Aftermath

American literary figure David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon College commencement address in 2005 said–and I concur–”Everybody worships.” One cannot read his speech without thinking that he had life almost figured out. Yet he committed suicide. The London Times said that he had friends. I wonder if any of them told him that he should follow his own advice and worship Jesus or YHWH.

Here’s an excerpt:

[I]n the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Who or what do you worship?

In late May, I started a discussion with my kids and a few others about politics. By July 23, the scales tipped for me in favor of McCain. I waited until today to say whom I would vote for to see if anything would happen to change my mind. Each section is headed with the party which in summary I support on that section. I do not regard the sections as equally important, but to weigh them is another hard discussion.

• Energy: Republican

  The Republican consensus seems to be to move slowly on clamping down on energy use, relying on free-market forces to bring some sense to the energy crisis. The Democratic consensus seems to be to clamp down hard and soon, as for example by increasing the Federal gasoline tax. McCain even spoke of temporarily lifting the Federal gasoline tax to provide some relief for low-income taxpayers. That goes too far. The US economy is like an incompressible fluid. One can push it down here only to have it shoot up there. Since the consequences of a much higher Federal gasoline tax (to be spent on infrastructure improvements, of course!) can’t be known, I prefer slower clamping down on usage, agreeing with Republicans.

  As you can see, I have made a common Republican mistake in this analysis. I have treated the US in isolation. In fact, it is the global demand for energy, including and especially countries emerging from the Third World like China and India, which are pushing that incompressible fluid of a global market. They should be a part of my model. I don’t think global demand is a part of either the Republican or Democratic model, though. (To be fair, Obama did say something about discussing the global economy with China.) Typically the Republican view is nationalistic and the Democratic view is internationalistic (or as the radio preachers rant, “one world government”).

  Energy demand is inelastic: I have to drive to work; I have to heat my house. So clamping down on usage as Democrats recommend might destabilize the economy more than allowing free-market forces to work.

  (I wrote this section before it was clear to everyone that misuse of credit is the prime destabilizer of today’s world-wide economy. This misuse was pushed by a largely Democratic view that everyone should be in a home of their own and by a Republican view that the market will be self-correcting without Federal regulation. We see clearly now that both views are wrong. See Economics below.)

  I like our US Federal system, in which states become laboratories for experimentation. We should investigate the effects of Democratic and Republican policies respectively at the state level. Car emission controls, for example, were first tried in California with success, and now we have them nationwide. I’m suspicious of Federal-level solutions first about energy. That makes me a states-rights Republican on energy issues, as on many other issues.

• Universal health care: Democratic

  I have changed my mind in the past few years on universal health care, from Republican (opposed to it), to Democratic, in favor of it. (Think about Hillary Clinton’s proposal when she was President her husband was President.) Using Pennsylvania as a laboratory, I see that universal health care for children aged 18 and under has gone well, both in terms of percentage enrolled and in terms of manageable economic impact. It’s possible to paint too rosy a picture of universal health care, as Michael Moore does in his film Sicko. But Moore says that Obama changed his mind from being in favor of “single payer universal health care” to being non-committal about it. All candidates change their minds as they move toward the center to capture uncommitted voters. In the current campaign, the Democratic-leaning New York Times editorializes about Obama doing that, as does the London Times. (h/t Micah Tillman for these references)

  I think that the US is ready to extend the Pennsylvania model of health care up to age 18 to the whole country as a first step in universal health care. The Democratic position seems more ready to tackle this, despite some waffling. The dissension that I hear about this is that it continues to allow private insurers to skim the healthiest segment of the population (ages 19-64) while the Federal government pays for the least healthy newborns and old folks. So a single payer universal health care for all ages would be cheaper per capita in the long run. I would be suspicious of the single payer being the Federal government were it not for the fact that the Medicare infrastructure is already in place. That makes me Democratic on this issue. I assure you that this has nothing to do with the fact that my Medicare coverage begins 3 days before the November 4 election! I changed my mind after hearing my philosophy professor colleague Tim Schoettle speak convincingly on the subject several years ago.

• Economic health: Republican

  Beyond energy and health care economic issues are other issues. I include here also whether we should bail out mortgage lenders who took foolish risks, how we can shore up the US dollar against foreign currencies, and whether tax cuts will help the economy. Since Obama has been changing his mind about these things too to become more like a Republican, I am giving this to McCain.

