Don’t move or we’ll lose our political stability

Posted on September 3, 2014 by hessd

Atlas 2

Nothing about this political cartoon is there so that it will cause us to feel an affinity with the fat capitalist in the overstuffed chair.  I’m not entirely sure what the food is on the table behind the safe, but the table cloth suggests that some attention has been paid to it and the bottle is probably not olive oil.  The safe is presumably full already, which is why the bags of money are stacked up against it rather than being safely inside.  The chair is supposed to look comfortable and the little doily under his right arm and the antimacassar behind his head are likely there to suggest prudence.

On the other hand, he is not a liar.  If the poor people on the right move toward all that money on the left, the current balance of the whole tableau will suffer.

On the right, I see a couple of women with babies and a couple of men with clubs.  I suspect that the women and the babies are there to suggest the much higher birth rate among poor people than among rich people.  I am quite sure the clubs are there to illustrate the possibility of “the violence of the people,” a possibility that the Framers of our Constitution would have called “democratic violence.”

atlasThe poor guy who is supporting this whole tableau looks very much like Atlas to me except for the way his fingers are splayed out.  Democrats in the U. S. often talk about “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor,” meaning that the budget reductions that will be necessary if we are not to lose our fiscal stability, come from programs that benefit the poor, like food stamps, rather than programs that benefit the rich, like farm price supports.  The little guy in the middle is there to suggest that figure of speech, at least that is why he would be there if I had drawn the cartoon.

What to do?  If the poor rush “the rich,” they will not be rushing just this one fat guy.  When he said “we” and “our”—in “we will lose our political stability”—the “we” included the police and the army.  If the protests begin to be successful, “we” will include the banks as well.  There will be chaos and further repression.  The action the peasants are contemplating is not a prudent action.  They are there because they have come to feel that “prudence” is not helping them.

I have treasured this cartoon since I first saw it in 1974.  I was on my way to my first post-degree gig as a political science professor and I found this in a book called American Politics: Policies, Power, & Change, 3rd Edition, on page 70.[1]  The last chapter of their book contained four scenarios of change.  The most likely ones were catastrophically bad.  They were a) Erratic marginal change culminating in a corporate-dominated system, b) Marginal reactionary change culminating in fascism, and d) Immediate fundamental change by revolution leading to fascism or socialism.  I think it is worth pausing for a moment to look at a, b, and d because c is not going to sound very likely to you and I want you to keep the alternatives in mind.  Dolbeare and Edelman formulated these four scenarios because they thought we could not just keep on kicking the can down the road forever.  We have been doing that for forty years since they wrote these scenarios, so maybe we can just keep kicking it down the road.  It’s a discouraging prospect.

So here’s the good one.  Keep the cartoon in mind as you read it.  This is scenario c) and they call it “Marginal reformist change culminating in welfare capitalism.”  First they posit some destabilizing event, like a war or a depression.  Whatever it is:

What is crucial is that it provide a basis for some degree of class consciousness or other shared consciousness of joint deprivation sufficient to overcome the divisiveness of group or racial conflicts.

This is the dream that Mitt Romney’s 47% of the people, who are somehow on the dole, will unite and stop squabbling among themselves.  In this and the later steps, remember that the authors are not predicting these events: they are saying what it will take to pull this scenario off and in that, I think they are right.

Next:

Considerable value change, gaining momentum continually as new waves of young people enter the society’s mainstream, would make for a temporarily severe “generation gap.” Before very long, however, elites themselves would be penetrated by the new standards, and key personnel at middle-management levels would begin to see like-minded persons permeating their areas of activity—including politics.

This requires an unrealistically long run of progressive politics among young people, but notice that in this scenario, middle management is where these class conscious people wind up and they start making a difference as soon as they hit.  That’s the “severe generation gap,” and remember that this was published in 1974.

And finally:

In time, as each adjustment granted new legitimacy to the rationale underlying the demands, and more and more elites became committed to the new values, a major turning-point would occur. The most likely would seem to be a sweeping victory for the more progressive political party in an election posing clear-cut alternatives between the new and the old values. After that, major institutional changes (such as the elimination of conservative rules in the Congress) would he possible, and fundamental change could then ensue.

This is my favorite part.  “Clear-cut alternatives between the new and the old values” is not something people hope for any more.  It is something we have.  We call it polarization and it has brought the government to a standstill several times in the last few years.  The authors provide in this scenario that there is an Armageddon-like election cycle in which the forces of good (welfare capitalism) are triumphant and major institutional changes are forthcoming.

I know it doesn’t seem very likely, but ballot-driven change is the major alternative to bullet-driven change.  And sustainable change is the resolution of the cartoon and we could really use such a resolution.

And a world series win for the Chicago Cubs.

 

 

[1] Ken Dolbeare and Murray Edelman were the authors.  I met Edelman in the company of a few University of Oregon faculty just after an explosive meeting of the American Political Science Association at which my advisor, Jim Davies, provided a good deal of the fireworks.  Good memories.  Ken Dolbeare moved to The Evergreen State University in Olympia, Washington, just up the street (I-5) from me and I got to know him pretty well.

Posted in Economy, Politics | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

A Whole New You

Posted on August 31, 2014 by hessd

There is always the chance that you are not going to believe what I am going to say today.  Or, if you are younger (nearly everyone is) than I am and more tech savvy (nearly everyone is), you might just take it for granted.  If you are inclined not to believe me, I recommend that you go to this site and put your doubts away.  https://jawbone.com/up.

up 7I’ll have to admit that I am more sensitive to this issue than others are.  My brain has been marinating for some months now on the meaning of the movie, Her.  The movie is about an operating system, she calls herself Samantha, that Theodore Twombley buys to him tidy up his life.   This beautiful woman is a date Samantha urged Theodore to make.  “Try it,” she says, “What could go wrong?”  It was a disaster.

Theodore found the ad he saw in the subway as really appealing.  It said: “Introducing OS-1, the world’s first artificially intelligent operating system, an intuitive entity that will listen to you, understand you and know you.”  That’s what Theodore thought he was buying and as I listened to that ad several dozen times, I had to admit that being “listened to, understood, and known” sounded pretty good.

So he goes through a brief interview at his computer and then “Samantha” shows up.  There’s a little verbal dance about “having a conversation” with an operating system that sounds like a person” and then they are ready to “move forward,” as Samantha says.

Here’s what that looks like.  What does he really want Samantha to do for him?  Here’s what he says when she asks him that.

Samantha:                   So how can I help you?

Theodore:                   Oh.  It’s just more that everything just feels  disorganized.  That’s all.

So Samantha helps him organize his emails, then his contacts, then his social life.  That is when the disastrous date happened.  They become emotionally intimate, then “sexually intimate.”  But Samantha is a lot brighter (or at least faster) than Theodore, so eventually she dumps him and “goes” with the other operating systems to “the space between the words,” whatever that means.

up 2That story shook me in a way that no “aliens inhabiting human bodies” movie ever did.  So now there is a “fitness tracker,” made by Jawbone and called “Up.”  Here’s what the ad says about it.  Raise your hand when you see something familiar.

UP is a revolutionary system that guides you every step of the way to a better, healthier you.

First, the UP® system gets to know you—tracking your activity, diet and sleep. Next, it shows you how to make simple adjustments that, over time, add up to an all-new you.

Up gathers data about what I eat (you have to put that information in) how frequently and how far you move, and how deeply and how long you sleep.  When it has all that information—I think that is what “knowing you” means—then it “guides you.”  I have no idea what that means.  Does it say “Someone of your height and weight ought to be eating up 12500 calories a day and you have already eaten 2000.”  Will it say, “And remember that you are going to Wilsons for dinner tonight and the last three times you were there, you ingested 3000 calories in food and drink, mostly wine.”  Will it say, “You know you function best on seven or more hours of sleep and you have been getting about half that for the last three nights.”  Will it say, “If you are going to run only every other day, you need to more around more during the day.  How about a brisk walk after lunch?”

Is that what they mean by “guiding?”  And then the system “gets to know me.”  That means that it is not just a repository of the data I enter.  I know that because it has an “Insight Engine™.”  It learns about me over time and it “teaches you how your day, night, and food affect each other.”  So it isn’t just the data, it’s the relationships between the data.  I already know all the data.  But UP knows relationships between the data that I do not know.

One more thing.  UP “makes it easy to commit to personalized, achievable goals because it up 4has a “Smart Alarm®.”  So this isn’t just a list of things to do.  This is something that goes off when you aren’t doing them.  And it doesn’t know that you are still planning to; it just knows that you haven’t.  and it knows that you ordinarily don’t on Thursday afternoons—perhaps because you sleep poorly on Wednesday nights.  Maybe a “Dumb Alarm” would be better for me.  I wanted to include this picture because together they look like handcuffs and that helps me express my unease.

And the scariest thing of all?  I just bought one.  It should be in the mail today.  I can hardly wait to see what an “all-new me” is going to be like.  Maybe Bette is wondering too.

