OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
1hr ago
Going straight to the section on papal infallibility, from page 53 onwards, this seems... straightforwardly false, to me? It's not true that the pope was understood to have universal jurisdiction, and his argument that universal jurisdiction coupled with the infallibility of the church as a whole body implies the infallibility of the pope seems like a non sequitur. To say that God will not allow the church as a whole body to permanently fall into grievous error does not imply that any particular individual in the church, not even the individual ex hypothesi at its head, cannot fall into error. It certainly does not imply that any such head is authorised to unilaterally promulgate new doctrine.
On the contrary, ancient sources that speak highly of the popes often do so on the basis of the pope's defense of doctrines known to be true some other way - this is what Vincent of Lérins argues, for instance. Vincent affirms some kind of infallibility of the church but without affirming a similar status for the pope. Pope Stephen is praised for his adherence to the tradition of the ancients, which is the relevant authority.
Fortescue cites many examples of ancient authors respecting the pope in some way, which is unproblematic as far as it goes, but then makes the unmerited assumption that all of these statements in the aggregate, none of which individually imply papal infallibility, do collectively imply it. Isn't that absurd?
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
I am wary of reasoning from any individual case to a general principle. I don't think the Council of Rimini qualifies as a true ecumenical council, but I did say myself that I think a legitimate ecumenical council can err, so even were that the case it would not matter. An example of a council erring and a pope being correct does not challenge me whatsoever. I think that both councils and popes are capable of error.
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
Oh, fair. Sorry for misreading you.
I'm not sure what significance that is? You can declare statements infallible post facto, but the doctrine of papal infallibility is nonetheless an innovation, surely? Or do you disagree with my assertion that Munificentissimus Deus and Ineffabilis Deus are the only two uncontested instances of papal infallibility? (The latter of which also predates Vatican I, actually.)
My understanding was that because there isn't a clear label, theologians can and often do debate whether exactly which statements come under papal infallibility and which do not.
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
Isn't that just a matter of what's presently controversial?
In contemporary America, you expect everybody to know and accept that murder is bad. It is not controversial. The film In Bruges expects you to understand that murder is bad. It is, in a sense, already priced in. Add in that fictional violence is often treated symbolically, and not as seriously as real violence, and it does not occasion any cognitive dissonance for you to sympathise with the hitman. Child murder is presented as a flaw, and hating child murder does not position you on either side of a contemporary partisan conflict.
On the other hand, saying nasty things about a fat black woman does position you on this or that side of a present divide. Attitudes to fat people or mentally disabled people or whatever do code as left-wing or right-wing or the like.
Compare the way that, for example, in Mass Effect 3 (2012) you can carry out the genocide of entire species, but you cannot disapprove of gay marriage. In Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014) you can lobotomise people, control people through their drug addictions, and so on, but you cannot misgender Krem. Capital-E Evil choices are fine, as long as everyone knows they're evil, but being on the wrong side of a subject of present controversy, which codes political, is not fine. The low-stakes issues matter more than the high-stakes ones, not because they're more important, but because they sort people.
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
I understand this to be a folk etymology.
Similar minced oaths do exist - my mother was very fond of "strewth!" while I was growing up, a mincing of "God's truth!" - but I believe 'bloody' predates any plausible minced origin.
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
In my experience it probably depends on the workplace and culture? I'm Australian born and bred and have a white collar full time job here, and I not only never hear, but would never say the C word.
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
My impression is that even in the US, 'spunk' to mean 'spirit' or' daring' is in the decline, probably because of the spread of 'spunk' in the obscene sense?
From Australia I am accustomed to the verb 'bugger' as a pretty light swear. I might say, "oh, bugger me" or "bugger this" in public and it's about the same level as 'crap'. 'Bugger' is not as rude as the F word, for instance, as you can probably tell from the fact that I do not hesitate to write 'bugger' but I do hesitate to write the F word.
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
My first thought is 'gangbanger'.
