Column 1/09/2023: Christmas and the Divine Creativity

Christmas and the Divine Creativity

Cur Deus homo? 

"Why is God a man?"

So asked St. Anselm of Canterbury, long ago; and so many us are hopefully compelled to ask, for the first or the hundredth or the thousandth time, by the Christmas season. Or perhaps not; perhaps, after a dozen or two or three or five or seven dozen Christmases, perhaps we simply take the angels and the Mother and Child and Wise Men and Shepherds all as givens. Perhaps we have never questioned them at all. Perhaps all our knowledge of Christmas comes from Hallmark Christmas movies. Perhaps we always thought that Christmas was a fictional holiday invented for Jim Carry's How the Grinch Stole Christmas. 

Why is God a man? Why is God a human being? Why is God a child, an infant, held in the arms of his mother, watched over by a stepfather, surrounded by animals and poor shepherds and exotic magicians? Why is God nursing, why is he crying, why is he sleeping? Why is God the descendant of the founding king of a minor Near Eastern dynasty? Why is God a political subject of Gaius Iulius Caesar Augustus? Why does God need a blanket?

Why is God something?

Of course, to even begin to answer the question posed above, we have to have some understanding of what God is; and also (a much harder question) what man is. Anselm had one very good answer to these questions; and I invite you to consider this answer at your leisure. For now, I will merely suggest some thoughts that came to me recently, and which were for me wrapped together inextricably with the event of Christmas. 

Column 08/01/2023: Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is a Crime Against Humanity

Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is a Crime Against Humanity 

Movies are back.

This, it seems, is what everyone is taking away from the unprecedented Barbenheimer phenomenon, which out of nowhere rocketed ticket sales from post-pandemic lows back to blockbuster levels. Two bizarre and bizarrely ill-matched movies released on the same weekend that somehow, instead of undercutting each other, ended up boosting each other, entirely through the power of Internet memes. 

What a strange time to be alive.

There is, really, nothing quite like modern Internet culture, a culture where incongruity and bizarreness and the power of a single ephemeral joke are valued, literally, above all else--and are powerful enough to get millions of Americans out of their homes and into movie theaters. Chesterton in the 1910s said that there had never been a power like the modern press: and he was right. But he hadn't seen nothing yet.

This is supposed to be an essay about the movie Oppenheimer, but discussing Internet memes is not a bad place to start. For what makes Oppenheimer so horrifying, at least for me, is the degree to which it associates and intertwines and simply and precisely treats as the same thing the power of mass media and the power of mass destruction.

Let me start over. I saw the movie Oppenheimer recently, and hated it as I have never hated any work of art produced by human persons before. It is the only film I have ever watched that made me absolutely livid with rage and sick to my stomach and unable to speak coherently for hours thereafter. I am still mad about it.

This is not precisely because it is a bad movie. In matter of fact, it is a clumsily made movie in many obvious repects--but rehearsing these would be largely besides the point. This is very much a film that does what it sets out to do, that makes the point it wants to make, that conveys what it wants to convey, to such a degree as to almost qualify as a genuine revelation. 

That being said, what it aims at, what it reveals, what it piously and intently worships, is, in my humble opinion, evil--and not just any evil, but precisely the evil of our time and place and society, the underlying belief and devotion and preoccupation behind all the most central and mainstream trends and all the most wasting moral and intellectual and social and political diseases of the world since 1945. And the movie loves this, and wants us to love it, too. And that is why I hate the movie.

Column 03/25/2023: The Trouble with (Modern) Physics: Lee Smolin's Time Reborn

In my last essay, I decided that I understood ancient Platonism. In this post, though, I will not pretend to understand modern physics. I will, however, say some things about a recent book from an eminent theoretical physicist and cosmologist, Lee Smolin (who also happens to be my uncle), that I recently read: Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe. 

Many of my posts on here are notable for their sheer cheek in tackling topics, but this one, as they say, takes the cake. If you happen to know about this topic, then please accept this humble disclaimer that I emphatically not a physicist, and take this as what it is: some hopefully interesting comments from a non-expert.

What is the Trouble?

Lee Smolin's task over the last decade or so has been to argue that (1) modern physics and cosmology has reached a crisis point that threatens the bases of the entire field, and (2) only a radical paradigm shift can save it. The former point was argued at most length in his previous book The Trouble with Physics, while Time Reborn attempts to provide a way forward and a sketch of the necessary paradigm shift: an effort that he has more recently followed up on with several other volumes along the same lines. 

This, I think, is the best sort of book to gain some measure of understanding of a field: not a textbook or popularization, both of which typically present caricatured versions of research from decades ago without interpretation or explanation, but a interpretation of a field by an acknowledged master with a clear and obvious angle. 

Of course, such interpretation of a whole field, especially a field as abstract and analytical as theoretical cosmology, cannot help but be philosophy.

I won't defend this claim, which would drive many physicists crazy, but I will, as stated above, comment on the book's conclusions and arguments from the perspective of someone well-versed in ancient and medieval philosophy.