When he [Augustine] asks (himself)[in the Confession], when he asks in truth of God and already of his readers why he confesses himself to God when He knows everything, the response makes it appear that what is essential to the avowal or the testimony does not consist in an experience of knowledge. Its act is not reduced to informing, teaching, making known. Stranger to knowing, thus to every determination or to every predicative attribution, confession shares [partage] this destiny with the apophatic movement. Augustine's response is inscribed from the outset in the Christian order of love or charity: as fraternity. In order to make them better in charity, Augustine addresses himself to "brotherly and devout ears" (10.34.51), and to the "brotherly mind" so that it "loves in me" what you, God, "teach us to love" (Amet in me fraternus animus quod amandum doces) (10.4.6). Confession does not consist in making known-and thereby it teaches that teaching as the transmission of positive knowledge is not essential. The avowal does not belong in essence to the order of cognitive determination; it is quasi-apophatic in this regard. It has nothing to do with knowledge-with knowledge as such. As act of charity, love, and friendship in Christ, the avowal is destined to God and to creatures, to the Father and to the brothers in order to "stir up" love, to augment an affect, love, among them, among us (11.1.1). And so that we give thanks to God and pray to Him for us in greater numbers (10.4.6). For Augustine does not respond only to the question: Why do I confess to you, God, who know all in advance? Augustine speaks of "doing the truth" (veritatem facere) , which does not come down to revealing, unveiling, nor to informing in the order of cognitive reason. Perhaps it comes down to testifying. He responds to the question of public, that is to say, written testimony. A written testimony seems more public and thus, as some would be tempted to think, more in conformity with the essence of testimony, that is also to say, of its survival through the test of testamentary attestation. I want "to do the truth," he says, in my heart, in front of you, in my confession, but also "in my writing before many witnesses" (in stilo autem meo coram multis testibus) (10.1.1). And if he confesses in writing (in litteris, per has litteras) (9.12.33; 10.3.4), it is because he wants to leave a trace for his brothers to come in charity in order to stir up also, at the same time as his, the love of readers (qui haec legunt) (11.1.1).2 This moment of writing is done for "afterwards" [apres]. But it also follows the conversion. It remains the trace of a present momem a: the confession that would have no sense without such a conversion, without this address to the brother readers: as if the act of confession and of conversion having already taken place between God and him, being as it were written (it is an act in the sense of archive or memory), it was necessary to add a post-scriptum-the Confessions, nothing less-addressed to brothers, to those who aR called to recognize themselves as the sons of God and brothen among themselves. Friendship here has to be interpreted as charity and as fraternity. But the address to God itself already implies the possibility and the necessity of this post-scriptum that is originarily essential to it. Its irreducibility is interpreted finally, but we won't elaborate on that here, in accord with the Augustinian thought of revelation, memory, and time.Jacques Derrida, "Sauf le nom (Post-Scriptum)," On the Name, tr. David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr., and Ian McLeod (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press 1995), 38-40.
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Thought for the Day -Thursday, Third Week of Lent, 2007
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Thought for the Day God's Country Abandons God's Time
If America really were run by the Christian Right, Daylight Savings Time would not start on Sunday.
Take it from a pastor. It's guaranteed to lower attendance at least once a year.
Take it from a pastor. It's guaranteed to lower attendance at least once a year.
Saturday Night Document Dump
Here I go, breaking all the rules.
I'm getting to like this rhythm. Blogging tends to run on immediacy and rapid-response, which is not always the best way to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Listening to Daniel Schorr this morning I realized the ghost of Richard Nixon was still with us, because: "We are all bloggers now." Not that Schorr was blogging, or even talking about blogging, but he was blathering on about the Libby trial and saying absolutely nothing any sentient being couldn't have thought just from watching CNN Headline News. I was thinking about Molly Ivins, who was known for her opinions and sharp wit, but who was, first and foremost, a reporter. A, quelle horreur as we say in Lubbock, journalist! Bloggers pontificate on what they read, based on what they think (Glenn Greenwald, as a case in point, has a book coming out in the fall all about his opinions of who George W. Bush really is. Yet I doubt Mr. Greenwald has ever spoken to George W. Bush personally, any one who knows George W. Bush, either as a friend or an employer or business person, or did any more research for his book than read news accounts about George W. Bush. That's blogging, folks. That's Sen. Frist diagnosing Terri Schiavo via videotape. Fine to have your opinion, but it doesn't mean you know what you're talking about).
So am I a blogger? Well, maybe not, if the standard now is how many people read what you say, and agree with it (it's all about popularity, ya know!). But maybe blogging should just be about airing ideas, spouting opinions, sounding a barbaric yawp the world can hear, if they choose to listen. I'm no journalist, and I certainly have political opinions (as a Jeffersonian democrat I consider that not only a right, but an obligation); but maybe blogging would benefit a bit less from "I saw it first!" and a bit more from: "Let's reflect on this a bit." And let's remember history happens over time, not every morning in the headlines.
Sometimes I feel like I'm supposed to be a goose, waking up in a new world everyday. I'd rather feel like I was inhabiting eternity; but since blogging is never going to encourge that long a view, perhaps we can at least stretch the view out to a week at a time, for a while.
See how that feels. Anyway, for at least 4 more weeks that's my story, and I'm stickin' to it!
(And yes, I know the time stamps are all over the place, and everything went up Saturday night. I blame Daylight Savings Time. This is what happens when you tinker with God's time!)
I'm getting to like this rhythm. Blogging tends to run on immediacy and rapid-response, which is not always the best way to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Listening to Daniel Schorr this morning I realized the ghost of Richard Nixon was still with us, because: "We are all bloggers now." Not that Schorr was blogging, or even talking about blogging, but he was blathering on about the Libby trial and saying absolutely nothing any sentient being couldn't have thought just from watching CNN Headline News. I was thinking about Molly Ivins, who was known for her opinions and sharp wit, but who was, first and foremost, a reporter. A, quelle horreur as we say in Lubbock, journalist! Bloggers pontificate on what they read, based on what they think (Glenn Greenwald, as a case in point, has a book coming out in the fall all about his opinions of who George W. Bush really is. Yet I doubt Mr. Greenwald has ever spoken to George W. Bush personally, any one who knows George W. Bush, either as a friend or an employer or business person, or did any more research for his book than read news accounts about George W. Bush. That's blogging, folks. That's Sen. Frist diagnosing Terri Schiavo via videotape. Fine to have your opinion, but it doesn't mean you know what you're talking about).
So am I a blogger? Well, maybe not, if the standard now is how many people read what you say, and agree with it (it's all about popularity, ya know!). But maybe blogging should just be about airing ideas, spouting opinions, sounding a barbaric yawp the world can hear, if they choose to listen. I'm no journalist, and I certainly have political opinions (as a Jeffersonian democrat I consider that not only a right, but an obligation); but maybe blogging would benefit a bit less from "I saw it first!" and a bit more from: "Let's reflect on this a bit." And let's remember history happens over time, not every morning in the headlines.
Sometimes I feel like I'm supposed to be a goose, waking up in a new world everyday. I'd rather feel like I was inhabiting eternity; but since blogging is never going to encourge that long a view, perhaps we can at least stretch the view out to a week at a time, for a while.
See how that feels. Anyway, for at least 4 more weeks that's my story, and I'm stickin' to it!
(And yes, I know the time stamps are all over the place, and everything went up Saturday night. I blame Daylight Savings Time. This is what happens when you tinker with God's time!)
"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:
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:
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:
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 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?
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."Dorothy Day, from The Dorothy Day Book, p. 11 (Via Pastor Dan)
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..."
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?
The Robert Fisk Interview
from Democracy Now!. If you have the time, listen to it. If not, some highlights:
Blowback
Blowback
ROBERT FISK: Well, the first one was in Sudan. A Saudi friend of his, who had fought with him against the Soviets in Afghanistan, who, mind you -- he was now a journalist -- he met me at an Islamic conference in Khartoum, and one Sunday morning, he said, “Robert, I want you to come and meet someone.” And for him, it was a bit of a joke. He knew bin Laden was out in the desert, where bin Laden’s construction teams -- he was, of course, in the construction business, as most his family were -- had been building a new road from a little village to the main highway between Port Sudan and Khartoum to link up so that the villagers could take part in the national economy.Culture Clash
AMY GOODMAN: Bin Laden's father was a great Yemeni construction magnate in Saudi Arabia?
ROBERT FISK: A billionaire so, yes. And, indeed, most of bin Laden’s -- or some of bin Laden's money came from the construction business. He built the roads upon which the Afghan guerrillas took tanks to fight the Russians. I mean, I actually went in an air raid shelter twenty-five feet high, built into the living rock of a mountain in Afghanistan, built by bin Laden during the Russian war, next to a camp built by the CIA, of course.
But, no, I went out with this guy. We went across the desert past pyramids you’ve never seen before. I mean, they’re not even in guidebooks. And we ended up in this desert village, and there was this man in this long white robe with all these kids dancing in front of him and people slaughtering chickens and goats and sheep. And my journalist friend, who knew bin Laden well, went up and spoke to him in his ear. And I saw bin Laden's eyes flick towards me with palpable concern. He had never met a Western journalist before. And I was invited to meet him. I shook hands with him, and he thought I was going to ask him about terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, because he was already being implicated. There were comments by State Department officials that bin Laden was plotting world terror.
ROBERT FISK: Yeah, I’m about ten years older than him. Yes, that's right. I don’t think -- I mean, he always -- we never discussed age, but, I mean, he must have guessed I was slightly older than him. He was always very courteous towards me. And when he stopped to eat, I would sit on the ground with the al-Qaeda fighters and eat yoghurt and drink tea with him. He broke off occasionally to pray, as well, which I, of course, didn’t do with him.Can We Help You With That?
But certainly, the next time I met him in Afghanistan, he was a much more angry man. He was filled with fury at the corruption of the Saudi royal family. He went into great detail on how many millions of dollars they stole on this occasion, how many princes have taken these dollars, and so on. And it looked at that stage as if what he really wanted to do was to overthrow the Saudi royal family and become caliph of Arabia. He didn’t say that, but I suspect. I mean, Arabia is what he’s interested in. At the end of the day, it’s Arabia, not because of oil, but because of the holy places of Mecca and Medina and his own religious Salafi beliefs.
But he was already beginning to talk about people having dreams. You know, in the Wahhabi sect, people believe in what I call “dreamology.” They think that when they have a dream, it's a message coming from somewhere outside the world. Obviously, you know, you can interpret the Prophet Mohammed’s receiving the message of God as being in a kind of trance or a dream. Remember, the first message he received, he talked about how he was wrapped in, and it was felt tight -- that an angel wrapped him and squeezed him tight. And I think that bin Laden believes in dreams. I think a lot of al-Qaeda people do. They have ideas that come to them. We don't. We believe that this is an inactive but still living brain taking over, just things come through like stars pass through the heavens, but I think they interpret them or want to interpret them, which is a very -- something we basically gave up in the Middle Ages in Europe.
And, in fact, the last words he said to me, as we sat in a very freezing mountaintop -- I spent the night with his al-Qaeda people in a tent sleeping. I woke up with ice in my hair. And the last words he said to me, and I have my notebooks, which, of course, I will research for this book, and his words were, "Mr. Robert, from this mountain upon which we are sitting, we destroyed the Soviet army and helped to destroy the Soviet Union," which was an element of truth, though obviously a usual bin Laden exaggeration. And then he said, “and I pray to God that He permits us to turn America into a shadow of itself.” Those were his words. And in my notebook, which I actually took these words down in, I put two lines on each side of the quote. At the time, I wrote, “Rhetoric?” It wasn’t, of course."Iraq is better off today..."
And I remember that, you know, on 9/11, I said before, I think, to you, that I was crossing the Atlantic that day. The plane turned around, and I got back to Europe and saw, you know, the biblical crashing of the Twin Towers. I remember thinking, well, New York is now a shadow of itself, all that dust and fog going across the city. I was pretty convinced, from the start, that bin Laden was involved. I still am, of course.
