The Sacred And The State

     Good morning, Gentle Reader. As you know, I’m a Catholic Christian, so the statements and deeds of prominent Catholic clerics are of concern to me. Of course the highest of those clerics, the Supreme Pontiff of the Church, gets a lot of attention for his statements. After all, no one can claim to have more “followers,” or more influence, than the Pope. Even Protestants pay attention when he speaks.

     That suggests that a Pope should be extremely circumspect in his emissions. A casual remark from him can sway the opinions and decisions of a billion-plus people. Yet the late Pope Francis seemed to disagree. He’d opine on any subject, as if he were just another neighborhood boozer holding forth at the corner pub.

     Dare I say that the world is riven by sufficient strife that we do not need the greatest religious leader on Earth to add to it?

     No one is suggesting that papal infallibility should be held to apply to papal political opinions. Nevertheless, the Pope’s opinions have power. His words can sway elections and topple regimes. Granted that some regimes deserve a good toppling, that is not a course of action to be lightly undertaken.

     Pope Leo XIV, our current Supreme Pontiff, appears to be following in the late Pope Francis’s train. He’s emitted opinions about American foreign and immigration policy that, to me at least, seem unwise. They’ve put American Catholics in quite a dither. (Incredibly, he’s also suggested that Christians and Muslims can “get along” and “be friends.” On that last count, let it suffice to say that both history and current events disfavor that prospect.)

     Why is he saying such things? He hardly needs more attention than he gets in the usual course of things. He may feel strongly about his opinions, but men with strong opinions have restrained themselves before this, when it struck them as prudent. As his office guarantees that he’ll listened to by billions, I’d have hoped he’d be similarly guarded. The more influence you have, the more careful you should be about using it.

     But dare to say that on a social medium, and you’ll get a lot of unpleasant attention. You can’t criticize the Pope! He’s the head of your Church! He’s infallible! I’ve had other Catholics – and I shan’t name them nor criticize them for it – people who don’t know me at all, tell me I should go to Confession at once.

     That sort of discord within the body of the Church is enough to say to me, at least, that for the Pope to declaim on politics and foreign policy is a dangerous business. But there’s more to say than that. Some of it strikes me as imperative.

     Christianity is not like other faiths. Its Founder emphasized that each of us is responsible for his own moral-ethical stature. Saying “I was misled” at the Particular Judgment will not save you from Hell. Our individual decisions to speak or not, to act or not, are what matter, and they are solely ours.

     Politics and the decisions of governments are quite different things. God will hold the masters of the State responsible for their words and deeds in their turn, but the actions of a State are collective actions. They are undertaken on behalf of a nation – and in all cases, there will be some who benefit and others who are harmed. We must hope, often against the odds, that those decisions and actions will do net good rather than net harm.

     The decision to use military force is only the most dramatic such case. Nearly all military actions involve death and destruction. But a head of State sets out on such a course on the basis of the information available to him, which isn’t always available to anyone else. He acts in the belief that it serves a greater good. At least, that’s what we hope – and let’s be candid: we may be fools to hope so. The history of warfare among States is not kind to our hopes.

     A Pope who condemns a military action probably won’t be equipped with all the information that head of State had before him. The Pontiff may be right that an invasion or aggression is condemnable. But even in egregious cases, for him to say so openly can have unforeseeable costs. Some of those costs may be paid in blood.

     Many Catholics will disagree, but the matter is too fraught with peril not to speak my mind. The proper role of any Christian cleric, high or low, is to conserve and promulgate the Gospels, to counsel individuals on their decisions and actions, and to administer the Sacraments at need and upon request. He must not insert himself into the world of statecraft. Christ Himself said so:

     Then went the Pharisees, and took counsel how they might entangle him in his talk. And they sent out unto him their disciples with the Herodians, saying, Master, we know that thou art true, and teachest the way of God in truth, neither carest thou for any man: for thou regardest not the person of men. Tell us therefore, What thinkest thou? Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not?
     But Jesus perceived their wickedness, and said, Why tempt ye me, ye hypocrites? Shew me the tribute money. And they brought unto him a penny.
     And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription?
     They say unto him, Caesar's. Then saith he unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.

