The Dilettante's Dilemma

Go and do likewise

Posted on August 7, 2016 by hessd

I want to tell you right up front that the topic I want to get to is the teaching in Jesus’s story of the Good Samaritan. I mention that because it is going to take me a little while to get there. I’m going to begin with a few fragments.

Fragment 1: Bette and I will be moving soon into a retirement center. We are really excited about it. Everything seems wonderful. I am still in the infatuation period—and I am remembering when I use that word that we get it from the Latin fatuus, “foolish.”

samaritan 2 I’ve been there a lot in the last few weeks on one errand or another and I have used the restroom on the first floor just north of the lobby. There is good hot water there and a soap dispenser and a tray of rolled up cloth towels. Very classy. Because people wash their hands at the sink, there accumulates on the counter little pools of water and soap suds. So after I have wiped my hands on the towel, I mop up all the water and soap and throw the towel into the basket under the sink.

Why do I do that? Well, as I said, I’m feeling foolish about the place and it just feels good to me to help make it look really good and all the materials are there. But why that action particularly? I wouldn’t feel any need to clean up a mess anyone had left on the floor or to wipe down the mirror. Why that cleaning of the counter in particular?

Let me spend a sentence reminding you that I am still working on the Good Samaritan story. Really I am.

Fragment 2: The story I am about to tell you has bounced around in my mind for quite a few decades now. I’m not sure anymore what the original version of the story was, so I’m just going to tell it the way I remember it. It’s true; I’m just not sure it is accurate.

A faculty colleague of mine at Westminster College in Pennsylvania used to take the paper towels he had left over from drying his hands and dry the faux marble top of the counter in the locker room where the sinks were. I remember seeing him do it and I remember thinking that it seemed a really good thing to do. I thought more highly of him because he chose to do that and I began to do it myself for no better reason than simple imitation. It was “what he did” so it became “what I do.”

The Good Samaritan

A lot of lessons have been drawn from this story. [1] I’m going to assume you know the story. If by any chance you don’t, you can check it out at Luke 10: 25ff. It ends like this.

36 Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” 37 He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

Now “likewise” means “like he did.” Do what the Samaritan did. That sounds like a law or a principle to me. I have always heard it cast as a principle and therefore also as an obligation. But as I consider it, I am not sure that is the best way to think of it and I am not sure, either, that that is the way Jesus intended it.

If “likewise” means, “Do what he did,” then it might pay us to look at what the man from Samaria did. That’s a few lines up the page.

33 But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. 34 He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him.

I am looking now at the sequence. He saw him. He was moved with pity. He took care of him. One, two, three. What if he hadn’t been moved with pity? What if you take the moving—using the same root, we all them motives today—out of the sequence. Nothing connects one and three. Nothing happens.

Moved with compassion

When I finish this essay, I am going to go down to the office at Portland State that I share with a number of other adjuncts. Portland State is an urban university; it is very “downtown.” When I walk to the office, I am going to walk past any number of people whom I will see sitting on the pavement with their signs and toward whom I will not feel compassion and whom I will not offer to help.

Should I? Does the “lesson” of the story instruct me to help these people? Is that what “do likewise” means? I have always thought so and I have always been taught so, but how I am beginning to wonder. And I didn’t do it anyway.

samaritan 1 That way of understanding the story has not helped me. It has brought a consistent and principled demand down on my behavior. It has not caused me to intervene when otherwise I would not have. I don’t think I have ever seen anyone intervene because of the “do likewise” instruction. That formulation is really good for blaming yourself, of course, and it is even better for blaming other people, but without compassion, it doesn’t actually work and I think we know that.

I had some fun with this a few years ago. I developed two alternative tracks to this narrative, neither of which required a compassionate enemy. In the first, a businessman with a lot of contacts in Jerusalem and Jericho developed a stretcher service that ran on a regular schedule. The compassionate Samaritan is systematized so that no actual compassion is required and many more people are helped. No one liked it.

In my second track, I developed a large scale economic intervention that began with a man with contacts in Rome. He got a planning grant from the emperor, using “law and order” arguments. He discovered that there were valuable minerals in the wilderness through which the road passed. He developed a mining operation that provided stable employment with good wages to people who used to be only highway bandits. No one got hurt. No one liked that one either.

There was no compassion in them. It was the compassion that made Jesus’s story appealing. The the command “Go and do likewise,” doesn’t have any compassion in it either unless it begins with verse 33c. The story might be understood as a demand that we should be neighborly in some general way. Maybe you believe that commanding people to feel compassion causes them to feel compassionate. That has not been my experience.

Beginning with the experience of compassion

What if “go and do likewise”(verse 37) were understood as beginning with compassion. “When something really moves you,” this version of Jesus’s story would hold, “follow that compassion with action.” This way of understanding opens up a whole new approach. It is addressed to people who are in situations like that and who feel compassion. It says that compassion is a good instigation and should be trusted. It doesn’t say anything to people who don’t begin with the experience of compassion. But what if other kinds of things move you to compassion? The man who is hired to play the part of Jesus in a passion play in Montreal [1] takes compassion on the actors who are auditioning for a beer commercial and smashes all the video equipment and chases the advertisers out of the building with a whip made of cords. “Contempt,” he says, “really upsets me.”

This way of looking at it not only changes the way the “lesson” takes shape, but changes the role Jesus plays as well. He is not The New Lawgiver in this way of looking at things. If the punchline of the story is “Go and Be Neighborly,” then Jesus is, in fact, the New Lawgiver. Instead, Jesus is someone who tells a story about a really appealing person—the kind of person you feel drawn to. The kind of person whose actions—not his feelings—you might want to emulate. Jesus, in this way of looking at him, is the kind of guy who says, “Let me tell you a story about my Uncle Abram. He was on the road one day….”

I want to end with that approach because it is appealing. I am going to skip over all the objections people are going to offer to this new way of looking at it. I think I’ve heard them all. I may have used them all myself. But I wouldn’t mind hearing them again.

Bullying

Instead, I would like to look at bullying. Every school I have ever attended has had bullies. Every school has had people who somehow evoked bullying behavior. Predators, in other words, and prey.

There has been a lot of attention recently to cutting down on bullying. It begins by identifying people who are standing around watching the harassment as it starts. It asks them to intervene and it gives them some language that might work; it gives them some training in using that language.

samaritan 4 I think that’s a really good idea. The bully’s aggression works by isolating some vulnerable person. If the bystanders refuse to fall away, to expose this boy or girl to abuse, then he or she is not isolated and the bully will have to reconsider. He may very well reconsider by going after you, but that is one of the things you might have to risk. You might be willing to risk it because you feel compassion for the bully-bait, especially if you have seen it before. You feel compassion and you are impelled to follow those feeling with actions.

But what if you can tell, walking into a new school, who is going to get bullied. You can tell just by looking around. The person is doing everything but holding up a sign saying, “You can bully me with no risk. I have no idea what to do.”

What are you going to do when you walk into a new place and see that person? What if you can see the bullying coming and you would like to intervene before it all gets started? What if you look at this kid and feel compassion? What actions would flow from that compassion?

Would they be getting to know this kid? No one else seems to have bothered. Would it be teaching him that presenting himself this way is not a good idea and here is why? Would it be teaching him that this is not a good place for him to be at this time of day and here is why? Could it be that your compassion might flow out of you not when you see the bully looming over him, but when you see him inadvertently inviting the bully to loom over him?

Would that work?

I don’t know whether it would or not. It does begin with compassion and eventuate in action. It does seem silly to continue to use the setting of Jesus’s story—beaten up by the side of the road—as the only kind of event that might evoke compassion. Why not the school setting? What if that evokes my compassion?

Finally, I want to go back to my friend who cleaned up the counters before he left. I don’t bring him back to help me close this essay on the grounds that his action proceeds from compassion. Compassion for puddles of soapy water? I bring him back because seeing him do what he did and admiring it as I did has helped me to remember to do it myself. When I find myself in that situation—and I just did at the retirement center—I want to act in that way. I want to “do likewise.”

My friend at Westminster is Jesus’s Uncle Abram. He’s a character in a story and when you see who he is and what he does, you feel sometimes that you would like to be that kind of person yourself.

And maybe that’s a good way to teach. And maybe that’s why Jesus used it.

