Priests

And all of you
have seen the dance
That God has kept
from me.--Leonard Cohen

The Archbishop of Canterbury roiled the waters in the Anglican Communion recently, an event that would have meant more to me a year or so ago than it does now. If you are curious about how Anglicans are reacting to it, you could do worse than follow the conversation at The Wounded Bird, which is where I take note of it. It's simply a hunt I don't have a dog in now, and a hunt I don't ever want to have a dog in again. And my feelings on this have to do with Pennsylvania and Simone Weil. Let me explain.

Part of the recent travels were spent in the home of a friend from seminary. She's been at the same church since leaving seminary, a feat I am openly and shamelessly envious of. Clearly she has the gifts needed for the pastorate, and she has been blessed with a good congregation. Several years ago, her congregation decided to leave the UCC, a denomination she was ordained in (as am I), and which the church had been a member of since the denomination started in 1957 (it's a very old German church, though whether it started as E or German "R" I don't know). The decision to leave was a carefully considered one, and a painful one, but it wasn't a defiant one. Or at least, not from their point of view.

Here I should explain that my friend and I are great, good friends; but we disagree on almost all points of theology. We went to the same seminary, studied under the same teachers in the same classes, but came to different conclusions about all the issues now dividing churches, issues like Biblical authority and homosexuality (should gays and lesbians be allowed in the pulpit?), etc. We differ strongly on these issues, though we agree on others (like the basic tenets of Biblical interpretation. She's far more "conservative" than I am, but she learned the same exegesis and hermeneutics I did.). We differ, but we simply agree to disagree. It's really no great matter between us; we can discuss our disgreements freely, but I really don't care that she differs from me. She's my friend. She's a good person, a fine pastor, an admirable Christian. What are issues of theology in such a situation?

But it mattered to the UCC in her area. As she tells the story (let's be fair here, I know only one side of the story), she didn't leave the UCC, they left her. Ah, you say, we've heard that before! And especially if you come to this from the context of the troubles in the Anglican Communion and The Episcopal Church, you will think you have. I invite you to think again. My friend told me of events she might have told me about before, at the time they happened; but I'd forgotten them. She reminded me that, before she and her church broke with the UCC, the pastors in her area, her colleagues in the UCC, broke with her. They treated her as a pariah, as "invisible" in the terms of that new Twilight Zone series, "To See the Invisible Man." At meetings of the local UCC, pastors would shun her, would avoid her table, would openly turn away from sitting with her at meals.

You will say this is very human conduct, and it is. It is also very shameful conduct, especially for a religion which bases its primary sacrament on an open table to which all are welcome. The very heart of Paul's eucharisto was a table that welcomed everyone, but especially believers. Was my friend less of a Christian because her theology was not the theology of the denomination? Because she did not agree with the other pastors on one or two points? I will not call those points major or minor, because my interest is in the boundaries question: when do we get to draw them, and against whom, and on what basis? When do we get to decide, as followers of a God who taught us hospitality was important above all things, that someone is undeserving of welcome? How can we live with ourselves when we do such a thing?

As I say, I disagree with my friend on the issue of homosexuals in the pulpit (we have no bishops in the UCC, so that can't be the issue here). But I respect her, love her, and find room in my church for her church, even if they find no room for me. I'm not sure they would reject me, ultimately. I'm not sure they'd reject me if I didn't reject them, but that would be their choice, their decision. That's the paradoxical dark/light heart of Protestantism: the matter of choice. But I would not force that choice on them by demanding adherence to a protocol on how to treat homosexuals. Perhaps they would insist on it; I don't know. But I am ashamed of my colleagues in Pennsylvania who insisted on it against my friend.*

Which brings me to Simone Weil. She was, as Verbis et Operibus says, a paradox:

She came from a secular Jewish home and was never baptized, but she considered herself a Christian — a non-committed Catholic, to be more precise. She was a pacifist, but fought in the Spanish Civil War. She was an intellectual, but was known for her anti-intellectualism. She was a member of the bourgeoisie, but worked on a French assembly line for a year. She loved life, but yearned for her death.

What I know of her I know from the introduction to the book I picked up, Waiting for God. Leslie Fiedler says of her there:

Since her death, Simone Weil has come to seem more and more a special exemplar of sanctity for our time--the Outsider as Saint in an age of alienation, our kind of saint. In eight scant years, this young French woman, whom scarcely anyone had heard of before her sacrificial death in exile at the age of 34, has come to possess the imagination of many in the Western world. Catholic and Protestant, Christian and Jew, agnostic, devout, we have all turned to her with profound conviction that the meaning of her experience is our meaning, that she really is ours....

She speaks of the problems of belief in the vocabulary of the unbeliever, of the doctrines of the Church in the words of the unchurched. The askesis, the "dark night of the soul," through which she passed to certitude, is the modern intellectual's familiar pattern of attraction toward and disillusionment with Marxism, the disciple of contemporary politics.

...To those who consider themselves on the safe side of belief, she teaches the uncomfortable truth that the unbelief of many atheists is closer to a true love of God and a true sense of his nature, than that kind of easy faith which, never having experienced God, hangs a label bearing his name on some childish fantasy or projection of the ego. Like Kierkegaard, she preached the paradox of it being easier for a non-Christian to become a Christian than for a "Christian," to become one....For those to whom religion means comfort and peace of mind, she brings the terrible reminder that Christ promised not peace but the sword, and that his own last words were a cry of absolute despair, the "Eli, Eli, lama sabacthani!" which is the true glory of Christianity.

Obviously at that point I swerve away, since I think hospitality is the true glory of Christianity, because then it isn't about me, but about the other. However, the idea of alienation is a powerful and alluring one, even though it leads, in this post-Romantic era and interregnum between the end of the Romanticism and the start of whatever will finally replace it, rather quickly and easily to navel-gazing. Weil, from Fiedler's introduction, would simply flagellate herself to avoid that, but we needn't be sidetracked by that. It is the sense of being required to be perpetually outside as an insider, that interests me.

Weil, it seems, tried to play a balancing act, which much of this book reflects in the letters she wrote to the Reverend Father Perrin. One of her prime concerns appears to have been whether or not to accept baptism; her reasons for always lingering at the baptismal font, but never stepping through it into the realm of those accepted for the eucharist, are complex and convoluted. For many reasons she felt compelled to remain always at the threshold, and never to cross over or step back.

I have a similar feeling about my call to ministry. I am not devoted to my denomination, although as a pastor I'm expected to be. My friend got in trouble, even with old friends of hers (who were also ordained), because she displayed insufficient devotion to the generally accepted tenets of other UCC ministers. She says today that one reason her church left the UCC is that she and her congregation believe in the authority of scripture; sola scriptura, as Luther famously put it. I think that's a bit of a dodge, and an attempt to assert some higher ground for their congregation against the larger church. I don't think the UCC has abandoned the authority of scripture, but that they understand it differently than my friend and her congregation. That should be fundamental, in a tectonic plates kind of way, but it isn't, for me. I don't interpret scripture in the same way as the larger UCC on many topics. I certainly don't interpret scripture as giving me an excuse, or even a duty, to shun people at meals, or otherwise. "In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, diversity; in all things, charity" is apparently a nice thing to say, but really too much trouble to live up to. But if I give authority to scripture, I think I have to live up to it, because I think scripture teaches what those words say. You see the problem with scriptural authority, or any authority: there can be, Robert Browning, but one "Sordello." But "Sordello," and my "Sordello"?

Which does not leave me on the outside, throwing rocks at everyone. I'm an ordained minister, I gave up any pretense to "outside" status when I knelt down and let hands be laid upon me. I gave up any allegiance to "outside/inside" when I first professed Christianity. That's why I put hospitality at the center of my understanding of Christianity: without the radical understanding that we are all strangers who should welcome each other as strangers, even as we are all hosts who are obligated to welcome the stranger, what is the point of professing a faith? If that faith is simply faith in and of the world, then what need is there for God at all? If it isn't, then what confession is it without God? And if a confession of faith in God doesn't radically relocate my life, what need is there for God or confession? In other words, if religious practice cannot lead a group beyond ordinary sociological practices, of what difference is a religious community?

