The Dilettante's Dilemma

How Matthew prepares us to receive Mary

Posted on December 10, 2015 by hessd

I really think Matthew puts as much effort into preparing his readers to understand Mary as Luke does. Luke is famously Mary-centered. In Luke, Joseph is part of the ensemble, back there with the oxen and the asses. He doesn’t speak a single line. But in Matthew, Joseph is in David’s line of descent and that is why his son is “a child of David.”

Although Matthew does not feature Mary—Mary does not have a spoken line in Matthew’s account—Matthew needs to prepare his readers to understand who she is and what she has done for us. Of all the ways he does that, I want to think today about the genealogy he presents. This is a royal genealogy. The king’s son is king after him; the grandson is king after the son; the great-grandson king after the grandson. We don’t really need to know who the mother is if the father is the king.

And mostly, Matthew does not tell us who the mother is. Matthew’s genealogy is arranged in sets of fourteen, so to make this point, we can look at the the first fourteen, beginning with Abraham and ending with David the King. “Abraham fathered Isaac, Isaac fathered Jacob, Jacob fathered Judah and his brothers.” That’s the way it goes (Matthew 1:2) and that is the way we expect it to go. But if it continued that way, how would Matthew be preparing us for a pregnant virgin? (The picture comes from Luke. Sorry. It was the only way to have a picture.)

So we begin to see breaks in the pattern. He ended with “Judah and his brothers,” the sons of Jacob. But now Matthew says, (verse 3) “Judah fathered Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar.”

The mother was Tamar? Why? Matthew didn’t bother to tell us that Isaac’s mother was Sarah,[1] nor that Jacob’s mother was Rebecca, nor that Judah’s mother was Leah. Why break the pattern to tell us about Tamar? Hold that thought.

A few generations later, we find another break. Verse 5 tells us that Salmon fathered Boaz, whose mother was Rahab; and right after that, Boaz fathered Obed, whose mother was Ruth. Then, in the second part of verse 6, that “David fathered Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah’s wife.”

So we have a clear pattern. We have not yet addressed how these breaks help Matthew prepare us for the role Mary plays. Matthew drops in the mother in addition to the father four times. And then we get to Mary. “Jacob fathered Joseph, the husband of Mary, of her was born Jesus who is called the Christ.” (verse 16) [2] In the case of Mary, a new pattern is substituted because Matthew does not want to say that Joseph fathered Jesus. That phrasing sounds like sperm and egg stuff and that’s not what Matthew wants to say. [3] The picture shows Tamar seducing Judah.

So these four breaks in the pattern—Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba—are introduced to help prepare us for Mary in some way. How do they do that? We could stop and note that they were foreigners; all but Bathsheba, who is not called by her name, but “the wife of Uriah the Hittite.” That might be part of it.

The role each woman plays is morally ambiguous. Matthew is going to record some accusations against Jesus in 11:19. “Look,” his accusers say, “a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.” Matthew doesn’t allow any of Jesus’s accusers to point a finger at Mary and shrug and say, “Like mother, like son.” I do think that Mary’s morally ambiguous situation has been prepared for by the women who preceded her—the women Matthew had to break his pattern to introduce. Let’s look at the cases Matthew gives us.

Tamar, after all, had extramarital sex with her father-in-law, Judah. Rahab was a traitor to her people, the Canaanites, by harboring Israelite spies. Ruth put herself in a very compromising on the threshing room floor with Boaz. Bathsheba was taken, probably against her will, by the king, who then killed her husband, Uriah the Hittite. These women lead us to Mary…how exactly?

I can think of two ways. [4] I don’t know whether these are the ways Matthew had in mind. The first is that these women aligned themselves with the story God was telling through them. Tamar, for instance, was fixed on the notion that descendants were to be raised up in the name of her dead husband, Er. That’s what God said should be done and she couldn’t find anyone else who was interested in doing what God said should be done. She counted on an array of men to do the job (including her brother-in-law, Onan, Onan’s younger brother Shelah, and Judah, the patriarch, which is where the buck stopped. When they would not, she did it herself. She disguised herself as a prostitute and got herself pregnant by Judah, her father-in-law. And the children were reckoned to be the children of her husband, Er. [5]

God says, in other words, that children shall be raised up to carry on the line of the dead husband. That’s what God says. Everyone said no except Tamar. She “aligned herself with the story God was telling” by getting pregnant out of wedlock.

Rahab, the traitor, threw her lot in with the invading Israelites and against her people, the Canaanites. Since the only account we have of that comes from the Israelites, Rahab is revered. And without Rahab, there would have been no inhabitation of the Promised Land by God’s people—at least not in the way it actually happened. And without the Promised Land, of what nation would David have been king? It is all very well to say, as Matthew does, that Ruth’s husband Boaz fathered Obed, who was the father of Jesse, who was the father of David, but if there is no kingdom, there is no king and it was Rahab the traitor who aligned herself with God’s story in helping establish a kingdom. The picture shows Ruth on the threshing room floor with Boaz; actually, it shows more of her than scripture really requires.

That brings us, skipping over the fascinating story of Ruth, to Mary herself. You know, the “pregnant out of wedlock” Mary? The initiative-taking Mary? The aligning herself with God’s story Mary?

By the time we get to Mary, the Mary for which Matthew has prepared us, we know that “racial purity” is not going to be any part of Jesus’s claim to be Messiah. Paul can call himself “a Pharisee of the Pharisees,” but he does not call Jesus that. Jesus was born on the other side of the track in socially embarrassing circumstances and he was born to a woman who aligned herself with God’s story—like her predecessors, Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba.

[1] Nor that he had fathered another son, Ishmael, before Isaac.
[2] Joseph, by taking and naming the child, declares himself to be the child’s father according to Jewish law. Joseph was his father “fully and legally,” to use and expression biblical scholar Raymond E. Brown uses. And Mary calls Joseph the father of Jesus as well (Luke 2:48). The question in these cases is not genetic, but legal.
[3] Actually, Matthew wants to talk about “a new creation,” but that will have to wait for another essay.
[4] At some point in this essay, I need to acknowledge my very substantial reliance of the work of Raymond Brown. The chapter in his The Birth of the Messiah that begins to treat all this is called, “Why the women?”
[5] This is, obviously, a matter of law, not of genetics. Perez and Zerah were “the children of Er,” who had been long dead by that point.

Posted in Biblical Studies | Tagged Bathsheba, God's Plan, Matthew's artistry, Rahab, royal genealogy, Ruth, Tamar, Virgin Mary | Leave a comment

Four Years Early?

Posted on December 8, 2015 by hessd

George Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948. It wasn’t a prediction, really; more of a convenience just to flip the numbers around. Robert Reich wrote Aftershock: The New Economy & America’s Future in 2011 and in it, he imagined a boiling over of populist fervor in 2020. He might be right. He often is. On the other hand, as I look at Speaker Paul Ryan’s call to arms, I wonder if Reich might not be four years late.

Here is Reich’s scenario.

November 3, 2020. The newly formed Independence Party pulls enough votes away from both the Republican and Democratic candidates to give its own candidate, Margaret Jones, a plurality of votes, an electoral college victory, and the presidency. A significant number of Independence Party members have also taken seats away from Democrats and Republicans in Congress. [1]

On the night of November 3, President-elect Jones gives a victory speech. Her tone is defiant.

My fellow Americans: You have voted to reclaim America. Voted to take it back from big government, big business, and big finance. To take it back from the politicians who would rob us of our freedoms, from foreigners who rob us of our jobs, from the rich who have no loyalty to this nation, and from immigrants who live off our hard work. (Wild applause.) We are reclaiming America from the elites who have rigged the system to their benefit, from the money manipulators on Wall Street and the greed masters in corporate executive suites, from the influence peddlers and pork peddlers in Washington—from all the privileged and the powerful who have conspired against us. (Wild applause and cheers.) They will no longer sell Americans out to global money and pad their nests by taking away our jobs and livelihoods! (Wild applause, cheers.) This is our nation, now! (Wild applause and cheers that continue to build.) A nation of good jobs and good wages for anyone willing to work hard! Our nation! America for Americans! (Thunderous applause.)

There are eight sentences here, nearly all of them dripping with paranoia. Richard J. Hofstadter wrote “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” first as an article in Harpers’s Magazine, then as a collection of essays with that title. Hofstadter justified the use of “paranoid” by specifying “the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” which characterizes some political movements. [2]. You can argue that there are public policy goals valued by the right and not the left, in American politics, and vice versa, but “paranoid” is not about policy goals. It is about ways of thinking, prominent among which are “us” versus “them.”

Reich identifies a few trends that sound just as clear today as they did when he wrote them five years ago. These conditions, taken together, are, he says, “toxic.”

