Reflection on Recollection

 My last couple of reflections have to do with recollection of my own story, and that seems to continue.  This week, I was working on a comprehensive family tree with Geneanet.com, which is similar to Ancestry but does offer more benefits. One of the benefits it offers is to print and publish a family tree up to 50 generations.  The only problem with this, like many of these genealogical sites, is that people do make dumb mistakes when they input information, so you have to comb through a lot of inconsistencies to sort out things.  One is birthdates of ancestors - some of the dingdongs who post the information have weird dates - people having kids before they were born, people having kids or getting married when they are under 10 years old, etc.  When I transferred my Gedcom from Ancestry to Geneanet to work on getting the book printed, I had over 300 of these crazy inconsistencies in my tree, and the easiest resolution for many of them is to just take out birthdates or death dates (some of the inconsistencies even had people being buried before they died!  Talk about a horrible way to go, right?) as the names are probably right but the data is screwed up. Other problems included having baptism information long after a person's death - being that both Ancestry and Geneanet both rely on Mormon archive sources, that may actually not be a mistake as Mormons do practice baptism in proxy of dead ancestors, which is weird and heretical, but it is a thing for them.  So, an ancestor who died in 1500 has a baptism date of 1875 - that would be due to the fact that said ancestor probably had a Mormon descendant who undertook this.  For Mormons, it is a weird evangelistic thing, which is why they started collecting genealogical data to begin with, and thankfully the positive fruit of that is they have perhaps one of the most comprehensive genealogical archives in the world.  So, if you are doing your own family tree and notice weird baptism dates centuries after an ancestor died, that may be the reason for that.  

My own family tree now encompasses about 1500 years, and it contains pretty much a complete family history that includes everything from Roman emperors to Black slaves, and it covers practically every ethnicity in the Western world as well as at least 4 Native American tribes.  It also makes me distantly related to several others who share my heritage - Franklin D. Roosevelt, Robert E. Lee, George Washington, Barack Obama, the Hapsburgs, the Windsors, and others.  I often joke that my own veins are a history of Western Civilization, and to be honest that may be truer than I even know.  Reflecting on one's heritage is an important part of one's "story," and thus it does make you appreciate better the person who you are.  After all, you are not a random accident of nature - God gave you the genetics and other distinctions you have because you are uniquely created in his image.  The modernist secularism which denigrates personhood also is iconoclastic when it comes to history, and and as a result people don't value themselves, much less anyone else.  And, that is what will be the backdrop of a little discussion I want to have today. 

I am going back to my education in Philosophy I had at Franciscan University of Steubenville, and my professor there, Dr. John Crosby, wrote an amazing book entitled The Selfhood of the Human Person (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996).  Crosby deals a lot with the topic of personal recollection, and in doing so he connects it to another concept called subjectivity.  Subjectivity, as he defines it on pages 83-91 as being comprised of two things - self-presence and self-determination.  The first is defined on page 83 as a person acting through themselves in such a way that it entails the utilization of distinguishing between cognition and volition.  What that means is that knowledge and will must be differentiated, and that one can easily overcome the other if not balanced.  The second one is defined as the subjective freedom of the person to act - it doesn't matter if the choice of the person is good or bad, but personhood grants liberty to exercise that choice. On the downside of this however, is that a choice will always have a consequence, and the wrong choice could result in the loss of exercise of will and even one's freedom.  Also, when one exercises will over another to subject them to their whims, that violates the gift of personhood.  This is also why subjectivity is not the same as subjectivism. Now that we have established that, Crosby later goes into why this is integral to understanding our own individuality.  For this, on pages 248 -280, he gives several signs as to why the personhood of human beings is finite, and thus should be cherished as such:

1. The plurality of persons and in particular a certain partiality of each individual.

2. The individual's relation to time.

3. The suspension of the individual between potentiality and actuality - we have the potential to be or do certain things, but our choices actualize that. 

4. The unity of "person" and "nature" in every individual person - personhood is a gift of God, and thus we also inherit a nature that channels our individuality.

5. Discrepancies between being and consciousness

6. The endangered condition of individual freedom - the choices we make could subject us to the control of other things.

7. The unity of belonging to oneself and receiving oneself as a gift - "created in the image of God" is a precious attribute of personhood, in other words. 

8. Selfhood awakens in the human person as a result of self-transcendance - or, making potentiality an actuality.  This goes in line with a saying I heard years ago - "your present position does not determine your future potential."  

