The Loser Edit

Posted on March 12, 2015 by hessd

I am not a fan of “reality shows.” Shows about realty are another matter, but those showssurvivor 2 raise the question of what is real. The question of the difference between the two was raised to prominence yesterday in the March 8th New York Times article about a phenomenon called “the loser edit.” It’s worth your while and you can see it here.

The church is deeply into the season of Lent by now but everybody knows how that part of the story is going to end. “You killed him,” says Peter at his Pentecost sermon, “but God raised him up” (see fragments from Acts 2: 23—25). And how did Peter know all this? It wasn’t at all apparent during Jesus’s life; at least it wasn’t apparent to Peter.

The church celebrates Easter by waiting for it during Lent. Easter is the story of Jesus’s life as told from the end of it, from the conviction that he was more than he had seemed to be while he was preaching in Galilee and a great deal more that he seemed while he was being crucified in Jerusalem. Jesus had received “the Winner Edit.”

Before we go any further we are going to have to look at Colson Whitehead’s notion of the two “edits.”

The concept first bubbled up out of the pop-cultural ether when competitive reality shows hit upon their formula, in the form of “Survivor” and “The Amazing Race.” TV enthusiasts — part fan, part Roland Barthes with a TiVo — congregated on online message boards like Television Without Pity, creating a new slang with which to dis and deconstruct their favorites.

A new slang with which to dis—that meant “disrespect” once upon a time, but now it doesn’t seem to need the rest of the letters—their [former] favorites. In other words, once someone is shown to be a loser, we can go back over the tape, literally or metaphorically, survivor 4and show that the signs of his eventual loser-dom were obvious to anyone who was paying attention. Examples of Brian Williams, formerly of NBC, and of Bill Cosby, once a wise and loving TV father, are given.  Notice how this picture isn’t funny anymore?

Now that we know, we can find segments of tape that clearly indicate the problems that eventually brought them down. Finding all these tape clips and running them together as “the main narrative” is what Whitehead means by “the Loser Edit.”

But, as he points out, where there is a loser’s edit, there must be a winner’s edit. What is that like?

Over the course of a season, the inevitable winner thrives. He or she will suffer some setbacks for drama and suspense, sure, but the groundwork for victory is established challenge by challenge, week by week. It has been written, by fate or the producers, pick your deity. It cannot be reversed.

I take “pick your deity” as an expression tossed off for effect. In fact, however, “deities” are the beneficiaries of the Winner Edit. Take Jesus, for example. Born in the boonies, had modest successes in the Galilee district, made powerful enemies, made the mistake of going to Jerusalem during a major feast and got himself killed. That’s the Loser Edit and it makes no sense at all the Christians.
survivor 3The Christian church is based on a “winner edit,” of course and the Bible is pellucidly clear about that. Here is the famous “road to Emmaus” encounter from Luke. On Easter Sunday, two of the apostles were walking to Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, when a man they did not recognize joined them and asked them what they had been talking about. So they told him the whole sad story, including the despairing “…we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.

Jesus then produces an introduction to the Winner Edit. “O foolish men, and slow to heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” And—here’s the Edit—“…beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.” He took all those little scraps from the Law and the psalms and the prophets and he wove them into an air-tight narrative. Having already won, he could do that. Knowing that he had won, his disciples could do that. And it happened really fast. Peter, in Acts, chapter 2 and again in chapter 3 and Stephen, in chapter 7 give the full Winner’s Edit less than two months after the complete disaster of Jesus’s crucifixion.

What should we make of this? The crucial first point is that it doesn’t bear at all on the question of truth or falsehood. All the facts are what they are and what they were. (Clear memory of these facts is another matter entirely and I’m not getting into that in this post.) No facts have “become true” now that we know who won.

Still, an “edit” has the purpose of explaining something. The Winner Edit and the Loser Edit are the same in that respect. To explain this thing, one assembles the facts that are relevant to the outcome—those are the ones that explain something—and relate them to each other in a satisfying narrative.

If you have a story about how you and your sweetheart met and married, you have probably constructed such an edit. I have. I dated for six months in 2004—2005 before I met Bette. I dated a lot of women who have receded into the shadows of my mind now—not as quickly, probably, as I receded into the shadows of their minds, but still…—because they are not part of the story I tell now. People who have disastrously bad marriage perform the same alchemy along the lines of the Loser Edit. Some “facts” are recalled, others are relocated in time, others are invented to patch a hole in the narrative, and so on.

So it isn’t a question of what is true. It is a question of what is salient—what, as this Latin word asks us, “jumps out” at us.

And we’re almost to Easter and the narrative that sustains a Christian’s faith is being woven tighter and tighter.

Posted in Theology, ways of knowing | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

What does “moral fact” mean?

Posted on March 6, 2015 by hessd

One of the great advantages of writing a blog is that you get to decide what the title of a blog is. That is a luxury not shared by people who publish in newspapers, so I don’t really know who is responsible for this headline. On the supposition that it might be Justin McBrayer, the author, I would like to poke at it just a little. This little icon is the emblem of moral 3the philosophy series, The Stone” in the New York Times. That’s where I found McBrayer’s column.

I note, first, that although the headline implies that our children really should think that there are moral facts, McBrayer doesn’t say so directly. Second, what he says is that our children don’t think the notion of “moral fact” has meaning and this column has taken on the task of explaining why that is. Maybe they have been brainwashed. [Footnote 1, “Brainwashed” is never going to be a good word in the U. S., but I learned only recently that the Chinese notion of what brainwashing does is that it “cleanses” the mind. “Cleansing the mind” sounds a lot better. The root of the English word obscene is caenum, “filth, so “washing out the obscenity” is the kind of thing brainwashing might do and that wouldn’t be all bad.] Or they have been lied to. Maybe they are confused and unwilling to commit to a notion that has actual implications for their behavior.

To give McBrayer his due, he does answer the question. The answer is that the schools teach our students that the world of assertions can be divided usefully between “facts” and “opinions.” The curriculum has no place for an opinion I hold which is based on substantial research and consistent findings. I can see the value to McBrayer of setting the world up that way but I think he really does know that he is chasing a phantom.

We would have a better chance of understanding what the schools are doing if we thought about what they might do instead. Whatever they might choose to do, it ought to have the effect of providing a stable and useful vocabulary for discussing value questions and it ought to have a beneficial effect on the actual value choices made by students. If the schools could choose to do that and they do something else instead, surely they are to be censured.

McBrayer thinks that the schools should teach our children that there ARE moral facts. I moral 5don’t have much attraction to the notion of “fact,” myself. “Fact” is a shorthand notion like “sunrise.” All believers in a heliocentric universe agree that the Sun does’t “rise.” We say it anyway because that is the way it appears and, in ordinary conversation, there is no advantage to saying “the earth has continued it’s rotation with the effect that the Sun is now visible from this location.” It is a fact that the Sun doesn’t “rise;” it is also a widely shared opinion.

All “facts” are shorthand expressions for the great likelihood that a phenomenon, on being investigated by appropriately trained people using the right equipment will show a particular outcome. When the general feeling is that the outcome is so likely to be X (the universe really is expanding faster and faster) that there is no reason for continuing the language of “very well supported theory,” then we may call it a “fact” without messing anything up. Think of “fact” as a slang expression.

Morals aren’t like that. Morals are values that are widely shared. While etymology is not meaning, it is worth noting that we get our word moral from the Latin mos (the singular form) and especially mores, the plural. [Footnote 2, the plural word, which I now consider English, is still pronounced in the Latin style, as “more A’s” as if you wanted to have “more A’s on your transcript.  The singular is pronounces with a long o- as in “mos’ likely.”] It means “having to do with the manners or customs of a people.” I abbreviate it as “how we do things here.”