“Americans might be able to accept a high rate of unemployment coupled with lower wages,” he says (Chapter 3). [3]

“We are likely,” he continues, “ to accommodate absolute as well as relative losses in our standard of living for a long stretch of time. (Chapter 4).

“We might abide even wider inequality.” (Chapter 5)

And he concluded, “But when all of these are added to a perception that the economic game is rigged—that no matter how hard we try we cannot get ahead because those with great wealth and power will block our way— the combination may very well be toxic.” That’s the first paragraph of Chapter 6. The title of Chapter 7 is “The Politics of Anger.”

The conditions Reich identifies are undeniably there, with the exception of the last one. It is not widely agreed that the game is rigged. [4] And if it were, there would be very little agreement on how it is rigged, on whose behalf it is rigged, and what might be done about it.

In a way, that’s even worse. Terms like those that President-elect Jones uses, “us” and “them,” really don’t require agreement on who is being referred to. Those who are furious about immigrants and “pork peddlars” can vote happily beside those who are furious about “money manipulators” and “greed masters.” All are THEM. A government elected by such incompatible angers could not govern, of course, but such a government could continue to be elected so long as the angers are generalized and potent.

This brings us to Speaker Paul Ryan. Ryan is conservative. He is not paranoid. On the other hand, how close to the us v. them worldview does he dare to go before a spiraling radicalization takes over?

The New York Times’ David Herszenhorn reported on December 4 that Speaker Ryan said, “Our No. 1 goal for the next year is to put together a complete alternative to the left’s agenda.” Ryan imagines a “them” which is not the government and not the Democratic party, but “the left.” He believes that “the left” has an agenda and he would like to see a point for point alternative from…well…from “the right,” I guess. [5] Ryan puts “the government” on one side and “the people” on the other.

Not that the Speaker doesn’t have policy goals. He wants to overhaul the tax code. Everybody likes that as a general proposition; it is the specific provisions that hurt. He wants to support American manufacturers; to strengthen the military, especially against the threat of the Islamic State; and to repeal Obamacare.

So here’s where we are. The combination of economic forces has been abrasive to middle class hopes for more than 40 years now. Things are getting worse and they are going to go on getting worse. Economic inequality in the U. S. has reached levels we saw last in 1929, just as the Great Depression broke. The political fight of today could be—eventually—about what to do about it. [6]. But what to do about it seems, in the present paranoid climate, a little abstract; a little brain driven. Before we get there, and possibly instead of getting there at all, there is the question of who is to blame. US v. THEM is the lineup we need for the politics of blame.

This would be like the little NFL dramas that occur when offensive and defensive lines collide before the ball is snapped. The O line points to the D line; the D line points to the O line. It’s predictable; it’s theater; it’s funny. But in the NFL, there are referees who will decide who is at fault and will assess the proper penalty. There is no chance that the fans can be so offended by the refs’ decisions that they will vote them out at put in “our own guys.” The NFL doesn’t work that way because they need to keep their fan base and that requires at least the presumption of fairness. The U. S. needs to keep its fan base too and a Left v. Right battle of Armageddon in 2016 is not going to do that job.

And if it doesn’t get done in 2016, Margaret Jones awaits in 2020.

[1] Not that Reich is opposed to having fun with the scenario. The Republican candidate that year is George P. Bush. The Democratic candidate is Chelsea Clinton.
[2] See a very interesting current look at the same phenomenon by Neil H. Buchanan posted on justia.com on May 21 of this year.
[3] Reich numbers the chapters separately in Part I, Part II, which begins on page 77 of the Vintage paperback, and Part III. All the chapter numbers I cite here are in Part II.
[4] According to Gallup, Americans asked in 1998 whether there was “plenty of opportunity to get ahead in America today” said that there is. 81% thought so. By 2011, that percentage was down to 57%. The most recent poll on that question (2103) only 52% said yes.
[5] Ryan is no more “the right” than Obama is “the left,” but this is the side-choosing season and the Speaker would like to see competing lineups.
[6] All of Reich’s Part III is about his proposals for what we should do about it. Secretary Reich is a wonk.

Posted in Political Psychology, Politics | Tagged Agenda conflict in 2016, Robert Reich, Speaker Ryan, the paranoid style in American politics, the politics of blaming | Leave a comment

Tidings of Delicious

Posted on December 4, 2015 by hessd

There is a bright red banner across the glass front of the pastry case at our Starbucks in Multnomah Village. It says, “Tidings of Delicious.”

Every time I see it, I think of Matthew’s strategy for placing the birth of Jesus in a rich context of Old Testament events that he doesn’t have time to name specifically. There is no reason, after all, for Starbucks to write out, “Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.” [1] On the other hand, I can’t think of any other common use of “tidings,” so “Tidings of Delicious” might just as well have a scriptural tag on it (see Luke 2: 10).

It’s a word that tunes the ear to a previous setting: a story or a joke or a controversy. It tilts the table of your memory in the direction of “that other thing” without ever mentioning it. [2]

Matthew does it a lot. Some of the instances are plain, right on the surface. Others are hidden to the eyes of ordinary people in our time, but were water cooler conversation in the time when Matthew was written, probably in the mid-80s A.D. Today, I want to play with one of the rich ones.

The door to this reference is almost clear. The problem Jesus had as a little boy is that Herod wanted to kill him. Magi showed up, who knew that a new king of the Jews had been born—Herod’s successor: I’m sure he noted that part—and were led to Joseph’s house in Bethlehem. Joseph escapes to Egypt and comes back when he gets the angelic “All Clear.”

So picture Matthew’s infancy narrative being read aloud to a congregation of Jews and Gentiles, all of whom believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the promised Messiah That belief is why they would be a part of the church for which Matthew adapted his gospel. The Jews who believe in Jesus would hear the words, “For those who sought the life of the child are dead,” (Matthew 2:20) Matthew and they would say, “Those? What do you mean, ‘those?’ It’s just Herod isn’t it?” And then they would catch themselves and say, “Besides…that sounds really familiar. Doesn’t that sound familiar?”

And it does, of course. “Reminds me of something” is the reason Starbucks uses “Tidings of Delicious” and it is the reason Matthew uses this plural—“those” who sought your life are dead” (Exodus 4:19). It reminds people who are hearing the story of Jesus for the first time, of the story of Moses, which they have heard many times. Hm…they say. That happened to Jesus too. Jesus and Moses. Hmmm. [2]

It’s a little bit tougher to see the paralleling of the Magi in the story of Moses to the Magi in the story of Jesus, but that is because we don’t have the texts for Moses. But Flavius Josephus did. In his Jewish Antiquities, Chapter 10, he has this passage: [4]

“One of the sacred scribes [Magi] who are very wise in foretelling future events truly, told the king, that about this time there would a child be born to the Israelites, who, if he were reared, would bring the Egyptian dominion low, and would raise the Israelites…Which thing was so feared by the king that, according to this man’s opinion, he commanded that they should cast every male child which was born to the Israelites into the river and destroy it.” [5]

Now it is true that the Magi did not cooperate with Herod. They were warned, in a dream, not to report back as Herod had asked. But Matthew also records that the Magi had told Herod when they had seen the rising of the star—Herod treats this star, remember as The Star of the One Who Is Going To Replace ME—about two years prior. So “the baby Jesus” is at least two years old by this time. [6] That is why Herod orders only male children and only two years old or less to be slaughtered. The information provided my his Magi is the reason the Pharoah decided that all the Israelite babies should be killed at birth so that the birth of the future leader of Israel could be prevented.

Please remember that I am not arguing the historicity of either event. We may find, eventually, some way to verify that they occurred or, less likely, to show that they could not have occurred. I am showing you the background Matthew presumed among his hearers which allowed him to say something to them that escapes us entirely. Jesus and Moses. Moses and Jesus. Anything sound familiar? Tidings of Delicious.

And finally, why Egypt? An angel appears to Joseph—who seems, like his namesake to have been a major league dreamer—and says “Take the child and go to Egypt immediately.” Joseph goes and wakes up his wife and his little boy and takes off immediately.

The case that Matthew wants to make is not only that Jesus is Moses, but also that Jesus is the nation Israel. So Matthew is working toward Hosea 11:1, with says “I called my son out of Egypt,” which he cites in Matthew 2:15b. Matthew has taken a lot of trouble to assure that Jesus is “a son of David” through Joseph and he will he will be quite explicit about Jesus’s identity as Son of God (Matthew 3:17), but adding that Jesus is a “son” in the sense that Israel is a “son” is a little like winning the trifecta for Matthew.

He says “Egypt” so you will start thinking, “Hm…that sounds familiar.” And he says “magi” and Pharoah so he can say Magi and Herod. And he said “a special child will be born” of Moses [6] so he can have the Wise Men say it of Jesus. Matthew knows how this works.

