Ayn Rand’s re-translation of Aristotle’s logic, ethics, and aesthetics into modern parlance is invaluable. However, she seems to have followed some trails and assumed they are the only possible ones. Atheism is one of those. Scores of Randies think that atheism is the only rational alternative simply because it fits with what they’ve learned from Rand. But, of course, that’s a fallacy. It would only be the only rational alternative in a positivistic world - one in which the only thing we know is what we’ve gleaned from what we already know. And no one lives that way, least of all Randites.

Rand has a lot to say that we should listen to about the use of force (extortion, compulsion, etc) and about, without most readers hearing it, Death.

“I can get along with a Randite” - Bernardo de la Paz.

I consider Rand a mentor, and I’ve read her analysis of religion, which is why I think both that she would make a welcome addition to the faithful, and why I suspect she never really absorbed the significance of Orthodox thought in her Communist and Jewish Russian experience. Her commentary seems absorbed primarily with late-Western forms of Christianity, and perhaps just a smells and bells interaction with Russian Orthodoxy. She didn’t have a Vladimir Lossky to translate our thinking into modern parlance and, by the time she could have, her ideas were already well-formed and she was committed to her path.

But I pray for Ayn. And ask that she receive mercy, because she tried to reach the truth and got there in some respects, but also got sidelined, perhaps by pride and loneliness, as I would have. And if the Lord will have mercy on her, perhaps he will have mercy on me by her prayers.

“Pancho needs your prayers, it’s true. But save a few for Lefty, too. He only did what he had to do, and now he’s growing old.” - Towns Van Zandt

If you should think of her, pray for Ayn Rand.

One of the reasons, if not the reason, I am continually falling in love with my wife, over and over again, is that my wife shows me the face of the poor.

My wife was born very premature and very small, and only just survived with a lot of care, but she has had a lifelong illness that has been crippling or life-threatening when it’s not in remission. Her mother abandoned the family when my wife was a child. Her father became wealthy but, when he died, the family’s fortune was lost, and my wife and her brother suffered, their hopes for college and a bright future dashed. My wife, when I met her, was an orphan, broke, and sick, though her disposition was so sunny and cheerful, open and expressive, that you’d never know it.

Continually, when I see the poor of the world, I see her. When anyone is suffering or deprived, the fact that they are Somali or Kenyan or Cambodian or Indian or Palestinian doesn’t intrude - it’s as if, in their faces, I can see her face so clearly; in fact, I see in their faces the same simple hope, the same crushing pain, the same humanity I see whenever I look at my wife. She has shown me the poor, and turned my heart toward them, and so toward her.

I take no great lesson from this; I don’t know what the lesson is. I do know that it seems to be unusual. The people I know, good people, don’t look at others of different colors and features and nationalities the same way. They see a dichotomy between foreigners and their own, and there’s a rift between them and the world, and I don’t know how to communicate through that barrier. It’s a sadness and an alienation that will always be with me, and it seems to be the American attitude.

I go to work, and the Indian contractors call everyone “Sir”, because they are afraid of making a mistake (which could be ruinous for them in our hypersensitive corporate culture), and no one responds “But we’re the same, you and I. I’m John (or Peter or James).” They eat smelly food (which is delicious), and they sit among themselves, and no one intrudes to join them. They are looked upon simply as “they” and, since they are temporary, there’s no real need to identify with them on a daily basis. Instead of being our honored guests, they are our “guestworkers“, and you know what that term has meant, historically.

Among my associates, I watch eyes glaze over when I talk about the poor in other countries, and I watch a nationalism come out that talks of “my own community” (even among conservatives who ordinarily wouldn’t use the word “community” to save their lives). They don’t realize that precisely because the “foreigner” seems distant to you, he is your stranger, your poor. He is Christ the Stranger, Christ the Foreigner, Christ the Alien, the Unknown Christ. But we live in a religious culture that behaves as if, when it doesn’t openly assert, that nothing about Christ in unknown. We have Him fully circumscribed. And in such a culture, Christ does not come to us in the stranger. He is not found in the wounded Jew cared for by the Samaritan. He is not in the suffering beyond the sea. He is Citizen Christ, of the United States. He is only the rich poor, and the rich’s poor.

