James E Hartley

Plato, Aristotle, and Jesus

Quiz: Name the five most influential philosophy books in Western Civilization. Go ahead, make your list. Don’t worry if you are not an expert in the history of philosophy. Just name the five most influential philosophy books of which you have heard.

There are a lot of viable candidates for that list of five. The number of possible lists is vast. But there is one book that, while it should be on everyone’s list, would show up on very few lists unless mentioned in advance. What is this most important work of philosophy that nobody remembers to list? The Bible.

In terms of influence on Western Civilization, it is hard to think of a book which would rate higher than the Bible. The only question is whether it is properly labeled a philosophy book. A few years back, when George W. Bush was asked to name the philosopher who influenced him the most, he replied “Jesus Christ.” That answer met with much derision. It is not his answer which is odd, however, but the derision.

Jonathan Pennington has set out to fix this state of affairs in his new book, Jesus the Great Philosopher. It is a book which should never have needed to be written. The main argument is so obviously true that it is hard to see how anyone could spin out a book stating the obvious. The fact that this argument is not obvious, however, is exactly why it is good this book exists.

Read the rest at the Circe Institute

How to Write The Grapes of Wrath

“It is my observation as an editor that most beginning authors are attracted to the trade of letters, not because they have anything apposite and exigent to say, but simply because it seems easy.”

That is the start of H. L. Mencken’s essay “Authorship as a Trade” (reprinted in Prejudices: Fifth Series).

I have been teaching for over a quarter of a century now. What has been the hardest thing to teach students? Not even a contest. I have never figured out how to convince students that writing well is hard work.

I can’t fault the students too much; I didn’t discover that writing well was hard work until after I graduated from college. My economics professor Tom Mayer did his best to teach me this, but I did not absorb the lesson. I remember my shock in class one day when he asked students to raise a hand if they ever struggled trying to find the right word to use in a sentence. One or two students raised their hands. I was not one of them. He then said, “Those of you who raised your hand might be good writers. The rest of you are not.” Truth be told, I was a bit indignant.

What Eliot called the intolerable wrestle with words and meaning is a real thing if you want to write well. There is a myth that some people are just naturally gifted prose stylists, that ever since they were born they have this supernatural ability to sit down and observe impeccable prose pouring forth. Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (edited by Robert DeMott) is a marvelous demonstration that writing is hard even for good writers.

When Steinbeck set out to write The Grapes of Wrath, he started a daily journal in which he would record how he was feeling at the outset of every day. It is a remarkable view of the craft of writing. Four and a half months into the process, Steinbeck, acknowledging that he is going to have to revisit the work of the last several months to fix words and tone, exclaims, “Sorry, but I could hardly be expected to whip out finished copy.” Remember, this is a diary—he is apologizing to himself.

The diary has one recurrent theme: Despair.

“I’m not a writer. I’ve been fooling myself and other people. I wish I were.”
“This book has become a misery to me because of my inadequacy.”
“Maybe I was silly to think I could write such a long book without stopping. I can’t. Or rather I couldn’t. I’ll try to go on now.”
“I’m getting worried about this book. I wish it were done. I’m afraid I’m botching it. I think it would be a good thing to stop and think about it but I hate to lose the time. But I want it to be good and I’m afraid it is slipping. But I must remember that it always seems that way when it is well along.”
“…I am sure of one thing—it isn’t the great book I had hoped I would be. It’s just a run-of-the-mill book. And the awful thing is that it is absolutely the best I can do.”

This awful run-of-the-mill book, botched by an inadequate failure of a writer, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and was a large part of why Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize. Yet, in writing it, Steinbeck was unrelentingly in a state of despair at his failures as a writer. As Tom Mayer noted, that is the mark of someone who might be a good writer.

How did Steinbeck manage to write the novel despite his constant sense that he was failing? That is the other theme which runs throughout the diary: Discipline.

