The Dilettante's Dilemma

Doing What You Can

Posted on January 26, 2013 by hessd

Back in the old days, before doctors were able to cure many illnesses, a big part of “medical care” was being with the patient. Just being there says things that can’t be said otherwise, principal among them is, “You matter so much to me that I am spending time with you, comforting you as I am able.”

It seems to me that as medicine has gotten better, the gift of human comfort has gotten poorer. We still do it—we still spend time with the people who are ill—but we think more about recovery than we used to and less, it seems to me, about comfort. Nothing about the medical regime that will return me to health says. “You matter this much to me.”

I got to thinking of this as I watched the bittersweet ending of a very good French movie called All Together. I want to tell you enough about the movie that you might understand what I want to tell you about the end.

Five long-time friends decide to move in together. At first it looks like a simple efficiency. They spend all their time visiting each other anyway. Each of these five people, the three men more than the two women, is having trouble letting go of who he has been in the past. Albert’s memory is going and he flickers in and out of the present. Jean, the political activist, is an old man now and can’t even get himself arrested at a public protest. Sex means everything to Claude, but his heart attack complicates that as well, even with readily available prostitutes. Even so, each of the five is present for the others in a meaningful way.

It is Jeanne, Albert’s wife, who introduces the dilemma I want to point to. She knows that he is so forgetful that he cannot manage on his own. She also knows she is dying of cancer and that when she is gone, the remaining friends will not be able to care for him anymore. She dies and has just the funeral she wants, complete with the bright pink coffin she is shopping for when we first meet her. Albert comes to the service with the other friends. But later in the day, he can’t find her. He has no recollection of the funeral. In his present confusion, he no longer knows she is dead and he goes out looking for her.

The remaining three friends look at each other, weighing the task of telling him, yet again, that Jeanne has died. They decide not to. Albert is quite agitated. He decides to go out looking for her. The other three, worried about letting him wander around on his own, go with him. He begins to call her name. Where could she be?

At that point, an emotionally powerful moment occurs. The friends understand that Albert can no longer join in their life. They decide to join his instead. Each of them begins to call “Jeanne,” just as Albert does. They walk along together. Albert is calling Jeanne’s name and looking for her. The friends are walking with him and calling her name as well.

There isn’t a satisfying end to the story. There can’t be. Albert’s daughter will come and get him and put him in a place where he can be cared for and watched over. Jean and Annie and Claude will go back to their house and live as best they can.

So it isn’t really the ending that got me and that I offer to you today. It is the choice the friends made and that I admire. They do what they can. They walk with him for a long time, honoring a lifetime of friendship by calling out his wife’s name.

This is a situation our medical advances have not caught up to. No one can heal Albert. The best we can do is walk with him for a little while and help him search for his wife. It is an honest choice and a hard one.

Posted in Getting Old | Tagged compassion, friendship, senility | 2 Comments

How are the prospects for President Obama’s second term in office? Pretty good, I’d say, all things being considered. The President is duly aware of what he calls “locusts”—unforeseen events that swarm the political landscape and destroy the prospects for anything good to grow there. He knows that a lot of otherwise promising presidential second terms have faltered and failed and he knows that his second term might be like that. Or so says today’s New York Times.

On the other hand, the New York Times released yesterday the poll that they conducted, with CBS, on January 11—15 and it looks pretty good. (I just love it when they publish polls.) Here are five things I like about his prospects.

1. People are not at all excited about the new healthcare prospects of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (hereafter P-PAC, in honor of all the peas I harvested for Del Monte in the summer of 1958). A third of the New York Times/CBS sample would like to see the entire law repealed. That is 1% less than the number who identify themselves as “conservative on most political matters.” Some (19%) would like to see the requirement that individuals purchase health insurance (the individual mandate) repealed. Some (18%) would like to keep the law as it is. A few more (24%) would like to see it expanded. I think that’s not too bad for a law that has been trashed without much subtlety and the benefits of which have yet to kick in. It is reasonable to expect that people will be more favorable about P-PAC when they have experiences with it and not only warnings about it.

2. Also, the economy is thought to be improving, and not just by economists. When the economy improves, the President is thought to be smarter, more decisive, nicer to his children, and more likely to be a Christian (rather than a Muslim) and to have been born in the United States. A substantial minority (40%) of those surveyed are not concerned at all that they or someone else in their household might be out of work in the next 12 months. Except for the number a month ago, you have to go all the way back to the summer of 2011 to get more than 40% on that question. And an additional 33% say they are only “somewhat concerned.” An additional 27% say they are “very concerned,” but that number hasn’t been lower than 30% since the summer of 2009 and I think it will continue to decline unless there are “locusts.”

The more general numbers about the economy are not as rosy as that. Those who disapprove of “the way Barack Obama is handling the economy” outnumber those who approve by 49% to 46%. On the other hand, there aren’t that many people, it seems to me, who can distinguish between Obama’s handling of the economy and the condition of the economy. And, in answer to the “condition of the economy” question, 32% say “good” or “fairly good,” while 66% say “bad” or “fairly bad.”

3. The political side of these economic questions always asks who you would rather have making the decisions and what approach to the decisions you have more confidence in. President Obama has been fortunate in his enemies. Some support for my contention that President Obama’s situation is pretty good can be found by looking at the people’s alternatives. Speaker of the House John Boehner is not thought to be handling his job very well—49% disapprove; only 29% approve. Majority leader Harry Reid, over in the Senate, is in pretty much the same boat—45% disapprove and only 29% approve. So people would rather have the executive branch in charge of framing and answering the questions than the legislative branch. Note that this is not a Republicans v. Democrats question. It is an executive branch v. legislative branch question.

4. One of the framing questions is who is responsible for the economic slump we are still experiencing. After four years of trying to cope with this question, Obama is still seen as least responsible for causing it. In the blame index, he gets 13%. Everyone else gets more: the Bush administration 27%, Wall Street financial institutions 19%, and Congress 14%.

And it gets worse. Who do you trust more to make the right decisions about the nation’s economy? Obama 50%, “Republicans in Congress,” 35%. The right decisions about the budget deficit? Obama 50%, Republicans in Congress 37%. The right decisions about taxes? Obama 52%, Republicans in Congress, 36%.

And how should these agreements be arrived at? Should they be produced by compromise as both Speaker Boehner (intermittently) and President Obama (persistently) have said or by “sticking to the original positions,” which characterizes a portion of Boehner’s majority in the House so large that he couldn’t get Republicans to pass a bill he wanted them to pass? Most Americans favor compromise (84%) over “stick to the positions,” 11%. The Republicans in Congress are particularly at risk here because 80% of those surveyed said they should compromise and only 14% said they should stick to their positions.[1] People feel that the best way to reduce the federal budget deficit is a combination of raising taxes and cutting spending—Obama calls it “a balanced approach.” The combination gets 61% of Americans, where just raising taxes gets 3% and just cutting spending gets 33%.

