How Not To Pick Your Art

Well, the blog restart seemed pretty short-lived, didn’t it? Sorry about that. I’ve had various distractions to deal with, and maybe A Secular Age is proving too much for me after all. So rather than wait till I’m ready to post about that again, I figured I’d go into something lighter. After all, my blog used to be about more than one thing!

Recently on Facebook, Eve Tushnet posted a link to her article on a book called The Artificial Silk Girl, with some basic comment like “I read The Artificial Silk Girl.” The first comment on it was from some reader who asked “Is it good?”

Of course, the obvious answer to that is READ THE DAMN REVIEW, but it’s also possible that the reader actually did read it but didn’t see a direct answer to the question. There’s no score, no grade, no commandment to run out and buy it. And I know from personal experience that a lot of people don’t have the patience for anything else. The comment, in fact, sent me hurtling back in time to the early 1990s, when I was working at a movie theater counter. If I had a dollar for every time a customer showed up and asked, “What’s that movie about? Is it good?” I would probably have been able to pay for grad school up front. It was an early lesson for me in how different other people’s consumer behavior is from my own, because it had never occurred to me before then to ask a random college student working at a movie theater to basically pick out my movie for me.

I guess some people may have misunderstood the business model of a movie theater — this was an upscale suburb, and maybe they were used to going to restaurants and clothing stores where the staff was specifically trained to help them choose what to buy. Believe me, that was not the case with us — we worked for minimum wage and knew no more about movies than the next person. But what really flummoxed me was how many people still seemed to believe that goodness is an objective fact about a movie, which could therefore be stated in one yes/no answer. I don’t think you need an education in postmodern theory to know about personal taste, and I also don’t think that recognizing it means throwing out artistic standards. The trouble is that a cultural canon takes quite a while to form — hence the cliche about great artists not being recognized in their time — so appealing to transcendent standards of Art isn’t really going to tell this person whether this newly released movie is a good way to spend a Saturday night.

A movie industry worker who goes by the pseudonym Film Crit Hulk has written some interesting articles on this subject, particularly one from last year called What Makes A Movie Good? It is, I admit, overly long and you have to get used to his gimmick (semi-imitating the voice of the Incredible Hulk), but I like his overall point that subjectivity of response isn’t a problem to be overcome in film viewing/discussion, but actually part of what makes it meaningful:

A LONG TIME AGO (WHEN HULK WAS A YOUNGER HULK), HULK USED TO GET PRETTY ANGRY WITH THE AMERICAN MOVIE-GOER.

HULK WOULD RAGE AGAINST THEIR STUPIDITY. “HOW COULD THEY LOVE TITANIC SO MUCH!?!?!?! L.A. CONFIDENTIAL IS ONE OF THE BEST MOVIES HULK HAS EVER SEEN! WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THEM?!?!? HULK SMAAAAAASH!!!!!” AND SO ON. HULK JUST WANTED TO IMPOSE THE WILL OF WHAT WAS LIKED AND NOT LIKED. HULK WANTED PEOPLE TO SEE THE PROVERBIAL LIGHT. HULK WANTED EVERYONE TO LIKE THE SAME KIND OF MOVIES AND SUPPORT THEM SO THAT THE INDUSTRY WOULD COME AROUND AND KEEP MAKING MORE OF THOSE GREAT MOVIES. AND WHEN HULK GOT TIRED OF SMASHING LIKE THIS? WHEN HULK GOT BEAT DOWN BY WHAT HULK PERCEIVED TO BE POOR TASTE? A FUNNY THING HAPPENED… HULK ACTUALLY LEARNED MORE ABOUT FILMMAKING MORE THAN HULK EVER THOUGHT POSSIBLE.

AND THAT’S BECAUSE HULK STOPPED JUDGING AND HULK STARTING LISTENING. WHEN PEOPLE LIKED A MOVIE HULK’S FIRST QUESTION BECAME: “WHY? WHAT DID YOU CONNECT WITH?” THIS IS NOT SOME CYNICAL APPROPRIATION OF BEING LIKE “HEY, WHAT ARE DEM KIDS INTO? LET’S MAKE MORE OF THOSE!” THIS WAS ABOUT CURIOSITY. AND IT WAS A CURIOSITY THAT HAD LITTLE TO DO WITH BUSINESS OR MARKETING OR ANY OF THE THINGS WE IDENTIFY WITH GENERAL AUDIENCE MOVIE INTEREST (ALTHOUGH BUSINESS/MARKETING OBVIOUSLY A FACTOR IN OUR OPENING WEEKEND-OBSESSED CULTURE). HULK SIMPLY TALKING ABOUT THE KIND OF MOVIES THAT RESONATE AND PEOPLE THINK ARE ACTUALLY GOOD. THE MOVIES THAT TEND TO DO WELL THROUGH THE WEEKS AND HAVE WORD OF MOUTH. THE MOVIES THAT INFECT THE CULTURE AND PEOPLE THINK ARE GOOD. YES, THAT DOES INCLUDE MOVIES LIKE TITANIC.

AND INVESTIGATING HOW PEOPLE (OTHER THAN HULK) ACTUALLY WATCHED MOVIES, IT SUDDENLY SET HULK DOWN THE PATH OF ACTUAL UNDERSTANDING. ALL THOSE CONCEPTS HULK KNEW ABOUT SUDDENLY MADE MORE SENSE THAN EVER: CONFLICT. DRAMA. EMPATHY. THE BASICS AND HEART OF CONVENTIONAL STORYTELLING. AGAIN, THIS ISN’T SOME CYNICAL APPROPRIATION OF THESE DEVICES. IF ANYTHING, IT SEEMED THE KINDS OF MOVIES THAT SUCCEEDED ONLY CONFIRMED THAT THIS HUMANE UNDERSTANDING OF STORY AND THE PURPOSE OF ART HAD TO BE GENUINE. SINCERE MOVIES PLAYED BETTER THAN ANYTHING.

Listening is, I think, what people are trying to circumvent when they ask, “Is it good?” Because as Hulk indicates here, listening doesn’t just mean trying to understand other people’s headspace, it means trying to understand our own. That is, when you listen this way you come to see that your love for your favorite movies doesn’t just reveal your excellent taste (because those movies are objectively good), but reveals something about who you are and where you’re coming from. And only when you have that self-awareness are you really going to be very good at guessing which unseen movies you’re going to enjoy.

Because even a lot of experienced filmgoers don’t understand why they reacted to movies the way the did. Elsewhere in the essay Hulk mentions that people keep getting distracted by the “tangible details” of movies, and I certainly experienced that one too. I remember when people used to ask about one movie that was playing at our theater, Muriel’s Wedding, a colleague would respond by asking, “Do you like ABBA?” Now, I saw Muriel’s Wedding and I can see how if you absolutely hate ABBA that would be a problem, but otherwise that doesn’t have much to do with whether you’d enjoy the movie — the heroine’s favorite band could just as well have been someone else, and nothing would have changed. More recently, I remember trying to convince a friend that just because he liked Shakespeare in Love didn’t mean he was going to like Anonymous, because the two movies have nothing in common except that they both have to do with the creation of Shakespeare’s plays. (He saw it anyway, and still sounded befuddled as to why he didn’t like it as much.)

So actually, it can take a long acquaintance to be able to guess whether a person is going to like a particular movie/book/whatever. I’m still frequently surprised by Eve, and we’ve been talking and blogging about this stuff for ten years. And I’m still sometimes surprised by myself, even though the acquaintance is far longer.

'This isn't like going to Earth, where you summon a little lightning and thunder and the mortals worship you as a god!'

I've recently been laid up at home with a broken toe, comforting myself by rewatching some of the recent Marvel Comics movies on Netflix, and got to thinking about the popularity of the Chariots of the Gods hypothesis. You know, where the ancient pagan gods were actually aliens. Marvel used it as the premise for the Thor franchise, and it's also turned up in Star Trek, Prometheus, and a the most recent Indiana Jones movie, just to name a few off the top of my head.

I think it's so popular because modern Westerners, whether Christian or materialist, don't believe those gods really exist, but it seems rather strange and unsatisfying to say that they were just plain made up. They were so universally believed in, and while each pantheon was different they were similar enough that pagans seemed to readily identify their own gods with those of others. The idea that they were aliens, despite its total lack of scientific or historical support, provides an appealing way to honor the old stories without swallowing them whole.

But after reading Charles Taylor's description of paganism in A Secular Age, I'm even less inclined to think it's true. The image of gods as aliens fits with the modern view of gods, gods as 'extras,' beings who intrude upon a mechanically functioning universe with extraordinary, miraculous events. Paganism, though, was more about the day-to-day realities. Even if some ancient version of Marvel's Thor did show up and summon a little thunder and lightning for the frightened mortals, I don't think they would have assumed him responsible for all thunder and lightning unless they had some notion of a thunder-god already.

