Something in the water?

I'm not sure what's happened at NPR, but this is another story that shouldn't be missed. All I have now is this paragraph at the website, but it will do until the audio is up:

Mike Shuster tracks the events leading up to the U.S.-led invasion. These include Bush administration claims -- since discredited -- of ongoing Iraqi nuclear weapons development and links with al Qaeda.

The "since discredited" line is a bit misleading, as the report makes clear the claims, down through Colin Powell's famous UN speech, could have been discredited at the time they were made. Nothing the Bush Administration said about Iraq prior to the invasion, per this report, was justifiable, and there were plenty of reasons to conclude Iraq was not lying, was not a danger to world peace, and that invasion was not justified.

But the Bush Administration wanted war. And the American media ignored any evidence to the contrary. And that, says Mike Shuster's report, is how we got here. It's nothing that hasn't been said on left blogistan ad nauseum. But now it's being broadcast around the country. As Bush continues to make the same tired excuses for war, and offer the same vague and glittering generalities and pathetic homilies, the ravens come home to feast on the carcass.

And even American media can't ignore the truth anymore.

"No one lights a lamp and covers it with a pot or puts it under a bed; rather, one puts it on a lampstand, so that those who come in can see the light. After all, there is nothing hidden that won't be brought to light, nor secreted away that won't be made known and exposed. So pay attention to how you're listening; in fact, to those who have more will be given, and from those who don't have, even what they seem to have will be taken away." Luke 8:16-18 (SV)

Truth, Justice, and the American Way

If you are of a certain age, you associate that line with the old Superman TV show. I'm not sure where it got attached to Superman, but I suspect it began with the older Superman cartoon serial, which I got on DVD recently. Just a series of cartoons by the Fleischer Bros. (the look something like the older Popeye cartoons the same brothers produced), always with the same beginning. The only difference is, in those Superman fights for "truth and justice." Rather like "under God" was inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance in the 1950's, I suspect "and the American Way" was added to "truth and justice" for the 1950's era TV show. As we know now, the three do not necessarily walk arm in arm together. Lately, we've had reason to wonder even about truth and justice keeping company.

This morning, however, Anthony Cordesman gave such a clear-eyed assessment of Iraq that I had to keep convincing myself I was hearing it on NPR, not Pacifica. Listening to Anne Garrells story, just before that (my local station is running its membership drive, the stories are coming in all out of order), I was thinking about how this Administration resembles the old Aggie joke about being put in a round room and told to go sit in the corner. The problem, of course, is that the Administration takes the rest of us with it.

The audio won't be up for a few hours at those links, but if you missed either of them, listen to them. And consider that while the arc of the universe is long, it does indeed bend toward justice, and toward truth; because the two tend to walk together. And the American way can yet be steered back to compassion that is more liberally dispensed, not just compassion that is conservative.

How you turn things upside down!

Woe betide those who seek to hide their plans
too deep for the Lord to see!
When their deeds are done in the dark
they say, 'Who sees us? Who knows of us?
Isaiah 29:15 (REB)

I don't think anything here is unfamiliar if you've read the article in Harper's Magazine from the February issue, "Judgment Days: Lessons from the Abu Ghraib Courts-Martial." Unfortunately, that still isn't available online, although I excerpted from it here. This article makes it clear that Abu Ghraib was not an aberration; and that the stench clearly rises to the top:

As the Iraqi insurgency intensified in early 2004, an elite Special Operations forces unit converted one of Saddam Hussein's former military bases near Baghdad into a top-secret detention center. There, American soldiers made one of the former Iraqi government's torture chambers into their own interrogation cell. They named it the Black Room.

Black because of its color. Black because even the Red Cross wasn't allowed in this prison. Black, too, for the deeds done there.

Placards posted by soldiers at the detention area advised, "NO BLOOD, NO FOUL." The slogan, as one Defense Department official explained, reflected an adage adopted by Task Force 6-26: "If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute for it." According to Pentagon specialists who worked with the unit, prisoners at Camp Nama often disappeared into a detention black hole, barred from access to lawyers or relatives, and confined for weeks without charges. "The reality is, there were no rules there," another Pentagon official said.

No more than there are at Abu Ghraib. Go to the article; they even had their own logo (the placard mentioned there).

The heart of the matter is this:

The new account reveals the extent to which the unit members mistreated prisoners months before and after the photographs of abuse from Abu Ghraib were made public in April 2004, and it helps belie the original Pentagon assertions that abuse was confined to a small number of rogue reservists at Abu Ghraib.

The abuses at Camp Nama continued despite warnings beginning in August 2003 from an Army investigator and American intelligence and law enforcement officials in Iraq. The C.I.A. was concerned enough to bar its personnel from Camp Nama that August.

With these kinds of protests going on within the government, how can anyone argue this abuse was unknown, unauthorized, and disapproved? When an Army investigator issues a warning about the abuses, American intelligenc and law enforcement officials raise the issue, and the CIA won't send agents there, who is overriding all the red lights and blaring klaxons those actions are setting off?

Three guesses, first two don't count.

The article notes that: "The documents and interviews...reflect a culture clash between the free-wheeling military commandos and the more cautious Pentagon civilians working with them that escalated to a tense confrontation." But it quotes Gen. Bryan D. Brown, the commander of the Special Operations Command: "Any kind of abuse is not consistent with the values of the Special Operations Command." So which is it? Are our soldiers poorly trained and unable to do their jobs in accordance with the laws of this country and our military regulations? Or are they being told to ignore those laws and regulations, and secrecy is protecting them?

Some complaints were ignored or played down in a unit where a conspiracy of silence contributed to the overall secretiveness. "It's under control," one unit commander told a Defense Department official who complained about mistreatment at Camp Nama in the spring of 2004.

Secrecy is a great way to get away with things:

The secrecy surrounding the highly classified unit has helped to shield its conduct from public scrutiny. The Pentagon will not disclose the unit's precise size, the names of its commanders, its operating bases or specific missions. Even the task force's name changes regularly to confuse adversaries, and the courts-martial and other disciplinary proceedings have not identified the soldiers in public announcements as task force members.

Out of 5 incidents, 34 people have been "disciplined." How? For what? That information, apparently, is "classified." "Trust us; we're from the government."

Right.

And then there was the "High Five Paintball Club," which Jeralyn Merritt has already written on. They even had their own logo (picture at the NYT article).


And if there is any doubt this was "a few bad apples:"

Task Force 6-26 was a creation of the Pentagon's post-Sept. 11 campaign against terrorism, and it quickly became the model for how the military would gain intelligence and battle insurgents in the future.

This is not accidental; it's institutional. The mission of Task Force 6-26 was to capture al Zarqawi. How did they do?

Despite the task force's access to a wide range of intelligence, its raids were often dry holes, yielding little if any intelligence and alienating ordinary Iraqis, Defense Department personnel said. Prisoners deemed no threat to American troops were often driven deep into the Iraqi desert at night and released, sometimes given $100 or more in American money for their trouble.

The CIA knew this was a problem in August, 2003; American generals learned about it at least by December of that year. The FBI went on record as being concerned in June, 2004. American generals knew about it in December, 2003. Stephen Cambone wrote a note demanding information about the camp and the task force on June 24, 2004. Later that summer, Camp Nama was closed. The task force was disbanded, right? Wrong. And remember: secrecy is a good thing; for those it protects, anyway.