5. Of course, not all the questions Americans have are about the economy. We seem to like what the President is doing on foreign policy (49% approve to the 36% who disapprove). People are optimistic about the next four years of an Obama administration (59% optimistic v. 38% pessimistic). People are confident in Obama’s ability to make the right decisions about Afghanistan: “very confident” and “somewhat confident” total to 62%; “not too confident” and “not at all confident” total to 36%. The same groupings show confidence in Obama’s ability to make the right decisions in protecting the country from a terrorist attack (69% to 30%) and the right decisions about immigration (55% to 44%)

People don’t trust President Obama overwhelmingly, of course, but they trust him on a lot of things. And they trust “the Republicans in Congress” or Speaker John Boehner even less. They would rather see the crucial decisions made in the executive branch than the legislative branch. They favor the approach to handling the deficit that the President (and occasionally the Speaker) favors, but not the approach the conservatives in the House favor. They are optimistic about the future.

If I held a federal office—God forbid—I would much rather be in the President’s shoes than in anyone else’s.

[1] That doesn’t reflect the majorities in the districts that sent these Congressmen to Washington, of course, which is another problem the Speaker faces.

Posted on January 21, 2013 by hessd | Leave a comment

The Value of Routines in a Marriage

Posted on January 4, 2013 by hessd

I have been a husband for a long time now and I have learned something about being married. At the very least, I have learned something about being a husband in the kind of marriage I want to have. Just to head off some easy objections, I am not claiming that the kind of marriage I like (and that I have) is better than other kinds. Without question, there are horrible marriages that demean and impoverish the husband or the wife or both. Let’s grant that and move on. There are also many kinds of marriages that are not at all like mine, but that suit the husband and wife perfectly—it is the kind they chose; the kind they have achieved; the kind they like best. I’m happy for all such people.[1]

I am saying exactly that about the kind of marriage I now have. Though the social scientist in me wants to be sure to say that there are many good kinds, the husband in me wants to say that this kind—the kind I am going to be writing about—is the kind I like best.[2]

And for today, I want to think about one part of this kind of marriage. I call this part “routines.”[3] You could call them “set pieces” or “practices”[4] or any one of a number of things. You will know what I am talking about by my description. I’m still looking for a good name for the category.

Routines are little habits that are put into the marriage or that just show up and one day you recognize that they have been there for a good while. Let’s take the car door routine as the example for today. When we are going to go somewhere in the car, I open Bette’s door and “help her” into her seat. When we get there, I go around and “help her” out of the car.[5] That’s the whole thing. At least, it is the whole thing you would see if you were watching.

Of course, to us, there is more. For one thing, the kind of marriage we have tops the cake of equality with the icing of asymmetry. Neither of us has any interest in a “head of the household” status. Neither of us thinks one of us is more important than the other. We believe in equality as a matter of social theory and, because of our prior marriages, also as a matter of chastened experience.

I called that the “cake” mostly so I could spend some time on the icing. If the cake is our equality, the icing is a joyful appreciation of our different roles. It isn’t, for instance, that I open her car door for her and, in turn, she opens my door for me. There’s no asymmetry there. For us, the exchange is that I open the door for her and she expresses her appreciation to me. She likes having the door opened and I like doing something she appreciates.

It isn’t very complicated. It is simply an exchange of gifts. I give her something she likes and she responds by giving me something I like. If we had a device that opened the door remotely, she would hand me the device and I would open the door remotely and help her into her seat. It isn’t practical at all. It’s just a routine that reminds us of the cake and the icing and how much each of us likes icing. You could almost call it chivalry, except that chivalry had a very practical aspect as well, protecting maidens from dragons and all that.

Of the other things I could say in praise of marriage routines, let me choose just one more. This one is a little more complicated, but it isn’t more complicated than the average teen romance novel, so I am going to chance it. Bette and I have cultivated a practice of “rich communication.” We called it “rich language” at first, before we understood how many times we would use it with no words being spoken at all. Rich communication is simply adding into a routine, some words or gestures of affirmation and appreciation. It doesn’t change the routine at all, to look at it, but it transforms the routine entirely to the people who enrich and who are enriched by it.

Pretty simple so far. The next step is less so. What does “rich” mean? It means whatever the person who is to be affirmed means by it. The language Bette is speaking when she enriches a routine, it is my language, not hers. Imagine a couple where the husband was comfortable only in his native German and the wife comfortable only in her native French. When he holds the door for her, she thanks him in German. It means more to him and that’s why she learned how to say it in German.[6]

If I am going to enrich a routine, I am going to have to do it in a way Bette will recognize as intended to convey warmth and regard and that actually does convey warmth and regard. I don’t need to know why that particular language means so much to her. It may seem rather odd to me. All I need to know is what language it is and how to speak enough of it to make her glow.

OK, that was the complicated part. Now here is what the routine does. On a given day, I might help Bette into and out of the car, half a dozen times. There is no need for her to do anything unusual on any of those times. “Usual” is just fine. But let’s say that we have been having a conversation in the car and that it meant a lot to her. When I helped her out of the car that time, she would do something—I can think offhand of a dozen things she has done at one time or another—to sweeten the gesture; something to make it richer; emotionally warmer; more personal; more loving.

If she knows the language, and she does, she can do it any time she feels like it. She can do it when she feels moved to. She can do it when she thinks I need it. The occasion is there many times a day and it will be there whenever she decides to use it. And that is what is so great about a routine. It doesn’t cost anything. It doesn’t go away. It is a frequently repeated action that could at any time be used to give a truly wonderful gift.

Imagine, by contrast, that there is a time when Bette is feeling extraordinarily loving to me. She wants to make a small speech saying how happy she is to be married to me and what a wonderful husband I am and how happy she is and so on. If you are married, you can fill in whatever content would mean most to you in a speech like that. If she has to look for a place to deliver such a speech or just the right occasion or just the right setting, it isn’t going to happen very often. Those considerations make it bulky or clunky. Or imagine that she takes her seat in the car and tells me these wonderful things before I close the door. Imagine further that it is really cold or really raining or that the wind is blowing really hard. I like what she is saying, but I am getting colder and wetter by the microsecond, so my feelings are ambivalent at best.

Now imagine, by contrast, that she can “say” all those things by the way she takes my hand and by the way she looks at me before I close the door. This takes about three of the microseconds I referred to and I am happy to get colder and wetter for that long. This is especially true when I take into account how I am going to feel afterwards. I almost hate to say this about such a wonderful act of affirmation, but the truth is, it is efficient.

I love to see effective routines in a marriage. Building them takes careful work by both partners. Learning just what the other understands as “richer” takes some work. But when those are in place, the routine just sits there. Either of us can use it anytime we choose. The effects dramatically outpace the cost of the actions. And for husbands or wives who would like to be loved a lot more frequently than they now are, it’s something to think about.

[1] I’m going to be talking about marriages because it is the context where I have learned about this. There is nothing in the nature of a routine that requires marriage at all (it works for “significant others”) or heterosexual marriage (it works the same way for gay and lesbian partners). It’s just a human thing.

