Redemption: It Isn't About You

Well, it’s not mostly about you. That’s a hard thought in an aggressively individualistic society, but I want to hold it for as long as I can.

I want to look at the long slow historical development of the concept. And having followed the history of this notion, I want to see what happens when what we mean, today, by “redemption” is put into the context where it was developed.

It can be done. I have done it. And so have you—although not, perhaps, about the notion of redemption. Here’s what I mean. It is like watching/listening to a TV program when suddenly a magnificent sound system with good mid-range speakers, a world class woofer, and surround-sound, kicks in. It isn’t that you are now listening to a different program. It is, rather, you’re your experience of the program is now entirely different and you might think, about the experience you were having before all that world class acoustic boosting happened, “What was I even taking the trouble to listen to THAT?”

I want to come back to that experience at the end, but let’s spend some time with the texts that will provide all that boosting. We’ll start early. I will be looking at the Greek noun lytron, “a ransom, a redemption” and at the verb lytrousthai, “to ransom, to redeem.”[1] I want to get a sense of the earliest situations to which those words were applied. You will find that they are amazingly clear. The noun, lytron, is “the means or money for a ransom.” (C. Brown). The ransom has to be paid for those, like the first-born of man or animal, which by sacred law” belongs to God. One “buys back” the first-born son or first-born animal by means of a sacrifice or a money payment. It is the payment itself that is designated by lytron.[2]

The same word is used for the redemption of a relative. I will pause briefly here for you to clear your minds of all the relatives you may have who are, for one reason or another, in need of redemption or who are by common acclaim, beyond redemption. OK. Done with that? Let’s go on. The redeemer—the Hebrew word is gō’ēl—was originally the closest relative who, as Colin Brown says, “as the avenger of blood, had to redeem the blood of the murdered victim.” He would be, in this case, the clan’s designated executioner and he would be “redeeming” the blood of his relative by finding and killing his murderer. Follow me here: the dead relative’s blood (his death) would be redeemed by this action. You may look at Numbers 35:16—19 if you are feeling a little woozy.

The gō’ēl was also the designated man to redeem the family possession that had been sold and even the relative who, under economic duress, had sold himself into slavery. That’s a lot of redeeming. What is going on here?

This makes sense only against the background of the covenant. Under the terms of the covenant, Israel is God’s unique possession and the people among whom He dwelt. The land, Israel, belonged to God, which was why it was never to be sold in perpetuity, but rather, had to be redeemed. If you can picture “land” being purchased by a modern developer and thereby removing it from the natural conditions and interactions of nature—rain no longer falls there, the food chain is broken as swings back and forth in the breeze, or would if the breeze still blew there—you will get a sense of what a big deal this is. Israel is unalienable. One could no more remove the land from Israel (because being Israel, the land belongs still to the Giver) than the land from Nature.

This redemption was both social, by the way, and systemic. The nearest relative had the obligation to redeem a fellow Israelite from slavery, but if for any reason that didn’t happen, the year of jubilee, the mechanics of which are laid out with painstaking detail in Leviticus 25. But if all else fails, a slave will be set free during the jubilee year, because that honors God who set all Israel free in Egypt.

We move now to the verb lytrousthai and get ready for the next leg of the journey. As early as Deuteronomy 7, this verb is used to refer to the redeeming activity of God. We begin to edge toward metaphor here and as a result, lose some of the concreteness. So long as there is someone or something in hock and someone obligated to pay for his or its return and some concrete means of exchange, everything was pretty clear. But early (see Deuteronomy 7:8 for an example), the verb refers to no material price at all, but rather to the redeeming activity of God in “buying Israel back” from slavery in Egypt. Isaiah uses the same metaphor (Isaiah 41:14) for God’s redemption of Israel from Babylon and return to Judah.

These early uses are difficult because not all the pieces of the simple model are there and because some of the pieces that are “there” are there metaphorically. Ideally, we would a condition before (e.g. slavery) a redeemer (likely a kinsman) a ransom (for slavery, however much money the market demanded for that particular slave) and a condition after (e.g., freedom from slavery). So Samuel was enslaved and Jonathan, his kinsman, paid $100 to his owner, after which Samuel was a free man. Concrete, clear, and simple.

In the redemptions above (Egypt, Babylon) there is a condition before( slavery) and a condition after (freedom), but no concrete actor and no payment of a ransom. It is notoriously hard to say what God is doing at the time He is doing it. Every religious community which conceives of one God who acts, does so mostly in retrospect. An easy way to see this is to compare the very dark prophesies of Isaiah and Jeremiah with the relatively mild prophesies of President Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright. The prophets of the Captivity are much more horrifying, but Pastor Wright’s was seeing God’s hand in his own time and so provoked a firestorm of protest.

Things get a good deal more complicated in the New Testament and I think I ought to take a fresh run at that one. There, the abstract notion of “what we are to be redeemed of” is taken for granted. It is sin. And the means of redemption are clear. It takes a sacrificial death. And the conditions before and after are conceptually clear, but practically contentious, as Paul discovered when he used them. In short, they require a fresh start.

We have looked at this closely enough, however, to come to a conclusion I want to share with you. All my life as a Christian, I have heard words of the ransom/redeem/redeemer group.[3] They have been abstract; often they have been used casually. And even when they weren’t casual, they were worn down by much use; they were trite.

Now I see that there is nothing casual about the relationship between God and Israel, nor between the people we call Israel and the land we call Israel. They are seen, all through the Old Testament, as fundamental relationships. I mean by “fundamental” what Thomas Jefferson meant by “inalienable.” You can like them or hate them, but they are there and nothing you can do can make them not there.

Similarly, I got a real jolt from realizing that it would be someone’s responsibility to redeem me, even from a slavery into which I had sold myself, because IT IS NOT RIGHT that I should not be free—being one of God’s people. It is not, in other words, about me. Nothing here speaks of market transactions. Nothing has to do with economic causes or effects. God and the people and the land are, being held together within God’s intention, a single entity and land and persons must be bought back to maintain the integrity of that entity.

Frankly, I find it overwhelming. You can see, now, why I used a metaphor as powerful as a new sound system in the introduction. I’m reading along, reading about “redemption,” and all of a sudden, the term falls into its full context and MEANS SOMETHING! The bass and the midrange speakers and the surround sound all kick on and I wonder why I thought I was listening to music before.

It isn’t an entirely comfortable feeling, but as I close out 2010, I wish it for you and I claim it for myself.


[1] It would be wholly misleading to so much as imply that I know any of the information I am about to retail to you. I am completely in debt to Colin Brown, of Fuller Theological Seminary, who wrote the article “Redemption” for the New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology and who serves as general editor of the English version of this masterpiece.
[2] I first stumbled on this when I noticed that Jesus’ parents had to “redeem” him because otherwise, he would have “belonged to God.” I had a very good time with that.

[3] In fact, like many others raised by Christian parents in Christian settings, I was puzzled when I first saw the word used in a secular context. I probably heard “ransom” in a story about kidnappers. I probably heard “redeem” in a story about pawnshops. This is considerably complicated by the expression about doing something “to redeem yourself,” which is also common. So I projected the religious meanings I already had on these new uses and was puzzled for a time.

Bah! Humbug!

It's the day of Christmas Eve. If this post is going to get written, this is definitely the time. "Bah! Humbug!" is probably the most famous line delivered by Charles Dickens, Ebenezer Scrooge. For family, I will take the trouble to point out that this is NOT Charles Dikkens, the well-known Dutch author.

Is Christmas a humbug? It seems to be a question worth asking, although by the time I finish, I hope to have shown that no good answer can be given. "Bah!" need not delay us much. It is phatic speech, so we don't need to look for a meaning. It is an expression of disgust and is clearly appropriate to Mr. Scrooge on the occasion of Christmas. But what is a humbug?

Ordinarily, I turn to etymology for help, but this time some people offer guesses and other just give up. Skeat thinks possibly hum, an old verb meaning “to hoax or cajole” and bug, a contraction of bugbear, “a spectre or ghost.” You have to admit that isn’t very much help.

But a humbug, and this word was in use with this meaning at least a century before Dickens brought it to our attention, is “something made or done to cheat or deceive,” a fraud, a sham, a hoax. That gives us something to work with. Is Christmas a fraud, a sham, and a hoax?

We come now to the question of what “Christmas” means to those who are putting it on and what it means to those who are receiving it. That’s not a lot of analysis, but it is enough to establish that something may be offered as a sham and received as a genuine gift or offered as a genuine gift and received as a sham. This isn’t like “valuable property” in Florida which, when you examine it, turns out to be a swamp. This is like a thoughtlessly given present that turns out to be absolutely perfect and that turns the recipient’s day into a glory of celebration. Where’s the humbug?

