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That Was My Future

“Governments should strive to restore to men that taste for the future which religion and the state of society no longer inspire, and they should, without exactly saying as much, teach daily in practical terms that wealth, reputation, and power are the payment for work, that great success should come at the end of a lengthy period of waiting, and that nothing lasting is ever gained without difficulties.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

One of my favorite memories of childhood and early teen years is the image of the future as seen by Popular Mechanics in the late Fifties and early Sixties. As a recurring theme, the future was glorified for its clean cities, happy, healthy families, and the self-guided cars. 

Ah, the cars! They were blessed with automatic guidance systems so that Dad could take his hands off the wheel and turn around to the kids in the back seat who were playing a game together (nicely!), while Mom smiled approvingly. The family would arrive—on time—to their programmed destination, a gleaming skyscraper or, alternatively, a pleasant wooded valley for a picnic. These cars, as I recall, had only one flaw, but it was one that simply could not be overlooked. They were visual variations on what was later to become the AMC Gremlin, one of the most perverse cars of all time for many reasons. That mistake can be forgiven but how can the good people at Popular Mechanics have thought that our metropolitan highways would be anything but stupefyingly clogged?  I thought of this recently as I  inched through traffic on my way to the first class of a new semester. It took me as long to drive seven miles (45 minutes) into Washington, DC as it takes to drive almost forty miles to another campus just north of Baltimore. 

Understanding what this moment in the Great Timeline of History really means is beyond us. It’s beyond us in a curiously literal fashion in that the meaning of this moment, seen from a certain angle, is no-where, and it won’t be anywhere that makes sense for quite awhile. Of course, if you adopt another perspective on this, the present is not no-where but now-here, to be reveled in if not understood. These are not just word games; it makes all the difference in the world how we think about the present with regard to the future. For example, if the future is an eternal recurrence of the present, just more of the same, the appropriate response might be satire, as in Engel’s remark in a letter to Marx that Hegel seemed to be directing history from the grave, “once as grand tragedy and the second time as rotten farce.” 

Stephen Colbert, the faux Republican comedian and favorite spokesperson for the political theatre of the absurd, understands this. He understands it so well that he’s willing to put thousands of dollars into a campaign for the presidency that parallels, but does not converge with—at least not yet—the “real” Republican primary campaign. Watching the current survivors of this fracas is instructive. As I write Rick Santorum has declared himself the winner of the Iowa caucus, Rick Perry has quit the race, Jon Huntsman bailed out the previous week, and Newt Gingrich continues to savage Mit Romney at the knees. The tragedy is that these are the kind of people who want to be president; the farce is what they are willing to do to get the job. 

I saw a photo on the front page of the New York Times the other day, a shot taken backstage of one of the Republican debates, moments before the candidates took their places. In the rear of the photo can be seen three or four stony-faced onlookers, aides perhaps, while in the foreground Rick Perry joshes Rick Santorum, putting him in an elbow-grip and leaning in close with a tight smile like a preacher about to clamp the guilt-cuffs on a prodigal parishioner. To the right of the photo, bathed in a Rembrandt spotlight, the two alleged statesman of the event speak together. Mit Romney, his back straight, his fixed smile gleaming, his hands gesturing expansively, makes a point to Newt Gingrich who is positioned with his back to the camera. Gingrich is hunched over with concentration, perhaps trying to hear over Perry’s raucous laughter and Santorum’s sharp response. The tableau reminds us that candidates are actors in a traveling road show, fellow evangelists in a long-running gospel revival paid for, produced, and packaged by groups with unlimited funds and a few simple demands. 

After all the name-calling, the low blows, the viciousness, and the outright lying, one of them, probably Romney, will stand up, wipe off his sword, and march off to battle the incumbent. The ability to cut and thrust, grapple and disembowel—and then to emerge, winner and loser together, all smiles and a thousands points of light, makes one’s head spin. I grew up thinking that it mattered what one believed in and acted upon, that you shouldn’t be wielding the sword to dismember your opponent and then denounce him for not beating his sword into a plowshare. 

But such bald-faced hypocrisy is not the talent of the Republican tribe alone. Robert Hughes writes that  “Propaganda-talk, euphemism and evasion are so much a part of American usage today that they cross all party lines and ideological divides.” Even so, naiveté has its benefits: we continue to believe that calculated sins were probably ignorant mistakes long after others have written off the whole political process as a bad joke. That naiveté grows into hope with time and conscience, and hope will not be fooled. The future we looked for in the past is here and it’s nothing like we imagined. It’s not as bad as some made it out to be and it’s certainly not as good as Popular Mechanics painted it. That future never really existed anyway. If you take a much longer view and if you realize that change is incremental and slow—until the fault line snaps and looses the tsunami—then what matters is that consistency and integrity will have their day, though you may not live to see it. Yet at some point we all look back and realize how much has changed, how much is still the same, and how much is still to come. 

More and more these days when I am tempted to regard the present order with horror, I appreciate Orwell’s comment that “Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If it seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin.”

We should save the word “tragedy” for the genuine article: the suffering of those in earthquakes, tsunamis, and war. The political battles and campaigns that we are watching right now can be viewed as comedy when seen up close. But let’s not forget that the means often become the ends because through constant use they have come to define us.

Zero to Sixty . . . .

