I am going to be pretty generous to hypocrisy and hypocrites in this post, so the rhythm that I hear as I begin comes from Tom Lehrer's song, "Smut." He introduces the song by saying something like, "The next topic I want to treat this evening is smut. I'm for it." So..."hypocrisy: I'm for it"
As a general matter, hypocrisy is pretending that you are better than you are. That doesn't seem so bad. I have probably had more recent experience with dating than any other old man you know, so let me tell you that dating involves all the effort necessary to appear better than you are. You need to look interested when you are not, for instance, and exchange the normal social compliments because ignoring those social requirements would be rude. I know that isn't really what people mean when they use hypocrisy, but really, how is it different?
Most rationalization involves putting a more positive construction on your actions than impartial analysis would grant. A generally mediocre effort at something is modified by "I did what I could" and "it wasn't really my responsibility" and even "you know, sometimes these things just happen." None of those highlight the careless job you did. All of them make you look better than you really are. Are these really hypocrisy?
Most of the charges of hypocrisy I hear have to do with religion and politics. Religious people try to make themselves seem more religious than they are. Of course, what "religious" means will vary by the religion. Even within Christianity, you want to seem more outraged by an event than your really are in a social action church, more profoundly spiritual in a pietist church, and engaging in more daring forms of "outreach," in an evangelistic church.
Politicians are supposed to have the public good in mind and if they seem not to have the public good in mind, they will lose their next election. But if they actually have the public good too much in mind, they will be disciplined by party leaders in Congress who like the public good, but demand party loyalty; or by the lobbyists who will finance their campaigns, but only if the public good leans significantly toward their own private good; or by the voters of the district, who love the public good, but really need increased defense spending in the district for the jobs it will bring. So...in presenting himself or herself as one who is interested in "the public good," is this representative engaging in hypocrisy? I don't see why not.
The hypocrites we like best are those whose hypocrisy is so flagrant it doesn't raise these more subtle questions. We like a moralistic governor who pushes laws against human trafficking and then gets caught in them. We like senators who are prominently anti-gay, but are gay themselves and get caught at it by their constituents. We like conservative praisers of "the family" whose own families are catastrophically bad.
But treating hypocrisy the way we do is really cherry picking. We say we oppose hypocrisy, when we oppose only the forms of it we can afford to oppose. It hardly seems worth our time. It might be easier just to say that by and large, hypocrisy helps people seem better than they are and most of the time, we are better off because of it.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Obama's Waterloo
Waterloo. Munich. Katrina. 9/11.
There's no chance, I suppose, that this Obama moment has actually never happened before and that the analogies we use are so crude that they are of little use or so ideologically loaded that they blow up in your hands.
Maybe it's all about power. Or maybe about comfort. Or maybe about competence. We just don't like the feeling that we don't know what is going on or what will happen as a result. To call an action President Obama takes his "Munich" is not to explore the meaning of the action, but to damn it by historical analogy. If the use of analogies is supposed to give us the sense that we understand what is going on, I suppose there is no getting away from them. The sense that we understand what is going on is much prized.
That means that my first proposal for defusing the use of historical analogies won't help us much. I was going to say that choosing an obscure battle in an obscure war as the crucial analogy might work. The long version would be "The meaning of this event is like the meaning of the Battle of Gloenkloof for the Boers." The everyday form would be, "This is Obama's Gloenkloof."
I admit there are a lot of battles to choose from, battles that only historians specializing in that period would have heard of, but I like this one because I like saying Gloenkloof. Try it yourself. Don't hold back.
My second proposal is to choose a historical analogy that goes in the direction you want it to go (criterion 1) and that has enough historical similarity to keep it from being dismissed out of hand (criterion 2).
It is the Gulf oil crisis that is generating the most demand for historical analogies at the moment. The least imaginative one I have heard is that "BP-gate" is "Obama's Katrina." OK. The President needs to be careful not to say "Hell of a job, Brownie" or to have his picture taken in a flyover at 10,000 feet. But what else does it offer?
Thomas Friedman, who thinks the administration should never let a crisis go to waste and who follows that advice as a columnist, wants to call it Obama's 9/11. Certainly there is some point in that. Friedman wants Obama to base on this event a huge and broadly supported reform agenda against oil dependency. Not a "war on oil" but a "crusade for independence." Nice idea, but President Bush didn't have to face down a huge pro-terrorist corps of lobbyists to get the PATRIOT Act passed.
It will not surprise you that I have an analogy in mind myself. I choose the Iran hostage crisis of 1979. President Carter's commitment to getting the hostages back safely meant that he could not plan a "rescue" that would get them all killed. (He did get them all back, by the way, and is still proud of that.) That means he was limited to the public display of the powerlessness of his office--to his own powerlessness.
It turns out that is unacceptable. For all that our schoolchildren learn about "co-equal branches" and "checks and balances" and all that, when we get into really distressing circumstances, we want HIM to "do something about it." We don't care all that much what. What we know is that we have a right not to be afraid and that it is the President's job to keep us from being afraid. Or discouraged.
From the standpoint of political psychology, this is the principal function of the presidency. It is the service most prized by the people. It is the failure they find least forgivable. The voters shrugged, more or less, at President Clinton's dalliance with Monica Lewinsky and they kept on shrugging as more and more titillating versions were marketed. Clinton's bad judgment adjacent to the Oval Office didn't make them feel fearful.
But Obama holds the most powerful office in the world. An oil disaster of unprecedented scale is upon us. And the President is doing....what? He's visiting the Gulf coast for photo ops. He's making speeches. He even lapsed into an uncharacteristic vulgarity, hoping to show how upset he is about all this. Nothing works. BP has or has access to the best petro-disaster experts in the world. They are doing everything they can, now that we have a disaster to work with. These are the people Obama would hire if he took control of the crisis away from BP and ran the capping and diversion operations from Washington D. C.
There's really nothing he can do. It's his hostage crisis and he's the hostage. He is failing in the most basic popular demand that he do whatever is necessary to "fix things" or pay the consequences at the polls. His helplessness can't be spun. It can't be replaced by any story over which the President has personal control. It's like being put in the stocks, for the derision of passers-by.
So that's my choice analogy. It doesn't offer any advice, but it gives some direction to hand-wringers.
There's no chance, I suppose, that this Obama moment has actually never happened before and that the analogies we use are so crude that they are of little use or so ideologically loaded that they blow up in your hands.
Maybe it's all about power. Or maybe about comfort. Or maybe about competence. We just don't like the feeling that we don't know what is going on or what will happen as a result. To call an action President Obama takes his "Munich" is not to explore the meaning of the action, but to damn it by historical analogy. If the use of analogies is supposed to give us the sense that we understand what is going on, I suppose there is no getting away from them. The sense that we understand what is going on is much prized.
That means that my first proposal for defusing the use of historical analogies won't help us much. I was going to say that choosing an obscure battle in an obscure war as the crucial analogy might work. The long version would be "The meaning of this event is like the meaning of the Battle of Gloenkloof for the Boers." The everyday form would be, "This is Obama's Gloenkloof."
I admit there are a lot of battles to choose from, battles that only historians specializing in that period would have heard of, but I like this one because I like saying Gloenkloof. Try it yourself. Don't hold back.
My second proposal is to choose a historical analogy that goes in the direction you want it to go (criterion 1) and that has enough historical similarity to keep it from being dismissed out of hand (criterion 2).
It is the Gulf oil crisis that is generating the most demand for historical analogies at the moment. The least imaginative one I have heard is that "BP-gate" is "Obama's Katrina." OK. The President needs to be careful not to say "Hell of a job, Brownie" or to have his picture taken in a flyover at 10,000 feet. But what else does it offer?
Thomas Friedman, who thinks the administration should never let a crisis go to waste and who follows that advice as a columnist, wants to call it Obama's 9/11. Certainly there is some point in that. Friedman wants Obama to base on this event a huge and broadly supported reform agenda against oil dependency. Not a "war on oil" but a "crusade for independence." Nice idea, but President Bush didn't have to face down a huge pro-terrorist corps of lobbyists to get the PATRIOT Act passed.
It will not surprise you that I have an analogy in mind myself. I choose the Iran hostage crisis of 1979. President Carter's commitment to getting the hostages back safely meant that he could not plan a "rescue" that would get them all killed. (He did get them all back, by the way, and is still proud of that.) That means he was limited to the public display of the powerlessness of his office--to his own powerlessness.
It turns out that is unacceptable. For all that our schoolchildren learn about "co-equal branches" and "checks and balances" and all that, when we get into really distressing circumstances, we want HIM to "do something about it." We don't care all that much what. What we know is that we have a right not to be afraid and that it is the President's job to keep us from being afraid. Or discouraged.
From the standpoint of political psychology, this is the principal function of the presidency. It is the service most prized by the people. It is the failure they find least forgivable. The voters shrugged, more or less, at President Clinton's dalliance with Monica Lewinsky and they kept on shrugging as more and more titillating versions were marketed. Clinton's bad judgment adjacent to the Oval Office didn't make them feel fearful.
But Obama holds the most powerful office in the world. An oil disaster of unprecedented scale is upon us. And the President is doing....what? He's visiting the Gulf coast for photo ops. He's making speeches. He even lapsed into an uncharacteristic vulgarity, hoping to show how upset he is about all this. Nothing works. BP has or has access to the best petro-disaster experts in the world. They are doing everything they can, now that we have a disaster to work with. These are the people Obama would hire if he took control of the crisis away from BP and ran the capping and diversion operations from Washington D. C.
There's really nothing he can do. It's his hostage crisis and he's the hostage. He is failing in the most basic popular demand that he do whatever is necessary to "fix things" or pay the consequences at the polls. His helplessness can't be spun. It can't be replaced by any story over which the President has personal control. It's like being put in the stocks, for the derision of passers-by.
So that's my choice analogy. It doesn't offer any advice, but it gives some direction to hand-wringers.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Going to sleep
I'm not thinking of this as a metaphor for anything. Getting to sleep is a really interesting theoretical problem for me and a very practical problem as well. Anyone who can clarify the theory or share things that worked for you is encouraged to jump in.
The theoretical problem is that I so associate effort with success. You formulate a goal and you collect the resources and build whatever networks are necessary and you act so as to achieve the goal and monitor progress and take whatever modified paths are indicated. And all that. It's just a style, really. But just describing it shows how poorly adapted it is to getting to sleep.
All of you, probably, have had trouble falling asleep or staying asleep. You know how unhelpful "trying really hard to get to sleep" is. For one thing, since you are trying so hard, you are also monitoring. "Am I sleepier now? Am I closer to the goal?" And if there is some reason why you really really need a good night's sleep on a particular night, then the cost of not getting the sleep would be high. So to the monitoring, you add the anticipatory anxiety. "Oh, no! I'll doze off during the job interview! I'll go to sleep on that long stretch of driving!"
So here's what I'm trying now and have been for the last few years. I minimize the consequences; I experience the breathing; I count. It works as well as it works. I'm still thinking about it.
The first one is a little bit of sleight of hand. I try to focus on "resting" rather than "sleeping." I think there really is something to it. I have (rarely) had the experience of resting peacefully for most of a night and actually sleeping very little and feeling rested the next day. So, experientially, it isn't really nonsense. On the other hand, composing myself to rest is something I can do if I am clear about it and don't make it stressful. Going to sleep because I really want to is beyond me.
Counting makes it all seem doable to me. I breathe to the count of sixteen, for reasons that are deeply idiosyncratic and probably beside the point. Part of that is just having a number. I know I can count to sixteen, giving the number on the exhalation. If I lose track within one of the fours, I have to go back to the beginning that that four. One night it took me nearly an hour to breath with conscious awareness from five to eight. But many more times, I get up somewhere between eight and twelve and drift off.
Another part of the counting gimmick is I can say something like, "I'll do this twice, and if I'm not making any progress, I'll get up and read. Then' I'll come back and try it again." That's a little bit of sleight of hand too, I think. When I'm trying to count and breathe and relax, the question comes, "What if it doesn't work?" The approach I described says, essentially, "It's not that big a deal. If it doesn't work, you go read a little and come back and try again." Making it "not a big deal," of course, makes me less anxious and sleep more likely.
I've made the breathing the most intricate part of the whole process. How I wish there were words for the feelings in inhaling and exhaling! I feel very constricted, sometimes, when I begin. It is as if the expansion of the lungs was pushing against a wall, like trying to blow up a balloon inside a box. Even in that case, there are different feelings that go with the different stages of inhaling. But when I am more relaxed and my lungs expand freely and then settle back gratefully to rest, there are many more stages.
