Hillary and “the women’s vote” in Pennsylvania

Posted on January 5, 2017 by hessd

Emily Bazelon, who is as consistently feminist as any writer I know, wrote a piece for the New York Times that must have discouraged her deeply. It was published on November 15 and you can see it all here.  She is being grilled by Stephen Colbert in the picture.

hillary-3The part I have excerpted does not deal with the whole topic that the headline writers thought worthy—“college educated white women.” It deals with Palma Frable of Moscow, Pennsylvania and her daughters, Abigail and Lauren.

In this essay, I am going to pick seven reasons for the Frables’ choice and reflect on them. I recommend the article very highly and you may have your own reflections to share. I will put the quotations from the article in quote blocksand the West Wing dialogue in italics.

1. Trump promises improvements in the future

Clinton also lost white women by three crucial points in Pennsylvania. The Frables help explain why. The three women are college-educated or college-bound, and they voted for Trump not because they feel left behind but to improve economic opportunity, as they see it.

Of course, Clinton promised to improve economic opportunity too. The Frables believed Trump, but they did not believe Clinton. Why? My guess would be that the Clinton/Kaine proposals sounded very much like “more of the same.” Trump’s proposals sounded like a whole new approach. He made contradictory proposals, of course, which Clinton did not, but all of the proposals were “try a new approach” in their style. The Frables are not down and out, but they would like more opportunity rather than what we have now.

2. Not the bankruptcies but the recoveries

Trump’s business record — the fact that he bounced back despite the ups and the downs — initially attracted Frable and her daughters.

Nearly everyone I know focused on all the Trump failures and, in addition to that, on his characteristic way of making other people pay for those failures. That isn’t what attracted the Frables. They were impressed by how he kept bouncing back. His failures didn’t seem to daunt him. I imagine they could picture him as an entrepreneurial president, trying new things and bouncing back from his failures.

He seemed resilient, I guess. Hillary merely endured; Trump bounced back.

3. Not Gloria Steinem feminism, but “lipstick feminism”

Frable also admires Ivanka Trump and felt she was one of the campaign’s “top three assets.” She sees Ivanka as a role model for Abigail in her own entrepreneurial interests. It’s not Hillary’s “Gloria Steinem feminism,” as Frable put it, that she values. It’s Ivanka’s sleek version of female success, which commentators have labeled “commodity feminism” — branding to sell products.

When I got to the expression “sleek version of female success,” my mind went immediately to the best treatment of this contrast I have seen. It appeared on a West Wing (Season 3, episode 14) episode called “Night Five,” right in the middle of Season 3. Here’s what you need to know about this exchange.

Celia is a temporary worker in the White House. She represents “the old feminism” in this piece. Ainsley Hayes is an attorney working in the White House. She is beautiful, aggressive, and smart—oh, and Republican. She represents “the new feminism.”

hillary-2Sam had said to Ainsley, when she showed up in the dress she had been wearing to the opera before she was called back to work that night, that she was “enough to make a good dog break his leash.” Celia was offended and accused Sam of being a sexist. This dialogue follows.  Here is Emily Procter in her role as Ainsley.

AINSLEY
This [getting the treaty right] is important.

SAM
Yeah, I also think it’s important to make clear I am not a sexist.

AINSLEY
You’re Celia?

CELIA
[looking up] Yes.

AINSLEY
He’s not a sexist.

She turns back to Sam to continue the argument.

CELIA
If you’re willing to let your sexuality diminish your power.

AINSLEY
I’m sorry?

CELIA
I said, I’m surprised you’re willing to let you sexuality diminish your power.

Ainsley Hayes
CELIA
If you’re willing to let your sexuality diminish your power.

AINSLEY
I’m sorry?

CELIA
I said, I’m surprised you’re willing to let you sexuality diminish your power.

AINSLEY
I don’t even know what that means.

CELIA
I think you do.

AINSLEY
And I think you think I’m made out of candy glass, Celia. If somebody says something that offends you, tell them, but all women don’t have to think alike.

CELIA
I didn’t say they did, and when somebody said something that offended me, I did say so.

AINSLEY
I like it when the guys tease me. It’s an inadvertent show of respect that I’m on the team and I don’t mind it when it gets sexual. And you know why? I like sex. I don’t think that whatever sexuality I may have diminishes my power. I think it enhances it.

CELIA
And what kind of feminism do you call that?

AINSLEY
My kind.

GINGER
[from over her shoulder] It’s called Lipstick Feminism. I call it Stiletto Feminism.

hillary-1My excuse for including this patch of West Wing dialogue is that Ainsley Hayes, the Republican on the show, claims the right to define “feminism” the way she wants it defined, where Celia, the temp worker, is stuck on the old definition. The contrast between the two views is precisely what Emily Bazelon is trying to make clear in his article.  The redhead is Kim Webster as (what else?) Ginger.

4. No history of gender discrimination

“I’ve been paid the same as men, I’ve managed men,” Frable said. “I’ve not had any trouble working with men.”

For Trump supporters that I talked to, college education didn’t seem to lead to support for the liberal women’s movement.

Palma’s experience at the workplace—which could be represented as the crowning achievement of “the old feminism”—is not experienced in gender terms at all. If you think of Hillary as an exemplar of the feminism that brought all these wonderful conditions to Palma Frable, then she is an exemplar of “some old historical movement.”

5. Christian and anti-abortion

Frable and her daughters oppose abortion as Christians. Other women called themselves pro-choice but backed Trump because they didn’t think he really opposed abortion or thought the law in states like theirs wouldn’t change even if he chose future Supreme Court justices with an eye to overturning Roe v. Wade.

This is a classic of Trump’s style. If you take all sides of an issue, as Trump has, then supporters who really want to vote for him can cite one statement or the other as their excuse. The Frables are anti-abortion as is Trump. The pro-choice women who voted for Trump heard the anti-abortion rhetoric, but didn’t think he was serious about it.

6. Feminism and the attitude toward women

All of this [Trump’s wish list] matters far more to her than anything Trump said about women or was accused of doing to them. Anyway, given Bill Clinton’s history, how can Hillary complain?

“I have disrespect for Hillary for not doing more for herself, not standing up for herself with him,” Frable said. “That’s more damaging than goofball words Trump came up with.”

This is a dramatic reversal of values. Frable disapproves of Hillary on essentially feminist grounds. She tolerated Bill Clinton’s sexual flaws when he was President and she was First Lady (that’s POTUS and FLOTUS in West Wing language) and she should not have. Just as Frable has stood up for herself in the workplace, Hillary should have stood up for herself in the White House. I suppose that means that Frable would have liked to have seen Hillary publicly condemn Bill’s behavior.

In doing what she did, Hillary seems to have lost both the “stand by your man” vote and also the “don’t be the enabling wife” vote. Politicians are accustomed to being required to “split the difference,” but it does seem odd for Hillary to lose on both sides of the argument.

7. What was the election about? Not gender or race, but about “elitism.”

Frable has close friends and clients who are ardent Hillary supporters, but she discounts the despairing social-media posts she has seen about women who didn’t support Clinton’s historic candidacy.

She thinks the election wasn’t about gender or race. It was a victory of “Middle America.” Clinton, she said, “is more the white elitist than Trump. She’s the one who had elitist celebrities stumping for her.”

This is likely an “anti-Hollywood” complaint. It is true that lots of elite CEOs and financiers campaigned for Hillary, but so did a lot of celebrities, people who represent the lifestyle the Frables oppose. Trump, by contrast, represented himself as the lone voice of truth and therefore “not really an elitist.”

Those seven points capture Emily Bazelon’s view of why Clinton lost the women’s vote in Pennsylvania, a key state in a very competitive election. This strikes me as a very telling account and I see Bazelon’s professional judgment all over it. She’s really good.

