The strong baby war

A dilemma came before me today. The details aren't interesting, but the interior state I found myself in, due to the dilemma, was interesting.

There is a difficulty embedded in our genes. Namely, that all genes worry about is propagating the species. After you've done a good job of that, you can pretty much just die and go to hell. 

Oh, but in order to propagate, of course you should flourish and grow happy and healthy and strong. Physical and intellectual health secure survival to full generative potential, not to mention the social clout to obtain the other half of strong genes. Important baby ingredient.

When my own genes look at me, those generators of the urges I find most meaningful and tender within me, they don't see Kathleen in all her beautiful uniqueness. They see, in potentia, one really freaking strong baby. No, not one, so many strong babies; as many as I could pop out.

This realization sometimes makes me a little put out. Why? Oh, I don't know. I guess because I was beginning to think, "Hey, I think Kathleen is kind of ok." 

I was raised by an emotionally repressed Italian Catholic stay-at-home mom, so I started out suspecting Kathleen was about as wretched and useless as all my poor mother's own unresolved baggage about her self-worth told me I was. Counterintuitively, that was what bestowed my youthful swagger: because, back then, Kathleen and her genes were tight. Sooo tight. 

What is this you exhort us to? "Self-gift?" Spend my entire life doing nothing but pouring out my love on everyone around me until I shrivel into a papery husk of a human being? Is that supposed to be hard? I'm so freaking good at that. I do it without thinking; pure instinct. Bro, I don't even think I have real human rights. I'm just that humble.

When a woman lives without a motive for self-preservation blocking the way to her own death, everything made a crazy amount of sense. I nurtured my hearty sacrificial/maternal instincts (aka traditional family values), which were in turn overwhelmingly canonized by my community as deep selflessness. I was in an infinite affirmation loop.

Then thanks to some relatively mild spiritual abuse, I had this falling out. All these canonizations, affirmations that I should give up basically all sense of my desires and rights -- or at least, the more the better -- began to feel a tiny bit fake. Then a tiny bit faker. Now they're gone.

Having lost that thread, I started trying to be happy in ways that didn't require paying a spiritual debt upfront in the coin of gratuitous suffering. This is an extremely difficult habit to unlearn. But anyway, this had the effect of gradually causing me to think that I might be someone who is worth making an effort to give good things to. Maybe I don't have to die to self just yet -- maybe I'm kind of ok after all. 

But keep in mind, it's only the canonizations are gone. The genes are not. They're here. They don't see even one single baby. 

And they're angry.

(Unfinished. Haha yep I'm never finishing this probs)

Well that was depressing

I'm back home now. I'm no longer perched above Queens Boulevard in my old apartment, gazing down upon on the (assuredly literal) bleak chaos below. 

I sometimes enter a state as if I were a small black cat crouched atop a refrigerator, observing the goings on in someone's kitchen below me. That was me when I was writing the last post. 

Now, I'm just a small black cat ... sitting at a table, typing on a computer. In a room, in a house, with nobody else in it. The greenery outside the glass doors is a more cheering and peaceful sight, a more optimistic picture of "the real world out there", than the intersection at Union Turnpike. And...yet.

I wasn't really expecting this blog to become a diary. But I'm not using it for anything else, so why not? And perhaps it will help me see clearer the ways I change, with that extra kick of awareness that others can see it as well. (Or maybe I'll delete this later, oh dear.)

I read something once about how the lead in "Spirited Away" gained spiritual sight by facing her fears. And I thought, "oh hey, I guess I could think of this as facing my fear of being alone. That feels a little better than just being alone."

But, that's fake too. I'm just existing without a clan, in a world without grand purpose or meaning, with all the antinutrients evolution-wise both of those states entail. And I chose them both. Why? I can't even be sure. 

I am trying to learn how to be this whatever-I-am, successfully. I want to discover an angle to life by which I might start traveling a sustainable avenue of growth, through a force of creative joy alone, unsupported by the instinct-drive for those other things. Yet this is difficult. I'm genuinely unsure if it's possible for me to do. Some are strong enough to relish the benefits of long, deep fasts; others are simply too weak, victims of their constitution no matter their good intentions. I fear I count as the latter.

I'm not doing great at it so far. But I haven't had a lot of practice yet. In other words, I think this is something I must feel.

I removed this post because I felt like it had missed the point, that it failed to articulate that which urged its writing in the first place. Also, it seemed to have relatively little content. 

But perhaps I should be more comfortable with open-endedness, with putting down faltering words where they can be seen. Let's see if it sticks this time.