And so does Starbucks, of course, which is why we have “Tidings of Delicious.” [7]

[1] “Which shall be to the whole people,” i.e. all of Israel. The King James Version is being prematurely ecumenical here.
[2] One of my favorites is Roosevelt’s castigation of his wealthy opponents as “malefactors of great wealth” at a time when the most common use of “malefactors,” possibly the only one anyone had ever heard, was to refer to the criminals who were crucified on each side of Jesus. Roosevelt could have said “those of the wealthy who do evil” and no one would have stirred. My wealthy opponents are like those who were crucified with Jesus—it doesn’t have to be said out loud, you know—is much better, i.e., it is much worse.
[3] Matthew is the gospel writer who begins the story of Jesus’s ministry by having him go up a MOUNTAIN and address his followers about THE MOSAIC COVENANT. It is Matthew who shapes his gospel into five functional units like the five books of Moses—not all scholars agree that that is the best way to account for the structure of Matthew, and, not being a scholar myself, I follow those who make the point I like best.
[4] “And, indeed, Josephus seems to have had much completer [sic] copies of the Pentateuch or other authentic records no lost, about the birth and actions of Moses, than either our Hebrew, Samaritan, or Greek Bibles afford us…”
[5] The Pharoah and his Magi are the “those” in God’s word to Moses, “Those who sought your life are dead.” Not that they were the only ones seeking Moses’s life; he was a fugitive from justice after all. And this accounts for the “those” in Matthew which refers only to Herod. Follow me here. This “those” needs to line up with that “those” in order to get the “Hm…that sounds familiar” hit.
[6] So all those picture of the Wise Men and “the infant Jesus” really ought to be revised. Fat chance.
[6] Remembering that the story of “the special child, Moses” was either in the Penteteuch of the day or was a popular story known in that day. For Matthew’s purpose, it doesn’t really matter which, provided that it begins to turn your mind in the right direction.
[7] And since it is Starbucks, I will forgive them for using an adjective where they really should have used a noun. But if they ever put up a poster where the angelic host proclaims “Tidings of joyful,” I will have to find some other place to get my coffee.

Posted in Advent | Tagged Advent, Herod, jesus, Matthew, Moses, Pharoah, Starbucks | Leave a comment

Happy New Year

Posted on December 2, 2015 by hessd

Happy new year to all.

As you know, there are as many different calendars as there are reasons to establish a cycle of days. We think first of the annual calendar. [1] It starts in January, to honor Janus, the two-faced god, and ends in December, which was, apparently once the tenth month. Some of us think of the federal budget calendar, which begins in October and runs to September.Some might think of the Christian church calendar, which begins very plausibly with the celebration of Advent—the birth of Jesus—and which is marked on the four Sundays before Christmas. [2]

And that is more or less where I begin my Blogging Year. Like the federal budget, I date the “year” by when it ends, so the 2016 BY, the one that just started, begins on the first of December 2015 and goes until the 30th of November, 2016.

So Happy New Year.

I was sitting with a new friend recently who had just been told about my blog. “Oh,” she said, “What’s it called?” I said, “The dilettante’s dilemma.” And she said what a lot of people say who are accustomed to noticing their own reactions to events [3] “Why do you call it that?”

There are two parts to the answer. This essay will begin to veer in the direction of serious thought as I begin to treat the second one: dilemma. I call myself a dilettante for several reasons. The first is that it is a negatively connoted term. [4] This is an easy way to preempt criticism. I use and thereby affirm the charge you were just getting ready to make. The the second, and the original, reason was that I got such a bump out of learning that the root of dilettante is the Latin delectare = “to charm.” “See delight,” says my dictionary. [5] And that is why it says, “Delight is the heart of the dilettante” just below the title. I aspire to write about the things that delight me.

But, as simple as that might sound to anyone who has never tried it, writing about the things that delight you and not about other things, is difficult to do. People say sometimes, “You really ought to write about that.” Do you write about it? You write an essay that gets an amazingly popular response. People write in from all over the world and say what a terrific post that was. And right away, you want to write more posts like that one, whether these later posts interest you in the way the first one did or not. I notice sometimes that the topics in my posts are leaning heavily in the direction of politics or biblical studies or something and I have the urge to “balance” the blog by the addition of other topics. What if those other topics don’t delight me at the time?

So, as I was saying, it is hard to maintain the inner silence that will allow me to hear the voice of a curiosity or a grievance or a celebration that is just beginning to take form. [5]
And that is the dilemma. A “dilemma” is being confronted by two (and only two, contrary to the illustration here) lemmas. “Lemma” is an English word. Look it up. It means “proposition.” But when we say “the horns of a dilemma,” we are thinking of two lemmas, either of which might pierce us and cause damage (to our person or to our pride), and in which over-attention to one of them makes you more vulnerable to the other one. The bull, t dilettante 5 he bearer of the horns which represent the lemmas, will see to that.

So the dilemma is that I need to orient myself outwardly, so as to have enough follower to sustain a conversation [6], and to orient myself inwardly so I can hear the first rustlings of an idea that would like to make my acquaintance. It’s not a bad dilemma, as dilemmas go, but too much attention to the one weakens the equally necessary attention that must be paid to the other.

It is, briefly, a dilemma. This delight? Or that one? Or both if some way can be found that makes them allies for even brief period, rather than antagonists. [7]

[1] Just a note of appreciation for the a- in annual. We get it from the Latin annus = year. The a- saves it from being annul (Latin again: ad + nullus) = “to bring to nothing.” I have had years like that so I am well placed to appreciate the difference.
[2] That always seemed so reasonable to me. You begin the Christian calendar with the birth of “the Christ.” Sorry for the quotes, but I wanted the parallel of Christ and Christian and I wanted to avoid the whole briar patch about when Jesus of Nazareth “became” the Christ.
[3] A smaller group than you might think. Knee-jerk reactions do not require any consultation of what your own reaction actually was.
[4] You can verify this very easily by googling “dilettante” and looking at the collection of images. The back story of delectare has a dark side to it. It can apparently mean “to charm” in the sense of “to befuddle” as one “charms” a snake. I don’t do that myself and I think the people who claim to be able to are fakirs. Behind “charm” is de- plus lacere = to entice, literally “to ensnare.”
[5] Not to make this a bigger deal than it ought to be, but the experience of Elijah in the wilderness comes back to my ear sometimes. (See 1 Kings 19 for his version of the story.) I grew up with the translation, “still, small voice.” After all the natural phenomena (hurricane, earthquake, fire) have done their thing, Elijah hears “a still small voice.” Quite a number of modern translations say that he heard “the sound of silence.” That would have struck me as deeply philosophical or even paradoxical had not Simon and Garfunkel taken out a patent on the phrasing.
[6] Very often, the conversations following the posting of an essay are the best part of the whole experience, particularly with friends who follow the blog regularly and who see how one thing has led to another or how one emphasis weakens another.
[7] Who, according to the Greek derivation, “wrestle each other.”

Posted in Advent, Living My Life, Words | Tagged "sound of silence" lemmas as horns, an inner quiet, blogging, dilemma, dilettante | 1 Comment

Terrified of Muslims: A Liberal Rant

Posted on November 28, 2015 by hessd

My son Dan posted a piece by Andy McClure on Facebook. I think it originally appeared on http://www.dailykos.com, but it got so popular so fast that I’m not really sure. Like a lot of ideological rants, it is really funny if it is based on your own ideology. And it is, actually, based on my ideology, but it didn’t strike me as funny.

For one thing, it was too edgy, too angry, to seem funny to me. For another, the artistry of it was so prominent—it is a small masterpiece of the genre—that I was moved more to admiration…well…envy…than to laughter.

If you’d like to see the whole piece, you can google “Andy McClure, muslim” and find it, but I’d like to start at the top and just turn it over in my mind a little. Before I start, let me include a mostly unfunny joke. When I write a piece like this, it always makes me feel a little referee-ish.

Question: Why are there so many referees at a football game?
Answer: So each of them will have someone who is willing to talk to him after the game.

Here’s the way it starts.

A: I’m terrified of Muslims. I don’t want sharia law in America.

B: OK, Let’s avoid that by separating church and state.

A: Nope. I believe in Jesus and want this country to be more Christian.

That’s the first unit. There are six more in McClure’s piece: refugees, veterans, homeless
kids, Planned Parenthood, access to healthcare, and freedom of religion. In each of them B proposes a public policy that I support, only to see it rejected by A for reasons I deplore. That said, this is still a rant and my hopes lie in the direction of civil debate. [1] If you want to pop over to http://www.civilpolitics.org, a site run by psychologist Jonathan Haidt, you can browse the approach to politics that I find most attractive. I found this note in the second line of a statement of what his site is about.

to help liberals understand (and be civil to) conservatives: Videos [to come]

So let’s look at this first unit. The conservative caricature, A, is terrified. Language has a tendency to get inflated by use, so maybe he’s only anxious, but let’s say he really is terrified.

