This Is Your Brain On Music By Daniel Levitin

Before reading further, turn on some music. Anything will do. I read the last hundred or so pages of this book with a Porcupine Tree concert playing. It seemed incongruous to me to be reading about how the brain processes music - as well as how music makes the brain work better - without having some music playing. So, whether it's Mahler or Molly Hatchet or Merle Haggard, turn it on. I'll wait.

OK, ready? From page 191, we have the following general description of what happens in the human brain when it hears music.

Listening to music caused a cascade of brain regions to become activated in a particular order: first, auditory cortex for initial processing of the components of the sound. Then the frontal regions, such as BA44 and BA47, that we had previously identified as being involved in processing musical structure and expectations. Finally, a network of regions - the mesolimbic system - involved in arousal, pleasure, and the transmission of opioids and the production of dopamine, culminating in activation in the nucleus accumbens. And the cerebellum and basal ganglia were active throughout, presumably supporting the processing of rhythm and meter. The rewarding and reinforcing aspects of listening to music seem, then, to be mediated by increasing dopamine levels in the nucleus accumbens, and by the cerebellum's cotribution to regulating emotion through its connections to the frontal lobe and the limbic system. Current neuropsychological theories associate positive mood and affect with increased dopamine levels, one the reasons that many of the newer antidepressants act on the dopaminergic system. Music is clearly a means for improving people's moods. Now we think we know why.

Daniel Levitin started out as a musician. He moved on to become a sound engineer, then a record producer. Late in life, he returned to college, and now studies the interconnections between music and the human brain, at McGill University in Montreal.

This work, a popular distillation of the latest (as of 2006) cognitive neuropsychology that deals specifically with music, can be considered as a musical composition. Each chapter becomes a movement within the larger suite that is the book. Within each movement is a stated theme, that is elaborated through discussions of the unfolding of the scientific evidence, punctuated by examples from music that work out that theme. Each chapter, up to this point Levitin has explicated a particular theme; in this chapter, he begins by relating his meeting with Francis Crick, the impact of Crick's personal story upon his own life, and how this meeting encouraged a new direction in Levitin's research. All this seems to be a new theme, yet again, but as the chapter unfolds we realize that, like the best composers, Levitin is bringing together all the previous themes, weaving and recasting them as part of a much larger, more grand theme that culminates in the climactic release of the paragraph quoted above.

The final chapters are far from being mere addenda, or to use musical terminology a coda. Rather, they describe certain practical considerations of how the picture drawn in this paragraph work themselves out, first in the lives of musicians (the issue of expertise and technical mastery) and the larger question of the evolutionary basis of the development of musical ability in the human species. These are variations on the now-revealed central theme, working through a whole series of questions that revolve around the the nature/nurture debate and the place of art in the life of the human species.

Levitin's books is nothing short of masterful. Whether one is a musician, a musical aficionado, or one interested in cognitive neuropsychology, the book has much to offer, with a minimum of technical vocabulary - either musical or scientific - to interfere with the flow of explication. As one reads through the paragraph quoted above, taking the time to work through it slowly, it is nothing short of remarkable what is occurring within our brains as we sit and listen to music. Even more amazing is the reality that we human beings have the ability to do all that, and do other things while listening to music. I do hope you are still listening to whatever music you put on. Your brain is doing all that stuff and I hope continuing to process the words on the computer screen in front of you. Perhaps other physical stimuli is being processed, too, whether it's the amount of light or darkness around you, the background sounds in the room or house. In short, what makes the book amazing is what it reveals about the ability of the human brain, engaged in what some consider such a trivial activity, sitting and listening to music. Everything from memory to the pleasure center to the emotive portions of the brain are not just firing but exchanging information, the neurological activity constantly moving among the various areas of the brain working as a piece of music plays.

Whether one likes hip-hop or hoedown, reggae or Rachmaninov, your brain is involved in a complex operation, a series of evolutionary adaptations related to other characteristics but resulting, as biologist Ernst Mayr describes them, in an emergent phenomenon that also is rooted in human evolution, in what Darwin referred to as sexual selection. Music is part and parcel of what it means to be human for no less a reason than musical ability is one of the forces in mate selection. Levitin offers the simple example of rock stars and the sheer volume of sexual conquests they have; I had a similar discussion at work with a colleague just a few days ago about Vince Neil, lead singer of the 80's hard rock band Motley Crue. While hardly begrudging rock musicians one of the perks of the trade, it is a bit frustrating that even Vince Neil manages to win this particular evolutionary battle. Reading Levitin, it makes sense why this is so.

Musical Templates

I've been reading This Is Your Brain On Music by cognitive neuropsychologist and former rock engineer and producer Daniel Levitin. It is a marvelous, eye- and ear-opening book that, among other things, gets you thinking about what, exactly, shaped your appreciation for music. In one review, author Fahrad Manjoo writes of the impact of Weezer's debut back in the mid-1990's. Levitin speaks of lying on the floor while his mother played the piano. The late rock critic Lester Bangs wore his musical heart on his sleeve about his introduction to the anarchic possibilities in rock in the mid-1960's.

I, too, once wrote - not on the internet, but for myself - a long piece that attempted to understand the birth, growth, and development of my own musical obsessions and preferences. I started out with hearing "Star Cycle" by Jeff Beck on the radio, and kind of moved on from there. To this day, having listened to that song for 30 years, I still get chills during parts of it, and am discovering little nuances and subtleties both of production and arrangement that surprise me. All the same, I was being dishonest with myself. While "Star Cycle" was, and remains, a pivotal point in my (I hope) never-ending search for moments of transcendent bliss in the midst of music, both performing it and listening to it, were I honest, I would have to admit a far less cool beginning for my understanding of what is exciting in music.

It is the English single-version of this:



It was probably a 45-rpm single one of my older sisters bought. The performer, Miguel Rios, was one among many who, even today, take basic melodic themes from the classical repertoire, and adapt it for pop songs. In this case, Rios took not just the musical theme from Beethoven's 9th Symphony, Fourth movement, he also took the poetic theme, which was a poem by the German Friedrich Schiller. Interesting enough, I found several videos for this song on YouTube and, not having heard this song in what may be almost 40 years, I remembered the twists and turns, not the least of which is a break around 2:10 in to the song, after a passage from a string section, where some horns play a descending decrescendo motif as a Spanish guitar enters to take the next verse. The final section weds both classical and contemporary, as Rios syncopates in front of a fully-orchestrated backdrop, complete with choir.

I admit it sounds dated, it really kind of cheesy, and is a bit too literal in its adaptation (just consider how Eric Carmen treated Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto, Second movement in his song "All By Myself"; better yet, don't). All the same, having heard the song for the first time in decades, I recognize how much it has influenced my obsession with music, with what I find exciting and beautiful and interesting.

First, it is a wedding of classical and pop music. Hello Yes, Genesis, ELP, the end is listless. Yet, there is more. The arrangement, while faithful harmonically and melodically, takes liberties with instrumentation, rhythm, even mixing and matching classical and contemporary instrumentation and approaches simultaneously. Further, being a bit longer than the standard pop song (at just over four minutes, it must have seemed an eternity in a world where two minutes and thirty seconds was the norm), there is room to accentuate breaks in arrangement and verses, such as the one described above, to build tension and release it until the song comes to a resounding finish.

It isn't the song itself whose sound I continue to emulate. Rather, it is the emotional response I was surprised to learn I still had. The variation within the arrangement actually allowed for multiple tension/release moments, for rhythmic and timbral variation on the basic melodic theme, elements that are as surprising now as they were when I was four years old. In a sense, that continues to drive what I look for in songs. Some songs are simple enough in their emotional impact - consider any punk or heavy metal song, and you have that relentless sense of a release of energy. One advantage seventies classic rock has over much heavy metal is the build-up of tension (consider "Stairway to Heaven" as the archetype, too often badly copied; another approach was Boston's debut LP, where the songs use that tension/release formula, multiple times in the same song, in textbook fashion). On the other hand music I continue to listen to - classical and jazz, rock and pop - returning time and again follows those simple rules I first learned in Miguel Rios' "Hymn to Joy".

The Necessity Of History

We are a month away from the centennial of Ronald Reagan's birth. Accordingly, the state of Indiana is celebrating by, among other things, offering students the opportunity to write an essay on the importance of Ronald Reagan for American history. Here are some thoughts on that particular subject.

Whether we like it or not, Reagan is a historical figure of much import. During the 2008 Presidential campaign, then-candidate Barack Obama praised Reagan's rhetorical approach, his sunny optimism, his oft-stated belief in the power and promise of America and the American people. He received quite a bit of heat, in particular from his rival at the time, Sen. Hillary Clinton, for his comments. I defended the things he said at the time, and I still believe he was right, as far as it goes, that Reagan's contribution to our national psyche included praising America and Americans for our better natures. There's nothing wrong with that, in a general way. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama seemed to understand this in ways other Democratic candidates for President have not, part of the reason they won.

All the same, Ronald Reagan's time in office, his impact upon our polity, our politics, our national discourse, and so much else, has been, once one gets passed encomiums such as this, quite pernicious. As the Republican Party drifts further and further to the rights, they cling Reagan ever more closely to their collective bosom, it is important to keep in mind that the fault lines within the Party lie squarely at the feet of the 40th President.