[1] Jesus of Montreal. A superb “play within a play” treatment of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

Posted in A life of faith, Biblical Studies | Tagged feeling compassion, moral exemplars, moral laws, systemic solutions, the good Samaritan | Leave a comment

Fitting in

Posted on August 2, 2016 by hessd

It isn’t always what you want to do, of course, but it is probably something you always want to be able to do. In Abraham Maslow’s well-known hierarchy of needs, “fitting in” and “not fitting in” are adjacent goals. My University of Oregon mentor, Jim Davies, who was a careful student of Maslow’s work, used to say that we wanted first to be a part; having achieved that, we wanted to be fit in Cute.

I’m thinking about the move that Bette and I will be making to a retirement center later this month. It’s a little like moving to a new school. You look around and see what clumps of people there are and you decide which group or groups you want to be a part of or that you don’t want to be a part of any group. [1]. I’ve never done this at a retirement center before, so I’m trying to anticipate, what the process will be like.

I’m guessing that there is a rough sorting of the residents by mobility. There will be people like me, who can walk out the front door and go anywhere within walking distance just by deciding to. There will be people who can walk a short distance if they are careful. Then there are the people with walkers and wheel chairs. Then there are people who need for someone else to provide the push for the wheel chairs. For now, I fit best into the category of people who can go wherever they want. I doubt that this category is also a group [2], but I am not opposed to starting with a category.

Strolling through the parc

There will also be a sorting by mental ability in the very rough sense of recognizing other people and having conversation. I don’t know quite how those categories will shape up, but I very much hope that I will have access to people who like to read and think and talk and who are likely to remember on Thursday, the conversation we had on Tuesday.

Within this category, I imagine that people are different from each other more by preferred style of interaction than by ability. Some people like to sit together and share stories of their grandchildren and their pets. Some people like to talk sports; it is their soap opera. Some people like to harangue each other about moral or religious or political issues. It is the haranguing, more than the topics, that makes them a viable group.

When it comes to conversations, I know what I like, but I also know that you can’t always get what you like. And I know that knowing how to fit into a style of conversation that you would not have chosen is a very important skill. I practice that skill at our Starbucks nearly every morning. It I do it right, it will make me a part. There will always be time to set myself apart.

fit in 2 I know there will be other sortings as well; I’m just not sure what they will be. Will there be a group—a real group, not just a category—of “people who used to be teachers?” Will there be “people who used to run businesses?” Will there be a group who used to be important and miss it dreadfully? Will there be a group of movers and shakers who serve on retirement center or on neighborhood committees and who want to tell you what is going on? I have no idea.

I am thinking, however, that there is a visual element to these groupings and the visual element is what I am thinking about right now. I know there is a tendency to get shabby and unkempt when you get old because no one actually cares about how you look. I don’t want to do that. On the other hand, I don’t want to turn suddenly into a clothes horse, which I have never ever been and which I would tire of. Bette could be a clothes horse if she wanted to; I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t tire of that.

But apart from “not grubby and not classy,” which is pretty broad, I am sure there are ways of presenting myself that will invite some people to want to know more about me. I already know that they will be presenting themselves in ways that affect me that way.

I recently wrote a very brief biographical statement, as the Director of Resident Services asks of all the new people, and I tried to tuck into it little indicators of who I am and what I care about. What I would like, from that little bio, is for some people there to read it and be interested in meeting me and for other people to read it and decide not to. I actually know how to do that with words. In this essay, I am trying to imagine how to do that same thing with how I look. As you can tell, I have no idea how to think my way through that.

fit in 4 I know this happens all the time in new settings. I know I am going to walk into the dining room and look around. I am going to see some people dressed as “we used to be teachers” or “we used to run businesses” or “we were stay-at-home moms.” And they are going to look at us, at “the new guys,” and make the same kinds of early decisions. Where is the Sorting Hat when you really need it?

What I will do if I don’t get any kind of a handle on this process, is just to continue looking, as we become part of the Holladay Park Plaza community, the way I look now and see what happens. There’s nothing really wrong with that, but if I could understand the process better, I could do something on purpose—and I love doing things on purpose.

[1] I discovered well after I graduated from high school that back when I was there, I was considered to be a member of “the smart kids.” More a category than a group, I regret to say, but even so, I would have appreciated knowing at the time, that people thought I belonged anywhere.
[2] I use the word category to refer to any collection of people who share certain traits. Left handed catchers whose mothers immigrated from Puerto Rico, let’s say. But a group is interactive. People know each other and choose their behaviors based on likely responses. That’s what I am going to mean, in any case.

Posted in Getting Old, Living My Life, Uncategorized | Tagged deciding not to fit in, fitting in, looking shabby, looking sharp, retirement centers, sending signals | 1 Comment

The D and R Conventions

Posted on July 30, 2016 by hessd

They are over now. At least for me. For the last two nights, I have watched a bunch of very capable Democrats giving really terrific speeches. If it were just for the pleasure of living in the world their words create, I would listen to people like Clinton (either one), Biden, Kaine, and Obama for hour after hour. But when the evening was over, I was discouraged.

Let me pause for just a moment to establish my credentials. I’m not new to politics. I remember the Truman v. Dewey campaign of 1948 although it would be too much to say that I understood what was at stake. I have taught political science for most of my life, including courses in parties and elections. I talked my way into managing a campaign on the basis of those courses in parties and elections. That was how I learned that studying campaigns and running campaigns are completely different jobs. I served as a legislative assistant in the Oregon House of Representatives. I have been part of many campaigns for many offices in Oregon. I’m not new to any of this.

I know, particularly, as the fictional Mr. Dooley said in 1895, “Politics ain’t beanbag.” [1] That’s not what bothered me.

cons 1 As I tried to find a way to say what it was about the two conventions that bothered me, I made my way back to 1895 again. That’s when H. G. Wells’ well-known science fiction work, The Time Machine was published. As nearly everyone knows—I’m sure there is a Classic Comic version of this famous story—the Time Traveler goes far into our future, to a time when there are only two species: the Eloi and the Morlocks. Here’s a piece about their relationship from the Wikipedia article on Morlocks, but you can see it all in the picture.

the Morlocks are the working class who had to work underground so that the rich upper class could live in luxury.

The Morlocks do all the work, in other words, and are dark and strong. And they use the Eloi as their food source. They harvest them as needed, very like the Cowslip warren in Watership Down, where all the rabbits have plentiful food and safety from predators and no one talks about the fact that the farmer who feeds them takes a rabbit with a snare whenever he needs a meal.

Let me pause again, briefly, to reassure you that I am not saying that the Democrats are Eloi or live in the Cowslip Warren nor are the Trump Republicans Morlocks. But what I do want to say is that the experience of watching the one convention, then the other, put me in mind of differences as stark as those. The Republican convention was dark and angry. The Democratic convention was light and hopeful. These are tones, not policy positions.

I began to listen in the Democratic rhetoric for any awareness of the issues that make the Republicans—at least the pro-Trump Republicans—angry. I couldn’t hear it at all. Do they not know what issues are riling the village folk? Is it in their interest to pretend they hadn’t heard? That’s not going to make anyone less angry.

The Real Issue

Here’s an idea about what is going on in the world. Indulge me just a little. It may help explain why neither party is talking about it.

cons 2 The production and distribution of goods and services are being globalized. American manufacturers want to find customers for their products and as a global middle class continues to develop and grow, they are finding them. Not the American middle class, but still, a customer is a customer. A global labor market is also taking shape. This pool of “laborers” includes blue color and white collar; it includes jobs in production, sales, and services—including some very demanding services, like architecture and engineering. The need for workers—reduced as it is by robotics—is still quite large, but there is no need for these to be American workers.

The result of these trends is that whole segments of American society—right where the American middle class used to be—have been hollowed out and are now, for all practical purposes, Third World countries. [3] Consumer purchasing power in this segment is going down and has been going down for a long time. It’s going to continue to decline. The prospects for reversing this trend are scarcely imaginable. These conditions are the prescription the major economic powers of the world have written to treat whatever disease they might have imagined they had. The political parties in the United States can do virtually nothing about it except to bluster. They bluster in different keys, but it is all bluster.

That’s what, it seems to me, is going on in the world.

