A Better World

Posted on November 4, 2017 by hessd

Jean Paul Sartre published Being and Nothingness in 1943. I was five years old, so I alone 1missed most of the early discussions, but as I came to understand it, Sartre argues that life has no intrinsic meaning at all and that the task of existentialists, those who are courageous enough, is to live a life of authenticity. Authenticity as a value has the great virtue of being centered in the self and if there really is nothing else, that is a great virtue indeed.

But if, in fact, there is something else, it would be good to know what it is and how to align oneself with “it”—or him or her or them, if you think ultimate reality has the characteristics we ascribe to persons. [1]

A lot of the broader questions I have heard discussed lately have divided on the question of whether human life as we know it is an I—It kind of arrangement or an I—Thou kind. As a Christian, and most often the only one present for these discussions, I am a champion of the I—Thou model. It is the presupposition of my own faith and of many many others. It is antithetical to non-personal religions of all kinds and to cynicism, which argues that it really doesn’t matter.

I began with Sartre, who, as I pointed out, is way out of my period, so I could make the point that the world in which I grew up—everywhere but home and church—took the non-personalist model for granted and celebrated it. I celebrated it right along with them until I realized that I was committing myself simultaneously to contradictory views. If I am going to hold contradictory views, I much prefer to hold them serially, rather than simultaneously.  It’s less embarrassing.

Invictus

I’d like to begin with the poem” Invictus,” particularly as it is presented by President Mandela of South Africa in the movie, Invictus, in which Morgan Freeman plays Mandela. “It’s just a Victorian poem,” he tells the captain of the national rugby team, “but it helped me stand up when all I wanted to do was lie down.”

alone 3I have great respect for the effect that poem had on President Mandela. I have been affected in that way from time to time. It is a marvelous experience—not always one that feels good—and I am always grateful to have it. So I am a fan of standing up when all you really want to do is lie down.”

I am not a fan of the point of view represented by the poem. I am, as I said, a Christian. I am not the master of my fate or the captain of my soul. The person I associate most with that stance is Adam, the legendary father of us all, who caused us all a lot of grief by taking that position.

I know I am being unfair in making that comparison. “Invictus” was built for an I-It world. William Ernest Henley, who wrote “Invictus” finds himself unafraid. How much better that is than being fearful, and that is the comparison available to him. He finds himself unbowed (although bloody). He finds himself in possession of an unconquerable soul. How much better than is than having a conquered one.

But Henley is forced to chose between those polarities because there is nothing in life or in death to trust. If he isn’t “unconquerable,” then he must be “conquered;” if not unbowed, then bowing down; if not unafraid, then afraid. Those are Henley’s options.

But they are not the only options. What if there were someone—Someone, I admit the theistic premise right away—who could say, “I am your Father and I love you with a perfect love.” That gives new meanings entirely to “bowed,” to conquered; and to unafraid. This Father who loves can be said to conquer resistance (if not persons), and the bowing is completely appropriate as an acknowledgment, and the fear is replaced by trust. Those are, from Henley’s standpoint, new options. He doesn’t reject these options. He just doesn’t see them as available. [2]

When you walk through a storm

I didn’t really start this mental trip with” Invictus.” I started with an anthem text by Gerard Marklin. The anthem is called “Do Not Be Afraid” and it has this line in it: “When you walk through the waters, I’ll be with you.” I guess that was close enough for one nerve ending to make a post-synaptic recommendation to another and I remembered “When you walk through a storm,” from Rogers and Hammerstein’s Carousel (1945)

alone 2It is not clear to me just why Julie will never walk alone. Will her husband Billy Bigelow, who killed himself, be walking with her? Will Julie’s cousin, Nettie Fowler, who sings this song to her, be with her? It says to have hope in your heart, which seems like a good thing, but what is one to hope for? Is an unspecified hope, a hope with no home, enough to keep you from being alone? It doesn’t seem like it, but this was the mid 1940s and maybe “hope itself”—hope with no clear referent at all—was thought to be enough.

Do Not Be Afraid

Marklin’s text, in “Do Not Be Afraid” provides a context for the hope and that is where the tears started running down my face. (See the full text at the end of this post or, if you prefer, hear it here.) It is a richly considered hope, fully as Jewish as it is Christian, and it has these elements. [3]

I am your Father and I love you.

I will be with you.

You will walk through the waters, but they will not cover you.

You will walk through the fire, but you will not be consumed.

You will encounter the fear on loneliness, but you will not forget that I am with you.

You will dwell in exile, as a stranger dwells, but you will remember that you are precious in my sight.

Belonging

Marklin uses half of a family metaphor, a half that matters a great deal to me. But here, I am going to add the other half because I think they make sense together. [3] I will call you by your name, says God in the passage (Isaiah 43) Marklin has in mind. But God also says, “I will call you by my name.”

I can’t help thinking of these as phases of development, although I know it isn’t really alone 4fair. Abraham Maslow, whose stages of development are widely cited, says that we need to be a part of a group. But after that, we need to go on to become who we are ourselves, without reference to the group. My grad school mentor, Jim Davies, used to identify these stages by saying that we need to be a part—then we need to be apart.

Yes. We need to be called by His name. We need to belong to God’s family. And we also need to be called by our name. This God whose family we belong to, knows us, knows who we are, and knows our name. [4]-

It is that identity that marks off the I-It world celebrated by “Invictus” and by “When you walk through a Storm” from the I-Thou world of “Do Not Be Afraid.” I think the virtues claimed in “Invictus” are indeed admirable, by contrast to the alternatives that are considered. But there are, in this other world, alternatives that cannot be found in that world. Who, really, would choose simple indominability, if one could be truly known and truly loved?

I wouldn’t. But to choose to be known and loved, you must choose a world where one could be known and loved, a world where there are better choices than being simply the master of our fate, the captain of our soul.  I choose that world.

[1] Ultimate reality “is personal,” I would normally have said, but this is a mixed audience and there is no harm is trying to communicate clearly, even if it does, on occasion, require a few extra syllables.
[2] Or maybe he sees them as available and contemptible. I don’t know that much about Henley.
[3] Conceptually, they belong together—belonging and being known are part of the family metaphor. But I think there is also a historical upgrade here. The context of the early passages ( 2 Chronicles 7 and many other citations) is that we are known by His name. We took His name in becoming part of the family. It is very collectivist. But this is an individualistic time and to say that He calls us by OUR names is the other part. He knows our names. He knows who we are. And in Revelation 2:17, the metaphor is extended even further: “I will give you,” says God, “a new name—a name only you and I know—the truest name you can have.”
[4] There is no way to make too much of this. In the ancient world, the name was the whole being. “Know your name” and “Know who you really are” can be considered equivalent expressions within that understanding of “name.”

Text

Do not be afraid, for I have redeemed you.
I have called you by your name;
you are mine.
When you walk through the waters ,
I’ll be with you;
you will never sink beneath the waves.
Do not be afraid, for I have redeemed you.
I have called you by your name;
you are mine.
When the fire is burning all around you,
you will never be consumed by the flames.
Do not be afraid, for I have redeemed you.
I have called you by your name;
you are mine.
When the fear of loneliness is looming,
then remember I am at your side.
Do not be afraid, for I have redeemed you.
I have called you by your name;
you are mine.
When you dwell in the exile of a stranger,
remember you are precious in my eyes.
Do not be afraid, for I have redeemed you.
I have called you by your name;
you are mine.
You are mine,O my child,
I am your Father,
and I love you with a perfect love.
Do not be afraid, for I have redeemed you.
I have called you by your name;
you are mine.

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A Marriage Covenant

Posted on November 1, 2017 by hessd

We call it a “marriage covenant” without thinking much about it. A covenant is a “coming together,” certainly; every way of parsing the word must note com = “together” and venire = “to come.” But we “come together” in so many different ways, don’t we? This picture is about several of those ways, all happening at the same time.

For a number of years now, I have liked this particular way of understanding it.
I’d say these people, Al and Vickie [1], have been married a long time, so, presumably, they have had their ups and downs.

We can see in this picture that Al is generous and disciplined. We can’t tell just by looking whether he is also smart. If Vickie understands the “acts of service” Al performs for her as the truest and most authentic expression of love, then what Al is doing in this picture is not only generous and disciplined, but smart as well. If she understands displays of  emotional attachment—not acts of generosity—as the building block, then what Al is doing is not going to cut it. And he is getting wet needlessly. [2]

politics 1.jpg

He is grumpy. She is morose. Very likely, that is how they express discord between them. Al is being actively grumpy. I think that is why the artist wanted us to see the puffs of smoke coming out of the pipe. Al is working at it. And I think that means that he is going to have to be the one to take the next step.

He seems to understand his choice to shelter her, rather than himself, as part of the trip back toward each other And that is one way to understand it. If, on the other hand, his holding the umbrella is more of a gambit; more an attempt to entice her to take the next step, then what we are seeing is not the precursor to an initiative of his. It is a request for an initiative of hers. And if that is the way she understands it, then we, as onlookers, can be sure it will fail.

