The Dilettante's Dilemma

We have met the enemy and he is us[1]

Posted on April 10, 2016 by hessd

In 1888, Edward Bellamy wrote a very influential book called Looking Backward. That’s Bellamy in the next paragraph. He placed the action well into the future—the beginning of the 21st Century—so that his readers could get some distance on the society they were living in at the time. Some things in his imagined future look odd to us, the technical things particularly, but every future is an imaginative projection of our present and very often, we are so immersed in that present that we cannot see it clearly.

2312-1 In 2011, roughly the time when Looking Backward is set, Kim Stanley Robinson wrote 2312: A Novel. His goal is different from Bellamy’s in many ways. Robinson, who also wrote the breathtakingly technical Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars series, is a practitioner of “hard SF.” [2] He’s not a reformer, really. On the other hand, the protagonist, Swan Er Hong, lives on Mercury and when she is forced to visit Earth, she is scandalized by what has become of it. It is what we all know but projected to a catastrophic future.

In this essay, I would like to point to two very small excerpts from Robinson’s latest work. The first is a new “periodizing system” by the fictional historian Charlotte Shortback. We use historical periods as common currency in the West and give them very little thought: the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Romantic Period, the Early Industrial Period. They use historical periods in the East too, of course, but they use different ones. Those all collect sets of years in agreed upon chunks.

2312-3 Shortback’s periodization takes off from our present and moves to the present in which the novel is set. I’ll name them all and then I will pay closer attention to three of them. First, The Dithering: 2005 to 2060; then The Crisis: 2060 to 2130.; then The Turnaround: 2130 to 2160; then The Accelerando: 2160 to 2220; then The Ritard: 2220 to 2270; then The Balkanization: 2270 to 2320.

All those are, of course, unfamiliar, because only the first part of the first period has yet occurred. Still for a story set in 2312 that will feature a ruined and barely habitable earth, it is hard to think of a better title for our own era that the one Shortback provides. We live in “the Dithering.” Here is Shortback’s description.

The Dithering: 2005 to 2060. From the end of the postmodern (Charlotte’s date derived from the UN announcement of climate change) to the fall into crisis. These were wasted years.

That is followed immediately by:

The Crisis: 2060 to 2130. Disappearance of Arctic summer ice, irreversible permafrost melt and methane release, and unavoidable commitment to major sea rise, In these years all the bad trends converged in “perfect storm” fashion, leading to a rise in average global temperature of five K, and sea level rise of five meters — and as a result, in the 2120s, food shortages, mass riots, catastrophic death on all continents, and an immense spike in the extinction rate of other species. Early lunar bases, scientific stations on Mars.

Shortback points out that “all the bad trends” converged during this time. The convergence belongs to her time period, 2060—2130, but the trends are all perfectly understandable in our own time. Note the “disappearance of Arctic summer ice (happening now), the irreversible permafrost melt (happening now) and the methane release which results from the permafrost melt (happening now) and the unavoidable…sea rise (happening now).

Then a bunch of things happen. A good deal of the plot of 2312: A Novel comes from these intervening periods. But I thought it might be worth your while to look at the final period of Shortback’s set.

The Balkanization: 2270 to 2320. On earth the major events of The Balkanization are these: “volatile shortages pinching harder, causing hoarding, then tribalism; tragedy of the commons redux; splintering into widespread “self-sufficient” enclave city-states.”

We have met the enemy, it seems.

So Shortback’s historical periods serve as the first clip from the novel. The second excerpt has to do with restoring the Earth and its people with space-based technologies. It doesn’t work very well and in this second excerpt, I would like to explore why.

The “splintering into widespread enclave city states” is known, even in our time (the first few years of The Dithering), but they become prominent in parts of the world that live under life and death tensions for decades at a time. People living under those conditions become less and less able to help themselves and also less and less able to accept help from outside. The local rulers demonize “Outside” as a way of keeping control.

Here’s a recent example. Do you remember the Clinton Administration’s brief foray into 2312-5 humanitarian politics in Somalia? There were starving people in Somalia and there were TV cameras. It was the combination that made it hard for U.S., specifically the Clinton Administration, to bear. The Somalis needed food and we had food.

Here’s an account of what happened by General John S. Brown, Army Chief of Military History. The picture shows “the cheering Somali mobs” Brown describes.

The United States Army has a long tradition of humanitarian relief. No such operation has proven as costly or shocking , however, as that undertaken in Somalia from August 1992 to March 1994. Greeted initially by Somalis happy to be saved from starvation, U.S. troops were slowly drawn into inter-clan power struggles and ill-defined “nation-building” missions.

That sense of “mission accomplished” made the events of 3-4 October 1993 more startling, as Americans reacted to the spectacle of dead U. S. soldiers being dragged through the streets by cheering Somali mobs, the very people Americans thought they had rescued from starvation.

For our purposes, it is the “starving Somalis” and the “inter-clan power struggles” that matter most. The worse things get for the people, the more powerful the clans are. The more powerful they are, the more there will be conflict between them. The more conflict there is, the more their attention will be focused on their power relative to other clans and the less it will be focused on the needs of the people.

Robinson deals with this same process on a much larger canvas. The need on Earth is so great that Swan and some other spacers [3] decide to “terraform” Earth. [4]

They planned to start by reconstructing the part of Harare called Domboshawa, transforming its northernmost ring of shantytowns into garden city versions of themselves. This “refurbishing of the built infrastructure” was not a complete solution but the selfreps [not really sure what those are] did build wells, health centers, schools, clothing factories, and housing in several styles already used in Domboshawa, including aspects of the traditional local rondavels.

That sounds spectacularly good to me. It sounds like American marines storming the beach in order to provide food for starving Somalis.

But on Earth, it wasn’t working out. The transformations involved were too great; there grew furious objections, often from elsewhere that the areas being renovated.

It was happening all over Earth…; their restoration projects were getting tangled in dense networks of law and practice and landscape, and the occasional sabotage or accident didn’t help. One couldn’t change anything on Earth without several different kinds of mess resulting, some of them paralyzing. Every square meter of the Earth’s land was owned in several different ways.

Are we surprised? I was surprised only by the scale.

There were of course very powerful forces on Earth adamantly opposed to tinkering from above in general and to creating full employment in particular. Full employment, if enacted, would remove “wage pressure”—which phrase had always meant fear struck into the hearts of the poor [bold font in the original] also into the hearts of anyone who feared becoming poor, which meant almost everyone on earth.

I’m nearly finished with the book. I don’t expect the “terraforming of Earth” to be any part of a successful conclusion of the plot, although they did bring Florida back above sea level. The technology, even now, is enough to relieve a great deal of the present misery, but our efforts founder on what General Brown calls “inter-clan power struggles.”

In setting after setting, we meet the enemy and, as Pogo has it, “he is us.”

[1] One of my favorite quotes of all time, but variously attributed. The original dates from 1813, when Oliver Hazard Perry reported on his success against the British fleet on Lake Erie, “We have met the enemy and they are ours.” Walt Kelly, in the Pogo comic strips I read when I was growing up, revised it to, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Pretty existential for a swamp possum. Lately, I have heart it attributed to Charlie Brown of the Peanuts comic strip.
[2] I learned that phrase a few weeks ago, just before I started reading Robinson. It means science fiction (SF) that focuses on the scientific and technical aspects (Hard) of the story, rather than the social or psychological aspects.
[3] “Spacers” are people who were born “elsewhere,” i.e. not on Earth and/or who identify with their place of birth. Swan was born on Mercury. Neal Stephenson has the same naming problem in SevenEves where a “people” who have lived in space for generations come back to Earth to confront two separate populations, one of which survived below the land and the other below the sea.
[4] Our planet is often referred to as Terra so “terraforming” would mean making life “there,” like life here. Constructing an atmosphere containing oxygen and adequate heat and adequate gravity and so on. By 2270 they have terraformed quite a few planets and asteroids. The question now is, would those same techniques work on what is left of Earth. The technical answer is that they would. The political answer might be entirely different, as it was in Somalia in the 1990s.

Posted in Books, Economy, Politics | Tagged dominance by local warlords, ecological catastrophe, hard SF, Kim Stanley Robinson, technological mastery, the earth as a future catastrophe | 2 Comments

First, meet your own standards

Posted on April 7, 2016 by hessd

I was on a long drive, once, with a woman I did not know well. I knew the family. I knew her husband much better than I knew her. But it was early morning and it was dark and it was a long drive and she began thinking back over her part in the history of what, so far as I knew, was a very good marriage. Telling it easily, as if it had happened to someone else.

I’m going to tell you the story she told me. This single account is all I have to go on, but I believed every piece of it—I believed, that is, that she was telling it to me exactly as she understood it herself. Beyond that, I can’t go and have no interest in going.

She said that at the time this event took place, she and her husband had been married a few years. I don’t believe they had children at that time. Her husband came to her one night and said that he thought the marriage really wasn’t working and that he thought it should end. So far, that’s a story that is so familiar that it seems trite even on soap operas. What happened next was not trite. I had never heard anything like it before, nor have I since.

wife 2 She told him that she knew she had not been a good wife. She was disappointed in herself. Would he give her six more months, she wondered, and in that time she would be the wife she could be. If she did her best to be the kind of wife she approved of—her standards for her performance—and at the end of six months, he still wanted a divorce, she would raise no obstacles to his dissolving the marriage.

