Drinkers live longer

Drinkers live longer than teetotalers, says this news article. I wonder why it didn't work with the Chesterton and Shaw?

Looking at "Abbr." - or, the Mirror of Life

One of the very best things one learns as one explores the vast cosmos - a trick hidden from most students, alas, and ignored by most of the modern industries - is that one can use knowledge from one field to make advances in another field. The little corner called "higher education" has tried to market this idea under the label of "interdisciplinary studies": they have "Physics for Poets", and (I presume) "Poetry for Physicists". Of course this only goes so far; there are what some call "Impassable Divides". I've seen them. I could tell you stories, but then today's column would be even more huge than it is going to be. So instead of telling you of the failures, I will tell you of the successes. As you might expect, they have to do with our Uncle Gilbert.

Speaking as a scientist, one of the startling things I have found in Chesterton's writing is an honest admiration for true Science - Science "writ large" as Father Jaki always writes. If you wish a detailed study of this matter, consult Jaki's Chesterton a Seer of Science. One of the more delightful epigrams, and the one which perhaps exemplifies my point today, is this:

The wrong is not that engines are too much admired, but that they are not admired enough. The sin is not that engines are mechanical, but that men are mechanical.
[GKC Heretics CW1:113]

If we really admire something...

Ah well. Let me interrupt for a non-science interlude. I do NOT say nonsense there; please! That word "admire" comes from the Latin mirari = "to wonder at". In other words, we ought to have a sense of wonder at the engine.

Earlier this week on the Duhem Society blogg I posted a fascinating excerpt from a little book I am reading. (I'm still not done, it's a terrible shame to think it takes me this long to finish a book with less than 100 pages!) It was in connection with my comments about "a university" and Newman's famous book, and it was really an amazing statement:

If there were no Catholic universities, the academic world would be the poorer for it. The reason Academe would be poorer is that it would lack an advocate of mystery.
[Francis J. Wade, S. J.: The Aquinas Lecture 1978: The Catholic University and the Faith, 4]

It would take another book (much larger than Father Wade's) to properly handle that amazing idea. But the important thing is not that "Catholic" part, but the "mystery" part - though they are connected, and my purpose is not to argue that connection. My point is to underscore the MYSTERY.

When we talk about "mystery" we usually understand something like one of GKC's Father Brown stories: an intellectual puzzle, phrased in a traditional form of literature, and brought to a clever and (hopefully) unexpected resolution - indeed, to a surprising resolution. The theological underpinnings of Christianity have long spoken of Mystery in a somehow related sense, though here there is not usually the sense of an "intellectual puzzle". In religion, "Mystery" is tied up with the term "Mystic" - meaning a person who touches or perhaps perceives a Mystery. Let us hear Chesterton who has done truly great work on elucidating this difficult matter:

A poet may be vague, and a mystic hates vagueness. A poet is a man who mixes up heaven and earth unconsciously. A mystic is a man who separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both. ... no true mystic ever loved darkness rather than light. No pure mystic ever loved mere mystery. The mystic does not bring doubts or riddles: the doubts and riddles exist already. We all feel the riddle of the earth without anyone to point it out. The mystery of life is the plainest part of it. The clouds and curtains of darkness, the confounding vapours, these are the daily weather of this world. Whatever else we have grown accustomed to, we have grown accustomed to the unaccountable. Every stone or flower is a hieroglyphic of which we have lost the key; with every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand. The mystic is not the man who makes mysteries but the man who destroys them. The mystic is one who offers an explanation which may be true or false, but which is always comprehensible - by which I mean, not that it is always comprehended, but that it always can be comprehended, because there is always something to comprehend. ... Every great mystic goes about with a magnifying glass; He sees every flea as a giant - perhaps rather as an ogre.
[GKC William Blake 4, 131-2, 155]

Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. ... The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid. ... Symbols alone are of even a cloudy value in speaking of this deep matter; and another symbol from physical nature will express sufficiently well the real place of mysticism before mankind. The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility.
[GKC Orthodoxy CW1:230, 231]

Well, I could go on, but clearly this is another wonderful research topic. The point you see, is that one begins to realize that there is always something more... it is grasping that reason itself requires an initial commitment to something unreasoned (though NOT unreasonABLE) - the acceptance of some truth exterior to that proven, or provable. Again, I am NOT going into this here as much as it needs to be gone into - but I do have something to say, and I want to get to it.

In the course of my work (Ah!) I have relied heavily upon all this, as well as upon that most practical line from Heretics about reverting to the doctrinal principles of the thirteenth century. One of the links provided by this mysticism was the one which gave me an elegant way of handling the daily transport of some 17,000 files to-and-from a location in the Rockies to our location somewhere in southeastern Pennsylvania. It was not my idea; it was God's; it was how He manages transport of messenger RNA within eukaryotic cells. (I got it from reading a book on biochemistry.) Another came from the famous Gray's Anatomy; I've written about that one in my book on Subsidiarity, which is still awaiting a publisher. But there is more to the mystery of mystery - and aptly enough, it touches on the mystery of life itself.

But I will get there by a kind of pun - the pun in my title, represented by the symbols "abbr." As you may know, this is nothing more than the abbreviation for the word "abbreviation".

Here, I shall delete a whole extraneous diatribe about the so-called "problem-solving skills" one continually hears about from "educators" and simply teach you another of them, one of the more powerful known to computing. It is simply "abbr." - the idea of self-reference, though we have a more formal name and call it "recursion". No, I am not going to lecture on that formalism, or teach you factorial (surprise!) or make comments about the Peano axioms and mathematical induction. Rather, I want to tell you about how it happens in life.

Life - when we learn about it at the molecular level - consists in two very unusual things, which are really one thing. Life is a complex system of a variety of molecules - most of which are complex collections of carbon and three or four or five other elements (some call this CHONPS) - but they are busy molecules, reacting with each other, or more importantly NOT reacting with each other. That is because they are all collected within some water, and are at what we call "physiological temperature" - they are warm, and so are bumping around within that water. One would not be wrong to claim "Life's one big pool party" - if you look through that microscope GKC mentioned in connection with Blake.

But as you have heard before, there is a mystery to life. It is most simply phrased, "What came first, the chicken or the egg?" Nowadays, since we know a little more about it, we could say it a little differently, but I don't want to go into a lot of that detail now. I do hope you've heard the term "DNA" by now, since we need to talk about it next.

The mystery isn't so much that there's a pool party. The mystery is that one pool party can give rise to another and now there are two. How this is done involves things like DNA and RNA and two marvellous engines called "polymerase" and "ribosome" (yes I am skipping all sorts of tech details here).

But I won't skip all of the details.

Just as I told you about "abbr." and the computer-science problem solver called "recursion" I do have to tell you this much about life. The DNA, you see, contains the exact instructions to build those two engines. Oh it seems very readily understandable that one could "copy" DNA into another DNA. Somehow. We have photocopiers, don't we? We can make a copy of a piece of paper.

Ah, now here comes the mystery.

Obviously if that paper is a blueprint for the photocopier, we could make another copy of the blueprint. Yeah, that's nice, but the thing is we need a copy of the photocopier itself.

There - you see it? We have a self-reference. We have "abbr." We have recursion.

Yes, the DNA code (they call it the "genome") contains instructions to build the polymerase and the ribosome, and all the other tools those machines require. (It also contains instructions for other things - building the heart, or the skin, or the eye - all that.) But the "common denominator" to life is this self-reference, the idea that somewhere in the 3,000,000,000 bases of DNA the instructions say "and don't forget to make a copy of these instructions".

Now for the mystery in the other sense.

In that other technical work I do, which some call "prayer" I often say the rosary, or what we could call the "hand-held gospel". One day I was saying the "Second Glorious Mystery" during which we consider the Ascension of Jesus into heaven. As you no doubt know, this is mentioned just at the conclusion of the Gospel of St. Luke and also in its sequel "Acts of the Apostles". Also associated with this event is the "Great Commission" given at the conclusion of St. Matthew's gospel, which I will quote:

Going therefore, teach ye all nations: baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you. And behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.
[Mt 28:19-20]

And somehow I started thinking about DNA and life and then.... OH. Well... how very curious. In the very last command of our Lord, what do we find?

"Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you"

BUT THIS IS ONE OF THOSE THINGS HE COMMANDED.

Hence it is recursive. It is self-referential. It is like the ribosome code appearing in DNA, or like "abbr." Wow! (hee hee) In fact, this one phrase constitutes the Life of the Church, the mystical Body of Christ on earth, since it constitutes the replication process in itself. The "increase and multiply" of Genesis is here renewed, and life takes on a whole new meaning - even though it is still mysterious.