     [Matthew 22:15-21]

     A Christian cleric must not go against the plain words of the Son of God.

Chronicles Of The Low-Trust Society

     Good morning, Gentle Reader. It’s a lovely day here on Long Island, New York: bright sunshine, gentle spring warmth, a sweet breeze redolent from the mulch pile around my front hedge. Yuck. With all that to be pleased by and thankful for, I thought I might say a few words about today’s plague of vipers: online scammers and their methods.

     The Internet is a marvelous development, but it does have a downside. Time was, if you wanted to defraud a man, you had to get close enough to him that he might just knife you. No longer! Today, scammers from around the world can ply their trades on targets from every land and clime. The victim doesn’t have a Chinaman’s chance to get him back.

     The predominant type of scammer offers his target something that’s too good to be true: easy money, in the usual case. “Guaranteed 100% return in just ten days! Just sign here. Oh, and we’ll need your bank account information so that we can forward your winnings to you.” Of course, if it’s too good to be true, what do the odds favor?

     Some scammers are “sympathy scammers:” “I can’t pay my rent! I can’t feed my baby! I can’t put gas in my car so I can get to my minimum-wage job putting panties on lamb chops! Please just send me an Apple gift card for $500!” I don’t think this variety fools many people, so why are they constantly bugging me? Must be my goofy looking face.

     But there are other subspecies of scammers operating today. Some don’t offer you easy money or the chance to “do good.” Instead, they tout their skills at doing something you wish you could do, but know that you can’t. The payment for those skills must be in advance, of course. Don’t expect to hear from them afterward.

     Indie writers are particularly promising targets for the skill-scammer. Even those of us who can actually write a decent tale are usually complete failures at selling our works. He who can persuade us that he’s ready, willing, and able to do that job for us looks like a dream come true. His come-on is an impressive-looking multi-stage “campaign strategy” that looks like something culled from an MBA program’s marketing textbook. Consult this weird Al Yankovic video for a taste of the “look and feel.”

     I have an email folder into which I put solicitations from such “promotion and marketing experts.” It’s bulging at the seams. I’ve asked other indie writers about their experiences, and they parallel mine: all buzzwords, no performance.

     But here’s a fresh one: a radio station wants to interview me! Wonder of wonders, a respectable format, interested interviewers, and an immediate audience to which to prattle about my books. Wait… what’s this? There’s a price? To “defray production costs?” Uh, thanks but no thanks, guys. Better luck next time.

     I’ve received two radio-station-interview solicitations this week already. I’m sure more will arrive with the morning dew.

     None of this strikes me as at all surprising. What does is that even with all the experience I’ve already garnered – some of it remarkably painful – the scammers are still coming up with ways to elicit my interest. Fresh new pitches! Fresh new offers! Fresh new plans! And for the low, low price of only $49.99!!

     At least they haven’t yet tried the late-night-TV commercial stinger: “If you act now we’ll double your order at no extra cost! Operators are standing by! Pay only separate shipping and handling.” But I suppose I should give them time.

     If an old Curmudgeon can feel tempted by such things after all this time, no one is safe. Consider this your heads-up:

     They’re out there.
     They’re clever.
     They’re hungry.
     They’re swarming.
     And they’re looking at you!

     Beware!

Practice Trumps Theory

     Happy Cinco de Mayo to all you Mexicans out there among my Gentle Readers. To the rest: don’t go out for Mexican food tonight. Trust me on that.

     Now have a snippet of dialogue from an unnamed story:

"Why is there a herring duct-taped to the ground wire?"
"Sir, I don't question your methods."
"That's not a method, that's madness. Witchcraft."
"Look, sir. Do you want to be right, or do you want results?"
"Well, results, of course."
"Then don't touch the fucking fish."

