Where your treasure is

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

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

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

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

Why am I telling you this?

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

And what was it Jesus said about this?

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

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

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

Candy is hard! It's hard!

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

The power of celebrity is truly appalling.

Μακάριοι οἱ πτωχοί

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are we evil? Are the doctors?

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

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

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

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

Coincidence? I think not....

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

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

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

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

And then my morning reading leads me to this post:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"How to be Topp"

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

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

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

And then, of course, this post:

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

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

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

Just need to decide what it should mean.
Rmj,

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

chicago dyke, greened

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

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


Images courtesy of St. Custard's.

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

Because:

a) I like Anthony

b) I've nothing better to do; and

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

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

Can I beg your indulgence to post this here first?

The New Atheism As A New Dark Age by Anthony McCarthy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They're made up of people.

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

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

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

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

Same as it ever was.

I blame literature

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

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

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

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regarding Sonia Sotomayor

I'm always fascinated when people with no background in jurisprudence (the philosophy of law) take up questions like "How should judges judge?"

Judges themselves have considered this question in some detail, and there are several schools of thought on the matter. The two main schools are "legal positivism" (which, through John Austin, is based largely in utilitarianism) and "legal realism" (which follows the basic philosophy of the English common law, i.e., "what works"). Judge John Hutcheson famously gave judges the idea of the "judicial hunch": all other factors being equal, you finally come down on the side that simply "seems" right. That's not as arbitrary as it seems, but neither is judging merely a machine-like process. Judicial realism, indeed, takes into account the background and experience of the judge (and accepts those elements as valid). Judicial positivism is rooted in Thomas Hobbes, where the political sovereign has no limitations on his power whatsoever. If that begins to sound like Antonin Scalia or, more appropriately, Chief Justice John Roberts, it should. Funny nobody ever discusses the philosophy of judicial nominees in even these broad terms, isn't it?

When people with no knowledge of jurisprudence take up the subject and seriously ponder the qualifications of would-be Supreme Court Justices, they end up asking and answering stupid questions the equivalent of: "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"

Which may be why so many public figures think Antonin Scalia is so "smart."

Memorial Day 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that "all men are created equal"

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it, as a final resting place for those who died here, that the nation might live. This we may, in all propriety do. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow, this ground -- The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have hallowed it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; while it can never forget what they did here.

It is rather for us, the living, we here be dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that, from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here, gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people by the people for the people, shall not perish from the earth.--Abraham Lincoln



PEACE

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

AMEN.

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

SAVE US AND HELP US, O LORD AND MASTER.

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

SAVE US AND HELP US, O LORD AND MASTER.

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

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

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

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

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

SAVE US AND HELP US, O LORD AND MASTER.

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

SAVE US AND HELP US, O LORD AND MASTER.

Then all shall join in the Lord's Prayer.

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

--The E&R Hymnal

Take Me To The River

Wade with me a moment:

“As long as one supposes, concesso non dato, that religion has the slightest relation to what we thus call God, it could pertain not only to the general history of nomination, but, more strictly here, under its name of religio, to a history of the sacramentum and of the testimonium. It would be this history, it would merge with it. On the boat that brought us from Naples to Capri, I told myself that I would begin by recalling this sort of too luminous evidence, but I did not dare. I also told myself, silently, that one would blind oneself to the phenomenon called 'of religion' or of the 'return of the religious' today if one continued to oppose so naively Reason and Religion, Critique or Society and Religion, technoscientific Modernity and Religion. Supposing that what was at stake was to understand, would one understand anything about 'what's-going-on-today-in-the-world-with-religion'...if one continues to believe in this opposition, even in this incompatibility, which is to say, if one remains within a Enlightenment, one of the many Enlightenments of the past three centuries (not of an Aufklärung, whose critical force is profoundly rooted in the Reformation), but yes, this light of Lights, of the Lumieres, which traverses like a single ray a certain critical and anti-religious vigilance, anti-Judaeo-Christian-Islamic, a certain filiation 'Voltaire-Feuerbach-Marx-Nietzsche-Freud-(and even)-Heidegger'? Beyond this opposition and its determinate heritage (no less represented on the other side, that of religious authority), perhaps we might be able to 'understand' how the imperturbably and interminable development of critical and technoscientific reason, far from opposing religion, bears, supports and supposes it. It would be necessary to demonstrate, which would not be simple, that religion and reason have the same source. (We associate here reason with philosophy and with science as technoscience, as critical history of the production of knowledge, of knowledge as production, know-how and intervention at a distance, teletechnoscience that is always high-performance and performative by essence etc.) Religion and reason develop in tandem, drawing from this common resource: the testimonial pledge of every performative, committing it to respond as much before the other as for the high-performance performativity of technoscience. The same unique source divides itself mechanically, automatically, and sets itself reactively in opposition to itself: whence the two sources in one. This reactivity is a process of sacrificial indemnification, it strives to restore the unscathed (heilig) that it itself threatens.

