The Dilettante's Dilemma

In 1977, I invented the “victory lap.” It’s one of the best things I have ever done. There were, of course, victory laps before mine, but I am quite sure there were no victory laps quite like mine. The “victory laps” I had seen on TV and the ones I had watched at Hayward Field at the University of Oregon resulted from one runner having beaten other runners. [1] I was the only runner in my program, so my victory laps would have to mean something else. [This is early Prefontaine. He got better later.]

They did.

I was living on what the Westminster College folks called “New Faculty Circle” at the time. It was half a mile around the circle and when I came in from a long and sometimes grueling run on the roads in the hills around the college, running another half mile was the last thing I really wanted to do. On the other hand, I was committed to running 1776 miles before the 4th of July of 1977 and I had fallen behind and really needed the extra miles. [2] Adding half a mile to every day’s run was just a way to add to the total.

On the other hand, I noticed after several such additions that running that extra half mile didn’t feel like running the route I had just finished. It didn’t even feel like running the last half mile of that route. It was as if some part of my mind had declared the run to be “over” and the difficulties I had been experiencing on the run were also, therefore, over. If I had developed a blister, it stopped hurting. If I had some soreness from a leg cramp, it stopped bothering me. If I had had trouble getting a good deep breath, the trouble disappeared along with the discouragement I had some days in checking my time.

Why did that happen? I think some part of my mind, not the part I use in making decisions, decided that if it was really a “victory lap,” then the discomforts of training were really over and it turned off (or turned down) my awareness of them. I also very naturally used that time to review some of the strategic decisions I had made on the run. A route I often ran had a lot of hills and I did some experimenting with pushing my pace going down or pushing it going up. Which produced the better time? Which cost me more that it gained me?

It was a reflective frame of mind. It presumed a lot of things that I found helpful at the time and still find helpful. The first is that I was going to keep doing those runs. That was implied by my evaluation of today’s run; it would provide some benefit to tomorrow’s run. The second is that my stance toward it was evaluative and thoughtful. It was not resentful or despairing. It was calculating. I continued to wish myself well in my planning of tomorrow.

Eventually, I began to think of the “course” of my life as something like a mile run with its four laps, each of 20 years. I would “finish the race” when I turned 80. I was 40 in 1977. And when I finished the “race,” I would keep on running as if I were adding the New Faculty Circle loop, and I would reflect on what I had learned on that run. How had the strategy I was using worked out? For reasons of convenience, I declared a year to be the right length for a “lap.” I turned 86 today so I am beginning my sixth victory lap, and as I run it [3] I get to consider the run I have just finished—not just the original eighty, but the also the five I have added to it.

What worked? What do I know enough to avoid now? And again, I benefit from the presuppositions. I am going to keep on living (metaphorically, keep on “running”) and I am going to hold onto a contemplative frame of mind. I want to evaluate what I have learned and to benefit from it.

With this kind of starting point in my experience, I was not all that surprised to stumble across the notion of “temporal horizons.” For young people, time is infinitely expandable and therefore need not be taken into account. For people in the middle of their productive years, the future is the future of the job or of earnings and the discharge of responsibilities in general. But old people need to think also, in terms of death; in terms of the time that is left.

I remember vividly the switch in my mind that flipped when, in a 10K road race, I switched from making sure I had enough left to finish to making sure I used it all by the time I got to the finish line. Talk about shifts in temporal horizons!

The victory lap that I begin today gives me a chance to look at the race as a whole not, this time, so I can do it better next time, but so I can use what I have left in the best way. For me, the “best way” in the most productive way. I want to do—in most cases, to “continue to do”—the things that make life make sense to me and/or that make a contribution to the lives of others. [4]

So I get to look at what my life has prepared me to do with the resources I have left in the time I have left. That is very much a “victory lap” kind of thinking. Now if you will excuse me, I need to get moving again. The clock keeps ticking.

[1] Steve Prefontaine was famous for his victory laps. He was a favorite among U of O track fans and when he won at Hayward Field, he would take a lot of laps, receiving the adulation of some very loud fans. I heard an announcer say once that his most recent victory lap (that’s a quarter of a mile) passed in 67 seconds.)
[2] This was a project of the National Jogging Association, purportedly to celebrate the Bicentennial. We celebrated the events of 1776 by jogging 1776 miles between the 4th of July of ’76 and the 4th of ’77.
[3] Not actually running anymore, alas. It is all cycling now. I may have used up my knees on the hills around New Wilmington, Pennsylvania.
[4] I don’t think you really have to choose, in most circumstances, between meeting the needs of others and meeting your own needs. Choosing a strategy that does both is better and you are responsible for managing the tradeoffs.