     That made me howl with laughter, not just because of the exceptionally clever phrasing, but because I’ve been there.

     In my years in engineering, I was often responsible for meeting a tight, rigid deadline: one which allowed for no slip-ups. On a couple of occasions there was a large pot of money at stake. Once it was in the tens of millions of dollars. Defense engineering can be like that.

     No one in his right mind would commit to such a deadline without the certainty that he can meet it. In the world of military procurement, there are no second chances. If Company A fails to meet the time and budget targets, Company B will be ready to step forward.

     But once you’ve committed, the watchword becomes No Experimenting! You must insist on proven methods only. The development team leader must resist any attempt to insert an attractive but unproven method with immovable firmness. Yes, the attractive but unproven method might later be proved better, faster, cheaper, or some combination of the three. But you can’t risk it with all those bucks on the line.

     That’s akin to blasphemy to a bright young engineer, only a year or two out of college, who’s sure he has a silver bullet chambered and ready to fire. The team leader was educated in the Sixties or Seventies; he’s hopelessly out of touch with what’s been happening since then. And boy, can that bright young engineer pout! He’ll also talk to his colleagues about his old fuddy-duddy of a boss. “Isn’t engineering about doing things the best way?” he’ll protest.

     It’s a sad lesson, but it’s one that must be administered and driven home with as many hammerblows as necessary. No: engineering is not about doing things “the best way.” It’s about meeting the specification within the given constraints, especially the constraints of time and budget.

     Getting that across to subordinates has been among the toughest and most thankless tasks of my career. I’m sure I’m not alone in that.

     But there’s worse: that bright young engineer might not be a subordinate. He might be a “compliance officer” assigned by the customer. Again, that’s common in defense engineering. You have to listen to him; he can throttle the money flow at his whim. And it’s amazing how intrusive and extensive his whims can be.

     There was one such occasion where a compliance officer wanted to have my team develop a very large program in a language none of us knew. I fought him off, but it was a memorable tussle. We delivered on time and within budget, but I never got another polite word out of him. Fortunately he was reassigned to another defense contractor after that.

     In such situations, when you have a love of knowledge and technology, the temptation to “go along to get along” is amplified by your own predilections. Here there be tygers! What a victory it would be, your subconscious whispers, to improve on the prevailing state of the art – even if no one knows you did it! Maybe the shiny new method will work!

     Well, yeah… but what if it doesn’t? What if you can’t get it debugged in time? You’re the point man; when you miss the deadline, the avalanche will fall on you. You won’t get to point at anyone else and say “Well, he said it would work.”

     So consider engraving this exquisitely concise and pointed motto on a nice piece of mahogany, inlaid with mother-of-pearl:

Don’t Touch The Fucking Fish.

     Hang it where all your people will look upon it daily. And do have a nice day.

Of Cars And Cash

     First, some music:

     Did you play it? Did you listen with attention? It’s one of the most moving odes to freedom ever put into song form. It’s musically brilliant as well. Every syllable and every note speak of the passage of time, the uninterruptible progression toward death, for a creature denied the freedom that belongs to it by nature.

     Yes, we make pets of birds, dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters, ferrets, turtles, wombats, aardvarks, tree sloths… oh, never mind. And it’s arguable that in some cases, their lives improve from domestication. But they’re still captives, held in thrall by a more powerful and capable species. The poignancy of birds kept in cages is particularly striking, considering how flight is possible to them but not to us except by artifice. Yet flight figures pre-eminently in our dreams of freedom:

     There she stood, her eyes screaming hatred and fear, like a trapped raptor – hawk eyes, he thought, which you better never look into. I learned that early, he reflected; don’t look into the eyes of a hawk or an eagle. Because you won’t be able to forget the hate that you saw…and the passionate, insatiable need to be free, the need to fly. And oh, those great heights. Those dreadful drops on the prey; panic-stricken rabbit: that’s the rest of us. Funny image: an eagle held prisoner by four rabbits.
     The MPs, however, were not rabbits. He made out the kind of grip they had on her – where they held her and how tightly. She couldn’t move. And they would outlast her.

