The Dilettante's Dilemma

Thy rod and thy staff…

Posted on March 17, 2017 by hessd

…they comfort me.

That’s the way the psalm goes. It is Psalm 23, very likely the most famous psalm in the world. [1] I got to thinking about it the other day and, like so many other things I think about, when I get far enough away from it, I see new things. [2] The powerful truth in this exegetical advice has been captured by Yosemite Sam, as you see.

So today I would like to think through some of the most obvious, and therefore the sheep 4 most likely to be overlooked, aspects of Psalm 23. First, it was written by a sheep. We will need an adjective or two here, so let me offer ovine (sheep-like) and pastoral (shepherd-like) as the most useful.

This sheep is a disaster as an author because he has the authorial viewpoint of the shepherd. He speaks, in other words, in his own voice, but he knows things that only the shepherd would know. Or, to use the adjectives I provided above, the voice is ovine, [3] but the words are pastoral. That’s not how they told us to do it in Writing 101.

An Apology

So I would like to explore this discrepancy, but before I do that, I would like to apologize to lovers of Psalm 23 (although I am one) and to explain why the approach I will be taking, helps me. There is a way of understanding this psalm that takes its real world images into account. What, for instance, are rods and staffs used for? And, from the other side of the road, what images are supposed to be called to mind by the use of these words.

There is a danger, when you ask these questions, that you will come to care more about the answers than about the certainty of God’s care that the psalmist wanted to convey. That would be a wrong reading, it seems to me. But where there is danger, there is opportunity as well and the opportunity is learning to take account of the real world and the biblical allusions that his hearers would have understood instantly. With great effort, we can learn to hear these psalms in the way that even the dumbest Israelite would have been able to hear them and then we can appreciate them much more fully.

In short, although I am aware of the danger of substituting the study of the 23rd Psalm for the beauty of it or for the meaning of it, I think it is a danger worth taking. I hope very much that I will not take away form anyone what he or she most liked about the psalm, but this blog is a place where I think out loud and today I want to tell you what happened to me when I started thinking about it.

Ovine Knowledge

I am going to move past the lines “The Lord is my shepherd,” which sets the master metaphor for the psalm, and “he restoreth my soul,” which summarizes the sheeply benefits in a most un-sheeply way. So let’s go to the benefits this sheep celebrates. I have put the King James first and the New Jerusalem Bible in parentheses after it.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures ( In grassy meadows he lets me lie)
He leadeth me beside the still waters (By tranquil streams he leads me)

These are perfectly ovine preferences. Good grass is better than desiccated scrub and slow moving water is easier to drink from than fast moving and tastes better than stagnant water. Any sheep knows that and any sheep who associates these benefits with the leadership of the shepherd has every reason to be grateful to him.

The Failure of Pastoral Knowledge

We come now to the part where something in my mind said, “Hey. Wait just a minute.”

Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. (Your staff and your crook [4] are there to soothe me).

'I'm sorry but this is a staff meeting and that is obviously a rod...' Any shepherd knows what any pastor knows: those under his care are often willful. They want what they want. Very often, they pursue what they want without reference to the dangers to themselves or to the rest of the flock. The shepherd, seeing that, would do what needs to be done. Apart from more spiritual considerations, these sheep are the source of the milk and meat and wool he relies on for his living. So what might he do?

Here I begin to rely on material from an African shepherd, W. Phillip Keller, who wrote a book called A Shepherd Looks at the 23rd Psalm. He knows more about rods and staffs than anyone I have come across and if I am to approach my goal of learning, through careful study, what the stupidest shepherd in Palestine took for granted, I can profit from Keller’s recollections.

We will begin with the staff because that is the picture that came first to my mind. Here is Keller.

The shepherd’s staff is normally a long, slender stick, often with a crook or hook on one end…The staff is also used for guiding sheep. Again and again I have seen a shepherd use his staff to guide his sheep gently into a new path or through some gate or along dangerous, difficult routes. He does not use it actually to beat the beast. Rather, the tip of the long slender stick is laid gently against the animal’s side and the pressure applied guides the sheep in the way the owner wants it to go…Being stubborn creatures sheep often get into the most ridiculous and preposterous dilemmas. I have seen my own sheep, greedy for one more mouthful of green grass, climb down steep cliffs where they slipped and fell into the sea.

Note: I did remove a sentence from that account. See the second ellipsis. It will return to us shortly.

The staff, you will notice is used “to guide the sheep in the way the owner wants it to go.” True as this may be, it is not, let me assure you, the experience of the sheep. Consider this line from that paragraph:

Being stubborn creatures sheep often get into the most ridiculous and preposterous dilemmas. I have seen my own sheep, greedy for one more mouthful of green grass, climb down steep cliffs where they slipped and fell into the sea.

I ask you now to consider the perspective of the sheep. There is a mouthful of green grass to be had and the sheep is greedy. Why not just stretch out a little bit—just a little bit—and get one more mouthful? That is what the sheep wants. The staff is what is preventing me from getting to that luscious bunch of grass. It is an impediment. If I am a sophisticated sheep, I might say it is an unreasonable or an unnecessary or an overly prudent impediment.

I don’t see any comfort there. The operation of the staff to keep the sheep from going sheep 3 where its owner wants to prevent it from going—that makes perfect sense. I might go so far as to say that it comforts the shepherd. It does not comfort the sheep.

The rod is a little better, but it is a little like having a father who is capable of dealing out serious physical punishment. You might feel really good about that if you are in danger of getting beat up by others, but you have to know he is capable of that kind of punishment against you. You do know that.

Keller says:

The skilled shepherd uses his rod to drive off predators like coyotes, wolves, cougars or stray dogs. Often it is used to beat the brush discouraging snakes and other creatures from disturbing the flock.

He also says:

And it was, furthermore, the instrument he used to discipline and correct any wayward sheep that insisted on wandering away.

So the comfort you take in the rod, as a sheep, depends on whether you think of its being used on you or on predators. I think that maybe ambivalence is the best I could manage if I were approached by someone with a clipboard and asked, “So…how do you feel about the rod? On a scale of 10.”

That’s how I think I would feel as a sheep. This particular sheep, the one who wrote Psalm 23, is a sheep who thinks like a shepherd. He’s an amazing sheep. I am not at all surprised that goodness and mercy follow him.

[1] I suspect that it is, in part, because it is only 122 words long (in the New Jerusalem Bible), while Psalm 119 is 2448 words long.
[2] I once had a brief enthusiasm for establishing this truth in a website to be called “Find ASIA.” The gimmick is that those four letters are so spread out on the map that you have to get some distance away to see the name of the largest continent in the world
[3] Baaaa.
[4] I’m not going there and I hope you will bypass it as well.

Posted in A life of faith, Biblical Studies, Living My Life | Tagged comfort and guide, discipline and punish, Psalm 23, rod and staff, the good shepherd | Leave a comment

What the composer intended

Posted on March 14, 2017 by hessd

I want to tell you about a really powerful experience I had yesterday. I won’t be making an argument of any kind. I am going to be relying on a series of analogies that came to me all in the same moment. I will be trying here to separate them and share them at the same time.

Everyone who composes music has some notion of how it ought to sound. The conventions of scoring [1] give us not only pitches and rhythms, but also tempoes and even moods. You write them all down on the paper and hope good musicians will see them and know what to do with them.

I am thinking of religious texts the same way. Any kind of instruction, really. If you have ever written instructions that are, in your view, pellucidly clear, only to have them muddied by people who want to misunderstand them, then you So that's the first 10. who's up for the next 603? know the experience. So here we have Moses anticipating the 613 mitzvot by starting off with a very general 10. Good luck, Moses.

One of the really good things about singing in a choir with gifted musicians is that you sometimes get to sing compositions by one of the members. Some years ago, we had a chance to sing Aaron’s Benediction composed by Benjamin Kinkley. It’s a really lovely piece, but it was special for us because Ben was singing in the bass section at the time and our choir director asked Ben to teach the piece to us.

A score has all the instructions anyone would want on it, but these are instructions in general. Ben told us how he wanted our choir in particular to sing it. He told us what effect he was hoping for and what we could do individually and as sections to try to produce that effect. He simply ignored some of the instructions on the page either because they didn’t matter for the use he had in mind or because they were there to keep choirs from making a kind of mistake we weren’t likely to make. [2]

So we got instruction from a man who was in a position to be dogmatic about “the composer’s intent” because he was, in fact, the composer. And he was also one of us and also knew the acoustical properties of the space where his work would be performed. That’s a lot more information than you usually get.

Similarly, I have gotten a lot of good instruction about how to live a really good life. I have had some very wise friends and a gifted counselor and have been taught by some amazingly good preachers. And, like everyone else, I have benefitted from reading excellent authors, some theoretical and some “oriented toward practice.” [3]

But yesterday, I got closer. Yesterday we sang Amen of Hope by Brandon Stewart and I sang it standing next to Brandon Stewart. It is the best sense of “the intention of the composer” I have ever had. We had the markings on the music to rely on, like those we get from Handel or Brahms. We had a little bit of instruction about what he would like, what he had in mind, but not very much and most of what we got came in response to questions from our choir director.

composer 3 So I had the two indicators of the intention of the composer that I have had before, but this time I had a third. As we practiced it yesterday, for instance, I noticed that he—as a singer, but knowing what he knows about the piece—treated rests of identical length differently. We are considering a measure with four beats, the last of which is half a beat—an eighth rest.

