The Church and Secularism - part 1

In the melee that the Catholic church finds itself in the present and its citadel in Europe crumbling the following article makes a last attempt to sae the bastion from obliteration.



The Church and Secularism - part 1

PETER KREEFT

I'd like to address the problem of the decline of Western Civilization in terms of symptoms, diagnosis, prognosis, and prescription.

Sometimes, when people hear me addressed as "Dr. Kreeft," they think I'm the other kind of doctor — a medical doctor — and then, when I tell them that, no, I'm a philosophy professor, they usually say, "Oh, well, I guess we need that kind of doctor too." But today I want to act like a medical doctor, but for the soul rather than the body.


I'm told that in medical school they tell you that there are four indispensable steps to any medical analysis of a patient's condition. And these four steps are the basic logic of all practical problem-solving in every field — medicine, business, detectives, whatever — because, there are two variables: there's something good or desirable and something bad or undesirable. And then there's the cause and the effect. So you can have the bad effect, the bad cause, the good effect, or the good cause. So the four steps of a medical analysis are first, an observation of the symptoms, which are the bad effects; then a diagnosis of the disease that is causing the symptoms — that's the bad cause; then a prognosis of the hope for a healing, which is the good effect; and then a prescription for the treatment, which is the good cause.

All of Buddhism is based on those four points, which Buddha calls the Four Noble Truths. And when one of his disciples once asked him to speculate about other philosophical questions, he refused, saying, "This is all I teach you. I teach you simply that life is suffering, and that the cause of suffering is selfish desire, and that there is hope for ending all suffering by ending its cause, and my Noble Eightfold Path is the way to end the cause." That's a doctor's analysis but applied to the soul rather than the body.

So I'd like to address the problem of the decline of Western Civilization in terms of symptoms, diagnosis, prognosis, and prescription.




Symptoms

Start with the symptoms. If you went to a country and you found that fifty percent of the citizens of that country committed suicide, you would say that that is a very sick country and does not have a very good hope for survival. That is Western Civilization, because the fundamental building block of all societies is families. Families are the fundamental citizens of every society. And divorce is the suicide of a family. When the body and the soul separate, the body dies. When the mother and the father separate, the family dies. So a fifty percent divorce rate, which is what we have in North America, means a fifty percent suicide rate. That's a very, very serious symptom.

If you think that's a stretch, let's take suicide literally. What is our suicide rate? I think it's the fourth highest in the world, directly proportionate to wealth, by the way; the richer you are, the more likely it is you'll think your life is so wonderful that you put a bullet through your head. And William Bennett's index of social indicators tells us that in just fifty years, in the last half of the twentieth century, the suicide rate among teenagers has increased five thousand percent. That's a rather spectacular statistic.

An even more spectacular statistic is our willingness to murder our own unborn children. As Mother Teresa says, "If abortion isn't wrong, nothing's wrong." Our ancestors would literally not be able to believe that.

It used to be that seventy-five percent of the people in England were in church on a Sunday morning. Now it's four percent. It used to be that five percent of Frenchmen identified themselves as atheists. Now it's forty percent.



I have a little story that shows that. I know a doctor who told me that his friend, a dietician, agreed to work in — I think it was Zaire — some African country — for a couple of years for the United Nations because they discovered this tribe that was so isolated that they were still very innocent, and they distrusted outsiders, and it was one of the most primitive tribes left on earth, and the anthropologists wanted to study them before they died out. And they were dying out because their diet was so bad they were killing themselves but they didn't know it. They were very primitive. For instance, their favourite spice was dried flies. Dead flies dried by the sun. And they didn't trust outsiders, black or white.

So this doctor, who I think was from Canada, volunteered to spend, if necessary, two years of his life trying to win his way into this tribe to convince them to change their diet to survive, so that the rest of the world could study them for scientific interests. And he succeeded, and it took a long time, and he persuaded them to change their diet, and their health improved dramatically and very quickly, so everybody in the tribe knew that he spoke the truth and he was trustable and he was the first outsider they loved and trusted, and they were fascinated with him.