Thinking through how to enjoy things

So, I'm back in NYC for a few days. I have missed Queens. I'd just begun to feel at home here when Covid whisked me down South. But I'm back now for a few precious days, and everything has obtained the golden aura of lost things: dollar stores crammed with hilarious content, cozy brunch spots, early sun on hidden stone walls, a downright European fresh croissant and macchiato on a quiet church corner.

I dove straight back in to those memories this morning. I found everything just as I hoped to find it, and I really did enjoy it. But what attracted my curiosity was a persistent, small, confused voice in my mind as I did so: "these things used to mean something, and now they do not."

At first, I concluded I was observing the usual cycle of having once experienced a setting while living a certain internal state, enshrining that memory as a high point, missing that setting, then at last returning to it as if to a treasure box. The second time around, the box is equally beautiful, but always empty. By nature, it holds only a present moment, so it must be filled again with whatever is at hand.

When I first remembered this, I went about filling that box again, entering in to the present moment. This had the usual good effect of relieving me of the subtle anxiety of rapidly hopping between past and future moments, comparing and analyzing and despairing, instead of really resting and taking in what lay around me. But while I expected the voice to be satisfied, it seemed to repeat itself as if with a shrug, but a slight furrow in the brow: "there is no more meaning here." 

I probed that thought. It felt as if the story that was missing was the one I once used to weave together my life and even my sensory input into one coherent whole. It amounted to a loss of savor. I realized it was something that had been constructed in order to derive joy and a kind of forward momentum from things, and now that tool was lacking. All things seemed to smile at me less.

But I also recognized this degradation as purposeful on my part. Over the past couple of years, I had made more moves to value the truth as much as it can possibly be valued, particularly with respect to what can loosely be called first principles. I was trying in good faith to dismantle the edifice of this cosmic inner story for the innocent lie that it essentially was -- in particular, the impulse to weave things together as aspects of God, or events as aspects of his love or intentions for me. Love in the abstract experienced the same degradation: the love in our hearts is not destiny, or a promise; it is only the cruft of our sex-centric evolution.

I have striven to bring to its logical conclusion something I began to believe some years ago: if God exists, he exists in darkness. The only way I can understand God to possibly make sense is if he is the God of the mystics, which means accepting that I have no special ability to feel him, above Muslim or agnostic or atheist. To the extent that I seem to do so, I must conclude I'm misleading myself. And thus with all things "spiritual": free will is an illusion, and love is not greatness of spirit, but mere hormonal thrashing.

Meanwhile, it just so happens this "meaning of life" I seek to destroy is by many accounts the foundation of lasting human happiness. That is, at least, if we accept the basic insight of Victor Frankl:"those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'." I agree with the general sentiment and have no doubt that human intelligence evolved to survive on stories as heavily as our bodies evolved to need food. 

One may seek both truth and happiness in moderation, and get along well enough. But to set your sights on the maxima of one seems to require a final goodbye to the other. Frankl would guide us to the maximum of happiness, and give up seeing all things in the precision of their bleak chaos; Buddha would guide us to the maximum of truth, and accept that bleak chaos as the final say.

It may be most appropriate to leave it at that. It's not a problem to be taken lightly. 

But to complete my current thought with honesty, and record things that happen in my life, I will note one further thing. As I completed my meandering walk in Forest Hills, it felt as if I was examining that broken present moment in my hands, like a -- like a what? Well, since I consider potatoes the universal variable -- like the saddest little potato: withered, full of eyes sprouting everywhere, and indeed, emitting a faint stink. It's inedible, impossible to derive real joy or strength from. But it's literally all I have.

What do I do with this potato? To exaggerate: Frankl says eat it, and with each bite believe with all your heart it's giving you strength; Buddha says let it go, and into the trash where it belongs. 

Out of sheer habit, though, a third option popped up: give the sad potato to the God in darkness, in a gesture of gratitude, without knowing if it was ever received.

When I thought of this, immediately the inner voice perked up. "Aha! I almost forgot that solution. That is the only one that has ever worked."

The experience happened separately from an explicit belief in God; the word emerged to my conscious mind basically after the fact. "God" is a label, but the concept was "the appropriate target of gratitude for life," something I found at least in my case to be uniquely positioned to provide a certain concrete emotional utility.

As is my wont, and as previously noted, I don't consider this experience something we should try to draw information from about God or reality. But it seems like a worthwhile piece of data nonetheless.