[reading] “The Americans and British benefited from these accounts of terror under Saddam. Would you rather he was still here in Iraq torturing and gassing his own people? they would ask. Don't you think we did a good thing by getting rid of him? All this, of course, because the original reasons for the invasion -- Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction, his links with the outrages of September 11th, Mr. Blair's 45-minute warning -- turned out to be lies. But it was a dark comparison that Bush and Blair were making. If Saddam's immorality and wickedness had to be the yardstick against which all of our own iniquities were judged, what did that say about us? If Saddam's regime was to be the moral compass to define our actions, how bad -- how iniquitous -- did that allow us to be? Saddam tortured and executed women in Abu Ghraib. We only sexually abused prisoners and killed a few of them and murdered some suspects in Bagram in Afghanistan and subjected them to inhuman treatment in Guantanamo. Saddam was much worse. And thus it became inevitable that the symbol of Saddam’s shame -- the prison at Abu Ghraib -- subsequently became the symbol of our shame, too.Mercenaries and black water:
“What was interesting was the vastly different reaction in East and West to our abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan. We ‘civilised’ Westerners were shocked at the dog-biting and humiliations and torture ‘our’ men and women administered to the inmates. Iraqis were outraged, but not shocked. Their friends and relatives -- some of whom have been locked up by the Americans -- had long ago told them of the revolting behaviour of the American guards. They weren't surprised by those iconic photographs. They already knew.
“By early 2004, an army of thousands of mercenaries had appeared on the streets of Iraq’s major cities, many of them former British and American soldiers hired by the occupying Anglo-American authorities and by dozens of companies who feared for the lives of their employees in Baghdad The heavily armed Britons working for well over 300 security firms in Iraq now outnumbered Britain's 8,000-strong army in the south of the country. Although major US and British security companies were operating in Iraq, dozens of small firms also set up shop with little vetting of their employees and few rules of engagement. Many of the Britons were former SAS soldiers -- hundreds of former American Special Forces men were also in the country -- while armed South Africans were also working for the occupation authorities.
“The presence in Iraq of so many thousands of Western mercenaries -- or ‘security contractors,’ as the American press coyly referred to them -- said as much about America's fear of taking military casualties as it did about the multi-million-pound security industry now milking the coffers of the US and British governments. Security firms were escorting convoys on the highways of Iraq. Armed plain-clothes men from an American company were guarding US troops at night inside the former presidential palace where Paul Bremer had his headquarters. In other words, security companies were now guarding the occupation troops. When a US helicopter crashed near Fallujah in 2003, it was an American security company that took control of the area and began rescue operations. Needless to say, casualties among the mercenaries were not included in the regular body count put out by the occupation authorities.”
The latest figure that I have as a journalist now is that we now have in Iraq 120,000 Westerner mercenaries. That's almost equal to the total number of American troops.
ROBERT FISK: Oh, they would turn up and stay in the same hotel I was in. They turned up during checkpoints on roads, sometimes wearing hoods or masks. Why? Why hoods? Why masks? What were they doing? I would come across them driving vehicles through the streets of Baghdad, guns pointing out the window. “Get out of the way! Get out of the way! Get out of the way!” Tch-tch-tch-tch-tch, in the air. Very similar to the same gangs that Saddam used to use for security purposes to get people out of the way in vehicles. In fact, the way in which the occupation authorities have sealed off vast areas of Baghdad with walls is classic. It wasn't as bad under Saddam. There weren't so many walls, but it's very similar to the same practice that Saddam's regime used. In fact, in many ways, what we do has become a kind of pale mirror of the regime we got rid of. You know, hanging people and their heads come off when you hang them, this is incredible.In one more F.U., we'll be one more F.U. further along...
ROBERT FISK: Look, we've been through Abu Ghraib so often. First of all, it was liberated, and we all went in and saw the hangman’s noose and where Saddam's people were executed. Then they announced they would have to use it briefly as a prison. I said -- immediately I went to prison. I said, “They’ll use it as a prison again,” because they always do, and they did. And then, one Iraqi historian said it should be turned into a museum of Saddam's horror. This is Kanan Makiya, of course. And then, after the abuses were made photographically evident at Abu Ghraib, it was announced by the then-Iraqi government that it was going to be bulldozed to the ground. And then it was announced that, after all, it was still needed as a prison, so it would stay as a prison for more abuses, perhaps. And now, again, we have this suggestion it should be razed to the ground. Later on, it will be stated that it will be still needed as a prison. Then we'll hear yet again that it has to be razed to the ground. You don't realize, unless you go to Iraq, that this is a circular track. All the stories we report, we reported last year, and we're going to report them again next year, believe me.R.I.P. Democracy
ROBERT FISK: Well, you've got to remember that at one point it looked as if the Brits might pull out of the original invasion, and Rumsfeld made a statement rather similar to Cheney's, saying, well, we can do it without them. You know, I mean, I’m still wondering what on earth Britain is doing in Iraq and how we ever got into it. You know, one of the extraordinary things at the moment about both Iraq and Afghanistan is that our leaderships, British just as much as Americans’, have lied continually. They've lied about weapons of mass destruction, links between Saddam and al-Qaeda, 45-minute warnings, as I said.The Surge is Not Enough
But this is the first war I’ve ever covered in which the leadership in the West bases its policies on its own lies. I mean, it's one thing to lie to the people, and then you have your own policy of how to pursue a war, but to pursue the war on the basis of the lies you're telling the people, this is an entirely new concept in war and strategy in foreign policy. I’ve never seen it before.
You know, you have Blair standing up now in the British parliament -- well, less and less, thank goodness; I mean, soon he's going, because of Iraq, of course, and because of his relationship with Bush-- and he keeps saying the same thing over and over again: “I absolutely and completely believe I was right.” And that's not good enough. You know, we can all believe we're right. We can jump off the Empire State Building believing we can fly, but we won't fly, will we? And Blair actually thinks that his conviction, his own self-regard, is sufficient to make up for the factual mistakes that he makes. It's OK, because he really believed it. That's not the way you go to war.
You know, one story, which has not really come out in the American press -- I know it's a fact, because I’ve investigated it fully in Iraq -- is that in the first battle of Fallujah -- remember, when there was a ceasefire and then the Iraqis came back, then they had the second battle and they took the city and managed to destroy much of it -- in the first battle of Fallujah, there were twelve US Marines guarding the mayor’s office at Ramadi, the neighboring city to the west, and they were attacked by hundreds of Iraqi insurgents, and that twelve-man US Marine unit was liquidated. They were totally eliminated. They were killed, all of them. They were wiped out. And that is not a story that's gotten the front page, as far as I know, of the New York Times, but that's what happened. So the dangers you see that we're now facing, very much -- I don't mean to make too facile a comparison -- very much the same dangers that the crusaders faced with overwhelming force from the Muslim armies of the 12th century, is that the local populations are now so full of fury and anger against us that they are attacking us in their hundreds, overwhelming force.Winning Hearts & Minds v. Kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out!
AMY GOODMAN: And the latest news out of Afghanistan, thousands of angry demonstrators taking to the streets after US forces were involved in a panicked shooting, which left sixteen civilians dead and twenty-three injured -- at least that's how it was described -- panic shooting in The Independent.No wonder there is no plan B. No wonder:
ROBERT FISK: No photos, please. That's what you were talking about also. We will delete you if you take pictures. Look, this is happening over and over again in Baghdad. A car blows up, a suicide bomber attacks, so everyone in the area is shot at. You know, at the very beginning of the invasion, when the Americans reached Baghdad, there was a frightening circumstance of Highway 11, I think it was. I went there afterwards, and a US tank column was moving down the road. They were ambushed, and the tank commander believed that every car on the road was a potential suicide car, and he ordered his men to fire at every civilian car. So when I got to the scene, there were smoking cars. There were women, their clothes blasted off them, naked in the backs of vehicles, children lying with rugs over them, dead beside the road. It was a massacre. Now, there was an ambush by the Iraqis. The Americans were attacked there, but their response was to kill everything in sight. And I actually talked to the US tank commander -- he’s quoted in my book by name -- who said, “Look, I have to defend my men. I have a duty to defend my men. I’m sorry if innocent people get killed.”
Daniel L. Byman and Kenneth M. Pollack of the Brookings Institution last month released the most comprehensive public exploration of containment. The two national security experts seemed to wince even as they proposed keeping up to 80,000 troops along Iraq's borders, cautioning that "there would be no end in sight either for the war or for their mission." But it is "the only rational course of action," they wrote.Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends....
The dark underbelly
of the dark underbelly. The Walter Reed scandal is monstrous, of course; and most of the problem is being attributed, not to primary healthcare, but to long-term care. This is the true belly of the beast in this situation.
It wasn't really so long ago (Horton Foote ably included a character in "Places in the Heart," a movie set in a Texas I almost remember) when blind people were considered useless to society. I have a recording of a song about the battle of Gallipoli where the narrator recounts losing both his legs and laments the price of war, because he is virtually worthless. Society has adjusted, and people missing limbs are not only not looked upon as objects of pity, they can be objects of political scorn and smear. Such is progress.
But we have, as a society (and therefore helped individuals) adjusted to those who lose limbs. Early in the war (it seems "early" now, anyway), cable news was filled with "uplifting" stories about wounded soldiers recieiving titanium limbs and physical therapy, always in clean, sterile settings free of black mold and rat droppings and surrounded by several caring, professional medical care personnel. Now we have a different picture.
But we still don't have the whole picture. The number of wounded from this war is staggering, but we knew that. In late 2006 the number was reported to be 20,000, which is nearly 7 times the number killed, and the number of wounded in March are already over half of what the number was in February. The worst problem is, many of these wounded are wounded as Bob Woodruff was wounded: in the head. Thanks to advances in science, many soldiers who would have died of their injuries are instead surviving. But, as the testimony has shown, the military medical care system simply is not ready to handle such survivors. If the military is not ready, is American society?
This is a society where we still argue about whether health insurance should cover mental health care, and to what extent. The kind of injuries are are talking about now are a new wrinkle in the question of the human psyche and how we approach the questions of will and responsibility. Too many people think the "insanity defense" in a murder case means the defendant did it, but he's not responsible because he was "crazy." Now we will have thousands of soldiers whose injury is completely invisible, even to them, and the desire to blame them for being "crazy" will be strong. There is no phantom limb syndrome for a loss of brain funtion, no visible scars or obviously missing body parts to elicit our sympathy or understanding, not even a social system which accomodates the wheel-chair bound or those with articifial legs or arms. but not those with psychic, or even organic brain, wounds. These wounds are injuries which perplex even the injured, which have a more material foundation than "post-traumatic stress disorder," and yet is less well or widely understood.
This is going to be the ongoing legacy of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and everyone else who championed this war, but won't pay any price for their decisions. This is the dark underbelly of the dark underbelly of the veterans' and soldier's care scandal swirling around Walter Reed hospital right now. NPR calls it "purgatory." I can only imagine those people suffering from it, suffering from those injuries for the rest of their lives, would describe it instead, as hell.
It wasn't really so long ago (Horton Foote ably included a character in "Places in the Heart," a movie set in a Texas I almost remember) when blind people were considered useless to society. I have a recording of a song about the battle of Gallipoli where the narrator recounts losing both his legs and laments the price of war, because he is virtually worthless. Society has adjusted, and people missing limbs are not only not looked upon as objects of pity, they can be objects of political scorn and smear. Such is progress.
But we have, as a society (and therefore helped individuals) adjusted to those who lose limbs. Early in the war (it seems "early" now, anyway), cable news was filled with "uplifting" stories about wounded soldiers recieiving titanium limbs and physical therapy, always in clean, sterile settings free of black mold and rat droppings and surrounded by several caring, professional medical care personnel. Now we have a different picture.
But we still don't have the whole picture. The number of wounded from this war is staggering, but we knew that. In late 2006 the number was reported to be 20,000, which is nearly 7 times the number killed, and the number of wounded in March are already over half of what the number was in February. The worst problem is, many of these wounded are wounded as Bob Woodruff was wounded: in the head. Thanks to advances in science, many soldiers who would have died of their injuries are instead surviving. But, as the testimony has shown, the military medical care system simply is not ready to handle such survivors. If the military is not ready, is American society?