On December 13, John McWhorter wrote a column for the New York Times. I haven’t read it yet. I read his columns whenever they appear in the Times and I very much enjoyed his lectures on linguistics, which he developed for The Teaching Company. But I want to write this based on the headline. If McWhorter himself wrote the headline, he included in it all the major emphases I expect to find in the column.

Here’s the headline: “Black Students Are Being Trained to Think They Can’t Handle Discomfort.” Here are three observations based on that headline.

First, note that “black students” are the focus. They are the object of the passive verb “are being trained.” That’s not all that unusual. There is a lot of talk from the left that young black people are being trained for docility and from the right that they are being trained for racial hatred. But if you buy the premise, as it is offered in the phrasing of the headline, that this is another column about the infinite plasticity of young black people, you are in for a surprise. That’s the first thing I like about the headline.

Second, note that “black students are being trained to think something in particular.” The most common use of such a phrasing is as the setup to the next statement, which is that what they are being trained to think is false or destructive. “Trained to think that….” prepares the writer, McWhorter in this case, to say that they should not be trained in this way and to say just why. “Trained to think that…” stops short of saying that what they are being trained to think is an illusion. But not short by much.

Third, the word “discomfort” signals that this is not the kind of column we are used to seeing, particularly not from a black professor. The whole escalation of attitudes about race is recent and powerful. “Using the wrong word about a racial group is racism and racism is cousin to genocide.” Now you know. It is that very common and scarcely noticed escalation that McWhorter analyzes in his book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. It has nothing to do with “discomfort.”

If you are writing on this topic, the very least you can do it to call the experience “pain” or possibly “anguish.” Clearly “discomfort” is a step down. It may be several steps down. And if you are going to write about the discomfort of black students, the very least you can do is bury it in the text of the column somewhere. You absolutely do not want to feature it in the headline, as if the “discomfort” of black students were important. And even more, that the training of these students to feel discomfort were important.

Those three observations are what I saw in the headline. As soon as I finish this post, I am going to read the column. I am quite certain it is going to say that the students who could be trained to feel something more useful—I’ll return to that in a moment—are being trained to feel discomfort instead. Thereby, McWhorter will say, the discourse about race is made brittle and inflammatory. The range of views about race and its implications is thereby constrained and the heat of the discussion intensified.

McWhorter might argue that if we are going to take the trouble to “train” black students at all, they should be trained for something more useful. They could be taught that an immediate hot anger is more appropriate and more useful. (How one might express that anger is a separate question.) They could be taught that compassion for the people who are demeaning them is more appropriate and more useful. It shows their ignorance, their confinement in the racism of their little section of society, their emotional vulnerability. They could be taught to take the immediate discomfort they feel as fuel for the next step in the interaction, which could be making the slur or the institutional practice the focus of sustained debate.

McWhorter might go so far—I don’t think he will—of saying that one of those responses is more appropriate in some circumstance and a different one in other circumstances. He might say that black kids with this skill set might respond in one way and kids with another set might do other things instead.

I don’t actually know what he will say, but those are things that he has prepared for in the headline and I am really looking forward to finding out.

I started blogging so I would have somebody to talk to. When I began—May 30, 2010—I was married to a wife I liked to talk to; I was teaching at PSU and had access to quite a few students to talk at (and even a few to talk to); I was part of a long-running book group, a very promising coffee group, and I taught adult ed classes at church. You wouldn’t think there would be a difficulty of any sort.

But what I really wanted was some place to say things like these. Did you see that? There they go again! You’d think they would have noticed by now that that doesn’t work. Did you ever notice the “cowed,” the verb and “coward” the noun, are not related to each other etymologically?

The book group only allows me three such “observations” a meeting and we meet only monthly. My wife had her own observations to take care of. The kinds of observations I am talking about will always be diversions from what we are doing in class at PSU—the occasional course in political psychology excepted.

So a blog seemed like a good idea. It was light-hearted and quippy at the beginning, like the sample observations above. But then national politics began to go dark and I didn’t feel so quippy so I didn’t write so often. I did notice, however, that when I encouraged myself to make in the blog the snarky little comments that ran through my mind, I kept on wanting to make them.

