Divertissment

We know [torture] works. It has worked. It's just a lie to say that it has never worked . . .

Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.

Sam Harris

I noted back in November that Sam Harris has written a book entitled The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. The latest edition of The New York Review of Books has a review.

Harris is aware that such large claims will invite charges of naive scientism, but he is unfazed. In particular, he is well aware that a long intellectual tradition insists that anything resembling a science of morality is impossible: science trades in facts and ethics trades in values and, according to the tradition, facts can never justify values. So Harris’s project will require him to do battle with some deep, and widely shared, views.

The result of all this is not particularly pretty. Part of the problem is that the book suffers from an awkward structure. While the first half of The Moral Landscape is concerned with the possibility of a science of morality, the second half features long chapters on the neurobiology of belief and the delusions of religion (including a lengthy attack on Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health and an evangelical Christian). Harris ties these chapters only loosely to his main thesis. It turns out that some of this later material is more or less imported from Harris’s earlier scientific publications or from Op-Ed pieces or online essays that he’s written. None of this makes for a particularly coherent presentation and the book seems, in places, aimless. By the end, one worries that Harris has lost focus on the ostensible point of his book: that a science of morality is possible.

A large part of the review concerns itself with Harris' curious idea that Hume's distinction between is and ought, that there is no logical connection between statements of fact ("Daniel is my brother.") and statements of value ("I ought to honor my brother."). Orr notes that Harris muddles certain understandings and definitions. For example, at one point Harris writes the following:

If, from the point of view of the brain, believing “the sun is a star” is importantly similar to believing “cruelty is wrong,” how can we say that scientific and ethical judgments have nothing in common?

Orr writes directly:

But of course no one ever said that factual and ethical judgments aren’t “similar” or have “nothing in common.” They’re obviously similar and have much in common. Both are judgments, both are believed by human minds and not by rocks, and so on. The relevant claim is that facts and values are not the same and that statements about facts cannot justify statements about values. It’s hard to see how Harris’s data address this issue.

Quite apart from the philosophical issues, Harris also seems either to misconstrue or be apathetic to what science is, does, and can do, resulting in what Orr calls "naive scientism", which, Orr also says, Harris seems to dismiss by plowing ahead anyway.

Harris' understanding of what constitutes the moral life is simply stated, according to Orr: "It is the well-being of conscious creatures.

Indeed Harris suggests that any other conception of the good either is equivalent to this one or is nonsense: “Concern for well-being (defined as deeply and as inclusively as possible) is the only intelligible basis for morality and values.” After all, every notion of the good ever offered concerns a putatively conscious creature (either our present selves or, in some religious traditions, our future spiritual selves in an afterlife) and it’s hard to see how concern for a conscious creature could involve anything but concern for its well-being. A science of morality must, then, be concerned with what contributes to well-being: a “prosperous civil society,” for instance, or an atmosphere of “beneficence, trust, creativity,” and the pursuit of “wholesome pleasures.”

I'm assuming, then, that torturing and killing conscious creatures who do not share this rather simplistic and vague notion of the good life, then, is pursuing the good for this conscious creature who is befuddled somehow? Or perhaps it is a "wholesome pleasure" to kill people who think and live in ways different from us?

Help me out here.

Orr does say one thing that troubles me.

In the end, it’s odd that one can share so many of Harris’s views and yet find his project largely unsuccessful.

Which of Harris' views does he share? His belief in psychic phenomena such as xenoglossy? His pimping of Hindu deities and Buddhist meditation practices, all the while insisting that "religion" has done nothing good for society, without ever once glancing at the contradiction? His support for torture and the indiscriminate killing of other human beings - conscious creatures, one and all whose well-being is supposed to be the highest morally scientific principle - because they choose to live and think and believe in ways that differ from other people?

I, for one, cannot take much that Sam Harris says seriously. His scientific work may be intriguing, even interesting, although, as Orr notes, even Harris himself notes the promise of neurobiology lies in the future; even the experiments he has conducted and published with colleagues yield far less in the way any "science of morality" than he initially claims. Harris is as much a fundamentalist true-believer as any jihadi, and far more dangerous. Precisely because he seems to speak in a contemporary idiom that resonates, insists his vision is one of expanding human tolerance and the good-life while his opponents are dangerous throwbacks to the age of religious absolutism, his own lack of fellow-feeling, his glib statement that there is factual support for torture when none exist, and the rather blase nature of his idea that killing some people simply because they exist is preferable to living with them; all this give him an air of reasonableness he has neither earned nor demonstrated.

It is sad, really, that so many otherwise intelligent folks have found in Harris' something with which to agree. Taking his published works as a whole, his many public statements and appearances, I find it hard to understand how anyone could possibly consider Harris as someone who grasps "morality" in any manner fashion or form.

Up From Truly Stupid

Our national debt is our biggest national security threat.

Adm. Mike Mullen, Chair, Joint Chiefs of Staff, June, 2010

We are in the midst of a national discussion on the whole question of our national debt, what our fiscal posture should be, and how to prioritize spending in the face of growing strains caused not least by the on-going economic stagnation inhibiting economic growth and keeping revenues low. There are various budget proposals of a more or less serious and mendacious nature, with the plan offered by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) being the most prominent. The House of Representatives endorsed the plan in a partisan vote, and with House members back in their districts, the plan and those who voted in support of it are being hit pretty hard. This isn't surprising, really. Just as Pres. Obama's policy agenda was the focus of so much constituent angst and anger over the past couple years, so now that the Republicans have control of the legislative agenda, their proposals are large, easy targets.

All the same, the level of discussion, while rising ever so slightly, has been abysmal. There seems to be little coherence to much of the discussion, made even more ridiculous by the adamant opposition of the Republican Party to countenance any serious talk of tax increases. Paul Krugman's simple, clear, and destructive breakdown of the effects of Ryan's proposal is part of the much larger backlash against the kind of policy nonsense Republicans continue to support.

What's needed is not a "plan" that decimates any part of the tattered remnants of the social safety net. Instead, our entire fiscal structure needs to be looked at, as a whole, with the guiding questions being: Who are we as a people? What kind of country do we wish to have? Answering these questions should set our budgetary and fiscal priorities all the time; now, more than ever, we need, in a way, to rip it up and start again.

In this regard, "A National Strategic Narrative" offers itself as a helpful guide for starting, and guiding, such a discussion. As I wrote earlier, Mr. Y sets the whole question of national security within the whole broad context of our domestic and foreign policy, defining security in far broader (and, historically, more accurate) terms than simple physical, national protection from military attack. Indeed, the authors seem to follow on Adm. Mullen's comment, the epigram to this post, that our current fiscal and long-term situation poses a far graver national security threat than any other. To that end, while short on specifics, they envision a set of policy priorities, including defense, that are reset along an axis and against a horizon that sees the United States far less reliant on military defense alone. Indeed, as security is dependent upon economic and fiscal health as big ships and bombs, they call for what they term a National Prosperity and Security Act that would set our national security policy firmly within a larger policy framework of relative fiscal probity and sanity, as well as understanding our military stance as far more flexible than it currently is.

Reading through Mr. Y, I sense a certain reluctance to make some things clear that, if stated (let alone implemented) would drastically alter the entire fiscal and economic outlook we face. First and foremost, ending our military engagements in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Libya. The maintenance of nearly 50,000 American troops in Iraq is hardly a "withdrawal"; the force is too small to face any possible large-scale military contingency, and large enough to be a constant irritant to Islamic militants across the regions (in particular in a time of political turmoil all over the Muslim world). In Afghanistan, we have over 100,000 troops whose mission, it seems, is to sit there and respond to attacks from various forces, most of whom manage to cross back to Pakistan. Responding by using military RCVs is having a horrible effect on Pakistan in any number of ways, creating an atmosphere diametrically opposed to any perceived interest. Mission creep in Libya continues, and the President's assurance that we won't send American ground forces is hardly reassuring.

Ending these missions and deployments as quickly as feasible would certainly end certain fiscal and budgetary strains, as well as ease political tensions at home. It would also create an opportunity to have a far more serious, far less dangerous discussion on the structure of our military moving forward. While Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has already set out a proposal for cutting $78 billion from the Defense budget, much of the savings would come in the form of future savings, from a draw-down of forces after the 2015 end-date of American deployment in Afghanistan. Other cuts Gates proposed, including the F-35 joint strike fighter, would be, relatively speaking, far smaller.

What is needed, however, as Mr. Y makes clear, is an entire revisioning of our military within a far larger understanding of security. Do we need a 400-ship Navy? Do we need a large strategic bomber force? Do we need a large force of nuclear missile submarines? Part of the reason our defense budget is so large - we spend more on defense than the combination of the next fourteen largest militaries on the planet combined - has been the tradition, outlined in the previous post, of defining American interests and projecting our interests pretty much anywhere on the globe. There was a certain logic to this in 1950. Today, it seems almost absurd, and in tight fiscal times, far less defensible.

None of this is to suggest we should "gut" the US military. Our defense costs would shrink quite a bit, however, if we defined our interests differently, and saw our needs, therefore, within a far different frame of reference.