I'm no expert, but I can't help thinking that our image of ancient paganism has been distorted by the fact that the main thing that we know about it is the wild stories. So we all know about how Zeus impregnated Leda disguised as a swan, but only the specialists know anything about how Zeus was habitually worshipped. However, I suspect that the ancient priorities were different, and one clue to this is how they identified each other's gods. Take Odin the king of the Norse gods, for instance. Sounds like Jupiter, right? But actually, Jupiter was identified with Thor, while Odin was identified with Mercury the god of commerce. It doesn't really make sense unless you consider their points of interface with humanity. Jupiter and Thor were both creators of storms, while Odin and Mercury were both psychopomps, who escorted the souls of the dying to the next world. Their mythical personalities and relationships seem to have been less important than those tangible roles in human life.

I suspect that the Chariots of the Gods theory is also based on the modern idea that the heart of religion is believing that certain things happened for which you have no proof. That is obviously influenced by Christianity, in that belief in the events described in the New Testament forms the basis of the whole religion (especially for Protestants, since they are so Bible-focused). But here, too, the point of interface between God and humanity is the key; it's just unusual in that it's so focused on one point of interface, one that grows more distant from us as time goes on. Describing the revolt against sacraments in the late Middle Ages, the Catholic Taylor injects a bit of editorializing when he suggests that maybe, even if God isn't "magic," he might distribute his power through sacraments and rituals to allow for the fact that we are embodied beings and not just creatures of pure, ethereal faith in things not seen. Maybe so.

A Secular Age Part 4: The Disciplinary Society

In my last entry on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, I described how in the late Middle Ages a theory arose in which the natural world is a sort of machine that God controls for his ultimate purposes. As always, the concept of the natural order was echoed in the concept of the social order:

Living a godly life in this world is something very different from living in the order Aristotelian Cosmos of Aquinas, or the hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius. It is no longer a matter of admiring a normative order, in which God has revealed himself through signs and symbols. We rather have to inhabit it as agents of instrumental reason, working the system effectively in order to bring about God’s purposes, because it is through these purposes, not through signs, that God reveals himself to the world. These are not just two different stances, but two incompatible ones.

It’s here that we get the beginning of a view of society that we modern Westerners probably take totally for granted: that it’s something to be constantly reformed and re-engineered toward a never-achieved ideal of justice and order. In my first post in this series I wrote about how strange it was to try and mentally inhabit a world where communities don’t really need to have a purpose to exist, but that appeared to be the attitude of most of the ancients. They lived primarily in families, after all, and families are what you live in when you don’t consciously leave and do something else (especially if you live in a society without institutions like schools and corporations that suck you away from the nest). But once Protestants — especially Calvinists — gained positions of power, they started to act on the idea that society could be reworked to be made more godly.

Some of the changes they brought are the classic anti-fun ones we tend to associate with Calvinists: no dancing, no prostitution, no Carnivals or feasts of misrule. But some other changes are still with us, and indeed taken completely for granted.

One of the most interesting changes, to me, was in the attitude towards poverty. According to Taylor, in the Middle Ages the rich looked down on the poor just like always, but this was counterbalanced by a sense of Christian sanctity about poverty. It was voluntarily taken on by the holiest members of society, and even the involuntary poor were seen as occasions for sanctification, as the wealthier folks took to the biblical maxim that giving to them was giving to Christ.

But the Protestants, both in the interests of social reform and in the rejection of separate classes of vowed religious, came to see poverty the way pretty much everyone does now: as a social problem in need of a solution. This brought with it the famous ‘Protestant work ethic,’ which in Taylor’s view was a double-edged sword for the poor themselves. On the one hand, it made improvement in their condition thinkable. On the other hand, it put pressure on the poor to go along with whatever agenda for their improvement their leaders had come up with, thus creating the inevitable division between the ‘good’ poor and the ‘bad’ poor. Voluntary poverty, far from leading to holiness, could get you shipped to the workhouse. (Taylor notes in passing that madness underwent a very similar change in social position, leading eventually to the horrors of Bedlam.)

Another hugely significant shift that endures is the lowered tolerance for interpersonal violence. The medieval noblemen comprised a warrior class who were regularly embroiled in brawls, vendettas, and feuds, so they didn’t hugely care if their subjects did the same, so long as it didn’t get in their way. But toward the end of the Middle Ages, Taylor suggests, violence started to reach critical levels, partly due to the religious disputes themselves, and also because of various social and economic dislocations of the time. Couple that with the Calvinist ‘rage for order’ and the rise of the merchants and bureaucrats at the expense of warrior-nobles, and the idea begins to take shape that the government’s primary job is to keep domestic peace.

Although Protestant governments adopted this most strongly, Taylor says many traditional Catholic monarchs such as the kings of France also adopted these reforms when they realized how useful they were. The Protestant work ethic was helping to make whole countries richer, which meant more money for the treasury as well as more disciplined armed forces. Only Spain, in reactionary Catholic mode at that point, resisted the new order.

But government policy alone can’t make order from chaos. The view of the individual self was also changing in parallel with the changing view of the natural world: no longer the helpless ‘porous’ self, the haunt of spirits and magic, but the self that rules its own animal nature like the Calvinist God rules the universe. Taylor writes that this was influenced not only by Christian movements but by a revived version of Stoicism, the old Greco-Roman philosophy that put a premium on overcoming the passions.

There’s an interesting little paradox in here that I noticed. Taylor describes how, on the one hand, the rejection of traditional Catholic asceticism and religious stratification brought a more positive view of the physical world, so that it became a form of devotion to examine and admire nature as such, instead of just looking to it for religious symbolism as the mystics tended to do. On the other hand, the ‘rage for order’ meant seeing nature as something barbaric and gross that must be suppressed by civilization. There is thus a sharp divergence of nature and morality that — again — everybody nowadays just seems to take for granted. I remember in some of my many past discussions about natural evil on this blog and elsewhere, some Christians were just baffled by the idea that nature should have moral meaning at all; ethics are only for sentient creatures who can choose between good and evil, and therefore there’s something inherently unnatural about them.

This is, I think, why that whole medieval concept of universals I tried to describe in Part 2 seems so strange. The universals are both real things and normative things, and the human will is less an agent of superior morality than a disruptive force, threatening to carry you away on your doomed individual path. Granted, I might be reading a bit of Bhagavad Gita into this, but that’s how I see it. However, if nature is no longer an imperfect instantiation of universal forms, but simply what is, then we have a problem that would eventually lead to arguments with God himself. The nature documentarian David Attenborough once explained his agnosticism this way:

“…when Creationists talk about God creating every individual species as a separate act, they always instance hummingbirds, or orchids, sunflowers and beautiful things. But I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, [a worm] that’s going to make him blind. And [I ask them], ‘Are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child’s eyeball? Because that doesn’t seem to me to coincide with a God who’s full of mercy’.”

And yet Attenborough — like so many who take that view — also loves nature, so much that he’s spent his life studying it, camping out in it and telling the world about it. This is not a Manichean rejection of the material world as evil; it is, I think, an expression of the persistent division within the Western soul, wondering at the natural world even in its violence (maybe especially in its violence, going by the popularity of Shark Week), while at the same time finding it ethically appalling.

And yet I would still say that our conceptions of the natural world and the social world continue to mirror each other. That, however, is a subject for a later post.

A Secular Age Part 3: Nature's God

In my last post on Charles Taylor's magnum opus A Secular Age, I described how Protestants rejected a "magical" understanding of the Church's sacraments and rituals by asserting a purer monotheistic vision of a God who is above the forces of nature. This eventually resulted in the modern mechanistic view of nature, which runs so smoothly by itself that God can seem superfluous. But it took a few more steps to get there, since, Taylor argues, the original impetus for this move wasn't debunking but devotional.

Comprehending the shift requires understanding pagan European philosophies of nature in a bit more detail. As I said earlier, pagans tend to see natural forces and objects as inhabited by consciousness; but apart from such directly experienced aspects of nature, the spirit world was inhabited by what Jung called archetypes. The gods personify certain abstract qualities of human life: love, war, beauty, wisdom, male, female, youth, old age, and so on. Of course, belief in such gods was discouraged once Christianity came along. But among the literate classes at least, a more highbrow philosophical version survived through Christians adopting the classical Greek concept of universals.

Here I admit that my lack of philosophical education will probably make me screw something up, so I cede the floor to David Opderbeck:

Philosophically, the question relates to whether “universal” substances exist apart from their particular instantiations (“universals”), or whether substances are merely names for particular instances of things (“nominalism”).

Consider an apple.  What is an apple?  Is this particular apple on my kitchen table one instantiation of the substance “apple” – a substance with some sort of universal metaphysical  (“beyond-“ or “above-“ physical) properties that are shared by all apples?  Or is “apple” simply a name I apply to this object before me as a result of some observable similarities with other objects (other things we also call “apple”) that have no metaphysical connection to the “apple” on my table?

