St. Crispin's Day

Stricken from the liturgical calendar, but not from the hearts of English majors everywhere:

KING HENRY V
What's he that wishes so?
My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin:
If we are mark'd to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God's will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires:
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England:
God's peace! I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more, methinks, would share from me
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made
And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
We would not die in that man's company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

Thanks to DAS

Who posted, in comments below, what I was hoping for: something from the Jewish tradition.

"These remind me of Hoshanos which specifically mention water.

"I can't find any Hoshanos online, but there is the prayer for rain (also responsive) ... note the ending, even as water saves us, it also can kill, so we need to be careful of what we ask for as we just might get it (c.f. the tale of Yoni the Circlemaker who asked for rain and got a flood):"

You are eternally mighty, my Lord, the Resuscitator of the dead are You; abundantly able to save.

With water You symbolized Your might in Scripture, to soothe with its drops those in whom was blown a soul, to keep alive the ones who recall the strengths of the rain.

Our God and the God of our forefathers:

Remember the Patriarch [Abraham], who was drawn behind You like water. You blessed him like a tree replanted alongside streams of water. You shielded him, You rescued him from fire and from water. You tested him when he sowed upon all waters.

FOR HIS SAKE, DO NOT HOLD WATER BACK

Remember the one [Isaac] born with the tidings of, 'Let some water be brought. ' You told his father to slaughter him - to spill his blood like, water. He too was scrupulous to pour his heart like water. He dug and discovered wells of water.

FOR THIS SAKE OF HIS RIGHTEOUSNESS, GRANT ABUNDANT WATER

Remember the one [Jacob] who carried his staff and crossed the Jordan's water. He dedicated his heart and rolled a stone off the mouth of a well of water, as when he was wrestled by an angel composed of fire and water. Therefore You pledged to remain with him through fire and water.

FOR HIS SAKE, DO NOT HOLD WATER BACK

Remember the one [Moses] drawn forth in a bulrush basket from the water. They said, 'He drew water and provided the sheep with water.' At the time Your treasured people thirsted for water, he struck the rock and out came water.

FOR THE SAKE OF HIS RIGHTEOUSNESS, GRANT ABUNDANT WATER

Remember the appointee [Aaron] over the Temple, who made five immersions in the water. He went to cleanse his hands through sanctification with water. He called out and sprinkled [blood bringing] purity as with water. He remained apart from a people of waterlike impetuosity.

FOR HIS SAKE, DO NOT HOLD WATER BACK

Remember the twelve tribes You caused
to cross through the split waters,
for whom You sweetened the water's bitter taste. Their offspring whose blood was spilt for You like water.
Turn to us - for woes engulf our souls like water.

FOR THE SAKE OF THEIR RIGHTEOUSNESS, GRANT ABUNDANT WATER

For you are the Lord, our God, who makes the wind blow and the rain fall.

FOR A BLESSING AND NOT FOR A CURSE

For a blessing and not for a curse

AMEN

FOR LIFE AND NOT FOR DEATH

For life and not for death

AMEN

FOR PLENTY AND NOT FOR SCARCITY

For plenty and not for scarcity

AMEN

The three men I admire most...They caught the last train for the coast

The situation in California is one of those instances perhaps better suited to the Internet than to television. TV could show us the flooding of New Orleans, but it can't really show us the devastation of fire. For that, you need maps and just plain old text.

This map, for example, gives you location and fire temperature, which makes you appreciate what Scout Prime said: how do the firefighters do it?

The Google Map of the fires around San Diego is here. This one will at least give you an idea of how many people are responding to the fire: aiding in evacuations, in shelters, etc. The LA Times has another Google map indicating fires north of San Diego. As Athenae said, we are all in this together.

A straight up listing of the fires themselves is available here. You'll note at there are 22 fires listed; only two are listed as "Contained."

Maps of the Sawtooth and Millard Complex fires are here. These are probably the most helpful maps for getting an idea of the size of the fires.

This map will give you an excellent overview of the areas burned and the areas still burning. It's a JPEG image and may take some time to download, but it's the best overall view I've found.

And here's a NASA satellite picture of the smoke plumes, which is the best graphic I've found for expressing the size and scope of this disaster.

We beseech thee! Hear us!

Athenae sent me (as usual), looking for some prayers of intercession. I found these, instead; and decided they were the thing that was needed. They are from the E&R Hymnal. They were meant to be prayed responsively, so I have left them that way.


O Lord, who knowest our frame and rememberest that we are dust, pity those who are bearing pain and sorrow. Cheer those who are worn by constant care. Strengthen the faith of the dying and comfort the bereaved with thy compassion. Deliver the souls of those whoa re bound in the chain of their misdeeds, and send thy peace and joy to all who are oppressed by the burden of the world’s sin. Bringing all our sins and sorrows, we lay them before thee, in the Name of our Redeemer.

HEAVENLY FATHER, HEAR US.

Most holy and most merciful God, the strength of the weak, the rest of the weary, the comfort of the sorrowful, the Savior of the sinful, and the refuge of thy children in every time of need, hear us while we pray for thy help.

HEAVENLY FATHER, HEAR US.

When our faith is growing too weak, and our love is growing cold, and we are losing the vision of thy face, and the spiritual world is not real to us,

HEAVENLY FATHER, HEAR US.

When we are tempted to mean and wicked ways, and sin grows less sinful in our sight; when duty is difficult and work is hard, and our burdens are heavy,

HEAVENLY FATHER, HEAR US.

When the unknown future troubles us, and in our fears and anxieties we forget the eternal love and mercy; and when the last darkness shall close around us, and heart and flesh fail, and vain is the help of man,

HEAVENLY FATHER, HEAR US.

O God, who knowest us to be set in the midst of so many and great dangers, that by reason of the frailty of our nature we cannot always stand upright, grant to us such strength and protection as may sustain us in all dangers and carry us through all trials.

HEAVENLY FATHER, HEAR US.

O Lord, support us all the day long of this troublous life, until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then of thy tender mercy grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, nad peace at the last; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

AMEN.



O thou eternal Light, towards whose quickening dawn have moved the peoples that walked in darkness, rise with thy radiance upon the souls which here await thee.

By the visions of ancient seers who beheld thy power moving within the veil of earthly things,

TEACH US TO LIVE AS SEEING THE INVISIBLE.

By the voices of holy prophets who discerned the signs of their times and foretold the doom that follows wrong,

AROUSE US TO SEE AND OVERCOME THE EVILS OF TODAY.

By the mind that was in Christ Jesus, compassionate, free in thought, steadfast in purpose, stayed on thee,

AWAKEN IN US ALSO A GENEROUS MIND AND A BOLD VISION.

By the self-sacrifice of saints and apostles, martyrs and missionaries, who counted not the cost to themselves, if only they might testify to thy grace,

INSPIRE US TO FIND IN COMMON LIFE THE PATHS OF HIGH DEVOTION.

By the joy and praise of the Church universal, by every prayer for light in shrines of whatsoever faith, in east or west or north or south,

KINDLE IN OUR HEARTS THE FAITH THAT SHALL BE A LIGHT UPON OUR WAY AND A SONG UPON OUR LIPS.

By the labors of all who show forth thy wonderful works, searching out thy law in nature, fashioning forms of beauty, skillful in industry, wise in statecraft, gentle in parenthood, gifted with insight,

ENLARGE ALL OUR BEING WITH THE FULLNESS OF THY DIVINE LIFE, THAT IN THY LIGHT WE MAY SEE LIGHT AND BECOME MINISTERS OF THY LOVE BROUGHT NEAR.

O God, fountain of light and truth, give to thy Church a new vision and a new charity, new wisdom and understanding, that the eternal message of the Son, no longer confused by the traditions of men, may be hailed as the good news of this age; through him who maketh all things new, Jesus Christ our Lord.

AMEN

Don't know much about history...

You know, I could really learn to enjoy American history. For example: NPR this morning ran a story about the drought in Atlanta. Turns out it isn't much of a drought at all, at least not in terms of abnormally low rainfall. No, it's a question of water usage. It's a question of development. It's a question of too many people and other interests with too many straws sucking out of the same reservoir. So the problem is people, not nature. Hmmmm...back to the question of will. Somehow I don't think that's going to be a popular diagnosis. Now, why would I think that?

Our manifest destiny [is] to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.

John L. O'Sullivan, 1845

And this destiny didn't just come from God. It's the natural order of things:

Texas has been absorbed into the Union as the inevitable fulfillment of the general law which is rolling our population westward....It was disintegrated from Mexico in the natural course of events, by a process perfectly legitimate on its own part, blameless on ours....

