Either/or in the Peaceable Kingdom

Via a link in the comments, I stumbled into this discussion, which makes an excellent point about what we "Boomers" (I guess I should now say "old-timers") used to call the "generation gap":

there’s a downside to being post-Cold War too. Specifically, "newer" liberals have a lot of blind spots for the dog-whistle politics associated with these old scars.

Two of the recent Obama controversies illustrate the point well. Personally, I think younger people were a bit baffled about why the Jeremiah Wright controversy had such strong legs. I mean, they knew what the newspapers said, but they couldn’t feel the controversy in their bones the way Baby Boomers probably could.

That’s because Jeremiah Wright brings out old scars from battles we never fought. While it’s hard today to truly understand the intoxicating idealism of the civil rights era, it’s also hard to truly understand just how bitterly venomous the white backlash to these developments was.

Let me just stop here and point out: my father is still alive. He was barely old enough to fight in World War II, and as it happens he didn't; he wasn't finished with his training before the war ended. But he's still alive, a living member of the "Builder" generation, some sociologists call it. Rev. Wright and I are, very roughly, members of the "Baby Boom" generation. The author of this post, at 31, is "Generation X", I guess, or is it "Y"? And there are people younger than him, but of voting age, who probably consider themselves not a member of
his generation at all.

This is the first time in human history we have had such a spread of generations alive at one time, such a wildly differing set of "formative experiences" to contend with. My father grew up with World War II and radio; for me, it was 3 broadcast networks and Vietnam; for my daughter, it's cable TV (we hardly ever watch the networks), the Internet, and "Iraq." We don't even call it a war, an invasion, a pre-emptive strike. It's just: "Iraq."

And in between there was Gulf War I, and yuppies, and the Internet Bubble, and....

"Who are you," the Who sang to my generation. "Who, who, are you?"

Yes, those of us who remember 1968 and 1972 still see American politics through those lenses. We also remember 1973, when Nixon resigned. We remember the Watergate generation of politicians, the reforms and "liberal politics" that reached even into Texas, for one bright, shining moment. All history to a 31 year old, and about as relevant and memorable as WWII is to me. In fact, I'm sick to death of World War II, and wish everyone would quit defining our foreign policy in terms of "appeasement" and "battling evil." There has been no Hitler since Hitler, unless you count Joe "Steel" or Pol Pot or any of the other characters we couldn't be bothered to fight after the defeat of Nazi Germany. But World War II lead directly to the Cold War (thank you, Harry Truman, for giving us the National Security state we know and love today!) led directly to Ronald Reagan led directly to our involvement in Afghanistan led directly to 9/11 led directly to the "Global War on Terror."

And here we are today; as mired in history as that mosquito in amber in "Jurassic Park," and feeling about as fictional about our times. But these aren't just "old scars from battles we never fought." It wasn't but ten years ago I first learned that blacks are still followed through stores by suspicious clerks and wary security guards. It wasn't ten years ago I noticed that whenever the police in the county seat of St. Louis County had a car pulled over, the drive was always African American. Trinity United Church of Christ is still offering help to blacks on the south side of Chicago because discrimination and racism and the legacy of America's "hidden wound" still persist. No doubt it's true that younger generations don't feel this "in their bones," but as all the talk about the white rural voters of Pennsylvania (and now North Carolina) shows (and are there no rural voters in Iowa? New Hampshire? Texas?), that doesn't mean the situation is just the product of the memories of those over 65. The conclusion publius draws is:

The big lesson here is don’t ignore the perspective of older Americans. There’s a reason why Obama is getting killed among Democrats over 65.

Well, maybe; but "older Americans" doesn't begin at 65, and Barack Obama' candidacy doesn't mean there is no racism or prejudice or lingering wounds among even my daughter's generation. Culture simply does not work in discrete beads, even if we preach American culture that way (am I a child of the '60's, or the '70's, or the '80's? I've never been sure myself.).

But that's the problem: that we proclaim the "either/or" of experience, and yours is not mine, so while I "respect" yours, I protect mine. It's rather like the difference between tolerance and respect: tolerance is a minimal stance, an agreement that I'll leave you to your benighted foolishness and errant ideologies. Respect is something of a different order altogether; it requires I consider your perspective, your point of view, your experience, and not just accept the fact that it will be around for sometime to come, pestering me and providing an obstacle to my advance of the peaceable kingdom (that most American of American ideals).

This is not just a political problem, either; it is a cultural, a sociological, even a spiritual, one. I quickly found in church that congregations were divided not just along racial lines (it is still the most segregated hour in America) but along generational lines as well. A congregation dominated by people of my father's generation don't want to hear the preaching I was taught in seminary (which is much like the preaching of Rev. Jeremiah Wright). The generations closest to my age were more receptive, but they could not (and should not) quiet the voices of their parents' generation (silencing each other through sheer numbers is not what the church is for; or at least, it shouldn't be). Younger generations were more receptive still, but they were given no consideration at all. It is the exact opposite of the "real world," where Miley Cyrus now dominates a cultural conversation once dominated by Britney Spears (until she became too old); a conversation that, at the same time, excludes me entirely (even as my daughter prefers my generations music to most of her own; it would be like me listening to Duke Ellington and Glenn Miller when I was in high school, ignoring Led Zeppelin and Grand Funk Railroad and the Beatles). My parents' generation are left to their slice of the cultural pie, but they are relegated to the "over 65" contingent, one we must tolerate but also have to learn to ignore, or work around (such being the general tenor of advice to Obama: if you can't win 'em, find a way around 'em). Again, the necessary lesson of politics, but not the necessary, or even best, lesson of life.

We are on the way, however, to doing this: to establishing an either/or based on politics and political commentary. Cokie Roberts this morning on NPR declared again that Obama had "problems" with Jeremiah Wright because the subject "dominated" his interview on Fox News. I didn't see the interview, but clearly the subject dominated because, like the last debate, the questions were being asked by reporters with an agenda, not by citizens with questions. This point was lost on Ms. Roberts, who wants to keep the pot boiling, the better to prove she's still riding the cresting wave of the latest national conversation. Either you are concerned about Jeremiah Wright, or you aren't; and if you aren't, then you are blindly supporting Obama and closing your eyes to reality. So, once again, the either/or is neither; it is no choice at all. We excel at creating the false dichotomy, the better to prove ourselves right when everybody's wrong.

Kierkegaard called it the concept of irony, and pointed out it began with Socrates, who questioned everything, who established an either/or but destroyed all options of alternatives, so there really was no either/or at all, nor a both/and: there was simply the ironic stance which dissolves everything. Of course, in the peaceable kingdom, we will each of us stand alone, having willed the world around us to change, while never having to face change ourselves.

Having watched Rev. Wright on the Moyers' interview, and now having heard him speak again in clips from his NAACP speech on NPR this morning, my sympathies are even more with Rev. Wright.

Like me, he has a "preaching voice" and he has a "conversational voice" (like many other pastors I could name, too). And the one is strong and even, clipped from context, strident; while the other is mild, calm, even reassuring. I've been known, myself, to work up to a point with vigor and urgency, even stridency (though I don't preach in they style of Rev. Wright); clip that from the rest of the sermon, I might sound a bit harsh.

But the conversation on race will, of necessity, be a harsh one.

"I am not divisive," Wright said. "Tell him the word is 'descriptive' — I described the conditions in this country. Conditions divide, not my descriptions."

But much easier, always, to blame the messenger for the unpleasantness of the message.

This is not new. I was teaching Swift's "A Modest Proposal," this morning, and noting that the rebuttal of the last paragraphs, where Swift actually presents his own opinions about how to solve the problems of 18th century Ireland, proposals his narrator rejects as unworkable, those paragraphs present proposals that would require the effort of all concerned, Irish and British alike, to implement. They would, in short, require real change on behalf of everyone: change not just of economic habits but of personal, even spiritual, practices, too. Obviously it is far easier to ask someone else to change, so that I don't have to. The basic thrust of the "modest proposal" is that others sacrifice (literally) so that I can reap only the benefits (the entire proposal is an argument any free-market enthusiast would find hard not to embrace as a solution to poverty). Wright's message, of course, is quite the opposite: if the system is going to change, we have to identify it as what it is (as Swift did), and change individuals in it, not the system itself. The machine is not the problem; the designers of the machine, the reliance on the machine, is.

"I come from a religious tradition that did not hold slaves but preached against slavery and worked to end slavery," Wright said. "I come from a religious tradition that fought against lynching, like the NAACP; fought against discrimination, like the NAACP."

And those racial scars are still a legacy of America, one passed on to our children along with the benefits of American democracy, along with the wealth and power of this country that makes the lives of even the poorest among us almost beyond the comprehension of the truly destitute in the world. The level of poverty in India staggered even Martin Luther King, Jr. when he visited there. But the fight against lynching wasn't won because lynching is not widespread and public anymore; the fight against discrimination didn't end because discrimination has gone so far underground now we don't even recognize it when we attribute it to "rural voters" and those "over 65."

That "peaceable kingdom" is going to take a lot more effort to work through our differences, rather than just work in spite of them.