  (I wrote that paragraph before the recent economic collapse. Now three months later both candidates are looking more and more alike. McCain and George Bush are both behaving more like Democrats, which I think is a good move. However, I still oppose Obama’s plan for income redistribution. Listen to his own words about that in this audio clip (with a little video clip at its end).

• Net neutrality: Democratic

  Only geeks like me may care now, but if we lose net neutrality, everyone will care. The Democratic position is to favor net neutrality. This is ironic for Democrats, because it’s the laissez-faire viewpoint, viz. “Don’t regulate the internet!” McCain hasn’t really said much about it. I’m a Democrat here. There wouldn’t be an internet if it weren’t for the Federal government’s sponsoring the original DARPA as a national defense matter. In the same way, there wouldn’t be an interstate highway system or the US highway system if it weren’t for Federal funding for these projects in the interest of national defense. Some things require Federal participation. Which leads me to …

• Foreign affairs: Tie

  Obama is less experienced than McCain on foreign policy. But leadership depends heavily on those whom one listens to as advisors, and both candidates wisely do not say much about whom they will listen to as advisors. Leadership also depends heavily on stage presence, and Obama has more of that than McCain. Obama won a “global confidence” poll among several nations. This is either comforting or scary depending on whether you regard those governments as the kind you’d want to have supporting your views. Take this CNN video clip for example. McCain makes decisions rapidly. This is either comforting or scary depending on whether you praise his resolve or condemn his lack of deliberation. McCain’s Iraq policy, with its slower withdrawl timetable than Obama’s is a contrary example to rapid decision-making. Regarding foreign affairs, then, so far it’s a tie for me.

• Abortion: Republican

  McCain is pro-life; Obama is pro-choice. I’m pro-life.

• Supreme Court Judicial Appointments: Republican

  Since Republicans tend to be strict constructionist as I am, and Democrats tend to reinterpret the Constitution, even though the candidates haven’t been as clear as I’d like about Constitutional issues, I’m betting on the Republican party’s long-standing position.

• Gay Marriage: Republican

  As a consistent Federalist, I should say, “Let’s try gay marriage in a state, say Massachusetts, and see what happens.” Hey, we did! It has been oppressive in terms of respect for conservative Christians. For one example, a Roman Catholic adoption agency was not legally able to place children only in the families heterosexually married couples, according to their sincerely held religious beliefs. So they closed their doors after 100+ years.

  For a second example, parents cannot receive notification of when their kindergarten children will be taught about homosexuality in Lexington, MA, schools. This dated link does not address the very recent US Supreme Court’s refusal to grant a writ of certiorari to hear the case arising out of that, citing as its basis that Massachusetts law stands.

  For a third example, there is now pressure (Skip to the section headed “Restrooms.”) to assign people to public restrooms based on their self-perceived gender, since gay rights advocates include transgender rights as a next goal. Those are some of the not-so-good things that have happened.

  My son-in-law suggests (link broken) that we might “give others the grace to make the right decision for themselves, even when their choices are wrong and destructive.” By that logic, then Pennsylvania is right in having legalized slot machines, with some of the winnings being set aside for the “destructive” effects of same, just as the Federal government legalizes smoking, and then gives tobacco profits to states to spend on programs to reverse the destructive effects of smoking.

  I believe that there are good secular arguments against consensual homosexual sex relating to public health, just as there are good secular arguments against gambling, smoking, and obesity (just to throw in a much more pervasive health issue). So my vote related to gay marriage is Republican, although I would object if government told me that I eat too many cashews! (See my blog entry citing the liberal theme, “keep your hands off my body.”)

• Other issues

  I’ve avoided mentioning things about which I have not yet formed an opinion, such as embryonic stem cell research, global warming, resuming space travel, or fixing the nation’s aging infrastructure. I’ve avoided explaining why I think that Palin was a bad choice for McCain’s running mate. This post is already too long. But I wanted to get something up before November 4. Even if you disagree with me, vote!

Jonathan Haidt gave an incredible talk for TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) in March entitled “The Moral Mind.” It’s about five foundations for morality necessary to make society work, rooted in our innate genetic makeup, gathered by Haidt and his colleagues from many places, including their web site.

Haidt is a liberal caught on the horns of a dilemma.  Here are the five foundations of morality that he and his colleagues identify in their research:

1. harm/care
2. fairness/reciprocity
3. ingroup/loyalty
4. authority/respect
5. purity/sanctity

Haidt points out that the last three are conservative values.  Liberals propose that we “celebrate diversity” contra 3, propose that we “question authority” contra 4, and propose that we “keep your laws off my body” contra 5.  The intellectually honest thing to do upon discovering these findings about the foundations of morality would be to champion the benefits of conservatism.

