After the Future

Culture of Deception

I caught the last half of the Fitzgerald press conference yesterday, and the first thing you have to say is how dramatically he contrasts with Ken Starr.  This guy is not a sanctimonious ideologue on a mission from God.  He's not somebody with an axe to grind.  He exudes integrity, and he's the kind of guy every social system needs to make sure things don't get too out of whack.

Because out of whack things have gotten.  And as I have remarked in earlier posts, I've felt that this administration in its promotion of all of its deceptions and spin has lost touch with what is the unspun truth.  All that matters is the semblance of truth, a  storyline  that they themselves have come to believe as true because, well, "What is truth?  We have the power; we create our own truth.  And anyway, we're the good guys. If we deceive, it's in the service of the good."    It's bad enough to deceive, but to believe in your own deceptions is mental illness.

Well it's this culture of deception and self-deception that Fitzgerald has indicted, not just Scooter Libby the man.  He's the one who will have to pay, and like Lindy England, he's culpable, but more than likely he was just doing what was expected of him, going with the flow.  It's fitting that the first charges should be about perjury, because as Fitzgerald so eloquently stated in his defense of the perjury charge, the whole system depends on people telling the truth. 

Part V: Post Scatological Ruminations

Inferno/Purgatorio/Paradiso. Thanks to  Dave Shack for sending the following quote by Frederick Buechner in response to my "House" post.  I think it gets at Luther's neither here nor there status of human beings very nicely:

I am a part-time novelist who happens also to be a part-time Christian because part of the time seems to be the most I can manage to live out my faith: Christian part of the time when certain things seem real and important to me and the rest of the time not Christian in any sense that I can believe matters much to Christ or anybody else. Any Christian who is not a hero, Léon Bloy wrote, is a pig, which is a harder way of saying the same thing. From time to time I find a kind of heroism momentarily possible—a seeing, doing, telling of Christly truth—but most of the time I am indistinguishable from the rest of the herd that jostles and snuffles at the great trough of life. Part-time novelist, Christian, pig.

The rest of the time, in other words, we're normal.  And I guess the point that I've been trying to make is that it's ok to be normal; it's normal to be normal.  But being normal is not normative; for the Christian impulse is about loving the normal and yet not accepting it as all there is, and from time to time acting in such a way as to subvert it. 

Despite the pejorative connotations, I don't think it's such a bad thing to be a pig.  It's simply a metaphor for our normal, natural life in a fallen world.  There is so much that is good about that. Going to ballgames and hoping  your team wins.  Raising your kids to do well in school and to get decent jobs.  Normal is the ordinary joys and sorrows, the tedium and excitement of a life lived through its different rhythms. It means arguing about politics  and mowing your lawn. It's about falling in and out of love, and about our dreams for a better future.  It's our life as talking, self-aware animals, piggies if you will, living on the earth, and if we see our normal life in this way, it's hard to take it too seriously, because really it shouldn't be.

There is much in the normal that is truly good, but it's not the only possibility. We may be litle piggies, but we are capable being more. We want to be more or to think of ourselves as more, but there is a right way and a wrong way of going about it.  The normal route people take to being more has to do with ambition and pride, this always leads to problems.  The non-normal route is to recognize oneself for the piggy one is and then work with something that we don't think of as natural, but which is as much a part of our daily experience as the air we breathe. 

You know the movie "A Day without a Mexican"?  It tries to show how important to the life of L.A. is the mostly taken-for-granted presence of Mexicans.  Well imagine the world without the taken-for-granted presence of grace.  Maybe Quentin Tarrantino could be hired to do the movie about a world without grace--or maybe he already has.  For surely he has a knack for showing us the lives of people who live in a  world of banal vileness, banal and vile to the degree that they are closed off from the reality of grace.

I believe there is a principle of metaphysical evil that operates in the world, and its purpose is to  close humans off from the possibility of grace. Hell is the soul's state which has become completely impenetrable by grace. But I doubt anybody takes up permanent residence in downtown Infernoville.  There are, though,plenty of people who  live in its suburbs.  And  there are people who likewise live in the suburbs of Paradiso.  But most of us live in the murky, in-between burb, which is downtown Purgatorio. It's the place we call normal, neither filled with grace, nor completely cut off from it. 

These are metaphorical places, but also metaphysical ones.  It's the condition of all of us who live in a fallen world.  It is not a physical place, but the physical world is changed by being within the gravitatiional pull of those people who have Paradiso within them. Non-normal things can happen.

Natura est vulnerata, non delenda.  Nature is wounded, not destroyed.  I'm going from memory here, so I'm not sure, but think it's Aquinas who said it.  It makes a difference if you think of the world as we live in it as wounded, because it suggests that health and wholeness was something lost and also that it can be regained. It suggests that what we have come to take for granted as normal is not necessarily healthful.  It makes a difference because it contrasts with the naturalistic understanding that accepts the normal, natural world as the only possibility.  And it makes a difference in contrast with the view, Eastern or Western, that understands the world as a prison with no possibilities other than to be a prison, so therefore a place that must be escaped.

It makes a difference because it frames for us the nature of the "heroic" work that we are called to do--the work that truly makes us more than piggies eating at life's trough.  And it defines what heroic means in ways that circumvent all the recognition-driven motivations that are at the heart of the traditional  meaning of heroism. Natural heroism is piggie heroism, insofar as it's driven by adrenaline and testosterone. It is in my view morally neutral because it's natural and instinct driven, even if prodigious in its accomplishment.  It's bucks bashing one another in a battle for dominance.  It is a heroism that is neither here nor there.  For the heroism about which Bloy and Buechner speak is not about the performance of tasks that require extraordinary gifts. They are motivated by grace.

Heroism in this sense is  the cumulative record of a life lived, usually obscurely, in response to the presence of the possibility of true freedom or grace. It is about the development of the kind of character which, because it is capable of responding to grace in small ways over the the course of a lifetime, is then also capable, if the occasion arises, of responding in a big way.  It is only because of a lifetime of small decisions, small gestures, and the habit of soul that is developed as a result, that if something big comes, and even if notoriety comes with it, there is enough ballast to keep him or her from being blown over. 