I've never tried to describe this before. It's starting to sound a little weird to me On the best nights, though, I treat those feelings more as if they are what I want to experience. I like the feelings themselves. They are not just as markers on a journey that matters only when you get to the destination. They are not purely instrumental, in other words.
And finally, the numbers. Breaking the sixteen into fours has helped me associate different feelings with each number. The fact that the end of the long exhalation at two is halfway to four, when I declare a mini-victory, means that the end of two feels like something in particular. And it feels that way night to night because it is an artifact of the counting, not of the breathing. Thirteen is the first breath on the very last phase. In any case, each number is coming to have a "feel" associated with it and the more that is true in my experience, the more something else matters to me apart from just "getting to sleep"...and...the more likely I am to get to sleep.
Or to rest well.
Does any of this sound familiar?
The theoretical problem is that I so associate effort with success. You formulate a goal and you collect the resources and build whatever networks are necessary and you act so as to achieve the goal and monitor progress and take whatever modified paths are indicated. And all that. It's just a style, really. But just describing it shows how poorly adapted it is to getting to sleep.
All of you, probably, have had trouble falling asleep or staying asleep. You know how unhelpful "trying really hard to get to sleep" is. For one thing, since you are trying so hard, you are also monitoring. "Am I sleepier now? Am I closer to the goal?" And if there is some reason why you really really need a good night's sleep on a particular night, then the cost of not getting the sleep would be high. So to the monitoring, you add the anticipatory anxiety. "Oh, no! I'll doze off during the job interview! I'll go to sleep on that long stretch of driving!"
So here's what I'm trying now and have been for the last few years. I minimize the consequences; I experience the breathing; I count. It works as well as it works. I'm still thinking about it.
The first one is a little bit of sleight of hand. I try to focus on "resting" rather than "sleeping." I think there really is something to it. I have (rarely) had the experience of resting peacefully for most of a night and actually sleeping very little and feeling rested the next day. So, experientially, it isn't really nonsense. On the other hand, composing myself to rest is something I can do if I am clear about it and don't make it stressful. Going to sleep because I really want to is beyond me.
Counting makes it all seem doable to me. I breathe to the count of sixteen, for reasons that are deeply idiosyncratic and probably beside the point. Part of that is just having a number. I know I can count to sixteen, giving the number on the exhalation. If I lose track within one of the fours, I have to go back to the beginning that that four. One night it took me nearly an hour to breath with conscious awareness from five to eight. But many more times, I get up somewhere between eight and twelve and drift off.
Another part of the counting gimmick is I can say something like, "I'll do this twice, and if I'm not making any progress, I'll get up and read. Then' I'll come back and try it again." That's a little bit of sleight of hand too, I think. When I'm trying to count and breathe and relax, the question comes, "What if it doesn't work?" The approach I described says, essentially, "It's not that big a deal. If it doesn't work, you go read a little and come back and try again." Making it "not a big deal," of course, makes me less anxious and sleep more likely.
I've made the breathing the most intricate part of the whole process. How I wish there were words for the feelings in inhaling and exhaling! I feel very constricted, sometimes, when I begin. It is as if the expansion of the lungs was pushing against a wall, like trying to blow up a balloon inside a box. Even in that case, there are different feelings that go with the different stages of inhaling. But when I am more relaxed and my lungs expand freely and then settle back gratefully to rest, there are many more stages.
I've never tried to describe this before. It's starting to sound a little weird to me On the best nights, though, I treat those feelings more as if they are what I want to experience. I like the feelings themselves. They are not just as markers on a journey that matters only when you get to the destination. They are not purely instrumental, in other words.
And finally, the numbers. Breaking the sixteen into fours has helped me associate different feelings with each number. The fact that the end of the long exhalation at two is halfway to four, when I declare a mini-victory, means that the end of two feels like something in particular. And it feels that way night to night because it is an artifact of the counting, not of the breathing. Thirteen is the first breath on the very last phase. In any case, each number is coming to have a "feel" associated with it and the more that is true in my experience, the more something else matters to me apart from just "getting to sleep"...and...the more likely I am to get to sleep.
Or to rest well.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Friday, June 25, 2010
Reading Deep: It's not always the right thing to do
I began this blog with a reflection on reading deep as a way I have learned to approach a text (sometimes). But having spent a fair amount of time in grad schools as well, I know how to look at a book or article, decide what its structure is and then blow through it efficiently. The reminder that comes with this story is that “efficiently” isn’t always the right value and it doesn’t always relate just to the text.
Very soon after I met Bette, she showed me a book she was interest in. It was Gary Chapman’s The Five Love Languages. It didn’t look like too tough a book to me, so I asked to see it. I looked at the structure and saw that his one idea was contained in the first chapter (there are “five languages of love” and that he dealt with those languages at a rate of one per chapter. So I spent a few minutes, my new lady friend of only a few weeks was looking over my shoulder, and got the ideas in Chapter 1. Then I turned the pages over as fast as I comfortably could. just verifying that they said what I was pretty sure they were going to say. They did.
So I sat back and expounded to Bette what was in this book. She was impressed, but she wasn’t pleased. It took me a day or so to figure out why. I had treated lightly a book that was about something that mattered to her. I didn’t even notice. I was busy showing off.
Then I did something I am still proud of. I asked to borrow the book for a few days and I gave it a really thorough reading. We still use that book, although I think it means more to me than it does to Bette. The way Chapman defines “languages” is a little soft; almost arbitrary. But
the point he has in mind is that if you are trying to communicate to your wife, it is probably a good idea to use the language she understands best.
This is Bette in front of her favorite bookstore in The Dalles, Oregon, by the way.
To tell you the truth, I’d be more likely to choose the language I was most fluent in. Wouldn’t you? The five are: 1) words of affirmation, 2) quality time, 3) receiving gifts, 4) acts of service, and 5) physical touch. “Words of affirmation’ comes easiest to me and it is my own favorite—it is the language I always hear best. “Acts of service” is Bette’s favorite. I was very very surprised. But the fact is, when I want to tell her how important to me she is and how very much I cherish her, “doing things for her” is the way I can say that so that she will hear it best.
In Chapman’s five chapters of explication, there is not a single surprising episode. but if you read them all, carefully, you will have acquired a lot of little clues about how best to say the things that matter most.
I still like efficient reading. But if I had to choose between that and emphasizing a valuable and affirming common interest between my wife and me…I think efficiency can find its own way home.
Very soon after I met Bette, she showed me a book she was interest in. It was Gary Chapman’s The Five Love Languages. It didn’t look like too tough a book to me, so I asked to see it. I looked at the structure and saw that his one idea was contained in the first chapter (there are “five languages of love” and that he dealt with those languages at a rate of one per chapter. So I spent a few minutes, my new lady friend of only a few weeks was looking over my shoulder, and got the ideas in Chapter 1. Then I turned the pages over as fast as I comfortably could. just verifying that they said what I was pretty sure they were going to say. They did.
So I sat back and expounded to Bette what was in this book. She was impressed, but she wasn’t pleased. It took me a day or so to figure out why. I had treated lightly a book that was about something that mattered to her. I didn’t even notice. I was busy showing off.
Then I did something I am still proud of. I asked to borrow the book for a few days and I gave it a really thorough reading. We still use that book, although I think it means more to me than it does to Bette. The way Chapman defines “languages” is a little soft; almost arbitrary. But
the point he has in mind is that if you are trying to communicate to your wife, it is probably a good idea to use the language she understands best.This is Bette in front of her favorite bookstore in The Dalles, Oregon, by the way.
To tell you the truth, I’d be more likely to choose the language I was most fluent in. Wouldn’t you? The five are: 1) words of affirmation, 2) quality time, 3) receiving gifts, 4) acts of service, and 5) physical touch. “Words of affirmation’ comes easiest to me and it is my own favorite—it is the language I always hear best. “Acts of service” is Bette’s favorite. I was very very surprised. But the fact is, when I want to tell her how important to me she is and how very much I cherish her, “doing things for her” is the way I can say that so that she will hear it best.
In Chapman’s five chapters of explication, there is not a single surprising episode. but if you read them all, carefully, you will have acquired a lot of little clues about how best to say the things that matter most.
I still like efficient reading. But if I had to choose between that and emphasizing a valuable and affirming common interest between my wife and me…I think efficiency can find its own way home.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
A Nice Dilemma We Have Here
I began to be attracted to dilemma when I was an undergraduate at Wheaton and got to sing as part of the jury in a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's Trial By Jury. "A nice dilemma we have here," sing the principals, "which calls for all our wit." It was mostly a nostalgic memory for me. Then, in 1974, Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was published. It contained some very practical advice for people facing dilemmas.
"What Phaedrus had been presented with by the faculty of the English Department of Montana State College was an ancient logical construct known as a dilemma. A dilemma, which is Greek for "two premises," has been likened to the front end of an angry and charging bull.
If he accepted the premise that Quality was objective, he was impaled on one horn of the dilemma. If he accepted the other premise, that Quality was subjective, he was impaled on the other horn. Either Quality is objective or subjective, therefore he was impaled no matter how he answered.
Phaedrus, however, because of his training in logic, was aware that every dilemma affords not two but three classic refutations, and he also knew of a few that weren't so classic, so he smiled back. He could take the left horn and refute the idea that objectivity implied scientific detectability. Or, he could take the right horn, and refute the idea that subjectivity implies "anything you like." Or he could go between the horns and deny that subjectivity and objectivity are the only choices. You may be sure he tested out all three. In addition to these three classical logical refutations there are some illogical, "rhetorical" ones. Phaedrus, being a rhetorician, had these available too.
One may throw sand in the bull’s eyes. He had already done this with his statement that lack of knowledge of what Quality is constitutes incompetence.
One may attempt to sing the bull to sleep. Phaedrus could have told his questioners that the answer to this dilemma was beyond his humble powers of solution, but the fact that he couldn't find an answer was no logical proof that an answer couldn't be found.
A third rhetorical alternative to the dilemma, and the best one in my opinion, was to refuse to enter the arena. Phaedrus could simply have said, "The attempt to classify Quality as subjective or objective is an attempt to define it. I have already said it is undefinable," and left it at that."
I had just finished writing my dissertation at the time and was still very much attracted to the idea that you didn't always have to choose the horn on the left or the horn on the right. It also struck me for the first time when I read this passage that lemma meant something. Whoodathunkit?
So what kind of dilemma does a dilettante have? Since dilettante is defined, etymologically, as I do it, by what the person delights in, it doesn't sound too bad. Still, just as there are events you attend to on the basis of skills you attend from--more about both terms in a moment--there is the dilemma of what to pay attention to. If these are not the "horns" of a dilemma, they are...oh...the cushions.
I am hoping only to introduce in this post how it is that a dilettante would necessarily have dilemmas, so I will touch these two ideas, illustrate each, and send the post on its way. I think of "attending from" and "attending to" as a physical matter and as a cognitive matter. For those who are interested in the ideas themselves, the best short account is probably Michael Polanyi's marvellous little book, The Tacit Dimension.
Physically, I take all the infrastructure of hitting a baseball for granted so that I can attend to the ball itself. I attend FROM my stance in the box and my grip on the bat and the weight of the bat, et cetera, TO the ball. The dilemma is that you can't attend to both. Nothing works then. You have to attend TO the one FROM the other. And all is well if the infrastructure is stable and effective. It it isn't, you have to pay attention to it. Is my stance too wide? But then you are attending TO something you really need to be attending FROM if you are actually going to hit the ball. Batting slumps and other disasters ensue.
Cognitively, I assume certain things so I can attend to others. I assume that the behavior of public actors of all sorts, politicians for instance, is self-interested. To be fair, "self-interest" is a good thing and it may be minimal, as in staving off electoral disaster, or maximal, as in milking every situation for its maximum benefit to ME. Attending FROM this assumption, this lemma, I can observe acutely and accurately, the behavior of whatever public actors interest me. Should I be forced to doubt my assumption, to attend TO it--maybe there are kinds of instances or kinds of persons where this lemma does not hold-- rather than FROM it, the whole regime of observations goes awry and I fall into an "inference slump," which is like the batting slump, but harder to find and fix.
Even people like me who are spontaneously attracted to the delights of his own life face this dilemma. If you take real satisfaction in understanding what you are doing--that has been a prominent part of my life since the age of four--you have a source of satisfaction that is rich and extensive. But if you take pleasure in the events themselves, in the experience of them as opposed to the understanding of them, you find yourself facing the attending TO v. attending FROM dilemma.
