Camshafts

One Last Hurrah? What I've been up to

2008-04-13T12:38:00.000-07:00

Ignoring the 66% of you that think Camshafts is dead, I want to at least squeeze in one last post. Has anyone been watching the “John Adams” series on HBO? I was eagerly anticipating its airing, but four episodes in I feel a bit disappointed. I can’t quite isolate why I feel it’s been such a let down. Maybe it’s that Deadwood’s still ringing in my ears. That show demonstrated what’s possible with historical dramas—how far they can be taken, how good dialog can be and how a talented writer/ director can make a seemingly ossified historical period appear fresh. That said, John Adams still strikes me as a traditional PBSish educational film with obvious and slightly cliche dialog.

Last night I saw the Felice Brothers. Incredible! Along with tuning the guitars and setting up the amps, the stage crew set out 6 bottles of Red Stripe and what appeared to be a liter and a half of bourbon, setting the stage for a debaucherously delicious performance. All members of the band (3 brothers and a friend named Christmas) appeared toasted as they entered the stage, but this didn’t stop them from finishing the Red Stripe and whiskey. Surprisingly this had no detrimental affect on their performance—it may have even helped. Midway the drummer climbs a giant amp and, hanging from the curtain, performs an awkward cabaret strip…he later emerges from off stage with a hammer and proceeds to smash it into his drum set while singing, eventually breaking a piece off his symbols, later, two appear on stage shirtless, one riding the back of the accordion player, James Felice. The show ended with an encore which brought half the audience on the stage, passing around the bottle of whisky, throwing water on each other and the few remaining on the floor, shirts coming off, band members holding up drums so others can throw jabs at them. Again, incredible! Nicole summed it up when she said the whole time it felt like at any moment everything could go terribly wrong—like when two band members cast lit cigarettes onto the stage without putting them out or when one staggering guitar player made his way onto the bass drum perched, at most, two feet from the tip of the stage. Nicole also pointed out that at least half the women who climbed onto the stage for the finale disappeared with the band backstage—nice.

If you haven’t heard them, please check them out.

Mason Jennings has a new album due out soon. But, upon hearing the title of one of his new songs, “I love you and Buddha too,” my excitement has diminished.

Tony Jones Interview and Happy Holidays!

2007-12-22T08:38:00.000-08:00

I have not been the biggest fan of the “emergent church” movement, despite the interest in it of several people I deeply respect. However, my criticisms of emergent church have nearly disappeared as a result of this radio interview with Tony Jones. In it, Jones runs circles around the Southern Baptist talk show host, reducing him to childish retorts (after the conversation was over) like calling the emergent movement “Feuerbach with a soul patch” (which I’m pretty sure he thought up prior to the interview and waited with eager anticipation to deploy). The content and style of Jones’ presentation completely dismantled the position of his silly and cant-dependent interlocutor. If this was any indication of the general shift within mainstream Christianity, then it appears the down-home, old time religion rhetoric of many conservative evangelicals is completely unprepared to cope with the challenges leveled by the much more interesting and introspective emergent movement.

Oh, and Happy Holidays everyone!

Wow.

2007-12-10T21:44:00.000-08:00

The following was presented today in my 1:00 class. The assignment was to write a conversation, with a partner, incorporating all of the English we've learned this semester. I'm pretty sure none of this was on my syllabus:

A: What's up? You look serious.

B: I . . . accidentally reamed in the manager's ass.

A: Oh my god. You did what?

B: I meant to do it to Young-Hak.

A: But why did you do it to the manager?

B: Well, Young-Hak and the manager wore the same clothes and I took the wrong one.

A: How did he respond?

B: He was moved to the emergency room. I guess it did it deeply.

A: It's going to be a problem.

B: Maybe I am going to be fired.

A: Everything will be fine, don't worry.

Needless to say, they got an A+.

Garbage City

2007-10-24T04:51:00.001-07:00

For those interested, check out this interesting article on the changing face of Mokattam.

Religious Pluralism and Political Legitimacy: Part Two

2007-10-15T11:00:00.001-07:00

Thanks for the comments, Luke. I think adding Chaplin’s article to the discussion is helpful because it provides a focal point. My delayed response is due to my wanting to re-read the article before posting. Having read it, here is my response to your comments and the article:

(1) First, I think Chaplin must be committed to the idea that legitimacy depends upon whether or not public justice or the common good is upheld by a given government. Thus, for Jonathan political legitimacy can’t be (as it is for Rawls) merely a matter of procedure. So, I think you are right that for Rawls “A legitimate law can be legitimate while potentially unjust” but this cannot obtain for Jonathan. In fact he says as much in his unpublished manuscript on Dooyeweerd’s political philosophy, where he claims that “any exercise of coercive power which cannot be justified as advancing the goal of public justice is fundamentally illegitimate.” (Ch.7, p.24)

This is because a state’s distinct normative structure, according to Chaplin, is to uphold public justice. An entity resembling a state but one that does not pursue public justice cannot in fact be a state. In the same way, a union resembling a family (say, a gay marriage) but one that does not contain the normatively necessary components of a family (say, a mother and a father) cannot, for Jonathan, be an actual marriage or family because it lacks the fundamental normative structure of a family. An organized set of public procedures that fails to pursue public justice, therefore, is no more a state than three male, long-term roommates is a marriage.

Resembling the Calvinists of the Renaissance, who insisted that a ruler who fails to uphold God’s glory or defend the liberty of the people ceases to be a ruler at all, Chaplin seems to be forced to conclude that a political regime (the state) that does not uphold public justice or the common good ceases to be a state at all.

There are remaining questions of degree; that is to say, questions determining to what extent a state can be given over to private interests or fail to seek public justice and still qualify as a state. For instance, does the antebellum South qualify as a state even though it single-mindedly pursued the sole interests of its Caucasian, male citizens and completely failed to pursue public justice? If it does, then one must rethink what it means to say “public justice” is the normative structure of the state.

But, Chaplin’s position must still find the state’s legitimacy (or, its very ability to be recognized as a state) in its practice of pursuing justice. If it fails to pursue public justice, it is no longer a state.

One could conclude from this that if a state fails to pursue public justice one need not acknowledge its “stateness.” In the same way, if a marriage ceases to be composed of a man (husband) and a woman (wife), society and the state need not acknowledge it as a marriage. Further, a Christian may conclude that if (1) notions of “fundamental justice” are situated in a non-negotiable, religious heritage and if (2) states are only states to the degree they pursue public justice, then Christian citizens need not obey states that neglect to pursue public justice in a Christian sense.

(2) I find the notion of “political truth” a bit confusing, perhaps even unhelpful. As it appears to be heavily influenced by Rawls’ “overlapping consensus,” I think the concept would do better to retain the language of “consensus” rather than “truth.” I’m not sure what “truth” would add to a description of immanent consensus on political issues across divergent perspectives. What makes a given consensus also true? What is added to it? Is a consensus made “true” when others are agreeing with us? I acknowledge that this is a minor and perhaps nitpicky point, but it may have serious consequences for legitimacy. For instance, you said legitimate government relies on “an articulation [which] attests to a certain kind of “truth,” namely a political truth that is grounded in an ultimate truth.” This would make the “truth” of a state’s actions or self understanding the basis upon which citizens determine whether or not it’s legitimate. This could be a serious problem when citizens find the state’s actions or self understanding to be false.

(3) I think what Jonathan doesn’t address (and what classic Calvinists addressed more specifically) is what debt believers owe to God and the degree to which they ought to be faithful politically when this forces them to support governments acting contrary to God’s will. For instance Jonathan says, a Christian diversity state would “exclude…abortion on demand, unregulated capital exchanges or property development, destruction of rain forests, female genital mutilation, and same-sex marriage” all of which are “non-negotiable political demands” and “fundamental matters of justice.” (172) Not only are these “political demands” but they also represent a debt of justice owed by all persons to God. These are both political and also deeply moral issues. Calvin would have put these political positions in the realm of “piety.” If one believes abortion is murder, or unregulated capital exchange amounts to exploitation, then these comprise more than “political demands” for a Christian—they are nonnegotiable demands of divine justice. If it is disobedient for a Christian not to oppose these issues politically, then certainly it must also be disobedient for them to support a government who imposes (with the use of tax money) these anti-Christian policies. A believer is now caught in what I call the “Calvinian paradox”—one ought to be faithful to government because it is a divinely given institution, but one also has to be faithful to God.

I think many neo-Calvinists are neglecting the revolutionary heart of Calvinism, which, I think, finds its constant struggle in the Calvinian paradox. Calvinism is more than agonistic, it is volatile and uncompromising. This is not all it is, but this volatility always runs beneath the surface. I think Calvinist political theory would be well described by Gaus’ phrase “a rebel’s catechism.” Gaus’ criticism of Eberle’s book could be easily adapted to fit neo-Calvinism as well: “If it would be disobedient to God not to raise religious arguments, surely it is still disobedient to have raised them, but then act contrary to them because the majority has decided otherwise.” I’m not saying this is a bad thing, but it seems to me that neo-Calvinists have neglected to articulate the radical nature of their perspective—how readily it lends itself to civil disobedience and resistance.

This is just a brainstorm…what do you think? I look forward to your response!

What?

2007-10-11T16:41:00.000-07:00

Turkey has just recalled (but not withdrawn) its ambassador to Washington for "consultations" about the recent House Foreign Affairs committee vote declaring that the Armenian genocide was, well, a genocide. The French lower house passed its own resolution last year, and 20 other countries have taken similar measures.

Turkey's response is not surprising, since its government has long mandated an official state of complete denial as to the historical facts. People who dare to challenge this denial are convicted of "insulting Turkishness," a phrase that to my ears is about the most obvious bunch of medieval fairyland totalitarian bullshit in the repertoire.

President Bush's response, however, is more than a little surprising, more than a little flabbergasting, and more than a little infuriating. As I recall, anytime some mealy-mouthed America-hating liberal protested our plans for Iraq by pointing out that other countries might be offended, or that other countries thought it was the wrong thing to do, the Administration and its supporters (especially its supporters - I have specific people in mind) hit back with chest-beating self-righteous pronouncements about acting for the sake of our principles, not for the sake of popularity or practicality. We'll do it because it's the right thing to do, and if you're not with us, you're against us. We'll do it even at the risk of failure, even at the risk of causing more problems than it solves, simply because it's the right thing to do, and that's that. And who cares what the French think, anyway?!

Yet when it comes to a non-binding resolution from Congress recognizing what history shows to be the horrible truth about Turkish policy toward Armenians during WW1, the President himself steps in and warns that the Turks will be offended, and we don't want that - because we have military bases in their country, because they are an important ally in the war on terror, and because we don't want them hunting Kurds in the crossfire of northern Iraq. Good god. What a spineless pussy. Who cares what the Turks think of us? Is this not the right thing to do, period, and to hell with the consequences?

My rather strong feelings on the matter owe much to Peter Balakian's excellent history of the genocide, The Burning Tigris. It is impossible to get through this book without nearly throwing up. We are so familiar with the Holocaust's singular horrors that we find it difficult to imagine being uninformed about similarly terrible events, yet the Armenian genocide clearly was. Not in terms of sheer numbers and efficiency, perhaps, but in terms of state-mandated, thorough-going, pre-meditated cruelty, it was every bit as horrifying, and likely an inspiration to the better-known German project that got underway a few decades later. Yet Turkey continues to make it a crime even to publicly admit or argue that this is true - in stark contrast to Germany, where I believe it's a crime to deny the Holocaust. But apparently this doesn't greatly bother our President, who is more preoccupied with how to dispatch the evil (and patently crazy) Holocaust-denying president of Iran.

My point is not necessarily that Bush is wrong to be concerned about the strategic consequences of pissing off the Turks. My point is that Bush is an asshole. "Principle" and "the right thing to do" - clearly terms of convenience for this most principled and right-minded of White Houses.

In my knee-jerk fury, am I missing something here? Is there some legitimate distinction between the President's attitude toward opponents concerned with world opinion about the war, and his attitude toward the Turks?

Religious Pluralism and Political Legitimacy

2007-09-20T07:07:00.000-07:00

I hate to detract from the two posts below, but I’m about to take this blog into nerd territory. I’ve been thinking over some political theory-related issues and I’m kind of at an impasse, so I was hoping I could use the blog to mine the depths of you all, and hopefully breathe some new life into my thoughts.

Put simply, I’m interested in the relationship between political legitimacy and religious pluralism. I’m sure most of you are no longer in the religious pluralism/ political theory frame of mind, but if you remember anything from back in the day I’d love to hear it.

Here’re my thoughts, more specifically; I’ll try to summarize them under three main statements:

(1) The Christian tradition in western political thought (and I’m especially talking about figures like Calvin, Ponet, Althusius, the Huguenots, etc.) has always used what I will call a “theistic legitimacy test” to determine whether a law or government is legitimate. That is, a law or government is legitimate according to these theorists if it conforms to the will/ ordinances of God. This usually had two features: a law (1) had to conform to God’s demand to uphold justice and (2) a law/ government also had to proclaim the glory of God.

(2) Likewise, mainly beginning with Calvin, Christian political involvement has been described in terms of an expression of “piety” or “public worship.” That is, politics is primarily concerned with bringing glory to God, not with representing the interests of those being ruled. That is why democracy has always been a secondary question, even for people like Kuyper.

(3) The flipside of “legitimacy” is the right of civil disobedience or resistance. That is, if a law is legitimate (if it conforms to God’s will) one doesn’t have a right to resist it, but if it is illegitimate (if it does not conform to God’s will) then one not only has a right to resist it but, because politics is considered first and foremost an act of piety, one has a duty to resist it.

My questions then are as follows:

(1) Given this theory, what reasons do contemporary Christians have for submitting to laws that contradict the will of God, or seeing those laws as legitimate?

(2) More specifically, what reasons are offered by neo-Calvinist political theorists for submitting to such laws?

(3) My contention is that if, as Kuyper and to my mind contemporary neo-Calvinist political theorists suggest, legitimate law is that which conforms to God’s ordinances, then any law that doesn’t would have to be considered illegitimate. Unless, neo-Calvinists, or Christians generally, consider all laws passed as legitimate, but then they would have to admit that whether or not a law conforms to God’s will has little to do with the law being legitimate. Does that make sense?

(4) Any insight from Habermas, Rawls or other theories of legitimacy as it relates to this question would be helpful as well.

Thanks in advance.

Recent Reading: Huxley, Cashill, Suskind, Laurence, McCarthy

2007-09-18T18:45:00.000-07:00

Before Island, my only encounter with Aldous Huxley was in the ubiquitous Brave New World. The latter is often paired for obvious reasons with Orwell’s 1984, and to good effect when the purpose is to expose the insidiousness of totalitarianism. But I recall thinking even as a high school student that in terms of literary quality, the two novels are in different leagues. 1984 is stark, psychological, taut, subtle. Brave New World is not. It’s an enjoyable story and an effective picture of its subject, an effective communicator of its driving ideas, but it’s not a great work of art. It draws totalitarianism in brainy comic book relief, while 1984 is a portrait painted with great skill.

Island is the same way, only more so. It’s perfectly obvious that the characters exist not as figures of human experience, but as convenient mouthpieces for expressing Huxley’s ideas about that experience. This doesn’t necessarily make those ideas incoherent or uninteresting – they’re mostly coherent, and very interesting indeed. But it does make the story itself pretty bland. You don’t read this because it’s a great and well-written story. You read and enjoy it because of course it’s more enjoyable to consider Huxley’s theories on religion, politics, drugs, God, and society in the story format than it would be if he’d just written a bunch of essays. Actually, maybe he did write a bunch of essays, which he then cut and past into a story as dialogue assigned to whichever characters were convenient.

My father-in-law, an extremely conservative man in all things political, recently gave me a book called Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture, by a guy named Jack Cashill. Of course I was disdainful and skeptical to say the least, but having given him Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason, I decided I couldn’t in good faith expect him to read and take seriously my propaganda if I wasn’t prepared to give his propaganda the same respect. So I dove in.

Mr. Cashill, just to dispell some of the assumptions I myself had before reading his book, is nothing like an Anne Coulter or a Sean Hannity. Coulter’s shrieking, painfully stupid collections of rhetorical bullshit are about as low as it gets. Ditto for Hannity (though not even he can match Coulter’s brazen unreasonableness). Cashill, on the other hand, actually makes arguments before he trots out the conservative talking points to which he believes those arguments lend support. The large majority of the text is devoted to presenting his research and fact-finding, and I must admit I learned quite a few new things, and that he gave me no reasons to mistrust his facts any more than I trust Al Gore’s.

His sections on Mumia, Ward Churchill, and Michael Moore were especially convincing (though I’d be interested in reading more from the other side about Mumia and Churchill). The extensive chapters on the American Left’s failure to oppose, or naïve decision to embrace, Soviet communism were less so, though the facts he brought forward about figures like Lillian Hellman and Alger Hiss were interesting. Same for the chapter on multiculturalism; interesting facts, but nothing too damaging to the idea of “left-wing” as I know it. Richard Rorty, for example, has said as much about the Left and communism, and made some of the same complaints about the frequent absurdities of deconstruction and multi-culturalism. Cashill’s arguments may strike effectively at the sort of undifferentiated stereotypical “liberalism” to which most conservatives oppose themselves, but it does not make me any less inclined toward positions with which I agree that also happen to be “left-wing.” In the end, despite the pleasantly surprising credibility and reasonableness that Cashill brought to the table, he still returned to the talking points – now bolstered by much-needed facts and concrete examples, perhaps, but still vague and vacuous enough to be consigned to the distracting culture-war rhetoric I had assumed them to be when I suspiciously opened up to page one. This is especially the case with the final chapter on the sexual revolution, in which Cashill started too frequently indulging in the “liberals are perverts who hate families and love abortions!!!” riff.

In the end, a valuable experience – reading something from the “other side,” reading as a gesture of respect to someone with whom you have serious disagreements, putting into practice the virtue of reading “charitably,” of staying truly open-minded, of taking things as they come and giving the benefit of the doubt and all that. And besides that, I really did learn some new things: Mumia is probably guilty, Ward Churchill really is kind of an ass, and Michael Moore can manipulate facts with the best of conservative spinmeisters (although, Hoodwinked aside, Sicko is a must-see).

Patrick Suskind’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is a kinky German crime story about a guy with olfactory superpowers. Set in the 18th century France of Les Miserables or The Three Musketeers, Suskind’s novel revels in the opportunity the plot provides to describe in beautiful, lurid, and surprising detail what is usually the least-described of the five senses. We all know that smell is powerful, of course – that it is the sense most strongly connected to memory, for example, or that pheremones are powerful forces of sexual attraction. But we do not often devote whole novels to it, and the vocabulary of smell is not as developed, or at least not as familiar, as the vocabularies of sound, sight, touch, and taste. So at the very least, the concept is an interesting one.

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the super-smeller, is born in a fish market on a pile of discarded guts. Of course. He is left for dead by his mother, but survives and raised in a for-profit orphanage, where even as a baby he freaks out his fellow inmates so much they try to smother him. When he gets older the orphanage manager sells him to a tanner. He survives this too.

One night he sees – or rather smells, since he identifies and finds everything by smell, not sight – a beatiful girl walking down the street. He is struck by her scent, as for most of his life he has been mostly surrounded by bad smells, and this is his first encounter with something pleasant. He follows her, stalks her (he’s a bit crazy, by the way), and eventually, almost unintentionally, kills her. He becomes obsessed with finding a way to preserve her scent.

Eventually he makes his way to the most famous perfumery in Paris, where he impresses the owner by mixing on the spot a perfect copy of the scent being sold with great success by a competitor. Of course he becomes and apprentice, and makes his boss a lot of money. Along the way he learns how to take the essential scent from things and preserve them in alchohol, which is what he really wants to know. When he has learned everything he can from the master, he strikes out on his own for Grasse, the center of the perfume industry.

Other things happen, but to summarize – he kills lots of beautiful girls in order to obtain their scents and combine them into a master perfume. The finale tells what happens to the people around him when he dons this master perfume. It is more than a little ridiculous.

As I say, the concept is intriguing. The style and execution are passable but nothing special, though one should keep in mind that it’s a translation. The movie version, starring Ben Wishaw, Alan Rickman, and Dustin Hoffman, is much the same: really interesting, but nothing particular special as far as script, visuals, or acting are concerned. I would say that you might as well see the movie as read the book, except that the novel’s long descriptive passages about what things, places, or people smell like are worth the extra time. All in all, an entertaining read.

Far superior is Margaret Laurence’s A Jest of God. Laurence is my wife’s favorite writer, predictably Canadian given my wife’s love for all books Canook (including Margaret Atwood and David Adams Richards). After many glowing recommendations at the breakfast table, I finally decided to see for myself just how good a writer Laurence really is. And she is really, really good. Margaret Atwood’s forward calls Jest of God “an almost perfect book,” and that seems about right. As in McCarthy (but not that good!), nothing is wasted, everything is necessary, story and characters are subtle but spare and never ostentatious.

Jest of God won the 1966 Governor General’s Award. (For you red-blooded Americans unfamiliar with national subservience, the “governor general” is sort of like the Duke of Canada, and gets appointed by the Queen. Currently it’s some Haitian girl, so I guess “Duchess of Canada” is more accurate. It’s really quite nice, as far as vestiges of imperial glory go.)

Sorry. Jest of God, which won the 1966 Governor General’s Award and is published by the University of Chicago Press, is the third of Laurence’s five-book Manawaka series. Rachael Cameron is a middle-aged woman stuck at home with her passive-aggressive mother in the small town where she grew up, struggling to overcome fear and insecurity and discover love and freedom. The kind of storyline makes for a book that has to be really good if it’s to avoid being really bad. Laurence succeeds. Her portrait of Rachael, and especially of Rachael’s inner dialogues, is extremely sharp and sympathetic. This is a character study, full of insights, compelling even for people who don’t live on the desolate Canadian prairie with their annoying mothers. I will definitely read the rest of her books.

But now to the piece de resistance, the summit, the pinnacle, the book I really want to write about: Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark. Let me say again: Cormac McCarthy is the Ultimate Badass. This is only my second trip to his literary Pleasure Island, but already I can say with no hesitation that he is hands-down my Favorite Author. He is more Favorite than Umberto Eco, than Emerson, than Dostoevsky. He’s like all those guys combined, the Superman of superheroes, the Captain Planet of the guys who make up Captain Planet. Behold, he is like unto a god to me.

Enough? Ok. I’m sure you’re probably turned off from reading it fover. Down to the book itself. Like The Road, but even more so, the beauty of Outer Dark comes not from great and subtle characters, or from a brilliant plot, but from the sheer poetry of the writing itself. The plot is almost incidental (which, as becomes clearer at the end of the book, is actually the point), and the characters drift through the world with little identity and personality (again, this is part of the point). But the words . . . let me quote you a few passages.

These are from the small italicized interludes scattered throughout the main text. They grow increasingly shakespearean as the story. progresses. Here’s an early one:

They entered the lot at a slow jog, the peaceful and ruminative stock coming erect, watchful, shifting with eyes sidled as they passed, the three of them paying no heed, seeming blind with purpose, passing through an ether of smartweed and stale ammonia steaming from the sunbleared chickenrun and on through the open doors of the barn and almost instantly out the other side marvelously armed with crude agrarian weapons, spade and brush-hook, emerging in an explosion of guineafowl and one screaming sow, unaltered in gait demeanor or speed, parodic figures transposed live and intact and violent out of a proletarian mural and set mobile upon the empty fields, advancing against the twilight, the droning bees and windtilted clover.

This is from the last one:

What discordant vespers do the tinker’s goods chime through the long twilight and over the brindled forest road, him stooped and hounded through the windy recrements of day like those old exiles who divorced of corporeality and enjoined ingress of heaven or hell wander forever the middle warrens spoorless increate and anathema. Hounded by grief, by guilt, or like this cheerless vendor clamored at the heel through wood and fen by his own querulous and inconsolable wares in perennial tin malediction.

Yet all this Dantean loftiness is kept perfectly separate and balanced with a rendition of Appalachian backwoods dialect so precise and evocative you can almost hear the slack-jawed yokels offering to engage you in a banjo duet.

She was at the stove, turning fire up out of the dead gray ashes. Are ye not married? she said.
No mam.
She added wood. She lifted the lid from a pot crusted with blackened orts and tilted it for inspection. Her voice hollow and chambered: Where’s your youngern.
What?
I said where’s your youngern.
I’ve not got nary.
The babe, the babe, the old woman crooned.
They ain’t nary’n.
Hah, said the old woman. Bagged for the river trade I’d judge. Yon sow their might make ye a travelin mate that’s drowned her hoggets save one.
She sat very straight in the chair. Cradled among the stovewood against the wall was a sleeping hog she had not seen. The old woman turned, a small bent androgyne gesturing with a black spoon, waiting.
That’s a lie what you said, the girl whispered hoarsely. I never. He was took from me. A chap. I’m a-huntin him.

At the risk of spoiling things a bit (though not the story itself, as it has nothing much to do with any of the preceding plot), I want to quote also the last chapter of the book, because it is so freaking amazing, and I really want to convince you to check out Cormac McCarthy. If you don’t want to read it, stop now, and go buy the book for yourself. Here it is:

IN LATER YEARS he used to meet a blind man, ragged and serene, who spoke him a good day out of his constant dark. He overtook him tapping through the bright noon dust with his cane, his head erect in that air of wonder the blind wear. Holme would go by but not the blind man has stopped him with his greeting.
How you, said Holme.
Well as ever, said the blind man. Have ye a smoke?
No sir. I ain’t.
Nary a-tall?
I don’t have the habit.
Aye, said the blind man. He unbuttoned the bib of his overalls and brought forth tobacco. Well, he said, it’s good to see the sun again ain’t it.
Holme looked at the cups of blue phlegm which regarded him. It is, he said.
Aye. After so long a time. He trickled tobacco into the slender trough of paper his fingers held and put away the pouch.
It is a right pretty day, Holme said.
The blind man smiled. I know ye, he said. I’ve spoke afore with ye.
You might of, Holme said. I don’t remember.
The blind man twisted up the ends of his cigarette and took it between his lips. Yes, he said. I’ve passed ye on these roads afore.
They’s lots of people on the roads these days, Holme said.
Yes, the blind man said. I pass em ever day. People goin up and down in the world like dogs. As if they wasn’t a home nowheres. But I knowed I’d seen ye afore.
Holme spat. I got to get on, he said.
Yes, the blined man said. Is they anything you need?
Need?
Anything you need.
I don’t need nothin.
I always like to ast.
What are ye sellin?
I ain’t sellin nothin. I’m at the Lord’s work. He don’t need your money.
It’s good he don’t need mine. I reckon you’re some kind of a preacher.
No. No preacher. What is they to preach? It’s all plain enough. Word and flesh. I don’t hold much with preachin.
Holme smiled. What have you got to give? Old blind man like you astin folks what they need.
I don’t know. Nobody’s never said.
Well how would you expect to get it.
Just pray for it.
You always get what you pray for?
Yes. I reckon. I wouldn’t pray for what wasn’t needful. Would you?
I ain’t never prayed. Why don’t ye pray back your eyes?
I believe it’d be a sin. Them old eyes can only show ye what’s done there anyway. If a blind man needed eyes he’d have eyes.
Still I believe you’d like to see your way.
What needs a man to see his way when he’s sent their anyhow?
I got to get on, Holme said.
The blind man leaned oone hand on the cane where he had rested it against his leg. He sucked on the cigarette and two jets of blue smoke slid from his thin nostrils and faded in the air. I heard a preacher ina town one time, he said. A healin preacher wanted to cure everybody and they took me up there. They was a bunch of us there all cripple folks and one old man they did claim had thowed down his crutches and they told it he could make the blind see. And they was a feller leapt up and hollered out that nobody knowed what was wrong with. And they said it caused that preacher to go away. But they’s darksome ways afoot in this world and it may be he weren’t no true preacher.
I got to get on, Holme said.
I always did want to find that feller, the blind man said. And tell him. If somebody don’t tell him he never will have no rest.
I’ll see ye, Holme said.
Aye, said the blind man. It might be we’ll meet again sometime.
Holme raised a hand in inane farewell and set off down the road again. The blind man’s cane softly tapping faded behind him. He went on, soundless with his naked feet, shambling, gracelorn, down out of the peaceful mazy fields, his toed tracks soft in the dust among the cratered shapes of horse and mule hoofs and before him under the high afternoon sun his shadow be-wandered in a dark parody of his progress. The road went on through a shadeless burn and for miles there were only the charred shapes of trees in a dead land where nothing movied save windy rifts of ash that rose dolorous and died again down the blackened corridors.
Late in the day the road brought him into a swamp. And that was all. Before him stretched a spectral waste out of which reaered only the naked trees in attitudes of agony and dimly hominoid like figures in a landscape of the damned. A faintly smoking garden of the dead that tended away to the earth’s curve. He tried his foot in the mire before him and it rose in a vulvate welt claggy and sucking. He stepped back. A stale wind blew from this desolation and the marsh reeds and black ferns among which he stood clashed softly like things chained. He wondered why a road should come to such a place.
Going back the way by which he came he met again the blind man tapping through the dust. He waited very still by the side of the road, but the blind man passing turned his head and smiled upon him his blind smile. Holme watched him out of sight. He wondered where the blind man was goind and did he know how the road ended. Someone should tell a blind man before setting him out that way.

