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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lord, when did we see you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, I’m getting to that…..

"Bury my heart...."

I don't disagree with Athenae here, and yet....

There are profound issues of identity at play in "modern life." No surprise, that; Soren Kierkegaard diagnosed this particular angst over 100 years ago. Plus ce la change, and all that. What still makes the rounds, one way or another, is the solution of "Follow your bliss." Which is not quite, to be fair, what Athenae says:

I talk about this a lot, about our society's devaluation of work as a motivation in life, about the fallacy of the whole "nobody ever died wishing they'd spent more time at work" trope, about the essential horseshit of "working for the weekend" and seeing 70 percent of what you do with your waking hours as dues-paying without payoff, and the reason I talk about it so much is that I really do think it's got something to do with what's happened to this country in the past seven years. With the general dumbing-down of the public discourse. If you're not doing something that you think matters, that you enjoy, with even part of your time much less most of it, you're going to go looking for that. And you're going to find it, in many cases, in the kind of crazy that Tbogg cites above.

Well, maybe it isn't just the last 7 years which are the problem. Edward R. Murrow saw it, too, more than 50 years ago. Jean Paul Sartre saw it, after World War II. T.S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway and the whole "Lost Generation" saw it, after World War I. Theologians saw it in the 1960's and declared "God is Dead" just to get people to pay attention to their spiritual lives again. The Romantics saw it, back when the Machine which was the threat of three "Terminator" films truly began as a threat to human existence. No, this is not new; not at all.

But what's the solution? The Romantic solution has become "self-actualization," sometimes rendered in as flimsy a form as "Follow Your Bliss." There was a noble beginning there. When John Locke realized human consciousness was as much a function of memory as of psyche, Wordsworth seized upon the notion to declare (as Freud would agree at the end of the century): "The Child is Father to the Man." Whitman sounded his "barbaric yawp" to proclaim the dignity of the democratic man and woman. Bramt Stoker and Charles Dickens saw this as the beginning of a new millenia, a new hope for civilization (well, Western civilization, at least). While Stoker romanticized that change in his Texan Quincey Morris, Dickens actually traveled to America and was, shall we say, disappointed by reality. The Byronic declaration of the individuals defiance of faith eventually withered down to "finding yourself" and "following your bliss," a luxury afforded very few in this world, but more and more embraced by many as their true destiny. Thus the success of "American Idol."

Kings and queens didn't "follow their bliss." I remember a TV movie about Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam War, with Johnson raging through the White House about the failure of that effort: "This is the loneliest job in the world!" Uneasy lies the head beneath the crown. Thomas Hardy skewered the Romantic pretensions of the "simple" life of the working class, the farmworkers and the masons and the "ordinary people" whom the educated classes of England assumed had no interior life, no internal struggles, no fears and resentments and difficulties of their own because their life was unencumbered by the numerous demands of the middle class or of noblesse oblige, or simply of being educated. Read Tess of the D'urbervilles or Jude the Obscure and watch a master rebuke the arrogance of the blissfully ignorant. Hardy's work finally became so controversial he gave up novels for poetry, but his dark view of life didn't grow brighter. It is a myth that individual existence has ever been about doing what you think "matters." But it's also a myth that life is only about brute existence, about "what keeps mankind alive."

The truth, as Daniel Martin said, is in the river between.

But there is a crazy out there; Athenae is absolutely right. The question is, can this crazy be cured? Is the cause environmental, or genetic? That is, are some people just born this crazy, or do they learn it from the world they live in? Is it viral? Or endemic? I vote for viral, because I'm not that much of a Calvinist, and because, as I say, I agree with Athenae:

If you're not doing something that you think matters, that you enjoy, with even part of your time much less most of it, you're going to go looking for that. And you're going to find it, in many cases, in the kind of crazy that Tbogg cites above.

That's as succinct a statement of the spiritual crisis of "modernity" as I've seen written. And it's an idea, as I said, that stretches back at least to the Romantics:

Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

And what makes Wordsworth exclaim like that? Why, because:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

And given them away to what? Why are we so quick to give our hearts away? "Where your treasure is, there will your hearts be also." It's not a religious statement, it's a psychological one; that's a spiritual truth as much as it's simply common sense. As Dom Crossan renders it, even more bluntly: "You buried your heart where you buried your treasure." Why are we so eager to bury our hearts?

As I've said ad nauseum, seemingly ad infinitum, (and as Athenae says too) it's a question of identity, a question of boundaries. We know ourselves first by our boundaries, by what is not "me." An infant learns the first lesson: differentiation, and we never unlearn that as the basis for all other knowledge. What part of what is around me is not me? What are the limits of my reach, my grasp, my self? At first all is infant, but soon enough we learn that is not true, and the world begins to divide into Self and Other, and this becomes the foundation if not for knowledge, then for understanding. And yet we are made, not for Self, but for others. We are individuals meant to be a community? But community, and my community? And that takes a lot of energy. I know; I've seen it directed at church before; I've seen it going off like a loose cannon on deck; and I've imagined as Athenae does:

That poor fucking dope is so worked up, so totally convinced he's a part of the struggle, so totally wrapped up in finally finding something that gets him excited (and it's Michelle, and I don't get it, but she's kind of beside the point). He's like a kid having his first beer. Work that builds up, instead of tearing down.

Does she realize she's echoing Paul there? Or is it just coincidence that she's bordering on discussing ecclesiology here? Maybe; maybe not. Paul's focus, of course, (I am thinking of 1 Corinthians) was the church, but Paul saw the church as "having lasting societal benefit." What we often now call and set apart (make holy, Derrida would point out; heilige, unscathed) as "religious language" began as ordinary language directed to ordinary people. It is an easy matter to see that what he says for a nascent institution has application to societies. Paul was talking about the kind of people I have met personally, not just through rantings on the intertubes: people truly so caught up in having some kind of struggle, because "struggle=purpose," that they tear at the roots of the very institution they profess to love and defend, simply because they can't see the difference between Self and Other. It's a remarkably adolescent activity, and yet it goes on everyday, in ways large and small.

These conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your own cravings that are at war within you? You want something and do not have it, so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures. Adulterers! Do you now know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. Or do you suppose that it is for nothing that the scripture says, "God yearns jealously for the spirit that he has made to dwell in us"? But he gives all the more grace; therefore it says, "God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble."

--James 4:1-6

What is different there from what Athenae is saying, except the references to God, to a covenant to which only some are a party, a way of life only some have chosen? The letter of James doesn't have the meter of Wordsworth's sonnet, but it is no less eloquent, no less directed to the same point. "You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures." "And all I can think is, imagine all that enthusiasm, all that energy, all that gloriously righteous purpose directed not at psychotic revenge fantasies against imaginary assailants but at work that would benefit others, work that would have lasting societal benefit of any kind."

Yes. Imagine that. Imagine asking for the right thing, for what builds up others, rather than for what builds up me.

I am reading (Simone Weil's) essays as a part of my Lenten reading...She says that we "...must experience every day, both in the spirit and the flesh, the pains and humiliations of poverty...and further we must do something which is harder than enduring in poverty, we must renounce all compensations: in our contacts with the people around us we must sincerely practice the humility of a naturalized citizen in the country which has received us."