So they kept asking him questions about the outside world. And he said that they were like children: they were very innocent and peaceful, but ignorant. He had to explain to them what planes were, and he explained that we could fly to the moon, and they believed that, and that we had weapons that were so great that we could destroy the whole world with them, if some one madman just pressed a button, and they believed that. They believed everything he said. He was like God to them, almost.

But he said there were two things that it was almost impossible for them to believe. They just had no holding places in their mind. One was, that when they asked him, "Do you have wise men in the outside world too?" — sages, shamans — he said, "Yes, they're called philosophers." Well, philosophy means a love of wisdom. So they asked him "What gods do they believe in?" They were aware that other tribes believed in other gods. And he said, well, seventy-five percent of philosophers outside of Catholic universities are atheists. (Four percent of sane people are atheists, but seventy-five percent of philosophers are atheists.) They had no word in their language for atheists, so he had to explain to them that an atheist believes in no god at all. They at first thought that was a joke. They couldn't believe that. Not the good gods? Not the bad gods? Not the male gods? Not the female gods? Not the gods of the earth? Not the gods of the sky? Not the gods of our tribe? Not the gods of the other tribe? No gods at all? There are people in the world who believe in no gods at all? That blew their mind. But he said they were like very precocious children; they were very energetic and they didn't give up easily, so they said, "We must solve this puzzle."

Whenever they had a puzzle, he said, the oldest members of the tribe would get in a circle and they'd all talk together, like bees buzzing together. They had this ability to hear many voices at once. And after a few minutes or a few hours they finally solved the puzzle, and the head tribesman would announce the solution. So that's what they did with the problem of atheists. It took them all day. This was the biggest problem they ever had in their tribe. But at the end of the day, they finally emerged, smiling, and the head tribesman said, "We have solved the riddle of your atheists. We know that you people have these great big concrete buildings that you like for some strange reason, and that you live in these cities. Well, these atheists, as you call them, must have been born in the cellars of these buildings, and never emerged outside of these buildings. They have never seen a bird, they have never seen a waterfall, they have never seen the stars! That is why they are atheists!"

C. S. Lewis wrote, in an article entitled "The Poison of Subjectivism," that "this moral relativism will certainly damn our souls and end our species."



But there was another thing that he told them that they could not believe at all, ever. Literally, psychologically, impossible to believe. And that was that one third of all the children that were conceived in North America were murdered by people called "physicians" or "healers," who were paid by the parents. Their reaction to that was a polite giggle, because they knew it must be a joke and they didn't understand the joke, so they pretended to laugh. They giggled. And he tried to persuade them that it wasn't a joke. And they literally could not believe that it wasn't a joke. So they thought it was a riddle.

So he stayed there for a few months after he told them this, and every day they'd come to him and say, "Can you explain the riddle today?" And he kept saying, "It's not a riddle. It's true." And they literally could not believe that. He said the last sight I had of them was when the plane came in the little dirt landing strip to take me away, the head tribesman came to me and said, "We will never see you again in this world. You must tell us the solution to your riddle today, because we will never discover it ourselves." And he said, "It's not a riddle. It's true." And he said the last sight I had of him is walking from my side by the door of the plane back to his tribesmen who were eagerly awaiting the solution to this hilariously funny riddle, and they were looking with eyes wide open with expectation to hear the funniest joke they'd ever heard in life, and the head tribesman was looking down and hanging his head, and still not believing. One wonders who the primitives are.




We're not having children. For strictly biological reasons, a society cannot survive without having children. Europe is almost lost. In another generation, Europe will be a Muslim continent, because Muslims are the only ones having children. And we're not. They deserve it. It used to be that seventy-five percent of the people in England were in church on a Sunday morning. Now it's four percent. It used to be that five percent of Frenchmen identified themselves as atheists. Now it's forty percent. You can find statistics of our culture's decline and crisis everywhere. Some of them are very clear; some of them are more subtle. One of the subtle but deep symptoms is moral scepticism. No society in history has ever existed without believing in some version of the natural moral law. Ours is the first that officially does not believe in this. It's illegal to appeal to natural law to justify positive law. The United States Supreme Court said so. I think Canada is even farther advanced, like tooth decay can be farther advanced.

