The Dilettante's Dilemma

Fully and Visibly Engaged

Posted on July 12, 2013 by hessd

It has to be one of the hardest jobs in the world. You are on camera frequently and you have to be visibly responding to what someone else is doing. Yawning is out; napping is out; checking your watch is out. It’s just hard to do well.

I have thought for some time now that Vice President Joe Biden’s performances in appearing to respond to President Obama’s State of the Union speeches were Oscar-worthy. He’s not just happy and approving. He is amused, wry, anxious, hopeful. The emotional palette he uses is extraordinary.

“I have,” as Tom Lehrer says in introducing his satire, ‘The Vatican Rag,’ “a modest example here.”

This one looks like: “Whenever you start talking about presidential succession, I focus intensely. I think I am beginning to get that headache again.”

Here’s the Vice President again. I propose: Ve-e-e-r-y E-e-e-nerestink. This imagines that the Vice President knows Artie Johnson as well as other members of our generation do.

And finally, how about this one? I’m thinking: “It isn’t just anyone who can tell that joke, but you nailed it.” I am encouraged in that interpretation by the droll expression of the face of Speaker of the House, John Boehner. He would not have gotten the joke, I suppose, or would not have thought it was funny. Also, you will notice that Boehner and Biden are leaning away from each other. It’s just a visual artifact, really. Biden, on the left, is leaning to his right and Boehner, on the right, is leaning to his left. Both are trying to find a way to meet in the center. Or not.

One the other hand, Andy Murray’s girlfriend, Kim Sears, is a gifted responder as well. The best I have seen since Joe Biden. Andy Murray did some amazing work in putting Novak Djokovic away in straight sets in the Wimbledon finals, but every time Murray did something amazing, the camera panned over to Kim to see how she was reacting. She, too, needs to be fully and visibly engaged in the event. No yawning, napping, or watch-checking.

Here are some guesses about what she was thinking. I’ll make the pictures bigger because she is a good deal cuter than Joe is. Here are the three pictures I liked best along with my proposals for what might have been going on in her head.

“A drop shot? From behind the baseline? We’ve talked about that several times, you will recall.”

Andy Murray 6

And for the second picture, how about: “Oh. I can wear the blue gown to the victory dinner. That will work. When I wear white, people mistake me for Kate Middleton. Or they did before she got pregnant.”

And for the third one, how about this? “This must be so hard for Novak’s Djokovic’s girlfriend.”

This is the kind of game anyone can play, as you see, so if you have any ideas about what captions to supply to these pictures, don’t let timidity or good taste hold you back.

Posted in Living My Life | Tagged Joe B, Joe Biden, Kim Sears, State of the Union, Wimbledon | Leave a comment

Borrowing Bette

Posted on July 6, 2013 by hessd

Every metaphor you can think of is deficient in some respect and, regrettably, that includes the metaphor I am going to use today. I am going to treat the opportunity I have of living my life with Bette by the analogy that she is a book I have checked out of the library. This is what she looked like when I met her. Why would I not have wanted to check her out?

There. That’s the worst of it. Now you are in for a little exculpatory throat-clearing, after which I will work with the metaphor a little. One: there really isn’t any Library in this metaphor, out of which I could have checked Bette.[1] Also no Librarian, no cosmic Yenta who makes matches and therefore also makes mistakes. Bette is a person, not an object. She is not like a “book,” that can be owned, borrowed, and returned; and if she were, she would be the kind of book the librarian consulted with before loaning her to anyone.[2]

Here’s why I’m using this metaphor anyway. It distinguishes sharply between “reading a book” and “having a book.” That’s worth doing.[3] Besides, Bette was a librarian when I met her, so I am benefitting from both ends of whatever humor there is in this metaphor.[4]

Bette had a headache earlier this week. Bette doesn’t get headaches. So this was a potentially disturbing event. What did this headache mean? The question had a little more pop for me than it would have had for a guy who has not already lost a wife to a disease that first presented itself as a series of inconsequential medical anomalies. Being that guy, I press a little harder on just what “inconsequential” might mean, even if it is just an unexpected headache.

So I had a bad night that night and the next day the headache went away and Bette is back to normal. But during that bad night, it occurred to me that living intimately with someone is like reading a really good book from the library. Even if you have to let go of it—you can get it renewed sometimes, but eventually you have to give it back—you still got to read the story. Bette’s story–in this metaphor, the story that is Bette–is a rich and complicated story; it has subplots and sub-subplots; it has heroes and villains; it has engaging sidekicks and comic relief. It means something wonderful.

And you always get to keep the story, even if you have to return the book. That’s how far I got during that bad night. It’s a metaphor with some problems, as noted above, but it brings a wonderful clarity to the central meaning of the metaphor, which is that no matter what happens, you always get to keep the story.

I have books, and I’ll bet you do too, that I have not really given myself to. I’ve enjoyed them. I know there is more in them than I have yet found, but I also know that I have them, there on my shelf, and that I can always go back and read them again. If I knew that I could not go back and read them again, I imagine that I would invest myself more intensively, getting everything the book had to give me. What this metaphor does is to remind me that the partner you married really is not like the book you have. She is more like the story you need to give yourself to so that you will always have it when you have to give the book back.

So to conclude, I have offered a metaphor that has recently meant a lot to me. It is truly terrible theology and I don’t mean it as theology. They say sometimes that youth is “wasted” on the young because they don’t know how wonderful it is. They might also say that marriage is wasted on the married, because they don’t know how wonderful it is. But I really do know how wonderful it is and I don’t want it to be wasted on me and so far it has not been.

[1] This is not to say that I did not check her out when we first met, back in January of 2005.

[2] That was, in fact, the experience of the mutual friend who undertook the task of persuading Bette to loan herself to me for a brief coffee date. He pleaded; she resisted. “It’s a fourteen day loan,” he said, “and he is really good about returning the people he borrows.” Bette said, “That’s not good enough, I’m afraid. I have things I want to do in the next fourteen days and none of them involves getting back into the Slough of Dating.” The above story is true, more or less, in principle. The dialogue is entirely invented.