(What does all this mean? Did "Doc" explain life (in DNA)? Did he explain the Church? Did he even explain this "recursion"? )

Not really. I tried to show you something - put it out into view for you to look at.

(And why did you bother mentioning the mirror? You didn't say anything about mirrors.)

Well, that's part of the mystery - a mirror is a kind of simple symbol of recursion. Recursion is nothing by itself - a mirror shows nothing in the dark. But there is something strange - something mystical about this idea, just as there is something about recursion and the divine design of life (the biological or the kind Jesus meant when He said "I am the life").

Ah well. Since I didn't do so well with this prose approch, I will try a poetic one, and then leave you to ponder the matter. Some years ago I wrote a poem which tries to explain about mirrors and glass - or what a friend of mine calls "the strange color of the nearby" - but perhaps that too is a mystery. Well, try it anyway.

Mirror and Glass
"But glass is a very beautiful thing, like diamonds; and transparency is a sort of transcendental colour."
G. K. Chesterton, The Poet and the Lunatics

There are some colors none have seen:
Like ultra brown and infra green,
Fluorescent black and vivid gray;
All those I hope to see some day...
(Perhaps, because I’ve dropped some hints
The colorists will brew those tints!)
But there are two I see quite near
And on reflection it is clear
Neither one will ever be made
While the laws of light are obeyed.

[Copyright © 1998 by Dr. Thursday. This poem appeared in Something Good To Read for April 29 1998 and is used by kind permission of the Editor-in-Chief.]

Er - having quoted myself I felt it not appropriate to end that way. So I shall give you one further bit of GKC which may help a little:

The sublime words of St. John's Gospel permit of a sympathetic parody; if a man love not God whom he has not seen, how shall he love God whom he has seen? [1 John 4:20, also John 1:18, 6:46] If we do not delight in Santa Claus even as a fancy, how can we expect to be happy even if we find that he is a fact? But a mystic like Blake simply puts up a placard for the whole universe, like an old woman letting lodgings.
[GKC William Blake 102]

P.S. On re-reading this, I think it will be necessary to say some more about "mystery". But I will do that another time. If you want a thrill, however, try re-reading the scene from Easter Sunday about the disciples on the Road to Emmaus, and re-think it in terms of the classical "detective fiction" you know about. It's uncanny.

Behold and See 5

New for homeschoolers, Science for grade 5, written by our own Gilbert columnist David Beresford.

First Day of the 3rd Year of Chesterton Academy

These are the lucky kids who attend Chesterton Academy, a school based on ideals put forth in Chesterton's writings.

This is the third year of operation, and the school is obviously growing by leaps and bounds.

Congratulations, Chesterton Academy!

To See Things As They Are

As I mentioned last week, I had to leave the Conference early when something came up at home requiring my presence on-site. What I forgot to mention then - either at the Conference or in my LENGTHY gurgling last week - was the splendid relevance to one of the truly great quotes from our centennial text, one which I delight in appending to my e-mails, and which is a constant source of irritation to Luddites:

I have often thanked God for the telephone.
[GKC What's Wrong With the World CW4:112]

As I have read the book, I am well aware of the context; I know, far better than most, how difficult technology can be, to use or to be burdened with. (Hee hee! Like the centurion I know what it means to be under authority [Mt 8:9]: to have my cell phone go off and summon me to assist!) Nevertheless, let us recall that it is GOOD to thank God for the telephone, just as we should thank Him for beer and Burgundy. [See Orthodoxy CW1:268] These are indeed human constructions, but they are made with divine gifts. Oh yes: do not make the mistake (as some environmentalists do) of thinking man-made things have nothing to do with God. Beer and telephones are made from materials of physical creation - which are God's gifts, just as wood enters into violins and ground up minerals into tubes of oil paint. But how much more should we thank Him when we recall that these things have been devised by the great gift of the human intellect, and indeed not just by a single man, but by the cumulative power of millennia, summed up and passed on. The gifts of language, of coherent speech - indeed, of coherent thought.... did WE HUMANS invent them ex nihilo from nothing, all by ourselves? Oh no, they were given to us, by God, if only by inspiration. Why would anyone have thought to drink water in which some wheat grains had rotted, or some long-forgotten grape juice? Perhaps it was the 99 percent desperation (hee hee) of a thirsty farmer... Ah, inspiration. But more importantly, education. Most of the time we do no more than pass such gifts on to others. Baking bread or weaving cloth, brewing beer or designing telephones - all these arise in the same fashion as art.

Caution: do not imagine there is some distinction between art and technology. As GKC mentions about science and agnosticism in The Thing CW3:170, this is an error caused by not knowing Latin and Greek, since techne is
Greek for "art", a set of rules or method of doing.

You may call it art or you may call it technology, but under either sense we must be grateful. It is, as we say at Holy Mass, truly right and just to give thanks to God, and a telephone no less than a sunset glorifies Him - in fact, the telephone glorifies Him more than the sunset, for human choice and human activity enters into its making, and even the work of a fallen human is worth far more than a mere stellar furnace, no matter how "artistic" (with the casual sense of "pretty"), how useful, or how large.

I mentioned the concept of "passing on" of human abilities, and used that mystical word "education" - which is what I wish to write about today. And it relates to my introductory, since when my call came and I left the Conference, I was absent from the lecture on Newman and Chesterton - and this man, John Henry Cardinal Newman, is one whom we as Chestertonians ought to know more about.

Perhaps someday there will be a real study made of JHN vis-à-vis GKC... I know that Father Jaki has a book and several essays on Chesterton, and at least four books and several essays on Newman, but (as far as I know) he has not set them adjacent and examined them together. Possibly the lecturer (whom I missed) did this; perhaps others have, and hopefully others will, very soon. We need it. But let us see just a little, in a kind of exploratory manner. I think some interesting things will arise.

But let us, as Chesterton often did, begin our investigation in another place. The following quote is not from either GKC or JHN, but from a mystery fiction detective novel book. In it, a wise and ornery detective is comforting and assisting a young girl who had been seduced by Bad Books...

"...here are these three Russian crutch-walkers on the table by the bed. We'd better get rid of them now."
There was a whirr of leaves and then three separate thuds as Dostoevski, Tolstoy and Checkov flew out of the open window and struck the bole of an oak tree.
"The idea is," explained H.M. [the detective] "I want you to read some fellers named Dumas and Mark Twain and Stevenson and Chesterton and Conan Doyle. They're dead, yes; but they can still whack the britches off anybody at tellin' a story..."
[John Dickson Carr writing as Carter Dickson, Night at the Mocking Widow 219, emphasis added]

Oh yes!

Now, before you get up in arms about this censorship - or the even more curious list of recommendations, let us visit something even more anger-making. I want you to be good and emotive now so that in a little while you'll have gotten it all out, and THEN you can sit back and read this again and then begin to think about things.

So let us next visit the Index. Oh yes. The horrible intrusion of Papal Power into the literary realm! Yes, well... Just a word or two, you know. I think it is rather funny, especially since I obtained a copy of the Index for 1930 and explored the more than 500 pages of titles and authors it contains. I've bumped into many things in my travels as a computer scientist, but I would guess that over 99 percent of these forbidden titles are unknown, except to scholars, and I doubt that even they could summarize the contents of even one. What's funny for me to imagine is that these days the only thing on the New Index (as devised by the Media and Higher Education) would be papal encyclicals. (I feel the urge to misquote Chesterton here: "We do not need censorship by the Pope. We have censorship of the Pope." [cf Orthodoxy CW1:321]) Hee hee!

But to return to the Index: There were very few that I had ever heard of, even as titles, though a couple were surprising, like Victor Hugo's "Les misérables" and Blaise Pascal's "Pensées". I was discussing this with another young friend at the conference, and I pointed out that the reason for the Index was NOT to stop real intellectual study, but to restrain uninformed people from following dubious or misleading arguments. I said there is a really big difference in the various forms of censorship. Specifically, no reasonable person would give a book on calculus to a first grade student! But this is NOT censorship. It is merely the acknowledgement that one who does not know even the basics of addition, to say nothing of algebra, cannot fathom how that long curly S-shaped integral sign stands for an infinite number of additions... (Not precisely, I know, but let us not do calculus today.)

Ah... perhaps you begin to see what I am trying to point out?

No? Not yet. Perhaps I wondered off too far. (Not likely... ahem!) Ah well, I am just trying to sketch something. Let's keep going - but let us go into Newman now, and maybe he will help illuminate the matter...