This is a society where we still argue about whether health insurance should cover mental health care, and to what extent. The kind of injuries are are talking about now are a new wrinkle in the question of the human psyche and how we approach the questions of will and responsibility. Too many people think the "insanity defense" in a murder case means the defendant did it, but he's not responsible because he was "crazy." Now we will have thousands of soldiers whose injury is completely invisible, even to them, and the desire to blame them for being "crazy" will be strong. There is no phantom limb syndrome for a loss of brain funtion, no visible scars or obviously missing body parts to elicit our sympathy or understanding, not even a social system which accomodates the wheel-chair bound or those with articifial legs or arms. but not those with psychic, or even organic brain, wounds. These wounds are injuries which perplex even the injured, which have a more material foundation than "post-traumatic stress disorder," and yet is less well or widely understood.
This is going to be the ongoing legacy of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and everyone else who championed this war, but won't pay any price for their decisions. This is the dark underbelly of the dark underbelly of the veterans' and soldier's care scandal swirling around Walter Reed hospital right now. NPR calls it "purgatory." I can only imagine those people suffering from it, suffering from those injuries for the rest of their lives, would describe it instead, as hell.
"Lent, a time of reflection and prayer"
I have a friend who used to be in touch with conservative Christian groups bemoaning the fate of Christians around the world. These groups were trying to work up the theme that Christians were being persecuted, an attempt to both hearken back to pre-Constantinian days (which is partly theological; many conservative Protestant groups try to identify themselves with a pre-Roman church, and imagining themselves as persecuted is one way to do it. Of course, some Protestant denominations have roots in lower-class American society, so the sense of persecution is very real. Just consider where Dr. Martin Luther King's fervor came from.) and to claim special "victim status" for rich white guys like Dobson and Ted Haggard.
Funny nobody like Dobson or Falwell is making any mention of this:
Link via Pastor Dan, who looks out for these things better than I do.
Funny nobody like Dobson or Falwell is making any mention of this:
Christians around the world are currently observing Lent, a time of reflection and prayer before Easter and a period that symbolically commemorates 40 days that Jesus spent fasting in the wilderness. Lent this year comes at a moment of crisis for some of the oldest Christian communities in the world, especially for Christians in Iraq.Maybe our Lenten prayers should include confessions and intercessions for what our government is doing in our name to our fellow Christians. Maybe we should consider, once again, that there is a global nature to Christianity, not just a European or American one. It isn't all about what the Pope says, or what the Archbishop of Canterbury pronounces.
Internal conflicts there have led to the death of tens of thousands since 2003, contributing to the largest refugee crisis in the Middle East since 1948. Nearly 4 million Iraqis are now refugees or internally displaced, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, with Christians disproportionately among those forced to flee their homes.
The American mismanagement of Iraq has been particularly unkind to Christians. Militant gangs and terrorist groups target Christians for assault, murder, rape and kidnapping. One vivid example of the brutal violence is last October's murder of a prominent Syrian Orthodox priest whose beheaded body was found in the northern city of Mosul.
This campaign of intimidation and violence includes extremist fire bombings of dozens of churches, attacks on the heart of local Christian communities. In today's Iraq, Christians and other small religious minority groups lack the strength in numbers, the armed militias and the foreign support that the different communities in Iraq's Muslim majority possess.
While conservatives in America have warned of a cultural war against Christians by liberals and secularists in the United States, an actual war of attrition on Christians is unfolding in Iraq. Indeed, the plight of Iraq's Christians points to a cruel irony - an American president whose tight grip on conservative Christian voters at home helped propel him to the White House has stood by and watched the destruction of some of the world's oldest Christian communities.
Link via Pastor Dan, who looks out for these things better than I do.
"What Hath Got Wrot?"*
The New York Times Magazine boldly goes where Dawkins, Harris, and Dennet have gone before, with this cover article, "Darwin's God." In somewhat the tradition of Dawkins, it follows an anthropologist's search for the reason we "believe" ("belief" being, as ever, a poorly defined term that focusses solely on the question of God's existence. That is a position fraught with all manner of philosophical problems, but since philosophy is for academicians and scientists deal with "concrete situations," then we can be assured we are on solid ground in accepting this very narrow issue as the only valid one. Right?) Indeed, this is how the questions are posited:
Not surprisingly, then, this approach raises a few questions.
First question: is evolution "driven" by "survival"? Or is that Social Darwinism? "Survival of the fittest," we all say, is a tenet of Darwin's "theory of evolution." Without ever having read the book, we are all quite sure that Darwin posited "survival of the fittest" as a thesis explaining evolution in The Origin of Species. Or perhaps in The Descent of Man. Or was it The Voyage of the Beagle?* The idea isn't found in any of those, of course. It's found in the work of Herbert Spencer (and yes, I am being intellctually lazy in linking to Wikipedia. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa). Not that Darwin rejected the idea:
Maybe because the definition is so narrow as to be useless? We'll get to that in a moment (and the answer seems to be "Yes.") First, let's identify the value of "survival." Evolution is concerned with the survival of species, not individuals. If we are going to look at traits in the species which would seem to lead to doom, not life "into the ages" (the Greek phrase in the New Testament usually translated as "eternal life"), we should consider intelligence in human beings. Surely, we would say, that is what has made humans prosper and "survive." But from a biological point of view, or even a geological one, we are johnny come-latelies in the ecosystem, and while we have spread rapidly to every ecosystem on the planet, thanks to our "intelligence," we seem to be accelerating the pace at which we are destroying every species on earth we can, and destroying ourselves, too. Again, thanks to our "intelligence." Unless you consider the industrialized form of death we now call war, nuclear waste and weapons, and global warming (not to mention pollution, which chugs on almost unabated; see, e.g., Nigeria), then human intelligence is a dubious survival trait, indeed. "Survival" works only so long as the species is alive, after all. On what time scale do we measure the success of a "survival trait"? Human life? Geologic time? By any measure, as a species the dinosaurs were more successful than we've been; and the cockroach rules the world.
So what, really, does "belief" have to do with it? If belief is an irrational conclusion drawn on the basis of dubious evidence poorly investigated, then the whole concept of "survival" as the driving force of evolution seems a very dubious belief, indeed. Perhaps it's more accurate to say evolution explains the mechanism of change in species, and the extinction of species and appearance of new species, rather than "success." Because, after all, "success" only counts when you've ended the game, or reached a plateau after which no further change in status is, or can be, expected. Individuals "succeed," but species? On what scale? By what measure? Only against other species, or others in the species; and that returns us to the reprehensible traits of Social Darwinism, and the worst abuses of Darwin's theory, such as attempts to measure "intelligence," whether by skull capacity or with "IQ" tests. (Stephen Jay Gould, one would have thought, had laid that all to rest by now. But heresies in all fields of human thought abound. Hmmmm...wonder what the evolutionary explanation for poor reasoning is?) Does any credible biologist today still maintain that homo sapiens stands at the top of some supposed chain of being? If so, I can only imagine such a person is a Creationist, or at least a proponent of Intelligent Design.
Then, as Rick would point out, there is the obvious question of just how "objective" science as a field of knowledge is. Does it truly stand apart from the universe itself and know "truth"? How is that possible? Over 100 years ago Soren Kierkegaard critiqued the reasoning of Hegel by positing a man so objective in his thought, so separated from his own existence by his "system" of reasoning, that he awoke one morning to find he had died! So is it possible to objectively view the faith claims of another culture (such claims are always cultural, never individual) without presuming to put oneself in a position beyond the reach of such claims? And is such a position possible? If it is, how can "belief" be "hardwired" into us? Surely no amount of will can overcome something that is part of our "wiring."
What's truly intriguing here is that "belief" is defined, via a poor understanding of science (since "belief" itself is both a philsophical and theological term with no real "scientific" definition possible. There is, after all, nothing either fundamentally philosophical or theological about quarks, say, or viruses), by a reductio ad absurdum:
"Free will," of course, brings us back to philosophy and theology, where science doesn't purport to play. So once again, it's a matter of which paradigm you use, I guess. Funny how hard it is to get a simple answer, even in a reductio universe. There may be many arguments about monogamy, but biology is not a very sound basis for them. Perhaps if more scientists understood the concept of "abstraction" and "metaphysics."
So science (which involves an entire philosophy of its own, not just a stand on "truth" [which is, after all, a metaphysical concept; another problem, for the many "scientific thinkers" who eschew metaphysics]) is going to discver "truth" simply by examination of the "evidence." And the "evidence," according to this article, is based on this quite uncontrolled (there is no comparison group) and poorly understood "experiment":
These things that pass for knowledge I don't understand.
Of course, what I really love is what's becoming the newest meme of religion v. science (with neither of those terms being well defined, either; I'm such a lawyer about these things!), the one begun by Dawkins and Harris especially: "Religion started it!"
Oh boy.
Perhaps the confusion stems, as ever, from the nature and definition of "belief."
This, for examples, is the nutshell version of how Arten comes to his conclusion that the human brain is "hard-wired" to believe in things "that you know ain't true:"
Where do they find these people?
I'm sure it goes on and on in that vein. To be honest, at this point, I quit reading. So call this "critique" lazy and dishonest, if you like; I truly don't care. I have no illusions that I will become the anti-Dawkins and wipe such foolishness from the public discourse. If studying church history teaches you anything, it is that bad ideas (some of which the church labels "heresy," some of which it embraces like a motherless child seeking a parental figure) are forever, and are never banished, cannot be destroyed. I do not suffer fools gladly (for which I do frequent penance), but I also don't think I'm responsible for ridding the world of them. Besides, as soon as I attempt to vanquish the Dennetts and Harrises of this age, they will claim victimhood status and insist the fundamentalists and ID'ers not only started it, but are the REAL danger.
And I just don't have time for that nonsense.
*Walt Kelly
In short, are we hard-wired to believe in God? And if we are, how and why did that happen?There's a nice jump, there, from question 1 (are we "hard-wired" to "believe"? Well, first let's examine the metaphor "hard-wired"? Are our brains merely computers? Is there an area of human existence not amenable to the exertion of will? Are we, in fact, merely machines? If so, why isn't Mr. Arten a believer? There is more than a whiff of Social Darwinism in his entire premise. And what does this term "believe" mean?), to question 2: "And if we are ("IF"? Why bother with "if"? Haven't you read Dawkins and Dennett, the latter who has solved the riddle of the Sphinx and explained consciousness to us? Something even David Hume and Immanuel Kant and Martin Heidegger, to name three, couldn't do?), then we can move on to the scientific questions of "how" and "why". Nice work, if you can get it.
Not surprisingly, then, this approach raises a few questions.
First question: is evolution "driven" by "survival"? Or is that Social Darwinism? "Survival of the fittest," we all say, is a tenet of Darwin's "theory of evolution." Without ever having read the book, we are all quite sure that Darwin posited "survival of the fittest" as a thesis explaining evolution in The Origin of Species. Or perhaps in The Descent of Man. Or was it The Voyage of the Beagle?* The idea isn't found in any of those, of course. It's found in the work of Herbert Spencer (and yes, I am being intellctually lazy in linking to Wikipedia. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa). Not that Darwin rejected the idea:
He gave full credit to Spencer, writing "I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term natural selection, in order to mark its relation to man's power of selection. But the expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer, of the Survival of the Fittest, is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient." At this time the word "fittest" would have primarily meant "most suitable" or "most appropriate" rather than "in the best physical shape".There is a jump there, which we might call a "category mistake," and while the distinctions were blurred in Darwin's Victorian England, even for the "great" Darwin, they are not blurred now. There is quite a difference between explaining a process like natural selection, which works on species (i.e., biology) and differences between human societies (i.e., sociology). This is where the term "evolution" becomes syonoymous with "progress" (which always means "improvement"). Species may adapt to their changing environment, but societies do not progress toward greater and greater improvement, leaving "lesser" societies behind (any more than humans are "superior" to cockroaches. One is a much more likely to survive what humans are doing to the planet than the other. Jared Diamond is right; societal "success" is due to circumstance, not "evolutionary pressures.") By now Darwin's theory is no longer his alone, and few biologists accept the idea that evolution is en explanation of "progress," that it shows how "man" stands atop a ladder of some Great Chain of Being, stretching from amoebas to white European males. Still, we prefer to reduce evolutionary theory to one of natural conditions setting up a state of nature "nasty, brutish, and short" in which nothing which tends toward survival of the species is allowed entry. We then easily transfer that notion to human societies and, quelle surprise!, find ours is in the "superior" position on this hierarchy. So "belief in God" (which is not to be confused with "faith," please) is considered a "non-survival" trait, and so useless (although it exists in almost every society and human grouping on the planet. Although even that should be modified to "an acceptance of metaphysics." That, however, opens a completely different can of worms, which this article seems wholly unaware of. Nevertheless....). Why, then, does "belief" persist?