If the humbuggery of Christmas is a matter of a transaction between persons, then both how and why it is offered and how and why it is received, matter a great deal. A superb receiver can make “Christmas” truly wonderful in exactly the same way that an engaged student can make an otherwise mediocre lecture wonderful or an ardent parishioner can make a mediocre sermon wonderful. (I was going to say “an uninspiring sermon,” thereby falling into my own trap is attributing the effect to the product as if the spirit in which it was received could not redeem it—oops.)

So I think I would say that Christmas could be a humbug to many who trade upon the season and to many who endure it because they cannot find an acceptable way to evade it. But the moment you say “… a humbug to…” the meaning is transformed. Anyone with the wit, the insight, and the self-discipline can un-humbug Christmas for himself and for everyone around him.

Daunting, isn’t it? Merry Christmas to all and to all, a good night.

Luke, the Shepherds, and the Stable

Christmas is almost here. I'm fine with that. But Advent is nearly over and I will miss it sorely. There are good reasons and bad for that, I'm afraid. I'll start with the bad one.

Here is an ordinary map of the West Bank. You probably know that because of the long tongue of Israel that sticks in from west to east has Jerusalem on the tip of that tongue, Jerusalem in notin the West Bank. Bethlehem, just 5.2 miles to the south, really is in the West Bank.

Bette and I gave some thought to that and recalled that since our property slopes sharply down on the west side of the house, we actually have a west bank of our own. So we have taken the trouble to integrate the two maps and have put a sign on our west bank at exactly the right place for Bethlehem.

On the hills just outside Bethlehem, where David was herding his father's sheep when the prophet Samuel came to that house of looking for the next king of Israel, were shepherds...um...herding their sheep. They were confronted by "a heavenly host" and rushed off, delighted, to Bethlehem.

Bette and I have managed to represent "the heavenly host" as you see. The apron is supposed to make sure everyone knows this is the host.

The stable is another matter. Here comes a lot of literary speculation. The fact that I am cribbing it from mainline bibilcal scholars does not make it less speculative. So the stable appears in Luke because he needs something that has a manger. A manger is a feed trough. I paused, midway through Advent to speculate about the stable being the property of the Village of Bethlehem and the feed trough therefore being "the public trough" which has become so famous in our time for different things. That line of thought, Jesus being fed in the public trough, is a kind of alignment of images--for ironic intent in my case.

Luke seems to have done the same thing with another intent. A number of scholars think there is a manger in the story to call back to the Jews who were hearing the story the pictures in Isaiah 1:3: "The ox knows its owner; and the donkey knows the manger of its lord: but Israel has not known me; my people has not understood me."

In response to the angel and to the heavenly host, the shepherds of Luke go to Bethlehem and find "Christ, the Lord," as the angel said and "lying in a manger," as the angel said. They tell everyone they can find about this sign and then, they are shepherds, they go back to work.
It will be Christmas in a few days and we will need to go back to work as well.

That work, as Auden puts it in the last narration of his masterful poem, For the Time Being, looks like this.

There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,
Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem
From insignificance

.

What It Costs To Pay Attention

This will be about attention spans. I'm going to try to keep it from being a rant. And, partly to help me avoid that, I am going to weave around a little.

Let's start with attention. The verb at the root of all this is tendere, "to stretch." With the prefix ad- = "toward," we get "to stretch toward." If you want to pause for a moment to recall the myth of Tantalus, now would be the time. The point here is that "stretching toward" is a lot of work and requires resources. This is captured in our expression "pay attention," in which the cost is presumed and the ability to pay it is, by teachers at least, also presumed.

If there were a systematic shorting of the resources we need to pay this cost, we would expect that a smaller and smaller proportion of the members of the society would be able to afford it. This would likely happen to poor people first, so "attention deficit" could join "nutritional deficit" and "security deficit" and "socialibility deficit" and all the other deficits that go with low or irregular access to resources. It could be argued that the U. S. is experiencing just this kind of thinning out of psychic resources and I think a good case could be made, but it isn't what I have in mind today.

Yesterday, I started on a shopping trip and picked up "Messiah" at the place where I had turned it off the day before. I didn't like it. All I wanted to do right then was turn it off and listen to a sports station. (There might be another post there, one day.) But then I remembered that this happens to me fairly frequently. The longer, more relaxed receptivity that I need to really hear "Messiah" isn't always right there for me. But I know what to do to get it, having done it many times before. First, I categorize the problem: I am running too fast to hear such music well. Second, I consciously intend to slow down. Third, I pay close attention to the music to help me slow down. Fourth, when I have achieved the right "speed" for listening to such music, I find that it sounds to me just as wonderful as I hoped it would.

One way to put that would that that "I" have accommodated myself to "it." "It" requires a certain "speed," a longer, more leisurely, more attentive "speed" and "it" will reward me for achieving it. Another way to put it is to say that I want a certain experience--leave aside for the moment that I really didn't want it at the moment I had to act to achieve it--and I did the things I needed to do--I slowed myself down--to achieve it and reaped the rewards of my self-knowledge, my musical appreciation, and my self-discipline. I would probably object if someone else used that first form, but I am completely comfortable using it myself because I know what I mean by it.

Not only did I have the resources to "pay attention," but I had the self-awareness to act in a way I did not really want to act at the moment, secure in the knowledge that very shortly, I would want to and that I would receive what I wanted. I don't think that's an uncommon experience for people of my class and generation. Many middle class people in their 70s have learned to appreciate slower and more subtle and richer experiences. Most of us learned it, I expect, by being bored to tears and learning how to cope with it. "Bored," we learned, is not a quality of the event, but the quality of the interaction between ourselves and the event.

When I began listening to "Messiah" yesterday, I had just a flash of another thought. It was that so many kids today--adults too, but I want to think about the kids--haven't learned to slow themselves down so as to make such experiences possible. Is it because they are resource-poor and can't afford to "pay" attention? I don't think so. I think it is because they reject the prospect of the experience and because they have moral objections to it in principle.

Here's the way I'm thinking of it. If "bored" is a horrific and untenable experience and if being bored means that you are attending to something that has the essential quality of "boringness," then you never discover that "bored" is, in fact, a transaction; a relationship of one thing to another. This is equivalent to discovering that there is a relationship between putting money in your checking account and drawing money out of your checking account. People who see the relationship say, "Hello! You have to make deposits!" People who don't see the relationship are just unaccountably poor.

The unacceptability of boredom coupled with the location of boringness in the event could take us in any number of directions. Here's where I want to go today. The rejection of boringness amounts to a demand for entertainment. "Entertainingness" is a quality of the event, just as "boringness" was, so there is no progress there, but being "entertained." is pleasurable--or at least it is supposed to be--where being "bored" is not.

That leads to the stance, "I should be being entertained." This is a very good criterion from an experiential standpoint because usually you know whether you are being entertained or not. It sorts events into "entertaining" and "not entertaining" and rejects the "not entertaining" events not only on grounds of the right of the individual, but on moral grounds as well. If events ought to be entertaining and this event is not entertaining, then it is not an adequate event. It is a failure and should be rejected. So attributing causal efficacy to the event ("it" has acted on me, "it and I" have not failed to find common ground) and rejecting failed events on the grounds that they have not met the moral criterion (have not entertained me) leaves us at a very bad place. It leaves where we are.

It is true that several generations now have been raised on "fast cut" TV. It is true that increasingly, the interactive media, respond to immediate experiences rather than extended ones. It is true that several generations of children have been taught that being bored rather than entertained is a moral affront, rather than just a part of living a life. And these transactions have been invented by people who made money on them and supported by people who had no other goal that making their children happy and satisfied. "Happy" and "satisfied" are not the same thing, by the way.

These children are now incapable of the experience I had with "Messiah." There is no need for self-reflection, therefore no occasion for realizing a desire I have which can not be contained in the moment of first reaction, therefore no occasion for changing myself so I can properly appreciate the event, therefore no ultimate pleasure in the event itself. They have been deprived of the kind of self-knowledge I acquired as a response to boredom and now hold as a crucial skill. And, given the moral affront of boredom, I don't see any way they can begin to move toward it.