Certainly a liberal education does manifest itself in a courtesy, propriety, and polish of word and action, which is beautiful in itself, and acceptable to others; but it does much more. It brings the mind into form, - for the mind is like the body. Boys outgrow their shape and their strength; their limbs have to be knit together, and their constitution needs tone. Mistaking animal spirits for vigour, and over-confident in their health, ignorant what they can bear and how to manage themselves, they are immoderate and extravagant; and fall into sharp sicknesses. This is an emblem of their minds; at first they have no principles laid down within them as a foundation for the intellect to build upon; they have no discriminating convictions, and no grasp of consequences. And therefore they talk at random, if they talk much, and cannot help being flippant, or what is emphatically called "young." They are merely dazzled by phenomena, instead of perceiving things as they are.
[JHN The Idea of a University, Preface]

Did your "Chesterton Quote" alarm just go off? Ah, good - I thought it would. YES, now do you see why I am so thrilled? Is this not the very focus, the burning hearth, the altar of the gods of the home - or what Tolkien calls the Secret Fire of Anor? Well, maybe not, but it certainly is something remarkable. Yeah, yeah, I know some of you want to debate what "liberal education" means - or what "liberal" means, or quarrel about this view of boys. But let's just hear that critical phrase again, but set into first-person plural, and whatever tense (iussive?) this might be:

We must begin to perceive things as they are.

Where's that in Chesterton? Oh, you goose. It's just a hair's-breadth away from the THE QUOTE, better (and more accurately) known as this grand statement of Father Brown:

"It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense, and can't see things as they are."
[GKC "The Oracle of the Dog" in The Incredulity of Father Brown]

And this, in a nutshell, is Newman's argument of at least two of his Discourses from his masterful The Idea of a University.

So what is Doc getting at? Keeping calculus books away from little kindergardners? Chucking Russian novels out the window? Huh? Some old-fangled education scheme? What?

At the very least, I am getting at the real relevance of Newman to our work, and to an application of Chesterton to our consideration of Newman's writing. Sure, I advocate chucking certain books out of windows - yes, even calculus, if the child is not prepared. (Not for always, you understand. But the first time your son holds a bat in his hand you don't ask a pro pitcher to show him a fast ball.) And I advocate the reading of exciting stories with distinct good and even more distinct evil - and not just for children. Let me quote Newman again:

Our desideratum is, not the manners and habits of gentlemen; - these can be, and are, acquired in various other ways, by good society, by foreign travel, by the innate grace and dignity of the Catholic mind; - but the force, the steadiness, the comprehensiveness and the versatility of intellect, the command over our own powers, the instinctive just estimate of things as they pass before us, which sometimes indeed is a natural gift, but commonly is not gained without much effort and the exercise of years.
[JHN The Idea of a University, Preface]

Ah, did your GKC quote sensor beep at you again? Check this out:

To become a Catholic is not to leave off thinking, but to learn how to think... The Catholic convert has for the first time a starting-point for straight and strenuous thinking. He has for the first time a way of testing the truth in any question that he raises. As the world goes, especially at present, it is the other people, the heathen and the heretics, who seem to have every virtue except the power of connected thought.
[GKC The Catholic Church and Conversion CW 3:106]

But I find that GKC's mention of "connected thought" leads me right back to the very same place in Newman:

When the intellect has once been properly trained and formed to have a connected view or grasp of things, it will display its powers with more or less effect according to its particular quality and capacity in the individual. In the case of most men it makes itself felt in the good sense, sobriety of thought, reasonableness, candour, self-command, and steadiness of view, which characterize it. In some it will have developed habits of business, power of influencing others, and sagacity. In others it will elicit the talent of philosophical speculation, and lead the mind forward to eminence in this or that intellectual department. In all it will be a faculty of entering with comparative ease into any subject of thought, and of taking up with aptitude any science or profession. All this it will be and will do in a measure, even when the mental formation be made after a model but partially true; for, as far as effectiveness goes, even false views of things have more influence and inspire more respect than no views at all. Men who fancy they see what is not are more energetic, and make their way better, than those who see nothing; and so the undoubting infidel, the fanatic, the heresiarch, are able to do much, while the mere hereditary Christian, who has never realized the truths which he holds, is unable to do anything. But, if consistency of view can add so much strength even to error, what may it not be expected to furnish to the dignity, the energy, and the influence of Truth!
[JHN The Idea of a University, Preface]

There is far more on this which we must explore, but it will have to be on another occasion. If you have a copy of Newman's book, please read it - or re-read it. If not, I urge you to GET a copy. No, not just borrow it; you will want it, more and more, as time goes on. Please do continue your reading of GKC, but also make a start at Newman. If you want to really deal with what GKC "Education, or the Mistake About the Child" you will need Newman.

And please keep this famous Chesterton line in mind:

...the object of my school is to show how many extraordinary things even a lazy and ordinary man may see if he can spur himself to the single activity of seeing.
[GKC Tremendous Trifles]

Don't you feel an urge to study in Chesterton's own school? Remember that this was nearly the last command of our Lord, "Go and make disciples of all nations". [Mt 28:19] Some translations say "go and teach"; remember that the "disciple" in Latin has the sense of "student". You may get upset if I tell you the Greek looks a lot like "mathematics", but it does. Let us beg our Lord for the grace the blind man begged:

Lord, that I may see! [Luke 18:41]

P.S. I find, upon re-reading this, that I present a certain tone respecting "Catholicism" in regard to education. I don't have any brief way of decomplexifying this just now, except to claim that I could write a lengthy distinguo about what it means. Just as a simple caution, it is not said as a way of "dissing" or condemning those of other beliefs. Perhaps it may help if you recall that "University" and "Catholic" differ only as "Latin" and "Greek" - but even that will mislead. I will just have to let it stand as it is, and hope to address the matter more fully, at another time, in another place.

Also: I have, as you may infer, a very special interest in this matter. You see, I am involved in the foundation of a new University, much as Newman was, and facing the same trials and difficulties. But I have at least this advantage: not only do I have Newman's own writing. I also have Chesterton's. I also hope and pray for their intercession in the effort, and the support of some brilliant young people, some of whom were in attendance at the Conference. Well, actually, perhaps I support them. We work together on such things, after all; we know there are many gifts but the same Spirit.

How to Explain?

It is so difficult when people crucify others for misspeaking during a public speech.

If you go here, you'll find some particularly difficult people making fun of James O'Keefe. This seems to be an afternoon's pastime for some of them, who have never misspoken themselves.

What I think James meant to say was that people in public office should be monitored, and that this was a good use of one's moral judgment: To keep watch over what those who claim to represent us do and say.

They don't know Belloc (spelled Beloch on the site). They think Mount St. Mary's invited James to speak.Tweet

Just Discovered: lost comments

I was wondering what happened to the comments that usually come when one posts. Apparently Blogger took it upon itself to moderate the comments without my knowing where the comments lingered while waiting my moderation.Tweet

James O'Keefe at the Conference

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Your Blog Authors at the Conference Dr. Thursday (AKA Peter Floriani, PhD and Nancy C. Brown)

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Positive and Negative Triangles

After the excitement of last week's conference, it is good to turn back to our usual dull and LENGTHY ploddings, where you can just double-click away from me if I am boring you. But I ought to note something about it, since I was there, and I had a good time, even though it was truncated somewhat for me, due to matters beyond my control.

I saw several old friends, and met several new ones, and it was an awesome time. I laughed a lot, had some beer, and some food, and I think I might have also slept, but I forget. Not that it matters, hee hee. I think some people were surprised to learn that there really is a "Dr. Thursday" and he is not just a pen name of someone else.

The one talk which our esteemed blogg-mistress did not mention in her commentary was (in my own opinion) the best. It also happened to be the one SHE gave! It was titled "The Woman Who Was Chesterton" and (as she remarked) perhaps it sounds as if it was going to be some sort of "gender studies" approach to GKC's writing, his "inner female" or some such. Here, she could have quoted the very famous lines from GKC's letter to - er - to someone else. (I'll tell you who a bit later.) The lines I shall quote will earn you swift and immediate condemnation in the modern world, though the great ranks of the Scholars of the Middle Ages will welcome you among their number, since the lines are indubitably true:

I like the Cyclostyle ink; it is so inky. I do not think there is anyone who takes quite such a fierce pleasure in things being themselves as I do. The startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me: the fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud. It is just the same with people.... When we call a man "manly" or a woman "womanly" we touch the deepest philosophy.
[GKC writing to (someone) quoted in Ward Gilbert Keith Chesterton 108-9]

Very impressive. Anyway, the talk discussed the life of a certain person about whom we as Chestertonians ought to be interested in. I didn't take notes, as I was too entranced to do such mundane things, and I knew there would be a recording. Besides, it was scattered with most delightful humour, suggesting how Chesterton would handle life in the INTERNET age - I especially liked the bit that went something like this:

"I say! Shaw has accepted my FRIEND request!"

