The Point of Games

My personality is such that my interests come in successive stages of unanimous curiosity. An interest in baking will lead to an appetite for medieval history. And so, naturally, a read-through of George Friedman's "The Next 100 Years" led, not only to other books on the subject (e.g., R. Kaplan, "The Revenge of Geography"), but also to another subject, perennially dear to my heart: computer games.

And, moreover, to one specific game, 'Medieval II: Total War'. Like its siblings in the 'Total War' franchise, the cutely-abbreviated 'M2TW' gives a mixture of turn-based strategy and real-time tactics. You take command of a European faction in the 13th century and forge your path to hegemony, whether by trade or trickery, chivalrous alliances or main force of arms.

Such a pastime would obviously whet my appetite to get "hands-on" with geopolitical maneuvering; but — as I led the Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia to domination first of the Balkans and Asia Minor, and then of Transalpine Gaul &mdash it afforded another thought.

Games like these are fun — but why? Considered objectively, there is nothing intrinsically enjoyable about clicking and watching colored shapes; so why should we ever find such things other than tedious?

Obviously, because they are representational — that is, these games have "sign value". A game like M2TW "is" nothing very worthwhile, just as an octagonal piece of red metal "is" nothing very special. Rather, we look "through" these things to something else they were originally made to represent.

If a stop sign represents a traffic ordinance, a game like M2TW represents a story — or, rather, that the confines of the game allow the player to spin his own story.

Of course, absolutely none of this is original with me. Games as Storytelling Device is a topic that has been extensively (even exhaustively) worked over for decades (that is, after all, the essence of the Role-Playing Game).

But it did serve to distract me long enough to put me on my next track. And that's why I'm a third of the way through Dan Simmons' "Hyperion".

Geopolitics and the Philosophy of History

This weekend I started (and finished) George Friedman's engaging book, 'The Next 100 Years', in which he attempts to forecast the geopolitical trends of this century. He makes many claims that, on their face, seem entirely surprising and nonsensical — for example:

• Russia will collapse and fragment within the next two decades, without being able to expand to its former (Soviet Union) borders
• China will recede into de facto three separate nations within thirty years
• The dominant world powers in a half-century will be the United States, Japan, Turkey, and Poland
• Towards the end of the century, the United States will have a tense, (probably) violent confrontation with Mexico

Friedman defends his method against his more skeptical readers by showing us how it works: demography, geography, and economy combining into a single analysis.

His primary axiom is stated foremost: that human beings, and consequently human nations, are fundamentally rational; that they will always act from their own self-interest; and that they will always act with imperfect knowledge. The freedom of the will is circumscribed within those limits essential to human life - e.g., the desire for an assured food supply.

Now one question that arises: what does this science (if it is a science) do for a Philosophy of History?

Is History rational? Is it predetermined? Does it have an End (or, if you will, an "attractor basin")?

Environmentalism: two fundamental stances

One stance: Fundamentally one of humulity. Staring out at the world, self-forgetful, asorbed in contemplation of beauty. You might call this "conservation" -- a practical stance, interested in conserving what already exists. Another stance: One that sees the world, as it were, "objectively" -- as an object, especially an object of manipulation. You never place yourself within the context of the world you see -- you always remain "other", even, or especially, from other men.

Partus Primus: definitiones

"environmentalism", n.

#2. advocacy of the preservation, restoration, or improvement of the natural environment; especially : the movement to control pollution [source]

"Environmentalism" connotes many things; but chiefly we can say that an "environmental" person is one that wishes to see "Nature" preserved and protected against perilously premature putrefaction by other people.

"nature", n.

the physical world and everything in it (such as plants, animals, mountains, oceans, stars, etc.) that is not made by people [source]

We shall take "Environmentalism", then, to mean "That which seeks to preserve Things-That-Are-Not-People against the meddlings of People".

Partus Secundus: distinctiones

What follows here is not originally deduced from a priori principles. Rather, it is sensed or intuited experientially; and only later justified by reason.

