Faith, Reason, and Debating the Existential "Big Questions"

I'm past college, and with those years has passed the incidence of earnest debate about things like religion and the meaning of life. That I attended a Catholic university and majored in a "Great Books" meant that I fielded my share of challenges from those who believed something different than I did, and one of the most pressing questions that came up at that time was why.

Why do you believe?

There is something fantastic and mythological, certainly, about the story of a God coming to earth in order to offer Himself up as a perfect, spotless sacrifice in order to atone for every human sin, past and future, and reconcile the human race to Himself as God. The particulars of the story are indeed quaint and uncomfortably sentimental: a sweet young woman chosen to miraculously conceive God's child; archetypal authority figures hatching dastardly plots and darkly scheming to stop this bright young hero; a set of bumbling accomplices; an impossibly evil death; and the most mythical and unbelievable thing of all: that he was killed and then came back to life.

To my friends, well-educated and mostly liberal humanists, the tale of Christ bears too many similarities to the quaint myths of many other cultures, and is only the biggest myth in a child-like narrative of the world with a stylized creation story and a lot of horrible barbarities. Compared to sophisticated promise of modern disciplines like sociology, psychology, and specialized sciences, a primitive culture's myth seems plainly archaic. How could anyone believe this, much less someone college-educated?

The challenge about answering this question is that it is ideological rather than academic. Those who ask it have a certain perspective which I don't understand, but which seems to preclude the idea of a supernatural. Some profess to be humanists, who believe that continued enlightenment in sciences will eventually conquer our social and personal afflictions. Others profess to be rationalists, believing only in those things that science has proved or theorized.

Such alternative belief systems are not, in and of themselves, ideological. They fall more truly into the existential category, defining who we are and why we exist. But they seem to come with a lot of ideological baggage these days. After all, elements of our society today are unabashed and even aggressive apologists for faith (professing the Christian doctrine of sola scriptura) and many of them speak in terms of condemnation, specifically condemnation of those who disagree with them, to hell. They often stand for uncomfortably traditional values as well, like maintaining traditional gender and socio-economic roles. Now all of a sudden we aren't talking about a different moral and existential perspective, we're talking about an ideological opponent. And, to be fair, there are fundamentalist Christians who are offensive and judgmental in proselytizing their beliefs.

But to turn the tables, many so-called rationalists and/or humanists can be just as aggressive, and I am skeptical that their explanations of the world are actually more 'rational' than a faith-based one. It's easy to talk about gravity or astronomical relations and say that we can "prove" real science empirically, but I doubt that many of us have empirically viewed the behavior of a virus, or the release of certain brain hormones causing affection or depression. We accept that viruses and brain hormones work a certain way because we have studied the effect of those things and measured them in actual humans, so we know they exist and they affect, somehow, our health or mental state. We also believe people called "scientists" when those people tell us about viruses and brain hormones (and the behavior of chemical elements, and many other things), because we have faith that their education and certification makes them intrinsically trustworthy on certain issues.

Whether or not you trust a scientist or a theologian (or a priest) is really the question, unless on. An Op-Ed in the Washington Post recently pointed out very thoroughly that the two sides are not mutually exclusive. I have little to add to the writer's argument because I agree with him -- I believe in the story of the Christ and yet also pursue understanding of scientific matters, because I want to know more about us and this world we inhabit. He ends with a marvelous paragraph worth quoting in full:

The problem comes when materialism, claiming the authority of science, denies the possibility of all other types of knowledge — reducing human beings to a bag of chemicals and all their hopes and loves to the firing of neurons. Or when religion exceeds its bounds and declares the Earth to be 6,000 years old. In both cases, the besetting sin is the same: the arrogant exclusive claim to know reality.

The answer to the question of why I believe the entirety of the Christian story, with it's quaint mythological narratives about paradisiacal gardens and apples of knowledge of good and evil and floods and prophets and whales and the Son of God is that I find it more plausible than any of the alternatives. It really makes more sense to me. Not necessarily in they physical particulars ("do you really believe that some prophet actually parted water to create a passage?"), but in the tale it tells of how humanity became prone to doing bad things and how God then came Himself to redeem humanity from its sinful nature.

The Christian tale is plausible to me mostly because of my own experiences in sin and redemption. The vast majority of these experiences are with my own sins and redemptions in my life so far, and a few of them are observations of other peoples' sins and redemptions. On a precious few occasions I recall witnessing a miracle, or experiencing a beatific presence I attribute to the Christian God. These things are open to interpretation in an academic sense, of course. Rationalists might argue that my experiences of good and bad in myself and others are filtered through a strong inculcated Catholic belief system. They might doubt that I, in fact, saw or experienced so-called "supernatural" things, and point to the demonstrated phenomenon of humans to manufacture memories that suit their subconscious perspectives. And as far as that goes, they may be right. I can't transmit my experiences to others, so therefore I can't expect anyone else to believe my conclusions. And yet I can no more forget them than an astronaut could forget his view of a round earth from space, or an astronomer could forget the sightings and calculations that the earth and nearer bodies revolved around the sun in elliptical trajectories.

My point here is not to convince anyone in my beliefs. I don't think that's possible -- neither a rationalist nor a faith-based belief system can be truly transmitted via dialectic. Any belief system has to be experienced to be believed, personally and deeply experienced. And for a human, that means engaging both the intellect and whatever part of the brain controls belief.

Someone who believes that human emotions like love and depression are a combination of neuron activity and chemical activity in the brain has probably actively engaged the subject: he or she likely wondered why people experience love and other emotions, and pursued the answer until they found an explanation. That's the activity of his or her intellect. He or she also had to exclude other explanations for emotions (presuming they found others), such as activity of a metaphysical soul, or instinctual behavior bred in by evolution, which is primarily a decision of faith. Does he or she trust neurologists who measure neuron activity and brain chemicals? Priests, philosophers, and/or wise men and women, who have reached a supernatural explanation due to their long experience in considering and/or observing human behavior? What about sociologists and/or biologists who study behavioral patterns and instinct activity?

Personally, I don't believe that a scientist is intrinsically a better person than a priest or a philosopher. All three are human, which means they are subject to the same ideological myopia and vices, as well as the same inspiration and virtue, as the rest of us. No single person knows everything, and experience teaches that even if a person did, he or she would forget part of it, or hide part of it, or even use it to his/her advantage. Positing that it's possible to know everything, and use that knowledge correctly, is coming dangerously close to positing God. Whether we follow to that conclusion, or stop short -- and who/what we decide to trust and therefore believe -- well, that's just our obligation as rational beings. We each must individually decide what to believe.

It's natural that each of us would seek like-minded friends in the world, and so it's easy to see how we would gravitate towards those who believe the same things. So begins ideology, or the pursuit of actualizing an ideal, which carried to the extreme ends up forgetting that ideas are not more important than people -- or so I argue as a Christian: that individuals have the highest intrinsic value; ideas may be valuable but they're not worth more than life itself.

I plead that we don't let this social instinct push us into prejudice. I and many people I know believe in the teachings of Christianity and yet also follow the progress of scientific knowledge. Many of these people are scientists or doctors themselves. And likewise, I know that people who religious faith (Christian or other) is irrational do not reduce the human experience to the peculiar behavior of a peculiar animal, enslaved to instinct and evolutionary imperative.

So let's not discuss these existential issues of faith, science, reason, and belief with a desire to win, especially to win by painting other belief systems in pejorative colors. Rather let's do it to better understand ourselves and each other.

Restoring the Meritocracy, or addressing concerns about the US Officer Corps

Recently Mr. William Lind published his latest article, and as usual it was provocative. Titled "An Officer Corps that can't score," it argues that the United States military has lost the competitive edge in combat for the following reasons:

• An ego problem, the apparent perception of US Officers that they oversee the best military that's ever existed;
• A personnel problem, that officers are punished for creative thinking and innovation (and the mistakes that invariably accompany such a mindset);
• A staffing problem, which shortens command tours of duty so everybody on the bench gets a chance to play, if only for a short period of time; and worst of all,
• A moral problem, in which officers support and perpetuate the status quo to protect their careers--notably a problem the US Military did not have after the Vietnam conflict (according to Mr. Lind).

Certainly these are serious accusations. Mr. Lind's article sparked a great deal of response, too. Several active duty officers penned articles which asserted indignantly that there *is* a great deal of debate in the military regarding staffing, weapons acquisition, force structure, and other 'big picture' issues. What is conspicuously absent from the responses, however, is a critique of the personnel situation--which, as the lynchpin of Mr. Lind's argument, probably deserves the most thoughtful consideration.

Mr. Lind's own history plays a big part in his critique as well. I've never met the man, but if you'll indulge in a little amateur psychology, I would say that Mr. Lind very much has a dog in this fight. He was foremost among what he calls the most recent wave of "reformist innovators," and highly praises his contemporaries Col Boyd (USAF) and Col Wyly (USMC), with whom he generated much of the intellectual foundation of so-called Maneuver Warfare. He also helped introduce and develop the theory of Fourth-Generation Warfare, an extension of Col Boyd's definitive and much-lauded omnibus theory of combat "Patterns of Conflict." Anyone who is a bit startled (and/or stung) by the opening line of his article, "The most curious thing about our four defeats in Fourth Generation War—Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan—is the utter silence in the American officer corps," ought to at least realize that Mr. Lind is aggressively applying the theories of warfare that he developed and championed to his very broad-brush of a statement about our apparently constant defeats.

The predictable--and justified--knee-jerk reaction by junior officers in the US Military is that Mr. Lind is wrong, and that there is anything BUT silence about the struggles and outcomes of these so-called "Fourth Generation Wars." Indeed, in my own experience there is a lot of debate about technology (drones, bombs, tanks, and their efficacy) and tactics regarding the most recent conflicts in the Middle East. That is all very good. But I think Mr. Lind hits the nail on the head when he criticizes the military--particularly the officer--personnel system. And while there is a lot of debate about that issue as well, it's usually conducted in hushed voices and away from field grade and higher officers.

