Freeman Zimmerman

Last night, it suddenly crossed my mind that I wanted to listen to some Bob Dylan -- but not by that name. The thought that came to me was, "I'm in the mood for some Bob Zimmerman." That's not how I usually think -- I know the dude's real name, of course, but as a singer he's always "Dylan" -- so instead of putting on any music, I got sidetracked trying to figure out why his birth name had suddenly popped into my head. I finally traced it back to a September 27 blog post by a notorious anti-Semite (sorry, too radioactive to link from a Google blog) which mentioned "my favorite Robert Zimmerman song," adding parenthetically, "Zimmerman was for sure overrated, but claiming he didn’t have a few good ones is a type of anti-Semitism too extreme even for me."

Calling Dylan "Zimmerman" was obviously done in the spirit of "naming the Jew," and this idea of Zimmerman being a distinctively Jewish name made me think of the fact that the only Zimmerman I've ever known in real life was definitely not Jewish. When my family lived in Fallston, Maryland, in the late eighties, our Mormon ward was led by a Bishop Zimmerman, known for his enormous house featuring several secret passages and a Q*bert arcade machine. Thus I forgot all about Bob and his music, instead trying to remember as much as I could about this other Zimmerman.

The name Freeman has been in the sync-stream recently -- see "Syncs: Tropical dreams and not-dreams, 555, Freeman and not-Freeman" (September 29) and "Where Dreamers Become Doers" (September 30). So when I checked the Junior Ganymede last night and found a post referencing a "Sister Freeman" who had spoken at the recent CJCLDS General Conference, I clicked the link in case it should turn out to be synchronistically relevant. Sister Freeman's talk didn't do anything for me -- it falls into the travelogue-as-testimony genre all too familiar to anyone with a Mormon background -- but this part got my attention:

When I returned home from Israel, I listened more closely to the conversations around me regarding covenants. I noticed people asking, Why should I walk a covenant path?

My immediate reaction was: No, you didn't. Why should I walk a covenant path? Who the hell talks like that? Not Mormons! Did I somehow wander off lds.org onto Radix Fidem or something? It turns out I'm just behind the times, though. A word search on lds.org reveals that for the past several years they've been meming the living daylights out of covenant path -- a phrase which did not exist at all in the Mormon discourse of my day. (There's a 2018 Rameumptom post about how Russell M. Nelson -- the M stands for Man -- manpropriated the phrase from some unsung female genius and deprived her of her Nobel Prize. Many such cases.) I also feel I should point out that a single tap of the space bar transforms the phrase into coven ant path.

(This "covenant path" digression doesn't really have anything to do with the rest of this post, by the way. As Charles Kinbote would say, I trust the reader has enjoyed this note.)

This morning I did a bit of desultory browsing on /pol/, including this thread asking "How'd you even first discover /pol/." One anon, responding to the claim that "no one cared about /pol/ until the Trayvon Martin case," posted this dated meme:

Trayvon Martin was a while back (2012), and I wasn't paying much attention even at the time, so I don't get this. I don't recognize any of the faces or understand what the joke is. What I do understand is that it says George "freeman" ZIMMERMAN, followed by a bunch of anti-Semitic buzzwords.

Freeman first entered the sync-stream when I was reading Mike Clelland's novel The Unseen and somehow misread Foreman as Freeman. George Foreman is a household name, but here we have George Freeman. It's also a reference to a non-Jew named Zimmerman (like the Mormon bishop) but still in an anti-Semitic context (like the original Robert Zimmerman reference).

One final sync-link: Yesterday's post "Bigfoot? Bigfoot" included a photo of a T-shirt for sale in Taiwan, printed with rap lyrics referencing the cough syrup-based beverage Purple Drank -- a drug I don't think I've ever had occasion to mention before. The next day I get this Trayvon Martin stuff. You may recall that the justice-for-Trayvon contingent adopted as their symbols the Purple Drank ingredients he had bought just before his death.

Very minor sync: Mormon bloggers "advancing the ball"

In yesterday's "'Russian-reversal' consecration revisited," I discuss what I had thought was a peculiarity of Book or Mormon phraseology, but which turns out to have been used by Protestants as well. This made me think of my attempt years ago to find any non-BoM instances of the unusual construction "It supposes me that . . ." (to mean "I suppose . . ."), and I thought I might as well give it another go. Googling "it supposeth me" turned up a blog post with that very title, which got my hopes up, but it turned out to be an old 2006 post by Kevin Barney at the "liberal Mormon" blog By Common Consent, which I had read at the time but since forgotten about. He begins by citing me as the person who raised the question, spends a few paragraphs not finding an answer, and concludes with, "OK, that’s a start. Someone pick up the ball and advance it down the field for us." So the source of the construction remains a mystery.

Reading this Mormon blog reminded me that I hadn't checked the (much more simpatico) Mormon blog Junior Ganymede lately, so I rectified that omission and read the May 22 post "Reflections about Standards." The post begins with a long prologue about the overall purpose of the blog, including this:

Which brings us to the last and most unusual thing this blog is. We are faith exploring and faith compatible. We start with the gospel as a premise and then work out from there. . . . Instead of trying to get you to believe, here we take it for granted that you already do and then try to advance the ball.

Just a minor coincidence, since it's not that uncommon an expression. A site search of BCC shows that Kevin Barney uses it quite frequently. Junior Ganymede has only used it this once, though -- and I just happened to read it just after finding the same thing on BCC, a site I had not visited in probably 10 years or more.

Notice of G's recent work on virtue sets

G of the Junior Ganymede has been posting a lot of interesting ideas regarding the "virtue set" model. He has adopted the hot/cool terminology I proposed, where "hot" includes Ahuric virtue and Luciferic vice, and "cool" embraces Devic virtue and Ahrimanic vice.

• Virtue upon virtue: I have previously discussed the natural evolution from Good to Luciferic to Ahrimanic to Sorathic. G here discusses evolution in the opposite direction: the progression from cool vice to hot vice to cool virtue to hot virtue.
• In my Father's house are many virtues: The four members of the master virtue set are associated with the four kingdoms of the afterlife in Mormon theology.
• The plan of virtue: The four members of the master virtue set are associated with premortal, mortal, and postmortal stages in the Plan of Salvation.
• The sower of virtues: The biblical parable of the sower is interpreted in terms of the virtue set.