I keep reminding the young people who come to work with us that they are not naturalized citizens...They are not really poor. We are always foreigners to the poor. So we have to make up for it by "renouncing all compensations..."

Dorothy Day, from The Dorothy Day Book, p. 11 (Via Pastor Dan)

I actually wrote a paper on this subject in seminary, but decided I was crazy and have tried unsuccessfully since to either abandon the idea or modify it to something more rational. But sometimes I realize "rational" is just as much a human construct as "poverty," and wonder if we'd be abandoning the former if we just learn to live without the latter. and not by making the tide rise. Life does require purpose, but that purpose need not be a grand one. "Man's reach must exceed his grasp," true, "else what's a heaven for?", but so few of us really lust so fiercely after heaven. Most of us simply want to end the day without any undue concerns for tomorrow. "Give us this day our daily bread" is a prayer of true humility and of not asking for more than you can take on at one time. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof; but somehow, we are never satisfied, and too much is too often not enough. But we aren't taught to care about humility; we are taught, instead, to imagine ourselves Leonidas defying the armies of Persia, although we never get quite so far as to imagine we would really have to die and then wait 2500 years to achieve our fame. There is a bliss to be had in quotidian existence, though in our action adventure world in which Kiefer Sutherland saves the nation ever 24 hours and every villain in every movie wants to destroy, not another person but the world, not the world but the cosmos, we can be forgiven for not being able to think locally, act locally. Ordinary existence, as Hardy chronicled, can be a dreary affair; but the dreariness for Hardy, as for Eliot, as for Hemingway, was clearly connected to the loss of spirituality. The metaphysical continued; the reason behind the metaphysical, was lost. If there is one central problem behind this conundrum, that is it; and it is not a problem of discourse, or only of 7 years standing.

Kierkegaard, as I started out saying, gave us the idea we now call "self-actualization." He posited it as the apotheosis of the individual against the totalizing system of Hegelian thought, and he posited it not as the inevitable result of thesis/antithesis/synthesis or even of the "natural forces" of evolution (which is actually merely Social Darwinism in another guise, Hegeleniasm with a pseudo-scientific patina), but as the result of an individual choice and an individual effort. This choice is often mischaracterized as the "leap of faith," as if it were only a matter of a sudden and complete decision. But that was the language of Kierkegaard's pseudonym, Johannes de Silentio, not of Kierkegaard himself. Kierkegaard's teachings in his own voice, his "Edifying Discourses," were aimed at the believer, but a believer as a pilgrim, not someone suddenly arrived at her destination. And becoming an indivdual, or rather accepting that you were an individual, meant both a titanic struggle with responsibility, and a profound humility about your place. As it would later be for Sartre, being an individual was a bedrock of understanding, not an accomplishment of ego. "Self-actualization" is about ego, about "what's in it for me." The paradox is that, pursuing "what's in it for me" is precisely the pursuit Athenae condemns.

What hath got wrot, indeed?

Things I should know better than to comment on

This sounds like a fascinating book. It made it to the NYTime Notables List of Holiday Books, so hopefully it's not just the review that intrigues. Here, for example, in a nutshell, is the problem of post-Enlightenment Christianity:

The real issue seems to be that he infused her with religiosity without providing her with a workable theology, an intellectual framework with which to understand, or at least abide, the central contradictions of Christianity. If God exists, she asks her father, why does he allow so much suffering? “Ah,” he responds unhelpfully. “The $64,000 question.”

The "he" there is

a Lutheran minister who moved from parish to parish during her childhood, working for a poverty-level wage. As a minister, he was devoted to good works, helping parishioners erect a do-it-yourself church in the dead of winter and tending to the elderly and infirm. But he was also, as her meticulous, and meticulously nonjudgmental, narrative demonstrates, an awkward man, overly abstracted about his own intimacies.

Now there are no small number of assumptions worked into that description, some of them perfectly legitimate, some of them, shall we say, overly-culturally determined. Ah, but how can we know the dancer from the dance. Just as the reviewer reminds us of the '70's:

(Remember when a politicized Christianity meant fighting poverty and war? It’s no less a touching throwback to the 1970s than Blue Nun wine, track lighting and split ends, each of which gets an amusing mention here.)

So we have to consider that any period is peculiar to itself, and it's all a matter of how you divide it up. Looking backward, for example, we might run up against the culture of medieval Europe; or, of you don't want to go quite that far back, consider the "God is Dead" movement of the '60's; which was started by theologians, not radical atheist ancestors to Hitchens and Dawkins. Surely that, too, would leave a man wondering if there was "an intellectual framework with which to understand, or at least abide, the central contradictions of Christianity." Which brings us almost immediately to the question of the "Great Separation." Because there's another book on the notable list, about that. (I'm preparing my private Christmas list, can you tell?) And we're we're back to the problem of contradiction, or, if you prefer, ambiguity. Or, if you really prefer, Kierkegaard's paradox. As Johannes de Silentio said, the "thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling--a paltry mediocrity." But on the other hand, too much of nothin' makes a man feel ill at ease. So:

Those unusual circumstances were provided by Christian theology — but not, as some recent religious apologists have argued, because the Judeo-Christian framework itself promotes rationality and tolerance. Rather, it is Christianity’s own fundamental ambiguities — torn between a picture of God as both present and absent from the temporal realm, an ambivalence powerfully represented by the paradoxes of the Trinity — that made it “uniquely unstable,” subject to a plurality of interpretations that became institutionalized in sectarianism, and hence to several centuries’ worth of devastating upheaval.

In some sense, Lilla is saying that Christianity is just too philosophically interesting.

I blame the Hellenes. Which is to say this is not a new argument at all. Walter Kauffman noted in his introduction to his translation of Buber's I and Thou that separating Christianity from Greek rationalism was impossible (how do you separate the tapestry from its threads?), but a large part of the modern enterpries in theology has been the continuing effort to at least try. Which is where process theology came from (and where it's going).

What's really interesting is that Lilla connects the problem to a simplistic understanding of theology and religion promoted by Hobbes, one that sounds very familiar to any browser of blogs today:

and the answer [Hobbes] gives is: because man is a frightened ignoramus. Knowing enough to be terrified of his own mortality but knowing little else about objective nature and thus understandably alarmed, man creates an omnipotent being who can be supplicated and obeyed, a conception that then ends up tormenting him with new fear. Religion, Hobbes thought, comes from a dark place in the psyche.

Not so fast, says Lilla:

The religious impulse isn’t merely a matter of man’s cringing self-protective fear; it can also be an expansive response toward the universe, morality and freedom, and a strain of post-Enlightenment thinking, featuring thinkers of the caliber of Kant, struggled to do justice to religion’s expansive aspects.

So the "stillborn God" is the product of liberal theology which wants, essentially, to make man the master over the divine. An almost Greek act of hubris. Creon in Antigone could predict what happens next. But since our lives are not ruled by the dictates of playwrights, the response is more muddled, and even less easy to anticipate:

The “stillborn God” of the title is what Lilla calls the deity of liberal theology, a post-Hegelian movement, active particularly in Germany, that “wedded romantic soulfulness with the modern conviction that man attains happiness by freely developing his capacities, not by submitting them to God’s authority.” As the christening indicates, Lilla believes this fuzzy God to have been a dud, but, paradoxically, one that helped prepare the way for a far more fiery and apocalyptic breed of political theology.