Military and legal experts say the full breadth of abuses committed by Task Force 6-26 may never be known because of the secrecy surrounding the unit, and the likelihood that some allegations went unreported.

In the summer of 2004, Camp Nama closed and the unit moved to a new headquarters in Balad, 45 miles north of Baghdad. The unit's operations are now shrouded in even tighter secrecy.

And remember: we're from the government; you can trust us:

Senior military commanders insist that the elite warriors, who will be relied on more than ever in the campaign against terrorism, are now treating detainees more humanely and can police themselves. The C.I.A. has resumed conducting debriefings with the task force, but does not permit harsh questioning, a C.I.A. official said.

Compare and Contrast

From an interview yesterday on Democracy Now! Gen. Trainor and Michael Gordon are co-authors of a new book, Cobra II, about the invasion of Iraq. Notice the difference between the General and the Journalist:

GEN. BERNARD TRAINOR: Well, these -- I think it can be generally stated that there were erroneous assumptions made upon which the planning floundered. The ground attack went to Baghdad in record time. However, along the way they ran into the sort of resistance that they had not expected. But if you're looking for the weak link in the process, it wasn't the operation itself, the invasion itself. It was the plan for the end of the invasion. And I use the term "plan," because a lot of people say that there wasn't any plan after Saddam's regime fell.

But there was a plan. And the plan was for the United States military to get out of Iraq as quickly as possible, turn Iraq over to a U.S.-supported Iraqi government, on the assumption that the infrastructure, both the political and economic infrastructure, would be largely intact, and that the international community, the U.N. and others, would get involved in the post-Saddam period. That was a fatally flawed assumption, and as a result, a fatally flawed plan.

So, if you're looking for the problem that emerged with the insurgency, that would be kind of the fundamental principle. There were lots of other little mistakes that went through it, which turned out to be very large mistakes: disbanding the Iraqi army, not having sufficient American forces to follow on the invasion -- as a matter of fact, cutting back on the forces that were involved in the invasion -- and all of these things closed a window of opportunity of reasonable stability that existed immediately after the fall of Baghdad. But that window of opportunity only stayed open for a short period of time, and it slammed shut, and the insurgency emerged.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Gordon, do you think the invasion itself was a mistake?

MICHAEL GORDON: Well, that's a policy judgment and a political judgment that’s really beyond the scope of our book. Our book is not about whether we should or should not have gone to war. The book is about how we went to war. And one thing that our analysis and reporting shows, as General Trainor said, is in the summer of 2003 -- and I was embedded throughout this period in Baghdad then -- I think most of the U.S. military commanders there thought that there was a chance to put Iraq on a better course had we done some things differently, had we had more troops, had we had effective nation-building policies, had we not disbanded the army. And it was the combination of these errors that created an environment which allowed the insurgency to gain some traction.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Michael Gordon, your book is especially critical throughout of the role of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. You talk about a variety of ways in which he directly participated in the planning and even when troops would be deployed, micromanaged the military at a level unprecedented. Could you talk a little bit about that and why you were so critical of Secretary Rumsfeld?

MICHAEL GORDON: Well, you know, in our book, General Trainor and I, we didn't set out to do an investigation of Secretary Rumsfeld or General Franks. We just laid out the facts, and we had a lot of documents and a lot of interviews. And what the facts show is that Secretary Rumsfeld came to the Defense Department with an agenda. The agenda was to transform the American military. There's some good in that. We're not saying that's all bad by any means. But he wanted to create a force that could be basically lean and mean and carry out operations that were far smaller than, let's say, an invasion force that Colin Powell would put together. I think the force that he put together -- and he didn't actually order the generals to do it this way or that way, but he guided them, through suasion, as one of his aides put it, by asking the appropriate questions, by demanding certain briefings, by sending down papers that he wanted the generals to read.

But basically, the force that he essentially established for the invasion was adequate for the task of taking Baghdad and getting there, although there were a few hairy moments along the way, but utterly inadequate for what followed, you know, the so-called -- what the military called "Phase IV” or really the post-war operations. He was really a dominating presence. But, you know, General Franks, I'd say, was very much on the same wavelength, and the two, you know, basically collaborated to put together the plan. You know, one very interesting thing is that the joint chiefs of staff were largely marginalized in this process, and in certain respects, the National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, and Secretary of State Powell were pretty much cut out of it, too.

AMY GOODMAN: General Trainor, you talk about the troika -- President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Rumsfeld -- making the decisions?

GEN. BERNARD TRAINOR: That's correct.That's a correct -- the three of them were joined at the hip, if I can use that expressio n. They all thought basically the same way, and their perceptions became reality. I think the President, I would describe it as the man who presided over the troika. I think Vice President Cheney was very influential in terms of the policy. And certainly, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was a man in charge of the execution of the policy. Everybody else was what I would describe as in the outer circle. The National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, and even the neo-cons, which gained so much blame for things going wrong. But those people were -- they were in the outside of the private sanctum of the President, Vice President and Secretary of Defense. Those three thought alike and acted in unison.

You will note, if you read the entire interview, that at no time does Gordon mention any other name than Rumsfeld's. And Rumsfeld is already the designated fall guy for the errors of Iraq, per William Buckley and William Kristol. So it's safe to blame them, according to Beltway CW, apparently; but not yet safe to rope Cheney and Bush into it. But then, Gordon wants to continue working in D.C.; Trainor is retired and probably on to other things.

But what's really interesting is this ahistorical justification, by Gordon:

We're the nation that invented nuclear weapons. So, you know, it's a fair assumption that you would think that if we physically have the evidence, we have certainly nuclear expertise in this country, you know, they would be able to diagnose what they were intended for. Anyway, the C.I.A. took a very strong view on this, as did some of their allies in the intelligence community, and this was reflected as one of the key judgments in the National Intelligence Estimate that went to congress. So you know, if you took aside the -- whatever the New York Times wrote or others wrote, this is the heart of the National Intelligence Estimate that goes to the Congress, goes to the President, and in this, you know, what we now -- what I now better understand, is that while this was the kind of dominant view and certainly the institutional view of the C.I.A., there were a few other views within the intelligence community.

The Defense -- the Energy Department did not agree that these centrifuges were intended for nuclear purposes. However, they didn't really take a clear stand on this, because they also agreed, the same Energy Department that said the centrifuges were not for nuclear purposes, took the view that Saddam was trying to revive his nuclear program for other reasons. So the Energy Department sort of had a foot in each camp. The State Department experts in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, they're the only part of the American government that completely challenged the view that Saddam was trying to revive his nuclear program. The Energy Department didn't do it.

By the way, here's an interesting footnote. The British government, in a public report, more or less a few weeks later, challenged the notion that the centrifuges were for nuclear purposes, but then also asserted for other reasons, that Saddam was reviving its nuclear program. So it was a kind of a complicated picture.

