The Innkeeper’s Dilemma

Who should be evicted to provide a room for the lady expecting a baby? And what if someone needier came along? Ultimately, would Mary have given up the stable? The story of the Manger is presented without discussion. When need is the standard of judgment, the problems are not easily resolved. 

Apparently, the innkeeper gave them the use of the stable, free of charge. Logically followed from that premise, the innkeeper would become a charity, himself begging for money to supply others with room and board from the goodness of his heart, and that of the donors. In the Literal Word, the Holy Family was just passing through. After the visit from the shepherds, a few days later, the Wise Men found Mary in a house. Eventually, everyone fled Herod's soldiers. But the next needy person might not be a traveler. Then, the innkeeper could have a permanent guest. In the final analysis, his inn would be filled, not with the families of itinerate carpenters, but with clans of the unemployable.

On the other hand, our commercial culture rests on several thousand years of norms, folkways, and customs that prevent and remediate such conflicts. The power of the purse and the sanctity of contract could have informed a better solution. 

From The Daily Kos 22 Dec 2015

Joseph and Mary approached the inn. Joseph knocked. The innkeeper answered. “We need a room for the night.” 

“We are full,” the innkeeper said.

“But my wife is having a baby. We need a place.”

The innkeeper was sympathetic, but unmoved. “All I have is the stable. It will have to do.”

Having a better grasp of the problem, Mary spoke up. “Why not remove someone who is not in need and give us their room? Let them sleep in the stable?”

“Well, first of all, I do not want a woman in labor in the middle of the inn. It will disturb everyone.”

Mary countered, “It is going to be a miracle birth: no muss, no fuss; easy-peasy.”

“What?”

“It begins with the fact that I am a virgin, in fact, the Virgin.”

“All right, look,” said the weary innkeeper whose livelihood depended on making everyone (else) happy.  “Whatever you say… I am not going to stand here and argue. Let me make some arrangements. And speaking of arrangements, what did you bring for money? The stable you can have for eight prutot, as two mites make half a farthing. For a room, I need something close to the temple tax, a denarius, a drachmon, half a shekel.”

Mary whispered sweetly into Joseph’s ear, “I told you to call ahead and make reservations.”

Joseph said, “The drachmon, denarius, and half shekel are not exactly equal.” 

“I am not a money changer,” sighed the innkeeper. “Find them in the temple. Everything spends in this town, especially at tax season.”

And so it was done – with some difficulty…

The innkeeper knocked and entered, waking the rug merchant. “I am sorry,” he said, “but I am giving your room to a woman having a baby.”

“Where am I going to sleep?”

“The stable is available.”

“But I paid for a room.”

“I will refund half of your money. After all, you have been here half a day.”

“Oh, no,” said the rug merchant. “The stable is a downgrade. What have you got worth 24 Roman sestertii?  You know, if I took this to the judges, you might catch a break: those old Solomons love a challenge. But if I complain to the Roman curator, you might find yourself in an uncomfortable outcome. Plus, where am I to store my rugs? They will not be improved by the stable.”

Not seeing sleep in his future, the innkeeper put the rugs in his own room – at no charge and no discount, even up.

 

From The Daily Kos 22 Dec 2015

The Three Wise Men followed the star. They found the inn.  The inn was crowded. 

“Whoa! Where are you guys going?”

“We are seeking the King of the Jews for we have seen His star in the east.”

“Of course you did…” replied the weary innkeeper. “And that could not possibly have been Herod, the actual king in Jerusalem?”

“The star is over your place,” said Melchior.

“Well, I assure you, we have no kings here. Have a table. I will bring a nice brisket, some bread, olive oil, wine. What did you bring for money? Nulla mensa sine impensa.”

Caspar opened his purse and took out a large silver coin. The innkeeper inspected it. “You Parthians! The image of Mithradates is not popular with the Romans. I don’t want any trouble. Got anything else?”

Balthazar shook out a handful of civic bronzes from Antioch. The wise men enjoyed their brisket. The innkeeper racked his brain for a guest likely to be a king in disguise.

A knock at the door. The innkeeper opened up. There stood an old couple, bent and gray. The woman leaned heavily on the man’s arm. 