It is harder, I think to become less morose [3] than it is to become less grumpy. Grumpy is stamping through the halls and slamming the doors. Morose is hiding in the bedroom, holding yourself, and rocking quietly back and forth. Morose is static [4]; grumpy is dynamic. That means that if she sees the umbrella as an attempt by Al to draw her into action, it will be only another affront. If she sees it as a wisely chosen initiative on Al’s part—“wisely” because it takes into account the kind of person he knows she is—then she can safely respond is whatever way is appropriate.

And what way is appropriate? It will depend on the kind of person she knows Al to be. Does he respond best to praise? Some men do. To touch? Some men do. To actions that clearly have the restoration of the relationship as their premise? Some men do. If she has been paying attention over the last…oh…50 years, she will know how to respond to him—to Al in particular—in a way that is appropriate to him and that will say what she wants to say.

What Al knows, and I think this is the thing I like best about the picture, is that Vickie is still the woman he loves. And he loves her now, in this moment, when they have just had a disagreement that shredded the peace in which they normally live. He is angry at her at the moment, but his love for her is not a fact of their lives that exists at the same level that the anger does. The love is the foundation of the relationship; the anger is a badly chosen color for the garage.

So it isn’t that he doesn’t love her at the moment, but knows that he will again. His love for her is settled and decisive. It is an offer made and honored over and over again for many years. The anger is an emotion that has come and it will go and when it goes, Vickie will still be dry and Al will still be wet.

Finally, the caption that comes with the picture says that this shows “caring for each other.” Al cares for Vickie; Vickie cares for Al. The funny part of the picture is grumpy old Al holding the umbrella over Vickie’s head. But Vickie is caring for Al too.

I note, for instance, that she is still there. If you will think back to your own past, you will remember times when caring was not enough to keep you or your spouse from leaving the scene. When the relationship is bad, there are so many other places you could be.

And although she seems sad and withdrawn, we have to wonder whether that is really the best she can do at that moment. I think it might have been. And if it was, if holding herself at that emotional level and refusing to allow herself to go lower, was an achievement for her, then Al probably knows that and may very well be proud of her. In doing the hard work of emotional control, she may have been caring for him, just as he is caring for her by where he hold the umbrella.

I really like these people. I have no idea whether the internal stories I have made for them are true—or even what “true” means in this context—but they seem realistic to me because I have been at some of those places and have loved wives who were at others of those places and I think that is why I like this cartoon so much.

[1] I think I may once have had Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert in mind, but looking at the picture, Al and Vickie is as close as I could come.
[2] An important part of the early relationship Bette and I experienced was based on The 5 Love Languages, by Gary Chapman. The notion that loving your partner in the language she cares most about is the smartest thing to do comes from that book and from some years of living with Bette.
[3] I always hear “less-ose” when I write “morose,” but with vigilance and good will, I can confine it to the footnotes.
[4] It is a static that will interfere with whatever signals she is trying to send Albert.

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And don’t forget to put the milk in the icebox

Posted on October 25, 2017 by hessd

One of my favorite slogans is “Rising Above Decline” I first ran into it in a study of what to do with excess school space in Boston and they meant simply that the school age population was decreasing, so the need for school space was decreasing (decline) but that all that extra space could be put to good use (rising above decline). But I have declined a good deal myself since then and the slogan has come to mean quite a bit to me.

I want to reflect today on the stages of life. I’m sure no one will ever do it as well as Shakespeare did [1] but I have something else in mind. I want to look at the presuppositions of the normal periods of health, decline, and disability, But I want to start with the day my mother died.

I don’t want to play this for comedy exactly [2] but the account I am going to provide has someice box 2 iconically funny moments. Mother had seen a doctor for her regular checkup that day. On her way home, she stopped to get some groceries, including some milk. When she got home, she put the shopping bag on the table, put the milk in the refrigerator [3], went into the living room, turned on the TV, lay down on the sofa, crossed her ankles, and died. Just like that. But first, she put the milk in the…um…icebox.

That’s really where I want to get to. That’s the last stage in my list, where strength and intention are directed to goals that have immediate value. But when you get to that stage and you pause and look back over the route you have taken to get there, you realize right away that things have been different in the past. Of course, you say, they have been physically different because young bodies are different than old bodies. True, but that’s not what I mean. I mean that the presuppositions—the things you don’t look at because you take them for granted—change from one age to another. [4] Let’s look at that a little.

The categories I am thinking of are: a) youth and health, b) first illness/disability, c) later disabilities, more frequent or more serious, and d) extensive compromises with illness/disability. So the question as it shows up for me is, just what are the presuppositions of each stage? When older people sigh, “Youth is wasted on young people,” all they really mean is that the young people are taking for granted states that older people are working hard to retain or  just trying to remember clearly. These states are presupposed by the young. They look right past them and plan on how best to use their resources, given, of course, that they are healthy, which goes without saying.

ice box 5That presupposition is put even further out of conscious reach in the second stage in which you get injured or sick and then recover. You look at the picture of disability as an episode in an otherwise whole and healthy life. You might feel grateful, for a little while, to regain the full use of an injured leg, but you life goes back to normal and you count on the leg to function “normally.”

“Normal” is brought into question in the third stage for two reasons. One is that there are more such episodes and the other is that you don’t ever get all the way back to where you started. You are in the era of “substantially recovered,” but no longer in the era of “back to normal.” This is the state at which the presuppositions are called seriously into question. Now you need new goals or possibly just different ways of pursuing the old goals. This is the time you really need to give something up. It isn’t, as it was in the previous stage, that “recovery” is going to take longer. Recovery is never going to happen if you define it as returning to your old times or your old heights or your old Yards After Contact.

The presuppositions here are still about intention and effort and achievement, but you don’t take the old standards for granted anymore. You give serious thought to the new standards: what should they be, can they fully engage me, are they the best balance I can strike between what I aspire to and what I have to leave behind?

But what you get, if you are serious and wholehearted about the new goals, is a new ice box 4round of satisfactions and successes. I can go back to teaching if I teach two courses instead of three. I can get back on the trail because I can still run on soft surfaces, but running on the hard surfaces of my neighborhood are a thing of the past. I can rejoin the book group with the understanding that the “discussions” are now going to include detours of personal reminiscence and repeated stories. It’s “back” you see; it just isn’t all the way back.

If the previous stages were about full functioning, this third one is about mostly full functioning.

There is another substantial shift as we move into the next phase. In this stage, it is the condition that is primary. You are what you are and you can do what you can do. “Manning up” to meet the old standards is a thing of the past because so many of those old standards are no longer relevant. You can keep them relevant if you want. That will mean continuing to aspire to standards of performance you are no longer capable of. It will mean consistent and debilitating failure. It will mean continuing the presuppositions of stage three well into stage four when, really, you could do better for yourself. What would the condition first—goal second constellation look like?

Let me illustrate the difference by telling you about my team meeting. The “team meeting” happens in the shower in the morning. Back in the old days, I would “call the play. OK, guys, this is how we are going to score today.” But then I would be interrupted by the members of my team. They wanted to be sure that in calling that play, I had taken their special…um…abilities, into account. I call Red Right 30 Pull Trap. [5] The halfback who is going to receive the pitch reminds me that his hands have gotten arthritic and he may not be able to catch it. The center and the right guard look at what I am asking them to do—maintain the 0 hole—and remind me that the defensive players across from them are a lot better than they are. (They often say they are “younger” than we are, but I know what they mean.) The backside guard has been having trouble with his knees and getting up out of his stance is taking longer than it used to. And when all that is over, the wide receiver, who has been having what he calls “hearing issues,” says, “So…what’s that play again?” ice box 3

I don’t do it that way any more.  Now I start the team meeting by calling the roll. First, we find out who is there and ready to play a part—any part. Then we consider the plays available, ranked from those requiring the most coordinated action to those requiring the least. Then we eliminate the plays that will spook the players and keep them from showing up for tomorrow’s team meeting.

You get the idea. In this stage, what have you got to work with is the first thing in the process. When you know that, you have an idea what kind play might conceivably work. Who the team is and what abilities you can confidently ascribe to them is question one. We used to take that for granted. Now we take for granted that some match must be made between the resources we have and the task we might decide to attempt. That is why on one day, we walk to downtown Portland and take the light rail home after the movie and on another day, we hoard our energy because we are going to need to walk to the grocery in the afternoon.

Every age has some reality that is so pervasive and so important that we can’t see it at all. That is what every age has in common. Just what that reality is varies, as I have indicated, from age to age. I think it’s all good. What’s bad, I think, is failing to come to grips with how the reality of each new stage can be formulated and made a part of the planning. When you do that, you start losing games you could have won.

And although I treated it as a mild comedy when I told you about my mother and the milk, there is a sense in which her last decision was the very best one available. Put the milk in the icebox before you lie down on the sofa.

Good choice, mother.  I approve.

