Cactus Juice

Theology: Relevance and Irrelevance

I was commenting to a friend the other day that I find theology as irrelevant to my life as most Americans do, as even theologians themselves often have come to expect their craft to be.  When it's about commas and semicolons rather than ideas, you know the art is dead.

However, for several years theology was extremely important to me, and now things have changed. My adolescent obsessions with theology were driven by a need for a basis of a theory of justice.  I was experiencing the usual adolescent vertigo found after sitting on the fence of nihilism; existential freedom meant the end of meaning rather than the beginning.  I didn't have enough of a sense of worth to understand that freedom meant I could, I must, create my own meaning.  Teetering on the fence, there was nothing that could give me a foundation in understanding justice, that is, in finding an evaluation of my own worth and the courage to value myself and insist that others do so as well.

Theology created a sense of stability that surrounded the intolerable instability of day-to-day life.  I was still sitting on the fence of nihilism, but now it was a very big fence with the stability of millennia and I was just a bee buzzing in a small jar left on a post somewhere.  As a bee can sting an elephant, I found the power to demand the humane respect I desperately need at the time.

Here at 32, the void no longer threatens.  I have created my own sense of order, and of worth.  Looking back, I see that the greatest comfort in those old days wasn't from theology properly understood, but from various threads of religious superstition that can be found loosely attached to theology.

My internal order comes from the knowledge that I and my actions matter.  Is that theology?  Of course my existentialism supports this knowledge as much as my Christianity does.  My development co-existed with a Christian world-view, so I'm not sure what would have happened without it.  Gandhi said, "Be the change you want to see in the world."  Sartre said an ethical life requires commitment (involvement) to place and time.  Jesus said, "Feed my sheep."  My ethical measuring rod comes from the first two ideas more than from the third.  "Ensure the sheep have access to food."  Ethics that start here are the only relevance and theology doesn't have much more to say on the topic.

"Theology," so called, makes me angry.  It is mostly used as a game to justify certain superstitions and certain philosophies and to separate people from God.  As has been noted time and time again, God is not in the theology; he is in the sheep.  Yet religions compete on their superstitious margins.  "I don't know," usually is the right answer in theology, yet it is not an acceptable answer when theology is being used as a touchstone for philosophical certainty.  The only use I see for those who are meant to be leaders in religious life being well trained in theology is that they may (if they are truly trained well) be able to spot an absurd idea when they see it and identify it as such before it gets out of hand.  Large denominations and their checks on lunacy are a good thing.

The anti-intellectualism of religious extremism isn't unwarranted.  Intellectualism is a sphere different from theology.  No amount of intellectualism will get you to "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." (John 14:6)  Intellectualism can take that kernel and run around in circles with it, but by then you have left the realm of theology.  To make theology the totality of intellectual life is sad.  God has given so much, from the earthworm to the ability to create ethical theory, but God himself is truly hidden.  Theology is a shockingly tiny topic; there just isn't much to say.  "through a glass, darkly," (1 Corinthians 13:12) indeed.

Part of the viciousness of modern Christian piety can be traced to religion being turned to revolve around what you think rather than what you do.  Consideration of what you do has been stripped away for a variety of reasons, legitimate and not.  The final illegitimacy is to turn the focus to thinking about topics having nothing to do with the lives of most of the people.  I am addressing, of course, the focus on homosexuality and abortion.  This is a sign of theology at its most irrelevant.

And so my Episcopalian friend was surprised that I walked away from a rather sour article ("Turning Away from Jesus: Gay rights and the war for the Episcopal Church," Harper's Magazine, June 2008) feeling uplifted.  It was the absolutely boredom the article created in me that turned my attention back to God.  Pages of writing about church and "theology" which had nothing to do with God or theology.  After reading, I had a flash of clarity about how absurd the discussion is (In the context of theology.  In the context of civil society and the philosophy of politics these issues are very important.).  I felt quite liberated from theology!  The question continually posed to religion in America is how it shall restrict itself from civil society.  As many a religious person has pointed out, the biggest worry is quite the reverse.  So little of our lives is about theology; so much of cultural mores influence our experience of "religion."  And it all creates a confusing fog around that very tiny kernel that is theology.

Today, theology gives me one thing: that understanding of the value of human beings that is fundamental to any theory of justice.  And after that, theology is about what I do rather than what I think.

The other day in church I shivered to read Psalm 31 aloud; a Psalm that I read many times at midnight as a young woman and which has always held great significance for me.  In general, to think that one may call upon this Psalm in good conscience most clearly represents the self-gratifying superstitions of modern Western Christianity.  The concept discussed in the psalm is guaranteed to break against you.  Your best hope is that it might break for you a few times.  Or, at least that would be your hope should you ever have the misfortune to need it.  The woman or child trapped in exploitation; the innocent man who has received a death sentence.  We are thrown to the lions, but rarely- far more often we are the lions.  The majority of days, one would do well to read this psalm as a warning.  Nearly the only true theology that can be taught is repentance and trembling before the value of souls other than our own.  When theology is relevant, it's generally at the moment one would rather it not.

