Vision

Art
“Rusty planes, a chasm of rippling light. Spirits released.” Thus Cate McQuaid sums up the work of New England sculptor Jonathan Prince (“Geometric Breathing,” Art New England, January/February 2015). Prince works with metals, especially steel, and often cast his works so that they seem to be breaking open or apart, as if releasing something to life. I was especially intrigued by those works the artist covers with rust on the outside, but which reveal through a fracture gleaming stainless steel, simmering and breathing within. Prince strives for ageless themes and pieces – “the simpler the form...and more ageless.” Prince’s sculpture and Ms. McQuaid’s take on it express the power of art to communicate not only beauty but hope, and even transcendence. And they also reveal something – in the artist, the reviewer, and those who comment on Prince’s work – about a depth of being in persons that sometimes only art can reach, and coax into the light.

Evolution
Adam Gopnik denounces as irrational (and therefore unqualified for leadership) any public officials who will not embrace evolutionary theory as the engine and explanation for life and the cosmos (“The Evolution Catechism,” The New Yorker, February 19, 2015). Evolution is just the truth, he insists: “evolution is not, like the Great Pumpkin, something one can or cannot ‘believe’ in. It just is—a fact certain, the strongest and most resilient explanation of the development of life on Earth that there has ever been.” That’s a pretty sweeping boast for a theory that has not yet been around for 200 years, borrows for its most basic premises on a worldview it denies and intends to supplant, is rife with philosophical inconsistencies, denies it is a form of faith but quacks and walks life one nonetheless, and has failed to convince not only the vast majority of the public but large numbers of well-respected thinking people from a variety of worldview perspectives – and that in spite of possessing a virtual hegemony in the schools, media, and halls of government. Mr. Gopnik thinks belief in evolution should be a litmus test for political leaders, who should be asked, “Do you have the courage to embrace an inarguable and obvious truth when it might cost you something to do so?” He adds, “A politician who fails this test is not high-minded or neutral; he or she is just craven, and shouldn’t be trusted with power. This catechism’s purpose—perhaps unfair in its form, but essential in its signal—is to ask, Do you stand with reason and evidence sufficiently to anger people among your allies who don’t?” Goodness. Because, you see, it is irrational to believe in anything but evolutionary theory as the engine and explanation for life and the cosmos: “All the available evidence collected within the past hundred and fifty years is strongly in its favor, and no evidence argues that it is in any significant way false. Life on Earth proceeds through the gradual process of variation and selection, with the struggle for existence shaping its forms. Nobody got here all in one piece; we arrived in bits and were made up willy-nilly, not by the divine designer but by the tinkering of time.” Call me irrational, I suppose. Certainly evolution is a working part of the providential governance of the creation. But evolution only works, to the extent it actually does (evolutionists, of course, see it everywhere – see below), because it pleases God to use it. Denying or, at least, qualifying evolution’s role in the world is not inherently irrational, even tough its apologists seldom fail to insist otherwise, and employ the bludgeon of intimidation rather than reason to make their case.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/evolution-catechism

Disciplines
Getting at Truth
“It seems that every attempt to reject truth as objective correspondence to reality must run itself into the same brick wall.” By this Arnold Zuboff means to say that all explanations of truth which deny objective, absolute truth – relativism, pragmatism, deconstructionism, and so forth – are, sooner or later, hoist on their own petard because they cannot assert anything as true from their perspective without becoming self-contradictory, incoherent, and irrelevant. They self-destruct even as they assert themselves, leaving only the objectivist view of truth as the one that makes sense of the world (“Theories that Refute Themselves,” Philosophy Now, January 15, 2015). Dr. Zuboff demonstrates a use of reason, that of exposing inconsistencies in truth claims, that is important to understand in proclaiming the Gospel. Jesus employed this use of reason in Matthew 12.22-29, and Paul appeals to it in exposing the fallacious claims of certain Cretan philosophers in Titus 1.10-13 (on the basis of this use of reason he also upbraided the high priest in Acts 23.1-3). Reason is not the enemy of the Gospel, and the Gospel is not the enemy of reason. The Gospel makes sense of the world and our experience in it, and reason, rightly employed (according to the objective truth of the Gospel), helps us understand the Gospel in all its scope and power. We who profess belief in the Gospel do not help the cause of the Gospel by failing to understand or to make use of reason. Reason is a function of the Logos which we, who have the mind of Christ (1 Cor. 2.16), must learn to use consistently and in love.