“The failure of will for even one day has a devastating effect on the whole, far more important than just the loss of time and wordage. The whole physical basis of the novel is discipline of the writer, of his material, of the language. And sadly enough, if any of the discipline is gone, all of it suffers.”
“But I’ve got to go on and think of nothing but this book. I’m behind now and I want not to lose any more time, and so I simply must go on. It’s good to work even if the absolute drive isn’t in you.”
“…I must reestablish the discipline. Must get tough.”
“My work is no good, I think—I’m desperately upset about it. Have no discipline any more. I must get back.”
“I have been remiss and lazy, my concentration I have permitted to go under the line of effort….My job is to get down to it and now. For all the pressures, there is only one person to blame and I must force him into it.”

Putting it together, writing well is an act of seeming futility which breeds despair. The only way to write well is to endure that despair by sheer will and discipline. Just keep writing. Write bad sentences and bad paragraphs. Then wrote some more bad paragraphs and bad sentences. And bit by bit, some of those sentences will become better sentences and some of those paragraphs will become better paragraphs. Writing is a craft that must be learned by work. Hard work.

Why did I not learn this lesson in school? Why did I get through high school and college writing essays which earned good grades? Looking back on them now makes me wince. Why did nobody ever tell me that if I wanted to write well, I needed to spend way more time working on the craft of writing? Where did the myth start that it was possible to whip out a nice essay with no struggle over words and meaning, with no search for the perfect word?

John Steinbeck obviously writes better prose than most mortals. But, as this diary makes perfectly clear, the reason he could do that is because he worked at it, he struggled with it. Day after day.

The trouble with being too casual about a manuscript is that you don’t do it. In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration. Consequently there must be some little quality of fierceness until the habit pattern of a certain number of words is established. There is no possibility, in me at least, of saying, “I’ll do it if I feel like it.” One never feels like awaking day after day. In fact, given the smallest excuse, one will not work at all. The rest is nonsense. Perhaps there are people who can work that way, but I cannot. I must get my words down every day whether they are any good or not. And I am a little afraid that they are not much good. However down they go. The forced work is sometimes better than the easy, but there is no rule about it. Sometimes they come out better than at other times and that is all one can say.

That is indeed all one can say. If you want to learn to write well, there is no substitute for the discipline of writing. However, there is another barrier, I suspect a rather common barrier. In order to learn to write well, one must first be convinced that writing well is important. Not merely important to get a good grade, but important in and of itself. That was another lesson I never learned in school.

Wokeness at Noon

Are you Woke? It was not too long ago that such a question would have been greeted with a puzzled disdain for its grammatical barbarism. It is now the question of the moment, no longer limited to college campuses as part of the initiation rites to higher learning. In certain political circles, it has already become the code word for being taken seriously on policy questions.

The puzzling thing about Wokeness is not that it is fashionable among a small subset of the Campus Left. One should never be surprised by what is fashionable among college faculty and students. The curious question is how these ideas broke out of the academic asylum and met acquiescence among a large group of people who should have known better.

The answer is found in a book which should have never fallen off the radar: Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. First published in 1941, it was—along with 1984—one of the great books about totalitarianism written in the 1940s. Widely praised when it was published, the book was enormously influential in fostering the consensus view of post-war anti-communism. In 1998, Modern Library published a list of the 100 best English novels of the 20th century; Darkness at Noon was ranked eighth, five places above 1984.

Read the rest at Law and Liberty

Here We Come A-caroling

Joyful, all ye nations rise,
Join the triumph of the skies
With th’angelic host proclaim,
Christ is born in Bethlehem
Hark! The herald angels sing,

And you can join in that singing.

Here to help you in that endeavor is Hosanna in Excelsis: Hymns and Devotions for the Christmas Season, by David and Barbara Leeman. The book is a twist on the Family Devotional. Forty-three hymns, one per day from November 25 through January 6. (The final date is Epiphany. November 25, however, is odd. The authors say it is the first possible day of Advent, but that isn’t right. The earliest possible date for the first Sunday of Advent is November 27. It doesn’t take getting out a calendar and counting backwards to discover this by the way—it’s even in Wikipedia!)