Elaine Pagels makes an interesting point in The Origin of Satan:

Mark does not see himself as separate from Israel, but depicts Jesus' followers as what Isaiah calls God's "remnant" within Israel (Isaiah 10:22-23). Even the images that Mark invokes to characterize the majority--images of Satan, Beelzebub, and the devil--paradoxically express the intimacy of Mark's relationship with the Jewish community as a whole, for...the figure of Satan, as it emerged over the centuries in Jewish tradition, is not a hostile power assailing Israel from without, but the source and representation of conflict within the community.

Aye, there's the rub. It strikes me as an answer, too, to people who challenge the very idea of the God of Abraham because that God fails to save us from ourselves, or reveal the absolute truth to us which none of us can deny. Even in communities where that revelation is claimed, even in communities built on that asserted revelation and a claimed special relationship to the deity, even there, falls the Shadow. We imagine perfection, and then we imagine the perfection is one that suits us best; which means we just need to cast out enough strangers to make everything perfect. If we can just remove them, then we can end the conflict within the community. And if that doesn't work, well, obviously, we just need to remove a few more. Which is the very opposite of hospitality; but we're sure we can make this hospitality thing work, just as soon as we've got the blessed community in order; and then we can determine who we need to be hospitable to.

As Melissa Harris-Lacewell's father reminded her: the struggle continues.

It's an interesting thing that theology does matter in the world. Sadly, it matters for all the wrong reasons. Like anything else given to us by God, theology is supposed to be a tool to guide us, a light on our path, a resource and repository of wisdom for abundant life. Instead, we use it as a club, as denominator, as a chalk spreader for making lines in the grass, marking off what is mine and what is not mine, and who is mine and not mine.

Where does that leave me? Right alongside everyone else trying to make the ethical decisions of how to live in this world. But contrary to the teachings of Aristotle and Robert Wright, I don't think the world has the answers to those questions. "How should we then live?" Every person, unfortunately, has to answer that question for themselves. To that extent, Sartre was right. Whether we are all existentialists now is a more dubious proposition. The main difference between me and everybody else is that I've made a public commitment to a religious confession, made it in a way that is literally life-altering, as measured by the world, not just by theology. Simone Weil-like, I feel outside even as I am inside; but it would be a mistake to make too much of this. It gives me less comfort than I deserve (I've tried wearing hair-shirts; they aren't my style), but certainly no position of privilege, either. If I look upon the divisions in the Anglican Communion and The Episcopal Church, I do so in sorrow and recognition: all God's children need shoes.

Unfortunately there is something about us that does not love to share, or even to admit how many unimportant differences we have. We need distinctions (somebody has to be the pastor!), but we can't make them without making too much of them. I claim no distinction as either Outsider or Saint, but only that of a teacher about the virtues (if not the practice!) of humility, which makes it easier for the struggle that continues.



*There is an important distinction to be drawn on this point, between the UCC and The Episcopal Church. The polity of the UCC makes it far easier for the denomination to accommodate differing points of view, since the basis of the denomination is the congregation, not the bishopric. This means the larger church cannot speak for the local congregation, and the local congregation can only speak for the larger church when it chooses to ordain a pastor. However, no church can be forced to accept a pastor it thinks should be ordained (which would be foolish anyway, in any polity), so the ties that bind are loose enough, conceptually, anyway, to allow a wide diversity in a larger church that proclaims its purpose to be: "That they may all be one." "One" what, as ever, is the sticking point.

"The Struggle Continues"

What she said:

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And many a truth is told in jest:

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That's the signpost up ahead, your next stop....!

So I spent my spare time during the 10 days out of town re-reading Kierkegaard's Works of Love. I happened upon the Strand bookstore in Manhattan, where I picked up Simone Weil's Waiting for God, someone I'd never read before.

I had no internet access at the time, which made it all the more relaxing. Now I think I was being haunted.

Of Jefferson and Wright

I have been traveling, so I find myself returned full of piss and vinegar, as the saying goes; or perhaps it should be I'm relaxed and thoughtful. Either way, this post by digby on Matt Taibbi put me in mind of the second most famous Frank Lloyd Wright building: the Guggenheim in New York.

We wanted to go there simply because I'd never been in it, and the building fascinates me. But the one day we got near it it was near closing time and the tiny museum (well, compared to the Met or MOMA or even the Whitney) was packed, and the line to get tickets alone would have taken 30 minutes to clear. So we just looked around for a moment and left. But I left wondering: what are all these people doing here? There was no "King Tut" level exhibition there. The Guggenheim isn't known for having the collection of the Met or the Whitney, both nearby. It doesn't have the design collection or even some of the more famous pieces of the MOMA. But it was jammed, and I understand it's almost always jammed on the weekends.

It's the building, obviously. That much admired, much maligned circular ramp that defines and some say, defeats the museum. Critics castigate the place, or admire it; 50 years later it's still a controversial structure. But not with the people; the people love it, they are drawn to it, they can't seem to resist it. They want to be inside such a work of art, such a fantastic piece of architecture. Why?

I can only guess, but maybe for the same reason people read Matt Taibbi, and still read Hunter Thompson, and mourned his death in ways nobody thought to mourn Walter Cronkite's. Maybe, just maybe, because there's some authenticity to Wright's buildings (some of them, anyway. I've been in the Price Tower in Bartlesville, OK, and it's just weird!). Taibbi may be opinionated and even a bit challenged in choosing his metaphors (a vampire squid attached to the face of America? Really? Hunter Thompson he isn't.), but like Wright's building, he has a vision, and he sticks to it. And while the critics may tut-tut, the demos, the polis, loves it.

Maybe they know something....

You say you want an evolution, well you know, we all want to change the world....

To the praises of this book, let me add: "Utter crap."

Wright's thesis is plain first from the title: "Evolution" equals, not biological change in species over time, but "progress," "improvement," "advancement." And "progress" comes not from some metaphysical deity, but from "enlightened" human beings. In a nutshell, Jesus and Mohammed were tribalists who fiercely defended their own groups and didn't give a wet snap for charity or egalitarianism or most of the other finer attributes ascribed to Christianity and Islam (one wonders if they were, instead, responsible for all the violence done in the name of the religions they founded, while all the good is the result of anonymous human beings with no touch of divinity in them at all). Let me take one example, which Wright deals with in a single paragraph: the parable of the Good Samaritan.

According to Wright, it isn't authentic at all, because it isn't found in either the Gospel of Mark or Q. True enough; the parable is part of what Biblical scholars call "Special Luke," as it is found on ly in Luke. But most scholars, including the highly skeptical Jesus Seminar, agree it is original to Jesus of Nazareth, because it is such a striking tale of a morality that transcends tribe and social group and all the silly designations we use to decide who we must care for, and who we can ignore. Wright, however, is not fooled by such things, because he has already decided, using Mark's gospel as his Rosetta Stone, that Jesus of Nazareth was actually a rather nasty and narrow-minded tribalist who cared only for the sons and daughters of Abraham, and probably didn't care much for them. So all that "love your neighbor" stuff was added by unknown human beings long after the supposed Son of God was dead. In Luke's case, almost a century after. See? "Evolution" is a moral function, and it works in people but not because of "gods." So the evolution of "God" is actually the "evolution" of people, who get better and living together and getting along with each other because it's a biological imperative, or simply because we learn over time and have insights that are utterly human, and this is all true because the Gospel of Mark is the oldest gospel and therefore the truest, and it reveals, upon careful Wrightian examination, a picture of Jesus of Nazareth that actually makes him quite a wanker.

