It vexes me. I'm terribly vexed.

Several weeks ago, after making arrangements for an improved change of address, I called up the Internet provider that covers our new residence and signed up for service. I find out today, the day I had set up to have Internet access up and running, that the order was never processed. We'll be moving this weekend, but the earliest we'll have Internet access at home will be in a few weeks.

Do they realize what this does to the psychology of a blogger?!?!? I'm mentally disordered enough as it is!

Anyhow, for the next few weeks, I'll still be able to post with about the same sporadic frequency, but I will not be able to manage or respond to comments nearly as often. On the slight chance that a troll might journey here, I am going to turn on comment moderation during this time. Once I have service again, I'll return to my standard commenting format.

If you are feeling bad for me, and you should be, because I'm very miffed at this inconvenience, you might consider following this blog or encouraging others to follow as a way to cheer me up.

Happy Thanksgiving!

New Mythologies

My wife and I took a break this weekend from packing and cleaning to watch Up and Star Trek, two films we would have liked to have seen in the theater. Both were quite good.

I wasn’t sure how the whole time travel motif, common in the Star Trek universe, would play. I expected that Leonard Nimoy’s presence in the movie might annoy me, but it worked, and it actually proved a cunning way for the filmmakers to rewrite the Star Trek mythology, and even change its history, while remaining true, and even historically true, to the old mythology. Star Trek fans have reason to interpret the mythology with both a hermeneutic of continuity and a hermeneutic of discontinuity. Not being a convention-frequenting Trekkie, I wouldn’t have taken to the streets in geeky protest if Abrams and company had just started from scratch and written a whole new origin story for Kirk and company, but I was pretty much pleased with their choices.

Mythologies deserve rethinking and re-mythologizing. Doing so can enrich them and enrich us. I toast to the fact that Homer and Shakespeare didn’t frown upon composing their unique versions of twice told tales. I don’t share the disdain for sequels and prequels and creating new versions of old stories. Bring on the Batmans and the James Bonds and the Hamlets. Let the heroes and villains be given new life and new voice. Heck, let’s turn them topsy-turvy and see what happens. Would it take much to turn the soulless killer James Bond into a villain?

Personally, I’d like to see The Lord of the Rings get treatment by a filmmaker who actually understands holiness and magnanimity. Let’s have another round of Star Wars films while we’re at it, perhaps even new takes on Lucas’ imaginative but at times poorly crafted stories. I’d like to see the six episodes reduced three films depicting the rise, fall, and redemption of Anakin Skywalker. Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson or Joss Whedon.

What can I say about Up that hasn’t been said already? And is asking that question inconsistent with what I said above? I will say that Pixar has yet to make a bad movie, and if more companies had Pixar’s dedication to quality, our economy would be in much better shape. Up is first-rate movie magic, a comedy gravely serious about its emotional drama. Squirrel!

(MC)

From Comforting to Creepy

Facebook suggests that I reconnect with people I haven’t conversed with much online but whom I see almost every day. I suppose I should find this comforting, because it would be exceedingly creepy if Facebook had knowledge of my actual family activities, work relationships, and social life.

Vagrant Thought

I’m pretty sure Keanu Reeves has ties to the mob. I mean, how else does he get cast in a Shakespeare movie?

What I Learned about My Son Today

My son made an “I am thankful for…” diagram today. He listed “Mom, Dad, mulch, lollipop, plants, friends, grass.” My son appears to be Samwise Gamgee.

A Greater Triumph

Those certain that there’s no hope for committed jihadists to renounce their murderous ideology and no hope for the West but to destroy the jihadists would do well to read this fascinating piece by Johann Hari in which he interviews three ex-jihadists and one jihadist who remains unrepentant but is clearly burned by the “fire of certainty.” There’s much to digest in Hari’s writing, from the circumstances that led these people to embrace jihad to the affects of our foreign policy on their propaganda, but I was most intrigued and given hope by the small, seemingly insignificant moments that moved them to ultimately renounce Islamism.