It is easy to fuse the moral and the factual at the most superficial level. “We don’t allow a female member of the family to go out in public unattended,” let’s say. If that rule is followed by everyone, then “we” = 100% of the relevant population (possibly, but not necessarily excluding the women) really don’t allow it; that is a fact about the mores of the society. (You could say it is a mos, just one of the little pieces of the mores, but no one does.) Everyone follows this rule about unaccompanied women because it is a widely shared value.

It is a moral fact. Any anthropologist would confirm that.

But that’s not what McBrayer means. McBrayer wants to say that a “moral fact” is binding on everyone; that it establishes how everyone should behave. McBrayer wants to believe that this value is TRUE, that it lines up, somehow, with a moral universe in the way that “sunrise” lines up with the physical universe. I don’t think so.

There are, of course, ways to get there. Theism is one. There is a God and God says that slavery is wrong so if you engage in being a slave or in owning a slave, you are involved in a moral wrong. I know the “being a slave” element of the formulation sounds odd, but stay with me just a moment. The great problem of this kind of objectivity is showing that there is such a being (God) and that God has distinct and unvarying views about what is permitted and that doing what God does not permit is “wrong.”

That works. But you have to get to this God first.

moral 4I mentioned slavery because there is a covenantal obligation under the Mosaic Code not to allow a fellow Israelite to be a slave. There are some when and how long and to whom complications, but I am interested in the rationale. Here it is. God chose Israel as His people; Israel as a whole nation and every Israelite. The reason it is not right for an Israelite to serve as a slave is that if he is a slave, he has a master—he belongs to someone—and, since he already belongs to God, it is not right that he belong to someone (else). So a fellow Israelite has the obligation to go and redeem this person from slavery because—here’s the rationale—God wants it that way.

Apart from a God who has distinct and knowable preferences, McBrayer’s “moral universe” is hard to know. The advantage is clear, at least. If there are objectively demonstrable values, then not acting in accord with those values is wrong. If you say “This is the way we do it in my culture” and that way does not align with the True Value, then the whole culture is wrong. If a person says that what he is doing is fully in accord with human nature, then you get to say the human nature is wrong. It clarifies things enormously.

It does skip over the transition. When Thomas Hobbes said “there is no way to get from ‘is’ to ‘ought,’” (Hess summary) he was talking about that transition. You can say that acting on a particular value will have horrendous consequences. You can say that it will make ordered society impossible. You can say that it will render the earth unlivable. Those are all good reasons to oppose those acts but they do not establish that they are opposed by a TRUTH, that is, that they are “wrong” in the way an assertion about the nature of the physical world could be wrong.

So I oppose McBrayer’s notion of “moral fact,” by which I think he means “objectively demonstrable value.” I say it can’t be objectively demonstrated and I used the Mosaic code to show how costly a counterexample can be.

On the other hand, I agree with McBrayer that our society is rapidly going to pot and that this can be seen in the decay of traditional ethics. I am an old man who has taught for most of his life. How could I not think that? He cites “Copying homework assignments is wrong” as assertion that his son is supposed to identify as a fact or an opinion. He goes on to say:

It should not be a surprise that there is rampant cheating on college campuses: If we’ve taught our students for 12 years that there is no fact of the matter as to whether cheating is wrong, we can’t very well blame them for doing so later on.

He is right that what my generation called “cheating” is not understood by today’s moral 6generation of students in the same way we did and also that they do not disapprove of it in the categorical way we did. Those things are shown by survey research. But he goes on to argue that this has happened because some factual basis of the wrongness of cheating has not been taught. Really? Factual?

He imagines that there is no other reason for students to reject cheating. If everyone disapproved of cheating, the occasional person who was tempted would not succumb. Why? Because the factual status of the wrong had been established.? Of course not. He would refuse to cheat, if it ever occurred to him, because it contravenes the values of virtually everyone he knows. It puts him beyond the pale. It makes him alien.

I’m fine with that. Very negative consequences should be expected by people who violate values nearly everyone holds and that are seen as crucially important. Neither “nearly everyone holds” nor “crucially important’ adds up to “a moral fact.” And, as I see it, nothing else does either.

Posted in Politics, Society, Theology, Words | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Gladly Teach and Gladly Learn

Posted on February 26, 2015 by hessd

Let’s say you are young and idealistic and haven’t been married even once. Please accept my sincere congratulations and condolences. You have emotional heights before you that I can remember only with disciplined memory. A dark and quiet room would help as well. And you have some severe challenges ahead, too, because neither your youth nor your idealism are built to last.

I know of only one way to experience and express the fireworks imagined and then expressed and then accepted and then reciprocated. I know of lots of ways to deal with the demise of those hopes and before I get into my proposal, I want to name a few of those. But today I want to describe something better than either. It is not giddy. The explosion of romantic love is a sugar high. What I am going to describe is a balanced diet; something good for year after year after year.

puppet 1Some young people deal with post-romantic catastrophe by turning their love to hate, Some by plugging along in the relationship—trustworthy, don’t ya know—but no longer hoping for something better or mourning the “better” it had once been. Some transfer their real emotional and intellectual investment to something easier to control—financial derivatives or pork futures, say. There are lots of ways to deal with disappointments, but there aren’t many ways not to be disappointed in love.

Here’s one.

I am going to describe a model of married love that I like a lot. This is a model I have some experience with and I say that not because any of my marriages (I’m ten years into my third) have been exactly like this template, but because my marriages have had moments like this. More than moments; episodes. And there will be more such episodes and when they come, they will seem familiar to me and I will stay in that “zone” as long as I can.

I am going to use names—Bette and Dale—because it is easier than “He” and “She.” But these people are not Bette and me. I am putting our names into this template as a convenience. So here’s the setup. Bette wants me to do something for her. It might be idiosyncratic, complicated or unpleasant (ICU).[1] Whatever. I’m committed to doing this thing because I agree it is the best way to get it done, because I am grateful to her for any number of things,[2] and because I will enjoy our common achievement—we did this together—when it’s done.

I know I can do this because I know I can count on Bette’s help. How does she help and why does it matter? She thanks me for agreeing to do this task. She explains it as well as she can, but we both know that because it is ICU (idiosyncratic, complicated, or unpleasant), it is going to be hard for me to learn it and then to internalize it. Every time I try to do this, she expresses her appreciation that I tried and also for the degree to which I succeeded. She counts on our friendship as she explains the parts that aren’t quite right.

puppet 3Presumably, the next time, I do it better. Again, she thanks me for my effort and for my increased success and again points out what remains to be done. This goes on until I get it exactly right and until I have made that pattern of work my own pattern and then we celebrate what we have done; what we have achieved together. And still… every now and then…she remembers that this used to be a problem and  she thanks me for my care in preventing it.  “Telling the Truth” is a good idea, of course, but the truth is in the whole process, not in each statement that makes up the process.

Now I, the “template Dale,” really like this process. I wish it weren’t so ICU, but it is what it is. Bette hasn’t made it seem more onerous than it really is just to amp up her case that I should do something about it. I understand, also, that this isn’t a piece of cake for Bette. One of the things we both value, generally speaking, is authentic expression. Bette has chosen to forego that for a while because “strategic expression”—that’s what all that thanking and explaining is— is going to get the job done better and faster and with less collateral damage. I know giving up the feel-it say-it model is a sacrifice for her.