On the other hand, I am quite sure she deplores the kinds of reasons the Frable’s cite and I’d be willing to guess that she is wondering in which direction the future of feminism will take in the politics of the Democratic party.

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It’s our story and I’m sticking to it.

Posted on December 30, 2016 by hessd

Everybody knows the line, “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.” I discovered today that it comes from a Saturday Night Live regular I had never heard of—Kevin Quinn. I haven’t messed with it much in producing the title for today, but as you will see, the one minor alternation is crucial.

To introduce it, let me introduce a line from Dellarobia Turnbow, the protagonist of Barbara Kingsolver’s marvelous novel, Flight Behavior. Ovid Byron, a lepidopterist is visiting Tennessee to try to find out why the Monarch butterflies decided to winter there this year. While he is there, he discovers the whole culture of science denial and it puzzles him. He wonders why people cluster around beliefs that can be shown to be false.

Here is what Dellarobia says in return. “I’d say the teams get picked, and then the beliefs get handed around,” [1]

story-4Ominous, isn’t it? But it is the reason I changed Kevin Quinn’s sign-off line from “my story” to “our story.” If there is an “our story” and if joining with others in the community to support it is the way people can tell whether you are “one of us,” then joining in is crucially important. Being right about the changes in butterfly migration and the reasons for it, is not crucially important.

Here’s what I want to tell you today. In the last month, I have read two very good studies of Tea Party voters. Both scholars say that it isn’t how they vote that defines them. It is who they are as a community and how they see the world that defines them. The vote for Tea Party candidates or even for Donald Trump is just an artifact of their identity.

The first book is called Strangers in their Own Land: Anger and mourning on the American Right. It is by Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, who has been a favorite of mine ever since The Managed Heart: the Commercialization of Human Feeling, was first published in 1983. The second is The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker. [2] It is by Katharine J. Cramer and was researched the same way Hochchild’s book was: you go out and meet people unlike yourself and sit down and talk with them many many times. Then you write a book about as much of their lives as you were able to grasp, holding your personal empathy in one hand and your conceptual categories in the other. [3]

Hochschild studied people in Louisiana; Cramer in Wisconsin. They came, very carefully story-3and professionally to the same conclusion. But I found that same conclusion, much more graphically expressed in Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior. Had Hochschild and Cramer studied Dellarobia Turnbow, they would have come to exactly the same conclusion each reached about the groups they studied.

That conclusion is this: the membership in the group and the shared consciousness it generates are crucially important. The views you express are just a way of saying out loud “who we are.” Or, as Dellarobia puts it, “the teams (communities) get picked first, and then the beliefs get handed around.” Your prior commitment is to the people and their worldview and given that, you accept whatever beliefs go with it.

Please note that nothing is this way of making decisions requires that the beliefs are plausible from a factual standpoint. But because of what determines these view, the facts supporting them just don’t come up. Here’s an example that caught my imagination. Dellarobia and her husband, Cub, are discussion the influx of butterflies, followed very shortly by the influx of scientists studying butterflies.

Dellarobia: Dr. Byron says it’s due to climate change.

Cub: “What’s that?”
She hesitated, [then]

Dellarobia: “Global warming.”

Cub snorted. He kicked up a cloud of dusty frost. “Al Gore can come toast his buns on this.” It was Johnny Midgeon’s [local talk show host, very conservative] line on the radio, every time a winter storm came through.

There are a few important things to note here. The first is that Dellarobia cites Dr. Byron, who cites thousands of world-class scientists. Cub responds by reverting to a favorite boogeyman, Al Gore, and accepting the fact that there is frost on the ground as a refutation of the global warming, to which Al Gore insistently pointed.

story-2Two further things. There is a resentment of Al Gore the person in this remark. Gore is invited to “toast his buns” on the frost. Not a very dignified reference, surely, to a man who lost the presidency by one vote. Even “toast his toes” is not so demeaning. And all such expressions are beside the point anyway, unless the point is to derogate Gore.

And finally, the author notes, on Dellarobia’s behalf, that the line came from Johnny Midgeon a conservative local talk show host. So apart from what the line says, just citing Midgeon, who is “one of us” is a way for Cub to belong to the group. Cub doesn’t even have to know what Midgeon’s line means, although in this case, he probably does. Just citing the line, which expresses contempt for a well-known popularizer of the global warming hypothesis, is enough to establish membership.

Now take a man like Cub Turnbow and put him in a political setting. Cub wouldn’t hear these particular speeches because they are from candidates in Louisiana, but he would hear appeals to membership just like these.

Congressman Boustany: “We’ve been through hurricanes together. We’ve been through a moratorium on oil drilling that hurt jobs. We’ve been through a financial and economic crisis.”

Congressman Landry: “If it ain’t good for y’ll, I ain’t voting for it.” You can take a high school graduate—and I know some people that didn’t even finish high schools…work that tail off in the oil and gas industry and make better money than most people make anywhere else in this country. I’m tired of government being in my business. When I was struggling and needed help, I never went straight to the government…The answers to [our] problems are right here in places just like [the town of] Rayne.

Those are real life examples. In one of the poorest and sickest parts of one of the poorest and sickest states in the U. S., the appeals are to “some people that didn’t even finish high school” who are making good money; they are to anti-government feelings; they are to “neighbors helping neighbors,” which is always a good idea, but here it means accepting federal money and refusing federal regulation.

And, to return to Kingsolver’s fictional world, as a way to close off this argument, Ovid Byron’s wife, Juliet, puts it this way.

“The key thing is…once you’re talking identity, you can’t just lecture that out of people. The condescension of outsiders won’t diminish it. That just galvanizes it.”

And she’s absolutely right. Once political views like these “get to identity”—and that is the central message of both Hochschild’s book on Louisiana and Cramer’s book on Wisconsin, “the condescension of outsiders” is just more fuel on the fire.

The obvious solution would have been not to let it “get to a matter of identity.” We didn’t do that. The next step would be to remove political calculation from being no more than a reflection of community prejudices. Democracy requires that the performance of the government be evaluated so that the winners can be returned to office and the losers turned out of office. In standard democratic thought, that is what elections are for.

“Once you’re talking identity” undercuts all that. And that means it undercuts elections that are based on performance or even on promises of performance. It leaves us with nothing more than us v. them.

OK, I’m discouraged now.

[1] She describes her own team, the team her husband, Cub, belongs to this way. “Team camo, we get the right to bear arms and John Deere and the canning jars and tough love and care of our own.”
[2] There is another book called the Politics of Resentment, I learned today. This one is by Jeremy Engels and has the subtitle “A Genealogy.” It was written following the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford and 19 other Arizonans in 2011.
[3] I’ve done that kind of research. It isn’t easy. And the more clearly you know how to understand the experience, the less sure you that you really heard those people and their story.

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Madison v. Plato

Posted on December 28, 2016 by hessd

From the outside, you enter the rotunda of the Capitol in Salem, Oregon from the north. As you stand there, you face the information kiosk, where I have seldom failed to get the information I needed—including current gossip when I was a regular at the Capitol. But if you raise your sights just a little, you find this quote incised into the marble over the entryway.

IMG_0459 (1).jpg

I was told, when I was a legislative newbie, [1] that all the quotations on the Capitol building itself were from Plato. That may be true. About this one, the closest I have come to knowing for sure is a footnote saying that this quotation “is said to be from Plato’s Republic.” And maybe it is.

For the purposes of imagining a conversation between the author of this quotation and James Madison, I am just going to refer to him or her as Plato. Here’s how that conversation would go.

Plato: The character of the people directly determines the nature of the state.