So let’s see how it goes.

Several years in, I decided to start the blogging year at the beginning of December. I always write a few essays about whichever account of the birth of Jesus is “the right one” for that year, so starting in December is more a convenience than anything else.

This year, for instance, I have begun to be intrigued by the observation that although Matthew and Luke have the only birth narratives worthy of the name, Mark and John have clear allegations of illegitimate birth, which I would have to say is a birth narrative of some kind. And if that is true, it opens the way for some observations that seem obvious to me now, but that I have always passed by before.

Here are two versions of Matthew 1:24-25. First the King James, which is the version I grew up on.

“24Then Joseph being raised from sleep did as the angel of the Lord had bidden him, and took unto him his wife: 25And knew her not till she had brought forth her firstborn son: and he called his name JESUS.”

Then the NIV

“
24When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife. 25But he did not consummate their marriage until she gave birth to a son. And he gave him the name Jesus.”

In the light of the snarky allegations in Mark and John, my attention falls on the first part of v. 25. Why did Matthew feel that he needed to add “but he did not consummate their marriage”—“he knew her not,” in the KJV—to the text? He already had God’s assurance, received in a dream in 1:20b “because she has conceived what is in her by the Holy Spirit” With that much assurance, Matthew changes his mind about divorcing Mary. It was a life-changing dream. So why does Matthew put a little reminder of Mary’s virginity back in v. 25, just five verses later?

There may be a good literary or apologetic reason for that, but my interest this morning is that with the charge of bastardy fresh in my mind (from Mark and John’s accounts) it strikes me as too much. It seems urgent. It seems, “Oh by the way, did I tell you that Mary was still a virgin when she conceived?” By my current reading, it is TMI.

It can be argued, of course that it is or that it isn’t, but I feel richer for seeing the passage that way and asking the question. At the moment, it seems overwhelmingly likely that Matthew is, by this addition to the text, (that’s a guess) responding to allegations he has heard made. But I also know that “overwhelmingly likely” is, at least in part, a function of being excited that I just now saw the discrepancy for the first time. I know that the excitement makes it seem truer right now.

The “third birth narrative”

So what traces are there of this “third birth narrative in Mark and John? I’ve referred to it, but I have not yet presented the texts.

In Mark 6, Jesus goes to Nazareth and begins teaching in the synagogue. His teaching is astounding to his neighbors. They know him; they know his family. Where did all this religious “wisdom” come from? It is as if Jesus were putting on airs, when they know for a fact that he is a local boy.

And in the process of mulling over that discrepancy, they ask a really telling question. Is this not Mary’s son? Not, notice, “Joseph’s son.” Joel Marcus observes in his commentary on Mark’s gospel, “In Jewish sources the father’s name is normally used to identify the son even when the father is dead.”

Why then does Mark choose to identify Jesus by a matronymic rather than a patronymic? Joel Marcus, in his commentary, answers this question this way: ‘it is likely that the use of Jesus’ mother’s name is a slur against his legitimacy… This aspersion would correspond to the tendency in later Jewish traditions to portray Jesus as a bastard…” [2]

Marcus says that: “…Mark 6:3 comes closer to being a genealogical formula than the parallels cited because of the extensive list of other male family members. McArthur’s theory, moreover, does not explain the apparent embarrassment of Matthew and Luke at Mark’s term or reckon with the hostile context of our passage and the evidence for a trajectory of Jewish aspersions against Jesus’ birth.

Both Matthew and Luke revert to the usual pattern in their accounts of this event. Luke 4:22 reads “the son of Joseph” (cf. John 6:42) and Matt 13:55 “the son of the carpenter.”

The example in John is better in some ways and worse in some ways. It is better in that the charge of illegitimacy is clearer. In 8:41, Jesus says to his antagonists “You are doing your father’s work.” What he means by that is a little complicated, but it is the response I am interested in here. They respond, “WE (unlike you) were not born illegitimate. The only father WE have is God.”

The only thing I added to that exchange is the parenthetical part and, in fact the use of what I call “exclusionary phrasing” is common in John. He says things like “only the Son,” meaning not Moses; and “earthly,” meaning not heavenly. It is that style of John’s that makes me confident that the WE, above, is intended to mean “unlike you.”

That clear use is how it is better. It is worse, of course, because this clip is taken from the middle of a heated argument and there is no way to know whether cooler heads prevailed in the morning. And if you are inclined to pass this exchange off as the Pharisees being snarky, let me remind you that this particular exchange is between Jesus and fellow Jews who believed in him (John 8:31).