Complaints about personnel issues usually center around field grade officers focused on achieving the next rank (and running their subordinates into the ground to get it), or general officers trying to maintain their reputation to their civilian masters with an increasing administrative burden of annual training and paperwork accountability. To the uninformed, it just sounds like bitching, but hearing enough of it reveals that both types of anecdotes coalesce around one central issue: today's officer cadre does not have either the time or resources to focus on warfighting.

How has this come to pass? At the danger of theorizing ahead of data, I have some suggestions:

• First, during the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts we created a whole sub-combatant-command for each location, complete with Joint Force Commanders, Functional Component Commanders, Service Component Commanders, and associated staffs. This effectively doubled the requirement for staff officers in each of the four major service components. In addition to being top-heavy, it prevented the whole coalition from having any true cohesion as a unit, because new units were revolving in and out under a joint commander who, in addition to directing the whole campaign, also had to administer the vastly increased relief-in-place and transportation requirements of such an ad hoc system. Imagine if Patton had new armored and mechanized units rotating in and out of the 3rd Army throughout 1944 and 1945. Would he have been able to build such a successful and dynamic fighting force?
• Second, as a corrolary to the first, there are career requirements for officers appointed to joint commands. The demand for those officers has forced the services to cut career billeting corners to get enough qualified officers to meet the demand. That is a recipe for "check-the-box" leadership and careerism from start to finish.
• Third, most services made a decision to shorten deployment times in order to ease the burden on servicemembers' families. This was a social decision, and it may not have been a bad one. However it did create a 'revolving door' in nearly every unit in the military, as whole combat units turned over from year to year and had to be assigned places in the supporting establishment, which in turn was bloated beyond needs and suffered the same 'revolving door' effect. The Army alone experimented with year-long deployments in the hopes that more time in country would allow greater innovation and success in the counterinsurgency fight; I'd be curious to see if there were any positive results.
• Finally, Congress has micromanaged the benefits of servicemembers to the point of restricting officers from shaping their force. I doubt anyone in the military, including me, would complain about pay increases, money earmarked for better base gyms and housing (including 'in country'), and a reduction on sexual assault and/or suicide. The problem is the way Congress has enacted these changes. Forcing them down the military's throat creates a culture of 'yes-men' who must "support and defend" the Constitution by bowing to each new decree of a prime Constitutional institution, Congress, no matter what that does to already scarce military resources. Sergeant Major Barrett's comments, while tactless and insensitive, demonstrate the frustration of many military leaders that servicemembers need meaningful combat training, expensive as it is, more than they need administrative sexual assault training and fast-food joints on base.

The prevailing sentiment among junior officers is that the military is directionless, or maybe more specifically suffering the pull of too many 'missions' at once. There's Congress, forcing social changes and shutting down government. There's the so-called "War on Terror," which carries real danger but no real reward--neither Congress nor the Services themselves seem to care much about it anymore. There's the Administration, preaching a "pivot to the Pacific" and a drawdown, which ominously promises more tasks for the military to accomplish with fewer people, and there's the innate sense of honor in the services themselves that expect the officer cadre to keep all these masters happy and still field fighting units.

In this context, I will speak heresy to the die-hards and state that there's small wonder junior officers in particular keep their heads down and try not to screw up (i.e. bring all their servicemembers back alive with comparatively little regard for 'the big picture'). It also explains why so many veterans of the recent conflicts look back nostalgically on the simpler world of their combat tours, when they had a single direct mission and a feeling of accomplishment.

So what sort of reform would make Mr. Lind happy? I'm not sure, as he simply bemoans US Officers' lack of creativity and moral fibre, but I have some suggestions on that score as well. But first, I'll point out that some of the best ideas have come from much more creditable sources than me. Go there, and explore.

My ideas are pretty simple. There is a romantic conception floating around that the military is a meritocracy--in other words, the officers who are best at their jobs should be the ones that get promoted. The shortened command tours, vast administrative requirements, and glut of officers in the services effectively obscure the good officers from the mediocre, lowering moral and motivation. I believe that the best leaders in today's military truly seek a chance to lead and to show their mettle, so I propose the military make a few structural changes to recover a merit-based promotion system.

• Lengthen command tours, including the tours that are required for command screening, to 3 (or 4) years. This would first of all require existing commanders to put a lot of thought into the junior officers they promote, knowing that the officers they evaluate highly will eventually control a combat unit for three years (instead of 18 months), and would allow existing junior officers a lot more time to develop and lead their troops under the guidance of one Commanding Officer. 
• Longer tours help mitigate the 'zero-defect mentality,' a colloquialism which refers to the reality that one mistake in an officer's career is enough to prevent him/her from making it to the next step, because he/she will always be compared to other officers with no such mistakes. It's a lazy way to evaluate, because the positive effects of the officer with the mistake may be greater than those of his/her peers, and may indicate greater potential. But at least with a full 3 years of observed time, officers will be able to recover from mistakes--and their seniors will be forced to consider which of their subordinates are best suited for further opportunities, knowing that maybe only one will have the opportunity.
• Longer command tours also permit greater unit stability, which will increase esprit de corps, has been shown to reduce things like suicide and sexual assault, and will certainly increase combat effectiveness.
• Increasing tour length will be essentially meaningless if officer staffing remains high, because right now it seems like every officer gets the chance to move on regardless of his/her performance against peers. As part of the draw-down, the military as a whole should reduce officer staffing to the minimum level required for service administration, starting with Generals and working down the rank structure (and this reduction should occur before any enlisted personnel cuts, in accordance with good leadership practices). The military should also eliminate the additional joint force staffs located in Iraq and Afghanistan. This will be an unpopular step, as many generals will be forced into retirement, many more field grade officers will be forced into early retirement, and many junior grade officers will not have the opportunity to continue in the military past their first tour. It would help ensure, however, that only the best officers in each rank will remain--reinforcing the idea of the military as a meritocracy.

Actual, active duty officers have much more specific lists of things which need to change, most of which revolve around their ability to train their servicemembers. And we should listen to them. But we can't force current officers to change their way of thinking--most of them have been shaped by the questionable leadership environment that Mr. Lind notes for the entirety of their career. We can, however, collectively change the game--we can stop playing that 'everybody gets a chance' and start giving our officers the space and responsibility to fully lead their men and women. That's why most of them sought a commission in the first place.

These kinds of changes will force leaders at all level to focus on quality, not qualifications; it will force officers to make tough evaluation decisions after years of watching their subordinates develop. Ultimately, only the top 20-30% will have a career each tour, which will ensure that only the most effective officers run our military.

When our nation's security and American lives are at stake, isn't that what we want?

On graduation generally, with some commencement advice

There's nothing that makes me feel older than seeing graduation pictures and congratulations post all over social media. Many of my older friends have children graduating from high school, and many of my contemporaries have siblings, nieces, and nephews graduating. Such bright, exciting moments! And with the privilege of age I look back on my own shining moment, and remember that the aftermath was, well, difficult. The years following my degree were filled with growth and development, much of it painful. This article eloquently captures the sense of loss, of frustrated loneliness, the unexpected difficulty of 'real work' in 'the real world.'

I'll bet most of us remember this transition, and we have all sorts of advice for others on how to deal with it. But that's what all graduates hear, from the rumors of their friends (I heard so-and-so is a great company) to the advice of parents or teachers to the commencement address itself.

Obviously, I don't remember any of the advice I was given. I doubt anyone else does, either.

I mean, there's just so much of it! And it's not like any graduate is eager to plan their life 'in the real world,' not with celebrating to do. And most college graduates are complacent to some degree--by their graduation year they have usually  found a comfortable niche in their institution. By the way, the last semester usually doesn't have much impact on class standing, so I suspect that most college seniors spend rather more time socializing before graduation than studying.

So it isn't like anybody paying much attention to those wise words spilled extravagantly over commencement ceremonies. Yet if they did (and I grant some do--not me, I both proud and ashamed to admit, but some do), I doubt they'd get much out of the advice. The sad fact is that college education does not prepare one for 'real world,' and most commencement advice tells of how to succeed in the 'real world.'

By 'college education, I mean the kind of education to be had at institutions found in U.S. News' annual ranking.

I've written before that colleges and universities are supposed to be places that challenge students and train them, through rigorous study and discussion, to solve the problems of the world. There are technical colleges for training people to solve technical problems, there were law schools for training people to solve legal problems, and at the top of the proverbial academic totem pole there were the liberal arts schools, which trained people (theoretically) to solve people problems. Subsets of these liberal arts schools focused on societal problems, or artistic problems (not really great language, the problem that artists solve is that of too little art in our communities), or economic problems. But regardless, the graduates of these 'colleges' were supposed to be molded into the movers and shakers, advancers of society, generally good and reliable and virtuous people ready to make a positive difference in their business and social circles.

This still happens, of course. Excellent niche schools like California Tech or MIT maintain a sterling reputation based on the observable skills and attributes of their graduates. Well-regarded liberal arts (or "general") schools like Harvard, Stanford, and the rest continue to turn out exceedingly well-educated young men and women. But the 'post-college depression' that plagues my generation (and which increases, I bet) argues eloquently that the graduates of 'top-tier' universities are not prepared for the 'real world,' even if they are educated to the max. And I'll go so far as to suggest that today's college graduates may not be all that educated as compared with the graduates of yore.