I really suspect that my life would be richest and most satisfying if I attended sometimes TO and sometimes FROM, but that mealy-mouthed bit of advice is useful only if you know which is which, or rather when is when, and I confess that I do not. At least, I don't all the time.
A nice dilemma I have here.
"What Phaedrus had been presented with by the faculty of the English Department of Montana State College was an ancient logical construct known as a dilemma. A dilemma, which is Greek for "two premises," has been likened to the front end of an angry and charging bull.
If he accepted the premise that Quality was objective, he was impaled on one horn of the dilemma. If he accepted the other premise, that Quality was subjective, he was impaled on the other horn. Either Quality is objective or subjective, therefore he was impaled no matter how he answered.
Phaedrus, however, because of his training in logic, was aware that every dilemma affords not two but three classic refutations, and he also knew of a few that weren't so classic, so he smiled back. He could take the left horn and refute the idea that objectivity implied scientific detectability. Or, he could take the right horn, and refute the idea that subjectivity implies "anything you like." Or he could go between the horns and deny that subjectivity and objectivity are the only choices. You may be sure he tested out all three. In addition to these three classical logical refutations there are some illogical, "rhetorical" ones. Phaedrus, being a rhetorician, had these available too.
One may throw sand in the bull’s eyes. He had already done this with his statement that lack of knowledge of what Quality is constitutes incompetence.
One may attempt to sing the bull to sleep. Phaedrus could have told his questioners that the answer to this dilemma was beyond his humble powers of solution, but the fact that he couldn't find an answer was no logical proof that an answer couldn't be found.
A third rhetorical alternative to the dilemma, and the best one in my opinion, was to refuse to enter the arena. Phaedrus could simply have said, "The attempt to classify Quality as subjective or objective is an attempt to define it. I have already said it is undefinable," and left it at that."
I had just finished writing my dissertation at the time and was still very much attracted to the idea that you didn't always have to choose the horn on the left or the horn on the right. It also struck me for the first time when I read this passage that lemma meant something. Whoodathunkit?
So what kind of dilemma does a dilettante have? Since dilettante is defined, etymologically, as I do it, by what the person delights in, it doesn't sound too bad. Still, just as there are events you attend to on the basis of skills you attend from--more about both terms in a moment--there is the dilemma of what to pay attention to. If these are not the "horns" of a dilemma, they are...oh...the cushions.
I am hoping only to introduce in this post how it is that a dilettante would necessarily have dilemmas, so I will touch these two ideas, illustrate each, and send the post on its way. I think of "attending from" and "attending to" as a physical matter and as a cognitive matter. For those who are interested in the ideas themselves, the best short account is probably Michael Polanyi's marvellous little book, The Tacit Dimension.
Physically, I take all the infrastructure of hitting a baseball for granted so that I can attend to the ball itself. I attend FROM my stance in the box and my grip on the bat and the weight of the bat, et cetera, TO the ball. The dilemma is that you can't attend to both. Nothing works then. You have to attend TO the one FROM the other. And all is well if the infrastructure is stable and effective. It it isn't, you have to pay attention to it. Is my stance too wide? But then you are attending TO something you really need to be attending FROM if you are actually going to hit the ball. Batting slumps and other disasters ensue.
Cognitively, I assume certain things so I can attend to others. I assume that the behavior of public actors of all sorts, politicians for instance, is self-interested. To be fair, "self-interest" is a good thing and it may be minimal, as in staving off electoral disaster, or maximal, as in milking every situation for its maximum benefit to ME. Attending FROM this assumption, this lemma, I can observe acutely and accurately, the behavior of whatever public actors interest me. Should I be forced to doubt my assumption, to attend TO it--maybe there are kinds of instances or kinds of persons where this lemma does not hold-- rather than FROM it, the whole regime of observations goes awry and I fall into an "inference slump," which is like the batting slump, but harder to find and fix.
Even people like me who are spontaneously attracted to the delights of his own life face this dilemma. If you take real satisfaction in understanding what you are doing--that has been a prominent part of my life since the age of four--you have a source of satisfaction that is rich and extensive. But if you take pleasure in the events themselves, in the experience of them as opposed to the understanding of them, you find yourself facing the attending TO v. attending FROM dilemma.
I really suspect that my life would be richest and most satisfying if I attended sometimes TO and sometimes FROM, but that mealy-mouthed bit of advice is useful only if you know which is which, or rather when is when, and I confess that I do not. At least, I don't all the time.
A nice dilemma I have here.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
The Framers gave us a West Coast offense
I’ve spent some time today looking over the CBS/New York Times poll and things aren’t looking all that good. I really like reading the detailed poll results. For those who don’t like it so much, here’s a summary. "Things are going the wrong direction and no one has both the ability and the willingness to do anything about it. We’ll do anything to help provided it doesn’t cost anything." There. I just saved you a bunch of time
If you don’t oppose public opinion surveys on principle, here are the results that interest me the most and might interest you. The New York Times provides a hyperlink to the full survey.
Q. Can Congress handle the challenge A. Are you kidding?
Do you approve of the way Congress is handling its job?
Approve 19%, Disapprove 70%
Do you think “most members of Congress” have done a good enough job to deserve re-election or do you think it’s time to give new people a chance?
Deserve 14%. New People 73%
Note: “most members of Congress” will be returned to office as usual.
Q. How about Barack Obama? Nice guy but isn’t up to the challenge.
Plan for creating Jobs, No 55% to Yes 35%
Plan for new energy No 39% to Yes 48%
Plan for oil spill No 64% to Yes 30%
Good job as Pres. Yes 47% to No 43%
Note: Approval rating were in the 60s until June ‘09, in the 50s until January ’10 and in the 40s, with two bumps up into the 50s, since February ’10.
Is Barack Obama a good guy
Qualities of Leadership Yes 62% to No 35%
Cares about people like me Yes 68% to No 31%
Note: I got those by combining cares a lot with cares some and combining not much with not at all. You might say 68% to 31% isn’t bad, but in February of last year it was 83% to 8%.
Q. Maybe the oil companies can to the job. A. They can’t be trusted. Even the feds are better and they aren’t doing what they could be doing.
How much to you trust the oil companies to act in the best interest of the public?
A lot + some =26%, Not much and None at all 74%
Who do you trust to manage this oil spill?
Do you approve of the way BP is handling the oil spill? Yes 13%, No 79%
Are they doing all they could? Yes 15%, No 81%
Obama administration doing all they could? Yes 28%, No 67%
Trust BP or federal government BP 27% Feds 56%
Let’s see. The country’s going the wrong direction say 60% to 32% of the people and no one has a clue what to do about it. The businesses don’t really want to help and the government doesn’t know how. Let’s take one more try.
Q. Are you ready to think big on energy? A. Sure, as long as we don’t have to pay for it.
Does U. S. energy policy need a complete change? Most people, 58% said yes to that. Rebuild a major part of it, 31%; minor changes would be enough 6%, So, compare how important it is to protect the environment v. developing new energy. Environment 29%, New Energy Sources 49%--and, in all fairness—Both 20%.
So how about paying for the development of those new sources by an increased tax on gas? Favor = 45%, Oppose = 51%.
Let’s say a n added dollar of federal tax to support new sources—this would be what columnist Thomas Friedman calls “a patriot tax.” Favor =32%, Oppose = 65%.
Well, how about 50 cents? Favor = 19%, Oppose = 48%
Do you thin that sometime in the next 25 years, the U. S. will develop an alternative to oil. Very likely = 24%, Somewhat likely = 35%, Not too = 17%, Not at all = 9%
And this is just the oil spill. This isn’t regaining American dominance in industry and trade. It isn’t replacing the old industrial era jobs with spiffy new green economy jobs. It isn’t cutting entitlements like Social Security and increasing the public funding of them at the same time. It isn’t controlling the annual deficit, much less beginning to shrink the national debt.
And this guy has been in office a year and a half already! What’s he been doing?
President Obama is not the problem BP is not the problem. Here’s the problem. The Framers , all from the East Coast, built us a government with a West Coast offense in mind. A three step drop and throw the ball on a timing pattern. We still do that pretty well. Conservatives probe weaknesses in the left side of the defense; liberals do the same on the right side. You can make small gains that way.
But controlling entitlement spending and reinvigorating the economy and replacing our tattered infrastructure aren’t things you can do with a three step drop. If you are willing to see the time the public gives its chosen leaders to solve its chosen problems as the same as the time a quarterback has to get rid of the ball, you can see why the Framers were such fans of the West Coast offense. They were pretty sure that no one, maybe George Washington, would have an offensive line that would allow him to look down the field and hit the big one. Controlling federal spending is a big one. It will take a politically insulated non-partisan commission with the power to hurt people or a bipartisan commission that neither party can withdraw from and which has the power to hurt people.
Either of those could hold off the pass rush long enough for a gifted quarterback to score a lot of points. Neither is remotely likely in the present partisan environment where there are no long term allies and all the leaders are predators of opportunity.
So we are committed to dinking and dunking, as they call it. We can make some first downs that way, but we can’t score the points we need and the clock is winding down. We look at the clock and we see that we need some big plays. Then we look at the pass rush and we’re still dinking and dunking when the clock runs out.
We’re going to have to find a way to elect someone and give him or her the time and the resources to formulate and execute an ambitious and excruciatingly painful plan. I don’t see it.
If you don’t oppose public opinion surveys on principle, here are the results that interest me the most and might interest you. The New York Times provides a hyperlink to the full survey.
Q. Can Congress handle the challenge A. Are you kidding?
Do you approve of the way Congress is handling its job?
Approve 19%, Disapprove 70%
Do you think “most members of Congress” have done a good enough job to deserve re-election or do you think it’s time to give new people a chance?
Deserve 14%. New People 73%
Note: “most members of Congress” will be returned to office as usual.
Q. How about Barack Obama? Nice guy but isn’t up to the challenge.
Plan for creating Jobs, No 55% to Yes 35%
Plan for new energy No 39% to Yes 48%
Plan for oil spill No 64% to Yes 30%
Good job as Pres. Yes 47% to No 43%
Note: Approval rating were in the 60s until June ‘09, in the 50s until January ’10 and in the 40s, with two bumps up into the 50s, since February ’10.
Is Barack Obama a good guy
Qualities of Leadership Yes 62% to No 35%
Cares about people like me Yes 68% to No 31%
Note: I got those by combining cares a lot with cares some and combining not much with not at all. You might say 68% to 31% isn’t bad, but in February of last year it was 83% to 8%.
Q. Maybe the oil companies can to the job. A. They can’t be trusted. Even the feds are better and they aren’t doing what they could be doing.
How much to you trust the oil companies to act in the best interest of the public?
A lot + some =26%, Not much and None at all 74%
Who do you trust to manage this oil spill?
Do you approve of the way BP is handling the oil spill? Yes 13%, No 79%
Are they doing all they could? Yes 15%, No 81%
Obama administration doing all they could? Yes 28%, No 67%
Trust BP or federal government BP 27% Feds 56%
Let’s see. The country’s going the wrong direction say 60% to 32% of the people and no one has a clue what to do about it. The businesses don’t really want to help and the government doesn’t know how. Let’s take one more try.
Q. Are you ready to think big on energy? A. Sure, as long as we don’t have to pay for it.
Does U. S. energy policy need a complete change? Most people, 58% said yes to that. Rebuild a major part of it, 31%; minor changes would be enough 6%, So, compare how important it is to protect the environment v. developing new energy. Environment 29%, New Energy Sources 49%--and, in all fairness—Both 20%.
So how about paying for the development of those new sources by an increased tax on gas? Favor = 45%, Oppose = 51%.
Let’s say a n added dollar of federal tax to support new sources—this would be what columnist Thomas Friedman calls “a patriot tax.” Favor =32%, Oppose = 65%.
Well, how about 50 cents? Favor = 19%, Oppose = 48%
Do you thin that sometime in the next 25 years, the U. S. will develop an alternative to oil. Very likely = 24%, Somewhat likely = 35%, Not too = 17%, Not at all = 9%
And this is just the oil spill. This isn’t regaining American dominance in industry and trade. It isn’t replacing the old industrial era jobs with spiffy new green economy jobs. It isn’t cutting entitlements like Social Security and increasing the public funding of them at the same time. It isn’t controlling the annual deficit, much less beginning to shrink the national debt.
And this guy has been in office a year and a half already! What’s he been doing?
President Obama is not the problem BP is not the problem. Here’s the problem. The Framers , all from the East Coast, built us a government with a West Coast offense in mind. A three step drop and throw the ball on a timing pattern. We still do that pretty well. Conservatives probe weaknesses in the left side of the defense; liberals do the same on the right side. You can make small gains that way.