Besides, I like to be recognized for what I am doing, especially if it is difficult or onerous. There are different “love languages” as Gary Chapman says and what I like best is a style Chapman calls “words of affirmation.”[3] I call it “rich language.” It is the way of expressing love and respect that goes right to my heart and that gives me the resource base to do gladly what I would otherwise be able to do only dutifully. Or that I would regularly “forget” to do at all.

puppet 4Neither the template Bette nor the template Dale looks very good in this caricature. I look like a puppet; Bette looks like a puppet-master. I look credulous and naive; Bette looks manipulative and insincere. If we were actually those templates instead of the actual people we are, we would have to acknowledge, when criticized, that the whole deal looks bad. I don’t think it really is bad, however, because we know what we are doing and we don’t do it all the time and we like the results.  These two young lovers are not us, obviously, but they don’t have pictures of people our age saying “Thank you.”

So there’s the puppet master problem. Besides that, I am guessing that some of you think this is a lot of fuss to make about the simple process by which people adjust to each other, That is what the actual Bette thinks about how I describe the process. She calls is hyper-processing. Here’s why I don’t agree.

First, the easiest response the template Dale might make is to deny that there is anything that needs to be done. It isn’t “that bad,” he might say.[4] Or he might point out that resolving it is impossible because the problem itself is idiosyncratic. Denial comes in lots of flavors.

Second, for the work to continue in the way I have described it, it will need to be focused on for a long time. Dale will have to “pay attention” and he knows how well chosen the “pay” part of that expression is. It is a common thing for someone in his position to agree that there is an issue, to agree to do something about it, and then just to wander off. He isn’t really avoiding it; he is just refusing to do the work of keeping it in focus. It would cost too much to do that, he might say, picking up the “pay” metaphor without thinking about it.

Third, for incremental improvement to be made, he will have to keep trying and will have to accept the guidance Bette is offering him. “Rats!” he might think, “I failed again!” But the guidance, which is necessary if improvements are to be made, comes with the appreciation, which is.. .um. . .necessary if improvements are to be made.

The solution to these common difficulties is the same solution. Dale—this template guy, not me—needs to take Bette’s word for it—the template Bette, not my real wife—that this really matters. It will be easier to do if he knows she will support his efforts at every point. She will not seem exasperated even if she is; she will be generous and appreciative of his efforts no matter how veritasshe is feeling. Dale gets her appreciation for remembering that it is important, for attempting to accomplish it, and for making incremental improvements. Dale gets to look forward to the successful completion of the process, which will be treated as a win for the team, not the triumph of one person over the other.

That’s a pretty good solution, you have to admit. On the other hand, it isn’t for beginners. Here’s why.

  • You have to know what you are doing.
  • You have to be able to play your part, confident that your partner is playing hers.
  • You have to be willing to pay the price. It isn’t a high price compared with the value of the achievement, but the achievement is not until then and the price is right now.
  • You have to be willing to privilege the account you and your partner are using over the different understandings of the process that others might have.
  • You have to really care about the ultimate success and to commit to celebrating it together.

So it isn’t easy. On the other hand, it works. The goal of mutual adaptation is a commonplace in any marriage. This is just the style we use. And not only does it work, but the reasons it works, make sense. And besides, what is the alternative?

Here is a set of alternatives I cribbed from a book on social power.[5] You can overcome your partner and take what you want. I think we can rule that one out as not fitting the kind of marriage we are talking about. You can trade for it. That’s really common and a lot of people take it for granted in marriage. Tit for tat, I call it, meaning nothing really salacious. It’s not a bad solution if there is nothing better. I am arguing in this essay that there is something better. You can resolve to do without the resource the other person has. I’ve seen that in a lot of marriages that are on autopilot or that are coming apart. Finally, you can get “it,” the crucial resource, somewhere else. I know that sounds like outsourcing your sex life, but it could just be outsourcing your house cleaning or your yard work or your management of the kids.

All in all, I don’t like those. There are, after all, things you can outsource and things you can’t and all of the other “solutions” are ones I don’t like.

So I have an idea. Let’s do it my way.

[1] Yup.  Did it on purpose.

[2] See Appeciative Motivation, Vol.3. Just kidding about Vol 3. My piece on appreciative motivation is only a short essay, but it meant a great deal to us 10 years ago when we were trying to get to know each other. Note: This “template Bette” is not a model of consistency. What was ‘right” on the third try might have been superseded by some new notion by the fourth try. That’s fine. She’s gentle and I’m patient.

 

[3] “Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages. Bette introduced me to this book. It’s a very simple notion and anyone who has ever made a living selling things understands it at such a deep level that it seems pointless to form it into words and say it out loud. It is that if you want someone to understand what you are saying, you should language “speak” it in a language that person understands. Period. That’s the whole book. Amazing how hard it is to remember all the time.

 

[4]  ‘I call that specific flavor of denial “that control.”

[5] Peter Blau, Exchange and Power in Social Life. I’ve never seen it applied to a marriage situation, but as I think about it, it works pretty well.

Posted in Getting Old, Love and Marriage, Sustainability | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Jesus and the Lost Velociraptor

Posted on February 21, 2015 by hessd

Here is a satirical picture that my son Dan passed along to me. I think it is laugh-out-loud funny. He and I enjoyed it together.

I call it “satire.” What is satire? From a collection of similar definitions in the Oxford Jesus Velociraptor
English Dictionary, I harvested this one: “A thing or circumstance which exposes the faults or absurdities of something or someone; a mockery. “

So whose absurdities are being mocked? I think it is fair to say that religious conservatives are being ridiculed (Latin for “laughed at”) in this picture. It isn’t directed at Jesus; it is directed at creationism.

I chose conservatives as the likely target for several reasons. First, of all the kinds of pictures of Jesus there are, this is the kind that shows up in conservative homes and churches. It is a thoroughly Caucasian Jesus wearing a Brooks Brothers robe and looking messianic. I wouldn’t have a picture of Jesus looking like this in my house.

I categorized conservative Christians as the target also because of the cuddly little velociraptor and that’s also part of why I think it is funny. This is the picture that is being spoofed. Everything the same except the “lost sheep” is now a lost velociraptor.

velociraptor 2There is a branch of religious conservatism that argues that all creation happened at the same time. That would mean that humans and dinosaurs existed at the same time. Scientists who study the formation and development of life on our planet say it didn’t happen that way and they have warehouses of data supporting the assertion. [ Footnote 1 A much more challenging evolutionary development is the destruction of all the anaerobic bacteria on earth as oxygen began to be produced in such quantities that it could not be captured and stored. This was about 2.3 billion years ago as scientists calculate it. This is one of the greatest catastrophes earth ever experienced and not just because it cleared the way for oxygen-breathing mammals.] are not persuaded because they calculate that the cost of admitting the validity of the science would be the loss of their faith in the inerrancy of the Bible. Even liberals like me would agree that trading good information about the development of life forms on earth for good information about everything else—why are we here, is life worth living, does God actually give a rip about our lives?—would be a bad trade, but liberals like me argue that you don’t have to trade one for the other. God hates science denial the same way He hates meaningless religious observances (Amos 5:21).

It is this refusal to agree to the conclusion the data demand that so irks everyone else—everyone but the conservatives—and that makes them a target for satire. There is anger in this satire. Ordinarily, ridicule is not thought to be a good thing and the most common justification of it is that they, whoever “they” is, deserve to be ridiculed.

Let’s imagine that the artist who created this picture is named Charlie. Charlie knows he is going to offend a lot of people, but the people he is going to offend aren’t the people he cares about. And a lot of people, the people he does care about, are going to be delighted by what he has done. So it’s all good for Charlie.