As a general matter, every eighth rest in 4/4 time ought to be treated the same and my first reaction was to elbow Brandon and tell him he was doing it wrong. I managed to stop myself from doing that. I noticed, for instance, that he chopped the first eighth rest in the piece back to nearly nothing. He meant something by doing that, although I didn’t know what it was. But he did it every time in that particular measure, so I followed him and did what he did. In a later measure, he consistently gave the rest more time that he “should have;” again because he had a reason.

What I would really like to do here is skip to the “happily ever after” ending in which, by mimicking the performance of the composer, I was able to see what these different values of the eighth rest contributed to the piece and I became—so long as I was standing right next to him—part of the solution and not part of the problem. [4] In fact, I never did understand why he treated those rests the way he did. Or why he delayed the crescendo at the bottom of page one as long as he did or why he pushed a few phrases as aggressively as he did.

So those things didn’t happen for me, but what did happen is that I got the very practical demonstration of what composer’s intent was and I was led to compare it to my experiences with Benjamin Kinkley and Johannes Brahms. That’s comparing, if you are following this account, level three with level two with level one.

Here’s what I found. The printed score is good if that is all you have. Instructions about composer 2 how to treat the printed score are better if they are available. Best is standing next to someone who is singing it the way it ought to be sung. It amounts to an inversion of authorities. Ordinarily, I sing next to my friend Jim, and we have an active and friendly relationship as colleagues. If I hold the note over into the rest or don’t quite get up to the G# or get confused at where I go after the first ending, Jim feels free to help me get it right and I do the same for him. But in those cases, each of us is relying on the music—on how it is written [5]—and judging our performance by our fidelity to it.

Singing next to Brandon inverts the authorities. If he wants it to sound a certain way and sings so as to make it sound that way, I am not going to elbow him and tell him he is doing it wrong. I am going to emulate him and try to see what effect he had in mind. It is a reflection on the written text based on an intimate—I heard it myself—experience of the performance.

As a Christian, the analogous experience would be “singing”—taking repeated practical actions—next to Jesus. There isn’t any way to do that. [6] There are a few approximations, like paying particular attention to the lives of Christians you admire, but they are very rough approximations. I think what is going to stay with me from the experiences of rehearsal and performance this last week is that if you can experience what the composer does—what he DOES—you are in a much better position to evaluate the relatively cruder information you get when you are told what to do (as Ben Kinkley did) or when you read what the score says.

If, in other words, you could experience what the Creator is doing, you would have good grounds for taking some liberties with what the preachers say and what the scriptures teach. Intriguing, isn’t it?

[1] Not that kind. I’m thinking of musical scores
[2] And even at his relatively young age, Ben understood that every new instruction you give a choir divides their attention one more time.
[3] Ordinarily, I would just say “practical” there, but the very popular contrast between “theoretical” and “practical” is just too much for me sometimes.
[4] Or, as a chemist friend of mine likes to say, “part of the solution and not part of the precipitate.”
[5] And every now and then, there are typos in the score, especially a sharp or a flat that shouldn’t be there. In those cases, there is an even higher authority called “music theory” which tells us that whatever it says on the page, that was not the composer’s intention.
[6] Given the focus of this essay, you can see why I don’t want to take living by the “recorded words of Jesus” as the ultimate standard (like Brahms) or the reports of the experiences of mystics, or the “schools of practical theology” which set some words of Jesus over against other words of Jesus. None of those is like listening to when the composer breathes or how he stresses the phrase.

Posted in Living My Life | Tagged the authority of the composer, the authority of the score, the composer as instructor, the composer as performer, the composer as theorist | Leave a comment

It’s only natural

Posted on March 10, 2017 by hessd

“It’s only natural” seems like an easy thing to say. I hear it a lot. Most of the time I attend only to what it does–it excuses things– rather than what it means. Today, thanks to a comment by Scarlett Johansson, I would like to look at what it means.

You wouldn’t think it, but I am coming around to the idea that “only” is a very important word in this formulation. I think “only natural” means “this is nothing more than natural;” no further explanation is required, because this event is “natural.”

I know that it means different things in different contexts. I have philosophical and psychological and theological contexts in mind and I will look briefly at each. Well…not so briefly at the theological uses. It is a simple point—the Apostle Paul disagrees with Scarlett Johansson about what it means to call something “natural”—but it does take a little setting up, so the theological part will be the longest.

When Michael Pollan often begins his pitch with this snappy line: natural 2 (see pod with inhabitants) what he means by “food” is “something with ingredients your grandmother could pronounce.” He is opposing every instance of synthetically “enhanced” foods, foods that are stuffed with flavor enhancers and preservatives. It’s a readily identifiable meaning of “natural,” of course, the the prominence of the notion, the jihad-like dimensions [1] of the “natural food” movement are a reaction to the overwhelming artificiality of the American diet.

Scarlett Johansson

Here’s what started me down that road this time. It is part of a paragraph from the March 10 issue of The Week (see page 10).

“Johansson, 32, readily admits she now feels conflicted about the entire institution of marriage. “I think it’s a beautiful idea,” says Johansson. “I don’t think it is natural to be a monogamous person. It’s a lot of work. And the fact that it is so much work for so many people—for everyone—proves that it is not a natural thing.”

Let’s look at this statement carefully. Johansson has an observation to make. It is not natural to be monogamous. She goes on to explain the basis for her observation. It’s a lot of work to be monogamous and that proves it is not a natural thing. The premise, obviously, is that it will not take a lot of work if it is natural.

I’d have to say that I agree with Johansson about that. When I was getting to know Bette in 2005, quite some time before I actually proposed to her, I outlined a kind of marriage I was hoping to have. It was a kind that would take us both a lot of work to define and then ceaseless work—and ceaseless joy—to sustain. I wanted to be sure that when I asked her to say Yes to me, she knew that she was signing up to have a task as well as a partner in that task.

So I may know more about the “lot of work” part of monogamy than Johansson does. But I feel differently about whether it is “natural.” If I had a chance to talk to her, I would say that it is completely natural to say loving words to your wife when you are feeling loving. It isn’t any work at all. It is a good deal of work to say the things and do the things that will bring back the loving relationship after it has faded. And I would agree with her that such behavior, also, is not “natural.”

natural 4 Tantrums are natural. Tit for tat is natural. Holding grievances is natural. Lashing out in anger is natural. Doing loving things at the time you feel loving is natural. None of those things builds the kind of marriage Johansson might have wanted and that Bette and I most certainly want. We don’t want a marriage that is “natural.” We want a marriage that goes way beyond natural and heads in the direction of wonderful and satisfying and nourishing to the soul. “Natural” pales by comparison to what you can have if you are willing to put in the work.

Society

Political philosophers have divided sharply on what humankind must have been like “naturally.” Part of that question—it’s the part I am going to look at when things turn theological—is what is a human being like “naturally,” but these philosophers are thinking about groups of people; of societies. Rousseau famously said [2] “Man is born free yet everywhere he is in chains.” The bookend philosopher most often cited as “the other side,” Thomas Hobbes, characterized “natural life” more bleakly. In the absence of a powerful central government, Hobbes said, life is “solitary, nasty, poor, brutish, and short.”

natural 1 I’m not really sure we can say, as a matter of careful secular [3] observation that humans “have” a nature at all. This whole matter of Hobbes v. Rousseau is replayed on a much smaller stage by psychologists. On the one side, we have psychologists who describe people as having stable “traits;” and on the other hand, psychologists who think that other things, things outside us, determine what we think and how we feel and what we do.

The implications of the latter school are that people who come to awareness in societies that evoke good behaviors will be “good people” as that society defines “good.” Their goodness is “natural” because the society defines and rewards it. This seems very persuasive to me, but then again, the goodness is “in” the person/society interaction. It is not “in the person”—not a nature—and it is not “in the society.” [4] And besides, no behavior is “good” except in that time and place unless you bring some external standard to it and science can’t do that. And shouldn’t. [5]

Theology

And that brings us to theology. There is no reason for you to be surprised at that. For one thing, I have been hinting at it at every point along the way. For another, I have been calling for some external standard and saying that science cannot, by its nature, provide one. As an illustration, let me turn to another dispute that I know a little about. My tour of this new battlefield will not solve anything, surely, but it provides a really good illustration of why I pricked up my ears at Johansson’ comment that monogamy must not be natural because it is so much work.

I have in mind the distinctions made by Paul in his letter to the Romans and I am going to start off with the King James Version of the crucial texts. [6] Here is Paul’s argument in Romans 8: 4—8.

4 That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. 5 For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit. 6 For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. 7 Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. 8 So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God.

Notice first the recurring dichotomy of “flesh” and “spirit.” We are going to have to look briefly at what those terms meant to Paul, but for now, let’s just look at them. Those who “walk after the flesh” cannot fulfill the righteousness the Law intends, but those who “walk after the Spirit,” [7] can.