For the wicked carried us away

Start here:

More than 3,000 news stories have been penned since early April about Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama.

And just think about that a moment; then go to the video or the transcript. Notice how long the conversation lasts and, if you're like me, how quickly it passes. Then notice all the discussion of Barack Obama comes down to this much:

BILL MOYERS: You know, you mentioned Senator Obama. In the 20 years that you've been your pastor, have you ever heard him repeat any of your controversial statements as his opinion?

REVEREND WRIGHT: No. No. No. Absolutely not. I don't talk to him about politics. And so here at a political event, he goes out as a politician and says what he has to say as a politician. I continue to be a pastor who speaks to the people of god about the things of God.

BILL MOYERS: Here is a man who came to see you 20 years ago wanting to know about the neighborhood. Barack Obama was a skeptic when it came to religion. He sought you out because he knew you knew about the community. You led him to the faith. You performed his wedding ceremony. You baptized his two children. You were, for 20 years, his spiritual counselor. He has said that. And, yet, he, in that speech at Philadelphia, had to say some hard things about you. How, how did it go down with you when you heard Barack Obama say those things?

REVEREND WRIGHT: It went down very simply. He's a politician, I'm a pastor. We speak to two different audiences. And he says what he has to say as a politician. I say what I have to say as a pastor. Those are two different worlds. I do what I do. He does what politicians do. So that what happened in Philadelphia where he had to respond to the sound bytes, he responded as a politician. But he did not disown me because I'm a pastor.

....

BILL MOYERS: What does it say to you that millions Americans, according to polls, still think Barack Obama is a Muslim?

REVEREND WRIGHT: It says to me that corporate media and miseducation or misinformation or disinformation, I think we started calling it during the Nixon years, still reigns supreme. Thirty some percent of Americans still think there are weapons of mass destruction. That you tell a lie long enough that people start believing it. What does the media do? "Barack Hussein Obama! Barack Hussein Obama! Barack Hussein. It sounds like Osama, Obama. That Arabic is a language. So that's why many people still think he's a Muslim. He went to a madrasah. What's a madrasah? I don't know, but I know it was one of those Muslim schools that teaches terrorism. The kind of I don't want to think, just tell me what to think mentality is why so many Americans still think that.

And the media "conversation" (it is so one-way it is hardly that) has focused on the few sentences that were available on that website before the airing of the program yesterday. And will probably stay focussed there through the weekend, and pick up again after Rev. Wright speaks to the National Press Club.

But does any pundit today feel foolish for taking those words out of context? Will any pundit comment on the show, and point out they didn't see a fire-breathing demagogue seated in the studio with Bill Moyers? Didn't see a bomb-throwing radical racist preacher demanding retribution and condemnation for all things White and American? Didn't even hear a speech as radical as anything Malcolm X ever said, in the sermons excerpted in the program? And how many will comment on what Rev. Wright said about the "corporate media and miseducation or misinformation or disinformation"? Hmmmm...right after the broadcast and cable networks start commenting on their use of "experts" as revealed by the NYT last week, I'm sure.

Of course, we know you dare not mock the press, just as we all know Stephen Colbert was not funny at the White House Correspondent's Dinner two years ago. And we know that, as Greg Mitchell reminds us, because the press made great efforts to tell us Mr. Colbert was not funny.

But the nice thing about the show, and now the transcript, is that we have the language of the sermons that made Jeremiah Wright so controversial. Not the entire sermon, still, but enough. Here, for example, is the infamous "blaming America for 9/11" sermon:

I heard Ambassador Peck on an interview yesterday. Did anybody else see him or hear him? He was on Fox news. This is a white man and he was upsetting the Fox news commentators to no end. He pointed out. You see him John? A white man he pointed out -an Ambassador! He pointed out that what Malcolm X said when he got silenced by Elijah Mohammad was in fact true. America's chickens are coming home to roost! We took this country by terror away from the Sioux, the Apache, the Arawak, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the Navajo. Terrorism! We took Africans from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism! We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians, babies, non-military personnel. We bombed the black civilian community of Panama with stealth bombers and killed unarmed teenagers and toddlers, pregnant mothers and hard-working fathers. We bombed Gadafi's home and killed his child. "Blessed are they who bash your children's head against a rock!" We bombed Iraq. We killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We bombed a plant in Sudan to payback for the attack on our embassy. Killed hundreds of hard-working people; mothers and fathers who left home to go that day, not knowing that they would never get back home. We bombed Hiroshima! We bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye! Kids playing in the playground, mothers picking up children after school, civilians - not soldiers - people just trying to make it day by day. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and Black South Africans, and now we are indignant? Because the stuff we have done overseas has now been brought back into our own front yards! America's chickens are coming home to roost! Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred and terrorism begets terrorism. A White Ambassador said that y'all not a Black Militant. Not a Reverend who preaches about racism. An Ambassador whose eyes are wide open, and who's trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised--

It's not Rev. Wright saying "the United States had brought on al Qaeda's attacks because of its own terrorism." It was Ambassador Peck. Nothing Rev. Wright added in his litany of American history is untrue. As I've mentioned before, when the United Church News, the national newspaper of the church both Rev. Wright and I are pastors in, ran a photo after the "shock and awe" campaign, a photo showing a father holding his teenaged daughter with her foot blown off by American "smart bombs," a leg that ended in jagged and splintered bone with shards of flesh and muscle hanging off, the outrage expressed was not at the massacre of the innocent, but at the horror of the photo, the editorial decision to publish it. Chickens, coming home to roost.

And in the sermon, this was placed in the context, not of the nature of evil and how bad we are to seek revenge, but of this Psalm, the one everyone knows, except almost no one recites all the verses:

1 By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

2 We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.

3 For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

4 How shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land?

5 If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.

6 If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.

7 Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.

8 O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.

9 Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

That, said Wright, is what revenge brings: it is the innocents, the babies, who suffer. To which I would add: Christians who forget the Massacre of the Innocents in December (and so many of us do), Christians who lop off the last 5 verses of that Psalm, conveniently give themselves license to do Herod's job and murder the innocents so we will be secure. And who can deny such actions will have consequences? And who can deny we have told not to do this, even though in our heart of hearts, just like the Psalm sings, we want to? And what does that mean?

REVEREND WRIGHT: That Human beings, many times, do things for nefarious purposes. And God can take that and turn something- make something good out of it. That, for instance, using that Joseph passage, when his brother sold him into slavery, and they thought, after daddy's gone, he's gonna get us. And Joseph reassured them by saying, "No, no, what you meant for evil, God has turned into something good. I'm not trying to do revenge or payback. In fact, restoration is what God is. And I restore you. As brothers, we're all brothers." That those sound bytes, those snippets were taken for nefarious purposes. That God can take that and do something very positive for it- with it. That, in Philadelphia, in response to the sound bytes, in response to the snippets, in Philadelphia Senator Obama made a very powerful speech in terms of our need as a nation to address the whole issue of race. That's something good that's already starting. That because of you guys playing these sound bytes now what's getting ready to happen as something very positive, and something very powerful that God can take what you meant to try to hurt somebody to help the nation come to grips with truth. To help a nation come to grips with miseducation. To help a nation come to grips with things we don't like to talk about.

Which is the distinction between a pastor, and a politician. Any pundit who tells me any politician is running as a pastor, who says:

"Even though he was defending himself, quite nicely, he said Barack Obama spoke as a politician. That is the last thing Obama wants people to think of him as. He has approached the American people as a pastor-type himself," said [Cokie] Roberts.

That person fails completely to understand the distinction. But just as most Americans, especially non-Christians, wouldn't want a pastor for their President, most Americans also understand that what a pastor has to say, is very different from what they expect their politicians to say. Perhaps it is the flintiness that is the difference. Perhaps it is that pastors are expected to speak truth to power, and the politicians are the power that truth is sometimes spoken to. In any case, we have to set aside the sound bytes if we are going "To help a nation come to grips with things we don't like to talk about." We should all be doing as much "to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised--" (And "us", he said; he said "us"!)

Let the people say: "Amen!"

Cry! What shall I cry? All flesh is grass!

I should have seen this coming. Deliberate misrepresentation of one's words is the lot of both pastors and politicians.

So Bill Moyers interviews Jeremiah Wright tonight. And before we can possibly see it and decide for ourselves what the Rev. Wright says, the pundits and pooh-bahs have to pre-digest it for us:

"If he was a Barack Obama supporter, I think he would pull himself off of the stage at this point," said National Public Radio senior political analyst Juan Williams.

"Nothing good comes of this for Barack Obama," concurred ABC News political contributor Cokie Roberts.

See? It doesn't matter what he says, or how he says it. What matters it that he speaks! Disaster! Doom! Despair! And this from "objective journalists". What hope is there for us regular folk to understand the impact of the Rev. Wright's words without these wise people to interpret them first, and interpret them by: ignoring them!

When I saw the excerpt at the PBS website on TeeVee last night, I thought: "Wow! I would have that man as my pastor!" But I missed the fruity import of what he really said:

"At a political event, he goes out as a politician and says what he has to say as a politician," Wright told Moyers. "I continue to be a pastor … He's a politician. I'm a pastor."