If colleges and universities are separate institutions dedicated to forming young men and women for success in the real world, then they are also separate from it. That's necessary, but it is also dangerous. Separation breeds unfamiliarity, and unfamiliarity breeds contempt. True to form, a close look at 'college culture' shows that what higher education values in its students, and what it teaches, is a collection of loosely associated ideals that revolve around vague concepts like open-mindedness and experimentation and uniqueness or specialness. In my experience (a decade ago, but more recently via facebook) a great many of today's college students, and therefore graduates, see the point of college as getting an 'experience' (whatever that is--I assume it means mostly social drinking with a little class and sports spectating thrown in). That experience is supposed to be nurturing and consequence-free, so that students can 'find themselves.' It would be easy to launch into a righteous tirade, but those are a dime-a-dozen on the internet. Let's give this idea the benefit of the doubt and say that 'finding oneself' is probably related to being mentally/emotionally healthy, directly impacts a graduates' contributions to society.

Yet research has shown that 'the college experience,' while it may nurture and produce open-minded graduates who have 'found themselves' (actually I think it is probably unhealthy in sum) mirrors the 'real world' less and less. Grade inflation, on the rise since the 1960s, means fewer and fewer college graduates have dealt with failure and had a chance to recover. That's not like the 'real world,' and in fact many commencement addresses I've read (and successful people I've heard) talk about inevitable failures and the importance of learning from failures and doing better next time. Research shows that failure is an essential part of learning, and it's absence can cause excessive fear of risks and (you guessed it) failure. Students at 'top tier universities, crafted for admission by 'magnet' or 'prep' high schools, may not learn about failure at all. It's a particularly hard lesson to learn after college, when the consequences are life-changing.

What would make the university years a good separation is a connection to what comes after. Learning through challenge, failure, and perseverance is direct preparation for the 'real world,' and the separation is insulated from breeding contempt by the learning itself which is external and oriented at the world outside--even if the world available is bounded by university walls. But taking away that external focus and emphasizing reflective learning, or 'finding oneself,' creates a shelter wherein the separation breeds contempt very efficaciously. The contempt is usually expressed in rejecting traditional social metrics of success (a family, real estate, success in one's community), pejoratively labeling them as conformity, settling, or re-imagining them as social slavery, materialism, bourgeois values, or patriarchy (depending upon the ideology at hand). Sadly, such beliefs encourage new graduates to feel that they are better than everybody else because they are somehow independent and free-spirited, non-conformist and appropriately ambitious. And because most people figure out that acting better than others is a great way to make enemies, they simply compromise and disassociate a 'professional life' from what they regard is their 'real life.' I've seen myself and many contemporaries literally wear two faces: a sober, professional face for work and family; and an artificial 'eclectic,' interesting, face in selected social groups.

Certainly the perspective that the value of higher education lies mostly in 'the experience,' which students generally interpret as experiencing independence and fun, subtly relegates studies to an inconvenient but necessary part of 'the experience,' effectively teaching students to develop two faces--one for class and impressing professors, another for parties and Greek life. Essentially, the college years' chief role is providing ample 'find oneself' time to painstakingly craft the right persona for each environment. I know I spent many hours on AOL Instant Messenger, pompously posting impressive quotes and poems in my 'away message' and profile, hoping everyone would see what a sensitive intellectual I was. After college, I continued this personal dimorphism by constantly tweaking my Facebook profile. And I was not alone: I noticed the same behavior in college friends and co-workers. I can't help but think that a lot of the post-college depression had to do with all that focus on self and others, inviting self-doubt and constant comparison.

Worst of all, the values taught by the 'college experience' almost certainly have lasting, perhaps lifelong consequences. Although in humans the temporal lobe of the brain--controlling memory, the understanding of higher meaning, and complex problem-solving--develops by 17 years of age, the frontal lobe--controlling judgment, the understanding of consequences of future actions, and values (determining good and bad)--doesn't finish developing until a person is in their early to mid-twenties. So college or university freshmen are intellectually capable of learning undergraduate academics, but they are still in the process of developing their values. Teaching them anti-social behavior and sheltering them from the need to be valuable during the college is setting them up for failure throughout their lives, because those are the prime years when humans establish values. It becomes much harder to change values, and therefore behavior, after the mid twenties. Believe it or not, there's the science behind the phrase, "people don't change."

The dirty little secret about all of this is that graduates are about to enter society, and none of the things that makes a person fit for society (whether the society is a military branch or a hippy commune) are truly taught in universities--except maybe through having to live with a roommate. People who think they're better than everybody else, or people who are self-focused (what, after all, is 'finding oneself' if not self-focus?) are by definition anti-social. And guess what, post-college depression? Being anti-social leads to loneliness, insecurity, and depression. Reference "The Roseto Study," (thank you, Outliers by Malcom Gladwell), which shows scientifically that human happiness (and health) are tied to functional societies, which may be found in families, neighborhoods, and corporations.

So while the purpose of colleges and universities are to give students value to the societies they'll enter--value in the form of technical knowledge, problem-solving abilities, communication abilities, ethical development--I think that contemporary education falls short. Grade inflation means students don't really have to learn much of anything except perhaps how to charm their teachers into liking them, and their educational inheritance of anti-social qualities hinders their ability to join new companies and social groups after graduation. New graduates may possess a wealth of knowledge, skills, and abilities, but bringing all that goodness to bear in 'the real world' (a job, a relationship, or a new social scene) requires them to be social. In fact, success in the 'real world' usually depends more on one's ability to work well with others--become a part of a team--than on measurable skills.

I suspect that's the origin of the wry and cynical phrase, "[Success is] not about what you know, it's about who you know," which is almost true. Really, success not about what you know, but about your ability to know others and communicate.

That was the thing about Roseto: the town had a strong community. Most of the researchers who studied that place traced it to the fact that it was relatively isolated and it's inhabitants traced a common ancestry to a small town in Italy. But despite being 'as American as apple pie' (in terms of employment, diet, interests, etc.) at the time of all the studies, Rosetans were empirically far happier and healthier than their fellow Americans. They had a functional society, a community where each of them were better known and therefore better appreciated by their peers, allowing individuals both more freedom to be 'who they were' and demanding enough conformity and external focus to keep all members of the community valuable. Whether or not one agrees philosophically with the Rosetan social structure, the facts speak for themselves. Rosetans were happier, more satisfied with their lives, less depressed, and less prone to diseases ranging from heart attacks to cancer. And it's all due to the fact that they were social--something that's hard to accomplish living by the values encouraged in college and university environments.

I wish I'd known back then--really known (because I'm sure many wise people tried to tell me)--that all the hours spent on myself and my various images, all the anxiety I felt about the inevitable post-college setbacks, were wasted. Nobody read my facebook profile, nobody cared how eclectic my 'likes' and hobbies were, and nobody wanted to hear the complicated details of my love life or the reasons why I flubbed a particular task. Everyone was too busy developing their own self-image, simply wanted me to do my job, or cared about me and wanted me to be happy.

That's what I wish I'd know at my commencement, and I'm sure many people tried to tell me these things. Actually, I can remember some advice to the effect of, "be a good person and to work hard." But I didn't listen as well as I should, and maybe that's the story of college students everywhere. Perhaps if 'top-tier' colleges and universities emphasized team-oriented social skills, hard work, and resiliency more than self-focus and nurture, graduates wouldn't need any commencement advice. They'd be formed for success already.

A Suggested Scientific Definition of the Meaning of Life

It's funny how thoughts and ideas coalesce. As I worked my way through five or six Michael Crichton novels on one of my periodic binges, I noted in The Lost World an astonishing addition to the standard evolution narrative. And then as I trolled my Facebook feed I saw the same idea again in a Psychology Today article, which I read and shared. I didn't quite recognize the relation then. Not until tonight. There is something truly fundamental to humanity about relationships, it seems--and it seems like humanity eschews relationships to a greater degree now than ever.

Many scientists and philosophers have marveled at the evolution of humanity. Since Charles Darwin revolutionized the understanding of biology by showing that some species suffered extinction, and others evolved, a great many ideas have surfaced. For example, rationalists doubting the presence of God and suspicious of religion regarded this new information as another nail in the coffin of superstition, as humanity marched towards a greater and more knowledgeable civilization. This was regarded as an attack against religious institutions, who fought back first by declaring such belief heresy and blasphemy, and second by co-opting evolution as proof that God brought about His likeness on earth through this new biological process.

Interestingly, it seems that when scientists and thinkers began to examine the why of it all, they largely passed over the why as it related to humans. Some claimed that extinction and evolution were a result of "Natural Selection." Species had to adapt (evolve) to cope with changing environments which included new predators and predations, or they suffered extinction. Later, more randomness was inserted with the claim that evolution was a result of gene mutation; namely that species were randomly mutating all the time, and beneficial mutations conduced to survival and became species characteristics, while weakening or harmful mutations resulted in extinction.

These ideas became canon and carried wide influence. It's a neat and tidy explanation, and it has sheltered a comfortable delusion about the supremacy of humans. Anthropologists and sociologists drew a similarly tidy line from our forebearers, who must have evolved oversized brains as a clever response to the dangers of their world. Because we humans alone developed tools, and imposed our will upon certain animals to domesticate them, and upon certain plants to cultivate them, and formed societies for mutual support, we ascended to "the top of the food chain." We evolved to survive, and natural selection has declared us winners.

But there are problems with this canon. One is that our near relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas, survive just fine without walking upright and without our oversized brains. Another is that we are not the only species who use tools and exhibit complex problem-solving and form societies. Most glaring, however, is the problem that has clouded the issue of evolution since it broke upon the world: we assume that we are superior because of our brains, our tools, and our civilizations.

Furthermore, the evolutionary canon usually ignores an essential element in species, which is behavior. It's clear that human behavior--complex problem-solving, for one, and societies, for another, has enabled our race to not only survive but flourish. Interestingly, the behavior of certain animal species (such as gorillas, wolves, and dolphins) has conferred similar advantages. Perhaps my own research has been incomplete, but I have not found much historic literature on evolution which addresses this.

