C.S. Lewis, on Gay Marriage?

"My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognize that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members." - C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 1948 


Actually, he wasn't talking about gay marriage but divorce. But it's still a good out-of-context-yet-still-relevant chunk of knowledge. 

paradoxes of knowledge

"Our civilization has decided that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men... When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the most ordinary men standing round." - G.K. Chesterton


Knowledge requires both familiarity and objectivity.

Knowledge requires that the known subject be familiar to you. You must be acquainted with the person or object you profess to know.

But a belief wouldn't deserve the noble title of "knowledge" unless the process of forming that belief were one of dispassionate evaluation. You must be able to critically evaluate the subject in light of many other things you "know" about the world. It's only by its relation to everything that you can confirm that it "corresponds" to or "coheres" with the world. Only by the vantage point of an objective reference point could you determine this. 

What's so paradoxical about this is that the more familiar you are with a subject or person, the less objective you can be about it. The further you delve into the subject, the closer your ideas of the subject and your reference point align - until the subject becomes the new basis of comparison. "From now on I'll always compare every other girl with you." Conversely, perhaps the best way to ensure objectivity is absolute ignorance. But then, as Meno puts it to Socrates: "...how will you inquire into a thing when you are wholly ignorant of what it is? Even if you happen to bump right into it, how will you know it is the thing you didn't know?" 

So then knowledge requires the balance of two competing values. Some people cast this as the difference between first-hand subjective experience and third-person observation. And some value one more than the other. 

Our criminal legal system, for example, values objectivity more than familiarity. Economists, lawyers, scientists and psychologists scarcely make it to juries, for fear that they, familiar as they are with insurance, legal principles, and evidence, will be too biased to be impartial jurors. We have laymen pore over complex statistical data that they couldn't possibly understand, for the sake of a "fair and speedy trial." Not saying that the trade-off is not worth it, but it is interesting.

I wonder if many of our conflicts, misunderstandings, and weariness is a result of an imbalance between the double-edged virtues of familiarity and objectivity. 

Updates.

1. April 5, 2012: Joy came in the morning when my nephew was born.





That's his foot. 

That's his face. 

Welcome to our family, Nathan. You're lucky You're Indian. We eat curry. 

2. This month the Law School had its annual Diversity Banquet. 



Mad Men, minority edition. 

3. First final of the 2012 fast approaching next Friday. 

In the words of Ned Stark: Brace yourself. Administrative Law Final is coming. 

If I Were To Die In Two Years

I would sleep in the first day. I would brush my teeth but not floss. The first day, I'd eat Jimmy Deans sausage egg and cheese croissants for breakfast, (and lunch, and supper. (I like the word supper because it makes me think of soup.)) 

I'd ask my landscaper to teach me to mow the lawn, then mow the lawn myself from then on. I would commute by motor scooter, except where there are torrential rains or if the commute is longer than 30 miles. I would learn to repair it when it runs down, and refuse to bring it to a mechanic except to ask him to teach me how to repair it. I want to repair things. Not have them fixed. 

I would still complete my JD degree. I would have to enter the practice, but only to repay my loan debts. I would work in juvenile justice. I may have to work weekends. Toward the end of it all I may only have my mornings and my evenings to myself. 

I would call up my friends from middle school and high school and take them out to dinner. Maybe I'll arrange a reunion for them and then vanish like Bilbo. If I do not obtain an invisibility ring I might just stick around and sit in the corners of their conversations and laugh along, contented. I would take my family out to expensive dinners they could not afford and to Broadway shows they will always remember. I would watch my nephew begin to speak and crawl round the edges of kitchen tables. 

I would build a shed for the bike, and place Walden on its bookshelf. (All the rooms in my house will henceforth contain bookshelves.) 

I would argue less with people. No use in arguing with the cell phone company about bills. No intention of saving up for the long run when the run is short. I would sit and listen to people. I would want take the heat and absorb the anxiety of people I love. And I would want to love more people. I would sit with that guy on the corner of 23rd and 5th, and accompany his banjo with my guitar. I would be interested in making new friends, but even more interested in repairing the ones I have now. I want to repair things. Not have them replaced.

I would not get married. No point to start building something only to die and let someone else finish it. To remain single is to lose nothing. To become single is to lose someone, and to lose a large part of yourself as well. 

I would eat salmon the last day. By then, the lawn might be overgrown and the bookshelves I built fallen. The shed roof would be kicking in the wind and the rain because I did not bolt it in correctly. I would shout over the noise and cry over Psalm 51. On the last day I would sleep in. 

Human Rights, God.

Consider the following two declarations: 

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." -Declaration of Independence, 1776 
"All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood." - Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948

The world was a different place in the 1770's, far different from what it was as John Humphrey and his team drafted the Universal Declaration. The first was written in preparation of war. The second was written in the aftermath of war, in reflection of the horrors that happened in Holocaust, Dresden, and Nanking. The first is visionary and revolutionary. The second is almost nostalgic. 

The most significant difference between the two is the first declaration states the foundation of these rights, whereas the second does not. The first founds it upon the worth we have in our being fearfully and wonderfully created, the objects of equal value in the eyes of our maker. The second does not have such high pretensions. The international community, as the Declaration says, "reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights...", because such a faith needed recovering after it was so bruised by the destruction of war. The faith it pieced together, however, was not as lofty as the one Jefferson expressed. It spoke of rights, and in fact imposed such notions of rights upon the will of other countries, but with no more justification than that we are "born" with them. 

Alasdair MacIntyre once argued in his book After Virtue that modern ethics has expunged of its vocabulary any reference to a final purpose or narrative of human life, and has thus retained the form of moral discourse while losing its foundation. Maybe this is an example of that. Maybe as we attempted to salvage a sense of humanity and re-piece our global citizenry, we remembered the religious fanaticism and suppression in Germany, the failure of secular humanism's faith in people and science, and our loss of faith in our own goodness. So in remembrance of these things, we came together to affirm the following: (1) We are equals, as we always were. (2) And we do not know why.