The Dilettante's Dilemma

It’s hard to keep up with changes in the language. In the little language village where I live most of the time, it really doesn’t change that fast, but I know that there are places where it does and every now and then I need to decide just how far behind I am willing to be. Like today.

That dilemma was presented to me this morning. David French wrote a column in the New York Times that contained a couple of sentences I want to push at a little. In the first, he quotes Aaron Sibarium who says that his advice to young conservatives is to keep a sharp eye on the line between “edgelording” and “earnest bigotry.”

You don’t see sentences very often where “bigotry”—even “earnest bigotry”—is the better of the alternatives, so the line caught my attention. And when I saw that “earnest bigotry” was the better of these options, I took a more thoughtful look at the worse of the options. Edgelording?

I understand now that edgelord, the noun, is a portmanteau word made up of “edgy” and “shitlord.” I’m pretty comfortable with “edgy,” even though it a word that is incapable of any precision. “Shitlord” is new to me, but Wikipedia says it means “a person who basks in the bitterness and misery of others.” It’s just Schadenfreude, in other words, a notion that is hard to avoid these days.

Does that make any sense of the original distinction between “earnest bigotry” and “edgelording?” It does to me because the very heart of edgelording is playing a part. An edgelord takes positions that maintain his place at or near the edge, without any reference at all to what he thinks. It is language for effect, shorn of any genuine meaning.

Having come that far, I wonder whether it isn’t easier to say they edgelording is just hypocrisy. If edgelording is playing a part, hoping to be thought more “edgy” that you actually are, then hypocrisy—play acting—is just a more general term. That makes me wonder whether “lord” is now being used the way “monger” used to be used. A monger is a trader in something—the Molly Malone of the ballad was a fishmonger—but unless the trade is in some common tangible goods, it has a negative flavor to it, as in “scandalmonger.”

But “honest bigotry” now. If you really are bigoted and you say things that allow people to infer that you are bigoted, then you are not “edgelording.” It seems odd to me that the praiseworthy light in which bigotry is being displayed by this comparison is based entirely on its genuineness. You are not, in other words, pretending to be a terrible person; you actually are a terrible person.

And that’s the good news?

Analogies are funny things. They are often said to provide insight into a less familiar object or relationship by comparing it to a more familiar one. But I wonder if it might not work as well to compare a less threatening object or relationship to a more threatening one. The “less familiar” of the two is now recategorized as the more difficult of the two. There is no need to specify just how it came to be more difficult.

You will see, I believe, how relevant this is when I describe an analogy I ran across just recently. Bernhard W. Anderson, in his history of the Old Testament, [1] is making the point that the “information” we are given about Israel’s exodus from Egypt is not intended to meet modern standards of history. It is crafted—and re-crafted and re-crafted yet again—to make a point about the people Israel and their God, Yahweh.

To Anderson, that does not mean that some seminal event did not occur. It is more plausible that some event did occur than that it did not and the accounts we have were created out of whole cloth. What is does mean is that we cannot tell just what kind of an event it was by reading the re-written accounts of “what really happened.”

Of course, “what really happened” is what we really want to know. We will decide what “it” means when we know what kind of event “it” was. But the biblical material doesn’t come to us that way. The writers to whom we have access (writers of documents within the canon) have a goal for their writing and they pursue it in callous disregard of the different goals of later readers. For instance, us.

Williams says, (p.) that trying to understand “what really happened” in the event we call “the Exodus” by reading the biblical accounts is like trying to understand “what really happened” in the Civil War by reading Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. There is your analogy! I read that and just put the book down for a little bit.

I am completely familiar with Lincoln’s Second Inaugural and better than moderately familiar with the events of the Civil War as they have been described by historians oriented toward the Union cause and also by some oriented toward the Confederate cause. I am in a very good place, in other words to feel the power of Anderson’s analogy. It is hard, in fact, even to try to read the Second Inaugural as if it were a historical account. I encourage you to try it for yourself. Experience the turbulence yourself. Then we should talk.

Here are a two examples.

1. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not that we be not judged.

