Violence on the Planes

Yeah, I almost choked at Holy Mass today when I heard that in the readings - and something about the destruction of the buildings in the north. The gospel (about the cure of the centurion's servant) was most reassuring, however - just as He did at Cana, our Lord can perform miracles-at-a-distance, and we surely need His power to heal and to restore us. We must recall that profound insight of Newman: "[Jesus] has, if I may so speak, the incomprehensible power of even making Himself weak" - an idea sketched for us in GKC's gorgeous Christmas card: "...the hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle." [GKC TEM CW2:301] This is something neither His enemies nor ours can tolerate - and something which is their defeat: "The cross cannot be defeated - for it is Defeat." [GKC The Ball and the Cross]

This day, a day when we failed to be vigilant, recalls John Philpot Curran's famous epigram on vigilance:

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

and GKC's comment upon it:

...which is only what the theologians say of every other virtue, and is itself only a way of stating the truth of original sin...
[GKC The Thing CW3:312]

The term "vigilance" reminds me of WATCHER, the monitoring tool which watched all our other machines and programs. It reminds me of how nearly every one of the 48 television monitors, each showing a different cable TV channel, were all showing the same thing. I also think of how I quoted Chesterton as we watched the big screens in our Control Room - the screens which showed not WATCHER, but something more terrifying, but NOT surprising - and how, soon after, I changed WATCHER to display the American flag:



And if you'd like more detail, click here for an account of how it happened. It's phrased in a fictional style, but it's a good approximation. And yes, I really did quote GKC...

Art and Technology, or, the Magic of Chiral Letters and Trains

One of the odd lines I overheard at the Chesterton Conference was something regarding a tension or division between "art" and "technology". I laughed, since it is so a-Chestertonian. Note: I did not say anti-Chestertonian. It is not so much against GKC as much as "lacking" or "avoiding"; perhaps I should say without GKC. Do I mean this as some sort of unkind retaliation against whoever said it? Of course not. We don't go into such personal things here. Besides, it would not be quite right, as I don't have any actual statement about the matter to examine. Besides, I might as well go into a debate with Father Jaki about what he called the "Impassable Divide", which was his way of trying to examine the variety of fields of study. (He was too much of a student of Cardinal Newman to jump to the wrong conclusion about this, but more on that another time.) Rather, I just take the chance adjacency of these words - "art" and "technology"... No. I really need to say "chance conflict" there, though I will grab onto that "adjacency" for examination in just a little.

But first I want to show you how Chesterton dealt with this sort of conflict. It's quite elegant, especially since his words provide a precise paradigm for us in this case. It comes up in a remarkably relevant way, where he is (as Father Jaki puts it) writing as a Seer of Science:

The general notion that science establishes agnosticism is a sort of mystification produced by talking Latin and Greek instead of plain English. Science is the Latin for knowledge. Agnosticism is the Greek for ignorance. It is not self evident that ignorance is the goal of knowledge. It is the ignorance and not the knowledge that produces the current notion that free thought weakens theism. It is the real world, that we see with our own eyes, that obviously unfolds a plan of things that fit into each other.
[GKC, The Thing CW3:170-1]

We could do this as musicians when given violin parts in C and simply transpose for our E-flat and B-flat saxes. But it's funnier to me because we don't even have to do that much work!

The general notion that art establishes a-technology is a sort of mystification produced by talking Latin and Greek instead of plain English. Art is the Latin for skill. A-technology is the Greek for lack of skill. It is not self evident that lack of skill is the goal of skill.

Yes. You see, the Latin word ars, artis and the Greek tecnh (pronounced "techE", with a long e at the end) mean the same thing - skill, human cleverness, "art" in the widest sense. The opposite to these terms is rather surprising: it is natura or ingenium in Latin, or fusiV in Greek (pronounced "physis") - that is things which are natural in their work, and emphatically not human. (Incidentally, all this is from dictionaries and other references, and is not "my" opinion; if you don't like it, you'll have to take it up with them, and not me. Or perhaps you'd prefer to join me in my new university, which will deal with all these things in a just manner.)

Now what is particularly funny about this is the real opposition (at least from the words themselves) is not between "art" and "technology" but between "technology" and "engineering"! Oh yes - engineering descends to us from ingenium, and really means "something you're born with". Amazing.

But for Chestertonians - and indeed for all those who appreciate words like "catholic" (not upper-case) - we do not have a conflict; we do not face an impassable divide. We are following a well-trodden path; Newman and Chesterton and others have pointed the way to an excellent bridge. We know that God is just another Name for "truth" - even that atheist attests to this when (finding himself without God) he immediately created one as the device which detects truth! (Hee hee hee!) Just this past week I found another stunning link from Newman to Chesterton - and indeed to Duhem and Jaki. I can't give the whole essay, but I will just give the trigger sentence for you:

Though sacred truth was delivered once for all, and scientific discoveries are progressive, yet there is a great resemblance in the respective histories of Christianity and of Science.
[Newman, University Sketches 14: "Supply and Demand: the Schoolmen"]

Ah... does that sound familiar? Here's how Chesterton put it, in that classic debate between the Catholic MacIan and the Atheist Turnbull:

[MacIan said:]"...there are only two things that really progress; and they both accept accumulations of authority. They may be progressing uphill or down; they may be growing steadily better or steadily worse; but they have steadily increased in certain definable matters; they have steadily advanced in a certain definable direction; they are the only two things, it seems, that ever can progress. The first is strictly physical science. The second is the Catholic Church."

"Physical science and the Catholic Church!" said Turnbull sarcastically; "and no doubt the first owes a great deal to the second."

"If you pressed that point I might reply that it was very probable," answered MacIan calmly. "I often fancy that your historical generalizations rest frequently on random instances; I should not be surprised if your vague notions of the Church as the persecutor of science was a generalization from Galileo. I should not be at all surprised if, when you counted the scientific investigations and discoveries since the fall of Rome, you found that a great mass of them had been made by monks."
[GKC The Ball and the Cross chapter 8]

I would suggest this excerpt when faced with the question, "Did Chesterton know of Pierre Duhem?" Duhem, of course, is the great French thermodynamicist and historian of science; next Tuesday marks the 94th anniversary of his death. He wrote the ten-volume Le système du monde: histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic which examines in huge and meticulous detail the actual development of science during the Middle Ages. (See Jaki's Science and Creation chapter 10 "The Sighting of New Horizons" for details, or his biography, Uneasy Genius: : The Life and Work of Pierre Duhem.)

It would be fun to go into this further - I know some people like such debates - but I want to go into something even more difficult today. Last week we talked briefly about "chirality" - the idea that the basic chemicals of life come in two forms, mirror images of each other, possessing the paradoxical sameness/differentness as the left hand and the right hand. (Though as Sheila points out, all living things use only the L-form.) Today I wish to tell you a little more about the mystery of right-and-left, or rather about that "adjacency" I mentioned a little earlier, and show you how it enters into another field of study. No, not chemistry, but literature.

Oh yes. You see, I know where the bridge is - or perhaps I should say the Gate... and so I can "go in and out" (see John 10:9) It is remarkable (no, not my insight, but the truth of the thing) perhaps because it arises in such a strange and hard-to-see place that few ever spot it. It really takes a Chestertonian perspective, as we say over and over here: "the object of my school is to show how many extraordinary things even a lazy and ordinary man may see if he can spur himself to the single activity of seeing." [GKC Tremendous Trifles ch 1]

That mystery arises for me in particular because I am a computer scientist, and have to deal with extremely detailed matters which very VERY few people ever touch, and most never even suspect even exist! Last November I posted the story of how I shocked an intelligent young man by showing him how a computer cannot add. (Well, speaking as a computer scientist, I know computers cannot add; after all, computers do not even deal with "numbers" - but people persist in thinking such silly things. Computers, however, will do what I tell them, as long as I tell them correctly, and then they do it very fast. Ahem.) Well, today I must tell you (who I am sure are also intelligent, though you may be older or younger, male or female) a little more about what computers can and cannot do...

