Catching Eli’s Attention

Posted on October 9, 2019 by hessd

The story of old Eli and young Samuel has been told a lot of times.  The story I have always heard is how Samuel learned, finally, to hear God’s voice.  It’s a really good story.  But lately, I have been noticing what Eli hears.

Eli 1Eli can’t hear God speaking to him anymore.  He did once.  Now he needs help and Samuel provides the help Eli needs.  He doesn’t know he is doing that.  Samuel is innocent entirely of God’s plan for Eli, but he helps Eli to hear God by doing all the things he is supposed to do.  It’ a sobering thought.

Let’s look at it from God’s point of view.  How do you get a message to Eli when Eli has stopped listening?  Answer: you call Samuel.  I chose this picture because Eli looks really irked and Samuel looks clueless.

Samuel has no idea what is going on.  He hears his name being called and there are only two of them there, so he knows it is Eli calling.  So he runs to Eli to see what he wants.  Eli has no idea yet what is going on, but he is sure that he did not call Samuel and he tells Samuel that.  Samuel doesn’t know how to understand what Eli is telling him—might not believe it either—but he goes back to bed as Eli has told him to do.

Note the difference at this point between understanding what is going on and doing what you are supposed to do.

Samuel goes back to sleep and hears his name being called again.  Since it can only be Eli, he goes back to see Eli and gets the same answer.  Eli might be puzzling a little about why Samuel keeps hearing his name being called, but he is way past doing anything about it.  Only being wakened again and again out of a sound sleep by a very obedient little boy is going to raise that question in his mind.

The discrepancy between what Samuel thinks is going on and what Eli suspects is going on has now gotten sharp.  Eli now needs another explanation for why his servant keeps coming up and waking him.  This is a big deal.  He has lived for many years without stumbling on this discrepancy.  It is the equivalent of the harassment tactic of phoning a victim’s number every hour all night.  At some point, the victim will say, “Who are you and what do you want.”

Samuel knows that only he and Eli are there.  That’s how he knows who is calling him.  But Eli knows—now that he has been forced to consider it—that  there are three there: Eli knows Yahweh is there as well.  Samuel does not know that.  That means that if Samuel keeps getting called and Eli knows he is not doing the calling, it is God.  

It has been a long time since Eli has heard anything from God.  He has learned how not to hear God.  If spiritual sensitivity could be compared to wearing hearing aids, Eli has taken his hearing aids out.  He is slowly dying and everything is fine, but he can’t keep Samuel from waking him up and, eventually, he can’t help noticing what is going on.

God’s project of contacting Eli is now half done.  Eli is paying attention.  So God tells Samuel everything Samuel needs to hear, including a bunch of really nasty stuff about Eli.  The next step is for Samuel to break the bad news to Eli and he doesn’t want to.

But Eli has been awakened now, and from a much more substantial sleep that the one Samuel kept interrupting;  he understands, now, that the little boy is not going to want to tell him the bad stuff.  So he instructs Samuel very directly to tell him all the bad stuff and Samuel does.

17Eli asked, ‘What message did he give you? Please do not hide it from me. May God bring unnameable ills on you and worse ones, too if you hide from me anything of what he said to you.’ 18Samuel then told him everything, hiding nothing from him. Eli said, ‘He is Yahweh; let him do what he thinks good.’

As I was reading over this familiar story and seeing if from another angle, I rememberedeli 2 a very bad movie about God.  It is Oh, God, with George Burns playing God.  He wants to get a message to Jerry Landers (John Denver), who doesn’t believe in God in any way practical enough to allow God to give instructions.  God gives Jerry a written note inviting him to come and see Him.  Jerry wades it up and throws it away.  The next day, that note is in the outer leaves of a head of lettuce.  Jerry wads it up and throws it away.  Then it shows up on his pillow that night.

Jerry still doesn’t believe in God, but he wants his life back with the same intensity with which Eli wants his night’s sleep back.  So he goes to the place where God is and hears what God wants to tell him and is forever changed.

You can see why the story of Eli reminded me of the story of Jerry.  But in Oh God, the role of Samuel is played by a piece of paper that magically reappears over and over until Jerry gets tired of throwing it away.  If you don’t have a magic piece of paper, you will need someone like Samuel.

Who’s like Samuel?

Samuel is, in this story, God’s catalyst.  He has no idea what is going on, but he does his job.  He is, in that one sense, inert.  God knows what is going on and Eli once knew what was going on, but Samuel does not.  Samuel knows his duty and he does his duty and in that way, God is able to get Eli’s attention without using a magically reappearing piece of paper.

I look around, sometimes, for what I think of as “meaningful work.”  By that, I mean work that means something to me.  I’m not sure I have the patience to do the catalytic work Samuel was called to do.

Posted in A life of faith, Biblical Studies, Getting Old | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

The Greater Good and Its Rivals

Posted on October 1, 2019 by hessd

Of all the ways to “look at things,” I would like to explore one particular set that is currently bedeviling us. These ways of looking at things are based on value premises that are contradictory, if either is allowed to dominate,  but they can be integrated harmoniously under some circumstances.

One way of looking at things gives priority to “the good of all.” The right thing to do is the thing that will leave everyone better off. The other looks at the achievement of personal goals. Succeeding at what you are trying to do is not only invigorating, it is primal. We would not have gotten to this point in our history without it.

I know this is an argument that has been going on for a long time, but I keep stubbing my toe on it in casual conversation, so I thought I’d examine it again.

See now 1983

I ran into this in a new and unforgettable form in 1983. I was legislative assistant to arationale 1 newly elected State Representative (House District #1 in Oregon) [1] He thought I was politically naive (which was certainly true, although not in the way he thought) so he would bring me into the office from time to time and ask me a question. I thought it felt a good bit like a catechism. The question was, “What is a good idea?” The correct answer was, “Sixteen and 31.” [2] So, roughly, if you can sell it to a majority, it’s a good idea. [3]

And he was right about me in a way. I was much more vulnerable than I am now to the idea that proposed legislation that would be beneficial to everyone ought to be passed on the grounds that it would be beneficial to everyone. There is a “we” in there. It is a category we all belong to and by pulling together, we can achieve great things. What I discovered, over and over, was that people who were being asked to vote for something [4] needed to see that it was in their interest, somehow, to vote for it. The question, always implicit and sometimes also explicit, was, “Why would I do that?” The answer, “Because it’s the right thing to do” was nearly always thought to be inadequate.

The lesson I learned, that has served me on beyond the legislative context is that people, by and large, join movements that are in their interest. When you explain to them what voting yes will do for something they already care about, they are perfectly willing to go along. I might say, inventing the context just for this example, “It will help a lot of school children and it will free up money for the irrigation subsidies you have been proposing.” When he stands up on the floor and votes “Aye,” I am thinking of the school children and he is thinking about the irrigation machinery, but the Clerk of the House just records the vote as “Aye.”

Is there really a tradeoff?