2. 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

Example #1 isn’t that hard, at least as far as the first sentence. The rest of the point is done in the subjunctive mood, so it is hard to be too critical. But “It may seem strange” said by this person in this setting means “it IS strange” On the other hand, “Let us not judge” is a throwaway line, as the rest of the speech shows. [2]

In #2, the brutality of Southern slavery becomes the single measure against which all the bloodshed of the Civil War is to be judged. We get that from “every drop of blood drawn by the lash,..” and the conclusion is that this massive outpouring of blood by both sides is the just judgment of a righteous God.

Neither of those is “historical” in the sense that it gives us a feeling for what the war was about or how it was conducted. It is very good at saying “They brought it on themselves.” And the war was not even over at the time Lincoln delivered this. There was a lot of bloodshed for both sides still to come.

I have no wish to re-argue the Civil War or even the historical interpretations of the Civil War. I am offering only this analogy as Bernard Williams has crafted it. When you read Lincoln as a way of finding out what the war was about and how it was carried out, you are having the same experience you have when you read Exodus as a way of finding out what the escape from Egypt was about. And when it occurred. And where.

What I referred to as the “turbulence” above is as available if you invest yourself deeply in reading about the Exodus as it is when you try to read the Second Inaugural as history. It is not history. It is a powerful thematic statement of the “real meaning of the war,” that is, the meaning it has in God’s eyes.

Reading it with that in mind was a very powerful experience for me. I offer the same experience to you. And now, if you will excuse me, I must return to my study of Exodus and particularly to where the Sea of Reeds is.

[1] Bernhard W. Anderson, Understanding the Old Testament, 4th Edition, pp. 25-26
[2] Unless he had the Radical Republicans in Congress in mind as he spoke them.

In grad school, I did a lot of reading about how we know what we know. I gained a great deal of wisdom from that literature—nearly all negative. If I were to begin a line of question with “How can I know for sure that…?” the answer I got would nearly always be, “You can’t.” But along with all the cautionary tales, I remember a particularly vivid metaphor. Many scientific projects, this author said, are like building a building in a swamp. The first thing you do is to sink supporting structures into the murk to support the building you will be building.

So far so good.

But then some practical person—I was the person in this case—will ask, “How deep do you need to sink them?” The answer was, “It depends on how big the building is.” Of course it does. I went two directions from that encounter, one of which will be relevant to today’s reflection. [1] It involves what Chris Wells and Lewis Friedland call, in a recent issue of the journal, Political Communication, “misrecognition.”

They cite Charles Taylor in that regard:

“First, Taylor sees emerging, with the development of modern individual identity, a myth of the “true inner self,” the notion that each of us has an authentic identity, and that an important project of the modern individual is to discover and fulfill that immanent self.”

This demand to be truly recognized runs headlong into the dogma that each of is, or has, a “true inner self.” It is easy to be skeptical about a dogma like that. How would I know what my “true inner self” was like? How would I know whether you were correctly recognizing it and honoring it appropriately? To that, I respond with the answer I got to the question of knowing for sure that I have provided enough support in the swamp: “You can’t.”

But remember that the swamp example countered with another question, which was “How big is the building?” And if we are considering the “one true self,” we might ask, “What do you want it for?”

And finally, we come to what I think is the right question. I have no trouble believing that I “have” a self. Some say “am a self.” This self has intentions that I experience as “my intentions.” When they are frustrated or when they fail, I experience that failure as “my failure.”

But those are very crude measures and they are all action-oriented measures. The notion that Charles Taylor is referring to in the quote is a “true inner self.” If I had one of those, how would I know what it was. If it has qualities, are those qualities shared with all others? With some others? Are they unique?

Are the things I call my “self” traits, so that they are predictable from one time to another, as when people say, “I am uncomfortable among strangers.”? Are they episodic reactions I make from one time to another with nothing connecting them except the rationalizations I produce? I don’t know.

But that does bring me to the question—the building in the swamp question—which is, “What do you want it for?” In this way, I skip over what this self IS and move on to the question of whether this notion of the self will do for me what I want/need to have done. If it will, then I may know about it all I need to know.