Rationalizations abound, and I’ve heard them all - so much that they seem a drone of platitudes that each person parrots but presents as his original thoughts. Justifications, without real regard for truth. And I’ve no patience for it. It’s heresy. But give me the heretics who love the poor; they are my brethren. I must be willing to be even a heretic for their sake, though it is a grave thing to be considered so by one’s brethren.

My wife:

I was blind. Years of blindness. And my wife came and saved me. She showed me the outcast Somali woman, shunned by her own family for being sterile and incontinent from a childhood childbirth of a juvenile marriage. Made to live in a shack of sticks added reluctantly onto the back of the house - just enough shelter that the hyenas can’t get to her. That young girl dreams of belonging, of having a family, of being loved and wanted. My wife shows me the Kenyan woman who runs a barren stall under a tattered awning and dreams of getting just a little ahead, so she can make a life. Just a few extra wares, and she can sell all she can procure. She shows me Cambodian and Indian children, abandoned and with nothing, who are given pretty treats by passing adults (candy is easy to buy), but not enough real nutrition to grow properly, and who have no chance to go to university; it’s just a distant dream. Some of them may end up slaves, and some may wear away their lives in misery with never anything but the clothes that cover them in the fields. They begin to wonder why they are alive, why other peoples lives seem to have meaning. They begin to lose a sense of self. My wife shows me the Palestinian family, trapped in Gaza, the walled city, like the Jews in the ghettos of Germany, but this time the Jews are the jailors; a family any one of whom would work two shifts a day every day for the other, but surrounded by barbed wire and tanks, and not allowed even to seek a chance on the open streets in a fair market, while just beyond the tanks are high-rises and lush parks.

When I look at my wife, I see the simplicity, sincerity, the most basic desires that indicate a human spirit, and I look back and forth between her and the world, and she is everywhere. And we are the rich, the privileged, who complain because our 8hr jobs are too tiring, but she has taught me to see wealth differently. My wife has taught me to love the poor, and the poor have taught me to love my wife.

This is all I know about it. I am nothing special for being given this vision. It’s a grace. An unmerited gift. It has filled my life with such joy, such agony for others, and such sadness that I don’t know how to give it away. My wife has saved my life, saved me, a closed-minded, selfish, person who did not see the world and the poor for what they were. That’s all.

If this week 40 people would give $25 each to New Futures Orphanage, instead of that same amount spread out over a year’s time, the children could buy chickens, fish, plants, and other sustainable food sources that would last over a long time, and wouldn’t have to eat the small increments of money coming in, while they’re waiting, so that they have no future. If 20 of us could give $50 this week, instead of spread out over a year, they could eat all year, instead of just on the weeks that someone gives.

Choose a child from the orphanage photo below, hold him or her in your mind, and picture what eating all year long might do for his mind, his health, and his opportunities. Now picture him wondering every day if there will be rice today. It’s easy to do the right thing: give directly, so 100% of the funds go to the orphanage, which is run by volunteers, take it as a tax deduction (they email you a receipt automatically), and you break even, but their lives are changed. Christ reward you according to you charity.

Christ is an orphan. “Who are my mother and my brothers?”

Christ became an orphan for our sakes, “Lord, Lord, why has Thou forsaken me?”

I first got involved with direct giving to the poor because of the New Futures Orphanage. I was scouring the net, looking for just, real, and direct ways to impact the lives of the poor, with small funds. I came across a [ blog ] kept by an English teacher backpacking through Cambodia.

She’d come upon an orphanage there that needed volunteers to teach some English to the children. Teachers would come through, and some would stay a while and do this, and she was captivated and decided to stay for much longer. I was captivated too, and I looked, and they needed $900 in small gifts - that’s all they were asking for last year, and it was being given in small gifts ($25, $35, $45 at a time) through [ givemeaning.org ] a site that serves as the vehicle for giving directly to such small charities.

