Oh, HELL No!, or, Don't Try This At Home, Kids. Leave it to the Professionals

To begin with, this has nothing to do with the 'fundamental order of the universe'

I can't comment at Slate (don't ask, it's a technical thing, and NO, I don't want to solve it), and if I could (see?), I'd just bore everybody there.  And I was going to leave this alone, until I saw this Marcotte post was one of the "Most Shared."

Not that my response will be.

So let me start by saying I've never watched anything but scenes from Game of Thrones, and read only about one chapter of one book that my daughter had (and it bored me silly).  But GoT is a "classical tragedy"?

Oh, HELL NO!

I teach Aristotle's theory of tragedy (the "classical theory," if you will) every semester.  I've also taught both "Othello" and "Hamlet" on more than one occasion.  And frankly, what Amanda Marcotte knows about either play, or Aristotle and tragedy, would get her a "D" in my class.

Ned Stark’s story is lifted right out of the pages of Othello: A great man is brought into a culture that feels foreign to him, so that he can take a leadership role within it. A manipulative villain, with Littlefinger taking the place of Iago, ingratiates himself to our hero, pretending to be his friend while actually undermining him. The villain is jealous of the hero’s nobility, and decides to twist the hero’s fundamental decency—and the naiveté that comes with being trusting—into a weapon with which to destroy him.

Oberyn Martell’s story is informed by Hamlet as well. If Oberyn had acted with haste instead of trying to squeeze a confession out of Gregor Clegane, he could have saved the day. It’s exactly what drives the arc of classic tragedy—the sense that there was some decision the hero could have made to avert disaster, but for reasons of fate or personality, he was incapable of doing the very thing he needed to do to save himself.

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!   Let's start first with Aristotle, whom Shakespeare knew far better than Marcotte does:

“Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its katharsis of such emotions. . . . Every Tragedy, therefore, must have six parts, which parts determine its quality—namely, Plot, Characters, Diction, Thought, Spectacle, Melody.”

We can set aside Diction, Thought, Spectacle, and Melody:  those are peculiarities of Greek stagecraft (despite the 18th century British critics) and besides, this is not a scholarly treatise.  Go with Plot and Character, because for a tragedy, Plot is of first importance.

Consider "Othello:"  Yes, Iago is a villain, something inconceivable to Aristotle's idea of tragedy.  Yes, Iago plots against Othello.  Yes, Othello has a "tragic flaw" (hamartia) that undoes him.  But the plot of the play is Othello's marriage to Desdemona (they love each other, it isn't a rational decision) and the Duke's need for Othello to rout the Turks from Cyprus (it's not Othello's choice to go there for his honeymoon).  Once there, Othello must be a military governor, not just a military leader; a role he is already ill suited for.  Iago's plot against Othello takes advantage of conditions:  he quickly removes trustworthy Cassio from Othello's side, takes Cassio's place, and poisons Othello's already troubled mind.  Character is important, but it is the plot that undoes Othello, that exposes his tragic flaw and pushes him to a reversal of fate and fortune, and finally (and most importantly) a recognition that he is responsible for the tragic (sorry!) outcome of the play:  his wife dead at his hands, though innocent of the crimes he accused her of; Iago's wife dead, and Roderigo, and Othello dead at his own hand.  The hamartia, as Othello puts it, was that he loved not wisely, but too well.  The tragedy is that all the people who depended on him end up wounded (Cassio) or dead (Desdemona), or severely disappointed (the Duke).  Just because Othello was easily manipulated, and Iago a villainous liar, doesn't mean GoT took a page from Shakespeare and crafted a tragedy.

Plot first, Character second.  What is the plot of GoT, except a bunch of characters vying for control over a bunch of other characters, and willing to kill anyone who gets in their way?  And which character is the tragic hero upon whom everything depends (think Oedipus, king of Thebes) whose hamartia leads to a reversal of fate and fortune for which the hero recognizes he alone is responsible? Does this sound like any storyline in GoT?  And is any story in the show or the books plot driven?  Or is it driven by the set of characters all trying to kill their opponents and rule unopposed?

Maybe the incidents are meant to arouse pity and fear, but from what I read they mostly arouse disgust, and the writers say they are meant to arouse moral questions about the actions of the characters.

That is many things, but "classical tragedy" it isn't.  And tragedy is not driven by what might have been, but by what must be.  Oedipus, the most "classic" of all tragedies (per Aristotle) has no choice in his actions: there is nothing he can do to avoid killing his father and fathering children with his mother.  In fact, he's done all that before the play begins; all that's left is for him to find out how doomed he is.  And yet his hubris makes his fall worse (and leaves him blinded, his wife/mother dead by her own hand, and his four children orphans who later fight over the rule of the kingdom).  Hamlet cannot make a correct choice:  if he kills his uncle on the orders of his father's ghost, the kingdom will consider him a regicide.  If he doesn't, he's failed his duty to his father to avenge his father's murder.  He tries to expose the king, to make clear at least to himself that the ghost is not a demon or a delusion, and in the end he does kill the king, but inadvertently rather than directly.  Like Oedipus, he's caught in a situation he can't fix, no matter what choice he makes.  There is no "if" for Hamlet, no action which will "save the day" and keep Ophelia alive so they can live happily ever after.  Othello can't escape either; once he turns against Cassio (thanks to Iago's manipulations), he has no one left to trust except Iago.  And trusting Iago he is doomed; all we can do in the audience is watch as Othello is betrayed and destroyed by the choices he had no choice but to make.

As Barbara McManus notes:

Tragedy...is rooted in the fundamental order of the universe; it creates a cause-and-effect chain that clearly reveals what may happen at any time or place because that is the way the world operates. Tragedy therefore arouses not only pity but also fear, because the audience can envision themselves within this cause-and-effect chain.

There may be a way the world of GoT operates; but it's a world with magic, dragons, "White Walkers," and winters that last years and years, perhaps decades.  GoT is not "rooted in the fundamental order of the universe" (which means the Greek tragic vision of order arising from the Logos imposing order on Chaos; but Chaos eventually wins, as evidenced by the tragic outcomes of the best laid plans of men and kingdoms), it is rooted in a very specific fantasy.  The cause and effect chain it posits includes dragons as a deus ex machina, and winter as the return of chaos.  Possible in a tragedy (Medea escapes in a deus ex machina, after all), but those are really more features of fantasy.

And sword and sorcery fantasy, especially, rests heavily on bloodshed as part of the fundamental order of the universe.  Greek tragedy rests heavily on bloodshed as a disruption of that fundamental order, a sign that order is fleeting and impermanent, and will one day be completely undone.

The world of Game of Thrones, on the other hand, is chaos  That is its raison d'être and the reason everyone keeps watching; well, that and the fact you're almost guaranteed a sex scene featuring a topless woman.  It's premium cable, after all; that's what you're paying for.

And that's a whole different meaning of the term "tragedy."

I will bow and be free

That atheism is "parasitic" of religious belief cannot really be gainsaid.  In a world where no one believes, who would count themselves an "a-theist"?

But more interesting is the argument of many on-line atheists (at least) that religious belief is all about certainty, and so it is a fairy-tale version of reality. Yet it is scientists and atheists who seem to assert the virtue of certainty over all.

