The Dilettante's Dilemma

The President Should Be Free to Choose a Response to the Use of Chemical Weapons in Syria

Posted on September 6, 2013 by hessd

That title is my thesis. I’m going to make the best case for it I can, then I’m going to read that case several times and see if I am still willing to go along with it. I will say, up front, that I am trying as hard as I can to make a positive case—this is what we ought to do. Most of the emotion I have is anger against several negative cases—things we have done already and done in the wrong way—and I know that rejecting the bad actions is no way to choose a good action. This is a “better angels of our nature” sort of problem.

I’d like to take the time to clarify a few things before I begin. You noticed that the title of this post is ridiculously long. That is because it contains all the references I now have to clarify.[1] Note that I specify that it is “the use of chemical weapons in Syria” that requires a choice. It is not “civil war in Syria” or “Syria’s dictator, Bashir al Assad, is a bad man.” [2] The “red line” the President drew had to do with chemical weapons, not with who is going to govern Syria.

Second, note that I am trying to preserve for the President the freedom to choose “a response.” I did not say “our response.” I did not say, nor did I mean to imply, that the President should be free not to respond at all. The President might choose diplomatic or military responses or, as is commonly the case, both in varying proportions. The President might choose a direct military action, like bombing something, or an indirect military action, like arming whichever side has not yet used chemical weapons. The President might choose a coordinated action by all the major powers—including, as George H. W. Bush did, the Arab League—or he might choose a unilateral U. S. action. I am not choosing any of those. I am saying that I want him to be free to choose the one he thinks is best.

Finally, by “free to choose” I mean free from congressional acceptance or rejection. By “Congress,” I do not mean the chairs of the armed services committees and the foreign intelligence committees of the House and the Senate. They will have to be consulted. I mean Congress as a whole.

Here is my case. If the goal is to stop each and every instance of the use of chemical weapons, then the U. S. cannot, alone, be the guarantor of that ban.[3] That means that a substantial array of nations and international bodies will have to agree to the ban and agreeing to the ban means agreeing to prompt and adequate punishment of whoever violates it.[4] If President Obama is going to coordinate that scale of agreement, he is going to be collecting, “yes,” “yes, but,” and “yes, if” commitments from an extraordinary array of leaders. The work he will need to do cannot be done in public. That’s not how deals like that are made, particularly if our side of the deal requires extensive payments of one kind or another.

If there is to be anything like George H. W. Bush’s “New World Order,” the unprecedentedly large collection of nations and organizations that allied to condemn Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, it is going to be assembled in private. That’s the way Bush did it and that’s the only way it can be done. An international response, in other words, requires that the President be free to cut the best deals he can and not all of them are going to pass the sniff test.

If the President is going to treat the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons as a U. S. problem—something that will require a U. S. (not an international) response—then he is going to have to deal with the Congress. I’m talking about House and Senate hearings, not just quiet conversations with the Gang of Eight.[5] It will be treated to the full partisan attention of Democratic and Republican Senators and Representatives who are thinking about being reelected. It will be thought about carefully by anyone who wants to be elected President in 2016 and who does not want what happened to Hillary Clinton in 2008 to happen to him or to her.[6]

If the question of whether the use of chemical weapons is going to become a serious international norm, defined and enforced by all the relevant nations and organizations, then it needs to be negotiated and acted on at that level. Leaving the President free to pursue that goal requires that he be freed from the Congressional Carnival Tent so he can do the job that only he can do.

He doesn’t have to be reelected. He cannot be reelected. But he could actually earn the Nobel Prize he got for free just be being elected. And he should.

[1] It is still better than “bomb, bomb, bomb/ bomb bomb Iran.”

[2] It is also not that the world would be a better place if we turned Syria into a regional model for democracy by invading them and installing a pro-Western puppet government.

[3] I would, by the way, include Agent Orange as a chemical weapon, not because it is an antipersonnel weapon by design, but because it is an antipersonnel weapon in effect.

[4] I am not opposed to involving the International Criminal Court, but they fail on the “prompt” criterion.

[5] “Specifically, the Gang of Eight includes the leaders of each of the two parties from both the Senate and House of Representatives, and the chairs and ranking minority members of both the Senate Committee and House Committee for intelligence as set forth by 50 U.S.C. § 413(c).” That’s from Wikipedia: I got it by googling “Congress Gang of Eight.”

[6] The early Obama v. Clinton contest was very tight and one of Obama’s very large early advantages over Clinton was that George W. Bush had forced her to vote for the war in Iraq, while State Senator Barack Obama was out giving speeches against it.

Posted in Politics | Tagged chemical weapons, Congressional approval, President Assad, President Obama, red line | Leave a comment

Vengeance is His

Posted on September 3, 2013 by hessd

I have long thought that Lincoln’s second inaugural address was one of the most powerful pieces of English prose ever written. I still think that. But I am beginning to wonder whether I have misunderstood his message. Here is the passage I want to think about today. I would be happy to have whatever help you can give me.

Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

It is always wise, when considering a passage beginning with the word “yet,” to look at what came before it. Here it is: “Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.” We want this war to end quickly, says Lincoln.

But “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether,” so even if it costs the Confederacy unmeasureable blood and unmeasureable treasure, that would be only fair. That is what it looks like to me. Here is my argument, such as it is. Two very nearly rhetorical questions.

Who received the wealth piled up by the slave’s labor over the 250 years of servitude? As a factual matter, it wasn’t the slaves. As a matter of political sensitivity, it also wasn’t those Northerners who made a lot of money on the slave trade. Lincoln doesn’t mean either of those two groups. He means Southern slave holders. If the war continues, says Lincoln according to this interpretation, until the Southern slave owners have lost as much money as their slaves made for them in two and a half centuries, we see God’s justice in that outcome.

