<![CDATA[Jason Cather

<![CDATA[Jason Cather - Blog]]>Wed, 12 Feb 2025 11:13:31 -0800Weebly<![CDATA[I've Moved!]]>Sun, 02 May 2021 00:50:43 GMThttp://www.jasoncather.com/blog/ive-movedNot much to see here. I've shifted to another blog location.

jasoncather.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=substack_profile
]]><![CDATA[A Priori Politics as a Mentalism Routine]]>Wed, 13 May 2020 07:00:00 GMThttp://www.jasoncather.com/blog/a-priori-politics-as-a-mentalism-routineI.

I want to discuss politics on this blog, but in order to do so I need to develop a vocabulary. I have a meta-political pet peeve which I believe I can name and explain through a discussion of the parlance of magic. In honor of Penn and Teller, I’m going to try to make the world a slightly better place by giving away a secret to a magic trick. This is a big no-no in some parts of the magic world, and so I’m sorry to magicians everywhere. It’s for the greater good...

In addition to this appeal to a kind of utilitarian claim about the greater good, I would offer the following justifications. First, I am confident that almost no one will read this -- so the damage will be minimal. Second, one of the premises of contemporary magic is that audiences are sophisticated enough to understand that there is a trick. Many contemporary magicians are up front about this fact, and it doesn’t ruin the trick because, as the saying goes, the audience wants to be fooled. If you do a good enough job with this trick, it won’t be ruined.

But before I ruin the trick, I thought I might gratuitously exploit modern technology to render a very crummy version of it for your entertainment. It will also help you to get a sense of what's going on when someone pulls this off.

You can experience it in the form of an interactive survey. Take the survey, and when it's time to reveal my prediction (but not before), click on the spoiler button. To get the full effect, don't go back through the trick until you get to the end.

Experience the trick here:
https://forms.gle/NjvSkEBqEqMSjbb19

MY Prediction (no peeking!)

You will select The Yellow Ball

II.

O.K. -- what happened?

This trick works on a principle known as "magician's choice." This is often used in magic and mentalism routines. If you click "back" through the form and make the other choices, you will get a sense of how things play out.

The Magician has an outcome in mind (That you will choose the Yellow Ball), and is working in order to get you to arrive at that outcome. Your actions are being interpreted as your choice. But while you get to act freely, the Magician gets to do the interpreting. If you leave the yellow ball on the table, the Magician will interpret that as your having chosen the yellow ball by leaving it on the table. If you pick up the ball, then you will either choose the ball by handing it to the Magician, or by keeping it for yourself. The Magician already knows that you will choose it. What's up to you is how you end up choosing that yellow ball. The magician words things very carefully -- this skill is, appropriately enough, called equivocation.

II.b [an aside that can be completely skipped]
Mentalists use some of the same methods magicians use: misdirection, sleight of hand, and of course, equivocation. One difference between them is the alleged source of the powers through which they work their effects. If the philosophy of materialism has accomplished anything worthwhile (a doubtful claim!), it has been to give magicians less reason to lie. They are no longer able bill themselves as wizards able to control forces of the other realms, but as rationalists who are wise to the deceits of charlatans, and able to expose them. The Amazing Randi is the patron saint of this shift in the moral landscape of the magic world.

This change is so widespread that I am unaware of any current magicians who present their magic as genuinely paranormal. It is universally performed as entertainment: "I am going to fool you," they say. "I will not show you the mirrors through the smoke, but you can rest at ease that I am not really sawing anyone in half. I cannot really fly, and no mortal can produce something from nothing."
There are, however still those who present themselves as hypnotists, psychics and mediums. (A mentalist might be said to be one of these who admits to being a magician of a certain flavor,) Such performers have a longstanding history of bilking credulous marks and preying on the emotions of lovers and mourners. For only a few hundred dollars, you can communicate with your dead relatives or have a romance charm. In an age of allegedly increasing skepticism, mentalists are able to present their routines under the nebulous rubric of "social engineering." Mentalists too are getting in on the act of benign fooling, rather than taking advantage of the naive. But the malicious manipulation of others for personal gain has been an enduring theme among some practitioners (e.g. Uri Geller, who was exposed by the above-mentioned James Randi).

III.

I want to suggest that something similar is going on with certain elements of our political discourse -- that a kind of "magician's choice" is being used as a rhetorical weapon in defense of something I'm calling a priori politics. A priori politics is what happens when our political interpretation of an event occurs before the event itself.

You have seen this in action whenever someone performs the cliché trick of asking someone from Party A to evaluate a political proposal without properly identifying the author of said proposal. This trick is alternately presented as "What do you think about this plan from Party B [which is actually the latest from party A]?" or, "What do you think about this plan from Party A [which is actually the latest from Party B]?" It turns out that members of Party A detest the former and adore the latter. (N.B.: You have also very likely experienced this personally when you have found that such clever trickery only goes to show what fools those Party A people really are. Clearly no one from the respectable party to which you and I belong would fall so easily for such a thing.)

Partisans engaging in a priori politics do not evaluate a policy on its merits any more than a magician predicts the free choice of a yellow ball from a group of objects on the table. Someone who has decided in advance to like party A and dislike party B, will like anything party A proposes and dislike anything party B proposes. The "gotcha" interview simply tricks partisans into revealing their true methods.

Sadly, there has been no great debunker pointing out the unscrupulous methods of political charlatans. I believe this is In part because, despite rumors of decreasing credulity among the masses, the people who will notice the bogus routine are few. Note that I said, "will" rather than "can." Surely there are plenty who are perfectly capable of spotting nonsense, once they have been alerted to the possibility, and quite a few more who could join their ranks with a bit of proper training. Sadly, there are those who are more-or-less willfully ignorant: the group to which the old saw applies, "You cannot wake someone who is pretending to be asleep."