On Super-Specialing and Self-Sabotage.

Why is it that we so cling to the super-special reasons why each one of us cannot have health, cannot have happiness, and cannot have success?  The appearance of strange notions in current self-help literature is a response to a true problem in our culture.  Basic, obvious, solutions to suffering are routinely rejected out of hand.  To grasp the simplest of solutions to life is seen as unusual and even heroic.  What the heck is going on here?!

One aspect of our current cultural climate is that we wish to make evil spirits our pets.  Ever since Freud, we have been defined by our afflictions.  Affliction, prior to this point, was unwaveringly woeful.  No one thought to meet Achilles on the battlefield and point out that his one area of moral danger was an opportunity for him to fully experience his humanity.  No one suggested to Job that he had been "given a trial" to learn from.  Rather, Job's suffering reveals a character which he has already formed.  These days, Elizabeth Wurtzel revels in her weakness while Anais Nin and Simone de Beauvoir rot on the vine.  Here's a clue:  Weakness is just not that interesting; each of us was issued plenty of it at birth.

In this post-industrial world, we are meant to express ourselves as individuals in a world-wide culture where it is difficult even to get 15 minutes of fame.  Being the crazy cat-lady in no-where, Wisconsin isn't good enough; you have to be the craziest cat lady in the entire world.  Gaining notoriety through rare excellence is unlikely, so we turn to rare affliction.  Wurtzel having her latest drug stash FedEx'ed to her latest writing venue.  Pathetically, these afflictions are quite a bit less than rare.  From addiction to family dysfunction, the same story is repeated a few million times.

To add to all of this, the Western World in 2008 is the most superstitious it has been in at least 200 years, and perhaps one of the most superstitious cultures of all time.  Magical psychology has replaced ordered ethical thought.  Christianity, frequently dismissed as a kind of superstition, has an ordering of the natural and the supernatural which brought about some of the greatest flowerings of human thought and advancement.  However, there are broad trends of Christianity, in America at least, which are drivel that rivals the most backwards back-desert Mullah that they would like to preach against.  The superstition cloaks itself in science- this isn't the Flat Earth Society; this is the radio preacher that gives his listeners exact Prozac dosages to request from the doctor (true story).

The media market reverberates with the echoes of these cultural trends.  A generation after Archie Bunker, on any given night you can select from about a dozen uninteresting family dramas.  In the commercials, we now have "nicotine receptors in the brain" that are responsible for your smoking habit, though you'd be hard-pressed to find such a "receptor" in an actual brain cell.  For a while now the anti-smoking pharmaceuticals have focused on your likelihood of failure more than your opportunities for success.

Re-direction to success is generally not the goal.  Success --practical, reasonable, success-- is dull.  Affliction is dressed up to be much more exciting than it actually is, more exciting than excellence and much more exciting than success.  I fall into this trap as much as anyone else (Obviously- I have a blog which partly revolves around my obesity affliction.)  If I had a normal BMI, I'd just be a slow, dull, distance runner.  One of the few million others that completed a half-marathon this year.  At 232 pounds, I'm something special.  And that's difficult to give up.

Popping in behind this culture of "super-special" affliction, of late I've noticed an explosion in the use of the absurd term "self-sabotage".  It has all the earmarks of a darling of this culture: magical psychology, lack of personal responsibility, and affliction.  It would be easy to dismiss the thought pattern I just identified in myself as "self-sabotage."  I guess the way you explain it is, "I don't really want to lose weight."  But that's only part of the picture, which is one of the problems with the concept of self-sabotage.  Using the term is one way to refuse to think through and take responsibility for one's actual decision making process.  In my case, I have to finish the sentence: "I don't really want to lose weight because I want to be a special fat person rather than an undistinguished thin person."

All rational people, and all irrational people too (such as psychotics), engage in decision making patterns exactly like this; they make decisions designed to make their life better.  There is no evil spirit, no magical psychology.  I have made a choice.  What can I do to make a different choice?

There are lists and lists of techniques to help me make a different choice, and I'd like to put them into two categories: those which focus on affliction and those which do not.  Techniques that do not focus on affliction but rather focus on health, on self-actualization, on successful outcomes, are the best.  Thus the exotic solutions in the current crop of self-help books such a the "law of attraction."  For more sedate acknowledgment of this principle, note that the AA Big Book says, "We ceased to struggle."  The New Testament advises not to "kick against the pricks."

Needless to say, these are not the solutions that are the most popular.  When it comes to controlling eating, rather than act like a healthy eater (such as on a Weight Watchers program), "dieting" systems that interact with, and circle around, and focus on, and make war with disordered eating are the most popular.  There's a whole circle of extremism in Overeater's Anonymous that I would say does the same thing.

