End of the November Hiatus

Also, lessons from sickness and limitations

Welcome to another edition of The Mueller Report!

Updates

I’m finishing up this newsletter on what I expect to be my last flight of the year. I don’t have an exact count but I’ve taken at least fifteen trips this year that involved flying and racked up over 50,000 miles on United since May…

The November hiatus has ended and I must say that it flew by. We were able to visit our in-laws for a few weeks and experience a bit of Alaskan winter. It is, indeed, dark a lot (although the nights can be pretty bright with the snow and a full moon), and mostly cold (although not necessarily bitterly so). We got a bit of sledding in. But at least half the trip involved recovering from a nasty cold and cough.

In fact, I’m still at the very tail end of what will be about three weeks of being sick. Much can be learned from sickness, though I confess I was slow to learn some of the lessons. One thing to be wary of when sick is self-indulgence. That might sound odd since it’s hard to enjoy things when you are feeling badly, but I found myself often using discomfort as an excuse for doing other things I wanted to do – even if they were not productive or necessarily even that good for me.

The New Testament speaks clearly about bearing up under suffering as an important part of the Christian walk – something that should build character and hope via endurance. I believe sickness can also teach us to sympathize better with those who suffer, and pray more, as well as get a taste for how we ought to think of sin. I sometimes ask myself: “Do I hate sin as much as I hate sickness and being sick.” “Do I recognize that sin reduces my ability to live fruitfully and happily the way sickness reduces my ability to work and to enjoy things?” I’m going to try to keep these questions and lessons in mind this month even as I start feeling better and more energetic.

I mentioned that I hoped to do a great deal of planning in November during my hiatus. I did some. But with the family being sick, and then getting sick myself, I didn’t make the headway I had hoped for. I did, however, get a significant amount of work done before I was really down for the count. November was a record-breaking month (for me) in terms of publications with ten pieces coming out – five in the week before Thanksgiving alone. I’ll link to them in my newsletters this month.

I also bit the bullet and got back on X after leaving it (well Twitter) in late 2020. You can follow me @DrPaulMueller) if you are on X too. Using X makes much more sense for me now given my current day job than it did when I was teaching at King’s. Given how much I write about the news, X is the platform to be on to 1) see what kinds of news and topics are trending (including the outrage flavor of the day) and 2) see what kinds of arguments and conversations are happening in my social and professional circles.

It's hard to know what to hope for, exactly, by using X. The draw of “followers” and “influence” is strong and I sometimes catch myself thinking: “Well, if I get to 100 followers by this date, I can then level up and aim for 1,000 by this date and, who knows, really make some headway by shooting for 10,000.” Unfortunately, the main reason I can think of for wanting this is ego and status. Sure, it would be great to reach more people, but my work reaches a lot of people in a variety of ways already.

Avoiding spending lots of time on X is important to me. I welcome any suggestions you have using X effective and efficiently with respect to time. At the moment my strategy involves posting occasionally and trying to get one to two new followers a day.

Writing

As I mentioned, November was a big writing month. The annual two-week UN Climate Conference took place in Azerbaijan in the middle of the month. I was able to make a lot of hay out of that conference and the various issues related to climate alarmism. But before that, I started off the month with a piece about The Retreat of DEI in Corporate America. Since that piece came out, Walmart (the largest private employer in the United States) rolled back its DEI programming. Even the Unviersity of Michigan has reversed course on the DEI madness.

I reviewed (Gold-Backed or Bust) Judy Shelton’s book about the gold standard. The first of my climate-focused pieces came out on November 18^th explaining how Green Activists Are Coming for Your Money. As with so many other issues, money drives so much behavior and decision-making – even when people don’t talk about it explicitly.

I’m currently working on a short piece about Modern Monetary Theory and a longer piece about Philosophical Economics Versus Technical Economics and what Christians bring to the conversation. Four areas I think Christian perspective and theology can contribute to philosophical economics are:

1) Issues of meta preferences (preferences about our preferences)

2) The Great Gatsby problem (why wealth does not seem like a good solution for rich people’s unhappiness)

3) Tradition (how it improves our lives and should be given the benefit of the doubt)

4) Morality (what kinds of ethical parameters are important for society and where they come from)

Bookshelf

Believe it or not, I still haven’t finished Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge! We hope to record a podcast about part three this week (which I have finished) and part four within the week following. As I’ve mentioned before, Personal Knowledge is a tough slog. But the more time I spend in it and as I review my notes, the more profound I find the book. Polanyi basically accepts many of the post modern criticisms of knowledge and certainty, yet believes we must have reasons to hold the beliefs that we do.

My friends and I are deeply interested in this project. Rather than tossing up one’s hands and going down nihilistic or existential or intellectually vacuous paths, we want a robust wrestling with the limits and nature of knowledge. And we believe that the challenges we face when it comes to what can be known with “certainty” and how it is we come to know things actually helps us to know God and to understand the Bible better.