Some time ago I listened to a British podcast where some people were reading YA novels, and in one book the protagonist was attacked by a group of "street-hardened gangbangers" and the entire group was left sniggering for a good few minutes. I know that it means 'thugs' in American English, but the mental image of being jumped by a bunch of gangbangers in the British sense is really quite funny.
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
None of those examples look like clear claims to infallibility, to me. They invoke the authority of the see of Rome, but it was hardly in dispute that the papacy claims authority of some kind. Papal infallibility is a much more specific claim about the nature and extent of that authority.
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
Well, I would say rather that the papacy does not have the authority to demand adherence to a doctrine as a condition of communion with the church. Only the whole church assembled can do that.
I think that in taking this position, and asserting the superiority of an ecumenical council over a pope, or over any section of bishops, I am actually taking a position more consistent with that of the Church Fathers and the early church than the Catholics. I'm sure that our Orthodox posters would take the same position. Technically I would go further than that in that I admit the possibility of a legitimate ecumenical council erring, and thus assert the need for the church to correct itself by way of constant return to scripture, but ecclesia semper reformanda est is, I hope, hardly a controversial principle.
OliveTapenade
5hr ago
My experience is that adult converts usually hold themselves to a higher standard than people raised in a tradition, perhaps in part because their place in that tradition feels more provisional? I don't have statistics to hand, but the zeal of the convert is common enough to be cliché, and I would be unsurprised if Catholic converts take doctrine more seriously, or if Jewish converts keep kosher more rigorously than others, or adult converts to Islam are more consistent with prayer.
I even notice this with secular identities to an extent. I never took a citizenship oath or pledge of allegiance of any kind, and I feel a comfortable ownership of my citizenship. If someone asked me to take the Australian citizenship pledge, I would be offended and would tell them to piss off. If I were told that taking the pledge was a condition of my continued citizenship, I would have to do some soul-searching about whether or not I can honestly take it. What does it to mean to "pledge my loyalty to Australia"? What are these "democratic beliefs I share"? Can we spell those out? And yet we ask new citizens to all make this oath.
OliveTapenade
5hr ago
Yeah. I mean, I could get into a big slap-fight here over the ways "individual conscience" has led to some very strange wanderings* but basically yeah, and that's why papal infallibility: it's not a guarantee that we'll never go wrong or that individual popes will not be terrible, it's the minimum basic 'heresy will not be made official teaching'.
Well, I suppose the obvious Protestant response there is twofold.
Firstly, theoretically, it is not at all clear how the institution of the papacy is meant to guarantee that. Just in functional terms, it does not seem to follow. How does papal infallibility ensure that heresy will never be made teaching? To sustain this claim the Catholics usually need to bring in some bigger claim about divine intervention, whereby God will not allow the occupant of Peter's seat to infallibly teach heresy, but that is using a less plausible claim to support a more plausible one!
Secondly, historically, it is very far from clear that the papacy has done that. For a start, the safeguard you describe has not in fact been used like that - papal infallibility is actually a very recent idea, going back to the late 19th century at the earliest, and there are only two undisputed cases of its use (ironically, both of which I think are probably false). The doctrine has not been used as a safeguard on the essentials of the faith, historically, but rather papal infallibility in actual practice has functioned primarily to advance otherwise-controversial doctrines. If anything I think it is a tool used to justify innovation, rather than a guard on the tradition. Moreover, the Protestant position is that the Catholic Church has taught various errors. We don't need to get into the weeds on the specific ones, but suffice to say if we go back to the Reformation we will find lots of places where Protestants hold that the Catholic Church is substantively wrong on an issue pertaining to faith and morals. Those issues would need to be engaged on the merits.
If I were arguing against myself here the case I would make would be that the overall machinery of the papacy, as it were, is part of a system necessary to preserve fidelity to the gospel, and that it is absurd of me to profess my own fidelity to the gospel while being critical of its vehicle, all the more so because I myself admit an attraction to Catholic worship. The external evidence of this is, well, look around, the Catholic Church remains institutionally willing to defy power and go against political winds, even as every other church bends or breaks. I think that's partly true (certainly the Catholic Church has been more resistant to that pressure that either mainline Protestants or evangelicals, both of which have severe problems with being colonised by a political/ideological tribe), but also partly an instance of presentism, glossing over the long and corrupt history of the papacy and looking only at the present moment.