“The will is free, but who can account for his own acts and opinions without invoking influences and accidents?”— Jacques Barzun, “Toward a Fateful Serenity”


One of the benefits of an hour-long commute, really, the only benefit, is the time to think, to free associate, to sum up. In two weeks I will slip into that mysterious age of 60, an age which I have, until now, reserved exclusively for the old, perhaps the infirm, most certainly those far enough from shore that the next wave only lifts them gently in passing before cresting up ahead with a roar. We attach significance to these arbitrary numbers—12, 18, 21, 30, the BIG 50, 60, 65. What do they mean? 

The King James Bible (Psalms 90: 7) gives us one of the most memorable phrasings of our limits with its customary sturdy poeticism:  “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.” 

The line begins modestly, ‘days of our years,’ adds the common limit with ‘threescore years and ten’, offers up the exception with ‘fourscore years’ but undercuts the implicit surprise with the burden of ‘labour and sorrow.” Finally, the brutal efficiency of ‘it is soon cut off,’ is turned in mid-air as we strain against the tethers that bind us to the earth, and ‘we fly away.’ There’s nothing of Dylan Thomas’ plea to his dying father, “Do not go gentle into that good night/Old age should burn and rave at close of day/Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” It turns out that we were always meant to leave this earth, but the image is almost one of indifference—‘we fly away’ without a backward glance. 

It is not to be thought that I am at this threshold as yet. I’ve been fending off AARP for years, and both my grandparents lived past 90 with a good measure of strength and plenty of cheerfulness. But, as I say, it marks a moment that we invest with meaning. We should not shrug off these moments, for they will not always announce themselves. 

In 2000 Jacques Barzun, one of this epoch’s greatest cultural historians, published his massive work, From Dawn to Decadence, a New York Times bestseller and the capstone to 75 years and over 30 books of a remarkable career. Two years later The Jacques Barzun Reader: Selections from His Works was published, and the first essay, “Toward a Fateful Serenity,” speaks autobiographically of the fault lines and accidents of history that shaped him early on. As a child of wealth, privilege, and genteel upbringing he lived through the chaos of the First World War in Paris, Grenoble, and the south of France. He remembers how temperament, tragedy, and trauma shaped him into the ‘cheerful pessimist’ who, in his eighties, could live serenely despite a culture that exalts selfishness. One of the things that history taught him was ‘the lost faculty of admiration.’ “The past,” he said, “is full of men and women (and children too) whose lives and deeds are worthy of honor, wonder, and gratitude, which I take to be the components of admiration.” 

And I, too, find myself surrounded by those I can admire, argue with, be inspired by, and learn from—from Aristotle to Zola, Annie Lenox to U2, A Bug’s Life to Unforgiven. Barzun recommends reciprocity, a reckoning of the debt we owe to those who have lighted our way. Thus, in gratitude to just some of those whose music has raised me up, here are lines that gave me words for the unwritten scripts I have lived out through the years.

“When you’re down and troubled, and you need a helping hand . . . .” — James Taylor
“Your time has come to shine/All your dreams are on their way . . . .” — Paul Simon
“It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive . . . .” — Bruce Springsteen
“So let us not talk falsely now/The hour is getting late . . . .” — Bob Dylan
“Shower the people you love with love/Show them the way that you feel . . . .” — James Taylor
“In your eyes, the light the heat/In your eyes/I am complete . . . .” — Peter Gabriel
“You may say that I’m a dreamer/But I’m not the only one . . . . John Lennon
“Guide me, O thou great Jehovah/Pilgrim through this barren land . . . .” — William Williams
“You broke the bonds/And you loosed the chains/Carried the cross of my shame/Oh my shame/You know I believe it . . . .” — U2
“The river’s wide, we’ll swim across/We’re starting up a brand new day . . . .” — Sting
“Leave it behind/You got to leave it behind . . . .” — U2

and of course. . . .

“Will you still need me, will you still feed me/When I’m sixty-four?” — The Beatles


Whose Reality Show is This?

“This is the age of contrivance. The artificial has become so commonplace that the natural begins to seem contrived.” — Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America


If the Republican candidates were students in a communications and public speaking course their midterm evaluations—based on their classroom performances—might look something like this . . . 

Sarah Palin — Charming and even flirtatious when she wants to be, but can turn vicious in a heartbeat. Late with her assignments, doesn’t seem to prepare, spurns advice. A dominant figure in any group, she tends to blame others for her mistakes. Still waiting for her to turn in her thesis statement. 

Rick Perry — Another student who waits till the last minute to prepare and then tries to impress by his bluff and bluster. That works for awhile but his lack of preparation quickly comes to light when questioned on his positions. Proud of being a doer rather than a thinker—obviously believes you can’t be both at the same time. 

Michele Bachman — Reacts rather than responds. Talks faster than she thinks. Relays second-hand information picked up from headlines. Sincere, upbeat, dazzling smile, too impatient to study. Does C work because she is constantly distracted. Would rather text than study. 

Herman Cain — Gregarious, ambitious, loves attention, overconfident. Used to getting what he wants, thus cannot handle even the slightest criticism. Comes up with clever phrasing but with little substance to ground it on. Should change his major to advertising or marketing. 