Those who are “after the flesh” mind the things of the flesh. Those who are “after the Spirit” mind the things of the Spirit.

natural 3 And, finally, “the carnal [of the flesh] mind is an enemy of God and cannot please God; the spiritual mind, on the other hand, is “life and peace.”

OK, the goal of that set of excerpts was to establish the consistent dichotomies that appear in Paul’s argument in Romans. There ought to be no controversy that in Paul’s mind, “the way of the flesh” is “natural.” The way of the Spirit is not natural; it is a gift that comes from a source to which we have no access on our own.

Paul doesn’t argue that “natural” is bad any more than Johansson argues that “natural” is good. These are presuppositions, not conclusions. The whole drama you want to present—salvation in Paul’s case; monogamy in Johansson’s—is played out against the background provided by these presuppositions. “Natural” is a good thing to Johansson; it is a bad thing to Paul.

I want to finish with the question of whether work (Johansson) or “works” (Paul) is the way out of this dilemma, but before I do that, I want to look at another version of this text in Romans. This is the New Jerusalem Bible, my own favorite translation.

Romans 8: 4—8. This was so that the Law’s requirements might be fully satisfied in us as we direct our lives not by our natural inclinations but by the Spirit. 5 Those who are living by their natural inclinations have their minds on the things human nature desires; those who live in the Spirit have their minds on spiritual things. 6 And human nature has nothing to look forward to but death, while the Spirit looks forward to life and peace, 7 because the outlook of disordered human nature is opposed to God, since it does not submit to God’s Law, and indeed it cannot,8 and those who live by their natural inclinations can never be pleasing to God.

Note that the dichotomies are still there. They don’t look like “the flesh and the spirit” anymore. Now they are seen as “lives directed by our natural inclinations” and “lives directed by the Spirit.”

Those who live by their natural inclinations have their minds on the things human nature desires. That seems pretty natural. But those who live “in the Spirit” have their minds on spiritual things. That seems pretty unnatural.

And finally, the outlook of “the disordered human nature” is opposed to God because those who live by their natural inclinations can never be pleasing to God. The Spirit (on the other hand) looks forward to life and peace.

We see again the consistent dichotomies, but they are now “disordered nature, the nature of disordered humans” on the one hand, and “living life under the direction of the Spirit of God,” on the other.

Paul begins, as I said his argument must, by a standard external to us. God has a way for us to be and that way leads to life and peace. “Living by our natural inclinations” is not a promising start toward life and peace. We cannot naturally intuit from the outside any of the things that make up the life “inside,” i.e. under the direction of the Spirit of God. We cannot see things properly, we cannot value things properly, we cannot choose things properly.

Our resident human nature—what is arguably “natural” about us, seduces us. “Seduce” is a word I love for its presuppositions and it is the perfect word for what Paul is talking about. We get the word from the Latin verb duco, which means, not surprisingly, “to lead.” [8] and the prefix se- means “away from.” So the world that “seduce” offers us is a world where there is a way we should go; there is a right way. But we are led “away from that way;” we say “led astray”sometimes and that is a very fitting way to use the word.

It is what is natural, as Paul sees it, which is the problem. Of course, monogamy was very important to Paul too. Paul would have agreed with Johansson that it is a lot of work, but would have disagreed with her that all that work it requires shows that it is unnatural. “Of course it is not natural,” Paul would say. “Death and destruction are natural. War with God is natural. Throwing aside what is natural so that we may begin to hear the kind of direction the Spirit is giving us is the only proper beginning point of “life and peace.” Or, as Paul normally says, the beginning point of the process culminating in our salvation.

So…I didn’t mean to put Scarlett Johansson up against the Apostle Paul as if they were antagonists in some commonly agreed upon debate. They are not. On the other hand, her way of characterizing what is “natural” is prominent in our time and Paul would reject it utterly. And I think that rejecting it utterly is a good way to begin.

[1] I ordinarily would have said “crusade-like” but if I’m going to use religious terms, I might just as well spread the backgrounds around a little. General Dwight Eisenhower wrote Crusade in Europe, for instance, about his experiences in the 1940s., but the same title could have been used by Abdul Rahman al Ghafiqi about his experiences in Europe in the 730s. He would no more have called his book Crusade in Europe than Eisenhower would have called his Jihad in Europe.
[2] Thomas Szaa begins his book, Ideology and Insanity: Essays on the Psychiatric Dehumanization of Man, with this paragraph. “Among the many foolish things Rousseau said, one of the most foolish and the most famous is :”Man is born free and yet everywhere he is in chains.” This high-flown phrase obscures the nature of freedom. For if freedom is the ability to make uncoerced choices, then man is born in chains. And the challenge of life is liberation.” That paragraph is one of the reasons I decided I wanted to become a political psychologist.
[3] Once you get outside of empiricism, you can specify a standard, a constant. If you do that, which is a notably unscientific thing to do, you can say whether humans “naturally” achieve this standard or not. “Good and evil” as ways of describing the fundamental nature of human beings can actually mean something if there is a standard.
[4] James C. Davies, whose work is the reason I chose the University of Oregon for my doctoral work, summarized all this as: B =f (p,e). He said that meant that behavior (B) is a function of the interaction of the person (p) and the environment (e). That is my view here.
[5] Science can specify what circumstances will cause people to say they are happy, for instance, but they cannot establish that happiness is the right thing to be. Science is a tool; it does not tell you what to use the tool for.
[6] It isn’t just that this language is so familiar. Nearly everyone my age who was raised in a Bible-reading culture was reading this particular version. It is also that the values posed seem so much more blatantly polar than the values described in the New Jerusalem Bible’s translation of these same texts.
[7] The capital S in “Spirit” always refers to “the Holy Spirit” in Paul’s writings. Paul is not making a distinction here between our bodies and our spirits or souls. For Paul, we are one psycho-spiritual unity. The split he makes is between ourselves, this psycho-spiritual unity, and the Holy Spirit, in other words, between humans and God.
[8] We get the title, Duke, from the same source.

Posted in Political Psychology, Words | Tagged flesh v spirit, monogamy, Scarlett Johansson, the Apostle Paul, what is good, what is natural | Leave a comment

God is a liberal Democrat living in Princeton

Posted on March 8, 2017 by hessd

Quite a few member of the faculty of Princeton Theological Seminary (PTSem) [1] released a statement that they say represents their views, not the views of the seminary at large. [2] I was glad to hear that because I am preparing to quibble with them and I do not want to quibble with the seminary itself. I really do like the seminary.

Ordinarily, I would provide a hyperlink to their statement, but, as nearly as I can tell, there isn’t one. That means that you have to go to the official seminary website (ptsem.edu) and enter a search term. Hint: “Trump” will serve as the key word. It is so easy to find that I am not going to reproduce it here—saving us all the extra 608 words that make up the declaration. I do think it is well worth the search because it is a very clear statement of the politics and the theological vision of these faculty members.

I call these “quibbles” not because they are insignificant, but because it is hard to tell what values are genuinely proclaimed in the document. There is so much posturing and such profligate borrowing of words from other settings that I am not really sure how much they and I would wind up disagreeing on the substance of their vision. I do feel on better grounds when I criticize the statement for the effects it is going to have on the structure of current politics.

I have four “quibbles” in mind for this essay. I could crank up twenty more if time and space were not constraints. [3]

Quibble 1 Is demonizing the opposition the best course?

Nearly everyone I talk to would be harder to talk to if they had read this piece. I suppose somebody has to do that, but then again somebody needs to talk to real conservatives (not Trump supporters) and genuine independents and Democrats Against Hillary and the job of all those people just got harder.

Thank You for Not Quibbling Let me just give one example of demonization. The first paragraph of the declaration gives us this gem: “the god [small g-] of Donald Trump’s [ not President Trump’s] “America first” nationalism is not the God [capital G-] revealed in our scriptures.”

This statement begins with a charge of idolatry: Trump’s “god,” that is, the “god” he worships, is not really God. [4] It continues by saying that Trump “worships” nationalism of the kind that prefers American interests to all others. Being a liberal Democrat myself, I am inclined to believe that multinational treaties are better for moving in the direction of many of the policy goals I like. On the other hand, a preference for bilateral over multilateral goals is not idolatry and if the “America first” slogan means that we should be more forceful in seeing to it that the national welfare is protected in our treaties and trade agreements, I am not prepared to call that by a pejorative religious name. “Idolatry,” means “the worship of images.” It’s a serious charge. It’s not about foreign trade agreements. President Trump may also prefer “a white Christian America,” but that is not what this phrase means.

I call that demonization. Once again, if this is an elaborate ballet by which the PTSem faculty are playing “bad cop” and they know who is going to take on the role of “good cop,” I have no objection to it. That does seem sophisticated for a seminary faculty, but I am not there and I don’t know.

Quibble 2 What do we owe to “the stranger?”

Specifically, does it mean that modern nation-state violates God’s law by enacting immigration legislation. Is working for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) the rough equivalent to “working for” the Gestapo? That doesn’t make any sense to me at all. I have two problems with this “plank.”