Mormon recessional

Empty interior of the abandoned Kirtland Temple

A recessional is a closing hymn, marking the end of a church service. It is also the title of Rudyard Kipling's inspired poem of 1897, which -- although it is about the British Empire, written at its height and prescient of its end -- has long been part of the Mormon hymnal, under the title "God of Our Fathers, Known of Old."

In a post with the very appropriate title "The Singing Has Ended," John Mansfield of the Junior Ganymede writes:

What would a dwindling, a withdrawal of priesthood from the world and the church look like that is different from the ministry of Russell Nelson as president of the church? A sad, inglorious task to be given, but in sad, inglorious times some obedient son oversees the withdrawal of gifts.

Predictably, there is some obligatory looking-on-the-bright-side in the comments. One Michael Towns writes:

Of course, I recognize that we live in dark times. I acknowledge that. But I can’t agree with the idea that priesthood is being withdrawn from the world . . . . How many temples are being constructed right now? Seems to me the priesthood is advancing, not dwindling.

Mansfield, though, remains clear-eyed.

If, in a coming decade, it should be decided that since women perform many great roles (wife, mother, missionary, temple worker) without holding priesthood office, there is really no reason for most men to be ordained priests or elders, people will wonder then why I should care, and think my feelings of loss are nothing more than sentimental attachment to old-timey window dressing and scaffolding. I’m getting pretty used to that response.

The church age has ended. Institutional Christianity has done its work. The future, for the followers of Jesus, lies in a different direction. Is every church doomed to the grotesque cancer of full-scale convergence and apostasy, or will a select few be permitted to withdraw from the world stage with something resembling dignity? Have I been too flippant with my "Satan popping on the apricot tree" tag? Is Russell M. Nelson, for all his faults, fundamentally an "obedient son overseeing the withdrawal of gifts"?

How consciously and intentionally I cannot know, but President Nelson does seem to be paving the way for a post-church Mormonism. "Home church" was being promoted even before the birdemic. Where in the past members were cautioned not to go beyond the official (carefully edited) church study manuals, now the unabridged Joseph Smith papers are available for free online, courtesy of that same church. Perhaps most significantly, Nelson's "rectification of names" campaign has released the word Mormon into the public domain. Like Christian, it is no longer the exclusive property of any institution. I can now freely say, "I am a Mormon," with no need to clarify that I am not affiliated with President Nelson's organization.

One thinks of the prophet Jeremiah, preaching that Babylon would win, that Jerusalem would fall, that the Lord would not save his people, and that they should not resist. When the Babylonians took charge, they treated Jeremiah very well, and it must have seemed to many Israelites that he had been a fifth-columnist all along -- but he was a prophet of God. Where President Nelson falls on the continuum from Jeremiah to Nebuchadnezzar is not for me to know, but in their different ways both Jeremiah and Nebuchadnezzar were instruments in the hand of God.

I grew up in Joseph Smith's old stomping grounds -- "Thompson, Ohio, home of Doctrine and Covenants Section 51," I used to say when Utahns asked where I was from. Today I was moved to reread the revelation that was my little town's claim to fame.

And thus I grant unto this people a privilege of organizing themselves according to my laws. And I consecrate unto them this land for a little season, until I, the Lord, shall provide for them otherwise, and command them to go hence; . . . And whoso is found a faithful, a just, and a wise steward shall enter into the joy of his Lord, and shall inherit eternal life (D&C 51:15, 16, 19).

Look again at that picture of the Kirtland Temple, and think of when Joseph Smith himself used to stand at that pulpit while the congregation sang, "The Spirit of God Like a Fire Is Burning." Now it is a mere tourist attraction, owned by a completely converged once-Mormon organization that calls itself the Community of Christ, ordains women and performs same-sex "marriages," and operates out of a deliberately ugly "temple" that looks like a soft-serve ice-cream cone.

Kirtland was my backyard. Many a time have I walked those once-hallowed halls. Sometimes, when the mood is right, the ghosts of its glorious past make themselves manifest. One can see the Prophet and the cloven tongues of fire, feel the rushing mighty wind, hear the resounding chorus, "We'll sing and we'll shout with the armies of heaven, Hosanna, hosanna to God and the Lamb!"

But they are only ghosts. The singing has ended. Zion is fled.

Apollo, Dionysos, and the Ganymede model

Leonid Ilyukhin, Apollo and Dionysus (click to enlarge)

In "Scattered thoughts on the Ganymede model," I wrote:

The Birth of Tragedy . . . made me realize that another famous Nietzschean dichotomy may also be relevant: Apollinisch vs. Dionysisch. Isn't it obvious that Apollo is Devic/Ahrimanic in nature, while Dionysos is Ahuric/Luciferic?

Well, no, maybe it isn't obvious at all. Yesterday, I read this on the Junior Ganymede:

A few days ago we were talking about how the cool earthly virtues seemed chthonic and the hot heavenly virtues seemed apollonic.

G and I had been searching for suitable terminology for the two basic types of traits -- the one embracing the Devic virtues and Ahrimanic vice; and the other, the Ahuric virtues and Luciferic vices. G at first used the placeholder labels Type 1 and Type 2., typified as "virtues of control and discipline" vs. "virtues of passion and strength."  I proposed Cool and Hot. Other possibilities suggested on the Junior Ganymede included Yin and Yang, Lunar and Solar, Chthonic and Heavenly.

We can see now that these labels matter, that different labels cause us to categorize things differently. When I was using my original labels, it seemed obvious that Apollo was Devic and Dionysos was Ahuric. When G introduces his Type 1 and Type 2, it still seemed obvious that Apollo belonged on the "control and discipline" side of the ledger and Dionysos on the "passion and strength" side.