Ron Paul — One of the older students, keeps to himself, something of a loner. Firmly rooted in 19th century cultural values. In a group he sees himself as a spoiler rather than a tie-breaker. Uses every speech to advocate for American isolationism, the gold standard, or against taxes. Pre-med major; says he has no time for gen ed courses like Public Speaking.                                                                 

Newt Gingrich — Not afraid to speak a dissenting viewpoint, but was disastrous as a group leader. Seems to enjoy conflict for its own sake or as a way to gain an edge on someone else. Can be perceptive on certain issues but lets his need for power overrule his better judgment. Alienates the other students who think he’s arrogant. 

Rick Santorum — Knows how to articulate the free-floating fears of his contemporaries. Speaks with certainty on issues, but cannot understand people not like him. Sincere, has deep convictions, regards compromise on certain issues as moral betrayal. His inability to imagine other ways of perceiving the world hampers his ability to lead diverse groups. 

Jon Huntsman — Thoughtful, reflective, quiet, sits in the back of the classroom but pays attention. Often stays after class to discuss something or ask a question. In class discussions he often has the last word because he does not try to shout down the others. Will give his viewpoint if asked, but won’t compete with Gingrich or Santorum for air time. 

Mitt Romney — Class president, comfortable with money and power, looks “presidential.” Speeches are carefully outlined, delivery is standard, phrasing is predictable as are his positions. Ambitious, self-assured, but lacks depth. Out of his element when classroom discussions focus on issues of justice, poverty, or the increasing gap between the very rich and the poor. Envied but not particularly liked.

Of course, any person is more than what you see. But the hidden parts—you might call them ‘character’—are rarely seen in a public figure for two reasons: first, television transmits images, not ideals, and secondly, candidates play roles that they then try to live up to. 

It is not farfetched to imagine that if a candidate were to listen closely to a wide variety of Americans and then to honestly and clearly express his or her personal convictions in response, that such a candidate would be applauded in the media for a fine performance. It would not be at all clear that anyone had actually listened to what was said. 

Measuring Goodness

“I think we can’t go around…measuring our goodness by what we don’t do.By what we deny ourselves…what we resist and who we exclude.I think we’ve got to measure goodness…by what we embrace,what we create…and who we include.” — from the Easter Sermon, Chocolat

There are two great systems of ethics that most of us live by, often without realizing where they came from or their full outlines. While we may not know exactly why we make our decisions that does not prevent us from making them. But neither can we justify or even explain why we chose them in the first place. 

One system is built around duty, what we ought  to do. According to Immanuel Kant, one of the most influential philosophers of the modern age, we should act out of free will without regard for reward or punishment. What matters is why we do something, and the principle that establishes some action as ethical or not is whether we willed to do it or not. In Kant’s view, the only actions that could be counted as ethical would be the ones that we did because they were the right things to do, not because we wanted to do them or they gave us a warm feeling for having done them. We may, in time, come to enjoy doing what’s right, but that shouldn’t factor in as the reason to do the right thing. 

The other great system emphasizes the consequences of our actions. In the words of John Stuart Mill, the 19th century British philosopher who brought utilitarianism into general use, utility holds that “actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.” By a calculus of goodness, then, we are called to maximize pleasure and minimize pain for the greatest number of people. In short, we try to do the best for as many people as possible. 

These are general theories of ethical action, not a cookbook for whipping up a delightful dish of goodness for the situation at hand. Yet we unconsciously use these throughout our days to handle most of our ethical dilemmas. At times we do what we must, no matter what it might cost us; at other times we try to make the best of the situation for ourselves and those around us. Neither system answers all our questions. Most of us use both of them without feeling that we have to choose one over the other. 

Yet, we usually have a default position, an ethical perspective that we act from almost intuitively. We may, upon reflection, choose another way, but we can learn a lot about ourselves by how we instinctively react to matters that confront us. 

So in the spirit of summing up at the end of the year, here are some ways you can tell which ethical system you most naturally follow. 

You know you’re a Duty person if:
  • It makes you grumpy when people pass you when you’re driving the speed limit;
  • You finish your chores before you go out to play;
  • You toss and turn at night, replaying a faux pas you committed that day; 
  • You make sure your car is parked straight within the lines;
  • You’d rather embarrass yourself than cause someone else embarrassment by pointing out their mistakes;
  • It pains you to leave something undone;
  • You find yourself muttering, “What if everyone did that?” several times a day; 
  • You pick up trash that other people drop;
  • You can think of many reasons why someone did what they did;
  • You’re more fascinated with why someone did something than what they actually did; 
  • Holidays make you uncomfortable;
  • A good day is when you get through your list;
  • A bad day is when you don’t even make a list;
  • Your besetting sin is self-righteousness;
  • Your most annoying trait is being a tight-ass;
  • One of your good traits is that you’re reliable;
  • One of your best traits is introspection;
  • You are an investor.

On the other hand, you know you’re a Utility person if:
  • It matters to you if everyone around you is happy;
  • You keep working for consensus after everyone else has taken their toys and gone home;
  • You’re all about efficiency: effectiveness is for the slow;
  • You’re an idea person, not a detail person;
  • You get impatient with people who keep asking questions;
  • You’ll hire an expert if it will save time;
  • You like to be seen as generous;
  • You’re comfortable with groups of people; 
  • You’d rather have three okay desserts than one fantastic one;
  • You think in economic metaphors like ‘the bottom line’ and ‘cost-benefit ratios’;
  • Your besetting sin is cutting corners to get what you want;
  • Your most annoying trait is blaming others;
  • One of your good traits is that you can make decisions quickly;
  • One of your best traits is that you’re willing to try new things if it will bring better results;
  • You are an entrepreneur. 

For the duty-bound among us, here’s a gentle word for the new year: Don’t let doing things the right way stop you from enjoying the trip. 

And to those who are all about the bottom line: It does matter how you get there because you have to live with what you picked up on the way. 

It’s not too late to begin again.

Wearing the Faces We Keep

“Those who strive to account for a man’s deeds are never more bewildered than when they try to knit them into one whole and to show them under one light, since they commonly contradict each other in so odd a fashion that it seems impossible that they should all come out of the same shop.” — Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

Montaigne, that affable, erudite, bemused observer of human nature—mostly his own—would have found no end of contradictions in our political process. In an essay entitled “On the Inconstancy of Our Actions,” he marvels at the many faces we wear, sometimes on a single day, and wonders why people try to make sense of someone’s actions, especially “seeing that vacillation seems to me to be the most common and blatant defect of our nature.” 
Off he goes in his inimitable fashion, piling on Latin quotes from ancient philosophers and playwrights, and whipping out quips like a ninja’s throwing stars. “It is difficult to pick out more than a dozen men in the whole of Antiquity who groomed their lives to follow an assured and definite course,” he says, “though that is the principle aim of wisdom.” What’s more likely, says Montaigne, is that we “follow the inclinations of our appetite, left and right, up and down, as the winds of occasion bear us along.” 
So we get Herman Cain, a supremely confident man, who wakes up one morning and thinks, “I could be president: let’s do it!” Or Rick Perry, striding like a colossus through the Republic of Texas, glib in his own surroundings, but tongue-tied on the national stage. Who can resist the spectacle of the genteel but thoroughly manufactured fury of Mr. Romney, prodded out of his postage-stamp size comfort zone by the uncivil zaniness of Newt Gingrich, himself newly-resurrected and kissed by the media polls? Gingrich, who leads with his tongue, but has already sold his brain to science, defiantly admitted one of his major personal failings, a capacity to change to fit the context. For a conservative these days that is moral turpitude second only to being ‘progressive.’ Romney wins that honor, having declared himself a moderate Republican a few years ago. How he must regret those careless words about reforming urban schools and providing aid for the elderly! 
A politician these days must display an unbending spine of steel, be deaf to all pleas for fairness, and follow conscience, especially if it leads to money. In these chaotic times, when a reputation can vaporize with a single tweet, politicians decide their positions early and hold to them though the heavens fall. God forbid that they should see an issue in a new light, for that might demand a willingness to compromise. Thus obstinacy and bone-headedness are taken as the virtues of courage and resoluteness. As the Republican primary debates trudge onward it’s clear that only the strongest will survive this Bataan death march of moral recalcitrance. 
Why do we do this? I say ‘we’ because it is we the people who demand leaders who can instantly assess a volatile situation and then ignore their best counsel in order to stay the course. As American troops withdraw from Iraq I wonder if anyone can still believe the reasons why we devastated that country? Why do we want people who cannot deliberate, who will not reconsider, who can only perseverate? Montaigne was not glorifying inconstancy but neither was he denying it. He was allowing for it. That’s not the same as promoting it; it’s the realization of limits and how to work well within them. We want our leaders to be recognizable as leaders from a distance so we create a template for identification purposes. Do this, say that, wave this, kiss that. They have to fit the pattern or they won’t be taken seriously. Lacking any criteria for discernment, humility, and courage—characteristics essential for leadership in any age—we’re left to judge these people by the decibel level of their rhetoric and the cut of their hair. 
At the heart of it is something that is both necessary and elusive—trustworthiness. That is all we really require from a leader. The rest of it can be learned on the job, provided that person has the courage and strength to do so. 
When we communicate with each other, said Aristotle, we look for three things: logos, pathos, and ethos. They can be understood as reasoning, the ability to understand and empathize, and character. These were the things that Aristotle thought would protect us against the professional liars and the demagogues. How quaint they seem now in this viciously trivial political culture. 
“Virtue wants to be pursued for her own sake,” said Montaigne. “If we borrow her mask for some other purpose then she quickly rips it off our faces.”

History and the Scarecrow

“Some things are too clear to be understood. . . . We always have to go back and start from the beginning and make over all the definitions for ourselves again.” — Thomas Merton, Seeds
There is a common view that under the skin we are all alike, that were it not for accidents of birth, language, geography, and culture, we’d probably all be . . . Americans, or at least Western Europeans. On the other hand, Americans are so imbued with the belief that each and every one of us is sui generis, and that we have something of enormous import to bring to the universe which would not arrive in any other way, that we would be shocked to find ourselves considered merely curious in most parts of the world. 
We are constantly trying to make sense of life. It appears to us in many forms: as a ‘darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight/Where ignorant armies clash by night (Arnold),’ or as hope springing eternal or as the marketplace in which fortunes are made and lost in a moment, but no one is sure why or who to blame. And we see the many variations on a theme, some of them irreducibly contradictory, and may come to wonder if we could, any or all of us, ever understand each other. 
So at the end of a semester of teaching a course in Jesus and the Gospels, one that coincidentally I began my teaching career with 30 years ago, I discovered that the Jesus of the Gospels is even less intelligible to me now than he was then. Then I was fresh out of graduate school, brimming with other people’s research and ideas, ready to pass it all along to eager, inquisitive students. The Jesus of history and the Christ of faith were parallel figures to me, but they appeared to converge at only a few points. While Jesus of Nazareth could be placed in the historical stream of events with some certainty I never felt that I understood him. If the Christ of faith, carried in the heart, was more real I had the uncomfortable feeling that it was because he was made in our image—a 20th-century man under the first-century garb. Jesus was a first-century Jew whose short life was spent traversing the countryside of Galilee with occasional trips to Jerusalem. The Christ was an urban dweller, equally at home in Corinth as in Carthage, and fluent in Christian faith-talk. 
Those classes back in the day were exciting as we tried to look with fresh eyes at the Jesus of the Gospels. Reading the Gospels as both scripture and as literature, like miners we worked our way down through the layers of history with some of the tools of modern critical research on the Bible. But while it was illuminating to make the Gospels our primary texts instead of the usual Bible commentaries, it was usually with the assurance that the end of the story was known. The trajectory of the plotline was so familiar that we did not bother to look where it landed. I came away from the years of teaching that class with a sense that I had barely scratched the surface. I knew more of the context, of the historical and critical tools that helped to identify the strata of the texts, but I could sense that there was so much more to be found. 
Then my personal and professional life changed directions and for the next twenty-plus years my teaching was in communication theory, public relations, ethics, and religions of the world. Jesus and I traveled the same routes—not always at the same times however—and I found myself regarding him from a greater distance than before. I tried to place him more clearly within a historical context, a process that sharpened his outlines but made him smaller, like looking through the wrong end of the telescope. But my admiration for him increased, along with the growing conviction that I wouldn’t have understood him more than the disciples, even if I’d spent as much time with him as they did. I wasn’t even sure I could recognize him if he wasn’t surrounded by a crowd. 
Coming back to the course after all these years has been an exhilarating—and humbling—experience. The students have changed drastically—not just that there are new ones to take the place of the former students—but in so many other ways. When I first taught the course in 1981 almost all of the 100 students in two different sections were white and from Seventh-day Adventist backgrounds. This semester there were two white students in a class of 30 and only one was raised an Adventist. Most of the class were Africans and few of them were teenagers. They had come from many different Christian or Muslim communities; some had left families and husbands back in other countries, and they were here to become nurses as quickly as possible. They were dignified, deferential, and quietly stressed with work, studies, children, and bills. They regarded the Synoptic theory with wonder and found the variances between the Gospels as troubling at first and finally, merely interesting. For many of them Jesus was not a mystery but a personal friend. 
But I felt myself gripped this time around by the otherness of Jesus, the numinous quality of that which is alien, even transcendent, while still intensely human. I found myself struggling to put this experience into words. Whereas years ago, still in the heady glow of graduate school, I wanted to set off firecrackers in the classroom and rip away the placid veils of ignorance, now I came as one who knows how little he knows and is grateful to experience that hunger. 
We cannot step outside of history, particularly when it comes to following Jesus. His history is ours by virtue of the fact that he made our history his own. And yet . . . we must not grow too complacent with this God-man who can bless children and throw out money-changers. He traveled easily with prostitutes and counted possible insurgents as his friends. His eyes could fill with tears over the pain of the many, but he could roundly curse the religious authorities to their self-made hells. He knew us through and through and loved us anyway. In the end, he went to his death without heroics. Like a scarecrow against the threatening skies he was an awful sight to see. Most of us ran. Against all odds he transcended death after descending into it like one diving into the wreck. And on the third day, rising, he opened a portal to a parallel dimension. Lest there be any misunderstanding he said he would be with us to the end. Now we see through a glass darkly but one day face to face. 

Black Friday Blues

“In most societies, the very practices of routinized aggression in games, spectacles, and rituals of sacrifice that allow for expressions of anger and hostility also serve to shield people against full confrontation with the role of violence in their midst.” — Sissela Bok, Mayhem
Waiting through the usual previews, recently, before the Feature Presentation, we were treated to an updated version of Warner Bros. Tweety Bird and Sylvester. All rich colors and CGI enhancements, the characters remain the same, locked in an eternal Manichean struggle as predictable as it is violent. The cat was smashed flat, hurled through windows, rolled by a bus, impressed upon a brick wall, jabbed, flipped, bounced, punched, slammed, and wadded up — all to the warbling whine of the bird-as-victim, Tweety. At the end of this spectacle my wife leaned over and whispered, “Is it any wonder why my parents didn’t let me see this stuff?” 
Generations of children through decades of American television cartoons have seen this stuff, however, and new generations continue to thrill to the adventures of cat and bird. Coming on the heels of several stories of Black Friday violence, shoppers running amok, it made me wonder how to put all this into context. The temptation to Make a Pronouncement, Draw an Inference, or otherwise Reason to a Conclusion, reared its head, hoping for a blessing. Reluctantly, I gave in, cautioning myself to keep the salt nearby for a quick intake.
Two recent incidents, similar in the weapon used, bring our casual violence front and center. The first, in which a cop used pepper-spray on a huddled line of students at UC Davis protesting on behalf of Occupy Wall Street, immediately drew the outrage of millions when video of it appeared online. “But they were protesting peacefully,” ran the argument, which suggests that the cops would have been justified in spraying them had they been violent. An unprovoked attack is plainly wrong, especially when the right of peaceful assembly is upheld by Constitution and history. But an unprovoked attack by cops on citizens these days in front of literally hundreds of cameras, any of which can upload almost instantly to the Cyberus in the sky, is folly beyond belief. With the whole world watching, you had to ask yourself, ‘What was that cop thinking?’ It might be that he just snapped, finally having his moment in which all his inchoate rage boiled to the surface. 
But let’s say he’s more disciplined than that. Putting oneself in his position, a couple of reactions come to mind. On the one hand, he did it because they deserved it. After all—damn kids—why aren’t they in class? Snotty kids. Someone’s got to teach them to obey! If he took that position maybe he thought he had the Law on his side, along with all the grownups and adults. But on the other hand, maybe he didn’t think anything about it, that is, he didn’t think what he was doing was harmful or unusual. It was a brush-back, a gesture, a push, a show of force, just to establish who’s in charge here. Nothing personal, just business. If it’s the first option, then he obviously missed the lecture on freedom of speech back in high school. But if it’s the second he’s not going to understand what all the fuss is about. We live in a violent society; casual violence in pursuit of good ends is justified. Restoring the peace is justified: what’s the big deal? 

