Politics for Grownups

This autumn night
Dawns, yet unaware
An insect sings on-
Just as am I,
Is he sunk in sadness?

Another thing that struck me in the brief Jon Stewart-Peggy Noonan interview was Mr. Stewart's visceral frustration at politicians' meretricious use of slogans, catch-words, and symbols as stand-ins for defined terms, argument, truth, or clarity. I believe two examples he gave were Conservative pack-mules 'legislating from the bench' and 'strict constructionist.' These could mean all sorts of things, but in practice are code for rather specific anathemas and goals. As Stewart pointed out, rather than risk alienating some groups of voters by railing against gay marriage, a candidate can remain in good stead with both his more Conservative core and moderate voters by espousing his distaste for the first and his fondness for the latter. A major point in Noonan's book is that the bulk of the American populace, regardless of political views, is as angry at being talked down to in this fashion as is Stewart.

And I think this is part of Sarah Palin's appeal. Unlike 'managed' and 'handled' long-time 'insiders,' she says what she thinks. She may get flustered, she may not always make sense, but until recently, when her logorrhea and lack of self-censorship became blunted by those same managers and handlers, she could be relied upon at least part of the time to say what she meant. I don't mean to say that she any more than the rest of us always acted in accord with her values, but she was largely upfront about them and the extent to which they informed her decisions. Nor do I mean that she was entirely unsophisticated politically or did not sometimes choose her public words judiciously, but her back-country candor, her physical expressiveness, and her fitted pink jackets undoubtedly do seem fresh, and more 'real' than the blandly and painstakingly contrived 'brands' of other national figures.

Perhaps tonight in the VP debate, with Palin's recent intensive training and the 90-second limit on responses, she will say as little of what she means as anyone else. She may even have a new more 'professional' haircut and style. Perhaps those ghastly faltering interviews with their exaggerated expressions and gestures and the incoherent strings of 'talking points' were a necessary intermediary step between her original shoot-from-the-hip/ take-no-prisoners/'Joe-Six-Pack' upfrontness, and she will now be ready to respond to any and all questions in a perfectly-clear and meaning-bereft coherent iteration of the same populist 'talking points' minus the nose-wiggle and the finger-licking, but with added 'y'alls' and more consistently dropped terminal G's. Should she remain on the national stage, whether the point is reached tonight or later, she will eventually be able to say as little in as many words as anyone else -- but succeed in doing so with appropriate punctuation and breath stops.

I enjoy subtlety in the right places as much as the next person. But this isn't Edo Japan, and foreign policy can hardly be confused with a lone heron on a foggy marsh. Evocation is not called for: clarity and direct speech are. I don't want synechdoche or stand-ins; I want facts, actual positions, and exposition! It doesn't matter to me in the slightest who pulled whom up by whose bootstraps -- or whether there were bootstraps involved in anyone's 'narrative' at all. I am not a medieval Japanese, and neither are you, so a symbol-ridden terse tanka is of no use to me whatever in parsing your actual stance on a specific issue. God help me, I, as much as anyone else, support 'freedom,' 'democracy,' 'democratic values,' 'rights,' and wish the best for the 'American taxpayer' and the 'American Dream' - but from my espousal of these abstract concepts here you still have no idea in what way I believe they are to be defined, pursued, implemented, or served. Like a bugling stag weary in the browned bush-clover, or a departing goose calling a distant farewell, the autumn mountains echo with my mournful cry: Say something, one of you, any of you, that isn't fully, patently, abhorrently inane!

A Wretch Like Me

In the Weekend Journal, Lee Siegel gave a much more dignified and historical view of the U.S. 'culture wars' than I ever do, blinded as I am by the undignified results of the historical process he outlines. In his piece Siegel asserts that part of the communication gap is the product not solely of the two sides' differential weighting of 'culture' in their political reckonings, but their distinct ways of defining it. For Liberals, culture is a Vermeer or a Mahler symphony, while today's Conservative cannot but view culture, as Siegel says, in the anthropological manner, as 'the practice of getting through life.' Culture is thus what you do with your season tickets for Liberals, and how you live your life for Conservatives. While the Left has long asserted that 'everything is political,' it might now be equally true to claim that for the Right 'everything is cultural.' I'd say the two mean the same thing, but I can't hear myself think over the blaring Shostakovich or the stream of messages from church about the fundraising.

I suspect I agree with Mr. Siegel's view of the two sides' perception, or definition, of culture, but disagree with any hint that culture, however construed, does not markedly influence our political stance or voting decisions. For example, liberal or conservative, 21st century or 18th, certain values are implicit in Western culture. Those values then condition not merely our decisions, but what questions we are even capable of asking en route to taking decisions on one issue or candidate. If this is true, not knowing who Mahler is does not invalidate the many shared assumptions, or cultural inheritance, the non-Mahler-knowing individual has in common with his operagoing, Irigaray-reading, International-Herald-subscribing counterpart.