Maybe because the definition is so narrow as to be useless? We'll get to that in a moment (and the answer seems to be "Yes.") First, let's identify the value of "survival." Evolution is concerned with the survival of species, not individuals. If we are going to look at traits in the species which would seem to lead to doom, not life "into the ages" (the Greek phrase in the New Testament usually translated as "eternal life"), we should consider intelligence in human beings. Surely, we would say, that is what has made humans prosper and "survive." But from a biological point of view, or even a geological one, we are johnny come-latelies in the ecosystem, and while we have spread rapidly to every ecosystem on the planet, thanks to our "intelligence," we seem to be accelerating the pace at which we are destroying every species on earth we can, and destroying ourselves, too. Again, thanks to our "intelligence." Unless you consider the industrialized form of death we now call war, nuclear waste and weapons, and global warming (not to mention pollution, which chugs on almost unabated; see, e.g., Nigeria), then human intelligence is a dubious survival trait, indeed. "Survival" works only so long as the species is alive, after all. On what time scale do we measure the success of a "survival trait"? Human life? Geologic time? By any measure, as a species the dinosaurs were more successful than we've been; and the cockroach rules the world.
So what, really, does "belief" have to do with it? If belief is an irrational conclusion drawn on the basis of dubious evidence poorly investigated, then the whole concept of "survival" as the driving force of evolution seems a very dubious belief, indeed. Perhaps it's more accurate to say evolution explains the mechanism of change in species, and the extinction of species and appearance of new species, rather than "success." Because, after all, "success" only counts when you've ended the game, or reached a plateau after which no further change in status is, or can be, expected. Individuals "succeed," but species? On what scale? By what measure? Only against other species, or others in the species; and that returns us to the reprehensible traits of Social Darwinism, and the worst abuses of Darwin's theory, such as attempts to measure "intelligence," whether by skull capacity or with "IQ" tests. (Stephen Jay Gould, one would have thought, had laid that all to rest by now. But heresies in all fields of human thought abound. Hmmmm...wonder what the evolutionary explanation for poor reasoning is?) Does any credible biologist today still maintain that homo sapiens stands at the top of some supposed chain of being? If so, I can only imagine such a person is a Creationist, or at least a proponent of Intelligent Design.
Then, as Rick would point out, there is the obvious question of just how "objective" science as a field of knowledge is. Does it truly stand apart from the universe itself and know "truth"? How is that possible? Over 100 years ago Soren Kierkegaard critiqued the reasoning of Hegel by positing a man so objective in his thought, so separated from his own existence by his "system" of reasoning, that he awoke one morning to find he had died! So is it possible to objectively view the faith claims of another culture (such claims are always cultural, never individual) without presuming to put oneself in a position beyond the reach of such claims? And is such a position possible? If it is, how can "belief" be "hardwired" into us? Surely no amount of will can overcome something that is part of our "wiring."
What's truly intriguing here is that "belief" is defined, via a poor understanding of science (since "belief" itself is both a philsophical and theological term with no real "scientific" definition possible. There is, after all, nothing either fundamentally philosophical or theological about quarks, say, or viruses), by a reductio ad absurdum:
...religious belief is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved during early human history. What they disagree about is why a tendency to believe evolved, whether it was because belief itself was adaptive or because it was just an evolutionary byproduct, a mere consequence of some other adaptation in the evolution of the human brain.I've read of simiar theories about love and attraction, which is usually reduced to the biological need to reproduce. It's always seemed to me if that were the only reason I married, I'd have left my wife by now, despite the fact I am hardly an "alpha male" who could ever be in the market for a "trophy wife." It seems to me if biology is paramount, I'd simply make the move in hopes of increasing the "spread" of my "seed." (And notice how such ideas are still stuck in Darwin's conviction that males are "superior" to females. Plus ce la change, plus ce la meme chose.) But I haven't, so apparently "free will" is still a factor at play here. Which brings us back to Social Darwinism, again. Is belief something innate but which "superior" persons in "superior" cultures overcome by efforts of reason or intelligence? Are such persons merely lacking in "inferior cultures?" How else explain Mr. Arten's lifelong lack of "belief"? Shouldn't be he hard-wired for it? Did he overcome it by his superior will, a product of his "superior" culture? Is an "alpha male" with a trophy wife superior to me, a monogamous male in a 30 year old marriage to his high school sweetheart? Who gets to decide how this scale is determined, arranged, and who fits on it? Is "free will" a function only available to the "advanced," or the "evolved" cultures and/or individuals?
"Free will," of course, brings us back to philosophy and theology, where science doesn't purport to play. So once again, it's a matter of which paradigm you use, I guess. Funny how hard it is to get a simple answer, even in a reductio universe. There may be many arguments about monogamy, but biology is not a very sound basis for them. Perhaps if more scientists understood the concept of "abstraction" and "metaphysics."
So science (which involves an entire philosophy of its own, not just a stand on "truth" [which is, after all, a metaphysical concept; another problem, for the many "scientific thinkers" who eschew metaphysics]) is going to discver "truth" simply by examination of the "evidence." And the "evidence," according to this article, is based on this quite uncontrolled (there is no comparison group) and poorly understood "experiment":
His research interests include cognitive science and evolutionary biology, and sometimes he presents students with a wooden box that he pretends is an African relic. “If you have negative sentiments toward religion,” he tells them, “the box will destroy whatever you put inside it.” Many of his students say they doubt the existence of God, but in this demonstration they act as if they believe in something. Put your pencil into the magic box, he tells them, and the nonbelievers do so blithely. Put in your driver’s license, he says, and most do, but only after significant hesitation. And when he tells them to put in their hands, few will.Now that's a tightly controlled experiment, indeed. What, after all, are "negative thoughts about religion"? I'm quite sure I have some of those. Hmm, perhaps this doesn't reflect a belief in God, just a frightening willingness to accept what an authority figure says? Weren't there some experiments involving authority figures and pain dealt out to strangers? Why, yes, there were:
If they don’t believe in God, what exactly are they afraid of?
Milgram puts out a newspaper advertisement offering male Americans around the vicinity of Yale University to participate in a psychology experiment about memory and learning. Upon arriving at Yale, the participant is introduced to a tall, sharp and stern looking experimenter (Milgram) wearing a white lab coat. The participant is also introduced to a friendly co-participant, who is actually a confederate (a person pretending to be a participant, like a rigged audience for a magician). Milgram explains that the experiment investigates punishment in learning, and that one will be the "teacher", and one will be the "learner." Rigged lots are drawn to determine roles, and it is decided that the true participant will be the "teacher."Milgram's conclusions about his experiments are also illuminating:
The confederate is strapped to a chair, and his arm is dotted with electrodes. Milgram instructs the teacher to read out word pairs from a list, such as "clear" goes with "air", or "dictionary" goes with "red". Afterwards, when the teacher says a word, the learner must regurgitate the other word that goes with the teacher's word. If the learner recalls the correct word, we move to the next word pair. Otherwise, he is given a voltage shock. These shocks increase in amplitude as more mistakes are made. However, Milgram says that "no permanent tissue damage will occur" (gee how reassuring). Shocks start at 15 volts, and grow in 15 volt increments.
The shock generator is rather amusing. It has 30 switches, each labeled with a voltage ranging from 15 through 450 volts, and a verbal rating, ranging from "slight shock" to "danger: severe shock". The final two switches are labeled "XXX".
"The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation."To be fair, Atran is not pitting "the subjects' strongest moral imperatives" against authority. But he is trading on his classroom authority in order to conduct his "experiment." It's just as logical to conclude that his result arises from the psychology of teacher and student in Western culture as it does from some innate evolutionary principle. Is this a question of obedience, or of belief? Note that one is definable and verifiably by observation, whereas the latter is undefined (or, at best, poorly defined) and verifiable only by interpretation. Perhaps it's an issue of value, one again effected by the issue of authority. And even without those critiques, Occam's Razor says the former explanation (a question of authority) is to be preferred over the latter (a matter of unsound "belief"), simply because it is the simpler explanation.
These things that pass for knowledge I don't understand.
Of course, what I really love is what's becoming the newest meme of religion v. science (with neither of those terms being well defined, either; I'm such a lawyer about these things!), the one begun by Dawkins and Harris especially: "Religion started it!"
Religion made incursions into the traditional domain of science with attempts to bring intelligent design into the biology classroom and to choke off human embryonic stem-cell research on religious grounds. Scientists responded with counterincursions. Experts from the hard sciences, like evolutionary biology and cognitive neuroscience, joined anthropologists and psychologists in the study of religion, making God an object of scientific inquiry.To be fair, at least Henig doesn't mention, in the timeline between James and the 1990's, the "Scopes Monkey Trial," a conflict mostly misinterpreted by people who get their history from movies, not from history books. (Huston Smith points out the errors of interpretation of that trial, and how many of them stem from "Inherit the Wind," Why Religion Matters, New York: HarperSanFrancisco 2001, pp. 103-112). But still this is largely "blame the victim" rhetoric. Everything would have been fine if "religion" (i.e., fundamentalists with no more understanding of science than some scientist have of religion) hadn't declared war on knowledge (which is what the word "science" means, after all; but it is not, note, the philosophical concept of science today). We didn't start this fight, scientists now seem to say, but we'll finish it.
Oh boy.
Perhaps the confusion stems, as ever, from the nature and definition of "belief."
Atran saw such questions as a puzzle when applied to religion. So many aspects of religious belief involve misattribution and misunderstanding of the real world. Wouldn’t this be a liability in the survival-of-the-fittest competition? To Atran, religious belief requires taking “what is materially false to be true” and “what is materially true to be false.”William James is usually accused of giving us the famous aphorism that "faith is believing what isn't true." Except, of course, he didn't.
The freedom to ' believe what we will ' you apply to the case of some patent superstition; and the faith you think of is the faith defined by the schoolboy when he said, " Faith is when you believe something that you know ain't true." I can only repeat that this is misapprehension. In concreto, the freedom to believe can only cover living options which the intellect of the individual cannot by itself resolve; and living options never seem absurdities to him who has them to consider.It might be easier at this point simply to drop James' entire essay in and walk away. Some of his answers to these questions are remarkably akin to those of Johannes Climacus in the Philosophical Fragments. Certainly William James has a better, and more scientific (intentional irony) grasp of his subject than Mr. Arten does. And it is this failure of grasp which really interests me.
This, for examples, is the nutshell version of how Arten comes to his conclusion that the human brain is "hard-wired" to believe in things "that you know ain't true:"
Maybe cognitive effort was precisely the point. Maybe it took less mental work than Atran realized to hold belief in God in one’s mind. Maybe, in fact, belief was the default position for the human mind, something that took no cognitive effort at all.Belief, you see, is just a matter of lazy thinking! Wow! Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo and Duns Scotus and Maimonides and Plato, to name but four, banished at one blow! They couldn't help it! They were lazy thinkers!
Where do they find these people?
I'm sure it goes on and on in that vein. To be honest, at this point, I quit reading. So call this "critique" lazy and dishonest, if you like; I truly don't care. I have no illusions that I will become the anti-Dawkins and wipe such foolishness from the public discourse. If studying church history teaches you anything, it is that bad ideas (some of which the church labels "heresy," some of which it embraces like a motherless child seeking a parental figure) are forever, and are never banished, cannot be destroyed. I do not suffer fools gladly (for which I do frequent penance), but I also don't think I'm responsible for ridding the world of them. Besides, as soon as I attempt to vanquish the Dennetts and Harrises of this age, they will claim victimhood status and insist the fundamentalists and ID'ers not only started it, but are the REAL danger.
And I just don't have time for that nonsense.
*Walt Kelly
Is there a process theologian in the house?
No, seriously.
Pastor Dan agrees with Atrios and Huckabee that fully airing the religious beliefs of candidates is a good thing. Fine and dandy.
"Homoousias" or "Homoiousias". Which should it be?
What effects, positive and negative, do they think the "God is Dead" movement had on modern theology?
Where do they stand on Shubert Ogden's claim that Christianity must be acknowledged as the only true religion in order to make all the others "true"?