But the most pernicious fact is that once one sees how the trick is done, it becomes far more profitable to employ it oneself than to expose it. It is much easier to abuse one's neighbors through their ignorance than it is to disabuse them of that ignorance. Honesty is thankless, flattery ingratiating. Mentalism routines, when presented as something beyond entertainment allow the manipulation of others' minds. In the world of politics, mind control is real. It may not take the form of a Manchurian candidate, but it is mind control all the same. Someone who supports the piece of legislation when it's presented as originating from Party A, and hates it when it's presented as a plan from Party B is a mark, and is being hustled, just as surely as if she were at a cold-reading or a seance.

IV.

It remains perhaps to show some examples of the magician's choice applied to political ends, and it certainly remains to say what can be done about it. To the former, I will say that I intend to point out instances whenever I write about them (to which end, I will make use of the characteristic medium of our time and provide links to this post). To the latter, I will say that simply being aware of the magician's choice as a gambit with political force can help to combat some of its abuses. We should make our best good faith effort to root out our own proclivity toward a priori politics whenever we can. Simply by acting in good faith, one puts forth an effort to ward off despair.

I have already given one example of someone making a similar move, albeit not in the context of politics. Further examples will require more extensive analysis. They are likely to be controversial, and are certainly worthy of lengthy discussions on their own. In order to focus (for some definitions of that word) the topic here, I will have to provide a simple promissory note regarding such examples. They are, I promise, forthcoming.

]]><![CDATA[Auditing the Books (2019 review)]]>Tue, 11 Feb 2020 08:00:00 GMThttp://www.jasoncather.com/blog/auditing-the-books-2019-review Again, I will list the books I've read and the books I've "read" this past year. Most of these are in the audio"book" format. I spent a lot of this calendar year commuting to various universities where I was an adjunct. I also watch our youngest son, and so to get some peace and quiet, I opt to wash dishes while Megan gives the boys their baths and catches up with them. This gives me some extra time with the headphones.

1.) Francine Prose: Reading Like a Writer
2.) David Brooks: The Road to Character
3.) Margaret Atwood: Oryx and Crake
4.) " The Year of the Flood
5.) " Madd Addam
6.) " The Heart Goes Last
7.) Frank Herbert: Dune
8.) " Dune Messiah
9.) " Children of Dune
10.) " God Emperor of Dune
11.) Phillip Pullman: The Golden Compass
12.) " The Subtle Knife
13.) " The Amber Spyglass
14.) William Gibson: Pattern Recognition *
15.) " Spook Country
16.) " Zero History
17.) Alexandre Dumas: The Count of Monte Cristo
18.) Victor Hugo: Les Miserables
19.) Ursula K. Le Guin: A Wizard of Earthsea
20.) " The Tombs of Atuan
21.) Haruki Murakami: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage
22.) " After the Quake
23.) " Men Without Women
24.) " After Dark
25.) " Hear the Wind Sing
26.) " Pinball, 1973
27.) " The Elephant Vanishes
28.) " Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
29.) " 1Q84
30.) Gene Wolfe: The Land Across
31.) Jeff Hirsch: Sovereign (it was free with Audible)
32.) Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude
33.) Dostoevski: Crime and Punishment
34.) " The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
35.) " Notes From the Underground
36.) " Devils
37.) Neal Stephenson and J. Fredreick George: Interface
38.) Neal Stephenson: Fall
39.) Robert McKee: Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting
40.) Alfred Besters: The Stars My Destination
41.) Mark Kurlansky: Salt: A Natural History
42.) H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction
43.) Madeline L'engle: A Wrinkle in Time
44.) Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Skin in the Game
45:) " Antifragile
46.) Herman Melville: Billy Bud, Sailor
47.) Malcom Gladwell: What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures
48.) H.G. Wells: The Island of Doctor Moreau
49.) Jules Verne: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
50.) William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying
51.) Lemony Snicket: The Bad Beginning (It was recommended to read with Thomas, and I decided to check up on it to so see if we should read it. Yeah...Probably sometime)
52.) Sylvain Neuvel: Sleeping Giants
53.) " Waking Gods
54.) " Only Human
55.) Edgar Rice Burroughs: A Princess of Mars
56.) " The Gods of Mars
57.) " The Warlord of Mars
58.) " Thuvia, Maid of Mars
59.) " The Chessmen of Mars
60.) Jeff VanderMeer: Annihilation (I think this is the best of the Southern Reach trilogy)
61.) " Authority
62.) " Acceptance
63.) " Borne (I think I like this best of the four VanderMeer books I listened to)
64.) Austin Grossman: Soon I Will Be Invincible
65.) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Classic Sci-Fi Stories
66.) Robert Heinlein: Have Space Suit, Will Travel
67.) Flannery O'Connor: A Good Man is Hard to Find (and Other Stories)
68.) Neil Gaiman: American Gods
69.) Aristotle: Nichomachean Ethics *
70.) Mill: Utilitarianism *
71.) Kant: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals *
72.) Dante: Inferno (Translation by Anthony Esolen)*
73.) Marshal McLuhan and Quinton Fiore: The Medium is the Massage *
74.) Graham Greene: The End of the Affair *
75.) Kierkegaard: The Present Age (not quite a book, I realize) *
76.) Augustine: Enchiridion *
77.) Cicero: On Obligations *
78.) Corinda: Thirteen Steps to Mentalism *
79.) C.S. Lewis: The Great DIvorce
80.) " The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe * +
81.) " Prince Caspian * +
82.) " The Voyage of the Dawn Treader * +
83.) " The Silver Chair * +
84.) " The Horse and His Boy * +
85.) " The Magician's Nephew * +
86.) " The Last Battle * +
87.) " The Screwtape Letters * ^ %
88.) " The Four Loves
89.) " Miracles
90.) " Out of the Silent Planet
91.) " Perelandra
92.) " That Hideous Strength
93.) J.R.R. Tolkien: The Fellowship of the Ring * +
94.) " The Two Towers
95.) " The Return of the King %
96.) Brian Selznick: The Invention of Hugo Cabret * +
97.) Ted Chiang: Exhalation %
98.) Herman Melville: Moby Dick (re-listen)%
99.) Kenneth Greene: The Wind in the Willows * +
100.) Eiji Yoshikawa: Musashi
101.) David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas

% = indicates a book that I was in the middle of reading when the somewhat arbitrary marker of the new year occurred.

* Indicates that the medium was an actual book (rather than, say, an audio "book")
+ Indicates that the book was read aloud as part of our family's bedtime reading
^ Indicates that the book was read aloud with Megan.

]]><![CDATA[Consider the Stars (part 1 of n)]]>Tue, 03 Dec 2019 22:08:58 GMThttp://www.jasoncather.com/blog/consider-the-stars-part-1-of-nI recently found these notes, which I wrote on 18. July, 2016

There is an ancient argument for the existence of God. For many centuries it worked to produce pious men and women. Even brilliant thinkers were swayed by its simple clarity. The argument runs thus:

Consider the stars.

This alone was enough -- once to persuade the souls of men that there was an author of sublimity. But tonight, I look upon the night sky in my city -- which I have loved -- and see the glow of growth: reddish, and when there is fog, possessing its own beauty.

...But this is not sublimity. The city lights block out the stars. To be sure, the brightest still shine through. But not the milk-like swirls that inspired our home-galaxy’s name. Not the countless pinpricks that St. Thomas took for angels -- that Aristotle took for holes in the firmament. We stand in an ocean of divine light, and when our star dips below -- when our horizon lifts above it -- we could see this light leaking into our dark world as though the heavens were a gauze through which we peered toward God.

Consider the stars.

That this would suffice becomes clear to those who have been atop secluded peaks. But in the city, it is another matter.

My thesis is that the language of our time has a similar effect -- destroying other arguments. Not because they annihilate the stars themselves, but because they obscure them.

In the 1990s, there was a massive outage in Los Angeles. Its denizens called the police -- afraid of the glowing clouds. We know that they were being invaded -- by the angels.

]]><![CDATA[The Madness of Jason Cather]]>Wed, 14 Aug 2019 17:08:10 GMThttp://www.jasoncather.com/blog/the-madness-of-jason-catherI recently received an e-mail from someone asking about "how to get someone to counseling." This person knows that I have a history of mental illness, and that I am open about this, and that I am interested in talking to others about it, and was hoping I could help them with someone they care deeply about.

In the interest of sharing my thoughts with anyone whom it could help, I decided that I might share that account here. Eventually, I want to reflect on why I have chosen to be as open as possible about my experiences, even though people over-sharing online gives me the creeps, and I loathe the feeling that I'm acting self-important.

To anonymize the content as much as possible, I've opted for "they/them" as a gender neutral, third person singular pronoun. My middle-school grammar teacher was the amazing James Goodson, and because of him I know that these words are actually plural. Unfortunately, I have no other elegant way of respecting privacy.
Anyway, here's the story:

You asked, "how do you get someone to go to counseling?" There isn't a way to get someone to go to counseling when they don't want to, short of the kind of quasi-kidnapping that I associate with substance abuse interventions. That's probably a bad idea for you, so let's talk about what you can do. Counseling is a great idea, and probably everyone should do some version of talk-therapy, even those people "without any problems" (whatever that might look like). I have a grad-school friend who says that if we were professional athletes, we would of course go to physical therapy, and we would have a physical therapist to keep us healthy. As people using our brains all the time, it seems very reasonable to do the same for our mental health. It must be frustrating for you to see someone in obvious need of help, but unwilling to take the necessary step. It may help you to know a few things.

First: This person is unbelievably lucky to have family who is open to the possibility of their seeking counseling. It's a major hurdle that many people have to get over. Since our families play such a central role in our lives, it stands to reason that any examination of our lives will be wound up with our families. That fact was difficult for my grandparents, who raised me, to accept. They wouldn't go to counseling with my mom, and they wouldn't go with me. There is (sadly) a stigma attached to it, and it's hard to get over that step. So keep up the good work (difficult though it may be) of supporting them!

Second: It may not make sense to you that they don't want to see anyone, but maybe I can help you to understand what it might be like. I am not this person, and everyone's experience is unique and blah blah blah. But I can tell you what it was like for me. This story has helped several of my friends and acquaintances as they or someone they know and care about began treatment for mental health issues. I believe it to be part of my calling to help others by sharing my story with others, so I want you to feel free to share any part of this with any- and every-one whom you think it might encourage. One important qualification is that I mention the medications that did not work for me, but that is a statement about me, not about the medications. They may work very well for others. Everyone's brain chemistry is different, and you kinda have to figure things out by trial and error. Make sure that no one walks away from this story thinking, "oh, that medication is bad." It isn't "bad" -- it just didn't work for this one guy this one time. If a doctor recommends a medication, work with your doctor and see if it helps!