No. I won't. This is NOT a blogg about computers. I will use another analogy, one which I delight in, and which for me long antedates my awareness of computers.

I live in a famous town, a town whose name appears on a very popular board game - for a number of reasons I do not care to mention it here. The name of this town happens to look like the English gerund for what one does with books - which may explain a little about me - but it is not pronounced like that gerund. I live just three blocks from the railroad (that's how the name appears on that board game) and I have known that railroad from a very early age. Perhaps you also like trains; children do tend to admire them - and we know how Chesterton admired them:

For instance, we often hear grown-up people complaining of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train. Did you ever hear a small boy complain of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train? No; for to him to be inside a railway station is to be inside a cavern of wonder and a palace of poetical pleasures. Because to him the red light and the green light on the signal are like a new sun and a new moon. Because to him when the wooden arm of the signal falls down suddenly, it is as if a great king had thrown down his staff as a signal and started a shrieking tournament of trains. I myself am of little boys' habit in this matter.
[GKC ILN July 21 1906 CW27:239]

Here is yet another project for a wise student to pursue: GKC on trains. Ah. I must quote one other, to set up my argument correctly:

The rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it. We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria. No, take your books of mere poetry and prose; let me read a time table, with tears of pride. Take your Byron, who commemorates the defeats of man; give me Bradshaw, who commemorates his victories. Give me Bradshaw, I say!
[GKC The Man Who Was Thursday CW6:479]

(Of course you must remember that "Bradshaw" means the book of train schedules.) Oh my, you look pale. Did I just say something evil? I told you this would be much more a cause of debate than my struggle over "art" and "technology". Let me say it again, in isolation, in case you missed the fighting words:

Man is a magician.

Oh my oh my.

Yes. Let us proceed with our lesson, shall we? Wands out, then, class.

You don't have a wand? Oh yes you do... I have a bunch here on my desk. I use them a lot, even though I also use a computer. My favourite is made of a very special sort of wood, and contains a core which has a remarkable power... contained in that core are countless spells. Oh yes, let's say that NASTY word again...

Spells.


(hee hee!) Have I made it clear yet what that wand is?

Oh, perhaps not. (sigh) But then let's talk about what comes out of those wands. You see, as hard as it may be for you to realize, what comes out is just like those trains. While the wand is in your hand - ah - above the paper, it is like the empty track. It is nothing at all... it is a mystical expectation, it is that strange line from "Little Town of Bethlehem" about the "silent streets" filled with "hopes and fears of all the years"... or, as Chesterton told us about a writer with "writer's block":

"He did no work lately; sometimes sat and stared at a blank sheet of paper as if he had no ideas."
"Or as if he had too many," said Gabriel Gale.
[GKC "The Purple Jewel" in The Poet and the Lunatics]

But then - ah, then, with a rush of noise like the Holy Spirit on the first Pentecost, with a blaze of fire and smoke (in the old days when they were steam-driven) comes the Engine... that first and most mystic of the mystical components of the train! Behind it, in that grand order, which is the First Rule of Heaven, comes a chain of cars, linked at their ends - and on they roll.

But each must follow, according to that order. Not one can ever depart from the forward motion of the Engine... Once the handedness has been chosen, all the train cars, all the monomers (to use the chemistry term) must abide by the chosen direction.

There is a mystery here. Yes, you can yap at me for pretending that there is some occult thing lurking in a common pencil - but I shall defend (as Chesterton's Gabriel Syme) that Man is a magician, and never more so as when he wields that mighty wand full of spells... er, spelling.

The secret, of course, is that every single letter comes with two hidden and marvellous hands, and they are as distinct as our left hand from our right hand. Oh yes. Our letters are chiral. They are like the railroad cars, and they must follow the engine in proper order.

Now you will not see them, if you pick up a Q or even an X, and examine it under a powerful magnifying lens. These hands aren't seen in that manner.

However, if you have ever managed to see the OLD kind of printing press, where there are actual cases of type - that is, separate little chunks of metal, one for EACH letter - you will have a hint of those hands. You see, I am not talking about the SHAPE of the letters - some of which do possess some interesting symmetries. I am talking about the letters-in-themselves, in the sense that they are powerless unless they are combined into words. But when they are combined, they must abide by the rules of order. They must all stand on their "feet" and all with the "nick" facing in the same direction. (These are the technical terms applied to a single type block.) Yes, there really is a left hand of S and a right hand of H, and they join as mightily as two train cars (though usually not with quite the same crash; I've watched the making up of trains at the local train yard.) They also are like the amino acids - they only combine with the expenditure of energy, and the combination is signified by an advance along an ever-growing chain. That word "chain" is important; in computing, or rather in the branch of finite math where we study the theory of this sort of thing, we speak of "concatenation" - this comes from the Latin catena = chain, and refers to the act of joining two strings (two ordered collections) into one. Concatenation is reminiscent of the idea of "adding", and there are certain similarities, but there are also important differences - specifically there is NO difference, I mean there is no "subtraction"... but I must not go into this fascinating matter further today.

The mystery I am trying to display for you is that these letters - which you are perceiving and yet paradoxically ignoring as you read my writing - these letters are just like a man with his hands spread out on either side. They are like the train cars, linking together at their ends. (You do NOT stack train cars one on top of the other, or side against side; those are not trains but wrecks.) Even when you play Scrabble or work a cross-word puzzle, you MUST abide by this rule: you will always truly link "left hand to right hand" even though you arrange the physical letters in a vertical sense.

Yes, you can say that palindromes (words like "noon" or "radar") work both ways - they are ambidextrous, if you insist. But such are rare. You can also put your switch engine at the rear of the train and push it along - I've seen that done, but it is also rare.

What is the point of all this? The point is my poor attempt at shining light on something you may have not ever noticed: that there exists in each letter two little "connectors" - a right hand and a left hand, just like the amino and the carboxyl groups in an amino acid (which build proteins), or like the 5-prime and the 3-prime hydroxyls in nucleotides (which build DNA or RNA), or like the two couplers at the ends of a freight car (which build a train). Those "hands" are bound, not to the letter in its graphical form, but to the letter-as-it-is. "S" has a certain shape, and as a Scrabble tile it may fit above or below, left or right; but as an idea it can be enigne, car, or caboose: it may Start a word or come in the midSt, or at the end of other letterS - and in each case it always keeps its right hand distinguished from its left. It is in this binding that the mystery and the power of WORD occurs: the distinction which keeps "GOD" from running into "DOG" or into "GDO" (short for "grid dip oscillator" a tool used by radio engineers) or keeps "LIVE" and "EVIL" apart.

It is not for nothing that the wizards of fantasy speak of the power of a spell. We know what power there is in a spell. Remember that next time you pick up your pencil or pen - or when you see a train go by.

2b or not 2b

Wow. I just spotted an amazing comment made on one of my earlier postings, to wit, the one on positive and negative triangles. Here it is:

Sheila writes: Ooh, I actually knew about the "handed" isomers of amino acids -- Dr. Marshner brought them up in our apologetics class! Only one isomer (I forget if it is the left- or right-handed version) works in the human body -- making the chances of proteins forming randomly in the primordial sludge even LESS statistically likely.
posted August 31 2010

What a triumph - there is a theology professor SOMEWHERE who KNOWS about isomers of amino acids!

Here, for example, is a rendition of the amino acid called alanine. Again, remember, there are two versions - here is one and here is its mirror...