Lawrence Krause describes religion as a "precursor" to science; meaning science has displaced religion because the former has better answers now than the latter.  It's a definition that might have found some purchase among British intellectuals in the Victorian Era, but it's really about as absurd a definition today as to still argue radio somehow moves through "ether" to the receiving antenna.  The idea of the electro-magnetic spectrum has made that older idea (which lingered well into the 20th century) completely obsolete, and anyone who mentions it seriously is automatically marked as benighted.  Krause would be similarly marked for his statements, if more people were less ignorant on topics they think they know everything about.

That ignorance is buttressed by certainty.  Yet is is certainty that religious believers are supposed to cling to.  If I am challenged on my religious beliefs by an on-line atheist, the challenge usually takes the tack that I'm actually an atheist, because I don't profess the religious certainty of a fundamentalist.  But I find religious belief based on certainty to be the most brittle and fragile of states of mind, and I don't pursue the certainty of the fanatic, of the "true believer," for that very reason.   Certainty is arrogance; and the one thing life (to give it a name) seems to hate, is certainty of opinion.  On that which you are most certain, is that upon which you will be most shaken.  This is why a sound seminary education is a challenge to anything you hold dear.  Seminaries focus on a professional degree:  a Masters of Divinity, a degree for practicing ministers and priests.  If there is one thing you will face in ministry, it is a challenge to everything you hold most certain.  If you declare the bedrock upon which you stand, expect the storms of life to attack it with all the force life and muster.

And if you think it is your obligation to stand on that rock and never be moved; woe be unto you.

I will bow and be simple,
I will bow and be free,
I will bow and be humble,
Yea, bow like the willow tree.

I will bow, this is the token,
I will wear the easy yoke,
I will bow and will be broken,
Yea, I'll fall upon the rock.

That is not a sentiment you are likely to hear from Rick Santorum; or, for that matter, Chris Hedges (who recently received his ordination).  That is a beautiful hymn to humility and simplicity and trust. The only certainty in it is humility before God, is servitude to whatever God requires, to whatever God presents in life.  That is not the certainty of the blustering fundamentalist, of the Jerry Falwell or Jim Bob Duggar or Robert Jeffress.  That is the humility of the faithful.  If is a faithfulness and a humility I have known in my extended family members who belong to the Primitive Baptist church (which, in many ways, is as "primitive" as the name implies), or in many family members raised in the church for generations, but in no way influenced in the ideas of the Duggars or other like-minded groups.  As ever, there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

And God is more than anything humanity has ever dreamt of; which is why God is God.

Duggary, or, Let us now consider what should NOT be out of bounds

You know, the creepy thing about the premise of "The Truman Show" is that a child (Jim Carrey) was raised solely for the monetary benefit of another (the company producing and broadcasting the TV show of Truman's life).

And I'm trying now to figure out how that differs from the case of the Duggar family.

The distinction is that they are raising their children for the sake of their religion; but does anyone doubt Michelle Duggar keeps getting pregnant because it keeps them on TLC?  Or that they gave an interview to Fox News in order to salvage their TV contract?

They are accused by their critics of trying to raise their children in a bubble; but that bubble does not protect them from laws meant to protect children (who are not assets of their parents), and that "bubble" does not exclude the fact the Duggars make a living from raising their family for TV cameras.  Would the Duggars have any political sway at all, any notoriety and the power that comes with fame, even just within the state of Arkansas, if not for their TV show?

And now they proclaim themselves the victims of their son's "curiosity"?  And they insist Jesus has forgiven Josh, so all is well, nothing to see here, let's get those TV cameras back?

Can anyone seriously argue Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar are not raising their children for the sake of the money they can wring from TLC?

"The Truman Show" was fiction, and the purpose of it was to highlight our strange relationship to reality and reality as presented on television.  Harlan Ellison pointed out years ago that people didn't think reality was real unless they saw it on TV.

Well, now the question is:  which reality is real?  The one the Duggars want to get back to on TLC?  Or the one they say is victimizing them now?

And which reality should society insist on?

Let us now consider what is out of bounds

It's a mattress!  It's a protest!  It's a "rape performance piece"!

I've been struggling to formulate this issue, and I think I finally have.

What is the worst thing that ever happened to you?  And was it traumatic? Or were you told it was traumatic?  Do you even know what "trauma" is, or do you just think it's something very bad you can never forget?

I don't ask to be noisy and prying, I ask because we have social definitions of what is personally insupportable.  In the Victorian era it seems to have been sex (that's the popular opinion) and anything that brought disrepute to a woman.  Forget the Meryl Streep character of "The French Lieutenant's Woman," and think of the literary heroines who faint away because their beloved has broken off the engagement, or tries to hold their hand in public, or has been seen in the company of another woman; or whatever we would find ridiculous and incredible today.  "Barbara Allen" is a famous ballad of a young woman who spurns her beloved on his deathbed, then goes home to take to her deathbed when he dies.  It's a silly notion of romantic love, but someone at some point thought it made at least narrative sense.

So what is the worst trauma you could suffer?  Rape?  Assault?  Robbery?  Bankruptcy?  Someone pulling your pants down on the playground?

I ask because trauma is such a social thing.  Rape is the current aspirant to Worst Event Ever In Life.  I think a miscarriage would be higher, myself; but to claim that is to claim some superiority for "breeders," some moral elevation for those with children which makes the childless (by choice or circumstance) feel they are being shamed, and that is not allowable.  So rape is the candidate of choice, the one horror no one must ever suffer or think they've suffered, and it must be seen to affect us all, we must all agree rape is the worst event in anyone's life, a trauma that scars them forever, that they can never let go off or be shed off or "get over."  Miscarriage?  You can have another one.  Rape?  You must never forget.

I speak of this not because rape is "not that bad," but because it is the assault par excellence, especially among those who proclaim we suffer under a "rape culture" which doesn't take women's claims of rape seriously enough (which seems to mean believe them without question).  And because there is this matter of boundaries:  of what affects me when it affects others, and how the opinions of others does, and should, affect me.

And so we come to the story of Laura Kipnis.  Josh Marshall has as good a summation as you're likely to find, complete with links to everything he refers to.  It seems Ms. Kipnis' "crime" was, as Marshall sums it up, to write "breezily about teacher-student relationships and skeptically about two high-profile harassment/assault incidents on her own campus."  But writing breezily about sex and assault and harassment are things that are not done, and for her trouble of publishing in the Chronicle of Higher Education Kripnis was subjected to a Title IX investigation and is still being investigated for possible violation of the Northwestern University faculty handbook.

As I say, JMM links to both the original offending article, and the justification for the Title IX complaint penned by a Ph.D. student at the university, which Marshall has a hard time believing is not a parody.  And JMM's article is provoking interesting responses:

Certainly Kipnis’s initial Chronicle essay shows that she has an incomplete understanding of current laws surrounding sexual harassment and sexual assault. In a roundabout way, her Chronicle essay shows why Northwestern should have looked into her case. Not because her actions represented a clear violation of Title IX (the dismissal of the case suggests that they didn’t), but because professors like her—and she’s not alone in her views on sexual harassment and assault—maybe shouldn’t be trusted to make sure their universities follow the law.

By this reasoning any law professor who writes a law review article about sexual harassment should be subjected to a Title IX investigation to be sure his/her opinions are suited to following the law as...well, as who determines?  A college professor with no legal training?  Isn't that why we have a legal system staffed by experts in the law?  Pretty much the same reason we staff our universities with experts in the fields they teach?  This college professor provides an excellent review of the rationale behind sexual harassment law; but then turns it into a cudgel with which to enforce "correct thinking" on other professors.  Because there is this matter of boundaries:  of what affects me when it affects others, and how the opinions of others does, and should, affect me.