Introduce some of the other proposed labels, though, and the opposite classification becomes more intuitive. Obviously, Apollo is yang (sunlight) and Dionysos is yin (shadow). As a sun-god, Apollo is quite literally "solar" and "heavenly"; and Dionysos, while not literally one of the "chthonic" (underworld) gods, is clearly more "of the earth, earthy" than Apollo.

Did I put Apollo and Dionysos in the wrong columns, then? But how could I possibly put Dionysos -- Liber, Eleutherios, god of intoxication and frenzy -- under the heading "control and discipline"?

Two types, not four

In my last post on the Ganymede model, I was starting to realize that my schema of four elements (Luciferic, Ahrimanic, Ahuric, Devic) was actually about two fundamental types, each of which can manifest as either good or evil. Referring to Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, for instance, I wrote, "Isn't it obvious that Apollo is Devic/Ahrimanic in nature, while Dionysos is Ahuric/Luciferic?"

In his latest post on the subject, "The Two Types of Virtue," G makes this explicit, making a list of oppositions which he calls simply "Type 1" and "Type 2." Type 1 (Devic) virtues are distorted into Type 1 (Ahrimanic) vices, while Type 2 (Ahuric) virtues are distorted into Type 2 (Luciferic) vices. Using G's terminology, I could simply have said that Apollo is Type 1 and Dionysos is Type 2.

Solomon is Type 1, David is Type 2. Aaron is Type 1, Moses is Type 2. Odysseus is Type 1, Achilles is Type 2. Spock is Type 1, Kirk is Type 2. Hobbes is Type 1, Calvin is Type 2. Once the element of good/evil is abstracted away, classifying these archetypal characters becomes much easier. (I do notice, though, that G appears to have got the numbers backwards. For most pairs of characters I have listed, we would more naturally mention the "Type 2" figure first and the "Type 1" figure second: David and Solomon, Calvin and Hobbes, etc.)

G doesn't like my terminology, because it is "randomly technical" (i.e., uses words in a technical sense that would not be intuitive even to a well-educated person), and because Lucifer is the name of a specific being in Mormon theology who is definitely not "Luciferic." (In my post "Satan divided against himself," I even introduced the concept of Ahriman by quoting something Joseph Smith had written about "one of the angels," conveniently not mentioning that this angel's name was actually Lucifer.)

I had wanted to keep Luciferic and Ahrimanic because of their currency in my circle, and among followers of Rudolf Steiner. However, I do realize the confusion this may cause for Mormons, whose "Lucifer" is an Ahrimanic being. It's probably best to choose labels that have no religious or philosophical baggage. That way, Mormons and Anthroposophists can argue over whether Lucifer is Type 1 or Type 2 without arguing about the model itself.

G's terminology has the advantage of carrying no baggage, and of recognizing the unity of Devic/Ahrimanic and of Ahuric/Luciferic. However, the labels "Type 1" and "Type 2" have no semantic or mnemonic content and are thus even more "randomly technical" than my own, making it easy to get them carelessly mixed up. (In this very post, I originally wrote that Dionysos is Type 1 and Apollo is Type 2 and had to go back and correct it. I'm sure I would never have carelessly written that Dionysos is Ahrimanic.)

So, what terms would be better? Yin and yang spring immediately to mind, of course, but I think they are unsatisfactory on all counts. On the one hand, they bring with them considerable philosophical baggage. On the other, their foreign-ness and their phonetic similarity make it very easy for Westerners to get mixed up as to which is which. Lawful and chaotic (as used in D&D alignment) are another obvious possibility, but they carry too much semantic content that doesn't really fit.

Trying to think what sort of terminology would be best, I thought of Marshall MacLuhan's technical use of hot and cool to refer to different types of media, and how perfect it was -- simple, memorable, intuitively "right," and yet free of theoretical baggage. A few straightforward examples from everyday language (bikinis are hot, sunglasses are cool) made it easy to remember that, for example, film is hot and television (the low-definition TV of MacLuhan's day) is cool.

Then it hit me that perhaps what is needed is not just terms as good as MacLuhan's, but those very terms. Ahuric/Luciferic is Hot, Devic/Ahrimanic is Cool.

The temperature metaphor is a very natural one, I think, and G even includes "hot" and "cold" as one of the pairs of opposites on his chart. (I think cold always has a negative connotation, though -- cold virtue sounds weird -- so I prefer cool.) He also lists "expansion" vs. "consolidation" -- meanings which are included in the Aristotelian/alchemical use of hot and cool. There's also Nietzsche's "coldest of all cold monsters" -- the Ahrimanic state -- and so on. In fact, I even used a biblical hot/cold metaphor in my original post on this subject.

It is wrong to conceptualize the Christ this way -- as if the goodness of God consisted in being just Ahrimanic enough without being too Ahrimanic -- as if Lucifer were 0, Ahriman were 1, and the Christ were 0.618... (realized to infinite decimal places in the Christ himself, but only approximated by mere mortals!). "Moderation in all things" is a Greek maxim, not a Christian one. The Christian version is this: "I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth" (Rev. 3:15-16).

The master virtue chart, them, would look like this:

What do you think? Is this terminology better? More intuitive? Easier to think with?

No, there weren't more excess deaths in 2017 than in 2020.

Perhaps you've seen Samuel H. Preston and Yana C. Vierboom's paper, "Excess mortality in the United States in the 21st century," published this April in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

It was linked on the Junior Ganymede with the comment, "2020 is the deadliest year on record since . . . 2017." Vox Day, referencing the same paper, said, "Got that? Fewer people died in 2020 than in 2017." I more or less trust the JG and VD, but I clicked through to the original paper and read the abstract, which seemed to confirm their summaries:

In 2017, excess deaths and years of life lost in the United States represent a larger annual loss of life than that associated with the [birdemic] in 2020.

There's no excuse for my letting this slip past my BS detector -- I knew it completely contradicted the statistics W. M. Briggs faithfully reports every week -- or for failing to read the whole paper, which turns out to be really short. I'm ashamed to say I just saw it as ammo I could use with friends and family members who trust The Science and accepted it without asking too many questions. In fact, it turns out that the abstract is misleading, and the paper is garbage, publish-or-perish busywork that contributes nothing to human knowledge.

