Log24

Al Gore and the
Absence of Truth

"Evil is a negation, because
it is the absence of truth."

— Mary Baker Eddy,
founder of Christian Science,
in Science and Health
with Key to the Scriptures,
(Boston, 1906,
page 186, line 11)

 M. Scott Peck on evil:

"There are quite popular
systems of thought these days,
such as Christian Science
or the Course in Miracles,
which define evil as unreality.
It is a half-truth. The spirit of evil
is one of unreality, but it itself
is real. It really exists."

"We must not fall back into Saint
Augustine's now discarded doctrine
of the 'privatio boni,' whereby evil
was defined as the absence of good.
Satan's personality cannot be
characterized simply by
an absence, a nothingness."

— People of the Lie:
The Hope for Healing Human Evil,
by Morgan Scott Peck, 1986.
(Touchstone paperback,
2nd ed., 1998, page 208)
 

Al Gore on M. Scott Peck:

He did?

"The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled
was convincing the world he didn't exist."
— Verbal Kint in "The Usual Suspects"

A Baffled Reader

A reader this morning commented on my first Xanga entry (July 20, 2002):

“To set one up (which I have not done because I don’t want anyone to know what I think),” … William Safire regarding “blogs”.

I still don’t know what you think.  Yet … I try, try, try.

Here’s one thing that I think– today– based on my “Hate Speech for Harvard,” on “Devil in the Details” (Log24, May 18 and 23), and, more recently, on

1. last evening’s PA lottery number 005,
2. the I Ching hexagram of the same number, and
3. the New Yorker issue linked to at the end of the previous entry:

Revised version of the
New Yorker cover of 5/21/07

See the Dickinson poem quoted here on May 15 (the date, as it happens, of Dickinson’s death) in the entry “A Flag for Sunrise.”  See also Zen and Language Games and a discussion of a detail in a Robert Stone novel.

From the May 18 Harvard Crimson:

“Paul B. Davis ’07-’08, who contributed to a collection of student essays written in 2005 on the purpose and structure of a Harvard education, said that ‘the devil is in the details’….”

Related material:

“In philosophy, reductionism is a theory that asserts that the nature of complex things is reduced to the nature of sums of simpler or more fundamental things.” —Wikipedia

“In the 1920’s… the discovery of quantum mechanics went a very long way toward reducing chemistry to the solution of well-defined mathematical problems. Indeed, only the extreme difficulty of many of these problems prevents the present day theoretical chemist from being able to predict the outcome of every laboratory experiment by making suitable calculations. More recently the molecular biologists have made startling progress in reducing the study of life back to the study of chemistry. The living cell is a miniature but extremely active and elaborate chemical factory and many, if not most, biologists today are confident that there is no mysterious ‘vital principle,’ but that life is just very complicated chemistry. With biology reduced to chemistry and chemistry to mathematics, the measurable aspects of the world become quite pervasive.” –Harvard mathematician George Mackey, “What Do Mathematicians Do?“

Opposed to reductionism are “emergence” and “strong emergence“–

“Although strong emergence is logically possible, it is uncomfortably like magic.” —Mark A. Bedau

Or comfortably.

x

Related material:
Log24 entries of 11/18/05

Entertainer of the Year

Frank Rich on the United States:

“… a country where
     entertainment is god”

In another country:

Question:

“Que pasa, pendejo?”

— Question in a music video,
   “You Save Me,” by last night’s
    Academy of Country Music
    Entertainer of the Year

Answer:

“Yolanda King founded and led Higher Ground Productions, billed as a ‘gateway for inner peace, unity and global transformation.'” —New York Times

“Yolanda King’s Lecture Performances are tailored to suit your company’s immediate need for a critical and timely message delivered with a high-level of entertainment value.” —Higher Ground Productions

From the five log24 entries
ending with “Dinner Theater?”
(linked to in yesterday afternoon’s
Perspective on the News):

Frank Rich has the last word:

“A ‘moral values’ crusade
that stands between a TV show
this popular and its audience
will quickly learn the limits
of its power in a country
where entertainment is god.”