Proxy Villains

When you look at it from the standpoint of the party strategists, it makes no sense at all to identify an enemy you can’t defeat. So neither party does that. What they do is to take the anger that radical globalization has produced and to choose a proxy villain. Trump rages about American power in the world. [3] Hillary rages on about companies that get tax breaks and use foreign labor forces. Donald is openly admiring of Vladimir [4] Putin. Hillary is going to “stand up to China.”

These are proxy villains. No one has any idea what to do about the source of our economic distress which, for the purposes of this essay, is also the source of our cultural distress. I know that’s too simple, but it’s all I can handle in just one short essay.

cons 3 What would help? OK, I’m not going to call it socialism. I’m not going to call it anything at all. But here’s what needs to happen. If American businesses are going to go to the least expensive labor markets and if they are going to sell their products to a rapidly emerging global middle class, then we might as well admit that the cost to our own middle class—the late great American middle class—is going to be catastrophic. [5] The pain these policies cause makes they angry. The pain needs to be mitigated. That is something governments actually can do and they should. They can’t fix the problem, but they can make it hurt less.

Since I launched without much thought into medical metaphors, I will call this arrangement “palliative care.” The world’s economic system, with the eager participation of the American economic system, is not going to deal with the terrible problem of “low labor costs.” But in the political arena, “low labor costs” are better called “intractable poverty” and the collection of diseases that hopeless poverty produces. Richard Ball published an article in 1968 that used the term “analgesic subculture,” a pain-killing culture. An aspirin culture. [6] He was talking about the persistently poor areas of the Appalachians. This culture—the practices adopted by these people, both poor and hopeless—did nothing to solve their problems, but they did make everything hurt less. Making it hurt less is all I heard at the conventions. Presidential aspirants make it hurt less.

A Solution

Now that growing sectors of the American population are in a condition remarkably like the one Ball described, it is time for the government to intervene actively in ways that make it hurt less. I’m thinking of good food, good housing, good medical care, and good education. You can add whichever others you would like.

A society like that might be poor, relative to the good old days—you know, when America was great?—but it would not be frantic. It would not be hopeless. It would not be three jobs and daycare and families ground to nothing by the frictions of economic striving. The basic needs would be met by the same government that gave free rein to the corporations. It would be paid for by the whole citizenry, including the rich. With a little modesty in foreign policy, we would find it affordable.

And if everything worked out well, we could watch political conventions run by parties who seemed to be looking at the same world. That’s not what we have now. Politicians could point to policies that actually “treat” problems—some by eliminating them, others by making them hurt less—instead of spending their public time burning each other in effigy.

[1] The point of the bean-bag metaphor is that you can throw this object at people and hit them squarely and not hurt them. People actually do get hurt by what gets thrown around in politics, especially the machine style politics of Chicago, which was what Mr. Dooley had in mind.
[2] “Third World countries” was invented in the 1950s as a way to refer to the “uncommitted” nations of the world, mostly in the southern hemisphere. The West was the “first world.” It was out taxonomy, after all, so we got to be first. The “Communist world,” whoever that included at the time (remember Yugoslavia?) and everyone else was “the Third World.” In current use, it mostly means “non-industrialized,” or, more broadly, poor and hopeless.
[3] The Roman emperor, Caligula, had a Trumpian foreign policy, “Oderint dum metuant.” It is normally translated, “Let them hate [us], so long as they fear [us].” I refreshed my memory of this quotation by looking it up online in the Merrian-Webster dictionary. My eye was caught by a picture at the top of the page, and when I looked up to see it, I noticed that it was a picture of Donald Trump. It took a second, then a third look to establish that both Hillary and Donald had their pictures at the top of that page. I’d call that a visual prejudice.
[4] The name means, “the lord of the east.” I think that stands as an ironic comment now that Putin is moving west.
[5] It is worse when the distribution of income is so radically unequal (and the distribution of wealth even worse), but redistributing the income of the rich would be only symbolic. Worth doing, because it eliminates a distraction, but it is just a symbol.
[6]’Richard Ball, ‘A Poverty Case: the Analgesic Subculture of the Southern Appalachians’, American Sociological Review, 33 (1968), 885.

Posted in Politics, Uncategorized | Tagged Clinton and Kaine, Democrats, global production, global workforce, persistent poverty, proxy villains, Republicans, Trump and Pence, Trump Republicans | Leave a comment

Leaving home and coming home

Posted on July 26, 2016 by hessd

“Coming and going and going and coming, and always too soon,” sings Lili von Schtupp in her Wild West barroom show in Blazing Saddles. When I began to call the series of essays describing this move “Moving in Time,” part of what I meant was that neither the coming or the going was “too soon.”

auxin 1 Since Bette and I decided to leave our Hayhurst Neighborhood and move to a good retirement center somewhere, we have been thinking about the going part. How can it be done thoughtfully and gently, honoring all the neighborhood has been for us? And now that we have bought an apartment at Holladay Park Plaza, our choice of retirement centers, it is time to think about the coming part—coming to a new home. [1] HPP is actually in the Sullivan’s Gulch Neighborhood, as Portland counts neighborhoods [2], but I think it would be better for Bette and me to think of HPP itself as our neighborhood.

How will we go about that? I do like “thoughtfully and gently.” Plans that fail that auxin 2 standard are very likely to be rejected at the outset, even though there are other values that also need to be considered. If it isn’t thoughtful and gentle, I don’t want to consider it. I was shopping for a metaphor that would help me think through the process and in the middle of my search, I stumbled on the metaphor I used last January for leaving the neighborhood: it is “the abscission layer.” As soon as I saw that, I knew that I wanted to go around to the other end of the process, which is grafting. Bette and I want to be grafted in to our new neighborhood.

There are four parts of this process I want to think about further; four parts that are implicit in the grafting metaphor.

Nourishment (Resources)

First, we want to take on part of the responsibility for the process by which energy is produ auxin 5 ced by sunlight and magic and sent to wherever in the tree it is needed. I don’t understand photosynthesis, really, but I know it involves an interaction at a part of the tree whose principal responsibility is to make nutrients and put them into a transportation system that will bring them to the right place.

When I think of how many different kinds of things nourish me—and what different ones nourish Bette—I know that some people at HPP will count new projects as nourishment; others will count peace and quiet as nourishment. [4] I am hoping to find people who are nourished by reading books and seeing movies and talking about them because I often find those things nourishing. There may be a good ongoing Bible study at HPP and if there is not, maybe there should be. Nourishment, don’t you know. [5]

Distribution of Resources

Second, we want to join the distribution system by which the whole tree and all its parts are provided with nutrition. Being one of the sites that produces energy for the whole tree—being, that is, a leaf—is one thing, but getting that energy to where it needs to be is something else. Plants are equipped with cells that do that, but neighborhoods have cultures and some cultures are wonderfully adept at distributing energy; others not so much.

Structural Integrity

Third, we want to be part of the structure of our new tree, although being grafted in, we will never be as securely attached as the original parts of the tree. [6] I know that some people wait to move until they can no longer manage at home and when they have to move to a retirement center—are “put in a retirement center”—they have nothing left to give. They will never be securely attached to the structure. Bette and I hope to be there in time to be part of the structure of the place, whether that involves interaction with our part of the city, or helping to raise and consider new questions, or just serving on the boards and committees that, somehow, need to be served on. I get the notion of “becoming part of the structure” abstractly. Just what it will mean particularly we will soon begin to discover.

Governance

Fourth, and finally, we want to be a part of the highly interactive process by which a tree “governs itself.” Organizations, like trees, for instance, or retirement centers, are forced to engage in triage. [7] Some needs are more urgent or maybe just more important than others, so the less important will have to be dropped. I know that in societies, there are some people whose interests are more important than others. That’s true in trees too. The hormones that control growth and reproduction have the best interests of the tree in mind, and I think that is a good model for us at Holladay Park Plaza.

auxin 4 Not everyone would call the action of hormones like auxins, cytokinins, and gibberellins “politics,” but I would. The production and inhibition of growth and the distribution of resources to one place rather than another sound like the ordinary work of the legislature to me. We’ll see.

So there’s my metaphor. Bette and I want to become a part of the active and living tissue at Holladay Park Plaza. That will require that they cut into a branch of the living tree (the root stock) to expose the cambium layer, which is the nutrition highway. It will require of us (the scion) that our own cambium layer be exposed as well. And the two need to be joined together so that they become part of a single plant and therefore of a single system of nutrition and distribution and communication.