One day in 2002, I started weeping when I saw overcooked broccoli in the cafeteria, and I began to contemplate suicide -- in the abstract (not, "I want to kill myself," but, "I wonder whether that balcony would hold my weight" or "if I killed myself, I wonder which of these assholes who won't even speak to me will cry and pretend to be traumatized, and how long it would take for everyone to get back to their normal lives"). At one point, my cousin came to visit me in my dorm room, and discovered a dozen or so bottles of urine in my closet from when I couldn't even pull myself out of bed to go down the hall to pee, let alone to the dumpster to throw them away afterward. I realized that this was not normal, and that I was not in a good place. Actually, I only realize how bad this sounds now -- years after the fact.

I had always been a little freaked out at the prospect of taking mind altering medication. I was concerned about "turning into a zombie" where my thinking became permanently impaired or that my personality would be so altered that I wouldn't be myself anymore. But nothing impairs one's ability to think clearly as much as being dead. And since I was thinking about killing myself, it seemed that I wasn't permanently attached to being who I was. I figured that death would be a certain end to being myself, and a medicated brain is an unknown. I might be fine, or I might be someone else entirely. If I turned out to be fine, that's a win. If I turned into someone else, it wouldn't be any worse than dying, so it's at least a wash, but it may even be a little better. So I made the decision to pursue medication.

There's a fascinating book about the natural history and philosophy of medication of this kind. It's called Listening to Prozac, and it helped me think through a lot of my concerns about medication. I did most of this thinking after the fact.

In 2002 I began treatment for depression. I was prescribed Zoloft, and started feeling better almost immediately. I took it for just under two years. Eventually I felt well enough that I started to care about side effects. I weaned myself off of the meds, and felt okay for a few months. When I went back on Zoloft, it had less of an effect and the side effects were worse. This is one of the most frustrating parts of the process. It reminds me of how my uncle used to say, "they call it practicing medicine for a reason." That's very true, but I was willing to experiment because it seemed better than nothing.

I began to see a psychiatric specialist, and she prescribed me Wellbutrin. I felt great! I started running a mile every day. I turned in an assignment an entire week early. This was the only time in my entire college career up to that point that I hadn't turned an assignment in late. Then I started yelling and breaking furniture. I got into an argument with Megan about nothing -- because it wasn't actually an argument, it was a manic spell (I believe that it was technically hypomania). It turns out that I did not have clinical depression but bipolar disorder. One way bipolar disorder is frequently diagnosed is iatrogenically: it looks like depression, you give someone an anti-depressant, and they go into a manic episode. This means that they have bipolar disorder. You now have to stop the anti-depressant and put the patient on mood stabilizers. They call it practicing medicine. This is another major source of frustration for many people who have mental illness, mood disorders, or whatever else. It's also very frustrating for the people who love them, because you want the silver bullet that will make everything better. It helps me to remember that the silver bullet exists literally nowhere. If your car makes a funny noise, the mechanic may have to try several things to figure out what it is. And people built cars -- we have the whole instruction manual for cars! We're reverse engineering the manual for our brains. This goes for every thing that is hard: playing a piano, wrestling, painting, writing poetry, public speaking. All of it involves trial and error, and it's almost never a success on the first try. It just feels different when it's your brain. So, if treatment is not an immediate success, don't get discouraged, and don't reject treatment as useless.

After my manic episode, my doctor gave me a prescription for Lamictal. It's used as a mood stabilizer for bipolar disorder and as an anti-epileptic drug to prevent seizures. This was right before I graduated college. When I graduated, I no longer had health insurance, and my job did not have health benefits. I had to pay for it out of pocket, which was $300 per month for a very low dose. The most common dosage would have been over $1000 per month. The good news is that It's now generic, and so only costs 1/10th of that, and Megan's job provides insurance for our family.

This is another major point of frustration for people with this kind of condition. It's expensive to not die. My current medication is great. It works for me, and I have no complaints about it, but I have to take it every single day. If I miss doses, I feel it leave my system, and if I reintroduce it, I feel that too. When the level of the chemical in your blood changes, you start to get side effects. I have forgotten to take it a couple of times, I once ran out for a day and a half, and I once had to stop taking it for three days because I was worried about a possible reaction to it. When your brain chemistry changes, things can get weird. You can feel dizzy or light headed. I get absent-minded, and feel like I'm daydreaming. If I forget my meds at home, I might not be able to drive back from work that afternoon, and I definitely won't be able to do anything productive the next day. There's even a rare, but potentially fatal allergy some people have to the medication. All of this is worth it, though, because the alternative is worse. But in exchange for this risk and expense, I get the most wonderful thing -- I get to be o.k.

In my experience, first personally, as well as through conversation with others, feeling o.k. is actually a challenge for folks with mental illness. I know of several people who were on the same medication that I take. It worked great for them. They had little to no side effects, and they were able to get out of bed and lead normal, healthy lives. They felt perfectly fine, the way a normal healthy person would feel throughout a normal day. Then they suddenly stopped their medication because they claimed not to feel any different. My cousin's ex-girlfriend has the best characterization of mental illness that I've ever heard: "I don't understand why it is that when I take my meds everyone else stops being a bunch of stupid assholes." I share this sentence with everyone I can, because it is so telling about why we don't get help in the first place, and why we sometimes stop doing the very things that are actively helping. It doesn't feel like the problem is with me. I feel exactly the same as I did before I ever got on medication. When someone says something unkind, it might hurt my feelings. When I encounter something unfair, rude, or obnoxious, I might get angry. When someone is behaving in a foolish or unreasonable manner, I get frustrated. And my response is usually in proportion to the stimulus. But somehow, when I swallow these pills, the world becomes more kind, just, and reasonable than it was before. It's truly bizarre.