It is frustrating, to say the least, to be having a "national discussion" of economic and fiscal priorities that is almost wholly divorced from any reasonable and realistic assessment of the challenges and risks we currently face. Mr. Y's proposal for a security narrative, among its many other virtues, offers an opportunity to change the entire nature of such a discussion.

If only any one were paying attention to it.

What A Difference Half A Century Makes

While the anonymous authors of "A National Strategic Narrative" seem to invoke George Kennan's famous "X" article with their "Mr. Y" appellation, a more attentive reader will find much closer parallels with a far different document - National Security Council Memorandum 68 (NSC 68), signed in to law by Pres. Harry Truman in 1951 as a highly classified Executive Order. Reading through NSC 68 - and it isn't easy; unlike Mr. Y, the piece is long and detailed, rather than sketchy and general - I was struck, in particular, by the perceived strategic posture of the United States on the eve of the Korean War.

In the broadest terms, the ability to perform these tasks requires a build-up of military strength by the United States and its allies to a point at which the combined strength will be superior for at least these tasks, both initially and throughout a war, to the forces that can be brought to bear by the Soviet Union and its satellites. In specific terms, it is not essential to match item for item with the Soviet Union, but to provide an adequate defense against air attack on the United States and Canada and an adequate defense against air and surface attack on the United Kingdom and Western Europe, Alaska, the Western Pacific, Africa, and the Near and Middle East, and on the long lines of communication to these areas. Furthermore, it is mandatory that in building up our strength, we enlarge upon our technical superiority by an accelerated exploitation of the scientific potential of the United States and our allies.

Compared to the perceived strategic posture presented by Mr. Y, this paragraph can be summed up by saying the US needs to be everywhere all the time in force.

A quick analysis of the relevant fiscal outlays and GNP proportions reveals what seems, at first blush, a stark, and threatening, contrast:

The program will be costly, but it is relevant to recall the disproportion between the potential capabilities of the Soviet and non-Soviet worlds (cf. Chapters V and VI). The Soviet Union is currently devoting about 40 percent of available resources (gross national product plus reparations, equal in 1949 to about $65 billion) to military expenditures (14 percent) and to investment (26 percent), much of which is in war-supporting industries. In an emergency the Soviet Union could increase the allocation of resources to these purposes to about 50 percent, or by one-fourth.

The United States is currently devoting about 22 percent of its gross national product ($255 billion in 1949) to military expenditures (6 percent), foreign assistance (2 percent), and investment (14 percent), little of which is in war-supporting industries. (As was pointed out in Chapter V, the "fighting value" obtained per dollar of expenditure by the Soviet Union considerably exceeds that obtained by the United States, primarily because of the extremely low military and civilian living standards in the Soviet Union.) In an emergency the United States could devote upward of 50 percent of its gross national product to these purposes (as it did during the last war), an increase of several times present expenditures for direct and indirect military purposes and foreign assistance.

In 1950, Pres. Truman had proposed a military budget of $13 billion. The authors of NSC 68 foresaw the outline of a policy calling for an increase to $50 billion, a nearly four-fold increase. In his memoirs, former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, while recognizing that at the time he was writing the document was still classified, covered in broad outline the internal debates as well as the public discussion that followed the submission of the memo, and his own personal and professional opinion that, while a radical shift in national priorities, it was also necessary.

There could be little more stark contrast between the two strategic visions than the fiscal, investment, and even foreign policy assumptions guiding these two documents. From Mr. Y, in contrast to the committee that drafted NSC 68:

Rather than focusing all our attention on specific threats, risks, nations, or organizations, as we have in the past, let us evaluate the trends that will shape tomorrow's strategic ecology, and seek opportunities to credibly influence these to our advantage. Among the trends that are already shaping a "new normal" in our strategic environment are the decline of rural economies, joblessness, the dramatic increase in urbanization, an increasing demand for energy, migration of populations and shifting demographics, the rise of gray and black markets, the phenomenon of extremism and anti-modernism, the effects of global climate change, the spread of pandemics and lack of access to adequate health services, and an increasing dependency on cyber networks.

The closest the authors come to a mention of the boogey man of "Islamic terrorism" is citing "the phenomenon of extremism and anti-modernism". While I would hardly argue that the list is either exhaustive or orderly, that the authors manage to notice economic and social factors before they get to "extremism" (please note, they don't actually say "terrorism", let alone "terror") is telling. The authors recognize that terrorism in whatever form is merely the expression of extreme rage across a broad spectrum of ideologies, knowing no home, respecting no persons. Considering the abundance of domestic terror in the US stemming from anti-abortion and racist groups, one would think this obvious point need not be made.

In any event, against this background, rather than discuss specific fiscal, budgetary, or other outlays in any comparative fashion - precisely because the authors see the strategic challenges facing the US in coming decades coming far less from traditional actors - they do, nevertheless, talk about what our investment priorities should be. The difference with NSC 68 could not be more arresting.

As Americans we have access to a vast array of resources. Perhaps the most important first step we can take, as part of a National Strategy, is to identify which of these resources are renewable and sustainable, and which are finite and diminishing. Whtout doubt, our greatest resourse is America's young people, who will shape and execute the vision needed to take this nation forward into an uncertain future. . . . We must embrace the reality that with opportunity comes challenge, and that retooling our competitiveness requires a commitment and investment in the future.

Inherent in our children is the innovation, drive, and imagination that have made, and will continue to make, this country great. By investing energy, talent, and dollars now in the education and training of young Americans - the scientists, statesmen, industrialists, farmers, inventors, educators, clergy, artists, service members, and parents, of tomorrow - we are truly investing in our ability to successfully compete in, and influence, the strategic environment of the future. Our first investment priority, the, is intellectual capital and a sustainable infrastructure of education, health and social services to provide for the continuing development and growth of America's youth.

Our second investment priority is ensuring the nation's sustainable security - on our own soil and wherever Americans and their interests take them. As has been stated already, American view security in the broader context of freedom and peace of mind. Rather than focusing primarily on defense, the security we seek can only be sustained through a whole of nation approach to our domestic and foreign policies. This requires a different approach to problem solving than we have pursued previously and a hard look at the distribution of our national treasure, For too long, we have underutilized sectors of our government and our citizenry writ large, focusing intensely on defense and protectionism rather than on development and diplomacy.

There are no numbers in Mr. Y, and while this does present some weaknesses to the argument, it also points out a major distinction between the overall strategic picture today in contrast to that of 1950. Then, the threat was, in a sense, traditional. Today, we face a completely different set of challenges, calling for completely rethinking the way we "do" national security.

The Reality Of Adults Versus The Fantasies Of Children

I originally thought a rough overview of "Mr. Y"'s "A National Security Narrative" would be possible. After a few reads-through, however, I cannot possibly do it justice without taking time to linger over various points. I am not suggesting I agree with every detail, or even some of it. Rather, I think a piece of this seriousness, thoughtfulness, and intelligence at the very least deserves to be treated with some respect.

The very first page, indeed, is presented so well, it deserves a few moments to consider what Mr. Y has written. As a summary of the position offered, they write:

The primary approach this Strategic Narrative advocates to achieve sustainable prosperity and security, is through the application of credible influence and strength, the pursuit of fair competition, acknowledgement (sic) of interdependencies (sic) and converging interests, and adaptation to complex, dynamic systems - all bounded by our national values.

This single sentence is a challenge to the view offered by the National Security and Defense strategy of the Bush years.

For an official document of the U.S. government (in accordance with the Goldwater - Nichols Defense Department Reorganization Act of 1986), the Bush National Security Strategy of 2002 is disturbingly insubstantial, ideological, and, at times, disingenuous. All together, it betrays a remarkably casual attitude toward matters of grave concern to Americans and many people around the globe.

--snip--

Prototypically, a national security strategy is a place to spell out national interests, threats to those interests, and the organization and allocation of national resources to pursue and defend those interests. In neorealist international relations theory nation states are seen a "amoral" units which are expected to pursue their national interests internationally. National cultural values are seen as subordinate components of national interests. What is outstanding in the new national strategy is the notion that American values stand outside of American national interests and that this quality is a distinctive American virtue.

How do these values stand outside American national interests? In the Preface President Bush puts it this way: "These values of freedom are right and true for every person, in every society..." and represent a "single sustainable model for national success." Later the document says: "...this path is not America's alone. It is open to all." (p. 1) This is an invitation open to all who will follow the path laid out by the United States! It pays no heed to the reality that other states will have different interests. By giving little consideration to the national interests of other states the Bush administration risks being ineffective in the pursuit of U.S. national interests.

--snip--

To the extent that the Bush strategists are attracted to a culture of friendship among select nations their approach seems immature at best. In practice they seem loathe to identify with others or to equate their interests with international interests, while at the same time they explicitly call on their friends to adopt U.S. security interests as their own. These characteristics remind me of the behavior of children in their earliest friendships. At an older age they are characteristics of the phony friendships of a bully.