I am just a little leery that someone will read that and think that it is asking too much, but I don’t think so. I think it is quite modest and realistic. The process is not very often described analytically, at least I haven’t seen it, or placed into formal categories like nutrition and governance. I think it is the words that make the process seem daunting. But it is with words like that that I take hold of the situation and try to think my way into it.

Bette says I make it sound harder than it is, but I say that describing it this way gives me a better chance to know what I am doing and maybe even to do it better.

[1] Holladay Park Plaza is a lot to write, but Holladay Park is…well…a park. So I refer to it sometimes as HPP, sometimes as Ben’s Place (for Ben Holladay, the namesake), and sometimes as the Holladay Inn. I have a special fondness for “Ben’s place” because Ben was my father’s name, so I began my life at Ben’s place. I like the symmetry.
[2] The valley, through which Interstate 84 now runs, was originally on the property of Tim Sullivan, who bought the land in the mid-1850s.
[3] And sometimes, circumstances allow you to do even better. We will be taking the buyers of our house to the neighborhood picnic as our guests and we are passing that word around in advance as a way of increasing turnout. I never, in my wildest dreams, imagined that would be possible.
[4[ See, for instance, Susan Cain (in her book Quiet) on what enables introverts to be so productive.
[5] The hormone auxin is centrally involved in stimulating growth here and preventing it there. I think that auxin might be directly involved in whether there is a Bible study and, if so, what kind it is.
[6] So it’s not a perfect metaphor. A retirement center doesn’t have any original parts. It does have a structure, however; a physical structure (that’s why they did a seismic retrofit), a social structure, and a distinct culture.
[7] Thank you all for noticing that I did not pop “tree-azh” into the text. That’s what footnotes are for.

Posted in Economy, Getting Old, Politics, Society, Uncategorized | Tagged a society of salience, an economy of sucrose, grafting a new branch, moving in, moving out, retirement centers, the politics of hormones | Leave a comment

Knowing how it turned out

Posted on July 24, 2016 by hessd

Milton Mayer used to make fun of people who use Latin where they could just as well have used English. He managed to do that inoffensively by making that error repeatedly and then making fun of himself for doing it. I thought I would mention it because I am about to do it myself.

“Finem respice” he would say, “Principiis obsta.” Mayer died in 1984 but I can feel his gaze on my keyboard as I write this. “En Unknown vision the end” the saying goes, “resist the beginnings.”

I am working now with a marvelous book that Kendy Hess, my philosopher niece, brought to my attention and this morning, it occurred to me that the mechanism that C. S. Lewis uses in The Great Divorce is identical. What I am calling “the mechanism” is the trick of looking at the present from a hypothetical future time when all the events of our “present” have already occurred and we know what worked and what didn’t. Of all the claims we dealt with in our own time, we now know, from this hypothetical future, which were true and which misleading. This essay is about the advantages of knowing how everything is going to turn out.

A Broken World

Kendy passed along to me Tim Mulgan’s Ethics for a Broken World: Imagining Philosophy After Catastrophe. Mulgan has a person from our time—he calls it “the age of affluence”—visit the time from which he is writing. Since Mulgan is a savvy writer, he doesn’t say exactly when “the future” is, but he does locate it generally by saying that the age of affluence ended “only a handful of generations ago.” Let’s just artificially specify a handful as six and a generation as twenty years. So, for the purposes of this essay, he is writing from about 2140 C.E. [1]

As a way of making an argument, foreseeing the future with certainty—finem respice, remember—is a great advantage. Consider this passage from Chapter 1:

Our affluent visitor might initially refuse to believe that our plight represents the future of his affluent world. Drawing on the affluent faith in technology, he might be sure that human ingenuity must always outweigh the negative impact of climatic variation and uncertainty. We can only reply that, while this might have happened in a different possible world, it did not actually happen.

In our time—the affluent age—we still have a robust “faith in technology.” Smart broken 2 people argue that this or that can be done. Mulgan has the advantage of saying “while this might have happened…it did not actually happen.” Mulgan knows what happened—“is happening,” we would say—and so he knows that the faith in technology was misplaced. And here we have John Kenneth Galbraith, whose book, The Affluent Society focused attention on the early phases of a lot of the issues that are completely out of hand by 2140.

When you actually know what happened, you gain a real clarity about what is—from our present perspective—still going on.

We might say of a friend that although he hoped that his speculative financial losses would be offset by his gains, that did not happen. He went completely broke by the time he was 37. We might say that it looked for a while as if a marriage doomed both participants to frustration and despair, but in fact, they came out of that bad time and lived happily together for another fifty years. Writers have an enormous advantage in knowing what actually happened especially when they are giving advice. We can “resist the beginnings” (principiis obsta) if we know the beginnings (finem respice).

Heaven and Hell

broken 4 C. S. Lewis’s setting is entirely different, but the mechanism is the same. The “divorce” of the title is the separation between Hell and Heaven. Every day, the people in Hell (the Ghosts) have the chance to get on a bus and go to Heaven to commune with the people there (the Spirits), and to stay forever if they want to. Nearly everyone doesn’t want to. They get back on the bus in the afternoon and go back to Hell where, apparently, they feel more “at home.”

But while they are in Heaven, they are met by a Spirit who knew they in what we call “life.” In heaven, everything is known so the denials and evasions used by the Ghosts are transparently false, just as the “faith in technology” in Mulgan’s book is transparently false. Here are some examples.
.
The character I call “the Episcopal Ghost” is defending himself against the Spirit who has come to help him.

“Dick,” says the Ghost, “This is unworthy of you. What are you suggesting?

“Friend,” the Spirit answers, “I am not suggesting at all. You see, I know now.”

An artist wants to stay in Heaven so he can paint it. The Spirit who came to meet him, a fellow artist during their life, tries to explain what was really going on back on earth.

“When you painted on earth—at least in your earlier days—it was because you caught glimpses of Heaven in the earthly landscape. … But here you are having the thing itself. It is from here that the messages came. There is no good telling us about this country, for we see it already. In act we see it better than you do.”

A third Ghost is one I call the Rightsmonger. All he wants is what is his due

“I’m a decent man and if I had my rights, I’d have been here (Heaven) long ago and you can tell them I said so.”

“It isn’t true, you know,” says his friend, the Spirit.

“What isn’t true?” asked the Ghost sulkily.

“You weren’t a decent man and you didn’t do your best. We none of us did. Lord bless you, it doesn’t matter [any more].

So from a narrative standpoint, there is a great deal to be said for knowing all of the truth. In Mulgan’s work, you hear a lot of arguments that are being made today and that sound very plausible today. But when you know that they didn’t work—and in 2140, we do know that–the plausibility blows away like dandelion seeds. In Lewis’s fantasy, all kinds of self-justifications which any of us might use here in the present of our lives and/or might discount when we heard them used here, simply melt into incredibility before our eyes.

So, if you are thinking of writing a fantasy, I recommend that you or a narrative creature of your devising know what has happened. It makes everything else easier.

[1] I have recently read a book that is called 2312, by Kim Stanley Robinson, because that is the year in which the narrative takes place. In that book, our time is called “the age of muddling.”

Posted in Books, Environment, Theology | Tagged C. S. Lewis, environmental disaster, Ethics for a Broken World, knowing the outcome, The Great Divorce, the omniscient narrator, Tim Mulgan | 1 Comment

Genre and Meaning

Posted on July 22, 2016 by hessd

I want to ask you to think along with me today on meaning and scripture. I want to say that explicitly at the beginning because the opening example will seem to be about something else entirely, especially, coming as it does in the middle of the 2016 Republican convention in Cleveland.

Here is a text I would like for you to consider.

All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Therefore, Workers of the World, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains. [1]

Now I would like for you to deny all your instincts and a good deal of your education and read this as a single sentiment from a single source. It can be done that way if you try. Here is my try at it.

The fundamental inequality of peoples is at the heart of this sentiment and it continues by urging workers to unite, presumably to achieve that equality.
Since these rights are inalienable, there is no question of any legitimate taking of them, so, again, the uniting of the workers would be for the purpose of reacquiring rights that should not have been taken away.
Since “workers” are being asked to unite, it is presumably the people who hire the workers who are the culprits.