Imagine — I don't have a blackboard here — imagine a square on a blackboard, perched on one of its four points. And at the top there is Community and at the bottom there is Chaos. And at the two corners there are two other Cs which are the only arms, the only means that a community has to ward off chaos. They're called Cops and Conscience. The law of the four Cs. Any community, whether it's a human body, or a community of people, or a tribe of animals, survives only if it wards off chaos. Chaos is like death. It destroys, it separates. And for a human community, the only two ways to preserve that community against chaos are the inner cop or the outer cop. And the inner cop is conscience. And cops are the outer conscience. So conscience depends upon a natural law. If there is no natural moral law, if morality is simply positive law, law posited by man, manmade, the rules of the game, then it's not morality. It's just a contract. There's no binding absolute obligation to it. And that's the prevailing theory of morality among intellectuals and among media personalities in our civilization.

C. S. Lewis wrote, in an article entitled "The Poison of Subjectivism," that "this moral relativism will certainly damn our souls and end our species." C. S. Lewis was a British Oxford don. They are not prone to exaggeration. Why "damn our souls"? Well, according to Jesus, you have to repent and believe in order to be saved. How can you repent if there's no such thing as sin? And how can there be such a thing as sin unless there's an absolute moral law against which you sin? Why "end our species?" Because even though this may not biologically end our species, it will spiritually end our species by producing a new kind of creature, a creature without a conscience, Nietzsche's superman. Nietzsche was, alas, a prophet. A conscience-ectomy would be a very serious operation, to put it mildly. C. S. Lewis calls such a person "a man without a chest." He's got a head, he's got guts, but he's got no chest. He's got no conscience, no moral will.

Glimpses of Greatness

An argument that the limerent object may be seen in better light.

The previous blog was on the limerence and how it turned out in its discovery after 30 years and how lone wolf  (LW) perceives the LO (limerent object) having come to know the tip of the LO inceberg.

It may be harsh on the LO to be accorded a onesided view. It is also possible that LW develops the sour grapes syndrome to view the LO in such poor lght. For these two reasons 1) That LW knows only the LO iceberg tip and 2) the LW may have developed the sour grapes syndrome, it is necessary also to look at the positives which LW may have overlooked in the LO.

First of all LO's confession of being an HSP should have alerted LW. He should have taken a more cautious approach in blurting out even though he mentioned the truth. One needs to tell the truth, but not all truth  is to be told.

She cannot be blamed for developing a hypothesis that the LW circumstances made him develop limerence towards her. How is she to know anything of  76- 82 or LW tribulations given LW secretiveness? As she mentioned, 10 years may be too early to develop anything meaningful. That is subjective to LW. ( It may be a good idea to explore LW circumstances of  1976 too.)

Having made her own hypothesis or diagnosis, she tried to suggest medications such as her widow friend which was very clever but disguised in concern, so to say, by way of a test of her own hypothesis. That it is lack of company that gave rise to limerence. LW would have slanted to the widow friend if limerence indeed was caused by LW loneliness. But once again how is she to know the LW psyche? Anyway LW is willing to concede the benefit of doubt to her, that it was indeed her concern rather than covert cleverness. For the record, LW psyche is tuned to greater need for aloneness than to company. In fact company he will have, but more than a proportionate share of his time is and needs to be spent in reflective isolation.

She was kind enough to say good about LW writing skills. Good that she noticed. Better still if she would gather that there are indeed ways of sublimating limerence over many years in more productive ways.

She was kind enough to have offered guidance towards med school eg. Khan academy. Glimpses of goodness such as these would have found a conducive spillway if she had not  discarded religion an important carrier of culture or at least if she had replaced the vacant slot with something positively fresh.
She was forthcoming in how she was tired of the studies and raising of kids and running of family. LW was again insensitive to her in his eagerness to spill the historical account which except for its subjective historic value to the LW, is redundant for the most part.