Not necessarily. Sometimes actions taken for personal reasons have the effect of benefitting the whole system. The the rationales and clearly incompatible. Adam Smith, the foundational economist (see illustration below), tried to marry to two motivations by inventing an “Invisible Hand,” (the capital letters are supposed to suggest a deity) with will transform actions taken by individuals for their own benefit into a pattern of outcomes that are good for everyone. According to Smith’s rationale, what is done for private gain has the effect of producing public benefit.

It’s a very attractive argument, but capitalism, the economic system he was justifying, doesn’t actually work the to benefit of all. It works to the benefit of some and to the detriment of others. It is, in that way, like evolution, where progress is made on the corpses of all the species whose adaptation was comparatively inadequate. So the less good adaptors failed to the benefit of the better adaptors and that is how good things happened. The new modern giraffe with the long neck wins and thousands of almost-giraffes with less long necks, die.

Rationales

So let’s say I want to propose a new plant-based menu for the CCRC [5] where I live. I could start with the “It’s the right thing to do” arguments and I could produce studies that show how much better everyone will be if they accept the new plant-based menu. My interest in bringing this example up has nothing to do with food; it has to do with rationales.

rationale 4People who like more “meat” [6] will wonder why they should shift from a menu they like to a menu they do not like. That seems to me a reasonable question. There is a good tight relationship between the preferences of the resident carnivores and their meal choices. They like to eat meat and so they choose meat dishes from the menu. The counterargument, that they really should have different preferences than the ones they do have, will sound faint to their ears and if it persists, it will become annoying. Doing what you like to do—provided that it is not illegal, immoral, or fattening—is your right.

Notice how taut the line is kept between my preferences and my chosen actions. It is hard to ignore that. Note how loose the line is between the overall benefits that will come to all the residents of the CCRC and my nightly experience of dinner. From the standpoint of the rationales alone, the more immediate one, the personal one, will always win out and the system advantages will always be foregone.

It’s the Tragedy of the Commons (again) but with attention paid this time only to the rationales being used.

Overcoming Resistance

Anyone who has ever tried it has learned that telling people that they ought to feel differently than they do feel is an exercise in futility. People quite rightly object that they feel the way they feel about the matter at hand and they intend to pursue the course of action that feeling indicates. If they like eating meat, for instance, they would have to be given a reason for not eating it that is so cogent and so immediate and so personal that they will act in some way that their feelings so not dictate at the moment,.

Is there a solution?

Of course. All we need to do is to set up a system in which the behaviors (and subsequently, the hearts and minds) are those that are in the public interest. In the well-known case of grazing your cattle on the commons, you refuse to graze more than “your share, ” that if you do it, others will do it and the common grazing area will be destroyed. This is not one of those capitalist moments where private knowing greed is supposed to produce the common good. Nor is it reasonable to expect a given owner to refuse to enrich himself by grazing more than his share of the commons. The fact is that some will and others will not.

rationale 5So neither rationale—neither do the right thing nor do what you want to do—is going to work here. What works, instead, is an approach toCommon Pool Resources (CPR), such as Elinor Ostrom considers in her 1990 book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. . In Törbel, Switzerland, for instance they live with the possibility of private overgrazing at public cost and they deal with it. How? First, they inculcate the attitudes that will make voluntary compliance the normal thing. [7] Second, they rely on all the members of the association to monitor and report infractions. The association also hires people to monitor infractions, but they are not expected to do all the work, only to supplement the work the residents do. Third, they punish violators with both disapproval of their neighbors and with financial penalties.

I surveyed the two rationales above. This is neither, in a way, because it is both. It emphasizes the value of preserving the common resources, on the one hand, and on avoiding the punishments that the neighbors and law enforces would levy. [8] The first is systemic and remote; the second personal and immediate.

Conclusion

Either kind of rationale, taken alone, has deficiencies. Telling people [9] that “they really oughta wanna,” which is the way the systemic solutions are most often marketed, doesn’t work very often, and it annoys the target audience. [10] Telling people that you understand that they have to do whatever they think is in their own interest, is an easy sell, but is disastrous to the system. Building structures that encourage people to make choices that sustain the system and that identify and punish choices that selfishly harm the system is very promising. I am not quite sure whether it would work at the CCRC where I live, but I think people should adopt it anyway because…you know…it’s the right thing to do.

[1] I proposed that we devise a mural for the small bulletin board that faced the hallway outside our cubicle. It would have pictures from various settings proclaiming “We’re number 1!” Football teams, banks, insurance companies, soft drinks, whatever. Then we would say that what is a claim for them is a simple fact for us. We are, in fact, #1. I was not able to sell the idea and it still disappoints me a little.
[2] Those would be majority votes in the 30-member Senate and the 60 member house.
[3] I don’t really think he believed that. I think he thought it was a useful corrective for me.
[4] Or to lobby for it or to support it or to contribute money to people who are promising to vote for it—I’m putting all those in the same category.
[5] A Continuing Care Retirement Community, in my case, Holladay Park Plaza in Portland, Oregon.
[6] For purposes of convenience, any food a vegan would reject will be considered “meat.”
[7] Obviously, this works only for a closed system, so all the members of the association are alert for incursions into their pastures by outsiders.
[8] Please note: violators are not told to go back to where they came from. They pay their fines; they may or may not demonstrate a public penitence; and then life goes on.
[9] Robert Mager and Peter Pipe have written a very good book with a world class subtitle. The title—informative if not imaginative—is Analyzing Performance Problems. But the subtitle includes the phrase “you really oughta wanna,” which I think captures the dilemma of the first motivation taken alone.
[10] I chose that particular phrasing for the benefit of Mark Twain fans. You know who you are.

Posted in Economy, Political Psychology, Sustainability, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Shared “reality”

Posted on September 27, 2019 by hessd

The Crucial Text

Most of the material below has been taken from Neal Stephenson’s novel Seven Eves.  My strongest interest in this small slice of the novel is the expression with which it ends.  It is: “consensual historical hallucination.”

I will add in this section the excerpts I have made.  Then I will try to put the larger narrative frame in place.  Finally, I will try to unpack this fascinating combination of words.  Consensual historical hallucination?  Really?

Tekla had been an easier target, where Aida was concerned, since she had stated soSeveneves 1 forthrightly what she considered desirable in a future race.[1] It was easy enough to see that the children of Tekla were going to be strong, disciplined, formidable fighters. And one did not have to be a military genius to understand that fighting, for the foreseeable future—several millennia of being bottled up in space colonies—was going to be up close and personal.

Aida was not about to see her children dominated by the sons and daughters of Tekla.  She might simply have done what Tekla did, and created versions of herself modified for certain traits associated with athleticism.

 Instead, having become fascinated by the odd detail in her genetic report, she had embarked on a program to reawaken the Neanderthal DNA that, or so she imagined, had been slumbering in her and her ancestors’ nuclei for tens of thousands of years. It was a somewhat insane idea, and in any case she didn’t have enough Neanderthal in her to make it feasible, but she did produce a race of people with vaguely Neanderthal-like features, and in later centuries the processes of Caricaturization, Isolation, and Enhancement—which had affected all the races to some extent—had wrought especially pronounced changes on this subrace. 