This is excellent... and quite exciting. It may mean there are some philosophers who will have a clue about life and the real world. It is all very well to make odd and unattributed claims (as curiously humorous as they are) about papal encyclicals - but the truth of amino acids will stand no matter how many "philosophers" write journal articles against them or against their study. Perhaps, in this decadent time, there are some who do not believe in such things, as there are some who do not believe in the motions of the earth, or in the multiplicity of the chemical elements. I have no time for such silliness; I have real work to do. And real poetry to write. Indeed! I was able to hear Dr. Marshner at the recent conference, and I can readily imagine how he brought this important chemical fact to bear upon the moral and philosophical topics at hand. Such grand work gives us an excellent and most hopeful vision of greater things to come. And the mystery is far deeper, as we shall consider today.

Since carbon has four bonds, oriented along the vertices of a tetrahedron, there peers out from this common chemical the Sign of the Cross - yes, to the despair of iconoclasts and - er - a certain tribe of staurophobes.

Since this geometric truth is a bit difficult to describe, I will give you some pictures. But - er - since they are two dimensional, you will still have to exert your intellects, though not quite so much as if I only used words.

In the first, we see a tetrahedron - that is, a four-sided thing, sort of like a pyramid, except in pyramids the bottoms are square, and here the bottom is triangular.


All four sides are triangles. You can make one yourself, it's fun. Just cut out four equilateral triangles - that is, where all the edges are the same length - and then tape their edges together. Even easier, just print this picture and then cut it out - DON'T cut into the diagram, just around the outside - then FOLD on the lines, and tape it up, and you will have yourself a nice little tetrahedron.



Now for the intellectual part. Imagine a little ball floating in its middle - you got it?


Good. Let's make it blue, just because I like blue. (Actually, in the usual color scheme it ought to be black, but you already saw that in the diagram of alanine.)

Next, imagine four lines reaching out from the ball to the four CORNERS of the tetrahedron. (Or look at the picture.)

All right. Now for the tricky part. Instead of looking at it from the SIDE of the tetrahedron, try looking at it from the EDGE:


Ah.... THERE IS THE CROSS.

Those four lines represent the four single bonds of carbon. If you make several and then label them with letters, and try rotating them, you will see that there are TWO kinds, which work just like the left hand and the right hand - that is what is called "chiral" or "handed".

Organic chemistry, then, contains its own very special hint - a kind of subtle reminder - of the Passion. It is eminently fitting; all the sciences and all the technical disciplines carry the burden, just as history and civics and literature and music... it's suggested in that very curious and disturbing comment about Christ's lament over Jerusalem:

Therefore the story of Christ is the story of a journey, almost in the manner of a military march; certainly in the manner of the quest of a hero moving to his achievement or his doom. It is a story that begins in the paradise of Galilee, a pastoral and peaceful land having really some hint of Eden, and gradually climbs the rising country into the mountains that are nearer to the storm-clouds and the stars, as to a Mountain of Purgatory. He may be met as if straying in strange places, or stopped on the way for discussion or dispute; but his face is set towards the mountain city. That is the meaning of that great culmination when he crested the ridge and stood at the turning of the road and suddenly cried aloud, lamenting over Jerusalem. Some light touch of that lament is in every patriotic poem; or if it is absent, the patriotism stinks with vulgarity.
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:339-340]

If Chesterton can tie patriotism and poetry into the Great Story of the Crucifixion, I shall by no means refrain from tying in chemistry and three-dimensional graphics and all sorts of other matters. It may seem to be an inversion of St. Paul's restriction, "while I was among you I was determined to know nothing but Jesus Christ and Him crucified" [see 1Cor2:2] It is rather a more extensive application of that clause from the Nicene Creed, "per quem omnia facta sunt" = "Through Him all things were made". If there were no rocks there could be no Calvary; if no plants, there could be no cross; if no iron, there could be no nails; if no moon, there could be no Passover to signal the proper date; if no sun, there would be nothing to announce the dire extremity of the death of God... if no humans, there would be no reason for Him to have suffered.

Is it annoying to think of the cross always?

Is it annoying to think of your mother and father, your spouse, your children?

Is it annoying to think of One who loves you? Or the token of His love?

However - we know the cross is annoying to some. You may recall that very interesting introductory chapter to The Ball and the Cross, the great debate between Father Michael and Professor Lucifer...

"I once knew a man like you, Lucifer," he said, with a maddening monotony and slowness of articulation. "He took this..."
"There is no man like me," cried Lucifer, with a violence that shook the ship.
"As I was observing," continued Michael, "this man also took the view that the symbol of Christianity was a symbol of savagery and all unreason. His history is rather amusing. It is also a perfect allegory of what happens to rationalists like yourself. He began, of course, by refusing to allow a crucifix in his house, or round his wife's neck, or even in a picture. He said, as you say, that it was an arbitrary and fantastic shape, that it was a monstrosity, loved because it was paradoxical. Then he began to grow fiercer and more eccentric; he would batter the crosses by the roadside; for he lived in a Roman Catholic country. Finally in a height of frenzy he climbed the steeple of the Parish Church and tore down the cross, waving it in the air, and uttering wild soliloquies up there under the stars. Then one still summer evening as he was wending his way homewards, along a lane, the devil of his madness came upon him with a violence and transfiguration which changes the world. He was standing smoking, for a moment, in the front of an interminable line of palings, [vertical stakes; a picket fence] when his eyes were opened. Not a light shifted, not a leaf stirred, but he saw as if by a sudden change in the eyesight that this paling was an army of innumerable crosses linked together over hill and dale. And he whirled up his heavy stick and went at it as if at an army. Mile after mile along his homeward path he broke it down and tore it up. For he hated the cross and every paling is a wall of crosses. When he returned to his house he was a literal madman. He sat upon a chair and then started up from it for the cross-bars of the carpentry repeated the intolerable image. He flung himself upon a bed only to remember that this, too, like all workmanlike things, was constructed on the accursed plan. He broke his furniture because it was made of crosses. He burnt his house because it was made of crosses. He was found in the river."
Lucifer was looking at him with a bitten lip.
"Is that story really true?" he asked.
"Oh, no," said Michael, airily. "It is a parable. It is a parable of you and all your rationalists. You begin by breaking up the Cross; but you end by breaking up the habitable world."
[GKC The Ball and the Cross]

And so, we now see that this hated symbol stares out from the very essence of life... I once heard how a "certain country" banned a certain kind of army boot because it left tread-marks with a plus-sign... I don't know if they have also banned computer keyboards, along with ASCII code 2b, which produces that "+" character yet; I wonder if they will forbid coal, charcoal, oil, and diamonds - and end up forbidding all organic compounds - compounds containing carbon - including their own bodies. They too follow that man Father Michael describes; they too may be found in the river. It is a pity.

Enough. Let us think more positive thoughts, then.

You didn't catch the Hamlet pun, did you? Or did you?

You should recall this famous line:

If the morbid Renaissance intellectual is supposed to say, "To be or not to be - that is the question," then the massive medieval doctor [Aquinas] does most certainly reply in a voice of thunder, "To be - that is the answer."
[GKC St. Thomas Aquinas CW2:489]

It has fallen to computer science and the ASCII character set to link this great truth of ontology with the very Sign of the Cross. It is the sign that is opposed - but it is also the sign of reality. (The squares of imaginary numbers are negative; the squares of reals are marked with the cross, I mean a plus sign.) This universe, the only real universe, is the one which has sun and moon, rocks and trees, iron and all the rest - it has Man, and thus it has the Cross.

P.S. I am aware that the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross comes later this month, on the 14th to be exact; but somehow this seemed to be a most fitting derivative of Sheila's comment, and I hope you will consult it again, either on the 14th, or during a future Holy Week. All things, after all, science and engineering as much as literature and history, must glorify God. And they do.

P.S.#2: I forgot I had posted (quite some time ago) this poem about this curious character.

Drinkers live longer

Drinkers live longer than teetotalers, says this news article. I wonder why it didn't work with the Chesterton and Shaw?

