Maybe it will be like unplugging from the Matrix...

It's official: we're running out of internet.

When I shut the blog down, I'll notify you by email.

Weeping Ukeleles...

Best uke song I've heard in quite sometime.  Maybe that's cause I never listen to uke songs.  Maybe I should start.  Wait till he really gets goin'.

HT: Jonah Goldberg

"Systematic Training in Objectivity"

Lydia McGrew comments on specious reasonng in favor of physician-assisted suicide.

Early Marriage

Elsewhere on the internet, people are arguing about whether it is a good idea to marry early. This all stems from an op-ed in the Washington Post by sociologist Mark Regnerus, who writes:

In my research on young adults' romantic relationships, many women report feeling peer pressure to avoid giving serious thought to marriage until they're at least in their late 20s. If you're seeking a mate in college, you're considered a pariah, someone after her "MRS degree." Actively considering marriage when you're 20 or 21 seems so sappy, so unsexy, so anachronistic. Those who do fear to admit it -- it's that scandalous.

How did we get here? The fault lies less with indecisive young people than it does with us, their parents. Our own ideas about marriage changed as we climbed toward career success. Many of us got our MBAs, JDs, MDs and PhDs. Now we advise our children to complete their education before even contemplating marriage, to launch their careers and become financially independent. We caution that depending on another person is weak and fragile. We don't want them to rush into a relationship. We won't help you with college tuition anymore, we threaten. Don't repeat our mistakes, we warn.

Later:

Marriage actually works best as a formative institution, not an institution you enter once you think you're fully formed. We learn marriage, just as we learn language, and to the teachable, some lessons just come easier earlier in life. "Cursed be the social wants that sin against the strength of youth," added Tennyson to his lines about springtime and love.

Peter Suderman disagrees.  Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry agrees, and wrote this gem:

There is a very strong “ideology” (for want of a better term) that tells us each and every one of us must enjoy ourselves, start our careers and — for the love of all that is holy! — go through many, many, preferably long steps, including but not limited to, dating, assessing “sexual compatibility” (whatever that means), going “exclusive,” meeting the parents, moving in together, having a pet, having a kid or two, et caetera ad nauseam ad infinitum before we even think about getting married.

I never stop being amazed at the paradox that the more marriage is cheapened, contractualized, made commitment-lite, covenant-lite (sorry, the financial and biblical pun is irresistible), the more we are told to be careful and risk-averse when it comes to entering into it. After all, do you really need seven years of shared rent, a golden retriever, a boy and a girl to know whether your mid-life crisis divorce will succeed? It’s Sex and the City as life ethic.

Please don’t look for someone whose life outlook and deepest sensibilities complete yours — how quaint! But make sure to find out on the first date whether he likes 80s pop non-ironically or grunts weirdly during sex, so you can quickly move on to the next guy. And for the love of God never stop bar-hopping, never stop reducing courtship to a mating dance and a checklist of the most shallow criteria, and please, please extend your adolescence for as long as damn possible.

What think ye, loyal readers?

Uplifting

Stunning.

The Purpose of the Academy

Hi everybody, I am tired of studying biochemistry right now, so I will have a few brief comments on the Barack Obama/Mary Ann Glendon affair.  

For those of you who don't know, President Obama is slated to give the commencement address at Notre Dame, and Professor Glendon was scheduled to receive the Laetare Medal, a high honor given to Catholic scholars or stewards (in some capacity--I am no expert on the award).  In any case, she decided to decline the award, saying that she was used as traditional token church traditionalist in counterpoint to the President's pro-abortion views.   Google it at your leisure.

Elsewhere, Patrick Deneen wrote:

While Glendon does not emphasize one direction that these statements could be taken, the tactic is clear and widespread: it is enough for Catholic institutions to have some voice on campus that "represents" the Catholic view, and the very presence of such a voice is sufficient both to signal the soundness of the institution's Catholic identity as well as permitting the inclusion of any and all non- or even anti-Catholic voices. It's as if what's being said is: "Don't worry about all that stuff that indicates we are not Catholic - we have Program X over here, or Professor Q over there." What this thin and bankrupt argument seeks in fact to obfuscate is the absence of an actual dominant and defining Catholic culture and governing philosophy on campus. What it seeks to veil is that a large number of "Catholic" institutions seek to be indistinguishable from their secular and disaffiliated counterparts with a light sprinkling of some Catholic program or symbols that purport to show their distinctiveness. Meanwhile - as the student guides of the campus tours at Georgetown always seek to point out to prospective students and their families - we all know that this school is not REALLY Catholic - ::wink-wink:: - so don't worry. It's all just for show.

This raises a good point about the greater question of the purpose of academia and intellectual pursuit.  Some will allege that providing a panoply of views within a particular institution is beneficial, in that we need to have free inquiry into a wide variety of ideas: ideas imposed by an institutional monoculture are not ideas at all, but propaganda.  Agreed.  But intellectual humility can be taken too far, and is taken too far in many circumstances.  When official promulgation of doctrine or ideas is silenced for the prevention of "divisiveness," we must ask what, in the end, is the pursuit of truth for?  Because if we hold that adhering to an idea, or thought, or belief is necessarily oppressive or hurtful, then academia itself becomes a contradiction.  

