The Charlotte News

Tuesday, August 16, 1938

SIX EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Oh look, Scarlett. Praise Jupiter! We are nearing a victory by simple virtue of the enemy's weakness of resolve as exhibited by attrition in its ranks and failure to replace that attrition with determined strugglers toward righteousness such as populate our Cause infinitely, as surely as each new son of the South breathe's breath into his lungs at which point he strives ever onward in the march toward fulfillment of our Cause against this Yankee Evil. What is more, the false pride of the enemy is now shown with shining effervescence within the shallow waters in which the almighty glory of their effeminated fulmination precedes the coming of our Cause to Supremacy in the face of our superior will power: shining display, I say, Scarlett, shining, ever shining. I just knew that terrible news last month from the front in Pennsylvania was nothing more than the basest and vilest calumny adduced by the ever unrepentant Yankee press to foster a depressed and unrekindled spirit, unbridled from our true nature, always as independent rebels of the kind of which the good Book looks upon most favorably, not as the confederated fallen angels, my dear Scarlett, of which Apollyon appellation the devil's Yankee press tries to impress upon us, no. But rather of those, such as our forefathers sent forth unrequited to distill the false piety of Lord Cornwallis, those, in short, who are arisen to the heights of the mountain, who ascended with Moses to hear the writings cast upon the tablets and did see for themselves with their own eyes the wisdom which was and is within the burning bush where the foreboding of the cross and the Cause to come set forth first its shining vision to mankind. Shine on, Scarlett, I say, shine on! As surely as our brethren, fallen and standing still saw it last month in that harshest plain across that lane from which our dead not yet reached in life lay slain and gutted in the burning sun of the Yankee's devil-spell, spurning their last fateful hand grasp of their mutually fallen comrades in favor instead of shining glory across that field toward the little clump of trees, the mere accomplishment of which would have held within its store forever the engendering to the world of our Cause eminent, as foreordained on the Mount of Olives and by Pharaoh over eighteen centuries ago. But now, Scarlett. Now, as I am pleased to read: Victory, Scarlett, Victory, I say, is alas close at hand, m'Lady! We shall henceforth live with the Yankee Evil without our midst! Shortly, m'Lady, shortly, we shall dance the dance of Victory!

For Cash's take on "La Thompson's Guide", as reviewed by Herbert Agar, see "Primer Political Guide" from the book-page of August 14, 1938--(from which re-reading we admit to having been partially primed for the note on yesterday's pieces).

Whether, incidentally, "A Thousand Apiece" from August 16, 1937 is by Cash, we can't say for sure. Again, it was not included in the list of pieces for which Cash was paid before becoming a regular staff member in October, 1937, as provided by The News to Joseph Morrison in 1964. A piece, however, from the previous day, "Flies in the Ointment", August 15, 1937, was. Regardless, "A Thousand Apiece" makes a valid point, one eminently true to this day, having become by the unleashing of raw energy of manifold vast suns brightening in our midst even more startlingly so in the interim of time and times since 1937.

Although it may seem a little afield from the present day's offerings, it is not really; and so we shall comment on it anyway, that being the controversy afoot over Pope Benedict's remarks at the University of Regensburg in Germany on September 12, 2006, during which he quoted from a latter 14th century text regarding a conversation on comparison of Christianity to Islam, a quote which has been now widely disseminated out of context and has stimulated great outcry within the Muslim world from various Muslim clerical leaders demanding an apology. We think the Pope owes no one any apology for these remarks, when seen in context, though he was gracious enough to do so anyway for the offense caused to some perceptions. He was not knocking Islam: he was suggesting rather a path to understanding and inner peace, such a peace among us which might be better instilled from a young age, we think.