There were no pictures, by the way, that I could count on to illustrate my friend’s story. I chose this one because it is precisely true to her account, although I’d guess that 90 out of 100 people will misunderstand it. I’m after the other 10 of you.

I had no idea what to say and we rode along in comfortable silence for a while. That’s all I remember clearly, so from here on, it’s going to be remembered fragments of the conversation, stitched together by the ways I have told this story over the years.

Before we get there, a note or two to the reader. This is not a story about “women;” it is a story about this woman. It is not a story about the inadequacy of the husband. I’m sure a case could be made for that but it was no part at all of this woman’s story. It is not a story about his expectations of her as his wife—however appropriate or inappropriate they may have been. [1] So as you read, you need to give up those common narratives, just as I did, and listen to this amazing woman.

First of all, when some fundamental part of my life or of my self is attacked, the first thing I want to do is to counterattack. She could have said angry things to her husband that were true enough to hurt and I’m not saying that she should not have done that. I am saying that had she done that, she and I would not have been in the car driving along in the dark and she would not have been telling me one of the foundational stories of her life.

She didn’t do that.

Second, a very common exculpation is to deny the appropriateness of the standards. [2] If I haven’t been up to YOUR standards as a wife, that only shows that there is something wrong with your standards. The standards have been wrong or you have not been clear or you have not provided the resources necessary or the incentives necessary, etc. In a way, that is just a form of counterattack, as in the first point, but it implies that if the appropriate standards were used, your complaint against me would have no basis in fact.

She didn’t do that either. Here’s what she did do.

wife 1 She said that she was ashamed that she had not met her own standards as a wife. Perhaps you can see, by now, how breathtakingly simple this is; how many self-justifications she walked past in order to get to this statement: I have not met my standards. I know you are disappointed with me. I want you to know that I am disappointed with me as well.

She said that her meeting her own standards as a wife was the most important first step to take. That is the first step; note that there is a second step. She didn’t tell me what it was about her performance of that role that disappointed her. Maybe she didn’t care about it enough. Maybe she wanted so little emotional intimacy with her husband that he never felt a chance to be engaged in her life or she wanted so much that he was overwhelmed. Maybe it was the sex. Maybe it was the finances. Maybe there was a religious dispute or some sort or a disagreement about whether to have children. She didn’t say. I didn’t ask.

What she did say is that the second step would necessarily be her husband’s to take. She asked for six months. During that time, she was going to be the kind of wife she could be proud of. [3] She had a good notion of “what she should be as a wife.” That doesn’t mean that she had a standard for “what a wife should be” as if she accepted the stereotypical definition. Her standard was for her own behavior (not “a wife’s) in this relationship (not in “a marriage”).

In doing that, she preserved for herself her right to assess the marriage to see if it met her own needs. At that time, she would not say that the decision to remain married or not properly belonged to her husband. She would say–she is now the person in step two–that it is her decision to make. It a mark of her respect for herself, as well as for him, that either partner can raise the question of whether the relationship is to be kept or not.

I wanted to include the picture just below because it is a commonly expressed sentiment. It is NOT what she said. She said that she had not been doing the best she could. She said she would be content for him to make his decision based on her doing the best she could. She asked only for some time to do that.

wife 3 This woman and the husband who asked her for a divorce had been happily married for many years before the morning she told me this story. They are married still, and happy still, and their children have grown up and there are grandchildren. So, to use a formula more common among hobbits than among humans, “They lived happily until the end of their days.”

I wanted to tell this story because I have been looking back, recently, over the course of my life, and remembering with pleasure stories of ordinary people doing absolutely extraordinary things. This woman has set a standard that I use, myself, when I have the guts to do it. When I have done my best—which isn’t all the time, much as I wish it were—I want to let it go, as this woman did. When I am asked to leave—even listing the KINDS of groups, not the groups themselves, I have been asked to leave would make this a much longer essay than it needs to be—I remember the story of this heroic woman and try to live up to what she chose to do. [4]

[1] And just a note to readers. If you google nearly any phrase that is central to this story and choose [images] you will call up pictures that will make you want to throw up. The people who collect images for searches like this do not have this woman’s story in mind.
[2] And for the last decade or so, given the evaporation of common standards, it is enough to establish that the standards in question are YOUR standards. You don’t need to show that they are inappropriate standards. You don’t need to compare them to your own standards, in fact, your standards might be substantially the same. It is proposing those standards as the basis for taking an action that is so offensive.
[3] That may be the part of the story I like best. Had she attempted to “save the marriage” by trying harder “to please him,” it’s had to see that marriage as worth saving. She is doing new things and looking, always looking, to see if he approves. He is always the evaluator; she is always the one being evaluated. That’s not what she did. She determined to satisfy her own standards and when she had done that, she was ready for him to make any choice that seemed appropriate to him.
[4] Maybe just one quick example. I have been a member of First Presbyterian Church of Portland since the mid-1980s. Marilyn and I joined together. We were looking for a church because I had been asked to leave the church we had been attending. Asked by the pastor! He was new to the church and did a quick scan of people who looked like they might be able to cause trouble. So he asked me to come in to see him and gave me a just barely “spiritualized” version of “This church ain’t big enuf for the both of us.” So we left. And I left, feeling very much like the friend who told me the story of her marriage, that I had done my best work and I was proud of what I had done, but this new guy had a church to run and if I could make it easier by leaving, I should.

Posted in Living My Life | Tagged accepting your partner's judgment, autonomy, meeting your own standards, self-respect | Leave a comment

Faith Healing

Posted on April 2, 2016 by hessd

For reasons I don’t entirely understand, I am thinking about faith healing today. In the expression “faith healing,” there is no question about what “healing” means. Understanding what “faith” means is more difficult.

To introduce this speculation, I want to start with the TV show, NCIS. Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs is “God” for all practical purposes. He knows things he can’t possibly know; he appears with impossible suddenness at unpredictable times; he loves the little children like a father. And so on. Oh…and he demands absolute loyalty. He is a larger than life person and that is the way all his staff feel about him, especially Anthony DiNozzo, and that’s a good thing for him because DiNozzo is the one who needs to be healed.

healing 1 Early in the second season, an angry mother releases a genetically modified plague bacterium and Tony is the only one who comes down with it. The scientist who designed this bacterium says that Tony has about one chance in fifteen of surviving it. So if you set aside your certain knowledge that Tony appears in the next episode, it seems that he doesn’t have much of a chance.

Enter Gibbs.

He does three things, all of which require the relationship they have developed over the years. He says to Tony, his mouth so close to Tony’s ear that only he can hear, “You…will…not…die.” Then, “Can you hear me?” Tony nods, barely; it is the best he can do. And again, “You…will…not…die”

The second thing he does will be understood immediately by anyone who knows the show. He gives Tony a slap on the back of his head. Ordinarily, that means, “DiNozzo! Focus!” This time it means, I am not treating you the way I would treat anyone with only a few breaths left. I am treating you the way I will treat you when you come back to the team, having recovered from all this.”

The third thing he does is to give him a new cellphone. [1] He presses it into DiNozzo’s hand, which is lying limp on the bed, and says, as he leaves, “And change the number. Women keep calling and asking for Spanky.” DiNozzo knows what that means and smiles—just barely and at considerable effort, but he can’t help himself.

And he does get better. Of course, maybe he would have recovered anyway. He did have a 15% chance after all. But I think it is reasonable to think that the director wants us to believe that what Gibbs did affected Tony’s chances.

Is that faith healing?

I read a study a few years ago that opened another notion of faith healing to me. Here is the question it brought me to. What if there is a reserve of “illness-fighting” resources somewhere in your body? Whoever can release those healing resources in your body can be said to have “healed” you. Just to be clear, the resources are there but you can’t get access to them. They are like a computer document that you have “deleted.” It is still there, but it is not there “to you.” What if it were there “to someone else?”

healing 2 The experimenters I read about were studying how to treat athletes at the point of exhaustion. That sounds brutal to me, but there are athletes who really want to know how much they can take. These particular athletes were cycling—on stationary bikes, I suppose. They ride until they are exhausted and then are treated by one or another intervention. In this case the two interventions were: a) drinking sugar water or b) rinsing their mouths with sugar water and then spitting it out.

Group A, the ones who drank the sugar water, got extra resources of energy as the sugar was digested and processed and made available to the muscles. Group B, who only rinsed with the sugar water, got extra resources of energy immediately. There’s more to it, of course, but here’s the part I care about. The scientists concluded that the taste buds signaled the brain that new resources of nutrition were on their way. The brain said, “Oh good, then I won’t have to hold this energy in reserve any longer. I can release it because it will be replaced right away.”

Now…the taste buds were wrong, so the message they sent to the brain was wrong, but the brain responded as if the message were true. It released the energy it had been holding in reserve. In reserve. That means the brain is holding it somewhere where you can’t get at it.

healing 4 So then I got to thinking, “What if there were a “reserve of healing” that functioned by precise analogy with the “reserve of energy?” I don’t know that there is such a thing, but I would guess that there is. What would you call someone who has access to that reserve, someone who can cause the healing response to be produced? I don’t want to be stuffy, but I don’t think it would be out of line to call such a person a healer. If he “causes a healing response,” I’d be willing to call him or her a healer. If this response CAN NOT be called forth—the reserve cannot be released—unless you believe that this particular person can do it, then I would say that person is a “faith healer,” This person is someone who is able to “heal you” (call out the healing reserve) if you believe he or she can do it (if you have faith). Faith healer?