There was no agency in the American government that said Saddam was not involved in W.M.D. You know, the State Department, although it's turned out to be correct, certainly on the nuclear issue, did not turn out to be – you know, didn't challenge the biological case, the chemical case, and I'm going to offer you this last thought, and I'm happy to respond to any questions you have, but you know, there are a number of complicated W.M.D. issues --

We "invented nuclear weapons," so apparently we can never be wrong about judging other people's programs of nuclear weapons. No one in the Bush Administration, says Gordon, thought Iraq didn't have WMD; but certainly U.N. Weapons inspectors like Scott Ritter thought there was less than a 10% likelihood they did. But the British Government, (and let's set aside the publicized errors of its' intelligence work, shall we? The Downing Street Memo, and other embarassing bits that show the Brits were as anxious as Bush&Co. to find an excuse to invade Iraq? Let's just hide behind the skirts of authority, shall we?) thought just like the Bush Administration. How could you question that? And, when it turns out, "everyone" in the Administration was wrong, well: who knew?

And his escape clause? Well, there were, it turns out, a "few other views" in the intelligence community. And plenty of evidence since that those views were ruthlessly repressed by, among other things, unprecedented visits to Langley by the Vice President who, hey! surprise!, just happens to be a member of that "troika"! But no mention of that by Mr. Gordon. Apparently that would be unseemly! No, no, we must maintain the passive voice and rely on the vague and glittering generalization, and assure the public that, despite appearances, all is well.

Why do you think that is, Mr. Gordon? Could it be that intelligence is not unquestionable facts, but always questionable interpretation? And data does not speak to us, we decipher it? And in the process of interpretation, a supposed objectivity that allows us to stand outside time, space, and unreason, doesn't actually exist? Sort of like when the Energy Dept. said the tubes weren't useful for a uranium processing centrifuge, but that basically the absence of evidence was not evidence of absence? And I suppose it's a "fair assumption" we would never be led into a war on lies, huh? Can you really be an NYTimes reporter, and be this obtuse?

Apparently so.

St. Patrick's Day!

Well, half the day is gone and still no tribute to the saint of the day, our beloved St. Patrick. How could you, Robert?

Here in the comments to your post with the lovely angel in cross-stitch, I have taken it upon myself to honor him with this:

THE LORICA, OR, ST PATRICK'S BREASTPLATE

I bind unto myself today
the strong Name of the Trinity,
by invocation of the same,
the Three in One, and One in Three.

I bind this day to me forever,
by power of faith, Christ's Incarnation;
his baptism in the Jordan river;
his death on cross for my salvation;
his bursting from the spiced tomb;
his riding up he heavenly way;
his coming at the day of doom:
I bind unto myself today.

I bind unto myself the power
of the great love of cherubim;
the sweet "Well done" in judgement hour;
the service of the seraphim;
confessors' faith, apostles' word,
the patriarchs' prayers, the prophets' scrolls;
all good deeds done unto the Lord,
and purity of virgin souls.

I bind unto myself today
the virtues of the starlit heaven,
the glorious sun's life-giving ray,
the whiteness of the moon at even,
the flashing of the lightning free,
the whirling wind's tempestuous shocks,
the stable earth, the deep salt sea,
around the old eternal rocks.

I bind unto myself today
the power of God to hold and lead,
his eye to watch, his might to stay,
his ear to hearken to my need;
the wisdom of my God to teach,
his hand to guide, his shield to ward;
the word of God to give me speech,
his heavenly host to be my guard.

[Against the demon snares of sin,
the vice that gives temptation force,
the natural lusts that war within,
the hostile men that mar my course;
of few or many, far or nigh,
in every place, and in all hours
against their fierce hostility,
I bind to me these holy powers.

Against all Satan's spells and wiles,
against false words of heresy,
against the knowledge that defiles
against the heart's idolatry,
against the wizard's evil craft,
against the death-wound and the burning
the choking wave and poisoned shaft,
protect me, Christ, till thy returning.]

Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

I bind unto myself the Name,
the strong Name of the Trinity,
by invocation of the same,
the Three in One, and One in Three.
Of whom all nature hath creation,
eternal
janeboatler

Thanks to jane for supplying the prayer. And congratulations to NYMary and Thersites. I understand Sean Patrick was born today.

"The power struggle of the Late Bronze Age...

...ended with the death or exhaustion of all of the contestants."--John Bright, A History of Israel.

In relation to their systems most systematizers are like a man who builds an enormous castle and lives in a shack close by, they do not live in their own enormous systematic buildings. But spiritually that is a decisive objection. Spiritually speaking a man's thought must be the building in which he lives--otherwise everything is topsy-turvy.--Soren Kierkegaard

I was thumbing through my seminary copy of John Bright's A History of Israel when that sentence in the title caught my eye. I'd highlighted it many years ago (almost a decade, now) and it seems to me that encapsulates an important historical lesson, one tied up with the prevailing faith in the "big idea." When critics of religion speak of God as a projection of human desires, that's usually what they are talking about. And "the big idea" as a defense of the debacle in Iraq (on to round two today, to which jane alerted me earlier) has been resurrected, this time by David Brooks. Atrios has already mentioned this, but it struck me that this story has deeper historical connections.

Israel went into Exile for nearly 50 years. Conquered by Babylon in 587 B.C.E., Cyrus decreed the restoration of the Jewish community and cultic practice in Palestine in 538 B.C.E. As Bright says: "The destruction of Jerusalem and the subsequent exile mark the great watershed of Israel's history." One might even say a watershed of world history. I'm not sure the week of March 24, 2003 quite compares, but as Chiang Kai Shek said when asked his opinion of the French Revolution: "It's too early to tell."

One result of the Exile was the Deuteronomist school. Probably, thanks at least to Harold Bloom's The Book of 'J' from a few years back, everyone is now somewhat familiar with the 19th century biblical scholarship which posits at least four layers in the Torah, labed 'J,' 'E,' 'D,' and 'P.' It's 'D' we're concerned with: the Deuteronomists, the last layer and, if memory serves, the most extensive revision.

Deuterenomy is essentially a re-writing of Exodus, because the events of the Exodus gave Israel the source of its identity. In the Exodus the nation went from tribes to a people, from slaves to liberated, from adherents to the God of Abraham to followers of the law of Moses. At least the Deuteronomists thought that the most important lesson of the Exile, and they emphasized it. "Deuteronomy," by the way, means "Second statement of the law." It's a Greek word, and the title given the fifth book of Moses by the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures most relied on by Christian scholars until the discovery of the Masoretic text (which is in Hebrew).

The Deuteronomists (it's widely acknowledged to have been a school) were influential beyond their wildest dreams; but they are also usually caricatured rather than understood. 'D' insisted on adherence to the law, but did so for a reason that made perfect since in 538 B.C.E.: the law was the one thing the exiles still had in common. The only other thing was the geneaologies: these were important in reciting history, but also in establishing a claim to a land many who returned had not been born in. "Children of Abraham" meant more than a confessional statement. Indeed, the idea of confession we have today was completely foreign to the Hebrews returning to Palestine from Babylon. They were children of Abraham by birth, and parties to the covenant with their God by inheritance. The law, we might say, was an outward sign of an inward state, one as inextricably theirs as their eyes and hair.

But the law told them how to live; reminded them what it meant to be parties to the covenant; made it mean something to be back in Palestine rebuilding the Temple and recovering the ways of their God among the ruins. It gave them a way to separate from Babylon, and be their own people. It was the "big idea" that fostered their identity, and affirmed that they had a covenant stretching back to Abraham.

Take away that context, however, and the "big idea" remains. Look at it from the outside, and to Gentiles it seems strange and bizarre, and the emphasis on the law means it is the law that saves you: not the God behind it, and not the actions of human beings. The "big idea" becomes the reason you are alive: it is life and breath and health. "The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul...More to be desired are they than gold...sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb." The Psalmist is right, but the Psalmist understands that this is true not because the law is God, but because God is behind the law. But remove God, and you are left only with the law. And the law becomes god; and the law must always be served.