This criticism, leveled at the release of the 2002 National Security Strategy, sums up far better than I could, the most disturbing legacy of the Bush years, far beyond the failed economy and death and destruction of our wars of choice (which Obama seems eager to continue, despite his campaign promises to the contrary). At the heart of too much discussion of national security strategy is this whole idea that there can be no challenge to American preeminence and power. Any such challenge is not just competition, but a direct challenge to the interests and security of the United States.

Mr. Y, on the other hand, simply removes any such thoughts from how we understand national security strategy moving forward in the 21st century.

America's national strategy in the second half of the last century was anchored in the belief that our global environment is a closed system to be controlled by mankind - through technology, power, and determination - to achieve security and prosperity. From that perspective, anything that challenged our national interests was perceived as a threat or a risk to be managed. For forty years our nation prospered and was kept secure through a strategy of containment [emphasis in original]. That strategy relied on control, deterrence, and the conviction that given the choice, people the world over share our vision for a better tomorrow. America emerged from the Twentieth Century as the most powerful nation on earth. But we failed to recognize that dominance, like fossil fuel, is not a sustainable source of energy. The new century brought with it a reminder that the world, in fact, is a complex, open system - constantly changing. And change brings with it uncertainty. What we really failed to recognize, is that in uncertainty and change, there is opportunity and hope. . . . [emphasis added]

We must recognize that security means more than defense, and sustaining security requires adaptation and evolution, the leverage of converging interests and interdependencies [sic]. To grow we must accept that competitors are not necessarily adversaries, and that a winner does not demand a loser.[emphases in original] We must regain our credibility as a leader among peers, a beacon of hope, rather than an island fortress. It is only by balancing our interests with our principles that we can truly hope to sustain our growth as a nation and to restore our credibility as a world leader.

This is a direct challenge to the view offered during the Bush years that national security rested on a combination of moral and military force, the iron fist in the steel glove. By granting to reality the status of something to be taken seriously, Mr. Y has done policy planners a huge favor. Even if we can quibble over important matters, including whether or not deterrence was, indeed, our national security strategy during the Cold War; to what extent deterrence, as it emerged in the mid-1960's as a wholly nuclear doctrine with the acronym MAD (after flirting with, first, massive retaliation and then flexible response, which foresaw the use of American nuclear weapons in certain contingencies), was a sensible policy given the size and destructive power as well as fragility of the balance between the US and USSR (as well as mental acuity of national leaders on both sides). By making what should be the banal point that the world is a complicated place, and the US is "a" world leader rather than "the" world leader (the difference in article here is almost revolutionary), Mr. Y is offering up as context the simple fact that we are no longer "the superpower".

That's a marvelous place to start any discussion of national security strategy.

Telling A New Story I

If we lived in a more sane land, with a media less obsessed with birth certificates and phony budget plans, the release of a radically new view of American national security policy (.pdf document) would be the source of much discussion, argument, and debate. Alas, since our current moment seems dominated by nonsense - the President is too smart to be President! - the silence around this astounding offer of a vision for moving forward on national security strategy is deafening.

The article is introduced with a brief outline and summary by Anne-Marie Slaughter, identified as Bert G. Kerstetter University Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, who also serves, or has served, as Director of Policy Planning at the State Department since the beginning of the Obama Administration. The summary is succinct, and important in and for itself. Slaughter's context-setting - the authors are identified only as "Mr. Y", as opposed to George Kennan's "X" - makes clear their intention to move past the floundering sterility of the past two decades, in which a post-Cold War United States continued to act as if it were 1947.

There are some points with which I disagree with Ms. Slaughter's framing. She writes the following:

The authors argue that Kennan's strategy of containment was designed for a closed system, in which we assumed that we could control events through deterrence, defense, and dominance of the international system. The 21st century is an open system, in which unpredictable external events/phenomena are constantly disturbing and disrupting the system. In this world control is impossible; the best we can do is to build credible influence - the ability to shape and guide global trends in the direction that serves our values and interests (prosperity and security) within an interdependent strategic ecosystem. In other words, the Us.S. should stop trying to dominate and direct global events. The best we can do is to build our capital so that we can influence events as they arise.

The time when the US dominated events was actually quite short. By the time southeast Asia began to rile with anti-colonial violence, in the 1950's, with a sheen of communist rhetoric, such control should have been understood as gone. Instead, we reacted - as one of Kennan's more important critics, Henry Kissinger, noted was a major flaw in containment; it created conditions wherein the US reacted to an ever-shifting set of conditions, rather than taking the diplomatic initiative - within the already distorted lenses of a militarized containment policy (Kennan always insisted his view was that containment should be a political diplomatic project, rather than military).

In the decades since Vietnam, the number of "unpredictable external events" has skyrocketed. From the rise of OPEC to the stirrings of Islamic radicalism to the growing power of China and India, we have found ourselves facing missed chances and shifting demands upon our energy and resources for which containment was not designed. Any move away from keeping the Soviet threat not just our major but sole national security focus made these events unintelligible, leaving us forming ad hoc responses that, in the end, have left us far more vulnerable than might otherwise have been the case. In many ways, a strategy that grants both the "open" system and that events are going to occur that are unexpected is less a novel approach than granting to an existing reality the status of something we need to recognize.

When during the Bush Administration a national security strategy was developed that insisted the US continue to be the dominant global superpower well in to the 21st century, few people that I can recall called such an announcement nonsensical, practically impossible, and a recipe for fiscal and economic disaster. Now, however, we have a reasoned, articulate proposal for a national security strategy that recognizes the reality we have faced for close to four decades, offering a role for the US that is sustainable, realistic, and in tune with our deepest values.

Tomorrow, an appraisal of Mr. Y.

An Interesting Specimen

The reviews are in. Benjamin Wallace-Wells' profile of Paul Krugman is boffo stuff. Why it has been so well received is captured best by the Salon view of the article.

Maybe it's the paradoxical tone of Wallace-Wells' eloquently articulated elegy for liberalism -- Krugman's got a lot going for him, after all -- Nobel Prize, prominent public intellectual bully pulpit, hugely trafficked blog -- but somehow Wallace-Wells uses the profile to tell a story of defeat: of Obama's failure to deliver true progressive change, and Krugman's failure to get Washington to listen to his liberal "purism."

As I read the article, however, I was struck less by this than by the cliche sketch of Krugman, ever the academic, his mind filled with numbers and books filled with graphs, not engaging human beings in the real world. Some snippets:

Paul Krugman is a lonely man. That he is comfortable in his solitude, that he emphasizes its virtues, that his intelligence gives it a poetic gloss, none of this diminishes the poignancy of his isolation. Krugman grew up an only child and is deeply self-conscious. He will list his shortcomings as though he’d been preparing for the chance: “Loner. Ordinarily shy. Shy with individuals.” He is married but has no children nor—rare for a Nobelist—many protégés. When I asked him if there were any friends of his I could talk to in order to understand him better, he hesitated, then said, “That’s going to be hard.” One colleague at Princeton, where Krugman has taught since 2000, says the economist will avert his eyes when circumstance places the two of them alone in an elevator, his nose stuck in the corner, so as to avoid conversation.

Krugman is short and has a very round, very full belly; he is both generally agreeable and chronically rushed, and this gives him a myopic, distracted air. When he talks about himself, his ideas always arise only from his scholarship, as if once, long ago, he had erected a wall between his immersion in the world and his study of it. At Yale, he says, he formed no impression of the aspiring New York bankers and Washington lawyers who were his peers. Later, though he traveled frequently to Japan and met often with government ministers in the years when the country slipped into its lost decade, he says those meetings did nothing to shape his analysis. He has wondered often about why Larry Summers chose to support a smaller stimulus, but though he and Summers spoke every month or two when Summers was in the White House, Krugman never asked him. “He’s not oblivious to human nature; he will have conversations about this person or that and their motivations,” Wells says. “But he does keep it separate.”

A few years ago, Krugman, having decided that he was going to be writing about politics and so he should know more about it, did a very Krugman thing. He didn’t talk to people who worked in Washington. Instead, he started to read the political-science literature. Krugman had never understood the press coverage of politics, which seemed to emphasize its most irrelevant aspects. Why dwell on a presidential candidate’s psychology when the trends in unemployment would tell you who would win an election? But viewed through the prism of political science, politics began to seem much more familiar to him. There was a mathematics to it—you could assemble data, draw correlations, understand what was essential and what was noise. The underlying shape of politics came sweeping into view: If you arranged members of Congress from left to right based on how they voted on welfare-state issues—Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance—it turned out that this left-to-right axis could predict every other vote: On Iraq expenditures, on abortion, whatever. “When you realize the fundamental divide in U.S. politics is just this one-­dimensional thing, and that is how you feel about the welfare state,” Krugman says, “that changes things.”

It seems to me that Krugman is far less interested in himself, either as a person (let alone a personality), and far more interested in whether or not the information he provides is factual, and his ideological framing honest. Unlike Wallace-Wells' description of Rush Limbaugh as "authentic", which is a pose, a fake personality, Krugman's transparency, preferring readers take in the information, says much about the approach to politics that has reigned for the past generation.

The anecdote concerning the differences between Larry Summers and Krugman when they worked together in the Reagan Administration is key, I think. Summers was a consensus builder, working to bring together people around positions that seemed workable. Krugman, on the other hand, was far less interested in being a player. He was, and continues to be, far more interested in being right. That, more so than whether or not he makes eye-contact with a colleague in an elevator, is far more telling of who Krugman is and what he does.

