Rust Belt Philosophy

There hasn't been any specific traveling or event-attending going on for me recently, but non-specific pictures are just as good, right?

Pitt's campus actually has a few decent sights, but it's far from being the most photogenic in history. It's a double-edged sword, though: its awkward layout and architectural plainness are almost certainly a result of it being located in Oakland, a pretty decent business-type neighborhood.


Some of the buildings, though, are just inexcusable. I mean, really - somebody (probably a rich white guy) paid lots and lots of money to have this building bear their name, and this is the best they could come up with?


There's also a carousel nearby, which you can totally ride for free. Schenley plaza, where you can find the carousel, used to be a parking lot, but they changed it a few years back to be a lawn and a carousel and some food stands and a tent. It's sort of like the opposite of that Joni Mitchell song, kinda.

And, of course, Pitt is by no means an exception to the two rules of Pittsburgh: statues...

(If you can really call this a statue)

...and construction.


Another thing about the city that I had totally forgotten about up until about four days ago is all the stairways we have just sort of lying around. That might seem like an odd way to describe a staircase, but maybe some visual evidence will make things more clear.




Where do these stairs go? Basically, from one random street to another random street.


Or, occasionally, they go from a random street to somewhere useful, like a bus stop.


Oddly enough, although at least some of these staircases seem like they could in principle be helpful I've never seen anybody using one. Ever. Presumably at some point in the past they actually received some use, but for the life of me I couldn't say whether or not anybody even cares about them now. (Except as subjects of photographs, obviously.)

We've also got a few nice bike trails, assuming (a) you can deal with hills and (b) your bike can survive traveling over scads of potholes in order to get to and from the trails themselves. Anyway, at least one of the trails - the Eliza furnace trail, more popularly known as the jail trail - has all kinds of paintings and graffiti and whatnot on it.


This poor guy thought I wanted a clear shot of the image behind him but what I really wanted was a picture with someone walking past the mural of walking people. Next time I'll know to bring my own live subject, I guess.


"FALL IN LOVE NOT IN LINE," it says.


Those are amateurs, obviously. The pros produce work like this:


Something makes me want to say that this piece is related to that Shepard Fairey guy, but the twelve seconds of internet searching I have performed to this point are inconclusive. Thoughts?

Speaking, in any case, of art and artists, Pittsburgh has been building up a nice local arts scene for some time now. One of the older venues for art-type stuff is the city's Center for the Arts, located (for those of you for whom this information is meaningful) on the corner of Fifth and Shady. They rotate exhibitions in and out, of course, but they also have a nice little garden area; the former requires an admission fee and the latter is open to the public, so I settled for the latter.



It's a nice place to bring kids, cause it's big and complicated enough to keep their attention but not big and complicated enough to lose them. Well - I guess if you're either fantastically incompetent or actively trying to lose them then you could manage it, but...



One of the much more radical arts places to visit here is the Mattress Factory, which you can tell is radical by the fact that it has such a prosaic name. Whereas the Center is situated pretty much exactly where you'd want to find an arts place, the Factory is situated pretty much exactly where you wouldn't: hidden on the North Side (more recently known as the North Shore) in a low-income area known as the Mexican war streets. On the plus side, though, the property there is pretty cheap, which allows for things like houses that have poems painted on them in Chinese.


If anybody really wants a translation of this, I can find one.


This is also art (just in case some of you thought it might have been for drying laundry or something).


I assume that this next building is also part of the whole cutting-edge art thing, but I'm less sure.


Need a closer look at the windows? Here:


So maybe this is just some kind of straight-up monument. On the other hand, it appears to have been inspired or at least informed by Italo Calvino, so who knows.


I have to admit, while we're on the subject of "who knows," that I understand very few of the works inside the actual Mattress Factory building. Like this one:



I mean, I don't even know what questions to ask about this work in order to render it comprehensible. And it's called "Untitled," naturally, which helps not one bit. I guess it's a kind of neat achievement, making books sort of twist and writhe like that, but...is that it? Sometimes the material just goes right over my head.

Or take the whole floor devoted to tricks of light. First of all, you need to be instructed on how to view it, which always seems a bit dubious to me.


And then there's the actual instructions themselves...


Fifteen minutes! Allow me to describe for you my experience with Pleiades. Having walked up the (uncomfortably narrow) corridor and sat down, I saw a blurry gray rectangle set against an otherwise pitch-black environment. Knowing that I was supposed to wait for 15 minutes, I guessed that the rectangle (or whatever it was) would slowly come into focus or at least slowly brighten as my eyes adjusted to the darkness. Instead, the opposite happened - the gray area faded to the point where I lost track of it at least two or three times and had to refocus my eyes through force of will. The experience was odd, yes, and my eye muscles (I assume those were muscles) felt unusual afterward, but what did it teach me? What did it inspire in me? I am honestly not sure. Anyway, I felt like I had to take at least one picture of the actual light-art itself, so here you go - enjoy.