[1]As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7 begins:  

“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages…”

[2] Certainly not as tragedy. Mother lived a long and productive life and she deserved the celebration she received as people looked back over the course of that life.
[3] It was an icebox when she was growing up and I thought in a whole life survey like this, I could afford to do her that honor
[4] As they say, it would be a really bright fish who realized that he was always wet.
[5]”Red Right” specifies the pro set formation, with three receivers and two backs. The receivers include a split end to the left, a tight end, and a flanker to the right. The backs consist of a halfback and a fullback split two yards apart and two yards behind the quarterback. The fullback is lined up on the strong side (the side of the formation with the tight end) behind the right tackle, while the halfback is lined up behind the left tackle. In “30”, the “3” specifies a toss play: The quarterback delivers the ball to the halfback with an underhanded toss. The “0” specifies the hole the halfback will run toward. (The “0-hole” is the gap between the center and right guard). “Pull trap” describes a blocking scheme: The backside guard (the one away from the flow of the play) will “pull” out from his normal position to “trap block”, which means he leads the running back through the hole and blocks the linebacker back towards the backside of the play.

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“We don’t get no respect!”

Posted on October 22, 2017 by hessd

Martin E. P. Seligman surprised a lot of people when he predicted the standings in the next year’s baseball season from a content analysis of comments made by the management and the players about the season just finished. Like me, Seligman studies attributions, and he thought that the way a team explained whatever success they had had in the current season would be a useful indicator about how well they would be respect 3likely to do in the next season.

When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound so outlandish.  And Seligman’s predictions were better than those of a lot of sportscasters who know more about baseball than he does.

Ever since grad school, my ears have pricked up when I hear someone say why something happened.

  • Was it chance? OK, did this “by chance” event happen to all of the relevant people or just some of them?
  • Was it a failure of cooperation with someone else? That’s interesting. Why was the cooperation not forthcoming?
  • Was it a lack of clarity? Hmmm. In whose interest was it that the matter was clearly understood by both (all) parties?
  • Was it a failure of motivation? A failure of persistence? Was it sabotaged by someone out of ill intent? Did it fail because of someone’s incompetence?

And best of all:

  • is it, by any chance, a PLOT by THEM? Those are the most fun of all.

They don’t have any respect for us

Really? And how would that be displayed? I once had a friend who was dating an Austrian professor. On a visit to the professor’s homes near Vienna, my friend was perpetually irked that her boyfriend’s mother kept addressing her in “baby German.” [1] This was understood as a protest against her son’s marrying a non-German speaking woman. The “lack of respect” is flagrant and intentional and is intended to carry some more substantive message—which in this case, it did.

External Attributions

I was part of a discussion recently in which it was alleged that “they” had no respect for “us.” This is, as you might guess, a very satisfying point to make because the “us” are all here and all part of the conversation and “they” are elsewhere and might never find out what we think. Or care.

Now nothing in this essay is going to raise the question of whether” they” do or don’t respect 1respect us. I am concerned entirely with the effects of one kind of assignment of responsibility or another and the first thing I notice about this one is that it is external. It would be entirely possible for this group to say that they are not worthy of respect and that is why they aren’t getting any. It isn’t very likely, of course, but that would be an internal attribution (it’s “us”) rather than an external one (it’s them).

 

Trait Attributions

The second thing that came to mind when I heard this about “respect” is that the responsibility is placed at the level of a consistent trait. “They do not…” would be at the level of character if “they” were a person instead of an organization. The attribution, if it were folded out more fully, would say, “It is quite characteristic of them to have—and to display—this lack of respect for us.”  No one would say such a clunky sentence out loud but seeing it all makes the meaning entirely clear.

Again, if we were talking about an uncharacteristic behavior, we could say something like, “I’m really puzzled. Ordinarily they show great respect for us but in this last instance, they did not. What do you suppose was different about this last time that could account for that?” [2] This is not that. We are saying here that they characteristically do not show us respect and that was evident in this last instance as well.

Elastic Attributions

The third question that came to my mind right away is: “How elastic is this category?” The notion of categories that change size and shape is not at all unfamiliar, but they are not often called “elastic,” and I think that is the perfect word for it.  Let’s start with inelastic—rigid—categories and work our way up. If I take a minimum wage job and get paid the minimum wage, there is no puzzle about the cause (I’m a cheap hire) or the category. I get $11.25 an hour.

If I ask whether I am getting paid what I am worth, I ask a different kind of question. There are very specific measurements of how much I produce and if the question of “what I am worth” means whether I am to be paid in line with my merits as an employee, everything is still clear.  I could even compare my wages with those of others who have my kind of job.

But what if I am paid differently than other people who produce at the level I do, but who differ from me in race or age or religion or relationship to the boss?  We are dealing now with “respect” in a much more elastic way. How many different kinds of things could fit into that pay disparity? Could a category like that expand and expand until almost anything would fit into it? Yes it could and it does.

Where I live

So here are a few residents in a senior center who are unhappy. There is a current respect 5occasion for the expression of their unhappiness, but the current occasion is not the reason for their unhappiness, just a chance to express it. What kind of formulation of their unhappiness will loosen the borders of the category so that nearly everything “fits” into it? Conversely, what kind of formulation will keep each reason for unhappiness separate and therefore easier to act on?

I have argued already that the “don’t get no respect” explanation has some predictable effects. It is socially affirmative, because is separates those present from those absent and places the problem over there (with them, not over here with us). It is set at the level of characteristic action—the level that we would call “character” in a person. Because these actions occur from time to time, this formulation rounds them up and treats them as a disposition—this is something that might happen at any time. And, in dealing with “respect” where there is no context for earning respect, it provides a formulation that is remarkably elastic. It can be stretched so wide that any kind of grievance—any kind at all—will be seen to fit it. Parking is expensive or hard to find? See, that shows their lack of respect. A building project used professional contractors rather than relying on the expertise of residents? See, that too shows lack of respect? A failure in communication with the head of the organization? What reason could there be for that, apart from lack of respect?

When the concept is put at the right place and when the boundaries are so elastic that they can expand to accommodate nearly any kind of grievance, then you have an issue that won’t go away. At that size, it can’t be adequately addressed either, of course, so, like Bill Cosby’s barbecued sparrow in his skit, “Fernet Branca,” it “just lays there and makes gas.”

Needless to say, it is not an obviously good idea to formulate a problem that is so large that it attracts anyone with a grievance and that, on the other hand, is so large that it can’t be dealt with even when everyone wants to. The step that is most often missing in making problems like this one is the sense that it is you who are “making” the problem.

Other Kinds of Problems Beckon

If there is a condition that needs to be formulated as a problem, you have a lot of options about how to go about doing that. Alternative formulations are no more true or false than wearing the brown suit or the blue suit to a meeting is true or false. Formulating a situation as a problem needs to be useful. [3] “True” is much to broad a standard for it.

respect 6Internal:  There is no reason, for instance, that the problem described above could not have been formulated as an internal problem. [4] “They” don’t respect us (although they should) is an external problem.  There is no reason, absent some context, that the difficulty represented in this picture should be formulated as the bridge being too low or the water being too high.  Which way to define it depends entirely on what tools you have at your disposal.

Characteristic:  There is no reason, either, that some recent faux pas could not have been represented as a stand alone event, rather than linked to all the others so that it is only an “instance” of the same trait and not a separate events.

Elastic:  There is also no reason why the grievance could not have been defined in a less elastic (more stable) way, so that it does not expand to accommodate any and all grievances from any and all contributors. You can expand the concept by giving the same name—in this instance “lack of respect”—to every event you object to or have ever objected to.

So there is nothing at all inevitable about the “we don’t get no respect” coding of these events. The question is really whether such a coding is useful. I suspect it is not.

[1] This is nothing like “simple German,” that you would use on someone just learning German. This is something more like “Oooh. Does Greta wike the wittle red ball?” This was especially irksome because my friend’s name was not Greta and the potential mother-in-law knew it.
[2] NFL broadcasters note the extraordinary reliability of a receiver along with a recent lapse, with the phrase, “the normally sure-handed…..” “Normally” means that he wasn’t this time.
[3] Of course, a formulation is not going to be useful if it ignores or misnames crucially important parts of the situation. Even so, for every perspective on the situation, just what facts are crucially important changes. That is why perspectives are so important.
[4] It could be internal to the group, or internal to some persons within the group.

 

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Halloween

Posted on October 20, 2017 by hessd

I just don’t get Halloween. Not as a big deal celebration. I get a few things.

I get the language underpinning of it. I know, for instance, that the -een of Halloween is properly “e’en.” In the Scottish version of the word it is a contraction of “even,” still meaning “evening” rather than “eve.”

I get the notion of a liminal time—a time of the year when the borders between the living and the dead are thin and permeable. [2] Such a border means that “they” are closer to us and we are closer to “them.” Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing depends on your views of the relationship between the dead and the living, so it varies quite a bit among cultures and faiths.