Was Jesus a faith healer? [2]

I think so. Jesus is so variously presented in the different gospel traditions that it is hard to be too confident about it. In Mark 5:34, we get this ’My daughter,’ he [Jesus] said, ‘your faith has restored you to health; go in peace and be free of your complaint.’ Everyone calls that episode “a healing performed by Jesus” and I have no quibble with that way of characterizing it, but Jesus says, “The active agent in your healing is your faith that I could heal you.”

healing 3.png The counter-instance is made, too. Jesus, having established a reputation as a healer, returns to his home town, Nazareth, and runs into a wall of disbelief. Maybe “dismissal” would be a better word. The villagers said, “Where did this guy get all the religious stuff. He grew up here. We know his family and so he can’t be who he says he is.” And Matthew (13:58) tells us that Jesus “did not work many miracles there because of their lack of faith. Mark says (6:5) that he could not work miracles there because of their lack of faith.

So let’s see if the “healing reserve” analogy helps us here. A woman was restored to health because of her faith. Her faith that Jesus could help her gave Jesus access to the “healing reserve” and her body released all that “healing” and she was cured. In Nazareth, where, according to Mark, he was unable to heal, they did not believe in him and so protected their healing reserve and so Jesus was not able to open it so that they would be healed.

That is a way of understanding the healing ministry of Jesus. I don’t know if it is better than the others, but it is new to me. It is also a way of understanding what “faith healer” could mean. Again, there are lots of other ways of understanding the notion of “faith healer.” [3]

You could ask, I suppose, whether I have offered a “naturalistic explanation” of “faith healing” rather than a religious or supernatural one. To tell you the truth, when we get to the place where believing something is true has an undeniable real world effect on health, I’m not sure just what the “super” part of “supernatural” is any more.

[1] The old one was infected by the virus and had to be destroyed.
[2] English is such a vulnerable language. It associates adjectives with nouns by proximity alone, without the help of gender or case designations. So, just because faith stands next to healer, the expression could mean “the healer of our faith” or it could mean a person who heals because of or by means of our faith. It could even mean someone who is able to heal because of his or her own faith. Jesus as the “healer of our faith” is perfectly orthodox. In Mark 9:24, a father calls out to Jesus, “Lord I believe; help my unbelief.” Both meanings of “faith healer” are there.
[3] You could argue—I don’t want to—that it is the belief a person has in the “healing power” (efficacy) of a placebo that gives it such power to heal. If you gave a placebo saying, “Oh, and by the way, this is a completely inactive sugar pill,” it probably wouldn’t have any effect at all. I don’t want to stretch the word faith so far that it covers “faith in a pill,” but otherwise, I think the parallel is interesting.

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The Polls Don’t Lie

Posted on March 31, 2016 by hessd

Of course, they don’t tell the truth either.

The New York Times/CBS poll came out last week. I discarded the rest of my electronic New York Times and called up the poll. What do these 1,252 potential voters have to tell us about how things are? [1] Particularly, what do they have to tell us about Democratic and Republican candidates and the current look of the general election in November?

Reading Polls

Maybe just a note about these polls would be in order. Polling is a science. The mathematics alone is way past my understanding and the people who study polls seem to agree about the math. Interpreting polls is not a science. At the most favorable, you can say it is an art but there are less inspiring things it can be called.

poll 1 I’ll make two brief points here. The first is that these questions [Do you approve of the way Barack Obama is handling his job as President?] may seem simple-minded, but a good deal can be learned from the fact that they ask the same question in the same form year after year. [2] So in these polls, I can look at the responses to this question from from February 2—4, 2009 to this most recent one. Sometimes the fluctuation is the most interesting thing.

The second point is that I don’t read polls to see what they have to say. I have questions in mind and I read polls to find the answers to the questions I am asking. When I saw how low the “trust in Hillary” numbers were, I went back to see when they were higher. “Why are they so low RIGHT NOW?” is the question I was asking. The poll was not conducted to deal with that question, although it provies all the information.

OK. Now to the poll itself.

Bernie Sanders

First, this isn’t really a good time to be president. Most people (61%) feel that things in this country [3] are not going in the right direction, but rather that things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track. It would be nice, if you were thinking of being the head of the executive branch of the federal government to think that your people had hope; to find that half or more thought that things were generally going in the right direction. To do that, you would have to go back to March and April 2003. It has been less that 50% percent ever since then.

Or, if things are not going in the right direction and you still wanted to be the president, it would be nice if there were things you could do to put things back on the right track. But probably there is nothing an executive can do.

In April 2015, I wrote an essay called “Hillary’s Last Chance to Prepare for 2020.” In it, I

imagined that Hillary might be elected in 2016, in part because she was not seen to be poll 6 responsible for the poor showing of the economy. The economy is still going to be bad in 2020, according to my argument, and President Hillary is going to be swept away by the popular anger UNLESS she provides, by 2020, when she would be up for re-election, someone else for people to be angry at.

People are not going to say that things are going in the right direction when their own financial circumstances get worse and worse and particularly as inequality gets worse and worse. The president, no matter who it is, will not be able to change that trend so, I argued in April of last year, the only thing a president can affect is who gets blamed for it. So I argued that Hillary needed to start immediately because once she’s President in 2017, it’s going to be too late.

So I learned from the answers to Question 2 that things are headed in the wrong direction according to 61% of the people. I supplemented that by my own theories about why things are so tight economically and why they are going to continue to get worse and it left me wondering why anyone would want to be elected president this year.

That is especially true if you are a Republican candidate. The people in this survey think of the Republican party as “divided” (88% to 10%); they think the campaign is “negative” (58% to 10%); and they are “embarrassed” about the campaign (60% rather than “proud” (27%). I don’t think that looks good for whoever gets the Republican nomination, particularly if there is a fight at the convention in Cleveland and particularly if it gets ugly in public at the convention.

poll 4 There is not that same circus atmosphere on the Democratic side, but the difficulties of a Democratic candidate are already plain—people don’t know Bernie and they don’t trust Hillary. The favorable opinion about Hillary—Is your opinion of Hillary Clinton favorable—peaked in 2008 and 2009 during and just after her run for the Democratic nomination. She was above 50% approval for five polls in a row: that’s from September of 2008 until February of 2013. Something happened—the Benghazi controversy, probably—which resulted in here approval rating plummeting from 57% to 26% in just a little over a month. She has been, with a single exception, in the 20s and 30’s ever since. She was at 31% in this most recent poll. “Not favorable” is now over 50%. [4]

I don’t trust Bernie Sanders’ numbers because the time has been so short and the numbers so volatile, but for what it is worth, 84% of the sample say he is “honest and trustworthy” and only 11% say he is not.

For Sanders, the Achilles heel is “realism.” Only 56% think Sanders is “realistic.” The question is: From what you’ve heard or read, generally, would you describe Bernie Sanders’s policy proposals as realistic or not realistic? And 38% say his proposals are not realistic. That compares to the 78% who say Hillary’s proposals are “realistic.”

So on the Democratic side, people don’t trust Hillary and they think Bernie is a dreamer. Now you might ask whether this “don’t trust Hillary” feeling is one of the great achievements of 30 or so years of Republican pot-banging. Of course it is. But the electoral question is not whether Hillary is trustworthy; it is whether people FEEL (I didn’t say THINK) she is trustworthy. She needs to show that she is—I have no idea what would do that—and Bernie needs to show that his policies could actually be enacted. I have no idea how he would do that either, but I think I would start by urging every potential voter to go see Michael Moore’s new movie, Where to Invade Next. (I posted a review of sorts on March 21.)

I began by saying that things were “volatile.”This morning, The Donald “revoked” his pledge to support whoever the Republican Convention chooses. Amazing!

[1] This number included 362 Republican primary voters and 388 Democratic primary voters.
[2] If you run across a question that says, “How is PRESIDENT OBAMA handling foreign policy?” you are reading a poll put out by the Democratic party. The Times/CBS polls are exactly the same, word for word, decade after decade. And they don’t say “President Obama.” Ever.
[3] I will put the actual language of the question in italics, as here.
[4] The “trustworthy” numbers—do you think Hillary Clinton is honest and trustworthy—are a little better: 56% say she is and 40% say she is not. All the Republican candidates are at (Cruz) or below 40%. Kasich is at 16%!

Posted in Politics, Uncategorized | Tagged Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, John Kasich, New York Times/CBS poll, reading polls, realistic, trustworthy | Leave a comment

Almost Easter, 2016

Posted on March 27, 2016 by hessd

Today, the Saturday before Easter, doesn’t have a name so far as I know. In the church Bette and I attend, there are special services for Maundy Thursday [1] and Good Friday [2] and of course, on Easter [3]. At my church, and at English-speaking churches around the world, we will perform this little antiphon. The presiding minister will say, “He is risen” and the congregation will respond, “He is risen indeed”

Every year, I wonder why we say it that way. This year, I have been thinking that we use that language because it is not very specific. Also, because it is archaic and archaic expressions lend themselves very nicely to occasions that have the gravity to bear them. I’d like to explore the lack of specificity just a little, then this essay will take me wherever it wants to go. [4]

Passing On

When we began saying “passed on” to refer to someone who had died, I understood it as a reference to another place. That’s what “on” properly means. [5] You were here on earth and now that you have died, you have gone to “the next place.” Since this was being said out loud about someone we all knew, that was presumed to be heaven, but it is “on” that assured us that it was somewhere.

