Ah, you were lucky!

Franklinstein

Lucky he didn't get himself killed!

Ben Franklin says:

"Diligence is the mother of good luck."

Gasp! You mean luck's not a super power?

A Night in Shining Amour

"More Light"

There is none.

Jakub Grygiel on the EU and European Identity

Jakub Grygiel

Johns Hopkins University

Jakub Grygiel, a professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins University and a fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, has written a recent article for the Foreign Policy Research Institute on the Europen Union: "One Market, One Currency, One People? The Faulty Logic of Europe" (January 2012). I'll just quote a cut-and-paste summary and offer a brief, opaque commentary since I have little time this morning:

[N]o matter how much time and money European leaders put into this effort [of forging a common European identity], the outcome does not look promising . . . . The reason is that its causality is faulty . . . . The project of a united Europe is based on the belief that economic unity (itself poorly defined) will lead to political unity. The pooling of the economic aspects of state sovereignty . . . was meant to constrain and mitigate the nationalistic behavior of individual governments, thereby limiting the possibility of another war. Moreover, in the longer run, the expectation was that a growing economic integration, culminating in the establishment of a common currency, would create a common European identity . . . . Such a line of causation demanded a technocratic approach. Missing the underlying national unity, the establishment of a common market and a common currency had to be pursued by a supra-national elite with a very tenuous electoral accountability. Absent a demos, the technocrats had to take over the decision-making process. The hope, based on the assumption that a common economy creates a unified people, was that at a certain point a European demos would arise allowing the functioning of a European democracy. But until then, technocracy would have to suffice . . . . The "democratic deficit" of EU institutions is, therefore, a direct outcome of the faith in the transformative powers of economic structures. The economic, material conditions had to be first set up, then managed by the EU elites sheltered from electoral wishes (notice the EU's reluctance to allow, and fear of, referenda), and the effect would be the blurring of national differences and ultimately the birth of a European nation. One market, one currency, and -- sooner or later -- one people . . . . There was no need to figure out what Europe, as a cultural entity, really was because the new economic reality would have made a new nation. Hence, the EU technocrats strongly opposed any reference to a common religious background, Christianity, and ignored the three founding cities of Europe: Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. In their stead, an anemic paean to universal values, reason, and tolerance was much preferred, and the less defined these terms the better. In a way, there were meant to be empty vessels, so anyone could fill them with any substance they desired because they were simply temporary placeholders for the unity that would have sprung from the material conditions created by a common market. One Europe under one currency . . . . [But] Europeans will not be created by the euro and a common market, and what we have right now is a set of EU institutions with no Europeans. But to recognize this leads to the question of what Europe is, a question that neither Merkel nor Sarkozy nor Barroso are willing to ponder because they seem to have little memory of the Christian roots of Europe. Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome are seen as contemporary sources of security and fiscal problems, not as symbols of a great civilizational and religious inheritance that truly unites Europe.

I think that Grygiel is largely right about the limitations intrinsic to employing economic unification toward driving cultural unity. But the European elite would respond that they have not neglected a larger identity, for they do appeal to "universal values, reason, and tolerance." Grygiel calls these three rather "anemic" compared to Europe's Christian roots. I don't think that anemia is the real issue, however. The problem with these three Enlightenment values is that in a postmodern Europe, they are redefined and even contradict each other, for the radical multiculturalism implicitly adopted undercuts appeal to any universal value except for the universal value of tolerance, itself self-contradictory, and reason is distrusted as an authoritarian arbiter of differences that would seek to impose its metanarrative upon the various cultural groups of Europe's multicultural reality.

That's what needs to be discussed.

Persuasions Article: Jane Austen on Resentment and Love

Persuasions On-Line

Jane Austen Society of North America

Some readers will recall from last summer and into the following autumn that I was working out my ideas on Darcy's love for -- and resentment of -- Elizabeth in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. My subsequent article, fittingly titled "Darcy's Ardent Love and Resentful Temper in Pride and Prejudice," has recently seen publication in the Winter 2009 issue of Persuasions On-Line.