Part 5: seriously what the fuck, Kathleen

I think a lot of what I wrote below is fated to get deeply rewritten or just canned. Armchair psychology must be among the worst kinds of armchair thought. In any event, if these opinions of mine are going to be remotely shareable, first I have to open myself up to outside information and research about what I myself mean by "overly black-and-white thinking." 

At this moment, I don't have a precise idea of it. I only know that anxiety makes me feel like "all or nothing" are the only two options at times when there have proven later to be many more. "All or nothing" takes on the same felt-sense of inescapability as an if/else statement in code, but falsely. If I don't provide some precise means of discerning anxiety-driven versus logic-driven application of the if/else sense, and demonstrate how this differentiates traditionalist thinking, then honestly, I need to just go back to keeping a lid on it on these topics.

Part 4: the point being

So if these tests are such a problem, why don't most advanced Catholics figure it out and drop them? 

First of all, of course, the situation often just doesn't happen to demand a refactor. Usually we can expect a Catholic.sh with a strong Catholic.test.sh or whatever to chug along just fine. 

I sense a problem of implementation only to the extent that the engineer considers a test suite to be actually critical to Catholic.sh being able to run at all. Even worse is if they insist that the testing library be on a specific version first released around, say, 1870. This would be all well and good coming from a beginner on their first naive implementation, following some step-by-step guide also published in 1870. But not from someone we expect to actually know what they're doing.

As we've seen, It's plain to me these tests don't actually serve Catholic.sh. If an even remotely attentive engineer treats it like important code, it's because of what it does serve. If it was gone, he knows something would break.

And indeed there is, so to speak, another program in us that quietly consumes Catholic test output for its own purposes. If this program is big enough, the demand it imposes can force those tests to be run ragged, triggering refactoring for increased output, growing them like a cancer. 

What is this program? What would need a steady diet of answers to the question, "am I ok"?

Well, to those of a certain bent of mind -- that being Catholic means keeping within the bounds of the fold while lax Catholics and nonbelievers slide slowly toward Hell -- I, the lax Catholic from South Jersey, say unto you:

(ok, "maybe undiagnosed" would be more fair, but I don't feel like drawing it again)

The hardest part of this is that if this anxiety disorder is in fact, undiagnosed, it's very likely the person will deny have an anxiety disorder. Much less, that it could be affecting their reasoning in a profound way.

Ok, ok. Back up. I expect there must be a percentage of people in the group I just addressed who literally do not have an anxiety disorder, and have not had their religious beliefs systemically skewed by the habits of mind typical therein. Honestly, I think that percentage is small, and if I were right, that would be an important fact.

But to keep from losing all my friends in one blog post, I will say this: the point is not the disorder, but the mindset of anxiety. The mindset easily teleports through time and people when it is handed down as a co-tradition or hermeneutic. It's at least as much about the lens through which it's taught, as the lens through which it's lived. 

The religious anxiety mindset accumulates credence from making us sound like humans did in the olden days, when we had not yet outgrown our need for herd instinct: when we were more anxious as a species, but we kinda actually had to be. It really wasn't that long ago. But I'm arguing that we should deduce this credence is a misapplication. All of the patriarchs were members of the more-anxious species, not because this is the right way to think about religion, but because no alternative species could uniformly exist yet. 

Here's another way of putting it:

This one I did redraw to be less hyper-offensive than the first version. Sorry.

I might at some point add to this. I probably should. But yeah, guys, that's basically it. Please stop thinking the need to feed this maybe-inherited-from-our-religious-mentor mindset must be included in any legitimate definition of religiosity or Catholicism. 

It's not. Religion outside of an anxiety mindset is both possible and rational. It's just like many other parts of life which those of us who've lived almost our entire lives under the sway of anxiety, have maybe never before had a chance to experience or evaluate outside of it. Myself included!

So if we're going to discuss God or Catholicism, please let's first of all

a) talk about how anxiety causes us to draw black and white distinctions as a way to try to control or predict things we can't actually control or predict (eg. our place among the righteous, or how many people are going to hell; ultimately, our distance from death),

b) how this is distinct from how logic causes us to draw black and white distinctions as a way to conform to how things really exist; and 

c) how this means we can predict that anxiety is likely still skewing our way of thinking toward overreaching distinctions, and work toward a robust understanding of how we can correct for this.

Then we can move past this and talk about the fun stuff. Ugh, and I really want to.

Final thought: I would ask that you glance at this one more time. But that's it.

