The Dilettante's Dilemma

Chewing Raw Fish

Posted on November 11, 2015 by hessd

I want to think a little about “particularization” today. I got this idea from a not very good book by Snell and Gail Putney. It is The Adjusted American: Normal Neuroses in the Individual and Society. [1] Here is what they say about “particularization.”

Particularization is the equation of some specific means of need satisfaction with the need itself. The genesis of particularization is habit, or conditioned response. A person who has satisfied a need in one particular way since childhood is likely to have only a vague awareness of the need; his vivid consciousness will be of the familiar means of satisfaction. When feeling needful, he thinks instantly of the usual mode of fulfillment, bypassing recognition of the need itself. The effect is to confine his understanding to a specific pattern of response. So long as the habitual means of meeting a need are adequate and readily available, there is no problem.

I’ve been using this notion for fifty years or so and I can assure you that when I was in my 20s, I did not construe that last line—”so long as the habitual means of meeting a need are…readily available”—in age related terms. Imagine that a young man might say that there is nothing that clears his mind and readies him for a new project better than his daily dose of preparing for this next marathon. I was in my 40s when I ran my first one. Now imagine someone in his late 70s (me) with bad knees (me) reaching out for this old and familiar way of coping.

When the old ways fail (they do, trust me on that) and the old ways are all you have because means and ends have been welded together in your thinking, then you have a difficulty to deal with. The solution, of course, is to separate ends and means so that new more…um…”age-appropriate” means might be used to achieve the same old familiar ends. What the young runner casually identified an “a handy stress-reduction strategy” meets the Putneys’ “equation of some specific means of need satisfaction (the training) with the need itself (stress-reduction).

What the Putneys want us to do is to stop long enough to identify the need itself. “Hmmm…,” the not too adjusted American might say, “it looks like my stress levels are too high and I need to choose, from the means available to me, one that will have the effect of reducing it.”

Here’s an example they use.

To take an extreme example, men learn to satisfy their thirst by drinking liquids, a highly satisfying method. But many a shipwrecked sailor drifting without fresh water has died of thirst without recognizing the possibility of chewing the juices from raw fish. Failing to comprehend that behind his usual satisfaction lies a basic need which could be fulfilled by unfamiliar means, the deprived person engages in exhausting but futile attempts to secure a form of satisfaction that is no longer available.

The sailor has not taken the trouble to distinguish the goal (satisfy my thirst, replace bodily fluids) from the means most often chosen in the past (drinking liquids). So “I am thirsty” leads without so much as a mental flicker to “I need a drink of water.” As I note that the water I need is unavailable, I don’t say, “Let’s see, what other means might achieve that same goal.” Instead, I say, “Well, I guess I will just have to die of thirst.”

Not to associate being old with being ship-wrecked, of course, but in so many cases, the distinction needs to be made. I am going to look at two. In each case, I have associated the need with one means of meeting that need and the association s so tight that it would take the crowbar of extreme circumstance to pull them apart even enough for me to see that they are two things.

Running

So, if I like running because a) it keeps my legs from cramping, b) it burns off 100 calories a mile and c) it helps me sleep at night, then I need to separate those very happy outcomes from my traditional way of achieving them. I need to stop saying, “I need to get out and run, my legs are getting crampy,” and say, instead, “I need to do something that will help my legs not to cramp. Some kind of stretching, maybe.” And I need to stop saying, “I need to get out and run so I can burn off a meal’s worth of calories,” and say, instead, “I need to figure out another way to burn off those calories and/or to get used to taking in fewer calories.” I need to stop saying, “I need to get out and run so I can sleep tonight,” and say, instead, “I need to find a way to get a more relaxing night of sleep without that kind of exercise. [2]

Man running in woods, rear view

All this is classic “fish-chewing.” Running was efficient because it met all three needs at once, but each need can be addressed separately by a host of means—PROVIDED that I can bring myself to see that the need (fluids, in the fish-chewing example) and the means (chewing, rather than drinking) are separate. There are other ways, for instance, of burning off calories and many other ways of not taking in so many calories that I have to burn them off.

Sleeping

One would think that sleeping is pretty straightforward. You work hard all day or play hard all day and when you get a chance to go to bed, you simply go to sleep. But when you are old, it really isn’t that simple. For one thing, you can’t go to sleep by trying to go to sleep. Everyone knows that. You offer your body a chance to sleep and it says Yes sometimes, No sometimes, and I’m Not Sure sometimes.

But do you need all that sleep? [2] Is “sleep” the best way to define the need? Or is it like “a drink of water” at sea where there is not water to drink? I’ve decided that I need “rest.” I wouldn’t try to define it, but what I mean by it is “the kind of mental and physical relaxation that will take me through the next half day. [3] If “rest” is what I need, there are quite a few less demanding ways to get it and while all them run the “risk” of going to sleep, none of them really requires sleep. I’ve wondered sometimes if it doesn’t work the way my computer works—you turn it off and then turn it back on and somehow it works for a while.

Here again, it is the distinction between the means (sleeping) I always associated with the need (being rested) that is crucial. You can actually get rest just by wanting it, which makes it a lot less anxiety provoking that “needing to sleep.” And it works, usually, by some means I don’t understand and sets me up for another half day of what I do with my time.

The genius of Putney and Putney’s focus on “particularization” is that when you have separated the means from the end, it turns out that there are lots of other means available. And, of course, exercising and sleeping aren’t the only challenges old men face. We really weren’t designed to live as long as I have already lived, so it isn’t surprising that things just stop working.

And when they do, I say, “So…what is it I really need?” Are there other ways to meet the need if I can bring myself to think of it in a different way. I like that.

[1] The notions underlying the book are exciting. What is a “normal neurosis?” Can a society be “neurotic?” Are we “adjusting” to things we don’t need to or shouldn’t have to? The first three chapters, from which I will take their notion of particularization are superb. I have been using the for fifty years by now. The rest of the book just cranks out the formula applied now to one topic, now to another.
[2] We do need to dream. I’m not going to try to fight that. The studies are really clear. And to dream, you need to sleep. All I’m talking about is the sleep you need to do the next day’s work.
[3] I’ve also found that I can be less anxious if I only need to last until my mid-day nap. Half an hour is usually enough to carry me through the rest of the day.

Posted in Getting Old | Tagged common ways of meeting needs, particularization, real needs, running, sleeping, thinking new thoughts | Leave a comment

Why do Matthew and Luke have infancy narratives?

Posted on October 31, 2015 by hessd

The consensus among biblical scholars is that both Matthew and Luke had copies of Mark before them when they composed their own gospels. Mark starts his account with the baptism of Jesus. Matthew and Luke apparently looked at this way of beginning the story and said, “Maybe there’s a better way.” What did they have in mind?

I’d like to consider that question from Matthew’s point of view this year. [1] Matthew wants to bring the story of Israel into the story of the gospel. He wants to use the story of Jesus’s birth as a bridge, so “Old Testament” people, like the forebears of Jesus [2] and his royal ancestors and his prophetic ancestors. He wants to tell the story of Jesus in a way that evokes memories. He wants the hearers to cock their heads when they hear the story and say, “Wait…that sounds really familiar for some reason.” [3]

How would that work? Yesterday, I was writing a sentence about Victoria Roubideaux, a character in Kent Haruf’s wonderful novel, Plainsong. I started it like this:

The girl who was deceived by a randy young man and locked out of her house by an angry mother is now making a judgment…

As I was editing it, a shorter way of describing Victoria’s past came into my mind. I could say that she was “despised and rejected.” Then I paused for about a nanosecond to locate that language in my mind and then I had to laugh at myself. It is a line from one of the “Suffering Servant” passages in Isaiah, chapter 53. It isn’t obscure either because Charles Jennens, who organized the texts for Handel’s oratorio Messiah, made it familiar to nearly everyone.

So, in the middle of my thinking about Plainsong, I had to stop (not very long) and ask whether I wanted my readers to cock their heads and say “that sounds really familiar…oh yeah, it’s from Isaiah.” Of course, that’s not what I wanted, so I didn’t use it.

But what if I had wanted that? I don’t have to say, “As was predicted by the prophet Isaiah…” All I have to do is use the phrase “despised and rejected” and the minds of a lot of people—nearly all the ones I am writing for—will simply go that direction.
It’s easy to have fun with that response too. Some expressions are so focused and carry such an emotional charge that they mean what they mean—even if they clearly mean something else. One such expression is “get it up.” If they keep playing with erectile dysfunction (ED!) ads on TV “keep it up” may join it. So you could, if you had the temperament for it, tell the story of Sisyphus, who was condemned to roll a boulder up a mountain only to see it roll back down. Even people who know the story of Sisyphus will be distracted if you say that Sisyphus just couldn’t get it up. You could even say he was given a boulder to roll up the mountain, but he couldn’t get it up. It doesn’t matter how you disguise it. It doesn’t matter what plausible meanings you provide for it, the electric “that reminds me of something” response will occur. [4] Trust me on that.