     [Philip K. Dick, Our Friends from Frolix 8]

     Ponder that passage for a moment. It’s one of Dick’s best.

* * *

     Humans don’t make pets of other humans. At least, not often in the First World. It’s one of those things that’s “not done.” Our civilizations have progressed sufficiently that we understand the wrongness of such a practice. Captivity is conferred on a man only by the force of law, as a punishment.

     Unrestricted mobility, limited only by the property rights of others, is regarded as a human right. We build roads and highways, cars, trains, boats, and planes, to actualize that right. It sits at the core of our concept of freedom: room to move.

     But we do endure some limitations of mobility. Fuel, money, time, and competing responsibilities keep us within a short distance of some home point most of our lives. We accept those limits as the price of things we want: comfort, security, information, diversions, and so forth. They don’t hold us captive, really. They just keep us close to home, for the greater part of our lives.

     Yet look at how we cherish the machines that can take us away! Americans, above all other peoples, have known the mobility of personal transportation: the automobile. Walter Chrysler called autos “The most wonderful machines ever made by Man.” Whether we use them to go near or far, and often or seldom, they continue to be one of our foremost tangible symbols of freedom.

     That’s why those who despise individual freedom and seek to eliminate it want to take our cars away.

     The utter abolition of the private car wouldn’t be accepted by the American people. The power-seekers know that, so they use “salami tactics:” minor, seemingly modest infringements on our mobility, often in the guise of environmentalism. Increases in fuel and mileage taxes. Changes to the formulation of fuels. Ever-stiffening emissions and safety regulations. And think for a moment about the electric car, which has been touted so stridently as environmentally beneficial. Who controls the fuel for that?

     The “15-minute city” concept was a blatant stroke against personal mobility. It would have made the ownership of a car too burdensome to contemplate, for those within its limits. Give thanks that it’s been rejected so soundly.

     But quoth the Great Marketer, wait: there’s more!

* * *

     The ability to transact in privacy, such that only the seller and the purchaser are aware of the transaction, is an aspect of individual freedom that too many fail to appreciate. For quite a long time, most transactions were simple: you give me the product; I give you the price – in cash. Occasionally we’d write a check for things such as the mortgage or the phone bill, but the greater part of our commerce was in cash.

     But cash, it seems, has problems. The government agency that prints our currency is reporting losses. It just ended the production of pennies: they cost too much to make! Whether the rest of our coinage is endangered, I can’t say. But the penny’s demise has already been decreed.

     Then there’s our paper currency. Those steel engravings, produced with elaborate care, are a problem too! It seems that no matter how hard it tries, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing can’t quite make them un-counterfeitable. There are ways to make it harder, but every such tactic comes up against Porretto’s First Law of Engineering:

For every engineer,
There is an equal but opposite engineer,
And he’s straining to undo your work as we speak!

     Do not doubt this, Gentle Reader. Anyway, from the standpoint of a government economist, that means only one thing: physical currency must be obsoleted. Abolished. Supplanted by some electronic scheme of credits and debits that can’t be hacked. Something like credit and debit cards, but better, more secure.

     What could be better than credit and debit cards? Only a device that ties your balances, who owes you and whom you owe, directly to your person: an implanted identity chip! Your thumbprint would thereafter suffice to complete any transaction. The “reader” would access the ID chip, use it to inquire of the entirely-on-line Money Mesh, and issue a request for payment from whatever account you the purchaser designate. The seller would have to put his thumb on the device to “receive” the payment, of course. Sauce for the goose and all that.

     What’s that you say? Who would validate the transaction? Who would maintain the Money Mesh and certify its accuracy? Why, the government, of course, through the Federal Reserve System!

     And all privacy in transaction would vanish in a puff of smoke from a bonfire of twenties.