William F. Buckley called them the "postulates." Follow the postulates, and all is well. Failure to follow the postulates, the law, is the cause of sin, and the only reason allowable for failure. It is never the law that fails, but only the people who fail to meet the law's standards. It is an inhuman and unreal demand; and it always, as Gregg Mitchell notes, absolves the one relyin ont this argument, from responsibility.

But "religion is responsibility, or it is nothing at all." If we are going to draw from Christianity the notion that an idea is all we need to save us, then we had better at least take responsibility for drawing that lesson in the first place. No one can be allowed to build a system they are not willing to live in. No one can escape responsibility by pointing to the weakness of the other to live up to the requirements of a system they do not hold themselves accountable to. The Deuteronomists did not hold Israel accountable any more than the prophets did. They spoke for God, and stood under judgment and accountability and responsibility along with all the members of their nation. David Brooks, and William Buckley and Frances Fukuyama before him, want to speak for god, too. But their god is the "big idea" they have fashioned from reason and comfort and easy occupations lived out among people amenable to their ways, or at least agreeable to being of aid to them.

It's one thing I like about parish ministry, and that I miss, and I want to be back in it. There isn't much room for "big ideas" when someone calls you at midnight to come to the hospital; or calls to report their grandson has been killed; or calls you in the middle of a multiple personality disorder crisis. Or blames you for the death of their beloved; or just blames you for their lousy life, or what you let the children call you, or just the way you think. There isn't much room for competing "big ideas" when members of your church are convinced you have wed yourself to inhumanity, and should not share their hearth or their thoughts, and yet you rely on them for your living, for the roof you want to keep over your family. Sometimes all you can hang onto is God; and in those cases God doesn't seem to be such a "big idea" at all; nor do you want God to be. "It's the "big ideas" of the congregation members that are getting to you. It is their denial of responsibility that you are suffering from. "Big ideas" always put someone else on the hook.

Parish ministry keeps you in contact with people, and with responsibility. Sometimes too much so. But you don't have the responsibility of doctors; or of lawyers. And neither do pundits, like David Brooks.

It would be good for them to remember that. Too much of nothin' makes a man feel ill at ease. But too little responsibility, makes a man feel he can do no wrong, and that he is finally serving god.

It is a very dangerous form of idolatry.

Ed. note: Yes, I added the word above, because it was a typo to leave it out, and the sentence made no sense without it. And I added a link I'd meant to have there all the time. In good Cartesian fashion, I blame my fingers.

Ars Gratia Artis

Yes, Viriginia, I really do (did, mostly), cross-stitch.

This one is mine.
From many years ago, however. My eyes aren't up to that kind of work, at least not without so many lights that the fabric starts to smoke after a brief exposure. The frame around it is really the loveliest part:



(It's darned hard getting a decent photo of something hanging on the wall!)

And since I plan to spend the day reading Cormac McCarthy and pursuing other useful exploits, and to prove someone in the family has mad skills, this one is my daughter's work:


She's the one in the family with talent.

Concluding unscientific postscript

A postscript to this post, an anecdote I had forgotten, but which has some bearing on my point.

The UCC churches in Houston built a HUD low-income housing project in the '60's, and they still operate it today. It was, coincidentally, near the site of Osteen's church before it moved downtown. While I was a pastor of one of the Houston UCC church's, Osteen's church, which even then was both large and wealthy, donated turkeys to the residents of the apartment complex at Thanksgiving. It was a kind, generous, and much appreciated offer.

But one Thanksgiving, the church decided it wanted something in return for its generosity. It decided the residents should come to the church, a few miles away, and pick up their turkeys. In the years before (how long before, I don't know), the turkeys had been delivered. But this year, the turkeys had to be picked up. In person. By the residents.

Most of the residents, of course, didn't have cars. And they couldn't get to the church when it was open to give away the turkeys, because they had to work. The UCC congregations were mostly small, and composed of old people who, to be honest, felt little connection to the residents. But they were also unable to drive large numbers of them to the church to get the turkeys. The general consensus, too, from what was said by Osteen's church, was that the church wanted to evangelize the residents. They wanted, in other words, to recruit a few new church members, at a time when church membership seemed a bit more precarious (this was, if I recall, about the time Joel's father, who founded the church, had died unexpectedly, and Joel had not yet taken his father's place).

So the turkeys weren't delivered that year. Or ever again, so far as I know.

As I say, it can eventually become more important that you get something for your charity, than that you make the charitable gesture. It all has to do with a proper understanding of hospitality; but that's another discussion, isn't it?

Correction

An addendum to the assertion made by the Democractic staffer noted in this post:

"The majority of the American people agree with what the president’s doing. A lot of people outside the beltway see this as a tool that’s keeping Americans safe."

Uh, no, they don't:

In fact, most polls show the opposite. A Quinnipiac University poll conducted February 21-28 found that while 79 percent of "American voters say the government should continue monitoring phone calls or e-mail between suspected terrorists in other countries and people in the U.S.," 55 percent say "that the government should get court orders for this surveillance." A CBS News poll conducted February 22-26 asked respondents: "Regardless of whether you approve of the President authorizing the wiretaps, do you think the President has the legal authority to authorize wiretaps without a court warrant in order to fight terrorism, or doesn't he?" Fifty-one percent said the president does not have the legal authority to do so. A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll from February 9-12 reported that 50 percent of respondents believed the Bush administration was "wrong" to wiretap "conversations without a court order," while 47 percent said it was "right."

It's the echo chamber inside the Beltway, I guess. Hard to hear yourself think, apparently. Or to hear anything besides what Tim Russert says.

Link via Escahton.

Same as it ever was

A man walked along contemplating suicide, at the very moment a slate fell and killed him, and he died with the words: God be praised.

Joel Osteen has a book deal.

Given the success of "Your Best Life," Mr. Osteen last year gave up his $200,000 salary from his church. His teachings emphasize that consistent tithing — the giving of 10 percent of a person's income to the church — brings even greater rewards, both spiritual and otherwise.

I actually wrote a paper on this topic, in seminary.

I noted that people were much more willing to give money in exchange for some benefit, however token. In the small town (pop. 150) where I was living at the time, people would hand "sell" paper roses and small candies as a means of raising money for charitable efforts. It seemed more effective to make an exchange than to merely ask for money in exchange for knowing you had done some good with it for someone else, rather than made a purchase for yourself.

On this principle, Mr. Osteen has built, per the article, one of the largest congregations in the country. A Church of Meaning and Belonging, rather than a Church of Sacrifice for Meaning and Belonging. And what, pray tell, does that have to do with Christianity?

"It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven." I've heard that saying explained as a reference to a gate into Jerusalem called "The Eye of the Needle," and an over-laden camel could not pass through it. But, the explanation goes on, remove some of the excess load, and the camel can get through. The thoroughly bourgeois basis of this explanation is obvious: and it is completely false. Jesus meant just what you think he meant. Although the needles of his day were certainly larger than the ones we use today, the contrast is the same. A camel, laden or not, could no more get through the eye of a 1st century sewing needle, than it could get through the eye of the #10 tapestry needle I use for cross-stitching.

So what Mr, Osteen is clearly advocating is that we can purchase our salvation, and, considering the rewards in the next life and, at least for him, in this one, it's a cheap and safe investment. But we not only purchase our salvation and our comfort, we purchase our spirituality as well. Which is as curious, and American, a notion as I've come across in quite some time.

Not so curious as all that, as I noted in the paper in seminary. We all prefer to obtain something for our efforts, to reap some benefit for our discipline, to exchange what we have for what is better. Which makes the parable of the pearl of great price so confusing; and the parable of the buried treasure, and the lost coin, and the lost sheep. How do you buy benefit from buried treasure without admitting to the community you cheated another for it? Why would you sell all you have to buy a single pearl? What will you eat now, what wear, where live? If you go in search of one sheep, who is guarding the others? If you lose a coin and wake me up when you find it and throw a party, what's the value of the coin? Jesus never talked about gaining anything, he only seemed to talk about losing things. He was homeless, he owned nothing, he lived off the kindness of strangers. It runs contrary to our expectations. We'd rather make an investment: give up a little, so we will gain a lot. And he tells us that if we can be trusted to invest the little we have, we will be given ever so much more in reward. But in that parable the servants put their master's money at risk, not their own. Which means they risked everything. Surely we should be more prudent in our ventures; surely we are wiser to expect some recompense now for even our smallest charitable acts. A paper rose, a piece of candy, a tax receipt.

Pastor Joel makes it easier than all of that. Just give 10% of what you earn to the right entity, to the right representative of God, and you will be repaid many times over, both spiritually and materially. Church as the ultimate investment club! But is, then, spirituality merely a commodity, like any other? And the way to attain it, is through the right investment plan, and the right amount invested? Of money, of course, of money. What could be more valuable than money?

And what could be more real than the material? Surely it is more real than the spiritual. Surely the spiritual is merely an aspect of the material. And if it is, if I can purchase it, either directly or indirectly, do I really need a spiritual life? Isn't that just another way of saying "material" life? Maybe a way of describing the pleasure I get from ownership, the pride I feel in what I obtain, the security I feel from surrounding myself with more and more goods, the comfort I draw from knowing I've put as many of the vagaries of life away from me as possible? If I can do that, what does spirituality matter anyway?

But is God then material, too, and not spirit? Is God purchased as easily and surely as a new book which will surely explain it all to me?

If there is no spiritual, if it is all merely an aspect of the material, a by-product of my pleasure, my comfort, my pride, then indeed: death, where is thy sting? If I praise God for what I want anyway, doesn't that mean God provided for me, God favored me, God looked upon me kindly and gave me peace? Which should mean an easy death, too, right? Or at least a comfortable inheritance to pass to my child, so he can benefit in this life after I'm gone, as Pastor Joel did when his father died and left the church to the family.

The spiritual rewards only come hen I get what I want first, of course. Because without material benefits, how can I hope to gain any spiritual benefits? Without material benefits, where would spiritual benefits come from at all? That eye of the needle, you know, is a narrow gate; but it's just a matter of how you pack the camel, I hear. Isn't that how it is? I unburden myself of a small portion of my money, I take a small thing in return for my gift, and make a downpayment on an even larger gift, one that I recieve here and now, if only eventually, and one that I receive then and later and for eternity? Isn't that what it's all about? How much you own now, and how much more you will get later?

But if it's all material, how can there be an afterlife, a spiritual realm that I can go to when I die?

I'm sure Joel's next book will answer all my questions. For an advance like he got, it's certainly an answer to his prayers. Since he's already established that it's all material. And it's money that matters.

Some Aphorisms

from Søren Kierkegaard:

It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards. And if one thinks over that proposition it becomes more and more evident that life can never really be understood in time simply because at no particular moment can I find the necessary resting place from which to understand it--backwards.


The majority of men are subjective towards themselves and objective towards all others, terribly objective sometimes--but the real task is in fact to be objective towards oneself and subjective towards all others.


A man walked along contemplating suicide, at the very moment a slate fell and killed him, and he died with the words: God be praised.


In relation to their systems most systematizers are like a man who builds an enormous castle and lives in a shack close by, they do not live in their own enormous systematic buildings. But spiritually that is a decisive objection. Spiritually speaking a man's thought must be the building in which he lives--otherwise everything is topsy-turvy.


The method which begins by doubting in order to philosophize is just as suited to its purpose as making a soldier lie down in a heap in order to teach him to stand up straight.


All this nonsense one hears about making experiments as opposed to a priori knowledge is all very well, but it cannot be denied that the conscientious judge who wished to try every form of punishment, in order to be the more satisfied in imposing it, showed a praiseworthy tact in not extending his experiments to the death sentence.

But remember: only terrorists are being targeted

Terrorists like the Thomas Merton Center for Peace & Justice. Because Peace & Justice are what we are fighting...wait a minute.

FBI anti-terrorism agents spied on a peace group simply because it opposed the Iraq war, part of an ''unprecedented campaign'' to spy on innocent citizens, the American Civil Liberties Union said on Tuesday.

FBI documents acquired under the Freedom of Information Act and provided to reporters show the FBI conducted surveillance of the Pittsburgh-based Thomas Merton Center for Peace & Justice at anti-war demonstrations and leaflet distributions in 2002 and 2003.

One of the FBI documents, unveiled at a news conference by the two groups, carried the headline ``International Terrorism Matters'' and referred to the FBI's work with an anti-terrorism task force that includes several agencies.

Another FBI document said the Pittsburgh Joint Terrorism Task Force had learned that ``The Thomas Merton Center ... has been determined to be an organization which is opposed to the United States' war with Iraq.''

What were members of the Merton Center doing? Passing out anti-war leaflets. And why was the FBI spying on members of the Merton Center?

A separate document noted, ``One female leaflet distributor who appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent, inquired if (confidential source's name withheld) was an FBI agent. No other TMC participants appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent.''

But this war is not a racist war. We just have to protect our good white selves from the devious brown people.

Oh, and it's not because the center is "anti-war." It's because they advocate "pacifism." There is a difference; apparently the latter is "political," which makes the investigation legitimate.

An FBI memo dated November 2002 said the Merton Center ''holds daily leaflet distribution activities in downtown Pittsburgh and is currently focused on its opposition to the potential war in Iraq.'' The war began in March 2003.

The memo called the Merton Center ``a left-wing organization advocating, among many political causes, pacifism.''

The FBI acknowledged the report sounded as if it were reporting on the activities of an anti-war group, but said ''such a characterization would be factually misleading.''

Good thing we stopped COINTELPRO, isn't it?

There's more at DemocracyNow!

Would you be interested in some Gulf Coast beach property?

Why do I suspect a scapegoat?

Ms. Martin, an obscure official in the counsel's office at the Transportation Security Administration, now appears to bear responsibility for undercutting the government's long-running effort to execute the only man tried in an American courtroom for involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Known among her peers as an aggressive, largely behind-the-scenes courtroom strategist, she is said by the judge in the case to have committed a potentially devastating blunder of the sort that law students are routinely warned about: coaching witnesses.

Is this kind of error on the part of a "courtroom strategist" really credible?

This simply doesn't add up:

"She's articulate and forceful and aggressive and smart," said Thomas J. Whalen, an aviation lawyer at Condon & Forsyth who has worked on her side in some cases and against her in others. "I'm really surprised about what's happened. It's more than being tough and aggressive."

Her excuse?

Ms. Martin's mother, Jean Martin Lay, said she spoke to her daughter Monday night.

"She was so devastated," Ms. Lay said in a telephone interview from her home in Knoxville, Tenn. "She said she just didn't hear the judge."

The article provides stories of an overly-aggressive lawyer; but this is not an error of zeal.

It is a complete failure of reasoning. First year lawyers are expected to know better than this. She didn't "hear" the judge? Judges don't usually make rulings like this order from the bench. Commonly such orders are released through the judge's office to the lawyers involved. No lawyer ever "hears" an order like this; they read it in the file.

Nothing about this adds up. Which only increases my paranoia, like looking in my mirror and seeing a police car.

The Surgery was successful, but the patient died

Tell me again the difference between us and them:

Eleven people -- most women and children -- were killed when a house was bombed during a U.S. raid north of Baghdad early Wednesday, police and relatives said.

The U.S. military acknowledged four deaths -- a man, two women and a child -- in the raid that they said netted an insurgent suspect in the rural Isahaqi area, about 50 miles north of the capital.

[snip]

Associated Pres photographs showed the bodies of two men, five children and four other covered figures arriving at the hospital accompanied by grief-stricken relatives.

[snip]

''The killed family was not part of the resistance; they were women and children,'' Ahmed Khalaf said. ''The Americans have promised us a better life, but we get only death.''

The U.S. military said it was targeting and captured an individual suspected of supporting foreign fighters for al-Qaida in Iraq.

from Holden. Oh, and the "best part":

An AP reporter at the scene said the roof of the house collapsed, three cars were destroyed and two cows were killed.

Can we declare victory soon, and leave these poor people alone? Heard a report on NPR this morning, and it is quite clear our plan now is to replace Saddam Hussein's brutally repressive regime with another brutally repressive regime just so we can get the hell out of this f*ckup as rapidly as possible.

"No one likes us, I don't know why..." Well, we do, actually; we just won't admit it.

Why I love Molly Ivins

and always will:

Mah fellow progressives, now is the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of the party. I don’t know about you, but I have had it with the D.C. Democrats, had it with the DLC Democrats, had it with every calculating, equivocating, triangulating, straddling, hair-splitting son of a bitch up there, and that includes Hillary Rodham Clinton.

I will not be supporting Senator Clinton because: a) she has no clear stand on the war and b) Terri Schiavo and flag-burning are not issues where you reach out to the other side and try to split the difference. You want to talk about lowering abortion rates through cooperation on sex education and contraception, fine, but don’t jack with stuff that is pure rightwing firewater.

I can’t see a damn soul in D.C. except Russ Feingold who is even worth considering for President. The rest of them seem to me so poisonously in hock to this system of legalized bribery they can’t even see straight.
....
Every Democrat I talk to is appalled at the sheer gutlessness and spinelessness of the Democratic performance. The party is still cringing at the thought of being called, ooh-ooh, “unpatriotic” by a bunch of rightwingers.

Take “unpatriotic” and shove it. How dare they do this to our country? “Unpatriotic”? These people have ruined the American military! Not to mention the economy, the middle class, and our reputation in the world. Everything they touch turns to dirt, including Medicare prescription drugs and hurricane relief.

This is not a time for a candidate who will offend no one; it is time for a candidate who takes clear stands and kicks ass.

Who are these idiots talking about Warner of Virginia? Being anodyne is not sufficient qualification for being President. And if there’s nobody in Washington and we can’t find a Democratic governor, let’s run Bill Moyers, or Oprah, or some university president with ethics and charisma.

And then she tells us it is up to us. She's right. Time to kick ass and chew bubblegum.

And we're all outta bubblegum.

Because, after all, ours is a government of men

not of laws.

“I just think you know there’s was a concern among a number members of the caucus that this was going a little too far," [RussertFeingold's (good grief!) proposal for censure of Bush for the NSA wiretapping] the staffer remarked. "The majority of the American people agree with what the president’s doing. A lot of people outside the beltway see this as a tool that’s keeping Americans safe."

The aide added that some members have concerns that backing censure would hurt Democrats’ image on national security.

Didn't Joe McCarthy have a majority of the American public behind him, too? Except he was a liar, too, wasn't he? Turned out he wasn't exactly keeping the elephants away, either, as I recall.

Besides, the rule of law should always bend to political expediency. I mean, what's the point of having politicians, if they don't cling tenaciously to office even when the Executive brags about breaking the law?

There is, after all, a gameplan here:

“Democrats had decided that public hearings were needed on the wiretapping to educate the public before considering a censure,” one staffer quipped. “Hearings would’ve forced Arlen Specter and Lindsay Graham to continue to criticize the Administration. Everyone knew that was the gameplan. Feingold just wanted to hog the spotlight. If he were interested in holding George Bush accountable he would’ve made his pitch in the Democratic caucus behind closed doors.”

Behind closed doors, where Democratic criticism of the President belongs, apparently.

After all, if Republicans won't criticize Bush, who will?

The Red Wheelbarrow is Soaked

Holden gets ponies frequently now, but he's making me ride my newest hobby horse again.

When is a civil war a civil war? When the Powers that Be (i.e., the Beltway Pundits) finally agree to call it?'

Or when more than 70% of the American public think it already exists?

Of course, 4 out 5 of us expected this to happen soon. So this isn't exactly news.

The question is: why hasn't the Beltway heard this yet?

By the way:

Police in the past 24 hours have found the bodies of at least 87 people killed by execution-style shootings — a gruesome wave of apparent sectarian reprisal slayings, officials said Tuesday.

The dead included at least 29 bodies stacked in a mass grave in an eastern Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad.

The bloodshed — the second wave of mass killings in Iraq since bombers destroyed an important Shiite shrine last month — followed weekend attacks in a teeming Shiite slum in which 58 people died and more than 200 were wounded.

The importance of definitions seems more and more pointless.

Just shoot me

Computer problems ate my post.

I think I'll start drinking heavily this morning.

Had a lengthy post prepared concluding my unscientific postcript on Shulevitz review of Daniel Dennett's book. My computer has apparently eaten it (I'm on the other computer in the house, and just realized that post apparently didn't get saved before I was forced to shut down).

Allright, in a nutshell (if I can): Dennett's entire approach to religion fails on the ground Shulevtiz identifies but doesn't, to my mind, adequately describe: he is attempting to analyze a synthetic statement without adequately defining the terms under consideration (the very problem, as Boreas pointed out, that synthetic statements are subject to).

This problem has something of a pedigree, as I had carefully pointed out in words of genius now lost forever (no, of course not! But how will you ever know, eh?). It was the spark (the problem of definition) for Russell's pursuit of logical positivism, which gave rise to Rusell and Whitehead's brave attempt to map language onto mathematics, thus creating linquistic precision in philosophy, and eliminating ambiguity; and which produced one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, and Russell's greatest disciple, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Except that by the end of Wittgenstein's first book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he had eliminated logical positivism from his thinking (and for a time left all philosophy behind, only to return and examine the problem of language in philosophy, but to explore its ambiguities and exploit them, not eliminate them), and then Kurt Godel gutted the main contentions of the Principia. Russell was reduced to being largely an anti-war activist and something of an anti-religion crank, and Whitehead followed Wittgenstein into seeming mysticism, and wrote a book now largely notable for giving rise to process theology.

Ironies abound.

But here's the problem for Dennett, and Shulevitz put her finger on it: how can you validly assess a synthetic statement, if you cannot establish the terms of the discussion?

Any serious philosopher of religion would examine the question of religion before attempting to examine its evolutionary relevance (if any). After all, if you cannot define "love" within the limits of scientific discourse, can you examine its relationship to human evolution, or even biology? (And if you do define love within the limits of scientific discourse, tell me how that works out for your Valentine's Day card, okay?). Is there, in fact, "love" as you might define it for science, and "love" as you might whisper it to your beloved? And what's the difference? And why?

You see where this ends up, of course. You end up talking about two different things, and just using the same phonemes for them. The confusion originates in your language. If you can clear that up, maybe you can solve the problem. But you'll be Ludwig Wittgenstein if you do. Or near to him.

Dennett is not Wittgenstein (but then, who of us is?). But thre's a stil more fundamental problem with Dennett's work: it's not a serious work of philosophy, nor of science.

He fails to provide a scientific definition of the terms under discussion. This is a major failing for a scientist, of course. But he also fails to provide an adequate definition of his terms for purposes of philosophy of religion, or even philosophy in general. This, too, is a major failing, and it renders his entire enterprise both pointless, and poorly considered.

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is detailed and complex precisely because the issues involved are subtle and require careful delineation. Heidegger devotes much of Being and Time just to elucidating that being and Dasein are. Kierkegaard's output struggled with the questions raised by faith, and the response of reason to those questions, as well as the response of the faithful. His entire prolific output is a careful examination of only a few issues.

Dennett purports to solve all of that in one volume, written for a general audience. The only way to do that is to reduce the issues to a few straw men, and then proceed to knock them over. He can't even do the groundwork of learning about the philosophy of religion, nor the details of Christian, or Muslim, theology, or Jewish teachings; not to mention the other major world religions. All are subsumed in his assumptions, which he is quite free with.

Kierkegaard took on Hegel, on Hegel's terms and Hegel's issues. Kant took on Hume, beginning with Hume's terms and Hume's issues. Godel' s theorem is formally titled: "On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems." Dennett writes about: Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. The title itself is a silly and sophomoric conflation of religion and magic. And "religion" is a formally undefined term in his study.

How can anyone take seriously what Dennett has to say?

"The Show Must Go On"

Considering the report on This American Life, I wonder if this story illustrates just why the Bush Administration doesn't want to comply with even the minimal requirements of habeas corpus:

"This is the second significant error by the government affecting the constitutional rights of this defendant and more importantly the integrity of the criminal justice system of the United States in the context of a death case," Brinkema told lawyers outside the presence of the jury.

Apparently the judge in the Moussaui case is very close to dismissing it altogether thanks to what can only be described as sheer incompetence by government lawyers. The judge ordered that witnesses have no access to testimony or opening statements, as "a very important protection of the truth-seeking process." And then a government lawyer e-mailed testimony to 7 witnesses.

Prosecutor David Novak replied that removing the FAA witnesses would "exclude half the government's case." Novak suggested instead that the problem could be fixed by a vigorous cross-examination by the defense.

That's about the best the government has now: blame the defense for the prosecution's error. And how bad is that error?

"In all the years I've been on the bench, I have never seen such an egregious violation of a rule on witnesses," [the judge] said.

Stay tuned.

Addendum: Rick (in comments) is right, and I should have seen it immediately. The most novice trial lawyer knows you don't discuss trial testimony with other witnesses. Sending such testimony to 7 prospective witnesses looks less like incompetence, than a deliberate attempt to lose and, as Rick says, blame it on a "liberal" judge and 'technicalities.'

Which is a more frightening conclusion than simple incompetence. This story deserves closer attention.

UPDATE: NPR this morning ran a report that blasted the government's handling of this case, with Jonathan Turley quoted as calling it a "train wreck" and 9/11 families complaining It's hard to imagine how this can redound to the Administration's credit, but it's also hard to imagine this level of incompetence. The third explanation is that, since the government revealed this activity, the lawyer who sent the e-mails was being pressured to ensure a death penalty sentence, and the lawyer in charge felt compelled to reveal the mistake to the court (as he was). Which betrays some deep fissures in the Justice Department and the Administration generally, and just bolsters the analysis that incompetence has become the rule in this government.

And doesn't eliminate the explanation of deliberate malfeasance, either.

"Truth is Subjective"

Pastor Dan picks up on this quote from Judith Shulevitz' review of Daniel Dennet's book. And while it shouldn't bother me, it does. Because it continues to leave alive the seeming contradiction between religion and philosophy that doesn't really exist, except in the minds of people who understand neither, and gloss over Hume's real meaning in favor of saying he "destroyed natural religion."

Here's the quote from Shulevitz:

Faced with these dilemmas, philosophers concluded that there was only one way to tell religion from other apparent aberrations. Religion, they said, is what makes people feel religious. It puts them in touch with the Infinite or with what Freud called "the oceanic feeling." Defining religion as an experience, however, puts us back into the old Kantian world in which science goes here and religion goes there. An experiential definition of religion renders it impervious to empirical observation. You can never prove that someone feels religious, so you can never prove that something is a religion. The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard took this idea even further, saying that the nonreligious could never understand the truth of religion, because religious experience could be understood only subjectively, not objectively.

This is, in point of fact, precisely what Kierkegaard did not do.

"Truth is subjective," Kierkegaard famously wrote, but by that he did not mean that truth is mere sophistry, that what is true for me may or may not be true for you. He was following, in fact, in Hume's footsteps. Which is where we have to go, and do so by way of Kant.

Kant, as Shulevitz notes (rather reductively, but that's unavoidable in this cirumstance) divided the world into pure reason and practical reason. He was responding to Hume, who seemingly left reason in such tatters it could not recover. The problem has been ever since that some think Kant put Humpty Dumpty together again, and some understand he just invented a new Humpty Dumpty, a sort of hologram Humpty Dumpty, if you will. Dennett seems to be of the former category, the attitude that prevails (to be perfectly reductive and generalizing about it) in Anglo-American philosophical circles (and the reason they are usually dismissive of existentialism and other schools of phenomenology, which is primarily associated with "Continental" philosophers, primarily, most recently, Sartre, Heidegger, and Derrida).

So the lines are (very broadly) drawn. Now back to Hume.

Hume was the last great Empiricist, part of the "trinity" of great British empiricists, the other two being Locke and Berkeley. Empiricism (and it's influence on Anglo-American philsophers cannot be overstated) argued, contra Plato, that all knowledge comes only from sensory impressions. For Locke, this meant the mind was a "tabula rasa," a blank slate, upon which our experiences, via memory and the senses, wrote our knowledge (Locke is the reason we are so fascinated with memory and personal identity today. You can draw a straight line from Locke to Philip K. Dick, and to the movies "Memento" and "Batman Begins;" a line that obviously runs through Freud, too.)

Hume took this reasoning to its logical conclusion, arguing, among other things, that since he could not observe a "self" which in turn observed the world the senses told the "self" about, he had to conclude (as Shulevitz says Dennett does) that the "self" was an illusion (the validity of that we can discuss anon). But he also undid causation, and did so by developing a method of determining, quite rigorously, what could be known.

