And how are we feeling today?

The question I want to ask today is this: “How do you know how you are feeling?”

But as I was thinking about it, a scene came to mind. I don’t know what it’s a scene from. Maybe the scene is such a cliché that it isn’t worth asking about. In this scene, a man is in a bed in his hospital room and a nurse comes in and asks, “How are we feeling today, Mr. Jones?” What is that “we” doing there? It isn’t the royal “we.” It isn’t a collective “we,” as if the patient and the nurse had some way the two of them were feeling. Is there some advantage to the “we” form: it’s more empathic, less intrusive, more hopeful? I don’t see it. By the way, "Naughty Nurse" is one of the images you get when you google "How are we feeling today" so I guess it meets the cliche test.)

I want to say that we don’t really know how we are feeling, ordinarily, because there is always a context and what we know takes that context into account. So let’s say that I’m the guy in the hospital bed and when the nurse asks me “the question,” I say, “Let’s find out. I will need to consult the oracle.” The oracle I would have in mind, if I said that, would be my body.

But don’t you just know how your body feels? No. I read a really interesting piece of research about endurance. They were studying cyclists and what happens as they drive these cyclists to exhaustion. The treatment that worked best in staving off exhaustion was rinsing the mouth with sugar water. You might want to stop and read that again. No sugar intake. No new calories. What there was was the promise of new calories. It was the promise, not the calories, that released the extra energy.

How would that be? There is, it turns out, a center in your brain that decides whether the very last drop of energy should be released for use by the muscles. It’s a pretty conservative center—in my own mind, I picture the Federal Reserve System—and it hangs onto (does not release for your use) quite a bit of energy. “It” has the energy and “you” do not. You have to stop and catch that division. When you get the sugar water rinse, this center believes that new energy resources are going to be available soon (they are not) and releases a substantial part of its reserve, which you now get to use.

So my body tells me what it wants to tell me and, having no alternative source of information, I take its word. I always imagine that I am asking the “how am I feeling” question in absolute terms. Like taking a temperature. My temperature is 99.1 degrees: end of story. So if I imagined there were a “feeling good” scale (let’s say 100 points and anything above 80 is really good), I would be expecting a number. The oracle says, “You are currently at 67.”

The dilemma I am digging at is that I really don’t think that the oracle has an absolute scale in mind. I think it has a relative scale in mind. Even if I ask “how am I feeling today,” it answers “you are feeling well enough to/not well enough to” do something in particular. So I ask how I am feeling and the oracle says, “Well, you’ve got three meetings this morning and you don’t really want to go to any of them so you’re not feeling very well.” Or I ask how I’m feeling and it says, as it did this morning, “You’re going to go to church and teach an adult education course that you have been thinking about nonstop for about three weeks. You feel fantastic! I’ll give you a 90.”

In this way of thinking about it, the oracle consults what it knows about what I have to get up for, how I feel about those things, and gives me the number I asked for. It gives me a number (65) that sounds as if it belonged on an absolute scale, but it calculates that number by scanning through my physical and emotional systems and comparing them to the upcoming tasks. Then it gives me the number. And if a nurse were actually asking, I would say, “Oh, 65.” Actually, I’d say, “Oh, not all that well yet.”

Does the oracle distinguish between physical and emotional challenges? Let’s say I slept badly last night and the work I have to do in the morning is mostly physical. The oracle knows my schedule and says, “85, get right to work.” If I slept badly and the morning’s work is to deal with a line of students who are not happy about their grades, the oracle might say, “60. This is going to be a really tough morning.” In this speculation, the oracle matches my sleep-deprived state against the physical work and sees no difficulty (hence 85) and against the emotional strains of dealing with unhappy students and sees a lot of difficulty (hence 60).

If the oracle is going to do a schedule-based scan and report to me an absolute-looking number and if I don’t have any alternative source of information, what should I do? Maybe I should take the oracle’s way of coming to a conclusion a little more seriously. Maybe I just don’t answer the question “How are we feeling today?” or even “How am I feeling today?” Maybe I look first at the work there is to do—that sounds stoic, I suppose—and ask “Do I feel well enough to do THAT?” The oracle’s answer, I’d imagine, would almost always be, “Yes, you feel well enough to do that.”

So then I get up and do it. Would that work, do you think? Or is outpsyching the oracle mostly a waste of time?

Salad Days

When we started dating, the metaphor I first tried to sell to Bette was "a good marriage is like a high performance engine." She wanted to like it. She tried to like it. But she wasn't able. She didn't like the analogy between machines and relationships. I thought, at first, that I could explain it to her if I could match up the fine points, but I know next to nothing about internal combustion engines of any kind, so that didn't work either. Besides, the principal use I had in mind for that metaphor was that if you want the engine to run right, you don't run it on cheap gas.

Eventually I gave up on the engine analogy and Bette and I are working together on a new one. A good marriage is like a garden. I have added a look at our current garden so you will get the idea. The dilemma with metaphors is that you want a few of the major points to match, but you don't want to turn it into an allegory. Oddly, Bette is the one who wants to allegorize. As far as I really want to go with the garden metaphor is that nothing you can do can make up for the failure to have really good soil. Good soil is rich enough to feed the plants. It drains well. It is placed where it can get enough, but not too much, sun.

That's really all I know. I do know it is really hard to start with bad soil and turn it into good soil. That's what dating is for, I guess. I know that if you have bad soil and get, as a result, bad crops, most of the things you are likely to do first are not good things to do. If you want to make fundamental improvements, you are going to have to move the garden to the right place and/or amend the soil so that it will support the crops you want to grow and/or so that it will drain properly.

Bette has been relentless about this particular garden. She didn't do anything until she had the soil the way she wanted it. These beds are at the south and west sides of our house so it gets a lot of sun. There is a lot of the food the plants like best in the soil. Bette can irrigate to her heart's content, because the soil drains really well all the way down to the clay level. Whatever you might want to say about Bette's metaphors, there is nothing wrong with her garden.