Yes, that's it. I'm not making it up. The passage dismissing the parable of the Good Samaritan as the work of Jesus of Nazareth runs for about three sentences, no more. A parable that has provoked volumes of analysis and been subjected to scrutiny by skeptical Biblical scholars for almost 200 years now, is dealt with by Mr. Wright in about three sentences, maybe four. And he settles the matter once and for all.

These things that pass for knowledge I don't understand.

Noticing "Hirsohima Day"

A few days late, but still:

Most Americans ever since have seen the destruction of the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as necessary and effective—as constituting just means, in effect just terrorism, under the supposed circumstances—thus legitimating, in their eyes, the second and third largest single-day massacres in history. (The largest, also by the U.S. Army Air Corps, was the firebombing of Tokyo five months before on the night of March 9, which burned alive or suffocated 80,000 to 120,000 civilians. Most of the very few Americans who are aware of this event at all accept it, too, as appropriate in wartime.)

To regard those acts as definitely other than criminal and immoral—as most Americans do—is to believe that anything—anything—can be legitimate means: at worst, a necessary, lesser, evil. At least, if done by Americans, on the order of a president, during wartime. Indeed, we are the only country in the world that believes it won a war by bombing—specifically by bombing cities with weapons of mass destruction—and believes that it was fully rightful in doing so. It is a dangerous state of mind.

There is a direct line between that event, and its justifications, and "shock and awe" and the continued fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. Technology won the "Good War." As Ellsberg points out, "progress" meant, and still mostly means, changes in technology; not in society (although we apply the term loosely to "evolution" now). Technology, however, did not, shortly after the "Good War," defeat the "little brown men in black pajamas," but we have convenient excuses for that, too.

Our faith in technology continues unabated; including the faith that technology, in the guise of computers and the internet, will finally usher in the millenia of peace, prosperity, and democracy. It was supposed to destroy Chinese totalitarianism; it will finally allow progressives to control U.S. politics; and it's supposed to lead to products being "free." Can food without price and wine bought without money be far behind?

Somehow I'm quite sure human culture will continue to lag behind our technology. "O machine! O machine!"

Not that anyone will notice my asking, but...

Is America a country, or an idea?

But as this escalates we should continually be stepping back and thinking retrospectively from the vantage point of the future about where this all seems to be heading.

August, not April, is the cruelest month; in politics, anyway. I have to note, first, that Josh Marshall has no memory of 1968, a year I was later astonished to learn almost meant the death of the republic, according to wise grey heads like Eric Sevareid (no one remembers him anymore, oddly enough; all fame truly is fleeting). There were street riots in those days, actual riots where people were shot, killed, beaten, bloodied; where buildings burned and civic life was actually disrupted. Civil rights marchers were murdered in the '60's (NPR did a retrospective, briefly, on what they called the "Mississippi Burning" case [interestingly they named the case for the movie, which came decades later]). FBI agents were openly threatened (as mentioned in the report). Innocent people were shot to death at Kent State in 1970. And now the republic is threatened because of disruptions at town meetings and threatening phone calls?

Huh. I guess Henry Ford was right, and history really is bunk.

The republic survived the Civil War, as I recall. It survived the Great Depression, a situation actually made worse by the government before FDR started to make it better (and war, always a government enterprise, finally brought it completely to an end; ironically, just as it did for Germany). But we are threatened by a bunch of kooks and excitable people in a few closed rooms around the country? When Phineas Fogg visited America in his whirlwind trip around the globe, he ran into a riot in a frontier town, that turned out to be an election for dog catcher. Jules Verne was only slightly exaggerating the passions brought out in American politics. I read recently that no less a luminary than Ben Franklin despaired for the nascent republic because German immigrants in Pennsylvania were enjoying their liberty so much (and abusing it, in Franklin's eyes) that they were firing pastors whenever the pastor said or did something they didn't like (there's a complex tale behind that of the restrictions on releasing pastors that existed under German law; separation of church and state in America has always meant the courts won't interfere here in ecclesiastical matters which are state matters in Europe).

It's like Tommy Lee Jones tells Will Smith in "Men in Black": the planet is ALWAYS about to end. Deal with it.

So is America a country? Or is it just an idea? Such events don't threaten the social fabric of Germany, or France, or England, where multiple parties exist, some avowedly Marxist or Communist, some neanderthal in their conservatism. America has Tweedledum and Tweedledumber, and any variant shade toward either end of the political spectrum is dangerous and disastrous and means the end of the polis as we know it. I don't like the "tea baggers" and I despise the fear-mongers Rachel Maddow (especially) has exposed this week; but is this really the end of the Republic? Really?

I mean, in historical context, this isn't even a very interesting August....

And furthermore.....

What do I find interesting in the story of the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.? This:

His next project on race, he said, will be rooted in his arrest. "I hope to make a documentary about racial profiling for PBS," he said. "[The idea] had never crossed my mind but it has now."

He said the documentary will ask: "How are people treated when they are arrested? How does the criminal justice system work? How many black and brown men and poor white men are the victims of police officers who are carrying racist thoughts?

"I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that criminal justice system is rotten."

A lifetime of study, and it's a personal experience that makes him question the criminal justice system about what we know, and how we know it, and what matters most to us is pretty much what happens to us.

Sad how much we let systems do our thinking and experiencing for us, and how much we depend on personal experience to know anything about the world. Not a critique of Mr. Gates, or his next project; just an observation.

"The Emotional Issue of Race in America"

Offered to note the interesting shift of emphasis in the discussion of President Obama's response to the last question in his press conference. The first video comes immediately after the press conference ended; the other two are from later that same night.

Notice how the understanding of the Gates arrest changes when the discussion involves two white men, and when it includes a black man or woman. Tellingly, Fineman's comment that "race still haunts us" although Obama's presidency "proves otherwise" disappears from the subsequent conversations, even when Fineman is involved in them. Of course, the second time, he's sitting next to Eugene Robinson.

This is how we still talk about race in America.

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Long ago and far away....

I have some photos of the moon landing. They're as grainy and gray and fuzzy as the pictures you've seen recently, from the TV broadcast. I still remember Walter Cronkite giving the technical details for photographers, to adjust their cameras to get the best picture from the TV screen. A friend with a darkroom and an interest in photography took them and made copies for me, so they're on curling photography paper from a garage dark-room, not professional prints on Kodak paper.

I used to have a map of the moon, too. The near side, and in black and white (I think Calvin's Dad was right, sometimes, and the world was in black and white in the past). It hung on my bedroom wall, and I marked the places of the moon landings on it. I even built some of the Revell kits of the Mercury and Gemini and Apollo rockets and capsules. At one point I had a model of the Lunar Module, if memory serves. I still remember when the acronym for it went from LEM, for Lunar Excursion Module, to LM, for Lunar Module. I still called it "LEM" for a long time.

I remember the night of the moon landing. I remember the den where I watched it, in a friend's house, with my family and theirs. I remember Walter Cronkite talking, I remember the amazing pictures actually coming from the Moon. But my strongest memory is the one no one has talked about, although to me it was even more amazing. In this age of giant TV screens and international communication, where I can pick up a phone and talk to my daughter in Brooklyn as if she was in the next room, and always know I'll get her because I'm calling her cell phone, in this age where everybody knows, or can know, what's going on anywhere in the world at any time, where I can read newspapers from around the world at my desk, this memory is wholly unremarkable. But it shouldn't be, anymore than the moon landing should be unremarkable.

I hear now that we went to the moon to beat the Soviets, and I remember the "space race." But while it felt that way for the 7 original Mercury astronauts, it no longer felt that way by 1969. I don't remember feeling triumph at having defeated the Russian advance into space, which, after all, had disappeared by then. What I remember was the wonder when Walter Cronkite showed us that people around the world were waiting for Neal Armstrong to be the first human being to set a foot on the surface of the Moon.