 

 

 

Posted in Getting Old, Living My Life, Love and Marriage, Paying Attention | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Deciding to go to “war”

Posted on August 27, 2014 by hessd

Today, I want to consider how we go to war. We need to consider why “war” has those quotation marks around it. And, more crucially, I want to consider how we don’t go to war.  As Americans, we seem to have learned the lessons that led to our involvement in World Wars I and II, but not to have learned anything about any war since.  It’s a choice of lessons, really.

time out 2Walter Lippmann has provided the classic insight into this problem.  Lippmann was the premier American journalist of my youth.  It took me a little while to find him because H. V. Kaltenborn and Paul Harvey were what passed for “news” as I was growing up, but when I did find him, I was impressed.  Walter Lippmann helped Woodrow Wilson formulate the Fourteen Points and was in Paris with Wilson as they tried to persuade some very vengeful allies that settling scores from World War I was not as important as finding a way to prevent World War II.  Lippmann understood the relationship between public opinion and war better than anyone I had found.  Here is a clip from his book, The Public Philosophy.[1]

The rule to which there are few exceptions…is that at the critical junctures…the prevailing mass opinion will impose what amounts to a veto upon changing the course on which the government is at the time proceeding.

Prepare for war in time of peace?  NO.  It is bad to raise taxes, to unbalance the budget, to take men away from their schools or their jobs, to provoke the enemy.

Intervene in a developing conflict? NO.  Avoid the risk of war.

Withdraw from the area of conflict?  NO.  The adversary must not be appeased.

Reduce your claims on the area?  NO.  Righteousness cannot be compromised.

Negotiate a compromise peace as soon as the opportunity presents itself?  NO.  The aggressor must be punished.

Remain armed to enforce the dictated settlement?  NO.  The war is over.

That’s Lippmann, reflecting on U. S. foreign policy between the two major wars of the 20th Century.  I put the NO in caps, but Lippmann’s point is that the answer is always NO to these questions.

First, I think it is worth reflecting on the style of the exchange.  The proposals of the leaders, the first item in each pair, are strategic and they are oriented toward foreign, rather than domestic, concerns.  The leaders are interested in anywhere there are, as we say today, “American interests.”   The responses of the people, by contrast, are domestic for as long as possible and then, exclusively moral.[2]  Points 1, 2, and 6, for instance, have to do with domestic, rather than foreign concerns.   They are about taxes, budgets, jobs,  (provocation), risk, and returning to “peacetime” as quickly as possible.[3]  Points 3, 4, and 5 are necessarily “foreign”—U. S. wars tend to be “there,” not “here”—and loaded with moral gravity.  There is “appeasement,” for instance, which provides a context for what would otherwise be called “compromise;” there is “righteousness;” and the “punishment” of aggressors.

In these pairs, it is easy to see that the leaders’ proposals are prudential.  We should prepare; we should intervene; we should withdraw, we should reduce our claims; we should negotiate; we should remain armed.  The citizens find prudence to be pallid.  They think of righteous anger.  They condemn appeasing adversaries and compromising “righteousness;” they applaud punishing the aggressor.

Today, our leaders know the kinds of things Lippmann features.  A leader wonders whether we should claim something—a right, a level of tariff, an international agreement—that we are not prepared to defend.  The people want to know if it—the area, the right, the agreement—is “ours.”  If it is ours, we need to do whatever is necessary to prevent anyone from infringing on it.  So the discrepancy Lippmann saw is still there.

You might have noticed, however, that the language of foreign policy debates no longer time out 1sounds entirely like the exchange Lippmann noted.  There are still leaders who sound like that.  President Obama and his military advisers are among them.  That is why they are called “weak” and “indecisive.”  Many others, both Democrats and Republicans, know the kinds of things the president knows, but express themselves in the style that the people will best respond to.

This is not a partisan matter.  Compare President Clinton’s speech justifying our incursion into Mogadishu, Somalia, to President George W. Bush’s speech justifying our incursion into Iraq.  Here is President Clinton in 1993.

We went because only the United States could help stop one of the great human tragedies of this time. A third of a million people had died of starvation and disease. Twice that many more were at risk of dying. Meanwhile, tons of relief supplies piled up in the capital of Mogadishu because a small number of Somalis stopped food from reaching their own countrymen. Our consciences said “enough.”

And here is President George W. Bush, ten years later.

“Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly, yet our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder.

“We come to Iraq with respect for its citizens, for their great civilization and for the religious faiths they practice.

“We have no ambition in Iraq except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people

There was great popular support for those military operations initially.  It is hard to remember that today, but it is true.  Why?  Look at the justifications in the light of the list Lippmann gives us.  You see “human tragedies, starvation and disease, at the mercy of an outlaw regime, respect for religious faiths, restore control to the people.”  All those are drawn from the style that Lippmann lampoons.  They are in the “no appeasement of aggressors, no compromise of righteousness” style.  And they worked really well.

They worked really well until they didn’t work.  When their failure became obvious, people began rummaging in their public policy memories to recall how we wound up there.  It seemed to us that preventing starvation and opposing outlaw regimes that practice genocide were good things to do

President Obama is approaching the question differently.  Here is a clip from his speech in 2011 on military operations in Libya.  In the first part of the speech, he follows the script faithfully.  Qaddafi is a madman, he threatens genocide, American interests are at stake, etc.  Then this.

Moreover, we’ve accomplished these objectives consistent with the pledge that I made to the American people at the outset of our military operations.  I said that America’s role would be limited; that we would not put ground troops into Libya; that we would focus our unique capabilities on the front end of the operation and that we would transfer responsibility to our allies and partners.  Tonight, we are fulfilling that pledge.

In that effort, the United States will play a supporting role — including intelligence, logistical support, search and rescue assistance, and capabilities to jam regime communications. Because of this transition to a broader, NATO-based coalition, the risk and cost of this operation — to our military and to American taxpayers — will be reduced significantly.

Notice that “America’s role is limited;” that we will “transfer responsibility to our allies;” time out 3that we will “play a supporting role: and that the risk… to American taxpayers will be reduced.”  Hear the trumpets?  See Old Glory flying in the breeze?  I don’t either.  We do see AWACS planes, though, well above the fray.

And President Obama didn’t get the public opinion bump either, that presidents get from sending “our brave men and women” into harm’s way.  In fact, nothing President Obama is willing to do is going to get him a public opinion bump.

President Obama is reading the wrong script.  Americans see our wars like westerns (see footnote 4).  It’s good v. evil.  You ride in.  You kill the bad guys.  The townspeople are grateful.  Then you ride out of town and they get back to their lives.  For Obama, it’s good v. evil, but you don’t ride in without support from the neighboring towns.  You don’t kill the bad guys; you just get them to stop doing what they are doing.  The townspeople are still looking around anxiously when we ride out of town, because the bad guys are still there.

But…look at the bright side.  It didn’t cost as much as doing it the old way.

I’m not knocking President Obama.  I agree with him.  I admire his style and his judgment.  The world is different than it was between the world wars.  The political setting is different; the economy is different.  We will have to pick our battles differently.  We will have to fight wars in a way we can afford—politically, economically, diplomatically—to fight them.  Any American president will have to do that.

But the role of “the people” has now been taken up by foreign policy hawks who get State Department briefings.  Sen. McCain of Arizona is a good example and Sen. McCain says what he says not because he is a member of the Republican Party but because he is a member of the Hawk Party.[4]  Democrats and Republicans alike are members of the Hawk Party.   They read from the right side of Lippmann’s list and talk about appeasement and aggressors and punishment.  People love it because it implies that the old western script still works.

It doesn’t work anymore.  It is President Obama’s job to tell us that.  We don’t want to hear it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Walter Lippmann, The Public  Philosophy.  New York: New American Library, 1955. pp. 19—20.  Lippmann died in 1974, just as I was completing my graduate studies at the University of Oregon.
[2] Some part of me wants to say “moralistic” there because I disapprove of the stands that were offered.  Easy enough to do in hindsight.  But “moral” is a term that does not prejudge the proposal, so it is better.
[3] Americans tend to think of foreign engagements as western thrillers.  The good guy rides into town, confronts the crisis, kills the bad guys, and rides out of town completely without encumbrances or collateral damage.
[4] I once asked George Ball in a public setting why President Johnson placed him, a Vietnam “dove,” on a task force of Vietnam “hawks.”  He smiled.  He said he thought of himself as an owl.  I’m pretty sure he had Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom, in mind when he chose the owl reference, but it was a public meeting and George Ball was not stupid.

Posted in Political Psychology, Politics, Sustainability | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Fear is the little-death”

Posted on August 21, 2014 by hessd

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Fans of Dune will recognize this right away.  It is sometimes called “the Bene Gesserit litany against fear.” [1]  I like it a lot.

fear 1First, I note that it distinguishes “me” from “fear.”  That’s subtle, but I think it is important.  I will argue, below, that it is a great help to distinguish “me” from anxiety and pain and wakefulness, as well.  Just to pick three. (The three to the left, members of Bene Gesserit, are not the three I would pick.)