Part 3: I began learning about load-bearing structures

First, a brief note on how I hold the convictions I'm about to recklessly pontificate upon. 

I hold my ideas about how to actually live Catholicism well, rather strongly. This is because the memory of my trials in Carmel provides me with the same kind of conviction I experienced when I presented to my engineering teammates the tests I had run on my brand new algorithm before sending it to production: "You have no reason to trust that my idea is good on its own, but there's proof it can withstand some rigor." 

Unfortunately, I think it's pointless to try to detail the level of dedication under suffering my faith had to withstand to stay in Carmel, and stay Catholic since then. I'll have to leave it to your imagination. Nonetheless, if I could convey those validations in a meaningful way, I happily would.

But anyway, speaking of tests.

One reason I'm skeptical that gradient Catholicism is the only real kind is how that gradient is manifested: the Catholic test suite, if you like. 

My problem with the Catholic test suite hinges on this Biblical concept: "Thus sayeth the Lord God: 'Stop acting like your shitty tests are helping with or really telling you anything about how well the code is running.'" 

In non-Kathleen translations of these and similar verses, "your shitty tests" are visible signifiers of faithfulness (sc. "sacrifices and burnt offerings" or "the law" in "the power of sin is the law"), while the code is a man's mind and heart. 

Basically, there exists an emphasis among gradient-Catholics that we should have not only good code, but test coverage: very often, all the test coverage. 

In this view, to the degree a virtue can't be exposed to the evidence-based process we learned to love so well in Logic 101 -- to the degree it isn't externally verifiable -- it risks irrelevance. If its unit test is failing, then it's for all intents and purposes nonexistent. This method prioritizes the surface-ability of virtue, the provision of a strong logical interface. According to this view, unless there is a clear and rational excuse not to, code should be provable by means of an agreed-upon interface: ✓ : success, ✗ : fail.

Anyone who has written a program even a few files big knows that having tests is good and important for sustainable future development. They also know that to aim for 100% coverage, and craft code to optimize for this ahead of flexibility and performance, would actually be totally horrible and ruin the program. 

Why? I mean, I think you can probably imagine it. All I'm saying is, in Carmel I felt viscerally how the cost of building and correcting the output of perfect (or sometimes any) tests just isn't worth it under some conditions. This sense matched beautifully with the one I found again years later among a good engineering team under pressure.

After all, tests can show all sorts of results whose significance is permanently in doubt. Meanwhile, being the entirely separate concern that it is, the code runs. And it can run flawlessly. I'm certain this insight is broadly known among those who have stressed their Catholicism under demand for a certain type of extraordinary, constant loving action: I'm thinking primarily of single mothers or fathers, or parents of disabled children.

In Catholicism, we were taught to optimize for test coverage -- external signifiers of virtue -- by high, ancient authorities, and by our mothers and fathers. I now firmly consider this to signify a good effort tarnished by one other hidden, essentially animal, and effectively ruinous motivation: to be able to communicate among ourselves the passing state of our code: to reveal the vital ✓.

✓ and ✗ is survival. ✓ and ✗ is acceptance and inclusion in the herd, or not. It's old, it's ancient of days; it's an instinct without which the human race could never have persevered through countless winter starvations. Our subconscious minds apply it to non-faith communities and faith communities with the same primal simplicity and force. My mother greeted the friend-pattern of one nun's habit, and guarded me from the no-pattern of another nun's beige pants, by literal instinct.

But this instinct is outdated. We no longer need to stay accepted in our tribe to survive. In the past 100 years or so, sanitation and technology have lifted us a whole new distance away from the terror and heartbreak of death that once defined our lives on earth so much more uniformly.

Once, we had no choice but to weave the imperative ✓ and ✗ into our Catholic design. Today, we have a choice. And that's why it's just plain wrong to insist upon keeping it as much of a design priority as it ever was. It ruins Catholicism in exactly the same way this mindset would be expected to ruin a computer program.

If it's so obvious that this design pattern is flawed, why don't most gradient Catholics figure that out?

That's my next post.

Part 2: then I went to Christendom

Now, rewind almost 20 years to my college days (hard oof).

At Christendom College, I plunged into a faith community that took their religion very seriously and, for the first time, I joined, enjoyed, and continue to enjoy the special bond that exists amongst those who feel they have recognized together a secret and important fact. 

I quickly discovered that for most of my new friends, this special bond was nothing new. This was their normal experience of being Catholic in their families or parishes. 

