The Dilettante's Dilemma

I have a fantasy in which the people who make the points I like best use language that makes sense. The way I look at it, the language I use actually does make sense and if these other people would just use it, it would make me happy.

As you might suspect, I have an example in mind. David Brooks wrote a column today in which he appreciated Tim Keller’s insight into life in a very broad way. One of the teachings Brooks cites is Keller’s emphasis on what he calls “self-sacrifice.”

I love the idea. I strongly dislike the language.

Here is the idea: “The only way forward is to recognize that your own selfishness is the only selfishness you can control; your self-centeredness is the problem here. Love is an action, not just an emotion, and the marriage will only thrive if both people in it make daily sacrificial commitments to each other, learning to serve and, harder still, be served. “Whether we are husband or wife,” the Kellers wrote, “we are not to live for ourselves but for the other. And that is the hardest yet single most important function of being a husband or a wife in marriage.”

What kind of thing is this “self” that is sacrificed in building a stable cooperative marriage? The first step is to define “the self” as a shrunken grasping little demon. In order to work, this will have to be an essential description. This not something all of us are vulnerable to from time to time. This has to be who we truly are all the time. This is what a “self” is.

Well…that’s nonsense. Selves are much more complex; they are also dynamic. They are mixtures of traits we approve of and traits we deplore. They are not things that need to be sacrificed.
If a self is necessarily and essentially as defined above, there is no reason not to sacrifice it. But who will do the sacrificing? Who else is there? You see the problem. Even the proposed treatment defies the diagnosis.

Here’s some better language. In offering this language, I have nothing more in mind that to affirm the “message” Keller was preaching according to Brooks. In order to achieve a very important thing—real relationship—you have to curtail some aspects of your self. Which aspects? Those that are incompatible with the new good that you want to pursue.

How bad is that? I desire to love and serve, and to be loved and served by, my partner. Together, we can be so much more than either of us could be alone. So I sacrifice the parts of my life that are incompatible with this new relationship; I do it willingly and gladly because I want what I can have only if I do.

It’s all good. It’s not all fun, but it is all good.

This is no more “self-sacrifice” than the changes a high-scoring point guard makes in adapting to a new team. He can’t be ignored by the defense because everyone knows he is a good shot. So he becomes the team leader in assists; the team thrives; the fans are ecstatic. What has been “sacrificed?” The old role.

The language of self-sacrifice does us all a disservice. What the self gains by sustained and mutually beneficial exchange does not need to be sacrificed. Such an active and thriving self does not need to be sacrificed. It needs to be celebrated.

I know Eleanor Rigby as background music. I’ve never actually paid any attention to the words. But I belong to a singing group that is getting ready to sing a Beatles concert and we are learning some Beatles songs. Kind of.

I have learned that Beatles songs are hard to sing unless you are the Beatles and my guess is that they sang them differently from night to night and they were all “right” because they were, after all, the Beatles. But if you look at the music, you see right away that the notation and the rhythm are just suggestions. In the first line—hum a little “all the lonely people” to yourself and you will know where I am—the “the” comes on the second half of the first beat; the “lone” of “lonely” comes on the second half of the second beat; -ly comes on the second half of the third beat; and the “peo-“ of “people” on the second half of the fourth beat.

Briefly, none of the words starts on the beat. No big deal? Hah! There is only one way to be on the beat but there are a dozen ways to be “off the beat.” And if you are singing as an ensemble, you have to all choose the same amount of “off the beat” all the time. Music notation was not developed for that level of cooperation.

You can be as exact as you like with the notation and the best you can do is sing it “right.” But any audience will tell you that singing if “right” sounds wrong. And it is wrong. The music values will get you all in the same parking lot; they won’t get you in the same slot—particularly if the slot you are all supposed to be in changes from night to night.

That’s why “actually being the Beatles” is the only really good solution. People hear what you are doing and assume it is what you intended to do and that it is therefore “right.” Singing it “right,” which is the best you can do by looking at the sheet music, sounds wrong.

Some years ago I was singing in the tenor section of a choir which was trying to learn to sing a response that had been written by a guy in my section. I was sitting right next to him. I could hear him singing his music and he was singing it wrong. There were three quarter rests in the first line. He gave each of them a different value and he did it the same way every time. In other words, he knew what he was doing.

