Size does not matter

The unstoppable Brian Visaggio of Saint Superman has posted a rhapsody about the appalling size of the universe in comparison to the size of the planet we inhabit. It is a moving and well-written piece, but it does not move me.

Pursuant to the point his reader Mary makes in the first comment on his post, there’s a good anecdote about Chesterton having lunch with (I think) Alexander Wolcott. Wolcott declared (I’m paraphrasing the whole thing, here) that, if a rhinoceros were to charge into their restaurant, Chesterton, for all his democratic and Christian sympathies, would be forced to admit its absolute power over those present. Chesterton replied that though he would be the first to gladly admit of its power, he would also be the first to rise and coolly inform the rhinoceros that, although it had power in plenty, it had no authority whatsoever.

So it is with the cosmos. The Earth vanishes quickly as we broaden our view of everything that exists – Sagan and other atheists have been eager to point that out.  Nevertheless, it remains the case that it is on this pale blue dot that God Incarnate strode among mortal beings.  Jupiter is an enormous planet, and the Milky Way is a vastly large galaxy, and there are stars greater even than Sol, but it is in this miniscule backwater that God Himself was once born a man.  The vast, empty, senseless expanses of the universe at large are pointless by comparison, and need not even be thought of.

H.P. Lovecraft had a powerful passage in one of his poems (yes, he wrote poems), “Nemesis:”

“I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded,
Without knowledge or lustre or name.”

This is one of the few true things he ever wrote. It is profitless to meditate upon the vastness of a still-to-be-filled cosmos. The story of mankind has only begun, and though we may look upon those purely hypothetical pictures of a huge and empty universe (for in truth we have neither been there nor sent probes there) with a sort of sad awe, there is nothing in them to suggest that we will not one day conquer them as Israel conquered Canaan. Not that Canaan was empty, of course, but you get the picture. It is not a pretty picture, but is one in which we figure heavily.

I am not humbled by the size of the universe, but rather reminded of the great and terrible things that we as a race have yet to do. Lewis understood this as well as anyone, and wept thereat. I do not weep.

Horrifying excellence

Through the power of Dark Methods of which it would be imprudent to speak (see Samuel 28:3-25 oh nooooooo), the good people at the Ignatius Press have been able to call up the shade of G.K. Chesterton for the purpose of an interview about the latest Dan Brown masterwork, The Lost Symbol.  Brown famously authored The Da Vinci Code, and you all know how that worked out.

Chesterton’s candour on this matter is typical:

Ignatius Insight: And what of the claim, in The Da Vinci Code, that the Church has suppressed the gentle Jesus for a divinized Jesus who inspires fear, hatred, and violence?

Chesterton: We have all heard people say a hundred times over, for they seem never to tire of saying it, that the Jesus of the New Testament is indeed a most merciful and humane lover of humanity, but that the Church has hidden this human character in repellent dogmas and stiffened it with ecclesiastical terrors till it has taken on an inhuman character. This is, I venture to repeat, very nearly the reverse of the truth. The truth is that it is the image of Christ in the churches that is almost entirely mild and merciful. It is the image of Christ in the Gospels that is a good many other things as well. The figure in the Gospels does indeed utter in words of almost heart-breaking beauty his pity for our broken hearts. But they are very far from being the only sort of words that he utters. Nevertheless they are almost the only kind of words that the Church in its popular imagery ever represents him as uttering. That popular imagery is inspired by a perfectly sound popular instinct. The mass of the poor are broken, and the mass of the people are poor, and for the mass of mankind the main thing is to carry the conviction of the incredible compassion of God. But nobody with his eyes open can doubt that it is chiefly this idea of compassion that the popular machinery of the Church does seek to carry. [8]

The original impetus for the Chesterton passage there (originally from a chapter in The Everlasting Man ["The Riddles of the Gospel"]) is his remarking on the complete absence of any statues of Christ driving the money-lenders from the Temple or turning on frauds in scorn.  “There is something appalling,” he writes,  “something that makes the blood run cold, in the idea of having a statue of Christ in wrath. There is something insupportable even to the imagination in the idea of turning the corner of a street or coming out into the spaces of a marketplace, to meet the petrifying petrifaction of that figure as it turned upon a generation of vipers, or that face as it looked at the face of a hypocrite.”  It’s a good chapter.

Anyway, read the whole thing.  Do it!  The article, I mean, but the chapter too if you feel like it.

Saving the world

Lars Walker, at the Mere Comments blog, has a note about the recent death of Norman Borlaug, a truly astonishing and unjustly obscure man.  Walker points with a certain frustration (rightly so, I think) to complaints levelled at Borlaug’s unparalleled successes and writes:

For leftists, saving billions of lives isn’t enough. You’ve got to do it the right way.

Indeed, but I had an objection to that.  It really is the case that you have to do it the right way; since it is always better to endure hardship and evil than to perpetrate them, it is therefore entirely correct to say that saving billions of lives wouldn’t necessarily be enough to make any act morally licit.  It really would have to be done the right way.

To borrow entirely from a comment I already posted over there: the trouble is that we’re looking at this from different sides of the same problem.  It’s not the case that saving billions of lives is immoral because it comes as a result of a wrong act, but rather that the wrong act is immoral and that its consequences, unless inextricably bound up in whether the act is right or wrong, are irrelevant. For example, the consequences of an act of theft are wholly relevant to its moral status, because one of those consequences (the unjust deprivation of someone of his property) is what makes it theft in the first place. If it were rather an act of rape that happened to free a thousand slaves, however, the freeing of those slaves is not relevant to the moral status of the rape because the freeing of slaves has nothing to do with whether or not rape is rape.

The mere fact of billions being alive who would otherwise have died is morally good, or at least neutral, but “saving” can mean a lot of things, depending upon what was actually done, and it’s here that the trouble lies.  If that “saving” involved the murder of an innocent and unwilling man, for example, then the act of saving would in that case indeed be immoral and it really would be better – shocking as it is – for the one who would otherwise commit the murder to allow the billions to perish.  This is not because billions dying is good, but rather because immoral acts are bad and it is never licit to commit them.

Naturally, in cases where billions of lives are saved through some immoral act, it is not necessarily the billions who take the burden of that immorality upon themselves, but rather the person or persons responsible for the act in the first place.  It’s not as though the continued life of those billions is an affront to God, and they must be snuffed out at once to make up for the error that was committed.  The fault and responsibility lie with their rescuer(s), not with the rescued.  If those who were saved contributed to the infamous act that saved them (i.e., as in the example above, restraining the innocent man so he might more easily be killed), then they share in the guilt of that as well.

It’s an interesting question, and (thankfully) one that doesn’t often come up on the scale mentioned in this example.  We very often do bad things with good intentions or to attain good consequences, so the problems addressed here in the abstract are not trivial, but we are fortunately not often confronted with choices upon which the lives of the multitudes hang in terror.   For my own part, shameful as it is, I would probably murder the man and save the billions, thereafter spending the rest of my life in repentence.  The enormous “WELL DUH” that was just sent up by my secular readers is likely only matched by the silent difficulties being experienced by the religious.

How soon he forgets

So I actually DO have a reasonably good excuse this time in the form of the new school year having started.  It may be the case that I only work three hours a week, and that my only real responsibility otherwise is to read a lot of stuff that I’d happily read anyway, but, you know, it really seemed very busy, at the time.  So that’s what’s been happening since Sept. 4th.

If you all had a dollar for every time I’ve said I’ll be getting back to a regular schedule of posting, you’d probably have enough to pay me to post regularly.  Think about it.  It might work.

Poetic Interlude

When we are old, and all our race is run,
And, brittle bones protesting, seek our beds -
Or when through many hardships we have come,
And we, the battered living, grieve the dead -

At end of all our troubles we look up,
And in the reigning half-light count the cost:
We see, in truth, ’tis dawn, and not the dusk -
And find that all is possible, not lost.

[Written on a pub patio sometime in mid- to late July]

Because you demanded it

I guess it wouldn’t be fall in Canada without an unneccessary election. And it wouldn’t be a Canadian election without the Liberal candidate saying things:

A Liberal government, Ignatieff pledged, would return “competence and compassion” to the federal government to replace an “incompetent” Harper government that “doesn’t care.”

That’s a pity; an incompetent government can’t get much done, which is fine, and a government that doesn’t care is perfect for someone like me, who doesn’t care either. I never suspected that the current suit-wearing buffoon in the PMO represented me this well. It’s not enough to make me vote for him or for any of them, of course, but still.

The Conservatives, he charged, have sat back and done nothing all summer as Canada’s health-care system is dragged through the mud in the United States.

“The Liberals are fiercely proud of our health-care system and, unlike the Conservatives, we are not afraid to defend it,” he said.

So what? Mr. Ignatieff seems to be misreading the Canadian public’s approach to hot air from the south, particularly when it comes to health care. Rightly or wrongly, our system is viewed as being so robust and integral to our national identity that actual defenses of it, in theory or in practice, aren’t really necessary. This is especially so in the case of American criticisms, where a prevailing attitude of “oh they’re ones to talk those Yanks,” rather than of “please save us Mr. Prime Minister,” may be found. Haughtily rebuffing American criticisms is practically a national sport, and Mr. Ignatieff is making a grievous mistake if he thinks that the Canadian public – who enjoy it as much as they enjoy anything – would like to see this job assumed by the country’s political wing.

Besides, had the Prime Minister boldly condemned the recent American claims and made a big fuss over it, can we really be confident that his opponents wouldn’t have denounced him in turn for trying to cheaply curry favour with the Canadian public? “Our health care system is the finest in the world,” Mr. Ignatieff might himself have said, “and it’s laughable to think that it needs the likes of Stephen Harper to defend it. Canadians shouldn’t be fooled.”

Be honest with yourself: that’s so absolutely likely that you can actually picture him saying it right now. I know I can.

But enough of tearing down his opponent; what does he bring to the table himself?

In his address, Ignatieff spoke of his vision for Canada in 2017, the country’s 150th birthday, saying the Liberals would create a “knowledge society for the 21st century.”

“We can be the smartest, the healthiest and the greenest, and most important of all, the most curious and open-minded and international country there is, but only if we choose to be so,” he said.

I see. It’s “most important of all” that we be “the most curious and open-minded and international country there is.” Obviously it’s just vague waffling, but I can conceive of little that it might practically entail that would please me. It’s also a tad convenient that when it comes to one’s own qualifications for leadership one can defer them to the idealistic ether of the distant future, but when criticising the incumbent it’s all domestic, here-and-now stuff that matters. No doubt the latest Liberal platform will be revealed in greater depth as the election (if it happens) actually ramps up. For the time being, though, there is little there in which to stake any great hope.

The first opportunity for a vote of non-confidence in the current government will come on October 1st, and Liberal MP Bob Rae has made it fairly clear that the vote will be cast. If the NDP and the Bloc Quebecois lend their support to the Liberal vote, as they’ve said on other occasions that they will, we’ll have our election.

Spoil your ballot.