They finally met their fundraising goal, which was used to provide some basic things to the orphanage, like cinder block walls and a roof to enclose the toilet. I read the updates from Claire, who was giving her time there. She reported on how the children were doing, their improving skills, what this means for their future. I read what the children thought about their situation, and their hopes for their futures; each one is an individual. I knew I had to help.

The poor are Christ to us. They are the icon, the image. They are the means by which we are saved, by being filled with love. Apart from them, I know I at least cannot be saved. They are the ones of whom Christ said, “inasmuch as you have done with your riches to the least of these, who are my brothers, you have so done to me in my impoverishment”.

Recently, the landlord sold the orphanage and the children had to be taken to a facility that doesn’t have electricity. So they need to raise money to get 12volt battery-powered lighting installed and survive with the soaring food costs. The project has established a funding goal of $1000. I’m asking you to help me help them. Take the cost of a night out, or a new video game, or a month of cable TV, and give directly to them, for this need.

They are [ here ].

Direct Giving defined: Give in reality, not in theory. Give to people, not to ideas.

It astonishes me - the casualness, the callousness, the stupid matter-of-factness with which people can discuss euthanasia. People discuss putting their family members to sleep with only slightly more gravity than putting a pet to sleep. Why is abortion given a greater level of discretion in conversation than “pulling the plug”? Because starving someone to death and taking them off life support is considered a more humane way to kill them than vacuuming off their limbs and crushing their skull?

Let it be known that I don’t want anyone deciding when it’s time for me to die. I’ll fight to the last moment, thank you. And the same goes for my family. There’s all kinds of pious crap put out by religious fanatics (and they are fanatics, when we’re talking about neglect and murder) — all kinds of garbage about not using extraordinary means to save us. Who decides what’s extraordinary? The world? By this logic, why use CPR on a drowning victim? It may be their time, right? I hate this with my whole heart. I will fight to the end, I will sustain my family with everything in me, and I will not set an example of pushing myself out on an ice flow so as not to be a burden. That’s the culture of savages, not of Christ. People are not burdens, they’re not expendable, and they’re not ‘in the way’.

In fact, when I hear the words of Christians justifying the Culture of Convenience, the Culture of “Don’t get in my way” (to borrow from Franky Schaeffer), of “Don’t burden me”, I breathe and spit. This is the Enemy we’ve known from of old, and it has infected the minds of the faithful with the silky foulness of the demonic.

It’s worse, of course, to kill someone or abandon them or neglect them to death than to talk about killing them. But the fact that there’s no shame, that’s it’s considered a normal part of polite conversation makes me want to vomit. And I’m supposed to express condolences at their loss? That kind of “sensitivity” is the same kind that would congratulate someone for fornicating, because they’re now in a meaningful relationship.

Human life is an absolute value. I really hate this culture, its transvaluation of ethics, and all it represents. Most of all, it represents a culture of sacrifice, as Rand pointed out. A culture of expending some for the sake of others. You see it in our resource wars, in the way we drive on the freeway, and in the institutionalization of medical care not as a saving charity but as a kind of semi-benign curse. After all, we’re the only country of this level of wealth where you can go bankrupt from receiving medical care, and die when the last pennies run out. Every other society with this much money, considers that barbaric. Here, we figure the laws of the market outweigh the cost of sustaining your existence.

Scorn, derision, excrement upon this culture.

Orthodox thinking doesn’t pair adjectives with the word “God”.

As I watch a spokesman for a group of fundamentalists talk about how “God is not a condemning god”, I realize that a simple way to express our apophaticism is to respond: Orthodox thinking doesn’t pair adjectives with the word “God”.

God is incomparable, indescribable, beyond understanding, not susceptible to analogy, and even these words cannot be considered attributes of God, but only descriptions of our unknowing.

The temptation in the culture is strong, to personalize and customize God, to make a god that does not worry or scare us, a god we understand, that fits our ideas, and fits our expectations. But there is no such deity. As surely as a stone idol, the god of our imagination is just that - imaginary. In regard to that, we can only be atheists.