Like everyone else, I want to accomplish things of interest to me, to have a circle of friends I can count on, and to be at ease with the sense of who I am that I have crafted over all these years. I need enough of a self to do those things. That’s not really very much of a self, but I think it will do everything I need for it to do. I call it “good enough.”

[1] The other one became a very practical device for formulating limitations and which became the core of my dissertation. It involved keeping some notes on things you were trying to do (or thought you were) and failing to accomplish (by some measures).

“Every talented and qualified student deserves an opportunity to attend the college of their choice. Affirmative Action existed to support that notion. Legacy admissions exists  to undermine it.” 

So says NAACP President Derrick Johnson, pictured below. I don’t think he meant that. I think what he meant to say is that the outcomes of practices like “legacy admissions” are at odds with the outcomes of practices like Affirmative Action. The effects of one principle go this way; the effects of the other, go that way.

So, if that is what he meant, why did he say what he said? I have two explanations, both drawn from my own treasure chest of types of explanations. The first is that he got trapped in the sentence and either didn’t notice what he was saying or wasn’t willing to give it up.

I have done both of those.

Look at the parallelism of “exists to support that notion” and “exists to undermine it.” And if I could just export some of my own vulnerabilities onto President Johnson, I suspect that that line came from a speech—probably a speech given many times. It’s nice in written form, but it’s really powerful in a speech. You can almost hear the oral cadence in the words.

I don’t give a lot of speeches, but I have given a lot of lectures and I can tell you that a line that “worked” last semester comes back to my tongue when we get to federalism or civil rights or whatever in this semester. It waves its hand. “Use me again,” it calls. “Remember how well I worked last time.” I’d call it “seductive” except that the whole transaction is almost entirely unconscious.

I took this quotation from Vox Sentences, where it was featured. Someone thought it was clickable. They were right in my case, of course, but I think that parallelism probably did it’s work at Vox Sentences just as it attracted me and all those people in President Johnson’s previous audiences who responded noticeably to it.

So the first explanation I offer is that either he was in thrall to the parallelism of the sentence and couldn’t bring himself to give it up or—more likely—just didn’t notice that he had said that the purpose of legacy admissions as a policy was to undermine Affirmative Action. Legacy admissions is an ancient practice. Affirmative Action is an innovation. Really?

The second explanation I offer is that the notion of effects on the one hand and intention on the other, has gotten blurry. Let me offer a recent illustration.

The alder helps to improve poor wet ground for the benefit of other plants.

That is the first sentence on a sign at an abbey we visited in Ireland recently. It was part of a family trip [1] When I saw the sign, I took a picture of it and began looking for a chance to have a conversation with the grandson. I wasn’t looking for a fight, but I was looking for a discussion in which he could plausibly take one side and I the other and both feel good about it. It was an ideal topic for that kind of argument. Who cares that much about alder trees? Who cares that much about inadvertent attributions of intention? Beside me, that is.

It worked just as I had hoped. I showed him the sentence. I explained why I didn’t like it. I argued that it wasn’t exactly wrong as it was, but that it didn’t draw a big bright line, as I would prefer, between the intentions of the alders and their effect.

I will argue momentarily that we have gotten accustomed to just ignoring the difference and that shows up in sentences like the one the NAACP president used. I don’t care all that much about legacy admissions and even less about alder trees but inadvertent allegations of intentionality drive me nuts.

I offered my grandson an alternate phrasing. “Let’s change it,” I said, “to
‘The alder helps to improve poor wet ground TO the benefit of other plants’.” That makes it clear that improving the soil may be the effect of the alder trees, but it is not their intent. He didn’t immediately see the difference between between “to” and “for” in that sentence, and when he did, he said he preferred “for.” I pushed a little. I made sure that he understood that using “for” allowed the interpretation that “improving poor wet ground” was the intention of these alder trees. He said it was a risk he was willing to take.