[3] People who know my life will understand that I have also lost a book. You have to pay a fee for that. It is a quite substantial fee. I did return my next book when it was due, and I understand that I may be called on to return Bette as well. I hope not. It is about my turn to be returned.

[4] I went so far as to say, at our wedding, that I was proud to have taken her out of circulation, a joke only her librarian friends really appreciated.

Posted in Getting Old, Living My Life, Love and Marriage | Tagged borrowing, intimacy, libraries, marriage, ownership | Leave a comment

Hannah Arendt

Posted on July 5, 2013 by hessd

Please go see this movie. It will be good for you. You will want to talk about it with your friends.

Critics have not been very kind to the movie, Hannah Arendt, because it is a talky movie. I don’t see what else it could be. Hannah Arendt, played in the movie by Barbara Sukowa, was a prominent political philosopher before the New Yorker asked her to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. On the left, here, is Arendt as herself. On the right, Sukowa as Arendt.

I know Arendt from her Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition. This movie is about Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Most particularly, it is about Arendt’s insistence that the most horrible thing about Eichmann was his mediocrity. Eichmann was not a monster, according to Arendt. He was only a paper shuffler. He was not even an anti-Semite. He was a nothing. That is what made the Holocaust so horrible.

Have you ever had the experience of trying to point out the “real cause” on an event and being defeated because your explanation didn’t have any villains in it? Or not villains who were quite evil enough? I have had that experience many times.

Here’s what happens. Imagine that villainy can be calibrated on a scale of ten. The prevailing sentiment among your audience is that the Villain at Issue—it is Eichmann in this case—should be an 8. Your own view is that, given the circumstances, he is no more villainous than 5. What will you be charged with, do you suppose? Defending the villain! The case you make that he is a 5 is an affront to decent people everywhere and especially to the victims of villainy. You are “defending” the villain by arguing that 5 is a better measure of his villainy than 8!

This response is what the movie, Hannah Arendt, is about.[1] We see Arendt in Jerusalem listening to the testimony. Eichmann is in a class case. They say it is to protect him, and maybe it really was, but he looks in that case, like an exception to the human race. There is everyone else and then there is Eichmann. Arendt is struck by how horrible the death machine is. Nothing can be said about the Nazi intentions and actions that is too awful to say. On the other hand, once the machine is built, it doesn’t take any particular malice to run it. It just takes bureaucrats who have their orders and who comply with them to the very best of their ability.

It is evil, surely. But it is also banal. The OED gives these meanings to banal: commonplace, common, trite, trivial, petty.[2] The operation Eichmann ran was so thoroughly evil it was hard to comprehend. Eichmann’s part in it, Arendt argued, was trivial. It was petty. It was trite.

It has always seemed to me that it is more valuable for all of us to understand that social systems can be built that do not require evil men to operate them. Trivial bureaucrats will be enough. This is scarcely saying more than Edmund Burke said: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Arendt, however, pointed to the system. That is what we need to understand. Her opponents wanted to revile Eichmann, himself. In doing this, said Arendt, we cheat ourselves and deny to ourselves a knowledge of what is now possible that we will urgently need in the future.

Arendt’s major professor, Martin Heidegger, joined the Nazi party in the hopes of reforming the university system. He was tried, in the denazification hearings following World War II. The French military finally classified him in 1949 as a “Mitläufer or Nazi follower (Mitläufer : person who gives into peer pressure without participation nor resistance nor inner conviction, unlike a fellow traveler, literally “with-runner” similar to “lemming-like”).”[3] I think Arendt’s position was that Eichmann was a Mitläuffer.

I’m in no position to say whether Arendt or her critics is nearer to the truth. The better question, it seems to me, is whether we need to understand Arendt’s view of Evil—that’s a capital E—or her critic’s view. Which is more crucially important for us? I’m with Arendt on this one.

[1] Mostly. It is also, to a certain extent, about her judgment that the local German rabbis made the Nazi’s work easier by organizing the local Jews for them. Arendt is charged, in this instance, with “blaming the victim” rather than “defending the villain,” but the dynamics work out along the same lines.

[2] There is an earlier meaning of banal which has no real historical association with the modern use of the word, but the meaning seems almost an eerie forerunner in Eichmann’s case: “of belonging to compulsory feudal service.”.

Here is a use of that meaning from 1753: “ a kind of feudal service, whereby the tenants of a certain district are obliged to carry their corn to be ground at a certain mill, and to be baked at a certain oven for the benefit of the lord.”

[3] Thanks to the Wikipedia article “Heidegger and Nazism” for that quote.

Posted in Movies, Politics, Uncategorized | Tagged Adolf Eichmann, banality, evil, Hannah Arendt, judgment | 4 Comments

In a Larger Sense, We Cannot …Hallow This Ground

Posted on July 2, 2013 by hessd

The battle of Gettysburg began on July 1, 1863: 150 years ago today. Three days of unparalleled carnage followed. Recent studies conclude that the Union army and the Confederate army each lost somewhere in the neighborhood of 23,000 soldiers in those three days.

It was Abraham Lincoln who said that the men who died there had consecrated this ground “far above our poor power to add or detract.” That line is from the Gettysburg Address, of course, given on November 19, 1863.

But it was also Lincoln who said:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. 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.”

That familiar judgment is from Lincoln’s second inaugural address, given in March of 1865—a year and eight months after Gettysburg and one month before Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, Virginia.

It’s hard to know, 150 years later, how to feel about Gettysburg. Lee didn’t invade Pennsylvania because he wanted to capture it; he invaded to show that he could go anywhere he wanted and that Lincoln couldn’t stop him. The idea was to show that Lincoln’s war aims were a travesty and that Lincoln should sign a treaty then and there to end hostilities and recognize the realty that the north and south were sovereign nations, each controlling its own territory.