I believe that I've previously posted preliminary stages of the introduction and the conclusion to this article, but just in case anyone is interested in the final form of each, I'll post both below -- starting, naturally, with the introduction:

In 1759, Adam Smith wrote in Part 3 of his Theory of Moral Sentiments that "Love does not judge of resentment, nor resentment of love. Those two passions may be opposite to one another, but cannot, with any propriety, be said to approve or disapprove of one another" (192). Kenneth Moler has argued that Smith's work on the sentiments exerted an influence on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, written some forty years later (567-69). Similarly, Peter Knox-Shaw examines Elizabeth Bennet's query, "'Is not general incivility [toward others than the beloved] the very essence of love?'" (160) and finds in it an echo of Smith's observation in Moral Sentiments (Pt. 1) that "though a lover may be good company to his mistress, he is so to nobody else" (87-88, n. 44) -- although the similarity seems rather faint to be heard as an echo. On the "incivility" of lovers, anyway, Smith and Austen would generally seem to agree, but possible influence by one writer on another can be found as readily in disagreement as agreement. Despite her apparent convergence with Smith on some points, would Austen have accepted Smith's views on love and resentment, namely, that neither can judge the other?

Not to leave anyone hanging on this point, here follows the answer in my conclusion:

Adam Smith may have thought that the opposed feelings of love and resentment did not judge one another, but Jane Austen -- whether or not she knew specifically of Smith's view -- appears to have held a radically different opinion. Ever since Juliet McMaster's 1978 book Jane Austen on Love, we have known that Austen conceives of proper lovers as each taking on roles as the teacher and the taught in a pedagogical economy concerning love, and of proper love as achieving the "integration of head and heart" (45) in a manner that does not lose passion because "the full and mutual engagement of head and heart is what is passionate" (46). But if love involves the heart as well as the head, then love plays a unique pedagogical role, for it also provides an impassioned epistemological framework for understanding the world and acting within it. In Austen's understanding, the heart's romantic love must be imbued with the head's charitable Christian love, which can judge pride and resentment as improper to love and thereby seek a better way. Douglas Bush, writing in 1975, spoke of Austen's "fusion of Christian virtues and principles and eighteenth-century reason, . . . sensitized and fired by controlled feeling" (196). Perhaps this remark gets at what Austen was up to, namely, responding to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment with a renewed Christian view of the human being. The best education by itself would not overcome one's natural evil, as Darcy himself remarks of his own "implacably" resentful temper, but a genuine love -- neither proud nor resentful, but charitable -- could empower one to do so, and in Darcy's case actually does so.

But if you want to know why I conclude these things, then you'll have to go read my online article. You'll want to, of course, since the editor, Susan Allen Ford, praises it so highly:

"C. Durning Carroll, Horace Jeffery Hodges, and Edward Kozaczka read individual novels through very different but strangely compatible perspectives."

Now that you've heard such highfalutin praise -- me and my article likened to C. Durning Carroll, of "Willoughby's Apology," and Edward Kozaczka, of "Queer Temporality, Spatiality, and Memory in Jane Austen's Persuasion" -- who could resist an urge to read more?

"mind . . . instead of mentality"

Averroes (Ibn Rushd, 1126-1198)

Arab Enlightenment: Mind, not Mentality?

(Image from Wikipedia)

In its Special Dispatch Series, No. 2067 (September 29, 2008), "Liberal Syrian Intellectual Georges Tarabishi: Without Secularism, There Can Be No Democracy," MEMRI supplies excerpts from an interview early this year that the London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat (January 23, 2008) conducted with the liberal Syrian intellectual Georges Tarabishi. In that interview, Tarabishi made some insightful remarks on the difference between thinking with one's mind and thinking with a mentality.

Tarabishi's distinction was made in response to a question that the newspaper posed concerningn reasons for the decline in Arab intellectual culture:

Q: "What is your explanation for the decline of the Arab mind, following the period of openness and flowering in the past? Are we in need of an Arab renaissance project? [And if so,] what would be its outlines?"

The query might be referring to the sort of flowering that ended with the Muslim rejection of Averroes (ibn Rushd) in the 12th century, along with the long decline over the centuries that followed, but Tarabishi seems to take the question as referring to a more recent decline:

A: "It is difficult to answer in [only a few] lines this kind of question, which I have written entire books answering. Here I will just express a reservation about the use of the word 'mind.' I believe that many Arab intellectuals, and the audience they address, do not think with their minds, but with a mentality. There is a big difference between the two.