He is the expert on whether he is “terrified” but when it gets to what it is that terrifies him, he needs to say things that make sense. Is it possible to be terrified of “Muslims.” Well…in a sense, it is. It is possible to be scared of the boogyman. But I would like to say to A what I would say to a child who is scared of the boogyman: “Don’t be afraid. There isn’t any boogeyman.”

There are Muslims, of course, and they can be described demographically as a group and can be known personally one or so at a time and some of them are scary and some are not. Being afraid of “Muslims,” in the aggregate is silly and A ought to try to get over it.

On the other hand, he isn’t scared of Muslims. He is scared of one or more subsets of Muslims. These prominently include, no doubt, the terrorists he sees on TV and perhaps the fundamentalists who want to see the requirements of their version of Islam fastened on all Muslims and perhaps on all persons. [2] If those are the pictures that the word “Muslim” calls up, then I agree they are scary pictures. Now we need to unhook his fears from the word “Muslim,” then we need to talk about how likely these fantasies are.

So A, our conservative caricature, has seen terrorists who claim the authority of Islam for their acts and fundamentalist vigilantes who claim that Allah [3] is the source of their interpretation of the Quran. It is perfectly sensible for any American to oppose those practices.

His illustration, Sharia law, suggests that he is particularly concerned about the possibility that American non-Muslims might have to obey Sharia or be punished. There are several settings in which that might be a very relevant fear for a Christian. In some countries, Egypt, for instance, the bulk of civil law is strongly influenced by considerations of Sharia. The United Kingdom makes Sharia courts available to English citizens who are Muslim, but there is no such provision in the United States.

I am sympathetic to our conservative caricature. I would not like to live in a country where I could be tried in the civil courts for blasphemy. [4] On the other hand, my sympathy is tethered by his interest in seeing “this country…being more Christian.” Does that just mean “In God we trust” on our coins or does it include courts where people could be tried for violating some fundamentalist interpretations of religious duty? Would anyone be interested, for example, in implementing Deut 21:18—21 which calls for the public stoning of a son who is disobedient, stubborn, and rebellious?

I mention that particular crime and that particular punishment because, although they are “biblical,” they are not practiced. Also because there are similar passages in the Quran which, in A’s fantasy of Sharia law, might be visited on him or his family. The conservative knows that such scriptures are not put into practice in the U. S. He does not know whether similar Muslim scriptures are or are not put into practice in countries where Sharia is “the law” for everyone.

The conservative could be criticized, of course, for saying he wants his religion to be dominant in his country and wants other religious to be banned. But if he believes that “his religion” is what God wants and that “other religions” are an abomination to God, then he is really not free to partake of the genial secularism of the U. S. where expressions like “faith communities” are used so readily.

If this guy really wants a Christian theocracy, he should say so. My guess is that he wouldn’t say that; he would say that he wants the country to be “more like Jesus,” i.e., “more Christian.” Of course, he wants a lot of other things too, including low taxes, so quite a number of Jesus’s sayings about caring for the neighbor would have to be re-examined in the context of a modern consumer capitalist economy.

The other six interactions are all like this one, at least in principle. The liberal interviewer is positive and policy oriented. The conservative is negative about every public policy approach to solving the problems that he agrees we have. I think some careful vocabulary agreements could bring him into a public discussion of what realistic options are open to people with his values, but the process of clarifying the choices and providing an acceptable vocabulary would be exhausting and frustrating work.

And, of course, it doesn’t pay well. At least in the short run.
[1] Not to say that rants aren’t a valid part of democracy. The nation needs them and I think we are all better off is someone is writing and posting them. It just seems to me that ridicule is a tool that will take you only so far, then you need to decide what to do next.
[2] In the novel, Prayers for the Assassin, Muslims have conquered the United States. Here is the beginning of the clip that appears on the Amazon account of the story:
“SEATTLE, 2040. The Space Needle lies crumpled. Veiled women hurry through the streets. Alcohol is outlawed, replaced by Jihad Cola, and mosques dot the skyline.”
[3] “Allah” is not the name of “the Muslim God,” by the way. It is the Arabic word referring to the God of Christians and Jews. Thinking that Muslims worship a deity called Allah is like thinking the French worship a deity called Dieu and the Germans a deity called Gott. A has a point, however, because the common practice of the media is to translate the French and German words into the English “God” and to leave the Arabic word untranslated so that it could reasonably be construed as the name of another deity.
[4] I was once asked to take my membership and leave a Presbyterians church and also once asked to teach the Sunday School class I was teaching across the street at a restaurant that was closed on Sunday mornings (so I wouldn’t actually be teaching IN the church), so I am not as far away from A’s fears as one might think.

Posted in Communication, Politics | Tagged Christian nation, Freedom of Religion, Muslim terrorists, rants as toxic politics, Sharia law | Leave a comment

Is the U. S. “anti-immigrant?”

Posted on November 26, 2015 by hessd

Not exactly. But “anti-immigrant” is just a political spitball. It is not intended to and it does not, in fact, help anyone understand what is at stake here. Let me start with the passage that helped me start thinking about this. Here is Timothy Egan in a recent New York Times.

{France has] nearly five million Muslims, many living in slums that breed hatred and isolation. But [President] Hollande said Wednesday that France would honor its commitment to those fleeing the barbarians of the Islamic State, allowing up to 30,000 refugees to settle in France, with proper vetting, over the next two years.

I think it was the juxtaposition of “slums that breed hatred and isolations” with “admitting refugees who are in great need” that started me thinking. I would like to run a simple analogy here. The analogy asks whether it is worth our while to align the values in Scenario 1 with the values in Scenario 2. It does not assert. It asks.

Scenario 1 is about entrance into the world the way the fetus experiences it—or, actually, the way we imagine a fetus might experience it. The fetus is in the womb, then passes through the birth canal, then is “accepted into” the larger reality that the rest of us call “the world,” ignoring, by calling it that, how very different it is from anything the new member has ever experienced before.

Scenario 2 is about entrance into the country the way a new immigrant experiences it. We do actually know something about how they experience it [1] because we have asked and they have said. I am going to shift over, at this point, to talking about “refugees.” We call people refugees who immigrate to the U. S. seeking refuge. They have been forced out of their homes by religious persecution or gang violence or civil war. [2] This makes them “fugitives.” [2] There are many places where immigrants—those who call themselves refugees and those who do not—are admitted to the U. S., but for the sake of the analogy, I am going to choose the best known such place: Ellis Island.

So the argument is going to be that we can learn a lot by imagining that these two processes are parallel. To help do that, let me introduce some ordinary terms. In Scenario 1, I will use “Pro-Birth” to refer to people who believe that extraordinary care should be exercised to get a fetus through the birth canal. At that point the birth has occurred and no further consideration would need to be given. I will use  “Pro-Life” to refer to those who are concerned not only with the successful birth but also for the conditions of a successful life. The infant will need shelter and food and human caring at first; then a stable home life and opportunities to prepare for fulfilling and rewarding work. The Pro-Life position, as I am describing it, commits the society to all those things by the most practicable means, whether they are public (governmental) or private (families, clans, small villages, gangs) or some combination of public and private. Preparing the conditions within which this new life can thrive will be part of the designation, Pro-Life.

Similarly, I will use Pro-Refugee as the stance the takes it as crucially important to get a person or a family who lives in intolerable conditions in the homeland, to Ellis Island. Government policy should favor it, private charity should favor it, voluntary movements of compassion should favor it. Whatever is necessary to get the refugees to Ellis Island. I will use Pro-Immigrant to refer to the position that there is no merit in shepherding refugees through Ellis Island only to dump them into the streets of our cities without support. These new residents and potential new citizens, will require what the infant requires: shelter and food and social support at the beginning; then opportunities to establish themselves in this country, and provide for their offspring.

The analogy continues so far as recognizing that, in Scenario 1, people will come to maturity at different times in different ways. They will make their livings in different ways and raise their families in different ways. “Different strokes,” we used to say, “for different folks.” In the same way, people who are reborn in this country will choose different styles of living together. They may gather together in clans, which is not the form of organization we expect today. They will exercise their right to worship together in the faith of their choice. They will need public assistance until they are economically secure and the kinds of employment they choose may provide an oversupply of any one kind of work–at least in the short run. Any displaced American workers may also require some short term aid.

immigrant 6 Pro-Life and Pro-Immigrant positions look at these continuing needs and begin to work at ways to provide them. New humans will need these services and guarantees; new immigrant groups will need those services and guarantees. These two positions will be at odds with the Pro-Birth and the Pro-Refugee positions, which will argue that the work is done at the farther end of the birth canal or the exit doors of Ellis Island. Compassion is appropriately offered, they will say to the fetus and the refugee, but then the needs of society needs to be weighed as well.