The Psychology Today article noted in passing some recent research that suggests cognitive development happens more efficaciously in social environments--literally, at play. The social environment seemingly must include physical interaction, like eye contact, physical cues, and auditory communication. It may have suggested that the human brain evolved to support more advanced social relationships, or it may have been Mr. Crichton. But that strikes me as a very important piece of information, because it suggests that our large brains are not primarily problem-solving apparatuses that (for example) helped us connive ways to bring down a wooly mammoth. More likely our brains have developed to handle relationships.

If true, this has great implications for our way of life. Whence notions of love, honor, duty, and morality? From an evolutionary standpoint, such notions are of dubious value, because often they result in annihilation (I recognize that that they also result in creation). But in a social context--seeing society as an evolved characteristic which permits adaptation to an environment--such notions actually conduce to the continued presence of the species. Nature is full of examples where an organism sacrifices itself for the good of it's species, and I find it unlikely that humans are that different. Take the common characteristic of mothers to defend their young unto death, if necessary. That is certainly a necessity for the procreation of the species, but it also fits into a description of love and honor and duty, which exist in nearly all human societies and accomplish the same end.

In fact, I've read some evolutionary studies that have remarked upon an accelerated development of species that exhibit complex behavior. Whereas it may have taken a geological epoch for life to move from single-celled organisms to multi-organ mammals, the amount of evolution which has occurred in the last million years has seen the ascendance of incredibly rich biodiversity, many with complex behavioral components (not least humans and their close relatives). Is this a sort of evolutionary arms race? As competitors evolve to survive, they must become more complex and more social in the process. Larger-brained humans could not be born as mature as other animals, some of which can walk and even defend themselves immediately after birth, because the large head containing that brain wouldn't fit through the mother's pelvis. Therefore they were born increasingly helpless, with brains small enough to be housed in a birth-able head--but with increased need of protection as well. Therefore societies had to be formed to protect children until they could survive on their own--misnomer in and of itself, because humans don't generally survive alone.

Which brings up another question: why don't humans fend for themselves? why do we do that in societies? Do we need cooperation to survive, or did we learn that cooperation (and the intangible values and ethics that support it) simply yielded a more successful species?

Taking religion, humanism, and arrogance out of the dialogue, it would seem that the human organism is constructed for societies. Perhaps that's why research shows that cognitive development happens the most in a social environment. Perhaps that's why the majority of our brain runs our 'unconscious,' which provides intuition, directs and interprets body language, and generates moral reasoning, all of which are of great use in helping us get along with our fellow humans, and of less use than our 'conscious' rationality when it comes to solving problems (like bringing down that scary mammoth).

So if science has an answer to the meaning of life, it would appear to be relationships and societies. That's nothing new, of course--the importance of family has been defended by Aristotle, the Bible, and every eastern religion of which I'm familiar. Concepts like freedom, and equality, and virtue, and the rest appear to exist to support our biologic need for society and it's advantages. I'm not diminishing them; such concepts I believe to be essential. Yet they exist to serve our relationships, and not for their own sakes.

I find it a common conception that humanity has marched steadily from primitive beginnings to ever more advanced and meaningful civilization. I disagree with it, however--perhaps our physical quality of life is better now than in the Renaissance, but whether we are happier or better is conjecture, and I believe in doubt. Science tells us that the denizens of hunter-gatherer societies are happier and healthier than we civilized internet-users, by nearly every criteria (objective and subjective). In fact, the current generations are shorter, less healthy, and more prone to mental and behavioral disorders than recent generations, such as those which fought in the Second World War and the baby boomers.

While I don't believe that human societies will ever be perfect--society by it's nature constrains because cooperation requires sacrifice--perhaps the exploding diagnoses of mental illness and disorder in our own can be traced to the breakdown in relationships. I think it no accident that the most destructive humans among us are usually loners, with little in the way of participation in society (there are exceptions to this, of course). It's no secret that our modern world offers a great deal of distraction from the business of relationships, from demanding careers to ubiquitous media to solitary entertainment (like video games). All of which makes it easier to plug away at the office, or watch one's favorite shoe (or sports team) on the television, or develop a virtual life via social media.

It's important to note that relationships and societies are physical things. Studies show that human senses are more stimulated by other humans--our eyes tend to focus on other people, we react more strongly to the smells of other people, we pick out speech more readily than other sounds. In a sense, our oversized brains are a complex communication device meant to connect us with other people. That does not happen effectively via computer (although I admit that deploying away from my wife made me very grateful for the telephone and video chat).

Apparently, the wisdom of religion and of old wives has been corroborated by science: family (and by extension, society) is everything. It is the key to humanity's success, and probably to its happiness as well.

A critique of modern scientific thought

The theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) has caused a great of discussion in the past 30 years. There have been books, and award-winning movies, and Nobel-winning personalities, and most significantly millions (if not billions) of dollars dedicated to educating the public about this theory, and to stopping it. I personally have participated in debates about, mostly with my friends (on Facebook), and I have been surprised at how religiously the belief in the verity of the theory is held. It is one of the defining issues of our epoch, equal to the subject of the Vietnam conflict in the 1970s and perhaps eclipsing our on-going Middle Eastern conflict today.

AGW is depressingly obscure, I've found. There are those who debate the meaning of the word theory, explaining that it means only an explanation of something instead of a law. A theory is not immutably true, such as the laws that govern the conservation of energy in physics. Of course, I believe that gravity is a theory--the best explanation of why objects interact with this large land mass we call earth (and why other masses in space interact the way they do)--which seems pretty immutable itself. Clouding the issue further is the fact that the theory of gravity has laws that apply within the theory, such as the law that an object in space within the gravitational field of the earth will fall towards it.  So how much trust are we to place in this AGW theory? It appears that the answer lies in one's perception.

Then there are the details of AGW. I generally get the impression from the all rhetoric about "global warming" that pollution causes the world to heat up. That will apparently result in sea levels rising, perhaps several hundred (or thousand) feet. Digging a little deeper, it seems that the warming is supposed to occur because of carbon dioxide, a "greenhouse gas" that traps heat. Where it traps heat is confusing as well: is it in the atmosphere, or on the surface? The most scientific explanations focus on atmospheric warming, proposing that a global warming of the upper air will irrevocably trap heat on the surface, with a host of terrible consequences: mass species extinction, including the oxygen-producing algae in the ocean, and perhaps a catastrophic shut-down of the world's biological equilibrium. I've already noted the possibility of sea levels rising, which (given that most of the world's population lives on the coast) would be a very grave threat indeed. Spreading deserts, making agriculture impossible and engendering a massive famine. Terrible stuff indeed.

I hear a lot about climate models, vastly complicated computer programs which seek to extrapolate a set of data into the future. I could misunderstand, of course, but it seems that many of the terrible consequences we can expect to face are themselves extrapolated from a single set of data, the expected temperatures determined by the climate models. And that is what causes me the most concern.

A very passing and abstract understanding of Chaos Theory and a slightly more nuanced understanding of human experience in conflict has made me very suspicious of linear thinking, which is what those climate models appear to be (in essence). Linear thinking establishes direct relationships between things, such as causes and effects. It works very well, too, in what scientists call a "closed system." We use it with great success in everyday life, when we travel places, cook food, conduct our daily work, and the like. After all, most of us know that if we leave our house at for a familiar destination, it takes a well-known amount of time. For me, it takes 30 minutes, give or take, to get to work. If I set the stove dial to "8" instead of "Hi," my bacon cooks quickly without burning. If my daughter does not have much of a nap, she will have a hard time sleeping at night.

In fact, I would posit that linear thinking is essential to our lives. Almost anything we do which is complicated needs a linear explanation--perhaps in a checklist--that helps us achieve the task. Hunters learn and understand complicated details about their spears, bows, or firearms; parents develop complicated sets of procedures for their children, businesses develop strategic plans (not to mention floor procedures, sales protocols, and marketing campaigns), and individuals come up with life plans that may include college, a specific job, a relationship, and so on.

The success of this mindset, and the almost unconscious way which we collectively apply it, tends to obscure the fact that such linear thinking is partially inadequate. But instinctively we know it. We know that an unexpected traffic jam, or a suddenly malfunctioning burner, or a child's unexpected whim, or a new product (or service), or the weather, or any number of other things can disrupt a linear procedure. We recognize it so easily that we have birthed uncounted idioms describing it: "that's life," "expect the unexpected," "murphy's law," and others.

In fact, in my former profession, there was a great deal of debate about whether a battlefield could be treated linearly. That was, of course, the great dream of the American military starting in the 1960s: as weapons became more and more advanced, and more control was possible via computer systems and advanced radios, military thinkers began to wonder if the terrible uncertainty of war could be avoided. They imagined a great army, with all weapon systems and theaters coordinated and controlled from a central location. Armed (literally) with that dream, and with advanced Command and Control (C2) systems developed at ruinous taxpayer expense, all designed by extrapolating past experience into future conflicts, the American military strode confidently into Vietnam, then into the Persian Gulf, then into Afghanistan, and finally again into the Persian Gulf.

Of course, with the possible exception of Desert Storm (1991), history teaches us that our military confidence was misplaced. Vietnam became a bloody, protracted war confused results and our forays into Iraq and Afghanistan look little different. And yet how, with the most advanced weapons and control technology that humanity has ever developed, did we end up with such debatable success?

One proposed answer is in non-linear thinking. Called in different disciplines Chaos Theory, or "Complex System Dynamics," the short story is that our world is inherently unpredictable. It does not behave according to cause and effect, or set rules. It is subject to "emergent factors," which is a verbally precise way to say that new, unexpected things occur. That accident on the way to work, or the new product that destroys a marketing plan, or the new behavior of a child or an entity. Something that is totally unexpected.