OK, here's the yes but section. I know it is true that every generation learns, to some extent, the skills their times have required and, forgetting the relationship between the particular times and the particular skills, yearn to see the next generation learn the same skills. Yup. I know that. But as attention spans get shorter and shorter, the deficits start to play with how the brain is wired and how it responds to new stimuli. (There's another post waiting to happen.) At a certain point, it is not possible to turn this development around, no matter who wants to do it. It is, in that way, like global warming. An environmentalist wins the presidency and everyone breaths a sigh of relief because now the average global temperatures are going to start going down. Not really. And in four years, we are going to have our revenge on the environmentalist who promised "improvement" but didn't actually deliver it in his four years in office.

Even starting to want to deal with the situation--I'm back to attention now--is hard, but it may no longer be possible to actually deal with it for generations to come. For one thing, the misunderstanding of "boredom" needs to be addressed. Does that seem likely to you? And then the moral criterion, in which an immediate demanding experiential self is the ultimate judge of worth, has to be challenged. Does that seem likely to you.

Me either.

On Playing the Hand You Are Dealt

In this morning's New York Times, there was a marvellous piece by Gina Kolata on Alzheimer's disease. I won't link the article because it isn't what I want to write about. The question they were dealing with was whether people who have very early Alzheimer's or a high risk of developing it, should be told given that there is no treatment. It's an interesting dilemma. For the record, I'd like to be told.

Robert Stuart-Vail found that he had a gene variant (APOe4) that made the disease very likely for him and said, "You play the cards you are dealt." I've heard that a lot and I've never had any objections to it before, but today it seemed oddly constraining. The perspective required for "you play the hand you are dealt" seems to blow by a few things we ordinarily know about ourselves.

The first is that we deal ourselves quite a few of the cards we have. That's just a thing; it's not a good thing or a bad thing.

The second is that this is just one hand. There was a hand before this one and there will be a hand after this one. Why should I think of my present situation as just one hand?

The third is that "hand" in this metaphor is thought of as the resources for strategy, but it could also be thought of as the resources for resilience or even for graceful endurance.

Let me put the card metaphor in the most unattractive light I can contrive for it: "The cards I have came to randomly from some source outside myself and severely constrain my ability to follow the best strategy."

On the other hand, I like the new meanings metaphors can bring and I use them myself. I don't want to be put in the position of criticizing a metaphor Mr. Stuart-Vail found useful on the grounds that I didn't find it useful. I have had hard times myself, and I have taken comfort in pithy little sayings. I'll tell you about one and refer briefly to another, which will have meaning to fans of The West Wing and probably no one else.

The first comes from poet Edwin Markham, of Oregon City. At the time I needed it, the last two lines were all I had heard and I didn't like them right away. Here they are:

For all your days prepare,
And meet them ever alike:
When you are the anvil, bear-
When you are the hammer, strike.

They meant something to me because I was feeling like the anvil at the time. The meaning it had for me was that there are times when just "taking the hits" is the best you can do. A time to act will come and when it comes, you need to be ready, but this is not the time. I found real comfort in that.

The second comes from an episode in the second season of The West Wing (Noel) in which Josh is being treated by Dr. Stanley Keyworth for his inability to buffer himself from his memories of being shot at a Bartlet rally. "You need to be able to remember it without reliving it," Keyworth says. "You're reliving it." It turns out that it is music that cues Josh's panic attacks and when he hears that, he despairs. "So that's going to be my reaction every time I hear music?"

"No," says Keyworth.

"Why not." says Josh.

"Because," says Keyworth, "we get better."

Those last four syllables meant a lot to me. It wasn't just the idea. They were delivered with a calm assurance and a matter of factness that helped me remember that I would get better too; that there was a trend toward healing in me. I could count on it, but I needed to be patient.

So you see, I'm not in much of a position to criticize Stuart-Vail's choice of metaphors. I would like to be aware, however, of how many of the cards in my hand I have dealt myself and to be aware, also, that there will be another hand.

On the Clarity of Ideologues

I've been having a hard time lately on the New York Times op-ed page. I've been agreeing with the liberals and intrigued by the conservatives. That can't be good, can it?

Ross Douthat wrote a column last week in praise of Sen. Tom Coburn and specifically in praise of his ideological dogmatism. There's an argument you don't hear very often. It is an argument that makes a good deal of sense to a political psychologist and I'd like to say why but first I want to share an Oregon politics story.

When I started my apprenticeship with the Oregon House of Representatives (I was Rep. Bruce Hugo's legislative assistant), Rep. Glenn Otto was widely known for one particular quirk. He strongly disliked having an "emergency clause" tacked onto a bill unless there was actually an emergency. He did not consider the eagerness of the sponsors to see the bill take effect quickly as an emergency. He would not, he said, vote for a bill with an emergency clause unless there was some reason it deserved to have an emergency clause. He was adamant.

There aren't too many principled politicians (I am not disparaging them; they are elected, in most cases, to be pragmatists) and even fewer who are adamantly unwilling to compromise their principles. Many of his colleagues wished Rep. Otto would be adamant about principles that were more ennobling and broadly applicable and even more lobbyists wished it. I saw Rep. Otto vote against his own bill after an emergency clause had been added to it unnecessarily.

And what was the effect of this monomania? If the vote was going to be close and they needed Rep. Otto's vote, the managers of the bill were forced to consider whether they would have to remove the emergency clause. No one considered trying to convince Rep. Otto that the emergency clause was as bad as he thought it was. They knew he wasn't going to change, so they had to consider how they, themselves, might change. That was the effect. It amazed me, as a novice to politics, to see how it played out.

Sen. Coburn's principles are a good deal broader according to Douthat, citing Coburn's influence on the healthcare debate, the financial reform debate, and "the White House's deficit commission." That final entity is "The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform." You can see why Douthat called it "the White House's" plan and called the plan "the deficit commission."

Here's the point Douthat made that set me to thinking. "Again, his ideological rigor was a spur to creativity: it enabled him to consider the possibility that what was branded as a left-wing idea might actually be better for free markets than [the more traditional conservative alternative]." To someone with my training, that sounded like "category accessibility," and I found myself really appreciation Douthat's point that the categories accessible to ideologues are genuinely different from those available to pragmatists and that the difference might be a vital asset.

Now we need to consider "category accessibility." Consider this passage from cognitive psychologist, Jerome Bruner, from his article "On Perceptual Readiness." I was twenty years old, by the way, when this article was published and I have been giving it pretty hard use for the last 35 or so years.

Conceive of a person who is perceptually ready to encounter a certain object, an apple let us say. How he happens to be in this state we shall consider later. We measure the accessibility of the category “apples” by the amount of stimulus input of a certain pattern necessary to evoke the perceptual response “there is an apple,” or some other standardized response. We can state the “minimum” input required for such categorization by having our observer operate with two response categories, “yes” and “no,” with the likelihood of occurrence of apples and non- apples at 50:50, or by using any other definition of “maximum readiness” that one wishes to employ. The greater the accessibility of a category, (a) the less the input necessary for categorization to occur in terms of this category, (b) the wider the range of input characteristics that will be “accepted” as fitting the category in question, (c) the more likely that categories that provide a better or equally good fit for the input will be masked. To put it in more ordinary language: apples will be more easily and swiftly recognized, a wider range of things will be identified or misidentified as apples, and in consequence the correct or best fitting identity of these other inputs will be masked. This is what is intended by accessibility.

The "apple" Sen. Coburn is looking for "small government." To see what that means, simple substitute "small government" for "apple" in the sentence above: "Policies leading to reducing the size of government" will be more easily and swiftly recognized..." Or consider this sentence: We measure the accessibility of the category "policies leading to a reduction in the size of government" by the amount of stimulus input...is necessary to evoke the perceptual response, "Say, this policy might work!"

In healthcare, in deficit reduction, and in financial reform, the amount of input necessary to attract Sen. Coburn's attention is extremely low. He will see possibilities where others will see nothing at all. Many of his colleagues will walk right past the "apple" that so excites Coburn.

Of course, everyone has an "apple" and for every other member of the Senate, there is something he or she cares about so much that the necessary stimulus threshhold is made so low that nearly anything will cross it. Douthat writes about Coburn's "apple" because he likes Coburn's "apple." I like Rep. Blumenauer's (East Portland) "apple" better, myself, but it's politics and as the great Walt Kelley said, "One man's [apple] is another man's cold broccoli."

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Bette and I asked some friends over to watch Close Encounters of the Third Kind with us. If you can separate Christmas movies, like A Christmas Carol and Miracle on 34th Street, from Advent stories, Close Encounters is my favorite Advent story.