California will, probably next fall away from...Mexico...imbecile and distracted...The Anglo-Saxon foot is already on its borders....All this without agency of our government, without responsibility of our people--in the natural flow of events, the spontaneous working of principles....

Democratic Review, 1845

If you listen carefully, you can hear the geist of Hegel whistling between those lines.

And for those of you who say the present Administration is the greatest embarassment and moral horror in the history of this country, well, as the French say: plus ce change, plus ce la meme chose.

How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave's government also.

Henry David Thoreau

And as for our proclivity to war, it's funny how the same arguments keep getting made again and again and again. Change "Mexico" to "Iraq," and this argument could come from William Kristol or anyone on Fox News:

Now we ask, whether any man can coolly contemplate the idea of recalling our troops from the [Mexican] territory we at present occupy...and...resign this beautiful country to the custody of the ignorant cowards and profligate ruffians who have ruled it for the last twenty-five years? Why humanity cries out against it. Civilization and Christianity protest against this reflux of the tide of barbarism and anarchy.

New York Evening Post, 1848

Son of Same As It Ever Was

Speaking of metaphors, cultures can be said to have a kind of "genetic inheritance" in them, traits and conditions and even behaviors which get handed down from generation to generation. Consider, for example, the "split" between rural America and urban America, between the "rubes" and the "city slickers," between the "bucolic countryside" and the "dens of iniquity" in the cities, between the....well, you know what I mean. Ever wonder where that started?

Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

While we have land to labor then, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a work-bench, or twirling a distaff....For the general operations of manufacture, let our workshops remain in Europe....The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.

Thomas Jefferson

All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the people.... The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second, and as they cannot receive any advantage by change, they therefore will ever maintain good government.

Alexander Hamilton

Not an exact cleavage, but the "rich and well born" tend to hie themselves to the cities, the better to enjoy their "first class" lifestyle, and the "people...turbulent and changing" tend to be either the working class of the cities, or the manual laborers of the farms. And back and forth we have swung ever since, from the Sodom and Gomorrah of the cities to the Winesburg, Ohio and Spoon Rivers of the small towns and the country. Ever and again we renew this dichotomy, and to this day, like good descendants of Lev Tolstoy, we identify the "heartland" as somewhere equidistant from both the cities on the East Coast, the cities on the West Coast, and even the cities on the Third Coast. Few of us know anyone who lives there, but we're quite sure they are the "real" America, even if we aren't quite as starry-eyed as Jefferson or cynical and elitist as Hamilton.

But that's only a portion of the fun we have. This is from 1801; it could be from 2007, as well:

Yesterday Expired,
Deeply regretted by Millions of grateful Americans,
And by all good men,
The Federal Administration
of the
Government of the United States....

It found the United States bankrupt in estate and reputation; it hath left them unbounded in credit; and respected throughout the world. It found the treasuries of the United States and individual states empty; it hath left them full and overflowing....

It found the United States at war with the Indian Nations;--it hath concluded peace with them all....It found Great Britain in possession of all the frontier posts; it hath demanded their surrender, and it leaves them in the possession of the United States. It found the American sea coast utterly defenseless; it hath left it fortified. It found our arsenals empty; and magazines decaying; it hath left them full of ammunition and warlike implements. It found our country dependent on foreign nations for engines of defense; it hath left manufactories of cannon and muskets in full work....

It found our mechanics and manufacturers idle in the streets for want of employ; it hath left them full of business, prosperous, contented, and happy. It found the yeomanry of the country oppressed with unequal taxes;--their farms, houses and barns decaying; their cattle selling at the sign-posts; and they driven to desperation and rebellion; it hath left their coffers in cash; their houses in repair; their barns full; their farms overstocked; and their produce commanding ready money, and a high price....

It found the United States deeply in debt to France and Holland; it hath paid all the demands of the former and the principal part of the latter....It found the United States without a swivel on float for their defense; it hath left a navy--composed of thirty-four ships of war.... It found the exports of our country, a mere song, in value; it hath left them worth above seventy millions of dollars per annum.

Boston Columbian Centinel, 1801

What sad event does this commemorate, what unprecedented disaster presaged the famous farcical Onion headline with such sad tragedy? The election of Thomas Jefferson to the Presidency, and the change of government from the Hamiltonian Federalists to the Jeffersonian Republicans. Yeah, the GOP today is not only not the party of Lincoln, its not the party of Jefferson, either.

But you knew that. What you didn't know, perhaps, was the calamity the Jeffersonian election was predicted to be:

The Bible would be cast into a bonfire, our holy worship changed into a dance of Jacobin phrensy, our wives and daughters dishonored, and our sons converted into the disciples of Voltaire and the dragoons of Marat.

Yale College President Timothy Dwight, on the possibility of Jefferson's election

Ah, for the days when all we had to fear was the author of Candide. But who knew the fear of losing our Bibles to a President was such an American custom?

And last, but not least, in this era of High Broderism where we look winsomely back to the past, hoping to recover some of that bi-partisan spirit which led this country for nearly 200 years, and which has been shattered in the last 7, perhaps never to be recovered, it is worth recalling the campaign materials of a more civil time, when disputes were carried out in measured, even tones, viz:

Thomas Jefferson is a firm Republican,--John Adams is an avowed Monarchist....Thomas Jefferson first drew the declaration of American independence;--he first framed the sacred political sentence that all men are born equal. John Adams says this is all a false and a falsehood; that some men should be born Kings, and some should be born Nobles....Will you, by your votes, contribute to make the avowed friend of monarchy President?--or will you, by neglectfully staying at home, permit others to saddle you with Political Slavery?

1796 Jeffersonian election statement

Don't you just love American history?

Happy Islamofascism Week

In the spirit of tolerance which marks this blog, we recognize Islamofascism Week with the DCI Counterterrorist Center "Terrorist Buster" Logo:

CIA & The War on Terrorism

"Victory will come, but it will take time and require the kind of focused and sustained national commitment that we saw during the Cold War. Most importantly, it will require a relentless global campaign, joined by those in the Muslim world who are repulsed by al-Qa'ida's savagery, to expose the terrorists for what they are: peddlers of a hopeless, negative, backward vision of the world...."— D/CIA Michael V. Hayden, speaking at the
Duquesne University Commencement Ceremony
May 4, 2007

Unlike America, where we label them "Islamofascists" and create logos with scimitars for bayonets on the barrel of an AK-47. Al Qaeda doesn't stand a chance. In the battle of the logos, we clearly win!



(Al Qaeda in Sweden. Best I could do.)

The Problem of the Will

Will is actually a profoundly difficult issue in Western philosophy. It comes into the foreground, then recedes again. Lately it has been badly tainted by recent history. It invariably raises memories of "Triumph of the Will" and that leads us straight to Nazism, the one unabashed evil we call recognize and agree is "evil." It's last great promoter was Nietszche (Nazis, again), and before him, Schopenhauer. That's one problem with it. The other is that will necessarily entails volition; so in science, any "natural process" is necessarily unwilled, because to declare it a product of volition is to posit a metaphysics that science no longer countenances. What, then, to do about something like evolutionary biology, which posits a "selfish gene" which tries to pass on its phenotypes to the next generation? If the gene has no will, how does it determine to even be "selfish"?

Aye, there's the rub.

The present worry is that the explication of natural selection by appeal to selective breeding is seriously misleading, and that it thoroughly misled Darwin. Because breeders have minds, there’s a fact of the matter about what traits they breed for; if you want to know, just ask them. Natural selection, by contrast, is mindless; it acts without malice aforethought. That strains the analogy between natural selection and breeding, perhaps to the breaking point. What, then, is the intended interpretation when one speaks of natural selection? The question is wide open as of this writing.

Well, I will assume it is. I'm not a scientific expert, but I have learned a thing or two about reasoning, and the reasoning behind evolutionary biology has always bothered me. It's nice to find I'm not alone in that:

The answers that have been suggested so far have not been convincing. In particular, though there is no end of it in popular accounts of adaptationism, it is a Very Bad Idea to try and save the bacon by indulging in metaphorical anthropomorphisms. It couldn’t, for example, be literally true that the traits selected for are the ones Mother Nature has in mind when she does the selecting; nor can it be literally true that they are the traits one’s selfish genes have in mind when they undertake to reproduce themselves. There is, after all, no Mother Nature, and genes don’t have, or lack, personality defects. Metaphors are fine things; science probably couldn’t be done without them. But they are supposed to be the sort of things that can, in a pinch, be cashed. Lacking a serious and literal construal of ‘selection for’, adaptationism founders on this methodological truism.