If, for instance, “they,” the people on the other side of the border that separates the living and the dead,” are active and inclined to be mischievous, I can see why placating them would be a prudent thing to do and a big part of Halloween is about that.

I get the attachment to the annual cycles of death and rebirth. The autumn is, after all, the time of year when the sun is going away—and who knows whether it will ever come back north—and the plants are all dying.

On the other hand, all these understandings have declined quite a distance from their earlier meanings. Often, when we say things like, “declined from their earlier meanings,” the implication is that we have substituted later meanings. That is not true in this case. In the case of Halloween, the customs have declined from the spooky earlier meanings to no meanings at all. Of course, “no meanings” doesn’t mean “no reason.” The commercialization of Halloween insures that there are lots of reasons to push the celebration of it. I’m thinking of the costumes, the cards, the candy, the paraphernalia. [1] And Bette says that a lot of people have a lot of fun at Halloween, dressing up and going out for candy and so on. I never did, so I really wouldn’t know.

And while I don’t begrudge anyone a bit of special holiday fun—provided I don’t have to do it myself—I belong to a related but different tradition. And for reasons that have nothing at all to do with the secular celebration of the holiday, it is a tradition that has come to mean a lot to me.

In my tradition, the “hallow” of Halloween is a big thing. It means “holy.” Most Americans probably know it as a verb because that is the way Abraham Lincoln used it in the Gettysburg Address: “we cannot hallow this ground.”

Some Christians celebrate All Saints’ Day. In fact, I celebrate All Saints’ Day, having known and honored quite a few saints in my time. All Saints’ Day is the remnant of a much older and longer celebration called Allhallowtide, which had—as did Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost—a vigil that began the night before. It is that inaugural vigil, “all hallow’s eve,” which placed the word “Halloween” in Western Christianity.

And the limen?

If we are to think that the boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead is stretched thin at this particular time, I can’t think of a better way to honor that thinness that than to honor those who have left us but whom we still hold in our hearts. The “dying” or “dozing off” of nature in winter suggests it. Pope Gregory III suggested it in the middle of the 8th Century. [2] The practice of many cultures outside the culture of the church, suggest it.

If there is “another side”—something on the other side of the threshold, it matters a great deal how a culture imagines what is there. Is it the spirits of the ancestors, watching kindly over their progeny? Is it the spirits of the ancestors, angry at being dead and waiting only for the thinning of the barrier to come back and wreak havoc? Are there beings that were never human—fairies, ogres, dryads—who have intentions of their own if they can just get back among the living?

There is a lot of such speculation—all of it implicit—in the modern celebration of Halloween. That is, in fact, what the fire theme is for. It accounts for the “lantern” part of the Jack-of-the-Lantern. [4] The fire is supposed to scare the spirits away. On the other hand, it also accounts for the food themes because the food is supposed to appease the spirits, on the off-chance that they are inclined toward malice. And, to add the last little bit of historical setting to it, if you were approached in the “trick or treat” mode by a Druid priest, you might want to think seriously about what a Druid might think a “trick” was.

All Saints’ Day

At my church, the tradition is to hold a reading of the names of the saints who have died since the previous All Saint’s Day. A name is read and a bell is tolled. Then another name; another tone. From the time my wife, Marilyn, was diagnosed with cancer, we expected that we would have only a few All Saints’ Days left to us and we sat in church as the names were read and the bells tolled and held hands and cried. On the All Saints Day after she died, I sat there and listened to her name being called and the bell being tolled and cried by myself.  It was bitter, but the context of meaning made it tolerable.

That year, the “boundary” between my world and whatever is on the other side [5] was thinned almost to transparency. So when I think of Halloween, I think of All Saints Day. And when I think of All Saints’ Day, I think of the day Marilyn’s name was read. And then I think of the day when my name will be read. [6]

So I don’t really object to Halloween. It’s just, as I said at the beginning, that I don’t get it. I do object to conceiving of that time as a time for appeasing malevolent spirits and warding off angry minor deities. I don’t want to be any part of that. [7] All Hallow’s Eve, on the other hand, makes perfect sense to me and offers a great deal of comfort.

[1] How many innocent pumpkins, for instance, have given their lives to become jack-o-lanterns so they can simulate the ignis fatuus, “the foolish fire?”
[2] We don’t use liminal (from the Latin limen) straight up, but it is common in compounds like “subliminal.” A limn is a threshold.
[2] The reference of the author of 2 Timothy may have had something like this in mind (1:16—18) but given the lack of context, it is hard to say for sure.
[3] These people didn’t become saints just by dying. Here’s a good summary of the broader meaning of the terms from http://www.gotquestions.org, a site I like a good deal. “Christians are saints by virtue of their connection with Jesus Christ. Christians are called to be saints, to increasingly allow their daily life to more closely match their position in Christ. This is the biblical description and calling of the saints.”
[4] I almost hate to tell you this, but they didn’t always use pumpkins. Sometimes they used rutabagas and I really like rutabagas.
[5] I don’t mean by that phrasing to say that there is something “on the other side.” I have no idea. But at the beginning, my sense of “no longer here” was so strong that it virtually stipulated some “…and now there.”
[6] I’m not forgetting Bette. I’m just skipping over her because according to our deal, she has to live longer than I will. It just isn’t right to expect a man to marry and lose two such women in just one lifetime.
[7] On the other hand, I fully believe that people can be killed by witchcraft in cultures that believe in witchcraft. People are psychosomatic unities. We don’t come in two packages, one universal and the other local.

 

 

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Stronger. Also wiser.

Posted on October 17, 2017 by hessd

In Stronger, Jeff Bauman, played superbly by Jake Gyllenhaal, learns a really hard lesson. It isn’t all that easy to say what it is, but at the very core, it involves being willing to be who people need for you to be.

This is not, in other words, a movie about authenticity. At least, it is not about what we ordinarily call authenticity. [1] Quite the contrary, it is a movie about transcending that core of self and opening yourself as a means by which others’ needs can be met.

Jeff was near the finish line of the Boston Marathon when the bombs went off. His legs stronger 6were so badly damaged that they had to be amputated above the knee. He may very well have died from loss of blood had Carlos not intervened. But he didn’t die and a very frightened city declared him to be a hero—just for not dying.

That put Jeff in a really difficult place. First, he knew he wasn’t a hero. So accepting the status of hero [2] is hard for him. Second, he is a long way from understanding that the city needs him to be a hero—that his hero status is a sacrifice for him and a gift to the city. It takes him a long time to get there. And third, his family and his buddies all try to cash in on Jeff’s status as a hero, which adds an immediately repulsive patina to the whole thing and makes it seem to be one giant con job.  He is repelled by the con job; it takes him longer to see into the core of the matter.

That’s a huge challenge for Jeff and he doesn’t have much to go on in meeting it; he is not much of a person. The whole first part—the pre-marathon part— of the movie is given over to showing us that. Jeff is fiercely tribal and his tribe is not equipped to help him either. In fact, they are the first ones to exploit his new notoriety. [3]

stronger 4The help he gets, he gets from his sometime (but not current) girlfriend, Erin (Tatiana Maslany) who sees what he needs and is unwilling to withhold it from him. She is immediately heroic, as I see it, although that is not the way the movie understands her. And when all the crisis is over and Jeff has had a chance to discover in a whole new way just who he is, he gives himself to Erin.  That is very satisfying. He says something to her in this scene about “leaning on her.”  Yes he does.

The dimensions of Jeff’s difficulty are that a) he is called on to play a part for the benefit of someone else, b) it is a high profile and honorable part, and c) he is trapped by the conventions and expectations of his tribe. Three really big problems and he doesn’t deal with them very well. [4]

It will simplify this transition if we just look at two instances: one is very bad and gives us a sense of just how strained Jeff’s resources are. The other marks the occasion for a substantial step toward health (the Red Sox game) and also an occasion where the work Jeff has already done can be displayed.

The Bruins Game

They want Jeff to come onto the ice wearing a Blackhawk shirt. Erin, also wearing a Bruins shirt, pushes him onto the ice in his wheelchair. Everyone cheers, Jeff’s name is on the readerboard, along with his picture. He is required to wave a flag that reads “Boston Strong” back and forth while everyone cheers.

In the elevator on the way out, he attacks the only person who has dealt with his tragedy in his terms, rather than is her own (the mother) or his own (the father) or their own (his buddies) terms. Erin has put Jeff’s life in the center of her concern and she is the only one who has. That is why she is close to him and available for his anger and rejection.

stronger 8Everything is wrong with the Blackhawks event and it is portrayed so that we see that. Here, for instance, is a picture I didn’t see at the movie and now that I am looking at it, I can hardly believe I missed it.  Look at the cage the shadows of the hockey goal make on his face!  Then Jeff goes through a lot of development. He learns, for instance, that giving Boston the hero they need so badly is a form of self-transcendence.