So I may use these two passages as “the third birth narrative”—Jesus was a bastard—or not. Let’s see how the year goes.

[1] According to Marcus: “This aspersion would correspond to the tendency in later Jewish traditions to portray Jesus as a bastard, a pattern that may already be reflected in John 8:41.”
[2] There is additional fun to be had in that the English word bastard probably derives from the French fils de bast (packsaddle child) and therefore does actually mean “born in a barn.” And that is true is Luke’s account, but not in Matthew’s.

The Christmas Visitor

In the letters of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John, the author is really upset about some notion about the earthly ministry of Jesus. It is not easy to say just what it is, but someone seems to be open to the idea that Jesus “seemed to” have come to earth and taken on flesh and lived the same kind of life we did. He didn’t, actually, but he seemed to.

The Hallmark video, A Christmas Visitor, which I have enjoyed watching many times, presses right on the nerve that separates the gospel of John from the teaching the Johannine letters are trying to quash. I suspect it could be called docetism. We get this from the Greek dokein, “to seem,” so it could be called “seeming-ism.” What gets the writer of the Johannine letters so upset is that someone seems to be teaching that Jesus did not actually take on flesh and did not actually become a human being, but only seemed to.

In A Christmas Visitor, the Boyajian family lost a son in Iraq. It was a terrible loss for the family. The father carried on as TV fathers tend to do. “I gave them my son,” he says. “They gave me this medal.” The mother acts out her grief in some ways she recognizes (and justifies) and in many other ways as well. The daughter feels herself confined to a perpetual second place, never really as important as her martyred brother, and having very slim personal reserves.

The father, George Boyajian, decided, finally, that enough is enough and he is going to start over by celebrating Christmas again. The film loses track of this early moment until the very end of the film when the spirit of his son John, embodied in a “person” named Matthew is asked, “Why did you come back to us?” The person who is, but who does not seem to be, John, answers, “Because you were right. It was time.” [This is John in the body of Matthew.]

“You were right” points to what would be the most remarkable part of the movie if it were a part of the movie, which it is not. Somewhere, “John” is monitoring how his family is doing and when his father says it is time, “John” returns in the body of Matthew and does a lot of wonderful things to turn the family around. “John” was listening. Where, without “Matthew,” was he?

In the meantime, in the body of the plot, “Matthew,” heals the daughter, Jean, of her cancer, restores a long broken Christmas star to full functioning, and remembers things about John that he could not possibly know. How does he do all that? Because he is not Matthew; he only seems to be Matthew. He is actually John, visiting his earthly family in the body of Matthew. Matthew seems to be John, but he is not. The film maker puts the last nail in that board by having Matthew, as he is leaving, morph briefly into John, then back into Matthew, while the father holds his salute.

Miracle on 34th Street (1994)

On the other hand, the Santa Claus of Miracle on 34th Street really is Santa Claus. There are two phases in the identity positioning in this movie. We see a fat man with a white beard approached by a desperate employee of Coles Department Store, who asks him to fill in at the last minute as the Santa Claus in their parade. He is a very good “Santa Claus” and the department store hires him to be their official Santa.

The second phase is that at the hearing, it is the job of the judge to rule whether a man who believes himself to be Santa Claus can be ruled sane. His lawyer doesn’t argue that his client is sane; he argues that he is not dangerous. That doesn’t work.

Finally, the judge hits on an analogy that works for him. On a dollar bill a little girl gave him, he notices that it says “In God We Trust.” The judge argues that if the U. S. government can declare its belief in God without demanding any evidence, then he, the judge, can declare that the man before him actually is Santa Claus without demanding any evidence.

Between these two times—the parade at the beginning and the hearing at the end—viewers are treated to Santa Claus playing the part of “Santa Claus.”He speaks a lot of languages, which ought to seem odd. He knows sign language. He has his own “Santa suit” with real gold buttons and gold thread. By claiming that he is who he says he is, he brings the woman who hired him into existential crisis, and raises the desperate hopes of her daughter that she will finally get a home in the country and a baby brother.

At the hearing, there is casual banter about “department store Santas,” of which Kris Kringle, the main character, is one. The daughter of the Cole’s employee who hired Kris is very worldly wise. “I know how this works,” she confides to him. “You work for Coles.” Kris pauses momentarily and says, “That…is true.”