I haven't had much time lately, and I don't feel that I'm saying this very well.  I want to take this further.  But there's too much else going on for me to really dig into it just now.  But I will get to it. 

Plamegate Endgame

I haven't had much to say about all this because I thought I would just let it play out. What's to say that hasn't been endlessly said?

But if it turns out that these thugs get their just desserts, will that be a schadenfreude moment for me?  Hardly. I'm worried. It just seems that the country is particularly vulnerable right now, that things are being held together with paper clips and duct tape. If these guys go down, they are not going down without a fight.  Things could get pretty messy.

Americans convinced themselves in electing this administration they were putting the grownups back into power, but they're discovering now that instead they put in a callow frat-boy who might be the only one left standing when all the dust settles.  I don't know about you, but that makes me pretty nervous.  He's got three more years. It's one thing to pop the country's balloon about what they really have in this man, but once the balloon is popped, there he is.  And he's still running the show. By himself.  No help from  Rove, and  maybe not even from Cheney. We'll see.

When abstractly considered, being rid of Cheney and Rove would seem to be a good thing.  But their boy in the oval office is in over his head in the best of circumstances. How confident do you feel about his stability and his capability to deal with the kind of firestorm it looks like his administration is about to face? Is Condi Rice going to be holding his hand as Kissinger held Nixon's? Oy.

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of pressure is being put on Fitzgerald right now with this  argument: Back off, Fitzie.  The stability of the country depends on it.

Style and Substance

Todd Gitlin at TPM Cafe reproduces parts of a talk he gave in November 2002 in which he tried to make the case for a sane anti-war rationale before the invasion.  It's difficult to do, because so much of our political discourse is about style rather than substance:

But the peace movement in its way is also slapdash.  If there is war in Iraq, it seems to me that the odds of one or another catastrophe in the short, middle, or long run are terribly high, and the chances of a smooth, slick, low-cost, high-gain victory are terribly low, so surely, the moment cries out for a smart, extensive, inclusive popular movement against the gangbusters approach that the Bush administration favors.  Surely, the sobriety and skepticism of the American people deserve organization and mobilization.  But at some of the mass rallies, the strongest arguments against an Iraq war, which are pragmatic, are barely in evidence; and people of good will, religious, secular, whatever, are drowned out by various flavors of Old Left nostalgia.  Much of the antiwar initiative was taken by left-wing groupuscules who cannot find it in their hearts to find fault with Saddam Hussein; who consider the no-fly zones that afford some protection to Kurds and Shiites illegitimate; who for that matter think the military action in Afghanistan illegitimate, and whose essential views amount to:  U. S. out of everywhere, on principle.  These Old Left remnants cherish their own version of bulldozer politics.  That limits their potential—not just against the Iraq war, but against others that might well be in the offing as the Bush doctrine comes into play in the years to come….

I was one of the millions of people who marched on Feb.15, 2003, to protest the by-then inevitable U.S. invasion of Iraq, but it bothered me that the event was so coopted by the "left-wing corpuscules," as Gitlin calls them.  I suppose that it's inevitable that in a media, sound-bite age it's the easily recognized cartoon characters who become the public face of any given political position or movement.   

But the consequences are significant, because lots of people who don't have the time or the energy to do their own research and reading and thinking make decisions based on style rather than substance.  If I, who was so adamantly against the war from the beginning, felt estranged by the lefty, sanctimonious  cant of the march and have avoided all public demonstrations against the war since then, should anybody be surprised that those who felt more ambiguously about the coming war were driven into the pro-war camp? 

"If being against the war means being associated with these people, I'm for it," such people think to themselves. Or don't think.  Their antipathy toward the left style drives them unconsciously to accept the substance of the the pro-war argument, which was framed in all this naive idealism about spreading democracy and stabilizing the middle east.

Is this just the way or politics has to play out?  Is there any hope of developing a sane, sensible, progressive politics that also has a style that attracts sane, sensible Americans rather than repelling them?

Taking Your Eye off the Ball

Here's a followup piece to the "Intexification" post I put up last week.  It's an excerpt from a Lee Drutman post at TomPaine:

For those trying to make sense of President Bush’s decision to nominate Harriet Miers to the supreme Court, here’s a question: What do Miers and John Roberts have in common, besides the fact that they were both nominated to the Supreme Court?

Answer: Both had substantial careers as corporate lawyers before being nominated. . . .

Miers, meanwhile “has a blue-chip résumé that would wow Wall Street,” as Business Week correspondent Lorraine Woellert put it in Sunday’s Washington Post . Miers was a managing partner of the Dallas law firm Locke Liddell & Sapp, where she handled consumer class-action lawsuits for Microsoft Corp., the Texas Automobile Dealers Association, and former mortgage industry giant Lomas & Nettleton. She has also defended Dupont, Disney and Miramax, among others. Additionally, Miers has served as a board member of Dallas' Better Business Bureau and the Greater Dallas Chamber of Commerce.

Such legal service to large corporations is not typically part of the resume of a Supreme Court Justice. As Bruce Josten, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s top lobbyist, told the Christian Science Monitor , “Having two justices, [Chief Justice John] Roberts and Miers, who we expect to join him shortly, that's adding two to nothing from the point of view of that kind of experience. That's big for the business community.”. . .

Unfortunately, this angle has been largely lost in the public debate over Miers. Instead, the media has focused on the infighting among conservatives about her credentials.

Indeed, it is newsworthy that many of the president’s hard-core social conservative supporters say they feel betrayed. They want to know: Where is the strict constructionist they were promised, the justice who would heroically restore America back to a shining theocracy on a hill, safe from the liberal scourges of pornography, homosexuality and abortion?  ...

Yet, one lesson we should have learned from the Bush presidency by now is that while social and intellectual conservatives are nice to have on your side, it is the large corporations that write the checks. And if you can throw a bone to those other groups now and then (like, say, coming out for a gay marriage amendment that has no chance of passage, or giving elegant speeches about your Christian faith), you can keep them in line.

But if you look closely at Bush’s record, you’ll see plenty of words about family values and religion and the virtues of small government, but plenty of actions on behalf of things like tort reform and bankruptcy reform.