In that paragraph of hypothetical construction, I have tried to illustrate that the ideas genre 4 suggested in the first part can be logically extended to the second part. All that passage is nonsense, of course, but I would like for you to stop and consider just why it is nonsense. It is not the words. They work fine. It is not the ideas. They can be made to work. It is the sources. What I am going to call the genres.

What if, instead of cobbling together that quotation, I had said, “I would like you to consider as allied texts this piece from the Declaration of Independence and this rhetorical climax from the Communist Manifesto.”

Paul’s argument

So with that as an introduction, I would like to introduce the announced topic: meaning and scripture. Let’s start with part of a speech by the apostle Paul, as Luke has recreated it.

We tell you the good news: What God promised our fathers he has fulfilled for us, their children, by raising up Jesus. [2] As it is written in the second Psalm: You are my Son; today I have become your Father (Acts 13:32-33).

Here is the argument Paul makes, according to Luke. God has kept the promise He made to the Israelite forebears. This was done in the resurrection of Jesus. It is at that point—“today, I have become your Father”—that Jesus becomes the messiah.

There is a single source (Psalm 2) with a single meaning: Jesus becomes the messiah at and by means of his resurrection from the dead. The notion of just what “messiah” means is not a difficulty here because it comes at the end of Jesus’s ministry and no one knows what the Messiah, now in heaven, is going to do next.

The synoptic argument

But Matthew, Mark, and Luke treat this question differently. They introduce a distinctive voice of God, they put it at the beginning of the ministry, and they add a second source to the proclamation and the second source is not royal at all. It is the mixed sources I want to call to your attention and that is the reason I gave you that little political detour at the beginning.

So here are the synoptic texts as they appear in the New Revised Standard Version.

Mark says, (1:11) “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
Matthew has (3:17) “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
Luke has (3:22) “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

When I asked you to deny all your natural instincts and read that composite political passage, I knew I was asking a lot because I knew you would recognize the sources—and as I see it, the sources ARE the message. It is the genres, not the meaning of each clause that shapes the meaning.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The first part of this text comes from Psalm 2, just as Paul’s did. The second part (highlighted) comes from one of the songs of the suffering servant in Isaiah 42:1, “Here is my servant whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom my soul delights.” That doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

So first, note that the gospel writers put this event at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry. Paul puts his at the end. That means that the writers of these gospels want to make the claim at the beginning of Jesus’s public ministry that Jesus is king AND suffering servant. That was novel, of course, and offensive.

genre 2 Messiah and king and son of God all had triumphant overtones. Jesus just can’t be, according to the Jewish understanding at the time (and today) the triumphant messiah and the suffering servant. One or the other; not both.

But this is a genre question, not a text question. There are three other servant songs in Isaiah (Chapter 49, verse 1 and following, Chapter 50, verse 4 and following and Chapter 52, verse 13—53, verse 12. There is quite a bit in these songs that is not kingly.

For instance, “he was so inhumanly disfigured that he no longer looked like a man.”
Or “He had no form or charm to attract us, no beauty to win our hearts.”
Or, “Ill-treated and afflicted, he never opened his mouth, like a lamb led to the slaughter house.”

Those are all from the songs of the suffering servant and none of them fit with the kingly emphasis of Psalm 2.

How to understand this passage and why it is so hard to do

So here it is. Mark and the other writers have a point they want to make. It is that Jesus was claimed by God at his baptism and identified as the Son of God (the messiah) and as the Suffering Servant. Both. When they joined the genres, the point that is made by joining them is that at this point, right at the beginning of his ministry, Jesus has redefined what “messiah” means.

What does it mean? It now means “the promised One of Israel who will suffer and die.”

How is that meaning established? By joining a psalm that means “coronation” with a song that belongs in the genre of “suffering servant songs.”

Does that seem like a stretch? I confess that it does seem like a stretch to me, but I am confident that it did not seem like a stretch to Mark. And remember that it did not seem like a stretch to you to look at the little clip (famous, but small) from the Declaration of Independence and see that it was attached to another little clip from the Communist Manifesto and to say, immediately, “That’s ridiculous! Those two texts don’t belong together!

I think that is the reaction Mark, followed by Matthew and Luke, had in mind. And I think they wanted to say, “No, it is not ridiculous. But it is new. God is doing a new thing.” And I think they counted on the sources to carry the meaning with their readers just as I counted on you to do the same thing.

Really, my only concern is this. How can a modern Christian pick up a Bible and read that text—just the words—and get the meaning the author intends if it is true that the meaning comes from combining the genres? It seems like a hard job, but I don’t see another way to get there.

[1] I admit that I cheated a little to add the “therefore.”Actually, I just borrowed it from the last paragraph. Some sense of the relationship of the two expressions was needed and I thought this did the least damage to the idea.
[2] Note, however, the difference between “raising up Jesus” and “raising up Gideon.” Gideon was one of the judges of Israel who was living a quiet life in spite of the occupation of his land by the Midianites. God “raised him up” to lead a military insurgency and to drive the Midianites out. That is not what “raised up Jesus” means, but it is what it was expected to mean. The messiah was to do for the nation what Gideon did for his little area..

Posted in Biblical Studies, Uncategorized | Tagged careful scholarship, genre as a source of meaning, kinds of meaning, the meaning of "messiah", the suffering servant songs | 2 Comments

A Failed Conversation at Starbucks

Posted on July 10, 2016 by hessd

I experienced one of the few failures of conversation I have ever had in our Starbucks group last week. I had a position I wanted to sell. It is position the group almost certainly accepts in general, but they didn’t want to accept it this time. And it is the failure of the conversation I want to point to, not my own failure. Although… (see below)

Blame

I am accustomed to considering “blame” as a relationship of events. I know that the legal perspective, which requires that someone be found guilty or negligent or something, likes to find one person, but not the other, at fault. Most often, I don’t see it that way. If a heavy person sits on a chair, which collapsed beneath him, I might say that the person was too heavy for the chair or that the chair was too flimsy for the person. You could say it either way, it seems to me.

Similarly, I could say that the group at Starbucks (the Caucus) stubbornly refused to accept the point I was making or that I made the point so poorly that they, although it was in keeping with their usual values, did not accept it this time. Either form can be seen to be a form of blaming. The combination of the two is not a form of blaming. It simply points to the disjunction.

They will see it as a loss

caucus 1 When I referred, above, to the position the group accepts as a general matter, this is the position I had in mind. People should be granted the right to feel what they feel. This means only that we understand that every decision is made on the basis of a welter of considerations, many of them contradictory. I would really like to have my son and his family nearby, but the best job offer is in a distant city and I know the family will be better off there. The Caucus would, as a rule, say that they “understand” my feeling of personal loss and that they “approve” my giving greater weight to the more important consideration. On the other hand, if I said that I am opposed to my son and his family moving to a distant city even though I know it would be the best thing for them and that my opposition is based on my own regret that they will no longer live near me, they would not approve. They might very well characterize my consideration as “selfish.”

I understand that weighing of values and approving the greater value even at the loss of the lesser value. How could anyone oppose that?

Well, it turns out that it is not that hard to do. Here are some possibilities.

People insist that “America” (the United States) [1] is better than all the other nations of the world, not just one more nation like all the rest.
The white working class in the decades after the Civil War [2] actively sought to demean black people because being “white” made them feel they had some merit.
Many Germans in the 1920s and 30s believed that violating the restrictions the Versailles Treaty imposed on them and invading their neighbors as soon as they were able, was justified because it was a way for them to reclaim their national honor.
Men may mourn the loss of easy camaraderie in their work group when a woman is introduced into the group as their new co-worker.

Here is how the Caucus and I feel about those situations. The hyper-patriot has every right to mourn a loss of that “special” designation that many generations of Americans have cherished, but they should set that small loss aside and choose to honor the greater and more important truth that every nation feels that it is “special” in its own way.

caucus 5 The white working class of the post-bellum south has every right to mourn the loss of the one social advantage they had, but they should set that aside in favor of the much greater importance of racial equity and social justice.

The Germans of the 20s and 30s have every right to mourn the disdain with the German nation was treated at Versailles, but they need to assert strongly that their need for national affirmation does not justify the invasion of their neighbors.