“In our ‘wars of religion’, violence has two ages. The one…appears ‘contemporary’, in sync or in step with the hypersophistication of military tele-technology—of ‘digital’ and cyberspaced culture. The other is a ‘new archaic violence’, if one can put it that way. It counters the first and everything ir represents. Revenge. Resorting, in fact, to the same sources of mediatic power, it reverts (according to the return, the resource, the repristination and the law of internal and auto-immune reactivity we are trying formalize here) as closely as possible to the body proper and to the premachinal living being. In any case, to its desire and to its phantasm. Revenge is taken against the decorporalizing and expropriating machine by resorting—reverting—to bare hands, to the sexual organs or to primitive tools, often to weapons other than firearms. What is referred to as ‘killings’ and ‘atrocities’—words never used in ‘clean’ or ‘proper’ wars, where, precisely, the dead are no longer counted (guided or ‘intelligent’ missiles directed at entire cities, for instance)—is here supplanted by tortures, beheadings, and mutilations of all sorts. What is involved is always avowed vengeance, often declared as sexual revenge: rapes, mutilated genitals or severed hands, corpses exhibited, heads paraded, as not so long ago in France, impaled on the end of stakes (phallic processions of ‘natural religions’). This is the case, for examples, but it only an example, in Algeria today, in the name of Islam, invoked by both belligerent parties, each in its own way. These are also symptoms of a reactive and negative recourse, the vengeance of the body proper against an expropriatory and delocalizing tele-technoscience, identified with the globality of the market, with military-capitalistic hegemony, with the globalatinization of the European democratic model, in its double form: secular and religious. When—another figure of double origin—the foreseeable alliance of the worst effects of fanaticism, dogmatism or irrationalist obscurantism with hypercritical acumen and incisive analysis of the hegemonies and the models of the adversary (globalatinization, religion that does not speak its name, ethnocentrism putting on, as always, a show of ‘universalism”, market-driven science and technology, democratic rhetoric, ‘humanitarian’ strategy or ‘keeping the peace’ by means of peace-keeping forces, while never counting the dead of Rwanda, for instance, in the same manner as those of the United States of America or of Europe). This archaic and ostensibly more savage radicalization of ‘religious’ violence claims, in the name of ‘religion’, to allow the living community to rediscover its roots, its place, its body and its idiom intact (unscathed, safe, pure, proper). It spreads death and unleashes self-destruction in a desperate (auto-immune) gesture that attacks the blood of its own body: as though thereby to eradicate uprootedness and reappropriate the sacredness of life safe and sound. Double root, double uprootedness, double eradication.”

Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, tr. Samuel Weber (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 27-28; 52-53.

First, I bring this up because the prescience of the second passage is interesting, given events that began 7 years after Derrida delivered those words to a colloquium on the Isle of Capri. “No one could have foreseen,” indeed. Second, I bring it up because I want to mine these two passages both for vocabulary and for ideas relevant to the present day, and to the situation of religion, specifically of Christianity, in the present day and among believers (and, to some extent, non-believers).