Or him (the other college professor), in this case.

Your opinions and my opinions may differ; but at what point, and on what subjects, does the expression of your opinions merit a government investigation?  When I'm afraid what you say may traumatize me?  Or others?  Is that what "trauma" means, now?

Everything old is new again

Talked today at the open forum which meets every Sunday afternoon in the high school.  The "lunatic fringe" of the city congregates there, in addition to many sensible people.  The question period in such meetings is unfortunately monopolized to a great extent by the foolish ones, though not always.  Today one gentleman wanted to know when I thought the Lord would come again, while a young fellow spoke volubly on communion and ended by challenging me to admit that all religion is fantasy.  Between these two you have the story of the tragic state of religion in modern life.  One half of the world seems to believe that every poetic symbol with which religion must deal is an exact definition of a concrete or an historical fact; the other half, having learned this is not the case, can come to no other conclusion than that all religion is based upon fantasy.

Fundamentalists have at least one characteristic in common with most scientists.  Neither can understand that poetic and religious imagination has a way of arriving at truth by giving a clue to the total meaning of things without belief in any sense in an analytic description of detailed facts.  The fundamentalists insist that religion is science, and thus they prompt those who know that this is not true to declare that all religious truth is contrary to scientific fact.

How can an age which is so devoid of poetic imagination as ours be truly religious?

Reinhold Niebuhr. "1927." Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic.  Louisville, Kentucky.  John Knox/Westminster Press.  p. 114.

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

There is nothing new under the sun.

And other truisms.

Let us now praise the wisdom of youth

Just for the memory that picture brings, I should dedicate this post to my maternal grandmother

I heard about this study (that the questioner can influence the response on gay rights issues) on "This American Life."  Then this morning I found a link to a story at New York Magazine which, in my pre-caffeinated state, I assumed was another story about that story.  Somewhere in the tabs I had open as I waited for the coffee to boil was that story, then I closed it and thought no more of it.

Until I read this.  I won't quote the article at length, except to note the excellent opening, which deserves more attention than it will get:

Human beings make science. They collect the data. They analyze the data. Other human beings peer review the science, edit the science, and publish the science, and still other humans report the science to the public, who then go around telling each other about the science on Twitter, and at the dinner table, and at the gym, and who knows where else.

Somewhere in this Chain of Fact, things can go wrong.

The very idea of a "Chain of Fact" is exactly what empiricism is based on; but, as any lawyer will tell you about a chain of evidence, links in a chain are easily broken, and not always visibly.

Which is why some of us speak of "fundamentalist atheists," although on-line atheists hate that term the way vampires hate garlic.  But even Hume recognized that "facts" are just a chain of assumptions which are only valid until the assumptions change:  such as when Planck dropped his opposition to atoms as necessary components of the cosmos.

But for me the choicest part was this, which corresponds exactly to any institution, from the church (parish, judicatory, what have you) to academia to the government:

The moment your name is associated with the questioning of someone else’s work, you could be in trouble. If the target is someone above you, like Green, you’re seen as envious, as shamelessly trying to take down a big name. If the target is someone at your level, you’re throwing elbows in an unseemly manner. In either case, you may end up having one of your papers reviewed by the target of your inquiries (or one of their friends) at some point…Moreover, the very few plum jobs and big grants don’t go to people who investigate other researchers’ work—they go to those who stake out their own research areas.

Which might well be why Max Planck said scientific truth changes when the old guard dies off and the young, who have grown up with it, accept it.  But really, that applies to almost any deep social change, doesn't it?  All our "advances" are based on that fact that NOW we know better; and pity those poor, benighted fools who didn't understand as we do.

Of course, at some point, we are the poor benighted fools, and the younger generation is just foolish to take so quickly to new, untested and unproven, and probably untenable, ideas.  Who is right is pretty much, as ever, a matter of who's in charge.

"If I had my way...."

Very interesting stuff here:

When fundamentalists and evangelicals rally against abortion or same-sex marriage, for example, it’s not primarily about their right to stand on a street corner and preach good news to the unconverted. It’s about their right to authoritatively define the fundamentals of truth and public morality, based on an authoritative interpretation of an authoritative Bible.

But the really interesting part is the idea of the paradox at the heart of fundamentalism:

It’s important to understand, as I argue in the book, that fundamentalism is a paradox. Fundamentalists describe themselves as both marginalized and a majority. They speak of national revival and theocratic dominion, but both are always deferred. They celebrate local victories while announcing imminent national destruction. This paradox is rhetorical—meaning that it’s constructed in and through language. I’m a student of rhetoric and, in this book, I’m not particularly interested in whether fundamentalists “really” represent localism or really speak as an oppressed minority. What’s important is that they say they do, and this paradoxical claim drives and justifies political action.
In the book, “superchurch” is one of the words that speaks to this paradox in fundamentalist rhetoric. There was a big push for Protestant unity in the immediate aftermath of World War I, and many of the early fundamentalist leaders denounced ecumenical organizations like the Federal Council of Churches and the Interchurch World Movement as elements in a “super church confederacy” that would eliminate denominational distinctions and eventually destroy “Bible-believing” churches altogether.

There was a kernel of truth in these arguments; some ecumenical leaders were pushing, for example, to consolidate under-staffed rural churches by merging congregations from different denominations. But this kernel of truth became part of a much larger narrative in which national religious and political leaders were joining together to crush local churches and outlaw fundamentalist belief. This narrative, in turn, has continued in different guises over the past century—linked with apocalyptic fears of communism, secularism, environmentalism, socialism, and so forth.

The flip-side of this narrative, however, was that of churches that resisted. Magazines published anecdotes about local pastors who stood up to ecumenicists and local churches that broke away from their corrupted denominations. Fundamentalist publications began celebrating large, independent churches as islands of local resistance. By the 1960s, pastors like Jerry Falwell had begun arguing that local, “superaggressive” churches could “capture” their communities for Christ, reform local politics to reflect fundamentalist authority, and become media centers for global evangelism. These fundamentalist “superchurches” would eventually provide the foundation for national political organizations like the Moral Majority in the late 1970s.

Of course, even as fundamentalists have become more nationally visible and politically active, the paradox remains. Just a couple of months ago, for example, when Senator Ted Cruz announced his candidacy for president at Falwell’s Liberty University, he encouraged Christian conservative voters to think of themselves as both an oppressed minority and an untapped majority. He described the federal government as a monolithic and mischievous force that crushes the dreams of small business owners, the relationships between individuals and doctors, the rights of parents, and the freedom of religious believers. At the same time, he spoke of “millions of courageous conservatives” and “born again Christians” whose votes could restore an idealized constitutionalism and drive the big-government bureaucrats out of the American temple.

That is a history I did not know; and apologies for the long quote (something I always tell my students never to do!), but I'm less interested in the ecclesiology there than the paradox of the soteriology, perfectly captured in this story:

A pastor in Kings Mountain, North Carolina is coming under fire for telling a group of graduating seniors at a public high school that, if they belong to the LGBT community, they are going to hell, WBTV’s Sarah-Blake Morgan reports.

The interim pastor of Temple Baptist Church, Scott Carpenter, spoke before a group of students at King Mountain High School’s annual baccalaureate service. The service was optional, but most students chose to attend.