Madison: Actually, it does not. The size and organization of the state mediates between the two. Really, that is our only reason for hope.

That’s how I hear the argument. It has been hard for me, over the years I have walked under that quotation and often stopped to read it, to focus on what it actually means. I am so very much in love with the language! Who talks like that anymore?

  • confident in their liberties
  • lovers of “doing the right thing” [2]
  • clean in justice
  • bold in freedom

But today, I am trying to get past how beautiful the language is and to notice that it says that the state—Plato was thinking of a city-state—will have the characteristics of its citizens. The Framers of our Constitution didn’t really disdain good character. In their minds, they filled up the national government with people who had such character. Madison calls them representatives “whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. “  Madison was a hopeful man in some ways.  On the other hand, in this description, he was trying to sell the Constitution to a skeptical New York audience.

Again, language so beautiful that you have to exercise some discipline just to attend to what it means.

But as beautiful as this account is, the Framers didn’t really count on character either. They counted on the system they built to buffer the bad character of the faction-ridden citizens and so ensure the stability and freedom of the system as a whole.

Plato says that if the citizens are good, the state will be good. Madison says that the citizens are not good and that is what the state is for. Here is a small clipping from The Federalist Papers #51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

Does that look like a fundamental disagreement to you? It does to me.

Portrait of James MadisonSo the Framers put their hopes elsewhere. They put their hopes in the architecture of the system. I have said it this way sometimes [3]. “The Framers no more believed in the goodness of citizens than Newton believed in the goodness of planets. Newton’s idea was that if the planets were of a certain size and density and velocity and a certain distance from each other, they would just keep doing what they are doing and no “intervention” would be necessary. That’s what the Framers thought about federalism, the separation of powers, and checks and balances.”

Actually, it was a longer lecture than that, but you get the idea.

Do you see an intentional “system” in the division of powers between the central government and the states? I do. And the 2-year, 4-year, and 6-year terms of representatives, presidents, and senators respectively? I do. And the careful distance maintained between one part of an action—declaring war, for instance which the President asks for and which Congress either does or doesn’t grant—from another? I do.

For Madison, pace [4] Plato, it wasn’t a matter of the character of individuals. It was a matter of the nature of civil society. Consider this imposing list from The Federalist #10:

Here’s how Madison sees it.

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society.

A zeal for different opinions

  • concerning religion,
  • concerning government…
  • an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power;

These latter two have, according to Madison: “enflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.”

Does anything sound familiar yet? But wait, there is more. Madison continues:

So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.

This is what civil society is like according to Madison. This is “the nature of man” as it is played out in society. So it can’t be prevented. In fact, trying to prevent it would only result in a suppression of liberties, about which Madison says (still from #10) “It could never be more truly said of [this remedy]… that it was worse than the disease.”

And if it can’t be prevented it must be mitigated as well as social and political architecture can manage it. And that is, the authors of the Federalist Papers wrote in a series of editorials signed “Publius,” what we truly have in the proposed Constitution.

They despaired at the outset of the connection that attracted Plato, that good citizensplato-2 could produce a good state. They despaired also of forcing people to act as if they were good citizens, as if their own interests did not matter more to them than the welfare of the state. They settled on a system that would allow them to be as bad as they actually were, hoping that the long and torturous maze that confronted them would tire them out before they took over the government.

I think that is a lovely idea. It’s worked pretty well so far.

[1] I began my legislative years as a legislative assistant in 1983.
[2] If I could find the quotation, I could find it in Greek and find out if the word “righteousness” is dikaiosyne, as I suspect and which I have represented in my paraphrase.
[3] Many times, actually. This was part of my lecture on the structure of American government so 2500 students at Portland State, the only institution for which I have a careful count, certainly got this lecture.
[4] Latin reference common in some circles. It means “with peace toward…” whoever is named. Plato in this formulation. Some journals use  (against) in the same way as an indication of disagreement with the named scholar, but I like this one better.

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Mug Shots

Posted on December 26, 2016 by hessd

You may not have noticed that there is a conflict of major proportions going on in this country. Very nearly anything can be turned into a weapon. If you are young, you will be surprised.

If you are not young, you might remember what happened during World War II, where every product you can imagine was tied in some way to “the war effort,” and was something you should buy because it expressed your support for “our boys overseas.” If you can find a Life magazine from the 1940’s, I recommend that you leaf through it slowly, looking only at the ads.

We are not at that level of conflict with each other yet [1] but taking a shot at your neighbor’s views [2] by means of lawn signs is pretty old hat. How there are bumper stickers, and banners, and tee shorts. And now, coffee mugs. You can take the next shot at your neighbor, if you like, with just the right mug.

I have, as Tom Lehrer says, in introducing his song The Vatican Rag, “a modest example here.” This one is called the “disappearing civil liberties” mug. It is marvelous! [3] You can tell a lot just by looking at this picture.

 

mug-1
However, I recommend that you travel over to http://www.philosophersguild.com and look at their whole collection. They aren’t mostly political, but they are mostly snarky and I enjoyed browsing the collection.

So let’s pay a little attention to this particular mug. It says, “disappearing civil liberties” but that doesn’t refer to all ten amendments in the Bill of Rights. Just to some. And just to parts of some. It’s pretty sophisticated, really. I’ve seen final exams that weren’t as sophisticated as this. Here is a sample question that you could derive from the mug: Which clause of the 5th Amendment does NOT disappear? What political philosophy does that suggest? How? * [4]

Now I call that a good question.

I have no idea how the makers of this mug manage the thermodynamics, but the fact is that when you pour hot liquid into the mug, some of the letters fade away and other do not. In fact, I suspect—further tests will confirm or deny—that some clauses disappear almost instantly, while others that will disappear in time, do so more slowly. That’s how it seems to me. Further research will be undertaken.

But here are some examples of the differentially vulnerable “rights.” The Second Amendment, which is currently being construed as an unconditional right to bear arms, doesn’t disappear at all. It is as glossy and black when you finish your hot coffee as it was when you poured the coffee in.*

No visible change affects the 10th Amendment either. Given our political history, I find it hard to think of the 10th Amendment as a part of “our civil liberties.” but that’s how it was thought of in December of 1791 when the ten were ratified. It holds that powers not explicitly granted to the national government are retained by the states.*

Liberals have loved “the fifth amendment” for years. But casual references to “the fifth” nearly always mean the freedom from self-incrimination. Actually, not all of the Fifth Amendment disappears. The last clause, which reads “nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation,”* doesn’t fade at all. In fact, given that ALL of the rest of the amendment does fade, this little remnant looks bolder than ever.

Conversely, nearly all the Seventh Amendment survives intact. Nearly all. The right to a jury trial fades entirely away, but the rest of the amendment stays black on white.*

You get the idea. This mug is good for holding the hot coffee you pour into it. Under the right circumstances, it is good for holding forth on political philosophy. Under the wrong circumstances, it is just a mug shot.

Just go the the site and get one of these. They are truly witty and any knowledgeable liberal will find it funny as well. And if, by any chance, you teach a course in constitutional law [5] it would make a truly memorable final exam.

[1] An older person who hears the word “red” as a fearsome thing, things the reference is the communism. A younger person knows it is a reference to Kansas.
[2] If he is your neighbor in the geographical, as opposed to the spiritual sense, he probably doesn’t have opposite views. More and more we are living in single-ideology ghettoes.
[3] Sincere thanks to my stepdaughter, Kathy Humphries, who gave me this mug as a Christmas present. It livened every party I went to all day.
[4] To save us all a lot of time, I hereby adopt the asterisk (*) as shorthand for: NOTE TO CON LAW STUDENTS—WHAT JURIDICAL INTERPRETATION DOES THIS SUGGEST?
[5] David Johns, I hope you are reading this. The political science division at Portland State University would benefit from your using this mug as a final exam.