It is a fact of the professions that the medic is more likely to receive the patient's disease through contamination / infection than the professor likely to be enriched in wisdom through contact with his young students. Anything new, even a new suggestion is seen by the professor in good light, but to the medic anycontact  is a potential contaminant to be carefully handled, if not avoided. Hence the openness of the professor and the relative jumpiness of the medic, which the professor is now enlightened about. 

She reduced it to LIMERENCE

Lone wolf in limerence !!!!!!!!!!

For almost 6 years from 1976 to 1982 lone wolf was suffering from limerence. So says the limerent object. It even extended up to 2012 when it was finally diagnosed. By whom? None other than the limerent object medic!!!

The poverty of lone wolf English is in some way now reduced with lone wolf's introduction to the word limerence. Is it possible? that lone wolf was indeed in love with her? How can anyone know the intense tribulations of the place, the songs and the fragrances that still make one recall the days, if not the limerent object?  To his subjective self  YES. To the medic, who if not careful sees everybody as a potential patient with a disease waiting to be named, NO. She named it limerence probably with the help of her Psychologist colleague.

To lone wolf,  limerence falls on a scale between eros and agape; love in its perfectly selfish form and love that sacrifices self and waits yet travels patiently like a mellow brook. Limerence to him tends towards agape.To the medic, limerent object it might even lead to sexual fulfillment in finding a denoument towards physical gratification. By definition limerence need not end up so...as the next blog will illustrate.

So there starts the difference between the lone wolf and the medic.The happy, strong and responsible lone wolf and the jumpy medic! The medic cannot be blamed. She might by training and practice be conditioned to perceive the physiological and anything that is of the boy girl rolls down to the physical and the physiological.

But cant it be the other way around that the limerent tends to make utmost mellow to the HSP or even anyone and everyone that he sublimes such emotions to the agape end and grows in more desirable ways and outcomes?

Love, romance, limerence, dalliance, resonance, eros are the different shades of the same boy girl possibilities pictured in many works of art and fiction rooted in human life itself. So what did the lone wolf find after almost 30 years of waiting? She has discarded religion and calls herself an agnostic. Lone wolf immediately guessed she is only one step away from discarding others  too and lo and behold she comes out with "why should I love my neighbour? let him mind his own business", in true confirmation of lone wolf intuition.

To him it is like the discarding of civilisation layer by layer much like the discarding of the clothes by the amorous dancer at nightclubs. And what have you finally; the naked limerent object shorn of everything of the good imagined for well nigh 3 decades. Even professing respect many times over found no way in such unexamined condiitoned existence of the Keralite. The limerent has not discarded however, the extreme conditioning of the milieu where anthing boy girl is viewed with suspicion.

The tunnel vision  of an early ambition can do harm to the human being; de-personation and the reducing to the instrumental self. Like a hooded horse. A mother first, wife second and a doctor third. But where is the place for her in this gradation? In all, it is not her but she in relation to the children, husband and to the patient in that order. Not bad if it goes well with a general sacrificial going. But then it would go only with a spiritual self which she has discarded !!


The harm? No harm as long as she is cocooned in her comfortable existence. An existence to the extent that lone wolf knows had never occasion to be tested against tough situations thrown up by life. The biggest disaster that she had encountered may be her fathers' demise.

Her ambition by her own account was to be like her father (a natural Freudian admiration like many young girl's) a doctor. But that has taken a third place. In the order of preference. But has not lost its capacity to treat a person like an object (eg. neighbor indifference). Even her education in the late 80s in the med school serves only as a trophy to scare anyone away with empty threats of having been there in the late eighties. The little Transactional Analysis she learned helps her in no way other than putting others in lesser light. ( I am ok , you are not ok).

I was remembered for the intense competitive feelings that I evoked, because to her I was the only one whom she thought would outsmart her. And as for anyone who knows lone wolf,  he is in competition with none except himself. The psycho analysis? She needs a foil even to be competitive. Conversely, her competition is an outlet for her aloofness and apathy not an enriching of self and the society. If only she would listen to her brighter side!