Carpenter told WBTV that he doesn’t believe he did anything wrong. “Nobody got bashed or anything,” he said, “all I did was simply speak biblical truth.”

He insists that his comments were motivated by love, not homophobia. “Do I hate anybody?” he asked rhetorically. “Absolutely not. I just love them too much not to tell them the truth.”

A paradoxical sense of love, to use it to judge people.  I don't remember that model in the gospels; but maybe my memory isn't so good.  Still, a representative example of yet another paradox of fundamentalist thinking.  If you are going to insist on the "right to authoritatively define the fundamentals of truth and public morality, based on an authoritative interpretation of an authoritative Bible," you're going to sound like a judgmental ass.

Unless, of course, you do it in love.

I went looking for something to close this with; I found something better.  First, Julian of Norwich, from chapters 27, 29, and 33 of the Shewings:

But I did not see sin; for I believe it has no sort of substance nor portion of being, nor could it be recognized were it not for the suffering which it causes. And this suffering seems to me to be something transient, for it purges us and makes us know ourselves and pray for mercy; for the Passion of our Lord supports us against all this, and this is his blessed will. And because of the tender love which our good Lord feels for all who shall be saved, he supports us willingly and sweetly, meaning this: 'It is true that sin is the cause of all this suffering, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.' These words were said very tenderly, with no suggestion that I or anyone who will be saved was being blamed. It would therefore be very strange to blame or wonder at God because of my sin, since he does not blame me for sinning.

And I wondered greatly as this revelation, and considered our faith, wondering as follows: our faith is grounded in God's word, and it is part of our faith that we should believe that God's word will be kept in all things; and one point of our faith is that many shall be damned--like the angels who fell out of heaven from pride, who are now fiends, and men on earth who die outside the faith of Holy Church, that is, those who are heathens, and also any man who has received Christianity and lives an unChristian life and so dies excluded from the love of God. Holy Church teacmes me to belive that all these shall be condemned everlastingly to hell. And given all this, I thought it impossible that all manner of things should be well, as our Lord revealed at this time. And I recived no other answer in showing from our Lord God but this: 'What is impossible to you is not impossible to me. I shall keep my word in all thing and I shall make all things well.'

...the more anxious we are to discover [God's] secret knowledge about this or anything else, the further we shall be from knowing it....

And then Merton, on a  different subject altogether, but still applicable here, as well:

We are living under a tyranny of untruth which confirms itself in power and establishes a more and more total control over men in proportion as they convince themselves they are resisting error.

Our submission to plausible and useful lies involves us in greater and more obvious contradictions, and to hide these from ourselves we need greater and ever less plausible lies. The basic falsehood is the He that we are totally dedicated to truth, and that we can remain dedicated to truth in a manner that is at the same time honest and exclusive: that we have the monopoly of all truth, just as our adversary of the moment has the monopoly of all error.

We then convince ourselves that we cannot preserve our purity of vision and our inner sincerity if we enter into dialogue with the enemy, for he will corrupt us with his error. We believe, finally, that truth cannot be preserved except by the destruction of the enemy-for, since we have identified him with error, to destroy him is to destroy error. The adversary, of course, has exactly the same thoughts about us and exactly the same basic policy by which he defends the "truth." He has identified us with dishonesty, insincerity, and untruth. He believes that, if we are destroyed, nothing will be left but truth.

Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, "Truth and Violence: An Interesting Era," (New York: Doubleday 1989), p. 68.

Starting the day with the commonplace book

This sounds very much like Kuhn:

Surprisingly, [Max] Planck ["father" of quantum mechanics] never requested or expected flexibility from his peers. He famously stated what’s become known as “Planck’s principle”: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” In other words, new ideas do not advance by evidence, argument, and persuasion, but rather by older thinkers with older ideas passing away. One wonders if he was being darkly humorous, but in keeping with Prussian stereotypes, he was not a very funny man in general.

And this conclusion to the article, is just worth repeating:

 Changing one’s mind is a beautiful thing. It requires the hardest work between the increasingly common and more comfortable extremes of outrage and applause.

I've said it before and I'll say it again (mostly because of the on-line company I keep; or rather, I read):  the place that most challenged my thinking and pushed me to change my mind not once, but on a regular basis and as a professional matter, was seminary.  Ministry is the profession that requires the hardest work between outrage and applause, because applause largely means you aren't doing God's work, and outrage often means you are taking pride in doing what you think is God's work.

God, as John Fowles observed about truth in Daniel Martin, is always in the river between.

People don't matter. Things matter. Ideas matter.

Ain't it always the way?

The new Ford car is out....Mr. Ford has given out an interview saying that the car has cost him about a hundred million dollars and that after finishing it he still has about a quarter of a billion dollars in the bank.

I have been doing a little arithmetic and have come to the conclusion that the car cost Ford workers at least fifty million in lost wages during the past year.  No one knows how many hundreds lost their homes in the period of unemployment, and how many children were taken out of school to help fill the depleted family exchequer, and how many more children live on short rations during this period.  Mr. Ford refuses to concede that he made a mistake in bring the car out so late.  He has a way of impressing the public even with his mistakes.  We are now asked to believe that the whole idea of waiting a year after the old car stopped selling before bringing out a new one was a great advertising scheme which reveals the perspicacity of this industrial genius.  But no one asks about the toll in human lives.

What a civilization this is!  Naive gentlemen with a genius for mechanics suddenly become arbiters over the lives and fortunes of hundreds of thousands.  Their moral pretensions are credulously accepted at face value.  No one bothers to ask whether an industry which can maintain a case reserve of a quarter of a billion out not make some provision for its unemployed.  It is enough that the new car is a good one.  Here is a work of art in the only realm of art which we can understand.  We will therefore refrain from making undue ethical demands upon the artist.  Artists of all the ages have been notoriously unamenable to moral discipline.  The cry of the hungry is drowned in the song, "Henry has made a lady out of Lizzy."

--Reinhold Niebuhr, "1927." Leaves from the Notebooks of a Tamed Cynic. Louisville, Kentucky: John Knox/Westminster Press, original publication date 1929. p. 123.

A musical followup

to what I was saying; because what says it better than music?


 

More entries for the commonplace book

Now with more Niebuhr!

And apropos of this post (and to introduce a few entries from another of Niebuhr's books):

We had a great Easter service today....We received our largest class of new members into the church thus far, twenty-one in all.  Most of them had not letters from other churches and yet had been reared in some church. We received them on reaffirmation of faith.

This matter of recruiting a membership for the church is a real problem.  Even the churches which once believed a very definite conversion experience to be the sine qua non of entrance into the fellowship of the church are going in for "decision days" as they lose confidence in the traditional assumption that one can become a Christian only through a crisis experience.  But if one does not insist on that kind of experience it is not easy to set up tests of membership.  Most of these "personal evangelism" campaigns mean little more than ordinary recruiting effort with church membership rather than Christian life as the real objective.  They do not differ greatly from efforts of various clubs as they seek to expand their membership.

Of course we make "acceptance of Jesus as your savior" the real door into fellowship in the church.  But the trouble is that may mean everything or nothing.  I see no way of making the Christian fellowship unique by any series of tests which precede admission.  The only possibility lies in a winnowing process through the instrumentality of the preaching and teaching function of the church. Let them come in without great difficulty, but make it difficult for them to stay in.  The trouble with this plan is that is is always easy to load up membership with very immature Christians who will finally set the standard and make it impossible to preach and teach the gospel in its full implications.