These are fun because they are predictable and are broadly accessible. But Matthew records that Joseph, the father of Jesus, is told in a dream to go to Galilee (rather than back home to Bethlehem) because “those who wanted to kill the child are dead.” (Matthew 2:20). It’s a puzzling verse because the only one we know about who wants to kill the little boy Jesus is Herod. If it said “because he who wanted to kill the child is dead,” we would understand it immediately. It doesn’t say that.

So my first thought would be that actually there were a lot of people in Jerusalem who wanted to kill Jesus. It wasn’t just Herod. And this message means that all of them are now dead. That’s perfectly plausible had Matthew’s focus been journalistic. You count how many wanted to kill the child; then you count how many of them have died. Then you send a messenger to tell Joseph. And all that might be true. We have no way of knowing.

It is quite certain, however, that Matthew’s focus was not journalistic. It was kerygmatic. It is focused, that is, on preaching. And what is Matthew preaching? He is preaching that Jesus is the new Moses. [5] That means preparing a Mosaic context for Jesus and you prepare the context by using language that makes the right group of hearers cock their heads and say, “that really sounds familiar.”

And it should sound familiar. In Exodus 4:19, where God says to Moses, “Go, return to Egypt, for those who wanted to kill you are dead.” The plural is clearly necessary here. Many translations read, “All the men who wanted…”

My argument [6] is that the preaching of Matthew requires a relationship between Jesus and Moses and he opens that bridge of association by using about Jesus, language that his hearers already associate with Moses. Now you are probably going to catch yourself objecting that the “get it up” association or the “knock her up” association are common knowledge, while the “those who sought the child’s life” association is opaque to nearly everyone. I’m sure it is opaque to nearly every modern Christian English speaker, but how many of those was Matthew writing for?

And there are lots of others in Matthew. Let’s just take one more. How about Matthew 2:15, “Out of Egypt I have called my son.” Two verses earlier, an angel appeared to Joseph in a dream [7] and told him to take his wife and child to Egypt. From a preaching standpoint, Matthew is opening the bridge to associations with Joseph the Patriarch who is the focus of Israel’s going to Egypt and to Moses, who is the focus of Israel’s escaping Egypt. It is not the journalism—no disrespect intended—that guides Matthew choice of associations. It is the preaching. The Joseph references and the Moses references and the Egypt references are indirect, under the radar ways to highlight the rich Old Testament background of Jesus, the Messiah.

I called those the under the radar associations, but when Matthew says that the sojourn in Egypt was made “to fulfill what the Lord had spoken through the prophet,” he is making a claim in broad daylight. In Hosea, 11:1 “When Israel was a child, I loved him/and I called my son out of Egypt.” There is no question that in the “son” metaphor, Hosea means to refer to the nation Israel. But there is also no question that Matthew uses it to refer to Jesus as “the son” who had been called from Egypt.

The other citation is even more fun because it is taken from Numbers 23, where Balaam, a Wise Man from the East, is told to curse the nation of Israel and refuses to do so because “God has brought him [Israel] out of Egypt.” Matthew wants to refer to Balaam the Wise Man [8] because Matthew has other Wise Men in mind and he’s been telling us about them since the beginning of Chapter 2. Matthew is tying the tent, the narrative about Jesus, to tent pegs driven into as many discrete pieces of Israelite lore as he can find.

I’m pretty sure Matthew didn’t do all that just so I could have this kind of fun with it, but I don’t think he would mind.

[1] For many years, we have worked only one infancy narrative at a time at our house. It was just not possible for me to keep the stories straight. So I wound up alternating years. It’s the only way I knew to keep the Wise Men and the Shepherds from running into each other at the stable. This is Matthew’s year.
[2] We do, in fact, put four bears on the Christmas tree in the Matthew year.
[3] The “bridge” metaphor belongs to Raymond E. Brown, a charming and erudite biblical scholar. He develops the metaphor in his lectures, The Infancy Narratives, which are available from welcomerecordings.com. I do think that the image of the bridge was made a good deal more available to me by watching Spielberg’s movie, Bridge of Spies, where people from one side “cross over” into the narrative of the other side.
[4] A lot of jokes in American English play with the British use of the expression “to knock up.” For Brits, “call up”—I’ll call you on the phone—and “knock up,” meaning that you will come to the house and knock on the door are parallel expressions. In the U.S., “knock up” more commonly means “to get [someone] pregnant,” as in “he knocked Victoria up in the back seat one warm summer evening.” This also happens to English speakers who think the Spanish embarazada means “embarrassed,”when, in fact, it means “pregnant.”
[5] Matthew is the one who is going to present Jesus’s teaching in the form of “you have heard it said [in the Law of Moses] that you shall not do Y, but I tell you that you should not even do X.” That makes perfect sense if Jesus is, for Matthew, “the new Moses,” and if Matthew is going to say things like this in chapter 5, it would be good to alert us in chapter 2, which is what he is doing with that “out of place” plural, “those.”
[6] Raymond Brown’s argument, really. I don’t want to make you tired of him, but the ideas I am working with are really not mine. Yet.
[7] An association is intended between Joseph, the son of Jacob, who made his way in the world by understanding dreams and Joseph, the son of Jacob, who married Mary and who is guided by dreams. Joseph the Patriarch is the reason the children of Israel stayed in Egypt in the first place. Joseph the father of Jesus was instructed to take the mother and child to Egypt.
[8] Balaam is a “magus,” the singular form of Magi. It can be translated astrologer or magician and in most cases, it is not a positive reference.

Posted in Biblical Studies | Tagged familiar phrasing, journalism, kerygma, Raymond Brown, the infancy narratives | Leave a comment

Plainsong

Posted on October 30, 2015 by hessd

Tucked into Kent Haruf’s novel, Plainsong, is a small and powerful plot. Haruf’s writing is lovely throughout this small story, but a lot of what he writes could be described as “what it is like to live in Holt County, Colorado.” [1] Those parts of the book didn’t really engage me.

Then in the 2nd chapter, [2] Victoria Roubideaux, a high school girl is discovered by her mother to be pregnant. At that point, although I didn’t know it then, the narrative that came to matter a great deal to me began. A few chapters later, locked out by an angry mother, Victoria winds up at Maggie Jones’s house and gets Maggie out of bed. She knows Maggie because Mrs. Jones is a teacher and Victoria seems to sense that she would be willing to listen to Victoria’s tale, even if she has to get out of bed to do it.

Maggie: Victoria? Is that you?

Victoria: Mrs. Jones. Could I talk to you?

Maggie: Well honey, yes. What’s wrong?

Just like that.

Maggie buys a kit and makes sure that Victoria actually is pregnant and then sets up an appointment with Dr. Martin, so options can be discussed. When allowing Victoria to stay at her house is no longer possible, she drives out to see the McPheron brothers, Harold and Raymond.

Her case that Harold and Raymond ought to let Victoria live with them has two parts. If you were diagramming it as a battle, you would say it had two fronts. Here they are.

“…that girl needs somebody and I’m ready to take desperate measures. She needs a home for these months. And you—she smiled at them—you old solitary bastards need somebody too. Somebody or something besides an old red ow to care about and worry over. It’s too lonesome out here.”

So the bothers say Yes and Maggie brings Victoria out to live with them. Harold is showing Victoria around the house, having no idea how to do it. [3] His “best manners” are an embarrassment. “Damn it, Maggie, I’m just trying to be proper. I’m just trying to get us started off on the right chalk. I don’t want to scare her off already.” Maggie patted his smooth-shaven cheek. “You’re doing just fine,” she said. “Keep going.”

Haruf doesn’t tell us how Maggie came to be the person Victoria could just crash in on, or how she came to be the person who shows up at the McPheron’s farm with a preposterous proposal which she justifies, in part by what she says they need. The reader has to take it for granted that in Holt, Colorado, it is plausible that Maggie would know what Harold and Raymond might need. But Maggie’s encouragement and her patting Harold’s cheek astounded me. Who is this woman? [4]

So Victoria comes to live with the McPheron brothers, but the social distance between the old brothers and the young girl is too great and Maggie has to make further demands on Harold and Russell.

“I was hoping I’d run into you,” she says to Harold when they meet at the grocery store. “What for,” says Harold, “What’d I do now?” Maggie’s response is, “Not enough. Neither one of you has.” Then:

You’re not talking to her. You and Raymond don’t talk like you should to that girl. Women want to hear some conversation in the evening. We don’t think that’ too much to ask. We’re willing to put up with a lot from you men, but in the evening we want to hear some talking. We want to have a little conversation in the house.” [5]

Finally, it is time for Victoria to have her baby. This is a girl who was impregnated by a self-important predator in the back seat of a car. She was thrown out of her house by an angry mother. She was kidnapped by the boy who got her pregnant and barely escaped from him. Victoria Roubideaux has been in some very difficult places.

