Albertus Minimus

More tea, vicar, er, vicaress, um, whatever

One of the factors driving Muslim anger is a general disbelief that Islam, a civilisation that for centuries understood itself to be the pinnacle of human achievement, could possibly have been outstripped by the decadent West. Reading stories about transsexuals being ordained as priests in the Church of England it's hard not to have some sympathy with them.

Thanks to the Moral Highground for digging up the story.

What made them do it?

That's the headline on this BBC piece about the bombers who killed themselves and 54 other people on the London underground and one bus on 7 July. I take one of the tube lines concerned to get in to work, and the bomb that exploded on the bus was close enough for it to rattle the windows of our office.

The wording of the headline is itself interesting. Not 'Why did they do it?' but 'What made them do it?' Rather than being men responsible for their actions, it implies that they were driven to their actions by some force at least partly outside their control. The curious thing is, I suspect that the individuals concerned felt in some way the same.

You see, it's not terribly hard to understand why they did it. These were four young men, born and brought up in England but who identified themselves as Muslims first and English second. This is reasonably common within the Islamic community, which sees itself as transnational, or perhaps supranational would be a better way of putting it.

Now these young men were native Britons, but their greater loyalty was to their faith. In itself that is no great problem. However, growing up they saw, or more accurately perceived, a world where Muslims were suffering at the hands of Western powers and, being young men, grew angry at such injustices.

(Usually the worst crimes are perpetrated as the result of the perversion of some of the finest instincts in people. Thus one of the best aspects of the young is their impatience with and determination to do something about the wrongs they see in the world and which their elders are too tired or too scared or too complacent to tackle. As St Thomas says, the will is an appetite for what is good. In principle one cannot will what one knows is bad because that would go against the nature of the will.

Seeing the leaders of their community unable to affect any changes in British policy, seeing innocent Muslims killed and wounded, and identifying with their sufferings, they decided to strike back.

All very straightforward.

The problem of course lies in what they did. And their actions reveal the poisonous ideology that has infected far too much of the Muslim world. Now it is one the strongest characteristics of Muslims everywhere to present a united front to non-Muslims, which is one of the reasons Islam appears so monolithic to outsiders. But to insiders it is riven with division. In fact, there is war within the faith, a war which has spilled out to claim the lives of many non-Muslims but has actually resulted in the deaths of many more Muslims at the hands of other Muslims who did not consider them Islamic enough. In later posts I hope to go into further detail as to how the Muslim world finds itself in the state that it is, and maybe hazard some speculation as to the future.

We're all doomed

Political life appears to be rapidly passing into a coma. Rather than a great clash of principles, it has degenerated into an unprincipled, unfocused and incoherent rearrangement of the stage scenery by politicians who appear to have not the slightest clue what script they are supposed to be articulating.

For a cogent analysis of the state of British politics today, read the rest of Melanie Phillips's article.

Walk this way

My four year old son told me last night that he wants to go down Heaven Road.

Would that we all follow him.

Not tonight, Joe

'I told one of my patients who is going through IVF that another IVF patient had just conceived naturally. She said: 'What? She's having sex? Bloody Luddite'."

Contraception and consumerism: the logical consequence.

You can blame it on Albert

The maxim of the age: it's all relative, innit. Poor Albert Einstein, I wonder if he knew what he was letting out of the bag. Of course, before my intelligent readers inundate me with emails pointing out that the theory of relativity has nothing to do with philosophical and moral relativism, I do understand that.

But of course, ideas have consequences. Arthur Lovejoy in his wonderful book 'The Great Chain of Being' traces the effects of the constellation of notions that formed the Great Chain of Being, from Plato through to the nineteenth century. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is how he shows the way philosophical ideas filter through into the popular consciousness, via novels, poetry, even songs, often being distorted along the way.

Thus when Einstein developed his theory, the name he chose tended to validate quite separate ideas and tendencies in philosophy and morality. Perhaps even Albert was affected at some level by these ideas, since in some ways a better name for his work would be the Theory of Invariance.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century physicists were wrestling with the problem of frames of reference. That is, in order to measure the motion of an object moving at a constant velocity, you need a reference point that is still. We've probably all experienced that ourselves when sitting in a train at a station and then the train on the next platform starts moving. Or is it our own train? It's a strange, disorientating feeling, is it not? The problem is that motion at a constant speed leaves no imprint on our senses. And even with instruments you need something still against which to calibrate them.

Now this was not a problem when we thought the heavens revolved in splendour around the motionless earth, but by the late nineteenth century it was clear that all the planets and stars were in constant motion. So where could astronomers and physicists find that still point against which to measure the motion of everything else?

The candidate at the time was the ether, the substance that was believed to permeate the universe, and the medium through which light waves travelled, rather like the sea is the medium through which ocean waves travel. But then the famous Michelson-Morley experiment proved that there was no ether through which light could travel.

Ah. Then how can we measure anything at all? A young physicist played some thought experiments, imagining himself riding on a beam of light, and he realised that there was a constant, but it wasn't still, it was moving: the speed of light. It remains the same, whether you are running towards the source of the light or running away from it, or even if the light source is rushing towards you very fast and you would expect the light to get a boost from the speed of its source. Not a bit of it. Light (in a vacuum) always travels at the same speed, 186,000 miles per second.

So rather than describing how the motion of objects can be measured relative to the speed of light, Einstein could have highlighted the invariance of light with respect to everything else.

And perhaps, without the reflected prestige of his extraordinary work, other tendencies within Western thought would not have gained such traction.

It's all relative, innit?

'It's all relative.'

No doubt you've heard the statement as often as I have. But let's continue the dialogue a little further.

'Ah yes, but what about what you just said?' I asked.

'Huh?' the epigrammatist will most likely reply.

'Sure, it's all relative, but what about that?'

'What about what?'

'It's all relative: is it relative.'

'No, course not. It's, like, always true. Stands to reason.'

'Right. So the one thing that's always true is saying that nothing is always true?'

'Yes, sure.'

'Well, can I point out that everything I say is a lie, black cats are always white and England will never win the Ashes.'

Will he, won't he?

Aquinas: makes my head ache.

But of course, being Aquinas, he can also explain why my head aches. It's all to do with how the intellect, the will and the emotions interact and, what's more, it goes a long way to explaining why we do the wrong things in spite of our knowledge of our wrong doings.

‘From the fact that God has understanding, it follows that He has a will’ (Summa Contra Gentiles I.72).

This is the fundamental point in St Thomas’s understanding of the will and, as such, is rather different from the idea of the will widespread today. For St Thomas the will is an appetite for what is good. In principle one cannot will what one knows is bad because that would go against the nature of the will.

How then do we explain those, unfortunately innumerable, instances of men doing evil? This is because while the will wills the good it is up to the intellect to decide what it is that is good. Thus I am currently sitting here blogging because my intellect tells me that it is the best way to keep some of my new readers and because I would like some sort of audience for my writing.

But I am also aware that my understanding of all these issues is by no means complete. So my intellect could decide that a better thing to do right now would be to go to the library and read up some more and try to fix the ideas in my mind.

Then I would decide to stop writing and get on the tube. Or alternatively, while my intellect might know that the best way to finish this post is to get down to some work, my will might decide that it really does not want to think about this at the moment and would much rather happily waste some time surfing the internet.

Then the will would have chosen not to apprehend the intellect’s judgement that it is best to finish this post at the moment but rather to apprehend the intellect’s judgement that a good way to waste a couple of hours is to go on line.

Or if I was in a state of depression and the judgement of the intellect was clouded by that depression I might (wrongly I hope) judge that it is pointless me labouring at this post as I will never understand what on earth St Thomas is talking about and I might as well go and watch some television instead.

Thus the action of the will takes the form of a complex feedback, its operation in human beings often clouded by the passions or choices to apprehend to a lesser and short term good rather than a greater long term good.

There, told you your head would hurt!

School's out

Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor doesn't want Christian children attending Muslim schools. Doesn't seem unreasonable. But I'm pretty certain that if Christian children did attend Muslim schools, quite a few of them would convert to Islam. Strangely enough, many Muslim children attend Catholic schools in this country, yet very few of them convert to Christianity. I wonder why that is?

Named and shamed

What's in a name? Well, if you're a teacher (and I was one for a short time) it's a pretty good touchstone for what your class is going to be like. Read through the register and find a form of Elizabeths, Duncans, Katherines and Michaels and you can begin counting up the exam passes and prespending your bonus. But a class of Jordans, Waynes, Jades and Chelseas and you may as well book in for that session of stress counselling.

Don't believe me? Check this thread from the Times Educational Supplement's forum, where teachers reveal the true meanings of children's names (warning, some bad language in there).

Some examples:

Jordan -No way, no how
Liam - Pleeeeesseee no, no, you teach him and see how you like it
Conner - Er no no no no no no no
Callum - spawn of the devil
Arren - immature
Shane - evil
Ashley- worse than evil

So watch out what you christen your child: the wrong choice and teachers will be playing pass the pupil!