Roberts and others saw the defense as short of unassailable.

"Even though he was defending himself, quite nicely, he said Barack Obama spoke as a politician. That is the last thing Obama wants people to think of him as. He has approached the American people as a pastor-type himself," said Roberts.

Williams agreed that calling Obama a politician would have Americans asking "was he simply being politically expedient, or was he being sincere?" during his "race speech" in Philadelphia last month.

The MSM is unassailable. "Unfair," Rev. Wright? Devious? You forget who controls the conversation in this country. You will take your "wackadoodle" label and wear it proudly until the MSM tells you that you can take it off. Because it is NEVER about them, and always about someone else. So Jeremiah Wright may seem calm and sensible and rational, and bring a smile to Bill Moyers' face; but we all know, in reality, he's trashing Barack Obama. Again.

And before you get a chance to hear him, the MSM wants to be sure you understand that. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Content is for wonks. The people who speak without resort to bladders and flappers are not thinking deep and worthy thoughts, and must be disregarded. Most of all, what they say is not important; what is important is only what the pooh-bahs and pundits choose out of what they say. After all, people like Rev. Wright speak without Climenoles, which surely indicates a lack of seriousness on his part.

The rest of us, meanwhile, can enjoy the excellence of Mr. Moyer's website, which gives information on the black church in America, James Cone and Black Liberation Theology, and even background on the Rev. Wright. No Flappers required.

Forget either/or. How about "neither/nor"?

And in case you missed it: we don't have any laws anymore. Not for the Administration.

We just have an Attorney General who dispenses "Get out of Jail Free" cards. Better than that, they're: "Do whatever the hell you want, we've got your back," cards.

Never thought I'd miss John Mitchell and Ed Meese.

Lord, when did we see you?

Grosse Gott:

Haiti’s hunger, that burn in the belly that so many here feel, has become fiercer than ever in recent days as global food prices spiral out of reach, spiking as much as 45 percent since the end of 2006 and turning Haitian staples like beans, corn and rice into closely guarded treasures.

Saint Louis Meriska’s children ate two spoonfuls of rice apiece as their only meal recently and then went without any food the following day. His eyes downcast, his own stomach empty, the unemployed father said forlornly, “They look at me and say, ‘Papa, I’m hungry,’ and I have to look away. It’s humiliating and it makes you angry.”

...

In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar, typically consumed only by the most destitute.

“It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt,” said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. “It makes your stomach quiet down.”

...

Meanwhile, most of the poorest of the poor suffer silently, too weak for activism or too busy raising the next generation of hungry. In the sprawling slum of Haiti’s Cité Soleil, Placide Simone, 29, offered one of her five offspring to a stranger. “Take one,” she said, cradling a listless baby and motioning toward four rail-thin toddlers, none of whom had eaten that day. “You pick. Just feed them.”

"The crowds would ask him: 'So, what should we do?'
And he would answer them, 'Whoever has two shirts should share with someone who has none, whoever has food should do the same.'"--Luke 3:10-11

The World Bank says food prices have risen world wide 80% in three years. Ironic, since they had a hand in it.

Either/Or and the Pope

How often, after all, do I get to embed a video by a professor and journalist talking reasonably about religion?

I'm intrigued by the coverage of the Pope. NPR tells me he met privately with some victims of priestly pedophilia, which struck me as very pastoral of him. NPR also reported on the mass in the baseball stadium in Washington, D.C. As they said, this Pope speaks in paragraphs, not soundbites. Sadly, the NYT squeezes the Pope into soundbites. Sometimes function must give way to form, no matter what.

I would prefer to focus on the paragraphs, myself. If anyone finds a reliable source of the Pope's words, I'd welcome the link. I may not agree with this Pope, but I don't know that until I can study his words; and what I have heard so far makes those words worth examining on their own terms, in their full paragraphs.

Steinfels is clearly right: journalism treats religion only as a story when it involves conflict. Otherwise, religion is wholly uninteresting, and messages of "hope" and "love" are "Hallmark greeting cards," and not to be taken seriously. Not to go political, but the same critique was leveled against Barack Obama for awhile; the idea that a politician could campaign on "hope" without campaigning on American chauvinism (the only distinction I can find from Reagan's campaigns; I'm trying to be charitable to the pundits) was soundly reviled as mere foolishness, or mawkishness, or, well...

It certainly wasn't a plan.

These things insist on coming back to faith, don't they? Faith, and the nature of faith. Not things easily spoken of in the marketplace of ideas; not things easily hammered into a shape we can trade in. Still worth talking about, though.

Either/or: A discursus

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
Voltaire

This was recently quoted in my general direction as a statement against religious belief; specifically Christianity, in the case of Voltaire. But the fact is, you can't make people believe absurdities. They will, by and large, only believe that they want to believe. It's part of the epistemological divide: what do I learn v. what is revealed to me. Nothing I learn is ever absurd; not to me. So the doctrines of the eucharist, baptism (infant or otherwise), the Trinity, the Incarnation: all quite reasonable, if I learn them and take the teachings as sound.

But "Love your neighbor as yourself"? "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"? If you have two coats, give one to the person with no coat? Feed the hungry? Shelter the homeless? Give water to the thirsty? See the kingdom of God here, now, immediately, among you? Absurd! Who can believe such things?

Now, and especially given the lessons of history, which of these is more likely to lead to atrocities, I leave up to you. But while I may make you acquiesce (somehow!) to that which can be learned; how do I ever make you believe what is patently so absurd? The kingdom of God, where the first are last and the last first, can be among us right now, and we can proclaim it, even as Jesus directed his followers to do?

Don't be ridiculous!

Here endeth the lesson

The New York Times

Alberto R. Gonzales, like many others recently unemployed, has discovered how difficult it can be to find a new job. Mr. Gonzales, the former attorney general, who was forced to resign last year, has been unable to interest law firms in adding his name to their roster, Washington lawyers and his associates said in recent interviews.

He has, through friends, put out inquiries, they said, and has not found any takers. What makes Mr. Gonzales’s case extraordinary is that former attorneys general, the government’s chief lawyer, are typically highly sought.

A longtime loyalist to George W. Bush dating to their years together in Texas, Mr. Gonzales was once widely viewed as a strong candidate to be the first Hispanic-American nominated one day to the Supreme Court. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he carried an impressive personal story as the child of poor Mexican immigrants.

Despite those credentials, he left office last August with a frayed reputation over his role in the dismissal of several federal prosecutors and the truthfulness of his testimony about a secret eavesdropping program. He has had no full-time job since his resignation, and his principal income has come from giving a handful of talks at colleges and before private business groups.

...

The greatest impediment to Mr. Gonzales’s being offered the kind of high-salary job being snagged these days by lesser Justice Department officials, many lawyers agree, is his performance during his last few months in office. In that period, he was openly criticized by lawmakers for being untruthful in his sworn testimony. His conduct is being investigated by the Office of the Inspector General of the Justice Department, which could recommend actions from exonerating him to recommending criminal charges. Friends set up a fund to help pay his legal bills.

...
While he has not taken any full-time job, friends said he was probably receiving as much income from speaking engagements as he did as attorney general with its annual salary of more than $191,000. Places like Washington University in St. Louis, Ohio State University and the University of Florida have paid him about $30,000 plus expenses for appearances, and the business groups pay a bit more, said sources at the schools and elsewhere who are familiar with the arrangements. Pomona College debated inviting him and decided he was not worth the money, the college newspaper reported.

Jesus of Nazareth:

There was this rich man whose manager had been accused of squandering his master’s property. He called him in and said, ‘What’s this I hear about you? Let’s have an audit of your management, because your job is being terminated.”
Then the manager said to himself, “What am I going to do? My master is firing me. I’m not strong enough to dig ditches and I’m ashamed to beg. I’ve got it! I know what I’ll do so doors will open for men when I’m removed from management.”
So he called in each of his master’s debtors. He said to the first, “How much do you owe my master?”

He said, “Five hundred gallons of olive oil.”

And he said to him, “Here is your invoice; sit down right now and make it two hundred and fifty.”

Then he said to another, “And how much do you owe?”

He said, “A thousand bushels of wheat.”

He says to him, “Here is your invoice; make it eight hundred.”

The master praised the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this world exhibit better sense in dealing with their own kind than do the children of light.

I tell you, make use of your ill-gotten gain to make friends for yourselves, so that when the bottom falls out they are there to welcome you into eternal dwelling places.—Luke 16:1-9 (SV)

Go, thou, and do likewise.

Either/Or: In Which God Dies (#2 in a series)

The central question of religion of philosophy in the 20th century and now the 21st seems to be the proof of the existence of God. This is the either/or on which so much rises or falls. Yet it's a curious pursuit, since we cannot prove the existence of a platypus or a ceolocanth: we can only produce an animal or a fish we can identify as a platypus or a coelocanth. We do not thereby prove it's "existence," but then the popular discourse seldom questions the definition of "existence" that it is demanding proof of. That way, of course, lies phenomenology: Husserl and Heidegger, Sartre and Levinas, and even, to some degree, deconstruction and Derrida. Too much idealism, and too Continental; so we content ourselves with equating existence with presence, and when adequate reports of the presence of platypi and coelocanths are obtained, we ask no more of them. No such reports of "God" can be obtained, of course, because all such reports are subjective, and none can produce an object for examination, so the "proofs" fail and the subject is considered closed against those who assert any faith at all.