This is the GOP m.o., folks.  When push comes to shove it's all about the money, and what money wants, money gets.  Thomas Frank nailed it in What's the Matter with Kansas.  Most red staters aren't crazy, religious fanatics.  They are sincerely concerned about the moral climate of the culture, and when given the choice they align with people who speak in a traditional-values vocabulary.  I understand that, but what I don't understand is their credulity.  I thought we were smarter than that.

With the Miers nomination some red staters are finally catching on that they've been conned. Dobson's a little slow to grasp the situation, but what do you expect? Karl told him what he wanted to hear, and Dobson, the tribal leader with the ear of the great white chief in Washington is credulous enough to believe him.

Should that mean that liberals should rejoice that their abortion rights are probably safe?  Maybe, but they're being conned as well.  Money doesn't care one way or another about abortion. The abortion issue is a red herring. Something to get liberals and conservative all riled up about in the front yard, while in the back yard they've got their truck backed up to the door and are stealing everything they can carry.

It's remarkable to me that hardly any one is focussing on the concentration of wealth and power theme.  That's at the heart of the Bush agenda, everything else is posturing.

Hillary in '08?

The conventional wisdom is that she's the front runner. For me the prospect is appalling, and reinforces why I feel so alienated from the prevailing mentality of the Democratic Party--but I'm willing to be convinced otherwise.  Anybody want to argue for or against?  How do people feel about Gore making a second go of it?  After all, he did win in 2000.  Kerry? Please God, no. Obama? too early.  Edwards? I could live with him.  Dark horses?  What do people out there think?

Part IV: House, The Purgatorio Man

If you’ve been following the logic of the three preceding pieces on Original Sin, it should be clear that there is no necessary moral difference between being naughty or nice.  Being nice means for the most part being well socialized, which has the  moral equivalence of being potty trained.  Being nice is what we are trained to do in order to get along with others, and I’m all for potty training and getting along.  But there’s nothing metaphysically good about being nice; it’s just convenient.

I’ve become a fan of the Fox Tuesday evening TV show “House”. The main character, Gregory House, is a legendary medical diagnostician, and he is not at all "nice," and he is not at all interested in "getting along."  At first glance he  seems to be just another arrogant doc.  But after watching the show for awhile it becomes clear that he is a  Diogenes figure, a ruthlessly honest man searching for other honest men and women, and not usually not finding anyone who qualifies. He sees through every subterfuge, every charade, every supposedly noble justification that masks ignoble motives. His basic assumption about human beings is that they are full of shit, and he’s right. For me that’s another way of saying that we’re all under the influence of original sin. 

Is House a good man? No, but he is an honest man. Morally, he is neither here nor there. He has yet to be won over. He is not nice, but neither is he deluded, which puts him on the threshold of goodness. He is nauseated by any manifestations of cheap grace and sentimentality, but the 9/20 episode suggests that he is capable of recognizing and honoring goodness when it is the real thing. 

The story involved a little girl with an inoperable  tumor which was going to kill her within the year.  She was the poster child for courage in the face of suffering and death, and House was having none of it.  At one point he says to Wilson something along the lines of “Why is it that all these children are courageous?  If they are all courageous, then none are courageous.” Courage, if it is real, has to be something that transcends the cliche about the plucky, terminally ill child celebrated by Oprah or Katie Couric.

He hypothesizes that the child really has no emotional grasp of the reality that she will die and that she will suffer terribly before she does. Or even if she does understand, that the illness has affected her brain in such a way that she does not have the normal fear response. So he takes it upon himself to make sure that she does understand, and that she doesn’t have to go through with it, and that it could end right now by refusing to go through a hellish procedure required to buy her a little time. Without going into the details, she proves him wrong, and in the end he reluctantly acknowledges that there is something going on with her he can’t quite fathom. He has brushed up against the true goodness that lies behind the cliche, and he is moved by it. 

So the point is that it’s possible not to be full of shit, because this kid wasn’t.  Sometimes what appears conventionally nice is in fact truly good.

In the Christian mystical tradition going back to Pseudo-Dionysus and Bonaventure, the path toward God comprises three stages: Purification, Illumination, Union. House represents the first stage—having the ruthless honesty to recognize that we’re mostly full of shit and that we need to be purged. House is a purgatorial figure in this sense—a monk wrestling in his cell with the devil. He is more progressed than the other docs around him because he sees more shrewdly and clearly than those around him. Illumination is the gradual process by which the substance of truth and goodness fills the space that was formerly occupied by all the shit. And union is what becomes possible when all the shit is purged and the shattered image cleaned and restored.  Then we will have fully realized that which we were created to become, and then we shall see face to face. Most people are like me, mostly full of shit with occasional moments of illumination.

Martin Luther, who knew a thing or two about shit, insisted that we humans were simul iustus et peccator, at the same time saved and sinner. I think he got it half right. He was describing accurately our existential condition insofar as we have awakened to the fact of grace, and how it breaks into the shit-filled world that is our souls.  And that therefore our condition as humans is both to be half full of shit and half full of grace, so to say. 

But I don’t think there’s always an even balance between the two. In each of us there’s more of one or the other. I think there is a tipping point and the balance can shift, and that shift is effected at least in part by our effort. So sure, sola fide and sola gratia—it all starts there, but you got to do something with it. You’ve got to be fruitful. 

Lutheran-style Protestantism easily leads to the kind of "I'm not ok; you're not ok--but it's ok" complacency that is so typical of mainsteam Christianity. And I think sola fide Protestantism emphasizes  too much the idea that there has to be this conversion moment, this eureka, I’ve found Jesus moment. I think some people have such moments, but mostly it doesn’t work that way, and it doesn’t have to.

But even if it does, even if you have an experience that knocks you off your horse, what difference does it make if you don’t do anything with it? If it just results in your joining up with a bunch of Jesus freaks and spend the rest of your days congratulating one another on your great good luck, and nothing comes of it--you still remain mostly full of shit with no prospects for improvement. It seems to me that there's an awful lot of what passes for evangelism is little more than recruitment into the Christian Complacency Club--my definition of hell. I’d rather hang with House.

(Ed. Note: See post "Shrewd as Serpents, Guileless as Doves" that comes at this from a reflection on Steinbeck's East of Eden.)

Dems' Chances in 'O6?