Interestingly, though the review never mentions it, this is the critique of "liberal theology" contained in Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society. Hmmm...maybe everything old really is new again. That marriage of soulfulness and modern conviction which we now call "self-actualization" is precisely what Kierkegaard was reacting against, too, even though his aim was to fully realize the "individual." Ironically, precisely what he went for is now precisely what is used to justify self-actualization and the "It's all about ME!" trend of modern American society and even modern American Christianity. Well, Neibuhr is only remembered for a short prayer he wrote for a summer worship service and almost immediately threw away, so fame and immortality are never what you mean them to be.

What, then, do we make of this muddle? There are questions of theodicy here, and of ecclesiology; and the questions of ecclesiology are always questions of church in society. There are personal questions here, and social ones. There are questions of abstractions, and problems of concreteness, of transcendence in the quotidian. Being a pastor can indeed be a difficult calling, especially if you can't find a way to set aside your self-interests; but set those aside, and what do you have at all? Society cannot seem to say, and theology seems almost barren of comfort. Maybe it's time for a radical disconnect. Maybe it's time for Advent...again.

Of course, that's still more than a week away. Still, I suppose we can start getting ready to...get ready.

Jesus said, "A new commandment I give you..."

I'm going to ramble on a bit, finding my topic as I go (as is my wont). I know this would be more effective if I cut it into pieces, put the "punchiest" stuff into separate posts, but I don't really want to do that. It may dilute some parts of the message to do this all at once, but I think the issue needs to be seen as a whole as much as possible. This is a topic near and dear to my heart, and while I don't agree with everything Pastor Dan says, he makes some good points. I'm not comfortable saying Ted Haggard "got what he had coming to him," but I don't doubt for a minute that the arc of the universe bends toward justice, and it was a very short trip before Ted Haggard met up with that truth. Pastor Dan's analysis of the "alpha-male" in charge of the mega-church is particularly good. They do exist simply as cults of personality, different even from the huge Baptist church here in town, a church which understands it will go on after it's latest pastor retires, a church which will go seeking another leader like him, as they sought him, for purposes that other churches and members of other churches may or may not approve of, but which many, one way or another, try to emulate. Mega-churches are wholly in "the business of ministry." They are a breed apart.

But what intrigues me about the Ted Haggard story is in this Harper's article. Reading through it (and you should before you read on), I think first of the Community Church of Joy in Phoenix, Arizona. I encountered that one in seminary: a very mainstream mainline Protestant seminary which wore its theological "liberalness" proudly. Yet some of the older professors, the most mainstream and Old School, saw places like Community Church as a "new Reformation," the "wave of the future." That was in the 1990's. Heard of it lately?

It was a "mega-church" that started as a Lutheran congregation. The pastor had a vision, though not necessarily a mystical one. As I recall the story, he decided he would take the moribund congregation and make it grow, growth being the only measure of success recognized in American culture. He rallied some congregation members to his side, chased the rest off (I'm going from memory here, and not trying to exaggerate), and started his program of "seeker services," much as Willow Creek had done in Barrington, Illinois. I remember this from a presentation put on in a class my last year in seminary. I also remember what I've mentioned before, from Community Church of Joy: they sold videotapes of their services, the better to advertise themselves and evangelize their idea of mission. The service we watched was a TV show, not a worship service. It was the "seeker service," and rather than a Scripture reading or the recital of a Psalm, a "skit" was performed with an overweight woman clearly dressed and acting like a poor white woman, and telling her "life story" for laughs. The "preacher" then used her story to teach a "life lesson." This was meant, according to the church's own literature, to bring people into a more traditional worship of God, or at least a more spiritual one. There were supposed to be 4 steps in this process, from entry in the seeker service to full-fledged committed discipleship. Problem is, as I've pointed out before, it didn't work. People liked the ease and comfort of the seeker service, and never saw a reason to be more disciplined about church than to attend that. Community Church of Joy is probably still thriving; but it is no longer the "hot new thing."

As the Harper's article indicates, the center of power, of gravity in evangelical circles, just keeps shifting. It was in Wheaton. Then Colorado Springs claimed the mantle. At least in Houston (and, IIRC, Texas Monthly), Joel Osteen was proclaimed "the greatest preacher in the world" for awhile, mostly coincidental with his book being on the best-sellers list at the time. (He was very hot in August, 2005. Guess he needs to release another best-seller.) Ted Haggard lead the NAE, well, until recently. Power always seeks its own ends, and laughs at anyone who thinks it controls power. And lest you doubt it is about power:

In the chapel are several computer terminals, where one can sign on to the World Prayer Team and enter a prayer. Eventually one's words will scroll across the large flat screens, as well as across the screens around the world, which as many as 70,000 other Prayer Team members are watching at any point in time. Prayers range from the mundane (real-estate deals and job situations demand frequent attention) to the urgent, such as this prayer request from “Rachel” of Colorado: Danielle. 15 months old. Temperature just shy of 105 degrees. Lethargic. Won't eat.

Or this one from “Lauralee” of Vermont: If you never pray for anyone else, please choose this one! I'm in such pain I think I'm going to die; pray a healing MIRACLE for me for kidney problems (disease? failure?); I'm so alone; no insurance!

One might be tempted to see an implicit class politics in that last point, but to join the Prayer Team one must promise to refrain from explicitly political prayer. That is reserved for the professionals. The Prayer Team screen, whether viewed at the center or on a monitor at home, is split between “Individual Focus Requests,” such as the above, and “Worldwide Focus” requests, which are composed by the staff of the World Prayer Center. Sometimes these are domestic—USA: Pray for the Arlington Group, pastors working with Whitehouse to renew Marriage Amendm. Pray for appts. of new justices. Pray for Pastor meetings with Amb. of Israel, and President Bush. Lord, let them speak only your words, represent YOU! Bless! But more often they are international— N. KOREA: Pray God will crush demonic stronghold and communist regime of Kim Jung Il.

Prayers for the sick are an ancient part of Christian tradition. Care for the sick is also a part of that tradition. Indeed, the common criticism of the Roman Catholic church by Protestantism is that the "princes of the church" became too worldly, too concerned with their competition with the princes of the world. That which you most oppose, you most come to resemble.

It's also an institutional weakness. Institutions think in terms of instituitonal worries. Nations and government policy and foreign policy are much easier abstractions to deal with than "Lauralee" of Vermont. Which is, again, the sad, the soul-devouring horror, of the contemporary church, especially the "mega-church."

I've said it before, but I'll say it again: if this is tne "New Reformation," I want no part of it.

