RANDOM MAILBAG: Here’s a bunch of stuff that requires little or no reply from me. Stuff requiring reply will come later. As is traditional, I am in plain text and my readers are in bold. If nothing else, this should give you some idea of the wiggy variety of topics addressed on this blog–this is the unorganized flotsam skimmed off the first three screens of my overstuffed inbox.

An anonyreader, on “National Outdoor Intercourse Day”: Some more information on “National Outdoor Intercourse Day,” which really sounds like a prolonged exercise in self-parody: (my comments set off by *’s)

link

link

“Hooray, hooray the eighth of May–outdoor intercourse starts today,” Sanchez quietly sings.

This year the center, along with Primary Prevention Wellness Center, Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Alliance and the Women’s Center, will introduce “Condom Inquisition,” Bekki Brown-Winkels, Resource and

Outreach Programs Director, said.

“(During the “Condom Inquisition”) one thousand condom packets will be distributed,” Brown-Winkels said.

**Is “inquisition” really the best name for a voluntary event?**

The Sexual Awareness Center will also present Pornfest on Friday. The center encourages students to view a variety of porn to decide for themselves how they feel about the images, she said.

“The display will offer thought-provoking questions,” Lombardi said. “We are not trying to pollute people’s minds with pornography.”

**Have they never heard of Catherine McKinnon? Don’t they know that they are reinforcing the patriarchal culture of rape? The only person they could find on the campus to suggest that there might be a connection between porn and sexual violence, or that they might want to consider educating about the latter, was a Campus Crusade for Christ member.**

Tim Sandefur has started a series of responses to my Questions for Objectivists–the first few ones are here.

A different anonyreader, on “blind spots of the Left” w/r/t human rights: I think the worst of these is the left’s apparently unthinking support for environmentalism, especially its support for that variety of environmentalism known as “deep ecology”.

It is this that leads a certain class of left-wing thinkers to support the crasser forms of population control; to assume that “traditional” agrarian or hunter-gatherer societies must be preserved intact and unchanged, regardless of the human costs to that society’s members; and to support land reforms that “give the people back their land”, no matter whether such efforts may lead to mass starvation because the land is too exhausted or too heavily populated to support traditional forms of agriculture.

I strongly suspect that nowadays the left in rich countries draws many supporters who simply do not like human beings very much, and would welcome a mass catastrophe that stripped the Earth of most of its human

population. (I have seen speculation by “deep ecologists” suggesting that the ideal human population of the earth would be about 10 million people or so. But don’t ask me where; I can’t remember.)

It is very strange, in that the left was not, historically, associated with conservation and preservation movements. Or at least the Marxist left was not. Marx’s theory of history was intended as an _answer_ to those “iron law” theorists like Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo, who believed that increases in population and the desperation of the poor would inevitably keep food supplies low and prices depressed. (Of course, Adam Smith also attempted to forumulate a theory to address their pessimism – a very different theory.)

Marx and most of the 19th and early 20th century leftists who followed him supported technological innovation because it would end man’s enslavement to his bodily needs. As late as the 1930s, Orwell was writing that it was impossible in England for a man of the left to say that he liked horses or the countryside without provoking howls of derision among his fellows.

I have to confess that I have some regrets – both sentimental and real–for what human culture loses in the process of modernization and “development”. As one of Tolkien’s characters put it, “many fair things will fade and be forgotten.” As a foreign service brat, I had the chance to travel in the “Third World” from the mid 1960s until the late 1970s, and saw much that is probably now going or gone, cultures that were primitive but whose beauty still haunts me.

But I don’t share the barely concealed misanthropy of today’s lefties. (For a good example, check out the interview in Salon with T. Coraghessan Boyle a few weeks ago.) Sometimes it strikes me as being properly labelled as aristocratic rather than “left wing”; that is, if the left still has any connection with democracy and human rights. After all, conservation was traditionally the concern of the noble classes; that’s why they had gamekeepers while the laboring classes were poachers.