But listen to this. This is where she has gotten to; this is the emotional climax, for me, of the Victoria story. She is just getting ready to go to the hospital to deliver the baby.

Earlier, she had thought that she would call Maggie on the day the pains started, but she had decided against it now….She had a feeling about wanting this to happen just for herself. And just for them too, the old brothers, without others being involved. She thought they had earned that.

This thing that has happened to her through the callousness and disregard of others is now something she “wants to happen just for herself.” That marks a lot of the journey traveled. And not only that, she wants it to happen “just for them too, the old brothers.” Now the “just” is out of place, I will grant. She can’t have the baby “just” for herself and also “just” for the brothers, but I think that language catches something of her emotional expressiveness and of her generosity as well. And I think that particularly because of the last phrase, “they had earned that.”

This girl who has not been given what she deserved by quite a few people is now making a judgment about what she owes these brothers; about what consideration they have “earned” from her with their steadfast kindness. Even to Maggie Jones, who made it all possible, she does not owe what she owes to them, to “the old brothers.”

Victoria Roubidoux has traveled a long and difficult road and she has arrived at a good place.

[1] The materials about “Holt” identify it as Holt County. The book itself treats it as a town, e.g. “seventeen mils southeast of Holt” is where the McPheron brothers live.
[2] The “fourth chapter” because the chapters don’t have numbers. Each chapter is named by the person (s) who are considered in that chapter. Thus, there are 12 chapters called “Victoria Roubideaux,” 9 called “McPherons,” and only one named “Maggie Jones,” who is, arguably, the central narrative mechanism of the story.
[3] Russell decides he is going to accept Victoria’s need to live there whether Harold wants to or not. It seems an oddly abrupt decision for brothers who have been on their own, without parents, since they were very young. Harold’s reproof of Raymond’s impulsiveness seems to me as charming as anything in the book. “Raymond,” says Harold, “You’re my brother. But you’re getting flat unruly and difficult to abide.”
[4] She also reaches down, as she and Guthrie are beginning the only lovemaking scene in the book, and takes hold of Guthrie’s penis. “You do make a person feel interested,” said Guthrie.
[5] In this one conversation, Maggie goes from “having a girl in your house” to “women want to hear some conversation” to “We—women like Victoria and me—don’t think it is too much to ask.” Harold is too slow to follow to series, but the reader is not. And we know that although Maggie aligns herself with Victoria as “we women,” she herself does not have “a little conversation in the house.” She lives with her demented father, which is to say, from a conversational standpoint, she lives alone.

Posted in Books | Tagged Colorado, Holt, the ingenious Maggie Jones, Written by Kent Haruf | Leave a comment

Bridge of Spies

Posted on October 21, 2015 by hessd

I will establish, in what I am about to say, that I am a movie illiterate. Would that be an invidiot? I like movies a lot, but I have no training and so, no depth of understanding. However. I would see nearly anything Steven Spielberg directs and nearly anything in which Tom Hanks stars and I have just seen Bridge of Spies twice in two days.

Spielberg moves from one scene to another in a way that just captivates me. Tom Hanks projects an affable man with a core of steel as well as anyone I know.

Bridge of Spies captures the very nice duality of Hanks and Philip Seymour Hoffman, playing Gust Avrokotos, in Charlie Wilson’s War. Hoffman plays a ready to rumble CIA operative and Hanks a congressman. The two don’t hit it off right away. Wilson says, “So…you’re no James Bond,” to which Avrokotos replies, “…and you’re no Thomas Jefferson so let’s call it even.” [1]

In Bridge of Spies, Hanks is given the Avrokotos part. He meets with official East German diplomats and official Soviet diplomats and is dumped into East Berlin on his own. He has no power and no authority, but he knows how to put a case when it matters and he has the guts of a burglar.

Everybody knows that Rudolf Abel was a spy for the USSR. He was captured and exchanged for U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers. Jim Donovan was a lawyer specializing in insurance cases. He was asked to defend Abel, which he did, and then appealed Abel’s conviction to the Supreme Court. In the movie, he did that against the wishes of his law partner (Alan Alda) and his family. He lost at the Supreme Court as well, 5-4. [2] That’s Mark Rylance in the middle, to Hanks’s right.

I point all that out just to say the nothing I am going to write here ought to be thought of as a spoiler. Besides, Donovan wrote about the whole affair himself in
Strangers on a Bridge: The Case of Colonel Abel and Francis Gary Powers. So all I really want to do is froth a little about what I liked.

I liked Mark Rylance as Rudolf Abel. Very quiet; very slow; very methodical. A marvelous wry sense of humor. He assures Donovan that he is not afraid to die. Then, after the perfect pause, he adds that it would not be his first choice. When Donovan marvels that Abel is not nervous, Abel asks, “Would it help?” They repeat that response several times and when I saw it the first time, the audience burst into laughter the third time the line showed up. “Hm,” I said to myself, “Radio humor.” You just keep using the line and the more often you hear it the funnier it gets.

Abel also provides a wonderful metaphor for Donovan’s character and he does by telling a fairly long story about an event that happened in his home town when he was a small boy. He saw a man beaten, but then the man stood up again. They hit him harder, but he stood up again. Finally, the leader called the beating off and called the man, “Stoyashchego,” which, Abel says, is something like “standing man.” [3] I thought the story took too long to tell when I heard it first. It seemed an idle memory; just filling in Abel’s character.

But at the crucial moment at the Glienicke Bridge in Berlin, Donovan risks it all. When he is supposed to let Abel go across the bridge, he just stands there, waiting. And Abel stands with him, waiting. And Abel says, “Stoyashchego.”

He doesn’t translate it. But now we know why that story he told took so long and why Abel gave us the Russian expression and also the English translation. Donovan, we now see, keeps getting back up.

And Spielberg makes his own commentary. After Powers, the American spy has come west and Abel, the Soviet spy has gone east, Donovan just stands there like this. I might be invidiot, but I’m not blind.

I liked Tom Hanks as James B. Donovan. He’s not hard to like, but because we like him, it is hard to remember to see his skills. I once had a mentor is state government who would reprove people tangled in needless conflict. “You are confronting a policy space the size of a football field,” he would say, “and you insist on fighting for space in a policy area the size of a phone booth.” That’s what Donovan did. He presented the situation in a way that allowed everyone to win something.

But that’s not all he did. Donovan was a nice guy, but if he had been only a nice guy, he would have lost this one. When he had been decisively defeated by the Soviet diplomat (the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) and then the East German diplomat (the German Democratic Republic) [4] and then arrested by the Volkspolizei, he stood back up and reframed the issue.

Here’s how he did that. He delivered this message to an underling who might or might not have understood what Donovan was saying. [5] The message he gave the underling was to ask his boss how he is going to feel explaining to the Soviets why they did not get their spy back because the East German was more interested in fending off a diplomatic snub by the United States. “Ask him,” said Donovan, in effect, “to picture himself delivering this message to people who will be angry and who have the means to punish him. Forget the law and what is fair and what will serve all parties and focus on whether you want to have to deliver that message.”

I remember these events from newspapers and TV. We do get to hear, it a brief clip, the voice of David Brinkley talking about the story. But I never understood the story this way. And now, if you will excuse me, Donovan’s account of what happened has arrived on my Kindle and I want to go read it.

[1] That’s not the way IMDb.com has the quotes, but that’s the way I remember them and they flow better the way I remember them.
[2] Frankfurter wrote the decision. He was joined by Harlan, Whittaker, Stewart, and Jackson. Brennan wrote the dissent, joined by Warren, Black, and Douglas.
[3] Erdem Gündüz is a Turkish dancer, actor, performance artist, choreographer, and teacher, a man I had never heard of until today. In 2013 he stood quietly in Istanbul’s Taksim Square as a protest against the Islamist government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He became “internationally known,” according to a Wikipedia article as “The Standing Man.”
[4] Donovan quips at this point that the real difficulty is that the names are too long.
[5] We think, watching the movie, that he might have really understood because all his English prior to this was very correct and formal. But when Donovan asks if he understands the complicated message he has been asked to deliver, the kid replies in an amazingly colloquial way, “Got it.” And that was not, by the way, what anyone would have said in 1962. Spielberg knows he is addressing a 2015 audience and he “translates” the line from what would have been said in 1962 to what would carry the same tone today. Nice job.