The Red Sox Game

The setting is not all that different than the Bruins game, but Jeff if different by now. He is not yet ready to go beyond his own limits and offer himself to another person (Carlos is the exception so far), but it is something he can do for his city and the Red Sox are his team—he would really do anything he could for them.

stronger 7So he does. He plays the hero for them. He throws out the first pitch. [5] Carlos pushes his wheelchair out to the mound and that makes sense because Carlos is a hero in the same sense that Jeff is a hero. (As viewers, we understand Erin’s heroism at the Bruins game, but no one in the film understands it that way.) And then he tries to escape from the setting of the game, having done everything he thinks he can do. But here, his heroism catches up with him—not the phony imputed heroism that Boston lavished on him, but the real personal heroism that is based on his courage in responding to his personal disaster. A man named Larry needs to talk with him about the courage he has shown, and Jeff is willing to talk. We are surprised when Jeff asks the man his name; we are dumbfounded when Jeff reaches up and hugs him.

And after Larry, there is another; then another. The scene ends with Jeff still surrounded by people who want something he actually has and is willing to give. I was willing to call Jeff a hero when he understood that the hero business wasn’t really about him—it was a gift he gave to his city. But now Jeff understands that in his determination to work through his disabilities, to have a life again, he has become a hero of another kind entirely. And this heroism, based on his own understanding and his own work and his own pain, is his to give to anyone who needs it.

And he does.

[1] That may be a comment on how inadequate our notion of authenticity is. You could say that by the end of the movie, Jeff authentically embraces his status as a hero—a public property—and uses it to serve the needs of his fellow citizens.
[2] We see the other side of the mirror in the movie Hero, in which Bernie LaPlante (Dustin Hoffman) rescues a woman from a plane only to see John Bubber (Andy Garcia) take the credit for it. Taking credit for being the hero he knows he is not doesn’t bother Bubber at all, but in Stronger, it bothers Jeff a lot.
[3] It’s hard to blame them, under the circumstances. They are no more prepared to deal with Jeff’s situation than Jeff is.
[4] I know I am skipping over the fact that he had his legs blown off and that he suffers, after the blast, from PTSD. Those are large challenges, but they are not the ones that caught my attention this time.
[5] Following Pedro Martinez’s advice, which I am sure we are to take in both the literal and the metaphorical senses of the term: “aim high.”

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Is “the good doctor” candid?

Posted on October 14, 2017 by hessd

You can ask questions so that they are easy or so that they are hard. This one seems hard to me. [1]

The doctor—the titular doctor in the new ABC series, The Good Doctor—is a very youngdoctor 4 man. Also autistic. Also extremely bright. When you hear him diagnosing a medical condition, you think of Sherlock Holmes.

I have seen one episode so far (twice) and I can tell you with complete confidence that the show is going to be about Dr. Sean Murphy saying inappropriate things and everybody else coping with the destruction he causes. If you picture a tornado (Dr. Murphy) and a horde of relief agencies (the hospital staff) moving in where he has passed, you will have the essential dynamic of the show. [2]

In the first episode, we see Dr. Murphy joining the surgical staff of St. Bonaventure hospital in San Jose. There is a lot of resistance to hiring an autistic surgeon, but Dr. Murphy has a champion, the president of the hospital, Dr. Aaron Glassman. [3] And because Dr. Murphy is always right about the medical things and always wrong about the social things, this is a pot that is just going to keep boiling.

Is Dr. Murphy candid? Here’s an example to work with.

“Why were you rude to me when we first met, then nicer to me the second time we met and now you want to be my friend? Which time was it that you were pretending?”

To begin with, we, as viewers, see all three of the occasions Dr. Murphy is referring to. In the first, he was an odd-talking person who had administered first aid to the patient at the airport. He is urging the medical staff at the hospital to take an action, an echocardiogram (echo), for which no clear diagnostic need exists. And he tries to force his way into the hospital. It is a that point that Dr. Clare Brown (Antonia Thomas) gets firm with him. That is “You were mean to me.”

doctor 5The second occasion was set up when she comes back outside—where Dr. Murphy is still waiting in the rain—to ask him why he kept recommending an echocardiogram. He gives a plausible reason, but while they are talking, the call comes that the echo revealed nothing at all. Dr. Murphy rejects that reading of the echo and when, through Dr. Brown’s auspices, he is shown the screen, he sees something no one else had seen—why the patient is still in danger. That’s the second occasion, and Dr. Murphy characterizes it as “nicer to me.”

The trauma is over; Dr. Murphy has been proven right on all counts. Dr. Brown comes to the cafeteria to congratulate him. That is “Now you want to be my friend.”

So now you know what the circumstances were that Dr. Murphy characterized so badly. The first thing to notice is that he has understood all these events to be personal. They were “about” the relationship of this beautiful woman, Dr. Brown, to him. We know they were not. Dr. Brown was protecting the hospital in the first case, defying her colleagues to consult Dr. Murphy in the second, and generously congratulating him in the third. None of those was personal in the sense Murphy thinks, and it makes me wary of the character of Dr. Murphy that he thinks they were. Then again, he is autistic.

The second thing to note is that Dr. Murphy thinks that some of those actions by Dr. Brown were insincere. When you look at it through the “it’s personal” presuppositions of the autistic doctor, there is one true interpersonal orientation between people. Or between these two people, at least. But the three interactions were different—we are leaving aside the fact that all three situations were different—so Dr. Brown “really meant” what she said in one of those interactions as “was pretending” the others.

Society is not possible under those circumstances.

doctor 2That brings us to the final two questions. The first is, what can Dr. Murphy do to keep from destroying a very good hospital staff? We pretend with each other. We represent ourselves as more interested than we actually are or as less offended than we actually are. We are expected to do that. We are very nearly required to do that, given the penalties that are meted out for failing. [4]

Dr. Murphy simply doesn’t know how to pretend. Some autistic adults learn how to do it after a manner. By some accounts I have read, they don’t learn empathy, but they learn what kind of responses are required from them. These responses are “a performance” of empathy.  To a required expression of sorrow, they learn to return a required expression of thanks. They do not observe, as they might once have, that the person expressing the sorrow is not, in fact, truly sorry but is “only pretending.”

There is reason to think that Dr. Murphy could learn to do that. I’m quite sure he won’t, however, because the show is set on the contrast between his extraordinary medical skills and his abysmal people skills. If he were to get better at his people skills—even in the paint by numbers way I described—the tension of the two threads of the narrative would suffer. Besides, the surrounding cast is responsible to cope with his behavior as it is and it needs to be incumbent upon them to change rather than it being incumbent upon Dr. Murphy to change.

So there are some things a real autistic doctor could do, but I think Dr. Murphy will not be allowed to do those.

The second question is, “What is candor?” If we are going to think about whether the doctor 3doctor is candid, we are going to have to think about what candor is. The Merriam-Webster podcast which featured this word in 2012 gave an illustration like this: “when the job applicant admitted to some indiscretions in his past, the interviewer thanked him for his candor.” Since the root, the Latin adjective candidus, means “white” or “pure,” I think we can see in this interview, the idea that putting your best foot forward is a violation of candor. The “shaping” of your presentation of yourself is a “blot,” let’s say on what would otherwise be a pure unshaped presentation of yourself.

So I think the direct answer is that “the good doctor,” Dr Shaun Murphy is always candid. He cannot choose to be candid because he cannot choose to represent himself in whatever way the situation demands. Nor can he understand—as was illustrated in his conversation with Dr. Brown—that other people routinely “violate” candor for the sake of their colleagues and the welfare of their organizations.

So I think the best short answer is, “Yes. He is candid. But he can’t help it.”

I’m actually OK with Dr. Murphy’s candor. But as I was watching Episode 1, I kept having the feeling that there were people who were celebrating this disability as a goal we should all strive for. “If only,” this line of thinking goes, “we were only candid with each other.” I want to reject that in the strongest terms, even as an ideal.

It may well be that we should approach candor more closely than we sometimes do. I think it is crucially important that we refuse to mislead others unless it is truly necessary. But I really value being brave, as bravery is imagined in the expression “Discretion is the better part of valor.” [5]

I always like valor. Candor, I like sometimes.

[1] When I started running, in the 1960s, it was common to run without socks and that is what I did. I liked the feel of the leather on my foot. Ah, the Nike Cortez. But when I began to use an orthotic, I had to wear a sock on that foot at least, so it wouldn’t blister the sole of my foot.. It was a small town, and people would stop me and ask why I had one sock on and one sock off. I would say that “one sock on” is a matter of simple observation. But the question of how many socks I was not wearing is a deep and vexing philosophical problem. It was a college town so I got away with it for quite a while.
[2] That is not the view of David Shore, who has been called “the creative force behind the show.” Shore says that there is “an honest, unabashed emotionality to this show that is…refreshing.”
[3] Played by Richard Schiff in a style that is nearly identical with his Toby Zeigler of The West Wing. I’ve seen him play other kinds of characters, but I’d have to say he is really really good at this particular one.
[4] Jim Carey approaches this same question in his movie Liar, Liar, in which he falls under a curse of some sort as is doomed to “tell the truth” for 24 hours. To the makers of this film, “telling the truth” means refusing to play the normal parts we play and which make society possible. A woman who has just had sex with Jim Carey’s character asks him, “Wasn’t that just great?!” His response—which is called “honesty” in the movie, is “I’ve had better.” Really? That’s being honest?
[5] Professor Paul Brians on his Washington State University website gives this helpful caution: “In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I when Prince Hal finds the cowardly Falstaff pretending to be dead on the battlefield, the prince assumes he has been killed. After the prince leaves the stage, Falstaff rationalizes “The better part of Valour, is Discretion; in the which better part, I haue saued my life” (spelling and punctuation from the First Folio, Act 5, Scene 3, lines 3085–3086). Falstaff is saying that the best part of courage is caution, which we are to take as a joke. Truly courageous people may be cautious, but caution is not the most important characteristic of courage.”