The portrait that emerges in Wallace-Wells article is, with its mixture of cliche and almost disdainful piquancy at Krugman's audacity to believe that he might well be intelligent, portrays the Princeton Nobel laureate as some odd species of insect - a deeply thoughtful, intellectual individual who is also passionate that our politics no longer be one long exercise in public mendacity. There is an odd combination of arch disdain and anti-intellectualism at work in this profile I find deeply troubling. That someone who is intelligent, passionate, learned, might actually have a better grasp of what is going on than colleagues with similar backgrounds who work in the corridors of power is something Wallace-Wells simply refuses to grant. After all, Paul Krugman can draw a graph really well. That is odd, isn't it.

Nattering Nabobs Or Chicago Billy Clubs?

Rick Perlstein's Mother Jones piece on lying in politics is exceptionally good. It echoes certain themes from Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media?, in particular what Alterman calls "playing the refs", going after the media itself in order to intimidate it. This tactic, which usually doesn't work in legitimate sports, is something one sees in professional wrestling - "sports entertainment" - all the time.

In a remarkable overview of the decline and fall of the United States in the post-WWII era, British journalist Godfrey Hodgson spends quite a bit of time talking about Agnew's "nattering nabobs" speech, and the larger picture of the news media in the late-1960's to early 1970's, and has an awful lot to say about the way the editorial positions of the three networks in particular shifted after 1968. Hodgson makes it clear, in his America In Our Time, that the pivot wasn't Agnew's speech. It was the Democratic National Convention of 1968.

After reviewing the events in Chicago, including the police attacking and even seeming to target the media, Hodgson cites an important fact and quotes a column by Joseph Kraft to show that, even before Nixon was elected, the theme of a liberal media was already taking shape. First, in the immediate aftermath of the Democratic Convention, the major news outlets expressed shock and rage at the behavior of the Chicago police department. Yet, even then, no less than Walter Cronkite conducted an interview that Hodgson notes showed the revered CBS anchor "obsequious" before the bully-boss of our Second City. It seems the actions of the Chicago police were a bit less unpopular than many people thought. From pp. 373-374:

The Chicago convention, in fact, was traumatic for the media. Not only the reporters, for once, but a good proportion of the publishers and executives and editors, too, had seen what happened. The instant reaction, angry condemnation of the police, was from the heart. But then came the disorienting experience of discovering that, in this reaction, they were in a minority. They felt proud of the courageous way they had done their job: and, to their amazement, thousands of abusive letters poured in from their readers and viewers, denouncing the way they had done that job and commending their enemies. "We got thousands of call," Bill Small, Washington bureau chief of CBS remember, "from people saying they didn't believe their eyes, accusing us of hiring cops to beat up kids. That produced a profound impression." . . .

Abruptly, the mood in the media changed from righteous indignation to self-doubt, apology and even penitence. Less than three weeks after the convention the Washington Post was half-apologizing for police brutality with the remarkable argument that "of course" policemen must be expected to be annoyed by the sight of men in beards!

Even before that, however, within a week of the convention, Joseph Kraft wrote a column that, in many ways, set forth the themes we continue to live with to this day in any discussion of the media, themes Vice President Agnew was to sound with fake righteous fury in just a couple years.

Most of us in what is called the communications field are not rooted in the great mass of ordinary Americans - in Middle America. And the result shows up not merely in occasional epidosed such as the Chicago violence but more importnatly in the systematic bias towards young people, minority groups, and the kind of presidential candidates who appeal to them.

To get a feel of this bias it is first necessary to understand the antagonism that divides the white middle class of this country. On the one hand there are highly educated upper-income whites sure of themselves and brimming with ideas for doing things differently. On the other hand, there is Middle America, the large majority of low-income whites, traditional in their values and on the defensive against innovators.

The most important organs of press and television are, beyond much doubt, dominated by the outlook of the upper-income white. . . .

In the circumstances, it seems to me that those of us in the media need to make a special effort to understand Middle America. Equally it seems wise to exercise a certain caution, a prudent restraint, in pressing a claim for a plenary indulgence to be in all places at all times the agent of the sovereign public.

Hodgson then goes on to note the shifting editorial emphasis on the Vietnam War, away from on-the-ground combat reporting to stories about integrating South Vietnamese forces in to the war. Coverage of anti-war demonstrations dwindled; the huge Moratorium March in 1971, the single largest anti-war demonstration of the period, received barely any notice at all by the major dailies, weeklies, or nightly news shows. In order to atone for their sins, brought down roughly by the Chicago police and rhetorically by Spiro Agnew, the media - a much smaller and far more elite thing then than now - changed.

We are living with the tattered remnants of a mainstream media, beaten up by Chicago cops and brow-beaten by a criminal Vice President, too scared to ask some important questions, to point out that repeated misstatements are in fact lies, and that much of the rhetoric on the right is so far off the charts it should be ignored. No one seems to want to point out the horrid noblesse oblige of Kraft's idea that, somehow, there is this Middle America out there that the media just aren't a part of, yet need to get to know - like some weird anthropological field study - in order to do their job. FOXNews is predicated on this picture of reality. So, too, I'm afraid, are some liberals, like Rachel Maddow and even, at times, Bob Somerby, whose media criticisms I largely agree with, yet who accepts without premise the notion that Americans are too dumb to understand when they are being had.

Having said all this, it is nice to read a historian who understands this isn't a problem that began with birthers, or the anti-Clinton brigades in the 1990's, but stretches back to the very beginnings of Republican political dominance. Like so much else in our political life, it seems to have started when Mayor Daley cheered on his cops when they took off their badges and charged the masses.

Northern Sounds

The Band. Buffalo Springfield. Joni Mitchell. The Guess Who. Gordon Lightfoot. Bachman Turner Overdrive. Frank Marino & Mahogany Rush. Rush. Loverboy. Triumph. April Wine. Saga. Sebastian Bach of Skid Row. Bryan Adams. Shania Twain. Barenaked Ladies. James Labrie of Dream Theater. These and many more musicians and singers and performers have one thing in common. Canada.



When Rush broke through the American AOR market in 1980, there was a brief moment when other Canadian bands seemed hot. Triumph managed an AOR hit that sounded an awful lot like Journey. April Wine tried ripping off King Crimson, then scored their one AOR hit with an early power ballad. All the same, it seemed possible that other Canadian bands could break through, like Saga. Unfortunately, bad timing and bad management killed Saga's chances of making it in the US.



Canada continues to forge its unique path, and we are continually blessed by the sounds from up north. Thank you, land of lacrosse.



And now, from a little closer to home . . .

Heaven and Hell - Black Sabbath
Bright Size Life (Live) - Pat Metheny Trio
Transition - Lunatic Soul
Oboe Concerto in C, Movement 3, Allegretto - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
The Castle Hall - Ayreon
Forty Six & 2 - Tool
I Don't Wanna Know (Live) - Indigo Girls
Clear Blue Eyes - Amos Lee
Idiot Wind - Bob Dylan
Blue Light - David Gilmour

No Canadians, alas. So, here's one more.

Shaking In Their Boots

Sometime around a decade or so ago, a pastor in a small midwest town held a community-wide meeting on a grave threat to our children. It wasn't the discovery that there were sexual predators living nearby. It wasn't a scourge of drinking or huffing or smoking dope or even heroin. It wasn't a teacher who took advantage of his position or authority to abuse children in his care.

It was the Harry Potter books.

I wish I was kidding. Even writing this makes me feel stupider. The flier announcing the meeting - which I did not attend because I was afraid all the dumb would infect me - noted the books "celebrated" witchcraft, and even posed the threat of releasing "magic" upon the world. Again, I wish I was kidding.

Part of me wishes I could have taken the person who was holding this meeting by the hand and, very gently and kindly, informed this person that there are no such things as witches. Magic, either, for that matter. Oh, there are folks who call themselves witches, I suppose. There are also people who call themselves the spawn of experiments between humans and aliens. Those latter we refer to mental health professionals.

In all seriousness, there are real dangers in the attitude expressed here. Not only the ridiculous idea that a set of marvelous books are part of some secret agenda by witches and wizards to have their evil ways accepted as normal, with a concomitant explosion of the use of magic. No, the real danger here is the message such an attitude sends - be afraid of everything.

I have often felt the same way about the whole nonsensical creation/evolution non-debate. Ours is a marvelous, strange world, full of oddities and questions that force themselves upon us. Science is a marvelous tool for answering certain questions. That the world is intelligible is itself a mystery that many people have found a source of wonder. The theory of evolution by means of natural selection, in its contemporary, modified form (as distinct from Darwinism; Darwin has no idea of biochemistry, of genes or DNA, as the mechanism of mutation and change) is a wonderful, simple scientific theory, for which abundant evidence abounds across time and species.

The doctrine of creation, on the other hand, has nothing at all to say about these matters. It concerns itself with the God who is the author of the Universe, and the fact that there is something rather than nothing tells us who God is, and that this God is a God who does not will be alone. That God is love, according to 1 John is shown by the simple reality that the Universe, and all that is in it, all its wonders and terrors, exists at all, and continues to exist.