For many who claim a modern scientific worldview, there are only particular objects called “apple,” which are more or less related to other particular objects in morphology and chemical composition, all of which are categorized as “apples” for the sake of convenience.  What is “real,” in this view, is merely chemistry and physical laws, not any substance “apple.”  In contrast, for those who believe in universal properties, “apple” implies properties that are real and transcendent of any one apple.

Opderbeck and Taylor both point to 13th-century thinker William of Occam as the prime example of the shift to the modern view, called nominalism, and it was driven by a concern for God's sovereignty. As Taylor says: "The Aristotelian notion of nature seems to define for each thing its natural perfection, its proper good. This would be independent of God's will, except that he it is who created the thing thus. But once created, it would appear that God cannot further redefine what the good is for that thing." Nominalism, on the other hand, sees things as instruments of God's will, as interlocking parts in his ongoing project.

That at first might not sound very scientific. This is the God of Intelligent Design, the God of the purpose-driven life, and (much to Opderbeck's annoyance) the God that a great many American conservative Protestants believe in. But nominalism also did something extremely necessary in the move toward modern science, in that it turned the material world into inert "stuff," whose meaning and purpose comes only from the intelligence who created it and uses it. Nature is no longer archetypal, but instrumental.

This discussion was rather difficult for me to follow, but if I understand it right it does help to clarify the difference between "purpose" as understood in, say, Thomas Aquinas and other Natural Law theorists, and "purpose" in modern scientific thinking. I mean, while it's true that some will say that purposelessness is the defining characteristic of scientific materialism, on the other hand the narrative of cause and effect does make it possible for, say, a scientist to agree that sex is "for" reproduction. What's lacking is the inherent connection between the general purpose and every particular instance, and along with it  the connection between form and function. So, for instance, conception achieved in a lab instead of in a woman's body equally well achieves the purpose of reproduction; conversely, if you cancel the reproductive purpose of sex through birth control or sodomy, and use it for your own emotional fulfillment, then that becomes the purpose of that particular sex act just as surely as reproduction is in another case. The idea of universals, by contrast, seems to say that only reproductive sex is the universal form, and while you may more or less tolerate deviance in individual instances, those deviations can never really participate in the universal.

This, I think, pretty well explains how the culture war has gone. Because if I have trouble wrapping my head around universals -- and I am both attracted to mythopoetic thinking and kind of a prude -- then it's going to be pretty well impossible for someone with more skin in the game, like a partnered gay person. Because we moderns live in a completely instrumental world. I mean, the archetypes are nice in theory, but I have no idea how to actually live as both a woman and as an instance of Woman. Without a sense of the reality of the universal, this idea simply turns into a pile of pointless restrictions: you can't do this or that because you're a girl.

Even the conservative side of the argument tends to think instrumentally: traditional marriage and family are good for society because statistically children are better off in this way and that. But as Eve pointed out a while ago, statistics can't entirely resolve our moral problems -- in part because we have to decide beforehand just what purpose we're using them for.

But anyway, long before these culture-war arguments broke out, the shift towards nominalism was changing society. The next post will look at how that began to play out.

A Secular Age Part 2: The Revolt Against Magic

So the first post in this series brought us up to the Middle Ages, with an entrenched social division between the Christian “virtuosi” and the other folks who were still going about their worldly business, participating in the Christian life more indirectly by supporting the Church, taking the sacraments, and praying to saints, often embodied in holy relics. Taylor writes that this sort of social arrangement was common throughout Christendom, and indeed everywhere that the more otherworldly religions had become established, such as Platonism and Buddhism. But, the late medieval era in western Europe was distinguished by people being bothered by it.

Here Taylor (who is Catholic) differs somewhat from the Protestant version of history that I learned, in that he sees this concern about religious inequality coming as much from the elite as from below. He admits that he doesn’t know exactly why they were so concerned about it at that time, but offers a few plausible theories. For one, even the 1200s were beginning to see the appearance of new elites, alongside the old landed aristocrats, who would come to define modernity: the merchants, the scholars, the bureaucrats, and so on. They were, in other words, early meritocrats, so I suppose it’s not surprising they’d be bothered by a gap between standards and practice. Another point Taylor makes is that, while Christianity in its eastern Mediterranean homeland had a chance to spread as a grassroots movement before it became a state religion, those in the Germanic world adopted it much later — Sweden didn’t officially go Christian until the 1100s — and often at the fiat of a king. So Taylor suggests that the peasants in these regions were still pagan in many ways.

In Taylor’s view, the peasants basically absorbed Christianity into their worldview by seeing the Church as a source of beneficial magic. In some ways this was not hard, because of medieval Catholicism’s use of rituals, sacred objects, and pilgrimages, which fits paganism’s view that certain places and things are “charged” with magical power. However, due to the worldly concerns of paganism that I mentioned in the last post, the way people tended to interpret “beneficial” was “beneficial to me and my kin in some practical way.” So we have reports of people taking home the eucharist and trying to use it as a love charm, or saying a funeral Mass for someone who’s still alive, in the hopes it would make him die.

The reformers at the time — which included wandering freelance preachers as well as some actual church officials — tried to counter such behavior by emphasizing the transience of those worldly concerns in the face of eternity. In time, according to Taylor, this turned into a kind of obsession with death. Apparently this era sees the birth of the evangelism tactic we all love to hate: “If you died tonight, would you go to heaven?” Which was a change in practice not just because of its emphasis on fear, but because of the whole idea that when you die you’ll face immediate judgment. This was, actually, something I’ve always wondered about, because it seems to take away the whole point of the Last Judgment that the Bible spends so much time on. And indeed, Taylor writes that in the first millennium of Christianity, once the idea of an immediate apocalypse faded, the Last Judgment was basically tacked onto the end of the existing popular view of the afterlife, where the soul separates from the body and persists as a kind of shadow.

The new emphasis on instant judgment scared people not only on their own behalf, but also on behalf of loved ones already dead. Taylor writes that the conflict over the sale of indulgences for souls in purgatory, which was such a hot issue in the Reformation, was set up by the public’s rising fears about the departed’s suffering and corresponding sense of responsibility. But the people’s rising sense of their own sinfulness also scared them away from the more earthly manifestations of God. Taylor points out that another feature of the pagan view of magic is that even when it’s beneficial it can be sort of dangerous to work with, like electricity. With God’s moral judgment so at odds with their own desires, many common folk started avoiding sacraments altogether, even communion, for fear that contact between God’s magic and their own wickedness would make something bad happen.

But one lesson that Taylor draws from this — which I can always get behind — is that if you scare people too much, you’re setting yourself up for a backlash. Thus, even before the Protestant movement as such got going, some late-medieval heretic groups such as the Waldensians were challenging the idea that the sacraments and relics actually had powers at all. They did this basically by invoking the purity of monotheism, and claiming God’s power over and above all magic, unconstrained by particular places, times, and things. Martin Luther, for one, believed in sacraments, but you can see how his doctrine of justification by grace alone, through faith alone, answered the overriding concerns of the time. Essentially, it assured the fearful masses that God’s grace was not a magical energy force, but an act of forgiveness and love, and to be a Christian is simply to believe in that. In this way, God’s action moves from ‘out there’ to inside a person’s soul — a first step toward the buffered self.

But it’s not like anyone back then was going to instantly displace the enchanted world with a modern mechanical one, because such an theory of nature didn’t exist. This emerges in Taylor’s answer to a question all this raised in my mind: if one of the key features of Protestantism was demystification of magic, why did Protestants participate in the witch-hunting craze that broke out at that time? Taylor suggests that came from the developing view that since the Church was no longer a source of ‘white magic’, all magic was black — the work of Satan, whom all the reformers definitely believed in. And actually, when I think about it I can imagine how depriving the populace of white magic could in its own way lead to paranoia. In societies nowadays where witchcraft is practiced, the way to fight magic is with magic: if you think someone’s hexed you, you go to the local sorcerer to figure out how to undo it — and perhaps cook up a revenge hex of your own. If Christians now believed they couldn’t do that, but still believed they could get hexed, it’s not all that surprising they tried to violently stamp out witchcraft altogether.

The actual development of a mechanical worldview in which magic is totally ineffectual would take much longer. And that is the subject of the next post.

A Secular Age: Part 1

Yes, I’m still alive! After a stretch of physical therapy and a regime of regular exercise, I feel ready to at least try the blogging thing again. Because it still seems like the best medium for discussing Serious Books. And I’ve been reading a doozy.

Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age is one of those books to which it seems apt to apply the aphorism created for A Brief History Of Time: “Millions bought it, and thousands finished it.” Only in this case, I expect that both numbers are a lot smaller. But anyway, way back in April 2008 I mentioned to Russell Arben Fox that I was in the first chapter of the book. And so I remained, for quite a while. But now, after my third attempt, I’m in the fourth chapter! And so I blog.

So yeah, Taylor isn’t the world’s most page-turning writer. But I keep going because his subject is so interesting, and so huge: why did the modern West, of all places and times, bring the birth of secularism? And a sub-question, of particular interest to me: how did the world become disenchanted? I mean, we all know that at some point in the last few hundred years a whole lot of people stopped believing in fairies, witches, demons and so on, and this made it a whole lot more difficult to believe in God. But how and why did that happen? Obviously scientific discovery was a factor, but you have to be in a certain frame of mind to be looking for those discoveries and interpreting them in that way. And this is what Taylor attempts to explain.

To set things up, however, Taylor does a remarkable job of describing the “enchanted world” of ancient pagans and how it was different from ours — both on the societal level and on the level of individual consciousness. As he puts it, to live in the enchanted world is to live with a “porous self,” in which experiences that we attribute entirely to the brain could originate elsewhere in the body or come from outside the body entirely. This does not just refer to the experiences that we would now call hallucinations or mental illness, but emotions, meanings, and morals. So if you fall in love, for instance, that is a personal experience of yours, but it also means you’ve come under the aegis of Aphrodite, or some similar being.

In contrast to this, Taylor defines the modern self as a “buffered” self, a relatively detached consciousness in a world of inert matter. Even with the advent of modern neurology, there’s still a notion that the “self” is in some private untouchable place; as Taylor points out, someone who’s told that they’re depressed because of a neurochemical imbalance can distance themselves from the experience, and say “it’s not really me.” By contrast, an ancient person might have been told that he has an excess of black bile, but that doesn’t somehow separate it from his consciousness; black bile was not just seen as a cause of melancholy but melancholy itself, unmediated.

In one way, this is all very weird; but in another way most of us know it if we remember back far enough. Children naturally tend toward the enchanted world, a fact which adults regard with a mixture of nostalgia and contempt. So parents read fairy tales to their children and tell them about Santa Claus, but then tell them that these things are make-believe and make-believe things don’t count in this world. More subtly, those experiences that might seem to come from spirits — dreams, artistic inspiration, flashes of insights, sudden uncontrollable emotions — are rounded up and put into the domain of the mind, and thus become the responsibility of the conscious will. The dismissal of the enchanted world as juvenile is, according to Taylor, a large part of how we enforce modern thinking.

But in the days when people grew to adulthood and elderhood in the enchanted world, this way of thinking had profound effects on how they viewed society and nature. One important thing to realize here is that all these spirits and gods, which we call supernatural, actually were considered nature by pagans. Spirits were just what made nature run, and they had their own interests and desires that could be in conflict with human beings or with each other. And for the ancient pagan, nature was the all in all and couldn’t be escaped from, merely adapted to. By the same token, a person’s goals were very natural and worldly: health, prosperity, honor, sex and so on.

It’s when this is translated to the social and political realm that the modern brain really needs to stretch itself — or at least mine did. Because in the modern way of thinking, any time people come together — whether as a family, a social clique, a business, a church, a political unit, or whatever — it seems to require some purpose. It may be a purpose as frivolous as having a good time on a Saturday night, but it may be as grave as ensuring the well-being of millions of people. Either way, though, there is this assumption that the structure and roles within the group are geared toward some purpose — and if something else works better for that purpose, feel free to rearrange.

However, the ancients mostly saw human community not as instrumental, but natural. Of course, nowadays when someone talks about a “natural order of society” it usually prefaces some dubious theory about evolutionary psychology and genes. But the ancients didn’t think in biology either. The analogy Taylor makes is that society was thought of as a kind of organism unto itself, which like other organisms, has a state of being “healthy” from which deviation is “sick.” And thus it is evaluated not by looking forwards towards a goal, but by comparing the state of things to an archetypal “form.” Yet to say that keeping to the forms is entirely a matter of human will would also be thinking too much like a buffered self; according to Taylor, forms were thought of as growing into maturity just like organisms. Thus humans defied them at their own peril.

The basic shape of pagan society is what Taylor calls “hierarchical complementarity.” And here some might object that he’s painting with an overly broad brush. After all, there was, and is, a great range in the amount of hierarchy found in pagan societies — from the god-kings of Egypt to the democracy of Athens to a great many independent clans that had no government at all. But I would say, in my capacity as an amateur student of anthropology, that even the most egalitarian pagan societies don’t think of equality in terms of modern Western legal and moral equality, which is ultimately about interchangeability — everyone has the same rights regardless of their particulars. Think about how many discussions of fairness involve counterfactual swaps, e.g., “Would you say the same if that happened to your daughter? If you switched the races/genders? If you’d been born in the time/place that that person was?” Instead, everyone in every kind of ancient society was embedded in a family, a clan, and thus their identities and moral duties were defined by their particular relationships with those particular people. And this itself made them vulnerable to some particular forms of hierarchy, which some ancient societies took to the nth degree.

One primordial source of authority was age. Even if you’re living in a simple hunter-gatherer clan, you know that state of dependence on your parents and other older relations. And even when you grow up, the elders have wisdom and knowledge and experience over you (and are also “libraries” in non-literate societies). And — here is where the enchanted world comes in again — that respect for your elders doesn’t have to end just because they die. Shamans the world over have made it their business to communicate with ancestors, and regular folks frequently have rituals to honor, placate, or care for them. It’s not uncommon for dead ancestors, especially if they distinguished themselves in life, to be thought of as gaining supernatural powers in the next world, and thus becoming godlike. Officially, this was what the Roman imperial cult was about: and emperor could only be deified after his death, though some regarded this as a license to act like gods while they were alive.

However, if we can’t understand pagan relationships by limiting them to the living, we also can’t understand them by limiting them to the human. As I said earlier, the ancients saw nature as a realm of sentient spirits, some of them very very powerful. So some ancient rulers clothed themselves in the authority of these nature gods. The most obvious example of this is the pharaohs of Egypt, who associated themselves with the sun god, and participated daily in rituals that were believed to ensure the annual flooding of the Nile and other natural events that Egyptians depended on.

In the first millennium B.C., however, religions and philosophies started to spring up that challenged this view of the natural/social order. For our purposes, let’s just focus on the obvious one. The strict monotheism of the Jews challenged the powers of god-kings, as we see in Yahweh’s showdowns with Pharaoh and Baal. But this isn’t just a case of two tribal gods duking it out. Yahweh wasn’t a god representing a natural phenomenon, a god “of” something or other. He was a god above all those things, who used nature as his instrument. This would turn out to be very important in the secular age, as we shall see.

Christianity, when it came along, questioned the natural order even more radically, by saying that the apparently eternal order of nature isn’t actually God’s ultimate plan. Jesus talked on and on about how this order was going to be turned upside down, and what looked like human flourishing was actually the opposite. So love your enemies, lose your life so you might gain it, the humble shall be exalted, don’t worry about tomorrow, don’t save money. After Jesus rose from the dead, Paul concluded that death was not, in fact, an integral part of nature but an evil that had been conquered.

Needless to say, the near-term apocalypse that a lot of early Christians seemed to be expecting didn’t happen. Instead they found themselves in the place where Christians still live today, in an age when the kingdom of the world and the kingdom of God coexist. And even more needless to say, the amount of faith required to live in the kingdom of God when the kingdom of the world is so real and immediate is beyond the grasp of a lot of people, a lot of the time. Thus a bifurcation formed between what Taylor calls the religious “virtuosi” — the saints, monastics, hermits and others who gave everything up for Christ — and the ordinary folks who were in it because it seemed like the way to get along or get ahead. And so the church eventually was absorbed into the very hierarchical complementarity that it challenged. “From the beginning, mankind has been divided into three parts,  among men of prayer, farmers, and men of war,” wrote Gerard of Cambrai in the 11th century, describing the three-part harmony of medieval society.

However, it wasn’t long after he wrote those words that it all started to unravel. That will be the subject of the next post.

And as it turns out, Telford ain't the only one moving

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Transitions

I apologize to those of you who've gotten interested in the historical-Jesus discussion, that it's going so slow. I've come down with a cold and have had a hard time concentrating lately, while the Westmont server seems to have gone down and taken Telford's blog with it. Before it disappeared, though, the blog announced the happy news that Telford found a house. Which will also slow down the discussion since he'll be so busy, but it's a relief for Telford.

