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[ by Charles Cameron — religion can tear us apart by bringing us together – it can also bring us into balance – the three movements here are Diné (Navajo) – Dreher – Diné ]
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Diné:

It was at a smaller meeting at a church commonly associated with tent revivals that COVID-19 seems to have struck the Navajo nation:

Navajo Times, Virus strikes at rally: Chilchinbeto church gathering may be source of outbreak

The nation — the Diné — is highly susceptible to the coronavirus, susceptible by virtue of widespread diabetes, obesity, and other underlying conditions. In the words of the New York Times:

As of Wednesday night, the virus had killed 20 people on the reservation, compared with 16 in the entire state of New Mexico, which has a population 13 times larger.

It is not the fault of the religion —

The participants in the large gathering that congregated March 7 at the Chilchinbeto Church of the Nazarene Zone Rally — a meeting in which pastors deliver messages to their members — may have all been exposed to coronavirus by at least one person who later tested positive for the disease.

— but perhaps of a failure of government to inform the Diné with sufficient clarity in enough time, or of this particular congregation to refrain from congregating when that puts the congregants, and the Diné as a whole, at risk of death.

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Catholic:

Rod Dreher is a pretty interesting writer`, a conservative Catholic who draws a lot of his ideas from St Benedict, the founder of Western monasticism> A paragraph of his caught my attention recently:

I’ll end by repeating what I think is a useful simile: going to church during the pandemic is like participating in an Appalachian snake-handler worship service, because it puts the participant in mortal danger. The virus is the poisonous snake, which may or may not bite you. But the virus differs, in that a person who is exposed to it at church could carry it out into the world, and share it unwittingly with every person he meets thereafter. It’s like leaving snake-handler church with pockets full of copperheads, which slide out in the grocery store, and everywhere else the worshiper goes.

Very insightful, IMO.

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Still relevant, IMO, are the prayers of the Navajo Night Chant:

In beauty may I walk.
All day long may I walk.
Through the returning seasons may I walk.
On the trail marked with pollen may I walk.
With grasshoppers about my feet may I walk.
With dew about my feet may I walk.
With beauty may I walk.
With beauty before me, may I walk.
With beauty behind me, may I walk.
With beauty above me, may I walk.
With beauty below me, may I walk.
With beauty all around me, may I walk.
In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk.
In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I walk.
It is finished in beauty.
It is finished in beauty.

How could the Navajo ideal of balance, Sa’a Naghai Bik’e hózhó — untranslatable, at least by myself — balance, beauty, blessing, or more literally In old age walking the trail of beauty — how can this most basic of Navajo concepts ever be less than relevant? In the words of Mountain Way:

Thereby blessing extends from mountain ranges roundabout, thereby I shall live in blessing.

[ by Charles Cameron — finally approaching a core understanding that has been accumulating across many posts here ]
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Briefly put: I’ve been thinking about the arising of the many from the one for quite a while, and think that in a lake or mirror with varying images reflected, arising and departing, I have a decent metaphor or analogy for that arising and it’s corresponding departing. Here I want to tie that highly abstract, poetic or philosophical understanding to a variety of more concrete dualities with which we need to come to terms:

the abstract and the concrete

the ideal and the practical

the individual and society

simplicity and complexity

top down and bottom up

divine breath (ruach, pneuma) and creation

and perhaps most important of all, as I hope to explain below,

global warming and the many lesser issues we need to tackle

Okay, onwards to the specific pairings.

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First, I’d like to observe that it’s extremely interesting, and perhaps unexpected, that the abstract and the concrete (and for that matter, the ideal and the practical) should turn out to be analogs of the individual and society — the latter pair is central to political philosophy, but it’s provocative to think that an understanding of the other two — or at a more abstract level of the abstract and the concrete — might be able to shed some light on the (ideal) relation between the individual and society..

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The abstract and the concrete

The abstract and the concrete is a thinker’s issue. How shall the abstract clarities that thought provides us with be brought into a balanced relation with the perceived, brute facts of the world we inhabit?

From a philosophical point of view, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy tells us:

Objects are Concrete; Properties are Abstract

or at least that’s one view — philosophers vary: objects are things, qualities are, well, the qualities or attributes of things. And yet the qualities turn out to be, in moral an aesthetic terms, more significant than the things themselves — which the senses take very seriously, and which Samuel Johnson famously used in what came to be called his “argumentum ad lapidem” against the idealist Bishop Berkeley, telling the good Bishop to kick a stone, and see if he still felt the world was ideal and not concrete..

Argument to the stone is now recognized as a class of logical fallacy, btw, dismissing an opponent’s argument without any real proof, just by saying it’s ridiculous.

One of the finest balancing of opposites I’ve found is SI Hayakawa’s ladder of abstractions, which climbs from the concrete — a cow, Bessie — to the abstract — livestock, and eventually wealth. I’ve written more about it in A woman, a ladder, four goats, and a cow named Bessie

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The ideal and the practical:

The ideal and the practical bits anyone who possesses a conscience: The ideal is clean, pure sometimes morally in the sense in which the religious mind may say virginity is pure, but also in the non moral way in which we we can say higher mathematics is pure.

What needs to be reconciled here can be presented in the form of a DoubleQuote from two of the greatest scientific minds of the last century: Richard Feynman said, in a Cornell lecture, 1964:

It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.

to which we may respond, in the words of Paul Dirac — hey, both of them in turn were great contributors to quantum mechanics and electrodynamics —:

I think that there is a moral to this story, namely that it is more important to have beauty in one’s equations that to have them fit experiment.