The delicious irony here is the question of objectivity. Yeats famously asked: "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" As Wittgenstein pointed out later, we can't separate what we know from how we know (Hume reached much the same conclusion). Which means we can never truly see the world outside of our place in it, and our experience of it.

Which brings us back to the problem of the will. This limitation is, of course, the favorite cudgel taken up against religious belief, usually by people with a very poor knowledge of what religious belief actually is. But it underscores the "log in your eye, splinter in mine" problem. Or rather, the problem of metaphor.

Natural selection, we like to say, is a "mechanism," as if that makes it both (a) scientific and (b) therefor true (because "machine" is not a religious metaphor). But before the Industrial Revolution, the metaphor of "machine" would not have seemed, well, "natural." It was only after the "Computer Revolution" that we began to speak of the "mind" (whatever that is) as a "computer." It isn't, of course. The computer I am typing on now can no more think than the half-eaten scone sitting in front of me. It is merely a device which produces output based on certain limited inputs. It doesn't draw the amount of knowledge from its environment that a spider is capable of doing, or a cockroach. It no more seeks knowledge than the coffee I drink "seeks" to cool off. It isn't even proper to say it 'responds' to input. This computer does no such think. It functions, like the car I drive. It is a mechanism, and nothing more. It certainly is not, in any true manner, "human."

Yet when faced with a complex process that seems to follow some guidance, that seems to respond at least to environmental factors (if no other factors are allowed play in the explanation), we fall back on the metaphor of "mechanism." This is not a weakness, unless we fail to see that metaphor is what we are using. The medieval mind was quite comfortable with metaphor, especially in the form of allegory. Stained glass windows in the Gothic cathedrals which mean little to us because we lack the context of the original audience, were as profound and meaningful to the original audience as a movie or a novel is today. Dante's profound allegory of life reflected in his Divine Comedy was understood as a window on reality, not a portrayal of it. Those who made the mistake of taking it as a travelogue of the afterlife were as guilty of counting angels dancing on the heads of pins as those today who think there actually is an identifiable "mechanism" which science can uncover. As Thomas Kuhn pointed out, our paradigms are not revelations of the reality we examine; they are products of the way we look. And when enough data is assembled to make the current paradigm useless, to render it unable to answer the questions being put to it, it collapses, and a "paradigm shift" occurs. But what does not occur is a progressive step away from ignorance and toward deeper understanding of some Platonic reality.

Metaphor is our way of organizing information so that we can examine it; but it is not linked to reality itself. It is the stuff dreams are made on, not the stuff of the cosmos itself. "Mechanism" is already a dangerous metaphor to put our faith in. We come perilously close to the discredited "cosmic watchmaker" attempt to prove God's existence, when we explain the ways of the world by relying on terms like "mechanism." That proof runs like this: if you find a watch in a field, you don't need to see the watchmaker build it, to posit that the watch is indeed a product of design, not merely of "blind" natural forces. Where there is design, there must be a designer, and so if the watch is a metaphor for the cosmos and it's fantastically intricate systems, then the designer must be God. There are several problems with this "proof," but the one that's interesting now is the mistake of the metaphor. The watch, after all, is designed to serve a single purpose. The purpose of the universe, if it has one, is not so obvious. It is as likely to be the product of random physical forces as to be the product of purposeful design. A watch has a telos, and from that a designer can easily be proposed; but what is the telos of the universe? You can't answer that question without first assuming there is, or is not, a designer; and so your argument becomes no argument at all, but merely a tautology. In the end, the "proof" proves nothing.

So is evolution a "mechanism," a device for, say, propagating genes? If so, who designed the mechanism? No one, you say. Well then, it has no purpose, and cannot be purposeful, except as we attribute purpose to it. So, then, can genes, for example, be "selfish"? Can they seek to propagate themselves? From where do they derive this will, this desire, this telos? Isn't telos a function of consciousness? The Greeks certainly thought so. They set us on this path of discerning purpose by conceiving the nature of the cosmos as chaos, chaos upon which the logos imposed order. The logos, of course, is reason; it is the most human of human functions. But the nature of this philosophy is profoundly tragic, in precisely the sense Aristotle meant about Sophocles' plays. It is tragic because chaos eventually overcomes logos, and order disappears again into disorder. If the universe moves toward purpose in any way, even if only for living things to propogate their own genes, that is an idea derived from Christianity, from the belief that the Second Coming of Christ will restore the cosmic order promised by the prophets during the Babylonian Exile, that human history is therefore moving toward that final, apocalyptic moment. The validity of that interpretation of the teachings of Paul and Jesus is another matter entirely, but its impact on Western civilization, for better or worse, is beyond argument. We come back, in rather abrupt fashion, to where we started: with the question of will. Is it possible to be selfish without a sense of will? Is it possible to understand the world without looking in the mirror of ourselves, of how we know the world?

Philosophers have tackled this question; what is interesting is how few scientists understand it. There is, as Hume pointed out, a gap between data and interpretation, and we continue to founder on Hume's distinction between synthetic and analytical statements. Analytical statements about reality are pointlessly trivial, and synthetic statements are either true and meaningless, or false and, also, meaningless. We have, in other words, the data; but we can abstract nothing significant from it. Kant, of course, would disagree; but to follow Kant you have to allow idealism into your thinking, and then we are back to wrestling with metaphysics. Something the medieval mind had no trouble with doing, of course; but that highlights the problem for the modern mind more neatly than any metaphor could do. The medieval mind understood it was thinking in metaphor, and accepted it. We run the constant risk of confusing our metaphors with reality, and concluding we understand far more than we actually do.

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

The "log in the eye" problem is that we are, as fundamentally as we are anything, self-centered creatures. We can never quite imagine that what we experience is not universal, is not a profound reflection of the nature of the cosmos. We never quite stop being the infant who can make no distinction between self and other, or even all that is beyond our immediate grasp. So we see in the cosmos what we know in ourselves. Our metaphors reflect this: "mechanism" and "computer" are shorthand for complex issues we can't, or won't, think properly about, and we assure ourselves they are "true" pictures of the world because they are examples of our masterly "progress," by which we mean nothing more than the exertion of our power in the physical world. Funny how it all comes back to power, isn't it? At one time, we are told, we felt powerless, and so we attributed to nature the characteristics and conditions of our human psyches. Now, having attained enough power to reshape the climate of the planet (albeit unintentionally), to turn the materials of the earth into tools and energy, to raise crops in places that, left to nature, would be deserts, we say we have withdrawn our anthropomorphization from the deities we presumed and projected, and declared ourselves lords of creation. Oddly, however, despite these "advances," the anthrophomorphism goes on. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

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

What Digby said

goes a little deeper than this. Digby calls it "Post-Modern Serfdom," but it's as old as human community.

We come back, again and again, to the issues of utilitarianism (and, no surprise, I found the Digby link through Paul Krugman's blog. What's the connection? Well, Krugman's an economist, and utilitarianism underlies economic theory). The center of utilitarianism, of course, is "enlightened self-interest," which is nothing more or less than the acceptance of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin. That is, the assumption is that we are all selfish, but if we pursue goals which are "enlightened," i.e., which to some degree or another move us toward altruism and away from selfishness, but retain a self-interest in the outcome which we cannot forego (there's the "original sin," the basso continuo we can't write out of the composition of human nature), then the rising tide of self-interested altruism will float all boats.

It's not an idea confined to economics, by the way. Barbara Tuchman has written a book analyzing different historical events, including the Vietnam War, and analysing them as failures of national enlighted self-interest. Why, in other words, do even nations continually act agains their own self-interests? We could ask that again today, with regard to our "War on Terror." As Frank Rich quoted on Sunday:

“We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture,” said Henry Kolm, 90, an M.I.T. physicist whose interrogation of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, took place over a chessboard. George Frenkel, 87, recalled that he “never laid hands on anyone” in his many interrogations, adding, “I’m proud to say I never compromised my humanity.”

Which brings us back to Digby's observation.

“We have always known<" quotes Krugman in another column, "that heedless self-interest was bad morals.” He is quoting F.D.R. He goes on:

“We know now that it is bad economics.” These words apply perfectly to climate change. It’s in the interest of most people (and especially their descendants) that somebody do something to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but each individual would like that somebody to be somebody else. Leave it up to the free market, and in a few generations Florida will be underwater.

And the solution, of course, is a utilitarian one: enlightened self-interest.

The solution to such conflicts between self-interest and the common good is to provide individuals with an incentive to do the right thing.

Well, I suppose; but I'm more inclined to Auden's answer (one he himself rejected as too idealistic: "New styles of architecture. A change of heart."