He pauses because he knows that the true answer he gives will be taken to mean things he does not mean and that are not true. The little girl will understand the answer to mean “I am an employee of Coles and therefore am not the real Santa.” What Kris really means and what all the viewers are in a position to appreciate is that he works for Coles AND he is the real Santa. He’s just filling in until he has to take off on Christmas eve

These two stories, both of which I enjoy watching every Christmas, are the formal opposite of each other and it doesn’t bother me a bit.

The last several hundred times I have heard references to a Comfort Zone—except, of course, from the heating and air conditioning people—they have pointed to the virtues of being outside it. Unfortunately, when you have been around and paying attention as long as I have, you hear the same pitches over and over and they get irritating.

I remember the era of “the gray flannel suit” with real clarity. I remember how everyone was urged in the direction of “nonconformity” as if that were a good thing of itself. I remembered those little sermons for quite a ways into the 1960s until it wasn’t fun any more. So these blanket prescriptions are not a new thing for me.

I am used to hearing them at church. I got used to hearing it in the announcements, which are at least partly ad-libbed. Then I heard it several times in the sermons, which are ordinarily read. To me, that means that someone has written it and then, having read it at a later time, has said, “Yes, that is what I want to say.” This last week, I heard it in a liturgical formulation and I said, “Surely not!” So today, I am reflecting.

Some time on the same day I heard this, I heard some NFL announcers assuring each other that a quarterback had just not found a way to get comfortable with the offense in the first half. They didn’t quite say that he had found his “comfort zone” in the second half, when he played very well, but they came close. They said he had “found his rhythm.”

I think I might be like that quarterback. When I can find comfort in a role or a setting, I do my best work. When I can’t, I pay more attention to the setting than I should or more attention to what I am doing than I should, and my performance suffers. That is my experience with my “comfort zone.” [Of more than a hundred images I looked at for “comfort zone,” this is the only one that showed any promise. What advice would I get from these people if I were already in the good green zone? Would they urge me toward the chaos ring because I was showing signs of comfort?]

It is not difficult to lob the “out of your comfort zone” idea at someone else, of course. Anyone who is not taking the risks you think they should take would be vulnerable to such a charge. Or anyone who is more conservative about risks than you are; or someone who values the associated rewards less than you do. I know people who are even more risk averse than I am and I would have no trouble at all in saying to that person, “Why don’t you give it a try? It looks to me as if you would do very well and if not, there are several alternative approaches to try.”

None of that approaches putting a generalized dismissal of comfort zones into the church’s liturgy as if God had something against comfort zones.

I think the complaint against comfort zones has become a linguistic habit, just as the complaint against “conformity” was in the 50s. It isn’t a thoughtful thing to say. It’s just a bromide. Why we should be attributing bromides to God I am not quite sure. [1]

The real loss in the linguistic habit—apart from the dull thoughtlessness of it—is that is doesn’t ask what a comfort zone is for. It doesn’t ask what other questions—not just comfort or no comfort—ought to be asked that are being shouldered aside. It doesn’t ask what benefits we can expect from someone who is operating in the comfort zone. I can see complaining about lack of productivity, of course, but what is the relationship between productivity and comfort?

And even if God is not offended at having “comfort zone” attached to the divinity, maybe it would be offensive enough if God did not want to be represented as a klutz. Well…a Klutz, I guess, being God.

[1] That might not be the use God had in mind when He created bromine. I guess we’ll never know.

I’ve been listening to more sports radio recently, so I have been hearing more ads imploring people who are being charged with drunk driving [1] to enlist the help of a law firm that specializes in helping people in their situations. I have no general objection to advertisers formulating their pitch in a way that does not insult and repel the people whose money they are trying to attract. What would be the point? An ad is a tool.

On the other hand, the pitch I hear most is addressed to “good people who are facing DUII charges.” [2] I have to focus my mind to remember that there is a story behind “facing…charges.”

First, the people who are being addressed are “good people.” When I focus, I remember that the law firm would also, in a pinch, take the money of bad people. Or even of intermediate people who are neither notably good or bad. So “good people” isn’t a screen that would separate out all the “not good” people who might need legal representation. It serves, rather, as a signal that there will be no moralizing about whatever the potential client is alleged to have done. Or, as the devil in the film Needful Things, puts it when a man tearfully confesses to him that he has just murdered his wife, “Hey…these things happen.”