The problem is one Johannes Climacus considered over 150 years ago, in a little noticed discussion of the issue. Climacus first puts the issue in the context of the paradox. He praises the paradox, asserting: "the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion, a mediocre fellow." But he quickly looks beyond that:

But the ultimate potentiation of every passion is always to will its own downfall, and so it is also the ultimate passion of the understanding to will the collision, although in one way or another the collision must become its downfall. This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.

There is a buried epistemological assumption there, one we should not glide over lightly: thought "discovers," in proper Hellenistic fashion (we will leave the Platonists and Aristotelians to thrash out whether it is truly "discovery," or merely "recovery", and move on). Hebraic epistemology, at least as it pertains to matters of the God of Abraham, does not depend on discovery, but rather on reception. It is the revelation that enlightens; knowledge of God is given, not found, is revealed, not unearthed. The shift is a small but important one; indeed, it is central to the question of the importance of the will.

Thought, Climacus points out, wants most to think something it cannot think. It wants, then, to be able to think the existence of that which it cannot know except through experience. It wants to be able to discover, for itself, irrefutable proof of that which is by definition not subject to such proof. We cannot establish the existence of a platypus, but we can identify a specific monotreme as a platypus. We can dissect it, study it, classify it, discard it, and never prove the existence of it. But since we cannot do these things with Deity, we discard it. We demand proof of Deity's existence, even as we cannot imagine what that proof would be. We want to think the thought we cannot think, even if thinking that thought would be the downfall of the thought itself. So here is the first problem: we set ourselves a task we know is impossible and then, when it cannot be done, we declare the subject of the impossible quest responsible, and declare the impossible, at the very least, the question that must be answered and, since it cannot be, content ourselves with our paradox. Our passion can never be satisfied, never reach the collision, never face its downfall: and of how many passions in our lives can the same be said? Is it any wonder we are so passionate about the proofs of God's existence, and the inability of any of them to satisfy?

But that is only the beginning, and it still establishes nothing; it still leaves the passion waiting expectantly for a fulfillment it knows can never be, that it doesn't even want. Let's pursue the question, and find not what it's establishment would mean, but what the inability to establish it means. We have put so much on that issue, we have staked everything on its outcome. Even if we really don't want to know the answer, what answer do we presume there could be?

But what is this unknown against which the understanding in its paradoxical passion collides and which even disturbs man [sic] and his self-knowledge? It is the unknown. But it is not a human being, insofar as he knows man, or anything else that he knows. Therefore, let us call this unknown the god. It is only a name we give to it. It hardly occurs to the understanding to want to demonstrate that this unknown (the god) exists. If, namely the god does not exist, then of course it is impossible to demonstrate it. But if he does exist, then of course it is foolishness to want to demonstrate it, since I, in the very moment the demonstration commences, would presuppose it not as doubtful--which a presupposition cannot be, inasmuch as it is a presupposition--but as decided, because otherwise I would not begin, easily perceiving that the whole thing would be impossible if he did not exist. If, however, I interpret the expression "to demonstrate the existence of the god" to mean that I want to demonstrate that the unknown, which exists, is the god, than I do not express myself very felicitously, for then I demonstrate nothing, least of all an existence, but I develop the definiteness of a concept.

What is lurking here is the analytic/synthetic distinction from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Is "existence," in other words, an analytic truth (one where the truth is established solely through analysis of its meaning), or is it synthetic (one which "add[s] to the concept of the subject a predicate which has not been in any wise thought in it, and which no analysis could possibly extract from it,” i.e., one which can be based on empirical facts about the world.). The common assumption is that existence is synthetic; but the proofs of the existence of "the god" all presume the statement is actually analytical. Small wonder the result of all of these efforts is an epistemological black hole.

"It is generally a difficult matter to want to demonstrate that something exists--worse still, for the brave souls who venture to do it, the difficulty is of such a kind that fame by no means awaits those who are preoccupied with it. The whole process of demonstration continually becomes something entirely different, becomes an expanded concluding development of what I conclude from having presupposed that the object of investigation exists. Therefore in the world of thought, I never reason in conclusion to existence, but I reason in conclusion from existence. For example, I do not demonstrate that a stone exists but that something which exists is a stone. The court of law does not demonstrate that a criminal exists but that the accused, who indeed does exist, is a criminal. Whether one wants to call existence an accessorium or the eternal prius, it can never be demonstrated.

The demands for proof of God's existence, of course, presume existence can be proven, and once it can, then proof of God's existence cannot be far behind. But the proof of existence itself is still wanting. As Climacus points out:

If one wanted to demonstrate Napoleon's existence from Napoleon's works, would it not be most curious, since his existence certainly explains the works but the works do not demonstrate his existence unless I have already in advance interpreted the word "his" in such a way as to have assumed he exists.

Napoleon, of course, is not necessary to his works, but the god is presumed to have an absolute relation to the god's works. So perhaps that is the difference that allows a proof of the god to be formulated:

But then, what are the god's works? The works from which I want to demonstrate his existence do not immediately and directly exist, not at all. Or are the wisdom in nature and the goodness or wisdom in Governance right in front of our noses? Do we not encounter the most terrible spiritual trials here, and is it ever possible to be finished with all these trials? But I still do not demonstrate God's existence from such an order of things, and even if I began, I would never finish and also would be obliged continually to live in suspenso lest something so terrible happen that my fragments of demonstration would be ruined. Therefore, from what works do I demonstrate it? From the works regarded ideally--that is, as they do not appear directly and immediately. But then I do not demonstrate it from the works, after all, but only develop the ideality I have presupposed; trusting in that, I even dare to defy all objections, even those that have not yet arisen. By beginning, then, I have presupposed the ideality, have presupposed that I will succeed in accomplishing it, but what else is that but presupposing that the god exists and actually beginning with trust in him.

Is it any wonder Rudolf Bultmann wrote his magnum opus on John's gospel with John open before him, and Johannes Climacus open beside him?

When he was in Jerusalem at the Passover celebration, many believed in him once they saw with their own eyes the miracles he performed. But Jesus didn't trust himself to them, because he understood them all too well. He didn't need to know more about humanity; he knew what people were really like. John 2:23-25, SV.

So when he came to Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him, since they had seen everything he had done at the celebration in Jerusalem. (They had gone to the celebration too). Then he came back to Cana in Galilee, where he had turned the water into wine.

There was an official whose son was sick in Capernaum. When he heard that Jesus had returned to Galilee from Judea, he approached him and pleaded with him to come down and cure his son, who was about to die.

Jesus said to him, "You people refuse to believe unless you see portents [semeia] and miracles [terata]."John 4:45-48

"Now my life is in turmoil, but should I say, 'Father, rescue me from this moment'? No, it was to face this moment that I came. Father, glorify your name!" Then a voice spoke out of the sky: "I have glorified it and I'll glorify it further."

The crowd there heard this, and some people remarked that it had thundered, others than an angel had spoken to him.

"That voice did not come for me but for you," Jesus rejoined.--John 12:27-30

In fact, after reading Bultmann, one wonders if Kierkegaard didn't have John's gospel in mind when writing the Philosophical Fragments. The Johannine distinction between semeion and dunamis seems almost tailor made for the philosophical concerns of his namesake Climacus. Either we see signs, proof, irrefutable evidence, or we do not believe! "The works from which I want to demonstrate his existence do not immediately and directly exist, not at all." They are signs, but only if we already see what they point to. If we don't see that, we don't see the signs, either, except as objects. And objects, no more than signs, can speak to us, and overcome our ignorance, our doubt, our lack of knowledge. Either we already know, and the sign merely confirms it for us, or we do not know, and at most what we hear is...thunder. Was it an angel who spoke to Jesus? Why didn't anyone in the audience get even that sign right? If that sign cannot demonstrate, finally and absolutely, the existence of the god, what can?

Climacus would leave the matter here:

The paradoxical passion of the understanding is, then, continually colliding with this unknown, which certainly does exist but is also unknown and to that extent does not exist. The understanding does not go beyond this; yet in its paradoxicality the understand cannot stop reaching it and being engaged with it, because wanting to express its relation to it by saying that this unknown does not exist will not do, since just saying that involves a relation. But what, then, is this unknown, for does not its being the god merely signify to us that it is the unknown? To declare that it is the unknown because we cannot know it, and that even if we could know it we could not express it, does not satisfy the passion, although it has correctly perceived the unknown as frontier. But a frontier is precisely the passion's torment, even though it is also its incentive. And yet it can go no further, whether it risks a sortie through via negationis or via eminentiae.*

But that simply leaves us where we began; although it explains rather nicely the energy some bring to this discussion, so determined are they to resolve once and for all the existence of the unknown; a resolution, of course, which can never be reached, at least not by the understanding.