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ATHEISTS IN FOXHOLES

As a philosophical objectivist, I am an admirer of the fiction works of Ayn Rand and her philosophy of Objectivism. I participate in three discussion boards, Rebirth of Reason, Objectivist Living, and Galt’s Gulch Online. The producers of the Atlas Shrugged movies created Galt’s Gulch to promote the films. With the release of Part 3, the site had over 20,000 subscribers and hundreds of active writers and commenters. Of necessity, many of them are political conservatives, which Ayn Rand was not (here). They tend to receive Atlas Shrugged as a political novel condemning the Obama Administration, and to have less interest in formal philosophy.  

Preparing to evaluate a TXSG dive team
at the TMAR annual drill
April 11, 2015.
Not prior military when I volunteered
on November 22, 2014,
I was enlisted as a Petty Officer Third Class.

Today, contributor Inpuco, a 30-year USMC veteran posted a discussion topic linking to an American Legion article about saving the cross at Mt. Soledad Memorial. A Congressional bill authorized the sale of the federal site to a private association. That shunted aside an on-going lawsuit filed by the ACLU and the Jewish War Veterans. In my reply there, I granted that a privately-owned memorial for Christian soldiers could have a cross if they wanted.

The problem is that Jewish veterans also are buried there. Searching for the string “stein” revealed Col. David G. Epstein (plaque here) Sgt. William Rothstein (plaque here) and Navy Radioman Third Class Herbert A. Steinert (plaque here). Their memorial plaques all display the Magen David. It is easy to find other common Jewish family names. You can see why the Jewish War Veterans called on the ACLU to help remove the cross. It is the only religious symbol, and it dominates the landscape.

We have no easy way to know how many of the others interred were non-believers, freethinkers, agnostics, or atheists. Easily, the US military reflects the general population, with some skews. For instance, southerners are over-represented, and women are far less common. About 21% of the current military force self-identifies as “atheist or no religion.” In the general population, the number is 19%.  (Population Reference Bureau, 2004, Table 5.   cited in Wikipedia “There are no atheists in foxholes” here)

On the Rebirth of Reason website, Byron E. Garcia, posted an essay in 2005, "Atheists in a Foxhole" about his interactions and observations as a hospital corpsman in the US Navy. 

The Military Atheists and Freethinkers is an active association of over 200. Their website provides a wealth of statistical information and reporting.  

“Besides the MAAF members below, keep in mind atheists in foxholes whose stories have been in feature stories and documentaries: Pat Tillman, Afghanistan war Army Ranger and football player, Hans Kasten, WWII POW leader, Phil Paulson, Vietnam Veteran and activist, Kurt Vonnegut, WWII POW and author, Ted Williams, WWII Veteran and baseball player, Ernest Hemingway, WWI Vet and author, Sherwin Wine, Founder of Humanistic Judaism, Major Sidney Excell, who arrested Heinrich Himmler, Bob Kerrey, former Governor and Senator, Navy Seal, and Medal of Honor recipient.” See more at: http://militaryatheists.org.

In response to "there are no atheists in foxholes," Ayn Rand asked: "Who created the foxholes?" Wars are caused by political collectivism, which rests on moral altruism, which is derived from epistemological and metaphysical mysticism. It was the Age of Reason that led to the Enlightenment and capitalism and 100 years (1814-1914) of surprisingly low-level conflicts. It was not perfect, because the capitalism was not firmly grounded, but it indicated a truth we all know: when people can obtain what they want by production and trade, they have no need for war.

Christopher Hitchens is famous for his debates on atheism and his book god is not Great. Significantly, Hitchens also abandoned his former secular religion, Marxism. Ayn Rand, of course, often equated communism and Christianity for their identical moral codes. Rand did claim that Christianity was the first religion to center on the individual. I think that Buddhism was first, but the point remains that loving yourself is antecedent to loving your neighbor.

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god is not Great

god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens (New York: Twelve, 2007) delivers a coordinated series of complaints with deep merit, each of them fashioned by insight, reason, and experience.  That experience defines the reasons for the insights.