Posted in Movies | Tagged Cold War, Francis Gary Powers, Rudolf Abel, Steven Spielberg, tom hanks | 3 Comments

Mr Bennet’s Folly

Posted on October 18, 2015 by hessd

It is really hard to dislike Mr. _____ Bennet. [1] In the early scenes, he stands unmoved amid the hurricane force moods of his wife. The wife is so obnoxious that I felt an immediate admiration for Mr. Bennet just for being unmoved. In one of the early scenes, for instance, Mrs. Bennet is lamenting at the very top of her emotional range.

Mr. Bennet, how can you abuse your own children [in his previous remark, he characterized his daughters by saying “they are all silly and ignorant like other girls”] in such a way. You have no compassion on my poor nerves.

To which he responds:

You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration these last twenty years at least.

And because Mr. Bennet is so cool under these effusions from his wife, I have always tended to like him. I’m going to try to get over that in this post. Jane Austen gives us every reason to judge him harshly. She does not give us much motive, pairing him with his silly wife, but she does give us grounds. I never really noticed that until recently.

The story of Elizabeth Bennet starts to go the wrong direction when Mr. Bennet chooses his wife.

Her father, captivated by youth and beauty, and that appearance of good humour, which youth and beauty. generally give, had married a woman whose weak understanding and illiberal mind…

Mr. Bennet was “captivated” by the youth and beauty of the young woman he chose. He inferred, incorrectly, it turns out, that she was a woman “of good humor.” She was not. Further, she had “a weak understanding” and “an illiberal mind.” [2]. So, a bad choice.

But it gets worse. The weak understanding and the illiberal mind:

…had very early in their marriage put an end to all real affection for her. Respect, esteem, and confidence, had vanished for ever; and all his views of domestic happiness were overthrown.

This doesn’t seem quite fair. These traits of Mrs. Bennet “put an end to” Mr. Bennet’s affection. Does Mr. Bennet have no voice in the matter? No agency? Are his wife’s traits something that is done to him, to which he can respond only by retreating into irony? In any case, Mr. Bennet no longer has affection for her, nor respect for her, nor esteem for her, nor confidence in her. And that is the relationship between them that we see in the first scene of the book.

On the other hand, we don’t really care all that much in the first scene of the book. But later on (page 180 in my copy [3]), it matters a great deal. By this time we know that Mr. Darcy (who is Proud) has fallen in love with Elizabeth (who is Prejudiced) and she, almost, with him. Then word comes that Lydia, the irresponsible youngest daughter, has eloped with a dastard. Elizabeth understands immediately that Lydia’s disgraceful behavior is the end for her own relationship with Darcy.

[Darcy] seemed scarcely to hear her, and was walking up and down the room in earnest meditation, his brow contracted, his air gloomy. Elizabeth soon observed, and instantly understood it. Her own power was sinking; every thing must sink under such a proof of family weakness, such an assurance of the deepest disgrace.

By the time this happens to Elizabeth, we care very much about her disreputable family, and that leads us back to Mr. Bennet, whom we can, in this context, consider less kindly. He has taught his five daughters very bad lessons about family life.

Had Elizabeth’s opinion been all drawn from her own family, she could not have formed a very pleasing picture of conjugal felicity or domestic comfort. (p. 154)

By means that Austen doesn’t disclose, Elizabeth has escaped the picture of dysfunction that her father has drawn. Elizabeth still knows what a family would look like if it were done right. She also knows that her father has not done that and she tells him so plainly.

Our importance [the Bennet family], our respectability in the world, must be affected by the wild volatility, the assurance and disdain of all restraint which mark Lydia’s character. Excuse me—for I must speak plainly. If you, my dear father, will not take the trouble of checking her exuberant spirits, and of teaching her that her present pursuits are not to be the business of her life, she will soon be beyond the reach of amendment.

These are the harshest words Elizabeth has for her father. He will not “take the trouble.” Elizabeth thinks he should have and she knows that for her prospects with Mr. Darcy it is too late, but she still thinks Mr. Bennet should step in and do something about Lydia. We know that is not going to happen because Mr. Bennet has made his life tolerable by retreating into an unheeding distance.

To his wife he was very little otherwise indebted, than as her ignorance and folly had contributed to his amusement. This is not the sort of happiness which a man would in general wish to owe to his wife; but where other powers of entertainment are wanting, the true philosopher will derive benefit from such as are given.

Austen calls this emotional distance “philosophy.” “The true philosopher,” Austen says. I think she means only “resignation” or perhaps “wry amusement.” She certainly has no higher hopes for him.

In order to “take the trouble,” Mr. Bennet would have to take his family seriously, which means that he would have to take his wife seriously, which he is not willing to do. So the family of otherwise marriagable girls suffers, which means that Elizabeth suffers and that last disaster really hurts readers who admire Elizabeth. Like me, for instance.

And further, if Mr. Bennet were to have thought about the marriage chances of his daughters, he would have been well-advised to endow them with enough money to attract—or at least, not to repel—suitors. He didn’t do that either.

Mr. Bennet had very often wished, before this period of his life, that instead of spending his whole income, he had laid by an annual sum, for the better provision of his children, and of his wife, if she survived him. He now wished it more than ever.

He ended by settling five thousand pounds on Mrs. Bennet and the children. Having refused, year after year, to set aside enough money to help support the girls’ marriage hopes, he ends by being disappointed in himself, and even, for a brief time, ashamed.

So…I have come a long way from my early enjoyment of Mr. Bennet. His reliance on ironic detachment works if I place it against the background of his undisciplined and garrulous wife. If I place his behavior against the background of his responsibility to provide for the girls a family life that would support and instruct them and a financial backing that help them find husbands, if find him not all that enjoyable.

[1] According to my heavily annotated edition, no first name is ever given for Mr. Bennet. And, if memory serves, he ends his letters with the closing, Yours &ct. where others, Darcy, for instance, end with their names. Hm.
[2] I am no Austen scholar, but I do think it is important that we give these crucial charges the meaning and the weight she intended to give them. My best guess is that “weak understanding” refers to the lack of subtlety she displays. People are good or bad; her daughters are better than anyone else’s daughters; grasping at recognition from one’s social superiors can only produce good results. I think the old meaning of “liberal” as “free from constraints” is what Austen has in mind when she describes Mrs. Bennet as “illiberal.” Her mind is bound to the small setting of her village and the everyday beliefs of her neighbors. She doesn’t read or think, so she is trapped.
[3] I am very partial to the Norton Critical Editions of the Austen novels. There are notes on corrections Jane Austen or her sister made from one edition of the book to another, explanations of the meaning of a given word at the time it was written, and a lot of critical reflection, about 150 pages of it, at the end.

Posted in Books | Tagged a failed father, Elizabeth Bennet, Mr. Bennet, Pride and Prejudice | Leave a comment

Screwtape and Salience Games

Posted on October 11, 2015 by hessd

From the time I first read The Screwtape Letters (TSL), I have been intrigued by the way Screwtape plays with salience. And that was before I spent four very concentrated years at the University of Oregon studying salience. In this essay, I would like to follow that notion a little and see where it leads me.

The gimmick of TSL is that it consists of letters from a very senior and important devil to a much younger and less experienced devil. Screwtape is the head [1] of a large department, in a sense, and Wormwood is just one of the many devils who work in that department under Screwtape’s mentorship. Wormwood has only one person, a “patient” in Screwtape’s vocabulary, to focus on and his job is to damn the man’s soul or, again in Screwtape’s language, to bring the patient “safe into the House of our Father Below,” i.e., in Hell. The point of all the letters of advice from Screwtape is to help Wormwood with this single task.

I called this perspective a gimmick, meaning no disrespect, because it provides a different perspective on spiritual issues and it attracts and holds our attention. Still, it is worth pointing out that Lewis, a well-known medievalist and philologist, does not really know how Screwtape looks at things. Lewis’s notion is not derived from biblical texts, which show only the mildest and most occasional interest in angelology, but from Milton, who cares quite a bit about angels. That means, to say the same thing another way, what we are told about Screwtape is true to Milton—Lewis, the scholar, passes it along faithfully—but not to scripture.

Now there is a sense in which Screwtape knows what God knows. The Devil, Screwtape’s boss, is a “spiritual being,” and Screwtape sees things as they really are. [2] But “knowing” is not the whole thing for the Bad Guys. They recognize the holiness of God and the grace of God and they hate it passionately. They deny it when they remember to, but often Screwtape says what is going on in terms that any Christian would recognize and then says how completely nauseous it is. So Screwtape’s information is first class, but his value system is abysmal. [3] The abyss is in the foreground here. In the background is “Pandemonium,” literally “the place of all demons.”

