Not Ours

I found this post from TPM's David Kurtz to be disturbing, in particular the last bit, highlighted:

The President's brief comments from the State Dining Room of the White House suggest that he doesn't necessarily see the imminent end to Mubarak's reign -- or consider it anything close to a slam dunk that whatever might emerge post-Mubarak will be more democratic. If this were a clear choice between an authoritarian regime and a western-style democracy, it'd be a no-brainer. But it's not. It's a problem to be managed, with the sober understanding that the real world offers potential outcomes that are worse than Mubarak

The history of American "management" in crises like this is . . . well . . . it sucks, really. Furthermore, any public perception that the US is "managing" this can only hurt in the long run. After all, we have enough troubles in the Middle East; interfering in what is, quite clearly, an uprising fed by exhaustion among the Egyptian people with the lack of leadership and the success of the Tunisian revolt.

I have been following events via a live video feed from Al Jazeera's English-language broadcast online. While a mixture, as all such events tend to be, of the episodic burst of excitement and terror followed by hours-long lulls of not much at all, it is evident this is an outburst of popular resentment, and the express desire of tens of thousands of Egyptians to rid themselves not only of Hosni Mubarak, but a dictatorship in its dotage, no longer even pretending to help out the mass of the Egyptian people, 50% of whom barely exist on $2 a day, and whose social infrastructure has crumbled. While the system provides near universal education through University level, there are no jobs of any kind for those who emerge, degree in hand.

The problems Egypt faces are multiple, but it seems pretty clear there is a desire for some sort of democratic reforms to get the ball rolling for larger social and economic reforms. Any volatile situation presents dangers, to be sure. There is zero, zilch, nada indication of any kind that there is any participation by Islamic extremists, as claimed by idiotic former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton. Indeed, the leaders of the Islamic Brotherhood were carted off to prison early-on in the protests; the allegations that the country has been infiltrated by any extremists, religious or otherwise, is just not borne out by the facts on the ground. Indeed, the one person many of those in the streets seem to be turning to is Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mohamed Elbaradei, former chief UN Weapons Inspector for Iraq, who has voiced his enthusiastic support for "the youth" of Egypt, and made repeated calls for Mubarak to step down.

I do not know what the future holds in and for Egypt. Right now, there seems to be a shift from large-scale, peaceful protest to an increase in looting, at least in Cairo. This is due, in part, to the disappearance of any police presence in the capital. Yesterday, when the military was called out, they interposed themselves between the police and protesters, protecting the latter from an increase in violent force from the former. While protecting key areas of the city - from the foreign embassies and various government buildings to the Museum of Antiquities which was - briefly - entered, with some displays smashed but nothing appearing to have been stolen - much of the city is experiencing an absence of any presence of law enforcement, which can only lead to trouble.

There are also reports that water has been shut off to one of Alexandria's eleven districts.

So, the situation is still fluid - despite a lack of water in part of one city - and it is anybody's guess whether Mubarak stays or goes, the military continues to protect the people or turns on them, or perhaps the police return to their duty stations and protect the people and shops of Cairo from the depredations of looters. My most fervent wish is for the situation to resolve itself for the benefit of the great mass of the Egyptian people, desperate for a change. My next most fervent wish is that Americans, official and otherwise, allow this to evolve - or, perhaps, sadly, devolve - as a wholly Egyptian affair. This is not a "crisis" to be "managed", but a possible revolution to observe and, if successful, support as much as we can.

Egypt

The fall of the Tunisian dictatorship, covered thoroughly by Al Jazeera, has fueled the current anti-Mubarak protests in Egypt. Even as I type this, I am following Reuter's live-blogging of events, as well as Twitter.

My hope is that the United States government will step back, allow events to unfold, while perhaps quietly suggesting to Hosni Mubarak that a safe retirement in, say, New Mexico, might be in his best interest.

As I wrote on Twitter, were I the President of Syria, the kings of Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and the Sultan of Oman, I might be getting just a tad nervous. Apparently there have already been street protests in Amman against King Abdullah. While I realize his mother is American, our support should always be to the people who yearn for a more vital, active role in their own governance. Even if we don't always like the results, it seems our interests lie in greater democratic freedoms.

I just pulled up a live blog from Al Jazeera's headquarters in Doha, Qatar. Their Egyptian offices have been shut down by police.

God's blessings to the people of Egypt, yearning to breathe free.

"They have crucified the sun!" - The Paganism Of Henri Lefebvre

After the liberation of France, Henri Lefebvre returned to his little village, Navareenx, in the Pyrenees. He strolled up to, then entered, the village church. After returning to Paris, he narrated his impressions which became the essay, "Notes Written One Sunday in the French Countryside", which was included in a 1947 volume, Critique of Everyday Life. This short piece receives a close reading by Boer, and in it Boer claims that using Lefebvre's own interpretations, particularly of the dialectics of space, both as a representation and as represented, he can see hints even in Lefebvre's otherwise vitriolic, barely-concealed disgust with the Roman Catholicism of his youth, small hints of an alternative reading of the local parish as a place not just of the reification of the repression of the (rural) proletariat through the rituals and practices of the Church, but also a place full of potential protest, a "cave" he says, an underground where possible subversion can be planned.

For all this may be a possible reading, I think Boer works too hard for this conclusion. After wending one's way through Lefebvre's essay, with small excursions looking at Maurice Blondel and Joachim of Fiore, this conclusion seems to ignore some important aspects of Lefebvre's thought and life. Boer notes that Lefebvre was the founder or rural sociology in France; he further notes that, like Bloch, Lefebvre was a kind of utopian-Marxist, although of a different cast of mind. While Bloch's utopia was always not-yet, for Lefebvre (as, indeed, I think one can say of some of the writings of Marx himself) the consummation of the communist revolution, as the state withers and life and human beings are no longer alienated one from another, the result is akin more to the agrarian communism of ancient Greece, a pastoral effervescence, rather than some not-yet existent future.

The title of this post comes from a passage in the essay where Lefebvre reacts to a Celtic cross, with its circle superimposed upon the otherwise bland cruciform wall-hanging. In that instant of - what? not revelation, certainly, but perhaps anger-filled insight - clarity, we have the key to Lefebvre's protest against the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church in the life of rural France. He juxtaposes the virile, sensual, life-affirming rituals of pagan religious rituals - those moments after harvest and before planting when communities would toss caution to the wind, celebrate a massive communal feast, and end in an (imagined, I think, in Lefebvre's preference for sensuality) orgy of Epicurean gluttony and Dionysian sexuality. The Church, by which he means the Roman Catholic Church, has baptized these and other rituals, robbed them of their sensuality and life-affirming celebratory core, and rendered them not just placid, but even negative. What was once a huge communal feast has become the Eucharist with its bland little wafer and barest hint of a taste of (consecrated) wine. Sexuality? The Church gives us a neutered, even emasculated Christ and the Virgin Mother. Rather than affirming life, even as these celebrations created conditions that kept rural populations perpetually on the edge of near-catastrophe, the Church has simultaneously offered a certain amount of safety to rural communities even as it strips life of those rituals and signs that would give meaning and joy to it.

With the sun crucified by the Church, we have the negation of all that Lefebvre wishes to see returned to a rural life robbed of any joy by a set of doctrines and practices that repress, even destroy, what little of real life might remain.

While it might be possible to see, buried in his description of his local church there in he Pyreneean foothills hints of possible subversion, of space reserved for clandestine gatherings in the heart of a space consecrated to the on-going repression of the rural proletariat, I believe this over-reading misses a key component of Lefebvre's approach to Marxism. It is not just liberation; it is a reconstitution, the possibility for life, particularly rural life, to be in greater accord with the rhythms and tempo of the seasons. Part of the practice of such communities is the ritualized acknowledgment of these rhythms, important touchstones for communal life. It is this ritualized harmony, this celebration of life, that Lefebvre wants to see restored. It is a deep streak of paganism that runs through at least Boer's presentation of his musings not just on the Roman Catholic Church, but his far larger project of understanding rural life.

There is little room, it seems, even for a subversive Catholicism, to take root in the heart of a community that, once it has tossed off the shackles of capitalist exploitation, would return in some manner to a more natural - and more ritualized practice - way of living.

A Gap Filler

I'm between thoughts at the moment. Reading Boer on Henri Lefebvre has left me in a bit of quandary. I really want to say . . . something . . . but there are a whole host of reasons why I keep hesitating.