Princeton 4 The first is just exegetical. There are no biblical texts anywhere that deal with how a wealthy national economy should handle the hordes of people who can improve their lives by moving there. None. “The stranger” presupposes an agricultural context in small villages in the highlands of Palestine. It isn’t Ellis Island; it isn’t the Rio Grande. Those scriptures need to be reconsidered in a modern context if they are to be used as first principles. Does “immigrant” really equal “stranger” in the biblical sense? Does even “illegal workers” (as in the angry poster above) equal “the stranger?” Of course not.

The second has to do with policy goals. I think national immigration policy should be enlightened and I think it should serve the cultural and economic interest of the host country and that it should stay within the political constraints by which issues are defined and processed. “The stranger” does none of those things. If “the stranger” meant immigrants who are here illegally and who are now having their life situations upset for no reason beyond partisan advantage, then I applaud the sanctuary movement—both its legal and its illegal forms—as a countermeasure. But realistic immigration policy would make that unnecessary and neither Bible nor catechism tells us what that is. The Congress has not told us either.

Quibble 3 Is President Trump opposed to the “empowerment of women?”

This is a little more complicated because the charge is more complicated. If you look at the causal chain that makes up this charge, you will see that the declaration contains a lot of elements. It begins with “the policies and approach embraced by the Trump administration.” That is the element defining the source of the action. It continues with “executive orders and members of the new administration’s cabinet;” these are the means through which the approach is executed. The goal of this actor and these specified means is a whole series of outcomes, from which I have chosen “the empowerment of women” as my example.

What does “the empowerment of women” mean? I called myself a liberal Democrat, Princeton 5 earlier, but I will have to admit to an exception here. The “empowerment of women” has often meant the demand for the professionalization of women—whether any particular woman is attracted to that style of life or not—and the blanket condemnation of women who choose other kinds of life. If these women don’t want what we (liberal Democrats) think they ought to want, then clearly, they have been brainwashed and we are here to set them straight. I reject that view.

What I would like to see is an aggressive clearing of the way for women to rise in business and government to the levels to which they aspire and to which their talents and their hard work entitle them. Simultaneously, I want every woman to be free to choose the kind of life she aspires to and to be celebrated for that choice. I want, in other words, for some women to be empowered to choose this and for other women to be empowered to choose that. No one I know means that by the phrase “empowerment of women” and when I read these faculty members declaration that they are for “empowerment” and that the Trump administration is against it, I suspect that they mean the old one-sided liberal Democratic pitch. This is the pitch, by the way that caused white women by and large (53%), to vote AGAINST the feminist and FOR the misogynist.

Maybe one more.

Quibble 4 God hates capitalism.

What these authors, quoting Martin Luther King Jr., call “extreme materialism,” is the foundation of the capitalist system. That isn’t the way Adam Smith, the first great theorist of capitalism, thought it ought to be, but that is the way it has been ever since aggregate consumer spending became the principal driver of the economy.

I’m sure “extreme materialism” is bad for the individuals who choose it, but I am not sure it is a proper subject for public policy.

Princeton 7 It can be a personal disease; I do know that. People can strip their lives of virtually everything worthwhile just to get more things. But I don’t think I want to say that it is a fault in an economic system based on consumer spending. No recent Democratic president has taken a stand against “extreme materialism.” Some—President Obama is a good example—have preached and modeled the value of other kinds of goals, but the Federal Reserve System has not been given any guidance about how to reduce the materialism of the American consumer; nor has the Department of the Treasury, nor Commerce, nor Labor.

What we would replace “extreme materialism” with is a complicated matter, particularly if we think of it as national policy. A “happiness metric” such as the one California briefly adopted? A family solidarity standard, such as the one columnist Ross Douthit suggested in his New York Times column on February 26? An increase in national virtue, such that spiritual rather than material values are to be pursued? What executive department would you give that to? I suspect these signatories are thinking of Mar a Lago, President Trump’s Florida showplace—just my suspicion—but remember that this charge started with the Trump administration and its members and their policies; they are thought of as the source of the action.

So, in summary, I am not attracted to the faith proclamations of these PTSem faculty. I don’t disagree with them very much. They and I could sit down and have a very civil and productive discussion about them I am sure. But I really don’t like the religious weaponization; I don’t like the demonization of opponents; I don’t like seeing personal standards being treated as if they were legitimate matters for policy adoption.

And most of all, I don’t like the way they make my job harder than it already is. I favor productive and persistent civil discourse across political positions. I do actually talk to conservatives. It won’t take that much to restore the Democrats to national power, but it is going to take a different direction than these seminarians are choosing to provide Democrats with the popular leeway to do anything.

[1] PTS, which you would think would work, is actually owned by Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, so Princeton has had to adjust.

[2] There are 44 full time faculty at the seminary according to the seminary web site. There were 33 full time faculty among the listed signers, along with 13 emeritus professors and 7 adjuncts. That’s 75% of the full time faculty.
[3] Another famous resident of Princeton, Albert Einstein, said that time and space are not really the constraints we had imagined them to be, but I am an essayist and they are real to me.
[4] This will undoubtedly amaze the 80% of evangelical Christians who voted for him.

Posted in Politics, Theology | Tagged faith and politics, President Trump, Princeton Theological Seminary, promoting civic discourse, speaking prejudice to power | Leave a comment

Resilience and its precursors

Posted on March 6, 2017 by hessd

So far as I have heard, everyone likes “resilience.” Especially in March. Only the good basketball teams wind up in their conference finals, and half of those good teams lose that game. And then they go on to play in the great March Madness tournament and the commentators wonder how those teams—the ones that lost in the conference finals—will react to the loss. Will their lose their momentum? Will they lose their confidence? Will they “rise to the occasion?” Will they learn, to their surprise, how unfazed they can be as they regroup and learn from their mistakes.?

Obviously, something bad is the precursor of “resilience.” If something bad had not happened, no one would want you to “bounce” [1] re-, “back” from it. So, not to get all smiley-face about it, the simple fact is that if bad things don’t happen to you then you don’t acquire the much-lauded trait of resilience.

I’m going to talk about marriages in a little while. I want you to know that as I continue just a little further about basketball teams. So your team lost. That’s a bad thing, of course, but it is not a simple thing. Accounts of why you lost will be varied and some will be more valuable than others. There is no point in saying that any of these accounts is wrong, but it is just a fact that they cannot all be made the focus. Some part of the experience—the defeat—needs to be the center of our team’s reflection and learning. Something, to say the same thing another way, must be salient.

We get “salient” from the same source as “resilient,” just as you would have guessed. Something is salient if it “jumps out” at you. That’s the “jump” of salire showing up again. Of this welter of possibilities, I would like to offer two for today. One is, “I did something wrong.” It could be because you were not able to do the right thing or it may be that you just screwed up. The other is, “We did something wrong.”

resile-5 I want to argue that the second interpretation is better. Improving something about the game of one player is a good thing, of course, but improving something about the team is a great deal better. And it sometimes happens, in the world created and sustained by sports analysts, that that loss in the conference finals was a blessing in disguise. “There is no way,” the analyst might say, “that this team wins the NCAA tournament without having suffered that crucial loss and learning how to put it behind them.”

And it might be true. We don’t know. Of course, they don’t know either. But buried in the particularities of winning and losing is a powerful truth. Who you became as a team is a result of the way you treated that setback and it may be the best thing that ever happened to that team or to that program. Where it is the challenge to the team that is salient, the learning that can result can be life-changing.

Marriage

And with “life-changing,” I shift over from sports to marriage and I want to start with a story. My very much loved wife, Marilyn, died of cancer in 2003. And now you think that I am going to consider how I “bounced back” from that tragedy. But if I was going to do that, I would have largely wasted everything I have written to this point, so that is not what I am going to do. I am going to talk about how Marilyn and I bounced back from the initial diagnosis and how we flourished as a couple during the years from then to her death.

“We” bounced back. That’s really the point. It wasn’t that I did or that she did. We did. That’s why I started with team metaphors.

But, of course, we had had practice and the one example of practice I would like to tell you about is our experience of driving together in England, Scotland, and Wales. It was really difficult and in that process, we learned something about each other and about ourselves as a couple.[2]

This is what British roundabouts look like. They take them very seriously there. And resile-1 Marilyn was not at her all-forgiving best. She had been in an automobile accident just a few days before we left; she was still badly bruised and was sitting “on the wrong side of the car,” as one does in the UK, and watching cars driving in unfamiliar patterns and heading straight at her door. It was a tough first day. She proposed that we turn the car in and find another way of getting around. I agreed that I would, should it come to that, but I asked if we could try something else first.

We went to a book store/coffee shop. I bought the most detailed map of the UK I had ever seen. It showed the precise configuration of every roundabout in the country [3]. Then I went to a few people in the coffee shop and did my helpless American thing and asked them to explain the roundabouts to me. Each and every person I asked took a paper napkin from the dispenser on the table and drew the same diagram and then explained it using very nearly the same words.