Let me take three examples. The first is falling in love. A great many people fall in love with someone unexpected, for an unexpected reason. Perhaps they knew the person before, and weren't romantically or sexually interested, then something occurred that changed their perception. Perhaps they were surprised by a new person they met. Either way, the encounter and the complex emotions that followed--joy, care, desire, excitement, need, contentment--was unexpected. It was emergent. Though we could try to explain it as cause and effect ("I was always attracted to blondes," or "It happened when I stopped looking"), those causes are not, in fact, causes. They are woefully inadequate causes. If it was blonde hair, or the fact that a person has stopped "looking for love," then what about all the other blondes, or all the other people one meets when they stop looking? Even trying to articulate it aloud is beyond the capacity of our language, and most people in love finally resort to phrases like, "it was just different," or "I just knew." They are recognizing that in their love, there was something new. New about them, new about the other person, new about their life, perceptions, and perspective, literally new about the world.

This example also tells us a lot about our relationship to non-linear thinking. We humans seek love inescapably, if we are to believe the evidence of adolescent behavior, the enduring institution of marriage (whatever it's relevance now), the preponderance of our art and media, and the time-honored tradition of matchmaking (now updated to websites like eHarmony and Match.com). In fact, we don't collectively consider love authentic unless it is non-linear. We are contemptuous of arranged marriages, for example. We expect love to be exciting and unscripted. Spontaneous. There is a deep need for and understanding of dynamic, unpredictable relationships that is at the core of who we are and how we relate.

The second example lies in the twentieth-century conflicts already described. Linear thinking, cause-and-effect perspective taught that a disciplined, advanced military such as our own would protect the Republic of Viet Nam (RVN, or South Vietnam). That proved inadequate because the Soviets armed and trained the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) to a much greater extent. That was an emergent event. So we thought up a linear pretext to accomplish our goal of supporting the allied RVN--we sent our own disciplined, advanced military. Unfortunately, the NVA changed tactics. They allied with the Viet Cong guerrillas and began avoiding open conflict. Even so, they were defeated in every major military engagement, but what Americans did not suspect was that such defeats, which crippled their ability to fight, in fact advanced their cause. They were behaving unexpectedly. They didn't attempt to beat the American military on the battlefield, they attempted to make America as a whole tired and ashamed of the conflict. That was an emergent behavior to which the Americans couldn't adapt, and it dynamically interrelated to other emergent qualities such as the "counterculture" social movement occurring in American universities, the increasing prevalence and social acceptance of drugs, and the increased media access to the world which was provided by Americans themselves, through embedded TV reporters. The true relationship and origin of all these events is (I argue) too complex to comprehend, which is why it is non-linear. But their unexpected, frustrating effect is well-documented in history.

But those first two articles deal with human phenomena. What about "natural" phenomena? The third example of dynamism and emergent behavior is evolution. The theory of evolution has long been lauded as a rigorously scientific perspective. Because it stands at odds with the biblical story of the world's beginning, many rationalists have used it to debunk Christianity (and in a broader context, all religion) despite the fact that many scientists who have contributed to the theory were practicing religious men and women. And there is a nice, apparently linear path from single-celled organisms in vast primordial seas to breathtaking biological complexity in the form of mammals and reptiles (including humans and dinosaurs). Charles Darwin, the scientist who first proposed this theory in The Origin of the Species, explained simply that evolution occurred as a result of "natural selection," positing that organisms best suited for their environment survived, while those more poorly suited were eventually killed off through competition (or by the environment itself.

But "natural selection" is an explanation with many facets. It has been reduced to "survival of the fittest," where evolution occurs to cope with changing environments and the species who are less capable of survival and procreation become extinct. Darwin himself, however, became a household name in the Western world due to his idea of "sexual selection," claiming that sexual desirability was responsible for evolution (a titillating idea, especially in Victorian England). In fact, Darwin's work seems to focus on sexual selection, making me wonder as I read it whether or not he departed a bit from the path of rigorous scientific research and began publishing explanations that continued to draw more attention and publicity. Yet no matter how we choose to define "natural selection," the troubling fact remains that we don't really know how it happened, or why it happened. We can explain that this species became extinct, while that species evolved. But excepting a few instances of evolution or extinction we were collectively fortunate enough to observe (such as antibiotic-resistant bacteria), the natural mechanism of evolution is pure speculation. We cannot explain coherently the cause and effect of it all, we can only guess.

For example, if evolution was driven by the need to survive, why then have traits evolved in species that have no apparent effect on survival whatsoever? Evolution certainly caused humans to have different eye colors, but it's unclear as to how that was "naturally selected." And why is the absence of a tail (when the tailbone is present) more efficacious to survival? Why have some species become extinct, while others survived. It is not satisfactory to say that somehow such traits must have aided survival, because if we can't explain something then we have no right to believe it (else we make science the same as religion). Sharks and crocodiles, organisms that have survived the dinosaurs, the ice age, and untold other environmental changes--not to mention the evolution of creatures that share their environments--make a mockery of evolution as a response to "natural selection." And "sexual selection" makes no more sense, because the mating patterns of bygone creatures are forever a mystery, absent time travel. We observe that sexual behavior tends to "breed out" weakness within a species, but it certainly doesn't explain the extinction or development of various species.

Further reinforcing the non-linear characteristics of evolution are the the philosophical implications it has inspired. Evolution is random and follows no single discernible pattern, therefore we humans are an accident (with all our art and science and other achievement as well). And while that is a wonderful overarching expression of the unknowability of this great process of biology, geology, and atmospherics that has been the story of this planet's life, it points inescapably at dynamic, emergent behavior. Literally every evolutionary step has been emergent, something new, whether it was the asteroid that supposedly began the extinction of the dinosaurs or the increasing brain size that characterized the transition from ancient apes to our modern human. Evolution may in fact be the most confidently non-linear perspective in the modern world, and evolutionary biologists have by and large ceased offering conventional cause-and-effect linear explanations for the developments they discover; instead they focus on explaining the apparent facts, which in detail continue to be frustrating obscure. For example, evidence suggests that Neanderthals may have used speech and tools, and probably interbred with both Cro-Magnons and Anatomically Modern Humans (AMHs). Was their extinction then "bred out," or did they become extinct through some other evolutionary mechanism, such as persecution and genocide at the hands of more advanced evolutionary cousins (which would itself be an emergent event)? It's not even clear whether they were more or less intelligent, since they appear to have had more voluminous brains than AMHs, which is a crude indicator of intelligence in organisms.

For some reason, it appears that science has given humans the illusion that there is a finite amount of information in the world, and once all information is known--once science and research has plumbed the depths of all mysteries and revealed all--then there will be no more surprises. That attitude is most concretely seen in the repeated, futile attempts by militaries in the last half-century to bring all aspects of the battlefield under control. But with people and with the world, experience teaches that emergent behaviors occur, without precedent and unpredictable by any cause-and-effect extrapolation. And any attempt to neatly package emergent behavior with a linear explanation is pure speculation. No one will ever know why the North Vietnamese martyred themselves militarily, or how why such martyrdom, if carried on long enough, would result in American war fatigue. Certainly the Americans, who ought to have known best, did not predict it; while it might be fashionable to say that Ho Chi Minh and Giap were smarter than Americans, the fact is that their emergent tactic itself occurred to them through a result of unexpected effects and opportunities. Likewise, no one will ever know what happened to Neanderthals. And a guess, even one made by a scientist, is still a guess.

Eastern thought deals with this reality much better than our contemporary Western thought. Since the renaissance, Westerners have undergone a half millennium of constant progress and living improvement. We have mastered agriculture, distance travel, flight, and medicine. To a certain extent we have even mastered weather--hurricanes no longer slam against ships and shores with 36 hour warnings; our satellites allow us to evacuate days before landfall. But for all this mastery, we can't predict. Eastern disciplines such as Buddhism or the way of Lao Tzu take what is to Western minds a curiously fatalistic approach to life, but I argue that there is wisdom in recognizing one's inability to control one's surroundings. The Marine Corps General James Mattis recognized how little he could control a battlefield, despite commanding whole divisions, because of the violent and highly dynamic environment. He took the radio handle "Chaos" to illustrate that he did not seek to control the battlefield but rather to thrive in the unpredictable environment. That is a military tenet perhaps first articulated by Sun Tzu, an eastern thinker.

And speaking of weather, our weather "predictions" are merely speculations based on observed data. The path of a hurricane is projected, and large swathes of coastline are put on alert. Why? Because we simply don't know where it's going. Half the time a hurricane deviates by hundreds of miles from it's projected path. Other weather developments are guesses at what might happen over, say Chicago when system A intersects system B--never minding that weather systems, like hurricanes, are projected in the future with poor accuracy. And the results of weather systems which intersect are unpredictable, too. These systems are emergent, dynamic, and probably respond to variables that are as of yet uncomprehended. Such as land use, as in cities (which tend to be warmer than surrounding countryside).

All of this calls the predicted outcomes of global warming into serious question. While empirical data over the last 200 years has clearly shown a warming trend, and glaciers melting, and growing holes in the ozone layer, the effect of such facts is unpredictable. It is essentially dynamic and emergent. The "El Nino" phenomenon was hailed as a manifestation of the consequences of global warming, but evidence suggests that it has been occurring at two to seven year intervals for 300 years, and perhaps even further back. So we can't be sure if the extreme weather caused by El Nino is due to AGW or not. In fact, while NOAA has identified that the number of anomalous weather/ocean systems regarding temperature has increased, nobody is sure whether that's a new development or not. And the fact that within the broad warming trend of the last 200 years there existed a 30-year cooling trend from 1940-1970 clouds the issue even further.

