Vade retro, Satana !

Spirit:   What! have you let the false enchanter scape?

    O ye mistook; ye should have snatched his wand,

    And bound him fast. Without his rod reversed,

    And backward mutters of dissevering power,

    We cannot free the Lady that sits here

    In stony fetters fixed and motionless.

-- from Comus, Milton’s masque in praise of chastity

William Blake: Comus

We  noted earlier that the world of the New York Times Magazine, and especially its Style Section, is largely devoted to spelunking the undercrofts of inversion.  Less commonly realized is the fact that their agenda is crypto-misogynist -- an assault on normal womanhood, in the name of misgendered things.   Today’s Magazine scrapes bottom.

Notoriously, the world of haute couture is in the hands of paraphiliacs.  In itself this is of little moment, since it is its own hothouse subculture, far from the lives of the ordinary working woman -- she, that is, that lets the sun shine on the world, while the night-creatures writhe in the shadows.  The problem comes in when, innocently subscribing to the New York Times -- a source of much good and important reporting, let us give them that -- she happens upon such a monstrosity as this:

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/08/scorecard-azzedine-alaia-wins/
.

I once lived next to a girl whose arms looked like that:  the result of polio;  very sad.  But the key point to notice is the head:  it appears to be on backwards.   Possibly photo-shopped, as a sick joke;  possibly the model is possessed, and has yet to meet her exorcist.   A still more disturbing possibility is that she is actually (so far) a normal woman, but the couturier has so slyly set awry the natural lines that should properly complement her innocent womanhood, that she appears deformed.

(For the full horror, scroll down the photograph until the neckline is at the upper margin, and the head is out of sight.   Take in the image.  Now slowly scroll up.)

The worker, wife and mother, stares aghast.   Yet the whole authority of the New York Times, and the Paris fashion world, is telling her:   For shame, your hands chafed with the world’s work;  for shame, your bosom sagging from having nursed your babe.   Don’t you wish that you could Look Like Her, with your pretty head on backwards ?

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Nota Bene:

I am not entirely funning, in connecting such things with the Satanic.  Central rituals of the Black Mass include reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards, and hanging the Cross upside-down.

I once wrote a book called The Semantics of Form.  There is also such a thing as the morality of form; for which the locus classicus is Chesterton’s story, “The Wrong Shape”.

Once Murphy, the noted two-fisted Private Eye, was up against that dark prince ... and he couldn't handle it, not alone ... He had to Call In a Specialist:

Summary and purchase options here:
http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

[Update 5 Aug 2011:]
 Cf. now also this.  The SPCA needs to rescue those bunnies before they wind up like the Gadarene swine.
[Update 16 March 2013]  Too late!  The Illuminati have censored that LATimes story from the Web.  But you can find it if you go to Cached Content.

[Update 15 Aug 2011]:
We have modified the title of this post, towards a more chaste Latin.  You will often see the phrase written "Vade retro Satanas";  but cf. this, from the rite of exorcism:

Crux sancta sit mihi lux / Non draco sit mihi dux

Vade retro satana / Numquam suade mihi vana

Sunt mala quae libas / Ipse venena bibas

Here the form without -s is (as we say in the business) "guaranteed by the rhyme".

For a deep and brooding story on this theme -- the one case that Murphy could not crack alone -- cf. this:  Murphy Calls In a Specialist.

Terminological Land-grab

Casually scanning the WaPost op-ed page for anything of interest (an increasingly difficult quest), I noticed the headline, “Another shift on marriage equality?”  Now, at present, there are several fraught ongoing stories in France and in Italy, concerning the eternal Battle of the Sexes, and I idly wondered what social-engineering poppycock it would be this time.  But in the event, the piece did not concern the dialectic of Man and Woman, Father and Mother, Husband and Wife, but rather the pantomime of inverts playing at husband and wife.   Apparently the writer meant homosexual marriage, but was now calling it “marriage equality”.

Perhaps this insidious phrase has been purling through the national bloodstream for some time, I don’t know, it’s the first time I’ve come across it.    In any case, the author insured that it would stick in the mind, since the article, ho-hum in content, was principally concerned to trot out the phrase over and over: “…a sign that opponents of marriage equality are losing the argument … support for marriage equality is growing.”   It’s like an advertising jingle, really, simply trying to drill-in the brand-name.

Quite apart from the pros-and-cons of the gay-marriage issue, on which I shall not dwell, this semantic sleight-of-hand represents a terminological land-grab.  It is one of those coinages that, purporting to be just one referential lexeme among others, from the outset  tilts the field of the debate:  “illegal alien”, “statutory rape”, “No Child Left Behind”.   Well, each to his own opinion;  but linguistically,  defenders of faith and family should by no means put up with such rubbish.  