There are millions of well-meaning, sincere believers who find even the idea of evolution a dire threat not only to the existence of the Christian faith, but to Christian social morality as well. That is like arguing that the theory of heat exchange in chemistry, or the inverse square law of gravity is a threat to the American way of life. The one has absolutely nothing to do with the other. Furthermore, are all these sincere, well-meaning believers so afraid of an idea they fully and honestly believe to be misguided that it poses a mortal threat to the faith in the God revealed in Jesus Christ? Really?

The point of this post is not to show that the Harry Potter books are wonderful Christian literature. Rather, it is to point out examples of folks who claim the name "Christian" who seem to have little regard for the strength of the God in whom they claim faith. Of all the thing we need concern ourselves over as Christian parents, the Harry Potter books just don't make the cut. If some folks prefer not to allow their children read these books, well, that's OK. Making a public argument, however, that these books pose a public danger to the faith, not least because of the possibility that children might start trying to learn magic, well, that's another thing entirely.

I realize this may sound like a silly example, but the fact remains our society abounds with silly examples of people who perceive all sorts of mortal threats to the faith. Music. Movies. Television shows. Books. Science. Political and social ideologies. Somehow, a faith that has existed for two-thousand years across Empires and in the midst of chaos, spanning the globe in the languages of the world to bring the One Word of salvation may not survive the onslaught from American popular culture.

Either we live as people of the resurrection, or we don't. We need to stop looking for boogeymen and dark forces around every corner, and live as those who are not afraid, but who will mount up with wings as eagles, who will run and not be weary. If we do this, we can appreciate the marvelous story of Harry, Ron, and Hermione for what it is. We can marvel at the beauty and mystery of God's creation, and that we have been granted the ability to figure out all sorts of things about it, including how it came to be filled with such a marvelous array of strange and wonderful and occasionally dangerous creatures.

We do not have to be afraid anymore. One would think this would be the clearest thing to get out of Easter, the most wonderful thing to be granted by the Spirit, the strength and faith no longer to be afraid.

He Is Risen . . . Sorta . . .

The past couple days I've been pushing my own meditations on the death of Jesus as far as I have felt comfortable, given textual and theological constraints. Today, we find ourselves as that moment, most impossible to believe or even consider possible, that this same dead Jesus is alive. Churches around the world are chanting, "Christ has risen! He is risen, indeed!"

I don't think most churches really believe it, though.

If they did, we wouldn't be facing all the crises we face. If we really believed that Jesus rose from the dead, we wouldn't worry about whether or not there was prayer in public schools. If we really believed that Jesus lives forever, enthroned next to the Father, reigning with him and the Holy Spirit, we wouldn't hear people who call themselves Christian claiming that this same God was being pushed out of our society and culture. If we really believed that we are baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus, and are, in the words of St. Paul, a new creation, we wouldn't claim that the sole reason for all this nonsense was so that we could go to heaven when we die.

I don't think most churches really believe in the resurrection any more. The churches are scared, worried, concerned. Some people who call themselves Christian think we need to force people who don't think or believe like they do to mouth empty phrases to a god in whom they place no trust. Some Christians think that the real test of faith isn't accepting the embrace of the crucified and risen Jesus, but ensuring that every fetus makes it to term. Some Christians insist that we need to show our love to some people by telling them they are outside the bounds of God's grace because they love differently than other people.

I don't think anyone who really believes that they will meet Jesus in the sky when they die really believes in the resurrection. I, for one, would want nothing to do with a God who went to all this trouble, said all those neat things and did all those marvelous deeds, died that horrible death only to make sure that a bunch of rich white folk didn't have to continue to mingle with undesirables on some cloud or other in some spiritual afterlife. Such a god isn't worth my time.

Either we start to live as people who understand, at least provisionally, that the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead inaugurates the new creation, or we don't. If we don't, no one is going to force them. All the same, I would much prefer if such people wouldn't call themselves Christian, go around talking about God as if they really understood what they were saying, and getting people to give them money. Either we start to live and work in the faith the New Creation has already begun, that everything we thought was right and true is now over and done with, or we admit we really don't believe all that resurrection nonsense, and go about telling everyone how wrong their lives are.

I am quite tired of weak, cowardly, pusillanimous false Christians who don't really believe in the resurrection. If we believed that Jesus was raised from the dead, what in the world, quite literally, are we afraid of? Declining numbers and giving? That some people might point out all the bad stuff folks in the past have done in the name of God? That some people might laugh at such nonsense? Are we children?

I am quite tired of churches more worried about relevance than they are about resurrection. If God wanted us to be popular, we wouldn't have been told that we are going to be persecuted, tortured and killed for professing the God of the risen Christ. If God wanted us to be successful, there wouldn't be all this talk of prison and being despised. If God wanted us to be rational, reasonable folks, we wouldn't need to be reminded, as St. Paul did, that what we preach is foolishness to the wise.

Today we recall the singular event of Jesus rising from the dead. All that has ever been, or will ever be is now changed. We who confess faith in the risen crucified one had better start living out Charles Wesley's words, "Ours the cross, the grace, the skies," or admit we don't believe it, don't want any part of it.

Some Personal Reflections

In the midst of thinking about and praying in this Passion weekend, I have been led to read the Preface to Jurgen Moltmann's The Coming of God. Normally, I skip prefaces, yet I sat and read this and discovered a passage that echoed in my own heart. First, he notes that he was not brought up in a Christian home, and only discovered and read the Bible as a German POW after the Second World War.

Right down to the present day, theology has continued to be for me a tremendous adventure, a journey of discovery into a, for me, unknown territory, a voyage without the certainty of a return, a path into the unknown with many surprises and not without disappointments. If I have a theological virtue at all, then it is one that has never hitherto been recognized as such: curiosity.

I have never done theology in the form of a defense of ancient doctrines or ecclesiastical dogmas. It has always been a jorney of exploration. Consequently my way of thinking is experimental - an adventure of ideas - and my style of communication is to suggest. I do not defend ay impersonal dogmas, but nor do I merely express my own personal opinion. I make suggestions within a community. So I write without any built-in safeguards, recklessly as some people think. My own propositions are intended to be a challenge to other people to think for themselves - and of course they are a challenge to objective refutation too. Theologians also belong to the communio sanctorum, the communion of saints, provided that the true saints are not merely justified sinner but accepted doubters, too, thus belonging just as much to the world as to God.

Unlike Moltmann, I was brought up in church, baptized and confirmed at First United Methodist Church, Sayre, PA. After a pretty standard and typical college experience, I went through what I now consider my own wilderness years, landing safely, if somewhat bruised and psychologically battered, at the safe shores of Wesley Theological Seminary 20 years ago. I have, ever since, considered this the singular event of my life. What came before was, at best, preparation. What has come since has been a blessing beyond words, all down to that moment in the late summer of 1990 when I stepped in to my dorm room in northwest Washington, DC and discovered a people who were willing to let me be a part of their lives, to start this journey that, for me, will not end even as death takes me.

This blog has been an important part of my own working out of what it means for me to live as one claimed by the risen Christ. Even at its most profane, most bombastic, even occasionally humorous moments, all I have ever been doing is trying to figure out for myself what it means to call myself a Christian. Does it even mean anything at all, or is it little more than fantastic thinking surrounding the on-going delusions of the mad, those who actually consider our world something more than a passing phase in the emptiness of cosmic history.

Nothing I have ever written here, whether on topical matters of the moment, my own philosophical curiosity, or faithful reflections on what God continues to do for all of us, has been to satisfy some vain grasping after intellectual integrity for its own sake. That kind of thing, the life of the mind chasing down various ephemera for the sake of itself, doesn't interest me in the least. Nor am I interested in being seen by others - for I surely do not see myself! - as some kind of self-proclaimed expert. On any matter whatsoever. Expertise is a highly overrated commodity. I am astounded each and every day by the array of things I cannot know and will never know. All I can say in my own defense is I write what I do know, never claiming any more for it than that - it is what I know - and I chase down what it might mean for myself and others, to the best of my meager abilities. I am quite happy with the expectation that quite a lot, if not most, of the things I have written and will continue to write, will be proved quite wrong. Not to do this, however, would be a kind of premature death for me. To refuse to take a stand, even if all upon which I stand is washing away by the tides of time and the pressure of reality, is a kind of cowardice. One cannot fall unless one first stands, and the rock upon which I claim to stand, that cornerstone the builders rejected, has held up countless others, so I have faith there is room for one more.

All this is to say that what I do here, and will continue to do as long as I can, to the best of what little abilities I have, is and will be working through what it means to profess that one is claimed by the crucified and risen Christ. Not for me, because the first thing that bursts forth on Easter is the realization that none of this is about me, or you, or you, or any individual. To stand upon the rock that is the risen Jesus of Nazareth is to look out and realize that our world is not defined as a veil of tears, that the burden of existence has been lifted, that the pain and suffering we see around us - not just of our fellow human beings, but the planet itself, groaning as it does under the weight of our many violations of its integrity and wholeness - is not the final word. If God exists, if Easter really happened, if Jesus was indeed raised from the dead, then all bets are off. We are, even now, if we are willing to see and hear and even work for it, watching the birth of that New Creation. Chronicling my own meager perception of that birth is what I do.