[2] I have fallen back on “kind of marriage” because I don’t really have a name for it. I’ve experimented with a few but I haven’t found one that Bette and I like and that usefully describes what we are doing.

[3] This might be the time to confess that Bette doesn’t like the term “routines” either. It has negative connotations. Yes, it does, or at the very least, it is emotionally flat. But I like the neutrality of the term. A routine is just a vehicle for other things and it is the other things I like.

[4] Though not in Alisdair Macintyre’s sense of the term in After Virtue. That sense of “practice” is very useful and widely used, but it is not what I am talking about here.

[5] The expression “help her” is in quotes because she actually doesn’t need the kind of help I am giving. She is perfectly capable of getting into and out of the car herself. On the other hand, I was once married to a woman who actually did need help getting in and out of the car and she chose to treat it as an act of chivalry on my part. That was pretty wonderful.

[6] This might be the time to cite Gary Chapman’s The Five Love Languages. I can be critical of the book for some purposes, but I don’t know any book that does a better job of establishing that if you want to convey your love and appreciation to your partner, it is wise to use the language that means the most to him or her. Bette and I have substantially different “language” preferences, and when it is important that I understand what she is saying to me, she says it in the language that matters most to me.

Posted in Love and Marriage, ways of knowing | Tagged affirmation, love languages, marriage, routines | Leave a comment

What We Know About God

Posted on December 30, 2012 by hessd

On Christmas, the New York Times published this op-ed piece by Maureen Dowd. It is, in fact, a reflection by Father Kevin O’Neil. Dowd asked him if he could write something that reflected his faith and his practice in the aftermath of the Newtown, Connecticut killings. Dowd described Father O’Neil as a saint and that is certainly what he sounds like. I would love to have a man like that among my friends. And if he were among my friends, I would love him all the more if he would allow me to quibble with his theology, as I am about to do, and still have me as a friend.

Ten years ago, I finished a series of essays for my children, whose median age at the time was forty. There were fifty-two such essays (two pages each) and I sent them one every Friday for a year. The last two sections were called “Theology” and “Discipleship” and when I first imagined the series, I thought that the discipleship essays would simply be an application of the theology essays. In fact, there was virtually no positive connection at all. No practice of Christian discipleship derived particularly from the doctrine of the trinity or of God’s providence or the nature of sin or of salvation. I say “positive connection” because some theological doctrines did, in fact, preclude some behaviors. Not many.

After weeks and weeks of wrestling with these questions, each week culminating in a Friday essay, I devised these two images to help me keep track of what I was doing in theology, on the one hand, and living out the kind of life Christian faith points to, on the other hand. Theology is like geometry. Discipleship is like a convention of cooks.

When I look at what Father O’Neil does as a disciple, I want to get up next to him and ask how he was able to do this or that, reflecting that when I tried it, it didn’t work at all. I want him to say things like, “No, you have to let it marinate for at least 12 hours” or “I learned when I was trying to bake at the altitude where you live, that I had to use higher temperatures and shorter cooking times.” Or even, to bring it a little closer to living, something like, “I can understand why you felt that way. I did too. It was an awful experience. But it has to be done and people like us are called to do it.”

But theology isn’t like that. Theology is like geometry. You start with the axioms and derive propositions that are consistent with them. Internal consistency is what makes geometry work. That’s how it’s like theology. When you say that a proposition is “true,” you mean that it is consistent with the axioms. You don’t say that the axioms are true; you just assume them and start deriving propositions. In the same way, when you say a doctrine about God is “true,” you mean it fits with the others. You don’t mean you have found a way to prove that there is a God or that God has this trait or that one or that God has “traits” at all.

By now, I have lost at least 47% of you, but blogs don’t survive on the basis of votes and I am happy to continue this quest with the 53% percent of you who have no idea what I am talking about or who are sure I am underselling theology or who can’t figure out why I bother making these distinctions at all, particularly during the BCS bowl season.

Here’s why.

How can we celebrate the love of a God become flesh when God doesn’t seem to do the loving thing? If we believe, as we do, that God is all-powerful and all-knowing, why doesn’t He use this knowledge and power for good in the face of the evils that touch our lives?

These questions are good questions and for them, Father O’Neil finds no theological answer. Is that because God is beyond knowing? Certainly God is beyond our knowing, but our theology is our own work. We build these theologies ourselves. If we build a house badly, it falls down. If we build a lens badly, it distorts our vision. If we build a theory badly, the data don’t clarify it one way or another. But if we build a theology badly, we wind up saying, “It a mystery.” And we shrug as if we were saying that God is a mystery (of course) rather than that the operation of the system of propositions we built to help us discipline our thinking about God has, regrettably, failed us.

Father O’Neil says that Christians believe God to be all-powerful (since it’s just us, here, talking, we can say “omnipotent”) and all-knowing (omniscient). Then he asks why God doesn’t do the loving thing. Well, he doesn’t say that exactly. O’Neil is a priest and he knows to say “doesn’t seem to do the loving thing,” where the issue is in the seeming, not in the doing. I recast his remark into the form in which I most often hear it. We look at a dreadful event and say, “A God who would do this (or allow this) cannot be a loving God.”

So let’s look, just briefly, at the kind of system we have built. Considered as “knowledge about God,” it has certain drawbacks. It is negative knowledge; it works only by excluding things. We can feel confident when we say that there is nothing God does not know. If you begin with the axiom that God has no limits, this is just an entailed proposition. But then we have to say that God knows everything, a positive statement, and there is no way to know what that means. We know it’s true—in the way you know things about geometry and theology—but we don’t know what it means. Does it mean God knows what the future will be? We say that God is omnipotent. Again the negative position doesn’t sound so bad, there is nothing God cannot do, but the positive position is simply incomprehensible.[1] And about “loving acts,” this imagines that we can tell by looking at an outcome whether it was intentional or not and if we think it was, whether the intention was benign or not. Why would we think we can tell by looking?

So Father O’Neil’s statements, if they are taken as “true” about God, run into all the difficulties I offer about theology. And if they are taken as theological constructions, they lead us nowhere. I think we can do better than that if we ask less from our theology. Here are some possibilities.

We could begin by asking two questions. The first is “What is theology for?” The second is, “How good does it have to be to be useful?”

One answer to the first question is that theology is a system of thought that helps us talk to each other. It is a language game. People who agree to play by the rules of this game can understand each other in ways others cannot. They can have actual conversations about topics like: a) what does it mean to say that God is “person-like” on the one hand and unlimited on the other, b) can we understand the character of God’s interaction with the world on the analogy of a narrative, e.g., that what we call “history” is a story God is telling, c) what is the ultimate value in this narrative of God, a value so great that it justifies great costs? A theology doesn’t, I am arguing, settle questions like this. It does provide some helpful definitions and some rules of engagement and it guards the boundaries of the conversation, sending back onto the field of play, discussants who were on the verge of wandering up into the stands.