Because "the environment" is such a complex system, with emergent, non-linear, dynamic developments, I think that all the trouble and fuss about predicting climate change is a mistake. The simple fact is that we can't predict anything--we can only guess. Perhaps a guess or two will be correct, but that will itself be an emergent effect from the whole. Besides, the use of terrifying predictions to stimulate more attention on the issue of AGW strikes me as manipulative, a way for AGW apologists and researchers to increase their support, especially financially. I certainly have no illusions that scientists, like everyone else, are susceptible to stretching the truth to get their way. After all, bankers, businessmen, and priests have done it for years. Ultimately, I think our resources are better spent learning to thrive in this emergent environment, which starts by understanding it. Computer models apply linear thought to a non-linear system, which makes them nearly useless. Rigorous research aimed at knowing instead of predicting is much more helpful.

It is perhaps tempting to think that if our world is so dynamic and emergent, then what use is there for linear, scientific thought at all? What can we possibly do to make a difference if we have no way of knowing or predicting what the effects of our action will be? The fact is that we live in relation to this world, and we always have. Native Americans burned forests and fields to flush game and make the land into something more congenial to them. We have farmed for thousands of years. We have learned to thrive by taking our environment and adapting to it in a way that is advantageous to us. This doesn't just apply to the natural world, either--businesses do it in the marketplace, governments do it in political spheres, and we individuals have done it with every single aspect of our lives. It is a survival mechanism. And if our environment is changing now, I think it's a good bet that we have something to do with it--but simply reversing the processes is unlikely to reverse the effects we've seen to date. The world will continue to evolve, dynamically. That is why I think it is so foolish to think that we can control the "environment" to such a degree that...what? What is the desired solution to AGW? Make the world as it was in 1930? 1830? Does anybody really know when the world was healthier? What about in the Jurassic period (200-150 million years ago), when there was more oxygen in the air (and more carbon dioxide as well), not to mention warmer temperatures?

We should "pick up" after ourselves, of course. We should not destroy if we can help it. Demanding greater energy efficiency is virtuous, and certainly will mitigate the effects of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not to mention the deleterious smog that existed in Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s, which we have successfully cleaned up, and which exists today in developing cities like Shanghai. Finding better ways to use land than mass deforestation and urban development might slow the warming effect, since scientists point to land use as a major factor in the present warming trend. Of course, that entails a behavioral change, as by and large the population of the world continues to concentrate in the cities. And contamination of water and land with industrial by-products including hormonal, radioactive, and corrosives is still a major threat, and ought be combatted to the maximum extent possible. But whatever steps we take, we should be mindful that they will birth their own emergent effects, and almost certainly will not have the effects that we expect (or not entirely).

Keeping that in mind, we should be careful not to impose restrictions on developing societies that do not have the luxury of guilt over a theory of projected environmental behavior, and struggle daily with poverty. The science behind AGW does not account for the human cost of change, except where it predicts catastrophic results for humanity. That fact is the most suspicious of all.

To thrive in this world, as we have done so far, we must remember that science does not tell us what to do; rather it tells us what is. And that information may help us discern what to do about things, but there is no blueprint. The climate is certainly changing, and the reasons for that change are probably much more complex than industrialization and land use. After all, the earth has already been through three atmospheres and many geologic periods already, and likely will go through more as the earth's evolution continues. How that evolution will be affected by warming, carbon dioxide, or anything else attributed to us is unknowable.

And our evolutionary business is to remain, as the sharks and the crocodiles have. We must learn to thrive.

My Farewell to Arms

I stood on the steel staircase landing and looked out over the river, which had seemed impossibly big when I first saw it. The brackish, heavy air stirred around me and carried with it the scents of heat, of humidity, of mud and gently decomposing vegetation. It was, for me, the smell of the Corps.

A trivial errand had brought me to DMO, which stands for "Distribution Management Office." It was one of those ever-changing acronyms in the Marine Corps--it had been TMO, or "Traffic Management Office" for as long as I could remember. It had the same function now as it did before, which was taking your military orders and translating them into a government contract for a moving company, so you could be moved as painlessly as possible. Perhaps at one time it was staffed by Marines, and moderately efficient. Now it was staffed mostly by civilians, which I viewed with a healthy distrust. Most, I'm sure, were diligent and hard-working...but the Marine spouse who I'd spoken to earlier, and who set up my move, had received me like a bad cold and lectured me in a voice both whiny and severe about the limitations of my particular move.

Unfortunately, I didn't have my check-out sheet--on which I was required to get her signature--when I had first seen her, which meant today's trip to this dilapidated brick building. The steel staircase felt like a patch, added recently to cover some defect in the original building. An apt metaphor for DMO itself: a sad, uneasy hybrid of the Marine Corps and the vast, suffocating apparatus of support that grows like fungus on the military organization.

The first time I saw the river, I stood on sweltering asphalt outside Bobo Hall. I had just stuffed some 1500 calories in my face while Drill Instructors screamed and strutted all around me. Terrified of their attention, I bolted my food and ran outside to the comparative safety of my place in formation and my "knowledge," the little read handbook I had to read in every spare moment not occupied by instruction. As I meditated intently on Lieutenant Bobo, who to cover the retreat of his Marines had jammed the severed stump of his leg into the dirt of Vietnam to stop the bleeding, and who won the medal of honor for it, I noticed that this "river" flowing past was tremendously wide. Wider than the Columbia River, by far. Nearly as wide as Lake Washington.

The pungency of the air contained many memories. There is a particular smell to Virginia--maybe just to Quantico--that is known to every Marine Corps officer. A smell that reminds of early mornings and aching chests after a run, or the slimy cool of the Quigley, or the itch and suppression of a flak jacket, vest, and pack in the treeline. It reminds of Drill Instructors with massive arms and veins popping out all over their neck and face as they scream, of taciturn Captains exuding contempt and disappointment at another failed attack, of the heavy numbness of pack and rifle and road and the back of the Marine in front of you, which sets in and carries you through the hours of a forced march.

The overwhelming feeling of being yanked back to the very beginning, of returning to where it all started, is gone. I am back in my car, and irritably searching for a parking spot near the IPAC (Installation Personnel Administration Center, a sweatshop of administration Marines struggling to handle all the administration problems of tens of thousands of other Marines assigned to Quantico). In the back of my mind, I'm wondering what other memories I've buried.

I'm trying to control my astonished wonder at the ghostly green nearness of the mountains. They slide by, fast and deadly, invisible unless I swing my goggles at them. Then they are dangerously close. But I'm conscious that it is my friend in the other jet, struggling to earn his qualification, and we need these attacks to go well. So I drop my gaze under my goggles, watching the displays. Weapons page, set. HUD to the left DDI. I glance to my left and see the other aircraft zip through two small mounds, level with us. I frown. I know we, the wingman, are supposed to stay above our lead for safety. But my pilot is also the flight evaluator, an experienced and outstanding pilot. I wonder, as I nervously flick my eyes between the HUD, the approaching desert floor, and the lead aircraft slowly rising above us, if my pilot is maneuvering to look at something, or to test the other aircraft, or simply is holding a more disciplined altitude than the relatively inexperienced lead. Am I imagining, or is the ground getting closer? How close are we? Wait, I can't tell. The altimeter says 2,160 feet. Without thinking I say, "RADALT to the HUD." Suddenly G-forces come on, and we angle upwards. The RADALT alarm sounds our proximity to the ground as the pilot adjusts it. The altimeter, showing 2,230, instantly shows 240. There's an instant of nausea, as I marvel that we were flying less than 300 feet above the deck with absolutely none of the safety precautions in place to a collision with the ground, if for but a few seconds we fail to pay attention. Then I realize we're coming up on the target, and I hurriedly bring up the Litening Pod display on the right. Over the ICS, I hear my pilot say, "RADALT to the HUD. Thanks."

I joined the Marine Corps chiefly to be free of my parents' financial support. But a latent streak of romantic adventurism awakened as I arrived on that hot, humid asphalt in the summer of 2003. There was the icy, nauseating fear of the drill instructors, but also this strange exhilaration in the company of my fellow candidates. We were doing great things, in our own way--hiking distances, and performing tasks, and learning things that only days before had been unimaginable. And the sea stories of the prior-enlisted, or the drill instructors (delivered in the form of harsh instruction) made me hunger to travel and take this wonderful, small world of right and wrong, good and bad, of exertion and mission to exotic places. There was the middle east, where the battle of An Nasiriyah had concluded. There were stories of the DMZ in Korea, the Central Training Area of Okinawa, and rumors of Afghanistan. There was more heat in Camp Lejeune, and mountains in Camp Pendleton, and I wanted to see it all. I was in love--and I have remained so until the very end.

One thing true of Marines everywhere is their consciousness of history and tradition, from leathernecks to cake ceremonies, Belleau Wood to Frozen Chosin, and always the revered names of our antecedents like Bobo and Barnum and Chesty. Marines, when prompted, will talk for hours on the lineage of the "blood stripe" on their trousers or the origin of the phrase "Gee-Dunk." I know all the old histories, too, and will no doubt repeat them more often as an veteran than I ever did as a Marine Officer. But I think the real well-spring and deposit of tradition lies in the time-honored Marine institutions that remain, virtually unchanged, into our modern times.

I shivered. The biting wind mocked both the desert-pattern windbreaker I wore as a "warming layer" and the magnificent desert mountains rearing all around. It was just before dawn, and the sky was beginning to lighten behind the ridges. Twenty-five yards in front of me, a row of man-shaped targets quivered, and between them and me strutted the campaign-covered marksmanship instructors. We waited for the sunrise, which promised warmth and would allow us to begin shooting. I wasn't looking forward, however, because there was something oddly familiar about this situation. It wasn't deja vu, but something more like finally seeing a building you've only before seen in pictures. I recognized this.

Then suddenly I remembered. E. B. Sledge had been here, had described it in his World War II memoir With the Old Breed. He had described this whole institution: the unspoken expectation of marksmanship, the cold, the weapons, the instructors, the targets, the pits. He might have been to this range, actually, for he described the remote Camp Eliot which still existed, a mountainous wilderness of hiking trails now sitting under the approach path to Miramar Marine Corps Air Station. Before the modern Marine Corps, before helicopter flight, before Iwo Jima and his own battles of Peleliu and Okinawa, before and Khe Sanh and "The March Up" in 1991, Private Sledge had qualified on the timeless ranges of the Marine Corps. Just as I was doing.