But controlling entitlement spending and reinvigorating the economy and replacing our tattered infrastructure aren’t things you can do with a three step drop. If you are willing to see the time the public gives its chosen leaders to solve its chosen problems as the same as the time a quarterback has to get rid of the ball, you can see why the Framers were such fans of the West Coast offense. They were pretty sure that no one, maybe George Washington, would have an offensive line that would allow him to look down the field and hit the big one. Controlling federal spending is a big one. It will take a politically insulated non-partisan commission with the power to hurt people or a bipartisan commission that neither party can withdraw from and which has the power to hurt people.
Either of those could hold off the pass rush long enough for a gifted quarterback to score a lot of points. Neither is remotely likely in the present partisan environment where there are no long term allies and all the leaders are predators of opportunity.
So we are committed to dinking and dunking, as they call it. We can make some first downs that way, but we can’t score the points we need and the clock is winding down. We look at the clock and we see that we need some big plays. Then we look at the pass rush and we’re still dinking and dunking when the clock runs out.
We’re going to have to find a way to elect someone and give him or her the time and the resources to formulate and execute an ambitious and excruciatingly painful plan. I don’t see it.
Faith Seeking Understanding
“Faith seeking understanding.”[1] What a puzzle. But first a little throat-clearing. This seems to me a long post. It seemed to me a short to medium “essay,” but as I put it in the blog, it seems long. At the moment, there are 2171 words. I tried to break it up into several posts, but they are connected and I don’t want to start serializing like Charles Dikkens (the well-known Dutch author, thank you Monty Python).
So here is the idea. There are three parts. In the first, I tell the story of how I learned to hear the low trumpet/flugelhorn part in the march, The British Eighth. In the second, I identify the two relevant parts of that experience as “faith” and “understanding.” In the third part, I illustrate just how sticky that relationship between the two can be and end with a passing note on what the church is for. I thought if I said where this journey goes and pointed out that there are, in fact, rest stops along the way, that fewer of you would simply sign out and wait for a shorter one. The episodes can serve you as rest stops. That's how they served me.
Second throat-clearing. It’s hard to get really accurate about The British Eighth without distracting myself and all of you from the point I am trying to make. That’s why I didn’t embed a hyperlinked recording or paste in the first six measures of the score. So some of the “facts” about this march are just invented as a convenience. Is D the first relevant tone? Does the run end at D#? I don’t really know. Just call the music part “fiction” and I’ll get on with the story.
So. Where was I. Oh yes.
“Faith seeking understanding.” What a puzzle! And no prominent role at all for knowledge.
Today, I would like to tell you a story that has provided the context for most of my thinking about this in the last year. It isn’t, except by analogy, about religious faith, but it does set trust and experience dramatically at odds with each other and I want to tell you, it is not a comfortable experience.
Episode 1: The British Eighth March
Marilyn and I both played musical instruments. She was a virtuoso and I was good enough not to get myself thrown out any of the several bands I played in. But we had both played a lot of marches. A lot of marches. We took it upon ourselves, sometime back in the late 1990s to figure out what was going on in the first six bars of the march, “The British Eighth.” We had the Ohio State band’s recording of it to work with.
We listened to it over and over and couldn’t make it work. The trumpets doodle a little, (two measures)drop an octave, and they work back to half a tone higher than when they started (four measures) and they do it in eight notes. Let’s say that the ru begins on the D above middle C, drops an octave to the next lower D, then crawls back up: D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D. Oops. That’s my eight notes. That’s all I get and I’m not at E yet.
It’s a very common band phrase: flutes and clarinets do it all the time, which might by why Marilyn and I were so sure we were hearing what we knew what we were hearing.. This time it’s trumpets, or possibly, since it’s the Ohio State Band, flugelhorns. Two very experienced musicians who couldn’t account for what we were both hearing. Eventually we gave up.
Episode 2: Cold Case
Sometime within the last year, I decided enough was enough. This was a mystery that really shouldn’t be allowed to linger, so I took it on in a “Cold Case” spirit. I went to one of the most talented musicians I know, our church’s organist and choirmaster, Jon Stuber. We put the Ohio State disk in his player and he followed the trumpet line on his keyboard. It didn’t work. He could tell what the pitches were, but he couldn’t get back to D# in eight notes.
So he called in our mutual friend, Ann van Bever, who is, among other things, the best oboist I know. Jon explained our dilemma to her. It starts here and drops an octave and gets backto D# in eight notes. She listened to it once. She said to Jon, “What do the trumpets do?” He repeated it. We listened again. “No,” she said, “They don’t do that.”
She said that as an oboist, she had played a lot of marches and had learned how to hear them. I remembered at that point that I had gone first to a church organist. What they actually do, she said, is drop to the low D, then drop further to C, then make the run up to thefinal D#. Jon said, “OK, let’s listen to it again.” I said, “No, it can’t be.”
So we listened to it twice more. Not the dozens of time Marilyn and I had listened to it. Yup. We all heard it the same way. D, then C, then the run, ending where it was supposed to end. In just eight tones. I went home a bemused and happy man.
It almost goes without saying that I put that disk in the CD player on the way home, mostly in celebration of a problem resolved at last. I wasn’t much of a celebration. I heard it just the way I had always heard it. I “heard it,” that is to say, in a way that is not really what they were actually playing. And by that time, I , I knew they were not playing it that way.
The solution, in any case, was straightforward. I played that track every time I got into the car for several days. I instructed my mind to hear it in the way I knew it was, despite my continuing to hear it the way it wasn’t. Hearing it truly flickered for a little while; now on, now off. Then it stopped flickering. Itcame on and stayed on. I actually heard it the way it actually was. And, if I am careful, I still hear it that way. And eventually, I won’t even have to be careful.
Episode 3: And your point is…..?
Remember that this is a reflection on faith seeking understanding. The people I have been reading and listening to recently have been pushing for a notion of faith that has more the flavor of trust. I am attracted by it; I am trying it out. I have someone who says the music goes like this when my own experience tells me it goes like that. On the other hand, my experience is ineffective. It doesn’t solve the problem I know I have. That’s the dilemma.
What I could do is to trust Ann. I could, in language I am more familiar with, “have faith in Ann.” That means that I refuse to do, in this case, what I do in virtually every other situation in my life, which is to bring the views of another person to the bar of my own experience and see how it fits. In this case, I would be rejecting my own experience and trusting someone else. But what the heck, right? It’s just a piece of music, right?
Let’s imagine the same dilemma in another form. I visit my parents-in-laws. I’ve had three complete sets of parents-in-law, so I can use this example without pointing the finger at anyone. My father-in-law hates me. He is belligerent and aggressive and sarcastic. Not so, says my wife (three of those too, of course) in this unspecified example, “He is a shy man and he is intimidated by you. He isn’t really being mean; he is just trying to get comfortable with you. Just respond in a friendly way and all well be well. Eventually.”
. “Faith seeking understanding” might have stuck you as a little abstract. The father-in-law who is so obnoxious is not abstract. I know what he is doing and I know why. I tell myself that I have experienced both the “what” and the “why” even though some academic part of my brain knows that you can’t really experience “why.” That means I also know what the effect will be of my playing nice with him. It is three more days of being his piñata. I don’t think so. That is Lemma ! of the di-lemma.
Or, I could trust—I could have faith in— my wife. That is Lemma 2 of the di-lemma. I could privilege her experience and her understanding. I could try to hear in her father’s manner what she is hearing rather than what I am hearing.. I could discipline my own experience so that it reproduces in my own mind, what her experience is. I could, to refer back to the British Eighth, “try to hear what Ann is hearing.”
Episode 4: Finally. Faith Seeking Understanding
Which brings to the last two points, the first of which offers a more conventional example (religious) of faith seeking understanding and the second of which speculates about what the church is for.
Many times, when I was young, I stood in church beside my father and listened to him repeat the parts of the Apostles’ Creed he agreed with. He would have said, “those parts he understood,” but he was a gentle man. I heard the Creed go on then off then on as if Dad had a loose wire. What does it mean to say that we believe Jesus “descended into hell.” Or in the confession based on Philippians 2: that every knee shall bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth. Under the earth? The sound came on; then it went off.
Dad had his own reasons and chose well from the options available to him. But the options we are considering today were not available to him. Dad’s cosmology made “under the earth” a silly thing to say. Dad’s Christology made “descended into hell” incomprehensible. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t know what “the church” had meant by saying those things across the centuries: all those scholars and mothers and mechanics. He had his way of looking at the world to guide him. He would have called it his integrity. He felt that if he gave that up, he would be giving up everything.
Now you see why I started with the trivial example of The British Eighth. It gets harder. Giving up the way Marilyn and I heard the flugelhorns was something I could do. More specifically:
*I could withdraw my consent from the way I heard it.
*I could decide that I was hearing it in error, even as I continued to hear it that way.
*(Having faith in Ann made a new choice possible for me. )
*I could believe that reality was the way she heard it; not the way I heard it.
*I could not only withdraw my consent from the way I was hearing it, but I could give my consent to the way she heard it. And,
*I could do that, could give my consent, even when I couldn’t hear it that way myself..
So how does faith seek understanding. Well, I could, in the same way:
*withdraw my consent from the objections I have learned to make to the creeds.
* I could give my consent to another way of hearing the creeds, even if I am not at the moment able to hear them that way.
*I can tell myself what I believe (what I am trusting) the truth to be and instruct myself to see it that way. Even for the British Eighth, it didn’t happen right away. But I kept trying to hear the truth and eventually, I did.
The last light touch is on the question of what the church is for. In the example I have been playing with, Jon and Ann and I are “the church.” We are listening to the same music. Jon and Ann are “the church” for me. As I stand there with them, knowing what they are hearing, I can hear it. But I am new at hearing that and very experienced in hearing something else. So when I go home and put the CD on, I can’t hear it. I have lost my sense of what they are hearing. I’m not denying it. I’m still remembering what we all heard. But by myself, I can’t really hear it..
That worked for Jon and me because we had faith in Ann. Can I have faith in “the church?” Are there things that all Christians though all the ages have said to be so? Have they come, after years of work, to experience on their own the reality they have trusted? Is that what the church is really for? I have no idea. It does seems worth asking, though, doesn’t it?
[1] Augustine. Also Anselm. I am reminded of it every time my copy of The Christian Century comes in the mail.
So here is the idea. There are three parts. In the first, I tell the story of how I learned to hear the low trumpet/flugelhorn part in the march, The British Eighth. In the second, I identify the two relevant parts of that experience as “faith” and “understanding.” In the third part, I illustrate just how sticky that relationship between the two can be and end with a passing note on what the church is for. I thought if I said where this journey goes and pointed out that there are, in fact, rest stops along the way, that fewer of you would simply sign out and wait for a shorter one. The episodes can serve you as rest stops. That's how they served me.
Second throat-clearing. It’s hard to get really accurate about The British Eighth without distracting myself and all of you from the point I am trying to make. That’s why I didn’t embed a hyperlinked recording or paste in the first six measures of the score. So some of the “facts” about this march are just invented as a convenience. Is D the first relevant tone? Does the run end at D#? I don’t really know. Just call the music part “fiction” and I’ll get on with the story.
So. Where was I. Oh yes.
“Faith seeking understanding.” What a puzzle! And no prominent role at all for knowledge.
Today, I would like to tell you a story that has provided the context for most of my thinking about this in the last year. It isn’t, except by analogy, about religious faith, but it does set trust and experience dramatically at odds with each other and I want to tell you, it is not a comfortable experience.
Episode 1: The British Eighth March
Marilyn and I both played musical instruments. She was a virtuoso and I was good enough not to get myself thrown out any of the several bands I played in. But we had both played a lot of marches. A lot of marches. We took it upon ourselves, sometime back in the late 1990s to figure out what was going on in the first six bars of the march, “The British Eighth.” We had the Ohio State band’s recording of it to work with.
We listened to it over and over and couldn’t make it work. The trumpets doodle a little, (two measures)drop an octave, and they work back to half a tone higher than when they started (four measures) and they do it in eight notes. Let’s say that the ru begins on the D above middle C, drops an octave to the next lower D, then crawls back up: D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D. Oops. That’s my eight notes. That’s all I get and I’m not at E yet.
It’s a very common band phrase: flutes and clarinets do it all the time, which might by why Marilyn and I were so sure we were hearing what we knew what we were hearing.. This time it’s trumpets, or possibly, since it’s the Ohio State Band, flugelhorns. Two very experienced musicians who couldn’t account for what we were both hearing. Eventually we gave up.