Marilyn and I came to call it “doing the roundabouts.” Here’s what we did. I drove (from the wrong side of the car) and she managed this huge atlas of roadways. As we approached a roundabout, she would tell me which arm of the complex we were coming in on, which one we would be going out on, and how many we would pass up in doing that. Then she would count them off as I drove—not this one, not this one, the next one, OK, this one. It gave me all the information I needed to negotiate the roundabouts. Providing that information was obviously useful to the process, but, less obviously, it gave Marilyn a job that did not involve looking out the window. It was beautiful. Had it been in France, it would have been a pas de deux.

resile-6 When, some years later, when she was diagnosed with cancer, we had the roundabout process to fall back on. We called our negotiation of the diagnostic marathon, “doing the roundabouts,” and we knew exactly what that meant. It meant an intimate and joint understanding of what we were doing and the full engagement of each of us in some necessary part of the task. And, best of all, we did it on purpose and we knew we were doing it on purpose.

I don’t want to imply that we “learned resilience” by driving together in the UK. In fact, each of us had learned resilience to some extent before we met and we learned to resile together (I had to do it just once—the verb, you know) in many other ways before and after the UK. But the roundabout experience served as a common referent and when we referred to it, we were referring to all the things we had learned to manage together and, mostly, to master together.

What you can learn

Obviously, I am not pitching traveling together in foreign lands. I am not pitching doing things that are new and possibly dangerous and that could cause you to fail—either a failure of nerve or a failure to succeed. I am pitching the process by which either partner takes a failure as the occasion for strengthening the team that will have the responsibility for managing the consequences of the failure. “His failure;” or “her failure.” Who cares?

Every couple knows that a failure by either can become the occasion for a civil war. How many formerly happy couples have failed to survive the death of their child? But over and beyond the obvious truth that he must find a way to process a tragedy in his life and she must find a way to process a tragedy in her life, it is powerfully true that they must find a way to process a tragedy that affects them both. If life is a dance, a common tragedy is an opportunity for a pas de deux.

Every defeat that improves the capacity of the couple to respond is a victory. Like the team Shoulda. Woulda. Coulda. that lost in the conference finals and met in the locker room to look each other in the eye and vow to trust each other more, the couple that treats a defeat like that has laid the foundation for a successful season. Or a successful program. Or a tradition of winning. Years down the road, some new player will start blaming another for “having lost us the game.” And an older player—ANY older player in that program—will take him aside and say, “That’s not how we do it here.”

And if the coach says, “Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety,”[4] he says it quietly in his office or at home to his English teacher wife.

[1] The root of the word “resilience” is salire, a Latin verb meaning to jump or leap. There is actually a transitive English verb “to resile,” meaning roughly the same thing, so sportscasters might always hope that Duke, let’s say, will resile from its defeat by North Carolina.
[2] A highway patrolman from a department that is self-insured, ran into her. He made an illegal U-turn and collided with her right on the driver’s door. He and she wound up on adjacent beds at the hospital (both hurt, neither seriously) and before either could move, the police department mounted a charm offensive, hoping that Marilyn would not sue them for their obvious and inexcusable misdeeds.
[3] Except London, probably, and even I knew better than to drive in London.
[4] Henry IV, Part I, Act 2, Scene 3

Posted in Communication, Living My Life, Love and Marriage, Uncategorized | Tagged better common decisions, driving in the UK, failure, March Madness, my fault, our fault, pas de deux, resilience | 2 Comments

And all the residents are above average

Posted on March 4, 2017 by hessd

When Bette and I completed our plan to move to a retirement community last August, we knew that we were going to “reside” there. That was the point after all. Neither of us appreciated the exalted status that would imply; that we were going to be “residents.” Being a resident at Holladay Park Plaza in Portland is a very big deal. We were surprised—I was, anyway—and that is what this essay is about.

At Holladay Park, a persistent tension exists between two entirely respectable positions. Each establishes a set of categories. The first set, I would call status-denying and status-affirming. That will mean something in just a moment; please be patient. I’m a social scientist by training and clunky-sounding terms like that actually mean something to me.

I call the two status-denying and status-affirming, but, of course, denying the particular status of a person means focusing on something else and the other set of categories relies on that “else.” I think the people who work with the other set of options might call their preferred set “person-affirming,” meaning that every human has an inherent dignity and the right to be treated as an equal, and “person-denying,” meaning that some humans have this right and some do not. People come like the six dots below.

That latter position is entirely honorable, it seems to me, as a motivation, but as a rule of operations, it is a SNAFU waiting to happen. If I were called on to defend the status-oriented system, I would say that, at least at Holladay Park status-1 , it functions to protect the staff and it protects the residents and that is why it is good.

A very attractive staff member explained the principle to me recently. The background of this principle is that no tipping is allowed here. There is no giving of gifts either, except the programs by which “the employees” are given gifts or bonuses or scholarships. The staff member who explained this to me is exactly the kind of staff that people would want to give gifts to. The gifts would single her out as special, which she is, and then there would be the expectation that she would reciprocate is some way, however subtle. That’s where the train starts to go off the rails.

If she did not reciprocate, the gift giver might wonder why. The example she gave was that she would not be permitted to accept “a chocolate,” but it would be fine for her to accept “a box of chocolates” because she would share them with everyone else in the office. The “gift,” in other words, would not entitle the giver to anything—and that would be clear to everyone— and therefore she could accept it. No harm, no foul.

I think this is a wonderful rule because I have an acute sense of where the natural pattern of behavior would lead if we did not have such a rule. In a setting where everyone knows who has received good service and who has not, it is almost inevitable that favortism be chosen as an explanation. If A got served more promptly than B or if A’s food preferences were remembered while B’s were forgotten, or if extra menu options are offered to A but not to B, you know it will not take the B’s of the world very long to charge that the staff are playing favorites. It would be like throwing sand in the gears of the community.

And that’s just the dining room. If the housekeepers treat some apartments better than others or the maintenance staff respond to some needs more promptly than others, the charge of playing favorites is right around the corner waiting to attack.

The solution to all these problems is the same: it is the formal equality of all residents. status-5 That is, the residents are treated alike because they all share they same status. They are “residents,” the status I stumbled into when I moved here. They are not treated differently because they are so different as persons. And this formal equality is played out as the staff [1] refers to each resident formally as Mr. or Mrs. or Ms. and we refer to them by their first names. There is a status asymmetry, in other words, that is presupposed by the culture and practiced by the staff.

It is this distance, this echo of formality, that protects the staff from getting trapped in interpersonal relationships which will necessarily vary from one person to another. The dining hall manager, who doubles as the maître d’ hôtel, receives each diner by name and seats them at the tables they have reserved or arranges tables for those who have not made arrangements on their own. “Mr and Mrs. Hess, your table is ready for you,” is a common way to be greeted in the dining room (when we have made a reservation) and that treatment started the week we became residents.

The same pattern is taken up by the wait staff, who have been trained by the manager and who are under her guidance. Some of the wait staff are very good and others not so good. We are pleased by the performance of some and displeased by the performance of others. But all wait staff are protected by the formality of the relationship. If their supervisor needs to know something about their service, she is told. But the servers are not told. They are, in a sense, “too far away” to be treated like that and that protects them. [2]

status-2 It’s really just the no tipping rule played out in most forms of face-to-face interaction. Tipping is a great idea in a restaurant because rewarding the staff for extraordinary service is built into the model and works to reward be best servers. There is a very good restaurant within a few blocks of Holladay Park Plaza where there is a superb waitress; I conspire to be seated at one of her tables. She is good at her job and has a great deal of fun in the process and I tip substantially to reflect how well pleased I am. That works just fine in the restaurant setting. It would be just awful at the retirement center.

Before I let this go, let me represent “the other side” of the argument. I characterized it as nobly motivated. It is based on the truth that all persons have a dignity that belongs properly to them, but then it skips over the roles those persons are playing at the time and which are necessary to the smooth functioning of a society.

According to this view, it would be unacceptable for me to be called Mr. Hess by a staff person and for me to call him George in return. If I should call him George, then he should call me Dale . That protects the equality of persons by requiring a symmetry of address. “Mutual respect” requires that we relate as persons, not as statuses. This is the same logic by which “modern parents” teach their children to call them by their first names just as they call the children by their first names. It is, these parents believe, a mark of respect to insist on symmetry.

Some of the older residents at Holladay Park feel that way about the staff. They know these staff people; they may know the spouses and the children. They celebrate these staff members’ successes, especially those that have nothing to do with their employment, and mourn the setbacks. They involve themselves as they are able in the health and illness of staff and woe to the resident who tries to tell them that they should not. Woe also, I imagine, to the staff supervisor who objects to this bending of the rules by a long-time resident.

So long as these little bendings of the rules are isolated, they are unlikely to cause tensions status-3 within the system, just as the occasional filching of towels from motels is not likely to cause the motel owners to hide all the towels. The behavior of these older residents is, in a sense, the cost of doing business. It is allowable so long as it doesn’t become common.

But it is not a principle of operation that could be tolerated within the system and the major reason that is so is that it offers no protection to the staff.

The same staff member who gave me the example of the box of chocolates summarized her point in very general terms. “You live here,” she said, meaning me in my resident status, not me personally. “We just work here. It’s your home and we need to make it a good place for everyone.”