Micah in his comment on my "What's Next?" post today makes me wonder what others think.  How many of you think the Dems can reclaim the House in '06? Are Bush's dismal approval ratings relevant in local races?  Or is the local culture and the strength of the particular candidates more important? Or are things so ideologically driven now it doesn't matter who the candidate is so long as the party base perceive him or her as orthodox?

The Dems need 15 seats.  Can they get them?  What do you think? Leave a brief comment with the number of seats you think they're likely to pick up.  They lost seats in '04, and my gut tells me that at best they'll gain about 8-10 next year.   Convince me I'm wrong. 

I'm also not averse to people making an argument from real knowledge.  Anybody know of any sites where this thing is being tracked in an objective way?  Or is it too early?  Didn't find the Swing State Project that helpful, but maybe I need to read through its entries more carefully.

Also check out this idea from Walter Cronkite.  The Dems answer to the Contract with America that ousted them in '94?

What's Next?

Those of you who have been reading my posts over the last two years know that I am no great defender of the Democrats.  I want very badly to support a progressive politics, but I have a hard time seeing the Democrats as the vehicle for achieving that.  They are deeply, deeply implicated in the big-money system that in my darkest moments I see as irreparable.  And while I voted Green in 1996 and 2000,  I hardly think that the Greens offer a realistic alternative. My vote for Kerry in 2004 was simply an anybody-but-bush vote.

In 2000 I saw Bush as an empty suit who was unlikely to do much harm if he won, and I really expected Gore to win anyway.  Boy, was I wrong. But in those days the goings-on in Washington were only among the most rearward of the back-burner issues for me.  I have always believed that politicians are not really leaders but reactors.  And so five years ago I was more interested in what was going on in the culture because that's where the life is, where the  "new" enters into our collective life.   

The carnival house of mirrors, otherwise known as  Beltway culture, is  dominated by the power game, and nothing new ever comes of that.  It's the same old story in which only the cast changes.  I still believe that.  Politicians are simply pimples on the backside of larger cultural impulses, and they are taken far too seriously. In our system they are simply gofers for big money interests.  Some are better than that, of course.  I'm talking more about the reality of national politics in relationship to the larger culture, and the larger culture in America is market driven.

And so since I was more focussed on trying to understand the dynamics of cultural transition as we move out of the modern era into whatever comes next.  As a result I failed to take seriously enough the backlash forces that were about to make their play.  I still believe the forces of reaction are in the long run historically unimportant.  The world is moving against the backlashers.  They are like frightened children digging in their heels when it's time to go to sleepaway summer camp for the first time. They can dig in their heels all they want, but they are going whether they like it or not.

But it is clearer to me now than it was in 2000 that these backlash forces have tremendous potential for making life miserable for the rest of us who are trying to find a sane way forward. They have to be taken seriously for that reason alone.  They are like cornered animals whose adrenaline-soaked brains are in survival mode and see every unfamiliar thing as a threat.   It would be nice if we could take a tranquilizer gun and put them asleep until things stabilize.  But we can't, and it's also not possible to try to calm them down and tell them that eveything is going to be all right.  It's not at all clear that everything is going to be all right. 

It's as if we're on an airplane that has an engine out while trying to ride out a storm.  It's hard enough for the pilot to do what he has to do to get everyone to safety, but his job is all the harder if he has to fight off the hysterical guy who is trying to break into the pilot's cabin.  The troublemaker is a control-freak type who believes he knows better than everybody else what's needed, and he thinks we're doomed unless he's in charge.  But he hasn't a clue.  The religious right and the neocons make strange bedfellows in several respects, but they share in that peculiar  hubris that has got us into the mess we're in right now.

So the backlash forces pose a real threat, and they have to be dealt with.  And the best we can do is adopt a strategy of containment. The crazies and the arrogant fools need to be gagged and tied up somehow so the sane people can focus on figuring things out, and the only way to do tht is to get them out of office. Get them out of the pilot's cabin. 

I would welcome an impeachment process if for no other reason it will paralyze this adminstration and restrain it from doing more harm.  The only way we get there is by getting a Democrat majority in 2006.   Do I think that's likely?  No.  But one way or the other, these foolish people must be hamstrung. 

And so I would like to believe that the worst, most regressive elements in American society, which in the last forty years have worked through the Republican Party--through Nixon, Reagan/Bush, the insane anti-Clinton impeachment Congress, and now Bush2--have lost all credibility and are seen more clearly for what they are.  I'd like to believe that.  But what difference does it make if no sane grownups  emerge now to take hold of the wheel and get this rig down safely? As much as I dislike what the Democrats have come to stand for, our chances are much better with them.  It's time to put them back in the pilot's seat, and then exert as much pressure on them as we can to work for the best interests of ordinary Americans than for the interests of big money.

But we, out here in the culture, have to have some idea about what the right thing is, don't we? 

Part III: Ideas Matter

My goal in what I’ve written in the "Sinning Originally" pieces is not to argue for a position; it’s rather to describe the world as it appears from within the mental framework I have developed over the years.  It contrasts dramatically with the mental framework of pagan naturalism, which has been the basic script governing the modern narrative.  It’s closer to, but also pretty different from, the framework within which most conventional Christians operate. 

I have said elsewhere that I’m a Catholic because I believe the whole thing--the fundamental doctrinal, sacramental, and liturgical package makes beautiful, profound sense to me. (The ecclesial power structure is pretty corrupting, but that’s to be expected because all power structures are corrupting.) And it’s important to say that it’s just not some rigid, doctrinally pure Catholicism that makes sense to me—much in Hinduism also makes sense to me, and I have also learned much from shamanic religions and from Kaballah, the Christian Hermetic tradition, and from the Orthodox Sophianic tradition.  And it all connects, and provides for me a framework that is always in the background of everything I write here. For me the word catholic is just right--all embracing,  broad, synthetic, more interested in connections than distinctions, but at the same time true to it's own Christocentric logic.

Ideas matter; they either imprison or liberate. One’s ethics follow from one’s metaphysics. One’s behavior in the world follows from one's beliefs about the fundamental principles that govern the way the world works.