Whose blood is going to be spilled if this war continues? The correct answer is that all the soldiers are going to have to pay. At this very late state of the war, the Union was losing three men for every two the Confederacy lost. That was a winning margin for the Union. But the question of God’s justice calls into question only the blood of Southerners, as I see it. Who drew blood with the lash? Owners of slaves. Whose blood will be spilled, if God’s true and just judgments are to prevail? Owners of slaves and those armies that defend the practice.

So Lincoln is saying, as I read it, “No matter how much it costs you, God says you deserve it.”

The passage I quoted isn’t the most familiar part of the Second Inaugural and it has never been my favorite part. Here is my favorite part.

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

I don’t see “malice toward none” and “charity for all” in the passage we considered first. What I see in that passage is, “You are getting what God says you deserve.” That’s why I titled this post “Vengeance is His.” So what does this second paragraph mean?

Looking at it in the light of my (brand new) understanding of the first paragraph, I’d say that this is Lincoln’s Union paragraph. “Let us strive on to finish the work we are in” would be directed at General Grant. “Malice toward none” and “…bind up the nation’s wounds” are directed at the Radical Republicans, who weren’t sure that the Lord’s vengeance would really be enough. Similarly, “all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves” is Lincoln’s program for the post-war years.

So this last paragraph of the speech sets out Lincoln’s standards for the post war years. The earlier paragraph sets out God’s standards of justice as it applies to the South. It is of such havoc as General Sherman wreaked on the south that Lincoln says, “…still it must be said that the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

Now…I confess that I have never heard anyone say this and I haven’t done a lick of research to see if any of the avalanche of Lincoln books touches this question. I don’t know if it is a startling new insight or something every Lincoln scholar has known for years.

And I don’t care. I’m a dilettante.

Posted in Living My Life, Politics | Tagged God's justice, Lincoln, second inaugural. providence, slavery | 4 Comments

What Steven Pinker Should Have Said

Posted on August 24, 2013 by hessd

On August 6, The New Republic published “Science Is Not Your Enemy: An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less historians,” an essay by Steven Pinker. It was an attempt to claim the word “scientism” for scientists and by claiming it, take it away from science’s enemies. This is a much-used strategy. It’s what gays and lesbians did with “queer” and what the Society of Friends did with “Quaker.”

I thought Pinker’s article was pretty aggressive. It was a name-calling, finger-pointing article. Note that calling it that doesn’t establish anything at all about whether his accusations were true. The finger-pointing did produce a lot of responses, though, and the New York Times printed seven of them on August 15. (You can see Pinker pointing one of the fingers here.)

From the seven, I’ve picked these four as the most fun. None of them responds to what Pinker actually said. Some talk about a topic they wish Pinker had written on rather than the one he did write on. Some issue massive rebuttals of positions Pinker did not take. Many of them have written books on “related topics” and the titles of the books go right below the name and the institutional affiliation.

Mine would look like this. “Why is Steven Pinker So Scared of Steven Gould?” Dale E. Hess is Adjunct Emeritus[1] at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of Steven Pinker and His Critics and a number of films, interviews, VHS tapes and filmstrips on the same subject. These comments on Pinker, in other words, serve as blurbs for the book.

The first respondent was Karl W. Giberson, a physicist who teaches science and religion at Stonehill College, in Easton, Massachusetts. Here is his resounding beginning.

We are hard-wired to want creationism to be true. A strong belief in a creation story like that told in the Bible validates the powerful human desire to believe that our lives have meaning and purpose, that what we do matters…

Notice “hard-wired.” Very scientific. “Hard-wired to want…” Not quite as scientific. “A strong belief (like that told in the Bible) validates our desire.” Validates? I could go as far as “illustrates,” but I don’t think our belief actually “validates” anything at all.

Giberson’s next step is this: “The brouhaha about “biblical creation” is really a proxy war about the reality of meaning in the world.” Pinker is the war-maker, I’m guessing. He doesn’t want a war about the creation story (stories) in Genesis, so he is fighting a war, instead, to establish that life doesn’t actually mean anything! Really?

Actually, Pinker does think that life means something. He does not believe that its meaning is given to us from “beyond.” And there is nothing, absolutely nothing, Pinker would like more than a war about “biblical creationism.”

Nevertheless, the problem that shows up clearly in Pinker’s article, according to Giberson, is that he asks “either/or questions” and he should not. One of the many reasons he should not is that Giberson has written a book.

I laid out just such a “bipartisan” story in my book “Seven Glorious Days,” but the warring camps are just too far apart in this conversation to appreciate any mediation..

My second choice is Kevin Wax, managing editor of The Gospel Project. The Gospel Project thinks that Pinker went too far. Of the respondents the Times chose, Wax comes closest to Pinker’s finger-pointing style and is furthest from Pinker’s actual views. Wax wants to talk about whether people who accept that science is the only path to knowledge really live as if their lives had no meaning or purpose. They should live that way, Wax thinks, once they have renounced “meaning” as the organizing principle of life, but they don’t. They live as if their lives mean something. Furthermore, “science,” is as impressive as religion is in handling data, because science is based on unprovable assumptions and is therefore “based on faith,” just as religion is. So there.

Pinker didn’t actually raise the question of how scientists are to live, given that they “believe in” meaninglessness. Wax thinks Pinker should have raised it. Pinker also believes that scientific assumptions—which must, as Wax says, be taken on faith—are justified by their utility in accounting for data that cannot otherwise be accounted for. Pinker’s standard is “Trust, but verify.” Wax thinks that one or the other should be enough.

Wil Gafney is our next respondent. She is an associate professor of Hebrew and Old Testament at The Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia and she wants to talk about why the creation account(s) given in Genesis should not be taken literally. Pinker doesn’t actually raise the question of literal readings of the Bible, but you can tell he knows about them and that he is not happy.

Gaffney spends her days teaching students not to fall for literalism.

Literal readings of nonliteral texts can also lead to fraudulent readings, dogmatic tenacity to ahistorical or unscientific claims, and the loss of credibility for those who insist on nonsensical interpretations.