Haidt concludes instead that we rise above the liberal-conservative divide, beyond “us and them,” beyond “right and wrong,” even beyond “true and false.”  These sound like an oriental world view beyond all dichotomies, but they also sound strangely like the big tent of liberalism in contrast to the very foundation of values that Haidt’s research identifies as essential to a well-functioning society.

Noam Chomsky of MIT (political über-liberal as well as a world-class linguist) faced a similar problem.  He originally believed in a Lockean blank slate mind, but the more he studied children’s language acquisition, the more he rejected that in favor of his “innateness hypothesis.”

To say that language or morality is innate is not to say that it is God-given, but you shouldn’t miss Haidt’s use of the word “miracle” in describing the moral mind.  Haidt says that evolution led to this genetic situation.  Which is to say, Haidt has no idea what led to this genetic situation.

I applaud Haidt’s call to reject self-righteousness, which is a common failing of conservatives like me.  I also applaud Haidt’s providing another example of the self-defeating nature of liberalism, apparently unintended.

Florida State University offers a nice animation of
“Powers of Ten,” a variation of the animated film that Charles and Ray Eames made in conjunction with their
book Powers of Ten.

There we find our place evenly distant between quasars and quarks–between the gigantic and the minute. (At least logarithmically, which is the point of the book’s title.)

My pastor’s sermon this morning was on Psalm 90:12, “Teach us to number our days, so that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.” The number of my days is a couple of gigaseconds, somewhere between a terasecond and a picosecond

Psalm 8 puts humans in the middle too. “What is man that Thou art mindful of him? … Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels. Thou hast crowned him with glory and honor. … Thou made him to have dominion over … the beasts.” We are neither angel nor animal.

I think about being in the middle a lot. My September alumni magazine, Technology Review, had two article that reminded me of that. One article mentioned how hard parallel programming is for humans. But programming in zeros and ones is hard too! We talk to machines best in the middle distance between very high-level concepts and very low level concepts.

Another article mentioned that we fare best psychologically in the middle distance between boredom and anxiety, called “the flow” by the psychologist with the unpronouncable name Mihály Csikszentmihályi. (Here you go, with X as in German ach or Scottish loch: mi XALE ee tshick shent mi XALE ee.)

His diagram summarizes his book.

I became a teacher to stand in the middle. “To teach” is a ditransitive verb: I teach a student a subject. I bridge the gap between the subject and the student.

Jesus is the Man in the middle, my Mediator. I think of that a lot.

I have been trying to summarize in one word the platform of the Democratic Party and in one word the platform of the Republican Party. I have those words now. They are the same word.

Security.

Economic security. Health care security. Securing a good education for our children. Security from war. Securing our borders.

On these issues, the messianic candidate is Tweedle Dum and the paternal one is Tweedle Dee.

I told my friend Pastor Dan that I was pleased recently to discover that there are three Hebrew words for love: dod, ra’aya, and ahava, corresponding roughly to eros, philia, and agape in Greek, or sexual love, friendship love and selfless love in English. And even more recently I was pleased to discover that the noun “the good” in Hebrew, tuwb, also means “the beautiful”; while the adjective “good” in Greek, kalos, also means “beautiful.” I owe the latter observation to David B. Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite which I mentioned briefly in an earlier blog.

Those were two beautiful thoughts.

Dan’s reply surprised me. “Hebrew doesn’t have as large a vocabulary as Greek.” I narrowed him down to what he meant: “Hebrew roots in the Hebrew Bible are fewer than Greek roots in the New Testament.” With that I agreed. Hebrew is a very productive language. Just a few roots (stems, base forms) give you a large vocabulary. It is as if as soon as you learn the Latin stem “-fer” (to carry) you already know all these English words: transfer, confer, refer, prefer, and infer.

Almost. You have to infer that “infer” means more than “carry in.”

But what if Dan meant (I’m jus’ sayin’), “Greek is better for doing philosophy in than Hebrew because Greek has a richer vocabulary”?

Hogwash.

This is a misunderstanding of the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis, even if we assume that we think (only) using language. The Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis claims that because languages differ between cultures, monolinguals in those cultures think differently. I disagree. (Actually I even disagree that we think only using language. We think non-linearly; language is linear.)