Recent Listening: Sean Hayes

2007-08-26T20:59:00.000-07:00

Much-missed Pandora first introduced me to Sean Hayes, when it played for me his "Rattlesnake Charm," a song that is somehow fun and catchy at the same time as it's subtle and melancholic. I almost immediately downloaded it from iTunes, along with the somewhat similar "The Rain Coming Down," both from the album Alabama Chicken, and listened to them about a hundred times. After that I got distracted with Great Lake Swimmers (another Pandora discovery), a suddenly developed taste for Arcade Fire (Neon Bible is now my preferred running music), and a rediscoverd love for Ravel. The purchase of the entire album was put off, therefore, until my recent birthday, when one of my wife's gifts to me was an album of my choice from iTunes.

The strengths of Alabama Chicken rest on Hayes smooth but slightly strained tenor, which is finely suited to keeping his looping melody lines from sounding repetative. In Hayes' hands, the Bolero-like phrases of "Rattlesnake Charm" are hypnotic (which I suppose is why I could listen to it a hundred times before I ever got around to getting the rest of the album).

Comparisons to Nick Drake are well-drawn. To me the resemblance is especially apparent in "Balancing Act in Blue" and "Two Big Eyes," though I couldn't really say why.

Hayes' music is also notable, as far as I can tell from this album, for its simplicity. "Moonrise," the opening track, could hardly be more spare, at least in terms of structure and lyrics (though it does indulge in a tastefully employed saw). Two chords move the whole song, but it works. And, more to the point, every time you listen to it it seems to work even better than the time before. That's what I most like about these songs: they don't get old.

The title track might just be my favorite. It's an artful backporch jam (though again, it does indulge a bit of theatrics by opening with a short rooster crow), with a tune that sticks in your head all day. As she does on "Rattlesnake Charm," Jolie Holland adds over the melody line an amazingly tight freestyle harmony that for me provides a lot of the song's appeal.

So - check out Sean Hayes.

Recent Viewing: Bier, Von Donnersmark, Gaiman, Groening et al,

2007-08-26T19:17:00.000-07:00

Efter Brylluppet is a Danish film, written and directed by Susanne Bier and starring Mads Mikelsen (you may have some vague recollection of him as Tristan in King Arthur). Mikelsen plays an aid worker who travels from his orphanage in India back to Denmark in order to secure new funding from a wealthy businessman. From there the story unravels in ways I can't discuss without giving away the plot. The acting in this movie is incredible. Suffice it to say that I vomited saltwater from my eyes on not a few occasions.

Ditto for Das Leben Der Anderen, a German movie set in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The plot revolves around a true-believer agent of the Stazi who is spending his days spying on a writer suspected of being a dissident. The agent, a good but lonely man, is transformed by his secret observation of the writer's life. This also elicited a number of embarassing eye-ball eruptions.

After the Wedding and The Lves of Others came highly recommended by our friends Mark & Naomi, and we were delighted to find that they not only met but very much surpassed our high expectations. I now pass on their recommendations and exhort you, for the love of God and human decency, to see these movies. They are the genuine "must-see." You will not be disappointed. And if you are, well, then you're a jerk.

Not in the "must-see" category, but still delightful and recommendable, is the Neil Gaiman fairy tale Stardust, adapted for the screen and directed by Matthew Vaughn. Very funny, well-acted (with Robert DeNiro as an effeminate pirate!), and thoroughly rooted in the good-clean-fun, kids-movie-that-adults-still-love tradition of The Neverending Story and The Princess Bride. Peter O'Toole, Claire Danes, Ian McKellan, and Michelle Pfeiffer all make a contribution, as does the hilarious Ricky Gervais (from the British version of The Office). I really enjoyed this movie.

Finally, last but not least, is The Simpsons Movie. I went in somewhat afeared, as turning a half-hour show into an hour-and-a-half movie is one of those things that more often flops that succeeds. My fears were allayed in the first minute, when Homer, sitting in a theater heckling the screen, turns around to face the audience and declares that we're all suckers for paying good money to see this crap. From there it was all the best of The Simpsons. Making Arnold the prez, giving the EPA director dictatorial powers and attack helicopters - brilliant. Satisfyingly clever. Mmmm. Excellent. But I'm curious - did anyone else have a different opinion? I had not watched any Simpson episodes for a long time before seeing the movie. Perhaps I was overdue for a fix, and my craving colored my judgment.

Recent Reading: Adams, Rushdie, McCarthy, Eco, McDonough, Nisbett, Gladwell

2007-08-25T03:52:00.001-07:00

I have a distant memory of spending a random rainy afternoon listening to the BBC's radio drama version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and being persistently amused by the kooky British humor. After that my knowledge of it was tied mostly to memories of King Slender reading it during our junior year (right?), and getting the impression from him that it sort of fit thematically with his Vonnegut (RIP) and Heller. I carried around his ringing endorsement of Hitchhiker for five years, and only just this summer got around to reading it for myself. I was not disappointed (though it did get pretty long there toward the end). By the end, seriously entertained as you are by the parody and absurdity, you also find yourself seriously entertaining the book's central question: just why are we so obsessed with finding the "final ansewr" to "life, the universe, and everything?"

A few months ago I read Shalimar the Clown, and it turned me into a serious Salman Rushdie fan. Fury was my second Rushdie novel, and while it too displays Rushdie's talent for combining the fantastical with the very real and very current, it came nowhere near the scope and virtuosity of Shalimar. The plot revolves around Solanka, an Oxford professor world-famous for his creation of an educational variety show called "Little Brain," which starred his handmade puppet of the same name. That's just the beginning of the weirdness. He's just separated from his wife, for reasons he doesn't quite understand, and moved to New York, where his life is spinning out of control. I found very few of the characters in this story to be even slightly likeable, and while that is not necessarily bad in a novel, it always tends to leave me feeling like important things have been left out. That's how I felt at the end of Fury. Even though I've only read one other of his books, I get the impression that this is one of his lesser efforts. I'm still looking forward to my next Rushdie tome, because I suspect that despite the relative disappointment of Fury, someone who can write a book like Shalimar is bound to have some other interesting things to say.

One of my newest and most exciting literary discoveries is Cormac McCarthy. You may know him from his western trilogy, the first installment of which (All the Pretty Horses) was made into a film starring Billy Bob Thornton. This year his No Country for Old Men was picked up by the Coen brothers and turned into a movie of the same name, with Tommy Lee Jones heading up the cast. And most recently, Ridley Scott has announced his plans to put McCarthy's Blood Meridian up on the big screen. McCarthy is a real heavyweight; critics put him in the same category of "American masters" with Philip Roth, Don Delillo, and the like. They also compare him to classics like Faulkner and Joyce. This rare interview with the man may help whet your appetite a bit.

So far I've read only one of McCarthy's books: The Road, published in 2006. It is extremely short, unimaginably well-written, and terrifyingly evocative. The power this guy has over the English language is stunning. Nothing is wasted, nothing is left hanging, nothing is extraneous; it's about as close to perfectly written as it gets. Absolute simplicity. The plot is simple post-apocalyptic stuff: father and son walking through a burned-out America, evading cannibals, trying to survive, the normal tropes. Nothing terribly innovative on the face of it, just your usual end-of-the-world/incredible journey. But it'st the way McCarthy writes. I was sitting in blazing morning sunlight while I read this book, and all I could think of was ash and darkness and horror. It's been a while since I literally couldn't put a book down, not to get a drink or take a piss or anything. Needless to say, I highly recommend it (and so, to my undying elitist chagrin, does Oprah). Next on my list is Outer Dark, one of his older books. I'll let you all know if that one lives up to my very high expectations.

Umberto Eco is one of my favorite writers. The Name of the Rose (Camshafts review here), Foucault's Pendulum, Baudolino, The Island of the Day Before - all among the most enjoyable books on my shelf. So I was of course excited to get The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana in the literary care package my parents sent us this summer (I couldn't find it here in Korea, for some reason). The concept behind the novel is fascinating. A man awakes from a coma to find he can remember nothing about his own life, but retains an encyclopediec knowledge of literature, pop culture, and history (before his accident he was a voracious reader and a seller of rare books). He sets out to reconstruct his biography piece by piece, by going through the novels, school textbooks, comic books, and old records stored in the attic of his childhood home. The novel then is about how our knowledge of the world around us, mediated through our books and music and movies and such, is formative of our identity. As is Eco's habit and special talent, by the end of the book the story has woven itself into such a fantastic, criss-cross, self-re ferential fugue of themes and counterthemes (this time actually accompanied by color repoductions of real-life comic books and children's adventure novels) that you find yourself wondering what is reality, what is interpretation, and which realities are being interpreted in which ways.

That said, I thought the executation of the concept was not up to Eco's usual standards. When I read the other books I rarely if ever found my attention wandering. But with Queen Loana I not infrequently caught myself looking at my watch, so to speak, and wondering when it was going to finally wrap up. Maybe I was just wishing for another clever philosophically-slanted medievalist epic stocked with plenty of history and swordfights and religious wars and swashbuckling adventures, and was a little disappointed to find a very different setting filled with very different kinds of characters. Certainly I still had fun reading it; I'd just have to rate it last compared to the rest of Eco's fiction collection, which comprises a lot of really wonderful writing.

William McDonough is an architect and advocate for sustainability, and specificially for what he calls a "cradle-to-cradle" design for the post-industrial economy. He's been tapped by China to build green cities that incorporate his ideas, which basically revovled around the concept of zero-waste. I read his very interesting (and water-proof!) book on the subject while at the beach this summer. The book itself, physically, is designed as an example of his ideas. Made entirely of post-consumer plastics (no trees died in the making of this book), its design is a step toward the concept of "industrial nutrient." McDonough argues that just as there is no such thing as "waste" in nature, neither should there or need there be any such thing as "waste" in the human economy (which anyway must be integrated with the natural economy if it's to survive at all). Things should not just be "recyclable;" they should be designed with later use in mind, designed to serve as an "industrial nutrient," just as fallen leaves build up the soil that nourishes the trees that make the leaves that fall to the soil that . . . . His examples of this idea are not pie-in-the sky, melodramatic, technophilic fantasies; they all seem to be practical solutions available now. It's all very intriguing and not a little inspiring, though at the end of this and other books like it, I always find myself realizing that no matter how brilliant and practical the technical solutions to environmental problems may be, the obstacles to those solutions are political, and so the solutions themselves must be finally just as political as they are technological or behavioral. Anyway, Cradle to Cradle is worth the quick read that it is.

Two other quick reads, and I'll stop. One is Richard Nisbett's The Geography of Thought, a study of how Eastern and Western thought processes appear to fundamentally differ from one another. Nisbett's research is pointed in opposition to the thesis, to which he himself used to subcribe, that there is a universal structure to the way human begins think. It's filled with often startling examples - some of which concern not only the way East Asians and Westerners use logic, but the way we actually, physically see the world around us. I'd write more about this, but I already loaned the book out and can't scan it for examples.

Another is Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point. Gladwell wrote the much praised-and-ridiculed Blink, which King Slender has read, and from what I can tell this is in the same vein: proposing a really interesting and counterintuitive way to think about the world, and supporting it with lots of psychological experiments, historical anecdotes, current events, etc. The Tipping Point is about how change is precipitated at the margins, from unexpected places, with not one large but many tiny yet highly effective causes. Think small, not big, is the point. Change gains momentum until it reachings the "tipping point," at which it becomes something large and obvious, to which we inaccurately attribute causes and identify solutions that are also large and obvious. The most interesting example: the New York City crime epidemic of the 1990s, which suddenly and dramatically dropped when a new police commissioner instituted some innovative new policies. Instead of concentrating on catching murderers and armed robbers and the like, he began by cleaning the grafitti off the subway cars. He prosecuted farejumpers, cleaned up the streets (as in, cleaned up the junk on the streets) - a lot of other small and undramatic things that produced very dramatic results. It's the "broken windows" theory put into practice. "Broken windows" proposes this anecdote: a window is accidentally broken in some building. Passersby assume the building is abandond, and break more windows. The building eventually is abandoned, more windows are broken, more vandals move in, criminals set up shop, and the neighborhood goes to pot. Of course it's more complicated than that, in that the initial "broken window" could not have been the only factor. But that's just the point; it's never just one factor. It's a bunch of factors, like but not limited to, the broken window. Someone also decided not to fix the broken window after it was broken. It's likely that the building was already run-down in several ways; a fresh coat of paint, new siding, or whatever might have made the difference. The point is not to make a linear argument that "broken windows cause crime." The point is that cause and effect are extremely complicated and chaotic, but also that we can by observation and experiment gain some insight into their operations beyond the simplistic "A>B" that we normally employ: either the liberal "A (bad childhood) leads to B (crime)", or the conservative "A (bad choices) leads to B (crime)." Why not recognize what we intuitively know is the case: that of course it's both, and many other, factors that play into producing both bad things, like crime, and good things, like crime reduction. It leaves us feeling both a little less in control, but also a little more in control. We can "tinker around the edges" more effectively than we can attack the problem head-on. The Tipping Point is an argument for more creative and innovative approachs to social problems (as well as marketing challenges, which Gladwell sees as being much the same sort of thing).

Rest assured my friends, there's plenty more where this came from. I've also been reading some Barbara Kingsolver and Wendell Berry, who have inspired me with some new thoughts on environmental issues that I'm eager to share here on Camshafts. At the moment I'm into Aldous Huxley's Island, and soon I'll start in on my recently acquired collection of used Vonnegut novels - heretofore the near-exclusive territory of King Slender, whose insightful comments I hope to procure when I get around to posting on the subject.

Books: a bottomless treasure chest of delight. Let us all partake.

NYT on Political Theology

2007-08-20T07:11:00.000-07:00

Professor Mark Lilla (here he is in Slate) has an article in the New York Times called "The Politics of God." Us Van Heemsters and Chaplinites will be familiar with the broad-brush history of Western political theology, as it developed in different directions through Hobbes and Rousseau. He ends with a pragmatic kind of response to the criticism of Tariq Ramadan that Paul Berman advanced recently in The New Republic (which we discussed here). It's worth your time.

Jenkins' Ear

2007-08-09T21:26:00.000-07:00

Our recent discussion of Christianity was sparked by my post of a few months ago, on Philip Jenkins' The Next Christendom. Jenkins is an extremely charitable and perceptive observer of religion, and in God's Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe's Religious Crisis, he turns those talents to producing an extremely helpful reconsideration of the conventional headline wisdom about European religion, which is that secularism is the rule, Christianity is at the end of a long decline, and Islam is at the beginning of its ascendancy. Issues of immigration, terrorism, and multiculturalism are all in play, and their complexity is often underrated. Jenkins does a thorough job of bringing it to the fore. I feel like I have now a much clearer picture, not only of European issues, but also of American and global questions of religion and politics. There is a marked difference between this work and something like Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations. Huntington is evocative, but leaves you feeling like very obvious parts of the picture are missing. Jenkins resists at every turn the temptation to melodrama. The contrast between the clarity of his own insights and the obfuscation of the headlines is dramatic enough. He never blinks at the grave dangers posed by Islamist terrorism. Nor does he fail to recognize that new security measures and different kinds of public policy might be genuinely necessary in the face of this threat. And he understands that European Christianity does indeed face great challenges in the face of both secularism and Islamic immigration. But he is never at a loss for historical context, for the perspective of the longer view, or for a steady stream of the necessary and often missing facts and figures. For anyone who wants to better understand the future of Christianity, of Islam, of Western secularism, and of the relationships and conflicts being forged between them, this an indispensable resource.

A Surprise from Jurgen

2007-08-09T16:07:00.000-07:00

I'm coming to the end of Philip Jenkins' God's Continent, and was very surprised by this passage quoted from Habermas' recent Time of Transitions (April 2006):

Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [to Christianity]. Everything else is postmodern chatter.

Jenkins quotes further from the book Habermas' declaration that he is "enchanted by the seriousness and consistency" of Aquinas,

a spiritual figure who was able to prove his authenticity with his own resources. That contemporary religious leadership lacks an equally solid terrain seems to me an incontrovertible truth. In the general leveling of society by the media everything seems to lose seriousness, even institutionalized Christianity. But theology would lose its identity if it sought to uncouple itself from the dogmatic nucleus of religion, and thus from the religious language in which the community's practices of prayer, confession, and faith are made concrete.

Rollicking Rollins Review

2007-08-01T19:05:00.000-07:00

Peter Rollins’ How (Not) to Speak of God is an eloquently written (aside from the repeated and maddening substitution of “infer” for “imply”) exploration of the mystical traditions of Christianity, the revival of which the author suggests is an important aspect of the emergent church. Diverse as it is, Rollins describes the emerging church as united around the idea that whatever Christianity is, it is something one is becoming, not something one is. The mystic or at least pre-modern incarnations of Christian theology (or, in proper pomo style, “a/theology”) are a way to express what this means. Armed now with Derrida, Marion, and passing nods to Neitzche-Marx-and-Freud, Rollins sets out to recover this tradition over and against the ideological kind of Christianity that emergent is out to reform.

If this sounds to you like nothing very new and exciting – more of the same stuff we got in college from David Walsh, Brian Walsh, Leslie Newbiggen, etc. – you would be partly right. But Rollins does manage to say some interesting things in the course of his contribution to the modernity-is-the-disease, postmodernity-is-the-cure line of contemporary Christian thinking. The reason I say they are interesting is because they begged some interesting questions in such a way that rather than dismissing Rollins for failing to address them, I found myself wondering what he might say if asked about them. In other words, the book managed to engage me despite my familiarity with the arguments and my own growing but good-natured skepticism about the whole religious “thing.” Even further, it managed to make me wonder yet again whether my skepticism might have enough in common with this kind of Christian faith that I might even identify myself with it. Whether and how this kind of Christian faith can be identified with Christian religion – which Rollins tends to take for granted – is another question.

One interesting idea is Rollin’s (re)conception of revelation as concealment. Against the contention that “revelation” gives us privileged access to the mind of God, Rollins argues that what is “revealed” by revelation is precisely the fact that God is concealed, unknowable except as something unknowable. This experience of revelation-as-concealment is itself transformative. It is experientially real. This is its truth. We are transformed by the ongoing experience of discovering God as something undiscoverable. The experience itself, not objective knowledge of its content, is apparently what is important to Rollins.

This leads Rollins to say some interesting things about the content of the revelation, i.e. the Bible. The content helps us experience God as concealed by the way it presents God as both unnameable and omninameable. Scripture contradicts itself, is fragmented and broken and filled with competing voices, and this is the whole point. Revelation is not a unified system. It reveals God by concealing God behind a cacophony of rival stories. God cannot be defined ideologically by any one name. And the only “one” name given as his “true” name – YHWH – is unpronounceable.

This conception of revelation-as-concealment lies in contrast to the revelation-as-tip-of-the-iceberg idea that I’ve often heard: “Of course God is bigger than we can imagine, but we at least know something, some small part of his infinity, and that is thanks to the revelation of scripture (and nature, and tradition if you’re Catholic).” The idea is that while there are infinite depths of divinity hiding below the surface, there is still a little piece of solid ice above the waters that we can latch on to. Rollins says no – even the little piece that’s revealed is comes to us as darkness, even absence. God cannot be present to our understanding or our emotions, so he is known to us as an absence. We are transformed by longing for God’s presence. We are transformed by our desire for knowledge, not by the knowledge itself, which is something we cannot possess.

Rollins’ revival of the mystical (he would probably say “original”) concept of revelation also leads him to an equally contrarian take on “evangelism.” Instead of evangelism as a “power-discourse” of apologetics or wonderworking, where religion is presented as an answer to a question, he argues that Christian evangelism presents religion as a question that transforms the person who asks it. On this account, “the divine mystery is something to be transformed by rather than solved.” Evangelism is inviting people to engage this question with you, in an ongoing way. This for Rollins is how Jesus did missions. “Instead of religious discourse being a type of drink designed to satisfy our thirst for answers, Jesus made his teaching salty, invoking thirst.” Evangelism is not a salve for doubtfulness; it is an enthusastic purveyor of doubts. It’s supposed to engage people with their doubts for the sake of making space for faith, because faith is only possible in the midst of doubt. “Doubt” here is not just the sense that evidence is lacking and that a leap of faith is therefore required. We do not make decisions in spite of doubt. Rather, doubt allows us to make our most important choices. Faith is therefore more akin to a promise than a belief. It is more like promising to remain faithful to your spouse than believing in the theory of gravity. In faith I “promise” to believe in God (which is different from believing things about God), even if God goes away or has already gone, which is actually a genuine possibility. It might all be poppycock. Jesus might just be dead after all. Rollins tells some interesting parables about how faith is most real in the space between Good Friday and Easter – when there is no idea of the resurrection, when God is truly gone. Faith is doubt. If you have no doubts, you have no faith.

It’s clear that by “doubt,” Rollins is clearly not referring to mere academic objections to religious propositions, since religion is not a set of propositions. It is something altogether more existential (though certainly academic and existential doubt are not unrelated). Doubt is not a reaction to the divine mystery that we must struggle past in order to arrive at faith. It is rather the faithful mode of participation in that mystery. It is the means of our transformation. It is how we experience truth – not as a description of something to be believed in, but as love. Truth is love. Truths here, including religious truths and Christian truths, are made relative to love.

There was a certain kind of “kill the buddha” motif present throughout the book (he even threw in a few Buddhist parables to make the point). Meister Eckhart’s prayer “God rid me of God” figures prominantly. He uses cool turns of phrase like “a/theistic” and “a/theological” to paint his picture of a Christianity that is supposed to be “a/religious” (my term) – anti-ideological, non-systematic, pragmatic, provisional, existential, experiential, always evolving, take your pick of attractive terms. He sprinkles his reflections with intriguing stories and anecdotes, like the one about the “prodigal father,” or the invitation to imagine yourself dead and standing before a great white throne in heaven, only to discover that Lucifer has finally defeated God and now, sitting on God’s throne, presents you with the choice between worshipping him and entering paradise, or retaining allegiance to Christ and entering hell. Faith without assurance of reward. Faith without guarantee of eternal life. Faith as hope, not certitude.

All this, and the style of writing, made the book a worthwhile read (and the expository part is a quick 75 pages, the rest devoted to descriptions of liturgies employed by his church community). It returned me to some of the recurring questions I’ve occaisionally posed here on camshafts.

To me it’s intellectually exciting to portray God as a present absence and a hypernonymous mass of contradictions, revelation as “concealment,” truth as a transformative experience instead of an accurate description, doubt as the locus of faith, evangelism as the stoking of questions rather than the supplying of answers, pragmatic love as knowledge of God, etc. etc. The question begged by this portayal, however, is whether there is anything exclusively Christian about it. One can imagine all this being said, with different words, by a Buddhist or a humanist or a Sufi Muslim. It seems to me that mystics, philosophers, and generally broad-minded people of different religions tend to have more in common with each other than with the dogmaticians and fundamentalists of their own faiths. What does this imply?

Perhaps it implies what Rollins says, which is that we must distinguish the way we believe something from what we believe. What I still cannot get clear on is whether The Way is Christianity; whether Christianity itself, with all the things that are supposed to be necessary to its definition (like scriptures and traditions and creeds and such) are able to sustain that distinction; and whether if it can sustain that distinction, it is exclusively so capable.

From the beginning Rollins firmly rejects both absolutism and relativism in favor of pragmatic, contextual, one-on-one engagement with individual people. This is not because he has some third philosophical way to recommend in their stead. It’s just that he thinks the questions to which absolutism and relativism give answers are not very interesting to begin with. Why, I hear him asking, do you need “the truth” about life, the universe, and everything (and relativism is just an absolutist truth flipped on its head)? It’s not about that. It’s about engaging people lovingly as individuals. And there is no “truth” that gives you a once-and-for-all accurate definition of what this love is. Its nature can only be discovered in experience, by loving and being loved, and that discovery is part of what love is.

I find this compelling. But it is also quite radical for anyone who believes that there is some revealed “tip of the iceberg” on which we must necessarily rest ourselves and which we can definitively name “Christianity” and “the truth.” Appropriately, toward the end of Rollins’ expository section he includes a summary of the film Amen, the story of which points up this radicality. He says:

One of the most powerful and controversial cinematic explorations of this double reading [scripture and tradition read and interpreted always in light of our context and experience] is found in Costa-Gavras’ film Amen. The film itself explores the failure of the Catholic and Protestant Churches when confronted with the terror of the death camps during the Second World War. We are presented with two religious figures, a Protestant youth pastor (Ulrich Tukur) and a Catholic priest (Mathieu Kassovitz), who each attempt to inform their respective religious leaders about the genocide. In response the churches struggle to retain their ignorance of the situation, wishing to keep their innocence by closing their eyes to the horror.
The response of the priest is of particular interest. At one point he wonders aloud to the Cardinal (Michel Duchaussoy) whether it would be possible for every Christian in Germany to convert to Judaism in order to stop the horror, for the Nazis couldn’t possibly condemn such a huge number of powerful and socially integrated people at that stage in the war. The idea is, of course, utterly rejected. Then, in complete frustration, and with a crushing sense of obligation towards the persecuted, the priest takes his own advice. In tears he turns from that which he loves more than life itself – his own faith tradition – and becomes a Jew. By taking on the Jewish identity he suffers with the persecuted, voluntarily taking his place on the trains that run to Auschwitz.

So, Rollins concludes, it was his tradition that itself demanded that he give up his tradition. This allows for a nice riff on the “killing the Buddha” theme (the usual question is “would you die for your beliefs?” but perhaps we should also ask, “would you kill your beliefs?”).

The fact that this is a possibility, and in fact may be a necessity in certain contexts, implies a thoroughgoing relativization of belief to practice, of truth to love, of Christian religion itself to individual people and our encounter with the world around us.

The radicality is compelling. But after feeling so compelled, I then find myself in another position altogether, grappling with possible logical consequences or at least possibilites. Faced with a refreshingly reformist, flexible, and extremely attractive portrayal of Christian faith as something to be loved and cherished not because it is objectively true but because it is transformingly beautiful, I at first move to embrace it, and then I am struck by the thought that there is never only one beautiful thing. There are always many, and they are not exclusive. Where does this leave the potential Christian? Rollins’ book is filled with intimations of a deep love of diversity, contradiction, and individuality. The idea is that you cannot genuinely know the beauty of one thing, one name of God, one experience of love, if you become obsessed with the idea that it is the only beautiful thing in the world. So how does the Christian affirm the beauty of other things, of other transforming, non-ideological experiences of truth-as-love – not just other Christian denominations, which Rollins allows for, but other religions, and non-religions and anti-religions and whatever else you want to call the stuff that different people think about? Here he is more reticent.

I suppose that the only answer is to take Christianity to the next metaphysical level, the next Emersonian circle. Christianity then is the “religion” that recognizes the beauty of all diverse experiences, the supremacy of love, the relativity of truth to practice, the relativity of religion itself, including the Christian one. It is self-critical. It deconstructs itself. It is open-ended. It is the synthesis. It is dialectical, pragmatic, the iconographic question that opposes the idolatry of “the answer.” It is not only a recommender of paradox; its content, the content of scripture itself, is paradoxical. Its revelation is a revelation-as-concealment. It frees you of obligations to uncover “the Truth.”

This move is always partly satisfying and partly disappointing, even if it is also inevitable. But suppose I could accept its legitimacy, at least provisionally. Christianity as a religion relativizes itself and disappears into a “hypernonymity,” just like its God.

Why then should I call myself a Christian? Or, if I do call myself a Christian, can I see it as an identity tied to certain contexts, not an absolute assurance of salvation, which is guaranteed aforehand by the grace that allows us to “believe in the right way,” not by “right beliefs”? Is Christianity nothing more than the discovery of grace, the freedom to dispense with obsessing over the answers? And if I am frustrated, disgusted, uninspired, or bored by much that is called “Christianity,” is that not a good reason to divest myself of the name, perhaps (if you like) for the sake of Christianity itself? In order to keep my Christian faith, which embraces all beautiful things, sees people as individuals before they are ideologically marked, and refuses to reduce God and truth to anything (or rather reduces them both to love), can I in everyday life and relationships do precisely that: embrace all beautiful things, treat people as individuals, and refuse reductionism at every turn?

Or, conversly, since in this kind of Christianity it doesn’t ultimately matter anyway, only love matters, love which works through experience, can I continue to call myself a Christian despite my suspicion that I am not one? Can I call myself a Christian with people who call themselves Christians but mean something quite different, in order to embrace the beauty they have to offer, and to avoid reducing my faith this time not to a set of doctrines, but to a principled rejection of them?

Hah. And all this ridiculously convoluted interrogative regression is exactly why I often think it might not always be helpful to talk about all this stuff in the first place. I find myself inspired by Rollins book. I enjoy the poetry of it. I have a mystical bent. Not everyone does. So what?

Of course Rollins has an answer for that, in the idea that his mysticism is not about changing what we believe, but rather changing the way we believe it. I suppose this means that the fundamentalists can keep their beliefs, as long as they understand them as one language among others (in which case they would no longer be “fundamentalists” per se). Maybe this is possible; it’s also possible that the content of some beliefs cannot survive a change in the way they are believed.