The dangers of literalism is what Gaffney would rather talk about. Pinker, we would hope, wishes her well, but I am sure he would wonder why her students are reading sacred texts at all. Pinker’s view sounds more like this and it is a much broader charge than Gaffney is responding to.

Most of the traditional causes of belief—faith, revelation, dogma, authority, charisma, conventional wisdom, the invigorating glow of subjective certainty—are generators of error and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge.

Finally, my favorite respondent. Salam Al-Marayati is executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. He has no interest in Pinker at all. He has a soft spot in his heart for the fundamentalist position on creationism, but he also thinks that the creationists are pansies. “You think it’s bad when you want to talk about creationism at dinner parties,” he tells them. “You should try talking about Shariah law.”

Americans should all be able to discuss topics like Shariah and creationism without intimidation and browbeating. Freedom of speech applies to those who want to follow religion as well as those who want to flee religion.

Al-Marayati has found that people don’t know much about Shariah, but they know they hate it. He seems to believe that if creationists got treated better, there would be a chance that advocates of Shariah would be treated better. I’m sure he would appreciate that and I don’t blame him. Besides, Shariah is what he wants to talk about and Pinker’s pitch on the virtues of “scientism” is of no more interest to him than Shariah is to Pinker.

I titled this post “Responding to Steven Pinker.” You know now that I consider that a heavily ironic title. No one did actually respond to Pinker. Everyone responded to something that Pinker’s article made them think of. In many cases, it made they think of the jobs they have or the books they have written.

Of course, I have not responded to Steven Pinker’s argument either. But I might.

[1] That is my actual title since my retirement. An adjunct professor is like a substitute teachers in an elementary school except that you get the phone call earlier. “Adjunct Emeritus” means that I am a substitute teacher based on my merit, which you could take either way, really.

Posted in Political Psychology, ways of knowing | Tagged biblical literalism, creationism, evolution, Shariah, Steven Pinker | Leave a comment

Grants Pass (rhymes with Alas), Oregon

Posted on August 14, 2013 by hessd

For some time, I have been pitching a schema that relates society, economy, and polity. The goal of this device is to explore ways of keeping issues away from the polity, as small government advocates have been proposing.

In Grants Pass, Oregon, I may have found the limiting case. To the embarrassment of Oregonians who live up north in the Willamette Valley, this piece was published in the New York Times. I’d like to reflect on it a little. My plan is to look at the way it is being characterized by several participants, who are quoted in the story. Then, I would like to put it on the small government grid and see how it looks.

The story, in brief, is that Josephine County, Oregon has not taxed itself to provide what are often called “law and order services.” For our purposes, that’s a sheriff’s department, enough deputies to do the work, and a jail to put people who need to be put there. The recent levy would have raised Josephine County’s property taxes from $0.59 per $1000 of property value, Oregon’s lowest, to $1.48 per thousand for the next three years. It failed.

This brings the manpower of the Sheriff’s office to a total of one (1) and makes the jail unusable for most of the usual purposes. Some of the residents of the county like that just fine. Some others are troubled by it. It does sharply raise the question of what government is for and what the alternatives are.

Let’s start with Sam Nichols and Glenn Woodbury. They serve on “citizen crime patrols.” These are vigilante groups, I imagine, since they have no authority. The group they represent, Citizens Against Crime, says that the county’s financial troubles are having two distinct and beneficial effects. The first is that they are strengthening the community. I’d guess that means that the armed citizens who patrol the community feel very good about each other and it may mean that the people they protect feel good about them as well. The second is that this do it yourself law enforcement shows that, in fact, the job can get done without any increase in property taxes.

Except for the uneasiness I feel which led me to use the word vigilante, I’d have to say that these two claims sound good. Let’s look at some other perspectives.

Keith O. Heck, a county commissioner, said he fears that the county could break apart into balkanized camps of self-government, each on its own lookout, if a fix to the problem is not found soon.

This fear is completely compatible with the satisfaction of Citizens Against Crime. A county is an official unit of government. Within the county, the “balkanized camps” Heck is worried about are exactly the same as the “communities” Sam Nichols and Glenn Woodbury are serving. In this vision, every “community” arms some of its members and protects those members against other groups. By that means, the county is balkanized into groups that are not only self-governing, but fully armed.

The question arises, however, of what to do with people you catch in the middle of an attempted burglary. Do you shoot them? Do you wait until they try to escape and then shoot them? You can’t put them in jail because the jail is closed. And that’s just burglary. How about public order?

“We have homeless people sitting in the alleyway — they drink, urinate, defecate, fornicate — whatever they can get away with,” he said. And a ticket or citation from a police officer? They laugh and stay put. “They don’t care — they know there’s nowhere to put them,” he said.

That’s from Jack Ingvaldson, the owner of the Grants Pass Liquor Store. Presumably these activities are violations of public order. In Portland, they would be warned a couple of times and if it continued, they would wind up in jail. But then, we still have a jail in Portland

“I hold my breath, every day, for everything,” said Sheriff Gil Gilbertson in an interview in his office, where images of John Wayne lined the walls.

At grocery stores in Grants Pass, stopping and citing shoplifters — sometimes with whole carts of beer or food in tow — have become part of the daily law enforcement routine.

The one Sheriff’s deputy available for general calls in Josephine County might not be at every grocery store that is being robbed. They will not likely continue to watch as “whole carts of beer or food” leave their stores without having made the customary stop at the cash register. What’s next? Armed guards at the groceries? Shooting shoplifters? Remember that you can’t arrest them, because there’s no place to put them.

What to do? I have been using a model in which the social arrangements we make (the society is the blue oval), the economic arrangements we make (the economy is the green oval) and the political arrangements we make (the polity is the red rectangle) are shown together. The goal of small government fans is to keep issues successfully in the society and the economy. You keep them there by preventing anyone from appealing to “outside forces,” i.e., the polity.