* * *

     I’ve written about these things before, of course. This piece addresses the hostility to personally-operated cars. This one addresses the threat to cash. But many a reader has told me I’m conjuring phantasms.

     I’d like to believe that. I hope I am. But I don’t think so.

     Hold onto your car and your cash, Gentle Reader. Shy away from these latest cars that transmit everything about your driving to a distant entity. The ones coming next year can rule you unfit to drive. As for cash, I hope there’s no need to advise you further.

     Have a nice day.

The Helpless Who Are Not Human

     If you’re a regular reader of Liberty’s Torch, you’re surely aware that we here at the Fortress of Crankitude are animal lovers. Not in the “PETA sense,” mind you; just as persons who cherish innocent lives. We’ve had pets of several kinds: dogs, cats, rabbits, turtles, hamsters, a white rat, a raccoon, and briefly an opossum who’d “tied one on” and couldn’t make it home after his bender. It always hurts when we lose one.

     Wherefore, upon reading about an egregious case of animal abuse, I did some research and discovered that aggravated animal abuse is a felony in all 50 states of the Union. However, it seems that prosecutors are as reluctant to try animal abusers as felons as judges are to put black felons in prison. Why? If the law is clear, why not enforce the law? Are our “enforcers” afraid of something, or are they just lazy?

     I suppose that’s a subject that needs further research. But this one doesn’t:

Abuse of the helpless is vile.
Including those helpless that aren’t human.

     Western civilization is distinct from all others in several ways, but this one is particularly notable: We condemn all abuse of the helpless. We don’t tolerate it in any form or under any rationale. When we see it, the decent among us – and that’s very nearly all of us – move against it.

     Wait, what did I just write? All abuse? All of us? Hm. That might demand a bit more thought.

     We permit Muslims abusive practices in the preparation of “halal food.” We permit them cruelty in their treatment of wives and children that no other Americans would be permitted. We permit black fathers to abandon their children, and black mothers to neglect them. We permit Hispanics their cockfights, as long as they “keep it to themselves.”

     Fury against the abuse of the helpless is a White thing. If you aren’t White, you might not understand.

     Even Whites make an exception, of course: abortion. Third-trimester and partial-birth abortions are demonstrably abusive, even barbaric, yet they don’t receive uniform condemnation. We’ve been told that that would be “judgmental.” God apparently forgot to include that sin in the Decalogue. Funny that we’re allowed to be “judgmental” about so many other things.

     There’s a continuum here. Abuses of humans don’t stand isolated in the realm of moral evaluation. The abuse of helpless subhumans touches them at the low end. Tolerating those abuses makes it easier to tolerate the abuse of humans. But the reverse is also true: tolerating the abuse of humans makes it far easier to turn aside from the abuse of subhumans.

     If I may inject a bit of black humor here, we’ve had a declaration on the subject from a voice of years past:

     If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begun upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time. – Thomas de Quincey

     That’s quite enough humor.

     Wasn’t the nasty little boy who pulls the wings off flies once held up as the prototype of the abuser-to-be? Have we forgotten how “great oaks from little acorns grow?”

     Man is at the top of the Terrestrial food chain by virtue of his intellect, his adaptability, his skills at fabrication, and his moral sense. Animals may kill and eat one another, but with vanishingly rare exceptions they don’t abuse the helpless members of the animal kingdom. Are we really superior to our animal brethren? Shouldn’t we be?

     I’d like to see our awareness of the abuse of the helpless – human and subhuman – restored to full horror. I’d like to see our censoriousness, our judgmentalism, directed unflinchingly at it. It seems to have slipped a bit. And should some judgmental type go a bit overboard and cripple an abuser he caught in the act, I’ll vote to acquit him. Maybe strike him a medal, too. A few examples would help to keep our less civilized fractions in line.