What “powers” did God give up, for instance, when humans were created as free moral agents? Did God give up omniscience so that freely chosen worship by agents who could choose otherwise was possible? If God values our freedom of choice, does it make sense that we would be protected in the exercise of that choice? And if God could not “create” a free moral agent in the same sense that, say, a planet could be created, would it make sense to say that God had put limits on omnipotence as well?

We don’t have to talk about Newtown to raise these questions. We can ask whether God could have prevented Cain from killing Abel.[2] It’s a good question and it is particularly good if we remember that it is a test of whether our theology allows us to raise and talk about those questions. It is not a test of our knowledge of God. It is not a test of God. It is a test of our theology—a stress test. If asking this question makes our structure fall apart, we need to start over and build a better one on our next try.

Those are very modest goals, it seems to me, and people who talk theology ought to be modest about what they have to offer. This is particularly true when theologians, people who have agreed to the rules of this particular language game, are talking to people who have not agreed.

The second question is, “How good does it need to be?” I think a theology will make a very valuable contribution if it is good enough to help us keep on telling the stories on which our community depends. No one would ask, about a room, “Is it warm enough?” We would want to know what was going to happen in the room and we would think about how much worse things would be if it were too cold for that activity and then we would say, “Yes, it is warm enough for that.”

If theologies can’t be true, we must count on their being useful. That means the question, “Is it useful enough?” is a good question and it is especially good if we can say, as we did about the room, that it is useful enough for some activity in particular. In my view, the heart of our faith is not usefully characterized by propositions, but by stories. It’s the stories you can live in and learn from. It’s the stories that can live in you and change the way you think about things.

So we need a community of people—Father O’Neil has followers of Jesus in mind—who can share the stories and live out the implications together.[3] The rules we follow—our theology—rules out some stories. They cannot be justified if we begin with the assumptions we have agreed to accept. But the rules allow a substantial diversity of stories, including stories that would, if they were treated as journalistic accounts, contradict each other. But they aren’t journalistic accounts. They are narrative traditions. And when they don’t agree, we live in the tension between them.

This way of casting the issue means a good deal to me. It continues to engage my best efforts, even after all these years. It keeps me out of several kinds of swamps, including the one John Bunyan called “the slough of despond.” I don’t think this way of asking the question does anything at all for Father O’Neil. On the other hand, I don’t think Father O’Neil needs to have anything done for him. He seems to be a gentle and loving man and he knows how to say nothing when he has nothing to say. May God make us all more like that.

[1] Although I have to say that I do treasure George Carlin’s rendition of God’s omnipotence, “God is all-powerful. He can do anything He wants. He can throw a boat right over a hedge.”

[2] I’m not treating these well-known stories as if they were history. I’m just taking them for granted as our common property, which is something I can do under the rules of engagement.

[3] The rabbits of Watership Down are a superb illustration of living together by telling the stories. In that book, Richard Adams arranges things so that the rabbits tell the story that they are just about to need. I wish I knew how to do that.

Posted in Theology, ways of knowing | Tagged Nature of God, Newtown, theodicy, theology | 2 Comments

It’s not really about Hef. It’s about you, you smug SOB

Posted on December 25, 2012 by hessd

Chuck Tatham has written an absolutely dizzying op-ed piece in the New York Times. You really ought to read it for yourself. It rubbed me in so many sore spots that I considered, only briefly, that I was having a neurological failure of some sort.

Tatham is an executive producer of a televised comedy series, so there is always the chance that this whole piece is a spoof, but I am going to take it seriously because—spoof or not—there are some issues embedded in the piece that I care about.

Let’s start with the headline—“Cynics, Step Down. Let Hef Love.” “Hef,” is, of course, Hugh Hefner, creator of the Playboy empire and serial bridegroom of beautiful women in their twenties who have long hair, long legs, and big boobs. Cynics, it appears have the power to prevent Hef from loving. How they could do that, I’m not really sure.

Also, there are a lot of people who need love, especially at this time of year. If my memory serves, his daughter Christie now runs the Playboy empire and I’m sure she would appreciate all the love her father can spare. And maybe a little help at the office. It isn’t hard to find people to love, certainly.

Unless, of course, the word “love” in the headline has to do with sexual intercourse—always a possibility, given the context. I didn’t like the collapse of the language of sex into the language of love. Sex seems to me so…well…specific and there are so very many kinds of love. In fact, if it weren’t for the actual patterns of our current speech, there is no reason that the expression “making love” could not refer to what Alicia Nash said about her husband in the movie, “A Beautiful Mind,” when she confided to a friend, “…but then I look at him and I force myself to see the man I married. And he becomes that man. He’s transformed into someone I love.” If language were fair and just, that would be called “making love.” And then there is the further descent from “making love” to “loving.”

Chuck Tatham isn’t responsible for the cheapening of our language about love and neither is Hugh Hefner. But it has happened and now we can read in the headlines that cynics will prevent Hef from “loving.” A love like that would be a little thin, I think. Unless, Crystal Harris, the next Mrs. Hef, is the cynic Tatham has in mind.

But we don’t really need to address any of those questions, because the op-ed piece really isn’t about Hefner—it’s about us. Let’s see, just what are we like?

Well, we are “part of a rampant trend of cynicism that must cease.”

And, apparently, we sneer.

Also, we are part of “snarky observers whose raison d’être is to mirthfully degrade anything and everything, including a warm, loving relationship.”

Of course, it also might be that we are “jealous of the passionate connection between Hef and Crystal.”

We should know better because after all, “No one mocked [our] nuptials; what gives you the right to” mock Hef’s?

And, of course, we are smug.

Besides, what did Hugh Hefner ever do to you?[1]

The reason I suspect this is a spoof is that it contains all the put-downs Tatham says he is deploring. Here are four from the treasure chest of this column.

Hef and Crystal have already “registered for silverware, bath towels and a defibrillator.”

Or, Tatham was chosen as best man because “I’m Hef’s blood type and I know CPR.”

Or, “The guests at the wedding won’t throw rice, they’ll throw Viagra.”[2]

Or, “The wedding will be unique for a lot of reasons, including the fact that there will be a ring bearer and a pallbearer.”

There may not be any way to hold Hefner’s newest wedding up to the scorn it probably deserves, but the substantial protection it has—this is Tatham’s approach and it is increasingly common—is that Hefner’s wedding is really inconsequential. What is truly worth talking about is the cheap, sad, and easy criticisms that are launched at Hefner. So no matter what he does, the issue will be whether people have responded to it with appreciation and generosity.

You know, I don’t think that is always the issue that most deserves our attention.

[1] I like that one particularly because it establishes the standard that only the things that have been done to me, personally, give me a cause for complaint. I have no reason to complain about the 87 gun-related deaths per day, it appears, because I was not one of them. Of course, people who actually were one of them aren’t complaining either. This “personal cost” standard is thoroughly perverse.

[2] This particular response is called “cheap, easy, sad.”

Posted in Words | Tagged casting aspersions, Hugh Hefner, Mr. Smug | 2 Comments

Luke’s story, for kids

Posted on December 23, 2012 by hessd

I learned “the Christmas story” the same way you did. Unlearning “it” has been one of the great delights of my adult life. In unlearning “it,” I was free to learn “them,” and that has been very satisfying.