So the reader knows, although Screwtape uses language like “safe in the House of our Father Below,” that it is the eternal destruction of this person’s soul that is his object. And Screwtape’s object is the direct and sole responsibility of the apprentice devil, Wormwood. That means that when Screwtape says to Wormwood, “You need to be careful to do this…” .or “Try to keep him from realizing that,” we know that if we are interested in the salvation of the man’s soul, in terms that Christians would recognize, we need to be against what Wormwood is for. [4]

So if we could imagine ourselves as the Christian mentor to Wormwood’s “patient,” we would quickly see that all the advice is bad. It is bad so far as its moral direction goes—evil is praised and good is denied—and it is bad so far as salience goes.

“Salience” is not a word that is used as much as I would like. It derives from the Latin verb, salire, meaning “to jump.” We would say that the “salient” part of a statute or an argument or a property deed “jumps out” at us; that it calls itself to our attention. [5] Screwtape says things like, “Under these circumstances, be sure the patient is paying attention to A, but under other circumstances, our cause will be better served by focusing his attention on B.”
The first example comes in the first letter.

I once had a patient, a sound atheist, who used to read in the British Museum. One day, as he sat reading, I saw a train of thought in his mind beginning to go the wrong way. The Enemy, of course, was at his elbow in a moment. Before I knew where I was I saw my twenty years’ work beginning to totter.

The patient’s mind is “beginning to go the wrong way.” His thoughts are on a trail that leads to a serious consideration of God and what claim God might have on his life, in particular. For the patient to pay attention to those ideas, for him to claim them as salient, would be a disaster for Screwtape—20 years of his work with the patient, he says, is at risk. What to do?

Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 3 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man’s head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of ‘real life’ (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all ‘that sort of thing’ just couldn’t be true.

What to do? Change what is salient. The patient could sit there and focus on these new thoughts, but Screwtape suggests that it is time for lunch. On his way out to lunch, he sees the No. 3 bus and hears a newsboy and the salience of what he categorizes as “real things” takes over. The ideas God was proposing become “that sort of thing” and the bus and the newsboy become “a healthy dose of real life.”

So not only does what is salient, what draws and holds the patient’s attention, change from A to B, but also from the standpoint of B, A is redefined. When his mind began to move in the direction of God, it was kind of interesting. Scary, maybe, but intriguing. Once the patient chooses B as his focus, he looks back at A and redefines it as uninteresting and probably false.

Lewis gives us a special treat by having Screwtape recall this event with satisfaction. By this time we know that the man’s soul is damned, he is, as Screwtape says, “safe in our Father’s house,” i.e. in Hell. And knowing that, Screwtape gives us the very language that the patient used later in his life, recalling his “narrow escape” at the British Museum: he was fond of talking about “that inarticulate sense for actuality which is our ultimate safeguard against the aberration of mere logic.” [6]

Salience is everything.

Let’s try one more example. Here is Screwtape’s formulation. Remember that in these exchanges of letters, Screwtape is the tutor. He is the master of the craft which Wormwood, the junior devil, is supposed to be learning.

One can therefore formulate the general rule; in all activities of mind which favour our cause, encourage the patient to be unself-conscious and to concentrate on the object, but in all activities favourable to the Enemy bend his mind back on itself.

That’s the rule. The rest of that paragraph is an example.

Let an insult or a woman’s body so fix his attention outward that he does not reflect ‘I am now entering into the state called Anger—or the state called Lust.’ Contrariwise let the reflection ‘My feelings are now growing more devout, or more charitable’ so fix his attention inward that he no longer looks beyond himself to see our Enemy or his own neighbours.

These are salience games, as you can clearly see. Direct the patient’s attention outward in all cases where the external focus will help us damn him. The salient matter is the bad behavior of the guy at the bar—sorry, the “pub”—or his bad character. Focus on those. Inundate yourself in how despicable he is. Do NOT allow the patient to see that he is getting angry or being unreasonably judgmental or losing his self-control. If those, the state of his mind at the moment, become the salient matters, he will reject them. He will not choose anger. But if he is thinking about the moron at the pub, the question of anger will never come up; it will never become the salient question.

The other side of this, indicated by Screwtape’s use of “contrariwise,” is in all cases where the patient’s inward attention will help us damn him, then focus his attention on those. If he is taking a turn toward thoughtful and sympathetic treatment of a difficult friend or relative, we don’t want him thinking about the friend or relative, not about the effects of his behavior on them, not about what additional services they might require. If those are highly salient to the patient, then our cause—Screwtape’s cause—is not looking good. What Screwtape wants is for the patient to be focusing on how kind and sympathetic he is; how noble, how generous.

The more he thinks about what a nice person he is, the thinner and more vulnerable his choice of good actions will be. The salience is directed inward in such a case, not outward.

So we can look now, at Screwtape’s rule—favoring us, focus out; favoring them, focus in—works in practice. All the power of his analysis flows from a very simple truth: what you are paying attention to, matters. It matters particularly as it affects what you are not paying attention to.

[1] The author, C. S. Lewis, has a lot of fun with spatial terms in this book. Because “Our Father in Heaven” is a standard Jewish and Christian way of referring to God, Screwtape refers to his own boss as “our Father Below.” Lewis gives Screwtape the nonsense word “Lowerarchy,” as if it could be set off as the opposite of hierarchy. It can’t: hierarchy derives from hieros a Greek word meaning “sacred” or “holy.” Screwtape’s word would have to be Higherarchy, but Lewis is a linguist and he is having fun. Is it really appropriate, in terms of this inversion, to say that Screwtape is the “head” of a department? Would he be the tail or the foot or the butt or something? Similarly, can we say with confidence that a junior devil works “under” his boss? If the boss is very low in the Lowerarchy, do not his “subordinates” work “above him?” There is really no way to be consistent about it, but as I say, Lewis is just having fun.
[2] He is forced, sometimes, for reasons of office politics, to deny that he knows what he knows, but he slips up—Lewis makes sure Screwtape slips up—frequently enough that we know what he really sees. Screwtape and Wormwood are on the wrong side of that quip in the New Testament Letter of James in which James sarcastically congratulates his addressees on “mere orthodoxy.” “What you believe,” says James, “is orthodox. Good for you. The devils believe the same thing and it scares them silly. You don’t even have the wit to be frightened.” Screwtape, for instance, describes the actual presence of God in terms that sound very much like the description of “the glory of God” in Exodus except that the “clouds of glory” are horrible asphyxiating vapors to Screwtape.
[3] Lewis uses that word too. It once meant “of or pertaining to the Abyss,” i.e. to Hell. It has come to be a term of general derogation—your grades this term have been abysmal—but Lewis knows what it once meant and puns on it mercilessly.
[4] That didn’t always work out in practice. The Screwtape Letters were printed, one at a time in the newspaper, and one reader wrote the paper to say that the “advice” that Screwtape was giving was very bad advice; that it was ultimately “diabolical.” That’s the word he chose. It must have made Lewis’ day to see the perspective he formulated for the Devil to be called “diabolical” by a reader.
[5] The means by which this “jumping out” occurs has been studied by cognitive psychologists for many years and is now being studied by neurologists. All I really need from the word is “something you are likely to pay attention to” and that is what Screwtape has in mind, without using the word, as well.
[6] I really like that kind of language. It sounds so smart, so appealing. And Lewis wants us to be drawn by it while at the same time we know that it is by words like this that the patient chooses Hell.

Posted in Books, Living My Life, Theology, ways of knowing | Tagged heaven, hell, paying attention, Screwtape, the value of salience, Wormwood | Leave a comment

The Moral Minority

Posted on October 6, 2015 by hessd

Molly Worthen writes in The New York Times (see the column here) that Donald Trump’s candidacy has exacerbated a split among evangelicals. She describes it like this.

What is most striking is that Mr. Trump’s campaign has exposed a rift within evangelicalism — a split between those calling for culture war as usual and those who say Christians must adjust to life as a minority in American Babylon.

I confess that I was taken aback by the phrase “culture war as usual.” The American phrase was borrowed from the German Kulturkampf, where a better understanding is “struggle.” No one would deny that we are having a “struggle” about the most appropriate cultural commitments in the U. S., but it may not really be a translation problem. It may just be that what is a “struggle” anywhere else in the world starts getting called a “war” as soon as it hits the U. S. Lexical inflation? It’s always worse when it happens to me?

The culture war should continue according to this evangelical faction. And what is the war about? Well, let’s just run down the list that James Davison Hunter provided in 1991 in his very useful book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. He surveyed abortion, federal and state gun laws, global warming, immigration, separation of church and state, privacy, recreational drug use, homosexuality, and censorship. Looks familiar, doesn’t it?

That’s a lot we could choose to fight about, you will agree. but not everyone thinks differences should be fought about. My mind goes immediately to H. Richard Niebuhr’s influential book Christ and Culture. In that book, he laid out five modes of dealing with the conflict between what churches feel they are being called to do and what the more pervasive culture is doing.