Men have every right to value the easy relationships that can grow up in a men-only setting and to mourn the loss of that ease when a woman is added to the group, but they need to set those feelings aside and do everything they can to make the experience of this woman—their new co-worker—successful and satisfying.

That’s what the Caucus and I think. That is our “position.”

But that isn’t what happened that morning last week. I don’t remember clearly what the caucus 3 trade-off at issue really was. It doesn’t really matter for this essay. Let’s say that it was the satisfaction that Trump voters feel is seeing “their guy” stand up to the enforcers of “sensitivity.” They, it seems to them, are forever being corrected by the Nazis of Political Correctness and they have to adopt new terms because the common old ones are now “offensive” and adopt tortured syntax to work their way around a word that can’t be used any more. They have to stammer and apologize and kowtow to criticisms. But Trump doesn’t. He just doesn’t. He faces the same forces that require us to submit and punish us if we don’t and he refuses to kowtow. How satisfying to see someone stand up to them!

Let’s say that’s how they feel. They feel exultant that someone—finally—has the guts to tell it like it is. [3] So what we think (the Caucus) is that they have every right to feel the way they feel, but these feelings need to be set aside in favor of larger and more urgent considerations. Many of the things we value about our lives would be undone by a Trump presidency. The Republican party would be wounded beyond repair. The full faith and credit of the United States would be ruined around the world. The U. S. leadership of the Western Alliance (including Japan, Vietnam, and Taiwan) would be tarnished. Domestic policies in the area of environmental protection, race relations, medical care and many others would be set back by decades.

Let’s just say that all those speculations are true. Just for now. On the basis of all those unbearable losses, we expect the Trump voter, who is just looking for a little respect, to lay aside his petty emotional hankerings, and cast the vote that an adult would cast—a vote for policies that are good for us all. We don’t deny the regret with which Our Great Spokesman has to be laid aside, but first things first. That is what the Caucus ought to want.

They didn’t want that on this day. They abandoned the whole idea that the lesser value must be abandoned for the greater. They simply denied the rightness or even the existence of the losses that these people must suffer—that they must choose to suffer. It was as if some values are so bad, so worthy of disapproval, that there is no need to grant that they matter to the people who hold them.

I value the common good as much as the next guy—more, probably, from having lectured on its behalf for 40 years or so. But there is a human side, too. It is worth taking the time to notice that something is being given up. The working class hunger for respect, for instance, is perfectly valid. It is only pursuing that goal by pushing helpless black populations down that is wrong.

So I guess I’m after the collective good, but with a little empathy. That’s a position that normally wins out at our Starbucks. Not this time.

[1] If you are going to make an emotional argument, “America” is the way to refer to our nation. “The United States” seems dry, as if it were part of some larger classification. “America” is more a word of the heart.
[2] For the purposed of this essay, I don’t need to take a position on whether that same special feeling is still expressed today.
[3] In another essay, I speculated that this emotional resonance is the true meaning of “tells it like it is,” which is often said of Trump by his supporters.

Posted in Communication, Political Psychology, Uncategorized | Tagged conversation, empathy with enemies, letting go of the lesser good, paying attention to the costs, Starbucks, The Northwest Corner Caucus | Leave a comment

Arguing with Trump voters

Posted on July 5, 2016 by hessd

I’m not recommending it. I’m just thinking about how I would go about it.

The argument from self-interest is the best there is in electoral politics. And although we celebrate elected representatives who can sacrifice their own good for the good of the nation, we don’t count on it as the operative principle of the Congress. The out of focus woman at the left is the reason this picture is here. [1]

Chelsea Clinton smiles as she looks at her father, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, during the final day of the Clinton Global Initiative 2012 in New York

We do count on it as the operative principle in elections. People in a democratic system are supposed to know what their “interest” is and to vote in a way that reflects it. That doesn’t sound so bad for my role in this essay. I just show the Trump voter that his (the Trump deficit with women voters is more than I want to take on) true concerns are going to be addressed by a Clinton presidency.

I don’t think I can do that. This Trump voter knows that it is harder and harder to make a living and things are looking even worse for his children than for himself. The share of the economy going to middle and working classes has almost nothing at all to do with who is president. It has to do, as I understand it, with two things.

The first is the increasing reliance of manufacturers on foreign middle classes to purchase their products. The old thing—think Henry Ford—about paying your workers enough that they can afford to buy your product really isn’t necessary if you can sell your product to someone else. Businesses that rely on sales don’t really care who they are selling to if they are selling enough and if they don’t have to pay domestic workers enough to support sales, then they can save on labor costs (see point two) as well. That will go on happening under a President Clinton and also under a President Trump.

The second is that jobs are being off-loaded at a rapid and increasing pace. The products made by robots are not made by domestic workers. The products made by foreign workers are not made by domestic workers. The new jobs created by this new pattern require new skills; not the skills we needed from the old work force and many of them don’t pay well. And the new jobs are being done by the labor force least likely to be protected by unions and, needless to say, the robots don’t require any unions at all. The production jobs are on the decline and the protection of worker’s interests in at the lowest level in decades. That will go on happening under a President Clinton and also under a President Trump.

So if the self-interest of the Trump voter has to do with reversing the long-term impoverishment that the economy has been offering him, then I have nothing to say. I don’t like that, but if you are going to argue self-interest as an economic goal, that’s the way it is.

Then there is the argument from demonstrated failure. Clinton is a “status quo candidate;” Trump is not. The recent decades have shown that “the status quo” is unable to restore the jobs that once made American the envy of the world, so why should we keep on choosing it?

T Voter 3 This argument represents an authentic feeling. As the guy assigned to argue the Trump voter out of his madness, the intensity of this feeling is my problem. I can argue that the objection in that form is the sheerest nonsense; that “status quo” doesn’t mean anything at all if we are talking about the effects of all policies at the same time. That doesn’t help me. The anger against “the status quo” will not be mollified by more abstract considerations. Revoking Medicare and Social Security, for instance, would be a dramatic rejection of “the status quo,” but it turns out that is not what they were thinking of.

So I come to these voters prepared to make rational arguments; prepared to show them T Voter 4 what is truly—that ordinarily means “economically”—in their interest, but I find that they are not interested in arguments and are prepared to deny the truth value of anything that has ever been studied. They don’t believe the reporting of journalists if it is inconvenient because of “the liberal media.” They don’t believe the overwhelming consensus of experts about the causes of global warming because it is not unanimous.

Besides, “experts,” i.e., people who have studied the question are “them,” they are not “us.” And we already know what we need to know because it is “common sense.”
So in making an argument based on studies and logic, I am asking them to violate the norms of their tribe (common sense) and to throw their lot in with the enemy (them) and the people who fund the studies conducted by “them.” And to believe the media, which all my friends know is deeply biased. My argument is not going to work.

Besides that, agreeing with my case will not feel good. A very common dilemma–and I have this just like everyone else– is that I follow the facts and they lead this way but I don’t like where they lead because my heart inclines me to go the other way. Please note that all you have to do to resolve this dilemma is to deny the validity or the applicability of the facts. Problem solved.

So I notice that there are lot of “Mexicans” in town and I already know that household income for working class families is going down decade by decade. Notice what wonderful efficiency there is in hating the Mexicans because they are ruining my standard of living. It may be, for instance, that you really didn’t want to do the stoop labor that agricultural work requires or to do construction work for the wages the Mexicans get or landscaping in all kinds of weather. But pairing the “taking our jobs” idea with the “reduced standard of living” idea gives you just one thing to be angry about. Just one. It simplifies your cognitive life and purifies your emotional life. What’s not to like? [4]

T Voter 7 The problem I am confronting in dealing with these Trump voters is that I need a solution to the grievances they have that will feel good for them to hold. I can’t think of one.

And when they do express their anger, they are shushed. That is not a pleasant experience for adults. They present their grievances and they are told that they are being insensitive. [5] You can’t tell the ethnic jokes you grew up with; or the jokes that turn on sexual stereotypes; and you can’t count on Christian rhetoric as a foundation for public policy anymore—not since “they threw God out of the schools” at any rate.