Gene sequences taken from the toe of an actual Neanderthal skeleton, found on Old Earth and sequenced before Zero, were put to use. Old Earth paleontology journals had been data-mined for stats on bone length and muscle attachment so that those could be hard-coded into the Neoander wet-ware. 

The man sitting at the end of the table was the artificial product of breeding and of genetic engineering, but, had he been sent back in time to prehistoric Europe, he would have been indistinguishable, at least in his outward appearance, from genuine Neanderthals.

Their Neanderthal heritage had been fabricated out of whole cloth, yet it was taken more or less seriously by everyone—it was a sort of consensual historical hallucination. 

Narrative Context

To provide the context for this expression, I am going to have to fill in a very small part of the book.  You need to know, so that you don’t get entirely lost, that all human beings (so far as we know for most of the book, including this part) have died except for these seven women, [2] who produce a “race” of people each.

seveneves 2You will see the names Tekla and Aida.  They are two of the Eves and the races that derive from them are known as Teklans and Aidans.  There are also subraces, one of which are called Neoanders, one of whom is referred to as “the man sitting at the end of the table.”  His name is Langobard.  This is Eve Tekla in the movie version.

So Langobard is an Aidan because he is of the genetic line of Eve Aida. He  “is” a Neanderthal.  Let me explain why I put “is” in quotes.  He is the product of a great deal of genetic manipulation, but the starting point of all the manipulation is “gene sequences taken from the toe of an actual Neanderthal skeleton, found on Old Earth.”  In addition, “Old Earth paleontology journals had been data-mined for stats on bone length and muscle attachment so that those could be hard-coded into the Neoander wet-ware.”  Langobard is as close to a genuine Neanderthal as anyone will ever see.

Is he a “Neanderthal?”  He is granted the status of Neanderthal.  Without any question, the word “consensual” in the phrase we are unpacking shows that.  “Historical” may refer to the period of history he is emulating or to the period where his status has been granted.  I lean toward the latter.

But what is the hallucination?  The principal referent of “hallucinate” is visual (the other senses may be involved, too) so it might refer to how Langobard looks.  Except it doesn’t.  You could plop him down on Old Earth in the company of naturally produced Neanderthals and he would blend right in.  It is the “heritage” that is hallucinated.  

Everyone has agreed, apparently, to grant that there is a body of people who are bestseveneves 3 thought of as modern day products of Old Earth’s Neanderthals, both of their physiology and their culture.  Langobard’s actual “cultural history” comes from the time when there were enough Neoanders (modern Neanderthals) to build a culture, which could not happen before the genetic manipulations of Aida and the natural population distortions referred to above as “caricaturization, isolation, and enhancement.”  Let’s say less that a thousand years of “history.”  Not 5000, which separates Langobard from the actual DNA that was harvested to create his subrace.  And Eve Aida, the progenitor of Langobard.

If this is what Stephenson has in mind, the “hallucination” is simply the exchange of the real Neanderthal history on Old Earth (surviving only in the DNA they harvested) for the real Neoander history of the most recent centuries.  That is was “taken more or less seriously by everyone” is a choice they have made.  As a choice, it cannot be a hallucination.

I think he has an agreed upon myth in mind.  It is a “shared reality,” as in my title, but it is not a mistake.  Nor is it true.

[1] Neal Stephenson, SevenEves.New York: HarperCollins, 2015, pp. 684-85 and 689-90.

[2]  Ron Daniels is making the movie and you should see who he has cast as the Eves.  I have included the pictures of the two whose names I use here.

Posted in Books, Movies | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Impeachment 101

Posted on September 25, 2019 by hessd

I don’t have a view, myself, about whether impeaching Donald Trump (hereafter, CHEB, the Current Head of the Executive Branch) is a good idea or not. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said, when she authorized the first tentative step toward impeachment, “No man is above the law.” I appreciate the sentiment, but I think we would have to call it an aspirational statement.

No one is above the law

Here’s why I say that. We were in Scotland recently and while I was there, I learned aimpeach 6 good deal more than I had ever wanted to know about clan governance. Clans cohere around the leader. Until, of course, someone kills him and takes over, at which point they cohere around the new leader. “The law of the clan” is a fiction for the same reason the “law of the mob” was fiction in Chicago when it was being run by Al Capone. These are “leader-driven” not “law-driven” societies.

I think we might be better off thinking of some such notion as “outside the law”  than “above the law.” These leaders are people to whom the law does not pertain. These leaders are not, in the eyes of their respective clans, “illegal;” they are a-legal.” That is why I referred to Speaker Pelosi’s standard—no man is above the law—as aspirational.

It is a commonplace that the U. S. is divided into “tribes” [1] but the implications of that  observation, which is correct, are not always made clear. When you go to a collection of tribes and ask whether they want to follow their leader or to submit to someone’s notion of “law and order,” they will choose the leader. It is unnatural—I use that word with care—to prefer to be governed by an abstract set of norms than by a person you trust. There are some strata in American society who have achieved that unnatural standard and maintained it across several eras of American life, but the strata are thin and few and they are routinely dismissed by most of the population. The U. S. is more tribal now than it has been since the decade leading up to the Civil War. [2]

In that sense, the tribalism of the Congress, which is more formal, simply lags behind the tribalism of the electorate. The Constitution, in specifying that the President may be impeached for “high crimes and misdemeanors” refused to specify just what actions could be called that and tossed the ball over to the political process. That is what the Framers intended.

As a result, the House of Representatives, which has the power to impeach, may call anything it wants “high crimes and misdemeanors.” It is true that CHEB has broken new ground in the areas of obstruction of justice, of collusion with foreign leaders, and in treason, but he need not have done all that to be impeached. Just as “the Constitution says what the Supreme Court says it says,” so “high crimes and misdemeanors” are what the House says they are. [3] The House could impeach CHEB for having an astounding sequence of bad hair days provided that they called the offense, “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Is it a good idea?

Some people say we really no longer have a choice. The longer we go on saying nothing, the more complicit we are in his crimes. In this view, it is courageous and moral to point to the crimes and call for impeachment and this is the case NO MATTER WHAT THE OUTCOME OF THOSE ACTIONS WILL BE. Sorry for the shouting. The case here is that when we consent to this kind of behavior on the part of our elected leader, we have lost a moral battle we will never be able to win back. This is, in the eyes of people who hold this perspective, a “crossing the Rubicon” sort of moment. [4]

They may be right. It may be that in allowing the President to do unprecedentedly scandalous things and to be approved of for them, we have finally ceded the high ground and will never be able to get it back. On the other hand “the moral high ground” requires a law and order perspective and the liberals are very nearly (not quite) as tribal as the Trump voters. In a nation as divided as ours “the moral high ground” is just a rhetorical tool of one of the tribes. It is not, any longer, a way of mediating among the tribes.

If that is what the “moral culture” critics are afraid of losing, it is already lost.