Part of that approach is humility and the (initially) unsatisfying recognition that we cannot address all criticisms or evidence against our beliefs. I recently had a long conversation with some co-workers about belief and creation, evolution and science. I also watched this stimulating debate over whether God exists. And although I favor the arguments for God, I confess there are some scientific questions that I am not sure how to answer (and that defy most easy answers).

At the same time, I am confident of many other forms of evidence – certainly of the resurrection (which is dealt with poorly by the atheist) and even more so of the effects of the resurrection. But you can see how the shape of western civilization developed around God’s revelation and his work in his people. The sweep of Israel’s history is remarkable and much of the archeology continues to confirm biblical accounts in amazing ways.

At the same time, I cannot answer every query, every objection, even every “fact” thrown up that undermines Scripture or theism. And so we are left navigating competing kinds of evidence, which involve recognizing the kinds of frameworks and paradigms we use, as well as how we reason with one another. And there is also the question of what reality is like and how we interact with it.

Chapter 8: The Logic of Affirmation

Polanyi discusses here the use of words – confident and direct vs. skeptical or oblique. Although definitions help reduce the ambiguity of the words we use, they can never eliminate the “tacit coefficient of meaning” altogether. He also explains that only a speaker or listener can “mean” something by a word – words don’t have intrinsic or abstract meaning apart from the users or participants in language.

He also argues that there is a “fiduciary” element to speaking. And our act of assent is similar to acts of discovery. And he has a complicated explanation of consciousness:

“Our capacity for knowing thing either focally or subsidiarily is decisive here. Mind is not the aggregate of its focally known manifestations, but is that on which we focus our attention while being subsidiarily aware of its manifestations….According to these definitions of ‘mind’ and ‘person,’ neither a machine, nor a neurological model, nor an equivalent robot, can be said to think, feel, imagine, desire, mean, believe or judge something. They may conceivably simulate these propensities to such an extent as to deceive us altogether. But a deception, however compelling, does not qualify as truth”

I think this speaks in many ways to the development of AI and large language models.

He says that “tacit knowing cannot be critical.” Only articulate statements and knowledge can be criticized. “Tacit acts are judged by other standards.” His conclusion to the chapter is worth stating in full:

“I am seeking…to restore to us once more the power for the deliberate holding of unproven beliefs. We should be able to profess now knowingly and openly those beliefs which could be tacitly taken for granted in the days before modern philosophic criticism reached its present incisiveness. Such powers may appear dangerous. But a dogmatic orthodoxy can be kept in check both internally and externally, while a creed inverted into a science is both blind and deceptive.”

Chapter 9: The Critique of Doubt

Polanyi begins with the common argument that complete skepticism is impossible because it is inconsistent to doubt one's own beliefs. This is related to the limits of “proof” – “The test of proof or disproof is in fact irrelevant for the acceptance or rejection of fundamental beliefs, and to claim that you strictly refrain from believing anything that could be disproved is merely to cloak your own will to believe your beliefs behind a false pretence of self-critical severity.”

As with much of Polanyi, this chapter is complicated and nuanced. He goes into detail about how people build consistent systems of belief that become immune to criticism – because every problem or anomaly, taken by itself, can be jerry-rigged into the existing system. Changing one’s belief from a strongly internally coherent system is rare and requires facing many simultaneous external challenges to the system simultaneously. He describes defense mechanisms people employ against data or arguments that don’t fit their beliefs: Circularity, Self-Expansion, Suppressed Nucleation.

These defense mechanisms are not necessarily bad. Afterall, deconstruction ends in meaninglessness and/or contradiction: “This kind of doubt might eventually lead to the relinquishing, without compensation, of all existing means of articulation. It would make us forget all hitherto used idioms and dissolve concepts which these idioms conveyed. Our articulate intellectual life, which operates by the handling of denotable concepts, would thus be reduced to abeyance for the time being.”

Interestingly, Polanyi argues that extreme skepticism results in fanaticism. This is surprising because many of the early skeptics (like Hume) or more modern skeptics (like Bertrand Russell) thought skepticism, as opposed to religious faith, would lead to less radicalism and extremism. Polanyi claims just the reverse: “Modern fanaticism [Marxism and Nazism] is rooted in an extreme scepticism which can only be strengthened, not shaken, by further doses of universal doubt.”

Chapter 10: Commitment

Polanyi argues that as human beings, we have a responsibility to “search for the truth and state my findings.” His exercise in Personal Knowledge is “teaching myself how to hold my own beliefs” in the face of skepticism. As mentioned earlier, he describes intellectual beauty as a “guide” to discovery and a “mark” of truth. This idea, while attractive, raised some questions for me. “What constitutes beauty?” “And more importantly, what about a beautiful (or noble) lie?”

Polanyi also says that “personal” transcends the categories of the subjective/objective distinction. It blends them in a way. There is a subjective element of knowing, yet we subject our claims and beliefs to external validation and criticism – reality is not inherently relative or unknowable the way a pure subjectivist might argue.