But anyway, there was one particular pun which was left out. And you can find that pun here, but it may be made more clear - that is, the real topic of that talk will be revealed if I say it in this fashion:

There was one thing in particular in which GKC anticipated our modern "connected" electronic age. It was this: Long before the INTERNET came to be, G. K. Chesterton got his very own Blogg on June 28, 1901.

Ah well... if you are still confused I will spell it out in ASCII for you: That was the day on which Gilbert Chesterton married Frances Blogg. (Yes, that really was Mrs. Chesterton's maiden name, and she was the topic of Nancy's excellent talk: she was the Woman Whe Was Chesterton.)

As it happens, just before the conference I was looking into a very interesting puzzle, one which has tormented computer science for some time... but I won't go into that just now, since it may irritate some of my readers, and unduly attract attention from - er - various government agencies. Not that I have any insights, of course! Indeed, all I had was a new question. And from that question I was led to study some very curious things, some of which almost do not make sense until you poke around a little and try to understand why the words are used in that way. It's far more magical than any magic - in fact, it's precisely the true difference between magic and technology, the difference which poor Arthur C. Clarke happened to miss. But I cannot lecture on that matter just now; besides I've already put it into a story, and it's much better there. So let us proceed.

Just yesterday (or maybe Tuesday) I found out that a triangle can be "positive" or "negative". This sounds hilarious, and perhaps not very Chestertonian, until you recall that Gabriel Gale asked:

"Were you ever an isosceles triangle?"

in "The Yellow Bird" in GKC's The Poet and the Lunatics. In fact, you can find quite a bit of homage to Euclid and triangles in Chesterton - and they often lead to even more amazing truths. For example:

There is one element always to be remarked in the true mystic, however disputed his symbolism, and that is its brightness of colour and clearness of shape. I mean that we may be doubtful about the significance of a triangle or the precise lesson conveyed by a crimson cow. But in the work of a real mystic the triangle is a hard mathematical triangle not to be mistaken for a cone or a polygon. The cow is in colour a rich incurable crimson, and in shape unquestionably a cow, not to be mistaken for any of its evolutionary relatives, such as the buffalo or the bison. This can be seen very clearly, for instance, in the Christian art of illumination as practiced at its best in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Christian decorators, being true mystics, were chiefly concerned to maintain the reality of objects. For the highest dogma of the spiritual is to affirm the material.
[GKC William Blake 132ff]

Ah! Read it again: "The highest dogma of the spiritual is to affirm the material." It's simple, too: you cannot feed the hungry or clothe the naked by theology. It requires knowledge of cooking and sewing, of agriculture and textiles, but it also means CHEMISTRY and BIOLOGY and all sorts of theoretical and practical disciplines. But then we already knew that: "It is wrong to fiddle while Rome is burning; but it is quite right to study the theory of hydraulics while Rome is burning." [GKC WWWTW CW4:43]

Ahem. To revert to the positive and negative triangle.

The idea is quite simple, and in fact links in to a very great concept - the idea of "chirality" or "handedness" - the idea of RIGHT and of LEFT. When we "name" a triangle, that is, we go out onto our lands with our surveying tools, our transits and chains and plumb bobs, and we select (much as the Roman augurs would) the three points which are the three "GONs" - the angles or corners - why, depending on the ORDER IN WHICH we choose those three points, we give that triangle either its positive or its negative state. The Romans, of course would label it fas or nefas - lucky or unlucky. But this is a simpler idea, even if there is still something sinister about it! (Latin pun, hee hee) I won't give the equation here, but there is a way of computing the area of a triangle from the coordinates of its three corners, and the FUN thing about this equation is the SIGN of the area tells you whether you went around the triangle in a clockwise or counterclockwise direction.

Ah, you sigh. So that's what the Doctor is ranting about today. Directions. Clockwise and counterclockwise. Right and Left.

Yes. We could always quote St. Matthew about right and left - you know, the Last Judgement, the sheep and the goats - but you may also recall this famous snippet of dialog from Chesterton:

"First of all, what is it really all about? What is it you object to? You want to abolish government?"

"To abolish God!" said Gregory, opening the eyes of a fanatic. "We do not only want to upset a few despotisms and police regulations; that sort of anarchism does exist, but it is a mere branch of the Nonconformists. We dig deeper and we blow you higher. We wish to deny all those arbitrary distinctions of vice and virtue, honour and treachery, upon which mere rebels base themselves. The silly sentimentalists of the French Revolution talked of the Rights of Man! We hate Rights as we hate Wrongs. We have abolished Right and Wrong."
"And Right and Left," said Syme with a simple eagerness, "I hope you will abolish them too. They are much more troublesome to me."
[GKC The Man Who Was Thursday CW6:490]

Yes, and the funny thing is that right and wrong - I mean right and left really are a matter of life and death, not simply at the end of time, but even in our daily lives. You may wonder (if you know any Latin at all) why there is a sugar called DEXTROSE and another called LEVULOSE. (The Latin dexter means "right" and laevus means "left".) And the secret of all this was discovered only 26 years before GKC was born.

I am sure you know the name Louis Pasteur. The first of his astounding discoveries was made in 1848 when he was studying certain organic salts called the tartrates. (An aside: if you are a baker (like me) you may have something called "Cream of Tartar" in your pantry - it is NOT the same as the "Tartar sauce" used on fish, but a fine white powder. The tartrates are compounds of tartaric acid, a weak acid found in certain fruits. It is used with baking soda as a leavening agent.) Anyway, Pasteur established that a given tartrate came in TWO DIFFERENT FORMS. They are made up of the exact same elements, in exactly the same proportions, and many of their properties are identical.

BUT NOT ALL OF THEM ARE IDENTICAL.

Specifically, the property which Pasteur studied was NOT identical: the rotation of polarized light: one form went right, another form went left, and there was one which didn't have any effect.

That is because they are related as your right hand is related to your left hand: they are MIRROR IMAGES of each other. They are "chiral" (from the Greek word for "hand") because they have "handedness". (The one which had no effect was an equal mixture of the right and left forms.)

As it turns out, just about ALL the compounds found in living things are chiral. Most importantly, the various amino acids which build proteins, and the various sugars which form the most useful of our body's energy sources.

You may be wondering what all this has to do with my moaning and berating and all that. It's simply my attempt to point out how even the deep and hidden truths of our real world bolster the greater, deeper and even more hidden truths about God and our relation to Him. It's not enough for us to sit and listen to lectures, or sit and read bloggs, even this one. Here is Chesterton's own admonition about it:

I do not know Mr. Eustace Miles personally, but I must confess that I like him: he seems to me to be sincere, and much simpler as well as much saner than many of his followers. But he is chiefly in danger rather from his leaders than his followers. He allows himself to be lectured by a lot of Pundits who suppose they have a true explanation of life when they have only got a false simplification of it. I remember a man of this sort who told me he was on a spiritual plane ("we are on different planes") on which yes and no, black and white, right and wrong, right and left, were all equal. I regarded him as I should any boastful aviator who told me that from the height to which he had risen all London looked like an exact chess-board, with all the squares and streets the same size. In short, I regarded him as a liar. London streets are not equally long, seen from a flying-ship or from anywhere else. And human sins or sorrows are not equally serious, seen in a vision or anywhere else.
[GKC Aug 15 1914 CW30:145]

Indeed. Don't be caught by a false simplification. At the end of time, we're going to see that right and left really are different - and a number of other things, too. As GKC said about male and female, what God has put asunder, let no man join. [see "Two Stubborn Pieces of Iron" in The Common Man]

ChesterTen

The conference is over, but the energy lives on. All the way home I was thinking, what can I do? How can we spread the Gospel? How do we live an authentic life?

There were so many amazing people at the conference, so many great conversations and discussions and debates took place. What fun, and how stimulating for the mind. One line of one speech caused hours of debate after hours, defining terms, asking why, what and how, figuring out what God wants, what dogma means, how that translates to life here on earth while we await heaven (hopefully!).

There was inspiration to read more, do more, think more, and act more. From the start of the conference, and Tom Martin's thoughts about social science (and his very helpful description of what the logo of the conference meant) to James O'Keefe's talk about journalism and activism and the role of the independent journalist (just like Chesterton) to Dale's closing cry to live like Jones and Mrs. Jones in a world that denies and disbelieves there is such a normal couple.