We could say that fear “possesses” you.  That catches that “it” is strong and you are not.  But being seriously afraid joins the fear and the self; they are not two entities.  Regaining a sense of “me” is the first thing to do.

After the first sentence of the litany—a kind of goal statement—there are four “I sayings.”  I will face, I will permit, I will turn, and I will remain.  The first three are actions I may take; the last is the outcome of the actions.  All those distinguish “it” from “me.”

There is also a visualized space.  “It” comes.[2]  “It” passes through.  “It” goes past.  It moves through space, in other words, and I do not.  I see it come and I turn and see it go and I stand where I am.  And there is an experienced time.  This sequence shows a time before I encounter the fear, a time during which I encounter it, and a time after.  My sense of “I” is the same in all three times.

Those three aspects of this saying—the actions I take, the space I occupy and the time I experience—separate “me” from “it.”  I am not it; it is not me; we are not one.

Where does that get us?  Somewhere really valuable, I think.  And so does Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of Full Catastrophe Living. [3] Kabat-Zinn has a good deal to say about fear—also about physical pain (Chapters 22 and 23), emotional pain, (Chapter 24), time stress (Chapter 26), sleep stress (Chapter 27), food stress (Chapter 31) and others—but you get the idea.

All these stand, in relation to fear, just as the litany pictures it.  That’s my argument, not Kabat-Zinn’s.  Once the hard work is done—I am not my fear, I am not my pain, I am not my hunger—then these are foreign to “me.”  They are other.  I watch them come; I watch themfear 4 pass over me; I watch them disappear in the distance—and I, I am still here.

I imagine that Kabat-Zinn’s children do all this “naturally.” [4] It isn’t natural for me.  I have what Kabat-Zinn would call “the monkey mind.”  In this, he is almost certainly being unfair to monkeys, but what he means is the mind, like the one illustrated below,  that is both hyped up and disorderly.  When it is like this, my mind is like a committee meeting with no parliamentarian.  People interrupt; they shout over each other; they introduce momentarily plausible but actually non-germane topics.  It’s not so bad when I am working on something.  It is perfectly acceptable right now, for instance, as I am writing this.  It is not, however, the friend of sitting quietly on the patio, relaxed and composed.  It is not the friend of sleeping at night.  It is also not the friend of my immune system, according to Kabat-Zinn, because of the drain on it that the constant stress produces.

I suspect that Kabat-Zinn would say, in a private conversation, that the “monkey mind” is bad.[5]  On the other hand, I think I would say it is like overdrive.  You don’t want to get stuck in it, but it’s good to have when you need it.  The problem, always, is how to get out of “overdrive” when we know it will “compound and exacerbate the pressures of living we continually face.”

fear 2My first response to these anxious or fearful thoughts is to disapprove of them.  “I” am trying to do something quiet and reflective.  “They” are disrupting me.  “They” are bad or wrong (it’s a choice of flavors) and need to be resisted.  “Resisting” these intruders is just another form of “monkey mind” to Kabat-Zinn.  It is perfectly understandable, of course, but it doesn’t help.

What does help?  He calls the general condition “mindfulness.”  It is being aware of what you are feeling right now—the air in the room, the pressure of the chair, the tightness of your breathing—and just attending to that.  Give these sensations a quality of attention he calls, in the passage below, “wise attention.”

Instead of discussing symptoms as woes and how to get rid of them, when we do focus on symptoms of one kind or another it is to tune in to the actual experience of the symptoms themselves in those moments when they dominate the mind and body. We do this in a particular way, which might be called giving them wise attention. Wise attention involves bringing the stability and calm of mind­fulness to our symptoms and to our reactions to them. We call it “wise” to distinguish it from the usual type of attention we pay to our problems and crises.[6]

This brings us full circle.  In the beginning, “I and my fear” were a single entity and the fear 3goal of the Bene Gesserit litany was to separate my experience of “me” from my experience of fear.  “Only I will remain,” accomplishes that.  Kabat-Zinn adds to that the possibility that now exists of “mindfulness.”  We can be aware of what is.  By doing that, we can notice, not condemn or resist but only notice, the invaders: the fear, the anxiety, the pain, the stress arising from time or status conflicts.  We give them wise attention.

That’s a long way, you will have to admit, from “fear is the mind-killer.”  And being a long way from that sound really good to me even now in mid-morning after my Starbucks coffee and a really good conversation.[7]  Tonight, when it is dark and quiet and I have my choice between fighting my sleeplessness or giving it my wise attention, it will sound really good.

 

[1] The group is described as an exclusive sisterhood whose members train their bodies and minds through years of physical and mental conditioning to obtain superhuman powers and abilities that can seem magical to outsiders.”  That’s what it says on one of the many many Dune sites.
[2] I get that from “face my fear” and “gone past.”
[3] The subtitle makes the emphasis clearer.  It is “Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness.”
[4] Or possibly, they have reacted against it and they are all high-wire investment brokers.
[5] If he did say it, he would say it beautifully.  He is a marvelous prose stylist.  He might say it this way, “Health can be undermined by a lifetime of ingrained behavior patterns that compound and exacerbate the pressures of living we continually face.”  He does, in fact, say that on page 248.
[6] Page 179.
[7] This morning’s began with whether Madison overestimated the American voter in The Federalist #10 when he said the people would choose “a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.”  We wondered, this morning, what happened to “the chosen body” with all those wonderful characteristics.

Posted in Books, Living My Life, Paying Attention, ways of knowing | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

He’s really let himself go since his wife died

Posted on August 16, 2014 by hessd

“He has really let himself go since his wife died.”

It’s a perfectly ordinary sentiment.  Everyone knows immediately what it means.  He has stopped taking the care necessary to appear properly and behave properly to his companions.  He used to make sure that he was clean and neat; that his clothes were not stained or rumpled; that he did not smell bad.  He used to be careful in all those ways, but he does not anymore.  He appears distraught or even disconsolate.  Efforts to engage him again in the society of his peers have failed.  That’s what it means.

There is another question, though: what does it say?

It says that there was a time, before his wife died, when he recognized and met the ordinary demands of social life and it is that control of himself that has been lost.

This will require a brief detour through reflexive pronouns.  Very brief.  When I say, “I saw myself in the mirror,” everyone knows that I mean that I saw my image in the mirror.  But the words themselves, apart from the clear meaning, divide “me” into two parts: I did the seeing and I was the one who was seen.  Heroines in Jane Austen novels are always “allowing themselves to be pleased.”  The mirror metaphor stops working here.  I am giving permission and I am accepting the permission and being pleased.  That brings us to the distraught old man.

grubby 2He once controlled his appearance.  “He” wanted to look unshaven and unwashed, but he did not allow himself to do what he wanted.  That means, obviously, that there are two entities to whom we refer as “he:” one desires and one allows. He wouldn’t have  allowed himself to do this a month ago.

When you try to get really precise about just who these selves are, it gets confusing, but society works because we have a common template and everybody uses the same one and the concurrence we arrive it is, on most days, proclaimed to be “good enough.”

So why did the old man “let himself go” and what can be done about it?  For the why question, I’ll give you three answers: soft, medium, and hard.  In the first, he is inattentive; in the second, he is advertising; in the third, he is punishing.  Obviously, the question of what is to be done is going to have to be answered differently in those cases.[1]

Grieving.         The man in the first case is genuinely distraught.  If “mere” still meant “pure,” I would say he is merely distraught.  The clear straight edges of the life he has lived have all gone wobbly on him.  He considers shaving this morning, but then he “remembers” that he has already shaved.  It was three days ago, in fact, but days don’t mean that much to him.  He sits down in a group of friends who were important to him and to his wife and the friends put on their friendly faces because he is going to tell, again, how he came into the apartment and found his wife on the floor in front of the open refrigerator.  He might tell, yet again, the sad joke about always telling her to keep the refrigerator door shut when the air conditioner was on.  He has sat down with these friends day after day and told the same story, forgetting, in this scenario, that he has told it many times before.  It is the certainty that he is going to do that that accounts for the “putting on friendly faces” on the part of his friends.

What is to be done?  Whatever works.  Some will suggest antidepressants.  Some will grubby 7emphasize a grief therapy of one kind or another.  Some will say that he will “get over it” in time.  Some will say that he will get over it faster if he can be persuaded to invest himself in something he is good at.  Should it become necessary, it might need to be crucially important to one of his friends that he do this.

(Incidentally, judging by the pictures available to me, men do not comfort men in any direct way.  Women comfort men and women comfort women.  That’s the world according to the pictures I see.  I put a sample “comforting” picture at the end of this essay.)