This was extraordinary, too; and possibly as unprecedented in human history as the moon landing itself. Around the world, despite the hour of the day depending on what point on the planet people were, people were gathered around television screens waiting to see the amazing sight. It was a human effort that day, not a USA effort. It was humankind that set foot on that dusty surface, not just an American. Everyone everywhere, the TV told me, the pictures told me, was watching: watching, and for the moment, the hour, the event, feeling the same emotion. It wasn't a magical Hollywood moment, but it gave a sense of common humanity, of shared experience, of how much more alike we are than different.

It was a technological triumph. But the response was almost....spiritual.

Vanity of vanities

I knew this 30 years ago. No, really.

When you read the emails by Gregory, King, Stephanopoulos and others, you start to understand why most major network interviews with politicians tend to be a lot less hard hitting than they need to be to really hold their subjects accountable. The politicians themselves have the power to make or break the networks, by granting or withholding access. That ends up meaning that, consciously or not, the networks soften their approaches -- both in their pitches, and in their actual interviews -- in exchange for that access.

That's how the world works, and it's hard to know what to do about it.

It must have been in Harper's Magazine, which I was reading devotedly at the time. I was also watching "This Week with David Brinkley" as if I were an acolyte in the Church of News. Then I read this article pointing out that none of the journalists (or George Will) ever asked sharp questions of the "guests" because they would lose all access to the politicians who are the only reason anyone tuned into those shows on Sunday morning. And this, of course, was back when most people were in bed or in church on Sunday morning, and the Sunday morning talk shows were A) a snoozefest that B) nobody paid attention to.

Before McLaughlin, in other words, changed the TV landscape forever, and ushered in the era of Cable News as we know it today (i.e., before CNN was Fox-ified).

There is indeed nothing new under the sun, and even the advent of the Intertubes has not made us wiser. We're just re-inventing the wheel and re-discovering fire at the same pace we were before. Americans really do have the worst inter-generational transfer of knowledge on the planet. It must be something unique to our culture.....

Adding:



Walter Cronkite never did a Sunday morning show with "guests." When he talked to politicians, he was still a journalist. He reported the news of my childhood: the death of Kennedy; the Democratic Convention in'68; the moon landing.

God be with you, Mr. Cronkite; and with your family.

Travel Plans

Planning the summer vacation. Had to get my map out.

Got to get ourselves back to the Garden....

Proof, once again, that I am reading all the wrong stuff:*

A few years ago, when I was visiting the Dominicans in the Czech Republic, I spent the night in a small town called Snojmo near the Austrian border. There was the usual meeting with the Dominican Family. There were lots of young families with their noisy offspring, and we feasted on delicious sausages and drank slivovitz. Then we had an open discussion, and the first question was from a young woman who asked how she could transmit the Church’s moral teaching to her children, who seemed to be just as resistant as children in Western Europe. I did not know how to answer the question and so I passed it to my companion for that trip, a moral theologian called Wojcieh Giertych, professor at the Angelicum University in Rome.

He went to the blackboard and drew a small square in a corner. “In that square are the commandments. Is that what morally is about?” And everyone cried “Of course.” “No,” he said “God is not much interested in commandments.” Then he drew a square which covered all the rest of the board and said, “That is freedom. That is what interests God. Your task is to teach your children to be free. That is the teaching of the Gospels, and of St Thomas Aquinas.” (pp. 29-30)

*I have been entertaining myself re-reading the entire Sherlock Holmes stories. And by "right stuff" I mean both the book and the blog linked to. I, too, was young once, and thoughtful....

Plus ca change....

This Matt Taibbi article is getting attention because it purportedly rips the lid off of Wall Street scandals and goes to the heart of what ails our economy.

While this book is more worthy of our attention, as it discusses the "invisible poor" in America at the height of the "boom" in the American economy. I'm listening to the author talk about places in America labelled "food deserts" because there is no food available within 100 miles, except from gas stations selling "junk food." Imagine such a term being a part of the vocabulary of people who care for the poor in this country, and try to help them. Imagine such a word applying to this "land of plenty."

As the author points out, we used to expect to be wealthier than we already are, and lived and spent into that expectation. Thus did the economy grow, but thus, too, were bubbles created. There are strong indications this continuous growth not only cannot continue, but has come to an end.

But the expectation hasn't; yet. And the problem is not the perennial one of market manipulators; it is that the poor will always be with us. The question is: will we always ignore them?

Happy Forth of Jooly!

*Be kind to your web-footed friends.
For a duck may be somebody's mother!
Be kind to your friends in the swamp!
Where the weather is very, very damp!
Now, you may think that this is the end...

WELL IT IS!


*Tune: Stars and Stripes Forever, 3rd movement, if you're wondering. I have a soft spot in my heart for Mitch Miller, what can I say?

Huh. Well....

Is it me, of have conservative politicians suddenly decided it really is all about them, and this decision is leading to self-destruction?

The similarities between Sarah Palin's resignation announcement and Mark Sanford's statement are eerie. And it isn't lost on me that both of them assure us they are taking these actions in the name of, if not on behalf of, God. Or at least because they are so certain this is what God wants. I want to discuss, a bit later, Locke's "Letter Concerning Toleration," and this is an almost perfect chance to do that.

But the weirdness has to sink in, or slink away, or something. This is just really, really, odd. Not exactly unexpected, if you understand that excessive self-regard usually leads to self-destructive acts (destruction of reputation, if nothing else); but as to what it all means...well, that requires some reflection on Locke and Kierkegaard and the bewilderment of current events.

Friday document dump, indeed.

*picture courtesy of watertiger

Humility is hard

I understand that: humility is hard. And it looks nothing like this:

So in the aftermath of this failure I want to not only apologize, but to commit to growing personally and spiritually. Immediately after all this unfolded last week I had thought I would resign - as I believe in the military model of leadership and when trust of any form is broken one lays down the sword. A long list of close friends have suggested otherwise - that for God to really work in my life I shouldn’t be getting off so lightly. While it would be personally easier to exit stage left, their point has been that my larger sin was the sin of pride. They contended that in many instances I may well have held the right position on limited government, spending or taxes - but that if my spirit wasn't right in the presentation of those ideas to people in the General Assembly, or elsewhere, I could elicit the response that I had at many times indeed gotten from other state leaders.

Their belief was that if I walked in with a real spirit of humility then this last legislative term could well be our most productive one - and that outside this term, I would ultimately be a better person and of more service in whatever doors God opened next in life if I stuck around to learn lessons rather than running and hiding down at the farm.

Because the whole point of humility is that it's NOT about you. The whole point of humility, just like the whole point of identifying pride as a sin, is to remove yourself from the center of the world, and recognize the importance of others. But in Mark Sanford's case, the humble thing to do is to treat the Governor's office like a hair shirt, and his continued political career as penance.

Thomas More this guy ain't. Worse than that, he doesn't even understand why he's not approaching sainthood with such a public display of sacrifice. A sacrifice that isn't a sacrifice at all, of course, because what he's offering on the public altar is his wife, his children, his marriage, any possible sense of shame or culpability, everything except his ego, his libido, or his pride.

I suppose this is what comes from having a spiritual adviser who makes his living as a court reporter and whose spiritual advice seems to consist of telling you God wants you to do whatever it is you're doing. Funny thing is, Jesus spoke directly to the question of adultery once, in very clear language:

As you know, we once were told, 'You are not to commit adultery.' But I tell you: Those who leer at a woman and desire her have already committed adultery with her in their hearts." (Matthew 5:27-28, SV)

I suppose you could read that as: "So go ahead and get her in bed!," but I don't think that's what Jesus meant.

