“Though hatred is a convenient instrument for mobilizing a community for defense, it does not, in the long run, come cheap. We pay for it by losing all or many of the values we have set out to defend.” Eric Hoffer, The True Believer

How strange it is to realize that on a day filled with sweetness and light in one corner of the global village in another corner men are desperately fighting face to face, gun against fist. A man in a corner coffee shop sits down with a newspaper and a latte while far away another man starts in terror at the sound of gunfire and helicopters. One glances later at his watch and gathers his things to go, the other sees the light fading around him as he clutches the earth.

Osama bin Laden is dead, shot in the face by Navy SEALS and CIA agents in a daring raid deep inside Pakistan. America’s number one enemy, a man whose single-minded hatred for all things Western—and especially American—cost the lives of thousands and will continue to burn up lives for years to come. Here in Washington, DC, many people cheered at the news, danced outside the White House, and generally carried on as if their football team had spiked the division rivals in the Superbowl. The Daily Beast, heir to the remains of Newsweek, and current arbiter of What’s Happening Now, published a poll for the occasion which gave Obama no bounce at all for ordering Osama’s death. Details of the raid were predictably confusing but the public called for more. Many decried the decision of the White House not to release photos of the deceased and Sean Hannity huffed about the burial at sea of bin Laden’s body. If one looked closely in the evening sky at the end of that day the glowing contrails of a conspiracy theory could be seen drifting at high altitudes.

The raid was contrasted to the disastrous attempt of the Carter administration to spring the American hostages from Tehran and favorably compared to the Israeli raid on Entebbe to grab their own and split in a hail of gunfire without the loss of innocent life.  What a difference 10 years makes: American intelligence in the field concerning WMD and Saddam’s whereabouts back then could not be trusted. But this raid reveals an unusual patience on the part of the Americans, almost British in its willingness to gather details, observe patterns, slowly, slowly close the net, and then strike. So it is with relief but not celebration that this death can be understood. Of course, as common sense would dictate and some voices have already cautioned, this is not the end of Bush’s ‘War on Terror.’ As Churchill said, “It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

A ‘War on Terror’ might play well in a headline but it makes no sense on many levels. Can you imagine a war without terror? Do abstract concepts galvanize troops, launch Predators, fatten the wallets of the bomb merchants, and stiffen the spines of the weakest politicians? Yes, actually, they do. Words like ‘freedom,’ ‘the American way of life,’ ‘honor,’ and ‘sacrifice,’ are tossed around, hammered into steel and concrete, emblazoned on jackets, license plates, baseball caps, and T-shirts. We use them up, these words, drain the life out of them, freeze-dry them into slogans, and sprinkle them like fairy dust when the situation gets serious, just in case anyone should mistake victory for tragedy or object to living with delusions.

In a strikingly different context, Reynolds Price noted that, “Despite such a likably humane doctrine as what might be called the universality of the human heart in all times and places, it remains beyond doubt that human beings alive on the same day in the same city block—not to speak of different countries and centuries—will witness, reflect on, and respond to equal stimuli in ways as divergent as an infant’s and a leopard’s.” Thus, while some cheer at the death of a hated enemy others may take the occasion to think on the brevity of life, on the tenuous grasp we have on the weight and measure of our own times, and to regard with sorrow the ferocious drive within us to blot out our complicit guilt. “If there is one thing that the tragic wars of our time have taught us,” says Ernest Becker, “it is that the enemy has a ritual role to play, by means of which evil is redeemed.” And so it goes.

“The acts of consumption define the spirit of the age, and it would need a library of many volumes to catalogue the texts of extravagance.” Lewis Lapham, Money and Class in America

Nothing I could say about money will sound anything but resentful to the true worshiper of American capitalism. Such is our reverence for both money and the means of free market acquisition that we feel compelled to offer a weak disclaimer, “Now, I’ve got nothing against people making a profit for all their hard work. . .” before we go on to register our doubts. But money is the means of establishing value in American society to an extent that takes one’s breath away. Everything can be monetized, everything—and it seems—everybody, is for sale.