A lot of people are willing to take that risk and in consequence, the difference between “to” and “for” has become nearly invisible. And that is my second explanation for how the NAACP President managed to put his stirring charge in the language he did. What was once a bright line—effect v. intention—has become a dim shadow and in the bright light of composition, even a careful user of language can ride right across it and never know.

It is not, of course, that great civilizations rise and fall on such matters, but it makes a difference to me and my status as a dilettante needs a little buffing from time to time. This should do it.

[1] The grandson who is the occasion for this part of the story is the son of one of my many step-daughters. When he reads this he will call and I will say, “You know who you are.”

Earlier in my blogging history, I looked around for some way to get as much forward motion as I could, now that my horsepower seemed to be declining.
The model I finally settled on was “intelligent four wheel drive.” (I-4) [1] I hope that’s still what it is called. The idea is that the car senses which wheel has the best traction and feeds more power to that one. I guess that “unintelligent four wheel drive” would sense when the traction of the vehicle is inadequate and would feed more power to all four wheels, even the ones that will have no notion at all of how to deal with it.

But we recently took a trip to Ireland that was a lot harder than it should have been. A lot of very good things happened on that trip, including seeing a good bit of Northern Ireland that we had never seen before. We saw a clock tower (the Albert Memorial) in Belfast that I will never forget. [2] We saw a lot of the west coast of Ireland that was rocky and gorgeous. But I was a little rocky myself on the trip and it gave me an occasion to reconsider the broader arc of my life.

I am beginning to think more analytically about some other things, not just how to keep moving forward efficiently. But what if I were to try to devise a system that was as good as I-4 but was oriented toward another goal—a goal, let’s say that presumed decline. Let’s say, just to pick an example, to pay more attention to reducing the amount of pain or discomfort I experience. Now, I discount those as part of the price of moving forward efficiently. But what would come next?

Three come to mind right away.. I can imagine choosing to continue moving “forward” in the same way and at the same speed I did when I was younger and just putting up with the increased failure rate. I think that’s respectable, but I don’t like failing as much as that, so I would not likely choose it.

Finally, I can think of living positively. All the goals in this section, no matter how they are phrased, should be understood to have the suffix, “current conditions being what they are.” I mean “positively” in an emotional sense mostly. Feeling good about what I am doing (an assessment) and feeling good while doing it (an experience).

I can think of prioritizing some aspect of the way I live. It ought to be the part that I understand to be “my part.” The language of choice here would be religious language for me, so I would say “what I am called to do.” And since I have been “called,” there is One Who Has Called. That changes my job, at least on the surface, from deciding to discerning.

In that oblique way, what I feel I have been called to do would take priority over other ways of using my time and my resources, particularly over those that are only enjoyable. That sounds resolute and Spartan, I suppose, but the fact is that I am not all that good at enjoying myself if that’s all I’m doing. If I am doing something I think is worthwhile, I can tell in a heartbeat whether I am also enjoying it or not. I much prefer to be enjoying it.

But “enjoying” all by itself has come hard to me. I remember a joke I used to hear when I was a kid. This was set in what was then called a “progressive school,” the principal practice of which was to allow the students to do whatever they wanted to do. The joke version I was familiar with has one of the kids complaining, “Mrs. Jones, do we HAVE to do whatever we want again today?”

I would be that kid, had my life turned out differently.

So there are three versions of the I-4 adapted to the downward part of the arc of my life. In the first, I just keep doing what I am doing for as long as I can and just accept the increased failure rate. That’s not the worst version of a future I have ever heard. In the second, I emphasize accepting the new changes, all negative changes from the standpoint of performance, with a positive attitude and enjoying each new change for all it’s worth. In the third, I give priority to some notion of what my life is about and scavenge spare parts from other parts of my life to feed that part.

I’m just beginning the stage of weighing the possibilities, so I’m not asking for a great deal. Very likely, I’ll proceed haphazardly on all fronts at the same time and do more of whatever I think is working best.

[1] It’s a personal shortcut. I just got tired of writing the whole thing out. I realize that it means something entirely different to the Florida Department of Transportation, but I don’t care a great deal.
[2] It has begun to lean a little and some wit observed that the tower now has both the time and the inclination.

