniques are nothing special; they are the techniquest that you might get at any business seminar on "improving your memory." The point is that these techniques were necessary and were part of the living experience of the educated class of the time, a tradition that took a substantial hit with the introduciton of printing and may whither away almost completely with the hyper-indexing capabilities of Google.

The failure of memory may have some profound unintended consequences.

According to Thomas, as essentially embodied intellectual creatures, we cannot thing without "phantasms", without images. Everything we know comes from our senses. We know things first as the actual individual thing in which a "form", i.e., a concept or an "essence", is embodied.

Hence, if someone mentions "triangle", some image - a coat-hanger, a drawing, etc. - forms the basis of our understanding. We may "flash" on that image (or maybe not, but the image is always there, ready to be called upon if we have to do something new or complicated with it.)

According to Thomas, this all means that our reasoning is part of our "imagination." We do our thinking with our imagination because thinking involves constructing a reality that is not there. "4" is not "there" until we add "2 plus 2." The inalienable rights of Man are not "there" until we work through our argument.

Accordingly, we need a substantial storehouse of "phantasms" or "images" which are retained in our memory if we want to have have a vibrant imagination and a powerful ability to reason.

We can sometimes see this in practical application. People who know things - whose memories are filled with the images provided by experience - can see things that those who lack that experience cannot see. In one of his books, the late Stephen Jay Gould - who was an expert on snails - talked about how he was on an expedition with other biologists who overlooked the many fossilized snails that Gould saw as standing out in bas relief. In other words, having the images of snails in his memory allowed him to see snails, which he then used to substantiate his theory of "punctuated evolution." I'm sure that we have all had a similar - albeit "non-snail" - experience at some time.

If Gould had not had those images in his memory, he wouldn't have seen the snails, and our intellectual life might have been poorer for that lack.

Hence, from a Thomistic standpoint, by starving our memory, Google may be weakening our ability to reason.

A Discussion on "Christian" Politics.

This is something that I posted on Thomisticguy's website.

Timbo wrote:

Finally, in my view, some of these issues, as a practical matter, don't get us very far for the amount of capital that is expended. Gay marriage is an example. While I'm not advocating for it, I don't see how this issue directly impacts the message of Jesus or the mission of the church. Its a civil issue. Keeping homosexual people from calling themselves married won't change their conduct, or ours. It certainly won't turn people gay who aren't living that life already. Nevertheless, it turns up as a hot button issue for "evangelicals". We spend so much fighting this when it will have such a small practical impact.

Timbo,

Thom has anticipated much of what I was going to say – but I’ve had computer problems.

First, I will admit that my teeth begin to ache when I hear someone espouse a “Christian” position in politics.

I think it is fair to say that identifying a particular political position as the “Christian” position is “problematic” and that the explicit injection of “church” into political affairs can discredit faith. Interestingly, Pope Benedict has made that point in his recent encyclicals and in his book “Jesus of Nazareth.” Benedict has been saying that the Church is not a political party and is not strictly interested in reforming the world.

Needless to say, I’ve been puzzled about why he has been putting such an emphasis on this point. Maybe your points tie into his concerns.

On the other hand, Benedict also says that the Church is interested in the cultivation of good ethics and morals in its members and believes that its members have an obligation to charity and justice.

The Church's social teaching argues on the basis of reason and natural law, namely, on the basis of what is in accord with the nature of every human being. It recognizes that it is not the Church's responsibility to make this teaching prevail in political life. Rather, the Church wishes to help form consciences in political life and to stimulate greater insight into the authentic requirements of justice as well as greater readiness to act accordingly, even when this might involve conflict with situations of personal interest. Building a just social and civil order, wherein each person receives what is his or her due, is an essential task which every generation must take up anew. As a political task, this cannot be the Church's immediate responsibility. Yet, since it is also a most important human responsibility, the Church is duty-bound to offer, through the purification of reason and through ethical formation, her own specific contribution towards understanding the requirements of justice and achieving them politically.