As applied to the Grants Pass situation, it means that people who want these crime issues to remain in the non-governmental areas—that’s the society and the economy in this chart—need to find a way to prevent appeals to Sheriff’s Office. That means that people will need to prevent violations of community norms. No one will be hanging around the liquor store getting drunk, urinating, defecating, and fornicating because doing that would violate community standards of behavior. In every strong community, those internalized standards are the first line of defense. That hasn’t worked in Grants Pass according to Mr. Ingvaldson, so he just might appeal to the government to deal with the issue, particularly if potential customers are afraid to come to his store. So this problem is not contained within the society; it is appealed to the polity where there are laws and the necessary funding to enforce them.

No one will deny, I suppose that, the sale of groceries is a part of the economy. Economic problems like watered stock, noncompliance with contract demands and, of course, theft, could be dealt with by the merchants themselves. This is precisely how the saloons were run in ten thousand western dramas of which the Virgil Cole series by James Patterson are my current favorite. Virgil is hired by the owner of the saloon to keep order. When threats don’t work, Virgil shoots someone and they throw the body out into the street. And it doesn’t require any tax dollars. The saloon owner provides the means to protect his own space and his own profits.

If they can’t do that in Grants Pass, they will have to appeal to government to do it. This is, again, a loss for the small government proponents because the issue escapes from the economic sphere and gravitates to the polity, where authority resides and where tax dollars are spent.

Even a small government enthusiast might conclude that Josephine County has gone too far. While it is true, as these theorists always say, that things are better when they are handled closer to home—meaning the society, where standards of decency prevail, and the economy, where contracts are honored—even they will have to say that things are not being handled at all and the time for bigger government has arrived.

The idea is that people who want issues to remain in the non-governmental areas—that’s the society and the economy in this chart—need to find a way to prevent appeals to government. That means that people will need to prevent violations of community norms. No one will be hanging around the liquor store getting drunk, urinating, defecating, and fornicating because doing that would violate community standards of behavior. In every strong community, those internalized standards are the first line of defense. That hasn’t worked in Grants Pass according to Mr. Ingvaldson, so he just might appeal to the government to deal with the issue, particularly if potential customers are afraid to come to his store. So this problem is not contained within the society; it is appealed to the polity where there are laws and the necessary funding to enforce them.

Posted in Political Psychology, Politics, Sustainability | Tagged limited government, night watchman government, Oregon, vigilantee | Leave a comment

Secularism 2

Posted on August 12, 2013 by hessd

It came to my mind, as I was reflecting on “secularism”—my son, Doug, remarked in passing that he was a “secularist” and I got to thinking about how good a term that is—that it was an “extent of time” word, like “day” or “hour” or “age” or “era.” In Secularism-1, I said the crucial question was whether there was only one age—ours—or whether there is also another one. I called Doug and me both “secular” because both of us think “this age” is the only one there is.

Nothing I have noted so far has a religious connotation to it, but we have come to the trap door. If “this age” means “an era bounded by time” and is to be opposed to the notion of “eternity,” then we will have to ask what “eternity” means and that is going to get religious really fast. (I’m going to come back to touch on one good way to pose the “eternity” question at the end of this note, but only lightly.) If, on the other hand, “this age” is to be contrasted to “the age to come,” then we get religious even faster.

My view is that neither of those ways of putting the question presents us with the alternatives we need. I propose, instead, as the second question: “Is this age under the authority of a Being, who has constructed it, who rules it, and who will see to it that it comes out right?” Since I am writing within a Christian frame of reference myself, I need to say “…a Being who…” only once. Now I can say “God” and allow the other parameters to be handled by Christian traditions.[1]

If these are the right questions, then we may ask anyone (Question 1)whether there is one age (this age only) and expect yes, no, or “it depends” as the answers. Then we may ask anyone (Question 2) whether there is a Being, an Agent (“God,” after this) whose rightful authority extends to the governance of this age. Again, we may expect yes, no, or “it depends” as the answers.

Question 1 puts Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, Doug and me in the same camp. This “age” is it. All of us are “secular” in this understanding of the word. Of those seven people, the first five never considered whether there was an age to come or did consider it and rejected it as pagan. Egyptians were big on “the age to come;” that is what all the pyramids were about. We Israelites don’t take that path. Doug and I have considered it and have our doubts. We are, then, “secularists” or “only one age-ers,” if that is the meaning we can all agree to give to Question 1.

Question 2 divides us differently. Those who are both theistic and secular will please form a line at the left. Of the named people, I am the only one in the line. The gospel writers are not in that line; the apostle Paul is not, post-Exilic Judaism is not, and, for other reasons, Doug is not.[2] I really do believe that there is a God who has brought this era into existence, who rightfully rules it, and who will, in the end, bring its story—the story of this age— to an appropriate conclusion. That makes me a theist and a secularist and makes Doug a non-theist and a secularist. I have been trying to build a set of pigeonholes that will accommodate Doug and me and this is my best try so far.

I promised that I would come back to touch on the “eternity” question before I finished. I don’t have anything philosophical to say about it. Physicists seem willing to talk about things that exist within the space/time continuum or outside it. I honor their efforts, but I don’t know enough to follow them. My approach will be a good deal simpler. I want to deal with “eternal life” as “the life of the ages.” The Greek is zoein aionion in John 3:16, its most famous location. The adjective aionion may be understood as an indefinite extension of time—“everlasting” is a way to represent that—or as a different kind of “time.” I take it as “of the ages” or “for the ages,” which is a perfectly legitimate translation, although it is not the only perfectly legitimate translation.