And along comes a man who is every bit as crude as we would like to be and the legion of shushers descend upon him and he refused to be shushed! He just refuses! And he ridicules the people who are saying that he should “watch his language” or “be more sensitive.”[5]

I think it is this refusal to be shushed that it as the heart of the celebration of Trump as a man who “tells it like it is.” Liberals are inclined to understand that as a truth claim. Trump knows the truth and will not be dissuaded from telling it. But I think it is a freedom of expression claim. He says crude and offensive things, the things we would say if it were not for the shushers, and he gets away with it. He’s our kind of guy!

So it turns out that I don’t have anything to say to the Trump voter. They hate Hillary and telling them that they should feel differently than they do is a hopeless task. They blame “the status quo” but that is a notion so ill-defined as to have virtually no content at all, so it is an emotional stance more than an actual critique. They can’t be shown that their assertions are incorrect because if it is in the media, it can be disregarded—the “liberal media,” don’t you know. And if it is the consensus of scholars, it can be disregarded because scholars don’t have common sense. If they did, they would get real jobs. I can’t argue that making the right political choice will turn the economy around because the economy is not going to get turned around no matter who is in the White House.

So I leave my meeting and go home and write a dauntingly large check to the Clinton campaign. It’s pathetic, I know, but I have not been able to think of anything to say to the Trump voters that will make a difference and I have stopped trying.

I’m open to suggestions.

[1] My favorite recent example is Rep. Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, who provided the 218th vote in the House for President Clinton’s budget, knowing it was going to cost her her seat at the next election. It did, but as she got Chelsea Clinton as a daughter-in-law, it was not all for naught It does seem humorous to me, however, that in this picture, she (at the far left, next to her son) is the only one who is out of focus.
[2] There is always that argument from comparative advantage. It is true, this argument goes, that there will be fewer jobs that pay well, but if you get a good education and work diligently, you can have one of those jobs and then this won’t be your problem at all. Needless to say, this is not a systemic argument. It presupposes that proportion of bad jobs will always be high, but argues that you can always get someone else to pay the price for that.
[3] Former Speaker of the House John Boehner once rejected a meticulously crafted report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) by saying, “Well…that is the CBO’s opinion.”
[4] Which is why is was used against the Irish and the Italians and the Germans and the Poles, etc.
[5] I still prize the story of the student living in a college dorm who, just as a joke, crossed out the COLORED PAPER sign and wrote PAPER OF COLOR instead. The recycling coordinator was devastated and apologized to everyone she could find. “Oh dear. How could I have been so insensitive?”

Posted in Communication, Political Psychology, Politics, Uncategorized | Tagged don't believe the liberal media, economic self-interest, Mexicans are stealing our jobs, Trump tells it like it is, working class grievances | Leave a comment

“Bad Faith” and Politics

Posted on June 28, 2016 by hessd

I don’t know J. D. Vance at all, but I think I’d like him if I had the chance. The New York Times for June 26 offered his article, “The Bad Faith of the White Working Class,” which you can (and should) see here.

This particular column could use some editing—either that or it has been over-edited so as to cram several themes into just a few column inches. I’m going to object to a few things I read here, none of which reflect badly on Mr. Vance. I just want to use his argument for some other purposes. Let’s begin here.

The evangelical Christian faith I’d grown up with sustained me. It demanded that I refuse the drugs and alcohol on offer in our southwestern Ohio town, that I treat my friends and family kindly and that I work hard in school. Most of all, when times were toughest, it gave me reason to hope.

I like all of those effects. Who wouldn’t? As a Christian myself, I don’t take any particular satisfaction in the religious context in which Mr. Vance grew up because the good outcomes he describes are not an intrinsic part of any particular religious faith. A warm and loving coven of witches would do just fine. We’ll get to that.

His religious upbringing demanded that he refuse drugs and alcohol. [1] It demanded that he treat friends and family kindly. (No word there on how to treat enemies.) It demanded that he work hard in school. It gave him a reason to hope—for what, Vance does not say, but I’d guess it had something to do with a stable and prosperous life.

These effects are produced by institutions that are vehicles of his Christian faith, as Vance understands it, not by Christian faith itself. When you look at the statistics, you find that kids who attend “church” [2] “perform better in school, divorce less as adults and commit fewer crimes. Regular church attendees even exhibit less racial prejudice than their nonreligious peers.”

At this point, Vance begins to move in a direction that concerns me. He points out that working class whites have largely abandoned their churches; not their faith, just their churches. And if it is true, as Vance and I both believe, that it is the institutional effect that produces the good outcomes he remembers, then this is a substantial loss to society.

Though many working-class whites have lost any ties to church, they haven’t necessarily abandoned their faith. More than one in three identify as evangelical, and well over 75 percent claim some Christian affiliation. But that faith has become deinstitutionalized. They carry it alone.

Those losses show up as increases in incarcerations rates for white women, increased deaths from drugs for white youth, and increased rates of divorce and domestic chaos. It is the loss of the institutional home, according to Vance, that has produces these effects among working class whites.

But I want to think now about what Christian churches are for. Presumably, the purpose of a church—as it sees itself—has something to do with God. I would hope that it had something to do with the invitation to reconciliation God offered through Jesus Christ. If churches aren’t for that, I’m not sure what they are for. [3]

Vance’s consideration of the value of institutional churches is entirely instrumental. Being a part of a religious community does all the good things he is talking about—the drugs, the divorce, the dropouts—but that is not “what they are for.”

jdvance 6 Vance’s second point is that as “faith” as been de-institutionalized, it has been re-politicized. But politicization, even among white working class voters, means more than Vance considers in this column. Further, the black Protestant churches are almost surely the most politicized churches in the U. S. The “values voters” that Vance laments are only a pale reflection of the “black Christian voters” that the black churches turn out year after year. [4]

What Vance really wants to get at, though, is that Christian commitment can lead to “a certain amount of self-reflection and, occasionally, self-criticism.” The pale residue of a community of faith he sees among the “values voters” has enough power to collect and confirm class prejudices, but not enough to compel self-reflection. Or, as Vance says:

“…this fusion of religion and politics necessarily forces people to look externally [and]…a Christianity constantly looking for political answers to moral and spiritual problems gives believers an excuse to blame other people when they should be looking in the mirror.”

I didn’t know, for instance, until I read this article, that Donald Trump succeeded best among people who identified as evangelicals but who rarely—“a few times per year”—attended church. Among evangelicals who go to church frequently, Ted Cruz got nearly twice as many votes as Trump did.

jdvance 3 Vance sees that as the difference between a religious stance with and one without an actual community. Evangelicals who worship in community have, as Vance puts it, “camaraderie, community, and a sense of purpose.” Evangelicals who are alienated from actual communities have only a vacuum there and “into that vacuum has stepped Donald J. Trump.”

I was first attracted to Vance’s article by the title the headline writers gave him: “The Bad Faith of the White Working Class.” Now that I have spent some time with Vance’s take on it, I think I can rule out some possible meanings and make a good guess about what the notion means here.

Jean-Paul Sartre used the expression “bad faith” (mauvaise foi) as a centerpiece of his existential critique. But he meant that we deceive ourselves about the real possibilities open to us and imagine ourselves to be the prisoners of our circumstances, when in fact we have consented to them. That is not what Vance means.

I think that for Vance, “bad faith” is more like junk food. You choose it, you eat it, you pay the consequences for eating it. It is advertised extensively and packaged attractively and you gobble it down, knowing you shouldn’t. And then you find out that it does not sustain you. It will fuel a considerable array of short term actions, but it will not sustain you through anything that takes time and consistent effort.

I think that Vance believes that a religious faith as part of a supportive community does actually provide that kind of support. A faith that moves you to remove the splinter in your own eye before you attempt delicate surgery on the speck of dust in your brother’s eye [5] is “a good faith.” If it just provides more juice for the hating machine, then it is bad faith.

I think Vance is right about that.

[1] That one means something to me because he grew up, as I did, in a southwestern Ohio town. He grew up in Middletown, Ohio. I grew up in Englewood, which is roughly 75% smaller.
[2] I have seen the same effect in statistics about attendance at mosques and synagogues and I would guess that participation in any regular religious community would have this kind of effect. If rehydration is your concern, you don’t really care what flavor it comes in.
[3] By saying what they are for, I don’t mean to imply that they might not have other effects—such as the ones Vance is talking about—or that society might not benefit from them.
[4] The best film version of that role I know is The Long Walk Home starring Whoopi Goldberg and Sissy Spacek. The best academic consideration I know is Amazing Grace: How Religion Units and Divides Us by Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell
[5] Matthew 7:3, freely paraphrased.