Other people say we do have a choice. These are the “keep your eye on the ball” people, of whom, I should pause to say, I am one. I want Donald Trump out of office; I want a Democratic House and Senate; I want a fair electoral system; I want aggressive conservation measures; I want decent sustainable treatment of immigrants. I want a lot of other things too and I want to take a position on impeachment that maximizes my chances of getting as many of those as I can. If impeachment proceedings help, fine. If not, fine. Keep your eye on the ball [5]

CHEB is not going to be convicted by the Senate no matter how high the impeachment count gets in the House. He is not going to be removed from office that way. He can, of course, be voted out of office, which I think is the surest way to do it and the best way to pursue the collection of goals I specified above. I have always felt that Speaker Pelosi agreed with me on that, but she has suddenly changed and I don’t really understand why. I am quite confident that she has not gone over to the “moral critique” camp. She is still a numbers counter. What does she know that I don’t? It makes me less sure that relying on the 2020 election results is the best way to get all the things I want.

Finally, some people argue that a premature impeachment—an impeachment with no likely conviction—will still weaken CHEB. All his dirty laundry hung out in public view and producing public disgust. I don’t think so. At a certain point, you have to decide whether the dirtiness of the laundry is worse or the mean-spiritedness of the people hanging it out. We (our tribe) keep pointing to how dirty the laundry is. They (the other tribe) keep pointing to the distorted and shriveled morality of the people hanging the laundry out. Oh…they are hypocrites too, of course.

That’s the way if worked for Bill Clinton, if you recall. The more grievous the charges the Republicans brought, the more they seemed like bullies who might turn on people like me when they were done with poor ol’ Bill, who had, after all, only showed his common humanity. Clinton’s popularity went up sharply as a result of that impeachment and the Republicans’ went sharply down.

I don’t want that to happen to me and I don’t want it to happen to us.

[1] I am going to shift now to talking about tribes rather than clans. It sounds more contemporary, for one thing, and it offers a useable adjectival form, “tribal.”
[2] The standard that political scientist Robert A. Dahl used in measuring the degree of division in the U. S. House was ingenious: how many things do you need to know about a Representative to correctly predict his vote? When it got down to one—you need to know only one thing (region, in the case of the Civil War) then you are justified in calling the nation “divided.”
[3] There is the practical matter of living in glass houses and throwing stones, but that is practical only in the long term and we are not living in a “long term” era.
[4] Joseph N. Welch is celebrated by liberals for saying to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, “At long last, sir, have you left no sense of decency,” but “at long last” points to how very long he waited to say that.
[5] I realize I have defined “the ball” as the political and policy outcomes most important to me, but I would be willing to share the agenda space with others.

Posted in Politics | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

8.6667

Posted on September 16, 2019 by hessd

The first time I saw this wonderful cartoon, I thought it was just funny, The second time, I thought it was witty and funny—not at all a common combination. I still think it is witty and funny—the whole Olympic gesture with the scores on cares the way they used to be displayed—but now I am thinking it is a little sad, also.bon voyage 5.jpg

“Who are you to judge?” [1]

We always imagine when we see the scores held up by the judges that they know what a good performance is. We might imagine, to take the case of platform diving, that the judges had been very good divers themselves in times past and they know a great dive when they see it. That doesn’t work for this picture, I’m afraid. The caterpillars have never been butterflies.
They have no experience at all with what they are assessing.

The next thing that occurs to me is that whoever knows what, only one of these creatures is actually flying. The caterpillars can imagine, they can hypothesize, they can project…but when it comes to saying what it feels like, the butterfly takes the stage.

There is a distinction to be made—it isn’t valid for everything, as I will note below—between those who are are actually doing something and those who are only criticizing. Criticizing is pretty cheap by comparison with flying. [2] If you are flying, you can fly in the wrong direction, you can run into something, you can fall out of the sky. Leaving aside for the moment, predators who feast on caterpillars, nothing all that bad can happen to you while you are just sitting there criticizing someone else.

I get the chance to preach every now and then. I’m not a very good preacher—not at least to the congregation I get access to—but going through the process has the effect of making me a good deal less critical than I would be otherwise. [3] When you spend a lot of your own time backstage, and when you are a very occasional preacher, you spend a lot of time backstage, you know how many sudden inspirations would be meaningless to the people you are going to preach to. You know how different it is to build a story that means a lot to you and to know with that clear sinking feeling that it will not mean anything when you actually have a chance to give that sermon. A good sermon is a picture that makes sense from the standpoint of the people who can see it. You just got done drawing it; you can’t see it the way they can.

But I’m good at judging

So the other side of this question is that an activity—flying, in this cartoon—is chosen as real and other things—judging, in this cartoon—are demoted to being “not quite real.” That is the source of the jab about teachers being people who can’t actually do anything. “Those who can,” the slam goes, “do, and those who cannot, teach.” Some activities are “really doing something,: in this insult and teaching others to do that thing are not really doing anything.

So those who can’t box can teach boxing; those who can’t play tennis can be tennis coaches, and those whose own lives are frightful messes can still counsel others about how to improve their relationships. In each of those examples, there is a real activity (boxing, for instance) and a fake activity (teaching boxing). But I maintain that as appealing as that form of grievance is, it is false. Both boxing and teaching boxing are “real.”

Let’s look at it from the other side. There are superb performers who have no idea how they do what they do. They make terrible teachers. To teach, you have to know what works AND how to help others acquire the knowledge or the skill required. Neither the knowing nor the helping require a past experience with doing. That does not argue, of course, that the experience of competent practice might not help; it argues only that doing and teaching are not the same thing. Both are “real” but they are different.

And the counselor who is quite skilled at helping couples see what is impeding their pursuit of a better marriage may not be good at being married—at least not to his current spouse. Does the fact that he is not a good husband mean that he is not a good counselor, as if one activity were “real” and the other only a pale reflection. I don’t think so.

And although it takes all the fun out of the cartoon to say so, there is no reason to believe that the “judges” are not correct. The fact that they cannot fly doesn’t mean that they can’t see. And 8.66667 reflects quite a lot of agreement, when you stop to think about it.

[1] OK, I’ve abused the quotation. The word translated “judge” in this passage would better have been translated as “condemn,” but my use of it requires that it be able to have meaning in both contexts and “judge” does that for me.
[2] Actually, these days almost everything is cheap by comparison with flying.
[3] I’ve been a college professor most of my life and my sermons still sound mostly like lectures.

Posted in Living My Life, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Selling Providence

Posted on September 15, 2019 by hessd

In these brief comments, I reflect on the way Providence (formally Providence Health and Services) markets itself.  At every Providence site I have seen—and I have seen many in the Portland area—these five framed posters are displayed.  It is a way for Providence to say who they are.

IMG_0486.jpeg

You can imagine that the process that produced this array of five virtues could have
begun at the biblical end with the five cited scriptures and then worked “upward” to the named virtues and then outward to the question of how to attach these names to the present concerns of people needing healthcare.  Or you can imagine that went the other way, with the needs and hopes of potential customers first, then the panoply of named virtues, and finally specific scripture citations.