He's been looking for a few months, ever since he found out Westmont was going to rehire him (this time on a tenure track). It's tough enough to find a house in Santa Barbara, which is one of the most expensive places in the country, but Telford's task was made harder by the size of his family. It occurred to me when I heard him talking about this, that one thing that's hard about having a lot of kids in modern American society is that our shrinking fertility rates have upped the expectations for how children should live, especially in terms of how much space they have. I remember in the movie My Left Foot, the first half of which was set in an enormous working-class Irish family, the brothers and sisters squeezed together in communal beds by sleeping head-to-foot, and kept those arrangements until they were old enough to leave home. Nowadays we tend to think there's something vaguely incestuous about a brother and sister even sharing a room. Yet throughout human history, the movie's image of family life was probably more normal than what I grew up in. (And as I pointed out in an earlier post, having relatives in your face all the time may be precisely what de-eroticizes them.)

When my family moved to California, when I was three, we bought our four-bedroom house from a very large family. The oldest daughter lived in the little bedroom that was to become mine; two brothers lived in the larger bedroom next to it, that would be my sister's; and two more kids lived in the downstairs bedroom (I forget the gender). When we showed up, they'd just had another baby, and decided they needed a new house.

With just two kids in the house, we had a lot of room. This was even more so because there was a field out back that actually belonged to a neighbor, but he wasn't doing anything with it, so he let us run around there. Since we lived in a pretty well built-up suburb, half a mile from the freeway, it was nice having that patch of nature. There was a stretch of meadow grass where we'd play; farther from the house, where there must have been an underground water source, there was a bramble of blackberries and a quince tree that must have been planted for some long-abandoned garden, but that still fruited. There was also patch of wild fennel, which the local kids called "Indian chewing gum" because when the stalks dried out you could peel off the hard skin and get a soft chewable core. It didn't taste very good, but when you're a kid there's an odd thrill to finding a source of something that isn't through your parents.

When we got older, new residents in the house tried different things with the field. First there was a terraced garden; then when I was in my teens, they fenced it off and raised sheep there. Now, as I said this was a built-up 'burb, with no agriculture for miles around, so it was always entertaining when visitors to the house would suddenly hear a "Baa-a-a-a." They would stop with the expression of someone who thinks they must be hallucinating, and say something like, "Did I just hear ... something like a ... sheep?"

There was quite a bit of animal life in the area. There were deer that aggravated my mother and me by munching on the garden. There were stray tomcats who managed to impregnate both our female cats before we could spay them. I watched the birth of one set of kittens; as you can imagine, it was quite fascinating to a six-year-old girl. I still flash back to those images, when I think of what birth is like. It wasn't much like a human birth, but it's still the only one I've seen in the flesh.

That house carved so much of my mental landscape, it's hard for me to imagine growing up moving around the way the Work children have. This is something like their fourth house in the last six years. But I guess that, whether in Pasadena or Santa Barbara, four to a bed or one to a room, children always adapt somehow.

For goodness' sake

T.S. O'Rama wrote me an email in response to my remark here that when I read about God in the Bible, he doesn't always seem especially good. He writes:

Here's my 2 cents: Part of the difficulty is that the bible wasn't written for us. It was written for all times, for all peoples - including the people *at that time*. So the Old Testament necessarily had to be written in a way that would instruct and help people who had not a clue scientifically or morally, while preserving a kernel of truth (the important part) for all generations. God colors with crayon until he can paint with oils.

For example, if I am a caveman who rapes every woman I see and don't know any better, then if you are God you'd probably get across the idea of respect for God first (so I'll listen) then respect for women second (so I'll understand why raping is bad) and finally I go down the "monogamy only" path (i.e. faithfulness and exclusivity). But the latter comes later. First you'd get the respect idea down. People who are cruel only understand cruelty.

The bible may, in some places, induce head-scratching. But fortunately there are parts (especially at the end) that display total love for us, like the idea that God would come down as a man and die for us. Here's a quote I came across that unfortunately I cut & pasted but don't know who said it:

"I do not understand suffering - but I know it is real. But a God who is in any way responsible for this terror of our lives, such a God must be terrible, a Molech consuming the children we love in contempt for any individual's striving and selfhood. But that is not the God revealed in the history of Israel and in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, a man whose life is written to echo the history of his people. Our God shows that he is with us - Emmanuel - in the slime of life, in the pain of life, in the joys of life, and in our death. I still do not know why people should die meaningless deaths, but because God is with us, he can look me in the face and I will not turn away in disgust. This story is so powerful that its symbols grip me absolutely. If all the details are wrong or ahistorical, the story itself remains true. Perhaps it is a dream, although I think not, but the story of Christmas is that life has meaning, humanity is worthwhile, and ultimately "all will be well, and all will be well, and all things will be well".

I've been around this a zillion times with Telford (to the point where he's heartily sick of it), but I'll say again what I've said to him: this would all be a lot easier to believe if I didn't have to believe Yahweh is the omnipotent creator. It would be easier if I didn't have to believe in an omnipotent creator at all. If somebody said there's a powerful but limited force for good in the universe that's doing what it can, that might excuse certain klutzy moves it makes along the way. But that's not the argument Christianity makes.

This reminds me of Joel Gazis-Sax's interesting post on Zoroastrianism. I don't know a whole lot about the faith, but what I know agrees with what he says. In that scheme, there is a good, but non-omnipotent god who is constantly at war with an evil one. It has heaven and hell, and an apocalyptic end-times scenario similar to Revelation (some think Zoroastrianism influenced Revelation, but that's another story), but with a rather different spin on them:

Zoroastrians believe that we have two linked souls, one which animates our earthly body and another which remains in Heaven with God (Ahura Mazda) at all times. This heavenly soul never becomes corrupted. But Ahriman, who can be called Satan if you please, can and does work to pollute the earthly soul. When he succeeds, he gets to drag you down to Hell. But not for eternity.

Hell resembles Christian Purgatory, but with a lot more pain and suffering. Good deeds performed during your lifetime help to ameliorate your pain. Once you have been cleansed, Ahriman has no more hold over you. Your earthly soul reunites with your heavenly one and you are with God...

I'm not about to convert to any religion, but if you've got to have one that demands an unequivocal belief in good and evil, Zoroastrianism's formula solves a lot of questions. God doesn't cause suffering: Satan does. In the struggle between Good and Evil, though Satan makes advances, he can never completely win. God will reclaim all that is good and beautiful after a period of purification. No one is damned for all time because God loves us. We suffer in hell so that all that is Satanic in us can be removed. In the end, we all join God in Paradise. Zoroastrians don't fret about the behavior of others: they labor to perfect themselves.

Christians, Jews, and Muslims, it seems have corrupted these ideas, largely I think for political reasons. When Satan's role changed to resemble that of Ahriman more, these other religions failed to incorporate compassion for the suffering soul here on earth completely. Therein, I think, is the root of the contradictions which drive so many of us mad. The critic of the Levantine religions asks "If God is Good, why does He allow evil to flourish in this world?" And it's a good question, one for which the answers I have heard are halting, selfish, and unconvincing. The Zoroastrian replies "God does not cause the evil in the world. Satan does. God can win, but He needs your help. Work hard on your own soul."

I find that empowering.

I tend to agree. I'm comfortable enough speaking the language of good and evil, but the Zoroastrian version makes more sense to me than the Christian version. It would be interesting to talk to a Zoroastrian one of these days, but sadly, there aren't a lot of them left.

Yearning to breathe free

Recently I got around to reading Freedom House's latest report on the state of freedom in the world. In the essay prefacing the data, the house points out that the news is mostly good. The authors say a "third wave" of democratization began in the 1970s, and continues today. (So, you poli-sci wonks out there: what were the first two?)

The report gives some attention to the regional trends, especially the fact that the "wave" so far hasn't hit the Middle East. There's been no general improvement in the freedom ratings there in 30 years. A lot of ink has been spilled about why that's so, and I'm not going to try to add to it.

Also interesting when you look at the data is the fate of the post-Communist world. As FH noted in its Nations in Transit report, a split seems to be developing between the western and eastern parts of the former Soviet bloc. The nations of eastern Europe, as well as the Baltic states, have mostly succeeded in democratizing. (The exception has been the Balkans, but even there it seems to be happening now that the war's subsided.) The rest of the former Soviet Union, however, has had a much tougher time of it. Some, like Turkmenistan and Belorus, have fallen under the sway of outright dictators. At best, as in Russia, the scene is mixed.

This trend continues if you look at China and Indochina, which have de-Communized themselves but remain repressive. The former non-Communist, authoritarian states of east Asia, like South Korea and Taiwan, have mostly democratized successfully.

So where did the wave hit? Africa, to a certain extent. In the early 1990s there was a wave of popular protest there, no doubt inspired by eastern Europe and the end of Cold War shennanigans in the continent, and a lot of dictators lost their jobs or were forced to compromise. In only a few places did this end up with complete democracy, but the improvement is significant. (And today, via Eve Tushnet, comes news that another thug is gonna hit the road.)