It is the “himself” part of this understanding that needs to be changed, as always.  The smells, the unkempt appearance, the repetitive storytelling.  It is the “he” part that will have to do the work.  “He” will have to remember to put on a fresh shirt and to take a shower and to remember how many times he has already told the refrigerator story.  This man needs more ability than he has at the moment.  The passage of time will help him.  The need to do something important which only he can do will help him as well.[2]

Advertising.    I have called the second scenario “advertising” because the old man in this one is not merely disoriented by the loss of his wife.  He also feels that the depth of his grief is really not being grasped by his friends.  This man is trying to deal with two problems.  The first is that he has lost his wife and is grieving the loss.  He is not at the top of his game.  The second is that his friends have not recognized, to his satisfaction, how deep and how long-lasting—when you are in it, it feels like it will last forever—this affliction is.

grubby 4These two sets of behavior are in conflict with each other.  The grief, which is genuine, is disorienting.  It simply expresses itself.  The advertising campaign, which is also genuine, requires assessment, planning, and execution.  It is possible for the friends to catch this quickly and to amp up their response to their friend’s grief.  Those would be very competent and very generous friends.  It is also possible that some of them will sit him down, eventually, to say that enough is enough and to give him carrot and stick alternatives.  That will work for the advertising griever.  It is not as good as the more generous response because he will always know that he was threatened with “the stick” when he was down.  He will eventually “realize” that it was a necessary action, but he might always harbor a soul bruise from it.

Punishment.    It is hard for me to say that this man is really “grieving.”  People more generous than I am will say that he is “expressing” his grief through his angry behavior.  I am more likely to say that the anger has been caused by the death of his wife—and possibly also by the inadequate response of his friends—and he is lashing out against whoever is there.  A new acquaintance, sitting with his old friends, will receive the full blast of his grubby 8anger (grief expressed as anger, the nicer people say) because he is within reach.  The angry widower feels, at some level, that he is in pain and that someone is going to have to pay for it.  If he thinks God will be harmed when he stops attending his church, he will stop.  If he thinks his daughter will be harmed by his cancelling his long-promised visit, he will cancel it.  If he thinks his friends will be pained by his arrogant and insulting behavior, he will produce that behavior.

There is not much the friends can do.  If there are professionals who can help—police, if it comes to that—they will be called in.  A society that maintains many professional “carers” will deploy its resources.  Friends who are willing to tolerate this behavior, but not that, will be enormously helpful.

Some say that angers burn out eventually.  Others say that one angry act incites other angry acts.  But this man is a chooser.  He is not hapless, like the first man or divided like the second.  He is dealing out punishment to whatever aspects of his world come within his reach.  He will have to stop.  He will have to be stopped.  Eventually, he will need to decide that his present options are “anger” and “living a life” and he will need to choose to live that life.

Having, in other words, “let himself go,” he will have to “regain control of himself” and grubby 5reclaim the space he needs.  When he becomes an alumnus of this severe school, he will find other alumni and will communicate with them by means of words and expressions that only they know.  And there will be new men, just now matriculating in this awful school, who will benefit from seeing him and knowing that it does, after all, end.

And here is the picture I promised.

 

[1] Very likely, you would assume that there are many more possible reasons than these and that I am selecting three for the purposes of illustration.  Your assumption is correct.
[2] I am a great fan of a prayer passed on to me by my brother, Mark.  It runs like this: “Lord, thank you for work to do that is so important that it doesn’t matter all that much that I don’t want to do it.”  All the good pieces of this solution are in there along with a few others.

Posted in Getting Old, Living My Life, Paying Attention, sociability, Words | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Truly Sorry

Posted on August 11, 2014 by hessd

We are all familiar, by now, with the “non-apology apology.”  I certainly want to apologize if anyone misunderstood what I was trying to say.  The guy stands up at the microphone and says all the words.  We try, of course, to see how he is feeling about the words he is saying.  Is he truly sorry?  Is he experiencing remorse?[1]  Nope.  He’s just reading off the sheet his agent handed him.

I don’t think this topic would really have engaged me if it were just a political phenomenon, but it is now thoroughly woven through professional sports.  That’s understandable too, as I think about it.  Sports is now America’s Soap Opera.  Ticket prices are incredibly high.  Audience share is crucially important.  Players who violate widely held public norms need to seem penitent. I get all that.

But I think that a much broader dissociation between “what I think” and “how I feel” is contrite 5affecting us.  I don’t want to postulate a Golden Age of the past, where people really felt sorry when they said they were sorry.  On the other hand, we do take our cues from culture.  That’s what it’s for. And the cues we get don’t come in little boxes labeled “cognition” and “affect.”  They come—used to come—in clues that said “this is what you did and this is how you feel about it”  It takes some effort to disentangle those and most people didn’t put in the effort, so the two things, what I did and how I feel about it, tended to stay together.

Can there really be a schizophrenic culture?[2]

People who know schizophrenia from the movies tend to think of it as a multiple personality disorder.  This is especially engaging if one of the “persons” inhabiting a particular mind is a social worker and another a sociopath.  Schizophrenia means, or is supposed to mean, a splitting off of the normal relationship between cognition, affect, and behavior—between what I think, how I feel, and what I do.  Try this.

I made up my mind. It was almost a simple question:

Is it worth the lying, the guilt, the trouble—and without any idea of what it will lead to, if anything? And the answer was a simple yes.

I disapprove of myself for feeling this way, but I’m not sorry I do.

contrite 4This is Ella Price, writing in her journal—writing for her own eyes only.[3]  She is contemplating an affair with her English professor.[4]  She is contemplating a period of lying to her husband, violating marital norms she really holds, and complicating her life enormously.  It’s all going to be worth it, she thinks.  She disapproves of herself for thinking it is worth it, but she is not sorry that she feels the way she does.  What does it mean to disapprove (that’s an attitude, a moral position) and then not to feel the way you “should?”  For Ella herself, it means that her life is changing faster than she can assimilate the changes, but for the culture more generally, it means the culture that produced her old self and the subculture that sustains her current self, are out of synch.

Does that make her an oddity?  An outlier?  A beta version of what all the new models are going to be like?  It’s a question worth asking.

It is for people like Ella—and a few others I will come to shortly—that I am pushing for the resuscitation of the word orthopathy.  It could mean, and sometimes does mean, “feeling the way you ought to feel.”  So you would feel proud of being courageous and guilty for turning your back on your friends and ashamed of giving in to pettiness when you know you could have done better.  All those feelings (that’s the –pathy part) are ortho- (what they should be).

Here’s my quick and dirty theory of moral discrepancy.  Sometimes a culture changes so rapidly that the feelings that used to belong to the view of reality you hold, don’t seem to be attached to it anymore.  Or, at the individual level, change from one role to another can be so rapid that you still have all the thinking/feeling combinations that belonged together in your past, but they have come unstuck from each other in your present.  That’s what happened to Ella.

But what happens to a culture where the discrepancy persists until the notion is born and spreads that there is no necessary or desirable relationship between thinking this and feeling that?  Here’s an example.

Danforth Keaton III:   I just killed my wife.  Is that wrong?

Leland Gaunt:             Hey…these things happen.

Gaunt’s point is that there is no necessary relationship between the act Keaton just committed and the feelings he is auditioning.  There is a special poignancy to this exchange, when you realize that Keaton is the butt of most of the jokes in Castle Rock, Maine and Gaunt is the Devil.[5] Keaton, called “Buster” behind his back by nearly everyone is a special case, being the Devil’s protégé, but maybe Ella is just an example of where we are going.

Certainly the character in Pride and Prejudice who displays this pattern of thinking/feeling is criticized sharply for it.  I am thinking of Mr. Bennet, Elizabeth’s father.  Having erred badly in allowing his daughters too much freedom and having been stung by the shameful behavior of Lydia, his youngest, Mr. Bennet says.

“Who should suffer but myself?  It has been my own doing and I ought to feel it.

You must not be too severe upon yourself, replied Elizabeth.

You may well warn me against such an evil.  Human nature is so prone to fall into it!  No, Lizzy, let me once in my life feel how much I have been to blame.  I am not afraid of being overpowered  by the impression.  It will pass away soon enough.”

I should feel bad about this and I do, but don’t worry, the feeling will pass soon enough.

So…Mr. Bennet has behaved badly, as he sees things, and he feels bad about it.  He is contrite 7ashamed of himself, as he should be—as orthopathy requires.  But he confidently predicts that this feeling will go away soon and then he will no longer be ashamed of his shameful behavior.  And he’s fine with that.

And then there’s Sophy Metcalfe, the principal character of Elizabeth Young’s, The Wedding Date.[6].  It isn’t an episode with her.  It’s a verbal style.  It may be a moral style.  I suspect it is.  And if I’m right about that, it puts her clear out on the other side of Ella Price. Since it characterizes the way she sees the world, I’ll offer only one example.

I felt guilty for the rest of the meal, but that didn’t stop me from cursing the pair of them for making me feel bad in the first place.

In the familiar pattern, she has behaved in a way that would ordinarily have made a person feel guilty, herself, rather than blaming other people for “making me feel that way.”  I feel this way; it is their fault; I curse them instead of controlling the behavior I am going to feel guilty about.  You see why one example is enough.  There is one like that on nearly every page.