What's not to like? In this story, it's Joseph who gets "pregnant." I put that in quotes because it is a vision, not a fetus, that is emplanted in Joseph, but the implications expand until they drive out everything else in his life. Including his wife and kids. And when you stop to think about it, what do we know about the other couples Joseph and Mary hung around with?

This vision has three parts. It is a representation of Devil's Tower, in Wyoming. It is a sense that this picture means something. It is a sense that the meaning is crucially important. That's it. And for that, Joseph gave up "normal life." That all sounds biblical to me. Except for Joseph being the one who got pregnant, and that's not as different from Matthew's account as it is from Luke's. Richard Dreyfuss plays Roy Neary, the Joseph character; he's wonderful.

The Wise Men get the message too--in earth coordinates. They are Wise Men, after all. But a lot of "potential wise men," like the pilots of the planes that see the alien ship as clearly as could be asked, think that telling what they saw is way too much trouble. And it might alert Herod.

Herod is the U. S. Army in this movie. They protect the Wise Men and help them get to the place of meeting. But then they use "security concerns" to control the guest list by getting rid of as many of the shepherds as they can. The chief Wise Man protests, "Major Walsh, this is not your party. These shepherds are here by invitation and you have no right to exclude them."

The shepherds are marvellously unreliable as witnesses. They are too old or too young or "unreliable looking." If you haven't noticed the delightful irony that in Luke, the shepherds were the only ones who were told the whole story because they were the only ones nobody would believe, then you have still before you one of the great jokes of the Bible.

I love all that. But there is a special place in my heart for this story because my daughter Dawne made this picture for me. This shows the special U. N. reception area that was set up to receive and understand a message from far beyond their understanding.

She made it by running that scene--I call it the "Little Town of Bethlehem" scene--over and over, putting the picture on pause and painting it in oil. Bless her! I had copies made and sent it out as a Christmas card once, years ago.

Here's a poem I sent out with it.

It is in the dark months; these months
That we are given the chance to notice
That the most glorious of all our almost denied hopes
Is really true.

The poem isn't everything I wanted it to be, but it does capture how completely preposterous the story of Advent is and how much less attracted to it we are than we might expect. That's what the line about "our almost denied hopes" is about.

The Redeemer, "redeemed"

I want to see if I can get the tone just right for this question. Why did Jesus' parents take him to Jerusalem when he was about a month and a half old? I'm trying for the tone of "Why did the chicken cross the road?"

I want to be careful about the tone because for this question the way is strait and few there be that find it. Some diverge, for instance, to consider how very little Luke knew about Jewish customs. OK so he got some of the customs wrong. Is that really a big deal? Or that he got into a cut and paste action from the birth of Samuel, the judge, and didn't quit in time. Or maybe there was a story about John the Baptist that was modeled on Samuel and Luke ran across it and appropriated it for the story of Jesus. Those aren't big deals either, unless you are treating these stories as if they were biography, rather than the myths that have collected about the founder of our faith and which are important to us only because the founder is important. These stories, in other words, would be exactly like the stories about Zeus--if we were Zeus worshippers.

OK, why did Jesus' parents take him to Jerusalem? Let's start at another place--just one more time--and then I'll answer the question. I love this question. It's new to me and I'm just enjoying the hell out of it. The other place is Luke 24:21. Jesus is walking along with Cleopas and a friend to Emmaus. They didn't recognize him and he didn't declare himself. Cleopas and the friend are in despair because Jesus had been crucified by the Romans, but it isn't Jesus' fate they are lamenting at the moment, but the death of their hopes. They were among Jesus' disciples and they had had hopes about what "the Jesus movement" would mean. Those hopes died when Jesus died. "We had hoped," says Cleopas, "that he was the one to redeem Israel."

It had looked to Cleopas and many others as if Jesus would be "the redeemer" of Israel. Which takes us back, for the last time, to the question of what Jesus was doing in Jerusalem as an infant. The answer is that his parents were redeeming him. And why did he need to be redeemed? Because he was a first-born male (see Exodus 13:1 and 13:11ff) and they took him to the temple to "consecrate him" to God's service.

The original idea was that God earned the services of all first-born males by passing over them when he was slaying all other first-born males in Egypt. In return, these little boys would spend their lives serving God in some special way, perhaps as a priesthood. But the tribe of Levi eventually took over the priesthood (Jesus dealt with the Levites through all of his ministry, you will recall). This change was reflected in a provision that the child could be "bought back," i.e., "redeemed" for five shekels. As near as I can make it, that's about $170 U. S. dollars. (see Numbers 18:15--16 for the original provision.). That would be a lot for parents who couldn't afford a lamb (Luke 2:24) and gave, instead, the poor person's offering of two pigeons.

There would be a glorious symmetry if Jesus would have had to be redeemed so that he could be the Redeemer. I think it is that thought that first tickled my imagination. In fact, the ministry of Jesus would not have been different in the smallest degree had his parents' not consecrated and then redeemed him. It tells us a lot about the parents and it lodges Jesus firmly within the tradition of the Law, but he lived a life of complete consecration to God in any case so from a theological standpoint, it really doesn't matter.

It was fun, though, wasn't it?

Students Know When They Are Being Well Taught?

Some do. Some don't. Neither of those propositions is on my mind today. Today's question is this: will the students say what they know and will the result be better teaching?

There was a really interesting piece in the New York Times this morning. It begins with the interest the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has shown in locating good teachers. They have devised a "value-added" metric, by which they statistically calculate how much of a student's test scores can be attributed to particular teachers. A student of mine told me last week that in Los Angeles, these scores are printed in the newspaper next to the names of the teachers. I haven't verified that, but I find it plausible. Horrifying too, of course.

The new interest from the Gates Foundation is to see what other measures correlate with high value-added scores. They have discovered that you can ask the students. That seems obvious, I guess, but I began by observing that some do (know) and some don't. Here are three such observations.

Classrooms where a majority of students said they agreed with the statement, “Our class stays busy and doesn’t waste time,” tended to be led by teachers with high value-added scores, the report said.

The same was true for teachers whose students agreed with the statements, “In this class, we learn to correct our mistakes,” and,

“My teacher has several good ways to explain each topic that we cover in this class.”

This is information worth having and it can not be collected by having an administrator drop into the class, as if by parachute, jot a few notes and leave. The students know things like this and they will safely tell you provided the questionnaire is anonymous and is not used to evaluate the teachers.

Oops. We have just reached the brow of the hill and are peering down the slippery slope. I don't see any vegetation down there and it has been raining for a week. What are the chances we can keep our footing? (Here in Portland, it actually has rained for a week and there are months yet to go.)

When the answers these students provide are used to discipline or to reward teachers, to promote or demote them, to hire them or fire them, the students are presented with a new set of choices. I don't mean to cast aspersions on the students, but this new choice is a challenge routinely flunked by congressmen, judges, and White House staffers.

The choice is this. Do you want to say what you know or do you want to produce the kind of effect your assessment could produce? That's the question I had in mind when I started; that's what's on my mind today. Let me phrase that in a few other ways. Dear student: do you value the accuracy of your observations more than you value seeing justice done in your school? More than you value the chance to retaliate against the teacher whose homework you did all last week instead of going to the coast with your family? More than you value that chance to hurt the teacher who had one of your friends suspended from school last month?

Dear student: do you really think the administration is going to make good use of the information you provide them? Will they not, rather, put this information to their own purposes? Don't you think you can trust the clout you have right now (in answering the questionnaire) more than the clout some administrator might have in using the results for good purpose?

The question for these students, in short, is this: will you be willing to tell only the truth you know rather than trying to have an effect of some kind? The question for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is this: do you really think students will continue to tell you what they know after you have put into their hands a tool that will allow them, instead, to get what they want? Do you really?

I don't.

A decade or so, the legislature in California began a program of sending cash awards to high schools with high (or with rising) achievement scores. The students at some schools began meeting with the administration to talk about what the money would be used for, should it actually arrive. In a number of cases, the administration's vision of the best use of the funds did not match the vision of the students, who were thinking that a day at Disneyland would be really cool. And, since the students controlled absolutely whether the scores would be high or not and since they personally paid no penalty for low scores, they were in a perfect place to blackmail the school. Which they did. And after enough schools did it, the Assembly suspended the program--probably over protests from Disneyland.

Have we taught our students to tell "the truth they know," to admit that there are some important truths they do not know, and to walk past all the inducements of power and influence? It would be nice to think so, but I don't. And until we do, this lovely new source of information that the Gates Foundation has given us will remain a small candle in a very large dark room.

