The Consciousness Spot, Curtis Yarvin & Converts to American Mysticism
Here’s your weekly roundup of everything I’ve curated or created online, October 13–19, 2024.
Thought-Provoking Content
Why I, As a Mother… by Victoria Smith in The Critic:
Motherhood, as concept and experience, constitutes a radical challenge to the identity politics of both Left and Right, because it is rooted in relationality. It is a reminder not just that sexed bodies matter, but that they are bound to vulnerability and dependency. Babies are not gestated in bags; there is not one person alive whose existence has never been wholly reliant on that of another. Modern identity politics wants individuality, unfettered self-realisation, total freedom. Motherhood gets in the way of this, not because conservative politicians imbue it with conservative “family values”, but because of what motherhood is.
The Philosopher Wins: There’s No Consciousness Spot in the Brain by Denyse O'Leary in Mind Matters:
Back in 1998, premier neuroscientist Christof Koch had wagered philosopher of mind David Chalmers a case of fine wine that within the next twenty-five years, a specific 'signature of consciousness' would be found in the brain.
How did Chalmers win? A contest between two theories of consciousness, announced by Templeton World Charities in 2019, enabled the bet to focus on specifics: Koch’s Integrated Information Theory was pitted against Global Network Workspace Theory.
The six independent laboratories that tested the hypotheses came up with results which did not match either theory perfectly. But in any event, the “signature of consciousness” was never captured.
We all sense that we are conscious but that sense is not located in any one place or current.
Perdition by Miles Smith in Mere Orthodoxy:
Evangelicals seem convinced that they could never be a part of a national political tragedy, and their refusal to concede the essentially tragic nature of American politics is to their peril. Every succeeding generation of evangelicals, left right and center, seem convinced that salvation lies in their own political exertions, seemingly unaware that they too could be a part of a national political tragedy, wherein God’s judgment comes on the moral and immoral, on the pious and impious.
I concur here.
John Wesley and the Five Miracles of Healing by Stephen Seamands in Firebrand:
• Jesus heals directly and supernaturally—the miracle of the supernatural touch.
• Jesus heals through doctors and medicine—the miracle of modern medicine.
• Jesus heals through the human body’s healing power—the miracle of nature.
• Jesus heals through bestowing grace in suffering—the miracle of sufficient grace.
• Jesus heals through victorious dying—the miracle of the victorious crossing
Curtis Yarvin Wants American Democracy Toppled. He Has Some Prominent Republican Fans. by Andrew Prokop in Vox:
[Yarvin's Substack] is basically a set of thought experiments about how to dismantle US democracy and its current system of government.
“We are in a late republican period,” [J.D.] Vance told [podcast host Jack] Murphy. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”
The Allure of American Mysticism by Michael Ledger-Lomas in UnHerd:
The appeal of rewilding religion is evident in two new books from writers of very different temperaments.
Converts have correctly sensed the “malaise—call it cultural, call it spiritual, call it psychological”—into which our rule-bound and incredibly online Western societies have fallen. Like the questers of the Sixties, they are rebelling against the “air-conditioned nightmare” of modern life, which tends to depression and suicide.
Regarding Abel’s Offering by Scott Fairbanks in Theopolis:
Cain had faith in what he had seen, an old form of multiplying from the ground. Abel had faith in the persistence of a new form of life.
Freedom of Conscience in a Culture of Death by Matthew Hosier in Think:
But that someone should be arrested, receive a criminal record and have to pay a significant fine (the council had initially asked for costs of £93,441 to be awarded) for silently praying is troubling.
Fragments
On Abortion and Female Bodies
Moral progress in the modern era is historically linked to legally recognizing beings as persons that were previously considered to be something less. Now, fetuses and animals that are next on the list to be recognized as such: animals, because they display consciousness, will, character and other faculties of personhood; and fetuses, because they are embedded in the human story in the way that every other human being is.
That will not mean that killing fetuses and animals is always murder, just as killing children is not always murder. It means that the reasons taking their lives must pass the highest threshold of ethical justification. (And regardless of this, the Seventh-day Adventist back-to-Eden ethic eschews killing, even when it is not considered murder.) It means we can no longer treat their bodies as mere property or tissue.
Yet we are stuck and politically divided on these issues. Leaving aside the question of animal rights, in my view, the legal problem with recognizing fetuses as persons is that the human rights framework on which we depend for such recognition assumes that the kind body that can exercise bodily autonomy is the least vulnerable kind of human body, the typical male body, for which there is only ever one person per body. But female bodies can have two people per body. And if pregnancy is two people sharing a body that makes the position that the adult has an absolute right to choose, on the one hand, or that the fetus has an absolute right to life, on the other, untenable.