In fact, that post turns me in the direction I keep trying to go: it is the soul-destroying isolationism of American culture that produces mega-churches and pastors like Ted Haggard. And these institutions arise, not as an antidote to that problem, but as its cruelest symptom. It's also a very heady mixture:

“Behind the piano player, the front range of the Rocky Mountains stretched across a floor-to-ceiling, semicircular window with a 270-degree view. Above him, a globe fifteen feet in diameter rotated on a metal spindle. When he took a break, I sat with him in the front row. His name was Jayson Tice, he was twenty-five, and he worked at Red Lobster. He'd grown up in San Diego and once, he said, he'd been good enough to play Division I college basketball. But he broke his ankle, and because the Marines promised him court time, he joined. There didn't turn out to be much basketball for him in the Marines, just what he described as “making bombs and missiles,” so he didn't recommit, and decided to start over in a new city. His mother had moved to Colorado Springs, so Jayson and his girlfriend did, too; his mother left after three months, but Jayson had already decided that God, not his mother, had called him to the mountains. He discovered that a lot of the people he knew, working as waiters or store clerks or at one of the Air Force bases, felt the same way.

Colorado Springs,” Jayson told me, “this particular city, this one city, is a battleground”—he paused—“between good and evil. This is spiritual Gettysburg.” Why here? I asked. He thought about it and rephrased his answer. “This place is just a watering hole for Christians. For God's people. Something extra powerful's about to pour out of this city. I hope not to stay in Colorado Springs, because I want to spread what's going on here. I'm a warrior, dude. I'm a warrior for God. Colorado Springs is my training ground.”

This mixture gives purpose, meaning, warrant to life. The very thing Romanticism professed to do in the face of the Industrial Revolution. Wordsworth took us back to childhood, redeemed our experiences in the idea it was our youth, not our families or our place of birth or even our choices as adults, which made us what we are. By now we have gleefully chucked the responsibility quotient of adulthood, preferring to present a perpetual adolescence as the normative ideal, one in which everyone is always free from parental restraints, eternally young, perfect in physique, and endlessly fascinating to everyone else. Romanticism taught us to be warriors for our ideals, for our personal integrity. Theology even tried to weld that onto Kierkegaard and make Christianity be all about "self-actualization." But the self-actualization now, is to be a soldier for Christ, a warrior in the battle of good against evil. It's the ultimate struggle, of course, which is what makes it so alluring.

And which leads directly to such catastrophic failures of Ted Haggard has just suffered.

But its the loneliness that is the wellspring. "If you never pray for anyone else, please choose this one! I'm in such pain I think I'm going to die; pray a healing MIRACLE for me for kidney problems (disease? failure?); I'm so alone; no insurance!" That is a plea of desperation, of someone casting out into the dark, hoping for a reply. Jesus told us that whatever we do for the least of these, not for world peace, or foreign policy, or social issues, we did for him. What is the Christianity of "New Life" doing for "Lauralee"?* Or for Jayson Tice, 25 and working at Red Lobster? He can't play professional basketball, he was misled by the Marines, it's safe to assume a divorce in his past, and a rootless existence that made "starting over" seem reasonable. "What life have you if you have not life together?" But what kind of life together can we make in this culture, in this land? Jayson is the true Romantic warrior, the disciple of Byron who imagines his feats will lead to as much glory as the famous poet who loved women and swam the Hellespont. Unless they don't, of course; unless working in Red Lobster is the most the world has to offer Mr. Tice. What else can a mega-church offer him, except a fictional apocalyptic vision in which nothing really, radically, happens, except that somehow, rather like the war in Iraq now, if he says faithful, "we win"?

Did Ted Haggard get what was coming to him? Not quite yet, I don't think. Because his real sin, his fundamental sin, was not hypocrisy. It was simony:

According to Ted, it was this army of Christian capitalists that took to the streets [of Ukraine]. “They're pro-free markets, they're pro-private property,” he said. “That's what evangelical stands for.”

In Pastor Ted's book Dog Training, Fly Fishing, & Sharing Christ in the 21st Century, he describes the church he thinks good Christians want. “I want my finances in order, my kids trained, and my wife to love life. I want good friends who are a delight and who provide protection for my family and me should life become difficult someday . . . I don't want surprises, scandals, or secrets . . . I want stability and, at the same time, steady, forward movement. I want the church to help me live life well, not exhaust me with endless ‘worthwhile’ projects.” By “worthwhile projects” Ted means building funds and soup kitchens alike. It's not that he opposes these; it's just that he is sick of hearing about them and believes that other Christians are, too. He knows that for Christianity to prosper in the free market, it needs more than “moral values”—it needs customer value.

It's such an old ecclesial sin, and one so associated, by most Protestants, with the Roman Catholic church, that we don't really think of it anymore. But running the church as a business, is simply selling spiritual offices. It's a concept usually relegated to the Roman Catholics because they alone in Western culture, anyway, have the polity and the hierarchy to claim ownership of those offices, and so to judge those who misuse the Church's authority. The root of Protestantism is the relationship of the individual directly to God, which all but makes simony impossible; or it would seem to. It's a concept worth resurrecting, though, because that is the real sin of Ted Haggard and James Dobson and the NAE: the sin of selling spirituality to people, of peddling the gospel to the highest bidder, and for the best rate of return to the salesman. Let us at least be plain about that. It may not be the old sin of the Church; but it is certainly the new sin of the mega-church.

The Harper's article points out, with some excusable exaggeration, that many mainline churches today are "now evangelical in all but name." I think that is certainly true of the largest denominational churches (Community Church of Joy is still an ELCA church), and I also think many a smaller church would happily be more evangelical, if only because people like to go along to get along. But, in America, is this really new?

In one sense, yes; in another, no. Most Christian churches in America have a fevered beginning which settled into a more complacent institutionalized present: the Methodists, the Cumberland Presbyterians, the Campbellite Movement, even the churches of the First Great Awakening. Apparently, in fact, that's precisely the problem, in a way I'd never imagined:

The idea of applying market economics to religion originated not within evangelicalism, nor even in the petri dishes of the laissez-faire think tanks in D.C., but with a sociologist from the University of Washington named Rodney Stark, whose work has won a broad readership beyond his discipline. Stark (who now teaches at Baylor, a Baptist university in Texas) and various collaborators began interpreting religious-affiliation data through the lens of neoliberal market theory in the 1980s. The very best sort of religious economy, insists Stark, is one unregulated by either the state or large denominations. Left to form, change, and die organically, Stark believes, churches will naturally come to meet the populace's diverse spiritual needs, which he divides into a spectrum of six “niches” akin to a left/right political scheme. He argues that the law of the market spurs new religious movements, which start out small, in “high tension” with the society around them, at the “ultra-conservative” end of the spectrum. As these sects grow, their tension usually decreases—that is, writes Stark, they dilute the “seriousness” of their faith—until they eventually drift to the “ultra-liberal” end. Implicit is that there is a natural and fairly steady demand for religion that needs only to find expression in a properly varied supply.

It isn't, in other words, about the changeless and unchanging word of God in an ephemeral world, but about the ephemeral world and how best to sell the product to it. As Judas asked in "Jesus Christ Superstar":

Now why'd you choose such a backward time
And such a strange land?

If you'd come today
You could have reached the whole nation
Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication

But the product is the Gospel; the product is spirituality; it is acess to the Creator of the Universe. If that isn't simony, what is?