OliveTapenade
5hr ago
Oh, certainly, and I wouldn't have a problem with the church suggesting this idea, or offering it as a theory on the basis of certain theological presuppositions, or a gap in the historical record. This is what the Church of England calls a 'pious opinion' - something permissible to believe, but not obligatory. Most of the Marian dogmas are, in the Anglican context, pious opinions. So you may believe in Mary's perpetual virginity, her immaculate conception, or her assumption into heaven, and you may even believe that it is meritorious to do so, but you may not require belief in these dogmas of any person, nor say that belief in them is necessary for salvation.
I'm quite fond of Article VI for that reason - "Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation". Now there is some room for controversy around the question of what may be proved thereby (e.g. I think the Trinity can be proven scripturally, but some disagree with me), but I think it is commendable to limit the scope of doctrine in this way. The church cannot keep piling dogma upon dogma, but must always return to the essentials.
There are some places where I think the Catholic Church wisely take this approach. One example would be private revelations. I find it a little odd how much the rationalist blogosphere got obsessed with the Miracle of Fatima, as, quite apart from the 'miracle' itself being in my opinion unconvincing and relatively uninteresting, the Catholic Church does not even hold it up as obligatory! A pious, orthodox Catholic is free to either believe in or to deny the Miracle of Fatima as seems good to him. The church declares the miracle 'worthy of belief' but that is merely permission to believe, not a requirement to do so.
If dogmas like the Assumption were in the pious opinion/worthy of belief category, rather than the binding, obligatory category, then I might not feel that they are so heavy a yoke. I might still have issues with the Catholic Church's insistence that it has the right to declare dogmas in this way, but at least the dogma itself would be removed from contention.
OliveTapenade
5hr ago
For me the most surprising thing about reading the Culture novels was the tone of them. I had mostly experienced the Culture beforehand through people excitedly talking it up as a utopia, or describing it as what they want to build after the Singularity. To then read the books and find that, even just on the level of the basic prose, Banks doesn't like the Culture was striking. He does not describe it with the kind of enthusiasm that you would expect a utopia to merit. His characters often spend most of the story trying to escape the Culture only to fail. After all, most of the alternatives to the Culture on offer are plainly worse than it.
The Culture novels are mostly from the 1990s (the first, Consider Phlebas, is from 1987, and the last, The Hydrogen Sonata, is from 2012; but I think the most significant ones are probably The Player of Games (1988), Excession (1996), and Look to Windward (2000)), and I think reflect the angst of a kind of end-of-history ascendant liberalism. Have we won history? Liberalism wins, everything else falls by the wayside? And while liberal polities in the 90s had problems, suppose we extend this trajectory into the future so that all those temporary problems are solved. Endless material prosperity, endless personal freedom. What now? What is left to do? And if you find this in some way insufficient - why? What's missing? To me the series seems to be grappling with that question, and it struggles to articulate a clear answer. There's this restless discomfort with the Culture, a feeling that this isn't enough, and yet the Culture is still the least-bad thing.
I feel like the Culture doesn't so much celebrate the triumph of liberal values as it does mourn their triumph. The Culture is pretty clearly its setting's stand-in for America or for the West more broadly, and it reflects a kind of pre-2000s angst about American intervention.
Thus with Idir, Azad, the Chelgrians, the Affront - the stories keep coming back to the question of when and how it is desirable for an ostensibly more enlightened, compassionate society to intervene in a weaker one.
The case the Culture could often make for themselves is twofold. Firstly, they can 'prove', in a mathematical, utilitarian sense that they are making the galaxy a better place. The Culture are good effective altruists in that their interventions reduce suffering and increase sapient welfare. They show this 'with apologetic smugness' but show it all the same. Secondly, their principles of individual sovereignty can justify many of their actions. Special Circumstances violates them a little, as with Gurgeh, but because the Culture is an anarchy that only recognises individuals, not the rights of states or communal political organisations, they can resort to this to explain their inventions.