Second, there is no consideration of what the potential client has done. He has not, in the language chosen by the ad, endangered the lives of other drivers, of any passengers he may have had, or made his family, if any, insolvent. The situation the client faces is a legal one. A charge has been brought against him. [3] He needs help in avoiding or minimizing the likelihood that he will be convicted for the purported offense; or, if convicted, in minimizing the punishment he will face.

Something has happened. That is why there is an ad. It is not the violation of public safety or the endangerment of people’s lives. What has happened is that this good person is facing a DUII change, the merit of which is entirely unconsidered.

Again, I am not protesting the ad. This is a legal firm seeking clients in the most effective way they have found. It does feel odd to me when I hear it that what the person has done is being passed over and his character is being praised in advance.

Surely that is worth something.

[1] The British crime shows we watch refer to it as “drink driving.”
[2] DUII has been a meaningful abbreviation for so long that I couldn’t remember what the acronym stood for. Driving Under the Influence of Intoxicants.
[3] I say “him” with a clear conscience. I had to scroll through 80—100 pictures under [drunk driver, images] to find a picture of a woman as a perpetrator rather than as a victim.

I am a part of several studies that look at the life of declining older people, [1] and one that tracks changes in the life of an older couple. As a part of those studies, I answer a lot of questions that make perfect sense as part of the study, but that are completely preposterous on their own. The question that serves as the title of this reflection in one of those.

Here’s what I know about my sentiments toward the life I am living. On good days, I love it. This is one of those days. On bad days, I endure it. On intermediate days, I invest in the moments that invite investment and limit the damage, as I am able, of that comes from the others.

Those ways are “how I like my life.” What shall I say in answer to the question on the survey?

As you might imagine, not much management is required for the good moments (similarly, the good days), but in bad moments (or on bad days) there is a discrepancy between what I need to do and what I feel like doing, and I need to choose between what makes sense and what I know will help.

Without that discrepancy, I do what makes sense to me and everything works. With the discrepancy, I need to choose against what makes sense, and choose to do, instead, things that will help. Since I have done this for a long time—much more in recent years—I know what kinds of things will help.

That is important because my way of determining what “helps” is one of the parts of the machine that is broken—well…not functioning at the moment. That means that I cannot do something and see if it helps. I need, instead, to rely on my recollection of “what usually works” and just do that. And then keep doing it and keep resisting the desire to see if it is working.

So I do that. I do the things that have proved helpful in the past and I keep doing them despite the lack of feedback that they are working.

On good days, I use the machine (my life when everything is working) to address my life; to do the things that I think are worthwhile. I choose as many activities as I can that are also pleasurable because I think it is better for them to be both useful and pleasurable than to have to choose. [2] On bad days, I don’t use the machine; it tinker with it. It isn’t in working order, so I do the things that will keep me functioning until it returns to working order. Ordinarily, it does not return to working order as a result of the tinkering. At least I don’t think it does. I think it reboots itself and returns when that process is done.

There is one small problem. It is that I am embedded in a social network and the network works because of the expressed and fulfilled expectations of the members. The expectations—I am going to call them “demands” from here on, not meaning anything aggressive by that term—keep on coming. They do not distinguish between my good periods and my bad ones.

For example, I teach several courses that study what I am going to call, for the purposes of this essay, the narrative logic used by authors of ancient near eastern texts. The essays that will form the basis of these discussions go out of Mondays. The meetings themselves are on Thursdays. For a schedule like that, what does it really mean that I have good days, when I live my life expansively and bad days when I tinker with the machine?

Since the work to be done is constant, it means that sometimes I prepare the materials in Bad Day Mode and sometimes in Good Day Mode, but I always prepare them and distribute them. When, as often happens, I prepare the essays and teach the classes in Good Day Mode, they are spectacularly good. But, as you can see, if you look a couple of sentences ahead, sometimes I prepare in Bad Day Mode (BDM) and teach in Good Day Mode (GDM). At other times, I prepare in GDM and teach in BDM. Both those are…um…suboptimal. But I do them because they are what I have to offer and I do believe seriously in the value of the commitments.

I can, after all, commit to giving them what I have to give. [3] Some days it is spectacularly good. I have had good training and on those days I have a good mind and I have been a teacher all my life. On other days, I rely on the training and the history, but not on the mind, which is somewhere in the rebooting process and is “currently unavailable.”