Back to the question: What should I do?  To say that I shouldn't engage in self-sabotage is meaningless since I'm in fact not trying to make my life worse, rather, I'm trying to make my life better by having a special accomplishment. I am a healthy animal, a rational person, and I make decisions for a reason.  And not just any reason, but a healthy and completely normal desire to treat myself well and have a good life.  I can take responsibility for my own decisions.

What would it look like to "not engage in self-sabotage"?  I guess it means nothing more than "Just don't overeat!"  In response to that simplistic message, I will quote the Buddha, who said that you cannot "press your tongue to the roof of your mouth and force your brain a certain direction."

Here some different decisions I am going to make:  I am going to focus more on actual success and less on affliction.  Perhaps you will be hearing more about my running accomplishments and less on my eating struggles.  I have set myself up for a potential running failure that will be caused by my obesity, entering a marathon where I may not be able to make the time cut-off. Affliction is a lot less fun when it actually curtails the possibility of accomplishments and the reality of experience beats magical psychology every time.  There are no evil spirits lurking around the corner, there is just the reality of conflicted decision making and the burden of heavy cultural influences toward making the wrong decisions.  My affliction is not going to be my pet.

A Nation and a Culture Without Shame.

America doesn't do shame.  Our continual desire to hammer the Germans over Nazi atrocities juxtaposes badly with our inability to face the slave-holding roots of our own nation.  Presently, national righteousness over Burma stands in embarrassing juxtaposition to our recent bout with Hurricane Katrina.  American sheriffs refused to allow people to leave New Orleans, thereby violating the American constitution.  And yet they have neither been hanged for treason or (more realistically) jailed for civil rights violations.  The failures in Burma are not any different from what is expected out of that government.  America failed to be America, and therefore the shame should be that much greater.  I find Laura Bush's interest in Burma embarrassing in its shamelessness.  A First Lady should have political hobbies, but one of the core hobbies of First Lady is meant to be compassion upon the people of her own nation, and nothing much interesting has happened there.

What do I mean by "shame"?  Dictionary definitions tend to start with "dishonor."  And our repulsion with shame starts there as well.  In our culture, we see ourselves as ethical free agents.  You may have done something dishonorable, but you will never be a dishonorable person.  Brownie failed to manage the response to Katrina and caused untold suffering and death, but he's off managing horses again or something like that and he's whatever he is today.  His actions are things that happened at a point in time, but his essence is not made of those actions.  It's all about "what have you done lately."  Today there is more of a psychologized definition of shame which then creates it's own particular Christian response.  An in depth review of these pscyhologized definitions can be found here.  Since we don't believe that a person can have any action stick with them, "shame" becomes some rootless negativity in the emotionality.  Christians turn it into a psychologicalization of Original Sin and make Jesus the Christ the answer.

I tend to think of shame as a gap between guilt and reaction.  As the gap, it is somewhere between useless and destructive and almost always should be destroyed.  I have learned that shame feeds addiction.  One thing that was absolutely required in bring my eating problem under control was ending my shame about overeating.  There are doctors and various foolish people who think that can belittle or shame a person into losing weight, and it is an absolutely false concept.  Obesity is a painful and horrible condition.  It is medieval in the experience of punishment that it inflicts.  A person who deserves punishment could find little better than the discomforts of obesity.  I like to say, "No one ever hated themselves to health."

And yet, at the same time that I am rooting shame out of my own life, I do see a place for it.  Consider the following story:  a woman loans a digital camera to a friend.  The camera is about five years old and only takes 2 mega-pixel pictures.  You can't even get a 2 mega-pixel camera anymore, but she's happy with it and hasn't seen a need to buy one of the new 6 or higher mega-pixel cameras.  The friend falls in a lake while carrying the camera.  At first it seems that the camera is fine, and she returns it.  But as the camera dries out it ends up being ruined.  The memory card, which had never been backed up, is also ruined.  The friend is horrified and offers to replace the camera.  The owner of the camera looks up the price on a midrange camera and emails the price to the friend.

The friend is living off savings while she puts herself through college and still puts food on the plate for her two children.  She calls the owner of the camera and says that she'll make payments to make it right, but she should only pay for the replacement value of the camera.  What about half the price of the cheapest camera available?  At this point the owner of the camera is really starting to morn the pictures she lost on the memory card, and she feels insulted that her loss is being undervalued.  She insists that her friend isn't making things right, that she should pay for a midrange camera, since that was what she had bought to start with all those years ago.

I've heard various versions of this story many a time.  Just turn on Judge Judy and you can see it over and over again.  One person insisting on "ma rights," no matter what the hardship imposed upon the other person and no matter how reasonable an accident may have occurred.  I find this recourse to a legalistic form of morality brutish.  The fact is that if you have a camera for a long time, something is going to happen to it.  You might fall in a lake, you might leave it in a restaurant.  It is inevitable.  When you bought the camera, you knew that would happen.  It was probably part of the reason you didn't buy a more expensive camera.  It was also probably part of the reason you didn't trade up earlier: you were waiting for the inevitable day when you would be forced to buy a new one.  When you chose to let someone else use your toy, you passed along the possible risks to the other person.  Perhaps the person was more careless than you would have been, except your level of care included the risk of selecting that particular person.  So you are exactly equal in your level of care.  To think otherwise is absurdly self-righteous.