The moral approach to these two groups can be seen, oddly, as one in which the fetus has great moral value, but loses it somehow in the trip through he birth canal. A fetus in the womb of a poor and/or unmarried woman has incalculable value, but the infant child of a poor and/or unmarried woman is burden on society and society is justified in taking measures to ensure that such young lives are not seen as an encouragement of other women to follow this course. The young child will certainly be punished in making such spartan provisions for the mother, but she should have thought of that either before she got pregnant or before she got poor.

Similarly, the moral approach to the refugees grants them great value, a value immigrant 7 proportionate not only to their need but to our distaste for their oppressors. But as they emerge from “Ellis Island,” they lose all their moral virtue. They are now just that many additional poor people. They will take jobs away from “real Americans,” i.e., those who preceded them at Ellis Island. They will practice religious faiths unlike the most common ones practiced here and they may very well fail to understand how deeply we value non-religion here. If they are “religious” in any obvious way, those of us who are “non-religious” may feel disapproved of or even judged.

My practice in these thought experiments is, as a rule, to set up the conditions, to run the machine, and to allow whatever emerges to stand on its own. In that same way, I offer here no guidance other than the sets of affiliations that are implied in the terms I have given to the four positions.

My goal was to argue that if these two cases—birth and immigration—are set up as parallel systems, interesting commonalities emerge. I think I have done that.

[1] Not to imply that there is one immigrant experience. Obviously, there are many. But we know something about the variety of experiences because we have asked a variety of people about their experience.
[2] This is probably the place to say that people who want to live in the U. S. and who know that being a “refugee” gives them a better chance to do so, will call themselves refugees whether they are or not. “Immigrant” is a fact; “refugee” is an explanation.
[3] This whole family of words is based on the Latin fugere, “to flee.” A fugitive who is looking for a new place to live is a refugee. Same word.

Posted in Politics, Society, Sustainability, Words | Tagged birth canal, burden on society, Ellis Island, fetus, immigrants, infinite worth, refugees | Leave a comment

Jonathan Haidt’s “Inner Lawyer”

Posted on November 24, 2015 by hessd

Jonathan Haidt offers the third illustration in the clutch of three we are examining. All three involve two functions—actively suppressing information and not receiving the information—but it gets complicated because I am the person who plays both parts. I hide information from myself; I search actively for it but am unable to discover it. It makes no sense. It is like hiding a treasure where you will never be able to find it.

Nevertheless, we have looked at two instances of this—I am the one who is saying they are
three instances of the same thing—and I am arguing that this third episode, the Jonathan Haidt episode is essentially like the others. “The others” include Queen Susan of Narnia (in Prince Caspian) who would have believed Aslan was there if she had allowed herself to believe it. “The others” also include a character I call “the Episcopal Ghost” (in The Great Divorce) who suppressed his gradual loss of faith because he wanted other things, incompatible things, more. Thus, he drifted to a place where he could be, “sincerely heretical.”

The question for today is simply this: Does Jonathan Haidt, in the episode he narrates, fall into the same category? Let’s begin with the most directly relevant quote from Haidt’s account, “I then lied so quickly and convincingly that my wife and I both believed me.” I lied so well that I believed me? Really?

Here is Haidt’s account.

On February 3, 2007, shortly before lunch, I discovered that I was a chronic liar.[1] I was at home, writing a review article on moral psychology when my wife, Jayne, walked by my desk. In passing, she asked me not to leave dirty dishes on the counter where she prepared our baby’s food. Her request was polite, but its tone added a postscript: “As I’ve asked you a hundred times before.”

My mouth started moving before hers had stopped. Words came out. Those words linked themselves up to say something about the baby having woken up at the same time that our elderly dog barked to ask for a walk and I’m sorry but I jut put my breakfast dishes down wherever I could….so I was acquitted.

Haidt continues to write the review article. Then:

I disliked being criticized, and I had felt a flash of negativity by the time Jayne had gotten to her third word (“Can you not…”). Even before I knew why she was criticizing me, I knew I disagreed with her… The instant I knew the content of the criticism (…leave the dirty dishes on the…”) my inner lawyer went to work searching for an excuse… It’s true that I had eaten breakfast, given Max his first bottle, and let Andy out for his first walk, but these events had all happened at separate times. Only when my wife criticized me did I merge them into a composite image of a harried father with too few hands, and I created this fabrication by the time she had completed her one-sentence criticism (…counter where I make baby food?). I then lied so quickly and convincingly that my wife and I both believed me.

‘I didn’t hear you calling. I can’t listen to everybody who yells at me.’

As I indicated in the introduction, it is that last sentence that matters most to me. He lied to his wife in this instance. He does that a lot, apparently, because he calls himself “a chronic liar.” And he didn’t do it because he chose to. He did it because his “inner lawyer,” who, apparently acts on his behalf without being asked to, produced this excuse. And the excuse was so good that not only did his wife believe it at the time, but he, himself, believed it at the time as well.

Excursus: I need to find a place to say that Haidt did, eventually, realize what “he” (his inner lawyer) had done. And when he realized it, he accepted it. He didn’t ignore it, he didn’t deny it, he didn’t repress it. He realized what his inner lawyer had done to him and presumably—this is not part of his account—he went to his wife and told her what had happened.What he would be forced to say is that “it”—my inner lawyer—lied to you this morning, and as soon as I discovered it, I came to you to correct the account which he, deceitfully, sold to both of us. Notice the “it” and the “I.”

The Length of the Process

Reincursus: (End of excursus, I’m just playing) So now we have all three instances before us. Let’s rank they first by how long the process took. Haidt’s lying is obviously the fastest. He—his inner lawyer—starting putting together an untrue account of his actions three words into his wife’s accusation. That’s fast. Susan admits on Day 2 that she “really believed” on Day 1, but also says that she did not really believe on Day 1 because she did not allow herself to. The inner reality she constructs a day later—“would have believed had I allowed myself to”—shows an awareness of something. Did she sense the inner lawyer at work and chose not to go over the the desk to see what the lawyer was doing?

The Episcopal Ghost is the slowest by far and we have only his friend Dick’s understanding to go on. Now it is true that Dick says the same thing was happening to him at that time, so he does have an inner perspective. Then too, Dick is a Spirit—in other circumstances, we might say “an angel”—and he is in Heaven, that place of ultimate reality, so presumably he knows what is true and says what is true.

Direct Agency

So that is a ranking that takes the speed of the process into account. Let’s look now at direct agency. Who acts most clearly as an agent making choices? This time I think we have to put Haidt last. His account of what happened—his “inner lawyer”—is the gold standard for failure of agency and I am going to try to use it to look at the other two cases.

Haidt, to say the same thing another way, does not act at all. The “inner lawyer” acts and Haidt is, for a little while, deceived. So we score Haidt, in this first round, at least, with no agency at all.

I would put Queen Susan next. On the second day, she admits that she “really believed…
deep down inside” that Aslan was there or “I could have if I had let myself.” So even when she was saying she could not see Aslan, some part of her knew that she did see him. We can say this another way. Susan’s “inner lawyer” was not as good as Haidt’s “inner lawyer.” Susan felt, or could have felt, that the “inner lawyer” was doing something and could have made it her business to find out what it was. At the time Haidt—or someone—lied to his wife, there was nothing to attract his attention, to make him wonder.

I would put the Episcopal Ghost last. This line is the crucial line for the Episcopal Ghost. It would be better for my argument if he said it himself, but he cannot, so it is said instead by a completely trustworthy witness who shared the Ghost’s vulnerability at the time. We accepted, says the angel, “every half-conscious solicitation from our desires.” Now…not get all arithmetical, but “half-conscious” means that only half of the subversion of his faith was “unconscious.”

If the question is one of agency, who could have acted on his own behalf and did not, they the Ghost wins. There were times, according to the angel, when you were conscious of being pressed by your desires, being seduced [2] by your desires. At that point you could have done something, but you chose not to. You could have “gone over to the desk” and looked at “what your inner lawyer was writing” on your behalf and you could have torn it up. There was that much opportunity for agency on your own behalf, but you did not take it.

One of the things I like best about blogging is that you get to propose a topic, to make the argument, and then to decide that the argument was solid. You do all that yourself. Well…really you just decide that the argument is “solid enough.” Or you just decide it isn’t going to get any better and you just abandon it. So I am going to declare that my attempt to show that Haidt and the Ghost and Queen Susan were involved in the same process—the same close family of processes—and can be understood in the same way.