If you missed it, or even if you were there, you will probably want the CDs or DVDs or both, a set to own and a set to give away. The videographer will need about a week to process everything, and when the recordings are available, you'll be the first to know.

Next year, St. Louis!

Notes from Joseph Pearce's Talk on The Mistake about Progress

Joseph Pearce
The Mistake about Progress

“Progress is the mother of problems.” GKC

Joseph doesn’t like the word conservative because so many conservatives are idiots.

Chesterton says that even if you want something to stay the same, you have to keep interfering with it, because otherwise things devolve, if left on their own. (The gate post needing constant re-painting example.)

Reality is not in the process of becoming, whether you think it’s becoming better or worse, it simply is. The laws that govern reality is unchanging. Original sin is as real as thermodynamics. We can’t progress beyond what we are, which is the Image of God.

This age is decaying in terms of its understanding of virtue. Yet, we have these dangerous technological gadgets. Its not a very clever thing to do.

Rousseau’s big thing was that there was no such thing as original sin. He was behind the French Revolution. The danger of that idea is if you can make the system better, the government, the state, the environment, people will become better. Pearce believes Obama thinks this way.

To Chesterton, history isn’t linear. Christ’s incarnation was the center, and everything before it pointed to it, and everything since then, points back to it.

Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man was a response to H.G. Well’s Outline of History, although he never quite says that, it is, says Pearce.

Wells’s assumption is that the world is progressing. Wells’s assumption is that the past was worse or inferior to now.

Chronological snobbery is a bit like racism. You treat people as inferior because of the time which they were born.

DWEM the new acronym, Dead White European Male, progressives dismiss DWEMs, even though it’s a racist attitude.

Progressivism is poisonous.

Richard Aleman on Distributist

Notes from the talk:
Richard Aleman (Editor of the Distributist Review) speaking on the Mistake about Distributism

What people think distribustism is and isn’t.

Distributism finds it’s base in the church’s social teaching, Rerum Novarum.

Wide ownership makes the best sense politically.

Neither wage slavery nor slavery to the state.

Common errors:
•It’s just another form of capitalism

•It’s just another form of socialism
•Distributist don’t believe in competition

Distributists believe in cooperation, based on uniqueness, creativity, the competition should be healthy.

•Distribustism is dying

Reprints of older books, and new books are being written

Workers must be seen as a partner, paid a living wage, and have the choice to own if he chooses.

How do we start distributism?
American Chesterton society meetings, talk about it, begin with a study group, using the local Chesterton society’s as a model. Meet once a week to learn the form of distrubutism.

Run for politics, run on a distributist platform.

Examine the failures of your local area. School, politics, parents teach your children distributism. Economics for Helen adapted into the homeschool program.

Working on the Distrubutism Catechism, Q&A

Micro-credit lending, community land trust

•We cannot meet large technological needs, and we can’t regain the farms that were lost

Distributists want to restore localism

Mass production can’t be centralized, but if it’s decentralized, it may work.

Richard speaks very quickly.

A community should produce, the essential goods, the majority of goods, in it’s own community.

If a mass producer collapses, so do we.

If a mass producer leaves a community, and it was the small town’s sole source of employment, the town dies.

Cooperatives, worker-owner businesses are the answers.

Cooperative, is a multi-partnership. The employees are the owners.

Utility, construction, utility companies, insurance, law firms, restore the Made in the USA label.

•you can’t change the current culture

Small business is the life source of this country.

David Zach: Futurist

David Zach spoke about the Mistake about Technology
A Great Many Clever Things: the Mistakes about Technology

Neal Stephenson author The Diamond Age book David recommends.

Mistakes
Cell phones are tools of disconnection, we don’t talk to new people or strangers like we did before. We are afraid of strangers today. WE use cell phones to connect with people we know.

Teens prefer texting to face to face communication.

If you work on a computer, research shows, you touch your computer more than anything else you touch in your life.

The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr multitasking makes everything a distraction.

Distracted, by Maggie Jackson What are we doing to ourselves?

Silence is an endangered species.

If we’re afraid of silence, we’re afraid of ourselves.

The self is becoming empty because of external distractions.

Your attention is your most valuable asset.

We are distracted by the unknown future, the promise of all answers, the seduction of upgrades. We’re afraid of looking at the truth.

We don’t respect eloquence. We tweet.

The Mistake about Pandora

Worldbuilder (a movie on the internet) by Bruce Branit

The conference has begun....

The conference has begun, old friends have been hugged, new friends have already met and had supper together.

Tom Martin is our opening speaker, and he is speaking on the problem of social sciences.

The good news is that although we don't have live streaming video, we do have video, and DVDs will be on sale along with the audio CDs this year. Yahoo! I think this is excellently good news.

An award will be given, a wine glass that has the inconvience is only an adventure quotation, to the person who has the most inconviences this weekend, donated by Su Morton, who had an inordinate amount of inconviences last year in Seattle.

Clerihew contest: Clerihews are due 12:59pm tomorrow, Friday.

There seems to be no wifi or internet available at this conference, so I'm not sure who will be able to read this but non-conference attendees, unless you, like me, are able to get on in the library or by another of your own private networks.

For those who like stories....

A Quayment short story for you to enjoy courtesy of Loome...

You may be wondering where the Chesterton connection is here.

That will become apparent eventually. It is rather in the nature of a surprise.

Stay tuned.

Dale in Rome

88 and 55, or, The Mystery of Repetition

Tomorrow, Friday, the 30th of July, is the 88th anniversary of the reception of G. K. Chesterton into the Roman Catholic Church. The next day, Saturday, the 31st of July, is the 55th anniversary of my own baptism into the same Mystical Body. I thought this repeated appearance of multiples of eleven to be quite wonderful. Eleven is an interesting number - it is the only prime palindrome which has an even number of digits. (I have a proof for this, but people will moan if I post it here. In other words, "the margin is too small", though it surely is not a problem worthy of Fermat, hee hee. You lit'ry folks can ignore this very "3+4i" math pun. Sorry, I know you EE's call this "3+4j". Ahem.)

Repetition is a curious idea, and it may sound redundant to say that it comes up again and again in GKC's writing. (hee hee) We all know the great law GKC states:

Now, there is a law written in the darkest of the Books of Life, and it is this: If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.
[GKC The Napoleon of Notting Hill CW6:227]

We also recall his triple exemplification with the drama of the spoken word:

[Holbrook Jackson:] XIV. Familiarity breeds not contempt, but indifference.
[GKC] But it can breed surprise. Try saying "Boots" ninety times.
[HJ/GKC Platitudes Undone 15]

There is a truth in talking of the variety of Nature; but I think that Nature often shows her chief strangeness in her sameness. There is a weird rhythm in this very repetition; it is as if the earth were resolved to repeat a single shape until the shape shall turn terrible. ... Have you ever tried the experiment of saying some plain word, such as "dog," thirty times? By the thirtieth time it has become a word like "snark" or "pobble." It does not become tame, it becomes wild, by repetition. In the end a dog walks about as startling and undecipherable as Leviathan or Croquemitaine.
[GKC Alarms and Discursions 30-31]

It may sound strange to say that monotony of its nature becomes novelty. But if any one will try the common experiment of saying some ordinary word such as "moon" or "man" about fifty times, he will find that the expression has become extraordinary by sheer repetition. A man has become a strange animal with a name as queer as that of the gnu; and the moon something monstrous like the moon-calf.
[GKC The New Jerusalem CW20:211]

In previous columns I've mentioned the huge repetitions of three words - "the", "of", "and" - which comprise over ten percent of all GKC's writing. I've also mentioned the deeply mystical and significant repeated phrase within GKC's The Everlasting Man, which I found by applying my extension of DNA pattern-matching software to the text:

"Heaven and earth shall pass away; but my words shall not pass away."
[GKC TEM CW2:327 and 392, quoting Lk 21:33]

Remember, I am not suggesting this statement applies to GKC. No, I think it is clear (even if utterly unintentional) that this repeated phrase of our Lord's own words is Chesterton's signal homage to our Lord's words: the One Who is Engineer ("Bridge-builder") is also Author, for He granted "a real romance to the world". [GKC TEM CW2:380] Or, to take a far more delightful avenue:

We must certainly be in a novel;
What I like about this novelist is that he takes such trouble about his minor characters.
[GKC quoted in Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton 63]

An aside: Remember, too, that "The Everlasting Man" is Chesterton's own mystic title for Jesus Christ. For proof, see The Thing CW3:302.