On that last point, you may decide that what I am actually talking about is humility.  In 12-step, humility is defined as placing yourself equally with others, neither above nor below them.  Laura Bush could possibly, with humility, comment on Burma.  Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles could have, with humility, chosen their re-marriage to each other.  With shame, Laura Bush must be silent on Burma.  The marriage of Charles and Camilla was accepted partly because of their shame in publicly stating their humility.  And the owner of the camera could use a little shame to step back from what in all legality she perhaps deserves.

When I make this argument, I am at this point told, "Well, what about personal responsibility?"  The point is that the hapless friend should take responsibility for her accident.  And yet, look at the responsibility of this camera owner that I have already outlined, including her economic choices in when and what to buy.  And, let's get real for a moment, do you really want to live in a world where you are going to be held "responsible" for everything you do?  Personal responsibility is a very popular concept... just so long as it's someone else's responsibility.

The addict has to renounce shame because it is about hopelessness.  Shame for the addict is moving into the gap between guilt and reaction permanently.  "Just for today" (a 12-step mantra) pulls him out of the gap and firmly onto the reaction of right here, right now.  And yet, conversely, shame can be a particular holder of hope.  The wisdom of millenia that grappled with Original Sin isn't something to lightly push aside.  The fact of shame and the fact of redemption says that we expect that we will get more than we deserve.  And with that hope, perhaps we can give more than others deserve.

Earlier this week, the CNN headline "Woman opens heart to man who slaughtered her family" captured my attention.  Through a process that involved public confession, a Rwandian Tutsi accepted the confession of a Hutu man who participated in the slaughter of her family.  She does business with his wife.  She told the CNN reporter that despite this man's confession and the importance of the confession process that "reconciliation would not have happened unless she had decided to open her heart and accept his pleas.  She said, "I am a Christian, and I pray a lot."  I cannot even begin to imagine how much prayer such a choice takes.  Because of her choice and the choices of others who have as much hope as she does, Rwanda is becoming an African success story.

It was her choice.  Forgiveness was entirely hers to give.  No human being had the right to demand it of her, only her Christ who shares in her suffering could ask such a thing.  A person, often a misguided Christian, who requires the forgiveness of others is making an evil and self-centered statement and is in danger of putting his own self as idol in the place of God.  I am completely in agreement with commentators such as Ayn Rand on this point: ethically, you do not have to give anything.  The only reason to demand someone give what they do not have to give is to be self-serving, and anyone who makes such demands is to be considered as a serpent.

But her choice certainly has brought me to reconsider the choices I have been making.  How many resentments do I cling to?  One is over a matter of about $200 that a close relative backed me into a corner on when I was destitute.  A "bait and switch" kind of a situation.  As I was forced to spend the money, with various family members peering over my shoulder, I didn't even know if the credit card would go through.  There was no cash, and I was on the last of my credit.  This incident is a decade old.  What makes the resent even more absurd is that the relative has matured in the meantime and would certainly never do such a thing today.  I have even received an apology of sorts.  I don't have to forgive, but a little more shame in realizing that I know I get more than I deserve might help me realize that about now is time to give more than someone else deserves.  I definitely know I don't want to get exactly what I deserve.

Change a Behavior and Finding God May Follow

The Business Self Help Book That Helped Self

Influencer: The Power to Change Anything isn't deep philosophy.  It isn't say, The Varieties of Religious Experience, where we will end up today.  But it is one of the best books in the self-help / business segment genre that I've read- I'll be adding it my shelf with First, Break All The Rules (a book that every parent should read on behalf of their children and every high school student should read for herself), The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and Getting Things Done (issue these two books and a good secretarial manual to each new college graduate).

A self-help book must give a prescription for change, preferably in a numerated list.  Influencer offers in the categories of personal, social and structural solutions a prescription each in the motivational and ability categories- six total.  For best results, the authors recommend throwing all six solutions at a problem.  Best of all, the book explains that these methods can be used not only to influence others, but to influence yourself.  The example provided is of a man who lost a large amount of weight; a real person.

Another requirement of the self-help book is that it speak from authority.  Statistics and case histories are presented to illustrate that the author knows more than you do.  Much more.  Your job, therefore, is to not worry about thinking but to simply follow the prescription.  I did, and I've lost eight of the 23 pounds I've gained since my last VFT (Virgin Fat Territory- a lowest number ever seen in a weight loss journey).

The particular lesson that influenced me was told in the history of the fat guy: Influence must be aimed at behaviors.  A goal does not contain within it the elements of influence that will lead to the goal being achieved.  My New Year's Resolution included getting to onederland (a weight starting with a one) this year.  Twenty-three pounds up was not getting me there, but the desire to get 23 pounds down wasn't enough to make it happen. 