Santa Claus v. The Heavenly Host: Part XII

I remember how hard it was for me when the Christian fish symbol was taken over by creationists and I had to give it up. You know. This one.

I really liked that fish. It was a First Century symbol used by Christians and it was a handy little acrostic of Christian doctrine.[1] But I came eventually to feel that no matter what it meant to me, what it meant to everyone else was something I didn’t want to be part of. The Creationists took it over and now it means “Creationist and Proud.” to everyone else. Not on my bumper! I’m starting to feel that same way about Christmas. Well, I’m not starting. It’s been going on for a while. But it is getting steadily worse.

So I’m giving up Christmas as something to care about on its own. I have nothing against presents and eggnog and Christmas trees and Ho Ho Ho, but I don’t invest in them either. More and more, it is Advent that moves me. Nobody’s going to make a lot of money at Advent, probably, or at least not enough for them to start pushing it up before Thanksgiving.[2]
With that distinction made, I have found my way to some questions that have interested me for a while, but which seemed…oh…divisive. Not really part of the spirit of the season. But they really are divisive and are fully a part of the spirit of Advent. So, I’d like to think about that division a little and I would be glad for your company.

Stan Freburg did a little skit many years ago called “Green Christmas.” It was funny, but it was also a protest about the commercialization of Christmas. Mr. Scrooge, the Chairman of the Board, couldn’t see what the point of Christmas was if it didn’t move the merchandise.[3] Bob Cratchit, who runs “a little spice company over in East Orange, New Jersey," protests. He just wants an ad that says, “Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men.”

It’s a heart-warming sentiment, but is foreign to the Advent story Luke tells. If you consult people to whom the language matters and to whom the intention of the author matters, it is less a jolly inclusiveness and more the beginning of a tempestuous and cataclysmic ministry. I’ve been reading Raymond Brown again this year (The Birth of the Messiah, but just the half about Luke) and also Joseph Fitzmyer, author of the Anchor Bible Commentary on Luke. They both say that the message of the angel went like this.

“Do not be afraid. Look, I bring you news of great joy, a joy to be shared by the whole people.”

The “whole people” the angel has in mind is Israel. God’s people. What it means for any other “peoples,” the angel doesn’t specify, but “the nations” (everyone else) is not what the angel has in mind. But there is more. The angel isn't done yet.

Glory to God in the highest Heaven
And on earth, peace for those He favors.

We could have a discussion about whom God favors, I guess, but it doesn’t seem to be everyone. It isn’t Cratchit’s “Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men.” Not quite “the Christmas spirit”. But oddly, it seems to be entirely in keeping with Luke's notion of Advent.

We might get a further clue by looking a Mary’s response to the greeting of Elizabeth. This is the justly famous Magnificat. Here is the part I was thinking of.

…the Almighty has done great things for me,
Holy is His name
And His faithful love extends age after age to those who fear Him
He has used the power of His arm,
He has routed the arrogant of heart
He has pulled down princes from their thrones and raised high the lowly,
He has filled the starving with good things, sent the rich away empty

So Mary—where we got the notion there was anything “mild” about her still mystifies me[4]—celebrates God’s faithful love in his routing of the arrogant of heart (Brown has “He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.”) and in pulling down the princes and in sending the rich away hungry. Ho Ho Ho. This is good news, truly, for the lowly, who are raised high and who are filled with good things. No shortage of Christmas spirit there, I guess.

Old Simeon was at the temple in Jerusalem when Jesus was circumcised and presented to the Lord as a first-born. He embraced the baby and proclaimed the lines we call Nunc Dimittis. Then he has some words for Mary.

Behold, he is set for the fall and rise of many in Israel
And for a sign to be contradicted—
Indeed, a sword will pass through your own soul—
So that the inmost thoughts of many may be revealed.

On the one hand, that doesn’t sound as vindictive as the quoted lines of the Magnificat. On the other hand, it cuts right to the heart of Jesus’ ministry. “Set,” in this passage means “set as a foundation stone is set.” Maybe builders have a technical word for that. This is the stone over which some stumble and on which others will build.

The child is set “for the fall and rise of many in Israel.” Some will rise; some will fall. It wouldn’t be too far afield to imagine that those who will fall will not be entirely entertained by the experience

.
The child is a sign to be contradicted (Fitzmyer translates, “A symbol that will be rejected.”) Fitzmyer’s choice of words calls to my mind Isaiah 53:3, “He was despised and rejected of men,” but that may be only because I have been listening to Handel’s Messiah for the last week. I don’t know what it brought to Luke’s mind.

These inmost thoughts that Simeon referred to are “bad thoughts, doubting thoughts, vain thoughts” says Brown on the grounds that all thirteen uses of this word in the New Testament (the word is dialogismos) are pejorative. The rejection of this sign will, Simeon says, reveal the inner anger and rebellion of many. And the truth is, you don’t have to read much farther in Luke to see that beginning to happen. In fact, Luke 12 would be a good place, where Jesus says,

"Do you think I have come to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you: rather division; for henceforth in the one house of five they will be divided, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother.”

We don’t know what old Simeon saw, but if he saw the vision contained in that saying, you can see why he wanted to have a word with Mary privately. In short, the Christ Child is not good news in the same way that Santa Clause is good news. Or Frosty the Snowman or Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. But the texts are there and they say what they say. It doesn’t seem quite right to ignore them. Not at Christmas.

[1] For the record, the Greek letters spell out icthus, or “fish.” and can be read as “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior”.
[2] Bette did remind me that if you are going to buy an Advent calendar, “before Thanksgiiving” is the only sensible time to do it.
[3] It almost goes without saying that Freburg himself played Mr. Scrooge.
[4] It does rhyme nicely with “child,” which is probably why it is used.

Free, Equal, and Dependent

Independence is the goal of childhood. Interdependence is the achievement of adulthood. Dependency is the nightmare of old age. Is there any way to do this very hard task, well?

Caveats and Yes-buts I have something I’d like to talk about. The goal of this section is to help you let go of some other emphases, even very plausible ones, and come along with me on this trip. First, I know it is true that dependency happens to young people as well as middle-aged and older people. Second, I know that there are caregivers who are more dependent on giving than the receiver is on receiving. Third, I know that what looks like a one-way dependency on the surface is often a two way dependency—not a true interdependence—when you get below the surface. And last, I know that a lot of people who face this dilemma will not have a good marriage to fall back on.

OK, having said all that, what about being permanently dependent on another person? It is true with this question, as it is with many difficult questions, that an easy and very good answer can be given. This is true in the same way that putting the ball in the basket is easy after four or five difficult and well-executed passes. The trick is in the passes, not in the shot. So the trick is in the relationship, not in the dependency.

So here is the answer that seems to me easy and good.[1] I had my closest approach to this topic when Marilyn, my wife of many years, suffered two very hard years of cancer and cancer treatment. These “easy” answers draw on that experience and on our conversations at the time.

Rule one: You can’t pay for your care with gratitude. The dependent person gets a lot of care and doesn’t give any care. She—my reference point is Marilyn, but I really believe this would work either way—will be tempted to see how much it costs the givers to be there and do all the things that need to be done and to respond with expressions of gratitude. “Gratitude” in that way becomes the coin with which she “pays” the caregivers. Gratitude is a feeling and there is nothing wrong with expressing it when you feel it, but you get the care you need when you need it and there are lots of reasons you might not be feeling grateful. Saying how grateful you are when you are not feeling grateful gets toxic pretty fast.

The question now is how the dependent person can learn not to pay in gratitude. She must know first, that if she gives in to the temptation, it will be worse for everyone. She must also know that gratitude is not expected. The service that is provided by the caregiver in a good marriage is entailed in the marriage. That what the “in sickness and in health” language is there for. It is not a contract; it is a reminder. This is not, however, the kind of adaptation that can be developed when it is needed. If this mutual respect has been a part of the relationship when both partners are whole, it will be easier to adapt it to the relationship when one is not.

Rule Two: The caregiver knows enough not to expect expressions of gratitude. He knows it is a pleasure to express gratitude when one is feeling grateful and is onerous to express it when it is only an obligation. So he is careful not to seem, in what he does or what he says, that he expects such expressions. This leaves him free to enjoy them when they are offered and free from expecting them as a matter of course.

The marriage is a mutual commitment. It means that the well one cares for the sick one. It is the luck of the draw which one of you develops the cancer or has the stroke or whose memory starts to slide. When I was doing this, I developed a metaphor that not everyone likes, but it brought some clarity to me and I still like it. It is that the marriage is like a meal in a restaurant. You pay for the food and for the preparation and for enough service to get the food from the kitchen to the table. When they agreed to serve you a meal and take your money, they took on that obligation. But, in fact, everyone one of us has been served, at one time or another, by a server who had some sense of who you were, as diners, and what would make your meal more enjoyable. It is a great pleasure to tip those people by way of saying thank you.