The beds you are looking at are beets, peas, lettuce, arugula, spinach, bell peppers, carrots, onions. The edge of the jungle you see to the right is all tomatoes. We are eating really well right now

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.

Blog 2

This is my second post labeled “blog.” I wrote the first one on May 30, 2010 and I titled it “Blog 1.” That’s not too adventurous, I now realize, but I was feeling my way at the time. This blog is number 128 and I want to give it over to reflecting on my first year of blogging.

Since May 30 of last year, I have written about a third of a post a day. When I think that this is something that was added to a life that already had a lot of things in it, that seems to be a lot. I have written more about politics than anything else (27); I guess that’s not all that surprising. Posts with religious topics come next if you combine the biblical studies (10), the Christian praxis (7) and the Christian theology (4). That gets you to 21 “religious topics.” The label “Words” is next at eleven. You can get another eleven if you combine Kiddie Lit, movies, books, books and movies, and reading. As you can see, I struggled with topic names.

I was completely surprised by the availability of a label “Saturday Evening Post.” It did occur to me eventually that a post I put up on Saturday evening was a Saturday Evening Post, so I started calling them that.

I routinely go fishing for pictures, now, to add to all the words. They are remarkably easy to find. In the most recent post on emotional intimacy, I typed “emotional intimacy” into Google and got a lot of pictures to choose from. Virtually any biblical account has a lot of pictures, mostly done in romantic styles. Politics is great for pictures: I put both Paul Ryan and Kathy Hochul in the most recent one. It was almost easier to put them in than to leave them out.
So what, if anything, will be new in the next Blog Year?

The best answer is that I don’t really know. I find that I am much more responsive people who write and say, “Yeah, but what about THIS?” Or, “That was interesting. Let’s have more about that.” One reader characterized my style as “jolly and mordant.” I loved that. Many more readers have characterized my style as terse and difficult. That presents me with a difficulty. I keep my posts fairly short by writing concisely and formally; I use a lot of parallelism to keep the structure clear. I provide labels for each new section, as a rule. Those, together, don’t do the job that needs to be done.

What would do that job, is a lot of examples. But examples are long and posts are short. If I really thought I could carry a reader through 7953 words rather than 2651 words—the length of my most recent post on emotional intimacy—I would do it. But 8000 words seems like a lot of words to me and I suspect that it is a price higher than the traffic will bear.

Ah well.

I’m going to play with my ten pages just a little. I’m going to change books and movies and music into “Arts.” Besides grouping them better, I like the idea that just as there is an art implicit in the book or the movie or the symphony, so there is an art in how to read a book, to see a movie, and to hear a symphony. And by “Arts,” I hope to put both kinds of endeavor into the same category.

I don’t have a favorite post. Some were easy to do; they nearly wrote themselves as I watched. Some were really hard to do, but those were satisfying when I got to the end of all the wrestling. I think the Love and Marriage ones were hardest to do. I think I’m still changing the shapes of some of the categories. In politics, by contrast, the categories are nicely stable.
I hope to write a post called Blog 3 on May 30, 2012. We’ll see.

False Alarm. My Bad

Did you ever watch a firecracker not go off? It takes a little while to decide to light the next one and a little while more to pick up the not-yet-exploded one. That’s how I felt about Harold Camping’s May 21 End of the World prediction. I was at quite an emotional distance from him; so far, in fact, that I found myself wishing that he wouldn’t hurt himself.

Ordinarily, I would be angry at someone who so misuses scriptures that are important to me. Everyone who treats scripture as if it were a book of code (which he, the author, has been able to crack) or a book of prophecy (of the telling the future kind, not the Thus Saith the Lord kind) or a guide for investment in the stock market, cheapens texts that mean something to me and set me up to be lampooned by the next jerk who wants to package me and Camping in the same box because we read the same book.

But not this time. When I saw this photograph, or one reenacted in imitation of it, I realized I was feeling more sympathy than anger. The sign I saw said, "False Alarm. My bad." I can't read all of this one.


“My Bad” seemed like a collegial sort of thing, as it is when a member of a team who has played his heart out, says, on behalf of his team, “We just didn’t want it enough tonight.”

And right after that, I had a quick little mini-vision of various slaves standing up, one at a time, saying “I am Spartacus.” This is not a sharing of the load of persecution, givien what the Romans had in mind for Spartacus, but a complete shifting of the load. It amounted to “Crucify me, not him.” It seemed an odd sequence to me, but in fact, the Spartacus image followed immediately after the "My Bad" picture.

OK, that’s not what I had in mind. Ridicule me, not Harold Camping. On the other hand, I wondered whether we—some of us—couldn’t manage to treat Camping’s several predictions as the kind of utterance a Tourette’s Syndrome sufferer might make. They are unpredictable; they are often vulgar; they are entirely out of the control of the speaker, and people often feel compassion more than disgust. “I know. He says these things. It’s a shame, but you mustn’t take it personally. And when he’s not saying them, he’s a perfectly nice man.”

Maybe I’ll be angry at him next time, but this time, I’m thinking we might just as well offer him our sympathies—especially since he has only postponed until October—and move on.

Living Without God

The easiest way downtown from our house is along Barbur Boulevard. You are going mostly north on Barbur—it weaves a good bit because of the Willamette River just below and the West Hills just above—and just to your right as you pass the Seventh Day Adventist Church, you encounter this sign.

I laughed out loud. I really love this sign. I deeply respect the questions underlying it, since I bear most of them myself. When I imagine myself in conversation with the folks at the Center for Inquiry, I don’t imagine it going very well. Still, when I saw the sign, I felt a wave of collegiality come over me.

First, these guys are in favor of inquiry. I like inquiry. Let’s get to it.

Then, “you don’t need God” for any of the four specified actions. I want to get to the specified actions later, but I want to think now about the position they are attacking. Someone is arguing, apparently, that you need God. Note the instrumental approach. The covenant God made with Israel selected then to be—Tevye’s memorable complaint aside—a chosen people and it was their delight and privilege to be that people. Is there a “need” there I am missing? The gospel, in its most gentrophilic form (occasionally, there just isn’t the word you really want, and you have to dip into the etymological tool kit for your own) form tells the new gentile Christians, “You, who were no people {at all) are now God’s people.” Any desperate need there?

