Climate Emergency?

What makes me sceptical about the ‘climate emergency’?  Part of it is the catastrophisation that follows every extreme weather event.  Climate cannot be assessed by single events.  It takes 30 years or more before a trend is evident.  Given the mess of Covid where all the variables were well known and absolutely simple compared to the complexity of weather and climate one cannot be sanguine about the certainly that there is an emergency.  Also there is the deep stupidity of the solutions offered, wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles each of which cause massive spoliation of the environment and do not work.  If those scientists are so clever!

'Who was Changed and Who was Dead' by Barbara Comyns

 

They  had it all in Bidford-on-Avon in 1911, first flooding and later the heat wave that lasted from July to September all over the U.K.

1911 u.k. heatwave

The manor house on the banks of the Avon at Bidford that Barbara Comyns was living in at the time was of course flooded up the stairs.  She begins the novel:

THE DUCKS swam through the drawing-room windows. The weight of the water had forced the windows open; so the ducks swam in. Round the room they sailed quacking their approval; then they sailed out again to explore the wonderful new world that had come in the night. Old Ives stood on the verandah steps beating his red bucket with a stick while he called to them, but today they ignored him and floated away white and shining towards the tennis court. Swans were there, their long necks excavating under the dark, muddy water. All around there was a wheezy creaking noise as the water soaked into unaccustomed places, and in the distance a roar and above it the shouts of men trying to rescue animals from the low-lying fields. A passing pig squealing, its short legs madly beating the water and tearing at its throat, which was red and bleeding, and a large flat-bottomed boat followed with men inside. The boat whirled round and round in the fierce current; but eventually the pig was saved, and squealed even louder.

Deny that climate if you like.

Barbara Comyns makes the grotesque normal and the bizarre mundane.  All the adults are a whisker short of sectioning, Grandmother especially who owns three farms and the souls of the family and servants whom she terrorizes like a demented Tsarina.  She is in mortality competition with the duck caller Old Ives whose foible is making wreaths for the departed of the parish using the symbolism of flowers.  For Nana:

OLD IVES sat in the potting shed weaving a wreath of roses and thyme for Mrs. Hatt’s grave—full bloom roses because she was a full blown woman, although she had never had a child. Ives liked to choose suitable flowers for his wreathes. He often planned the one he would make for Grandmother Willoweed:—thistles and hogswart and grey-green holly—sometimes he would grant her one yellow dandelion. Ebin was to have one of bindweed and tobacco plants. Quite often people would die when the flowers already chosen for them were not in season. Then he made a temporary wreath for them, and months later they received the real one.

Will she die before Old Ives?  It would be a happy release for everyone.   Comyns sketches the family and the villagers setting the scene for the bizarre events that the novel culminates in.  It is Grandmother’s rule never to walk on ground that she does not own.  This makes attending a funeral impossible until she hits on a solution:

Grandmother Willoweed paced to and fro with her determined tread. Impatiently she kicked a tortoise that happened to impede her. She gnawed her horny thumb nail as she concentrated on the problem of attending the funeral without passing over ground that did not belong to her. Then her glance fell on the river shining between the fir trees, and suddenly the problem was solved. She would travel to the Church by boat. It would mean that the weir by the bridge would have to be opened for the occasion; but that was nothing. She strode towards the potting shed to give Ives his funeral orders. The old punt could be draped in black, and Ebin and Ives would attend her. She could see herself sailing in state under the bridge, the great black plumes on her hat gently swaying.

 To say that it was a good novel seems fatuous, odd genius defies appraisal.  Her books are maps of dreamtime irrupting into the waking state, too simple and wonderful.

The Problem of Religious Diversity and God's Hiddenness

 

Salience which I have written a note on recently:

salience

has a very interesting etymology.

salient

In other words, what is it that leaps out at you, that impresses by its, to you, obvious prominence.  If you are of a logico-empirical cast of mind then the difficulties presented by those associated problems of the diversity of religions and God's hiddenness will be salient.  This is where the light is and here is the locus of your search though what you seek is in the dark elsewhere.

What do the Marshs miss, what are they not seeing:

diversity paper

Specsavers:

not seeing

They are like the Mulla Nusruddin who was searching under the street lamp for his keys even though he had lost them in the house.  His house was not electrified at the time.

There are several luminaries who are not in the least baffled by diversity, of any kind.  God isn’t hidden, merely that the logico-empirical method can’t find Him.  Shankaracarya does not hesitate in his declaration that the Vedas are part of the superimposition on the Absolute and not the truth.  They are an interim position or a metaphorical projection of the Unknowable, Unnameable. The great modern sage Sri Swami Sadchidanandendra writes:

Thus the means of knowledge called the Veda is ultimateley seen to be an illusion.  And its power to effect release through destroying Ignorance is also an illusion.  And on this basis one might wonder whether direct knowledge of the supreme Self was itself also an illusion, or whether it was real.  If it were an illusion, then the liberation it effected would also be  illusory, and in that case what would be the point in the upanishadic discipline?  If, on the other hand, we say that direct knowledge of the Self is real, then how could real direct knowledge arise from illusory upanishadic texts?

Further down Sri S.S.S. answers this doubt:

Know that the supreme reality is self-evident and self-established.  For superimposed fancies could not sustain themselves for an instant without the supreme reality as their substratum.

So by extension all scriptures are of their nature ways of focusing the mind.  Each has its own internal coherence but the final truth is apophatic and lies under ‘the cloud of unknowing’.