People feel uncomfortable not being able to say “God is loving” or “God is just”, despite the fact that their own scriptures contradict them constantly, because they are referring to created concepts that exist only in their minds. But God cannot be expressed in Dixie Cup sayings or Hallmark sentiments.

The word “God” is not a name, but refers to our inability to know - to the impossibility of attaining to knowledge of God. The word “God” is a confession that there is something that doesn’t even share what we think of as existence. If God exists, then we do not, and vice versa.

If God could be contained in created human concepts, then he would be a small “god”, less than the concepts that contain him - he would be a homonculus, not God. But we reject as heresy the very attempt to approach knowledge of God through religious philosophy, which can only sculpt idols from ideas that were once carved out of wood.

God is so unknowable, that we cannot even refer to God as unknowable. God is so beyond the possibility of human knowledge, that if God were there, real, existed (all words we cannot use of God), it would be irrelevant to our understanding.

In fact, the only way for God to be known is to make Himself known, on his own initiative, and then to be known, since God cannot be contained in human thoughts, God would have to become man, and indeed make possible the union of God and man without the reduction of one or destruction of the other: The Incarnation, which only the Orthodox hold to in its fullness. Even then, we would have no understanding of God’s essence, but rather union with God through the person of the Incarnate One. We would know love, as God’s uncreated energy, which is God, but we would not know the essence. Rather, we would know love through the person, through Christ. The same is true of justice. And mercy. And so on. We would know God by grace, through grace, and in a particular person, Jesus Christ.

We would no then claim to “know God” the way it is common to do among the heterodox, proceeding to describe God’s attribues. We would, however, recognize the activity of God toward us, through Christ. God loves us, God has mercy on us, God chastises us, and so on.

This is why when many heterodox begin a conversation with “Do you believe God exists?” or “Do you believe God is a loving God?” or “Do you believe God is love?” I say “no”. Given what and how they’re asking, I prefer to swear off the wrong thing so we can talk about the true thing. Even when we Orthodox write that “God is love” we do not believe this refers to God’s essence, nor is this the name of a person. Rather, we refer to the energies of God, in humility, believing even then our understanding is neither comprehensive nor perfect. And any significant knowledge occurs only by interaction - synergy - and deep knowledge comes only to very advanced ascetics.

I was on the verge of coining a neologism: ethikotroge (or ethikotrogonist) when I discovered that I’m a flexitarian. I still might keep the overall neologism, since there is more than one reason for being a flexitarian. Someone looking at this in a public journal is likely to ask “What’s a flexitarian?”, so I’d better define it. A flexitarian is someone who eats a diet mainly without meat, but uses meat occasionally.

My reasons are ethical overall, and include reasons of good health. I’m a decided latitudinarian when it comes to being flexitarian.

• Often it’s just a matter of eating a much smaller portion of meat, and more vegetable matter, on the European mode, refusing to make meat the center of the meal. It’s a more balanced approach.
• Sometimes it’s leaving meat out of some meals altogether, refusing to treat it as less than a meal if it lacks meat. The hegemony of meat is irrational, and is repudiated, along with its basic contribution to the passions.
• Sometimes, it’s refusing to eat certain kinds of meat (like poultry), or any but free-range eggs. It has to do with ethical treatment of animals.
• It’s often refusing “meat products” that aren’t whole cuts of meat. No processed lunch meats, hot dogs, etc. Occasionally, though, I’ll do sausage as a cultural concession to Italian food.
• It includes avoiding establishments that specialize in particularly heinous use of meat, such as restaurants that serve shark fin, dog, lobster, or specialize in high-production poultry farming, or are McDonalds.
• It’s refusing meat when there’s a choice between low grade meat and high grade vegetable matter. For instance, Taco Bell is out (as essentially garbage-meat), but I’ll eat a steak on occasion.
• It’s refusing to eat meat that comes from severe environmental disruption, such as Brazilian beef.
• It’s refusing to over-complexify food (e.g. with processed food) with too many ingredients at once and, even in gourmet cooking, specializes in a form that uses few ingredients at one time.