The contrast I want to make, and I believe the one Jesus had in mind in John’s account of the conversation with Nicodemus, is that there is a kind of life that is lived without meaning or consequence and also a kind that will be meaningful as long as the age lasts. The former is a life oriented toward transitory goods; toward “use it once and throw it away” goods. The life that is aionion –significant on the scale of the ages— or, more simply, the life God intends, is not like that. That life matters now and it matters enduringly. How enduringly? Well, all the way to the end of the age.[3]

Acting in a way that matters (that supports the story the Creator is trying to tell through us) all the way until this age is over seems a very attractive meaning of “eternal” to me. And I think that a lot of us secularists might feel that way.

[1] Needless to say, fobbing the other questions off on Christian tradition does not establish their truth or even they plausibility. It does clarify things, however, so I don’t have to do it here.

[2] The Jews seem to have brought a new interest in “a life after this life” home with them from exile in Babylon. I know that’s too simple, but this is a short piece and I think it is close enough for that.

[3] See Matthew 28 for Jesus’ use of that time scheme.

Posted in Biblical Studies, Living My Life, Words | Tagged eternity, heaven and hell, theism | 4 Comments

Secularism 1

Posted on August 10, 2013 by hessd

My son Doug has taken to calling himself a “secularist.” I think it is the perfect word for him, but he used it very casually in a conversation we were having about something else (the influence of Norman French on the English language, as I recall) and I got to thinking about what a good word it is. I had never heard it used the way he used it and I wondered if I had just not been paying attention.

The words I am more familiar with are atheist and agnostic. As I look at them, however, I see that both begin with negative prefixes. The question being raised is presented by the root—theos = God in the first case and gnosis = knowledge in the second. The position you might take, yourself, is presented not by the root, but by the prefix. These words offer the question, then: a) do you believe in God, or a god, or “the gods?” and b) do you believe we can know for sure about God, or a god, of “the gods?” Those are really good questions, but they are not the only good questions.

“A secularist is an adherent of secularism.” I don’t trust dictionaries for everything, but I am willing to go with the OED this far. Secularism (the OED again) is “the doctrine that morality should be based solely on regard to the well-being of mankind in the present life, to the exclusion of all considerations drawn from a belief in God or in a future state.” I like that definition because I like where it starts. Here is another; I don’t like this one as well. “…worldly spirit, views or the like; especially a system of the doctrines and practices that disregards or rejects any form of religious faith and worship.” I found that one in Webster’s New World Dictionary. Note the emphasis: secularism is a system that disregards something. Does that strike you as odd?

As you can see, given where I started, it seems odd to begin with what this view disregards. Let’s play with this idea by looking at some other words. If I believe that a husband and a wife should keep their promises to each other—all of them; not just THAT one—then I could say I believe in “marital fidelity.” But this view I hold could be represented by quite a collection of other words that do not take their salience from “fidelity,” but from other notions entirely. I could be said to be cowardly, the theory being that if I were brave, I would be mating with as many women as would have me. You could argue that coward is not a word about marriage, but then you would have to admit that fidelity is not a word about bravery.

The root of the word establishes what we are talking about. I could ask whether you are the kind of person who lives with his tail tucked between his legs (the picture that the etymology of coward gives us) or a person who lives adventurously. The question of whether I am being true to my marriage vows is not even referred to by this set of terms. The choice of these terms imagines that we are talking about something else entirely.

Or, to get the same destination by another route, you could say that what I call “faithful,” is just doing the same things with the same person over and over again. It is just “routine.” Or worse, it is a routine, a “regular, unvarying, or mechanical procedure, discharge of duties, etc.”— (Webster’s New World Dictionary ). I am just a dullard, an automaton, vulgar (lower class) or bourgeoisie (middle class), or having no discrimination at all. The discrimination charge implies that in staying with my original choice of a mate, I am displaying no interest at all in newer models or, worse, no ability to discriminate between my present mate and the set of potential mates.

The word we begin with, in other words, has a landscape of meanings in mind and treats alternative meanings unfavorably.[1] I may want to talk about how faithful I am to my wife; that brings infidelity onto the table as an alternative. You may want to talk about how risk averse I am (risk taking is a good thing) and brings risk avoidance onto the table as the unfavored alternative. Or about how mired I am in routine, unable to choose the good that is new or unable any longer to tell the difference.

So the root of the word chooses the topic and the prefix (usually) establishes a position with reference to that topic.[2] That is why I like “that morality should be based solely on regard to the well-being of mankind in the present life” and don’t like “a system of the doctrines and practices that disregards or rejects any form of religious faith and worship.” The first one says that secularism holds a certain view. The second one says that secularism disregards a certain view.

I myself would prefer to say that I value fidelity, rather than that I undervalue courage or that I can’t tell the difference between a lower quality mate and a higher quality potential mate. None of those distinctions has anything to do with what is true. All of them have to do with establishing just what we are talking about.

The idea that occurred to me as Doug and I were talking was that secular is a really good word for a relative emphasis on this world and its events and relationships without regard for the additional question of whether there are alternatives (other worlds, events, and relationships). Being a theist myself, I can’t think of the basis on which I would object to being called a “non-secularist.” Or an infrasecularist, if the question should be whether my views come up to the level of secularism or whether they stay below (infra- or hypo-) secularism.

Actually, I don’t want to be called a non-secularist. I just can’t think of how to go about complaining about it.

[1] This makes perfect sense historically, of course, but every history has its own beginning and its own preferences.

[2] Negative suffixes like –ard are sometimes used, as well as the -phobias and the -oseses.

Posted in Living My Life | Tagged secularism, theism, word roots | 3 Comments

Still Mine

Posted on August 5, 2013 by hessd

I am not honestly sure whether this is a really good time for movies about old people or whether I have just started to get interested in movies about old people. I think it’s just a good time. When Ron Howard gave us Cocoon, nearly 30 years ago, I was ready to invest myself in it.

In any case, Bette and I saw Still Mine this week and I’ve been thinking about it. You probably shouldn’t see it if you happen to be a building inspector. To the extent there are any bad guys at all (death and senile dementia are not bad guys), it is the building inspectors. On the other hand, if you are a libertarian, an old woman who is married, an old man who is married, the son or daughter of either of the above, a builder, or a neighbor, you are going to find something here to like.