In the case of abortion rights, the two camps have linguistically  agreed to disagree:  the one says “pro-life”, the other “pro-choice”:  coreferential, yet differing wildly in intension.   (Readers interested in following-up on this notion, a chestnut of analytic philosophy, can seek discussions of “Morning Star” vs. “Evening Star”, “9” vs. “the number of planets”, learning in the course of it the interesting difference between intention and intension.)   Accordingly, the ball is in the court of the other camp (to which I am not here declaring my allegiance, just being an umpire here) to come up with some slogans of their own. 

Now doffing my umpire’s beanie, and donning the wordsmith’s cap, I offer these, as co-referential/hetero-intensional terms for the neologistic gay-agenda use of “marriage equality”:

Marriage Parody

Marriage Frivolity

Marriage Absurdity

And as a positive, “pro-“ (life/choice) name for what we ourselves hold dear:

Traditional Marriage

Sacramental Marriage

Genuine Marriage

Some modest proposals, offered humbly in the spirit of our lexicographic ancestor Cawdrey.

La manif pour tous

 [Update III 2012]

There is a trick to be guarded against.  … [re apparent altruists] “We just have agents whose full self-interest  includes these other things: … the rain forest or third-world debt.  They are still just as self-interested as anyone else.”  The reason this is a trick is that it empties the view of all content.  It kidnaps the word ‘self-interest’ for whatever the agent is concerned about.  But just for that reason  it loses any predictive or explanatory force.

-- Simon Blackburn, Being Good (2001), p. 36.

[Update Mother's Day 2012]  An important new scholarly contribution  here:
http://magnaliadei.blogspot.com/2012/05/bonds-of-brothers.html

Pity and Terror

Today, on our sister site,  begins a series that will harrow up thy soul.  De profundis …

=>  Murphy:  The Early Years

Name that Deity

 Wéll before I became a Christian, or knew that C.S. Lewis was one of that ilk, I revered Lewis for his semantic acumen.  When I taught a graduate seminar in lexical semantics, the only texts I used (apart from my own notes) were Lewis’s Studies in Words,  and Word and Object, by that splendid atheist Quine. The idea being, that if I did nothing but babble, at least the students would have read two good books.

A repeated theme of C.S.L.  is that we speak incessantly in faded metaphors: not only about the ineffable, but about anything and everything that we can ascertain [OF, from ad- + certain] and comprehend [Latin con- + prehendere ‘to seize with our fat fingers’] in our everyday environment.

The metaphors fade; yet are not indifferent.  Witness Lewis on “he” vs. “she” for the Godhead, and its application to the ordination of women. Whether he was in this respect   right or ill-advised is not the point;  the point is:   metaphors matter.

And so: What of metaphors for the Deity?  who certainly needs them, like any infinite thing.

First of all, there’s “the Father”.  To this I have nothing to add beyond Lewis.  The metaphor  goes far, but only so far; the same epithet has been applied to UBL.

Next there’s “the King”.  Meaning what, with like a crown?  Well,  kind of like a king, or rather a King of kings, anyhow one whose writ runs well beyond Sherwood Forest.  All very regal.  The problem is, real kings generally suck, so they poison the metaphor at the source.

(Rare example of a good king:  Babar.  But that for later.)

And then: the “Lord of Hosts”.  – It was long, before I came to understand this phrase; yet let me leave it here, unparsed and uncommented, just as I found it.

“Creator” is much better; for we somehow intuit what it means, yet…based upon what?  It is hard to find an example, really, here on earth.  You have craftsmen, who would still be peasants or cavemen if they hadn’t learned the craft from their masters (they may have improved upon the techniques as received, but they didn’t invent them).  You have parents, but if they have any wits at all, they know they didn’t create the kid: they made certain fumbling motions, hopefully accompanied with a prayer, and before you know it, nine months on (why nine? who knows), out pops this – miracle, with an immortal soul.  It’s the d*mnedest thing. The closest we come to a feeling of actual creation is with the artist or the scientist – or even better, the mathematician, presenting Hilbert space to the world.  But the view I am arguing  is that the most “creative” mathematician is nothing like a playwright, he’s really just a stage hand, pulling back the curtain. If we’d *dreamt up* Hilbert space, rather than *discovered* it, -- who’d give a sh*t?  --Likewise the scientist.  And as for the artist, well yes, there is, there, more of the personal, which is to say the contingent, but if it gets too contingent, it’s sort of pointless; and certainly a great deal of dreck has been put forward as art, especially in the last century. -- The best possible subject for a painting, so I conceive, is the Annunciation.  Let us all praise your skill in visualizing and reproducing that pre-existing scene.  But that is the whole point:  you didn’t invent it.  Otherwise who cares.