The Artist As Instrument

     I just received an email from Megha Lillywhite, who runs a Substack titled Classical Ideals. In it she invites attention to this piece. A brief appetite-whetter:

     To deny one’s moral disease is the primary symptom of it, so those who have the worst judgements of beauty, are the most morally diseased, and the most vociferous in their claims to the idea that judgements of beauty are “subjective”. They claim that what is ugly to one person may be beautiful to another so there is really no meaning to beauty and ugliness anymore. One of the most morally diseased people in the world, Frida Kahlo, expressed her malaise best when she said “La belleza y la fealdad son un espejismo” meaning, “beauty and ugliness are a mirage.” It is because of this disease that Kahlo never made a single work of beautiful art in her life and is another charlatan pushed on the population to demoralise us with the ugliness of her work.

     If you have any interest in art and what’s happened to it in recent decades, I exhort you to read the whole piece.

     I wasn’t conversant with Frida Kahlo, other than as a Mexican Communist activist. Miss Lillywhite’s evaluation of her as “One of the most morally diseased people in the world” made me sit up and take notice. So I surfed through a few online reproductions of Kahlo paintings, and I came to agree with Miss Lillywhite: Kahlo was an enemy of beauty, in intent and effect.

     My thoughts veered from there to a passage from That Hideous Strength:

     He had a look at the pictures.
     Some of them belonged to a school of art with which he was already familiar. There was a portrait of a young woman who held her mouth wide open to reveal the fact that the inside of it was thickly overgrown with hair. It was very skilfully painted in the photographic manner so that you could almost feel that hair; indeed you could not avoid feeling it however hard you tried. There was a giant mantis playing a fiddle while being eaten by another mantis, and a man with corkscrews instead of arms bathing in a flat, sadly colored sea beneath a summer sunset. But most of the pictures were not of this kind. At first, most of them seemed rather ordinary, though Mark was a little surprised at the predominance of scriptural themes. It was only at the second or third glance that one discovered certain unaccountable details—something odd about the positions of the figures’ feet or the arrangement of their fingers or the grouping. And who was the person standing between the Christ and the Lazarus? And why were there so many beetles under the table in the Last Supper? What was the curious trick of lighting that made each picture look like something seen in delirium? When once these questions had been raised the apparent ordinariness of the pictures became their supreme menace—like the ominous surface innocence at the beginning of certain dreams. Every fold of drapery, every piece of architecture, had a meaning one could not grasp but which withered the mind. Compared with these the other, surrealistic, pictures were mere foolery. Long ago Mark had read somewhere of “things of that extreme evil which seem innocent to the uninitiate,” and had wondered what sort of things they might be. Now he felt he knew.

     If that gets you thinking about the degeneration of art from classical subjects and standards to the presentation of mounds of filth in museums, you’re not alone.

* * *

     I hold to an admittedly minority view: i.e., that there are objective standards for beauty. By implication, there are objective measures by which to discern beauty from ugliness. The prevailing “eye of the beholder” view crashes against Robert M. Pirsig’s demonstration that there is a reality to Quality:

     When I say, “Quality cannot be defined,” I’m really saying formally, “I’m stupid about Quality.”
     Fortunately the students didn’t know this. If they’d come up with these objections he wouldn’t have been able to answer them at the time.
     But then, below the definition on the blackboard, he wrote, “But even though Quality cannot be defined, you know what Quality is!” and the storm started all over again.
     “Oh, no, we don’t!”
     “Oh, yes, you do.”
     “Oh, no, we don’t!”
     “Oh, yes, you do!” he said and he had some material ready to demonstrate it to them.
     He had selected two examples of student composition. The first was a rambling, disconnected thing with interesting ideas that never built into anything. The second was a magnificent piece by a student who was mystified himself about why it had come out so well.
     Phaedrus read both, then asked for a show of hands on who thought the first was best. Two hands went up. He asked how many liked the second better. Twenty-eight hands went up.
     “Whatever it is,” he said, “that caused the overwhelming majority to raise their hands for the second one is what I mean by Quality. So you know what it is.”