Looking at "Abbr." - or, the Mirror of Life

One of the very best things one learns as one explores the vast cosmos - a trick hidden from most students, alas, and ignored by most of the modern industries - is that one can use knowledge from one field to make advances in another field. The little corner called "higher education" has tried to market this idea under the label of "interdisciplinary studies": they have "Physics for Poets", and (I presume) "Poetry for Physicists". Of course this only goes so far; there are what some call "Impassable Divides". I've seen them. I could tell you stories, but then today's column would be even more huge than it is going to be. So instead of telling you of the failures, I will tell you of the successes. As you might expect, they have to do with our Uncle Gilbert.

Speaking as a scientist, one of the startling things I have found in Chesterton's writing is an honest admiration for true Science - Science "writ large" as Father Jaki always writes. If you wish a detailed study of this matter, consult Jaki's Chesterton a Seer of Science. One of the more delightful epigrams, and the one which perhaps exemplifies my point today, is this:

The wrong is not that engines are too much admired, but that they are not admired enough. The sin is not that engines are mechanical, but that men are mechanical.
[GKC Heretics CW1:113]

If we really admire something...

Ah well. Let me interrupt for a non-science interlude. I do NOT say nonsense there; please! That word "admire" comes from the Latin mirari = "to wonder at". In other words, we ought to have a sense of wonder at the engine.

Earlier this week on the Duhem Society blogg I posted a fascinating excerpt from a little book I am reading. (I'm still not done, it's a terrible shame to think it takes me this long to finish a book with less than 100 pages!) It was in connection with my comments about "a university" and Newman's famous book, and it was really an amazing statement:

If there were no Catholic universities, the academic world would be the poorer for it. The reason Academe would be poorer is that it would lack an advocate of mystery.
[Francis J. Wade, S. J.: The Aquinas Lecture 1978: The Catholic University and the Faith, 4]

It would take another book (much larger than Father Wade's) to properly handle that amazing idea. But the important thing is not that "Catholic" part, but the "mystery" part - though they are connected, and my purpose is not to argue that connection. My point is to underscore the MYSTERY.

When we talk about "mystery" we usually understand something like one of GKC's Father Brown stories: an intellectual puzzle, phrased in a traditional form of literature, and brought to a clever and (hopefully) unexpected resolution - indeed, to a surprising resolution. The theological underpinnings of Christianity have long spoken of Mystery in a somehow related sense, though here there is not usually the sense of an "intellectual puzzle". In religion, "Mystery" is tied up with the term "Mystic" - meaning a person who touches or perhaps perceives a Mystery. Let us hear Chesterton who has done truly great work on elucidating this difficult matter:

A poet may be vague, and a mystic hates vagueness. A poet is a man who mixes up heaven and earth unconsciously. A mystic is a man who separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both. ... no true mystic ever loved darkness rather than light. No pure mystic ever loved mere mystery. The mystic does not bring doubts or riddles: the doubts and riddles exist already. We all feel the riddle of the earth without anyone to point it out. The mystery of life is the plainest part of it. The clouds and curtains of darkness, the confounding vapours, these are the daily weather of this world. Whatever else we have grown accustomed to, we have grown accustomed to the unaccountable. Every stone or flower is a hieroglyphic of which we have lost the key; with every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand. The mystic is not the man who makes mysteries but the man who destroys them. The mystic is one who offers an explanation which may be true or false, but which is always comprehensible - by which I mean, not that it is always comprehended, but that it always can be comprehended, because there is always something to comprehend. ... Every great mystic goes about with a magnifying glass; He sees every flea as a giant - perhaps rather as an ogre.
[GKC William Blake 4, 131-2, 155]

Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. ... The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid. ... Symbols alone are of even a cloudy value in speaking of this deep matter; and another symbol from physical nature will express sufficiently well the real place of mysticism before mankind. The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility.
[GKC Orthodoxy CW1:230, 231]

Well, I could go on, but clearly this is another wonderful research topic. The point you see, is that one begins to realize that there is always something more... it is grasping that reason itself requires an initial commitment to something unreasoned (though NOT unreasonABLE) - the acceptance of some truth exterior to that proven, or provable. Again, I am NOT going into this here as much as it needs to be gone into - but I do have something to say, and I want to get to it.

In the course of my work (Ah!) I have relied heavily upon all this, as well as upon that most practical line from Heretics about reverting to the doctrinal principles of the thirteenth century. One of the links provided by this mysticism was the one which gave me an elegant way of handling the daily transport of some 17,000 files to-and-from a location in the Rockies to our location somewhere in southeastern Pennsylvania. It was not my idea; it was God's; it was how He manages transport of messenger RNA within eukaryotic cells. (I got it from reading a book on biochemistry.) Another came from the famous Gray's Anatomy; I've written about that one in my book on Subsidiarity, which is still awaiting a publisher. But there is more to the mystery of mystery - and aptly enough, it touches on the mystery of life itself.

But I will get there by a kind of pun - the pun in my title, represented by the symbols "abbr." As you may know, this is nothing more than the abbreviation for the word "abbreviation".

Here, I shall delete a whole extraneous diatribe about the so-called "problem-solving skills" one continually hears about from "educators" and simply teach you another of them, one of the more powerful known to computing. It is simply "abbr." - the idea of self-reference, though we have a more formal name and call it "recursion". No, I am not going to lecture on that formalism, or teach you factorial (surprise!) or make comments about the Peano axioms and mathematical induction. Rather, I want to tell you about how it happens in life.

Life - when we learn about it at the molecular level - consists in two very unusual things, which are really one thing. Life is a complex system of a variety of molecules - most of which are complex collections of carbon and three or four or five other elements (some call this CHONPS) - but they are busy molecules, reacting with each other, or more importantly NOT reacting with each other. That is because they are all collected within some water, and are at what we call "physiological temperature" - they are warm, and so are bumping around within that water. One would not be wrong to claim "Life's one big pool party" - if you look through that microscope GKC mentioned in connection with Blake.

But as you have heard before, there is a mystery to life. It is most simply phrased, "What came first, the chicken or the egg?" Nowadays, since we know a little more about it, we could say it a little differently, but I don't want to go into a lot of that detail now. I do hope you've heard the term "DNA" by now, since we need to talk about it next.

The mystery isn't so much that there's a pool party. The mystery is that one pool party can give rise to another and now there are two. How this is done involves things like DNA and RNA and two marvellous engines called "polymerase" and "ribosome" (yes I am skipping all sorts of tech details here).

But I won't skip all of the details.

Just as I told you about "abbr." and the computer-science problem solver called "recursion" I do have to tell you this much about life. The DNA, you see, contains the exact instructions to build those two engines. Oh it seems very readily understandable that one could "copy" DNA into another DNA. Somehow. We have photocopiers, don't we? We can make a copy of a piece of paper.

Ah, now here comes the mystery.

Obviously if that paper is a blueprint for the photocopier, we could make another copy of the blueprint. Yeah, that's nice, but the thing is we need a copy of the photocopier itself.

There - you see it? We have a self-reference. We have "abbr." We have recursion.

Yes, the DNA code (they call it the "genome") contains instructions to build the polymerase and the ribosome, and all the other tools those machines require. (It also contains instructions for other things - building the heart, or the skin, or the eye - all that.) But the "common denominator" to life is this self-reference, the idea that somewhere in the 3,000,000,000 bases of DNA the instructions say "and don't forget to make a copy of these instructions".

Now for the mystery in the other sense.

In that other technical work I do, which some call "prayer" I often say the rosary, or what we could call the "hand-held gospel". One day I was saying the "Second Glorious Mystery" during which we consider the Ascension of Jesus into heaven. As you no doubt know, this is mentioned just at the conclusion of the Gospel of St. Luke and also in its sequel "Acts of the Apostles". Also associated with this event is the "Great Commission" given at the conclusion of St. Matthew's gospel, which I will quote:

Going therefore, teach ye all nations: baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you. And behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.
[Mt 28:19-20]

And somehow I started thinking about DNA and life and then.... OH. Well... how very curious. In the very last command of our Lord, what do we find?

"Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you"

BUT THIS IS ONE OF THOSE THINGS HE COMMANDED.

Hence it is recursive. It is self-referential. It is like the ribosome code appearing in DNA, or like "abbr." Wow! (hee hee) In fact, this one phrase constitutes the Life of the Church, the mystical Body of Christ on earth, since it constitutes the replication process in itself. The "increase and multiply" of Genesis is here renewed, and life takes on a whole new meaning - even though it is still mysterious.

(What does all this mean? Did "Doc" explain life (in DNA)? Did he explain the Church? Did he even explain this "recursion"? )

Not really. I tried to show you something - put it out into view for you to look at.

(And why did you bother mentioning the mirror? You didn't say anything about mirrors.)

Well, that's part of the mystery - a mirror is a kind of simple symbol of recursion. Recursion is nothing by itself - a mirror shows nothing in the dark. But there is something strange - something mystical about this idea, just as there is something about recursion and the divine design of life (the biological or the kind Jesus meant when He said "I am the life").

Ah well. Since I didn't do so well with this prose approch, I will try a poetic one, and then leave you to ponder the matter. Some years ago I wrote a poem which tries to explain about mirrors and glass - or what a friend of mine calls "the strange color of the nearby" - but perhaps that too is a mystery. Well, try it anyway.

Mirror and Glass
"But glass is a very beautiful thing, like diamonds; and transparency is a sort of transcendental colour."
G. K. Chesterton, The Poet and the Lunatics

There are some colors none have seen:
Like ultra brown and infra green,
Fluorescent black and vivid gray;
All those I hope to see some day...
(Perhaps, because I’ve dropped some hints
The colorists will brew those tints!)
But there are two I see quite near
And on reflection it is clear
Neither one will ever be made
While the laws of light are obeyed.

[Copyright © 1998 by Dr. Thursday. This poem appeared in Something Good To Read for April 29 1998 and is used by kind permission of the Editor-in-Chief.]

Er - having quoted myself I felt it not appropriate to end that way. So I shall give you one further bit of GKC which may help a little:

The sublime words of St. John's Gospel permit of a sympathetic parody; if a man love not God whom he has not seen, how shall he love God whom he has seen? [1 John 4:20, also John 1:18, 6:46] If we do not delight in Santa Claus even as a fancy, how can we expect to be happy even if we find that he is a fact? But a mystic like Blake simply puts up a placard for the whole universe, like an old woman letting lodgings.
[GKC William Blake 102]

P.S. On re-reading this, I think it will be necessary to say some more about "mystery". But I will do that another time. If you want a thrill, however, try re-reading the scene from Easter Sunday about the disciples on the Road to Emmaus, and re-think it in terms of the classical "detective fiction" you know about. It's uncanny.

Behold and See 5

New for homeschoolers, Science for grade 5, written by our own Gilbert columnist David Beresford.

First Day of the 3rd Year of Chesterton Academy

These are the lucky kids who attend Chesterton Academy, a school based on ideals put forth in Chesterton's writings.

This is the third year of operation, and the school is obviously growing by leaps and bounds.

Congratulations, Chesterton Academy!

To See Things As They Are

As I mentioned last week, I had to leave the Conference early when something came up at home requiring my presence on-site. What I forgot to mention then - either at the Conference or in my LENGTHY gurgling last week - was the splendid relevance to one of the truly great quotes from our centennial text, one which I delight in appending to my e-mails, and which is a constant source of irritation to Luddites:

I have often thanked God for the telephone.
[GKC What's Wrong With the World CW4:112]

As I have read the book, I am well aware of the context; I know, far better than most, how difficult technology can be, to use or to be burdened with. (Hee hee! Like the centurion I know what it means to be under authority [Mt 8:9]: to have my cell phone go off and summon me to assist!) Nevertheless, let us recall that it is GOOD to thank God for the telephone, just as we should thank Him for beer and Burgundy. [See Orthodoxy CW1:268] These are indeed human constructions, but they are made with divine gifts. Oh yes: do not make the mistake (as some environmentalists do) of thinking man-made things have nothing to do with God. Beer and telephones are made from materials of physical creation - which are God's gifts, just as wood enters into violins and ground up minerals into tubes of oil paint. But how much more should we thank Him when we recall that these things have been devised by the great gift of the human intellect, and indeed not just by a single man, but by the cumulative power of millennia, summed up and passed on. The gifts of language, of coherent speech - indeed, of coherent thought.... did WE HUMANS invent them ex nihilo from nothing, all by ourselves? Oh no, they were given to us, by God, if only by inspiration. Why would anyone have thought to drink water in which some wheat grains had rotted, or some long-forgotten grape juice? Perhaps it was the 99 percent desperation (hee hee) of a thirsty farmer... Ah, inspiration. But more importantly, education. Most of the time we do no more than pass such gifts on to others. Baking bread or weaving cloth, brewing beer or designing telephones - all these arise in the same fashion as art.

Caution: do not imagine there is some distinction between art and technology. As GKC mentions about science and agnosticism in The Thing CW3:170, this is an error caused by not knowing Latin and Greek, since techne is
Greek for "art", a set of rules or method of doing.

You may call it art or you may call it technology, but under either sense we must be grateful. It is, as we say at Holy Mass, truly right and just to give thanks to God, and a telephone no less than a sunset glorifies Him - in fact, the telephone glorifies Him more than the sunset, for human choice and human activity enters into its making, and even the work of a fallen human is worth far more than a mere stellar furnace, no matter how "artistic" (with the casual sense of "pretty"), how useful, or how large.

I mentioned the concept of "passing on" of human abilities, and used that mystical word "education" - which is what I wish to write about today. And it relates to my introductory, since when my call came and I left the Conference, I was absent from the lecture on Newman and Chesterton - and this man, John Henry Cardinal Newman, is one whom we as Chestertonians ought to know more about.

Perhaps someday there will be a real study made of JHN vis-à-vis GKC... I know that Father Jaki has a book and several essays on Chesterton, and at least four books and several essays on Newman, but (as far as I know) he has not set them adjacent and examined them together. Possibly the lecturer (whom I missed) did this; perhaps others have, and hopefully others will, very soon. We need it. But let us see just a little, in a kind of exploratory manner. I think some interesting things will arise.

But let us, as Chesterton often did, begin our investigation in another place. The following quote is not from either GKC or JHN, but from a mystery fiction detective novel book. In it, a wise and ornery detective is comforting and assisting a young girl who had been seduced by Bad Books...

"...here are these three Russian crutch-walkers on the table by the bed. We'd better get rid of them now."
There was a whirr of leaves and then three separate thuds as Dostoevski, Tolstoy and Checkov flew out of the open window and struck the bole of an oak tree.
"The idea is," explained H.M. [the detective] "I want you to read some fellers named Dumas and Mark Twain and Stevenson and Chesterton and Conan Doyle. They're dead, yes; but they can still whack the britches off anybody at tellin' a story..."
[John Dickson Carr writing as Carter Dickson, Night at the Mocking Widow 219, emphasis added]

Oh yes!

Now, before you get up in arms about this censorship - or the even more curious list of recommendations, let us visit something even more anger-making. I want you to be good and emotive now so that in a little while you'll have gotten it all out, and THEN you can sit back and read this again and then begin to think about things.

So let us next visit the Index. Oh yes. The horrible intrusion of Papal Power into the literary realm! Yes, well... Just a word or two, you know. I think it is rather funny, especially since I obtained a copy of the Index for 1930 and explored the more than 500 pages of titles and authors it contains. I've bumped into many things in my travels as a computer scientist, but I would guess that over 99 percent of these forbidden titles are unknown, except to scholars, and I doubt that even they could summarize the contents of even one. What's funny for me to imagine is that these days the only thing on the New Index (as devised by the Media and Higher Education) would be papal encyclicals. (I feel the urge to misquote Chesterton here: "We do not need censorship by the Pope. We have censorship of the Pope." [cf Orthodoxy CW1:321]) Hee hee!