Early on in my treatment, a college friend asked me if I had forgotten to take my meds that morning. I checked, and sure enough, I hadn't. I asked how he knew, and he said, "you're much more difficult to talk to today." My other friends and family have also assured me that this is the case. But it doesn't feel that way from inside. I know it's the case. But I do not and have not ever felt like it's the case. This is really hard for everyone I know to understand. It's even frustrating for me when I have to interact with others who have the same condition I have. Here's what I tell people to imagine:

You go to a party, and there are fifty or so people there. Everyone starts having terrible fits of coughing. No one can finish a sentence without coughing. Someone comes up to you and offers you a glass of water, and then starts coughing uncontrollably. Someone else, hacking and gasping, offers you a lozenge. Finally someone says in a raspy voice, one word at a time, between coughs that you should leave the party and go see a doctor right away.

I would expect that this might be one of the weirdest experiences of your life. Now if you replace coughing with being in a bad mood, you get an idea of the experience. And being in a bad mood isn't helped by being asked about your bad mood, either. Imagine that you are having the best day ever. You're happy. It's sunny. Birds land on your shoulder and start tweeting Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Da. Then the first person you meet asks, "What's your problem?" Then the next. And the next. How many times would this happen before you start to actually have a problem? The first nineteen years of my life were like a constant whats-your-problem-party. For nearly two decades, now, I have been taking these magic pills with my coffee every morning. Their size, color, and number have changed over the years. But people have stopped being stupid assholes, and they've stopped asking me what my problem is.

I'm afraid that this may sound bleak to you. I hope it doesn't. It doesn't have to be. But you should be prepared for frustration. Getting someone to seek counseling or to try pharmacological treatment is like getting the person at the party to drink a glass of water or take the lozenge. It's a tough sell, and likely frightening and confusing for that person. Fortunately, we've come a long way in the past few decades. In the early days, the anti-depressants were something called MAOIs. If you were taking them and ate blue cheese or dark chocolate or red wine, you would die. But that's an upgrade over being tied to a chair and shocked, or dunked in ice water, or being placed in a hut filled with smoke and having strange things chanted at you to expel the demons. This is the best time there's ever been for fiddling around with your brain chemistry (with appropriate supervision).

It helps an unbelievable amount to have people who are encouraging (not pushy), rather than dismissive of the enterprise. You also have to have a bit of clarity and openness to trying it out. Ultimately you will never be able to convince anyone that they are the one who needs to change. Just imagine if they thought it was you who had the problem -- as hard as it would be to convince you right now is how hard it will be to convince others. I think this is in part because there isn't any one person who needs to change. All of us could use work. But we can do our best to help others to be open to it. I don't know how to tell you to do this, other than patiently and lovingly. When I'm having a hard time, I want nothing more than for Megan to know just the right thing to say and do, and she never quite does, and it's very frustrating for her sometimes. But there isn't any thing that is "just the right thing." And it's not her job to try to do the impossible. It helps when she is concerned and caring enough to put up with me and help me to have some clarity on things.

I did think of one more thing. I have to keep reminding myself of it constantly. Like confessing sins, this sort of realization can only be done by oneself. If performed on another's behalf it is presumptuous to the point of giving offense, and is often counter-productive. So this is something about me, that I can tell, not something to be told to someone else about themselves. It's a joke Grandpa used to tell. Like Woody Allen in the opening of Annie Hall, most of my understanding of the world comes in the form of jokes.

A man's wife calls his cellphone. She tells her husband to be careful coming home - some maniac is driving the wrong way down the interstate. He responds, "It's worse than that. Everyone I've passed on the interstate is driving the wrong way!" When I realized that I'm the husband, I became more willing to try to fix things.

I hope this helps in some way.

]]><![CDATA[The Madness of Odysseus]]>Tue, 19 Feb 2019 21:00:47 GMThttp://www.jasoncather.com/blog/the-madness-of-odysseus

He broke off and anguish gripped Achilles.
The heart in his rugged chest was pounding, torn…
Should he draw the long sharp sword slung at his hip,
Thrust through the ranks and kill Agamemnon now? --
Or check his rage and beat his fury down? -Homer (Illiad Book I; Robert Fagels, Transl.)

I'm a boss-a** b****, b****, b****, b****, b****, b****, b****
I'm a boss-a** b****, b****, b****, b****, b****, b****, b****
I'm a boss-a** b****, b****, b****, b****, b****, b****, b****
I'm a boss-a** b****, b****, b****, b****, b****, b****, b****
I'm a boss-a**...

-Nicki Minaj

I.
A dear friend once described the willfully ignorant to me: “It’s as though they had super-powers!” It is strange, indeed to think how one can believe what one knows not to be so. It is somewhat akin to flying. Upon reflection, it is perhaps even more to be desired. For flying is sometimes dangerous, and one must leave the comforts of home. To be able to believe oneself to be flying without leaving the living room -- why, that affords all of the delights of both!

And so it is that I am amazed when I have a conversation with people who are allegedly educated and are able to convince themselves of anything, regardless not merely of its truth, but regardless also of their own belief that it is true! The context of this description on the part of my friend was a conversation the two of us were having with a third party. My friend was (and is) a Christian. I was not (although I believed in God -- or rather, I believed that I believed). The third man was neither a Christian nor a theist, but a prospective graduate student interested in something called “theory.” Theory is much like philosophy, lacking only the earnest desire to pursue wisdom.
Borges tells us that etymologies do not tell us what a word means, but rather what it no longer means. The etymology of theory comes from a Greek word for speculate and spectator. Thus, theory no longer means thinking about what one observes. It is not an attempt to understand what one takes as given by experience. Rather, theory is an attempt to decide what experience one wishes to have based upon what has not been given in order to avoid understanding the object theorized.