And this brings me to a post I aborted when it went off in so many directions. One of my points was going to be about the insipidity of the Left's unceasing plaint that the Right always want to 'legislate morality.' In the name of all that is Magna Carta, children, that's what laws do! We may believe that a given legislation legislated morality wrong, or that a candidate poses a threat to what we believe is right, but to the extent that we are not in fact discrete, isolated monads but rather members of a polity - a culture, perhaps, even - with assets, concerns, needs, streetlights, highways, and social institutions (and whatever else you want to throw in there) in common, proscribing first-degree murder or grand larceny has rather more in common with the Decalogue than with a text on descriptive economics.

Laws against murder, theft, rape, and child abuse reflect legislators' and governments' (and, we hope, under a representational system, their constituents') moral stances on those issues. (Yes, they are also expedients toward a society's stability, security, and continuity, and it wasn't in hopes of cultivating a God-fearing, Republican citizenry that Hammurabi promulgated his set of suggestions) but when Liberals assert that single, low-income mothers should have access to social services, medical care, parenting resources and financial assistance, they are as much taking a moral stand about a society's responsibility toward bettering mothers', poor peoples', and childrens' lives as are religious Conservatives with regard to the same society's responsibility toward embryos and fetuses when they argue that we as a society have some responsibility for the unborn. Either is an attempt to 'legislate morality' just as is enacting laws against domestic violence or armed robbery.

Obviously the Left has come to grasp this to a greater extent than Siegel gives them credit for: in many states as fully as at the national level, a candidate from either major party with any hope of winning must, for example, trot out his religious credentials and attempt to convincingly portray his personal friendship with Jesus Christ as the most important and influential relationship in his life (I don't remember sola φιλíα from any theology I've ever studied, but that's politics for you!). He must conjure up a spiritual rags-to-riches story to entrench the narrative of the relationship in voters' minds not only as the bedrock of his views, obviously, and as guarantor of good, clean, ethical behavior if elected (his party represents God, after all, and he is the current incarnation of his party), not to mention proof of his just-like-us faith, falls, and redemption (literally, too, for those of you somehow outside the reach of American media), but also as an arc that will be replicated in his saving us and the country, as well, just as he through grace was able to save himself. Religion becomes theatre, however heartfelt it might actually be in some candidates, and we end up with a bunch of agnostic aspirants and speech-writers falteringly inserting Martin Luther alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. into word-heavy but content-free campaignspeak.

What Would a Unicorn Do?

On Got Medieval, there was a 'contest' back in July to see what seven words readers would come up with to describe the Middle Ages. The origin of the idea, which is described here, was a disheartening day in class when the new crop of students was asked to free-associate their way to a picture of the era. They came up with 'knights, knights, knights,' 'other knights,' and 'things about knights,' basically, and the writer of the blog uses the story on social occasions to set others at ease when they start to apologize, upon hearing his profession, for their lack of knowledge about Ye Olde Medieval Tymes.

I don't think it's particularly odd that nobody here knows anything about the Middle Ages, because I would imagine most people at cocktail parties would be equally hard pressed to come up with much about the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment. (...Uh, Luther, yeah, Martin Luther!, em, art! there was lots and lots of art! The Crusades! no, em, no, those big skirts with the hoops in them? no, wait.) I may sound more generally pessimistic than is warranted, perhaps, but I will give him this: I do think the Middle Ages probably are a more complete void in most people's understanding of history than are other periods. Before reading his account, though, I hadn't really thought about how thoroughly jousting, heraldry, and ladies-in-waiting with long pointy hats encapsulated the era for most.

The lazy explanation is that it's down to The Media, since any film set in that time tends to have Chain Mail in the leading role, with horses, maidens, and scrofulous serfs filling in the gaps. But if after watching Le Weekend I don't feel I have a complete understanding of 20th-century French history, is that really Godard's fault?

Still, the reality is that most Americans think that, like, nothing happened in Western civ for ten centuries or so. Other than the Black Plague and jousting, that is. Plato or somebody died, and then everyone went to sleep - in really dirty clothes - until da Vinci, or maybe Martin Luther woke them up. (At which time, of course, they then wore hoop skirts and codpieces and really ugly hats with buckles on them and everyone had syphilis.)

But, although the whole thing makes me sad, as does the idea that his (very hilarious) blog gets lots of hits from people looking for sexy chainmail pictures, I like to think of what my list would be, and it was fun to read other lists, because it shows how unique our own perspectives or prejudices are. I would probably put:
-neo-Platonism
-monasticism/orders
-Norman Conquest
-Sacking of Constantinople
-East/West
-books
-The Church

There's repetition, and there's no form of 'music,' or 'law' or even 'Law,' but I think if you take what themes I do have, you end up with those anyway, and much more besides. I suppose you could just say 'The Church' and come up with my whole list incidentally, not to mention unicorns and guys in chainmail, but with a book-banning vice-presidential candidate, I can only muster so much self-loathing.