There are several things to mention here, all of them relevant to a central theme. One is the idea of the “machine,” an idea much with us since the Industrial Revolution and it’s double rooted, double uprooted, doubly eradicated, twin, Romanticism. Before the Industrial Revolution, the machine was not a metaphor for the human, nor for much of anything else in life. The machine was simply a tool, nothing more. It was as relevant to the position of the human, as the condition of the slave was to the master: i.e., not at all, except as it served the master (the inhumanity of slaver is another issue; but you look in vain for evidence that slavery is inhumane, in writings much before the 19th century. The machine and the slave were, for much of European history, on the same level). When the machine “arose” (and the mysterium tremendum of the Industrial Revolution continues, as evidenced by films as disparate as the first “Alien” movie, through now four “Terminator” films, and “Blade Runner,” on into “The Matrix.” We fear our machines precisely in relation to how much we depend on them. It’s not even an inverse relation. “Double root, double uprootedness, double eradication.”), it quickly became a metaphor for the human condition, and even today we have a hard time speaking of brain or mind or consciousness, without resort to metaphors drawn from computers. The machine long ago stopped being a tool, and became a reflection of who we are. More than occasionally, reflection and reality merge. Derrida says:

As long as one supposes, concesso non dato, that religion has the slightest relation to what we thus call God, it could pertain not only to the general history of nomination, but, more strictly here, under its name of religio, to a history of the sacramentum and of the testimonium. It would be this history, it would merge with it.

He means that religion would, properly considered, be not only a name (“nomination”, to “denominate” is simply to name; but what’s in a name?) but the history of sacrament and testimony itself; would be itself sacrament and testimony, both in time and beyond time, as the theologians understand it. We can comfortably, by now, say the same thing of the machine and our relationship to it It has merged with us, it has become the human. The frisson of the Terminator films is that the machines reflect the demons of our nature, unleashed and sanctified by technoscience, perfect examples indeed ot tele-technoscience, of:

[the] history of the production of knowledge, of knowledge as production, know-how and intervention at a distance, teletechnoscience that is always high-performance and performative by essence etc.)

The “essence” of the machines in the Terminator stories is an essence we recognize, even praise when it is used by “our” side: the “perfect” killing machine. So perfect that in the last two movies, it has taken another machine to defeat it. They embody the “history of the production of knowledge, of knowledge as production,” and most especially “know-how and intervention at a distance,” distance being measured in both time and space; a technology not only from “the future” but one step beyond remote-control: autonomous. It is teletechnoscience that is always high performance (each machine dazzles more than the one before) and performative by essence (its essence is entirely that of the machine: doing the job it was designed to do, without fear or favor or prejudice or any human consideration. The Terminator robots will destroy life with as much indifference as any machine will crush a limb or smash a body. Or a “smart bomb” will level a village, or smash the mud huts of Afghans to rubble and kill civilians and those labeled “Taliban”, together. It is all one, from a distance; and to a machine. Thus does science improve our humanity by increasing, augmenting, amplifying the importance and the power of the performative.

The performative and the concept of the performative is the key that turns the lock in this discussion, and that lock unlocked opens a door into a very interesting world, indeed; or at least an interesting weltanschaaung. Indeed, the performative is the thing:

Religion and reason develop in tandem, drawing from this common resource: the testimonial pledge of every performative, committing it to respond as much before the other as for the high-performance performativity of technoscience.

But before we plunge too far ahead and make the leap of faith to the conclusion that the performative is the root of all evil because it is only visible and efficacious in the material world, because it is only a semeia, a sign, that doesn’t point just one way, that may conceal as much as it reveals, that may leave us thinking we know what the actions of Jesus meant but, if we have to ask, as John’s gospel makes clear, then we will never understand, we will never have the gnosis: if we get, in other words, too far ahead of the double root, and the double uprootedness, we will find ourselves past the point of the double eradication, and fail completely in our understanding. So the root of performativity is not in reason or science alone; it is also in faith:

What good is it, my friends, for someone to say he has faith when his actions do nothing to show it? Can that faith save him? Suppose a fellow-Christian, whether man or woman, is in rags with not enough food for the day, and one of you says “Goodbye, keep warm, and have a good meal,’ but does nothing to supply their bodily needs, what good is that? So with faith; if it does not lead to action, it is by itself a lifeless thing…..As the body is dead when there is no breath left in it, so faith divorced from action is dead. James 2:14-17, 26 (REB)