In short, this is all personal because I believe and proclaim and confess and profess that none of it has little to do with me at all. The beauty and joy and pain of life, in all its various flavors and colors, fill me precisely because I am unimportant, ignorant, a tiny voice in the deafening chorus before the throne of God. I have no interest, nor investment, in saying anything once for all. I am glad, however, that I have been baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, bearing in my very being the marks of the crucified and risen one. That is the only unchanging reality of my life. To quote St. Thomas Aquinas, all the rest is straw.

The Mystery Of Holy Saturday

N.B.: This was originally published on April 23, 2011.  I have made some minor corrections for spelling, but otherwise it is at it appeared two years ago.  I can't imagine saying more, or better, what I wrote here.  Wait and watch with me, as we consider the dead Jesus in the interconnected reality of the Triune Life of God.

The vision of death by the mode of immediate experience, is the most complete punishment possible. And since the death of Christ was complete, since through his own experience he saw the death which he had freely chosen to undergo, the soul of Christ went down into the underworld where the vision of death is. For death is called "underworld", infernus, and it has been loosed from out of the deeper underworld, ex inferno inferiori. The lower or deeper underworld is where one sees death. When God raised Christ he drew him, as we read in the Acts of the Apostles, from out of the lower underworld, after delivering him from the torture of that underworld, solutis doloribus ingerni. That is why the prophet says, "He did not leave my soul in the underworld." Christ's suffering, the greatest one could conceive, was like that of the damned who cannot be damned any ore. That is, his suffering went to the length of infernal punishment. . . . He alone through such a death entered into glory. He wanted to experience the poena sensus like the damned in Hell for the glorifying of his Father, and so as to show that one should obey the Father even to the utmost torture. That means praising and glorifying God in every possible way for our justification - which is what Christ has done.

Nicholas of Cusa
De Civitate Dei

We are in that time over which the Gospels remain silent. From the moment on Friday evening when Jesus corpse is laid in the tomb until the arrival of the women on Sunday morning there is nothing. One sentence and paragraph ends, another begins. The Sabbath lies in-between. The only hint that day contained anything of substance is given not in the Gospel, but in 1 Peter, where the author claims Jesus preached to the dead.

Which, of course, raises far more questions that such a short phrase could possibly answer.

The mystery of the Passion is boundless. On this day of Biblical silence, we are nevertheless pushed to consider the naked fact of Jesus' death. What does that mean for one who claimed solidarity with the God of Israel whom he called his Father? In a sense, reflecting upon this day only becomes possible because of Easter. Had there been no resurrection, there would be no reason to consider this day, what Hans Urs von Balthasar calls "the hiatus". Yet, there is this hiatus, this break. Jesus is dead. The silence of the witnesses is deafening in the questions it raises.

The same von Balthasar noted above has a short yet powerful meditation on the Passion, Mysterium Paschale, from whose pages the Nicholas of Cusa epigram comes. The chapter on Saturday is entitled "Going To The Dead", and in it, von Balthasar considers the 1 Peter passage as well as later doctrinal developments, the question of the development of the idea of Sheol, Gehenna, Purgatory, Limbo, Hell, within the context of the fact of Jesus being dead. His final move is to a Trinitarian consideration of the event, which is, to me, the starting point of a fuller understanding (never full; the events of these days are without full measure). From pp. 174-175:

That the Redeemer is solidary with the dead, or, better, with this death which makes of the dead, for the first time, dead human beings in all reality - this is the final consequence of the redemptive mission he has received from the Father. His being with the dead is an existence at the utmost pitch of obedience, and because the One thus obedient is the dead Christ, it constitutes the "obedience of a corpse" (the phrase is Francis of Assisi's) of a theologically unique kind. By it Christ takes the existential measure of everything that is sheerly contrary to God, og the entire object of the divine eschatological judgment, which here is grasped in that event in which it is "cast down". . . . But at the same time, this happening gives the measure of the Father's mission in all its amplitude; the "exploration" of Hell is an event of the (economic) Trinity.

--snip--

If the Father must be considered as the Creator of human freedom - with all its forseeable consequences - then judgment belongs primordially to him, and thereby Hell also; and when he sends the Son into the world to save it instead of judging it, and, to equip him for this function, gives "all judgment to the Son" (John 5:22), then he must also introduce the Son made man into "Hell" (as the supreme entailment of human liberty). But the Son cannot really be introduced into Hell save as a dead man, on Holy Saturday. This introducing is needful since the dead must "hear the voice of the Son of God," and hearing that voice, "live". (John 5:15) The Son must "take in with his own eyes what in the realm of creation is imperfect, informed, chaotic" so as to make it pass over into his own domain as Redeemer. . . .

This vision of chaos by the God-man has become for us the condition of our vision of Divinity. His exploration of the ultimate depths has transformed what was a prison into a way. . . .

There is much more in this vein, but the point, I think, should be clear. Even as that moment of abandonment lingers, it bears the character of inner-Trinitarian obedience, of the furthering of the mission of the Father by the Son through the Spirit. What von Balthasar calls throughout the solidarity of the dead Christ with the dead captures the fullness of this mission, in both its immanent and economic Trinitarian forms, and what the historic doctrine of the descent to Hell and the Harrowing of Hell by the dead Christ cannot. What constitutes the character of this obedience is nothing more or less than taking in to very existence of the inner life of the Triune God that which cannot be, that which was before God created, chaos and lifelessness. Matters of Hell and Gehenna, of Purgatory and Limbo, not only cross a line where speculation rooted in misunderstanding and silence should calm our nervous spirits, but in any event continue to see the Passion as something rooted in human existence, human needs. The being solidary with the dead is part of the Divine desire to be in relationship even there, with the dead in the nothingness, the powerlessness (he quotes the Hewbrew refa'im, those who are powerless, to emphasize the utter passivity of Jesus even in death) which is their lot. Salvation is not only God's act for Creation. Considering the death of Jesus within the context of the Trinitarian life of God leads one to see the fullness of God's desire to take in to that mysterious love of the Three for one another that which cannot be a part of it. The Passion becomes, through the emptiness and silence of Holy Saturday, more clearly understood as a working out of the depth of the Three Persons for One Another in the world God created, even to that which denies creation.

We are in a time of vigilance, of waiting and watching. As we wait and watch in silence, what no eye has seen nor ear heard is about to burst forth. We believe this and proclaim it as the heart of the Good News which even now rests in the silent depths of the grave. On this Holy Saturday, only because we can look back from Easter, we see just how far Jesus is willing to go, not only for us, for for the Father who loved him, and left him alone to die on the cross.

Death Of The Son Of God

The scene from The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe is iconic. After voluntarily going to The White Witch's camp, offering himself as a substitute for the crimes of Edmund Pevensie, Aslan the Great Lion is humiliated, his mane shorn. He is bound and gagged and set roughly on a table. The White Witch, her face flush with triumph raises the knife and plunges it in Aslan's heart. The noble beast breathes his last. The White Witch, an almost erotically charged look of satisfaction upon her face, declares the final end to the great Lion, and moves on to the battle with the Pevensies and the armies of Narnia.

This too-obvious allegory of the crucifixion never ceases to move me. It also makes me wonder if people understand that, on that Friday afternoon, God died. The day belonged to the Adversary. The signs and wonders reported in the Gospel of St. Matthew - the rending of the veil in the Temple; the rising of the dead saints; the darkness at noon - can be understood, I suppose, as marks of victory. Yet, whose victory? With the veil in the Temple torn, the God of Israel has departed. The dead, vomited out of the ground like bad beef, are not to be embraced but feared. In these hours and days before the real ending of the story (which should always be borne in mind, but at the moment set to one side as we contemplate this moment of pain, suffering, agony, Godforsakenness, and death) these walking dead are a blasphemy, a violation of the Divine order.

As a side note, I suppose, we should consider the betrayal of Judas. As I've read The Gospel According to Judas, with the author I have to ask how Judas' betrayal is qualitatively different from the abandonment by the disciples, the denials of St. Peter, and even that final abandonment by God. On that Friday, in the midst of all the horror and pain, Jesus comes to understand the lengths to which he must go, the loss he must endure. Pain and death are a part of life, of being human. Any reading of the Gospel narratives leads to the conclusion that Jesus' predictions of his own passion are rooted not in some weird Divine foreknowledge, but the all too human realization that the only way his path leads is the very sticky end of a Roman cross.

So, how important then is Judas' betrayal in the overall scheme of things? Jesus made the choice to follow the path to which God, his Father, called him. He walked it, understanding it led to the Hill of the Skull, outside the city gates. Judas was paid, to be sure. No less dishonorable, however, was the fleeing of the Apostles. No less a betrayal was St. Peter's insistent denials, "I do not know this man." No more final an act of abandonment was that moment when Jesus, his strength already stretched and tested by a night of no sleep, the ritual humiliation and torture of the Romans made even more so by the crown of thorns, hangs on that cross and feels and knows that even his Father, even the God in whom he trusted, who walked with him, called him, loved him, gave him the Disciples, has left him utterly, and completely alone. In that moment, Judas' betrayal is as nothing to that cry that God has forsaken Jesus, that he hangs there in pain and humiliation, alone.