It’s an attempt to reduce harmful impact on nature, some of the agony caused to animals, over-use - the gluttony of production, subterfuge - the mythology of ethical animal product production, subordination to passion-bearing foods that captivate and dominate the soul and senses and lead to various social ills as well as personal failings, an attempt to reduce negative health impacts from harmful feed and hormones (including natural feeds and hormones), an attempt to avoid excess and irrationality, and a repudiation of the basic assumptions of the dominant culture (which is always a good and healthy thing - in that regard, I tend to share the opinion of some fathers that even when the culture does good, it’s doing evil). Finally, I believe all death to be the result of my sin, and so to be evil, and want to keep this in mind, and keep an eschatological attitude, looking to the end of death, for which creation groans, and the peace between lion, lamb, and child.

At the same time, I have certain dietary needs tied to my own chemistry and physiology that generally require animal products, especially dairy. And there is a sense in which, unless it’s a fast, I think it can be a conditional good to participate in the feast (e.g. kill the fatted calf). I think, in fact, there’s a general duty to feast (on fish, at least), when it’s a Feast, in the same way it’s a law of the Church to fast during the Fasts. For these reasons, I eat some animal products.

The ultimate reason I’m a flexitarian is to assert, with action, and keep in mind always, that eating is not a n ethically neutral endeavour. Ethics are just as necessary and important there as in driving, investing, etc. So I’ll keep my new word, too, as the overall explanation.

Meanwhile, this also does two things in regard to Great Lent, Little Lent, and the other fasts. It means that it’s not such a horrible impact to “switch”, because it’s not switching, it’s a slightly more severe modification. And it carries the meaning and purposes of the Fasts into the rest of life and time, including the Feasts. So, I think there’s a strong religious benefit.

So that’s it, I’m either a very liberal flexitarian or a strict ethikotrogue.

References

• Wikipedia Entry
• About.com Entry
• Medicine.net Entry
• Associated Press
• American Dialect Society

Note to self: next entry is on ethical shopping (or non-shopping).

I know people deeply immersed in one or the other, and just a few immersed in both. The thing is, non-fiction gives us a direct dosing of ideas, seemingly without setting or apparatus. Fiction often doesn’t pay off what it promises, in terms of meaning. And our reading, really, is either a search for entertainment or a search for meaning.

Non-fiction, though, really does come with a substantial apparatus. In place of the normal aspects of fiction - plot, characterization, setting - we get the author’s presuppositions (e.g. about what the important questions are), his unaccountable absolutes (the unchallenged assertions inherent in his ideas), his biases, and the emotional impact of his own convictions, if any. In other words, there’s more weeding and processing to do than some readers acknowledge.

I’m a fan of both forms, but I confess I prefer fiction when I can get it. The thing that unites both forms is theme. If we refer to the theme of “the union of all men”, someone can suggest a non-fiction work, and I can suggest a work of fiction. But frankly, I find there are more subtle themes available in fiction that are as yet unexplored in non-fiction, and that would force me to look there, in any case.

One is not more important or significant than the other, but I think it’s easy for non-fiction lovers to deprive themselves of the real value of fiction by, if not careful, seeing everything as a prosaic proposition. There’s a kind of communication of through the whole soul available in fiction that seems only rarely accessible in its counterpart.

For me, sci-fi and fantasy are the unparalleled repositories of soul in modern art.

I’m referring to literature - not films, games, comics, etc. which often as not are mere masquerades - parodies of what these genres are about. Harry Potter is not fantasy, even in novel form. Not really. Most sci-fi films are not really sci-fi. And even the Lord of the Rings films, I think, did not achieve the twin goals of satisfying the diehard lovers of the literature while introducing non-literary types to the genre. It was only about 80% successful in the former goal, and I think spectacularly unsuccessful in the latter. Likewise, dragonlance isn’t fantasy. Terry Pratchet is parody and appeals to a particular personality type, but is only fantasy in the way that Get Smart is an espionage drama.