"It may well be that the renewal of the project of the Arab Enlightenment (nahda), which is currently suffering from severe setbacks, is dependent on the ability of the Arab intellectual to once again go from basing himself on the mind instead of on the mentality. And a mind is only a mind if it is critical.

"What characterizes a mentality is its tendency towards defensiveness and justification. That is what most dominates the prevailing culture today in the Arab world, especially on the Arab satellite stations, which put defensiveness before criticism and stir up emotions instead of stimulating the mind."

I think that this is a useful distinction to make -- a mind versus a mentality. One who 'thinks' with a mentality doesn't really think at all. Such an individual (if that's the correct term) might reflect, but only in order to remember the correct position and repeat the proper response. The purpose of such reflection is to reinforce ideological boundaries and prevent others from crossing the borders.

Those who do cross are accused of having betrayed their identity.

Hirsi Ali: "Islam is hostile to reason."

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Philosopher of Tempered Reason

Also with "Downcast Eyes"?

(Image from Wikipedia)

For some reason, perhaps in part due to this blog, I end up on all sorts of mailing lists and therefore receive a lot of emails, most of which get consigned to my spam folder, but occasionally, I receive materials that I find useful and interesting.

I'm therefore not sorry to regularly find emails from The Spectator, an old (since 1828) conservative British magazine published weekly, for it sometimes has articles that catch my interest. Recently, this one by The Spectator's assistant editor, Mary Wakefield, attracted my eye:

Mary Wakefield, "'We are at war with all Islam': An interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali," The Spectator (November 28, 2007)

I found most interesting Hirsi Ali's views on reason and religion as she and Wakefield discuss the differing character of Christianity and of Islam:

'Christianity is different from Islam,' says Hirsi Ali, 'because it allows you to question it. It probably wasn't different in the past, but it is now. Christians -- at least Christians in a liberal democracy -- have accepted, after Thomas Hobbes, that they must obey the secular rule of law; that there must be a separation of church and state. In Islamic doctrine such a separation has not occurred yet. This is what makes it dangerous! Islam -- all Islam, not just Islamism -- has not acknowledged that it must obey secular law. Islam is hostile to reason.'

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's eyes are now aglow. She is a terrific believer in reason. For her, Western civilisation is built on the bedrock not of Judaeo-Christian values, but of logic. After seeking asylum in Holland, she spent five years at Leiden university studying political science, absorbing the Enlightenment philosophers -- Spinoza, Hobbes, Voltaire -- and she mentions them fondly, as if they're family. But there's a steely side to her atheism, which says with Voltaire: Ecraser l'infâme! During a recent debate with Ed Husain, as Husain was explaining his moderate Islam, she began to laugh at him, saying: 'When you die you rot, Ed! There is no afterlife, Ed!' And it makes me wonder whether, for Hirsi Ali, Islam's crime is as much against reason as humanity; whether she sees the point of spirituality at all.

Are you so sure you understand what is at the heart of Islam? I ask her. Isn't there a peaceful prayerfulness -- apart from the politics -- that an atheist might not understand? 'I was a Muslim once, remember, and it was when I was most devout that I was most full of hate,' she says.

OK then, you talk about your conscience, and how your conscience was pricked by 9/11. But if there's no God, what do you mean by a conscience? And why should we obey it?

'My conscience is informed by reason,' says Hirsi Ali, surprised I should ask. 'It's like Kant's categorical imperative: behave to others as you would wish they behaved to you.'

Although Hirsi Ali may be unaware -- for I'm not certain how informed she is of Christianity -- Kant was secularizing and sharpening (albeit insisting that his categorical imperative was logically prior to) a teaching of Jesus that has come down to us in two forms:

Matthew 7:12: "So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets."

Luke 6:31 "Just as you want others to do for you, do the same for them."