     Pirsig, in his “Phaedrus” persona, had touched what C. S. Lewis called the Tao: the absolutes that are the bedrock of reality itself:

     The Chinese also speak of a great thing (the greatest thing) called the Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar. ‘In ritual’, say the Analects, ‘it is harmony with Nature that is prized.’ The ancient Jews likewise praise the Law as being ‘true’.
     This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as ‘the Tao’. Some of the accounts of it which I have quoted will seem, perhaps, to many of you merely quaint or even magical. But what is common to them all is something we cannot neglect. It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.

     From here I could spin off into an exhausting ramble about things versus events, and what modern physics tells us we can and cannot know, but I’ll spare you. The point is a simple one:

There are real things.
We know them by their qualities,
Which reflect Quality – The Tao – in greater or lesser measure.

     Among those real things are beauty and ugliness.

* * *

     Artists, like the rest of us, are purposive beings. What they do, they do for a reason or reasons. It’s not always easy or pleasant to infer their reasons.

     Contemporary visual art has largely turned away from depictive art: i.e., art that attempts to show the viewer something real or plausible, though perhaps in a heightened or dramatized degree. Some “artists” have departed altogether from art as derived from artifice. Have a tale of a museum janitor who “destroyed” an exhibit by such an artist, because he took it to be trash:

     “The most delicious news to emerge from the art world this year,” I wrote at the time, “came in October, courtesy of the BBC.”

     Under the gratifying headline “Cleaner Dumps Hirst Installation,” the world read that “A cleaner at a London gallery cleared away an installation by artist Damien Hirst having mistaken it for rubbish. Emmanuel Asare came across a pile of beer bottles, coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays and cleared them away at the Eyestorm Gallery on Wednesday morning.”

     I went on to express the hope that Asare would be immediately given a large raise. “Someone who can make mistakes like that,” I noted, “is an immensely useful chap to have about.”

     I also daydreamed about this paragon of the cleaning industry being taken on by some large metropolitan paper, the Daily Telegraph, for example, since he clearly demonstrated sounder aesthetic judgment than most of the fellows calling themselves art critics.

     Alas, Asare’s good work was soon undone.

     John Q. Smith, the Celebrated Man in the Street, coming upon a heap of “beer bottles, coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays” in the street would unhesitatingly classify it as garbage and ask why it hasn’t been cleared away. Put that same detritus on the floor of a museum and he’d all but certainly react the same way. But what happens when the museum puts a placard on it, naming it and attributing it to an artist? Would it change Smith’s reaction? More pointedly, should it?

     Smith is either in harmony with the Tao or he isn’t. If he is, garbage is self-evident to him. If he isn’t, he can be bamboozled, propagandized, led by the nose… trained to celebrate offenses against the Tao. Which brings us, via Miss Lillywhite’s observations through Pirsig and C. S. Lewis, capped by Roger Kimball’s tale, to the point I had in mind.

     We have been admonished in stentorian tones not to ask “What is art and what is not?” But unless we insist upon answering that question, we cannot discriminate – we cannot rule some things out of consideration as artistic efforts. A firm answer to the question would make it possible. It would also dethrone quite a number of “artists” and the critics that celebrate them.

     The above focuses on visual art, as I intended, but similar questions must be asked about other art forms: sculpture, musical composition, storytelling, poetry, dance, and so on.

* * *

     There’s a snippet from “Individuality,” a poem by 19th Century poet Sidney Lanier, that comes to mind here:

What the cloud doeth,
The Lord knoweth,
The cloud knoweth not.

What the artist doeth,
The Lord knoweth;
Knoweth the artist not?

     I submit that the question is an imperative one. We must answer it. Why is the artist doing what he does? What is his intent? Does he have an agenda – and if so, is it for good or for ill?

     Many an artist of times past spoke of himself as an instrument: a tool being used by some remote power. For some artists, such talk was a form of “humble-brag.” But some were sincere. George Friedrich Handel said something of the sort when an admirer asked what drove him to compose The Messiah.