Even if there is some small part of Jesus that understands this is not the real end of the story, how is that any consolation for the utter, hellish knowledge that there is a gulf, a final separation, between himself and the God whom he called Father? How can that chasm be crossed (no pun intended)? To die is one thing. To die in the full understanding that even God is no longer there . . . there is no hell hot enough or cold enough, no eternal darkness trapped in the madness of one's own thoughts, that challenges my own sense of loss more than that single moment when Jesus cries out, from the depths of his now objectless faith, that even God, along with his Disciples, has abandoned him.

Seems to me the silence of the grave, the coming darkness, would be welcome. Even if it offers nothing. Even if, as that abandonment makes a mockery of all one's hope, all one's love poured out for others. Even if it gives no meaning to all the pain and humiliation, it seems to me far more welcome than the never-ending torment of the eternal moment that Jesus, moreso than any person who has ever or will ever live, is utterly, completely, totally alone. No God. No victory. No friends to stand and watch him.

On another note, isn't it funny that the old pagan Day of the Dead is considered a day to celebrate all things spooky and even evil? Isn't it odd that we dress up this night in the midst of autumn with all the trappings of a bad horror show when here in the midst of spring the real victory - Pyrrhic though we understand it to be - of death and hell, the abandonment by God not only of the Divine Son, but the very real death of God in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, provides the true moment when evil is triumphant?

Like the trussed-up and shaved lion, over whom Susan and Lucy Pevensie weep, when Jesus is taken down from the cross he is quite dead. His eyes would have been cloudy, his jaw gaping. If he wore a loin cloth, it was probably soiled. There may have been very little blood in him, since he had gaping wounds in his feet from the nails placed there; with his heart having stopped hours before, the blood pulled by gravity would have started pooling in his legs, only to run out those huge holes. Since it was near dark, his body would not have been ritually purified; the flies who had come to feast and lay their eggs would be a cloud. All the ways nature has of making death ignoble and inhuman would have been present.

It is impossible, this side of the resurrection, to completely live in and grasp that moment, to live in the despair of Divine failure, abandonment, and death. All the same, we need to recall over the next thirty-six hours the very real, very horrifying thought that worse than death triumphed that day. Abandonment, betrayal, denial, meaninglessness all win. Death may seem welcome, yet the eternal moment when one sees the triumph of nothingness, the helplessness of God may well chase us down even as the light fails, and silence engulfs Jesus.

Conservatives Hate The Military

I'm so old I can remember, back in the dim, dark days of 1994, when the late Sen. Jesse Helms (R-KKK) said the following:

Just days after Mr. Helms, a Republican from North Carolina, created a furor by saying that President Clinton was not up to the job of Commander in Chief, he told The News and Observer, a newspaper in Raleigh: "Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here. He'd better have a bodyguard."

Mr. Helms said soldiers disliked President Clinton because he had avoided service during the Vietnam War, supported homosexuals in the military and had reduced military spending.

On its face, this is one of the most insulting things I can imagine anyone saying about the military. Did members of the military dislike Pres. Clinton? In all honesty, I have no idea, but my guess is probably some did, quite a lot. All the same, this little quip by the big old hooded Tar Heel Teddy Bear not only envisioned a military so unprofessional it would allow political differences to affect its actions; it seemed to suggest that this lack of professionalism was so broad that it actually raised the specter of a military coup (and please note, dear reader, that the implied threat to the life of the President of the United States, the Commander-in-Chief of the US military, by a member of the uniformed services, is just that).

For years, decades, we have been hearing how liberals hate the military, think folks involved in combat are evil baby killers to be spat on when they return from service, that we liberals, being pacifists and traitors, want the military weakened so that our foreign enemies will have an easier time taking us over. How anyone could lend any credence to these statements is quite beyond my capacity to understand, yet they are not only given credence, they are so much a part of our political culture one continues to read stories of Democrats and liberals being "nervous" about discussing any military question because of "credibility".

Yet, if one considers actual facts - those strange things that impose upon us whether we like them or not - I have to wonder how this upside-down situation arose. If one considers just the Bush Administration, there is the war of choice in Iraq - open-ended and on-going despite the claim that it has "ended"; 50,000 US troops in Iraq are a huge target - and all the opera bouffe nonsense surrounding it. Too few troops too ill-equipped and ill-trained (in particular for the aftermath, the policing duties, etc.). Slashing services to wounded military personnel, in particular mental health services. The deplorable conditions at veterans hospitals made glaringly obvious by the horrible scandal at Walter Reed. When the occupation of Iraq dragged on, and the Afghanistan conflict seemed never to end (it still seems that way), rather than spend more money for recruiting new troops by providing for larger numbers of uniformed service personnel, troops were rotated in and out of the various theaters multiple times. Even retired and discharged troops were eligible for service through the ready reserve. Then, of course, we had National Guard troops, who are supposed to be nationalized only in cases of emergency, not because the Executive is unwilling to spend more money to recruit more troops.

The anecdote about troops asking family and friends to send body armor and equipment for improving the armor on HUMVEEs should be enough to convince anyone the jokers in the Bush Administration not only had no idea what they were up against, but seemed to threaten the lives and bodies of the military unduly. No one, however, raised the latter claim, for the singularly stupid reason that they were Republicans.

Fast forward, to the past half-year or so, and we have the nonsensical claim that the military will experience a mass-exodus due to the repeal of the anti-gay Don't Ask Don't Tell policy. Except, maybe, not so much.

You might remember General James Amos from such anti-gay rumors as “Letting gays join the military will cause a distraction” and “If gays join the military, there will be a mass exodus of soldiers.” Yeah, good times.

In news that is sure to shock absolutely nobody with half of a brain, General Amos has revealed that he’s heard of exactly zero soldiers resigning from the military since the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

“It would be naive to think that somewhere down the road there’s not going to be issues,” Amos told reporters. “I think there probably will be in probably all the services, but I don’t think it’s going to be of any magnitude that’s going to cause much more than a blip. So I’m very optimistic.”

Implementation of repeal is going smoothly, according to the service chiefs in testimony before a Congressional committee. Why is that? Is it because the military is secretly gay? Perhaps a more likely explanation is that the military, which among its many other points of pride is its professionalism, understood that the order to allow full integration of gays and lesbians in to the services was legal, and therefore devised a policy (my guess is it has existed in some skeletal form since the early Clinton Administration, when the subject first arose; never underestimate the ability of any bureaucracy to have all sorts of contingency plans ready to hand) to do so that served the twin goals of making the policy real without disrupting the overall mission of the military.

All the same, most of the declared candidates for the Republican nomination for President are tripping over themselves claiming they will re-institute the policy if elected. Why? Not because they know anything about the military. Not because they accept the findings of the service-wide survey that found a majority of uniformed service personnel in favor of repeal. Not because there is any evidence that repeal is being done in an unprofessional manner that threatens national security. No, their sole beef, it seems, is their own fever dreams of shower scenes from bad porn movies being enacted on military bases around the world. Yet again, they are not only showing their bigotry for all the world to see. They are also displaying a marked lack of faith in the integrity and professionalism of the members of the US military in acting as adults usually act.

There is abundant evidence from recent history that shows how little conservatives regard the lives and health of the military, as well as its primary mission, protecting and defending the Constitution of the United States and our national interests in extreme emergencies. With the reaction - rooted not in reality but bad sexual fantasies - to DADT repeal, we have yet more evidence how little conservatives regard the military.

Right On Cue

The other day, I wrote a bit about the gas exploration boom in and around the area in which I grew up. Today, there's a report that one of the drills, near Canton, PA, is out of control and the fluid used in fracking is spilling out all over the ground.

So, um, is this just one of those things, over which we should all shrug our shoulders and say, "Oh, well"? Or, perhaps, is this an indication that we might need a tad bit of, well, regulation, considering what is spilling out over the ground is a secret, a secret that contains known toxins and carcinogens?

I love it when reality comes along and smacks us in the face. Except that such things are painful, both in reality and metaphorically.

Paul Ryan Is An Ignoramus

I want to respectfully disagree with Matt Yglesias on what is the most important point of this little story. Along with lying about what his "budget plan" does to Medicare and Medicaid, Ryan styles himself as someone who understands monetary policy. Yet, as the exchange at Matt's post makes clear, he doesn't know anything about monetary policy.

Gas prices are currently high due to the exploitation of Middle East unrest by futures traders manipulating the market. Here in Illinois, prices are especially high because we have higher standards which increase the base price. None of this is especially murky, and it certainly has nothing to do with monetary policy.

That Ryan would make such a claim, in public, after insisting he understands monetary policy, is all the more reason to cease paying any attention to him whatsoever. Except to call him an ignorant boob and move on.