A Confederate victory at Gettysburg could very well have accomplished that. Anti-war sentiment was strong in the north. A war president is always popular when the war is going well. Otherwise not. Lincoln was not.

You can see on the map what happened on the first day. The Confederate armies, attacking from the north, pushed the Union armies right through the city of Gettysburg and onto the hills south of town. On the second day, Lee faced an army larger than his, entrenched in positions on the high ground. He attacked the Union left wing on the second day, trying to get around Little Round Top. He failed. He attacked the Union center on the third day. He failed again. Then he took what was left of his army home to Virginia.

The most engaging accounts I know of Gettysburg are Michael Shaara’s Killer Angels and the movie, Gettysburg, which was based on that book. Both the book and the movie emphasize the role of junior officers, improvising to shape the battle (like Brigadier General John Buford) or devising new tactics on the spot (Like Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain). It was not a battle won by strategy, according to these accounts; it was a battle won by the imagination and daring of soldiers on the ground.

I understand a good deal about the battle because I have read books about it all my life, but my feelings are being played with these days—by Aaron Sorkin, of all people. In the movie, Gettysburg, Robert E. Lee is played by Martin Sheen, who is dear to my heart as President Josiah Bartlet, of The West Wing. Sorkin gave President Bartlet some of the best political speeches ever given on television.[1] But Colonel Chamberlain is played by Jeff Daniels, who is dear to my heart as Will McAvoy of The Newsroom. Sorkin has not yet given McAvoy the speeches he gave Bartlet, but the second season begins this month and we will see.[2]

There is no legitimate connection between Gettysburg and these two Sorkinesque characters, but I can’t see Col. Chamberlain without hearing Will McAvoy and I can’t see General Lee without hearing President Bartlet.

So I still know what I know about Gettysburg, but my feelings have gone all screwy.

[1] President Bartlet’s first spoken line in Season 1, Episode 1 is, “I am the Lord, thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” It’s a snappy opening for a Democratic president, but the context helps us understand how appropriate the line was.

[2] Will McAvoy delivered the line for which he is best known when a student asked him in public to say why America was the greatest country in the world. He said, “It’s not the greatest country in the world. That’s my answer.” A three minute rant follows. And after that, “…but we used to be.” And after that “…and we could be again.”

Posted in Books, Movies, Politics | Tagged Gettysburg, The Newsroom, The West Wing | Leave a comment

If It’s Not About the Nail, What IS it About?

Posted on June 27, 2013 by hessd

With any luck at all, I will embed a wonderful short clip called “It’s Not About the Nail” in this post. If it doesn’t work, I recommend that you Google “It’s not about the nail” and enjoy the following 78 seconds. It’s serious and it’s funny. It’s wonderful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4EDhdAHrOg

OK. That was the last wonderful thing I have to offer. Now I want to think about what “it” means in the expression “It’s not about the nail.”

There is an object somewhere (an artifact, a fable, a relationship) that is consonant with some meanings and not with others. I know that sounds stiff, but I am trying for the most general formulation I can think of. It will get better from here on.

“Consonant with some meanings and not with others” is my way of saying “about.” When you say a movie is “about” something, you are trying to identify a theme, often a theme that means a lot to you. You will expect other people to say, “No it isn’t. It’s really about [something else].” Many happy and collegial hours have been consumed, along with unnumbered beers, in such discussions.

Contentious issues are a different matter. When I say that closing a tax loophole is “about” forcing the corporations to pay their fair share and you say it is “about” taking away the incentive for corporations to create jobs, then “about” means something very important. The tax loophole has many effects. I pick the one I want to talk about and say that the loophole is “about” that; it’s about tax equity. You pick the one you want to talk about and say that the loophole is “about” that; it’s about a thriving and growing labor market.

It makes no sense at all to ask what it is “really” about. On the other hand, we both agree that it is not “about” global warming or aesthetic standards. Another way to say this is that tax equity is very important to me and it is the effect of the loophole on that that I want to talk about. That is how “about” functions. The tax loopholes are consonant with some meanings—the ones that I think most urgent—and not about others.

Let’s talk about what I think is important! No, let’s talk instead about what I think is important. That’s what “about” is about when there is a conflict to be resolved.

This formulation casts a new, but not really unexpected light, on “about the nail.” The nail is an external problem.[1] It is an issue she is facing, but he is not. The issue he is facing is that she wants from him—desires urgently from him—a response that he finds difficult to summon up and which, in his judgment, will do no good at all. He is highlighting this issue; she is highlighting that issue. One will be in the foreground; the other in the background.

This little clip is a parody. It’s intended to be funny and it is. But it is funny because it plays off of a very common situation that is not funny at all. Wives very often want a response of emotional intimacy from their husbands.[2] When their husbands treat them as people with problems and then put all their attention on the problems, the wives feel that the problem has been featured and that they, themselves, have been forgotten. Husbands very often take pride in their ability to solve problems and their attention gravitates to the external part of the issue rather than to their wives’ emotional response to it.

If the wife’s difficulty has to do with being bullied at the office, for instance, it may be that she has done everything about the situation she is willing to do. She has examined the possible responses. She is sure that the one she has chosen is the best one available. Now she wants help is carrying the burden that her choice has imposed on her. There is no “nail” here. A husband who insists on perceiving a “nail” (because there is something he can do about it if there is a nail) is choosing to deal with the problem he would prefer to the problem he actually has—which is that is wife is suffering and needs the patient non-judgmental caring that someone who knows her and loves her can offer.

No nail. So it isn’t “about” the nail.

This little skit is funny—I know this analysis is not, I’m sorry about that—because here there really is a nail. The husband wants to do what husbands mostly want to do—solve the problem—but in this particular case, he is exactly right. And the wife knows it. All the understanding in the world will not keep her from snagging her sweaters—all of them, she says—on the nail.