9. Finally, the finite personhood of human beings revealed in their moral existence. 

What we are talking about, in plain language, is not letting circumstance and the opposition of others dictate to you who you really are.  I am not into the Joel Osteen "positivity" crap or anything like that I will assure you, but there is a certain validity in being able to recognize one's self-worth, but doing so realistically and honestly.  We all should know we all fall short of perfection, and that even includes what we think is perfection.  This has nothing to do with that - rather, it is using assets you may already possess inside you to reach whatever potential you have capabilities for.  In some cases it will not be easy - it takes work to get to a certain goal for sure, but if you have what you need within yourself and also have the willpower to commit to the goal, it can be achieved.  It also helps when you have people along the way who believe in you, as well as putting as much distance as possible between those who want to drag you down and condemn you.  They don't see the full picture, and therefore their opinion in regard to your personal development is worthless.  You should be aware of your own potential, know your own limitations, and not let circumstances or the opinions of others discourage you.  No doubt, you will be gossipped about, laughed at, condemned, criticized, and dismissed, but don't worry about that.  You can just tell such detractors - even if they are family - to screw off and your duty is to focus on your objective.  Recollection entails all of that.  And, it will also be integral to network with others who share similar convictions or who do actually give you encouragement - you will need that as well. This need to have like-minded or encouraging people around you is essentially a component of subjectivity.  Critics, gossips, and detractors on the other hand are subjectivist, and that is an important difference to understand.  And, if you stay the course, what is sure to happen one day is that those who set themselves up as your critics and detractors will either be humbled by your success or they will be apologizing to you.  If they apologize, always forgive, but make them understand as well that their behavior can be toxic and they need to do self-examination.  All this now leads to the second aspect of my discussion today. 

In his seminal book Leisure, the Basis of Culture (New York: Random House, 1963), Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper expands further on this by noting something on page 44 in the definition of a Latin word, acedia.  Pieper notes that the term could be specifically translated as "despair from weakness," and it is associated with the denial of a person to give the consent of his will to his own being.  This is one aspect today we see in corporate culture in many companies - let me get into that a little bit.  Big corporations are about one thing - their bottom line.  This means that philosophical principles of personhood are irrelevant to them.  I turn again to the whole Dhar Mann phenomenon which has taken social media by storm.  In one of his videos, Dhar creates this story of a woman who misses many important things in her own daughter's life because her boss thinks she is a robot.  It is causing friction at home for her, but the boss doesn't care - all he wants is a huge account to be acquired, and the personhood of his subordinates is seen as a hindrance to that goal. The lady in question is a hard worker - she gives a lot to the company, but whatever she gives is never enough. So, on the day of a family vacation that her young daughter was looking forward to, she gets a call from this jackass boss of hers demanding she comes in for a meeting with a high-profile client despite the fact at this point she and her family were just about to take off for their vacation together.  Under much duress and protest, the lady relents and goes to the business luncheon.  During the course of the meeting, she gets a call from her husband, who had taken the daughter ahead of time for the vacation in which she would join them later, and the call is bad news that her little daughter had sustained an injury and was in the hospital. She has to immediately leave, but the boorish boss follows her out and berates her over it, and finally she has had enough and promptly quits.  Later, she and a former co-worker actually go into their own business together and set up their own firm, and it begins to take clients away from her former boss.  Irritated by this, the former boss storms into her office and is short of threatening legal action when one of his former clients who now signed with her comes in and talks about the success of a new work/life model adopted by their company she initiated, and finally the former boss gets it.  The lesson here is that one cannot enslave themselves to money and corporate servitude, as that is the form of acedia Pieper defines.  Let's add a few other observations here. 

Many people these days feel stuck in dead-end jobs - they may earn a good paycheck, and they may have a level of success, but they miss something.  I know, because I was there myself some years ago. The demands of such jobs often become an idol to the person stuck in them, and everything ends up being sacrificed to the company for a bit of convenient material stability.  There is nothing wrong with having a few bucks in the bank, and to be honest even the Bible does not condemn financial success - what the Bible actually condemns is the idolatry that financial success causes one to risk, and in the corporate world it is an imposed idolatry on people.  And, many feel this too - that is why movies such as Office Space became cult classics in all honesty.  And, what is worse is that the "security" such a job brings is extremely temporary and vulnerable.  Companies do not prioritize personhood, and the average employee is a means unto an end for the company.  If a situation renders an employee unable to do what the company is expecting of them, they are easily replaced like a used tampon.  God never intended human beings to live and exist like that, and in the process of acquiring a nice salary and some impressive benefits, a person has to put themselves on hold and many of their passions and dreams are forgotten.  Pieper actually presents the concept of leisure in a way that it is seen as a virtue, and sometimes time alone to reflect and organize one's thoughts is essential.  However, crony corporatism is a jealous god, and when something else starts to garner a worker's attention in some way, the wrath of the corporate "god" is meted out without mercy. It is truly sad that so many don't have the benefit of living life the way they are supposed to because some corporate executive holds their future over their heads.  That is what needs reform.  This is also a major reason why many of these corporate moguls are atheists - or, I should say they profess atheism.  In reality, they see themselves as gods and want to exert their power over everything, and there is no better example of this than those wannabe antichrists that control the World Economic Forum - Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, and company want to control you by making you live in a dystopian caste system of their creation, but they see themselves as above what they expect of you.  This is the true goal of social Darwinism and every other adverse political system in the world - communism, fascism, Nazism, and corporatism are all variations of the same species of dehumanizing demagogery.  None of this was God's plan for humanity, and therefore it should be condemned at all opportunity.   Now for some closing thoughts.

Recollection, reflection, and leisure are all vital components of the human experience, and God hardwired them into us from our creation. We risk peril if we deny ourselves those things, or if we allow others to deny them to us - they are fundamental to our existence, and without them we lose the essence of who God created us uniquely to be.  Thank you for allowing me to share, and I will surely have more to say on this later.