Okay, Azad never attacked the Culture. But Azad is not a monolith - Azadian society is a strict and oppressive hierarchy, and Emperor Nicosar is not the incarnation of the will of the people. In fact the Culture itself never attacked Azad. The Culture deliberately engineered a political crisis that would cause an Azadian revolution and which, they predicted, would set Azad on the path of becoming more Culture-like. But the revolution would never have happened if the Azadian people had not wanted it. The Culture refuse to accept Nicosar's or the Azadian elite's description of what Azad wants. They speculate, probably correctly, that if you gave a secret poll to every single Azadian, most of them would want their government to be overthrown. The destruction of Azad is something like an idealised American intervention in the Middle East - the Iraqis/Iranians/Azadians will greet us as liberators. How would you make the argument against this? Azadian state sovereignty ought to prevent that? Why? Should the Culture behave more selfishly, in light of the fact that Azad posed no threat? One of the Culture's own justifications is precisely the fact that they have nothing whatsoever to gain from intervention. It proves their selflessness and the purity of their own motives.
One of my temptations would be to turn the argument back on the Culture. There wasn't a general poll of the Culture. Contact and Special Circumstances function like conspiracies. There is no group that is 'the Culture', which expresses a unified will. The Azadian intervention was the work of a small group of committed individuals within an organisation, Special Circumstances, that we are told most Cultureniks think of as sketchy and morally doubtful. So in what way are SC different to Nicosar or the Azadian elite they seek to destroy? Their answer may be as simple as, "We are selflessly acting to reduce suffering; Nicosar is selfishly acting to increase it". Is that enough?
That's interesting to me, in light of your earlier mention of the Eucharist. Which branch of protestantism believes (or which branches, plural, believe) that Jesus is truly present in communion?
Lutherans, for a start. I thought the Marburg colloquy was famous and the instance of one of the first big splits among Protestants. Calvin believed that Christ was truly present in the Eucharist, albeit in a spiritual or mystical sense - he did not think the bread and wine literally became the body of Christ, but he did think that Christ was genuinely there and that the believer was united to him. John Wesley also believed in the real presence, though he largely refrained from trying to elaborate on how that presence functioned. The Articles of Religion of the Church of England state that the Eucharist is not merely a sign, but is genuinely a partaking in the Body and Blood of Christ; it firmly rejects transubstantiation, but nonetheless says that Christ is truly received "after an heavenly and spiritual manner". In practice among Anglicans you find both people with a 'high', almost Catholic, theology of the Eucharist, and those with a 'low', almost Zwinglian, theology.
Still, by my count that makes the Lutheran, Reformed, Methodist, and Anglican traditions as all believing that Christ is truly present during communion. I think that makes up most of the world's Protestants. None of them affirm transubstantiation, but transubstantiation, though the Catholic perspective, is but one theory about how Christ is present in the Eucharist.
The Zwinglian view, often called 'memorialism', where Christ is not truly present but the bread and wine are just a symbolic commemoration of the Last Supper, is to my knowledge common among Baptists, and... pretty much only them. However, because the Baptist movement is large and influential in the United States, and has probably shaped most Americans' view of evangelical Protestantism, it seems to be often accepted over there.
As far as I'm aware, it's more "abide by" than "believe in". If you don't agree with (let's say) the church doctrine that extramarital sex is wrong, I believe that's ok as long as you are willing to try to live by the teaching under the basis that the church has the authority, duly delegated by Jesus ("whatever you bind on earth is bound in heaven", etc), to definitively interpret Scripture. I realize I'm splitting the hair kind of fine there, but the difference seems meaningful to me at least. There are doctrines I think that the church is flat out wrong in their reasoning about (in vitro fertilization, for example), but to the best of my knowledge that's acceptable as long as I'm willing to abide by the teaching and do my best to wrestle with the arguments with an open mind.
