Wednesday Meander
- Mike Dickey
- May 29, 2024
- 4 min read
“Belief is when someone else does the thinking.”
— Buckminster Fuller
A brief one today because, well, I need to write a brief. Or at least hash out the guts of one. It's a relatively pleasurable intellectual exercise, but becomes sort of all-encompassing as one sifts through thousands of pages of trial transcripts and motions and orders, looking for the nuggets that support your argument.
That feels rather backwards, as a matter of basic reasoning: we start with a conclusion, then go back and find facts to support it. Welcome to the practice of law.
Speaking of law, I see DJT's case goes to the jury today. One of his former lawyers opines that the Cheeto Messiah is doomed by the jury instructions.
Maybe. Any good trial lawyer will tell you that jury instructions are critical; my trial preparation, indeed my litigation of a case begins with thinking through the first draft of jury instructions, then building my case through discovery and motion practice toward that goal. But in my world, jury instructions are mostly bespoke; lawyers submit drafts to the judge, then argue about what language correctly states the law to the jury without advocacy or subterfuge. In criminal cases, I think most of the instructions are standards promulgated by that state's highest court, so I don't know how much room the judge in Trump's case really has to throw him under the bus.
On a more interesting note, last night P and I started watching a 63 part series of forty-five minute lectures by Michael Sugrue, covering the history of western philosophy. Dr. Sugrue died four days ago at the age of 66, of prostate cancer, and an article about how his lecture series on YouTube went viral during the pandemic piqued my curiosity.
The lectures took place over thirty years ago, when he was a prof at Princeton presenting in rumbled khakis and a corduroy blazer. The guy is mesmerizing, pacing in front of a blank wall and explaining, without notes, some of the most difficult concepts in philosophy in a way that is approachable for us public school types.
"I feel like I should be taking notes," Peg said more than once.
There were lots of "aha" moments during the lecture last night, but the one that called me up short, the insight that's been there in plain view, had to do with the "logos".
Sugrue posits the two centers of western intellectual thought in the ancient world in Athens and Jerusalem. The Athens school laid its foundation in reason, observation of empirical reality, and science. The Jerusalem school found its reality in a transcendent world with an all-powerful being who commanded obedience and brought order to the world through divine judgment. Jerusalem was Job; Athens was Prometheus.
Then Sugrue observes that Christianity became a bridge between the two because of language. Of the three main faith traditions that grew out of the Jerusalem tradition, Muslim scripture was composed in Arabic, Judaism's in Hebrew, and early Christianity's in Greek. The last of the three, therefore, had to find a way to express its faith-based reality in the language of a culture that viewed stories of gods as just so many campfire tales. This led to some odd melding, maybe the oddest being what happened to the "logos".
In ancient Greek culture and language, logos stood for reason, for man's ability through observation and thought to comprehend and master the world around him. But the logos of the New Testament is a different thing, indeed. The authors of early Christian scripture took this Greek word for, well, "word", and repurposed it to describe the Hebrew ruach, the holy spirit moving as wind across the void in the beginning of the creation story as reconsidered by John. The word, the "logos", was God, and is God.
It's sort of a Hegelian synthesis, coopting the Greek word to describe observed empirical reality into a means of conveying the truth of a greater divine reason and power. This is, in Sugrue's view, the reason of the three Jerusalem traditions, Christianity was the one that so deftly jumped the tracks to become a world tradition.
There's a little sanding away the edges to generalize to this conclusion, of course. Judaism had its so-called "Wisdom Books", which pre-dated Jesus but came after that culture's encounter with Hellenic culture through Alexander and his successors. And Philo of Alexandria's writing folds a sophisticated Neoplatonism into Jewish thought, all in Greek. But unlike the other two Jerusalem faith traditions, Christianity in its scripture didn't maintain a traditional, very foreign language as a barrier to entry (it also didn't require you to give up pork or lop off your foreskin, two serious impediments to joining the tribe). And by adopting the language of the Roman world as its own, Christianity became more mobile and more comfortable in the intellectual and philosophical world that created that language.
Fun stuff. Now back to that brief.
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