I was right on the edge of getting snarky with him. I was singing it exactly the way the music said to sing it and he was not. Then, finally, it occurred to me that he was singing it the way he wanted it and it was the notation that was flawed. If there was a sign for pause for “about two thirds of a quarter rest” and another sign for “just a little more than one third a quarter rest” then the music could have been printed the way he was singing it. There is not.

Finally, I gave up and did what the Beatles do. I learned to sing it the way he was singing it. That means sensing how he is about to sing it and then singing it that way at the times when he sang it that way. It wasn’t easy, but is was exciting and singing with the composer was a real kick.

That’s the musical part of the Eleanor Rigby problem. The second part is easier. How on earth did this become a popular song? It’s not about love. It’s not about loss. It’s not about cheating. It’s about pervasive and meaningless failure. Oh boy!

Eleanor Rigby waits at a window in a church where a wedding has been. Not hers, obviously. She is “wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door.” It is not her face. She keeps it handy in case she has to wear it. As an image of profound alienation, I don’t see how Lennon and McCartney could have done any better.

Father McKenzie is busy writing the words of a sermon no one will hear. You would have to know a great deal to know that no one will hear the sermon, but Lennon and McCartney need it only as marker of futility and it does that really well. As does the last line, which remarks on the effects of Father McKenzie’s funeral liturgy: “no one was saved.” Saved? Really? Were they supposed to be? Well not really, but if you can hang a priest simultaneously for trying to do some pointless thing and also for failing at it, this is a marvelous line.

Eleanor is buried at the service where Father McKenzie gives the homily that doesn’t save anyone. No one attended the service. Eleanor lived an inconsequential life. The only marker suggested is that she might have left progeny behind and she did not. Her name was buried along with her body.

So these four young men with Liverpudlian accents get up and sing a rhythmically challenging song about a priest and a young woman who are living or have lived inconsequential lives. And the crowd goes wild.

Right.

We are not cheap moviegoers, really. It is just that we do stay and watch until the last credit has appeared on the screen. That is how Bette and I found out that the movie we had just seen, The Quiet Girl, was made from a book called Foster, by Claire Keegan. We stopped on the way home and got it out of the library.

I have enjoyed reading it several times now. The language is unusual. It is told from the viewpoint of a young girl; younger, I think, in the book than in the film.

The first line that really caught my attention was spoken by the husband of the family who agreed to keep the girl for the summer. his name is John Kinsella. Here’s the line; then I’ll give a little context.

“Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.”

John Kinsella’s wife, Edna, agreed to let a very nosy neighbor take the girl home early from a wake. The neighbor abused Edna’s trust by asking the girl a flock of inappropriate questions. That is what John Kinsella is referring to.

‘Strange things happen,’ he says. ‘A strange thing happened to you tonight, but Edna meant no harm. It’s too good, she is. She wants to find the good in others, and sometimes her way of finding that is to trust them, hoping she’ll not be disappointed, but she sometimes is.’

He laughs then, a queer, sad laugh. I don’t know what to say. ‘You don’t ever have to say anything,’ he says. ‘Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.’

“Always remember that as a thing you never need do,” he says. That is the lesson that belongs with the proverb which begins, :Many’s the man…”

The summer ends—a truly wonderful summer for the Kinsellas and for the girl—and it is time for her to be taken home. Her mother is immediately suspicious.

‘What happened at all?’ Ma says, now that the car is gone.

‘Nothing,’ I say
.
‘Tell me.’

‘Nothing happened.’ This is my mother I am speaking to but I have learned enough, grown enough, to know that what happened is not something I need ever mention. It is my perfect opportunity to say nothing.

Look at the sequence of the girl’s reflections. “Learned enough to know, grown enough to know…” And then her conclusion. This is it; this is the time. “It is my perfect opportunity to say nothing.

The girl grew up in a lot of other ways, too, but this is the first one that caught my eye and the one I still like best. The perfect opportunity to say nothing.