Let me give you a concrete example. One difficult point for me was the Assumption of Mary, which is (supposedly) infallibly defined to be true in Munificentissimus Deus. Pius XII's words seem pretty clear: "...if anyone, which God forbid, should dare willfully to deny or to call into doubt that which we have defined, let him know that he has fallen away completely from the divine and Catholic Faith".
As far as I can tell, with particular thanks to Stephen Shoemaker's excellent book on early Assumption traditions, this is extremely doubtful historically. The earliest records of any Assumption tradition date from the fifth century - to assert that it's historical you need to posit the existence of some sort of underground tradition in the Near East that preserved this truth long enough for it to emerge into the Byzantine world centuries later, but which church leaders and theologians were somehow ignorant of. Moreover, as you can see in MD, Pius' actual justification for the Assumption is not historical but rather theological - we can reason that this must have happened because it is symbolically fitting, or because it fits with certain presuppositions about death and original sin (which then makes the Assumption rest on the Immaculate Conception, another doctrine that is both infallibly defined and in my estimation highly doubtful).
Can I be a Catholic if I believe that the Assumption of Mary probably didn't happen? It seems unlikely. Pius does not say "as long as you do your level best to understand and receive this doctrine, it's fine". He says that if you willfully call it into doubt, which I certainly do, you have fallen away from the Catholic faith.
Lastly, I note that in the rite of initiation for adults baptised in another Christian tradition (see RCIA study edition) p. 280, the person to be received into the Catholic makes a profession of faith including the Nicene Creed (which I confidently affirm in its entirety) and then the following: "I believe and profess all that the holy Catholic Church believes, teaches, and proclaims to be revealed by God".
Perhaps I am being overly autistic, but I will not say those words unless they are true. And they are not.
OliveTapenade
23hr ago
I'm not going to go in to bat for any specific theory of the Atonement, which for me is mostly a matter of theological... well, not indifference, precisely, but I would say acceptable diversity. As long as a person agrees that Jesus died for our sins and to redeem and save humanity, I think it is acceptable for Christians to disagree about precisely how. By comparison this is also how I think about the Eucharist; provided we agree that Christ is really, truly present in bread and wine, I think there is a level of acceptable uncertainty and speculation around exactly how.
However, I suppose I should to say a few words in defence of Protestantism. This is always a tricky challenge because Protestantism is by far the most diverse of the three big streams of Christianity (four, arguably, if you count Oriental Orthodoxy as an additional stream to Eastern Orthodoxy), and I will not go in to bat for everything that every zany sect teaches. In particular I am not a Calvinist and therefore see no particular reason to defend capital-R Reformed doctrine.
What I would say, I suppose, is that as a devout Protestant who has several times considered becoming Catholic and always stepped back from the brink, one of the major issues for me is to do with ecclesial authority.
That is, the Catholic Church demands, as the price of entry, a full submission of the intellect. Protestantism is founded on, among other things, the conviction that it is possible for the teaching authority of the church to go astray and therefore for the individual conscience, albeit one well-formed by scripture, tradition, and the life of worship, to validly critique the church. Catholicism denies this and therefore requires a convert to consciously pledge to believe doctrines that he or she may not even be aware of. For that matter it requires a pledge to believe doctrines that may change in the future.
This has been a bridge too far for me - however great my attraction to Catholic worship, that submission is not something I am able to offer. It seems to me to be a kind of idolatry of political or institutional authority. At least if a Protestant wants to convince me of something, that Protestant must try to convince me that it is actually true, by appealing to scripture, tradition, reason, and experience (and it is here that tradition has an authority, albeit one subject to scripture). The Protestant does not say, "this is the teaching of the church and that is the end of the matter". This seems the better approach to me.
