Update At the Personal Blog

A little update on life and work and the blog over at joshlore.com. 

This blog shall be active again very soon, by the way!

A Mission Statement, of Sorts

Joshua Lore

I’m working on the second, lengthier part of what I began in my last post on The Religion of the Technocratic Mind, but in the meantime, I suppose I need to draft a mission statement for this blog — for my own self, as well as for my readers — so I’ll attempt that here, but I’m going to go about it in more of a testimonial way — background matters. If you want, you can skip on down to the statement of purpose.

For whatever reasons, stating the intentions of a blog has always been one of the most intimidating parts of the endeavor for me. I’ve had several over the years, some more successful than others. There was, for example, my first back in college, a collaborative blog I ran with a few friends focused on US foreign policy. It was called Empire’s Edge, and was inspired by the now defunct Washington Babylon that Harper’s hosted by Ken Silverstein and Alexander Cockburn. It was successful in the sense that it had a clear mission and was productive, although it didn’t last much longer than a year. The attention and interests of we (at that time) undergraduate students drifts like a piece of ocean debris, and other demands intrude. On top of that, such a precise purpose can itself be challenging when there are so many other things you’d like to think, talk, and dialogue about. Ultimately, too clear an intention was the beginning of the end of that project.

Then there was a blog I started a few years ago, titled In the Middle Way (a title inspired by a beautiful passage from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets). I had no idea where I was going to go with it and, ultimately, barely got beyond drafting an ambiguous mission statement. It’s still out there, hidden behind its expired domain name.

So here I am back to Tempus in Forma, a blog I began in my undergrad years with a purpose as equally opaque as the last one, which ended up just becoming a place to host quotes and poems by other writers that I wanted to share or easily return to later on.

The name, Tempus in Forma, was inspired most directly by this passage from the inimitable Guy Davenport’s essay The Death of Picasso:

“The scale of ubi and quando is, as far as we know, one of the infinitudes so strangely interrelated, so perfectly harmonized, that we shall probably never perceive how time is knit with space, how the pulse of light is also the pulse of time, or how the energy of radiant stars can brake and still itself to become matter.

The stuff of a world, ant, iron, cantaloupe, is light ash accumulated over quadrillions of quadrillions of eons. Finished time, said Samuel Alexander, becomes a place.”

It is still, to me, a meaningful name, and so as I set out on another attempt at blogging, I’ve decided to return here rather than to start anew. So…where was I? Oh, right, a purpose…

The purpose of this blog is largely a response to what seems the near-absence of honest, charitable, and mature thought in our public discourse. What I would like to offer is a personal and critical moral, religious, philosophical, theological, literary, humorous, half-certain Catholic-Christian perspective on life and culture, taking a Christological look at the issues and goods therein — asking the question of what demands our attention today, for good or ill, but is perhaps not receiving it either genuinely or else at all. And to do this in a way that is at once informed yet accessible to a broad audience.

As a mission statement, that admittedly doesn’t define the point of focus very well. But it’s a step into clarity for me in terms of an inspiration to write in this form — all along I have been struggling for an object, when what I needed was simply to find a clear point from which to observe. I think that’s in many ways what we need more of today, so that’s what I shall do here, and we’ll see what form that begins to take as time lurches on.

Andrew Sullivan kept appended to the side of his excellent and now sadly retired The Dish the quote by George Orwell, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant effort”, and I would like to offer that the sentiment is relevant for what I hope to do here as well. As a Catholic, for however a sobering look one must take at reality (and at one’s self), and however dark it may at times appear, the end is always one of hope. In his powerful Nobel Prize lecture, Seamus Heaney explores the fundamental lesson of his own life, essentially that we must attend to the murderous as well as the marvelous if we are to live truly in this world, but that we can never become so encumbered by despair that we lose sight of the “diamond absolutes”, those striking moments and places of revelation where an almost pristine clarity on the truth of things seems to crystallize.

In short: as Werner Herzog says, “the poet must never avert his eyes”, and so I shan’t.

I hope that this flows much like a conversation: freely, uncoerced, yet coherently wending along a natural and steadily meaningful course. Apart from my own personal contributions, I will continue to bring the wisdom of others, past and present, into the conversation. There is too much truth-ful eloquence out there to encumber one’s self and abuse one’s readers by the rather narcissistic task of trying to rearticulate that which has already been beautifully and properly said by another.

In that sense, Eliot’s words which gave name to my last blog still ring true for this one:

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

I’m also in conversation with a few other sites about beginning to contribute guest posts there, and will link those here whenever they happen. A more loose-ended blog of mine, where I will mostly share random blurbs and links to articles of note, is also on Tumblr if anyone is interested in following. You can find it here.

So there it is. A purpose-ish. Thanks for reading!

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I want to avoid inundating readers with advertising, so every small contribution makes sustaining this space possible.