FWIW, I think the left’s unwillingness to look critically at population-control programs has more to do with American abortion politics than with deep ecology; but I have known a few (human!) leftists who had deep emotional attachments to the idea of humans as disease, people who I am pretty sure wanted to believe Malthusianism was true.

Lynn Gazis-Sax: [quoting me quoting Juan Non-Volokh] ‘Well now you know how we felt about [insert Roe, Baker, Miranda, or some other outrageous case here].’

I’ve never understood the upset over Miranda (it always struck me as a perfectly ordinary extension of the Fifth Amendment, and a good one).

[quoting me:] That’s one reason the term “textualism” seems to me to be something of a misnomer (I prefer “judicial humility in the face of text and legislature,” though I can see why people don’t rattle that phrase out at every opportunity!).

I like the “judicial humility” phrasing – there’s more humility in it about what people are actually capable of doing (often conservatives seem to me to be saying they show a lot more fidelity to text than they actually do, and even more than they’re realistically capable of).

[quoting me quoting Nietzsche:] “Philosophers are prejudiced against appearance, change, pain, death, the corporeal, the senses, fate and bondage, the aimless.”

–Will to Power

I think I’m prejudiced for pain, death, the corporeal, and the senses (I have an aversion to philosophies that seem to want to make these things less than real), and against fate and bondage.

Rob Dakin [quoting me quoting Nietzsche again:] “Philosophers are prejudiced against appearance, change, pain, death, the corporeal, the senses, fate and bondage, the aimless.”

Wouldn’t you say that Jesus Christ was prejudiced against all of those things, as well? (Particularly the final item!)

Sara Asmann: If you’re going to stay up late for Adult Swim be sure to check out Cowboy bebop — I hope they are still showing it. The most interesting Cartoon series I have seen in a long time.

Bob Finegan: I’ve enjoyed reading your blog and often find myself impressed w/ your writing and your spiritual insight. I especially appreciated the wisdom of your post on Hamlet & faultfinding/judgment a few weeks ago. I’m glad there are Catholics like you out there. I grew up Catholic, rejected the Church and Christianity in general during my proud and rebellious teen years, became an Evangelical after college, grew disillusioned w/ that brand of Christianity, found myself attracted to Catholicism again during grad school and later, went to church sporadically. But there were a lot of questions that Catholicism couldn’t answer to my satisfaction, such as how the inheritance of sin or its effects could ever be just to those plunked down w/o their consent into a fallen world buzzing w/ all the attractions and shocks that flesh is heir to. I was also troubled by the ambiguity of the Gospels concerning the divinity of Jesus, the way Jesus himself seems to hedge about it, or even sometimes to be confused concerning his mission or identity. Also, discovering websites like yours and Amy Welborn’s has been a sort of revelation to me since almost all the Catholics I’ve ever known personally seem pretty uninterested in learning about their faith — my mother and sister, both regular churchgoers and college grads w/ degrees in education, recently asked me who Saul of Tarsus was, and once I attended a mass during which the lector, reading a passage from Job, repeatedly pronounced his name w/ a short o (as if the poor guy hadn’t already been through enough!)

So my Catholicism was of the Flannery O’Connor/Walker Percy variety, and though they and Merton and Augustine and Aquinas addressed a lot of my questions, I had plenty more questions about the human condition, God’s personality, the afterlife, the multiplicity of religions, and most of all, theodicy issues that weren’t getting answered satifactorily by any Christian writers or philosophers. Simone Weil had a huge influence on me — she answered some of my questions but raised many others, especially about other religions, that Christians writers, at least those I know of, couldn’t address very well. Huston Smith’s book “The Forgotten Truth” led me further away from giving credence to orthodox Christianity’s sometimes exclusionary claims about truth or salvation.