And how do we understand this?

When we attend to the debates of philosophers and theologians about faith we are struck by the fact that every participant, no matter how he assails the faith of others, expresses some confidence of his own. And then we further note that confidence is usually professed not in one object only but in several and that often the effort to state this faith moves in a kind of circle from a first object to a second and perhaps a third and back to the first. The common, usually unanalyzed, association of faith with such terms as democracy, the people and education, or nature, experience, and reason, in popular statements about the things we can rely on has its counterpart in the more careful analsyses of academicians.

An example in philosophy of this expression of a pluralistic and circular faith is offered by A.J. Ayeer's radical book, Language, Truth and Logic...."We rely," he writes, "on our senses to substantiate or confute teh judgments which are based on our sensations." This is indeed a faith, an expression of sheer trust in what is not sensibly perceived, since the continuity and unity of sense-experience is not something that is sensed....A kind of structure of faith emerges in his confession. He relies on science because he is loyal to human life, not his own merely; and because science is based on sense-experience which he trusts. There are three objects of faith here: sense-experience, science and human values. And faith moves in a kind of circle justifying reliance on each of these objects by reference to the others.

And where does this lead? Back to the either/or:

In the midst of all these questionings and arguments about faith; in the controversies of the religious sects and philosophical schools; among the contentions as defenders of this and that faith attack others with different beliefs, we become aware of a strange fact. Belief and disbelief, trust and distrust, fideilty and infidelity toward one another is present in all those who contend or agree with each other as they argue about faith. Defensiveness of one's own beliefs and suspicion of those with other beliefs, distrust of their intellectual ability or honesty accompany men [sic] in all their encounters with each other. Confessions of loyalty to values of one sort or another and of reliance upon powers, no less than the implicit and explicit confessions of doubt or confidence in one another can be heard in the midst of all these arguments and analyses. Belief and trust and fidelity and their opposites are forever present as active attitudes in the very subjects who make them the objects of their inquiry or disputation.

So:

"Questions about faith, about its relation to action, to sight and understanding, about its objects and circular movements are important to us only because we have previously been required to answer the questions of faith."

When we are reduced to the either/or, the question of faith is put before us, and we have to answer. Faced with the unknown, we cannot explain it, but we cannot avoid it. And so we tried to see what would happen if we did without it; and so in the 1960's, a small group of theologians tried to proclaim God "dead." That theology alleged traced its roots back to Kierkegaard, to Bonhoeffer, even to Barth and to Tillich. There is a rather tedious revisionist history argument to be had about the length, breadth, purpose, and efficacy of the "God is dead" movement. But it actually asked a series of questions arranged around a central point: what is the metaphysical nature of God in a non-metaphysical world? One answer was to face the abandonment of metaphysics. The other answer was to reconsider the proposition that metaphysics had no meaning. And from that came reconsideration came phenomenology (out of German Idealism) and process theology (out of the ruins of the Principia Mathematica, following the acceptance of Gödel’s theorem of incompleteness.) But the clear question of the movement was: could we live without God? Could we reject the orthodox explanations of the nature of God (the heart of theology) and still practice theology? In what, in fact, did we have faith? What we could understand, if not see? Or what we could believe?

Was belief still an either/or? And could we ask that question without being accused of simply seeking publicity? (Ironically, Emory University shifted from an obscure college to a major research institution largely because of the notoreity of Thomas J.J. Altizer, a professor in the seminary at Emory, and one of the proponents of the controversial theology.) If we cannot prove God’s existence, must we necessarily lose faith in God? If we cannot establish the first object and then the second and perhaps a third and fourth, is it impossible for our faith to be generated by the movement among them? Or are: “Belief and trust and fidelity and their opposites …forever present as active attitudes in the very subjects who make them the objects of their inquiry or disputation”?, so that even the declaration that the ground of faith, God in this case, is dead, is gone, is simply another statement of belief and trust and fidelity or perhaps, its opposites? The argument of Climacus lingers, though: if God is “dead,” does that mean the unknown is no more? And if it cannot mean that, then how can the unknown, the god, be “dead,” destroyed, obsolete, removed from all further consideration? “But a frontier is precisely the passion's torment, even though it is also its incentive. And yet it can go no further, whether it risks a sortie through via negationis or via eminentiae.”

So for all that effort, where have we gone, except to the place where we began? And is it possible yet to know it for the first time?


*The via negationis is the way of negative theology; i.e., we can only speak of what God is not, not of what God is. It is a theology that has its own satisfactions and limitations, and while it much appealed to Luther, it is not the final word on the nature of God, or even the best word. The via emenentiae is the way of idealization, essentially the ground of Anselm's ontological "proof," i.e., that God is all that can be best possibly conceived, which ultimately is no more definitive nor satisfactory.

All the quotes from Philosophical Fragments, by the way, are from: Kierkegaard, Søren, Philosophical Fragments/Johannes Climacus, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985). Quotes from Niebuhr are: Niebuhr, H. Richard, Faith on Earth, ed. Richard R. Niebuhr (New Haven: Yale University Press 1989).

Irrationality is a force that gives us meaning

I realize I've been down this road once or twice before (and I really need to go back and tag all the 2746 posts in this blog; maybe when I can afford to hire a secretary...), and some will disagree with me, but Anthony McCarthy, in comments here, put me onto Chris Hedges new book, I Don't Believe in Atheists. I have to admit I hadn't heard of it, and I missed this interview with Hedges in Salon last March. I am correcting that oversight now, because I love what Hedges has to say.

I would say that the fascist agenda was Utopian, and that it adopted the cult of science. That's what leads Hitler to try and breed humans and apes to try to create an oversized warrior or to send expeditions to Tibet to find a pure, Aryan race. I mean, that's not science. It's the cult of science, and I think the New Atheists also make that leap from science into the cult of science, and that's a problem.

The Enlightenment was both a curse and a blessing, because it was really a reaction to the kind of superstition, intolerance, bigotry, anti-intellectualism of the clerics, of the church. But it also ended up with the Jacobins, [who said] well, if we can't make certain segments of the society "civilized," as we define civilization, then they must be eradicated, in the same way that you eradicate a virus.

I write in the book that not believing in God is not dangerous. Not believing in sin is very dangerous. I think both the Christian right and the New Atheists in essence don't believe in their own sin, because they externalize evil. Evil is always something out there that can be eradicated. For the New Atheists, it's the irrational religious hordes. I mean, Sam Harris, at the end of his first book, asks us to consider a nuclear first strike on the Arab world. Both Hitchens and Harris defend the use of torture. Of course, they're great supporters of preemptive war, and I don't think this is accidental that their political agendas coalesce completely with the Christian right.

Now, the most interesting thing from a blogging point of view, is the reaction to the Hedges/Hitchens debate on the intertubes. I Googled "Chris Hedges Hitchens" and found this Salon interview. I also found a lot of other stuff, most of which seems quite impressed with Hitchens rhetorical skills, but paying no attention to what Hedges or Hitchens actually said. My favorite is this one:

The arena where this pivotal re-alignment took place was the King Middle School auditorium in Berkeley, where far-left "progressive" journalist Chris Hedges formally debated iconoclastic "neocon" pundit Christopher Hitchens. (Videos of the debate and photos from the event can be found below.) The topic of the debate was "Is God...Great?", a riff on the title of Hitchens' new book, God Is Not Great.

Surprising as it might seem in a contemporary political landscape where mocking religion is an established liberal pastime, and where Christianity and spirituality are most often associated with conservatism, it was Hitchens -- now loathed by the left for not toeing the party line over the Iraq War -- who attacked religion, while the neo-Socialist, anti-patriotic, radical Hedges volunteered for the seemingly topsy-turvy position of having to defend spirituality and the existence of God.

How did this strange state of affairs come to pass? In one word: Islam.

The left -- of which Hitchens was a part until recently -- has always been anti-religion. But now, they've become caught in a philosophical bind: how can they promote multiculturalism -- and by extension all non-Western cultures, such as fundamentalist Islam -- if they condemn religion in general? Neocon pundits have since 9/11 frequently accused the left of being in bed with Muslim extremists, a charge which the left has vehemently denied. But with every denial their position was becoming more and more untenable, as the verbiage and narratives of Islamic radicals and "anti-war" progressives have grown to become virtually indistinguishable.

Someone had to take the lead and resolve the dilemma that the left had created for itself. And so it was Hedges who stepped forward in this debate to test the waters for the first time, taking what is for him (and the left) a revolutionary position: that spirituality and religion -- with the noteworthy exception of organized Christianity -- is good.

Now, at no point did Hedges state that he was performing this amazing flipflop specifically due to Islam. He didn't need to say it -- because Hitchens said it for him. In fact, Hitchens repeatedly tore the roof off of Hedges' carefully constructed rhetorical edifice, saying aloud the exact thoughts that Hedges and the left didn't want anyone to hear.

"Pivotal re-alignment"? How did I miss that? Anyway, follow that reasoning carefully, because you won't find it in the Hedges interview. In fact, here is what Hedges says:

A lot of the book is devoted to making this comparison between Christian and what some call secular fundamentalists, but you are pretty hands off when it comes to fundamentalist Islam.