Polanyi later talks about the idea of “responsible beliefs” versus irresponsible ones. These responsible beliefs are “born of necessity, and not changeable at will.” And “The paradox of self-set standards is eliminated, for in a competent mental act the agent does not do as he pleases, but compels himself forcibly to act as he believes he must….The outcome of a competent fiduciary act may, admittedly, vary from one person to another, but since the differences are not due to any arbitrariness on the part of the individuals, each retains justifiably his universal intent….Therefore, though every person may believe something different to be true, there is only one truth.”

Again, there is an element in which we are compelled, by our nature, to hold certain things as true given our experience and our minds. Our conscious inquiry, then, is also shaped by our communities and our commitments. There is an important element of “belonging” when it comes to commitment and community. He advocates a counter-Rawlsian “veil of ignorance” position.

John Rawls famously argued that the best way to theorize about justice involved removing all the local particularities of our circumstances (race, gender, religion, wealth, physical abilities, etc.) and think about what is just behind “a veil of ignorance.” Polanyi argues such an approach is nonsensical given our nature as persons and the nature of our knowledge.

I’m afraid I’ve hardly done this part of Personal Knowledge justice, but the newsletter is already running long. Hopefully a bit of this is thought-provoking and intriguing. I hope there will be an extended podcast to share in the new year unpacking more of these themes and commenting on them!

Reflection

As I begin to wrap up the year and emerge from the fog of sickness, a few things have been on my mind. One is that I clearly enjoy my work and seem to be a good fit for the job but two, it has involved a great deal of travel which three, my family has handled well but four, may not be the right tradeoff now (or in the future). As I’ve thought about this, I’ve realized that there are complex desires/experiences at play: pride, satisfaction, fear, escape, uncertainty, ambition, adventure, and distraction.

By God’s grace, I still have a lot of energy and creativity to throw at other projects (like this newsletter) involving church, business, finance, and family. But being sick for three weeks gave me pause to consider what life with less energy would look like. And there have been moments this year where unexpected problems or projects emerged and I had limited bandwidth or margin to deal with them.

And underneath it all is the lingering thought that I ought to be more proactive with my kids. They are growing wonderfully and I am certainly present a lot when I am not on the road. Kathryn does a remarkable job homeschooling them. They are developing well, learning God’s Word, slowly growing in character and godliness. But they are also growing quickly!

I’ve realized that these next 7-10 years are going to be a critical time for me to do special things with them and train them in habits of thinking and devotion for life. In 2025, I want the goals I have for doing things with my kids to come first. I’ll build my work, business, and other goals around that. I have a few ideas of what some goals for the children will be and will likely share them in a later newsletter.

I also have great hopes for our church and our community in 2025. Lord willing, we’ll amend our constitution in January to set up an eldership structure. We may also nominate a few men at that point to begin a training/vetting process for a couple months. Starting with three elders would serve our church perfectly well – though moving to five at the end of 2025 or sometime in 2026 is not out of the question. We’ll see who God raises up and who the congregation calls to the office.

Moving to an eldership model should also streamline our ministries. This year we tried a lot of things and held a lot of events. Pastor Tanner encouraged people to use discernment about what to attend. There was no expectation that people should come to everything. While I agree with that general approach, I’ve noticed that there is a bit of fragmentation happening when some people go to one event or serve in one ministry while others choose to focus on different events or ministries.

I hope that we can consolidate many of our activities into a weekly prayer and worship service that will be a priority for everyone in the church.

Game Corner

While we were in Alaska we played a great little game called Quixx. Every player has the same small score card with four colors corresponding to four dice. Two colors have a row of boxes labelled from 2 to 12. The other two colors have boxes labeled from 12 to 2. The goal is to score the most points by crossing off the boxes.

There are several important dynamics to the game. Players take turns rolling the four colored dice and two white dice. You must check off at least one box on your turn or take a five-point penalty. Once you check a box, you may no longer check any boxes to the left of it in that row. On your turn you have the option of using the two white dice together and/or one of the white dice and one colored die. So you could mark off two boxes if you wished.

Another dynamic is that you may choose to use the white dies rolled on someone else’s turn. For scoring, you receive points based on how many X’s in each color row you have. More X’s result in an increasing score (1 – 1 pt, 2 – 3 pts, 3 – 6 pts, 4 – 10 pts, 5 – 15 pts, 6 – 21 pts, 7 – 28 pts, 8 – 36 pts, 9 – 45 pts, 10 – 55 pts, 11 – 66 pts).

One final twist involves how the game ends. While someone taking a fourth penalty because they cannot mark any boxes on their turn triggers the end, it more commonly comes about through two colors being “locked.” At the end of the rows are the boxes with 2s and with 12s. Marking a 2 or 12 allows you to mark an additional bonus box in that row. It also “locks” the row so that no players may mark anything more in that row for the rest of the game. However, you may not mark a 2 or a 12 unless you have already marked at least five other boxes in the row.

Quixx is easy, fun, and fast. It obviously involves a lot of chance but it also requires calculation of odds and strategic choices about which box(es) to mark and when. It plays faster (and is more interesting in my opinion) than Yahtzee. It is also very compact and easy to travel with – even if you use laminated score cards and expo markers.