What he meant, of course, is that it isn't all about you, and that your actions begin in your thoughts. That's a very constrictive view of responsibility, but then humility restricts what we can do, too. And Governor Sanford is having none of it:

They have also made the point that a good part of life is about scripts - that the idea of redemption isn't something that Marshall, Landon, Bolton and Blake should just read about, it's something they should see. Accordingly, they suggested that there was a very different life script that would be lived and learned by our boys, and thousands like them, if this story simply ended with scandal and then the end of office - versus a fall from grace and then renewal and rebuilding and growth in its aftermath.

Yeah, this is all about teaching his kids. Sure it is.

What's really astounding here is to listen to this man preach on the sin of pride while displaying such conviction as to his own self-importance. He wasn't handed his head by the SC Legislature and Supreme Court (the former overrode 10 of his vetoes, the latter forced him to take the stimulus money he said he wouldn't take) because he was wrong; he was rebuffed because he wasn't in the right spirit to carry God's message to a government that desperately needed King David to save it from the grip of evil, a grip he knows because Cubby Culbertson told him it wasn't Mark's fault he had to go to Argentina or New York or outside South Carolina to sleep with his mistress. So now he has to bring his hard-earned humility to South Carolina, as a purified vessel of God's will. It takes a humble man to realize how important he is, and how important it is to God that he stay and do what God wants, because it just happens to be what Mark Sanford wants! And that's the lesson he wants to pass on to his children: God wants what Mark Sanford wants.

And that's what real humility is all about. Recognizing that you and God are totally sympatico.

That's how they say it in Argentina, right?

Where your treasure is

This is the photo provided by the San Diego Sheriff's office touting their helicopter. I can't honestly tell if these deputies are meant to be the three guys from "Ghostbusters," or the thin green line that stands between San Diego and anarchy. But the militarism of the image is a bit disturbing.

I've written before about this; about the creeping militarization of American society, about how we only have a civilization because we have a military, or militarized police. It's a Hobbseian view of government that would make Hobbes think twice. What's worse, of course, is that helicopter and 8 squad cars were used to subdue a Democratic fundraiser that was already breaking up when sheriff's deputies arrived and proceeded to pepper spray anyone within reach. What intrigues me about it, though, is this persistent idea that what we really have to fear are the people who will do us physical harm.

I live on the north side of I-10 in Houston. The south side, across from me, is some of the most expensive and exclusive real estate in the city (apart from River Oaks). There is a grocery store on the freeway, on the south side. The freeway access is important, not only to shoppers, but to any would be thieves in the parking lot looking for a snatch and grab on a purse, and a quick getaway. But because the store is on the south side, on the edge of the expensive real estate, it is considered "safe."

There is a new grocery store, near me, on the north side, equally accessible to the freeway, and much nicer than the store on the south side. Within a week of its opening, though, an e-mail made the rounds describing a frightening purse snatching incident, on top of which another victim (as the writer of the e-mail is describing her ordeal to another shopper in the parking lot) runs up to declare her car has been broken into, and the thieves escaped on...yes, the freeway. Shortly thereafter closed circuit TV cameras went up conspicuously in the parking lot (none in the lot on the south side of the freeway), and uniformed security officers stand at the doors, looking like police (and sometimes they are off-duty police) and riding around on a kind of Segway, to be sure the shoppers are safe. (Again, no such security measures deemed necessary at the south side store.) What's the difference between these stores? Location, location, location. On the north side of the freeway we are all poor, or dopers, drug runners, and cutthroats. At least according to those on the south side. Oh, and we're all shades of brown, too, since we can't afford the exclusive environs on the south side of the freeway. That part is true; we do have a lot of Asians, Hispanics, and Blacks on this side of the dividing line. Is it any wonder the freeway through this part of town was just widened to 26 lanes? It's a powerful symbol of demarcation.

Why am I telling you this?

Because police and the military are needed to keep us safe from those who would harm us. And yet, yesterday, Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison. Go to TPM and listen to what was said about him. He was very much a criminal, very much a danger to society. Bernie Madoff is white, Jewish, respected, and at no time presented a threat of violence to anyone. Yet he did more harm to more people than anyone in my neighborhood, or in the city of Houston, has ever done. Why didn't the police and the military protect us from him? Aren't the greatest threats to our way of life "those people" who dream only of taking what we have by force of arms? Surely the people we trust and willingly hand our property to are not as dangerous as the people we fear and constantly worry about protecting our property from.

And what was it Jesus said about this?

Don't acquire possessions here on earth, where moth or insect eats away and where robbers break in and steal. Instead, gather your nest egg in heaven, where neither moth nor insect eats away and where no robbers break in or steal. As you know, what you treasure is your heart's true measure. (Matthew 6:19-21, SV)

Yeah, but he didn't really mean that. After all, the biggest church buildings in Houston are all on the south side of the freeway; or downtown, or inside the Beltway, where the high-rent districts are. So he couldn't have been serious about that. Besides, the helicopter riding Ghostbusters will protect us from what scares us most.

I ain't afraid o' no ghost....

Candy is hard! It's hard!

Been working all day for an event at a local bookstore selling this tonight at a book signing.

The power of celebrity is truly appalling.

Μακάριοι οἱ πτωχοί

The doctor walks into the basement room, the ER level of the hospital, a room empty except for you and the woman from your church you have just met. He tells her that her husband is dying, that only life support is keeping him alive, that the sudden heart attack he's just been brought in for has killed him, but his body doesn't know it yet. One thing the doctor cannot decide, though, is whether or not to remove life support. She has to make that decision; he won't.

And she turns to you and asks: "What do I do?"

The client walks into your office seeking legal advice. She tells you horror stories about her ex-husband, none of which arise to the level of actual child abuse, but none of them leave you very comfortable about how he behaves around their young daughter. And the problem is, he is trying to take custody of the child from her, because she works as a stripper. She has few marketable skills, and working as a stripper pays better than anything else she can do. She doesn't do drugs or bring men home from the club. She keeps her life separate from the life she leads with her daughter, at home. But she has no other source of income that pays the bills as well as this, and you know child support is a poor substitute for earned income. You do the best you can to represent her, but it's an uphill fight and legal representation is expensive and you have to always be aware of how much time you are spending on her case, because you have to pay your bills, too. In the end you lose, because of her job and her ex-husband's convincing manner (you are convinced by now yourself that the best liars are the worst parents, and wonder why judges never see that). You wish you had the money for investigators and time to build a serious case and present more facts about your client and her ex-husband; and you realize it may work that way on T.V., but this is real life. And you hope the daughter will be alright, and you try to put it out of your mind.

The patient comes to you with signs of gastrointestinal distress. Do you get them to change their diet, wait a few weeks to see if it resolves? Or do you order tests and refer them to a surgeon, reasoning the patient won't change their diet and it's better to be safe than sorry? According to Atul Gawande, the doctors of McAllen, Texas, one of the poorest communities in the country, generally choose the latter course. And the result, overall, is poorer healthcare against the national average, while healthcare spending in McAllen is nearly the highest in the country.

Most likely you've heard of the article, but if you haven't read it yet, you owe it to yourself to do so. Gawande's thesis is sound (and it's the one relied on by countries where health care is provided by the gov't, one way or another): unless costs are contained, nothing can be done to provide health care for an entire population. But it's when he tries to get down to the facts on the ground about McAllen that it gets interesting:

Beyond the basics, however, many physicians are remarkably oblivious to the financial implications of their decisions. They see their patients. They make their recommendations. They send out the bills. And, as long as the numbers come out all right at the end of each month, they put the money out of their minds.

Others think of the money as a means of improving what they do. They think about how to use the insurance money to maybe install electronic health records with colleagues, or provide easier phone and e-mail access, or offer expanded hours. They hire an extra nurse to monitor diabetic patients more closely, and to make sure that patients don’t miss their mammograms and pap smears and colonoscopies.