At the root of every human occupation there is a choice, which in turn informs how you engage in the occupation. This choice is between one of Humility and Pride. So it is with Environmentalism: one may engage in Environmental activities from one of these two perspectives. This is not to deny that both may be at work within the same individual, at different levels; but one will always be his radical motivation.

Consider: that man is humble who looks primarily to other things. His "locus of attention" is primarily on the Outside; he is in a permanent state of self-forgetfulness. What is most important to him is that Things Are. He desires to "get his head into the heavens".

Contrast with this the proud man. He desires to be important — that is, to be isolated. He himself is the only Subject; all others are Objects to him. His primary self-regard causes him to keep things at "arms length"; he avoids entanglements.

Partus Tertius: explorationes

The Humble Environmentalist looks out upon a world of Beauty. He sees things everywhere — trees, mountains, gophers, zooplankton — as worthwhile, valuable, important in themselves. He sees himself in the context of this world; more to the point, he sees other human beings in this world.

The Proud Environmentalist is not immune to the beauty of natural things - he would hardly self-identify as such otherwise! But his failing is precisely this: that he, in some way, stands aloof from the world he sees. He relates to things as objects of manipulation - and especially other human beings.

the Failure of Introspection - or, Mixed-up Messy Brains

" ... The surest means of disarming an anger or lust was to turn your attention from the girl or the insult and start examining the passion itself. The surest way of spoiling a pleasure was to start examining your satisfaction. "

— C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

Introspection, as Lewis goes on to point out, is actually rather misleading. The very act of turning our attention from a beautiful thing to the experience of beauty itself promptly causes that experience to stop; and we are led to believe that "beauty" itself consists in no more than remembered words, images, childhood memories, or associations with emotion. Thinking about the thing is never identical with the thing itself.

As above, he frames this by-the-bye as a bit of advice: that you can make your own experience of emotions more "rational" (i.e., less strong, less unruly) by taking better care to examine them. And it would be awfully useful if this were unreservedly true.

the Experience of Inertia

But this technique is not absolutely perfect — at best, it is only mostly reliable. The truth is that our minds are far more entangled with our bodies than we are quick to suppose.

Experience itself tells us that our emotions may not so easily killed as all that. They can have a life of their own, continuing on without the support of our thoughts and even against our mightiest efforts to subdue them by mental discipline.

Closet Platonists

We forget this — possibly because we are, by default, "closet Platonists". We unconsciously make sharp distinctions between "myself" and "my body" — "it's my body and I'll do what I want with it", etc. etc. etc. We find ourselves suggesting that, after all, morality is a thing entirely "spiritual" (whatever that means) and so can have no influence on what we happen to like doing with our bodies (which are, after all, something quite different).

We see this vague bias at work in various scientific theories, too. Often some eminent biologist, or more likely some enthusiastic hobbyist, will hold up some study on brain chemistry to prove that, after all, thoughts are only chemicals, or electrical potentials, or what you will. They will claim that all human thoughts are entirely determined by brain structure; and that, if only you could put a man down inside a X-ray CT machine, you could read his thoughts like a book.

By a curious mental accident, they always seem to leave themselves out of their own system; they may describe everyone else all right, but their own system cannot explain how they themselves arrive at their conclusions, nor give any assurance that their conclusions are necessarily true. (For if thoughts are only chemicals mixing or charges accumulating, if all our concepts of "truth" or "beauty" or "goodness" are purely fictitious and might very easily have been other — then our thoughts can have no meaning.)

Anyway: we quickly find that we are not so neat a division between "mind" and "body" as we are quick to suppose. We are not completely "mind", remaining — like Queen Victoria — unamused because unaffected. But neither are we chemical automata, completely dependent on our surroundings.

Instead, we are some sort of messy combination of both.

Messy Brains

We have a daily experience of our minds as minds: thinking, judging, analyzing. We reason logically and validly. We discover truth and uncover falsehood. We recognize beauty when it appears to us. We not only know, but know that we know. We not only experience time, but stand sufficiently outside time to see it flow past.

