The Substitution Effect And Its Limits

The Substitution Effect and Its Limits

Unlike the substitution effect in math whereby a variable is substituted by an equal, equational substitution of time, person, quantity has taken on unpleasant new dimensions which affect individuals and encroach on basic human freedoms.

Of course we are used to having something replaced if it is damaged or unsuitable:? an airline ticket with a different time slot, an ersatz automobile if a car doesn't work or is not useable following a crash; a second pair of clothes if they are damaged; an Amazon replacement for damaged goods.? The list is extensive, including even the milk on the grocery store shelf which is misleadingly marketed after its expiration date.

As theories of the human race continue to develop - in particular theories which have to do with the denial of human freedom or acquiesence to new and irreligious parameters for action, the question of whether substitution is an adequate solution to the human condition, reducing humanity to a bill of damaged goods.

Notwithstanding the fact that we are born with a soul the substitution effect lays out, in keeping with the theories of Eric Kandel, a reparable, generic human being as a worthy end.? What was hailed earlier as sacrosanct becomes an industry's profit and growth:? life itself.? Witness IVF and the great crime it inflicts on not only man's creator but also upon its participants, as if though they were nothing more than a updated t.v. series or serial actors who get new clothing for their newest runs.

Again, when we substitute variables to create models which reflect conditions born of past experience, we also take into our hands an element which was heretofore god's own, that of time, In Acts 1:7, Jesus admonishes, “It is not for you to know periods of time or appointed times which the Father has set by His own authority.? Yet today we pay any number of forecasters a fortune not to interpret these words but to play god, to set the times.? If we are able to set the times, then we necessarily live with a historiographic view of the lord's grace, and we also live with a circular view of time: that what was can happen again, whether war, budget, peace, the human being, any material good.? All we need is memory and god-like formulas to violate the space of the lord's choice.? It becomes, much like a Wikipaedia write-along, a question which we have to answer from our hearts.? Is god calculable?? Is he without volition?? Without power?? Without hope or love?? Like Pilate, we process formulas for a new scourging, exclaiming that our power is larger than our opponents', that our variables are of an intellectual quality which St. Paul derided and yet which we, like in Nineveh, wish to build up in opposition to his curt explanatory, But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.

The vocabulary of substitution can be seen at times as a vocabulary of improvement.? Like a housebuilder who concentrates on the materials for renovation, we restore, build anew, create wars, weapons, systems which divide because the projection of our variables is one where victor and vanquished cannot sit at the same table, where there is no new beginning, simply a continuum of the right against what our formulas and formulaic language term evil.? And then we have the audacity to say a new Fat Man with north korean lettering, a KIm Jong Il, is really so awful for having come up with a nuclear bomb, smiling as he normally does.

Think for a moment what came of 2+5 negotiations with Iran.? Nothing.? They, too, have a bomb, even after all of the fine legalese of secretaries of state or ministers gathered in Vienna or Lausanne.? Privileged to define new constraints on Iran's Pandora's Box yielding, if for a moment or some years, the victory of a new sun of chaos and of Dan Brown at the airport.? Now even the airport has been redesigned and the Boeings have new numbers like 737, if with faults which appear beyond engineers' best calculations.

Substitution, because it is an act of assigning values to old variables - essentially heartless - leads to much more than a conundrum; it leads to a new retardation in the guise of progress.? No longer content with Borghese's travels to Mongolia, substitution allows for the possibility of creating new monsters, like avatars in Disney movies.

Where we forget the human and the bestowal of life as named and sacrosanct we risk eliminating exactly that we purport to benefit.? We become perchance what has already been.

I for myself would not live by the maxims of Ecclesiastes, where he exhorts, like a sick man drawing time line, that The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. [10] Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.

This Easter, is it right or tenable to follow a path of substitution?? A path with less than the miracle of absolute love?? Not to laugh or cry, but there are only about 1,150 named saints in a world with a population of 8.1 billion.? Can we really be content with a restart, with an operative plan which we put together in the face of new tensions?? Are we not living in a new Nineveh, again resorting to variables and bargaining in the face of god's wrath?

The substitution effect, like a good tomato, comes with any number of new formulas for growth.? Should the lord really exit the garden which Ezekiel so aptly describes:? Along the bank of the river, on this side and that, will grow all kinds of trees used for food; their leaves will not wither, and their fruit will not fail. They will bear fruit every month, because their water flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for medicine.”

Ask in static cases for the substitution effect; in dynamic ones don't appeal to its casuistry.? Like the egyptian courtiers reading the stars in Emperor Rudolf's times, the world is threatened with a new necromancy, a disbelief which would chop the fig tree of the lord down and plant a new one, greatest of human follies!