More precisely, I claim, some things can be said simply in one language that must be said in a roundabout way in another language. But they can be said. No matter how many Inuit (Eskimo) words there are for snow—to use a shopworn example—, we can modify the single English word for snow to express them all: powdery snow, crunchy snow, wet globs of snow. No matter how many words there are for the color indigo (dark blue, Messiah Blue, hexadecimal 4B0082, or Pantone® Matching System 295), they denote the same thought.

Of course they don’t connote the same thought. Pantone is a proprietary color space, so “Pantone 295″ has legal connotations. To a colorblind person like me indigo connotes “the color that looks like blue to me but other people whom I trust say it’s not.”

Dan is my wife’s older brother’s daughter’s husband. I bet in Inuit there’s a single word for that.

Emily and I brought our friend Angelina Shannon a picnic lunch on Saturday to see her townhouse in York Springs and to catch up with her year since she graduated. Angelina told us a story of how our friends in Seattle showed Jesus’ love.

When Angelina was a student at Messiah College she helped Emily with her public school programs. She was in my honors first-year seminar, Science Fiction World Views, five years ago, the legendary Peer Group 43 (Pg43). The seminar bonded like no other class that I’ve ever been involved in, despite AJ and Danina disagreeing goodnaturedly about politics, and despite majors as diverse as Nursing (Ashleigh), Engineering (Mike), Political Science (AJ), Philosophy (Bryan), Mathematics (Angelina), English (Danina, Cory), Computer Science (Clayton, Chris), Psychology (Jim, Erin), and Sociology (Eric). Angelina’s parents threw Pg43 a party in their freshman year; Angelina threw Pg43 a Thanksgiving party in their senior year. Pg43 bonded so well that folks like Dee and Danielle asked to become “honorary members.” We saw Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers together.

After graduation four of Pg43 moved 3000 miles to Seattle, where none of them had ever lived, to find jobs and to live in community.

In August of their graduation summer, just before those four were to move, Danielle, now the fiancee of Brian, died in a car accident near their hometown of Chambersburg. All of Pg43 were at her funeral, and many stayed a week to be with Brian—a common thing in other cultures, but not at all common in our culture.

After moving to Seattle, the four thought that Brian needed a break from his job in Chambersburg where everything reminded him of his fiancee. They invited him to come to live with them with free room and board, to give him space to grieve, until he felt that he could make his own way there. Now he is making his way.

Maybe it’s because I just finished reading The Emerging Church, but this kind of love and hospitality strikes a chord with me. Maybe it’s because 54 years ago I was loved into the Kingdom, not argued into it.

James says (1:27 NIV), “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” Brian was a widower before he was even a groom.

I’m proud to be known as a member of Pg43, one expression of Christ’s body, with a “religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless.”

1. Why don’t we feel the rotation of the earth or its revolution around the sun? The common answer since Galileo has been to say that we can’t tell the difference between uniform motion and rest. But that’s obviously nonsense, because neither the rotation nor the revolution is uniform motion, since constant speed in a circle is still (vector) acceleration. The right answer is that our non-uniform motion is so small that we can’t feel it because of the limitations of our senses. Moral: Ya can’t always trust your senses.

2. An investment firm told me, “Let our company manage your funds, and we’ll see to it that they are invested in a diversified portfolio as a hedge against any one kind of investment letting you down.” In my heart I replied, with no courage to say it out loud, “But if diversification is so good, why should I trust your company with all my funds? I need a diversity of investors.” Moral: Ya can’t always trust other people’s senses.

[First entry newly added 03Nov2008]

For Mathematics

Dave Richeson

Dave is a colleague of mine at Dickinson College, the author of a new book, Euler’s Gem, about mathematics accessible to the scientific generalist. His blog is entertaining and informative.

For Philosophy

Micah Tillman

One of my former students offers interesting insights on philosophy, linguistics, theology, and his personal life. G. K. Chesterton says that angels fly “because they take themselves lightly.” This blog flies. A day without Tillman is … well … a day without Tillman.

For Reformed Theology

Scott Moonen

I’ve just finished reading as much as my mind can hold of David Bentley Hart’s
Beauty of the Infinite It’s an Eastern Orthodox treatment of philosophy based on starting with the Trinity. (My mind could hold about 1/4 from various parts of the book this summer. More another summer.) Scott in similar fashion writes starting with God, only from a Reformed instead of Eastern Orthodox perspective. Both Hart and Moonen are more subtle than Foundationalist theology, which is explicitly the Reformed view of my mathematics professor colleague John Byl at Trinity Western University in Canada.

Scott’s blog is not updated often. Scott, like Micah, is one of my former students. Scott wrote his blog software himself, so it’s missing navigation aids like tags and topics, so from time to time I will link to specific parts of interest, as I did in my first blog below. I appreciate Scott’s thinking Christianly.

For Sexuality

Warren Throckmorton

Warren is a psychology professor at a sister institution of mine, Grove City College. Warren finds things that interest me in the area of sexuality and posts here even before I knew that the topic was in the air.

For Sociology

Jenell Williams Paris

Jenell is a colleague of mine at Messiah College. An articulate anthropologist, Jenell writes engagingly on sexuality, on raising young boys, on college teaching, on evangelical subculture, and on feminism.

For Computer Science

Gene Rohrbaugh

My colleague Gene Rohrbaugh collects for the convenience of his Computer Science students interesting links about the field. Not updated frequently.

“Platonicity” is a word coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his second book,
The Black Swan. It means the human tendency to find patterns. Putting it that way sounds good, but Taleb is critical of Platonicity. He contrasts Platonists with practitioners. He exposes the “ludic” fallacy, where one builds a mathematical model of something (as in Latin “ludens,” playing a game) but then believes the model–the rules of the game–too much. It’s another form of the fallacy of induction: All swans that I’ve seen are white, therefore all swans are white.

Some people undergeneralize. I always overgeneralize, so I needed Taleb’s book.

Hmm, that was probably an overgeneralization. I usually overgeneralize.

Taleb has been a practitioner–an options trader in the stock market–, and is now a college professor. So it is possible to profess mathematics as well as to practice it! Qua option trader, he gives the following advice for investing in stocks: 95% conservative and 5% on highly improbable “black swans.”

I used to call black swans “albino crows” when I discussed the fallacy of induction in my classes. (See, I did know what Taleb is saying, theoretically at least.) But Taleb is such a good historian that he knows that black swans were John Stuart Mill’s example as early as the 19th C. From now on, all albino crows are black swans. (Take that, W. V. O. Quine!)

Besides J. S. Mill, Taleb’s heros include Umberto Eco, Benoît Mandelbrot, David Hume, and Karl Popper. I’ll agree except for Hume, since I do believe in miracles, and I do believe in moral truths.

Taleb’s anti-heros are almost all economists who have won Nobel prizes, like Kenneth Arrow, Paul Samuelson, Robert C. Merton, and Myron Scholes. He spares laureate Herbert Simon, who extended George Zipf’s linguistic work on power laws to a broad array of phenomena. (This link in turn links to Simon’s 1955 article.) Taleb is very big on power laws.

Published in 2007, Taleb’s book cautions that Fanny Mae is so exposed to risk that it is “sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup.” (225 n.) For a moment I thought that this proved that Taleb’s book is sound: Fanny Mae is in trouble as I write! It proves no such thing. There I was falling for the inductive fallacy again.

Now that I’ve read the book, I see examples of it everywhere I look. You’d expect that of an overgeneralizer, wouldn’t you?

Theology. Between the premodern period and the current postmodern period, the Western world had a run of Protestant Platonicity in developing systematic theology instead of Biblical (narrative) theology. Gibbs and Bolger in their 2005 book
Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Cultures
claim that this was spurred on by the printing press. They claim that worship for Protestants (my people!) became word-centered, linear, structured. I am reading this book now.

---

Beware: Posmodernism plays loose with the idea of truth. I’ll blog about truth separately, but for now just two hints. First, in the Christian worldview, Truth is a Person, not a proposition. Second, in logic besides the inductive fallacy mentioned above, there is also a deductive fallacy, wherein the reasoning is airtight but the premises are false. See my friend Scott Moonen’s
blog on a proof for the non-existence of God for a nice illustration of this.

---

Math. Besides championing the power law mentioned above, thanks to Taleb I’m more likely to be critical of assuming a normal distribution, or even a lognormal distribution. Or even further a Bayesian approach. I’m happy to say that my most recent professional publication tempers arguments about lognormal distributions and Bayesian reasoning with common sense.

Physics. Lee Smolin’s latest book,
The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and what Comes Next, is critical of the current state of Physics too enamored with Platonicity. I read that just before I read Taleb.

(h/t Both Taleb and Smolin were recommended to me by my good friend and polymath Curt Byers. Thanks!)