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by Jim Holman.
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Oily Rags and Aristotle

Philosopher Mechanic Reflects on Natural Law

By James McCoy

If the Creator of the ordered and good world cares for all his creatures, why did he allow the Hudson bolt?

That bolt sat on the back of the transmission at the very top behind the engine in the Hudson, a classic car today. "If you don't believe in evil," said Pat Norris, a master auto mechanic, "you're forced to accept that there's something not good in the world when you look at that problem. The only way to remove that bolt -- and this is the absolute truth -- you had to open the doors, remove the seats, then you had to remove a panel, then you had to take a wrench that was crookeder than a dog's hind leg -- and the wrench had to be fitted blind up behind the transmission to the bolt and then very carefully turned; if the bolt would be willing to be turned. If you stripped it, then you'd really be in trouble; and there are expressions for what your situation would be like, but you don't say them in public."

Norris was interviewed under a 1980 Toyota Corolla (standard transmission) in the driveway of his home in Claremont last month.

"Then ... you could only turn [the Hudson bolt]... 30 degrees... because that's the best you can do with a 12-point wrench; so you had to turn it 12 times to make one thread-turn on it. So you've -- what, six, eight, ten threads in there you have to get out in order to get the bolt out of there." Making the mechanic turn it about a hundred times was the final turn of the screw -- or the Hudson bolt.

Norris did not expect to confront this mystery of iniquity while replacing the Toyota's worn-out clutch. "Things have to be done for an end," he said. "So you get used to expecting things in a certain way... When you look around, your identification is by type. You know that this is a Toyota, so you know you're gonna work with 12, 14 and 17 millimeter bolts in most cases.

"Here we are upside down, reaching for bolts; all we can do is turn them until we get this part of it done," Norris went on. "That gives you a chance to think about what you're doing. You can either worry about the next step ... or all the problems you have getting your family's groceries and kids to the doctor, or you can... think about things that are worthwhile." Norris, 46, is married with 10 children. He met his wife Charlotte at a dance at Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, from which he graduated in 1978. Having won a fellowship at Claremont Graduate University, Norris took a Ph.D. in philosophy. He wrote his dissertation on the ius gentium, "the law of the peoples", so named, according to St. Isidore of Seville, a Doctor of the Church, because "nearly all the peoples use it." The ius gentium contains inescapable conclusions from the dictates of the natural law, "such as justice in buying and selling and things like that without which humans cannot live together in society," said St. Thomas Aquinas, another Church doctor or teacher.

I asked Norris why he wasn't working as a teacher. "I'm somebody who believes in natural law," he replied. "That's not something that sells in modern academia. Even a law school." Describing himself as "still idealistic," Norris adapted to circumstances. "No matter how you want to do things, you have to take the circumstances God gives you.... Circumstances provide challenges."

"We learn quickly as mechanics to do things in terms of end or purpose," he said. "What's the key to the natural law?" Norris quoted Aristotle, an ancient Greek philosopher: "Nature acts for an end."

But at least one mechanic in the Toyota's past had not learned this natural lesson. "Now we have a problem here," said Norris, after trying two or three different wrenches on a recalcitrant bolt. "When this car was fixed, somewhere along the line either they ruined the bolt or they stripped it; but it's not moving. It's in place, but there's no way to attach to the head.... On a car, you strip the wrong bolt, and you can't get a part out, you can't get the transmission out, or other things can go wrong, and it's because something is damaged. Now how do you repair the damage? There's not one opinion on this, because there's too many different ways people approach things, even on cars.

"When you take something that doesn't really belong, and you force it into place, you get the wrong result.

Daaaah! Humph! "Well, we finally got this bolt loose," Norris said. "A bad mechanic would just throw a new [wrong] one in."

On our way to the crossroads of I-10 and I-15 (where auto repair, parts and salvage businesses have mushroomed in the shadow of the two interstates) with the right bolt as our goal, Norris says that the first law of auto repair is diagnosis of the ultimate cause of a problem. "Treating it symptomatically won't solve it," he says. "You can't proceed in an orderly manner unless you answer 'why?' It's teleological, in that answering why means answering, 'why isn't that end [in Greek, telos] being produced?' Not just that there is a problem, but why. Until you figure out why, you can't treat it."

Unfortunately, Norris adds, customers usually put time pressure on a mechanic, making it frequently impossible for him to find the more remote causes. Haste makes waste. Haste can also lay waste to any order. "If we won't obey order -- like that guy who just ran through the red light -- that guy is not going to understand order even as an idea. If you're committed to instant gratification ... you're not reflecting." Reflection is indispensable to seeing the order in things, and not hasty reflection at that.