I won’t bother you with the plot. Here it is: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2073086/

The first thing to like is the work of James Cromwell and Geneviève Bujold as Craig and Irene Morrison. They have been married for sixty years or so. He is watching his life start to flatline because nothing moves him to demand more of himself. She is losing touch with reality—little things, mostly, but they can’t continue to live in the big old house he built for them and their seven children.[1]

She needs to love him and trust him and she does, as she is able. He needs to love her and treasure her and he does, with a couple of exceptions. I like the exceptions. I don’t approve of them, but the fact that he is not endlessly patient and constructive helps me believe that he is actually a person and not just a moral mirage. Cromwell and Bujold need to be very very good because there isn’t much plot. The movie is about who they are, particularly who they are for each other.

I wanted more to be made of the way Craig and Irene had friends. They were particular friends with Chester and Margaret Jones. Chester and Craig mostly just rag on each other; it took me a little while to be sure that it was just their way of being friends. Margaret brings a casserole over after Irene falls and is taken to the hospital. Craig refuses until Margaret says, “If the roles were reversed, this is what Irene would have done. You know that.”[2] Craig does know that and accepts the casserole.

I wanted to see more of the way their relationship was lodged in their community because I suspect they could not have been who they were for each other had they not been those people to others in their town. We hear about things they have done for others, but we don’t get to see it so it doesn’t serve as the vivid context as it should.

I also wanted to see more because right in the middle of everything, Chester dies. We don’t know Chester well, but Craig does and Chester’s death reminds him of all the deaths to come—some not all that far off.

Just go see it if you fit into any of the categories I named. Bette and I came away thoughtful, but also hopeful.

[1] One of the tug of the heart scenes is Craig leaving the big family house for the last time and stopping to put his hand on the door frame they used to measure the height of their children as they grew. He could always pry it off and take it with him, but he knows it would be better if he left it.

[2] That’s almost right. I’ve only heard it once so far.

Posted in Movies | Tagged a castle doctrine, senile dementia, strong love | Leave a comment

What Pope Francis said

Posted on August 3, 2013 by hessd

How shall we understand the new pope, Pope Francis?

“If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Francis told reporters, speaking in Italian but using the English word “gay.”

That’s a clip from today’s New York Times, in a story written by Rachel Danadio. She is careful to point out that the Pope’s remarks came during a very long trans-Atlantic flight. Pope Francis was returning from a triumphant tour of Brazil and had every reason to feel good about what he had accomplished. So he wandered back to the press room on his plane and had a very long talk with reporters, of which this one comment has been, so far, the most prominent.

“Who am I to judge?” is an interesting question coming from the CEO of the Roman Catholic Church. To Protestants, it is apt to sound like the head of the Personnel Department asking whether he should have a view on whether hiring decisions are distorted by racial bias. “Yes, they might be,” he would be saying, in this example, “but who am I to judge?” In the personnel case, a good answer would be, “You are the one who is breaking the law if there is a racial bias in hiring decisions. Who are you? You are the one who is going to jail.”

That isn’t the most interesting part of what the pope said, but it is the easiest part of peel away, so I thought it was worth starting there. The Pope is also, according to Catholic dogma, “the vicar of Christ.” What is a “vicar?”

Well…Joe Biden is a vicar. The White House accepts a lot more meetings than the President can attend himself, so he sends the Vice President in his stead; as a substitute. “In his stead” and “substitute” point to the most common meanings of the Latin vice, which is why the office is called “Vice” President.[1]

It would be odd, everyone would think, if Vice President Biden announced at a gathering, “Well, I don’t know how the President feels about this, but I, myself, don’t feel competent to make a judgment.” It would be odd because Biden is the “vicar” of the President. Following the logic, what the Pope really needs to do is to pass along Christ’s judgment, not to make one of his own. And what is “Christ’s judgment?”

This is one of the many places where the argument turns nasty. Homosexuality is not a topic Jesus ever addressed in any text we know. He did talk about caring for the poor and inviting the outcast. In Luke’s version particularly, he said really awful things about rich people. He taught that compassion was the heart and the source of neighborliness. He didn’t say anything about homosexuality.[2]

This means, to revert briefly to the Joe Biden example, that the Vice President has no judgment to pass along. He is no one’s agent. He speaks only for himself and is perfectly free to say, “Who am I to judge?”

No one believes that the Pope is free to speak for himself on a matter that threatens to seriously divide his church. In the news coverage I saw, the reporters were very happy with Pope Francis’s “tone.” He seemed humble. No one imagined he was substituting his own personal judgment for the teachings of the church. He wasn’t and, frankly, he shouldn’t.

The church over which the Pope presides teaches that a homosexual orientation is “unnatural” and reflects a “distorted” personality.[3] Both of these are difficult charges. There is no shortage of same-sex behavior among animals generally, so if “occurring in nature” is what “natural” means, then homosexual behavior is natural—not unnatural. The argument that it is a distortion requires a judgment about what it is a distortion of. Following this line of thought, the Catholic Church would be on the hook to show what God’s preferred personality was and that homosexuality is not an acceptable “version” of this personality, but a distortion. Those are very hard things to show.[4]

The church over which the Pope presides is also divided between a more liberal northern hemisphere—particularly the United States—and a more conservative southern hemisphere. Making changes in Catholic dogma is going to make people unhappy. Seeming to be open to changes is going to make people unhappy. Changing the style of his pronouncements and leaving the substance alone is going to make people unhappy.

Those are the issues as I see them in the large context. What Pope Francis actually said man mean more in a small context. He may have said that homosexual behavior is entirely unacceptable in priests, but a homosexual orientation is not unacceptable. He would be saying, in other words, the same thing he says about heterosexual priests. And what look like conditions in his remark—provided that “he searches for the Lord and has good will”—are not conditions that would not apply to heterosexual priests as well. What priest should not search for the Lord and have good will? And if all priests are resolutely celibate, what difference does it make?