So in the marriage. All the care the caregiver offers is part of the marriage the way the price was a part of the meal. And if the partners both look at it like that, it enables the receiver to express gratitude where it was not expected and the giver to receive it with surprise and with great joy. That arrangement is the A game of a lot of couples, but you don’t always play your A game. Sometimes you are tired. Sometimes you are distracted. Sometimes you are in pain or fighting off despair. This metaphor reminds you where you want to be and for that reason, it is especially important when you have failed in the task to which you are both committed. Being reminded helps both of you remember what you want to do. It is a great help.

Rule Three: Be the Partner. Finally, both the giver of these services and the receiver need to know that there is only so much the giver can do. It is tempting to hold onto the job yourself, even when there are others who would be glad to help. It is tempting to do more than you should and in that way, you slide over into resentment. You might think you are hiding it, but resentment is a strong signal and the person who receives the care is a very sensitive receiver. She will know.

Again, the practicalities of finding the help you will need may be daunting, but the simple clear realization that you will need help is easy. The fact is that the person you are caring for needs a partner. She needs a partner more than she needs a caregiver. When you have burned yourself out “caring for her,” who will be her partner? Looked at in that light, all that “selfless behavior” which cost you so much seems only selfish and shortsighted. There are things only you can do for your partner. Do those. Someone must see to it that the whole collection of her needs are met. That’s your job too. But a lot of other people, some family, some friends, and some professional, need to be a part of this show. You don’t need to do all the caring; you need to do all the planning.

And for the rest, you need to be for her the partner only you can be.

The older I get, the more I appreciate the truth of the saying, “Growing old isn’t for sissies.” Many of these things are hard, hard, hard to do. But they won’t get done at all if the ideas aren’t in place and if there is a manual for how best to love the actual person who is your partner, I’ve never seen it.

[1] I want to keep “easy” in my formulation, but I’m not really an idiot. I know that “easy” refers to knowing what to do, not to the process of doing it.

Just a Little Paranoid

I want to ask a question first. I want to ask it as open-mindedly as I can and that means posing it first because when I start writing about language, I get engaged and that wide-open mental aperture shrinks to the size of a pinhole very quickly.

Let’s put the question narrowly first. What is paranoia? It is, first, a term of psychiatry just as psychosomatic once was. We all saw how that one turned out. “Is it real, Doc, or just psychosomatic?” Paranoia is a mental disorder characterized by systematized delusions as of grandeur or especially of persecution.[1]

If you listen to words, and you probably do or you wouldn’t be reading this, you have heard people say they are “a little paranoid.” I have never heard anyone say that a person is “just a little sociopathic” but if he did say that, it would put the meaning in the same tension with the word that paranoid does.

If we want to talk about the array of words that might show up on the path that led, at its very end, to paranoid, we find that there are a lot of them. A person might be said to be troubled or dubious, or shady. He might be suspicious, or wary, or even fearful. But we don’t want that. We want to take the word at the end of the line and say we have just a little bit of it.

Why do we do that? Don’t know any of the other words? I don’t think so. We use all those words in other contexts. I think we want the pop of the big one—I’m PARANOID—but just the meaning of wary. Is it like getting cranberry juice concentrate and adulterating it with water? Or is it like getting battery acid and diluting it so it is not quite at full strength?

In Oregon recently, there was a political ad opposing something or other and using the slogan, “It’s too extreme!” Hello? Extreme means the very furthest away, the “furthest out,” we might say. But “too extreme?” What does that mean? Would an advocate say, “No, no, they are just saying that to frighten people; actually, it’s only moderately extreme.”?

There is probably a word for words that have that function. I call them “polar words” because they occur only at the pole (the very end) of the range of meanings. You could say that someone is nearly paranoid, I guess and you might be able to say that something is “nearly extreme.”
But those aren’t the only kinds of words where this problem pops up. People don’t use unique as a sliding variable term because they don’t know any others. Anyone who listens or reads comes across “very unique” as if unique meant “different.” Unique mean that there aren’t any others like it.[2] Unique is a polar word. It represents only the very end of the continuum. Is unique so valuable that people draw against it by using it where “different” would be correct? Does calling a new kind of cracker “a little big unique” help sell crackers?

This week, I saw an ad for something—it might have been a new phone—that said they were becoming more ubiquitous all the time.[3] Of course, if it is ubiquitous, there is nowhere else for it to be. Is this like unique and paranoid in that there is a certain pop you get by using the polar terms, even if you have to cut back on the actual meaning? It’s hard to think so. Does ubiquitous have a lot of pop?

Some gentle soul is going to say it is just ignorance, but you notice that all these deviations from established usage move in the same direction. These are not random changes. This is a substantial portion of American English which is being moved in a particular way. That way is that terms that were once “end of the line” terms are now being used as “anywhere along the line” terms.

Which brings us to the question I promised in the first paragraph: Does this really hurt us? Probably not. It is painful to people, like me, who were trained to respect such terms. It is not just their meanings, but their existence as polar terms at all. If all the terms that were once polar, standing at the ends of the axis of meanings, become relative so that they can legitimately be modified by adjective phrases like, “a little,” or “a substantial amount” or even “excessively,” which imagines a “just right” meaning somewhere in the center and says this one is too far out? I don’t think so.

I think people like me—in my previous essay about my perspective on language, I called myself “Conservative and Proud”—will probably serve the language by pointing out what is going on and by raising the question of whether the language suffers (and thereby, all its users suffer) by this new kind of language. So I offer this essay as a reflection on a kind of change I see taking place and I ask whether it is a big deal or just an irritation.

What do you think?

[1] The etymology of a word often adds depth to its array of meanings. Paranoia occurs in a mind, nous, that is para, “beside” itself. We say a person is “beside himself” with grief or with anger, but that just shows that an etymology is not the same as a meaning.
[2] And for those of you who have a theological appetite as well as a lexical one, the Greek monogenēs, which the KJV translates “only begotten,” also means “unique” rather than "only." Isaac, the son of Jacob was monogenēs and had a brother, Ishmael.
[3] The word we could really use is ubiety (yoo-BY-i-ty), which means “the condition of being in a particular place.” This emphasizes its “whereness.” Ubiquitous, by contrast, matches ubi, “where” with que, “any,” giving us not “anywhere,” but “everywhere.”

On Reading a Really Good Book

The book is Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future, but this post isn’t really about the book. It is specifically about my reading of the book and more generally, it is an example of what I called, on my Page, “strategic reading.” I should remember to say that I have not read any more of the book than I have either included or pointed to here. I will read it all, I am sure. Reich is a delightful writer and his argument strikes me as urgently important. He also has a blog, by the way. http://robertreich.blogspot.com/.

Furthermore, and this is more to the point of this post, knows how to organize a book. I took a look at his comments on how the current distribution of income violates “the basic bargain,” and turned to the index to see what there was under “basic bargain.” This is what was there. It doesn’t take much to see that in the three bold and asterisked headings, the basic bargain is defined, revoked, and restored. So I read those three sections and called it good.

basic bargain
economic growth and, 75—76
historical and conceptual evolution, 29—31
need for restoration of, 64—65, 75
in post—World War II prosperity, 42—43, 45—46, 51
*principles of, 28public understanding, 59—60
*revocation of, 55—57*strategies for restoring, 128—40
*strategies for restoring, 128—40

It doesn’t take a lot of smarts to do that. I have been thinking about that because we are now approaching the tenth and last week of the term at PSU and my students are beginning to complain about the huge reading assignments. I have no sympathy at all for their complaints. When I assign long readings, I specify exactly what I want them to get out of it. My favorite metaphor is that there is a trophy in this reading somewhere. “Go in. Find the trophy. Grab it and leave. You’re done now.”

The students who learn to do that have learned a valuable skill and have preserved time for their other courses. The students who, on moral grounds—I just isn’t right to treat a text like that—refuse, have made the academic hill steeper. Those who initially can’t do it right away get repeated instruction and many examples. If, after that, they still can’t, they need to take some other professor. In any case, what I did in this post is what I am urging them to do.

“Principles of, page 28.” This is the section that begins there. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you saw this before when I lamented my inability to feel the force of the argument even when I granted its soundness.

