The Dilettante's Dilemma

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

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