Yet we are embodied — physically, carnally, dirtily. We are held hostage to our senses. Our thoughts are driven in tumult before sudden storms of emotion. Spells of irritation or stress can render our powers of judgement and discernment helpless. We are really quite inconveniently messy.

Reflect, again, on the first test of all metaphysics everywhere: "does it meet the test of our experience?" To put it in other words, our philosphizing must be about fact, not about theory. We reason from what the world really is, not from what we should happen to think most rational or agreeable or comforting. This is yet another reason why Philosophy will always be a valid pursuit — why it will always remain a Science in its own right.

Metaphysical Health

(this is, among other things, a first stab at blogging via my smartphone; hence a probable paucity of prettiness or fine formatting)

"... Certainly there is no true Christianity without the contemptus saeculi; but contempt for the world is not the same thing as hatred of being - quite the contrary, it is hatred of non-being. ..."
        -- Etienne Gilson

From inside Christianity this meaning is clear: that while the Christian must needs renounce the world and, in one way or another, turn his back on it, this renunciation has none of the character of a Manichean or an Over-Populationist; it is much more like a child turning away from a present to the mother who gave it to her.

The Christian does not turn his back on the world because he loathes it so much, but because he loves something else so much more. He looks excitedly from one thing of great importance and beauty, to another of incomparably greater worth.

Notice how this attitude is inevitably one of attention - almost of startlement. The really healthy religious attitude is of a rapt attention to Being Himself - so the really healthy philosophical attitude is one of rapt attention to things.

Attention to things, not to sensations. Our scientific successes have taught us all sorts of bad lessons; and one of the worst is the notion that qualia, after all, are only "subjective" and therefore unreal. "Redness", we assume, is only a name; the real thing is the frequency of reflected light.

And yet, this is profoundly untrue. And "metaphysical health" consists in habitually shaking off this vague atmosphere of Reductionism, in order to live, not in a ghost-town of accumulations atoms, but in a gloriously-variegated world of things.

On Saint Patrick's Day

All Irishmen on earth today
  Are surely merry and glad and gay,
Yet through it all, I staunch shall say,
  "I do not keep Saint Patrick's Day."

Ev'ry lubber's son of middling birth
  Is quick to don a copied mirth,
And claim a special kinship dear
  ("I have no Irish blood, I fear")

And all my peeps in Ch'cagoland
  Wear green, for such is the command,
And all get quite assuredly drunk —
  "Saint Patrick's Day is a load of bunk."

Saint Patrick is now in Heav'n's bliss,
  And looks on all with love, i'wis —
And since his Church mine own I call,
  I shall this day keep after all.

Being: Act vs. Repose - or, the Inadequacy of Science as a Metaphysic

"... For [the medievals] the verb to be was essentially an active verb signifying the very act of existing; to affirm their own actual existence was much more to them than to affirm their present existence, it was an affirmation of the actuality, that is to say the very energy, by which their being existed. If, then, we should arrive at an exact understanding of the medieval conception of causality we must ascend to this very act of existence, for it is clear that if being is act, the causal act must necessarily be rooted in very being of the cause."

— Etienne Gilson, Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, ch.5: "Analogy, Causality, and Finality"

How different is this understanding of being than the modern! informed as it is by physical science, which must necessarily take the existence of its objects for granted.

We apprehend a little more of that final blaze with which the 'Divine Comedy' ends:

L'amor che muove il sole e l'altre stelle.
The Love which moves the sun and the other stars.

— Divina Commedia - Paradiso, Canto XXXIII, line 145

Postscript

I hope it is obvious that I do not mean to disparage physical science itself. In its proper sphere (taking such things as existence and causality for granted) it is one of those things that really are "essentially" human — i.e., that it is an obvious, appropriate, and entirely necessary thing to do.

What I take aim at is a casual transplant of scientific methods from the physical into the metaphysical — a move which results in something entirely inadequate. Because science originally takes certain things for granted, it cannot then explore or even explain these things; this is the reason why science cannot give us a metaphysic.