Jiggling the idea of beauty with that of experimental verification until the two of them come into alignment is quite a challenge.

Dirac himself came close to formulating the one-many duality in a manner antithetical to poetry:

The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible.

to which we may respond that Einstein formulated Dirac himself thus:

This balancing on the dizzying path between genius and madness is awful.

Oh dear, what can I say?

The dualism of lhe ideal and the practical is often in play when you see that phrase “that’s where the rubber meets the road”. In this case, the road is the practical, and the rubber, for reasons I have yet to fathom, is the ideal. Is that an aircraft landing metaphor?

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I don’t want to extend this post any further, but I still have several dualities to compare and contrast — and consider. I’ll be with you shortly, insh’Allah and the creek don’t rise..

[ by Charles Cameron — two instances of somewhat unexpected balance ]
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Here, first, something you’ve already seen — the Maastricht bookstore in a restored church, arguably an instance of word being made flesh:

and the gardens now surrounding the clay court on which the French Open is played:

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Sources:

Marcus Fairs, A shop in a church by Merkx + Girod Architecten

Gerald Marzorati, How the French Turned a Tennis Court Into a Garden

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I say alchemy because marriages of hard and soft, above and below, word and flesh, have it in common that they bridge significant metaphysical divides — like the fall of the Berlin wall, to take a political equivalent within living memory — and thus perform a healing work.

Tikkun olam.

[ by Charles Cameron — weaving a web of mirrors, echos, neurons and mimetics ]
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Magic: the Gathering — the game designers know this pattern well!

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The Far Right And Reciprocal Radicalisation

Could fragmentation within the Far-Right contribute to increasingly extreme responses to Islamist terrorism? There is increasing evidence of instrumental responses from some of the most extreme groups, which seek to encourage the strategic use of violence.

Reciprocal radicalisation, or cumulative extremism, is a concept that suggests extremist groups become more extreme in response to each other’s activity. This means a group may frame violence as justified or necessary because they perceive an opposing group as extreme. Identifying how to respond to such a dynamic has become increasingly important, as terrorist threats from both Far-Right and Islamist groups increase, alongside increased hate crime and group membership.

The nature of siloing would encourage a focus on ISIS violence alone, a terrorism subset of natsec foreign policy, or on alt-right violence alone, a terrorism subset of natsec interior policy, thus remaining blind to the possibility that the two comprise a whole system, with systemic interactions between the two. The UK Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats report whose header and intro paragraph I’m quoting here is dealing with a pattern in that system, huzzah.

Such patterns — true reciprocity, which is a form of mirroring, and the kind of escalating reciprocity described here, which is more like an echo chamber with built-in feedback loop, are significant both because they cross-pollinate silos, in a system-friendly way, but also because they offer hints of a pattern language of forms that can be watched for and cataloged.

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Wilder speculation:

Speaking of mirroring — other readings of mine recently have brought to my attention the intersection of two “hot” fields of study — mirror neurons as a biological substrate for much in human behavior, including our propensity of violence, and Rene Girard’s mimetics as a psychological substrate for much in human nature, including our propensity of violence..

The conjunction of the two, which I intuited, is explored in Vittorio Gallese, The Two Sides of Mimesis: Girards Mimetic Theory, Embodied Simulation and Social Identification.

Again, we have a creative leap, again we have silo-crossing, and again mirroring is the form that lies behind the analogical possibility that creates the possibility of the leap.

{ by Charles Cameron — the pardon ouroboros, the antifa / neo-Nazi equivalence ]
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A couple of issues of form cropped up for me this morning in WaPo — one from today, one from yesterday, carried over.

Let’s start with Jennifer Rubin. Her headline, Trump may get bitten by his own abuse of the pardon power, comes close to calling Trump a serpent, if like me you think of “self-biting” in terms of the ourobotos. Of course, Ms Rubin may not think like me..

I don’t see any further serpent references in Rubin’s piece, though, but I did find a Pharaoh reference:

To the contrary, as far as I understand, most of Arpaio’s most egregious conduct will go unpunished. Combined with his frequent attacks on the judiciary, this latest episode will no doubt harden Pharaoh’s proverbial heart.

There are serpents in the Old Testament too, Jennifer.

Oh God, there’s an impeachment reference if the Dems take over the House.And reverends are already all but calling for civil war in that eventuality…

Argh.

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And then — back to issues of form — there’s Marc Thiessen, Yes, antifa is the moral equivalent of neo-Nazis. Moral equivalences are frequently contested. and often “read into” statements of comparisons that aren’t necessarily intended to imply equivalence. Here, the claim of moral equivalence is specific — it’s right there in the title.

It’s interesting that the article itself bases the equivalence on terming Antifa communist:

Mark Bray, a Dartmouth lecturer who has defended antifa’s violent tactics, recently explained in The Post, “Its adherents are predominantly communists, socialists and anarchists” who believe that physical violence “is both ethically justifiable and strategically effective.” In other words, they are no different from neo-Nazis.

Well okay — communist equals Nazi, right? — from that oerspective, case closed.

But are there other perspectives?

Antifa equals Neo-Nazis, right? Could be — but my question is whether Antifa would exist if Neo-Nazis hadn’t already shown up. Does that make a difference? WHo struck th first blow, so to speak? Or is it a simple matter pof two forms of extreme violence, mirroring eachg other.

Mirroring: another formal property to watch for,