And, of course, the irony is, Stark is describing precisely what happens (Methodism, the Campbellites, even the Southern Baptists), while the mega-churches are planning on containing that historical force (if I can risk being so Hegelian) and channeling it to the purposes of the corporation. Haggard, in other words, as a representative case here, hopes to be this church, in the mainline of Reformed tradition:

Grant that thy Church may be delivered from traditions which have lost their life, from usage which has lost its spirit, from institutions which no longer give life and power to their generation; that the Church may ever shine as a light in the world and be as a city set on a hill.

HEAR OUR PRAYER, O LORD.

But a church aimed not at serving God, but serving an ideology. There's a name for that in Christian tradition, too: idolatry.

And, of course, the irony runs even deeper. The members of New Life are rewarded for their fealty to the ideology of Pastor Haggard. But he gives them something else, too: "...what Pastor Ted has given his flock are lifestyle choices." Remember: that sentence was written 2 years ago. And, interestingly and coincidentally, the article follows that statement with a story about "Commander Tom" and his vision of America. Commander Tom, it seems, is an aficionado of The Lord of the Rings, and uses it for his metaphors. So he sees a vision of America succmbing to darkness, a la the hand of Sauron spreading over Middle Earth, and Pastor Haggard, says Commander Ted, "is Gandalf." And the Balrog?

...the Balrog, he said, is inside Pastor Ted, and inside every Christian. Before the church can condemn the world, it must cleanse itself, thought Tom; he believed that American evangelicals were filthy with pride.

“Pride's dangerous,” he said.

Be very careful in calling these people foolish. They may sound like fools, but they have some insight, nonetheless. It would be interesting to talk to Commander Tom now. I suspect he'd say Pastor Haggard had found his Balrog, delving too deep into the mines of Moria. It's worth nothing the Balrog is "Durin's Bane," too; the result of dwarvish pride and digging for jewels and gold in places they were not meant to go, but were not content to leave alone. Pride is dangerous, indeed.

On the other hand, one wonders if Pastor Haggard ever preached on Luke 12:49-53 or 14:26:

James, an aspiring film critic with oval glasses and a red goatee, spoke up from the floor, where he'd been sitting cross-legged. “You know that Bruce Springsteen song on Nebraska, about the highway cop?” he asked. He was referring to a song called “Highway Patrolman,” in which the patrolman's brother has left “a kid lyin' on the floor, lookin' bad” and the patrolman sets out to chase him down. Instead, he pulls over and watches his brother's “taillights disappear,” thinking of “how nothin' feels better than blood on blood.”

“He can't arrest his brother,” James said, and quoted the song: “a man turns his back on family, well, he just ain't no good.”

“I think that's how it is,” James continued. “That's how I feel about Dobson, or Haggard. They're family. We have loyalties, even if we disagree.”

This conclusion in the article is, I think, absolutely right:

The language of the Christian right was, I realized, hardening, collapsing. “Spiritual war,” a metaphor as old as the Gospels, has been invoked for the sake of power before—the Crusades, the conquest of the Americas—but for most of Christian history it has been no more bellicose than “jihad,” a term that once referred primarily to internal struggle. But the imagination of the Christian right has failed, and its language has become all-encompassing, mapped across not just theology but also emotions; across not just the Church but the entire world

Faced with the need to maintain power, the evangelical church is becoming more and more like the Roman Catholic church it once so vigorously opposed (many old-style evangelicals grew up on American anti-papist sentiments as surely as they grew up on the inerrancy of the Bible). But the real ending of the article, appropriately, is here. That revelation comes from a wedding service presided over by Pastor Haggard. This is how that service ended for the happy couple:

The sliding doors of the main entrance whispered open, and Marcus and Sarah walked through. It was a brisk day, blue skies fading to white on the horizon, too cold to be crossing New Life's vast parking lot in a sleeveless wedding gown, but what could they do? Marcus hadn't arrived early enough to get a prime parking spot. It was too cold for me: I watched from inside. Sarah's veil snapped behind her like a white flag. At an SUV—no tin cans, no decorations—about a hundred yards off, Marcus fumbled in his pockets. It seemed like he might have forgotten his keys or, worse, locked them in the car. The pair looked helpless, peering in the SUV's windows; for a moment, I thought I was going to have to call for someone to jimmy the newlyweds' door. But they figured it out. Then they got into their SUV and drove away. As far as I could tell, I was the only one who took any pictures.

It's enough to break your heart, to think about what we are doing to each other, in the name of the one who told us his new commandment, was that we love one another.



*amended on the very wise advice of my blog grandmere.

Alone Again, Naturally

Spending time alone?  Or avoiding loneliness?

Really?

The idea was to see how our views of boredom, loneliness, selfhood, and community have evolved over time, and how technologies have sparked those evolutions. And what they found was striking: We don’t merely develop new devices for expressing our emotions — our devices actually alter what emotions we express.

Our emotions are altered by the decline of pen and paper, and the rise of keyboards and screens?  What, pray tell, were our emotions like when we were almost universally illiterate?  Or do our emotions have to do with culture, with philosophy and even theology?  The very idea that our emotions are discernible by the technology available to us is, shall we say, suspect.

Or should we just cut to the chase and call it baseless?  Because to the man with the hammer:

The idea was to see how our views of boredom, loneliness, selfhood, and community have evolved over time, and how technologies have sparked those evolutions. 

The whole world is a nail.  And here we go:

Very different things. The word “boredom” didn’t even exist until the mid-19th century. When people experienced empty moments, they described them as dull or monotonous or tedious. Boredom wasn’t a category of experience yet.

People expected feelings of empty time and accepted them as part and parcel of being human. It doesn’t mean they enjoyed dull moments by any stretch of the imagination, but they weren’t surprised by empty times. And in fact many thought that’s how God had laid out the world.

Just as 19th-century Americans accepted monotony as inevitable, they also accepted loneliness — or as they called it, “lonesomeness” — as part of the order of things; they thought it was unpleasant but not unexpected and that everybody was going to experience aloneness in their lives.

Start with that first paragraph.  There is enough there to keep Wittgenstien and a whole host of French philosophers busy for another century (it kept them busy enough in the last century); not to mention the Desert Fathers who identified acedie in the fourth century, so I kind of doubt "boredom wasn't a category of experience yet" in the 19th century.  And speaking of the hammer and the nail:

Sure: the radio. We found many people in the 1920s and 1930s thinking the radio was transforming their lives and times, often voicing the sentiment, “Thanks to the radio, I don’t have to sit in solitude in my house.” We found evidence of that in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s.

It's an interesting observation; but it raises the question:  why did people feel the solitude of their homes was oppressive?  Because radio relieved it?  Or because modern life was so dehumanizing?  Consider Eliot's version:

"Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ..."

That's from 1915, and technology has certainly changed the way people live already by that time.  All the "lonely men," like the narrator, "leaning out of windows,"  each in his own apartment but as separate as if they were hermits alone in the desert.  And is that because of the radio, or in spite of it; or does the radio have nothing to do with it at all?  Are they not lonely because they don't have radios yet?  Or are they lonely and isolated because of technology?  Maybe it has to do with philosophies of how human live should be lived, and what it is lived for?  Technology there certainly has to do with why people would live that way, rather than in the extended family units familiar in human history for centuries (and shattering in England already by the time of Grey's "Elegy"); but technology is not introducing ideas like boredom and isolation, it is creating those realities because of the way human being shift their standards of what life is and how and why it is lived.

