Be Kind—Rewind: Just when I thought that the clock had run out for comments on my time-telling brainteaser post and the ensuing "25 or 6 to 4" post, along comes a lengthy response from the man I'd called by the pseudonym J. But first, since I know Michael Malice (who, despite at least one reader's assumption, is not J.) has his fans among Dawn Patrol readers, I must share his response to my refusal to print a reader's comeback to one of his blog entries:

Thank you from refraining from turning this into a pissing contest, since I (literally) don't understand why someone would care what I think, or why they would bother to send a "comeback." I like it much better when people just dismiss me as an asshole. . .

Dear Dawn,

Man.

You know I love you, but I must say I cannot for the life of me imagine a worse or more complicated analogy for differing moral/philosophical premises than the Carroll clocks story.

Carroll, who greatly appreciated math, was clearly not commenting on psychology at all except in so far as he was saying that one would have to be nuts to prefer being-precisely-correct only for two instants a day
(which is useless for any practical purposes) to being at least approximately correct, as with a slightly too slow or fast watch (which, it should be remembered, lots of people used back in those non-digital, imprecise days). That's the essence of his joke: that someone would ever be silly enough to defend the broken clock as useful.

So to torture and twist this into an analogy for a metaphysics debate in which the two participants disagree about fundamentals and therefore drift farther and farther apart forever more, let's see how many bizarre moves we have to make:

1. Simply ignore the broken clock (since I'm assuming you see me as a slow, slightly "off" watch and yourself as correct time), which is then doing no work in the analogy.

2. Analogize, in a way Carroll clearly never intended and in no way implies, the slow clock to a philosophical position.

3. Analogize correct time to another, more accurate philosophical position.

4. Imply (in a way he never does) some ongoing, perpetual deviation (as opposed to occasional resetting of the clocks).

5. Throw in the utterly unstated assumption that one of the aforementioned philosophical positions (both of them, as noted, themselves unmentioned and unimplied in the fable) is an unproven or a priori one like belief in a God.

6. And, if we're to take your first entry about all this seriously, throw in the side inference that the differing philosophical positions are in some way motivational, such as spurs to moral decision-making
(since you claimed it was all Carroll's effort to show that motivations matter—and I'm glad to see I wasn't the only reader baffled by this claim).

7. Ignore completely the fact that to the extent stopped watches are used as analogies for human thought at all, they are used pejoratively to connote extremely-rarely-accurate monomania (as in the case of a person who always thinks the British are coming and is finally correct one day out of seven thousand because the British happen to come), while —I think—neither Dawn nor Todd was supposed to be likened to a
monomaniac in our last philosophical conversation (unless you're saying belief in God is an erroneous monomaniacal belief, but that seems unlikely).

All I can say is, if that's an analogy, I can't imagine what two things in this world you wouldn't see as analogous to each other (and even if I've misinterpreted some portion of your interpretation, which
certainly seems likely, I can't imagine that the real story is going to be a much smoother one). Why not claim that the battle of Waterloo is an analogy for the differences between folk and rap music while you're
at it? Or that the difference between slavery and freedom is best understood through the story of the tortoise and the hare (perhaps by likening the heavy shell of the tortoise to whites of the old South—and just ignoring the hare altogether)?

Indeed, it's an overeagerness to make intuitive/analogizing leaps like that which ought to make observers seriously question whether someone can be trusted to draw any correct oracular hunches about the nature of the universe ("A flock of birds! That must mean we're going to win the war!! Dirt being washed off a horse! It's just like the fall of Rome!!"). And that's why some people are a bit more cautious than certain other people, though I'm not naming any names, about making big leaps of mystical inference from scanty evidence.

Carroll liked logic puzzles and depicting characters who make logical-sounding but illogical arguments, such as that a broken clock is useful. Let's not extrapolate too wildly beyond that or someone may get injured.

I love you, but I think you should leave the philosophical intuiting to others, my dear. (And Michael's basically arguing about completely different issues, and I'm too tired to get into all that, though I think the fact that he ends up having to respond to your piece by defending ethical egoism is itself an indication of how many light years removed the whole debate has gotten at that point from anything remotely like what was going through Lewis Carroll's mind when he wrote about broken clocks.)

But if you do make another foray into this territory (such as posting this e-mail, which I encourage), feel free to name me. No need for the "J." pseudonym. Without being called "Todd Seavey," I guess I sort of
feel like I'm not getting credit for my work. You might even consider restoring my trademark by referring to me as My Ex-Boyfriend Todd Seavey™.

Whatever appellation makes you happy is O.K. by me, though. But if I ever get my own blog—and it's tempting, just so I can weigh in on spats like the Eden/Malice Conflict [What conflict?—Ed.]—I will kick asses and name names. . .metaphorically speaking, of course.

Respectfully,

Todd

I love Todd, too.

As anyone who's read his Editor's Rants on HealthFactsandFears.com knows, Todd is a great arguer. Here, he has ably ripped my clock analogy to shreds. My mistake was in attempting to do it piecemeal. I used many examples—the stopped clock's showing how motives matter, the "off" clock's showing how two people can drift apart—but couldn't sustain any of them.

My real point, which I explained in my second post, was that Carroll's brainteaser resonated with me because, wittingly or unwittingly, it worked as a satire on "the futility of trying to explain a metaphysical concept that one knows is right."

In my Friday-night conversation with Todd, I gave him my Christian witness. But an eyewitness report is only valuable if the person who hears it believes that the witness has seen something outside his or her own imagination.

I know what God has done for me. I know how he has changed my mind, body, and spirit, and how he has healed me of suicidal depression. I suffered from that depression for 17 years, and it ended years before Todd knew me. I know how hard I tried to heal myself through books, therapy, friends, relationships, sex, and butterfingered attempts at grasping religious faith. And I know that, when God healed me, he did so in a dramatic, tremendously powerful way that I could only attribute to Him, and not to any wishful imagination on my part. For someone to then say that my faith makes me (along with every other theist, from William F. Buckley on down) mentally "off," and that this healing came from a mere hallucination—how can I respond to that? The reply I'd like to give is decidedly non-Christian: "Yo' mama's a hallucination."

But then I think of the condescending narrator of Carroll's brainteaser: "Why, suppose the clock points to eight o'clock, don't you see that the clock is right at eight o'clock? Consequently, when eight o'clock comes round your clock is right. " And I remember that, however real the object of my faith is to me, I cannot reasonably expect Todd to understand that whatever it is in me that really knows what time it is—whatever light of "truth and grace" he sees in me—comes from God.