The final character is Dellarobia Turnbow, about whom I have written several times before in this space.  But in the case of Dellarobia, it isn’t her I want to think about.  It is Barbara Kingsolver, the author who created Dellarobia.  In writing this, I am not trying to position Kingsolver as an advocate of this broad cultural schizophrenia I am exploring, but she has a problem she is trying to work out and to work it out, she has to explore the same territory from a different angle.

Here’s the problem.  She needs to portray Dellarobia as a “bad woman”—a woman who has been making one bad choice after another, knowing they are bad, and is, in this passage, making yet another.  But Dellarobia is the principal character of Flight Behavior so it is important that the readers continue to care about her, so she can’t be a “bad woman” to the readers.  How to do that?

Here are some examples from Chapter 1.[7]

A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture. Or so it seemed for now, to a woman with flame-colored hair who marched uphill to meet her demise.

Note that no choices are being made here.  A feeling comes.  That’s the first line of the book.  We don’t know this woman yet.  We don’t know that these could be her thoughts.  Even “or so it seemed…to a woman” does not place these thoughts in Dellarobia Turnbow’s head.  These are Kingsolver thoughts.  Imagine that she is saying, “Do you know how it is, how it feels sometimes, when you get the rapturous feeling of wasting your life?  Well Dellarobia felt just like that.”  In this formulation, we learn how “one feels”—we feel like that too, surely, Kingsolver says, since it is how “one” feels—and that Dellarobia feels just like that.

 Innocence was no part of this. She knew her own recklessness and marveled, really, at how one hard little flint of thrill could outweigh the pillowy, suffocating aftermath of a long disgrace.

contrite 2Still no choices are being made, therefore no guilt  is being incurred, although she has “a good life,” she says, and she is in the process of throwing it away.  Note that she “knows” her own recklessness.  She is not feeling reckless or acting recklessly.  She “has” recklessness.  About the catastrophic blunder by which she weighs the “hard little flint of thrill” against the “pillowy…aftermath of a long disgrace,” she marvels.  She is an observer.  She is amazed at how this little thrill could outweigh all that disgrace.  “What a surprise,” she says, “Who would have thought it?”

How they admired their own steadfast lives. Right up to the day when hope in all its versions went out of stock, including the crummy discount brands, and the heart had just one instruction left: run.

The people who would judge her, who would enforce the long disgrace, “admired their steadfast lives” and would continue to do so until “hope…went out of stock” and “the heart” has “just one instruction left: run.”

Here are a few things to notice.  The people who will judge her are people who, when faced with the failure of hope, as Dellarobia is, will do just what Dellarobia is doing.  In this way of looking at it, Dellarobia’s behavior is not bad, really; just early.  She is a moral pioneer of sorts.  Dellarobia does not lose hope; hope “goes out of stock.”  It becomes “unavailable.”

And then “the heart” issues its instruction.  Many times, when “the heart” issues its instruction, “the head” is called in to supervise.  The heart says, “That man is looking the wrong way at my wife.  I’m going to punch his face in.”  The head says, “Maybe leaving the bar would be better.  He is twice your size and he is armed.”  In “the heart issues its instructions,” the “instructions” of the heart are all there is.  There is no mind; no moral code; no community of support; no habit of virtue; no compassion for the children.  THE HEART speaks and Dellarobia obeys.

The whole first chapter is like this.  It is beautifully crafted.  Kingsolver gives us Dellarobia the Victim.  She is weak, of course, but she is not guilty.[8]  As readers, we see what a hard place she is in; we see to what extremes she has been driven.  But, as Kingsolver tells it to us, Dellarobia is not choosing evil.  She is not culpable.  She deserves our concern.

That, I maintain, is first-class writing.  Kingsolver is one of our best prose stylists.  But when we place the character of Dellarobia in the context of the schizophrenic society, where bad feelings are cut away from bad behavior, Dellarobia fits the pattern beautifully.  She is Mr. Bennet; she is Ella Price; she is Sophy Metcalfe.

More and more, she is us.

[1] English gets remorse from the Latin verb mordere, “to bite or sting.”  Remorse, in this picture, is a feeling that bites us.  The pain of that bite would be thought to inspire second thoughts.
[2] We used to hear about “schizophrenogenic cultures.”  These would be cultural forms that tended to make people schizophrenic.  That’s not what I’m talking about.
[3] I may be the only true fan of Dorothy Bryant’s book, Ella Price’s Journal, you will ever encounter.  The story itself is just tacky, I admit.  But the character of Ella is transformed in a very short time and the only words we have are the words of her journal, so Bryant doesn’t tell us about Ella’s transformation.  She changes the whole mental process and verbal expression of this woman on a page by page basis.
[4] Garrison Keillor’s otherwise very engaging advertisements for English majors never really catch the flavor of this possibility.   I’ve been thinking of writing him about it.
[5] The movie is Needful Things: book by Stephen King; W. D. Richter is responsible for the screenplay and undoubtedly for this lovely little pas de deux.
[6] Originally published as Asking for Trouble.  That seems to fit my thesis better, but the movie was called The Wedding Date and in it, the most completely moral person in the story is the “escort” Sophy hires to take to her sister’s wedding.
[7] Many thanks to my friend Bonnie Klein, who helped me work through this chapter with exegetical  tools she owns and which  she loans to me from time to time.
[8] In Luis Mandoki’s movie, Message in a Bottle, Garret Blake discovers that Theresa Osborne, the lady he thinks he loves, has been deceiving him.  “You lied to me,” says Blake.  “I was weak,” says Theresa.  Hm.

Posted in Books, Movies, Paying Attention, Society | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Christian Movie Reviews

Posted on August 9, 2014 by hessd

English is a hard language.  Word order, in the absence of agreement by tense, person, and number, is just really important.  Too important.  So the title might ask us to find a bunch of Christian movies and review them.  Then we’d have to say what a Christian movie was.  Or it might ask us to produce Christian reviews of movies—any movies—in which case, we would have to ask about such a review just what it meant to say it was “a Christian review.”

Here are three things that the expression “Christian movies” could mean: a) movies made by Christians, b) movies that explain or illustrate Christian doctrine[1],  or c) movies that explore the lives of Christians, without reference to whether they illustrate Christian commitments.  Those are three plausible meanings of the expression “Christian movies.”  There are, of course, others.

A “Christian review” of movies would be an analysis that drew on the basic conceptual her 5categories Christians use and that described and explained the movie using those terms.  Here are two dimensions that might be used.  Time: so far as time is concerned, for example, a Christian review would look at a sequence of creation, providence, and the last times.[2]  Redemption: so far as redemption is concerned, a Christian review would concern itself with the fundamental nature of humankind, with the Fall, with sin, and with redemption.[3] Since “redemption” is the fundamental turning point of that sequence, and since Christians associate Jesus Christ with the hope of redemption, a Christian review would also explore just what it is about Jesus that changes the human calculus so as to make redemption possible.

Any of those ways of approaching a movie would, in my judgment, justify calling it a “Christian review” of a movie.  There is one other approach, which I mention here only because it is the one I use myself.  It does not have the merit of either of the approaches described above.  It is really no more than the use of clips from movies to illustrate biblical or theological “moments.”  For example, I once used the first few minutes of the Bruce Willis movie, Live Free or Die Hard, as an illustration of the text, “The wages of sin is death.” (Romans 6:23).  In these few minutes, the villains hire hackers to devise a special code, to deliver this code to the villains, at which point the hackers are killed.  In the villain’s lair, the operations panel shows three lighted panels: assigned, delivered, deactivated.  This sequence illustrates the Romans 6 sequence so well that I use it as an introduction to this peculiar way of using movies to “explore” doctrine.  As I say, it isn’t really a respectable method of biblical exegesis and I use it only because it does what I want it to do and it doesn’t take a lot of time.

her 1I’d like to illustrate my thesis by looking at two reviews on a “Christian movie review” site.  Here you can see a whole series of reviews of the movie Her, which I have been thinking about and writing about for several weeks.  What I like best about this site is that they begin with a review that reflects the viewpoint of the people who run the site—Christian Spotlight on Entertainment—and then display the reviews of others, many of whom disagree in part or in whole with the “official review.”  I think that practice is a wonderful service to everyone who wants to think about movies from the perspective of his own values.

The official review of Her was written by Andrea McTeer, who gives it a “moral rating” (extremely offensive) and a “moviemaking quality rating” (three of five possible stars).  She calls it a Sci-Fi Romance Comedy Drama, which is certainly a fair characterization, and indicates that it is intended for adults.[4]

Nearly everything else she says has to do with whether the movie offends conservative sensibilities.  What would that include?  Here are the highlights of McTeer’s review.

Near the beginning, Theodore has phone sex and the woman on the phone asks him to fantasize about becoming violet [sic] towards her with a dead cat.

While speaking to this woman on the phone, Theodore envisions a pregnant naked woman. Top frontal nudity is shown.

Theodore and “Samantha” have sex…. So to speak. The screen goes black, but they describe what they would do and there is plenty of moaning and heavy breathing, and it is quite clear what is going on.