"Excess deaths in the United States" means, in this paper, not deaths in excess of what would be expected in a "normal" year in the United States, but rather the degree to which death rates in the U.S. in a given year exceed those of five selected European countries in the same year. The paper's meaningless and useless "finding" is that the difference between American and European death rates in 2017 (with American rates being higher) was larger than the difference between American and European death rates in 2020.

This has nothing to do with whether more people died in 2017 or in 2020, or with how serious the birdemic was. In fact, it has nothing to do with anything, and it's not entirely clear why anyone thought it worth publishing.

Thanks to my father for reading the whole thing and informing me that it doesn't actually say what it says on the tin.

Scattered thoughts on the Ganymede model (virtue sets)

"G" of the Junior Ganymede is writing about virtue sets again, and incorporating some of my own work in that area. Most importantly, he now agrees with me that all individual virtue sets are examples of two complementary types of good (Ahuric and Devic) and two complementary types of evil (Luciferic and Ahrimanic). I'm going to go ahead and dub this four-factor theory of good and evil the Ganymede model, unless G strenuously objects and suggests a better name.

Since someone else is also working on this now, I am, in the interests of creative cross-pollination, going to throw out several half-developed ideas in the hope that some of them will fall on fertile ground.

⁂

In defense of opaque terminology

G says he doesn't really like my terminology (Ahuric, Devic, Luciferic, Ahrimanic), but I would like to insist on it and on the importance of not replacing it with more descriptive terminology such as Active/Passive, Masculine/Feminine, etc. Essentially, I think the observation that there are two complementary types of good and two complementary types of evil is prior to any hypotheses about the fundamental nature of these goods and evils. It is important to keep in mind that I arrived at the Ganymede model inductively, by looking at lots of individual virtue charts. This inductive -- "botanical," as it were -- classification of good and evil comes first. Theories about why there are two types of good and two types of evil, and about how these may relate to other concepts, come later. To use descriptive titles rather than just names is to make unjustified presuppositions.

As I explained when I originally introduced the terms, Zoroastrianism contrasts good ahuras with evil daevas, while Hinduism contrasts good devas with evil asuras. The terms are assumed to be etymologically related, but the moral polarity is reversed. These four words, then, would be perfect for the Ganymede model. Asuric evil distorts Ahuric good and opposes Devic good; Daevic evil distorts Devic good and opposes Ahuric good. In practice, though, I think the terms are too phonetically similar to be practical, and would be easily confused. Since Steiner's Luciferic/Ahrimanic distinction fits the Ganymede model so well and is already well established, and since Ahriman happens to be the Zoroastrian name for the enemy of the ahuras, I decided to keep Steiner's terms for the two evils and use Ahuric and Devic for the two goods.

I think the fact that most of the terms are of non-Christian origin is a feature, not a bug. It keeps the terms free of unwanted baggage, since we Christians are unlikely to get sidetracked by arguments over whether Ahriman is truly "Ahrimanic" or the devas are truly "Devic." Lucifer, of course, is a name used in Christianity, so we just have to accept that we're using it in a technical sense in the Ganymede model and are not necessarily claiming that the Lucifer of scripture is specifically "Luciferic" rather than "Ahrimanic" in nature.

⁂

Nietzsche again

I've mentioned Nietzsche's discussion, in The Genealogy of Morals, of Gut-und-Böse versus Gut-und-Schlecht, and identified Böse and Schlecht with Luciferic and Ahrimanic, respectively. The other day I got out The Genealogy of Morals to review some of the specific things Nietzsche had said about this. My copy of this work is bound together with The Birth of Tragedy, which made me realize that another famous Nietzschean dichotomy may also be relevant: Apollinisch vs. Dionysisch. Isn't it obvious that Apollo is Devic/Ahrimanic in nature, while Dionysos is Ahuric/Luciferic?

⁂

Throwing Dante into the mix

Dante's Purgatorio groups the Seven Deadly Sins into three categories: perverted love, insufficient love, and excessive love. Our model tends to identify supposed "excess" of virtue with perversion or distortion of virtue. It would be an interesting exercise to give the Seven Deadly Sins the Ganymede treatment.

From Barry Moser's illustration for Allen Mandelbaum's Dante

⁂

What about Sorath?

Bruce Charlton and I, in our thinking about Steiner's Lucifer and Ahriman, have both come to place more and more emphasis on a third sort of evil, the Sorathic, and to see it as being just as important as the other two. How does Sorathic evil fit into the Ganymede model? Does it have as its opposite some third type of good?

⁂

Masculine and feminine

Looking at lists of Ahuric and Devic virtues, I found that the first list made me think of Jesus Christ and the second of Our Lady. This led me to the tentative conclusion that these two types of good corresponded to masculine and feminine, and that the Ganymede model helped to explain why the two sexes were necessary and eternal.

I had also at one point thought of Ahuric good as primarily "seeking good," and Devic good as "avoiding evil." I was not really happy with those descriptions, though, since "avoiding evil" can be accomplished perfectly by not existing at all! Both types of good must be in some way positive and active, not merely negative and passive.

In his latest post on the topic. G helpfully summarizes the two types of good in a rather different way.

In a virtue set, one complementary virtue will be [an Ahuric] virtue of strength and passion.  The other complementary virtue will generally be a [Devic] virtue of control and discipline.  The matching vices will be [Luciferic] vices of uncontrolled strength and passion and [Ahrimanic] vices of a lack of strength and passion.

This startled me because, by "coincidence," my wife and I had just hours earlier been discussing (without reference to the Ganymede model) the question "What is masculinity?" and kept coming back to the idea of control and discipline as definitive masculine characteristics. My wife also mentioned that very masculine men -- Ernest Hemingway, Humphrey Bogart, James Bond -- sometimes seem to be almost emotionless and not to care about anything. Since I had provisionally been thinking of Ahuric as masculine and Devic as feminine, it came as a shock to see G (correctly) identify Devic virtue with "control and disciple" and Ahuric virtue with "passion." Clearly the relationship of masculinity and femininity to Ahuric and Devic good is more complicated than I had been assuming.