Enlightened self-interest too easily turns into the self-interest which enlightens me; not the self-interest which leads to enlightenment. The problem with an analysis that leads to the common good arising from individuals having an incentive to "do the right thing" is that the incentive mentioned is usually "by doing something for yourself that just happens to help someone else." On that path we end up with the kind of charitable giving I mention below, and the self-interest is seldom all that enlightened. It may be functional (to a point), but it is function that serves a few while relying on a system that still exploits the many. You get to eat your cake and have it too, in other words. Which, in the long run, is neither enlightened nor finally, in your self-interest (which you may not live to see, but eventually you will have eaten the sour grapes which set your childrens' teeth on edge). Sure it's bad economics, but until the bubble bursts, we can all enjoy the ride! And when the bubble finally does burst, we can always find someone else to take the blame. I lived in Austin through the 1980's when insane real estate speculation led to a bursting real estate bubble that left the city with the highest per capita percentage of empty office space in the country (and Austin is still not that large a city, 20 years later), and a huge number of abandoned houses. The real estate speculators, of course, blamed the environmentalists who constantly fight to preserve the natural beauty of the Austin area which draws so much real estate development in the first place. Sound familiar? As the housing bubble continues to burst in the national economy, look for more and more complaints directed at those who had nothing to do with the speculation; but don't look for any mea culpas from those who did. "Enlightened self-interest" keeps the focus on what is in my self-interest; and the first principle of self-interest is self-preservation. "Enlightened" self-preservation tends to be the luxury of those who are already secure in their own needs, and feel able to give out of what they have left.

What does this have to do with Digby? Well, quite simply, in a market based culture where everything is for sale, it is quite logical to think that even a gift of charitable giving is actually a purchase, and a purchase is always an exchange, never really a gift. When we think of gift, we think of something given without expectation of return, but when we give we always expect a return. We expect at least an acknowledgement, a "thank-you," a smile, a bit of gratitude. We never give without expecting something back, and the difference between giving a quarter to a homeless person who says "God Bless You" or holding a poor relative for ransom for the "gift" of $100 a month is only a difference in degree, not in kind. When I lived in a parsonage and had money from a church to offer to those in need, I never asked what they would do with the money. I know some pastors who only hand out food, or fast-food coupons, so the money isn't spent on liquour. Perhaps I should have done the same, but I never asked where the money would go, because I wasn't buying them or their burdens; I was offering help, and leaving it to them to take it or abuse it. But this is not a practice or a custom confined to the US because it espouses "free-market capitalism." It's a human trait as old as human community itself.

There is a reason so much of the Mosaic law is concerned with care for the poor and the powerless, for the widow and the orphan (real categories who also symbolize those with the least access to the necessities society provides, or is supposed to provide). There is a reason Israel had to be constantly reminded of its obligations to such classes of persons, and why the prophets returned again and again to the question of justice as a question of what you did for the least of these. Jesus didn't invent anything when he tells the disciples in Matthew "Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me," he simply radicalized the Psalmist, who repeatedly says that God sits with the poor and the powerless. It is a reminder, constantly, of who the society should take care of, else what is a society for? And it is not an argument of enlightened self-interest. It's a simple matter of justice.

So I don't think Digby has it quite right here:

And this impulse (which is not confined to the right although they're the ones who seem to make a fetish of it --- at least since the temperance movement ran out of gas) is why government programs were developed in enlightened, modern Western societies in the first place. Charity robs the recipient of the dignity and personal liberty to which all people have a claim, rich, poor or in the middle. Using government to act as the safety net instead of the good will (or good mood) of those of means allows that.

Government can be just as crushing as private charity. I remember trying to help a woman who needed medical care, but the only way she could qualify was to divorce her husband so the house they owned couldn't be counted as an asset; that was the barrier to her receipt of any medical aid. That law has since been changed, but if I remember it, by definition this wasn't that long ago. Government charity in America has never come without strings. The "Graeme Frost" affair which prompted the post Digby is responding to did not leap sui generis from the forehead of Michelle Malkin or some commenter on a right-wing blog. It is a concept with roots in Charles Dickens' Victorian England. It is a concept as old as "God helps those who help themselves." It is a concept which has its roots in the history of human community. And it wasn't enlightened, modern Western societies which began public charities, or took it away from the good will or good mood of the private sector. That root actually goes back to the Church.

Kings of England, for all too brief a period, brought in beggars from the kingdom so that, on Good Friday, in an enactment of the "sacrament that wasn't" from the Gospel of John, the king would bathe their feet and then give them gifts as a sign of the king's recognition that God was with the poor. Not exactly charitable relief of their poverty, but a humbling act that recognized the words of Jeremiah:

Think of your father; he ate and drank,
dealt justly and fairly; all went well with him.
He upheld the cause of the lowly and poor;
then all was well."--Jeremiah 22:16

The custom didn't last long. Too soon the king grew tired of such humility, and the act faded into giving gifts from the royal treasury, without even the king's attendance. Michel Foucault opens his book on society and healthcare with the anecdote about the last of the leprosy colonies, colonies run on the Continent largely by the church. There was even a ceremony for removing the leper from society. As he was dragged backward out of the church to be transported to the colony, the priest would bless him and pronounce him a blessing on the community, a reminder that God was with the least and the least wanted. God, presumably, should stay out of the church when contagious, though, or badly disfigured, but still the charitable act came from the church, which in concert with the state prevailed on the monarch to provide for the destitute. This was something monarchs did, not just out of enlightened self-interest, but either out or nobless oblige, or simply because the church directed them to. The reasons, of course, would vary, but to say "enlightened, modern Western society" invented a better form of public charity, is to assume all public charity before that always followed what the French today would call the "Anglo-Saxon model."

But that model, of value for value, is the one we are stuck with in this country, for better or worse. Clearly the Scandinavian countries, to pick an example, have a different view of how society should be organized. It may be a better view, but only if you accept the premises they have accepted. Until the society does, that model won't work in this country. So we fall back on the notion of "enlightened self-interest," or "utilitarianism," or "the greatest good for the greatest number." And enlightened self-interest never quite gets beyond what I can see as a benefit to me, rather than what simply serves simple human dignity.

When I was a student in seminary, I was struck one day by a charitable campaign in the small town I was living in. Men were "selling" penny pieces of candy for $1.00, or however much more you wanted to give. The money went to a charity, of course, but it was apparently so much easier, without a celebrity-driven national telethon to fall back on, or the symbolism of fireman (who represent selfless public servants), to give something in exchange for the donation. Since we would never see the effects of our largesse, we needed some catalyst to open our pocketbooks, and a piece of candy was it. Is it really surprising, then, that we still see charity, by and large, as a matter of purchase, of exchange, of an economy in which I should seek a return on my investment?

The sharp-eyed will have noted that there's little seeming difference between the challenge of Jeremiah to the king, and the notion of "enlightened self-interest." There is, of course, quite a distinction, and it isn't based on a "God will smite thee" kind of ethics. Doing "the right thing" because you are the king and charged with that responsibility is quite different from "doing the right thing" because it will aid you in the end. The former is a burden of power and duty; the latter is a way of avoiding responsibility by assuring yourself that what you want can actually help others out. The king, after all, can easily justify his fine palace (which is what Jeremiah is criticizing) as a necessity of governance, much as the much hallowed (and poorly understood) Solomon defended his need for power and arms (and, thus, more and more wealth) as actually being in the best interests of Israel (in the end, it wasn't. In the end, God was right, and Israel would have been better off without kings (a statement made before there was a throne for David to ascend to). There is an almost straight line from Solomon to the Exile, but the line is so long that few would have denounced the consequences of Solomonic rule on the basis of "enlightened self-interest," since the results would be felt by their children's children's children, and were largely unforseeable in Solomon's time. The problem with enlightened self-interest, in a nutshell, is that my self-interest no more inevitably leads to the good of all than your self-interest does. It's that old problem of what Christians call "original sin" again. That, and the sad, sad truth that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I have no doubt the torturers in the CIA have intentions every bit as good as those of George Frenkel; but the differences between them couldn't be more stark, the results more disastrous, in the former case, for the common good. Thus it has been; thus it will always be.

It does not, of course, have to be this way. But changing it will require more than mere "enlightenment."

Blink

Simply start with the first words of Isaiah, and where do you end up?

Let the heavens and the earth give ear,
for it is the Lord who speaks:
I reared children and brought them up,
but they have rebelled against me.
An ox knows its owner
and a donkey its master’s stall;
but Israel lacks all knowledge,
my people have no discernment.
You sinful nation, a people weighed down with iniquity,
a race of evildoers, children whose lives are depraved,
who have deserted the Lord,
spurned the Holy One of Israel,
and turned your backs on him!