The question is, what does it mean if we understand Christianity as only a form, to which the content is ultimately incidental? Is Christianity only a matter of “believing in the right way,” not also a set of right things to believe? What is the relationship between the form and the content: is it possible that the content of some beliefs cannot survive a change in the way they are believed? Is the content of Christian revelation and tradition a set of things we find ourselves talking about, a story provisionally useful for guiding us as we become more skilled in the right way of belief, but which in principle may be changed and expanded and contracted in response to the demands of love and the outworking of human experience? Can we read our novels and have our conversations and do our science and think of all those novels, conversations, and scientific discoveries as also being revelation? Is Christianity really the thing you can and maybe even must give up in order to keep it (here with the obvious nod to Jesus’ statement on losing and keeping our souls)?

Christianity, enabling and requiring such thoroughgoing honesty with ourselves and each other that eventually a Christian is compelled to ask some hard questions about what being a Christian even means - and whether it means anything at all besides the freedom-bringing experience of change and transformation that is wrought by engaging those hard questions? Change that takes us beyond the thing that made the change possible? Change that kicks the ladder out from underneath? Change that decenters us and leaves us peaceful and content?

I Had Become Americas Delightful Exotic Doll

2007-07-30T10:53:00.000-07:00

A character in the story, "Ineluctable Modality of the Virginal" by Rick Moody just reminded me a lot of myself - so, since I needed something to post about anyway, I'll do that. I owe a lot of the thoughts here to him.

My mind is possibly the most disorganized thing about me. That's a lot to say considering that at least two girls in high school, out of pity, (I believe it was Madhavi Vehmapauli and...maybe Stephanie Ramirez (nay Bobalik), brought binders and folders and what nots, and organized my crumbled, disheveled mess of a backpack into an easily accessible, easily understandable, meticulously detailed study accessory. Understand, they didn't do it together, there were actually two times where it was bad enough to drive two individual incredibly kind and benevolent women to this point. And I don't think either effort lasted long (though not for lack of effort..well, sort of for lack of effort - but not for lack of desire for effort - you know? I really wanted to not be a lazy maloke...really).

Anyway, I've always been envious of my sister's mental capabilities. To this point, she can still run through Pete's Dragon and Winnie the Pooh in their entirety, and probably the rest of the movies we watched in the Cancer ward together as kids as well. I mean, she nails the musical intros, every line - everything. She would CRUSH any of those new karaoke/don't forget the lyrics type shows - if she listened to more top 40 as they're bound to role. If PAX or something comes out with a Christian Music version, or Disney does a mock-up or Richard Simmons does "Sweating while Not Forgetting the Lyrics of the Oldies" - seriously, I'd take any odds on her to win in those musical fields of her choice.

Yet, even though I can't remember the way home the 40th time I make the voyage..I think I also have a pretty ridiculously good memory, for some things. I can remember odd conversations from years ago with the right trigger, I think with some effort, I could almost map them perfectly. I memorize things pretty easily as well, by thinking for however long it takes to come up with some individual trigger for each one - some image, some rhyme, some acronym, something to call up the rest of whatever it is.

It's sort of an annoying way to remember things, though. First of all - it's completely dependent upon something triggering it. It's all up there, everything everyone has ever said, every motivation I had, and that I perceived (correctly or not) in others. I remember things about people, anecdotes, things they said, almost perfectly.

And that's really cool, except it isn't easily recalled (so maybe it's not better than everyone else..I don't even know). I'm possibly the sloppiest thinker ever. In discussions, be they about what to do for the night, or the gossomer moment of ontology (ok..that was in the Moody book I just put down..I've never really talked about that..nor am I certain what it is) - I arrive at a point by circulation, I go around and around seemingly unrelated things. I can't stay on point, I exceed and overflow.

This has the negative effect that I am not very good at winning arguments (since I think of every burning example in my favor 3 hours later) - nor am I very good at recovering and picking up or reiterating a past depthful conversation. Everything, every thought, is completely contingent upon what's going on at that time in that place...I can't do it again. This is in everything - I don't know how to recall events, even big, once-in-a lifetime beautiful things.

When I got back from a high school choir trip to England, my mom asked me how it was, and I said "It was good" and just sort of stared at her. I had taken hardly any photos (except for about 100 while climbing around the fells, where I used "Oh man, this is just beautiful - I gotta stop and take some pictures" repeatedly in order to flimsily mask a desire to stop and rest every 20 steps). I couldn't even recall more than 60% of the places I had just been the week prior. Luckily, the B-Ram came over the next night with all his freshly developed pictures, his diary, and his incredibly detailed recall, so all was not lost for mom, but, that's just not how I remember things.

I DO remember how ridiculously over-bearing and obnoxious I was in trying to get certain people not to drink or smoke,

I do remember the ridiculously crazy infestation of bees in my room (It's always my room), which led to me getting the incredibly pimp pad with massive space and jacuzzi, which I then gave up to a group of girls who were stuck with 4 girls in about 2 cubic feet in their other room. I do remember altenately feeling proud and stupid for that move. That room was amazingly awesome to have to myself for..like an hour.

I do remember finding Nate and some others on the roof smoking.

The time two of my friends were "hooking up" but one of my friends was dating someone else, and I was obnoxiously overbearing on that issue too - and then, after repeatedly making a nuisance on the issue, and insisting over and over again that they wait until she could tell her boyfriend (which was none of my business) - I had listened to this Christian band the night before who I really dug - and thus went up and said "HEY! Have you two ever heard of this really great band, THE WAITING????" Which had to seem like the most obvious elbow jab in history, and was greeted with every sort of annoyance - but was totally innocent.

I remember Nate fell asleep on my shoulder on the way home, and it was awkward, but I think I reciprocated after a while..which is weird, cause while I always thought of him as the peak of coolness, we weren't that close.

I remember Mr. Stevenson smashing bottles on the stage after he'd found a bunch of people drinking.

I remember overhearing B. Wiggs (who, in a recurring theme with most of the people on that trip - I sort of looked to as the peak of cool in the school) talking about having hooked up with some French girl or a maid or something, and being envious,

I remember this crazy man I saw on a street corner after one of the musicals we went to, He kept licking his tongue all crazy and sticking his fingers up like bull horns and sort of charging at me, poking me and going back to repeat this process.

I remember many nights of Euchre with Dan, Josh, Ben and that kid from Swartz Creek - Nick?

I remember jumping in a puddle and splashing muddy water all over Josh, for which he said he'd repay me one day - and has yet to do so (THOUGH I think screaming WILL SOMEONE PLEASE MAKE OUT WITH MY FRIEND ROBB? HE'S NEVER REALLY KISSED A GIRL while we were walking around the Austin City Limits festival might have qualified).

I remember getting locked out of the dorms after seeing a musical with a 3-4 others and opting to eat at Pizza Hut.

I, of course, remember completely missing the bus to one of our concerts, then swimming through a sea of bagpipe conventioners, blaring at full blast, to finally scream that I needed a taxi, which resulted in an awesome taxi ride with Mr. Boyce.

I remember Mr. Boyce talking to this man about his dogs for like an hour, and thinking that I wanted that sort of ability, to just have the most personable conversations ever.

I remember the sheep crap all over the Easter Island rip off.

I remember getting off in Stratford-Upon-Avon, everyone going to various pubs, and then getting back on the bus - except the Bobaliks - I think they payed homage to Will.

I remember the fish and chips in that one city with the crazy sheer face cliff with all the buildings in it being the only ones I enjoyed on the whole trip.

I remember that Robin Hejhal and others got tatoos there.

I remember losing in the semi-finals of the euchre tournament to frickin' Noelle Wershky and her dad. I think I was actually a little hacked off.

I remember that sad club where we were staying, where there was just this DJ playing random songs - and absolutely no one in the building. Finally, some of us danced, because he was rather pitiful.

I remember that in the front of that club was this TV with a sega and FIFA..what..98 I guess? I remember no one knowing how to play, and lots of throw ins somewhat ruining the original awesomeness.

I remember everyone geeked about buying the Beastie Boys "Hello Nasty" several weeks before it came out.

I remember being geeked to buy rare Delirious (ahem..Christian Rock band) albums that couldn't be found in the states.

I remember being surprisingly good at getting around in the subway.

I remember everyone thinking Mr. Stevenson and Mr. Boyce were going to jail after we started singing impromptu in ..what? St. Martin's in the Fields or St. Paul's or something while touring..since we weren't scheduled. All the security guards pacing and going wild as we sang through Ave Maria.

I remember Mr. Stevenson forgetting to do both my solos in our farewell concert..where my family could have heard them.

I remember Ben travelling back with a realistic as possible James Bond imitation BB Gun and a huge bottle of Wine that had been a present in his carry on - and not getting any questions.

OK - this wasn't the intention going in, so I'll stop - but it'd be relatively easy to list 50 things more. This is how I things do. Here's 40 embarassing moments I posted 4 years ago in an effort to expunge, but there, as here, I stopped only as convenience to the reader.

The point, then, is this - THIS is how my memory works. These are things I remember. And I see the looks on people's faces, and I feel the same crushing embarassment or overwhelming happiness or whatever else that I felt at the time all over again. Ask me what we did in England, or what all I did in college or high school or here in Korea - and honestly, I haven't done much, and I can't recall much - I don't remember the things I've done half as much as just the things that happened.

My memory doesn't stay on point, just as I don't in conversation. It exceeds and it overflows. But, I think this is good too. I think (and this is from Moody basically) that "Staying on point" is just a way of dictating the terms of a discussion. If my memory stayed on point, I could tell you chronologically how my trek through the UK went. Instead - I remember a lot of fun stories that would be lost in trying to remember what is supposed to come next, in trying to set barriers and limits on what the terms of the conversation are.

If you let the point vacillate in this way - you see what other sides of things look like. Conversation becomes chaotic and disorganized, but it's also open and vulnerable. It's not efficient or timely, but it is a lot of fun and random, which gives the possibility for viewpoints to be seen and understood that otherwise couldn't.

Of course, if the whole world worked this way..no problems would ever get solved, and what little progress there was would be quite slow going..but at least we'd all be aware that such was the case...haha.

Egotism and Belief

2007-07-24T06:49:00.001-07:00

The following comments were inspired by two events: (1) a fairly recent discussion on Thinknet, and (2) several similar quotes I happened to read over the past week. First, the discussion:

Not long ago a member of Thinknet posted that he had significant doubts about the infallibility of the Christian scriptures. He further added that he feels the scriptures are best read as reflecting the views of a particular culture at a particular time, but not, necessarily, reflecting the unique will of the divine.

If you don’t know what Thinknet is, it’s an email listserve where only the nerdiest of the nerdy Calvinists gather to discuss arcane ideas, awkwardly air out their dirty personal laundry, and, at times, pounce on anyone who expresses a dissenting opinion. This is exactly what occurred when the aforementioned expressed his doubts. Immediately a firestorm of criticism poured down upon him. Most of the criticism, however, was the same: if you don’t believe the scriptures are 100% infallible, then you are arrogant.

Take this comment for example, which is pulled directly from the listserve (without corrections added):

“If the transcendent God of Scripture is not the foundational point of your religion, something else - something imminent within creation – is…It easy to see where this comes to play presently. Rather than Christ revealed in Scripture, one's archê becomes one's own self - standing some 2000 years after the fact judging Scripture by one's own sceptical apparati. Those silly Judeo-Christian fables couldn't possibly be true, so one must concoct some explanation that is more palatable to one's taste. We've come so far, we know so much more - we're so much more Enlightened. Add some higher-critical spice, and it even sounds nice. But C.S. Lewis had this approach nailed when it named it, "chronological snobbery".But one hasn't really achieved freedom from whatever one is fleeing. One has simply found a safer idol - made in one's own image, and devoid of any real demands on one self. No more lion of Judah; one prefers the slippers and cardigan of one's own study. But this is not even a lateral move, in truth - it's a devious descent. One has not advanced beyond "primitive" religion. One has become, in fact, more primitive. More's the pity.”

Thus the kind of charitable readership I’ve come to expect on Thinknet. Equating doubt with egotism, however, is not unique to lonely neo-Calvinists typing away in front of computer screens, of course. There’s a long history of this line of thinking. Augustine used a similar argument in the late 4th century when he confronted the “heretics and Donatists,” writing that their heterodox conclusions resulted from the fact that they were “swollen with hateful pride and with the self-assertion of evil contradiction.”

I was surprised to read in a recent post on this blog that Thomas Merton also operates under the assumption that one is either an egotist or a believer. Or, as he puts it, one either has “a human, limited, external faith in human society with all its inert fear of solitude and on the need to “belong” to the group and to accept its standards with passive acquiescence. Or, in the second place, a faith in what we do not “see,” a faith in the transcendent and invisible God, a faith that goes beyond all proofs.”

The latter option, Merton asserts, arises from a “natural awareness,” which means, then, that if one doesn’t accept this natural conclusion it is because it has been displaced by a hubristic society or an egotistical individual. We’re back to the insights of the disgruntled neo-Calvinist above; “One has simply found a safer idol - made in one's own image.”

I think these particular Christians react this way because they (1) operate with a type of foundationalism, albeit a fideistic one, which states that one must get their metaphysical ducks in a row before proceeding to any other activity, or that any other activity presupposes having one’s metaphysical ducks in a row, and (2) the false idea that asking for reasons presupposes a faith in “Reason.” I’d type more, but this is too long already. Suffice it to say, I disagree with them.

The Dog Gone Girl is Mine..

2007-07-17T11:36:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the rather..misleading title..but..has anyone ever listened to this Michael Jackson song? IT'S FANTASTIC!!! I want to meet the girl that Paul McCartney and Michael fought over..that's who I want to meet.

Ok - here's my actual post, to which I hope to garner many a response from you folk.

It is merely a quick thought, inspired by Lamb, which was authored by Christopher Moore..a mostly comic novelist with occasional deep thoughts! Most of this is directly from the book, I gather the thoughts here to ruminate about it more later, and to perhaps get others thoughts on it:

Compassion, moderation and humility are the three jewels of the tao.

Compassion leads to courage, moderation leads to generosity, and humility leads to leadership.

But the tao values inaction. Contemplation, steadiness, conservatism. Thus the great wall - China could have built an army to defend itself for a fraction of the cost - but a miles and miles long wall is the defense of a country of inaction.

The tao hits home on the three jewels - but misses here. One can't be free without action - a wall holds people out as well as in.

Not action as in work - action as in change. You have to let tradition fall sometime, you have to take action, sometimes Jews have to eat bacon.

There's no such thing as a conservative hero.

I (King Slender) think this is true. I think tradition must be taken as guidance, but that they have a hard time when speaking to our day-to-day situations - and any hard and firm rule leads to inaction in circumstances where compassion, humility and moderation are called for. Tradition is an incredible learning tool, one to be studied and incorporated into our thoughts - but it is not intended to provide easy answers for our problems today. It's intended to show us how to find those answers by focusing on those aspects of humanity that allow us to love - humility, moderation and compassion.

That's really cheap philosophizing..but it's really late, and I just wanted to put something down to come back to later.

On Global Warming

2007-07-10T21:27:00.000-07:00

Last night, in conclusion to long-running battle of words and emailed articles that I was failing to win, I sent my mom a surrender note conceding victory to her opinion on global warming. For many moons I’ve been trying to convince her that there is no reason to trust the opinion of Rush Limbaugh and the American Enterprise Institute over the conclusions endorsed by most of the world’s climatologists; that there is no reason to suspect scientists and activists of having ulterior motives without being equally suspicious of the motives of oil executives and presidents who used to be oil executives; that there is no good reason to assume every environmentalist is a communist and a liberal; that for many good reasons environmentalists are no longer (if they ever were) a solid cancerous mass of godless America-hating communist ideologues, and now include many ardent capitalists and even some evangelical christians; and that for all these reasons and more she should admit that global warming is a serious problem for which we human beings are partly to blame, open up to suggestions about how to deal with it, and maybe even consider how her own lifestyle affects her environment and make changes accordingly (which would require discarding her strange belief that recycling is for wierdos). I’m convinced that I made some pretty strong arguments.

However, I’m now just as convinced that they haven’t done any good, and probably never will. So I step back and reconsider. Some of the counter-arguments she threw my way – dissident scientists with their alternative theories, humorous newspaper articles from the 1970s worrying over “global cooling” (which really did sound strangly familiar), reminders about the possibilities of groupthink, mass hysteria, fearmongering, and the history of minorities proven right by history – were genuinely solid enough that not infrequently I found myself thinking of the conversation as a real debate between genuine opponents instead of as a continuous running of my head against a brick wall. At least they conjured up sufficient doubt to allow me now to concede the point for tactical reasons.

My willingness to dispense with the argument – an argument most people see as a matter of the utmost importance – stems from a conclusion I’ve reached about this whole “global warming” business. My conclusion is that it’s ok not to care about it. With your eco-conscious friends, sure – keep on preaching to the choir. But in the political arena, it shouldn’t be the main event.

First, my mom is right to call our attention to the fact that groupthink is responsible for some things that in retrospect are really, really crazy. The whole global cooling scare of the 1970s – while I’m not sure it was quite of the same weight and magnitude as the current state of global warming awareness – is not an uncompelling argument. I’m not saying that there is any reason per se to doubt the scientists and their consensus, to distrust the motives of the activists, or anything like that. I’m just saying that, as a matter of principle, we must admit the possibility that things which are obviously right at the moment can always seem obviously wrong when we look back on them in fifty years. A little perspective is all, or at least respect for those who urge us to grant the possibility that perspective is not necessarily illegitimate, even when considering supposedly world-ending catastrophes.

Second, it’s true that a lot of what’s communicated in the media about global warming amounts to unhelpful fear-mongering. Connecting the climate crisis to Hurricane Katrina, the Australian drought, and every other random terrible newsmaking weather event might be a good way to make things simple and grab the public’s desperately needed attention, but it’s also inaccurate and manipulative. Is the problem so great that it justifies sloppy journalism and scare tactics? Maybe, but then so is terrorism: a few suicide bombers with nuclear-weapons is just as epicly dangerous as rising sea levels, and a graphic artist’s rendition of what their effects might look like is equally effective at galvanizing the people’s support for (dis)proportionately dramatic responses from the government (Iraq War? PATRIOT Act?). It is inconsistent to oppose scare-mongering when it comes to terrorism, while using it or at least looking the other way when it helps to raise awareness of global warming.

But third and finally, it just doesn’t seem necessary to make global warming the centerpiece of environmental education, awareness-raising, policy-making, and problem-solving. It’s not just that there are some problems with the manner in which global warming has been made the overarching cause celebre for the environmental movement. It’s that the problematic practices that contribute to global warming could be addressed and changed without ever referring to it. As I consider my failed conversation with my mom, I think this would be a better way to go.

Global warming is a big, far-away problem. Sure, I’ve been seeing pieces detailing how some community somewhere in the world is being directly affected by changed temperatures, advancing deserts, declining species, less or more water, etc. These are all interesting. But they are few, and again, the connection cannot be positively established. By and large global warming disbelievers don’t have very convincing reasons to change their opinions, other than the fact that they are in the minority – which can as easily be taken as a badge of pride as a sign that you’re mistaken. So it’s difficult to argue “the facts,” because (a) neither of you are scientists, and you don’t really have any idea what you’re talking about; and (b) the facts, if they exist, are really not very relevant to daily life. They’re not appreciable. In the end, they’re speculative. They may be the very best and most reliable speculations we have, but their speculativeness makes them fair game for anyone inclined (for good or bad reasons) to doubt their legitimacy.

Meanwhile, there are lots of environmental problems – terrible, awful, possibly civilization-ending problems – that are the furthest thing from speculative. The yellow dust we get here in the spring is not a speculation. The carcinogenic air of a Chinese city is not a forecast generated by some climatologist’s computer. The Asian Brown Cloud and the damage it’s done to South Asian agriculture is not a “maybe.” African desertification is not a figment of some wacko tree-hugger’s imagination. The depletion of world fish stocks and the horrendous loss of biodiversity are not virtual models of the future easily improved by slightly altering the data set.

These are all there to be seen. They are facts here and now, undisputable and extremely significant. They are part of the overall picture that a lot of people are drawing together under the banner “global warming.” And if global warming does it for you – if global warming is big and scary and apocalyptic enough to convince you that these environmental problems matter – then that’s fine and good. My point is, it shouldn’t take global warming to tell us that we need better ways to integrate our society and economy with the environment that sustains them.

Why should we (I) expect people (my mom) to be convinced by the spectre of global warming when they’re not convinced by the spectre of dying, overdeveloped Chesepeake Bays and dried-up Colorado Rivers? Don’t get me wrong. Global warming is probably real, and its terrifying reality can be a great motivator, and good for it. But really, what it should be motivating us to do is to tackle all those up-close and personal problems I just mentioned – the ones we can see even if we don’t believe in global warming at all. So again, I conclude – if you want to care about the environment, it’s just not necessary to care whether global warming is real or not. You can spend all day pouring down a long checklist of these problems, go to bed without having come even close to the entry for “climate crisis,” and do more to address that crisis than all the speculative handwringing and left-handed vote-casting in the world. All the things we should be doing for quite obvious and less apocalyptic reasons are the same things we should be doing if we want to keep the planet from frying and flooding and melting into a noxious green-skied ocean.

In short: if it’s not even necessary for people who care about the environment to care about global warming in order to care about the environment, then it seems foolish to try and use global warming to convince people who don’t care about the environment to care about the environment.

Transformers: A Review

2007-07-10T07:10:00.000-07:00

Transformers figured prominently in my rearing. Every Saturday morning I would watch it, and the fairly long running show bridged the age gap between my older brother and I, so our love for robots who transformed into Volkswagen Beetles was something we could share in common, or at least fight over. Transformers also presented one of my earliest experiences of trying to navigate appropriateness: In my fairly sheltered youth I recall being mortified when, during a battle scene at the climax of Transformers: The Movie (cartoon version) Grimlock, a Tarzan sounding robot who turns, for reasons that escape me, into a Tyrannosaurus Rex, declares, “Grimlock kick butt.” What must my friend’s parents think? Will they jerk it from the VCR? How will I ever know what happens to Optimus after ingesting the matrix!?

How times have changed. Two nights ago I finally went to see Transformers, and 20 minutes in found myself surrounded by children and parents sharing a good laugh over masturbation jokes and language that, if it were spoken to the Transformers of my youth, would no doubt have been met with, “Grimlock feel awkward.” Nevertheless, I wasn’t offended and I thought the several complaints made by conservative Christian parents which I heard leading up to and following my viewing are overblown. It was actually a different part of the new movie that I found most intriguing, and most unlike its predecessor: the movie’s complete saturation in contemporary politics.

Before I continue, let me be clear that the CGI is incredible in this movie, and to my mind it even surpasses Spiderman II, which I think up to this point held the title. The cartoony faces of The Matrix trilogy are gone, and the interaction between the CGI and real life buildings, cars and actors is seamless. The movie is quite a spectacle and pure escapism. Which is why its political moments come as such a (perhaps unwelcome) contrast.

Between sequences of battling robots and unnecessary subplots we see the Democratic platform practically laid out before us. First off, the movie opens with Marines who, beyond their control, are thrust into a dangerous situation wherein they are given little support by the executive branch representatives and who are kept in the dark as to the true nature of their enemy and their government’s knowledge of it. They are portrayed as the always courageous and disciplined servants of the state who just want to do their job and go home, but whose intentions are always made more difficult by those with a higher pay grade. And the primary members of this latter group belong to the highly secretive sector 7—a governmental agency classified even more off-limits than “Top Secret.” It’s the secretive government masterminds that have ultimately caused all the problems by keeping their knowledge of the robot threat under wraps, but it’s the marines that have to lengthen their military service to accommodate their government’s ineptitude. One can almost hear the Transformer world’s opposition party say, “I’m against the robot war, but I support the troops!”

It’s interesting that this covert agency has taken the lead and completely displaced the president, who only appears in a two-second scene on Air Force One where he’s seen lounging and requesting ding dongs. Meanwhile, the nation is on the verge of destruction. One will recall that previous alien invasion movies like Independence Day saw the president take the lead, but in Transformers the Secretary of Defense is calling the shots, subduing his leader with cream-filled snacks.

Bay’s most potent blast of political commentary, however, is not directed at the presidency or his minions, but at the American public. After the movie, during the credits, the patient moviegoer is rewarded with some extra footage, the longest of which is a pseudo-news interview with the fictional parents of the movies hero, the young Sam Witwicky. During the interview the two parents look blankly at the camera and ensure us with sincere ignorance that the government would never hold out information from us and that we would do well just to trust them because they have our best interests in mind.

For Bay the greatest threat to American security comes not from an inept government, but the dumb middle class that put them there and fails to hold them accountable because they’re too busy drinking and doing yard work. It’s a bold move, one that seemed completely lost on the crowd of spectators as they laughed at the two dimwitted baby boomers. However, I miss the first Transformers movie, the one that was just about battling robots, the one that didn’t take potshots at the people paying $8.75 to see it.

Everyman Dies

2007-07-09T18:15:00.000-07:00

Philip Roth’s short novel Everyman is an intimate story of death – what the main character calls “life’s most disturbing intensity.” It is death as a physical, medical, slow/fast-moving affliction of old age, something terribly concrete and unsuited to all the euphamistic flights of poetic fancy we use to convince ourselves that it is something noble and profound. We tell each other that death is “what makes us human,” or that it’s reassuringly “natural” (as if natural was necessarily good), but now that everyman is looking at it every time he looks at his face in the mirror and feels the dry weight of his own deteriorating body, it is clear that “once one has tasted life, death does not even seem natural.”

The book is about the decline of the body as the unavoidable, universal human experience. There are degrees, of course; some people live to their deaths with perfect health, others spend their last days in intractable pain. But every man and woman, unless they are spared by dying suddenly and unexpectedly while still young, is confronted by the sheer felt presence of finality hovering over their minds and bones and organs.

It is also about the regrets and nostalgias that overcome the dying everyman. To me, Roth’s character has a bit too many dramatic regrets to make him a convincing “everyman” – multiple affairs, children who won’t speak to him, all conspiring to make his last days lonely and shut off. The terror of his experience was partly derived from circumstances having less to do with death itself than with how he had lived his life. Roth might have been even more successful in conveying the starkness of death if he had surrounded his dying person with loving friends and family. If Roth’s aim was to describe death as horrible per se, he would have done better to give his character supports that could in no way reduce that horror.

Of course, it may be that his goal was actually to describe not the horror of death in general, but the horror of a death closing on a life dominated by regrets instead of joys. I came away much more aware of the reality of my own death, but also very hopeful that, if I continue to avoid doing things that I will really regret on my deathbed, it will be a less unpleasant experience for me. But the title makes me think he really was trying to get us to think more attentively about old age and dying, not just about old age and dying as experienced by someone for whom youth and health produced mostly fleeting pleasures and pained memories. Insofar as this is the case, I thought the novel made its point less convincingly than it might have.

But the descriptions of old age and of the thought processes of a man for whom the hospital has become unbearably familiar are nevertheless deeply affecting. Roth’s everyman speaks of “the prospect of coming steadily to be dominated by medical thoughts to the exclusion of everything else;” of “the aimless days and the uncertain nights and the impotently putting up with the physical deterioration and the terminal sadness and the waiting and waiting for nothing;” of “the rage and despair of a joyless sick man unable to steer clear of prolonged illness’s deadliest trap, the contortion of one’s character;” of wondering if “the best of old age” is nothing more than “longing for the best of boyhood;” of the pressure “to prevent your mind from sabotaging you by its looking hungrily back at the superabundant past;” of the times when there is “nothing but the pain,” and “pain makes you so alone;” of the “longing for the last great outburst of everything;” and of the constant awareness of “a stone, the heavy, sepulchral, stonelike weight that says, Death is just death – it’s nothing more.”

Roth is yet another depressing American novelist – though not as depressing as Franzen, and I think less cynical – but here he persuades you that depressing is the only way to write about death and dying. Varnishing it with false sentiments and protests about its mystery and nobility only make us less able to die well, as far as that is possible. We must see it for what it is – a time of fear and pain and nauseating anticipation – if we are to in any way deal with it for what it is. Maybe we can master our fear of death; maybe we can avoid living the sort of life that makes death even more fearful; but we cannot avoid the physical, material reality of dying itself. So perhaps the good, the “edification” that comes from reading a novel like Everyman is that it helps us confront that reality while we still have some strength to fight the mental battle it enjoins. For we will soon discover that “[o]ld age is a battle . . . if not with this, then with that. It’s an unrelenting battle, and just when you’re at your weakest and least able to call up your old fight.”

Recent Reading: Franzen, Laughlin, Spence, Conrad

2007-07-01T18:41:00.000-07:00

I left off my post on Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason with a teaser for Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, a viscerally depressing book that I was extremely glad to finish. That is pretty much all I have to say about it. I am glad I read it. It its own negatively edifying way it was a worthwhile literary experience, but the further I went into the story, the more often I found myself assaulted by a low and cynical mood. It is hard to explain. I’m sure others read it without this experience. I think that of late the ability of books to directly affect my mood has increased, and this book did a real number on me. Its relentless potrayal of broken promises, thwarted intentions, self-deception, dishonesty, “anhedonia,” and stifling inauthenticity got on my nerves, eloquent and perceptive as it was. Little good happened. In the end, humiliating death. It was 500 pages of tightly argued emotional claustrophobia.

And now, for something completely different! Laughlin’s A Different Universe was the polar opposite (an appropriate metaphor, no doubt) of “emotionally claustrophobic.” Though I’ve always had a penchant for pop-science, cleverly written pop-theoretical-physics is a new genre for me. Thoroughly enjoyable, not because I understood all the physics stuff, but because all the physics stuff was so mind-boggling, and so directly connected to some interesting philosophical questions with which I am more familiar.