Matteo Ricci, Mandarins, and Moksha...

So, R. gave me a copy of What Makes You Not a Buddhist, which is a brilliant little book that brilliantly feeds into my particular prejudices, except that it lays out a solid argument for what I get too cranky to articulate beyond the level of whininess. Moreover, it is written by a Tibetan Buddhist, and 'Tibetan Buddhism' is at the moment the preferred flavor for those who are too young to have been 'Zen' before its huarache-wearing disciples were supplanted by 'Tibetan' flocks in Tevas and Birkenstocks. What binds the two groups beyond their shared fondness for open-toed shoes is a distaste for 'organized religion,' 'dogma,' and a purportedly mediated experience of the Divine, as well as the sense that what they perceive as lacking in Christianity can be found in a bastardized version of a tradition that, being exotic, they have no bad memories of.


I have been wanting to write a semi-sensible rant on this for a while, because it ties together Chesterton and the Dalai Lama, which not so many things do, really, if you think about it, and also because it fleshes out to an extent what I have said about the secularized (and thus inaccurate/irrelevant) and largely pernicious vestiges of Calvinism that haunt even a stolid, fourth-generation atheist in this country. What Chesterton had to say on the one hand was this little nugget: 'The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.' In The Everlasting Man he also said this:

'They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians and they cannot leave off being Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith. Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best thing is to be far away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian.'

And the reverse of the vantage point of that Confucian to a distant and exotic Christianity is what we take with us as we look at Buddhism, or Tibetan Buddhism specifically. Our parents never threatened us with bardo if we misbehaved; we were never disappointed with Tara if our entreaties to the Eternal appeared to go unanswered. We can approach Buddhism with open arms and hearts because we have no (substantive or distorted) history with it, whereas we cannot even view a (likewise quite distant) thirteenth-century Christian contemplative from a perspective untainted by our views on the Reformation, the Inquisition, colonialism, or even every terrible or just mediocre pastor or believer we've ever known.



Chesterton again:

'The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgments; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard. He does not judge Christianity as a Confucian would; he does not judge it as he would judge Confucianism. He cannot by an effort of fancy set the Catholic Church thousands of miles away in strange skies of morning and judge it as impartially as a Chinese pagoda' (super-double-bold-italics mine).

But metaphors can only go so far, and I would quibble with Chesterton's only to the extent that even as our Londoner looks more charitably on a Confucian or a pagoda than he does on a Christian or a cathedral, he still does so ineluctably from the balcony of his apartment or the front porch of his Georgian, or Queen Anne, or 'Tuscan' home. He comes into life with a Judeo-Christian weltanschauung from within which he can never fully remove himself, however many embroidered Hill Tribe jackets his closet holds. Whatever sympathy he may find himself to hold for the precepts of karma and moksha, and whether he decides he ascribes more to the concept of atman or of anatman, he is, like Matteo Ricci under his Confucian silks, ever and always a Westerner, regardless of the extent to which he claims, or purports to reject, his own spiritual heritage.


As the Dalai Lama asserted many times in the 1994 John Main Seminar (The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus), though there are many similarities between teachings in the Gospels and Buddhist works, just as there is no one type of man, nor no one type of spirituality or spiritual practice suited to every individual equally, there can be no one tradition that incorporates all the teachings of all the world. The Trinity is not equal to the three kayas - but there are 'parallels and similarities,' just as there are between mahabrahman and the Christian God when viewed in His aspect as ultimate ground of being. The Dalai Lama acknowledges that reaching too far abroad for spiritual insight frequently creates more confusion in the seeker than wisdom or equanimity. To gloss over these significant differences and the culturally-specific origins of Tibetan Buddhism is to demean both the Tibetan tradition and the Western would-be bhikku. What he likely adopts under these conditions is neither Christianity nor Buddhism. He cannot extricate himself from his patrimony - however ill understood it may be in his case - nor can he successfully through sheer force of will insert himself into the story of millennia of Himalayan spiritual inheritance. He begins with misunderstanding his own religion and ends with exoticising, romanticising, cheapening - and misunderstanding - a different one.

I didn't get to the eminently sensible Buddhism book (written by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, originally from Bhutan). But now I fully intend to, since I was at least able to start. This has been simmering a long time. Like, years and years. It's good to let it go.

Mustangs, Ministers, and the Misery of Politics

Like you, I'm often scared of religious people. They can be arrogant, preachy, narrow, provincial, and very, very poor listeners. Perhaps also like you, I often find academics to share many of the same attributes. Both groups also tend to associate solely with their own kind, which does little to broaden either their experience or their perspective.