(Isaiah 1:2-4, REB)

So far, sounds like the preaching of any televangelist railing against the iniquitous Sodom and Gomorrah which they say is America. Hey, that’s not a coincidence!

Your country is desolate, your cities burnt down.
Before your eyes strangers devour your land;
it is as desolate as Sodom after its overthrow.
Only Zion is left,
like a watchman’s shelter in a vineyard,
like a hut in a plot of cucumbers,
like a beleagured city.
Had the Lord of Hosts not left us a few survivors,
we should have become like Sodom,
no better than Gomorrah.

Should I stop here to point out the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was not homosexuality, but being inhospitable to strangers? Isaiah continues on with the metaphor; addressing Jerusalem, he says to them:

Listen to the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom;
Give ear to the teaching of our God, you people of Gomorrah:
Your countless sacrifices, what are they to me?, says the Lord
I am sated with whole offerings of rams and the fat of well-fed cattle….
Who has asked you for all this?
…
To bring me offerings is futile;
The reek of sacrifice is abhorrent to me.
…
When you hold out your hands in prayer,
I shall turn away.
Though you offer countless prayers,
I shall not listen; there is blood on your hands.
Wash and be clean;
Put away your evil deeds far from my sight;
Cease to do evil, learn to do good.
Pursue justice, guide the oppressed;
Uphold the rights of the fatherless,
And plead the widow’s cause.

And there it is: the problem of Jerusalem, the problem in Israel, is the problem in Thebes at the beginning of “Oedipus Rex.” Injustice is being allowed, and this brings the righteous wrath of punishment. But there is no mystery here, no caprice, no doomed birth foretold which the attempt to escape such a dreadful fate has simply established. There are no innocents suffering for the prophecy given to Jocasta and learned by Oedipus long after the fact. Israel itself, the people themselves, are guilty, and why? Because they have ceased to do good and learned to do evil. And what is this evil? They no longer guide the oppressed; they no longer uphold the cause of the fatherless; they no longer plead the widow’s cause. In sum: they no longer do justice. They are not condemned for their religious practices: like Thebes under Oedipus, they are condemned by their own hand, and God merely pronounces the judgment.

But God is just, and God is fair, so God calls for a discussion, an argument, and offers hope:

Now come, let us argue this out, says the Lord.
Though your sins are scarlet,
They may yet be white as snow;
Though they are dyed crimson,
They may become white as wool.
If you are willing to obey,
You will eat the best that earth yields;
But if you refuse and rebel,
The sword will devour you.
The Lord himself has spoken.

And here, by the way, the comparison to Oedipus and Thebes completely falls down. The fate of Oedipus is set in stone; it must work its inexorable way out. By even trying to avoid the dread prophecy, Oedipus and Jocasta have set it in concrete, and they bear the requisite responsibility for their actions which makes the play a tragedy. But back in Jerusalem, what is the problem? Again, it is not a question of blind obedience to Pecksniffian laws. It is a question of justice:

How the faithful city has played the whore!
Once the home of justice where righteousness dwelt,
She is now inhabited by murderers.
Your silver has turned to dross and your fine liquor is diluted with water.
Your rulers are rebels, associates of thieves;
Every one of them loves a bribe and chases after gifts;
They deny the fatherless their rights,
And the widow’s cause is never heard.

Which causes God to pronounce a change in Israel, but that change will come when God “Makes your judges what once they were, and your counselors like those of old.” And: “Zion will be redeemed by justice and her returning people by righteousness.” The punishment is, in other words, not God’s wrath, but the consequences of the people’s actions. The recovery from those consequences is already promised in the announcement of the verdict. But one more time, for emphasis: the problem is not faithlessness, or a failure to follow some minor Levitican dictate, not some tiny divergence from a rigid and demanding religious law. No, the problem is “They deny the fatherless their rights, and the widow’s cause is never heard.” And the solution will be a reset to re-establish that justice in the land.

Examples of this abound; indeed, justice and injustice are the major themes of the prophets, and the primary reason why Israel was forced into Exile by Babylon (the prophets all write to explain why Babylon was allowed to take Israel captive, and why God would return the children of Abraham to Jerusalem). What it is usually twisted into, though, is a much more human scale agenda, and one that doesn’t require any effort from participants except to identify who is “us” and who is “them.” What it is usually turned into is the Idea, and the Idea is perfect, the Idea is the “Saviour,” and what always fails us is those entrusted to serve and protect the Idea. Sort of like this:

Still, I find Hitchens' piggy-backing on a dead American soldier a rather cheap and easy way to express his penance, such as it is. There's the predictable Orwell/Barcelona reference, which suggests that Hitchens still thinks that the invasion of Iraq was undertaken for "noble" purposes, but was "hijacked by goons and thugs, and where betrayal and squalor negated the courage and sacrifice of those who fought on principle."

from Dennis Perrin

The Idea is always a noble purpose, and its failure is always the result of being “hijacked by goons and thugs,” or men in police or military uniforms. There is always a distance, a remove, between the Idea and those who uphold it, because even for an avowed atheist like Christopher Hitchens, the Idea is holy, and none may touch it lest they sully it, pollute it, degrade it and take from it its essential purity.

It is an alluring notion, because it draws a line between "insiders" and "outsiders," between "Us" and "Them." “We” are the ones who protect the Idea; “they” are the ones who would defile it. The lines shift constantly; those in uniform who should protect the Idea can become “men in military uniforms” who have in fact betrayed our trust; and the line is redrawn to exclude them. “We” stay inside the line, “we” protect the idea; and the circle of insiders becomes smaller and smaller as the Idea fails, again and again, to deliver on its promise. It is never that the Idea fails; it is the supporters of the Idea who are weak.

Bill Moyers ran a story that is merely a variation of this theme: Christian evangelicals who have become Israel's BFF because they think they are playing a substantial role in the coming Apocalypse. The very idea of an Apocalypse is not one widely embraced by Christianity, though you can be forgiven for thinking that it is. Those who espouse it can always produce colorful charts and fearsome pictures and, as Hollywood knows, disaster sells. So it always has been, and always will be, a popular theme. And whenever the noise from that clamor grows too loud, I put on one of my favorite CD's of early vocal music: "1000: A Mass for the End of Time", by Anonymous Four. The subtitle is: "Medieval Chant and Polyphony for the Ascension." It is music chosen to explore "dread of the Last Judgment and fear of the end of the world which pervaded late tenth-century thought." Wars and rumors of wars, indeed.

We've been here before. We'll be here again. But the real allure of apocalyptic vision is for those who think they are "inside" the sacred circle, where they can look with pity or smug satisfaction on those who will find the circle unbroken and against them. It is, at heart, the Idea that matters; the Idea that will finally come, triumphant, establish itself with power and finality, and put an end to all quarrels and troubles by destroying, in blood and fire and doom and horror, those who are not worthy to stand within the charmed circle. The only difference between the tenth century and the twenty-first century, is that the tenth century feared the judgment of God. In the 21st century, those who anticipate, seem to be waiting gleefully for justice to be done against others. They are quite secure justice will pass over them like the Angel of Death in the land of Egypt.

Christianity calls this attitude the sin of pride, and connects it to Original Sin. But that is another matter.

We are talking about the power of the Idea, of the central concept which cannot suffer change or loss or diminishment, which will always be true and always bring salvation, if only its ministers and priests prove themselves worthy of its virtue. It is hard to slip a piece of paper between the fanaticism of Christopher Hitchens and the fanaticism of John Hagee, though they would think themselves bitterest enemies. Both imagine a world which will only be cleansed of evil when enough blood has been spilt, enough tears shed, enough bodies stacked up that even the horses can't move through the sea of ichor that will cover their imagined battlefield. Apocalypse by the hand of God or by the hand of this busy monster manunkind is the same apocalypse aimed toward the same end: Armageddon, Ragnarok, the end of history but the establishment, not of chaos, but of the millenia, the final peace. For both Hagee and Hitchens, peace can only come when all enemies are destroyed. It is, ultimately, a very lonely, very empty, world they long for.

It is also a very human world. All too human.

This comment by Richard Cohen is a prime example of the supremacy of the Idea over reality:

In 2003, this mass murderer [Saddam Hussein] — responsible for millions of dead and some 25 million psychologically crippled Iraqis — is removed in a bungled American-led invasion, undertaken under false pretenses, beset from the beginning by incompetence and hubris on a massive scale, marked by miscalculation on everything from U.S. troop levels to the impact of an American-propelled social revolution that thrust the long suppressed Shia to power. It is certain that things could have been handled better.

Cohen's reasoning here is almost wholly Platonic. The Idea is everything. The Idea is sacrosanct and sacred and always sound. It is the priests of the Idea who let us down, never the Idea itself. Blessed be the name of the Idea!