I agree we are giving up something essential when we give up the ability to be alone with our thoughts.  But I'm old enough to remember knowing people scared of precisely that (and those of us who liked our solitude were both "weird" and "anti-social," with the latter meant as a clinical description), long before the personal computer was even a glimmer in the eye of Woz.  Humans have always been gregarious social animals; the "loner" is the odd ball, the "lone wolf" (a metaphor meant to underline the strangeness, as wolves are pack animals).  Technology didn't change that.  Still, there's something here:

I think there are lots of things that people are giving up when they lose the ability to be alone. Unfilled moments, moments where you don’t have entertainment, or moments where you don’t have companionship, may actually spawn creativity. Certainly a lot of 19th-century romantics thought that.

Being still with yourself can give access to all sorts of ideas and musings that wouldn’t otherwise occur. So perhaps in our quest to end boredom our creativity is being stunted, and we’re actually becoming more boring.

Maybe; or maybe we weren't all that interesting before the internet.  I don't remember us being all that fascinating or more self-actualized.  And yeah, just like the idea of "self-actualization" comes from the 19th century Romantics, so does the fact the mass of men thought that handful of Romantics to be a bit crazy or self-indulgent.  Indeed, I think there's a direct line from the worst excesses of Romanticism to the present day, and it doesn't necessarily run through smart phones:

We certainly found that, among the people we interviewed today, they talked about how they felt new and growing pressure to express, celebrate, and brand themselves.

Technology makes it accessible, but culture makes it seem that's the only expression possible.  Cell phones might well be an inevitable result of the scientific revolution, but the "growing pressure to express, celebrate, and brand themselves" is straight outta Wordsworth and Byron, bay-bee.  Or Whitman, if you want to be American about it.  Whaddya think the hippies and college students were doing in the '60's, when the only technology of mass media was TV studio cameras?

Get back to me when you've thought about this a bit more.  Seems more than a little half-baked right now.

Pounding Sand

Athenae started it! (She of the superfluous vowels).

I have many things to add, but not in any coherent order. One observation, though, is on this whole question of "meaning" and "meaninglessness." That's a favored pursuit of many social critics, from T.S. Eliot:

"What life have you if you have not life together?
There is no life that is not in community,

And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads
And no man knows or cares who is his neighbour
Unless his neighbour makes too much disturbance,
But all dash to and fro in motor cars.
Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.
Nor does the family even move about together,
But every sone would have his motor cycle,
And daughters ride away on casual pillions."

to the crisis in Iraq:

Haider Ali communes with God through his CD player.

That is how he listens to the lectures of Shiite imams these days, for he rarely sets foot in a mosque anymore.

Even on Fridays, the Muslim Sabbath, he prefers to pray at home, kneeling on a rug in a room adorned with posters of green-robed Shiite martyrs slain centuries ago.

“We’d go a lot to mosque before, but it’s too dangerous now,” Mr. Ali, 42, said as he watched his 9-year-old son stack boxes in his downtown convenience store. “Now, you feel a little empty inside.”

Across central Iraq, more and more Iraqis associate the neighborhood mosque, the cornerstone of life in the Muslim world, with the Kalashnikov rather than the Koran.

Exploding sectarian violence has undermined the mosque’s traditional role as a gathering place, further unraveling the country’s communal fabric. Mosque attendance has plummeted, according to clerics and government officials, as tens of thousands of Iraqis like Mr. Ali choose to pray at home out of safety concerns. Gatherings at Friday Prayer are sometimes one-tenth the size of what they once were, and parents no longer send their children to mosques for spiritual lessons.

As a result, sales of CD’s with religious lectures have boomed, while satellite channels showing bombastic clerics are more popular than ever.

The decline in mosque attendance is a noticeable reversal of a trend that began right after the American invasion of 2003, when religious freedom flowered and worshipers, especially long-oppressed Shiites, flocked to mosques.

Now, however, mosques have become a frequent flash point in the widening Sunni-versus-Shiite warfare.

The reality of the spiritual and communal cost of that war is just now being realized. How do we quantify that? On what spread sheet do we assess it? By what body count do we measure it? With what metric do we guage it? Does it have any meaning at all?

Sociologists like Robert Wuthnow will insist it does; but sociologists deal with abstractions like human motivation, and speak in generalities which can be reflected in statistics, hard numbers which somehow make the situation real and tangible and, in some way, something we can respond to, if only to use science in our condemnation of "them," "those people" who are always our problem. Vague and glittering generalities dressed up as established verities. That is, to the critic, the domain of sociology. But I am no critic of sociology; I don't know enough about it to criticize it. Instead, I use it, as I was trained in seminary to do, to decide that this picture may well be right:

An awful lot of people, good people, nice people, people living what you'd call normal lives, are just sort of ambling around trying to figure out what the fuck they're doing here... ...They're miserable in a low-level kind of way, quiet desperation and all, and church isn't doing it for them, and drugs are too destructive, and most of them aren't living the lives they wanted to live.

Even easier, I can just go with Thoreau over 100 years ago: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." Even then it was apparent to the New England naturalist that the American Dream was a chimeraical object.

But is meaning truly what we are looking for? Sociologists say yes. It's where we find it, and the energy we'll expend on it, that's the issue. Athenae is clearly committed to her cause, and just as clearly frustrated that other people don't seem to be as committed as she is. It's a problem every seminary student faces leaving seminary with a heart full of idealism and a head full of biblical and scholarly knowledge: why aren't the people in the pews as excited about this as I am? Why don't they care about the same things I do? Why am I willing to sacrifice to make the church a place of meaning and belonging, and most people just want it to mean something they can belong to? Who's wrong: me, or them?

Dangerous question. A lot of this goes back to the Industrial Revolution, actually. Once we no longer had to depend solely on agriculture in human society, God was easily displaced (today the weather is still capricious, but the machine does just what we expect it to do) and meaning supposedly came from our own existence (the insistence on the primacy and later, supremacy, of the individual made this understanding inevitable. Existentialism is the logical outcome of Romanticism.). Suckled on a creed outworn:

They wait for that kind of leadership, and even when they seem to have found it they say, maybe next time, when the time is right, when I'm ready, when the world is ready, when something so horrific I can't ignore it any more jolts me out of this Barcalounger and onto my feet, then I'll follow. Then I'll act.

And we're back to Thoreau's observation. Or maybe Alfred Bester's, from The Stars My Destination. Maybe the driven ones, the leaders, think they have to be in charge, and the rest of us just let them. Maybe we're waiting for someone to tell us to take control, to make them, the leaders, the masters, the ones who take charge, let us make the decisions about our own lives.

Mabye. Except I'm not so sure we are. I'm not so sure so many people really are looking for such ultimate meaning in their lives or otherwise, don't bother me. I'm not so sure everyone is waiting for the wake-up call that makes their existence worthwhile, meaningful, "self-actualized," as the modern vocabulary has it. For instance, this isn't the 1960's that I remember:

It had everything to do with a hunger in suburbia for the kind of purpose their parents had as young people in the 1960s, the kind of purpose America had when it was led by real men and not hucksters and thieves.