It is not the performativity that is evil, then; it is not the expectation of performance that is wrong. A dualism that leads to a denial of the value of this life in this flesh, is a pernicious dualism that elevates form over substance. Faith commits us to respond before the other as much as for our faith. It is not the action that matters; it is the end, the telos, the purpose behind the actions. Just as science that does not serve humanity is the paradigm of peril and even evil in the “mad scientist” and the scientific experiment gone awry which endangers humankind, the staple of special effects movies, so too faith that does not serve humanity is zeal and madness and imperils what it would save, as in “Angels and Demons;” or a former Vice President who, in order to save the national village, must destroy everything it is built on. The blind act of faith and the blind pursuit of reason are simply two conditions that often appear alike. Or, to repeat where we started from:

The same unique source divides itself mechanically, automatically, and sets itself reactively in opposition to itself: whence the two sources in one. This reactivity is a process of sacrificial indemnification, it strives to restore the unscathed (heilig) that it itself threatens.

If there is a consistent, clear and present danger here, it is in acting “mechanically, automatically,” rather than mindfully; rather than heartfully; rather than thoughtfully and compassionately. And we are back to the metaphor provided us by science, by “Enlightenment;” but we are not back to a new idea, one unknown to the dialogues of faith.

If we take “Angels and Demons” as our framework for a moment, we can transition to the second long quote from Derrida. The “hypersophistication of military tele-technology—of ‘digital’ and cyberspaced culture” is represented in the film, but only mildly. Mostly the violence of the film is the “‘new archaic violence’” that counters the first and everything ir represents.” But that latter violence is meant to expose the dangers of the former, a form of violence present not in military technology, but in modernity (although it is technology which provides the threat that drives the plot, and technology that provides the opportunity for both salvation, confession, and justice). It is not too much to say that the heroes of the film represent modern society with its roots deep in history, and the villains of the film represent marginalized forces reacting to the hegemony of society and responding to it with the only means at hand: ‘new archaic violence.’ In other words, it’s a reflection of recent modern history.

The villain of “Angels and Demons” is revealed to be something of a neo-con, trying to use violence to prompt a reformation, a purification, this time not of society or nations, but of the Roman Catholic church. The real goal, of course, is not reformation: that’s why Luther left the church when it wouldn’t accept him, and instead started his own. The lesson of the neo-con is not to accept defeat, but to seek power, to overthrow the institution, society, nation, for the good of the institution, society, nation. The villain of “Angels and Demons” truly is trying “to restore the unscathed (heilig) that it itself threatens.” When Derrida’s words are understood in that light, it’s easy to transfer his example of Algeria to Iraq, and see in words written in 1996 almost a prediction of what would happen in 2003 and beyond, something done in the name of both reason and religion. Revenge has become the model on both sides, and the justification for continuing the battle. Soldiers want to return to war to defend their fellow soldiers. Politicians justify the ongoing slaughter on the grounds that ending now would only mean the deaths so far were pointless, that those deaths would go unavenged without victory. The “expropriatory and delocalizing tele-technoscience, identified with the globality of the market, with military-capitalistic hegemony, with the globalatinization of the European democratic model” is the justification for continuing the battle, even as it is the reason the battle is waged at all. And the toll is taken on both sides: it is a two edged sword that cuts the assailant as well as the assailed, with every stroke. Battle is always an inhuman and de-humanizing affair. And it works against us as ferociously as it works for us: “It spreads death and unleashes self-destruction in a desperate (auto-immune) gesture that attacks the blood of its own body….” We are still compelled to endanger, if not absolutely destroy, our society, in order to save it. Former Vice President Dick Cheney would have us abandon everything unique about America in order to insure merely our survival. President Barack Obama, faced with prisoners who cannot be brought to any court, perhaps because no evidence that proves their complicity in killing, and their willingness to kill again, would be admissible in any court, perhaps because of the policies Vice President Cheney still champions. So in the name of defending our values, the President must change our values, although he will do it within the legal and Constitutional system, not in spite of it. We are set to attacking the blood of our own body, whether we want to pursue that assault, or not.

No one could have foreseen…..

Derrida describes more than prescribes, but at Verbis et Operibus the signs of an exit, of an option, of an alternative, begins to appear.