Do they think the influence of Bultmann has been a net positive, or a net negative, on the church?
What is their position on Christian Existentialism? Is it even possible to be Christian and an existentialist?
What is their personal metaphysics?
Do they prefer Moltmann's emphasis on "the crucified God," or Sorbino's Christology?
What is their pneumatology?
How do they feel about apophatic theology?
Is a negative atheology still a theological position? Why, or why not?
Wittegenstein said: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Agree? Disagree? Discuss.
Yeah, I know it's Lent, but I'm trying to get a piece of this action! Answers, people! We want answers!
Pastor Dan agrees with Atrios and Huckabee that fully airing the religious beliefs of candidates is a good thing. Fine and dandy.
"Homoousias" or "Homoiousias". Which should it be?
What effects, positive and negative, do they think the "God is Dead" movement had on modern theology?
Where do they stand on Shubert Ogden's claim that Christianity must be acknowledged as the only true religion in order to make all the others "true"?
Do they think the influence of Bultmann has been a net positive, or a net negative, on the church?
What is their position on Christian Existentialism? Is it even possible to be Christian and an existentialist?
What is their personal metaphysics?
Do they prefer Moltmann's emphasis on "the crucified God," or Sorbino's Christology?
What is their pneumatology?
How do they feel about apophatic theology?
Is a negative atheology still a theological position? Why, or why not?
Wittegenstein said: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Agree? Disagree? Discuss.
Yeah, I know it's Lent, but I'm trying to get a piece of this action! Answers, people! We want answers!
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Wednesday of the Second Week of Lent-2007
Now we are going up to Jerusalem--Matthew 20:18
JESUS is going to Jerusalem to fulfill his destiny. He knows it. From the beginning he has before his eyes all our sins which he will redeem. Now, little by little, day by day, their weight I ies on him more heavily, for the moment approaches when he must pay. The cross. And he alone; all the others are busy with silly dreams.
We too; there is our business and the stock exchange which is not going well and which is worrying us. Or else it is working out all right and our worries are no less. There are clients and there is the price of butter. All that is so much more important than the cross of Jesus.
--Jacques LeClerq
POOR JERUSALEM, words by Tim Rice
JESUS
Neither you Simon, nor the fifty thousand
Nor the Romans, nor the Jews, nor Judas nor the Twelve,
Nor the Priests, nor the Scribes
Nor doomed Jerusalem itself,
Understand what power is
Understand what glory is
Understand at all understand at all
If you knew all that I knew, my poor Jerusalem
You'd see the truth, but you close your eyes
But you close your eyes
While you live your troubles are many, poor Jerusalem
To conquer death you only have to die
You only have to die
JERUSALEM: the face visible yet hidden, the sap and the blood of all that makes us live or renounce life. The spark flashing in the darkness, the murmur rustling through shouts of happiness and joy. A name, a secret. For the exiled, a prayer. For all others, a promise. Jerusalem: seventeen times destroyed yet never erased. The symbol of survival. Jerusalem: the city which miraculously transforms humans into pilgrims; no one can enter it and go away unchanged.
For me, it is also a little town somewhere in Transylvania, lost in the Carpathians, where, captivated as much by mystery as by truth, a Jewish child studies the Talmud and is dazzled by the richness and melancholy of its universe made up of legend.
Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav, the storyteller of Hasidism, liked to say that no matter where he walked, his steps turned toward Jerusalem. As for me, I discovered it in the sacred word. Without taking a single step. I saw it then, as I see it now.
Here is the Valley of Jehoshaphat, where one day the nations will be judged. The Mount of Olives, where one day death will be vanquished. The citadel, the fortress of David, with its small turrets and golden domes where suns shatter and disappear. The Gate of Mercy, heavily bolted: Let anyone other than the Messiah try to pass and the earth will shake to its foundations.
And higher than the surrounding mountains of Moab and Judea, here is Mount Moriah, which since the beginning of time has lured humans in the quest of faith and sacrifice. It was here that we first opened our eyes and saw the world that henceforth we would share with death; it was here that, maddened by loneliness, we began speaking to our Creator and then to ourselves. It was here that two sons, our forefathers, discovered that which links innocence to murder and fervor to malediction. It was here that the first believer erected an altar on which to make an offering of both past and future. It was here, with the building of the Temple, that we proved ourselves worthy of sanctifying space as God had sanctified time.
This city of unshakable memory, I admit loving it, I even admit loving its hold over me. Distant lands no longer lure me. The seeker is weary of seeking, the explorer of self-excitement. Beneath this sky in which colors and faces clash, steps in the night reverberate to infinity; one listens, spellbound, overwhelmed. Follow them far enough and you will take by surprise a king lost in a dream, a prophet who reduces life and language to dust. Why then don't yoU follow them? You are afraid. The beggars are not.
--Elie Wiesel
My battles are fought out inside, with my own demons; it is not in my nature to tilt against the savage, cold-blooded fanatics who clamour for our destruction. I am not afraid of them either, I don't know why; I am so calm it is sometimes as if I were standing on the parapets of the palace of history looking down over far-distant lands. This bit of history we are experiencing right now is something I know I can stand up to. I know what is happening and yet my head is clear. But sometimes I feel as if a layer of ashes were being sprinkled over my heart, as if my face were withering and decaying before my very eyes, and as if everything were falling apart in front of me and my heart were letting every¬thing go. But these are brief moments; then everything falls back into place, my head is clear again and I can once more bear and stand up to this piece of history which is ours. For once you have begun to walk with God, you need only keep on walking-with God and all of life becomes one long stroll--such a marvelous feeling.
--Etty Hillesum
O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from your ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of your Word, Jesus Christ your Son.
---The Book of Common Prayer
JESUS is going to Jerusalem to fulfill his destiny. He knows it. From the beginning he has before his eyes all our sins which he will redeem. Now, little by little, day by day, their weight I ies on him more heavily, for the moment approaches when he must pay. The cross. And he alone; all the others are busy with silly dreams.
We too; there is our business and the stock exchange which is not going well and which is worrying us. Or else it is working out all right and our worries are no less. There are clients and there is the price of butter. All that is so much more important than the cross of Jesus.
--Jacques LeClerq
POOR JERUSALEM, words by Tim Rice
JESUS
Neither you Simon, nor the fifty thousand
Nor the Romans, nor the Jews, nor Judas nor the Twelve,
Nor the Priests, nor the Scribes
Nor doomed Jerusalem itself,
Understand what power is
Understand what glory is
Understand at all understand at all
If you knew all that I knew, my poor Jerusalem
You'd see the truth, but you close your eyes
But you close your eyes
While you live your troubles are many, poor Jerusalem
To conquer death you only have to die
You only have to die
JERUSALEM: the face visible yet hidden, the sap and the blood of all that makes us live or renounce life. The spark flashing in the darkness, the murmur rustling through shouts of happiness and joy. A name, a secret. For the exiled, a prayer. For all others, a promise. Jerusalem: seventeen times destroyed yet never erased. The symbol of survival. Jerusalem: the city which miraculously transforms humans into pilgrims; no one can enter it and go away unchanged.
For me, it is also a little town somewhere in Transylvania, lost in the Carpathians, where, captivated as much by mystery as by truth, a Jewish child studies the Talmud and is dazzled by the richness and melancholy of its universe made up of legend.
Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav, the storyteller of Hasidism, liked to say that no matter where he walked, his steps turned toward Jerusalem. As for me, I discovered it in the sacred word. Without taking a single step. I saw it then, as I see it now.
Here is the Valley of Jehoshaphat, where one day the nations will be judged. The Mount of Olives, where one day death will be vanquished. The citadel, the fortress of David, with its small turrets and golden domes where suns shatter and disappear. The Gate of Mercy, heavily bolted: Let anyone other than the Messiah try to pass and the earth will shake to its foundations.
And higher than the surrounding mountains of Moab and Judea, here is Mount Moriah, which since the beginning of time has lured humans in the quest of faith and sacrifice. It was here that we first opened our eyes and saw the world that henceforth we would share with death; it was here that, maddened by loneliness, we began speaking to our Creator and then to ourselves. It was here that two sons, our forefathers, discovered that which links innocence to murder and fervor to malediction. It was here that the first believer erected an altar on which to make an offering of both past and future. It was here, with the building of the Temple, that we proved ourselves worthy of sanctifying space as God had sanctified time.
This city of unshakable memory, I admit loving it, I even admit loving its hold over me. Distant lands no longer lure me. The seeker is weary of seeking, the explorer of self-excitement. Beneath this sky in which colors and faces clash, steps in the night reverberate to infinity; one listens, spellbound, overwhelmed. Follow them far enough and you will take by surprise a king lost in a dream, a prophet who reduces life and language to dust. Why then don't yoU follow them? You are afraid. The beggars are not.
--Elie Wiesel
My battles are fought out inside, with my own demons; it is not in my nature to tilt against the savage, cold-blooded fanatics who clamour for our destruction. I am not afraid of them either, I don't know why; I am so calm it is sometimes as if I were standing on the parapets of the palace of history looking down over far-distant lands. This bit of history we are experiencing right now is something I know I can stand up to. I know what is happening and yet my head is clear. But sometimes I feel as if a layer of ashes were being sprinkled over my heart, as if my face were withering and decaying before my very eyes, and as if everything were falling apart in front of me and my heart were letting every¬thing go. But these are brief moments; then everything falls back into place, my head is clear again and I can once more bear and stand up to this piece of history which is ours. For once you have begun to walk with God, you need only keep on walking-with God and all of life becomes one long stroll--such a marvelous feeling.
--Etty Hillesum
O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from your ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of your Word, Jesus Christ your Son.
---The Book of Common Prayer
Sunday, March 04, 2007
We can't put it together;
it is together.--Stewart Brand, The Last Whole Earth Catalog
It's Sunday (or near enough, I'm cheating on the time stamp tonight, but tomorrow will be a busy day, so today we'll post a few hours early but call it Sunday anyway. Call it "God's time). Time again to unlock the word-hoard.
Stewart Brand on the resiliency of systems
That is one worth reading all on its own. When you're done reading everything below, you can read this one, too. This should be enough to keep you busy for th next week. When I have time, I'll have more to say about this, but I invite your reflections, too. On anything; on everything.
May God's blessings be with you.
It's Sunday (or near enough, I'm cheating on the time stamp tonight, but tomorrow will be a busy day, so today we'll post a few hours early but call it Sunday anyway. Call it "God's time). Time again to unlock the word-hoard.
Stewart Brand on the resiliency of systems
That is one worth reading all on its own. When you're done reading everything below, you can read this one, too. This should be enough to keep you busy for th next week. When I have time, I'll have more to say about this, but I invite your reflections, too. On anything; on everything.
May God's blessings be with you.
This is some more of it
(The book, that is. You can tell where it breaks down into notes I haven't completed yet. I'm working on a brief lecture I will give this morning [Sunday] about the central paradox of hospitality as the core of Christian practice and understanding of God, which is the paradox that makes us both host and stranger simultaneously. I'll try to present that later.)
Hospitality is not about guests; it’s about strangers. That’s the first lesson.
Hospitality is not about people you know; it’s about people you don’t know. Hospitality is about people you never know, because there is always a stranger, a person you have not yet met. Which isn’t to say that hospitality requires you to go out into the world, seeking out strangers and making them friends. Hospitality doesn’t require you to go out into the world at all. And it has nothing to do with making friends. Making friends is up to you. And wherever you are, the world will find you; the world will come to you. What you do then, is the concern of hospitality.
Let’s begin with Abraham. Everything begins with Abraham. We’ll have occasion to say that over and over again as we go along, because it is so fundamentally true. Everything begins with Abraham. He is the patriarch of Israel, which is to say of the Jews, which is to say of Judaism. Moses liberated the slaves and gave them the law; Elijah and then Isaiah and the other prophets gave them the vision; Scribes and Pharisees and then rabbis down through the ages have given them the guidance; but there is only one Abraham, and no one calls themselves a child of Moses or Elijah. For the Jews, everything begins with Abraham.
As it does for Christians. Open the Gospel of Matthew, the first book in the canon of the New Testament. The first name in the list of the geneaology of Jesus the Christ, the son of David, is Abraham. Luke starts there, too. And even Islam traces itself back to the father of nations, through his first son, Ishmael. Abraham is the patriarch and physical founder of three of the most important religions in human history, of all the people named by the Koran “the people of the Book.” From this fountainhead a great deal of human activity flows. Everything begins with Abraham.