 

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Two Cheers for Kristof and Keller

Posted on December 23, 2016 by hessd

Only two, though.  I am saving the last one for a better resolution of the dilemma.

I want to think this morning about Nicholas Kristof’s column in the New York Times, which you can see here.  (For reasons I don’t pretend to understand, the hyperlink is below on the word “of.”)

Maro Chermayeff, Shana Goodwin, Ashley Judd, Nicholas KristofAnd I want to start with three comments. First, I am grateful to Nicholas Kristof for asking the question, Timothy Keller for providing some answers, and to the New York Times for publishing it on the front page—of the electronic version, at least— two days before Christmas. Thanks to all.

Second, I am probably not an evangelical myself. My friend, Bill Teague, of Langhorne Presbyterian Church in Pennsylvania, says that I am. I think he’s just being gracious. He is an evangelical himself and we have had delightful talks over the last thirty years or so and I think he wants to offer that status to me as a gift. But even Bill says that I am a “minimalist evangelical.”

Finally, when my father taught me how to drive a car (an old stick shift pickup truck), he said, “OK. Now you are not going to be completely satisfied with the way anyone else drives.” And as in many other things, he was right. Once you know how you would do it, the way anyone else does it doesn’t seem quite right.

Like Tim Keller, I have had this conversation a lot of times. Nearly always, I walked away from the conversation still friends, as I am sure Keller and Kristof are. I count that a good thing, although it is not the only good thing. And because I have “learned to drive” in this conversation, I am not entirely happy with the way Keller drives. I’m not really critical of him. I just know that I do it differently.

For instance, Keller winds up making two points about orthodox Christian beliefs. One iskristof-1 that you have to have them. The other is that some doctrines that seem fully dispensable to me, seem crucially important to him.

As to the first, I would be really wary of identifying the holding of a particular set of beliefs as “being a Christian.” Especially in a country whose history has been predominantly Christian. Are we really saved by what we believe? Really? Not through relationship with the God whose character and intentions we understand through the life and ministry of Jesus? Really?

It is to take care of difficulties like this that I have come to identify the whole corpus of Christian beliefs as “Christianity.” Christianity is, in that sense, like Pythagorean geometry. It starts from the premises and proceeds through logic and evidence to answers to a whole bunch of questions of application. But if I misunderstand one of the premises or if I lose my way in reasoning myself from one conclusion to another, what happens? If Christianity is a “discipline” like geometry, I have failed. If it is a relationship with God, understood in the light of Jesus, the relationship doesn’t go away. What parent among us can imagine that only the child who is perfectly in line with our expectations is going to be welcomed home?  And faith is, as in the picture, a kind of trust.

So I see the business of “being a Christian” not as Keller sees it—believing in the crucial doctrines—but as a relationship that will survive substantial degrees of heresy.  The church could not, but a Christian could.

kristof-3Then there is the question of what doctrines are really crucial. The virgin birth? Really? Keller bases his argument on the idea that if there really is a God, we have no idea at all what He is capable of. [1] Keller is right about that. We cannot know. On the other hand, we don’t need to know.

It is true that many New Testament works present Jesus as “without spot or blemish,” but it is also true that these presuppose the Jewish sacrificial system in which the purity of the sacrifice is crucial. The church has taught at times that Jesus saves because of the good example he was. Some have said that whatever his life and death were about, they did nonetheless produce a historical community bound by love and committed to obedient sacrificial living within God’s (renewed) Covenant. I think of “sacrificial atonement” as a metaphor. There are lots of metaphors. And many of them have no need at all of the virginal conception of Jesus. [2]

So my argument with Keller is that the virginal conception is not a crucial part of the body of Christian doctrine as I imagine it. I wouldn’t say that about the resurrection of Jesus, however, and that puts me right back in the “miracles in modern times” soup along with Keller.

What I can say confidently is what Keller says: something happened. After Jesus’s death, something happened to his followers—and not to anyone else—that turned them from from losers hiding in spare rooms to dynamic evangelists moving the crowds and daring the authorities to stop them. What did that?

I don’t know. The several New Testament witnesses don’t have the same notion of what kristof-4happened or, indeed, of what “resurrection” means. You can say that Jesus acquired “a spiritual body,” but no one knows what that means. You can say he went to “heaven,” if you want to hang onto the geocentric picture of the universe which was common coinage in the time the gospels were written. You can wear yourself out on what the resurrection “was.” I wish you well. My interest is in what the resurrection “means.” It means—the witness of all New Testament writers supports this—that the life of Jesus, which was understood at the time to have ended in defeat, actually ended in triumph. God raised up this Jesus whom you crucified. (See Acts 2:36 for a concise formulation). That is what it “means.”  (Skepticism is still, as you see in this picture, an aspect of a relationship, just as faith is.)

But, to tie these two ideas together and get off the stage before the audience starts throwing fruit, let’s say I can’t find my way to believing that Jesus was resurrected and let’s say that his resurrection is logically crucial to the integrity of the whole argument. Is God going to reject me because I continued to believe in Him and His son and His work although by rationale was faulty? Really?

I don’t think so. If I thought there was a heaven and if I thought I would meet God there, I could imagine Him taking me by the hand and showing me where I screwed up—how, once I put this piece back into my doctrinal armory, the resurrection would be necessary and would make perfect sense. But, in this little fantasy, God did not damn me because of the mistake I made.

I would have been prodigal in my thinking, but still, I would be His son.

[1] Sorry about the pronoun. I don’t believe God can be meaningfully thought of as having a gender. I just like to stay as far away as I can from any sentence that will require me to say “Godself.”
[2] Joseph Fitzmyer and Raymond Brown, both Roman Catholic priests, argue with each other as scholars and friends about whether Luke really has a doctrine of the virgin birth. Fitzmyer says no on textual grounds; Brown says yes on the grounds of literary format.

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A White Male Working Class Tantrum

Posted on December 22, 2016 by hessd

There is no question in anyone’s mind, I am sure, that I am talking about the 2016 election season. Not the outcome of the election particularly. I could have made the same argument I am about to make if Hillary had won. I probably wouldn’t have but I could have. It’s the election, not the outcome.

And it is the response of mainline voters I want to consider here. I want to reject some proposals I have heard and offer others. The response is really what is on my mind today, but, of course, tantrum-4the best response will have to be based on what it is responding to.

Donald Trump was elected by the tantrum vote. People who are thinking of how to respond should begin by understanding that.

Here is a little background. In calling it a “tantrum” [1] I don’t mean to imply that there is nothing to protest. The privilege of “whiteness” is under attack everywhere. People who are looking at how “whiteness” is being defended need to remember that it never needed to be defended before. That is the main thing in the minds of the defenders. Maleness is widely derogated in casual conversation. If you remember the “dumb blonde” jokes of a bygone era, you get the idea. All you have to do is substitute “man” for “dumb blonde” and the joke works just fine. The working class has been losing both political and economic power for many decades now. [2] They have been, in the “deep story” Arlie Russell Hochschild [3] tells about these voters, standing in line for a long time, but people keep cutting into line in front of them. It’s not fair!!

So, to reiterate, it is not as though there is nothing that needs to be opposed. The question is whether throwing a tantrum is the best way to oppose it. This year, it worked better than anyone thought it would.

Let’s start back a little bit. Richard Ball published an intriguing article in a sociology journal in 1968.  It had this title—“A Poverty Case: The analgesic subculture of the Southern Appalachians.” “Analgesic subculture?” Really? This is a subculture oriented to killing the pain of their failed lives. It involves drug abuse, alcoholism, loss of stable social structure, and the active subversion of anything that could improve their lot in life. None of this helps to improve their lot, of course, but it make it hurt less. And when the pain is constant, that matters a great deal.