 

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Ebb Tide

Posted on October 12, 2017 by hessd

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

I think that must be one of the most famous exchanges in the English language. The “it” that Frodo wishes had not happened is the discovery of the One Ring, the ring of power, but Gandalf’s rejoinder is much more general. “So do all who live to see such times…” he says. You are a member of a category and the way you are feeling about it is the way all the members of that category feel. But you must find a way to deal with it anyway.

Now…wizards, like Gandalf, live a very long time. Gandalf has seen “such times” overebb 2 and over and he knows what he is talking about. Frodo, like most of the rest of us, is living in the only time he knows. [1] And like the rest of us, Frodo is forced to take the presuppositions of his age for granted.

Peter Stearns, the social historian [2] has a way of approaching matters that is a great deal more like Gandalf’s than like Frodo’s. Stearns will study some small aspect of the whole social whirl and pay attention to how that one small aspect has developed over time. I’m going to reflect on his treatment of the notion of “obedience” today, but I’ll be back from time to time with another notion from his work.

Imagine that you are standing at the shore of the ocean in the middle of the afternoon on a beautiful sunny day and watching the “tide” go “out.” (How odd, you think, to put those words in quotation marks.  I thought so too.) And let’s say you know nothing at all about the influence the moon exerts over the tides on earth. You don’t know that the water goes out for awhile and then comes back in and then goes out. You don’t know the system.

ebb 1What you do know is that the water used to reach much further up the beach and now it is clear down to where you are standing and it is still going down, going “away.” You are horrified, let’s say, because you liked this part of the coast where the ocean “used to come” and you long for “the good old days” when the water—you don’t know to call it a “tide”—used to come all the way up to here.

It seem odd, I suppose, to imagine anyone who doesn’t know about “tides,” but really, who knows about grieving; who knows about “jealousy;” who knows about what a “real man” or a “real woman” ought to be like; who knows whether children should be obedient to their parents? All these are like the tides and we, who take for granted the sentiments of our own time, are like the guy who doesn’t know that “the water going out” is called an ebb tide and that it will all come back.

Let me illustrate by recalling what I can from my recent reading of Stearns’ treatment of obedience. The point of all this is that these ideas about obedience—is it a good thing or a bad thing, does it come at the expense of other important virtues, how is it to be inculcated— are broadly shared by your contemporaries. Whenever you were a child or whenever you were raising children or, more ominously, grandchildren, there was a set of ideas that was considered to be “common sense.”

Stearns says that agricultural families neeebb 3ded to have large families of obedient children.
That’s how the family was made an economically viable unit. So there is an economic infrastructure to the ethical demands of “obey your parents.” Notice how powerful it is when the two are joined. Obeying your parents is the right thing to do and besides that, you will all starve without it. Powerful.

The Industrial Revolution removed the economic infrastructure for many families. For these families, the admonition to obedience was still strong, but now it had to stand alone. After a period when urban and suburban children “helped out at the shop” or even “tended the vegetable garden,” the chores of children shrank to things like keeping their own rooms neat and taking out the garbage and washing the dishes. Household chores, in other words, instead of contributions to the family’s economic viability.

In the latter part of the obedience phase, there grew up an ideal that children should obey gladly. In my own mind, I suspect that there were some good reasons for this new emphasis and some bad reasons. The good reason is that when the cows had to be milked, all that mattered was that the kids got up at the right time and milked them. They could be a snarly about it as them wanted. But for the new work, the “chores,” it actually matters whether the kids “obey” sweetly and kindly or with grousing and foot dragging. The bad reason I am thinking of is that the parents and the people who wrote books about how to be parents sensed that the old “obedience” norm was slipping away and tried to prop it up with a new emotional resonance. “I’m obeying my parents (as I should) and I’m happy about it.”

As urban (and later, suburban) notions of what a good child is like, this happiness in compliance was joined to a happiness in independence. It’s not as hard as you might think. Once you start caring about whether the kids are happy or not—as opposed to just obedient or not—it is easy to join this virtue of any other virtue and “the child who can choose for himself” was the next virtue in line. So now we want children who make good choices and are happy about it. Obedience of the “look both ways before you cross the street” is still appropriate, but that kind of obedience is justified by the immediate context, not by the nature of the parent/child relationship.

ebb 4In the next phase, the helicopter parent phase, parents are responsible for the good choices and the consequent happiness of the children. Let’s just stop and think how far we have come from the farm family where the kids are plowing the back forty and gathering and selling the eggs. Now that the parents are responsible for the choosing that the child does—not, please note, for the choices themselves [3]—a child who is not choosing well or who does not play nicely with others or who can’t make the soccer team or who is not happy, is a problem that the parents need to do something about.

Does that seem weird? Not if everyone you know is doing the same thing. When everyone is doing the same thing, we are back to the guy who doesn’t know what tides are and who therefore mourns the “passing away” of what was once “a mighty ocean.”

Stearns historical approach gives us a chance to look at the matter more broadly. There is a very nice fit in the situation where the farm family has to make a living and so needs a lot of children who will do what they are told. There are good things and bad things about this scheme—as there are about any scheme—but the parts all fit together.

What we need in our time is an economic infrastructure and  an understanding of moral obligations that will do for us what the old agriculture/obedience construct did for them. What should we aspire to for our children? What does it cost them for us to aspire to so much? What does it cost us to aspire to that on their behalf? What do children actually need from their parents [4] as opposed to the things they want or things they think they have a right to?

I think it is an advantage to us all that the problem can be posed generally–that is Stearns’s gift– even granting that any particular family will have to come up with some response to that commonality that works and that is within their means. [5]

So it might be worth considering that the tide is now in, it is high tide, on such questions ebb 5as autonomy for children and choosing as the principal mode of self-expression and the complete responsibility parents have shouldered for the quality and the success of their children. If it is really high tide on all those things, then the demands they make need to be met in some way. Or perhaps they can be modified. Or even rejected.

Whatever is done, it will have to be done again as the tide begins to go back out and new structures will have to be devised. And I would think that even as we must work in the present we are given—just as Frodo must—still we may be able to get some relief from knowing that out children will face different demands and different collections of virtues.

And maybe letting them see us struggling with ours, will help them struggle more successfully with theirs.

[1] Sociologist Peter Berger makes the very good point that “society” is a show that is meant to be seen only once, and when you live a long time and start to see the same things a second or third time, you start to notice things you missed at first.
[2] “my guy,” as I said last month, on gender roles
[3] The law still has the old fashioned view about legal and financial liability.
[4] I will grant you the truth of the observation you are about to make that different children require different things from their parents. That is true. But it is also true that every child needs certain things, common things, although they might need to have them delivered in different ways. The unity and the diversity are both true and both trite.
[5] When my wife and I were raising children, we agreed about most things, but differed on the obedience question. I wanted prompt and effective obedience and I didn’t care all that much what emotional flavor accompanied it. One of my kids could say almost anything by way of complaint while he was doing what he was told to do. My wife felt that the emotional part of the act of obedience was important too. She really wanted happy obedience, although she would settle for silent obedience, if “happy” was too much to ask for at the time. I had no idea when she and I were having these discussions about childrearing, how well we represented the recent emphases of our culture.

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Jesus and Nicodemus in The Matrix

Posted on October 3, 2017 by hessd

The question of what kind of life is worth living is addressed in compatible and complementary ways by the Gospel of John and by the Wachowski brothers movie, The Matrix.[1] John’s account of the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus is powerful, but it is confusing and if you are trying to visualize what they are talking about, you are going to have trouble. The Matrix is a dystopian fantasy, but it tells much the same story John tells and it is remarkably visual.

If they really tell the same story, they belong together. Do they really tell the same story?  I think so. Both ask what “real life” is and if we are going to think about it, we are going to ask what “unreal life” is.

I can think of two ways to approach to notion of “unreal life.” In one, the life you are experiencing isn’t really happening at all although it feels like it is. In the other, the goals toward which a life is oriented are so nearly insignificant that a life in pursuit of them might be said not to be a “real” life at all.

The Matrix

What does the contrast between real and unreal life look like in The Matrix? I’m going to have to count on your familiarity with The Matrix because there is not a good way to summarize it. I do want to point out some of the most important parts.

In The Matrix, we hear about, but do not see, a city of humans located down in the earth where it is warm. [2] It is called Zion. All human beings who are living “the life of the ages” [3]—real life, rather than imaginary life— are in Zion or in one of the ships sent out from Zion. These ships are the only settings in which we see truly self-aware humans in the first movie. It is into one such ship that Neo’s body is taken when it (he) is rescued from his tub of goo.

What about all the other humans? Every other human in the world is locked up in a podmatrix 3 of goo and the sole function of these humans is to provide, through the natural operation of their bodies, the electricity that the Matrix requires to rule them and keep them (us) in their place.  In this picture you can still see the goo on Neo and several of the pods near him, each containing a “human battery.”

It turns out that it is necessary, in order to keep the human bodies alive, to stimulate the brain with an electronic probe. This probe provides all the neurological input that is needed to simulate a life in society and even the illusion of free moral choice.

Our hero, Neo, is rescued from one of those pods by a crew from Zion and is given access to “the life of the ages”—a life in which things will actually matter. All the other people we see—people who are apparently living lives of consequence (except that there are no consequences)—are people we see as they appear to themselves in the Matrix. They are actually, physically, encased in their own tubs of goo.

Given that a big part of the New Testament is given over to contrasting “real life” and “lingering death,” The Matrix is a good theological movie because it is so graphic. The dialogue between Jesus and Nicodemus is not at all graphic. It is all verbal, and the words are deliberately filled with ambiguity and misunderstanding. [4] If the point being made by John in chapter 3 is the same as the point being made by the Wachowski brothers in The Matrix, it will be a marvelous convenience. John is obscure and difficult; The Matrix is explicit and graphic. My case today is that each is making the same point about life.

Jesus and Nicodemus in John 3

Here I show how the argument is organized in John, with particular attention being paid to some of the deliberately ambiguous words Jesus uses. Here is the passage from the New Jerusalem Bible.

3 Jesus answered: In all truth I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above. 4 Nicodemus said, ‘How can anyone who is already old be born? Is it possible to go back into the womb again and be born?’ 5 Jesus replied: In all truth I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born through water and the Spirit; 6 what is born of human nature is human; what is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not be surprised when I say: You must be born from above.
12 If you do not believe me when I speak to you about earthly things, how will you believe me when I speak to you about heavenly things? 13 No one has gone up to heaven except the one who came down from heaven, the Son of man; 14 as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so must the Son of man be lifted up 15 so that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him. 16 For this is how God loved the world: he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

Jesus talks (verse 3) about being born (genēthē) from above (anōthen). Both of the Greek words I put in parentheses have alternative meanings and Nicodemus takes the wrong one both times. That is the way John has organized this tutorial. Jesus offers the opportunity to misunderstand. Nicodemus makes use of that opportunity. Then Jesus “explains further,” making, in that explanation, the points John thinks are most important.

For instance, the Greek genēthē can mean either “begotten” or “born.” Jesus likely intended “begotten,” since it was more common in his time, as it is in ours, to refer to God’s action as male rather than female and “begetting” is the male contribution as “bearing” is the female contribution. It doesn’t actually matter very much.

On the other hand, it does set us up for his misunderstanding of anōthen, which can mean either “from above,” which is clearly what Jesus intended, or “again,” which is the way Nicodemus construed it.

The third ambiguous expression, one that Nicodemus doesn’t seem to have trouble with, although exegetes do, is zoēn aiōnion. It means “the life of the ages.” It can be construed as a life as long as the age {5] or as long as all the ages. Or it can be construed as a life characteristic of the ages, a life of enduring significance and value.

matrix 5By all three of these expressions, Jesus is talking about the new life in the spirit—the life of the ages—and Nicodemus is talking about the old life, the life of the flesh. So when Nicodemus understands anōthen as “again,” he immediately thinks about being born a second time in the same manner that he was born the first time. So he asks disbelievingly how it is possible for a grown man to enter his mother’s womb so he can be born again. My argument is that in his conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus is better understood as contrasting the insignificant (merely earthly) with the enduringly significant (the heavenly).

Jesus continually stresses the higher life—the life of the ages—and contrasts it with the lower earthly life. He does it in verse 7 where he says “You must be born (begotten) from above.” In verse 12, he chides Nicodemus about not being ready to hear about heavenly things since he is not even ready to hear about earthly things.  Notice the “higher and lower” imagery.  In verse 13, he refers to himself as “the one who came down from Heaven.” In the famous verse 16, he says that the higher life—the zoēn aiōnion—may be granted to anyone who believes in him

Throughout this failed and frustrating conversation, Nicodemus presupposes the quotidian life while Jesus presupposes the significant life. In none of these uses is the extent of “the ages” the point of the argument; rather it is the quality of “the ages” that matters.

This is an easy argument to make, but it is abstract and as pointed as the contrasts might have been for the Johannine community, they seem vague to us. And there, I think, The Matrix can help us.

Jesus and Neo

In The Matrix, the meaningful life is the result of the grasp of reality you have and the choices you make and the actions that flow from those choices. [6] If you are not part of this “higher life,” you are stuck in a tub of goo with a brain probe helping you to imagine that you are living a real life—the life you are not actually living. The contrast on the screen is overwhelmingly clear.

And it is made clearer by the one person who has chosen to live the zoēn aiōnion and matrix 2found it too challenging. Cypher is rescued from the life he imagined he was living and was made part of a real life. The real life was dreary and difficult and he made the choice for which John ridicules Nicodemus. Here we see Cypher in the matrix “experiencing” a juicy steak. At the moment of this picture, his body is back in the hovercraft, but he is making arrangements to be put back into a tub of goo and to have an imaginary life restored—a life of complete insignificance. He says he wants to be somebody famous.

Just how good is this analogy? Well…it’s not perfect. (Perfect is a lot to ask of analogies.) But it is very good in some ways and it is graphically clear, which the account in John is not. First of all, in The Matrix we clearly see “the living and the dead.” The living dodge around in the dark places of the city or hide in the last human city, deep underground. The “dead”–people whose choices matter not at all– are secure in their tubs of goo, imagining that they are actresses or police or notorious hackers, but actually, just producing the electric power that enables their enemies to dominate them. The dead live wonderful lives, but only by the courtesy of the brain probes that allow them such a satisfying hallucination.

matrix 1Second, you can be rescued from such a life. We see Neo choosing it. This is the justly famous “red pill or blue pill” scene where Neo may choose to go back into his life of illusion (blue pill) or he may choose to be rescued (red pill)—literally “lifted up” from the tub of goo—and live a real, though hazardous, life.  Note: to insert the picture here, I have to click on a button that says CHOOSE.  Not a bad name for this picture.

The question I am asking by bringing this difficult passage from the Gospel of John together with an imaginative movie like The Matrix is this: do the “higher” and “lower” lives in the Nicodemus dialogue match up with the “in the matrix” or “free from the matrix” pictures in the movie? I think they do.

Neo is offered the red pill or the blue bill by Morpheus. Nicodemus is offered the red pill—“believe…and enter the life of the ages” or the blue pill by Jesus. Nicodemus chooses the blue pill He is not begotten by the Spirit; he does not enter into the life that believing the claims of the Son of God would have enabled him to enter. He continues living in his tub of goo. [7]

From here on, Neo, having accepted the red pill—which is the only thing he can do as a slave of the matrix—has experiences that Nicodemus cannot have. Neo is redeemed from his tub of goo; his body is restored and his mind aligned to reality; he is trained to do the work that his new colleagues are doing, including rescuing others. But Neo discovers that he is not just one of the colleagues; he is, as Morpheus always believed, “the One.” [8] He is killed by the forces of evil and restored to life, but a life of an entirely different kind. There is a “risen Neo” that is comparable to the risen Christ, but there is nothing in Nicodemus’s life to compare it to.

So far as Nicodemus’s life of “new reality” is concerned, it ended when he took the blue pill rather than the red.

The analogy assessed.

Pretty good. My goal here is to bring John 3 and The Matrix into alignment so that the obscure and hard to visualize meanings in John are given graphic form in The Matrix. If that works for you, you have to see Nicodemus’s puzzlement at Jesus teaching as equivalent to Neo’s continued imprisonment in his tub of goo.

You have to see Nicodemus’s failure to grasp and to choose the message of Jesus as equivalent to his choosing the blue pill; continuing, that is, to live on the meaningless level of mere existence, rather than accepting the life of the ages, which Jesus is offering him.

From there on, Neo has experiences—described above—which Nicodemus does not have and cannot have because all of them require that he take the red pill so that he can be rescued from his slavery and redeemed to be part of a free people.

In closing, I need to say that this is not the view of the contrast between the gospel and the alternatives that is described elsewhere in the New Testament. The Synoptic gospels don’t see things as drastically as this. Quite a number of the New Testament epistles, notably James, but also the Pastoral Epistles, do not see life and death tin these stark images either.