She focuses on the easy issue for her. Her husband wants to “solve the problem” rather than to “care about me.” She’s had that grievance many times before and charging her husband with “not listening to me” is so easy she doesn’t even notice that she has chosen one line of response to him rather than any of several other more promising ones. The husband doesn’t help himself much when he uses genuinely inflammatory language. When she says, “What I really need is for you to just LISTEN, he actually says, “See, I don’t think that IS what you need…”

The man is fearless! She has said what she needs. We all tend to think that there is a reality to which we have private access. We know and others do not. He has said that she has read this “reality”–her own reality–wrong. This “fact” to which she has direct access and he does not has been misinterpreted by her. He knows what she really needs and she does not.

OK, so he’s correct in this particular instance. It still is something he should know he cannot say. Maybe he could say it in some other way—some way that does not use those particular words. Those are truly awful words. Trust me on that.

Because once you say those words, that’s what the conversation is “about.” And nothing good is going to happen.

[1] OK, part of it is internal to her, but we’ll leave that aside for now.

[2] I’m assuming “wives and husbands” here, mostly for convenience. This particular issue operates the same way with nearly any set of two people who care for each other, on the one hand, and who have a project they are pursuing jointly on the other. I have seen this dynamic exactly between doctoral students and advisers.

Posted in Love and Marriage, Paying Attention, ways of knowing, Words | Tagged emotional intimacy, husbands and wives, problem solving | Leave a comment

Hearing God’s Voice

Posted on June 25, 2013 by hessd

How do you go about “hearing God’s voice?” I’m not sure, to tell you the truth. It isn’t anything I’ve ever been good at. It may be that I just don’t have the basic capacity. Or it may be that I have just not been willing to do the necessary work. In any case, it is what I want to think about today and you are invited.

I’ve been thinking about Samuel, the last judge and first king-maker of ancient Israel. He anointed David to be king, which was a rather dicey thing to do, since Saul was king of Israel at the time and did not have a reputation for playing nicely with others. God told Samuel to go to the house of Jesse and to anoint one of his sons as king.[1] You can see all this yourself in I Samuel, chapter 16. It sounds a little improbable and you might think I am making it up.

First up was Jesse’s son Eliab. Samuel thought Eliab looked like the kind of man God would choose to be king, but God said No. Next up to bat was Abinidab. “Him?” said Samuel. “Nope,” said God. Then Shammah. Nope. Then four more sons whose names are not given. Then they fetched David, the youngest, from the fields and God said, “Him. He’s the one I want. Anoint him to be king.”

This all sounds fairy-tale-ish to me and I have written it to emphasize that sense. But here is a fact: Samuel did not choose the son that looked right to him. He waited until he heard God’s voice and did what that voice told him to do.

Parenthesis 1 If you want a very emotionally compelling experience of what it can be like to hear God’s voice and do what it tells you to do, I recommend a scene from the movie, “Ghost.” Sam Wheat (Patrick Swayze) is killed early in the movie. He is now “the ghost” of the title. He devises a way to communicate with his fiancée, Molly Jensen (Demi Moore), and tells her to go to the police and tell them who killed him and why. The communication comes to Molly through a medium, Oda Mae Brown (Whoopi Goldberg), who has a substantial police record. Molly goes to the police as Sam has asked her. She says what Sam has told her to say. She accepts the ridicule she gets from the police for asking them to act on information she got from a ghost by means of a medium and leaves humiliated and distraught. As viewers, we know that everything she told them is true, but that doesn’t help her and if wouldn’t have helped Samuel. If you watch this clip, you will see that it wouldn’t have helped you, either.

So what did Samuel have to do to “hear God’s voice?” First, he had to know that the voice he was hearing was not his own voice. Everything in Samuel said, when he saw Eliab, “Yes. That’s the one. I have a sense about things like this.” He heard that voice, but, remarkably, he recognized it as his own; not God’s. Samuel’s my hero.

Parenthesis 2 Another experience you might want to try on is the experience of the baseball scouts in “Moneyball.” They keep proposing players who either won’t work out for their team or that the team can’t afford. And they keep doing it because their nominees meet their own criteria. They are hearing their own voices and are being completely seduced those voices. They know what the team needs, but they can’t bring themselves to want that. These scouts would have chosen Eliab, only to watch him drift down through the minor leagues.

How did Samuel get so good at “hearing the voice of God?” We don’t really know, of course, and that isn’t the kind of question the historical accounts of the Old Testament show any interest in. I’m interested, though, and here’s my account.

Go back now to I Samuel, chapter 3. Samuel is a little boy, serving Eli, the judge of Israel. It had been a long time since anyone had heard from God. So it’s 1:00 a.m. and Samuel is sound asleep and hears a voice calling his name. “Rats!” says Samuel, “And I was sleeping so well. Now I’ve got to get up and go see what Eli wants.” So he gets up and runs to Eli, who says he did not call Samuel and sends him back to bed.

Now it’s 2:00 a.m. and Samuel hears the voice again. Very likely he doesn’t want to hear the voice, but he does hear it. He also doesn’t want to get up and see what Eli wants, but he does go. And Eli again says he did not call Samuel and sends him back to bed.

The same thing happens at 3:00 a.m. and Samuel’s patience is wearing thin. Maybe I didn’t hear him this time. Maybe he will forget again that he has called me already—twice. He didn’t do any of those things. He got up and ran to Eli again. This time, Eli understood what was going on. He understood that God was speaking to Samuel. He was not, you will notice, speaking to Eli and Eli needed to find some way to be OK with that. “It is God speaking to you, Samuel,” said Eli. “The next time, just say ‘Is there something you want to tell me’?”