The idea of the book: you gather with your family every day of the Christmas season. You first read about the hymn for the day. There are biographies of the writer of the hymn, the writer of the music to which the hymn is set, and a few paragraphs of a daily devotional. You and your family then sing the hymn together. If that idea sounds wondrous to you, no need to read the rest of this discussion, just get the book.

But, if you are of a discriminating type, you also want to know how this book is any different than just getting a cheap used hymnal and singing with your family. If this book has any value, it would have to be in the write-ups about the hymns and not the hymns themselves. There we have a mixed bag.

First, the really good news. By pausing each day to actually think about the hymn, these old familiar carols can suddenly reveal fresh surprises. We have all had that experience at some point in our lives. For me, the biggest puzzle when growing up was where on the map one would find that place called “Orient Are.” You can imagine the waves of relief when I realized it was just an oddly organized sentence structure; “We are three kings from the Orient” just doesn’t scan and loses the nice little rhyme with “traverse afar.” Poetic License.

Reading through this book, I had a similar Epiphany. Consider the incredibly well-known line “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” It turns out there is a comma in that line. Where is the comma? My guess, and I suspect that you Dear Reader assume the same, was that the comma is after “Ye.” “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentleman” is a nice message at Christmas. Merry Gentleman all being wished the gift of Rest at this fine, but busy, time of year. Ah, but that is not where the comma is. The line is actually “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.” It is not addressed to merry people, but to all people, and the wish is that God will bring the joy to all.

Let that sink in for a minute and then think about how Dickens employs the song in A Christmas Carol. An urchin sings the song through the keyhole of Scrooge’s establishment. If the comma went after “ye,” then the episode is just there to give more evidence of how much Scrooge—who is most certainly not a “merry gentleman”—hates Christmas. But, put the comma in the right place, and the episode is suddenly an invocation; the street urchin’s song proclaims the message of the entire story. Indeed, a nice paraphrase of the line from the hymn would be, “God bless us, every one.”

Who would have thought so much hinged on the placement of a comma? The biographies had a similar fascinating revelation. “Hark! The herald angels sing, “Glory to the Newborn King.” It would be hard to get a more familiar first line. Charles Wesley wrote the poem, which was set to music written by Mendelssohn. Except: Charles Wesley did not write the first line.

The first line of Charles Wesley’s poem reads, “Hark! How all the welkin rings, glory to the King of kings.” Welkin is an Old English word that means, “the vault of the sky” or “heaven.” It exclaims that all of heaven rings glory! A friend of the Wesleys, the famous reformed evangelist George Whitefield, took the liberty of publishing Wesley’s carol, changing the words to proclaim who sings glory. “Hark! The herald angels sing, glory to the newborn king.” Wesley was furious with his friend!

One final insight from reading though this book. From which hymn are the flowing lines taken? “Nails, spear, shall pierce him through, the cross be borne for me, for you.” You know the hymn. It is, indeed a very common Christmas song. “What Child is This?” has embedded in it both the sweet image of a baby sleeping on Mary’s lap and the horror of nails being driven through that same baby’s hands and feet. These Christmas carols are rather rich in content.

This book provides many opportunities for reflections like these. But, alas, along with the good, you have to take the bad. The devotionals are a mix of interesting insights and cringe-inducing literalism. An example of the latter. The carol “Ding, Dong! Merrily on High” opens with this verse: “Ding, dong! Merrily on high, in heav’n the bells are ringing. Ding, dong! Verily the sky is riv’n with angels singing!” The Leemans’ commentary begins with this paragraph:

Is it scriptural that in heaven there were bells ringing? Not precisely. But Jesus tells us “there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents….joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents” (Luke 15:7, 10). Certainly, there was joy in heaven when Jesus was born, as the angels knew what it would mean to all the world. Historically, bells are associated with religious rituals, and steeple bells would call communities together for church services. Bells are also used to commemorate important events. At the declaration of peace at the end of WWII, bells rang for hours and hours throughout England.