What to do?

Of the remaining questions, let me chose one. “Can we do anything about this?” I think the best answer is Yes, but you notice that the agency question reappears. When we say “we,” we are back to agency. At the moment, Susan could not want less desperately to be out of the woods, the Ghost could not want less passionately to be accepted by the smart and modern world, and Jonathan Haidt could not want so urgently to remember what had happened that his “inner lawyer” just shut up.

But if we start the story further back for each of these characters, things look better. It is possible, in principle, for Susan to know that when she gets stresses, she is vulnerable to selling out higher values for lesser ones. It would have been possible for the Ghost to clarify his highest commitments—the angel says that “resisting” and praying would have been a great help—and so have been less vulnerable to the daily solicitations of other needs. I don’t really see any help for Jonathan Haidt, and, in all fairness, he told that story to illustrate that there is no help available, but something in him began to separate the strands of his lie almost as soon as he was done telling it. That’s pretty good.

I put my money on identifying categories. I want to be able to say, “In it is situations like THESE, that I am in most risk of selling out.” OK, so how do you form the categories? You pay careful and systematic attention to how you explain things to yourself and you notice the situations that keep recurring. Then you give those situations a name of some sort, e.g., dealing fairly by people who are hostile to my cause. That is a category name. And if you have done the work [3], the categories you build make you more sensitive to “what happens in situations like these.”

That would have been a great help for the Ghost, at the time in his life when he was selling his birthright for a mess of favorable reviews. It would have made Susan aware that these are situations where she really doesn’t want to see Aslan and if she is to see him, she needs to set her fears aside and know what “she really knows, down deep.”

Professor Haidt, you’re going to have to handle this one on your own.

[1] I needed to stop here anyway to give you the citation, but while I am stopped, let me just celebrate that sentence. That is the first sentence in Chapter 3 (page 52). Who would not want to keep reading? Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon Books, 2012.
[2] “Seduced” is one of those wonderful words that packs so much imagery it is hard to mistake its meaning. The word come into English from Latin, where the prefix se- means “apart, away, aside” and the root is the verb duco, “to lead.” So “to lead astray.” But “astray,” the part of the word contributed by the prefix, presumes that there is a right way to go. “Astray” cannot mean anything if there is not a right way to go. So the word means “You could have gone here, but you were led off and went there.” Also “to lead” means that these are not choices you made yourself; someone led you.
[3] I am a big fan of a recording device I call a “causal attribution journal” (CAJ); it has been my principal academic focus since 1974.

Posted in Political Psychology, Theology, ways of knowing | Tagged C. S. Lewis, Jonathan Haidt, lying to myself, Queen Susan of Narnia, the Episcopal Ghost | Leave a comment

Sincerely Heretical

Posted on November 22, 2015 by hessd

This is “When I lie to myself, I don’t believe me, Part 2” It is the second of a series of three essays which, I maintain, are about the same issue. Maybe they are and maybe they aren’t, but the series is based on the idea that they are. That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.

Here is the question. How is it possible for me to prevent myself from knowing something. In such a case, who is it who prevents? Who is prevented? How does it work?

In our first look at this question, we examined Queen Susan of Narnia at one of the least respectable moments of her reign. In C. S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian, Susan opposes her sister Lucy’s story that Lucy has seen Aslan, but later she says:

And I really believed it was him tonight, when you woke us up. I mean, deep down inside. Or I could have, if I’d let myself. But I just wanted to get out of the woods…”

So “deep down inside” there is a belief, or the beginnings of a belief. “She,” Susan, “has” this belief…somewhere. But she didn’t accept it; didn’t allow herself access to it; didn’t claim it in whatever part of her is not “deep down inside.” But in some way, she did not allow herself to “know” that she believed it was really Aslan.

You see the problem. Who is doing what to whom, and how?

The second case is harder for a number of reasons, so I am going to dip briefly into the toolkit I assembled over fifty years of teaching. I am going to change the crucial quote from The Great Divorce so that the categories parallel Queen Susan’s confession more closely.

I really believed in God during those crucial years, I mean deep down inside. Or I could have if I had resisted the half-conscious solicitation from my desires, had I continued to pray for guidance. But I just wanted the success and approval that came being a daring renegade priest.

I wrote it that way to highlight the similarities between the second case and the first. Now it is time to admit what I have done and to try, still, to have you accept the similarities.

The person who, in my paraphrase, said these things in one of the characters in C. S. Lewis’s fantasy, The Great Divorce. He is one of seven major characters in the book and since they don’t have names, I will refer to him as “the Episcopal Ghost”—or EG when I get tired of typing the whole title.

In Lewis’s story, there is a bus that leaves Hell every day and goes to Heaven. Anyone may get on the bus in Hell and anyone who wants to may stay in Heaven. But none do. EG walks away from his friend, Dick, humming softly to himself, ‘City of God, how broad and fair.’

All the major characters are met at the bus by an angel, a person who had known them in life. The angel who meets them is a Spirit (not a Ghost) and, being in Heaven, knows the truth about everything, Heaven being the place where Reality is recognized. The body of the Spirit is real substance, as is Heaven. The body of the Ghost is insubstantial, as is Hell. That means, among other things, that when the insubstantial foot of EG steps on the substantial grass of Heaven, the grass pierces the foot. If the Ghost is going to go anywhere, he will need help.

In this particular case, we have a clergyman who has become a heretic and who simply cannot be reached any longer. [1] The Spirit, whose name is Dick, tries every way he can think of and the Ghost simply cannot be reached. But it is the Ghost’s justification of himself that has won him a place in my blog. The question for him, too, is “Who is doing what to whom?”

The Ghost’s self-justification (not, you would think, the kind of justification that would work well in Heaven) comes in two parts. It is from these two parts that I crafted his “statement” above. In the first, you will note that the speaker is not the Ghost himself, but his friend Dick. We both did the wrong thing, says Dick, who now, in Heaven, knows that to be true.

Having allowed oneself to drift, unresisting, un-praying, accepting every half-conscious solicitation from our desires, we reached a point where we no longer believed the Faith.
And what resulted from this drifting? …What was at all likely to come of it except what actually came—popularity, sales for your books, invitations, and finally a bishopric?’

Now let’s put the two statements we are examining—Queen Susan’s and the Episcopal Ghost’s—back into their common format.

Queen Susan says she “just wanted to get out of the woods;” the Episcopal Ghost says—through Dick, the Anger—that he accepted the lure of his desires and later we find out what those desires were. They were popularity, book sales, prestigious invitations, and a high church office. Those are the things each wanted so much that they were willing to defy some other part of themselves, a better part, to get it.

Susan says she could have let herself believe that Aslan was truly there, but she did not The Ghost says—Dick says for him—that he wanted success so much that he stopped praying, he stopped resisting, and he chose his own desires instead, desires he was only partially aware of.

In those two ways, I am saying, their cases are the same. On behalf of X, a strongly felt desire, each of them suppressed any awareness of Y, when each would have admitted that Y was the right thing to do.

By this means, the Ghost had allowed himself to drift to a place where “sincere” and “worshipful” could not be said of the same views. Once he was there, he could be as sincere as he likes. When his doubts are blocked off, “sincere” is only an assessment of the motives he is willing to recognize. There is no good resolution once this has occurred.

That’s really the end of my argument. You will be convinced or not or, just as likely, wonder why I have spent so much time “knocking on an open door,” as one of my Oregon professors used to say. But I did come across one more similarity between the two characters; one I did not expect.

I have been making the point that Susan began to see on her own as she followed Lucy, who saw Aslan. This was an act of faithfulness on Susan’s part, even though it had nothing to do with Aslan. During that trip, during those step by step acts of fidelity, she herself came to see Aslan.

Dick, when he sees that nothing he is going to say is going to move his friend the Ghost, takes another tack.

‘Will you come with me to the mountains? It will hurt at first, until your feet are hardened. Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come?’

This is the “real grass” versus the “insubstantial feet” problem I referred to earlier. The Ghost, according to this offer, does not have to believe anything at all, just as Susan did not have to believe that Aslan was really there. All the Ghost has to do—much more painful physically, but much less painful spiritually—is to walk, holding his friend’s arm—toward the mountains. [4] Like Susan, the Ghost will not really have to believe anything; only to walk and keep on walking. Eventually, he will begin to see where he is and what that means.

In the next (and last) of this series, I will consider the case of political psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, who calls himself “a chronic liar,” for reasons we will explore.