The rectangle appears to pop out at you despite being projected against the corner of the room - sort of a basic optical illusion, but there it is.

But the sort of impenetrability of the art inside the building is more than made up for, I feel, by the main outside attraction. Entitled Garden (as I recall), it's basically a post-apocalyptic space - and that's it. Just a ruin specifically designed to be aesthetically pleasing.


It must be all of a couple hundred square feet, but I swear I could hang out there and explore it for hours if I didn't have all this homework to do.




Notice how overgrown everything is. I have reason to believe that that's largely natural: the artwork has existed for at least a year or two and I'm confident that they do only minimal upkeep on it, if they do any at all. It's a very clever idea, building that sort of adaptiveness into the work itself, but with one exception.


See that disgusting green brackish water? I don't think that was there originally. And it really is disgusting, which serves as a significant (and I think unintended) disincentive to move around in that part of the work.



On the other hand, there's certainly some danger built in. It's awfully tempting, when you're there, to walk around on those narrow bits, but if you fall off of one of those you will actually drop about 12 feet and then land on stone. But I have to say, it would significantly detract from the experience to have safety tape or something up there to prevent you from putting yourself at risk.


Another nice thing about the work is how all the beauty in artifacts is subverted, like the broken statues from earlier.



(By the way, do these remind anybody else of the angels from Doctor Who?)

Or this chandelier-type object made apparently from empty tennis ball containers.


Seriously, I think it's an amazing piece and I strongly encourage any visitors to come check it out.



So yeah - that's the Mattress Factory, which just about rounds out this post. The only remainders are the Olde Allegheny Gardens, which I had no idea even existed...




...and a few final random shots of the city.

If you ever stop to read the Bible, you might notice that several things seem off. Even aside from the various scientific problems, the book just doesn't seem to have its moral head on straight. (Maybe this is why the most religiously literate Americans are, statistically, areligious.) In between the instructions about how to stone disobedient children and the stories exalting a father who offered up his daughters to be raped by strangers, you might get to thinking that maybe the Bible isn't so hot a place to learn ethics from. And, according to Paul Copan, you would be wrong.

Much of Copan's argumentation can be summed up by the phrase, "...but there's good stuff, too!" For example, he responds to the slew of biblical role anti-models by saying that, "while Christians can rightly criticize negative moral exemplars and actions with the best of the new atheists, we should also recognize commendable characters and their virtues [as] well." How, one wonders, is this supposed to count as a rousing defense of the Bible as a source of morality? "Yeah, it gets a lot wrong, but it gets some stuff right, too!" Optimism is only the start, one feels, of what Copan must possess in order to make so sunny a claim. Or take this argument about race in the Bible:

"Moses marries a black African woman-from Cush/Ethiopia, which was south of Egypt and under Egyptian control at that time. The term 'Cushite' is mentioned twice for emphasis. Aaron and Miriam are very upset about this marital arrangement-perhaps a power struggle because a new person has entered into the circle of leadership. Despite the objections by Moses' siblings, Yahweh resoundingly approves of Moses' marriage to a black woman, highlighting his approval by turning Miriam's skin white!"

Yeah, no, there's nothing racist about that at all. Nope.

Rather than serving as his end conclusion, however, this glass-half-full mentality is just a premise in Copan's larger argument, which is that, through the Bible, "God is incrementally 'humanizing' ANE [ancient near east cultural] structures within Israel to diminish cruelty and elevate the status of, say, slaves and women-even if such customs are not fully eliminated." As insufficient as this answer is even on its own terms - how, for example, can we excuse a morally perfect God for waiting for so long to begin this process? - it also fails to account for the numerous biblical passages that explicitly call for behavior that couldn't possibly represent any improvement at all, such as the whole "kill the gays" thing. If God - or the actual writers of the Bible - wanted to nudge people along slowly towards an actual ideal rather than just hit them over the head with that ideal, it's incredibly difficult to see how that process is helped by the inclusion of commandments and stories that represent the absolute opposite of the ideal itself.

The biggest problem with Copan's argument, though, is that it takes nothing into account about the way in which moral beliefs actually change in societies. He repeatedly claims that the Bible was designed so that some parts would be phased out and others would be more greatly emphasized, but that hypothesis rests on a premise that's fatal for Copan: that the text of the Bible does not change. Where he would like us to believe that the Bible itself has somehow served as the catalyst for moral change throughout the centuries, forcing us to continually reevaluate the way we live, that's exactly backwards: the way we live has changed over time and that change has forced us (or, at least, the Jews and Christians among us) to reevaluate the Bible. There is, after all, a reason why religious communities have consistently lagged behind the general society in terms of adopting changes to the prevailing moral code. (I have a citation for this if anyone is interested, but I can't find it just at the moment.) It would be silly to argue that the changing interpretation of the Bible isn't related at all to the slow moral improvement in human culture, but Copan just plain got the direction of the influence wrong.