Once upon a time there were blasphemy laws in the United States. [Footnote 2 When I think of blasphemy laws, I think of Muslim countries and Shariah law. The federal courts acted on the blasphemy laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in may of 2010. SeeGeorge Kalman v. Pedro A. Cortés in U. S. District court for the whole story.] is no reason for Charlie to fear prosecution under such laws. Blasphemy is a charge that makes a lot of sense in a society where things are held to be sacred. If nothing is really sacred—we would say “sacrosanct,” I believe, a real demotion—then blasphemy isn’t just a bad idea; it’s impossible.

Charlie also knows that wild-eyed conservatives with double-bitted axes are not going to storm his office and kill his staff. In the U. S., conservatives limit themselves to rearguard gestures. Pretty much anything that gives the finger to the secular majority will do the trick: a few tons of marble bearing the ten commandments in the courtroom, a creation museum next to an interstate highway, a paper banner with scripture quotations for the football team at a public high school to run through. Anything, really, except violent reprisal. So Charlie is safe.

velociraptor crucifiedCharlie does know that there are people who still have some notion of “sacred.” He thinks, I suppose, that they are ridiculous and should not be coddled by having their “sacred images” respected by others. That would make what was once called “empathy” into some notion of “complicity.” People who feel (in the general case) that there are “sacred things” or who feel (in this specific case) that images of Jesus are sacred, need to get over it. [Footnote 3 In my lifetime, “irreverent” has become an entirely positive word. “Irreverent” is why you might want to subscribe to a magazine or join a group. On the other hand, a great deal of reverence has attached itself to NFL football, so it may be more a change of location than any decline in religious fervor. Jonathan Haidt in his, The Righteous Mind, introduces his chapter on “religion” with a long and loving description of pre-game activities at the University of Virginia. He was serious about it, but he wasn’t being Cavalier.] “sensitive” toward their feelings will only postpone the inevitable day of reckoning when they will grow up and join the secular society of adults, having (finally) given up their infantile fantasies.

Now let’s say that Charlie has a friend. The friend could be a person acting on her own. She could be the general counsel for SEAR (the Society for Empathy toward All Religions)—still a friend, but also an attorney with a client. In olden times, she could have been the staff person responsible for writing the rules to implement the legislature’s new blasphemy law. In any case, she comes to Charlie and says, “Please don’t publish that picture.”

On the other side of town, religious conservatives are organizing a rally, then a boycott, then a lawsuit against Charlie’s impiety. But the leader of these churches has a friend and he sits down with the pastor and says, “Please don’t retaliate against Charlie for publishing his picture.” This friend could act on his own behalf or he could be the general counsel for Free Speech in Our Most Basic Liberty.

Our society has institutionalized “satire”—generally, just making fun of people. Our society has institutionalized religious retaliation. No one seems to have taken the trouble to institutionalize good manners. The friends I invented, above, either don’t exist in the real world or they don’t represent organizations that would allow them to do what I have described.

There are some things that really need to be said, even though they are going of offend people. But if the only value is the offense it gives, why would we think it was a good idea to do it? Take the one above, for instance, which I found on the same page. Is it funny? Is it like the Jesus and the Velociraptor picture? Is it just vicious? Does it depend entirely on whose ox is being gored?

I’m willing to go as far as the first picture. I wouldn’t go to Charlie’s office, no matter how well I knew him, and plead with him not to publish it. The second one…I might go. “Charlie,” I would say, “A lot of people are going to think you are making fun of the central reality of their lives. And even if that doesn’t move you, consider that crucifixion real
ly isn’t all that funny.”

I don’t suppose it would work. Je ne suis pas Charlie.

Posted in Getting Old, Society | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Starbucks and the balanced diet

Posted on February 8, 2015 by hessd

This isn’t really about food.  It’s about conversation.  I will want to use the balanced food diet as a metaphor to help me explore the balanced conversational diet.

starbucks 8Here is the protein bistro box, which is my normal Starbucks breakfast.  It’s 380 calories, 170, from fat, and with 13 grams of protein.  And of course, there are salads of various kinds and sandwiches.  And there is also junk food.  The notion of “balanced diet” is meant to suggest many kinds of good food and, for emotional reasons, every now and then some bad food.

The original idea was that there is a certain kind of conversation—metaphorically, a certain kind of food—that I really like and that I would choose every time.  That is not the way to choose a good diet.  The easy way out of this dilemma is for me to simply refuse to always choose the food I like best; sometimes I would choose other kinds of food and together, those choices work out to a balanced diet.

That’s pretty straightforward if we are thinking about food, but conversation is a joint enterprise.  What if the other people at the table[1] don’t like the same kind of conversation I like.  What if they don’t like conversation at all?[2]  I could stop by the table and see if the makings of “my kind of conversation” are there.  If it looks like the chances are good, I put my coffee down and buy my protein bistro box; if not, I get my coffee to go and head home.  Alternatively, I could try to formulate “the kind of conversation I like” as the work of the group while I am there and try to get everyone to buy in.

I don’t really like either of those.

Yet another alternative is for me to practice liking the kinds of conversations that take starbucks 9place at the table.  One of the guys, let’s say, wants to talk about air pollution; one wants to talk about corporate capitalism; one wants to talk about home repairs; one wants to talk about some religion or other; one wants to talk about the subordinate state of women in the U. S. and what should be done about it.  If I liked several of those topics, I could just enjoy each one in some way—some as entrees, some as appetizers, some as desserts—and call it good.  I think that’s a pretty good strategy, but things aren’t always that easy.

I skated by just what a “conversation” is.[3]  To be a conversation, as I am using the term, it has to be about something.  All the examples in the previous paragraph are or could be “about something,” even home repairs.  But every one of them could also be the occasion for the promiscuous trading of stories.  Here’s how that goes.

Speaker 1.       The way we treat women in this country is just shameful.

Speaker 2.       That’s true.  At the hardware store the other day, the clerk was lecturing a woman about electrical adapters as if the didn’t know anything.  Here’s the electrical adapter problem as it is normally seen…

Speaker 3.       I can see why the incident with the adapter interested you, but you’d have to admit that the quality of the air is a good deal more important.  I was lobbying a legislator just yesterday…

Speaker 4.       Most of the people I see lobbying these days seem to have a religious cause in mind and I wish they would just leave the public sector alone.

That collection of four statements is not a conversation.  It is not about anything.  To say what a conversation is…well, it’s hard.  It’s a way of talking together, not some topic in particular.[4]  For our purposes, I will call it a conversation if it is about one thing and if the participants act as colleagues in developing the topic.

starbucks 7Take the scattershot sequence I indentified  as “not a conversation.”  Numbers 1, 3, and 4 could easily be “a topic.”  If we chose number one, and sometimes we have, we would have to take some time developing what we mean by “we” (in “we treat women”) and whether “this country” is the best scale for the discussion and just what the standards are by which “shameful” could be established.  And there might just be someone in the group who wondered whether “shameful” was the most useful attribution to make; the most likely to lead to clarity, to action, etc.

If that were the conversation, it would be just the kind of conversation I like best.  And that brings me to the other questions I wanted to ask.  Is it really a balanced diet?  No it isn’t, and changing from that topic to 3 or 4 would not make it a different “kind” of conversation.  The balanced diet idea would require that I invest myself, sometimes, in the personal stories that are being told (Speaker 2, above); sometimes in personal issues (my wife nags me every time I go home).  Of course, dealing with the issue of the nagging wife or the issue of why some people just need nagging could substitute for the stories, but that wouldn’t help balance the diet.

starbucks 5The idea here is that I need to learn to appreciate all kinds of conversation—even one story after another if they are related—and not insist on the kind I like best.  This is a standard related to my own durability and wholeness.  There is also the question, however, of what kind of conversational diversity it would take to keep the group together.  At my Starbucks, we don’t have a deep bench; we have to play the players who show up.  If one is a story person—you’ll never guess what happened to my kids on Hawaii—we will have to be a rewarding audience for those stories.  The same goes for stories about gifted grandchildren, neurotic pets, and unattractive nursing homes.