This so-called 'Golden Rule' occurs in various religious traditions and probably in secular ones as well, so it's certainly not unique to Christianity. Interestingly, Hirsi Ali's formulation of what she refers to as Kant's categorical imperative ("behave to others as you would wish they behaved to you") comes closer to Matthew 7:12 ("do to others what you would have them do to you") than to any of Kant's formulations, e.g.:

"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." (Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, translated by James W. Ellington [1785], third edition Hackett Publishing Company: 1993, page 30.)

Hirsi Ali may have spent half a decade studying political science at Leiden University and learning about the Enlightenment philosophers (though Spinoza and Hobbes are, to be precise, usually considered pre-Enlightenment), including a dose of Kantianism, but her formulation of Kant's categorical imperative sounds more biblical than Kantian. In fact, it doesn't sound like Kant at all. I'm not ridiculing Hirsi Ali, for I find that Matthew's formulation of the Golden Rule comes more readily to my lips than does Kant's secularized and sharpened reformulation of it in his categorical imperative.

I don't know that this particular point is, strictly speaking, an issue of reason and religion, but it's mildly intriguing that Hirsi Ali's appeal to reason as having informed her conscience actually gives biblically informed listeners the impression that she's paraphrasing the Matthew 7:12.

Nevertheless, we should take seriously her claim to appeal to reason, for she is a brave woman under threat of death at the hands of Islamists for such statements as "Islam is hostile to reason." Her critique of Islam is not leveled at present-day Christianity, but her praise for Christian tolerance is tempered:

'Christianity is different from Islam,' says Hirsi Ali, 'because it allows you to question it. It probably wasn't different in the past, but it is now.'

This raises the question of Christianity's relation to reason, an issue broached by Pope Benedict XVI in his Regensberg lecture and also one that interests me, but I'll save this, perhaps for tomorrow.

Natural Law and Limits on the Divine Will

Allah

Humanity Confronted by Divine Will

Eski Cami (The Old Mosque) in Edirne, Turkey

(Image from Wikipedia)

In 1999, Edward T. Oakes published an interesting article in First Things, "Natural Law in Judaism," in which he looked at the work of David Novak (Natural Law in Judaism) on the "Euthyphro problem" in Judaism.

The "Euthyphro problem" refers to Socrates's dialogue with the Athenian seer Euthyphro, in which Socrates subjects the Greek gods to an ethical critique on the basis of the abstract norms of moral law, in the light of which, the behavior of gods like Zeus appear decidedly immoral.

The problem -- reputably a dilemma for revealed religions like Judaism and Christianity -- can be posed as follows: "Is what is moral commanded by God because it is moral, or is it moral because it is commanded by God?"

Oakes argues that in Judaism and Christianity, abstract moral law has triumphed over the conception of God as omnipotent Divine Will.

Oakes does not deal in detail with the implications of this for Christian theology (though others have more or less reconciled God with Natural Law). Instead, he observes, rather pragmatically, that this victory of natural law has an upside, one that becomes evident when compared to the absence of the concept in Islam:

That victory is not entirely a matter for dismay, in my opinion, as the example of Islam suggests. Consider the matter of the stoning of adulterers, which, to the great horror of Westerners, is part of Islamic jurisprudence. That practice, as it happens, is not required by the Qur'an. In fact, it was introduced into Islam from Jewish law, according to an oral tradition transmitted by the second Caliph of Medina, Umar ibn al-Khattab (reigned a.d. 634-644):

They brought to the Prophet, on whom be God's blessing and peace, a Jew and a Jewess who had committed fornication. He said to them, "What do you find in your book?" They said, "Our rabbis blacken the faces of the guilty and expose them to public ridicule." Abdullah ibn Salam [a convert to Islam from Judaism] said: "Messenger of God, tell the Jews to bring the Torah." They brought it, but a Jew put his hand over the verse which prescribes stoning [probably Deuteronomy 22:21-22] and began to read what came before and after it. Ibn Salam said to him, "Raise your hand," and there was the verse about stoning beneath his hand. The Messenger of God gave the order and they were stoned. . . . They were stoned on the level ground and I [Umar] saw the man leaning over the woman to shield her from the stones.