If you imagine the second of those, which I, with no real knowledge of the process, take for granted, the first work is done by the marketers, using sophisticated market research surveys  The second work is done by people I call “the branders,” whose job is to establish and convey an image of some sort to the public.  The third work is done by someone in the organization—it is, after all a Roman Catholic organization—who knows the Bible and can choose appropriate verses to be attached to the virtues.

The Virtues

Here are the named virtues, with a few reflections on them.

Justice, The prophet, Micah, who might as well have never said another thing in his life, 6:8

There is a vertical dimension here: humility with God, and also a horizontal dimension, comprising justice and kindness.  Presumably these have different audiences.

Excellence us supported by Luke (12:48) who says that much will be required from those to whom much has been entrusted.  The crucial word here is “much,” and the meaning of that word will have to be determined from the context.

Respect draws on Genesis, which teaches that everyone has been made in the image of God, whatever that means, and is thereby due what God is due.  Very often that is translated “fear” as in “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” but here is would be akin to “respect.”

Compassion is based on the observation made in Matthew 4:24 that Jesus taught and healed with compassion for all.[3]  It is hard to understand what that might mean in the context of the Providence Healthcare system, which is not called upon to have compassion for anyone who cannot afford to be their patient.

Stewardship is rooted in Psalm 24:1, which teaches that the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.  This could be understood to mean that, since it doesn’t belong to us, we have some responsibility to care for it.

Smiling healthcare workers with their arms crossedIt is easy to be critical of these choices of crucial virtues and/or of the choice to attach a fragment of scripture to each of them and/or of the particular scripture that is chosen.  I get dizzy just imagining the project that produced these five little posters.  Presumably someone in the Providence system knows the scriptures and someone understands marketing.  Very likely, those are not the same people, although you never know.  The marketing people know the virtues they want associate with the Providence brand.  Someone else—some third body—has decided that there ought to be scriptures attached to each one.  And then someone has to make the choice of which fragments to use.

Problem 1: Societal Setting

There are no scriptures whatsoever that reflect the tensions of practicing healing in a highly developed mass consumption-based economy.  So whoever is in charge of choosing the scriptures is going to have to go for something like “tone” or to make the tie in so general that it will be thought to apply.  So the value-to-scripture connection will always be tenuous.

The marketing-to-value connection isn’t that hard, so long as market research is trusted and so long as healthcare systems are not treated with automatic cynicism.  The marketing people need only ask what virtues will incline potential customers to choose the Providence system rather than any of its competitors.  I am quite sure that in these five, we are looking at the winners of such research.

The Directly Relevant Virtues

Who would not want a healthcare system that is compassionate, excellent, and respectful?  These are values, and therefore traits, that bear directly on the relationship between the healthcare providers of all sorts and the patient.  The patient wants the care to be excellent (even more, probably, than efficient) and wants to be treated with respect and compassion.

The Indirectly (if at all) Relevant Virtues

The other two are harder.  “Stewardship” could be construed to refer to Providence’s commitment to value and care for the resources the patients invest in them.  It might be evidenced by a refusal to perform unnecessary procedures or to require expensive procedures when less expensive ones work just as well.

I call those relevant meanings.  This is not the direction, however, that the chosen quotation points.  “The earth is the Lord’s” sounds like an environmental admonition of some sort.  It works just fine for identifying the Providence brand, but it gets wobbly.  You could, if you were the marketing department, swing for the fences and quote the Johannine Jesus (18:9) to the effect that God has given him these few disciples and that, due to his stewardship, not a one of them was lost.  Unnecessarily.

“Justice” is hard too.  First, it is a virtue chosen out of the three—humility and kindness are the other two—for emphasis.  In the context of the prophet Micah, “justice” is a social virtue based on being fair to the poor and vulnerable.  However the doctors might feel personally, Providence cannot be corporately fair to the poor and vulnerable.  “Justice” might be rendered minimally as “not unjust” to its patients, which might be treated as if the patients got good value for the money they spend.  It is harder to tie that back to Micah, of course, but how many people really look up the scriptural citations?

Alternatives

I suppose I would have made different choices if the project has been left up to me.  At a minimum, I might say that the virtues chosen ought to reflect our practices (the actual practices of Providence Healthcare) or at the very least, the practices we aspire to. Stewardship and Justice don’t do that as I understand them.

It would be easy to imply that it is not Providence Healthcare Systems exhibits these values, but each and every one of these values is attached—very loosely sometimes—to a fragment of scripture.  That troubles me.  I understand that President George W. Bush requires that the daily security briefing must come to him with a scripture verse on it.  Such a use precludes understanding a verse in context, as does this use by Providence.

So the problem as I have set it up is that the branding project of which these five posters are part goes from the marketers, who know what alleged virtues will make a healthcare system attractive to the paying public, to the branders, who choose names for these virtues that will meet the market requirements, to the biblicists, who produce a “relevant” verse for each of the named virtues.

I realize that marketers to branders to biblicists has overtones of Tinker to Evers to Chance, the old double-play combination made famous by the Chicago Cubs.  I hear the echoes; I just don’t know what I can do about it.

 

Posted in A life of faith, Biblical Studies, Living My Life, Society | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

A very good kind of place

Posted on September 1, 2019 by hessd

In Portland, Oregon, where I live, there is a section of North Portland called St. Johns.  St. Johns is a pleasant bike ride from my neighborhood and my brother, Mark, and I rode up there today with the idea of stopping at Anna Banana’s Café for a sandwich and a beer.

Screen Shot 2019-08-31 at 4.01.35 PM.pngThis short essay is in praise of the kind of place it is.   It is not an assessment of a restaurant.  I would like the kind of place Anna Banana’s is no matter what its business was.  This picture is from their website.

Downtown St. Johns is a little bit on the raggedy side, so it made sense to me that the restrooms at Anna’s required keys.  There were two restrooms: the slotted spoon restroom and the black spatula restroom.  I discovered those names for myself when I went back looking for a restroom and puzzled a little while over the names.

I puzzled first in how the names identified the  men’s and women’s restrooms.  My attempts to associate “spatula” with some known attribute of men or women failed as did my attempt to associate “slotted spoon” with either, although I did experience a brief flurry of possibility.  When everything failed, I noticed that each of them was, in any case, locked, so I went back up front for a key.  There they were, hanging on the wall: one key tied to a black spatula and the other to a slotted spoon.

So I took one and opened the restroom and confronted two signs on the wall.  It is partly the signs I have in mind when I say that Anna’s is “a kind of place.”  Another part is the the people who were doing the cooking and serving seemed like the kind of people who would have wanted signs like these in the restrooms.

Here’s the first sign.

Small art pieces wanted

Instead of graffiti I propose we
collaborate on a gallery of your art or 

cast off art.  I want the pieces to come 

from a place of love, viewable by all ages.

All art must be ok’d by the barista on 

duty.  Let’s make the bathrooms a more 

interesting place.

I like it that in this tacky little sign in a restaurant restroom, there is a goal statement.  “Let’s make the bathrooms as more interesting place.”  There are lots of bad things that can be said about bathroom graffiti, of course, but “not very interesting” seems to me one of the better ones.