One last thing to note about Copan's thesis is that his position basically requires us to use the Bible less and less as time goes on. The verses he doesn't like are the specific ones, like the section about how to treat slaves or how to handle polygamy; the verses he does like, meanwhile, are vague to the point of uselessness in and of themselves. Yes, there's the golden rule and how we're all created in the image of God and all that stuff, but those sentiments aren't anywhere near sufficient to generate a working moral code. In particular, they can be used to justify atrocities: "all humans share the imago dei, so this minority we want to oppress must not really be human!" As a decision-making tool, Copan's image of the Bible is simply not very helpful. But should this really come as a surprise? If the book was originally written to be one step above what people were doing thousands of years ago, we shouldn't really expect it to help us today at all (because if it were helpful, that would mean that we haven't progressed meaningfully from where we were thousands of years ago). In a way, then, Copan's conclusion is almost self-defeating: this book is actually really good and reliable, just not for, y'know, us. At any rate, Copan himself rejects the majority of biblical moral teaching, so at least we can agree on something.

Which Ken Samples demonstrates quite amply here. Who knows, though - maybe this is just another one of those literal metaphors we've been reading so much about lately.

"Let’s consider three ways in which the Trinity makes sense.

1. It is important to appreciate that the doctrine of the Trinity has been formulated by Christian thinkers in such a way that it avoids being a formal logical contradiction (A cannot equal A and equal non-A at the same time and in the same respect). For example, the Triune God is one in a different respect (essence) from the way God is three (personhood).
2. The Trinity doctrine is an understandable teaching in and of itself even though human beings can never fully comprehend just how God is ontologically triune (three in one). Yet imperfect analogies do provide meaningful insight into God’s triune nature. For example, a single triangle with three sides is helpful in connecting the important concepts of 'oneness and threeness.' Additionally, the analogy of one family with three members illustrates the ideas of 'unity and personal diversity.'
3. Reasoned and careful theological inferences drawn from Scripture about God do make sense, even though God’s nature and being can never be ultimately or totally comprehended."

Leaving aside the third of these claims, which is essentially content-free, and the first, which would require too much backstory explanation for my current state of mind, we're left with way number two in which the Christian doctrine of the trinity allegedly makes sense. His triangle analogy fails to be persuasive because it specifically avoids all of the problematic concepts - agency, consciousness, personal identity, and so on. But that analogy basically serves as a restatement of his point #1, so (again) I'm not going to get too far into it.

Having now whittled this down to the absolute minimum I feel like I can get away with discussing in a blog post, we're left with the analogy that God is like a three-person family. While Samples is right enough in saying that such a family has both unity (in some biological sense, perhaps, or at least a sociological one) and personal diversity (hopefully this is obvious), that's so plainly insufficient that it's hard to even respect this as an argument. Families, for example, are unequivocally groups; they only exist in some abstract sense and so can't rightly be described with the same set of concepts that describe individuals. To call God "omnipotent," then, is meaningless if God is relevantly like a family. (Indeed, Christians couldn't even use gendered pronouns in this case.) Further, the existence of a multi-member family entails the existence of more than one individual member of the family. That's a pretty tautological thing to say, granted, but think about it: we're willing to say of the Barry family that Rick, Brent, and Jon are all Barrys, but Samples is committed at all costs to saying that only one God exists. If the three people of the Christian God are all members of this family-like thing because of some shared attributes (in the same way that regular people are members of regular families in virtue of their shared lineage), the appropriate conclusion is that all three are Gods in the same way that all members of the Barry family are Barrys. Samples could escape this conclusion if he were to say that the three members were identical - but then he wouldn't have any "personal diversity."

Note also that the criteria for group agency differ quite markedly from the criteria for individual agency. In other words, when we say that Barack Obama did something we mean something very different from what we mean when we say that the US government did something. (Or, to continue with Samples's analogy, a family performing some act is not the same as a member of that family performing the same act.) Some people even go so far as to say that groups, strictly speaking, are not and cannot be agents at all. At any rate, using families as an analog commits Samples to explaining each and every instance of God's (supposed) behavior with a theory of agency applicable to groups. Since the traditional Christian response has always been to regard God as an individual, this requires a wholesale reinterpretation of practically the whole Bible (especially the Jewish part, which of course is based on the premise that the God character is unitary).

Worse yet for Samples, these are problems that arise just from the bare minimum idea of what a trinity (in the Christian sense) could be like - we haven't even begun to look at the myriad claims made in the Christian literature about how this trinity works in particular, nor have we tried to see whether or not the trinity concept is compatible with any of the other basic axioms of the Christian religion. Samples, however, knows full well that he can't actually deliver on his promise: as he himself says, "the Trinity doctrine is mysterious, paradoxical, and ultimately incomprehensible." As such, we shouldn't really feel too good about ourselves just because we understand that the whole thing is a shambles. Be proud instead that, unlike Samples, you reject a shambles when you see one.