Just as their journeys into the jihad were strikingly similar, so were their journeys out. All of them said doubt began to seep in because they couldn't shake certain basic realities from their minds. The first and plainest was that ordinary Westerners were not the evil, Muslim-hating cardboard kaffir presented by the Wahabis. Usman, for one, finally stopped wanting to be a suicide bomber because of the kindness of an old white man.

Usman's mother had moved in next door to an elderly man called Tony, who was known in the neighbourhood as a spiteful, nasty grump. One day, Usman was teaching his little brother to box in the garden when he noticed the old man watching him from across the fence. "I used to box when I was in the Navy," he said. He started to give them tips and before long, he was building a boxing ring in their shed.

Tony died not long before 9/11, and Usman was sent to help clear out his belongings. In Tony's closet, he found a present wrapped and ready for his little brother's birthday: a pair of boxing gloves. "And I thought – that is humanity right there. That's an aspect of the divine that's in every human being. How can I want to kill people like him? How can I call him kaffir?"

We may well find that this jihad is not ultimately defeated by concentrated technological power and the killing of jihadists, which are failures more than victories, but because doubt is impressed by numerous caresses of grace and human kindness. (VN)

Terrorism and the Framework of War

Matthew Yglesias' argument against responding to international terrorism in the manners and metaphors of war makes sense to me. He writes that in approaching terrorism within the framework of war, "you partake of way too much of the terrorists’ narrative about themselves." He continues:

It’s their conceit, after all, that blowing up a bomb in a train station and killing a few hundred random commuters is an act of war. And war is a socially sanctioned form of activity, generally held to be a legally and morally acceptable framework in which to kill people. What we want to say, however, is that this sporadic commuter-killing isn’t a kind of war, it’s an act of murder. To be sure, not an ordinary murder—a mass murder—but nonetheless murder. It’s true that if al-Qaeda were something like the "blowing up train stations" arm of a major country with which we were otherwise at war, it might make the most sense to think of al-Qaeda as fitting in with spies and saboteurs; criminal adjuncts to a warrior enterprise.

I suppose if we don't think of ourselves as at war with terrorists, then we might be less likely to go to war against countries under the banner of that war. That would be a good thing. I suppose as well that this debate about language would be less of an issue if we didn't generally hold war to be a legally and morally acceptable framework in which to kill people. That would be a good thing too. (VN)

Sameness and Difference in the Blogosphere

The world of weblogs can be the propagandist’s dream world, a place where his talking points, simplistic narratives, and manufactured emotions find seemingly infinite repetition and affirmation. People repeat ideas and display emotions they find attractive but do not understand; their unique voices become lost as they speak only as a conduit for the propagandist. Blogs written by very different people nonetheless appear very much the same, full of the same phrases, buzzwords, and feelings.

I’m still a fan of the medium, though. For while the blogosphere can be home to the ugly sameness of hateful emotions and unthinking repetition, it also affords people the opportunity to speak as many, to share their uniqueness, their differences. Blogging can be a very personal activity. The best bloggers, in my opinion, have not only something to say and say it well, they also speak as no one else does. They communicate who they are in what they say. They may repeat, but they do so with understanding and with personal uniqueness. (MC)

Worthy of Derision

Considering the continually growing voices of atheists in our society, who make arguments against religion on grounds that religion is unreasonable and even immoral, I was taken aback upon opening The Texas Catholic and seeing an editorial about how it’s foolish to argue with atheists. The Catholic News Service editorialist asserts, without any evidence, that atheists have a hidden agenda and have set their will against believing. Therefore, they won’t let you convince them.

I could point to a number of blogs by former atheists who became convinced of God’s existence, and I doubt not that I could find blogs by former theists turned atheists. Believers and unbelievers change their minds. Struggles happen, evidence is considered, arguments are made, and minds change. There’s no universal hidden agenda here.

In his editorial, Fr. Father John Catoir continues to assert that theists shouldn’t argue with atheists because atheists laugh at theists at their mentioning of angels. Atheists are in denial, he says, and “would rather enjoy their delusion than admit they are subject to God and his supreme law.” It couldn’t be that atheists are atheists because they have come to the conclusion that their position is true, could it?

The editorial concludes:

The next time an atheist asks you to prove that God exists, just say, “I don’t have to. God will do that for you one second after your death.”

Or say, “Albert Einstein is arguably the most brilliant scientist in the history of the world. He was convinced that there has to be a supreme intelligence behind the universe. Are you smarter than Einstein?”

With all due respect, if I were to say such things to my atheist friends, they would deride me, and they would be right to do so. I understand that the arguments of Aquinas, Anselm, Descartes, and others may not have the sway the once had, but these snarky gibes just aren’t the way to spread the Good News in our postmodern society. (EC)

Layout

Routine travelers to this land will undoubtedly notice a change in scenery. I am still experimenting with the landscape, and I welcome comments about the layout, color arrangement, font, and so forth. Black, white, gray, and blue seem to be popular colors for blogs, perhaps because they’re easier on the eyes than others. Figured I’d give them a look-see.

My main objective is to expand the width of the blog without stretching the text to the full width of the screen. This template has done that, but if anyone knows how to expand the width without changing the template, please let me know. Thanks!

Discovery and Trial

So I think I may have found a use for my Twitter account. The whole idea of keeping up with thousands of tweets and having my tweets lost among thousands of others just didn't appeal to me. However, I see that some blogs now have a feature that allows readers to tweet blog posts they liked, so I am forthwith using twitter to promote posts, articles, videos and other things on the web that appealed to me. Now for a disclaimer: tweeting something doesn't mean I agree, mostly or even a little, with what is said on the page to which I linked. This blog being about alterity, I will be directing your attention to points of view and interpretations otherwise than those you will get here from me. Don't take the tweeted links as indicating that I've lost my faith or abandoned my postmodernism or have suddenly taken an intense interest in sports. You'll know of any of those events from my posts. Anyhow, I've added a gadget about half way down the right column that shows my four most recent tweets. I've labeled the section "Recommended Detours," though maybe I should have referenced Ricoeur and called it "Hermeneutic Detours." Whatever. Enjoy.

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You can follow Journeys in Alterity by going here or by clicking the "Follow this blog" button in the Networked Blogs section in the right column. There are worse things you can do in Facebook. Like play Farmville.

Dangerous Heidegger

There’s no learning the landscape of contemporary continental philosophy, no knowing the paths of phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, and deconstruction, no interpreting the stories told by the postmodern pilgrims who tread such ways, without understanding the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. If serious philosophical study of Heidegger were to cease, not a few philosophers would say, “Good riddance,” and shed not a tear as the ways were shut to those dark, dry caverns where bandits, marauders, and tricksters dwell. Having gained some of my education in a climate largely hostile to any hints of subjective thought, I am quite familiar with the distain Defenders of Truth feel for names such as Derrida.

Knowing how invidiously postmodern philosophers are despised, I find plausible Freddie’s theory concerning the desire to relegate the works of Heidegger to the pile marked “Dangerous” on account of his Nazism. Freddie is certainly right that the philosophies Heidegger influenced undermine the very groundwork of Nazism and other such ideologies.

Here’s Freddie:

Let’s get real: this has everything to do with what philosophies Heidegger has contributed to. It has everything to do with the assault on “postmodernism,” that capacious and vilified term that encompasses just about every straw man to be stacked up as a straw man against lefties and their various relativisms. If Heidegger’s philosophy had contributed to some new entrenchment of objective values, some neo-classicists return to “good sense and order,” I submit, his terrible personal failings would be relegated to the same margins that we relegate, say, the despicable support for slavery of many of the philosophers responsible for Western civilization. Existentialism, post-structuralism, constructivism, subjectivism– whatever you call them and to whatever degree they are actually consonant systems, they have been despised for decades, and the recipients of a massive and sustained assault that accuse them of all manner of sins. They are corrosive! They are subversive! They are incapable of defending us from fascism and totalitarianism and Marxism and Islamism and various other frightening things! Ah, but now we see the real story– they’re all secretly corroded by Nazism, I can hear the argument now. There we have it, the magic bullet to kill the beast.

Never mind that the actual content of all of these -isms is as far from the certainty and Manicheanism of Nazi ideology as is possible. Never mind that all of the greatest villains in the history of the world, every one, thought that they were in possession of just the kind of righteous certitude that this postmodern tradition tells us we can never really have. Never mind that the great advantage of the philosophy of people like Richard Rorty is precisely because it engenders caution, care and delicacy in the pursuit of actualizing ones values.

For You English Majors

And for anyone else who likes a little linguistic humor:



H/T: E.D. Kain

Not Panicking

We are free so that we may love and do what is good. Because of this, I find assertions and arguments that healthcare reform measures will diminish our freedom and should therefore be opposed to be less than convincing. We uphold the value of a free society not because freedom is an end in itself – it isn’t – but because a free society affords us the best opportunity to achieve the common good. And even in a society with the greatest possible freedom, restrictions on freedom would still exist and be necessary for the common good.

The idea that our public servants would require us to participate in a health insurance plan seems especially outrageous to some people, but even this idea, while I’m uncertain as to its prudence, doesn’t cause me much concern. We, through the institution of our government and other social structures, require each other and ourselves to do certain things in order for society to function effectively and justly. Generally speaking, we have to pay taxes, find and maintain employment, converse on telephones, use some means of transportation, get an education, shop at grocery stores, and fill out paperwork. Society demands a lot from us, and these demands place limits on our freedom, but, if our power to do the good is not diminished, we are not really less free because of these limits.

History has shown us that free societies can become enslaved to dictators, tyrannical systems, and more subtle evils such perverse appetites. I don’t dismiss the possibility that our country could cease to be a free society: recent grave offenses against our freedom and the common good are not hard to spot, but I don’t buy the argument or share the fear that giving our government a greater role in our healthcare system necessarily takes us a step away from a free society. (VN)

The 11/3 Project

Jon Stewart channels Glenn Beck. Bloody brilliant.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
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Vagrant Thought

When the Grandpa in The Princess Bride tells the young Fred Savage that Princess Buttercup doesn’t get eaten by the shrieking eels, he qualifies his assurance with the phrase “at this time.” Curious. Does he mean that the princess gets eaten by the eels at a later time?

Advice from a Philosopher, Grinning

"No one should ever presume to know what Derrida means...about anything."

- Richard Kearney

Responsibility for One's Political Philosophy

William Brafford over at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen remarks that “if you advocate for a political philosophy, taking responsibility means that you ask yourself: ‘what does it look like when this philosophy goes wrong?”’ I’d add that responsibility for one’s political philosophy also means recognizing that it was constructed by people in history and in response to particular political events and problems.

Political philosophers, like all philosophers, are distinguishable by not only the answers they give, but the questions they ask. As much as they responded to each other, Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, for example, were exploring different questions and responding to different issues; they were not just giving their own answers to the same timeless questions or the unique questions of the age.

No political philosophy is the True Political Philosophy. None can be applied in all times, places, and circumstances. Even the best possible political philosophy will fail in its application. Even if pure, committed adherents to it get exactly what they want and the philosophy “goes right,” the philosophy will fall short, will exclude, will reach its limits, and will in some ways fail.

Responsibility here means taking responsibility — appropriately responding to — the limitations and consequences of one’s philosophy. Irresponsibility, then, means acting as though one’s political philosophy, if only applied rightly and by the right people, would be free of failure, limitations, or negative consequences. (VN)

Favorite Films of My Lifetime: 10-8

We now return to my series on my favorite films made in my lifetime. You can read the previous posts here, here, and here.

Writer and director Whit Stillman has made three movies, and all three are on my top ten. It’s difficult to say which of his I like the most. Metropolitan, his first film, I arbitrarily rank at number 10. The comedy of manners depicts the débutante culture with what I’m told is perfect accuracy. The characters are all educated, but lacking in awareness and experience. They talk about intellectual figures like Charles Fourier and Jane Austin and about whether one has to actually read a novel to critique it or whether reading good literary criticism is sufficient to have an opinion on the primary text. Here’s a sample of the dialogue:



Hey, at least they have some idea of what they mean by the word “socialist”!

The Princess Bride is my number nine, but I love this movie so much it could easily be placed higher on the list. When my son gets a little older, we’ll be watching this with him religiously. I want him going to school and telling his friends to get used to disappointment and that he’s not left-handed and that they should fight each other like civilized people. I’ll tell him to ask the principal is he has six fingers on his right hand. Hehehehe. He may not be a popular kid, but he’ll be culturally literate, and no one will mess with him if he combines the wit and swordplay of Westley, the strength and rhymes of Fezzik, and the dedication and passion of Inigo.

I admire a lot though not all of Woody Allen’s movies. Love and Death, his parody of the Russian novel, is a hoot, but I usually prefer is more dramatic films. He strikes a perfect balance between comedy and drama in Crimes and Misdemeanors. Allen asks and explores the philosophical question of whether a normal guy, in this case a successful eye doctor, can commit a murder and not be bothered by the morality. Allen is challenging the notion that sin leads to misery, a notion I generally hold, but Allen has a way of challenging my core beliefs without being insulting or offending. Many of his stories strike me as means by which he grapples and struggles with important philosophical and theological questions. I don’t share his worldview, but I’m not sure if I can think of any other filmmaker who so regularly delves into the existential mysteries so deeply. Crimes and Misdemeanors should be required viewing in any philosophy or ethics class.

Buffy: Slaying and Saving

This weekend, my wife and I finished watching Joss Whedon’s television opus, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show of seven seasons which had taken over our evenings. I now hope to get more reading and writing done after our son goes to bed. We just have to fight the temptation to watch Angel, Dollhouse, or, once again, Buffy.

We’d seen a few episodes of Buffy here and there and were entertained, but hardly hooked. It was not until we started from the very beginning and watched the series in order that we recognized Whedon and company’s masterful storytelling. We knew Whedon’s genius from seeing Firefly, but the world of Buffy hadn’t tempted us the same way. I still think the short-lived western in space is a better work of art than Buffy, but Buffy deserves the praise and popularity it’s received. The show is smart, mythological, metaphorical, genuinely emotional, funny as hell, and morally dramatic. Don’t let the cheesy title or make-up fool you; Buffy is serious literary art.

Almost all of the characters are well defined, rounded, and memorable, but I have to say that I found Spike the most interesting. He’s the most humorous character, in my opinion, or at least among the funniest, but he is perhaps also the most developed and explored. He’s one of two vampires who regain their lost souls, but unlike Angel, who had his soul thrust upon him by a gypsy curse, Spike seeks his soul while still a demonic vampire. In the Buffy mythology, humans who become vampires retain their personalities and knowledge, but lose their souls, the core of their personhood. They are demons in human-like bodies, with a demon’s evil will and dark power.

When we first meet Spike, he’s researching a way to kill Buffy, whose fated vocation is slaying vampires and other demons. Spike has killed two slayers in his death, no easy feat even for a powerful vampire, but Buffy proves too powerful for him. He later teams up with Buffy, not out of any good motive, but for mutual benefit. He’s back to trying to kill her soon enough, though. In Season Four, the military, researching the demonic, places a computer chip in Spike’s brain that prevents him from attacking humans. This basically neuters him for almost the rest of the series; all of Spike’s various attempts to remove the chip fail.

We learn more about Spike’s past as the series progresses. Before he became a vampire, he was an overly sentimental and love-sick poet named William. His poetry was terrible and didn’t win him the heart of his beloved. He was mocked and scorned and ridiculed. Interestingly, even after be became a vampire, Spike seemed mostly motivated by love. He made his mother a vampire, wanting her to be with him forever. His actions in the second and third seasons revolve around his love for Drusilla, the vampire who sired him. As you might guess, Spike falls in love with Buffy. His love for Buffy ultimately leads him to undergo a series of tortures by a very powerful being who can give him back his soul.

Spike seems unique among vampires in that he becomes motivated by the good without possessing a soul. Perhaps other vampires are capable of this as well: the moral structure of Buffy isn’t entirely clear on this point. Demons are not spiritual entities or fallen angels, but ugly physical beings of immense strength that often have horns, scales, and multiple bumps. The mythology is more pagan than Christian. In any case, Spike’s story reveals a truth very much at home in the Christian imagination.

Buffy, like all vampire slayers, has superhuman strength which she uses to fight the forces of darkness, but her method of fighting evil is basically the same as the world’s typical way of fighting evil: she slays the evildoers. Spike’s story shows another, deeper, and ultimately more triumphant way of fighting evil: saving the evildoer. While several of Buffy’s friends would see Spike turned to ashes, Buffy sees in Spike hope for redemption, and she’s willing to risk their physical safety to give Spike the opportunity to become more human. What makes Season Seven’s final victory possible isn’t just the power of the slayer, the power to kill, but Spike’s act of loving self-sacrifice. His gift of self presents a greater and more fundamental triumph over evil than destroying evil men, vampires, and demons. Buffy’s vocation of slaying vampires is just, but also tragic. Spike shows that every slain vampire isn’t ultimately a victory, but a failure, a failure to redeem, a finality marked by the triumph of evil over a vampire. (VN)

Operation Enhance Kyle's Ego

A recent study by an esteemed peer-review journal found that while my humility knows no bounds, my ego could use a boost. So as not to ignore the unequivocal findings of science, Operation Enhance Kyle’s Ego is now underway.

This operation requires no great sacrifice on your part. Simply scroll down until you see “Followers” on the right column, click the “Follow” button, and follow the instructions. Doing this doesn’t really help you in any way – you can read my blog without following it – but it does help me by making me appear a popular fellow in the ‘sphere. A humble fellow like me should be popular. I set an example, you see. If nothing else, do it for the children. They are our future.

Ethicists and moral philosophers across the globe agree that following this blog is an objective moral imperative, so unless you want to be a moral relativist, start following today.

Obligations happen. This is one of them.

[Update]

A reliable source informs me that the fictional characters Sam and Dean Winchester of the TV series Supernatural, of which I've seen only clips, have expressed a desire to follow this blog, but are unfortunately prevented from doing so by virtue of their being fictional characters. Apparently they heard the word "alterity" and thought it had some paranormal meaning. No matter. What counts in their desire. While they cannot follow this blog, you can, so please, for their sake and the sake of all fictional characters unable to follow blogs, please sign up. Put a smile on their faces.

My Suspicion

The majority of those who hold a position one way or another on global warming do not possess scientific knowledge sufficient to defend the position, but believe the position is true because it is the position of a trusted authority.

Human Power and the Triumph of Evil

Should the warning attributed to Edmund Burke – that all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing – itself cause us some concern? The answer depends on how we interpret the warning: in particular, what we mean by the implied “something” that good people must do else evil triumph.

We can find the idea that evil might triumph over the whole world at play in a contemporary collective imagination, an imagination fed by the fears of terrorism, weapons of mass murder, the social and economic collapse of civilization, foreign ideologies, and even political opponents. In the world created by this play of ideas, images, and fears, we narrate evil as something exterior to us that resides in our enemies, and we imagine ourselves and our instruments and our ideas as forming the necessary weaponry in the fight against evil. We see ourselves as the true hope for the world, as the knights who will deliver us all from evil’s triumph. We, the good people, are the solution to the problem of evil.

In the Christian imagination, evil is seen as something both caused by us, all of us, and something (yet not a thing) already present before we exercise our freedom, before we are even born. Evil corrupts us, makes us less that what we ought to be, and separates us from God. From the Christian standpoint, the solution to the problem of evil is grace: God’s power, not ours. The ultimate response to evil, the divine response, isn’t destruction or prevention, but salvation. Though we are not saviors, we may participate in God’s act of saving grace, in his plan of salvation. We can, alas, also refuse salvation and embrace our own destruction.

If we understand the “something” that good people must do as in some way participating in God’s power, as living a life nourished by grace and marked by the virtues, as fundamentally responding to evil as a terror from which only God can save us, then Burke’s warning is of no concern. May good people respond to evil. May our good deeds help prevent the triumph of evil. On the other hand, if by that “something” we mean trusting in our own powers to defeat evil, we will only help push us along toward evil’s triumph. (EC)