Posted in A life of faith, Politics | Tagged alienated Trump voters, Donald J. Trump, faith and community, what churches are for, white working class | Leave a comment

How not to feel like a frail old man

Posted on June 26, 2016 by hessd

It’s not as easy as you might think. Here are some things we need to consider just to get started.

First, it would help a good deal of you are actually not frail[1], not old, or not male. That would take care of “frail old man” on all three counts. [2] Second, it would help if the way your body is did not cause you to represent it to yourself as “frail.” Notice, please, that it is the representation to yourself that does the damage in the problem I am constructing, not the fragility itself. That will become clearer in the stair-climbing example.

What the process is like

That is the point in the argument where I lose nearly everyone. People have no idea the extent to which they construct a reality for themselves and then later—not very much later, sometimes—“discover” this reality and treat it as a part of the common objective world in which we all live. This essay is aimed at paying attention to that hidden part of the process—and then, later, at messing with it just a little.

frail 1 How does that work, exactly? “Frail” is an evaluative term that requires an outside perspective. If you were to see an old man shuffling along warily, concentrating full force on not falling over, you might easily call that old man “frail.” But you would apply that term to yourself only if you imagine others would see you in that light. You imagine the way you may be viewed and apply that label to yourself.

But…here’s the thing. There really doesn’t need to be anyone else around to make that judgment. If “frail” is a term in common use, then you have a notion of “what it means.” [3] And when you have that notion, you will apply it to yourself whether anyone is around or not.

So far, we have an old man trying to decide if he is “frail.” He doesn’t know he is doing that, but we know that he is. We know that he is going to internalize and apply to himself the word “frail” when that is the judgment he thinks “others” would make. We have to say that clearly because the point here is that the label is an external entity. The feelings he has are internal; the word he chooses as an appropriate description of his feelings is held in place by social processes that are external.

So this old man uses the word the way “others” use it. Now we can ask, “Which others?”
The short answer is, “his reference group”—those people whom he counts on to make the judgments he approves of and who use that word “as it should be used.” That should make it clear that when you “choose” the people who who will make up your reference group, you are choosing the meaning of the word “frail.” Is it a sympathetic word? A dismissive word? A condemnatory word? Is the criterion for its use set low, so that nearly everyone past the peak of physical fitness is “frail” or is it set high, so that only old people who must move slowly and warily are “frail?”

Whatever is the case, you will apply the word “frail” to yourself the way your reference group does. If you are an old man and your reference group has placed the criterion low and if they use it in a condemnatory rather than a sympathetic way, then the chances that you are “a frail old man” are extremely good.

Let me stop one more time to say that we are not talking about the c frail 3 ondition of your bones and muscles and joints, we are talking about the conditions that will cause you to apply a word to yourself. The word is “frail.” And if you have decided that “being a frail old man” doesn’t serve you well, what can you do about it?

Messing with the process

There really are some things you can do. You can, as I promised, “mess with it just a little.” To do that, you have to know how the process works. This is how it works. There is a loop which comprises three links. [4] First, a)you act and then, b) you interpret and then, c) you apply. You do this many times a minute for some traits. It is a loop by which your action (walking up a flight of stairs, pulling the bath mat off the bar on the shower door, getting out of a car) asks whether the word “frail” applies to it and receives the answer. Many times a minute. If you are an old man and the answer to your question—the one you are not aware of asking—is always Yes, then you are a frail old man.

However.

Because it is a process and because it is a repetitive process, you can intervene in it. You can “mess with it a little.” I say that on impeccable theoretical grounds and support it on the grounds of daily personal experience.

Let’s start with the stairs. When I walk up a flight of steps, I try to plant the first foot firmly and push pretty hard of the second foot and swing it up to the next step. It takes more energy to do it that way. The lead knee comes up higher than it would really need to. But by doing it that way, I feel strong and confident on the steps.

This is not an argument from efficiency. I am trying to meddle with b) and c), the “interpret” and the “apply” steps of the process. My internalized reference group watches me climbing the stairs and says, “Wow. He’s still got it.” I know that sounds odd, but when you try to imagine how you might appear to others, that’s what you are doing and it doesn’t matter in the slightest if any of those “others” is actually present. It also doesn’t matter whether you know you are doing it. I interpret that way of climbing the stairs as “vigorous” or some such word and apply it to myself, which pushes the “frail old man” interpretations way out to the margin.

Now if I were not able to climb stairs that way, I would have to rig the criteria a little more. If, for instance, I had to plant the lead foot (carefully) and then push to bring the second foot up to that step, I would be climbing more slowly, but everything else would work the same for me. The internalized other says something like, “Wow. And him with that bad knee, too. Look at how he attacks those stairs!” You see, it really doesn’t matter–beyond a very low minimum– what strength and flexibility I actually have left. What matters is using my understanding of the process to rig the “interpret” and “apply” phases so that they tell me what I need to hear.

I feel the need to pause to remind you that it is “feeling like” a frail old man that I am attacking and that feeding information to myself about how I look, doing what I am doing, is the way I am working it. This goes on faster than you can catch it so rigging the process is the only efficient way to manage it.

Example two is even more lowly. One of the things I do every morning is to take the bath mat off the rail and put it on the floor where I can step onto it when I get out of the shower. I pull it off pretty hard. It reminds me of that scene in the magician movies where the maestro whips the table cloth off of the table, leaving the crystal, the china, and the silverware undisturbed. [5] Now, I can’t grip it with my fingers and thumbs (bad thumbs), so I roll it a little and grip it with my fingers and whip it off the towel rack and put it on the floor.

Stop for just a moment and imagine a hesitant and unsteady way to do the same job. The mat gets on the floor either way. The difference is in the message that gets sent to me about who I am and how I’m feeling this morning. “Frail old man?” Nope.

Example three involves getting out of my car, as you can see in the picture. There is hardly anything I can do when my knees are in that position. The car seat is low and my legs are long and my knees are achey. So I change how I act, which categorizes that kind of action as my internalized “other” will do it, which changes the meaning of what I have just done as it is applied to me. There is not an internal or “self-talk” piece in this routine anywhere. The action is external. The “meaning” is external. The application is automatic.

So, as you see, I hook my arms onto the two sides of the door and just explode up and out. It feels terrific. It gets the job done (“standing up” is the job) and it hacks into the communication system that would otherwise be reminding me how pathetic I look trying to get out of the car.

My approach to this whole problem–over and above doing what I can to keep from being frail–is to keep demonstrating to myself that I am not. And if you think that this is way too much attention to pay to “frailty,” be assured that everything else that uses evaluative criteria of any kind, works exactly the same way.

If it is an unconscious process and if it is repetitive and if it uses external criteria (all those are true), then you are going to have to intend an outcome. You are going to have to act in accordance with it and interpret it and apply it so that you wind up as near to where you want to be as possible.

And then, you call it “good enough” and move on to the next item on the agenda.

[1] If you were uncertain about whether it was really a bad thing to be “frail,” allow me to present a pile of dictionary-provided synonyms: “easily broken, shattered, damaged, or destroyed, fragile, delicate…not robust, weak” and, by analogy, “easily tempted to do wrong, morally weak.” The whole array comes to us with the blessings of the Latin adjective fragilis.
[2] This is largely an autobiographical reflection, so I’m going to draw the examples narrowly. More broadly than just me, but not much more broadly.
[3] And when we say “it,” we mean the word itself. We do know better. We know that words are sounds that we use by common agreement to refer to things. But then “the common agreement” fades away and “it” seems to mean something all by itself. It’s a very efficient way to treat language and that’s why we all do it, but every now and then it is worth our while to remember that “words don’t really mean—we mean things and use words to convey them.”
[4] Or 8 or 13. How many “slices “ are there in a stick of salami? That’s the way it is with “the crucial elements of a process.” You can slice them thin and get a high number or thick and get a low number. I’m slicing it thick today.
[5] More often, I guess, that scene shows up in comedies where someone tries to do it and trashes the entire scene by his incompetence.

Posted in Getting Old | Tagged getting old, interpreting action, not being "frail", reference groups | Leave a comment