“We do that,” she said, “by putting the interests of the residents at the center of our concern. We want you to have the kind of life you had in mind when you chose Holladay Park. That’s our job.”

She may have expressed it a little more cogently than another staff member might have, but I am quite sure that it is “the line” of the institution she was expressing. It is the focus of training, as I imagine it, and of memos and of special commendations that we residents never get to see and the existence of which we only imagine.

It is the staff contribution to the resident culture for which Holladay Park is well-known and widely respected. It isn’t “natural” in the sense that people are natural because systems organized around statuses, such as the system we have at Holladay Park, are not natural. They are an achievement. But it has been carefully thought through by someone, long before Bette and I got here, and it is practiced daily by a circulating cadre of staff who, when they have been with us for awhile, learn that “this is how we do it here.”

[1] Not all kinds of staff (there are exceptions) but within a kind of staff, e.g. dining hall staff, everyone follows the same rule.
[2] If the dining hall manager were also “far away,” the whole system would collapse, but she is not.

Posted in Living My Life, Sustainability | Tagged courtesy, fomality, formal equality, generous service, protecting the residents, protecting the staff, retirement centers | Leave a comment

I know exactly how you feel

Posted on March 2, 2017 by hessd

Well first, can it possibly be true? Can anyone who is not me know just how I feel? No. It cannot be.

But it can be largely true? Yes, and it almost certainly is. I am going to think a little today about why we choose the first answer more often than the second. (Hint: it isn’t because it is more accurate.) But first, let’s do a little cleaning up of the underbrush.

grief-3 The first question we might ask is, “Do you know how you feel?” You wouldn’t know it from reading introductory psychology texts, but emotions don’t come with discrete labels. You feel what you feel, of course, but when you get around to calling it something, you are in the same mess anyone else is. It isn’t quite like the Snickers ad that assures us the we aren’t quite ourselves when we are hungry, but I think the truth is off somewhere in that direction.

When you are emotionally distraught for some reason and someone says, “I know just how you feel,” you might plausibly say, “Really? How do I feel?” [1] And the person attempting to reassure you offers some labels like angry or sad or happy or horny. You compare the words you have chosen to represent those feelings and compare your list to his and you feel quite justified in rejecting his understanding of you if the lists don’t match.But here’s the truth. You are guessing just as much as he is. Maybe you ought to back off a little. There is no reason to think that the lists will match or, if they do not, that his is less accurate than yours.

grief 4.jpg

But that’s not really what is pushing my button today. The diagram above is a way of thinking about which personal experiences we will claim as unique and which we will grant to be widely shared. The representation of what is widely shared—nearly everything as the yellow area shows—is the way community-oriented societies picture it. This represents both the fact of the matter and the ought of the matter; it represents how things actually are and how they should be.

In individualistic societies like ours, on the other hand, being unique is a highly desired status. It is, as I say a status; a recognized position. As a matter of actual fact, each of us really is unique, but that’s not what we are after. We want our uniqueness to be recognized. This has been apparent to advertisers for many years, of course, but you do notice it as the incessant drumbeat of uniqueness dominates the way we push products and services.

So what would it mean to be completely one of a kind if we are talking about an experience like grief? It would mean that no one understands what you are going through. You wouldn’t think that is a good thing. It makes you wonder why we demand it.

When someone says he or she knows how we feel and we, ironically or snarkily or grief-2 furiously deny that it is true, we are left to our own incomprehensible, unsharable grief. I was told by someone I asked about it yesterday that it was “an arrogant thing to say to another.” [2]

I argued above that no plausible mechanism exists by which I can say as a matter of careful determination that you do NOT know how I feel. I am arguing here that the terrible aloneness of grief is an artifact of our demand for uniqueness.

What would happen if we decided that the emotions we feel—what we call “private inner emotions”—are pretty much the same as those felt by others who have gone through what we are going through? A man whose wife had died could say, for instance, to another man whose wife had died, “I know what you are going through,” and be received warmly. “I know you do,” he might say in reply, “Isn’t it just horrible?”

Or he might say, “Does it ever get to the place where it doesn’t hurt all the time?”

Or he might say, “Did you do anything that helped you? I’m not having much luck with what I’m trying.”

Or he might say, “I know there are a lot of differences between the situation I am facing and the one you faced, but I take great comfort is seeing that you have emerged whole and ready to help.”

Those sound attractive to me. I have benefitted, myself, from being on both sides of that experience and have been warmed by the generosity and the empathy of others. All that goes away when I say I would rather be incomprehensible than comforted.

Consider this, for instance, from Harry Triandis’s well-known Individualism & Collectivism. [3] I am going to change his word “collectivism” in the quotation to “group-oriented.” It is a shame that “collectivism” is such a scary word in our time, but it is and I want you to be able to hear what Triandis is saying.

Identity among group-oriented cultures is defined by relationships and group memberships. Individualists base their identity on what they own and their experiences. Not surprisingly, the emotions of [people in] “group-oriented cultures” tend to be other-focused (e.g. empathy) and of short duration (they last as long as the [members] are in a situation). The emotions of individualists are ego-focused (e.g. anger) and of long duration (do not necessarily change with the situation).

One of the implications of this focus on relationships is that the range of common experience it imagines is quite large—I imagine your experience to be largely like mine—and the range of feelings thought to be appropriate is also large. And one of the implications of organization that Triandis calls “individualism” is that emotions are organized in terms of oneself (by ego-centered, he doesn’t mean egotistical). That means that there may be a good deal of payoff for rejecting the applicability of the experiences others have had.

Groups like Alcoholics Anonymous have, of course, defined the similarity of experiences by group membership. That’s what being a member means. The structure of rewards is reversed in an AA meeting so that the experiences of each are declared to be very much like the experiences of all. Members are said to take great comfort in this, but alcoholism is the ticket to membership in such a group.

Why would common humanity not be enough?

[1] I said it was plausible. I’m not recommending it. It has a belligerent sort of sound to it.
[2] And maybe it is. If we have organized our society so that “nobody knows how I am feeling” and that anyone who says he does in engaging in some form of oneupmanship, then maybe a gesture of this kind is arrogant. I don’t think it would have to be, but maybe it is.

[3] Westview Press, 1995, pp. 71,72.

Posted in Living My Life | Tagged grief, individualism, sharing feelings, the demand for uniqueness, the desire to belong | Leave a comment

How not to save civil society

Posted on March 1, 2017 by hessd

I am going to urge you to take a look at Paul Krugman’s column in today’s New York Times. I don’t like it and I very much hope that you won’t like it either, but let’s start by reading it.

civil-1 Here’s the argument. Trump has his heart set on authoritarian control of all the major institutions in the country, not just the political and economic ones. If we just sit back and let him do it, as some self-styled “voices of reason” counsel, we will lose our democratic system and may never get it back. [1]

So here’s Krugman’s counsel. It is the last line in the column and it is a bell-ringer.

When neither the president nor his allies in Congress show any sign of respecting basic American values, an aroused public that’s willing to take names is all we have.

Of course, “ringing the bell” isn’t all Krugman has in mind. He is an economist, after all. He provides specific instances of the kind of opposition he thinks is crucially important. Here are the examples he provides:

It means patronizing businesses that defend our values and not those willing to go along with undermining them.
It means letting public figures, however nonpolitical their professions, know that people care about the stands they take, or don’t.
For example, it is not O.K. for newspapers to publish he-said-she-said pieces that paper over administration lies, let alone beat-sweetening puff pieces about Trump allies. It’s not O.K. for businesses to supply Mr. Trump with photo ops claiming undeserved credit for job creation — or for business leaders to serve on “advisory” panels that are really just another kind of photo op.
It’s not even O.K. to go golfing with the president, saying that it’s about showing respect for the office, not the man.

The examples make it clear what he would like to see happen. His initial phrasing—“an aroused public that’s willing to take names”—is very spirited; the examples, not so much.

Let’s remember that Krugman’s announced goal is to protect civil society. His proposal is that formerly civil society be relentlessly politicized. It means in point one that we patronize the businesses with the right political values and, I suppose, boycott those with the wrong political values. It means in point two, demanding of all public figures—writers, lecturers, actors, athletes, people who are famous for being famous—that they trade their fame in for public position taking. It means, in point four, that the highest office in the land be treated as a partisan office ONLY, and not also a ceremonial office. [2]

That’s what Krugman says. I have three things to say in response.

plowshare

First, you don’t protect civil society like that. Krugman defines “civil society” as “institutions outside the government proper.” I agree, but I would define it a little more broadly. I would say that institutions that are principally political or principally economic are both outside “civil society.”

Second, Krugman portrays this an an emergency measure as if when the need for it is over, we will stop doing it. Isaiah 2:4 celebrates the beating of swords into plowshares and the spears into pruning hooks. I am glad that can happen, but the much more common transformation is from plowshares into swords and pruning hooks into spears. Not very many people ever feel it is safe to change them back. It’s like not carrying a gun after a period of carrying it. It’s like turning off your burglar alarm now that it is safe to. These things just don’t happen.

Third, Krugman seems to feel that when we have done the right thing—we have risen up against the impending Trump dictatorship—we will stop and then it will be over. Why would it be over? When we stop, the other side will start. Everything we politicize, they will politicize. And when we are done, they will feel that it is their turn, especially if we are successful at it. What we do as an emergency measure, will become the new norm as they respond in kind.