On January 5, 1914, Henry Ford announced that he was paying workers on his famously productive Model T assembly line in Highland Park, Michigan, $5 per eight-hour day. That was almost three times what the typical factory employee earned at the time. In light of this audacious move, some lauded Ford as a friend of the American worker; others called him a madman or a socialist, or both. The Wall Street Journal termed his action “an economic crime.” Ford thought it a cunning business move, and history proved him right. The higher wage turned Ford’s autoworkers into customers who eventually could afford to plunk down $55 for a Model T. Their purchases in effect returned some of those $5 paychecks to Ford, and helped finance even higher productivity in the future. Ford was neither a madman nor a socialist, but a smart capitalist whose profits more than doubled from $25 million in 1914 to $57 million two years later.

Ford understood the basic economic bargain that lay at the heart of a modern, highly productive economy. Workers are also consumers. Their earnings are continuously recycled to buy the goods and services other workers produce. But if earnings are inadequate and this basic bargain is broken, an economy produces more goods and services than its people are capable of purchasing. This can lead to the vicious cycle Marriner Eccles witnessed after the Great Crash of 1929 and that the United States began to experience in 2008. (Global trade complicates this bargain but doesn’t negate it, as I will discuss later.)

In his time, Ford’s philosophy was the exception. From the 187os to the 193oS, during what might be termed the first stage of modern American capitalism, most workers didn’t share in the bounty. Large factories, mammoth machinery, hand a raft of new inventions (typewriters, telephones, electric lightbulbs, aluminum, vulcanized rubber, to name just a few) dramatically increased productivity. But most working people earned far less than five dollars a day. America’s burgeoning income and wealth was concentrated in fewer hands. Consequently, demand couldn’t possibly keep up. Periodic busts ensued. The wholesale price index, which had stood at 193 in 1864, fell to 82 by 1890. Sharp downturns continued to jolt the economy. By the first decades of the twentieth century, the economy had stabilized, but productivity gains continued to outpace most Americans’ earnings. The rich, meanwhile, used their increasing fortunes to speculate— making the economy more susceptible to cycles of boom and bust. Eccles saw this pattern eventually culminate in the Great Depression.

“Revocation of, pp. 55—57.” Here Reich described how we drifted away from paying our workers enough to buy what we were trying to sell them.

The real puzzle is why so little was done in response to these forces that were conferring an increasing share of economic growth on a small group at the top and leaving most other Americans behind. With the gains from that growth, the nation could, for example, have expanded our educational system to encompass early-childhood education. It could have lent more support to affordable public universities, and created more job retraining and better and more extensive public transportation.

In addition, the nation could have given employees more bargaining power to get higher wages, especially in industries sheltered from global competition and requiring personal service— big-box retail stores, restaurants and hotel chains, and child and elder care, for instance. We could have enlarged safety nets to compensate for increasing anxieties about job loss: unemployment insurance covering part-time work, wage insurance if pay dropped, transition assistance to move to new jobs in new locations, insurance for entire communities that lose a major employer so they could lure other employers. We could have financed Medicare for all. Regulators could have prohibited big, profitable companies from laying off a large number of workers all at once and required them to pay severance—say, a year of wages—to anyone they let go, and train them for new jobs. The minimum wage could have been linked to inflat,ion.

Why did we fail to raise taxes on the rich and fail to cut them for poorer Americans? Why did we fail to attack overseas tax havens by threatening loss of U.S. citizenship to anyone who keeps his money abroad in order to escape U.S. taxes? America could have expanded public investments in research and development, and required any corporation that commercialized such investments to create the resulting new jobs in the United States. And we could have insisted that foreign nations we trade with establish a minimum wage that’s half their median wage. That way, all citizens could share in gains from trade, setting the stage for the creation of a new middle class that in turn could participate more fully in the global economy.

In these and many other ways, government could have enforced the basic bargain. But it did the opposite. Starting in the late 197os, and with increasing fervor over the next three decades, it deregulated and privatized. It increased the cost of public higher education, reduced job training, cut public transportation, and allowed bridges, ports, and highways to corrode. It shredded safety nets—reducing aid to jobless families with children, and restricting those eligible for unemployment insurance so much that by 2007 only 40 percent of the unemployed were covered. It halved the top income tax rate from the range of 70 to 90 percent that prevailed during the Great Prosperity to 25 to 39 percent; allowed many of the nation’s rich to treat their income as capital gains subject to no more than 15 percent tax; and shrank inheritance taxes that affected only the topmost 1.5 percent of earners. Yet at the same time, America boosted sales and payroll taxes, both of which took a bigger chunk out of the pay of the middle class and the poor than of those who were well-off.

We allowed companies to break the basic bargain with impunity—slashing jobs and wages, cutting benefits, and shifting risks to employees, from you-can-count-on-it pensions to do-it- yourself 4o1(k)s, from good health coverage to soaring premiums and deductibles. Companies were allowed to bust unions and threaten employees who tried to organize (by 2010, fewer than 8 percent of private-sector workers were unionized). We stood by as big American companies became global companies with no more loyalty or connection to the United States than a GPS device. By 2009, Intel, Caterpillar, Microsoft, IBM, and a raft of other so-called American firms derived most of their revenues from outside the United States, and were hiring like mad abroad.

And nothing impeded CEO salaries from skyrocketing to more than three hundred times that of the typical worker (up from thirty times during the Great Prosperity), while the pay of financial executives and traders rose into the stratosphere. Increasingly, the ranks of America’s super-rich were made up of top business and financial executives. More than half of all the money that the top one-tenth of i percent of American earners reported on their 2001 taxes represented the combined incomes of the top five executives at the five hundred largest American companies. Almost all the rest were financial traders and hedge-fund managers.

Significantly, Washington deregulated Wall Street while insuring it against major losses. In so doing it turned finance—which until then had been the servant of American industry—into its master, demanding short-term profits over long-term growth, and raking in an ever-larger portion of the nation’s profits. Between 1997 and 2007, finance became the fastest-growing part of the U.S. economy. The gains reaped by financial executives, traders, and specialists represented almost two-thirds of the growth in the gross national product. By 2007, financial and insurance companies accounted for more than 40 percent of American corporate profits and almost as great a percentage of pay, up from 10% percent during the Great Prosperity. Before and after the bubble burst, the biggest Wall Street banks awarded tens of billions of dollars in bonuses. In 2009, the twenty-five best- paid hedge-fund managers together earned $25billion, an average of $i billion each. Henry Ford’s legacy was a company that no longer made its money exclusively from selling cars; in 2007, Ford’s financial division accounted for more than a third of the company’s earnings.

As the financial economy took over the real economy, Treasury and Fed officials grew in importance. The expectations of bond traders dominated public policy. And the stock market became the measure of the economy’s success—just as it had before the Great Depression.

Why did the pendulum swing back? Why didn’t America counteract the market forces that were shrinking the middle class’s share of the American pie? Answers to these questions offer clues about when and how the pendulum will swing in the other direction.

“Strategies for restoring, pp. 128—140.” This is Reich’s “here’s what ought to be done” section. This is where many authors with elegant and impassioned critiques fall entirely apart. Not Reich. I’ll hyperlink the whole chapter, just in case you are interested, but I’ll print here the nine things he thinks we should do. Here they are.

1. A reverse income tax.

The most immediate way to reestablish shared prosperity is through a “reverse income tax” that supplements the wages of the middle class.

2. A carbon tax.

We should tax fossil fuels (coal, oil, and gas), based on how many tons of carbon dioxide such fuels contain.

3. Higher marginal tax rates on the wealthy.

In a nation facing a widening chasm between the very rich and everyone else, it is not unreasonable to expect those at the top to pay a higher tax on their incomes, from whatever source (wages, salaries, or capital gains).

4. A reemployment system rather than an unemployment system.

The old unemployment insurance system was designed to tide people over until they got their jobs back at the end of a downturn.
5. School vouchers based on family income.

Over the longer term, the best way to boost the earnings of Americans in the bottom half is to improve their education and skills. To that end, spending on public schools should be replaced by vouchers in amounts inversely related to family income that families can cash in at any school meeting certain minimum standards

6. College loans linked to subsequent earnings.

A large and growing percentage of college students from lower- and middle-income families must finance their education with student loans.

7. Medicare for all.

The passage of health care legislation in 2010 represents only the first step toward reform. The next stage should be Medicare for all.

8. Public goods.

There should be a sizable increase in public goods such as public transportation, public parks and recreational facilities, and public museums and libraries.