Parenthesis 3 In our time, people have come to understand God as a cuddly sort of being. We wonder why the first thing the angels always say is, “Don’t be afraid.” The God who is the central character of these stories is not at all cuddly, which is why I chose, as Samuel’s question a line from “The Sixth Sense.” Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment) is being terrorized by a ghost who has come into his bedroom. It has gotten cold in the room as it always gets when a dead person is there. Fighting for control of himself, he approaches the ghost, step by difficult step, and says what his counselor has told him to say. Nearly overcome with terror, he manages to say to this dead person, “Is there something you want to tell me?”

It may have been something like that for Samuel. We don’t really know. It was not anything like a coronation. It was dark and severe. But still, he asked the question he had been told to ask and he got the answer that served as the foundation of the rest of his life. This answer, and what he had to go through to hear it, still mattered to him when God sent him out of find a replacement for Saul. That’s how Samuel knew that Eliab wasn’t God’s choice and that David was.

Samuel had learned to hear what he heard. He did not deny it. He did not pretend he had not heard it. He did not disobey it. He got up, over and over, and went to the bedside of the old man who kept on saying that he had not called. In a word, Samuel practiced hearing the voice of God. He got good at it. He heard it even when it said things he didn’t want to hear. He learned that God’s voice did not sound like his own voice.

This has been swirling around in my mind since I started reading T. M. Luhrmann in the New York Times. Here’s the whole article and here’s the clip that caught my attention:

I eventually discovered that these experiences [unusual auditory experiences] were associated with intense prayer practice. They felt spontaneous, but people who liked to get absorbed in their imaginations were more likely to experience them. Those were the people who were more likely to love to pray, and the “prayer warriors” who prayed for long periods were likely to report even more of them.

The prayer warriors said that as they became immersed in prayer, their senses became more acute. Smells seemed richer, colors more vibrant. Their inner sensory worlds grew more vivid and more detailed, and their thoughts and images sometimes seemed as if they were external to the mind. Later, I was able to demonstrate experimentally that prayer practice did lead to more vivid inner images and more hallucination-like events.

It seems that you have to have a leaning in this direction, Luhrmann says, but beyond the residual “gift,” you have to do the work. I suspect that I might not have the resident capacity, but I am quite sure that I have not done the work.

That means that when I report that “I have not heard God speaking to me,” I have several ways of accounting for that, several “attributional options,” as we say in my line of work. God isn’t speaking.[2] I don’t have the talent to hear God speaking. I do have the talent, but I haven’t done the work necessary to distinguish “the voice of God” from my own preferences. All those explanations work. God had not spoken in Israel for a long time before He spoke to Samuel. Samuel had the talent, the residual capacity, to hear God speaking. But even for Samuel, he had to do the work that will always be necessary to distinguish “what God said to me” from “I’m not sure God says things” and “I can’t hear God’s whispering over the shouting of my own ego.”

We see Samuel first in the role of king-maker. He is the one who understands what choices God is making. But before that, we saw him as a dutiful little boy, getting up over and over to tend to an old man. In this story, it was patience of the little boy that produced the anointing of a new king.

[1] The whole operation was covert. God said to go to Jesse’s house. Samuel objected that if Saul caught him at it, he would kill him. God said not to worry and gave Samuel the precise lie to tell that would keep him from getting caught. God instructed Samuel, in other words, to “bear false witness,” which is interesting, all things considered.

[2] I am leaving aside for the moment the question of whether there is a God to do the speaking. Some say there is such a being; some say there is not. No one, on either side, has produced anything that a serious scientist would call “evidence.”

Posted in Biblical Studies, Paying Attention, ways of knowing | Tagged David, Eli, hallucination, Hearing God, Samuel, TM Luhrmann | Leave a comment

Skeptification

Posted on June 19, 2013 by hessd

We don’t always have at hand the words we need most. A lot of people, facing this difficulty, chose a word with meanings close to what they need and call it good enough. People who are more confident in their acquaintance with their language are more likely to feel vaguely affronted. There should be a word for that. There really should. Why isn’t there?

At that point, some of us just make up whatever words we need and launch them on their careers. These careers are inevitably short and the deaths of these new words mostly unlamented, but they do meet the short-term interest of the person who fabricated them and ordinarily, that’s value enough.

You know one of these new words is coming, right?

Everyone knows that for every public policy adopted, there are winners and losers. The winners are called “beneficiaries;” sometimes thoughtfully, but more often not. In common unthoughtful use, someone who is affected by a policy is called a “beneficiary.” But what if the effect on that person is disastrously bad. Negative beneficiary? Too clunky. So I made up, for use in my public policy classes, “maleficiary.” Because bene- is “good” and mal- is “bad,” I figured that the meaning would be easily understood and it was—for the purposes of the class.

This brings us to skeptificate. As you see, this is a noun. I have a skeptificate in the proper use of words. You’ll have to admit it makes perfect sense. A lot of people have certificates these days. The effect of a certificate is certus = “certain” plus facere = “to make.” I might or might not have the relevant skills—how is one to know?—but if I have a certificate, it makes you more certain that I have those skills. Why, otherwise, would anyone have issued me a certificate under their own name?

A skeptic is, according to the etymology of the word, supposed to be a “thoughtful person.” We get it from the Greek skeptesthai, = “to reflect, look, or view.” It is related to a number of more familiar –scope words that come to us from Latin. Skeptics, however, tended to be thoughtful about matters other people took for granted, so the word began a slow evolutionary drift in the direction of “doubt” or “challenge” and it has had this meaning since early in the 17^th Century.

How do I know all this? Well, I read a little article about this word in the online etymology dictionary, which I heartily recommend. The article on skeptical was written by Doug Harper, whose learning I have every reason to trust. Do you know why?[1] Yes. Because Doug Harper has certificates from places I have heard of and these certificates make me more certain that his work is trustworthy.