But we shall let you be the judge of his meaning as we quote the statement from within its context more fully. After opening his remarks by referencing his time, beginning in 1959, teaching at the University of Bonn in West Germany, he continued:

There was a lively exchange with historians, philosophers, philologists and, naturally, between the two theological faculties. Once a semester there was a dies academicus, when professors from every faculty appeared before the students of the entire university, making possible a genuine experience of universitas--something that you too, Magnificent Rector, just mentioned--the experience, in other words, of the fact that despite our specializations which at times make it difficult to communicate with each other, we made up a whole, working in everything on the basis of a single rationality with its various aspects and sharing responsibility for the right use of reason--this reality became a lived experience. The university was also very proud of its two theological faculties. It was clear that, by inquiring about the reasonableness of faith, they too carried out a work which is necessarily part of the "whole" of the universitas scientiarum, even if not everyone could share the faith which theologians seek to correlate with reason as a whole. This profound sense of coherence within the universe of reason was not troubled, even when it was once reported that a colleague had said there was something odd about our university: it had two faculties devoted to something that did not exist: God. That even in the face of such radical skepticism it is still necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason, and to do so in the context of the tradition of the Christian faith: this, within the university as a whole, was accepted without question.

I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by Professor Theodore Khoury (Münster) of part of the dialogue carried on--perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara--by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both. It was presumably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than those of his Persian interlocutor. The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Qur'an, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship between--as they were called--three "Laws" or "rules of life": the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Qur'an. It is not my intention to discuss this question in the present lecture; here I would like to discuss only one point--itself rather marginal to the dialogue as a whole--which, in the context of the issue of "faith and reason", I found interesting and which can serve as the starting-point for my reflections on this issue.

In the seventh conversation edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion". According to the experts, this is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur'an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels", he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached". The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God", he says, "is not pleased by blood--and not acting reasonably [Greek word] is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death..."

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practise idolatry.

At this point, as far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we are faced with an unavoidable dilemma. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: "In the beginning was the [Greek word]". This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, [Greek word], with logos. Logos means both reason and word--a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist. The encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance. The vision of Saint Paul, who saw the roads to Asia barred and in a dream saw a Macedonian man plead with him: "Come over to Macedonia and help us!" (cf. Acts 16:6-10)--this vision can be interpreted as a "distillation" of the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry.

In point of fact, this rapprochement had been going on for some time. The mysterious name of God, revealed from the burning bush, a name which separates this God from all other divinities with their many names and simply declares "I am", already presents a challenge to the notion of myth, to which Socrates' attempt to vanquish and transcend myth stands in close analogy. Within the Old Testament, the process which started at the burning bush came to new maturity at the time of the Exile, when the God of Israel, an Israel now deprived of its land and worship, was proclaimed as the God of heaven and earth and described in a simple formula which echoes the words uttered at the burning bush: "I am". This new understanding of God is accompanied by a kind of enlightenment, which finds stark expression in the mockery of gods who are merely the work of human hands (cf. Ps. 115). Thus, despite the bitter conflict with those Hellenistic rulers who sought to accommodate it forcibly to the customs and idolatrous cult of the Greeks, biblical faith, in the Hellenistic period, encountered the best of Greek thought at a deep level, resulting in a mutual enrichment evident especially in the later wisdom literature. Today we know that the Greek translation of the Old Testament produced at Alexandria--the Septuagint--is more than a simple (and in that sense really less than satisfactory) translation of the Hebrew text: it is an independent textual witness and a distinct and important step in the history of revelation, one which brought about this encounter in a way that was decisive for the birth and spread of Christianity. A profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place here, an encounter between genuine enlightenment and religion. From the very heart of Christian faith and, at the same time, the heart of Greek thought now joined to faith, Manuel II was able to say: Not to act "with logos" is contrary to God's nature.

After further exploration of this topic of the various forms of defining God through the ages, the tension inherent in our tendency--as technological, scientific, and philosophical enlightenment through time have combined throughout the world, but initially and especially within Western civilization, to change our modes of thinking about ourselves, our world, our universe and our places, individually and collectively, within those ever-widening spheres--toward empirical explanation over spiritual ones, reason over faith, and whether one must necessarily supplant the other or each make room for the other such that the two may co-exist simultaneously within the same sphere of enlightened understanding, as within the university setting, albeit still within a sphere of continued debate within that sphere, toward further understanding and continued better co-existence--the universitas, as the Pope touched (with great distinction, in our estimation) a word on our particular alma mater's seal, lending to us a special zeal then of recognition of that word, long-established in our individual mind since our papa, from our inquiry as a child, explained long ago what that word meant--, the Pope thoughtfully concluded:

This attempt, painted with broad strokes, at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age. The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvellous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us. The scientific ethos, moreover, is--as you yourself mentioned, Magnificent Rector--the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which belongs to the essential decisions of the Christian spirit. The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith.

Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world's profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures. At the same time, as I have attempted to show, modern scientific reason with its intrinsically Platonic element bears within itself a question which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its methodology. Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based. Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought--to philosophy and theology.

For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding. Here I am reminded of something Socrates said to Phaedo. In their earlier conversations, many false philosophical opinions had been raised, and so Socrates says: "It would be easily understandable if someone became so annoyed at all these false notions that for the rest of his life he despised and mocked all talk about being--but in this way he would be deprived of the truth of existence and would suffer a great loss". The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur--this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. "Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God", said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university.

Thus, we conclude that the speech was not any knock against Islam as a religion, but only one by design to elucidate that to which both religion in its ordinary sense of universal practice seeks as well as that which the university in its ordinary sense seeks to encourage, an understanding, within the context of reason, of the universe, and man's place within it, its operands and manipulanda, (are we deterministically marionettes of some external force of will or agents, to the extent we so wish to be, of our own independent desires to destiny, or somewhere in between the two extremes, as the classic debate goes?), its transgressions, and favor provided to us of provender, ultimately an understanding, ever in need of adjustment for daily service to enable closer symbiosis between Man, God, the universe, Nature, as different cultures must perforce in an ever-shrinking world come together more closely to understand the reasons for these different conceptions of time and the universe and seek better to live with each other within those different conceptions, while respecting mutually the differences, without physical warfare borne of mutual misunderstanding leading to open, violent conflict with weapons of iron and steel.

That, at least, is our understanding of the overall essential message conveyed by the Pope's words in that speech, one which we found both enlightening and comforting, as suggesting this Pope as a scholar, understanding of both the past and the present, as a continuum of time, and the need always to bridge the subject matter we are taught in school to our spiritual understanding, rather than separate them as a gulf in time--that studied in Sunday School for instance and that studied in daily lessons at the public school being unbridgeable in the mind of the individual for their teachings being separate in time and by usually different people from the community in which we grow to adulthood. Yet, we think it not so. For we think that these various times and teachings are Bridgeable, individually, through a process of thought--not instruction on Sunday School lessons from within the public school, or vice versa. As that which is inherent in the doctrines of our own Constitution, affording freedom of speech and religious belief, of individuality. And, that individual, sometimes excruciating, task of understanding and bridging must be maintained always as an individual choice to make, not one dictated by others.

Ultimately, however, the choice to take up arms of steel in conflict with fellow humans is one prescribing Death as a Solution to Man's dilemma with Nature, plainly an irrational one.

But is this not holy nevertheless, if commanded against the infidel?

But hold. Death is a concept of Nothingness when so employed as a Solution, a condemnation of all which is Life, a condemnation of the Spirit itself--for without Life on this planet, we have no conception as to how there might yet be a Spirit beyond it to re-vivify that which is from that which is but would not be in Death, as perforce, if we profess to accept a god, it must be so within that god's or gods' capabilities to so re-vivify, or such god or gods would fail to have the chief attribute of any god by definition, omnipotence of will over the universe, or at least that province of it to which its governance is assigned by the holy text of the deity or deities.

So can we not even therefore posit the irrational concept of destroying all which is within our conception in order to allow the divinity of omnipotent will to recreate all from scratch again to better serve the holy words from which Man's present inherent nature through the ages has clearly strayed and fallen?

Such, no doubt, of the latter two were questions posed, in different terms perhaps, by Hitler, positing himself as the ultimate god of Germania.

Let us stop for a moment and posit the unthinkable--unthinkable only because of what did happen, a lesson which we must never forget for its unthinkable result--but let us nevertheless posit what might have been had, for instance, Adolf Hitler as a young man in his mid-twenties not experienced to his otherwise artistic nature the horrors of warfare occasioned by World War I. Would he have been not inclined to seek the role of Saviour of the nationalistic spirit of Germany after its defeat, much as the Ku Klux Klansmen of the South during Reconstruction and afterward felt it their solemn duty to preserve a way of life, one gone awry obviously, had someone from a university, rather than the Junker class, gotten hold of his untrained mind and provided encouragement to seek understanding of his time and place--much as W. J. Cash did, for example--rather than to foster another war to restore that which was perceived by the masses of his time to be lost in the War to end all wars?