Lyndon Johnson could give Karl Rove master classes on political hucksterism, as could Richard Nixon. J. Edgar Hoover was the scariest man in government right up until the day he died, and even afterwards, for quite a while. Martin Luther King, Jr. wasn't lionized even after his assassination; he was vilified, he was caricatured, he was despised for his anti-war stance and he died supporting a labor action for fair wages, not because he integrated a lunch counter. People had dogs set on them, fire hoses trained on them, bullies in police uniforms beating them near to death; "inner cities" (the first time I ever heard that phrase) were burning, riots were so prevalent some said in 1970 that the country was lucky it didn't split up in revolution in 1968. Yippies and SDS and Weathermen and Vietnam and Kent State: the '60's and early '70's were an unrelenting drumbeat of violence and racial tension and fear and hatred and if anybody thought they were going to change the world, most likely they thought they would burn it down or blow it up, but it was gonna end in a bloodbath, not a new millenium, a thousand year reign of peace and love and pot-smoking.

That's all looking backward, long after the dust has settled, and any view about the past that thinks that's how it was is not longing for meaning, it's just dumb wishful thinking, it's just plain ignorance.

Which is not to attribute those sins to Athenae; but if we're gonna talk truth to power, let's talk truth. There was never a unifying call: Kennedy's call didn't reach Martin Luther King. Kennedy wanted nothing to do with the civil rights movement King envisioned. He was part of the crowd urging King to "go slow." Johnson was pushed into it; he was smart enough to see where the parade was going, and Southern enough to understand the justice issues involved, and he did the right thing. But he didn't unify anybody. The violence provoked by King's non-violent movement had to be lived through to be believed; it's almost impossible to understand it without experiencing the racism that was then so strong (and is now so hidden) in American society. Hoover spent so much time investigating King it took the Church Committee to finally uncover everything he had on the minister, and how he tried to use it. King didn't unify, he scared people. Malcolm X advocated violent change. The Black Panthers were seen as thugs and gang members long before that term took on the connotation it has today. They all wanted what King wanted, at least. But they weren't unified behind him. The country wasn't unified in its opposition to Vietnam, it nearly broke apart over it, and in ways far more deep, far more public, and far more meaningful, than a contested primary in Connecticut.

It has, in other words, never been better than this. Life has never had more meaning than it does now, things have never made more sense than they do now. It wasn't that Bush had a golden opportunity to make things better after 9/11 and he squandered it. The only opportunity Bush had was to make wise policy decisions, to boldly and intelligently guide the ship of state. And this he completely and even resolutely failed to do, but then, given his history, his past, his life, what could we expect? Sure we bought into the jingoism masquerading as patriotism, and our willful ignorance of the world and what we call the "Middle East" and our ever-renewed faith in violence led us charging into war, but, you know what? That's what human beings do.

This is who we are. This is what we expect of our "nation." This is what being a country means. People from Neil Young to Atrios still argue we were right to invade Afghanistan, and aver that anything that went wrong in that war was the result of the "distraction" of Iraq, as if more troops or more reports on CNN or FoxNews or by the New York Times would have made a difference in the invasion and occupation of a third-world country that no outside power has been able to control in centuries. This is us; this is what we do. We have met the enemy. Look in a mirror. The whole effort is dreams and delusions. And we never quite get away from Thoreau, do we?

His objection was to the industrialization of New England. He lamented the loss of peace and quiet brought to his retreat on Walden Pond by the faraway train whistle, a sound we now remember nostalgically as a part of a pastoral past we'll never know again, a simpler time when people rode the rails instead of dashing "to and fro in motor cars./Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere." The loss of meaning is tied intimately to the changes we have eagerly embraced, nay, sought out, by way of technology. And when we have lost meaning, replacing it with what we are assured is the better life, yet somehow none of the improvements seems spiritually fulfilling, quite finally bring about the "self-actualization" we are told we all long for, then we say the church or the politicians or even the bloggers have let us down, and we'll just wait here for someone to come along and lead us.

Or "they" will: the mass of people leading lives of quiet desperation will. Meanwhile, their desperation is driving us, the concerned ones, slowly mad with despair and anger, with trying to figure out just what's wrong and why "they" are like that, why "they" elected Bush over Gore, or Bush over Kerry, or listen to Bush at all and give him even enough votes to fudge the rest and claim another victory.

So that's maybe the worst of it. Pundits and politicians taken in by Bush's blather would have to admit they wanted to feel good about themselves more than they wanted 2,500 American soldiers to live.

In the end, that's what it comes down to. But we all want to feel good about ourselves. We all want to join the group that gives us a sense of meaning and belonging, and few of us want to join the group that requires a sacrifice for meaning and belonging. It's simply the way we are. Like electricity, we follow the path of least resistance, and we call our anger, our despair, our sense of helplessness against the tides of history or forces of war in nations, our sacrifice. We want to take away all meaning, and then replace it solely on our terms. And I'm not indicting Athenae, here, just speaking to the same subject from my own observations. "They" are not some species of animal or human in which I have no part, share no character, bear no resemblance. "They" are me, and we just disagree on what is most important. And when we say "They" fail to provide meaning to us, or "they" fail to take up the responsibility of seeking meaning, or accepting meaning, or even trying to make meaning in their own lives, we are lying to ourselves. We are failing to remember that in a convex surface, objects are closer than they appear; and everything we see, is seen through our own eyes. And too often what we see, is a reflection.

Which image is right, in the end? The self-important person who only has to reach out his hand to pluck the grapes, and worries about his life's ultimate meaning? Or the mother working two jobs, just trying to get by, too tired to even be concerned with her "self-actualization"? Are people, indeed, "drinking the sand"? I don't quite see it. Yes, there is a need for meaning, and for spiritual meaning, in human life. Disassemble the Iraqis ability to attend mosgue, and you haven't made them more rational, you have undercut their identity, truncated their humanity. Maybe John Cheever and John Updike and Raymond Carver are right, and those people aren't so different from one another after all. And we aren't so different from Haider Ali. We want our lives; we want our places to pray, or not pray, as we are moved. We don't want a life of violence; but then, maybe, we should stop visiting that on others, stop even thinking that violence is sometimes a solution, is viable as a rallying cry, makes sense in some situation some time, this time, the very next time.

It doesn't. It's about as effective as pounding sand. What life have we if we have not life together? And what does "together" mean, if it doesn't include all of humanity, in an increasingly intertwined, "global village" of a world? We all want to feel good about ourselves. But if Donne was right, and "no man is an island," perhaps no man includes no woman, too; and no child; includes everyone, everywhere. Which is no real solution; not in the real world. But there are worse sins you could commit, than to love your enemy.

Far worse; like to not even try. What kind of meaning would that give your life, to just try, every day, day after day?

Update: courtesy where courtesy is due: Hecate's response to Athenae's post.

Faith v. Everything Else

I have been challenged to respond to Mitt Romney's "Religion in America" speech, and so I must take up the gauntlet, despite the fact others have already done so far better than I can hope to manage. Still, a challenge is a challenge.

On the purely political front, let me just say that, when you've lost David Brooks, (addendum: and Peggy Noonan; it's worse than I thought) you've pretty much laid a political stink bomb. Romney was clearly going for the LCD of the GOP, and whether he got it or not, he seems to have alienated almost everyone else in the Party. But the title given to Brooks essay makes for a pretty good starting point on this entire issue.