The takedown of Greg Mortenson, lately of Three Cups of Tea fame, is a case in point. Just when you thought you had a hero of significant proportions, he turns out to have jiggered the accounts in literary, philanthropic, and managerial ledgers. The ascension of Donald Trump to the Republican flavor-of-the- month club for the presidency in 2012 is yet another example of what money can buy. Buffoonery takes on a kind of burnished luster when accompanied by a gazillion dollars. It says something exceedingly tragicomic about the state of American democracy when a person is considered by many to be qualified for the highest office in the republic simply because he cuts the sharpest deals in Atlantic City and Las Vegas.

Don’t worry, this won’t be another screed about the barbarians at the gates and a rant against the philistines who populate the halls of Congress and Wall Street. After all, they paid dearly to be where they are. Who are we to deny them the fruits of their labors?

Money and the worship of it has been much on my mind these past months as I have prepared for and conducted a class entitled “Religion and Money.” To an extent I would not have thought possible while growing up in the 60s in California, I have immersed myself lately in the works of John Kenneth Galbraith, Adam Smith, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, R. H. Tawney, John Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter, Andrew Carnegie and others. Advice has been taken from Jacob Needleman (Money and the Meaning of Life), Jim Wallis (Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street), Michael Lewis (Liar’s Poker, The Big Short, and The Next Next Thing), as well as Kevin Phillips (American Theocracy) and Craig Gay (Cash Values: Money and the Erosion of Meaning in Today’s Society). The last two were the assigned textbooks for the course.

Early in the course I made a simple assignment—to keep a money monitor log, just for one day. The idea was that the students would track throughout the day every time they made a purchase, thought about making a purchase, or otherwise found themselves thinking about money. The results were surprising. Some came back with a short list of purchases, misunderstanding that I wanted them to reflect upon, not simply catalogue, their dealings with money. When they returned with a narrative it was clear that the exercise had opened their eyes. They spoke of realizing how much they spent on lunch at work, how much a tank of gas for the truck cost, or the prioritizing of bills at the end of the month. They marveled at how much it cost for a family lunch out or Easter outfits for the children. They worried about the bills for their education, rejoiced that they had money for tithes and offerings at church, and vowed to cut out the glass of wine at dinner. In ways both revealing and unsettling they found that in their own private state Money held all the offices, advertised all the goods, told the stories, and conjured up the language.

It’s not that we were surprised at how much things cost these days. As gas tops $5.00 a gallon in the District of Columbia you realize that the legislators don’t drive themselves to work, and even if they noticed the prices without being advised by their constituents, it wouldn’t be in their interests to fuss about it. No, what became clear to us is the pervasiveness of what theologian Craig Gay calls the ‘Money Metric’ system, that which is closer to us than the DNA in our cells. It objectifies everything, quantifies all values, reduces relationships to a cost/benefit analysis, and flattens the curve of experience to a line graph of projections. It is the pesticide devised to sabotage all unhappiness that travels up the food chain to accumulate in our guts. It was also clear that extracting religion from this pecuniary life-cycle might also kill the patient.

Mainline denominations are on the endangered species lists as their spiritual forests are being clear-cut by the evangelical megachurches. At this rate, one estimate shows the Presbyterians will be extinct by 2050, to be recalled only by those who compile the statistics on vanishing fauna. Where once vast herds of Methodists roamed out West, now there are the Willow Creeks, the Saddlebacks, and other purposefully driven spiritual centers catering to thousands of religious consumers. What makes the difference? The relentless marketing, advertising, and branding of the message of liberation from worry and the sweet reward of success the American way, blessed by Him from Whom all blessings flow.

In the midst of all this there are many, no doubt, who yet feel the stirrings of true godliness. Who would have the arrogance or hubris to claim that God’s spirit simply cannot be present in a gathering of 10,000 in a church with an annual budget in the millions? And while poverty is no ticket to transcendent spirituality neither is mass-produced religion a guarantee of spiritual success. American religion, by necessity in this country, is a business, its assets protected by the Constitution, but its daily bread provided by those under no obligation to stay, a voluntary association of consumers used to having their wants catered to in the marketplace.