     But there are powers and powers. Might some self-styled artists be tools in the hand of Satan? Might the filth and degradation they present as “art” – all too often celebrated as “transgressive” by a gaggle of critics – be something more than a jest at our expense? Consider the passage I cited from That Hideous Strength. Perhaps Lewis had seen such “artwork;” he wrote about it piercingly enough.

     Do such “artists” know what they’re about?
     Do they know what they serve, and do they serve it willingly?
     And can we the audience afford not to ponder the implications?

     Have a nice day.

The Natural, The Supernatural, And The Arguments

     I hadn’t intended to write anything today, but I just had an encounter with something both brilliant and concise. When you find those two attributes in a single package, applause isn’t just appropriate; it’s damn near mandatory.

     First, have a quote that’s rather popular among atheists:

     “I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” – Stephen F. Roberts

     Appended to that slogan is this summary of a particular pseudo-argument against belief in any god:

     As a dear departed friend liked to say, “It has a certain syrup, but it doesn’t actually pour.” He had a way with words, even if most of us didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, much of the time. But enough of that. What do Roberts’s statement and the appended image actually contend? Do they concern themselves with anything factual or logical?

     Of course not. They don’t offer an argument, but a rejection of argument. “These previous claims are substanceless; therefore all other claims that have certain specific similarities to them can be dismissed without examining the associated logic or evidence.” That looks a lot like “It never happened before, therefore it can’t happen.”

     Now on to the good part:

It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. If you don't keep your feet, you may end up regurgitating unhelpful slogans that obfuscate reality.

> The "absence of discriminating evidence" is the entire game. Taking me on this journey only gets us to where we already… https://t.co/8YKdXic0Fn

— Limit and Mind | Know the Times (@limitandmind) April 27, 2026

     Allow me to repost the really striking portion, as I don’t want my Gentle Readers to stop short:

     The "absence of discriminating evidence" is the entire game. Taking me on this journey only gets us to where we already were...evaluating the evidence for and against different god claims. Otherwise we are collapsing into the same boring mantra that we hear all the time "there is no evidence for god."
     Parsimony is misapplied if explanatory power is not equal. If you hold that the universe is brute, as many atheists do, the theist has an explanatory advantage, and I don't have to believe Zeus is real or treat his claim of divinity as equally serious as the Christian God to get there. Which feeds into the next point.
     All deities are obviously not in the same reference class. The slogan treats them as if they are. The Greeks never considered their deities to be the sufficient ground of their existence. Overall, I think it's clear how unhelpful to the conversation the slogan is.
     When both atheists and theists are saying it's time to retire this one, it may be time to retire it and move on.

     Extraordinary. I’m in awe.

     I’ve ranted before about the widespread misunderstanding of Occam’s Razor, alternately known as the “Principle of Parsimony.” (Please read that earlier essay if you’ve forgotten.) The universe is decidedly not simple. We probe for simplicities beneath the complexities we can see, but we’re not guaranteed that the understratum is any simpler than the layer of reality we can perceive. That’s why we keep probing.

     As the embedded tweet says, you cannot validly use “parsimony” to dismiss an explanation for a phenomenon without examining the evidence for it. It’s an especially egregious violation of logic to do so when no other explanation has demonstrated validity – even conditional validity. If we maintain that existence itself demands an explanation, we must be dispassionate in our consideration of any candidate explanations.

     Even those atheists who claim that no explanation is required continue to probe. They seek to reach and know that understratum as avidly as theists seek to know God. That makes their militancy against theism, especially Christianity, particularly ironic. If they could accept that our explanation is no worse logically or evidentiarily than their “it just is” dogmatism, and allow us to go our own way, an awful lot of bad feeling could be avoided.

     What’s that you say? You want to know why they can’t allow us to go our own way? I wish I knew. But ultimately, it’s irrelevant. We all believe what we prefer to believe. Our respective choices in that regard are a great part of what defines us.