So: It’s kind of interesting, that we have some sort of intuitive sense of what “creator” might mean, given that we’ve never met one.

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Other descriptions:

The “Necessary Being”.  Not really a metaphor, more like a woefully inadequate “Hi my name is…” tag, or like describing Napoleon as a “person”.

“Maker of Heaven and Earth”:  not a metaphor, just a bullet point in His resumé.  And probably not the main one.

The “First Cause”. – Yeh-h, well… true enough, I suppose, the way the President might be defined as the “husband of the First Lady”. It subordinates the Creator to the created world.  If you think of anything blander or more denuded, gimme a ring.

“The Author of our being”: This is a nice phrase.  For our purposes, however, it leads astray on two counts:  First, with the specifically literary image of “author” vice “creator”, thus tending to distract from mathematics as residing among the created things.  Second, with its quite excusable focus on ourselves.  But if we are contingent, and the truths of mathematics are not, it diverts the focus to what is not a Necessary part of His being.  (There is a theological view that we are actually not contingent, but are a necessary aspect of His being;  but such a matter is too profound to be investigated here.)

Outreau à l’outrance -- and Clinton

 American readers:   Before reading further -- what does “the Outreau affair” mean to you?

And:  What was the essence of Bill Clinton’s offense?

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Much of France has come to the conclusion that, whatever his faults otherwise, DSK was ensnared in a case that has been poisoned by the lies of a woman, and blown into outrage by the excesses of the American judicial system.

Whatever your opinion of this tarnished kettle, it turns out the pot has even darker such blotches of its own.

An op-ed piece by Sylvie Kauffmann in today’s NYTimes  sumarizes the matter  thus:

The infamous Outreau case involving false accusations of child abuse in France went much farther than the Strauss-Kahn affair. The prosecution did not reverse itself even when the main accuser, Myriam Badaoui, retracted her testimony. The accused were convicted, and were only exonerated on appeal.

Now, I did not know this.   I vaguely recalled some francophone case by that name, though I thought it had occurred in Belgium.   The sum-total impression was:  it was some kind of child sex thing, and the perps were guilty as sin.  -- And this, indeed, is the typical residue left by all such accusations, whatever the actual truth may have been.  (Remember those infamous lacrosse players from Duke, who kidnapped a black choir-girl and gang-raped her on an altar while reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards?  -- What, oh, you say it didn’t happen quite like that?)

Further:  The Outreau trial was held in huis clos -- entirely behind closed doors. Several people spent years behind bars; one died in prison, a possible suicide, before he could be exonerated.

For further details, consult the French account in Wikipedia;  the English is lacunary, and seems to have been clumsily translated from some French source (“Due to the ampler of his power abuses by pronouncing guilty 17 innocents to jail, Fabrice Burgaud is legitimately a Criminel d'État”).

8 Nov 2011 -- Update to the Outreau case:

Myriam Badaoui, “cette mère incestueuse  très corpulente  de quatre enfants  avait été condamnée pour les viols de sept enfants, pour des agressions sexuelles sur dix enfants, ainsi que pour proxénétisme sur ses quatre fils et corruption de onze enfants,” has been set free.

 

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Bye the bye… That op-ed piece perpetuates a falsehood -- and not a little one -- already retailed and retold tens of thousands of times.   Since I have never seen anyone refute this in print, I shall do so here.

Quoting again from the op-ed:

What got Bill Clinton in trouble was not his relationship with the intern, Monica Lewinsky, but that he lied when he insisted that “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” Perjury is a serious offense in the United States.

This is typical.    The rhetorical stance is (this being the New York Times): 

(1) We are all so broad-minded here, it wasn’t the sex, cough cough, no-o-o no …
[dbj: --  Bushwah.  What got him in trouble with the masses of Americans was precisely his relation with the intern, and everyone knows it.  (What got him in trouble with the “vast right-wing conspiracy”, as Hillary accurately described it,  which had been laying for him long before that, setting their traps, is another matter entirely.)]

(2) Uncontested fact, like two-plus-two:  Clinton committed perjury when he said “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

(3)  Tut-TUT !  We tried to be broad-minded, sirrahhh, but in view of your perjury (vide (2)) -- your blatant, your bald-faced, your shaaameless perjury --  reahlly, this is too utterly too much, ahem ahem, -- Perjury is a serious offense -- seeahrious, mind you! -- heah in these United States.  It may not be a serious offense where you come from, m'wog, but here in these United States, b’golly b’dad.  You could’ve been locked up, y’know.  Lucky to have gotten off with just an impeachment, humph humph, pass the brandy.