And then, after the stories, maybe a conversation.  What if, for instance, the members who tell the stories are asking, “Are you really interested in me as a person?” and mean by that “Are you willing to listen receptively to the stories I tell?”  This person thinks of “who I am” in terms of the stories” and of “colleagues” or maybe even “friends” as “people who will listen to my stories.”  And what if, after his stories had been listened to—some not for the first time—he said, “OK, now let’s have a conversation about something.”

Would that work?  Is the price too high for that particular show?  Will people make excuses and leave?  OK, I need to go think.  Maybe a quiet room would help me.

[1] I am thinking of the Northwest Corner Caucus, which meets at the Multnomah Village Starbucks in Portland, Oregon.  The same people are not there every day, but the pool of people who show up at that table at that time of the morning is not a large pool.  So when I think about “a balanced conversational diet,” I know who I am talking about.
[2] I talking this post over with the Northwest Corner Caucus, I stumbled on a view I had never heard before.  “What about the relationships?” asked one of the members.  “What about them?” I said, having no idea where this was going.  The point was that the conversation was just a gimmick to enable relationships to form and grow.  You need “conversation” in the group the way you need mayo in potato salad—just enough to keep it together.  The conversation was just a means to the relationships; not a desiratum itself.
[3] We could say, broadly, that it is a “conversation” if people sit around talking about something.  I would like to slice it finer than that.
[4] It is harder to talk as colleagues, of course, about some topics.

Posted in Getting Old, Living My Life | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Repent! No, not you.

Posted on January 31, 2015 by hessd

Let’s think about “repentance” a little bit. My thesis is going to be that it is a really good idea sometimes and a really bad idea sometimes.

The Greek verb normally translated “repent” is metanoein, which can be narrowly translated as “change your mind.” In that way of looking at it, the prefix meta- is the “change” part. What is to be changed is represented by the noun nous meaning mind. But other things could be changed, too. Besides being asked to change what we think, we might be asked to change how we feel or what we intend or what we are doing.

Who should change what he or she is doing? Why?

(c) David J Owen Photography www.davidjowen.comThe form in which this came to me yesterday was: “to change your mind, you have to have a mind.” And immediately after that, I remembered a discussion from my long ago legislative days. We were talking about when to lobby a certain Senator in the Oregon State Legislature and we decided to call him off the floor in advance of the vote. Why? Because much more powerful than any commitment he made to anyone was the persuasiveness of whoever talked to him last.

When we talk about a “mind,” we mean to imply some continuity of views. I can sit down with the Caucus at Starbucks and on any given topic, give the views that each of the members has been taking on that subject. When the possibility that someone has “changed his mind” comes up—and that happens with amazing frequency for a group of…um…mature…men and women—it is a change from that position. We have opinions that are retained in similar form from one time to the next and we change those opinions when we think we should; we know hold to hold ‘em and know how to fold ‘em.

Consider by contrast a person whose views don’t have that stability, that crucial repent 2component of what we call “mind.” Imagine a person who is pathetically eager to please and whose view take on the form of whoever he is with. That person doesn’t have a “mind” in this sense so it cannot be “changed” in the sense that metanoia presupposes.
Martin E. P. Seligman, in his marvelous book Helplessness, tells about “the Tuscaloosa Plan” for under-assertive men. It was a pretty simple treatment. Each man was given a meaningless task, like sanding and sanding and sanding a block of wood. Every now and then the workshop supervisor would come by and yell at him for doing it wrong. “You’re sanding with the grain!” he would yell. “What an idiot!” So the helpless schlub “repents.” Sort of. Changing in the direction of the person yelling at him is why he is in the workshop. He is an “over-repenter.” He needs to learn to stop repenting.

And in the workshop, he does. The next time the supervisor comes around, he finds the poor guy sanding against the grain of the wood as he was told to do. “What an idiot!” bellows the supervisor, “You should be sanding with the grain.” This goes on and on day after day until repentance, which is the life plan of this man finally runs out. He rises up in holy wrath and tells the supervisor where he can go and who his parents are. The supervisor apologized profusely—that is his job too—and the man is released from the workshop for the day and given whatever luxuries the center has to offer. Hot fudge sundaes, let’s say.

repent 3The next day, he is right back in the workshop being castigated for doing what he was told to do until he finally refuses to repent. Eventually, the day comes when the supervisor wanders by the bench and takes a deep breath and the former over-repenter wheels on him and says, “Don’t even think it!” At that point, the patient is declared cured and released from the treatment.

What was his problem? He was told to change his mind so often and so painfully that he decided it would be better not to have a mind. To every demand, a shrug and then compliance. He needs to stand up for himself in at least the rudimentary ways and that will require refusing to repent. He will have a mind and he will not change it.

John the Baptist came preaching, “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” When we look at the population he was addressing, we have no difficulty knowing in general what he meant. The way they are thinking—and feeling and intending and behaving—is not in line with the way God wants it to be. That means they need to change it.

This familiar scene—familiar, by the way, to every street corner political activist or religious evangelist—does not imagine that each and every person in the crowd should repent. It means that you (plural)—that y’all—should repent. The idea that a culture could “repent” sounds odd only because we so seldom mix the taken for granted ideas of religion and apply them to politics or vice versa. But when you try to do it, it turns out that it is easy and natural. Furthermore, I have an example.

In 1960, Harry Bredemeier and Jackson Toby proposed a new kind of text for courses repent 5normally called “Social Problems.” The direction they proposed is not the direction textbooks went for those courses, but I was drawn to it right away. The subtitle of their book is “Costs and Casualties of an Acquisitive Society.” The way we have organized our society regularly drives people into difficult circumstances. I’ll pick a few. We drive people into over-conformity (p. 133) and deviance (under-conformity) p. 215; into ritualism—accepting means as ends (p. 290)—and into a “search for oblivion” (p. 428), where anything that makes it hurt less is chosen.

“We” are over-acquisitive as Bredemeier and Toby see it and “we” need to repent. We need to change our minds and change our ways in by those means, we will reduce the “costs and casualties” that “we” are producing by our current choices. John the Baptist would have been entirely at home in the world this text shows us.

But what about me? Do I need to change? What if I have been one of the few voices of social sanity. I have been arguing that we all pay the price of allowing our society to degenerate into camps of very rich (a small camp, but gated) and the very poor (a very large camp). I get pressed a lot about holding this view, let’s say, and even more for arguing that we should change the policies that sustain it. Hanging on desperately to my position could very well be my job. Changing my mind, as the word metanoein, taken without context, argues, is the wrong thing for me to do. All the bad guys are arguing that I should “repent,” but my conscience and the tattered remnants of my integrity urge me to hold firm.

I’m sure you see the point of that simple illustration and I can’t imagine that you would want to argue against it. I don’t either. But if we don’t, then we are left with “repentance” is a good thing for some people, but not for others. Changing the direction of the social contract—beginning to limit it in preparation for reneging on it entirely—is a change we ought not make. We should consider the case for change, reject it, and find a way to hold our commitments in place.

