Breakfast Serial

I'm just about to listen to the last episode of Serial and I have a prediction: I'm going to end up feeling dirty.

It looks like this is going from "investigating an interesting mystery and maybe learning something new about the case" to "let's talk about ME and MY FEELINGS" and forgetting the fact that a family of real people have had to have their daughter's murder dredged up again for no real benefit.

I hope I'm wrong, but here goes...

The Value of Definitions

Today's Wall Street Journal has an editorial titled "Misunderestimating Vladimir" by Bret Stephens.

Ignoring its main content, it includes an aside that interests me. Stephens mentions "the notion that geography no longer matters, the high ground, the warm water ports and everything else that nations have fought over since time immemorial are superfluous in our 21st century world."

As I do with most problems in the world today, I think this notion is rooted in bad philosophy. Outside of talk about borders ("how can we really say where one country starts and the other country ends?"), this comes up in plenty of other contexts. Think extreme linguistic descriptivism: "Languages are defined by their users, how can we say that any particular grammatical usage is an error?" Think of the definition of personhood: "We can't pin down exactly when two gametes have reached 'conception,' so let's just say an embryo can't be a person."

It's positivism mutating into nominalism. It's the lazy idea that, since we can't absolutely define something with absolutely no grey area, there's no point in trying to define it at all.

It's despair, ultimately rooted in a lack of faith. If there's no God (even in the Aristotelian, if not the full Christian conception), there's no final arbiter of truth. There's no standard to conform to. We all make up our own definitions, or we decide that definitions don't matter anyway. And once there are no definitions, reason goes out the window, leaving will and power. You don't have to know a lot about history to know that doesn't end well.

I Don't Believe in Global Warming

I don't not believe in global warming.

A friend posted an article on Facebook earlier today that claimed Tim Cook of Apple told investors who didn't believe in global warming to get rid of their Apple stock. "Screw him," I posted. "I'm holding."

I object to being told to treat a scientific theory as dogma.

Yes, I know what theory means in scientific parlance. It doesn't mean a wild guess. A theory is an interpretation of the data observed. It may be useful, it may fit the data well. But it's always going to be open to refinement, and possibly being overturned. It's never going to graduate to "fact", especially not on the basis of popularity or consensus. I don't care to put my faith in any particular theory.

But anyway, it turns out that's not what Tim Cook said (in spite of what a million internets worth of linkbait headlines insisted). What actually happened was that an investor group was unhappy with some of the environmental initiatives Apple has been working on (including reducing carbon emissions, which is where the tie to global warming comes in). He asked Cook to promise to only make company decisions based on return on investment. That's when he responded "If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock."

I apologize, Mr. Cook. You're absolutely right on that one. If an investor wants to absolutely maximize monetary profits, no matter the cost to the rest of the world, maybe they should get out of Apple stock. Maybe they should get out of the economy in general because they're part of the problem.

My "Contempt for Journalism" Tour Continues

This one's about the White House Correspondant's Dinner!

I don't have a problem with the dinner, per se. It's nice that wealthy, famous and influential people can finally have a night that's all about them for a change.

What I don't like is how self-important reporters get when reporting about reporters going to dinner. Tom Brokaw, probably rightly, worries that the Correspondant's Dinner makes journalists too chummy with the people they are supposed to be covering objectively. The defense is, basically, "but it's so much fun!" Isn't that also the accusation?

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

I Love to Say "I Told You So"

In case you thought my previous post about the sorry state of journalism was overblown, I offer some evidence.

There's a trope in political commentary that I don't know of an established term for. I call the "F.E.B.",  since I can't otherwise say the phrase out loud without offending people. Let me explain that the acronym is in the format of adjective-adjective-noun and the middle word is "Evil."

When this trope is deployed, Editorialist A describes a situation his Political Opponent Z is bringing about. He lists all of the bad things that will happen because of Z's actions. Then he concludes that doing this is A Very Bad Thing. Note what he does not do: he doesn't do is address the reason Z wants to do this, or the potential good effects of the action. The implication is that Z is just an evil mustache twirler who likes seeing orphans starving in the streets while puppies are thrown alive into furnaces to provide cheap energy. I'm not saying A needs to make all of Z's arguments for him. But he ought to at least acknowledge that Z has a reason for what he does, and maybe try to address why those reasons are wrong, or the good effects are outweighed by the bad.