Well, it is unthinkable in the cases we instance. Cash grew up as Cash. Hitler, as Hitler. But had Hitler a Poteat instead of a Haushofer & Mackinder, would it have been different? Or was the seed of Wormwood's bitter acridity so firmly implanted in young Hitler even before that War to have ever turned back? Was it indeed thusly so firmly ingrained within the milieu which was Germany, of Europe as a whole, of that time at the beginning of the twentieth century, a time of transition from the agrarian way of life to the inevitable intrusion of modernity on every town and village brought by the immediacy of the automobile, the airplane, the telegraph and telephone?

But could not the same be said of little towns and villages within post-Civil War North Carolina and South Carolina, the same villages which produced Thomas Dixon just 35 years before they also produced Cash? Or was something so self-evident by the turn of the century in those towns and villages, much as it was in the towns and villages of Germany by 1945, that it was inevitable to have a Cash born of it, as surely as it had been inevitable to have a Dixon born 35 years before it, as surely as it had been inevitable to have a Hitler born in Austria in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war? The unthinkable.

We are aware, of course, of the Pope's personal past in the 1930's and during the War as a young boy in Nazi Germany. We are also aware, however, that such was not coloring of his character--any more than say, though the analogy is not perfect, membership as a young lawyer of Hugo Black in the Ku Klux Klan of Alabama colored his character such that it prevented him from becoming, as he did, one of the greatest champions of civil rights ever to sit on the United States Supreme Court during his tenure from 1937 through 1971.

It is obvious that there are, as with any holy text, Biblical words subject to great misinterpretation, words indeed which have, since the days of the Crusades right on down to the Ku Klux Klan era in the South--, lasting with tenacity through, and as a reaction to, even the modern, progressive era of the 1960's and beyond in the United States--, been the subject of tragic misinterpretation by some who lacked a sensitive understanding of the poetic, that engendered hopefully by the university, if not otherwise before or after its immense four-year journey, words such as those R. L. Godwin quoted just the other day in his letter to the editor of August 13, 1938, about which we briefly remarked the other day, these words from Hebrews 4:12:

For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.

Out of context, the words could be, though we do not ascribe this perception necessarily to Mr. Godwin, discerned as an injunction to those who profess belief in God and the Word therefore, becoming themselves one with that Word, and thus, since created in God's image as the Bible explains, to be inclined, by simple syllogism, to take up the literal sword, just as did those Crusaders of yore, just as did the Klan of the South, and, in the name of God, literally seek to divide asunder the soul and spirit, the joints from the marrow, of the perceived and appelled infidel, a literal result which the pictures of any Southern lynching will readily demonstrate to the perceptive viewer that the lynchers literally believed they were accomplishing, not understanding through reason the poetic, sometimes deliberately not understanding it, as with the more educated provocateurs and liqueured-up soul-stirrers who used the lesser lights as merely henchmen to achieve political and worldly ends.

Not understanding, deliberately or by manipulation, through more careful reading the fuller context, as in the case referenced, for instance:

Let us therefore fear, lest, a promise being left us of entering into his rest, any of you should seem to come short of it.

For unto us was the gospel preached, as well as unto them: but the word preached did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in them that heard it.

For we which have believed do enter into rest, as he said, "As I have sworn in my wrath, if they shall enter into my rest: although the works were finished from the foundation of the world."

For he spake in a certain place of the seventh day on this wise, "And God did rest the seventh day from all his works."

And in this place again, "If they shall enter into my rest."

Seeing therefore it remaineth that some must enter therein, and they to whom it was first preached entered not in because of unbelief: again, he limiteth a certain day, saying in David, "Today, after so long a time; as it is said, Today if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts. For if Jesus [a reference, say Biblical scholars, to the passage to Joshua of the authority of Moses as set forth in Deuteronomy 31 and Joshua 22] had given them rest, then would he not afterward have spoken of another day."

There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God.

For he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from his.

Let us labor therefore to enter into that rest, lest any man fall after the same example of unbelief.

For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.

Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do.