A study of history, too, shows that this legacy runs further back than 1942. The two regiments of Marines who went to France in 1918 were reluctantly included by the Army because Congress knew they were already basically qualified soldiers--they had essential marksmanship training, essential training that was reduced for the Army's conscripts in order to more quickly field combat units. It's likely that the Marine doughboys of Chateau-Thierry and Belleau Wood knelt on the same hard ground with their Springfield rifles, re-fought their grandfather's civil war battles just as today's Marines re-fight Vietnam and the early battles of the long war in the Middle East.

The general rubbed his hands briefly together in a nervous gesture that could have been his transition to a new topic, a physical equivalent to saying, "um." But I detected some glee in the movement, and so readied myself for a joke. And I was not disappointed. "When I was a young Lieutenant in the late seventies," he began, "my platoon lived up in Camp Margarita on Pendleton. And we lived in these really crappy barracks. There was a single squad bay, with a partition at one end for me and my platoon sergeant's desks. It was crumbling and dirty, no matter how many times we field day'd the place, and the showers were always backed up and the toilets never worked. And being a conscientious and enterprising lieutenant, I filled out the chit every Friday specifying the discrepancies and requesting maintenance to come to fix the plumbing. One day, as I was dropping the chit off in the Facilities section, the gunny who was there said, 'hey wait a minute, Lieutenant.' I turned back and said, 'yes, gunny?' He motioned me close--" the general made a comical beckoning motion--"and said, 'now I like you, Lieutenant. You seem like you're really trying to do the right thing here. But I gotta say, those barracks you're living in are condemned. They're scheduled to be replaced in the next five years, so nobody's going to spend any money to fix them at all.' And he pointed to a drawer, where I could see every chit I'd ever written neatly filed." The general paused as an appreciative chuckle swept through the Lieutenants. "Well, I went back and continued writing my chits, but I was a little satisfied to know that there would be new buildings soon." He paused for a second. "Fast forward to the early two thousands, when I became the CG of 1st Marine Division. Shortly after I arrived back on Camp Pendleton, I drove up to Camp Margarita to see the new barracks. By then I was wise enough not to be surprised when I saw the same old crappy, crumbling barracks standing there." A muted laugh from the audience. "But I parked my car and headed into the same old squad bay to find a Lieutenant sitting at the same desk behind the same partition, doing some paperwork. He jumped up quick when he saw mygeneral's star, but I calmed him down--" another muted laugh--"and asked him how the Barracks were. 'Well, sir,' he replied, "the toilets don't work and the showers are always backed up! I write a chit every Friday after field day, but I'm told...'" Here the general paused for dramatic effect, with the air of an impending punch line, "'that these buildings are scheduled to be torn down in five years and new ones built in their spot!'" The laughter was loud and long.

The amazing thing about the Marine Corps is this vital continuity of experience, the feeling of being part of something meaningful, with roots in the past and a mission for the future. Generations of Marines have field day'd crumbling buildings and ships, and written chits that were ignored, and felt the lash of a salty, scornful, authoritative tongue on their sincere efforts. Generations of officers have struggled to care for their Marines who are coping with substandard living conditions, and have with secret pride rejoiced in the Corps' preference to spend money on training rounds and field rations rather than cushy barracks with serviceable plumbing. The great work of the Marine Corps, to win battles and make good citizens, continues in the small details and virtues that are comical, and ridiculous, and the very lifeblood of the military.

In the gathering darkness I watched them line up in the LZ. The shouts and complaints, audible in the still air, told of their exhaustion. Steam rose from their necks and faces, and I shivered. Forcing myself to be still, despite the lack of warming layers (which I had conspicuously stripped), I waited until the student platoon commander told me they were ready "to step." Hoisting my pack smoothly I took my spot at the front left of the column, and started walking.

By now it was dark, and large flakes of snow were falling. I could feel their despair behind me. Despair is not too strong a word, because after their first wake-up-and-full day-of attacks in the field, they were beat down. Bad. I knew how they felt--the sweat, clammy and gritty with dirt but now freezing, the shaky legs and ankles, sore from walking up and down and alongside hills all day. It didn't help that I was marching them past their quarters in Graves Hall, whose windows shone with warm light. There was despair dragging behind me as the dark closed in, and the sad and terrible finality of falling snow extinguished any hope of warmth and light. I had been through it all before, and I knew why ancient people worshipped the sun.

But the despair was born of fear, and baseless fear at that. Soon, I knew, we would arrive at our next LZ, and the snow would keep our sleeping bags dry in the freezing air. I knew we soon would be happily bivouacked. And so I strode remoselessly on, swinging off the paved road on to gravel. Here the carefully constructed model officer I projected to the world fell apart, for I tripped on a pothole and face-planted, with 80-odd pounds of pack helping to drive the point home. Almost immediately, the students had picked me up and were asking if I was okay. I growled at them a thanks and continued to stride, angry and embarrassed but otherwise unhurt. After several paces I commented to my student platoon commander that at least I gave them something to use against me at Mess Night.

We tramped across the wooden bridge, and climbed raggedly up Cardiac Hill. As I strode away from the top, I heard murmurings behind me that swelled, slowly, until someone finally yelled, "stop!" I stopped, turned around, and asked who had fallen back. The students, in huddled postures, told me the name of the two Marines who hadn't kept up, and again I felt their despair clutching at me. The night was cold, the woods were close, and two of their peers were lost somewhere behind. Angry at their weakness, I told my student platoon commander to keep the platoon there, and I took a squad leader with me back down the hill. Eventually I found my Marines, struggling and slow, morale as bad as I'd ever seen. They were uninjured, however, so I told them to continue after us and I walked back to the main group.

Some packs were off, the quintessential expression of defeat for students. I ignored the questioning (pleading?) glances, took my place at the head of the column, and began walking. There was a sullen scramble behind me to pick up and begin again. But it was easy going from here, as the road was flat, and soon we'd turned in the treeline.  The slow Marines had caught up. The trail endd at another LZ, where there were other platoons and some vehicles, engines humming comfortably. I had my students take off their packs and sit on them, and talked briefly about the next day's event. Then I let them go make up their sleeping positions. Before lying down, I checked in with my firewatch Marines and chatted briefly with the Marines who were still awake.

From my sleeping bag, slowly warming up with my body's heat, I finally appreciated the beauty and the stillness of snow, delicately outlining every branch and quieting the world. After that night, I never felt any fear or despair in my Marines, and I hoped they learned the lesson: with a Mission to accomplish, and Marines to lead, they can get through anything--or rather, certainly through harder trials than a snowy night hike.

For nearly nine years (thirteen if you count my time in ROTC, which most don't, but which seemed quite military to me at the time) I have loved and served this institution. I have shivered in wet foxholes, and soaked in coffee to stay awake through the small hours while preparing some report or another. I have honed my skills at air-to-air combat and close air support in readiness for conflict, used some of the same Quonset Huts at Iwakuni as the Marines who occupied Japan in 1945. I have suffered the disappointment of my peers and superiors and (worst of all) my Marines, and have taken joy in our shared successes, and I have grown up. Grown to know that I could truly give to a marriage, truly give to my children, truly face danger and difficulty and uncertainty and yet do something constructive.

I have many sea stories to tell and re-tell in nostalgic moments to come. The Naval Service still holds sway over my heart and the thrill of new, dangerous places is only a memory away. But I have found a greater love in my wife and child, and a hitherto unknown desire for peace and quietude. So it is time to hang up my uniform. I taste, one last time, that particular air of the Marine Corps: brackish water and effort and heat and the joyful burden of scrutiny and responsibility. I look out at that river which started it all, the strange brown river as big as a lake and a visible sign that home was far away and I was, then, somewhere completely different. It was exciting, terribly exciting, and I followed that excitement a lover.

But now, with happy memories, it is time to go home.

Semper Fidelis.

Reflection on the practical role of the Church

The world has eagerly watched the abdication of Pope Benedict XVI over the past week, and eagerly wonders the identity of the next Pope. Events which make this historic moment in the Church even more titillating are afoot, like the continuing world-wide sex-abuse scandal (which has reached England), the recent censoring of American nuns, and the Church's controversial stance on political issues.

The issues are complicated for Catholics, who understand the Church doctrinally as the Bride of Christ, protected from serious error by the Holy Spirit, a hierarchical institution with the proverbial keys to the Kingdom of Heaven. Part of the Church is the magistrate, which teaches a practical right from wrong for Catholics to gain entry into Paradise upon death; another part is the Pope himself, who is chosen by the Holy Spirit through the College of Cardinals, and is the vicar of Christ. It needn't be said that for Catholics these institutions aren't passing political things to be voted out of office or changed through demonstration or revolution. As God is eternal so is the Church, even if it is suppressed (as it was most brutally in ancient Rome, and equally may be today in totalitarian countries like China).

Another issue at play is the understanding of human history as linear. In the Catholic tradition, after the Fall (described in the first part of the Book of Genesis), God chose a people born of Abraham to be His instrument of salvation of humanity. Through their trials and fealty to Him, He was born as a human to them, uniting his perfection to our imperfection in the real person of Jesus. To fully atone for our sins, he--as a human--had to sacrifice himself to God. Without going into the deep ontological logic that describes how the one God could also be two separate persons (much less three, to include the Holy Spirit), He did sacrifice Himself on the cross and redeemed humanity. Yet to fully conquer our sins He had to defeat the punishment for our sins, which was death, and rise from the dead. This, according to Catholic teaching, he did three days after he died. But before he returned to heaven, he commissioned his apostles to preach His good news with His power. Hence the Church and the priesthood was born. Catholicism teaches that at some point he will come again to reconcile all things, ending the sinful world humanity made through the fall by creating it anew as it was before. And so Catholics believe there was a beginning, and there will be an end.