The liberal must “save” the poor from poverty. The conservative must keep the poor from indolence. Both pity the poor as something less desirable. Neither attempts to challenge the basic idea that the poor are ultimately disprivileged.

[...] True Christian charity, therefore, is something more than our common definition of pity. White guilt is pity. Condescension is pity. Even inaction might be pity, for some conservatives. And what pity obscures is the paradoxical realization that the poor are, by certain biblical definition, worthy of higher honor. They own something we do not. And the means by which we might participate in that honor with them is charity.
12.2 Ultimately, Henreckson is arguing that empathy — specific Christian empathy — should replace pity. I agree.

So do I. Empathy is the key; because empathy requires something of us. Empathy is faith bound to works. Empathy is grace incarnated. Empathy is the reason for the incarnation. Empathy is the product of the change of heart that must be accomplished before any salvation is possible. And that change of heart does not spring from either reason or religion. It may be channeled through them, guided through them, explained or exploited through them, but it is not produced by them. The change of heart is what religion supports, succors, and encourages; it is what reason uses, promotes, idealizes: but it is not produced by either of them. And yet it still comes from the heart: from the flesh.

Dom Crossan engages this discussion in the prologue to his study The Birth of Christianity. He notes the distinction between Jewish and Christian traditions, drawing the line along the contours of Platonic dualism, of the person as flesh and the ‘ghost in the machine.’ Paul would argue we are now neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, but:

…no rabbinic Jew could do so, because people are bodies, not spirits, and precisely bodies are marked as male or female, and also marked through bodily practices and techniques such as circumcision and food taboos, as Jew or Greek as well. Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel, quoted in Crossan, p. xx.

Which observation leads Crossan to consider that:

The “Word”—Logos, in Greek—is the intelligibility of the world, the rationality of the universe, the meaning of life, as revelation of the Divine Mind. And John says that Word became not just body but flesh, not just the special –effects body of standard Greco-Roman divine visitations, but the one and only flesh and blood of full and normal human existence. The Word became flesh; that is to say, the divine meaning of life is incarnated in a certain human way of living.

But that divine meaning of life must be incarnated in a certain human way of living, and that incarnation requires not just empathy, but precisely what empathy requires: a change of heart.

And where does that come from? That’s the next question.

"Prolonged Detention"

This issue got Rachel Maddow quite exercised last night:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Like many in left blogistan, Rachel wants Obama to be the anti-Bush, much as the Bush Administration seemed driven, at one time, to be the anti-Clinton: if Clinton did it, the Bush Administration wouldn't. And while the idea of "prolonged detention" struck me as a dubious one, too, I tried to think first of the justification for such an idea. And then it occurred to me: the idea of closing Gitmo is to release the detainees there. But the sticking point has been: release them where?

Some, like the Uighurs, are innocent and wholly deserving of repatriation, but returning them to China would be returning them to danger; so that door is closed, yet another stubbornly refuses to open. Now, what about people the international community deems dangerous, and we do, too? But we cannot hold them, we have no evidence (presumably) sufficient to convict them, even in a military tribunal. If we release them, where do we do it? To wander the base at Guantanamo? No country will admit them; do we then drop them in Haiti, or Somalia, or some other country with a weak central government, one almost incapable of denying us the disposition of these persons? Where, in fact, do they go, if they have nowhere to go, if no country will grant them entry? This is not an issue of due process. We cannot sue other governments under "universal jurisdiction" or complain under the terms of the Geneva Convention, for there are not terms for this. Countries have a right to deny entry to anyone they want or even, in the case of North Korea, almost anyone at all. Aa Condi Rice said in 2007:

"One of the things that would help a lot is, in the discussions that we have with the states of which they (detainees) are nationals, if we could get some of those countries to take them back," Rice said in a Dec. 12, 2007 , interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. "So we need help in closing Guantanamo ."

Help we are still not getting. What, then, is the alternative?

It may be Obama is simply trying to make legal what is now almost patently illegal, and he is trying to bring "prolonged detention" into line with our Constitution and our laws by engaging, as Robert Gibbs told NPR, the Congress and the Courts, so that the tripartite system of the government works on this "mess" (the President's words) that was left by the former Administration. If we can't release these "detainees," we need a legal framework to justify holding them, not merely the dictate of the Presidency. Until we can release them somewhere besides Anarctica, until we can release them in accordance with our obligations to international law, it may be we have an obligation to our legal system to at least attempt to make their prolonged detention legal.

We are stuck with is the result of Dick Cheney's "unitary Presidency" and American exceptionalism, and George W. Bush's agreement or at least acquiescence to those ideas.

Angelic v. Demonic

I read this yesterday. I'll first admit, I didn't get this out of it:

Theological debates are meaningless to me because I'm agnostic and have no interest in any particular faith tradition, and tedious because participants are too often convinced that they've got a handle on The One True Religion while often failing to perceive a rather important implication of that: it's a pretty lonely religion.

I mean, I understand if you don't have a dog in the fight, debates about ideas are pretty boring. I often feel that way about political discussions, when I step back and realize (based on the traffic here, if nothing else) that absolutely no one of consequence is listening to what I say, and I'm having absolutely no influence on policy or politics. Besides, it's almost always as abstract as how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Which was a mean-spirited joke in the Renaissance about the unimportant obsessions of the medievalists, not a description of an actual debate. But I digress....

There is a point when religious and theological discussions have to answer basic questions like the one put to Robert Langdon in Angels and Demons: "Do you believe in God?" Turns out it was an ironic question from the interlocutor, because Langdon, a non-believer, gave the priest the right (and also honest, though it wasn't right for that reason alone) answer. Which is a lesson about such questions, one of many I thought the film raised: never assume you know what the questioner means.

It's an old legal trick, which may be why a dilettante philosopher cum theologian like myself is/was also a dilettante attorney. But one thing studying the law makes you do is look at things with a relentless logic matched, so far as I know, only by Zen Buddhist priests, some rabbis, and (by reputation, at least), the Jesuits. Funny, huh? Even mathematicians tend to assume the world is essentially Platonic, a leap of faith no true priest, imam, rabbi, or pastor would ever make. Indeed, the central conceit of "Angels and Demons" is that the villain is not a true priest, although he is a true believer. And he certainly makes a leap no one else follows.

Maybe that's what prompts Ron Douthat's harsh reaction to the film, one I don't think is warranted. Maybe he's upset because the rigid assurance of the villain of the piece looks too familiar. (I don't know Douthat's politics, but the villain of "Angels and Demons" is pretty easily understood as an all too familiar figure in America today: the neocon.) Or maybe he just means what he says, and he prefers a more traditional reading of Church history and doctrine. But I didn't read Douthat's comment (nor can I, now) as a declaration that there is only one true religion, or even one true Christianity. Every declaration of belief, every confession of faith, is by definition a statement that other confessions and declarations are wrong, at least for the professor or confessor. That's as unavoidable as declaring your allegiance for a political party or simply a political candidate. And it that's "lonely," then we are all existentialists now, and Sartreans to boot. Douthat and I would probably disagree on what the one "historically plausible Jesus" would look like; but we can both agree the stories of Dan Brown are not historically plausible in any sense of the word.

It is a dividing line question, though: "Do you believe in God?" It can't be other than a dividing line question, because it puts you in one category, or the other. Today many people are quite happy, almost anxious, to tell you that they don't believe, or that they do. And they do it with a clear eye to dividing the world into two groups: those who are with them, and those who are against them. Thrillers like Dan Brown writes, of course, need those two groups: the "good guys" and the "bad guys." Maybe Rod Douthat needs them, too; I don't know. Still, there are such questions; and sooner or later, you have to insist upon them, if only to know where another person, a person who (ideally) matters to you, stands (the only point of finding out where a person who doesn't matter to you stands, is to use the issue as a cudgel, rather than as a way of understanding them).

In fact, to the extent Douthat is arguing that Brown is too accomodationist to modern sensibilities, that he re-casts the kerygma of the Gospels in modern American "love me, love my life!" terms, I agree with him. To me, this is the heart of Douthat's argument:

In the Brownian worldview, all religions — even Roman Catholicism — have the potential to be wonderful, so long as we can get over the idea that any one of them might be particularly true. It’s a message perfectly tailored for 21st-century America, where the most important religious trend is neither swelling unbelief nor rising fundamentalism, but the emergence of a generalized “religiousness” detached from the claims of any specific faith tradition.

The polls that show more Americans abandoning organized religion don’t suggest a dramatic uptick in atheism: They reveal the growth of do-it-yourself spirituality, with traditional religion’s dogmas and moral requirements shorn away. The same trend is at work within organized faiths as well, where both liberal and conservative believers often encounter a God who’s too busy validating their particular version of the American Dream to raise a peep about, say, how much money they’re making or how many times they’ve been married.

These are Dan Brown’s kind of readers. Piggybacking on the fascination with lost gospels and alternative Christianities, he serves up a Jesus who’s a thoroughly modern sort of messiah — sexy, worldly, and Goddess-worshiping, with a wife and kids, a house in the Galilean suburbs, and no delusions about his own divinity.

But the success of this message — which also shows up in the work of Brown’s many thriller-writing imitators — can’t be separated from its dishonesty. The “secret” history of Christendom that unspools in “The Da Vinci Code” is false from start to finish. The lost gospels are real enough, but they neither confirm the portrait of Christ that Brown is peddling — they’re far, far weirder than that — nor provide a persuasive alternative to the New Testament account. The Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — jealous, demanding, apocalyptic — may not be congenial to contemporary sensibilities, but he’s the only historically-plausible Jesus there is.

The historically plausible Jesus said demanding things like:

Don't get the idea that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword. After all, I have come

to pit a man against his father,
a daughter against her mother,
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.

A man's enemies will be the members of his own household. Matthew 10:34-36, SV

A sentiment that is certainly true in "Angels and Demons."

Jesus also said welcoming things like this:

As they were going along the road, someone said to him, "I'll follow you wherever you go."

"And Jesus said to him, "Foxes have dens, and birds of the sky have nests, but the sone of Adam has nowhere to rest his head."
To another he said, "Follow me."
But he said, "First, let me go and bury my father."
Jesus said to him, "Leave it to the dead to bury their own dead; but you, go out and announce God's imperial rule."
Another said, "I'll follow you, Sir; but let me first say good-by to my people at home."
Jesus said to him, "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is qualified for God's imperial rule." Luke 9:60-62, SV

Or this bit of comfort:

Some who were there at the time told him about the Galileans, about how Pilate had mixed their blood with their sacrifices. He answered them, "Do you suppose that these Galileans were the worst sinners in Galilee, because they suffered this? Hardly. However, let me tell you, if you don't have a change of heart, you'll all meet your doom in the same way. Or how about those eighteen in Siloam, who were killed when the tower fell on them. Do you suppose that they were any guiltier than the whole population of Jerusalem? Hardly. However, let me tell you, if you don't have a change of heart, all of you will meet your doom in a similar fashion." Luke 13:1-5, SV.

A distorted picture of Jesus in the gospels only because I have picked a few specific examples to make a point, one I think Douthat has in mind. There isn't really much about the Jesus of the gospels in "Angels and Demons," which is just fine for the story; but unless you think the Roman church doesn't have much to do with the teachings of Jesus either, Brown's is a very distorted view of Christianity. Douthat is right about that: Jesus was not all about you, and what makes you feel better.

Atrios picks up the tail end of that Douthat quote in his objection (and he's welcome to it; I'm not trying to start an argument of Douthat here). But in context, I find little to disagree with. If something is not particularly true, what's the point of it? If my politics are not particularly true, how do I blog about them? If my religious beliefs are not particularly true, how do I hold to them? If my love for my wife, my daughter, my friends, my family, is not particularly true, what good am I?

And the fact is, "The 'secret' history of Christendom that unspools in 'The Da Vinci Code' is false from start to finish." There's really no argument about that. The argument Douthat makes about "lost gospels" and "persuasive alternative[s] to the New Testament account" is an unremarkable one. Perhaps it's the exclusion of the religious community Atrios objects to, but every community inevitably means some are included, some excluded. As Dom Crossan points out, it is the community that decides whether an experience is even religious, or not.

Hopes and fears, dreams and nightmares, visions and apparitions are not the same as delusions and hallucinations. If you wake up screaming because a giant figure is ready to attack you, that is a nightmarish dream. You spouse reassures you, saying it is just a bad dream, urging you to go back to sleep. And you do. Buf if you call 9-1-1 that night to report an intruder and summond ADT the next day to put in a security system, you are moving from dream to delusion. It is part of reality to know which is which. If you come down from the mountaintop and report a revelation from Archangel Micheal, you have seen an apparition. If you keep insisting that Bigfoot-with-Wings is up there and that everyone should go see it, you are beyond vision and into hallucination. If is part of reality to know which is which....Trance and ecstasy, vision and apparition are perfectly normal and natural phenomena. Altered states of consciousness, such as dreams and visions, are something common to our humanity, something hard-wired into our brains, something as normal as language itself...And only when their human normalcy is accepted can a proper response be offered. That response should not be, We deny the fact of your vision. It should be, Tell us the content of your vision. And then we will judge, nother whether you had it or not, but whether we should follow it or not.

John Dominic Crossan, The Birth of Christianity (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999), ix-x.

If you haven't chosen to follow it, the visions, even the distinctions, may seem odd; but if you do follow them, they make sense. Either way, while I may disagree with Douthat's conclusions, it's hardly accurate to say he's strictly arguing for a "true religion" of "One." More accurately, he just doesn't like the picture of Christianity painted by Dan Brown. But even a "liberal" Biblical scholar like Dom Crossan doesn't care for Dan Brown's version of history; and I doubt Rod Douthat and Dom Crossan would agree on much else.

Indeed, the picture Douthat paints in his critique of Brown's presentation of religion is a theology little distinguishable from the "Gospel of Wealth" of Joel Osteen. The archives of the Vatican, for example, as envisioned by the film, would be the envy of any museum in the world (not least for its holdings, but also for the facilities that hold them). There's something bizarrely bourgeois and materialist about the Vatican the film imagines, right down to the superlative security gear that would be the envy of the White House (Nixon had nothing on the Pope!). But hey, it's a thriller! And Hollywood can never imagine how real people live. Even "Roseanne" lived in materialistic splendor compared to most working class families I've ever known. It's not a documentary; it wasn't meant to be. Still, Douthat makes a good point: the kerygma of the Gospel is not about wealth and health and happiness in this life, right here, right now, hallelujah! But to critique the film on that basis overlooks one of the best lines in the film, said to the agnostic Langdon by the religious head of the Swiss Guard:

"My church comforts the sick and the dying. My church feeds the hungry. What does your church do? Oh, that's right, you don't have a church!"

It's not Joyce, but it's not meant to be (talk about a guy who hated the Church!). Now, that's exclusionary, too; and yet it's not an assertion of "one true religion."

I do think the fascination with the "lost gospels" and the "Gnostic gospels" is largely a matter of ignorance. But, by the same token, there's a lot of ignorance swirling around the canonical gospels; indeed, just as much. Ironically, I've been looking at a Catholic university for my daughter, and this morning I noticed their words on their college seal: "Sapientia et Doctrina." Wisdom and doctrine: two poles of understanding that I would agree to myself. Wisdom arises from knowledge, but it is something much more than that alone. Doctrine arises from the community, but it alone is not enough to guide a life by. Of course, my doctrina might well not be the doctrina of this university. Does this make either of us exclusionary? I suppose it could, but it doesn't have to. It doesn't mean we are so open minded as to accept everything as equally valid but then, who is? As for Douthat, people who cling to the "truth" of the canonical gospels without any understanding of the culture they came from, or of history for the past 2000 years, are living in glass houses and throwing stones at people who find any value or interest in the Nag Hammadi and other documents; and to that extent, I part company with Douthat. But only to that degree. I suppose he's trying to proclaim the One True Religion, and yes, that is a lonely profession in the best of circumstances. But it's not necessarily the wrong confession.

Who among us doesn't believe in the One Truth Thing? And who among us is angelic enough, or demonic enough, to keep from making our confession sound exclusionary, if we are pushed to acknowledge it?