More than one observer of the American culture has said that Money is the religion of America and the key to its deepest anxieties. Alexis de Tocqueville noted in the 1840s that Americans have a desperate fear of ‘sinking in the world’ that results in a kind of ADHD in which they “clutch everything but hold nothing fast, and lose grip as they hurry after some new delight.”

Jesus said ‘the poor you have with you always.’ While not disputing that, we could add that ‘the monetizers you have with you always, even to the end of the world.’ There will always be those, the majority most probably, who see no value in that which cannot be reduced to utility, that which has value that cannot be calculated, projected, and sold. Craig Gay’s recommendation is to sidestep the Money Metric system by regarding life and everything in it as a gift. Lewis Lapham, slightly more irreverent but no less to the mark, notes that the most subversive doctrine in America today comes to us from the ancient Greeks and the early Christians as the virtue of temperance and says, ‘I’ve got enough, I don’t think I’ll buy anything more this week.’

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.
— Czeslaw Milosz

Easter weekend and Earth Day, a fortunate conjunction—maybe in the turning world it happens frequently, maybe I am just now sensitive to it, but every year at this time I think about the Christ dropping down to hell on Friday afternoon and climbing back up—so far to go!—on a Sunday morning.

There are those texts—what are we to make of them?—in which he harrows Hell, sternly admonishes the inhabitants and then rises, stooping as he steps out into the garden that morning. What did he feel? Relief? Wonder? Or did he take it as any other day, perhaps brushing away the clutching grasp of an awful nightmare, a slight furrow to his brow as he sets about his business? The Gospels are laconic in their recitation, as if any concession to wonder, magic, the supernatural, was to create a distortion field around the Savior. And how long was it before someone called him that to his face?

I’ve always been intrigued by the story of the two on their way home to Emmaus that weekend. Somewhere, T. S. Eliot writes of a third, flickering at their peripheral vision: “Who walks always beside you?/When I count, there are only you and I together/But when I look ahead up the white road/There is always another one walking beside you/Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded. . . .” They ask him to stay, to eat with them, he demurs but then gives in. When he spreads his hands to bless the food they see the marks in his palms and thus he vanishes from their sight. So much to ask him and ask of him, perhaps he was like a man emerging from a cave, blinking and tearing up from the searing gaze of the sun. Perhaps every sense was heightened and rubbed raw; above all, he needed solitude, but had precious little time. There were demands, longings, fear overcome by joy, the joy of those deeply in debt whose necks had been in the noose not twenty-four hours ago and now felt the gasp of clean air bursting through their lungs as the Christ appears before them in the secret room, and no one had moved fast enough to open the locked, bolted, and barred door. And the Christ kicks free the chair jammed up against the doorknob, spins it around, and sits down with a wink. “Let’s go fishing,” he says.

Against all odds there is good news. The news is so good it cannot be believed, so improbable that they look to one other hesitantly to see who will be the first to look him in the face. “Who is the third who walks always beside you?”

What if the Christ were to emerge this season, walking out from behind some dark Satanic mill or more likely, out of Wall Street in the early morning. Would he seek a green place before he trod the highways and byways? “Do not touch me,” he murmured to Mary, “for I have not yet ascended to the Father.” Was it an embrace he needed? a strong handshake between men and then off to the blue world again?

Earth Day, when we find the courage to be grateful for all we have been given, all that has been entrusted to us, all that we have so despitefully abused and yet continues to sustain us. The phrase is Thomas Merton’s from a journal entry in the sixties. He is rejoicing in the fruition of a ten-year dream, a little hermitage built up on a hill behind the monastery of Gethsemani in Kentucky. He can barely contain himself as he swings through the moonlight and the dewy grass to read and pray alone before the sun comes up. To not feel guilty, he thinks, to not feel guilty for all he has been given and enjoys in this moment. To find the courage to be grateful.