The second incident that brings our casual violence into sharp relief is the ‘competitive shopping rage’ of a woman at a Wal-Mart in the San Fernando Valley who was making the most of her Black Friday offensive maneuvers. Minutes after the kickoff at 10 pm she had fought her way up the aisle to the Wii display where she took her stand, defending her booty against all attackers by hosing them down with pepper spray. Bystanders in other aisles caught the toxic cloud and were soon choking and tearing up. Not to be deterred, the woman marched off to another part of the store and did it again. The story I read did not say whether she stopped to pay for the items. Nobody apparently took her down nor were police able to get a make on her, presumably because she couldn’t be clearly seen through a veil of tears. 
You have to wonder if she reacted violently because she felt threatened or if she’d planned it all along. The fact that she did it twice might suggest that it wasn’t simply blind rage. I guess we should be glad she didn’t have a gun. How would you like to be the kid who receives these presents on Christmas Day, knowing that his mother literally fought for his right to get what his heart desired? 
There’s no direct line from Tweety Bird and Sylvester to a rogue cop and a customer run amok. These are isolated incidents, brought to light by a media that feeds on them and holds them up as the norm, if only through stultifying repetition and commentary. So I’ll come to a modest and tentative conclusion: Perhaps all this is simply entertainment, examples of life imitating art for an audience easily distracted and looking for the next over-the-top moment. Perhaps we are in the position of the child described by David Denby in his thoughtful Great Books, who “knows that everything in the media is transient, disposable,”  everything is a role that can be changed or tossed, depending on the ratings and our attention span. But perhaps now is the time to put away childish things. 

Shall We Let the Dogs of War Sleep?

Who will tell me
why I was born,
why this monstrosity
called life.— Anna Swir, from Poetry Reading
One of the unintended consequences of globalization is that no one is a bystander to world events anymore. A. C. Grayling, Master of the New College of the Humanities in London, philosopher, and frequent contributor to The Times, notes that “Saying that there are no bystanders any more means that everyone is involved in everything.” In Grayling’s words, running away from our knowledge of atrocities and terrorism “is a refusal to recognise, think through, and try to deal with the sources of that danger.” 
There have been plenty of opportunities to think through the atrocities of the twentieth century, the bloodiest in modern history, and one of them, the Khmer Rouge genocide against the middle class in Cambodia, surfaced this week in a story in the New York Times. A tribunal that is trying leaders of the Khmer Rouge has released one of the defendants, Ieng Thirith, 79, the most powerful woman in that government. Between 1975 and 1979 the Khmer Rouge government murdered 1.7 million people through “execution, torture, forced labor, starvation and disease.” Ms. Thirith, the former minister for social affairs, was charged with crimes against humanity in “planning, direction, coordination and ordering of widespread purges.” 
But the tribunal has recommended the immediate release of Thirith because she “lacks capacity to understand proceedings against her or to meaningfully participate in her own defense.” She exhibits symptoms of Alzheimer’s, is disoriented and forgetful, and sometimes talks to herself. Occasionally, she snaps in public and rants at the tribunal, proclaiming her innocence and expressing shock that she, the scion of a respectable family, should be hauled up on such outrageous charges as murder and genocide. Apparently, her powers of reasoning allow her to place the blame for murder on her compatriots, while she was only responsible for bureaucratic paper-shuffling. 
Her fellow defendants are, like herself, old people now, but once they were young revolutionaries who joined Pol Pot in turning Cambodia into the killing fields. Pot Pot died in 1998 without coming to trial. Should the international community forgive these people because it was a long time ago and the defendants are weak, powerless people with one foot in the grave? 
It is a mark of moral courage that courts such as the International Criminal Court even exist. The United States is one of three countries worldwide that unsigned itself from the Court during the Bush era, will not participate in any proceedings, and will not allow its citizens to be brought up on charges. No doubt there are varied and complex reasons for this, but it smells bad. 
Since we are all participants and no longer bystanders, the action of the U.N. court in Cambodia raises all sorts of ethical questions. A humane society holds that no matter the culpability of a defendant, that person cannot be tried if he or she cannot understand the charges through mental incompetence. The presumption is that only the sane can be tried because only the sane are responsible for their crimes and for the acknowledgement of them. The banality of evil in people (the phrase is Hannah Arendt’s) means that a person can sign the death warrants of millions and go home to a loving family, a cosy dinner, and a satisfying sleep for a job well done. Thus, Ieng Thirith, no doubt as sane as any government official can be, could participate in genocide but cannot be held accountable for it years later because she has the mental and moral capacity of a squirrel. 
Many of the 20th-century’s war criminals have been indicted while in their golden years but die before a verdict can be reached. Slobodan Milosevic and Augusto Pinochet come to mind, while the early phase of Mubarak’s trial in Egypt was conducted while he was in a hospital bed. No doubt Syria’s Assad, should he ever come to trial for crimes against humanity, will suffer a heart attack. I’m sure it’s all very stressful. On the other hand, rough justice of a sort caught up with Saddam, and Gaddafi, already indicted for war crimes before he met his ignoble end in the midst of an angry mob, might have also stood trial. 
Is it the sheer magnitude of their crimes, that sometimes beggar description, which fill us with revulsion? Is that why they should be brought to justice? What do we gain by sentencing a 70-year old to 134 years in prison? Even if they are executed that doesn’t serve as a deterrent to up and coming young dictators; each one seems to believe that he plays out his drama on a stage sequestered from the world. Can we make up for the loss of thousands of lives, sometimes millions, of victims who will never live out their potential? Can one death redress the hurt of so many of the victims families? 
We know it can’t. But we’re also not willing to let these crimes pass by. Why do we pursue the perpetrators, spending years and sometimes millions of dollars tracking them down, producing witnesses, compiling evidence, and presenting the facts? 
Perhaps it is for two reasons: to honor the memory of those who were humiliated, displaced, tortured and executed, and to remember what it means to be human. Vengeance is God’s but honor remains to us, the living. We must carry on from day to day, fighting the impulse to strike back in like manner, and instead, through a scrupulously fair legal process, show that the poison of evil that pervades the human psyche does not define the human spirit. 