This linear thinking can lead to some odd conclusions. European (and following their lead, American) Catholics seem to have collectively drawn the conclusion that the power and influence wielded by the Church is a sure sign of its favor in the eyes of God. This thinking was most apparent in the 16th century, when the Church was at the height of it's power. Never mind that could look back on some very corrupt episodes in it's history: most of the Crusades, the Avignon Papacy, and the Inquisition, to name a few. But it was priestly misconduct--namely the wanton selling of indulgences--that sparked Martin Luther to nail his 95 Theses to the doors of Wittenburg Cathedral, leading to schism and the offshoot Protestant religions. Yet despite the bitter feuds that followed, spilling over into catastrophic wars, and an attempt at curbing the corruption (the Council of Trent), the Church continued to see itself as condoned by God. This view was aided by the vast number of new conversions in South and Central America and in the Pacific.

The Church suffered other grievances also. The 1789 French Revolution was horribly anti-Catholic and saw most Parisian religious go to the guillotine. Outside the capital, the Church fared better--it's lands and wealth were largely nationalized by the new French government(s), but religious were persecuted and put to death in cities like Reims, Toulon, and Lyon. The humanistic philosophies of The Enlightenment which provided the intellectual foundation of the French Revolution continued to diminish the Church's influence throughout the 18th Century, and in 1917 the revolution in Russia which installed the Soviets (and the subsequent treaty of Versailles, which gave the Soviets outright some predominately Catholic nations, like Ukraine) was accompanied by fresh attack on religion. This one was easier to ignore, perhaps, because the Church that suffered the most was the Orthodox Church, to which most of the citizens of the new USSR belonged. The Spanish Civil War of 1936 hit closer to home, as the liberal side conducted many persecutions of religious in it's territory during the war. And the Second Vatican Council of 1962, which attempted to 'modernize' the Church by making it more accessible to world which knew it little after 500 years of enlightenment philosophy, indirectly resulted in far fewer priests, religious, and laity in the Western World.

While it is clear that the hegemony of the Church is now but a shadow of it's former self (in the 16th century), it is strange that it continues to have such an aura of authority to others. Catholic and non-Catholics alike tend to view the Church as having very broad authority, that its teachings and actions are inviolable. Whether in that context one sees the Church as a force for good or for evil is a matter of faith and perspective, of course. But as an indicator of God's favor, the secular power and influence of the Church throughout history tells a very uncertain story.

The phrase, "the Church is protected from serious error by the Holy Spirit" obviously also requires examination in light of the well-publicized scandals of the Church, from the Crusades on down to the current, probably yet-untold, incidence of sexual abuse by priests. It is facile to simply regard that phrase as untrue. The language is cloudy here, because of course unprovoked wars (with all the attendant horror of war itself), oppression as seen in the inquisition, and the sexual abuse of minors are very serious crimes. But my understanding of the "serious error" is that which specifically endangers the souls of Christians. In other words, as the Bride of Christ, the Church (whatever the intentions of its ministers) is assisted by the Holy Spirit such that it cannot "cause one of the little ones who believe in [Christ] to sin" (Mt 18:6).

That statement itself is fraught with connotations. It is certainly not true that Church ministers have been protected from persuading Christians to sin, both at the macro level (see: Crusades and Inquisition) and at the micro level (i.e. a priest giving unwise or malicious advice to a parishioner, causing him or her to sin). For that statement to be true, the "serious error" must have to do more with the broad teaching of the Church and very little to do with the actions of Christians. And, so far one accepts that explanation, it may be true. The Church has never taught as doctrine or dogma persecution--which nevertheless does nothing to excuse the sins committed in Catholicism's name down the ages.

Yet these arguments render the Church practically ineffective. In the rarefied world of doctrine and dogma the Church may indeed be "holy and without blemish" (Catechism #1426), yet in the world of material influence the Church has to account for at least a great deal of evil. This brings forth the question of it's practical purpose. If the ministers and body of the Church do evil, why should it continue? And certainly no amount of offsetting good (through charity, etc.), valuable as it may be, can be expected to repair great evil. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains that the Church's purpose on earth is to faithfully continue Christ's work: "[T]he Church's mission is not an addition to that of Christ and the Holy Spirit, but is its sacrament: in her whole being and in all her members, the Church is sent to announce, bear witness, make present, and spread the mystery of the communion of the Holy Trinity" (Catechism #738). The language of this excerpt puts the Church into a role of providing sacrament (the tangible rendition of God's Grace) to the world. There is nothing in either the stated mission or the idea of a sacrament, notably, that implies a mandate of material authority over people, either to tell them how to think or punish their actions.

In fact, sacrament lies at the very center of the Church. In discussing the first sacrament, Baptism, the Catechism provides a clear picture of the holiness available to humans contrasted with the natural tendency of humans to sin.

Conversion to Christ, the new birth of Baptism, the gift of the Holy Spirit and the Body and Blood of Christ received as food have made us "holy and without blemish," just as the Church herself, the Bride of Christ, is 'holy and without blemish.' Nevertheless the new life received in Christian initiation has not abolished the frailty and weakness of human nature, nor the inclination to sin that tradition calls concupiscence, which remains in the baptized such that with the help of the grace of Christ they may prove themselves in the struggle of Christian life. This is the struggle of conversion directed toward holiness and eternal life to which the Lord never ceases to call us. (Catechism #1426)

Therefore the call to holiness, and the necessity of the sacraments for receipt of Grace, is universal (one might even say, Catholic). It is the primary imperative for humanity as described by Christ when he said, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment" (Matthew 22:37). It applies to all people, whether Christians or not. And more significantly, it applies to all Christians, to include the priests, bishops, cardinals, popes, nuns, and laity. In the same way concupiscence applies to all Christians. And the Church makes no claim of infallibility as regards its ministers--the claim applies only to the collective action as regards dogma, an example of which being that the mission of the Church is to be sacrament for the Holy Spirit, succinctly stated thus:

The seven sacraments [of the Church] are the signs and instruments by which the Holy Spirit spreads the grace of Christ the head throughout the Church which is his Body. The Church, then, both contains and communicates the invisible grace she signifies. It is in this analogical sense, that the Church is called a 'sacrament.' (Catechism #774)

The language of the Catechism, which interprets the teaching of Christ, puts the focus of Christianity squarely on the holiness of the individual Christian, which itself proceeds solely through the Grace of God as administered by the Church through the Sacraments. Holiness is manifestly not something bestowed by the Church upon people, but by God upon people, because God is the only source of Grace. The Church functions as a conduit of Grace in the Sacraments, but it cannot limit God (for He is by definition illimitable) by stopping Grace. For this reason, the Church teaches the primacy of conscience: "A human being must always obey the certain judgment of his conscience" (Catechism #1790), which protects the freedom implied in Jesus' second great commandment, "Love your neighbor as yourself" (Matthew 22:37).

Furthermore, as the Church may enjoy the special protection of the Holy Spirit in its mission as sacrament, its practical value lies not itself but in its body.

Because they are members of the Body whose Head is Christ, Christians contribute to building up the Church by the constancy of their convictions and their moral lives. The Church increases, grows, and develops through the holiness of her faithful, until "we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God." (Catechism #2045)

It is appropriate that the Church is called a 'mystical body,' because insofar as it exists in the realm of the angels, beyond our tangible and material world, it is 'holy and unblemished.' No doubt this Church, called the Church Triumphant, has all more power and glory than humanity can imagine. But the practical Church of this world, in its divinely-ordained role of assisting people in the struggle for holiness, is called the Church Militant and, as it is ordered and ministered by humans, it is no more protected from concupiscence than the rest of humanity. There is a great mystery in the fact that both Churches are, in fact, the same entity (much like, perhaps, the Trinity constitutes one God), and it is therefore indeed mystical. The fact remains, however, that Christians--even priests or other religious--are no holier than the rest of the mass of humanity.

Therefore the secular power, influence, and glory of the Church falls into this category: "Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity" (Ecclesiastes 1:2). The sacramental nature and mission of the Church, however, is the legacy of the apostles and the rock that underlies the institution (cf Matthew 16:18). The Church deserves a special reverence because of it's power to administer the sacraments and assist humanity in receiving the Grace of God, but "special reverence" is demanded only by the Church's role as the Bride of Christ and the conduit of Grace, and not for any material manifestation. Neither should "special reverence" be construed as to imply that the Church is above reproach. A cursory examination of the tragedies perpetrated and suffered by the Church, in fact, indicates that it most deserves reproach most when it seems to forget about the individual ministry of sacrament and turns it's attention toward propagating or protecting its secular power and influence. But that is a discussion for historians and theologians. What is beyond discussion entirely is that the chief practical value of the Church is in the sacraments, and by extension the Grace and divine assistance which proceed from those sacraments.

(It's important to note here that the objective value of the Church lies in it's very identity as the Bride of Christ. For that reason alone it is good, and for that reason it obligates Christians to reverence. Its participation in the material world, however, animated as it is by humans, is prone to the same sins as the humans itself.)

The abdication of Pope Benedict XVI amid the increasing evidence of great scandal in the Church is a great issue for the administration of the entire Church and for the administration of the diocese affected. As the Church is called to participate in the world, those Church members (laity and religious) who commit crimes ought to be punished accordingly, by the laws that apply to them as participating citizens under the jurisdiction of their government. For the rest of the Church, the sins of its members serve as a sad reminder that nothing in this world is immune from the inclination to concupiscence, and therefore Grace that flows from the sacraments is all the more urgently needed.

Let the world eagerly watch proceedings in the Vatican. Let Christians more eagerly turn to the sacraments and answer the call to holiness; let us more eagerly seek to follow Christ's two great commandments.