One can survey the totality of his Presidency for all sorts of evidence that make clear how bad it really was. He began his run for the Republican nomination in Stone Mountain, GA, the birthplace of the KKK, a definite signal he was not only continuing but expanding Nixon's Southern Strategy. It has worked so well, the southern states, formerly iron-clad Democratic in their politics, are now Republican, for very bad reasons. In a famous moment in an early debate in New Hampshire, Reagan insisted on being given time to respond to a question by saying, "I've paid for this microphone." Except, of course, he hadn't paid for the microphone. It had been provided for him. The celebration of his sense of rugged individualism was belied by the reality of the case. No one, even at the time, pointed out to him that he was either misinformed or lying through his teeth. Of course, this was the case throughout his public career, from his time as governor of California to the end of his Presidency.

Reagan's courting of the religious right, hugely successful, is an object lesson in the contradictions of American conservatism. For reasons that I still cannot fathom, fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals rejected one of their own, Jimmy Carter (who spent his Presidency teaching a Sunday School class at a Baptist Church; his invocations of the Deity were real, heart-felt, and deeply-rooted) for Reagan. Quite apart from the obvious personal issues involved - divorced; forced to marry his second wife because she was pregnant; he was not a church-goer at any time in his adult life - his vocal support for many of the policies embraced by the religious right came late in the pre-1980 election cycle. Up to the primary season, the then-nascent religious right was going to throw their support behind former Texas governor and former Democrat John Connally. Connally not only sang their tune. He also was deeply committed to their vision, and had a record of support that Reagan lacked. The switch came not least because Reagan's people convinced people like Richard Viguerie that Reagan, not Connally, was the only Republican capable of beating Carter.

The Republicans have failed, in the generation since Reagan's election in 1980, to deliver on any of the religious right's pet policies. There is no official prayer in public schools. Abortion remains legal. Our culture continues to drift toward openness, rather than embrace some arbitrary set of values labeled Christian, yet bearing little resemblance to the Christian ethic. Yet, the religious right continues to support the Republican Party, always a bridesmaid and never a bride, it seems.

One could continue in this manner ad nauseum, but the central point, I hope, is clear. For all that Ronald Reagan is and will continue to play a pivotal role in our understanding of the second half of the 20th century in America, any such understanding needs to be done with at least one eye on the contradictions and flaws within the Republican Party he helped shape, and the pernicious effects it has had on our country.

Moving Forward - New Year's Resolutions?

The Daily Howler is one of my daily "must-reads". Despite several issues I have with Somerby's approach, in general it is a site that keeps me thinking about the ways our public discourse is distorted by our elite press corps. His column today, for example, focuses on a really bad page 1 story in the New Year's Day New York Times. For him, this is just a question of elite stupidity spreading a cancer of Dumb through the body politic by metastasizing their core neuroses to the rest of us through the bloodstream of the press.

I take this same article, and while I agree it is cliche-ridden and nonsensical, I see it less of a symptom of elite stupidity, than elite distraction. Like the columns of Maureen Dowd and Gail Collins, or even David Brooks and E. J. Dionne, two often held up as more thoughtful commentators from a conservative and liberal bent, respectively, the sum-total of mainstream discourse is really awful for a reason. Elites tend to believe that those not of the same social or cultural milieu are ignorant. Dangerous, even. Consider how often we hear characters in television shows talk about the dangers of making some bit of information public because it might cause panic. Yet, in actual emergency situations - the New Orleans flood, say, or a tornado ravaging a small town - most people act both sensibly and even communally. Far from the specter of the mad, mindless mob, human beings in fact do quite well. Yet, the myth refuses to die, and is part of the operant conditioning of our political elites. Thus, we get page one stories in our most important national newspaper that are mindless rehashings of cliches that have absolutely no validity whatsoever (there are cliches that have some ring of truth about them; these, however, do not).

I have already written, and completely deleted, who whole posts this afternoon. Not because either one was bad. Rather, they really weren't focused on the aim of this site, or my current interests. So, in the future, expect less knee-jerk reaction to whatever insanity happens each day and more thoughtful (I hope) exploration of underlying structures and assumptions. Raging against the mindlessness of so much of our politics makes little difference because the mindless happen to be in charge.

Captured By Britney Spears' Abyss

The syllabus of The New Inquiry now has a link to a 2008 Esquire magazine piece - it was supposed to be an interview, but morphed in to ruminations far beyond anything captured in the interview itself - to accompany a now-famous photo-shoot, Britney Spears in as little as possible, yet again tantalizing and teasing an America so wrapped-up in a whore-madonna complex it may never find its way out again. The article, by well-known pop-culture critic Chuck Klosterman, hits all the right points in discussing Ms. Spears, yet it seems to me that he misses something that would have been more obvious had he not been present for the photo shoot before doing the interview. I'm not blaming him; Lord knows, had I been there, even with that translucent screen keeping the rest of the world away, my guess is my thoughts would be addled. All I'm saying is that, when trying to "figure out" Ms. Spears and her place in pop culture, her history as a constantly manipulated cluster of social and cultural symbols is really what is important about her.

Since her emergence in the late-1990's as that most dangerous female creature for most men - the not-quite-of-legal-age yet nevertheless undeniably sexy young woman, either unaware of her sexual appeal, or using it to achieve her own ends - she has rarely moved forward in either her private life or career without those movement being scripted, covered by the ubiquitous tabloid press and paparazzi, with attendants including personal assistants and publicity directors carefully feeding stories, even contradictory ones, to those same tabloids. In other words, even in the very-public emotional and personal meltdown that followed not long after this interview was published, we should remember that Ms. Spears is far less an individual than she is a brand, perhaps even an industry unto herself.

Getting caught up in what Britney Spears thinks or says about her public image misses the fundamental reality that it this image has been carefully cultivated, kept before a public eager to finally pierce the veil (as it were). When Klosterman asks her about her sexuality, and Ms. Spears insists she doesn't think about it, in all likelihood she is correct. Since she was a child appearing on The New Mickey Mouse Club, Britney Spears has been a commodity. The entertainment industry in all its facets - music recording, television, photography, the music video - has attuned itself to her. My guess is Britney Spears has no idea how to live any other way than what others would see as exploited, dehumanized, hyper-sexualized, and finally foisted on the public with its various sexual and interpersonal neuroses. What "Britney Spears" has to offer by way of reflection on any subject matter is irrelevant not because she as an individual is irrelevant.

As an individual, sad to say, "Britney Spears" does not exist. No matter how many pictures we have of her, we are looking at an empty space, the contours of which are filled in by masters of manipulation. Stripping away the facade, we come face to face with the best example of Nietzsche's abyss that stares back at us, dragging us down.

New Year's Resolution With An Example

John believes it necessary for me to provide links to every factual claim I make, because facts can be disputed. In order to accommodate his wishes, in the future, my posts will look like this. Full of links that allow John the ability to check and make sure that I haven't made something up.

In fact, I'm going to provide a service in this post. A test case, as it were, of how this would work. It is common currency among right-wing pundits, bloggers, and politicians to insist that tax cuts increase revenue. This has been shown to be factually inaccurate - not controversial, not disputed, but an actual inaccurate description of the fact of the matter - over and over and over again. How do I know this latter case is, indeed, true? Why, I just made it up.

As with my already long-standing policy that I do not debate the reality of the Holocaust, of biological evolution, or global warming, the established fact that tax cuts do not increase revenue will not be a matter for dispute, debate, or controversy. I do not treat facts as disputable, as John does.

Enron And The Financial Collapse - A Dry Run?

I have been thinking quite a bit about the collapse of Enron and whether or not it presaged the bursting of the housing bubble and the collapse of financial markets. While I realize there are some that don't trust Wikipedia, its well-documented entries are easy enough to double-check, and it is a nice clearing house for all sorts of information, one-stop shopping as it were. So, from Wikipedia, a key point:

In Enron's natural gas business, the accounting had been fairly straightforward: in each time period, the company listed actual costs of supplying the gas and actual revenues received from selling it. However, when Skilling joined the company, he demanded that the trading business adopt mark-to-market accounting, citing that it would reflect "... true economic value."[20] Enron became the first non-financial company to use the method to account for its complex long-term contracts.[21] Mark-to-market accounting requires that once a long-term contract was signed, income was estimated as the present value of net future cash flows. Often, the viability of these contracts and their related costs were difficult to judge.[22] Due to the large discrepancies of attempting to match profits and cash, investors were typically given false or misleading reports. While using the method, income from projects could be recorded, which increased financial earnings. However, in future years, the profits could not be included, so new and additional income had to be included from more projects to develop additional growth to appease investors.[20] As one Enron competitor pointed out, "If you accelerate your income, then you have to keep doing more and more deals to show the same or rising income."[21] Despite potential pitfalls, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved the accounting method for Enron in its trading of natural gas futures contracts on January 30, 1992.[20] However, Enron later expanded its use to other areas in the company to help it meet Wall Street projections.[23]

So, Enron signs a contract with the Widget Corporation, a 10-year deal that will bring in $10 billion. Instead of reporting $1 billion on its balance sheets for each of the ten years - the actual net gain it received that and each subsequent year - it reported the full $10 billion. In order to make up the lost reported revenue in subsequent years, however, it had to keep looking for new contracts, and kept reporting the income in this same fashion. Not only were reported net earnings erroneous. The actual cash-on-hand, the capitalization of the company, was wrong. Instead of receiving a check for $10 billion from Widget, they received and could only use $1 billion.