“Them” are the narratives of the birth of Jesus provided by our only two sources of information, the gospels written by Matthew and by Luke. In this post, I’m going to say how I learned about the two birth narratives. Then I’ll offer a sample of one place—of the two—I have wound up.

Raymond E. Brown was one of the best known and most respected biblical scholars of his era. He died at the age of 70 in 1998. The book that introduced me to this topic was his The Birth of the Messiah in 1977. For a book that has two sources, it is very sensibly divided between Matthew’s account—the first half of the book—and Luke’s account. For twenty years or so, I have been reading one of those halves each year at Advent and ignoring, as nearly as I was able, the other half.

Those twenty years or so have allowed me to get comfortable in each of the stories and to enjoy the integrity of each narrative. Integrity is not something you will find in “the Christmas story,” which is a head-spinning combination of the two stories. It has given me a gift that is not often found in people my age: I really like the birth narratives. They aren’t sentimental mush to me. They are two rich artistic reconstructions of the kind of birth Jesus must have had to be the Messiah as Matthew sees him or the Messiah as Luke sees him.

So you could do it the way I did it. It is twenty or thirty years, but…you know…it’s just for the season of Advent. You would still have the rest of the year. Or, alternatively, you could read the story that makes up most of the rest of this post.

Last year, when I was reading and thinking about the narrative Matthew tells, I wrote a version of it for the only grandchildren I have who are still young enough (none are yet old enough) to appreciate it. Try this sometime with a story that matters to you. Try to write it so that it could be understood by a beginning reader. One of the first things you learn is that there are a lot of questions about the story that you, yourself, have never asked. And, of course, you don’t know the answers.

This year, I’ve been reading and thinking about Luke’s account. Here’s what I wrote. Then, below, I’ll tell you about three problems that I wasn’t able to solve this year. My next chance at it will be in 2014. Maybe I’ll get it right then. If not, there’s always 2016.

Luke for Kids: 2012

This is the story of how God provided Jesus with two invaluable gifts: a mother and a teacher. The mother’s name was Mary. She was a young woman who lived in Nazareth. The teacher’s name was John. As you will see, Jesus was born according to the plan God had laid out. The planning was very careful and there was only one tiny mistake.

John would be Jesus’s cousin and nearly a year older than Jesus, so let’s start with his story. John’s father Zechariah was a priest and one day, as he was in the temple in Jerusalem, the angel Gabriel appeared to him and told him that his wife, Elizabeth, was going to have a baby. Elizabeth had wanted a baby all her life, but she had never been able to have one and was now an old woman. Or, as Zechariah said to Gabriel, she was “getting on in years.”

Zechariah knew how happy Elizabeth would be about this, but he had trouble understanding how it could happen for people as old as he and Elizabeth. Gabriel said that Zechariah should have been willing to trust God’s message to him and because he doubted, he would not be able to hear or to speak until the child was born. But the child would be born anyway, just as God had promised.

And he was. Zechariah and Elizabeth were both so happy and all the neighbors and family came to their house to celebrate the wonderful event. It wasn’t so hard to believe any more, now that it had happened. Everyone assumed that the little boy would be named Zechariah, after his father,[1] but Elizabeth insisted that he was to be named John. “John?” they said. So they signed to Zechariah, who, you remember, could still not hear or speak, and he wrote down on a pad, “His name is John.” So years later, when Jesus met him, his name was John and he was famous and people called him John the Baptist because he baptized people in the river Jordan.

After the angel Gabriel appeared to Zechariah in Jerusalem, he came to Mary at her parents’ home in Nazareth. He told Mary that she was going to have a little boy as a special gift from God. Mary was to name the boy Jesus and that Jesus would do God’s work in a wonderful way when he grew up. When Elizabeth learned from Zechariah that she was going to have a baby, she was very happy, you remember. But Elizabeth was an old woman who had always wanted a baby. Mary was a very young woman who was not married and who had not even begun to think about having a baby. She loved her fiancé, Joseph, but they had never lived together the way they would after they were married.

So she asked Gabriel the same question Zechariah had asked, “How could this happen?” Gabriel said it would be a special gift from God and that she should trust God about how and when it would happen. Mary thought about how complicated it would be to have a baby before she and Joseph were married, but she trusted God to have a plan.

But the next step in God’s careful plan was not to happen in Nazareth, where she lived. After Gabriel’s announcement, Augustus the ruler of the Roman Empire, which included Nazareth and Jerusalem and the rest of Israel, had an announcement of his own. He wanted to get a count of how many people there were in the empire and all the Jewish people were supposed to go to the town where their ancestors had lived. Joseph’s family came from Bethlehem, way down south near Jerusalem, so he and Mary went to Bethlehem to be registered in the census.

While they were there, it was time for the baby to be born and this is where a really odd thing happened. Do you remember how the whole story of John and his parents and Jesus and his parents showed such careful planning and everything went just according to plan? Well, when Joseph and Mary got to Bethlehem, it turned out that nobody had made a reservation for them at the inn and they had to spend the night in the stable with the animals and that is where Jesus was born. Of course, they didn’t have a bed either, out there in the stable, but they put him in the animals’ feed trough and he looked very comfortable there.

Not long afterward, some shepherds from the nearby hills showed up and asked to see the baby. Joseph and Mary were surprised to see the shepherds. They didn’t understand how anyone else would know about the baby Jesus. But it turned out that the shepherds had an amazing story to tell. They were out in the fields, they said, protecting their sheep from harm when suddenly an angel was standing there with them and a bright light shone all around them. They were scared of course, but the angel said there was nothing to be afraid of.

He had wonderful news for them, he said. A baby had been born down in Bethlehem and this baby would be the Messiah and would grow up to be the one to save Israel. They could tell which baby it was, the angel said, because he would be in a stable, sound asleep in a feed trough.

And then the whole sky filled up with angels, singing “Glory to God in heaven and peace on earth to everyone who bears God’s blessing.” That’s when the shepherds decided they just had to go to Bethlehem and see. And they found the baby and saw for themselves what the angel had said. Then they left to go back to the sheep and on their way back, they told everyone who would listen about the little baby who would grow up and save Israel.

Before they went back up to Nazareth, Joseph and Mary took the baby to the temple in Jerusalem. There, they made an old man very happy. The old man’s name was Simeon and God had promised him that before he died, he would get to see with his own eyes the Messiah that God had promised. Simeon had waited many years for God to fulfill the promise, but when he saw Jesus, he knew that his long wait was over. He took the baby in his arms and prayed, “Thank you, God, for showing me the baby who will rescue Israel. Now at last I can die happy and at peace.”

After this, Joseph and Mary went back to Nazareth where Jesus grew up. As a young man, Jesus wanted very much to know what special work God had for him to do. He even went to the temple once and stayed there for a while, talking with the priests and listening to them. Then one day, he heard that his cousin John was baptizing people in the Jordan River, telling them to give up their sins and open their minds to what God wanted them to be. People wondered if John might be the Messiah, but John knew he was not. He thought about his cousin, Jesus, and he said to the crowds, “I am baptizing you with water, but there is one coming, very soon, who is more powerful than I am.”