Thus, we think that this reference to the "two-edged sword" is not meant as a literal Excalibur to cut men and women to their marrow and separate their spirits and souls but rather a metaphor to suggest the laying aside on at least this one day of rest the implements of daily toil, the things of steel, the things of war, both the war of survival vis á vis Nature and the war of survival between Man's own separate tribes within that Nature; and in that one day, perhaps an understanding might then come to pass to afford a laying aside of those implements of steel for making war on one another for yet another day, then another, until they are set aside throughout the week, thus affording a constant rest, a rest implying thus an understanding, as such an understanding should be imparted by the university when properly upholding its responsibilities to engender universitas, a mutual pact of course with each student who must individually undertake his or her responsibility of attention and study to respect, learn, and thus understand that task, to receive that which is imparted by the waters, by the sword, by the understanding then of logos.

As we have suggested before in these spaces once or twice, there is one impenetrable mystery to which positivism, empirical science, within the conception of infinite microscopy, may never, by definition, be admitted. That club whose doors are forever locked to it is that of the ultimate origin of Man. For just as it is not fathomable for any one of us to know, of our own memory and defined perception, our own point of inception to life, our first breath independent of the womb, thus it is impossible for science to penetrate that mystery of conception, of origin of life. Oh, of course, we can view photographs of the womb, of the microscopic nature of the travel of the swimming fish to fertilize the egg, and so on. That, however, is merely to witness a natural process through microscopy and photography, but not, by it, to understand therefore conception or the origin of life of humankind. It is only to understand that process by which individual life comes to be--the empirical part of nature. Anthropology might trace roots through bony skeletal remains and connect the physical attributes naturally associated with those patterns of bony matter to produce rudimentary connections back far into time. But yet, it is not to define the origin of life itself or even the origin of mankind still. From whence the divine spark by which we are, as beings, motile? From whence the divine spark, as human beings, by which we have the capacity to ask ourselves such questions, to achieve a state of consciousness?

For to comprehend scientific inquiry and anthropological inquiry is to understand only arguable assumptions based on rational observations of a process by which humankind has climbed a tree, even if all of the stutter steps, missing rungs, are someday filled empirically by those connections of the vast array of buried drybones within the various encrusted layers within Yellowstone, from the cockroach embedded in amber to the dinosaur's jaw in the bubbling cauldron issuing the steaming fire below of the Dragon.

That origin remains, and must, nevertheless, by definition, always remain, within the realm of intuition, spirituality, metaphysics, divorced from susceptibility of discovery by physical empiricism. It is, in short, as, in truth, much of the basic premises on which science itself rests, those commonly understood assumptions of logical deduction to conclusion, if A=B and B=C, A=C, still, in the notion of the meaning of the symbol "=", a matter of approximation, a matter thus of faith, within practical application, as no two things are susceptible to perfect equality within the known universe by proveable science--yet, by faith, as in the empirical mode, that the commonly accepted rationale of the moment is a correct one, not flawed by a flawed larger framework of conception from which we are viewing it, a framework which, if rational, ought to exhibit itself plainly and rationally within its own circle of truth, we may theorize the concept of equality of matter and thus understand it intuitively and by faith. ("Hogwash," you say. "Here we have two Ford trucks of the same make, year and model, same tonnage and same engine, same equipment to factory specs to the I-bars, pal, even of same color, precisely sprayed by robotic micrometric, atomizing paint sprayers to Ford color spectrographic perfection, brand new, right off the assembly line--and they, my silly friend, are therefore, perfectly equal." "Alright, alright," we reply, "get out your atomic microscope, then, Mr. Adam Ant, and start counting the atoms within each of those equal trucks, and get back to us with the answer when you're finished. Then we'll start on the sub-atomic particles.")

But acceptance of all of that, in the end, still requires a leap of faith, as with any thought process, not one which is selected fancifully, as picking out mercurially which set of clothes one might wish to don this day because of one's subjectively being drawn to a particular color combination suiting a mood, but rather a different sort of faith, one which is largely understood through semantic phenomena rather than somatic, strictly observable, phenomena, semantic phenomena nevertheless subject to repetition within our universe even if not, by their very nature of occurrence, being as they are within the realm of serendipidity, subject to laboratory control and precise analysis through deliberate reproduction--for they disappear ephemerally as often as they appear to us, in the twinkle of an eye. Yet, confirmable through intuition rather than pure logic--logical positivistic intuition, lopointu, as we have once coined it. One which, thus by definition again, has in its final analysis, a form of empirical proof nevertheless, even if not one produced, or capable of being artificially reproduced in controlled environs, by strict scientific methodology, via that circle, whether viewing that circle from without or from within its boundaries. For if we are to call this article of faith one authored by God, then is it not so that God would resist being controlled by any artificial experiment to prove the existence thereof, existence which we are told in scriptural texts we must accept through faith? Yet again, do we not see the evidence of faith, that which is the testament to the existence of something beyond the living humanity of the time, in those things unseen? Those things we intuit to be which then, without any conceivable living human physical intervention or sensation by a living human being of our uncommunicated intuition, come nevertheless to be in reality? Q.E.D.