--Reinhold Niebuhr, "1919."  Leaves from the Notebooks of a Tamed Cynic. Louisville, Kentucky:  John Knox/Westminster Press, original publication date 1929.  p. 23.

This is Reinhold Niebuhr, recording contemporaneously his experiences as a new pastor in Detroit at the beginning of the last century.  It is the conclusion that makes the point:  what is church for?  For anyone, including non-believers?  And how many of those can be allowed in before it is "impossible to preach and teach the gospel in its full implication"?  Yet I have pastored churches where that was already impossible, and no one in that congregation would admit to being an atheist.

They were more likely to label me a heretic.

"Make it difficult for them to stay"?  The only person who would find it difficult to stay in that church would be the pastor.

And I've held fast to the idea that church membership today means nothing more than the "efforts of various clubs as they seek to expand their membership."  It makes me sound terribly cynical to out-Herod Herod on this point, but it is my experience nonetheless.  I served two churches that insisted increasing membership was a necessary goal; but all they really meant was to make the club more popular, by enticing more people like them to appear on a more permanent basis.  There is comfort in numbers, but greater comfort in people like us.

But for many churches, there are fewer and fewer such people around.  Interestingly, in 1919 only about 41% of Americans considered themselves affiliated with any kind of religion.  (I use this study constantly because I find context around these issues constantly important).  So Niebuhr is contemplating an America even more different from our own, but not in the way we might imagine.  Like the church today, Niebuhr had to work with, and accept into his church fellowship, the "unchurched."  Believers, but believers who really don't want to be asked to do anything for the sake of their belief.  Should they be winnowed later?  Willow Creek Community Church uses that model, but studies have found it doesn't really lead to any greater commitment than to show up on Sunday morning for the show.  Especially in the "seeker service" that was "a pretty good show for a buck."*

Robert Wuthnow makes much of something that never seems to occur to Niebuhr:  the need for the church to raise the money it takes to continue being a church:  building, programs, employees, etc.  But is that what church is for?  Upon re-reading his book I want to introduce him to Walt Kallestad:

Walt led Community Church of Joy in Phoenix, a megachurch that had been an average congregation of 200 before he took over in the 80s and oversaw it's growth. But in 2002 he suffered a massive heart attack requiring six-way bypass surgery. The heart attack, says Walt, was a "wake up call" for the leaders to develop a succession plan to ensure the megachurch continued to thrive after Walt's tenure.

Kallestad began networking around the country looking for a young pastor he could bring onboard and eventually hand the church over to. One conversation stuck with him.

"It's a pretty good opportunity," Walt said. "We have 187 acres just off a major freeway, multipurpose buildings, and a great staff."

The leader looked him in the eyes and said, "Who'd want it? Who in their right minds would want to run that?"

"That's when it dawned on me," Kallestad reflected. "By the time we service the $12-million debt, pay the staff, and maintain the property, we've spent more than a million before we can spend a dime on our mission. At the time, we had plans for a spectacular worship center with a retractable roof. After that conversation, I scrapped it."

Making those changes, by the way, cost Kallestad 4000 church members.  I've never been even associated with a church with that many members, much less one that could lose that many and still exist as an institution.  And maybe the lesson of the Crystal Cathedral is instructive here:  when Schuller died, the church had to sell the building to the Catholic diocese just to pay its debts.*

So how do we make Christian fellowship unique?

*An old joke I picked up in seminary, about what it "costs" to attend worship on any given Sunday.

**I got carried away with this, but you can have my footnotes.  I couldn't find any numbers on the membership of CCJ, a church I had some encounter with in seminary.  According to Internet Monk, at it's height CCJ had 12,000 members.  In 2009, when it broke with the ELCA over the ordination of gays and lesbians (CCJ was agin it), they reported 6800 members, an attendance of 2500.  Where their membership is now is anybody's guess, but Internet Monk provides more information on how two megachurches decided "seeker services" weren't the alpha and omega of Christian discipleship.  We always come back to the Church of Meaning and Belonging v. the Church of Sacrifice for Meaning and Belonging.  And if I keep repeating all of this it's only because I long for a serious conversation on these topics, and the best I get is people misreading and misunderstanding the latest Pew polls.  No, I don't mean to be haughty; but damn!, the signal to noise ratio on the internet is low!

Waiting for the Big One

And all I got was this lousy sign.... 

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."

Thoreau, Walden

If you are reading this within a week or so of when I publish it, check the front page of Religion Dispatches for all the articles responding to the latest (again!  Timeliness!  The internet is out of date faster than the dailies!) Pew report on why we are all godless heathens.

Well, no, we aren't, but we are supposed to think something on those lines.  Pastor Dan has one; there's another by Peter Laarman (another UCC pastor, along with Pastor Dan); another by Timothy King; still one more by Kaya Oakes;  and there's still one by Sarah Posner.*

And frankly, no offense to any of those writers, but none of them tell me anything I didn't already learn from Robert Wuthnow in the late 90's in seminary.  I just pulled one of his books off my shelf, something I marked up in 1997 or so; and I was struck how nothing has really changed in 18 years.  Except, of course, that we keep rediscovering the wheel that is the church in crisis.

The same crisis, as I've said ad nauseum, that T.S. Eliot was describing almost a century ago, now.

When does this disaster finally arrive and sweep all of Western culture before it?  I feel like I've been waiting 60 years for the fulfillment of this prophesy, and it still won't come.  Maybe it's something to do with messianism?

Wuthnow in '97 was very earnest about the crisis in the churches, which he blamed largely on middle-class pastors not relating their preaching to middle-class lives.  And yes, I did know pastors who still hadn't quite recognized, in the late '90's, that the average American family included two adults working outside the home, and schedules of play-dates and athletic practices and all manner of "extra-curricular" activities that would challenge the organizing skills of an events director on a cruise line, as well as the pressures (building since the '70's) to run as fast as you can just to stay in one place (because no child can be left behind without a cell phone/iPad/iPod/what have you; and no adult, either!  Nor be denied satellite TV and Netflix and Blu-Ray and...and...and....).  Pastors were, curiously, caught in a  time warp where it was perpetually 1959 and June was in the kitchen in her high heels and pearls worried about the Beaver.

Wuthnow was describing that 18 years ago, and advising preachers to talk about the daily lives of their parishioners, and encourage them to give so the church could stay open and pay its bills (and especially give its pastor a raise).  And he was completely wrong; because the churches he described with staff and middle-class congregations were not the churches full of the elderly on fixed incomes with no vision for the future except God's waiting room, and no interest in the future either except as an undisturbed continuation of the present; and who quit working shortly after June stopped worrying about the Beaver, because the show had gone off the air.

Or they might as well have, for all they were aware of the radical changes in the American home and business since the inflationary days of the '70's gave way to the yuppies of Reagan's Morning in America.

Nobody knows the changes I seen, nobody knows but Jesus.....

And the French are right:  the more things change, the more they stay the same.  But the changes are different for each church, and the causes of the changes are different, and the same.  Some of it is the American determination to go bowling alone.  De Tocqueville marveled at how many private organizations we started as Americans.  My father was an Optimist.  He went to regular meetings, we sold Christmas trees at Christmas and cokes at the parades in the spring to people standing on the street watching, and they are some of my favorite childhood memories.  He was a member in good standing.  Who joins the Optimists now?  Who is an Oddfellow, an Elk, a Shriner?  People used to go to church for the same reason they joined such clubs:  because it is what people did.