This is when Jesus, whose ministry was not clear to him yet, really needed a teacher and he chose his cousin John. Jesus became a part of John’s ministry and listened to what he told the people. Then one day, God chose Jesus out from the whole crowd of John’s followers and said to him, “You are my true son. It is time for you to begin your own ministry.” John, his teacher, watched him go and was very proud, as teachers are sometimes.

So there’s my best shot for 2012. Here are the three concerns I still have, this being an account for children to think about.

1. I have overdone the reliance of Jesus on John’s ministry. I was driven to it by my designation of John as a “teacher” of Jesus and I was driven to that by Luke’s choice to commit nearly all of the first chapter to the birth of John. I have chosen a historical solution to a problem that is really only a narrative problem. The historical problem, however, is Luke’s and the narrative problem is mine, so I’m choosing to solve my problem.

2. The heavenly host celebrate peace on earth of “all who bear God’s blessing.” There are some exegetical problems with that phrasing, but I’m OK with what I’ve done with them. As I phrase it as a story for children, I have to find a way to deal with this new translation—a blessing the kids are likely to see as quite exclusive—especially if they have heard “Peace on earth, good will to men.” I skipped over Simeon’s observation that the baby he was holding in his arms would cause the fall of many in Israel. I thought I could do without it. But here is that same problem with the angels and I don’t think I can do without them.

3. Simeon appears to have exceeded his “best deceased by” date. He is eager for death, as I read it, although he is even more eager to see the Lord’s promised messiah. I wonder how to put his eagerness (“….at last, I can die…”) for the kids. I muffled it a little bit with the cliché “die happy” but the rest of it sits there.

I have two more years to think about this. Sage advice would be appreciated.

[1] The father had been named Zechariah some years earlier.

Posted in Biblical Studies, Living My Life | Tagged elizabeth, jesus, john, mary, shepherds | Leave a comment

Hark, the Herald Angels Sang (in traditional barbershop harmonies)

Posted on December 15, 2012 by hessd

You don’t have to read much of Tanya Luhrmann to feel like a fan. Today’s editorial in the New York Times ought to be enough. If this tickles your appetite and you like more academic prose, which she also does well, I recommend “A Hyper-real God and Modern Belief” in the journal Current Anthropology in August of this year.

Luhrmann is an anthropologist at Stanford. She studies evangelicals the way the first generation of anthropologists studied Polynesians. She is not an advocate; she describes. But she describes things that ought not be there. That is troublesome. And when the question arises of whether “it” is “really” there or not, she asks you to enter into the mindset of the people who claim to experience “it” and ask the question that way.

As an anthropologist, she is inclined to talk to “informants.” One such is “a man from Horizon Christian Fellowship” in San Diego. “The Bible is a love story,” he told her, “and it is written to me.” Wow. Another such is Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. “My first concern,” Mohler told her on his radio show, “is not with the God we are looking for, but the God who is.” Luhrmann says his practical concern is that “imagination drifts quickly away” from what [what he would call] the truth. And there it is. The man from Horizon Christian Fellowship or the man from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary?

That is the dilemma, she says, of Christianity in the modern West.

Which position you take depends on whether you are more worried about heresy or atheism. The pope and Albert Mohler are concerned that Christians get God right. They fear that congregants in these experientially oriented churches will imagine God in a way that inadvertently violates Scripture and leads them astray (God might become wholly loving, for example, and not at all judgmental).

Are we more in danger of heresy or atheism? Actually, that isn’t the way I would put it. Atheism is a commitment to the notion that God does not exist. I think the other pole—the non-heretical pole—is that the question of God and of being a part of what God is doing in the world becomes a kind coffeehouse debate. Everyone is “tolerant” because no one really believes that any one of them is more nearly right than any other and, in fact, the notion of “being right” about things like that violates the spirit of the game. It is this idle recreational treatment of God that I think is the true alternative to the God of everyday intention and sensation and emotional chumminess. I’m sure there is a website somewhere where visitors are asked to “like” God.

On the other hand: “Richly described settings — Narnia, Middle-earth, Hogwarts — become places that people can imagine on their own.” Yes they do. And Earth Sea and Star Trek and the Game of Thrones. There is no clear end to our ability to invest in “fictional” or “nearly fictional” realities, provided that we have made them. Realities that have made us, on the other hand, can scarcely be trusted.

I am inclined to resist this dilemma. As Phaedrus says in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, you don’t have to choose the left horn of the dilemma or the right horn. You can try to distract the bull—the practical and immediate bearer of the “horns” of the dilemma—or you can throw dirt in his eyes and head for the exit. I think it is really possible care deeply about the biblical texts and to refuse to ask them questions that are not a part of their authors’ worlds.

This is deeply anthropological, so Luhrmann ought to like it. You can ask about Luke or the Deuteronomic school or the Pauline school, “How did they see the world? Within the meanings they could possibly have had in mind, which of them gives the best guide to what a text really means?” And you can refuse to ask of them questions that arise in your world but that have no place in theirs.

Luhrmann wants us to adopt the anthropology of Robin Horton on what is real.

He [Horton] was saying that it was a theory and that the correct question to ask about such seemingly strange ideas as water spirits was not whether they were sensible in the abstract but how and why they were used.

Those are the questions we might as of the Deuteronomist . When you described God as saying, “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts…” what kind of law and what kinds of hearts and what kind of “writing” did you have in mind?

Now the Pope maintains, according to Luhrmann, that Roman Catholics should not be distracted from the gospel accounts we have—neither to the right (popular myth) nor to the left (historical scholarship). But for some modern Christians, the historical scholarship is the way we can get inside the worlds inhabited by the authors of scripture. This gives us a chance to ask the kinds of questions Horton is asking, not, in other words, “Did Jesus really walk on the water?” but, “What is Luke trying to tell us by passing that story along?” Luke does not want to consider the possibility that the water was particularly dense at that particular place on the lake. It’s of no interest to him. We should ask him the questions that belong in his world and therefore in his account.

It is in my hope for biblical scholarship that I differ from the Pope’s remarks and that’s really closer to the Pope than an Anabaptist boy should be. And it is that third way—inhabiting the world of your informants, as Luhrmann does—that is my hope of escaping the dilemma Luhrmann offers us.

Posted in Biblical Studies, Theology | Tagged atheism, evangelicals, Joseph Ratzinger, secularists | Leave a comment

I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be unclear.

Posted on December 4, 2012 by hessd

It is not quite fair to either Horace Greeley or to Abraham Lincoln to characterize them the way I am about to. Lincoln won’t mind, I am sure. And despite Mark Twain’s caution that one should not pick a fight with anyone who buys his ink by the barrel, I will take my chances with Greeley and his New York Tribune.