The only reason I go after Christian fundamentalists and New Atheists is because they're here and I'm an American. Fundamentalism -- whether it's Hindu fundamentalism or Jewish fundamentalism or Christian fundamentalism or Islamic fundamentalism -- is the same disease. Karen Armstrong has explained that brilliantly. Fundamentalists, no matter what their religious coloring -- bear far more in common with each other than they do with more enlightened members of their own religious communities. I'm an enemy of fundamentalism, period. And if I'm not going after Islamic fundamentalism in this book, it's because what I've tried to do is talk about these two very dangerous ideological strains within American society, although the New Atheists are peddling this under the guise of enlightenment and reason and science in the same way that the Christian right tries to peddle it as a form of Christianity.

It seems to be, from scanning those entries on Google, the standard take on this debate (which, below, would not surprise Chris Hedges, nor does it surprise me). And I will admit I haven't watched those debates and carefully analyzed them for coherence by either party; life is simply too short. But taking that comment as representative of the pro-Hitchens side of the Hedges/Hitchens debate (and is it any coincidence that the neo-con line is that any sympathy for Islam is sympathy for the devil?), consider this by Hedges on his debates with both Hitchens and Sam Harris:

Do you think the new atheists are similarly uninterested in their impact? It seems that what the New Atheists write and say is somewhat a performance.

Well, not Harris. Harris is just intellectually shallow. Harris doesn't know anything about religion or the Middle East. For Hitchens, it's about a performance, and that was true when he was on the left. He hasn't changed. It's all about him. It's all about being a contrarian. He reminds me of Ann Coulter, he's that kind of a figure. He's witty, and he's funny and insulting. You know I debated him, and in the middle of the debate he starts shouting, "Shame on you for defending suicide bombers!" Of course, unlike him, I've actually stood at the edge of a suicide bombing attack. That kind of stuff is just ... it's the epistemology of television. They make a lot of money off it, but it's gross and disgusting and anti-intellectual and not at all about real discussion.

Do you think Hitchens really believes what he writes?

I think he's completely amoral. I think he doesn't have a moral core. I think he doesn't believe anything. What's good for Christopher Hitchens is about as moral as he gets.

It's actually the "suicide bomber" line I want to focus on. That is a classic (pardon the pun) "bomb throwing" technique, the kind that is Hitchens stock and trade. It's also, as Hitchens says, "the epistemology of television." When was the last time any of us stood at the edge of a suicide bombing attack? I think at the very least, before we start throwing such claims around, we should consider our own authority on the subject. Hedges makes this point a bit earlier in the interview, in even better language:

I spent so long in war zones that I think we don't know what we would do under repression and abuse -- you know, if somebody killed my father. That's the brilliance of the great writers on the Holocaust, like Primo Levi and [Bruno] Bettelheim. They understood the humanity of their own killers. That line between the victim and the victimizer is razor-thin. We all carry within us the capacity for abuse, and I think that's the most disturbing lesson you walk away with when you cover wars. We're all capable of evil, under the right circumstances, and very few of us are immune.

Such understanding, of course, is anathema to Hitchens. As Hedges says, and it could be said about the entire "New Atheists" debate as conducted by Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens: "it's gross and disgusting and anti-intellectual and not at all about real discussion."

But these debates, as he points out, are seldom about listening; they are just about shouting:

We had over 1,500 people at the debate at UCLA, and I think that the people who came liking Sam Harris left liking Sam Harris. I don't think that they heard a word I said, and it's just insulting ... I've debated Christian fundamentalists, and it's the same. I can get up and say, look, I grew up in the church, I went to seminary. No, I'm part of the forces of godless secular humanism that are trying to destroy Christians, and they just repeat it like a mantra -- half of their audience which came to hear them hears it, and the same is true of the New Atheists.

Now I will say I haven't encountered too many "audiences" like that in left blogistan, mostly because you can avoid them as easily as encounter them. I pick where I read and comment, as life is too short and I don't have the public platform Chris Hedges does. Still, it is nice to read something like this once in awhile, to hear a truly rational voice that not only has knowledge, but reasoning to support it. It's almost like being back in seminary.

Isn't it ironic? Don't you think?

The Engine of Hope

Nothing was going to make me break my series this time. Then I went to the New York Times, and opened this op-ed by Taylor Branch:

Many of Dr. King’s closest comrades rejected his commitment to nonviolence. The civil rights movement created waves of history so long as it remained nonviolent, then stopped. Arguably, the most powerful tool for democratic reform was the first to become passé. It vanished among intellectuals, on campuses and in the streets. To this day, almost no one asks why.

Take that in for a moment, alone; then move on to Mr. Branch's second paragraph:

We must reclaim the full range of blessings from his movement. For Dr. King, race was in most things, but defined nothing alone. His appeal was rooted in the larger context of nonviolence. His stated purpose was always to redeem the soul of America. He put one foot in the Constitution and the other in scripture. “We will win our freedom,” he said many times, “because the heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.” To see Dr. King and his colleagues as anything less than modern founders of democracy — even as racial healers and reconcilers — is to diminish them under the spell of myth.

Several things going on there at once, not all of them compatible with the prevailing sentiments of left blogistan. Take the center of that paragraph: "He put one foot in the Constitution and the other in scripture." We are told, over and over again, by many voices, that such a stance is not only impossible, it is flatly unconstitutional. I suppose that throws out the baby with the bathwater, because, as Branch goes on to say in the very next sentence: "Dr. King and his colleagues [are nothing] less than modern founders of democracy," and to see them as anything less, "is to diminish them under the spell of myth."

Which is not to say religion is essential to the defense of democracy, or to its founding; but perhaps, again, it is. Perhaps religion that teaches that all people are equal under God, that all are children of God and that in the kingdom of God the first will be last and the last first, is a core belief necessary to embrace democracy. It isn't necessary that all those in the democracy embrace that belief, anymore than it was necessary that all who lived in Israel in the time of the judges and kings embraced the God of Abraham. It was enough that those who did, understood that God to be the God of all, and concerned with all. There are more than a few stories of non-Hebrews in the Hebrew Scriptures, and they are not despised. There is no superiority in Christians in a democracy, but there is certainly a power in Christian belief that can make democracy what it should be, that can make the goal of freedom Dr. King proclaimed was the goal of America, possible.

Or it can selfishly destroy it, under the leadership of unrepentant and unreconstructed racists like the late Jerry Falwell. Every coin always has two sides. Which is, of course, also the great lesson of Iraq. This morning NPR tells me President Bush and Prime Minister Putin made at least public statements indicating they want less tension, not more, between the US and Russia. The statement is clear: Iraq or Iran the US can push around; but Russia is another matter, so let's be nice to them. Anyone else remember how quickly North Korea slipped off the 'Axis of Evil' once it had a nuclear weapon? As Mr. Branch says:

There is no more salient or neglected field of study than the relationship between power and violence.

We've had another object lesson in that field of study for the past 7 years. Whether we have learned anything from it, or not, remains to be seen. What we have learned, sadly, is that power is more important than right, that authority trumps democracy, and that control is the whole point of politics. Dr. King thought otherwise, and for those thoughts, at the end of his brief 39 years, he was labeled "Chicken à la King" and "one of the most menacing men in America today." We truly don't like the lessons of non-violence, because they put us out of the center, they leave us without control. And that thought terrifies us more than the consequences of violence itself. But consider where Mr. Branch ends his speech; with the story of Lazarus and Dives, from Dr. King's last sermon at Riverside Church.

Dives is the rich man, who wouldn't even feed Lazarus the scraps from his table. When they both die, Lazarus goes to heaven, to sit with Abraham, and Dives is sent to hell, to suffer eternal torment. Dives pleads with Abraham to send Lazarus back to life in order to warn his still living brothers of this fate, that they might avoid it, but Abraham says they have the prophets, they should listen to them:

Dr. King said Dives was a liberal. Despite his own fate, he wanted to help others. Abraham rebuffed this request, too, telling Dives that his brothers already had ample warning in Torah law and the books of the Hebrew prophets. Still Dives persisted, saying no, Abraham, you don’t understand — if the brothers saw someone actually rise from the dead and warn them, then they would understand.

Jesus quotes Abraham saying no. If the brothers do not accept the core teaching of the Torah and the prophets, they won’t believe even a messenger risen from the dead. Dr. King said this parable from Jesus burns up differences between Judaism and Christianity. The lesson beneath any theology is that we must act toward all creation in the spirit of equal souls and equal votes. The alternative is hell, which Dr. King sometimes defined as the pain we inflict on ourselves by refusing God’s grace.

Equality, of course, means vulnerability. It means I don't have as much power as you do, and what does that do to me? It is a vision well beyond that of the "Founding Fathers," with their restriction of the vote to white property owning males, and with a republic, not a pure democracy, in their Constitution. It isn't too much to say today that Republic is going the way of Rome, with the diktator of Roman law becoming the "unitary Executive" who, in time of "war," has all powers necessary not to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution," but to declare enemies on every phone line, and the power to discover them and imprison them without trial or warrant. It is the very fear of vulnerability that our government has played on since September 11, 2001. It is that fear that a man with one foot in the Constitution, and one foot in Scripture, would show us how to overcome.