Then there are the physicians who see their practice primarily as a revenue stream. They instruct their secretary to have patients who call with follow-up questions schedule an appointment, because insurers don’t pay for phone calls, only office visits. They consider providing Botox injections for cash. They take a Doppler ultrasound course, buy a machine, and start doing their patients’ scans themselves, so that the insurance payments go to them rather than to the hospital. They figure out ways to increase their high-margin work and decrease their low-margin work. This is a business, after all.

The "invisible hand of the market," of course, is supposed to take care of this, so we don't have to. But McAllen is the near-perfect example of why this doesn't work, and Gawande puts his finger on the problem in those three paragraphs. Just before that he visited the chief executives of the newest hospital in McAllen, one the other hospitals and doctors blame for raising costs without raising benefits. Why do they blame Renaissance, the new hospital? Because it is run by doctors, which means there is an inherent conflict of interest that makes those doctors order more procedures, the better to make money. Except the man who runs Renaissance doesn't see it that way:

So I asked him why McAllen’s health-care costs were so high. What he gave me was a disquisition on the theory and history of American health-care financing going back to Lyndon Johnson and the creation of Medicare, the upshot of which was: (1) Government is the problem in health care. “The people in charge of the purse strings don’t know what they’re doing.” (2) If anything, government insurance programs like Medicare don’t pay enough. “I, as an anesthesiologist, know that they pay me ten per cent of what a private insurer pays.” (3) Government programs are full of waste. “Every person in this room could easily go through the expenditures of Medicare and Medicaid and see all kinds of waste.” (4) But not in McAllen. The clinicians here, at least at Doctors Hospital at Renaissance, “are providing necessary, essential health care,” Gelman said. “We don’t invent patients.”

Then why do hospitals in McAllen order so much more surgery and scans and tests than hospitals in El Paso and elsewhere?

In the end, the only explanation he and his colleagues could offer was this: The other doctors and hospitals in McAllen may be overspending, but, to the extent that his hospital provides costlier treatment than other places in the country, it is making people better in ways that data on quality and outcomes do not measure.

“Do we provide better health care than El Paso?” Gelman asked. “I would bet you two to one that we do.”

Did you get that? Government is the problem because it doesn't pay enough, so the private sector has to make up the costs (I guess). There's lots of waste in government programs. But nobody at Renaissance is responsible, because they practice sound medicine. And finally, ultimately, it's not all about the money, or what can be measured scientifically.

Which doctor is ever going to say otherwise? Maybe you cheat, but I don't. Your costs are excessive; mine are reasonable and necessary. Your patients may get better, but mine get well! You can't measure that in dollars and cents! One can see easily how Gawande reaches his conclusion as to how we all miss the big picture because of our quotidian duties.

Which brings me back to my opening comparison. Two of those three scenarios I've lived through. All professionals face something similar, some point where they are responsible for the words coming out of their mouths, responsible in ways that go bone deep and provide a pivot point in some individual's life. Is it worse in the emergency room when you are the doctor, or the pastor? Is it harder to make decisions about a patient/client in your clinic, or in your law office? It's an impossible argument, ultimately. The burdens come with the territory, and you accept them or move on. But I will say this, about the financial side, speaking strictly from my personal experience:

The pastor gets paid whether he gives the right answer to the soon-to-be widow, or not. And whether he helps her or not, he may still lose his paycheck. The outcome is almost entirely personal and individual; it needn't affect your ability to pay your bills or have a place to live.

The lawyer gets paid only to the extent he can convince the client the work done was reasonable and necessary. Lawyers don't get paid by third-parties, generally. They don't get to insist extra work must be done, more pleadings filed, codicils to the will be drafted, pages added to the contract, simply because it might seem necessary and somebody will pay for it, so why not do all you can and then some? Indeed, I don't know of a profession where you could regularly charge any client more for doing what is arguably (according to Gawande) less; except for the practice of medicine.* Consider, again:

Beyond the basics, however, many physicians are remarkably oblivious to the financial implications of their decisions. They see their patients. They make their recommendations. They send out the bills. And, as long as the numbers come out all right at the end of each month, they put the money out of their minds.

I worked for a large and wealthy law firm, before going to law school. The partners were always aware of every hour billed to their clients, and that included my billable time as a paralegal. The thought of what was in the bills was never out of their minds. When I entered private practice, this was equally true for the small firms I practiced in, and doubly true when I stepped down into family law, where only individuals hire you, and never even a small company. I couldn't be oblivious to the financial implications of my decisions, even when those decisions were regarding child custody or child welfare. I never had a third party paying my bill.

Is this to damn doctors, condemn hospitals, assault the industry? No. It's simply a fact. Doctors get paid for what they do, and that's the key difference between doctors and hospitals and almost any other profession: they get paid for what they do, and, as Gawande points out, that's part of the problem. There's nothing to keep them from getting paid, whether the outcome is better, or worse, or the same. Pastors get fired for displeasing the wrong people; lawyers get stiffed on their bills because the client didn't like the outcome, or didn't have the money to pursue the custody fight or to collect the past due child support (most people who really need a lawyer need a family lawyer; and they are least able to pay for those services). Doctors, if Gawande's article is to be believed, pass the costs on until someone picks up the tab. Does this make them evil? No. But it makes the system untenable, and unsustainable. I almost said "and liable to collapse," but in many ways, it has already collapsed. Michael Moore showed us that; but we just collectively shrugged our shoulders and went back to our quotidian lives, consumed with the details of our own existence.

Are we evil? Are the doctors?

It is worth pointing out that Gawande seems to disagree with my analysis:

When it comes to making care better and cheaper, changing who pays the doctor will make no more difference than changing who pays the electrician. The lesson of the high-quality, low-cost communities is that someone has to be accountable for the totality of care. Otherwise, you get a system that has no brakes. You get McAllen.

Which takes us back to his thesis, actually, as I was saying. No, we can't take the third-party payor out of the equation. So we have put some kind of controls into the system, as Gawande points out in his conclusion. But that's merely saying what I am saying: without someone controlling the expense, without a system that works to control costs, there is no solution. We cannot make health care that unique in America, or it will fail more and more of us than it already does.

*I saw only one instance of a lawyer grossly abusing a client's pocket book, but the client was wealthy and the lawyer had obviously persuaded her the courtroom appearance was a necessity (it wasn't; I was trying to withdraw from the case because my client had quit paying me or returning my phone calls; he wanted nothing more to do with it). I cite it as the exception which proves the rule. No doubt it happens, but it is no more common than doctors who order extra procedures just for the money, not for the sake of the patient (many doctors in Gawande's article accuse other doctors of doing this; some give accounts of outright fraud. But is that the root of all the evil?).

Coincidence? I think not....

Prof. Wombat leaves this comment, which I find this morning:

They all make the usual points, with which it's hard to disagree. But all accept the Enlightenment entirely uncritically, as an unmitigated good. All accept the notion of 'scientific truth' similarly, and that science should be free of politics, objective and like that.

George Bush as a potted Romantic hero, actualizing his ego, making one pine for those serene Enlightened slaveholders, racists and warmakers?

Needs more thinking, this stuff does, than even these worthies give it, seems to me...
ProfWombat |

And then my morning reading leads me to this post:

Actually, the line of the piece that sends chills down my spine is this quote from the original piece by Gelb, the foreign policy maven who talks about his own initial support for the war in Iraq. From Gelb's perspective:

“My initial support for the war,” he writes “was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility.”

There are wars that merit support -- Afghanistan was the training ground and safe haven for terrorists that killed nearly 3,000 Americans, for example -- but it didn't take much probing to see that Iraq was not one of them, that this was a country that not only had nothing to do with 9/11 but had allowed the entry of inspectors unable to find weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. But Hastings correctly notes that there is safety in the pack, that journaliists who got it wrong had the comfort of knowing that so did everyone else -- and that you could always change your position with everyone else as events on the ground changed.