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It’s easy and secure:

 

The Religion of the Technocratic Mind

Joshua Lore

I want to start with a striking quote by my friend Michael Martin from today:

‘We live in an age of untrammeled superstition: the hope that science will save us from ourselves and bless us with prosperity and allow us to overcome death. This is an age of the totalization of the technological and the technocratic: an age of the unreal, the artificial, the illusory, of the simulacra. Indeed, our moment anticipates the absolute technological colonization of the human person, a grotesque and horrifying apotheosis of all that is implied by the notion of “evolution.” This teleological unfolding which will without question be attended by the violence implicit in such a blind (if altogether unconscious) faith in a new “survival of the fittest.” Thus superstition.’

Firstly: This is a scathing yet, I believe, terrifyingly accurate diagnosis of our societal predicament, and cuts through the puerile fits and tantrums against traditional faith that we hear from New Atheists and their ilk. If we take religion as a metaphysical system of beliefs about the nature of the world — along with its origins and its ends (and this is unavoidable, and essentially so, for the human person!), then scientism and uncurious and pompous atheism is simply, to use the words of David Bentley Hart, “the metaphysic of no metaphysics.” This is fine, I suppose, if one is painfully conscious of the problem there, as Nietzsche and Camus and many other atheists of an earlier time were, but becomes a malignant and dangerous situation when it is pushed out of the mind’s purview.

But I digress from why this quote is sticking with me today.

I’ve recently been reading George Grant’s ‘Technology and Empire’, a deep and unnerving book I hope to talk a little more about in a subsequent post. It’s an excellent look at the dangers of the technocratic mindset, so pervasive in Western (especially North American) society today, and for as much as it infects secular thinking, Christianity across the spectrum has become plagued by it in equal lengths, and that is by far the greater tragedy.

Christianity, along with many of the other great faith traditions, provides a view of man that reaches beyond man, and in so doing gives him a sense of his smallness — and his dependency — in the scheme of things, while not diminishing his substantial and dignified place within the universe, his role as a blessed steward and interlocutor between Creator and his higher beings, and the rest of Creation. In other words, to use Pascal, man stands in a strange and mysterious locus between the infinite and the nothing, capable of perceiving beyond a sense of wondrous admiration (the mysterium tremendum) the extremes of neither. This is an important realization, and all that questioning of “what is man?” flows from there. Pascal:

‘Returning to himself, let man consider what he is in comparison with all existence; let him regard himself as lost in this remote corner of nature; and from the little cell in which he finds himself lodged, I mean the universe, let him estimate at their true value the earth, kingdoms, cities, and himself. What is man in the infinite?

‘But to show him another prodigy equally astonishing, let him examine the most delicate things he knows. Let a mite be given him, with its minute body and parts incomparably more minute, limbs with their joints, veins in the limbs, blood in the veins, humorous in the blood, drops in the humours, vapors in the drops. Dividing these last things again, let him exhaust his powers of conception, and let the last object at which he can arrive be now that of our discourse. Perhaps he will think that here is the smallest point in nature. I will let him see therein a new abyss. I will paint for him not only the visible universe, but all that he can conceive of nature’s immensity in the womb of this abridged atom. Let him see therein an infinity of universes, each of which has its firmament, its planets, its earth, in the same proportion as the visible world….in which he will again find all that the first had, finding still in these others with the same thing without end and without cessation. Let him lose himself in wonders as amazing in their littleness as the others in their vastness. For who will not be astounded at the fact that our body, which a little while ago was imperceptible in the universe, itself imperceptible in the bosom of the infinite, is now a colossus, a world, or rather a whole, in respect to the nothingness which we cannot reach?…’

And then the clincher:

‘He who regards himself in this light will be afraid of himself, and observing himself sustained in the body given him by nature between those two abysses of the Infinite and the Nothing, will tremble at the sight of these marvels; and I think that, as his curiosity changes into admiration, he will be more disposed to contemplate them in silence than to examine and manipulate them in presumption.’

Pascal here, after first providing a beautiful illustration of the human condition, hints at the first essential step away from a sort of hubristic thinking that leads to our present predicament. If you’re as of yet unsure what I mean by technocratic (which I intend to simplify and explore a little more groundedly in my next post), you’ve only got to trace that final transformation backwards. It is, fundamentally, a religious sensibility though it detests what is implied by religion. This is why its embrace by so much of Christianity today is a tragedy, for the believer and the non alike — indeed for the whole of creation.

More soon.

Fall, Robert Frost, and the Flowering of Loss

Joshua Lore

“On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked in fear…” —John 20:19

This is the second year in quite a long time that I haven’t been involved with farming in some way — it feels a sad exile not somehow immersed or at least in close proximity to work so in tune with the seasons — but even still, in this time of year, there is yet (and has been since I was young) both a deep and peculiar sorrow Fall seems to visit on me and an eager readiness for rest and huddled warmth that I feel swell up in my heart at the creeping chill and the hush-sounds of ruinous foliage swept dryly across the mute terrain, so recently awash with color. It instills in me its own array of mixed emotions and remembrances beyond the veil: of lost love, of the inevitability and role of death within life, of our retreat before the hearth as the cold clasp of winter closes down outside the door (O, Hestia!), of simple but weighty memories. But in that melancholy rush one remembers too of the warmth and goodness of love, of family, of closeness and the solemn joy of togetherness: of companionship. It beckons us to turn away from our laboring and toward one another, as well as inwards.

This slow turning of Summer toward Winter perhaps still shapes our common lives like nothing else, be we farmers or not (possibly we all long in some way back toward our agrarian beginnings…). Poet Mary Kinzie laconically sums up the dissonant emotions this time of year draws out calling Fall “the flowering of loss….the ripening of diminishment into husk and hull.” Winter is a time of pallid silence, of stillness; but it is a pregnant silence and stillness too, and even in its most desolate days we quietly remember that it gives way to kaleidoscopic Spring. That time before both the Birth and the Resurrection is hard, filled with uncertainty and hiding and tearful longing, but it draws us close, and is ripe with promise.

Today, though, in the early throes of the whole ordeal my mind has been on that ripening of diminishment, and I’ve had Robert Frost’s ‘Reluctance’ on the heart. I’ll leave you with it:

Reluctance
Robert Frost

Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question ‘Whither?’

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

Men Without Chests

a talk by my former professor, R.J. Snell

Men Without Chests:
The Intellectual Life and the Moral Imagination
Dr. R.J. Snell, Philosophy Lecture Series—The Intellectual Life
17 November 2009. Eastern University. St. Davids, PA.

When a young man, I subsisted on a literature diet of romance novels—and I’m unafraid to admit that. And now, as a grown man, husband and father, I wish I had more time to read romance novels.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about those books one sees on supermarket shelves with the Fabio-looking handsome man, his shirt mostly unbuttoned, passionately grasping the heroine with the wind-swept hair. Good grief, no. I read romance novels.  

Romance, as you know, is a genre involving adventure or warfare, pageantry or chivalry, and requiring courage and skill in the face of danger. So I’d include Gilgamesh, the Iliad and (more so) the Odyssey of Homer, Judges and Kings from the OT, Beowulf, Ivanhoe, White Fang, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, Narnia, Tolkien—and while I was forbidden from reading such things, I imagine certain comic books might fit the category as well.  

Love and the Revelation of the Trinity

A beautiful passage from Theology and Sanity
Frank Sheed

“God has revealed certain things about Himself, we accept that He has done so, but find in ourselves no particular inclination to follow it up. God has told us that He is three persons in one Divine nature, and we say “Quite so”, and proceed to think of other matters — last week’s retreat, or next week’s Confessions or Lourdes or the Church’s social teaching or foreign missions. All these are vital things, but compared with God Himself, they are as nothing: and the Trinity is God Himself. These other things must be thought about, but to think about them exclusively and about the Trinity not at all is plain folly. And not only folly, but a kind of insensitiveness, almost a calousness, to the love of God. For the doctrine of the Trinity is the inner, the innermost, life of God. His profoundest secret. He did not have to reveal it to us. We could have been saved without knowing that ultimate truth. In the strictest sense it is His business, not ours. He revealed it to us because He loves men and so not only wants to be served by them but truly known by them. It is the surest mark of love to want to be known. The revelation of the Trinity was in one sense an even more certain proof than Calvary that God loves mankind. To accept it politely and think no more of it is an insensitiveness beyond comprehension in those who quite certainly love God.”

Ruth Moritz – Caravaggio Light

(This poem is a beautiful example of ekphrasis—the use of language to describe a painting or work of art, in this case, Moritz uses a poem to illuminate Caravaggio’s The Calling of Saint Matthew)

He ground flesh, they say
Instead of color, skin itself
The luster he mixed
As grown men, transfixed
Below the high transom
In The Calling of Saint Matthew
Could only still their lives,
Their faces straining toward his brush
Which applied lucence like a poultice,
Each stroke of color an unguent
To salve the pastiche of their human need
To the ochre of hallowed blessing.
It is that way with such rarity,
Constraining each blush to a
Rogue.  I cannot move.
My skin takes on miracle
Beneath your touch, sun
Tincturing this room to wine.
I bear it–the burnished glaze
Where your hand comminutes
Want to umber, rubbing
Each molecule till it hums itself
To a flame–a flicker on cheekbones,
Shoulders, and balmed hip; votives
Of table and wall and sill, where
The sun spills, its light ground down,
Smoothing and riding each saddled edge.

David Foster Wallace on Irony

From ‘E Unibus Pluram’
David Foster Wallace

Make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us.

Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That’s what made the early postmodernists great artists. The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. The virtuous always triumph? Ward Cleaver is the prototypical fifties father? “Sure.” Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff’s mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, “then” what do we do?

Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. Once everybody knows that equality of opportunity is bunk and Mike Brady’s bunk and Just Say No is bunk, now what do we do? All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.

The problem is that, however misprised it’s been, what’s been passed down from the postmodern heyday is sarcasm, cynicism, a manic ennui, suspicion of all authority, suspicion of all constraints on conduct, and a terrible penchant for ironic diagnosis of unpleasantness instead of an ambition not just to diagnose and ridicule but to redeem. You’ve got to understand that this stuff has permeated the culture. It’s become our language; we’re so in it we don’t even see that it’s one perspective, one among many possible ways of seeing. Postmodern irony’s become our environment.

All U.S. irony is based on an implicit “I don’t really mean what I say.” So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: “How very banal to ask what I mean.” Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like a hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its content is tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.

The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels.

Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.

Christ and Nothing

Christ And Nothing
David Bentley Hart

As modern men and women—to the degree that we are modern—we believe in nothing. This is not to say, I hasten to add, that we do not believe in anything; I mean, rather, that we hold an unshakable, if often unconscious, faith in the nothing, or in nothingness as such. It is this in which we place our trust, upon which we venture our souls, and onto which we project the values by which we measure the meaningfulness of our lives. Or, to phrase the matter more simply and starkly, our religion is one of very comfortable nihilism.

This may seem a somewhat apocalyptic note to sound, at least without any warning or emollient prelude, but I believe I am saying nothing not almost tediously obvious. We live in an age whose chief moral value has been determined, by overwhelming consensus, to be the absolute liberty of personal volition, the power of each of us to choose what he or she believes, wants, needs, or must possess; our culturally most persuasive models of human freedom are unambiguously voluntarist and, in a rather debased and degraded way, Promethean; the will, we believe, is sovereign because unpremised, free because spontaneous, and this is the highest good. And a society that believes this must, at least implicitly, embrace and subtly advocate a very particular moral metaphysics: the unreality of any “value” higher than choice, or of any transcendent Good ordering desire towards a higher end. Desire is free to propose, seize, accept or reject, want or not want—but not to obey. Society must thus be secured against the intrusions of the Good, or of God, so that its citizens may determine their own lives by the choices they make from a universe of morally indifferent but variably desirable ends, unencumbered by any prior grammar of obligation or value (in America, we call this the “wall of separation”). Hence the liberties that permit one to purchase lavender bed clothes, to gaze fervently at pornography, to become a Unitarian, to market popular celebrations of brutal violence, or to destroy one’s unborn child are all equally intrinsically “good” because all are expressions of an inalienable freedom of choice. But, of course, if the will determines itself only in and through such choices, free from any prevenient natural order, then it too is in itself nothing. And so, at the end of modernity, each of us who is true to the times stands facing not God, or the gods, or the Good beyond beings, but an abyss, over which presides the empty, inviolable authority of the individual will, whose impulses and decisions are their own moral index.

The Babylon Lottery

The Lottery in Babylon

Jorge Luis Borges

Like all men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like them all, a slave; I have also known omnipotence, opprobrium, incarceration. Look: on my right hand is missing my index finger. Look: through this rent cape can be seen on my stomach a ruddy tattoo — it is the second symbol, Beth. On nights when the moon is full, this symbol confers unto me power over the men whose mark is Ghimel while rendering me subject to the men of Aleph, who on moonless nights must obey the men of Ghimel. In a cellar in the half-light of dawn, I have slit before a black altar the throats of sacred bulls. For an entire lunar year, I have been declared invisible: I would cry out and no one would respond, I would steal bread and I was not beheaded. I have known what the Greeks knew not: uncertainty. In a brass chamber, before the strangler’s silencing scarf, hope has remained faithful; in the river of delights, panic stood steadfast. Heraclides Ponticus relates with admiration that Pythagoras recalled having been Pyrrhus, before him Euphorbus, and before him some other mortal; to recall analogous vicissitudes I need not find recourse in death, nor even imposture.

I owe this almost monstrous variety to an institution that other republics do not know, or which works imperfectly or secretly in them: the lottery. Into its history I have not delved; I know that the sages cannot manage to agree; I know of its powerful aims what a man not versed in astrology can know of the moon. I am of a vertiginous country where the lottery is a principal part of reality: until this very day, I have thought as little of it as I have the conduct of the inscrutable gods or of my own heart. Now, far from Babylon and its beloved customs, I think with some bewilderment of the lottery and of the blasphemous conjectures that the shrouded men murmur at twilight.