Perhaps more significant to the U.S. is Latin America. Despite various setbacks, democratization there seems to be for real. This is, I think, part of a larger point: Latin Americans are in some ways becoming more like us northerners. Much has been made of the Latino cultural influence in the U.S., but politically, economically and even religiously (given the inroads Protestant groups have made there), the movement is going both ways.

This is an important point for people who fear Latino immigrants, I think. Last year when Pat Buchanan's book The Death of the West came out, several commentators criticized how he defined "the West" -- especially his including eastern Europe and Russia but excluding Latin America. As Jonah Goldberg pointed out, he was really defining a racial group rather than a cultural one. (And a rather dubious racial group at that, since the boundaries of "white" are pretty blurry.)

This point is even more striking when you add economic data to the mix. One obvious difference between "the West" and "the Third World" is the former is rich and the latter is poor. Yet according to the World Bank, Latin America is richer than the former Soviet bloc. (Look at the column where it says GNI per capita.) In fact, one real shock to me when I first saw the Bank's table last year is how poor some of the old Soviet states are. If you scroll down to the third page -- to the poorest countries in the world -- you'll see Ukraine, Moldova and a couple Central Asian republics lurking there.

If there's one thing that's clear from all this, it's that the old Cold War division of the planet that we imply when we say "Third World" is way out of date. What the next arrangement will be -- well, we'll see.

The meet market

On Saturday I wrote about this costume I wore to this party I went to, but I didn't write that much about the party itself. Like I said, it was put on by a singles group associated with church, but I really didn't know anything about it. After I got there I found a couple of surprises: it's for singles 35 and up (making me three years too young for it), and a lot of people there were actually from other churches. I guess the market for middle-aged Christian single people isn't that big even in L.A., so these groups are networked together.

Whenever I go to one of these singles scenes, I end up with ambivalent feelings. I chatted with some people and attracted a few interested men, and like any woman I like getting that kind of attention. But as always seems to happen I gave my phone number to a guy I really shouldn't have. He danced with me toward the end of the night -- he danced rather uncomfortably close to me, I thought -- and after that he immediately asked for my phone number, without even asking my name. That seemed a bit ... aggressive to me. I said I needed to rest and went to a sofa and sat down, and he followed me, and finally I gave him my business card. He called me at work today, where I put him off with the convenient excuse that I was busy. I've gotten much worse pickup attempts before, but this kind of thing just makes me feel ... ugh. Scuzzy.

It wasn't all that bad, though. There was another guy who hung around me the first hour or so of the party; I gave him my card too, but I think he got the feeling that it wasn't really happening for me and by the end of the night he'd moved on to another woman. I also met a couple of friends who were a bit younger and hipper than the rest of the crowd, who invited me to a party on a yacht this weekend. It costs $52 apiece, so I don't think I'll go. But they seemed to be part of some vaguely Christian party scene, so I gave one of them my card too, and told him to put me on his email list if anything was happening.

Another guy, though not an "interested" guy, that I met at the party turned up again in a weird way. After church yesterday I went outside with Telford, and he prayed for me. Telford does most of the talking on these occasions, but sometimes I make an attempt at it also. I don't really do anything in a formal "prayer" style; I just start talking about whatever's on my heart. This time I spoke about how I'd seen other people experience God, like someone they know whose presence they carry around with them always, and suddenly a voice said, "Yeah, I see him like that!"

I opened my eyes and he was already walking away, waving back at me and smiling impishly. Telford was totally confused, of course, but when I told him I'd met the guy at the party, he said, "Oh. Cool."

I was pretty disconcerted -- not just because I'd been interrupted in prayer, but because he'd been eavesdropping on me. I guess CA people don't think of prayer as a private act, especially when it's done in a public place, but I do pray with the expectation that only Telford and maybe God are going to hear me. I am not sure how freely I would speak if I didn't.

At any rate, I think a singles group is not the thing for me right now. I'm single and I don't want to remain single forever, but really, I'm not in a good place for dating at the moment. It did occur to me, though, that instead of my phone number I should have just given them the url to this blog. If they read it and still want to go out with me, then it might be worth doing.

In the name of love

Somehow -- call it feminine intuition or something -- I get the feeling Telford is still not happy with Borg.

Actually, he makes criticisms similar to the ones I made, about how Borg tries to categorize Jesus. I would defend Borg on one charge Telford lobs at him, though:

His religious experience would have been "shaped by" his Jewish heritage (64). (Not defined, but merely shaped. Borg has already ruled out the applicability of Israel's tradition of a God set apart from the world and occasionally intervening and dwelling there, on 62 and 258 nn. 25-27. This "Western supernatural theism" has "seriously negative consequences.")

I read Borg's position as a little more nuanced than that. He agrees that "...imaging God as a personlike being is very common in the Bible. It is also the natural language of worhips and prayer, and there is nothing wrong with it in such contexts." But he regards the concept of God as a separate person standing outside the universe "is theologically deficient: it affirms only the transcendence of God and neglects the immanence of God, despite the fact that the Jewish and Christian traditions have consistently affirmed that God is both."

This actually kind of agrees with what I was told in the Holy Spirit part of the Alpha course, and by Telford himself, that the Holy Spirit has been a rather neglected part of the Trinity in the last few centuries. Indeed, I gather that the Pentecostal movement arose largely in response to this. What I took from Borg's comment about "supernatural theism" is that we should not look at Yahweh as if he were one of the Olympian gods of Greece, sitting up in a remote heaven and only noticing us if we do something to grab his attention. The God of the Bible is personlike but in a different way from that. I don't know, maybe he's going too far in the opposite direction with his "panentheism" concept, but I don't think he's rejecting outright the Jewish way of looking at God.

Anyway, that's kind of a side issue. Telford, like me, wondered why it was so important to Borg whether Jesus knew he was the messiah; unlike me, who disposed of it in one paragraph, he goes through a long series of guesses. I think I should elaborate a bit more on the reason I perceived this to matter to Borg, although maybe all I'm doing is projecting my own concerns onto it.

Borg wrote that he thought this went to the question of whether Jesus wanted people to believe in him, specifically, or placed more importance on what he taught. I wrote that I sympathized with this question because sometimes the focus on the name and the person of Jesus seems like you're "siding with the winning team" -- that is, if you say the right name, fly the right flag, wear the right colors and so on then you're saved. But the question that raises for me is, what is the difference between the one side and the other side? It seems to me that if this side-picking isn't based upon moral superiority, this is no more than tribalism. Our side is better because it's us. Or -- even worse -- our side is better because it's going to win.

I think that danger has always existed in religion. In fact, in a lot of ancient paganism that seemed to be more or less explicit: gods were partisans for one nation or another, and if another nation conquered you, your god "lost" so you might as well start worshipping the conquerers' gods. Back when I was blogging Exodus I griped that I saw a strain of it there, and it's pretty clear that in Christian history a lot of people have used the name of Jesus that way.

In my experience it's pretty common in liberal circles, whether Christian or not, to want to exalt the principles of Jesus over the person of Jesus for exactly that reason. I suspect that Borg's attraction to the idea of Jesus not knowing he was messiah comes from this. If he did not know, if he thought he was just a guy who had an unusually close relationship with God, then his message would have been more about goodness than power. In other words, "This is how to be the best person," rather than, "This is who you follow if you want to come out on top in the end."

I can already hear Telford protesting that this dichotomy is way too crude, and he's right. In fact, I should say that only since I've known Telford have I realized the problem with that way of thinking. But since I first read Telford's post a few days back, I've been concluding that this shows a kind of running tension between the way Telford and I look at things.

Some years ago Carol Gilligan famously, and controversially, claimed that men and women use different forms of moral reasoning: men think in terms of abstract principles, while women seek harmony in relationships. I don't know if that's true in general, but with Telf and me it's the exact opposite, because I'm always pushing principles while he's always pushing relationships. For him, religious faith is all about relationships: with God, with Jesus and with the fellow faithful. We've argued about this enough that he seems to believe I don't like the idea of faith being relational. Actually I do like it, but I put principles ahead of relationships. A lot of the disagreements we've had over Bible reading come from me looking at God's behavior and saying I do not want to have a relationship with him because he does not seem especially good. Telford seems to look at it the other way: you have a relationship with God and so you trust that even when it looks bad, it's all for the good.

But getting back to the subject, I think that this heavy emphasis on relationship is the more benign reason why a Christian would want to see God as a specific person with a specific identity. You can't have a relationship with abstract moral principles. And I can see why it would be hard to have a relationship with something as vague and floaty as Borg's "panentheist" vision. Jesus gave a name, a body, a personality to God, making God someone you could relate to like a human being. No other religion that I know of did it in quite that way.