But what if Doug Harper came to me with a document from the Academy of Peace, Justice, and Love (APJL)? This academy vouches for Doug Harper, but no one vouches for APJL. The document Mr. Harper brings to me does not, in fact, make me more certain. It makes me more doubtful. I am less likely to trust him on this matter than I was before he showed me his little piece of paper.[2] His piece of paper says CREDENTIAL at the top, but it does not make me more certain. Papers like these should be called something else and I think they should be called SKEPTENTIALS because their effect is to make one less certain; more likely to doubt and challenge.

That brings me to this morning’s article in the New York Times, which describes the new wave of interest in “Death Cafes.” A bunch of people get together to talk about death in a philosophical way. That sounded pretty good to me. I’m interested in death in a philosophical way, so I looked to see whether there was such a gathering in Portland, Oregon. We really are that kind of town, so I thought the chances were pretty good.

Sure enough, there is such a gathering. At least there is a convener. Nothing at the site actually says where they meet or whether they have met—although technically, there is no convener if a convention has not actually occurred—or whether anyone is actually interested in the topic. The convener’s name is Holly Pruett, about whom I know next to nothing. I do know that she is a “certified” (that means she has a certificate) Life-Cycle Celebrant. Her certificate has been granted by the Celebrant Foundation and Institute (CFI) of Montclair, New Jersey. “Live the art of life through personalized ceremonies.”

I don’t know anything about CFI either and what follows is really only a meditation on my own prejudices. I, personally, am extremely wary of a “Celebrant Institute.” It is the support of such programs that produces documents affirming that Holly Pruett is a competent celebrant and I have no reason to think she is not. But the paper issued to her by CFI does not function to “make me more certain.” It functions to make me less certain. It makes me more likely to doubt and challenge. It is, in other words, not a “certificate” but a “skeptificate.” For me.

Frankly, I was leaning in that direction anyway, but I have not been helped at all by reading John McKnight’s The Careless Society: Community and Its Counterfeits. Here’s a clip from Chapter 1:

Modernized professions also piece us out in time. Service professionals now assure us that we live through a set of needs defined by age. Professionals have “found” seven life crises (formerly known as the seven ages of man) from infancy to death, each requiring its helping professional. Elizabeth Kǜbler-Ross has advanced the process by giving us five phases of death. Her work ensures a new set of helpers for stage one of dying, stage two of dying, and so on. Following these dying therapists will be research professionals attempting to decide why some people skip, say, stage two or three of dying.

This paragraph moves from Shakespeare’s “seven ages of man” to the “seven life crises.” Crises are occasions for judgment, with “ages” are not.[3] The work of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross “ensures” (that’s McKnight’s word) a new set of helpers for each stage of dying. But it turns out that not everyone seems to go through all the stages (apologies to Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, who did not argue that everyone should go through all the stages or even that the stages had an invariant order). That means that we will need research professionals who will study why some people “skip” one or more stages. These “skippers” are, apparently, not doing it right and will need professional assistance. I found this picture by googling the Professional Dog Walkers Association.

I had read that passage from McKnight just before reading about the Death Cafes, which was just before I wondered whether we had one in Portland, which is what brought me to Holly Pruett, who brought me to the Celebrant Foundation and Institute. Had that line of thought gone in a different direction, it would not have produced this post.

The best encapsulation of this dilemma I know of comes from Crocodile Dundee. Mick Dundee is from Australia’s Outback and his new girlfriend is a New York City journalist. She tells Mick that a friend of hers is seeing a psychiatrist. There’s nothing wrong with the friend; it’s just, you know, to have someone to talk to. Dundee is incredulous. “Doesn’t she have any mates,” he asks?

Apparently not. We have chosen, as McKnight’s subtitle puts it: “counterfeits for community” rather than “community itself.” I am sure we feel safer in a community we have hired for the purpose, but I am not sure that such a “community” sustains us.

[1] Harper is a graduate of Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pa., with a degree in history and English. He has been featured in a BBC production on the Welsh settlements in America, and has been interviewed as a source for historical articles by the Philadelphia Inquirer, Washington Post and many magazines.

[2] Credentials, by the way, are scarcely any better. Credentials—credo, “I believe”—are supposed to give you a reason to believe in the competence of the person. On this foundation, a certificate is just further confirmation.

[3] The Greek krisis includes, among its principal meanings, “to decide,” and this remains true even though krisis has also given us critic, which has flowed, over time, in the same direction as skeptic.

Posted in Paying Attention, Words | Leave a comment

What Will We Do After Work?

Posted on June 15, 2013 by hessd

And I don’t mean “after work” like 5:00 and I get to go home. I mean “after work” like there isn’t enough work to do to sustain us as a country. That kind of “after work.”

I am not an economist, like Paul Krugman. I know enough economics to be a fan of his columns in the New York Times. This column was about how we are going to cope with the relentless loss of jobs. And on this issue, I am ahead of him. I am still behind Karl Marx—aren’t we all?—who scrambled to find a kind of society that would continue to function when “jobs” had become superfluous, but I am ahead of Krugman.

Today’s column ended like this

So what is the answer? If the picture I’ve drawn is at all right, the only way we could have anything resembling a middle-class society — a society in which ordinary citizens have a reasonable assurance of maintaining a decent life as long as they work hard and play by the rules — would be by having a strong social safety net, one that guarantees not just health care but a minimum income, too…

I can already hear conservatives shouting about the evils of “redistribution.” But what, exactly, would they propose instead?”

Yup. That’s where I’ve been for several months now. We use employment as the way we distribute income. We have to distribute a lot of income because our economy is based on consumer demand. Consumer demand requires the levels of income that good jobs used to provide.

On the other hand, we are also committed to reducing labor costs. Keeping costs low keeps prices low (lower than they would otherwise be) and profits high. We have reduced labor costs for many decades now, by using machines that do away with human workers. We also export jobs to places in the world where we can pay workers less money, of course, but even these workers can’t match the productivity of the new machines—which, among other things, don’t take coffee breaks.