Imagine now that a leader comes by who says that the reason for all this suffering can be tantrum-7clearly identified and that it is “them.” The power of this leader does not come from any solution to the problem, but only with a way to fix the blame for it. This is very satisfying in several ways. First, if it is “their fault,” it is not my fault. Second, making them “pay” in some way for what they are doing to us is a perfectly satisfactory substitute for actually dealing with the issues. I may still be dying from the diseases my work reliably causes and still desperately poor and alcoholic, the the new problem—the gift of the leader to people like me—is that “they” don’t respect us.

Ha! Well, Mr. Big, we just elected one of our own and defeated one of yours. How do you like them apples?

A tantrum, you will notice, is not oriented toward policy at all. Not toward rejecting the policies of the past (who knows what those are?) nor toward demanding policies for the future. It is not oriented toward solving the problems I know I have, but on making the people who look down on us sorry they were not more respectful.

That recalls to my mind a wonderful scene from the film version of Needful Things, in which the chief schlub, having fallen completely under the control of the Devil, reveals to the other people in the town that he has strapped huge amounts of explosives to his body and is going to blow them and the whole town up. “You’re going to pay,” he keeps saying. “You’re going to pay BIG.” This from a man who is just about to blow himself to bloody pulp and seems not to have noticed. [4]

So what is a liberal to do?

The most thoughtful and sensitive liberals I know propose that we sit down with angry conservatives and get them to confide in us—to tell us just what it is they are throwing the tantrum about. There are quite a few things wrong with that, it seems to me. Unless it is a rope-a-dope strategy and unless you have trained for it (as Mohammed Ali did) you are going to get tired long before they are. Second, they are going to complain about things that are demonstrably false and you are going to want to correct them, gently, by saying that the grievance they just described has no basis in fact. That will not work.  And third, my experience in rewarding tantrum-driven behavior is that it evokes a good deal more tantrum-driven behavior. It is working, after all. Why should they change a strategy that is serving them—“serving them” please remember, has to do with feeling better, not with solving the problems that define their lives—so well?

So what’s better than volunteering to be a liberal piñata until the angry conservatives get tired of beating you with a stick? I suggest civil conversation with people who have different values, different policy preferences, and different blind spots than you do.

tantrum-3Let me describe how that would work and then you can tell me that it doesn’t solve the problem as I framed it and then I will tell you why it will work anyway. [5] I propose that we sit down with conservatives who are willing to have a civil conversation based on the different values each of us seems to have. Our job, the job he and I are working on, is having this conversation in a way that is honest and sustainable. If we succeed, it will be because of our teamwork. If we fail, “we,” not one of us, will have failed.

We are, in short, “colleagues” so far as this discussion is concerned. “Honesty” and “sustainability” define the boundaries of the conversation. [6] Each of us knows how to say “acceptable things” to the other. If these acceptable remarks do not reflect our own understanding of the society and the polity, then we will have gone “out of bounds.” Each of us has a sense—not quite so acute as the sense of what we ourselves believe—of what risks we might run that will destroy the future of this conversation. We need to try to withhold those things. Not withholding them would be going out of bounds.  Sustainability is more important than any one of them. The relationship may very well grow robust enough that it will tolerate remarks that would have destroyed it earlier. We can hope that, but we can’t presuppose it.

Honest and sustainable conversations about the welfare of the country we both live in and both love. That’s the solution.

tantrum-6But, you say, that doesn’t end the tantrum. No. It doesn’t. You are quite right. But it may well do two things that are worth doing. The first is that it may change the relationship between the policy-oriented leaders of the “Less Government” school of thought and their angry and self-destructive supporters. The second is that it may change the relationship between the “More Government” people (myself included) and the “Less Government” people.

Neither of these is a forlorn hope. Do you remember how many people supported President Clinton’s hopes for abortion that was “safe, legal, and rare?” That is a formulation that recognizes the different hopes of different groups and doesn’t demonize anyone.

Do you remember how much Republicans favored George W. Bush’s proposals for systematizing our immigration policies? It was a wonderful idea until it was proposed by Barack Obama. [7] Then it was a terrible idea. My proposal would not change the nature of the tantrum vote, but it would give conservative leaders resources to oppose it and that is something they want to do.  The tantrum will constrain them as well once they take office.

Do you remember when feminism touted the right of every American woman to make her own choices and have the kind of life she wanted? That standard requires the professional women to honor and value the choices made by women who want to be wives and mothers. It would, plausibly, require the homemakers to honor and value the careers and the childlessness often chosen by professional women. But when homemaking women are “anti-feminist” by the choices they have made, then “feminism” includes only “these” women; it excludes “those.”  What kind of feminism is that?

Those are, to pick just three, sets of conflicting values we could reconsider in the kinds of conversations I am proposing. And, although you might not think it, foreign policy decisions are even more open to value consensus that these few domestic policies.

Besides, for people like me, what else is there? I’ve always been a fan of the adage that if there is only one horse running in the race, you know who is going to win.

[1] The dictionary to which I have easiest access defines it as “a violent willful outburst of annoyance, rage, etc.”
[2] In a small experiment I used to use in my public policy courses, I would set up a system that was structurally unfair to four fifths of the population. This system separated the conservatives in the class very neatly from the liberals. The liberals wanted to change the system so that it was fair to all; the conservatives wanted to secure the favored statuses for themselves.
[3] Hochschild’s book is called Strangers in Their Own Land.  It is superb.

[4]  This guy is the poster boy for the tantrum voters. His name is Danforth Keaton III and is often called, for obvious reasons, “Buster.” The bomb is intended to punish the people who dissed him by using that name.
[5] I am not proposing, by the way, that this is all that should be done. I favor massive bureaucratic intransigence, down and dirty political infighting, litigation wherever current legal practices allow it, and huge efforts to reconnect traditional Democratic voters to the party, not just to the candidates. I am focusing in this essay on what people like me and my friends should do.
[6] While I am not talking about standards of decorum like that used in the U. S. Senate (My friend, the honorable Senator from Kentucky, seems to have missed the argument I was trying to make.) On the other hand, such formalities used to make it possible to discuss policies that would not have been possible otherwise and that is the testimony of generations of Senators.
[7] Except, of course, with conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who is given credit by some for scuttling it singlehandedly. I don’t think he did that, but he undeniably ignited hope in the hearts of the most bitter opponents who were beginning to think they had lost.

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David’s line–I’m just the driver

Posted on December 14, 2016 by hessd

I am teaching a Bible study with a couple of old friends.  That will happen in just a few hours.  My friend Fran has a dramatic flair and her idea for today was to pass out the parts of the Infancy Narrative that occur in Luke’s account.   Not Matthew’s account.  No borrowing!  So much as one Wise Man shows up and we go on to the next reader!

Well…Luke’s account is pretty good for Mary, but it’s really thin for Joseph and I got the part of Joseph.  There are three (3) references to Joseph in Luke’s account and not so much as a single speaking part.  We learn that Mary was engaged to me and that I am “of David’s line.” [1]  Then I haul Mary and her fetus to Bethlehem.  Then Mary and her son to Jerusalem.  Then back to Nazareth, where Luke thinks we lived.  Then all three of us down to Jerusalem for Passover, some years later.  That’s it.  I’m mostly a carrier service.

So anyway, here’s what I wrote.  I hope Fran doesn’t gong me and go on to the next reader.  I did add some other material–the mileage and the altitudes, for example–but nothing from Matthew. So here’s my contribution.