I would really prefer it if I could do something about how I am in BDM. When I have a headache, I take a couple of aspirin and the headache goes away. That’s how I would like it to be. In the situation I have described, I can take the aspirin, metaphorically speaking, but I can’t know whether it did any good. That’s one of the parts of the machine that isn’t working anymore.

Oh well.

[1] Because I can rattle off the major forms of the Latin noun agricola, I am, as a matter of fact, a declining adult. You have doubts? Agricola, agricolae, agricolae, agricolam, agricola. And in the plural agriolae, agricolarum, agricolis, agriolas, agricolis. Those are the forms appropriate to the nominative, genitive, accusative, dative, and ablative cases in both singular and plural numbers.
[2] I am not one of those people who thinks that if it is pleasurable, it is somehow morally suspect.
[3] I suspect that they have BDM and GDM ways of being in those classes and have found ways to cope. Besides, nearly all the people in those classes are old people, like me, and likely have good days and bad days themselves.

In an editorial the new House Speaker Mike Johnson wrote in the Shreveport times in 2005, he concluded with this line: “We must always remember,” Johnson concluded, “that it is not bigotry to make moral distinctions.”

That is the line I would like to think about today. First, it is hard not to admire the rhetorical advantages of a line like that. “Bigotry” is bad and “moral distinctions” are good. And if they aren’t good, they are at least inevitable. Try to imagine objecting to “moral distinctions.” The set of examples you would get to test your objection would certainly include traitors, rapists, and murderers and you would be invited to “make no moral distinctions” about the people in those categories.

Johnson, having established that “making moral distinctions” is good is then free to make whatever distinctions seem good to him. There is no end to the cultural issues the Republican party is pursuing that can pass a “distinctions.” Anything on gender identity will work. A lot of things on race and ethnicity will work. The “right kind of family” will work. Abortion as murder, obviously.

All these pass as moral distinctions. But what Johnson really has his eye on is the charge by Democrats—and by majorities of Americans—that these positions are bigotry. The power of his distinction, then, is that it reassures Republicans that it is not bigotry. Notice that it doesn’t support any particular moral distinction. It doesn’t even say that making moral distinctions is a good idea. It only says that it isn’t bigotry.

It actually says so little, but I suspect we will be hearing it as a Republican shield for quite a while now. Provided that it works.

It is really no different than Barry Goldwater’s famous line: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. Moderation in the protection of liberty is no virtue; extremism in the defense of freedom is no vice.”

C. S. Lewis poses a nasty dilemma for the Narnian children in his book, The Silver Chair. Jill Pole (a newcomer to Narnia) and Eustace Scrubb (from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader) come across the prince just before the hour when, every day, he is released from his enchantment. During that hour of freedom, he is able to tell the truth.

In the fictional setting Lewis has provided, we can say that Rilian is his true self (I*)during this brief time. He tells the children that he is under an enchantment and that all the things he has told them before are false. Furthermore, all the things he will tell them when this hour has passed are also false. Only during this time can he be believed.

Keeping the dilemma in mind and changing settings, let’s look at a person’s right to specify what medical procedures will and will not be performed on him as he nears death. The Prince Rilian scenario has three time periods. He has before (when he is enchanted) during (when he is free to tell the truth) and after (when he is, again enchanted.) The patient I have in mind is suffering a progressive dementia. The more severe depths of the dementia are his “enchantment.” But there is a time, before the enchantment, when he is free to assess his preferences and to say clearly what he wants.

The reduction of the three periods Prince Rilian has to the two of the demented patient makes all kinds of trouble for us. For the impaired patient, there is only NOW and LATER. Now, I know who I am and what I* want. Then, I will still want something, but it will not be connected to who I* am right now; to the continuing self who has lived a life and has reflected on it.

OK, I cheated a little bit. I invented the I* (with the asterisk) to mean the continuing person, the essential person. In dementia, that is what goes away or, more exactly, I* don’t have unimpaired access to that person’s mind. Functionally, I* is Prince Rilian during the hour he is freed from the spell and is free to be himself. And “I” (without the asterisk) is Prince Rilian under the spell. In the example, it is the person who is under the “spell” of dementia.

I have heard of a court ruling—I haven’t bothered to find out if it actually occurred—in which the court accepted the decision of a patient at an earlier time to be binding on the patient at a later time. The decision and intention of the I* patient is accepted over the later statements of the person who no longer has regular access to the I* person. This later, impaired, person has “intentions,” but they are momentary and they have no relationship to all the other things that make up his life.