What does it entail?  A medic's garb that narrows one's mind in a specialised hole of a profession that in its original is noble but from the stories of the med school ignoble. By the time one is in the 2nd year it is easy to forget that one was treated like scum last year but now one is qualified to treat newcomers as scum. So much for education too that still retains the barb but lost out on the refinement that should have come about in so many years to anyone had she not discarded the beliefs and the neighbours. Neither has she replaced the discarding with anything else worthwhile as far as lone wolf intelligence goes.

So we come back to the real question. Was lone wolf in limerence?  Yes of course. Lone wolf regressed her to age 10  and decided to nurture her in alternate history to improving the interior decoration as much as the landscaping. And she could be an intense character in his upcoming story yet to be named. Ther are multiple worlds, science reports. Goes well with the social science observation that there are as many worlds as there are people.

The penal code does not list limerence as a crime, the DSM IV does not list limerence as a disorder. Either way, neither do I require anyone's permission to be in limerence or wishing everyone the best.

My efforts to throw her out of my bones in the proper way is made all the more difficult........Just delayed ......Never mind....

--------------------

And it is good to stand alone.............

And at the end of it all
It feels good to stand alone as always…
After all my emotions are mine
And am under no compulsion either to pretend
Or to keep someone else in good stead.

My laugh is mine
And I don’t own anyone's laugh or the curves
That others attribute also to me and my will...or neglect

And I am not like a patient etherized on a table
To be treated by an indifferent physician
Who is just well landscaped but poorly interior decorated.........  

The God of Small things

The God of Small things As a Mallu (Malayali, Keralite) I had my reservations on reading ‘The God of Small Things’ by Arundhati Roy though it got the booker prize. So I did not bother to read it.. until last month when I grabbed it from the library. It is a typical case of ‘emic’ reading that is I am reading a story about my own people, just as someone studying his own culture. Sometimes it poses problems when you see at a peripheral level and find it difficult to believe that life is either too rosy or too bland or too much of romance or some such one sided extremes. This was what happened with the likes of muttath varky of the painkily ilk. I was fortunate that much of the things that Ms Roy speaks are identifiable to me. The portrayal is typical of the central Travancore especially the Kottayam area. But more than that, what is of literary and universal is that she uses metaphors of a rather personal and the subjective such as the movement of butterfly or a lizard or a dead frog on the roads , everyday scenes that are typical of this part of the world or may be every part of the world. One more step and I found that the mundane and the bizarre and many times the static give a richness of reality that only the native can understand and identify with. It also gives a picture of the social and the physical fabric of the place to even the foreign reader. That brings us to Macondo. Macondo is a city now famous for its place in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ ‘One hundred years of solitude’. I find the style very similar to Marquez and to me the place Aymanam is the Macondo of Kerala. The too mundane and the magical weave in what is now in the literary world called ‘magical realism’. And Roy’s novel stands out for this reason alone. I am not sure whether other critics have found such a parallel. But most of all the title has it captured everything about the little lives of this bizarre creature called Malayali. To my mind he has everything and aptly calls his country ‘God’s own country’ to which he himself has added ‘devil’s own people’. Imagine a people who had never had to go anywhere, never been invaded, had developed the wrong notion that if one has to have then someone else has to lose and then blissfully believes that life is all about drinking and reveling and add to it the never have gone out of Kerala attitude of forced ‘anotherness’ though he is very much like his neighbor..that has been captured in the novel and all those characters like Chacko and Margaret Kochamma are all just foils created by Ms. Roy to highlight this fact and the title comes alive that the Malayali’s concerns are too small and then he lords it over in a miserable life that need not be so……….

HR Fraternity Meet 2012 , 11.1.2012

Text of the Vote of thanks I delivered at the HR fraternity meet 2012. HR fraternity meet is an annual event organised by Rajagiri Centre for Business Studies involving the HR professionals from in and around the city of Kochi, Kerala, India.

Vote of thanks
HR Fraternity Meet 2012


Our distinguished Guests from Western Michigan University, Members of the HR Fraternity, Respected Principal, Faculty colleagues, dear Students and all gathered here..