The fact that I understand both these points of view doesn't mean I completely like either of them though. Borg, from my point of view, has a way of raising issues I understand but offering solutions that I don't really like. The pre-Easter/post-Easter Jesus idea was one of those, and the he-didn't-know-he-was-messiah thing is another. On Telford's side, I like his idea of a relational God but it's ethically troublesome to me, especially the idea that one's salvation depends on it. Telford complains at the end of his post:

Borg shows us a way to admire Jesus for "knowing God" as intimately as he did, without feeling bothered by the calls to follow him alone or the warnings of rejection's dire consequences that litter the canon of his followers, even when they appear to come from his own mouth. We can have our other ways to God without having to turn away from him.

The funny thing is, though, that Wright himself seems to have an answer to that one. As I mentioned in my Chapter 3 post, Wright believes Jesus' "judgment talk" was attached to the specific place and time: if the Jews didn't heed his words, the Romans would destroy them. It makes you wonder then, if those commands to follow him or else would really apply to all people in all of history in quite the same way. But I suppose that may come in a later chapter.

Get this party started

Last night a singles group associated with Christian Assembly threw a '60s costume ball. Seeing as I've had no life for a while now, I thought it would be fun to go. But I had no idea what to wear. The '60s were not a very good fashion decade for someone who looks like me, so I don't own anything that looks '60s even in a vague sort of way. And since this was, after all, a singles event, I also kind of wanted to look good.

So I emailed my sister, who seems to know everything there is to know about clothes, especially historical clothes. I had hoped that she could just give me some general tips about what sort of thing to look for, but she took it on as a project. She went to a vintage clothing store in her town and found a genuine '60s candy-pink polyester minidress. Now, I should point out for those of you who don't know, a candy-pink polyester minidress is definitely not me. But it was the right size, it cost $10, and I was running out of time, so I said sure, get it. And then, unasked, she also somehow found a white pillbox hat with a pink bow on the back and netting over the top, faux pearl earrings, and a white purse that was actually a modern item from K-mart but looked properly retro.

She mailed all this to me. I put it on and thought, this is definitely not me, but it's actually kind of cute. The only trouble was that the hat seemed to be too small, which is not surprising given that women's hats almost always are on me. (I like to think it's my outsized brain, but maybe it's just my swelled head.) Also, the only shoes I had to go with it were pumps with two-inch heels. I try to avoid wearing heels to dance parties because they're uncomfortable and because they make me taller than most of the men, which makes them less inclined to dance with me. But I figured, it'll do, so I put everything on and headed off.

I went as "establishment" '60s, but most other people there went hippie. There's got to be a cultural comment somewhere in the fact that an evangelical Christian church would throw a party imitating the Summer of Love, but I don't know what it is. There was a live band that played the Beatles, Hendrix, and other counterculture music. Toward the end the female singer even did a Janis Joplin impersonation, complete with whiskey bottle, but it didn't actually have any whiskey in it because there was no alcohol at this gig. The band also did a strangely clean version of "Shaft," if you can imagine that.

Anyway, despite the heels I did find guys to dance with. I realized then that an era's dance styles probably have as much to do with clothes as with music, because when you're in a short skirt and high heels, all you can really do is stand there and shimmy. The outfit won third place in the costume contest (the prize was a Betty Boop mug, for some inexplicable reason), and was variously described as "Jackie Kennedy," "airline stewardess" and "Junior Miss." When I received the prize some photographers there jumped in front of me and took a bunch of pictures. If they turn up at church tomorrow, I think Telford's going to be in for a big laugh.

Blogroll updates

Will at Mysterium Crucis seems to have lost interest in blogging once he became a Real Catholic, so he's losing his spot on the Catholic blogroll to T.S. O'Rama. I've also added 111:2 and Reaching for Zion to the Miscellaneous Monotheists.

If you can't get enough of this stuff...

Lynn Gazis-Sax has read another book by Marcus Borg (this one entirely by Borg) called Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, and she posts some thoughts on it. Plus more meta-commentary on Telford and me.

Chapter 4: Spirit of the age

Marcus Borg starts off his chapter on Jesus' doings and teachings by defending his uncertainty about whether Jesus knew he was the messiah. He bases his argument partly on the fact that in Mark, which he believes is the oldest Gospel, Jesus doesn't say that directly, while in parts of Matthew that draw from Mark, Jesus' assertions of messiahdom seem to have been added in.

Again I'm chafing against the lack of methodology: as with Wright, I don't really know how Borg knows these things, such as why Mark is the oldest or how he knows Matthew appropriated things from him. His point also reminds me of something Telford wrote a few days ago, that the oldest source isn't necessarily the truest. Sometimes your understanding of something improves with time. My feeling about is that it depends on the type of knowledge you're talking about. In terms of details of events, like what exactly did Jesus say to Peter on X occasion, I would think having the memory fresh would be better. Time tends to give you perspective: the details fit together in a more coherent picture.

Then again, sometimes the picture you form takes you farther from truth rather than closer, especially if you don't remember the details right. Really, how can we know which happened in this instance?

Also as I was reading this, I wondered why it mattered whether Jesus knew he was the messiah. Personally I'm more interested in the question of whether he actually was the messiah, and whether he lives today, and has any interest in me. (Hey, there he is! Sorry..:-)) But Borg says this relates to whether Jesus specifically wanted people to believe in him, or believe in what he was doing.

I think I see what he's getting at. That relates to my complaint about Wright in the last chapter, when he denied that Jesus' message was really about ethics and religion and instead made it about rallying Israel to its historic moment. It makes it sound like it's mostly about siding with the winning team, whereas I assumed that the whole reason for rallying Israel at that point was religious and ethical. As I asked before: what does it really mean to be "light of the world"?

Borg begins to tackle this question by identifying Jesus' identity and message. First of all, he says, Jesus was a Jewish mystic or "Spirit person." What's a Spirit person? Borg draws upon William James (which I haven't read) and spiritual traditions of other cultures (which I have read, a bit) to draw a broad, and rather appealing, picture of mysticism:

Mystics, as I use the term, are people who have decisive and typically frequent firsthand experiences of the sacred.

The most dramatic of these experiences of the sacred involve a variety of nonordinary states of consciousness. In visions, there is a vivid sense of momentarily seeing into another layer or level of reality. In shamanic experience, one not only sees another level of reality but also enters it and perhaps even journeys within it...

The world looks exquisite, and it may even appear as if there is light shining through everything or bathing everything in its glow. Moreover, the boundary between self and world, which defines our ordinary subject-object state of consciousnes, becomes soft, indeed, less pronounced than a deep sense of connectedness and reunion.

Borg goes on to argue that Jesus was clearly one of these -- his "vision quest" in the desert, his frequent conversations with God, his mystical healings and exorcisms -- and this was foundational to his being and to understanding him.

What bothers me about all this is its attempt to cast Jesus as a typical example of something. In fact, though I didn't mention it last night, Wright did the same thing in his chapter. He argued that Jesus did know that he was messiah on the ground that it was more or less standard operating procedure at the time:

This, I must stress, is not a particularly odd thing for a first-century Jew with a strong sense of God's presence and purpose, and a clear gift for charismatic leadership, to think. Others thought much the same, with local and personal variations...

If Jesus was all the things Marcus says he was, then, in a century that saw many would-be messiahs and royal personages come and go, leading movements, announcing the kingdom, going to Jerusalem, saying and doing things about the temple, it is highly likely that Marcus's "Jewish mystic", if he was indeed a Spirit person, a social prophet, and a movement initator, would have faced the question both from onlookers and from within his own heart and mind: was he, then, the messiah? ... Even Josephus could tell people to believe in him; I can imagine Judas the Galilean and bar-Kochba telling people to believe in them. If Jesus really was, as Marcus allows, a "movement initiator", why should he not have done the same?

The two scholars use essentially the same argument: Jesus resembled people who were X, therefore he was X. Wright draws comparisions to other Jewish messianic types, while Borg draws cross-cultural categories, but they both run into the same question. Was Jesus a typical anything? If he was the Son of God, in one way he was the most untypical being ever to walk the planet. Even if he wasn't, he was a unique individual. People have their commonalities, and people are influenced by their cultures, but they also can be radically different. How much can we really infer by resemblance?

Borg does more of this when he describes Jesus as a "wisdom teacher." He compares Jesus to other teachers of "alternative wisdom," such as Buddha and Lao-tzu, and draws inferences on that basis. He also describes Jesus as a social prophet, speaking against oppression and the institutional reigious powers -- on which points he basically agrees with Wright.

I don't really know what to make of all this. I don't feel like I'm getting much closer to the historical Jesus. I did notice as an interesting little aside, though, that Borg thinks Jesus' healings were not supernatural, but not psychosomatic either:

Inexplicable and remarkable things do happen, involving processes that we do not understand. i do not need to know the explanatory mechanism in order to affirm that paranormal healings happen. And Jesus seems to have been uncommonly good at them.

I don't feel so convinced that paranormal healings happen, but Borg does seem to be agreeing with what I said at the end of this post. You don't have to defy the laws of nature to do amazing things.