So the easy call for people to “repent” turns out to presuppose some constant position which is mistaken or inapplicable or harmful. If I don’t have a position at all, the best an advocate of repentance could do would be to urge me to take a position and hold it. If it is the right position, and if he has no message other than “Repent!” then he ought, on the basis of his values, leave me alone and find someone else to talk to. If I do have a position and the speaker thinks it goes in the wrong direction, he would have to show that the direction is wrong and why and why his direction would be better.

There is no reason those things cannot be done but both of them go beyond the call for repentance. If you are going to go seriously into the repentance business, what you really need is people who have a position. No position, no changing the position. You need people who have the wrong position. You don’t want to go changing the good positions just because you like to see change. And if persuasion is the preferred mode of inducing repentance, it would be a great help if people know why they are holding the positions they are holding.

I haven’t dealt with a person who “holds a position” because he will be punished if he does not. I know that’s a significant source of positions that ought to be challenged, but those people don’t need to be reformed; they need to be freed.

Posted in Biblical Studies, Living My Life | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Selma

Posted on January 20, 2015 by hessd

Selma has been nominated for an Academy Award as the best film of the year. One of the things that means is that it is going to get talked about a lot. Since it is about race relations in the United States, it is going to get argued about a lot. For those of us who “remember” Selma, in the removed sense of watching it on television, it will evoke the ransacking of memories and the scratching of heads.

And it should. We live in the “docudrama era.” Is a movie like a document or it is like a drama? When we say it is “based on” a true story, does that mean it is true or does it mean that all the falsehoods it contains were added after the true story was written?

Selma 7In a way, I am surprised that this is still so hard for us. In 1971, John Gardner wrote Grendel, an account of the familiar story of Beowulf, told from “the other side.” Fans of Beowulf did not rise up shouting that this story was false. Well, you say, but that was easier. No one was claiming that Beowulf is an actual historical event. Because it is a tale, one version is as good as another.

Is Selma a “tale?” Ava DuVernay, the director, puts it this way, “I wasn’t interested in making a white-savior movie.” Maureen Dowd was not charmed by DuVernay’s approach, as you can see here.

DuVernay’s point, I suppose, is that the story of Lyndon Johnson’s effect on the civil rights has been told as a “white savior story.” It may be that DuVernay thinks the white savior story isn’t true or maybe she is just tired of it. She could have written an article saying it wasn’t true or an editorial saying she is tired of that story, but she’s a movie maker, so she made a movie.

And what does the movie “say?” Obviously, it says quite a few things. It says that there was discord among the black activists about the best way to proceed. It says that Lyndon Johnson had an agenda of his own and wanted Dr. King to be a part of it. It says that Jesse Selma 4Jackson was no part of the activities around Selma. It says that Dr. King was not unfaithful to his wife. The most central statement it makes is that the civil rights movement was about black people, not white people.

Here’s what that means. As the plans for the movie go forward, everything that shifts the focus from the intentions and feelings and actions of the black civil rights marchers in Alabama just has to go. If Gandhi had marched with them to Birmingham, DuVernay would not have covered it. It’s a question of where to point the camera. Selma is where the action is; Washington is a reluctant child who needs to be brought into line.

Selma 5And just as there is only so much camera time, so there is only so much credit. The credit you award over there, you cannot award again over here. If President Johnson had a determination to pass a voting rights bill, that will need to be obscured so that Dr. King’s struggle—inside himself and outside—can be what causes the events we see. No congressional sentiments favorable to civil rights are shown. Support, even distant support, takes the credit away from the black marchers who faced mounted troops and unruly mobs.

That’s what you have to do to tell a story.

Now…is it a true story? I’m going to say No, but I want to stop first and trash the notion of “true stories.” All stories gain coherence by featuring some things, including other things, and excluding yet other things. If “true” meant that all the facts were included, we can easily see that no story is “true” in that sense.

That brings us to “our story” and “your story.” This is the cowboys and Indians problem. The settlers were peacefully farming their land when vicious savages murdered all of them except the one child who got away to tell the whole pathetic story. The Indians were peacefully living in their way on their land when soldiers came in and killed a lot of them and forced the rest into an arid ghetto. In Stan Freberg’s marvelous retelling of Christopher Columbus landing in the new world, he “discovers” the Indians living there. Selma 2The Indians “discover” Columbus’s crew tooling around on the beach. As the chief says, “Is all how you look at it.”

Selma is “their story.” It proceeds as it must if it is to be their story. What I experienced in the 1960s as “what was happening” was “my story” and it has been told many many times.

So what’s the problem? Is there still a problem?

Yes there is. For me, there is. If you could add up all the stories—everything adds together and nothing is subtracted—you could just pile one story on another. I did that recently with a story about a girl I called Allison, who was a Goth and also a cheerleader and also an honor student. As a cheerleader, she had long fingernails painted in the school colors. As a Goth, she chewed her fingernails short and ragged. It doesn’t work. Someone will want to know what the fingernails “really looked like.”

We learn in Selma that President Johnson unleashed J. Edgar Hoover to wiretap Dr. King. Here’s Bill Moyers on the portrayal of that event.

As for Lyndon B. Johnson: There’s one egregious and outrageous portrayal that is the worst kind of creative license suggesting the very opposite of the truth, in this case, that the president was behind J. Edgar Hoover’s sending the ‘sex tape’ to Coretta King. Some of our most scrupulous historians have denounced that one. And even if you want to think of Lyndon B. Johnson as vile enough to want to do that, he was way, way too smart to hand Hoover the means of blackmailing him.

selma 3So…in DuVernay’s story, is it OK to portray Lyndon Johnson as an obstacle that must be overcome but not OK to say that he committed a deplorable act that he did not commit? We learn things about President Johnson that, according to Moyers, (that’s a very young Bill Moyers with LBJ) many careful historians have determined not to be true. Is this the price to be paid for DuVernay’s story to be told? If it is a necessary price, is it too high?

I was troubled by DuVernay’s depiction of President Johnson’s speech on behalf of the Voting Rights Act. Lyndon Johnson was one of the worst orators ever to hold the office of President of the United States, but I thought at the time that this might have been the best speech he ever gave. He was equal parts determined, frustrated, angry, and powerful. He dominated a packed House chamber full of people who looked and sounded as if they knew what was going on. It was powerful!

DuVernay has the speech in the Senate chamber, not the House. It is not a crowded room. The hearers are not enthusiastic. Johnson himself is clearly trying to seem determined, but we can tell that he is not. You can also see why it chafes Bill Moyers.

Johnson was more animated and passionate than I have ever seen him, and I was standing very near him, off to the right. The nation was electrified.

In all these things, she is “wrong” in the sense of being inaccurate. And she is “right” is pushing to the background the actions of a white man that would eclipse the actions of a black man. She is telling her story.

I feel the frustration of her telling a story that doesn’t line up with my own experience. In a more removed sense, I feel the built up anger that shows through her “white-savior movie” comment. I think there is real merit in having our various frustrations aired—hers and mine—in bars and coffee shops all over the country. I think we will all be better for that conversation

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My teammates are not offended

Posted on January 18, 2015 by hessd

I was taken, recently, with the premise of the movie, Surrogates. I liked the premise so much that I tried really hard to like the movie. I failed, but I still like the premise so I am going to make use of it today. Surrogates is set in some unspecified future in which ordinary people spend their days in “stim chairs” and are represented in public by automatons who look just the way each of them would like to look. [footnote 1: “Including drool 1the fat and balding old man who chooses to inhabit a surrogate that looks like an incredibly sexy young woman.”]  In this picture she is appearing in her surrogate; he is not.