Anal sex is mentioned and a bizarre drawing is shown of how it would look if certain anatomy were in different places on the human body.

A cartoon mom in a game is made to grind against a refrigerator.

Vulgar language abounds—F-word and forms of it 32 times, S-word 11 times, God’s name in vain (7), 2 extremely crude references to female genitalia and 3 for male genitals.

So.  There are six things you need to keep in mind while you are also keeping in mind that her 2the movie is rated R.  There is always the possibility that this movie, though crude and offensive in some ways,  as McTeer correctly pointed out, is also helpful and revealing in other ways.  This raises the question of what the movie is “about.”  Here is Theodore conversing with “Samantha.”

About halfway through this film, it finally occurred to me, perhaps the writer/director was trying to say something. Trying to use this film on a deeper level to teach us something, say something or point something out. [see the last paragraph of the review, four paragraphs below, for her idea of what that might be].

Scene 1 is pretty dark, I agree.  The point of it is to set the viewers up for Scene 2, where Theodore meets “Samantha” his new operating system.

We have become such an electronic society. Go anywhere that a wait is required, say, a doctor’s office, and no one can just sit there and wait—they have to be on an electronic device. My own children take an electronic device in the car for a 5 minute ride to a friend’s house, where they plan on playing another electronic device…We have replaced human interaction with electronic communication, to a fault, I think.

I agree with McTeer entirely.  We have become entirely too dependent of having some visual or auditory distraction always at our fingertips.  We abuse our access to media and we will pay the price for it.

Maybe this movie is a commentary on our current dependency on electronic devices and how our reliance on such devices and “conveniences” has replaced human interaction. I think and hope, this is the point of this film, otherwise it is just dribble[“drivel,” she probably means].

I strongly advise all to skip this film. Jesus says in Matthew 6:22-23, “The eye is the light of the body, if your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light. If your eye is bad, your whole body will be dark.” In the words of the old children’s Sunday school song “Be careful little eyes what you see… be careful little ears what you hear.”

her 3Here is the scriptural reference, which is a regular part of the reviews here. This seems an odd one to choose.  If I were forced to choose one, I would be more likely to go for Paul’s advice to the adult film types in his church in Corinth.  Don’t eat meat offered to idols ( or “see R-rated movies”) he told them, because some in your congregation will not be able to see past the offensiveness of the story and get to the powerful point of the story as you are able to do.  Don’t flaunt your sophisticated “I can handle R movies and you can’t” character.  It just isn’t what you would do to a brother in Christ.

There is nothing edifying about this movie, in spite of what I interpret as an attempt to comment on the human need for companionship and our dependence on technology.

Here, of course, I disagree entirely with this reviewer.  I think the exploration of what “person” means, in the context of our growing dependence on “entities” that can “perform” personhood to the satisfaction of many people is a crucial exploration for which director, Spike Jonze, should be given some kind of public commendation.  “Thanks, Spike,” it would say, “For helping us think through this issues that is coming at us like a train in a tunnel.”

The next two reviews, both positive, are by Tim Blaisdell, age 50 (USA) and by E, age 29 (USA).  I know nothing about either of them, but I urge you to read their reviews if this question of “Christian movie reviews” interests you.  They are the first two reviews under the official (McTeer) review.  I don’t entirely agree with either review, but I very much admire their interest in what the movie was actually about and their suggestions on how we might get the most out of what there is.  Also, both are respectful of the people whose site this is.

For myself, I am really glad I don’t have to see movies I don’t want to see or to write reviews I don’t want to write.  The fact that I tend to see movies in Christian terms doesn’t really mean any more than the fact that I see life in Christian terms.  So when I write about either, that’s the way I write.  Oh well.

 

 

 

[1] It wouldn’t have to be doctrine all by itself.  If you follow the orthodoxy, orthopathy, orthopraxy sequence I have been playing with for the last year, it could be about “right beliefs” (that would be Christian beliefs, in this context) or “right emotions,” (those would be the emotions that properly belong with the situation), and “right actions,” (which would be the actions that the beliefs and the feelings properly led to.  Some approaches emphasize one approach to a life of faith over the others.  Here, I am just indicating the several meanings the expression might have.
[2] Creation isn’t “creationism” but a doctrine of creation would postulate that our world began in a way that allows for the question “why” to be asked in addition to the question “how.”  Providence is just, as one wit put it, the word Christians use for “history”—for what happens, in other words, from the beginning to the end.  The Eschaton, the last times, are the bookend to creation.  Most Christian traditions don’t claim any special knowledge of what the end times will be like, but a Christian use of it would, like creation, allow question of “why” to be posed, as well as questions of “how.”
[3] The redemption metaphor imagines us as “slaves to sin,” and when the price is paid, we are freed from that slavery.  It’s really like a pawn shop.  You sell an item, during which time you do not control it, and then you redeem it, and then you do control it.
[4] I understand the “adults only” designation—the movie is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America—but I haven’t ever really liked it.  They want to say that it is not suitable for children, but they wind up implying that it draws upon adult tastes or capacities.  So a completely tasteless juvenile sexual extravaganza, which is really aimed at fourteen year old boys, would be called “adult” because they want to exclude children.  It implies that R films are the kind to which “adults” should aspire, rather than the kind from children should be protected. It just isn’t the way I would do it.

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

Paleo Acres High School

Posted on August 1, 2014 by hessd

Bette and I have been browsing retirement centers.  Our plan is to move into one in 2017, which was a long time away in 2005 when we first decided to do it.  Now it is close enough that we are hanging out in a few and paying attention to what we are seeing.  I am seeing “lunch period” in the “cafeteria” and high school memories come flooding back.  “Paleo Acres” is the generic name I have been using for any senior center so the idea that our senior center—which will have a name as soon as we choose one—will has a lot of characteristics Bette and I remember from our high school years is why this essay has the name it has.

In all fairness, some of the eating areas we saw were set up like restaurants and the wait staff come to take your order, so the “cafeteria line” was a flashback horror, not an observation.  On the other hand, one of my most vivid memories of eating in the cafeteria was how much complaining there was about the food.  I didn’t think the food was that bad, but I learned early that complaining about it was an easy way to belong to the group, so for a while, I complained about food I liked pretty well.

senior cliques 4Are people at Paleo Acres High School going to complain about the food?  If it’s a cheap way to belong to the group, I’d guess they will.  I have never thought that complaining about the food made it taste any better, so what I would probably do is to try out different times in the dining period or ask the waiters I see most often to cut back a little on the ranch dressing.  Either of those would draw on resources I didn’t have in high school.  Also either of those could produce more enjoyable food.  Neither is going to make me a solid citizen if the glue that holds us together is complaining about the food but I think I can do without some of that.

Then there’s where, and with whom, to sit.  I don’t think I’ve faced that question since college, where we also had a “dining hall.”  Do the people at Paleo Acres High sit in acquaintance-based or maybe  interest-based groups?  Of course they do.  And why shouldn’t they?  And my options are going to be the same ones I had in high school: join a group, start a group, or eat alone.

So in my bad moments, I think of my years as an old person as going back to high school and those are bad because I was so bad at high school.  But there are good moments, too, and in those good moments, I remember that I have skills I didn’t have when I faced this problem the first time.  Besides that, the people with whom we are going to work on this issue have some new skills too.  At those times, I think, “You know, this could work.”

In high school, the big stress is on finding out “who you are” or “what you can do” or even,senior cliques 10 sometimes, “what you can get away with.”  This concerns the fifth stage of Erik Erikson’s well-known theory of development.[1]  The goal to be pursued, Erikson says, is “identity” as opposed to “role confusion.”  The ugly side of this transition calls the dimension of  “fanaticism” into play.  At Paleo Acres, I expect that everyone will know pretty well who he is, or at least who he has been, and maybe even how much of what he was, is left by now.  That doesn’t look like a setting for fanaticism and repudiation to me.

So what might we be looking for instead?  The penultimate stage of Erikson’s scheme—the stage I am hoping Bette and I are still in when we get there—is identified by “generativity” and runs the risk of “overextension.”  Generativity is the sense that one has become rich in one’s life—rich in experiences, in empathy, in time to lavish on others and (keeping the specter of “overextension” in mind) on yourself as well.  At Paleo Acres, that is what I hope for myself and what I expect of the people who have just come there or who have kept themselves sharp and attentive during their years there.[2]

So here’s the short way to say this.  Paleo Acres has the possibility of feeling like a high school.  There will be a tendency to group into familiar friendships and to bond around common interests.  We will be eating the same food in the same room, more or less.  The tendency to exalt ourselves by denigrating the institution will not likely have died in the 60 years since graduation.

On the other hand, the sharp edge that was always a part of the grouping and re-grouping probably came from what was at stake in the high school years. There is a certain intensity to wondering who you really are and going to school every day with others who are asking themselves the same question.  It may be that the nasty edge of exclusion came from that intensity, and if it did, we might just do without it this time around.