So it is fitting we should start there, in a discussion of God and hospitality. Because hospitality requires three things in order to be seen, in order to even be known. Hospitality requires a host; and a guest; and most importantly, hospitality requires a home.
Hospitality is first an offer. It is an offer of something, and it is an offer consciously made. The offer has to be made by someone, but it cannot be made simply by anyone. If the servant makes the offer of hospitality, it is understood that the offer is made in the name of the master. If a servant presumes to make an offer of hospitality without authority, it is a breach of etiquette, of the social rules that govern any culture’s standards, and it is understood to be an empty thing. I cannot welcome you to the home of another; the offer is not mine to make, the hospitality of the place is not mine to extend. I have no authority there; my act is a nullity. While an offer appears to have been made, nothing in fact is extended, and you the guest are given nothing to receive.
So hospitality requires a host, a person authorized to make an offer. But what is the offer that is made? It is the offer of the comforts of a place; without a place, no offer is possible. Just as I cannot welcome you to a house that isn’t mine, neither can I welcome you to a public building where I am equal to you, where we are both guest or strangers. It may be socially convenient to play host to my city’s museums, but I cannot truly offer you comforts that are as equally yours as they are mine. The comforts of my home are mine; to share them with you is to sacrifice what is mine so that it can be offered in equal, or preferably unequal, measure with you. The comforts of a public building are as available to you as they are to me. Perhaps I can guide you, explain customs and manners to you, be a good guide and in the broadest sense a welcoming “host.” But I cannot really host you in a place that is not mine, in a place where we are equally strangers and stand on the same footing with regard to access to amenities. I can be polite, helpful, reassuring; but hospitality requires something more, to be in existence.
Hospitality requires sacrifice. Not a life threatening sacrifice, but a small one, an accommodating one. It is a sacrifice for a host to accommodate a guest; it is a sacrifice of time, or material, or food, or space. It is a sacrifice of privacy, or privilege. In showing hospitality, something is given away, something that is not expected back, that, indeed, cannot be given back. In showing hospitality, the host has to freely give away what he or she would keep, has to surrender to the other what is the host’s alone to give. That is the duty of a host; to give; just as it is the duty of the guest, to receive.
So the host must give, and to be able to give must give of what is his alone to
give, what she alone controls and has at her command. Hospitality, then, requires a home, requires the host’s home, in order for the offer to be made, for the transaction to take place. And more obviously now than in the beginning, our definition of hospitality requires a guest to receive these things. Without a guest the offers are not possible, are not even required. The guest, then, prompts our hospitality, even requires it of us. Without the guest, no hospitality is called out of us; without the guest, hospitality isn’t even possible.
Which is the paradox of hospitality, because the guest must always be a stranger. If the guest is someone known to you, it is no longer hospitality you offer, but friendship, courtesy, a social convention that takes place within an economic circle of exchange. To show courtesy to your friends, even to an acquaintance, is to make an offer because it is foreseeable that it might be reciprocated. If the guest is not a stranger, an act of courtesy is always an exchange, a payment made that can be repaid at some time in the future. All courtesies take place within a system of exchange. You treat others as you yourself would be treated. The slightest courtesy can be repaid in kind, can even be repaid immediately. I smile at you; you honor my offer by smiling back. I extend my hand; you honor my offer by extending yours, and we shake hands. But hospitality is not merely courtesy. In an act of hospitality I do not make a simple offer of societal conventions, expecting a response in kind. In an act of hospitality I, as host, offer you, as guest, as stranger, my place, and all the comforts that my place can give to you. I make this offer without even expectation that you accept it. If you do not or cannot, my obligation as a host is to make you whatever offer I can that meets your needs. The host’s obligations are to put the needs of the guest above the needs of the host, to offer the best of what is within the host’s power to give.
What is the best is defined by the needs of the guest, and the limitations of the host, and of the place. A host cannot offer more than he or she has, but if the host can meet the needs of the guest, hospitality is only satisfied, is only truly known, when the host has done so. But if this is done with the expectation that such an offer will be repaid, either in kind or better, then it is not hospitality, it is a mere exchange. The stranger who comes to you may be a king disguised as a pauper. Or the stranger may be a pedophile, a rapist, a murderer. Either could repay your hospitality in a coin out of all measure to the hospitality you have shown; but not every anticipated payment is also a desirable one. Just as we imagine the king would repay us generously, we imagine the murderer would repay us by taking something away. Even though the king has as much power of life and death as the murderer, and the murderer as much capacity to be generous as the king. Still we imagine that once we know who the stranger is, we know what the stranger will do. But hospitality functions in that area of “unknowing,” in that point in time where the stranger remains a stranger, and all possibilities are still open. Hospitality functions, then, at the very moment of our greatest vulnerability.
“Never cease to love your fellow-Christians. Do not neglect to show hospitality; by doing this, some have entertained angels unawares,” the letter to the Hebrews reminds us. But (setting aside for the moment the narrow restriction of this advice to only one’s “fellow Christians,” and so to Christians entire and alone) the converse is what we are more often aware of: by doing this, some have entertained monsters unawares. Our experience and the news of the world around us, indeed, makes us more concerned that we will entertain the former rather than the latter; from one we expect sympathy; from the other, we fear assault. So hospitality requires vulnerability; but it has to be a vulnerability clear-eyed about the danger, not focussed solely on the hope of extravagant reward. To entertain angels, after all, would be to entertain God. But to live by the hope of entertaining God, one must live with the risk of showing hospitality to the Devil.
So it is no simple matter, this matter of hospitality. It requires a host, a place, and a guest. And the place must be the host’s own, his alone and entire, a place from which the host can ban strangers, in order to be a place where strangers can be welcomed. Without the power to control access, the host cannot offer the comforts of her place, her home, to a stranger. And unless the stranger is absolutely unknown to the host, unless there is an absolute risk that the stranger is a monster or an angel (not yet to speak of “as well as,” for the monster and the angel share one common characteristic, that of being wholly other to the host), there is no hospitality. Being absolutely unknown, the stranger must be, as a stranger, in no apparent position (at least) to repay the host; because in a position of commonality, there is also a position of exchange, and the offering of the host is merely one of economy, one that may be repaid either by the guest directly, or by the guest indirectly. Hospitality must stand outside the economic circle of offer and exchange; it must be an offer without hope, without thought, without chance, of repayment. It must be a gift, but a gift given knowingly by the host, where the host sees only the offering and receipt by the stranger. This makes it, in the strict sense, not a gift at all. But receipt of this gift is not the same as acceptance. Whether the guest receives the gift, it is enough that the host offers it; indeed, the host cannot expect an acceptance, since such acceptance would indeed constitute a payment, an exchange, the offer repaid in the coin of gratitude. But it is not my purpose to make hospitality seem, or even have to be, impossible. It is enough to show that hospitality requires sacrifice; and one sacrifice required is the expectation of an exchange from the host’s offer. It is enough for the host to truly make the offer required of hospitality; how that offer is received is beyond her control, and in the truest sense none of her concern. Her actions are measured by what she has done, not by how others respond to it.
So we begin with Abraham, just as God did. God invites Abraham (without appearance, without preamble, without so much as an apparent introduction) to a place God will show him, to a place of God’s that God will share with Abraham. The story of Abraham begins with the story of God as host.
“Leave you own country, your kin, and your father’s house,” God says to Abraham, “and go to a country that I will show you.” Immediately God sets two patterns for God’s followers: the call to leave, and the call to follow. One makes us strangers and aliens on the earth; the other promises an end, a goal, a place as our destination. Aliens and strangers are always guests dependent on the hospitality of others; those with a home are always hosts to the alien, the one without or, for the moment, away, from home. So we are not either/or; we are both/and.
Hospitality is an “either/or.” Unless the offering of the place to the guest is whole and absolute, unless all the comforts of the place of the host are made available without reservation to the guest, there is still no hospitality. The host may meet the simple courtesies of the time and culture, of the larger place within which the place controlled by the host is situated; but the host will have failed completely to show hospitality. The offering of hospitality must be without boundaries as to the place. Which is not to say the offering is without boundaries as to what is in the place; there are understood limitations even in the phrase “mi casa es su casa.” My house is offered to you as your house; but my possessions remain my possessions. The offering of place while it remains the possession of the host is what draws the line between hospitality and surrender of the premises and all its contents. The offering is not a whole offering (“all that I have is yours; take it away from me”), but an offering of sacrifice. The “first fruits” of what is mine, I offer to the stranger. What is taken, what is received, is the offering only, and whatever physical substance embodies it: a chair, a table, a bed; food and drink; a place to bathe. These things are not taken away; they are not removed. But their use is taken, and received, and made the possession of the other, of the unknown guest, the stranger. It seems like an over-drawn distinction. But in that distinction is all the glory and blessing of hospitality.
Because the host cannot offer a place that is not hers to offer; and a host cannot offer the comforts of the place that are not hers to give. And hospitality is merely the offer; it is the relinquishment of use of what is mine to another, to the stranger, while the possession remains mine, remains under my control; and therefore, remains with me. This keeps the stranger with me, too. The stranger must be in my place to accept my hospitality. The stranger and I must remain close, in contact at least proximally if not physically. I may do good works, I may give money or goods or things to charity, I may assemble boxes and deliver food to the hungry, blankets and clothes to the naked, transport the homeless to shelter; but while these are all acts of great kindness and much to be encouraged, while these are blessings and even fruits of the kingdom, the basilea tou theou, they are not offerings of hospitality. No thing of mine is offered, because all that is given is given away. When I give the money, when I donate the goods, when I deliver to the hungry or transport the homeless, the moment I release the money, the goods, the time, they are no longer mine. They leave me, and become the possession of someone else. I do not put myself in the possession of another when I provide transport; I give away my time, perhaps even the use of my vehicle. But the moment I release anything, whether I give it away or sell it, it is not longer mine to control; and by delivering the goods, handing over the money, or driving the car, I am only carrying out the obligation I have already agreed to fulfill. Once decided on, only the act remains to conclude the agreement; but the act is the final sinecure, the last remaining function to make official what has already occurred: the possession and I have already parted. The act itself then, is symbolic; it completes a transaction that is already done.
But hospitality is an action that requires me, and me alone. I alone can be the host to my place; I alone can welcome the stranger across the threshold into my domain. I alone can offer the comforts and amenities that are mine to offer, and I alone can witness to their use by another, a complete stranger, to whom I make the offers of a dearest friend. If another does this for me, I am no longer the host. If my goods go in my stead, they were no longer mine the moment I agreed to let them go, and nothing of me goes with them. Hospitality is an offering of what I still have, not of what might have once passed through my hands. So hospitality is not a gift, nor entirely an offering; it is something else entirely.
God gives Abraham and his descendents the land as early as Genesis 12:7. But this gift is always understood as an offering, as a gesture of hospitality. It is given by the Creator, who cannot give away Creation, who cannot severe, or be severed, from a relationship with the Creation, from the position of originator. A position that corresponds with, but is not the same as, ownership. The land is God’s to give possession to, but God does not give the land over to, transfer title and all rights and responsibilities appurtenant thereto. The place remains God’s, who gives its use to a guest. But for the host to give over all connection with the place to the guest, is to change the status of both guest and host, and so eliminate the issue of hospitality. When the host severs all contact, all possession and responsibility for, the place, she is no longer host to that place. For God to sever all contact, all possession, to even a portion of the Creation, is to sever contact with all of Creation; and it is for God to no longer be God. The revelation that begins the story in Genesis is that God is the Creator. If God is severed from that relationship, then that revelation is meaningless, and God’s relationship ab initio to Creation and its creatures, is negated. It is literally null and void, just as it was before the Creation. The whole of the revelation is undone on that point, and falls away.
But the Creator cannot be severed from the Creation. So the Creator is also host, and intends to extend through Abraham a blessing on all humanity: “I will bless those who bless you, and the ones who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
It is an ongoing relationship, the relationship between Creator and Created, between guest and host. Hospitality is always present so long as the guest and host are present. After the Exile to Babylon, trying to reconstruct their society and their covenant with the Creator, the people of Israel are told to annually remember that what they have, beginning with the land, comes from the God of Abraham, so they will not lose it again. Deuteronomy 26 opens by restating the understanding that Israel is given the land to occupy, not to own; land they have only recently recovered: “After you come into the land which the Lord your God is giving you to occupy as your holding and settle in it, you are to take some of the firstfruits of all the produce of the soil…and…go to the place which the Lord your God will choose as a dwelling for [God’s] name.” (Deuteronomy 26:1-2, REB) The land, like the offer of hospitality, is always provisionally given. Hospitality involves what gift giving does not: a risk.
Now we are ready to begin with Abraham.
So Abraham is sitting outside his tent at the oaks of Mamre, and three strangers come up. It is the Lord, the narration tells us, but Abraham has no way of knowing that. “Lord, when did we see you?” becomes a plaintive cry when we put ourselves in Abraham’s position, and consider how we have welcomed strangers coming up to our door. It is the common humanity of Abraham that he doesn’t know any more than we would; but it is the wisdom of Abraham that he doesn’t need to.
[Because the guest must always be the stranger, in order for there to be hospitality. the wisdom of Abraham that he doesn’tThey stop at his tent, which makes Abraham look up. Their presence demands his attention. A small enough thing to give, but even this offering entails obligations. For Abraham, it is starkly the obligations of a fellow traveler. He has settled in the land that God has shown him, but Abraham is still a pilgrim in life, still awaiting the goal of children as numerous as the stars in the sky, as uncountable as the grains of sand by the sea. Abraham is still on his journey, and he understands that it means to be a traveller. So Abraham looks up, and immediately invites the strangers to take a meal from him.
“If I have found favor with you,” he says, by way of opening and offering. It is the most humbling statement he can make. How can they have found favor with someone they have not yet even met? But Abraham, of course, treats nothing as accident.
It is shown or not shownbased only on one hope. overly optimistic about
I do not make a simple offerThe guest must always be the unknown person, [develop this, along lines Derrida would use for developing the strictness of the idea of “gift”. “Guest” is not a stranger who invokes hospitality, any more than a gift is truly a gift when an exchange is possible. Hospitality toward friends is mere reciprocity. Speak of it in terms of “economy,” where “hospitality” is that which breaks the economy. This is the lesson of Abraham at Mamre, or Jesus at the table of Simon. Indeed, especially Jesus, who is always accepting a hospitality he cannot possible reciprocate (“Foxes have holes,” etc.), but also offering a hospitality (the unnamed prostitute) that cannot, in its same terms, be reciprocated. Don’t neglect the importance of the terms of the reciprocity. In fact, exploit that; there is hospitality between social unequals, where one is actually shamed because he/she cannot return the favor of the other. Think of “Howard’s End.” There is a generosity, a hospitality, that embarrasses, that shames, because it so breaches the economy of reciprocity. Howard’s End is the example to cite there. Focus on this question of breach, because the stranger is always the one who breaches the economy, the enclosed sphere, with something that cannot be accepted nor repaid. In fact, hospitality does not always have the intended result. As Howard’s End illustrates, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. {with the best of intentions, the younger sister befriends the poor clerk, which eventually costs him his job and finally his life. We offer hospitality at great risk to the other, especially when we offer more than can be accepted, more than we can ourselves convey.) Again, the blessing of Abraham that makes Sarah laugh, because she cannot accept the news from the strangers. She laughs, and hides her laughter (being a good hostess), but she does not accept what is given to her, what breaches her sphere and gives her something wholly new and wholly unexpected. It comes anyway, but not with her acceptance.)
[With Abraham, God takes a risk. God the omnipotent, God the all-wise, is an assumption of the Greeks, not the Hebrews. Perfection is the ideal of Hellenistic thought; reason is its avatar. The God of Abraham is the Creator, not the Perfecter nor its perfect origin. It is God’s sufficiency that is praised by the Psalmist, not God’s embodiment of the Ideal Attributes. As we will see, God plays the host in many of the Biblical stories; and hospitality always involves risks. Without the risk, there is no hospitality.](develop that theme as well; cf. Moriah. Not an example of hospitality, but an example of God testing the risk, to be sure the person God has invited, understands what is required. This is outside the bounds of hospitality, but not all that God does, nor all of our lives, are lived strictly within the requirements of hospitality. Like God, our relationships begin there. Like God, our relationships are infinitely too complicated to long remain there. Note here the double risk, by God and by Abraham. Both risk all in this gamble, this offering and accepting of a home, of a place be at home.)
Hospitality is not necessary unless there is a guest involved. In fact, hospitality is
[include an analysis of the Prodigal Son; an example/parable of the extremes of hospitality, where true hostility has been shown to the host, and the host actually gives away what is not his to give. Hospitality presumes upon the boundaries we draw, and forces us to erase them, or at least face having them erased. How we respond is then mystery, truly mystery, because it is up to us. And THAT is the mysterium tremendum, the thought that makes us tremble because we know it has already happened. How do we know? We have been told. “Lord, when did we see you?”]
[Another paradox of hospitality: it requires boundaries. Hospitality requires space. We can’t separate hospitality from space, from location, the physical. Hospitality is not merely a “state of mind.” Without action, hospitality does not exist at all. Without space in which to perform hospitality, it does not come into existence. So hospitality requires space; but not limitless space. It requires place, and place must have boundaries. Place must have limitations. Boundaries between persons are ineradicable. But God is boundless. How do we invite the boundless into our bounded space? Having done so, what have we done? Boundlessness persists in the parables. Prodigal son is one example. Last Judgment is another. “Lord, when did we see you?”]
Hospitality is not about guests; it’s about strangers. That’s the first lesson.
Hospitality is not about people you know; it’s about people you don’t know. Hospitality is about people you never know, because there is always a stranger, a person you have not yet met. Which isn’t to say that hospitality requires you to go out into the world, seeking out strangers and making them friends. Hospitality doesn’t require you to go out into the world at all. And it has nothing to do with making friends. Making friends is up to you. And wherever you are, the world will find you; the world will come to you. What you do then, is the concern of hospitality.
Let’s begin with Abraham. Everything begins with Abraham. We’ll have occasion to say that over and over again as we go along, because it is so fundamentally true. Everything begins with Abraham. He is the patriarch of Israel, which is to say of the Jews, which is to say of Judaism. Moses liberated the slaves and gave them the law; Elijah and then Isaiah and the other prophets gave them the vision; Scribes and Pharisees and then rabbis down through the ages have given them the guidance; but there is only one Abraham, and no one calls themselves a child of Moses or Elijah. For the Jews, everything begins with Abraham.
As it does for Christians. Open the Gospel of Matthew, the first book in the canon of the New Testament. The first name in the list of the geneaology of Jesus the Christ, the son of David, is Abraham. Luke starts there, too. And even Islam traces itself back to the father of nations, through his first son, Ishmael. Abraham is the patriarch and physical founder of three of the most important religions in human history, of all the people named by the Koran “the people of the Book.” From this fountainhead a great deal of human activity flows. Everything begins with Abraham.
So it is fitting we should start there, in a discussion of God and hospitality. Because hospitality requires three things in order to be seen, in order to even be known. Hospitality requires a host; and a guest; and most importantly, hospitality requires a home.
Hospitality is first an offer. It is an offer of something, and it is an offer consciously made. The offer has to be made by someone, but it cannot be made simply by anyone. If the servant makes the offer of hospitality, it is understood that the offer is made in the name of the master. If a servant presumes to make an offer of hospitality without authority, it is a breach of etiquette, of the social rules that govern any culture’s standards, and it is understood to be an empty thing. I cannot welcome you to the home of another; the offer is not mine to make, the hospitality of the place is not mine to extend. I have no authority there; my act is a nullity. While an offer appears to have been made, nothing in fact is extended, and you the guest are given nothing to receive.
So hospitality requires a host, a person authorized to make an offer. But what is the offer that is made? It is the offer of the comforts of a place; without a place, no offer is possible. Just as I cannot welcome you to a house that isn’t mine, neither can I welcome you to a public building where I am equal to you, where we are both guest or strangers. It may be socially convenient to play host to my city’s museums, but I cannot truly offer you comforts that are as equally yours as they are mine. The comforts of my home are mine; to share them with you is to sacrifice what is mine so that it can be offered in equal, or preferably unequal, measure with you. The comforts of a public building are as available to you as they are to me. Perhaps I can guide you, explain customs and manners to you, be a good guide and in the broadest sense a welcoming “host.” But I cannot really host you in a place that is not mine, in a place where we are equally strangers and stand on the same footing with regard to access to amenities. I can be polite, helpful, reassuring; but hospitality requires something more, to be in existence.
Hospitality requires sacrifice. Not a life threatening sacrifice, but a small one, an accommodating one. It is a sacrifice for a host to accommodate a guest; it is a sacrifice of time, or material, or food, or space. It is a sacrifice of privacy, or privilege. In showing hospitality, something is given away, something that is not expected back, that, indeed, cannot be given back. In showing hospitality, the host has to freely give away what he or she would keep, has to surrender to the other what is the host’s alone to give. That is the duty of a host; to give; just as it is the duty of the guest, to receive.
So the host must give, and to be able to give must give of what is his alone to
give, what she alone controls and has at her command. Hospitality, then, requires a home, requires the host’s home, in order for the offer to be made, for the transaction to take place. And more obviously now than in the beginning, our definition of hospitality requires a guest to receive these things. Without a guest the offers are not possible, are not even required. The guest, then, prompts our hospitality, even requires it of us. Without the guest, no hospitality is called out of us; without the guest, hospitality isn’t even possible.
Which is the paradox of hospitality, because the guest must always be a stranger. If the guest is someone known to you, it is no longer hospitality you offer, but friendship, courtesy, a social convention that takes place within an economic circle of exchange. To show courtesy to your friends, even to an acquaintance, is to make an offer because it is foreseeable that it might be reciprocated. If the guest is not a stranger, an act of courtesy is always an exchange, a payment made that can be repaid at some time in the future. All courtesies take place within a system of exchange. You treat others as you yourself would be treated. The slightest courtesy can be repaid in kind, can even be repaid immediately. I smile at you; you honor my offer by smiling back. I extend my hand; you honor my offer by extending yours, and we shake hands. But hospitality is not merely courtesy. In an act of hospitality I do not make a simple offer of societal conventions, expecting a response in kind. In an act of hospitality I, as host, offer you, as guest, as stranger, my place, and all the comforts that my place can give to you. I make this offer without even expectation that you accept it. If you do not or cannot, my obligation as a host is to make you whatever offer I can that meets your needs. The host’s obligations are to put the needs of the guest above the needs of the host, to offer the best of what is within the host’s power to give.
What is the best is defined by the needs of the guest, and the limitations of the host, and of the place. A host cannot offer more than he or she has, but if the host can meet the needs of the guest, hospitality is only satisfied, is only truly known, when the host has done so. But if this is done with the expectation that such an offer will be repaid, either in kind or better, then it is not hospitality, it is a mere exchange. The stranger who comes to you may be a king disguised as a pauper. Or the stranger may be a pedophile, a rapist, a murderer. Either could repay your hospitality in a coin out of all measure to the hospitality you have shown; but not every anticipated payment is also a desirable one. Just as we imagine the king would repay us generously, we imagine the murderer would repay us by taking something away. Even though the king has as much power of life and death as the murderer, and the murderer as much capacity to be generous as the king. Still we imagine that once we know who the stranger is, we know what the stranger will do. But hospitality functions in that area of “unknowing,” in that point in time where the stranger remains a stranger, and all possibilities are still open. Hospitality functions, then, at the very moment of our greatest vulnerability.
“Never cease to love your fellow-Christians. Do not neglect to show hospitality; by doing this, some have entertained angels unawares,” the letter to the Hebrews reminds us. But (setting aside for the moment the narrow restriction of this advice to only one’s “fellow Christians,” and so to Christians entire and alone) the converse is what we are more often aware of: by doing this, some have entertained monsters unawares. Our experience and the news of the world around us, indeed, makes us more concerned that we will entertain the former rather than the latter; from one we expect sympathy; from the other, we fear assault. So hospitality requires vulnerability; but it has to be a vulnerability clear-eyed about the danger, not focussed solely on the hope of extravagant reward. To entertain angels, after all, would be to entertain God. But to live by the hope of entertaining God, one must live with the risk of showing hospitality to the Devil.
