The Old Man

Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, has intrigued me this past weekend. He claims, and I have not evidence to prove him wrong, that many writers make an unwarrented leap from original "man" to uncivilized people. He does not think one can conclude from the behavior of uncivilized persons in our era what it would have been like in the world of the primitve. To the contrary, our uncivilized may very well be at the downward slope of their original civilization.

I'll write more on this later.

ETHICS

Finally straightened out my thinking about ethics. Ethics is about the rightness or wrongness of doing; is what I do moral or not? One can look at ethics either from the Act itself or from the consequences of the Act.

1. ACT: God commands it, or reason finds the moral structure of the universe, or one takes the hard view of Emmanuel Kant - the categorical imperative.

2. CONSEQUENCES: Choose the best consequence for yourself (ethical egotism) or the greatest good for the greatest number (Utilitarianism). One can choose the best consequence from the Act, or one can choose to use the rule that provides the greatest good.

What do you think?

DEONTOLOGY

Robert Ludlum's new book, the Bancroft Strategy, paralleled my Professional Ethics course very nicely this week. I started the book and quickly understood (he makes it obvious) the theme to be Utilitarianism versus Kantian ethics. "The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number of People" versus "People are not a Means to and End." An interesting axis around which to write a novel. How does one do a squel? Write a novel to show Kantian ethics does not grapple with the morality of inclinations, that the moral absolute may be difficult when one cannot morally act "out of love?"

EXPANDING UNIVERSE REVISITED

My "telescopic" friend and I, along with several others, drank coffee this morning in the usual haunt and the subject of an expanding universe came, once again, to the fore. In a past blog I touched the subject with the note that the expansion is at an increasing rate, a phenomenon that puzzles scientists, an observation that breaks the observed historical pattern of weird coincidences or repetitions (it breaks the established probability). To return to the point at hand, one of our friends, a former AT&T scientist, observed that not only is the universe expanding at an increasing speed, but that certain pockets within the universe expand at different rates. Newton, move over. Our old constants are shaken and we have yet to replace them with the secrets waiting to be discovered. What or Who is holding the pedal to the metal?

SANITY

Is G. K. Chesterton correct in saying that a poet is less likely to go insane than chess masters and logicians ? My thought is that he is correct in his observation: poets attempt to place their heads into the heavens whereas logicians (theologian?) attempt to place the heavens into their heads - and as a consequence their heads split. The logician and the determinist, the person who believes all can be accounted for by cause and effect or that all can be logically accounted for, create a world much too small for the cosmos in which they live. Fairy tales and imps play an important part in expanding our universe and keep us sane.

GIVING

The thought is this: Love is the act of giving to someone so that they can be blessed. Or, giving to the benefit of the other. Hadn't thought of this side of love for some time. I've always used the phrase, "to love someone is to help them maximize themselves." I like the former better. Perhaps I've seen too much taking and not enough giving. Entitlements, as one person said in a morning conversation, is people taking without a thought of giving. Perhaps this explains why many persons cannot love: they haven't learned to give.

ACCELERATED EXPANSION

Friend Mike attended a lecture about interesting Hubbel telescope research. The one piece of information I found interesting (I assume he did as well because he deigned to tell me) is that the universe is exapanding at an accelerated rate. Most of us have learned that since the "Big Bang" the universe continues to expand - Newton's law of objects set in motion will continue in motion unless acted on by something else, and all that kind of thing - but what we have not known, and what the telescope shows, is that this expansion is accelerating. That is the Puzzle: what force or what is acting on the object in motion that cause our galaxies to move apart from each other with increasing speed?

Is the edge of our universe something of a mass that pulls all to itself? Or, is there something within our universe that accelerates the galaxies? Will need to read more about this phenomenon.