In other words, Pope Francis may have said nothing at all. On the other hand, seeming to have said something may have lit a fuse that is not as long as he thinks it is.

[1] “Vice” in the sense of “bad habit” derives separately from the Latin vitium, “fault.” Richard Nixon’s Vice President Spiro Agnew managed to be a Vice President in both senses at the same time and he wasn’t the first one.

[2] He did say, in the Sermon on the Mount, that condemning other people is a very dicey thing to do and cited the principle that what goes around comes around. The word Matthew chose for that saying means “to condemn;” it does not mean “to make a judgment.”

[3] This might be the time to confess that I am no scholar of Catholic dogmatic theology. I got those two words—“unnatural” and “distorted”—from a site called “What Catholics Believe.”

[4] And following the biblical principle that teachings should be based on biblical texts that are about the same subject as the teaching—teachings about homosexuality, that is, should be based on biblical texts about homosexuality—runs into the difficulty that there are no New Testament texts about homosexuality—not even from the Apostle Paul, who is the go-to guy for Catholic interpretation.

Posted in Biblical Studies, Politics, Theology | Tagged distorted personality, gay priests, natural theology, Pope Francis | Leave a comment

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Posted on July 25, 2013 by hessd

I have heard it said that every story has an inner core of meaning—a structure of meaning. I might have said it myself. Yesterday.

In fact, every story has as many narrative structures as there are people who know the story. When I have seen a movie I like half a dozen times or so, I find that my mind has been turning the story this way and that, trying to find “the” structure of the story, meaning, I suppose, some inner coherence in the narrative that attracts and holds my attention. I have seen and enjoyed Lasse Hallström’s Salmon Fishing in the Yemen for several months now and just today I realized[1] what it is really[2] about.

Here’s the plot. Dr. Frederick Jones (Ewen McGregor) is forced by office politics to hear a ridiculous scheme pitched by Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Emily Blunt). Harriet represents a Sheik (Amr Waked) who would like to introduce the sport of salmon fishing into his country. Fred fights as hard as he can to stay away from the project, but he is drawn in; then he gets interested in it; finally committed to it. The three of them—Fred, Harriet, and the Sheik—become a team with a common interest that transcends everything they would otherwise have thought to be more important.

Dr. Jones fights involvement the way some of the movie salmon fight being reeled in. When you know him better—and after watching the move half a dozen times, you do know him better—you wonder why. He has a really awful job. It doesn’t challenge him; it scarcely engages him. The project he is most ardent about at the beginning of the film is presented as so narrow that only a fishing geek could be interested in it at all. He has a really awful marriage. Dr. Jones and his wife have not shared anything important to them for a long time. Even the little we learn about their sex life is more than we want to know. Fred’s wife makes a major career change and forgets to mention it to him. There’s really nothing there.

Here are the two lines of dialogue that, in this understanding of the story, form the turning point from alienation to commitment.

Harriet: I mean, you know, it’s fishing. Who the hell cares?

Fred: Well…strangely enough, I do.

How and why did Dr. Frederick Jones arrive at that point? In one way, you would think Dr. Jones would welcome a daring new project. What does he have to lose? But he fights it in every way he can. The reasons he gives for judging the project to be impossible as well as a huge waste of money sound rational. They are factually wrong, because he has not taken the trouble to find out anything about the Yemen, but they sound good. For each of his objections, Ms. Chetwode-Talbot has a satisfactory answer. She is also unfazed by his manifest contempt for the project.

It’s when you understand that Dr. Jones’s life is a wasteland, that you begin to see the desperation in his rejection of the project. He is completely bored in his job. He has narrowed his focus further and further until choosing the right graphic for a very narrow article he is publishing is really the most important thing in his life. He has no more life outside his job than inside. He and his wife, Mary, exist in the same space, but have no warmth to share.

It is clear then, that Dr. Jones is not rejecting the project so he will be able to get back to a life that he finds challenging and nurturing. He is rejecting it so he will not be forced to notice that he is living a life in which nothing matters. Ms. Chetwode-Talbot moves him in the direction of noticing that. That is why she is such a threat. She is attractive, knowledgeable, competent. She meets every objection he can come up with: the infrastructure has already been completed, the Sheik’s commitment is strong, the money has already been allocated.

This is a project that ought to make a salmon fisherman’s soul leap with joy. Dr. Jones is an avid salmon fisherman, or used to be—back when his life allowed for joy. But experiencing his heart leaping for joy would be very frightening to Dr. Jones. It would call his attention to how long it had been since anything really mattered to him. He wants very much not to have to notice that; and then, to admit it; and then, to know it to be true.

That’s what is going on inside—in the movie I have learned to see after all these re-watchings—when all we see on the outside is injured pride and the verbal abuse it produces. For example:

Dr. Jones: Water, Ms. Chetwode-Talbot. H₂O. Fish require water. You are familiar with the concept?

Ms. Chetwode-Talbot: Yes. I am. Yes.

For reasons that have largely to do with British politics, Dr. Jones is forced to pretend to take the project seriously. Simple boorishness will no longer suffice. He demands a meeting with the engineering team from the Three Gorges Dam; a meeting with a British oxygen company; and two huge Russian cargo planes—one, he explains, to transport the fish and one to carry all the money they are wasting. He prices the project so high that he is sure it will be out of reach. Harriet simply notes the price and wants to know if the figure is in dollars or pounds.

At the end of that session, we learn that Dr. Jones will be continuingly involved with the project whether he likes it or not. Here are the lines that mark that transition.

Dr. Jones: I mean, this is a sort of joke.

Ms. Chetwode-Talbot: Well, I’m sure you wouldn’t want to joke about a 50-million-pound project, Dr. Jones. Not when you’re in charge of it.