9. Money out of politics.

Finally, and not least, we are all painfully aware of the failures of our democracy. As inequality has widened, money flowing from large corporations, Wall Street, and their executives and traders has increasingly distorted political decision making

So there you are. I'm back. Reich's last word was "making" in the above paragraph. In considerably less time than it took me, you have marched into the house, snagged the trophy from the mantle, and have headed back home for a well-earned beer.

Too Much Month Left at the End of the Money

Sound familiar? Here is a comment that evokes just those feelings in me and did in my Political Psychology class as well. It shouldn't have, but it did.

Here's Robert Reich in his new book, Aftershock.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, assessing what had happened to the United States in the years leading up to the Great Recession, repeated the conventional view that "for too long, Americans were buying too much and saving too little." He went on to say that this was "no longer an option for us or for the rest of the world. And already in the united States you can see the first signs of an important transformation here as Americans save more and we borrow substantially less from the rest of the world." He called for a "rebalanced" global economy in which Americans consume less and China consumes more.

Geithner was correct about the transformation. But he misstated the underlying problem, of which the Great Recession was a symptom. The problem was not that Americans spent beyond their means but that their means had not kept up with what the larger economy could and should have been able toprovide them.

I highlighted the "hard to swallow" part. I simply could not get myself to take it seriously.
Reich goes on to say--this is the remainder of that paragraph:

The American economy had been growing briskly, and America's middle class naturally expected to share in that growth. But it didn't. A larger and larger portion of the economy's winnings had gone to people at the top.

I look at Reich's point at it characterizes the economy as a whole. The output of the economy has been redirected so that more has gone to the most wealthy and less to everyone else. I knew that. The economic inequality of our society is now at its highest levels since--a chilling date in this context--1928. I knew that. We can not expect to sustain aggregate demand without paying American workers enough money to allow them to buy things. I knew that.

But when it comes right down to it, you have to say that there is too much month left at the end of the money, and I just can't get myself to take that seriously. All my life, the only people who were characterized that way were ridiculed. Women especially. The family income just doesn't seem to keep up with the way I am spending. Oh dear! I guess we need more income.

In the macroeconomy, the situation is entirely different but my ears hear it the same way. The emotional revulsion I feel comes whether I understand it to be appropriate to the national economic picture or not. Thank God you can choose to vote what you think, rather than what you feel.

This is complicated for a lot of people by the fact that a lot of people they trust--members of the media and of Congress--are telling them that they ought to feel just this way--and that they should call this "feeling," thinking. I don't have that particular difficulty. When I hear those people, I say, "Oh...them again." I am not confusing what they call thinking with what I call "feeling." But I still have to fight the feelings.

Two chapters later, Reich tells the oft-told story of Henry Ford who paid workers at his Highland Park, Michigan assembly plant three times what the typical factory employee earned at the time. The Wall Street Journal called it "an economic crime." Ford thought that if he paid his employees enough money that they could afford to buy the Model T they were building, they would buy them and Ford would make a lot of money. Which he did.

It's a well-known story. I feel the sense of it in my body as well as in my mind. I feel it in just the same way I feel the shame of thinking there is too much month left at the end of the money, although the implications for policy go in exactly the opposite direction. What a mess.

Reich says that people bought what they could as long as they could afford it. When they ran out of money, they took on extra jobs. When that didn't do it, they maxed out their credit cards. When that came to its predictable end, they borrowed on the eternally rising value of their homes. Then the housing market crashed. There really isn't anything to do except to do what Henry Ford did. What we call the "economic crises of our time" are only symptoms of our inability to buy what we make.

I really hope I don't enjoy my disparagement of overspenders so much that I can't really feel the truth Reich is preaching. I can think it now, but I really believe that until we can feel it, it won't do us any good.

The Angel Gabriel and Gender Equity

Every year, Christmas means less to me and Advent means more. It’s not as bad as it seems. I have been unable to hold onto my preferred definition of Christmas. The commercial interests have taken it away the same way the creationists took away the Christian symbol of the fish. Christmas is now Santa Claus, “a right jolly old elf,” and his entourage. Advent, on the other hand, is still a religious holiday to me.

You can tell this is a year for studying Luke because Gabriel does not appear in Matthew. He does appear in Luke and he makes me nervous. Let’s consider the question of gender equity. Gabriel appears before Zechariah, the priest, and future father of John the Baptist. Raymond E. Brown, my source for all this,[1] calls him JBap and over the years I have come to like that. Gabriel said to Zechariah, “Your wife, Elizabeth, will bear you a son.” Zechariah replied, “How can I know this? I am old and my wife is getting on in years.”

We see immediately that Zechariah has been a successfully married man for a long time. If we knew no more than that he says he is “old,” but Elizabeth is only “getting on in years,” we would know that he has been married for a long time. What a classy guy! But Gabriel is not amused. “Since you did not believe my words…you will be silenced…until this has happened.” Gabriel is deeply offended, apparently. No reason, I suppose why an old man can’t impregnate the elderly and nulliparous old woman he has disappointed all these years. Still, this is God’s messenger and Zechariah really ought to have kept his incredulity to himself. And so, we would think, should Mary.


Gabriel continues on his rounds and stops next at the home of Mary’s parents, in Nazareth, which is where they live in the Lucan account. Gabriel says, “You are to conceive in your womb and bear a son.” Mary says, “How can this come about since I have no knowledge of man?”[2] Now to the casual observer, Zechariah’s response and Mary’s response are substantially similar. But Gabriel’s response to the two is not similar at all. Zechariah gets to be deaf and mute. Mary gets a son who “will rule over the House of Jacob forever.”


Being a little playful in the title, I raised the question of gender equity. But even without being playful, there is the question is what Zechariah did wrong that Mary did not do wrong. And if they did the same thing wrong, why was only one punished?

This post is not an attempt to answer that question. It is, rather, an attempt to say why it is not a very good question. It is based on a naïve view of how the scripture is to be read and understood. I will also suggest another way to understand it—following Brown—which gives a great deal of clarity about Luke, as a writer but not much at all about Gabriel, Zechariah, and Mary. I find it very satisfying intellectually but at the end, I remain just a little wistful that the question I began asking of this passage when I was a boy, is not really going to get answered.

The new question, a question much better adapted to the text and the Luke’s choices as the teller of this story, is this: Why did Luke handle the Zechariah story one way and the Mary story another way? The short answer is that these episodes are set in different backgrounds stories—Zechariah in Daniel and Mary in I Samuel. Luke tweaked each of them so he could both tell his story and evoke the echoes of other more familiar stories.

Luke is using the appearance of Gabriel to Daniel as the template for the appearance to Zechariah. The list of commonalities between the two is formidable. Both are called “visions;” Gabriel appears in both at the time of liturgical prayer; the visionary in both has offered a prayer in distress; both react to Gabriel with fear; and the visionary, in both cases, is struck mute. “By these echoes,” says Brown, “Luke is giving a new application to a common Christian reflection in which such Gospel motifs as the Son of Man and the Kingdom of God were related to Daniel 7:12—14.”

If we begin with Luke as the artist, this explanation accounts for why Zechariah was made mute. It is because Daniel was made mute and Luke wants his hearers to notice the background and feel some of the weight it gives to the gospel.

And the explanation for Gabriel’s response to Mary? The same, in a way. Luke builds the annunciation to Mary on Hannah’s canticle in I Samuel 2. Hannah prayed to God “in the bitterness of her soul.” Thereafter, she bore a son to her husband, Elkanah, and dedicated the son to temple service, as she had promised she would. Hannah’s prayer of thanksgiving is a long one (see verses 1—10.), but even the beginning strikes students of Jesus’ life as familiar.

My heart exults in Yahweh
In my God is my strength
lifted up
My mouth derides my foes
For I rejoice in your deliverance

And there are six more stanzas like that, all of which serve as a canvas on which Luke can paint the Magnificat. So Mary was not rebuked because Hannah was not rebuked and Luke wants the hearers of the Magnificat to hear it as an echo of Hannah’s song.

I think that is a very satisfying solution to the reason Zechariah put himself in harm’s way by asking the same question Mary asked safely. It begins with a much better question than the one that troubled me as a boy and to this new question, there is a good answer. Luke is placing his new material within old and meaningful traditions.

[1] Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in Matthew and Luke. New York: Doubleday, 1977.
[2] This is a shame, because men aren’t really that complicated. Patrick Jayne, on an episode of The Mentalist, compared men (in their relative complexity) to toasters. It’s almost easier to see Mary with Zechariah than with Joseph, particularly since Joseph doesn’t have a single line of dialogue in Luke’s account.