Apropos of this, Ron Tomlinson left this comment on my post "Satan divided against himself" -- a post which discussed Lucifer and Ahriman extensively, before I had developed the Ahuric/Devic concept.

Good men tend to err on the side of Luciferanism (pursue good by evil means)

Good women tend to err on the side of Ahrimanism (avoid evil by playing it safe)

Bad men are often Ahrimanic, e.g. those who pursue power/promotion

Bad women are often Luciferan, e.g. overweight with tattoos

Again, this suggests that sex is an important element in the Ganymede model, but not in so straightforward a way that we can simply identify each sex with one type of good or evil.

Retracing the development of the Luciferic/Ahrimanic/Ahuric/Devic model

Traditional thinking before Aristotle had virtue sets with only two members: a virtue and its opposite. The recognition of such opposites as hot/cold, big/small, brave/cowardly, etc. must be as old as thought itself. The first (implicit) steps into the realm of virtue theory came with the realization that, for many of these pairs of opposites, one member of the pair could be called a "virtue" and the other a "vice," and that virtue as such had a single unifying character. This must have been the point of all the couplets in the Book of Proverbs (and their equivalents in the Confucian literature) that take the form "The wise/righteous man does X, but the foolish/wicked man does Y" -- observations that strike us as obvious and trite today but must have represented an emerging awareness that all these different qualities we now call "virtues" were characteristic of a particular sort of man; and their opposites, of another sort.

Aristotle's key insight was that each virtue has two corresponding vices -- a vice of deficiency and a vice of excess, with the virtue conceptualized as a mean between the two. This table of Aristotelian virtue sets is adapted from Hugh Tredennick's appendix to his revision of J. A. K. Thomson's translation of The Nicomachean Ethics. I have numbered the sets for ease of reference.

But Aristotle's insight was incomplete in two ways. First, it lost sight of the unifying "types of men" recognized by Solomon and Confucius. That is, it paints a coherent picture of the virtuous man -- the sage or "superior man" of Confucius, the wise and righteous man of Proverbs -- but not of the vicious man, the wicked, the fool. Or, rather, of the two different kinds of wicked fools that would seem to be implied by the Aristotelian theory. Aristotelian virtue is a single coherent whole, but vice-of-deficiency and vice-of-excess are not. For example, a quick glance at the chart above shows that rashness and shyness are both listed as vices of excess. Obviously, there is no human archetype to which this list of vices corresponds.

If we are able to pick one vice from each set based on how well it fits, though, without regard for whether it is classified as a "deficiency" or an "excess," we can in fact create two coherent lists characterizing two different types of bad men. Aristotle never noticed this. Nietzsche got part of the way there in his Genealogy of Morals, where he distinguished between Gut-und-Böse morality and Gut-und-Schlecht morality, but he failed to realize that his Böse ("evil") and Schlecht ("bad") really were two different ways of being bad -- both bad -- and that good was something else entirely. For Nietzsche, there were really only two sorts of men: the sort called evil by those who opposed them, and the sort called bad; each of course called himself good. For Nietzsche, you had to choose between calling Böse good (as Nietzsche himself attempted to do) and calling Schlecht good (as he accused Christians of doing). Nietzsche recognized the unity of Böse and the unity of Schlecht, and in this way was more advanced than Aristotle -- but he lost sight of virtue itself!

It fell to Rudolf Steiner to unify the insights of Aristotle and Nietzsche. Like Aristotle, he recognized virtue (as typified by the Christ) as a middle way between two sorts of vice. But rather than characterizing these as "deficiency" and "excess," he classified the vices into two coherent types of evil: Luciferic (Nietzsche's Böse) and Ahrimanic (Nietzsche's Schlecht). This was a major step forward.

Coming back to Aristotle, though, I said that his insight was incomplete in two ways. Look back at the first virtue set on our table. The virtue is courage, its deficiency is cowardice, and its excess is rashness. So far so good. Now look at the second set. The virtue is temperance, its deficiency is insensibility, and its excess is licentiousness -- wait, what? Surely these are backwards! Licentiousness (eating, drinking, and being merry) is not an "excess" of temperance but a lack of it. One might call a rash fool "too brave," but no one would ever call a glutton or drunkard "too temperate"! It is the other vice, insensibility (measuring out one's life with coffee spoons), that we would call an excess of temperance.

I'm not sure if this mistake (and the similar one in set 7, where irascibility is called an excess of patience) is Aristotle's own or Treddenick's, and I don't really feel like poring over the Ethics to find out, but that's not really the point. The point is how very easy it is to make this sort of mistake when thinking about virtue within the Aristotelian framework. Licentiousness very obviously is an excess of something -- just not an excess of temperance. Licentiousness is a deficiency of temperance and an excess of something else; insensibility is an excess of temperance and a deficiency of something else. And this "something else," this complementary virtue to temperance (we could call it "enjoyment" or something), is what is missing from Aristotle's model.

A proper virtue set has four members: two complementary vices (as in Aristotle), and two complementary virtues. This was discovered and published on the Junior Ganymede blog by the anonymous blogger who chooses to be known only by the letter G. Here is his model as applied to the first of Aristotle's virtue sets -- filling in the missing virtue of prudence.

However, G, like Aristotle, considered each virtue set in isolation, failing to notice that by looking at many such sets one could identify two coherent types of evil and two coherent types of good. In the set shown above, for example, rashness is clearly Böse/Luciferic, and cowardice is Schlecht/Ahrimanic; and a similar classification is possible for every single Ganymede virtue set. Steiner had already provided names for these two types of evil, but it fell to me to coin names for the two types of good: Ahuric and Devic.

Only later did I realize the correspondence between Ahuric/Devic and male/female. By simply exploring these models of good and evil, without thinking of sexual identity at all, I had inadvertently arrived at a possible explanation for the eternal nature of sexual identity -- the necessity that good be expressed in two complementary forms rather than in a single asexual Supergod.