Civic Poetry
Robert Huddlestone invites us to consider the relationship between poetry and society in “‘Poetry makes nothing happen’” (Boston Review, February 26, 2015). The line is from a poem by W. H. Auden and asserts the independence of the poet from the expectations of anyone and every one. Mr. Huddlestone recounts Auden’s movement away from Marxism and the pasting he took from peers and critics for refusing to endorse the socialist cause in his verse. Politicians and other ideologues have always feared poets they can’t control. That’s why the English burned the harps of the Irish bards and the Soviets organized all artists into a manageable propaganda society. Poets today are untroubled by politicians and ideologues because, for the most part, they’re singing the proper tune – not to mention that their scorn for form and seemingly incurable self-referentialism ensure that almost no one beyond their tribe is reading anything they write. Poets must be true to their own hearts and visions, Mr. Huddlestone concludes. And if that means they buck the political status quo, so be it. 

https://bostonreview.net/poetry/robert-huddleston-wh-auden-struggle-politics

Self-Watch
Adam Phillips thinks we’re too hard on ourselves, that we don’t need to pay too much attention to that inner voice – conscience – which keeps insisting we’re losers (“Against Self-Criticism,” London Review of Books, 5 March 2015). We can’t help ourselves; we are inveterately self-critical: “We are never as good as we should be; and neither, it seems, are other people. A life without a so-called critical faculty would seem an idiocy: what are we, after all, but our powers of discrimination, our taste, the violence of our preferences? Self-criticism, and the self as critical, are essential to our sense, our picture, of our so-called selves.” This is the function of conscience, or, as Freud defined it, the super-ego. But conscience is something we construct, which then constructs us, and not always for good. For many – perhaps most – of us, all this self-criticism can be oppressive: “...we just implicitly take it for granted that each day will bring its necessary quotient of self-disappointment, that every day we will fail to be as good as we should be; but without our being given the resources, the language, to wonder who or what is setting the pace, or where these rather punishing standards come from. How can we find out what we think of all this when conscience never lets go?” Mr. Phillips thinks we shouldn’t indulge this “pleasure” of belittling ourselves as much as we do. But his view of conscience and its role is incomplete. According to Paul, conscience, one of three components that make-up the soul, has the job both of condemning and affirming. But it requires standards in order to do this. God has written the works of His Law on our hearts, and He has sent Christ to dwell in our hearts by faith. Our self-criticism should therefore rightly condemn us at times, at the same time – at all times – reminding us that we are righteous in Jesus Christ and that His power at work in us can enable us to become even more so. The discipline of self-watch, which Paul commends, along with Jesus, Solomon, and others, should light up the darkness and scrutinize the shortcomings and failings in our lives. But it should also, at the same time, show us Jesus and guide us in ways of becoming more like Him, and give us the assurance that such progress can truly be realized.

Outcomes
Information
Daniel C. Dennett and Deb Roy have discovered a link to the so-called Cambrian Explosion and our rapidly expanding/accelerating Information Age. The link is light, and more specifically for our day, information (“Our Transparent Future,” Scientific American, March 2015). As one viewpoint within evolutionary theory explains it, the sudden appearance and rapid development of new forms of life during the Cambrian period was the result of chemical changes that allowed more light to penetrate the oceans, where, at the time, all life was located. Light brought on the development of eyes, which improved predation, defenses against predation, and adaptations of fauna in all kinds of directions and ways. Just so, the authors insist, the profusion and speed of information in our day means individuals, organizations, and institutions are becoming more transparent, and they will have to adjust to that transparency or risk extinction. That may well be true, but the link with the “Cambrian Explosion” and the explanation for it offered in a recent book (“a particularly compelling hypothesis”) demonstrate how the evolutionary worldview bullies its way into every nook and cranny of life, threatening other epistemological schemes with its big science flex (twice in a four-page article the authors mention churches or the Church with a menacing voice; not once do they extend a similar warning to the scientific community and the increasing amount of junk science published, and then retracted, by major science journals). Start with a basic assumption or two – in this case, evolutionary theory and the infallibility of natural science; take up the latest “compelling hypothesis” – which must, in this case, always remain only a hypothesis; then apply it with the weight of scientific credentials to matters social, cultural, and moral, and warn everybody to get in line behind your “conclusions.” Should this magazine be called Scientistic American? Or Scientism America?

Envoi

Fragment
   ...compose from fragments a world perfect at last.
                             - Milosz

Because I’m such a disappointment to
myself, for who I am and how I serve,
because I lack the skill, panache, or verve
to do the things I really want to do –
because the world conspires with all my faults
and foibles to frustrate my fondest dreams
and bring to naught my best laid plans and schemes –
because each project not quite done assaults
my sense of who I am and what I will 
amount to or accomplish in the end,
because no matter how much time I spend
on this or that, it never fills the bill –
  because of these and doubtless things far worse,
  I seek a world made perfect – mine – in verse.

T. M Moore