“Hi. I’m Joseph. “Joseph” like Jacob’s son, Joseph. Here is my story as the writer Luke tells it. I didn’t get along with him all that well, to tell the truth. He was a lot more interested in Mary. Now the other guy, Matthew, I liked him a lot better. He really wanted to hear what the whole story was like for me.

So here are the few fragments Luke wrote down. I will try to adapt it to your culture, so you will understand what it felt like—just a little bit. I knew Mary’s family of course. Up in the hill country where we lived, everybody pretty much knows everybody and they and I contracted for the marriage between Mary and me. Then I went home and got back to work.

When she showed up for the living-together part of married life, she was pregnant. All I know is5d1d03fd11e339bfd67d71eebe636aa8.jpg I wasn’t the father. She said she that had had a vision and that this was all God’s work somehow and that there was no shame in it. She also said that God said we had to name him Jesus. There haven’t been any Jesuses in my family as far back as I know.  Even in this picture, all you see is my back.  Luke must have taken the picture.

As you will discover, my part is mostly just to take my family to different places.

First, we had to go to Bethlehem because of Caesar’s census. It’s 85 miles by the shortest way, but that’s through Samaria and we aren’t supposed to go through Samaria. David the King grew up just outside Bethlehem, so that’s where people from his line are supposed to go and that includes me.

It was a long way and Mary was really really pregnant. I found a barn that was pretty comfortable and Mary delivered the child there. It would have been a pretty restful night after all that work, except that we had visitors all night who just wanted to see the baby. I said, “Hey, we are Jews. There are lots of babies around.” They said they wanted to see this particular one. OK. Maybe we can get some sleep tomorrow.

The next week we had to take go to Jerusalem so Mary could be purified [2] and so I could make an offering to God (redeeming the first-born child), rather than just leaving him in the temple, which, as it turned out, might have been easier. And old man and an old woman at the temple made a big fuss about him.

5a1a7dd7a4e0a61faa2f5777967552c0.jpg I had to get everybody back home to Nazareth. When Jesus was right on the edge of the teen years, we wanted to go to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover. So I loaded everybody up again and made the trek down south and then up the hills to Jerusalem—which is a thousand feet higher than Nazareth. It’s a climb, let me tell you. And then he got himself lost and Mary and I had to go back for him. That kid! He looked me in the eye and said that we should have known he would be in “my father’s house,” he said. Pretty mouthy, I think, but the scribes at the temple seemed to think he was something special. I should have just left him with them, but that’s not my part. I am a transportation service. So I took them all back home again.”

[1]  That was when it occurred to me that “David’s Line” sounded like a bus route and since all I do in the story is haul my family around, I decided that I must be a bus driver.  Not a pilot, like that Pontius guy.

[2]  Luke has both of us being purified.  He got some other things wrong too.  I really liked Matthew better.

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Depth in a Superficial Story

Posted on December 8, 2016 by hessd

I want to tell you two stories today. They are related, so I don’t want to put them into separate essays. The first is just personal. It has to do with the transition my mind made from a superficial made-for-TV movie to an intriguing question. And then, while the question (still unanswered) is holding my attention, I discover a deeply buried but very important theme. In the second part of this combined post,  I tell you about the theme and go on and on about it.  It is about healing.

The first story is about the made-for-TV movie that I saw on the Hallmark channel. I don’t want to recommend the movie. My friends would never forgive me. [1] I wouldn’t have watched it myself had I not walked in on it when Bette was watching it and sat down with her to watch the end.

I have a real resistance to Hallmark-channel movies and that is what brings me to today’s dilemma. The show I watched with Bette is called visitor-4A Christmas Visitor. I have seen several of the main actors in other, more demanding parts, and I know they can act. It is not their fault that this movie doesn’t require them to do any. There is “the dad” (William Devaney); and “the mom” (Meredith Baxter); and a son and a daughter—and a “visitor.” That’s pretty much it.

So here’s the dilemma. When I watched (the last part of) it with Bette, I realized that this movie was working with a metaphor I needed help with. Of course, the neat confluence of my need for help in thinking about a metaphor and the basis of the movie in that same metaphor does not make it a good movie. But it does make it a movie that I am going to be attracted to.

The metaphor can be described in any number of ways. I have two in mind. Here is the one that came first to my mind: “God was, in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.” (The language is Paul’s in 2 Corinthians 5:19) There is nothing religious about the movie. I would say that this connection I made is really just a religious application of the theme of the movie. So the second use of the metaphor I had in mind was “agency,” (literally, “doing-ness) and I have a great interest in personal agency. What does it mean , for instance, to say that one person acts by means of the actions of another person?  What does it mean when you reject agency, yourself, and remain passive and miserable?

“God was…reconciling the world to himself” is a very serious claim. It is, in fact, so serious that it gets in the way of working out what “agency” means. Here is another one; this one doesn’t have that problem. And to save having to look it all up and get the names right, I’ll just tell it the way I remember it.

This is from an old Rock Hudson/Doris Day/Tony Randall movie; probably Pillow Talk. Hudson is a big guy and Randall a little guy. Little, but rich. They get into a conflict and Randall, the little guy says to Hudson, the big guy, “How would you like a punch in the nose?” They are at their cars. Hudson is sitting in his; Randall is standing by the back seat of his limo. “I’d like that,” says Hudson, starting to get out of his car. “George,” says Randall to his chauffeur, “Give that man a punch in the nose.” George unfolds himself from behind the steering wheel, all 6 foot 5 and 280 pounds of him. It is not the scenario Hudson thought he was accepting, so he gets back in his car and drives off.

I said it wasn’t serious, you will remember. But is still about agency. Randall would have been the agent (actor) who caused a fist to hit Hudson’s nose even though it was George’s fist. Stay with me. Randall was, “in George,” hitting Hudson in the nose.

Not that hard, you say. Simply instrumental. If Randall had used a crowbar, you could have said the same thing about the crowbar. Randall acts “through the crowbar” to hit Hudson in the nose. And that’s right. But no one says that Randall was “in” the crowbar. No one says that Randall “became the crowbar” for the purpose of crushing Hudson’s nose.

So “in” and “through” don’t always mean the same thing and they do not mean the same thing in A Christmas Visitor. In fact, in A Christmas Visitor, they mean nearly the same thing Paul meant when he said “God was…in Christ…” You see why “through Christ” (which is also true) is not enough. And it is not enough for A Christmas Visitor either.

Plot

Very briefly, the Boyajian family allowed their son John to enlist in the army and become a green beret. He was killed in Operation Desert Shield and the rest of the family, as we meet them at the beginning of the movie, has yet to recover. On Christmas Eve, George Boyajian, the father, picks up a hichhiker named Matthew and, having determined that he has nowhere to spend the night, brings him home with him.

From the time Matthew walks into the house, odd things begin to happen—all of them good. George has decided that what he really wants for Christmas is healing in his family. That happens. The daughter, Jean, wants her breast cancer to go away. That happens. Carol, the mother, wants to feel close to her son, John, again. That happens. And then “Matthew” goes away, having revealed himself in the last 15 seconds of the movie as their son, John, who is indeed dead, as the army has informed them, but who is, nevertheless, “in” Matthew. John is, in fact, “the Christmas visitor” although no one knew it

So now I have seen this not very good movie many times, reaching deeper into the characters and the dialogue and finding things that fascinate me. The movie has helped me keep this odd inquiry of mine alive. I have continued, by using the movie, to wonder just what “in” means in the gospel accounts of the life of Jesus.