There is to be “a gallery of your art,” which may very well be how the graffiti artists felt about what they had been doing, but now they are invited to do something better.  And they are to do so in collaboration with the management.  You see that in both “collaborate” and in “Let’s.”  Let us make…

The management can’t prevent it anyway.  They may own the restrooms, but they can’t control what is done there.  Ownership and control are just not the same things in a setting like this and an invitation to collaboration seems a good substitute.

Here’s the second sign, pinned to the wall just below the first.

Please

Do not flush

***********

Paper towels

Tissues and Wipes

Sanitary products

Kittens and Puppies

Hopes and Dreams

****************************

Thank you

This one doesn’t really work the way the first one does.  The first few items are standard and there is the temptation to think you know what the rest is going to say.  It is true that each line is in a different font and that might keep some part of your mind on the lookout for ambiguities.

Still, it is a big leap from “Sanitary products” to “Kittens and Puppies.”  And the background of “don’t flush sanitary products” is not at all like “don’t flush kittens and puppies.”  I wasn’t sure how my body had responded to that prospect.  But, well before the verdict came in on how I had responded to the demise of the kittens and puppies, I came to the last line. We don’t want you to flush your hopes and dreams here.

The people who posted the sign about making the restroom a more interesting place and who solicit your art are the kind of people who would think you have hopes and dreams and who hope that you treat them kindly.  Flushing them down the toilet in the black spatula restroom is not treating them kindly.

So I left Anna’s, having had my sandwich and beer at this table on the sidewalk on a beautiful day after the first half of a very good ride and as the context for an even better conversation with Mark.

I was still happy about it when I got home, so I wrote this.  I wish all the people at Anna Banana’s Café well.  It’s a very good kind of place and I am looking forward to going back.

Posted in Living My Life | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Why hating “religion” isn’t going to help anything

Posted on August 31, 2019 by hessd

Timothy Egan posted a pointless rant in the New York Times today.  I don’t think it will do any damage because the only people who will get past the first several paragraphs are people who want to see a really talented demagogue blistering the hides of religious hypocrites.

And “religious people” are all hypocrites,  It is “people of faith” who are worthy of praise.  And that’s why hating religion is not going to help anything.

How did “faith” get to be such a good thing when “religion” is such a bad thing?  That seems to me a question worth asking.  Or, with Egan’s rant in mind, let me put it another way: what is the rhetorical advantage of valorizing “faith” and demonizing “religion?”

First, “faith” has no content at all.  “Faith” doesn’t believe anything; it doesn’t feel any way in particular.  It does intend outcomes—good ones—and it acts on behalf of those intentions.  Therefore, “faith” is not hypocritical.  It is not institutional.  It is not doctrinal.  Faith is completely coated with teflon.

Second “faith” is being active on behalf of good causes.  You would think that a faith withegan 1 no content would be problematic.  Theodore Kaczynski had a faith.  Osama bin Laden had a faith.  Hitler had a faith.  Once you jettison the commitments to which “faith” is attached, you have dealt yourself a very mixed hand and there is no way to play such a hand with integrity.  You just “proof-villain.”  Here is the “faithful” Ted Kaczynski in a really scary prison portrait.

Religion, on the other hand, is a sitting duck.  Because it actually is doctrinal and institutional, you can show that its institutions do not always do what its doctrines require.  Any reader of the New York Times would take that for granted, you would think.

Still, there are ways of making it look worse, and Egan is all about making “it”—the Roman Catholic church, in this instance—look worse.  Egan’s premise is that the Catholic church should feel the same way about divorce that it feels about homosexual marriages.  How can you say that without, you know, actually saying it?  

You can use a verb like “frown on” to encompass them both.  That way, you can argue that when the church reacts one way to one issue (gay marriage) and another way to another issue (divorce) that it is engaging in “selective moral policing.” That’s Egan’s phrase. I have already characterized Egan’s column as a “rant” so I don’t want to be too demanding, but Egan is the one who dumped divorce and gay marriage into the same box (the Catholics don’t) so he really isn’t the one to point the finger at “selective moral policing.”

The Roman Catholic church is not Egan’s only target, of course.  There are the white Evangelicals, who are, everyone agrees, the core of Trump’s support.  (Egan calls them “the rotting core,” which does no favors to the orchardists in my neck of the woods.)

Egan’s problem is that when he unleashes a rant like this, he needs to stay away from quoting other ranters and he doesn’t do that.  

“There has never been anyone who has defended us and who has fought for us, who we have loved more than Donald J. Trump,” said Ralph Reed at a meeting of professed Christian activists earlier this summer.

And Egan explains this be remarking  

Older white Christians rouse to Trump’s toxicity because he’s taking their side. It’s tribal, primal and vindictive.

egan 2The similarity between the kind of appeal Egan is using—tribal, primal, vindictive—and the kind he is condemning is very clear to me.  It is a different tribe, of course, but if Egan wants to be spared the tarbrush he is wielding so effectively against people with “religion,” he is going to need a way to distinguish the good kind of faith (his kind) from Ralph Reed’s kind and you can’t do that without talking about the content of the faith and Egan doesn’t want to do that.  So he is left with one tribe against another.  Here is Vice President Pence digesting the refusal of the Prime Minister of Iceland to meet with him.

No good person in Egan’s column believes anything in particular.  That seems a loss to the public discussion and a particular loss to Egan.

Then there is the question of “what the Bible says.”  Let’s just say that the Bible “says” things that are of comfort to social liberals and also to social conservatives.  It is a commonplace among apologists for whom the Bible is a relevant part of the debate, to cite the comfortable ones and to ignore the uncomfortable ones.  But if you aren’t careful, you make yourself look stupid and that can’t be a good thing.

Egan ridicules Archbishop Charles C. Thompson (Indiana) for saying that he tries to be “Christ-centered” in his decisions.  Egan says that  if Thompson is going to accept a standard like that, then he should cite any words Christ may have said that bear on homosexuality.  Egan is equating here “words Jesus said”—as if that is the only applicable standard—and “Christ-centered.”  The whole Christian tradition has, by this device, been shrunk into words that are recorded and attributed to Jesus.

And, of course, we don’t need to use all the words that are attributed to Jesus, when some of them point the wrong way and others are so very useful.  

Egan cites the well-known and widely abused passage where the king, in a final judgment, says that believers will be judged by the sole criterion of how well they treated the poor and vulnerable (Matthew 25).  It isn’t much of a criticism of  Egan, frankly, to say that he proof-texts, except that he is so mean spirited to his fellow proof-texters, like Vice President Pence and Archbishop Thompson.

egan 3In this piece, Egan contributes to the degradation of dialogue about crucial public issues.  If people are looking to Egan’s writing to help them understand the role of “religion” in the public secular debates of our time or even the role of “faith” in those debates, they will look to this column in vain.

Egan reminds me very much of Jack, the Irish writer in Emelio Estevez’s film, The Way. That’s the writer with the orange pack. “Where I come from,” he says, “the church has a lot to answer for.”

Posted in A life of faith, Political Psychology, Society | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Microaggression

Posted on August 26, 2019 by hessd

I would like to begin by changing the form of this word. The reasons will become micro 1evident. I would like to summon up parallel terms, one for offense and one for defense. I am thinking of something like the pair of fouls that occurs so often in basketball when one player runs into another. Was it charging? Was it blocking? Was it a case of really good acting?

If I change the noun “microaggression” to “microaggressiveness”—one noun for another—I will not have changed the meaning at all and it will give me the chance to introduce a parallel form, “microdefensiveness.” So people who are watching the interplay of language could say, as basketball fans so often do, “That wasn’t microaggressiveness! (Charging) That was microdefensiveness! (Blocking)”

I had a friend once who persisted in attacking my motives, my behavior, and my honesty. I did not respond well to this, is you might imagine. “Why are you being so defensive?” my friend would ask, when this had gone on longer than I should have allowed it. “I can’t imagine” I would respond, “Why do you keep attacking me?”

It was not a response that did anything good for the relationship but it did introduce me to the symmetry of aggressive and defensive acts, and that has prepared me to consider microdefensiveness today. What does it mean?

Microaggressiveness means small acts of aggression. How are they small? It is aggressive in a small way to say something which another person might find offensive not because of who he is, but because of some category he belongs to. It is offensive—in a small way—because it crosses the line of what a person—more often a category of person— might find offensive. It is mico- because it might not be any part of the offenders intention to cross that line, or even any part of his consciousness.

A Precarious Example

Let’s try an example. I hope you will find this a silly example, but when you do, I would like you to try to say IN PRINCIPLE why it is silly.

So Jed says to Hiram, “Your son’s old enough to be going to school now. Maybe you ought to buy him an encyclopedia.” Hiram thinks about it for a minute and then says, “Absolutely not. He’ll have to walk, just like I did.”

Is that funny? Well I thought so when I first heard it….oh…70 years ago. It is a discrepancy taken playfully. The discrepancy is Hiram’s confusion of an encyclopedia as a mode of transportation, of course, but it isn’t just a random mistake. Hiram hears the cyclo- part of the word as “wheel” and very plausibly imagines that it is a way of getting around. The ped- part, if it means “foot” (it could mean “child”) might imply the same kind of thing either with or without the wheel.

micro 3So it is plausible but it is only plausible if you don’t know what an encyclopedia is, which Jed does and Hiram does not. So…why does Hiram not know what an encyclopedia is? Everybody knows what an encyclopedia is.

The names Jed and Hiram connote people who live in the country. They do not live in cities or suburbs. Further, Hiram walked to school—as one would where there was no transportation provided and where he did not have a bicycle—and he thinks what was good enough for him will be good enough for his son. There is no sense here that things ought to be better for the son than they were for the father. And that’s why Hiram is so stupid. He is a hick.

There are other ways of explaining Hiram’s response, of course, but jokes use stereotypes as a quick way to lay out a lot of background information so we can get on to the discrepancy. That is why I went so far, in the previous paragraph to use words like “stupid” and “hick,” even at the risk of offending someone.

Is the person who told this tired old joke, “microaggressive?” Does the routine disparagement of rural folks constitute a microaggression? Certainly the argument could be made. It would mean giving up on the idea that it is funny because the fact is that no discrepancies are funny if they are not taken playfully.

Microdefensiveness

Now I get to the part of the essay when I can cash in on the change I proposed, turning “microaggression” into “microaggressivenss”—a change of form without a change of meaning. Now we can talk about “microdefensiveness.”

Microdefensiveness would mean the readiness to take offense at very small discrepancies, categorizing them as slights. These “slights” may be deliberate, in which case they are wrong, or they may be only “insensitive,” in which case they are still wrong, but not so serious. Think of the difference between felonies and misdemeanors.
.
micro 2These discrepancies may be left over from earlier patterns of use, as where occupational names ended in –man. They may be national stereotypes: Scotsmen (Scotswomen too, I suppose) are stingy, French are sexy, Irish are drunk and rowdy. If you take those not as statements of belief or fact, but as the presuppositions necessary for the “witty remark” to follow, there is no reason to take offense. If you are microdefensive, there is every reason to take offense.

I remember a story about a woman who was pretending to be microdefensive—just because she thought it was funny—and got a real and serious apology from the person who thought she had been accused of an insensitivity. The woman who turned out to be the patsy of this prank had put out two barrels for recycled paper, labelling one WHITE PAPER and the other COLORED PAPER. The jokester wrote a little note on the COLORED PAPER sign saying, “You mean PAPER OF COLOR.” I thought that was pretty funny until a tearful and overwrought apology came from the woman who thought she had been called “insensitive.”

Microdefensiveness takes “how I feel,” which is often distorted into “how that makes me feel,” as the gold standard for wrongdoing. Perhaps I am not the one to say this because my awareness of just how I am feeling is not very acute, but it is hard always to know how you feel. It isn’t like looking at some inner blackboard to see what is written there. One time you might feel one way about a remark and another time, another way.

It is especially difficult, I think, to know “how I really feel” when substantial advantages could flow from feeling one way or the other. If, as is often the case among the people I know best, being offended puts everyone else in the conversation at a disadvantage, it would be much harder to know just how you feel.

micro 5Upton Sinclair is associated with the saying, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” That is the kind of connection I have in mind. It is really hard to recognize that you are not offended when there are such advantages to discovering that you are offended. One simply cannot reward the feeling of offense and expect it not to show up more frequently.

Furthermore, it is not any longer necessary to be offended on your own behalf. You could very well take offense on someone else’s behalf. You could say that an ethnic group or a disabled person or someone who is unusually well educated or unusually poorly educated that they would surely be offended at an expression you had used.  “Egghead” comes to mind, or “the Hottentots of Yugoslavia” made famous by George C. Wallace in his presidential bid.

You might have called a group “gypsies” when they would rather be called Roma or Lapps when they would rather be called Sami. You might refer to a person in a wheel chair as “wheelchair-bound” rather than as a “wheelchair user.” You might refer someone with a profound physical handicap as disabled, only to learn that he prefers to be called “differently abled.”

The microdefensive person you are talking to doesn’t really need to be any of those himself to imagine that the group he is thinking of would be offended by the words you used to describe them. “Speaking on their behalf,” your conversation partner might say, “I object to the way you are characterizing them.”

Conclusion

This interplay of microdefensiveness and microaggressiveness make social conversation a chancy affair. I think it is a self-inflicted wound upon the body politic and I wish we could find a way past it.

I remember with fondness an exchange in the movie, Millennium, with Kris Kristofferson and Cheryl Ladd. She has come back to his time from the distant future and what she knows about his time she learned from some kind of very fast brain learning device. He remarks that there have been tensions between men and women lately (1989) and she, trying to be part of the conversation, rips off a set of historical markers including bra burning, Rosie the Riveter, and “the War Between the Sexes.” So…she says, genuinely curious, how did that turn out?