You can see why that appealed to me. These people weren’t prisoners…exactly. They refused to appear in public as the people they actually were—inhabiting the bodies they actually had—and chose, instead to live all day every day sitting in a chair wired to connect them to their surrogates. This isn’t like not going to the dance because you “don’t have anything to wear.” This isn’t like skipping your high school reunion because you still have a lousy job and a disreputable car. This is a lot worse.

I let my condemnation of “those people” run free as I watched the movie, in part because I don’t make those particular mistakes. But there is the question of how to think clearly about the kind of mistakes I do make—the Dale kind of mistakes. I have an answer I’d like to offer, but first I want to prepare that answer with plausible starting points.

drool 2Here is the first such. A sociology text I read long ago attempted to define what the word institution means to sociologists. The author imagined a scene in a restaurant in which all the normal customers were sitting and eating. One man was standing at the window turning slowly left and right looking, apparently, for something. A young woman new to the restaurant thinks maybe she should call the manager and get that guy out of here, but one of the regulars stops her. “It’s OK,” he says, “he always does that.” When “always does that” makes everyone relax and go on with their business, “institutional status” has been achieved.

Here is the second. Imagine that I am a guy who just can’t hold his liquor. I drink a little bit and I get “funny.” [footnote 2: ‘thinking you are funny would be one of the great consolations of being drunk if only everyone else got drunk at the same time and alto thought you were funny.  Alas, it is not always so.”] And then I drink a little more and I get sociable and I plan parties for us all to attend next week. Eyes roll. No date books are utilized. Finally I get mean and start to say really nasty things to these people who are my friends. “It’s OK,” says one of my longtime friends to a new acquaintance, “He always gets like this after the first six-pack. He doesn’t mean any of it.”

You see the similarity, of course. You feel the same way I would, I suppose, that if I can’t handle alcohol any better than that, maybe I should stay away from it. Good idea. Let’s move on.

Third starting point. Let’s say the difficulty isn’t alcohol. It’s a stroke and the effect of the stroke, for our consideration, is that I can’t feel the side of my mouth, which means I can’t feel the saliva that pools there. And I don’t know when I start to drool. This a failure of presentability.  It’s serious. It is one of the things “one simply does not do” and now I can’t help it and don’t know when I’m doing it.

There is the Surrogates strategy, of course. I am so embarrassed about being the guy in drool 3the group who drools that I just don’t become a part of the group. Understandable, certainly, but not very satisfactory. And if I have been in a group where one or more of the members drools, then I know how I felt about it and about them. Naturally, I imagine that people are feeling that way toward me. The strong side of me doesn’t want to inflict that experience on the others; the weak part of me is just self-conscious and ashamed.

Fourth starting point. I was married for a long time to a wonderful woman who died very rapidly of cancer. In the short time between the diagnosis and the death, she experienced a bunch of really nasty treatments and felt really bad a lot of the time. And, of course, all her hair fell out. Marilyn wasn’t really the self-conscious type. She imagined that everyone either liked her or was looking around for a strategy that would enable them to like her. Here’s what that did for her.

She took her physical liabilities—the analog to the drooling man, above—as difficulties her friends were trying to overcome. There is a certain wariness people have when they sit down to a good conversation with a woman who is dying of cancer. You don’t know quite how to treat her. You don’t know whether she is self-conscious or frightened or angry. You just don’t know how to be.

Marilyn saw her job as finding a way to make them comfortable with her. She taught themdrool 4 how to be with her and rewarded them for continuing to try and for getting it right. She was a warm and generous woman and when she rewarded you, you knew you had been rewarded. No one avoided her. People continued to introduce her to their friends and to be introduced to her friends, just as they always had. In the meantime, her husband (me) stood there dumbfounded. I had not only never seen a performance like that; I had never imagined that there could be one. The faint beginnings of the concept and the repeated concrete actions occurring at the same time, day after day. It was dazzling. On the other hand, it set the bar pretty high.

Having started now at four different places, let me arrive at a strategy I think even I might be able to use. I tell my friends that I am sorry to be the guy in the group who drools and doesn’t know when it is happening. I tell them that I value their friendship and would like to presume on their good will for a favor. Since they can see the early stages of drool and I can’t, they can just give me a signal—I picture any one of them putting an index finger up to the corner of his mouth—and I act to prevent the occurrence. That’s it, really.

But I see the power of this in the establishment of the institution. I’m like the guy in the restaurant about whom they say, “Don’t worry. He always does that.” This difficulty I have isn’t like remembering not to get drunk and abuse my friends; this is about having had a dool 5stoke and needing friends. If this works the way I am thinking it will, these friends are my team. They have my back. They know the many ways we care for each other and the little signal, the finger to the corner of the mouth, is just one of those ways of caring.

People who would like to be offended by it will face a wall of people who are not offended by it. They would be violating a norm that my friends learned how to honor and then to value. The new people would run very quickly into the wall of “this is how we do it here.”

We are a team. About me they say, “He is one of us.” To other people, they say, “Don’t worry about a thing. We’ve got this under control.”

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Obamacare and “Death Panels”

Posted on January 11, 2015 by hessd

This is a question that has gotten a lot more attention than it deserves.  Let’s take a look at it.  A “death panel” would have to be a number of people (panel) that is empowered to take an action or to withhold it, the result of which would be that the person in question dies.  That brings us now to two questions: a) are there any such panels and b) is there any provision in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) that facilitates the death of patients?

Are there death panels?

death panels 8Yes.  Of course there are.  Not like these. Let’s try to imagine what it would be like if there were not.  It would mean that there were no medical procedures  that “cost too much.”  For the very rich, of course, this is often true.  If a procedure were available that extended a rich man’s life at the cost of a million dollars a day and he wants to pay the million dollars a day, he will be treated.

If that same procedure were recommended for a poor woman, the question of cost would come up.  If the poor woman is insured, the insurance company will have to say yes or no.
If not, some payer of last resort will be looked for.  Back when there were no procedures that cost a million a day, families sometimes pitched in, but we are out of the range of family resources here.  In Oregon, I have seen tearful mothers begin media campaigns for contributions that will save the life of a child, only to see the child die before enough money was contributed.  If there were some way to make it funny, it would be a terrific TV game show.
Here’s the truth.  If there is a medical procedure to be done, someone is going to have to be paid to do it.  Any group of people who refuses to pay the cost of a procedure, is a “death panel.”
2.  What does Obamacare have to do with death panels?
Nothing.  Let’s start the question at another point.  Do you think that elderly people ought to have the right to make decisions about how their last days will be managed?  Me too.  If they don’t decide when they are able, someone will decide for them when they are no longer able.
Brief Excursus:  The word I always use for this is “agency,”  I want to be the agent—that’s death panel 6Latin for “the one who acts”—in my own life.  There is a nastier form of this consideration that uses autonomy instead.  I am a big fan of autonomy when it is my own autonomy we are considering, but I am not such a big fan of the word anymore because “autonomy” is too close to “heteronomy.”  Someone is going to “be the law” in a situation—that’s the nomos part.  It will be me (auto-) or someone else, (hetero-).  My hesitation about the word autonomy, considered in the light of its alternatives, is that it raises the question of alternatives.  I don’t want that question raised.  I want it presumed and “agency” does that for me. Incursus resumes here.
Presumably a woman and her husband will sit down with a knowledgeable person to talk about how they want their last days handled.  Making my own decisions about that is important to me and having the advice of a doctor can help a lot.  Question: who is going to pay the doctor for spending his or her time that way?  Here is a little cut from Wikipeda, every piece of which, with the exceptions of the names of the cosponsors, I know to be true.
A bill to provide for reimbursement every five years for office visit discussions with Medicare patients on advance directives, living wills, and other end of life care issues was proposed by Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) in April 2009—with Republican cosponsors Charles Boustany (R-LA), a cardiovascular surgeon, Patrick Tiberi (R-OH), and Geoff Davis (R-KY).[32][33][34] The counseling was to be voluntary and could be reimbursed more often if a grave illness occurred. The legislation had been encouraged by Gundersen Lutheran and a loose coalition of other hospitals in La Crosse, Wisconsin that had had positive experiences with the widespread use of advance directives.
death panel 7Earl Blumenauer is a very good congressman, but I take special pleasure in noting his contribution to this issue because he is the only member of Congress who could greet me by name if we met on the street.  So the answer to the question of who pays the doctor to be a part of this conversation is: Medicare. As important as these conversations are—they are the only way to guard agency and understanding at the same time—the doctors aren’t going to do them for free and they shouldn’t have to.  So the “Obama death panel” controversy, from this standpoint is, “Should the doctors be compensated for their work in helping people insure that their wishes are honored when they are no longer able to insist on them?”
You don’t have to be liberal to like the sound of that.
The argument against this provision of Obamacare is that it could be abused, that “panels of bureaucrats” (Sarah Palin’s phrasing) would coerce elderly people to “choose” to have the government kill them.  Any discussion can be perverted.  I know that.  Even teacher parent conferences can be perverted.  I have been the student, the parent, and the teacher in those conversations.  When the common purpose uniting the members of the conference falters, everyone has a “me first” substitute.  I remember that most vividly when I was the child in question.
So here are two questions.  What will happen if we do pay doctors to be a part of these discussions and what will happen if we don’t?  Remember the reference, above, to LaCrosse, Wisconsin?  Here’s why that is there.  You can see the whole piece from Forbes Magazine here.