This young man’s theory had convinced him that there is no evidence for the beliefs my friend held about Christianity, or those which I shared with him about the existence of God. The young man believed this because evidence would be something that is given, and could be observed. And without theory, once evidence is observed, we would need to consider what it means, and try to form beliefs about the world. Worse still, one may discover that beliefs one previously held do not stand up to evidence. That is, one might discover oneself to be wrong. But theory had bestowed its blessings upon this young man, and he was in no danger of discovering anything so dreadful.

Helpless in the face of theory, my friend made a final attempt at communication. He asked the young man, “Am I wearing shoes?” The reader will perhaps believe that she is in no place to answer the question at this point, lacking an observation of my friend’s feet. But this is only because she suffers from perhaps too much philosophy, or at the very least from a dearth of theory. The young man was already adept at his theory, and promptly responded, “There is a perspective according to which you are wearing shoes. But there might also be a perspective according to which you are not. It would be unfair to judge between two such equally valid perspectives, and so I can only say that I don’t know whether you are wearing shoes or not.”

II.
This truly baffled me. It seemed silly that someone who is able to utter words with multiple syllables while walking and avoiding being run over by Chicago traffic cannot glance down for a moment to determine whether my friend is barefoot. Sillier still is the notion that there is a perspective about the matter or that all perspectives are somehow equally valid. I confessed my confusion to my friend, and he explained it me thus. Had the young man admitted that my friend was in fact shod (as he was), the man’s very world would have begun to collapse. For at this moment, there would be something true that even theory cannot explain away. This would have meant that another is not simply entitled to an uninformed opinion about the existential state of my friend’s shoes. This would mean that there is a fact of the matter. And facts of the matter are like any pests: where there is one, there may be others.

You, dear reader, may not be bothered by the possibility of a fact or two milling about in the world. But I assure you that nothing is more dangerous to any theory than certain facts. But the fact that there are facts will suffice to put an end to theory itself. Theory can offer a critique of power dynamics in the form of a perspective under which we can fly, but which has been marginalized by the dominant paradigm. This is every bit as good as flying itself, until we find an open window.

If we are forced to abide in the realm of fact, those brutes -- then those facts will impinge upon our minds until we are convinced that something is true, or else tease our curiosity until we try to discover those truths. And that truth will erode our will until we believe it, and perhaps we would decide to act accordingly. Soon, we may even begin to consider evidence! And if there is evidence for (or against) claims we dislike, such as the existence of God or the resurrection of Christ, we may find ourselves in the shameless position of changing our minds about the matter.

This young man was able to see down the road -- far enough to see all of this coming. Shoes...truth...Christ. Clever young minds who are capable of seeing where the path leads are capable of avoiding that path if the destination is a place they do not desire to go. I have not been clever enough to avoid this path. I could not see as far into the distance as the young man. I believed in the shoes, and so I believed there was truth, and was ready to admit as much. I was not clever enough to avoid this path, and so it would eventually lead me to a belief in Christ before I could get away. My impoverished education did not provide me with enough theory to escape the force of reality when it came to believing the sorts of things this young man wished to avoid.
The foresight to predict the consequences of one’s beliefs before holding them is a powerful tool. When combined with the ability to choose one’s own beliefs at will, it means you need never about discovering that you were wrong.

III.
Years later, I found myself having a conversation that reminded me of this last one. This time, the parties were a young woman (an atheist) and a different friend (also a Christian) and myself. By now I had worked out the commitments of the beliefs I could not force myself to reject, and so I too was a Christian. Our conversation was about art. My friend maintained that there is beautiful art, and thus there is beauty. The young woman maintained that any allegation of beauty is simply a matter of preference on the part of a subjective, limited perspective. She was another student of theory. As you know, according to theory, all perspectives are limited and thus equal in merit.

One of the delightful things about theory is that there is but a single rule of inference, and it allows for such conclusions. My logical training is unfortunately old fashioned, and thus I am not skilled in the use of the logic which belongs to theory. The best formulation of the rule that I have been able to derive is the following:

Any conclusion can be asserted, provided that it is preceded by another assertion and the word “therefore.”

This inferential rule is sound and complete with respect to theory, and is terrifically consistent with believing whatever one wishes. The proof of this is left to the reader as an exercise in theory. It is worth remembering that the first assertion, or the premise, is not restricted to merely dubious assertions. If it is necessary to do so, true statements can also be admitted as premises when they are available.

The young woman, a student of theory and thus familiar with theory’s rule of inference, did not believe any art was more beautiful than any other. Since something is only beautiful according to a perspective, it cannot be true that it is beautiful. It can only be “beautiful according to X.” Thus nothing is better, or preferable to anything else. A quick bit of theorizing will reveal that this must be the case. If this assertion weren’t true, there would be things that are untrue, which would mean that some things are less preferable than others. But we’ve already established via theory that something is only preferable according to a perspective. And since any perspective is equal to any other perspective, therefore (per our rule of inference), the statement “X is truly beautiful” is false.
This seemed odd to my friend (who also was a poor student of theory). He asked a question in full sincerity: “Is [the music of] Nicki Menaj equal in beauty to [the music of] Bach?” The reader, having been introduced to theory will know that the answer was, “there is a perfectly valid and equal perspective according to which it is equally beautiful.” I confess that I have done my best to theorize this point. But alas, my skill in theory being weak, there are many things that I cannot make myself believe. One of them is that the two passages which open this essay are equal in value, merit, or beauty.