The SEC did approve this particular bit of legerdemain for one aspect of their business - energy trading. Enron, however, was a diverse company, and the practice spread to all areas. In essence, they were their own bubble - overvalues not the least because they claimed to have a certain amount of capital reserves they did not in fact possess. One $10 billion contract might have been easy enough to cover. Soon, however, all its business dealings were accounted for this way. When audited by Arthur Andersen, they insisted this accounting method was legitimate (it was, in one of its businesses) and that, in fact, their reported income was accurate. Andersen was duped, or perhaps went along with the charade.

How does this relate to the collapse of the mortgage-financing industry? I am still at a loss as to how smart investors would view a liability - and a mortgage, whatever else it might be, is just that, a debt owed - as an asset. Yet, they are routinely sold from the originator, bundled together, and sold on the open market as assets. In the 2000's this practiced was supported by no less than a statement from the President of the United States that home-ownership was a goal of federal policy. Mortgages, then, became not only a hot item with a certain safety net - mortgage default in the US has historically been relatively low - but with the backing of the federal government. It became a seller's market. The goal was increasing home-ownership. Banks, real estate firms, and other mediators were aggressively pursuing all sorts of potential customers. Once the pool of safe home-buyers dried up - those folks who would have qualified for a mortgage in any market - they started pursuing more and more marginal customers. No money down was offered. The variable-rate mortgage became commonplace, where the change in rate came in the future, at some time perhaps when the customer may be in a more secure financial situation. Interest-only mortgages seemed to promise low payments, but actually created much of the problem. Without any principal included, no equity could be accumulated; such mortgages were actually worthless in a financial sense.

In this seller's market - like the energy market that Enron controlled - the price of the commodity being sold went up, so the situation arose where more and more marginal customers were chasing after products, the price of which was climbing out of any realistic assessment of value, but also their ability to afford. The whole system teetered. As defaults began to increase, in 2007, the mortgage-backed securities held and traded by the large investment houses and banks (now indistinguishable thanks to Gramm-Leach) shrank in value, then disappeared.

The various stages differ. Enron was a single company, but did control enough of a particular market to have an impact, particularly on pricing. The end of Governor Gray Davis' term in office in California was in no small way due to Enron's price-manipulations of energy, and absent a regulatory regime, no effective controls. Absent a regulatory regime over the various financial products during the housing boom, investment houses and insurance companies that promised to cover potential losses (think American International Group, which died when Lehmann Brothers went south) had no floor beneath them. In both cases the free market worked to create not just volatility but instability, precisely because pricing control rested in the hands of either a single actor (Enron) or a few such actors (the investment banks, plus Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, a few others). While Enron died not least because of fraudulent accounting practices, claiming all sorts of profits and capital reserves it simply did not have, the housing bubble worked in much the same way, driving up the value of properties, creating a situation on paper where their value exceeded any reasonable estimate.

I'm not sure if these similarities offer any insight. They do, for me at any rate, point out that free markets, outside any regulatory framework or control, end up bringing about their own instability. In this sense, regulation of markets, setting all sorts of legal and administrative barriers, in effect keep capitalism afloat, a point most economists accepted during the Depression when it was noted that, far from overturning capitalism, Roosevelt's New Deal saved it from itself. Despite years of stagnant economic activity, except of course for the investment banks bailed out by the Bush Administration that are enjoying record profits, there is the general notion abroad that any attempt to regulate the financial markets will result in economic stagnation, while free markets are our only hope. How this can be, I do not know.

Enron died not least because, with the markets it controlled deregulated, there was no one looking over their shoulder. Arthur Andersen's audits, while legally required, were not themselves checked because going through the motion of an audit was enough to satisfy the requirements of the SEC. The investment houses, seeing an opportunity and operating in a favorable market condition - the so-called "ownership society" - also acted outside any effective regulatory control. Both created a situation of unsustainable market volatility that could only lead to a settling of accounts. In Enron's case, once the actual value of their capital reserves became clear, the value of the company crashed. Once increasingly marginal mortgages started to default in greater numbers, the value of mortgage-back securities, the investments made with them as collateral, and the insurance backing them all collapsed.

On Poverty Both Economic And Intellectual

In this comment on another site, I get challenged because I refused to respond to the claim that poverty in the US is in decline, that situation of the poor here in the US is improving, and that the best way to consider our economic situation is within the context of the most free, most open personal space imaginable.

There are multiple layers here. So, to be fair to John, I'm going to deal, first, with the more concrete claim - that poverty in the US is in decline. John, apparently, doesn't know there is this thing called Google that provides access to all sorts of information. In order to use it, one types in the words one wishes to find in context. In my case, I typed "US poverty rate by year", and I received access to 3,870,000 links in under a second. The first couple links, because they have the words I typed in Google most closely associated with them, are from, in turn, Bread for the World, and the United Nations. Then, we come to a report from The Washington Times, from September just passed, that the poverty rate is on the rise. Indeed, right there in the title, it reads that the poverty rate has hit a 15-year high!

So, after glancing through that article, I continue on down the Google results page - having used that "Page Back" key - and I come to a US Bureau Of The Census report on poverty. There are many links on that main page to various Census surveys and summaries (.pdf) and one, a summary of the 2008-2009 Household survey, includes in its sidebar under the "Highlights", in the very first one, the little fact that in 2008-2009, the number of people living in poverty in the United States increased to 42.9 million. Increased. Which, in vernacular English, means went up.

I could go on in this way, but just these two little links provide a pretty clear counter to the claim that poverty in the US is on the decline.

OK. So. Libertarianism.

In the same linked comment, John seems to believe that I have made a claim regarding the Bush Administration that is contrary to fact. In many ways, he is correct. The beginnings of our current socio-economic tragedy began during the Clinton years. They were given a jet-engine during the Bush years, the declaration that home-ownership was now the goal of federal housing policy. Coupled with completely deregulated financial markets, this was a recipe for disaster, as people at the time predicted would happen.

Libertarianism begins with the premise that, with minimal interference from the public sector, individuals pursuing their interests create the conditions for optimum economic efficiency and growth. Many of the arguments made by the Republican Congresses of the Clinton and Bush years, and their supporters in Think Tanks and academia, were adamant on this point - the regulatory regime was stifling economic growth, financial innovation, and our general commonweal. The last tattered vestiges of Depression-era regulatory and legal restrictions ending toward the end of the Clinton years, the path was opened toward a golden age of entrepreneurship, of individual and social betterment with no brakes in the form of artificial legal barriers to economic activity.

What actually happened was, in many ways, akin to Somalia. Individuals, in a state of lawlessness, have no power. They may have rights, in some abstract sense. Absent power, however, in particular the police power of the state to protect those rights in the face of more powerful, organized actors - in this case the large investment banks, insurance companies, and brokers of various financial products - the only real players that mattered were these large institutions. With quite literally no barriers to what constituted a legitimate investment opportunity, the limited mortgage-backed security became a potential goldmine. Except, it relied upon a certain magical thinking whereby a debt actually became an asset. Because of the lack of oversight of the financial markets, and because of the federal policy goal of home ownership, the field seemed wide open. Mortgage default was in a steady state, relatively low and shrinking as the housing market expanded.

The end result, of course, is what we are currently living with. It was predicted at the time, of course, but all those who said that when the bubble burst the wreckage would be enormous were shouted down. They were nay-sayers, maybe even anti-American. The promise of the unfettered market, while benefiting the large corporations at the heart of the bubble, seemed to be helping individuals fulfill that part of the American dream that is most dear - owning their own home. Except, of course, what was really happening was a mixture of massive fraud, the aforementioned magical thinking, and the hubris that comes from unchecked power. Those who are paying the price for this libertarian dream-come-true aren't the criminal banks and investment houses; they got bailed out and continue to enjoy record profits by playing the bond market with the bailout money. Meanwhile, the millions who have lost their homes, the millions more who will lose their homes, the stagnant economy (stagnant in part because, as a recent NPR story reported, businesses don't like hiring the long-term unemployed) are all laid at the feet not of those who created the mess, but its victims.

Every time I hear a libertarian talk, I look around at the wreckage wrought by libertarian practice, and I want to scream. The human damage, the social damage, are incalculable. That it was preventable makes it even more tragic. That there are those who insist the just-rehashed facts of our recent past make no difference is a kind of intellectual cowardice that is breathtaking to behold. Because Bush expanded the federal bureaucracy over here (the growth of the national security state) means that freeing up some sector from any legal framework over there (the financial markets) doesn't count. Except, of course, that was not and has never been the concern of libertarians in practice, no matter how much they claim to the contrary. Rather, their sole concern is the unfettered marketplace. So, libertarianism as a practical matter results in . . . economic collapse. Most observers who are sensitive enough to the sufferings of our recent years understand this.

So, John, there you have it. There are your answers.

Re-Imagining The World: An Introduction To The Parables Of Jesus

Bernard Brandon Scott's Re-Imagining The World is a marvelous introduction for the general reader to the power, the possibility, and the multi-layered nature of the parables of Jesus. In the introduction, Scott says that while the book is not a scholarly text, his hope is that it is, nonetheless, scholarly. Indeed it is. Using a variety of sources - the Beatles, the Talmud, non-canonical Christian texts, Pliny the Elder - Scott brings to life a perspective upon and understanding of the parables of Jesus that restores to them their arresting, even scandalous quality.