And one warm, sunny Sunday afternoon, mid-September it was in 1971, not unlike the present one 35 years hence, we sat on an expansive green of our university campus and merely thought on the notions imparted the previous week in two courses, one, symbolic logic, the other, introduction to philosophy, and the admission of those conceptions, somewhat foreign then to us, to our world in combination and in aid, as opposed to displacement, of our previous understanding. While we could not call it, in the lazy sense of the term, restful, a rest, musically so, it engendered in us, one still very much extant, and, we suggest, never absent of great merit to the continued vitality and unity and health of our soul and spirit through even the worst travails.

There is an invocation which we hear at weddings: Let no man put asunder what God hath joined together.

It is an invocation, we posit, worthy to consider as regards each of us, too, as individuals.

An understanding of logos.

"Sears-Roebuck? Montgomery Ward? James Cash Penney? Windows XP? Apple?"

No, not exactly, dear one--but then again, maybe those, as well.

Other efforts of the day at understanding logos, and logos, too.

It's the Heat

Archy, the cockroach swarmed up over the edge of the desk and stood waiting, his antennae in a dither.

boss, he said when he observed our eye upon him, boss, did you feel that heat yesterday--96 in the shade. swell, wasn't it?

What do you think we are, we growled: magnetic ice encased in lead? Of course, we felt it, and as for it being swell, why, you, you...

now, now, don't excite yourself, boss. it isn't good for you in this kind of weather, heat prostration and all that kind of thing, you know. Anyhow, it was swell for me. You have no idea how heat touches up the paste in your pastepot, which by the way needs replenishing. furthermore...

Scram! You snipe! Already you have the sweat popping out on our brow again, and it's only nine o'clock in the morning with a hard day ahead! Get out before...

one moment, boss, till I say what I really came up here to say. did you observe, boss, that yesterday when it was 96 in the shade in charlotte, at mammoth hot springs in yellowstone park it was 33. just 33, boss, one degree above freezing. how's that for a place with a name like that? and, boss, it snowed in the high passes of the rockies. snowed, did you hear? boss, wouldn't you love...

The pastepot just missed his left ear, and he fled over the edge of the desk, giggling sadistically as he retreated to his own concrete-cooled quarters under the baseboard.

Bride Price

Over in Kraijevo, Serbia, the gypsies have been holding their annual powwow and buying their brides. This year times are hard and even Gypsies hesitate to take over the somewhat sketchy responsibility of taking care of a Gypsy wife. Besides, gals are plentiful. And so the selling prices have been low. A pretty with flashing black eyes, hair like midnight, trim ankles, and a gold tooth, and good at cooking and dancing, sets her buyer back only $6.40--somewhat less than the cost of a good American hat. And gals with thick ankles or moles can be had for as little as $3.60.

It sounds like a bargain. But, no doubt, there will be grumpy misogynists to growl that the little dears would be exceedingly dear even at a dime a dozen.

Cold Trail

From time to time, it has occurred to us that there might be some correlation between the number of police officers a city has and its crime rate. Maybe if we had more coppers, we thought, we might have less murder. But the result of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's figures on the number of cops kept by American towns of from 50,000 to 100,000 people, doesn't seem to bear out the notion, though at first glance you might think so.

Thus Charlotte has 93 cops on its payroll, and Charlotte has 23 murders this year. But Lawrence, Mass., has 130 cops, Quincy, Mass., has 120, Atlantic City, N. J., has 198, Harrisburg, Pa., has 129, and Winston-Salem has 99. And Lawrence and Quincy belong to a group of New England towns which averaged only .4 of a murder per 100,000 of population during the first six months of 1938. Atlantic City and Harrisburg, again, belong to a group which averaged only 1.5 per 100,000 people. And Winston-Salem had only eight murders in 1937, as compared with Charlotte's 37.

But the correlation breaks down if you look a little further. Allentown, Pa., belongs to the same group as Harrisburg, and there is no evidence that it contributes more than its share to the prevailing rate of 1.5 per 100,000. It has only 92 cops. And Medford and Maiden and Pittsfield, all Massachusetts towns, belong to the same New England group as Lawrence and Quincy, but they have only 87, 87, and 60 policemen, respectively. And Jackson, Miss., has only 48 cops. But it had only six murders last year.

Lay On!

The people of Georgia, it seems to us, can congratulate themselves on having a pretty clear-cut choice between Left and Right, which is yet not so tremendously serious as to involve the fate of the republic. The fight is purely one of politics, in the strict sense of that word. The President himself has said that Senator George is a good man, and that his sole objection to him is that he is "out of touch with the broad objectives of the administration." Which is to say, finally, that the Senator is out of touch with the President's desire to increase the power of the Federal executive branch at the expense of the Congress and the State, for it is mainly on that line that opposition has developed. And the Senator on the other hand admits that Mr. Roosevelt is no villainous plotter out to make himself a dictator, and argues merely that he does in fact think that the Federal power should not be further increased.

The Senator did make some remarks about a second march through Georgia to be sure. But that is only an appeal to sentiment, precisely like the President's frequent dark suggestions that anybody who doesn't agree with him is bound to want to leave the unemployed to starve. None of it need be taken too seriously, nor should too much significance be attributed to point and counterpoint. All that is taking place is that a couple of expert politicians have got a fight on their hands, and the Democratic decision rests with Georgia voters. If George wins, it won't mean the end of Roosevelt; and while, if Roosevelt's man wins, it may mean the end of George, his state of Georgia will have willed it so.

Consider the Policyholders*

That North Carolina is being over-charged for its unemployment insurance appears to be incontrovertible from the Unemployment commission's report on the last six months. A dreadful six months they were--about the worst imaginable for putting a completely new insurance line to the test of actuality. Factories were closing up like morning glories in a Summer's sun, and the State had contracted to pay their employees half wages (up to $15) for a period of sixteen weeks. Offices were besieged by claimants, and at headquarters in Raleigh they spent their days and nights writing checks. Altogether during those dreadful six months they wrote 821,531 checks for a total of $6,136,322.

But the money held out. In fact, during those dreadful six months the money coming in as premium payments on the wages of men and women still at work lacked only a million dollars of being enough to pay for the disbursements to men and women out of work. The commission began the period with a bank balance of ten millions and ended it with a bank balance of nearly nine millions.

Unemployment insurance has met its first test and has been found to be adequate to the demands of an unexpected and stringent depression. When the directors of the company next meet, which will be at the 1939 Legislature, their first order of business should be to reconsider premium charges. These can stand a reduction which experience has shown to be both safe and justifiable.

At Gun's Point

If you reduce Europe to the size of a single street and Germany to the size of a single house in that street, and imagine its denizens hanging out the windows with tommy guns trained on the cops and the civilians below, and neither the cops nor anybody else daring to make a move lest it precipitate wholesale slaughter--you'll have a very good representation in microcosm of what is actually taking place.

The mobilization Hitler is putting on is totally without any precedent in the practices of nations. Indeed, mobilization has itself always been considered tantamount to a declaration of war. It was so in 1914--hence the interminable dispute as to whether it was the Czar or the Kaiser who actually mobilized first. And why it has been considered so, and why it has always been held necessary promptly to answer mobilization, is easy enough to see. Germany is in position today to make sudden war with an advantage of at least 72 hours. France and Czechoslovakia are undoubtedly moving troops to their borders as rapidly as they can. But both are confined to their regulars, and cannot move those with any great speed. For large scale movements would probably excite their populations to the point of beginning to demand a counter mobilization. And the very order for counter-mobilization would in all likelihood set off conflict.

It is one of the most curious situations history has recorded. And the only possible explanation for the nations having let matters go so far is in their terror and dread over the realization of the fact that the question of war or no war hangs on the hunches and impulses of a fanatical dreamer who is also plainly mad.


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