Now, Muhammad is obviously thinking of Moses when he orders the stoning of the fornicating pair, but the crucial point is that the Mosaic law being enforced here has reached the Prophet unmediated by either Talmud or New Testament. Moreover, for accidental reasons of history, Islam never passed through the "fiery brook" of the Enlightenment; its confrontation with Judaism and Christianity in the contemporary world is often intertwined with a simultaneous confrontation with the Enlightenment. The clash gets even more complicated by Islam's much higher doctrine of revelation, which makes an accommodation with secular Enlightenment morality even more painful than has proved to be the case with Judaism and Christianity. (Islam's high doctrine of revelation had such difficulty conceding legitimacy to the deliverances of reason that it eventually deprived Muslim philosophers of the oxygen needed for independent, rational reflection; and Muslim philosophy almost entirely died out with the death of Averroës in a.d. 1198.)

At least in certain formal respects, Islam can be described, after a fashion, as "Judaism without a Euthyphro problem," or Moses without a Talmud, so to speak-as the civil war in Algeria so amply testifies, where the most horrific acts of barbarity are perpetrated under religious auspices and in the name of the God of revelation. The Euthyphro problem lives on in today's headlines, and it seems to me that David Novak needs to probe this issue more deeply, for his own (admittedly quite mild) Enlightenment-bashing leaves him with more problems than he seems to realize. (Edward T. Oakes, "Natural Law in Judaism," First Things, 1999, Part IV, paragraphs 4-5)

Islam lacks a Euthyphro dilemma because it simply denies the problem, holding that what is moral is moral because it is commanded by Allah. This is what Pope Benedict XVI was referring to in his Regensberg address when he noted that the Muslim thinker "Ibn Hazm went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practise idolatry."

Quoting that got the Pope a lot of bad press, but Ibn Hazm's conclusion is the problem that the world faces in the Islamic refusal to put limits upon Allah's will.

The problem was posed with particular acuteness by the Jesuit James Schall, professor of political philosophy at Georgetown University, in an interview about the Pope's Regensberg address. Schall's words were published in ZENIT: The World Seen From Rome as the article "God as Logos, Allah as Will":

The Holy Father posed the fundamental question that lies behind all the discussion about war and terror. If God is Logos, it means that a norm of reason follows from what God is. Things are, because they have natures and are intended to be the way they are because God is what he is: He has his own inner order.

If God is not Logos but "Will," as most Muslim thinkers hold Allah to be, it means that, for them, Logos places a "limit" on Allah. He cannot do everything because he cannot do both evil and good. He cannot do contradictories.

Thus, if we want to "worship" Allah, it means we must be able to make what is evil good or what is good evil. That is, we can do whatever is said to be the "will" of Allah, even if it means doing violence as if it were "reasonable."

Otherwise, we would "limit" the "power" of Allah. This is what the Pope meant about making violence "reasonable." This different conception of the Godhead constitutes the essential difference between Christianity and Islam, both in their concept of worship and of science.

Finding an authoritative voice is not easy in a religion so decentralized as Islam, but perhaps the words of Abdul M. Omar can be cited as representative, for he was the editor of a 22-volume Encyclopedia of Islam, and in an online article, he states the following:

He is Incomprehensible, and nothing is like him, therefore the knowledge of Allâh's Reality (His Essence, Haqîqat al-Dzât), cannot be known through logical proof (Dalîl) or rational considerations (Burhân Aqlî). Revelation is indispensable as a proof of His existence. Nor can any definition or description grasp Him. (See: A. M. Omar, "2. Allâh -- The God of the Holy Qur'ân," paragraph 6, in online article, "Who is Allah?")

Although the reference to "His Essence, Haqîqat al-Dzât," might imply that Allah has a 'nature', Omar is quick to insist of Allah that "There is nothing like Him (He is beyond all comparison)" ("2. Allâh -- The God of the Holy Qur'ân," paragraph 4). If Allah is beyond all comparison, then he can be known only through revelation, as Omar also insists, but such a revelation would not touch on Allah's nature in any substantive sense but merely inform us of how he intends for us to submit to his will, which cannot be questioned.

But this is a complex issue requiring closer philosophical reasoning, and I'm not sure that I'm up to the task, though my friend Bill Vallicella would certainly be able to handle it.