We must have the humility to admit we can be wrong, but we must also have the honesty to stand for something.  At some point, rationality cannot be the riddle of the Zen koan--a delicate balance of yin and yang, ever opposed, ever different, but always equal.

To clarify, in the setting of Catholic universities:  some will say that official doctrine is ipso facto oppressive and antithetical to thought.  Yes, I admit, it can be; truth imposed by fear or sheer rigidity does not cause agreement, but rather, acquiescence--later to be replaced by rebellion, when out of the shadow of the nun's icy glare, so to speak.  Persuasion is necessary.  However, the entire concept of education is that the young pupils must be built up by those who are older, wiser, etc.  The power differential between teacher and student must not be abused, but we must recognize that a power differential exists, but that this is not a problem in itself.  Too often, the concept that the young should rebel against their elders is upheld, citing abuses of traditionalism and authority, but this is to say their misuese implies they are by their very nature bad, when this is not so.  Yes, all societies and cultures have problems that require change and reform, but they also have things that should endure and be preserved, and reflexive spewing about the "damn kids on your lawn," or "crotchety, old codgers who know nothing" only spares us the hard work of asking us the hard questions of what must be kept and what must be thrown out.

To the point of intellectual pursuit in a Catholic university (or any with an official doctrine): again, free inquiry is desirable in its own right, but only to its proper extent¹.  At some point, if a university or organization is established under the premise that "This is true," then eventually, it must uphold that tenet.  Why?  Because again, if academia and inquiry actually matter because the truth is actually true, then when someone concludes tenet X or point Y, they have an obligation to fight for it.  You may say that this stifles debate, asking questions, etc, but remember, universities do not exist in a vacuum, but in the greater milieu of the culture at large, where there a plenty of other universities, groups, scholars, et al who will gladly disagree.  In other words, a university that vigorously defends its tenets is not squelching dissent, but engaging it.  If we cared deeply about debate and inquiry, we would see that anything less is not accomodation---it is abdication.

1.  Yes I know I am not asking the "hard questions" of what that extent is.  It's late, I'm tired, and I have to go review aminolevulinic acid.  If you have any ideas, that's what the comment box is for.

Hopelessness

Only the man who has had to face despair is really convinced that he needs mercy.  Those who do not want mercy never seek it.  It is better to find God on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt the need of forgiveness.  A life that is  without problems may literally be more hopeless than one that always verges on despair.

Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island,  1955,  pp 21-22.

Greg Oden is still awesome

Yeah, you thought he was gonna fade away, but constant injuries can't prevent Greg Oden from being cooler than you are.

From Eleven Warriors

Good doggie

Here, I am going on vacation and don't want to leave you on a downer.

So here's a picture of a bulldog from the Daily Puppy.

Chas: "Ello, there! Me given name is Charles, but you can call me Chaz.  Headed down to the pub for a pint or two. Care to join?"

Ok, have a good one, y'all.

Nietzsche's Abyss

Dinesh D'Souza writes in a recent Christianity Today on another well-known atheist, ethicist Peter Singer.  D'Souza writes:

Nietzsche's argument is illustrated in considering two of the central principles of Western civilization: "All men are created equal" and "Human life is precious." Nietzsche attributes both ideas to Christianity. It is because we are created equal and in the image of God that our lives have moral worth and that we share the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Nietzsche's warning was that none of these values make sense without the background moral framework against which they were formulated. A post-Christian West, he argued, must go back to the ethical drawing board and reconsider its most cherished values, which include its traditional belief in the equal dignity of every human life.

Singer resolutely takes up a Nietzschean call for a "transvaluation of values," with a full awareness of the radical implications.

Read the rest to see what those implications are.

Not to be Here, Not to be Anywhere

Over at the American Scene, Alan Jacobs posts a couple of posts on facing death as an atheist.

Within, he notes a curious non-chalance or even celebratory attitude of some atheists towards death.  He noted that biologist Richard Dawkins called the fear of death "illogical,"  and that fantasy author Philip Pullman wrote that some characters' deaths were like "vivid little burst of happiness [like] the bubbles in a glass of champagne."  But this is a confused metaphor: any pleasure from the champagne bubbles bursting is within the tongue of the drinker.  The bubbles are the object of the pleasure, not the subject, and this sloppy metaphor provides a way to gloss over their annihiliation with the foggy memories of past soirees.  Alternatively, such language could be used to imply the bubbles are subsumed into the greater whole of the champagne itself---the raindrops becoming part of the ocean idea--but this is pantheist, and not atheist, thought, and Pullman should be clear and honest enough to say so.

Jacobs posted a portion of a poem by a more circumspect atheist, Philip Larkin, entitled "Aubade." An excerpt:

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse

- The good not used, the love not given, time

Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never:

But at the total emptiness forever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,

Not to be anywhere,

And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says no rational being

Can fear a thing it cannot feel, not seeing

that this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,

Nothing to love or link with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round.

So, if you want to pursue atheism, you are free to do so.  Just be prepared to shudder; the reaper does not take kindly to glib snickering.