[1] I found myself originally sympathetic to this Ghost, but eventually the persistence of the Spirit and the utterly impenetrable denial of every kind of truth and every kind of fact wore me out. I was relieved when he got back on the bus to Hell.
[2] I grant that this is more likely to be implied as a premise and to be illustrated by speakers who have had the experience themselves. They will call “leaving their faith behind” something much more attractive, I am sure. “Fearless modernity,” possibly or “Unmasking the myths of religion.”
[3] A very plausible list of such refutations is launched against Dick during their conversation in Heaven, but Dick, who confessed his faith in life, now Knows the Truth—in Heaven—so he is not wounded by his friend’s barbs.
[4] “Going to the mountains” is the higher worship of the Spirits. It is what they are supposed to be doing. Dick came back to the bus stop to meet his friend and with him or without him, he will return to his trip to the mountains.

Posted in Political Psychology, Theology, ways of knowing | Tagged C. S. Lewis, deceiving ourselves, Queen Susan, the "daring renegade priest, The Great Divorce | Leave a comment

When I lie to myself, I don’t believe me

Posted on November 19, 2015 by hessd

The title I have chosen is the good scenario. There are scenarios that are not as good and the next several essays will be about those. What are those other, worse, scenarios? The first and most basic has to do with hiding the data. It goes like this: “I didn’t know it was happening and the reason I didn’t know is that I hid it from myself.” That’s the one we are going to deal with first and we are going to join Queen Susan of Narnia to look at an instance.

The second has to do with not keeping clear, not doing what is necessary to continue to see a truth clearly. There are things you could do—imagine de-fogging the windshield, for instance—and if you do them, you will be able to see clearly. If you do not, you will not see clearly and the decisions you make will be based on other things. We will use the Episcopal Ghost to explore this one.

The third has to do with self-justification. This one is a little harder to describe. On the other hand, it will instantly familiar to most of us so it doesn’t have to be described all that well. In this model, the justifier—Jonathan Haidt calls it “my inner lawyer”—takes over instantly and instead of seeing the truth, you see the reason why you are not to blame. I am going to call it an exculpatory narrative. [1] The narrative preempts the understanding or, to say it another way, the result of the work of the “inner lawyer” is that you understand the facts only as part of the narrative.

The dilemma, as it appears in all three of these, is that “you” are represented as two “persons” or as two “functions.” One of these persons prevents the other from correctly assessing the situation, which prevents “you” from dealing appropriately with the situation. In all three of the situations I am going to offer, some part of you hides the truth so that the other part of you does not experience it. Does it feel weird yet?

My own view is that I am presenting three versions of the same dilemma. They are not identical, but they are so like each other at the center that they ought to be seen as members of the same family. The two questions I will be asking you are: a) do you agree with me that these are members of the same family and b) do you know how these work in your own life or, possibly that they don’t work this way in your life? My own answers are Yes and Yes.

Queen Susan of Narnia

Susan Pevensie, who is Queen Susan when she is in Narnia, has a difficulty to deal with. Allowing herself to realize that she has seen what she has, in a sense, “seen” will require her to do quite a number of things she does not want to do. I sympathize.

Her dilemma is revealed in C. S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian, the second of the Chronicles of Narnia. Lucy, the youngest of the four Pevensie children, is the best of them in some senses. She is less likely than the others, for instance, to get caught up in a role that forces her to overlook more important things. She blusters less than her brothers, Peter and Edmund. She rolls her eyes in disdain less than her sister Susan.

So it is not all that surprising that when Aslan needs to reveal himself to the Pevensies, he chooses Lucy. He calls her directly out of sleep and leads her to himself. The reunion—they came to know Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—is joyful, but brief. He sends Lucy back to the others with very difficult instructions. She is to wake her sister and her brothers, all older than she is, and persuade them to follow her on the grounds that she has seen Aslan and continues to see him. They will not be able to see him—we will get into why they will not, but not right now—so they will be doing something they very much do not want to do entirely because of the claims she is making.

And…Aslan has instructed her to follow him whether the others do or not. In other words, in a hostile and strange country, she will simply desert her companions if they do not follow her.

This small piece of the plot works out well. All the children are reunited with Aslan and they reach the crucial battle in time to save the day, and so on. But it is very dicey at the beginning and it is the dicey part that interests me most.

The children are lost in an unfamiliar landscape. They are tired and hungry. They have to get to Caspian’s camp before the climactic battle and they don’t know how to get there. In the middle of all that, Lucy sees Aslan. Only Lucy sees Aslan. [2]

“Where did you think you saw him,” asked Susan.

“Don’t talk like a grown-up,” said Lucy, stamping her foot. “I didn’t think I saw him. I saw him.

“Where, Lu?” asked Peter.

“Right up there between those mountain ashes. No, this side of the gorge. And up, not down. Just the opposite of the way you want to go. And he wanted us to go where he was—up there.

“How do you know that was what he wanted?” asked Edmund.

He—I—I just know,” said Lucy, by his face.”

So there’s the confrontation. Lucy, only Lucy, sees Aslan, so only Lucy knows that they should go up the gorge not down. But then, in the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, only Lucy knew that she got through the back of the wardrobe and into a strange and wonderful forest in winter. Professor Kirke, the owner of the wardrobe, counseled them at the time to put their trust in a trustworthy person and they did, eventually. But they don’t do it this time. Instead, they vote. Lucy loses.

So, as I said above, Lucy is called to Aslan in the middle of the night and sent back to rouse her brothers and sisters from a sound sleep and to get them to follow her on no grounds other than that she says Aslan wants them to. This time they follow her—aided by her determination to go alone if need be—and the longer they follow her, the more they think that they, themselves, might be seeing Aslan up ahead of them.

Very soon, we get to the place that caught and held my attention. Here it is.

“Lucy,” said Susan in a very small voice….I see him now. I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right.” [said Lucy].

“But I’ve been far worse than you know. I really believed it was him…yesterday. When he warned us not to go down to the fir-wood. And I really believed it was him tonight, when you woke us up. I mean, deep down inside. Or I could have, if I’d let myself. But I just wanted to get out of the woods…”

So let’s look carefully at what Susan is saying. She is saying, first, that when Lucy came back to camp from talking with Aslan, Susan did not believe she had really been talking to Aslan. Even now, knowing that she had been on the wrong side, she can go no further than to say that she “could have…believed” if she had allowed herself to do so.

So this is that one person/two selves problem as it plays out in Narnia. Queen Susan is the person. Within her is a self who wants intensely to get out of the woods and who obscures all information that is incompatible with it. It is possible that Susan could have said, “I would really like to get out of these awful woods, but that is Aslan—I really believe I am seeing Aslan—and I will follow him even if it means staying in the woods.” In this formulation, Susan wants two things: she wants to be aware of seeing Aslan (that means following him) and she wants to get out of the woods. She could weigh the two sides and come to a conclusion.

That’s not a good deal for the denying self. If Susan knows she wants to get out of the woods and does not know that Aslan is there, then everything is easy for the Denier. Only one reality is left; no decision needs to be made.

And things would stay that way except for Lucy. Lucy asks her brothers and her sister to follow her on a journey following “a lion” whom only she can see. Under the circumstances, Susan has no choice but to go along. But there is something about “going along,” about following the lead of the most faithful person of the four that brings back the suppressed truth. As Susan goes along, the thinks that she herself might be seeing Aslan, then is completely sure that she sees Aslan. At that point, she remembers that she “really did” or “really could have” seen Aslan yesterday.

Here’s what we know for sure. Susan did not see Aslan yesterday. Here is Susan’s “sense” of why she didn’t. She could have seen Aslan “if I had let myself.” She did not let herself, so she did not see Aslan. But Lewis wants us to believe that Susan retains a “memory” of an event that did not happen. Or that she has a “memory” of what she did to prevent the event from happening. We have to take account, somehow, of her confession to Lucy, “I could have believed [it was Aslan] if I had let myself…”

Does she know that? It’s hard to say. The principal witness in the next essay will be a character from C. S. Lewis’s fantasy, The Great Divorce. He is the character I call “the Episcopal Ghost.” We will look at the Queen Susan problem—same problem—in the Ghost’s case next.
[1] An exculpatory narrative is, first, a narrative. It is a story. That means it is an arrangement of facts and values into a sequence that has and effect. The effect is, “It wasn’t my fault.” I emphasize this because the facts, otherwise available, are swept up into the narrative, where they are not available any more.

[2] The others do not see Aslan because they have been unfaithful. I think that is Lewis’s view. When they begin to act faithfully, by following Lucy who is following Aslan, they begin to see. We would like to have the vision first and act, later, on the basis of it. In a lot of cases, only acting clears the way for you to see. That’s Lewis’s view, in which he follows the Apostle Paul.