A point that Scott makes early on is the distinction between orality and literacy, something we moderns need to keep in mind when considering the reality of the parables, indeed considering the pre-literate Gospel tradition, which began as oral storytelling, only later to be committed to paper in a literate, sometimes narrative, form. By drawing on a wealth of information in a succinct manner - very often his asides are quite literal, boxed definitions or quotes from the Hebrew Scriptures, or some other source - Scott makes clear in a variety of ways the inherent power of oral storytelling to use compression to its advantage. What even a single word conveys in a parable, requires, at a minimum, several pages of unpacking for the modern reader.

As presented by Scott, the parabolic teachings of Jesus remind me of what Walter Brueggemann writes about The Prophetic Imagination. Using the prophetic call of Jeremiah as a template, Brueggemann sees the prophet's call as both destructive and constructive; to use the words contained in the scriptures, "to pluck up and to plant." In much the same way, Scott's introduction to the parables shows Jesus deconstructing our received notions of the sacred and holy, as well as constructing alternative possibilities for real human community lived outside these received notions. Central to the destructive/constructive project lies the very first parable he considers - the parable of the leaven.

This was the most arresting point for me, as a reader. Indeed, I wondered how, in all the years of reading and study, this short parable of a woman baking bread could be overlooked for its radical revisioning of holiness, of our view of women in society and their relationship to sacred community, and much else. The destruction/construction continues in each of his discussions, from the Mustard Seed right through to the parable of the great feast. In each case, Scott shows the way, in as economical a way possible, Jesus subverts, and even insults and confounds, our received ideas, in the process offering a living, breathing alternative to those ideas.

Were I to teach a short class to laity on the parables, this would be the central text. Despite the three previous posts that point out where I differ or disagree with some of Scott's methodological choices, this short work opens up the parables of Jesus in a new way, offering to any reader reasons to think, perhaps to frown in disagreement, but certainly to be challenged and, best of all, changed.

Problems Of Method In Scott's Re-Imagine The World, Part III: False Distinctions

In the concluding section of Bernard Brandon Scott's Re-Imagining The World, he writes the following:

Jesus' revolt takes a very special form. He revolts in parable. I see no evidence that Jesus was leading a political revolution or that he had a social program in mind. . . . Although the idea is now out of fashion, Jesus the oral storyteller seems to me closer to a poet. The activist will always be dissatisfied with he poetic vision, but change comes about because a creative individual has that vision.

First of all, the evidence that Jesus may well have been leading, at least in part, a political revolution is the manner of his death.

Be that as it may, the distinction Scott offers - Jesus wasn't a political or social activist or organizer, but a poet - misses an important point. These distinctions would have been unintelligible for Jesus' original audience. Furthermore, the idea that political activists are not visionaries - that this is the realm of the poet, a part in some way of the life of the mind, rather than the gritty life of a political or social revolutionary - is belied by the fact that the most important political and social activists are, in fact, visionaries, sometimes visionaries of a most poetic bent.

To see Jesus as a traveling poet, I think, subsumes the rest of his ministry to his parabolic teachings. For Scott, they are primary; all the rest of Jesus life and teachings and ministry is the working out of these parables. While the parables are important for understanding what Jesus was about, they should be set alongside the rest of his ministry - his direct teachings, his healings and exorcisms, and his various social engagements that raised so many eyebrows. They are part of a whole, rather than the central fact of his ministry, to which the rest of his work was dedicated.

It is important to remember our modern preference for separating out the political, the social, the religious, and even the poetic, is false. It is part of our problem, one of the ways the modernist project, for all its successes, fails us. By creating artificial divides among the various ways we live our lives, we see ourselves fulfilling different roles, with different rules, different values, and different voices. We are not whole people, living from a center within a community that defines and upholds and supports us, but wandering hither and thither among a variety of situations and communities that compete to define who we are.

This is not to say that Jesus' ministry can be reduced to political activism, or re-envisioning social relations, or even kicking against the pricks of the established order. It included these things, but transcended them, and in that transcendence pointed out the contingency of all our attempts to corral God for our personal projects.

I would like to repeat that I really like much of what Scott has to say. I am setting my criticisms in separate posts in order to make clear that they do not at all distract me from the wealth of goodness this short work contains.

Problems Of Method In Scott's Re-Imagine The World, Part II: Parables In The Gospel of Thomas

Among the parables considered by Bernard Brandon Scott is one from the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas, the parable of the empty jar. While certainly a fascinating entrant in parabolic literature, I am not sure that including this parable serves anything other than the narrow purposes of Scott's larger project of separating the parables from their literary contexts. By doing so, including a parable that we have from only one source - non-canonical at that! - he creates multiple problems. First, ripping this parable out of the Gnostic context of the Thomas' Gospel does structural violence to the parable itself. Since we have no other source for this parable in the canonical literature - or other non-canonical literature - pretending that we can understand it outside the Gnosticism of Thomas leaves me wondering how we do that, exactly. If the intent of studying the parables, apart from their literary settings, involves a certain amount of serious intellectual legwork, including comparing and contrasting across various literary contexts, then how can we arrive at any conclusions outside the context of the Gnosticism of the Thomas Gospel?

While the non-canonical texts, including non-canonical Gospels, are important intellectual and literary sources for seeking a greater understanding of the texts we consider canonical, it is always important to keep in mind that they were not included in the canon for a reason, or multiple reasons; examination of the texts themselves usually reveal these reasons, while occasionally being odd to our modern sensibilities, do make a considerable amount of sense. Taking a single parable from Thomas' Gospel, without any canonical referent, leaves me scratching my head.

Furthermore, Scott's argument as to the antiquity of the Gospel's compilation just doesn't hold up for me. The earliest extant manuscripts we have of the Gospel of Thomas do not predate the beginning of the third century of the common era. They are in Coptic, and while revealing a certain tendency to struggle to render in to Coptic from some original Greek source, this original source has yet to turn up. To argue that the originals may date as early as the mid-first century, without any evidence other than the extant are translations from some earlier Greek version adds nothing to the antiquity of the originals. Again, it needs to be emphasized, the earliest manuscripts of the canonical Gospels predate the Gospel of Thomas by at least, if not more than, a century. Absent evidence, such as a scroll or fragment, that can be dated with a certain amount of precision, any speculation as to the date of the original is just that - a guess.

None of this is to suggest we cannot learn from the non-canonical texts. We can indeed. All the same, we must do that learning with a different set of assumptions; the Gnostic literature, in particular, presents unique issues for any faithful Christian. Does this mean the parable of the empty jar isn't a true parable of Jesus? Of course not. I am just not convinced, given Scott's arguments and the paucity of evidence, that such arguments matter all that much. Furthermore, one can gain much from a study of the parabolic literature in the Synoptics and St. John's Gospel without reference to non-canonical sources to bolster any arguments we make about how they served various purposes in Jesus' ministry.

Problems Of Method In Scott's Re-Imagine The World, Part I: The Historical Jesus

I received a marvelous Christmas gift from ER. Re-Imagine The World: An Introduction to the Parables of Jesus is a fantastic general introduction to the parables of Jesus. I do not wish this post, or the one to follow, to indicate anything less than my great thanks for this little book and the way it has opened up possibilities for reading the parables in new ways. I only write these posts as introductions to a far more appreciative overview to come once I've finally finished it (I'm about two-thirds the way through).

One of my most treasured possessions is a biography of Geoffrey Chaucer by John Gardner. The book was given to me by my father, and was originally a gift from one of my older sisters decades ago. At the beginning of his book, Gardner points out a major obstacle to writing a serious biography of Chaucer - we have no information, first hand or otherwise, on Chaucer's life, beyond certain records of his various official, royal, positions, and his writings. Much, then, of Gardner's book, involves painting a portrait around the empty space that is the man Geoffrey Chaucer in the hopes that this empty space can be filled in by the intellectual and existential vacuum it creates. By drawing in from what we do know in general, and those rare bits - baptism records, court documents on Chaucer's diplomatic missions, the writings he left behind - it is hoped we can come to some understanding of who Geoffrey Chaucer, an English gentleman of the early Renaissance, was.

The biggest problem one encounters, faced with a lack of evidence, comes at portraying the last years of Chaucer's life. At some point, the documentation that the man Geoffrey Chaucer lived, simply ceases to record this same person as living. There is no record of anything - no death records in any church, no records of judicial procedures, no diplomatic letters from others at the time noting his passing - and, as my mother noted, "He just disappears." My father points out that, as a royal diplomat and courtier, in all likelihood, Chaucer attracted enemies, not the least for the profane nature of his writings as for his service to the crown. His disappearance was probably the result of intrigue; the Argentines and Chileans may have perfected the disappeared, but the English managed to go a long way to creating that category.

At the end, while Gardner's book is extremely strong on Chaucer's writings, his speculations of an elderly Chaucer enjoying his sunset years puttering in quiet obscurity just doesn't square with the massive silence that ensues. Given what we know about the ways of courtiers, in all likelihood, Chaucer's ending was probably far from pleasant.

With Jesus we face an even greater silence from start to finish. Jesus wrote nothing of which we know. The extant records of his life, contained in the canonical and extra-canonical Gospels, are hardly biographical. The various contradictions among these texts would confound anyone trying to reassemble anything like "The Life of Jesus".