“A leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time, is related to the whole and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm and faithfully renders the likeness of the world.”  — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

We can divide the world and everything in it into two great piles: that which was created or evolved—it doesn’t really matter which at this point—and that which was engineered. The two are threaded together in innumerable ways and cannot be extricated except by the imagination. Yet when we look at the world we see the ‘natural’ and the human constructs. Concrete, oil, broken glass glinting in the sun, heat radiating off the pavement, a guard rail twisted, two parallel prints where tires bit deeply and then abruptly lifted off—elements we glimpse as we churn by at 60 mph. All this happening on the skin of the earth as it suffers our constant abrasions.

I sometimes try to imagine what these forests and low hills of Maryland must have looked like 200, 500, 1,000 years ago. We are not far from one of the oldest ranges of mountains in North America, the Appalachians, worn down through the millenia to a gentle slope, lying patient as a cat in the sun, and dropping roughly northeast to northwest through the Mid-Atlantic states. Even traversing the landscape atop six inches of tarmac, aggregate, sand, and bedrock, one can sense the vast body of the earth, breathing quietly, flexing now and then, the deep silence of its presence there beneath the furious assault of midday traffic.

By some counts we are losing a species every 20 minutes of every day of every year, year in and year out. But how would we know, encased within our tin boxes on wheels, speaker systems thumping with the imprecations of the latest urban prophet of conspicuous consumption? These particles of information arrive quietly through the research of scientists who pick their way through the Amazon, scour the Outback, jounce over dusty trails in the Southwest, and hover over the Great Barrier Reef. Occasionally, the tip of a message surfaces in the media tide pools to the effect that scientists speculate we have, at best, a decade or slightly more, to turn the effects of global warming around. And then the local anchor will chirp brightly, “So, Candy, what kind of weather have you got for us today?” Candy, just back from the ritual hazing of weatherpersons during hurricane season, assures us that tomorrow we’ll be done with all this awful rain and that she’s doing her best to gift us with sunshine. But these days scientists must pitch their findings in six words or less, the bulk of their work submerged under the surface of our collective skittishness.

I used to think that if people could just put their stuff down, stop their twitching and gyrating, and just stand silently in the midst of a forest for a few minutes, they’d be blessed into awe and wonder. But for many Nature is an acquired taste and one that they have little patience to savor. We get our minimum daily adult requirement of ecology from advertising these days, corporations having learned the value of ‘going green’ to increase the net return on investment.

As a teenager, growing up in the foothills above the Napa Valley, I roamed the woods with my friends on the weekends. We came across a simple tragedy one winter Saturday, as we jumped from rock to rock across a foaming creek. A doe had broken a leg as she tried to cross and had apparently drowned in a pool at the base of a cliff. We approached cautiously, thinking she might be alive and not wanting to alarm her. But the body was cold, the eyes blank. We hauled her beyond the rocks to an open space under the dripping trees, and it was then that we discovered she was swollen with pregnancy. We could see the outlines of the fawn in her belly. We decided to open her up. With a hunting knife we carefully slit her from sternum to hindquarters, and there it was: a tiny fawn, perfectly preserved, hooves white and soft like almonds, its long lashes plastered wetly, its fur dappled with patches of white. We gazed at it in silence, feeling perhaps, amidst the thunder of the creek waters and the fog between the trees, that mysteries were there for the seeing.

There was little sentimentality about it; we buried the doe in a shallow grave and covered the spot with branches. We carried the fawn through the woods, clambered up the cliffs above the creek, and eventually found our way to our high school biology teacher’s house. He came out at our knock and listened patiently as we excitedly told him the story. Then together we found a box, placed the stiff little body in it, and dug a grave in his backyard. The man never blinked. I think he felt that what we’d learned that afternoon was deeper than anything he could have said in the classroom.

When I look back on it now two things stand out on reflection. One is the utter physicality of the moment: the weight and denseness of the doe’s body, the graceful arch of the fawn’s neck, those tiny hooves not yet hardened and black. There was the story of a life on our sweet, old Earth, a moment’s wavering on a slippery rock, a crack of pain and a brief struggle alone in the forest. The fragility of our existence, any existence, magnified through the lens of adolescent wonder. And the other thing, as fresh now as it was then, is the steady realization that this other world, the one that pulses just out of  sight, is our true home.