Being in charge of the project finally begins to wear on Dr. Jones. The problems he now faces are practical problems—his kind of problem—and they are huge. His wife leaves for a job in Switzerland. He is forced to continue to deal with Harriet who, as I have already pointed out, is attractive and remarkably sweet-spirited. Then the word comes that Harriet’s new boyfriend, who was sent to Afghanistan, has been sent on a patrol from which, according to official reports, there were no survivors.

Harriet is distraught. It is she, now, who wishes there were no project to introduce salmon into the Yemen. She doesn’t care about the Yemen or anything else. But by now, Dr. Jones does care about the project. He has the beginnings of care for Harriet as well. He wasn’t sure how to relate to the competent confident administrator she was when he met her, but she is now a woman brought quite low by grief, and Dr. Jones knows quite a bit about grief. We have seen that he knows only how to deny it in his own life, but we learn, to our surprise, that in someone else’s life, he knows what to do about it.

That brings us back to the two lines with which we began.

Harriet: It’s just fishing. Who the hell cares?

Fred: Well…strangely enough, I do.

The story goes on. They build the project, but it is sabotaged. Harriet’s boyfriend returns from Afghanistan, but Harriet chooses the colleagueship of the project over romance with the boyfriend. The three of them—Fred, Harriet, and the sheik—recommit to the success of the project and we have reached the end of the story.

But the story that mattered to me was over when Fred said, “…I do.”[3] Isn’t it odd, I have thought since thinking about this movie, how very hard we will fight when the alternative is to notice that the life we are now living is not really worth it. Continuing not to realize that justifies alienation, anger, resentment, pride, contempt, and simple nastiness.

[1] I hope you notice the irony there.

[2] More irony

[3] Just playing. Fred and Harriet do wind up together—not only as colleagues but as intimate friends. Probably, well after the time of this movie’s story, husband and wife. But he did say, “I do,” earlier, I want you to notice.

Posted in Movies | Tagged colleagueship, intimacy, Meaningless life, salmon fishing | Leave a comment

“That includes me:” Obama talks about race

Posted on July 21, 2013 by hessd

On January 20, 2009, Barack Hussein Obama was inaugurated as our first black president. A lot of the early betting went against him as a candidate. No one seemed quite sure if Democrats were ready for a black nominee of their party; they were certainly ready for a woman nominee. But then, an odd thing happened. Over the course of the campaign, Obama didn’t seem all that black. “Black,” sure. His father, after all, was from Kenya.[1] But “black” didn’t seem to be any of the top four or five things about him.

That is what the gaffe-prone Senator Joe Biden was really trying to say when he said this: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”[2] He got hammered for including “clean” as one of the descriptors, but I thought when he said it that he meant “clean” as in “a clean record.” Biden meant that candidate Obama didn’t look like this. Very often. Also, Biden was campaigning against Obama at the time because Biden wanted to be the Democratic nominee and remarks like these are NOT how you campaign against someone. I’m sure Vice President Biden knows that now.

So “not all that black” Barack Obama was inaugurated in January and his Attorney-General, Eric Holder gave a speech at the Department of Justice on February 18, less than a month later. It quickly became known as his “nation of cowards” speech. If you follow this link, you will find that expression in seconds 18—20 of the speech. He didn’t waste any time getting to it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Fy2DnMFwZw

We are “cowards” he said because we do not talk with each other about race.

That was shocking for a lot of reasons. One is that Eric Holder looks more or less like Barack Obama. He is not a scary looking black man. Another is that President Obama was elected by moving discussions about race into the background. Every time the Republicans pointed out that the Democratic nominee was a black man, the Democrats changed the topic to something else; the rainbow nation, a post-partisan nation, the terrible economy. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn from the historians of that election that Obama lost more votes because of the myth that he was a Muslim than because of the fact that he was a black man. And finally, most of the people I had heard talking about race were using it as a way to talk about social justice. For these folks, it was inequality, not race, that needed to be focused on.

For whatever reason, we didn’t have the conversation about race that Eric Holder wanted us to have. And then George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin. The jury who found George Zimmerman not guilty heard almost nothing about race during the trial and did not, according to the most vocal juror, take it into account in their deliberations. Since the trial, it seems that we have heard about very little else.

On July 19, President Obama walked, unscheduled, into the press briefing room because he had a few things he wanted to say. You can see the text here. There weren’t any teleprompters. Just the President talking about being a black man in America. He said some of the things Attorney General Holder said in 2009. I think he said them better, but they weren’t really different things. And then he said this:

There are very few African American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me. There are very few African American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me — at least before I was a senator. There are very few African Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.

And I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African American community interprets what happened one night in Florida. And it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear.

It wasn’t a speech. It wasn’t a conversation with friends over a beer. I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it. He called it “expanding on my remarks.” I thought it was the most candid and personally revealing appearances I have seen a politician make.[3]

You should see this. Printed words just don’t do it. If you watch this video from the 3:12 second mark to the 4:19 second mark, you will see what I mean. Here’s the link.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/2013/07/19/president-obama-speaks-trayvon-martin

Maybe this will change the conversation some. Maybe watching the President say, “That includes me,” when talking about the department store setting and the street setting and the elevator setting he used as instances.

It will be a long time before I forget seeing the President say that. “That includes me,” he said. I hope it is a very long time.

[1] I have never quite understood why President Obama is not called Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. His father’s name was Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. That ought to do it, shouldn’t it. Does anyone doubt that there was a Martin Luther King Sr.?

[2] Jesse Jackson said that although Biden’s remarks were “highly suggestive,” they were not “off-color.” Isn’t that just sweet?

[3] Ever. Unless you saw and believed Richard M. Nixon’s “Checkers Speech” in 1952.

Posted in Politics | Tagged Barack Obama, racial violence, Trayvon Martin | Leave a comment