The Newtonian model holds that the physical universe is governed by fundamental, absolute laws (like gravity and the speed of light), a priori. The scientists task is to discover these laws through measuring and experimenting with that physical universe. Laughlin’s thesis turns this around: the universe is not governed by absolutely fundamental laws; rather, laws like gravity and the speed of light emerge as the physical universe self-organizes. The book is basically a popularized defense of this theory of emergence. He contends that quantum physics is demonstrating a peculiar thing about Newtonian physics. It is not that it is wrong; it’s that it is only right at a certain level of physical existence. Newtonian laws like gravity only come into operation when the physical thing we are measuring is of a certain size. It literally doesn’t apply when the things we’re interested in are smaller. It emerges when these smaller things combine themselves to form, say, atoms.

Key to this theory (and this is where the philosophy questions really start popping around your head) is the idea that law cannot stem from any sort of unitary “oneness” or abstract universal order. Law is necessarily a relation between two or more actual, independent, individual things.

Legitimately or not, this reminded me of William James’ contention that the idea of an abstract moral order from which moral laws descend is quite senseless: ethics is a matter of the relations between living, breathing people, and if there were no people, then there would be no ethics. People create laws for their relations by relating to one another as independent individuals, says James (though it is more complicated than this, and James doesn’t at all believe that “man is the measure of all things). This does not mean that morality is an "artificial" human creation, or that moral laws can be freely dispensed with. That laws are created as things organize themselves does not mean that any one thing is free to reject the laws or make completely different ones on a whim. The existence of other individual things carries obligations (now I’m thinking of Habermas). The system of obligations arising from the very existence of a bunch of individual things creates laws. In various ways (on different size scales) they both determine and are determined by. Things can change, but the absolute freedom of a single entity is as meaningless an idea as absolute determinism.

The idea that reality creates its laws – that discreet, independent things make laws when they combine, rather than combining according to laws – is obviously fascinating for anyone interested in social and moral theory, though we would need to do more work to say exactly whether and how the apparent analogy (maybe even more than an analogy?) works. Laughlin only hints at the possibility that the theory of emergence may be directly relevant to thinking about human society and human relationships, but the hint itself was enough to keep me fascinated above and beyond the sheer cool factor of his subject matter.

Individuals independently deciding together how to run their common affairs was most assuredly not the political vision of Mao Zedong, who thought the “emergence” of utopia could be helped along by imposed absolute and very abstract laws in the form of "Great Leaps Forward." (Like the segue?) Jonathan Spence’s nice little biography (Mao Zedong: A Life) of China’s Master of Disaster provides an elegantly written overview of a subject I knew pretty much nothing about. The thing that most impressed me about Mao’s life was how the insecurity he felt about his own intellectual powers seems to have played such a large role in the tragedy he brought to his country, especially the Cultural Revolution. He had an iron will and political smarts, but he thought that to be a great communist leader, you had to be a great communist theorist. He was not a great theorist, and that provoked in him a dehabilitating distrust of intellectuals. While his beginnings give a biographer little indication of what he was to become – no failed artist’s depression or penchant for torturing small animals – by the end of his life he had clearly developed a

Heart of Darkness (impressive, no?). Apparently everyone reads Conrad’s novella in high school, but for whatever reason I missed out. Last year I caught up on Catcher in the Rye. I’m sure there are several other classics I’m unable to discuss because of certain conservative proclivities in my Christian high school, and I plan to get around to them all eventually. Heart of Darkness was not a very pleasant read, however; I hope the other missing pieces of my education aren’t so, well, “dark.”

My copy included at the beginning several commentaries by famous writers and critics, including H. L. Mencken, Virginia Wolff, Hemingway, and Chinua Echebe (who called Conrad a “bloody racist”). After I finished and wondered “what it all meant” (I always thought it was a piece of anti-colonialism, but that didn’t seem quite right, especially with Kurtz’s “the horror!” swansong stuck in my head), Mencken’s long essay was the most helpful. His analysis that Conrad is “forever fascinated by the ‘immense indifference of things . . . fascinated, and left wondering” seemed right to me. Kurtz, while in a sense he might represent or offer a critique of “civilization,” seemed more precisely like someone “destroyed and made a mock of by the blind, incomprehensible forces that beset them;” representative not of “civilization” as oppsed to “barbarism,” but of the human condition in general, to which Conrad offers no solution because he does not think that one exists.

So, after all my clever transitions, I end on a note as depressing as the one with which I began, beautifully tying together a review of four completely different books into one neat little Camshafts package. That’s what we here at Camshafts like to call “excellence.”

Berman on Ramadan

2007-06-21T07:08:00.000-07:00

The new New Republic format allows for, in addition to extra glossy cover portraits, longer essays. One of the first fruits of this shift is Paul Berman’s 28,000 word essay on Tariq Ramadan. The mammoth essay displaces the issue’s book review section and engulfs the poetry entries. I barely finished it a day before the next issue arrived in the mail. Contrary to several sharp critiques, I really enjoyed it.

Berman’s (of Terror and Liberalism fame) essay focuses on Tariq Ramadan, an Islamic intellectual who enjoys wide endorsement, to Berman’s chagrin, by many of Berman’s western, liberal colleagues. Ramadan has achieved mainstream intellectual acceptance: he was offered a position at Notre Dame but, due to visa difficulties, now teaches at Oxford. He has also published widely (with OUP) and has acted as a consultant to western governments. Berman, however, finds this uncritical reception appalling in light of what he takes to be Ramadan’s many ethical shortcomings, which he spends the bulk of the essay chronicling.

Berman focuses on three of Ramadan’s questionable ethical stances: (1) his alleged anti-Semitism (he, derogatorily, refers to people as Jews or accuses people of being part of the Jewish agenda, who are not Jewish), (2) his ambiguous opinion about stoning women adulteress, and (3) his seeming endorsement of violence in Palestine.

I’m not sure all Berman’s arguments stick and many of his connections seem forced. Despite this, the essay’s value lies in its central insight: Berman attempts to document a trend he sees among Western leftists who were once influenced by expatriates of former fascist regimes, defenders of women’s rights and freedom of expression, and are now kowtowing to Islamic conservatives.

He highlights this shift by comparing Ramadan’s reception (despite his many un-liberal comments) to the incredibly hostile reception given to the liberal-minded Ayaan Hirsi Ali. He further contrasts Ali’s critics with the consensus support among intellectuals for Salmon Rushdie during the fatwa crisis (which is apparently not over). Berman only hints at why this shift has occurred, but after citing a full page of journalists who have had to go into hiding or have hired body guards due to death threats (not to mention those who have actually been killed), he seems to suggest it’s the result of fear and intimidation.

Assuming Berman is right about this shift (and I’m not sure he is) it seems to me that there are two other possible explanations: First, criticizing the Nazi’s or the Soviet Union for their anti-liberal practices was to criticize a power structure. These were powerful, oligarchic regimes which were oppressing minorities. However, many of the anti-liberal Islamic voices hail from slums or the global south. While their opinions are oppressive, they themselves seem to also be part of the oppressed. Secondly, Bush’s militaristic response (and its seeming failure) has made it difficult to be critical of Islamic extremism and at the same time distance oneself from the rhetoric of the Bush administration. Take Ali for instance, who now works for the American Enterprise Institute. Or, consider Hitchens’ position on Islamic terrorism which has almost forced him into the political right, despite his sustained critique of Reagan and his long-held socialist leanings.

If anyone cares to read the article let me know and I’ll email you a pdf version.

The Assault on Reason

2007-06-15T18:49:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I've posted on my "recent reading." Since my last review I've put away generous helpings of Jared Diamond, Salman Rushdie, Samuel Huntington, Cornel West, Thomas Friedman, Eric Schlosser, Nicole Krauss, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William James, even a little Ray Bradbury and Frank Herbert (of Dune fame). I've read about a fundamentalist Christian boot camp in the Domincan Republic and a Stalinist prison camp in North Korea. I read Cold Mountain and found it far superior to the movie, although the movie had really great music. I salivated over the fascinating pages of 1491, and was greatly disappointed when 1421 turned out to be a complete farce. I was greatly moved by Peter Balakian's history of the Armenian Genocide and America's involvement therein. I was delighted by Tobias Wolff's Catcher-in-the-Rye-esque novel Old School, one of many random finds that have become long-term favorites.

In short, I've read a lot and shared only a little with my Camshafts comrades, and for that, my sincerest apologies. I shall now attempt to rectify the situation with some reflections on my most recent meal-for-the-mind: Al Gore's The Assault on Reason.

Like many people, I've become a fan of Gore since the 2004 elections. This book took me to the next level of respect. It is well-written, peppered with references to Habermas and the Founding Fathers without seeming (to me) pedantic, and extremely persuasive in his criticisms (though of course I didn't need much convincing), especially with regard to the Bush Administration. By "persuasive," I mean that it seems like this book might even be convincing to conservatives like my parents and, maybe, yours.

Gore starts off with what is probably a rehashing of his college thesis, which was about the impact of television on the political process. Bottom line: it's not good. Democracy in America, he argues, is in bad shape. He ties the extremely worrying expansion of executive power, the near-absence of deliberation in a legislature totally consumed with reelection, and the amazing success with which lies go unchallenged and are used to advance the agendas of special interests together with his ideas about the effect of technology on society. He doesn't argue that television is the sole cause of the failure of democracy (or, more precisely, of the deliberative culture necessary to democracy's survival), but he does argue that communication and the technologies that determine its form are crucial factors. One-way communication is generally bad for deliberation. That's why he harps on so much about the potential of the Internet to help resuscitate deliberative democratic culture. His penultimate chapter describes the need to establish a "well-connected citizenry."

The most visceral, enraging parts of the book, however, are the central chapters, in which he details the Bush Administration's blatant disregard for the rule of law, its disdain for the Constitution's designs for the separation of powers, its use of secrecy and outright lies, and the general incompetence of its handling of our national security. It was most unpleasant, and it has inclined me toward a more radically negative view of our President than I've so far allowed myself to have. The bastards really should be impeached.

Having read this latest offering from the man Rush Limbaugh derisively called "algore," I may go out and pick up his other books (Earth in the Balance and An Inconvenient Truth).

I recommend that you add The Assault on Reason to your list of depressing-inspiring summer must-reads.

Now I'm onto Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, which, 50 pages in, appears to be another one of those cleverly written, illuminating screeds on the apocalyptic drudgery of middle class American Life, a la White Noise or "American Beauty." I'm not knocking it at all; it really is extremely well-written, and very illuminating. Perhaps I'm just not in the mood to get even more concerned about my homeland, with its fanatical public prosecutors and its passport laws (which just prevent my wife's parents from making the visit to Korea they'd been planning for months) and its airport security and its closed loops of fast food, illegal immigrants, and obesity.

That's the thing about Al Gore's book, though: at the end of it, I was less depressed than I was inspired to find ways of being more engaged with solutions to these problems. It wasn't just a litany of George Bush's abuses of power; it was that litany put up against lucid warnings from the founding fathers about the evils of those abuses and about how to keep them from destroying the country. A good American current affairs book, I think, does just that: it doesn't just identify what's wrong with our country; it shows that these things are wrong by contrasting them with the good things that we can be proud of and inspired by, the better visions of our traditions that provide us alternatives to the status quo, stories of times past when big problems like the ones we face today were confronted and often overcome.

And after all, there are beautiful things about America that I sorely miss here in Korea. The relative cleanliness, the continued existence of a natural world, the big thinking and big imaginations, the people I love, the room to take a road trip, the views unobstructed by apartment complexes, the things to be done and the projects to undertake, the existence of alternatives alongside the persistence of all those things so easy to criticize. The opportunities to be involved in the forward movement of things still not defined completely by their potential for profit. The life you can't easily lead in a foreign culture and an unmastered language, the life possible only in someplace that has a semblance of home about it.

So, here's to America, land of the free-for-now, home of the hopefully-brave, where the sunsets in Indiana go all the way to the edge of the cornfields, and a guy can have a big dog and a back yard and a woodburning stove and see wild animals out his kitchen window.

Indiefeed

2007-06-14T03:11:00.000-07:00

I was greatly disappointed when Pandora was suddenly made unavailable to overseas users. I have now discovered something of an alternative. Indifeed is a podcast series in which each episode is a single from a random band or artist. I've subscribed to the indie pop feed; they also have "alternative/modern rock," "blues," "electronica," and "hiphop" categories. Already I've discovered several people that I'll definitely be checking out in further detail (including Pete Stone, Stars (Define Me is a fan, I'm told?), Beirut, Liam Singer . . . ).

Enjoy.

The End of an Era: Rorty Passes at 75

2007-06-11T06:59:00.000-07:00

In case you haven't heard already, Richard Rorty passed away on Friday at the age of 75. America has lost one of its most imaginative, influential and humble philosophers to write in the late 20th century. NPR released special episodes on Davidson and Rawls after they recently passed, so I certainly hope they choose to produce one on Rorty. The 'greatest generation' of American intellectuals is passing or getting very old (Hilary Putnam)--who will rise to take their place?

UPDATE: Slate's rounded up some of Rorty's former collegues to get reflections on his life and influence.

Also, if you are interested in some Rorty audio, I found this site which features a wide variety of Rorty interviews and debates, in addition to some other philosophy related mp3's that may be of interest to some.

So far, no word from NPR.

Still More on Faith and Doubt

2007-05-29T18:57:00.000-07:00

I am finding it extremely difficult to explain my point here, because my point is ultimately that the outcome of this conversation is not the point. There is of course no way to prove such a point, and that is why I used the word “faith” to describe it. I am trying to describe an ethical or spiritual stance that somehow succeeds in remaining unamenable to rational critique, without closing off rational discussion. It is something like “contentment,” a resting in the daily reality of actions and relationships that engages and takes pleasure in the discussion of beliefs and concepts, yet is sustained not by the content of the beliefs and concepts, but by the experience of the discussion itself.

You may now dutifully alert me to the infinite regression involved in that statement: I am basically saying that I “believe” that “beliefs” are not the point, that my “concept” is that “concepts” are not the point. To escape I would have to get behind that idea, at which point the regression appears again, and so on ad infinitum. So be it. My feeling is that this problem is part and parcel of any attempt to philosophically “get at the bottom of things,” and can’t be avoided. This too is something with which I wish to be content.

What I am describing, and what I really hope can be described with the word “Christianity,” is not a rational conclusion, revealed or otherwise, to some line of inquiry. It is more like an ethical or existential response to the persistent lack of such a conclusion. Or, more precisely, it is an ethical response to the persistent lack of consensus around a conclusion. This ethical stance wants the pursuit of consensus to continue, because it is nourished by the act of conversation. But it does not require consensus for its legitimation, and it cannot really be expressed as a rationally, doctrinally defensible conclusion around which consensus might be established.

Does this make me a relativist? I don’t think so, but outside of this conversation, I wouldn’t care too much if it did. “Relativism” is an abstraction, a philosophical concept that might work and might not. That’s something we can discuss. The ethical stance I’m trying to describe has little directly to do with a conclusion about the correctness or incorrectness of relativism as a philosophical concept (I think it is incorrect). It has much more to do with an atittude we might take toward a real-life discussion of relativism: one in which formulating and defending our own conclusions is a means of loving our neighbor-interlocutor, and in which we view our neighbor-interlocutor’s arguments as a means for them to love us. Of course our conversations are a means we may neglect to use, opting instead to view “correct conclusions” as the purpose of the conversation. My attitude is simply that it is the other way around: “conversation” is the shared pursuit of correct conclusions (expressed as beliefs, facts, concepts, doctrines), and pursuing correct conclusions together is a way to love one another. The point of conversing is to love one another. [In this way, conversation is simply one activity among many others. Performing the act with excellence means pursuing correct conclusions, but the act can be a means of love even if the participants are not very skilled thinkers – just as performing well as a soccer team means pursuing victory, yet the game can draw the players together as friends even if they all suck and lose every match they enter.]

A personal example: in the first semester of my sophomore year at college, my thinking changed drastically, thanks to the teaching of our political science professor. For a long while I thought the change was due to what he taught us: a book by Eric Voegelin “opened my eyes,” broadened my horizons, etc. But later, as I read more books and changed my opinions and started disagreeing with or not caring much about what Eric Voegelin had to say, I realized that what I learned my sophomore year was not a conclusion to a problem, an answer to a question. Rather, what I learned, really learned for the first time, was that I might be wrong about things, and that other people might be right. I learned the joy of conversation – which is not the same as the pleasure that comes from winning the argument. Oh, I still take great pleasure in winning arguments. But I learned, or started learning, that the point of the conversation was the friendship it produced, not the conclusions it reached.

The conclusions we’re trying to reach are very important if we are to have a good conversation; we must be very serious about searching for the truth. But the true joy of pursuing truth is that we pursue it with our friends, and that by pursuing it together, we learn better how to love each other, and how to be loved. We learn how another person thinks, and how to appreciate that. We learn humility and patience. We learn how to give and receive. We learn new ways of community, both close community with good friends and cordial community with strangers and acquaintences. And, I hope, we learn to be content with the ongoing pursuit of truth (as opposed to its possession) which is one more thing that holds you together and connects us with (at least some of) our neighbors.

As Chris suggested, all this is an existential or ethical position, not so much (as far as I can avoid it) a philosophical one. It absorbs the pursuit of correct beliefs into the practice of everyday living. It’s the idea of arguing passionately with friends over a shared meal. Its an attempt to describe for myself and you how I want and am inspired to live my moment-by-moment, everyday life. I’m not sure it’s rationally defensible, which is why I’m having so much trouble describing it theoretically. I almost want to say simply that I’m not interested in formulating such a description, in making this into a theory. The reason I continue to try and describe it at all is that if I don’t, the effect may be to shut down conversation rather than energize it. Yet there is almost as much danger in expressing it, as what I’ve said my not be enough to keep people from mistaking it for a theory amenable to rational scrutiny. It is not amenable to such scrutiny. Its sequestration from this scrutiny is where the potential danger to conversation lies, but I think it is something I must risk, and a risk I can control as long as I am willing to keep trying to describe it.

So I must be perfectly frank: my commitment to this ethical stance is “prior” to my commitment to Christianity, insofar as Christianity is a set of doctrines and beliefs. If there is some honest way to equate Christianity with this ethical stance, then I would be more than happy to call myself a Christian. My understanding of the idea of grace and of the life of Christ keeps me hopeful that such a way exists; that this equivalence can be established; that Christianity is more than a religion or a concept or a belief or a doctrine; that Christianity is a contentment with life and living that seeks to pursue truth excellently, but does not equate knowing the truth with being saved – that this is the way Jesus lived and showed us how to live.

This is precisely the reason I am hopeful: the idea of “grace” seems to me the one idea I know of able to conceptually describe this non-conceptual point. Grace works whether you want it to or not, whether you believe it does or not. Grace is simply there. All things work together for good. Do you have to be “convinced” in your head of the reality of grace before grace is operational? Sure, if you want to put it that way. But there is no reason to assume that such a state of being “convinced” is an affirmative conclusion to an mental inquiry along the lines of “is there such a thing as grace?”. You might just as well assume that your believing in grace calls grace into being. It seems to me that the whole idea of grace is that grace is not an idea to be proven correct or incorrect, a truth to affirm or deny, a belief to adopt or a concept to be convinced of. Perhaps at this point I’m just being nonsensical and ridiculous, speaking in paradox, and generally being unhelpful. But I’m running out of ways to express myself. I’ll finish with a few specific points in response to Josh’s comment:

- The idea that God is beyond words was one attempt to express these things, but I think it’s too easily bogged down in a conceptual quagmire that I’d prefer to step around, if I can.

- You suggested (Josh) that perhaps my problem is not so much with Christian beliefs as with their misuse. This may be true, but it goes deeper than that. My problem is that beliefs are inevitably “misused” if we don’t use them, and make them into an end instead of a means. This is just the unavoidable risk of using words, and we shouldn’t fear to believe things because of it. All we can do is be aware that it will happen, and try to hold each other accountable by continuing the conversation.

-You’re right that we must hold knowing and unknowing together in dialectical tension, but that alone doesn’t help you determine what you know and what you don’t know. One person knows what you say you don’t know, and another person doesn’t know what you say you know with great certainty. I’m suggesting that we pursue true knowledge in conversation with others, and that this conversation is the point, not the true knowledge it may or may not obtain.

- I agree that theology seems to depend on something like “special revelation.” The problem is that it is difficult to understand how we may determine which revelation is “special.” If you wish to compare revealed religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) as an apologetic strategy, or if you simply wish to use revelation qua revelation (the mere fact of revelation) as a way to say that your religion is true, then I don’t think you’re going to get very far. Anyone can say anything is “revealed.” Why should I believe it? Before we can introduce the concept of “revelation” into the discussion, it will need considerable fine-tuning.

Sorry for missing any important points or questions from the previous post and comments; if you want to restate them, I’ll be glad to pick up on them again. And I apologize if I’ve generated more confusion than clarity. This is a lot of fun; I’m up for keeping the conversation alive for as long as we want to keep talking.

Jeffrey Stout on Religious Foundations and Common Predicaments

2007-05-20T20:11:00.000-07:00

From a recent essay by Jeffrey Stout:

“One of the things for which human beings should be held responsible—in the religious domain no less than in the political—is whom, if anyone, they choose to worship and obey…If, as theists claim, we all owe the true God worship and obedience as debts of justice, then we must all be in a position to ask who, if anyone, actually merits the title of ‘God’. On pain of vicious circularity, this question must be posed and answered, at least provisionally, without presupposing a settled view of God’s identity.”

He later adds,

“Coherent application of the concepts of justice, merit and worthiness must, then, be possible without already taking for granted who, if anyone, is divine and which sets of plans and commands, if any, ultimately determine the content of our obligations. Otherwise, theists would be incapable of identifying the true God as God.”

This seems to me a variation on Plato’s argument against divine command theory, but cleverly rephrased. In light of this quotation, some questions:

(1) What do you make of this line of argumentation?

(2) If what he describes is true, how does it affect the picture of religious ground motives presented by Neo-Calvinism?

(3) What prospects does it offer for religious believers to be critical of their own religious impulses/ commitments?

(4) What tools are there within the Neo-Calvinst tool box one could use to be critical of one's own religious ground-motive?

More on Church and Jesus, Faith and Doubt

2007-05-07T01:43:00.000-07:00

I appreciated very much Josh's response to my comments on the post below, and I'd like to continue the discussion by clarifying a bit.

I think you [Josh] understood my basic question correctly, and I want to emphasize that I really do want to be a part of the Christianity community. So if wanting to be there and doing no harm are the criteria for inclusion, then I am quite satisfied that I can be involved without hypocrisy or dishonesty.

What I want to clarify has to do with the idea of "faith and doubt." My position is not that of a doubter struggling to gain some more faith and wanting to be accepted as a Christian even in his struggle. My position is that of someone for whom faith and doubt are not the point of Christianity, if by "faith" we mean assenting to a set of doctrines ("God exists," "Jesus is the Son of God," "God is Trinity," etc.), and by "doubt" we mean withholding some measure assent from these doctrines. You might say that my faith is precisely that "faith and doubt" so defined don't matter very much; what I mean by "faith" can only be defined by actions. To put it a bit too simplistically - is is actions that are Christian or non-Christian, not "beliefs." Faith is a matter of these actions. It is, as you said, a matter of "what kind of life do we actually live. How we spend our money, how we respond to unwelcome interruptions, how we treat the poor, how we respond to the morally broken . . . " Perhaps where I am going further than you is that I wouldnt even say that beliefs are "included" in the much larger and broader act of trust. Rather, I would say that beliefs are peripheral to that act of trust that plays out in our actions.

This is not a question of a "works" salvation vs a "salvation by faith." That distinction is not between actions and beliefs; it is between legalism and grace. What I am trying to say is that Christian actions are grace-oriented actions - we act freely on the faith, the hope, that all things work together for them that love God. Works-based salvation advises us to act only under the constraints imposed by a law that leaves no need for faith and hope.

Religion is about beliefs, about agreeing or disagreeing with them, about those who agree going to heaven and those who disagree going to hell. The way of Jesus, I would like to think, is about loving people whether they agree with you or not - even if what you disagree about involves ways of describing the truth about the way of Jesus. Or, put another way, loving our neighbor is not a matter of getting them to agree with what we happen to believe is the best way to describe the truth of neighbor-love, except insofar as our beliefs might help them (which means our beliefs are tools for loving our neighbor, nothing more, nothing less).

The Christian religion is a set of beliefs, doctrines, symbols, traditions, and practices designed to communicate the truth of neighbor love and salvation by grace. The Way of Jesus is loving your neighbor and enjoying grace. I may and do have "doubts" about the efficacy, accuracy, legitimacy, and/or usefulness of the Christian religion or certain aspects thereof. But those "doubts" are not doubts about the truth or untruth of those beliefs. It is rather a sense of perspective that comes when we take them only for what they are - as beliefs, words, language, the tools we are given and which we also help to construct, the tools we need to appreciate mystery, accept grace, and keep from taking ourselves too seriously.

But living in the way of Jesus means living in such a way as those doubts are simply not the point, because those tools [beliefs] are simply not the point. This is my faith - not a faith that is the opposite of doubt, but a faith that holds "doubt" (doubt defined as holding beliefs as absolutely necessary but relative and changeable tools) as central to living faithfully. On my account, doubt is the name for the ability to keep beliefs relative to people, to keep doctrines subordinate to the experience of living abundantly and loving freely and learning about and from other people's experience of this life and love (or lack thereof), to make language our tool rather than our master - in short, to keep ourselves humble in the face of mystery.

Put very simply, there is no mystery without doubt. There is no humility if we are not genuinely open to the possibility that we might be wrong. There is no honesty if we are not willing to admit our ignorance. And there is no community if we are not willing to live together around our shared, ongoing, fundamental unknowing. And I believe, without a shadow of a doubt, so to speak, that there is no faith without mystery, humility, honesty, and community. Maybe Tillich's idea that "faith comprises both itself, and doubt of itself," is another way to put it.

So, all that to clarify that I am not "struggling with doubt." Nor am I really even "struggling" with doubt as to whether the Christian religion is the best or most helpful expression of faith, grace, neighbor-love, abundant life, or whatever other finally inadequate words you want to use. I think it probably is, and at any rate it's what I've been given, the toolset I've been blessed with for living "life more abundant and free." What I am struggling with is whether the institution called church - the local church, and our local church specifically - can include me if this is what I think of Christianity: relative and provisional, constantly changing, imprudently inclusive, a set of words aimed at describing a way of life (the way of Jesus) which many walk who use none of those words, and which others who use those words like an addict uses heroin hardly walk at all.

I've seen the Greg Boyd book and thought it looked interesting, and I noticed Mark G. was reading it a while back. I'll see if I can get a copy from Whatthebook. (I've read the McLaren and Chesterton already, and I'm fairly familiar with Plantinga). I'm definitely interested in learning more about the Cappadocians.

I look forward to your response(s)!

The Myth of Immigrant Criminality

2007-04-26T10:18:00.000-07:00

Due to my current job I've been spending much of my time focusing on the area of immigration. If this issue is as contentious where you live as it is in Iowa, then the following new report by American Immigration Law Foundation may serve to deepen and perhaps balance the conversation. It states, despite what many of the reactionary talking heads are claiming in your area,

"data from the census and other sources show that for every ethnic group without exception, incarceration rates among young men are lowest for immigrants, even those who are the least educated. This holds true especially for the Mexicans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans who make up the bulk of the undocumented population."

Read the rest here.

While we're at it, look here for a rebuttal to the argument that immigrants are (1) worsening employment opportunities for the native born and (2) driving down wages.

On Love and War: Drawing the Proper Boundaries

2007-04-24T07:14:00.000-07:00

So far, William Stacy Johnson’s new book, A Time to Embrace: Same-Gender Relationships in Religion, Law, and Politics, has proved to be one of the most charitable, comprehensive and creative books on homosexuality and the church I’ve yet read. It ranks up there with Eugene Rogers’ massive accomplishment, Sexuality and the Christian Body: Their Way into the Triune God, which stands to date as perhaps the most imaginative and compelling argument for inclusion. (In the interest of being balanced, the two most charitable and thoughtful theorists I’ve read on the, roughly, against full inclusion side are Richard B. Hays and Richard Mouw) In fact, the two have much in common; both books struggle to overcome the dichotomy (pro-gay/ anti-gay) of the culture wars and detangle positions on all sides from the language of liberal individuality, and they both seek to situate their positions firmly in the realm of theology and ecclesiology.

When read side by side, one gets the impression that how the debate is structured is as important as the content of the debate itself. That’s not to say the seriousness of the disagreements regarding homosexuality are unimportant; such disagreements are of the deepest nature, and this is perhaps what makes the debate so intriguing and divisive. This debate lays bare some of the most important questions regarding Christian ethics and the nature of the Christian community. Which biblical passages ought we privilege over others? How do we know when our positions reflect those of the movement of the Spirit? Which ethical commitments are essential to the Christian community and why? And, an issue that’s been brought up on this blog already, which disagreements can be sustained, which can’t and why?

Writing in the early to mid 1500’s, Sebastian Castellio argued relentlessly against John Calvin (and later his prize pupil, Theodore Beza) that persecution of heretics is never justified. Castellio was originally invited by Calvin to Geneava, where he held a teaching position and acted as theological council. It wasn’t long after his arrival, however, that he found himself in direct opposition to what he took to be Calvin’s rigid dogmatism. Tensions came to a head over the controversy regarding Servetus, during which time Castellio began writing anonymous tracts against Calvin. After Servetus’ execution Castellio left Geneva in disgust and continued his theological battle with Calvin for several years.

I bring this up because I’m reading a book about it and find it really interesting, but also, and more importantly, because Castellio’s questions are ours today as we face the issue of gay-inclusion. He was concerned primarily with how Christians ought to draw the boundaries of their community, and which disagreements ought to be sustained. Castellio’s defense of Servetus and like heretics was mainly that the bible is “full of obscurities” and the process of rendering these obscurities clear is far from an exact science. As a result, when drawing up boundaries regarding who is in and who is out of the Christian community our default position should be inclusion and charitable dialog.

So, with that in mind, here is what I would like some feedback on: is the debate over violence (or war) similar to the debate over sexual orientation? And, if so, can we make the same room (in the church) for opinions regarding homosexuality that we make for the variety of opinions regarding war and pacifism? My brother is a Presbyterian minister who is also a pacifist. When he “came out” as such, his congregation didn’t run him off or call for his resignation, despite their long just war tradition. If the state is a sphere of existence (in the neo-Calvinist sense) equal to that of the family, then should the denial of the state’s authority to use violence be as egregious as a church that chooses to go full inclusion? Would the Reformed church break apart into a million factions over the issue of when, if ever, state violence is appropriate? In sum, are the two debates similar? If so, why so much room to “sustain the disagreement” regarding the issue of violence and so little regarding the gay debate?

The Emergent Church and Exorcism

2007-04-14T21:55:00.000-07:00

Lately I've developed an interest in what's called the "emergent" church. If you know about or have read anything by Brian McLaren, you'll have some idea what I'm talking about. My wife read several of McLaren's books, and we're now reading his Secret Message of Jesus in our bible study (it's good stuff that I genuinely appreciate, even if it is largely familiar given the backgrounds of us Camshafts contributors). The particulars aren't my point at the moment, though I may post some more about them as I continue to listen to the emergent podcast series and read more emergent books and articles. The point is rather that my interest in emergent stems from my wondering whether it might possibly represent the kind of Christianity and the kind of church that has room for people like me (and you, maybe) - people who are not able to say with the same unequivocal sense apparently enjoyed by most Christians a phrase like "I believe in God the Father Almighty," but who really do want to affirm by their actions that "we should love our neighbors as ourselves," and who would like some way to authentically participate in a certain community that for various reasons, feelings, memories, and hopes, remains important to them. Because I've been grappling with the desire for this kind of church for quite a while now, learning more about emergent has stoked a (still cautious) excitement in me.

However, I've just now finished reading Philip Jenkin's The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (you might recall his 2002 article on "The Next Christianity" in The Atlantic), and it has me wondering if even this cautious excitement might be wishful thinking from a nostalgic no-longer-Christian. From Jenkins I learn that there are billions of poor, oppressed, persecuted, and fiercely committed believers in the forgotten nations of the Souther hemisphere who have little time for the liberating exegetical subtleties that allow wealthy white-skinned progressives enamored with Jaques Derrida to amuse themselves by stealing the pretty fire of authenticity from their enfeebled ancestral god. They see no reason to think that thaumaturgy and snake-handling went out with the first century A.D., like it had a built-in expiration date. Their "Christianity" is not just conceptual or pragmatic or nostalgic or ceremonial or mystical or poetic. It's all about God and demons and angels directly intervening in everyday life.

It seems to me, furthermore, that these people have a lot more in common with the Christians of the early church than I as an heir of Christendom and a reader of Brian McLaren could ever have. If the question is about who gets to define Christianity, then I'm not sure why that job shouldn't belong to African or Latin American Pentecostals rather than to wealthy Europeans and North Americans with graduate degrees and laptops. And if "Christianity" is indeed more legitimately defined by the poor of the earth than by projects like the emergent church, then my prospects for remaining a Christian aren't looking so good. Because I am not a Christian if being a Christian has more to do with witches and exorcisms and miraculous healings and raving self-apointed lunatic "prophets" and "apostles" than it does with loving my neighbor and addressing my finely-tuned existential angst.

On the other hand, if the emergent movement were as part of its project to take up this challenge and address the question whether there is room in the word "Christian" and the community "church" for both myself and the crazy, meek and mild in the crowded tabernacles of Nigeria, then I would probably continue to be interested, and there might still be some hope that I can still use the word "Christian" without getting struck by lightning. So far I haven't found much, but just a hint to anyone who might want to think more about it (including me): if there is room, then the room will have to be provided not just in Christianity, but by Christianity - it will have to be a characteristic of Christianity that it has room for both kinds of people. And I must admit - any idea or community that can sustain that kind of expansive tension will keep me very hopeful indeed.

Is that a hotdog in your pocket?

2007-04-12T06:55:00.000-07:00

My wife and I went to hear Terry Gross speak at Iowa State recently. If you don’t listen to her show (do these people really exist?) I recommend it. And if you get a chance to hear her speak while she’s on her speaking tour then drop everything and go. Her presentation is hilarious—full of sound bites of outtakes and awkward moments like when Gene Simmons asked Terry to “receive me with open legs” or when Monica Lewinski walked out after Terry asked her why she interpreted performing oral sex on the president while he spoke with diplomats in Bosnia as a soul connection. Also, you haven’t lived until you’ve heard Terry Gross ask, “Is that a hotdog in your pocket?” in front of a crowd of 70 year olds.

In completely unrelated news, has anyone listened to the new Bright Eyes album yet? It’s a goodie, right up there with I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning.

More on "religion"

2007-02-28T11:17:00.001-08:00

I realize that my entering into this conversation is a bit like “looking for noon at two o’clock” seeing as you all have been going at it for some time now, but I thought I’d throw a quick pitch anyway. I haven’t taken the opportunity to read all the comments that were posted, so forgive me if this is simply a rehearsal or repetition of the same.

The term “religion,” or the religious, is a way of conceiving the boundaries and limits of human reasoning. The “scientific” mode of reasoning has no object of inquiry beyond the “objective” material world. But one can attempt via “theoretical” reasoning to locate the necessary or structural laws which condition or govern the possibility of experiencing such a world (while conceding that such laws need to be “mediated” in order to be understood—yet another limit condition). We needn’t insist on finding the transcendental conditions of the “religious,” then, if all we mean by such a term is that which exceeds or is beyond theoretical inquiry. For, we will have moved the inquiry to the Transcendent, which is by definition beyond transcendental conditions.

Here’s how I understand the modern neo-Calvinist story. When theoretical thought ignores the “deep totality” and integration of the created order, “us moderns” end up in a situation where we are trying to resolve what seems to evade resolution. The modern neo-Calvinist philosopher is in many ways continuing the same project but finds the means of “resolution” in the “limits” of theoretical thought themselves. We need not be fixated on solving logical aporias if such aporias are only necessary given a certain inflated epistemology. Truly reflexive thought comes up against a boundary. To recognize this boundary as a mere limit is to allow theoretical reasoning to have the last word, for this limit is also a connection. To speak of the “limit” as “connection” is to speak liturgically or confessionally. It is to speak meaning into the being of created reality, which is surely religious language. Obviously, this is an intentional move away from the kind of theorizing that construes limit conditions too rigidly or too loosely. Those who are caught between the throes of “nature” and “freedom” have overestimated the ability of theoretical thought to come to proper terms with its own limits. In and of itself the theoretical attitude cannot cope with such limit conditions. An authentic critical philosophy can and should open us up to the “religious” horizon of meaning, which in turn requires a religious response.

Now Adam mentioned what might be called the “unintended consequences” of such a move to the “religious” as at best “mystical” and at worst a kind of empty religiosity. I have been reading a book by Pope Benedict XVI called The Spirit of the Liturgy. He speaks of the importance of the “cosmic dimension” as essential to Christian liturgy. For the Christian, a religious response is both historical and cosmic. While the cosmic serves the historical (for “only in history is the cosmos given its center and goal”), it is a “cosmic vision” that gives us a sense of the scope of redemptive history. I would suggest that the “cosmic” is akin to what we have been describing as the “religious” insofar as both point to a general orientation within the created order itself. As Benedict states: “Creation and history, creation, history, and worship are in a relationship of reciprocity. Creation looks toward the covenant, but the covenant completes creation and does not simply exit alongside with it. Now if worship, rightly understood, is the soul of the covenant, then it not only saves mankind but is also meant to draw the whole of reality into communion with God.” The creation order (the cosmos), then, is infused with a kind of religious tendency or directionality—that is, a kind of reditus or comportment toward the Creator. I think a neo-Calvinist conception of religion is getting at this “structural” movement not only within theoretical thought but also within all of created reality, where a “restless” reality is directed toward the Creator. Though theoretical thought cannot give us instruction on how to faithfully respond in word and deed to redemptive history, a truly critical philosophy need not cut us from the religious or cosmic horizon of meaning-content that pulls theoretical thought beyond and outside of itself.

While a truly critical philosophy will open us up to the general religious orientation of the cosmos, this in no way secures for us true religion. Again, as Benedict states, “only in history is the cosmos given its center and goal.” This need not lead us to the conclusion that history supersedes the cosmos, but only that the cosmos comes to nothing aside from redemptive history.

It would be interesting to reflect more upon the Pope’s distinction between history and cosmos as compared to the nature/grace motif. Any thoughts?

A Little Rant

2007-02-26T18:15:00.000-08:00

I know I'm preaching to the choir, but I just wanted to say this:

Today the sky is not clear. By “today” I don’t mean “these days,” something abstract and only vaguely threatening. I mean today, February 27, 2007, another day of dirty sky. The threat is concrete. I can see the sky outside my window, as I’m writing this. There is a hill at eye level to my ninth floor apartment, and on days like this the bushy edge where the trees of that hill meet the sky is a subtle, creeping, thoroughgoing grey blur. On good days the edge is sharp, especially when the sky is brilliant blue and cloudless. Then it looks almost like a painting (but those days are rare and easily remembered). Today, the trees and the grey melt into each other. The feeling is one of resignation, acquiescence. If a sound accompanied this picture, it would be something like a long, muffled sigh.

The grey of this sky is not the grey of a cloudy day, or the grey of rain, or the grey of dusk, or even the grey of those “blah” days when the clouds are not distinct shapes but rather the name for the whole sky. It is something different altogether. At least it feels like that to me. I've always liked looking at skies, noting the differences between summer and winter skies, marking the various colors and tones and the way sound travels differently in different air. I know this sky is different. It’s a deep, brooding depression.

Even deserts, stark and barren and uninviting, have color. I call this sky ‘grey,” but that’s somehow wrong. “Colorless” would be more appropriate. Except for when the yellow dust comes in force, which could happen any day now. Then the sky will be yellow. Not yellow like the sun, or like a daffodil, or a banana, or whatever. A yellow that is somehow not yellow, empty of color but full of foreign desert and mixed with chemical death. It is all vague, without reality, and it’s all very, very real.

Whenever people back home hear the word “pollution,” they don’t really know what to think about. Maybe people in larger cities with bad air like Los Angeles have some idea, but most people don’t live in Los Angeles. They live in suburbs or in small towns or in big cities on windy plains. When people tell them the planet is in trouble, they often assume the problem – if it exists at all – is being exaggerated in order to promote some other agenda, which is to increase government regulation. They can’t see it, so it’s a “problem” in the same way that malaria in Africa is a problem. Here, in my ninth story apartment in Cheonan, South Korea, pollution is a “problem” in the same way that my getting malaria would be a problem.

Of course there are plenty of things that people back home could see if they looked hard enough, or if they knew what they were looking for. But most of those things – and that are exceptions that for short periods of time grab our attention – are not so in-your-face as the skies I’m looking at right now. In America we have good air and lots of open land and green grass on our lawns and enormous fields that stretch as far as the eye can see (I’m speaking as a midwesterner now). Encroaching urban sprawl is a problem, but its only immediate effect is on our sense of beauty. We don’t see lost forests and farmland, and it’s hard to see the danger if as a result some animals are forced into extinction. We have huge national parks, decent air quality laws, and large clean-up projects that promise solutions to those problems we do recognize. So when we hear people pressing for more laws to restrict environmental degradation, we see only a call for more regulation, without seeing clearly the problems they think justify that regulation.

I don’t care right now what you think about government regulation. I don’t like it any more than you do. Certainly it can’t solve all the problems I’m talking about. What I care about is getting more people to see the problems that the people recommending increased regulation are talking about. I want you to see the problem like I see it, circulating outside my window, keeping me indoors praying for a fast wind or a good rain and remembering the sky of yesterday, which was blue and clear enough that for once I could actually smell the straggling pine trees as I walked past them on the street. I want you to see the piles of trash clogging the pitiful little creeks that run through Cheonan, and the litter strewn about the dumpster-less sidewalks. I want you to breath in the exhaust of a million cars on the main road into the city as you try to run the jogging path that lines its southern side. I want you to remember your childhood spent playing in the woods and fields of your family farm in Indiana, and wonder when it will be turned into a housing development designed by and for commuters who, because they can’t see the immediate effects of development and traffic jams and foreign oil and coal-burning power plants and landfills filled with worthless wasted crap made from trees and ripped from mines and leached from rivers and hauled from oceans and slaughtered by the millions on factory farms nourished by chemicals destined for your Big Mac, can’t imagine why anyone would want to curtail their freedom to make money and live comfortably.

I don’t care whether you believe the best solutions are public or private. I only care whether you recognize the problem and sense its urgency in your own lives. If you then want to tell me why a conservative approach to keeping our environment from collapsing and taking us and our money with it is better than a liberal approach that emphasizes government, then I would love to hear about it, because I personally would like to keep our government as small as possible. But please recognize that something has to be done; doing nothing is not an option. If you say that the government shouldn’t require recycling, then you’d better be recycling your stuff on your own initiative. If you say that the government shouldn’t prevent people from driving their cars into crowded cities, then you’d better be putting your entrepreneureal brains to work and coming up with innovative plans for encouraging people to take public transportation, or for providing good public transit where its missing. You should be walking, not commuting, to the store. You should be coming up with ways to turn Amtrak into a popular and profitable enterprise. You should be supporting private companies investing in alternative energies, buying your electricity from them, encouraging them to set up shop in your own area, installing solar panels on your roof, etc. etc. If you don’t want the government to make laws designed to keep us all from ruining our environment, then you’d better do whatever it takes to keep yourself from contributing your share to that ruin. I don’t see that happening. I see the same people who oppose government regulation ridiculing those who take private initiative to address these problems. I see the same people who oppose government regulation dismissing the fact – a fact that I can see for myself right outside my window – that there actually is a problem. I wish these people would change their minds and get on the ball. Certainly that is the best “solution” to these problems. But if you won’t change your minds, something still has to be done. Perhaps this is why others push for government regulation. Not because they have some ulterior agenda – though certainly those motives exist – but because they see a terrible problem that threatens everyone, not just in the future, but here and now (again – it’s actually unsafe for me to walk outside today). If you don’t like their solution, then what’s yours?

On Religion

2007-02-22T00:38:00.000-08:00

I don’t mean to interrupt the good conversation prompted by Chris’s post, but by now the comments are too many and too extensive for me to comfortably chime in. I thought it might be easier for me to condense some ideas into a fresh post. If I fail to address any of the issues you all are discussing, please feel free to continue the previous thread instead of commenting here, or to bring them up again.

Let me see if I can summarize the neo-Calvinist conception of religion as I understand it.

(1) There is one thing that is “utterly unconditional.” Among other words, we call this “God.”
(2) All of reality depends on, is conditional on, this “God.”
(3) Religion is an orientation towards or away from God. If it is oriented toward God, it is true religion. If it is oriented away from God, it is false religion. There are as many false religions as there are false Gods. False Gods are conditioned things mistaken for the Unconditioned.

To this I would add that a sufficiently subtle neo-Calvinism recognizes that:

(4) Doctrine, philosophy, theological speculation, the activity in which we are right now engaged – these things are not “religion.” Claims, propositions, and statements about God and God’s unconditionality do not have the authority to silence ongoing conversation about God.

This conception can take us in two directions, which are not necessarily contradictory. On the one hand, properly understood it encourages a kind of mysticism. If God is wholly distinct from Creation, then we can never rest on the promise made by any aspect of creation – be it words, feelings, logic, history, psychology, cause and effect relations, or whatever – to tell us what God is like. We are left with little more than a “feeling of dependence.” On the other hand, the fact that “feeling of dependence” is so vague means it is easily elaborated upon by humans drawing upon their various life experiences. This encourages a temporalization of religious life, so that its content is understood in terms of how we live our lives.

This means that religion is everything and nothing. We are prohibited from a full theoretical understanding of religion such as we are trying to nail down right now, because the theoretical definition we offer asserts that religion is depending on a God that cannot be understood in any terms, theoretical or otherwise. This is mysticism through and through (I’m in no way saying that’s a bad thing!). Yet we are required by our theoretical definition to say that religion encompasses all of life, because the whole of reality exists in a condition of dependence (or denial thereof). The only place then to which we can legitimately turn is precisely this “all of life” – the sum of our experiences. The definition of “dependence” – of true and false religion, of good and evil, good and bad, etc. – is reduced to the conclusions we draw from our experience (again, not a bad thing in my view, though the word “reduced” sounds perjorative).

Personally I think all of this is a very attractive way of thinking. A sense of transcendence, of not having it all figured out, or whatever, is maintained, which in my experience is important, and at the same time “experience” is not allowed to crystallize into unmalleable propositions concerning absolute (T)ruth, which given its status as the source of all (t)ruth is what usually happens.

The problem (for neo-Calvinists) is that it is hard to say whether this has anything to do with Christianity. Certainly most Christians do not think this way. They don’t view their relationship with God as “a sense of trancendent.” They think in terms of Jesus Christ, Yahweh, the Trinity, etc. They don’t view moral laws of right and wrong as the accumulated experience of human lives lived in proper mystical awareness of dependence on trascendence. They think in terms of the ten commandments, the seven deadly sins, etc. On the view I’ve just sketched out – you might call it a rough and ready combination of mysticism and pragmatism – it matters little whether we even “believe in God” in any orthodox sense of the word. It only matters that you are not dogmatic about your answer to that question. Is this sort of agnosticism compatible with identifying oneself as a “Christian”?

Perhaps even more pressing, mysticism is an extremely individual thing. The extent to which one person can understand what another person means by the things he or she says mystically about “God” or the absence thereof seems very limited. It hardly seems susceptible to being rendered into a “tradition” that unites people around common ideas. The sum of human experience, communicated through conversation, history, etc., is on the other hand more amenable to the building of communities. But it seems unnecessary to call whatever community might be constructed by this conversation “the church.” It would probably be more appropriate to call it simply “the human community” or community of communities.

This is all a bit on-the-fly. I hadn’t thought about it this way before I wrote it, at least not explicitely. This conversation has helped me put together in a different way some questions and ideas I’ve been having as I’ve lately spent a lot of time considering whether and in what sense I am or want to be a “Christian.” And on a side note, I hadn’t thought about how my neo-Calvinist training – those long hours reading Dooyeweerd – may have inadvertantly contributed to what others might call this “crisis of faith.”

So, two questions to which I invite your response. First, do you agree with my reading of the neo-Calvinist conception of religion, and my thesis about what may be its unintended consequences? (And by the way, even if it’s at all accurate no doubt this is not unique to neo-Calvinism. Others more knowledgeable than I might say this is a general reading of modernity and/or postmodernity itself). Second, do you think this conception of religion can in any way be called “Christianity”?

Some Questions for Neo-Calvinism

2007-02-16T13:21:00.000-08:00

As you can probably tell by my last posts, I’ve been reading a lot about the Calvinist heritage lately. Between reading Stout and Connolly and trying to work on my thesis, I’ve been squeezing in way too much time to read back issues of Comment, a biography on Calvin, and other articles about Neo-Calvinism. I’ve been struggling with some issues related to this tradition and the following is a distilled form of my thoughts/ questions. It’s pretty long so, if you dare, take a deep breath, get another cup of coffee and be prepared to offer me any feedback you can.

Here are my four issues with (or, questions for) the tradition:

(1) There is an inherent ambiguity in the language of “worldview” or “ground-motive”

I’m still not clear as to whether a “worldview” or a “ground-motive” is an idealized form of coherent motivation which one strives to obtain or whether it is an account for the actual underlining motivation for one’s actions. Does it operate like a virtue (“I wish I had a more Christian worldview”) or does it account for the primary cause of action (“She did that because of her pagan worldview”)?

(2) Ground-motive isn’t explanatory

If, indeed, the latter is true of worldview (that it accounts for the primary cause of one’s actions) I just don’t think it’s a very good tool. My exposure to William Connolly and Jeffrey Stout has convinced me that non-inferential responses and visceral reactions account for a great deal more of our moral actions/ beliefs than many moral philosophers (and perhaps we ourselves) would like to believe. But many of our visceral reactions are hardly the result of a coherent set of beliefs about the world. Instead they may be the result of childhood memories, or maybe certain moral examples we’ve come to love, or perhaps encounters we’ve had, or maybe a book we’ve recently read, or perhaps our current physical/ mental state. I’ve recently come across attempts at distilling an Islamic worldview and even a Korean worldview (Smitty, please shed some light on the accuracy of this). Read the comments section of this blog post over at Reformatorische for a recent discussion of this issue between a dedicated neo-Calvinist and some ICSers.

I know only a little about Islam, but all the Muslim's I've met both in the Middle East and here in Iowa seem to be too diverse to accurately link under a common worldview, at least one that attempts to account for why they treat people, places and things the way they do. It strikes me that as I try to assess the reasons for the actions of those closest to me, or even my own, I find such a web of motivations and influences (sometimes even conflicting ones) that I have a hard time believing that distilling a central worldview would do much good in the effort to try to understand them, or myself.

This language also fails to grapple with the complexity of some of our nation’s most interesting moral examples: people like Whitman, Ellison and Lincoln. Which worldview or ground-motive was driving the Invisible Man? Was it a pagan ground-motive, or maybe a Greek or maybe a modernist? Trying to understand novels like this is silly, and I would argue the same is true when it comes to trying to understand one’s neighbor.

(3) Is it foundationalism?

The neo-Calvinist position prides itself for preempting many of the central critiques of modern epistemology, and rightfully so. Kuyper and Dooyeweerd do a great job of demonstrating the roots and the genealogy of modern attempts to establish autonomous reason as a foundation for knowledge. However, in my opinion they prematurely “stop the buck” at religion. Sure, we can establish that all epistemology requires some foundation, but why stop the critical inquiry at the religious? Why not question what grounds religion? Why not ask what grounds the supra temporal heart? Why not ask what are the conditions for the possibility of biblical authority? This is the danger in attempting an anti-foundational transcendental critique; you can ask the question “what are the conditions for the possibility of x” all day long and never reach the truly “fundamental epistemological criterion” that allows the infinite regress to stop. Take the aboriginal tribe that Smitty has posted about a few times. Here is a tribe that lacks words for basic colors and numbers, lacks basic aesthetic awareness and lacks anything close to a developed theology or even a concern about things divine. For them to ever understand a concept like “trinity” or “Eucharist” or “redemption” (in the theological sense with which we use the term) they are going to have to learn a lot of other concepts first. Their limited vocabulary restricts their “worldview” or their ability to express certain ground-motives. If this is true then why not assume language is a more fundamental criteria then religion or the supra temporal heart, since the expression of the latter is only possibly if certain linguistic options are available?

Further, why not question the reliability of the Scriptures or the geographic evidence for biblical claims? Why place the authority of the bible or creeds outside the realm of critical inquiry? (Look here for a good example of a criticism of biblical authority, and here for an examination of geographical evidence for Old Testament biblical claims) Does Neo-Calvinism require one to simply accept these things uncritically or does it scrutinize them as well? Theoretical thought is indeed not autonomous, but transcendental criticism surely does not reveal that at root all things are religious; it merely reveals all things are dependent. To stop looking for foundations at religion would require one to speak more about why the roots of religion ought to be exempt from criticism.

(4) Its criticism of dualism seems unfounded

Finally, I’m not sure why paradox or dualism gets such a harsh trial in neo-Calvinism. Neo-Calvinists, particularly those following Dooyeweerd, offer as evidence of the weakness of other worldviews the dualism inherent within them. At the heart of modern humanism, we are instructed, lies the nature/ freedom paradox, which they inherited from the nature/ grace dualism of the Scholastics who in turn got theirs from the Greek’s form/ matter dialectic. Not only have some of these readings been put under question, but it seems like certain impassable dualisms have always been important to Christianity.

In his Flight From Authority, Jeffrey Stout pays particular attention to the central role paradox played for the Christian tradition before, during and after the challenge of modern skepticism. Indeed, MacIntyre, in his essay “The Fate of Theism,” identifies the issue of paradox to be the central difference between a pre-modern Christian approach to existence and a modern scientific one: in the former, paradox is accentuated and shrouded in divine mystery, in the latter it is seen as a sign of the weakness of a position and, if possible, avoided or discarded. Kierkegaard, for example, emphasized the importance of paradox in the Christian faith. But not just theologians are into paradox, at the heart of the bible itself lie intractable paradoxes, or downright logical inconsistencies, such as God is wholly man and wholly God. God, who by definition is immortal, died. God is one being and still three persons. The Eucharist is bread and wine but also flesh and blood (a paradox of particular importance to Roman Catholics). I also have a difficult time not seeing dualism throughout the book of Hebrews. If, then, paradox or dualism exists at the heart of the faith, why are neo-Calvinists so critical of theories which also express paradox? In other words, what's so bad about dualism? (as a side note, I’m still not sure how the neo-Calvinists’ Creation, Fall, Redemption approach avoids the nature/ freedom tension. I have a hunch that it simply skirts the issue by suggesting all things are under God’s law, from protons to purity. But wasn’t the point of nature/ freedom tension to get at the phenomenon that some objects operate according to unalterable conditions, (apples don't have a choice whether or not to fall to the ground when dropped from a tree) but humans don’t (humans have a choice, for instance, whether or not to tell the truth)...any help here would be much appreciated)

OK, so there’s the laundry list of current questions I have for the neo-Calvinists out there, or just those that know more than I about these issues, who care to help me out. I welcome any clarification, explication, explanation or pontification.

Chaplin's "Understanding Regimes of Tolerance": Some Questions and Considerations

2007-01-25T08:13:00.000-08:00

Jonathan Chaplin has written a very interesting article for the “living with liberalism” series I mentioned in my last post. His article mainly addressed the internal contradiction wrought by a liberalism which simultaneously touts itself as universally tolerant and yet promotes a particular agenda by limiting the expression of certain minority communities.

The part I found most interesting centers on a particular issue: nondiscriminatory practices within voluntary associations. This has to do with how one goes about deciding who can justly be admitted and excluded from campus organizations, political groups, etc. Is it tolerant to exclude males from holding high level positions in a feminist organization? Is it unjustly discriminatory to disallow a Caucasian from holding office in an African American organization? Or (this is the particular case study of the article) is it discriminatory to disallow homosexuals from membership in a Christian organization on a college campus? To assist in adjudicating these complex issues, Chaplin proposes considering whether the issue in question is arbitrary or non-arbitrary to the overall purpose of the society. He then posits that exclusion is justified (by and large) if it is based on a non-arbitrary opinion or action. Or, in the form of a question, is what’s at issue “crucially pursuant to the very purposes of the societies?” Is it “hard to imagine how such societies could sustain their stated goals over time” if the opinion or action in question is allowed into the fold?

Chaplin clearly supports the rights of a Christian association to exclude homosexuals from their organization. What needs to be established, however, is whether being against homosexuality (or rather, pro-heterosexuality) is central to a Christian organization, or Christianity itself. Jonathan’s way of putting the issue is helpful and certainly opens up the conversation in a way that many approaches do not, but I wonder whether his own position can be sustained under the requirements of this principle. Clearly in the case of an African American association being of that descent is central to its mission, but this hardly parallels the issue with Christianity and homosexuality. One’s ethical opinion about homosexual marriage could be seen to be as arbitrary as one’s opinion about what type of tax structure God demands, or which ethical requirements God calls us to when engaging in war. I would have thought central to the mission of a Christian organization would be a belief in the divinity of Jesus, the Immaculate Conception, the trinity, etc. Questions of whether homosexuals can be included in the covenant relationship Christians call marriage is an important issue, but hardly central.

In another passage, Chaplin shifts gears, suggesting that equating or comparing racial difference with sexual orientation at all is misled:

"…those who place racial identity and views on sexual morality in the same category are simply not comparing like with like. As a biologically determined trait, racial identity is wholly outside someone’s choice, while also being profoundly implicated in someone’s social identity. This is the basic reason why we have rightly come to insist that racial discrimination is arbitrary. Views of sexual morality, by contrast, are elective: we adopt them, either through individual choice or by remaining within a community that upholds them."

The problem here is, Chaplin isn’t comparing “like with like” either. A better comparison would be that both skin color and sexual orientation (as more and more studies seem to indicate) are (by and large) “outside someone’s choice” and that our ethical approach to either skin color or sexual orientation is elective. In contrast, Jonathan seems to be comparing the biological trait of skin color with an ethical opinion about sexual orientation. While one cannot control what skin color they have, one can certainly control what ethical opinion they have about people with a certain skin color (just ask some of my uncles from southern Iowa). In the same way, whether one desires to betroth themselves to another of the same sex may well be outside their control, but our ethical opinion of that action is well within all of our control. In this example, Chaplin’s arbitrary/ non-arbitrary distinction appears to not necessarily support his conclusion.

Overall, I think Chaplin’s distinction (arbitrary/ non-arbitrary) is a helpful one. It gets all of us away from the Manichean language of the culture wars and encourages us to begin to discuss what is central to our various community commitments and what issues are so objectively difficult as to require space within our communities to sustain the disagreement. Chaplin confronts us with the need to determine what kinds of disagreements can be sustained, which one's can't and why. No doubt all communities contain difference, and Chaplin’s categories help to bring into focus our obligation to determine why some disagreements (like the ethics of war, how God demands we spend our money, or how to best address the problem of evil) can be sustained while others (like homosexuality) must be excluded from the picture in an a priori fashion. However, my hunch is that Chaplin’s distinction actually works at cross purposes with his desired conclusion.

"Living With Liberalism" A More Complex Matter

2007-01-19T22:09:00.000-08:00

Has anyone else read this series about “living with liberalism” on Comment? They are written, of course, by a community familiar to many of us on this blog, and offer arguments many of us here would likely expect. Nonetheless, I found the articles (I’ve read only 4 so far) thought provoking so I thought I’d let those of you who haven’t read them yet know about them. I do, however, have some questions and observations regarding what I have read (and I eagerly await any insights from those who have also read them).

David Koyzis and Brian Dijkema size up liberalisms fatal flaws thusly,

(1) “liberalism manifests little concern for what might be called the commons—namely, the shared heritage of the citizenry not subject to individual or nonstate corporate ownership”

(2) Liberalism “reduce[s] a variety of communities to mere voluntary associations.” Thereby losing any attempt to distinguish properly between different communities.

And, of course,

(3) “most liberals attempt to consign ultimate religious convictions to the private realm”

Gideon Strauss defines it a bit less carefully as simply, “the modern ideology committed to individual freedom above all else.” And he adds, “That individual freedom is the ultimate purpose of politics and economics continues to be the basic conviction of liberalism.”

Having, fairly recently, had the chance to re-read through many of the classic “liberal” texts, I found many of these attributions puzzling. I, however, have become increasingly doubtful that too thick a connection can be made between the Romanticism (at times anti-rationalism) of Rousseau, the Calvinist/ natural law theorist/ rationalist Locke, the terrified proto-authoritarianism/ collectivism of Hobbes and the utilitarianism of Mill. Certainly they all discuss the individual as a category that needs to be taken seriously, but in the case of Rousseau this category quickly becomes consumed by the “General Will” and in Mill the individual’s demands and claims must aim toward the “greatest good." The tradition that connects Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Mill may be seen as a theoretical wrestling with the place of the individual (and the individual will) in larger society, particularly in light of the post-Reformation predicament of what Stout calls the “problem of many authorities.” Even if this thread is followed, however, the aforementioned thinkers would have little else to agree upon.

More specific to the claims of the articles, I wonder whether the analysis offered is helpful in truly understanding our historical/ ethical predicament. It seems to me figures like Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Lincoln, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, Jr. have been far more influential to the American system than Rousseau or Locke, and definitely John Rawls. Perhaps I’ve been reading too much Jeffrey Stout, but I have to say he has a point when he seeks to divide what is popular in political theory departments from what is actually at play in the moral language of American society. Assessing these aforementioned characters in terms of “the commons” or the public expression of religion would be a much more complex undertaking, but one that would assist in understanding how to “live with liberalism” much better.

Regarding the point (2) which I am attributing to Koyzis and Dijkema, I have always been confused by this objection—if anyone can help me with this please do. I can’t imagine what a non-voluntary church would look like. Or a non-voluntary marriage. Is not the opposite of voluntary compulsory? Surely, there is room within a “liberal” society to take as seriously each of these covenantal relationships as one desires, but I’m not sure what legal measures could be taken to ensure either one operates by compulsion. Especially in the case of religion, as Stout suggests, all of us must determine what kinds of deities there are and which one, if any, is worthy of our deference and devotion. We can’t simply defer to any and every deity, existent and not, moral and immoral. This structure of accepting and denying, if I am not mistaken, is a voluntary one. I can lose my faith, I can regain it—I can be a zealot or apathetic (I think I’ve experienced all of the above), but in all cases I am the one choosing. This is one of Locke’s central points in “A Letter Concerning Toleration” and one I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten past intellectually. If anyone can shed some light here, again, please do.

Lastly, I’m not sure I’ve ever read anyone who would endorse the sort of liberalism (“individual freedom above all else”) Strauss discusses. I’ve yet to come across anyone so reckless. Anyone I’m familiar with has some normative constraint on freedom. Does anybody know to whom this careless freedom-monger Strauss is describing is supposed to refer?

Arendt and Rorty on Cant and Thoughtfulness

2007-01-18T07:44:00.000-08:00

I was inspired by Define Me’s post to explore his comment about his resistance to “commonly used words” in terms of two figures I’ve been reading: Arendt and Rorty. In Hannah Arendt’s now famous coverage of the Adolf Eichmann trial for the New Yorker, she concluded that Eichmann’s murderous complicity in the Nazi party was a result not of anti-Semitism, hatred, or any intentional evil motivation—instead it was a product of his (intentional or unintentional) “thoughtlessness.” She writes, “He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.” Eichmann had clearly demonstrated during the trial that his mental capacity was not lacking—he was the logistical key that enabled the mass transportation of thousands of Jews from camp to camp and he freely quoted Kant to demonstrate his moral knowledge. Arendt, however, noticed a pattern that spread throughout Eichmann’s life, into his involvement with the Nazis, running up through his rise to prominence in the SS and amply demonstrated during his own trial and execution. The pattern she noticed, put simply, was his inability, or refusal, to think about his predicament and the predicament of those around him—this all symbolized most clearly by his continual reliance on kitsch phrases or canned terms. Arendt frequently notes that Eichmann could barely get out a sentence in his defense that was not peppered with folk sayings and cliché. Arendt writes that even “in the face of death, he had found the cliché used in funeral oratory.”

Arendt makes a connection between relying on cliché (in her usage, something similar to what Jeffrey Stout would call “ossified poetry”) and behaving immorally. Cliché, she insists, actually aids thoughtlessness and disables one’s ability to make moral decisions. It is reliance on kitsch and cliché that not only reveals Eichmann’s thoughtlessness, but actually contributes to it. Cliché, Arendt suggests, is most dangerous because it prevents us from expressing empathy—from seeing things from another point of view. In the end, this may be Arendt’s ultimate critique of Eichmann. Arendt would later counter this condition with the suggestion that thinking morally requires that one adopt an “enlarged mentality” that seeks to imaginatively project oneself into another’s point of view—emptying, as much as possible, one’s own mind of cliché and embracing the view of another.

In his recent essay, “Redemption from Egotism: James and Proust as Spiritual Exercises,” Richard Rorty makes a similar case. He challenges his readers to seek “autonomy,” a moral goal which seeks to “liberate one from one’s own previous ways of thinking about the lives and fortunes of individual human beings.” The enemy of autonomy is “ideology” which provides “a set of general ideas which provide a context in which the reader places every book she reads.” Although Rorty begins with this literary definition, he later draws out the moral connections, and in fact, insists that reading itself is a spiritual and moral enterprise. Later in the essay the reader becomes a moral actor and the book becomes other moral beings.

“Cant,” a term Rorty borrows from Harrold Bloom, is the primary contributor to and enabler of ideology. Cant, explains Rorty, is “what people usually say without thinking, the standard thing to say, what one normally says” and its danger lies in its “easy accessibility and intelligibility—its ready-made character.” As was the case with Eichmann, cant provides a quick and easy way to make moral consideration—it allows for almost any context to be judged according to pre-established phrases and words.

A moral agent, however, ought to seek to “transcend the parents, teachers, customs, and institutions that have blinkered her imagination, and thereby permit her to achieve greater individuality and greater self-reliance.” Rorty doesn’t see this brand of “self-reliance” as a type of egotism because it requires that one constantly seek to “enlarge oneself”; as a spiritual practice it opens one to the “possibility that the next book you read, or the next person you meet, will change your life.” For Rorty, egotism is more the result of thoughtlessly relying too much on the inherited categories of a community than relying on one’s own ability to thoughtfully innovate.

Arendt and Rorty would have much to agree on. Both set up a dialectic between inherited ethical knowledge the moral necessity to thoughtfully innovate. They also both indicate that central to moral deliberation is the ability to resist reliance on a laundry list of cant words and phrases and the ability to creatively think for oneself. I’m wondering whether religion (or specifically Christianity) tends to hinder this ability or whether it can encourage this sort of activity. It seems to me that part of a church’s strength depends on its ability to command communal acceptance of a set of beliefs and word usages (a certain orthodoxy) which, if one’s goal is autonomy of the sort Arendt and Rorty recommend, would appear to get one off on the wrong foot. Any thoughts?

Deepak Chopra Anyone?

2006-12-20T08:46:00.000-08:00

Was just wondering if any of you have read Deepak Chopra's stuff. If so, I'd be interested to read some comments. There, I've upped my post #! I was thinking of reading his latest since I saw it on the Colbert Report last night. Happy Holiday!

Oh, Nicole and I are having a son! April 1st is the due date. I hope it's not a true April-fools. "Aww, it's a girl!"

I love you all

Knock Not The Boob Tube

2006-11-28T17:00:00.000-08:00

Lest Define Me's post lie in splendid isolation, I have a few thoughts on that glorious glowing gratifier of our every wish, the television. Or, more specifically, on the current state of television programming and viewing.

I grew up with the idea that watching television was a guilty pleasure to be indulged lightly or not at all. I had my one or two shows - Star Trek on Saturdays, the 6:30 news after supper - and that was it. Never ever was the box turned on during daylight hours, unless perchance it was raining. To this day I have trouble watching tv before it gets dark without feeling restless and guilty (again, unless it's raining). My dad - ironically the family member who was probably most susceptible to the lure of "vegging out" - would occasionally try to impose a fortnight or so of no-tv, or some schedule that specified a more frugal viewing budget ("only on the weekends," or something similar). My mom would often interject that none of us really watched that much tv anyway, so rules and regulations were sort of pointless.

The point being, I've always looked at television as mostly a waste of time - something I've never been past indulging in, but something I've always seen precisely as an indulgence, like junk food. That, of course, has usually been the argument in favor of the "waste of time" label that conjures up pejoratives like "boob tube" - most everything in on television is "junk. TV is supposed to be immoral, unintelligent, or both. You should be reading books!

It's also decried as a great isolator, a promoter of sullen stupified individuals eating takeout alone in their living rooms, a divider of families who sit without speaking in front of that "cold blue screen" that one sees through the windows of every home (instead of the perfect nuclear knot of love and happiness that used to play scrabble and discuss their respective days at work or school, back in the 1950s).

All of these objections, of course, are partly true. A lot of TV was and still is junk, and for many people the mindless nature of their viewing practices does encourage isolation and crowds out other and possible more fulfilling ways to spend time, like playing a game or reading a book or taking a walk.

In my own life, however, two changes have turned television viewing into something quite different: marriage and torrent downloads.

Far from being an isolating experience, now that I'm married tv has become a way to spend time together. We sit side by side, select a show that we both genuinely enjoy and will certainly discuss together after it finishes, and experience the story and characters together. (Reading a book, by contrast, is an almost entirely individual activity. In the mornings we read over breakfast, and there is very little to share as she sits engrossed in her latest acquisition and I march through another novel.)

The fact that we download our shows, often whole seasons at a time, and watch them on our own schedule without commercials, makes an enormous difference in our viewing experience. For us tv isn't background noise or something we do "because we're bored," or "because there's nothing better to do," or any of the other genuinely bad reasons to turn on the set. It's an event that we both anticipate with real excitement. We select precisely what we want to watch, and we watch faithfully through the whole season. This allows for a deeper experience of the plot and the characters than viewers get when they watch once a week, maybe missing several episodes, always interrupted with at least 15 minutes worth of advertising. It's much more like watching a very long movie than it is like watching "tv."

But that is another, crucial factor in my new and improved experience of the television. Programming just seems to be better these days. There are more shows to choose from, and many of them are oustanding. I've written before about Six Feet Under, which might be one of the best things I've ever seen in terms of being relentlessly thought-provoking. I don't think I ever thought much about death before watching that show - now I'm actually aware that, yes, someday, I will in fact die. Weird.

On the less serious end, King Slender recently introduced us to Boston Legal, an otherwise run-of-the-mill network show that has some of the most interesting characters around (including one played by none other than William Shatner). ABC has Heroes, a wonderfully entertaining version of the X-men story that has me salivating for every new episode.

The beauty of torrent files also led us into the strange delights of an older series, David Lynch's Twin Peaks. Other great shows have also passed through the spacious halls of our much-appreciated external hard drive: 24, Big Love (you'll never see polygamists the same way again!), Prison Break, Desperate Housewives (surprisingly enjoyable), and Grey's Anatomy (surprisingly entertaining).

A key element in the improving quality of television is, as King Slender recently pointed out, the fact that shows nowadays are continued stories rather than seperate episodes. There is more to develop, more to gain by following the story consistently, more depth to put into the characters.

I would write more, but the latest episode of Heroes has finished downloading, and we're sitting down to watch. I suppose my point is that the manner in which you watch, as well as what you watch, almost entirely determines the value of your viewing experience, and with recent technological and personal developments, both the manner and the content have changed considerably, with the result being that tv is now officially AWESOME.

With that, I leave you with some truly mindless entertainment, courtesy of Mr. Artegall Acclaimian. Check it out. Unless you're a little baby.

Olbermann's Good Night and Good Luck

2006-09-27T23:07:00.001-07:00

The Best Blog on the Block

2006-09-21T03:14:00.000-07:00

This may not actually be the best blog on the block, as Tongil Korea is surely its superior in terms of sheer recockulosity. But friends, you really must check out President Ahmadinijad's weblog.

I hope it's for real. Or should I say, Ensha'allah, it's for real.

Via Dominic's Tuesday Hatred over at The Weblog.

Digging it

2006-09-14T16:40:00.000-07:00

Piggybacking the post by define me: The new John Mayer album, Continuum, is excellent. Loving it. Can’t stop listening. Highly recommended. Agree?

Google Earth, Global Giving

2006-08-31T02:02:00.000-07:00

1. Google Earth
I have rediscovered Google Earth. I used it a few times on my parent's computer back home, but since moving to Korea I'd forgotten about this most delightful of Google's many gifts.

I've located everything from my childhood home in Indiana to the Egyptian restaurant we frequent up in Seoul. This morning I went to Ulaanbaatar, and I'm pretty sure that I saw the people there living in yurts. This afternoon I traced the path I climbed from St. Anthony's Monastery up the mountain to the cave shrine where we secretly spent the night. Hover over Busan, in the south of this country, and see if you can spot the capsized cruise ship that happened to be there when the satellite flew overhead. Zoom in on what some concerned citizen has helpfully labeled "Area 51," deep in the Nevada desert.

Since Google Earth is updated piece by piece, the map is a melange of snapshots taken at drastically different times of year. In Korea you can see the deep green of summer cut off abruptly by the dirty brown of winter. The contrasts are amazing.

One fun exercise is to pick some spot - say, Kathmandu - and, with the tilt set to give you a real flyover feel, hold down the arrow that takes you north, so that you don't know exactly where you'll end up. Starting from Kathmandu, for example, you'll find that moving due north brings you to a big lake in a southern area of Russia that protrudes between Khazakstan and China. Along the way, of course, you'll have skimmed the Himalayas, watching the elevation meter rise to 15, 16, 17 thousand feet.

2. Global Giving
This is one of the best websites I've ever seen. It lets you browse through all sorts of political, social, and environmental projects - the brainchildren of what are now being called "social entrepreneurs" - and donate to them directly. The genius is that it makes giving money feel more like shopping on Amazon than putting a check in the offering plate. You can read all about the projects, and many of them are brilliant, exciting ideas that actually make you excited about the prospect of contributing to them. Check it out, if you've got some spare cash laying around.

Bright Green

2006-08-21T23:28:00.000-07:00

A while ago I tried to narrow down my current interests into three categories, as a way hopefully to organize my reading and writing into a coherent program. That has more or less happened for my reading, but I have yet to follow through and blog about what I learn and discover. Now's a good time to start; classes begin next week, so my days will be more scheduled and so more open to scheduled tasks, like posting daily in at least one of the three categories: (1) environmental politics, (2) immigration and cultural politics, and (3) America and American politics.

Here is post number one. File it under environmental politics.

Bright Green
Lately, as you may have noticed from recent additions to the "good-stuff" section of the sidebar [especially Worldchanging], I've been fascinated with things like renewable energies, architecture, urban planning, efficiency improvements, reformulations of capitalism, reconceptions of the relationship between economics and ecology, and every sort of practical proposal I can find for solving environmental problems and improving social structures. (One of the main lessons I learned from Jared Diamond's Collapse is that environmental problems are social problems, and vice versa.) Two things are constantly impressed upon me by all this new reading. First, the terrible seriousness of the problem. And dear God, is it depressing; if you ever want to ruin your day, read through some stats about China, or reports from the Pentagon about how future wars will be fought openly over resources like oil and water.

Second, the amazing things being done to address it. For every mindnumbing factoid detailing extinction rates or pollution levels, there are both mindbending and mindbendingly simple proposals (many actually being implemented) for slowing those rates or lowering those levels - for redesigning cities to ease pressure on the land those cities depend on for survival, for harnessing new energy, for reducing consumption, for changing attitudes. Knowing your world these days is, as it always has been, a permanent struggle between pessimism and optimism. But most days, I find myself optimistic - not necessarily because it's rational, but because I think optimism is a more effective problem-solver than pessimism. Though it's kind of hard living in an apartment, we're trying seriously to live as responsibly as we can: being intentional about how much water, air conditioning, and lighting we use, obsessively recycling even though there are no bins on our floor and we have to go to another building to dispose of our trash. Actually doing something, even small things like this, is essential.

Months ago I contrasted the "Wendell Berry" approach to all this with the "Sustainability" approach. Now more than ever I am convinced that the latter is preferable - not because the Berry approach is wrong, but because it is too narrow. What does Berry have to say, for example, about improving cities - where most of humanity lives? What can we do in that problem-plagued meantime until billions of people buy little farms in Kentucky and till the ground with a team of horses? I'm excited to think about and get involved with plans (through investing, for example) for plug-in hybrids, more extensive public transit, green building, fair trade, local production systems, organic food, carbon offsetting, and a million other things that people are really, actually doing to solve real, actual problems and make the world really, actually better.

This sort of optimism doesn't require any assurances that all these terrible problems will be solved before wars, droughts, diseases, floods, and whatever other horsemen of the apocalyse come riding through and kill us all. It doesn't require that I balance the bad news with the good news and calculate that there is more of the latter than there is of the former. It's more like a decision, an act of the will not entirely without foundation, but not entirely assured of its own vindication. The only thing it knows for a fact that if more people recognized these problems and made efforts to address them by making the decisions accordingly (simple things like walking or biking short distances instead of driving), then real improvements would be made. The town of Reynolds, just north of Lafayette in good old Indiana, was recently christened "Biotown." The goal is to make it entirely energy self-sufficient. 100 residents have already gotten ethanol-ready flex-fuel vehicles thanks to a discount from GM, and the gas station will have an ethanol tank by the end of the summer. A plant is being constructed that will harvest electricity from waste produced by the 150,000 hogs housed in the surrounding farms. I think this is just great. I love it. Makes me want to move to Reynolds when I get back.

"Bright green" is a term that's been introduced to distinguish today's defiantly optimistic and extremely practical environmentalism from the doomsday, let's-all-live-in-the-trees environmentalism that turned so many people off back in the 60s. It has no time for knee-jerk hatred of "corporations" - it is as prepared to applaud them when they do something right as it is ready to hate them for being rapacious plunderers of the earth. That's the sort of environmentalism I like, the sort that can convince my mom and dad to make their next car a hybrid instead of an SUV. The kind that makes economic as well as ecological sense - the kind that recognizes no distinction between economy and ecology, and lays blame at the feet of traditional economists and traditional ecologists for keeping that distinction alive for far too long.

Let it be known...

2006-08-18T06:01:00.000-07:00

Nicole Carlisle is 7 weeks and 3 days pregnant. The next step is finding out who the father is. She is due April 3. The spring will (hopefully) be an exciting time. I say hopefully because if the baby comes out black, I’ll have to kill the milkman. We find out where we will move for residency on March 15. Just thought you would want to know. Much love to all, and to all, good-day.

Recent Media Intake: A Mixed Review

2006-08-08T00:57:00.000-07:00

To mold into coherency some of the scattered sources of inspiration and despair with which I have occupied this summer, I offer this incoherent ramble:

The God of Small Things, by Indian agitator Arundhati Roy, is pure poetry in prose form. She makes her own language; if a word is missing, she invents one, spinning Whitman-esque combinations that make perfect, thrilling sense. But I'm only halfway through, and a full-on review is out of order. I believe Define Me and King Slender have both made their way through the book, so I look forward to trading comments after I finish. For now, consider the novel's epigraph, a line by John Berger:

Never again will a single story be told
as though it's the only one.

Roy's non-fiction writing and speaking is often focused on this Lyotardian insight (it came through with great clarity in the speech-cum-documentary "We," which King Slender and I watched a few weeks ago). Similar themes dominate the work of Umberto Eco, who has become one of my favorite novelists. Earlier I read The Name of the Rose, and last week on the beach in Gyeongpodae I finished The Island of the Day Before.

Much like Foucault's Pendulum and Baudolino, Island is a finely plotted meditation on the relationship between truth and narrative, good and evil, will and desire, and a dozen more of the densely knotted philosophical puzzles on which Eco's fiction dwells. He devotes special attention to 17th century debates over the possibility of infinite worlds, and over the possible infinity of our own world - ideas branded as heresies by many in the Church, and embraced with romantic passion by subtle heretics like the Monsieur de Saint-Savin, who dies dueling with a churchman over his casual suggestion that infinite worlds would require infinite stories, not the church's narrative told, in Berger's phrase, "as though it's the only one."

Trapped on a shipwreck off the coast of a deserted island said to lie on the mythical meridian separating yesterday from today, Roberto (the main character) discovers worlds upon worlds in his own past, in his memories both real and fictitious, in the story he writes to keep himself sane, in the view through his telescope and in corals snatched from the ocean, and he reflects that

To live in the Antipodes, then, means reconstructing instinct, knowing how to make a marvel nature and nature a marvel, to learn how unstable the world is, which in one half follows certain laws, but in the other half the opposite of those laws. (102)

Eco's heros are always learning, more or less successfully, to live in the Antipodes. His failures and villains, like Jorge in Name of the Rose, are those who deny that such a life is possible or acceptable: for them (usually orthodox religionists or victims of modern philosophy), the same rules must apply everywhere, there is only one true account of what the rules are, and it is necessary to formulate this One True Account in order to live well, or to live at all. Eco agrees that formulating accounts - telling stories - is necessary for our survival (he says so exactly in Island, but I've forgotten the page), but like Roy he insists that there are many stories to tell, and that living means learning how to cope with this fact, to tell a story confident of its truth while at the same time recognizing that other and opposite stories are also true (it was Fitzgerald who said that "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function").

The stories we tell are important because they tell us how to live. Or, to put it more precisely and in such a way that avoids that theory/practice-chicken/egg conundrum - stories are how we live. We live stories, tell ourselves stories about how we're living, which change or calcify the way we're living, requiring new stories for validation or inspiration, and so on forever and ever, until we die. The great question, the moral question - What shall I do? How shall we live? - is at the same time posed and answered by a story. I am preaching to the choir; none of us are willing to practice "metanarrative" as a way of life. Even if for theory's sake we know and defend those logical arguments about all truth claims being a metanarrative inevitably imposed on competing narratives, including the claim that metanarrative is logically unviable, in real life we are repulsed by provincialists who honestly see their own perspective as the only one, and we feel guilty when we notice the same arrogance in ourselves (an arrogance that sticks around long after theoretical therapy sessions have turned us into enlightened liberals). We already know what Eco and Roy tell us: we can never get away with telling one story as if it was the only one.

What we (or at least I) don't know is what this means for how my story spins the question of morality: what shall I do, if there is no One True Account of The Rules? Or more importantly, what shall we do, if there are as many stories about the rules as there are members of the "we"? What can make us a we? After we learn to live in the Antipodes, what becomes of the law?

This, of course, is one of the great projects of contemporary philosophy. Habermas devotes page after numbingly dense page to the problem of "post-conventional morality." MacIntyre retools pre-modernity in an effort to reorient overly-individualized individuals without ejecting the individuality wrested from the all-absorbing hierarchy of pre-modern life. Rorty preaches self-creation and ironic solidarity. To whatever extent I continue this sort of work, reading this sort of stuff, this will likely be my project, too.

Most of what I've been reading, watching, and listening is being filtered past this question in some way or another. Take Six Feet Under, the amazing HBO series with which my wife and I have become obsessed. [Spoiler Alert]

Nate and Brenda have finally gotten engaged. Brenda's character has really been fine-tuned in recent episodes (we're in season two), and from a few key lines we realize that her neuroses stem from an addiction to detachment and self-observation. She is too sophisticated to commit herself to any One Thing or One Person; she knows too well that no one thing or person is ever exactly what they same, and that such a commitment can never be fully validated - there is always more observation to be done, always more contradictions to be uncovered and blithely cited as proof that things are not simple, that there are no rules.

So for Brenda, an engagement is a fearful thing. She loves Nate, but she is afraid of what that means, because she knows it means the end of detachment, the suspension of disbelief, a permanent moratorium on eternal analysis. She hates herself for her addiction, but like all addicts she abhors the thought of sobriety even as she craves it; she got addicted to detachment because it promised her freedom, and it seems now that with marriage, her freedom will be lost and and she'll be chained to One Thing that might - upon further analysis - turn out to be the Wrong Thing.

And so, putting her mental powers to use, she justifies a slew of secret encounters, casual sex with strangers, debasing herself with worsening debauchery until it finally becomes another obligation to be despised instead of what she thought would be a self-affirming new exercise of her cherished but little-understood independence (her moral descent reminds me of the vivid spiraling despair in Requiem for a Dream). "After all, we're just biology," she desperately and wearily insists to herself after crossing another line, "and the line is in our heads."

After this scene, my wife and I had a disagreement. She thought Brenda was wrong: the line isn't just make-believe, and Brenda's disgusting behavior was linked directly to her narcissistic and self-serving view of morality. I thought that while Brenda's actions were wrong, her account of where the moral lines lie was right. The lines are in our heads.

How then can I insist that her infidelity is "wrong"? The key, I think - and this is nothing new, just things I learned from Habermas and others that keep resurfacing through other media - is that it is not an "I" that draws the lines for a "me." It is a we that draws the lines for an us. Morality, contrary to how many of come to think of it, is not the concern of individuals per se. Morality is a condition of relationships, and is in that respect simply a fact, as relationships are facts. The lines are drawn as we negotiate our relationships with each other. Brenda's affairs are destructive not because some eternal commandment floating in metaphysical space deems it to be so. They are destructive because they hurt her relationship with Nate, and so they hurt her self. If, in one of the alternate worlds imagined by Saint-Savin, people were not hurt by affairs, then no line could justifiably cordon them off from acceptability. But in the experience of our world, affairs do hurt, and so they are wrong. Brenda knows she is in the wrong, because her experience of her relationship with Nate tells her so.

And so it should be easy, given her intellectual prowess, for her to act on the knowledge of good and evil. Yet this same intellectual prowess leaves her keenly aware of how complex that knowledge is, because it is a relational knowledge shifting constantly around various antipodes, changing as partners change, never a general framework universally applicable to every particular instance. That there is no such framework - no ten commandments - leaves her without that volitional shortcut to commitment which in older times was provided by those commandments. Her will must act freely, firmly, and in the face of protests registered by a mind aware from vast experience that if nothing can be totally described by a single story, then no single story, no single thing, no single person, should be able to justify the total commitment of marriage.

What we require, in other words - what Brenda requires, what Eco and Roy want to envision, what Habermas and MacIntyre and Rorty et al want to provide - is some way of the will to act on the good without knowing with complete certainty that it is, truly, the good. Will and reason must be mixed anew, with measurements derived from a different algebra, one built on the knowledge that one does not precede the other as cause and effect, but that both come together for life and living.

The Public Eclipsed

2006-07-27T22:08:00.000-07:00

Chapter four is the best so far. Still no answer that I can see to Chris' question, but here Dewey gives us a clear formulation of the problem of the public's absence, a problem that has since his time only grown more pressing and extensive.