The old solution was to keep the brainy jobs here and leave the manual jobs for foreigners abroad and the lower classes here at home. This two-part solution has two challenges to face. The first is that as the machines get brainier (have you seen any GE or IBM ads on television lately?) more and more of the brainy jobs can be done by workers powered by battery packs. There have been, for instance, some truly amazing experiments recently using robot counselers.[1] And, of course, the other challenge is that you can’t pay low income workers enough to enable them to sustain a consumer economy.

Those two projected paths are so clear that I am willing to call them, for the purposes of this post, “facts.”

Is there a liberal response to these facts? Yes, there is. In the short run. It is that we follow the socialist democracies of Europe with substantially higher taxes and substantially higher services. That will work for a while. But unless we find some way to keep ourselves from turning most productive labor—including “creative labor”—over to smart machines, it won’t work for very long. I don’t see us passing laws requiring that some given percentage of all “labor” must be performed by human beings.

Conservatives don’t have a response even in the short run. The percent of national income now controlled by the top 1% is now about where it was on the eve of the Great Depression.[2] We can argue for upward mobility until we are blue in the face, but upward mobility doesn’t create enough good jobs to sustain an economy based on consumer spending. It changes who gets to do the spending, but now how many people are able to spend.

So the liberals win this one. Let’s move on to the next one. What will people need to be like in a society where most people’s time is not structured by “doing jobs,” and where people are free to “be” whoever they want to be? I’ll tell you. They will need to be like the people the conservatives have been arguing for—not, I hasten to point out, supporting—lo these many years. They will need to be—WE will need to be—people of character. Neighbors, friends, communities. Dilettantes.

If you thought the U. S. government was up against a huge challenge in redefining “work” so that we can afford it, how do you like this challenge? Here, the U. S. government is going to have to make citizens who can be trusted with these levels of resources and freedom.

I said that the worst way I could think of. “The U. S. is going to have to make citizens…” Except in the very most technical sense, no government “makes” citizens. And no government makes citizens virtuous. The very best would could do as a government is to make family settings rich enough in resources that parents—who may not have had a fighting chance themselves—could give their children a fighting chance to become virtuous citizens. And ordinarily, that doesn’t work. We would need to find a way to enrich the communities that actually could, if they chose to and if they had the resources, provide nourishing contexts for the families that make up those communities.

We will need, in short, the kinds of communities conservatives have been kvetching about for decades now and liberals have been telling them to shut up. That brings us back to Krugman’s very good question, “What…would they propose, instead?”

Except that now it is a short term question only, given that “they” refers to conservatives. The long term question is the same, but it is asked by conservatives about liberals. Looking at our great need for the traditional virtues—given the “fact” of a machine-dominated economy and a human dominated world of leisure—conservatives will ask “What…would they propose, instead?”

I’m a liberal and I feel the bite of that second question. I know what kind of society I would like, but when conservatives ask about “proposing something,” they are not asking about preferred outcomes. They are asking about how to get there.

I have no idea. No way of getting there seems very likely to me.

[1] It’s a lot worse than it sounds. See Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together for a much larger dinner of bad news. And here is the entre to that dinner. We are redefining our needs so that they can be met better by computers than by humans. We are redefining our needs. Redefining. We are doing that.

[2] Robert Reich has a very readable account of this in his book, Aftershock, but no one disputes that it is true.

Posted in Politics, Sustainability | Tagged character, consumer spending, Krugman, welfare, work | Leave a comment

The Exception Proves the Rule

Posted on June 14, 2013 by hessd

This is a really cheap post. I labor over some of my posts. I use punctuation and everything. For this one, I am going to point you to the website (The Phrase Finder) that deserves the credit for this and then just say a few things that I feel like saying.

“The exception proves the rule.” I have never understood this saying. Why does an exception prove anything? To the best of my recollection, I have never used it. Ordinarily, I am the guy who is pointing to the regularities; to the rule. It is the other guy who is saying that the rule doesn’t apply at the moment. And since it didn’t really mean anything, it couldn’t be refuted. It was just an annoyance.

The Phrase Finder cites this situation—my situation—first. “To the untutored ear it might appear to mean “if there’s a rule and I can find a counter-example to it, then the rule must be true.” This is clearly nonsense; for example, if our rule were ‘all birds can fly’, the existence of a flightless bird like the penguin hardly proves that rule to be correct. In fact, it proves just the opposite.” So here, my opponent would be arguing that that the existence of a flightless bird proves that all birds can fly. It is, as the Phrase Finder notes, “clearly nonsense.”

I came to this topic yesterday because Dr. Andrew Novella, whose lectures I have been listening to, (see: Can You Be Too Skeptical?) pointed out that “the exception that proves the rule” has been widely misunderstood. The reason it has, he says, is that we don’t understand that “prove,” in that formulation, means “test.” The exception tests the rule.

Of course it does. I have had a particular affection for the word anomaly ever since I learned that it is formed of an-, a negative prefix, and homalos, “even.” An anomaly is an unevenness: a bump in an otherwise flat plane. It is an anomaly. It is an exception. Does this exception “test” the rule? Do we want to call this plane “flat,” even though there is this exception?

I liked that a lot better. But if you go to the Phrase Finder hyperlink, you will find this response to that explanation. “Unfortunately, when we go back to the legal origin of the phrase, we see that it doesn’t mean that at all.”

The origin is the maxim, “Exceptio probat regulam in sasibus non exceptis” and is interpreted to mean “exception confirms the rule in the cases not excepted.” The exception points out, in other words, what the rule is: it does this in the process of removing one instance from the rule. Phrase Finder’s example is: “If we have a statement like ‘entry is free of charge on Sundays,’ we can reasonably assume that as a general rule, entry is charged for. So, from that statement, here’s our rule—you usually have to pay to get in.”

Think about the realities—the rules—pointed to by such phrases as: except when accompanied by children; or, without proof of membership; or, unless you are a Democrat. Every one of those points to a situation that is to be taken for granted—it is a rule—and makes a small exception to that rule. It is the exception that testifies to the existence of the rule.

Isn’t that satisfying? Unless, of course, you are a casuist and therefore an exception.

Posted in Words | Tagged exceptions, rules taken for granted | Leave a comment

Can You Be Too Skeptical?

Posted on June 11, 2013 by hessd

Yes. You can.

I want to refer, down the page a little, to a controversy between medical doctors. Dr. Andrew Newberg, whom I know only from his recorded lectures, called “The Spiritual Brain” is one; the other is Dr. Steven Novella, whom I know only from his recorded lectures called “Your Deceptive Mind.” So far as I know, they don’t know each other and if they did, they might not know that they are arguing with each other. But I know.

Phyrro, the father of the school of thought called Skepticism, is with us still. At least, he is with the inventor of “truthiness.”

To illustrate this point—not to prove it, only to illustrate it—allow me to contrast a word that managed to survive in English with one that did not. The word that did survive is sepsis, “a poisoned state caused by the absorption of pathogenic microorganisms and their products into the bloodstream.” No one would ask if I had “too much sepsis.” Any sepsis is too much. The word that did not survive is skepsis.[1] The OED defines it as “inquiry, hesitation, doubt.” Their one quotation comes from 1876: “Among their products were the system of Locke, the scepsis of Hume, the critical philosophy of Kant.”

This glimpse of the two words is enough to show that they represent different ways of pointing to gains and losses and that is what I want to think about today. An appropriate treatment of skepticism requires a balance. There is too much, too little, and just right. An appropriate treatment of sepsis requires only simple condemnation. There is no just right; the absence of septicism (sepsis) is really the only good.[2] The further you can get away from sepsis, the better.

Here is Dr. Newberg’s contribution to this dilemma. He cites a study in which “believers” and “non-believers were asked to find objects embedded in a complex picture. For the purposes of this study, “believers” are religious, spiritually engaged people and “non-believers” are athiests, agnostics, and people disengaged generally from religion. I know those ways of assigning people to categories are crude, but they are good enough for this study.

He gave these volunteers a very complicated picture to study. Embedded in the picture are some real images and some lines that “suggest” an image, but are really not images. Here’s what he found. Believers found a lot more of the embedded objects than nonbelievers. They also found more “pseudo-objects,” partial patterns that were supposed to “suggest” an image, but not really to “be” an image. So believers got more right answers and more wrong answers. It will not surprise you that non-believers found fewer objects in the picture and very seldom mistook a pseudo-object for a real one.

This is a particular kind of finding. It shows that believers are readier to say yes. They give more right answers because they are sensitive to the “is this really an object” cues. They give more wrong answers for the same reason. A reasonable person could argue that this is a pretty good deal. You gain this and you lose that—not bad over all. Or one person could say that she was really more the “make fewer errors” sort of person and preferred the style used by non-believers. Another could say he was really the “make more good identifications” sort of person and preferred the style that was more common among the believers in the study. Most of us would call those stylistic choices.

Sepsis isn’t like that. And, for Dr. Novella, skepsis isn’t either. I haven’t finished all of Dr. Novella’s lectures yet, although I plan to because I am really enjoying them. Still, I have listened to three or four hours so far and I have yet to find a study, illustration, or personal anecdote in which skepticism is not the good that is to be sought. The good guys Novella has in mind are crouching down at the far end of the scale, as far from “over-willingness to believe” as they can get. Novella doesn’t have anything bad to say about religion but, oddly enough, religious people are the bad guys in all of the examples. Sometimes they are the butt of the joke; sometimes real villains.

For Newberg, skepticism is something to be engaged in in moderation. Too much is bad; too little is bad. For Novella, the more skepticism you can manage, the better, provided that it doesn’t drive you to be skeptical of everything as a matter of principle. To tell you the truth, I believe that if you sat Drs. Newberg and Novella down in a room and asked them to devise a criterion for skepticism, they could do it with no trouble. They would produce a joint statement with both signatures and call it an easy morning’s work.

Then they would go back to their studios to continue recording their lectures. Dr. Newberg would talk about belief and believers. The statistics show that their lives are better in every way we know how to measure.[3] Sure you make more mistakes, but look how much better your lives are. Dr. Novella would talk about the credulous and simpleminded (both victims and villains) who don’t recognize the power of coincidence and of probability and who, therefore, attribute agency to the oddest situations. He regularly cites people who believe in Bigfoot, people who believe they have been abducted by aliens (as we see here), and people who assign religious answers to problems for which there are perfectly good scientific answers.

Their work, that is to say, would be entirely unaffected by the paper they had just devised and signed. Why is that? It is because Newberg is working in a world of too much, too little, and just right. All the studies he reports fit that model. And Novella is working in a world where credulity is a kind of sepsis and the better you can defend yourself against it, the better off you are.

My guess is that neither of them knows the truth of what I just wrote about them. But if you look at the title of this post and at the first line, you know where I stand.

[1] Don’t worry too much about the spelling. Our linguistic cousins, the British, spell this family of words sceptic, scepticism, sceptical. We spell them skeptic, skepticism, skeptical. I had to go back and change all the sc- words to sk- words. My spellchecker didn’t just disapprove of the British spelling; it attacked it and Americanized it on the spot.

[2] I’m going to keep fussing with these forms. English has borrowed an adjective from one word and a noun from the other. The complete pattern, which English does not have—did not have until today—would offer skepsis, skepticism and sepsis, septicism. We don’t do that.

[3] In fact, he comes perilously close to proposing that people ought to be religious because it has X, Y, and Z benefits for their health. That pisses me off more than anything Novella says. “Religion” that you adopt so that you will get the benefits isn’t religious enough to consider God as anything other than a tool. Just routine idolatry in the Judeo- Christian-Muslim way of looking at things.

Posted in Living My Life, ways of knowing, Words | Tagged gullible, religion, science, skeptical | 2 Comments