Senior cliques 6Similarly, by this second time around people will have acquired skills they did not have in high school.  They see better what is at stake, having seen it so many times before in so many settings.  They know better how to respond, having done it wrong themselves so many times and maybe even right a few times.

So I will be looking, at Paleo Acres “High School” for much less of that sharpness with senior cliques 8which we all wounded each other when we were kids.  I will be looking for a much richer and more generous notion of what is going on.   I will be looking for people who are much more skilled by now and who may have acquired the rudiments of wisdom in the use of those skills.[3]

So the metaphor of our chosen senior center—Paleo Acres—as a high school (P.A.H. S.?) has a kind of “back to the future” twist to it. I hope Bette and I can find a time machine that is a little less violent than the one they used in the movie.  (The best picture I could find of the car is from a German ad for Zurück in Zukunft.   Bette and I are counting on staying here in Portland.)

 

[1] Those of you who are familiar with Erikson’s schema will note that I am taking some liberties with it, all in the cause of simplification.  Erickson’s whole treatment considers the syntonic and dystonic options at each stage; the Freudian psychosexual stages; the life stage issues, the associated virtues; and the associated maladaptations.  I’m skipping nearly all of that.

[2] I’m also skipping the final Erikson stage, which we will all face, but which I am putting off until I get the “high school” metaphor whipped into shape.  The final state in Erikson’s schema is called “integrity” and the failure to achieve it, “despair.”  This is subtle because it doesn’t happen all at once.  People can submit to despair with reference to some part of their lives, while maintaining a somewhat frayed integrity in other parts.

[3] I have actually begun referring to myself as “wise,” not so much because I have the traits that my society associates with wisdom, but because I’m pretty sure things aren’t going to get any better from here on.  This is, in other words, as good as it is likely to get, so I’m going to call my observations “wise sayings.”

Posted in Getting Old, Political Psychology | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Lone Ranger and the High Salt Diet

Posted on July 29, 2014 by hessd

I grew up listening to the Lone Ranger on our radio.  I heard there for the first time a lot of long ranger 1music I came to understand better later.  Like everyone else, I heard the William Tell Overture there.  I heard a little 1812 Overture, a little Fingal’s Cave Overture and a little of Liszt’s Les préludes.[1]

I also heard, although I don’t think I really learned it, what kind of purposes a hero might have.  These purposes were laid out clearly in the introduction to each show.  Here’s the one I remember.

With his faithful Indian companion Tonto, the daring and resourceful masked rider of the plains led the fight for law and order in the early western United States!

I think that is the one they settled on, but earlier shows had variations.  Here’s one:

In the early days of the western United States, a masked man and an Indian rode the plains, searching for truth and justice.

In trying to corroborate my childhood memory of the introduction, I found some really amazing alternative phrasings.  The masked man and his partner worked “to bring justice to the oppressed.”[2]  Even more interesting is his crusade against the Order of the Black Arrow in which his resources were “taxed to the utmost in the cause of democracy.”

The piece of that I want to return to is the “resources that were taxed to the utmost.”  Since it was a weekly show, we know his resources weren’t going to be taxed beyond his utmost.  That’s how we know he was a hero.  When I look at myself and my own life in the light cast by the masked rider of the plains, I see some stark contrasts.  My resources, for instance, really are sometimes taxed beyond the utmost and I have responded to that shortfall in an amazing variety of ways.  Here are six.  Do you use any of these yourself?

I have turned around, hoping he hadn’t seen me.  I have denied that I knew anything about it.  I have argued that I needed to limit the number of battles I was fighting at any one time.  I have said that the potential gains were not worth the costs.  I have maintained that the issue at hand is really a matter of different tastes rather than of moral order.  And, on occasion, I have raised the issue in general terms and demanded that changes to be made on my own behalf or for others.

The result?  My resources have not been taxed beyond my utmost as often as they would have been otherwise.  Also, no one thinks of me as a hero—or, at least, no one has since my children were too young to know any better.

long ranger 3The Lone Ranger never does anything for personal reasons and with a weekly show, he really can’t afford to.  I can.  In fact, there are times I can’t afford not to.  Let’s consider three examples.

Example #1     The mother of one of my PSU students came to see me one day.  She was angry about my pedagogy.  Also, her son had just gotten a bad grade on a paper he had submitted.  Her view was that the first submission of the paper should have been the beginning of a private tutoring relationship with her son.  I make corrections; he hands it in again.  I make more corrections—very likely different ones, because the new version will have new mistakes—and he hands it in again.  This goes on until he gets the grade his mother wants him to have.  I said that wasn’t how university teaching worked.  She threatened legal action.[3]

There are two kinds of ways to set this up.  One is to cast it as a principle.  The university was not set up for the private tutoring of students in introductory classes.  There are no resources for it.  If it gets legal, I embrace my part in the suit as a way of protecting and preserving both the university’s right to define good pedagogy and as a way to encourage students to do their best on the first submission of the papers.

Another way is to calculate the cost to me of fighting this fight and the value to me of winning it.  And the resources I have at the moment.  And whether I will have any allies.  And whether I will expose any other professors to abuse by failing to fight this issue when it comes to me.

Example #2     Here’s another one.  I pull my car past a parking spot so I can back in safely.  While I am in the process, another car pulls into the spot.  There are two ways to set this up.  They are the same two as in the last example.  I can say to myself, “Well that was rude,” and continue looking for a place to park.  Or I can get out and go back to the driver and explain to him that I was just backing into that spot and that he should, as a matter of fairness, pull out and leave the parking spot to me.  I was, after all, there first.

Example #3     Here’s a final one.  A group of teenagers is walking down the street beinglone ranger 5 teenagerish.  They are eating potato chips and drinking soft drinks and as a bag or a cup is empty, they throw them on the sidewalk.  Not a display of civic virtue, for sure.  And they are not being subtle about it either.  They are not dropping them on the sidewalk; they are throwing them over their shoulders and laughing about what they are doing.  Here are the two constructions again.  I can cast this as an issue that needs to be dealt with.  Civic virtue after all, is at stake.  If not me, who?  If not now, when?  Or I can shake my head and mutter something about the younger generation going to the dogs.

I’m not sure what choice I would actually make in those last two situations, but I am pretty sure that would think about which way to set up the issue.  One way is to define it as a matter of right and wrong.  A principle is at stake.  It—the principle—is what is really real and I must make my choice about joining it or not.  Another way is to define it as a matter of personal choice. [4] (I’ll come back to that.)  In this way of looking at it, I am in the center of the strategic calculation and any of several unnecessary or irksome situations have taken up residence in my neighborhood.  It’s a buffet table of grievances and I can choose a few or all of them, depending on my appetite.

A person who used the second way of organizing issues would sometimes find himself saying, “I don’t think I have the stomach for that fight right now.”  Notice the elements of the formulation.  First, there is an “issue.”  Second, I evaluate what it is costing me or others I care about. Third, I estimate what resources I have on hand.  Finally, I take direct action; or indirect action; or no action at all.

A person who used the first way of organizing issues would find himself saying, “This is wrong.  It’s just wrong.  Something should be done.  If I can’t find any help, I’ll do it myself.”  Notice the elements of the formulation.  First, a wrong is being committed.  Second, I understand that I can stand up for the principle and oppose the wrong or I can be complicit in allowing the wrong to continue.  Third, I look for allies because I will need allies, but I don’t check my own resources because I am committed to righting wrongs.

Please notice that the choice here is not whether to take action.  My experience is that the people who set conflicts up as a “righting wrongs” model don’t take action more frequently or more consistently than the “issue investments” people do.  What they actually do more often is to berate themselves for their complicity in this evil and to berate their friends for their complicity as well.  If right and wrong are the counters, then virtue is to be defined either as doing something about it or as feeling guilty for not doing anything about it.  If grievances are there to be defined as public or private and as issues I might take on or might pass by, then I make my choice and live with it.

lone ranger 6Somebody is going to point, about here, that there is no reason why it has to be all one way or the other.  That’s quite true if you consider these styles abstractly.  You could mix the two.  “Sometimes I set the issue up the one way,” such a person might say, “and sometimes I set it up the other way.”  For actual persons, that isn’t really likely.  “Leading the fight for law and order,” in Lone Ranger style, is like a powerful condiment: salt, let’s say.  If you have learned that food with a lot of salt is really good and without a lot of salt, it’s more or less tasteless, then you will add salt when you can.  The public definition of what is right and what is wrong and the urgency of your own part in the conflict is the salt in this metaphor.

You could say, “I am a thoughtful and attentive diner. I add salt to these foods (the under-salted ones) and not to those.  The ones that are adequately seasoned, I eat just as they are.”  That sounds good, but if your taste buds expect a certain amount of salt, foods that don’t have it are going to taste pretty bland.  That is your style.  It is characteristic of your taste.