This is Hitchens’s own personal accusation of immorality against all religions. As a prosecutor, he accepts no plea bargaining from the perpetrator.  The crimes committed are documented and often stipulated. Hitchens' begging of us to condemn the malefactor is not enough. For all he cares, ultimately, the guilty should go free lest the innocent suffer unjustly.  While he accuses those who are evil, he grants (always tangentially) that many people live well because of their religions. 

That said, Hitchens remains uncompromising in his charges against Jews, Christians, Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists. (Lesser populations draw fewer references.) At the same time, he advocates for reason, reality, the Enlightenment, and humanism. This is not the perfect book to convert the unenlightened. That claim could only be made for a holy book. 

Ethics and morality are central here. Metaphysics does not get much attention. If the universe – alternate time lines and parallels and all that – the entire Universe is all that exists, then anything outside of existence would not exist.  How could any entity outside of existence create  the universe? That is not one of his points.  Hitchens does cite (page 71) the argument of infinite regression: what created god? He quotes William Ockham page 68 et seq., after taking us to an encounter between Napoleon Bonaparte and Pierre-Simon Laplace. Laplace had constructed an orrery, a model of the solar system.  “Where is God?” asked the emperor. “I do not need this hypothesis.” (“Je ne pas besoin de cette hypothèse.”)  

http://www.arm.ac.uk/orrery/

 Among the many insightful theses about God, the Catholic Encyclopedia cautions us that when we say that a brave man is a lion we understand that as an analogy. So, too, when we say that God is infinite or eternal or all-loving or all-knowing are we only expressing by analogy what we truly cannot understand.  But religionists do not torture and kill people over admitted analogies. They claim absolute knowledge and the right to destroy in the most horrible ways those who disagree with their highly putative assertions. Perhaps some un-analogilizable Aristotlean quintessence was the creator of the hyperspace wormholes traversed by Carl Sagan's Ellie Arroway. Do you believe that such an entity cares about who occupies the Gaza Strip, Northern Ireland, or Tibet?

Traditionally, atheists have a well-known attack in pointing out that other assertions about God are internally contradictory or mutually exclusive. Can God make a stone so big that He cannot lift it? Can God change his mind so that he will not know in advance what he will do next? Omniscience and omnipotence cancel each other. The Catholic Encyclopedia addresses those, also. Hitchens does not. 

He also fails to find the center of the target when admitting to the atrocities committed by communists who were atheists. Any one of Lenin, Stalin, or Mao Zedong, among others, were worse by orders of magnitude than the sum total of all deaths attributed to the Inquisition and the Crusades combined. Though not on the bull's-eye, Hitchens does find the target.

When I was a Marxist, I did not hold my opinions as a matter of faith, but I did have the conviction that a sort of unified field theory might have been discovered. The concept of historical and dialectic materialism was not an absolute and it did not have any supernatural element, but it did have its messianic element in the idea that an ultimate moment might arrive, and it most certainly had its martyrs and saints and doctinaires and (after a while) its mutually excommunicating rival papacies. It also had its schisms and inquisitions and heresy hunts. I was a member of a dissident sect that admired Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky, and I can say definitely that we had our prophets... 

... But there came a time when I could not protect myself, and indeed did not wish to protect myself from the onslaught of reality. Marxism, I conceded, had its intellectual and philosophical and ethical glories, but they were in the past. Something of the heroic period might perhaps be retained, but the fact had to be faced: there was no longer any guide to the future. In addition, the very concept of a total solution had led to the most appalling human sacrifices, and to the invention of excuses for them. ... 

...  There are days when I miss my own convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general, I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better, too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking.  (Page 151)

Near the end, in Chapter Seventeen, he takes on "An Objection Anticipated: The Last-Ditch 'Case' Against Secularism." There he cites The God that Failed, edited by Richard Crossman, which contains essays by Arthur Koestler, Andre Gide, and other former communists. Hitchens acknowledges that totalitarian ideologies bring religion to earth with central doctrines, orthodoxies, and claims of infallibility.

Although he admitted to finding The Virtue of Selfishness to be the best of Ayn Rand’s works Hitchens had contempt for her fiction and most of what she advocated.  Nevertheless, this from him could have come from her:

“Until relatively recently, those who adopted the clerical path had to pay a heavy price for it. Their societies would decay, their economies would contract, their best minds would go to waste or take themselves elsewhere, and they would consistently be outdone by societies that had learned to tame and sequester the religious impulse. A country like Afghanistan would simply rot. 

Bad as that was, it became worse on September 11, 2001, when from Afghanistan the holy order was given to annex two famous achievements of modernism – the high-rise building and the jet aircraft – and use them for immolation and human sacrifice. The succeeding stage, very plainly announced in hysterical sermons, was to be the moment when apocalyptic nihilists coincided with Armageddon weaponry. Faith-based fanatics could not design anything as useful or beautiful as a skyscraper or a passenger aircraft. But, continuing their long history of plagiarism, they could borrow and steal those things and use them as a negation.” (page 280)

Hitchens was a rationalist and a materialist. Time and again through all of his writings, he appeals to the critical judgment of his reader.  For Hitchens, writing was a conversation between two people. His thesis here is that many people live well and do good by others often because of their own religious experience; and so do non-religious people.  But only religion can justify the horrors perpetrated since its inception, and can only do so exactly because it is not reasonable, not rational, not logical, not empirical, not evidentiary, and not objectively true.

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Centralization and the Inverse-Square Law

The fundamental tension between planning and discovery forces utopian philosophers to walk a tightrope between their visions and our choices.  

The farther away you are from something, the less you know about it.  Information decreases by the square of the distance.  At about a kilometer or half-mile, it is difficult to know whether a vehicle is moving toward you or not.  Outdoors in a meadow your indoor voice for the kitchen is ineffective at about 10 meters (30 feet).  The boss in her office knows much less about the shipping dock than the workers who are there. The President of the United States knows very little about your needs.  

Trading the specialized division of labor among ourselves delivers to the participants greater rewards than are possible (even conceivable) in a world of self-sufficient generalists.

Organization lowers transaction costs and rationalizes the allocation of resources. Rather than just instinctively grabbing whatever is available, think things through a bit. Use your imagination to create possible outcomes. Then choose among them. Keep records. Then, when you try different ways to achieve a desired result, you will know whether and to what extent one or another methods or procedures or formulas is better, perhaps (nominally or putatively), the best of all possible.

Entropy is the barrier to the organization of specialized labor. Information lowers entropy. Market price measures entropy because market price is information about how much resistance must be overcome to achieve a desired result. 

Trade began as ritual gift exchange. Gifts create reciprocities, if only in the intangible of good will which creates the potential for other exchanges.  Trade became a social pattern that allowed rational actors to maximize their real gains and their expected gains.  The exchange of tangibles is the trading of information. 

Christopher Hitchens was a rational man. He was never recorded to have initiated force against another human being. He was also a member of the Socialist Workers Party and an admirer of Leon Trotsky who commanded the Red Army in the Russian Civil War. Therefore, the passing of Christopher Hitchens leaves unanswered how he would have imagined the consequences of one person offering another person a novelty (sea shells daubed with red ochre or a silver coin) in exchange for help with a project.  That is the story of Ayn Rand's Anthem. Fundamentally, all choices are the desire to discover electricity and invent the lightbulb.

But not all choices are equally informed. Higher entropy brings worse outcomes.  Better information lowers transaction costs.  Smarter people can foresee the errors committed by others, thus the name Prometheus (Fore-thought), whose brother Epimetheus (After-thought), gave all the claws and fangs and hides to all the other animals, leaving Man defenseless.  Prometheus gave us fire. And so, utopians such as Christopher Hitchens - as well as Ayn Rand, if not Leon Trotsky - perceive the potential of a world in which all people are as rational as they are.  To me, that would be a world without religion and without government. But "with" what I cannot imagine. That better day will come... 

In the mean time, the inverse-square law limits both Hitchens and Rand. They were metaphysically constrained in their ability to perceive the future of humanity.  The broad latitudes of science fiction offer a wondrously more varied array of expectations. But all we here and now can do is to hope for the future while we attempt to manage our own lives in the mutable present.

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Workers Paradise Promised an End to Money
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Mortality

A couple of years ago, I did not understood why my libertarian and objectivist comrades were effervescent about Christopher Hitchens.  For a while, Michael Stuart Kelly allocated space to the “Christopher Hitchens Watch” on his Objectivist Living discussion board. I have another friend, a conservative in the basic meaning of that word in American politics - not a libertarian and certainly not an Objectivist. She told me that when Hitchens died, she felt that the universe had cheated her.

I finally viewed a YouTube video of Hitchens debating D’nesh Desouza.  As much as I instantly liked Hitchens, I had to give the debate to Desouza. I was impressed with the fact that the more he drank, the more compelling grew Hitchens’s elocution.

In 93 pages, I learned three new words: inanition, imbricated, and lambent. 

The last flight he took before he received the diagnosis included his millionth mile with United Airlines, earning him free upgrades for life.  He soon realized that his American Express card had an expiration date farther out than his own. Hitchens invested increasingly rare ink reflecting on religion, specifically the various expressions of it by others: some prayed for him; others blogged that he was getting what he deserved.  In all, he suffered 19 months of chemo-therapy and radiation, to die at an age 13 years younger than his father who was taken quickly by the same cancer. Hitchens convinced me that when the time comes, I am better off to eschew the treatments and bring the curtain down without an encore.

“You are tapped on the shoulder and told ‘The party’s over.’  Worse, what you are told is that the party is going on but that you have to leave.” -- Live presentation not in this book.

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The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice by Christopher Hitchens (Verso: 1995) is an exposé of the greatest fraud and swindler in the 20^th century.  Mother Teresa was a double-dealing hypocrite who ensured that millions would suffer so that she could watch over their final pains, torments, agonies, and despair. Mother Teresa sought and gained the approval of dictators such as Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier and Ramiz Alia, the successor to Envar Hoxhia of Albania.  

They were only points on a line that included the Reagan White House, Margaret Thatcher at 10 Downing Street, the British Royal Family (who are legally prohibited from marrying Catholics), and countless others.  Near the bottom of the list is Charles Keating, the convicted savings and loan swindler of the 1980s.  A devout Catholic, he donated over a million dollars to her charity. She sent him a special crucifix. When he faced sentencing, Mother Teresa sent a letter to judge Lance Ito begging for clemency for Keating.  The prosecutor, Paul W. Turley wrote back asking Mother Teresa to return the $1,250,000 that was stolen by Keating and given to her.  She did not reply. 

 Hitchens, of course, was proudly an old-school liberal who also had harsh words for Ayn Rand’s Virtue of Selfishness.  Hitchens was less concerned with the success of capitalism than he was with the civil rights, civil liberties, and civil sensibilities upon which it ultimately depends.  The fact remains that while Christopher Hitchens wrung his hands over Mother Teresa’s duplicity, it was Ayn Rand who explained quite clearly why no disconnect existed: the swindle began with mysticism, grew with altruism, and therefore of necessity enveloped the poor in even worse circumstances. In India that hardly seemed possible. But the Missionaries of Charity ran 102 missions in 40 countries back then and has continued to grow.  When Hitchens wrote 20 years ago, his best guess was that $50 million sat mostly idle in bank accounts.  Mother Teresa had no use for money, though she attracted it. In our common culture that makes her some kind of saint – which the Catholic Church may well do: she has been beatified.  But it also meant that no resources were spent on the poor who were sick and dying.  Mother Teresa needed their suffering. 

Christopher Hitchens was a brilliant polemicist, and a deft, insightful writer.  He never wasted words.  Here in just 98 pages, Hitchens destroyed the myth of Mother Teresa.

About the same time that this book appeared, T. J. Rodgers, the president of Cypress Semiconductor made the news with a letter to Sister Doris Gormley, OSF, Director of Corporate Social Responsibility for The Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia.  The letter is easy to find online.  Cypress is proud to let you read it here.  Basically, Rodgers told the good sister why her advice would bring nothing but headaches and heartaches, including a loss of comfort for those in her order who depend on the profits from their stock holdings in Cypress.

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