Niebuhr proposes that Christians have disagreed among themselves about whether to “withdraw from, compromise with, or selectively affirm and reject, or transform society.” [1] I was raised in a “withdraw from” culture, the one Niebuhr calls “Christ against Culture.” Politics is a dirty business, the general culture is corrupt and if we are to be holy as God requires—the principal thrust of holy is “separate from”—then we need to withdraw. The Amish are a good example of that choice.

All that changed for the conservative wing of Protestantism around 1980. For one thing, Paul Michael Weyrich, a conservative political activist coined the term “moral majority.” It’s a really good phrase for a nation that prides itself on majority rule and that keeps electing thoroughgoing secularists to office. They are “only the political majority,” Weyrich’s term says, while we are “the moral majority.”

The moral majority took on electoral significance through the work of Kevin Phillips, who argued, in The New Republican Majority, that the Republican party could get a lot more votes out of the white south if they stopped trying for racial justice. He called it “the Southern Strategy.” Here’s a quote of his from the New York Times from May 1970.

From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that…but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes [that was the publicly acceptable term for American blacks in 1970, by the way; it is not a racial slur] who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.

You’ll have to admit that worked pretty well. Unless you are old, like me, or have read a lot of political history, you wouldn’t know that the expression “Solid South” once referred to the political monopoly of the Democratic party in the South. As a result of Phillips’ analysis and the Republican party’s pursuit of his logic, it is now solidly Republican.

So the culture wars that James Davison Hunter wrote about and the moral majority that Paul Michael Weyrich named, now have a solid sectional and electoral foundation. With that as a background, the expression “culture war as usual” actually makes sense.

But I began by observing that Molly Worthen says that there was a split among evangelicals and so far I haven’t called the other side anything. I think maybe “Moral Minority” would be appropriate. On second thought, I’ll write that without the capital letters: moral minority. What would that mean?

First, it would mean that these evangelicals do not imagine themselves as representing a majority view in the U. S. Jerry Fallwell and Pat Robertson, two of the best-known of the Moral Majority, argued that there existed a majority in the U. S. supporting of their views and their job was to mobilize it. Representatives of the moral minority don’t think that is true now and deny that it was ever true or that it ever will be true. They deny “a Christian America, either of the made-up past or the hoped-for future.” That language belongs to Russell Moore, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. Moore was one of Worthen’s major sources for the column.

Just what that means politically isn’t really clear to me. If these evangelicals were political leftists, they could scan down the list of culture war items Hunter provides and take the progressive side (that would be the “sinful” side in Moral Majority terms). So, to pick just a few, they would be in favor of a woman’s right to choose abortion (not the same as being pro-abortion), they would want tighter federal and state gun laws, they would be environmental activists, strictly police the wall that is supposed to and sometimes does separate church and state and so on. That’s not what they do, according to Ms. Worthen.

These evangelicals are not more liberal than the Moral Majority; they are just responding to the issues in a different way. They might be convinced anti-abortion activists, for example, but what they would do is witness to their faith in declaring abortion to be wrong. They would not try to pass laws against it or control access to hospitals where it is offered. They might picket a clinic that offers abortions—that would be part of their “witness”—but if they did, they would be nice about it.

Again, Moore provides the language: “Change doesn’t come from a position of power, but a position of witness.” Rejecting “a position of power” is rejecting the Moral Majority approach. The moral minority position is a clear witness to their faith in God and in the social practices God demands from His followers. God does not, in this image, demand such behavior from non-followers.

So, for instance, we could imagine a moral minority member refusing to open his or her business on a Sunday. That is a witness to God’s having declared “a Sabbath” to be holy. They would not, as a part of their witness, demand that everyone else close their businesses on the Christian sabbath.

Dr. David Platt, a megachurch pastor, points out the role of William Wilberforce, the

WHM146809 Portrait of William Wilberforce (1759-1833), 1794 (oil on canvas) by Hickel, Anton (1745-98)
oil on canvas
© Wilberforce House, Hull City Museums and Art Galleries, UK
German, out of copyright

evangelical politician who helped end slavery in the British Empire, as a helpful example, and Gabe Lyons, who runs a conference and media organization called Q, says, “We want to be a counterculture for the common good,” he said. “A counterculture can be antagonistic, lobbing grenades, but that’s not how Christians should be engaging.” In these two comments, Platt indicates how broadly cooperative he would like to see the work of evangelicals and Lyons describes a little of the style (not throwing grenades) that would support such a breadth.

But the moral minority is not pushing for doing nothing. They want to be sweetly reasonable but they want to be effective as well. The moral minority want to reject the immorality of the society that surrounds them. Dr. Platt points out that one of the Apostle Paul’s most vital churches, was set in “the fleshpots of First Century Corinth” and Paul’s council to the Christians in his charge was not to participate in such practices. Paul did not go on to urge them to take over Corinth and set everybody straight.

Then there is the question, also, of distinct Christian practices affirmed by the moral minority approach. Dr. Platt urges evangelicals to “reject Christian nationalism, ‘cap’ their materialistic lifestyles and give more to charity.” These are ways they can witness to their faith. If they are going to be active in politics, Platt would like to see crusades against human trafficking where a coalition as broad as Wilberforce’s might be sustained, rather than against abortion, which is a deeply divisive and solidly partisan issue.

So as Molly Worthen sees it, the evangelicals in their response to Donald Trump are dividing into two groups. The first is the old style Moral Majority, taking pubic power and brandishing “the sword of the Lord.” The second is the newer, smaller moral minority that emphasized witness more than power and persistent persuasion over the sectarian bullhorn.

There is no question in my mind that the culture generally is moving in a direction opposed to both groups. Surveys reflecting attitudes toward homosexuality, for instance, show a decade by decade decrease in condemnation until it gets down to people who simply cannot grasp why you are asking the question at all. For many years now, surveys on abortion show majorities who say it is a bad idea and majorities who are opposed to depriving women of the right to choose abortions. Even in the South and even in the current Supreme Court, the logic of a secular government presiding over a richly religious—of many religions—people seems to continue to hold sway.

It is in their response to these cultural developments, as I see them, at least, that the two groups of evangelicals have divided.

[1] I took this list of options from a book whose authors are deeply critical of Niebuhr’s work: Authentic Transformation: A New Vision of Christ and Culture. You can tell from the title that these authors think Niebuhr chose “transformation—the church transforming the world” as his favorite. You can also tell that they don’t think much of his choice. These authors’ choice was “authentic transformation,” not the kind they say Niebuhr wants.

Posted in Politics, Sustainability, Theology | Tagged Christ and Culture, faithful witness, Jerry Fallwell, moral issues and politics, moral majority, the Southern Strategy | Leave a comment

Where did Cain’s Wife Come From?

Posted on October 5, 2015 by hessd

One of the enduring questions about reading the Bible, is how to read it with the same interests and worldview as the author of the story. [1] I know that way of saying it makes it sound easy. I apologize for that because I am sure you know it is not easy.

It is going to take us a little while to get to why this point causes friction because we are going to have to start in very early childhood.

If we started at the very beginning, we would have to go back to that stage of early childhood where the child first discovers that different minds have different contents. “I know this is true, but she thinks that is true.” It is only an extension of that early awareness to note that the author of a biblical text pictures the world differently that I do, has different values to account for and keeps those values in a different priority order than mine, imagines that there is such a thing as “the natural world” or not and if there is one, what the rules of its operation are and under what circumstances they can be broken.

Now I can know that to be true—the author thinks this way and I think that way—and still have no inclination at all to prefer the author’s understanding to mine. When Tamar—one of my favorite people in the Bible, not just one of my favorite women in the Bible—seduces her father-in-law, Judah, and gets pregnant, we want to say that she shouldn’t have. Naughty, naughty. But to the author, is it the supreme act of obedience to God and compassionate service to the father-in-law. [2] To understand Tamar, see Genesis 38, you have to care about what the author cares about and the author is engaged in caring about what The Author cares about, which is, in this case the regular transmission of property from one generation to another. There is a lot of sexual activity in Tamar’s story and we, in our very sexualized age, are drawn to it in a way the author is not. And that’s just Tamar. There are a lot of stories where the challenge of caring about what the author cares about is much more severe.

We are now almost to the step where we started. We know now that we need to find a way to get inside the author’s intention or we will not understand the text. One way to do that is to recognize the kind of text it is. Is is a history? If so, is it guided by modern or ancient notions how how to do a history? Is is poetry? If so, are the arts that make their poetry work the same as ours? Is it biography? Where did the information come from to describe the crucial events of that life? Is it myth and folklore? What events is this folklore about and/or what lessons does it try to teach?

OK. NOW we are back to where we started. This is the why of reading the stories in this way. Now we get to the “how” question. How do we do all those things? [3] Well…this has been pretty abstract. Let’s take a particular question. How about one of the all-time favorites, “Where did Cain’s wife come from?”

