Lament for a frightened virtue…

Does this look like a dangerous person to you?
Before you favour me with the ‘kindnesses’ of your response, there is this:
The Ram 50 is a stead little beast but no amount of anthropomorphic resilience will bring her back to life after a winter's day spent shining her headlights into a snow bank. The wind-swept clutches of an icy parking lot work their slow magic on this proud monster like the little mice chewing away Aslan’s bonds. Only this time the creature does not come back to life but merely whimpers the last gasps of breath as I twist the little shank into her neck.
the battery is dead…
it’s dark. I’m tired. There’s the edge of a rankling brewing on the less than acceptable preliminary results of the exam I have just written. There are 4 other vehicles in the parking lot.
I push the truck to the middle of the lot. It sits prominently under a light pole, hood gaping wide like a suckling at the ready. I even have my own jumper cables. it’s cold.
three young ladies approach fomenting unimaginable horrors upon the nether regions of their professor. They will attend confession in the morning with a tell tale ache of the cerebrum. one of them makes her car beep and as they huddle around the red pontiac like coyotes around a carcass - I make my move.
they scurry inside the car and are gone before I can utter a word. even my inestimably demonstrative gesticulating of my arms does not attract their attention. I’m four bloody feet away from their car and the windows are not frozen. they are not looking at me – on purpose! the tail lights taunt, now visible at the exit. taunt like thumbs stuck in ears - fingers flapping.
my fingers are not flapping – they are stiff with cold. I dial my son to come and help.
two other girls approach – a guy, a pair of guys, and a girl all drive away in vehicles parked within mere meters of my dead Ram. I begin to wonder about the semiotic ‘readability’ of the propped open hood.
at first my anger seethes uncontrolled. a light post becomes receptacle for nasty epithets that discount the honour of the mothers of each of these unhelpfuls
as the blistering rage pauses for breath - a dim recognition
perhaps the sign that is misread here is me. perhaps, as the photo above will attest, I am the very thing their mothers warned them to avoid. looking at me they see that man – the dangerous man.
I should take a glory in the light of this. a smile perhaps? Not that I might revel in the thought of some imagined heinous identity I might possess. no the small glory should come in the success of post Mexico beard growing. but even that small medallion escapes.
now I am repulsed. that I could be a threat to any of those ‘brave’ souls who managed to ‘escape my wicked clutches’ is simply ludicrous. my repulsion fades into gloom.
how is it that an act of charity demanding meagre time wasted -- accomplish-able through the crack of the window, could so easily be discouraged? Should I conclude with Hobbes that we are an evil lot looking only for a way to excuse our selfish enterprise? Is the imagination of me being a potential threat an evident enough image to excuse charity?
Well Hobbes be damned there is benevolence after all. A boy, really, in his Ford SUV pulls up, having spotted me from the other side of the next parking lot. His girlfriend waits in a posture anything but patient. “I was just gonna drop her off at home – when I saw you.” it’s quarter to ten. “need a boost?”
i thank him through the inch and half crack of his window. it’s done. he’s gone. my son pulls up. as my hands slowly, in a screaming burn, return to normal circulatory function I dispense with Hobbes and shake my fist at fear.
a fear so humbly embedded on the everyday negotiation of safety left me out in the cold. a fear not recognized as fear anymore its just the way you do things. you don’t help beardy strangers in a parking lot – is just the way you do things. it is exactly the same quotidian negotiation that keeps us from dragging home the poor soul trying to sleep tonight on the park bench in Galt Gardens. fear is worked down deep inside the practices, keeping us from the charity that empathy might otherwise evoke. perhaps we no longer notice it as fear – its just the way we do things…
we’re not that bad – we’re just scared – and maybe we don’t even know just how scared we are…
look at me – won’t you be scared of me?

A bit more…

So in class today we unpacked that reading. It seems Sartre is advocating absolute choice without moral attachment. When faced with a choice, doctrine helps us nothing since which doctrine to follow is a choice in the first place. He also contends that selecting a doctrine is a way to deceive ourselves into a sort of determinism. But here is the problem, how can we even tell that we have a choice to make unless we are informed in some way that a decision or action must be made.

So I can eat a salad or a hamburger. Sartre, I think, would say that suggesting that one choice is healthier than another choice is already making a choice about what things are valued to be healthy. Essentially each option should be weighted equally in Sartre's evaluation. My desire to honour certain convictions about what I deem to be healthy might actually be a self deception – bad faith.

But what tells me that there is a choice in the first place? What informs me that there is a problem that needs resolution? Unless some pre-existing compass can help me recognize that I have choice to make – I simply act without cause whatsoever.

Sartre and free will…

I just finished working through a portion of Jean Paul Sartre's first chapter entitled, Existentialism. It was assigned reading for one of my sociology classes. Sartre makes some interesting claims about reality and human action. He contends with a common perspective. The idea that, "Circumstances are against me. What I've been and done doesn't show my true worth…there remains within me, unused and quite viable, a host of propensities, inclinations, possibilities, that one wouldn't guess from the mere series of things I've done," is the only way people can bear their own wretchedness. In other words it's an excuse. And further more, "dreams, expectations, and hopes warrant no more than to define a man as a disappointed dream, as miscarried hopes, as vain expectations."

So basically we are what we do. We change what we do and we change who we are. Yet in that he states that the only way to put any value on what we do is through the process of others evaluating our actions. We can only be famous, for instance, as others define our actions as worthy of fame and recognize us in that way. But that is certainly not how individual actions are most often perceived. We usually consider that personal qualities like honour, happiness or compassion are intrinsic to human nature in some essential way. We often use the phrase, 'human nature' to talk about some essential element of the experience of self that is somehow universal to all human experience. Sartre would argue that that notion is flawed since it is defined in the interaction that we have with others. So Sartre advocates the idea that people exist first then they act and then they are attributed with essence or qualities. This is so clearly evident at funerals. We have a hard time talking about the qualities of a person without describing his/her actions as proof. So for Sartre free will looks like a blank slate upon which we act and as a series of informed, scheduled and defined actions that we can arrange in such a way as to construct the identity we desire.

My question then is – is that really free will? If the actions that I perform are what defines who I am and if those actions are under the evaluation and definition of others is the act of arranging my actions actually freedom or is it actually a type of inescapable coercion.

What then of the Christian notion of free will? Are we actually free to choose for or against God? Is this the sort of thing that the Scripture talks about when it suggests that slavery isn't optional but that the master is the only choice we have (Luke 16, Romans 7)?

New Web Site to check out - BIG THINK

For those of you interested in this - I've posted this video to some of Steven Pinkers thoughts. This type of thought was pretty common in my philosophy class last semester and I think it is worth contending with (that's different than endorsing - ok). It's a more condensed version of some of the stuff that Ryan posted on here
here is the link http://www.bigthink.com/faith-beliefs/1132

Nothing really exists

There's this fun little philosophical problem that might keep party guests entertained for – oh minutes.

Nothing really exists.

There's the past. The past is what used to exist but no longer does. We get to it basically through our memories.

The future is what will exist but does not yet exist. No matter how much we want it to – we will never experience the future.

The present is a tricky little thing. The problem with the present is that everything we perceive (that is everything that we receive through our senses takes time to be processed (even if only in a few milliseconds). So essentially everything we experience as now is essentially in the past which we already know no longer exists.

So is it possible to prove that you exist right now…

Well, something to chew on – especially at those times when start feeling particularly self important.

Discrimination

My philosophy prof is quite the trip - - - like most ardent/aggressive atheists he spends a lot of time talking about God. He's a pretty scattered flappermouth (hmmm – I don't know anyone else like that eh?). But Monday this is sorta how the discussion went. We were talking about Janus words. The prof doesn't actually hold to the strict definition of the concept he says that a Janus word is one that has both a value association in one sense and neutral value in another. Normal could be an example of this. Normal could mean the average of collection of measures (neutral) but normal also is used to refer to nothing being wrong (value).

Anywho we started talking about the word discrimination. "To discriminate" actually is a complex Janus word because it not only has a neutral meaning (being able to distinguish between various objects or concepts – value neutral) but it has two covert value meanings (1. Neg. to let irrelevant factors count in some circumstance and Pos. to let all and only relevant factors count). The Negative meaning we all recognize when people don't allow people to be hired based on gender or racial differences. The positive we recognize as connoisseurs – people who have discriminating taste for wine or cheese. As an example of all this he held up this dilemma:

We expect judges to be unbiased in their judgements. We could say they should not discriminate (racist judges would not last long in our system) in their judgements. But in another sense we could say that judges should be discriminating in their judgements (here we mean that the judge should weigh all and only the relevant information about the case to make a precise decision). We would ask judges to care about everyone involved equally – so as to be an impartial judge. But the judge could not be impartial if either the defendant to the prosecution was his/her daughter – we would ask that judge to recuse him/herself for that case. So we could see that it would be ridiculous to expect a parent to not care more for their own kids than for other people in the courtroom. Or in our neighbourhood for instance let's say that Char and I had only $100 dollars for food. You would expect us to spend that hundred on groceries for our own kids. You would look at us weird if we were to decide to divide that money between all the children in our neighbourhood (not to mention that if we really didn't want to discriminate we might consider sharing it with ever kid in the whole world).

Enter the teachings of Christ. Love your neighbour as yourself. Is this to be taken literally? We would say yes? Stuck? Well maybe but then our prof goes on to suggest that God (the supreme judge in Christianity) was definitely not impartial. He chose and paid special attention to the Jews. Our prof then asked if we could really suggest that God was just. He pointed out that one of the central messages of Jesus was captured in the parable of the Good Samaritan yet historically according to the Biblical account God seemed to anything but impartial. So there you go. Wrestle with that one. See if you can come up with some counter proposals or other arguments – just curious how you might respond to that.