I liked Michelle Goldberg’s column in the February 24 New York Times. I liked it for some good reasons and some not so good. Among the not so good is that she said she had been working on the topic of “the politics of depression” for awhile, but “since I lost faith in my initial interpretation …I never ended up writing about it.

”It was an experience I have had so often that I was just barely able to keep myself from writing her to say, “Really? You too?” That is a really bad reason for liking her column.

Fortunately, there is a better reason That better reason is this paragraph:

Social media didn’t just cut into offline socializing. It precipitated a revolution in consciousness, in which people are constantly packaging themselves for public consumption and seeing their popularity and the popularity of others quantified. It’s not shocking that this new mode of existence would be particularly fraught for those in a stage of life where both fashioning the self and finding a place to belong are paramount.

Let’s start with “precipitated.” That saves her from having to say that social media caused “a revolution in consciousness.” She can say that it was the final element of some toxic cocktail. She could have said, herself, what the other elements of the cocktail were or she could have let anyone else do it. She has identified the straw that broke the camel’s back and it is that straw she wants to talk about. It is social media.

Social media precipitated “a revolution in consciousness.” There is a way of being before this revolution and a different way afterward. She doesn’t say what it was like before, but the “after” account is pretty vivid. People are “constantly packaging themselves for public consumption…” I would have said that that is the normal condition of society. We all do the things we need to do to belong. And after that, we all do the things we need to do to stand out. We are fully aware of neither process, discovering only later what we did and being forced to speculate about why we might have done it.

But the next part of Goldberg’s account is riveting: “…seeing their popularity and the popularity of others quantified.” Two aspects of that seem potentially disastrous to me. The first is the quantification. Nearly all the information that comes with normal social assessment is lost in a single quantified assessment and all the parts of it you might want to argue about are lost behind the blank fact of a number. Not only is it beyond argument as a number; it also seems truer.

What is not captured in this metric? Oh…not much. Only your own intention and your own assessment of the quality of your work. Hardly anything at all compared to the quantified and casual assessments of others.

What could be more central to the self than an answer to the question, “What am I trying to do?” What I am trying to do is more likely to be linked to my fundamental identity than any other single measure I know. The sense of self-efficacy as it is called in some fields or of “agency” as it is called in other fields begins with an answer to that question.

And that is true, I maintain, despite that fact that we are not always doing what we thought we were doing. The readiness of standard categories for intention and action means that we are quite likely to use one of the standard labels—Oh, I’m just making sure he is held accountable—rather than giving a more thoughtful and accurate account. Coming up with an acceptable account of why you are doing something is no mean feat in itself. To skip over that part and to consult, instead, a quantified measure of whether others approve of what you are doing, seems like giving away the store.

And not only that, if you know what you are trying to do, you know both whether you are succeeding and whether you are giving your best efforts to the project. Assuming that you would choose to make some changes if your efforts are failing, it would be nice to know whether they are failing. If you pay careful attention to what you are trying to do, you have a good chance of knowing that.

The world of quantified assessment that Michelle Goldberg talks about seems horrific by contrast. It is a world in which not only you but everyone else in that world is assessed on things that have nothing to do with their intentions. They have to do only with the reactions of others to the way you “package yourself for public consumption.”

The reaction that many young people have to this situation is one Goldberg describes as characterized by loneliness, depression, and alienation. And why would it not be? The people who buy this kind of world or find themselves swept up in it, have lost the crucial connection between what they intend and who they are,

Whether there is a way out of this or not depends on how deep a hold social media have on how many people. There are lots of other things to worry about. The aggregate category some are calling “deaths of depression” continues to rise, for example. Maybe the social media bubble is going to burst and we will look back on it as an oddity, as if we had been visited by a powerful and quirky relative and were glad to see them leave.

Or maybe it is fundamental to who we have become. I hope not.

This Wednesday, a lot of Christians are going to have a mixture of ash and olive oil applied to their foreheads. I am not. There are two reasons, one of which isn’t really very respectable. It is that it seems to “high church” for me. The churches that had access to me when I was young were markedly low church. I didn’t like that either, but when very high church things show up, I head back home in my mind.

The Ash Wednesday service at my church this year is going to be held at noon. That means that some people of our congregation are going to go about the rest of their day with a cross of ash on their foreheads. Why?