I like that distinction. It is, of course, clearer in the case of Prince Rilian. Once we accept the premise—he is under an enchantment except for this one hour—we know to accept the words of Rilian during this hour and to resist what “Prince Rilian” says during the other times. It is clear because there is a will behind the enchantment and it is an evil will. We know that when “Prince Rilian” speaks when he is under the enchantment he is expressing the views of the evil witch who cast the spell.

The patient is “under the spell” of distorted brain function. We know that the patient does not have access to the I* as he once did. We reject the idea that the spell he is under has been “cast” by anyone, but that does not mean it is not there and functioning. It means only that it has not been “cast.”

This brings us to the cusp of a dilemma and that is where I want to leave us for today. Dementia offers us a kind of Prince Rilian situation in which I am Prince Rilian and I want to be believed sometimes and not other times. I need to say ahead of time when the “accepted times”—I am right on the edge of calling them “canonical times”—will be. Then I need to empower others to refuse to accept what I say (the I without the asterisk) at other times, no matter what it is.

Do I really want that? Yes, I think I do.

I’m teaching a Bible study this “term” [1] that I have called “Doing It Wrong.” I knew, in the most general terms, what I had in mind. If you survey the biblical material for the different kinds of ways—and by that, I mean categories of ways—that are formally objected to in some part of the Bible, you will have an interesting kind of dilemma before you. As a teacher, I like dilemmas. After a year or so, my students seems to develop a taste for dilemmas, too, so I have had hopes.

This particular group is set up to study the Bible from a secular and scholarly standpoint. That is not always easy. God does things, especially in some of the Old Testament stories, that we find offensive and we want to object. But if you are going to object in a scholarly way, you will first need to lay out the criteria on which the criticism is based and to show that they are criteria appropriate to the case to be judged.

That is hard. You find that you can’t quite get rid of the desire to criticize, nor can you demonstrate that the standards you propose are appropriate to God, as God is described in the text we are using. Today, if all goes well, we will consider the case of Uzzah, the man of good intentions. According to the story in 1 Chronicles 13 and 2 Samuel 6, Uzzah was helping to transport the Ark of the Covenant, which was being drawn on its journey by two oxen. One of the oxen stumbled and there was an immediate danger that the Ark would be dumped beside the road. Uzzah put out his hand to steady the Ark and for doing that God killed him.

My Bible study group is studying “holiness” as a category. This week, the existence of the category makes many things right and wrong. The painstaking cultic purity of Aaron, which he undergoes before sending the scapegoat out to meet his fate, is “right.” Step by step, profanation is avoided; dedicated materials and sacrifices are used. [2] Uzzah (and the sons of Aaron) did it wrong and died.

That doesn’t feel right. Particularly the fate of Uzzah, who seems to be a good guy. My class’s problem will be the one I described above. They know there is no scholarly way to criticize God’s actions so they should not voice their criticisms as part of the class. On the other hand, if their experience is like mine, it is also hard to just let go of it. I want to found a Friends of Uzzah chapter or something.

Now we will be moving on, not looking at the Law of Moses, but at what it means to have a law to follow. The people of Israel, as we have followed the story are now a People of the Covenant. That sounds lofty because right away the mind is drawn to Who It Is you have a Covenant with. But the Covenant itself does not include the intentions you might have for following it; it is the rules and regulations themselves.

And what happens when you have a system held together by rules? Two things—two categories of things— I will argue. The first is that some people will try to game the system. They follow the letter of the Law, but care nothing for its intention,. The second is that if “law-following” is meritorious, some people will pursue all the merit and acquire all the social status that merit earns them and flaunt their “righteousness” before everyone.

I am hoping that the class well help me deal seriously with that, but the fact is that if there are rules, they need to be adequately specified. How far is “a Sabbath day’s journey” exactly? If you specify it exactly, there are ways to get around it. If you don’t specify them adequately, everyone makes up their own mind about how much is enough and what God must have had in mind. In that way, you cease to be a “people” at all; bound by a common Covenant.

That’s the edge of the knife. If the rules are clear enough for everyone to know what is right and what is not, then they are clear enough for evasion and for status games. What to do?

[1] Since I am the one who proposed this particular gathering, I have taken the liberty to define what a “term” is. It is nine weeks.
[2] Two of Aaron’s sons did it wrong and were killed for it. They used “unauthorized fire,” as described in Leviticus 16. I hope the U. S. Forest Service doesn’t hear about that.