People don't do that anymore.  There's a reason for church decline that isn't connected to disillusioned Millenials or disinterested Gen X'ers or the corrosive influence of knowledge flowing into homes through the internet.  Church attendance, as even Wuthnow was noting 18 years ago, has been in decline since its peak in the 1950's.  When does it finally decline to the point that we can say there has been a significant change?  Or has that already happened, and we just won't admit it?

Harvey Cox made a splash in 1965, coat-tailing on the "God is Dead" movement with his book The Secular City.  The church, he said, was defunct.  We had to accept, as Christians, that we were living in a secular city into the foreseeable future.  By 1969 he was writing about the revival of Christianity in Feast of Fools, and praising the spirit he identified in that book, in the 1973 play "Godspell."  Which hit Broadway largely because of the reception of the rock opera "Jesus Christ Superstar."

When does the collapse finally happen, so I can quit anticipating it?  But more to the point: when does the internet finally start providing information that is true and can be trusted?  Because the latest favorite meme is that religion is in decline because people can read about biblical archaeology or biblical scholarship or just the wit and wisdom of Lawrence Krause (who insists science is not a philosophy but Truth!, which makes it a religion) or Daniel Dennett (who insists philosophy must be a science to be True!) or Richard Dawkins (proud of his ignorance of subjects he disdains and disparages), and yet none of it is even on the cutting edge of the 19th century.  There is still more information in books (even if they are digitally available!) than on the whole of the internet, but books are tl;dr.  What matters in this brave new world is not facts and knowledge but opinion and stridency.

Which is not really any different from the world of the telegraph in 19th century America, when American skepticism, which became a branch of philosophy known as Pragmatism (see William James and, in the 20th-21st century, Richard Rorty), came into its own.  So what has the internet done for the dissemination of knowledge?

Little more than dump muddy water into the pond.  Maybe Thoreau was onto something:

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. If we refused, or rather used up, such paltry information as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform us how this might be done.

If not by experience then by true knowledge.  We must learn.  We think the internet has made auto-didacts of us all, but the hardest part of learning is to learn what you don't want to know, to engage what you don't want to consider, to wrestle with arguments and ideas you cannot overcome.  Auto-didactism is so much sausage stuffing without the struggle.  It is the building of walls, not the removal of them.  And that is what education should do:  remove walls, make us aware of the complexity of the world, of the messiness of life, of the importance of the other to our Self.

So perhaps to reawaken ourselves we need to be less like Thoreau by the pond, and more like Jacob in the wilderness. 

Back to beginnings; again.

*And I forgot Richard Flory telling us U.S. Christianity is dead (at last!), so now we need to bury Caesar.  Or something.  Back to beginnings, indeed.

Why nobody wants to teach in public schools

Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.
Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always
substance and increase, always sex,
Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed
of life.

To elaborate is no avail, learn'd and unlearn'd feel that it is so.

...

I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other.

Loaf with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat, Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice.

I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn'd over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your
tongue to my bare-stript heart,
And reach'd till you felt my beard, and reach'd till you held my
feet.

--Walt Whitman

And remember, this didn't happen in Texas, or anywhere in the 'benighted' South:

It was the kind of moment teachers covet. An Advanced Placement English class focusing on poetry, and a student brings in a poem that caught his eye, hoping to discuss in the waning moments of the period how the poet uses language in his work.

The teacher, David Olio, a 19-year veteran of the South Windsor School District and winner of Connecticut’s highest award for teaching excellence, didn’t know the poem in question, but he took a look and walked the students through it in the remaining time.

The poem the student discovered and brought in was “Please Master,” an extremely graphic account of a homosexual encounter published by Allen Ginsberg in 1968 that begins: “Please master can I touch your cheek / please master can I kneel at your feet / please master can I loosen your blue pants.”

Clearly, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” this wasn’t. But the students were 17- and 18-year-olds, some of whom were taking the AP course in conjunction with the University of Connecticut and receiving college credit.

One day after the class, Olio was placed on indefinite, unpaid leave by the district. Seventy-two hours later, the district began termination proceedings against him. Three weeks after that, he agreed to resign.

Reading the poem in class, the district found, showed “egregiously poor professional judgment,” Olio’s termination letter stated. “By so doing, you violated the trust placed by the Board of Education in you as a teacher, you brought discredit upon the South Windsor Public Schools, you undermined public confidence and parent trust in you as a teacher, and you put the emotional health of some students at risk.”

The unceremonious dismissal of a beloved teacher has thrown the town of South Windsor, population 25,000, halfway between Hartford, Connecticut, and Springfield, Massachusetts, into tumult. The local newspaper denounced him in editorials. Alumni, town residents, and Olio’s current students crammed into Board of Education hearings to testify on his behalf.

It's the reference to the editorial against the teacher I like the best.  I teach a dual credit class on behalf of a local community college, in a high school (not a public school).  I teach a contemporary poem that includes the line "they can go fuck themselves."

It's a sentiment I find myself wanting to direct to the Olio Board of Education, especially for the language in their dismissal letter.  19 years of exemplary work, and this is what they do to you.

So far I haven't been fired for such an offense.  Maybe I should be more daring, and teach Whitman..... 

Something to chew on....

Tastes like chicken!

I should leave this stuff alone, but....

I can't.

Coyne and his fellow New Atheist writers are at their gadfly finest when they remind us that people really are motivated by beliefs, and that the specific details of ideas can indeed influence our actions. In the case of Coyne and many of his intellectual allies, what emerges is a vision of a world in which reasoned argument—in which being right—can cure religion and the social ills that supposedly accompany it.

That’s an idealistic, even utopian vision. One need not be cynical to call it naïve. “The ability of people to ignore inconvenient truths that conflict with their faith, whether or not the faith be religious, is astonishing,” Coyne writes, confused that not everyone may have the willingness—or the luxury—to let ideas trump convenience.

Actually, the use of the term “inconvenient” is rather strange here. If you’re a coal miner, the reality of climate change is probably more than an inconvenience for you, especially if climate policy costs you a job. Not everyone is an affluent, tenured Chicagoan who gets paid to think. With his obsessive focus on the correctness of ideas, Coyne is blind to the ways in which class and power can entangle themselves with any kind of belief (including, perhaps, Coyne’s own).

That blindness is chronic; there are essential questions that Coyne doesn’t even think to ask. For example, in a book about the harmful incompatibility of science and religion, he never explains why it’s inherently bad to sometimes hold logically inconsistent beliefs. Within the purity of this ideas-above-all mindset, that awfulness is simply a given. But for those of us curious about the inconsistencies and weirdnesses of actual human experience, it’s not.

Consider, alone, the case of Oscar Romero:  a man revered by the people of El Salvador, who were rewarded with his canonization as a saint.  He was not "an affluent, tenured Chicagoan who gets paid to think."  He was not "blind to the ways in which class and power entangle themselves with any kind of belief."  Indeed, I've learned to make trenchant critiques of class and power and belief, from seminary.

Not from any of my science classes.  How could I?  Lawrence Krause declares science has superseded philosophy and theology.  I guess this means we can discard ethics as well as aesthetics along with phenomenology and even empiricism and philosophy of science itself, because science has figured it all out!  Or has the worm simply devoured its tail?  I dunno; is that a scientific question?  If not, it's out of order!

"The blindness is chronic."  And I've never encountered any field of study which examines that blindness more persistently and perceptively than philosophy and theology and, far less technically but with equally valid insight, religion.  The idea of religion as imagined by Coyne and Krause is simply puerile.  It is the flimsiest of scarecrows.  Alas!

Even the wind in dry grass has more to say than these two, and the rat's feet over broken glass make a more intelligible sound.  Self-examination is not even a concept to them.  Finding common cause with humanity is beyond their ken.  Understanding actual human experience in all its complexity and strangeness and other-ness, is beyond their interest.  And no wonder they would reject philosophy; they aren't any good at it:

...take one of Coyne’s central premises, that “religious claims are empirical hypotheses.” In other words: religious groups make claims about the world that are directly comparable, in their aims and in their applications, to scientific statements.

If I have to explain what's wrong with that kind of reasoning, there is too much I have to explain to you to make you realize how wrong you are.  As a wise man once taught me (via talk radio):  "you can't fix stupid."

I do wonder, though, why it finds itself so easily published and publicized.

Mmmmmm.....coffee!

I'm going to do this in two or more pieces (and then probably never finish it, so be warned), and I want to start here, because it came on the radio this morning after a few thoughts fit together on the bridge table of my mind (where the jigsaw puzzle is laid out; whether even all the pieces are there has yet to be determined, thanks to Godel and Schrodinger).  Call it synchronicity, call it coincidence (the mathematical model), call it what you will.

I called it odd and a little inspiring.

We like to speak of common sense — of understanding, shaped by common experience. You and I share similar sensory input, so we share ideas about reality. It's that common sense that keeps us from stepping out of a two-story window. We don't have to know Newton's law of gravity. But even Newton's laws are limited to our slow-moving experience. If we moved near the speed of light, Einstein's relativity would change what Newton tells us.

Common sense could never tell us that we'd return from a high-speed trip to Alpha Centauri less aged than those back on Earth. That's a most uncommon result of relativity theory.

Common sense gets really tricky when we think about time. After all, we never really experience time; we know only present moments. Yet we do have a sense that moments flow toward what we call the future. Common sense is what tells us that a teacup, fallen on the floor, won't repair itself and fall back up on the table.

Still, I'm told that the Comanches did not see time as moving ahead. Instead, their common sense told them that we live the same year, over and over, while people and events in that year change. And I wonder — just how would I contest that idea?

To get beyond the limited reach of common sense we use remarkable measuring instruments. And, when we reach the limits of what they tell us, we turn to tools of math and logic. As we do, we learn things that far outrun common sense. And, it's small wonder that people outside science often view it with distrust.

Once instruments, logic, and math have so magnified what our senses tell us, common sense stops serving us. We find things stranger than we ever imagined — that Earth is not flat, but also that space itself is curved. We learn that, if an object is small enough, it can no longer have a definite location.


So think about that narrow slit through which we look at a vast universe. Then think about science: Science is the way we finally manage to see more than that cramped view through the tiny window of our common senses — and of our common sense.

As you will see (soon enough, I hope), I'm intrigued by the idea of "common experience," especially as it impacts how we know what we know.  For example, children ask their parents "How do you know when you're in love?"  Nobody has an answer for that, exactly.  "You just know," we usually reply.  It's kind of like asking what coffee tastes like, or raspberries.  Aside from chicken, what comparison do we have for flavors?  Coffee doesn't taste like tea, but how is it different, exactly?  What does coffee taste like?

And yet no one worries about the common experience of enjoying a cup of coffee, or who prefers it to tea.  The tiny window of our common sense is very cramped, indeed.

I'm also intrigued by the experience of time.  We have one concept of time today, and we are convinced it is universal and immutable and inalterable.  Except for that Theory of Relativity stuff.  Or when we look at the experience of other cultures (which we seldom do).  I'm equally interested in the idea of the "adolescent brain," an idea important to us because of modern culture, not because of something fundamental to human anatomy.  For one thing, we don't mean the "brain" of the adolescent (whatever that is, but I'll come back to it in a second), we mean the "mind" more or less "arising" from that brain.  And what do we mean by "adolescent'?  It's a new term, like "teenager."  It's maybe less than 100 years old, as we apply it.  It suits our social order, not the biology of homo sapiens.  But we use it because it suits us, and because it suits us we decide it describes the substance of reality, a substance which cannot be altered, because it so much conforms to our "common sense."

Which maybe ain't so common after all.

Then, of course, there's the simpler fact, illustrated in the brief essay I quoted, that we have to take most of what science explains to us on faith.  Einstein tells us space and time are connected, and space can effect time, and time itself can be altered by velocity.  Do we really understand this, or do we just accept it as true because we trust science?  We are told that physicists with expensive particle accelerators at their disposal have discovered truths about reality.  Have they, or do we just believe them because so much of society's resources have been invested in the endeavor?  And how different is that from the trust in the "witch doctor" in non-Western cultures, or in the parish priest in medieval Europe (which trust was never 100%; just read Chaucer, that's all you need).

Yes, science can tell us that elephants hear infrasound (frequencies too low for our ears) and that ultraviolet light can be seen by insects.  But we trust science to tell the truth about these things, because how can we ever know such statements are true?  Without resort to more science, we can't; which is the same complaint commonly raised against religious thought.

So how do we settle this issue?  With common sense?  Or do we need to settle it at all?  After all, what does coffee taste like?

The better nature of our angels....

I'm not a fan of "Game of Thrones," mostly because I don't have HBO.  I tried reading one of the books on my daughter's Kindle, but I found the writing very pedestrian (YMMV, this is not a judgment on those who like "GOT").  Frankly, I've found a new appreciation for Tolkien.  For all that he wrote his story in an arch-"archaic" English, much influenced no doubt by the King James Bible and the tendency for churches to speak in fake Elizabethan tones for centuries after that age had passed into memory (translations of the "classics" suffered this fate, too.  In order to sound "serious" they had to sound "old and venerable"), his story was so affecting that even to watch the ending of the final movie (if you know the whole) is to be moved by the characters.  Even in the version told by the movies, which is not entirely Tolkien's (and not entirely an improvement on the source material).  The special effects and the complicated world (orcs?  Rings?  Gollum?) fall away, and the characters shine through.  The characters are what you care about.

Is that because Tolkien is such a good story teller?  Or because he's a Christian?

The tale of Harry Potter was particularly moving, too; and the ending could only have come from a deeply Christian core.  Harry makes a sacrifice; but so does Dumbledore; so does Snape; so, in the final battle, do several characters, major and minor.  They don't die, they make themselves a sacrifice, for the sake of others.  They struggle against evil (a common theme of modern fantasy) and they learn that in love there is greater strength than in fear and hatred; and that love is much, much harder to live up to, but also much, much more rewarding.  In sacrifice they even learn the power of mercy; not unlike the victors at the end of LOTR.   In the end, what shines through is not the chaos or the action (well, more so in the movies, perhaps) but the characters.  The characters are what you care about.

 From what I can tell, there is no such strain of mercy and self-sacrifice in "GOT."

Season 5 of Game of Thrones has been an exceptionally slow burn, especially in comparison to the previous season, where Joffrey was dead by the end of the second episode. However, we’re finally starting to see momentum gathering, as the characters are being pushed to the brink as we find out what they are willing to sacrifice to achieve victory, and whether the gods will view those sacrifices favorably. 

I don't know much about the gods of Westeros, but I do wonder if they have prophets to challenge the inhumanity of the kings.  Where are the calls for justice, for fair treatment of the widow and the orphan, care for the poor?  Not a call we associate with medieval Europe (and just how medieval is Westeros?  Well, as medieval as our imagined "dark ages Europe," I suppose); although tales of kings crawling through the snow to the home of the Pope to seek absolution from excommunication have filtered through; as well as the English king who used to bath the feet of peasants in honor of his Heavenly Lord, on Good Friday (a custom that didn't last nearly long enough, IMHO).  Small points of abject humility before either a spiritual leader, or perhaps more importantly (to us Protestants), a spiritual ideal.  And then there is the wisdom, not to say sense of justice, of the Wife of Bath.  And while Shakespeare admires (and makes proper obeisance to) power, it is the weak and powerless that most claim his attention, and our sympathies.  It is the characters that shine through.

Where is that in Westeros?  What hope is there of kindness and mercy in Westeros, or is it merely Rome with more petty empires, Italy without central Roman rule but all the lusts and corruption we associate with the Borgias?

Nothing, again, against Westeros, but if this is how we imagine life truly is:  nasty, brutish, and short, even under the rule of what passes for law, if our vision is more Roman than European, then we have to acknowledge the power (and the responsibility) of the Christian church in Western civilization.

And just how much, as Vattimo argues, it has been emptied into daily life, and changed us since the days of Rome.

We still admire the Roman fasces.  Who can doubt it?  Our proudest halls and monuments in D.C. are Greco-Roman revival structures.  The pediment above the Supreme Court building relies on Roman, not Greek, iconography, including the fasces.  E pluribus unum, we say, and we are united by law as the sticks are united by their bindings.  We are, under law, benevolent.  Rome was quite benevolent.  It was tolerant, just as we pride ourselves on being tolerant.  But actually, in Rome as now, that was and is mere toleration.  Acknowledge the supreme authority of Rome, and you were permitted to worship and live (by and large) as you please.   But keep that supreme authority ever before you; preach the wrong ideas and you wind up like Spartacus and his slave rebellion; or like an itinerant peasant healer and preacher in a far east backwater of the Empire.  Rome was benevolent; but only so long as it was pleased with you.

We don't live that way now.  Stephen Pinker insists the "angels of our better nature" have taken over.  But there did they come from?  The Renaissance?  The Enlightenment?  Sweet reason?  Swift skewered that when Gulliver traveled among the Houyhnhnms.  No, sweet reason leads to no finer a morality than utilitarianism, which is merely Roman rule with a kinder, gentler face, feudalism without quite so many landed gentry.  Pinker can't imagine that Christianity played a role in this.  Which doesn't mean it didn't; it just means he can't imagine it.

Is it a coincidence that we have removed religion from the popular eye, or let it be replaced with caricatures like Liberty University and the Duggar family, and so have fallen into despair about both the future (where chaos reigns in automobiles with, most fantastically, no industrial infrastructure whatsoever, but unlimited gasoline supplies?) and the imagined past?

I don't know.  I don't really want to be an old bible-thumper preacher finding sin the popular culture and inveighing against it.  I just wonder how we set aside the brutality of Westeros in history, or how we imagine that brutality changes in the fictional world of "Game of Thrones," with nothing to avail us except that "might makes right."

A little birdie tells me.....

I want to agree with Charlie Pierce that Rick Santorum is a....well, a little richard.

But I can't quite make that argument right now.  It seems Rick Santorum is "sickened" by the Josh Duggar story; and rightly so.

In other news, Dan Savage wants to do to "Duggar" what he did to "Santorum."  But apparently Twitter can't quite get around the fact the victims here, and the perpetrator, share the same last name, so using that name to become a new pejorative just seems, shall we say, "sick"?

Even Twitter finds an acorn once in a while; and even supposedly clever people step on their....well, little richard.

Memorial Day 2015

Sometimes originality is not the key; sometimes solemn repetition is more appropriate....

Perhaps it began as "Decoration Day." Probably it was a memorial for the dead, like Samhain or Dios de los muertos. Now it is to remember that "freedom is not free," even though it was not won by war for the Founding Fathers but simply one's birthright. The militarism of society is a problem for another day. Today, as we honor soldiers we should also honor the dead, whoever they are. Because of them, we lead the lives we lead.

The characters are two African American Marines in the bush in Vietnam.

He was silent for a moment. Then he said "Ever'one here think it easy for me. I be this good little church boy from Mississippi with my good little church-goin' Mammy, and since I be this stupid country nigger with the big faith, I don't have no troubles. Well, it just don't work that way." He paused. Jermain said nothing. "I see my friend Williams get ate by a tiger," Cortell continued. "I see my friend Broyer get his face ripped off by a mine. What do you think I do all night, sit around thankin' Sweet Jesus? Raise my palms to sweet heaven and cry hallelujah? You know what I do? You know what I do? I lose heart." Cortell's throat suddenly tightened, strangling his words. "I lose my heart." He took a deep breath, trying to regain his composure. He exhaled and went on quietly, back in control. "I sit there and I don't seen any hope. Hope gone." Cortell was seeing his dead friends. "Then, the sky turn gray again in the east, and you know what I do? I choose all over to keep believin'. All along I know Jesus could maybe be just some fairy tale, and I could be just this one big fool. I choose anyway." He turned away from his inward images and returned to the blackness of the world around him. "It ain't no easy thing."

--Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War, by Karl Marlantes (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press 2010).


A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child?. . . .I do not know what it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we
may see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child. . . .the produced babe of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them;
It may be you are from old people and from women, and
from offspring taken soon out of their mother's laps,
And here you are the mother's laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
What do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprouts show there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.

All goes onward and outward. . . .and nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.--Walt Whitman


PEACE

O Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy upon us.
Thou that sittest at the right hand of the Father, have mercy upon us.
Arise, O Christ, and help us,
And deliver us for thy Name's sake.

AMEN.

O Christ, when thou didst open thine eyes on this fair earth, the angels greeted thee as the Prince of Peace and besought us to be of good will one toward another; but thy triumph is delayed and we are weary of war.

SAVE US AND HELP US, O LORD AND MASTER.

O Christ, the very earth groans with pain as the feet of armed men march across her mangled form.

SAVE US AND HELP US, O LORD AND MASTER.

O Christ, may the Church, whom thou didst love into life, not fail thee in her witness for the things for which thou didst live and die.

TEACH US TO DO THY HOLY WILL, O LORD AND MASTER.

O Christ, the people who are called by thy Name are separated from each other in thought and life; still our tumults, take away our vain imaginings, and grant to thy people at this time the courage to pro-claim the gospel of forgiveness, and faithfully to maintain the ministry of reconciliation.

TEACH US TO DO THY HOLY WILL, O LORD AND MASTER.

O Christ, come to us in our sore need and save us; 0 God, plead thine own cause and give us help, for vain is the help of man.

SAVE US AND HELP US, O LORD AND MASTER.

O Christ of God, by thy birth in the stable, save us and help us;
By thy toil at the carpenter's bench, save us and help us;
By thy sinless life, save us and help us;
By thy cross and passion, save us and help us.

SAVE US AND HELP US, O LORD AND MASTER.

Then all shall join in the Lord's Prayer.

Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy Name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.