Episode 2: Cold Case
Sometime within the last year, I decided enough was enough. This was a mystery that really shouldn’t be allowed to linger, so I took it on in a “Cold Case” spirit. I went to one of the most talented musicians I know, our church’s organist and choirmaster, Jon Stuber. We put the Ohio State disk in his player and he followed the trumpet line on his keyboard. It didn’t work. He could tell what the pitches were, but he couldn’t get back to D# in eight notes.
So he called in our mutual friend, Ann van Bever, who is, among other things, the best oboist I know. Jon explained our dilemma to her. It starts here and drops an octave and gets backto D# in eight notes. She listened to it once. She said to Jon, “What do the trumpets do?” He repeated it. We listened again. “No,” she said, “They don’t do that.”
She said that as an oboist, she had played a lot of marches and had learned how to hear them. I remembered at that point that I had gone first to a church organist. What they actually do, she said, is drop to the low D, then drop further to C, then make the run up to thefinal D#. Jon said, “OK, let’s listen to it again.” I said, “No, it can’t be.”
So we listened to it twice more. Not the dozens of time Marilyn and I had listened to it. Yup. We all heard it the same way. D, then C, then the run, ending where it was supposed to end. In just eight tones. I went home a bemused and happy man.
It almost goes without saying that I put that disk in the CD player on the way home, mostly in celebration of a problem resolved at last. I wasn’t much of a celebration. I heard it just the way I had always heard it. I “heard it,” that is to say, in a way that is not really what they were actually playing. And by that time, I , I knew they were not playing it that way.
The solution, in any case, was straightforward. I played that track every time I got into the car for several days. I instructed my mind to hear it in the way I knew it was, despite my continuing to hear it the way it wasn’t. Hearing it truly flickered for a little while; now on, now off. Then it stopped flickering. Itcame on and stayed on. I actually heard it the way it actually was. And, if I am careful, I still hear it that way. And eventually, I won’t even have to be careful.
Episode 3: And your point is…..?
Remember that this is a reflection on faith seeking understanding. The people I have been reading and listening to recently have been pushing for a notion of faith that has more the flavor of trust. I am attracted by it; I am trying it out. I have someone who says the music goes like this when my own experience tells me it goes like that. On the other hand, my experience is ineffective. It doesn’t solve the problem I know I have. That’s the dilemma.
What I could do is to trust Ann. I could, in language I am more familiar with, “have faith in Ann.” That means that I refuse to do, in this case, what I do in virtually every other situation in my life, which is to bring the views of another person to the bar of my own experience and see how it fits. In this case, I would be rejecting my own experience and trusting someone else. But what the heck, right? It’s just a piece of music, right?
Let’s imagine the same dilemma in another form. I visit my parents-in-laws. I’ve had three complete sets of parents-in-law, so I can use this example without pointing the finger at anyone. My father-in-law hates me. He is belligerent and aggressive and sarcastic. Not so, says my wife (three of those too, of course) in this unspecified example, “He is a shy man and he is intimidated by you. He isn’t really being mean; he is just trying to get comfortable with you. Just respond in a friendly way and all well be well. Eventually.”
. “Faith seeking understanding” might have stuck you as a little abstract. The father-in-law who is so obnoxious is not abstract. I know what he is doing and I know why. I tell myself that I have experienced both the “what” and the “why” even though some academic part of my brain knows that you can’t really experience “why.” That means I also know what the effect will be of my playing nice with him. It is three more days of being his piñata. I don’t think so. That is Lemma ! of the di-lemma.
Or, I could trust—I could have faith in— my wife. That is Lemma 2 of the di-lemma. I could privilege her experience and her understanding. I could try to hear in her father’s manner what she is hearing rather than what I am hearing.. I could discipline my own experience so that it reproduces in my own mind, what her experience is. I could, to refer back to the British Eighth, “try to hear what Ann is hearing.”
Episode 4: Finally. Faith Seeking Understanding
Which brings to the last two points, the first of which offers a more conventional example (religious) of faith seeking understanding and the second of which speculates about what the church is for.
Many times, when I was young, I stood in church beside my father and listened to him repeat the parts of the Apostles’ Creed he agreed with. He would have said, “those parts he understood,” but he was a gentle man. I heard the Creed go on then off then on as if Dad had a loose wire. What does it mean to say that we believe Jesus “descended into hell.” Or in the confession based on Philippians 2: that every knee shall bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth. Under the earth? The sound came on; then it went off.
Dad had his own reasons and chose well from the options available to him. But the options we are considering today were not available to him. Dad’s cosmology made “under the earth” a silly thing to say. Dad’s Christology made “descended into hell” incomprehensible. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t know what “the church” had meant by saying those things across the centuries: all those scholars and mothers and mechanics. He had his way of looking at the world to guide him. He would have called it his integrity. He felt that if he gave that up, he would be giving up everything.
Now you see why I started with the trivial example of The British Eighth. It gets harder. Giving up the way Marilyn and I heard the flugelhorns was something I could do. More specifically:
*I could withdraw my consent from the way I heard it.
*I could decide that I was hearing it in error, even as I continued to hear it that way.
*(Having faith in Ann made a new choice possible for me. )
*I could believe that reality was the way she heard it; not the way I heard it.
*I could not only withdraw my consent from the way I was hearing it, but I could give my consent to the way she heard it. And,
*I could do that, could give my consent, even when I couldn’t hear it that way myself..
So how does faith seek understanding. Well, I could, in the same way:
*withdraw my consent from the objections I have learned to make to the creeds.
* I could give my consent to another way of hearing the creeds, even if I am not at the moment able to hear them that way.
*I can tell myself what I believe (what I am trusting) the truth to be and instruct myself to see it that way. Even for the British Eighth, it didn’t happen right away. But I kept trying to hear the truth and eventually, I did.
The last light touch is on the question of what the church is for. In the example I have been playing with, Jon and Ann and I are “the church.” We are listening to the same music. Jon and Ann are “the church” for me. As I stand there with them, knowing what they are hearing, I can hear it. But I am new at hearing that and very experienced in hearing something else. So when I go home and put the CD on, I can’t hear it. I have lost my sense of what they are hearing. I’m not denying it. I’m still remembering what we all heard. But by myself, I can’t really hear it..
That worked for Jon and me because we had faith in Ann. Can I have faith in “the church?” Are there things that all Christians though all the ages have said to be so? Have they come, after years of work, to experience on their own the reality they have trusted? Is that what the church is really for? I have no idea. It does seems worth asking, though, doesn’t it?
[1] Augustine. Also Anselm. I am reminded of it every time my copy of The Christian Century comes in the mail.
Friday, June 18, 2010
Fathers as the bad cops
In the May/June issue of Scientific American Mind, there’s an article called “Family Guy.” This post is a reflection on what it says about fathers. If these observations make you think you'd like to see the whole article and especially if you think I have taken liberties in interpreting it click here. It’s about some of the ways dads and moms handle their kids differently.
It’s a comparison that doesn’t work perfectly because it compares a starting pitcher in the 8th inning, about 130 pitches into the game, with the relief pitcher who is just about to throw his first pitch. But it’s worth thinking about.
I have a metaphor in mind that helped me think about these two sets of relationships. Let’s start with which way the kid is facing. I’m interested in that metaphorically, really, but it was suggested to me by a research note observing that in swimming class, the fathers tended to hold their babies so they faced out into the water, whereas the mothers stood in front of the children, establishing face to face contact.
If I had only one point to make, it would be that having two parents, whose styles of parenting are different, but not irreconcilable, is the best possible setting for the child's development. People make knowing references to the “good cop/bad cop” scenario without pausing the notice that good cop/bad cop really requires two cops. Sometimes, at home, there is only one cop and usually, that’s the mother.
There are lots of reasons why it’s usually the mother. Some are economic, some sociological. The one I have is mind is an odd combination of politics and psychology. Imagine that! Some mothers install themselves as gatekeepers and in that way, they control who is involved in raising the children and also how. The linked article cites research to the effect that mothers with low self-esteem are most likely to control how the children are raised. The father participates with her permission only, and the quality of his fathering is judged byhow similar it is to the mother’s mothering. Mothers with high self-esteem were more likely to permit their husbands to do some fathering, even if what they did looked different from what they themselves did—as, in the case of risk-taking with the child, it often did.
To look at these relationships with the metaphor of who is facing where, I see the first “facing” as the mother and the father. If the mother permits fathering, there is a second “facing;” the father and the child--as in the swimming metaphor. The benefits this gives the child aren’t so much that the way the father is with the child is better than the way the mother is. It is that two styles are better than one. Not just any two styles, of course.
In styles of play, the images the article uses are “lifeguard” and “cheerleader.” The fathers are the cheerleaders. The “facing” motif shows up here again. When the fathers act as cheerleaders, the relationship between the child and the task at hand is emphasized. When the mothers act as lifeguards, the relationship between the child and the caretaker is emphasized. At the risk of using another sports metaphor this close to Fathers’ Day, it’s the difference between a closely called basketball game or a loosely called game. When the game is loosely called, the players have the luxury of attending only to their opponents, the people on the other team. When it is tightly called, they have to divide their attention between their opponents and the refs. The refs are now a crucial audience and a lot of reacting and emoting is done for their sake. But less basketball. In fact, fathers engage in a more physical style of play with children and they engage in more unpredictable play. That may be because they are fathers and that is the kind of play they like. It may be because they function as relief pitchers and they can afford to do that for the few innings they are going to pitch. Hard to say.
The last point is about language development. In the communications setting, either a mother or father would be facing the child, to use the metaphor for the final time. In this area, the three findings that stuck me were: a) it is the father’s language use with the child, not the mother's, that predicts the child's language development at age three, b) fathers use a larger variety of word roots and so are more likely to stretch the children’s verbal abilities, and c) children end up using longer sentences and larger vocabularies when talking to their fathers than to their mothers.
Why? The article isn’t big on why questions, but I’d guess that the mothers, who know their children’s language capabilities better, shape what they say to what they know the child will understand. The fathers, who don’t know the children’s abilities as well, use a broader array of words, which, in small doses at least, is good for the child and more natural for the father.
It’s an interesting article. The main points, it seems to me, are: 1) two cops are better than one cop and not just because it enables the good cop/bad cop routine, and 2) because fathers are either more distant from the children (less time, less knowledge) or because they like being with a child who is focused on something else, e.g., not drowning, the fathers have a very nice complementary effect on how the kids learn.
But since it is (nearly) Fathers' Day, I have a couple of pictures to share. The leadoff picture is of Dawne and me and the family puppy, Heidi. Dan and Doug and I are down here. Sorry guys, I don't seem to be able to post more than one picture in any one post. The pictures come from 1967. I was 29 and the kids were 6, 4. and 2.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
By reason of strength, four score
I started running in 1968 and I've been thinking in running metaphors ever since. And since I do some of my best thinking while I am running and my brain is soaking in endorphins, I benefit in that way as well. One more fact. In 1976, I accepted the challenge of the National Jogging Association to celebrate the bicentennial by running 1776 miles--or was it 1976 miles?--between July 4 or 1976 and July 4 of 1977.
There's another story there, but I did run the distance and in the process, I devised several ways to add to my daily log of miles. One was to run the half mile around New Faculty Circle, where we lived in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, at the end of a run. So, for instance, I would wind up running 18 and a half miles that day instead of just 18. Every little bit helps when you get as far behind as I was. To help me do that extra half--only half of the biblically mandated distance, it now occurs to me--I called it a "victory lap."
It wasn't just words after a while. I found myself thinking back over the run I was just finishing. I would revise the route, celebrate that very nice 10 mile stretch in the middle of the run when everything worked so well. I noticed that physical problems I had had on the run, blisters, for instance, stopped bothering me during that extra half mile. So the essentially fraudulent "victory mile" actually felt different; my mind worked calmly and reflectively and my body stopped complaining. Pretty good.
Then I got to thinking that my life was dividing itself almost naturally into scores of years and that four scores of years would bring me very naturally to the age of 80. I married Donnie when I was 22 (barely). Our marriage came to an end when I was around 40--just when it ended isn't as clear as when it began--and shortly after that, I met and married Marilyn. That looked like the end of lap 2 to me, still thinking of the mile. To begin the third lap, we moved to Portland and I got serious about being a stepfather, but Marilyn died when I was 66, so the third lap was longer than a competent race official would have allowed. From the time I was 60, I began thinking about the last lap, the one that would end when I was 80, and about what my victory lap would be like.