But like the young man of theory in the first encounter, this young woman was able to see what lay ahead on the road -- where my theoretical nearsightedness would have rendered it merely a hazy outline.

I am impressed at her ability, not merely to see so far ahead, but to bite the bullet of affirming the ouvre of Minaj. This ability is especially impressive when one considers that the reason for affirming Minaj stems ultimately from her commitment to the aims of feminism. This appears to me as madness, and I find myself unable to know how to respond. Augustine observed when contemplating the nature of time that the hardest positions to explain or justify are often the very ones we find the most obviously true. So it is to me that the melodies of Minaj are of less value than those of Bach, and her lyrics of less value than the words of Homer.

Speaking of Odysseus and insanity...

IV.

... But he, not wishing to go to the war, feigned madness. However, Palamedes, son of Nauplius, proved his madness to be fictitious; and when Ulysses pretended to rave, Palamedes followed him, and snatching Telemachus from Penelope's bosom, drew his sword as if he would kill him. And in his fear for the child Ulysses confessed that his madness was pretended, and he went to the war.

-(Apollodorus, Epitome E.3.7)

In a sudden flash, it occurred to me that the madness of the young woman and that of the young man reminded me of something. Surely, I thought to myself, no one is so truly mad as these two. And then I remembered Odysseus’ ploy to avoid fighting in the Trojan War. In the story I remembered, he went into his field, tilling up the crops that were growing and sowed salt into his fields as though it were seed. No one in his right mind would do this. Clearly, Odysseus had lost his mind, and was unfit to perform the service he had pledged to his king. Palamedes took the infant Telemachus and placed him in front of the plow. When Odysseus stopped to avoid killing his precious son, he showed that he was merely feigning his insanity.

Each time I have encountered theory, I have sought after something to place before the plow. I have sought something that will reveal the apparent madness of my interlocutors to be a feint.

I have failed.

]]><![CDATA[Course Websites]]>Thu, 13 Dec 2018 16:30:58 GMThttp://www.jasoncather.com/blog/course-websitesI've been experimenting with Google Sites to make websites for my courses. Here is my first go:

sites.google.com/view/cather-religion-media

I'm still updating it, but I have to teach, so I'm on the run.]]><![CDATA[Updates to my Auditing and a List of Book-Books]]>Tue, 11 Dec 2018 21:05:24 GMThttp://www.jasoncather.com/blog/updates-to-my-auditing-and-a-list-of-book-books
UPDATE:
I went on a Saul Bellow kick:
65. The Adventures of Augie March
66. Herzog
67. Mr. Sammler's Planet
68. Humboldt's Gift
and then a Michael Lewis stint:
69. The Big Short
70. The Undoing Project
71. Liar's Poker
72.* Don Quixote (Part One) -- I ran out of time before I could finish part two, and the Chicago Public Library repossessed the book. Thanksgiving break was great, but it meant less time in the car, and so less time with El Caballero de la triste figura.
73. Francine Prose: Reading Like a Writer (this is, apparently, her actual name)
74. David Brooks: The Road to Character
75. Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment

-----

The books that I read this year in actual book format were mostly for the classes I was teaching or else for bedtime reading with my son (I will let you guess which is which).

1. Genesis
2. The Gospel of Mark
3. The Acts of the Apostles
4. Job
5. Augustine: Enchiridion (the Handbook on Faith, Hope, and Love)
6. Plato: Apology
7. Crito
8. Euthryphro
9. Machiavelli: The Prince
10. Robert Bolt: A Man for All Seasons
11. Aristotle: Nichomachean Ethics
12. Cicero: On Obligations
13. Kant: Grounding of the Metaphysics of Morals
14. Mill: Utilitarianism
15. Aquinas: Treatise on the One God (Which is really just a longer section of his Summa)
16. Alice in Wonderland
17. The Invention of Hugo Cabret
18. The Wind in the Willows
19. The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe (the CORRECT way to begin the Narnia series)
20. Prince Caspian
21. Voyage othe f Dawn Treader
22. The Silver Chair
23. A Horse and His Boy
24. The Magician's Nephew
25. The Last Battle

]]><![CDATA[Auditing the Books]]>Sat, 20 Oct 2018 14:32:45 GMThttp://www.jasoncather.com/blog/auditing-the-booksMy Audible account says that I've been using it since October of 2016. It feels like less time than that, but as one gets older, one's sense of time speeds up. I started listening because a YouTube channel I follow was sponsored by Audible. I thought it would be cool to support the channel, and at the same time I could possibly better myself in some regards. A few months ago, I discovered that I could also borrow audio-"books" from the Chicago Public Library. Things were almost in place for the listening binge I've been on for the past two years. The next puzzle piece came during a party where a friend of a friend who studied economics talked about listening to podcasts at double-speed (hey, it doubles the ROI of your time!). The final piece has been my lowly adjunct lifestyle, in which I spend at least five hours per week in the car. This gives me lots of time to listen, and I've been going through my list at something more closely approximating the pace some of my friends do their actual reading.