What was a behavior that I could change?  Overeating is so complicated.  There are so many different reasons I overeat.  I recently saw a study that claimed the average adult made more than 1,000 decisions per day about eating.  I've spent more than a decade now with therapists and overeating comrades analyzing my eating.  All I needed was one behavior.

I decided not to eat food the minute it was in my possession.  Specifically, I decided to wait five minutes from having food until eating it.  For the most part I haven't waited five entire minutes, but I have broken the cycle of grabbing food and stuffing it in my mouth.  While I wait, I "write-before-bite", another important behavior in controlling eating but not the primary goal.  I also do general journal writing, which has been missing from my life because I "don't have time" for that.  I've lost those eight pounds.  But most importantly, I feel in control of my eating again for the first time in more than six months.  One behavior.

Where God Comes In

I have been meaning to write a post about the limiting nature of happiness, to go with the post on the limiting nature of strength.  You know the old footprints poem: God is rarely seen in happy times.  For an addict having the time of her life with good health, a great job, and fabulous friendships, getting one inch past Step One into that God stuff is difficult.  I'm a proclaimed theist of the Christian variety, but my sense of spiritual connection has been at an all time low.

And yet notice what happened when I started pausing before my food.  My selected behavior was not prayer, which would be more directed toward God and would be another means of pausing, and yet the behavior of pausing just for the sake of the space caused me to start writing in my journal again.  Not in itself prayer or intended meditation, but a space for a spiritual experience.

William James considered this space to be important.  On a separate page I offer a lengthy excerpt (pp. 395 - 398) from The Varieties of Religious Experience for those who wish to read it.   It is an excellent defense of creating space for spirituality through practices of asceticism.  Waiting a few moments before eating is a tiny asceticism, but an effective one in a life that is just too easy.  James, referencing the ease of 1902, wrote:

...it is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty amongst the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers. (p. 403)

Poverty isn't just a matter of zip code, it's a matter of separation from ease.  It is an asceticism enforced or chosen by interactions with the outside world.  Avoidance of poverty at all costs includes the willingness to sell one's soul at any cost; this is what makes it a moral disease.  Single-minded devotion to the things of this world is what makes it a spiritual disease.

Many years ago I read an a book of existentialist psychology.  There is no possibility I could recall the identity of this book, but it made the argument that addiction is a kind of necrophilia- a chasing after death.  When I mentioned this to my therapist he was so startled that it ended the conversation immediately.  Reading James, I realize that the concept was wrong.  Addiction is a maladaptive chasing after life.  One thing that the fat on my body says is that I have provided life for myself.  One thing that choosing food before anything else says is that I choose nourishment and life.

American culture has made an idol worship of not dieing- we don't spend a quarter-million dollars on the last few days of life on accident (the cost of the typical American dieing process); it is the final sign of respect to the idol.  According to James, asceticism is about increasing life through an acceptance of death.  The final paragraph from the excerpt mentioned above:

The metaphysical mystery, thus recognized by common sense, that he who feeds on death that feeds on men possesses life supereminently and excellently, and meets best the secret demands of the universe, is the truth of which asceticism has been the faithful champion.  The folly of the cross, so inexplicable by the intellect, has yet its indestructible vital meaning. (pp. 397-398)

I happened to finish reading  The Varieties of Religious Experience this week.  Much of it is relevant to  my spiritual struggles, and I shall surely be devoting a post just to wrapping up my interaction with the book.  The book is wide and souring and exactly the kind of philosophy that is central to my existence as a human being, but I know that this specific topic required changing a behavior first and letting the meaning follow.  As I mentioned in a previous post, without any experience of life the book was meaningless.  With the experience of one tiny, very tiny, behavior a "metaphysical mystery" became clear.

Managing Encounter with Spiritual Genius: creating religious experience

I've just begun reading The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James for the second time in my life.  Now that I have a few years of experience as an adult, it has been a goal to re-read a few books first encountered in my teens and early twenties.  This book was not selected for that project: I cannot compare the two experiences of reading it because on the first exposure the book held no meaning for me.  I picked it up now because I'm feeling a great deal of clarity about philosophy and, after some various religious experiences of my own, not so much clarity about my relations with spirituality and religion.  This time it is proving much more engaging.  And timely:

There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric.  I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammadan.  His religious has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit.  It would profit us little study this second-hand religious life.  We must make search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-settings to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct.  These experiences we can only find in individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever rather.  But such individuals are "geniuses" in the religious line... They have known no measure, been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas; and frequently they have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, and presented all sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological.  Often, moreover, these pathological features in their career have helped to give them their religious authority and influence. (pp. 8 - 9)

James then goes on to give as an example George Fox, founder of the Quaker religion and very odd duck.  Martin Luther King, Jr., who has been canonized in American culture and will be of special note next week on the fortieth anniversary of his murder, and Malcolm X, ignored with diligence in the same culture, are examples that I spent more time pondering in my early college days.  Today the focus is on Rev. Jeremiah Wright and whether his rhetorical fervor has tainted the politician Barack Obama.