So it is no simple matter, this matter of hospitality. It requires a host, a place, and a guest. And the place must be the host’s own, his alone and entire, a place from which the host can ban strangers, in order to be a place where strangers can be welcomed. Without the power to control access, the host cannot offer the comforts of her place, her home, to a stranger. And unless the stranger is absolutely unknown to the host, unless there is an absolute risk that the stranger is a monster or an angel (not yet to speak of “as well as,” for the monster and the angel share one common characteristic, that of being wholly other to the host), there is no hospitality. Being absolutely unknown, the stranger must be, as a stranger, in no apparent position (at least) to repay the host; because in a position of commonality, there is also a position of exchange, and the offering of the host is merely one of economy, one that may be repaid either by the guest directly, or by the guest indirectly. Hospitality must stand outside the economic circle of offer and exchange; it must be an offer without hope, without thought, without chance, of repayment. It must be a gift, but a gift given knowingly by the host, where the host sees only the offering and receipt by the stranger. This makes it, in the strict sense, not a gift at all. But receipt of this gift is not the same as acceptance. Whether the guest receives the gift, it is enough that the host offers it; indeed, the host cannot expect an acceptance, since such acceptance would indeed constitute a payment, an exchange, the offer repaid in the coin of gratitude. But it is not my purpose to make hospitality seem, or even have to be, impossible. It is enough to show that hospitality requires sacrifice; and one sacrifice required is the expectation of an exchange from the host’s offer. It is enough for the host to truly make the offer required of hospitality; how that offer is received is beyond her control, and in the truest sense none of her concern. Her actions are measured by what she has done, not by how others respond to it.
So we begin with Abraham, just as God did. God invites Abraham (without appearance, without preamble, without so much as an apparent introduction) to a place God will show him, to a place of God’s that God will share with Abraham. The story of Abraham begins with the story of God as host.
“Leave you own country, your kin, and your father’s house,” God says to Abraham, “and go to a country that I will show you.” Immediately God sets two patterns for God’s followers: the call to leave, and the call to follow. One makes us strangers and aliens on the earth; the other promises an end, a goal, a place as our destination. Aliens and strangers are always guests dependent on the hospitality of others; those with a home are always hosts to the alien, the one without or, for the moment, away, from home. So we are not either/or; we are both/and.
Hospitality is an “either/or.” Unless the offering of the place to the guest is whole and absolute, unless all the comforts of the place of the host are made available without reservation to the guest, there is still no hospitality. The host may meet the simple courtesies of the time and culture, of the larger place within which the place controlled by the host is situated; but the host will have failed completely to show hospitality. The offering of hospitality must be without boundaries as to the place. Which is not to say the offering is without boundaries as to what is in the place; there are understood limitations even in the phrase “mi casa es su casa.” My house is offered to you as your house; but my possessions remain my possessions. The offering of place while it remains the possession of the host is what draws the line between hospitality and surrender of the premises and all its contents. The offering is not a whole offering (“all that I have is yours; take it away from me”), but an offering of sacrifice. The “first fruits” of what is mine, I offer to the stranger. What is taken, what is received, is the offering only, and whatever physical substance embodies it: a chair, a table, a bed; food and drink; a place to bathe. These things are not taken away; they are not removed. But their use is taken, and received, and made the possession of the other, of the unknown guest, the stranger. It seems like an over-drawn distinction. But in that distinction is all the glory and blessing of hospitality.
Because the host cannot offer a place that is not hers to offer; and a host cannot offer the comforts of the place that are not hers to give. And hospitality is merely the offer; it is the relinquishment of use of what is mine to another, to the stranger, while the possession remains mine, remains under my control; and therefore, remains with me. This keeps the stranger with me, too. The stranger must be in my place to accept my hospitality. The stranger and I must remain close, in contact at least proximally if not physically. I may do good works, I may give money or goods or things to charity, I may assemble boxes and deliver food to the hungry, blankets and clothes to the naked, transport the homeless to shelter; but while these are all acts of great kindness and much to be encouraged, while these are blessings and even fruits of the kingdom, the basilea tou theou, they are not offerings of hospitality. No thing of mine is offered, because all that is given is given away. When I give the money, when I donate the goods, when I deliver to the hungry or transport the homeless, the moment I release the money, the goods, the time, they are no longer mine. They leave me, and become the possession of someone else. I do not put myself in the possession of another when I provide transport; I give away my time, perhaps even the use of my vehicle. But the moment I release anything, whether I give it away or sell it, it is not longer mine to control; and by delivering the goods, handing over the money, or driving the car, I am only carrying out the obligation I have already agreed to fulfill. Once decided on, only the act remains to conclude the agreement; but the act is the final sinecure, the last remaining function to make official what has already occurred: the possession and I have already parted. The act itself then, is symbolic; it completes a transaction that is already done.
But hospitality is an action that requires me, and me alone. I alone can be the host to my place; I alone can welcome the stranger across the threshold into my domain. I alone can offer the comforts and amenities that are mine to offer, and I alone can witness to their use by another, a complete stranger, to whom I make the offers of a dearest friend. If another does this for me, I am no longer the host. If my goods go in my stead, they were no longer mine the moment I agreed to let them go, and nothing of me goes with them. Hospitality is an offering of what I still have, not of what might have once passed through my hands. So hospitality is not a gift, nor entirely an offering; it is something else entirely.
God gives Abraham and his descendents the land as early as Genesis 12:7. But this gift is always understood as an offering, as a gesture of hospitality. It is given by the Creator, who cannot give away Creation, who cannot severe, or be severed, from a relationship with the Creation, from the position of originator. A position that corresponds with, but is not the same as, ownership. The land is God’s to give possession to, but God does not give the land over to, transfer title and all rights and responsibilities appurtenant thereto. The place remains God’s, who gives its use to a guest. But for the host to give over all connection with the place to the guest, is to change the status of both guest and host, and so eliminate the issue of hospitality. When the host severs all contact, all possession and responsibility for, the place, she is no longer host to that place. For God to sever all contact, all possession, to even a portion of the Creation, is to sever contact with all of Creation; and it is for God to no longer be God. The revelation that begins the story in Genesis is that God is the Creator. If God is severed from that relationship, then that revelation is meaningless, and God’s relationship ab initio to Creation and its creatures, is negated. It is literally null and void, just as it was before the Creation. The whole of the revelation is undone on that point, and falls away.
But the Creator cannot be severed from the Creation. So the Creator is also host, and intends to extend through Abraham a blessing on all humanity: “I will bless those who bless you, and the ones who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
It is an ongoing relationship, the relationship between Creator and Created, between guest and host. Hospitality is always present so long as the guest and host are present. After the Exile to Babylon, trying to reconstruct their society and their covenant with the Creator, the people of Israel are told to annually remember that what they have, beginning with the land, comes from the God of Abraham, so they will not lose it again. Deuteronomy 26 opens by restating the understanding that Israel is given the land to occupy, not to own; land they have only recently recovered: “After you come into the land which the Lord your God is giving you to occupy as your holding and settle in it, you are to take some of the firstfruits of all the produce of the soil…and…go to the place which the Lord your God will choose as a dwelling for [God’s] name.” (Deuteronomy 26:1-2, REB) The land, like the offer of hospitality, is always provisionally given. Hospitality involves what gift giving does not: a risk.
Now we are ready to begin with Abraham.
So Abraham is sitting outside his tent at the oaks of Mamre, and three strangers come up. It is the Lord, the narration tells us, but Abraham has no way of knowing that. “Lord, when did we see you?” becomes a plaintive cry when we put ourselves in Abraham’s position, and consider how we have welcomed strangers coming up to our door. It is the common humanity of Abraham that he doesn’t know any more than we would; but it is the wisdom of Abraham that he doesn’t need to.
[Because the guest must always be the stranger, in order for there to be hospitality. the wisdom of Abraham that he doesn’tThey stop at his tent, which makes Abraham look up. Their presence demands his attention. A small enough thing to give, but even this offering entails obligations. For Abraham, it is starkly the obligations of a fellow traveler. He has settled in the land that God has shown him, but Abraham is still a pilgrim in life, still awaiting the goal of children as numerous as the stars in the sky, as uncountable as the grains of sand by the sea. Abraham is still on his journey, and he understands that it means to be a traveller. So Abraham looks up, and immediately invites the strangers to take a meal from him.
“If I have found favor with you,” he says, by way of opening and offering. It is the most humbling statement he can make. How can they have found favor with someone they have not yet even met? But Abraham, of course, treats nothing as accident.
It is shown or not shownbased only on one hope. overly optimistic about
I do not make a simple offerThe guest must always be the unknown person, [develop this, along lines Derrida would use for developing the strictness of the idea of “gift”. “Guest” is not a stranger who invokes hospitality, any more than a gift is truly a gift when an exchange is possible. Hospitality toward friends is mere reciprocity. Speak of it in terms of “economy,” where “hospitality” is that which breaks the economy. This is the lesson of Abraham at Mamre, or Jesus at the table of Simon. Indeed, especially Jesus, who is always accepting a hospitality he cannot possible reciprocate (“Foxes have holes,” etc.), but also offering a hospitality (the unnamed prostitute) that cannot, in its same terms, be reciprocated. Don’t neglect the importance of the terms of the reciprocity. In fact, exploit that; there is hospitality between social unequals, where one is actually shamed because he/she cannot return the favor of the other. Think of “Howard’s End.” There is a generosity, a hospitality, that embarrasses, that shames, because it so breaches the economy of reciprocity. Howard’s End is the example to cite there. Focus on this question of breach, because the stranger is always the one who breaches the economy, the enclosed sphere, with something that cannot be accepted nor repaid. In fact, hospitality does not always have the intended result. As Howard’s End illustrates, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. {with the best of intentions, the younger sister befriends the poor clerk, which eventually costs him his job and finally his life. We offer hospitality at great risk to the other, especially when we offer more than can be accepted, more than we can ourselves convey.) Again, the blessing of Abraham that makes Sarah laugh, because she cannot accept the news from the strangers. She laughs, and hides her laughter (being a good hostess), but she does not accept what is given to her, what breaches her sphere and gives her something wholly new and wholly unexpected. It comes anyway, but not with her acceptance.)
[With Abraham, God takes a risk. God the omnipotent, God the all-wise, is an assumption of the Greeks, not the Hebrews. Perfection is the ideal of Hellenistic thought; reason is its avatar. The God of Abraham is the Creator, not the Perfecter nor its perfect origin. It is God’s sufficiency that is praised by the Psalmist, not God’s embodiment of the Ideal Attributes. As we will see, God plays the host in many of the Biblical stories; and hospitality always involves risks. Without the risk, there is no hospitality.](develop that theme as well; cf. Moriah. Not an example of hospitality, but an example of God testing the risk, to be sure the person God has invited, understands what is required. This is outside the bounds of hospitality, but not all that God does, nor all of our lives, are lived strictly within the requirements of hospitality. Like God, our relationships begin there. Like God, our relationships are infinitely too complicated to long remain there. Note here the double risk, by God and by Abraham. Both risk all in this gamble, this offering and accepting of a home, of a place be at home.)
Hospitality is not necessary unless there is a guest involved. In fact, hospitality is
[include an analysis of the Prodigal Son; an example/parable of the extremes of hospitality, where true hostility has been shown to the host, and the host actually gives away what is not his to give. Hospitality presumes upon the boundaries we draw, and forces us to erase them, or at least face having them erased. How we respond is then mystery, truly mystery, because it is up to us. And THAT is the mysterium tremendum, the thought that makes us tremble because we know it has already happened. How do we know? We have been told. “Lord, when did we see you?”]
[Another paradox of hospitality: it requires boundaries. Hospitality requires space. We can’t separate hospitality from space, from location, the physical. Hospitality is not merely a “state of mind.” Without action, hospitality does not exist at all. Without space in which to perform hospitality, it does not come into existence. So hospitality requires space; but not limitless space. It requires place, and place must have boundaries. Place must have limitations. Boundaries between persons are ineradicable. But God is boundless. How do we invite the boundless into our bounded space? Having done so, what have we done? Boundlessness persists in the parables. Prodigal son is one example. Last Judgment is another. “Lord, when did we see you?”]
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