This is a theology (which is what it is) often espoused in Christianity; but it shouldn't be. It is one Protestantism especially is prone to, as Protestantism doesn't have a central authority that can steer churches away from temporal (immediate) concerns and offer the guidance of the eternal (long-established doctrines). Not that the latter doesn't create its own set of almost intractable problems; but each form (no central authority; strong central authority) creates its own weaknesses.

The first and fundamental problem with this idea is: it is not Biblical. This is not the God of Abraham. This is not the God of Isaac, or Jacob, or even Jesus. God as Idea is the God of the Greeks, of the Hellenists, of those who think reason will finally raise us above our "animal" nature, as if reason were not as human as our emotions. Indeed, the elevation of reason to the source of salvation is just another Idea, another way of abandoning responsibility so that, as in the Dr. Who episode "Blink,” we become creatures of the abstract, devouring potential and depriving our victims of the life they would have lead. It is no coincidence that the creatures in that show are angels; stone angels. As the Doctor says, you can’t kill stone.

Neither can you kill an Idea. But selling all to possess it is the ultimate abstraction. Perhaps this is what Jesus meant when he said:

The Kingdom of God is like this

A trader sold all his merchandise to buy a single pearl

(But how is the Kingdom of God like that?)

John Dominic Crossan, The Essential Jesus (New York: HarperSanFranciscso, 1994, 1st ed.), p. 93

The question Crossan adds at the end is the question of the audience: How is the Kingdom of Heaven like that? But isn’t that what we want the kingdom to be? An idea we can possess, can call our own, and we would give up everything to have it? But if that is the kingdom, and we can obtain it by purchase, any purchase, and if it costs not less than everything, what have we gained? A pearl is only valuable if you are willing to trade it. You can’t eat it. It can’t shelter or clothe you. It can’t even buy you a place in the eternal dwellings, unless you sell it again. If the pearl is the Idea you must have, then once you have purchased it, what good is it to you? The value of a pearl is completely in the abstract. You have sold your entire potential just to have it. So what do you have now?

But if your ideal is in justice, in how the fatherless and the widow (the weakest, the poorest, the least defended) are treated, then your ideal is concrete, not abstract. If your focus is on how others are treated, how society regards them, how they are cared for, then your ideal is justice, not what you possess. If you are paying attention to the lot of others, you aren’t paying attention to the boundary lines. And if you aren’t paying attention to the boundary lines, you are paying attention to people. Which is the beginning of hospitality; which is one of the real purposes of the law, and of society: it’s a way of caring for one another.

The Last Word on the Unswept Floor

Time Magazine:

"My son Graeme has helped put on a human face, that of a young boy, representing the needs of children and families across this nation. We are a hard working family that has stepped forward to support SCHIP. Mudslinging from the fringe has now been directed at the messenger. To be smeared all over the Internet and receive nasty e-mail — my family does not deserve this retribution. It is both shameful and pathetic.

"Driven by a most dubious agenda, shortsighted cut-and-paste bloggers, lacking all the facts, have made a feeble attempt at being crack reporters. This is an aberrant attempt to distract the American people from what the real issues are. Hard working American families need affordable health insurance.

"I find it morally reprehensible, and the act of a true coward, to publicly (world wide) smear a man and his family and not sign one's own real name to what they have written. I sign my name to what I write.

-Halsey Frost"

He also passed along a letter from a friend, Andrew Gray, who wrote: "Chances are, Bonnie, Halsey and their kids will survive this. The sad reality is that they've already been through much worse. But what does it say about us as a nation that we seek to destroy the reputations of those we should honor? Have we become so cynical and nasty that we no longer can recognize simple courage and decency?"

The Unswept Floor

Well, that stirred things up a bit. I return to the topic one last time only to underline that I meant no disrespect nor disagreement with the interest Atrios, Thers, or any other blogger has shown in it. You blog what you want to blog. I was only using them, and the controversy, as examples of what gets people's interest.

The whole mess is like a grisly car wreck we can't look away from; and many people are justifiably upset with the way the family in the center of this melee is being treated by perfect strangers who should know better (there is more than one post on hospitality to tie in there). But my point was, and remains, that the critics of the Democrats are still setting the terms of the discussion. It may be emotionally satisfying to respond them in this case, but is it wise?

Aye, there's the rub.

The subtext of my concern is even deeper, and harder to get at. But fortunately for me, Rudy Giuliani summed it up perfectly:

"America has the 'strongest economy on earth, it is the last best hope of humanity.' "

I was reading an art history book this morning (don't ask) when I came across a reference to the picture, above. It's a Roman mosaic meant to reproduce the floor of a Roman villa, where the custom was to sweep what was unwanted from the table onto the floor, to be swept up later. The book pointed out the Romans gave public dinners, quite different from the private ones the Greeks were accustomed to. Part of the reason for such public intimacies was conspicuous consumption: the Romans, the text noted, wanted to show off their wealth, something very different from the Greeks, who had a less materialistic lifestyle. The mosaic, then, is a display of ostentation, an example of one's ability to provide so much food for a meal for many people, that food could be swept up and thrown away. Such wealth, of course, is a function of empire. And what empire provides, it always provides at a cost.

I've no doubt the Romans, for quite a long time, thought their imperial economy was the greatest in the world, and the last best hope of humanity. Indeed, the idea of an economy as the hope of humanity is why Augustine wrote The City of God. He had to defend Christians from being blamed for the collapse of the empire which had provided such wealth for so long, but which couldn't do it forever. When the "last best hope of humanity" finally failed, someone had to offer an alternative.

But an economy is a cycle of exchange; and hospitality breaks that cycle. If all we have to offer is just another variation on an old theme, then, are we really offering anything? My critique of the argument in left blogistan is not personal; it is theological:

The Roman Empire was based on the common principle of peace through victory, or, more fully, on a faith in the sequence of piety, war, victory, and peace.

Paul was a Jewish visionary following in Jesus' footsteps, and they both claimed that the Kingdom of God was already present and operative in this world. He opposed the mantras of Roman normalcy with a vision of peace through justice, or, more fully, with a faith in the sequence of covenant, nonviolence, justice, and peace. In Search of Paul, xi.

I like to look at this mosaic now, and think of it as one metaphor for hospitality. There are better versions of hospitality than this. And, I think, better ways of establishing hospitality in the world, than arguing with those who don't share your vision. If I am going to step away from the ways of empire, from "faith in the sequence of piety, war, victory, and peace," I not only have to step away from it, I have to replace it with something better.

Aye, there's the rub, again.

Blogistan's Controversy du jour

Atrios has covered the controversy three times in two days. He got it from Whiskey Fire, where Thers is still debating those who would debate the topic of even allowing the Graemes to speak in public. Apparently Atrios linking to Thers upped the latter's traffic by 30,000+. Which displays no small amount of interest in left blogistan.

Now it's at Firedoglake, and everyone is quoting the same facts from Think Progress:

1) Graeme has a scholarship to a private school. The school costs $15K a year, but the family only pays $500 a year.

2) His sister Gemma attends another private school to help her with the brain injuries that occurred due to her accident. The school costs $23,000 a year, but the state pays the entire cost.

3) They bought their “lavish house” sixteen years ago for $55,000 at a time when the neighborhood was less than safe.

4) Last year, the Frost’s made $45,000 combined. Over the past few years they have made no more than $50,000 combined.

5) The state of Maryland has found them eligible to participate in the CHIP program.

We're even down to the point (via ScoutPrime at First Draft) of knowing there is no asset requirement for aid in Maryland, only an income requirement. And still the "Mighty Wurlitzer" whirls on. And why are we surprised?

How many times has that blog post been repeated stating the facts of the financial situation of this family. And that is relevant because? Well, because Malkin and the right-wing bloggers started it, that's why, and their facts MUST BE REFUTED!

And does Malkin & Co care that you are refuting their facts? No. They only care that you respond. They only care that you spell their names right. They only care that you dance when they pull the strings.

This is trolling raised to an art form.

When do we finally stop feeding the trolls, and take the conversation back to the subject of health care? Scout Prime raises the most salient point of all: we have been able, in the past, to decide that people shouldn't have to bankrupt themselves in order to have health care. So some states (at least) did not take asset value into account (after all, the greatest value of a home is that you can live in it) when determining need for health care. Why have we decided to abandon that? Have we decided to abandon that?

Yes, stories about people are "red meat" which inspire all manner of invective and passion and interest, and yes, the tactics of Malkin & Co. are despicable, especially in this case. But why do we keep arguing with them on their terms?