It has indeed been a valuable and fruitful hour for all of us.

As a profession like any other profession the gap between the academic community consisting of faculty and students and the practitioner community of managers is one of convenience and not real.

While the practicing community would like to sharpen their skills by constantly being in touch with the developments in the field, the academic community would much rather have insights into the daily workings of an organization from the inside so that these insights can be transferred on to the next generation of budding professionals. As the saying goes, theory without practice is barren and practice without theory is blind.

Ideally the two communities of academics and practitioners should be in mutual contact more often. It is this felt need that we are trying to bridge in the institutes’ initiative of HR fraternity meet which is running the third consecutive year now.

If as an educational institution we have a name, it is because of the active co-operation and good wishes of all from the industry and the organizations especially those gathered here today.

Prof. Satish P. Deshpande, Professor of Management & Associate Dean for Operations and Graduate Programs of the Haworth College of Business, Western Michigan University, USA has enlightened us…. Among others things on the origins of HR, its service orientation, related legislations, its relation to business value, transition from expense to resource, need to be confidants as opposed to zombies, long term structural aspects, the problem with the younger generation Y, the intricacies with technology in HR, on the importance of Hr knowing the language of business, on the relation between economy and HR, strategies to manager downturn in his talk . “Managing HR in a Continuing Global Downturn” ……..thanks…

As was introduced, Dr. Howard Dooley is closely associated with our school for the last 12 years. He is the Professor of History and Director of the International Affairs of the WMU.

He has been instrumental in making the twinning collaborations between Rajagiri and Western an ongoing success. To my knowledge rajagiri was one of the pioneers in the concept of the twinning programme,, iin this part of the country..Our thanks are due to him ……


The field work programme of our MHRM students has been widely appreciated by all from the industry and it is reflected in the sincere co- operation from the professionals especially the HR professionals who are gathered here today and many who could not make it to the venue due to other prior engagements. As Faculty in chage of field work at this institution I am first hand witness to the enthusiasm and support that they provide our students every time I get in touch with them for the permissions for our students for a visit or concurrent fieldwork. They have also been acting as off campus faculty guides for our students while our students are with them in their respective organizations.

In turn we have also had requests from various organizations from within and outside Kerala asking for HR students and specifically for HR students who have undergone concurrent field work of our kind. This has all been due to the support of one and all from the industry here. I would like to use this opportunity to thank them all not only for their guidance and support but also for their presense here today….


I would like to specially acknowledge the presence, among the audience, and extend my hearty thanks to

Mr. P. Premchand who is the Vice-President – Corporate HRD of Sud-Chemie India Pvt. Ltd., Fellow of the NIPM and also the General Convenor of the forthcoming National Conference of the NIPM to be held in Cochin 2012 September….; Thank you very much for the presence and best wishes for the national convention.

Mr Saji V. Mathew, Sr. Manager (HR & IR) of Sud-Chemie India Pvt. Ltd. and currently the Hon. Secretary of the NIPM, Kerala Chapter…

Mr. M.S. Sreekumar, Associate Vice-President – HR of Muthoot Capital Services Ltd. and the Chairman of the National HRD Network, Cochin Chapter…and

Mr. P.T. George, Head – HR of FCI Technology Services Ltd. and Chairman of the ISTD, Cochin chapter.


And most especially Mr. PK S Menon and Mr. Paul Paliath for their continued contribution to the profession…



I also would like to thank the management and especially our Principal Dr. Joseph I. Injodey, for supporting and guiding an initiative of this kind.

All our faculty members HR and other wise as also staff, teaching and non teaching have been quite enthusiastic about this event and have co-operated in various capacities and efforts during the last few days. I thank one and all from among them…


I thank the sincere efforts of all students in personally inviting and helping organize this programme.

The benefits of all these efforts and time spared from all of us gathered here ultimately goes to the students who are the future leaders in organisations of various kinds. In that sense we are all today witness and participants to a fraternity meet that goes far into the future.


Thank you all once again.