All of that is to say that I’m talking about the actual literature - the stuff with high doses of ’soul’ rather than the McLiterary derivatives which retain the trappings (elves or space ships) but have become largely soulless. Robert Heinlein, Orson Scott Card, Neil Gaiman, Guy Gavriel Kay - this, generally speaking, is literature. In fact, a friend of mine, from my childhood, used to say that sci-fi/fantasy (literature) is the last form of prophetic literature. I tend to agree.

Well, I’m opinionated about it, but I think those ‘lost’ in the mainly intellectual world of non-fiction, or who supplement this, at best, with biography (crossover literature - nonfiction as story), are missing out. But they don’t know it. You can’t discuss with them some things, because the only way to communicate is in a language of literary references. They’ll often challenge this, but that’s an indication of precisely the conviction that all things are reducible to propositions, something a fiction-lover cannot really accept.

In fact, sometimes, the quality of what is being communicated, recapitulated, in a work of literature, gives it a ‘bible-like’ status. For me, Speaker for the Dead (the sequel to Ender’s Game) is this way. But even in the realm of philosophical fiction, there are some works whose contents simply have never been conveyed as effectively in non-fiction, and perhaps never will be. Rational Anarchy in Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Objectivism in Atlas Shrugged. Even, perhaps, evil in A Wind in the Door.

You notice it when you’re having a discussion about these things and you realize you’re not really speaking the same language. You can’t use the literary references, because you don’t have a shared literature. You want to hand someone a novel, but it’s not like when they hand you a non-fiction book. The latter is greeted more like a manual, and the former more like an endeavour. So you do what you can to make converts.

In that sense, there’s some parallel between the writings of the academic theologians, like St. Maximus the Confessor, which are brilliant, life-changing, and essential, and the writings of the theologians of the desert. Theology, we understand, is true prayer. That’s what it is we seek. What an academic describes as a rejection of all propositions about God’s nature, a rejection of attributes, and of confusing operations with the unknowable essence, a desert theologian writes of as ‘removing from the mind all false images’. They are both describing apophasis. But the latter, as I see it, shows us how it is really used, what it is for.

I tend to think story is like that. It’s like history. It’s like real events. It shows us in an enfleshed way, what we otherwise can only ‘know’ in an intellectual way. It’s only my opinion.

You know, the fundamentalists are deluded about the public schools. They constantly complain about anything sexual, but they let the schools decide to do mandatory ASVAB testing, and otherwise turn these kids into good little patriots and citizens, without batting an eyelash. You can’t sell part of a soul.

A friend and I were recently discussing what’s important in charity or, more specifically, charitable giving. And we came up with some key elements:

• consistency: it’s better to give consistently than to splurge once in a way you can’t sustain, and in fact give less, and nothing over time. The same is true of prayer rules. Better to pray 5 minutes morning and night, than two hours once, that doesn’t get repeated until you feel guilty and defeated. Besides, $75/month over 12 months is three times as much as $300 in a one-time splurge.
• avoid pride: it’s better not to try to slam dunk a problem you can then be proud of; instead, give also to causes for which the world says there’s no hope
• diversify: same as with any investment, scatter your seed abroad: it’s often claimed that charity should start at home - which usually means, actually, that it should remain at home - in fact, there’s no real justification for easing the mere discomfort and inconvenience of those who are most like you while neglecting the life-threatening and soul-destroying need of those who are least like you. Remember the Good Samaritan who gave his money for the infidel. Something useful may be to lend to the working poor (e.g. through microloans), give to the very and desperately poor (e.g. orphanages), and give to an organization (like Oxfam) for relief of the most devastatingly impoverished. Also donating to a local food bank may be a good idea for charity in one’s own community.
• [avoid delicacy]: there’s already an article on this (click the link) but, in brief, it means avoid the paralysis of not doing much because you can’t find the perfect thing to do.