If you have been reading along in Genesis, you have noticed the prototypical human couple, Adam and Eve. They had two children, Cain and Abel. That is the pool of people to draw from. Now, suddenly, Cain gets married. Huh? Who? The only named woman so far is his mother, Eve! Uck! We don’t want to go there. So…where?

Using the understanding that there are multiple stories going on, all at once, and that characters may drift from one story to another, gives us a new way to understand Cain and a new way to answer the question. A lot of stuff was going on in the neighborhood while we were focused on Cain and Abel. The woman Cain married came from one of those other stories.

So how do we understand the stories if there are a lot of them going on at the same time, representing several genres of literature and drama? This is going to sound simpleminded, I know, but I recommend starting with the question, “What is this story about?” Every narrative is there for a reason. Every narrative requires a time and a space for its logic to play out. Every narrative requires a cast of characters adequate to the time, the space, and the meaning.

So…questions like what, for instance. How about these?
why is there evil in the world?
why do we die?
what is the intended relationship of men and women (two answers are provided)?
what is the fundamental relationship between God and humankind?
why does childbirth hurt?
why is it so hard to make a living?
where is matter come from OR (alternatively) why is matter ordered rather than chaotic?
why do we all speak different languages?

And so on.

Every one of those is addressed in a story that does not preclude other stories which account for the same interest. Here are some examples.

Example 1: Adam and Eve

For there to be a relation between humankind and God, there needs to be one entity called human. Not many entities: one. Genesis manages that by having God create the progenitors of the one race, the human race, and proposing a relationship of a certain kind with them. The oneness is crucial. It’s how we understand human nature, how we understand the Fall and sin; how we understand being a race of people alienated from God (alienated from the relationship for which we were created) and in need of reconciliation.

Example 2: Cain and Abel

Italian Baroque Painting of the Killing of Abel and the Banishment of Cain — Image by © Geoffrey Clements/CORBIS ORG XMIT: 12873731

But when you move to kinds of economies and of cultures, you don’t need oneness, you need multiplicity. Actually, two-ness will be enough. You make Cain, a farmer, and Abel, a rancher/shepherd. It’s very much “Oh, the ranchers and the cowhands should be friends” from Oklahoma! That’s who Cain and Abel are: they are the farmers and the cowhands.

Now the story comes from a people who are nomadic herders, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it was the farmer’s sacrifice that was not acceptable. When Israel occupies a land and grows its own crops, the crops can be “sacrificed” (the first fruits) as well, but Cain and Abel are a lot earlier than that. Israel is going to be a nation with animal sacrifice an essential part of its religious practice, so God needs to prefer the sacrifice of an animal—Abel’s sacrifice—as the right kind.

Again, as the question becomes “this way of life or that one” the oneness emphasis of the humankind in paradise gives way to the multiplicity of economies. It requires another stage setting because it is another question. A new question gets a new cast of characters and a new set of scenery and a new narrative focus and so on.

Example 3: The Tower of Babel

One more. Humankind living together in an urban setting. Huge numbers of them, all speaking the same language and proud of their technological powers. “God is up there,” they reason, “and we know how to build a tower that gets us up there. Let’s build it and overthrow God.” You see what question is being asked, so you see what kind of setting will have to be constructed so that the answer can be played out. God notices the work and decides to “confuse”—I think today we might have said “diversify”—their languages so that can’t cooperate with each other. Another story based on a question and with a new cast of characters.

So what is a good answer to a child who is thinking these matters through for the first time and stumbles on Cain getting a wife from…well, from nowhere? I have sketched, above, the answer I think is a good answer, but you may have noticed—those of you who are parents will certainly have noticed—that it is not an answer to the question the child asked.

It is not a good practice to tell a child he or she should not have asked that question. It is especially bad if you want the child to continue to formulate and ask interesting questions. I think what I would do is to point out how many stories are going on at the same time. Genesis 1—11 gives an amazing buffet of stories. If they are all taken as historical, one precludes another. But if they are taken as answers to questions, there is a story that goes with every question and you can focus as much as you want or even as much as the child wants on the relationship between the narrative and the point.

The child will continue to be interested in reading these stories in the wrong way because that is the way he or she has been taught to read stories. But coming back over and over to the relationship between the story and why it matters (the point) ought to function, eventually as a kind of narrative rope-a-dope and the child’s curiosity about these stories as history ought to wane, while the freshness and the significance of the stories as narrative that say something important ought to remain.

To tell you the truth, I don’t remember whether it worked with my kids. It has worked really for me and I continue to learn things about these stories that amaze me.

[1] In the context of my own upbringing, the question was always of the Author (God, obviously) and not the author, say Nehemiah. After all these years, I find I am entirely happy with the Author/author division but I have made the work of the Author the presupposition and the work of the author the focus of my study.
[2] No, not that kind of service. By my calculation, Tamar saves Judah’s life by running the particular con she managed so well.
[3] With great difficulty, I would say, and only by persistent study—particularly if you were trained, as I was, that all that was not necessary. I’ve been working on this for nearly 70 years and I still have bad habits to catch and refuse.

Posted in Biblical Studies, Getting Old | Tagged Adam and Eve, biblical narrative, Cain and Abel, Cain's wife, multiple plots | Leave a comment

Being the Sweep

Posted on September 30, 2015 by hessd

On every bike tour IBT (International Bicycle Tours) does, there is a Sweep. [1] On nearly every bike tour I have taken with IBT—the Danube (twice), Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium, the Rhine and the Mosel Rivers, and most recently the Loing River valley in France—I have had a chance to be the Sweep for one day.

We were working our way up toward Paris on September 17 when I was chosen as Sweep most recently. The Sweep’s job is to be dead last. IBT prides itself on never losing anyone on a bike trip and the key to all that is the Sweep. [2] Here’s how serious they are about it.

If your bike breaks down, the Sweep waits with you until it can be fixed or replaced
If you have to find a bush that will accommodate taking a discrete leak, the Sweep will wait for you
If there is a picture you really need to take and which will take you away from the bike path, you tell the Sweep and go wherever you need to go and when you get back, the Sweep is waiting for you.
Being the Sweep is one of the very few things you can do that will allow people to address you by your status (Sweep) rather than your name, as in “Thank you Sweep.”

So I always thought it was a big deal to be chosen Sweep for that day. That makes sense to me. The leader thinks I can be counted on to exercise the discipline of being last and to make the unpredictable decisions that crop up from time to time. Here’s what didn’t make sense to me. I took positive pleasure in my Sweep day. And when I did, I remembered that I had enjoyed it on those earlier days as well. I enjoyed interactions between the other riders that I would not have paid any attention to before and, even better, I was simply not irked at the normal run of stupid things that someone will do on any given day. Here is the Village of Mammés, at the confluence of the Loing and the Seine, by the way. I wouldn’t swear that we saw this exact scene, but we saw quite a few like it.

So…more responsibility and less irritation and more pleasure. Not really a common combination, is it? How does it work?

My guess is that it works because when I am the Sweep, my own wishes are not the top item on my mental agenda. Ordinarily, I have a pretty acute sense of what I want to happen and sometimes I allow that to morph over to “what should happen.” But when I have a job—being Sweep is a job—the top item is whether the things I am responsible for are happening. Am I really the last rider? Is the group getting too strung out? The riders below are not us. There were twice as many of “us” but you get the idea.

So what happens if someone wants to stop and take pictures of each other—not “look how beautiful France is” pictures, but “here I am in front of some garden gate” pictures? If I were not the Sweep, I would just pass them and rejoin the group. No harm; no foul. As the Sweep, I have to wait until they are done unless waiting too long would separate us too much from the rest of the riders. It seems to me, taking my own personality into account, that waiting for people to do things that don’t have any value anyway (no value I recognize) would be extraordinarily irksome. But it was not.

Why? Well, if the top item on the agenda is “Am I doing my job well?” then the second item, “Am I being inconvenienced by the lack of discipline of my fellow riders?” just does not get asked. If it did get asked, the answer would be Yes! and I am quite sure I would either be angry or engaged in some sort of anger management strategy. But nothing they are doing is preventing me from being the very last rider, which is my job, so only the first question is asked and by that standard, everything is just fine.

It doesn’t make sense right away. When I am freed to do what I want—I am one rider in a line of riders—I get irked by the gimmicks other riders use. Some of those things are selfish. Some are just insensitive. Some are dangerous. I disapprove of them in principle and several times, had a fall from my bike because of them, a sad fact to which I refer later.[3] But in every case where I am just one rider among many, the top question in my mind is “Am I being inconvenienced by the lack of discipline of my fellow riders?” And, as I noted earlier, when the question gets asked, the answer is certain and my own emotional struggles follow directly. This actually is the Loing, just upstream from the Seine. Isn’t it gorgeous?