But any belief system is just a complex delusional mental superstructure if it doesn’t make a practical difference in the way we live, and ultimately the difference test is 'by their fruits you will know them.' Most people’s behavior in the world is determined by unconscious instinctual impulses.  They may have a very noble ideational superstructure that makes them feel good, but their behavior in the world is just as unconscious and instinctual as the next guy's. For most people what they think is spiritual is just socialization to be well-behaved. Their lives are still mostly instinct driven, and their religious ideas are sterile. They effect no transformations in the soul.

For me the fruits test has more to do with how ideas affect the disposition of the soul to be open, supple, and fertile. Christianity is not about being well behaved. It’s about being subversively productive, bearing fruit.  This is a theme that comes up repeatedly in the gospels.  The bottom line is not whether you minded your Ps and Qs, but whether you made a difference, whether you brought something new into the world, no matter how humble or innocuous.  In other words, has one been an infusion point in the world for the liberating grace that seeks always to penetrate the regime of delusion and to subvert it.   

The only measure for the success or failure of a human life that matters is the degree to which one was  an effective infusion point.  It  matters hardly at all what one’s conscious beliefs are if he has lived a fundamentally sterile or frutiful life.  It doesn’t matter whether someone is Muslim, Christian, or atheist.  What matters most is the disposition of the soul toward the ubiquitous, superabundant presence of grace, whether recognized as such or not. Are you open or are you closed?  If you’re open and you act, you’re an infusion point, and the world is changed. 

The great saints in all cultures are the ones through whom this grace pours into the world in torrents.  But for the rest of us it’s enough that we be cracks in the wall through which it trickles.  I’m not talking about anything humanly spectacular here. The simplest acts of kindness, of loyalty, of speaking the truth can be infusion points of grace into the world, and they may bear fruit in ways that we never know.  It’s only important that we are open and that we act. “Think not of the harvest, says St. James in his epistle, “but only of proper sowing.”

The mental framework is not the most important thing; the disposition of the soul is.  While the obsession with doctrinal purity is to me absurd and often a sign of mental illness, nevertheless the mental framework within which one lives, depending on its suppleness or rigidity, affects the disposition of the soul.  What you believe and think makes a difference. What you believe can open up possibilities, and it can close them off. It can lead to cynicism or naïve idealism, to slavishness or proud resistance. The soul suffers significant consequences if the mind is seduced by cultish ideologies of the left or right.  It is precisely from these mind prisons that so many people need to be liberated, and religious fanatics are among those in direst need. 

The Pharisees in the gospel stories are the paradigm for this kind of enslavement to religious ideology.  The obsession with correct behavior and correct belief  becomes a wall that closes one off from grace. I’ve called it elsewhere whited-sepulcher syndrome. By their stench you will know them.

Which leads me back to what I want say about Original Sin.  I think it makes a difference if you live within a mental framework in which this concept plays a role.  I want to  explain how it has come to make  a difference to me.  But this is long enough for today.  More another day.  For Part IV, click here.

Barack Speaks Some Sense.

Here's an excerpt from a Barack Obama diary at DKos in which he challenges the doctrinaire leftism you typically find there:

I am not drawing a facile equivalence here between progressive advocacy groups and right-wing advocacy groups.  The consequences of their ideas are vastly different. Fighting on behalf of the poor and the vulnerable is not the same as fighting for homophobia and Halliburton.  But to the degree that we brook no dissent within the Democratic Party, and demand fealty to the one, "true" progressive vision for the country, we risk the very thoughtfulness and openness to new ideas that are required to move this country forward.  When we lash out at those who share our fundamental values because they have not met the criteria of every single item on our progressive "checklist," then we are essentially preventing them from thinking in new ways about problems.  We are tying them up in a straightjacket and forcing them into a conversation only with the converted.

Beyond that, by applying such tests, we are hamstringing our ability to build a majority.  We won't be able to transform the country with such a polarized electorate.  Because the truth of the matter is this: Most of the issues this country faces are hard.  They require tough choices, and they require sacrifice.  The Bush Administration and the Republican Congress may have made the problems worse, but they won't go away after President Bush is gone.  Unless we are open to new ideas, and not just new packaging, we won't change enough hearts and minds to initiate a serious energy or fiscal policy that calls for serious sacrifice.  We won't have the popular support to craft a foreign policy that meets the challenges of globalization or terrorism while avoiding isolationism and protecting civil liberties.  We certainly won't have a mandate to overhaul a health care policy that overcomes all the entrenched interests that are the legacy of a jerry-rigged health care system.  And we won't have the broad political support, or the effective strategies, required to lift large numbers of our fellow citizens out of numbing poverty.

The bottom line is that our job is harder than the conservatives' job.  After all, it's easy to articulate a belligerent foreign policy based solely on unilateral military action, a policy that sounds tough and acts dumb; it's harder to craft a foreign policy that's tough and smart.  It's easy to dismantle government safety nets; it's harder to transform those safety nets so that they work for people and can be paid for.  It's easy to embrace a theological absolutism; it's harder to find the right balance between the legitimate role of faith in our lives and the demands of our civic religion.  But that's our job.  And I firmly believe that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, or oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose.  Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose.  A polarized electorate that is turned off of politics, and easily dismisses both parties because of the nasty, dishonest tone of the debate, works perfectly well for those who seek to chip away at the very idea of government because, in the end, a cynical electorate is a selfish electorate.

Amen.  We go nowhere so long as the debate is controlled by the loudmouth ideologues at either end of the political spectrum. But the middle cannot be understood as some lukewarm compromise between the extremes.  The middle has to be defined on its own terms. 

Being in the center does not mean being neither here nor there.  It means standing in a place of strength, integrity, clarity. It is catholic in embracing anything and everything that makes sense, that speaks truly and honestly.  And it will not tolerate the b.s. of any political party that seeks to  disguise itself in ideals that provide a smokescreen for them to pursue a more cynical agenda.

Are we too far gone?  Have things just got too complicated?  Is it ridiculous to expect that our public servants should be held to such a standard?  If it happens, it will require two things: First the emergence into the spotlight of political leaders who exemplify these characteristics.  Second, an electorate who recognizes and supports them.  The first element cannot become reality unless the second is in place.  The electorate, for better or worse, gets what it deserves.  It's not the politicians fault; it's our fault for not demanding more of them.  They are our servants, after all. 