I have profited greatly from reading a communitarian sociologist named Frank Hearn. In his book, Moral Order and Social Disorder: The American Search for Civil Society, he looks at things in the common three-part way. There is the polity (the political system) and the economy (the economic system) and the society (the social system). As a communitarian, Hearn finds that most problems are best addressed in the social system. He writes soaring and persuasive prose about social institutions and how reliant we are on their proper functioning.

And along with all the beautiful language, he provides a few really ugly words: politicization and commodification. These are processes (the -zation and the -ification tell you that) by which an issue that was at one place is taken up and put somewhere else. Some issues that are properly social have been “politicized;” they have been taken out of the setting where good outcomes might be achieved, and have been put somewhere else. If they have been put into the political system, Hearn says they have been “politicized;” if they have been put into the economic system, he says they have been “commodified.”

Krugman’s proposal is, using Hearn’s language, a massive politicization of civil society. If we do that, we won’t get it back.

[1] Revolutions, just in case your mind was going that way, are very poor ways to establish democratic systems for the same reason that “broil” is not a good setting for croissants.
[2] We have already had parents of soldiers killed in action refuse any recognition of their sacrifice if it is to come from the President, the Commander-in-Chief of all our armed forces.
[3] A perfectly ordinary triad of social institutions reflects this: polity, economy, society.

Posted in Political Psychology, Politics, Society | Tagged a Trump dictatorship, civil society, Paul Krugman | Leave a comment

The Re- of Resurrection

Posted on February 26, 2017 by hessd

The argument in this essay is that whoever put the re- prefix on resurrection did us no favors. We’ll see. Despite the imminent onset of the Lenten season, this is not a doctrinal investigation. This is a linguistic investigation. There is, of course, a doctrinal background, but the problem is going to boil down, eventually, to how to describe three things in a word that is able to point to only two things.

In Christian circles, the notion of the resurrection of Jesus is important for several reasons. One has to do with his own resurrection, sometimes called “The” Resurrection. He was alive, as everyone knows, then he was dead for awhile and then he was alive again. [1] The second reason Christians think of this as an important event is that it is taken to be the first of many, as if some wall had been breached and now that it was open, everyone could go through.

Resurrection has also been contentious among Christians because, on the one hand, there seems no way to understand it and, on the other, no way to do without it. As I have thought about it recently, it seems to me that the part of the word I am having trouble with is the first part: re-. If it means “again,” which it most often does, then something is like it was before. There are three stages required here: it was, then it was’t, now it is again. That’s “re-”

Three words are common in the re- business. I thought it might be worth while to check out the root metaphors. These metaphors were devised by people who, like us, want to give a sense of what has happened or could happen, but can’t describe it more exactly. The three words I have in mind are: reanimate, resuscitate, and resurrect. [2]

The Etymological Infrastructure

Animate looks straightforward. The Latin anima, now often used as an English word thanks to Jung, means “what makes us alive.” It is what “animals” have in common; they all have anima. They are animate (slipped an adjective in there) because they have been animated. Just how they were animated depends largely on what kind of animal we are talking about, but since we care about the word rather than the beast, it doesn’t really matter.

For anything to meet the requirements of the word “reanimate,” it must have been animate, and then not animate, and then animate again. The word needs those three steps. That doesn’t sound too hard. We look up what anima meant in Latin and we are almost home. But when you look it up—I use the Webster’s New World Dictionary phone app for nearly everything on the first pass—you discover that it meant “breath, air, life principle, or soul.” The first two aren’t that hard—we know what breath and air are—but what are the “life principle” or the “soul.” Are they the kinds of things you can have and then lose and then get back? I don’t think the etymology helps us here.

Maybe resuscitate will be better. We have the familiar re-, with its little three step test, and the Latin verb suscitare, “to arouse.” I had a quick hope, just as quickly dashed, that there might be a relationship between the sus- of suscitare and the suss of “So, you sussed it out, did you?” [3] But the actual source of “resuscitate” leaves us with only another video of what happened. Something was aroused and then not—dormant, inert, dead?—and then “aroused” again. Resuscitation as an empirical matter is not at all uncommon. Aren’t we resuscitated from sleep every morning? Who has not wakened a person from an unconscious inert position and seen the “resuscitation” firsthand?

That brings us to resurrect and to a new metaphor. The Latin verb is surgere, “to rise up.” Of course a lot of things can rise up. Waves can, springs can, voltage can, underdogs can. [4] Rising up is not a particularly animate thing, which distinguishes the root metaphor from both animate and suscitate; rather it is a low to high thing. Anything that can move quickly from low to high can “surge” and the second time it does it, it has “resurged” (actually an English word, which I have never encountered before.) The old tagline, “The South shall rise again” could be rendered “the South shall resurge,” but of course, when you say it out loud, you see why it shouldn’t.

We have completed the etymological infrastructure now. I found it interesting and informative, but not very helpful as a theological matter. Biblically, the big distinction is between resuscitation and resurrection. As a matter of metaphors, it requires us to choose between “arousal” and “surging up” and there is no rationale at all to guide us. As a matter of the significance of those events themselves, there is a lot to guide us, so let’s turn to that.

Resuscitation and Resurrection

Here we have to confront the difference between the words and the meanings. Only resuscitation can properly use re- as a prefix. Resurrection does not postulate a “going back” to anything, but a going on to something. This something happens after death, so we need a prefix the points forward. We have several, though so far as I know, none has been used so solve this problem. At the very least, we have trans- from the Latin collection and meta- from the Greek collection. Why not use one of those? Here is why we need to distinguish them.

Resuscitation is the postponement of death. Resurrection is “something else.” I’m not sure just what the “else” is, but as we look at the development of the stories, I think we will see that the early tellers and re-tellers were more interested in what meanings it excluded than they were with exactly what meaning it specified.

I wouldn’t want to say that resuscitation—“unexpected arousal”—stories are a dime a dozen in scripture, but there are too many of them to try to cover. Let’s remember that we are looking at the three stage “re-” pattern and let’s try it on Jesus’ friend Lazarus, as John tells the story in chapter 11. Lazarus was alive and then he was dead and then Jesus “raised him from the dead” and he was alive again.

That’s the way the story goes. But notice that when we say “raised” (a low to high word) to describe the resuscitation (an inert to aroused word) of Lazarus, we have mixed the two root metaphors. I don’t think that’s a big deal—or at least, I didn’t before today—but it would be tidier if we kept them together. If we did that, we would say that Lazarus was “aroused from the dead” (following suscitare) and that Jesus was “raised from the dead” (following surgere).

In any case, there is a fourth step to resuscitation, which is that you die again. The “arousal” doesn’t last; It is a postponement of death, not a transcendence of it or a revocation of it or whatever else the New Testament writers might mean. Resuscitation is a good thing to the extent that being alive is better than being dead.

In the biblical sense, however, resurrection brings us to new ground. Resurrection is not a temporary reanimation. The word describes a new status entirely. And that brings us to ask why reaching a completely new level of life is described by a word beginning with re-. Why is that?

I think the language problem we are facing here is that we have only one visual reference. We do have “living;” we know what it looks like. If you want to point to a new status—a life beyond death—you have to say either that it looks just like the old life or that it looks like something new.

Resuscitate works just fine for returning to the common referent. Lazarus is “alive again, just as he was before.” But Jesus is not “alive again just as he was before;” he is alive in a different way entirely. Theologically, just what that new way is, is crucially important, but linguistically, the problem is that it is new and that means we can’t use re- to describe it.

Are there other terms we could use?

We could use a Latin prefix like trans-, which points to a crossing over, rather than to a coming back. The Greek meta- is even better with its principal meaning of “beyond.” But if we use those, we lose the common referent, which is what re- gives us. “Re-“ says, “Remember what living looks like? He has come back to it.” “Meta-“ says, “He has gone beyond what we know, whatever state that implies.” Surely that is not very satisfying.

A partial solution is to make the referent “death,” rather than “life,” and we could say not that Jesus “returned to life” but that he “transcended death.” I call it a partial solution because it doesn’t really tell us anything. On the other hand, it avoids a word we already know is wrong. Jesus was not re- anything. But he was meta- something. He went “beyond” death.

The Greek noun thanatos, “death” is an available word for this purpose. If we latched the Greek prefix meta- to it, it would enable us to define the experience of Jesus not as a “return” to life—which we know is not correct—but as a “going on beyond death,” which is correct as far as it goes, even though it doesn’t tell us what “beyond death” is like. Besides that, it would require the development of some truly ugly words, like metathanatos for “resurrection” and we might even have to say that Jesus was metathanatized; he was “beyond deathed.” Word like that seem a high price to pay just for being right.

If we want to skip references to life and death entirely, we can say that the Jesus who appeared to his disciples after his death had experienced “metamorphosis” or “transformation.” The combination of prefix and root is identical; the difference is that metamorphosis uses the Greek morphē, (form) while transformation uses the Latin forma. The good thing is that these are already common English words pointing to a fundamental change of “form.” The bad thing is that in concentrating of the form, we lose the focus on life and death, which is also fundamental to these ideas.

Maybe this is going to be one of those language problems where you have to say X and it’s OK to do that if you remember that Y is actually the case. We do, after all, say that the sun rises, when we all know that the earth turns. Maybe we could just say that the Son also rises.

[1] This had a substantial impact on his followers, who went very quickly from people who had high hopes, but had been deeply disappointed in how things worked out, to people who were exultant and began making nuisances out of themselves.
[2] I have chosen to work with the verb forms because it is the action of becoming something again, not the state of having become something again, I want to look at.
[3] Alas, suss is an altered contraction of suspect and has been with us for only the last 50 years. The sus- of suscitare is actually sub- (under) where by linguistic convention, the b- of sub assimilates to the s- of suscitare and disappears except for etymological inquiries. The other part of suscitare is the Latin verb, citare, “to arouse,” and if you think it looks familiar, it is probably because you have seen it in incite and done it in recite.
[4] The crack about the voltage meter reminded me that anyone who uses computers knows about “surge protectors.” And since there is a religious background to the use of resurrection, not to its core meaning, it leads my mind to what the Sadducees and the Romans would have given for a really good “surge protector” early in the first century A. D.

Posted in Biblical Studies, Words | Tagged going beyond death, reanimation, resurrection, resuscitation, taking prefixes seriously | Leave a comment

How “it” really happened

Posted on February 18, 2017 by hessd

I am going to wind up saying that I don’t know how it really happened and before you start pressing me on just what “it” I have in mind, I want to say that I don’t have one in mind. I do have an illustration.

Let’s touch down very briefly at recent at the chemistry of memory. According to the latest it-1 reading I have done, memories are not “accessed” in the way a filed document is; it is “recreated” each time. One thing that means is that although pulling a document out of a folder—either the paper kind or the electronic kind—doesn’t alter the document at all, recreating a “document” out of the elements of memory most certainly alters it.

That’s what I know about memory and chemistry; more than I know, actually.

Then I think of Annie Dillard’s lecture in Portland. A woman asked her, after the talk, to reflect on some aspect or other of her childhood. It seemed like a reasonable request to me. Dillard has written a very good book, An American Childhood, about that time in her life. But she shook her head sadly and said, “I don’t have a childhood anymore. I cannibalized it for spare parts.”

I knew exactly what she meant. She had ransacked her childhood memories for the details that would make the book work and now she doesn’t know what really happened anymore. I think I would have said that she had “commodified” her early memories, but I have probably read more Marx than she has.

My family is the kind that treasures the stories of our childhood. Mostly, we don’t remember the actual events that make up the story. What we remember is Mother’s retelling of it. Well, Mother had a goal in mind in shaping that story to begin with and a separate goal in retelling it over and over and probably yet another goal in writing it down in the form she wrote it in the books of family lore. Asking, after all that, “what really happened” is completely futile.

But I want now to tell you something that happened to me. I remember a couple of actual facts pertaining to the event—none of them particularly important. I had an experience I have been calling “a vision.” I call it that because I don’t know what else to call it; I don’t remember any visual part of the experience at all.

This happened to me in 1959 on a Friday afternoon in the spring. I had just finished teaching an 8th grade class in a suburb near Wheaton, Illinois (we called it “practice teaching” back then) and I was walking east across the parking lot to my car. “It” was instantaneous. I ordinarily say, in describing it, that “it” happened between the time my left foot hit the pavement and the time my right foot hit, but that’s just an accommodation to a narrative style.

I describe it as a vision so that I can say what the vision was like. All of this is pure invention (except for the obvious debt it owes to Peter’s vision in Acts 10) but it enables me to say that something happened first and something after that, and so on. I say that I saw a great grey filing cabinet [1] coming down from the sky and a voice speaking to me. It might have begun, “Listen up, dummy.” Or not.

It said that the filing cabinet was made up of drawers, the drawers of folders, the folders of documents, the documents of paragraphs, the paragraphs of sentences, the sentences of words, and the words of letters. And it might have concluded with an admonition like “Look and understand and learn.”

Not only is that “all I remember,” it is all I have ever made up in telling the story over and over again. I have a really good memory for “how I tell that story about my vision,”since I have done it many times, but how I actually experienced “it” at the time, much less just what it was that happened, I have no idea at all. None.

However, “it,” whatever it was, transformed my life. I had been a less than mediocre student, going to a very good school. My problem, as I reflect on it, was that I didn’t have any notion of subordinating one fact to another. Headings and peripheral observations and subpoints and illustrations of the main point were all just “things to learn” to me. I dumped them into the same box and at test time, fished around in the box for some number of them and then presented it in as intellectual-sounding language as I could command. That had served me very well before Wheaton. Wheaton wasn’t buying it.

Immediately after “my vision” and ever afterwards, I have seen the structure of things—an argument, a description, a personal reflection—first, and then the major subordinate elements and then the minor subordinate elements, and so on. Just as “the voice” told me to do. I never got another bad grade, ever, and my career as an elementary and high school teacher and as a professor of undergraduates and graduates was transformed. I tried to teach them, with limited success I will say, the beauty to which my vision had pointed me.

Two years ago, I taught a course in “the Bible” at the First Presbyterian Church in Portland, Oregon (hereafter, “my church.”) The Bible! Daunting, you say? Not at all. There are two testaments, each of which is made up of “books” each of which, with an exception or two, is made up of chapters, which are made up of “verses” and so on. Does anything sound familiar?

As a class project, the members of the class wrote an essay in answer to the question, “What is the story the Bible tells?” I gave them a 300 word limit; they finished it in 284. Nothing of “the story” the Bible tells is left out so far as the scope of the story is concerned. They began where the story begins (Genesis 1:1) and ended where the story ends—not where the Bible ends. How did they do that? Well…about halfway through the 34-week course, I told them about my “vision” and we went from there. [2]

Since I have lived my life this way for—let’s see, in 2019, it will have been 60 years in the life of a man who won’t turn 80 until later this year—a long time and in that time, I have found little clippings that represent the approach in a more palatable manner. Here, for instance, is Max Eastman in The Enjoyment of Laughter.

The mind should approach a body of knowledge as the eyes approach an object, seeing it in gross outline first, and then by gradual steps, without losing the outline, discovering the details.

Then he gives an example.

A book on American history, for instance—I mean a textbook, for I am not talking about literature, thought, argument, or education in the full sense, but only instruction—should begin by telling in a few sentences the author’s conception of the significant form of that history as a whole, America was inhabited by Indians, Europe discovered it, certain phases of development were passed through, and we arrived at the Great Depression—not more than a page. [3]

So an overview of the Bible or anything else is a matter of structure first, then depth, then detail. I have just agreed to read a very densely written book called Jesus: Symbol of God by Roger Haight. According to my first quick pass over it, it is going to be really good and I chose it so I could discuss it with a resident here, who suggested it to me. We both like theology and I thought I should play in his yard before I invited him to come and play in my yard.

How to handle a book as dense and difficult as Haight’s book? No problem. You look over the way the book is laid out and choose the crucial spot. The crucial spot might be the methodological weakness or the part of his case that matters the most to me or the place in my own thinking that is the weakest and where I could use the most help. Any of those are potentially good criteria for choosing what to read first.

I chose Chapter 4, “The God of Jesus.” I could justify that choice theologically, but that’s not what this essay is about. That chapter is 31 pages long in small print and its internal structure is very complex. What to do? No problem. The chapter is made up of headings, right, and the headings are divided up into subheadings…you get the idea.

Over the years, I have devised a way of visually representing this approach. It looks like this.

it 4.jpeg And so on. 2a might be further divided into 2a-1 and 2a-2 by horizontal lines, but that is seldom needed and never very useful. There are, as you can easily see, four major parts to this “chapter;” the introduction and four substantive sections. The first section has seven subsections. The second section has 12, and so on. A, B, C, D provides the “outline” of the “chapter.” Subsections 1—7 provide the “outline” of Section A.

I taught this to my 8th graders beginning in 1960 and to my doctoral students beginning in 1998. In both cases, it was obvious to some, achievable by other, and completely mystifying to still others. I can do without the visualized table—although ordinarily I use it when I am working out the structure of something for myself—but I cannot conceivably do without the top down organization of the material.

And this happened to me between the time my left foot hit the pavement and the time my right foot hit. At least, that’s the way I tell the story.

[1] You remember filing cabinets, right?
[2] There were conflicts, of course. Some wanted this doctrine or that, this event or that to be included, but the absolute limit on words was pretty unforgiving and they had to perform a doctrinal triage, which rejoiced the heart of their teacher.
[3] In my few years at Malone College, I had the chance to teach American history several time and this is how I taught it. A single page first. Then the articles from the World Book Encyclopedia and from the Great Bolshoi Encyclopedia, telling the story briefly from the American and Soviet perspectives. Then two weeks spent in a short and well written American history, then, finally the course text.

Posted in Biblical Studies, Books, Living My Life, ways of knowing | Tagged arguments and structure, having a vision, retelling a story, the vision that changed my life, what happens to old memories | Leave a comment

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