I kept praying for answers, asking God to guide me through all the ambiguity and the profusion of contending doctrines, to show me what Major Barbara called “the truth behind all this frightful irony.” My prayer was basically, “I’m confused by all these faiths saying different things, so please show me what you want me to believe.” Then a few years ago, through some rather odd chains of events, I encountered Krishna Consciousness — about which I had, at the beginning, many of the prejudices most people in this culture who don’t actually know any Hare Krishna devotees harbor. After I got through many layers of resistance, I was shocked at the depth, the detail, the comprehensiveness w/ which this ancient Vaishnava faith answered all the questions which Christianity had either ducked altogether, or answered only in an incomplete or speculative way. Vaishnavism is actually a monotheistic faith with a highly personal God (Krishna) who is described, and who speaks to us, in amazingly generous detail in the Vedic scriptures. This was another thing I’d sort of missed in Christianity — while Jesus is a person we can get to know and love to a certain degree, the First Person of the Trinity is a hazy, amorphous, elusive figure about whom so many Christain theologians harbor such fears of anthropomorphic projection that he’s often characterized, as in the apophatic mysticism of St. John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart, etc., as an impersonal power that “transcends” personhood and thus a frustratingly difficult object of prayer.

I ain’t trying to proselytize. But your post on Nietzsche’s derogation of a personal God and your postulation of a Person as the only valid source of a compelling overarching morality, a la Ivan Karamazov, got me thinking. It’s been hard for me to find Christians or any other Western monotheists to have a fruitful interreligious dialogue with; some Christians get visibly nervous when I begin to tell them about my current religious life (in case you’re wondering, I’m a strictly plainclothes devotee). It’s a shame b/c I actually still consider myself a Christian — Vaishnavism, with what seems to me its stronger explanatory power and devotional nourishment, has not so much replaced my Christianity as enveloped it. Of course I’m no longer an orthodox Christian (I’ve given Vaishnavism a sort of doctrinal line-item veto power), but these two faiths have a common central goal — in the words of Jesus, to love God w/ all your heart, soul, mind and strength. As you pointed out, only persons can love, and thus reciprocal love can only happen between persons. Through Vaishnavism, my love for God has grown much stronger b/c I’m able to get to know God in ways I wasn’t able to as an orthodox Christian. But I’m cheered whenever I see Christians like yourself emphasizing the personhood of God, since so many Christians I’ve known seem to think of God in his ultimate nature as a sort of big pulsing cloud of vapor, a cosmic mainframe tricked out with nebulae-sized strobe lights — cool-looking, awe-inspiring, but still just a machine. This sort of thinking is bad for spiritual life b/c it only alienates people from God.

So, I’m looking for open-minded, spiritually and intellectually hungry people like yourself, Christians or otherwise, to correspond w/ on topics like these, if you’re interested. Other topics too, of course — e.g., I’m curious about your fiction. (I’m a fiction writer myself, right now working on a satirical novel about pro wrestling and religion.)

If you’re too busy or have a surfeit of correspondents right now, I’ll understand. Either way, thanks for your bog — I think you’re helping a lot of people w/ their spiritual lives.

P.S. The links below are to articles I think you might find interesting.

http://www.iskcon.com/icj/4_2/4_2theo.html

http://www.iskcon.com/icj/4_2/4_2dialogue.html

http://www.iskcon.com/icj/1_2/12rsd.html

A quibble: You said “Leather/silk not harmful, but not admirable, either” — I think the cows might have a different opinion about whether the leather industry is harmful.

Cacciaguida: Great post on gambling. I’ve never done the casino scene myself, but from what I’ve heard (which traces back to sources inside the Gambling Commission, headed by Kay James), casinos often take affirmative steps to encourage addiction. E.g., they rarely if ever have windows or clocks: people spend and risk more if they lose any sense of time. Also, re slot machines, the ones that pay of most readily are located near the entrance, to give gambling newbies a false sense of how easy it is to get money from those things. The more rapacious “one-armed bandits” are, of course, located further inside. Now, liquor stores of course try to make themselves attractive, like any retail establishment; but I’ve never heard that they take deliberate steps to encourage addiction.

Also, legalized gambling quickly spills into the surrounding culture. The Las Vegas airport has slot machines; I spotted a nun playing one of them as I dashed to connect from my flight from Chicago to my flight to San

Francisco for the APSA conference in 2001. In Connecticut, where gambling is still confined to the “Indian” casinos, you can’t turn on a radio without hearing ads about jolly New Yorkers just rarin’ to go on their trip up

to Foxwood.

Rob Dakin: [quoting me:] “We frequently hate responsibility and therefore hate freedom.”

That’s the basis of the Existentialists’ scorn of the bourgeoisie, n’est-ce pas?

And Dakin again: My Gnostic tendencies should not cause us disagreement on this one. Maybe a definition of terms is necessary. My concept of “person” is, I think, similar to yours. When used in the ordinary way, however, most people mean by “person” that which I would characterize as “persona”. Persona is certainly not capable of love in the fullest sense. We would probably also have to come to agreement on a definition of “love” to remove all ambiguity from this exchange. Does it not follow, however, that the more you and I each put off the old Adam and put on Christ, the more we will come to resemble each other in the process, and the truer will be our mutual love?

This is one of the few bits of this mailbag where I should respond. First, I do think that part of the nature of eros is the desire that the other remain other, not-assimilated, not-self, and therefore in some way both unique and un-selflike. Second, I don’t think that putting on Christ means becoming similar, necessarily. In some respects it certainly would make us similar–in level of charity, say! But in others, it would make us dissimilar–for example, Dakin and I probably have many, many things in common that are more a result of our conformity to American culture than of conformity to Christ. Those commonalities would likely dissolve as we became more of who we were meant to be. I’m very, very leery of the view of perfection, sanctity, as a kind of burqa for the personality, shrouding all one’s most spikily individual qualities. The lives of the saints certainly show an enormous amount of variety! I think Dakin and I may be using similar words for dissimilar things–I don’t think he’s actually proposing that virtue is a burqa–but I’m trying to point out some of the dangerous and false implications that can be drawn from his words. I know people who have really struggled with the Church, or rejected the very idea of virtue, because they think living virtuously would make them conformist automatons. That’s why I react so strongly against that kind of language–again, though, I don’t think that’s actually what Dakin is saying here.

Jendi Reiter: Thought this would interest you…poetry, feminism, reclaiming the feminine. Greenberg is an exciting new poet — her attempt to create a new synthesis of feminism and girlishness reminded me somehow of rock & roll conservatism!

From Elderlyn Lacson: I do agree that the finest purveyors of ice cream are based at York’s Castle.

My favorite flavors are mango and Guinness.

For a close second, I highly recommend Gifford’s over by Bethesda Landmark Theatre. They have a yummy Swiss Chocolate sauce!

From Kate Coe: Here’s a little piece of Jezebel trivia–Julie’s shocking red dress was actually brown–as the only color that would photograph as a contrast to all that white (most of which are every so lightly blue).

I think the most interesting part is the the quarantine of the fever victims.

Matt Rustler on Iraqis, guns, and rights.

Bill Hauk: I appreciate your hesitation to make any definitive statements one way or another on what American troops in Baghdad should have done to prevent looting at the Baghdad Museum. Obviously, at first glance, doing nothing to stop the looting at the museum seems really lame, and it’s quite understandable that many people are upset about it. However, one thing that never seems to be brought up in these discussions is whether or not the American troops legally could have stationed themselves at the museum. I’m not a lawyer, and reading treaties gives me a headache, but article 6 of the 1999 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict states that “imperative military necessity…may only be invoked to use cultural property for purposes which are likely to expose it to destruction or damage”.

UNESCO link

Given that all Iraqi resistance had not been cleared out of Baghdad at the time of the looting, would stationing U.S. troops at the museum have been an imperative military necessity? If troops had been there making themselves targets for a Fedeyeen Saddam suicide bomber, would they have been exposing the building to likely destruction or damage? In retrospect, not stationing troops there did have this effect for certain, but ex-ante, what would the probabilities have seemed like? I can’t give an unequivocal answer saying that they shouldn’t have been there, but it does throw another wrinkle into the argument.