Weather Report

 

Are you doing your bit?  Are you desponding down or up to the correct level?  And if not why not?  The weather forecast is for ‘whew’ or ‘scorchio’ which is accompanied by warning from the met office, the met office, about the danger of a fine day.  You could get sun blotched and the hanky with knots on the corners won’t be enough .  Really.  The country flocks to Spain en masse for temperatures in excess of the 30C. of the forecast.  My father claimed to have heard this conversation at the checkout.

 Did ye go away?

 We went to Spain.

 Where?

 I don’t know.  It was dark when we landed.

Increasing apprehension and dread is the principle function of the media which is why I never buy a paper but check the main stories on the web page.  Yes, still at it.  Farmers must control farting cows. Dutch farmers spray slurry on government buildings.  The inside is sufficiently bemerded.  I blame populism.

But I sense that you are getting bored.  Have a nice day and don’t forget the sun tan lotion/block.

Apology for Raymond Sebond by Montaigne / Salience

 

The most intractablearguments arise from the salience attached to some feature or other of the dispute.  You think X is harmful your opponent thinks otherwise.  Slightly obvious but on analysis perhaps not if you both are on different dialectical planes.  One of you could be empirical and the other metaphysical.  Raymond Sebond offers proofs of the existence of God let’s say on the grounds of contingency or the prime mover argument.  Contra that you may counter that you can easily imagine an endless series reaching back causally contingent for ever.  That’s an empirical point.  No, no, no the metaphysician says ‘I mean the nature of the series as a whole, any series, it might have been, might have not been, might have been different.

To get the salience of this type of argument requires, as has been claimed, a metaphysical sense to enable the enveloping feeling of a contingency that requires support.   Michael, Lord of the Mountain demurs - ‘We are talking about God here which is only a topic because of religion.  Your metaphysics only confuses the general, makes Lutherans of them or contentious Protestants.  Let God work His miracle of faith’ (single quote = putative )

On the same rhetorical plane there is, as it were, shouting from different rooms.  Logos calling unto Pathos and descrying Ethos.  For some the importance of hard cases is paramount for others that is the waffle of a well meaning moral imbecile.  So it goes round and round.

The Death of Blessed Antonio Rosmini

 

Manzoni told his friend: “I hope that the Lord spares you for our sakes, and gives you time to complete the many noble works you have begun; your presence among us is necessary.” Rosmini replied: “No! No! God needs no one; the works begun by God will be completed by the means he holds in his hand, there is no limit to them; they are an abyss into which we can peer and adore. As for me, I am quite useless; I fear I may even do harm; and this fear not only makes me resigned to death, but also makes me desire it.” Manzoni interjected: “For heaven’s sake, don’t say that: what shall we do? Said Rosmini: “Adore, be silent, rejoice (Adorare, tacere, godere).

Follow your destiny by Fernando Pessoa

 

Follow your destiny,

Water your plants,

Love your roses.

The rest is shadows

Of unknown trees.

 

Reality is always

More or less

Than what we want.

Only we are always

Equal to ourselves.

 

It’s good to live alone,

And noble and great

Always to live simply.

Leave pain on the altar

As an offering to the gods.

 

See life from a distance.

Never question it.

There’s nothing it can

Tell you.  The answer

Lies beyond the Gods

 

But quietly imitate

Olympus in your heart.

The gods are gods

Because they don’t think

About what they are.

 

‘Ricardo Reis’ aka Fernando Pessoa 1/8/1916

It may be that simple.  Forego the need to know more, to be better and thus come to true knowledge.

Justin E.H. Smith on Ultrasound pictures of ?

 

Justin E.H. Smith in his substack essay has presented a congeries of irony, paralepsis and willed cognitive dissonance.  There’s probably a name for it in Rhetoric.  What he has done is offer a series of observations and arcane illustrations which run counter to the common philosophical argument for the moral right to abort because there is no value bearing person at issue other than the mother.  Having expressed his dissent, deictically as it were, he then concludes :

I am not saying anything “for” or “against” abortion here. I do not use this space for advocacy. As it happens I think the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade was horribly wrong, and yet another symptom of the decline of participatory democracy in the United States.

Read at:

Justin's Ultrasound

Judith Jarvis Thomson and Liz Harman on Abortion

 

Generally a thought experiment is a way of backing a story onto a desired conclusion.  Judith Jarvis Thomson’s violinist has that science fiction flavor which philosophers love.  It is in every respect a disanalogy, which exploded though it be continues to fascinate.

Actually, if you want to grasp the sort of thinking that is behind the fact of abortion Elizabeth Harman precisely describes its recourse to magic.  Like the pro-life people who never stop talking about the unborn child she recognizes that the intention of abortion, what it is aimed at, is the child that will be born and will demand care. It’s a causal thing - if you want a cold beer you will have to open the door of the fridge to take it. Focusing on just the opening part is pointless, it’s the chilled tin that is the point.  Elizabeth Harman in her Calvinist predestinarian way, similar to the ‘I shall have already been saved’ doctrine, holds that being pregnant , really pregnant, is to expect a child that you hope to bring to term. In the event that you abort then her view is that one shall never have had been pregnant. It was not a pregnancy just a condition that needed medical attention. James Franco I feel your bafflement.

James Franco

Dobbs Judgment: Jubilation maybe.

 

To release the confirmation of the Dobbs judgment at the start of the American rioting season was reckless.  Midwinter would have been better and the fireside would be at home not downtown.

The demonstration of the totalitarian aspect of the permissive society is evident.  There must be no dissent from their view and they will express themselves by riot and mayhem.  Nevertheless it is no time for jubilation or dismay.  The proponents of violence will regroup and begin their propaganda amply funded by corporate money.  Politicians are notoriously malleable by their donors and the cracks of compromise will widen to a  highway in the state legislatures.  Compassion or else.