I am now well past the halfway mark of that final lap. I married Bette when I was 68, so at least, I thought, I get to finish the lap in the company of an intimate friend. I still hope for that, but there are 8 years to go before I start on the "victory lap" and I've had too much happend to me to take it for granted any more.
So what's a victory lap going to look like? I need to say at some point that my kids never much liked the victory lap idea. They may have imagined that I was planning to hit 80 at full speed like running into a wall. Or maybe they just didn't like the idea of my thinking about being that old. I explained as well as I could that what I really had in mind was a time when my (largely metaphorical, now) blisters stopped complaining and my intense focus on finishing the run eased off into a satisfied reflection on what a good run it had been. I hoped that would make it sound like a good idea, but I don't think it did. Kids! What do they know about being old?
I still like the changes that came over me during the victory lap, but I'd have to say that is the only area of my life that has worked like that. I was imagining that it would be a good plan to keep pushing until I was 80. Keep trying new things, keep taking risks, keep taking seriously the commitments I took on when I was young and couldn't imagine being an old man. Then after I crossed the line, I could relax and reflect and celebrate what a fulfilling run (life) it had been and how good it was to spend some time reflecting on it and treasuring it. It's as far from dying at my desk at the office as I could picture.
But I don't think I really ever have stopped trying new things, etc. Take this blog, for instance. What if I don't like resting and celebrating? What if I'm no good at it? Does that mean I keep on doing what I've been doing, so far as I am able to continue it? According to our current plans, Bette and I are going to think seriously about moving to a senior center when I'm 80. (So 2017 is really just a sticky note to ourselves, not a contract with an actual place.) I like the four-lap approximation as an aesthetic matter and I like the notion of spending some time reflecting and being grateful. I could say of myself, as they say of a Broadway play that is closing, that I had a good run. There's a question of how a person of faith would characterize those reflections and I'd like to write about that some day; not today.
I like being grateful. I've had a lot of practice. I've had a lot to be grateful for, it's true, but the literature I read mostly substantiates the idea that gratitude tracks better with grateful persons than it does with situations you really oughtta feel grateful for. Gratitude feels good to me.; it doesn't feel like an obligation. It feels natural. Can I spend that relaxed time the way I had been thinking I would if I keep on charging through life the way I am? OK, I do take a nap every day, but I charge before the nap and I go back to charging after the nap. If I were a battery, I'd probably fry myself.
So that's where I am today. I'm on the last half of the last lap. I get to look forward to a victory lap of undetermined time after the race. (I am reminded that Steve Prefontaine used to run victory laps after his wins in Eugene. Once, I saw him take eleven victory laps after a 10K race. He averaged 68 seconds--on the victory laps!) It will be a time to relax and refresh, I tell myself. But, what if, when I get there, I discover that I'm really no good at it. Then what?
There's another story there, but I did run the distance and in the process, I devised several ways to add to my daily log of miles. One was to run the half mile around New Faculty Circle, where we lived in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, at the end of a run. So, for instance, I would wind up running 18 and a half miles that day instead of just 18. Every little bit helps when you get as far behind as I was. To help me do that extra half--only half of the biblically mandated distance, it now occurs to me--I called it a "victory lap."
It wasn't just words after a while. I found myself thinking back over the run I was just finishing. I would revise the route, celebrate that very nice 10 mile stretch in the middle of the run when everything worked so well. I noticed that physical problems I had had on the run, blisters, for instance, stopped bothering me during that extra half mile. So the essentially fraudulent "victory mile" actually felt different; my mind worked calmly and reflectively and my body stopped complaining. Pretty good.
Then I got to thinking that my life was dividing itself almost naturally into scores of years and that four scores of years would bring me very naturally to the age of 80. I married Donnie when I was 22 (barely). Our marriage came to an end when I was around 40--just when it ended isn't as clear as when it began--and shortly after that, I met and married Marilyn. That looked like the end of lap 2 to me, still thinking of the mile. To begin the third lap, we moved to Portland and I got serious about being a stepfather, but Marilyn died when I was 66, so the third lap was longer than a competent race official would have allowed. From the time I was 60, I began thinking about the last lap, the one that would end when I was 80, and about what my victory lap would be like.
I am now well past the halfway mark of that final lap. I married Bette when I was 68, so at least, I thought, I get to finish the lap in the company of an intimate friend. I still hope for that, but there are 8 years to go before I start on the "victory lap" and I've had too much happend to me to take it for granted any more.
So what's a victory lap going to look like? I need to say at some point that my kids never much liked the victory lap idea. They may have imagined that I was planning to hit 80 at full speed like running into a wall. Or maybe they just didn't like the idea of my thinking about being that old. I explained as well as I could that what I really had in mind was a time when my (largely metaphorical, now) blisters stopped complaining and my intense focus on finishing the run eased off into a satisfied reflection on what a good run it had been. I hoped that would make it sound like a good idea, but I don't think it did. Kids! What do they know about being old?
I still like the changes that came over me during the victory lap, but I'd have to say that is the only area of my life that has worked like that. I was imagining that it would be a good plan to keep pushing until I was 80. Keep trying new things, keep taking risks, keep taking seriously the commitments I took on when I was young and couldn't imagine being an old man. Then after I crossed the line, I could relax and reflect and celebrate what a fulfilling run (life) it had been and how good it was to spend some time reflecting on it and treasuring it. It's as far from dying at my desk at the office as I could picture.
But I don't think I really ever have stopped trying new things, etc. Take this blog, for instance. What if I don't like resting and celebrating? What if I'm no good at it? Does that mean I keep on doing what I've been doing, so far as I am able to continue it? According to our current plans, Bette and I are going to think seriously about moving to a senior center when I'm 80. (So 2017 is really just a sticky note to ourselves, not a contract with an actual place.) I like the four-lap approximation as an aesthetic matter and I like the notion of spending some time reflecting and being grateful. I could say of myself, as they say of a Broadway play that is closing, that I had a good run. There's a question of how a person of faith would characterize those reflections and I'd like to write about that some day; not today.
I like being grateful. I've had a lot of practice. I've had a lot to be grateful for, it's true, but the literature I read mostly substantiates the idea that gratitude tracks better with grateful persons than it does with situations you really oughtta feel grateful for. Gratitude feels good to me.; it doesn't feel like an obligation. It feels natural. Can I spend that relaxed time the way I had been thinking I would if I keep on charging through life the way I am? OK, I do take a nap every day, but I charge before the nap and I go back to charging after the nap. If I were a battery, I'd probably fry myself.
So that's where I am today. I'm on the last half of the last lap. I get to look forward to a victory lap of undetermined time after the race. (I am reminded that Steve Prefontaine used to run victory laps after his wins in Eugene. Once, I saw him take eleven victory laps after a 10K race. He averaged 68 seconds--on the victory laps!) It will be a time to relax and refresh, I tell myself. But, what if, when I get there, I discover that I'm really no good at it. Then what?
Saturday, June 12, 2010
A Story Jesus Messed Up
I am telling here a story Jesus did not tell. But just for fun, I am imagining that this is the one he intended to tell and it didn't come out right or it was garbled in transmission and translation and became what we now call "the parable of the soils."
We all know that Jesus did not tell the story that I am, here, attributing to him. I think it might be worth asking why he did not.
A sower went out to sow. He threw the seed wherever he wanted to, knowing it wouldn’t matter where it landed. Some fell on the path where they were vulnerable to various herbivores. But God had thoughtfully made the seed distasteful to herbivores and, after poking around, they abandoned them and the seeds grew bountifully.
Some fell on stony ground where the soil layer was superficial. The seeds sprouted quickly, but the shallow roots were vulnerable to the heat of the sun. But God had thoughtfully adapted those plants so that the energy from the sun drove the roots deep into the soil, through the rock, even. And the seeds grew bountifully.
Some fell among thorn seeds. The sower’s plant and the weeds grew at the same time and there was a competition for water and nutrients. But God had made the farmer’s plants toxic to weeds and as they all grew, the farmer’s plant thrived and the weeds shrank away and got sickly and died. And the seeds grew bountifully.
And, somewhat anticlimactically, some seeds fell on really good ground and they grew bountifully.
So they all produced one hundred-fold and the farmer had more wheat than he knew what to do with and he thanked God, the gracious and provident God, for protecting his seed in whatsoever condition they were.
We all know that Jesus did not tell the story that I am, here, attributing to him. I think it might be worth asking why he did not.
A sower went out to sow. He threw the seed wherever he wanted to, knowing it wouldn’t matter where it landed. Some fell on the path where they were vulnerable to various herbivores. But God had thoughtfully made the seed distasteful to herbivores and, after poking around, they abandoned them and the seeds grew bountifully.
Some fell on stony ground where the soil layer was superficial. The seeds sprouted quickly, but the shallow roots were vulnerable to the heat of the sun. But God had thoughtfully adapted those plants so that the energy from the sun drove the roots deep into the soil, through the rock, even. And the seeds grew bountifully.
Some fell among thorn seeds. The sower’s plant and the weeds grew at the same time and there was a competition for water and nutrients. But God had made the farmer’s plants toxic to weeds and as they all grew, the farmer’s plant thrived and the weeds shrank away and got sickly and died. And the seeds grew bountifully.
And, somewhat anticlimactically, some seeds fell on really good ground and they grew bountifully.
So they all produced one hundred-fold and the farmer had more wheat than he knew what to do with and he thanked God, the gracious and provident God, for protecting his seed in whatsoever condition they were.
Father's Day
I suppose I ought to pause long enough to note that although the placement of the apostrophe is unusual, it does reflect my intention. This post is about my father specifically. It is about me as a father only indirectly. It isn't really bout fathers in general at all.
In 1985, Mother called to tell me that Dad had died and to ask me to represent the family in a reflection on Dad's life. That was a wonderful feeling for me. It was demanding, yet at the same time, I felt that it was something I could do. Best of all, it wasn't about me. It was a service I could provide for my family and for those who had known Dad.
Today's task is, frankly, more daunting. I do not have the sense that this is something I can do. I am going to try to provide a hypertext link to the celebration of Dad's life. On the reasonable likelihood that this first try will not work out well, I would like specifically to exculpate my son Dan, who as a kind of Father's Day present to me has gotten me this far, and my nephew Steve Hayes, who took time he didn't have to help someone he hasn't actually known since he was a little boy.
Having said all that, click here to see the tribute to my father's life, a document now 25 years old.
In 1985, Mother called to tell me that Dad had died and to ask me to represent the family in a reflection on Dad's life. That was a wonderful feeling for me. It was demanding, yet at the same time, I felt that it was something I could do. Best of all, it wasn't about me. It was a service I could provide for my family and for those who had known Dad.
Today's task is, frankly, more daunting. I do not have the sense that this is something I can do. I am going to try to provide a hypertext link to the celebration of Dad's life. On the reasonable likelihood that this first try will not work out well, I would like specifically to exculpate my son Dan, who as a kind of Father's Day present to me has gotten me this far, and my nephew Steve Hayes, who took time he didn't have to help someone he hasn't actually known since he was a little boy.
Having said all that, click here to see the tribute to my father's life, a document now 25 years old.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Beyond
I've been thinking about the "beyond" claim. I guess the context that comes first to mind is political argumentation. Consider these two book titles. I haven't looked them up, so for all I know they may be actual titles. First, Beyond Liberalism. Second, Beyond Conservatism. The first title is supposed to attract conservatives, particularly, I suspect, conservatives who were once liberal or conservatives who attended a liberal university and are still pissed about it. The second title is supposed to attract liberals, by the same mechanism.
The presupposition is that there is a linear development of some kind. Liberalism is here, but there is something wrong with it. It is internally contradictory. It is morally unsatisfying. It is impractical; it is expensive. It is NOT, however, a step on the road to communism. "Beyond" at least takes the "step on the road" argument away. Maybe we could picture it as the town you reach at the end of a long day and discover that there are no rooms available. That's what's wrong with it. So "what's beyond Citrus Springs?" becomes a pertinent and wearisome question. In Pleasantville, the movie I love and hate alternately, the outsider's question, "What's beyond Pleasantville?" is treated as a joke because there literally is not anything beyond Pleasantville.
But if anyone wrote Beyond Feminism, the author doesn't think much of feminism. Just to keep the pronoun's straight, let's make it a woman author. She thinks that feminism is...oh, I'll just look up the page a little...feminism is internally contradictory or morally unsatisfying, or impractical, or expensive (this would be in societal terms, I suppose). So we need to move "beyond" it. And the development is linear. So all we need to know is what is beyond feminism, in what sense it is "beyond," and what other valuable things do we have to give up to get there? Probably we are not going to find out those things.