Except, of course, such silence hasn't prevented a whole cottage industry of "Historical Jesus" scholarship from continuing on, blissfully insouciant to the many problems such an intellectual feat faces. Bernard Brandon Scott is among those scholars, a member of the Jesus Seminar, and committed, as he says at the outset, to understanding the parables as the stories of the historical Jesus, the first century Galilean Jewish peasant. Right at this point we confront a major obstacle - we have no direct access to the first century Galilean Jewish peasant apart from the various portrayals, written after his death, who attempted to understand his life and work through the prism of his execution and reported resurrection. Everything we have, accepted by the Church or not, can only be understood with that in mind. While we can, as Gardner did with Chaucer, come to an understanding of the world in which Jesus lived, the various communities that shaped his life and work, wrestle with the differences between orality and literacy as they pertain to Jesus' ministry (an issue to which I shall return when discussing the substance of Scott's text), and consider his ministry as part of the larger Jewish struggle against Roman dominance, at the end of the day, the hole in the middle of the story cannot be filled by all that ever-growing, overlapping sets of information and learning.

Which is not to say that the historical Jesus is some kind of cypher hiding behind the various portrayals of him in the Gospel literature. On the contrary, given the state of various historical-critical methodologies, understanding who Jesus was, what he taught, and how the communities that produced the texts we call Gospels understood his teachings becomes both deeper and broader with each passing year. All the same, I believe it not only impossible to get behind the extant texts to recover the man, Jesus, behind the testimony of Christ, I believe it is unnecessary. Jesus himself is clear enough, roughly speaking across the textual evidence we now have, about who he is, what he is doing, and why he is doing it. It is the texts themselves that testify who the person, Jesus of Nazareth is, because he was none other than the wandering preacher, teacher, healer, friend of tax-collectors, prostitutes, and other outsiders.

Furthermore, as an introduction to the second post - on the inclusion of the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas - the four Gospels, for all their contradictions, inner incoherence (at times), range of literary standards (from Mark's barely literate koine Greek to the fully realized narrative expanse of the Gospel of St. Luke and the cosmic Christ of the Gospel of St. John), provide a marvelous, multifaceted view of this Jesus, who he was, what he did, and most of all why he did it. To understand Jesus, absent any other evidence, by pretending that there exists behind these texts something that is accessible without these texts is really to pretend to something that isn't possible. This position is not helped by Scott's insistence that the entire reading project is theory-laden. This is true, to be sure, but his position on what constitutes a "theory" is wrong. A theory isn't a guess. Rather, it is a set of working assumptions that have proved themselves repeatedly and are connected because, fitting them together in a particular way makes what was previously unintelligible, intelligible.

Finally, while it is certainly important to understand the parables qua parables, the attempt, as Scott says, to understand them as this historical man Jesus told them, without the contextual settings in the Synoptics (as he notes, the Fourth Gospel is parable free, one of many reasons I find N. T. Wright's theory that is the earliest Gospel untenable), does violence not so much to the meanings of the parables themselves, but the narrative function of the parables within the larger project of each Gospel writer. Ripping them from their literary context robs them of their noetic authority, their theological depth, and their reality as part of a larger whole. Much like the "Q" hypothesis - arguments over what is and is not contained in a document that does not exist strikes me as an odd way to spend one's academic career - I find this way of "reading" presupposes facts not in evidence, and incapable of ever being in evidence.

That there was a historical Galilean Jewish peasant named Yeshua who ended up on a Roman crucifix at some point in the ham-fisted reign of Pontius Pilate as proconsul is pretty much beyond dispute. Of the man, the only testimony we have that remains after two thousand or so years is contained in a limited number of unique literary documents that limit themselves to various deeds, sayings, teachings, and goings-on that relate to his work in and for the poor and outcast in Roman Judea, Samaria, and Galilee, and how these acts are related to the claim that this same murdered apostate and rebel rose from the dead. Getting behind this portrait, regardless of the intellectual rigor involved in the effort, ends us up where it began. In the process we lose the context, the subtlety, the beauty, and the testimony of the Gospels. In other words, we lose far more than we gain in the attempt.

Steven Wilson

First, this is a nice summary of who he is.

Second, his many moods . . .

Porcupine Tree - "My Ashes" (live, with John Wesley on vocals on the chorus):


Blackfield - "Once" (live in NYC):


No-Man - "All The Blue Changes" (live in London)


Steven Wilson - "Collecting Space"


When I saw the name "Porcupine Tree" on the back of a tour t-shirt back in the spring of 2006, I had no idea it would lead me to one of the most obsessively creative musicians I have ever encountered. With no less than four simultaneous, on-going musical careers, Wilson is nothing if not driven and prolific. What makes him stand out, at least to me, is each of his projects - PT, No-Man, Blackfield, and his solo material - is distinct; further, one would be hard-pressed to find anything definitive such as a "Porcupine Tree sound", or trace a "Blackfield sound" back to something Wilson had written years before for No-Man.

What keeps me coming back, time and again, is the consistently high quality of the songs. In Porcupine Tree, Wilson works with three other musicians (John Wesley, second guitarist and back-up vocalist, is a touring companion, occasionally doing backing vocals on some of their studio recordings) who are among the most thoughtful and accomplished, not to mention talented, I have heard and seen. Indeed, seeing Porcupine Tree live at the Vic Theater in 2009 was a musical highlight for me.

Wilson, though, is the heart of all these projects. His ideas drive them, his personality holds them together, his refusal to settle keeps the quality consistent. I have little doubt that he has little life outside music, driven as he is. Some people have a difficult enough time with a couple jobs; Wilson juggles four very different jobs, with aplomb, deftness, a sense of humor (even when he's being a gloomy Gus), and, it seems to me, a sense of joy.

I couldn't end this without this emblematic PT song, the title track to Fear of a Blank Planet. This performance is part of their Anaesthetize DVD because it shows, no matter what we may say about him or his music, he is a rocker.

"I'm alive. I need help. But when you call for help, it seems like no one's there."

Back in the late 1980's, I had a subscription to Mother Jones, a hell-raising, left-populist magazine named after a famed hell-raising, left-populist labor heroine. In the early 1990's, I was thinking of resubscribing, but an acquaintance, much further to the left than I ever will be, insisted it had become the People magazine of the left. I steered clear.

I have been reading Kevin Drum's blog for a few weeks now, and it vindicates, in some way, my previous opinion of MJ. Drum's pieces are thought provoking, more than occasionally indignant, and do not deal in either trite formulas or stale jargon. For that reason, many on the left don't like him.

While reading him this afternoon, I came across a link to this story. The author's search for understanding why a seven-year-old girl was accidentally shot and killed by a Detroit SWAT officer on a mistaken raid on her home ends up providing a portrait not just of a city in rapid physical and civic decline. The story shows, in graphic, heart-rending detail, what happens when a city is abandoned, first by the businesses that helped create it, then the political infrastructure that sustained it, and finally any sense that the city contains human beings in need. The quote that serves as the title of this post is from the 39-year-old mother of two murdered sons, a plea that seems to fall on ears deafened to the cries and pleas from our abandoned cities.

I offer no answers to the multi-layered issues and questions this article presents. I offer only the article itself, a piece to be studied, read and re-read. In the face of the overwhelming testimony of decline, despair, and death that is the current reality of so much of the city of Detroit, I don't know if "answers", as a concept, a word, a set of possible policies, even exists. All the same, the city is not some abstract thing, but the place, long abandoned by the auto-industry, that 800,000 people still call home. These 800,000, long before we start devising "solutions" to their "problems", need to be heard. They need someone to acknowledge that their cry for help has not gone out to a silent universe.

Beyond that, we need to be silent. Listen, weep silent tears for the Aiyanas and Chaises and all the rest of those whose deaths seem too routine to bring about even mourning in their communities. Listen again. Then keep listening for more Detroit voices, more cries from the depths of our American Golgotha, a place outside the walls of American acceptability, where it seems people are condemned for no other reason than they live there.

So, just read this article, always with one ear open for more voices, more cries that need to be heard.

I Think We Need New Categories

The Immanent Frame is not really a blog, although it calls itself one.

Founded in the fall of 2007, The Immanent Frame is a production of the Social Science Research Council’s Program on Religion and the Public Sphere. In 2008, the new blog was named an official honoree by the Webby Awards and a “favorite new religion site, egghead division” by The Revealer.

This interview with Australian academic Simon During offers up some interesting food for thought, not the least of which is that we need to stop talking about "post"-cultural eras. Post-modernity, that marvelously trivial and largely spent attempt to make the decline of western capitalism look both inevitable and profound, tells us next to nothing about what, exactly, comes after modernity. Because it was less about what comes "after" the modernist project - everything from the Enlightenment to Nietzsche and Heidegger, really - and more about convincing the world that alternatives to capitalist dominance were pretty much doomed to failure even as it considered capitalism itself pretty horrible, it offered nothing more than the shrugged shoulders of the resigned fatalist.

Post-secularism seems to me, at least as it is explained and expanded upon here, to be much the same kind of term, although serving different ideological ends. While on the one hand, it seeks to correct the totalitarian nature of secularist thought by engaging with the historical reality that literally billions of human beings adhere to a variety of religious beliefs with some level of serious commitment, it clings, in many ways, to certain secularist principles, not the least of them being that much of the content of religious belief qua religious belief is humbug. Rather than engage Christianity, Islam, or other religious beliefs on their own terms, as well as larger social and cultural phenomena, they merely see them, as the author quite rightly points out, as pre-modern remnants of socialization that can serve as a critique of global capitalism precisely because these sets of beliefs and practices predate global capitalism.

How we are to utilize these potential sources without engaging them on their own terms, however, the author doesn't seem to consider. Furthermore, while the secularist critique of religion as an ideology certainly contains much with which I agree, and the social practices of secularization have been, by and large, forces for good, without setting engaging seriously and thoughtfully with what has been lost in process of secularization, as well as the short-comings of secularism as a part of that same ideology - global capitalism - that "post-secularism" wishes to critique.

Finally, it seems to me we are only now, albeit belatedly, to the realization that there are limits to the benefits of secularization, much the same as we have yet to learn there are limits to the benefits of global capitalism. One would hardly imagine calling our age "post-capitalist". "Post-secular" just doesn't seem even a good placeholder as a way of thinking about our current moment.

The Church Calendar - A Reality Check

It was years ago that I learned the first feast days on the (Roman) Church calendar are the Feast of the Slaughter of the Innocents (as told in St. Matthew's Gospel) and the Feast of the Martyrdom of St. Stephen. While hardly cheery festivals, these days coming on the heels of the day we celebrate the birth of Jesus remind us, first, of the kind of world in to which Jesus was born; second, with the Feast of the Martyrdom of St. Stephen, we remember what price we pay for following the man that Christmas baby will become.

Part of our problem, at least as Christians living in the United States - among many others! - is that, culturally speaking, we are the descendants of Rousseau. We view children as these marvelously innocent little creatures, open to the world, yet also destined to be corrupted by it. Our maudlin, hyper-romantic approach to the scenes of Jesus' birth too often elide a whole host of matters we would rather not consider in our warm, softly-lit Christmas homes. Everything from the heavy hand of Roman imperialism, Judean royal collaboration, the pretty obvious poverty and desperation of Joseph and Mary become matters that set a scene, rather than the heart of the problem Jesus came to address. With the birth, of course, we forget the ritually unclean state Mary and Joseph would have shared (if, indeed, Joseph assisted with the birth; he most likely did not), further estranging them from the larger society. We personalize our thoughts of the birth and immediate aftermath, rather than socialize them. Our minds filled with saccharine sentimentality, we refuse to allow any thoughts of hardship, worry, or care enter in to that moment that Mary first held her newborn son.

Thanks to the Roman calendar, we are snapped back to reality. Herod, that quisling false king, saw fit to order the death of all boy children under two years old. The blood of those children, the cries of the parents, the stink of the piles of corpses - these are ever-present realities, no less so for the horror, rage, and sorrow they evoke. We must never forget this moment, nor the reality that it was the birth of Jesus that brought it about. Herod, in his fear, sought to prevent any possible rival, even a newborn infant, from rising against him. All because he had heard of the birth of Jesus. Jesus' birth brought not just joy and peace. It also brought wails of mourning and streets running with blood.

St. Stephen's martyrdom gives us reason to remember that following Jesus is not a child's game. It doesn't fill us with that same saccharine sentimentality we keep trying to recall for our American Christmas celebrations. It is a matter of life and death. It might, perhaps, mean our death.

As we continue the week-long party that is Christmas/New Years, it is nice to have these little reminders that Jesus was not born so that we might vacation time, and have it more abundantly. Jesus was born in to a world filled with death and horror, of war and genocide. A world not much different from our own. Following this little baby, all cute and snuggling against his mother, can mean peace, to be sure. It can also mean rejection and horror and death.

Merry Christmas.

We Are The Reason To Hope

A report on Christmas Eve painted a portrait of national despair. Another report, this Boxing Day, offers us the image of the people of Florida having elected Ebeneezer Scrooge governor of Florida.

Do we despair? Do we blame the poor for their plight? Do huddle in the tattered remnants of an earlier age of largely false enthusiastic optimism, grasping what little remains to us, casting aspersions on the moral rectitude of those victimized by the false schemes of snake oil salesmen of market fundamentalists?

Of course, it seems we may well do just those things. All the same, I hope, beyond any evidence or reason to the contrary, because there is nothing inevitable about the future. Despair, as nonsensical and irrational as the sunny-eyed optimism of which it is just the flip-side, grants us nothing but the ridiculous notion that we have a grasp of the suture that is just not ours to have.

In the morally obtuse preachments of school marms like Rick Scott, we may rest for a moment if only because it assures us that we are not they. The bottom may have collapsed, but still have a toehold upon the ledge; those who have lost everything have no one but themselves to blame. If any such sentiments are less American, I cannot really imagine them.

The reason I have hope is simple - the future is in our hands. We may not believe it. We may think we need to listen to others for how we are to be America, but, really we don't. Climbing out of the pit in which we find ourselves, largely the making of the same people lecturing us now on our moral laxity, insisting we need to expect less from the future, begins with no longer heeding those voices that claim authority over us. We must understand this before we understand anything else - those same "leaders" who tell us that our choices are curtailed by "natural" economic forces, by the rules of the game that support those institutions that rained down such destruction upon us no longer have a hold over us.

We are free. We always were, but now, in an age of loss, we can also lose the illusion that we are chained to cruel fate, disguised as the economic marketplace.

Having lost so much, my hope lies that we can also lose our reliance upon those who insist their voices must be heeded. My hope lies in the possibility that we might just stand up, wipe the dust from the wreckage off our tattered clothes, and say together, "No." That would be the first step in the long journey to making us who we could be. It takes courage, to be sure. It also takes solidarity, recognizing that all of us, together, suffer from the misrule of those for so long who viewed their role as "leader" as natural, even inevitable.

This is the reason I do not despair. This is the reason that, even in the midst of fear and anger, I believe it is possible we may yet, together, move forward, lifting our hands out to those who have already fallen, instead of glancing away in fear and disgust.

Mary's Pregnancy And Our Sex-Obsessed Culture

The reading for today is Matthew 1:18-25, which tells us of Joseph hearing of Mary being with child, as verse 20b says, "the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit." He had been planning on ending their betrothal, albeit quietly, but with this news, he took her in to his house.

The post-Apostolic era, even through the early Church Fathers, was rife with stories about who the father of Mary's baby might be. Many rumors suggested that Mary, far from being the pure child, had worked as a Temple prostitute and was pregnant with the child from some Roman. Other stories were that she was raped by a Roman soldier. From the very beginning, the claim of "virgin birth" was considered ridiculous, and stories swirled that attempted to paint the conception of Jesus in an apposite a light as possible.

Yet, reading this passage, as well as the story in Luke 1, about Mary discovering her pregnancy, really, to my reading, have little to nothing to do with, to be blunt, biology or gynecology, and everything to do with theology. That is to say, Mary's child was not the result of the Holy Spirit placing within her womb a fetus. Rather, the story is about the grace-filled workings of God in the life of this young woman.

Part of my problem with the doctrine, if one can call it that, of the Virgin Birth, is its inherent hyper-rationality. It seeks to understand the mystery of the incarnation through a consideration of our basic understanding of human reproduction. Jesus is the Son of God; Mary gave birth to him; therefore, there must have been some kind of Divine intervention at the very beginning, to place this child within Mary to grow and from which to issue forth. This crossing of the lines between a simple, almost logical consideration of the facts we understand concerning how we make babies, and an almost magical view of the workings of God has produced this odd, and to my mind irrelevant notion, that Mary not only was a physical virgin before her pregnancy, but continued to be so after. Despite the clear testimony of Scripture that Jesus was part of a family with siblings (including James, who, after Jesus' passing, became a leader of the Jerusalem Church), the Roman Catholic Church has stretched this idea to the non-Biblical notion that Jesus was the only child of Joseph and Mary.

We can get so caught up in insisting on the necessity of the Virgin Birth for an understanding of the incarnation that we forget that these stories aren't about sex. They are about Divine grace. There really is no way to understand "how" it came to be that Mary, a young unmarried Nazarene woman, came to be with a child that her parents seemed to understand was more than just a generous gift from God to them, but for the whole world. Beyond insisting that the Holy Spirit was at work even then in the lives of Mary, Joseph, and the fetal Jesus, I think it is enough to say that it happened.

Far too often talk about Jesus' birth get caught up in social discussions on everything from abortion and class attitudes toward pregnancy (particularly as it to relates to the institution of marriage), to our general cultural psychosis about sex. It would be nice to do away with the magical thinking, which - to my mind anyway - seems to carry an implicit idea that sex, particularly in the case of the parents of Jesus, is somehow wrong. Much better to think of a young, barely adolescent Mary, pure and holy, discovering that she is with child through the intervention of God and in no other way.

It would be nice if we could reclaim the marvelous divine gift of human sexuality within the context of the birth narratives. The old rumors and stories - was she a whore? was she raped? - are of little consequence at the moment. Rather, we might just consider the all-too-human idea that Mary and Joseph, like not a few couples, might have eaten of the fruits of the matrimonial tree before they were fully ripe, as it were. In saying that, I am not saying anything more than that Jesus parents were, just as our Church has claimed for close to seventeen hundred years for their first child, fully human.

What Would A New Carol Look Like?

Like the sainted Dickens, my hope is the following doesn't put you out of temper with me, the day, or the sentiments of the season.

Toward the end of John Mortimer's Introduction to the sesquicentennial edition of A Christmas Carol, he "wondered how far we had really come in a century and a half since that endlessly active pen scratched its Christmas message."

All over the world povery and ignorance are tolerated. Those great Western democracies, the United States and Britain, accept the existence of an abandoned underclass, unemployed, unwanted, uneducated, and ignored. In Russia poor children live on the rubbish dumps, in Africa they starve. What we need is another Dickens, a novelist to stir our consciences and succeed where politicians and preachers and pamphleteers have so conspicuously failed. (p. xiii)

As marvelous a piece of literature as A Christmas Carol is I have to wonder how effectual it, or a contemporary equivalent, would be in snapping us out of our socially moral lassitude. The obstacles we face in regard to issues of wealth and poverty, the attitudes represented by Scrooge and, in particular, the Spirit of Christmas Present, would find it far more difficult to penetrate the hearts of our contemporary Scrooges. The problem is not that ours is a less religious, or less moral time. The problem is not that our economic and financial elite are in some manner, fashion, or form less moral, or even more evil, than those in Lord Palmerston's Britain. Rather, the structures within which these elites operate, the professional and ideological demands upon their attention, that which sets their public priorities, could not be met by appeals to their better human natures, to the thought that, as Marley's ghost tells Ebeneezer, the dealings of their trade are but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of their business.

Part of the problem with any attempt to do what Dickens was attempting here - to paint a picture of a society indifferent to the condition of a large sector of its population even as it claims the mantle "Christian" - is that we all too easily get hung up on the personalities involved. Because Scrooge, in particular, but also Bob Cratchit, the gentlemen who come calling for a charitable donation, even Fred Holliwell and Old Fezziwig are such marvelously drawn characters that we can forget that they are much more than that. For example, I can imagine Larry Summers or Robert Rubin announcing tomorrow that they are willing to make slightly less money if it would mean paying their employees slightly more. I cannot imagine, however, any government official, or CEO at a major bank announcing policies that would harm quarterly profits. I cannot imagine a scenario in which the Chairman of GM or Dow Chemical would welcome greater environmental regulation. I certainly could not see the Board of Target or some other big box store inviting labor organization at its stores.

The obstacles to a more just, more equitable society are not personal. I am not the least bit moved by character sketches of this or that person in business or government, because who they are as individuals means nothing to their professional, public conduct. It may well be that Dick Cheney is a loving, attentive father and husband. His public, professional conduct, however, in offices of public trust, has been egregious not for the least reason because there are structural rules and limits upon those offices that limit the impact any particular individual's personality may have upon their operation. This is why the endless focus on certain personalities - Sarah Palin, Pres. Obama as a person, John Boehner as a lachrymose spray-tanner - really mean little to me. I could probably sit and have a nice chat with all of them and more, share a beer with the President, tell jokes with Boehner, talk Winston Churchill with Newt Gingrich, and it would mean little to nothing about who they are as holders of public office.

Which is not to say that we are not in dire need of a fiction of moral redress in regard to the abysmal state of our political, economic, and social life as we are currently living it. Some attempts, such as Jonathan Franzen's bleak perspective of an ever-shrinking field of moral choices, are more descriptive than prescriptive; for all that, they seem to offer little hope in their explorations of the tortured soul of America in decline.

While it would be marvelous if the Spirits would visit, say, our Secretary of the Treasury, inducing his support for fiscal stimulus and greater banking regulation, my guess is even if they did visit - and please remember the vision of spirits bound together granted to Scrooge, which he divines as "governments" condemned in much the way Marley is - our public policy would change little, and the larger framework within which public decisions are made would not alter one bit.

I am not saying we should not read Dickens' "ghost of a tale". I am hardly suggesting that its weighty moral vocabulary is irrelevant. I do hope you don't get the impression that I do not believe there is still so much for us all to hear in the words of Marley's Ghost and the two Spirits who speak to Ebeneezer. I am only suggesting that Mortimer's idea of some contemporary fiction of moral sermonizing faces a far more difficult set of obstacles than those faced by Dickens.

So, God bless us, everyone!

Women And Motherhood: A French Feminist Perspective

I could probably spend days reading through the links on the syllabus at The New Inquiry. While older - from August - this interview with Elisabeth Banditer certainly offers an interesting perspective on the choices women face, and the differing cultural pressures, as well as generational changes, effecting women's realities. While her particular view is parochially French, her constant compare/contrast with German domestic culture and the pressures German women face is reminiscent of the same pressures American women face.

Because of the large influx of German immigrants here, much of our domestic culture in the United States is a rough adaptation and translation of the "kinder, kurche, kirche" notions of Wilhemine Germany. With the heavy weight of these demands, the demands of second wave feminism in the 1970's were felt as every bit revolutionary as the Civil Rights Movement. That these ideas were baptized by a cultural Christianity didn't help, at least here in the United States.

It is also nice that Ms. Banditer notes the socially structured limits on women's choices, that these structured limits aren't as present in France as they are in Germany (and the US as well). Yet, it is precisely at this point that I think Second Wave Feminism failed. While they pointed to the correct problem, placing it solely at the feet of patriarchy as a socio-cultural-political force ignored the capitalist system's demands, not just upon women, but men as well. The one attempt to redress the critique of patriarchy and capitalism - Catherine MacKinnon's Toward A Feminist Theory of the State - places feminism and Marxism in dialogue. MacKinnon, however, has far too many other issues, far too much baggage, to give her the kind of credibility needed to work through the synthesis such a dialogue might construct.

In any event, I recommend several reads-through as it offers up a whole salad for thought.

Holy Conferencing Starts At Home (Error Corrected)

With thanks to Matthew Johnson for the head's up, I would like to respond to this editorial at the United Methodist Reporter's website with some thoughts of my own.

Rather than looking to either individuals or a group at the top in the elusive quest after leadership, the United Methodist structure already has its own grassroots structure, waiting to be rethought, practiced with eyes toward real change, offering opportunities for real engagement. The Charge/Church Conference, the meeting of the local congregation that is held, minimally, annually, to address matters before the entire congregation, is far too often overshadowed by the Annual Conference as the place where we place our hopes. Yet, it is precisely here that local congregations/charges define themselves; where leaders find and even exercise their voices; where the vital interchange between clergy under appointment and laity exercise authority.

Far too long has the charge conference been seen as an autumn ritual to be gotten past. Far too long has its sole purpose been understood to be setting the pastor's salary, arguing over apportionments, and making the church's feelings clear concerning their appointed clergy to the District Superintendent. Yet it is precisely here, when the clergy and laity are gathered together to sum up their previous year, discuss the upcoming plans - budget! - and set out their vision for who they are as "church" that we have a far-too-untapped resource. We hear far too little of the ways local congregations can use charge conferences as a moment for making clear who they are, what they wish to be, and how they are to achieve their goals.

In my wife's previous appointment, a turning point was being reached. Not only was the church growing, but that growth had changed the self-identity of the whole congregation. A new group of younger leaders was coalescing, yet without any set of defined qualities, goals, or any mission. In this context, Lisa led a group through a year-long exploration that resulted in a Charge Conference that altered the leadership structure of the congregation, offered a vision and mission-statement that invigorated them, and set them on a path toward not just numerical growth - a result of changing local demographics that would have occurred anyway - but vigorous growth in their self-perception. It was a marvelous example of the power of Charge Conference as a vehicle for real change, real leadership, and the promise of what Holy Conferencing can achieve at the local congregational level.

I have a few other examples, but I think the point here is clear. Rather than seek "a leader", perhaps we need to rediscover the real leaders that we already have - our local churches, gathered in Charge Conference, telling the world who they are as the gathered Body of Christ.

Surprise

This might just reopen a great conversation.

Compared to America's legal drugs of choice, alcohol and nicotine, marijuana is relatively harmless, in terms of the health effects. Far from creating monsters, as alcohol can, it creates a mellow atmosphere, where strangers can become friends. The mild hallucinogenic effects, the way it opens up reception to stimuli, and the way it makes all such stimuli fascinating are all in contrast to the hyperactivity of nicotine, and the depressive, even narcoleptic effects of alcohol.

Plus, it does seem to mitigate certain issues in regard to appetite and pain relief under certain circumstances.

The debate over the legalization of pot has yet to finish, and Robertson's endorsement of decriminalization seems a huge step forward. While I doubt Pat fires up a hookah, it does offer a comical moment, too, the picture of moral rectitude sucking a fatty as a way of helping hear a Word from the Lord.

Confronting Library Shelves With Hope

I admit a bit of nerdishness here. I love University libraries. I remember times at the library at Wesley Theological Seminary and The Catholic University of America where, it seemed, endless possibility passed before me as I walked the stacks. For someone interested in just about anything, a University library in particular can be a dangerous place. It is all too easy to lose oneself in this or that set of stacks, rather than concentrate on getting the titles for which one is searching. In the midst of these searches, you run across a monograph on Chinese art, say, or the Northwest native Potlatch, opening up whole new vistas for understanding what it means to be human.

Even reading something daring in scope and intent - my own favorite in this regard is Bloch's Principle of Hope - provides an awareness of just how much there is to learn, how much to understand, about the world. Anything and everything is there for the taking.

It was with surprise, then, that I read Rob Horning's "Confessions of a Mass Man".

The palpable sense that there was so much more to know, the concrete proof of it bound up in volumes front of me, not only made it difficult for me to imagine leaving the library; it also made it hard to actually start reading anything. I wanted to stay there in the narrow aisle, facing the books forever, contemplating the spines, surveying Contents and Works Cited pages, poised in a moment of perpetual potentiality. As long as I didn’t commit to any one text, I could continue to fantasize about reading them all. Walking away from the shelf would be tantamount to surrender; I’d have to admit to myself how much there was that I would never know, how I was doomed to dilettantism.

This sort of library visit was somewhat counterproductive to my studies. I learned to evade that state of petrified fascination in the stacks only by avoiding the library altogether and ultimately by dropping out of school.

Obviously, this is a fully human choice. Horning sees himself as one of Ortega y Gasset's "mass men", defined in his The Revolt of the Masses as "constitutionally incapable of appreciating the society in which it found itself."

Sunk in a mire of “self-satisfaction” and “radical ingratitude,” this new inert generation lacked the autonomy to strive for the “noble life” of ceaseless moral and intellectual struggle. “They are from birth deficient in the faculty of giving attention to what is outside themselves, be it fact or person,” Ortega asserts. “They will want to listen, and will discover they are deaf.”

Ortega y Gasset's view of "mass man", however, is really a description of the petit bourgeois, that most reactionary, defensive, frightened of capitalist creatures. Threatened from below by the fear of proletarian victory, envious of the success of the bourgeoisie that always seems to elude them, the petit bourgeois' rage and frustration finds its outlet in fascist politics, anti-intellectualist attacks on culture, and racist and xenophobic attacks on "the other".

Far from the overwhelmed undergraduate, numb and dumb before the prospect and promise present in the University library, I would suggest, rather, that Horning's attempt to see himself reflected in Ortega y Gasset's "mass man" does himself a disservice. One can, I suppose resign oneself to a life viewed as dilettantism. On the other hand, one can dedicate oneself to seeing those shelves as holding the promise of a lifetime of learning, seeing the connections among things that might elude others. Certainly the reality of specialization, as Horning notes, leaves ever smaller niches, to the point where real knowledge and understanding will disappear. All the same, this is not the only possible answer.

An Odd Interview

The folks at The New Inquiry offer up an interview with Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor at The Utopian that is just strange. The interview seems to want to revolve around questions raised by Taylor's last, magesterial work, A Secular Age. The very first question signals that the interviewer hasn't quite grasped either the central point of Taylor's work, let alone surveys our contemporary scene for any clarity.

Is it possible to be religious in today’s world?

Even European intellectuals, long either resigned or elated by the passing of even the possibility of religious belief are coming to the realization that, as a very real human phenomenon, it has not and will not disappear as easily as was once envisioned. Indeed, the history of the past generation, if anything, is testimony to the tenacity of religious belief, and the very limited appeal of the western critique of the possibility of religious belief.

This last point is something that Taylor has made part of his philosophical project, that is, understanding how it is that the supposedly universal criticism of the possibility of religious belief is, really, merely a socially and culturally conditioned position. Furthermore, while it has given to the West many gains (which Taylor describes in brief in the interview), it also entails losses as well, which he also discusses.

Furthermore, the interviewers seem insistent to draw out from Taylor what he believes to be the political implications of the work, a view he rejects.

The book may have political consequences, but it’s not something that you could necessarily produce by political action.

What Taylor discusses in his book is the slow-moving intellectual change, with some political effects, but others as well. Are there political ramifications of this intellectual arc? Obviously. Yet, they are far more subtle, and might even be contradictory. Taylor is pretty clear about that in his work, as well as the interview.

Part of the problem, it seems to me, is the interviewer hasn't grasped the essence of Taylor's work. The following question makes that pretty clear; Taylor's response is generous, to say the least.

So let’s talk about these political consequences. If you jettison something like the mechanistic worldview, and perhaps substitute it with a more holistic religion that makes more claims of authority during our time on earth — wouldn’t one of the consequences be that it would be very difficult for many such religions to co-exist? Is the liberal part of your soul worried about the societal clashes that might result?

That sort of thing is possible, but it’s not inevitable. Religions can be lived in very many different ways. One of the big things that started happening in the 20th century is ecumenicism. I don’t just mean: let’s get together, let’s be nice to each other. (Laughs) I mean, I’m all for that.

But there’s something else which is much more subtle. This is ecumenicism as a real desire to learn from the other — and this extends to atheists as well — to learn from the other why their position so deeply appeals to them. There is a great deal of exchange operating at this level. It both presupposes but also builds initial respect and friendship. Again, you could say that this all corresponds to a new upheaval for people, who find it very difficult to flip back to the old way. So people argue that it, too, has downsides. I’m not sure about that, but it certainly has upsides. For instance, it frees in a plural-religious situation — where the other is a real possibility — certain kinds of ecumenicism that have traditionally existed in more despotically ordered societies. For instance, where the Greek Christians and the Armenian Christians and the Turkish Muslims all co-existed and nobody expected anyone to look at each other.

But in situations where one can move around, there is an easy tendency to defend yourself against any doubts about whether you should become an atheist, or whether an atheist should become a Christian, by supremely deprecatory views of the other. “I mean, I could change my mind, but their view is so ridiculous,” or horrifying or whatever. So the side of all this that clears away the deprecatory images is very important to one’s spiritual development — but it’s more than that. It’s a sense that (one is tempted to use one’s own language, naturally, so let me use the Christian language) you can see the Spirit moving in all these different lives, and that is something both very inspiring and furthering of one’s own spiritual development. I think a lot of that is coming to exist.

The interview is interesting precisely because there is an almost total failure to grasp the complexities of Taylor's argument. Like so many in today's world, there is the search for easy answers, for direct political or social implications from a certain intellectual stance. The interview is odd, and interesting, and worth a read, although at times, I wonder if Taylor isn't treating the interviewer like an undergraduate who hasn't quite got the point.

"[I]f you hate America, you have a great future in the Methodist church"

After linking to this story this morning on Facebook, I've been hesitant to say much more, not wanting to draw attention to Judson Phillips' stupidity. I decided, however, that I should at least make some folks who aren't with me on FB aware I saw it, and how I really feel.

Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips has a dream: "No more Methodist Church."

A blog post on his Tea Party Nation page says that on Friday he walked by the United Methodist Building in Washington D.C., which had a sign that said, "Pass the DREAM Act." Phillips wrote: " I have a DREAM. That is, no more United Methodist Church."

--snip--

Phillips explains that he was formerly a member of the church, but he left because it's "the first Church of Karl Marx," and "little more than the "religious" arm of socialism."

The United Methodist Church's Board of Church and Society has prime office space, right across the street from the Capitol building, hard up between the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress. They have been working hard to educate church members on the DREAM Act - originally introduced seven years ago by that Marxist Orrin Hatch and co-sponsored by the American Politburo consisting of Charles Grassley, John McCain, Susan Collins, and Sam Brownback - and urging them to contact legislators in support of it.

That is perfectly legal. It is in keeping with the UMC Social Principles. It continues the lived witness of John Wesley, who, along with fighting off personal attacks and the rejection of the C of E establishment, worked with Members of Parliament to pass legislation.

Beyond that, I really have nothing more to say. Mr. Phillips is certainly entitled to his opinion, as insane as it may be. He may be upset with the UMC for urging passage of the DREAM Act. Shoot, he can even work toward ending the denomination, although right now we are doing a nice job of suicide, really.

Mr. Phillips is also invited to Cornerstone UMC in Plato Center, IL for Christmas Eve candlelight service on Friday night, should he be in the area. My guess is the clergy - my wife, Rev. Lisa Kruse-Safford, and Associate Pastor Rev. Calvin Culpepper - will not even whisper St. Karl's name that night, mention the DREAM Act, or anything else. Instead, there will be the singing of carols, a recollection of the birth story by reading the first section of the second chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke, the lighting of the Christ Candle, which will burn until Good Friday, and a whole lot of folks wishing one another Merry Christmas.

I also would add, as my first reaction as I read the sentence which is this post's title:
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

Merry Christmas, Mr. Phillips. Many blessings during this season of hope and in to the new year.

Republicans In House Love Marriage So Much They Want To Protect Minors Forced Into It

Summarizing a large, now deleted, preface to this post, I am hesitant to cast aspersions on one political party over and against another. In regard to specific actions, however, it seems to me that aspersions need to be cast, particularly when they are egregious.

TPM noted an otherwise passed-over bill fail in the House.

On Thursday night, hours before passing the tax cut compromise, House Republicans thwarted a bill that aimed to protect girls around the world from being coerced into child marriage. They opposed it because, they claimed, it might fund abortions.

The bill's sponsor, Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN), was blindsided. After the Child Marriage Protection Act passed the Senate with zero objection on Dec. 1 -- a rare feat these days -- it didn't seem like there was much to worry about.

But just before the vote began, Republican leadership blasted out a "whip alert" to GOP staffers with a message: Vote no. The alert claimed the bill cost too much and that a competing bill, introduced just the day before, would be better.

"There are also concerns that funding will be directed to NGOs that promote and perform abortion and efforts to combat child marriage could be usurped as a way to overturn pro-life laws," the alert read.

--snip--

The text of the bill does not mention abortion, contraception or family planning. Instead, it directs the president to make preventing child marriage a priority, especially in countries where more than 40 percent of girls under the age of 18 are married. The ways to do that, according to the bill: support educating communities on the dangers and health effects of child marriage, keep young girls in school, support female mentoring programs and make sure girls have access to health care services.

Apparently, it's that whole "health care services" provision. Some folks see that, they read "abortion!!! contraception!!!" and they just fear that some fetus might be harmed at some future point in time.

So, rather than help children, the Republicans are saying they want to prevent any potential fetus from some scenario that might threaten it, or might not.

The fetishization of the fetus has reached alarming, ridiculous proportions.