This rant is brought on today by a report I heard on NPR over my lunch break. They were reporting on Margaret Thatcher's legacy. The particular story I heard was about the miners' strikes of the 1980's. I admit I knew next to nothing about the strikes when the story came on. Thanks to their reporting, I didn't know any more once it ended.

I did learn that the guest being interviewed disapproved of Thatcher's handling of the strikes, which he characterized as "going to war against her own people" (as though she were Saddam Hussein gassing the Kurds). What were the overriding issues? What was the strike about? Why did Thatcher's government want to end the strike? What were the government's tactics? In what ways did it resemble a war? How could it have been resolved differently? Is the mining industry in decline today because of what happened? Are the connections correlated but not causal? Are we reversing cause and effect? I don't know any of those answers.* But my point is I didn't learn them from the source whose very purpose is allegedly to educate listeners on those issues.

I understand that politicians will deploy the F.E.B. strategy. They want to make their opponent appear unelectable. But it's unacceptable for a journalist to broadcast an F.E.B. attack, or allow it to stand unchallenged. In fact, the host of the show thanked the reporter for his contribution and concluded that there were "mixed feelings on Margaret Thatcher's death." Not her "legacy", not her "influence on modern politics"… on her death. Because she is a F.E.B. and she deserves no better.

* Remember: No Research Zone.

Where is your God Now?

Those of you who know me will surely realize that tomorrow marks an important day, not only for myself but for many of my friends and family. That's right, my alma mater Marquette is playing in the Elite 8.

Of course, there's also the fact that tomorrow is Holy Saturday, the final day of the Triduum, the day Christ spent in the tomb. While not technically a part of Lent, the Triduum is one of the most solemn periods on the Church calendar. I'll be in a bar getting a nice afternoon buzz, watching basketball.

I spent some time today considering whether that would be appropriate use of my day. The realization came to me that, rather than being sacrilegious, it's more or less in the liturgical spirit of the season.

"God is dead," Nietzche said and, like a stopped clock, he's right once a year.* What else is there to do? Do like the late-Republic Romans, I guess, when they stopped believing in their gods. Drink wine, watch gladiator contests and try to ignore the fact that the country is transforming before our eyes into an imperial military state. For a few hours, we Christians enter into the state the pre-Christian world found itself in. Take a moment to read Phillip Larkin's poem Aubade. (No seriously, read it!) How else is there to live with the unescapable inevitability of our own demise?

Fortunately, we have the advantage of knowing how the story ends. Death is no longer the last word. Jesus (showing His humanity) enters into death, like Bruce Banner slipping on an ill-fated white shirt in the morning. But by the end of the day His divinity bursts forth in Hulk-mode, destroying the power of death in the process.

Within a couple of centuries, Roman culture went from the the fading worship of gods they didn't totally believe in, to killing the God who was sent to them, to being ruled by that God-man's followers. Yet, their culture wasn't extinguished. It was baptized. The very term "alma mater" comes from the language of Zeno and Marcus Aurelius, but was preserved by Catholics for use in the university system they created.**

Have hope, Christus Vincit!

(It's always disheartening to realize that someone else blogged about the same topic as you did, and better. After I finished drafting this post, I came across this article by David Warren. Mr. Warren's article is a lot like this blog post, except it's insightful and well-written. And when you're done, read his whole archive. I burned through it in a couple of days and I'm smarter for it, if only in the sense that I know what a real writer sounds like.)

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* Imagine this is some kind of calendar clock, with 365 positions on the dial, corresponding to days of the year. Or imagine that I'm not good with similes.

** Every week, my parish's confirmation class has Little Caesar's pizza for lunch. Each pizza comes topped with pepperoni, sausage and the delicious irony that Catholicism continues to be believed and passed on, while our 2nd century oppressor is now a cartoon image used to sell fast food.

And a Third Post, Just to Make Tom Nervous

Some of my more masochistic readers may wonder what it's like to be inside my head. Well, here's a little peek. The other day, a memory I hadn't even though of in years came back to me as a fully-formed (stupid) bilingual pun.

So, when I was in college I met a girl who was studying abroad from Germany. I speak ein bischen German (better than the average American, at least). She spoke a bit of English (probably better than the average American, as well), so we had that common. It seemed like we were kind of hitting it off [Ed.: probably not], but the semester came to an end and she heraus'ed back to Germany. Only then did I realize I hadn't gotten a home phone number, an email address, a Facebook friendship, any way to remain in contact.

"Well," my brain concluded as that old memory flickered past. "I guess she was the one that Goethe way."

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Blog up, Patrowsky.