The only possible response to that is “Yougottabekiddingme.” How is it possible that anyone would think the most important thing to discuss regrading this carol is that while there is no scriptural warrant for bells ringing in heaven when Jesus was born, that is OK because, gosh, people use bells for lots of important events, like when World War II ended? I dearly wish observations of this sort were unique to this hymn; sadly, they are not.

We don’t want to focus too much on the good and bad of the Leemans’ commentary, however. Of much greater importance is thinking about the carols themselves. And, there, you have a marvelous opportunity. Put on some carols and sing along. Hosanna in Excelsis, indeed!

Related Posts
Sproul, R.C. Growing In Holiness “Binging on Daily Devotionals”
Wigglesworth, Mark The Silent Musician “Conducting and Lecturing”

(Moody Press sent me a copy of the book in exchange for this review.)

Adam Smith Wants You to Enjoy the Holidays

“How to cope without typical holiday traditions this year—and even start some new ones” blares the headline at CBS news. “How Will Your Favorite Holiday Traditions Fare This Year? Tell Us About It” asks NPR. “Rethinking the Holidays: Traditions, Change Are on the Table” asserts US News. “New Holiday Traditions for 2020” is the headline at American Lifestyle, which somehow missed the fact that “new tradition” is rather oxymoronic.

Faced with a steady stream of headlines like that, you, like most people, might get rather depressed. Christmas is coming and the goose is getting…dropped from the menu. Multiply that by all those things you used to do and will not be doing this year, and it all seems rather bleak. But, why? Why aren’t you excited that your forthcoming celebrations are going to be novel and different?

Read the Rest at Adam Smith Works

I Know What You Did Next Summer

Do you have the right to commit a crime? Odd question, to be sure. One would not think there is much to discuss.

Yet, Philip K. Dick, spun it into a nice story. “Minority Report.”

First things first, let’s set aside the “Living in an Unjust Society” discussion. Whether you have the right to violate unjust laws is itself an interesting discussion topic. For now, let’s focus on more mundane crimes. For example: Do you have the right to murder your neighbor because you don’t like him? That seems like a really easy question to answer.

In the world of “Minority Report,” society has managed to eliminate all such crime by the simple expedient of arresting people before they commit the crimes. Accused of precrime, you will be incarcerated before you actually murder your neighbor. Best of both worlds, right? Your neighbor lives and you are punished for the fact that you would have killed him had society not arrested you before you did so.

The idea of punishments for precrime sends a chill down everyone’s spine—with one exception. Most people are quite happy with the idea of arresting people for plotting to commit a terrorist attack. In that case however, we could describe the crime as plotting to do something. What about arresting people for the precrime that they were going to plot a terrorist attack in the future? Can we arrest people before they actually start plotting? Can we arrest them before they have even thought about joining the plot?

The problem with precrime that you instantly realized is that it seems impossible to know that someone is going to commit a crime in the future. Sure, you may know that someone is violent and hates his neighbor, but is that the same thing as knowing that the neighbor is about to be murdered? Of course not.

The world of “Minority Report” has people who are born with the ability to see the future. Dubbed “precogs,” they are used by the Precrime Division to alert the police that a crime is going to be committed. The police then sweep in and arrest the person before the crime happens. Crime vanishes. Everyone is happy.

Imagine living in that world for a moment. Imagine there was a zero percent chance that any crime would be committed ever again. You can go anywhere you want, never lock your house or your car, and even leave your laptop on the ground next to a park bench and come back later and pick it up. Perfect safety all the time. Sounds nice, right?

It is indeed nice, until you get accused of a precrime. You can protest all you want that you didn’t commit a crime. That is, after all the point. Of course you didn’t commit a crime. You were arrested before you did so. Good luck proving your innocence; how do you prove you would not have committed a crime if you had not been arrested?