“I decided that what I wanted most of all was. . . . to feel at home in the world, which meant to know something of the best that has been thought, believed, and created by the great minds of the past and present.”  

Michael Dirda,  Book by Book

I’ve discovered, over the course of time, that I read in what might seem a haphazard manner. But there is an inner filament that illumines the way I read, a hidden gyroscope I’ve learned to trust. I pick up a book on any subject that piques my curiosity, read the front, read the back, read the introduction and the first page, and begin to settle into the rhythm of the sentences. Before two or three days have passed I know I’ll come across a parallel work or a book that complements what I’m reading. It happens so often that I’m not surprised anymore, although I’m always grateful.

Another part of how I read is that I acquire books to grow into. For example, years ago I bought A.N. Wilson’s God’s Funeral, a spirited yet wistful recounting of the loss of faith among Victorian poets, critics, novelists, and philosophers. I bought it on the strength of Wilson’s biographies of Jesus and C. S. Lewis, and on his reputation as a wry observer of humanity’s spiritual condition. I found I wasn’t ready for it at the time, but I set it aside in the assurance that one day I would be. During one Christmas holiday I read it straight through, discovering therein an inside dialogue with a string of Victorian writers I’d read only in fits and starts. Then I came across a new collection of George Orwell’s essays entitled All Art is Propaganda with the first one being “Charles Dickens.”  Wanting to know more I signed up for a “Victorian to Twentieth Century Literature” class at the university where I worked and was soon immersed in Dickens’ Hard Times, the poetry of Amy Levy and Christina Rossetti, the commentary of Elizabeth Gaskell and Thomas Carlyle, and the novels of Robert Louis Stevenson and Virginia Woolf.

I’ve had Goethe’s Faust in David Luke’s vivid and earthy translation on my shelves for almost 10 years. Every now and then I’d troll its waters but without dropping anchor. Then one evening I picked up Part One and dove deep. Coming up a day later, ready for Part Two, I was not surprised to find in the mail the current issue of Lapham’s Quarterly on the topic of Arts and Letters. Inside was a timeline of the development of the Faust epic, from an account of the life of Theophilus of Adana (c. 538), an Orthodox cleric who sold his soul to the devil, through Christopher Marlowe’s play (1604), Lessing’s scenes from an unpublished play on Faust (1759), Goethe’s masterpiece (1808, 1832), Berlioz’ opera (1846), Thomas Mann’s novel of the same name (1947), and Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s film, Dr. Faustus (1967).

Those of a crabbed and literal mind might say that I consciously went searching for links. I’ve thought of it rather as serendipity, a lucky coincidence. But lately I’ve come to regard it as synchronicity, a meaningful coincidence of elements resulting in a new consciousness.

Reading Thoreau’s Walden for the first time in years grafted me into previous readings on the craft of writing, from John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction to Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why, Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, and thence to Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, a kind of sociocultural conversation on the ancient ritual of gift-giving and how the creativity of artists and writers continues the forward motion of gifting against the commercialization of art.

Where I end up after one of these treks is a long way from where I begin but it’s a journey with a narrative thread that can be understood if not explained. To the pleasure of reading widely is added the satisfaction of synthesis, the weaving together of contrasting skeins of thought into a harmonious pattern.

Do we conform everything we see into a matrix of convergences? I wonder about this as I scan the horizon of my literary landscape. Do we suffer the fate of the old saying, “If you think like a hammer, everything looks like a nail?” I prefer to think that a loose thread from a book we’re immersed in weaves itself into the fabric of another book. Part of the pleasure is the sudden awareness that this connects to that and that leads up to this. Perhaps attention becomes heightened, consciousness not narrowed but thrown wide open, a path through a dark wood suddenly giving way to a golden and towering sky.

“We turn to books in the hope of better understanding our selves and better engaging with the meaning of our experiences,” says Michael Dirda. “They are instruments of self-exploration.”