In between are people who can combine rationality with spirituality, and who are possessed of a faith profound and vast enough to encompass new facts and new experiences: life, in other words. I was unexpectedly impressed with the Orange County pastor, Rick Warren, who is apparently very famous and hosted the question-and-answer session with the two presidential candidates. I admit that I didn't watch the whole thing; I'm going to have to do it in parts, since politicians scare me more than anyone else. But here is a guy whose whole life is built around his faith, who brought his little church up from meetings at local public high schools (Go Mustangs!) and other such buildings to the fourth largest church in the United States, who is an evangelical, for Heaven's sake - and who asked about the sanest question I have heard anyone ask a candidate.

He put the question the following way: 'A lot of good legislation dies because of partisan politics and party loyalty keeps people from really putting America’s best first. Could you give me an example of where you led against your party's interest ... and really maybe against your own best interest, for the good of America?' While every overpaid political 'journalist' unceasingly strives to provide the gossip-hungry public 'news' of candidates' 'flip-flopping' with as salacious a tone as if they were announcing yet another politician's sex scandal, any sane citizen realizes that as facts change - be they borders, heads of state, environmental conditions, social problems, diplomatic relations, demographics, economic conditions, or anything else within the purview of a aspirant to high political office or a lowly voter - our position on those facts might be a more sensible one were it to take into account that they no longer mean quite what they once did.

Let us take an avowedly religious person. He or she believes that some values and acts are always absolutely good, and likewise that some things are always wrong. His or her choices are thus always far more restricted than someone for whom all categories are, at least in theory, potentially fluid. But in even in this case, which I hold up to be the most rigid stance politically - even from this most rigid perspective one thing could have been right under previous circumstances and now completely indefensible ethically. Ergo, it's not 'flip-flopping,' but serious consideration, reflection, and analysis of facts. If Geo. W. Bush were to say in light of current circumstances that when he met with Putin in 2001 he should perhaps have been wearing his bifocals when he 'looked the man in the eye... and was able to get a sense of his soul,' I would be grateful for his new more reflective and less hasty analysis. I might think he was rash, gullible, or arrogant as regards his earlier pronouncement, but I would not impugn his current stance on the basis of its divergence from his previous statement.

So, that an evangelical Christian, the sort of person many people perceive as being the most inflexible, the worst at listening, and the least amenable to cooperation, should suggest that in the execution of the office of President the good of the country might conceivably at times trump strict adherence to Party loyalty - well, it fills me with the sort of faith, hope, and goodwill that I usually only experience while crying during films about brave dogs or talking beavers made for third-graders.

"'Et tu, Brute,' rief Er auf Lateinisch

--wie est dort die Landesprache war."

I've apologized once, and I've apologized twice, and I've apologized more than that, too, for when my rhetoric verges over into the preachy ~

~ See, the thing is, much as I might love Dominicans, I grew up when and where I grew up, none of which admittedly were the best of all possible places or times and any of which maybe should have been the thirteenth or fourteenth or seventeenth century but were not and, accordingly, while I have absolutely no bad feelings whatsoever about 'prædicare' since I can't speak any Latin other than 'Non calor sed umor est qui nobis incommodat,'* I cannot help but wince, shake a little, and discreetly and in an eminently ladylike fashion vomit inside my mouth from smelling the imagined leeching vapors of petroleum by-products from obstreperous and designed-to-impress synthetic altar-flower arrangements basted with 'Inspired-by-Nature' 'fresheners' at 7 AM sharp every Sunday anytime I find myself within 26 miles of 'preachy'~

So it is that every time I go off on caritas, agape, empathy, compassion, love, the Beatitudes, the Song of Songs, Bernard of Clairvaux, Nagarjuna, Dostoevsky, Avalokitesvara, or even Common Decent Neighborliness, I always feel as though I have too much product and too many extensions in my hair, too overwhelming a desire to restate endlessly the obvious with an ever-increasing lack of delicacy, decency, and eloquence, too great a tendency to tripthongize my dipthongs, and a garish and enormous Daughters of the Confederacy pin tacked to my (it would be, under the circumstances) abundant bosom.

So, as a sop to myself and those of you who find my exhortations as tiring as I do, here is a panel from my favorite comic strip writer, Peter Blegvad, whose Leviathan ran in the Independent and to which I was as addicted when I lived in Greece and Suffolk as I was to Gauloises Bleues and those pull-out, frame-able sections about minerals, indigenous beetles, and traffic patterns in the Sunday El País.


*'It's not the heat; it's the humidity.'

Mud Floors, Tibetan Sephardim, and Tuscany in SE Jung Guo

In other news, I had an absolutely lovely conversation tonight about (what else?) theology (with a friend soon to depart for another hemisphere.) He gave me a book which was absolutely perfect in many ways, not least of which is that it is entirely relevant to a rant I have not yet given into, since I'm terribly lazy and would have to buy another little easel in order to have three books propped up around the little laptop in order satisfyingly to vent my spleen.