So in an effort to keep track, I'm putting together a list of the "books" I've been auditing (I just can't bring myself to call it reading, so maybe this will catch on). I had a short chat with my wife's grandmother, who has also discovered the wonderful world of audiobooks, and we agreed to send each other our respective lists. Of course I had her list in my hands three days later, which was sometime in August? Here, then (finally) is my list:

In the last months of 2016, I listened to three audiobooks:

Alastair Smith and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita: The Dictator's Handbook
Nick Bostrom: Superintelligence
Some other popular nonfiction book that made so little impression on me that I don't even care about looking it up. I later traded it, once I learned that you could do that. I traded it for:
Ernest Cline: Ready Player One

2017:

Ernest Cline: Ready Player One (again)
Neal Stephenson: Anathem,
Quicksilver (Baroque Cycle),
King of the Vagabonds,
Odalisque
The Confusion,
Solomon's Gold,
Currency,
The System of the World,
Diamond Age,
Cryptonomicon,
Reamde,
Seveneves,
Zodiac
Hesse: Glass Bead Game
Tolstoy: War and Peace
Octavia Butler: Blood Child and Other Stories
Cixin Liu: Three Body Problem,
Dark Forest,
Death's End
Brahm Stoker: Dracula

2018: (Which started in roughly the order I listened to them, but then became a mishmash because I'm using multiple platforms)

Neal Stephenson: Anathem (again),
Quicksilver (again),
King of the Vagabonds (again),
Odalisque (again),
The Confusion (again),
Solomon's Gold (again),
Currency (again),
The System of the World (again),
Snow Crash (this was actually my first exposure to Stephenson, and I actually read the book-book, but I wanted to round out my audio collection of Stephenson's oeuvre),
The Big U,
Rise &Fall of D.O.D.O. (coauthored with Nicole Galland),
The Mongoliad, Book 1 (coauthored with Greg Bear and Friends)
The Mongoliad, Books 2 (coauthored with Greg Bear and Friends)
The Mongoliad, Book 3 (coauthored with Greg Bear and Friends)
Cixin Liu: Three Body Problem, (again)
Dark Forest, (again)
Death's End (again)
Phillip K. Dick: Man in the High Castle,
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Dostoevsky: Poor People,
The Brothers Karamazov
Paul Strathern: Dostoevsky in 90 minutes
Melville: Bartleby the Scrivener and Other Stories,
Moby Dick
Austen: Mansfield Park,
Emma,
Northanger Abbey,
Pride and Prejudice
Chesterton: Orthodoxy (I finished it as I was pulling out of the parking lot for a long commute, so I immediately started it again and re-listened!)
Homer: Iliad,
Odyssey
Dante: The Divine Comedy
Milton: Paradise Lost
Shelly: Frankenstein
Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Cather (Willa - i.e., the famous one -- possibly related): My Antonia
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle: The Mote in God's Eye
Arthur C. Clarke: Rendezvous With Rama
Richard K. Morgan: Altered Carbon
Annalee Newitz: Autonomous
William Gibson: The Peripheral
Isaac Asimov: I, Robot
Gene Wolfe: The Shadow of the Torturer
The Claw of the Conciliator
The Sword of the Lictor
The Citadel of the Autarch
The Urth of the New Sun
Gary K. Wolfe: How Great Science Fiction Works
Arthur Conan Doyle: The Complete Sherlock Holmes (technically, this includes four novels, so in those moments when I admit to myself that I feel like I'm keeping score, my ego wants the acknowledgment that this was more of an investment than a single episode.
Stanislaw Lem: Solaris
Robert A. Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land
Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go
China Mieville: Kraken
The City & The City
The Last Days of New Paris
Embassytown
Henry James: The Turn of the Screw
James Joyce: Dubliners
The Song of Roland
Graham Greene: The Quiet American
Robert Louis Stephenson: Treasure Island
Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
Malcom Gladwell: David and Goliath
Rudyard Kipling: The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories

Audiobooks I haven't finished (currently in the process of auditing, or that I've already checked out), but plan to finish before the year's end:

Phillip K. DIck: Ubik
̶S̶a̶u̶l̶ ̶B̶e̶l̶l̶o̶w̶:̶ ̶T̶h̶e̶ ̶A̶d̶v̶e̶n̶t̶u̶r̶e̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶A̶u̶g̶g̶i̶e̶ ̶M̶a̶r̶c̶h̶ (finished! see update below! about which, I hope to have something to say in a while)
Herman Hesse: The Glass Bead Game (again)
Whatever the last two audible credits get me this year (recommendations appreciated).

Audiobooks I was unable to finish for various reasons:

Graham Greene: The Heart of the Matter
The Power and the Glory (I have The End of the Affair in paperback, and I'll be reading it once the semester ends. I just couldn't get into these two with the same interest as The Quiet American.)
James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe (I'm about half way through, and while I haven't given up on it yet, it keeps getting pushed further down my list)
David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest (I don't get what the deal is. I like his non-fiction. I've audited War and Peace, and Moby Dick, for crying out loud. I just couldn't do it).
Richard Matheson: I Am Legend and Other Stories
Cather: Oh, Pioneers! (This was a timing thing. I checked this out at the same time as My Antonia, which I finished, but I didn't have enough time to finish this too, and I've been involved with other things, so I just haven't gone back to it.)
A Bunch of Shakespeare Plays (They were meant for reading or for watching, but the audiobook format doesn't do it for me here. Maybe I'll try again later).

My resolution for the end of the year is to come back and list the book-books that I've actually read, and perhaps provide some commentary on the lot of them, since, as it turns out, I have opinions!

UPDATE:
I went on a Saul Bellow kick:
65. The Adventures of Augie March
66. Herzog
67. Mr. Sammler's Planet
68. Humboldt's Gift
and then a Michael Lewis stint:
69. The Big Short
70. The Undoing Project
71.* Don Quixote (Part One) -- I ran out of time before I could finish part two, and the Chicago Public Library repossessed the book. Thanksgiving break was great, but it meant less time in the car, and so less time with El Caballero de la triste figura.

]]>