Rick Perry and the Politics of Certainty

How it tilts while you are thinking,
and then you know. How it makes no difference
for a long time—then it does. — William Stafford, “Figuring Out How It Is”
This week Rick Perry cocked a finger at Ron Paul in another Republican debate and shot a blank. In a gaffe heard round the world, Perry couldn’t come up with the third in a short list of federal agencies he’d throttle if he became president. In a single, riveting moment all his Texas-sized bravado farted out like an untied balloon. It was awful and cringeworthy and . . . there’s a lesson in it for all of us.


The world is made up of two kinds of people: those who think they know and those who know they don’t. I am definitely in the second camp. . . I think. How can we even make definitive statements like the one above when we are “of two minds”? How can we know anything with certainty? 
I am fascinated by people who speak with absolute certainty, and slightly repelled also. I wonder how they can be so sure, why they think they have an inside track on knowledge, and most of all, do they ever admit to being wrong? Confucius said, “Do you know what true knowledge is? To know when you know a thing, and to know when you do not know a thing. That is true knowledge.”  Epictetus, that tough old Stoic, used to say, “You can’t teach a man something he thinks he already knows.” And therein lies the beginning of wisdom, without a doubt. . . 
It’s not easy being this way. For one thing, living in a state of doubt means constantly seeking evidence, testing, sifting, weighing what appears, until something emerges from this process that offers a glimmer of hope. There are facts, of course, and necessary truths, such as 2 + 2 = 4, and all those a priori truths that Kant lured out of the shadows. For the doubter, even these pose at least a momentary pause (Whaddya mean these are axiomatic? Prove it!) until the mind overrules the emotions in the interest of saving time. 
Down at the level of leather-on-the-pavement this kind of epistemological suspicion can become quite inconvenient. For awhile after the United States Postal Service misdirected a couple of bills and my electricity was cut off I could not bring myself to drop any letters through a post box slot. Instead, I delivered the check in person, not trusting a service that daily delivers, with uncanny precision, tons of junk mail to each and every citizen with an address. I got over it. Eventually.  
For years I have wished that I could hold a viewpoint with confidence if not with complete assurance, for it would make life so much easier. Inevitably, I admit that an opposing perspective has its points, that in all honesty some of its points are better than mine, and after all, who am I to say that I stand upon the solid rock, while all around is shifting sand? Seeing multiple points of view often leads to double vision—and to vertigo—that existential disease that leaves one panting, hanging over the abyss while mice gnaw at the sleeve caught on a branch that soon will snap. Dubious workarounds present themselves in such desperate circumstances. One begins a sentence without knowing how it will end but the mind churns on, dredging up in nanoseconds all manner of rusty facts and anecdotes, the tires of memory lying at the bottom of our subconscious, the flotsam and jetsam of headlines and conversation. Occasionally, the will to power asserts itself, all niceties are sheared away, and the mind fastens, terrier-like, upon a position, any position that looks like it could stand an absent-minded glance if not a steely scrutiny. In those moments, one feels a giddiness that can be mistaken for  certainty until someone breaks the silence that follows with a sigh and a shake of the head. 
Time and time again I’ve had the experience of suddenly seeing something familiar shift ever so slightly and take on a new form. In those moments I wonder at the filters I’ve apparently installed that prevent me from seeing the full spectrum of visible light. Once having seen the new thing it cannot be ignored, of course, and one is left to ponder how much else has been overlooked or ignored because it simply did not register on our consciousness. But selective perception is not the only constraint upon us. In a discussion I used to be the one who waited so long with a question or a comment that the general train of thought had hurtled over the horizon by the time I offered it up. I wanted to make sure that my question did not betray any lack of knowledge or foresight.   Once I realized that recognizing our ignorance is the first movement toward learning, much of the ego simply melted away. 
So I bow to the idea that we are social animals and that we learn together. I’m rarely capable of doing a Descartes—shutting myself up in a little room and doubting my way down through the detritus to the solid foundation of indubitable existence. I learn faster when I’m with a group of people who have maximum curiosity and the willingness to share it. Most of what we know is handed to us, warm to the touch, from people like ourselves or sometimes from people we think we’d like to be. In those cases, having our doubts can be a good thing because they give us a moment to step back and look at the wide shot first. 
Humility and grace—the two virtues that free us up to learn. Of that I am certain.