The State of the Union gave me very little new to think about. Forced to sit in my car on the way to work and listen to a bunch of stupid people talk about the speech made me wonder if NPR could be prosecuted for mass murder; all that stupid, reaching out through the radio, sucking the life out of thousands of listeners, left gasping out their final breaths wishing the last thing they heard had not been Mara Liasson droning on about how much "people" care about the deficit. Had NPR decided to put Cokie Roberts in the same studio with Liasson, we might well have had the first intellectual black hole form, a stupid singularity drawing in even more American listeners, trapped and never allowed to exit.

John Boehner, pressed to say something contrary, claimed the President said nothing about "American exceptionalism". The entire speech was a paean to American exceptionalism, which means either Boehner wasn't listening or decided to say something meaningless to make conservative Republicans happy. Forced to choose, I think it is probably the latter.

Sarah Palin says the USSR won the space race. Because Democrats were in control of the country at the time, and wanted us to lose, just like they wanted us to lose in Vietnam. I made that last part up, but it makes a kind of insane sense.

Rather than winning the future, I'd much rather win the past. The future will take care of itself.

On a more serious note, I think it would be nice if discussions of the Tucson shootings would name those killed, rather than refer to them in passing. Since we still have little to no idea what prompted Jared Loughner to do what he did, for all we know the dead federal judge, or 9-year-old girl, or some other of the dead may have been his intended target. Their lives are in need of more than just a passing mention as we follow the recovery of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

I will admit that I doubt it will happen, but a Tunisian-style uprising in Saudi Arabia would be more earth-shaking, and more welcome by many (including me) than anything since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in that region of the world. Why the US would prop up a dictatorial hereditary monarchy in the face of a popular uprising may force the US to stand aside. If it should happen. The ripples from the Tunisian revolution have yet to settle.

I have great friends and family, and without a doubt the most beautiful wife and most marvelous children. I am truly a blessed man.

On that rather smarmy personal note, I think I'll sign off for now.

Putting The Hump In Hump Day - Mid-Week Music Randomness

First, a great thanks to Frank Gondo and his band, as well as Headspins, for a great Friday night treat of live music in an actual Chicago bar. Gondo's blues-rock, Headspins' pop-punk were a nice break in the humdrum of life; I particularly liked Headspins first and last numbers, "New Safe Vampires" and "Sex Camel", respectively. Many thanks to Frank, an unmet FB friend, for the good talk over a Newcastle Ale (me) and some kind of mixed drink (him) before the fun started. I must admit, though, almost getting nailed by a piece of his drummer's broken stick meant the bar was too small.

That little bit of formality out of the way, rev up those iPod/laptop/Mac gerbil-wheels, ladies and gents, and put your first ten random songs in comments, because it is through randomness that truth emerges. Seriously.

Not.

Ahem.

Dark Origins - Porcupine Tree
Afraid of Sunlight - Marillion
Wind at My Back - Spock's Beard
Duke's Travels - Genesis
Second Life Syndrome - Riverside
It's For You - Pat Metheny/Lyle Mays
Cheyenne Anthem(Live) - Kansas
Space Boogie - Jeff Beck
No Stranger - Saga
Blue Light - David Gilmour

What's something about music without, you know, music?


Steve Rothery is more than just one of the great, underrated guitarists in the world. His solos almost always have an emotional impact, which proves he's not just technically awesome, but musical. Were I to die on my way home from a Marillion show, I am quite sure it would be a happy death.

Vicarious Victimization

Kevin Drum has a nice rundown of tweets concerning a small drama yesterday at the Marine Corps base at Quantico, VA.

The only thing worse than this kind of narcissistic grandstanding is the ongoing self-righteousness of Glenn Greenwald. It isn't bad enough that he acts as if we were already a bureaucratic police state; his persistent view that his interpretation of the Constitution is the only legitimate one, while certainly an effective courtroom tactic, has turned off this former daily reader (parenthetically, were I ever in need of a Constitutional specialist in a court case, Greenwald would be the first person I would choose as an attorney; someone as big an asshole as he is would be a plus for any legal team). Specifically, it isn't so much his pose as the sole True Defender of the Constitution that bothers me as much as his nearly daily harrumph at some "outrage" that is perfectly intelligible, although perhaps not always forgivable, as part of the normal behavior of states. Whether it's the allure of power of the inertia of bureaucracies, all the things he huffs and puffs about make sense as long as one understands that no Administration has ever followed the Constitution perfectly, nor will they. Further, since there are neither penalties nor even serious political repercussions for officials violating either the law of Constitutional mandates, there is no incentive other than virtue - always in short supply among bureaucrats and officials - to do so. One would think that, as an attorney, he might just understand that.

Hamsher, on the other hand, is a different case altogether. The level of invective and sheer nastiness she used increasingly during both the 2008 Democratic primary, as well as the health care reform debate became too much for me. Further, her penchant for sheer fantasizing about the nature of the political opposition - only those who agreed with her were true Reformers; those who disagreed or took a different position were all corrupt, evil human beings - reached a level of self-parody that would have been humorous were it not for the fact that it revealed a streak of narcissism that, with events yesterday, proved that even left-wingers aren't immune from being fantasy-prone.

Pvt. Manning is being held in solitary, 23-hour lockdown. One can set aside questions regarding his hus guilt or innocence and still understand why the military might be wary of allowing him too much contact. He has admitted, publicly, that he has passed classified information to an individual, Julian Assange, who also has been quite public that his intended use of that information has not been in the best interests of the US. Whether or not Pvt. Manning is guilty of a crime, his public statements confirming his actions are to enough to make intelligible the military's decision to limit, as strictly as possible, his contacts outside detention. Furthermore, the complaint that certain visitation privileges have been revoked, well, Pvt. Manning is being held in prison. They can decide who can visit and not visit, and change their minds, for all sorts of reasons.

Some could argue that the MPs should have acted in a different manner; perhaps their superiors should have been less ham-fisted in their approach. Certainly, it has given Ms. Hamsher the opportunity to claim that she, too, like Pvt. Manning, is a victim of police-state tactics. Having one's car impounded is, obviously, right up there with being disappeared by authorities, being tortured, having one's interactions monitored and restricted by official decree. I can see why she is in such an uproar.

On the other hand, it seems to me this is a pretty clear signal to those who have lost any perspective out of sympathy for Pvt. Manning's actions that the military justice system will conduct its business in the manner it deems fit. Jane Hamsher is not a victim of a corrupt, repressive system. She was inconvenienced by parts of a system whose internal workings she has impugned, insulted, declared outside American legal and constitutional bounds. It seems to me they were sending her a bit of a message, one she might well be too dim to understand. When you bait the bear, sometimes, the bear wins.

Seek The Welfare Of The City - Stanley Haeurwas And The Problem Of Exile

After all, I have playfully used postmodern playfulness to try to remind Christians that we are in a life-and-death struggle with the world. - Stanley Hauerwas, "The Christian Difference, or Surviving Postmodernism", A Better Hope, p.36.

Jeremiah is a gloomy Gus. Reading through this prophetic book, one gets the sense that he rather enjoyed pronouncing judgment upon the evils of a people poised on the precipice of destruction, their kingdom small and weak about to face the onslaught of the Empire of Babylon. Once the catastrophe occurs, Jeremiah spends quite a bit of time comforting the people with, "I told you so".

He also offers a bit of advice to those in exile that was probably as difficult to hear as the dire warnings of imminent doom he spoke. He has a vision of two baskets of figs, and wonders what they mean. The LORD complies, starting in verse 5:

These are the words of the LORD the God of Israel: I count the exiles of Judah whom I sent away from this place to the land of the Chaldaeans as good as these good figs. I shall look to their welfare, and restore them to this land; I shall build them up and not pull them down, plant them and not uproot them. I shall give them the wit to know me, for I am the LORD; they will be my people and I shall be their God, for they will come back to me wholeheartefly.

But King Zedekiah of Judah, his officers, and the survivors of Jerusalem, both those who remain in this land and those who have settled in Egypt - all these I shall treat as bad figs, says the LORD, so bad that they are not fit to eat. I shall make them abhorrent to all the kingdoms of the earth, a reporach, a bysword, an object of taunting and cursing wherever I banish them. I shall send sword, war, famine, and pestilence against them until they have vanished from the land which I gave to them and to their forefathers.

Setting aside a whole host of questions that should properly be asked about such a text before doing the proper task of exegesis, I would, rather, prefer to offer this as a reply to Stanley Haeurwas' oft-stated desire for Christians to see themselves as those living in exile. In particular, as a reply to the all-too-often accommodated, mainline Protestant churches, their doctrinal differences getting ever fuzzier as they strive to become American Christian churches.