I mean no disrespect to Greeley by referring to him as a zealot, nor to Lincoln by referring to him as an agent. Zealots have a lot of…um…zeal. Greeley was an abolitionist, a worthy cause certainly, and that is just about all that mattered to him as a public man. The things that moved in the direction of abolishing slavery were good and the things that did not move in that direction were bad.

English gets the word zealot from the Greek zēlōtēs and zeal is “intense enthusiasm, as in working for a cause.” I know the etymology of a word is not its meaning, but I am amazed at how often it makes the understanding of a word richer. English gets agent from the Latin agens, the participial form of the verb agere, “to act.” An agent is one who acts.

You can see that this distinction really doesn’t separate them much. Greeley also acted—he published a newspaper—and Lincoln was also enthusiastic in working for a cause. But Lincoln was a public servant. That’s what I want to emphasize. Yes, he was president of the United States, but public servants at all levels need to act in the way Lincoln acted.

If, after all, only one thing is right, all we need to know about a public servant is whether he or she has the backbone to do what is right, or, as Greeley says in his editorial:

We require of you, as the first servant of the Republic, charged especially and preeminently with this duty, that you EXECUTE THE LAWS (caps in the original).

Actually, Greeley had one law in particular in mind and that’s a condition you often run into in zealots. Lincoln was not doing all that the second Confiscation Act authorized him to do and if he had done everything the act authorized him to do, more slaves would immediately have been freed. And Lincoln would very likely have lost the support of the border states for the forthcoming drama of the reconstruction of the union. Lincoln was “… unduly influenced by the counsels, the representations, the menaces, of certain fossil politicians hailing from the Border Slave States,” according to Greeley.

Lincoln had in mind the successful performance of quite a few actions at the same time. Some could be done immediately and others would have to be done over the long haul with the cooperation of men who would need to be cajoled, courted, and/or threatened. It is his attention to all the things that causes me to assign the label “agent” to him.

So the conflict between Greeley and Lincoln is just one of many such conflicts. You could change the names of the men and change the nature of the conflict and the dynamics would look very very familiar. Agents act as best they can to secure the range of outcomes the public needs. Zealots snap at their heels while they are doing it.

Greeley’s editorial was called “The Prayer of Twenty Millions,” a reference to the size of Lincoln’s popular vote in 1860—inflated, probably, by adding those who care about slavery but did not vote for Lincoln. The editorial was 2200 words. It was long and complicated; it was vitriolic and finger-pointing.

Here is the entire text of Lincoln’s response. It is 408 words long. It has a labored clarity to it, which is understandable, given the editorial to which it is a response. It is also a gesture of warmth to a friend, as well as to a person who buys his ink by the barrel. I’ll just put it on the page and make a few remarks and call it good enough.

Executive Mansion, Washington, August 22, 1862.

Hon. Horace Greeley: Dear Sir.

I have just read yours of the 19th. addressed to myself through the New-York Tribune. If there be in it any statements, or assumptions of fact, which I may know to be erroneous, I do not, now and here, controvert them. If there be in it any inferences which I may believe to be falsely drawn, I do not now and here, argue against them. If there be perceptable in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in deference to an old friend, whose heart I have always supposed to be right.

As to the policy I “seem to be pursuing” as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt.

I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be “the Union as it was.” If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.

I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.

Yours, A. Lincoln.

The range of ways Lincoln would save the union is staggering. Take, for instance “…and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” I doubt that that option really means anything by itself, but it does plug a hole that would have been there if he hadn’t said it.

And this line is intended especially for Greeley. I read it as saying, “I know you are a zealot and I hope you know why I can’t afford to be.” Here’s what he says to Greeley. “ If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them.”

This letter is perhaps the clearest letter by any politician I have ever read. It cannot be misunderstood. Even Greeley, who printed it, certainly didn’t like it. On the other hand, he didn’t misunderstand it.

Posted in Politics | Tagged Greeley, Lincoln, public servant, slavery, zealot | Leave a comment

Having Bill and Lou for Dinner

Posted on December 1, 2012 by hessd

For years, I have treasured the title of an article my brother John called to my attention. I haven’t actually read the article; I just liked the title. It is “Carrying Capacity is a Rural Truth; Bambi is an Urban Lie.” In the process of tucking in the last few loose ends so I can write this post, I have run onto a difficulty or two. John never heard of the article. He agrees with me that it is a wonderful title. I can’t find a record of such an article anywhere. My memory of how I reacted to it the day I was told about it is extraordinarily vivid, but I am now considering the possibility that it never happened at all.

In any case, I will point out that when you put “Bambi” in a sentence that goes on to consider what happens to deer when their numbers outrun the resource base, you get a truly unsettling sentence. Bambi is cute; hordes of starving deer are not cute. What to do?

Here is an interesting story from Vermont. It isn’t about deer, but I can see the “carrying capacity element” in this story and the “Bambi element” as well. I’m betting you can see them too.

Here’s the New York Times account in full, and below, a small excerpt.

Just past the village here is the farm at Green Mountain College, where chickens roam free and solar panels heat a greenhouse. The idea of sustainability runs so deep that instead of machines fueled by diesel, a pair of working oxen [Bill and Lou] have tilled the fields for the better part of a decade, a rare evocation of a New England agricultural tradition.

Their names are Bill and Lou, and by the end of the month, they are to be slaughtered and turned into hamburger meat for the dining hall.

If you take seriously the idea that this is a “farm,” everything fits nicely. Lou’s health is no longer good, so the farmers and deciding how best to use him next. Pot roast, possibly. “This is the logical time, said Baylee Drown, the assistant manager of the farm, “to use him for another purpose.” The farm’s manager, Philip Ackerman-Leist agrees. It is the farm’s purpose to produce food in a humane and sustainable way, not to shelter animals and concludes, “We have to think about the farm system as a whole.”

William Throop, the provost of Green Mountain College says, I’m imagining that I can hear the exasperation in his voice, “Bill and Lou are not pets. They’re part of an intimate biotic community of the farm, in food webs and relationships of care and respect.”

You might expect to get a little pushback from the students. Andrew Kohler, for example, took a course in how to drive a team of oxen and Bill and Lou were the team. “They start listening to you and they become your friend,” says Kohler. “I feel honored to eat them.”

Those are the “carrying capacity” voices, as I see it, but they are not at all the only voices. Pattrice Jones, is one of several founders of an animal sanctuary in Springfield, Vermont. He offered to take Bill and Lou into retirement and he might as well. The name of the sanctuary is “Veganism Is the Next Evolution.” Jones said the college’s idea of what is appropriate for the aging oxen “shocks the conscience of anybody who believes in kindness to animals.”

Animal rights groups have been incensed as well, and have amassed thousands of signatures of people opposed to this use of Bill and Lou and went on the college’s Facebook page to call for “a reprieve.” As ideas go, it seems to me that “reprieve” is over on the far side of retirement and I would guess that the next step would be a “pardon.”

At this point, Throop’s “Bill and Lou are not pets” runs smack into Jones’s “kindness to animals.” I suppose there is no way to say, in general, that one is better than another, but there is no question which better fits the college’s notion of what “sustainability” means on a small farm.