The Healing Theme

But as I have watched the movie, I have stumbled on another theme that attracts me and it is tracking down that second story that I have in mind for today. It is “healing.” George, finally, has had enough and does two important things. First, he clearly asks his wife and daughter for “healing.” That’s what he wants this Christmas. Second, he goes out and does a bunch of Christmas things: stamps, lights, a tree, etc.

Jean, the daughter, is a victim of her parents relentless mourning for her brother John and also of a recently diagnoses breast cancer. The story doesn’t quite come to saying that Jean is welcoming the cancer, but it is true that she needs to give her cooperation to “Matthew” so he can heal her.

This “inner healing” is a difficulty for scriptwriters, so they have arranged for a much visitor-5more visible healing. Jean has been rejecting, or at least has not been enjoying, memories of old times with her brother, John. The two kids are shown in a flashback, decorating the tree and and a direct result of their playing round, breaking one of the five points of the star. John, still in his character as “Matthew,” heals the star and in that way restores the memory to Jean. [3]

Carol is the most interesting one to me and she is the one whose healing first caught my interest. Here is the little sermon from “Matthew” that does the job.

When we lose someone we love, it doesn’t mean they’re not with you anymore. You just have to find them in a different way. John’s spirit is here. It’s everywhere. It’s in this house. It’s in your heart. Just don’t push him away. Embrace him. You’ll always have that.

Notice “just don’t push him away.” This is something Carol has been doing. It is not something we can see as viewers and if we did see it, we would excuse it because she is “a grieving mother.” She excuses it in herself on those grounds. But “Matthew” IS John. He is the one she lost. She doesn’t know that, but we viewers do. And knowing that gives an extra dimension to what “Matthew” says as if we are hearing every single note as a chord.

Just before “Matthew’s” little sermon about loss, Carol says to him that it is an awful thing to lose a child. Matthew responds, “I understand it’s a great loss.” Carol responds, “It’s an unbearable loss.”

The point of that exchange, I see in retrospect, is to help us see that Carol sees herself as someone who has been done to. She is passive.  She has no agency of her own and the fates have done terrible things to her. When “Matthew” says, “Just don’t push him away,” Carol begins to see that that is what she has been doing.  She has been an actor, has exercised her agency.  And it was to push John away.  And when she sees that, she sees that “healing” is going to require that she stop pushing him away. And that is what she does. When she returns his “Merry Christmas,” we know that she has found a way to move on.

And when everyone has been healed, “Matthew” moves on. In the final roadside moment with George, George says, “Why did you come to us?” And we begin to think that he knows who he is talking to. “Because you were right,” says “Matthew,” “It was time.”

visitor-2“It is time for healing” is what George said back at the beginning. And John knows that. We don’t know how he knows. And because he knows that, John comes to them as Matthew. John is credible as Matthew, but just barely. He knows too much and even after he explains everything away, the Boyajian family is not quite convinced.

But because George knows, John’s last line to him is, “Merry Christmas…Dad.” Then, as he walks away, he gives this salute. And then, briefly, becomes John in every way. He looks like John. He salutes like John. And then he turns away and becomes “Matthew” again, just before he disappears.

[1] This “recommendation” stuff is not for sissies. I recently recommended a wonderful movie called Tangerines to some old friends. It is about the Abkhasian rebellion in the former Soviet state of Georgie and it is a terrific anti-war film in which there is not a single line condemning war. Unfortunately, my friends went to see Tangerine. Here is the summary of that movie from imdb.com: A working girl tears through Tinseltown on Christmas Eve searching for the pimp who broke her heart. My friends still look at me funny when I recommend a movie to them.
[2] George says, early in the movie when it is too early to know what it means, “We’ve done this long enough. It’s time for us to get back to Christmas” (or words to that effect). In the last scene, George, who known, now, who “Matthew” asks, “Why did you come to us.” And “Matthew” replies, “Because you were right. It was time.”
[3] “Matthew” finds the broken point in the cardboard box and he and Jean glue it back together. Then he “finds” a battery in the box and puts it in the star and when they put it on the tree, it lights up. Everything “Matthew” does strains credulity just a little, but he is a healing presence and no one is willing to reject him. So they “believe” everything.

.

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“This isn’t told for sentiment”

Posted on December 4, 2016 by hessd

Every other year, I study Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus. [1] By happenstance (see footnote 1) the Luke years are the even numbered years, which means that I study Luke in the presidential years and in the midterm election years. Luke’s notion of the ministry of Jesus emphasizes gentleness and healing, so it turns out to have been a good choice, especially this year. [2]

The first thing that happens in Luke account of the birth of Jesus has to do with the birth of John the Baptist. [3] It takes Luke a little while to get around to considering the birth of Jesus at all and this year, I am going to follow him in that.

Zechariah, the father of John, is a priest and has been chosen by lot to go into the Holy of zechariah-1Holies in the temple and burn incense. The angel Gabriel appears to him and calls him by name and gives him the wonderful news about the forthcoming pregnancy of his aged wife.

Zechariah knows several very good reasons why this event is unlikely and he shares them with Gabriel. That always seemed to me a reasonable thing to do. [4]

18 Zechariah said to the angel, ‘How can I know this? * I am an old man and my wife is getting on in years.’ 19 The angel replied, ‘I am Gabriel, who stand in God’s presence, and I have been sent to speak to you and bring you this good news. 20 Look! Since you did not believe my words, which will come true at their appointed time, you will be silenced and have no power of speech until this has happened.’ (Luke 1 in the New Jerusalem Bible).

That always seemed harsh to me. Abraham said the same thing—using the same words—and God didn’t seem ruffled. Mary will say nearly the same thing later in the chapter, and Gabriel is not offended. What is it about Zechariah?

It is at that point in his lecture that Raymond Brown, my mentor in all this, speaks the line I have taken as the title of this essay: “this isn’t being told for sentiment.” Yes, it is true, says Brown, that Gabriel’s response seems harsh, but Luke is not trying to help you analyze Zechariah’s interview with Gabriel. Luke is trying to remind his hearers of something. “Gabriel,” he wants them to say, “haven’t we heard about Gabriel before?”

zechariah-2Yes, you have. That’s the best answer. Remember back to Daniel 10:15?, the only previous appearance of Gabriel? [5] Gabriel was telling Daniel about the events that will mark the end of this era and Daniel was struck dumb. Well, here is Gabriel again and Zechariah is struck dumb. So…what does the fulfillment of God’s promise to Zechariah have to do with the end of the era?

OK, if you were looking for an answer to that question, you will have to look elsewhere. The answer I am looking at belongs to a different question. My question is, “Why is Zechariah struck dumb?” and my answer is, “Luke is trying to direct our attention to the climactic event—the birth of the forerunner of the Messiah.”

In the light of that, I would say that the question I always asked is not a very good question. I always wanted to know why Gabriel was so mean to Zechariah, especially since Abraham and Mary asked the same question without any retaliation. The question that now seems to me to be a better question is, “What does Luke mean by trying to bring to our ears echoes of Gabriel’s encounter with Daniel?”

The question I was asking was, using Fr. Brown’s word, “sentimental.” It looks for the meaning in the interaction of the two members of the conversation. The question I am now offering you might be called “referential.” Gabriel is there because of what his presence will refer to. It is that “Gabriel…Gabriel…I’ve heard of him somewhere before?” response.

This is a dilemma for modern Christians. All we really want to do, we say to ourselves, is to “read the Christmas story.” But that is disingenuous. We must ask Luke to enter into our world and use only the references we know or we must try to enter Luke’s world and the world of his hearers and to understand the references they knew.

I phrased that as if it were a choice. In pretending it is a choice we can make—we change or Luke changes—I was trying to be funny. I do seriously believe that we have a choice to make, however. One option is to insist that the passage means and should mean what a superficial reading gives us. What? Gabriel didn’t like Zechariah? It’s not good to question God when you are being offered a favor? Leave your incredulity behind when you enter the Holy of Holies?