The Church cannot and must not take upon herself the political battle to bring about the most just society possible. She cannot and must not replace the State. Yet at the same time she cannot and must not remain on the sidelines in the fight for justice. She has to play her part through rational argument and she has to reawaken the spiritual energy without which justice, which always demands sacrifice, cannot prevail and prosper. A just society must be the achievement of politics, not of the Church. Yet the promotion of justice through efforts to bring about openness of mind and will to the demands of the common good is something which concerns the Church deeply.

b) Love—caritas—will always prove necessary, even in the most just society. There is no ordering of the State so just that it can eliminate the need for a service of love. Whoever wants to eliminate love is preparing to eliminate man as such. There will always be suffering which cries out for consolation and help. There will always be loneliness. There will always be situations of material need where help in the form of concrete love of neighbour is indispensable.[20]

The State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person—every person—needs: namely, loving personal concern. We do not need a State which regulates and controls everything, but a State which, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need. The Church is one of those living forces: she is alive with the love enkindled by the Spirit of Christ. This love does not simply offer people material help, but refreshment and care for their souls, something which often is even more necessary than material support. In the end, the claim that just social structures would make works of charity superfluous masks a materialist conception of man: the mistaken notion that man can live “by bread alone” (Mt 4:4; cf. Dt 8:3)—a conviction that demeans man and ultimately disregards all that is specifically human.

29. We can now determine more precisely, in the life of the Church, the relationship between commitment to the just ordering of the State and society on the one hand, and organized charitable activity on the other. We have seen that the formation of just structures is not directly the duty of the Church, but belongs to the world of politics, the sphere of the autonomous use of reason. The Church has an indirect duty here, in that she is called to contribute to the purification of reason and to the reawakening of those moral forces without which just structures are neither established nor prove effective in the long run.

The direct duty to work for a just ordering of society, on the other hand, is proper to the lay faithful. As citizens of the State, they are called to take part in public life in a personal capacity. So they cannot relinquish their participation “in the many different economic, social, legislative, administrative and cultural areas, which are intended to promote organically and institutionally the common good.” [21] The mission of the lay faithful is therefore to configure social life correctly, respecting its legitimate autonomy and cooperating with other citizens according to their respective competences and fulfilling their own responsibility.[22] Even if the specific expressions of ecclesial charity can never be confused with the activity of the State, it still remains true that charity must animate the entire lives of the lay faithful and therefore also their political activity, lived as “social charity”.[23]

Deus Caritas Est.

When I first read this I was puzzled because I thought it was the responsibility of the Church to form just structures. Of course, Benedict is not saying that the Church has no responsibility in that area, just that it does not have a “direct” responsibility.
The direct responsibility belongs to the “lay faithful” who have been formed in the traditions of Christian charity and justice.

Also, notice, as Thom alludes, the Church’s call to justice and charity is through “reason and natural law”, which are not explicitly “Christian” projects. So, as a Catholic, one should oppose – say – “same sex marriage” not because the Church says so or because the Bible says so, but because one has been formed in the traditions of reason and natural law and can recognize that the natural end of marriage is the creation of new human life within a framework of natural justice and love.

I also want to amplify Thom’s point about social changes that have made living a life of natural justice problematic.

I’ve been practicing law for 25 years. During that time I have seen that areas that were originally within the real m of conscience have now come under the realm of legal compulsion. For example, a case in the ‘90s held that a widow could not refuse to rent her guest house to an unmarried couple because it violated California’s Fair Employment and Housing Law. Previously, her religious beliefs would not have conflicted with the law, but now she is obliged to surrender those convictions or lose the income that she might need to survive. Likewise, great effort has been made to bring religious charitable organizations into compliance with anti-discrimination laws, such that Catholic Charities has been forced to shut down its adoption program for disabled children in Boston because it cannot reasonably comply with the edict to place such children with homosexual couples. Similarly, I know of a published decision that held the firing of a person who happened to be a pastor from a government EEOC position was permissible because the Pastor was mouse-trapped into affirming his belief in the literal accuracy of the Bible, albeit there was no evidence that he ever acted in a discriminatory fashion. Similarly, Catholic hospitals and Catholic doctors are coming under pressure to practice abortions.

What has happened is something like the old legal notion of “coming to the nuisance.” Religious positions haven’t changed, but secular positions have, and, now, people sigh and wonder why those “Christians” insist on having their own way in such a way that they inject religion into politics.

I’m not saying that you necessarily disagree with any of this, but it did give me an opportunity to ponder the subject, which I'm cross-posting to my blog.

Recently discovered Thomistic blogs.

Just Thomism

The Supplement.

"Saved by faith" and other Pelagian heresies.

Thomistic blogger "Reginald de Piperno has a nice post on why "cooperation with grace" is not Pelagian or Semi-Pelagian.