Thomas Edsall’s penultimate paragraph in his New York Times column this morning was this:

“The belief that Donald Trump was denied the White House in 2020 because of Democratic Party fraud is arguably the greatest challenge to the legitimacy of the federal government since the Civil War, if not in American history. It is hard to think of a time when nearly two-fifths of Americans seemed honestly to believe that the man in the White House is there because of theft.”

That sounds right to me, but it may be worth our while to go back and strip the skeleton out of that sentence. “[A] belief is the greatest challenge to the legitimacy of [the Union] the federal government since the Civil War.” The Civil War might be said to rest on a belief as well. Many Americans, south and north, believed that the Union was like a contract and they were willing to see it renegotiated. Lincoln believed it was a permanent organic union and that secession, the kind of negotiation that was being discussed, was impossible. It wasn’t just a bad idea. It was impossible.

These can be called theories of the nature of the union, but they are before they are anything else, beliefs. The beliefs Edsall is talking about are not beliefs of that kind. These beliefs are actually conclusions. One of the possible conclusions is supported by the overwhelming majority of evidence; the other is not.

No “evidence” could be presented about the “true nature of the union.” It was never a matter of enough evidence to support a firm conclusion. About the validity of the 2020 election, there is enough evidence and the determination to “believe” something else instead is what Edsall calls the “challenge to legitimacy.”

That argument sounds more plausible to me than it would have yesterday morning. Yesterday I watched Trump and DeSantis campaign against each other in New Hampshire. Trump is, needless to say, an election Denier. DeSantis can’t afford to take a position on the question. How can they possibly campaign? That’s what I learned yesterday.

In the Trump clip I saw, someone in the crowd appears to have asked him why he keeps beating up on Ron DeSantis. Trump said it was because DeSantis is in second place. He isn’t going to be there long, said Trump, and when someone else is in second place, I’ll beat up on them.

That’s his campaign. I can do whatever I want to people who think they are “the competition” and you can’t stop me.

DeSantis was asked to give a plain answer to the question of his views of what happened on January 6. This is a deadly question to someone who can’t afford to say what happened, nor can he say that it didn’t happen. Not in New Hampshire in the summer of 2023.

So he said this instead. He said that if the 2024 campaign was run on what happened on January 6 and who was responsible for it, the Republicans—he might have said “we Republicans”—are going to lose. If the campaign is run on the contrast between the current mess the country is in and the goals of the Republicans to restore the land to its deserved greatness, then we will win.

In all fairness, DeSantis was talking to a crowd that was willing to take it for granted that “a Republican winning” was a good outcome. That was not what he needed to justify. He needed to say why he was not going to address the most prominent threat to the union he would like to govern. He chose not to.

And it’s going to get worse.

I have had more simple enjoyment watching Netflix The Diplomat than I have had watching any show since The West Wing. It is not coincidental, really, since Deborah Cahn, who did a good deal of writing for The West Wing is the creator of The Diplomat. That’s Deborah below.

Still, there are little things that pop up from time to time. Expressions that are a little too much or wickedly inadequate. This belongs in the former category.

Julian Hoope (Rupert Vansittart) plays a hopelessly stuffy British diplomat. What he says is always correct in some sense, but it is not ever helpful. In the setting of today’s celebration, Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) is sitting with a group of men at table. She is having trouble getting comfortable in her chair, but she wants at all costs to protect the agenda of the meeting.

“I’m fine,” she says, as her struggles are noticed. “She’s not fine,” explodes Hoope, and uncorks a line about how the chairs at the table presumed men’s bodies. He laments that they will never get the full cooperation of women in the diplomatic service if they do not provide suitable furniture for them. But then he calls this mismatch of diplomat and chair, “Structural inequity in the plainest sense.”

The funny thing to me is that he isn’t wrong, but he has hijacked one of the most contemporary and difficult terms of the current political debate in the U. S. and used it to refer to a chair. If you have been reading, for instance, about “structural racism” in U. S. politics, this is the “structural” Hoope has in mind. It is a big time word; a completely contentious word. As is “inequity,”

And he’s talking about a chair. And he’s not even wrong.