More importantly though, it was also part of their definition of Catholicism. Whereas my old community would have called both us and themselves "Catholic", in this new view, some Catholics were not true Catholics, and slid away from the definition in the degree that they did not assent in their hearts to what we all knew we had to do, to be Catholic.

What is this thing we were doing? I think a definition my friends would agree on might be something like, "live out Catholic teaching in the ways that are uncomfortable but necessary when logic is brought to bear on the tenets of the Faith, in addition to the ways that are comfortable." I learned a new concept: something or someone is not just Catholic in a binary, but to a degree.

In its gradient form, "Catholic" (sc. something like "rational-and-Catholic", "intentionally-Catholic", "faithful") represents a ratio between assent to the teaching of the Magisterium and what rationalists would call inner alignment: grit, lack of akrasia, with respect to adhering to the conclusions of reason. I will call this gradient-Catholicism.

(Gradient-Catholicism exists on a gradient too. I'm not really addressing moderate amounts of this mindset. I'm referring for the most part to Catholicism with strong traditionalist tendencies.)

Gradient-Catholicism struck the same chord plucked by my mother long ago, the first time she looked at a nun in pants and whispered to me of betrayal. It was a precise, clear, sharp chord, like a taut violin string suspended in my soul, separating either side of it in an echo of the angelic Battle depicted in a painting prominently displayed in my home: the side of Light, and the side of Darkness. And indeed, that chord also defined the limen I felt I mustn't cross, whenever I considered the morality of an action. The goal, in a sense, was to sharpen this line ever more clearly.

It was with a feeling of enormous rightness that this aligned with another kind of precision and sharpness I was learning at the same time: Logic 101. This sensation cannot be emphasized enough.

Gradient-Catholicism provided the inner language whereby my religious identity and self-improvement could interface with this wonderful tool: the ability to make correctly reasoned distinctions, bidding the entire universe open up and deposit the jewels of reality and agency at our feet. 

Non-gradient-Catholicism was just that: Catholicism, but without this interface. It atrophied into irrelevance.

All us younglings graduated and gripped our firebrands -- one edge Reason, the other Faith -- as we toddled into the dark outside world.

Then what happened? Well, some "fell," you see. Some "lost the faith." Alas, they must have been led astray or grown weary, and are now languishing in darkness. Yes, I'm kidding. Many who say the same aren't.

Nearly all of my dearest friends are atheists. With those who fell away after Christendom, I enjoy our continued shared love of truth, rationality and the power of logic. It's no coincidence many of us are programmers. It is to these friends I am mainly speaking now. 

Meanwhile, I count myself lucky that my best friend, also an atheist, I have kept since sixth grade at St. Joan of Arc. I enjoy discussing spiritual things with Jamie too, and others of a more worldly stripe.

But there is an enormous difference in such talks with Jamie and her ilk, and with my post-Christendom, post-traditionalist atheists. The communication hurdle I face with the latter almost always makes less enjoyable, fruitful, and insight-rich the very conversations I would wish and expect were more so than normal.

The difficulty is that to their minds, and unlike the rest of the world, there is still no such thing as non-gradient Catholicism. It's not only erroneous, but nonexistent. Especially when compared to gradient-Catholicism, it is treated as essentially worthless in rational conversation.

Sure, I mean, they'd agree non-traditionalist Catholics are obviously out there. But they are definitionally on the "fringe." When seen from the inside, the reality is clear: if you embrace the teaching of the Catholic Church, you are taking the first step toward something that terminates in an unhealthy state of mind: a certain blocking-out of reality. 

One friend tells me that a Catholic "could not" write a book about sound rational practices, because being Catholic de facto means being slightly irrational (later amended to "probably would not"). A second habitually refers to Catholicism as a cult, and voices concern that someone thinking of leaving Catholicism might be in danger because "a life inside the church doesn't prepare you very well for a life outside." This sentiment is difficult to mesh with the St. Joan's Catholicism of my youth -- to say the least.

Telling from my own habits of mind, the argument for only-gradient-Catholicism-counts would go like this: the only kind of Catholicism is the kind to which you could apply tests of logic regarding tenets of the Faith and the resulting way of life. Because those other Catholics are failing obvious tests, much like writing code while ignoring big red errors in the unit tests, they are obviously not really using Catholicism as a load-bearing program in their lives. Sure, they have a file called Catholic.sh in their heads, but that's all it is: a bunch of text, dead code. When the reckoning comes, what do you suppose the odds are this code will run?

In principle, it's difficult to disagree. I become skeptical, however, for a few reasons, which will go in another post.