“Minority Report” goes one step further. Precogs do not all have simultaneous revelations of the future. So, there are three of them attached to the Precrime Division. An arrest is only made when two of them alert the authorities about an impeding crime. That feature creates the potential for a fascinating puzzle.

Suppose Precog 1 foresees that Charlie will kill Bob next Tuesday. Charlie had no idea that he would ever even think about killing Bob. Charlie is alerted to Precog 1’s knowledge of the impending murder, so Charlie immediately decides to leave town so that there is no chance that he will kill Bob. After all, Precog’s 1’s statement about the future does not prevent Charlie from leaving town to make it impossible for the statement to become true.

Precog 2 now sees the future and predicts that Charlie will not kill Bob. After all, since they will be in different places, there is no way for Charlie to kill Bob. Charlie then learns that Precog 2 has seen that he will not kill Bob. This is great news. Since Charlie won’t kill Bob, there is no longer a need to leave town. After all, if Charlie was really going to kill Bob, then Precog 2 would have foreseen it.

Now that Charlie no longer needs to leave town, Precog 3 comes along and sees that Charlie will kill Bob next Tuesday. So, two of the three precogs have now seen that Charlie will kill Bob on Tuesday, and Charlie is arrested.

The questions:
1. Is this fair?
2. Can we legitimately say that any of the precogs have actually seen the future when the future can change depending on Charlie’s decision about whether or not to leave town?
3. Did Precog 1 and Precog 3 actually see the same future?

All of those questions are nice little puzzles set up by the story, but you probably did not have a very difficult time answering any of those questions. Why not? You believe in human agency. You believe that Charlie really does have a decision about whether to kill Bob or not, and that up until the moment of the murder, Charlie could decide not to do so. Because Charlie can decide not to murder Bob, it seems unjust to arrest Charlie for precrime based on some precog’s vision of an unsettled future. Indeed, you think of the world of “Minority Report” as a dystopia. Sure, there is no crime, but the cost to liberty of eliminating that crime is simply too high.

Now, make the problem harder. The reason you don’t like the world of “Minority Report” is because you do not believe your future actions are predetermined. As of now, the future is still not predictable by humans: we do not know the mind of God and we do not have the ability to track all the chemical reactions which will occur in every brain on the planet. So, even if the future is potentially predictable, we cannot do so now. But, what if that changed? Just for a moment, imagine that the future is predictable. What if we could know that if Charlie is not arrested first, he will kill Bob next Tuesday? Absolute certainty; no margin for error at all. Now, can we arrest Charlie for the pre-crime of killing Bob in the future?

Saying “yes” seems wrong. We still have that same aversion to arresting Charlie before he has actually killed Bob. But, saying “No” means that we are consenting to the death of Bob simply because we are too squeamish to arrest Charlie before it happens. Does Charlie have the right to murder Bob before we can arrest Charlie? Do you have the right to commit a crime?

In a world in which the future was perfectly predictable, arresting someone for precrime seems like a moral obligation. Surely it is wrong to stand by and let Bob be murdered if we know with absolute certainty that he will be murdered. On the flip side, if we do not know that Bob will be murdered, it is surely wrong to arrest Charlie because we think he might murder Bob. But, where is the point at which this flips? Is it only in cases of perfect certainty that we are willing to arrest Charlie before he kills Bob? What if we are 99.999% certain that Charlie is going to kill Bob unless we arrest him? Does Charlie have the right to kill Bob because there is a 0.001% chance he won’t do it?

These sorts of puzzles about statistical probability are all around us, by the way. We literally could not act in society without forming guesses about what people might do in the future. “Minority Report” may seem like a pleasant story to read about the problems in a fictional dystopia, but sorting out what precisely is right or wrong in this story has intriguing implications for a whole host of problems in the world both now and in the near future. As the ability to sort through Big Data rises, as you volunteer an endless array of information about your life to Google and Facebook and Microsoft and Apple, your future is getting a lot more predictable.