One solution—the Sweep solution—is to put some other question first. That way the “personal grievance” question doesn’t get asked and so never gets answered. I confess that it is tempting in principle. I wouldn’t have personal wants like the other riders. I would have only the obligations and satisfactions that go with my status.

In addition to that, there is a lot of language that is used in the church I attend and in the religious materials I study that gives support to this kind of notion. It probably wouldn’t do any harm to start with the funny ones. Jesus says in Matthew 20:16 that the last shall be first and my job as Sweep is to be last so it’s really a path to advancement. In addition, a formulation of the church’s ministry to “the least, the lost, and the last,” would surely include Sweeps who are, as the saying goes, “last, but not least.”

OK, I’ve had my fun. Here are some problems with my formulations so far. I’ll deal with the religious ones first and then with the psychological ones. If you are using as your illustration, a society where there are masters and slaves [4], everyone knows what the slave’s duties are. But “serving” a bicycling group could mean riding up close to the leader; it could mean falling into line with some of the slower riders; it could mean walking your bike up a hill because you don’t want there to be only one walker; [5] it might mean being a very active corner and helping the other bikers navigate a tricky intersection safely. In a master/slave setting, you can tell who is “serving.” On an IBT tour, you can’t. Doing “what needs to be done” in an attitude of serving is a pretty good approximation and, as a further advantage, only you will know when you are doing it. And when you have failed to do it.

It is entirely possible that you can serve your fellow bikers best by engaging yourself as completely in the countryside as safety will allow and just enjoying the ride. You don’t have to pay any attention to the others at all, but if seeing you enjoying the valley helps them remember to enjoy the valley, that’s probably a good thing, although you are not likely to find out about it. Neither of these guys is me either, but I did fall off my bike four times in four days of riding and I wanted to remind myself.

From a psychological standpoint, I am pretty sure that the first thing I am responsible for is being who I am. Knowing who I am and being who I am is the foundation of everything else I might do. [6] Being who I am makes me a knowable entity, someone the others can be confident of; someone they know how to relate to. Being who I am allows me to place myself confidently in the various sets of social relationships that will be available.

I need to be sure that the fuel I need to run on is available. I know that’s a very general notion, but the kind of fuel I run on is sure to be different than the kind you run on and I don’t want to make too narrow a point. When I run low on fuel, I start to make bad decisions, often thoughtless and selfish decisions, about what to do. I put “enough of the right kind of fuel” up there with good food and enough sleep.

In short, to pick two very broad aspects of self-maintenance, I need to be who I am and I need to make sure that I have access to enough of the fuel that enables me to be that person. In the light of that, I see the Sweep solution as a really good solution for a day. It is kind of a vacation from myself. But that is also why it is a short range solution: I want to be myself. I just don’t want to have to be myself all the time.

[1] I don’t think we are supposed to capitalize the word, but I want to draw attention to the status itself. Every day, someone plays the role of Sweep and whoever it is gets treated differently that day.
[2] And the corners, but I don’t think this particular reflection will take me as far as the corners.
[3] In addition, that is, to being generally clumsy and having a deteriorating sense of balance.
[4] The same word, doulos, is rendered either “servant” or “slave” depending on the context.
[5] The Sweep WILL walk. It’s not a choice for the Sweep. There isn’t any other way to be last.
[6] Again, the elegant phrasing of Snell and Gail Putney, “an accurate and acceptable self-image”

Posted in Living My Life | Tagged Bike tours, French river valleys, the IBT system, the joy of being last, vacation from self | Leave a comment

Went There. Did That.

Posted on September 25, 2015 by hessd

If there is some sort of annual contest for the worst blog title of the year, I might consider entering this one. [1] But I still like the title I wrote before Bette and I left for France. That title was Being. In France. By that title, I wanted to convey my hope that I would be able to avoid “doing France” and would be able, instead, to be who I am with France as the relevant setting. [2] I’m back now—it is dinnertime in Paris as I write this, so I am only mostly back in Portland—and I am really pleased by how my effort to “be” rather than to “do” worked out.

I thought a lot about this the day I was the Sweep (about which, more later) and I formulated it as two models of what being in Paris might be like. I am going to call them Mode A and Mode B. This will not fool anyone and I don’t intend it to. I am a partisan of Mode B, for myself at least. This will lead my descriptions of Mode A in the direction of caricature. [3]

Mode A takes “what Paris has to offer” as its starting point. It has French cuisine and the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre and Notre Dame and the famous Left Bank and inescapable cigarette smoke and so on. These are things I can see or do there that I cannot do here. It is that distinction that brings them to prominence. So I want to do them when I can, which is when I am there. That’s Mode A. It runs the danger of becoming a checklist and having a checklist puts you in danger of seeing the boxes on the list and not the city at all. It’s a danger. Some people can apparently have a checklist and be genuinely charmed by the city. I am not one of those people.

Mode B takes “what my most genuine interests are like” as the starting point. If I have shown no interest in the works of art available in Portland (I haven’t), why should I focus my time on the works of art available in Paris? Just because they aren’t available in Portland? That seems thin to me. Wouldn’t it be better to focus on the things I already like here in Portland and see what they are like in Paris? I love language, for instance. I pay a lot of attention to it here in Portland and I will to pay a lot of attention to it in Paris. Bookstores, as well. Restaurants. Beautiful parks. Birds. That kind of thing.

So I “went there,” as the title has it. And I “did that;” I focused on my own settled interests in a new setting. Bette wanted to see some of the displays at the Louvre (above, the most famous one, which she did get to see) so I walked over there with her so she could see the inside. I saw the famous glass pyramid from the outside, for which I did not have to arm-wrestle busloads of tourists, and went on to other things. I saw a small figure sitting on the extreme western tip of the Île de la Cité. So I went down there and found a young woman sitting peacefully under a prominent weeping willow, reading a paperback book. There is a point very much like it is Portland and it reminded me that I really want to go there more than I do. [4]

I went to a bookstore—the book department of Le BHV/Marais, a really major department store—and spent some time seeing how they set up their books. The whole store is spare and classic, like this department. What kinds of demand did they expect? I couldn’t read anything, of course, except in the very small English language section, but I watched people pick up books and look through them. Then I went to Shakespeare and Company, an English language book store founded by American ex-pat Sylvia Beach in the 1920s. [6]

On our way up to the northern suburbs, we watched through the bus window as the buildings got lighter colored (not as dirty as along the river, I suppose) and the people got darker colored and there began to be signs in Arabic on the store fronts. We wound up at Place Pigalle [7] in the middle of a downpour and took refuge in a little restaurant where I had the most lavish French Onion Soup I have even had. It had more cheese on the top than a pizza I once had in Milan, but that’s another story.

I watched a lot of conversations going on at the same time at Le Buci. I would have done that anyway, at some point or another, but I did it this time at 4:15 a.m. because they were still making so much noise that Bette and I couldn’t sleep in our hotel room across the street. [5] That hour of the morning is not my favorite time for anything but sleeping, but watching conversations form and break up and reform is something I really like to do. By the way, the balcony you see just to the right of the black Le Buci sign was our room. That’s how far the conversations carried.

We saw some really beautiful Tits along the Seine one morning. This is the justly famous Cyanistes caeruleus, several of which we saw along the banks of the Seine one morning.

All in all, I had the kind of time I was looking and hoping for in Paris. I didn’t ignore the differences in context. In fact, I celebrated them. But I didn’t let the differences, alone, set the agenda. You would imagine that as a Mode B person, I would like to do that for myself and you would be right.

[1] I was thinking of something like the annual Darwin Awards, where acts that demonstrate that you are not really worthy of passing on your genes as described in loving detail. See http://www.darwinawards.com
[2] I am going to be thinking about my experiences in Paris, rather than in France generally, because the non-Paris part of our French trip was a bike and barge trip in Burgundy and “doing” was really most of the agenda on biking days.
[3] For which I apologize to my Mode A friends. I think I would be fairer to their way of looking at it if I spent more time describing it, but I don’t really want to have to put that kind of effort into it.
[4] The Portland spot is Kelly Point Park in Portland, where the Columbia and Willamette rivers run together and make a little point very like this one.
[5] And we couldn’t close the windows because the room was only recently a No Smoking room, or only intermittently a No Smoking room—and when we closed the windows, the smell of old tobacco was nauseating.
[6] The Book Group goes to the Sylvia Beach Hotel in Newport, Oregon most years in the spring. It is located at Nye Beach and is named for Sylvia Beach. This Sylvia Beach.

[7] The guidebook says that American Soldiers in Paris during World War I called it “pig alley,” which I am sure was intended to be a slur on the red light district, but it also doesn’t say much for their command of French.

Posted in Living My Life, Travel | Tagged cigarettes everywhere, Paris, Place Pigalle, Sylvia Beach, tourism as a disease | Leave a comment