Posted in Books, Paying Attention | Tagged knowing the truth, Prince Caspian, Queen Susan of Narnia, the inner lawyer, The inner voice | Leave a comment

Two Professors in Narnia

Posted on November 14, 2015 by hessd

There are two. In the seven volumes of the Chronicles of Narnia, there are two professors. They are both good guys. [1] They appear in the first two books about Narnia, C. S. Lewis’s “Middle Earth,” and then not again in the last five. [2]

You might ask a question at this point. You might ask, “Does this really matter?” [3] Or you might ask, “Why now?” That, as it happens, is a good question i.e., one I would like to try to answer. You would think that would have occurred to me long before now. For one thing, I have been a professor myself for most of my life. [4] Also, I read the Chronicles to my kids, parts of them several times, when they were small. But it didn’t occur to me then.

Last week when, in the process of throwing away books I didn’t need any more, I happened across an essay by John Warwick Montgomery in which, as part of a point he was making about Narnia, he summarized all seven books in roughly 500 words each. [5] I think of what Montgomery did as achieving a certain altitude from which all seven of the Narnia stories can be seen at a glance. If you like “level of generality” better, you may certainly use that metaphor instead.

I’ve been more than usually sensitive to the level of generality recently. Last year I taught a Bible study called Disciple 1. We met for 85 hours over the course of 34 weeks and “covered,” (you know what that means) the Old Testament and the New Testament in that time. You have to achieve a certain altitude to deal with that much material in 85 hours? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

I am currently teaching an overview of Disciple 1 (I know, an overview of an overview) with meets for six hours total. The level of generality has been raised again and, while it is true that at these rarified levels, the details get blurry, it is also true that the main features, the large features that you can’t see when you on the ground, become amazingly clear. “Look at that!” you say, of a feature so large that you would think only an idiot could have missed it, “I’ve never seen that before.”

John Warwick Montgomery’s brief overview of Narnia enabled me to see some things I had never seen before. “Look at that,” I said, “There are only two professors in all the Narnia books.” This brings us to just who these professors are and what they are there for. What is it, in other words, that can best be presented by a character who is a professor?

Dr. Cornelius, of Prince Caspian, the second of the seven adventures, is the easier one to deal with, so I’ll present him first. You need to know that Caspian, not aware yet that he is a prince, was being raised in a castle by evil usurpers who had killed his parents and taken over the throne. His favorite time of day was bedtime, when the nurse told him “fairy tales;” stories of “the old Narnia,” a place of talking beasts, and fauns and naiads and dryads, a kingdom ruled over by “two sons of Adam and two daughters of Eve.” The evil Uncle finds out that Nurse has been filling Caspian’s head with such nonsense and sends her away.

In her place comes Dr. Cornelius, who, from the standpoint of the evil Miraz’s plans, is worse in every way. Professor Cornelius knows all the old stories and he knows that they were true. And he knows that remnants of the old Narnia may still exist, hiding from the current evil rulers.

“Listen,” said the Doctor, “All you have heard about Old Narnia is true. It is not the land of men. It is the country of Aslan, the country of the Walking Trees and Visible Naiads, of Fauns and Satyrs, of Dwarfs and Giants, of the gods and the Centaurs, of Talking Beasts.”

That is what Dr. Cornelius is for. He confirms the truth of the old stories. He also sends Caspian away from the castle when the boy’s life is suddenly in danger. He sends him out to discover what he can of Old Narnia.

But the first professor, Digory Kirke, [7] has a more interesting and complicated role. Readers of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe meet Professor Kirke in his large house which is, notably, away from London which is being bombed. But if you read on a few more books, you meet him as a little boy named Digory who has an uncle who is a magician. Digory is “there” (there is no “there” there at the time) w Bette and The Wardrobe hen Narnia is sung into existence by a great lion. He brings home from Narnia a magic apple, the seeds of which he plants in ordinary English soil. The tree that grows from those seeds is made, eventually, into a wardrobe which Professor Kirke has in his house and which, sometimes, opens into Narnia. [6] Here is Bette, looking into that wardrobe, warily, it seems.

The Pevensie kids—Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy—have the run of the house and eventually discover the wardrobe. Lucy hides in the wardrobe, but to her surprise, the back of the wardrobe open into a forest in wintertime and she just keeps on walking until she meets a faun named Mr. Tumnus.

Later, Edmund,—still a bad guy at this point in the story—also gets into Narnia that way and out of meanness, refuses to confirm Lucy’s account. He knows the account is true, but wants to make Lucy look foolish. Peter, the eldest, is puzzled and he and Susan go to see Professor Kirke.

Kirke’s tutelage is classic. He is perfectly accepting of multiple universes and alternate time tracks. That wouldn’t be at all surprising had Lewis written The Magician’s Nephew first, so he and we would know about Digory entering Narnia and then coming back to England. It wouldn’t be surprising if we thought that Digory knew that the wardrobe was made of Narnian wood. But those things have not happened yet: not to Lewis, the author, nor to us, the readers. So Kirke’s ability to accept that Lucy was in Narnia for a long time although no England-time had passed, is really striking. The great defense against stories like Lucy’s is “all that kind of thing just can’t be true.” Professor Kirke’s response is, “Why on earth not?”

But Kirke also uses another strategy. Lewis himself uses it in his apologetic works. You might call it a “credibility triage.” Here is what Professor Kirke says to Peter and Susan (his strategy, my phrasing):

“You weren’t there, right? You don’t know any of this of your own knowledge, except that Lucy was in the wardrobe for only a brief time, as time passes in England.

So now you go to people who, by their accounts, have been there. That’s Lucy and Edmund. They give accounts that are so discrepant that they cannot both be true. Which of the two, Lucy or Edmund, do you accept as a truth-teller? Which is more trustworthy? Make your decision on that basis and live with it.”

There is more to it, of course, because no one can enter Narnia unless he or she is “called” to enter Narnia. So examining the back of the wardrobe won’t help. It’s a question of who you believe. The same thing happens in Prince Caspian, the next book. Aslan reveals himself to Lucy, only to Lucy, and tells her to persuade the others to follow her lead based only on her testimony. And there is no Professor Kirke to help them this time. On the other hand, the last time they believed Lucy, she proved to be entirely trustworthy and they remember that. Eventually.

There aren’t many Higher Ed Heroes to work with in Narnia, so it is not hard to be impressed that one of them, Dr. Cornelius, confirms the truth of “the old things” that the nurse knew only as cute stories. What Dr. Cornelius knows includes a Badger, Nikabrik, who counsels that Caspian be killed as soon as he is discovered. There is not much cuddly about Nikabrik, but he is fully a part of Old Narnia as Cornelius describes it.

The other, Professor Kirke, has the task of pushing the virtue of logic. His role is procedural. If you rule out Lucy’s testimony on the grounds that the world can’t have one time “there” and another time “here,” on what basis do you assert that? If you have contradictory testimony about another world, a world about which you know nothing at all yourself, is it really reasonable to choose the account that more closely approximates your current prejudices? Is that the best you can do? Would it be better to choose the testimony of the more reliable of the witnesses?

Kirk’s stance–and it anchors his role in the story–is that he doesn’t really care what can be reached from the back of his wardrobe, but he does wish that the children who go to our schools could be made to think more sensibly about things.

[1] That is to day that both are male and both are good. There is the question of whether Dr. Cornelius, who is half dwarf, ought to be called “a guy.” And if anyone reading this is new to the land of Narnia, let me assure you that in Narnia, dwarves are a race of people, not a kind of human.
[2] I’m going mostly from memory. If you have someone in mind who could reasonably be called a professor, please let me know.
[3] Not really. It’s a curiosity; nothing more.
[4] In the social sciences, a branch of knowledge for which Lewis had nothing but contempt. I really think that one of the reasons he wrote That Hideous Strength was to have available to him a plot in which nearly all the villains were sociologists.
[5] John Warwick Montgomery, “The Chronicles of Narnia and the Adolescent Reader” in John Warwick Montgomery, ed., Myth Allegory and Gospel. Minneapolis: Bethany Fellowship, Inc. 1974. Montgomery’s essay appears on pp. 97—118.
[6] A little careful distinction is needed here. The picture shows Bette pretending to enter “the wardrobe.” This is, in fact, C. S. Lewis’s wardrobe and it is the wardrobe he had in mind when he wrote the book. It is, however, made of oak and if the Digory Kirke story were true, it would be made of applewood. Oh well, it is a wardrobe and it is “the” wardrobe, and Bette was not gone for any of our world’s time when she went into it. Hm.
[7] Lewis never forgets that “kirk” is a Scottish word meaning “church.” It’s not a pun, exactly, but he does play with it. He would have loved it if the kirks of his time played the role he wrote out for Digory.

Posted in Books, Education, Paying Attention | Tagged C. S. Lewis, credibility triage, higher ed heroes, Narnia, Prince Caspian, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe | Leave a comment