But to return to the Index: There were very few that I had ever heard of, even as titles, though a couple were surprising, like Victor Hugo's "Les misérables" and Blaise Pascal's "Pensées". I was discussing this with another young friend at the conference, and I pointed out that the reason for the Index was NOT to stop real intellectual study, but to restrain uninformed people from following dubious or misleading arguments. I said there is a really big difference in the various forms of censorship. Specifically, no reasonable person would give a book on calculus to a first grade student! But this is NOT censorship. It is merely the acknowledgement that one who does not know even the basics of addition, to say nothing of algebra, cannot fathom how that long curly S-shaped integral sign stands for an infinite number of additions... (Not precisely, I know, but let us not do calculus today.)

Ah... perhaps you begin to see what I am trying to point out?

No? Not yet. Perhaps I wondered off too far. (Not likely... ahem!) Ah well, I am just trying to sketch something. Let's keep going - but let us go into Newman now, and maybe he will help illuminate the matter...

Certainly a liberal education does manifest itself in a courtesy, propriety, and polish of word and action, which is beautiful in itself, and acceptable to others; but it does much more. It brings the mind into form, - for the mind is like the body. Boys outgrow their shape and their strength; their limbs have to be knit together, and their constitution needs tone. Mistaking animal spirits for vigour, and over-confident in their health, ignorant what they can bear and how to manage themselves, they are immoderate and extravagant; and fall into sharp sicknesses. This is an emblem of their minds; at first they have no principles laid down within them as a foundation for the intellect to build upon; they have no discriminating convictions, and no grasp of consequences. And therefore they talk at random, if they talk much, and cannot help being flippant, or what is emphatically called "young." They are merely dazzled by phenomena, instead of perceiving things as they are.
[JHN The Idea of a University, Preface]

Did your "Chesterton Quote" alarm just go off? Ah, good - I thought it would. YES, now do you see why I am so thrilled? Is this not the very focus, the burning hearth, the altar of the gods of the home - or what Tolkien calls the Secret Fire of Anor? Well, maybe not, but it certainly is something remarkable. Yeah, yeah, I know some of you want to debate what "liberal education" means - or what "liberal" means, or quarrel about this view of boys. But let's just hear that critical phrase again, but set into first-person plural, and whatever tense (iussive?) this might be:

We must begin to perceive things as they are.

Where's that in Chesterton? Oh, you goose. It's just a hair's-breadth away from the THE QUOTE, better (and more accurately) known as this grand statement of Father Brown:

"It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense, and can't see things as they are."
[GKC "The Oracle of the Dog" in The Incredulity of Father Brown]

And this, in a nutshell, is Newman's argument of at least two of his Discourses from his masterful The Idea of a University.

So what is Doc getting at? Keeping calculus books away from little kindergardners? Chucking Russian novels out the window? Huh? Some old-fangled education scheme? What?

At the very least, I am getting at the real relevance of Newman to our work, and to an application of Chesterton to our consideration of Newman's writing. Sure, I advocate chucking certain books out of windows - yes, even calculus, if the child is not prepared. (Not for always, you understand. But the first time your son holds a bat in his hand you don't ask a pro pitcher to show him a fast ball.) And I advocate the reading of exciting stories with distinct good and even more distinct evil - and not just for children. Let me quote Newman again:

Our desideratum is, not the manners and habits of gentlemen; - these can be, and are, acquired in various other ways, by good society, by foreign travel, by the innate grace and dignity of the Catholic mind; - but the force, the steadiness, the comprehensiveness and the versatility of intellect, the command over our own powers, the instinctive just estimate of things as they pass before us, which sometimes indeed is a natural gift, but commonly is not gained without much effort and the exercise of years.
[JHN The Idea of a University, Preface]

Ah, did your GKC quote sensor beep at you again? Check this out:

To become a Catholic is not to leave off thinking, but to learn how to think... The Catholic convert has for the first time a starting-point for straight and strenuous thinking. He has for the first time a way of testing the truth in any question that he raises. As the world goes, especially at present, it is the other people, the heathen and the heretics, who seem to have every virtue except the power of connected thought.
[GKC The Catholic Church and Conversion CW 3:106]

But I find that GKC's mention of "connected thought" leads me right back to the very same place in Newman:

When the intellect has once been properly trained and formed to have a connected view or grasp of things, it will display its powers with more or less effect according to its particular quality and capacity in the individual. In the case of most men it makes itself felt in the good sense, sobriety of thought, reasonableness, candour, self-command, and steadiness of view, which characterize it. In some it will have developed habits of business, power of influencing others, and sagacity. In others it will elicit the talent of philosophical speculation, and lead the mind forward to eminence in this or that intellectual department. In all it will be a faculty of entering with comparative ease into any subject of thought, and of taking up with aptitude any science or profession. All this it will be and will do in a measure, even when the mental formation be made after a model but partially true; for, as far as effectiveness goes, even false views of things have more influence and inspire more respect than no views at all. Men who fancy they see what is not are more energetic, and make their way better, than those who see nothing; and so the undoubting infidel, the fanatic, the heresiarch, are able to do much, while the mere hereditary Christian, who has never realized the truths which he holds, is unable to do anything. But, if consistency of view can add so much strength even to error, what may it not be expected to furnish to the dignity, the energy, and the influence of Truth!
[JHN The Idea of a University, Preface]

There is far more on this which we must explore, but it will have to be on another occasion. If you have a copy of Newman's book, please read it - or re-read it. If not, I urge you to GET a copy. No, not just borrow it; you will want it, more and more, as time goes on. Please do continue your reading of GKC, but also make a start at Newman. If you want to really deal with what GKC "Education, or the Mistake About the Child" you will need Newman.

And please keep this famous Chesterton line in mind:

...the object of my school is to show how many extraordinary things even a lazy and ordinary man may see if he can spur himself to the single activity of seeing.
[GKC Tremendous Trifles]

Don't you feel an urge to study in Chesterton's own school? Remember that this was nearly the last command of our Lord, "Go and make disciples of all nations". [Mt 28:19] Some translations say "go and teach"; remember that the "disciple" in Latin has the sense of "student". You may get upset if I tell you the Greek looks a lot like "mathematics", but it does. Let us beg our Lord for the grace the blind man begged:

Lord, that I may see! [Luke 18:41]

P.S. I find, upon re-reading this, that I present a certain tone respecting "Catholicism" in regard to education. I don't have any brief way of decomplexifying this just now, except to claim that I could write a lengthy distinguo about what it means. Just as a simple caution, it is not said as a way of "dissing" or condemning those of other beliefs. Perhaps it may help if you recall that "University" and "Catholic" differ only as "Latin" and "Greek" - but even that will mislead. I will just have to let it stand as it is, and hope to address the matter more fully, at another time, in another place.

Also: I have, as you may infer, a very special interest in this matter. You see, I am involved in the foundation of a new University, much as Newman was, and facing the same trials and difficulties. But I have at least this advantage: not only do I have Newman's own writing. I also have Chesterton's. I also hope and pray for their intercession in the effort, and the support of some brilliant young people, some of whom were in attendance at the Conference. Well, actually, perhaps I support them. We work together on such things, after all; we know there are many gifts but the same Spirit.

How to Explain?

It is so difficult when people crucify others for misspeaking during a public speech.

If you go here, you'll find some particularly difficult people making fun of James O'Keefe. This seems to be an afternoon's pastime for some of them, who have never misspoken themselves.

What I think James meant to say was that people in public office should be monitored, and that this was a good use of one's moral judgment: To keep watch over what those who claim to represent us do and say.