“We know who we are only when we know who we are not and often only when we know whom we are against.” Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

The news that thousands of enraged Afghans surged out of their mosques on Friday, April 1, in Mazir-e-Sharif, Northern Afghanistan, and stormed the UN compound, killing 8 to 12 officials and wounding many others, came as a blow to the face. Equally shocking was the immediate cause of the rampage: the mock trial and burning of the Qu’ran by Pastor Terry Jones of Gainesville, Florida, on March 20. There’s no question that he and his flock at the Dove World Outreach Center intended the act as a deliberate provocation. The media were alerted, the event was televised. While it did not receive the media coverage that Jones intended, the news certainly got to the imams in that part of Afghanistan. Never let it be said that a bad deed goes unnoticed around the world. The simmering anger against foreigners of all kinds in the country was kicked up to the boiling point by the act itself and the exploitation of it by the holy men of Mazir-e-Sharif. Jones and the imams: two sides of the same tarnished coin.

In moments like these it’s hard not to fall into sweeping generalizations and stereotypes. We look at these heinous acts and want to strike back in kind. We search for reasons that will make sense of it all: These are rational people; have they all gone mad?

I try to imagine someone running at the edge of the crowd, curious but not yet furious, attracted like Elias Canetti notes in Crowds and Power, to the black spot where the crowd is thickest. Something is going to happen, we don’t know what yet, but it’s worth sticking around to find out. And then let’s say the crowd arrives at the gates of the UN compound. In moments they confront, disarm, and shoot the Nepalese security with their own weapons, swarm through the gates, over the walls and into the building itself. Let us shadow our outrider at the edge of the crowd; he has penetrated the walls and has been swept with the others into the building itself. Does he stop for just a moment to ask himself where this is leading? Does he feel any sympathy for the fallen guards? Is he so blinded by anger that his vision narrows to the bodies swirling around him and the din in his head of shots, screams, cries, chants, blocks his own thoughts? Does he pull back into a corridor and let the mob surge past him, realizing that he cannot force his way back against the stream? Does he then abandon himself to the bloody rush with a mixture of fear, guilt, and a kind of strange relief? And afterward, down the hot, dusty streets to home, trying to wipe the blood from his clothes, does he wonder what his wife and children will ask? how he will reconstruct the events? what role he will play in this drama? how much heroism he will (modestly) admit to in overcoming the Great Satan?

Does Pastor Terry Jones feel the hand of God soothing him as he prays? As he watches himself on TV, reads about himself online, and takes in the questions flung at him by reporters, does he feel a dissociation from the events? Does he watch from a distance as this person he knows, Terry Jones, straightens his shoulders, furrows his brow, and ponderously justifies his actions before the world? Or is it all so far away, so much like an event unwinding before him that he must drop his eyes to snap himself back to the present?

Canetti says we lose our fear of being touched when we join a crowd. We and the crowd are one, one body surging this way and that, a body without a head, witless, slavering, beast-like, mindless. . .

But that’s not like our Pastor Terry Jones. His is a mission, a battle against evil, a redressing of all the wrongs suffered by honest, God-fearing Americans since 9/11. It’s lonely at the top with this kind of knowledge. Pausing to peer in the mirror as he shaves he studies the lines around his eyes and feels the burden of righteousness on his shoulders. As he straightens his tie, his hand upon the doorknob, he takes a breath, knowing the press will be camped on his lawn. The message must go out he thinks. Lord, give me the strength I need to speak the truth. Help me to take the sufferings that come my way as You did, going to the cross to die for me, me! Your humble servant. . . And he opens the door to his day of infamy.

Now the blaming begins. Now come the expressions of outrage, the impotent words of heads of state, throttling their visceral rage and modulating it into phrases of stern neutrality. Now come the bands of pundits, swiveling in their chairs on the Fox news sets, calculating the odds of the next poll chronicling the decline of the President’s opinion ratings. Expect an avalanche of tweeting from potential candidates for 2012. Someone somewhere watches in quiet satisfaction as stocks rise. There is money to be made in any tragedy.

And our Afghani outrider, the one who let himself be swept along in the mob? We may see him now, alone in his home, pausing before he kneels for prayers, his hand up to his forehead for a moment, as if he began a motion he doesn’t know how to complete.

All week I’ve been transfixed by pictures of the destruction in Japan. One photo in particular is seared into my image bank. It shows a stretch of waterfront in the afternoon sun. The photo is naturally divided into thirds with the top third revealing a long curling wave towering behind a line of wildly whipping trees, and beyond that a tempestuous sea. The middle third shows buildings, homes, power lines, low shrubs, a trailer, a pack of cars huddled together in one corner of a parking lot. The bottom third of the picture is bisected by a silvery line, possibly a train track, with just the tops of some service buildings in the immediate foreground. As the eye adjusts to the scale and motion within the photograph we see, incongruously, a building upended and we realize, with growing horror, that the wave is already thundering ashore as fast as a fighter jet, tearing up everything in its path. In this moment an image frozen in the warm light of the afternoon becomes a lens through which we see the coming agony. In two, three, five seconds, nothing there will ever be the same again. What once was is no more.

In the 1790 edition of Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the book that is overshadowed by his far better known The Wealth of Nations, Smith notes that however selfish people may appear to be they nevertheless can feel sorrow for the sorrow of others. “The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it,” he says. Smith lays out a psychology of the emotions, illuminating the ways in which we put ourselves in someone else’s place to feel with them what they are experiencing.

“To seem not to be affected with the joy of our companions is but want of politeness; but not to wear a serious countenance when they tell us their afflictions, is real and gross inhumanity,” he says.

I read these words this week as a kind of anodyne against the sentiments of some that the earthquake, tsunami, fires, and nuclear meltdown were God’s judgment on the atheistic Japanese nation. As one person put it on a Facebook exchange, “maybe God was trying to send a message to the Japanese people.” It reminded me that certain religious leaders attributed 9/11 to divine judgment on New York City for its gay and lesbian population. With a god like that who needs the devil?

This is the age of the public execution rendered with brutal efficiency on those who flout the norms. Thus it was that two public figures fell from grace this week for making jokes about the Japanese tragedy. Governor Haley Barbour’s spokesperson made a tasteless comment and was fired by the end of the day. Barbour, having bent the needle on the Offense-O-Meter himself in past months, and being a possible candidate for the presidency in 2012, was quick to excise the cancer of his fool’s intemperate remark, while over at Aflac the voice of the duck was heard throughout the land in a remark that was remarkable for its callousness. Neither politicians nor corporations want to be tarred with such a PR disaster; Aflac is a major provider of insurance in Japan.

“The cruelest insult,” continues Smith, “which can be offered to the unfortunate, is to appear to make light of their calamities.” If Smith were here today how would he regard these insultors? Ever polite, ever circumspect, and ever discerning of human foibles, Smith would hold up these gilded apples to the light and discover their rotten cores.

We could imagine a range of possible explanations for their actions. Perhaps they suffered a kind of synaptic overload and couldn’t handle the barrage of horrific images. In defense, they turned to an ancient weapon against fear and anxiety: laughter. Sorry about that, but better you than me. But laughter of that sort has a very narrow bandwidth and is usually reserved for those who are up to their knees in it and have earned the right to make light of their burdens.

Perhaps they are the sort that simply cannot pass up an opportunity to grab the mic, tap it loudly and bellow, “Is this on? Can you hear me?” We can and we wish not to, thinking of the proverb that even the dumbest person can be thought wise if he keeps his mouth shut.