The mystery of repetition is a terribly common one, even if this sounds confusing to some. I mean that most of life is repetition. Not only in the sense that our bodies are built from the same things applied over and over - both DNA and proteins are polymers, though they are built as words are built (or perhaps I ought to say STORIES are built) not by pure iteration of the same letter, but by judicious selection - indeed, authorship. But we need not even delve so deep. Even from the most casual examination of a human face we see repetition - though we must not carry this idea too far:

Suppose some mathematical creature from the moon were to reckon up the human body; he would at once see that the essential thing about it was that it was duplicate. A man is two men, he on the right exactly resembling him on the left. Having noted that there was an arm on the right and one on the left, a leg on the right and one on the left, he might go further and still find on each side the same number of fingers, the same number of toes, twin eyes, twin ears, twin nostrils, and even twin lobes of the brain. At last he would take it as a law; and then, where he found a heart on one side, would deduce that there was another heart on the other. And just then, where he most felt he was right, he would be wrong.
[GKC Orthodoxy CW1:285]

In fact, it is the error of Aristotle and of Marx (and many others from the Dark Side of Thought) who try to apply this apparent repetition to Man, thinking that each human is UNimportant since he is just "yet another" proles - existing merely to give more offspring to the State. This error Chesterton corrects with all the emphatic power of Christianity in a most elegant statement:

For religion all men are equal, as all pennies are equal, because the only value in any of them is that they bear the image of the King.
[GKC Charles Dickens CW15:44]

Wow! High drama, for those who can stand it, and a brutal slap against followers of the Dark Power! It's not that we are (from one perspective) just a duplicate, a penny, a proles, existing only to replicate. No; we are IMAGES OF THE KING and therefore have immense value. But then we were told: "the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore: you are of more value than many sparrows." [Lk 12:7] If this romance-granting Author (Whose image we bear) "takes such care about Him minor characters" that He tracks even the dull details of every one of our hairs, how much more must He care about what we do. And that takes us to the next aspect of today's exploration.

Repetition is a fact of human life, whether it is in cooking yet another meal, washing yet another load of laundry, making yet another part, or whatever task one is employed in doing. It is a puzzle that so many people think that life - and especially work - must somehow be so dynamically variable... it isn't, not for artists or musicians or authors - who MUST use the same pigments, the same instruments and pitches, the same letters and punctuation over and over and over. What is it people think work is supposed to be? I dunno. But here too GKC gives us instruction:

the average man has to obey orders and do nothing else. He has to put one dull brick on another dull brick, and do nothing else; he has to add one dull figure to another dull figure, and do nothing else. ... the bricklayer cannot put the bricks in fancy arrangements of his own, without disaster to himself and others. ... A woman cooking may not always cook artistically; still she can cook artistically. She can introduce a personal and imperceptible alteration into the composition of a soup. The clerk is not encouraged to introduce a personal and imperceptible alteration into the figures in a ledger.
[GKC ILN Apr 7 1906 CW27:161]

Ahem! That was funny, and insightful, and does apply, but that was NOT the quote I wanted. Excuse me just a moment while I berate the programmer: This stupid software, who wrote it? (Well, I'll just take a look at the code.) Gosh, a computer program has the same lines of stuff over and over again, oh my it looks REALLY BORING to write such drivel, and I thought computer software development was supposed to be GLAMOROUS... Ahem!
Ah, here's the quote I wanted:

...there is one thing that no realist, however daring, however frantic, would venture to depict upon the stage. He may make indecencies walk naked in the open day. He may cry from the housetops the things of shame which humanity has kept secret for centuries. But there is one thing that no dramatist dare produce upon the stage. That thing is the thing called " Work." There is no playwright who would reproduce upon the stage the first four hours of an ordinary clerk's day. Nobody would send up the curtain at 8 o'clock on a man adding up figures, and send it down at 10 o'clock on a man still adding up figures. Even an Ibsenite audience would not support the silent symbolism of three scenes all of which were occupied with the same bricklayer laying bricks. We dare not say in artistic form how much there is of prose in men's lives; and precisely because we cannot say how much there is of prose, we cannot say how much there is of poetry.
[GKC "Ibsen" in A Handful of Authors 140]

But if the bricklayer did not repeatedly lay those bricks, there would be no houses, if the dairyman did not repeatedly milk the cows, there would be no milk, if the programmer did not write drivel, there would be no INTERNET and no bloggs - and the same is true for many (if not all) other forms of employment, even those deemed "artistic" and "free" by the Media! Ah. (More on this mystery another day - it ties into an important idea in one of St. Paul's letters...)

But perhaps the greatest of GKC's studies of repetition is the one in Orthodoxy, which comes up in his brilliant study of what is usually termed "the Laws of Nature" in the chapter called "The Ethics of Elfland". I've quoted it here before - this is the one which has the famous "Beach Boys" quote, the three-word cheer used by the sports teams at Chesterton University (er, actually there's only one - Gype)... and we've studied it at length some time ago. But please read it again, and think about it some more:

...the mere repetition made the things [of the natural world] to me rather more weird than more rational. It was as if, having seen a curiously shaped nose in the street and dismissed it as an accident, I had then seen six other noses of the same astonishing shape. I should have fancied for a moment that it must be some local secret society. So one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot. I speak here only of an emotion, and of an emotion at once stubborn and subtle. But the repetition in Nature seemed sometimes to be an excited repetition, like that of an angry schoolmaster saying the same thing over and over again. The grass seemed signalling to me with all its fingers at once; the crowded stars seemed bent upon being understood. The sun would make me see him if he rose a thousand times. The recurrences of the universe rose to the maddening rhythm of an incantation, and I began to see an idea.
...
A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore. Heaven may encore the bird who laid an egg. If the human being conceives and brings forth a human child instead of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life or purpose. It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that they admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every human drama man is called again and again before the curtain. Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant it may stop. Man may stand on the earth generation after generation, and yet each birth be his positively last appearance.
[GKC Orthodoxy CW1:262-3,263-4]

Now that I've quoted that, let me conclude by giving you two mystical excerpts which deal with baptism. There is some wondrous mystery here, a mystery touching "repetition" - but then is not baptism our entry into Life? Is not that Life a form of Work? Are we not bidden to "Do whatever He tells you"? [See John 2:5] Did not Jesus Himself seek to be about His "Father's business" [Luke 2:49] and did He not spend the next 18 years after He said that working in a carpenter shop? He weren't writing no theology journal articles... oh no. He was about His father's business, making tables and chairs and doors and Useful Things... Very Engineer of Him, oh yes, and very Common Man too, laying bricks for hours on end for the sake of His neighbor.

But I promised two quotes about baptism - one about GKC's own, the other in general. They are very Newman - that is, both tech and lit - which is just like being Augustine, very old and very new. It's a Catholic thing, you see... but you may have to read them several times before they sink in.

Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington; and baptised according to the formularies of the Church of England in the little church of St. George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge. I do not allege any significance in the relation of the two buildings; and I indignantly deny that the church was chosen because it needed the whole water-power of West London to turn me into a Christian.
[GKC Autobiography CW16:21]

I know only one scheme that has thus proved its solidity, bestriding lands and ages with its gigantic arches, and carrying everywhere the high river of baptism upon an aqueduct of Rome.
[GKC The Thing CW3:156]

Pre-registration for the conference ends today!

Pre-register today for the conference. Or else!

My Error! Or, "like the Pantheist's Boots"

As you know, this year is the 100th anniversary of GKC's What's Wrong With the World. Allied to this particular title is a rather famous quote - not THE quote (about "when a man stops believing in God") but another, which so far has not been located. It is said that some newspaper or other asked several authors to give their own answers to the question as to what is wrong with the world, and, the legend says, that GKC responded with this:

Dear Editor:
I am.
Sincerely,
G. K. Chesterton

CAUTION: Please note: to our present knowledge, this is legendary, like "THE quote" and we do not know that GKC actually did such a thing. But it does sound possible. (As you see there isn't a bibliographic reference to the above, as I always put on GKC quotes.)

Clearly, there are many things wrong with the world, and, just as clearly, all too often we are the cause of those faults. It is strange, therefore, that when the usual song about "problem solving skills" is sung by the educologs, they omit this important concept. I cannot fault them too much; I've seen it myself in my own discipline. I've seen tenured faculty who use their powerful computers to typeset their journal articles, because they don't know enough about programming to begin to convert their theory into anything at all. I've seen pompous professors who brag that they can "prove" that programs are "correct" but the library software they sell has major bugs of the kind which are most insidiously difficult to detect... all because they prefer the appearance of academic complexity to the usefulness of simple real-world engineering. (To put it into the classical tongue, Conspici quam prodesse.)

Ah, engineering. It provides the bumper, the thick padding, the safety equipment, for science... It is the mental discipline which assumes there are problems, maybe even unforeseen ones, lurking in our world. It is science made practical: it is the professor dragged, kicking and screaming, from the ivory tower and thrust into the mire of the real world. Not that he abandons his discipline - he must apply others in order to augment his skills. There is a very famous line which demonstrates this:

It is wrong to fiddle while Rome is burning; but it is quite right to study the theory of hydraulics while Rome is burning.
[GKC WWWTW CW4:43]

Engineering is the honest man's reply, like GKC's (if he really did say it): Yes, there IS something wrong, and in some cases, it is I who am wrong - but since I am honest, I hope to do something about it, in the hope of keeping it from happening again. It's the point of Christ saying "Go and sin no more". He could have changed the law - sure, He is God and He wrote the law - but it was more Godly to forgive. (If you want to know more about why He didn't, you need to read GKC about fences in The Thing CW3:157.) Now we are to go and do likewise, even if we are not engineers - because we will most certainly deal with mistakes and flaws and crimes and sins and errors... with what's wrong in the world. And sometimes these errors are a bit worse than a mere error of typography that changes "cosmic" to "comic". [As accurate as that error may be. See GKC ILN June 9 1906 CW27:206]

For example. Here is a famous line of Chesterton's which a very serious student has complained about. "Physical science is like simple addition: it is either infallible or it is false." [GKC ILN Sept 28 1907 CW27:558] But as most of us who balance our own checkbooks know, it is easy to make mistakes in simple addition. Is Chesterton wrong?

Maybe that is not a suitable quote. Let me try one with a known error, yes, where Chesterton really is wrong. Oh, are you upset? Well... there are plenty of others, but I don't know why you are whining. Maybe I have to pull that Caesarea Philippi thing [see Mt 16] and ask: "Who do YOU say that G. K. Chesterton is?" Ah, yes. Very good. You are right; GKC is not God. But let us stay on the topic.

For example, in GKC's masterwork The Everlasting Man we read:

Somewhere along the Ionian coast opposite Crete and the islands was a town of some sort, probably of the sort that we should call a village or hamlet with a wall. It was called Ilion but it came to be called Troy, and the name will never perish from the earth.
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:211-2]

At one point in my many explorations, I was curious about something else, and pulled out an atlas - and I found that the Ionian Sea is on the west side of Greece, and the Aegean Sea is on the east. Moreover, Troy was, even in legend, assumed to be on the west coast of Turkey, not the west coast of Greece. So that means...

Is this picky? Maybe a little. Chesterton isn't writing orders for a navy fleet, after all, and most people will guess that the Ionian Sea is somewhere at the eastern end of the Mediterranean - as it is. Yes, it would have been more accurate for him to say the Aegean - but the important thing for us to know is not where Troy was located, but that this little "village or hamlet with a wall" has a name with an enduring meaning to human history.

Here is another interesting and elegant statement of Chesterton's. It is important, too, and we'll explore it further a little later, but for the moment, I want you to look at just one little bit:

Ice is melted into cold water and cold water is heated into hot water; it cannot be all three at once. [see below for citation]

Uh, not quite. Water can be in all three states at once, and this is not some dogmatic lunacy of the Catholic Church, either! One of my other projects involves a number of curious facts about that wonderful substance called water, and one of those curious facts tells us that water certainly can be all three - ice, liquid, and steam - all at once! This happens at the temperature called the "Triple Point" of water, which is 273.16°K (0.01°C, or 32.018 °F) at 610 millibars (according to my CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics).

All right, Doc. What's going on here?

How nice of you to ask. In this case, as in others of this kind, whether in Chesterton or in other authors, we have to be careful about what we are doing. We are NOT trying to "show up" the author as "wrong" - where we take "wrong" to mean "useless" or "untrustworthy". We are not trying to dethrone him, or put him into a "bad light" - what is sometimes called an ad hominem argument. That's Latin for "to the man" - when you argue against a person himself, rather than against the issue at hand. You may not know how this is done, and since I am from the tech side of the world I don't get to see it very often, but I have seen it done, and it will be useful for you to know. So I will write it up for you, and then you can print it out and have it ready for use should the opportunity present itself:

Dr. Thursday's Guide To... (drum roll)
The Ad Hominem Argument.

This is best done in full academic regalia. So get out your frayed old gown with the little beanie, and get 'em on. Don't worry about whether the color matches your degree, people don't know those color codes these days; most of 'em don't even know what color acid turns litmus paper! If your shoes are scuffed, so much the better, but don't be wearing sneakers which will make you look like a student. Your hair ought to be a bit wind-blown, as if you had just been playing Quidditch (hee hee!) - this is easy enough to effect with your hand (DON'T use a comb!), even if you do not have a broom, or don't know what Quidditch is. Your glasses ought to be at the end of your nose. You can take them off and wave them for emphasis - this looks extremely professorial, and will earn you all sorts of brownie points from any deans who happen to be in the audience. If you don't normally wear glasses, get some to keep with you just for this purpose - but not sunglasses, which make you look like a student.

Next, you should obtain a copy of the offending book. This is where you may wish to use a grad student, assuming you can find one who isn't surfing the net or grading your latest test; grad students are quite adept at finding books in the library, and of course it would not DO to have anyone (like a Dean) see you in the library! If a Dean (or, Darwin forbid, the Provost) sees you in such an odd place, it's easy enough to make an excuse, but be sure to speak loud, look annoyed, and wave your glasses.

Now, once you have the offending book, use a little sticky-note to mark the page (and line) with the error. The grad student can usually help here, since most books are now stored in electronic form, though it may take a bit of searching to find the equivalent place in the actual book, but a stern threat or two will work wonders. Of course in certain disciplines, you won't need to actually acquire the book itself, though in that case you will have to implicitly appeal to Authority - or to Technology, which is the same thing. If you are pompous enough no one will notice your hypocrisy - and you can always wave your glasses.

Have the book in your hand when you are speaking, and wave it. Or hold it up, open to the offending page (the one with the sticky note) and point to it. Wave your glasses.

Now, for the important bit - what to say. Please note it's very important to get all this said in one breath, so you may want to practice it beforehand. Practice keeping your face pompous and magisterial; you are RIGHT about this, so don't let your emotion get in the way. All right, ready? Sya this:

"This author was wrong about this..."

[If the author is present, you may for greater effect revise this to "You were wrong about this..."]

Here you cite the book and page with the error, and perhaps quote the offending text with a very snide chuckle, but don't take too long, since you have to say the rest of this on the breath you started with!

"and so you are WRONG about everything else!"

(Now you can take a breath if necessary, but keep going.)

"I don't CARE how right you are elsewhere. It doesn't matter. You were wrong here, so you're wrong everywhere!"

Then you slam the book down, and walk out of the room. If it was a library book, send a grad student to return it to the library eventually.

There. Wasn't that fun? (Yes, I thought so too, but you see, I have actually been there, and seen how it works, but that was a long time ago, and I've got my degree. I live in the real world now, which has other sorts of problems. Seen any cable TV commercials lately? How about them prerolls, guys? Audio levels balanced? You're not pixelating, I hope... Hee hee!)

If that playlet sounds vaguely familiar, I can assure you, I am NOT quoting from GKC's Thursday. But since I happen to like that bit, I will quote if for you so you can compare:

