Posts about Western and world culture and the ramifications of culture for society.
I have just read this in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (towards the end of XII. The Resolution of Revolutions):
The man who embraces a new paradigm at an early stage must often do so in defiance of the evidence provided by problem-solving. He must, that is, have faith that the new paradigm will succeed with the many large problems that confront it, knowing only that the older paradigm has failed with a few. A decision of that kind can only be made on faith.
More later.
Not long after 9/11, I was talking to an elderly Dominican priest. I was startled to discover that he thought the felling of the towers was an inside job by the CIA, of some such US authority. The evidence for this was all over the web. Adherents to this particular theory are known as truthers, as in “the truth about 9/11,” much as believers in the theory that Barak Obama was not born in Hawaii, but in Kenya, are called birthers. Each of these theories is supported by a slew of websites and internet forums constantly presenting and re-presenting the evidence for their contention, although truthers have the more vigorous and voluminous support. In fact, 9/11 conspiracies have the largest following since the various theories about the assassination of JFK seized the public imagination, and the term “grassy knoll” came to have a specific meaning in the vernacular of the US. There’s never been any shortage of theories on a bewildering range of topics, from the trivial to the socially disruptive. With minimal effort, I can find a mass of evidence that Neil Armstrong did not land on the moon, but was in a TV studio in Houston, or that the Shoah was invented after the war. Continue reading “Belief, Knowledge, Faith”
If you start to read Xenephon’s The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates on your Kindle, or Kindle reader on PC or Mac, you will encounter in Book 1, Chapter 1, the following passage: Continue reading “Socrates’ Daemon”
Let’s go back a decade, more or less. Find, in memory, some Friday night. After midnight, the Victory gradually quietens down. The groups of drunken kids wandering from pub to club along Charlotte Street, begin thin out. Wander up the ramp from the footpath into the grounds of St Stephen’s, past the lovely old two-storey house, past Bishop Quinn’s statue, to stand at the curved glass wall of the sacrament chapel. The water flowing along the inside of the wall from the baptismal fount might be matched by a semi-circle of water outside. Or, depending on how late in these years you choose to visit, there might be a dry bed of pebbles, as there is today. Continue reading “Cathedral, after midnight”
It was, mostly, in the hall of the Presbyterian church at the end of our block, diagonally across from the headmaster’s house on the corner of the primary school. There, while the parents, notably excepting ours, or, I should say, excepting our mother, worshipped, the children were instructed in the basic tenets of the faith and in the virtues, until the day they could join the adult congregation, to be exposed to the more risqué passages of the Bible and dark talk of temptations and sin which would run off the steep flanks of their incomprehension, along the erratic, parabolic gradient from innocence to experience that ran through the listeners, to collect on the eroded terrain of others’ experience in pools of remorse and baptismal grace. I say our mother, because it was as though our father spoke a foreign language with no correlates to “church” or “religion” and could not comprehend this Sunday morning activity, and so ignored it. At our mother’s insistence we went, and grumbled at going. There was, despite this, much that I enjoyed about it. There was much that, to my later surprise, I remembered. Continue reading “Sunday School”
I’ve been thinking about the Kiwi I met on the way to Medjugorje, and mentioned in a previous posting. He’s had three incarnations in that post. In the first version, I mentioned meeting him on the ferry, and he did not appear again. I thought I was finished with the item, but I had an uneasy notion that it needed tidying up. The Kiwi was a loose end that I had to tuck away. So I went back, and took up the story of my unhappy co-tenancy with him at the boarding-house.
He wasn’t finished with me yet. The whole piece had an unfinished feel to it (and, in a compositional sense, it still does.) I made some small changes to the ending, and thought, “That will do.” This morning, on the train, he started to nag me again. Since the trip, my opinion of him had been dismissively low. But this morning, as I took out my notebook to write something completely unrelated, I noticed for the first time the places in which I had encountered him, and it dawned on me that he, too, had been on a pilgrimage.
To hold this faith, which after all was the point of my visits to Medjugorje and Jerusalem in the first place, is to acknowledge the active presence of God in the world. It is, among other things, to refute coincidence; to realise that one’s life is a narrative, as, consequently, are all of the lives with which one’s own story intersects, in whose narratives one writes some lines, while each, in turn, scribbles in your scrapbook.
I paid him little heed but that of embarrassment and avoidance, and even a few weeks ago, wrote dismissively of him. Yet he has returned to deliver his lesson. A touch more humility, a touch more charity, if you please. More wonder at the glories of your companions on the way. Here endeth, for the time being, the lesson. Deo gratias.
In the autumn of 1996 I took a ferry from Ancona across the Adriatic to Split. There was a reasonable swell, into which we heaved through the night. I slept little in the “aircraft style” seats, keeping an eye on my knapsack, in which all of my travelling possessions, and a significant portion of my worldly possessions were packed. I was travelling with cabin luggage only, which kept the volume down, and made the airports mercifully easy to leave. By dawn we were sailing down the Dalmatian coast. We moved in behind the shelter of the string of elongated islands that parallel the coast, and came into Split. I’d met a Kiwi on the boat who suggested we get accommodation together in Medjugorje. I agreed, having become all to aware of the cost of single rooms. It was a bad mistake. Continue reading “A visit to Medjugorje”
The election-night convention is that the losing leader first concedes defeat, and when these formalities are out of the way the victor claims the spoils. In each case, these speeches, replete with the necessary acknowledgments and thank-yous, are delivered to a gathering of the hard-core faithful.
I recall some vivid scenes from what my memory tells me are past examples of the genre: Malcolm Fraser in victory deflecting Tammy’s adoring embrace; Fraser in defeat, at the precipice of tears, with Tammy attentive at his side; Keating alone on stage, announcing, This is one for the true believers, to a rapturous rock-concert response. Continue reading “A Tale of Two Parties”