In the perspective of the Center for Inquiry, God is a utility. God is asserted by some to be necessary to some of the most deeply human actions we are capable of: hoping, caring, loving, and living.

You can hope without God. There are some things you can’t hope for without God—maybe I should pause here to note that the sign imagines a “God/god/gods” with no context at all, but I am presuming God as He is known to Christians, so these remarks do not bear at all on God/god/gods” as He or She or They are known to other traditions. You can’t hope to be accepted as “family,” of course. You can’t hope for the “life from above,” as Jesus described it—not because there is anything wrong with Jesus’ description, but only because there is no “life from above” if there is no “above.”

There are other things you can’t hope for either, but I want only to pause here to note that I will have nothing to say here about attaining heaven or avoiding hell. Those are both instrumentalist notions of God, like the notion held by the Center for Inquiry and by all the villains in C. S. Lewis’s compendium of instrumentalists, The Great Divorce.

You can care without God. You can even care deeply about other people without God. Altruism is a part of our genetic inheritance, along with homicidal rage. We wouldn’t have become what we call “human” without learning to care for others without concern for our own welfare. If Christians want to make a case that “caring” and God are connected, we will have to get to doing the kind of caring that wouldn’t otherwise get done.

You can love without God. Of course you can. Humans love. They love good things and bad things. Of course, you can’t love God without God. In the Christian notion, God is both the source of the love we draw on—the ocean from which we draw our little pails of lovingness and stagger back with those pails to our needy families and communities—and the proper object of our love. Christians teach that there is a godly love, agápē, which is characteristic of God and of our rightful love of God.

The hitch about loving is what you love and how you love. Ordinarily, love is a transitive verb and the complications come mostly with what you transition to.

You can live without God. This can’t be the trivial point in which live is equated with exist. It must mean “really live,” in which case, it is the opposite of “really die,” a prospect the serpent tried to assure Eve against in Eden. “Really live” must mean a life of significance and I affirm that heartily. I believe a life of significance is of utmost importance and if it were not, then the people who are “living” in the pods the Matrix has prepared for them are “living” in the same sense as Morpheus and the other members of the Nebuchadnezzar IV, who “live” by avoiding Agents when then can by dying when they can’t. Also, a life of significance is a life that signifies something and if there is no meaning, there is no signification—no sign-ification, if you will allow that.

So the Center for Inquiry is on the hook for a universe of meaning within which we find ourselves and within which we may have “significance.” I wish them well. It is a struggle that means a lot to me and which is, in my own theological commitment, the principal referent of “salvation.”

So good luck, guys. People who as good questions are even more valuable than people who give good answers. Nothing against good answers.

Names as Turbochargers

Ever since I started writing things that mattered to me, I have been really sensitive to what to call the thing I am writing. If it can be called something I like, particularly something that tickles my funny bone, I seem to work on it harder and make it a better product. I know that seems odd; it seems odd even to me, but there it is.

My dissertation was moving slowly in the right direction until I thought of calling it Undimensional Man. I played off of Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, which was very popular on the U of O campus at the time, but it was a cosmetic reference rather than a substantial one. When I began to call it by that name, the whole project just exploded forward as if I had hit warp drive with my elbow.

The mix of policy skills I push in my public policy course fits the pattern, too. I try—unsuccessfully in many instances and you can trust me on that because I just graded the final exams—to point to the axis (A) of the positions under discussion first. The first question, in this approach is “What should we be arguing about?” I give pro-life/pro-choice as my example because “what should we argue about” in the ONLY factor that matters. No one is anti-life or anti-choice. Then I stress the positions (P) that fall on that axis, both those at the poles (the extreme positions) and those in the middle, either more moderate or more nebulous—sometimes it is hard to tell. Finally, I stress that each position has its own way of looking at the issue, its own way of deciding just what the problem (P) is.

That got me as far as APP (axis, position, problem) and just a little more thought got me to Killer APP, which helped me focus on it and helped me sell it to the public policy students, all of whom know a good deal more about killer apps than I do.

It was by that same logic that a collection of skills, the ones I want each of my American Government students to master before he starts on the course project, into six skills exactly and the assignment as the Six Pack. Late in this term, there were very efficient references by students to “the six pack skills,” which made me feel pretty good about the whole thing. I did see a 12 Pack at the Plaid Pantry the other day. Hmmmm, I wonder if there are more crucial skills than I thought.

I was finished entirely with a yearlong project of writing essays to my kids when it occurred to me what to call the essays. They came in four sections, of which the section of Theology came first, with the understanding that it would necessitate a section on Discipleship. My idea at the time was that theology naturally overflowed in the direction of a life of faithful practice, but I discovered that it doesn’t. At least in my life it doesn’t.

But before I wrote the Theology section, I had to write one on Epistemology so I could explain to the kids how I came to the positions I took. There was a good reason for doing that because I wanted them to see that the positions I wound up in were constrained by my ideas about how we go about knowing anything. I hoped that would help them understand that with their different views on knowing, they would naturally come to different theologies. And I had only begun on the Epistemology section before I saw clearly that there had to be a Biography section, explaining how I came to, and why I especially needed, those particular ideas about how we know things.

By the time I was done, I began to notice that I had a biography (B) section, an epistemology (E) section, a theology (T) section and a discipleship (D) section. That resolved itself almost immediately into DEBT and the essays into the DEBT essays. In fact, I taught a course in my church’s adult education program on this kind of communication and called it “The Debt We Owe.” I did not call it “the DEBT We Owe.” Too cute.

I got to thinking about the effect that “naming” has on me today when I was beginning to re-write some materials to use in my American Government class next fall. What would I find out about these kids if I could? I’d like to know if politics is salient for them at all. That’s important to me because making politics more salient is important in that course and it would be a help to know where I’m starting with them. I’d like to know how much knowledge they already have. I’d like to know if they have a beginning ideological commitment—liberal and conservative is about as far as we go at the 100 level—or maybe a fixed and useful ideology. I’d like to know how they feel about civic discourse. Is the slashing and burning of the talk shows what they are used to and something they approve of? Would they rather see a more accommodating civic discourse in which reasons are given and disagreements are accepted as part of the process?

I would likely have found a way to ask those questions sometime before next September, but this morning, I noticed that salience, knowledge, ideology and discourse get me to SKID and that the measures we use to determine those four elements will be SKID marks. Now I’m absolutely certain this project will get done, probably well before September.

I don’t know if “having the right name” for a project is a big deal for any of you. It’s getting clearer and clearer that it’s a big thing for me.

The Concept 1-A

I just had a bad moment. Yesterday, I wrote about the search for the concept. This morning, I read this in The Oregonian.

"Ever since the Trail Blazers reconveded from the All-Star brak last month, coach Nate McMillan has been trying to sell his players on the team concept. with Canby and Roy returning from injury and with the addition of Wallace, McMillan knew minutes and roles could become an issue in the locker room. If the players thought about the team and winning, the coach argued, it

shouldn't matter who was playing or for how many minutes."

Or, in other words, it's not about you.

Oh no! Is that the idea I've been struggling to give a name to? Say it ain't so! "Team spirit?" Does it really make any sense to call God and Israel "a team?" Or my PSU students and I "a team?" Bette and me, possibly, but it seems to catch only a few pieces of what feels, as I live it, a much more subtle arrangement.

This Means Something

Tomorrow, I am going to write a post about an idea I nearly have. Almost. I'm so close to it, but I don't know what to call it and, of course, if you don't know what to call it, you don't really know what it is. Today, I was talking with my brother, Mark, and I remembered that wonderful line from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Richard Dreyfus plays a blue collar worker who has had a vision implanted in his brain. It's pretty distressing. He keeps seeing this same shape and he doesn't know what it means. In this picture, he sees the image in the enormous pile of mashed potatoes he serves himself while his wife and kids watch incredulously. He says, "This means something. This is important."

And that's the way I'm feeling about this idea. I hope it really does mean something. And I wouldn't be too unhappy, either, if it turned out to be important.

Thanks for the picture, Mark. Tomorrow I'm going to start banging the drum again and we'll see what happens.

Public and Private Integrity

Abraham Maslow says that we desire to belong to a group and when we have done that, we desire to distinguish ourselves from the group. Perfectly natural. Jim Davies, my mentor at the University of Oregon, used to paraphrase those stages by saying that we want to be a part; then we want to be apart.

I have nothing good at all to say about lack of integrity, but I know now that it comes in more than one flavor. Integrity is hard to describe, but it isn’t hard to recognize. In math, we say that this number is an integer and that one is a fraction. Those are your choices so far as “numerical integrity” is concerned: whole or broken into pieces.

Davies provided me with another way of looking at the meaning of this word. He passed on a story about a political theorist we both knew—by that I mean that Davies knew him and I knew who he was—who was not highly thought of as a person. “He’s a horse’s ass,” went the punch line of the story, “and I mean that isotropically.” I didn’t have to look it up because one of the reasons Davies liked to tell the story is that he got to say what the word meant. My dictionary says, “having…properties that are the same regardless of the direction of measurement.”[1] This gives the sense of “consistency” to integrity.

I think the idea of integrity my father had in mind is that you are a) who you really are and b) the same person in one setting that you are in another. I think that’s the heart of it, but since the word is always used positively, let’s toss in the Boy Scout virtues as a coating: you know, trustworthy, loyal, helpful, etc. I learned that that was what integrity meant. Then I went into politics.

In my first job, I ran a campaign and I was never ever asked what I thought about the issues of the campaign. I was asked what the candidate thought and it helped if I said it as if I thought that too. Then I was a legislative assistant. No one cares about the views of the legislative assistant.[2] So I would say, “We don’t think that bill is fair to the environmental concerns that are being raised,” meaning that the legislator didn’t want to vote for it for any one of a number of reasons. It was important, of course, that I give the same reason he did. Then I was a lobbyist, and in that capacity wrote testimony for legislative hearings and delivered the testimony myself once my office got comfortable with the idea of my doing it. Now the “we” was: “Madam Chair, our position is that this bill removes from the committee a crucial power to decide what the State of Oregon will fund and what it will not.”

Those were hard days for me. I didn’t have any trouble doing the work, but I had trouble feeling good about doing it. That was when I discovered what I have, since then, been calling “public integrity. No veteran legislator thinks that when you testify, you are giving your own views and if he did suspect that, he would be critical of it. What the legislators want is for you to give the best pitch of your agency’s position you can give. They know what your agency’s interest is. They know what you really have to say. They want to know how listening to you can a) make it a better bill and/or b) help the committee or the caucus with the work they are trying to do. It is silliness to tell a legislature he will be better off doing what you are proposing when you and he both know he will be worse off. Why would you want him to think you are that stupid? It might be worthwhile telling him why everyone else will be better off if he supports the bill. He may not be able to take your advice, but he will know that you have looked at the effect on him before you gave your testimony.

I came to that logic—a publically oriented logic—slowly. Well before I formulated these ideas, I saw that the best public actors—legislators, committee staff, governor’s aides, and lobbyists—were people everyone admired. They were people who contributed to the process. They always represented the interests they were there to represent and they always told the truth. Well, they always told “a truth;” there many truths in politics and any one of them will be respected. Untruths are not respected.

These policy superstars were people who saw the whole process and contributed to it. They allied themselves to everyone they could make mutual agreements with and they construed “mutual agreements” broadly, so that they included the next legislative session, not just this one. These people helped combatants see other approaches to the common problems and other ways of dealing with each other. They had, in spades, what I am calling “public integrity.”

After I got clear on the two kinds of integrity, I began to look a little more warily at the kind I grew up thinking was “the only kind.” I began to see some dark corners I had not seen before. For one thing, the moral stance I learned when I was growing up was relentlessly self-referential. I needed for my motives to be pure and to be seen as pure, even if I didn’t know entirely what they were. And if they weren’t acknowledged to be pure, I needed to defend their purity because I saw my “integrity” to be wrapped up not so much in achieving good outcomes as in intending good outcomes. After a while, that didn’t seem like such a good tradeoff to me.
And if you are “a man of principle,” what do you do when the principle has to be modified in order to fairly treat other interests? Do you say, “I know that would be the best thing overall, but I can’t support it because of my principles? I’ve heard that said. If you are “an honest man,” does that mean you are limited to saying what you think to be true, no matter what the question is? I’ve heard that said too. If you have a “strong work ethic,” is it an ethic that will allow you to work invisibly so that someone more important to the whole process can take the credit for it? Or will you be out in the halls justifying the role you had in the achievement for fear you will be seen to have done less than you should have? I’ve seen a lot of that.

The condemnations in the previous paragraph were not just a list of bad behaviors. It was a list of the mistakes people are driven into by their understanding of all integrity as private integrity. These people aren’t glory seekers, but they do want to make sure that they don’t find their own thoughts or intentions or actions taken or actions foregone to have fallen short of their own standards. It’s the personal shortfalls, not the public achievements, that most draw their attention.

Dark corners, I said. They aren’t bad. They are the products of people like me who learned that “doing the right thing” comes in only one flavor. And when you find other flavors, you call them bad because they are different from “what it ought to taste like.” But if you can learn that there a lot of flavors that are good—there are still flavors that are bad—then you have learned a powerful and useful and…I might as well say it….humbling, lesson.

[1] The word I left out was “physical.” Everyone knew that “horse’s ass” was a social, not a physical, judgment.
[2] Actually, some do. The seasoned lobbyists who know that the legislator does or does not have room for a brief chat (just before the vote) is often determined on the spot by the lobbyist’s relationship with the assistant. Those guys care.

Luke, the Shepherds, and the Stable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

.

What It Costs To Pay Attention

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Me either.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's a poem I sent out with it.

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

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

It's the cavalry! We're saved!

It’s been a good day all day today. I’ve had good meetings with students, a good discussion with my Wednesday group at church, and a bunch of good ideas for my course on public policy next term. But nothing so far has been more wonderful than the piece I read in the New York Times this morning with the headline: Atheist Groups Promote a Holiday Message: Join us.

It wasn’t just the article itself, I suppose. Bette and I were having coffee together at our favorite Starbucks. They are still serving the Thanksgiving blend, which is a good rich brew. I was headed down to the office afterwards where I knew I would be able to pick up my new not-very-business business cards—the only card I have ever seen with a footnote on it. So I think the setting had something to do with the explosion of joy which greeted the new atheist advertising campaign.

My heart really goes out to these guys. To start with, they are against “religion,” rather than any religion in particular. I’m not a fan of “religion,” myself, so I wish them well. Counterpoised to religion is “reason.” So they are going to be pitching “reason” to the country that has the largest percentage in the industrialized world who refuse to believe that the earth orbits the sun, rather than vice versa. This is according to a Pew survey within the last year. We lead the world, too, it almost goes without saying in the percentage who believe that the world is only a few thousands of years old.

The second giggle is that they are being forced by the logic of the market to arm wrestle each other for what they are calling “market share.” This according to Mark Silk of the Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life. This means that from the most practical of standpoints, whatever is good news for the Freedom from Religion Foundation is bad for the United Community of Reason. I guess if you’re going to get really involved in the race, you have to pick a horse. It won’t be long before they are having negative ads aimed at their competitors. I’d guess “More Atheistic than Thou” would be a good theme.

I think that American Atheists is my pick in the early going. They will be putting a billboard on the Jersey end of the Lincoln Tunnel—this would be the Lincoln who said, in his second inaugural address “…still it must be said that the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether” rather than some other Lincoln—and the billboard says “You Know it’s a Myth. This Season Celebrate Reason.” I would like them for that if there were no other reason. It’s way too long, for one thing. And it misuses “myth” for another. And it doesn’t say what “season” it has in mind, for another, or why reason should have a season. That sounds like the complaints I get from my PS 101 students along about midterm time.

American Atheists is also the group who, according to David Silverman, their president, said that the campaign is aimed at people who “might go to church but are just going through the motions.” Mr. Silverman, you may have them. I would rather see them taking up space at your place than at ours. Had you considered what to do when they continue going through the motions over at your place? It’s a tough group. They are more or less inert and seem to cherish their inertness. Whatever you can do to dent it will be a service to us all.

I am reminded of a nicely graphic passage I’ve read many times, so it’s probably in Never Cry Wolf. It says that the wolf and the caribou are allies. The wolves remove the old, the sick, and the disabled caribou from the population. The removal of these from the breeding pool does wonders for the health and vitality of the caribou herd, not to mention what it does for the wolves. So I can imagine the Presbyterian churches—the only ones I really know anything about—and the American Atheists mutually benefitting each other and both passing the benefits down to their progeny.

I am old, however, and I have grown wary. I’m not one to count his caribou before they are eaten and I don’t want to hope for too much. What if the atheists are wrong about this? What if the “unchurched”[1] really don’t care enough to raise the question at all. What if this is, as I think it is, really a question of “issue salience?” If that is the case, then the first task of the new atheist marketers will be to argue that the question is urgently important. Once the urgency of the issue has been raised—it is now salient—then the utility of the atheist response to the issue becomes relevant.

I’m not really hopeful. Establishing salience is a bitch. Still, there appear to be new allies entering the field so it is no time for me to despair. And just in time for Christmas.

[1] Meaning this to include the un-mosqued, the un-synagogued, the un-templed, and the un-covened as well.

Cheerleaders (Really)

There was a piece in the New York Times this morning that filled in a little blank spot in my mind and helped me feel I had something to say, finally. It’s about cheerleaders. Cheerleaders generally, I guess, although the article was about NFL cheerleaders specifically. I put the article here.

I do want to say some things about cheerleaders, I guess, but I am sure I want to write about how we think about cheerleaders. My mind was getting itself ready to read this morning’s Times when, last night, I watched some of the movie, The Replacements.[1] Part of the story has to do with the team recruiting extremely erotic cheerleaders from a nearby sex club.

These cheerleaders do things on the sidelines that nearly anyone would agree ought not to be part of a public performance, but the key to the movie’s treatment of this performance is the presentation of the mother who is scandalized and who puts her hands over her little boy’s eyes so he can’t see. All the other shots of crowd reaction are positive. The question here is whether we should disapprove of the mother (prudish) or of the cheerleaders (scandalous).

There doesn’t seem to be any way to make both judgments. Either the behavior of the cheerleaders is appropriate, in which the mother can be made an object of ridicule, or the behavior of the mother is appropriate, in which case the behavior of the cheerleaders can be criticized. One can imagine a middle ground in which some cultural consensus could be postulated. Then the cheerleaders could be said to err on one side of this consensus and the mother on the other. If you have hopes for such a strategy, you have not been watching how cultural arguments are made.

I didn’t know until I read the piece by William Rhoden that some NFL teams have cheerleaders and others do not.

“Philosophically we have always had issues with sending scantily clad women out on the field to entertain our fans,” said John Mara, the Giants co-owner. It’s just not part of our philosophy.”

Frankly, it isn’t part of my philosophy either. I remember from my own high school days that the cheerleaders did what they could to focus the student body on the upcoming game. At the game, they tried to coordinate or amplify the cheering that would otherwise have been scattered. They led offensive cheers when we had the ball and defensive cheers when we were trying to stop the other team.

Twenty years or so later, I was a faculty member at Westminster College in Pennsylvania. Westminster had some really good football and basketball teams while I was there, but the “cheerleaders” didn’t really lead any cheers. They performed little routines on the sidelines. They “gave” cheers. We all listened. They we went back to the game. There was a real cheerleader at Westminster during the time I was there. Whoever did the cheer I am thinking of was called Tommy Titan. He was, ordinarily, more than half drunk. He mimicked the letters T, I, T (gimme another T) A, N, and S and asked us several times afterward what that spelled. The response he got was thunderous and we returned to the game with a somewhat elevated sense that it actually mattered. He wasn’t performing except in the sense that he was performing a function.

The NFL cheerleaders--take this Dallas Cowgirl, the class of NFL cheerleaders--have no function I have heard of that has to do with football. Ditto for the NBA cheerleaders. They are something that happens during TV timeouts and called timeouts. As I write that, it occurs to me that there might be more objection to TV timeouts if there were no cheerleaders. Maybe that’s what they are for.


It’s interesting from a policy standpoint because the performance is public. It is what it is and everyone who is there gets to/has to watch it. It isn’t like the mother in the movie can take her son to wholesome places and the guys who like it hotter can go to strip clubs. If it’s at the game, everybody gets it or nobody gets it. That brings us back to the “sex is good fun” position taken by the men in the stands and the “this is disgusting” position taken by the mother.

As a policy-oriented kind of guy, I would like to see a discussion of the question, “Does this kind of display lead us in a good direction?” Does it say about “women” what we want to say? Does the association of women and violence say what we want to say? Do the 4th of July parades come next, after the football and basketball games? Should the norms of sexual permissiveness be permitted to evolve as sexual practices evolve?

I think those are good questions. They will not be asked so long as anyone who wants to ask them becomes the new subject of the debate. The debate will be about “The New Prudery.” The people who hoped to have the debate will be the killjoys who object to other people having a little fun. I can tell you how a debate on prudery will turn out. Really, I can.


Finally, a personal note. Just an asterisk, really. So I’m watching football on TV and they cut to a shot of the cheerleaders. What do I do? I watch and I enjoy it. These are gorgeous women and I am a man who grew up liking to look at gorgeous women. I don’t think I should be asked to do anything else and I don’t want to do anything else. I’d really prefer that there weren’t cheerleaders at these games. If there are, I would prefer that they didn’t put the cameras on them. If they put the cameras on them, I wish what they do weren’t so blatantly erotic. I would vote for those things if there were any way to vote.

Now this double-mindedness of mine could be called some bad things. Hypocrisy is what it is most likely to be called. But really, I don’t think so. I know what I would prefer. I would prefer my sports without the cheerleaders. That’s policy. Or philosophy. Or something. Trying to look away when they show the cheerleaders is something else. It’s a level of vigilance to which I do not aspire, for one thing. And it’s not what I want to do at the moment either. My policy preference doesn’t spare me from what the cameras show. My instant attraction to beautiful women doesn’t spare me from my response to them.

I take the resulting awkwardness as the kind of dish my culture has served up. I think I’m dealing with it pretty well, given the alternatives. What I’d really like is better alternatives.

[1] I will add this to my list of favorite “not very good” movies. I own it because it features Pat Summerall and John Madden, playing themselves as the play by play and color commentary broadcasters. There’s a good bit of John Madden going “Boom!” and going wild on the telestrator. Summerall has been called “the voice of Sunday afternoon.”

The Pac-12

It is Saturday. Good evening to you all.

When I moved to Oregon in 1980, I moved to Pac-8 country. That’s Pacific 8, although I don’t know how many Oregonians know that, and it was made up of a bunch of schools from states bordering on the Pacific Ocean. Some time ago, they added two Arizona schools and made it the Pac-10. We turned the corner and started heading east toward Texas.

By midweek we should have become the Pac 12, with the addition of Colorado and Utah. But 12 teams are too many to play each other, so some way of dividing them up began to be discussed. At that point, I began to have a quiet little hope. I didn’t tell anyone about it because I didn’t want to jinx it. It’s not that I’m superstitious, but I think sometimes not being superstitious enough can hex everything.

My hopes have been realized! There will be a northern division made up of the Washington schools (UW and WSU), the Oregon schools (UO and OSU) and the two northern California schools (Cal and Stanford). In short, they have reinvented Ecotopia as the northern half of the Pac 12. O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

I propose that the southern division be called Dystopia, which I know is harsh to Colorado, but it does include all of southern California, all of Arizona, and Utah, which are fine with me.
We need a divisional mascot, I suppose. Ecotopia is a place of cooperation and environmental stewardship. Maybe a pet rock? A salmon? A hammock?

I hope I’m not the only one who is giving thought to this. It starts with the 2012 season and now is the time to start planning.

Memo to Professor Harold Hill

Re: Relationship with your new librarian
Date: Saturday Night, October 9, 2010

I know you like Marian. She is a cutie, sure. But here’s something you might want to look at. Is she the kind of woman who can make a commitment?

I got to wondering when I heard her sing:

All I want is a plain man. All I want is a modest man. A quiet man, a gentle man. A straightforward and honest man to sit with me in a cottage somewhere in the state of Iowa...

That’s all she wants. You could do some of that, I think. I’m not sure about sitting in the cottage, but maybe it would grow on you. But…what do you get for sitting in that cottage. Do you get a commitment from your librarian? Noooo.

The commitment, it turns out, takes something else. This is where it really helps to understand that and is a coordinating conjunction and that a coordinating conjunction joins “words, phrases, or clauses of equal rank.” You get the “equal rank” part, right, Professor? Well then, consider this.

And …if occasionally he'd ponder what makes Shakespeare and Beethoven great. Him I could love 'til I die.

So there’s a culture test, too. That’s the test you have to pass to get to “as long as we both shall live,” which is the whole idea, right? And you have to approve a 16th Century Brit and a 19th Century German. If you were a John Keats, say, or a Heinrich Heine man, things would not be looking good for you at all. That’s the thing about the culture wars. It’s not just the Brits and Germans; it’s the right Brits and Germans.

So you have to wonder about Marian. Either she doesn’t know what a coordinating conjunction is…and she’s a librarian, right?...or she’s not serious about the “as long as we both shall live” part.

So think about it. Oh, and by the way, I got “as long as we both shall live” from my librarian. Removed her from Circulation and everything. Sorry.

"Every Saturday evening, I bring out the mag."

I’ve written some fairly serious essays this week. I thought I would post one of them tonight, but then I remembered that it is Saturday evening and it seemed to me that a Saturday Evening Post ought to be more on the lighthearted side. So I’m doing this one instead.

It intrigues me, for instance, that a “post” is something you put on a “log.” I referred in my first post to the crunching up that gave us, instead of web + log, just “blog.” Words are not always fussy about where you separate them. Take the process, for instance, that gave us “an uncle” from the older “a nuncle.” It isn’t so bad, though, really. If you remember that a “log” was once a chunk of wood thrown overboard to help in the navigation of a ship and that the information it provided was “posted,” so to speak, on a “log board” or “log slate,” then putting a log on a post is the most natural thing in the world.

Natural. Not necessarily simple. There are three nouns, “post,” and every one of them has a separate existence as a verb. There is posting like mailing a letter and like being stationed somewhere and like putting a sign up—-you could put it on a post, I suppose.

The folks who put together blogspot.com and who made it so easy to use (thank you, thank you) offer the user a chance to put up some permanent remarks, called “pages,” along with the occasional remarks, called “posts.” I’ve been capitalizing them as Pages and Posts to try to get used to the idea, but I think I’m over that now.
You get 10 pages; ten essays that just sit there. They don’t get pushed down into a historical sequence like posts. I can still find, for instance, the first post I wrote last May but I have to leaf through June, July, August, and September to find it. The pages just sit there at my site.

When I noticed that, it occurred to me that I would be writing about ten subjects—or somewhere in the neighborhood of ten. Shortly after that, I thought that if I had the wit to do it, I could turn each of the pages into an introduction to one of the themes. You get to say what the theme is in the box at the bottom called “label.” So each page would represent a label, like “politics” or “love and marriage.”

All I really had to do was work out what 10 things I was going to devise labels for and then write the ten essays—I mean pages. I’ve done that now. I expect I’ll keep fussing with them. I know, for instance that the page now called Christian Apprenticeship 2.0 is not what I want and that it will be replaced by a page called Christian Praxis…which also might not be what I want, but I like it better at the moment.

So I have a very broad category I call Living My Life. I thought if an idea didn’t go anywhere else, it would at least go there. And that is what I am labeling this one. There are three related to Christian thinking and acting: Christian Theology, Biblical Studies, and Christian Praxis. There are two political ones: Politics and Political Psychology. Then there are just things I like to write about, like Getting Old and Love and Marriage. Finally, there are Words, long a fascination of mine, and Books and Movies. That’s ten. Or, as a very wry friend put it, “One per commandment.”

I’m really happy to be blogging. I’m really happy you are helping me. And have a wonderful Saturday evening.

WOHAA

Today I want to think about "only." Only is the O is WOHAA, an acronym I treasure because it was the first one Bette and I shared. We both knew what SNAFU meant, so we "shared" it in a sense, but WOHAA we invented ourselves and it had an important role to play in helping us get to know each other.

WOHAA means "We're only human, after all." It is within easy reach when you have failed at something. It is especially handy when your failure, the discrepancy between your intention and the outcome of your choices, is going to get the bulk of the blame. In this latter use, the meaning of WOHAA is, essentially, "You really ought not to have intended that outcome (committed to that goal, maintained the importance of that value, etc.).

I want now to introduce a second acronym--a potential acronym, really, since it is likely that no one has ever used it. It is WFHAA. The F stands for "fully." We’re fully human, after all.

I grew up at a time when "only human" was something anyone could say, but "fully human" was something said only by aging transcendentalists and fans of the new humanistic psychology. "Fully human" is the name that belongs beside 10 at the top of the scale. From 9 on down is "less than fully human" and, depending on how you wanted to twist the graph you could get to "bestial" or "inert" at the lowest numbers.