For Dr. King, to answer was a patriotic and prophetic calling. He challenges everyone to find a Lazarus somewhere, from our teeming prisons to the bleeding earth. That quest in common becomes the spark of social movements, and is therefore the engine of hope.

Amen.

Either/Or (#1 in a series...)

Driving home the other day, find myself behind a pickup truck adorned with magnets on the tail gate reading (left to right): "Pray for our Troops;" "God Bless Our Troops" (this an oval with a candle in the center, adorned with red ribbon, all against a green background; I assume it was a Xmas item), and "Support our Troops." On the radio as I drive: testimony from US soldiers at Winter Soldier. I learn, among other things, that we have multiple launch rocket (MLR) weapons designed to destroy a grid 1000 meters by 1000 meters. The soldier tells me that's about a square block, and I'm imagining how far around my neighborhood the damage from such a weapon would spread. The truck, though, in this context, makes me think of the "either/or."

In modern politics, the preference is toward the either/or. Perhaps it's unfair to blame that on modernity; perhaps it has always been that way.

"Either/or" is a phrase which has taken on a particular meaning following Kierkegaard's use of it in the 19th century. Many early evaluators of the melancholy Dane's thought considered it the metaphor of the ethical "sphere," the one, supposedly, that mature and properly socialized adults live in. The term comes from one of the "aesthetic" works (S.K.'s term for them), Either/Or. Almost more a literary work than a philosophical one, Either/Or consists of two unequal halves. The first part is the "Diary of a Seducer," the journal of a young man whose sole interest in others is in their benefits to him. It is the adolescent's point of view, the man-child with money and social power, but little appreciation of the otherness of people who seem to exist only to service his pleasures. The "Judge" presents the bourgeois position of Danish society, counseling this young man, in a series of letters, to accept the mores and ethics of Danish society, the better to understand his obligations to something larger than himself and his selfish interests. That something larger, of course, is the "ethical," which requires one to think of others as others. If you read the book as a statement by Kierkegaard, it's a remarkably conservative and placid one, although rich in psychological insights. However, if you read it as one of the pseudonymous works, and recognize that the "Judge" means to exert power over the "Seducer," means to literally sit in judgment over the young man and call him to account on the basis of Danish society's ethics (which aren't necessarily S.K.'s), the book takes on a very different cast. And if you consider that one of S.K.'s "edifying discourses" (which were always published under his name, never a pseudonym) is: "Judge for Yourself!," you might begin to reconsider the importance of the Judge to Kierkegaard, altogether.

"Either/Or" refers to the bright line of ethics, the one we all claim a special privilege and access to, when push comes to shove. "Either/Or" means there is right, and there is wrong, and once we recognize the value of the other (the move from the aesthetic to the ethical sphere, according to the early interpreters of Kierkegaard), we recognize, too, the restrictions on our actions which necessarily accompany the "either/or." The "either/or" bifurcates the "both/and" of the aesthete (both eat your cake and have it, too). It splits that selfishness into self and other, and demands a decision, a choice be made. Of course, the choice is thoroughly bourgeois. The Judge is no different from the accountant who is Johannes de Silentio's Knight of Faith, save that the Judge fails wholly to make the invisible movements of eternity, the movements which set the Knight of Faith apart from the Knight of Infinite Resignation, the Judge trapped in the social web of the either/or, in the ethical which binds each person to each person and permits no longer the "both/and" of the aesthete, having replaced it with a "both/and" in which society is the beneficiary above the individuals (so could S.K. become a stern critic of the state church of Denmark, and utter his Attack upon 'Christendom,' the while himself remaining a beneficiary of his father's bourgeois achievement, which made Kierkegaard's life and publications, possible. S.K. resembled Socrates in more ways than one.)

However, there is an escape offered. If we truly self-actualize and achieve spiritual purity, we transcend even the ethical and achieve it's teleological suspension in the name of the true Authority behind the ethical itself. We become the Knight of Faith. Or we would follow that path, if Fear and Trembling were not itself one of the "aesthetic" works, published not by S. Kierkegaard, but by Johannes de silentio. A name which always reminds me of the final statement of Wittgenstein's Tractatus: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." There is much in Fear and Trembling which is central to Kierkegaard's thought, but central only as an examination of the ways we convince ourselves how very, very important we are in the grand scheme of things, especially in the face of all the evidence to the contrary. In fact, the central conclusion of Fear and Trembling is that either/or (the world as seen by traditional ethics) is not the right way to divide human existence in order to understand it. But neither is both/and (Hegel or Kant). Because what lands right in the middle of either/or or both/and, is the paradox of the teleological suspension of the ethical (which is impossible, but undeniable for Christians) and the Absolute Paradox of the Incarnation (equally impossible, but also undeniable for Christians). So the "Either/Or" is not one of the "Stages on Life's Way" (another of the aesthetic works), it is a way in which we determine our own importance. The "either/or" and the "both/and," the ethical as well as the aesthete, are simply two sides of the same coin. Which is why "either/or" is very important to us: it is our identity, it is the very composition of our Self. To begin to give up the either/or is to begin to admit the importance of Other; and to begin to define and understand the self in relationship to Self, not as the boundary against Other. As Anti-Climacus puts it:

A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation's relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation's relating itself to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two. Considered in this way a human being is still not a self.... In the relation between two, the relation is the third as a negative unity, and the two relate to the relation and in the relation to the relation; thus under the qualification of the psychical the relation between the psychical and the physical is a relation. If, however, the relation relates itself to itself, this relation is the positive third, and this is the self.

Now if that isn't as dense as a Christmas fruitcake and as dark as the inside of a dog, you simply weren't paying enough attention. But one key to unlocking it is to follow D. Anthony Storm's lead and consider "self" here as a verb, not a noun. Anti-Climacus has a bit more to say on the subject, though, first:

If the relation that relates itself to itself has been established by another, then the relation is indeed the third, but this relation, the third, is yet again a relation and relates itself to that which established the entire relation.

The human self is such a derived, established relation, a relation that relates itself to itself and in relating itself to itself relates itself to another. This is why there can be two forms of despair in the strict sense. If a human self had itself established itself, then there could only be one form: not to will to be oneself, to will to do away with oneself, but there could not be the form: in despair to will to be oneself.

The formula that describes the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out is this: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be oneself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it.

I tend to read this language in light of Hume's description of the self, i.e., that he can't find one, but merely a reception of stimuli which somehow create the illusion of a self observing objects empirically which are known via such stimuli, which in turn are known because...well, because they stimulate the sense organs, and this knowledge gives the illusion of a "self" observing same. There is clearly some relationship in Hume's idea, between the world percieved and the stimuli received, but that relationship is merely the creation of our erroneous assumption of a causal relationship between observation and observed, or perhaps more precisely between observation and the seeming awareness of the act of observation. Hume puts the self under his epistemological microscope and fails to find anything to look at. Kierkegaard puts the self at the center of all relationships (the beating heart of existentialism), and finds it to be the place where all the ladders start; although it is not necessarily the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. Indeed, it is the relationship which creates relationship by relating first to itself, and in so relating, can relate to others. The either/or of the Judge and the Seducer comes back around again; because the Judge's either/or, and the Seducer's both/and, are both products and creations of relationships between Self and others.

Which is the language of later phenomenology, specifically, in my usage, of Levinas and Derrida. But there is also, in Kierkegaard's language, one of the great topics of 19th century Europe, one of the central themes of Romanticism, from Wordsworth to Hegel to Byron to Nietzsche to Schopenhauer to the present day: the centrality of the will. Kierkegaard put this front and center himself, declaring in one of the signed (not pseudonymous) works that: "Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing." It is will, according to Romantic thought, which can purify the heart and cleanse it even of despair (despair is the central concern of Anti-Climacus, not the self itself). Here, then, is the great challenge: we escape the dichotomy of the either/or both/and by purity of heart. But do we will that purity, or do we achieve that purity precisely by abandoning the will? Is God revealed to us, in other words; or do we discover God?

Lord, when did we see you?

I said "self-actualize" back there, and thought long and hard about re-writing that, because it isn't accurately Kierkegaardian at all. "Self-actualization" belongs to modern "pop" psychology, not the densely pre-Freudian insights of the Dane; it has much more to do with Deepak Chopra than with Johannes de Silentio or Anti-Climacus. But it has, since the Romantic movement and then the "Oprah" movement (not an accurate start date, but an apt metaphor), become the ne plus ultra of human existence. At least, for human existence as lived by the petit bourgeois who inhabit the world reached and affected by the likes of Chopra and Oprah and the "Gospel of Wealth."