Chapter 3: King is coming

OK, I know Telford already blogged through 4, but my time and energy are running low, so I'll blog 4 tomorrow.

This pair of chapters deals with what Jesus did and taught, and this time Wright has the honor off the tee, so to speak. In my earlier post I said I wanted to see how Wright applied his historical method, and I'm still waiting, because I'm not seeing it in this chapter. When Telford first started urging me to read the historical evidence for Jesus I complained that it would take a year, and he claimed it would take only a few weeks. I am thinking now that I was right, because Wright doesn't build his case here so much as make a series of assertions, with footnotes referring mostly to his other works. How he reached his conclusions is not clear.

Still, what he says is interesting. He sets up the mood in Israel at the time: the belief they were being ruled by pagans as a punishment for their infidelity to God, and that a messiah would soon come to restore them to their rightful place by overthrowing Roman rule. There were a number of apocalyptic Jewish sects and claimants to messiahdom at the time; most Jews were looking forward to seeing their enemies humbled through violent conflict.

Jesus, says Wright, came to correct all that. Wright denies that Jesus was there to bring a new religion or ethical code; instead he was there to declare a new eschatology:

Jesus was challenging his contemporaries to live as the new covenant people, the returned-from-exile people, the people whose hearts were renewed by the word and work of the living God... all could practice his way of life, a way of forgiveness and prayer, a way of jubilee, a way which renounced xenophobia toward those outside Israel and oppression of those inside. This is the context, I suggest, within which we should understand the material we call the Sermon on the Mount. It is not simply a grand new moral code. It is, primarily, the challenge of the kingdom: the summons to Israel to be Israel indeed at the critical junction of her history, the moment when, in the kindom announcemnt of Jesus, the living God is at work to reconstitute his people and so fulfill his long-cherished intentions for them and for the whole world.

Wright also has an intriguing interpretation of Jesus' judgment talk:

Many have traditionally read Jesus' saying about judgment either in terms of the postmortem condemnation of unbelievers or of the eventual destruction of the space-time world. The first-century context of the language in qustion, however, indicates otherwise. Jesus was warning his contemporaries that if they did not follow his way, the way of peace and forgiveness, the way of the cross, the way of being the light of the world, and if they persisted in their determination to fight a desperate holy war against Rome, then Rome would destroy them, city, temple, and all, and that this would be, not an unhappy accident showing that YHWH had simply forgotten to defend them, but the sign and the means of YHWH's judgment against his rebellious people.

From my admittedly limited knowledge of these things, that does seem like a more Jewish way of looking at it than the usual otherworldly interpretations. I am having trouble seeing, though, how being "the light of the world" can be something other than an ethical and religious thing. Wright never explains what that phrase means (assuming we already know, I guess), but my impression from the OT is that it's Israel's worship of Yahweh (religion) and following the law (ethics) that makes it the light of the world. It also seems to me that opposing xenophobia and oppression is an ethical position. It may have been extra important at that particular moment, but has there been any time when those things are OK?

Heavy meta

Telford's already moved onto chapters 3 and 4, which I'll get to tomorrow. In the meantime, I like his post responding to the comments from the Catholic peanut gallery about our discussion. This has got to be one of those cases of infinite blog-regress: Telford and I write a commentary on a book, which brings a commentary over the commentary, with further comments on the commentary on the commentary ...

The space between

Telford remarked in his comment on my chapter 1 post that he was "interested in how you view N.T. Wright's appeal to his historical method as 'scientific'. Does Wright share your respect for leaving room for strangeness?"

I didn't discuss Wright's historical method in my own post on chapter 2, but Telford outlined it in his:

Wright's project is first to see whether the data of history support a picture of Jesus with coherence, explanatory power, and predictive power. These are the confirming tests of scientific adequacy. Here science is operating in its proper sense (not in the materialistic or naturalistic senses that have gained ascendency in our materialistic, naturalistic scientific culture). For Wright, every event of Jesus' life, including his resurrection, is open to scientific inquiry precisely because truly scientific historiography refuses to draw boundaries in advance for what counts as evidence (22).

I agree it sounds good, though I'm holding off until I see how it's applied. I have little experience with the scientific method applied to history, so it's largely theoretical to me at this point.

Telford also makes an interesting point:

Wright is forthright that he is intuiting and proposing pictures informed by his faith – and for that matter his Englishness, his schooling, his gender, and all the rest. The test is how well the picture serves, not where the picture came from. After all, no scientist I know is troubled by the fact that the discovery of benzene's chemical structure originated in someone's dream of a snake biting its own tail, or that the Big Bang theory came from a Catholic priest who didn't buy Aristotle's conviction of the constancy of the physical universe. Why should we be dismayed, or even surprised, if belief turns out to be a helpful source of intuition?

This is somewhat tangential, but it reminds me of the story behind the naming of dinosaurs. Richard Owen came up with the name in 1842, after a few species had been found and their similarities noted. (Later when more fossils turned up, scientists divided them into two separate orders -- saurischia and ornithischia -- so "dinosaur" is no longer a scientific name.)

Although it was a couple decades before Darwin's Origin of Species came out, there were already arguments about evolution. Contrary to popular belief, Darwin didn't invent the idea of evolution; the idea that species change into other species had been around for a while, but how it worked and why remained puzzling until Darwin came up with natural selection. Especially popular before Darwin was the idea that all species could be lined up from "lowest" to "highest," with every animal of the past and present on the chain somewhere. The idea of the branching tree of life hadn't taken hold. (Actually, the "great chain" concept goes on after Darwin -- unfortunately, it's often turned up in Star Trek.) So the popular idea was that all reptiles were below all mammals on the chain. Which makes a certain amount of sense, given the reptiles that live today.

The story goes that Richard Owen, who was an anti-evolutionist, wasn't buying for a minute that the gigantic, complex dinosaurs could have somehow evolved into the primitive mammals of the Eocene. The name "dinosaur" is translated "terrible lizard," but the word "terrible" had a different implication 150 years ago than it does today. Now we tend to use it to mean "lousy," but back then it meant something more like "inspiring terror, awesome." (Think, "I am Oz, the great and terrible...") By naming dinosaurs that, Owen was apparently emphasizing their impressiveness, and digging his elbow into the idea that these were lowly beasts.

What this story tells me, all this time later, is the danger of polarized thinking. Owen was wrong, overall, about evolution, but he was right about this point. No animal alive today evolved from the giant dinosaurs he was looking at. The evolutionists of the time were right about the concept but wrong about the details. If you're trying to assess which side was right, the answer is complicated.

It's something to keep in mind as I'm reading a book representing the "liberal" and "conservative" views of Jesus. The subtitle of the book is "Two Views," and it is indeed that -- two views. I doubt they're the only two views, and I doubt either one of them has a lock on the truth.

Marry me, marry me, marry me

Eve Tushnet, Ginger Stampley and Fr. Jim Tucker have lately been decrying the concept of a big, extravagant wedding. I tend to agree with all their points, though one thing that biases me is that my family seems to have a tradition of cheap weddings.

My mother's parents eloped, actually (her family disapproved, I think) so there wasn't much of a wedding at all. My parents married in the back yard of my grandparents' house, my mother wearing a short white slipdress that she'd made herself. They were both still in school, so there wasn't much time or energy or money to spare. My father married his second wife on the deck of his cottage. I remember my stepmother's story about the day: she got up and went off to get her hair done, and came back to find my father in his jeans, unshaven, laying carpet. When she told me this years later, she was still a little annoyed.

"Well, it was better than sitting around being nervous," my father objected. "I was ready at the appointed hour. And the carpet was down."

The fanciest wedding in my immediate family was when my sister got married, nine years ago. She continued the family tradition of marrying al fresco, in a live-oak grove in West Marin (hey, we're unchurched, so it makes sense). But she made herself a fancier dress and they rented out a women's club to throw a reception. Still, it was kind of a shoestring affair. I remember going to the grove for the rehearsal, thinking I was just tagging along, when my sister pointed out a spot next to where she and the groom were standing.

"You stand there."

"What?"

"You're the maid of honor."

"Oh. I am?"

Well it was a good thing I found out before the wedding!

What was really cool about it, though, was that many of the gifts that friends provided were contributions to the wedding itself. One friend got herself a license to actually perform the ceremony; another pair with good voices sang them up the aisle (seeing as you can't haul an organ into a grove); another did the cooking, and so on. This was apparently done by the woman in the article that started this discussion, and it was great not just because it saved money but because it added to the communal feel of the event. A lot of weddings seem like a show that the bride and groom put on that everybody shows up to watch, like a movie; but this felt more like a gathering of a community to launch a marriage. It also felt a lot more intimate that nobody there was a stranger. I haven't given much thought to what I'd want my own wedding to be like, but I think I'd like it to be like that.