They don't know Belloc (spelled Beloch on the site). They think Mount St. Mary's invited James to speak.Tweet

Just Discovered: lost comments

I was wondering what happened to the comments that usually come when one posts. Apparently Blogger took it upon itself to moderate the comments without my knowing where the comments lingered while waiting my moderation.Tweet

James O'Keefe at the Conference

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Your Blog Authors at the Conference Dr. Thursday (AKA Peter Floriani, PhD and Nancy C. Brown)

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Positive and Negative Triangles

After the excitement of last week's conference, it is good to turn back to our usual dull and LENGTHY ploddings, where you can just double-click away from me if I am boring you. But I ought to note something about it, since I was there, and I had a good time, even though it was truncated somewhat for me, due to matters beyond my control.

I saw several old friends, and met several new ones, and it was an awesome time. I laughed a lot, had some beer, and some food, and I think I might have also slept, but I forget. Not that it matters, hee hee. I think some people were surprised to learn that there really is a "Dr. Thursday" and he is not just a pen name of someone else.

The one talk which our esteemed blogg-mistress did not mention in her commentary was (in my own opinion) the best. It also happened to be the one SHE gave! It was titled "The Woman Who Was Chesterton" and (as she remarked) perhaps it sounds as if it was going to be some sort of "gender studies" approach to GKC's writing, his "inner female" or some such. Here, she could have quoted the very famous lines from GKC's letter to - er - to someone else. (I'll tell you who a bit later.) The lines I shall quote will earn you swift and immediate condemnation in the modern world, though the great ranks of the Scholars of the Middle Ages will welcome you among their number, since the lines are indubitably true:

I like the Cyclostyle ink; it is so inky. I do not think there is anyone who takes quite such a fierce pleasure in things being themselves as I do. The startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me: the fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud. It is just the same with people.... When we call a man "manly" or a woman "womanly" we touch the deepest philosophy.
[GKC writing to (someone) quoted in Ward Gilbert Keith Chesterton 108-9]

Very impressive. Anyway, the talk discussed the life of a certain person about whom we as Chestertonians ought to be interested in. I didn't take notes, as I was too entranced to do such mundane things, and I knew there would be a recording. Besides, it was scattered with most delightful humour, suggesting how Chesterton would handle life in the INTERNET age - I especially liked the bit that went something like this:

"I say! Shaw has accepted my FRIEND request!"

But anyway, there was one particular pun which was left out. And you can find that pun here, but it may be made more clear - that is, the real topic of that talk will be revealed if I say it in this fashion:

There was one thing in particular in which GKC anticipated our modern "connected" electronic age. It was this: Long before the INTERNET came to be, G. K. Chesterton got his very own Blogg on June 28, 1901.

Ah well... if you are still confused I will spell it out in ASCII for you: That was the day on which Gilbert Chesterton married Frances Blogg. (Yes, that really was Mrs. Chesterton's maiden name, and she was the topic of Nancy's excellent talk: she was the Woman Whe Was Chesterton.)

As it happens, just before the conference I was looking into a very interesting puzzle, one which has tormented computer science for some time... but I won't go into that just now, since it may irritate some of my readers, and unduly attract attention from - er - various government agencies. Not that I have any insights, of course! Indeed, all I had was a new question. And from that question I was led to study some very curious things, some of which almost do not make sense until you poke around a little and try to understand why the words are used in that way. It's far more magical than any magic - in fact, it's precisely the true difference between magic and technology, the difference which poor Arthur C. Clarke happened to miss. But I cannot lecture on that matter just now; besides I've already put it into a story, and it's much better there. So let us proceed.

Just yesterday (or maybe Tuesday) I found out that a triangle can be "positive" or "negative". This sounds hilarious, and perhaps not very Chestertonian, until you recall that Gabriel Gale asked:

"Were you ever an isosceles triangle?"

in "The Yellow Bird" in GKC's The Poet and the Lunatics. In fact, you can find quite a bit of homage to Euclid and triangles in Chesterton - and they often lead to even more amazing truths. For example:

There is one element always to be remarked in the true mystic, however disputed his symbolism, and that is its brightness of colour and clearness of shape. I mean that we may be doubtful about the significance of a triangle or the precise lesson conveyed by a crimson cow. But in the work of a real mystic the triangle is a hard mathematical triangle not to be mistaken for a cone or a polygon. The cow is in colour a rich incurable crimson, and in shape unquestionably a cow, not to be mistaken for any of its evolutionary relatives, such as the buffalo or the bison. This can be seen very clearly, for instance, in the Christian art of illumination as practiced at its best in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Christian decorators, being true mystics, were chiefly concerned to maintain the reality of objects. For the highest dogma of the spiritual is to affirm the material.
[GKC William Blake 132ff]

Ah! Read it again: "The highest dogma of the spiritual is to affirm the material." It's simple, too: you cannot feed the hungry or clothe the naked by theology. It requires knowledge of cooking and sewing, of agriculture and textiles, but it also means CHEMISTRY and BIOLOGY and all sorts of theoretical and practical disciplines. But then we already knew that: "It is wrong to fiddle while Rome is burning; but it is quite right to study the theory of hydraulics while Rome is burning." [GKC WWWTW CW4:43]

Ahem. To revert to the positive and negative triangle.

The idea is quite simple, and in fact links in to a very great concept - the idea of "chirality" or "handedness" - the idea of RIGHT and of LEFT. When we "name" a triangle, that is, we go out onto our lands with our surveying tools, our transits and chains and plumb bobs, and we select (much as the Roman augurs would) the three points which are the three "GONs" - the angles or corners - why, depending on the ORDER IN WHICH we choose those three points, we give that triangle either its positive or its negative state. The Romans, of course would label it fas or nefas - lucky or unlucky. But this is a simpler idea, even if there is still something sinister about it! (Latin pun, hee hee) I won't give the equation here, but there is a way of computing the area of a triangle from the coordinates of its three corners, and the FUN thing about this equation is the SIGN of the area tells you whether you went around the triangle in a clockwise or counterclockwise direction.

Ah, you sigh. So that's what the Doctor is ranting about today. Directions. Clockwise and counterclockwise. Right and Left.

Yes. We could always quote St. Matthew about right and left - you know, the Last Judgement, the sheep and the goats - but you may also recall this famous snippet of dialog from Chesterton:

"First of all, what is it really all about? What is it you object to? You want to abolish government?"

"To abolish God!" said Gregory, opening the eyes of a fanatic. "We do not only want to upset a few despotisms and police regulations; that sort of anarchism does exist, but it is a mere branch of the Nonconformists. We dig deeper and we blow you higher. We wish to deny all those arbitrary distinctions of vice and virtue, honour and treachery, upon which mere rebels base themselves. The silly sentimentalists of the French Revolution talked of the Rights of Man! We hate Rights as we hate Wrongs. We have abolished Right and Wrong."
"And Right and Left," said Syme with a simple eagerness, "I hope you will abolish them too. They are much more troublesome to me."
[GKC The Man Who Was Thursday CW6:490]

Yes, and the funny thing is that right and wrong - I mean right and left really are a matter of life and death, not simply at the end of time, but even in our daily lives. You may wonder (if you know any Latin at all) why there is a sugar called DEXTROSE and another called LEVULOSE. (The Latin dexter means "right" and laevus means "left".) And the secret of all this was discovered only 26 years before GKC was born.

I am sure you know the name Louis Pasteur. The first of his astounding discoveries was made in 1848 when he was studying certain organic salts called the tartrates. (An aside: if you are a baker (like me) you may have something called "Cream of Tartar" in your pantry - it is NOT the same as the "Tartar sauce" used on fish, but a fine white powder. The tartrates are compounds of tartaric acid, a weak acid found in certain fruits. It is used with baking soda as a leavening agent.) Anyway, Pasteur established that a given tartrate came in TWO DIFFERENT FORMS. They are made up of the exact same elements, in exactly the same proportions, and many of their properties are identical.

BUT NOT ALL OF THEM ARE IDENTICAL.

Specifically, the property which Pasteur studied was NOT identical: the rotation of polarized light: one form went right, another form went left, and there was one which didn't have any effect.