But I think John does see it that way and I find myself wondering if you do.

[1] As a stylistic matter, I use the initial capitals—The and Matrix—to refer to the movie. When the movie is already the context, I use a lower case m-, to refer to the system of control the machines permit.
[2] We do see it in the second two films of the trilogy.
[3] That way of characterizing it comes from John 3. I’ll spend some time with it when we get there.
[4] In fact, considered only from a teaching standpoint, the dialogue between Jesus and Nicodemus is wrong in nearly every way and is an utter failure. As an instance of teaching methodology, it is really awful.
[5] Jesus promises his disciples (Matthew 28:20) that he will be with them “unto the end of the age.” The same word—aiōnion—is used there.
[6] This sentence shows why the style convention I use matters. That sentence with the capitals—The Matrix—is true; without the capitals, it is false. There is no life of significance in the matrix.
[7] I know that is harsh, but I think it is exactly what John means.
[8] Here, as in many places in the movie, the dependence on the language of the Bible is clear. “The One” is a clipped reference to the longer expression “the one who was to redeem Israel.” See Luke 24:21 for an applicable instance.

 

 

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Albert Peterson’s Dilemma

Posted on September 28, 2017 by hessd

I want to introduce to you today a fictional businessman, Albert Peterson. [1] Peterson is a good guy in a bad situation. Peterson is the head of Personnel for a U. S. manufacturing firm, engaged in vicious competition with other such firms all over the world. He is a social conservative, which means, in the context of this piece, that he is a supporter of “traditional family values.” He is also a political conservative, which means, in the context of this piece, that he is against “government meddling” and higher taxes.

I invented this Albert Peterson, but there are thousands of these people in the U. S. and additional millions who hold Peterson’s combination of interests and responsibilities and who, therefore, are forced to ignore or to deny a good bit of today’s reality.

family 4My goal for today is to define the difficulty Mr. Peterson is in and to extend my sympathies. If he and I were having a discussion about the U. S. and the future and about what is needed for the long-term health of our homeland, I think I would get angry at him and say things I shouldn’t. But sitting here at my desk on a beautiful fall day, I have nothing for him but sympathy. [2]

Mr. Peterson makes his contribution to his company by keeping labor costs low. There are three ways to do that. You can automate production, export the jobs to Third World countries, where the wages are low, or pay American workers Third World wages. All those work and they are all used. And there is nothing about Peterson’s job that impedes his making to his company the contribution he can make, which, again, is to “reduce labor costs.”

But, of course, by doing the things he is doing, Peterson is doing quite a few other things as well. You can’t do just one thing. That’s not how it works.  The strategies he is pursuing also “have particularly negative impacts on the labor market prospects of men and degrade their marriage-market value.” Specifically [3] the effects include:

“diminishing their relative earnings—particularly at the lower segment of the distribution, reducing their physical availability in trade-impacted labor markets, and increasing their participation in risky and damaging behaviors.”

As you can see in the footnote, this paper was once called “The Labor Market and the Marriage Market.” What Peterson would do, if he could, is to affect the labor market—thereby preserving his company’s profits—without affecting the marriage market. But, apparently it doesn’t work that way, so Peterson is forced to do both or neither.

These events, which the three scholars refer to as “exogenous labor demand shocks,” do, in fact “degrade the marriage market value of these men.” That is, they make them less likely to marry. The “shocks” do not make them less likely to procreate, however, and it was this point that Clare Cain Miller’s article addressed. Marriage is becoming, as she says, “yet another part of American life reserved for those who are most privileged.” [4]

But leaving the class boundaries—her way of talking about privilege—alone, here are some facts she has collected from current research.

Currently, 26 percent of poor adults, 39 percent of working-class adults and 56 percent of middle- and upper-class adults ages 18 to 55 are married,

Just over half of adolescents in poor and working-class homes live with both their biological parents, compared with 77 percent in middle- and upper-class homes,

Thirty-six percent of children born to a working-class mother are born out of wedlock, versus 13 percent of those born to middle- and upper-class mothers.

All these trends are Mr. Peterson’s doing. None of them are things he intended and none are things he applauds. But when “the marriage market value of men” declines—and that is the effect of Peterson’s work—then these social effects follow, their influence on the lower classes being especially powerful.

These effects are not inevitable. People could choose otherwise. People like Peterson—and here I join him—wish that they would choose otherwise. But, in fact, women will continue to hold against men their inability to provide for a family. And why shouldn’t they? And these women and men will continue to make babies anyway, whether they can afford them or not. More single moms, more broken homes, more social stress, more incarceration, more cost.

Mr. Peterson is a social conservative, which means that he believes in the value of 'America's Biggest Export, Our Jobs!!'character. Well…”good character,” really. He believes that people ought to make the right decisions because they are the right decisions. And they do sometimes. But when the economic supports for what used to be “the right decisions” go away, you get a situation where “character” points this way and “economic viability” points that way.

This is a dance with a predictable conclusion. Even the choreography is familiar. It isn’t that there is a contest, something like arm wrestling, between Good Guy Character and Bad Guy Necessity. There are moments when, in the short run, it looks like that. But in the long run, the behaviors that used to be implied by “good character” are redefined and the needs to which “economic necessity” is tied are also redefined. So now the economically required behaviors violate only “what was once considered virtuous by traditionalists.” And there goes the old Good Guy v. Bad Guy contest that sold so many tickets.

“Character” is a tough sell. I saw a cartoon once that shows a man watering the plant to the left of his front porch, but not the plant to the right. His neighbor asks him what he is doing. “I want that plant to grow,” he says, pointing to the one he is not watering. “But,” objects the neighbor, “You are only watering this one.” “I know,” says the man with the watering can, “But I want this one to grow because it wants to grow.”

And that is the character problem. Without quite saying that what we call “good character” at any given time is an artifact of economic relationships, it is a fact that “good character” is forced to swim upstream against the economic current, and it gets tired and stops swimming upstream. The salmon has no choice, at this point, but the society does. It can decide that “these days,” downstream is a much more realistic direction. And that is what we have done.

So Mr. Peterson, the business realist and social conservative, has put himself in a difficult spot. The things he must do [5] to serve his business, cause—in the long run—social consequences he deplores as a social conservative.

But don’t despair. There is hope.There are all kinds of government programs that would help cushion the blow. Clair Cane Miller lists these commonly cited five, but there are many more, including much more basic ones.

Social scientists suggest more routes to good jobs, like through community colleges or apprenticeships. More affordable housing for young people would help, so they don’t move in together simply from economic necessity. Inexpensive and accessible contraception would help, too. Some have suggested expanding the child tax credit, and removing the marriage penalty for benefits like the earned-income tax credit.

But now we must return to Mr. Peterson, the political conservative. As a businessman, hefamily values 5 “degrades the marriage market value of the men.” As a social conservative, he deplores the destruction of intact families and the production of children that no one seems to be able to care for. But now, as a political conservative, he also opposes the government programs which could soften the impact of the economic difficulties and ease some of the social costs of postponed marriages. There really isn’t anywhere else to go.

Mr. Peterson may very well prefer that extended families or charitable organizations work with these broken families. He may very well oppose the substitution of government aid to these families for what should have been, in a better world, private aid. He may very well oppose the higher taxes that will be necessary to give meaningful help to as many men as have seen their jobs exported. But that is really what he is down to and that is why, now that I am writing about him instead of arguing with him in person, I have such sympathy.

There is really nowhere for him to go. He can’t stop replacing high wage workers with low wage workers (or even with much lower wage machines) and if he could, his replacement couldn’t. He can’t change his view about what kinds of families are to be preferred—those values are very deep in the way he sees the world. He can’t even imagine that assistance on the scale that is required will be provided by patchy private initiatives. A thousand points of light would not be nearly enough. And he can’t in good conscience agree that the taxes and the government programs that could cushion the blow and better than doing nothing.

Mr. Peterson is in a very difficult place. He’s not a hypocrite. He’s just stuck.

[1] The name, but not the circumstance, comes from Conrad Birdie’s agent in Bye Bye Birdie. The woman who wants to marry him, if he would only give up show business and become an English teacher, has fantasies of being :Mrs. Phi Beta Kappa Peterson, the English teacher’s wife.”
[2] Literally nothing. I have, for instance, no solutions for him except ignoring and denying reality and he is already doing those.
[3] This article, “When Work Disappears: Manufacturing Decline and the Falling Marriage-Market Value of Men” by David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson, was cited in the New York Times article. It was first circulated under a much better title: “Th Labor Market and the Marriage Market.”
[4] I really don’t like the dramatic phrasing. “Reserved?” Really? By whom? “The privileged?” Do you really want to define everyone above the 50th percentile (the definition she uses for comparison) as “privileged?”
[5] This is not a personal choice. This is the mandate of whoever holds Peterson’s job. If he were to decide, perhaps on grounds of social conscience, that he was not willing to take the actions that produced so many bad social consequences, then he would be replaced by someone who wouldn’t mind quite so much.

 

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