Simply put, the public has been "eclipsed" by the material conditions created by modern technology. Dewey has argued that the existence and integrity of the public depends on the common perception on the part of individuals that their actions have certain indirect consequences which require regulation. In a small polity, where interactivity is not so complex, the only barriers to the rise of this perception - to the creation of a public - are created by individuals themselves. But in a large polity, such as the United States has become, relationships and their consequences become so complicated that no individual can hope to more or less accurately perceive the interests of the public. It is not a question of moral lack, as if the public is in decline because citizens have shirked their duty. Rather, citizens quickly learn to realize that their "duty" is too complicated to be carried out, and with good reason they become indifferent to it. The public is too diffuse to hold together; industry, commerce, and growing global interdependency (Dewey cites the Great War as the watershed moment of globalization, though of course he doesn't use the word itself) make society too complex to become once more a community. And, as he sums up, "[t]ill the Great Society is converted into a Great Community, the Public will remain in eclipse." (142)

The next chapter, presumably, will commence the "search for the great community," but by way of conclusion Dewey here suggests that "[c]ommunication alone can creat a great community." His thesis is that material conditions have created a new world, for which a new kind of public is necessary, but that ideas and ordering symbols have not kept up with those conditions. We're still trying to build a public on old ideas about small communities and face-to-face responsibility, but technology has created a society in which that community cannot come to be. In other words, such a community can only exist to the extent that we shun a large part of our technology, a route taken by groups like the Amish. Dewey seems to favor the other approach; instead of turning back the clock, we need to create new ideas in order to construct a public able to take on the challenges of the new era.

The middle of the chapter talks at length about the need for "experts" to deal with the new complexities of administration and planning. But I wasn't sure whether he endorses this himself; it was presented as an idea often advanced by others. My feeling is that he sees the need for a cadre of experts to keep society running (since the non-expert can no longer hope to understand all the issues he needs to understand if he is to make good public decisions), but that turning this society into a community - reclaiming the public - will require something new, something to do with "communication."

I wonder what he would think of the internet?

Invisible Man and Blues Sensibility

2006-07-27T06:09:00.000-07:00

Upon finishing Invisible Man I’m left with the dilemma of desperately wanting to say something about the novel and knowing there is probably no way for me to sum up my thoughts and feelings about it. The text, characters and themes are too rich and Ellison is much too original to submit to summary. Nevertheless, here are at least three impressions I had of the book:

(1) Jazz/ Blues Sensibility

For Ellison (a once aspiring composer and jazz and blues enthusiast) jazz and blues represented more than musical traditions. They are uniquely American ways of viewing life; jazz and blues offered a perspective of life that was at once tragic and comic. According to Ellison this perspective can be seen in Emerson and Whitman, but found its most profound expression when black Americans transformed it by adding to it their own unique and ironic experiences of being offered the promise of American democracy while being denied its most basic tenants. The idea is captured by James Baldwin, “In all jazz, and especially the blues, there is something tart and ironic, authoritative and double-edged. White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and that God help, is exactly the way most white Americans sing them…Only people who have been ‘down the line,’ as the song puts it, know what this music is about.” (Democracy and Tradition, 313)

Jazz is also a style of writing. Ellison’s best passages are clever variations and reworkings of a single theme. He plays with the meaning of words and relies on words and phrases that can be taken several ways.

(2) Individualism, Identity and the Aesthetic

Ellison came under harsh criticism for not being properly reactionary or sufficiently political. Although he lived during a period which saw incredibly high numbers of lynching and various other violence, he chose to emphasize the “aesthetic” aspect of life rather than the political (at times this caused a rift between himself and Baldwin). Ellison viewed the novel as an important good in itself and insisted it need no direct connection to political movements or issues. He was interested in crafting the self (Harold Bloom considers Invisible Man an American example of Bildungsroman and a “novel of education” for the development of individuality). Ellison famously distanced himself from any movement (Nationalism, Communism, etc.) emphasizing, instead, the process of individual reconciliation of their various identities (he thought all Americans were both white and black) and, in particular, in their relation to the great experiment of America.

(3) America

I’ve noticed significant overlap between Ellison and Langston Hughes, particularly in their common hope for America. Hughes exhortation,

O, let America be America again

The land that never has been yet,

could have just as easily come from Ellison. The Canadian political theorist and expert in cultural pluralism, Will Kymlicka, described the political situation of African Americans in the US as “very unusual” and “quite distinct” from any other culturally plural situation on the globe. Ellison’s writings (not just in Invisible Man, but in “Shadow and Act” as well) would confirm this, and he would not have wanted the situation to resemble to cultural pluralism found in Europe or Canada. What he wanted was much more dialectical—he desired the interplay between the various identities and the recognition that such interplay is already at work. Invisible Man is not only the story of a young black man trying to determine what it means to be black in America. It is that, but it is something more. At the end of the novel the Invisible Man tells us “on the lower frequencies, I speak for you.” The novel is, then, about the American project in general, about what it means to be American: the irony, the tragedy and the comedy intact.

Disappointed by Dewey

2006-07-26T23:39:00.000-07:00

I read this chapter with Chris' question in the back of my mind: "In Dewey's state, whose account of the consequences gets to become public policy?" The question is addressed to a point from the last chapter, in which Dewey argues that "will" has nothing to do with the formation of the public as such (to the extent that it is involved, the public becomes less public, having been coopted for private ends). Here is the relevant passage (page 54):

The 'command' theory of common and statute law is in reality a dialectical consequence of the theories, previously criticized, which define the state in terms of an antecedent causation, specifically of that theory which takes 'will' to be the causal force which generates the state. If a will is the origin of the state, then state-action expresses itself in the injunctions and prohibitions imposed by its will upon the wills of subjects. Sooner or later, however, the question arises as to the justification of the will which issues commands. Why should the will of the rulers have more authority than that of others? Why should the latter submit? The logical conclusion is that the ground of obedience lies ultimately in superior force. But this conclusion is an obvious invitation to trail of forces to see where superior force lies. In fact the idea of authority is abolished, and that of force substituted. . . . The alternative . . . is surrender of the causal authorship theory and the adoption of that of widely distributed consequences, which, when they are perceived, create a common interest and the need of special agencies to care for it.

The first few pages of chapter three continue down the route Chris found so puzzling: problems in democracies, Dewey suggests, stem not from conflict between differing accounts of consequences, but from failure to keep the public public and the private private. This is the failure of real individuals, who in a representative democracy fill two roles - as private persons, and as officers of the public (either as voters or as elected officials). The health of the public suffers when individuals fail to keep their private aims from overtaking their public responsibilities (this is Dewey's definition of political corruption). He sets out the problem in this crucial paragraph:

. . . for long stretches of time the public role of rulers has been incidental to other ends for which they have used their powers. There has been a machinery of government, but it has been employed for purposes which in the strict sense are non-political . . . Thus we come upon the primary problem of the public: to achieve such recognition of itself as will give it weight in the selection of official representatives and in the definition of their responsibilities and rights. (77)

Put another way, "[t]he essential problem is that of transforming the action of [individuals] so that it will be animated by regard for social ends." (82)

This reemphasizes what Dewey from the beginning suggested is a basic factor in the Public: the gradually acquired perception on the part of private individuals that a public has in fact come into existence, and needs to be cared for. The public is more or less the name we give for the collective perception that our actions have indirect consequences to which we must attend, for our own sakes. The public is healthier the more this perception is solidified, made into a habitual frame of mind which informs the decisions we make as individuals.

Dewey spends the majority of this chapter on the history of individualism, which he obviously reprised eight years later in Liberalism and Social Action. It was old news, nothing exciting, and nothing with which I would really disagree. But my hopes for an answer to Chris' question were frustrated. He has three more chapters in which to redeem himself.

Hehe.

2006-07-26T22:26:00.000-07:00

Headline in the English edition of this week's Chosun Ilbo (a major Korean newspaper):

"Army Officer Arrested for Fondling Privates"

Discovering the State

2006-07-26T02:56:00.000-07:00

Dewey suggests that as we search for the public (chapter 1) we will discover the state (chapter 2). Dewey's search led him to the conclusion that the source of the public is "the perception of consequences which are projected in important ways beyond the persons and associations directly concerned in them . . ." In this conclusion he discovers the state as the entity organize "to care for and regulate these consequences." (39)

This is a purely formal definition; to flesh it out we must look at actual states to see how they perform this function. In looking at these states, the first thing we realize is that there are many of them, separated by borders and other boundaries. It's important to ask why these borders exist; the answer will shed more light on the nature of the public. Dewey observes the separation of states by mountain ranges and rivers, and notes that the effect of these borders is to keep communities on either side from developing a public between them. The acts of a community on one side has little or no consequences for the community on the other side, and this is why they develop into separate states, even though they are both human communities. The implication is that "[w]hatever is a barrier to the spread of the consequences of associated behavior by that very fact operates to set up political boundaries." (43)

A look at real-world states also reveals that many human associations exhibit "immediate contiguity, face to face relationships . . . too direct and vital to occasion a need for political organization." (39) Families, villages, etc. - only when a community reaches a certain size is does the need for a "state" arise, since prior to reaching that size most acts performed by community members have consequences which are more directly than indirectly experienced. (Dewey also notes that many "states" are improperly organized terms of these private relationships, rather in terms of properly public ones; every consequence of every act is considered to have a direct effect on the entire community, and so comes under the purview of the state - i.e., totalitarianism, "oriental despotism," etc.)

And so, "[s]omewhere between associations that are narrow, close and intimate and those which are so remote as to have only infrequent and casual contact lies, then, the province of the state." (43) As a formal definition this is strictly constructed - a state is organized to deal with indirect consequences of acts, and there is a continuum of "direct" and "indirect" such that their definitions cannot be determined a priori - but it is designed to account for the endless variations in the forms taken by actual states. By seeking definitions in consequences, rather than mythical "causes," Dewey avoids political theory's essentialist error:

"In short, the hypothesis which holds that publics are constituted by recognition of extensive and enduring indirect consequences of acts accounts for the relativity of states, while the theories which define them in terms of specific causal authorship imply an absoluteness which is contradicted by facts." (47)

The hypothesis also accounts for - and tends to approve of - the fact that the quantitative expansion of private activity gradually transforms it into public activity. Dewey's own example of this process is not very satisfying, but I can think of several times when Chaplin made the same point - though he usually explained it in terms of Dooyeweerdian modal theory and processes of "unfolding" and "differentiation." For a better example, one might think now of the enormous expansion of business activity under the aegis of giant corporations. In the past we considered business a private affair, for which public oversight would represent an unjust extension of state power. Now, with global warming etc. on everyone's minds, business activity is obviously a very public affair, the indirect consequences of which demand the attention of states.

On the other hand, history shows the converse movement of religious belief from the public sphere to the private, which Dewey's model also explains and endorses in terms of consequences. This means Dewey thinks of religious freedom not as a natural right finally recognized, but as a conclusion based on observations about the negative effects of intolerance.

But more needs to be said about how a "public" arises - about how we determine which indirect consequences deserve public oversight in the form of law enforced by the state. For in a real sense, every action has indirect consequences as well as direct ones. No actor can anticipate all of these, and neither can any agency of the public. So it is then that

when consequences concern a large number, a number so mediately involved that a person cannot readily prefigure how they are to be affected, that number is constituted a public which intervenes. It is not merely that the combined observations of a number cover more ground than those of a single person. It is rather that the public itself, being unable to forecast ane estimate all consequences, establishes certain dikes and channels so that actions are confined within prescribed limits, and insofar have moderately predictable consequences. (53)

This means that laws are not the state's "commands." They are simply ways to organize "the conditions under which persons make their arrangements with one another." (54) Laws enable action by regulating certain consequences (necessarily unforseen by single persons) of actions, consequences more easily recognized by a public than a private person, and consequences discovered experimentally in the course of history. Laws "canalize action": they prescribe consequences for certain action such that individuals know beforehand the effect their actions will have. This model dispenses with the concern that law is simply the expression of superior force, the "will to power," even that general will-to-power called the "will of the people" (which Dewey thinks is just nonsense).

From here Dewey moves on to an interesting discussion of the state's relationship to tradition and innovation. He argues that what is settled and customary eventually comes under the purview of the public, while innovation is the province of private individuals. He makes the curious claim that "[a] state which will organize to manufacture and disseminate new ideas and new ways of thinking may come into existence some time, but such a state is a matter of faith, not sight." It was unclear throughout whether he favors working toward this hoped-for-state, or whether he thinks it's just an evolutionary possibility with little relevance for the democratic experiment for which we today are responsible. The job of contemporary states, he says, is simply to provide the conditions in which innovation may take place.

Dewey closes the chapter with an interesting explanation of how his hypothesis understands the limits to state authority. For him, there are no normatively fixed limits; there are only consequences, good and bad, which recommend different limits for different circumstances. This means that the state can never claim total authority over other kinds of human society, but it also means - against pluralist theories with which he otherwise has a great deal in common - that there are no a priori limits to that authority. The limits shift with the times. Here I'm forced to reconsider my comparison of Dewey's ideas to those of sphere-sovereignty theorists. He insists that

Our doctrine of plural forms is a statement of a fact: that there exist a plurality of social groupings, good, bad, and indifferent. It is not a doctrine which prescribes inherent limits to state action. It does not intimate that the function of the state is limited to settling conflicts among other groups, as ifeac one of them had a fixed scope of action of its own. Were that true, the state would be only an umpire to avert and remedy trespasses of one group upon another. Our hypothesis is neutral as to any general, sweeping implications as to how far state activity may extend. It does not indicate any particular polity of public action. At times, the consequences of the conjoint behavior of some persons may be such that a large public interest is generated which can be fulfilled only by laying down conditions which involve a large measure of reconstruction within that group. There is no more an inherent sanctity in a church, trade-union, business corporation, or family institution than there is in the state. Their value is also measured by their consequences. (73-4)

The Consequentialist

2006-07-24T05:22:00.000-07:00

To open his analysis of the public and its problems, Dewey sets out to define the public - or more precisely, to define how to define the public. As I took notes, I kept wanting to us the word "consequentialism," as Dewey believes that the facts to be collected in our "search for the public" are the facts laid down by consequences, not those laid down by metaphysical "causes." But, I didn't really know what "consequentialism" is, so I wasn't sure if it can accurately describe Dewey's ideas. Before I so helpfully summarize the course of this chapter's argument, it will be good to retrace the detour I took in order to nail down the meaning of the term.

Dictionary.com defines it as follows:

"The view that the value of an action derives soley from its consequences."

A brief foray into academia turned up quite a lot on consequentialism, but less on whether Dewey was any such beast. I did find this article, by an Aaron Papenhausen of Concordia, on "Deweyan Scientism and Romantic Consequentialism." Papenhausen aims to tweak Rorty's reading of Dewey in some way that didn't seem very interesting, so I didn't read the whole thing. Scanning did seem to indicate that "consequentialist" is generally accepted as an appropriate label for J.D., though surely many a grad student could find enough fodder in the inevitable objections and qualifications to write up a decent conference paper (perhaps Dewey would not say an action's value derives "solely" from its consequences). For my own present purposes, I'll stand on this quotation, pulled from Papenhausen's page five:

"The test of consequences is more exacting than that afforded by general rules." (Dewey, The Philosophy of John Dewey, ed. Mcdermott, Chicago, 1981, p. 83)

The detour is finished. Dewey, the consequentialist, introduces in chapter one an extremely no-nonsense take on the state, public/private, individual/social, and the tasks of political theory. These are the main ideas:

1. Inquiry must pay attention to consequences, not hypothetical causal forces.
2. Consequences may be direct or indirect. This distinction gives rise to the distinction between private and public.
3. Consequences of action are social facts. Social facts are unique in that they are both facts about a society, and facts created by society. As such, awareness of the facts changes the facts.
4. A state is supposed to organize the public (to control indirect consequences of acts). It will do this better the more accurately it understands the facts about the public. Because these facts are social facts, subject to continual change, the design of a state is an ongoing experiment. Political theory is practical, not speculative.

"It is not the business of political philosophy and science to determine what the state in general should or must be. What they may do is to aid in creation of methods such that experimentation may go on less blindly, less at the mercy of accident, more intelligently, so that men may learn from their errors and profit by their successes." (34)

Mommy killed a mouse, Baby burned the house, Daddy found the pills, Uncie bought a church, Jesus came to Earth.....

2006-07-16T05:05:00.000-07:00

Adam is right. It is incredibly difficult to describe a Kundera novel. This is because the idea is the main character. There are no strong leads directing action here, there is only an idea being learned and demonstrated through whatever means necessary. Yesterday I happened to read the Amazon plot synopsis for Before Sunrise. It's an awesome movie that left me giddy upon seeing it, but their plot synopsis was simply

"A French Grad student meets an American boy on a train. They get off the train in Vienna and hang out for a while."

And I realized..that really is it. That's all that happens. If someone asked what the plot of the movie was, you really can't give any better answer than that. It's not the most thrilling description, and your friend probably isn't going to be gung ho to watch it if you leave it there, but that's all there is. You can't describe it any more in-depth by conventional means because both Ethan Hawke's character and the female lead are simply the supporting cast. It's their discussions, their looks, their mannerisms - the ideas, which are billed first. It's the same with this and all Kundera books I've read.

However, many writers attempt this style, and come off as hacks. They have an idea they want to get across, but they make the mistake of making that idea the plot, i.e. "first they think this...then they have this idea, but then this idea comes to them which is really much more clever." These authors are so concerned with getting their idea across, with appearing wise and witty, that they don't develop the idea, they simply beat you over the head with it. They come off as someone trying to teach their audience something, rather than someone seeking to have a discussion through a story, and no one likes a know it all.

Where Kundera and many other authors succeed is precisely in situating their ideas as the main character. They introduce it in the beginning, not giving it's full details, but letting us familiarize ourselves with it, letting us believe that it is our idea, as action or fantasy attempt to make the reader/viewer believe we are the character. If the writer is succesful in this, then the rest is in place. The main character encounters new problems, new situations. The idea we were so ready to accept meets situations which counter it, concepts which force it to become something more than it was introduced as. It gains complexity, just as any good main character does through the course of a novel. In the end, it is fully developed, and left to the reader for the final verdict, as a more conventional character rides off into the sunset or dies or gets married, and leaves the question of his virtue or intelligence or worthiness to the reader, having spoken his part.

Thus, these sorts of novels or movies or paintings convey ideas in a way not available to a non-fiction work. When we read non-fiction, we are in a state of either agreement or disagreement. We encounter each landmark phrase as something to either be quoted or denounced. Yet, when you read something like Slowness, you're in a state of understanding - you suspend disbelief (or suspend belief) of the idea for the time being, and simply experience what the idea is, what it is like to think that way, how people who think that way might act, what they may do when confronted with different things - be it murder, explosions, rape, or just how they converse, how they react to seduction, and other, smaller, things. At the end, you are once again free to critique the idea, but you do so as (depending on the skill of the author) one who understands, rather than one who has read only to find quotable points or points where you can interject a clever "zinger" and make the author cry (in your head, of course).

So, in sum, I think these kind of books are good.

I'll post more in detail on Slowness later, lest I surpass the 5 page double spaced mark with this post.

Slowness

2006-07-13T23:58:00.000-07:00

It’s a bit difficult to describe a Milan Kundera book (but I’ve only read two – maybe it will get easier). Slowness, I think, should be read as part novel, part essay. Its characters are thrown at you; not introduced in any straightforward, plot-driving way, but presented with such skill that you immediately feel an almost unbearable familiarity with them. Essay-like reflective passages weave through the conversations and acquire their insistent force, so that by the time he concludes with what otherwise might be a rather vulgar and sentimental exhortation –

I beg you, friend, be happy. I have the vague sense that on your capacity to be happy hangs our only hope. (156)

– you’ve come to the conclusion that since he seems to know more about your mind than you do, his “moral of the story” sounds like a truth of rare and wonderful purity.

Kundera’s great talent is for making public the fearful complex of thoughts and emotions that so aggressively govern our actions and (more precisely) interactions. His incisions are incredibly spare and precise. An experience, and exchange, a commonplace emotion, an inner turmoil of the everyday; no facet of these goes unexamined, yet Slowness took me just over an hour to finish. I come away brimful.

Consider this opening passage:

We suddenly had the urge to spend the evening and night in a chateau. Many of them in France have become hotels: a square of greenery in a stretch of ugliness without greenery; a little plot of walks, trees, birds in the midst of a vast network of highways. I am driving, and in the rearview mirror I notice a car behind me. The small left light is blinking, and the whole care emits waves of impatience. The driver is watching for the chance to pass me; he is watching for the moment the way a hawk watches for a sparrow.

Vera, my wife, says to me: ‘Every fifty minutes somebody dies on the road in France. Look at them, all these madmen tearing along around us. these are the same people who manage to be so terrifically cautious when an old lady is getting robbed in front of them on the street. How come they have no fear when they’re behind the wheel?’

What could I say? Maybe this: the man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present in the instant of his flight; he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future; he is wrenched from the continuity of time; he is outside time; in other words, he is in a state of ecstasy; in that state he is unaware of his age, his wife, his children, his worries, and so he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.

Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man. As opposed to a motorcyclist, the runner is always present in his body, forever required to think about his blisters, his exhaustion; when he runs he feels his weight, his age, more conscious than ever of himself and of his time of life. This all changes when man delegates the faculty of speed to a machine: from then on, his own body is outside the process, and he gives over to a speed that is noncorporeal, non-material, pure speed, speed itself, ecstasy speed.

A curious alliance: the cold impersonality of technology with the flames of ecstasy. I recall an American woman from thirty years ago, with her stern, committed style, a kind of apparatchik of eroticism, who gave me a lecture (chillingly theoretical) on sexual liberation; the word that came up most often in her talk was ‘orgasm’; I counted: forty-three times. The religion of orgasm: utilitarianism projected into sex life; efficiency versus indolence; coition reduced to an obstacle to be got past as quickly as possible in order to reach an ecstatic explosion, the only true goal of lovemaking and of the universe.

Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? (1-3)

And the rest of the book is a riff – character-driven but directly reflective and free-form enough to direct those reflections onto the reader’s own heart and soul. It is a riff on that question: “why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared?” It tries to answer by exploring pleasure, and exploring slowness, and uncovering those strained attitudes that try to appropriate pleasure as if it were a commodity, the acquisition of which (the faster and more masterful, the better) becomes its own pleasure, a substitute, false and fleeting.

Cursory Book Review No. 8

2006-07-05T23:01:00.000-07:00

This is Dewey's 93 page tract on the history and current crisis of liberalism (current for 1935, but still quite relevant). It was my first Dewey book (I'm now in the middle of The Public and its Problems), and for as much as I know it's probably the best way to introduce yourself to his more political works.

The essay traces the transformation of liberalism from agent of change to enforcer of the status quo, and recommends a new liberalism to carry out the original intent of reformers like Bentham and Mill. The thesis is very simple: the old liberalism sought to free individuals from the constraints of unbending traditions and oppressive social institutions. But their efforts, admirable and successful as they were, depended on the mistaken notion that the individuals they sought to liberate existed as atoms. To free them from traditions and institutions, they worked to seperate them from social context. This was accomplished by creating an economic system in which the myth of the asocial individual is needed to sustain production and consumption. That economic system has now, for the first time in history, made it physically possible to eliminate scarcity.

But the old liberals did not anticipate that an individual can profit from keeping other individuals poor, and today the effects of lassaiz faire have created less, not more liberty. They "failed to perceive that social control of economic forces is equally necessary if anything approaching economic equality and liberty is to be realized." (44) Absent this control, "[i]nstead of independence, there exists parasitical dependence on a wide scale . . ." (45-6)

For Dewey, it is crucial to understand that "effective liberty is a function of the social conditions existing at any time." (42) And so, [w]hen conditions changed and the problem was one of constructing social organization from individual units that had been released from old social ties, liberalism fell on hard times." (49-50). Liberalism rightly began with the individual, but what we now realize is that "liberalism that takes its profession of the importance of individuality with sincerity must be deeply concerned about the structure of human association." (48)

Cursory Book Review No. 7

2006-07-05T22:29:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, at an in-house conference at ICS, I heard a literature professor talk about a book called The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, by an English novelist named A. S. Byatt. The storyline intrigued me, so when I saw it in the bargain bin last year I picked it up. It's actually a novella and some short stories all put together, but I was quite happy with each one nonetheless. Before we left for Korea, I happened across a full-length novel by Byatt - yet again in the bargain bin - and decided to put it in the suitcase.

A Whistling Woman, come to find out, is the last in a quartet of novels set in 1950s and '60s England and centered around a woman named Frederica. Fortunately it stands on its own, too, and while its rather unstructured plot lent it a slow start, by the end I started realizing just how much I had enjoyed it. It is, for lack of a better term, a "novel of ideas," specifically the idea that dominated the 60s: revolution. The several characters and intersecting plotlines are Byatt's skilled attempt to negotiate the meanings of religious, intellectual, social, and personal changes that constituted that decade. Frederica, having quit her job at the university out of frustration with fuzzy-headed hippies and their aversion to studying, reluctantly takes up a position as host of a new, cutting edge talk-show called Through the Looking Glass, which soon becomes quite popular. Her friends and acquaintances, or her friend's friends and acquaintances - scientists, psychologists, writers, philosophers, student revolutionaries and university officials - contribute their conversations, reflections, letters, and research to a narrative that becomes tighter and more defined as the novel proceeds, until the end weaves a highly satisfying climax out of what I had originally thought were disparate strands only vaguely related to one another. I think I would have understood and enjoyed it more if I had been familiar with the first three books, but as it stands it's still a good read.

He Is Here.

2006-06-29T07:45:00.000-07:00

The King.

He Is Here.

In Korea.

All Hail King Slender.

My Summer Music Pick: Dan Reeder

2006-06-26T10:47:00.000-07:00

In light of Mason Jennings’ recent foray into the more experimental and Sufjan Steven’s latest album which maintains and, perhaps, furthers his state-centric avant garde, it was a joy to have recently stumbled upon Dan Reeder. I discovered him by complete accident: I was googleing Jesse Winchester, another great musician, and probably the only politically conservative, draft dodging, Bush critic, folk artist who posts routine book reports on his website about presidential biographies he’s recently read. If you’re familiar with Winchester, Reeder will betray an obvious affinity. His sound is classic folk with a touch of delta blues. Against the backdrop of the current barrage of anti-folk, pysch-folk, etc. Reeder’s more orthodox folk emerges as a fresh reminder of the southern front porch styling of a time less self-consciously experimental. Reeder’s album is completely familiar, and therein lies its greatness.

There are, however, some unpredictable features. His lyrics are delightfully dirty; the juxtaposition of his aged, inviting voice and his arsenal of four letter words is striking, but it also seems strangely appropriate. In one track (Reeder’s ode to the human condition) he confidently justifies his carnal urges, no, his desperate need for “food” and a certain portion of the female anatomy (prefix to “cat” and rhymes with wussy). Other songs are more childish than vulgar (like the blues song dedicated to his “little bitty pee pee”) but equally surprising and enjoyable.

His album straddles a space between melancholia and feel-good grooves, giving it a blues-like versatility—it would be perfect music for both a sunny day barbeque and a rainy day inside with a book and cup of coffee. Many of his songs could be rightly interpreted as midlife, retrospective longing; others are simply careful observations of the mundane. His lyrics would probably come off depressing if it didn’t sound like he was having such a good time.

Reeder himself is about as intriguing as his music. He has the Whitmanesque quality of genuinely inhabiting both the life of a working class day laborer (he’s a commercial painter) as well as the introspective artisan (he’s a published poet and painter). His intimate familiarity with the daily grind gives his middle aged laments an heir of legitimacy (when he sings, “I’ve got all the fucking work I need” you believe him) and his lyrical nuance and subtlety brings a degree of levity that doesn’t leave the listener hating life (an important dual structure that few young folk musicians have mastered). A few more facts for the road: he makes his own instruments, sings all his own harmonies and lives in Germany. Folk fan? Then this is a must have, and my summer pick.

Recent Viewing

2006-06-26T00:13:00.000-07:00

After many a rave review and unreserved recommendation, I have finally watched David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. Unnerving, perplexing, and astonishing, I must admit that, after it was over, I had consigned it to another of the "wierd for the sake of wierd," intriguing as an experience of surreality and perhaps a meditation on obsession, but lacking a "point" in the traditional sense of the word. But the compelling interpretation offered by our Canadian compadres changed my mind, and now I see the film pretty clearly as a brilliant riff on the psychology of ambition. I was right to see obsession as the important theme, but I was wrong about the object of obsession. Watt's character was obsessed not with the other woman, but with her own dream and the fears that stifled her chances of achieving it. Now equipped with this thesis, I think I might like to watch it again.

But immediately afterward, we were more in the mood for a less literary and more superficial psychological thiller. For my better half, this was more than adequately provided by When a Stranger Calls, a retelling of the classic ghost story/urban legend about the babysitter who gets the prank calls, only to discover too late that they are coming FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE! GET OUT! HE'S GONNA EAT YOU! AHHHHHHHHHHHH!

See it if you dare.

Recent Viewing

2006-06-20T01:28:00.000-07:00

Picture Christian Bale's Batman: buff and brawny, with plenty of muscle thrown into relief by the obligatory black leather, and a jaw so square it's almost comical. He's the caped crusader, ready to kick Liam Neeson's ass.

Now picture a holocaust victim or a famine-stricken Ethiopian: his rib-cage looking truly cage-like, each bar piercing through the skin with an awful bony solidity, the spine sticking out like a pole to which some shell of a man is loosly chained. He's ready to eat Liam Neeson's ass.