For Hauerwas, this has been unequivocally bad for the churches. They have lost, according to his reading of the history of Christian churches in the United States, the ability to worship, with any real meaning, any authentic prophetic or pastoral content, the God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth, crucified and risen. In the essays that open A Better Hope, he goes so far as to insist that the mere possibility of being a church that does so - i.e., authentic worship of the living God - would be an ever-living thorn in the side both of secular America and the all-too-willing accommodations of a neutered Protestant bourgeoisie.

Yet, "exile", at least for Jeremiah, is hardly a state of separation. Indeed, those who are in exile, as opposed to those who have been allowed to remain behind (or who have fled to Egypt) are "the good figs", those who still find favor with God. For a people whose identity has been shaped by an attachment to The Land rooted in Divine Grace and favor, this idea that there is blessing in exile from this land must have sounded not just odd, but may even have bordered on unintelligible. All the same, Jeremiah's famous declaration, the title of this post, is of a piece with this parable of the figs. The exiles are to pray and work and live as the people of God, including praying and working for the welfare of the city in which they are held as exiles.

For Jeremiah, then, exile is not a place of struggle against. Nor is it, I should add, a place of accommodation. Rather, the people are to maintain their identity; part of that identity includes being a living community, working and praying and worshiping together, who also seek the welfare of the larger community of which they are a part. Rather than a life-and-death struggle with the world, exile is part of the people's ongoing struggle for the world.

Hauerwas has maintained, for the better part of two decades, that the Christian churches in America, in order to be Christian, need to set to one side any effort at mutual accommodation. We are not to seek the Americanization of Christianity. We are not to seek the Christianization of America. For Hauerwas, only when the churches can worship the God incarnate in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen - and there are abundant references across many writings where Hauerwas is clear this has yet to take place, at least in mainline Protestant Christianity - without reference to America, are the churches not only authentically Christian, but also authentically working for America. For Hauerwas, in other word - to use his rather odd notions of narrative - the story of exile, as the Christian's story in America, is one of a dialectic of separation and prophetic transcendence on the one hand; and immersion and pastoral care leading to transformation on the other. This rather complicated way of envisioning Christian "exile", however, ignores the prophetic insistence, recorded in Jeremiah, that, as exiles, we are those favored by God. Furthermore, as exiles, we are to live our lives as part of the larger community, seeking its welfare in the ordinary, mundane run of life.

Not only is Hauerwas' insistence that real worship of God not yet happening in the Protestant churches, far too comfortable with American life; his understanding of exile is truncated, ignoring the Divine imperative to be - borrowing the imagery from Jeremiah - good figs. This is not treason to the God of Israel, apostasy to the God of Jesus Christ. Rather, in living as both Christians and Americans, including praying and working for the welfare of America qua America, we are living out the lives of exiles. Not in struggle with, even against it. In struggle for it.

Christianity, Marxism, And The Persistence Of Religious Protest

I decided it might be a good idea to pause and ask a really good question: Why am I at all interested in Marxist discussions and appropriation of Christian theology? Whether one considers Marx's ideas of a piece, or periodic with an early, more humanist Marxism juxtaposed to a later, more scientific approach, one thread that runs through his work is, at the very least, a hostility to the Christian religion as it was reified in industrial capitalism in western Europe.

I will state upfront that I think the other side of the equation, the Christian churches and their various theologians, have been all-too-eager to accept the indictment of Marx and his followers (they have been less enthusiastic toward Freud, but that is a subject for another day). All too often this agreement has been too vigorous, too shallow. Because they have sought it out, many theologians have found, within the text of the Bible, in the history of the faith, and in certain theological categories tools that can liberate not only this same dehumanized mass, but itself from the fate of going the way of the dodo. While there may be a genuine desire on the part of many to work for the liberation not just of those under the bootheel of late industrial imperialistic capitalism, for the most part I honestly believe it is rooted even more in a desperate attempt to keep the Christian religion alive, even vital, in the face of the protest against its use as a tool to degrade human beings.

Bad faith is never a good reason to do anything, especially a bad faith rooted in a shallow guilt and a desire to remain "relevant" rather than faithful.

The collapse of the Soviet bloc is so far in the past there are people in the US of legal voting age with no living memory of it. We have lived far too long under the lie, "There is no alternative" (TINA, as it has been shortened, was a favorite of Margaret Thatcher). There is a rich, vibrant history of Marxist thought, from the founders to our own day, and this is the precise moment it may well indeed speak to us who have the desire to hear of a better way, a more human way, of being together.

The Christian churches, in all their variation, are now, as they have always been, on all sides of various fences. The powerful and the powerless, the leaders and the herd of dehumanized masses who want only to live fully human lives find solace within the walls of the churches, comfort for their pains - social, psychological, physical - in the soothing words and outstretched arms of both clergy and laity. The challenge before us, really, is one of honesty. Were we Christians honest, we would admit not only that the churches have been complicit, sometimes overt leaders, in the exploitation of human beings for the sake of the powerful; we would admit, further, that it doesn't take a whole lot of effort to find support for such action within the text of the Bible and the categories of theology. The effort to lift out and read the Bible, the history of our theology and practice, those parts that favor a different view of what it means to be Church, to be a Christian, while noble and certainly finding support in various parts of the text, undermine themselves at precisely the point they deny any contradiction within the text itself, let alone in the history of the faith.

Like the far-too-shallow appropriation of large elements of liberation theology by North American Christians, the rush to accept the judgment that we have, indeed, been guilty of monstrous crimes against humanity in the name of God - implicating God, too - misses the point. We cannot rid ourselves of the distasteful past. We cannot wash the blood from our hands. We can work with those texts and categories that offer a way out of the abyss, but we should do so honestly, and with more depth than I think, heretofore, has been done.

In reading these Marxists and the ways theology informs their work, even as they deny any reality to the content of the truth claims of theology, I have discovered that, at the very least, much of the on-going protest against "God" and "religion" is not anything "radical". The God-deniers and church-bashers far too often are wed to an ideology that is hand-in-glove with those forces that continue to oppress and subjugate large parts of humanity. The shallow scientism of Dawkins and Harris, the sophistry of Daniel Dennett, and the imperialistic war-mongering of Christopher Hitchens are not at all radical critiques of religion and the evils it visits upon humanity in the name of humanism. Quite the opposite; Hitchens and Harris are enthusiastic war-boosters, with Harris going so far as to endorse the torture and murder of Muslism on grounds that can only be called genocidal. Dawkins beef with Christianity - its ridiculous creationist, young earth nonsense - has pushed one biologist past the point of endurance. The result, however, is an endorsement of an equally dehumanizing scientism that is itself part of the structure of liberalism that buries far too many human beings under its own groaning weight.

Furthermore, St. Paul did instruct us to be all things to all people, to be as wily as foxes. If there are, in fact, resources for imagining and living the Christian faith that can be found in Marxism - resources not only for judging those whose lives are rooted in human exploitation, but comforting and even struggling with those envisioning a better, more human/humane world - then, by all means, they should be given a third, or even fourth, look. That there are Marxists who struggle with theological issues, whose effort to consign religion to history's dustbin are thwarted by the reality that the many faces of religion include one that lives with, sides with, the exploited, dehumanized tools for the enrichment of the few, we owe it to ourselves to learn from them. Even if we cannot agree with all they say, by rooting around in the attic of western thought we may find some garments to drape across the tattered, withered frame of Christian thought and life.

A Catholic-Tinged Revolution - Louis Althusser

Fear is not a fatherland, nor is courage . . ., more the human condition is not a human fatherland. It is, perhaps, the fatherland of men as they appear to God; because we are Christians, we call this condition original sin. For the man who is not a Christian, and for the Christian who does not usurp God's place, the human fatherland is not the proletariat of the human condition, it is the proletariat tout court, leading the whole of humanity towards its emancipation. This proletariat has a real content.

For, as Christians, we believe that there is a human condition; in other words, we believe in the equality of all men before God, and his Judgement, but we do not want the Judgement of God to spirited away before our very eyes; nor do we want to see non-Christians and, occasionally, Christians as well, commit the sacrilege of taking the atomic bomb for the will of God, equality before death for equality before God . . ., and the tortures of the concentration camps for the Last Judgement.(italics in original) - Louis Althusser

Roland Boer moves from two semi-assimilated German Jews, comfortable with a certain German Protestant approach to Christianity to the first of two French Roman Catholic thinkers. In the case of Louis Althusser, the specificity of this description - French Roman Catholic - is necessary to understand the way Althusser takes a large part of what he, Althusser, found so attractive about Roman Catholicism. In the words Boer borrowed from Althusser for the chapter title, it lends to Althusser's work a certain "ecclesiastical eloquence." More, for Boer, it provides a clue to understanding some confusing aspects of Althusser's thought.