It is just as reasonable to declare that feminism is the end, the very highest point, of the scale of development. Any criticism you might encounter about feminism is, therefore, an imperfect version of it. The practice that is being criticized is inadequate because it "falls short of" feminism. As a practical matter, the difficulty may be not either "falls short" or "goes beyond," but it may be on another value axis entirely. That, I regret to say, is a topic for another day.
The great thing about Marx's historical determinism is that he puts the whole mechanism and all the stages and the certain endpoint all on the page at the same time. When he says that socialism is "beyond" capitalism, you know exactly what he means. It's linear...well, dialectical...development and capitalism is here and as you leave it behind, you get to socialism. Woohoo!
I think that "beyond," without all that careful setting up, really doesn't mean anything at all. Well...I suppose it means that the writer doesn't like it. But we should all be beyond that by now, don't you think?
The presupposition is that there is a linear development of some kind. Liberalism is here, but there is something wrong with it. It is internally contradictory. It is morally unsatisfying. It is impractical; it is expensive. It is NOT, however, a step on the road to communism. "Beyond" at least takes the "step on the road" argument away. Maybe we could picture it as the town you reach at the end of a long day and discover that there are no rooms available. That's what's wrong with it. So "what's beyond Citrus Springs?" becomes a pertinent and wearisome question. In Pleasantville, the movie I love and hate alternately, the outsider's question, "What's beyond Pleasantville?" is treated as a joke because there literally is not anything beyond Pleasantville.
But if anyone wrote Beyond Feminism, the author doesn't think much of feminism. Just to keep the pronoun's straight, let's make it a woman author. She thinks that feminism is...oh, I'll just look up the page a little...feminism is internally contradictory or morally unsatisfying, or impractical, or expensive (this would be in societal terms, I suppose). So we need to move "beyond" it. And the development is linear. So all we need to know is what is beyond feminism, in what sense it is "beyond," and what other valuable things do we have to give up to get there? Probably we are not going to find out those things.
It is just as reasonable to declare that feminism is the end, the very highest point, of the scale of development. Any criticism you might encounter about feminism is, therefore, an imperfect version of it. The practice that is being criticized is inadequate because it "falls short of" feminism. As a practical matter, the difficulty may be not either "falls short" or "goes beyond," but it may be on another value axis entirely. That, I regret to say, is a topic for another day.
The great thing about Marx's historical determinism is that he puts the whole mechanism and all the stages and the certain endpoint all on the page at the same time. When he says that socialism is "beyond" capitalism, you know exactly what he means. It's linear...well, dialectical...development and capitalism is here and as you leave it behind, you get to socialism. Woohoo!
I think that "beyond," without all that careful setting up, really doesn't mean anything at all. Well...I suppose it means that the writer doesn't like it. But we should all be beyond that by now, don't you think?
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Michael Chabon on being Jewish
Michael Chabon wrote a piece for the New York Times on "being Jewish" as part of the backwash caused by the recent interdiction of a Turkish aid ship bound for Gaza. It is classic Chabon. You can see The Yiddish Policemen's Union all over it. When I saw that the next day's New York Times brought seven letters in response, I decided to play with Chabon and his respondents a game I play in my upper division classes at PSU. The game is: read the responses first and form the best idea you can of what the original article must have been about. THEN you read the article. Playing the game was pleasant, as always, and enlightening, as usual.
Chabon's major point was that the notion is maintained by scanning over the Jews you know, counting the best ones as "typical" and passing over the others. You learn not to see, he says, the blockheaded Jews who are so bountifully available and to see the best, the most accomplished, as typical. That is how Jewish kids are taught that Jews are special.
Even Chabon did not attempt to reflect on how the notion of Jewish exceptionalism got started, much less whether it is justified. He did say that Israel's ability as a nation to stay in play this deep into history was a matter of luck, not of merit.
No one responded to his thesis. None of the seven. He might as well have written a piece inviting readers to submit "your thoughts about Israel and Jews." It was like the movie, The Jane Austen Book Club, in which a group of people get together to discuss one after another of the Austen novels, only to have each meeting, one after another, highjacked by the host for purposes of her own.
Of the seven, I found my heart going out to the writer who gave what I thought was the wittiest response. He said it was true, as Chabon argued, that "Jews" are not exceptional, but who is going to explain that to his 82 year old mother? Denying and affirming Chabon's thesis in the same few words.
Chabon's major point was that the notion is maintained by scanning over the Jews you know, counting the best ones as "typical" and passing over the others. You learn not to see, he says, the blockheaded Jews who are so bountifully available and to see the best, the most accomplished, as typical. That is how Jewish kids are taught that Jews are special.
Even Chabon did not attempt to reflect on how the notion of Jewish exceptionalism got started, much less whether it is justified. He did say that Israel's ability as a nation to stay in play this deep into history was a matter of luck, not of merit.
No one responded to his thesis. None of the seven. He might as well have written a piece inviting readers to submit "your thoughts about Israel and Jews." It was like the movie, The Jane Austen Book Club, in which a group of people get together to discuss one after another of the Austen novels, only to have each meeting, one after another, highjacked by the host for purposes of her own.
Of the seven, I found my heart going out to the writer who gave what I thought was the wittiest response. He said it was true, as Chabon argued, that "Jews" are not exceptional, but who is going to explain that to his 82 year old mother? Denying and affirming Chabon's thesis in the same few words.
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Playing the Enemy
I just finished reading the part of Playing the Enemy I was interested in. My librarian wife shook her head sadly, more from force of habit than from any real grief. I was so delighted by the movie, Invictus, and it wasn't until the second viewing that I noticed it was based on a book by John Carlin. But the book really is bigger than the movie. There is a great deal in it about Nelson Mandela's courtship of his jailers, and his political opponents, and the South African Rugby Association.
The next time I read this book, I will probably start at the beginning and read it all. If I do, it will be because that new material is now the material I am in contact with. I can presume the World Cup of 1995, which is when the South African rugby team "played the enemy" and go on to the new material that is now right next door. Had I begun at the beginning, it would have been two doors away—too far-- and I probably would not have finished the book.
I recommend this book to anyone who is seriously interested in reconciliation in any larger social setting. If the leadership of my church, for instance, were to stop whatever it is doing and read this book--just the part about the game--they would return to their work with a renewed sense of what is possible and what is might cost. Worse things could happen.
The next time I read this book, I will probably start at the beginning and read it all. If I do, it will be because that new material is now the material I am in contact with. I can presume the World Cup of 1995, which is when the South African rugby team "played the enemy" and go on to the new material that is now right next door. Had I begun at the beginning, it would have been two doors away—too far-- and I probably would not have finished the book.
I recommend this book to anyone who is seriously interested in reconciliation in any larger social setting. If the leadership of my church, for instance, were to stop whatever it is doing and read this book--just the part about the game--they would return to their work with a renewed sense of what is possible and what is might cost. Worse things could happen.
Saturday, June 5, 2010
New words are the fresh blood of a language. It's nice to have fresh blood. But it would be nice if it were healthy, rather than diseased blood. And it would be nice if it were not added at a rate that makes it difficult to assimilate it and get it circulating usefully. I also like new words, partly because I make them up myself, from time to time, and I need some kind of cover for doing that. And I realize that there are even better reasons than that for having them. I can "sync" my computer and my iPod in a way that has nothing at all to do with time. "Synchronize" still has that chron- in the middle, but "sync" doesn't need it any more. All is well.
However, I would not put a sticker on my car that said NEW WORDS ARE GOOD. For one thing, if you make new ones instead of using the old ones carefully, it gets harder and harder to say some things that really need to be said. I do have an example in mind, but for now, ask yourself why the expression "data points" had to be invented. Or why a sickly spinach plant would be said to be "healthy" on the grounds that it is good for you. Well. Enough of that.
I would like to write soon about pleasures; about "delights," more specifically, since delights are at the heart of being a dilettante. I would like to talk about significant and insignificant delights and I would like those words to refer to delights that signify--they act as signs of or that point toward--something and to delights that are attended to not because of their significance, but because they are there and they are delightful. That's what I'd like to do. I can't, of course, because "significant" is now most likely to be understood to mean "important." But I don't want to say "important" so I have to use a different word. I find that very trying.
However, I would not put a sticker on my car that said NEW WORDS ARE GOOD. For one thing, if you make new ones instead of using the old ones carefully, it gets harder and harder to say some things that really need to be said. I do have an example in mind, but for now, ask yourself why the expression "data points" had to be invented. Or why a sickly spinach plant would be said to be "healthy" on the grounds that it is good for you. Well. Enough of that.
I would like to write soon about pleasures; about "delights," more specifically, since delights are at the heart of being a dilettante. I would like to talk about significant and insignificant delights and I would like those words to refer to delights that signify--they act as signs of or that point toward--something and to delights that are attended to not because of their significance, but because they are there and they are delightful. That's what I'd like to do. I can't, of course, because "significant" is now most likely to be understood to mean "important." But I don't want to say "important" so I have to use a different word. I find that very trying.
A little soteriology, after some verbal playing around
I don't think it will take me long to establish my credentials as a dilettante. This morning, I am going to collect evidence for the existence of a hitherto unknown family of Northwest woodpeckers, the the Cyranophagidae. I will put the picture on the blog. This evening, I will publish another post on the blog because it is, after all, Saturday evening and I can see a Saturday evening post becoming a tradition here.
A followup on "deep reading." I have nearly finished Playing the Enemy, the book on which the movie, Invictus, was based. I am enjoying the book a good bit and it isn't taking as long to "read" as you might think, because I am reading only the part about which I became curious when I saw the movie. If I get curious about the other half of the book, eventually, I will go back and read it. Eventually.
So. Teriology. Theologians use the word soteriology to refer the doctrine of salvation or to any kind of study that focuses on salvation. If any readers get access to this blog other than the fairly tight group of family and friends, I should probably specify that I am talking about Christian theology, that I am, myself, a Christian, and that I have had no training in theology at all since college.
I wrote an essay earlier this year--I'll post it to this blog if I can find a way to do it--on just what it was about the death of Jesus that provides "atonement," as Christians have claimed since the first century. Actually, that's why we call it the First Century. Writing that essay brought me up against the mystery of it. The near unanimity of Christians that there was an atonement (an at-one-ment with God) contrasts starkly with our inability to say of what character the atonement is or how it was brought about.
Obviously, I am not presenting myself as someone who has "the answer," but I do have a way of looking at it that seems promising to me. The idea is to look at what "live" and "die" mean by contrasting the Atonement and the Fall. If you think of it as a word study and if you eliminate everything between, it is easier.
The story goes that God told Adam and Eve that if they ate of the fruit of the tree at the center of the garden, the tree I call (whimsically) "the Tree of Moral Discernment," that they would surely die. The Hebrew there, I have been told, is "you will die die." But the First Lady believed the serpent instead, who told her that she would not die die if she ate the fruit, and further that God's demand that she abstain had been politically motivated. So they both ate. Not she and the serpent; she and her husband.
And they both died. In some way. If we could say in just what way they died, it would be a great help when, skipping everything between, we come to Atonement to say just how Jesus "came to life." We are not paralleling, remember, the death of Adam and the death of Jesus. We are doing what Paul did in 1 Corinthians 15: we are contrasting the death-giving death of Adam with the life-giving death of Jesus. We could say that God created humankind (Adam and Eve)to be spiritually attuned to Him (language note: I use "Him" as a neuter pronoun, as I was taught in elementary school, when gender is not a consideration in a given context; I use the capital H- because I am a monotheist). That "attunement," the one God intended and had counted on, died that day. Adam and Eve as the people God intended them to be that day, died.
Following the trajectory of this comparison, we come now to Jesus. Jesus felt, in the Marcan and Matthean accounts I have been following, completely abandoned by God. He died knowing himself to be a failure. He could very well have sued his Father for non-support. He could have taken the advice Job's wife gave him at what she thought was her husband's bitter end, to "curse God and die." But he didn't. He "lived, lived" at the crucial moment where Adam and Eve chose to "die, die." Where Adam chose disobedience, hoping for equality with God, Jesus chose obedience though God appeared to have failed him entirely.