Part II: Sinning Originally

Most educated people I know are uncomfortable with the idea of sin.  They’re fairly sophisticated in their understanding of human psychology, and they recognize that people’s bad behavior is often rooted in childhood abuse or in chemical imbalances in the brain.  Do these people who commit even the most heinous crimes choose to do evil, or are the programmed by forces outside their control?  Is it that they have chosen to do evil, or that for them to have chosen differently would have been a remarkably heroic act?

How can these people be held accountable for their individual evil acts if they are part of a system that programs them for it?  That's hard to argue against, and I have no intention to do so. For me the idea of sin is not very robust if it is only a matter of individual responsibility. There is individual responsibility, of course, but I think we better understand what it is if we frame it in this context of collective complicity in the regime of fallenness into delusion.

I think that most people's idea of sin is enmeshed with the social psychology of superego and taboo which have more to do with social order than with the deeper reality of good and evil. Sin is thus perceived as a social construction rather than a metaphysical condition, and if it's a social construction, our ideas about it have more to do with arbitrary, culturally determined hangups than they have to do with the deeper reality of good and evil. In this view, if we are programmed for evil, it's the result of bad social engineering and can be remedied by engineering something more functional. This view leads on the one hand to Mao's cultural revolution or on the other to Skinner's box.

And for many the word just has a lot of baggage from their childhoods that they  would rather not carry around. So they have put it down and walked away from it, and I understand that.  And yet the idea points to an existential truth that we cannot deny if we are honest. If evil is real, we're all complicit. How do we talk about that in a way that makes sense? We have the choice either to come up with another word that describes this condition or to retrieve the older word and reframe it in a way that is relevant to our currrent cirucumstances.  I'm taking the latter tack.

There may be lesser and greater degrees of complicity, but we are all complicit.  At the deepest level it’s not about indvidual responsibility; it's simply the condition of being born on the earth. If we are all in this together, it starts with a recognition that we are all born into the same conditions, into a world ruled by the Regime of Delusion. And it is from this regime of delusion and futility that all creation longs to be liberated.

And it begins with our waking up to to two facts: First that we are deluded, and secondly that we can be delivered from this condition. Both the western and eastern spiritual traditions look at our life in this world as a bad dream from which we must wake.  The tradition of pagan naturalism would counter that if it's a dream, it's the only dream there is, and so we must therefore make the best of it.  I see the spiritual traditions and the naturalistic tradition as not opposing one another, but supplementing one another, and I'll explain how another day.  Right now I want to talk about rehabilitating this old idea of original sin from the western spiritual tradition.

I’m for retrieving the idea of Original Sin as a way of describing our condition here as denizens of the earth because it helps us to frame what the task is.  We have the choice to be either collaborationists with the bad dream regime or to wake up and join the resistance. 

But if resistance calls for individual courage and determination, it is not a struggle that can succeed if undertaken alone. That’s what churches are for, and I would say that any given church body on the local level or denominational level has authority and credibility to the degree that it promotes resistance and liberation in the way I speak of it here.  It fails to the degree that it functions as a collaborator. And let’s face it: none of the historical churches, especially my own, has a historically unambiguous record on that count.

But I like this metaphor of resistance vs. collaboration because of its a this-world rather than other-worldly focus.  It points us away from the idea that we are  exiles longing for a home far away.  It points us toward  redefining our situation as citizens in our own land involved in a multi-generational struggle to reclaim what has been occupied by the enemy. The task is not to find a way to escape, but to stay and fight. The goal is not to get off the planet and into the Godhead, but to stay and engage the enemy like savvy guerillas. To be agents of liberation on behalf of him whose purpose is the liberation of the world.

I like the metaphor, but I also see its limitations.  The abolitionist John Brown probably thought of himself as such a guerrilla, as do those nowadays in the Christian Aryan Nation.  How often have people set out to subvert the regime of delusion only to become its unwitting agents? 

In Tolkien’s saga, Boromir is a valiant freedom fighter who in seeking to subvert the regime becomes the evil he seeks to defeat. He seeks to play the power game on power’s terms, and even if he wins he loses. We all would like to be dashing Boromirs, but the task of resistance is more Frodo-like--unpretentious, out of sight. The task is as much about what we refuse as what we choose.

The subversion of the regime must call upon resources from outside the system, or even in victory the new regime just winds up becoming like the old one.  It’s just the old story of king of the hill, one buck endlessly displacing the one before him.  Everyone of them believes he's bringing something new, but it's always the same old thing. 

It’s not enough simply to be against the bad guys out there; we are continuously struggling with the the self-deluding part of ourselves which is always coming up with the most noble rationalizations for doing the wrong thing. And so if you don’t have a robust concept of sin as one of the basic organizing principles of the world we live in, chances are you’re not really grasping the gravity of the situation.  Chances are good that you will either be unwitting collaborators, or like Boromir, defeated by the way the regime has established its delusional rule in each of our souls. You have to understand the nature of he enemy if you are to develop effective strategies to defeat it.  And if you are to have any chance of success, you have to know what are the resources that will sustain you in the struggle. 

If people still feel uncomfortable with the idea of Original Sin in the way I describe it here, it’s probably because they have a sensibility that is shaped by the pagan naturalism that is at the heart of the Enlightenment secular outlook, which in turn is at the heart of what it means to be a modern. The idea of Original Sin is for them an answer to a question they don’t have. It explains nothing. How could it if one believes that there is nothing that transcends the world as we experience it with our five senses.  What we see is what we get. The idea of Original Sin and our need to be liberated from it is all make believe. It might be lonely and terrifying to think that we are these beings who have come into self-awareness in this cosmic void, but grow up, get over it.

But that Enlightenment secular outlook has been breaking down for some time now.  It had to sooner or later because it is way too one sided in its emphasis on rationality and in the way it denies the validity of so much human experience as "irrational." Reason in the end is simply a tool of the will; it gives its user the answers he wills.  If one's will is fundamentally materialist in its orientation, he will accept only materialist answers to life's big questions.  But materialism is fundamentally an irrational commitment or an unconscious prejudice.

I have the deepest respect for people who have made a commitment to materialism in full consciousness and live within such a mental framework with ruthless honesty.  Nietzsche and Camus are both noble souls in this respect. There are others, but these two mean the most to me. Nietzsche is for me the great exemplar of this kind of ruthless honesty, and there is such depth and beauty in so much of what he has written. He was a great freedom fighter, but in the end he was a Boromir figure defeated by the regime of delusion against which he so valiantly struggled throughout most of his life. The nimble spirit that speaks from the pages of Camus, especially in his essays, likewise expresses a powerful spirit of resistance. I respect that spirit of resistance to conventional delusionism.

My attempt to retrieve and rehabilitate the idea of Original Sin is to give a name to that which they were resisting. You don’t have to be a believer to be a resistor, but I do think there are advantages.  And I feel a deeper kinship with these unbelievers than I do the Dobsons, Fallwells, and Robertsons, whose brand of Christianity is collaborationist through and through. More in Part III. 

Part I: Sinning Originally

As an idea that lies at the very foundation of the Judeo-Christian narrative, original sin competes with other narratives, which for the sake of a short essay like this I’ll simplify into two categories: Eastern (as in Hindu & Buddhist) and Pagan (as in Greek, Germanic, and Celtic).  All three basic narratives comprise many variations, and my purpose here is not to survey them all (or to try to show, for instance, how African and Amerindian shamanic religions fit in), but to look at each of these three as deriving from a basic gesture of the soul  that distinguishes each from the other two. So before looking at the idea of original sin, let’s first take a quick look at its competitors—first, pagan naturalism; then the Eastern idea of maya and the chain of incarnations.

The modern period is steeped in nostalgia for pagan naturalism. And the Enlightenment made a very conscious shift away from a meaning framework rooted in the idea of original sin and salvation to one in which the pursuit of happiness through an embrace of rationality and material progress became the central concern. And this inclined the Enlightenment thinkers to lean more toward the Hellenic side of the Judeo-Hellenic marriage from which European civilization was born.  The Jewish Christian side of that tension was rejected as unnatural, irrational, too weird.

So the Enlightenment celebrates the Greek and Roman worldview. It's in the great paintings of the Baroque era through writings of Rousseau and later Nietzsche and Freud.  The Enlightenment impulse was largely driven by a longing to escape the constraints and the accompanying guilt of the Jewish-Christian part of the Western heritage. In the pagan view, the Christian idea of original sin was associated with the fallen body and with sinful sexual passions. And moderns have felt a deep antipathy to the idea, which they see as the root of all repression. Pagan naturalism sought to celebrate the pre-Christian way of being human, and to return to a less alienated, more earthy, sensual, spontaneous, full-bodied way of being in the world.

For the pagan naturalist, the world is what it is—beautiful and cruel. We humans are animals who, for whatever reason, have developed brains that have allowed us to adapt to and to control our environment in ways that surpass any other of the planet’s species. It's that simple, and we’re nothing more exalted than that. Any attempt to make more of who we are and why we're here is fanciful at best and dangerous when it results in the naive idealism about which I wrote earlier this week. And any attempt to see ourselves as more leads to alienation, to false consciousness, to a refusal to accept our human condition for what  it is. It takes courage to be human, and Christianity is the ideology of frightened slaves.  That was Nietzsche’s take on Christianity, and he is in large part quite right. In my view, any attempt to present a postmodern Christian narrative has to go through Nietzsche.  His is a flame that burns away everything that is not diamond hard.  But I’ll come back to that later.

The second competing narrative lies in the related concepts of maya and the chain of incarnations found in both Hindu and Buddhist thinking.  It is a given that we live in a world of illusion.  It is a prison of ignorance from which we must be liberated, and even death offers no liberation because we reincarnate continuously until we finally break free.  Liberation is achieved through one’s own effort with the aid of a teacher who has already found a way out, and the whole point is to get out, to get off the earth whose beauties are distractions and whose cruelties are incentives to leave once and for all and to merge with the godhead, the non-material, really real which contrasts with the shadow-world phantasmagoria we call our life on the earth. 

There are similarities here to the idea of original sin and also to Plato’s Myth of the Cave.  The idea of exile is strong in the Christian tradition, as in the Salve Regina—“…and after this our exile, show unto of the blessed fruit of your womb…”  If we are exiles, we are so many E.T.s longing for home. And both the Eastern and the Western ideas are rooted in this profound longing not to be here on the earth because it is not our home.  I embrace the idea of maya, of our fundamental delusionism as an element essential for understanding what original sin means for Christians, but I reject the idea that the point is to get off the planet. The Christian task as I understand it is not escape but subversion.

So there are important differences, and I’ll get into what they are in Part II. But here’s the main point I want to make today: Both pagan naturalism and Easternism are rooted in longings that go in two different directions. Both seek to overcome the fundamental alienation that is at the heart of the human condition. Paganism seeks to overcome it by looking toward the earth and the natural world, and Easternism seeks to do it by looking past the natural world to the really real which is non-material spirit.

It's as if the human being is pulled simultaneously in two different directions, and peace can come only by choosing one or the other. These two fundamentally different gestures of the soul propose different solutions to the basic neither here nor there-ness which is at the heart of the human condition. I want eventually to make the case that true Christianity refuses both and proposes as an alternative to integrate both these gestures, to perform both at the same time, and that we were shown how to do it in the life story of the Christ two thousand years ago. The whole business is not about saving our sorry individual asses, but saving the whole thing, the earth and everything on it.  More later.

Here are the links for Part II,  Part III,  Part IV, and Part V.

The DeLay/Rove Oligarchy Unraveling?

Check out Sidney Blumenthal's Salon piece today about the end of the Rovean empire, which supplements what I said in my post earlier today. He thinks Rove and DeLay have overreached.  Maybe so.  But the trend toward a crony capitalist oligarchy is not just about these two thugs. They've just been riding the wave, and the wave keeps rolling even if these two guys get tossed. The important thing is to understand the nature of the wave, not the personalities who ride it.