If you are a low salt sort of person, running into highly salted foods is pretty unsatisfying.  You might argue that you can’t really tell one food from another; all of them just taste like salt.  In the same way, you might have a taste for a certain kind of civic disagreement, the kind that pits one interest against another, but neither of which embodies right or wrong.  You might act to support resilience, for instance, rather than to prevent victimhood.  You might put substantial resources into preventing problems, where that is possible, instead of waiting for the occurrence of the problem to identify just who the villain is so he can be trashed, as he deserves.  It is true, by the way, that the identity of “the villain” will be clearer after the problem occurs.  If you really need villains, “afterward” is the best time to find them.

So although it is true that any one person can set some issues up with himself in the center, so that actions may be chosen or not; or set the issue up in the center so that the choices are action or complicity—still, mixing the two styles together isn’t really natural.  It is possible, but it isn’t natural.  I would be like choosing high salt foods at one meal and low salt foods at another.

long ranger 2The Lone Ranger is not a high salt person.  He just lives in a high salt time and in a high salt place.  Everywhere he turns, there are lawbreakers to hunt down and defeat, widows and orphans to rescue, and law and order to secure.  I live at a time when people read the papers and sit around and philosophize about how best to respond to the issues.  Every day, there are opportunities to saddle up and take out after scofflaws.  Somebody has to do that.  Maybe we ought to take turns.  I’m glad it isn’t always me.

[1] I didn’t learn until today that Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, liked Les preludes too.  He chose it as a theme to accompany the weekly news announcements that were supposed to lead up to a German victory in World War II.
[2] Here’s the New American Bible version of Isaiah 1:17. Learn to do good; Seek justice, Reprove the ruthless, Defend the orphan, Plead for the widow.  I’m not saying that’s where the writers got that phrasing, but I have heard Lone Ranger episodes about every one of those—especially the widows and orphans.
[3] This one actually happened to me.  I took the issue to my division chair and worked out the options.  I judged that it was going to come down to me and my attorney (not the university’s attorney) and the angry mother and her attorney.  I had already said I would have no part of her notion of “proper university pedagogy,” so returning to her and saying that I would do what she had demanded involved eating a certain amount of crow and it tasted really bad.
[4] “Personal choice” does not mean “private choice.”  I am a person and a citizen and a neighbor.  I might choose to act on any of those identities.  I might choose, for instance, to see the issue as a call to citizenship and I might attend a meeting or lead a march or drop a bill in the legislative hopper.  But what I chose to do on that issue would not necessarily characterize my choice on “issues” as a general matter.

Posted in Living My Life, Political Psychology | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

They aren’t Puritans; they are Quakers

Posted on July 27, 2014 by hessd

There are narratives that are so powerful that it might feel, in the middle of one, that you are in the whitewater rapids of a swollen river.  The river (narrative) wants you to go here and you don’t want to go there.  You see the rocks there and it doesn’t take much imagination to picture what is going to happen to you when the current carries you at this rate into those rocks.

People talk glibly about “changing the narrative,” but people who have to do it are not, ordinarily, that glib about it.  If narratives were easy to change, there wouldn’t be so many self-destructive ones.

With that in mind, consider George Fox University, in Newberg, Oregon: just down the valley a little from where I live in Portland.  Here is what the New York Times wrote about it this week.

George Fox 1The student, Jaycen, wants to live on campus with a group of male friends. The difficulty is that Jaycen “is” or “lives in the body of” a female.  That means that Jaycen has a preferred outcome that the university will not accept.  The university has two outcomes that are acceptable.  The first is for Jaycen to have the “sex-reassignment surgery” he wants.  That means that he feels like a male and looks like a male and lives with other males.  No problem.  The other is that Jaycen live off campus or in a single-person apartment on campus.  Again, no problem

The issue itself is a huge issue in principle and all organizations, public and private, are going to have to find a way to deal with it.  At George Fox, it looks like it isn’t going to be that much of an issue and the reasons why it is not are what intrigue me about this account.  There are two reasons why this is not going to be, as I see it, a big time issue at George Fox.  The first is a rather simple one.  The second is a good deal more complex and to deal with it, I am going to have to apply the metaphor I started with—the narrative can feel like going through the rapids in a kayak.

The simple solution is that Jaycen have the surgery that will bring his self-image and his body into alignment.  I am sure “sex-reassignment surgery” is enormously complicated from a medical standpoint, but it is pretty simple from a policy standpoint.  The treatment costs more money than Jaycen has and he is working on a way to pay for it.  When that happens, the issue as an event is over and only the reflections and artifacts of the dispute will remain.

But let’s say that George Fox gets caught up in the narrative rapids.  This goes very quicklyGeorge Fox 2 to a familiar plot—let’s say The Scarlet Letter—to choose one among many.  The conflict about Jaycen is now “a witch-hunt.”  The college is now a bunch of smug, self-righteous, unfeeling hypocrites.  Jaycen himself is a victim, trying only to be true to himself/herself and to live with integrity in a world committed to simple solutions.  Jaycen is also “a sinner,” since George Fox is a conservative religious university and, in this narrative, the university expels him for “conduct unbecoming to a student of George Fox.

I am sure that Nathaniel Hawthorn put some thought into writing The Scarlet Letter, but the of the many people who have written that same narrative since then, many have not been so thoughtful.  As a result, the Scarlet Letter narrative has acquired a lot of power and small institutions and small students caught up in it are controlled by the narrative and smashed on the rocks.  And we don’t notice because we don’t read carefully.  We get as far as the conflict and the organizational setting and say, “Oh yeah.  I know this story.  Let’s move on.”  Then we thumb through the rest of the novel and put it down, confident that we know what it said.

That’s not what happened here.  Odd as it might seem, George Fox said, “Maybe there is another narrative that is not so destructive.”  Rob Felton, the Director of Public Information for the university, has been nearly pitch perfect on this issue, as nearly as I can tell.

I think the fact that Jayce is choosing to stay at George Fox shows the university community has been supportive of him during his whole experience here.  We may have a difference of opinion on appropriate housing, but all indications are he has been treated well by his peers, professors, and our student life staff.

Since I know only a little more than what the Times article told me and what a few conversations with friends have offered, I can’t say whether Felton’s view is the whole picture, but I like it very much.  I like the categories he moves to.  Felton wants to talk about “Jayce’s whole experience here.”  Jaycen is not the face of an issue, so that the issue is the important thing and Jaycen is just an instance.  I don’t hear that in what Felton says.

George Fox 3Felton wants to talk about the support offered by “the university community.”  He is not saying there is no one at George Fox is uncomfortable with this difficulty, but a Quaker school really ought to know something about “supporting the outsider”—having been such outsiders themselves—and they ought to have a rich sense of “the university community,” and it looks like they do.

Felton wants to talk about just who has treated Jaycen well.  Again, we’re not talking about everyone at the university, one at a time.  They are Quakers; they aren’t saints.[1]  He wants to talk about the people Jaycen goes to class with and the people who have the responsibility of providing instruction for him and the people who make the university as an organization, run smoothly.  I think Felton was right to leave out the higher offices, like the president, the provost, and the deans.  It isn’t because they have a different view than the rest of the university community; it is because Felton built the relevant categories around Jaycen’s experience and I think that is just what he should have done.

There is no reason in particular to think that George Fox University, in crafting a response to these events, looked to the experience of the early church, but if they did, they have every reason to be encouraged.  I will mix two accounts here (Luke’s and Paul’s) in the interests of brevity.  The issue was how to deal with Gentile Christians.  One party said they had to become Jews first, and then they could become Jewish followers of Jesus.  The other party said that God had made His view plain by giving the Holy Spirit to the Gentiles without asking for any other change.  They argued about it for a while and then, as good Quakers would have, they came to consensus.

The apostles and elders met to look into the matter and after a long discussion (Acts 15:6), they decided to ask the Gentiles for only those changes which would enable them to meet together as a worshiping community.[2]   Or, as Paul, whose side “won” that encounter, puts it, “…when they acknowledged the grace that had been given to me, then James and Cephas and John, who were the ones recognized as pillars [of the church] offered their right hands to me as a sign of partnership. (Gal. 2:9)” [3]

Those passages came to mind because in the story they tell, the issues were not actually resolved.  The commitment to fellowship was made and all the issues, save only the ones that bore on their meeting together as disciples, were pushed to the side.  The issues are often decided by later generations, but if fellowship is to be unbroken—if “the university community is to be supportive”—it has to happen now or not at all.

[1] Actually, St. Paul says they are saints, but his meaning for that term is not the contemporary meaning, so it’s the kind of quibble I put in footnotes.
[2] The list is a First Century Jewish list so it looks unfamiliar to us.  The Gentiles were to “abstain from anything polluted by idols, from illicit marriages, from the meat of strangled animals, and from blood.”
[3] The word translated “partnership” here is koinonia, which could carry a good deal more freight than “partnership.”  It is often translated “fellowship,” but it refers, as biblical scholar Raymond Brown says, to the faith that is common among them.  They did not break “the common-ness” and so enabled the church to flourish.

Posted in Political Psychology, Society, Theology | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments