Speaker for the Dead, Part II

Vivid, isn't it?

In Part I, I told about Orson Scott Card’s idea of a Speaker for the Dead. I liked it very much, but in order to work for me the way it worked for him, I would need Andrew Wiggin, ancient in the way only time travel will allow, and a top of the line computer system. I don’t have either of those, but I do share Card’s idea that a memorial service ought to involve the telling of the dead person’s story.

This post is about how to do that with the limited resources at my disposal and imagining myself to be the dead person. I specify that I am to be the guest of honor because, frankly, not everyone would want to have his “story” told in this way. I think I would like it—prospectively, of course—but I also think it could be justified only on the grounds that the people attending the service would be benefitted by it.

That brings me to my two questions for this post. The first is: for whom is the memorial service? The second is: is there a way to approximate a Speaker for the Dead?

There is a cheap answer to the first question. The service is for the survivors. Who else could it possibly be for? Not for me, certainly. But that simple answer leads, as they often do, to a more complicated question: what is it that will benefit the survivors? The service needs to be about my life. That is, after all, why people are there. All the people who come, with the exception of a very small number of young people, will have one eye on my life and death and the other on their own current lives and approaching deaths. So whatever happens in the service ought to be the kind of reflection on my life that helps them appreciate its true significance. (I defer, briefly, the question of what its true significance was.) In that way, it ought to help them think about the true significance of their own lives.

In saying that I would like to help the survivors “think about” their lives, I don’t mean anything teacherish. I mean only that if my story is told properly, it will be richer and more complex than anyone there knew. It will be brighter and darker than they knew will be more vivid and it will feel more “true.” [ Footnote 1:In this point, I am relying on a fairly dicey notion of true. On the other hand, nearly everyone has had the experience of finding out the full story of some event and comparing it unfavorably to the version of that event that was available at the time. When you heard the current account of that event, it was unsatisfying. It felt flat; without adequate features. When the full story comes out, it doesn’t feel flat anymore. The “missing” features—the ones you had no names for—are restored. It is at that point that you realize that somewhere inside you, you had a “feeling for the truth.” You couldn’t give it a name or describe its shape, but you knew it well enough that when it is presented, you recognize it as the “truth” you were missing. That’s what I mean by “feel more true.”

I think people will be helped to understand that their own lives are like that. They themselves are seeing only one face of it and when the fuller story is known it will be more than they could have known it to be. “More” includes both better and worse. No one benefits from a candy-coated life.

So, to review, the survivors will sense as they hear the full and vivid story of my life, that there is a full and vivid story of their lives as well and that they should be open to every intimation of just what it might be. They might want to try to live into it a little.

But, beginning on the second question now, all this relies on my own life being told. The model we are working from requires a Speaker for the Dead and we don’t have one. I think we can come close, though. If the story of my life could be told in a way that took into account the very different perspectives of the people who knew me, that story could rich in a “Speaker for the Dead” kind of way. Again, that sounds easy but if you have ever seen it tried, you know it is not.

Picture forty people, each waiting his turn to toss some anecdote into the pot. A lot of these stories are not about my life, except by distant reference. They are about the life of the teller, who is truly grateful for this opportunity to “share.” And speaker ten said just what speaker twenty wanted to say, so speaker twenty has to wing it. [Footnote 2: There would actually be a delicious irony if that came about. So many of the events of my life have been just like that and, put on the spot, I said things I had never said and had never heard before. Sometimes they turned out to be important for me and for some others as well. To have that happen at my memorial service would be worth a large communal laugh over beer afterward.]
For these and many other reasons, a “you'all come” story fest doesn’t work.

My best solution so far is to have someone whose job it is to shape those materials into a narrative. I asked my son, Dan, some years ago if he would do that for me and he said he would. And he could do it, too. Dan is like a really good tight end. He’s got good soft hands, so the ball doesn’t have to be right on target. And he can take a hit and get up and run that same route again without flinching. Those are pretty rare, together. And, he has known me all his life, which ought to count for something.

Dan would be accountable for the vividness of the story. If you want to think of the story as a tapestry, Dan would actively invite the holders of red threads and blue threads, etc. to make those threads available. He would seek out, if necessary, the black threads. That’s why I need someone who can take a hit. He doesn’t search for the black threads because he wants to emphasize the dark parts of my life. Only an enemy would do that and Dan is a friend. Dan searches for them because he knows I want a vivid tapestry and it isn’t going to vivid without dark threads. So it is friendship that sends him out looking for the holders of dark threads. Dan is lucky, in a sense, because he can find quite a few dark threads withouteven going outside the family. It will be a short commute for him.

I’m not counting on Dan to be my Speaker for the Dead. I am counting on him to believe three things: a) that my “real life” was richer (or at least, more complicated) than any of the participants knows; b) that if he doesn’t actively intervene, his father’s life is going to be presented as superficial and unpersuasive; and c) that he has my blessing to go wherever those threads are that my tapestry is short of. Since his father was a Duck, he will know where to go for the yellow and green ones, but who knows where the burnt umber threads are? The battleship gray threads? The dark and stormy night threads? Who will bring them into the public view, if asked, in order to make a richer and more vivid (and more honest) tapestry?

That’s really all I know. As a way of easing my way back down from the limb I have climbed out on, however, let me offer two additional points. The first is that my life has not been all that vivid compared to a lot of the lives I myself have seen or have heard about. I’ve never been famous or infamous; never notably rich or poor; not notably saintly; not notably scholarly. I have dearly loved the life I have had and I have no complaints about it, but when I ask for it to be told “in full color,” so to speak, I need to say that I know it may not take much color to be full color. On the other hand, as one of you is sure to point out, according to my view, I don’t know how colorful it “really was,” no does anyone else, so who would know?

The second point is that as a Christian, I do believe that the whole of my story is known. And I believe that the most truly significant truth of my life is whether I really did consent to play the part that moves God’s story on toward its providential conclusion. And not only did I consent, but I also trained for it and gave it my full attention. I believe that we can’t know those things, so as we remember those who have passed away from us, we ask the best questions we can and give the best answers we can and call it good enough.

Good enough sounds pretty good to me.

What Will Happen in Afghanistan?

This is going to sound cynical. Maybe it actually is; I’ve gradually been losing my ability to tell. But this post really isn’t about Afghanistan. It’s about us and how we talk ourselves into doing what must be done.

Imagine that a father is dropping his son off at the bus station. The son is off on his first bus trip. He looks uneasy. The father is loth to leave him at the station by himself when he seems so uncomfortable. On the other hand, the father has a meeting and really needs to leave. Father and son come to an understanding—ordinarily, this is done without words—that the son will stop looking uncomfortable. This will permit the father to leave for his meeting, even though he knows his son is uncomfortable. The son, as a practical matter, grants his father permission to leave by appearing confident until after the father has left.

There is a lesson here. Whatever must be, will be.

We need to leave Afghanistan. That’s what must be. We don’t want to leave a failed state behind us. We don’t want to have failed in our mission, whatever it was. So we will be hearing the stories that will enable us to leave. Here are six of those stories.

First, the Afghan government is pervasively corrupt. I’m inclined to believe that is true, but my point here is that we need to hear that story whether it is true or not. “Corrupt” means that no additional money or handholding or training of local forces will be “enough.” That means that “staying until the job is done” is no longer one of the options and also that “leaving before the job is done” is not our fault.

Second, we will hear that the warlords are not as bad as we thought. These warlords will become “provincial leaders” fairly quickly, because we don’t want to abandon Afghanistan to warlords. The provincial leaders provide stability, after all. They control the countryside. They are the de facto governments in most of Afghanistan and will be the de jure governments as the grasp of the central government loosens further. Since we don’t want to pull out and leave the Afghan people in the hands of ruthless and irresponsible warlords, we will pull out and leave the people in the safe keeping of “local leadership” instead.

Third, we will hear that the true goal in Afghanistan is to prevent al Qaeda from having “a safe haven” to plot their evil deeds. That means that the Taliban are really not our reason for being there. We will hear that most of the Taliban troops are really just mercenaries. They would become “government troops” or “provincial troops” if someone paid them enough. They aren’t bad guys, really; just for rent to the highest bidder. The Taliban leadership, on the other hand, need to be included in any stable arrangement because they are…well…Afghans and we are not. So the leaders will be invited to “peace talks” where there will be “frank exchanges of opinion,” and the followers will be hired by the government to protect Afghanistan from themselves.

Fourth, we will hear that the war against al Qaeda is going nicely. What with the targeted assassinations of a substantial part of their leadership and a flurry of targeted drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan, al Qaeda’s ability to plan and carry out attacks on Americans at home and abroad has been limited. So the “war aims” have been achieved and we can leave Afghanistan as victors.

Fifth, we will hear that it is costing a lot to sustain our present effort in Afghanistan. That’s always been true, of course. But now, we will hear a lot more about it because it is the “pull.” The acceptability of the conditions we are leaving in Afghanistan—achieving the war aims and all—are the push. The unsustainable cost of continued war there is the “pull.” President Obama has begun to talk about “nation-building” here at home (which is not seen as something we can and should do) rather than “nation-building” in Afghanistan which is something we can’t do and so, as a practical matter, something we have already completed successfully.

Sixth, we will hear that Pakistan is, in any case, a more crucial ally than Afghanistan, and that our continued hostilities in Afghanistan have put the government of Pakistan in a very tight place. Pakistan has al Qaeda enemies too and what we have done exacerbates Pakistan’s ability to act in its own best interest. So pulling out of Afghanistan is not a step away from Afghanistan so much as a step toward Pakistan, which is a more important ally in the long run and which, in any case, has nuclear weapons.

All these stories will add up to the boy at the bus station being no longer afraid. Since he is no longer afraid, the father can go off to his meeting having fulfilled the duties of fatherhood. The duty of fatherhood in this case is not, whatever we might like to think, refusing to leave a frightened boy at the bus station—the father actually is doing that. No, the relevant duty is getting the boy to understand that he needs to stop looking frightened so the father can get on with his work.

What must be, will be. We will hear the stories that will tell us that it is a really good idea to do the things that we would have to do whether it was a good idea or not.

The Lord's Prayer: A Dilemma

I have a dilemma concerning the Lord's Prayer. Neither horn of the dilemma is scary, but there really are two horns and I am hesitating between them. Maybe you can give me a hand.

Raymond E. Brown, a noted biblical scholar, has a series of lectures on the beginnings of the church, let’s say from about 40—100 A.D. In those lectures, he talks about how the first Christians, who were Jews with special associations with Jesus, began to learn to pray as Christians. He says they prayed the Jewish prayers with which they had grown up. Then they began to adapt them, very gradually, to the idea that the promised messiah had actually come. And they had the training prayer of Jesus, the “Lord’s Prayer,” to use as a guide. So far, so good.

Brown holds what I understand is now the majority view among biblical scholars, that the Lord’s Prayer is to be understood as an eschatological prayer. What does that mean? It is a prayer that is clearly understood only if you believe that the last times are imminent. So the words that could, absent any particular context of meaning, be understood to mean nearly anything, really should be understood to mean something specific: they have to do with the awful trials and great hopes of the end of time. If the Lord’s Prayer is really an eschatological prayer, then those meanings should be privileged; other meanings should be moved on down the list of “likely meanings.”

With that in mind, the first three petitions make a great deal of sense: God’s name is to be blessed, God’s kingdom is to be realized, God’s will is to be done on earth as it is done in heaven. The verbs that fuel these petitions are what Brown calls “one time acts.” So, in the aorist tense, I suppose. And they are all what are sometimes called “divine passives.” When the text asks for something to be done that only God can do, it is understood not as a hope that it will happen, but as a request that God make sure it happens. So the petitions would have the flavor of: “Dear God, make your name hallowed; make your kingdom come; make your will be done.”

If these are acts, rather than processes, then we may ask, “When is God to do these things we have requested?” The answer, if this is truly an eschatological prayer, is, “Now.” If these are the last times—let’s say that Jesus gave the disciples this prayer around 30 A.D.—then we need to be looking for God to do these things in the immediate future. You would expect the early church, in praying this prayer, to be consulting each other on whether anyone had seen the first signs that day.

The second three petitions follow the same pattern, although the question of what “daily bread” means, is complicated by the fact that the word translated as “daily” appears nowhere else in the Greek language—ever. This is the single use of epiousios. So we don’t actually know what it means. The other two petitions are not quite so daunting. “Forgive us our debts, for we have forgiven the debts of those who would otherwise be indebted to us.” The second presupposes that the end times will be truly awful and that in those times, the Evil One will do to the covenant people whatever he chooses to do. This is the awful trial (pierasmos), which we ask to be spared. So “do not open us to the awful trial” and “deliver us from the Evil One” are parallel expressions. Both of them make immediate sense in the context of the awful last days, the eschaton. If a German Jew in the 1930s were to pray, "Do not allow us to be subjected to the Holocaust," it would have this meaning precisely. The picture I chose to illustrate this can be interpreted several ways, but it doesn't look like any of them are good.

The final petition could mean “that which we need all the time,” reasoning from the ousios part of the word. It could mean “spiritual bread,” the bread that is “above” material bread. It might even mean, following an Aramaic gospel text, “tomorrow’s bread,” referring to the manna that fell in abundance on the day before the Sabbath. In the context of the eschaton, it could mean the feast God provides for his children in the last times. Brown says he doesn’t know and that means that I don’t know either.

But the end didn’t come by the end of the First Century or by the end of the Second. The context required for this reading of the Lord’s Prayer became hypothetical and remote. New meanings, meanings Brown calls “pastoral,” come to the fore. “Give us each day the bread we need for that day.” It is not an eschatological meaning, but it fits very well with Jesus’ instructions not to worry about tomorrow, but to trust God for the meeting of today’s needs. “Deliver us from evil” can be an urgent prayer by any disciple in any era, who feels the world pressing him into its mold. It has no association, now, with “the Evil One,” but “sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” still has to do with Jesus.

So, briefly, the “meaning” of the prayer changed. It cannot mean for us what it meant for the disciples to whom Jesus taught it. Now what?

I come now to the dilemma I mentioned. Praying the prayer Jesus taught requires accepting the eschatological context that gave it meaning. That context is unavailable to us as believers. It is possible that scholars could come to approximate it. They could know in some detail what was meant by “end times” among Jesus’ contemporaries; they could dwell in those details until “the last times” became an emotionally significant possibility. Such people could meaningfully pray the prayer Jesus taught. Or mystics. By processes that I know next to nothing about, but which I respect, mystics could so apprehend the sense of the end times that they, too, could meaningfully pray for the climactic establishment of God’s kingdom or pray to be spared from an immediately sensed Evil One. I don’t think I could do either of those, myself. Not, particularly, starting at my age.

But what is the alternative? It is “adapting” the prayer of Jesus. We remove the context of meaning and substitute another context, the ongoing practice of living our daily lives as disciples. So the hallowing of God’s name and the onset of His kingdom are “good ideas” in some general way, but they are not things we look for and hope for. The daily bread becomes just “enough to live on;” the Evil One becomes “pervasive evil.”

That’s not a bad prayer. Nearly every element of it can be found in Jesus’ teaching somewhere. It is a prayer of admirable sentiments. It is a prayer worth praying. But it is not Jesus’ prayer.
I honestly don’t know whether to hold to what I “know”—keep in mind how tenuous my grasp on this is—and come as close to it as I can or to pray for what I need and cut the connection to the teacher of the prayer. I like the meanings of the Lord’s Prayer as I learned it as a child and as I have practiced it all my life. I probably can’t give it up now. Maybe if I just treated it the way I treat some of the early church confessions, I can have a little of each world.

That’s the problem about dilemmas. You really can’t own both sides and you have to choose.

A Speaker for the Dead, Part I

I expect that the process of dying will be a nuisance. And it might be worse than that. But after I am safely dead, there will be a memorial service and I have a glimmer of what I would like to have happen there [Footnote 1 Ordinarily, I would have said “would like to see happen.”] . I would like a Speaker for the Dead to address the people who have come together to remember my life.

This Speaker for the Dead business is going to require just a little bit of explaining, so I’ll start that right away. First, Speaker for the Dead is a marvelous book by Orson Scott Card. It is one of the series that began with Ender’s Game. Second, the Speaker for the Dead is the name of an office. It is the responsibility of those who hold this office to come when they are called, to find out the truth of the life being remembered, and to tell that truth, whether what he says confirms the opinions of the people who knew him, contradicts their opinions, or expands their opinions into wholly new and unimagined constructs which deny nothing and revalue everything.

Finally, in this book, the Speaker for the Dead is Andrew Wiggin. He is an ordinary person, rather than a demigod or demidevil, as some have said, but he has had an extraordinary life (He is Ender, in Ender’s Game and committed xenocide) and he has the worlds’ best computer implanted in his ear. [Footnote 2 Please note the placement of that apostrophe; I am very proud of it.] Wiggin comes to the Lusitania Colony on the planet Baía to “speak” the death of Marcos Maria Ribeira.

It is this “speaking my death” that so attracts me. Here is Card’s account of what the idea meant to him when he first thought of it.

“How did the Speaker for the Dead come to be? As with all my stories, this one began with more than one idea. The concept of a “speaker for the dead” arose from my experiences with death and funerals. I have written of this at greater length elsewhere; suffice it to say that I grew dissatisfied with the way the we use our funerals to revise the life of the dead, to give the dead a story so different from their actual life [Footnote 3 Learning what “the actual life” was is the first job of the Speaker. Saying what it was is the final job. My appetite for “the truth,” although it is lofty, is not that lofty. I am after a new story of my life; one that integrates the things people already know into a larger story, a fuller telling of the pattern of which my friends already know the pieces. It is just a little awkward to call this “my story,” because it is my belief that there is a story so grand and so encompassing that I call it THE story, and with reference to that story, I want only to be a character who appears in it somewhere. In that story, I would be happy to be the guy who shows up in Michael for the sole purpose of missing his train and who is never seen again.] that, in effect, we kill them all over again. No, that is too strong. Let me just say that we erase them, we edit them, we make them into a person much easier to live with than the person who actually lived.I had the privilege of giving the eulogy at both my parents’ memorial services. It was called “a eulogy,” but it was eu- = good in the sense that it affirmed their lives and led us all toward a broader appreciation of them. It wasn’t eu- in the sense of proclaiming the nice things and hiding the harder ones.]

I rejected that idea. I thought that a more appropriate funeral would be to say, honestly, what that person was and what that person did. But to me, “honesty” doesn’t simply mean saying all the unpleasant things instead of saying all the nice ones. It doesn’t even consist in averaging them out. No, to understand who a person really was, what his or her life really meant, the speaker for the dead would have to explain their self-story—what they meant to do, what they actually did, what they regretted, what they rejoiced in. That’s the story that we can never know, the story that we never can know—and yet, at the time of death, it’s the only story truly worth telling.”

That’s Card’s view. My view is a little more modest. I don’t believe in “the real story” as something we can know so no speaker, even a Speaker for the Dead, could tell us. And, there is no one to serve as a Speaker for the Dead. At the same time, I think Card is worth listening to. It is a paltry use of time to gather together to say good things about a person’s life, while everyone there knows that “the truth” is much larger, much more varied, much more interesting, and—in the absence of the new narrative I am hoping for—that life is much more mysterious as well. Now that would be worth doing.

We can see the effects of such a Speaker in Speaker for the Dead. It has taken me a little effort to pull out of comments made about the life of Marcos Maria Ribeira some “kinds of comments.” It is the kind of comment I’m after, not the specific comments, because my life has not been at all like Ribeira’s. Similarly, it will take you some effort to grasp the responses of the people who have gathered to hear the speaker because the value they have are as “kinds of responses,” not as actual responses. Let’s play with that pattern just a little.

Ribeira was accused of beating up on his wife. He did. It puzzled people that he never beat up on his children. The Speaker points out that Marcos had no children; his wife had children. Obviously, someone else was the father. He had had since puberty a disease that made him sterile. Here is the response of the Colony’s doctor:

Dr. Navio was puzzled…then he realized what he should have known before, that Marcos was not the rare exception to the pattern of the disease. There were no exceptions. Navio’s face reddened.

What happened here? Dr. Navio knew Marcos had a disease that should have rendered him sterile. He knew there had never been an exception to this effect of the disease. When Marcos’s wife began having children, Dr. Navio decided that Marcos must be an exception. Now, with the Speaker standing before them all and telling the story, Dr. Navio realizes that he did know the truth about Marcos and that he suppressed it. He must have thought that if he failed to realize it, everyone else would also fail. Now that the Speaker has put the truth before everyone, Navio must face his own failure and his own embarrassment.

Then there is Miro, who has just learned in hearing the Speaker that he, himself, is a bastard. All of his life suddenly appears as false; the love of his life turns out to be his sister; the work of his life is overturned. Here is his response.

Miro clung to the sound of [the Speaker’s] voice, trying to hate it, yet failing, because he knew, could not deceive himself, he knew that [the Speaker] was a destroyer, but what he destroyed was an illusion and the illusion had to die. The truth about [the indigenous species of the planet], the truth about ourselves. Somehow, this ancient man is able to see the truth and it doesn’t blind his eyes or drive him mad. I must listen to his voice and let its power come to me, so I, too, can stare at the light and not die.

Bishop Peregrino objects, on a number of grounds to what the Speaker is doing, telling Marcos’s story in public. The bishop would have preferred to hear it in the confessional. Yet Peregrino felt the power of it. Here is the way Card represents the bishop.

“Yet Peregrino had felt the power of it, the way the whole community was forced to discover these people that they thought they knew, and then discover them again, and then again; and each revision of the story forced them all to reconceive themselves as well for they had been part of this story, too, had been touched by it; all the people a hundred, a thousand times, never understanding until now who it was they touched."

By my time of life, I have been at a lot of funerals already and unless I die pretty soon myself, I will attend many more. I have tried, twice, to serve the function of the Speaker for the Dead. [Footnote 4 I had the privilege of giving the eulogy at both my parents’ memorial services. It was called “a eulogy,” but it was eu- = good in the sense that it affirmed their lives and led us all toward a broader appreciation of them. It wasn’t eu- in the sense of proclaiming the nice things and hiding the harder ones.] I gave it my best shot, but I didn’t know enough to really do it right and also may not have had the courage. I did try, though, and in trying, I got a sense of what it would take to do it well and of how wonderful it would be—what a gift to us all—if it really were done well.

Consider the effects described among the members of the Colony who heard the Speaker. Dr. Navio had to recognize that really, he had always known about Marcos’s illness. That means he should have understood something about the children of Marcos’s wife. But he didn’t and now he is ashamed of himself. Miro hears shattering things from the Speaker, but he can see that the Speaker is not shattered by them and takes from that the hope that he, too, can learn to look at the light and not be blinded by it. Peregrino has the broadest view. He sees his own congregants learning the meaning of their own lives; their complicity in a community tragedy; their blindness to what could have been plain to them had they been willing to see it.

These three responses—excuse me, these three “kinds of responses”— are truly wonderful. They are good for everyone. They begin a reconstitution of a broken and distant community. But they seem to require a nearly omniscient Speaker for the Dead and I am quite sure that such people are in short supply. So what does that mean for my own hopes? At my own memorial service, I am going to have to get along without a Speaker for the Dead. But I still aspire to the goals Card had in mind. They still sound really good to me.

How close could I get to that, do you think, if I got to work on it now? Whose help would I have to ask? Would people be willing to help if they took seriously the value of Card’s sense of what sort of an opportunity a memorial service is?

Local Corpses are Best

When I go somewhere I’ve never been, I like to find a bookstore and ask if they have any murder mysteries set there. It is a bonus if the author is also local, but it is how local the murder and associated events are that matters most to me. I tried this first in Alaska in 2004. That is the way I got reconnected with grad school friend Sue Henry and her first book, Murder on the Iditarod Trail, became my introduction to Alaska.


And I’ve been doing it ever since. Last week, Bette and I were in the San Juan Islands, in Washington. We hit a bookstore the first day and got the name Sharon Duncan. The next day we found a copy of Death on a Casual Friday at a used bookstore.

This is a really easy way to get accustomed to local landmarks, customs, attitudes, and institutions. It is particularly easy if the book is a good book in its own right. I think Sue Henry might have spoiled me in that regard. Sharon Duncan is no Sue Henry. If is not a particularly good book, it still might be an excellent introduction to the area, but now it requires a more focused treatment.

I call it “strategic reading,” but by that term, I only mean reading the book in the way that best meets my needs, rather than in the way it was written to be read. The whole middle section of Duncan’s book, for instance, takes place in California. That is necessary for the plot to develop as she wants it to develop, but it doesn’t do anything for my interest in the geography and local cuisine of Friday Harbor. So I paged through it fast enough to make sure I knew where the plot was headed. I think the designation on my VCR would have been about 4X fast forward. Probably.

She comes back home to San Juan Island for a final showdown with the bad guy(s). At that point, I slow down again. She is dodging around the island on roads Bette and I drove on with somewhat less speed and a good deal less urgency. All turns out well for Scotia MacKinnon, the tough but feminine but haphazard but insightful heroine.

It turned out well for me, too. With about an hour and a half invested in finishing the book, I had time left over to go out and explore a little of Friday Harbor. Beautiful place, Friday Harbor. Except that the whole downtown area gets to hear the partying at Herb’s Tavern (10 Front Street) from about midnight until about 2:00 a.m.

Ms. Duncan might have mentioned that, but she didn’t. And Scotia MacKinnon never went there either, so how were we to know?

Sounding Smart

It's not all bad, I suppose. Everyone wants to be liked and included. Or, as my grad school mentor, Jim Davies says, to be a part. And everyone wants to be looked up to and admired as having a little something extra. Or, as Davies says, to be apart. So we say the quirky little things that our linguistic tribe says, the tribe to which we belong or the tribe to which we aspire.

But even so, there's a right way and a wrong way. I'm thinking of the suffix -centric. The practice of using -centered, on the one hand and -centric on the other was so routine that it never occurred to me to formulate a rule about it. You said "human-centered" if that was the expression that fit best and anthropocentric if that worked best.

If there were a rule--and there probably is--it would be that if you want to use -centric, use the Greek or Latin root from which the English word is derived and slap the suffix onto it. If you want to use -centered, use the current English form. So you might talk about an Anglocentric alliance, for example or an English-centered alliance. You would never, ever, under any circumstances, refer to an English-centric alliance. If that language is a way of aspiring to a tribe defined by careful language use, I can guarantee you that it won't work very well.

My guess is that -centric sounds smart. And you know what it means. So you just slap it on. For now, I think any reader who is used to careful use of language just rolls his eyes when, in the middle of a column about the psychiatric world view, the word "penis-centric" shows up. My concern is that if people keep doing it, it will be accepted as appropriate and the mixture of language traditions in English will proceed apace.

It will become a fait accomplished. My advice--unsought, as usual--is, if you don't know the root, just say it in English.

Michael

I have enjoyed John Travolta in nearly every part he has played. When I heard that he was going to be the Archangel, Michael, I knew I didn’t want to miss it. I saw it and I liked it and I didn’t think anything more about it for several years. Then it struck me that most of the screen time of the movie is spent on things that have nothing at all to do with the plot. That interested me.

If you arrange all the events of the plot, some explicit and others only implied, you get something like this. Michael, the Archangel (THE Michael) likes earth and wants an excuse to come back. He makes a bet with someone. He tells it as the old story of the North Wind and the Sun betting who can get a man to remove his coat. In this story, someone—Michael doesn’t say who but he is an advocate of coercion—bets that by treating Frank Quinlan (William Hurt) harshly, he can get Quinlan to open his heart to love. It doesn’t seem all that plausible, but there must be a bet so Michael can come to earth. Michael plays “the sun” in this bet. His idea is that Quinlan can be brought to vulnerability and love in a more caring way.

So Michael comes to earth in response to Pansy Milbank’s insistent prayers that the bank not be allowed to foreclose on her little motel. While Michael is there, Pansy writes to Quinlan, a reporter for a supermarket tabloid, saying the there is an angel living with her and that he should come and see it. Quinlan shows up with his buddy, Huey Driscoll (Robert Pastorelli) and a supposed “angel expert,” Nancy Winters (Andie McDowell). All are satisfied that Michael is, in fact, an angel and they get him to agree to go to Chicago with them. He gets them to agree to go by car. “We need more time,” he says, not saying what the “more time” is for. We know that it is so he can shine on Quinlan long enough for him to take his jacket off.

At that point, all the rest of the movie happens. Quinlan and Winters fall in love. Then Michael dies (goes home) and they fall out of love again. This shows good judgment on Winters' part because Quinlan instantly returns to being the cold manipulative SOB he was at the beginning of the story.

Now comes the part that really interested me this time. Michael is gone. Quinlan has been fired from his job. He and Winters are “over.” Quinlan and his buddy Driscoll meet at a bar and discuss all that happened. All those days and nights of unforgettable wonder.

Quinlan.: As far as I’m concerned, it never happened.
Driscoll: But we were there. We saw it.
Quinlan: No. Never happened.
Driscoll: So…where’s your raincoat? (he gave it to Michael)
Quinlan: It never happened and you know why? Because if it happened, I’d have to believe that wonderful and unaccountable things could happen to me for no reason at all. And I don’t want to believe that. I refuse to believe that such things are possible. So I resolutely deny what you and I both saw and lived for all those days.

What Quinlan actually says is played out on the screen as an alternative and unacceptable chain of events, but I have described what it really means. He’s right, in a way. If he continues to remember all those events with Michael, he would have to believe in the possibility of a fundamentally different life than he is living.

It is easier to deny the facts you know are true than it is to allow for the possibility wonderful gifts you didn’t deserve.

Fortunately for Quinlan—and for Winters as well—Michael hasn’t “gone home” yet and he has not because his work isn’t done. Really, that means he hasn’t yet won the bet, but the plot requires him to be more serious, here at the end. So Michael leads Quinlan on a wild goose chase through Chicago and simultaneously leads Winters on a similar goose chase, the result of which is that they run into each other on the street corner where both thought Michael was. They reconcile. Quinlan “opens his heart to love.” Michael wins the bet. And the movie is over.

Choking

“Choking” is a really bad habit if you ever want to win the Masters. Those little three foot puts that you can put in the cup 999 times out of a thousand—they rim out or stop short. It makes you feel bad that you missed the shot, but you feel a lot worse because you can’t escape the feeling that you were the weak link. The ball was good, the green was good, the putter was good; the bad part was you. You choked.

That’s a bad thing, no doubt about it, but let me offer another line of work by contrast. I’m thinking of gunfighting. You choke there and you won’t have to worry about the Masters next year or the press coverage this year. For the last couple of days, I have been reading Blue-eyed Devil, by Robert Parker. Virgil Cole (Ed Harris) is the principal gunslinger in these books and his deputy, Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen), is the narrator. Here’s his assessment of Virgil’s state of mind at the crucial moment. "Virgil was in the place he goes when it might be time to shoot. Everything registered and nothing mattered." That sounds just perfect to me. If Virgil golfed, I’ll bet he would be a superb putter.

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It turns out that a lot of work has been done on the choking phenomenon. Today’s (June 13) New York Times reviewed the work of Sian Bielock at the University of Chicago. It won’t surprise any of you, I imagine, that it is the activity in the prefrontal cortex that causes the problem. When you get to thinking too much about an activity that you can do well only without thinking about it, it’s the prefrontal cortex you are using. Well, overusing.

Bielock says that are ways to train yourself not to overthink. She says you can train your brain to react more productively. You can give it something else to do, just to keep it busy and out of your way. You can practice under pressure. You can act promptly, rather than delaying and analyzing too much.

But I think Virgil has it right. There is a place you can go when you might need to shoot. It’s quiet there. You are aware of everything, but you really don’t care all that much.

Context is Everything

Don’t leave home without it.

This is a brief reflection on a movie I like very much. None of the critics shared my feelings, it seems, but I reserve the right to admit I like things that only a simpleminded person would like. This is The Joneses, starring David Duchovny and Demi Moore.

The plot, in brief, is that Steve and Kate (that’s Duchovny and Moore) are pretending to be husband and wife and parents to two perfect kids. It’s a stealth marketing scheme. The idea is that this perfect family—the Joneses—have a lot of toys and you too, if you buy all those toys, can be perfect. And, if you are Mr. Jones, you can have the perfect toy as your wife. That is the dialogue underlying this scene,

What nobody seems to have foreseen is the possibility that Steve might really fall for Kate. Not just take advantage of pretending to be her husband, but actually want a real relationship with her. That is just what happens, though. And no sooner has Steve realized that this is the woman he wants to spend the rest of his life with than he realizes that the demands of pretending to be “the Joneses” will prevent him from doing that. They can’t really be husband and wife while they are pretending to be Mr. and Mrs. Jones.

That’s the first horn of the dilemma. The second horn is that this “family” works for an outfit called LifeImage and KC (Lauren Hutton) works for LifeImage. Her job is to see to it that the Joneses and all the other families she supervises reach their potential as marketers of a certain style of life and all the toys that are necessary to sustain it. KC thinks Steve Jones really hasn’t focused the way he should, so she gives him a pep talk.

This is the point where context is so important. Had KC realized that Steve had fallen or would fall so hard for Kate, she would never have said this: “The question you have to ask is, “How far are you willing to go to get what you want?” She assumes that “what he wants” is going to be the money and the reputation that goes with being the top salesman for LifeImage.

In fact, what Steve wants is Kate. And when he has grasped the meaning of the question—How far are you willing to go?—he wrecks the whole family by telling all to the neighbors. Kate and “the kids” escape and set up another Jones family with a new Mr. Jones. But Steve finds them and comes in the back door for a heart to heart talk with Kate. After which, she leaves LifeImage as well and the two of them drive off together into the sunset.

Had KC known what Steve really wanted, she would no doubt have found a different motivational question to ask him. You really have to get the context right because, you know, it’s everything.

Small Government Odyssey (SGO) Creationism

This post continues my Small Government Odyssey (SGO), a series of reflections on what it would take to reduce the size of government on the one hand, while seeing to it that the legitimate needs of the citizens are met (by someone, but not by the national government) on the other.

The diagram shows economic, social, and political sectors. My argument is that to the extent that the needs of the citizens are met in the social sector (families, schools, neighborhoods, clubs, etc.) and in the economic sector (producers make money, consumers receive affordable goods and services, employees receive a living wage), there will no appeal to the political sector. The size of government, accordingly, will shrink. So will the proportion of the GNP it consumes and the power it gets from making authoritative decisions on the appeals made to it by dissidents in the economic and social sectors.

This view does not distinguish between legitimate dissidents and illegitimate ones. In the small government business, the focus is on reducing the appeals to the national government made by people who think they aren't being treated fairly in the social and economic sectors. It is what they think, not what a panel of fair-minded citizens decide, that makes them want to invite government in--an action we all pay for in higher taxes and fewer freedoms. You can do that by simple repression, of course, but repression gets expensive after a while, so that is self-defeating. You can do it by lowering expectations, but the principal commercial strategy involves raising expectations, so that isn't a sure thing either. You can do it by coopting resentment or by deflecting it to other targets, but whenver that fails, the federal government is there, looking for an invitation to substitute their judgment for yours.

In fact, school boards are governments, so they are part of the polity. The force of these questions, however, has to do with the national government, so for the purpose of this question, I am going to consider the school boards as part of society, rather than polity. If we want the national government to stop interfering with the preferences of local boards and the parents who elect them to office, what would we have to do?Since the Constitution forbids any promiscuous mixing of religion and government, we would have to find that Creationism is not a “religious doctrine.” It is a theory, like any other, about the origins of our world and the species of plants and animals that have come to live on it. Evolution is a theory and Creationism is a theory and which theory is to be taught is to be at the discretion of the local voters. That would work. The national government does not intervene in local school district decisions to mandate balanced histories or any particular approach to art or any of several methods of teaching arithmetic.

Under this scenario, biology would work the same way.Once the political hysterics had quieted down, however, the professional side of the question would have a chance to emerge. Just as there are pharmacists who refuse, on personal grounds, to dispense drugs they disapprove of, so we might find some biologists who refuse, on professional grounds, to teach poorly supported theories in place of well-supported ones. Just as the voters who elected the judge must share their authority with the judge’s professional promises, so the school district voters would have to share their authority with the teacher’s professional promises. It wouldn’t be an altogether bad idea if science teachers adopted “First, Do No Harm” as their professional motto.

If there were a professional certification by the Biology Teachers of America (so far as I know, a fictitious organization) and if you couldn’t teach biology without a professional certificate, then schools would have to choose between certificated biologists—who would emphasize the value of well-supported over poorly supported theories—and noncertificated biologists, who would teach anything the school board demanded of them. Parents might gather in silent protest at the home of a certificated science teacher who refused to teach Creationism in his biology class, but the teacher has his oath to protect him and the parents would have to choose between a well-prepared teacher for their children and an ill-prepared one.

Presumably, colleges and universities would not be forced to treat applications equally—those from school districts with professionally certificated teachers and those from districts without them. It would take action by the national government to require them to accept students who were, in the judgment of the university, ill-prepared for university work. We are trying to do without national government intervention and besides, there is the question of the grounds on which the government might intervene.

The Constitution requires the intervention of the national government in the affairs of the school districts IF Creationism is a religious doctrine.[1] If it is not a religious doctrine, then the present appeal to national government authority falls short and local preferences prevail. This provides a wonderful opportunity for biology professionals to decide what they are willing to do, as educators, and what they will need to refuse to do because of the harm it would cause.

For myself, I would rather see a conflict between a popularly elected school board, on the one hand, and professionally accountable biologists on the other than a conflict between a national government wielding the Constitution and local school boards wielding parent preference. I think it would be a more useful conflict and I am quite sure it would be more fun.

[1] It wouldn’t have to be religious. There are agnostic versions. “The earth and all subsequent living things were created at a single recent time, but the data now at hand provide us no way to say how that happened.” There are thousands of theistic versions. Nearly every culture, no matter how small or how isolated, has an account of how the god [name of local deity] or the gods [name of college of local deities] created the world and all that is therein. There could be a rotation of Creation myths, using each in turn.

D-Day and Global Warming

Questions don’t aggregate the way purchases do. When you have a million purchases, they push up “consumer demand.” When you have a million questions, they might not aggregate to anything at all.

Democracies are better in crisis conditions. The Framers devised a government that wouldn’t work very well under most circumstances, but when a crisis loomed, cooperation would span the chasms that normally separated the branches from each other and the states from the federal government and “considerate and virtuous citizens” from the uneducated rabble. Madison’s republic is built on social distrust and Newtonian mechanics. In a crisis, we get to keep the mechanics, but the common threat does temporary duty as “trust” and we work together. That’s the idea.

You’d think we could do it better than that after a while. Still, every looming (as opposed to an actually occurring) crisis takes power from some and gives it to others. That means that the industry of pointing to and describing the steady advance of a “looming crisis” is a rapidly growing industry. Taking one step in any direction is hazardous if there is a slippery slope two steps in every direction. And if experts, now widely reviled as the tools of [fill in name of group] can’t be trusted—and they can’t if there is always a group of “my experts” opposed by a group of “your experts”—then every uneducated opinion is as good as any other.

Under those circumstances, questions don’t aggregate. Therefore answers don’t aggregate. Therefore planning for crises that are certain but not immediate, is stuck in the governmental dilemma the Framers built for us.

I have global warming in mind. The idea of the canary in the coalmine is a warning sign from the standpoint of the miners. When the canary dies, we miners feel an urgent need to get out and get some fresh air. But with global warming, everyone feels that someone else is “the miners.” We are prepared to mourn the loss of that innocent canary, but we still believe in coal and we aren’t the ones in the mine. But, of course, we are.

It is a difficulty, particularly in the case of global warming where we actually ARE the miners, but it is not a new difficulty. Here are a couple of clips from Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War. It’s a fictional account, but Wouk continually faces the dilemma of making up “new facts” when the actual ones are widely known, or just using the correct ones. In those circumstances, he simply fills in the true history as the context for his characters, some of which are fictional (Pug Henry) and some of which are not (FDR).

On Memorial Day, 1940, the actual President Roosevelt asks the fictional Pug Henry to join him in the President’s reviewing stand. During the parade, Roosevelt handed Henry a slip of paper with these numbers on it.

Public Attitude Toward War, 28 May 1941
For getting in if no other way to win 75%
Think we’ll eventually get in 80%
Against our getting in now 82%

Here’s a little speech Roosevelt gave to Pug Henry along with the slip of paper. So far as I know, the speech is fictional, but the concerns were thought to be strategically plausible.
“If we get into war, Hitler will at once walk into French West Africa. He’ll have the Luftwaffe at Dakar, where they can jump over to Brazil. He’ll put new submarine pens there, too. The Azores will be in his palm. The people who are screaming for convoy now (“screaming their opposition to U. S. convoys,” he means) simply ignore these things. Also the brute fact that 82%...of our people don’t want to go to war.”

This is May 1940. In August 1940 the Congress passed the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, just in case the United States might need an army if it were to enter the war. The bill passed the House of Representatives by a single vote, and even that might have benefited from the very agile gavel of Speaker Sam Rayburn. In December, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and we declared ourselves in a state of war against “the axis powers.” Roosevelt in his little speech was looking at the seemingly unstoppable German army on the one hand and the implacable opposition to war by four fifths of Americans on the other.

In this instance, Japan provided us the canary in the coal mine. That is what got us from that 82% to D-Day in France, 67 years ago today. The attack on Pearl Harbor wasn’t just a catastrophe; it was an act of war. It was the infliction of harm by a navy willing and able to inflict it. Being attacked, like the prospect of being hanged, “concentrates the mind wonderfully. I chose a landing craft view for D-Day, by the way, because a friend of mine at church piloted one of those on D-Day. It's not the most graphic picture of the invasion I have ever seen, but it is the one he saw, so it matters to me.

Global warming isn’t like that. No one attacks. Polar bears drown. The mythical “Northwest Passage” becomes actual. Investors are buying up land on which wheat has never been grown so they will own it when the temperatures and the rainfall at those new latitudes will support wheat farming. The water at Florida’s coastlines is rising, by my best recollection, at the rate of an inch a decade. Here is a collection of more scary stuff.

But the questions about global warming and what to do about it don’t aggregate into a single national concern. No one has attacked us. The canary hasn’t died. And most of the people think there will be plenty of time to “do something” when the crisis in upon us. Then they will demand that Congress pass HR 1, the “End Global Warming Now” Act. Then they will complain about the untrustworthiness of government when the climate doesn’t turn around, as Congressional mandate has instructed it to, and return to the values of 1700 A. D.

If it was a real crisis, someone would have warned us, right?

Why Nobody Likes Me

I am a "misfit." A bad fit. Questions tend to cluster, so that people who ask Question A also ask Question B. Answers tend to cluster as well. People who accept Answer C tend also to accept Answer D.

There is some sense to this, of course. Questions and answers match up like couples at the prom. Just as you don’t go to a macroeconomics convention and start talking about the role of sin in poverty, so you don’t go to a course on systematic theology as start talking about GDP. It isn’t the position of the economists that there is no such thing as sin or that it can’t affect economic prosperity; rather, it’s that “sin” is an “answer” from another universe of discourse and they don’t want to be troubled by it.

But if I were at that convention, I might be interested in it. I find some answers interesting, even when I am with a question-defined group. I find some questions interesting, even when I am with an answer-defined group. And that’s why nobody likes me. Well, actually, it isn’t that they don’t like me; it’s just that when they see me coming, they start to circle the wagons.


Let me offer an example. For the last decade or so, I’ve been interested in sex roles. Our library has a journal titled Sex Roles. Here are some questions I began with when I started being interested in sex roles. What are they for? Why are violations of a society’s sex roles punished? What do the punishers get out of doing the punishing, given that it is a non-remunerated (volunteer) task? Would clearer sex roles be better? How? Would more ambiguous sex roles be better? For whom?

I couldn’t find any answers at all. None of the scholars I located was interested in the questions I was asking and, as you see, my questions are not in scholarly form. So it seemed to me that the people who could answer the questions I was asking didn’t care about the questions. Articles on sex role stereotyping abounded. It’s bad. Articles on tolerance of cross-gendered behavior abounded. It’s good.

Clearly, however, it costs us a fair amount to inculcate gender norms and to police them and we keep on doing it, year after year. It must be good for something.

Maybe a political example would help. I am a political and economic liberal. Pretty standard issue. For the other issues—religious, social, intellectual, and aesthetic (RSIA)—I am pretty conservative. Worse, I think I might be conservative for different reasons in each case. My aesthetic conservatism, for instance, is likely no more than ignorance. And in religion, I am a liberal as religious people judge things. But in politics, being religious at all, unless you are a black Protestant, is a kind of conservatism.

So when I attend the liberal pep rallies—sorry, when I was in school, we had “pep rallies” and they came out of instructional time—I do the cheers and yell at the times everyone else is yelling. Until the other questions come up: the RSIA questions I named above. Then I shut up and sit down and all my liberal buddies look at me funny. It isn’t any better at the conservative pep rallies, except that I am odd man out on the P and E issues and one of the guys on RSIA issues.

The root question is on what grounds do you want to curb individualism? I think there are not many good reasons in the political and economic spheres. Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend. When we get to families and schools and clubs and neighborhoods, I think there are often grounds for curbing individualism.

Religious questions? Yeah, there too. I am inclined toward scholarship on biblical issues. The question in my mind is, “What does the text say?” Part of that is pushing off of my literalist past, but some of it is just my enjoyment of good scholarly work. My conservative friends see me coming and circle the wagons. This guy is going to play fast and loose with Holy Scriptures. My liberal friends see me coming and circle the wagons. Maybe it’s just one set of wagons and they share them as they need them, I don’t know. The liberals say this guy is still stuck on biblical texts, when all of us know that when you take into account [fill in name of non-textual concern here] these texts just can’t be taken seriously.

So I see the outside face of a lot of wagons, circled. Ah well.

The Web of Technology, Stranded

Today I had an experience that started me to thinking. I took a trip into unfamiliar territory west of Portland—if you don’t go there every week, there are always houses in places there were none the last time you were there. So just as a precaution, I cranked up the little navigation app on my Droid phone. This picture represents several steps up, but I don't have a picture of me using my Droid to navigate, so it will have to do.

Now Bette does most of my navigating and I like that best because she has a really pretty voice—that is, by the way, the first thing I ever learned about her by experiencing it—but Bette is off doing something today. The voice on my Droid (there’s no reason not to call her Anne, I guess) isn’t very nice. It has a harsh mechanical diction to it. On the other hand, Anne gives directions EXACTLY the way I like to get them from someone I can’t ask any further questions.

Anne says, “Turn left on Oleson Road (which she pronounces correctly, with only two syllables) in one mile.” When I get close, she says, “Turn left on Oleson Road and continue on Oleson Road for point seven miles.” She even says “Stay to the right” and “Take the right fork” and other more sophisticated things. Although she is only a Droid app, she’s really good.

But then I got to noticing something. When I am finding my way to a place I haven’t visited before, I pay attention to everything. That’s not a program or a plan; it’s just what I do. Without thinking about it, I notice the road signs—not just the ones that describe where I am going—but all the ones that assure me everything is where it ought to be. I’m going to Bethany Center so Beaverton ought to be over there (and it is) and Hillsboro ought to be out there (and it is) and all is well. I notice where the sun is; or, it’s May in Oregon, where it brightest part of the clouds is. I notice how much water is on the pavement. I notice whether there are Red-winged Blackbirds in that patch of cattails. I probably shouldn’t, but I do. I notice whether I am coming to a commercial area or into a school zone.

Driving with Anne, I notice less of all those. Or I did today. Why?

Well, nothing against her. Her job is to know where I am, where I am going, and what my options are along the way. She does that. On the other hand, she gives me a lot of superfluous guidance, as I noted above. She doesn’t break in to reassure me that I am still on Oleson Road, as if I were concerned that I had wandered away, but she does things that are almost like that. She provides a web made up of anticipation, specific instruction, and next step instruction and I rely on that web. When I don’t have her, I rely on a web of my own making, which comprises the distances to cities whose locations I know, attention to the road surface, attention to the driving implications of the area, like a school zone, and so on.

So, it’s my web or hers. I really think mine is better. I also think it is better for me to be constructing one than to be receiving one. On the other hand, hers is so specific and it is hard not to confuse specificity with accuracy. Digital watches always LOOK more accurate than analog watches. And the regular anticipation and followup—anticipate the turn, make the turn, here’s what’s next—is almost liturgical. It’s very soothing.

On the other hand, I have little fragments of other contexts that attach to this experience and that aren’t really comfortable. For example, Anne relies on a GPS. The GPS has to know where I am. That means that a part of my phone record is “everywhere my phone has been for the last month,” which, since I carry it in my pocket and in my Camelbak, in everywhere I have been for the last month. It’s a little like an electronic bracelet, which wasn’t any part of my idea in buying a cellphone.

Then there’s Bertram Gross’s well-known little warning in his book Friendly Fascism: “When fascism comes to America, it won’t look like storm troopers with boots. It will look like Disneyland.” That’s a paraphrase, but it’s close and the reference to Disneyland is accurate. My little navigation system looks like Disneyland. And I don’t take what she tells me as part of a web of information, and add it to other parts which I produce myself. I could, but I don’t. I just do what she tells me and I get to the right place. I don’t get there by traveling on the roads that are “there”—not in the same sense that they were there apart from her narration—but by traveling on the roads she narrates.

My paternal grandfather was blind for most of his life and he liked to have people read the Bible to him. There were times, he said, when his location was really more THERE (it was the book of Romans in the example Dad told me) that it was the room in which he was sitting. He wasn’t in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania; he was in Paul’s Letter to the Christians at Rome.

I said these were fragments of context, remember. I think I could be in Anne’s narration more than I am in Bethany Village. More than I am driving my Subaru. I think that, all things being considered, being really driving my Subaru through Bethany Village is the right thing to do.
And it if were just navigation, I think I’d just wave it off. But are we really relying on more and more things to tell us where we are and where we are going? Every time I log on to Amazon to buy a book, they tell me what other books “someone like me” really ought to buy. And they know “who I am” because of all the other books I have bought from them. The clerk at the local bookstore doesn’t know me; doesn’t know what books I have bought; doesn’t know what kind of books I like. The computer at Amazon is more…”personal.”

Are you worried too? Is it just me?

Small Government and Abortion

At the launching of my “small government odyssey,” I provided only a set of characters and a single strategic principle. The set of characters were three sectors present in every societal system.[1] I called them the polity, the economy, and the society. When I get that far, I always remember a very useful acronym from undergraduate days. It is PERSIA. It functions to remind me that a societal system can be profitably considered by looking at its political, economic, religious, social, intellectual, and aesthetic components. In practice, I simply stuff R, I, and A into S and call it good enough.

The strategic principle was that people would continue to transact their business within the sector they were taught was appropriate. Things like buying and selling and producing and consuming goods and services “belong in” the economy. Things like expressing a religious faith, holding any view at all about anything at all, and producing something you think is beautiful all “belong in” society. We are all taught, more by example than by precept, what belongs where and by and large, we pay no more attention to it than that.

There are exceptions, of course. People who value society resent invasion by the economic sector. Social values and relationships can be “commodified,” i.e., turned into a commodity, and thereafter may be bought and sold. Both social practices and economic practices may be “juridified,” i.e., turned into political issues, especially through the courts.[2] The availability of wombs for rent is thought by many to be an outrageous commodification of conception and delivery. Making it a crime to smoke pot is thought by many to be an outrageous juridification of normal market processes.

In any case, keeping relationships and practices in the sectors “where they belong” is the very heart of the case for small government. A government that is not asked to do a great deal will not require a great deal of authority or resources—what we call today, “tax dollars.”[3] In order to keep issues in the sectors where they belong, people will have to believe that they are being treated fairly or that, fairly or not, there is no alternative.

With no more background than that, I thought that I would apply this logic to the question of abortion. By now, this is a full-blown sectoral conflict. Liberals, by and large, think that governments should not interfere with practices that are essentially “social” (doctor and patient) or essentially economic (professional and client). Conservatives, by and large, think that murder, which is how you get rid of unwanted fetuses, is against the law and that it is the natural and appropriate task of government to prevent these murders where possible or to punish the perpetrators, if necessary. It is, as I said, a sectoral conflict.

Let me grant you that this issue has been complicated in many ways. Conservatives are conflicted, for instance, about whether they want to prevent sexual promiscuity or to prevent pregnancies. But let’s just consider the implications for the three sectors under consideration. Everyone agrees that preventing the need for abortions is better than outlawing them and criminalizing the clients and the providers. Bill Clinton’s summary of his views on abortion remains a model of clarity: “safe, legal, and rare.” We are concerned about the “rare,” part.

At some point, a woman is going to be confronted by the prospect that she will deliver a baby she does not want. Let’s back the process up from that point and think of some reasons why she might not want to deliver this child. The child may be born deformed. The more we know about fetal diagnostics, the more we catch those possibilities. Small government advocates would be expected to be in favor of any non-governmental means of reducing these possibilities. If they are caused by inadequate medical attention to women who are pregnant or who may become pregnant, then making sure this attention is available is a superb way to reduce the number of deformed fetuses and the consequent demand for aborting those fetuses.

If the fetus is going to be “one child too many” for a single woman with other children, a small government advocate might want to look at why there are so many single women. The relationship of “jobs that will sustain a marriage” to the number of two-parent families comes immediately to mind. In urban areas, the number of single-parent families skyrocketed when the businesses left to cities for more expansive and less taxed environs. The jobs go away, the marriages go away, the babies keep coming. Some of these fetuses are aborted, who would not have been aborted had they been affordable and they would have been affordable had the marrige-sustaining jobs stayed put.

Or, consider adoption. If adoption were considered early (rather than, as is sometimes the case, abortion being considered late), it would cut down drastically on the number of abortions. For adoption to be reasonably considered early, a robust system of adoption services would have to be available and advertised. There would be adoption counseling. There would be a substantial number of adoptive families. Outcomes for adopted children would have to be comparatively attractive, and so on.

These are all means—starting way back with “adequate prenatal care”—that would reduce the demand for abortions. The process of not delivering an unwanted child would be “bought back” from the economy, where it is an economic transaction featuring willing buyers and willing sellers. It would be “bought back” from government, where it has been incessantly juridified since Roe v. Wade and it would be bought back not by blocking access to the courts, but by rendering the judgment of the courts superfluous.

When will “big government” happen with reference to this question? It will happen when there are a lot of people who feel they are losers and who feel that their needs would be better met by the intervention of government. Women will feel that they have the right to the professional services of a doctor and doctors will feel that three in the consulting room, where government is the third presence, is one too many. Legislatures will attempt to criminalize these professional services, but women will continue to seek them and providers will continue to provide them. The only reasonable way to keep government small is to keep it from juridifying the abortion question. The most efficient way of dealing with the abortion question is to prevent it. Preventing it will require substantial social change, all in support of women who through intension or inadvertence, find themselves unhappily with child.

So the task of the sector guardians—the people who want social issues to stay in the social sector and not be highjacked by the political sector—is to prevent these urgently felt needs from occurring. If they do occur, they ought to be met and I would expect advocates of small government to agree to the government’s meeting all the needs that can’t be prevented.

It seems only reasonable.

[1] My apologies for “societal system.” I’m saving “society” as the name of one of the sectors and using it both ways would run me into a tautonomy. We don’t want that.
[2] Left to my own devices, I would probably have chosen “politicized,” rather than the narrower “juridified,” but I am following the usage of Frank Hearn in Moral Order and Social Disorder. Hearn is a communitarian, so having pejorative names for the processes by which his favorite values are highjacked is very important.
[3] Or, if you are conservative, “hard-earned tax dollars.”

Launching a Small Government Odyssey

I am about to begin an odyssey. You are invited to accompany me and to keep me from time to time from throwing myself under the bus. I want to think about what proponents call “limited government,” but which is, in fact, “small government.”

I realize that we have a federal system and that the government people have in mind when they call for small government is the central government. These people want the federal government to be smaller not, as a rule, because they want less governing going on, but because they want more of the governing to be done by the regional governments. There are various reasons that might be given for that, some quite ingenious, but we will pass them by just this once.

I am imagining that our system can be thought of as three related parts, as in the diagram.
Just what the रेलातिओंस are of each to the other will be the continuing investigation. I am going to be known as the guy who put the odd- in odyssey, I suppose, but it would by only an –yssey if it weren’t for people like me. For now, I want to suggest one rule for using the diagram and note a couple of implications.

This is the rule: in a well-ordered economy and society, the transactions stay where they are. The buyers and sellers and suppliers and manufacturers and the providers and consumers of various services either like the way things are being done or see no alternative. The adherents of various faiths or of no faith, the family members, the educators and the students, the husbands and wives, the members of various racial or ethnic groups and of various cultures also believe that things are as they should be or that there is no alternative.

In a society like that and an economy like that, we may think of the outer line of the oval as very thick. This line protects the people inside and constrains them as well. Two possibilities thin the outer wall that defines society and economy. Sometimes it seems that there really is an alternative. Sometimes people are really really unhappy with the way things are working out. Or, of course, both. When that happens, people place themselves, figuratively, outside the society or the economy and solicit the action of government.

Government is, in this way of looking at it, an appellate court. It really isn’t as bad as that because in a society and in an economy, there are no necessity that there be any losers. Arrangements can be reached in which everyone is either satisfied or not so dissatisfied as to launch an appeal. In a court, there are losers by definition and as a rule, if you lose and if you have the resources, you start looking around for a second opinion. You appeal to a “higher” jurisdiction.

Now government has its own work to do. It is not only a court of appeals. It has to protect the nation-state from enemies both foreign and domestic. It has to maintain public order. It has to enforce contracts and allow forms of organization favorable to the accumulation of capital, and so on. But government runs on authority and funding and if there is a government, there are people in the government who want more authority and more funding. So they can, you know, provide more “services.” And that’s where the appellate function comes in.

Losers in the economy can solicit the attention of the government and ask for help. Losers in the society can solicit the attention of the government and ask for help. As a rule, the people who are doing well in the economy and the society do not look favorably at the prospect of having their monopolies broken. “Sector knows best,” they will say, meaning only their own sector. The way to keep issues “at home,” i.e., within the sector where they arose, is to keep people from feeling like losers or to keep them from availing themselves of an alternative.

So, just to pick two suggestive examples, a health insurance company might raise its prices by 20% and keep their discretion successfully at home in the economy. If they raise them 200%, someone is going to appeal for governmental intervention. If you have a child with a rapidly progressing illness, you might say that you are faith healers and are relying on God to bring about health. That works sometimes in the sense that no one alleges child abuse and demands government intervention. If you said, instead, that you didn’t want to spend the money on the health needs of your child, there would be a governmental intervention and you would lose control over the child.

So one straightforward implication and I’ll let it rest for today. The people who are currently winning in their sectors would be wise to do whatever is necessary to prevent conditions from getting so bad that there will be an appeal to government. The appeal is the hope of the losers in that sector and even if it fails, it destabilizes the sector and makes a new deal seem possible.