The more is let it lie quietly in my mind, the more I savor it.

Since I first learned the etymology of the word “seduction,” I have been fascinated by what it says and what it doesn’t say. I am going to try to come at the new cars’ Lane Deviation Warning devices (LDW) from the standpoint that “seduction” offers. We’ll see how it goes.

The two elements of “seduction” we need for this purpose are the Latin verb duco, “to lead,” and the prefix se-, meaning, in this case, “away.” We like to say “astray” rather than “away” when we are committed to the direction in which we are being led, but that is just our own preference heaped on a simple etymology. The great value of “away,” it seems to me, is that it establishes that there is a way we should be going. No other understanding gives “away” the meaning it has.

We are “seduced,” by this understanding of the word, if there is a way we should go and we are being led elsewhere. There is no necessary connection with anything erotic. There is not even a necessary connection with morality, despite the “should” in “the way we should go.”

I want to talk about what LDW means to me as a teacher. The classes I am talking about are Bible studies. By the common assent of the students in each of the two classes, these courses are: a) secular, b) scholarly, and c) congenial. Experiencing a class session marked by those characteristics is what we all agreed to pursue together. Contributions that violate the secular standard (as when explicitly religious comments are made) or that violate the scholarly standard (as when the contributions of the academic masters of the subject are set aside because they don’t feel right) or that violate the congeniality standard (as when needlessly abrasive comments are made) take us out of the Lane (hereafter, capitalized to mean this this).

There are so many ways to attack this idea. If I surveyed them, I would not have a chance to return to LDW in the context of my Bible classes, but let me take just three quick ones.

The introduction of “seduction” as a word that requires the existence of “a way we should go” may sound authoritarian. It cues up “Who says we should go that way?” [1] Of all the answers (God says, the state says, the church says, the common conventions of civil society say) my classes require only, “Because this is what we decided to do.” It is our intention. That intention functions as lane markers.

Similarly, it can sound deeply moral. It’s that “should” that does it But “should” can also mean that something naturally follows. If you keep going north from here you should eventually come to Seattle. But no morality other than doing what we committed ourselves to do is required. It’s more a matter of reliability and ultimately of the culture of the group that leads it to conform to some abstract and external standard.

Finally, when I say that I am talking about a class, about a number of persons collectively, there is the question of just what counts as a violation. Some hyperindividualist could say, “Well, that might be a violation for you, but it is not for me.” But that’s not the practical form of the problem. The practical form is that we do not all have—and cannot all have—common understandings of what words like “secular, scholarly,” and “congenial” mean. It is hard to say cogently even what they mean to me. It is impossible to say what they mean to us, if “us” means each individual assembled around the table.

So we learn together by trial and error. I say something that doesn’t violate my understanding of the scholarship dimension, but it turns everything around. The student sees that and understands the “the group’s understanding of scholarship” has in some way been challenged. The LDW light goes on. Some member of the group challenges the interpretation of another member and heads all around the table nod, agreeing with the assessment and not distracted by the challenge. The LDW light does not go on because there has been no violation of the congeniality norm. We learn that that kind of thing is OK. And so on.

The Lane

Eventually “the Lane” is defined. It is the way we have chosen to go. The group is the vehicle that is taking us there. At that point, and not before, we can begin to think about Lane Deviation Warning (LDW) devices. It can’t be the teacher, who, as much as he might like to embody the sense of the group on those three dimensions, cannot. He can, and if he is smart, he will, elicit the cues that will assure everyone else that the group still feels that we are in the Lane. The early discomfort of a member of the group can be picked up and amplified by such a teacher or any member of the group as a LDW. Then we can look at it and decide if it is.

For a group that does not know itself well, the LDW will function erratically. For a group that does not trust each other deeply (not “fully”) the LDW will function erratically. But a good group, a group that has come to know and to trust itself, will notice when the LDW comes on and will find out why.