The other choice is to learn what Gabriel’s presence means. What was Luke trying to tell us by putting Gabriel there? Matthew didn’t use any angels at all; just dreams. Gabriel is not essential to “the story;” he is essential to Luke’s story. And when we find out why Luke thought that situation would echo in the ears of his hearers, we can ask what that lesson means to us.

zechariah-3I can do that. I think the appearance is supposed to mean to Luke’s hearers what the sound of the gun at the beginning of the last lap [6] means to fans of track and field. It means that the race is almost over and if you had a move to make, this would be the right time to make it. [7] Jesus said that over and over in his ministry, but I think it is a mark of Luke’s art that he introduces it into the story of John’s birth.

Someone will surely point out that I have merely exchanged one problem for another. That’s true. Instead of fruitlessly wondering about why Gabriel was mean to that nice old man, I can wonder what it means to me that Luke thinks of Jesus’s birth as inaugurating “the bell lap” of the race we are running. I don’t know what that means to me, in fact. But I do think it is the dilemma Luke intended to offer his hearers.

I think that wrestling with the issue Luke intended for us to wrestle with is the right thing to do.

[1] Originally, it was just a matter of chance, like the division of Senate seats into three parts in the first meeting of the Senate. Obviously, if you are going to elect a third of the Senate every year, you are going to have to make some distinctions and all of the Senators who have to make that decision were elected at the same time. The choice of which Senator got to serve a two year term, which a four, and which a six was entirely random the first time. The first time I chose an infancy narrative, I chose Matthew and it happened to be an odd-numbered year.
[1] “Gentleness and healing” belong in this life only. The “life after this one” is a life of reversal and if you had a comfortable life here, Luke’s picture of what awaits you is the least comforting one I know.
[3] Verses 5—25 and 57—80 and about John and his parents, Zechariah and Elizabeth. In Luke, Elizabeth, the mother of John, and Mary, the mother of Jesus, are cousins.
[4] The young boy who is told by the suddenly changed Ebenezer Scrooge to go and buy a turkey is incredulous. “Walk-er!” he exclaims, meaning something like, “You can’t be serious.” That’s how Zechariah responded and it makes as much sense to me as it did to Charles Dickens when he wrote it.
[5] There aren’t many angels as separate beings in the Old Testament—angels with names and duties. They begin to become prominent when the Jews return from captivity in Babylon, bringing little pieces of the Babylonian cosmos with them.
[6] They use a bell at the University of Oregon, my alma mater. It works just as well and it is so…Oregon.
[7] The one I remember best was a 10K race dominated by Frank Shorter and Steve Prefontaine. Pre just sat on Shorter’s right shoulder until the bell sounded, then he moved decisively into the lead and won the race.”  I saw that race.

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Read this book

Posted on December 2, 2016 by hessd

Today is the beginning of my blogging year (Blogging Year 2017) [1] and I’d like to start by recommending a book. The book is Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild.

It’s a good book for right now, I think, because the “American Right” has just risen up and bitten political liberals (like me) in the butt. All over America and all over the rest of the world, people are asking, “What were they thinking?” [2] Hochschild’s answer is that they weren’t thinking. They were feeling. So this is a potentially fruitful topic for “the new year.”

arh-1Hochschild is a wonderful choice to begin the new year. She is a sociologist at Berkeley and has written on some very sensitive topics. She came to my attention when I read The Managed Heart: the Commercialization or Human Feeling. [3] in 1979. It was an adptation of what “labor” means from the Marxist notion to a much richer sense that is broadened to include “emotional labor.” To study that, she studied flight attendants, who are paid to maintain a certain emotional demeanor and who suffer, as a result, from what Hochschild calls “charm depression.”

Her method of study is to go sit down with people and get to know them and the learn about their lives. Then she brings her own keen mind and her sociological training into play and devises a way to represent what she has learned. That’s what she did this time, too. She went to Lake Charles, Louisiana and got to know a lot of Tea Party voters. She got to know them across the span of all their life conditions and interests, including politics.

The politics is what particularly interested me, of course and particularly her emphasis on “feeling rules.” Every culture tells you how you ought to feel about some event or relationship. And when you don’t feel that way, you wonder what is wrong. [4] And the culture tells you also what resentments and angers and sadnesses are “appropriate.” Think about the “anger” and “mourning” in the subtitle if you are looking for examples.

I have now recommended the book and appreciated Dr. Hochschild. And now I would like to use her book to make one small point. This is the point: you can’t weigh the costs and benefits of a policy if you don’t have any policy goals. Consider this grievance: [page 69]

At a meeting of the Republican Women of Southwest Louisians, across-the-table talk of regulation focused on the promotion of fluorescent or LED light bulbs: “The government has no right to regulate the light bulbs we buy,” one woman declared. “I made my husband change all my light bulbs back to the old ones.”

If I were there to reason with this group—a fool’s errand, surely—I would begin by saying that it is hard to have to change from products and practices we are familiar with. I would use a self-deprecatory example. maybe, about how I had to get used to a different kind of cake mix. Then I would say that as uncomfortable as change can be, sometimes it helps to achieve a goal we all want to achieve and in those cases, the discomfort is worth it.

Then I would say that America (not “the United States”) has begun to work very hard to reduce the amount of energy we use. I might, in some settings, talk about the harmful effects of global warming, but with this group, I might try “energy independence.” I might, if encouraged, make a snarky remark about “oil-rich Arab states” and how dangerous it is to give them power over us.

And then I would say that their grievance—having to change to more energy-efficient light arh-4bulbs—is actually an important part of achieving the goal. I might remember to call it “our goal,” hoping that that term might cause them to think of themselves as “Americans” and not as the “victims of federal regulation.” At that point, the wheels would come off the wagon.

You cannot work in the cost/benefit frame of reference if there are no policy goals. If there is no goal, there is no benefit that comes from reaching the goal, and if there is no benefit, then any cost at all, will outweigh it. The smallest inconvenience; the least grievance. Even a new kind of light bulb.

But, of course, it isn’t really the light bulb. The light bulb is just an instance of a larger category—“the government has no right to regulate us.” And the feelings of resentment about government regulation are so intense and so near the surface that reasoning about “how to reduce energy consumption” will not survive. [5]

And the feeling rules apply because we have “every right to be angry” when the government invades our lives and tries to tell us what to do. The feelings are attached to the regulatory process. They have nothing at all to do with energy consumption or, indeed, any other policy at all.

You can’t justify the means by reference to the ends if there are no ends. “Feels good” and “feels bad” is the whole range of policy responses. Along with a little “don’t tell me what to do,” which amplifies the resistance to every policy initiative, not only from the national level, but from the state level as well.

That, Hochchild says, is what is driving our politics. You can’t reason with it, but for people like me, it might be a good idea to try to understand it.

[1] There are, of course, reasons why I start at the beginning of December, but they need not detain us here.
[2] In the U. S., “they” refers to Trump voters. Everywhere else, it refers to all of us. That embarrasses me, but I think it is largely true.
[3] Whoever writes her subtitles is worth his or her weight in gold—not saying it isn’t Hochschild herself.
[4] I have tried and—so far—failed to establish the word orthopathy to refer to “having the feelings you are supposed to have.” This word would join orthodoxy (believing what you are supposed to believe) and orthopraxy (doing what you are supposed to do). You can find those two words in any good dictionary, but you will not find my proposed word, despite both the logic of it and the need for it.
[5] Leaving aside for the moment that this is the energy dependent part of a state that has mortgaged itself to attract oil companies.

 

Posted in Political Psychology, Politics, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments