After the Future

The Clintons and the Truth

Bob Somerby at The Daily Howler is doing a very important job of pointing out how the Beltway courtiers, otherwise known as the media, give Americans a profoundly distorted picture of the historical truth.  He's done a convincing job of showing how most of what we think we know about Al Gore is just wrong because of the witheringly unfair treatment he received by the Beltway MSM.  They did everything they could to make sure he would not be elected in 2000.  And the pass they gave to the profoundly flawed George Bush was equally as noxious. 

The MSM defines too much of our reality, and the picture we get from it has only the most superficial bearing on what is happening.  We have learn to read between the lines and we have to find more reliable sources of information on the net if we want to have any reasonable measure of confidence that we understand what's going on.

Somerby this week has come to the defense of Hillary after her having been attacked by David Geffen.  And I think that his main point is well taken--that if Hillary is a polarizing figure, it's because our perception of her is conditioned by the way she and her husband were treated by baseless accusations and other unfair distortions of the right-wing noise machine. Almost everyone believes that where there's smoke there's fire, and nobody is better at blowing smoke than the right wingers in this country.  The flap about Nancy Pelosi air travel arrangements are a recent trivial example of it--a lot of smoke, but no fire.  Same with Whitewater, same with accusations that Gore claimed to invent the internet.  The truth doesn't matter, creating confusion is the only goal.

That's why Bob Parry's piece on Clinton and the truth is important, too.  The problem is not that the right-wing machine creates a lot of smoke, but that guys like Clinton when they had the chance didn't do what they should have to clear it away. Parry points to the fact that when Clinton took office in '92, he had the opportunity to help the American people to get to the bottom of the truth about the Reagan years and about the crimes the right-wingers in the Reagan administration were responsible for in Latin America and the Middle East. 

Special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh was still battling the cover-up that had surrounded the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s; Democratic congressmen were digging into the “Iraqgate” scandal, the covert supplying of dangerous weapons to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in the 1980s; and a House task force was suddenly inundated with evidence pointing to Republican guilt in the “October Surprise” case, alleged interference by the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980 to undermine President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to free 52 American hostages then held in Iran.

Combined, those three investigations could have rewritten the history of the 1980s, exposing serious wrongdoing by Republicans who had held the White House for a dozen years. The full story also would likely have terminated the presidential ambitions of the powerful Bush family, since George H.W. Bush was implicated in all three scandals.

After winning in November 1992, however, Bill Clinton and the leaders of the Democratic majorities in Congress didn’t care enough about the truth to fight for it. Heeding advice from influential fixers like Vernon Jordan, Clinton and the congressional Democrats turned their backs on those investigations.

He didn't have the stomach for it.  And in retrospect if he had done it, it might very well have saved his presidency.  If he attacked the right wing elements in this country and kept them on their heels, they would have had to spend more time and energy defending themselves, and less time attacking him and blowing smoke.  As Parry points out:

But Bill Clinton never ordered a major declassification project, nor did he establish any U.S. truth commissions to put the Cold War history in a meaningful context. To Clinton, truth never seemed to be a high priority, either in his private life or in his public duties.

Ironically, Bill Clinton’s protection of the Reagan-Bush administrations didn’t protect him. Clinton saw his prized domestic agenda, including Hillary Clinton’s health care reform, defeated; his party lose control of Congress in 1994; the House vote to impeach him; and his Vice President, Al Gore, have the 2000 election stolen from him.

Then, once the Bush family again controlled the White House, one of the first acts of the new President, George W. Bush, was to sign an executive order ensuring that Reagan-Bush-era historical records, scheduled for release in 2001, stayed locked up, possibly forever.

Clinton is a very flawed, very foolish man, and that being said, is there any sane, informed American who at this point would prefer this group of right wingers to him, to Gore, or for that matter to Hillary?  They are all in their different ways flawed, but they are not viciously dangerous the way Cheney/Bush is. So I agree with Somerby that the noise machine and its manipulation of the MSM will find a way to make any non-rightwinger candidate seem polarizing, and they will gloss over the warts of guys like Bush or Giuliani.  But if we think Hillary is polarizing, wait to see how polarizing a figure they will make Obama to appear.   Obama might be the best person for the country, but my guess is it's going to be Edwards.  I could live with that.  The worst possibility would be  Giuliani.  He will be the new tool for the authoritarian right in this country that just is not going away.

Alan Moore & Lost

I haven't commented on the TV show "Lost" in awhile.  It seems stupid to try to explain it, since there just aren't enough dots to work with.  But a framework to consider connecting them apparently is to be found in Alan Moore's graphic novel Watchmen, which I've never read, but is supposedly thought by Lost producers and lots of other people to be a work of genius. 

The stewardess Cindy's comment to Jack about "watching" in this week's episode would seem to reinforce this.  Lost is not an attempt to adapt Moore's story as the film "V for Vendetta" was an adaptation of another of his novels.  But clearly several element in Watchmen shed light on what the writers are trying to do with Lost. The business of Hurley's numbers and the Valenzetti Equation suggest that the Dharma project layer of the Lost story trajectory is about an apparently failed attempt to forestall the destruction of the earth.  And so it occurs to me now that the Island is a staging area for a kind of Noah's ark--or is the ark itself.  This would explain in part the reason for their interest in certain children and in Juliet's skills in embryology.   The polar bear and the cages designed for animals would also support this idea--but where are all the other animals?

If it's true that the larger dramatic trajectory of the series has to do with the Dharma project goal of saving humanity, it remains to be seen how the individual stories of the Lost characters and the Others connect with that larger narrative.  Their stories matter, and the theme of judgment/redemption is clearly an important layer.  Perhaps it's a question of who gets a ticket onto the ark, whatever the ark's nature might be.  And while any  idea of the Island being the traditional "purgatory" is unlikely--I no longer think that the survivors are "sixth-sense" dead or that the Others are agents of divine judgment--it still seems that the writers are exploring ideas that reality comprises dimensions that exceed what we perceive in normal states of consciousness. The Australian connection coupled with the various visionary experiences suggests a "dream-time" explanation for a lot of what's going on.  But what precisely their ideas are about that and the future destiny of humanity remains to be seen. I still don't think the Others, even Ben, have been proven to be evil.

But this is probably (never say never) the last time I'm going to comment on this show.  There are tons of other places where people are more informed and more obsessed with understanding what's going on. But this show and "House" are the two that I won't miss each week.

Part 4: On Being a Postmodern Catholic

Consider this an epilogue to the three parts in this series that precede it.  There are a bunch of random themes and ideas that didn't fit into the already too-long earlier pieces, and I have been thinking about whether it would be worthwhile to continue on in successive parts to explore them. But the nature of these pieces was more apologetical than it was an attempt to get into a more developed exploration of central Christian themes.  To do so would not be interesting or helpful for skeptical people outside looking in, and for the most part redundant for people already alive to the mystery at the heart of Christian belief. I don't have much to offer that can't be find fairly easily elsewhere.

The main challenge in this series of posts was to explain to the skeptical why it could be both plausible and sane to be an orthodox Christian. And in doing that I was giving a personal view that relates pretty much to my own working things out in a way that makes sense to me.  And while there is nobody I am in any kind of dialogue with about these issues--no one I know is personally interested enough in these questions to engage me on them--I am also aware that I a swimming in a larger stream.  I'd situate myself somewhere between the emerging church folks on the evangelical side and the radical orthodoxy folks on the Anglo- and Roman Catholic side.

I'm peripherally aware of both these movement, but am not involved in either or know anyone who is.  Both of these movements are directly engaged with our human predicament as postmoderns, and it seems to me that if you want to think, really think, about religion, and Christianity in particular, you have to do it in a postmodern idiom. I know the word sounds pretentious, and it's too connected with a  French academic jargon that hardly anyone understands or cares to.  But I do think that there are essential insights into our current condition to be found in postmodern thought that have to be grappled with and ultimately passed through. 

We are all postmoderns now whether we like it or not, or whether we are aware of it or not. That being said, it doesn't matter what Lyotard, Derrida, or Foucault  think about it, but how we in fact experience our lives in this time of cultural fragmentation, decentering, and spiritual torpor.  To say we are postmoderns doesn't bring any relief from the condition it tries to describe. It is at this point no more than a cultural sensibility that has not really defined itself on its own terms, but only with the prefix "post" to suggest not what it is but what it is not.  We are no longer moderns.  Modern habits of mind persist, but the zeitgeist has moved on, and we're in an in-between time.  And Christians have just as legitimate a role in trying to define what comes next as anyone else.  And if what Christians contribute in this defining of the globalizing era that lies ahead is inspired by the liberating spirit of the gospels--as opposed to the fascism of the Christianist right--the world will be the better for it.  I would argue, along with people like Chris Hedges, the Dobsons, Falwells, Robertsons and Haggerts are inspired by impulses that are profoundly anti-Christian--and they have to be called what they are. 

These people are the proverbial devils quoting scripture.  They are cult leaders just as manipulative and misguided as Jim Jones and Rajneesh.  They open their mouth and Christian-sounding words come out, but there is nothing of the spirit of Christianity in them. Their goal is not freedom but seduction, and in a confusing transitional time as ours is, huge numbers of people are vulnerable to spell that they cast.

There have always been such false teachers among us and always will be, but the threat they pose at this time is far more significant than most ordinary Americans have grasped.  These Dominionist or Christianist leaders are not just foolish and mistaken, they are dangerous, and a containment strategy must be developed to neutralize their influence in the political sphere.  For they provide the political ballast needed by those who are already laying the groundwork to transform our democracy into an authoritarian corporate state.  It's chilling.  They see themselves as fighting to save the soul of America, but I see the more important task as fighting them to save the soul of American Christianity.

So I don't know.  The radical orthodoxy folks might be laying a foundation for something important that will be built some time in the future.  I am sympathetic to their liturgical focus, their Christian neo-Platonic metaphysics (I too am a fan of de Lubac and von Balthasar), their politics, and their project to turn secular postmodern thought on its head.  They are all about recovering or retrieving treasure from the premoderns what the moderns foolishly cast off.  Such themes interest me deeply, but, for me anyway, they are issues to be grappled with once the present threat abates. Right now it is more important that we find a less abstruse, more accessible narrative that will offer to those attracted to these Dominionist frauds something better.
   

It Grows Inside

As a postscript to the last post, I recommend reading the excerpt from Sara Miles' book Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion post in today's Salon.  Too bad it's behind a subscription wall, but the book might be interesting for those of you intrigued enough to learn more about how the whole thing works.  Miles was raised by atheist parents and ran in circles that were openly hostile to religion. she writes about the reaction of a friend when she told him that she started going to church :

My desire for religion just didn't make sense to him. He worked harder than anyone I'd ever met, spending fourteen hours a day defending Haitian refugees and Muslim political detainees and the victims of war and empire. He'd listened to prisoners at Guantánamo sob as they described Christian jailers destroying the Koran; he had represented a Nicaraguan woman raped by evangelical soldiers who sang hymns as they took turns with her on a dirt floor. Whatever faith drove him forward in his vocation, it had nothing to do with the Almighty God so readily invoked at prayer breakfasts in Washington.

But the Christianity that called to me, through the stories I read in the Bible, scattered the proud and rebuked the powerful. It was a religion in which divinity was revealed by scars on flesh. It was an upside-down world in which treasure, as the prophet said, was found in darkness; in which the hungry were filled with good things, and the rich sent out empty; in which new life was manifested through a humiliated, hungry woman and an empty, tortured man.

Exactly.  She goes on:

I had to be receptive or go crazy -- because even as I kept going to church, the questions raised by the experience only multiplied. Conversion was turning out to be quite far from the greeting-card moment promised by televangelists, when Jesus steps into your life, personally saves you, and becomes your lucky charm forever. Instead, it was socially and politically awkward, as well as profoundly confusing. I wasn't struck with any sudden conviction that I now understood the "truth." If anything, I was just crabbier, lonelier, and more destabilized.

All that grounded me were those pieces of bread. I was feeling my way toward a theology, beginning with what I had taken in my mouth and working out from there. I couldn't start by conceptualizing God as an abstract "Trinity" or trying to "prove" a divine existence philosophically. It was the materiality of Christianity that fascinated me, the compelling story of incarnation in its grungiest details, the promise that words and flesh were deeply, deeply connected. I reflected, for example, about [my daughter] Katie, and about what it was like to be both a mother and a mother's child. The entire process of human reproduction was, if I considered it for a minute, about as "intolerable" as the apostles said communion was. It sounded just as weird as the claim that God was in a piece of bread you could eat. And yet it was true.

I grew inside my mother, the way Katie grew inside me. I came out of her and ate her, just as Katie ate my body, literally, to live. I became my mother in ways that still felt, sometimes, as elemental and violent as the moment when I'd been pushed out from between her legs in a great rush of blood. And it was the same with my father: He had helped make me, in ways that were wildly mysterious and absolutely powerful. Like Jesus, he had gone inside somebody else's body and then become a part of me. The shape of my hands, the way I cleared my throat, the color of my eyes: My parents lived in me -- body and soul, DNA and spirit. That was like the bread becoming God becoming me, in ways seen and unseen.

Multiply stories like this by the thousands and millions, and you will get a sense of what the church is in the best sense.  Theology, if it is any good, is simply the collective effort through the ages of people who have had an experience like this and then try to understand what they have experience in light of what others have as it grows inside.

See also Believing.

Part 3: On Being a Postmodern Catholic

After listening to the Phillip Johnston podcast I referred to in my post about Getting Perspective on Iran, I subscribed to the "Speaking of Faith" free podcast service, and it immediately downloads dozens of their shows from the past, and as Sir Francis and forestwalker point out in their comments, many of them look very good.  I listened to two: the 8/17 interview with Karen Armstrong and the 5/18 rebroadcast of a 2002 interview with Jaroslav Pelikan, the great Yale historian of the early development of Christian doctrine.

Both were excellent.  Armstrong's story is a fascinating one, and is a vivid example of a very intelligent, spirited, curious woman who approaches all religions with  the attitude of the warmhearted music critic I talked about in my earlier posts.  And she 'gets' this idea that doctrine and the scriptures have to be approached as one approaches poetry or a Zen koan. Such verbal forms hold but hide truths that cannot be approached with the rational faculties alone.  They have to be cracked open to reveal an expansive interior which they contain, and the faculties that recognize these interior expanses are spiritual or soul faculties which have to be awakened or developed. That's the goal of spiritual practice.

So for those who have developed such faculties, there are cognitions, and then later the figuring out what they mean. Armstrong tells the story of Gregory of Nyssa's approach to the idea of the trinity which illustrates the point. I paraphrase from memory: He wrote:  'I think of the One, then I think of the Three;  I think of theThree, then I think of the One.  My eyes fill with tears.' I don't know the context of Gregory's statement, but when I heard Armstrong's recounting it, it struck me that Gregory was describing what was for him a Christian satori moment. 

The important thing for those who are skeptical about the truth claims of Christianity or any religion to understand is that those claims are experience based.  That's the meaning of revelation--something has been disclosed; a discovery was made.  An intellectual approach can only go so far; the usefulness of the intellect is secondary and works post revelation in order to understand the it, and it is never completely adequate to the task.

The Pelikan interview focused on creeds and the larger question why Christians have such a tendency to create them.  One of the last book projects Pelikan developed toward the end of his life was entitled Credo: Historical and Theological Guide to Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition. The interviewer asks him why Christianity emphasizes creedal formulations so much. After all, the Jews have gotten along fine with the simple, but beautiful schema: Hear O Israel, the Lord God is One!  Why have Christians this need for long lists of things to believe?  Can any modern person believe all these things that were formulated by people almost 1700 years ago? 

These are fair questions, and there are good and bad answers to it, but it would sidetrack us to get into now. But suffice it to say that creeds ought never to be used as an ideological straitjacket or as a mind control tool.  Their use in that way is an abuse of clerical power and always and everywhere should be repudiated. Nevertheless, for anyone to belong to a particular creedal community requires that he respect the discoveries of those who preceded him, even if their discoveries are not ones that he has made yet for himself. If one chooses to undertake the discipline of Zen, for instance, he does so in the hope of making discoveries like the masters who have done so before him. I see no difference when it comes to the deeper and seemingly incomprehensible truth claims of Christian orthodoxy. Because these truth claims are not graspable by ordinary rational consciousness does not mean that they are not graspable.

For me the creedal elements in Christianity are part of a  legacy bequeathed by those who have gone before us who have made discoveries they wished for us who followed them to discover for ourselves.  If thought of in this way, the creeds are not intellectual straitjackets, but signposts or trailmarkers left by those who have already explored the terrain.  Our job is to rediscover what they already discovered, and that's the essence of the postmodern task.  As the Renaissance was a rediscovery and retrieval of the classical heritage lost through most of the medieval period, so now must we rediscover what was lost or forgotten during the modern period. I think that means a rediscovery and retrieval of element from the premodern Christian traditions, which are Catholicism and the Eastern churches, but also the premdoern heritage of non-Christian religions. 

Now here are some of my thoughts about the truth claims of Christian teaching. All the teachings of the great religious traditions are based on the discoveries made by their founders:  Moses, Muhammad, the ancient Rishis of Hinduism, and the Buddha.  I believe Christianity is similar in many ways to these other religions, but different in this critical sense:  Jesus was not the founder of Christianity.  He was not the discoverer, but the discoveree.  Thus his question to Peter is archetypal question posed to all who encounter him on some level: Who do you say that I am? The encounter with the Christ is an experience of insemination in the Matthew 13 sense (parable of sower, mustard seed, etc.).  This seed has a subversive effect within the soul life of those who are inseminated, and they find that if they nurture its germination in the right way, a new regime grows within.  Jesus called this interior regime the kingdom, which was his historical task to bring into the world.  Being a citizen of this kingdom is a precondition for deeper discoveries of the Christian kind.

As the seedlings grew in the early experience of the Christian community, so did its understanding of the answer to the question about Christ's identity. The evolving process is the basis for the various creedal formulations that culminated at Nicaea in 325.  The story of those developments is a fascinating, enormously complex, and deeply human drama, and there is no better source to learn about it than Jaroslav Pelikan.  I'd be happy to debate all the alternative explanations, but that's how I see it.

And so to my way of thinking, the interesting existential question for any serious person is not whether these discoveries are in some way provable, but whether they are worth making the effort to discover for oneself.  For if you have not made the discovery for yourself, you cannot judge their validity; all you can do is believe or disbelieve the testimony of others.  Having some criteria for judging the credibility of such testimony is a serous issue, and that, too, perhaps can be explored in a future post if readers want to.

Ok.  So now to particulars.  Commenter Eusto could perhaps be persuaded that Christianity is a beautiful fiction, but cannot see how any sane person could truly believe what Christians say they believe.  I think to a large extent I've already answered the question, but he's interested to know particulars.  Do I believe in the virgin birth, the miracles, the divinity of Christ, and so on.  I'm not going go into each of these because to do so would require tediously long explanations.  So I will focus here primarily on the Christian belief in Christ's resurrection on the first Easter.  If that's not true, then none of it is.  If it is true, then the plausibility of the rest of it is easier to establish, and if there's interest, we can get into it in future posts. My goal here is not to convince the skeptic but to show how its possible for a sane person to accept what seems to be an impossible idea.

It comes down to believing or not believing the testimony of the early disciples, and that testimony lives both in the memory of the Christian community and also in some of the New Testament texts. I think that it's important to emphasize that in my opinion no sane intelligent Christian looks at the Gospel accounts as journalistically objective accounts.  The gospel accounts were on the one hand indeed a record of specific events that I believe happened in historical time both before and after his Jesus' death.  But they are on the other hand an attempt to represent what different communities of Christians believed to be the significance of those.  They are both exposition (this is what happened) and synthesis (this is what it means).  I don't believe that everything that can be known about the Christian mystery is contained in the scriptures.  They are a good place to start, but not necessarily where one stops. I do believe they are inspired and have enormous authority; I don't believe they are infallible.

And while we're on the subject of infallibility, let me say a few words about the pope's claim to it. It is hard for me to imagine a more colossal and unnecessary blunder than its promulgation in the 19th century.  What problem is this doctrine designed to solve?  That papal authority is not being taken seriously enough?  But is there any doctrine that has done more to undermine papal credibility? Whatever its rarefied theological justification, it's hard to think of a doctrine that has done more to make Catholicism hard to take seriously by anybody who thinks. And it is a scandal for the faithful insofar as it reinforces the stereotype of Catholics as passive sheep led by those who know better. It's another species of this certainty fetishism that I talked about in earlier posts of which fundamentalism and scientism are also examples.  It is an  testament to the astonishing cluelessness and pomposity of the house management.  If those in the church hierarchy think themselves somehow immune from the delusions of power, their thinking so is a symptom of the malady.

I digress.  Back to our reflections on the Easter event. What can we learn from the gospel accounts about the period after Good Friday? I like particularly the accounts given in Luke and John: I’m conflating a little here, but the essential narrative boils down to some women went to the tomb where Jesus’s corpse lay to dress his wounds  to discover that the tomb was empty.   The women are greeted by two men who ask, “Why do you seek the living among the dead. He is not here, but is risen.” The women return to tell the other disciples what they have discovered; the disciples are incredulous, but Peter and John run to the tomb and find that the women’s account was true. The tomb is empty.  There is no Jesus to be found anywhere. There are just the linens in which his body was wrapped. And John's gospel has little details that the other accounts do not.

In Luke the scene shifts to the story of the nameless disciples' encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Emmaus which has more of an archetypal symbolic quality than the particularities of the John account. There is the encounter with the risen one who they do not recognize.There are all the explanations to them of the significance that they had not yet grasped. There is the recognition at the moment of the breaking of the bread. There is the awareness of how their hearts burned.

I say archetypal because whatever its basis in historical fact, it points to the elements that characterize any encounter with the risen Christ either then or in the centuries following and because of its eucharistic overtones.  I think lots of people have had Emmaus type experiences. The purpose of the mass and the eucharist is to be a locus for such encounters. This is something that bible-centric Protestants in general don't get, and it's part of the premodern heritage I believe they need to retrieve.

In John's gospel, the scene shifts to the story of Mary Magdalene's encounter with him in the garden near the tomb. And again its the little details that are most striking in the account. This acount is not archetypal but empirical. Mary, like the Emmaus disciples, does not at first recognize him.  She thinks at first that he is the gardener.  I find John's gospel to be the most interesting for the way it combines these very concrete detailed empirical observations with its cosmic Logos Christology, but that, too, is another subject.

So what to make of all this?  I believe that something happened in real historical time, but I am not certain that if there were a video camera recording these encounters it would have recorded the physical presence of the Christ.  It might have; I just don't know.  I am clear, though,  that whatever the nature of Christ's body, it was not the same as the body he had before he died. It didn’t even look like him.  I'm speculating, but I see these encounters are subjective/objective visionary experiences.  Subjective in the sense that there has to be a subjective alteration in subjective consciousness to be able to have the experience, but objective in the sense that it wasn't just a fantasy.  They were not just seeing some projection of their subconscious.

But my Harrisite friends might be asking themselves Why?  Why is all this necessary.  Isn't the resurrection and the whole idea of redemption another example of a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist? How is it all connected to the Christian idea of redemption?  And if there was redemption, it didn't take, did it?   All fair question to which there are good answers, but already I fear I've written more than most Harrisites are willing to work with, but I'd be interested to write in response to any questions Harrisites or others pose if they want to go further.  I address some of these issues in my Sinning Originally posts from over a year ago.

Getting Perspective on Iran

Hat tip to reader Forestwalker for making me aware of the work of Douglas Johnston, whose efforts to develop the religious dimension in diplomatic relations especially with Muslim nations may save all our necks in the long run.  Listen to a very interesting interview about his several high-level initiatives in Sudan and Iran if you are open to the idea that there are often other possibilities than force when it comes to resolving thorny international conflicts.

I also liked his brief piece entitled "What Iranians Want Americans to Know about Iran."  An excerpt:

Security Concerns

1. Iran’s neighbors, including Russia, India, Pakistan and Israel, all have nuclear weapons and effective delivery systems.

2. Israel is estimated to have between 100-200 nuclear weapons and has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that Iran is criticized for violating.

US–Iranian Relations

1. The majority of Iranians living today do not remember the Shah.

2. The Iranian people do not hate the United States. The large majority, especially the young people, want a better relationship with the U.S., but Iranians will unite to defend their country against any foreign attack, just as they did during the Iran-Iraq war.

3. The U.S. may have felt humiliated when the U.S. embassy was seized in 1979, but no Americans were killed by their Iranian captors.

4. Democracy in Iran may not be perfect, but they do have competitive elections for their president and for the 290 seat Unicameral Islamic Consultative Assembly (or Majlis). There is more democracy in Iran than in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Egypt — all staunch U.S. allies.

Feb. 21 is the U.N. Security Council deadline for Iran to suspend enrichment-related and reprocessing activities.  If, as many believe, the decision has already been made to attack Iran, that's a date that should cause us to get nervous as it approaches. Good God, how I hope they're wrong.

 

Part 2: On Being a Postmodern Catholic

This post is a follow-up to Part 1, which should be read before this one.  Both Parts I and II, with Parts III & IV to come, are attempts to represent to sane outsiders why the creedal elements in Christianity, as contrasted with a generalized transcendentalism, are so compelling to sane insiders.  This a personal view, and, of course, I make no claims to represent anyone but myself. Although my approach might seem a little eccentric to some insiders, it leads ultimately to a ready acceptance on my part of the central tenets of the Christian faith.  And anyway, it's not directed to insiders.

It's important for "insiders" to think about their experiences and beliefs in the face of their incomprehensibility to honest, curious outsiders.  And such outsiders to Christianity are the primary audience to which I address these posts.  I have particularly in mind people who feel closer to Sam Harris than they do to Andrew Sullivan in the interesting blogalogue they've been carrying on over the last week or so. Some "Harrisites" wrote me in response to two posts (see here and here) I put up in connection to the Harris/Sullivan debate, and I am writing with their concerns and questions in mind.

I assume that people in this camp, even though they call themselves atheists, are at least open to the idea that there are dimensions of reality that transcend the material world of our sense cognitions.  Harris himself admits to having such an experience of transcendence (about which more later), but he says such experiences are what they are, and there is nothing in them that indicates definitively that there is a God or that Christianity is any different from any other religion.  And I would agree with that. 

But if one admits of there being a reality that transcends our ordinary sense experience, it shouldn't be that hard to accept that there are all kinds of experiences of transcendence and methods for experiencing it. Buddhists, for instance, have developed a variety of meditative technologies by which its practitioners can have certain kinds of experiences.  Sufis another.  Shamanic cultures yet another--for instance the vision quest of the Sioux and the experiences of the dream time of the Australian aborigines. There is the esotericism of Swedenborgians, anthroposophists, and Jewish Kabbalists. The point is that these are all in one way or another about experiences of transcendence, and they are not the same experience; they are not all about the same thing.

The phenomenology of religious experience is rich and varied, and I think of its varieties of experience as occurring in different rooms of a very large house.  To get some sense of its range, if you are unfamiliar with the literature on it, start with William James's Varieties of Religious Experience or the many works of Mircea Eliade.  I think this house also has a basement, and guys like Hitler and Stalin were frequent visitors, but I'm not interested to get into the problem of metaphysical evil in this series of posts.  It's not something that interests me very much.

So let's get back to Harris's problem with creedal claims which he believes have no plausible basis.  In his post to Sullivan, he recounts an experience he had in a particular "room" triggered by a visit he made to the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee:

As I sat and gazed upon the surrounding hills gently sloping to an inland sea, a feeling of peace came over me. It soon grew to a blissful stillness that silenced my thoughts. In an instant, the sense of being a separate self-an "I" or a "me"-vanished. Everything was as it had been-the cloudless sky, the pilgrims clutching their bottles of water-but I no longer felt like I was separate from the scene, peering out at the world from behind my eyes. Only the world remained.

The experience lasted just a few moments, but returned many times as I gazed out over the land where Jesus is believed to have walked, gathered his apostles, and worked many of his miracles. If I were a Christian, I would undoubtedly interpret this experience in Christian terms. I might believe that I had glimpsed the oneness of God, or felt the descent of the Holy Spirit. But I am not a Christian. If I were a Hindu, I might talk about "Brahman," the eternal Self, of which all individual minds are thought to be a mere modification. But I am not a Hindu. If I were a Buddhist, I might talk about the "dharmakaya of emptiness" in which all apparent things manifest. But I am not a Buddhist.

Come now, gentle Harrisites, where is that intellectual rigor you are always talking about? If it's true that there are many rooms, I'm sure you can agree that it would not be fair for Harris or anyone to generalize from his limited experience of one room to say that all the rooms in the house are the same as the one he visited.  And if you accept that, it shouldn't be that hard to accept that the kind of vague transcendentalism that many people embrace in response to experiences like the one Harris describes is not the kind of thing upon which Christianity is based, the site of his experience nothwithstanding.  It's like your listening to Miles Davis and assuming that my experience of Beethoven is the same thing. It's the fallacy of "You heard one tune, you heard 'em all."

I'm probably belaboring an obvious point here, but I want to be clear about it.  There are lots of experiences of transcendence and quite a few of them are not at all related to the particular Christian experience of it.  And so therefore such experiences have no relevance in proving or disproving the creedal assertions of Christianity or any other religion.  So I agree with the Harrisites on that point, but I make different inferences from it.

I would also say that while some people claim to have experiences of the transcendent, they are often mistaken in the interpretation they give it or to the importance they ascribe to it. It's easy to be deluded, and of course, there are phonies and charlatans. But not everyone or even most people who claim to have such experiences are phonies, charlatans, or to use Harris's term, liars. Any single person's experience is insufficient to base much of anything on, but particular experiences which have similarities to the experiences of others, especially if these experiences are recounted by credible sources from different places and different times, should at least pique the open-minded atheist's curiosity as to what they are about. Do you doubt that satori is a place many Zen Buddhists have gone?  How do you know there is such place?  Only by the reports of those who have been there.  I may not want to go there or make the effort to go, but I certainly have no doubt that it exists.

That they have been there is not scientifically provable, but these reports have a validity similar to the validity of reports of different travelers who have been to a foreign country you've never been to whose accounts reinforce one another. People who doubt the accounts of so many credible Christian witnesses over two thousand years are in my mind very similar to those who think that the moon landing was a hoax.  The only thing that would convince them would be if they were themselves someday to set foot on the moon. 

And so whatever judgments atheists might make about the validity and meaning of the experience these various people describe, the open-minded atheist at least owes them a fair hearing. But if we agree that such experiences can be authentic, can we also agree that the people in the best position to interpret them are those who have had the experience?  Surely their attempts to articulate what they mean are recognized as inadequate by anyone, most especially by those who make the attempt. But anybody with a good b.s. detector can tell who is speaking about something deep and true and who is just prattling pious formulas.  Surely whatever any given individual's or community's understanding of the meaning of such experiences might be, the reality of them exceeds all human attempts to grasp them in their entirety.

The title of one of Thomas Merton's books, Raids on the Unspeakable, captures the idea well.  The attempt to speak about the unspeakable is worth making, but the result is always inadequate to the reality about which it speaks.  And I would say that the Gospels and Epistles of St. Paul are such raids on the unspeakable. Yes, they do have a particular kind of authority, but to think of them as anything other than texts that attempt to put into words experiences of events that surpass any human's understanding by cosmic degrees of magnitude leads to all kinds of reductionist silliness, fundamentalism being one, demythologization another.  Nothing in these documents is univocal or simplistically prescriptive.  They are first and foremost artifacts that invite their readers into an alternative, upside-down experience of reality.

I would argue that all sacred texts need to be approached as sacraments, if we understand sacraments to be inspired human creations that move us from the doorstep into the big house to which I referred earlier. And I would say that sacramental texts or any sacramental objects or rituals operate sacramentally to the degree that they draw you from the outside into the inside, from a small world into a larger world. They are otherwise just fetish objects. The gospels and epistles are one of several portals into rooms in the Christian "house". I'm not interested to make the judgment about whether one set of rooms in the house is better than any other set.  To do so almost always leads to smug, ignorant assertions. I only want to stress that there are such rooms and that they are different.  And, of course, "rooms" are metaphors for subjectively experienced states of consciousness in which certain kinds of cognitions on non-subjective, or perhaps more accurately, inter-subjective phenomena are possible. I'll try to make what I mean by that clearer as we go along.

Sacraments have the characteristics of ordinary objects or behaviors.  Many people see just the object, but have never experienced how they function as portals into a "subjective" experience of the transcendent reality to which it points. It's understandable that many people, rather than to accept its invitation to go into a larger world or experience, seek to reduce it to terms that make sense in their comfortable smaller world.

Sometimes the only way to get out of the little world into the bigger world is to take the proverbial leap of faith. This leap is perhaps an overly dramatic metaphor.  I like better the biblical recommendation to knock on the door.  For the leaping is really first a choice to knock, and then should the door open, another choice to enter, and after that, well, if the experience is authentic, there is an encounter of some sort that, depending on the intensity of the encounter, has this way of turning your life upside down. This encounter, experienced in a variety of ways, is the central Christian experience.

Many more Christians have had this experience than have written about it, but some of the most articulate among many, many others are St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Teresa of Avila, Pascal, and more recently Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day. It's sometimes called a conversion experience, but I think of its essential nature as being an "encounter".  And at the risk of alienating my Harrisite readers, I understand these encounters as not identical with but similar to the encounters with the post-resurrection Christ the disciples reported, some of which are recorded in the New Testament.

I would argue that similar encounters have been repeatedly experienced by Christians through the centuries and have been the source of Christianity's longevity. Not everybody has it in a way they are conscious of, but enough people have it with varying degrees of clarity or intensity to make its essential characteristics recognizable. If there is no zen without satori, there is no Christianity without this ecnounter with the risen Christ. As there are many levels of satori, so are there many levels of encounter with the Christ.

Such encounters through the centuries have kept Christianity from shriveling into a zombie religion, a religion that has the form of the real thing, but which is animated by some alien force that has little to do with the spirit of Christianity.  This kind of counterfeit Christianity--as we see it in the pseudo Christianity of Dobson, Fallwell and Robertson--is a reality, and it is scary. And it might be hard for outsiders to distinguish it from the real thing, but the difference is very apparent to insiders.

I ask the Harrisites among you, if you are still reading, to suspend for a few more moments your disbelief or your bias that the New Testament accounts of these encounters with the risen Christ were all a fairy tale created by the early church to support their collective delusion.  Can we agree on at least this much: around two thousand years ago something happened.  The early disciples didn't really understand it.  They simply reported what they experienced.  Their lives were turned upside down by it.  They started acting in countercultural ways that caused them a lot of grief, and eventually, the seeming absurdity of those accounts became the accepted metanarrative of the West--and I would argue still is.  If nothing else, the very implausibility of this strange little sect with such a ridiculous story having such profound impact when there were so many other more attractive possibilities should give one pause.

Could it, in fact, all be a collective delusion? Collective delusions are fairly common.  They took hold of France in the 1790s, Russia in the teens and twenties, Germany in the thirties, China in the sixties, the current neoconservative and Christianist right in the U.S., and endless examples can be produced.  But collective delusions sooner or later collapse.  They don't sustain themselves for two thousand years.  If nothing else that's got to earn Christians enough credibility to get a fair hearing, and that requires listening to what they say about their experience rather than just dismissing it or reducing it to terms that fit comfortably into rationalist cubbies. 

Harrisites, are you really completely confident that you know better than some of the best minds and great souls who have lived throughout the past 2000 years? It would be fair for you to say that their experience is not your experience.  But to dismiss it so glibly as Harris and others do is facetiously parochial and callow.

That's enough for now.  There's more to say about how the world looks from inside the Christian suite of rooms, and that involves some discussion of the particularities of Christian belief.  I'll make my best attempt to do that soon in a Part III.

Part 1: On Being a Postmodern Catholic

This post is more or less connected to the debate between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan, and a followup to my two posts about it in the last week here and here. If this subject interests you, I encourage you to read the Harris/Sullivan blogaloue and my two previous posts and the comments after them. I'm on Sullivan's side on this issue, and I think much of what he has to say is very good, but my angle of approach to these issues is somewhat different. 

In this post I want to lay a foundation for a broader discussion of the creedal dimension of Christian belief.  I never saw the task of this blog as one for Christian Apologetics, but rather one of simply talking about the world from the point of view of someone trying to make sense of it from a particular perspective, and to characterize that perspective as postmodern Catholic is fairly accurate. The postmodern part of that is explained in my comment to Eusto in the second post referred to above. No choice about that part. The Catholic part is more problematic.

I know the word "Catholic" triggers intensely negative associations for many people, and for good reason.  I feel the burden of the  crimes and  stupidity committed in the name of the Church.  I feel similarly about being an American. The bottom line is that I feel the same way about being human. As there is no escape from the last, neither really is there any point in trying to escape the other two. I guess what I'm saying is that I've made a life for myself by sticking it out with all three, some of it chosen, some of it not. Purity is not the name of the human game. It's more about recognizing grace wherever you can find it, and we find it everywhere, even in Rome.

I'm joking, sort of. I guess the point is that while I cannot diminish the importance of human institutional failures, whether in Rome (or Boston) or in Washington, the people who set those policies are in my view usually the least interesting representatives of their respective groups.  We need what they do, but they overestimate their importance, and it's a mistake for the rest of us take them too seriously. What makes America great is not its government, but its people and their intelligence, imagination, and diversity.  It's the same among Christians--the least interesting, with some exceptions, are the ambitious ones who have sought and gained managerial responsibilities.  Or to return to my music analogy, I'm not interested in the centralizing, control-freakery of the concert hall's house management, but rather in the freedom, grace, and beauty of the singers.  The singers--the great souls who have sung the Christian song--make the very steep price of admission worth the cost.  I understand why that price seems too steep for some, but for me nothing could be more important than learning from them how to sing that song, and sing it better.

The managers often enough do not like the song--that's the point of Dostoyevski's great parable of the Grand Inquisitor, but the song will not be suppressed. For in the final analysis all that matters is that the song be sung.  The denominational divisions and the doctrinal disputes are head trips that are relatively inconsequential.  I am only interested to find those places where the singing is good, and it is found in the most diverse idioms.  But the idiom for me is sacramental, and that's why the song I try to sing is Catholic.  I find such joy in it.  Not always, and and at different time with varying intensity.  But it is one of the central themes of my life.

Does joy equal truth?  Does my subjective experience necessarily correlate with what is objectively, historically true?  Am I certain that Christianity is necessarily true or more true than other religious convictions or the conviction that it's all fantasy.  Well for reasons I've explained in the other posts, the issue of "certainty" doesn't interest me very much.  But since some readers have asked me to come clean about what I think about central Christian truth claims, such as the resurrection,  or the the biblical account of the virgin birth, I'll take a shot in my next post of explaining my approach to such assertions.  I will say this, though.  I am not a fan of Bultmannian demythologization.  It's a well-intentioned but misguided attempt to get at the "truth" by attempting to reduce something large and rich into something small and poor.  We need an approach that takes us in the opposite direction, from small and poor into what is large and rich.

And let me further preface what I'll say then with these remarks. I think it's a mistake to approach religion as if its primary expression was in its intellectually formulated propositions.  They are important, but secondary.  I think that a religion is in the last analysis to be evaluated not on the level of propositional truth, but on the best kind of human beings that it produces, and that's to be judged on their performance, not on the purity and certainty of their beliefs.  Too many theologians and prelates are like experts in music theory and music history but who cannot sing or play any instrument.  They can think about music, but they cannot perform it. The theory they teach may be interesting and even helpful, and performers benefit from knowing it, but it's useless if there is no one who can perform.

The music is the only important thing, and the primary task is not to understand it but to immerse ourselves in it and to love it.  And then thinking about what it means comes later.  It is secondary and derivative of the basic experience of participating in the song.   It's another way of saying that if you don't love the music, you can't really understand it.  The medievals  had a phrase for it: Fides quaerens intellectum. Knowledge abut the song is different from singing it. You've got to sing the song for awhile before you can even begin to understand what it means. 

It's another way to say that the test of one's religion is not in what knows or thinks but in the fruits (not some rigid orthopraxy) of a life lived well.  And anybody who has read this blog over time knows that I think there are plenty of non-Christians, even atheists, who are far better human beings than those who call themselves Christian. It's not because Christianity is untrue; it's because it's a very hard song to sing well and only a few have done it really, really well. 

And it's because grace does not discriminate along lines that favor one group over another, even Christians. The disposition of the human will is far more important than the disposition of the mind.  The mind is important only insofar as it works as an aid to help open us up to this ubiquity of grace or as it works to close us off from it.  When it does the latter among Christians, it causes the same syndrome that affected the Pharisees of the gospels, and results more often than not in the zombie condition I've called here 'whited sepulcher syndrome'--squeaky clean and boring on the outside, rotting stink on the inside.

And so the approach one should take in evaluating the truth claims of any religion is rather more like that of a music critic than of a scientist.  Look to the quality of its best performers.  The questions should not be "Are these claims true?  If you say so, what is the evidence for them?"  Rather the questions should be "Does this singer have depth and clarity?  Does she have freedom and grace?  Does she move us to see the world in a larger frame?  Is there something that inspires her song that comes from a source outside the cave of the subrational and the senses?  Those, at least, are the things that I look and listen for.

But the ideal critic is not a supercilious snob, but one who is warmhearted and eager to find genuine talent, and recognizes it wherever it appears, even when it is raw and undeveloped.  And neither is he someone who lies to be polite when he does not find it. And it is in that spirit that I approach all the world's religions and all its philosophies.  I'm not interested in whether they are wrong or right in some intellectual sense, but in the quality and depth their song expresses.

I love Nietzsche and Camus and Kafka, not because they are right or wrong, but because many of their songs ring profoundly true and enrich and broaden the range of my experience and imagination.  And I am drawn into the depths from which their songs are sung.  But I also love St. John of the Cross, Augustine, and St. Paul for similar reasons.  Not everything each of these and so many others wrote was good, but so much of it was, and it's that part that I care about. You cannot truly know what you do not love, and I know in my own life my failures in understanding and judgment are mostly due to failures in love, not to faulty reasoning.  My grumpiness, vanity, impatience, and anger are more obstacles to really understanding what it's important than any limitations of my IQ or ignorance of the facts.

Of course the facts are important, but to know fact is to know only the surface truth; it's only a beginning of knowledge.  The cognition of deeper levels of truth require the development of faculties that are not exclusively brain based.  We must make judgments about truth, but the more important judgments are not about their factual truth or falsity, but about their goodness or their lack of it.  Knowledge is in this sense erotic and relational. (If you want more on this read Buber and Kierkegaard.)  So I would argue that only with that mindset can you approach and judge the truth claims of any philosophy or religion, from aboriginal animism to trinitarian monotheism.   

That being said, readers like Eusto want to know what I think of the truth claims of Christianity, particularly what I think historically happened.  If there were a video camera posted at the tomb where Jesus was buried, what would it have recorded on Easter morning?  Even though I think it's a wrong-headed question circumscribed by the biases and limitations of the modern mindframe, I'll take a shot at answering it later this week. 

Searching for Flannery O'Connor

From tomorrow's New York Times Travel section:

Somewhere outside Toomsboro is where, in O’Connor’s best-known short story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” a family has a car accident and a tiresome old grandmother has an epiphany. The fog of petty selfishness that has shrouded her life clears when she feels a sudden spasm of kindness for a stranger, a brooding prison escapee who calls himself the Misfit.

Of course, that’s also the moment that he shoots her in the chest, but in O’Connor’s world, where good and evil are as real as a spreading puddle of blood, it amounts to a happy ending. The grandmother is touched by grace at the last possible moment, and she dies smiling.

“She would of been a good woman,” the Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

O’Connor’s short stories and novels are set in a rural South where people know their places, mind their manners and do horrible things to one another. It’s a place that somehow hovers outside of time, where both the New Deal and the New Testament feel like recent history. It’s soaked in violence and humor, in sin and in God. He may have fled the modern world, but in O’Connor’s he sticks around, in the sun hanging over the tree line, in the trees and farm beasts, and in the characters who roost in the memory like gargoyles. It’s a land haunted by Christ — not your friendly hug-me Jesus, but a ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of the mind, pursuing the unwilling.

End of the Republic II

From Chalmers Johnson over at TPM Cafe:

The combination of huge standing armies, almost continuous wars, an ever growing economic dependence on the military-industrial complex and the making of weaponry, and ruinous military expenses as well as a vast, bloated "defense" budget, not to speak of the creation of a whole second Defense Department (known as the Department of Homeland Security) has been destroying our republican structure of governing in favor of an imperial presidency. By republican structure, of course, I mean the separation of powers and the elaborate checks and balances that the founders of our country wrote into the Constitution as the main bulwarks against dictatorship and tyranny, which they greatly feared.

We are on the brink of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire. Once a nation starts down that path, the dynamics that apply to all empires come into play -- isolation, overstretch, the uniting of local and global forces opposed to imperialism, and in the end bankruptcy.

In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt offered the following summary of British imperialism and its fate:

"On the whole it was a failure because of the dichotomy between the nation-state's legal principles and the methods needed to oppress other people permanently. This failure was neither necessary nor due to ignorance or incompetence. British imperialists knew very well that 'administrative massacres' could keep India in bondage, but they also knew that public opinion at home would not stand for such measures. Imperialism could have been a success if the nation-state had been willing to pay the price, to commit suicide and transform itself into a tyranny. It is one of the glories of Europe, and especially of Great Britain, that she preferred to liquidate the empire."

I agree with this judgment. When one looks at Prime Minister Tony Blair's unnecessary and futile support of Bush's invasion and occupation of Iraq, one can only conclude that it was an atavistic response, that it represented a British longing to relive the glories -- and cruelties -- of a past that should have been ancient history.

As a form of government, imperialism does not seek or require the consent of the governed. It is a pure form of tyranny. The American attempt to combine domestic democracy with such tyrannical control over foreigners is hopelessly contradictory and hypocritical. A country can be democratic or it can be imperialistic, but it cannot be both.

If you've been reading this blog for the last year or so, this idea of the loss of the republic has been a continuous theme.  It's depressing, and it's someting we'd rathter not think about, and what can we do about it anyway?  At the very least, though, we can keep our eyes open.

What is astonishing to me about developments in the last couple of weeks has been the administration's we-don't-care-what-anybody-thinks-we're-going-ahead-with-our- plan-anyway attitude. It's an abuse of executive power that dwarfs anything that Nixon tried, and yet despite this administration's historical low political standing, there seems nothing anybody can do to stop them.   

As bad as what we have seen so far has been, we haven't seen anything yet.  It's going to get a lot worse in the next two years.  These guys simply are not going to stand down. We put him in the driver's seat, and he won't be pushed aside or be told where to drive.  Just wait till we attack Iran. It's seeming now very likely we will do something in collusion with Israel. Surge, smurge. The really big story in the next couple of months, I fear, will be Iran.

I'll end today with this quote from a TPM Cafe commenter

"Augustus won over the soldiers with gifts, the populace with cheap corn, and all men with the sweets of repose, and so grew greater by degrees, while he concentrated in himself the functions of the
Senate, the magistrates, and the laws.

He was wholly unopposed, for the boldest spirits had fallen in battle, or in the proscription, while the remaining nobles, the readier they were to be slaves, were raised the higher by wealth and promotion....

...Meanwhile at Rome people plunged into slavery--consuls, senators, knights. The higher a man's rank, the more eager his hypocrisy, and his looks the more carefully studied, so as neither to betray joy at the decease of one emperor nor sorrow at the rise of another, while he mingled delight and lamentations with his flattery." Cornelius Tacitus "The Annals of Imperial Rome" 

Bush is no Augustus, not by a long shot.  He doesn't have to be.  It's the underlying structural dynamics that Johnson points to that are changing reality, not the machinations of one man or even a group of them.  The momentum created by this system is huge, and it would take a herculean effort by a congress even now too timid to challenge the president.  I'm not saying it can't be done, but I'm not seeing how.

Late Update: See this post by David Kurtz about Cheney's role in all of this.