OliveTapenade
23hr ago
To an extent I think that's historical happenstance. For better or worse, the two biggest streams of Orthodoxy, Russian and Greek Orthodoxy, have spent the last few centuries frequently facing persecution, or existing in the midst of hostile societies. Russian Orthodox in the USSR and Greek Orthodox in the Ottoman Empire developed practices of resistance and to an extent became insular, unable to preach, but focused on maintaining and passing down the faith among themselves. In Western countries these churches exist almost entirely among migrant, ethnic communities, and I think have not yet re-learned the habit of evangelisation.
There's nothing inherent to Orthodoxy that forbids effective evangelisation, and in the past Orthodoxy has spread across the Near East and Central Asia with great speed, but it is not something that Eastern Orthodoxy in its present form is well-optimised for. By contrast, both Catholicism and Protestantism spread with European colonial empires, and then the latter also with American popular culture, and developed extremely effective systems of evangelisation. The Catholics tended to do it through top-down orders and missions, like the Jesuits, Dominicans, or Franciscans, usually brought by the Spanish or Portuguese; Protestants weren't as big on orders but did still accompany colonial governments, thus all the Anglicans in Africa and South Asia, and then in the 20th century got very good at doing decentralised individual evangelisation, as with the big Pentecostal boom in South America. The Orthodox never did this.
Something I would remind the Orthodox of, looking at that process, is that the way you evangelise and do mission will feed back into and change the rest of your church. It cannot be an adjunct, an extra activity on top of an otherwise static base. Modes of evangelisation have changed Catholicism and Protestantism in turn. You are what - and how - you preach.
Jesus affirms the accuracy of human moral intuition. His parables compare the reasoning of God to the reasoning of man. His sayings are based on a sensible person’s intuition. For instance:
What do you make of the argument that this is exactly backwards? Take, for instance, John Psmith on Believe:
His morality contradicts every normal human intuition about fairness, but He seems oddly unconcerned about fairness. Often, as He wanders the countryside healing and upsetting people, He explains His view of the world in simple stories. The stories are about everyday things familiar to the agrarian population of first century Palestine, sheep and vineyards and olive trees and rapacious officials, stuff like that. But think a little too hard about any of these stories, and they make no conventional sense at all. “You know how sometimes you have a hundred sheep?” I imagine everybody nodding along at this point. “Well, if one of your sheep went missing, wouldn’t you ignore the other ninety nine, and spend all of your time looking for the lost one?” Yeah, totally… hey, wait a minute! No, I would not do that. That is not what any sensible shepherd would ever do! Ninety nine is a bigger number than one! But He’s already moved on: “So you know how when you have a group of vineyard workers who work all day, and another group who only show up at the last minute, and then you pay both groups the exact same amount, and…” NO! I do not know that, because that does not make any economic sense at all, ARGH. But He has no time for your arithmetic born of scarcity, because He lives amidst infinity, and keeps telling you, maddeningly, that you do too, and that by giving yourself away you’ll have more left than you started with.
Jesus uses familiar images in his parables, yes, but the thrust of most of his parables is to cut against the logic of the world. Sometimes they are intuitive, but usually in ways that indict the moral intuitions of the listener. This is explicit in one of your citations: "If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children". Whatever is perceived by human moral intuitions is at best a glimmer of righteousness; in our evil and fallenness we can perceive only a dim, shimmering outline of the righteousness of God. We often have to reason from analogy because goodness is so foreign to our experience; thus with the parable of unjust judge, for instance.
Jesus tells people that they will be richer if they give their wealth away, he illustrates this miraculously by producing more bread and fish than his own disciples gave away, and he gives obviously unintuitive, contradictory messages like "the last will be first" and "whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, and whoever will lose his life for my sake will find it". Whatever constitutes common sense according to the world, it is frequently either irrelevant or actually opposed to Jesus' teachings.
This is someone whose perhaps most famous command is to love your enemies, and that plainly is not human moral intuition, to the extent that other, more practical religions, call it out as absurdity and recommend a more sensible course of action. This is the Islamic critique; love your friends, do justice to your enemies, which is indeed a much more commonsensical position.