That is because they are related as your right hand is related to your left hand: they are MIRROR IMAGES of each other. They are "chiral" (from the Greek word for "hand") because they have "handedness". (The one which had no effect was an equal mixture of the right and left forms.)

As it turns out, just about ALL the compounds found in living things are chiral. Most importantly, the various amino acids which build proteins, and the various sugars which form the most useful of our body's energy sources.

You may be wondering what all this has to do with my moaning and berating and all that. It's simply my attempt to point out how even the deep and hidden truths of our real world bolster the greater, deeper and even more hidden truths about God and our relation to Him. It's not enough for us to sit and listen to lectures, or sit and read bloggs, even this one. Here is Chesterton's own admonition about it:

I do not know Mr. Eustace Miles personally, but I must confess that I like him: he seems to me to be sincere, and much simpler as well as much saner than many of his followers. But he is chiefly in danger rather from his leaders than his followers. He allows himself to be lectured by a lot of Pundits who suppose they have a true explanation of life when they have only got a false simplification of it. I remember a man of this sort who told me he was on a spiritual plane ("we are on different planes") on which yes and no, black and white, right and wrong, right and left, were all equal. I regarded him as I should any boastful aviator who told me that from the height to which he had risen all London looked like an exact chess-board, with all the squares and streets the same size. In short, I regarded him as a liar. London streets are not equally long, seen from a flying-ship or from anywhere else. And human sins or sorrows are not equally serious, seen in a vision or anywhere else.
[GKC Aug 15 1914 CW30:145]

Indeed. Don't be caught by a false simplification. At the end of time, we're going to see that right and left really are different - and a number of other things, too. As GKC said about male and female, what God has put asunder, let no man join. [see "Two Stubborn Pieces of Iron" in The Common Man]

ChesterTen

The conference is over, but the energy lives on. All the way home I was thinking, what can I do? How can we spread the Gospel? How do we live an authentic life?

There were so many amazing people at the conference, so many great conversations and discussions and debates took place. What fun, and how stimulating for the mind. One line of one speech caused hours of debate after hours, defining terms, asking why, what and how, figuring out what God wants, what dogma means, how that translates to life here on earth while we await heaven (hopefully!).

There was inspiration to read more, do more, think more, and act more. From the start of the conference, and Tom Martin's thoughts about social science (and his very helpful description of what the logo of the conference meant) to James O'Keefe's talk about journalism and activism and the role of the independent journalist (just like Chesterton) to Dale's closing cry to live like Jones and Mrs. Jones in a world that denies and disbelieves there is such a normal couple.

If you missed it, or even if you were there, you will probably want the CDs or DVDs or both, a set to own and a set to give away. The videographer will need about a week to process everything, and when the recordings are available, you'll be the first to know.

Next year, St. Louis!

Notes from Joseph Pearce's Talk on The Mistake about Progress

Joseph Pearce
The Mistake about Progress

“Progress is the mother of problems.” GKC

Joseph doesn’t like the word conservative because so many conservatives are idiots.

Chesterton says that even if you want something to stay the same, you have to keep interfering with it, because otherwise things devolve, if left on their own. (The gate post needing constant re-painting example.)

Reality is not in the process of becoming, whether you think it’s becoming better or worse, it simply is. The laws that govern reality is unchanging. Original sin is as real as thermodynamics. We can’t progress beyond what we are, which is the Image of God.

This age is decaying in terms of its understanding of virtue. Yet, we have these dangerous technological gadgets. Its not a very clever thing to do.

Rousseau’s big thing was that there was no such thing as original sin. He was behind the French Revolution. The danger of that idea is if you can make the system better, the government, the state, the environment, people will become better. Pearce believes Obama thinks this way.

To Chesterton, history isn’t linear. Christ’s incarnation was the center, and everything before it pointed to it, and everything since then, points back to it.

Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man was a response to H.G. Well’s Outline of History, although he never quite says that, it is, says Pearce.

Wells’s assumption is that the world is progressing. Wells’s assumption is that the past was worse or inferior to now.

Chronological snobbery is a bit like racism. You treat people as inferior because of the time which they were born.

DWEM the new acronym, Dead White European Male, progressives dismiss DWEMs, even though it’s a racist attitude.

Progressivism is poisonous.

Richard Aleman on Distributist

Notes from the talk:
Richard Aleman (Editor of the Distributist Review) speaking on the Mistake about Distributism

What people think distribustism is and isn’t.

Distributism finds it’s base in the church’s social teaching, Rerum Novarum.

Wide ownership makes the best sense politically.

Neither wage slavery nor slavery to the state.

Common errors:
•It’s just another form of capitalism

•It’s just another form of socialism
•Distributist don’t believe in competition

Distributists believe in cooperation, based on uniqueness, creativity, the competition should be healthy.

•Distribustism is dying

Reprints of older books, and new books are being written

Workers must be seen as a partner, paid a living wage, and have the choice to own if he chooses.

How do we start distributism?
American Chesterton society meetings, talk about it, begin with a study group, using the local Chesterton society’s as a model. Meet once a week to learn the form of distrubutism.

Run for politics, run on a distributist platform.

Examine the failures of your local area. School, politics, parents teach your children distributism. Economics for Helen adapted into the homeschool program.

Working on the Distrubutism Catechism, Q&A

Micro-credit lending, community land trust

•We cannot meet large technological needs, and we can’t regain the farms that were lost

Distributists want to restore localism

Mass production can’t be centralized, but if it’s decentralized, it may work.

Richard speaks very quickly.

A community should produce, the essential goods, the majority of goods, in it’s own community.

If a mass producer collapses, so do we.

If a mass producer leaves a community, and it was the small town’s sole source of employment, the town dies.

Cooperatives, worker-owner businesses are the answers.

Cooperative, is a multi-partnership. The employees are the owners.

Utility, construction, utility companies, insurance, law firms, restore the Made in the USA label.

•you can’t change the current culture

Small business is the life source of this country.

David Zach: Futurist

David Zach spoke about the Mistake about Technology
A Great Many Clever Things: the Mistakes about Technology

Neal Stephenson author The Diamond Age book David recommends.

Mistakes
Cell phones are tools of disconnection, we don’t talk to new people or strangers like we did before. We are afraid of strangers today. WE use cell phones to connect with people we know.

Teens prefer texting to face to face communication.

If you work on a computer, research shows, you touch your computer more than anything else you touch in your life.

The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr multitasking makes everything a distraction.

Distracted, by Maggie Jackson What are we doing to ourselves?

Silence is an endangered species.

If we’re afraid of silence, we’re afraid of ourselves.

The self is becoming empty because of external distractions.

Your attention is your most valuable asset.

We are distracted by the unknown future, the promise of all answers, the seduction of upgrades. We’re afraid of looking at the truth.

We don’t respect eloquence. We tweet.

The Mistake about Pandora

Worldbuilder (a movie on the internet) by Bruce Branit

The conference has begun....

The conference has begun, old friends have been hugged, new friends have already met and had supper together.

Tom Martin is our opening speaker, and he is speaking on the problem of social sciences.

The good news is that although we don't have live streaming video, we do have video, and DVDs will be on sale along with the audio CDs this year. Yahoo! I think this is excellently good news.

An award will be given, a wine glass that has the inconvience is only an adventure quotation, to the person who has the most inconviences this weekend, donated by Su Morton, who had an inordinate amount of inconviences last year in Seattle.

Clerihew contest: Clerihews are due 12:59pm tomorrow, Friday.

There seems to be no wifi or internet available at this conference, so I'm not sure who will be able to read this but non-conference attendees, unless you, like me, are able to get on in the library or by another of your own private networks.

For those who like stories....

A Quayment short story for you to enjoy courtesy of Loome...

You may be wondering where the Chesterton connection is here.

That will become apparent eventually. It is rather in the nature of a surprise.

Stay tuned.

Dale in Rome