In particular is the way Althusser, in a way that is far too common, tended to use the word, "Church", written that way, that elided the many differences not just among various Christian churches, but even with the Catholic communion itself. As an active member of the post-war Catholic Left in France, the move from Roman-Catholicism to Marxism was aided, for Althusser, by a general desire for an alliance among various Left groups. This move was helped along by certain teachers, including Catholic ones.

In fact the Church, via its chaplains and encyclicals, made their own militants aware of the 'social question', of which most of us were totally ignorant. Foo course, once we recognize that there was a 'social question' and the the remedies proposed were ridiculous, it did not take much, in my case the profound political vision of "Pere Hours', for us to explore what lay behind the wooly-minded slogans of the Catholic Church and rapidly convert to Marxism before joining the Communist Party!

Boer examines not only four early theological essays. He also examines in some detail "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses", which forms a nascent sociology of both religion and morality. Within this essay, however, Althusser seems to replace "ideology" for the God of Thomistic doctrine. Unlike its actualization in specific ideological structures - including what Althusser calls "practical ideologies" like religion - "ideology" itself, or perhaps better Ideology, is transhistorical, eternal, and inescapable. Rather than arguing about Ideology, Althusser seems to suggest that most people are arguing about various instances of ideology incarnate in history; Ideology, unlike its early Marxist formula, is not rooted in the historical form of the class struggle.

In this way, the various Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) are, in a way, mere appearances to the Platonic Ideology that Exists. Boer sees the shadow of Augustine here as well as St. Thomas, which in some ways is ironic. Augustine, like Althusser, was a restless intellect, moving from Manichaean religious beliefs through neo-Platonism to Catholicism relatively rapidly, dragging various bits and pieces with him along the way. Althusser, so Boer wishes to argue, was a self-declared scientific Marxist whose writings are suffused with various elements from the French Roman Catholicism of his youth and young adulthood. Confusing the specific with the universal, seeing in Ideology an easy substitute for the God he rejected, Althusser's work was more a continuation of the leftward journey he began as he moved from the Catholic left to Marxism. I do believe that the marriage might be far easier for a Catholic than some other Christian groups, due in small way to the universalizing tendency within Roman Catholic thought. In that way, Althusser's ritualized, sacralized Marxism does seem to bear a remarkable resemblance to his discarded Church/church.

Snapshots II

The ridiculous nature of our discourse in the wake of the Tuscon shootings just won't end. The right continues to act the real victim, ignoring the six dead and multiple wounded. Stupidity piles upon ignorance as the leader of the Republican Party, Sarah Palin, continues her highly profitable star-turn as the biggest victim of the shooting (as a side note, as I watched her appearance on Sean Hannity's television program, I was amazed at his ability to ask questions while his tongue was stuck so far up her ass). The impossibility of any serious discussion of violence, guns, politics, rhetoric was clear enough in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, as some on the left decided to point the finger of blame absent any evidence whatsoever. The right, however, decided to play the game, using the trump card of victimization. What follows, like my previous Snapshots post, is just a random, stream of consciousness list of stories, facts, and other items. Rather than offer a way out of the discursive impossibility we face, I want only to break through, perhaps, with some bits and pieces from the reality we all live without even realizing it.

In a review of a recent scholarly work on guns and violence, Reload: Rethinking Violence in American Life by Florida Atlantic University professor Christopher Strain, Scott McLemee notes an interesting, yet desperate, statistic. In 1996, there were 15 handgun-related deaths in Japan. In the US, that same year, there were 9,390. That is, on average, almost 26 per day. Even accounting for differences in population, that is an astonishing, horrible reality.

Incidentally, the comments on Scott's review are a marvelous example of why having a sane, sober, restrained conversation on guns and violence is impossible. If I weren't used to it, I think I would cry a little.

On July 18, 1984, James Oliver Huberty walked in to a McDonald's in San Ysidro, CA carrying a 9mm Uzi semiautomatic, a 12-gauge shotgun, and 9mm Browning. He killed 22 people before being shot by a SWAT sniper.

On March 24, 1998, at a middle school just outside Jonesboro, AR, 5 people were killed and ten wounded in a shooting. The perpetrators were a thirteen year old and an eleven year old.

The phrase "going postal" has become a commonplace for marking workplace violence, due to a spate of shootings in postal facilities that began in the mid-1980's in Edmond, OK and include other incidents in New Jersey, California, Oregon, Michigan, and Tennessee.

In a summary of a study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they report that, in the fourteen years between 1992 and 2006, there were 11,613 workplace homicides in the United States. While the CDC does note variances among the years, the average is 829.5 people dying each of those years from violence in the workplace. Not accident, not unsafe working conditions directly related to workplace performance or equipment. 830 people died, on average, each of those years due to homicide.

The summer of 1919 was known as "Red Summer". As the United States tried to adjust to the post-World War I era, including the heroic actions of segregated African-American troops, the re-establishment of white supremacy, north and south, led to a series of race riots across the country. Between May 10, in Charleston, SC and October 1 in Elaine, AR, there were 34 separate racially-motivated attacks by whites upon African-Americans. The dead were numbered in the hundreds.

Two years later, the Greenwood section of Tulsa, OK, a thriving, economically and socially successful black neighborhood, disappeared, burned to the ground in an orgy of racial violence.

On January 17, 1989, Patrick Purdy opened fire on the crowded playground of Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, CA, kiling five children.

From today's Chicago Tribune:

Three men were killed and two others wounded overnight in a house on the south side of Gary in what police believe was a drug-related shooting.

According to police, a man called 911 at 10:40 p.m. from another home nearby, saying he had been shot in the home at 3829 Washington Street.

When police arrived, they found three adult males dead, all apparently from gunshot wounds.

They also found a 4-year-old girl, uninjured and now in protective custody. Police said her father was one of those killed.

According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, there were 88,097 forcible rapes reported in the United States in 2009, among the lowest figures from the past 20 years. That is 241 rapes per day. Hurray for lowering it to that figure.

I'll stop for now. All the blather on television, on radio, on the internet, at least as it is currently conducted, is meaningless. It seems impossible to grasp that there are 241 rapes - just forcible rapes - reported - just reported - each and every day in the United States. This is a low figure, as the violent crime rate continues to decrease. As long as these realities receive, at best, a sorrow-filled shake of the head, and a dispassionate shrug of the shoulders (what can you do, crazy people will do crazy things blah blah blah) we will continue to talk about inanities like "blood libel" and talk about pogroms of conservatives, all the while the bodies pile up, lives and families and whole communities lie broken and bleeding, as long as no one says quietly, but firmly - "Enough".

Looking Good For A Corpse

Yet another obituary for rock music.

So Neil Young was wrong. "Rock and roll will never die," the whiny-voiced old coot told us, and we believed him. But now along comes Paul Gambaccini, the self-styled "Professor of Pop", to announce that, since only three rock songs appeared in last year's top 100 singles, the genre has expired.

That's it? Because fourteen-year-old girls are buying Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber and Beyonce and L'il Wayne, because that's what the record companies are selling, rock is dead? Leith notes that this is hardly a marker of the demise of rock, but then goes on to note that ubiquity of pop/R&B will have repercussions down the road.

The problem is that if the kids aren't listening to rock, when they go into the music industry they won't make rock. It is going to run out. We have discovered too late that rock, like fossil fuels, is a finite resource. Sometime in the early 1990s, we hit Peak Rock: we now have only managed decline and a Mad Max style post-rock world to look forward to. Don't get me wrong. I love rock music. I'm so uncool I even sing along to the Killers in the car. But I have to recognise that I am that old fart I warned my younger self about. When I go to rock concerts, I don't look about me and see The Kids. I look around me and see The Man. The world's remaining rock deposits are being stripmined by irresponsible members of the boomer and post-boomer generations.

Um. Uh.

On the one hand there is the nostalgia circuit - Peter Frampton going from city to city replaying his Comes Alive LP from 1976, in running order, note for note. The reformation or on-going old-fogey tours - bands like Styx, Kansas, Journey, REO Speedwagon, and Cheap Trick hitting the road together, none of them with the exception of Cheap Trick having anything new to play - are cash-cows, because folks my age and a bit older have enough disposable income to afford the tickets and get a chance to go out, smoke some grass, and pretend they don't have gallstones or a hernia or have lost their hair or that it is gray. They can scream and sing along to songs that were popular, or at least played on the radio, when they were in high school, and feel young again.