I do not assert that Jesus' moral teachings are the inverse of common sense or human moral intuition - that would be just as rote as assuming that they go together. I assert only that they do not reliably coincide with human moral intuition. This is consistent with the doctrine of the Fall - there was an originally good human nature that we can still perceive to an extent, but that nature is marred by sin and therefore we have a tendency to go astray. The teachings of Jesus, therefore, call us back to something that we have lost. It is, in a sense, absolutely true to say that human moral intuition is good, but we do not have access to true human moral intuition, but rather a corrupted facsimile thereof.
Thus independent human moral investigation can be good to an extent, producing something like the Lewisian Tao, but this is a limited endeavour, and Jesus clarifies and corrects. The Christian tradition has therefore sometimes distinguished between the classical virtues (fortitude, prudence, temperance, justice), which are recognisable to all men on secular terms and the theological virtues (faith, hope, and love), with the latter being contrary to the way of the world, and necessary to crown and redeem the former.
I think they were a perverse writerly attempt to subvert or undermine utopia.
Taken at face value, the Culture seems like liberal utopia - individuals all have near-absolute freedom, luxury, and so on. Almost any conception of the good life can be freely pursued in the Culture, and the Culture will probably help you do it. Nonetheless, in practically every single Culture novel, Banks everything he can to problematise the Culture.
It's the same instinct as with Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. The author introduces us to a seemingly-perfect system and then the entire rest of the series is an attempt to pick apart or destroy that system.
Thus onwards with the series. In Consider Phlebas, the Culture starts a massive interstellar war that kills trillions of people. In The Player of Games, the Culture lies to and cruelly manipulates the protagonist while engaging in an act of unilateral aggression against a poor society that poses them no threat. In Look to Windward, the Culture mishandles the Chelgrians about as badly as anyone as anyone could. In Excession, I think it is significant that the Culture fails the Excession's test. Even on the level of characters, these books are not filled with happy people. The Culture character in Consider Phlebas, Balveda, puts herself into stasis and then commits suicide out of moral disgust with her own people. In The Player of Games, Gurgeh is selfish, slimy, and difficult to like, and Flere-Imsaho is a hypocritical liar. Excession contains that one guy who makes himself into an Affront because he craves the one liberty that the Culture will not give him, the liberty to be genuinely cruel to un-consenting victims. And so on.
The Culture is set up so as to theoretically be a utopia, but after reading just a couple of the books, I think Iain M. Banks hates the Culture, or at least, is keen to find its flaws. He doesn't cheat and give the Culture an obvious evil side (the Minds really are benevolent, humans really can engage in positive and meaningful work, this isn't made possible by any kind of oppression or injustice, etc.), but he is constantly looking for the ways in which this society is unsatisfactory. The Culture cannot manufacture meaning, or sense of communal purpose. The best it can find is the tawdry impulse to make more of itself.
'Dystopia' doesn't seem like the right word for something clearly designed as utopian, at least, as a logical extension of liberal values into a context of arbitrarily high resource availability and technological capacity, but at the same time, the word 'utopian' conjures up a sense of approval.
I think the Culture is a utopia that its author disapproves of, if that makes sense? Some readers are blind to nuance and therefore take the Culture as unironically good, but I don't think that reading stands up to closer examination. But Banks does everything he can to make the Culture fit most people's imagination of utopia. The result, at least on my reading, challenges some of those values. If the Culture is a utopia given those assumptions, and yet, as I think Banks wants us to, we look at the Culture and feel at best deeply ambivalent, that suggests that our assumptions might be flawed.
But what other ones are there? No one in the Culture novels ever articulates a very convincing alternative - Idiran or Chelgrian theocracy hardly seem better, Azad is awful on multiple levels, and the Sublimed steadfastly refuse to explain themselves. Balveda kills herself after enough time has passed that the Culture can mathematically 'prove', on utilitarian grounds, that the Idiran War was justified - as if she knows that this is wrong, but cannot explain why. Can we do any better than her?