Posted in Sustainability | Tagged Green Mountain College, kindness to animals, working the farm | Leave a comment

Nonviolent Communication

Posted on November 22, 2012 by hessd

The cover story in a recent issue of The Christian Century is called “Beyond Anger and Blame.” That sounds good to me. The “beyond,” especially, sounds good to me. I have no complaint at all about getting “beyond” anger and blame.

Here are the four steps that Allan Rohlfs, the author of the article, has in mind.

The four steps of NVC [Non-violent Communications] offer a way to change that physical reaction and the speech that flows from it. They offer a way to regard the other person as other than an enemy, and they give one the freedom to respond with care.

The four steps are: 1) naming the behavior that is a problem; 2) naming the emotion you feel when the behavior takes place; 3) naming the need you have that is not being met because of the other person’s behavior; 4) stating in very concrete terms what would you would like the other person to do.

I have nine responses to this approach. Truthfully, I have limited myself to just nine observations. Everything I say about this approach to conflict resolution from here on is going to be negative, so let me say at the beginning that I am sure there are people for whom it works very well and it is a great deal better than the approach Rohlfs presents as “the alternative.” (But why would there be just one alternative?) The following collection of “what ifs” and “yes buts” is my response not so much to NVC as to every kind of communication that takes this approach. There are many of them and they are very popular.

Nevertheless.

1. I am troubled by a package of communications proposals that is named by what it is not. It is good that it does not require violence, but what, exactly does it do? Does it bring peace? Does it bring justice? Does it nourish the small society where it takes place? Are other approaches notably more violent?

2. “Naming the behavior” that is the problem is fairly straightforward unless it is your behavior. My guess is that happens roughly 50% of the time. One of the things you might consider in such a situation is to stop doing the things that cause the other person to behave that way.

3. “Naming the emotion you feel” is a rat’s nest of difficulties. First of all, it imagines that you feel only one emotion. I have been in situations where I felt I was on two or three trampolines at once. I feel a lot of emotions and then I feel emotions about why I feel so chaotically emotional. Naming “the” emotion at such a time is just not going to happen. And even if I could isolate just one, can I give it a name? Is there a name that fits it pretty well? Is there a name that fits the combination of the two principal emotions you are feeling pretty well? Three?

4. With the best will in the world, “naming the emotion” is difficult and I don’t always have the best will in the world and that is true, also, of a lot of people who are my very good friends. And if you don’t have a relentlessly charitable and honest character, there are other things that could happen when you get to naming the emotion. You might, for instance, be drawn to the name of an emotion that will do your antagonist the most damage. “I feel really angry when you…” might just roll of his back, but there is always the choice of “I feel so hurt when you…” if that will hit him harder. Choosing an emotion name for strategic reasons is not fair, of course, but naming an emotion is difficult and when you are irritated anyway, it will be hard to find the “correct” emotion name and to continue to walk past the name that will do the most good or the most harm.

5. A related difficulty—logically, it comes earlier in the sequence, but I postponed it so I could make a little context for it—is how sharply or how vividly you feel something. If “irked” doesn’t do the job, would “devastated” be better? I think it must be better, at least in some ways, because there is a great deal of training going on—both by precept and by example—about how to be more “hurt” by insensitivities than you once were, or how to be hurt by “insensitivities” that you would previously have passed by without noticing. It is also true and perhaps not incidental that by being hurt by some particular behavior gives you an instant peer group: people who were also hurt by that behavior. A magically appearing group of fellow sufferers feels really good.

6. I notice that we began, immediately, to talk about emotions—right after the behavior that produced the emotions. Why are we talking about emotions? Could we talk about intentions? “What was it you had in mind when you did that, Charlie? I don’t think I really understand it.” Could we talk about prior agreements? “As I remember it, we agreed that we would stay away from that topic on Friday afternoons. Remember what used to happen before that agreement?”

7. Talking about emotions usually means talking about MY emotions. Talking about my emotions is not always the best thing to do, but it is a reliable way to keep the conversation about ME Not everyone likes talking about the emotions he or she is feeling, but some people like it a lot. The danger in talking about ideas is that it may turn into a cooperative endeavor, with one perspective feeding another. The danger in talking about achievements or failures is that they cue up an assessment of doing something well or a critique of doing something poorly. There are ways that conversations about ideas and achievements can turn toxic as well, of course. It is not the unique property of emotional transactions that they alone can be highjacked by other people’s needs. “We’re Only Human After All,” says my wife from time to time.[1]

8. This article describes a system of communication that “works well for people.” What kind of people, I wonder, does it work well for? Are there people for whom it does not work very well, no matter how well it is done? I suspect there are. At a grieving time of my life, I ran across the work of Terry Martin and Kenneth Doka, who maintain that there are “instrumental” ways of dealing with grief and “intuitive” ways. They are not at all alike, but they both work if they fit the style of the person using them. What doesn’t work is for a person whose natural style is instrumental to be told that he or she really ought to be handling grief intuitively. I think NVC runs precisely this risk. It’s not a good style for everyone.

9. Finally, there is the curiously isolated feeling of these conversations. It is as if the behaviors in question and the emotions in question did not take a good deal of their meaning from what other people do and feel. When you complain about a behavior that hurt your feelings, it would be good if it were not a behavior that is widely accepted in that social setting. I know from my extensive reading of undistinguished books that there are gatherings where the men and women refer to each other as “bitch” and “bastard,” meaning nothing by it except a gratifying crudeness and camaraderie. I would move off to a different group, myself, but another response a woman might take would be to approach the next man who referred to her as a bitch and say that when he did that, she felt sad and small.

The behavior you are referring to, when you say you felt some particular emotion, really ought to be extraordinary. If it is “how we do things here,” the person whose feelings are hurt will have to find another way to proceed.[2] And raising the question of “how we do things here” introduces social norms and social agreements. One of the things that might be said about a behavior that has, as one effect, hurting someone’s feelings, is that it makes the workplace or the classroom or the living room a poorer or more unstable place. It may well have, in other words, bad social effects and it might be opposed just because it has those effects. If it does have those effects, you may not be the only person who sees them or the only person who wants them stopped.

I think I’ll stop here. I’m a political psychologist by training, but before that—long before that—I was interested in the way people use power. There has been, it seems to me, a breathtaking rise in the number of people whose feelings are hurt and who want to tell you what you can do differently so that they will not continue to be hurt. This response is so popular that it is crowding out a lot of other responses to ill-advised behavior, some of which work better.

[1] We don’t even say that anymore. We just say WOHAA.

[2] And that is, by the way, the process by which the manager of an office wound up with the responsibility to maintain a “climate” that was not notably racist or sexist or ageist. The people who found the office climate offensive made it the job of someone in particular to have a plan to do something about it. That change of strategies was not achieved by hurt feelings.

Posted in Living My Life, Political Psychology | Tagged blaming, hurt feelings, social norms | 6 Comments