Connecting the Dots

LoneDancer:craig-whitehead-260375
Distance does not make you falter,
now, arriving in magic, flying,
and finally, insane for the light,
you are the butterfly and you are gone. — from Goethe, The Holy Longing
On the evenings I step back inside my home from my local coffee-house, I often pause by a bookcase just inside the door. I pick a book at random, usually one I’ve not read for awhile or even never read—having bought books over the years that I grow into eventually—and opening it anywhere, taking in the tone and cadence, the rhythm of the sentences, the delight of walking in on a conversation in full swing. Reading out of context breaks the mind out of dull expectation; it throws one almost violently into a world emerging into light, a creative disjunction, an optical bending of shapes into images. All that, and it’s fun, too. 
I picked up Michael Meade’s Men and the Water of Life, an initiation into myth and storytelling, and found a poem by Goethe I’d not read before called “The Holy Longing,” which concludes with this:
And so long as you haven’t experienced
this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest
on the dark earth.
 Then I pulled down Colin Wilson’s brilliant work, The Outsider, written when he was only 24, in 1956. The Outsider traces the literary development of the alienated ones, the  people just beyond the thinnest edge of the crowd, the ones who by their very nature do not fit nor conform to polite society. They cherish their aloneness, yet they need others to truly be themselves. And the first page I opened it to . . . contained the stanza above from Goethe’s poem. 
These moments of serendipity are mysterious and welcome. For me, they happen often enough that I am not surprised, though I’m always grateful. They are one of the small wonders of the universe. It’s like coming upon a bonsai garden, the tiny, perfectly-formed trees. sometimes hundreds of years old, that stand majestically in their created environments. 
On my way up the hill to home, with the sound of endless traffic behind me and a moonless sky above, I was thinking of “home.” Not the domicile (from Latin, domus) where, as the thesaurus puts it, “whenever you are absent, you intend to return,” but this Earth, this world. Perhaps not just this third rock from the Sun, but more the world we both create and observe, the imaginative world within which we live and move and study ourselves. 
My students and I had been talking in philosophy class about freedom, freewill and determinism, the questions that ask whether we choose our actions, whether we are destined or fated, or if we are simply flung upon this earth. The question I had put to them reflected our readings and our discussion: 
The determinist says: Every event has its explanatory cause.
Some people say: Everything happens for a reason.
Is there a difference between these two positions?
The answers were thoughtful, wry, insightful, even humorous. One group stepped up vigorously and denied any differences. Cause and reason, they said, are different words for the same thing. We see an event: we trace it back to a cause. If everything happens for a reason then there must be a cause, since reason implies purpose, and purposes don’t come out of nowhere. 
Another group advanced more cautiously, working the knife in between the stones in the wall and in finding the differences. For them, ‘cause’ implied a point of origin, the initial shove that set something in motion. ‘Everything happens for a reason’ is the phrase that people use in the aftermath of an event when they’re trying to make sense of something. They say it over the shoulder as they doggedly trudge forward. 
A smaller group saw it as the bridge between science and religion, since science seeks knowledge of events and religion looks to faith to interpret what cannot be solely based on facts. 
And all week I had been, in spare moments, reading Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Steve Jobs, both rich in detail and broad in its scope. It’s a fascinating work, not only because Jobs is a fascinating subject, but because Isaacson sees the relentless purity at the center of the man’s soul. Jobs was a man whose dark side got up every morning and went to work with a knife between his teeth. His light side appeared occasionally, smiling and charming, with the knife held loosely behind his back. He was the dazzling embodiment of Kierkegaard’s maxim, “Purity of heart is to will one thing.” And for him the one thing was found at the intersection of Art and Technology where extraordinary engineering met exquisite design. He could not bear any deviance from the path of simplicity that led to perfection. How deep were his flaws and how high his aspirations!
Such purity of heart is dangerous, a flame that consumes all and finally itself. Is this what it takes to make a dent in the universe? 
Tell a wise person, or else keep silent.
Because the massman will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive,
what longs to be burned to death.
Every event has a cause, but not all events are visible. Everything happens for a reason, but reason cannot always see it. Looking back, we connect the dots.