The second reason is really a better one. I teach a bunch of Bible study classes. It is what I am known for in the settings where I live most of my life. At the CCRC where Bette and I live, I regularly have the experience of seeing a new acquaintance learn that I teach Bible studies and then seeing them shrink back as if I have somehow become dangerous. If that’s how they react to learning how I spend my free time, how do you think they will respond when I show up with a dirty smudge on my forehead?

The principal resource I bring to the Bible studies is that I am not weird. Not, at least, in any ways that can be traced back to my religious life. In all the settings where I teach about the Bible, there are people who have been damaged by earlier teachers or—even more often, earlier preachers—and who welcome a chance to work it out.

I offer a framework of thought that is pretty robust. It isn’t going to bounce around or get distorted by anyone who says it’s ridiculous and self-contradictory. It is just going to stay there and the conversation we want to have will take place safely within it.

Often a starting point is that the Bible is ridiculous because it is self-contradictory and therefore unreliable. The issue there—the thing really worth talking about—is whether “the Bible” is a single thing, so that differences in the accounts it offers are “contradictory,” rather than just “different.”

Here are two examples. There are two Creation stories in Genesis. The first one—commonly attributed by scholars to the Priestly school of editors (referred to as P)—begins at Genesis 1:1 and goes to Genesis 2:4. The second one—thought to be the work of a Yahwist school of editors (and therefore designated “J”) begins at Genesis 2:5 and goes to the end of the second account.

When you give up “the Bible,” you give up the contradictions and then you get to ask what the P version of the Creation story is like contrasted with the J version. The “contradiction” vanishes. There are two accounts. It would be possible to press on to the question of which of them is true, but that is not ordinarily the concern of the people I talk to. Their common external response is, “Really? Why does P insist on this when it is of no interest to J at all?” Their internal response is likely something like, “Now that I have found a safe place to ask questions I have always been condemned for asking, I find that I am really curious.”

Ask yourself whether any part of that transaction would be improved by my wearing a cross of ash to class the next Thursday.

Another example is a course I have offered in several settings about how Matthew’s account of the life and ministry of Jesus differs from Mark’s. I’ll tell you why I think that has been so well received, then let’s go on and look at how it works. When attention is drawn to the differences between the two accounts, the conversation is not about what Jesus really said or did or what he was like. It is about why Matthew made the changes he made in Mark’s text, leaving some things out, adding other things, and rephrasing a good deal of the rest. That’s not all that horrible.

The material is taken over whole from W. D. Davies and Dale Allison’s study of Matthew. They list a series of occasions where Matthew makes changes and make observations about what those changes have in common. Matthew wants to use a much more reverential approach to his account of Jesus than Mark does, so every time Mark sounds caustic or critical, Matthew makes changes. Armed with Davies and Allison’s scholarship, all we have to do in class is look at the two particular texts and note the difference. Then we look at the next two and note the difference. Then we compare just how those differences are alike.

All those discussions arebiblical; they are all scholarly. They are all unthreatening to people who have been raised in the “contradictions in the Bible” culture and so they are a ground where real engagement with those texts can happen.

For me to help those things happen, I need to be knowledgeable. That means that I read Davies and Allison before they did. I need to be stable. I can easily do that. I don’t even have a dog in this fight. And I need to be willing to let them start from where the grievance is and work on it at whatever rate they like best—and to stop whenever they need to.

No one in any of those studies wonders whether I, myself, am a Christian. I am as candid about my own faith as I am about my commitment to secular study of the texts we work on together. I am reasonably sure that after a while, no one in any of the classes thinks I have designs—friendly or not—on their immortal souls.

Jesus does. Or so his followers maintain in the texts we have. One of the best-known of these texts pictures Jesus as standing at the door of someone’s house and knocking. The resident needs to decide what to do, at that point, and none of the answers is really easy. Listen to the knocking for a long time? Go to the door and say, “Go away.” Go to the door and invite him in? Then what?

So Jesus may be knocking on doors as I teach my classes. I wouldn’t know. But I am not. I need to keep on making that clear to people whose trust has been repeatedly abused. And wearing an ash cross on my forehead would not help. It would, in fact, be an imposition.