But, now I will feel impelled to buy my little easel (is it truly an easel? I don't think so; I don't know what they are called, but people who collect things with cats on them use them to display plates with either state insignias or details of Botticelli's greatest hits printed in Fujian) and tell you what the Dalai Lama had to say about 'Tibetan Buddhists' raised in Farmington in a John Main Seminar in the '80s or '90s. The Lama, not the Farmingtonians. I don't know that many were raised in a John Main Seminar. But I am open to possibilities. Not to mention, in the distant future, good nutrition.

In the meantime (not to hold all 7.3 of you in too-great suspense), here is how John Dunne, who is neither John Dear nor that John Donne, weighed in briefly - and similarly - on the issue: 'I think of a Sufi sheik I met on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem who told me and the two young Israeli women who were with me, 'Go deep in your own religion.' Okay, fine, I already know which book I'm trading him. But God bless those Sufis, eh? Here is the spiritual work one Naqshbandi master gave to an aspirant: Pray nothing, think nothing, say nothing, but 'Oh, God,' all day every day. When the disciple came back saying he had succeeded in that task, the teacher told him no longer to speak it, but to breathe the prayer in his thoughts, to think and feel nothing else but 'Oh, God; Oh, God,' all day. After internalizing this, after training his spirit to unceasing dhikr, one day a loose beam fell from the roof of his house onto the pupil's head. The blood that dropped to the ground spelled Allah on the mud floor.

'Even he,

to whom most things that most people would think were pretty smart were pretty dumb, thought it was pretty smart.' - Douglas Adams (patently, no less!)

So, I had some fish and chips and beer with the exhusband the other night. The musician one, not the gay one. Not that that one isn't a musician, too; they both are, and they both even play winds, just to make it more confusing, and they both teach, and they were both born within twenty-four hours of the other one. One grew up on an island; one lives on an island now, and the one who grew up on one also lived on the island of Honshu, which is where my brother and his family live now, although, apart from some mad air-guitar, the brother is rather less a musician than my various exhusbands, making him, at least, easy to distinguish. They were also both brown-haired and the same height, unlike my brother, who is not the same height as anyone. So you see how it can get infernally confusing to distinguish between them.

Despite all that, the exhusband is, naturally, dismayed at the tone the blog appears to be taking. All I can say is, A) I tried to maintain the coyness as regards spirituality and belief as long as I could, turning to overt ethical stances stapled to implicit conclusions to guide readers gently, fluidly, and subtlely into an occasional New Thematic Realm. I still reserve the right to call down imprecations on Mobil stations disguised as El Greco paintings, forests, or Roman hippodromes, and I patently intend still (not only to continue to overuse 'patently,' 'unsurprisingly,' and 'manifestly' but also) to insert irrelevant photos of perfume bottles, typographical coups, Central Asian needlework, and obscenely adorable palm-sized animals. But the fact is that if my ethical preoccupations obtrude herein - and they do - then surely the basis for them should likewise. Still, I realize that there are very many sound and good people who can get behind this or that stance of mine, but not fully with what leads, in my heart, at any rate, up to it.



But then, for them, I think: read backward. Start and stop with the praxis, which many would argue is the meaty part anyway, and leave the θεωρία to Adam Smith and Karl Marx. And, frankly, we end up at the same point, anyway, which is that if you are doing good, you're doing good, and if you're not - well, we both suspect you'll know it. The only difference is that I was pleased at some point to realize not only that there was an Urgrund behind all those values, choices, and yearnings, but that, conveniently felicitously, I already believed in it.

So, fine.

and B) I did contemplate, after a long-overdue recognition that having a multiply-segmented life was driving me a bit insane, the notion of having a post welcoming readers to the Explicitly Spiritual Section of the Blog. But I didn't bother because I never tried hard enough to have it come out amusing. So I opted instead for the Invisible Awkward Segue. Of course that's never a good idea, even if you're not trying to be de Man or Derrida. And so I am sorry. It was obtrusive; it was steep, sudden, and unwarranted, and it was probably a lot like basking in the middle of an Elle article on comparative depilation and then at the turn of a page being caught unawares in the midst of the final, prescriptive chapter in the still-typo-ridden galley version of some hand-wringing dissertation on the loss of the second-person vocative particle amongst the last fourteen speakers of X.

So I do apologize. I thought sneaking in more farm workers and food banks would help pave the way for the occasional saint, particularly if I made mention of how hard it was becoming to maintain a consistent voice. Now, though, I think it might be more consistent as a whole by not excluding one or other topics for the sake of maintaining a particular posture. The fact is, my spirituality is a part of my life, so it stands to reason it would be a part of this blog, as well, even if I demand to retain my right also to lambast (using the alt. sp. helps keep images of dry turkey and high-hatted Puritans at bay) examples of bad design, poor taste, petty theft, and my own misdriving, misjudgment, and misnavigation when I please.

Therefore, children: Welcome to the Explicitly Spiritual Section of the Blog. Except for all the parts that aren't. Including this pretty little display from Black and Spiro:

'There is something in humility

which strangely exalts the heart.' -St. Augustine

Just to bring humility, tolerance, and the common limits of our human understanding more fully into this rant about arrogance, bigotry, and factionalism, here is a quote about science and religion from turn-of-the(other)-century Muslim scholar Mustafa al-Maraghi. I want to use a Muslim because about as many Christians as atheists consider them unschooled and indelicate of thought, and also because the Muslim's relationship to the Qur'an as revealed rather than written, unchanging, untranslatable, and truly as the Word Inlibrate, is of a quite different order from other traditions' belief in and veneration for their own holy books. (In other words, I guess I conceive of this as the strong form of the argument to which other traditions could likewise accede in moderated form ?)

'True religion cannot conflict with truth, and when we are positively convinced of the truth of any scientific remark which seems to be incompatible with Islam, this is only because we do not understand correctly the Qur'an and the traditions. In our religion, we possess a universal teaching which declares that, when an apodeictic truth contradicts a revealed text, we have to interpret the text allegorically.'

Such a stance wisely refuses to conflate a holy book with a science text, to demand from one what it can never give and what, moreover, the other was explicitly designed to provide. It also places what might be an unsettling responsibility on the reader to read his book as well as the natural world carefully -- but this should be unsettling only if you find using rationality in your pursuit of wisdom and truth ignoble. For me, it points again to the need to recognize our limitations: there is much that each of us will never understand in this lifetime. Even if you don't believe there is one who is omniscient, it is pretty clear that humans are not. And a stinky-type atheist might do well to recognize that he is as limited in his understand as both the stinky and the thinky believers.

So the Bartender Says to the Horse --

Why the long face?

Alright, so I explained why I like and respect thinky atheists. But there are plenty of stinky atheists, too, and my bonhommerie is as stressed in thinking about them as it is with the feelgood self-help pseudopagans who take their spiritual direction alternately from 'Prosperity Gospel' quacks and shrink-wrapped plastic 'I Ching' sets from Barnes and Noble.

Part of the stinkiness I can't bear is their frequent supercilious meanness. Anybody who believes anything is dumb, not just different, wallowing smugly in willed ignorance, so restraint isn't called for: the idiots won't get the joke, anyway. Of course, religious people can be just as intolerant as this in their rhetoric, as well -- and knowledge of that fact is sometimes fodder for the mean atheists' lack of consideration. But for now I'm leaving uncharitable believers alone, since they really make my head bleed, and sticking with the angry atheists.

Now, before you say, 'And what about all those rants about Calvinists on here, Vif?', let me remind you they were not about real Calvinism nor even about John Calvin. When I go off on Calvinism it is about the entrenched and invisible secularized vestiges of Calvinism that underpin so many of our attitudes, habits, and neuroses here in the U.S. It's a bit like Althusser's ideology, a bit like Barthes' mythology, and a lot like a troublesome patch of morning glories which, despite having all the flowers and stems and leaves mowed down, are just as present as ever because their roots have already spread widely through the garden. You don't have to believe in the existence of God or John Calvin or even Geneva in order for these Calvinistic assumptions or aspirations to affect your view of culture, commensality, kindness, pleasure, and success. You just have to live in the United States for a while.

So, that having been resolved to all parties' satisfaction, my stinky atheist of the day is Mr. Eddie Izzard, who appears to believe that declaring his atheism over and over earns him a de facto Genius rating and the right to make jokes ridiculing the most heartfelt and sincere of beliefs. He likewise lampoons God and Jesus themselves in extended fashion as bumbling idiots, with Jesus as a sort-of sad sack sucker-Messiah who doesn't know what he is doing and doesn't much care.

Honestly, there are ways to do religious humor. I've seen plenty of stuff that succeeds mightily and yet doesn't offend even when it pokes fun at or contrasts particular beliefs or practices. And I don't just mean brilliant Jewish insider humor, but as well stuff from outside that yet manages to convey a level of respect for the subject. It is not impossible, not at all, but it requires subtlety, maturity - and compassion.

When people cry 'Is nothing sacred anymore???' they seldom intend their lament literally. Rather, it is a wish for a return to some measure of delicacy, consideration, and politesse: what most mean is 'Is nothing off-limits anymore? Is nothing private anymore?' and 'Is nothing beyond the bounds of decency and common courtesy anymore?' It has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with politeness.