An alternative form—I think of it as later because I began to hear it later—is “passed away.” Notice that “away” does not require another place. She was here and now she is not here. She is “away.” We could say that of dust on the porch furniture after a windstorm, although we probably wouldn’t because of the associations. The dust was here and now it is not; we would not imagine a “dust heaven” to which it had gone.

But now, the expression I hear most is “passed.” Why is that, I wonder. Why do we not specify the implications of either “on” or “away?” I think we use it because it is imprecise. We don’t have anything precise to say so we choose a form that accommodate all the current meanings.

Being Raised

Easter 1 I think that is why we say “He is risen.” But that’s not the way I say it when I have a chance to say it by myself. I say “He is risen” along with everyone else, but I mean, “He was raised.”

My choice of that formulation ought not be taken to mean that I know what happened at the event my church celebrates as “the Resurrection” with a capital R. It means that the form in which the church first began to preach about it is still the form that means the most to me. Here is Luke’s re-creation of the sermon Peter gave to the multitudes. Peter is speaking to the crowd at Pentecost and says this: “This man [Jesus]…you took and had crucified…but God raised him to life.” [6]
Notice what that says. The event that we celebrate at Easter is something God did. It is not something God did “through Jesus,” which is a way we often characterize his ministry, but something he did “to Jesus.”

Jesus was dead. That’s a very orthodox thing to say. And then he wasn’t. And it is God who accomplished that transition. That’s what Peter says. Later formulations [7] say that Jesus “rose” from the dead as if it is something that he did, rather than something that was done to him. You see now, I hope, why I began with “passing on” and “passing away.” Whatever the resurrectional appearances were like, as the disciples experienced them, they caused the disciples to focus on the implications, rather than on the mechanics of the process. The overwhelming hit for the disciples was, “So it was all true after all.”

In our period of history, so much more in love with knowledge than with trust, we would like to know what actually happened. We would like to have that account in our pockets and we think if we only had that, we could keep track of the expanding role of Christ that the church crafted on his behalf and we could do it with understanding and tolerance. We don’t have that account. We have the early stages of the traditions and the later stages.

What I am saying is the I find the early stages of that process—Peter, as Luke imagines him—more meaningful. On the other hand, I am part of a community here is Portland that really doesn’t care one way or the other whether the verb is active (rose) or passive (was raised) and I’m not saying they should. I am saying that I want to be a part of that community so when I am greeted by a dear old friend or by a relative stranger with “His is risen,” I will say, “He is risen indeed.” It is what I should say and it is what I will say. But some small and inaudible part of myself will say, “Jesus was raised. Thanks be to God.”

Easter 2 I think C. S. Lewis comes at this question best when he comes at it indirectly. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he includes a scenesin which Aslan, the lion, who is the Christ-figure, is humiliated, tortured, and killed on a stone Table. And then one in which he is alive again. The witch figured she had Aslan dead to rights because he gave up his life to save the life of a traitor. But, Aslan says, the next morning, “There was a deeper magic that the witch did not know. She did not know that when a willing victim was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.”

Lewis, in the children’s stories, contents himself with the notion that there is “a deeper magic.” I really don’t think that we, as Christians, can do better than that. Something happened. That is solidly historical. The first tellers of the tale were driven by the r Healed 2 (Dale).jpeg eturn to life of the story they had thought, up until the death of Jesus, they were part of. When he died, they thought they must have been mistaken. Then when they experienced him again, they said first, “So it was all true!.” Then they said, “Look, these scriptures—as we now understand them—show that this was the plan all along.” Then they said, “OK then. Let’s get to work.”

For me, most of this is captured in a whimsical little cartoon that my dear niece, Lisa Hess, sent to me years ago. She and I have a sense of humor that strikes people as odd on occasion. She thought this card was funny and that I would think it was funny in the same way she did. I did think it was funny that way, but for some reason it also strikes me as true in a powerful and not funny way.

On the front of the card, as you see above, the stone rolls away from the opening to Jesus’s tomb. It rolls over what must be the slowest bunny in the world and kills him. “Easter,” it says on the front of the card. On the inside, it says, “It’s not about a bunny.” Even about the world’s slowest bunny. But then there is this wonderful transaction in the bottom right hand corner of the card.

Jesus, restored now to life (but life of a different sort) heals the bunny. It’s You are healed (Dale).jpeg pretty simple, as you can see. “You’re healed,” Jesus says. “Thanks!” replies the bunny, “Welcome back!” This bunny knows from the beginning what the church struggled even to begin to grasp. It’s so easy for the bunny. It isn’t easy because he was healed although I think we could say that not being dead is an advantage. It is easy because it is easy. It is easy in the way it was easy for the girls in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

There is, apparently, a place you can be where Easter is easy. I don’t know where that is. But I celebrate in anyway. A part of my celebration is that every Easter, I wear to church a pair of socks that once belonged to my dad. His name is written on a tape on the socks because in that part of his life, he didn’t know what his name was.

For all the years I knew him, Dad struggled with the Resurrection, as I do. He believed it as he was able, as I do. He believed with great courage and I would fill his shoes if I could. I can’t. But every Easter, I wear his socks.

[1] From the Latin noun mandatum, “commandment.” Jesus said to his disciples, “A new commandment I give to you. Love one another.” (John 13:34) It is easy to see the English mandate in that.
[2] There is more debate about this than I thought among language people. I always thought it was an extension of God—as it is is “good-bye,” i.e. God be with ye. Apparently not. It appears that a consensus was achieved while I wasn’t looking that it reflects an earlier meaning of good, i.e. “sacred.”
[3] Easter is the only non-Christian word of the bunch. It’s almost ironic. We get the word in English from Eastre, the dawn goddess. It was, my dictionary says, “almost coincident in date with [the] paschal festival of the church.” I’m fine with that. There was already a festival at our Christmas, too. It isn’t as if we are going to run out of significant dates.
[4] My brother, John, and I have a very healthy respect for personalization. John is a biologist and there are moments when is just seems to him the right thing to say about a Roseate Spoonbill (for instance) that it is just beginning to think about heading home. There is something about the expression on the face that evokes that impression from John and he has no qualms about saying it because everyone understands that he is not claiming to know what the Spoonbill is thinking. It is a way of saying what John’s experience of the Spoonbill is. I do the same thing. I know that this essay does not have somewhere is wants to go. “It” does not exist, because I have not created it yet. But it does feel like that. It is like feeling a current in the water and imagining that the stream “wants you to go that way.”
[5] The series of alternative terms for “died” in Monty Python’s skit about the Norwegian Blue Parrot, one of which is Hamlet’s “shuffled off this mortal coil,” comes inevitably to mind.
[6] Those are fragments of Acts 2: 23,24. This is an amazing passage for any number of reasons, one of which is that Luke is giving to Peter a Christology that he himself does not hold, but that he thinks Peter held.
[7] Or Pauline formulations, which are based on a mystical “life and death” of Jesus, not a “following him around Galilee” life.

Posted in Biblical Studies, ways of knowing | Tagged He is risen, It's not about a bunny, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe | Leave a comment

Dementia and Orthodoxy

Posted on March 25, 2016 by hessd

I get into trouble more, in my opinion, than I really deserve to. It is true that I do like to have words mean something. I know that is troublesome. I like it even better when the words mean what they are supposed to mean. [1]

But there are, apparently, some questions you are just not supposed to ask.

Just don’t ask

I horrified quite a few people I did not want to horrify by asking whether Marilyn’s children were still my stepchildren after she had died. The question my friends heard, apparently, was “Do you think I should continue to have friendships with Marilyn’s children?” They embraced me in a truly wonderful way when their mother died. Each one of them did. Why I should want to simply drop them was hardly a thinkable thought for me.

So I changed the question so that it sounded more technical. “I was their stepfather,” I would say, “because I was married to their mother. Now that I am no longer married to their mother, how is it that I am still their stepfather?” It didn’t help a bit. The same people who translated my “what is the mechanism by which” question in the first form of the question, did just the same in the second form. There were two prominent results: a) I never did get my question answered and b) I got scolded by at least two sets of friends. I suspect that their estimate of my character was adjusted downward permanently, but you can’t find that kind of thing out by asking.

Dementia and Orthodoxy

I think I may have begun to run into that same trouble again. It’s a religious question this time, but the kind of trouble feels really familiar. Here’s the question. Can a Christian with Alzheimer’s disease be “orthodox?” [2] I think I want to say No.

orthodox 1 Here’s how I get there. If you treat “orthodoxy” as “believing the right things,” then you have to be able to believe something in order to be orthodox. Not to get rigorously etymological or anything, but the -doxy part of orthodox comes from the Greek verb (dokein) meaning “to think” and the ortho- part from the Greek adjective (orthos) meaning “straight.” So “thinking the right things” is a pretty good indicator of orthodoxy, especially if we allow “straight” to be defined by the local community.

But what if you can’t think? What if you can’t remember whether some statement that you hear is your head is your own or something you heard at lunch? What if the alternatives you pose don’t fit on the same axis? [3] What if you assert the truth of proposition X at 3:00 and the contradictory proposition Y at 4:00? This is where I start to lose people because they think I am being nasty, but really, if you can’t think, you can’t think the right things.

OK, let’s say that topic is concluded. (I know better, I just need to move on.) Is this person, who is no longer orthodox, still Christian? Of course he is. Did we think that being accepted as a part of God’s family was a matter of believing the right things? Really?

For many years I have treasured the scorn that James (2:19) lays on people who take pride in their orthodoxy. “You believe in One God? Terrific! That makes you as orthodox as the demons, who know it for a fact what you struggle to believe and they shudder.” It’s my own paraphrase: I just like to work in a little more of the scorn I think the verse carries.

orthodox 6 I think a much better measure of being Christian, of being, as Christians understand it, a part of God’s family, is saying Yes to God with every available resource. Here’s a handy checklist. (See Deuteronomy 6 and Mark 12) To know what the authors of Deuteronomy meant, you would have to have a better grasp than I do of the crucial terms. What did they mean by “heart” or by “soul,” for instance? When I run a checklist of that kind for myself, I use these four categories: what I think, what I intend, how I feel, and what I do. That is a series that is meaningful to me. [4]

We have already taken thinking off the list, so far as “believing the right things” is concerned, but there may be other ways you can use your mind to say Yes to whatever God is asking from you. Your ability to intend some outcome and to pursue it successfully may have shriveled along with your ability to remember what you intended, but I’d be open to the idea that intending to be truthful or generous or grateful in whatever lucid moments you have meets the “with all your strength” criterion in Deuteronomy.

I don’t know how rich the emotional life of an Alzheimer’s patient is, but my guess is that if you can feel both the tug of resentment and the invitation to joy, you can still lean in the one direction or the other.

I remember vividly a story my mother used to tell about what happened one day when my brother Mark and his wife Carol visited my father. There wasn’t much left of Dad’s mind by that time. Mark did what I would have done. He treated what was left of Dad as a person deserving of respect. Carol greeted him warmly and went over to the bedside and kissed him on the cheek. Those are both really good things to do.

When they had left, Mother reviewed the event with Dad. She wanted to be sure he understood that his son had come to visit. The way I heard the story, Mom said, “You know who that was, don’t you?” And Dad said, “His wife kissed me.” I have no idea what Dad was thinking or feeling about himself by then, but I’d guess that he understood that he had the choice of opening himself to this gift or of closing himself off from it and that he said Yes.

When the last fragment of you says Yes, you are doing the right thing.

Open the Door

Finally, I think sometimes about the invitation Jesus gives in Revelation 3:20. Here it is in the New Jerusalem Bible:

Look, I am standing at the door, knocking. If one of you hears me calling and opens the door, I will come in to share a meal at that person’s side.

orthodox 5 The only question that verse asks of the person living in that house is, “Are you going to open the door?” It doesn’t ask if you know who is knocking. It doesn’t ask if you had intended to have a visitor. It doesn’t ask if you are anxious about who is knocking. It asks whether you are going to open the door.

I’ve always liked that particular scripture because it is so clearly an invitation. It isn’t an invitation matched with a threat. It doesn’t say that Jesus is going to go on banging on the door until your neighbors are up in arms. I like it because it is gentle and because it puts the ball in my court. “What are you going to do?” it asks.

Imagine now that I have had a stroke and can no longer get to the door. Or that I have been gagged and tied to a chair. Or that I have gone next door to help care for a neighbor. Is there any circumstance you can imagine in which the Jesus of this invitation would say, “Well…if you can’t get to the door, the whole deal is off.” Any circumstance at all?

And that is why I imagine that people who have said Yes with all their heart and mind and soul and strength will be welcomed home when only the merest fragments of their “selves” are still at their command.

[1] I’m not talking about dictionary meanings here, but only that among these people, this word is ordinarily accepted as meaning this. That’s what I mean by “supposed to:” I mean that the word is commonly supposed to mean that one thing.
[2] I am not, obviously, using a common abbreviation for the Greek Orthodox church. I just mean “believing what you are supposed to believe in your religious setting or group.” A very very loose definition, you will agree.
[3] A joke I remember from grade school is: “Would you rather walk to work…or carry your lunch.” It was supposed to be funny because things are presented as alternatives that really don’t belong on the same axis.
[4] If you ever have to run that series yourself, you can call them what I called them in grad school: cognition, conation, affect, and behavior. Or “behavior tendency” if there is a behaviorist in the crowd.

Posted in A life of faith, Getting Old | Tagged Alzheimer's disease, orthodoxy, Say Yes, the momentary self | Leave a comment

Michael Moore on “Where to Invade Next”

Posted on March 21, 2016 by hessd

The United States (hereafter “we”) look really bad in the recent Michael Moore movie, “Where to Invade Next.” That’s not a headline. We don’t look good in any of the Michael Moore movies. It’s just a statement about what I want to think about today.

According to my own highly personal system of counting, I have seen “Where to Invade Next” three times. I went to see it while Bette was off visiting one of the countries Moore includes in the movie (Germany) and then, last night, saw it again with her. I count seeing a movie with Bette as seeing it twice. She sees it differently than I do and then we talk about it afterwards. It’s like seeing it again, only for free.

Jonathan Kim makes a really interesting point about Michael Moore movies in his Huffington Post article.

But when looking at his filmography, no one can dispute his track record for shining a light on issues several years before they’re noticed by the corporate media or adopted by politicians.

With his first film, 1989’s Roger & Me, Moore showed the devastating effects of offshoring and corporate callousness on his hometown of Flint, Michigan. Bowling For Columbine in 2002 drew attention to America’s uniquely insane gun obsession and its consequences years before mass shootings became commonplace. Moore slammed the door on the Bush administration’s response to 9/11, the catastrophic Iraq war, and the media’s complicity in both with Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004, and three years before Obamacare was signed into law, Moore skewered the cartoonish cruelty of the health insurance industry in 2007’s Sicko while making a demand for universal healthcare. And two years before Occupy Wall Street, Moore called out an economy rigged for the rich in 2009’s Capitalism: A Love Story, with the housing meltdown and subsequent bailout as the ultimate crime scene.

The first time I saw it, I paid attention to the material he presented. The Italians have more generous vacation policies than we do; the French serve better (and cheaper) school lunches, the Germans have dealt more courageously with their shameful past [1]; the Portuguese have a better drug policy; the Finns have better schools; the Norwegians have a more enlightened (and more effective) prison system, and so on.

What I noticed in seeing twice more [2] is that the argument he makes is the same for every topic. I’m going to add a bunch of caveats in the next paragraph, so just lay yours aside for now.

Moore compares the outcomes they are getting with the outcomes we are getting here. Theirs are better. Very often, they are also cheaper.

Now the yes buts. Yes, but Moore cherrypicks the issue he wants for every country he visits. Yes. He does. Imagining for the moment that Slovenia, for instance, is not as good at everything as they are at the feature Moore is examining [3], he spends no time at all on what they are not good at. That is not the point he wants to make.

Yes, but Moore does not account for the inevitable decay in the character of the work force when they are no longer driven by poverty or the threat of poverty. No. He does not. He looks at how things are now, not at how things might come to be if the same policies are continued.

Yes, but Moore considers only domestic policies. The only reference to foreign policy in the whole film is his claim that the U. S. spends 60% of its budget on the military. Could these other countries—Norway and Iceland and France, for instance—afford such generous domestic policies if they spend as much as we do on the military. No, probably they couldn’t. But since we are spending it, they don’t have to.

Yes, but Moore does not present a balanced picture. No. He doesn’t. He claims that the coverage of these issues in the U. S. is completely dominated by status quo conservatives and his films are a corrective. He films rebuttals. No one would expect a rebuttal to be fair to all the arguments.

OK, enough of that. I can’t hit all the yes, buts, so I have chosen these as a representative collection.

Moore’s movie is a visual feast. For instance, the sun is always shining in the countries he visits. Even Norway and Finland. The people are happy and productive. Things are good. The best part of the movie for me was seeing and hearing the people who get a chance to tell about their lives—on camera.

The Italian couple pictured here who are accustomed to eight weeks of vacation every year are astounded to learn that American workers get none at all—by law. Moore does admit that vacation hours are negotiated in contracts. She is in a mid-level business; he’s a cop. They both look very good in the vacation pictures that someone takes of them nearly everywhere in the world it is sunny and warm.

But this guy (below), who runs a Bugati motorcycle factory says that treating the workers well not only insures that they will work productively, but it means he gets to live in a country where people have free time and know how to use it. He agrees that he would make more money if he tightened the screws a little, but he thinks he makes enough money and he likes living in Italy.

I think France is my favorite. He chooses school lunches and sex education in France. The meal we see at the elementary school is charming. It is served by kitchen staff. On china. A four-course meal. For less per child than we spend. And they get an hour to eat it.

I suppose I could find something to criticize if I worked at it, but the whole scene charmed me and I didn’t feel like working at it. Lunch was treated as one of the school learning periods. What to eat. How to eat. How to share food with others at the table. Moore’s best line comes as a very attractive small plate of food is shown. Just that plate of food takes up the whole screen. It looks wonderful. Moore’s line is, “This is just the appetizer.” It turns out that there are three more courses to follow. In the picture below, Moore, playing the American buffoon, is the only inappropriately dressed person at the table.

The class in sex education was based on the idea that young people are going to engage in sexual activity. The question of whether they should or not was not raised. The teacher wanted to talk about how important it was for each party to attend to the sexual experience of the other; how the sexual part was just a part of a larger relationship, and so on.

It is entirely possible, of course, to approach premarital [4] sex from a principally moral point of view. That view can be succinctly summarized: don’t. But, of course, it doesn’t work. Moore brings Texas governor Rick Perry on in a film clip to say that “abstinence only” works as a public policy. He says he has personal experience that it works. The question the interviewer is asking Perry is why, if abstinence only education works so well in Texas, does Texas have the third highest teen pregnancy rates in the country. And lest we miss the point, Moore puts a graph of teen pregnancy rates in France and in the U. S. up on the screen. We have…maybe three times (or so) the number of teen pregnancies.

And this is really Moore’s strategy throughout. He shows what works in the host country. He shows that what they are doing there is working a lot better than what we are doing here. The question, mostly unasked in the movie, is, “Why wouldn’t we want to have those results here?” [5]

And that’s really the feeling I have after my multiple viewings. Watching those French and Finnish and Portuguese and Tunisian and Icelandic and German and Norwegian citizens describing the outcomes of their policies with such pride, I find myself yearning for those kinds of outcome and that kind of pride here in my country.

Bette said, as we sat down to discuss the movie, “What do you think about it?” That’s nearly always a good question for me because what I think about a movie is usually what is available to me first. Not this time. This time, I had to say, “This isn’t a thinking movie for me yet. It’s just a feeling movie so far and it makes me feel sad.”

[1] I’m sure Moore thinks every nation-state has a shameful past. He characterizes ours as “based on genocide and built by slave labor.” That’s not entirely accurate, of course; on the other hand, you can’t say it is wrong.
[2] I’m appreciating this numbering system more as I go on. I bought three tickets and “saw the movie” three times. It doesn’t sound bad at all that way.
[3] It is the free provision of university education to everyone who lives in Slovenia—even the American students who moved there because they could not afford to go to school here.
[4] As marriage continues to decline as a normal state of adult relations, we are going to need a prefix other than pre-. Extramarital could have meant, but it has not, “sex without reference to marriage.” Possibly “non-marital” is still available because, so far as I know, it does not have a meaning.
[5] The official in charge of Portugal’s drug policy tries to warn Moore away from his obvious interest in transplanting Portugal’s drug policy to the U. S. It isn’t just a piece of policy, the official says. You can’t just pick this one up and plunk it down in your country. Our policy requires health care for all our citizens and I know you don’t have that in your country.

Posted in Politics, Society, Sustainability | Tagged doing what works, michael moore, outcome-based policies, public costs v private costs, social democracies of Europe, where to invade next | Leave a comment

Being “useful”

Posted on March 20, 2016 by hessd

“We do not take well to uselessness.”

So says Wendy Lustbader in her superb Counting on Kindness: the Dilemmas of Dependency. She has older people in mind, but I would like to explore the idea today in a somewhat broader context. There is no question in my mind that she is right in what she says, but I wonder if the fact that we take so poorly to it retire 1 is as good a thing as she thinks it is.

Let’s take retirement first. [1] A common complaint among American men who have “retired” from their jobs is that they feel useless. [2] That kind of “usefulness” relies on the contribution you make to the company and fuses with it the regard for your work that comes from your colleagues. But it could mean that your retirement from that battlefield frees you to choose another battlefield, one that better serves the forces you still have to commit.

If retirement means only that, that you are now free to choose another engagement with other foes with increased odds of “winning,” then there is no reason whatever that a man retiring from his job would need to run the risk of feeling useless.

Unless, of course: a) doing that particular job is the only reason he values himself, b) there are no other commitments that truly engage him, and c) there are no other colleagues who assess his work and value it when it is good. If he doesn’t have any of those, then “not being at work” is not the problem he thinks it is. His problems are much deeper than he has suspected.

There is a broader context, however. “Usefulness” is a kind of doing. It is not a kind of being. Is doing really all that matters? Really? The being/doing distinction can be seen as fundamental, but that’s not the way I am thinking of it here. Anyone who engages himself or herself completely in a world (of experience) or in a task, does not rely on the activity, and may scarcely be aware of it.

Mihaly Czickszentmihaly describes the experience as “flow.” [3] When you are in a state of flow, the world goes away. The conversation you are having becomes vivid and all the rest of the world, pallid; the picture you are painting and its possibilities, both chosen and rejected, is the whole world of your experience; the concept you have almost but not quite grasped makes up all of “what you are doing” and peripherals like…oh…eating, sleeping, and being somewhere on time, simply recede into the distance.

No one, in a state of flow, wonders whether he or she is being “useful.”

There is a distinction, as well, between “who I am” and “what I do.” It’s not a simple distinction, obviously, but I would like to drop a pin in the map right there so we can find our way back.

retire 3 Another difficulty that the notion of “uselessness” hands us is, “What do we mean when we say ‘useful’?” Society is a rough and ready kind of enterprise so far as meanings go. Society is possible because “close enough” is the standard for giving and receiving meaning. But every now that then, “good enough” really isn’t good enough and I think this is one. What if, for instance, our common definitions of “useful” are merely conventional? What is these common definitions are not “useful?” What if another notion of “useful,” on being presented, would be welcomed and would benefit us all?

Here’s an example. There was quite a bit of time that elapsed between my wife, Marilyn’s cancer diagnosis and her death. During most of that time, she was disabled by cancer treatments of one kind or another and she understood that her obvious frailties made her a problem for her friends. Marilyn didn’t give up on being “useful” and she didn’t demand that her friends give up on it either. She did something better than either of those.

She actively pursued a sense of easy exchange with her friends. Her friends wanted to be with her and to console her. Marilyn did all the work that made it possible for them to do that. She actively defined the relationship between herself and her friends so that they would know they were “doing it right;” so they would be at ease from the first and would grow more confident and more effective as they went on.

Everyone looking at that scene would agree that her friends were there to “be useful to her.” And they were. And they would have done the things that she needed had she been self-conscious and spiteful or had she grown weary from the persistent demands for gratitude. But Marilyn’s notion of “usefulness” to her friends enabled her to invite them to do things for her and to receive their efforts with generosity.

So she was at least as “useful” to them as they were to her. More useful, as I saw it. I was dumbfounded. I had never considered the possibility that avoiding “uselessness” could look like that. Obviously, I had never seen it either. I filed it away so that should I ever be in that situation, I will have her strength and generosity as a guide.

When I think of “useful” in the conventional ways, what Marilyn did simply does not come into view. That is one of the reasons that conventional meanings need to be expanded from time to time. So here is an example of a different sort entirely.

I am part of a weekly discussion group where the discussion ebbs and flows. There is one retire 2.png member of the group who is willing to ask the “Why is grass green?” kind of question. No one knows the answer, but we all think we should so all of us pass the opportunity by and none of us asks it. But this one guy does. He would be very much surprised, I think, to learn that his contribution is “useful” to the group; it is, in fact, much more than useful. It is vital.

If he were to learn the value of what he does so that he could do it on purpose when it is needed, I think he should be designated A National Resource and loaned out, when needed, to groups whose discussions are doing more ebbing and less flowing.

Lustbader is right, I think, to point to the phenomenon of “uselessness,” especially in older adults. And the feeling of “being useless” is a very real feeling for many seniors. But we ought to ask, I think, why we have allowed our notion of what is “useful” to shrink so drastically. Why is “working for a wage” a useful thing to do, but making your home an inviting place for the grandkids or a place of refuge for their parents “not useful?” Why is making shrewd and productive investments in bonds “useful,” but making shrewd and productive investments in friendships, not? [4]

I want to leave you with an image of “retirement” to consider. I have a DVD of the movie The Twilight Zone, which, taken as a whole, is wa-a-a-y too scary for my taste. But there is one episode that features Scatman Crothers as Mr. Bloom. He’s new to this senior center. He apparently doesn’t know how the game is played, because he keeps asking questions that lead the residents to remember who they were and to take pleasure in the memories.

retire 6 One night, all the residents (except the one holdout) are magically transformed into themselves as children. They run and play and laugh. But before the night is over, they have begun to remember also the wonderful relationships and events of which they were a part and which they will not have any access to unless they go back to their old selves. And Mr. Bloom gives them that. You can go back, he says, to “your old comfortable bodies,” but with “fresh young minds.” The next morning these old people nearly erupt from the senior center, bursting with things to do and places to go that were there all along, but which they had not been willing to contemplate.
Mr. Bloom watches all this activity with satisfaction, then ambles down the walk and along the street where he turns in at the entrance to another senior center—one that looks remarkably like the one he has just left. The residents are sitting or standing in the front yard staring into a meaningless middle distance. Bloom waves his cane in front of the eyes of one old man, provoking not so much as a blink.

“Oh boy,” says Bloom, facing the camera, “this [new assignment] is going to be a tough one.

I tell that story for two reasons. The first is that we see Mr. Bloom “retire,” leave the field, from the first nursing home. This is the only field of action in the movie until the last few seconds. Why has he done that? Because he is about to begin his campaign at another nursing home. I think “retirement” can mean that.

And then there is the question of Mr. Bloom and “uselessness.” Mr. Bloom is the antithesis of uselessness. And also the antidote.

[1] I have been waiting for some time now for a chance to return that word to its natural home. When an army “retires” from the field, it may be for any number of reasons, most prominent among them is that they want to take up a stronger defensive position elsewhere. Robert E. Lee’s refusal to “retire” from Gettysburg after the first day brought about the disaster of the third day. For us, it just means that today’s retirement helps to set the table for tomorrow’s victory.
[2] This has not been so common among American women because they much more frequently have additional commitments and they don’t retire from those. That sounds pretty sensible to me.
[3] In his book by that name.
[4] The friendships you invest in don’t need to include you at all. It is perfectly possible to invest in people so that they are drawn to their friendship with each other. Seeing their friendship flourish, you have every reason to “retire” from it and to be pleased with your work.

Posted in Getting Old | Tagged being "useful", being as what you do, doing as who you are, leaving work as a whole person, retiring | Leave a comment

Why we want to elect “a strong man”

Posted on March 18, 2016 by hessd

I recently wrote an essay on the theme that Donald Trump, as scary as he is as a candidate, is really only a product of our electoral feelings. The metaphor I used was that Trump is a weed, the plant that grows naturally in the kind of soil we (the U. S.) now have. I used my back yard as an example. The soil in my yard is too “clay-ey” so the water doesn’t drain away as it should [1] so instead of the grass I prefer, I get weeds. I get the plants that grow naturally in the soil I have.

I liked that argument and so did a lot of other people. It is so easy to say nasty things about Trump, especially if you are a liberal Democrat like me, [2] but saying nasty things about weeds doesn’t grow grass. trump b2 Amending the soil, so that the kinds of plants you want in your yard really would help. If the moisture retention of clay is my problem, then amending it with organic matter to improve drainage is the solution.

So let’s turn this ordinary back yard insight toward our politics. Imagine, for instance, that our presidential campaigns pitted the two major parties and their ideas against each other. The people chose on the basis of the platforms provided by the candidates and the united party who nominated that candidate stood ready to put that platform into operation. You could have a party/candidate favoring more centralized power against a party/candidate favoring more freedom for the states to find their own way. You could have a party/candidate who favors the redistribution of income from the poor to the rich running against a party/candidate favoring the redistribution of income from the rich to the poor.

But that’s not what we have in our politics and in this essay, I want to argue that we are up against the limits of soil amendment. I am going to extend the soil analogy in a different direction today. I think that sometimes, historical circumstances so dominate the political reality of a country that the soil cannot be amended, that all efforts at “soil amendment” will fail. And not long after that “trying to amend the soil” will be vilified and the Amenders condemned as “part of the status quo.”

I have Germany in the 1920’s in mind. I think the same forces that produced Hitler in the Germany of the 1920s have made conditions favorable for Trump in 2016. I’m not saying that Trump is Hitler. I am saying that the same soil produces the same weeds.

That means that I don’t have to say that Trump is “like” Hitler or that he is “playing the role” of Hitler. I get to say, instead, that the passionate desire of many Americans to elect a “strong man” is caused by many of the same conditions in the U. S. today that caused it in Germany during Hitler’s candidacy. [3] Over and over, you hear Trump supporters say that the status quo has failed and the country is in danger and now is the time to elect “a strong man.”

Let me pause to tell you a story that I find to be pertinent. I was at a lecture in Missoula, trump 2 Montana in August 1991. A professor from the University of Montana had just given a talk opposing President George H. W. Bush’s “Operation Desert Shield.” It was a pro-Bush crowd so there was a lot of conversation afterwards. During the conversation, an old German man came up to me and said, in broken English, something that chilled my blood at the time and that I have never forgotten. He said, “I haff heard all ziss before,” and he went away shaking his head sadly. It chilled my blood because I knew who he had heard it from. He had heard if from Hermann Goering.

“Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.”

— Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials

The German people wanted a strong man as their leader. How could they not want that, given the condition Germany was in? So they elected Hitler and Hitler appointed Goering and Goering told the people that they were being betrayed by their leaders and attacked by their enemies and that those Germans who were not as bellicose as the Nazis were traitors.

Hitler and Goering are the people who would have had a chance to amend the soil once President Hindenburg gave up. Some responses to my earlier post were that it is “the people who should amend the soil, but in Goering’s statement above, the people ARE the soil. They are not in a position to “amend” anything. They are Germans, they are paying the price for their leaders’ conduct of World War I; their economy is a disaster of hyperinflation; their “Congress,” the Reichstag, does not seem to be able to stir itself to address the crisis. It is time for “strong measures” and that will require a “strong leader.”

To return briefly to my landscaping metaphor, the costs of World War I and the post-war effects of World War I “fixed” the soil beyond hope of amendment. The Weimar government (1919—1933) could not have amended the soil, under the circumstances, to bring to the front a Chancellor who would negotiate with other nations for a return to prosperity in Germany. [4] It is popular and common to blame the Weimar leaders for their ineffectiveness and there is no question that they were ineffective. The case I am making here is that the powerful desire the German people felt for a “strong leader” was what guaranteed that they would be ineffective.

Maybe it is time for another story. There is a Nazi extermination camp in Mauthausen, KZ Mauthausen, Häftlinge im Steinbruch Germany. For me, Mauthausen is the name of the camp, a place where Jews and other “enemies of the state” were to be sent to die. [5] The camp is now a tourist attraction, of course, complete with a very good bookstore. That was where I found The Logic of Evil: the Social Origins of the Nazi Party, by William Brustein of the University of Minnesota. These are “the stairs of death” at Mauthausen when the camp was in full operation. I walked these steps on a beautiful sunny day and could scarcely believe they were the same steps.

Brustein shows that the elections of 1932 in Germany and the United States were remarkably similar. Depression-ridden countries hoping for a new confident strong leader to bring the nation back to health were a similar soil for Roosevelt and for Hitler. Hitler had another agenda, of course, but he didn’t push it on the campaign trail in 1932. His campaign speeches sound remarkably like Roosevelt’s.

How about the pathetic ineffectiveness of the Weimar government? Would anyone like to compare the effectiveness of the German parliament from 1924—1932 with the effectiveness of the American Congress from 2010—2016? As an American, I would be very hesitant to make the comparison. The faith of the German people in moderate, centrist politics was badly frayed by that time. Their plight was so severe that they had begun to call a government by their elected representatives “politics as usual” and to reject it with scorn. They yearned for a strong leader who restore Germany to its former strength and glory. And they got one.

The passage of the PATRIOT act [6] was not as extreme as the Reichstag Fire Decree or the Enabling Act of 1933, which enabled Hitler to take complete control of the government and to suppress his enemies by means that were clearly forbidden under the German Constitution. The PATRIOT act was passed, however, in a flurry of hyped up fear and it immediately began to erode civil liberties that Americans had taken for granted. Bush’s PATRIOT act, like Hitler’s Enabling Act were “temporary measures,” necessary for “the immediate crisis.”

trump 1 But as the fear and anger are jacked up, what was once the vital middle of the spectrum comes to seem “politics as usual,” or, even worse, as “the status quo.” You hear people ay they are “against the status quo” as if it were one thing and as if whatever broke it would be better. Clearly politics as usual is not giving us back the America that was stolen from us under the leadership of the moderates. (Ronald Reagan, by the way, was one of those “moderates.”) Politics as usual is not protecting us from the threat of—in the U. S. today, that means “the existence of”—extremist groups who will count no cost too high if they can inflict even a minor wound on the U. S. It’s time to elect a “strong man.” This is a real Trump rally picture. Let’s hope it isn’t really representative.

My argument here is that under those historical circumstances, the nature of the soil is fixed beyond hope of amendment until the conditions favoring amendment return. If the people who want to fix my soil by improving the drainage and declared enemies of the people for their efforts, they will stop making those efforts. That applies as well to parties as to candidates.

The soil which is producing today’s weeds—I described it in the earlier post by using Richard Hofstadter’s term “the paranoid style”—is marked by irrationality and violence. If we are so fearful and so alienated that we will not elect people who will bring about an improvement in our civil soil, then we will keep producing weeds.

I’m looking for some appreciation of how we can move forward together. That was Barack Obama’s appeal. Then it was his promise. Then the promise was systematically derided for partisan advantage. We need to find a way to hope again. I don’t know what will do that for us.

Obviously, as a Democrat, I hope that a Democratic candidate will be elected, but electing a Democratic candidate won’t amend the soil. It won’t even remove the weeds. And I don’t know what will.

[1] “Should” here is not a term of argument. It means only that I have preferences about what kind of plants (grass) I want in my yard and growing that grass would require better drainage than I have devised.
[2] I’m a pragmatic liberal Democrat. That means that my heart belongs to Bernie, but my vote is going to Hilary.
[3] The rise of Vladimir Putin as a “strong man” ruler in Russia is directly parallel, but adding him in complicates the mix.
[4] Of course, the other nations did not want to help Germany return to prosperity. Hitler’s leadership in restoring Germany to prosperity was done by violating the treaties which had the permanent subjugation of Germany as their goal. How do you think that played on the campaign trail in 1932.
[5] Since it is the name of the town, local businesses have the same name. We rode past a Mauthausen McDonalds, for instance. It is hard to get past the association. Imagine that there is a McDonalds in Auschwitz (also a place name) that features “the Auschwitzburger.” That would be a hard sandwich for an American to order and there is nothing wrong with the name except my own inability to separate the name of the town from the name of the camp.
[6] People forget that the PATRIOT act—always, properly, in caps—is an acronym. It stands for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.”

Posted in Political Psychology, Politics | Tagged authoritarian politics, better people elect better leaders, frightened citizens and the yearning for a "strong man", Germany in the 1930s, The U. S. in 2016 | 4 Comments

“The Intern” as a Theological Prop

Posted on March 12, 2016 by hessd

This is a frankly theological take on Nancy Meyers’ movie, The Intern. As always, I absolve the writer, the director (both Nancy Meyers) the producers, and all the actors from having any such intention. I am writing here about the meaning that came to me as I watched this movie over and over, trying to find a name for just what it was about this story that fascinated me so deeply.

We are going to take this in three pieces. There is the theological background in general. intern 1 Then the question of what “empties himself” means, both in the case of Jesus and in the case of Ben Whittaker. Then, second, there is the question of what is actually emptied. I don’t know what that means for Jesus, but what it means for Ben is what the movie is about. Finally, there is the question of what is not–can not be?–emptied.

My overall goal is to give you a clear account of how this movie happened to me. If you can get that, I’ll feel pretty good about this essay. This is not the first movie to have affected me this way. I call it “Reel Theology.”

Theological Background

There is a well-known hymn in Philippians 2, which includes the famous “kenosis” passage. Here are the first two of the five stanzas, verses 6—17. It goes like this. “Make your own mind [like] the mind of Christ Jesus:

Who, being in the form of God
did not count equality with God
something to be grasped

But he emptied himself
taking the form of a slave
becoming as human beings are…”

Those two stanzas are the basis of a lot of Christian theology. I don’t understand it all, but I’m OK with that. What does “in the form of God” mean in verse 6 for instance or “in the form of a slave” in verse 7? Is the goal to distinguish form from substance? Too deep for me.

intern 12 My problem is not with understanding it. I can’t. My problem is with not caring about it. I’m not really critical of myself for failing to care, but I think all Christians are poorer if they fail to care about this fundamentally important mystery. I think we need to live with it and care about it. I would really like to understand it; that’s the kind of person I am. But even failing to understand it, I am not prepared to stop caring. How to do that?

One way I have approached this problem—the problem of understanding and caring— is to take a little piece of it; just a fragment. Maybe I can learn to care about the fragment. Maybe I can attach myself emotionally to the fragment and begin to engage the larger issue from a base of actually caring about it; feeling something about it.

In my view, for instance, the Muppets version of The Frog Prince is a really good treatment of this same passage. You don’t have to know what “in the form of God” means to feel a lot of sympathy with a little frog [1] who doesn’t know where he is (at the moment) or who he is (at the moment) but who is forced to say, when asked, that his name is Sir Robin the Brave. And he has to say that to Kermit, who is open, but skeptical.

I know it is suppose to be funny, but it is also humiliating and I don’t really think humiliation is funny, even when it is managed by the Muppets. I can feel a little bit of the little frog’s confusion and shame. All the other frogs have names derived from the knights of King Arthur’s time and they are big competent (they can swim) and confident frogs. And to them, the scrawny little frog must say, “They call me…Sir Robin the Brave.” Oh, and by the way, I am really a prince.

intern 5 Sir Robin’s problem is the tiniest fragment of the dilemma Jesus faced in “giving up the form of God,” but since I have no idea what “the form of God” means, I don’t really feel anything about it. I really get the little frog’s problem. I can feel that one.

I argue, below, that the dilemma Ben Whittaker faces in The Intern is similar. It is, like The Frog Prince, a tiny piece of a massive theological construct. But my mind, tuned to Paul’s theological rhetoric and the magic of the Muppets, sees in Ben Whittaker’s dilemma, an “emptying” that catches both my mind and my heart. [2]

What is to be emptied?

In the hymn, Jesus is supposed to have “emptied” his divinity. No one knows what that means, so it’s really hard to care about it. Ben has to empty his “self-importance.” Everybody know what that means. For this metaphor to work, you will need to understand that Jesus really was divine and that Ben really was (had been) important. V. P. for Sales and Advertising for a major company qualifies as “important.” But when you think about it, what Ben has done really doesn’t—or really shouldn’t—bear at all on whether he can be a successful “senior intern” with About the Fit, the online clothing company who is hiring the interns.

So Ben, in his interviews, needs to make a complete break. Yes, he used to be important, but now he is not. So the faintest breath of “I used to be a very important person” really should be called “self-importance.” And the faintest breath of it would kill his chances of doing anything worth while.

So let’s try the Philippians hymn again, hoping to keep the relationship between the statuses (form of God/form of a slave) intact, but changing the statuses themselves (VP for Sales and Advertising/intern). Here’s what that gives us.

Ben, who was really VP for Sales and Advertising
did not count “executive status”
as something to be grasped

But emptied himself
taking the form of an intern
being treated as interns are.

If divine/human are categories you care deeply about, this adaptation of the kenosis hymn is not going to be your kind of thing. I am aware that it might be offensive. But if you are like me—unable to really care about divine/human [2]—it is possible that you might really be able to feel the boss/intern dilemma. That’s what this is for: the emotions attach to the small event, the significance can be transferred to the framework of meaning.

How does the movie show that “emptying?”

Here are a few samples. The first interviewer starts off in a very orthodox manner. “Where did you go to school?” Northwestern. “What did you major in?” Then a very short pause and …”Do you remember?” They don’t show Ben’s face after than, but take it from me, there was no expression of exasperation or impatience. None.

intern 3 The second interviewer picks up at college and asks about work history. This is the first time we, as viewers, hear that Ben was V.P. for Sales and Advertising and later was in charge of the production of the physical phone book. For New York. The second interviewer wants to know why people don’t just google phone numbers. Ben is unflappable. “Well yes, but back then people needed phone books.”

His first interview with Jules goes the same way. I think you’d be much better down in “creative” or “sales.” The pace is a little slower.” Ben’s response is that he is here to learn about her world.

Throughout all this, Ben is someone who asks for no special treatment. There is not the merest vestige of “I used to be somebody important” in his words or his manner.

What does Ben keep?

I think it would be fair to say that the Jesus of the Synoptic gospels does not “keep” anything. He is, in that respect, a lot like Jason Bourne in that everybody is trying to kill him and Jason needs desperately to find out who he is so he will know why that is happening and be able to do something about it. [3] Ben isn’t like that. Ben will continue to be the kind of person in this new job that he has always been. So far as appearances go, that means he will stand out in a young-and-grubby culture. He wears a suit and tie every day. He shaves every day. He carries a briefcase that has “old things” in it: a calculator, a couple of pairs of glasses, a clock, and so on.

Ben the executive was like that and Ben the intern is like that. But Ben keeps some other things, too. He keeps his character. In his interview video he says this about himself: I’ve been a company man all my life. I’m loyal. I’m trustworthy. And I’m good in a crisis.

intern 4 He doesn’t “empty” those things. They were part of his old self and they are part of his current self. And they save him. They save the company, too. And Jules Ostin, the company’s founder, whose intern he is. It is not hard to track those traits in the story. [4] Ben goes into a conference room to perform a very simple task that Becky, Jules’ secretary, has summoned him to do. While there, he hears crisis discussed—a crisis for the company and also for the founder. When he reports back to the secretary, she says, “So…what were they talking about in there.” Ben replies, “I really couldn’t say.” Becky prompts, “You were in there a long time…” Ben comes back with, “I couldn’t hear a thing.” Not true, of course, because he did hear; but also not a lie because Becky knows exactly what he means.
When he begins as Jules’ driver, she cautions him, “Whatever you hear in this car is completely confidential.” Ben waves it off, “Goes without saying.” She knows what he means and believes him.

There is a lot more story, of course, but the narrative I care most about comes to a satisfying climax somewhere around the middle of the movie. Jules and Ben are working late. Jules brings a box of pizza and a couple of beers over to Ben’s desk because she “doesn’t like to eat alone.” The payoff in this scene comes when you see Jules’ eyes register the truth and then, “No. Surely not.” [4]

Jules already knew that this old building—the one they gutted and wired for online sales—was an old factory. She knew that old factory had made phone books. As they sit there together with their pizza, she learns that Ben used to be an executive in a company that made phone books. That’s when the light of recognition comes into her eyes. That’s when she realizes that About the Fit, her brain child (her heart child too) is built in Ben’s old home and that in coming to work for her, he is coming “home.”

That brings us to the same notion, theologically speaking, but from the other side. The hymn with the Gospel of John begins, includes:

10 He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. 11 He came to what was his own,[c] and his own people did not accept him.

That’s good for Jesus. It’s way too much for Ben Whittaker. But if you have that language in your ears already, it is very nearly irresistible. Ben, who was once a VIP, comes back to the very place where he was a VIP and esteems that past so little that his boss has to discover it herself. She knows what it means. And she knows that if she had not discovered it, no one would ever have known.

And that is my favorite moment in the film.

[1] We know that the little frog is “really” a prince and that an evil witch has enchanted him, but in his case there is no question what “in the form of a frog” means.
[2] The Greek is heauton ekenōsen: “he emptied himself. This passage in Philippians 2 is called the kenosis passage for that reason.
[3] The Jesus of the Gospel of John is an entirely different story. There, Jesus is, for all practical purposes, a tourist here in our world. He still has his citizenship papers and his passport and he can go “home” anytime. Well…any time after his mission is accomplished.
[4] Not hard, particularly, after you have seen it a dozen times, several times just to track the virtues promised in the video to see where in the narrative they are displayed.
[5] I added a few words to this quote because the real meaning in in the way she says it and I don’t know how to convey that.

Posted in Biblical Studies, Theology | Tagged De Niro as "The Intern", letting go of self-importance, movies as theology, not caring as a theological problem, not understanding as a theological problem | Leave a comment