Variety Is The Spice Of Life

Over the weekend, I had a couple great conversations regarding music. From an old college friend I learned there was a marvelous, all-black punk band, before punk was punk as it were, with the cheery name of Death.



Then, thanks to one of my FB friends acknowledging a recording by Pat Metheny, got into a discussion not only about him, but the great electric bassist Jaco Pastorius.



This led to a mention of the work Pat Metheny and Jaco did with Joni Mitchell (and in the following clip, that's Metheny's long-time keyboard collaborator, Lyle Mays).



Learning to Fly (Live) - Pink Floyd
Demon Queen of Spiders - Bigelf
Analog Kid - Rush
Dream The World Away - Wakeman with Wakeman
Dancing With Eternal Glory - Transatlantic
49 Bye-Byes - Crosby, Stills, and Nash
Get Ready - Temptations
A Time And A Place - Emerson, Lake, and Palmer
It's Alright - Indigo Girls
Neon Knights - Black Sabbath

Yeah. I hope your ears bleed.

Freedom Of Speech Includes The Freedom To Call Crazy Lies, Well, Crazy Lies (UPDATE)

What follows is an expansion of this comment.

It isn't just me. The level of crazy-stupid-bullshit in our public discourse rises and rises. We are actually having a serious discussion whether or not the United States will meet its debt obligations. We are treating a fiscal deficit due to a seriously warped revenue system in line with a bad economy as a puzzle on par with quantum physics.

For the life of this blog, I have made it my policy that I do not "argue" with, first, Holocaust deniers. Seems simple enough. I haven't encountered any, but, if I do, well . . . I have, in the intervening years, come to include creationists, global warming deniers, and now birthers. In each case, the principle is simple enough - I refuse to coddle people who hold beliefs that are counter to reality. If you wish to believe, say, that pouring billions of tons of carbon compounds in to the atmosphere in a relatively brief span of time has not created easily measurable effects on our climate, with disastrous results, that's OK, I can't stop you. If you refuse to acknowledge the .5-degrees centigrade rise in global temps over the past couple decades, bully for you. Just don't expect me to treat your ideas with anything like legitimacy.

Part of our problem, I think, is we in America believe that freedom of speech means we need to treat all ideas as having some kind of equal demand upon our attention, some equality of potential truth value. That's nonsense. If we had a public figure who insisted that he or she was the spokesperson for a group of aliens from the 28th century who wanted to rule us for our own good, I think most people would assume a serious mental illness.

Why do we not do the same thing for notions equally insane? Because a whole bunch of people, sincere, honest, hard-working, otherwise good-enough folks, hold them? Since these ideas - say, birthers - are rooted in claims that are demonstrably false, why not just make the point they continue to hold false beliefs and carry on? I mean, seriously. Are newspaper editors, journalists, and public figures so afraid of hurting the feelings of large groups of people they will coddle people who hold crazy ideas? We do these sections of the public no demonstrable good by indulging their fantasies.

We would be far better off if someone in a position of authority made it clear that, while there is no harm done by individuals holding all sorts of fanciful notions - I was abducted by aliens! Bigfoot ate my dog! - we cannot conduct our public affairs based on such ideas. I see not qualitative difference between believing in the tooth fairy and birhterism, say, or "cryptozoology" and "creation science" (or Intelligent Design, as it is now called). Why pretend otherwise? Since our country has been demonstrably harmed by social, economic, and political ideas that are the equivalent of belief in Hobbits, it seems to me a wise way of moving forward is taking these folks by the hand, smiling at them indulgently, and moving on. If their feelings get hurt, well, that can't be helped. Best to treat adults like adults, and inform them it is time to surrender belief in Santa Claus.

And, no, this is not "cowardice", as one person recently told me. There is nothing cowardly about laughing at nonsense. It is the height of intellectual integrity to tell someone who says something crazy, "That's just nuts."

UPDATE: Just one of so many stories that, I am quite sure, Marshall Art will dismiss as liberal lies.

Global warming is driving the American pika, a unique cousin of rabbits that dwells in the snowy peaks of the Rockies, to extinction. Pikas, who spend the summer days collecting alpine plants and flowers for their winter nests, die off when exposed to temperatures above 78 degrees. New research published in Global Change Biology find that local populations of pikas — each isolated on the upper reaches of different mountains — are being extirpated by warming temperatures at an increasingly rapid rate.

And Al Gore is fat.

Judas And Grace

With Holy Week upon us, I am venturing down a long-neglected road. As I speed through The Gospel According to Judas (a theological exploration of grace, not the novel of the same name or the spurious non-canonical text claimed to have been found) by Ray Anderson, I am confronted by a multitude of questions, most of which make me uneasy, and for which it seems there are no answers that leap to mind. It would be easy, I suppose, to rest with the traditional Biblical testimony that Judas was possessed by the devil, that Judas was a traitor all along, stealing money from the common funds, that Judas, consumed by guilt and remorse, cursed not only himself but the entire plot of land upon which he took his own life.

As Anderson makes clear, those easy answers are retrogressive justifications, the collective memory of the Apostles through the tradition making clear that Judas was, from the start, apart from the rest. Anderson also makes clear that these are half-self-justifications on the part of the rest of the Apostles for their own failures of nerve and abandonment of Jesus, as well as half-understandable reactions to betrayal that are a common occurrence in any such situation. Even taking these remarks - that Judas was acting through the impetus of demonic powers, or was a thief and not to be trusted from the get-go - at face value, we still confront the reality that grace, as worked out through a reflection upon the cross and resurrection of Jesus, never allows our choices, our actions, even death, to have the last word. We profess this to be true even for those chronologically out of synch with the history of redemption; does not, after all, the author of Hebrews insist that the patriarchs and matriarchs of the people of Israel are counted among the "great cloud of witnesses" to the faith embodied in Jesus?

As we Christians move through this week in which we remember the events from the triumphal entry to the ignominious death to the empty tomb, Judas' act of betrayal takes center stage, forcing us, should we so choose, to ask uncomfortable questions about ourselves, our relationships with one another and with God, and how we justify our own election and acceptance always with one eye on the one man who kissed Jesus to death. It isn't easy, and I have yet to rest comfortably with the implications. That, I suppose, is the mark of good theology, however. We should never rest comfortably with our own sense of theological truth, bound up as that is with the life of the Triune God.

Let's Wait Until Everyone Dies Before We Do Anything

Back in the 1970's, scientists discovered, to their surprise, that the use of choloflorocarbons had a deleterious effect on the ozone layer. It destroys it. They published their findings and a whole lot of people thought it might be a good idea to stop producing and using these chemicals for the perfectly sane reason that human life would be seriously threatened by the depletion of the ozone layer.

The chemical companies went in to full-bore lobbying mode, but their essential argument was this - since even the scientists admit their science isn't exact, how about we do nothing and see what happens, OK? So, no country did anything and in 1986, while doing som atmospheric mapping a satellite discovered a huge fricking hole in the ozone layer, as well as the presence of high concentrations of chloroflorocarbons. It actually didn't take very long to get up a treaty on the manufacture and use of CFCs, as they came to be called, and somehow, western civilization hasn't toppled because of their phase out. All the same, what the scientists said would happen, in roughly the way they predicted, actually happened, and industry, when given the evidence, shrugged and said, in effect, "Who knew?"

This little story is not only an analog of another, on-going story. It is a precautionary tale as well. Last June I wrote about how my hometown is ground zero for the biggest natural gas boom in the country, spanning a couple states and tens of thousands of square miles - the Marcellus Shale. Scientists have known for a very long time there might well be vast supplies of natural gas buried deep in the bowels of the shale deposits of this part of the Appalachians. Until recently, however, the problem of extracting it was technological. With the advent of hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, the final hurdle was leaped, and the companies hit the area like men wandering the desert hit an oasis.

There is one teensy detail. Most of what goes in to the compounds used to crack the shale and force the gas to the service is unknown (coffee grounds?) and some of it is quite toxic. Stuff like benzene and toluene. In Colorado, folks living near areas where fracking takes place have experienced their tap water catching fire (probably saves electricity having to boil water for dinner, I guess). A report in today's New York Times covers familiar territory, including the difficulty of finding out details on the exact makeup of the hydraulic fracturing materials. Since there is no law that compels the companies to reveal this information, and it is proprietary, they have every legal right to refuse to make public what goes in to the stuff they're pumping underground.

Except, of course, it doesn't stay put, and the benzene, and the xylene, and the other fun ingredients migrate and end up in the water table and eventually in the water supply. The companies have insisted this can't happen. When water has been tested, however, it is shown to have happened. When it is determined to have happened, the companies insist the levels are well within legally acceptable limits, even in their original use. Except, of course, as pointed out in the Times article, that isn't true either. For example, levels 28 times the legal limit was found in wastewater being dumped from one plant in Pennsylvania.

Just as with CFCs, at some point a whole bunch of people are going to get sick, and after all sorts of investigations and years in the courts, it will be determined that, indeed, the chemicals used in fracking are to blame. Just as the scientists said would happen. My guess is these drilling companies will react in much the same way the chemical industry did at the time the CFC treaty was being worked out - "Who knew?" Well, we all knew, of course.