Well, he says, I think it’s still going on but we could declare a truce just for tonight.

Posted in Communication, Getting Old, Political Psychology, Sustainability, Words | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Journalism Rears Its Ugly Head

Posted on August 22, 2019 by hessd

Nothing against journalists.

The “journalism” I have in mind is the perverse practice of reading the Bible as if you were reading a newspaper account. I think the Bible should be read as if it were a sermon with really terrific illustrations. [1] I want to introduce, for my own convenience, really, the Greek term kerygma (preaching) so I can use the adjective form kerygmatic as the alternative to “journalistic.”

I was taught and so was nearly everyone I know to read the Bible as if it were a newspaper. Thinking of the gospel accounts for instance, you can harmonize them so that they appear to be a single story. Then you can ask the journalistic questions even though you are asking them of authors who cared nothing about those questions at all. Or you can read each of the gospel accounts as if it were a newspaper account and say that there are contradictions between Matthew’s news story and John’s.

In every group where I have a chance to reflect on the meaning of biblical texts, I have been pushing the idea that the gospel accounts ought to be read like sermons (kerygmatically) not like newspapers (journalistically). Not infrequently, I forget to apply that teaching to myself and I find myself doing what I was taught to do. And teaching others to forego journalistic reading is a tough sell too because they were taught it, just as I was, and may have been using it all their lives.

A Kerygmatic Reading of the Birth Narratives

So it is a hard lesson to teach, but every now and then, I surprise myself by succeeding and I want to tell you about one such instance. This week, I was meeting with a group of friends and working on Matthew’s account of the Birth Narrative. This group has been running, in one form or another, for several years and everyone knows by now how I bristle at journalistic questions—questions that arise from reading the Bible as if it were a newspaper—and how firmly I rely on kerygmatic questions.

We were talking about Matthew’s use of “the wise men” and the magical star and the role judo 1played by Herod and his team of scholars. Why does Matthew have characters like this? How does he prefigure the gospel he is about to write by the stories about Jesus’ birth?  I love this picture because it shows the Wise Men following the star to Jerusalem (which they did not do) instead of from Jerusalem to Bethlehem (which they did do).

We started with Romans 1. I know there are lots of things wrong with a combination like that, but it had occurred to me the week before that Paul, in making the case that the righteousness provided by the Jesus event was necessary for everyone, needs to say that the Gentiles have their own access to the truth about God. What you really need to know about God can be readily observed in nature, he says. Here is Romans 1:19—20 in the New Jerusalem Bible.

19For what can be known about God is perfectly plain to them, since God has made it plain to them: 20 ever since the creation of the world, the invisible existence of God and his everlasting power have been clearly seen by the mind’s understanding of created things. And so these people have no excuse:

That ending establishes why Paul included a section on the Gentiles: they are without excuse. In Chapter 2, he makes the same argument, by a different route, about the Jews. They don’t have any excuse either.

What does all that have to do with Matthew’s Birth Narrative? Nothing, really, but I got to wondering whether Matthew introduces a bunch of Gentile magicians/astrologists/scholars [2] just so he can show that the knowledge of nature doesn’t get you all the way there. It got them to Jerusalem just fine, but it took more—it took the revelation of God’s intentions in the scriptures—to get them to Bethlehem. [3] There is a sermon to be had there, but I am on my way somewhere else.

Matthew is setting up a gospel that will encompass the Gentiles as well as the Jews. That is why he includes non-Israelite women in the genealogy. It is why the risen Jesus tells the apostles (28:19) to make disciples of all nations. That is what the “academics from the East” are for. All this makes sense from the standpoint of Matthew, collecting and displaying the stories he has about Jesus so that it will make the point he wants to make. Or, to say the same thing more briefly, it makes sense kerygmatically.

Kerygmatic Judo?

I know I am pushing this one point pretty hard, but I need to do that because the story I want to tell you is what happened when this group—one guy in particular—knocked the props out from under me. [4] I’m like the dog that keeps on chasing cars without the slightest notion of what he will do if he catches one. I am trying and trying to do away with journalistic reading and to establish kerygmatic (scholarly) reading and this week I experienced total victory and had no idea at all what to do.

One of the guys says, “You have established beyond a doubt (in this group at least) that “understanding these texts” means understanding them from the standpoint of the narrator. Where did these stories come from? Who assembled them? For whom? When? Why?” That’s really all I had been trying to do.

“Now,” he said, “Given that, I think it is worth our while to ask some subordinate questions, some supplementary questions. [4] Let’s pretend, for just a moment, that the Wise Men came into town and chatted with people on their way to the palace. They could have. They did need to find Herod, after all. If they did, that gives a little bite to Matthew’s account, where he says (2:3) that the whole of Jerusalem was perturbed when the Wise Men showed up asking for the new king. What new king? When? Where? What does that mean for us? Popular interest in the visitors and their message could have put Herod on the spot.

And Herod appears to have gone to some trouble not to let his own scholars, the scribes, get anywhere near the Wise Men. Herod goes to his own academics (2:4—6) and gets the scriptural account. Then he leaves the academics in the library and goes back to the throne room and sends the Wise Men off to Bethlehem.

Joseph's HouseMy approach, emphasizing the point of the story Matthew is putting together, has not raised at all the question of the spot Herod was in. That’s not what Matthew’s interest was. The journalistic account my strategic friend was using—in what looks to me in retrospect like a judo move— did raise those questions and I have to say, they are really interesting. Just how is it that “the whole of Jerusalem was perturbed?” I never wondered that. How is it that Herod never meets with his own academics and the academics from the East at the same time? Does the general upset of the city affect how he has to play his own cards?  This picture has been adapted by my son, Doug, to show how else the Wise Men could have found the house where Joseph and Mary lived.  It was the one with the Christmas lights.

All new questions to me and all questions worth wondering about. They are not, clearly, the questions Matthew was wondering about, but asking them sensitizes us to new ways of thinking through the story he does tell and that is all to the good. It is all to the good PROVIDED we don’t have to give up careful textual scholarship for casual journalistic musing.

But that is where my friend’s approach was so wonderful. He granted me everything I had been pushing so hard and so long to achieve. There is no longer a question of reading journalistically RATHER THAN kerygmatically. The scholarly reading is taken for granted. I won. So now, why not ask these other questions, given that the final rule of interpretation in our group is the scholarly one?

I don’t know. I had never won before. I have no idea how to proceed. So the group went on and indulged in a bunch of journalistic speculation and I enjoyed it as much as everyone else.

[1] There are limits. Christianity is a historical religion. It is based on the occurrence of actual events, some of which are established in the scriptural accounts. Not many.
[2] There are lots of handles you can use to pick up just what kind of people “the wise men” were. I call them “academics,” partly because they were thought to be learned and partly because they appear to have had no common sense at all.
[3] And then it took the star, again, to get them to the right house.
[4] And since I wrote that, he did it again. I wrote to him asking his permission to use his name in this essay. He gave his permission, but he also said, having read the essay, that he thought it worked better without the name than with. I agree.

Posted in Advent, Biblical Studies | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment