Consummating the marriage

Posted on April 29, 2016 by hessd

Everybody knows what it means to “consummate” a marriage, right? It means to “complete” it; to bring it to its highest state.[1] That’s what the words mean anyway.

That brings us to the question of what a marriage is. Is it, for instance, one thing with common and identifiable characteristics? If marriage has a common character, then the partners would know what choices and commitments to make, what actions were moving their marriage along toward its highest point.

On the other hand, maybe it would be better to say that every marriage is unique, not just in the trivial way in which snowflakes are unique, but in the important way that the standards of consummation will be different for each one. I am inclined to say that this kind of uniqueness is factually true, but unimportant.

consummate 6I like to work in the area between those. I believe that it is reasonable and also useful to say that there are “kinds” or “categories” of marriages and that each kind has the norms of growth and health that are appropriate to it and therefor the kind of consummation that is appropriate to it.

In any case, it is clear that when we move away from consummation as a one-time event we have to begin to consider it as a process. If one “consummates” [2] a marriage by bringing it to its highest point and keeping it there, then we have to leave the yes/no language that would be appropriate to an event and arrive at the need for a language that we can use to describe a level of development over time.

This came to my mind when I was reading a book about something else entirely. It was Leonard Sweet’s The Gospel According to Starbucks. Sweet and I may have somewhat different priorities about the gospel, but we are completely united in our appreciation of Starbucks and he knows a lot more about why Starbucks works than I do. So I was reading along, thinking coffee-ish thoughts, when I hit this sentence on page 52:

“A spirituality that does not bring together body and mind is like an unconsummated marriage. It’s a spirituality that could well be annulled.”

Traditionally, of course, when the bride and the groom have sex after the wedding ceremony, the marriage is “consummated.” But then again, traditionally the main reason to be married was to have children, so it isn’t that the two concepts are unrelated. The sexual union produces the children which brings the marriage to its highest and best state.

We haven’t been traditional in that sense of the word for a long time in the U. S. [3] We have an array of reasons for continuing to marry and it makes sense that if there are so many different reasons, there are likely different pictures of what the highest and best form of the marriage is.

consummate 1Let’s start on the easy end of the scale and work up. Let’s say a young couple discover each other at a party by a beautiful lake and fall instantly in love. This is a really terrific feeling and their idea is that if they get married, they will continue to feel that way about each other. Marriage “locks in” the feelings of infatuation, in other words.

OK, we all know that is not going to happen. There is no hope for the consummation of this marriage in the way we are considering that word in this essay.  But if they are good people and particularly if they get help, they can repent [4] of their folly and adopt a sturdier and more realistic notion of what their marriage could be and what they want it to be. There is no way to tell in advance what the consummation of this renewed marriage is going to look like, but I certainly wish them well and I recommend to them this piece of wisdom (in the section below)  from Ruth Bell Graham.

The two parts of a marriage

I think of relationships as being composed of intimacy and collegiality. I know those are not common terms, but it isn’t common either to divide relationships up the way I do and I need these words. By “intimacy,” I mean to refer to the face to face, “I know who you are” part of the marriage. By “collegiality,” I mean to refer to the side by side, “I am so glad we are working on this together” part of the marriage. Every functioning marriage I ever saw has both of these elements. It’s the balance that is different from one to the other and that really needs to be different.

consummate 4The balance is important because collegiality can decay into routine or even into drudgery. There’s nothing routine about a jolt of intimacy. Intimacy can decay into volatile emotions and loss of trust because when you go that far inside [5], neither of you knows what is there. The steady friendly pace of shared work is a wonderful balance to all that volatility.

 

Two kinds of marriage

Here are two unusual considerations of marriage. We can use them to practice on.
I have nothing bad to say about a marriage where one of the partners is wounded or fragile and who needs to be cared for and protected by a spouse who is much stronger. I am a fan of egalitarian marriage, myself, but that kind of marriage requires people who want it and who are competent to pursue it. How should a marriage be consummated—how, remember, should it be brought to its highest and best form, its “summa?” The stronger partner must bear the weight of the marriage while always remembering that the weaker partner is to be protected, not dominated. The weaker partner must bring harmony or beauty or gentleness to the marriage refusing always to treat weaker as in any way “less valuable.”

consummate 5

I paid a lot of attention to avoiding personal pronouns in that paragraph because there is no reason at all that the weaker partner ought not to be the man in a heterosexual marriage and the stronger partner the woman. If a strong woman and a weak or wounded man marry with the intention of building the best marriage they can make out of the materials that they have, they are not going to get anything but admiration and appreciation from me. And if the man is stronger and the woman weaker, I would feel the same way about it. Or, at least, I would try to. I would take a lot of heat for that from my friends, but I would try to do it anyway.

On the other hand, I have seen marriages that looked like business partnerships to me and that still provided all the values the partners were looking for. Each is independent of the other, sometimes financially independent as well as emotionally independent. Yet something more than convenience seems to keep them together and to enable them to take pleasure in their common work. They don’t seem, at least they don’t seem to me, to be taking pleasure in each other. Maybe the routine and the stability their relationship offers them gives them what they need most.

The consummation of such a marriage would, following the metaphor I am using, bring their cooperation as well as the freedom each enjoys within the relationship to its highest point—to its (con)summation. It is the granting of personal freedom by the partner as well as the celebration of the common work that consummates the marriage and should they fall away, for any reason, from that tenuous balance, they will look back at the time when their relationship was at its best and mourn the loss.

The kind we like best

The marriage I want for myself mixes all those values together in the way Bette and I like them mixed. I proposed a marriage like that when I proposed to Bette and I think she said yes to me partly because that kind of marriage sounded good to her. It was not clear to either of us at the time, just how we would go about defining and achieving that balance. [6]

consummate 3When I think about the consummation of the kind of marriage we have, two things are immediately clear and were clear even from the beginning. The first is that it would take both of us working at it consistently to achieve it. I am thinking, for instance, of the kind of work it takes to make sure that our emotional bank account always has enough funds for us to draw on day by day.  And, should it come to that, for emergencies as well.

The second is that we need to be sure we know what we are trying to do. In the context of this essay, I think I can say that we need to know what consummates our marriage. Not “a marriage” or “someone else’s marriage.” We need to know what consummates our marriage. We’re ten years into this—eleven if you start counting at the first date—and we still have the “doing it on purpose” kind of marriage we set out to have. I feel really good that we are still working (and playing) at trying to keep the kind of relationship we first set out to build.

On the other hand, we aren’t always successful. We achieve that tenuous balance of intimacy and collegiality really well sometimes and not so well at other times. That’s where Mrs. Graham’s maxim about forgiveness comes in. But I think of those ups and downs the same way I think about the ups and downs of temperature in our home. The temperature, as the thermostat measures it, is sometimes too hot and sometimes too cold. When it is too hot, the thermostat turns on the AC; when it is too cold, it turns on the furnace. Think what that means for “consummation.”

I think that if a marriage has a goal, if there is a “kind of marriage” the partners are trying to make and keep, that can serve as a temperature setting. It helps us tell when “the marriage”–the relationship itself– is too hot or too cold even if each of us is comfortable at the moment. We are the ones who need to know that and to bring on the cooler or the warmer air.  There isn’t any machinery for that; that is something we need to do.

But that really is what we are trying to do. It is not, as I have been pointing out in this essay, the only kind of good marriage. But it is the kind of good marriage we like best and keeping it “consummated” is the work and the pleasure of our life together.

[1] The summa in consummate is the same as the summa in summa cum laude. Of course “highest and best” is only good if we are talking about virtues. A “consummate” [it’s an adjective there and pronounces slightly differently] liar is the highest and best kind of liar which is the same as the lowest and worst kind of liar.
[2] Don’t get trapped into imagining that there is any relationship between consummate and consume. Consume is based on the Latin verb emere, “to buy or to take.”
[3] The perspective of former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia aside, that is. Scalia said that he had nine children because God wanted them to have nine children.
[4] The word most often translated “repentance” in the New Testament is the Greek noun metanoia, which means literally “to change your mind.”  The hope here is that these post-romantics could change their mind about what they want and need.
[5] The English intimacy is based on the superlative Latin adjective intimus, “most within.” That is one of the most helpful etymological reminders I ever received. My own view is that in addition to “inside me” and “inside you,” which people generally grant to be mysterious, there is an “inside us,” i.e., “inside the relationship,” which is a different kind of thing entirely and even more mysterious.
[6] Bette is not a defining and deciding kind of person and maybe if I had her instincts for balance and her generosity of spirit, I wouldn’t have to be like that myself. I am, though. I am a defining and deciding kind of person. I could call them discernment and agency if I thought it would help you feel better about it.

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Sustainable Systemic Political Change

Posted on April 26, 2016 by hessd

For me, the drama is beginning to leak out of the primary balloons. “Informed people” are beginning to speculate about Hillary’s possible running mates. I will want to check back in as the Republican convention decides whether there should be one party there or two. I remember the Dixiecrat secession from the Democratic convention in 1948 so I’ll have some criteria to use in appreciating such an event if it occurs.

So let’s step back just a little and try to think about what the election outcome will mean. Michael Lind’s piece in the New York Times (see previous essay) described Hillary’s center-left inclinations as Bill Clintonism updated for the teens of the new century. I think that’s about right. No Republican candidate I have heard is proposing anything that will result in anything but four years of sumo-style political wrestling. I think those are the practical possibilities.

So let’s look at the impractical possibilities instead. What if we began with an interest in systemic change—a change of the whole system, not just little pieces of it? And what if we considered only changes that could be sustained over many generations. This would not be a spasm of reform; this would be a new way of governing ourselves. I want to pass some ideas along, but I need to start with a story first. You will see why.

Dolbeare and Edelman imagine systemic change [1]

When I began teaching at Westminster College in the fall of 1974, a newly minted Ph. D., I taught an American government course using Ken Dolbeare and Murray Edelman’s new text, American Politics: Policies, Power, and Change, 2nd Edition. There were lots of reasons to like the text, but one that really won me over was Chapter 19, “Political Change.” I had never seen a text that did not imagsustainable 1ine that things would continue pretty much along the lines described in the earlier chapters. This one didn’t do that. That is what makes it so good for 2016.

In Chapter 19 they considered why political systems change and offered several “scenarios.” These were ways of imagining how the system might change beginning from where we all thought we were in the mid-70s. I’m going to tell you about three of them. The first imagines that we just keep doing what we are doing. The second imagines a substantial shift to the right, in the direction of fascism. The third imagines a substantial shift to the left, in the direction of socialism.

In the first scenario, the status quo option:

“basic conditions create no major new dislocations and leave established elites entrenched and with full capacity to orchestrate popular support for their decisions.”

The end state in this scenario is called: Erratic marginal change, culminating in a corporate-dominated system.

In the second scenario, we arrive at: Marginal reactionary change, culminating in fascism. In their account, it doesn’t seem like such a big step:

“…because of the wide spread inability to perceive any alternative to surveillance and repression such policies once undertaken become fixed, and can only intensify. In this manner—by the steady erosion of fixed standards of due process and fair procedures, coupled with rigid insistence on the status quo—a police state evolves. The American version of fascism, well grounded in popular support, is complete.

The “good scenario”

The third scenario, the one we are going to spend our time on, moves us to the left, but this isn’t a Hillary Clinton left. It isn’t a Bernie Sanders left either. There is an election in this scenario and it is a crucially important election, but when you see what events will be needed to prepare for that election, you will see how far we are from achieving it. Dolbeare and Edelman call it: Marginal reformist change culminating in welfare capitalism.

Here’s what that looks like. [2]

There are six major steps. These are all necessary if we are going to generate sustainable systemic political change of any kind I would hope to see. [3] At a certain point, in this scenario, “a tipping point would occur. “

“The most likely would seem to be a sweeping victory for the more progressive political party in an election posing clear-cut alternatives between the new and the old values.”

That crucial event falls between point five and point six in the seris below.

Since Dolbeare and Edelman wrote that in the 70s, we have made a lot of progress toward “an election posing clear-cut alternatives.” Both parties have become the bearers of coherent ideologies and cohesive groups of voters have mobilized to support those ideologies. The likelihood is that “the more progressive political party” will win in the fall, particularly if there are serious splits in the Republican party.

So for all of us lefties, admirers of democratic socialism, this looks like good news. It isn’t. Let’s look now at what happened in America—what, according to this scenario, needs to happen— before the “tipping point” in this scenario.

First, the continuing economic disorganization pushes disenfranchised workers to understand their plight in class terms, not in social group or gender or racial conflicts.

sustainable 2Second, young people with a new vision of the kind of country we could be are the source of new values, values which are both more humanistic (not just anti-corporate) and more egalitarian.

Third, these young people move up into the political mainstream, affecting even the current elite class with these new values.

Fourth, organizations demanding real change would proliferate, driven by the new values and they would vent their impatience with the “same old stuff” by repeated public demonstrations, some even turning violent. The unions would re-awaken and demand greater control over the conditions of work, not just higher wages and benefits.

Fifth, elites, aware of the threat to their control, would try to slow the process down by making marginal concessions. But instead, each concession is seen to grant a new legitimacy to the rationale underlying the demands. This results in increasingly wider agreement within the elites and also among the general public, that this new vision is not only attractive, but truly possible.

[This is when the election happens.]

Sixth, after the election, “major institutional changes” would spread through the Congress and the executive branch of the national government enabling large changes that are both systemic in scope and also sustainable.  So this scenario finally gets to the title I proposed; it is systemic and sustainable.

How close are we?

So let’s look at the current political debates, both articulated and implied. Since we are contemplating a systemic move to the left, let’s focus on what Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are saying. How do their platforms inform the events of this scenario.

sustainability 3Point 1: We have done very well with “continuing economic disorganization.” That’s why there are so many angry voters and why authoritarian candidates are so popular. And despite the rhetorical reliance on “the 1%,” we have not done at all well in seeing our dilemma in class-based terms. Class is important in this scenario because the group, gender, and racial/ethic conflicts can all be manipulated as distractions. Class, by this analysis, can not be a distraction and I can’t think of a substitute.

Points 2 & 3: There are a lot of young people with humanity-affirming and equality-affirming values. As a rule, they lose those when they acquire jobs and mortgages, but maybe it will be different this time. This scenario, “the good scenario,” requires these young people as the value source and before you rush to dismiss them, this is the role played by the communist elites in the Marxist system and if you are considering systemic change, somebody has to play this role. Systemic change is not improv.

Point 4: Organizations demanding “change” have indeed proliferated, but they have been presenting demands that are more easily blunted or diverted. That’s the value of the emphasis on economic class. There are lots of protests on behalf of black people, especially black victims of crime, and protests based on one form or another of gender discrimination, but these don’t add up. You can always play the blacks against the gays against the feminists against the evangelicals. Those disputes divide dissent. When people understand conflict in terms of their social and economic location in society, it unites dissent.

I’m not seeing it. And that means that the violence that attaches itself to some demonstrations is pointless violence. It is violence that expresses the feelings of the victims, but it trivializes the common message rather than amplifying it.

sustainability 4

Point 5. The success of the elites in buying off dissent by strategic concessions has been a wonder to behold. It has not been used by the dissidents as a justification of further demands as the scenario requires. The case for change in exactly the same before the concessions as after. The justification of the demands is the same. But the appetite for the work that these changes require begins to tail off after a few “victories.”

Then there is the “tipping point” election, which is powerfully significant because it has been preceded by the previous five points. There has been a source of the demand for new values and a unification of the economically disenfranchised, and a proliferation of groups demanding change even violently at times, and a refusal to be bought off by partial successes. THEN there is the election. Without points one through five, the election won’t mean much. And that means that point six, the spread throughout government of the demands made in the election, also does not happen.

I really wish Hillary well. I am going to vote for her and contribute to her campaign and propagandize on her behalf with the tools at my disposal. But everything she is doing can be easily assimilated within the political system as it is presently constituted. Everything that is happening now can easily be a part of Erratic marginal change, culminating in a corporate-dominated system.

It is true that electing a nominee like Donald Trump really is a step toward Scenario 2: Marginal reactionary change resulting in fascism. But it is not true, alas, that electing Hillary—or Bernie— is a step toward Scenario 3: Marginal reformist change resulting in welfare capitalism. I wish it were.

[1] One student who heard me lecturing but who didn’t read his book—just guessing—wrote a final exam in which he referred to the author (singular) of our text as Dolberry Nadelman. I am sure Mr. Nadelman would have been proud.
[2] There is a lot wrong with this scenario, of course. It is hugely unlikely, for one thing, and it badly underestimates the resistance to it by both the elites and the conservative electorate. I keep coming back to it because the alternatives are so gruesomely bad and I’m watching Scenarios 1 and 2 on my TV.
[3] Of course, the fascist alternative is systemic as well and sustainable for…oh…a thousand years? Does that sound about right?

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Party Animals?

Posted on April 21, 2016 by hessd

Michael Lind is a centrist Democrat. This piece (which was published in the New York Times on April 16) represents what he hopes is happening. On the other hand, he may be right and it doesn’t really matter what he is hoping. He sounds right to me.

Partisan Realignment

Lind surveys two processes in this piece on the way to coming to his conclusion. The first is partisan realignment. He describes that as “the breakup of the mid-20th-century Democrats and Republicans and the reshuffling of voter blocs among the two parties.”

menu 2It is easy to remember the Democratic party as “the party of American liberalism,” and that is true as far as it goes. It is not so easy to remember that “the party of American liberalism” was held in power by the solid South. That Democratic party was the party of “I have a dream,” as Martin Luther King Jr. put it and also of “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” as Gov. George Wallace of Alabama put it. Both in 1963, by the way.

You could call that kind of variation hypocrisy. You could call it diversity. You could call it practical politics. Whatever you call it, the civil rights movement put too much strain on it for King’s party and Wallace’s party to continue to be Democrats and the “Solid South,” once solidly Democratic, became solidly Republican.

Policy Realignment

Once the parties were sorted into ideologically coherent groupings, these groupings—Republican and Democratic voters—began demanding ideological consistency from their elected representatives. Or, as Lind puts it, “the adjustment of what each party stands for to its existing voter base.”

Now there’s a good way to look at this and a bad way. The good way is: This is democracy; this is what is supposed to happen. The voters, in their capacity as “the sovereign authority,” express their policy preferences and the candidates who most closely match them are elected and become “the government” and put them into practice. The legislators make the laws [1] and the executive [2] sees to it that those laws are implemented [3].

Two Restaurants

It really doesn’t work that way and it hasn’t ever worked that way. What happens is more like this. A couple walks down a main street, pausing at each restaurant to read the menu in the window. They do not start with “chicken and dumplings made the way mother usedmenu 1 to make them” in mind and search until they find a restaurant that offers that dish. They choose a “kind of restaurant:” vegetarian or Thai or, in Portland, Ethiopian and they go in and sit down and whatever happens is what happens.

So that’s the good way. Over time, the “bad restaurants” go out of business because the customers (voters) don’t choose them. Power to the people! But if you look carefully at what Lind is saying, you see that there are no longer two major restaurants with extensive menus. You don’t go in anymore and choose from the menu. “The kind of food you will get here” is painted all over the front of the building and you get your choice between Honkin’ Huge Burritos with all the hot sauce you can stand and cream of broccoli soup with a nicely seasoned crêpe.

When the customers no longer drive the menu options, the owners are free to do it themselves. And the owners are not relying on revenue from customers to keep the restaurants open anyway, so they can serve whatever they want. There is nowhere you can go to get a hamburger and fries, but then again—if you believe the political ads on TV—you really shouldn’t want a burger–even a tofu burger–and fries. Here’s what you ought to want…and then you get the picture of the restaurant as if it were a stump speech.

That’s where we are. Anyone can tell that just by following the news. What Lind has to say is that this is not an aberration. This is the way it is going to be for the foreseeable future. That’s what he means when he, or whoever wrote his headline for him, says that “TRUMPISM AND CLINTONISM [4] ARE THE FUTURE.

menu 3The voters have organized themselves into two cohesive voting blocks. Now they are requiring that the parties become ideologically cohesive parties. And, partly in response to that, the parties are repelling each other [5] and becoming more and more different. The politicians who succeed within these highly polarized parties are the ones who best represent the polarized electorate. What Lind means by his headline is that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton best represent their respective parties.  (I especially like this picture because of the alternation of foreground and background.)

Once upon a time, Lind tells us, there were “Rockefeller Republicans.” Those were centrist pro-business Republicans who were in most ways undistinguishable from the Democrats of those days. More cautious about social change, maybe; more inclined to leave the states to their own devices. But not fundamentally different. And not angry. If you ever saw pictures of Nelson Rockefeller running for the Republican nomination and trying to look angry, you know what I mean.

And there were southern conservative Democrats in those days. Some years the split was too big to finesse. In 1948, Strom Thurman and other southern Democrats stormed out of the Democratic convention and formed the Dixiecrat party, hoping to deny incumbent Harry Truman an electoral success. That failed and southern leaders returned to the Democratic party, where they held nearly all the leadership positions in the Congress.

When the two parties contained minority wings, they were compelled to be more menu 4moderate. The Democrats were “in favor of” civil rights in the south, for instance, and they “urged the southern states” to be more fair and moderate. They did not pass binding civil rights legislation and put money into implementing it. Not in those days. It would have…you know…split the party.

So now both the parties are split. The former Dixicrats are now Republicans and the former Rockefeller Republicans are now Democrats. [6] So both parties are “one entreé restaurants” and that’s the way it is going to stay. Here’s what Lind says.

Whatever becomes of his bid for the presidency, Mr. Trump exposed the gap between what orthodox conservative Republicans offer and what today’s dominant Republican voters actually want — middle-class entitlements plus crackdowns on illegal immigrants, Muslims, foreign trade rivals and free-riding allies.

And on the other side, it looks like this.

At the same time, the success of the Democrats in winning the popular vote for the presidency in every election since 1992 except 2004 has convinced most Democratic strategists that they don’t need socially conservative, economically liberal Reagan or Wallace Democrats any more. Many Democrats hope that the long-term growth of the Obama coalition, caused chiefly by the growth of the Latino share of the electorate, will create an all but inevitable Democratic majority in the executive branch and perhaps eventually in the government as a whole. The Clintonian synthesis of pro-business, finance-friendly economics with social and racial liberalism no longer needs to be diluted, as it was in the 1990s, by opportunistic appeals to working-class white voters.

I think Lind is right about where we are going. The restaurant/menu metaphor I use isn’t perfect, but it does point to what I think is the most important truth. Each kind of restaurant is “controlling” the political process by two principal means. First, they are advertising for diners (political propaganda). The candidates are marketed like new model cars. Second, the parties squelch meaningful alternatives. Anyone who proposed a hamburger and fries restaurant to compete with the two major kinds would be asking for a visit from an Inspector from the Department of Health and something—trust me on this—would be found not up to code. [7]

[1] The word means “they who bear the law.” Notice the “carrying” image.
[2] The word means the “following out” of a previous decision. The root word, well hidden in the modern English is sequi, from which we get sequence and sequel. “Following out” would be a great deal easier if the executive and the legislative were not formally co-equal branches, but they are.
[3] Implementation requires a new picture entirely. If you can see plenum = full (as in plenary) in there, then you can appreciate the picture that the “law” at the point that it has been passed, is an intention only and therefore “empty.” It is the job of the executive—and all others bound by the Constitution—to “fill it up” with actual policy. We say “to put meat on the bones” sometimes.  The law is just the bones.
[4] Lind’s distinction looks like this: “Hillary Clintonism, that is, a slightly more progressive version of neoliberalism freed of the strategic concessions to white working-class voters associated with Bill Clintonism.”
[5] There’s a joke there, but I’m not going for it. I have “repel as magnetic polarities repel each other” in mind.
[6] This didn’t all happen at once, of course. Senator Mark Hatfield used to tell me that he and the other eight “moderate” (his term) Republicans in the Senate were ignored by both parties’ leaders. Hatfield said the senators referred to themselves as “the nine lepers.” And Hatfield didn’t leave the Senate until 1997.
[7] If you are the kind of person who likes real life examples better, just check the variety of requirements the 50 states have invented to make third parties who want to play the presidential game hard to start.

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See it for yourself

Posted on April 20, 2016 by hessd

There is a moment in the new Sally Fields movie, Hello, My Name is Doris, that catches Doris 4everything I want to say about the movie. This picture gives you a feeling for what Doris’s house looks like. The audience sees it. Her brother Todd, who wants to sell the house, sees it. The therapist whom the brother engages to help Doris through the process of de-cluttering, sees it. But Doris doesn’t see it.

Until one moment, very near the end of the story.  It’s a very powerful moment if you are willing to care about Doris, and by this time I did.  This is the moment you want to see.  It’s the best moment in the whole movie.

Of course, you won’t understand the moment unless you see the rest of the movie and seeing the rest of the movie was really hard for me. There is a kind of “comedy” that plays to people who think that watching people humiliate themselves on screen is really funny. I don’t have any criticism of that notion; I just don’t hold it myself. When the characters in the story cringe, I cringe. And there is a lot of cringing to be done in this movie in which nearly 70 year old spinster Doris Miller (Sally Field) has a hopeless and embarrassing infatuation with John Fremont (Max Greenfield), who is 35 years old and handsome.

Doris 1I will need to say just a little about how she goes about pursuing him, but it’s really the house I care about. Doris establishes a Facebook account so that Fremont will “friend her.” Facebook is a whole new thing to Doris. She has no idea how it can be honestly used, let along how it can be dishonestly used, which is what her 13 year old friend Vivian has in mind. Vivian invents a new persona for her and chooses a picture that looks nothing like Doris to dress the page up. It’s a really dumb thing to do and it turns out badly, but—and you hardly notice this on the way by—it is doing something.

Once she has access to Fremont’s Facebook page (because he friended her), she rummages through his profile and learns a lot about him. He is a big fan of a very far out music group, for instance. So Doris goes out and buys some of this music and listens to it and leaves the CD case on her desk at work where Fremont will see it. Doris has never heard music like this and if it weren’t for her hopeless project, she probably wouldn’t like it. But she wants to look like she is accustomed to it, so she practices moving with the music a little. If you look at all this as part of her pursuit of an attractive co-worker half her age, it is all bad, but it you look at it as a lot of doing by a woman who is not used to doing things, it is all good.

Doris 3It turns out the Fremont has a girlfriend, and, as silly as it seems, Doris is shocked by it all. Fremont is two-timing her! He is being unfaithful to a romance he doesn’t even know he is having. So Doris sneaks around the city, following them. When they catch her at it—she really isn’t very good—they invite her to join them and they go to a club where the girlfriend is the singer. This is a place Doris would never have thought of going.

It goes on and on. I really think that in the mind of Director, John Tractenberg, this romantic pursuit is what the movie is about. That’s not what it was about for me. While all this is happening, Doris’s brother Todd (Stephen Root) is trying to get Doris to clean all that crap out of the house and put it up for sale.

Doris fights a losing battle in trying to keep the house just the way it is. She refuses to consider Todd’s proposal. When the Todd and the therapist force their way in, Doris begins to give the reasons why this and then that—one ski, for instance— ought to be kept rather than given away. The reasons are even more embarrassing than the clutter, but you have to remember that “the moment” I referred to has not yet occurred. Doris has not yet seen the clutter with her own eyes. Everyone else sees it, but Doris does not.

The pursuit of Fremont ends badly, of course, as it must. Doris is humiliated. She goes home thoroughly depressed and drinks as much wine as she can hold, collapses on the bed and wakes up with a ferocious hangover. But then it happens. In all the silliness of the office “romance,” Doris has become an active person. She has begun to act in what she thinks of—mistakenly—as her own interest. She has done a lot of new things, like the Facebook account, for example, and the far out music concert. She has done things.

All the goals were wrong, but all the things she did pursuing those goals, made her a person she had never been before. It gave her a stable core of regard for herself, as acting on your own behalf tends to do.

And at that point, she looks around and sees for the first time what everyone else has seen all along. She lives in a nightmare of useless things. These things preserve sentimental associations she has never had herself. They keep, for eventual use, things that will never be used. There is not room in the house for her to be the person she now knows she is capable of being.

We see her see that. And then she throws all the clutter away and begins a new life.

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Autonomous Christians

Posted on April 17, 2016 by hessd

Can Christian persons be autonomous? I have three settings where I would like to place that question. In those three settings, the answers are: absolutely not, of course, and “you’re going to have to be more specific.”

Setting 1: Living in the Garden of Eden

According to the Judeo-Christian myth of our origins, humankind came into being in a autonomy 1.jpgspecial relationship with God. There isn’t really any way to say precisely what that relationship was. C. S. Lewis in his Perelandra takes a very creditable shot at imagining what it must have been like. What we need to know is that it was a relationship of intimacy and trust.

Here’s a way of picturing the event that Christian theology calls “The Fall.” God starts up a business of His own. Fabrication, let’s say. And he makes the first man and the first woman junior partners in the business. The sign on the truck says Jehovah and Son and Daughter. [1] Then it is suggested by some nefarious force that it is demeaning to be always an employee and that there is no reason why they can’t just set up on their own: Adam and Eve, Fabrication! So they do that and go into business in competition with their father.

Not to play out this farce unnecessarily, the point is that what was once a relationship so close it couldn’t even be quite familial was wrecked by the demand that the son and daughter made for autonomy. In Christian theology, “autonomy” is just another word for rebellion and since, in this story, we were made for relationship, rebellion leads very naturally to alienation and then to anxiety and then to sin.

So “autonomy” in the essential sense of our relationship with God is just a euphemism for rebellion and that is why my answer to the question in this setting is “Absolutely not.”

Setting 2: Living in Oregon

Or anywhere else, of course, but Portland is the heart of “the none zone.” In Portland, we are “spiritual, but not religious.” So I am considering “society” in the secular sense in which sociologists and political scientists consider it. When we talk about “the sovereignty of the people,” for example, we don’t mean that God is not sovereign. We mean that the king is not sovereign. Autonomy is a perfectly appropriate relationship between neighbors. When my neighbor says he doesn’t like the way I have designed my garden, I say, “So…? Is there any reason your ideas about what my garden should look like should be taken in preference to mine?” The rough equality of personhood makes it possible for us to stand in line and (with small exceptions like a husband who was parking the car joining his wife who was standing in line) we take it for granted that the line goes in order of arrival—and not in order of title or rank.autonomy 2

Autonomy is a wonderful presupposition for a society. It means that if you want me to change my mind, you need to persuade me. It means that no one in a marriage is more important that anyone else. It means that if you are going to violate the expectation that it is my life and so I get to choose what I will do, you will need a really good reason for doing that.

So in the context of everyday life, not just in Oregon, I say the answer to my question is, “Of course.”

Setting 3: Living in Collegiality

People who are “colleagues” are people “chosen to work together.” [2] I am going to have churches in mind here. I didn’t choose churches because they are hotbeds of collegiality, but because they are intermediate between the loyalty and obedience we owe God and the individuality and autonomy we demand in society. [3] Churches are, in this location, “working groups,” and they are, in that way, very much like athletic teams, when the chemistry is good, or small groups of soldiers in battle.

My answer here is “you’ll have to be more specific” because in the intimacy of a well-functioning group, each protects the other. I risk my life to save yours because just yesterday you risked yours to save me. We are bonded into a single unit by the trust and the danger. I am not “obedient” to you as in Setting 1 and I am not separate from you as in Setting 2. I am functioning in such harmony with you—it is the kind of relationship that just might allow us to live until tomorrow—that only colleagueship is close enough.  This picture came from a search for, “He ain’t heavy; he’s my brother.”

autonomy 4Sports teams at their best are like that. If they cover me, they won’t be able to cover you, so you get the ball. It doesn’t mean you’re a better shot; it doesn’t mean you’re more important; it means you are open. The best quarterbacks working with the best receivers, look at the coverage and know how it will seem to the receiver and throw the ball to the place where the receiver will decide to go. That’s not obedience. It’s certainly not autonomy. It’s this third thing. It is a unity of purpose and an abundance of trust and experience: it is a relationship that words like “colleagueship” only hint at.

Now, I’ve never been in a church like that, but if I found one, I would want to go there tomorrow. I wouldn’t actually go, probably, because I have relationships of honor and trust with people at my present church and I wouldn’t want to violate those relationships. But I would want to.

In the schema I have devised here, you can see that the church is intermediate between the individualistic society, where individual autonomy may not be breached, and the relationship of Eden, where trust and intimacy were built into the relationship from the beginning. Structurally speaking, the church could be the place where the autonomy is superseded by the obligations of covenantal love and where the oneness of the community is a way of returning to the relationship of love and trust with God.

In a bad church, you would still have to insist on autonomy. Without collegiality, it’s all predators and prey. [4] And both of those are bad. In a good church, you would think that autonomy would only get in the way.

[1] I did once see a moving truck that said Smith & Son (and Daughter).
[2] The immediate Latin predecessor is collega, “partner in office,” and it is derived from com-, “with” and legare, “to choose.”
[3] I know that there are societies where that is not true: “collectivist societies,” they are called. In the U. S. we presume the values of an “individualist society” or, as critics often put it, a “hyperindividualistic” society.
[4] A very small church joke.

Posted in A life of faith, Living My Life, Society, Theology | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Angry voters are stupid voters

Posted on April 13, 2016 by hessd

That’s the thesis for today. I have a story to tell you—one of my very few polished performances as a teacher. [1] And there is some throat clearing to be done, 2016 being a presidential year and one of the angriest in my long political memory. And then, if everything works out, a rousing conclusion. We’ll see.

Throat Clearing

I don’t mean by the title to imply that anger is not perfectly appropriate in politics. Of course it is. It is a terrific motivator. Anger can get you up up our of your chair and off to a political meeting when all the rest of you would like to stay home and watch TV. Anger can get you to put your body on the line to protect some valued public right, aware that you are very likely going to get hurt today.

angry 1On the other hand, anger is like the first stage of a space shot. The booster rocket has no idea what the mission is; has no ability to guide the space craft; can not even orient the craft in the proper direction. That is not what it is for and it is no criticism of a booster rocket to say that it is dumb. It is strong; that is its job.

So anger, even in politics, is not a bad thing. On the other hand, anger is undiscriminating. If you have a policy outcome in mind, say reducing the rate of growth of the national debt or ensuring that every citizen is automatically registered to vote, you need to know which parties and which candidates and which policies will help you. Anger won’t do any of that for you so if angry is all you are as a voter, then stupid is all you are as a voter. [2]

Story

Angry voters are looking for appropriate targets for their anger. That’s the good scenario. The guy who hears a political speech that makes him angry and then goes home to kick the dog is not after an “appropriate” target. Anger motivates punishment. I understand that. The question is always who is to be punished and how. From a policy standpoint, kicking the dog fails both of those tests notably.

angry 2I

I was teaching American government at Portland State University during and after the political era of the September 11 attacks. Quite a few of the students in my classes were angry and they favored “angry responses” to this assault on America. When we got to the chapter on foreign policy, these students were looking for policies that would express their anger.

That isn’t what I wanted them to want. I wanted them to survey the policy tools available to us and to choose the ones that would take our country in the direction they thought it should go. I think that is the job of citizenship and to the extent that political science is involved in citizenship training, asking those questions was my job.

I am not above helping students who think that military action is all that works choose what wars to use, when, and against whom. My idea as a teacher is that once you get students on the if/then train, [3] you can get them to pay attention to the outcomes of the policies they have chosen and the methods they have chosen and then they can really learn something. I do the same for students who think that military approaches are usually counterproductive and who prefer diplomatic approaches instead. If you can get them looking at “if I do this, then that will happen,” you have set them up to learn a great deal on their own.

So this particular year, probably 2002, I tried an experiment. I set up a target. Who, exactly, are the bad guys? I chose terrorist recruiters as my bad guys. They prey on young and poor people and get them to sacrifice their lives in order to kill others. They distort the truth; they deceive these impressionable young people about the true meaning of their sacrifice.  They prey on ignorance and poverty and despair.

Then I said that we should come up with a response that “will make their lives a living Hell.” They liked that. It promised a vehicle for their anger. Then I proposed a series of pretty standard liberal interventions around the world.

I proposed a series of agreements with heads of state where terrorist recruiters were known to be active. That one could have come straight out of George Kennan’s theories about “containing” Soviet aggression in the 1950s.

I proposed active anti-poverty measures in areas where there were many poor Muslim young people. If it was the poverty that made the promises of the terrorist recruiters attractive, we could get there first and when the recruiters showed up, the doors would be slammed in their faces. And it would serve them right!

I proposed the direct and indirect support for education for these young people. The more they can learn on their own, the less dependent they will be on what they are told. That included the education of women because recruitment could be shown to be less successful where women were included in the educational system.

I proposed active support for the regional economies where joblessness, not the same as poverty, made young people easy victims of the recruiters. The recruiters would, in effect, have to offer these young people “a better job than the one they had,” which they could not do. The standard counsel of despair and heroism, which comes so easily to the recruiters, would fall on deaf ears.

angry 4Conclusion: If the terrorist recruiters ever found out who hatched this plan, this series of programs that made their lives so awful, they would hate us (“us” would be me and the American government class, I guess) but we are willing to be judged by the punishment we inflicted on them and which they so richly deserved.

They loved it. For each program, I made a plausible argument that it would have a certain effect. Ordinarily, those programs come with liberal rationales, which would cause them to reject those programs. Here, they are seen as fit vehicles for their anger against terrorism—the recruiters, in this case—so they are all good ideas.

Conclusion

OK, that’s the story. That actually happened in several of my classes. I was absolutely dumbfounded. Is it really possible that these students will accept pretty much anything that they see as a way to express their anger? That’s what it looks like to me.

And it is on the basis of experiences like that that I say that voting angry is voting stupid. Anger is a terrific motivator. That’s what it is best at. But when you go to vote, the right questions to ask are consequential questions. What will happen if this person gets to be President? How are the policies that are being proposed being accepted by the crucial audiences? Congress, say? Or our most important allies? Are the policies that best express my anger clearly unconstitutional? Maybe that’s not a good idea.

So my idea is that it is fine for citizens to be as angry as they want to be, but I think we would all be better off if we thought before we voted and the thought I recommend most highly is this: What do I want to see happen to my country?

[1] I don’t like “polished performances” as a rule. It’s not that I can’t manage them; it’s more that the kind of teaching I like best doesn’t have much use for them. I like working with students to define the nature of the problem we have before us and assimilating the experiences that are right there in class within a coherent framework of thought. That’s what I like best.
[2] A lot of people confuse “stupid” with “uninformed.” That’s not what I mean at all. The ability of uninformed voters to vote “correctly,” i.e. for the people they would have voted for had they known a lot more than they do, is really amazing. See Samuel Popkin’s The Reasoning Voter for details.

[3]  If you have a goal, a positive goal, and not just an emotion, then at some point, you will have to say “if we choose this direction, then that will happen.”  When you get on that train, you learn a lot about what your preferences are, about who your allies are, and about how to proceed.

Posted in Education, Politics | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

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.

2312-1In 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.

2312-3Shortback’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 into2312-5 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 , , , , , | 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 2She 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 1She 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 3This 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.

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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 1Early 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 2The 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 4So 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.pngThe 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 1I’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 6responsible 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 4There 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%!

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