And this is where Izzard's juvenile monologue about idiotic Creators and half-wit sons loses my interest. It was, and should have remained, settled a couple centuries ago that the natural sciences can tell us little of value about religion, and that religion likewise can tell us much about the cultivation of the soul but rather little about geology, or geometry, or cattle-breeding. That an individual has come to this epiphany in the 21st century and is shocked to find religion lacking in scientific insight (as in Izzard's version of Noah) just seems odd to me. A person can find himself unmoved by religion for various reasons, but that there is inadequate discussion of thermodynamics in John of the Cross is one, were it me, that I would feel slightly silly proffering as the crux of my atheism.

But I would also say that even if the individual believes the experiences of John, or Jonas, or Rumi or Rahman Baba to have been 'all in their heads,' ridiculing their interior experience, in addition to being uncharitable, mean-spirited, and thus indefensible morally, is also simply as stupid and pointless in a pragmatic sense as making fun of a friend who thinks he looks better in his new haircut than he does: it's his haircut; let him live in it. You have a right to your own path of haircut self-discovery, and if on it you decide you prefer to continue with the tried-and-true No. 3 in perpetuity, you absolutely are under no obligation to get a copy of your friend's style.

This reactionary approach moreover conduces to the sort of us-v.-them mentality that - you guessed it! - religion is famous, and endlessly parodied and excoriated, for: they're stupid, we're not, so join our club. That an atheist presumably above the fray should resort to the same dirty tactics he would quickly condemn in others is, while not shocking (since we're all only human) still lazy - and, again, puerile. I would cringe and wince and undoubtedly throw up a little in my mouth if I had to read my high school journals filled with every pithy quote from Camus and Gide and Rimbaud that I felt could serve to prop up my (age-appropriate, let me add) stance that Religion is idiotic crap for crappy idiots who like crappy things. Thank God no one gave me a microphone, because in my defensive and angry posture I, too, sounded a bit like a crappy idiot.

Although it helped me terrifically with French!

4 out of 5 French Existentialists Agree:

'if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.' --Nietzsche

If you are sick of feeling like a self-absorbed abyss, and you live near Seattle, there may be a great opportunity to change that. The self-absorbed abyss part; I offer no suggestions nor assistance as to relocation. Tent City is going to be up at Prince of Peace Lutheran in Shoreline for the next three months. With collaboration through the Shoreline YMCA and a grant from ELCA, there is a meal program there Wednesday nights for about 150-190 people.

With Tent City there, there will be an additional 100 or so people. Most of the volunteers start somewhere between 3:30-5, and the meal will now run from 5-7-ish, to allow for a second seating. Volunteers are needed for set-up, service, bussing tables, doing dishes, and cleanup. If you want to volunteer, please call the Shoreline YMCA at 206-364-1700.

If you need more convincing that doing nice things is a nice thing to do, here are what some famous religious figures have to say on the matter:


'Feed the hungry and visit the sick, and free the captive, if he be unjustly confined. Assist any person oppressed, whether Muslim or non-Muslim.' -- Muhammad

'Compassion and love are not mere luxuries.
As the source both of inner and external peace,
they are fundamental to the continued survival of our species.' -- XIV Dalai Lama

'But whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?' --John the Baptist

'Even offering three hundred bowls of food three times a day does not match the spiritual merit gained in one moment of love.' --Nagarjuna

'Love of all creatures is also love of God, for whoever loves the One loves all the works that He has made. When one loves God, it is impossible not to love His creatures. The opposite is also true. If one hates the creatures, it is impossible to love God who created them.' MaHaRal/ Yehudah ben Bezalel Levai

"Open my heart that compassion may
be my companion;
Where I meet pride, humble me;
Where I meet anger, calm my fears;
Where I meet injustice, cause me
to act in love's way.
May I be as gentle as the doe,
as fearless as the lion,
as faithful as the dog." --King David

'Live with compassion, Work with compassion, Die with compassion, Meditate with compassion, Enjoy with compassion. When problems come, Experience them with compassion.' --Lama Zopa Rinpoche

'I have been all things unholy. If God can work through me, he can work through anyone.' -- Francis of Asissi

Whether you call it tzedekah, chesed, rahmah, ihsan, metta, boddhicitta, mercy, compassion, or good works, everyone from Zoroaster to Abraham thinks you should be cultivating it. And if in their saffron robes and pilgrims' sandals all the foregoing are unconvincing, remember that the great existentialist unbelievers Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir all risked their lives to save those of others in the French Resistance. Surely not everyone needs recourse to a metaphysics or baleful eschatology just to wash a few darned dishes???

Architectural Indigestion

The last two Sundays, when I turned on NPR after church in the evening, the story I tuned into was on both occasions relevant to things I had been contemplating that day. This is not a blog about religion, but the topic does come up every now and then - if, I freely confess, primarily to blame the Calvinists for everything I can't blame on the Beats.

Today just before leaving, I was preoccupied with the topic of sacred architecture and, to a lesser extent, religious art, ornamentation, and sacramentals within a church building: in other words, the totality of the physical presence of a constructed sacred space. There are as many schools of thought on this as there are believers, non-believers, architects and art-haters. But there are two traditional purposes sacred architecture strives to fill: to present an invitation to the faithful and to the stranger, and to provide a physical, lisible symbolic representation of the individual's journey from the profane to the sacred. Now, NPR's story when I was driving back was about reconceiving and refashioning the newsroom not the chapel, but what it illustrates is that architecture is important, it can serve or hinder its putative goals, and that we, the victims or beneficiaries of an architect's design, do notice and are affected by the space.

What got me on to it first was writing about some of the perhaps surprisingly numerous shared beliefs of the Friends and Catholics. While every Christian church has some genetic resemblance to all others, there is not only serious doctrinal difference to address in comparing them, but also the subtler distinctions in emphasis among all the various ideas they still share. In other words, it's not just huge things like 'faith v. works' or literalness v. historicity, but how much stress is put on certain tenets at the expense of which other ones.

Now, the anti-clerical Friends may seem to be the furthest from the hugely organized Catholic Church - and yet in reality they both place tremendous emphasis on the need for individual discernment. Encyclicals and other writings, with increased vigor after Vatican II, insist over and over on the importance of an informed, passionate, and active laity, the need to question and to search for answers, and the importance of being an activist when convinced of the appropriateness of that course. Both churches, as well, lay tremendous stress on justice, including social justice, which is conceived in both traditions as emanating from and being necessitated by the fact of utter, radical equality among all people. The language is different, but the message is the same.

As fascinating as all that is (to me), one place there is a huge difference is in how meeting spaces are viewed by the two groups, which makes sense as they are meant to do different things. And I have no intention of going into that in any depth. But a Quaker meeting-house does not strive to invite, as do churches of most other Protestant and Catholic traditions, nor does it attempt to lay out a narrative or an argument, except of simplicity and the concept of the inner light within all present and all without. Friends would say we glorify God through our actions, and too many, or too-richly-decorated, things around distract us from the real issue, which is 'what are we going to do/ what does God want us to do?' Friends likewise assert that, rightly lived, life is worship, and if simplicity is integral to one's life, this value should of course carry over into meeting halls and the worship meetings within them.

I haven't given much of an explanation there, but it makes sense in a Quaker context. It does not make sense in the context of regular Protestantism, or in Catholic or Orthodox traditions, where the physical church is meant to inspire awe, create an atmosphere of reverence and solemnity, and lead us to contemplate the glory of God, a glory which exceeds that of the gilt and the plainchant, but which can be symbolized by them - by things we can apprehend through our senses and intellect. This, too, has an elegant and coherent logic, to which I'm also giving short shrift.

Additionally, in their beauty, churches, temples, mosques, and cathedrals are meant to invite the sinner in, that he might be led through beauty to Beauty. Again, part of the logic is that the place one worships God should celebrate His wonder through the highest efforts of human labor, and that being drawn to beauty is a noble and God-given trait - but since it is also true that humans like sparkly things, offering them a few in the place of worship is one way to help them keep coming back, in the hope that eventually more substantive things and a more mature understanding of the fullness of the religion will serve the same purpose.

However, even if you are not a beginner, there is something to be said for a holy space that looks like a holy space (unless you belong to a faith like the Friends within which this would make no sense). And I don't care if you believe in God or not, if you enter the Blue Mosque or the Hagia Sophia, a Thai temple or a Zen garden, the results of the care taken to evoke the majesty of the unknowable and the ineffable makes you believe in something. We were given our senses in the same package as we were given our minds, and unless you follow Mani or Mr. Calvin, I fail to see why punishing those senses in worship is necessary.

And that is my main point: the 1960s were regrettable. The 1960s were painful. The 1960s should have stuck to social reform and left style and design alone. That era is my proof that reincarnation does not happen, as I can attest that had I lived before, I would have done so much good in my life that not only would I not have been born when I would have had to witness the horrific legacy the decade wrought in the arts - but I would have taken every prophylactic precaution possible to ensure that my karma be so great that none of it would even have been perpetuated! So, since I'm here now, I wasn't here then, and the best I can do is to try to avoid imagining those puffy ladies' hats, those square ladies' suits, the clunky low heeled parsons' pumps with squared-off toes and ridiculous buckles, and the hideous architecture that evoked not so much the Great American Century as the Supreme Soviet. If I want to worship, I don't want to do it in a place that looks like the People's Recreation Hall and Refectory at Reeducation Center 29! There is a fairly crappy YMCA up the road, and a disastrous, menacing Albertsons a bit further on; I can always go to one of those if I need to savor a bit of Stalinist-gymnasium ambiance. I don't need to do it at church.

This is where I live.

It really is this beautiful here! Frightening!