The real-world consequences of being wrong...well, those were 11,000 miles away. They were things that were unpleasant to think about -- like roughly 100,00 Iraqi civilians deaths, many of them the very people these career-minded and very serious war pundits had advocated liberating,

There is an excellent point there, but it is all but undermined by the unintended irony of brushing aside the war in Afghanistan as a "good war." Everyone knows a "good war" is fine and dandy, while a bad war must be analyzed endlessly for the marks of its failure and the signs of its parentage.

The war in Afghanistan consistently manages to be excused from such analysis, despite the manifest fact that the pointlessness of that war cannot be overstated. One might as well say we should invade New Jersey and blame the Gov. for the presence of the Mafia, or blame the mayor of Boston for the presence of Jack Nicholson's gangster in "The Departed." We don't, of course, because those persons are not official guests of the government. Anyone remember "Move" in Philadelphia, and what happened when the Mayor decided to remove them as a police problem? An entire neighborhood went up in flames. It was not considered a "good" police action, any more than the storming of the Branch Davidian compound worked out well. Force is very attractive; but beyond movies and television dramas, it's seldom as effective as advertised.

And you will say the Mafia doesn't run New Jersey (no, but they ran Las Vegas for decades, and no one invaded Nevada), so the comparison is inapt. True, but while we've chased Al Qaeda into Pakistan, we have yet to invade there. Gee, I wonder why not.....

In the dim recesses of my memory there remain some glimmers of an idea that the Taliban might have given up Al Qaeda, with the right incentives. That war was initiated, after all, by the same guys who initiated the Iraq war shortly thereafter, the same guys who would have sneered at the suggestion a plate of sugar free cookies would do more good than a month of waterboarding.

Diplomacy, IOW, was never even tried in Afghanistan, and yet we still insist it is a "good war" because of 9/11. Except that wasn't Pearl Harbor, and Al Qaeda was not the government of Japan. And all we've gotten for our pains is a quagmire we can't seem to get out of, a national government that rules Kabul, at best, and some vague muttering in left blogistan about how we might, someday, improve the position of women in Afghanistan, if we keep trying.

"Keep trying," of course, means keep fighting the military situation. As if culture came from the end of a gun, or could be benevolently imposed by an invading army. Pardon my obvious cynicism and listen carefully to the question, because it's not hyperbole: isn't that exactly what the Nazis wanted to do? Impose German culture on the rest of Europe, and do it by military might? They were, at the time, the greatest military power in the world. Are we different because we shoot people benevolently, because our missile laden drones are compassionate, because our "daisy cutters" are merciful?

Does no one remember how the war in Afghanistan has been conducted? Or do deaths only count in certain wars, and not in others? Needs more thinking, this stuff, it seems to me.....

"How to be Topp"

"A gerund shut out. No place for it in one of my sentences."

The discussion at the Crack Den turned to gerunds, and how they were formed by adding an "ing", which lead to this post:

smithing is a verb, so i don't see why locksmithing wouldn't be.
chicago dyke, greened
-------------------------
so is rogering, and billing, and franking.
foolme1ns

And then, of course, this post:

I'm still trying to get "roberting" accepted.

Just need to decide what it should mean.
Rmj, Love Stupid Theologist

And wrapped up (so far as I was concerned) with this post:

Just need to decide what it should mean.
Rmj,

roberting: the act of annoying atheists and making pithy comments in the morning that are cynically amusing.

chicago dyke, greened

Now I just need to figure out how to work it into the masthead.

"Social snobery. A gerund 'cuts' a gerundive"


Images courtesy of St. Custard's.

"Of making many books there is no end..."

Because:

a) I like Anthony

b) I've nothing better to do; and

c) The ideas expressed here are not necessarily those of the management,

I decided to pick this up and give it a fuller airing than it will get in comments, below:

Can I beg your indulgence to post this here first?

The New Atheism As A New Dark Age by Anthony McCarthy

Are the ScienceBlogs supposed to be a place where people can go to find out more about science and reason? Is it unreasonable to ask a ScienceBlogger with a PhD in Mathematics, who teaches mathematics at a university, to clear up a disagreement about his subject on the thread of his blog?

http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2009/06/mooney_on_dover.php

The question is whether or not mathematical probability could deal with the proposal that Jesus was the only begotten Son of God, conceived by miraculous means and born to the Virgin Mary. What are the odds of The Virgin Mary conceiving a child by the Holy Spirit and giving birth to the only begotten Son of God, an event held by those who believe it to have happened exactly once in all of history.

I thought probability couldn’t honestly come up with the odds of that happening, apparently some of the new atheist faithless at the blog of Jason Rosenhouse PhD thought it could. I had pointed out exactly why science couldn’t deal with the question on the thread.*

Having had enough of trying to reason it out with the new atheists on his blog, I asked Jason Rosenhouse to settle the question by either telling us how it could be done or to say that it wasn’t possible to apply probability mathematics to that claim. If he thinks it can, would he sign his name to an attempt?

In the process of participating in the thread discussion this request was made in, it became clear to me that the new atheist program is a manifest failure. All over the blogs, the knowledge of the most basic requirements of science and logic demonstrated by the new atheists who post comments there, proves that they are generally quite ignorant of those. In many cases they are abysmally ignorant and as ready to spout their clueless blather as the most ignorant religious fundamentalists.

Many of the fundamentalists at least have the excuse that they’re not trying to pass themselves off as practitioners of science.

Is the level of science knowledge demonstrated by the new atheists of the blogs really what the new atheists are aiming for? Because it looks more like the dark ages to me, complete with sectarian bigotry and irrational hatred.

I thought that some other people might be interested in this question. Pass it on, if you think it’s interesting.

* 81 They are at odds because the scientific process by which one arrives at an understanding of the formation of, say, the blood clotting system is fundamentally *incompatible* with the theological process one uses to arrive at the conclusion that Jesus was the product of a Virgin birth.

I'm glad you used the Virgin birth, which I don't happen to believe in [see below], because it's such a good example of why you can't subject it to science.

1. There is no physical evidence to examine 2. It is held to have happened miraculously 3. It is held to have happened once in history

No evidence means no evidence that could identify a human father.

It happened miraculously, which means there is no way to explain how it couldn't have happened.

It is held to have happened once in history. As a unique event you could not debunk it by pointing to another or even every other human birth in history.

There is absolutely no reason you should believe it, as I said I don't, but any statement that you can subject the actual assertion to science only shows that you lack any real understanding of science.

[Note: I should point out I don’t believe in the literal truth of the story. I fully believe in the allegorical truth of it.]

I'll start by saying "Miraculous" already puts the matter beyond the purview of science, as "miracle" is, by definition, a violation of the scientific principle of "laws" of nature, or physics, or what have you. So calculating the odds of a miracle is a dubious prospect, at best. I mention this because I'm sure Anthony has an answer for that, and this creates an opportunity to solicit that answer.

Interestingly (coincidentally? synchronicitally?), this book came into the store yesterday, and I got a chance to look at it. The chapter which caught my eye was, of course, the chapter on religion: "God is a Liberal." Not sure what the title of that chapter means, as the author talks of "neo-liberalism," which some observers of international affairs have likened to a virus (it is as well regarded as the neo-conservatives are in America, and around the world, so "liberal" does not automatically mean "good"), but the thesis of the chapter draws a direct line from Henri Bergson to Karl Popper to the Reformation, arguing that the modern iteration of the Protestant ethic runs through Bergson and Popper to Wall Street, where we have ensconced the notion of the free market which makes all good, or, to paraphrase Eliot (and emulate Proust, with this sentence): "I think the market is a great green god...."