Imagine a town of 50,000 Americans where 96% of those who die have signed an “advance directive” codifying their conscious decisions about how they would like to die. This is quite an accomplishment given we haven’t been able to move the needle at a national level beyond 30% over the past 30 years. By definition every possible polarized constituency in this town– conservative and liberal, religious and secular, Republican and Democrat, rich and poor–  agree on one of the most divisive political and social issues in America. Welcome to La Crosse, Wisconsin– a Midwestern everytown USA that has managed to transcend Sarah Palin’s death panel rhetoric not only to become the “cheapest place to die in America.”  But, more importantly, they have transformed the entire “tenor of care” for end-of-life planning.

96%!  How did they do that?  By talking about it together.  What a concept.  And the effect on medical costs of this plan, which, in LaCrosse, is called “Respecting Choices Advance Care Planning?”

Nationally, the average  cost for a patient’s last two years of life  is $26,000 (in some hospitals average costs run as high as $65,000) the average cost in La Crosse, is just $18,159.

The “death panels” charge was a low blow.  PolitiFact, which makes its living checking such charges, named it their “Lie of the Year.”  It’s bad and everyone who participated in it should be ashamed.  But the real cost, beyond the moral theater of it, is that we are not doing, nationally, what they have already achieved in LaCrosse.  Agency is respected.  Conversations are held.  Money is saved.

Which of those three outcomes does anyone want to object to?

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Walking Gladly in the Dark

Posted on January 7, 2015 by hessd

And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: “Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”

And he replied:“Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”
So I went forth, and finding the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night. And He led me towards the hills and the breaking of day in the lone East

King George VI—the king of The King’s Speech—read this poem to his British radio audience during his Christmas broadcast in 1939.  Great Britain had, by that time, declared war on Germany.  Germany had conquered Poland, virtually over the weekend, and Hitler was biding his time for the attack on western Europe.  It was a dark time and finding the way in that dark time was daunting.  You can see why it appealed to the king.

The poem was popularly called, ”The Gate of the Year.” Minnie Louise Haskins, of the London School of Economics, who wrote the poem in 1908 called it “God Knows.”  You can see the whole poem here.

I have loved this first part of the poem since I first heard it.  “The man who stood at the gate 4gate” engaged my imagination and asking only for a light and being told there is a better way and finally, treading “gladly into the night.”  All those appealed to me.  But something did not appeal to me and I’ve never known just what it was.  Today, I want to poke around a little and see what I can find.

When I think of it as my own problem, rather than King George’s, I start at a different place.  Here’s what I want: I what to tread safely into the unknown.  I think it will not be “unknown” if I can see it, so I ask for a light.

The man said, “You will be better off trusting God because this trusting will be better than seeing where you are going and it will be safer than knowing where to go.”  That’s how I read what the man said.

I have that sentiment myself sometimes.  “Tell me what to do so that I can be safe,” I want to say.  I formulate it in those terms, but I don’t say it out loud because I don’t approve of it.  Safety first people don’t do improv, I’m sure.  Safety first people don’t put their lives in the hands of local populations who may be friendly or not.  Safety first people don’t catch a pass on a crossing route when cornerbacks of reliably hostile disposition are waiting for them.  So safety is good, but “safety first” is not.

As I see it, there are two kinds of reassurance I might (probably would) prefer to trusting that I have put my hand into the hand of God.  First is “the known way.”  Familiar; habitual.  “I could do this with my eyes closed,” we say, but we don’t often say it in inescapable darkness.

Second is “the observable way.”  This is not a “way” we know, necessarily, but it is a way we will know how to react to if we can see far enough ahead.  We trust our reaction time, rather than our foreknowledge.

I might have a shot at either of those, if I were entirely sure that I had put my hand into the hand of God.  But it’s hard to be sure of that.  It is easy to see that I am not calling the shots anymore, but it is not easy to know who is.

gate 4The image that comes to my mind—influenced, I am sure, by a rapidly increasing technophobia—is “giving control” over to my computer to someone as at “remote source.”  If the tech at the “remote source” cares about this glitch as much as I do (unlikely) and if he or she is more competent than I am (extremely likely), then I can relax and watch the cursor jerk frantically from one menu to another and from one function to another while I watch.  Do I trust this person to manage my computer better than I could myself?  Absolutely.  Do I trust God to manage my life better than I could myself?  In principle.  Do I know that the remote source now exercising control over my life is, in fact, the God whom Jesus referred to as “Father?”  No.  I don’t know that.

And if I did know that, would I turn control over to God with the wholeness of heart with which  I submit to the tech at the remote location?  My very best trust in God comes when there is no alternative.

When I have some notion, myself, of how things should work out, I discover that other, deeper, levels of myself have preferences.  I know a little something about this “way,” I say, because I have been here before.  I am asking for only a little light, not a lot, because I do trust my ability to respond to unforeseen events.  If there are alternatives, like these two very partial ones, trusting that the Being to whom I have given remote control over my life is, in fact, God and that He will “guide my way”—then those are harder.

There is a solution to this dilemma.  It is, to borrow a phrase of C. S. Lewis’s, a “severe mercy.”  It is to trust, not that God will guide me safely along my path, but that God will direct me where He needs for me to go.  When the weak point in a military position is just about to give way, any general will send more soldiers there  That might not be where the soldiers want to go, but it is where they are needed, so it is where they are sent.  I don’t think of my life as a battlefield, really I don’t, but in the battlefield situation, the contrast between where I need to go and where I want to go is nicely illuminated.

If I trust that I will be guided where I need to be, that will be “a mercy.”  If that “place” is somewhere I will be humiliated or bored or fired or killed,  that will be “severe.”  But if I can tread gladly into the night, I will feel that it is trust well placed and I will gladly give up my known way and my attraction to safety.

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