“Only human,” by contrast identifies “human” not as a goal, but as a limiting condition. “What do you expect, he’s only human?” we ask about a public official of our own party who has been caught in an extramarital tangle. That’s the kind of behavior your expect from people in his condition and the name of the condition is “human.” The most generous way to characterize this liability is “fallible.” “Broken” is more fundamental. “Sinful” isn’t any worse than “broken;” it just provides a religious context for it.

So which is it? Is “full humanity” our blessing or our curse? This is the place where we ask what the definition of is is. If I had a good solution to this dilemma, I wouldn’t be writing it here. You knew that, right? I do have an approach, however.

I agree that “less than fully human” is a phrase with meaning. We have all chosen the lesser good or the easier way at times when we know we could have done otherwise. We know what “more fully human” meant for us, particularly, at that time particularly and we know we didn’t measure up. We remember times when we did measure up. For me, “less than fully human” and “not my best self” or even “didn’t bring my A game” all mean the same thing. If we have friends who use similar standards—and we do because that is a big part of how we choose our friends—these norms can be made into “what people generally ought to do” or ought to want to do or ought to pay the price of failing at.

“Only human” has another context in mind. It imagines that “not bringing your A game” is pretty much what happens. It tries to manage the discrepancy between intentions and outcomes by lowering the intentions. Sometimes that’s the only humane thing to do. At other times, is expresses only your own unwillingness to expect more of the person in question or your own unwillingness to pay the price of recurring disappointment, which, after all, does hurt. It isn’t an unreasonable thing to do and sometimes, it is the best thing to do.

But there is another way to take “only human.” It’s probably theological, in essence, regardless of the language used. In this way of thinking of it, you don’t have to postulate a God/god or some gods to talk theologically. You just have to recognize that there is something which, as Martin Luther said, stands in that “ultimate place,” a place beyond which no appeal can be made.

In this context, “human” is just WYSIWYG, today’s final acronym. What you see is what you get. Actual human beings do is good sometimes and bad sometimes. It is the process by which we intend good or intend evil or don’t really care to choose between them that is broken. The point is that humans are broken. We are broken in the way that nearly everyone is broken in The Matrix, one of my favorite religious films. People think they are choosing to be cops or social workers or hackers or whores. In fact, they are none of those things. They are batteries. Their actual job, the only job that means anything in the real world, is to provide an energy source for their captors.

You want “only human?” There it is. In this larger context, you will never make a real choice, never do anything more than ephemerally good or bad as long as you are “plugged in” to a life of appearance and sensation. Getting rescued from the Matrix, which is something you can’t do yourself, would present your first opportunity to make an actual moral/immoral choice. “Only human” is what people tell each other, in this larger context for that phrase, as long as they are plugged into the Matrix and are only deluded puppets. Being rescued from the Matrix will bring you your first chance to begin trying to be fully human.

It’s hard to grasp. When you have grasped it, it’s hard to like it. But, you know, WOHAA.

After the second thought

I've been thinking about the expression "on second thought" or sometimes, "on sober second thought." And I've been thinking, what is it about second thoughts that merits this kind of confidence? There is an analogy, I suppose, by which you shift easily from one gear to another; presumably from one that used to be the best gear to the one that is the best gear now. But reverse is another gear, too, and that shift is frowned upon in the operator's manual.
You don't have to be a Marxist to be a dialectician. Really, all you have to do is to remember the last time you discovered that you have been seriously and embarrassingly wrong about something. Your next step is not likely to be edging toward the center of whatever discourse you have offended. It is more likely to be a sharp rejection of your earlier views and an unthinking affirmation of "the other side." (This imagines there is one "other side.") This rash and ill-considered embrace of "the other side" is often the change we have in mind when we say "on second thought."

Marx's notion of the way a major premise generates an opposing premise and his commitment to the idea that history moves in this three step way (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) is breathtakingly broad. My own tendency to "correct" my mistakes by jumping wholeheartedly to "the other side" is embarrassingly narrow, but I think is the same kind of motion (up to the synthesis).

I have, as Tom Lehrer says, "a modest example here." I'm studying Matthew's gospel under the teaching of people (Mostly Davies and Allison, Matthew) who think the best way to understand Matthew is to see how he diverges from Mark. I come from a background where "exegesis" meant mostly taking what Matthew says at face value and by presuming that the words mean pretty much the same to us as they meant to Matthew. I have been wallowing for several years now in how wrong that exegetical tradition is.

I want very much to embrace the teaching I am getting now. What I am reading now is "true" and what I learned (assumed, really) when I was young is "false." The judgment I really want to make is that what I am reading and the way I am understanding what I am reading, is correct. How likely is that, really? Does the fervor of my rejection of the exegesis of my misspent youth really incline me to hear clearly what Davies and Allison are trying to tell me? Not likely. Am I likely to buffer myself against the over-reaction which has catapulted me from my first understanding and landed me in my second (current) understanding? Not really.

There is no point in pursuing examples beyond the one I've already used, but I was also raised with a certain political attitudes and assumptions; some about what really worthwhile education looks like; some about the best kinds of sex roles; some about what kind of music is most worth listening to. I could multiply examples, but you have your own and you know what I am talking about.

When I continue, on "second thought," to affirm these views, I am likely to refine them and adapt them to the new things I have learned. When my second thought inclines me to radically reject these views, my second thoughts really ought to be as suspect as my first ones. That's what I think. It's not how I feel. I feel that I am now seeing the truth, at last, and am justified in rejecting the errors foisted on me when I was too young to defend myself.

So "on third thought" really isn't a punch line for me. On these questions, like whether I really need to read Matthew in a way that separates him maximally from Mark, third thought is going to be my first chance to retain the values of my early training and the values of my later training, even though they are, in the minds of my first teachers and my second teachers, entirely contradictory.

Third thought ought to be my synthetic phase. That's not what I want, immersed in my second thoughts, but I think I ought to try and, if all goes well, I may come to really want the new insights I get from my sober third thoughts. I know I won't benefit from these third thoughts as I should until I really want to and, captive as I now am of my second thoughts, I don't really want to right now. But I hope for better things.