Lucifer, Ahriman, and Ganymede virtue sets

Rudolf Steiner saw Lucifer, Ahriman, and the Christ in Aristotelian terms: Lucifer is one extreme; Ahriman, the other; and the Christ represents the perfectly balanced "golden mean" between the two. This corresponds to the virtue theory propounded in the Nicomachean Ethics -- where, for example, Courage is seen as a golden mean between the extremes of Cowardice and Rashness.

It is wrong to conceptualize the Christ this way -- as if the goodness of God consisted in being just Ahrimanic enough without being too Ahrimanic -- as if Lucifer were 0, Ahriman were 1, and the Christ were 0.618... (realized to infinite decimal places in the Christ himself, but only approximated by mere mortals!). "Moderation in all things" is a Greek maxim, not a Christian one. The Christian version is this: "I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth" (Rev. 3:15-16).

As I pointed out in my post "Vice and vice versa," Aristotle's one-dimensional theory of virtue is also an inadequate conceptualization of evil. It is quite possible to be simultaneously cowardly and rash -- it has in fact been the norm since 2020 -- but there is no Aristotelian way to model that. I recommended as an improvement the Ganymede virtue set (GVS) as pioneered by "G" of the Junior Ganymede blog.

A two-dimensional GVS consists of two virtues and two vices (whereas a one-dimensional Aristotelian virtue set, or AVS, has only one virtue per two vices). Cowardice and Rashness are not opposites; Cowardice is the opposite of Courage, and Rashness is the opposite of Prudence. Cowardice and Rashness are complementary (not opposite) vices, and Courage and Prudence are complementary virtues. It is (as we see every day now) possible to be both extremely cowardly and extremely rash. And it is possible to be (like the Christ?) both perfectly courageous and perfectly prudent. To quote G himself, referring to a slightly different virtue set, "Confident Humility sounds like a contradiction. So does Arrogant Timidity. But they are common enough that they are almost archetypes."

In the GVS diagram above, it is clear that one of the vices (Rashness) is Luciferic, and the other (Cowardice) is Ahrimanic. Is that a general rule? Here are some more GVS diagrams from G (taken from "Charting Virtue" and the other posts linked therein, to which the reader is referred for more details on these particular virtue sets).

Immodesty is Luciferic. Uglification is Ahrimanic.

Pride is Luciferic. Despair and contemptibleness are Ahrimanic.

The cult of authenticity etc. is Luciferic. Hypocrisy is Ahrimanic.

The cult of authenticity etc. is Luciferic. Conspiracy and blackmail are Ahrimanic.

Rebellion is Luciferic. Legalism is Ahrimanic.

High time preference, like all the multitude of sins G puts under the heading of "authenticity," is Luciferic. Fear and timidity are Ahrimanic.

Every single GVS we've looked at contains one vice that is obviously Luciferic and another that is obviously Ahrimanic, and there is never any uncertainty or ambiguity as to which is which. (I have so arranged the charts that the Luciferic vice is always in the upper right, and its Ahrimanic complement in the lower left.) I'm going to go ahead and call this a general rule.

This implies that just as there is Luciferic evil and Ahrimanic evil, there are two complementary categories of good. Here are how these four categories are exemplified in the GVS diagrams above:

• Luciferic vices: Rashness, immodesty, pride, "authenticity," "being true to yourself," the god within, gossip, "What? It's the truth!", confessionalism, rebellion, avant-gardism, high time preference
• Anti-Luciferic virtues: Prudence, modesty, humility, the "nameless virtue" of which hypocrisy is a distortion, discretion, obedience
• Ahrimanic vices: Cowardice, uglification, despair, contemptibleness, hypocrisy, conspiracy, blackmail, legalism, Pharisaism, fear, timidity
• Anti-Ahrimanic virtues: Courage, comeliness, glory, sincerity, plainspokenness, speaking out, breaking the letter to keep the spirit, trusting God to provide

All four of these seem to be coherent categories, and they need names. In my post "Satan divided against himself," I described Luciferic sin as "sacrificing the avoidance of evil in order to pursue good" and Ahrimanic sin as "sacrificing the pursuit of good in order to avoid evil." This suggests the following analysis.

However, "seeking good" and "avoiding evil" are too abstract to fully capture the "feel" of each type of virtue. They really need names, like Lucifer and Ahriman.

Well, Ahriman comes from Zoroastrianism, where his opposite is Ahura Mazda -- so perhaps we can call the good-seeking, anti-Ahrimanic virtues Ahuric. In Zoroastrianism, ahuras are good and daevas are evil. In Vedic usage, though, asuras are evil and devas are good. It would seem, then, that the anti-Luciferic, evil-avoiding virtues that complement the Ahuric should be called the Devic. The master GVS, then, underlying all others, is this:

If anyone has better name suggestions, leave them in the comments.

Vice and vice versa

One of the best ideas to come out of the Junior Ganymede blog is that of the "virtue set" -- an improvement on Aristotle's famous "golden mean" model of virtue. Aristotle, you will recall, maintained (in the Nicomachean Ethics) that any given virtue lay on a continuum between a vice of deficiency and a vice of excess. Insufficient courage, for example, is the vice of cowardice, while excessive courage is the vice of rashness. True courage -- the virtue of courage -- lay between the two, and consisted in being precisely brave enough without being too brave. Using a conceptual tool that was not available to Aristotle himself, we might plot each Aristotelian "virtue set" (of a virtue and two vices) as a curve.

The horizontal axis indicates how courageous one is, and the vertical axis how virtuous, with the horizontal origin line marking the division between virtue and vice. The curve is asymmetrical because Aristotle recognized that the point of maximum virtue is closer to one end of the scale than to the other -- that, in this case, courage is more akin to rashness than to cowardice, and that cowardice is more properly its opposite.

For Aristotle, then, virtues are not to be maximized but optimized. You want to be just brave enough but not too brave, just honest enough but not too honest, just and benevolent but not excessively so.

But is this really the correct way to think about virtue? If someone suffered from the vice of cowardice, you might well encourage him to have more courage -- but if his besetting vice were rashness or foolhardiness, would you say he should try to have less courage? The rash man's fault is not that he is too courageous, but that his courage is distorted by the lack of another virtue -- in this case, another of the cardinal virtues of the Greeks: prudence.