A Flag for Sunrise

The title of the Robert Stone
novel comes from Emily Dickinson:

A Wife -- at daybreak I shall be --
Sunrise -- Hast thou a Flag for me?
At Midnight, I am but a Maid,
How short it takes to make a Bride --
Then -- Midnight, I have passed from thee
Unto the East, and Victory --

Midnight -- Good Night! I hear them call,
The Angels bustle in the Hall --
Softly my Future climbs the Stair,
I fumble at my Childhood's prayer
So soon to be a Child no more --
Eternity, I'm coming -- Sire,
Savior -- I've seen the face -- before!

In keeping with the spirit of previous Log24 entries, here is today’s Pennsylvania Lottery commentary.  This afternoon’s entry suggests an interpretation of today’s numbers as comments on the new film “Georgia Rule.”

Today’s mid-day number, 384, is the number of symmetries of the tesseract, a geometric figure illustrated on the cover of the novel The Gameplayers of Zan (see, for instance, May 10, 2007).  That novel suggests an interpretation of today’s evening number, 952, as addressing (literally) the subject of Life.

See the address mathforum.org/library/view/952.html.

From that address:

“The Game of Life is played on a field of cells, each of which has eight neighbors (adjacent cells). A cell is either occupied (by an organism) or not. The rules for deriving a generation from the previous one are these: Death – If an occupied cell has 0, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8 occupied neighbors, the organism dies (0, 1: of loneliness; 4 thru 8: of overcrowding). Survival – If an occupied cell has two or three neighbors, the organism survives to the next generation. Birth – If an unoccupied cell has three occupied neighbors, it becomes occupied.”

Relevance to the film “Georgia Rule”: lonesomeness, generations, and the Lord’s name–

Georgia is a “lonesome and decent widow in wholesome Hull, Idaho…. her framed motto is ‘Count Your Blessings’ and she’s ready to ram [a] soap bar into your mouth if you insult the Lord’s name.” –David Elliott, San Diego Union-Tribune, May 11, 2007

There is not universal agreement on just what is the Lord’s name. Perhaps it includes the number 952.

From The Gameplayers of Zan:

“The Game in the Ship cannot be approached as a job, a vocation, a career, or a recreation. To the contrary, it is Life and Death itself at work there. In the Inner Game, we call the Game Dhum Welur, the Mind of God. And that Mind is a terrible mind, that one may not face directly and remain whole. Some of the forerunners guessed it long ago– first the Hebrews far back in time, others along the way, and they wisely left it alone, left the Arcana alone.”

From Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations:

“Nothing can be produced out of nothing.”
— 10th edition, 1919, page 952

See also “Zen and Language Games“
and “Is Nothing Sacred?“

Film Review

“No offense to either of them, but ‘Georgia Rule’ suggests an Ingmar Bergman script as directed by Jerry Lewis. The subject matter is grim, the relationships are gnarled, the worldview is bleak, and, at any given moment, you suspect someone’s going to be hit with a pie.” –John Anderson at Variety.com, May 8, 2007

Sounds perfect to me.

1. Jean Butler at CRC Irish Dance Camp
2. Women of the Sidhe

News from Belfast

“I was a child in the sixties
Dreams could be held through TV
With Disney and Cronkite and Martin Luther
Oh, I believed, I believed, I believed”

— “It’s a Hard Life
     Wherever You Go,”
     by Nanci Griffith

“Today we will witness
  not hype but history.”

— Martin McGuinness, of the
   republican and mainly Catholic
   Sinn Fein party, on today’s
   home rule ceremony in Belfast

Masters of Chaos

“Any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations.”
— Julia Kristeva

“Paris vaut bien une messe.”
— Henri IV

“Certain details might be considered and elucidated more fully.”
— A Mass for Lucero

“There is never any ending to Paris….”
— Ernest Hemingway

Three Souls

From today’s New York Times, Charles McGrath on Philip K. Dick:

His early novels, written in two weeks or less, were published in double-decker Ace paperbacks that included two books in one, with a lurid cover for each. “If the Holy Bible was printed as an Ace Double,” an editor once remarked, “it would be cut down to two 20,000-word halves with the Old Testament retitled as ‘Master of Chaos’ and the New Testament as ‘The Thing With Three Souls.'”

Now perhaps enjoying the afterlife together:

Philip K. Dick
Robert Anton Wilson
Kurt Vonnegut