(I pause briefly to vomit.)

Now:   

(1) and (3) are standard-issue hypocrite suckup balderdash;  ‘nuff said.   But (2), the crux of the whole rhetorical gambit, and the supposedly factual basis on which Clinton has been widely and piously condemned, requires a look.  (And this is the part that, to my knowledge, no-one has ever commented on.)

The definition of sexual relations (I set this in boldface, in the manner of headwords), in the standard Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary (recognized as authoritative in many a courtroom), at the time of the Lewinsky affair (I don’t know how the definition may have been revised since, possibly indeed in reaction to the widespread misinterpretation of the phrase -- ignorant on the part of the public, wilful in the case of Clinton’s lawyerly detractors), was -- I quote in its entirety, omitting nothing -- :  sexual intercourse.   The phrase “sexual intercourse” was set in small-caps, which is used (I know this, I once worked there) for a “synonymous cross-reference”.  That is to say, the two phrases, headword and gloss, mean the same.  The small-caps x-ref does not merely approximate the meaning of the definiendum, as most definitions do;  the two phrases  are, rather, synonyms.

Now, neither sexual relations nor sexual intercourse are nonce collocations of adjective and noun, whose sense directly reflects the component lexemes.  Rather, they are set phrases -- “lexicalized”, as we say in the trade;  which is why they, unlike (say) sexual dissatisfaction or parent-teacher relations, are entered as headwords in dictionaries.   These terms, then, do not denote just any relations between the genders, nor just any “intercourse” (in the original sense of the term, which originally just meant ‘relations’).  They both equally mean:  copulation; doing it; going all the way.   And this, indeed, Clinton and Lewinsky never did; nor has anyone ever contested that.  In other words, when Clinton said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”, he spoke the literal truth.   A fortiori, he did not lie (I say “a fortiori” because, for something to quality as a lie, more than mere falsehood is required).  And in particular, he did not thus commit perjury (again, to qualify as perjury, something more than telling a lie is required).

I mailed this analysis to the White House at the time.  They did not avail themselves of this reasoning;  perhaps surmising -- probably correctly -- that the puritans/feminists/right-wingers  had by that point worked themselves up into such a lather, that any defence along these blandly factual lines  would lead merely to further foaming among the Boeotians.

Encore une méditation savoureuse de Laroui

 N’importe le cas, il garde son bon sens et son humour -- en l’occurrence, vis-à-vis de l’affaire …

http://www.medi1.com/player/player.php?i=4944647

Mysticism and Majority Rule

We earlier examined some of the (in practice, in the course of ordinary work) largely unexamined metaphysical and even mystical principles that are required for science.  Here is a sketch of something similar in the realm of political theory.

In his newspaper column for 22 Feb 1954, Walter Lippmann wrote:

There is no way of proving the doctrine that all souls are precious in the eyes of God. … The doctrine proceeds from a mystical intuition.

Nevertheless, he says, following Chesterton, that such a notion must lie behind the democratic ideal, or that ideal is groundless -- metaphysically unmoored.

He then goes on -- in a rather Chestertonian passage of his own -- to observe:

The mystical democrat had said, ‘Gold and precious stones are of no account’;  the literal democrat understood him to say that everybody ought to have gold and precious stones.

He is respectful of the democratic ideal, as well as the mystical intuition behind it;  but polemicizes over and over, throughout his long career, against a tin idol in the hands of the practical democrat, “Majority Rule” (or, as he often puts it, the whim of the plurality or protority, since that’s all you need to win a multiply contested election).

Although the principle of majority rule derives a certain sanctity from the mystical sense of equality, it is really quite unrelated to it.  There is nothing in the teachings of Jesus or St. Francis which justifies us in thinking that the opinions of fifty-one percent of a group are better than the opinions of forty-nine percent.

(Or, in one celebrated case, of forty-nine percent plus five Supreme Court justices.)

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A related notion, which can be held by someone who is not a democrat in either sense, is that of the Group Mind, or World-Soul, or General Will (Rousseau’s volonté générale).  To make this notion coherent is notoriously difficult.

Lippmann again, in The Good Society (1937):

Many particular interests do not in any conceivable combination constitute the general interest.

And again, in  The Public Philosophy (1955, ch. 3), he not only observes the distinction between “the people” and “The People” (like that of democrats and Democrats), but even between italicized and non-italicized versions of the latter  -- which must have been a tough sell, since in those days  neither typewriters nor newspapes used italics:

… the discrepancy between The People as voters and The People as the corporate nation … A prevailing plurality of the voters are not The People.

Monostich (XXI)

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This sky must have been twice-dyed, to be so blue

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