G's breakthrough was to add this second virtue to the model. An Aristotelian virtue set consists of two vices, with a virtue conceptualized as the optimal balance between them. In contrast, a Ganymedean virtue set (for lack of a better term; the unadorned letter G isn't very good for naming things after), consists of two complementary virtues and two vices. Each vice distorts one of the two virtues via a lack of the other. In the example we have been using, the two virtues are courage and prudence. When courage is distorted by a lack of prudence, it becomes the vice of rashness. When prudence is distorted by a lack of courage, it becomes cowardice.

This relationship can be expressed in a Ganymede diagram, thus:

One big advantage this has over the Aristotelian model is that it reflects the qualitative nature of the difference between virtue and vice. The point is not to zero in on a precisely optimal degree of courage and of prudence, but to strive for perfect courage and perfect prudence -- for the two virtues are not themselves in opposition, but are complementary.

And, pace Aristotle, neither are the two vices in opposition -- and here we come to what inspired this post in the first place. Under the Aristotelian model, a single person or action could no more be simultaneously cowardly and rash than a single integer could be both positive and negative. But we know better now, don't we?

In the venerable Stagirite's defense, he never experienced, and could never have imagined, the world of 2020. "Our house might have germs in it! Let's burn it to the ground!" -- where do you put that sentiment on your continuum, Aristotle?

Synchronicity: Adam, who is He?

Back on November 19 -- that is, about a week and a half ago -- I checked the Junior Ganymede and found a one-sentence post by that blog's proprietor, who goes by the letter G. It read: "Wherever He is, there is beauty."

"He," being capitalized and all, obviously meant God. But something possessed me to pretend to think he was talking about the fifth letter of the Hebrew alphabet and to post this comment:

This is why God added He to the names of his chosen, changing Abram to Abraham, Sarai to Sarah. Definitely the most beautiful letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

I'm not sure why I left that comment, which I knew even at the time wasn't really funny or clever or anything, but I did. The thing about He being added to names in the Bible isn't even my own observation; I read it a few years ago in In the Beginning, Joel Hoffman's history of the Hebrew language.

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Today I happened to pick up Unsong, Scott Alexander's kabbalistic fantasy novel, which I have been reading on and off (more off than on) recently, and read a bit that talks about names of God that are even shorter than the well-known Tetragrammaton.

There is even a Monogrammaton. The sages took the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and decided that exactly one of them was a Name of God. That letter is "he". It's the fifth letter . . . . later I was looking through my trusty King James Version and started noticing things. Psalm 95:7, "He is our God". Psalm 100:3, "It is He that hath made us." Job 37:23, "He is excellent in power and judgment." All of these have an overt English meaning. But they are, in their own way, invoking the Monogrammaton.

So, shortly after reading the pronoun He, referring to God, and deliberately misreading it as the Hebrew letter He, I read something that says the letter He is actually a name of God and also connects it with the English pronoun. (I never knew that He was considered a divine name; I learned something from Scott Alexander today. I reciprocate by informing him that fish don't actually have four-chambered hearts.)

(A further coincidence is that "G," to whom my original comment was directed, chooses to go by a "monogrammaton" -- and by one which has also been used, by the Freemasons, as a name of God.)

One of the first things that came to my mind after reading the Unsong passage I have quoted, is that Hu is also a divine name, in Sufism, making the question "Who is he?" a statement equating one name of God with another. (Looking it up now, I see that Hu literally means "he" -- the pronoun -- in Arabic!) And that made me think of an essay I had read ages ago by the Mormon fundamentalist Ogden Kraut, titled "Adam; Who Is He? Adam; He Is God!" Who is He? He is God! Hu = He = God.

As for the "Adam" bit, I do not think I will guilty of doxxing if I mention that, before paring his handle down to a single letter, "G" used to post as "Adam G."

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Apropos of nothing, except that it is another coincidence involving "G," allow me to relate a dream I had last night. I was in a park with my wife, and I pointed up ahead and said, "Look at that!" What I was directing her attention to was a large brown tabby cat in the act of pooping on the grass. (It did this like a dog, not digging a hole and burying it like a real cat would do.)

I became aware that "G" was also standing there with us, also watching the cat poop. (I've never met him in real life and don't even know what he looks like, but I knew it was him.) After watching the cat for a bit, he announced, "This has convinced me that there is no such thing as a parallel universe. This universe we are in is in fact the only universe. And that means it is real -- fully real."

And then I woke up. So much for that being the only universe!

Checking the Junior Ganymede after the dream, I found a long post by G about a dream -- not a dream he had, exactly, but one he wants the reader (in this case, me) to imagine having. It begins with "Imagine you are having a dream" and ends with "That is your dream." Nothing about cats pooping or parallel universes.

Phantom arrivals

I think we're sisters and brothers not from the fact that we went through something together but from the fact that we noticed.

-- Whitley Strieber addressing fellow close-enounter witnesses in Communion

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The proprietor of the Junior Ganymede, who wishes to be known only as "G," reports the following eerie occurrence:

I ordered a large expensive rechargeable battery last week.  It cost several hundred dollars.  Monday it came, I found it left outside on our door step.  The box was a little crumpled, was an unusual size, and had a sticker on the side proclaiming that it was a battery.  I remember looking at the sticker and thinking, huh, I didn’t think they let you ship batteries through the mail, I thought the sellers would have claimed it as ‘parts’ or something.

I came inside and put the box down on a side table without opening it.  I didn’t need it right away.  Then it slipped my mind.

Yesterday morning I did need it.  But it was not on the side table.

We convened as a family, prayed, and then looked everywhere.  I even went outside to the garbage bin in case it had been thrown away by one of the kids during their clean-ups.  After all, the box was a bit crumpled, though the battery had enough heft that I didn’t think any one could carelessly think the box was empty.

No luck.

We prayed again, and looked again.

No luck.  I left to work.

When I came home the battery was sitting on my desk charging.

You found it, I said.  The wife and kids were sitting nearby.