In a situation where two people are dependent on the same body in ways that make them mutually vulnerable to each other in matters of life and death, how can we say that one has an right to live at the expense of the other's life or that one has an right to choose whether the other lives or dies? This makes no sense to most Americans, as evidenced by their varying degrees of support for limited abortion restrictions. But the human rights framework puts us into a pro-choice/pro-life dilemma because it assumes that the normative human body is the male human body.
In the absence of a better way to think through these problems (let me know if you've heard of one), there isn't a principled reason to never vote for a political party over the issue of abortion. It's not as simple on the principle of self-ownership as was slavery because we don't have a philosophical-legal framework that accounts for two people whose existence is implicated in one body. And therefore I also don't think American Christians should refuse to vote for a party that doesn't make the outlawing of abortion central to its platform, not because it isn't a salient issue, but because we haven't done the theological/philosophical/legal thinking necessary to hold that we can never vote for x party for that reason. I fear that on this issue, loyalty has become a substitute for thought. There are times when morality in politics reduces to a single issue, but abortion is not one of them, at least not yet.
While we haven't found a better framework than human rights to guide our deliberations about abortion, but I think this article points us in a fruitful direction: Let's start with the vulnerability of embodied existence and think about what that does for the nature of human freedom, justice, happiness, etc. I propose that those who are concerned about the status of unborn people should look for politicians and parties who take those issues seriously.
Devotional
The Divorce
Not long before Jesus was born two schools of Jewish interpretation developed in dialogue with each other. They were named for their founders: the rabbis Hillel and Shammai. Among the more serious topics of dispute was the question of justification for divorce. According to Shammai, a man could only divorce his wife for sexual unfaithfulness. But according to Hillel, even a burned meal was sufficient justification for divorce (Babylonian Talmud, 90a.2–3).
Jesus’s friends Matthew and Mark (10:2–12) recalled that Jesus ended up getting drawn into that debate: “And Pharisees came to him [Jesus] in order to test him, saying: “Is it permissible for a husband to divorce his wife for any reason at all?” (Matthew 19:3) Babylonian Talmud has Rabbi Akiba—born soon after Jesus died—arguing along the same lines that divorce is even permissible when a man finds another woman more attractive (90a.4).
“He answered, ‘Haven’t you read that, the one who created from the beginning, “male and female he created them” [quoting Genesis 1:27c]. And he said, “For this reason a man will leave his father and his mother and will attach to his wife and the two will become one flesh” [Genesis 2:24] So they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let not man separate.’
“They said to him, ‘When then did Moses command to give a document of divorce and divorce her?’
“He said to them, ‘Because of your stubbornness Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but it was not that way from the beginning. I say to you now that whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.’” (Matthew 19:4–9).
For Jesus, we can’t understand the Bible’s instructions about practices like divorce until we understand the whole story of God and humanity of which they are a part. But, as Jesus and those around him were doubtless aware, the Bible also tells the story of God and humanity in the Bible as a story of marriage and divorce.
The agreement between God and his people is figured in several places in the Bible as a marriage agreement. It is an agreement in which the less-vulnerable party agrees to care for the more-vulnerable party (for example, Jeremiah 31:32) and the more-vulnerable party agrees to rely exclusively on the care of the less-vulnerable party. Accordingly, when God’s people sacrificed to other gods in exchange for their care and protection, this was considered metaphorical prostitution (for example, Judges 2:17).
When this idolatry, and all the other problems that attended it, got to the place where there was no further remedy, God withdrew his protection, and his people were eventually conquered and deported to other countries. This situation was called exile, and it was figured in the Bible as a kind of divorce:
“And I saw for the very reason that faithless Israel committed adultery—I divorced her and gave her her divorce document—treacherous Judah, her sister, was not afraid. And she also went and was sexually immoral” (Jeremiah 3:8).
But God’s love was not closed to his people forever, in the same prophecy he proposed metaphorical remarriage:
“Return, faithless children, declares the Lord, for I am your husband. And I will take you, one from a city and two from a family, and I will bring you back to Zion” (Jeremiah 3:14).
In the time of Jesus, Jews were living in Zion again, but their kingdom had not been restored. They were wondering whether why the prophecies of a return from exile had been only partially fulfilled and what conditions they had to fulfill before God would finally honor the terms of his renewed agreement with them. It was as if they were engaged, but didn’t know when the wedding would finally happen.
In a story, Jesus compared the kingdom of God to a wedding feast with himself as the bridegroom. Those who should be his friends aren’t interested in going to the wedding, so he invites everyone who might be willing to come, as long as they put on a garment signifying their affiliation with him (Matthew 22:1–13). In another, his arrival to consummate the marriage with his fiancé was delayed, but those who prepare to wait as long as it takes are ready to join the feast when he arrives (Matthew 25:1–13).
By retelling these stories, Matthew indicated that he recognized that his friend Jesus was one who would one day end the exile by uniting God and his people in a faithful and fruitful relationship that restored what God his intended from the beginning. He had seen Jesus announce the metaphorical marriage, and was waiting for the consummation.