But first, you have to be in a Lane where you want to be—there is, after all, traffic coming the other way so it does matter—and the sides have to be defined by the informed consensus of all. Then we can count on the LDW.

[1] My kids were raised with a bumper sticker that said “Question Authority.” Some understanding of that maxim, not necessarily the one I was hoping for, is lodged deep in their brains. A few years ago, Doug, my youngest bought me a sweatshirt (black) that says is crude letters (white), “Who are YOU to tell Me to question authority.” Isn’t that just sweet?

I met with a group of friends this week, some around the table and some by Zoom, and failed to resolve an issue. Again. I imagined, in preparing for the session, that I would have to push a little to get through the initial opposition, which I expected. The “initial opposition” got stronger the more we talked about it. I never did get through it.

Looking back, I think I have an idea about why. As you might expect, the two sides were not arguing about the same thing. My favorite example of this kind of dilemma is the “debate” about abortion, where one side argues that saving lives is important and the other that the right to decide is important. Neither wants to argue on the others’ terrain, so the argument goes on.

The texts before this group were two parables from Luke. I should admit here that this was a Bible study group, but it was a secular Bible study group. The quick back-of-the-envelope test I use is this: was the discussion of these texts different in any important way than a discussion of two texts from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings? If the kinds of argumentation were the same, I get to claim the designation “secular” for my Bible study group.

The two parables are ordinarily called the Rich Fool (Luke 12:16—21) and the Wicked Steward (now, often the Cunning Steward) in Luke 16:1—8. My argument was that there is a single trait that unites these two parables. It is the duty of any wise person to know that the life they are living is brief and to take the resources they currently have (or, as we will see, have access to) and invest them in the next life, where they will be more important.

That’s it. The Steward passes that test; the Fool does not.

A number of members of the group took issue with that simple lesson. They wanted to see in Luke’s parables an interest in the clear violation of enduring norms. Theft, in the case of the Steward. They pointed out that the Steward defrauded his employer, as the text clearly says. That is true. And the master says not one word about it. He praises the Steward’s “astuteness.” Luke says not one word about it. Jesus has a saying appended to the end in which the main trait to be considered is astuteness; Jesus is in favor of it. You cannot find an interest in the Steward’s dishonesty in any of those sources. If you find it, you brought with you or you imported it from other texts.

We find that the Rich Fool was not astute. He had a short term surplus—as did the Steward—and the surplus actually belonged to him. This is the difference between having a safe full of your money and having a safe full of someone else’s money but you know the combination of the safe. The Fool has the money; the Steward knows the combination. Nevertheless, he is called a fool because he does not see the end coming—the narrator knows, but the fool does not, that he will die that same night—and therefore fails to plan for it.

It is true that the fool that makes plans to spend the money on himself in lavish ways, It is also true that there are many scriptures that disapprove of spending your money in lavish ways. None of them are here. The battle as I see it, is between Luke, who says, “I want to talk about astute planning” and those members of my group who say, “You can’t talk about that without also talking about how wrong theft is.” Or luxury. [1]

We can make this little friction a good deal more respectable by considering it more generally. We could say that there are two ways to read the Bible: in little pieces or as one large lump. In the pieces way, the guiding questions are about what the author is saying in this passage, to whom, and why. In the lump way, you imagine that “the Bible” has a position on whatever we are studying at the moment, and you take that position into account in each passage. [2]

There are many passages that condemn theft, for instance. In the lump view, those condemnations ought to be imported into other passages where theft is alleged, but not specifically identified. The pieces view is that the passage under consideration is best studied as a topic of its own. What is being considered HERE is the question.

A very general concern for “fairness” will require that the Steward be condemned for cheating and that the Farmer be condemned for the way he used his wealth. He really should have saved it against the coming lean years or he really should have shared it with his neighbors or given it to the poor. My view is that importing into Luke’s presentation a concern for “fairness”—which Luke fails to show in many of the Jesus stories he offers—saddles him with someone else’s concern unfairly.