"It is the business of the wise man to order," Aristotle once said. "The reason for this," says St. Thomas, "is that wisdom is the most powerful perfection of reason.... To know the order of one thing to another is exclusively the work of intellect or reason." St. Thomas lists four orders which are the province of the wise. There is the order which reason considers in man-made things like automobiles. There is the order which reason finds in things not made by man, for example, the laws of physics. There is the order which reason finds in its own activities, and studies in grammar and logic. And there is the order which reason considers in voluntary actions. This order found in a "man voluntarily acting for an end" is less susceptible to scientific formulation than the order found in an automobile engine. "The same certitude," says Aristotle, "is not to be expected in all sciences but in each according to its subject matter...."

"Cars work because somebody turns them on," says Norris. "People 'work' because they have a desire to do something right; so there's an internal motivation that actually belongs to them; it doesn't belong to the car." The art of mechanics is wisdom about man-made motors; natural law theory is wisdom about human motivations.

At the crossroads, Norris leads me out into the midst of a plain full of dismantled autos. We pass through rank upon rank; there are more than 1,700 vivisected vehicles. I also behold fuel tanks, camshafts, batteries, radiators, hoses, tires, hubcaps, air filters and headlights strewn on the ground like dry bones.

Norris descries a 1981 Toyota Corolla. "Bingo! I think we found it. Now I have to get dirty." Norris dives in. The right bolt rises from out of the vast valley of automotive parts.

Back under the car, "it's probably the case that we'll be able to get the transmission to slide out and drop down," Norris says while turning a wrench. "We'll find out. If not, we'll have to get the exhaust pipe and drop it out of the way too. If you take off something that should not be removed ... sometimes you break it; now you've got the headache of fixing it."

I quote the bromide, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

"The bromide is the tool for the common man," says Norris. Some people, especially intellectuals, dismiss such popular sayings as 'hackneyed, trite, unimaginative and unoriginal.' Those people are wrong, Norris maintains. "Aristotle gives more authority to the bromide than the intellectual." Though Norris is an intellectual, "I don't see that I'm privy to something; I'm privileged in having been given an opportunity to study these things more than most people. I'm not in a private world that nobody has access to.

"'If it ain't broke, don't fix it' has a lot more to do with a problem of complicating things by starting in on it," Norris continues. "In most cases if you want to improve something you have to change it some. And the changing that you do is going to disrupt what's already there... But what you do when you change things is you've disturbed, done violence to, made a change to something that was already in order, but for the purpose of making a better order. If that's your purpose ... then it's not a bad idea to go ahead and change something." In such cases, that old saying is "an oversimplification," Norris thinks.

At other times it is a word to the wise. "But when the order is already predetermined and you're not going to change it -- see, all we're doing here, we're not changing the order, we're simply restoring order with a better clutch -- then we're limited, we're proscribed by the order to go ahead and do it in a certain fashion. You don't replace this clutch by taking the tires off, for instance..."

Mrs. Norris comes out from the kitchen bringing glasses of water.

"Did you get the little wash cloth from James?"

"I did, thank you," says Norris standing, drinking the water.

"Yeah, you know it occurred to me that you didn't have any of your nice oily rags."

"I'd have to look around for them; there's a lot of the stuff we don't have --"

"-- His things didn't catch fire" Mrs. Norris tells me as an aside.

"-- a lot we don't have because we've been displaced," says Norris, "but that's life."

"I mean for years we thought if there'd be a fire, it would be his fault."

The house on East San Jose Avenue in which the Norris family formerly lived last October burned down in a fire. Since they rented the house, their possessions were not insured. (Mrs. Norris said that they rented because so many mothers have told her that if they didn't have to make mortgage payments, they wouldn't be working full-time outside the home). Mrs. Norris homeschools the younger boys, one of whom decided to have his own barbecue -- he set fire to a bed. Mrs. Norris, having ordered him and his brothers to run outside, just had time to find two-year-old Luke and lift him and herself out of a window. The house had already become pitch black with smoke from the fire. The entire house burned down in a matter of minutes, Mrs. Norris said. Firefighters came in time however to stop the blaze from spreading to other houses.

Claremont rallied around the family, helping them after the fire. The four older children go to the public schools and so the family was well known in the community and, as it soon proved, well loved. The Norrises now live in another house in Claremont, but it's up for sale, and one day they'll have to find another home.

The dinner table having been cleared and sponged down by Anne, 11, a spanking-new Monopoly game was unveiled by eight-year-old Patrick. Margaret, 10, and Jamie, 4, took their places at the table. I took the battleship as my token.

"You guys are going to be in a lot of trouble if you end up losing pieces," said Norris.

"Oh Daddy," said Jamie, " we won't do anything."

"Did you come to see Daddy? Do you want a big hug?" Norris hugged Luke.

"Daddy!" Luke exulted.

"No, from your money, Margaret!"

"But I'm the banker."

"That's illegal," said Norris.

"They're gonna cheat, Margaret!" Anne warned her younger sister. Anne's eyes smiled at me. Justice in buying and selling ... and more ... the law without which humans cannot live in society ... the law which nearly all the nations observe... and that law finds its whys and wherefores in the natural law.... "Didn't you write something on natural law or something?" she challenged. "I wouldn't play monopoly with you!"

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