First, Matthew Dowd is not only wrong but completely clueless on the public, political issue of "faith" (as he defines it). I know I'm jumping around to go from Brooks to Dowd, but stay with me a moment, it will all make sense. For Dowd, faith is apparently about "Finding an authentic place to call home." Shades of Kierkegaard and self-actualization rise to gibber and moan at the implications of that, but leave them be. What Dowd wants to declare is what Romney wants to declare: that "faith" is this "thing" that we all have, and most especially voters, and politicians ignore that "thing" at their peril. Dowd's recommendation could be tailor-made for someone advising Romney to give his "Ich bein ein Believer" speech:

Before you read much further, here's the bottom line: as one looks ahead to the primaries and the general election, the candidate who best understands the importance of faith in households across America and ultimately demonstrates authenticity will likely be the one taking the oath of office in January of 2009.

Advice which can be summarized as: "Sincerity. If you can fake that, you've got it made."

Should we talk about faith as a set of concepts to which one must rigidly adhere? What answer, then, Eliphaz, do you have for Job? Should we talk of faith as what is in your heart? Then even God is blind to that:

The heart is deceitful above any other thing,
desperately sick; who can fathom it?
I, the Lord, search the mind
and test the heart,
requiting each one for his conduct
and as his deeds deserve--Jeremiah 17:9-10

Words ominous enough to chill the blood of the most self-righteous of us. Should we talk about faith, then, as a set of common beliefs, known from our actions? I will tell you about my friend, by his actions the most Christian person I have ever known, but by his beliefs, a committed and confirmed atheist.

Tell me, then, how we will measure this thing "faith" and how we will appeal to the voters on the basis of it?

Maybe Matthew 6 should be our guide:

Be careful not to parade your religion before others; if you do, no reward awaits you with your Father in heaven.

So when you give alms, do not announce it with a flourish of trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets to win the praise of others. Truly I tell you: they have their reward already. But when you do give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing; your good deed must be secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.

Again, when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; they love to say their prayers standing up in the synagogues and at street corners for everyone to see them. Truly I tell you: they have their reward. But when you pray, go into a room by yourself, shut the door, and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.

Oops! Well, I guess not. Although we should notice Jesus does not say there: "Your religion is a private matter! Keep it to yourself!" What he says, quite plainly, is: "Your piety should be a source of humility, not of pride. Otherwise you, like the hypocrites, will have your reward." Which reward will be the honor of your fellows who, of course, when the time comes, will welcome you into the eternal homes.

Probably at this point, I should comment on the text of what Romney said. But that has, as I mentioned, been done better by others. I'm more intrigued by the fact Romney thought this speech needed to be made. You may think this is a new wrinkle in American political culture. But, of course, the election of Kennedy was within my lifetime, and I remember that one controversy of his candidacy was his membership in the "Church of Rome." But the fear of an anti-believer in the White House is a very old one:

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 [Thomas] Jefferson's election

It is, of course, an issue of exclusion; which is David Brooks' complaint, although theologically Brooks' argument is an ignorant one. Theology doesn't really rest on determing the distinction between the truth in my favored doctrine and the falsehoods in yours. It is actually much closer to "faith seeking understanding," although I prefer to see it as yet another tool available in a search for truth. It isn't the only set of tools, but it is certainly an abuse of them to use theological principles to establish what is right about what I want to believe, and what is wrong about what you were taught. Ecumenism is not as well advanced as it could be, but at least in theological circles it is certainly more advanced than that.

Not according to Richard John Neuhaus, however; as Brooks notes. But is faith really being victimized in America? Well, I suppose, if you presume faith is entitled to a privileged position from which you must further suppose it has fallen. This is no place to engage Neuhaus's thesis, except to say I categorically reject the idea that the faithful in America face any kind of persecution at all. As far as I can tell, the only faithful being attacked by the government are those with a "liberal slant." If there are mega-churches suffering, surely the "Restoration of Religious Freedom Act" afforded them some relief; and surely they aren't showing the strain, even of Sen. Grassley's questions. If the faithful are social pariahs, I see no evidence of that, either. From all I hear, the churches are better and more publicly attended here than in Europe. If there is a "counter-religion of secularism" (whatever that is; it smacks of the Roman Catholic response to the Reformation, to be honest; and today no church can claim to have the social or political control the Roman Catholic church had when Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door at Wittenberg), it is surely stronger in Europe than in America. As I say, I can't take on Neuhaus' thesis just from Brooks' column, but the evidence for "victimhood" looks weak indeed, and those crying over their lost authority are, to my eye, crying crocodile tears.

What, then, do we make of the reasons behind Romney's speech? Clearly it was meant to appeal to the base of the Republican party, a base stirred only by pious appeals to broadly defined and vaguely adhered to religious sentiments, which leaves him neither religious nor secular. In this, David Brooks is absolutely right:

In order to build a voting majority of the faithful, Romney covered over different and difficult conceptions of the Almighty. When he spoke of God yesterday, he spoke of a bland, smiley-faced God who is the author of liberty and the founder of freedom. There was no hint of Lincoln’s God or Reinhold Niebuhr’s God or the religion most people know — the religion that imposes restraints upon on the passions, appetites and sinfulness of human beings. He wants God in the public square, but then insists that theological differences are anodyne and politically irrelevant.

Religion is not about what everyone else believes, although it is usually understood and practiced that way. But religion has endured because it is about restraints on what we do. Such restraints are not necessarily burdensome or even a source of social evil. Remove the social restraints we all live with, and you have the chaos of Iraq. Which is not to say those restraints either properly or necessarily come from religion. Indeed, in a post-religious world, religious restraints may properly only apply to the individuals who choose to live by them. Such constraints and burdens are never anodyne, or politically irrelevant. But neither are they balm to be poured on public sensibilities in order to make a candidate more attractive to a group of voters.

There will always be voters who prefer such syrup on their political flapjacks. But such stuff is artificial, and bland, and being neither hot nor cold nor even tasting of the maples, we should all spit it out of our mouths, into the faces of the people who want to sell it to us. Faith is not a public commodity to be traded for votes or political support. Why did Romney give this speech? Because he's a politician. It may well be this analysis is right:

Our analysis of thousands of public communications across eight decades shows that U.S. politics today is defined by a calculated, demonstrably public religiosity unlike anything in modern history. Consider one example.

Which is not to say this is a good thing. As that column concludes:

In 1960, JFK sought to be commander in chief. Romney just made his case to be pastor in chief. It's good for his presidential chances, but bad for America.

The key point there is the "calculated, demonstrably public religiosity." That kind of piety has a long history in America, but not a distinguished one. Which means that it, like the poor, will always be with us. But it also means that I, as a Christian, have an obligation to care about the latter, but not very much about the former. The former is a political fashion. It will eventually wear out its welcome. In the meantime, it is Advent; and the stories of Advent remind me who is coming, and what I should do to prepare for him:

John said to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him, "You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?
Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Do not begin to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our ancestor'; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.
Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire."
And the crowds asked him, "What then should we do?"
In reply he said to them, "Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise."--Luke 3:7-11