Genius of all kind has always been suspect because of its destabilizing aspect.  The canonization of Martin Luther King, Jr. is troubling where the intent seems to be to tame his message into bland tradition.  We know that this was President Lyndon Johnson's outright goal.  Canonization is a more civilized means than whipping to turn King into a trophy in the sitting room,with the bonus that he's no longer around to open his mouth and get himself sent back outside. Christ, Mohammad and most anyone else that really matters have suffered the same civilizing indignity.

On the King holiday, when I will sometimes make it my civic duty to suggest reading Malcolm X instead, the response can be ferocious and insane- occasionally someone will suggest it is racist.  Appearing to speak against Dr. King or elevating any other leader near him is Bad.  Mentioning King's personal failings can be met with the same ferocity, although they are discussed evenhandedly in the landmark Parting the Waters, a three-book series discussing all aspects of King's life and influence and which is intellectual bedrock for the King canonization. (Malcolm X has many biographies, but no similar book of such substance and therefore I simply suggest reading his Autobiography.)

Is there such a thing as spiritual genius?  Can spiritual leaders impart a special kind of wisdom, despite their inability to live balanced, measured, lives?  In most of the world, the answer to the first question is seen as "yes."  Europeans of the modern era, with their post-totalitarian wariness of all extreme ideas, are the only culture that leans toward a "no."  When America is labeled backwards in relation to Europe, the issue almost always comes down to America's continued willingness to grapple with contrasts in ethical extremes.  In less-developed nations it isn't about willingness; the factors of limited means make it an absolute requirement.  The European slant sidesteps ethical decisions by declaring an underlying balance and unity of ethics which is still stuck on a form of the idealism that feeds totalitarianism.

America at large, long freed from philosophical idealism, nonetheless turns ideas into cartoons ("tradition", as referenced by James above).  Literally: the canonization of King means that all good school children learn all good things about him, including in their cartoon books.  The cartoon is that King was Good (and Malcolm was Bad).  Somewhere, there is probably a cartoon that he went potty when his Mommy told him to.  No one wants their children to imitate King literally: tilting at windmills in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, selected specifically because he was young and didn't know any better, copying someone else's homework.  We Americans tend to sidestep the question of how wisdom comes from the unbalanced, attempting to isolate out wisdom while burying the questions of ethical difference and ethical failure.  This leads to the absurdities of snake-oil televangelists and their followings.  If you saw a flash of genius, the next step is to bury your head in the sand about the snake-oil.  Sometimes it means you end a racist institution.  Sometimes it means you pay for someone else's castle and vat of mascara.

My own thinking has been to view spiritual leadership with suspicion.  Prior to my encounter with James' argument that the role is different from the role of citizen or philosopher, or politician, I considered the role dangerous to the individual.  The way I saw it a good person (a good citizen, a sound philosopher, given to being a good theologian) sometimes found himself called to spiritual leadership.  Accepting the call did bad things to people; it made them bad citizens.  A person who took the role outside of an established religious institutional structure was in even more grave danger.  James suggests that the person will find themself in the role because they are already unbalanced.  My error was one of philosophical idealism- that all existential roles are fundamentally the same.

Given these common errors, Obama's speech on race was not just sane, but remarkably sane.  He starts by asserting the argument for political genius, as bland as that may be: unity, unity, unity.  The politician has a different job, and ethical challenge is not it.  Think of Roosevelt's fireside chats.  Balance.  Stability.  Obama, as a civilian in the world of spiritual genius and as a politician, is required to divide Wright's statements into good/bad and this he does.  Here he fails somewhat- he isn't clear about the existential divide between his own locus of judgment and that of Wright, but this is a political speech and not a philosophical treatise.

His sanity is that he refuse to label Wright as Good or Bad.  Wright is familiar to him, and in that familiarity Obama has been spiritually inspired.  But he also places Wright's excesses at a distance.  He judges, not as the European disdainer of religious genius judges and not as the American snake-oil viewer judges, but with honest judgment rooted in the reality of his experience.

Without intending to, Obama's speech draws focus on the absurdity of the spiritual leader gone politician.  These are two separate roles.  Obama speaks of Wright's sermon in terms of "mistake" and it would be mistake- if he were a politician.  But in terms of evangelism and a call to repentance in the tradition of the Old Testament and the words of John the Baptist in the New, Wright was spot on.  This is what Obama said:

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society.  It's that he spoke as if our society were static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country... is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.  But what we know-- what we have seen-- is that America can change.  That is true genius of this nation [sic].  What we have already achieved gives us hope-- the audacity to hope-- for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

Obama is a politician.  Repentance is not his game; the future is.  Wright is part of the meaningful discourse that has influenced Obama, but Obama must make different judgments.

Back to the question of whether these odd ducks can impart any wisdom.  I think the answer is: not directly.  We make a mistake when we expect them directly feed wisdom into our minds and our hearts.  Across America this morning, legions of Christians have walked into their churches, notebooks at the ready, expecting to get direct advice on how to live.  Run-of-the-mill preachers, imparting tradition and providing solid leadership, are going to step up to the pulpit and give it.  That is a valuable continuation of social norms and stability, but it is not spiritual genius.

Spiritual geniuses do not impart wisdom by direction, but rather by inspiration.  Where they provide direction, they create tradition.  Fox with his Quakers, Wesley with his Methodists, Smith with his Mormons.  These men purposefully created institutions, but institutions pass on tradition rather than genius.  Spiritual genius is not passed on, but rather interacted with.  At best, the institutions create a environment where the spark of genius may survive from generation to generation.  Obama is not meant to model his forward-facing politics on his Rev. Wright, but rather have it informed by Wright's calls to repentance.

Human growth requires an input from outside the models that we have already nurtured and established.  I already have an idea what my ethics are and what my ideals are for most humane lifestyle.  Continuing to interact only with what I see as balanced approaches to ethics and lifestyle isn't going to change anything.  As James wrote, "It will profit us little..."  I may not go in for the instability, I certainly don't want the crowd-at-large to turn to instability (really the number one reason some would like to duct-tape Wright's mouth shut- "It isn't that I'm too stupid to be allowed to hear him, but you might be."), but institutions are going to teach us nothing.

When Obama portrays Wright as the sometimes embarrassing uncle, I think he has made the correct judgment about how you or I should interact with the spiritual genius that we encounter.  Close, but not too close.  In the interaction with instability I will shift my stability.  James would say that I continue to create my own individual interaction with divinity, an interaction which must be made and not copied.

P.S.

Where the topic is prejudice and complexity, I always have to bring up The Nature of Prejudice by Gordon Allport.  My opinion is that this book should be required-reading for every high school student.  I just learned today that both King and Malcolm X were also fans of the book.

Barry Saunders, a Raleigh News & Observer columnist who frequently comments on race and what I shall call (with absurd formality given the context of his columns) "the Black experience," had an excellent column on the flap over Wright.

To see how intellectually vacant, morally flat-footed, and in some cases utterly failing in courage the cartoon response to this question is, you can unfortunately do no worse than today's Sunday Forum (a kind of expanded letters-to-the-editor) "What to make of Obama and his pastor" in the Raleigh News & Observer.

The Conservative Soul

Andrew Sullivan's The Conservative Soul is most excellent as the confrontation of fundamentalism that it was meant to be.  I myself am currently in a state of extreme rootlessness regarding my religious ideals and though I have rejected certain ideas of fundamentalism, others had vined their way into my thinking through the constant message that fundamentalism is religion, a message that is megaphoned out from those speaking both for and against it.

Actually, our current cultural climate not only megaphones that religion is fundamentalism, but that all morality is fundamentalism.  The choices presented by popular culture are either to accept your religion or your morality with fundamentalism, or to reject all of them together.  Because of the importance of teasing religion and morality both apart from fundamentalism, I recommend this book not only for someone hoping to understand the current political climate, but for anyone hoping to escape from errors of thought which have been inculcated into them by the fact of having been born in this time and place.  For me, the most extreme of those errors are brought to light in my food addiction, and indeed so many of the addicts thought patterns start at the all-or-nothing abyss (pp. 202 - 209) essential to fundamentalism.

Sullivan's definition and description of conservatism proper is also an excellent little refresher and primer.  He at first launches into a rather grand idea of conservatism:

This is where conservatism starts [a "definition of humanness that is marked by imperfection and uncertainty", as found in the same gospels called upon by Christian fundamentalists].  If we are all humans, then we each have a beginning and an end; and each of us has a different beginning and end.  We see the world from where we are, and our understanding of the universe is intrinsically rooted in a time and place.  We can do all we can to increase our knowledge and gain deeper and deeper insight.  We can read history and philosophy; we can travel; we can ask questions of young and old; we can debate; we can pray; we can grow through pain and amusement of daily life.  But we will never fully or completely transcend where we are.  And even if we could, such transcendence would render us unintelligible to those still earthbound. (p. 174)

While this is a beautifully written call to the conscience-based theological alternative to fundamentalism that Sullivan has explained in his book, it is more abstract that political conservatism requires.  However Sullivan is not only presenting a political conservatism, but also presenting a world-view to take on fundamentalism.  He then advances from this philosophy into something a little more solid, that in my thinking is the philosophical beginning to political conservatism:

...we live in twilight, and we are unsure whether it is a prelude to morning or night. (p. 175)

This is direct contradiction to the Marxist idea of history as progress, and the subset of Christianity known as dispensationalism.  Conservatism expects nothing about truth to come out of history. (p. 211)  In fact, politics isn't about truth with a capital "T".  Sullivan writes:

As a politics, its [conservatism's] essence is an acceptance of the unknowability of ultimate truth, an acknowledgment of the distinction between what is true forever and what is true for here and now, and an embrace of the discrepancy between theoretical and practical knowledge.  It is an anti-ideology, a nonprogram, a way of looking at the world whose most perfect expression might be called inactivism. (p. 230)

That which passes for national political dialog is actually about ideology in the broadest sense.  Sullivan refers to calling this politics a "battle of ideas" as vulgarity. (p. 199)   The opportunity to run for President is seen as an opportunity to leave statecraft behind and enter into the realm of pure philosophy.  No one currently running for President, with the exception of Hillary Clinton and her crass proposals for repackaging the economic successes of some into goods for others, are talking about statecraft.

As someone who has always been politically conservative, I find it odd to have to make the argument that politics is only about statecraft, and that politicians should stick to the business at hand.  Defining the meaning of the universe is not the job of my elected representatives; having my trash picked up on time is.  That seems painfully obvious.

With no one in the presidential race talking about statecraft, certainly none of them are talking about political conservatism.  In contrast, Sullivan returns several times to the great statement of Ronald Reagan, patron saint of conservatism, in his 1981 inaugural address:

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.  From time to time we've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by and of the people.  Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who amongst us has the capacity to govern someone else?

This is conservatism, and it is important that we know it.  I have already suggested that hope starts with care, responsibility, respect and knowledge; the same four items named by Fromm as requirements for love.  When things are called by the wrong name, knowledge is perverted.  When knowledge is off the rails, there is no basis for hope.  Whatever one may think of the view currently being offered by President Bush and his team that we must allow someone else to make value judgments between liberty and security on our behalf, how it plays out in history must be judged by what it is.

The alternative, the confusion of mislabeling and misnaming, means that conservatism will head into the same morass that American liberalism has been in for perhaps fifty years.  It is actually probably too late (and Sullivan explains the problems in thought and in on-the-ground political action that have already happened because fundamentalism has been mislabeled as conservatism).  It was Sullivan's article on Obama, discussed previously in this blog, that helped me finally understand how this happened to American liberalism, crushed by it's own mislabeled fundamentalism of ideology (rather than religion) as played out in the various catastrophes of the last century.

Perhaps Sullivan is right.  Perhaps Obama, the only likely escapee from fundamentalism, is the only one who, like Bill Clinton before him, in turning the conversation to statecraft can ultimately turn the conversation to political conservatism.  But that is hoping for a history with direction, and that just isn't conservative enough for me.

P.S.

Sullivan makes important reference to Michael Oakeshott.  An Introduction, at Amazon.com.  Wikipedia article.
Sullivan also discusses Montaigne at length.  Wikipedia.
And Hobbes.  Wikipedia again.

Podcast of an author interview.  (I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet myself.)

Follow-up reading on the book:

Glen Greenwald's review of Sullivan's book and the issues discussed.

The Washington Post review of Sullivan's book by Bryan Burrough claimed that if you've ever read anything by Ann Coulter, then this book is not for you.  Actually, I so thoroughly enjoy this part of the review that I've got to quote the entire thing:

The Conservative Soul, unfortunately, is not only too polite but too high-minded to galvanize anyone without a graduate degree in philosophy.  This is not a bad thing, just a warning.  If you belong to the Elks Club, apply catsup to your scrambled eggs or have ever read anything by Ann Coulter, this is not a book for you.

You got that America?  You must be stupid, stupid, stupid. <Loafingcactus here cackles and cackles with amusement.>

For good measure, David Brooks in his review also brings up Ann Coulter, this time as not more stupid than Sullivan and his readers but as more dangerous than the Christian fundamentalists Sullivan is writing about.  While both are worth reading (as is Ann Coulter), I find the need to keep bringing up Ann Coulter as a contrast... um, curious.  It is Ann Coulter who is a force of nature in defining reality according to her own centered consistency.  True, she cannot be reasoned with in any way, but the one quality she has is truly amazing.

The Brooks article I found compelling on first reading, although I was hungry at the time.  After a snack and a re-read, no.  It's criticisms of the book are hollow, wrong.  But in criticizing the book he does present an interesting alternative viewpoint.

Hope: A Place to Start

Perhaps every addict starts from a failure of hope.  Rather than take on the world with integrity and courage, we retreat to our anesthetizing substitute.  What the world gives us may or may not be any good, and while what we pull from our substance (in my case, food) definitely won't be good, it is at least known.  The text for introducing hope as an ideal is 1 Corinthians 13.  Even hope, the miracle of faith, is only a support for greater virtues that one does not yet dare to dream.  Hope is not the ultimate ideal of Christianity, but the final verses give the hope for hope.

Here the King James Version, but recall that other versions commonly translate the virtue "charity" as "love":

1. Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.
2. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.
3. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and I have not Charity, it profiteth me nothing.
4. Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,
5. Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;
6. Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;
7. Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
8. Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.
9. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
10. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
11. When I was a child, I spake as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
12. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
13. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greastest of these is charity.