If Robert Plant and Jimmy Page doing shows under the name "Led Zeppelin" depresses you - it certainly does me! - or if you have the experience I did at a Rush concert a few years ago, looking around and realizing that, when you start bringing your kids to rock concerts, it might be a sign that you should stop going to rock concerts, it isn't so much evidence that "rock" is dead. Rather, the pretend ideology of rock - it's music about young people for young people, and if you're "of a certain age", you just won't get it - might well have been wrong, after all.

A commenter to this article got it right.

So an entire wing of the music industry is declared dead because singles sales have fallen??

Festivals and live shows are in rude health.

Album sales may be down, but this is due to rock music diversifying and splintering into many sub-genres.
All of these sub genres are in creatively good health but have had to downsize their expectations and stage shows in accordance with their smaller share of the market.

It is doubtful whether any one band or one main genre of rock will unite all rock fans in the way it did in the past.
Back then there were only so many sub-genres and this is why rock bands like The Rolling Stones, AC/DC, Judas Priest and Queen ruled the roost. Small pond syndrome.
With new sub-genres being invented all the time and the rock fanbase being subdivided along with it, we are unlikely to see rock dominating the charts as it once did.

I DARE you to go to Download, Sonisphere, Rockness, T In The Park, V Festival, Reading, Leeds, Isle of Wight or Hammerfest, get up on stage and announce that rock is dead in front of a crowd of 70,000 young rock music fans.

I have been saying much the same thing for quite a while. Part of the reason there were supergroups who sold millions of copies of albums that really didn't warrant such sales was the monopoly major labels held, the power of radio in the pre-internet age, and the luxury of a whole lot of disposable income. Part of the reason the majors are in such trouble and CD sales are down across the board is the majors refused to price them properly. Charging as much, if not more in constant dollars, for CDs as they did previously for LPs, even though the technology should have made the price fall, the record companies committed suicide. They still charge almost twice for a physical CD what it costs to get the same set of songs on iTunes. Unable to come to terms with the changed nature of the music public, they will, in all likelihood, go the way of newspapers. Unable to come up with a business model to survive in changed market circumstances, combined with the relatively cheap cost of high-quality music production and mixing software, allowing DIY bands to record, mix, and even produce their own product effectively and less expensively, they, not the genre that kept them afloat for decades, are the ones that are on the way out.

As the letter writer said, the situation isn't so much that "rock" is dead. Rather, there are no bands - no Beatles, no Led Zeppelins, no Rolling Stones, not even R.E.M. or U2 fill the bill anymore - that create a center around which others can revolve. Rather, the musical universe is alight with all sorts of stars of varying brightness. They all have their fan-bases, their little publics that follow them, buy their music, shows up at gigs. Some are bigger, some are smaller, but it's all vibrant and varied and quite lively.

So what if 14-year-olds aren't perceptive enough to realize that Taylore Swift is more a product than any of the alleged music she creates? The biggest rock act in 1965 wasn't the Beatles, it was Hermans Hermits, for crying out loud; the number one song the week of Woodstock was "Sugar Sugar" by the Archies. All of this is to say the story we tell about rock music elides all sorts of uncomfortable realities we want to forget. I think rock will do just fine, and bury yet another obituary.

Sectarian, Fideistic Tribalist - Stanley Hauerwas On The Church Versus America

America is at once the name of an aspiration to liberty and equality of rights and the name of the power that stands in the way of that aspiration. - Stanley Hauerwas, "On Being A Christian And An American", in A Better Hope, p. 31.

As I wade through Roland Boer's dense commentaries on the Marxist appropriation of theology, I am pausing to read an essay or two from my one volume of Stanley Hauerwas. For those who may not know the name, Hauerwas is more than just "a Christian ethicist". His name is a symbol for kicking against so many conventions, not the least of which is his contention that "Christian Ethics", as a phrase (let alone a discipline of the academy) isn't really intelligible.

A Better Hope: Resources For A Church Confronting Capitalism, Democracy, And Postmodernity is one of the initial publications by Brazos Press, a small imprint of Baker Book House. A compendium of essays from the 1990's, the collection could be considered "dated" (it was published in 2000) were it not that the topics he addresses are not just pertinent but really vital.

I will confess that I have mixed feelings about Hauerwas. I want to like much of what he has to say. I get the feeling that his intentions are not just honorable, but rooted in instincts that are correct. His counter-claim to what he sees as the unholy alliance between political liberalism (broadly understood) and the Christian churches in America is simple enough. He writes the following at the end of the essay quoted above, on p. 34:

I believe . . . Christians can do nothing more significant in America than to be a people capable of worshiping a God who is to be found in the cross and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The worship of such a God will not be good for any society that desires a god made in the image of the bureaucrat. A people formed by the worship of a crucified God, however, might just be complex enough to engage in the hard work of working out agreements and disagreements with others one small step at a time.

Fair enough. Yet, unlike those who face the fire of his ire - John Rawls, in particular - Hauerwas is thin on the ground as to how, exactly, we are to negotiate the differences among incommensurable vocabularies, or to put it in his terms, reconcile the different stories we tell about ourselves. If, as Hauerwas suggests, Americans are a people predisposed to a certain avoidance of conflict, pasting over very real differences in order to keep a certain social peace - and I am not convinced this view, which he borrows from an essay by Alisdair MacIntyre, is true - then the alternative he suggests would seem to prevent anything else than agreeing that we do, indeed, disagree. These disagreements, moreover, under the terms he sets forth here, would be unmanageable because they are rooted in "stories" that start in different places, have a whole different cast of characters, themes, motifs, and serve such a welter of purposes that "disagreement" is a polite way to describe what really would be conflict.

So, we end up where we are in many ways. Different groups insisting on the primacy of "their" story as being the key to being "America" (and despite his insistence that his view denies a role for "America" in a Christian's self-understanding, the practical result is the same), without any common vocabulary, or single "story" to which to appeal, sounds very much like our current situation. The appeal to the Church to "be" the Church of Jesus Christ, witnessing to that reality in its life in the life-world that is America is hardly a sectarian call to arms. All the same, working through both his method, and his sectarian, tirbalist view of what it means to inhabit a story, leads me to the conclusion that a key ingredient is missing from his theological polemic - grace.

Without grace, that sense that God's justice and love are united in a prodigal condescension to our human condition - and Hauerwas is certainly correct when he notes that the Nicaean/Chalcedonian formula is a shorthand for the uniqueness of the Christian story of God (although I prefer "confession" to story) - leaves out the key to understanding the "why" of the Incarnation. Are we, in being the Church in America, presenting a set of stark alternatives, the "thou shalt" of a new law? If this is the case, what need have we to confess this same Incarnation?

Again, there is much in this essay, and in Hauerwas' larger theological project, to commend itself to a variety of publics. All the same, what I found wanting in this essay - how we get to the point where we can negotiate those agreements and disagreements - is really indicative of a far deeper problem. Hauerwas' view of the Church is one much like himself, confrontational, committed to its "story" without any need to justify that commitment to those outside its walls, and lacking any sense of grace, which would be rooted in an acknowledgment of the contingency and partiality of any narrative. This, too, is a Scriptural insight, one Hauerwas passes over in silence.

When Everything Old Will Be New - Mid-Week Music Sharing (UPDATE)

I am committing blogger theft. It has been at least a year, perhaps more, since I stopped doing my music posts, and I miss them. Rather than just do the same thing over and over again, I have decided to do something someone else does. Tbogg, and if you're not reading him you should, does what he calls "Pre-Friday Random Ten". He sets his iPod on shuffle and the first ten songs that come up, he posts, with one to grow on. It is such a genius idea, I thought, what the heck, right? Is he gonna sue?

Please, don't sue.

In order to make this a more perfect Wednesday, breaking up the monotony of the week, and the somewhat dumbed-down headiness that has become my blog over the past few weeks, I am going to be doing this, at least until I get bored with it or forget it or someone tells me to stop (OK, maybe not the last one; I don't like people telling me to stop doing stuff, ask my mother).

You can play along! Do the whole "shuffle" thingy on your little Walkman or whatever, and let me know in comments what is on your playlist, getting you over the hump.

OK, set your phasers to stunning . . .

Prayer for the Dying - Seal
Fragile - Sting
Sowing the Seeds of Love - Tears for Fears
Closer to Fine - Indigo Girls
She Sells Sanctuary - The Cult
She's On Fire - Train
Lovesong - The Cure
Free Man in Paris - Joni Mitchell
Please Read the Letter - Robert Plant and Allison Kraus
How Come - Ray LaMontagne

Not quite making the cut, but I'm putting the video for it up, because, well, it's my blog. . .



UPDATE: I hate to admit it, but I liked that so much, I decided to do it again, with another ten-plus-one.

Court and Spark (featuring Norah Jones) - Herbie Hancock
The King of 17 - John Wesley
Up for the Downstroke - Parliament
Never Gonna Stop Me - Rob Zombie
Us and Them - Pink Floyd
Water - The Who
Casey Jones - Grateful Dead (Workingman's Dead)
Whipping Boy - Train
One O'Clock Jump - Benny Goodman Live at Carnegie Hall, 1938
I Want You - Marvin Gaye

And the pinch to grow an inch . . .

Allegory, Myth, And The Possible Future - Roland Boer On Walter Benjamin

The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard places on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback wao was and expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet's hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called "historical materialism" is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to jeep out of sight. - The first Thesis "On the Philosophy of History", Walter Benjamin, in Illuminations, p.253. Edited and with an Introduction by Hannah Arendt.

If there is someone who could be imagined the opposite of Ernst Bloch, it would be difficult to escape the idea that Walter Benjamin is the perfect candidate. They were friends and correspondents. Both shared an affinity for literature as well as Marxism. Both were semi-assimilated German Jews "of a certain age". Beyond that, the differences could not be more plain. Bloch's works were many, varied, sometimes far too long, their Marxist pedigree always in dispute. Benjamin's longest work, his habilitationschrift, was his first work. Bloch's style of writing - expressionist, the words and sentences and paragraphs defying normal grammatical rules as they pushed the reader forward, sometimes against that reader's will, to see with new eyes - was nothing at all like the spare, traditional style of Benjamin. Yet, that style belied a depth of analytic vision, an almost furious desire to draw in whatever tools necessary to demonstrate that Benjamin understood late capitalism to be the great destroyer, not least of beauty. Among the tools Benjamin uses, from his Trauerspielbuch to his late, unfinished Passagenarbeit, was the medieval method of Biblical interpretation, the four levels of allegory. As he wrote in his first thesis on the philosophy of history, it is precisely because theology is now wizened that it can be sneaked in, almost without anyone seeing it, to be of service to stripping away the crumbling facade of late capitalist triumphalism.

The second chapter of Roland Boer's Criticism of Heaven: On Marxism and Theology considers the work of Walter Benjamin. Boer focuses on Benjamin's two major works, his first, long-languishing work on the baroque German mourning-play, to which he refers throughout as the Trauerspielbuch, and his late, never-completed work on the Arcades of Paris. While he draws in several of Benjamin's aphoristic "Theses on a Philosophy of History", as well as his essay on translation, by focusing on these two works, the bookends of his intellectual life, Boer shows that Benjamin displayed a remarkable consistency of vision, even as he, Boer, sees that consistency was paid for with the limitation that Benjamin became trapped within a certain mythological - and by "myth" Boer clearly means "false" - consciousness that derives from his too-heavy reliance upon certain theological and exegetical methods and assumptions.

Benjamin's allegorical method not only generates the failure of his overt proposal but also becomes an appropriate method for what I am suggesting. It is not, as the anti-allegorical polecmic of biblical criticism has argued for so long, that allegory seeks a wooden one-to-one correspondence to carious items in the test. On the contrary, allegory, particularly in Benjamin's hands, might be seen to reach across the divide between a capitalist present and a communist future to draw terms from that future to itself, however imperfect they might be. The question remains as to whether the mythological material that runs through Benjamin's writing is able to do the job. In terms of specific content, no, but in terms of the effort to think differently, then myth provides one way of doing so. Roland Boer, Criticism on Heaven, p. 105.

There are two parts to Boer's chapter. The first focuses on Benjamin's use of allegory. The second, which flows from the first, considers how Benjamin sees myth, not just Biblical myth, but the category itself, as a useful category for seeing how capitalism creates its own myths, destructive - even self-destructive - as they may be. Boer claims, however, that Benjamin's use of certain Biblical categories - in particular, he considers Creation and Eschaton - traps Benjamin within a mythological framework that leaves him, with his reliance upon certain theological and exegetical principles lifted from biblical criticism, unable to escape. He cannot, it seems use the myths for the sake of pushing a liberating message; indeed, by falling back, as Boer demonstrates pretty clearly, upon highly sexualized language (although I think "gendered", as clumsy as it is, would have captured Benjamin's use better), to the denigration of the female imagery. Indeed, Boer points to a passage where Benjamin, using the first three chapters of Genesis to work up a theory of language, can make a plea for more creative possibilities for men, while accepting without any criticism, the inherent secondary status of women, including downplaying procreation in favor of a yearning for a more creative masculinity.

It is Boer's analysis of this particular passage that is the clue for the much larger criticism Boer levels at Benjamin - the use of allegory traps Benjamin within the categories of myth. As he states in the passage quoted above, Boer does see possibility in Benjamin's method, but only possibility. Benjamin's ploy seems to be, according to Boer, that capitalism is not just myth-making, but is willing to draw on pre-capitalist imagery to hold up its teetering ideological structure. Much that capitalist society and culture has to say about itself is little more than a combination of myths, scavenged from wherever one may find them, that end up predatory upon themselves and even the society and culture for whose sustenance they are employed. In this sense, the destructive tendencies of capitalism are clear enough.

All the same, while Boer expresses a certain sympathy for the possibilities inherent in Benjamin's project at the very end, he nevertheless insists that, trapped by his reliance upon allegory and the inevitable mirror-game of myth, Benjamin cannot escape from myth because he does not explicitly set forth how these new myths from a post-capitalist reality, can draw us in. Too much beholden to the original creative myth, with its denigration of women, seeking solely for a creative possibility for the male, even seeing in the procreative act of women something akin to Nietzsche's eternal recurrence rather than something new, Benjamin does not move forward. While there is possibility, at the end his project flounders upon these rocks, rocks first set down when he decided to invite wizened theology in to the game.

Can We Be America - Some Thoughts Inspired By The Life And Words Of Martin Luther King

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath --
America will be!
-Langston Hughes

It is with both sadness and something like awe that I read through King's 1967 speech, "A Time to Break Silence". Delivered at New York's historic Riverside Church, it was more than just a statement against the wars in Vietnam. It was a thorough critique of American life, foreign and domestic. As in so much else, King cut through the illusion that the war, like segregation, was the illness. In this speech, he not only pleaded to end the wars. He also talked about America being America. Like his 1963 speech to the March on Washington, he proclaimed a vision for the United States that was in deepest accord with our most cherished values; unlike that speech, he offered no vision of hope or promise in the ringing tones of a vision of eschatological peace. On the contrary, he indicted the United States for betraying that vision, wondering whether we were not, perhaps, demonstrating symptoms of national decline, a failure not just of nerve, but of those qualities that would, indeed, make us a great nation, not just a great power.

Unlike the speech in Washington four years previous, King was not playing to our best sense of ourselves. He was, rather, holding a mirror before a nation already weary from social strife, yet destined for years more of it and declaring that, without justice, there can be no peace; that the peace we sought in Vietnam was inextricably linked to social justice at home; that the justice of which he spoke, and for which he had worked for over a decade required more than adjusting a few laws and changing a few minds. Repeatedly, at the end of the speech, King stated that the two goals for which he worked, the America he wished to see, could only come about through revolution.

Not just some "change of heart", although that was certainly part of it. The revolution to which he referred was that same revolution he spoke of seeing across the Third World, revolutions to which the United States seemed institutionally and inherently opposed. To live out its highest values, to "be America" as Hughes said we might yet be, America needed to be on the side of these revolutions, support them actively and purposefully. Only then could we, in the words of his 1963 speech, live out our creed that all people are created equal.

In the years since his murder, King's legacy as a public figure was contested space. The prophet of a necessary revolution became the preacher of peace. We are inundated with the sounds of his 1963 Washington speech - a marvelous piece of American oratory, to be sure! - but without the context of his later speeches and work, including a "Poor People's March" he was planning as he was gunned down in Memphis, a year to the day after delivering his speech on the wars in Vietnam, leaves one with the impression that King was a sober liberal. That image, imposed pretty early on, is part of the reason for the remarkable veneration among many young African-Americans, of Malcolm X, his alleged rival until Malcolm had his own final confrontation with a gun. The differences between the two men, the subject of James Cone's remarkable work of social and ideological detective work, Malcolm, Martin, and America, were far less than the public, and perhaps even they, imagined. Yet, it was the appropriation of the peace-loving, non-violence-preaching King by white liberals that rendered so much of King's actual work unintelligible, silenced a forceful, revolutionary agitator in favor of an image that was uncomfortably close to the Establishment's house negro.

In the early 1970's, radical black theologian William R. Jones, author of Is God a White Racist?, gave a lecture at Wesley Theological Seminary at its annual celebration of King. The contested legacy of King was of some import at Wesley at the time. The academic dean, Phil Wogaman, had gone to Alabama and marched with King; he had been attacked by the police at the Benjamin Pettus Bridge. His mentor at the theological school at Boston University had been King's as well, L. Harold DeWolfe (whom Wesley stole from Boston to be its first academic dean in 1965; DeWolfe dragged along several BU alumni, including Wogaman and Jim Logan and, later, William "Bobby" McLain). In that speech, Jones declared that the contested legacy of King was, in large part, a matter for whites. Blacks had no need, and certainly no desire, to take their cues on whom they should venerate as leaders from whites.

Jones' speech was met with consternation, to say the least. He was hardly dismissing King's work. Rather, he was stating, quite boldly, that the arguments over who King "really" was were irrelevant to the question of "leadership" among African-Americans. They were quite capable of understanding who King was and what he did. The imposition of a part of King's legacy - that peaceful preacher of non-violence and racial coexistence - stripped away not only the revolutionary King. It robbed King's message of its historic depth because the onus, at least in the whitewashed (pun intended) version being sold after his death, was upon the African-American community to meet the social and psychological needs of whites, rather than understanding desegregation as part of a much larger revolution of social and cultural and political values that would fulfill the promise, long ago stated succinctly by Langston Hughes, that, America might yet be America for all its people.

The First Blogger?

I'm just past half-way through Roland Boer's chapter on Walter Benjamin, and I decided to pause and go back and read what little I have on Benjamin. My introduction came through mentions other writers had made, and then I read Hannah Arendt's Men In Dark Times, which includes a profile of Benjamin. There are two small collections of various essays, fragments (including his "Notes On The Philosophy Of History"). One is entitled Illuminations, and its was edited by Arendt and includes the essay that appears in Men. The other, Reflections was edited by Peter Demetz.

What came through my reading these volumes was, initially, curiosity. As Arendt rightly notes in her essay, for an age that needed to pigeonhole writers and thinkers, Benjamin defies even the most ardent attempts to do so. Comfortable with Marxist thought, he didn't join the Party. He wrote essays on Baudelaire and Kafka, yet he wasn't a literary critic. He utilized theological categories in his analysis, yet was not a theologian (indeed, as a mostly-assimilated Jewish German, his ease with Christian thought was probably an oddity that defied explanation). He was led to Kabbalah by his lifelong friend Gershom Scholem, yet was not a mystic.

His longest works are intricate works on the interchange among the history of ideas, culture, and social thought. While one might be tempted to call him a cultural critic, even that doesn't capture the range of his vision.

In many ways, Walter Benjamin was an example of a kind of writer with which we are only now getting acquainted. I think Benjamin would have found the internet a marvelous tool; the academy wasn't sure what to do with him, literary and academic journals consistently rejected his essays and articles. Writing on a blog, however, would have provided a forum for Benjamin to present his musings without having to assuage the egos of those with whom he was engaging.

Arendt's essay on Benjamin, upon reflection, is frustrating on a number of levels. A pedantic, pedestrian kind of thinker, she focuses far more on the frustrations of Benjamin's life, personal and professional, reading backward from his suicide on the Franco-Spanish border to see little but tragedy. She calls his Habilitationschrift on the Trauerespiele a work on German drama, when it is in fact far more specific, far more wide-ranging in its analysis. She describes The Arcades Project an unfinished work on 19th-century Paris. That's a bit like calling Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics an unfinished work of theology. The Arcades Project was, as described and unfolded by Boer, a look at the way late capitalism had rendered Paris, rather than the pinnacle of culture (as it was viewed at the time by many), a decadent, Philistine realm where the final ravages of commodification had rendered people incapable of grasping their own decline.

It is easy, I suppose, to get caught up in the frustrations and failures Benjamin experienced in his life, looking back from that terrible moment when he decided to end his life rather than face the possibility of being turned over to the Gestapo and returned to Germany. In ill-health, he probably would not have survived long the gentle ministrations the Germans visited upon Jewish intellectuals. All the same, his writings are a testimony to the power of a mind and intellect refusing to bow to convention (including the conventions of academic politics and expectations) that offer a view of our society and culture that continues to enrich our lives.

What's It All About?

A colleague of mine enjoys teasing me because I (a) am married to an ordained United Methodist clergywoman, and (b) do all sorts of things one does not normally associate with what this person calls "being a churchboy", including liking psychedelic music (which this person refers to as "stoner music"). I find it fascinating not only because this person, who neither goes to church nor cares all that much for Church, seems to think it perfectly fine to tease me, with an undercurrent of moral scolding, for not conforming to some notion of what a "real Christian" does. Like, say, not listen to psychedelic music.

In a similar way, one of the recurrent right-wing scolds insists that I, and others, are "immoral". It is different only in degree rather than kind than my colleague's sometimes not-so-subtle scolding. Both charges - real Christians don't listen to all that weird music! Real Christians are MORAL! - hinge upon what is an irrelevant, and actually insidious, understanding of what it means to be a Christian. I was trying to figure out a way to sort through all this when I came across this post by John Meunier.

A holy person does no harm to himself or to others, either by what he does or by what he leaves undone.

A holy person does good to all people she encounters. Her life is one that enriches others in their bodies, their minds, and their souls. And she cares just as much for her own body, mind, and soul because there is great joy in living fully into the goodness of her own life.

A holy person knows where the power source of life can be found, and he is constantly found there. He worships with passion and reverence. He prays without ceasing. He searches the word of God with expectation that it has a word for him. He draws close to God by letting go of the world through fasting. He seeks out brothers and sisters to talk, listen, cry, celebrate, and mourn with because where they gather, God is.

This is a good start, and is very much in line with Wesley's understanding of holy living. All the same, I think there is a bit too much asceticism, a bit too little of the Bible in this. In particular, St. Paul. Paul's vision of what it means to be a Christian, at least in my understanding, begins with, "Christ came so that we have life, and that more abundantly." For me, holiness embraces not only the things John describes. Like St. Paul, and Jesus, it includes going about one's life no longer afraid that, in that living, one might slip and fall so far there will be no getting up. Jesus went about his work not caring for the moral scolds who insisted he hung out with the wrong crowd, or violated the rules set forth by God. St. Paul went about his missionary work even as he was chastised by St. Peter and the rest of the apostles. Why did they do this? Because both understood that, at its heart, being a Christian means being free.

It does not mean being free to do anything one wants to do. Rather, it means free to be as God intended. Living in service to others. Living with the understanding that God's love for us is real not because of what we do, but just because we are.

St. Paul does not speak of holiness directly. Rather he speaks of the fruits of the Spirit - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. While he certainly insists that we are to conduct our lives in a manner blameless before other persons and God, it is in these expressions of a full human life that a Christian demonstrates what it means to be fully human as a Christian.

I'm not one to sit around and write about the moral failings of others. This isn't because I am an immoral person. Rather, it is because conventional morality is irrelevant to the Christian life. Again, not because I believe God is immoral or amoral. Rather, the Christian life both embraces and transcends any passing ideas on conventional morality, seeing the Christian life as one lived freely, for others, in love and joy and all the rest. Further, I honestly cannot imagine any circumstance in which God cares what music we might choose to listen to, anymore than I believe God cares whether we wear a suit and tie to church, or shorts and flip-flops (I once raised eyebrows in a eucharist service at Wesley Theological Seminary by showing up in shorts, a t-shirt, and flip-flops; the celebrant, indeed, was "offended").

As long as we focus on non-issues - how we behave in inconsequential matters speaks more about who we are before God - the Church will always run in to trouble. Instead, we need to be living our lives full of joy and laughter, love and patience, with a heart and mind turned out to the sufferings of others, seeking to help them, be a presence in the midst of their pain. That is true holiness. That is what the fruits of the Spirit yield. Whether or not I tell other people they are immoral or bad or evil is immaterial; that we show them God's love through our freely-given love for them - that is what matters.

The Atheist Synthesis Of Bible And Theology - Boer On Bloch II

I would much rather that Bloch had allowed his politicised biblical criticism loose on theology. I think of the discernment of myths along class lines, between those that encourage sevility and those that enable human beings to stand up to the power that oppress. Is not this kind of discernment necessary in his readings of theology? These debates might continue, but, in the end, Bloch drops his ideological guard too often, especially in regard to theology and it is precisely here that is is needed. Roland Boer, Criticism of Heaven, p.56

One of the first books I read as a seminarian is Phyllis Bird's The Bible as the Church's Book, a succinct discussion of the history of the formation of the canon. It is indispensable to any understanding of the Bible, to any approach to this much-contested text, to grasp that, in its final form, we have a Bible at all because the Church as a whole, early in its life, determined certain texts to be central to our communal understanding, while others were not.

This does not mean the canon is "closed". On the contrary, one of the most important insights of Hans Frei's monograph on biblical hermeneutics, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, is that interpretation itself keeps the canon open.

All the same, a basic historic fact is the Bible, for all that it presents many faces to many readers, and offers so much to readers less interested in religion and theology, nevertheless is the book of the Church.

Ernst Bloch recognizes this reality, calling the Bible Christianity's "uneasy conscience". A fair description, to say the least; it is in the words of the texts that so many in Christian history have found the resources to protest all sorts of abuses of power and authority. This historical reality, one Bloch notes runs from the Albigensians (one could add the Cathars and Waldensians as well) through the Hussites in Bohemia through Joachim of Fiore and Thomas Munzer and the Peasant Revolt during the early days of the Reformation. Rather than denounce the Bible as nothing but a work designed by those in power to maintain their power, Bloch wants to know how it is possible this collection of writings has offered and continues to offer so many readers resources, strength for the journey from nobody to fully human.

Bloch finds it, as he writes in Atheism in Christianity, within the contested texts of the Bible itself. Using the best available biblical scholarship at the time - in particular that known as "redaction criticism", a fancy name for how the various writings are edited - Bloch espies in the texts abundant evidence not only of stories from above, but of protests from below, stories that tell not only of a people's protest against various authorities here on earth, but also the imposition of a God who supports and even defines and legitimizes that imposition. In other words, within the Bible itself (much as each historical age, according to Marx, contains within itself its own contradiction that will, over time, lead to its destruction and the creation of a higher stage through synthesis) there lies a protest against God, the core of an atheism that elevates trammeled humanity to stand as fully human.

While applauding, in general terms, this hermeneutics of class, Boer wishes, as the quote above indicates, that Bloch had moved from the Scriptures to theology. The Bible has, indeed served as a check on all sorts of theological excesses. Taking the next, somewhat logical, step, and insisting that the Church's adoption of the Bible includes the incomplete revision of a whole series of texts, rooted in an oral tradition "from below", that undermine the very idea of God, falls short for Boer.

I don't think that Boer gives Bloch due credit. While I agree his interpretations of specific texts - for example the Cain/Abel/God story in Genesis 4 - include an attention to editorial detail that demonstrate clearly enough the heavy hand of a redactor somewhere, I believe that Bloch's insistence that this undercurrent of protest a-theology is "hidden" is belied precisely by the history to which Bloch himself appeals. Were it as hidden as he insists, it would not have served as a source for various social and political protests movements in the history of European Christendom, awaiting academic historical criticism to unearth. That this fundamental contradiction within the text of the books themselves exists is obvious enough to a careful reader. That Bloch uses it to construct a vision of Christian thought as anthropocentric, atheistic, synthetic of the questions raised throughout the text as the stories from below and above clash without any clear resolution is a testimony to his respect for both the Bible and Christian theology.

Boer's basic criticism, that the success of Bloch's hermeneutic and use of various historical-critical methods is belied by his theologizing misses, I think, a crucial issue. Bloch's project in Atheism in Christianity is precisely to construct a Biblically-based a-theology, an understanding of human community rooted in the Scriptural narrative that sees no need for hypostasizing "God" in order to make of creation something more. The protest stories, the hermeneutic of suspicion within the Bible to its various triumphalisms, reveal that, at heart, the higher synthesis, without any need for "God", is at the heart of the Biblical testimony itself.

Matters Of Style - Boer On Bloch I

When I first cracked open The Principle of Hope back in 1992, this was the very first section of the very first chapter:

I move. From early on we are searching. All we do is crave, cry out. Do not have what we want.

This rather inauspicious beginning both reveals so much, yet hides so much, about the writing style of Ernst Bloch. Described as expressionistic, Bloch's writing has a distinctive beauty about it, an almost romantic sweep and grandeur that is unlike anything, in any language.

Before delving in to what Bloch has to say, Roland Boer first says what needs to be said about how Bloch says it (pp. 11-12):

For there is an extraordinary charge in reading Bloch. His style has always been a source of delight and consternation, often incomplete, missing the various elements of the more conventional sentences (most notable the verb), declaratory when speaking of the most ephemeral of matters and tentative where the ground is firmer. There are thoughts and ideas thrown forward full of suggestion and promise; the longer sentences in which he juxtaposes two or more ideas or metaphors; and then the impossibly long paragraphs that run on for pages. The style is energetic, allusive. . . More specifically, along with the expressionist presence, there is a prophetic and poetic feel to Bloch's sentences, paragraphs and discourse, one that seeks not only to speak with the urgency of prophetic voices but also the encyclopaedic allusiveness of Goethe's poetry. It seems to me that Bloch sought, by means of style itself, to allow what he called the 'spirit of utopia' to speak, to create a new way of writing through which the utopian would emerge. . . .(emphasis added)

The distinct pleasure in the style, an almost utopian charge in the syntax itself tempts me to apply the comment to Bloch that Terry Eagleton first used for Jameson, namely, that he would have the oppressive pleasure of knowing that his works will be read in some future, postcapitalist society. . . For utopia is not merely hard work but also an extraordinary pleasure, an intense charge of which we can find moments now but not the continuity it should have. This is what Bloch's prose provides - a glimmer of such a perpetual pleasure.(emphasis added)

The seductive power of Bloch's style is canny enough to make criticism more difficult. Like parsing poetry, it would seem an intellectual crime to take the step back necessary and point out where Bloch has erred; who would want to do something so pedestrian, so pedantic, so mundane as take the effusive writings and render them something less?

Boer's comments on Bloch's style are also important because of the very seductive quality of that writing. Because one can fall under its spell, it becomes necessary to make clear its beauty in order to do the difficult work of delving beneath that style to what it is Bloch is saying in this most beautiful way. Boer does this quite well, a point to which we shall turn in the next post.

By Way Of Introduction

Since the move this past summer, I have felt more focused in certain interests. In particular, reading through my small, incomplete Reinhold Niebuhr library gave me a greater appreciation for just how radical the pre-WWII Niebuhr was, that his critique of Protestant liberalism was from the left, although itself deeply rooted in much of the same set of categories. After Niebuhr, I read Ernst Bloch's most thoroughly theological work, Atheism in Christianity. While dated, particularly his approach to biblical criticism, there is still a wealth of beauty, as is usual in the case of Bloch. His thesis, that the dialectic of Scripture reveals a protest against the royalist vision of YHWH, that Jesus' life and ministry was a protest against just such a vision. Inherent in Bloch's critical work is the idea that, at heart, the Bible is as much a sustained argument against the reigning notions of God as it is a defense of God.

After floundering around quite a bit this fall, I was given a new sense of where I wanted to move in thinking about being a Christian after reading, twice in rapid succession, Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith, and Revolution. I was not just intellectually impressed, I was emotionally moved by much of Eagleton's writing, not least because, as a Marxist, Eagleton's work provided evidence that much of what has passed for "the God debate" over the past few years has been deeply flawed on any number of levels. I turned back to Ernst Bloch, a collection of his writings on aesthetics (The Utopian Function of Art and Literature), and then, taking a hint from a friend on Facebook, just received (after much toil and trouble) Criticism of Heaven: On Marxism and Theology by Australian Roland Boer. The book is nothing short of exactly what I'm interested in - a critical engagement of 20th century Marxist thinkers at their deepest engagement with theology. Boer reads Bloch, Walter Benjamin (I guess I never really considered him a Marxist, per se; more a fellow-traveler), Louis Althusser, Henri Lefebvre, Antonio Gramsci, Terry Eagleton, Slavoj Zizek, and Theodor Adorno. That such a wide array of important figures in 20th century Marxist thought have considered theology important enough to address on its own terms should give any critic who wishes to dismiss it as irrational drivel at least a moment's pause.

So, because I am utterly predictable, expect posts over the next week or two on Boer's work, as I work through what he has to say about each of these men. That this work was suggested to me at the very moment that I was moving toward this very subject - the junction of Marxism and theology, and how to engage with respect two very different intellectual traditions - is proof, to me, of the existence of God.