Luke Timothy Johnson says that the common Pauline phrase pistis Christou may be translated either "the faith OF Christ" or as "faith IN Christ." If we follow the logic that connects the Fall to the atoning work of the cross, I see these as our two options. In the first, we look at the kind of faith Christ showed. We also know that being moved by that faith, Jesus' disciples revolutionized the world. (If you are wondering what happened to the resurrection, remember that we are working from Adam's choice to Christ's.) In the second, we trust that there was something about the death of Jesus that changed the condition of alienation we have endured since Adam. We aren't able to say what that was. We have evolved a series of metaphors that point in different directions: some, for instance, sacrificial, some juridical. But we use metaphors because we don't know how to say it the way an engineer would say it. That failure makes poets of us all.
So the question today is this: if you consider Adam's choice as a movement from union to alienation and Jesus' choice as a movement from alienation to union, does it help us understand what we are talking about when we say that something about the death of Jesus produced "at one ment" with God? It's a question to which everyone will have to produce his or her own answer. I'm not sure what my answer is yet, but I like the approach the question gives us.
A followup on "deep reading." I have nearly finished Playing the Enemy, the book on which the movie, Invictus, was based. I am enjoying the book a good bit and it isn't taking as long to "read" as you might think, because I am reading only the part about which I became curious when I saw the movie. If I get curious about the other half of the book, eventually, I will go back and read it. Eventually.
So. Teriology. Theologians use the word soteriology to refer the doctrine of salvation or to any kind of study that focuses on salvation. If any readers get access to this blog other than the fairly tight group of family and friends, I should probably specify that I am talking about Christian theology, that I am, myself, a Christian, and that I have had no training in theology at all since college.
I wrote an essay earlier this year--I'll post it to this blog if I can find a way to do it--on just what it was about the death of Jesus that provides "atonement," as Christians have claimed since the first century. Actually, that's why we call it the First Century. Writing that essay brought me up against the mystery of it. The near unanimity of Christians that there was an atonement (an at-one-ment with God) contrasts starkly with our inability to say of what character the atonement is or how it was brought about.
Obviously, I am not presenting myself as someone who has "the answer," but I do have a way of looking at it that seems promising to me. The idea is to look at what "live" and "die" mean by contrasting the Atonement and the Fall. If you think of it as a word study and if you eliminate everything between, it is easier.
The story goes that God told Adam and Eve that if they ate of the fruit of the tree at the center of the garden, the tree I call (whimsically) "the Tree of Moral Discernment," that they would surely die. The Hebrew there, I have been told, is "you will die die." But the First Lady believed the serpent instead, who told her that she would not die die if she ate the fruit, and further that God's demand that she abstain had been politically motivated. So they both ate. Not she and the serpent; she and her husband.
And they both died. In some way. If we could say in just what way they died, it would be a great help when, skipping everything between, we come to Atonement to say just how Jesus "came to life." We are not paralleling, remember, the death of Adam and the death of Jesus. We are doing what Paul did in 1 Corinthians 15: we are contrasting the death-giving death of Adam with the life-giving death of Jesus. We could say that God created humankind (Adam and Eve)to be spiritually attuned to Him (language note: I use "Him" as a neuter pronoun, as I was taught in elementary school, when gender is not a consideration in a given context; I use the capital H- because I am a monotheist). That "attunement," the one God intended and had counted on, died that day. Adam and Eve as the people God intended them to be that day, died.
Following the trajectory of this comparison, we come now to Jesus. Jesus felt, in the Marcan and Matthean accounts I have been following, completely abandoned by God. He died knowing himself to be a failure. He could very well have sued his Father for non-support. He could have taken the advice Job's wife gave him at what she thought was her husband's bitter end, to "curse God and die." But he didn't. He "lived, lived" at the crucial moment where Adam and Eve chose to "die, die." Where Adam chose disobedience, hoping for equality with God, Jesus chose obedience though God appeared to have failed him entirely.
Luke Timothy Johnson says that the common Pauline phrase pistis Christou may be translated either "the faith OF Christ" or as "faith IN Christ." If we follow the logic that connects the Fall to the atoning work of the cross, I see these as our two options. In the first, we look at the kind of faith Christ showed. We also know that being moved by that faith, Jesus' disciples revolutionized the world. (If you are wondering what happened to the resurrection, remember that we are working from Adam's choice to Christ's.) In the second, we trust that there was something about the death of Jesus that changed the condition of alienation we have endured since Adam. We aren't able to say what that was. We have evolved a series of metaphors that point in different directions: some, for instance, sacrificial, some juridical. But we use metaphors because we don't know how to say it the way an engineer would say it. That failure makes poets of us all.
So the question today is this: if you consider Adam's choice as a movement from union to alienation and Jesus' choice as a movement from alienation to union, does it help us understand what we are talking about when we say that something about the death of Jesus produced "at one ment" with God? It's a question to which everyone will have to produce his or her own answer. I'm not sure what my answer is yet, but I like the approach the question gives us.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Reading Deep
I'm reasonably sure that "reading deep" is what I want to say and not "reading deeply." There may be a little of Alexander Pope in there as in, "drink deep or touch not the Pierian spring." In any case, I'm probably right and even if I'm not, I can probably justify it at least partially, and even if I can, I like "deep" better.
I'm going to take a breath now.
Everyone who has ever really studied literature has learned ways of deep or "analytical" study. It's a way of getting deep into a piece of literature--into its "essence," you might say. But that's not what I'm talking about. I have two things in mind, both simple.
The first is to contrast reading deep with shallow reading. I mean to imply no value judgments here, but the truth of the matter is that a person who has read 20 books, once each, has had a different reading experience that has a person who has read 5 books, four times each. I do read a lot of different books, but I also read particular books over and over: Lord of the Rings, The Lathe of Heaven, Gaudy Night, Bedtime For Frances.
And why do I do that? This is the second simple thing I had in mind. I read a book the first time taking not very much for granted. It's all new to me. But you can't read a book for the first time twice and if you have ever tried to do that--to experience again that initial burst of novelty--you will agree with me. The second time, you begin by taking some things for granted. The part of the text you actually rub up against is the second layer. You're "in" the first layer and you are contacting the second layer.
But it's not the second layer "of the text." At least it's not for me. It's the second layer of things that come to my attention. If a given passage is seven layers deep (and I'm counting "layers away from me, so layers of infrastructure are layers and layers of superstructure are layers also) then the second time I read it, I presume the things I learned the first time and puzzle about the things that are new to me. The third time, I presume the first two and my attention is drawn to the new things.
Word rant: Why don't we just say infrastructure and ultrastructure if we want to use that set of substructure and superstructure if we want to use that series? Why do we have to mix them by choosing the more familiar one of each pair?
So if I follow my own curiosity, rather than, say, any intention the author might have had, reading deep takes me to fascinating places that are not available to anyone on one reading and were not available to me, either, on the first reading. The simple truth is that if you can't read a book twice, then it's a different book every time you read it.
I got to thinking about this in the early 1980s when I was taken with The French Lieutenant's Woman. It was an interesting story, but there was something suggested but not revealed (to me) about the woman. What was it about her? I read it seven times in a row, feeling all the time that I was getting closer to the answer I had "sensed." I got it on the sixth reading and read it the seventh time just to make sure everything worked with that in mind. The French Lieutenant's Woman was a modern woman and knew it. That's what her crime was. That's why she would rather be thought a whore than to have it known who she was.
If there are "right answers" to quests like this one (doubtful), I'd have to say I have no idea if this is one. I am quite sure that the answer I came to is the one I sensed on the first reading and finally put a name to on the penultimate reading. It was the right answer to the question I had been asking. Of course, I didn't know what the question had been either, until I found the answer.
The reason for this post at this time is that I was reminded of "reading deep" by my recent experience with Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. I had read it once before, I think, but last month I went on a P & P tear and read it four times. Not all of it four times. I scanned it all looking for what I was curious about. Then I scanned the parts I was curious about to see if I could say what I was seeing.
Here's what I came up with. For those of you who actually know the Austen corpus this may be beyond trite, but I discovered it myself so I get to plant the flag in the sand and claim it. There is a good deal of very funny prose in P & P. When I came face to face with how much I disliked Elizabeth's mother, I came to a new appreciation of her father, Mr. Bennet. Here is one that made me laugh out loud. Mrs. Bennet says, "Mr. Bennet, how can you abuse your own children in such a way? (by refusing to pay a call on a new gentleman in the area). You take delight in vexing me. You have no compassion on my poor nerves." To which Mr. Bennet replies, "You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration these twenty years at least."
When I began to look for lines with that perverted puckish sense, I found a lot of them. But then I found that she doesn't use that language when she's busy developing plot. If the plot can be said to have periods of description and development and periods of climax, this language I like so much is in the development parts.
It isn't all that much of a realization, but I had to go deep to find it, which means I had to respect my own curiosity (and withstand the routine and good-natured abuse of others) over a number of readings. I found the process very satisfying and the result very satisfying as well.
But...you can't read everything deeply and still read a lot of books. So I read broadly as well.
I'm going to take a breath now.
Everyone who has ever really studied literature has learned ways of deep or "analytical" study. It's a way of getting deep into a piece of literature--into its "essence," you might say. But that's not what I'm talking about. I have two things in mind, both simple.
The first is to contrast reading deep with shallow reading. I mean to imply no value judgments here, but the truth of the matter is that a person who has read 20 books, once each, has had a different reading experience that has a person who has read 5 books, four times each. I do read a lot of different books, but I also read particular books over and over: Lord of the Rings, The Lathe of Heaven, Gaudy Night, Bedtime For Frances.
And why do I do that? This is the second simple thing I had in mind. I read a book the first time taking not very much for granted. It's all new to me. But you can't read a book for the first time twice and if you have ever tried to do that--to experience again that initial burst of novelty--you will agree with me. The second time, you begin by taking some things for granted. The part of the text you actually rub up against is the second layer. You're "in" the first layer and you are contacting the second layer.
But it's not the second layer "of the text." At least it's not for me. It's the second layer of things that come to my attention. If a given passage is seven layers deep (and I'm counting "layers away from me, so layers of infrastructure are layers and layers of superstructure are layers also) then the second time I read it, I presume the things I learned the first time and puzzle about the things that are new to me. The third time, I presume the first two and my attention is drawn to the new things.
Word rant: Why don't we just say infrastructure and ultrastructure if we want to use that set of substructure and superstructure if we want to use that series? Why do we have to mix them by choosing the more familiar one of each pair?
So if I follow my own curiosity, rather than, say, any intention the author might have had, reading deep takes me to fascinating places that are not available to anyone on one reading and were not available to me, either, on the first reading. The simple truth is that if you can't read a book twice, then it's a different book every time you read it.
I got to thinking about this in the early 1980s when I was taken with The French Lieutenant's Woman. It was an interesting story, but there was something suggested but not revealed (to me) about the woman. What was it about her? I read it seven times in a row, feeling all the time that I was getting closer to the answer I had "sensed." I got it on the sixth reading and read it the seventh time just to make sure everything worked with that in mind. The French Lieutenant's Woman was a modern woman and knew it. That's what her crime was. That's why she would rather be thought a whore than to have it known who she was.
If there are "right answers" to quests like this one (doubtful), I'd have to say I have no idea if this is one. I am quite sure that the answer I came to is the one I sensed on the first reading and finally put a name to on the penultimate reading. It was the right answer to the question I had been asking. Of course, I didn't know what the question had been either, until I found the answer.
The reason for this post at this time is that I was reminded of "reading deep" by my recent experience with Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. I had read it once before, I think, but last month I went on a P & P tear and read it four times. Not all of it four times. I scanned it all looking for what I was curious about. Then I scanned the parts I was curious about to see if I could say what I was seeing.
Here's what I came up with. For those of you who actually know the Austen corpus this may be beyond trite, but I discovered it myself so I get to plant the flag in the sand and claim it. There is a good deal of very funny prose in P & P. When I came face to face with how much I disliked Elizabeth's mother, I came to a new appreciation of her father, Mr. Bennet. Here is one that made me laugh out loud. Mrs. Bennet says, "Mr. Bennet, how can you abuse your own children in such a way? (by refusing to pay a call on a new gentleman in the area). You take delight in vexing me. You have no compassion on my poor nerves." To which Mr. Bennet replies, "You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration these twenty years at least."
When I began to look for lines with that perverted puckish sense, I found a lot of them. But then I found that she doesn't use that language when she's busy developing plot. If the plot can be said to have periods of description and development and periods of climax, this language I like so much is in the development parts.
It isn't all that much of a realization, but I had to go deep to find it, which means I had to respect my own curiosity (and withstand the routine and good-natured abuse of others) over a number of readings. I found the process very satisfying and the result very satisfying as well.
But...you can't read everything deeply and still read a lot of books. So I read broadly as well.
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