Instant chorus in reply–No, no, no, it was delivered.

An hour or two before I came home the doorbell rang.  My wife opened it to find a delivery man out there with a box.  He said it was a battery and she needed to sign for it since it was an expensive, fragile part; they had to be extra particular.  He advised her to handle with care.

She opened it and put it on to charge.

I went and looked at the box.  It was the exact same box I saw on Monday, complete with the slight crumpling and the battery sticker on the outside.  I hefted the battery.  It was the same heft as I recalled.

A commenter, who uses the handle Handle, adds his own, similar experience:

Something almost identical happened to me about a month ago, in my case, it was a book. I held the book in my hand and put it on the counter. I came back and in was gone. I asked my family about it, if they had moved it, but they hadn’t seen it. I described it in detail, pointed to where I put it, said, “I was holding it in my hand right here,” mentioned the unfortunate position of the barcode sticker on the cover, and they witnessed me spending half an hour searching for it in the usual, and some unusual places. No luck. I figured it would turn up eventually, and anyway, I’ve always got a big backlog stack to work through. The next day, I get a stuffed-to-bursting padded envelope in the mail, take it to the same counter, open it, and glitch-in-the-matrix level deja by, it was exactly the scene I remembered. Freaked out, I dropped the book on the counter and took a step back, and that was exactly the scene I remembered too. Barcode sticker in the unfortunate place and everything. I yell, “it’s the book!” Wife dismisses this entirely, “you’re crazy”, son takes my side, “it’s exactly like he said, and he asked us for it, and was looking for it.” He is freaked out too, but also Bill and Ted style, “whoaaa, duuude.” Wife presents a thorough and comprehensive counterargument, with facts, evidence, and logic, just kidding, she just repeats, “you’re crazy”. Eerie is right.

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This reminded me of something I had read. It took me a while to track down, since I had mis-remembered it as coming from a book by Stan Gooch. I finally found it in Rupert Sheldrake's book The Sense of Being Stared At. Having previously written about Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, Sheldrake turns to examples of similar abilities in human beings.

In some cases the person's arrival was preceded by a kind of apparition, or phantasm, as the Victorian psychic researchers would have called it. For example, Ann Greenberg, of Silton, Saskatchewan, Canada, was on holiday with her husband in the family cabin by a lake. One night her husband went out in the boat, but a storm blew up and he did not return.

I was alone in the cabin and very worried so I stayed awake until about 2:00 A.M., when I fell asleep on the couch. Some time later I heard my husband walk up from the dock and cross the deck to the front door. He opened the door, walked over to the couch, leaned over, and put both hands on my shoulders. Then I woke up. It was daylight, but my husband wasn't there. I looked at the clock, which read 5:00 A.M. An hour later he pulled into our bay, safe and sound. He described how he had anchored in a sheltered bay and slept in the boat. He had woken up to a calm lake and decided he could make it back. Before setting out, he'd checked his watch, which read 5:00 A.M. The bay where he'd sheltered is about an hour away by boat from our cabin.

This hearing of sounds in advance is well know in northern Scandinavia, as I discussed in Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. In Norway there is even a special name for the phenomenon, vardøger, which literally means "warning soul." Typically, someone at home hears a person walking or driving up to the house, coming in, and hanging up his coat. Yet nobody is there. Some ten to thirty minutes later the person really arrives to similar sounds. People get used to it. Housewives put the kettle on as the vardøger arrives, knowing that their husbands will arrive soon.

Professor Georg Hygen, of Oslo University, investigated dozens of recent cases, and published an entire book on this subject. He concluded that the phenomenon is essentially telepathic rather than precognitive. In other words, the vardøger is not so much a pre-echo of what will happen in the future, but is related to a person's intentions. For one thing, the sounds are not always identical to those heard in advance. A person might be heard going up to the bedroom, whereas when he arrives he goes into the kitchen. Moreover, the vardøger phenomenon can still occur when a person does not in fact arrive, having changed his mind.

The Hygen book referred to is Vardøger: Vårt paranormale nasjonalfenomen (1987); no English translation appears to be available.

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The vardøger experiences recounted by Sheldrake involve the return of a person, and the premonitory hallucination is primarily aural -- although there may be a tactile component; Mrs. Greenberg felt her husband put his hands on her shoulders. (The name Ann Greenberg is a bit of a coincidence, since... uh, it begins with the letter G.) In contrast, G and Handle report visual (and presumably tactile) hallucinations prefiguring the arrival of an inanimate object. The delay between the phantasm and the actual arrival is also longer in the Junior Ganymede cases -- a day or several, as opposed to 10 minutes to an hour in Sheldrake's examples.

Despite these dissimilarities, could we be dealing with essentially the same sort of phenomenon here? Is Hygen's conclusion -- that it is not a true precognitive phenomenon but a telepathic one, related to intentions -- applicable to the experiences of G and Handle?

One reason given for Hygen's conclusion is that the vardøger sounds are not always identical to the sounds heard when the person really arrives. In G's case, too, the vardøger-like experience (let's go ahead and use that word) was not identical to what it foreshadowed. In the vardøger, he saw the battery box on the front step, took it inside, and put it on a side table without opening it. When the battery really arrived, none of that happened; it was given to his wife while he was out, she opened it, and he found it charging on his desk when he came home.

Could the battery vardøger have been triggered by the sender's intention? G wrote on October 2 that he had ordered the battery "last week" (i.e., September 21-26) and that the vardøger arrived "Monday" (September 28). In a comment to his own post, G mentions that "the vendor sent me a personal email on Sep. 18 saying they were planning on shipping that day." Since September 18 would have been before he ordered the battery, this must be a typo for September 28 -- the day of the vardøger.

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I suspect that experiences like those recounted by G and Handle are more common than we tend to assume. We filter them out with a simple "I must have been mistaken," move on, and forget that they ever happened. Or, in less dramatic cases, we never even perceive the anomalous thing at all because our brain does not consider it sufficiently probable (the Horseshoe Crab Effect). Making an effort to notice and remember such things, even if no explanation immediately suggests itself, is a worthwhile endeavor.