Why do we keep feeding the trolls, and then wondering why the Democrats in Congress don't ignore the Bush White House and do the right thing? Is it that pesky speck in their eye, log in our own, again?

My Vacation at the Reichenbach Falls

Which makes more sense if you know that one of Dom Crossan's early books on parables was Cliffs of Fall. But even then, it's not much of a pun.

SPIRITUALITY IS PRACTICALITY

Spirituality is practicality. That is where I want to begin. And I want you to understand that as a concrete statement, not as an abstract one, as a nice ideal of what spirituality should be but can only be for saints and monastics and maybe a few rare priests. Spirituality is practicality. In fact, it is the most practical thing of all. And spirituality is never more practical than when it is practiced as hospitality. That is actually my thesis, that hospitality is spirituality in practice. But before we can understand that, we have to get down the simple terms of hospitality:

Hospitality requires a stranger, a host, and a place. The stranger must be a stranger: not a guest, a relative, a friend, an acquaintance. And the host must be in charge of the place, must have authority to give access to the place to the stranger. The host must have responsibility for the place, and must give use that responsibility to give access to it to the stranger. The host and the stranger must be unknown to each other, because hospitality requires, above all, vulnerability.

Doesn’t sound very practical, does it? And yet this is the core of Christian spirituality. And a spirituality that is not practiced is not a spirituality; it is simply a nice idea, a pleasant notion, a comforting concept. “The Spirit blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it,” Jesus says in the Gospel of John; but he doesn’t say the spirit rests someplace. It may rest upon you for a moment, it may inspire you to speak by tongues of flame, as on the day of Pentecost, but it never rests with you, it never stays in you and finds a home and comfort there. The Holy Spirit is always active, always moving, always effecting us when it comes by. The Holy Spirit is activity, is practice, is known by its movement; it is not a comforting idea that gives us peace and tranquility. “The peace of God, it is no peace, but strife sown in the sod,” the old hymn goes. That could be describing hospitality, since hospitality is all about vulnerability, about opening oneself to the stranger, whether the stranger is guest or the stranger is host. And the fact is, the scriptures are rife with stories of hospitality. Take this one, for instance:

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)

When I say the scriptures are full of stories of hospitality, I don’t mean the scripture stories are only lessons about hospitality. Well, not lessons in the sense of “Go, thou, and do likewise.” This is one of those stories preachers don’t like, because they prefer the “Go, thou, and do likewise” kind of stories; and clearly the lesson of that story is not to be an unjust steward, even though the steward seems to make the best of a bad situation. But it’s a story that, in its ending, is about hospitality; and we start with it because it sets a boundary, an edge, a terminus to our discussion, because it is an example of anti-hospitality. It is also, however, a very practical story. The steward’s reaction is such a clever one, such a practical response to what has happened to him, that even his master is impressed with his cheating. Selflessness, that primary Christian virtue, is too easily misunderstood by the children of this world; it is too often taken as foolishness and weakness. Selfishness is what the world teaches; that is a very practical virtue. Well, practical as the world understands that word.

This parable is also, though, an example of anti-hospitality. We have to consider that sometimes, Jesus tells us what not to do, perhaps because we are so determined to do it, to do what we want and call it “practical,” or call it “God’s will.” So here is the story of anti-hospitality: take care of yourself, make friends for yourself in this world, and you will buy your way into the eternal homes. But that is not hospitality; that is hostelry. You might secure yourself a room by making a payment like the steward makes, but when your credit runs out…well, hospitality you buy only lasts as long as your credit does. And while surely the homes Jesus speaks of are not truly “eternal” ones, the unjust steward’s credit is likely to run out even sooner. If you are going to rely on hospitality you have to rely on the kindness, not the self-interest, of strangers.

“Come for water, all who are thirsty;
Though you have no money, come, buy grain and eat;
Come, buy wine and milk,
Not for money, not for a price.
Why spend your money for what is not food,
Your earnings on what fails to satisfy?
Listen to me and you will fare well,
You will enjoy the fat of the land.
Come to me and listen to my words,
Hear me and you will have life:
I shall make an everlasting covenant with you
To love you faithfully as I have loved David.
I appointed him a witness to peoples,
And you in turn will summon nations you do not know,
And nations that do not know you will hasten to you,
Because the Lord your God, Israel’s Holy One, has made you glorious.—Isaiah 55:1-5 (REB)

Now those are words of hospitality. Those are words of God’s extravagant stewardship, of God’s open-handed generosity. This is the ultimate statement of what Walter Brueggeman calls the “covenantal economy” proclaimed by the law of Moses and the Hebrew Prophets and Jesus Christ himself. This is economy not for the greater good, or the enlightened self-interests of the individual, but for the neighborhood: for those you know and can know. Never forget that the “nation” of Israel meant tribes of related people. It’s a mistake to read “nation” in the Hebrew scriptures as a term congruent with the 19th century European political philosophy of nationalism. When the prophets say “the nations,” they mean the people, the groupings; the thousands and thousands of “neighborhoods” of the world. All strangers, and all welcome to Israel, all welcome in the generous hospitality of the Creator. It is that hospitality which will make Israel glorious.

Still doesn’t sound very practical, does it?

But God’s generosity is the most practical thing in the world. It is the practicality of food that cannot be bought still being offered for sale. It is the practicality of wine and milk and grain that you can buy and eat, even though you have no money, even though your money is no good. Do you appreciate the paradox? It is what you need offered to you in the way you understand, but it is not the way you understand at all. It is absolutely impractical and at the same time the essence of practicality. What is more practical than food and drink and summoning strangers you do not know, strangers who do not know you but who will come to you? What is more practical than the glory of God realized as hospitality for the whole world?

Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in the Lord his God:
Which made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that therein is: w hich keepeth truth forever:
Which executeth judgment for the oppressed: which giveth food to the hungery. The Lord looseth the prisoners:
The Lord openeth the eyes of the blind: the Lord raiseth them that are bowed down: the Lord loveth the righteous:
The Lord preserveth the strangers; he relieveth the fatherless and widow; but the way of the wicked he turneth upside down.
The Lord shall reign forever, even thy God, O Zion, unto all generations. Praise ye the Lord.

The Psalmist understands why we should praise God. The Psalmist understands that, in the end, we are all strangers to God and each other; we are all guests of this omnipotent host. The Psalmist understands where all good things come from and how God reverses the ways of the children of darkness. God raises those who are bowed down: so God reverses the world’s order. God loves the righteous; and in all the world, what does the world hate most except those who do right? But the penultimate stanza is my favorite of those: “The Lord preserveth the strangers; he relieveth the fatherless and widow; but the way of the wicked he turneth upside down.” God is the one who preserves the strangers; and God turns the ways of the wicked upside down.

If that isn’t hospitality, I don’t know what is.

Because the way of the wicked is to demand payment for everything that is given; to demand a system of exchange, an economy, a tit for tat, value given for value received. But who among us can repay even our parents for the gift of life? Who among us can begin to imagine repaying our Creator for the gift of our existence? The Psalmist got that part right, too:

When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;
What is man, that thou are mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou visitest him?

We are strangers before this Creator, and yet we are not treated as strangers at all. What wondrous love is this? We have done nothing, we have paid nothing, we have offered nothing, and yet we have all of this? Truly the way of the wicked God turns upside down, because this economy, this exchange, this cycle of give and get and give again, is undone by the extravagant generosity of God, by the unbelievable offer of food without price and wine and milk purchased without money. No wonder we stand perplexed when Jesus tells us: “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.” God turns the ways of the children of darkness upside down, because God’s way is not purchase and contract, but hospitality! Come, and listen, and nations will come to take what you offer!

It is wholly impractical; and it is completely practical. Listen:

After a while the stream dried up, for there had been no rain in the land. Then the word of the Lord came to him: “Go now to Zarephath, a village of Sidon, and stay there; I have commanded a widow there to feed you.’ He went off to Zarephath, and when he reached the entrance to the village, he saw a widow gathering sticks. He called to her, ‘Please bring me a little water in a pitcher to drink.’ As she went to fetch it, he called after her, ‘Bring me, please, a piece of bread as well.’ But she answered, “As the Lord your God lives, I have no food baked, only a handful of flour in a jar and a little oil in a flask. I am just gathering two or three sticks to go and cook it for my son and myself before we die.’ ‘Have no fear,’ Elijah said, ‘go and do as you have said. But first make me a small cake from what you have and bring it out to me, and after that make something for your son and yourself. For this is the word of the Lord the God of Israel: The jar of flour will not give out, nor the flask of oil fail, until the Lord sends rain on the land.’ She went and did as Elijah had said, and there was food for him and for her family for a long time. The jar of flour did not give out, nor did the flask of oil, as the word of the Lord foretold through Elijah. 1 Kings 17:7-16 (REB)

That is a story of hospitality which is wholly impractical, and yet wholly practical. “Go and do as you have said,” Elijah tells the widow. “But first make me a small cake…and bring it out to me, and after that make something for your son and yourself.” Hospitality is all about giving the stranger priority; it is about giving the stranger access to what is under your control. It is that hospitality, over and over again, which brings life ; because such hospitality is an act of faith. It is the extravagance of the gifts we have already been given which sometimes surprise us. To paraphrase Annie Dillard, God is profligate, but wastes nothing. God gives life to everyone. God causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike. We are all guests in God’s creation, we are all given stewardship over the creation, and responsibility for one another. Elijah doesn’t say: feed me first, you’ll get yours later. The widow doesn’t respond: I must think first of my child! They are both strangers; they are both guests. They are both responsible for one another. Had either failed to be impractical, the practical would have overwhelmed them. Having been impractical, having trusted to God’s extravagance, the practical saves them. What are we to say about such things, except to sweep every corner of the house until we find the lost coin, and then wake all the neighbors and tell them to join us in a celebration!

Or again, is there any woman with ten silver coins, who if she loses one, wouldn’t light a lamp and sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it? When she finds it, she invites her friends and neighbors over and says ‘Celebrate with me, because I have found the silver coin I had lost.’ Luke 15:8-9 (SV)

Is this hospitality? Of course it is! Is it practical? Of course it is! God is profligate, but wastes nothing! Hospitality shares everything, and expects everyone to share. It may be this woman is as profligate as the widow, and uses the coin she had lost to pay for a celebration for finding it. Is that too extreme an interpretation? Then consider the parable that Luke pairs with it:

Is there any one of you who owns a hundred sheep and one of them gets lost, who wouldn’t leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one that got lost until he finds it? And when he finds it, he lifts it upon his shoulders, happy. Once he gets home, he invites his friends and neighbors over, and says to them, ‘Celebrate with me, because I have found my lost sheep.’ Luke 15:4-6 (SV)

Luke is a bit vague, there. Does he mean the shepherd left the other 99 in the wilderness until he came back with the one sheep? Or does he mean he left them there and went home with the one sheep for the celebration? Either way, it is profligacy of a kind we can only label impractical. Where there are many and one, we always know the answer is to consider first the needs of the many; we always know the one must be sacrificed to keep the many whole. How much oil did that woman use, searching for that lost coin? What time did she call up her neighbors to celebrate something they knew nothing about? How many sheep did the shepherd endanger in searching for the one that was lost? Anyone first hearing Jesus’ words, hearing them without the centuries of interpretation we have layered down upon them, would hear that opening phrase: “Is there any one of you…?,” then hear the story, and think: if there is any one of us who would do that, he would be mad! But God turns the ways of the world upside down!
Listen. Listen to one more story, and you will see. It’s the one Luke gives us just after those two. But I’ve read you enough Scriptures tonight, and you know this story so well already. I’ll give you the shorter, non-canonical version:

A younger son requested and received his inheritance, went abroad, and wasted it all. Destitute in the midst of famine, he envied the swill of the swine he tended.

The younger son
I will return home where servants eat their fill
I will say to my father
I have sinned against you and God
I am not worthy to be your son
I will be your hired servant

The father saw him even before he reached the house, ran out, embraced, and kissed him.

The younger son
“I have sinned against you and God
I am not worthy to be your son”

The father

“Bring robes, and shoes, and a ring
Prepare a great feast
My lost son is found, my dead son is back.”

The elder son returned at evening form working in the fields, heard the sounds of music, and asked a servant what was happening.

The servant

“Your brother is back and your father feasts him”

He was angry, refused to enter the banquet hall, and complained when his father came out to speak with him

The elder son

“I, who have always obeyed you, have never received a feast
He, who has disgraced you, receives one now”

The father

“You are with me always and mine is yours forever
But now is the time for feasting
Your lost brother is found, your dead brother is back” (John Dominic Crossan, The Essential Jesus)

Is this a story of hospitality? Absolutely! The ending makes that clear. But the beginning of the story brings us back to the unjust steward, when he was not so shrewd. The younger son thinks he knows how to buy his way into the eternal homes, and he will do it by walking over his father’s corpse. You cannot, after all, demand your inheritance of a living person; you can only obtain an inheritance of the dead, after they are through using all the property they might ever have owned. So the demand of the younger son is the most distressing one possible: he tells his father: “You are dead to me. Now give me my money, so I can go away.” It is an act of the most brutal anti-hospitality, more breathtaking in its cruelty and vice than even the actions of the unjust steward. Youth is sometimes harsher than age, simply because it cannot imagine the consequences of its selfishness. But the father is truly and fully hospitable, and gives the boy what he asks. He gives him full control of the property, and lets him take that property with him. Well, we know what he does with it; but how the father responds is even more unexpected.
Not because he welcomes his son back, but because he does it with the elder son’s property. The father may still be the patriarch, but he is no longer the owner of what was once his. He has divided it among his sons. He has made himself dead, in complete vulnerability and acquiescence to the demands of his child, who acts as if he is a stranger to his own father and his own brother. The elder son honors his father and gives him a home, but the elder son is in possession of all that is there. So when the father gives away to the prodigal what actually belongs to the steadfast son, the father is not acting as God in the story: he is acting as God would desire. All that we have, comes from God. We are all like guests in God’s creation. When we share that creation in hospitality even with those who are our enemies (what is an enemy, after all, except someone who wishes you dead?), we are acting as God wants us to act. We are acting as God has already acted. The elder son is confused by this. Who wouldn’t be? The extravagance of God’s hospitality is seemingly impractical, yet it is the most practical thing of all. The practicality the world teaches only seems practical to us if we think the world is all there is. The unjust steward is being practical to buy his friends so they will take care of him; but his purchase is only as good as the value he gives, and when the value runs out, so do his friendships. The prodigal son is being practical to beg forgiveness of his father, but his father is extravagant, is wild, is mad, and welcomes him back with love. And what is love, except hospitality? And what is love, except impractical?

And yet it is the most practical thing of all. Because it, too, comes from God. And where would we be without it?

Spirituality is practicality. Practicality is hospitality. Hospitality is what is offered to the stranger. Who could ever doubt it? Who could ever doubt it is the workings of God’s love in this good, good world?

Amen.

Jon Stewart made me do it

I was going to quit. I really, really was. But then a lot of things happened, and I started to reconsider. The truth is, your comments made me do it. And if you want to berate me for rising from the dead, well, I can only say I really meant for this blog to "die." But I took care of the dead that were haunting me, instead (it was all in my head, anyway). So enough of that.

Jon Stewart is a good reason to return, too. This is too good to pass up commenting on:



Probably you've seen that. The next night, it got even better, as Stewart opened by apologizing for being antagonistic, but not for being ethical.

That's right; ethical. As he is quoted in this marvelous appreciation at Editor and Publisher:

"But there has to be some core of soul in there," Stewart replied. "There's nothing in this book about, 'Be good, be competent.'"

A bit later, he told Matthews:

If you live this book, your life will be strategy, and ... you'll be unhappy."

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics:

Let us examine this question, however, on another occasion; the self-sufficient we now define as that which when isolated makes life desirable and lacking in nothing; and such we think happiness to be; and further we think it most desirable of all things, without being counted as one good thing among others- if it were so counted it would clearly be made more desirable by the addition of even the least of goods; for that which is added becomes an excess of goods, and of goods the greater is always more desirable. Happiness, then, is something final and self-sufficient, and is the end of action.

Aristotle set out to define what behavior would bring happiness, and then advised pursuing that behavior. It's not too much of a diminution to say his book is about how to "be good, be competent." That is the chief goal of ethics (and the distinction from morality is a subtle one, but the terms are not necessarily coterminous). And that is all Stewart is complaining about: that Matthews has written an unethical book.

Behold what a controversy it stirs, however. Matthews is irate; Ted Koppel comes on the next night and stirs the ashes. Stewart has clearly overstepped the bounds of polite discourse. Why? Because he dared to be ethical rather than, like Mr. Koppel (a protege and fan of realpolitik practitioner and war criminal Henry Kissinger) another person for whom expediency is all.

E&P notes what Stewart noted; the similarity between Matthew's position and that of Machiavelli. It's an apt parallel, not least because Machiavelli was not advising "The Prince" on how to be happy, but merely on how to maintain power. And when power is not all that matters, power is bewildered as to how to respond.

Amazing this is coming from a comedian, no?

No, not really. Stewart may be Shakespeare's Fool; but then, who is Lear?