Here's the key graf in Blumenthal's article:

Macro- and microeconomic policies are subordinate to the circular alliance of oligarchy and oligopoly. Government expenditures have raced to the fastest pace of increase under Bush since President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. But the spending is not intended to prime the economic pump. Nor is it invested mainly in public goods such as infrastructure or schools; nor is it used to expand the standard of living of the middle and working classes, whose incomes and real wages are rapidly shrinking. Instead it is poured into military contracts and tax cuts heavily weighted to the very wealthiest, who do not in turn invest in productive capital. As a result, the largest budget surplus in U.S. history has been transformed into the largest deficit, whose bonds are principally held by Asian banks, a shift that presages a strategic tilt of global power and long-term threat to national security. The illusion that as the post-Cold War unipolar power the U.S. faces no countervailing forces is undermined by the administration's constantly draining deficits. Thus 21st century Republicanism reverses the policies that brought about the American century.

Blumenthal is pointing to the story that needs to become the central focus here, which is the wave that is carrying us into the future right now.  We need to focus on the underlying structure of power and wealth. And as Walker point out in his comment to the previous post, you don't have to be a raving radical lefty to be alarmed about what's going on. It's just a matter of common sense.

We're Getting Intexicated

Here's my take on Bush's SCOTUS appointment of Texas crony Harriet Miers. It's pretty close to Jack Balkin's from TPM Cafe. So let him have his say first:

George W. Bush has always been an interesting hybrid of the traditional business conservative who came from a powerful Republican family and a religious conservative who found God. That combination has made him appealing to many different parts of the Republican coalition. But when the chips are down in his Administration, Bush has shown his true colors as a business conservative who above all wants a smooth ride for capital. That is what Miers offers.

Business conservatives are less interested in shaking up the world than in stability and in clearing a path for the promotion of their interests. Although their goals may often overlap with the goals of movement conservatives and religious conservatives, they are relatively uninterested in religious proselytization or ideological crusading. Business conservatives are pragmatists at heart, and the promotion of capital makes them more cosmopolitan in spite of themselves.

Religious and social conservatives may be shocked to learn that the Republican Party is the party of big business after all-- it has been since the Civil War-- and that big business is not always interested in the same things they are. That is why the Republican revolution in the courts inevitably will be a revolution on business's terms.

And what, exactly, does business want? Overturning the New Deal? The Constitution in Exile? The return of God to the public schools? The end of affirmative action? Outlawing abortion once and for all? Squashing gays and lesbians underfoot? None of these things. What business wants is stability, comfort, predictability, and an agile, productive, submissive and demobilized population. It wants a powerful executive that can protect America's interests abroad. It wants a Congress freed from federal judicial oversight that is able to dish out the pork, jiggle the tax code and deregulate the economy according to its ever shifting concerns and interests. And it wants a Supreme Court that will give a pro-business President and a pro-business Congress a free hand, a Court that will protect the rights of employers over employees, advertisers over consumer groups, and corporations over environmentalists.

It wants, in short, someone very much like Harriet Miers.

That seems about right to me. But if Balkin's point is that with the Miers' appointment we don't need to worry about the constitution in exile and other movement conservative cranks, well ok. But I've never seen them as a very serious threat. The threat in the long run does not come from the wingnuts, but from the regressive trend since the eighties in which wealth in this country is becoming alarmingly concentrated.

There are structural changes being promoted by the business conservative wing of the GOP that are very significant, and we need to make its agenda more a focus of our concern and vigilance. The cultural values debate in the political sphere is a distraction. That all should be worked out in the cultural sphere. Our primary focus in the political sphere should be about power distribution.

There are a lot of people on the left who see the GOP as trending toward fascism, and I would agree that there are fascistic tendencies on the wingnut right.  Those people are vulnerable to demagogic manipulation, and they can be pretty scary, along the lines of what I wrote about yesterday regarding naive idealism. But the power structure in the U.S. is not fascistic. In fascist societies, business serves the state. Our tendency is toward crony capitalism in which the state serves business. Is that so much better?

Well, ok. Corporate capitalism has no interest in gassing gays and Jews. It doesn't really care about how we live our private lives. It does have an interest in there being enough money in the pockets of the general population so that it can buy the stuff it sells. So things could be worse. But let's be frank. Crony capitalism is anti-democratic, and it undermines the republic. Are we living in a democracy if our elected representatives mainly represent the interests of Big Money? Are we living in a vibrant democracy if agenda items that serve the broader commonweal, like getting some kind of a sane health care system in place, don't have a prayer because of industry opposition?

The basic political question that we all need to focus on is this: Where's the Power? Who's in the driver's seat when it comes to making fundamental decisions about where we want to go as a society? Is there any doubt that the corporate agenda is the only one that really matters in the Beltway corridors of power?

The struggle against Big Money has been the most important political issue in this country since the Robber Baron era after the Civil War. This is the main act, and yet it seems to be at the very periphery of most of the political discourse. The debate about the Miers' nomination is getting hijacked by questions about whether she's for or against abortion or whether she has the competence to do the job. All of that is secondary to this bigger issue of the crapitalization of the country, of the making the Texas way of doing things the Beltway of doing things. The struggle that should be at the heart of the debate right now in America is who is in the driver's seat? Whose interests are driving policy--the interests of Big Money, or the interests of the rest of us.

I've explained this before. I'm not against business; I'm against concentrations of power. It would be ok if we were a nation of de-concentrated farmers and small business people. But we are not that. We are a nation in which wealth, and the power that comes with it, is becoming evermore concentrated in fewer and fewer hands with each passing decade.

These crapitalists, of course, are not monolithic; they are not a secret cabal hatching their plots in some bunker hideaway. But there is a confluence of interest that binds them, particularly those whose interests lie in the military industrial complex, and Bush/Cheney/Rove are completely on board with their program. And while dismantling the social programs of the New Deal era are not their central concerns, they don't really care about them. And so their alliance with movement conservatives like Grover Norquist, who do want to dismantle the New Deal, is quite painless.

And these crony capitalists do not care about the cultural values debate, except insofar as it creates a smokescreen behind which they can advance their agenda. They are more than willing to pour a little fuel on the flames from time to time to keep things smoky and everyone distracted. They are quite happy so long as they and their agenda are not the focus of the debate.

So that's what worries me about the Miers appointment, and also to a lesser extent about the Roberts' appointment. I retain some hope that Roberts willl not be a toady. But both are rather comfortable in that world, and I fear they will be consciously or unconsciously predisposed to support the crapitalist agenda.