Bale's transformation from the first to the second is the most immediately arresting thing about The Machinist. The first sight of his emaciated frame is enough to set the oppressive, paranoid tone that the rest of the movie plays to perfection. The wierd mystery and mental sweats, pushed forward quite effectively by a Hitchcock-esque score (complete with theramin), are immediately reminiscent of Hitchcock (not that I'm a scholar of Hitchcock - but that's the first thing I thought of as I watched). Director Brad Anderson takes a relatively simple theme (which I can't discuss without giving it away) and keeps you fascinated with it, so that when the end reveals what actually happened to Trevor Reznick (the title character), the effect (for me, at least) is to both satisfy your questions and to invite further reflection. I liked this movie.

Unfortunately, I did not like this movie. I went to the theater with great expectations. All day I had been cooped up, entering grades and doing paperwork, and looking forward to an evening at the movies like I a kid looks forward to tomorrow's trip to Six Flags. None of my friends was very excited about it, but I'd convinced them to come anyway and at least try to share my joy. But there was no joy to be had.

I loved the first two X-Men movies. I never read the comic books, but Schwada's obsession with them turned me into a fan. They were the epitome of the sort of movie whose only responsibility is to churn out awesome special effects, big save-the-world storylines, and cool characters. They're the sort of movie I love watching after finishing a stack of books about moral complexity and the dangers of Manicheeism.

Judged on these merits, the third installment was just plain disappointing. The special effects were not so awesome. Magneto's Brooklyn Bridge scene was only impressive in the abstract; it's cool to think about one guy moving a whole bridge with his mind, but it's not near as thrilling to watch it happen. All of Jean Grey's Pheonix scenes were too overwhelming to be entertaining. If you can literally do anything with your mind, then what's the point? Invincibility, even with the whole schizophrenia factor, is just not very exciting.

The cool characters were not very cool. All the new mutants were introduced haphazardly, with no time devoted to their development. I don't mean development in some deep literary way; I just mean development in the sense that they get to show off their powers in interesting ways. Archangel isn't even named - all he does is spread out his wings as trumpets blow, and fly off into the sunset at the end. And the old characters didn't do anything new, or at least nothing new that really grabbed my attention. And Frasier? Frasier from "Frasier"? Ridiculous.

I have also finished - at long last, and after much time wasted in morning marathon sessions of three, four episodes at a time - the last season of 24. I could write a great post on "the ethics of 24" (with a few bones thrown to Zizek's "The Ethics of Urgency" and Kotsko's "The Job") or some other topic with similar potential for great wit and insight, but for now I'll just stick with joining the near-universal chorus of agreement that 24 is the best show on television, period. I can't really talk about the plot much, for fear that I'll spoil it for the uninitiated. Let me say only that after my dad, who spend much of my childhood denigrating "the boob tube" and falling asleep during most tv shows, spent an entire day watching a back-to-back special showing of season one, and raved about it like a little kid for several days afterward, I was still skeptical. I prefered "Lost," and had no plans to get involved with something else that would only encourage me to read fewer books. How wrong I was, and how deprived. "24," my friends, really is everything it's cracked up to be. Watch it. Love it. Accuse it alternately of overcomplicating or oversimplifying current events. But by all means, enjoy it, and then try to get it out of your system as fast as you can. The dreams where you have to keep the virus from killing everyone in your city will pass soon enough, and you'll be back to your boring nightmares about missing the bus or running from poisonous cats or whatever. I promise.

Terror and Liberalism

2006-06-13T00:32:00.000-07:00

I had not heard of Paul Berman until I ran across an article on a website called “Radical Middle Newsletter,” which called him “an American Camus.” I was intrigued by the summary of Berman’s Power and the Idealists, and so when I ran across another of his books in Seoul’s Kyobo Bookstore this weekend, I decided to pick it up.

Terror and Liberalism turned out to be one of those few books that actually change my mind about something. I had probably been primed for his arguments by having so recently read Achieving Our Country, but whatever the contributing factors, it very effectively capitalized on a lot of my current thinking and pushed it decisively in a certain direction.

Berman is a masterful essayist (you can find his work at places like Slate, Salon, the New York Times, and The New Republic) whose ability to turn political and intellectual history into an engaging, smoothly flowing narrative reminds me of Louis Menand, the difference being that Berman’s narrative is intended to persuade the reader to adopt the strong conclusions he draws from it. His conclusions are those of what some call a “liberal hawk” – a leftist who supports the war, not just in Afghanistan, but in Iraq, too. “Bush may be an idiot,” he grants, “but he was right about Sadaam.”

In Terror and Liberalism he argues that Islamism is totalitarianism, period. He connects it, very convincingly, to the rest of the 20^th century’s totalitarianisms – Hitler’s Nazis, Mussolini’s Fascists, Mao and Stalin’s Communism, and others inspired by them. We’ve learned to believe that the 20^th century ended in 1989, when the Soviet Empire fell and the last of that legacy faded away on “the ash heap of history,” as Reagan liked to predict it would. That’s wrong, says Berman – the 20^th century is still alive and well, and so is what he calls the rebellion against liberalism.

A rebellion against liberalism is a rejection of liberal pluralism in favor of some totalizing vision of the world. But these totalizing visions of the 20^th century have shared some basic characteristics which unite them, despite their often fiercely guarded idiosyncrasies. They have all been chiliastic, focused on, as Eric Voegelin would say, “immanentizing the eschaton,” turning their ideal into a concrete no matter what the cost. And, more disturbing, they have all turned, either quickly or gradually, into something like a death cult. The costs – genocide, slaughter, and terror of all kinds – become ends in themselves, worshiped as proof of commitment, as beautiful sacrifices to the totality which becomes an idol. And with this they become wholly pathological, nihilistic, sacrificed to unreason.

This is where Berman challenges the usual liberal approach to such movements. Liberals want to discover what rational motivations are at work for Islamism, because they cannot accept the possibility that millions of people can be so easily and thoroughly caught up in the worship of death and an obsession with something that enslaves them. They point to colonialism and imperialism, globalization, poverty, and all sorts of things that certainly are real factors, but which in the end cannot explain the problem and definitely cannot point toward real solutions. Most troublingly, Berman points out that liberals prior to World War 2 had the same trouble recognizing Nazism for what it was – a wholesale rejection of diversity, freedom, tolerance, and pluralism that could not be reasoned with, but could only be overcome with more powerful arguments and, whenever the need arose, with more powerful bombs.

That Islamism, in both its Baathist version (Sadaam’s Iraq) and its overtly religious version (bin Laden’s Al Queada and the Taliban and – well, lots of other places), is a pathological totalitarianism is left to little doubt after Berman’s impressive foray into Sayd Qutb’s massive In the Shade of the Qu’ran, a founding document for Islamists everywhere. Qutb (a leading intellectual of Hassan al Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood) directed his arguments squarely at the most important principles of liberal civilization – the separation of church and state, the rights of the individual, and the basic idea that there are many authorities for this world, never only one. Of course his arguments were delivered as an exegesis of the Qu’ran, and they were thoroughly Muslim. But their impulse was the same as those made by Hitler, by Lenin and Stalin, by Mao, and by every sick and demented purveyor of fear and hater of freedom that that past century, the century in which liberal reforms have made the most progress but have seen the most setbacks, has coughed up.

Liberalism, Berman argues, must have the courage to believe in its own principles and defend them from destruction. It must give up the idea that the world is a basically rational place, and accept the real fact of irrationality as a challenge to be met and overcome. Bush may have been unable to marshal the right arguments, he may have lied and squandered the international goodwill that came our way immediately following September 11, and he may be surrounded by Nixonian realists more interested in securing American interests than in securing the liberty they talk so much about. But Bush was also right, Berman insists, to treat Sadaam and bin Laden (despite the lack of connections between the two and his stupid attempt to insist on their existence) as real threats to liberal civilization that had to be met sooner or later. Europeans need to put aside their “foolish resentment,” Americans need to put aside their “foolish arrogance,” and liberals need to earnestly wage the necessary war of ideas with those who insist to their naive and desperate followers that death is freedom and that they have secured the services of Absolute Truth to justify what is, in the end, mindless cruelty and astonishing barbarism.

This is a project, a liberal project, one that says “enough with powerless pronouncements from academic chairs about the ubiquity of the system and our complicity in its evil.” It invites us to get clear about what our principles our, to understand them as good and right, and to commit ourselves to pursuing the projects they can inspire. This is why Rorty’s book primed me for Berman – though I’m not sure Rorty would completely agree with Berman’s bellicosity. I, on the other hand, am beginning to. What he has fully convinced me of, however, is that there is a liberal project, that it is worth fighting for, and that it now again seems necessary to do so. I only wish someone besides Bush, with his muddled rationales and his abuses of power, were the one to be fighting it (or at least that some others were fighting it with Bush).

I remember Dr. Chaplin once insisting, provocativey, that he didn't have much patience for knee-jerk opposition to the idea of "imposing liberalism." "By all means, let's impose some liberalism!" he said, with that understated English enthusiasm of his. That strikes me as a nice little epigraph.

Cursory Book Review No. 5

2006-06-11T18:14:00.000-07:00

On Friday, after a long and anxious wait, Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country finally came to my mailbox. It was something of a disappointment, because having looked forward to a good long read, I finished it the next day on the bus to Seoul. I suppose that after reading mostly novels and online articles for the past few months, I was especially primed for a good dose of book-length philosophical (or anti-philosophical) insight, and this was partly responsible for my voracious rate of consumption (that, and it’s really short). But it’s also a great book, and that always helps.

Rorty diagnoses the current state of the American Left and traces the history that brought them to that state. During the Progressive Era, the Left was a reformist movement happily up to its elbows in the mess of politics, organizing campaigns, proposing and trying to implement policies, and working for real change. There was optimism and pragmatism.

Vietnam and the 1960s changed all that, as the reformist left gave way to the New Left of the student movements. The students got so disillusioned with “the system” and the insanity of the war that they came to prefer dropping out to getting involved. Later, when they became writers and professors and teachers and such, they completed the transformation of the reformist left into the “cultural left” – the left of political correctness, multiculturalism, and abstract theoretical treatises on the ubiquity of “the system” and the evils it commits.

The reformist left worked to combat “selfishness.” They talked about money and its abuse, and tried to imagine a more just economic and political order. The cultural left has worked to undermine “sadism,” the social practice of humiliating instead of recognizing the other (hence the proliferation of cultural studies programs for every conceivable “cultural” group). In the past few decades, the cultural left has been quite successful in this endeavor, and “the adoption of attitudes which the Right sneers at as ‘politically correct’ has made America a far more civilized place than it was thirty years ago.” (81) But the dark side of the cultural left’s cynical abandonment of the political nitty-gritty and of the reformist impulse of previous generations is that “[d]uring the same period in which socially accepted sadism has steadily diminished, economic inequality and economic insecurity have steadily increased.” (83)

The retreat of the left into the literature departments of the ivory tower has left the Right with a much freer hand to take its own policy initiatives to fruition, and to foist its own version of America – an America that needs only to preserve its purity and strength, and has no need of progress and change – onto the public.

To counter this dangerous right-wing movement, Rorty recommends a reinvigoration of the reformist legacy. The Left needs to “put a moratorium on theory. It should try to kick its philosophy habit.” (91) To do good political work, it is not really necessary to have all your philosophical bases covered, so that you can say precisely and absolutely what “good political work” amounts to. It is enough to know that encouraging diversity and minimizing unnecessary suffering are worthy goals. “To those who want a demonstration that less suffering and greater diversity should be the overriding aims of political endeavor, Dewey and Whitman [in this book, Rorty’s primary sources of inspiration] have nothing to say. They know of no more certain premises from which such a belief might be deduced.” (30)

He also recommends a reinvigoration of national pride. This is what I found most exciting. I sometimes struggle to square my genuine love for America with my disdain for the mindless patriotism of the John Ashcrofts and Toby Keiths, which is produced by my awareness of just how many evils have been and are committed by Americans and American policies. But I know the answer is quite simple, and Rorty’s straightforward formulation of that answer increases my confidence. My love for America is love for the place I was born, for the people I know, for the language I speak, and for the history I learned with its wonderful stories. It is a love for good things, good things that I can miss with no guilt while I spend these few years away from them. And it is, more and more, love for a possible future, one that I glimpse in reports on innovative companies, good laws, admirable people working for change in the spirit of others who in times past also worked for change. It is because of my love for America that I hate so much what America so often does, and what Americans so often do and think. Rorty is right to recommend this patriotic spirit – the spirit that animated Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass I am continuing to work my way through – to those who would criticize from afar, with no love lost, the wars and racism and ignorance and terrible greed of their fellow citizens.

Cursory Book Review No. 4

2006-06-08T22:50:00.000-07:00

Blindness is the best run-on sentence I’ve ever read. Saramago’s style, which all but eliminates the usual distinctions between dialogue, action, and narration, gives the reader the same sense of halting, tumbling momentum that the blind characters themselves must be feeling. Often it left me with a kind of emotional seasickness, but a seasickness that drew me instead of pushing me away.

Blindness is a pretty obvious kind of metaphor, but I am not sure if it is supposed to be a metaphor at all. I’ve read several reviews, and many of readers were split between interpreting the novel strictly as a exploration of an alternative reality – what would it be like to be blind in a world of blind people? – or interpreting it as a more philosophical meditation on moral blindness. I lean toward the first interpretation, but I could have enjoyed it as an allegory, too. There is much to be gleaned from the novel’s gut-wrenching descriptions of the consequences of universal blindness for human society. The doctor’s wife, the one person who can still see and the guide for the other core characters, might stand for a kind of prophet or moral teacher.

In the end, though, it is much more satisfying as a brilliant imaginative experiment, and if you read it, I recommend approaching it from that direction. Saramago is sometimes called a “magic realist,” but this novel is compared more often to Kafka and Camus. If you like either genre, or if you can appreciate both fiction designed to trace the logic of another world and fiction designed to “say something,” then check out Blindness.

Smitty & SuperE

2006-05-29T19:34:00.000-07:00

Nuestros compadres Smitty & SuperE have revised their blog, and it looks really nice. Check it out.

WHAT THE HECK???

2006-05-29T09:53:00.000-07:00

DUDE!!!

WE GOT HACKED BY DISPENSATIONALISTS!

WHO KNEW THEY WERE SO COMPUTER SAVVY!!

You're right of course, baby.

2006-05-26T06:50:00.000-07:00

I write really long posts.

It's Old Hat

2006-05-26T05:07:00.000-07:00

With the prospect of joining Nimble Jack and Mrs. Nimble in Korea on the horizon, I've been renting a lot of movies of late. Although, hopefully, Jack will teach me the wondrous ways of movie downloading, I have fears that I shall not be able to easily find things of the "indie" variety. Though who knows, maybe there's a Soulseek-esque service out there servicing the outer banks of movie watching.

But, anyway, I've so far been a perfect 4 for 4 in my movie picks, which is an unusually high not-sucking average, for me at least. I lay the credit on the focus which only a year of voluntarily limited movie watching behind and a year of involuntary limited movie watching ahead, can bring.

So, in the next few posts, I'll break these movies down, in an effort to spur you on to see them.

1.) Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room.

Bastards! Evil bastards!

I never understood Enron. Most of America doesn't understand Enron. They just know some people screwed up, and some people lost their jobs. They don't understand the pure criminal mind that brought this about, nor the scope of the damage they did, and the implications upon our every day life. This movie does a wonderful job of breaking that down.

What sickens me? I checked CNN.com yesterday morning, after the verdict was announced and Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, the two CEOs of the company, were found guilty on 34 criminal charges, and the announcement was at the bottom of their "top news" links. What had the picture and the big headline? Taylor Hicks, the gray-haired American Idol.

During the Michael Jackson trial, it led the news most nights. It was re-enacted by fantastically horrible actors on Court TV EVERY night. He allegedy touched a little boy.

There was little coverage of this trial, (though it is now third in CNN's link list). Enron destroyed the lives of 40,000 employees, 20,000 more employees at Arthur Anderson, and thousands more investors. Linemen who had spent their entire life working 50+ hours a week climbing polls were robbed of $3-400,000 in retirement money. What's more, people in California were held hostage by the evils of this company.

A quick explanation, now that I think I somewhat understand it: Enron was revolutionary in the energy industry. They had their own pipelines for years, but shifted in the 90s to become more of an in-house stock market for energy. They hired hundreds of traders to buy and re-sell energy from every possible source.

Now, this sort of company had never been tried before. Why? Because it's highly succeptible to risk. It is near impossible to show large long-term sustained profits when your entire company is basically built around a volatile market. Yet, Enron always met their projected quarterly numbers, and thus their company stock always soared, making them the stock exchanges darling.

But the entire company was a house of cards. They used every trick in the book, and then created new ones (giving them fun names like "Death Star") to either conceal their debt, or totally rip off their consumers in trades. Their trading was absolutely cut-throat and barbaric, as seen in California, yet it still couldn't make the profits they needed to make their quarterly projections. So they did things...things such as creating hundreds of cover-companies by names like "Jedi" and "Chewie Inc." with CEOs by the names of "M. Yass (my ass)" and "M. Smart (Maxwell), and these companies would buy tens of millions of services from Enron, thus the companies would have the debt on their books..not Enron.

Another trick that they used was Mark-to-market accounting. What this meant was that when they struck a deal, they could immediately book whatever their estimated profit from that deal was, as actual profit, whether it ever made a dime or not. The movie showed an in-house Enron video where Ken Lay comes in and re-enacts his meeting with the accountant. In a hillarious scene, he's just like "Well, we made 10 million on this project last year, so I think we'll make 72 million this year, so go ahead and put that on the ledger" and so forth. There's no checks and balances, there's nothing. The company could lose 80 billion on a project, but due to this accounting procedure (which their good buddies in the FEC were nice enough to grant them) all that investors and the government would see was the estimated profit.

Perhaps most insane was their dealings with California. See, California deregulated their electricity, meaning that to stop "big government" from intruding, they lifted all those silly things like price caps or regulations on when service is given or overseeing bodies and so forth (sort of like the deregulation of the internet Adam mentioned as being sought now). This was supposed to spawn innovation and competition, and let the free market truly bring all sorts of life to the energy industry. Instead, it let evil people like Enron make billions of dollars, robbing the state and her citizens blind. Enron started playing with the energy market in California. They'd export the electricity out of California, selling it to themselves, until the price of electricity in California would rise and rise, then they'd call their governments, and demand exorbitant amounts of money to import that very same electricity. Meanwhile, blackouts are rolling across California, people are going without heat in the midst of one of the hottest summers on record, old people are dying, etc., etc.

There are some horrible recordings of phone calls between two of the traders during this time. They crack each other up about those "fuckin' old ladies dying of heat stroke". In fact, when wild fires take out a power line, truly reducing the ability to bring electricity, one calls the other excitedly and tells him to turn to that channel...the guy sees what's going on, and knows the demand for electricity (and thus the price) will only go up (due to these people suffering) and he says "Oh no way...ha ha..burn baby burn!" In another god-awful phone call, while the entire state is panicking due to a lack of power, a big-wig at Enron calls one of his plant managers and says "We need you guys to get a little bit creative down thre...and come up with a reason to shut down"..thus driving the price up more. Electricity normally sold at $30 per unit. Due to Enron's actions, it reached $1000 per unit and higher. The company stole 90 billion from California, and that state may never recover.

Of course, eventually, an intrepid reporter and a whistle blower showed that the company simply had no money. They were surviving completely by duping investors, and using every trick in the book to drive their stock price up. From that story, people began to become suspicious - they figured out that there really was not much of a profit motive there for Enron..they simply weren't in a business to make the kind of profits they always reported. Investigation, investigation....BOOM .. the stock crumbles. The company is revealed for what it is, and a 90 billion dollar company, the 7th largest in the US, goes bankrupt in a month. Employees, who had been told just a few weeks prior that everything was fine, showed up and were told they'd get $4,000 severence pay and had 30 minutes to clear the building. What's worse, a few weeks prior, their stock options had been frozen by the company. Stock that had reached $90 a share was frozen when it hit $60 a share..and not opened to be sold again until it hit $9 a share. People who had stock valued at $350,000 found themsevles with worthless stock that was only going to bottom out more. Most sold their retirement for about $1,500, if that.

Of course, Jeffrey Skilling, Ken Lay, and every other executive, didn't have a freeze on their stock options. While telling their employees to buy more stock, that the low price was a bargain as it was bound to go back up...they made anyhere from 30-350 million off the sale of their stock, just before the ultimate plummet. Many fled the country and set themselves up with massive land overseas or on those lovely little island nations. As for Skilling and Lay, the orchestrators of it all...if their appeals don't go through, they both stand to face the rest of their life in prison. However, they'll likely just spend their life appealing that life sentence.

As far as sheer number of people affected, and sheer number of people involved, this is probably the worst crime committed in US history. Yet, a gray-haired American Idol winner is what the people want pictures of. I don't blame them. It's scary stuff. This isn't just a few people gone rogue and wreaking havoc on the system. This is a fatal flaw in the system itself.

This is a company where thousands of people, from traders to execs, every day did unethical things, and knew of worse unethical things being done by their superiors. Yet, not a one of them stopped themselves, or others, though they knew what they were doing. The oldest accounting firm in the nation, Arthur Anderson, only too quickly signed off on obviously dirty books, and did their fair share of burying the truth, because they received hundreds of millions of dollars for their "services". The oldest and most revered banks on wall street, Chase, CitiBank, DeutschBank, etc,
funded the many shelter companies, even being told exactly the nature of them, without reporting them, and received 100 million dollar investment banking jobs from Enron each time they did. The goverment, thought to be overseeing and keeping in check such powerful forces, instead gave them more and more unchecked power. When Enron pulled the chain of California's economy like a string before a cat, the government replied that this is simply how the "free market" works. The federal government told us that we just have to accept it, and it was sure to rebound soon. Hell, even as the cracks and scandals came forth, "Kenny-Boy" Lay was continually pushed by Pres. Bush to his Energy Secretary.

Every powerful institution that was supposed to stop at some point and stick up for the powerless felt no qualm of conscience, and the powerless were trampled on. That is the message of Enron. There is nothing keeping the powerful from taking full advantage of the weak, except their own conscience. And when that conscience is absent, and replaced by greed, machismo and power-lust, or in the case of the traders and other Enron employees, simply by the desire to obey, the desire to fit in and harken to the company line - well, then those without power are shit out of luck.

And nothing has been done. Stricter regulatory practices have not been put in place. This is merely being written off as a couple of guys who were up to no good and started making trouble in the neighborhood.

The greatest insult of all? The advertising slogan and company motto of Enron: Ask Why? That's exactly what the thousands of people behind Enron failed ot do. They failed to ask their superiors and their peers why they were continually asked to do blatantly immoral things. They failed to ask themselves if what they were doing was right. They just fell in line, and did as they were told. If no sort of check is put in from above, then those below are going to continue to think that their actions are alright - they must be, after all, those above them haven't said it isn't.

That reality, which comes through clearly in every facet of this Enron case, is a lot scarier than Michael Jackson. And a lot harder for late night hosts and our corny friends to make jokes about.

Network Neutrality

2006-05-25T16:56:00.000-07:00

"Network neutrality" is the Internet version of the "common carrier" principle that governs the operation of telephone networks. Basically, common carrier means the people who own the phone lines can't dictate which calls you get, or which calls receive priority, by charging fees for access. The same rule has applied to the Internet since its inception. Apparently AT&T and other telecommunications giants want to change that, and are lobbying congress to pass laws allowing for the creation of tiered access. The telecom corporation that controls the wires over which you access the Internet would be able to charge you for, say, quicker access or access to certain sites. Those unable or unwilling to pay would be shut out, and more importantly, the company would be in de facto control of which speech on the Internet is really "free," in both senses of the word. This, at least, is my understanding of the matter.

I've already signed the petition from Moveon.org, and today I donated some money and put up the Save the Internet Coalition banner on Camshafts. This coalition is an impressive thing. The thing that finally motivated me to actually donate was an email update from Moveon detailing the joint add to be taken out by Moveon and - wait for it - the Christian Coalition, in the New York Times, for $70,000. I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to put my money into something like that.

God & Ice Cream

2006-05-23T01:37:00.000-07:00

From The Scotsman (and many other s o u r c e s), we learn that Burger King has withdrawn the lids for its ice cream cones and pledged to redesign them in order to avoid offending muslims worldwide. As is perfectly obvious from the picture on the left, the ice cream logo is an exact match for the Arabic script for "Allah."

Harper's has a delightful interview with Rashad Akhtar, the man who first spotted the ~~sacrelicious~~ sacreligious logo and has pledged jihad against the world's second largest restaurant chain.

What I'm Interested in These Days

2006-05-22T18:34:00.000-07:00

We live in a whirl of interesting things. Every morning, when I go through my newsfeeds and read the articles on Political Theory Daily Review, the whirl gets bigger and more complex. Outside the strictures of grad school, it's difficult to identity and organize my interests into some sense of a "research program." After putting some thought into it, I think I've narrowed them down to three subjects that have come to occupy most of my mental space.

1. Environmental Politics

By "environmental politics" I mean the junction between environmental issues and politics. This means that while the science side of things is important and interesting, for me it's secondary to the political aspect of environmental problems, such as the the fact that the US government subsidizes oil companies while giving only token increases in the budgets for alternative energy research and development. Specifically this encompasses questions about the relationship between business and the environment.

2. Immigration and Cultural Politics

This is an interest formed while at ICS and deepened while working on my thesis, and with recent events (especially Europe-Muslim relations and Mexican immigration in the US) it has only increased.

3. America and American Politics

For a long time US politics seemed boring compared to international politics, but that has changed dramatically in the past year. I've become very interested in understanding the divisions that mark US politics and culture, and besides that my interest in and appreciation for my own country's history and culture has greatly intensified. I'm even putting some thought into doing my PhD work in something like "American Studies."

These three are in no particular order of importance. My hope is that by setting them out clearly, I can put more purposeful effort into reading and, perhaps, writing about things that fall under each category. For example, with regard to cultural politics, this morning I've been reading stories about recently deported Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Dutch politician of Somali origin who was close friends with Theo Van Gogh, the murdered film director.

Return of the Natives

2006-05-22T16:19:00.000-07:00

Long ago, on a blog far, far away, I wrote about an Amazonian tribe called the Piraha. The Piraha have garnered stunned attention from the scientific and philosophical community because of the unique properties of their language, which lacks words for numbers and colors and, most importantly, has no past tense or subordinate clauses. I tied this into some questions I was dealing with in my thesis, concerning whether language has a universal structure or not.

Here from Der Spiegel is another story on the Piraha and the challenge the pose to (especially) Chomsky's theory of universal grammar. I was especially fascinated to learn about the relationship between recursion and subordinate clauses, and about how the absence of subordinate clauses in the Piraha language is a real problem for the idea that recursion is a universal linguistic phenomenon.

Quite a few blogs are discussing the story.

Camshafts

One Last Hurrah? What I've been up to

Tony Jones Interview and Happy Holidays!

Wow.

Garbage City

Religious Pluralism and Political Legitimacy: Part Two

What?

Religious Pluralism and Political Legitimacy

Recent Reading: Huxley, Cashill, Suskind, Laurence, McCarthy

Recent Listening: Sean Hayes

Recent Viewing: Bier, Von Donnersmark, Gaiman, Groening et al,

Recent Reading: Adams, Rushdie, McCarthy, Eco, McDonough, Nisbett, Gladwell

NYT on Political Theology

Jenkins' Ear

A Surprise from Jurgen

Rollicking Rollins Review

I Had Become Americas Delightful Exotic Doll

Egotism and Belief

The Dog Gone Girl is Mine..

On Global Warming

Transformers: A Review

Everyman Dies

Recent Reading: Franzen, Laughlin, Spence, Conrad

Berman on Ramadan

The Assault on Reason

Indiefeed

The End of an Era: Rorty Passes at 75

Still More on Faith and Doubt

Jeffrey Stout on Religious Foundations and Common Predicaments

More on Church and Jesus, Faith and Doubt

The Myth of Immigrant Criminality

On Love and War: Drawing the Proper Boundaries

The Emergent Church and Exorcism

Is that a hotdog in your pocket?

More Questions Regarding Religion; or, Breaking Blog Protocol by Demonstrating an Attention Span

More on "religion"

A Little Rant

On Religion

Some Questions for Neo-Calvinism

Chaplin's "Understanding Regimes of Tolerance": Some Questions and Considerations

"Living With Liberalism" A More Complex Matter

Arendt and Rorty on Cant and Thoughtfulness

Deepak Chopra Anyone?

Knock Not The Boob Tube

Olbermann's Good Night and Good Luck

The Best Blog on the Block

Digging it

Google Earth, Global Giving

Bright Green

Let it be known...

Recent Media Intake: A Mixed Review

The Public Eclipsed

Invisible Man and Blues Sensibility

Disappointed by Dewey

Hehe.

Discovering the State

The Consequentialist

Mommy killed a mouse, Baby burned the house, Daddy found the pills, Uncie bought a church, Jesus came to Earth.....

Slowness

Cursory Book Review No. 8

Cursory Book Review No. 7

He Is Here.

My Summer Music Pick: Dan Reeder

Recent Viewing

Recent Viewing

Terror and Liberalism

Cursory Book Review No. 5

Cursory Book Review No. 4

Smitty & SuperE

WHAT THE HECK???

You're right of course, baby.

It's Old Hat

Network Neutrality

God & Ice Cream

What I'm Interested in These Days

Return of the Natives