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I tried TSW once but just really disliked the mechanics and moment-to-moment gameplay, which was a shame because it did have fantastic aesthetics, and this gothic, World-of-Darkness-esque, slightly-twisted modern-day setting dominated by conspiracies was a great idea for an MMO.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
That would be my thought - if there is no path to victory, at least not at an acceptable cost, then the best thing to do is cut your losses as soon as possible. If I were a Democrat I'd then bank on blaming the whole thing on Trump. That has the benefit of being true, though hardcore Trump supporters will no doubt argue he was stabbed in the back by congress.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
In this sense, I think it would be characteristically masculine behaviour that's considered unpleasant, bad, or socially maladaptive?
I feel like the obvious examples are things like heavy drinking, brawling, gambling, and the like? All the 'male' vices.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
Presumably 'gay' is a useful shorthand that connotes effeminacy, weakness, vanity, and superficiality? Something along those lines?
OliveTapenade
6d ago
Good luck explaining why 'Aborigine' is now frowned upon, while 'Aboriginal' is fine.
I have heard people explain something about how 'Aborigine' is a noun and 'Aboriginal' is an adjective, and a clipping of 'Aboriginal person' is better because it acknowledges their humanity in a way that 'Aborigine' supposedly does not. Or sometimes you just get vague waffle about how somehow 'Aborigine' has racist connotations from the colonial past that 'Aboriginal' does not. Now as Amnesty's own link some want to move the treadmill again to 'First Nations', a term borrowed from Canada (and not, contra the article, actually supported or used by a large number of Aboriginals).
It's all just... extraordinarily tiresome, petty language policing as if the letter E does some sort of psychic harm that AL does not, all as a substitute for any policy that might actually improve anybody's lives.
Well, I don't try to adhere to the positions of every person who has ever called himself Protestant, so pointing out that Protestants disagree doesn't do anything for me. And I don't see how you can get from "Protestants disagree with each other" to "Catholics are right". Size or uniformity are not evidence of correctness, after all, even if we overlook the great many internal disagreements among Catholics. But fundamentally, if Protestant Pastor 1, Protestant Pastor 2, and the pope all disagree, you cannot reason from PP1 and PP2's disagreement to the pope's correctness. The pope is in the same situation as a hypothetical Protestant Pastor 3 - he's just one more pastor with an opinion. What's missing here is the reason why the pope's opinion is more reliable or authoritative. I think we're better off just discussing the positive case for the pope. The fact of disagreement among Protestants proves absolutely nothing.
I don't see how Catholicism offers any solution to this problem. I've studied under Catholic professors, Jesuits and Dominicans. Catholic theologians have very similar hermeneutics and ways of trying to answer theological questions to Protestants. Almost all the baseline work of theology is the same regardless of whether you're in a Catholic or Protestant faculty. The Catholics just have a bunch more different answers, on matters that impact salvation. There is no fundamental difference of kind.
Well, no, and I don't think any human is capable of producing such a system. Thomas Aquinas made a heroic effort but failed. It's seashells all the way down. The human mind cannot fully grasp God.
My position is that Catholicism does not provide an escape hatch from this dilemma. It does not offer a complete or consistent system, and the smartest Catholics, certainly including the pope, face exactly the same problems that you and I do.
For me, part of my conversion experience - my own dark night of the soul - was admitting my own inadequacy. Like I suspect a lot of Motters, I was an intelligent kid who grew up very convinced of my own genius, and running into the wall of my inability to fathom the depths of God, my inability to jam the ocean into the hole on the beach, was my intellectual crisis. Learning to trust and put my faith in a God infinitely beyond myself was essential.
So I agree that it's very important to realise that you cannot solve every intellectual problem yourself, and find a way to accept faith alongside a level of ignorance or uncertainty - to step into the luminous darkness.
I think that we see a very different role for the church, epistemologically, in the growth of faith. It might be worth exploring that further, though I'd suggest that we might want to reframe it in a more constructive way, so that we can learn from each other, rather than engage in a Catholic-Protestant jousting match!
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