It's a fascinating analysis, especially as it includes the comments of several imams regarding Western culture. They admire the successes of Western science, indeed, don't gainsay them (how can you argue with success?), but they question our definition of "success." Science has succeeded, they point out, but at what cost? Materially we have benefited, although as the technological noose tightens we more and more understand there is, indeed, no such thing as a free lunch. But the imams question the moral, even the spiritual, cost (the former is still acceptable secular discourse, the latter deeply suspect; so it goes) to a culture so devoted to technology (which is all that science really is, anymore; at least to the larger society). And to the extent science is a philosophy, well, you get posts like the one Anthony linked to.

Anthony complains that the bloggers of such posts lack fundamental logic and reason; and I don't disagree. Alastair Crooke points out that our Western logic and reason has not been an unalloyed good which has led us, like a savior, to the Promised Land. I've commented before on the problem of the Big Idea, the one that miraculously works to save us from all our failings. Crooke points out that the Muslims we bestride (and we do, even we "liberals" and "progressives") see us has having moved away from the very roots of wisdom we claim to be rooted in, including Hellenism and even Hebraism (the former has become synonymous with science and "good," the latter with superstition and "bad." There are more than a few problems with that dichotomy, as the imams who spoke to Crooke point out. How many of us could provide the same trenchant understanding of Middle Eastern culture?). I've come to the conclusion the intertubes will no more save us than the political parties will, that both suffer from the same fundamental problem:

They're made up of people.

Soylent green is people. So are blogs. What now?

People are no smarter on blogs than anywhere else, and gathering PhD's is no better guarantee of wisdom or clarity than gathering a group of illiterate migrant workers. That sounds demeaning, only because we've been taught to honor PhD's and belittle the illiterate, but it's a certainty that Jesus of Nazareth was illiterate (who would have taught him to read? He wasn't a scribe or a Pharisee, like Paul, who couldn't write more than his name, either.). Illiteracy is not a sign of intelligence, nor certainly of wisdom. Solomon was probably illiterate, too. He had money, and money bought scholars, and scholars bought the patina of wisdom. Andrew Carnegie did the same thing by building libraries across the country after making money as a robber baron (one of his libraries was central to my childhood, and I cherish the memories of it, but Carnegie was still a robber baron). Same as it ever was. What we honor is power and privilege, and so people on blogs lay claim to both, myself included. I won't even bother with the details of the post Anthony linked; one glance convinces me it's in line with what Crooke critiques: the idea that empiricism and positivism (two terms I'd almost guarantee Jason Rosenhouse can't place in Western cultural history, much less adequately define or explain) are the roots of truth, and no other claimants need apply.

In radical political circles they used to call that attitude "hegemony." Apparently it's still okay, so long as the right people are doing it. The people Alastair Crooke rights about and quotes, understand this. We, for the most part, still don't.

And this is why I despair of the "blog project." There is, indeed, nothing new under the sun.

Same as it ever was.

I blame literature

No, really, I do. Dime novels, pulp fiction, 19th century romances, historical romances, Leatherstocking tales, Robert Louis Stevenson, Dumas pere et fils; what have you. It's not just "24" and "Dirty Harry" before it, and all the spew of "action films" out of Hollywood. It's the simple fact that drama demands conflict, and convinces us who have nothing to do with that conflict that brutality is strength, and strength is the only viable response to "evil."

And that evil is very, very real, and very, very pervasive; in the souls of the "Evil." Never in ours, of course.

So maybe it isn't literature, after all; maybe it's just the all-too human proclivity to declare the "other," and the all-too human inability to initially seek to understand the "other." But if that were true, then this story couldn't possibly be true:

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"They" hate "our freedom"? Who did we hear that from? The interrogators? The agents of our government who worked to get information, intelligence, from those who would attack the people of this country? No. We heard it from our leaders, men with great experience in politics and ideology, and no experience in criminal investigations or intelligence gathering. Listen to those stories again, and hear the "terrorists" appalled that their side killed their own, in the name of the cause. Listen again to the terrorist who relented when the agent of our government apologized for what our government had done. Listen again to the terrorist who gave up information for the consideration of a plate of sugar free cookies.

Listen again to the description of the words and actions of the evil villains we are supposed to be afraid of, the ones we are supposed to commit ourselves to destroy, as if that was the only purpose for America in the world. Listen again, and think about the villains in pulp fiction, dime novels, action movies: the kind of people you never meet in real life, because they are as rare as hen's teeth; or simply because they are fiction, not reality.

Update: Anthony McCarthy, in comments, links to this essay by George Orwell, which is well worth reading, and contains at least two very interesting (and relevant) observations about "crime fiction." Writing about the book No Orchids for Miss Blandish," he makes this observation about the plot: "Ultimately only one motive is at work throughout the whole story: the pursuit of power." And this, about the genre of the novel and its context (the 1940's):

As I have mentioned already, NO ORCHIDS enjoyed its greatest vogue in 1940, though it was successfully running as a play till some time later. It was, in fact, one of the things that helped to console people for the boredom of being bombed. Early in the war the NEW YORKER had a picture of a little man approaching a news-stall littered with paper with such headlines as 'Great Tank Battles in Northern France', 'Big Naval Battle in the North Sea', 'Huge Air Battles over the Channel', etc., etc. The little man is saying 'ACTION STORIES, please'. That little man stood for all the drugged millions to whom the world of the gangster and the prize-ring is more 'real', more 'tough', than such things as wars, revolutions, earthquakes, famines and pestilences.

There is more than a little something in that observation: fiction always appeals to us, especially in times of crisis. While we know how the decade of the '40's ended, those living in 1940 couldn't possibly see the future we know. Fiction is better that way: it ends quickly, and it seldom ends without justice, even rough justice, being done. If it confirms for us that everybody is scum (Orwell points out the detective in "No Orchids" is more concerned with money than duty), at least we're the survivors, and that's supposed to mean something.

The practical answer to morality is always going to be: "What good is it if you're dead?" Orwell goes on to point out No Orchids is written in American, not British, English, which says a lot, to him, about the story:

There exists in America an enormous literature of more or less the same stamp as NO ORCHIDS. Quite apart from books, there is the huge array of 'pulp magazines', graded so as to cater for different kinds of fantasy, but nearly all having much the same mental atmosphere. A few of them go in for straight pornography, but the great majority are quite plainly aimed at sadists and masochists.

Not a pretty picture, is it? But then who is the target audience of "24"? Or all the crime and mystery novels that pour onto bookstore shelves every month like clockwork? It's really quite an interesting article. Take this, for example:

The thing that the ordinary reader OUGHT to have objected to--almost certainly would have objected to, a few decades earlier--was the equivocal attitude towards crime. It is implied throughout NO ORCHIDS that being a criminal is only reprehensible in the sense that it does not pay. Being a policeman pays better, but there is no moral difference, since the police use essentially criminal methods.

Dirty Harry. Anything with Arnold Schwarzenegger as a policeman/government agent. I immediately thought of "The Departed," which is nothing but a meditation on this theme: how the police and the criminals need each other simply to justify their existence. But that was a moral examination of the question, and nobody paid much attention to it because it didn't involve the Mafia, Robert DeNiro, or Joe Pesci. "The Godfather" movies are much better, because they're "operatic." Or something.

Orwell makes one final point, a point worth considering more broadly than I have done here so far. He refers to:

what is now fashionable to call 'realism', meaning the doctrine that might is right. The growth of 'realism' has been the great feature of the intellectual history of our own age. Why this should be so is a complicated question. The interconnexion between sadism, masochism, success-worship, power-worship, nationalism, and totalitarianism is a huge subject whose edges have barely been scratched, and even to mention it is considered somewhat indelicate.

Which is the real issue for people like Dick Cheney: he is a "realist," he understands the world in ways no one else does; which probably explains his determination to speak as often as possible about what his Administration did, even as he now backpedals and blames the failures of intelligence on George Tenet. It is still "somewhat indelicate" to examine what Cheney's reasoning actually means; but it is high time we did.