That’s my summary of the arguments. I may be a little more sensitive to this issue than I would otherwise be because I know what other stories are coming up later in the term and a number of them are much worse than these.

[1] I know we have forgotten it, but “luxury” was once the name given to a deadly sin.
[2] There is an intermediate position that I like much better. It takes the themes or the word choices of a particular author into account. “Most of the time (many citations here) when Matthew uses this word, he means X.” That doesn’t guarantee that Matthew means that in this passage, but it does give some guidance.

Here is a line of dialogue from the Netflix show The Diplomat, which I enjoyed the first time I saw it and have enjoyed more every time since. This is a conversation between Kate Wyler, Ambassador to Great Britain (Keri Russell) and Stuart Heyford (Ato Assandoh). her principal staff aide.

Except that those designations are only superficial. The White House actually wants Kate to be the next vice president and Stuart is part of the team vetting her. Kate doesn’t know either of those things when she agrees to come to London; Stuart knew both.

What Kate knows is that she wants to be part of the diplomatic mission to Iran where she is a veteran and knowledgeable diplomat. Stuart keeps bringing up the vice presidency, which she resists and which eventually irks her into doing what she does in this little clip, which begins at 12:52 of Season 1, Episode 4. I’ll pass along the dialogue and enough remarks to tell you why I liked it so much.

This is one of those awful times when someone who thinks a joke is hilariously funny, tries to explain just how it is funny. Such attempts are notoriously unfunny, but there is a sublety to the interplay that I am hoping you will enjoy.

The Characters

It is easy to like these two people. He appears earnest and reasonable. She appears decided and energetic. Kate is a ball of fire. She is decisive and action-oriented. When we hear one of her pair of secret service agents say, “There she goes again.” we know what he is talking about.

The Setting

They are in her office. She is sitting at the table. He is standing in the middle of the room. I’ll bring the dialogue down to the line I want to highlight and then talk about it a little. Here is Phase 1.

Kate: I don’t want to talk about the vice presidency

Stuart:That’s fine

Stuart:Is Mr. Wyler the reason? Would you consider it if your marriage wasn’t—

Kate: A dead horse?

—if it wasn’t the issue?

Kate: It is the issue.

Phase 2

Stuart takes a moment and begins revising his approach. He knows he is pushing a topic his boss does not want to consider. He probably expects her to continue to be as candid as she has been. That means that he starts to miss some cues that he would otherwise have caught. I missed them too the first time through.

Stuart: People have… arrangements

Kate: Like what?

Kate knows exactly what Stuart is talking about. From this point onward, bringing him out to where the ice is thin is what she is after.

Stuart: Whatever…works.

And here is the line. This dynamo of a diplomat, candid, confident, and action-oriented, manages to project a halting, wide-eyed confusion that requires him to continue even if he is beginning to sense already that this is not going the way he hoped.

Kate: I— I just—-I don’t see how it would, I mean. How would it work?

Stuart gives a careful answer. This is not going the way he thought it would. She is neither accepting nor rejecting.

Stuart: Separate bedrooms. Separate lives. It’s a professional partnership.

We know now just what “works” means in the question “how would it work?” but at this point it is too late

Kate: Sex or no sex?

Stuart: Um…whatever you want. You get to make the rules.

There is a long pause here. She is still seated at the table. She looks up at him inquiringly. Stuart is beginning to get wary but he is too late.

Phase 3

Kate: Like, just oral?

Stuart sees now that he has been being led astray for most of the conversation. Everything since “It is the issue,” probably. Now he is just looking for a way to end it.

Stuart : Ma’am, are you messing with me?

Kate: I was gonna ask for a drawing.

I think that answer counts as a Yes.

Stuart: Sorry. It’s none of my business.

And the point has been made. Right. It is none of your business and don’t mess with me. Actually, we know that it is part of his business. He has been given specific instructions by the White House to do what he is doing. But she doesn’t know that—yet—and he knows, White House or not—that she is not someone to tolerate being messed with.

But what makes it funny is that Wiley Coyote moment when he realizes that he has just run off the cliff and knows that there is nothing he can do about it.