He did so by distinguishing two types of ideas: analytic, and synthetic. In briefest summation, synthetic ideas are those known through experience (more technically, information known a posteriori, not a priori). And example is the knowledge that a given stone is heavy. Analytic ideas are known a prior (a bow to Socrates), but are purely about relations of ideas; an example is 2 + 2 = 4. Synthetic ideas are encountered in the world, and so there are consequences to them; however, they don't reveal any truth. Analytic statements are true, but their truths are irrelevant.

Remember, these are the two kinds of statements we can make: they all divide into analytic, or synthetic, according to Hume; and while the argument over the precise nature of the divide rages in modern philosophy, the importance of the division to empiricism is not really questioned.

But Hume went one step further with his emphasis on observation. He annihilated the "self" by arguing he could never observe a self observing sensory perceptions, and therefore the "self" was just an illusion, a concept arising from the activity of perception itself, which activity, Hume argued, was all that could be known. Well, from that reduction of observation, he went to causation itself. First Hume argued that causation was a synthetic judgment; we know it only from experience, and our reasoning about it is always a posteriori. That is, we determine causation only after the fact. This much is sound "scientific" reasoning. But, says Hume, just as we can never observe a "self" observing sensory impressions, we can never observe a precise connection between the cause and the effect. Based on experience (which is a posterirori), we assume there is one. But that assumption is not proof. We cannot, actually, prove causation; we can only assert it, and that assertion is not enough. Minutely as we might observe the cue ball strike the 8 ball, we cannot say before the fact what will happen before the balls collide, especially if we are seeing it for only the first time. What we can say is what we expect to happen, but that expectation undoes our observation, because the connection between one event (moving cue ball, stationary 8 ball) and the next (moving 8 ball due, says physics, to a transfer of energy) cannot be shown. It can only be assumed, based on experience.

Must the cue ball move the 8 ball? Experience says it will. But how do we know? We must run the experiment. This, of course, is where science would seem to grind to a halt. The experiment says that, under certain conditions, certain results follow. But until we run the experiment, we don't know that is true. Once we run it, will it be true again? We'll have to run the experiment. Rather like Zeno's paradox of the turtle and Achilles, our observation is reduced to a nullity. We cannot, in other words, soundly predict what will happen. We can only, at best, say what we expect to happen.

And in that state of affairs we cannot validly predicate causation.

Kant reestablishes the validity of observation (especially our observation of causation) by linking our perceptions to reality through ideas (hence the name of Kantian school of philosophy, Idealism). He resorts, essentially, to Plato, to defeat the non-Platonic empiricism. To greatly reduce his subtle and complex argument, the crux of the matter is that while we cannot know things in themselves (the Ding an Sich for Kant, and there Hume remains triumphant) we can know the ideas related to those things, and for us, those ideas are reality, so the attempt to separate them from the things in themselves (the ding an sich) is ultimately bootless, because we only talk about the ideas anyway. Might as well accept them as real. On that split arises modern philosophy, and the Enlightenment, with it's assertion that reason is superior to belief, because the products of reasoning can be empirically established. But empirically established by idealism, not by direct observation (Kant and Hume both seal us away from the things in themselves). Kant, in other words, sort of gets folded back in, even as the staunchest materialists (like Dennett) try to reach around idealism and appeal to empiricism (if they grasp Hume fully, they are left with with his conclusion, summed up among philosophy students as: "No matter; never mind." Not a position entirely useful to a materialist.) .

This is also where modern philosophy turns toward language, something that becomes an abiding interst of philosophers as different as Austin, Wittgenstein, and (again) Derrida. All Hume really leaves philosophy with, in the end, is language. We cannot really establish anything (not without being Kantian Idealists), and so we have to talk about what we are talking about. Philosophy turns, in other words, on it's own tools: language.

Now, what does Hume have to do with Kierkegaard?

Kierkegaard is both post-Hume and post-Kant, and following somewhat on Descartes, becomes more concerned with the existence of the individual than with the "big idea" of the nature of existence. Hume has already established, at one end, that this "big idea" is at least very difficult, if not impossible, to discuss in philosophical terminology (which would lead to the intense focus of some philosophers on language itself), and Kant at the other had re-established our ability to speak of such things by appealing to trascendent ideals much larger than even humanity itself. That lead philosophy to the rarified atmosphere of Hegel's Idealism, which Kierkegaard was reacting against (in no small part because there is not much room for either individuality, or the God of Abraham active in human affairs, in Hegel's philosophy of history; at least not enough to satisfy Kierkegaard). But where Hume said we cannot speak of truth because we can never identify it objectively, Kierkegaard turned the coin over and said: well, then, truth is subjective.

But then we are referring, of course, to two different kinds of truth. The problem with Hume's definition of the self, for example, is that it leaves one (in our day, if not Hume's 18th century) with the image of a TV screen receiving pictures (sense impressions) in an empty room, yet somehow those sense impressions are turned into reactions, conduct, knowledge, even memories. By whom, or what? The TV itself? The room? The impressions themselves, reaching some kind of mysterious critical mass in some way we can't quite explain, and so we discard the whole process, even as we rely on it? Objectively, Hume is right. But as Kierkegaard pointed out, objectively is not the way we examine our own existence. We cannot stand outside of our own existence an examine it as we would a vase or a favorite pet. So, while objectively we may say we cannot observe the activities of this thing we call a self, that is because objectively, we are speaking nonsense.

Kierkegaard sardonically wrote of the man who got so outside his own existence, determined to be objective about observing all things, that he awoke one morning to find he no longer existed! It was his way of pointing out that the truth which is most important to us has less to do with Aristotelian observation of data, and more to do with the Socratic concern "How should we then live?" (This is where Tillich grounds his idea of God's relationship to humanity being one of "ultimate concern" to the individual. What, asks Tillich, could be more important to one's existence, than the relationship with God?) This emphasis on the individual seems very natural to us, but it is indeed very much the product of Romaniticism. But that is still another essay!

The issues of the difficulty of our observation raised by Hume are left intact here. The answer of Kant is left intact as well. What shifts is the ground of the discussion. What is most important to the individual: establishing the validity of our construct of consciousness (which both Hume and Dennett, after him, were concerned with), or establishing the validity of our existence in the world? What is the truth of your love for your family? Can you establish it scientifically, empirically? Can you establish it for me so that I can objectively see the validity of your love? (Does that even matter to you?) And yet which is more important to you as a matter of "ultimate concern"?

So it comes down, finally, to a matter of language, where Hume almost 200 years ago. What is truth? Well, what do you mean by the term?
what, in Wittgenstein's terms, language game are you playing? He explains the matter this way:

In religion every level of devoutness must have its appropriate form of expression, which has no sense at a lower level. This doctrine, which means something at a higher level, is null and void for someone who is still at the lower level; he can only understand it wrongly and so these words are not valid for such a person.

Empiricists like Dennett are still struggling with Hume (a far better philosopher, W.V.O. Quine, for example, worked to save empiricism from Hume's nihilism, without resorting to Kant's idealist escape hatch). Materialists like Dennett insist truth can be known only in terms of the material universe, but Hume leaves them unable even to talk about that universe, without resorting in some way to Kant's idealism.

Which leaves us in a rather dry place. Wittgenstein, ironically, can point a way out, by reference to that "subjectivity of truth" we started with:

Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For 'consciousness of sin' is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.