I made myself up into what was meant for a wild exaggeration of the old Professor's dirty old self. When I went into the room full of his supporters I expected to be received with a roar of laughter, or (if they were too far gone) with a roar of indignation at the insult. I cannot describe the surprise I felt when my entrance was received with a respectful silence, followed (when I had first opened my lips) with a murmur of admiration. The curse of the perfect artist had fallen upon me. I had been too subtle, I had been too true. They thought I really was the great Nihilist Professor. I was a healthy minded young man at the time, and I confess that it was a blow. Before I could fully recover, however, two or three of these admirers ran up to me radiating indignation, and told me that a public insult had been put upon me in the next room. I inquired its nature. It seemed that an impertinent fellow had dressed himself up as a preposterous parody of myself. I had drunk more champagne than was good for me, and in a flash of folly I decided to see the situation through. Consequently it was to meet the glare of the company and my own lifted eyebrows and freezing eyes that the real Professor came into the room.
I need hardly say there was a collision. The pessimists all round me looked anxiously from one Professor to the other Professor to see which was really the more feeble. But I won. An old man in poor health, like my rival, could not be expected to be so impressively feeble as a young actor in the prime of life. You see, he really had paralysis, and working within this definite limitation, he couldn't be so jolly paralytic as I was. Then he tried to blast my claims intellectually. I countered that by a very simple dodge. Whenever he said something that nobody but he could understand, I replied with something which I could not even understand myself. "I don't fancy," he said, "that you could have worked out the principle that evolution is only negation, since there inheres in it the introduction of lacunae, which are an essential of differentiation." I replied quite scornfully, "You read all that up in Pinckwerts; the notion that involution functioned eugenically was exposed long ago by Glumpe." It is unnecessary for me to say that there never were such people as Pinckwerts and Glumpe. But the people all round (rather to my surprise) seemed to remember them quite well, and the Professor, finding that the learned and mysterious method left him rather at the mercy of an enemy slightly deficient in scruples, fell back upon a more popular form of wit. "I see," he sneered, "you prevail like the false pig in Aesop." "And you fail," I answered, smiling, "like the hedgehog in Montaigne." Need I say that there is no hedgehog in Montaigne? "Your clap-trap comes off," he said; "so would your beard." I had no intelligent answer to this, which was quite true and rather witty. But I laughed heartily, answered, "Like the Pantheist's boots," at random, and turned on my heel with all the honours of victory. The real Professor was thrown out, but not with violence, though one man tried very patiently to pull off his nose.
[GKC TMWWT CW6:549-51]

Glorious! Some of the best humor in all of GKC. You see, that is the important thing for us to learn. If Chesterton is canonized, it will be due (at least in part) to his strong lessons about pride and humility - and knowing where we fit into the scheme of things. Please, please, I've told you before - if you have not yet read it, please do read (and re-read) GKC's "If I Only Had One Sermon to Preach" in The Common Man!

What is the point, Doctor? You wonder. Well - we do not throw out the Bible because there are typos in it, or even curiosities of writing caused by an archaic view - the firmament, the motion of the earth, the pillars that hold up the "corners" of the earth and all that. (The correct view was exposed long ago by St. Augustine, but perhaps you think it was Glumpe, and believe in it as much.) I was just struck the other day by the reading where Jesus says "the Queen of the South will rise and condemn this generation". He goes on to say how she came from the "ends of the earth" to see Solomon, yet there is a greater than Solomon here. [Mt 12:42] Do you think that Jesus didn't know the earth was round? Hee hee! Oh my. Do not be confused. I impute no error to our Lord, I am not committing blasphemy. (Compare GKC's famous bit about God writing a book on the Evolution of Grant Allen in The Everlasting Man!) This is a form of talking, and it's obvious to everyone, except the guy in academic robes we heard about a few minutes ago.

Let's try another realm of knowledge. Do you think astronomers get fined for saying "oh what a lovely sunset?" Hee hee! What about Aristotle, that Greek guy that so many people think was so smart. Maybe he was, but you do know what he said? He says that the Milky Way comes from a swamp! Oh yes, it's in his Meteorologica, Book I chapter 8. (See Jaki on this in The Milky Way Chapter 1.) Does that mean we junk all of Aristotle? Not quite - and the same is true for other authors, some of whom have phrases that are just as funny and just as wrong.

But let us resume poking our stick at Chesterton, which is lots more fun - he poked at himself too, you know. So, for a change, let us take an instance where he notes his own error. It is found in the hilarious essay called "The Real Journalist" in the collection of his Daily News essays called A Miscellany of Men. This is a famous case, and I have alluded to it previously. Here is an essay worth study - if not literal memorisation - by every journalist and media-being in the cosmos, as well as every blogger and blogg-commenter. It reveals how easy it is to make mistakes, and how even easier it is to have these mistakes be blown out of proportion. The essay tells the story of how GKC wrote a certain essay, and how, in the heat of the moment, or perhaps we might more charitably say, in the urgency of the situation, he stated that "Shakespeare" had written a certain line of poetry - a line which had, as a matter of fact, been written by "Thomas Gray". (In my own case, several columns ago, when *I* was what is wrong with the world, I had torn the authorship of "Trees" from Joyce Kilmer and assigned it to Rudyard Kipling! Hee hee!)

But GKC's case gets better, and the error is magnified in a way that both Bible scholars and computer scientists can both rejoice in. You see, he tried to "correct" this mistake, and he wrote a letter to the editor in which he made another mistake by spelling the poet's name "Grey".

An aside: Now, if you use just about any form of computer these days, you know how serious the smallest letter, or smallest part of a letter, [see Mt 5:18] can be - when you go to type in your password. It's not only the Ephraimites who can't say "Shibboleth" - see Judges 12:5-6. Ahem!

But that wasn't all that went wrong. This "correction" article was supposed to be titled

"G.K.C." Explains

but it actually appeared under the title

Mr. Chesterton "Explains"

And, as you know about the sometimes emotive use of quotes, that made it far worse! But you'll have to read the essay itself if you want all the details as to what really happened, and why. It is truly funny, and quite instructive as well as admonitory.

Now, I mentioned "engineering", and whined about some abstruse matters of software, and whatever. My point could be brought out by appealing to another sort of engineering, like bridge-building - I might note that John Roebling likely did not envision our modern automobiles crossing his proposed "Brooklyn Bridge" - but he "overdesigned" (as some say) and made the resulting edifice more than sufficiently strong to handle them. (It is worth mentioning here that it is also one of the most elegant of such structures, and well worth your study.) But the point is that in engineering, we must take errors into account. For example: we computer people spend an awful lot of time writing code that (hopefully) will NEVER be used, as it is there only to handle the hundreds of ridiculously unlikely cases of something going wrong! Or, if you don't like that, take your car, and consider that nice smooth paint job, those shiny bumpers... They're not really there to look cool, but to help keep you safe. Or take those circuit breakers... gosh, there are lots of things.

Here's an even more relevant one: you know that roughly every sixth character in all of Chesterton is the BLANK? Also called the SPACE - you know that long thing at the bottom of the keyboard. Don't forget I told you about the smallest letter... in computers, the space is just as important as any other letter or number or symbol, even if you cannot see it! I've told you elsewhere about how the ancient Romans didn't use spaces; they just rantheirwordsupagainsteachother - yeah, EVENONMONUMENTS. Sheesh. But if you have some philosophical aversion to the mystical details of things that no one can see but everyone believes in and relies upon, consider this: Ten percent of Chesterton's total writing consists of three words: "the", "of", "and" - and if you want a quarter of all of Chesterton you can have it with just another handful of words, all very common and boring. Sure, it is rare that any of these working words are critical to the discussion, though I am sure I could find examples where they matter... but the point is that these things are just like the rivets of the Brooklyn Bridge, or those almost-never-used bits of my code. They are there to help hold things together. These tiny things matter, like the space, even if they are almost never seen... BUT if they are gone how quickly will you notice! TRYITAGAINANDSEEHOWMUCHYOURELYONTHATSPACE! It's even worse in speech: try sucking out the silence between words and you get the same effect, like the fine print in a contract... Yo! What did that announcer just say???

The final point is this. It is easy enough to miss such minor details, of spelling, or niceties of grammar, or even more factual matters - (Say, GKC, who DID write "antique roots peep out"? And on what sea did you say Troy was located? How about the Triple Point of water? Hee hee!) The point is to fix such things and go on. We don't deny these things are flaws, but we do not discard the entire work because of them either. We recall the warning about the plank in our own eye, which is too big to be seen. [see "The Three Tools of Death" in The Innocence of Father Brown, also Lk 6:41-2]

And now, since there was something more to that quote about water, I shall give you its conclusion. Since we Chestertonians are always catholic even if we are not Catholic, we ought to consider it very carefully. Dogmatic accuracy is no insurance against a building fire; we need to keep up our study of hydraulics as well as ontology.

Ice is melted into cold water and cold water is heated into hot water; it cannot be all three at once. But this does not make water unreal or even relative; it only means that its being is limited to being one thing at a time. But the fullness of being is everything that it can be; and without it the lesser or approximate forms of being cannot be explained as anything; unless they are explained away as nothing.
[GKC St. Thomas Aquinas CW2:530]

Recall my recent voluminous gurglings about finite state machines? There is here revealed part of the mystery - the mystery of the limitation of being. It helps reveal why a quarter (or more) of Chesterton is working words, and an entire sixth is not even readable at all, being mere empty space. It helps reveal why the Brooklyn Bridge has to be so strong, or why software has so much code that is never executed, or why our bodies are mostly water - though not at its Triple Point, ahem! It even helps explain why God loves us so much, despite our failings, even though we are what is wrong with the world... but there I think I shall let you ponder the matter, and say good-bye for today.