Or—and this may not be such a stretch—they are simply taking a leaf from Charlie Sheen’s playbook and attempting such outrage that they transcend normal limits of crudeness to turn their brutishness into performance art. In the same issue of Newsweek that features a cover story on Japan’s earthquake there is an admiring piece on Charlie Sheen’s public implosion. We are living, says the author, Bret Easton Ellis, in a Post-Empire reality in which civility has run its course. The radicals of yesterday (read 60s) are today’s moneyed moguls. They have about them the stale air of set pieces, exhibits from a bygone era, a time of nostalgia and ferment long dead. By contrast, Charlie Sheen represents the death of civility, manners, courtesy. He is the reality of the celebrity who mocks his own image, makes light of the whole entertainment culture, and throws a bomb into the midst of America’s dark satanic media mills. We can’t make up our minds: is he completely nuts or is this all a subterfuge to remake his sodden career by giving the finger to everybody who would tut-tut at him?

The consensus Ellis flicks up before us is that for this era, all of two weeks and counting, Charlie Sheen is winning and this is the new reality. So maybe these two, giddy with their power to tweet to thousands, stepped—no, jumped—over the line of propriety, thinking that in the shine of Sheen’s glare their little infractions might get some laughs.

“We blush for the impudence and rudeness of another, though he himself appears to have no sense of the impropriety of his own behaviour; because we cannot help feeling with what confusion we ourselves should be covered, had we behaved in so absurd a manner,” says Smith.

Lest we become self-righteous, Smith cautions us:
“Every faculty in one man is the measure by which he judges of the like faculty in another. I judge of your sight by my sight, of your ear by my ear, of your reason by my reason, of your resentments by my resentments, of your love by my love. I neither have, nor can have, any other way of judging about them.”

With that in mind, if you, like me, were both moved by the plight of the Japanese and offended by those who would make light of this tragedy for their own shallow ends, then take some small comfort in your humanity. With all that would reduce today that noble concept to its lowest common denominator, we realize, with Smith, that “The amiable virtue of humanity requires, surely, a sensibility, much beyond what is possessed by the rude vulgar of mankind. . . . Virtue is excellence, something uncommonly great and beautiful, which rises far above what is vulgar and ordinary.”

We, all of us, have a long ways to go. There is nothing for it but grace abounding.

There can be no excuse to start yet another blog except the compulsion to explain. It’s not like I haven’t done this before. I’ve started and crashed three other blogs, some of them with real promise. But like my attempts as a child to keep a diary they just kind of. . . wimped away. So I make no promises about the duration of this one. Nor am I going to rely on that good ‘ol Protestant whip, guilt, to keep this ship at cruising speed. Not going to get me on that one. Here’s where I rely on my 60s legacy of irresponsibility to say I’ll do this as long as I want and no longer.

One reason the others didn’t work is that I tried to separate them. I had one for teaching with film, one for issues about teaching and learning, and another on spirituality and literature. What I came to realize is that I don’t make these distinctions when I’m swimming in the “stream of consciousness,” as William James put it. These themes are all there together, like flotsam, bobbing up and down in the eddies and currents, and there I am, trying to clutch them as I hear the falls roar downstream.

I observe this particular form of honesty in my wife, whose blog, Unrealistic Expectations , speaks of what she likes, loathes, and finds weird but compelling. She writes a lot and all of it is interesting and worth reading. I, on the other hand, have felt that everything I publish must be perfect. Since that’s not remotely possible my output has been doomed from the start, a kind of Crohn’s disease of writing.

But I’m also bedeviled by a fussy irritation with the chatterati, the professional gossipers who pass for journalists on many of today’s media faucets. I’ve held the view that opinions aren’t worth much, including my own, and it would be better to really know what you’re talking about before you speak. That’s before I really understood what Montaigne (1533–1592), that eloquent French gentleman slacker, was on about when he invented the essay (English for essais), what he called his “tries” or “attempts.” His interests ranged far, wide, and deep, he had a beguiling blitheness about mixing up the facts, and he followed where his nose took him. So now we’ve got all these glimpses of life through Montaigne’s eyes, priceless gems he scattered from his castle’s tower window.

I’m not in that league by any means but it’s the form I feel most comfortable with. Attempts, tries. . .to back up and take another run at it. Eventually there may be a breakthrough of sorts, a moment of clarity, and that’s enough to justify yet another blog.

Perhaps it’s a way to scratch the explaining itch. We’ll see.