It's very hard to read about Christianity's relationship to the self, to the individual, at least since Kierkegaard, without understanding it in terms of "self-actualizing." That it is not what S.K. considered the "road" to Christianity is clear from the break between the pseudonymous works and the signed works. Even the "will to be oneself" is simply a recognition of human reality, a rejection of the Hegelian Geist which controls human affairs; it is an acceptance, not an abdication, of responsibility. Self-actualization is all about me, but living as a Christian is all about living in a community, as Bonhoeffer said:

It is the mystery of the community that Christ is in her and, only through her, reaches to men [sic]. Christ exists among us as community, as Church in the hiddenness of history. The Church is the hidden Christ among us. Now therefore man [sic] is never alone, but he exists only through the community which brings him Christ, which incorporates him in itself, takes him into its life. Man in Christ is man in community where he exists is community. But because at the same time as individual he is fully a member of the community, therefore here alone is the continuity of his existence preserved in Christ. Therefore man can no longer understand himself from himself, but only from Christ.

But what does this mean? Surely if we had a sign, all would be clear:

What is to be understood by a 'sign?' A sign is the negation of immediacy, or a second state of being, differing from the first. It is not thereby affirmed that the sign is not something immediate, but that what it is as a sign is not immediate, in other words, that as a sign it is not the immediate thing it is.

I would stop right there, but Anti-Climacus goes on to clarify his meaning:

A nautical mark is a sign. Immediately it is a post, a light, or some such thing, but a sign it is not immediately, that is a sign is something different from what immediately is. This [viz. this failure to observe the distinction] lies at the bottom of all mystifications by the help of 'signs'; for a sign is a sign only for one who knows that it is a sign and in the strictest sense only for one who knows what it signifies; for everyone else the sign is only what it immediately is. Even in case no one had erected this or that into a sign, and there was no understanding with anybody that it was to be regarded as such, yet when I see something striking and call it a sign, it is qualified as such by reflection. The striking trait is the immediate, but that I regard it as a sign (a reflective act, producing something out of myself) expresses my conception that it must signify something, but the fact that is must signify something means that is is something else than that which it immediately is. So I am not denying the immediacy of the thing when I regard it as a sign without knowing definitely that it is a sign or what it should signify.

Deconstruction arose from structuralism, which arose from and alongside semiotics, all three of which are fields originated and dominated by French intellectuals. The fields are peculiarly French because they can trace their immediate cultural roots back the French Symboliste poets, rebels against the French bourgeoisie who felt a great affinity for the American Romantic, Edgar Allan Poe. It is not too much to say that Kierkegaard's prediction of his influence is proven true by this snippet of chronology. Writing in an obscure European language from a tiny and often overlooked European country (aside from fairy tales and Isek Dinesen, what is Denmark known for?), it was the mid 20th century before his works were translated widely enough to be known outside his native country. Interesting that he foreshadowed semiotics and structuralism and pointed toward deconstruction, almost 150 years too early. Interesting, too, that these considerations are, again, not the signed work of Soren Kierkegaard, but the pseudonymous work of "Anti-Climacus," he who wrote The Sickness Unto Death, and examined the reason, even the need, for despair. It cannot be overemphasized when considering the works of Kierkegaard: the pseudonymous works are not Christian works; and the signed works, the "Edifying Discourses," are not philosophical ones. The two realms, for Kierkegaard, simply do not overlap.

Which is not to say they exclude each other, but to point out Kierkegaard has different concerns which he addresses in forms as distinct and separate as the ancient Greek distinction between comedy and tragedy. As Aristotle observed of tragedy, one of its many aspects must be its seriousness. Greek tragedies were never leavened with humor, their comedies never darkened with serious consequences. Just so S.K.'s works hightlight the distinction emphasized in the Gospel of John, between the believing community (those with the "gnosis," according to many scholars, exemplified in the popular mind by Elaine Pagels) and those without. Except "gnosis" is not the bright dividing line it might seem to be, either. the "either/or" is a determinate for the culturally Christian pseudonyms; but it is not one for the pious and passionate author of the edifying discourses. Somewhere along the way we pass well beyond any teleological suspension of the ethical.

What, then is the sign we would accept? John's gospel is all about this issue. What the Synoptic writers call dunamis, works of power, John calls semeion, or signs. These signs are supposed to indicate the true nature of the Almighty and of the Christ, the Anointed One. But, as Anti-Climacus points out: "when I see something striking and call it a sign, it is qualified as such by reflection." And reflection requires some knowledge of the second state of being of the sign, some information that tells us how it can be more than the immediate thing it is. so is the conversion of water into wine at Cana nothing more than an act of power? If so, it merely makes us bow to the superiority of the wielder. And how is the kingdom of God like that? Does it matter who is first and who is last, if we are sll just subdued beneath the guy who can perform such transformations? If it is a sign, what does it point to? If it is more than what it immediately is, what does it mean? What reflection do I bring to bear upon it?

The Jesus of John's gospel is the worst at explaining these things. "You are a teacher of Israel and you don't understand this?," Jesus says to Nicodemus almost immediately after the wedding in Cana; and the fact is, none of us understand it. John turns us all into the cloth-headed disciples present in Mark and Matthew's gospels, and the Rabbi mocks our confusion. He doesn't explain what "born again" means, to Nicodemus or to us. He explains some of his signs, such as the raising of Lazarus: "Lazarus is dead, and for your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him." And, just before calling Lazarus from the tomb: "Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me." But the sign clearly points in two ways at once:

Therefore many of the Jews who had come to visit Mary, and had seen what Jesus did, put their faith in him. But some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done. Then the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the Sanhedrin.
"What are we accomplishing?" they asked. "Here is this man performing many miraculous signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation." John 11:45-48

Some see it's second being as the presence of God in Jesus; others see it as an act of power which threatens their power, and the power of the State. What should it signify? Well, that's the problem, isn't it? "[F]or a sign is a sign only for one who knows that it is a sign and in the strictest sense only for one who knows what it signifies." And we are always quite sure we know what a sign signifies; but on what do we base that assurance?

The statement of signs having a "second being" is not accidental. A sign is not a symbol. So when John writes of Jesus’ actions, he is not writing about symbolic events. The resurrection of Lazarus may foreshadow the resurrection of Jesus later in the story, and so be a literary device. But it is not merely a symbol of the triumph of the God of the living over death, or those who sleep, as Jesus puts it. It is a sign: but a sign as dunamis, or a sign of something more ethereal, something more akin to the metaphor of being “born again” (and is that a metaphor, or a sign? Apparently in John’s gospel semeion must be active, not rhetorical. The logos may have been the performative of Creation (but neither the performer nor the performed), but the logos here is the indicator, the one (as Bultmann says) who points toward the sign; and the sign points toward…? Or does it point at all? If the sign has a second being, what being is that? And what does any of this have to do with self-actualization or the validity and nature of the self, or for that matter the ethical burden of the either/or?

Well, I’m getting to that…..

The Peacock Spreads His Fan

I agree with Atrios: our public discourse is usually pretty stupid. That depends, though, on who gets to control the discourse; and while that control has seemed to be in the hands of the MSM, the Corporate Media, FixNews, or Chris Matthews, of late that control is clearly slipping.

Take the case of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who was supposed to outrage all of white America with the selected bon mots replayed ad nauseum on 24 hour cable news. Didn't exactly set America on fire, even when one of the more outrageous things he was supposed to have said was that America was complicit in 9/11. Of course, he wasn't the only person to have said that, but the "frame" was that this was an outrageous notion no "true" American could countenance, and certainly none of the usual suspects among pundits did. As Josh Marshall said, the Rev. Wright was on the way to being radioactive among the pundit class.

So how do we explain this?

When it comes to the Axis of Evil, a little diplomacy can go a long way. According to the latest Gallup Poll the number of Americans who view North Korea as our greatest enemy has dropped by half in the last year. In fact, North Korea isn’t even any longer in the top three. Thanks to diplomatic agreements reached concerning their nuclear weapons program, the percentage of Americans viewing North Korea as our biggest threat has dropped from 18 percent to 9 percent.

North Korea’s Axis of Evil partners, Iran and Iraq still top the enemies list. 25 percent of Americans see Iran as our biggest enemy and 22 percent say it’s Iraq.

Who’s the new number three? China with 14 percent. North Korea has dropped to number four with its nine percent rating. Number five is a tie between Afghanistan and us! That’s right, three percent of the people surveyed see the United States as its own worst enemy.

Read the comments: most agree the greatest threat to the US is...us. For various reasons, but the finger pointing out means three more pointing back, and yet no one seems to consider themselves a subersive or a terrorist lover. 3% is hardly a majority, of course, but it's interesting that it shows up at all. Will anyone cry foul? Will this become evidence of perfidy among patriots? Will the pundits chew this over endlessly, and demand the traitors be ferreted out and removed from civilization?

Of course not. Cafferty already made the obvious reference, on air, to Pogo's dictum about the enemy and us. 3%, in fact, seems like a darned healthy number to me. Not too many, but not too few; and ahead of Russia. I'm not sure what to make of those who think Iraq is a threat, except as perhaps it saps our resources, both human, material, and financial, a rat hole of waste and perpetual destruction for no purpose. In fact, put those two numbers together, and you get a picture of a very wise and worried body politic.

Which might make you think the stupidity of our national discourse isn't so persuasive or pervasive, after all.