After the Future

Cosmogenesis II

I suppose if I'm going to make the case for mythopoesis plausible, I have to establish that all of us live within a mythic framework.  I'll try to do that another time, but for now let's just assume that all of us live within belief systems.  And because our belief systems, no matter how sensible seeming, are saturated, soaked through, with the irrational, our attempts to speak rationally about them are the attempts of a swimmer in the middle of the ocean to dive a few dozen feet below to discover a thing or two about a vastness that he could never even begin to grasp. 

What we know is dwarfed by what we do not know. And yet whatever part of that ocean we have explored and have gotten to know is connected to the vastness that lies beyond it.  And we can deduce some things about what the ocean is like elsewhere based on what we have learned about it locally, but such deductions are provisional at best. How the ocean works near the surface is quite different from how it works in its deepest depths, and what might be true about its laws here could be very different from its laws there. And yet there is a continuum that connects there with here.

So the best myths are the narratives that we sense come from the deepest depths and yet make sense of our lives here. One cannot but read the Gospels with an open mind and come away from them with a sense that on the one hand they are talking about the ordinary world as we all experience it, and yet they present a narrative that is in almost every way a contradiction to the world as we ordinarily understand it to work. 

I do not think it is possible to grasp the astonishing significance of the information given to us in the Gospels unless one opens himself up to the possibility that the world as he has come to know it is not necessarily the world as it must always be. There is the kingdom of this world that operates according the austerely rational Newtonian and eat-or-be-eaten Darwinian principles, and yet within that framework there is another kingdom that Jesus said is "within," which as it grows in strength has the power to subvert the outer kingdom, to turn it upside down and to transform it into something very non-Newtonian and non-Darwinian. Lions will someday lie with lambs, and swords shall indeed be made into plowshares. 

But that's not something that will happen to us, effected by some divine intervention; it will only happen if we humans make it happen, and we will make it  happen over time to the degree that we live according to the law of the kingdom within rather than simply assuming that the law of the kingdom without is the only law worth taking seriously.

And this brings me to what I wanted to say about the Myth of Redemptive Violence, which exemplifies how we have come to assume that the law without, the eat or be eaten law, is the only one to be taken seriously. It's primal source is the Enuma Elish, and I will recount here quoting from Wink's The Powers that Be:

In the beginning according to the Babylonian myth, Apsu, the father god, and Tiamat, the mother god, give birth to the gods.  But the frolicking of the younger gods makes so much noise that the elder gods resolve to kill them so they can sleep. The younger gods uncover the plot before the elder gods put it into action, and kill Apsu. His wife Tiamat, the Dragon of Chaos, pledges revenge.

Terrified by Tiamat, the rebel gods turn for salvation to their youngest member, Marduk.  He negotiates a steep price: if he succeeds, he must be given chief and undisputed power in the Assembly of the gods. Having extorted this promise, he catches Tiamat in a net, drives an evil wind down her throat, shoots an arrow that burst her distended belly and pierces her heart.  He then splits her skull with a club and scatters her blood in out-of-the-way places.  He stretches out her corpse full length, and from it creates the cosmos...

In this myth, creation is an act of violence. Marduk murders and dismembers Tiamat, and from her cadaver creates the world.  As the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur observes, order is established by means of disorder.

I'm going to assume that people who are bothering to read this are on board with the idea that we all live within a mythic framework, even if it isn't commonly recognized as such.  And I'm going to assume that since we no longer live in a world of 'given' traditionalism, in which we have little choice about the myths into which we are acculturated, that readers are on board with the idea that we have an obligation to bring the unconscious assumptions in which all myths are rooted and to evaluate whether they are healthful or sickening.

I agree with Walter Wink that the myth of redemptive violence is the one that unconsciously saturates our culture and shapes our perceptions about what is most real, what is admirable, and what has cultural legitimacy. 

There are a lot of Christians who are more influenced by the cosmogonic myth of redemptive violence with its roots in the Enuma Elish than they are in the cosmogonic myth presented in Genesis. They accept that the world is ruled by the strong who dominate the weak, and that if you're smart you put your money on the strong man or you get branded as a loser. They look to the God of power and might before they look to the God who speaks in a still, small voice. They look to the strong, violent man for redemption before they look to the suffering servant. They feel more comfortable entrusting their fate to the Boromirs than they do to the Frodos.

This week I'll talk more about how this myth is part of the irrational that saturates our beliefs about how the world works. I'm, of course, not talking about literally believing or disbelieving that this is the way world was made, but in the irrational archetypes that govern our sense of what is real. My intention eventually is to get back to the Genesis myth and to contrast this one with that one, and then to ask: Which myth does George Bush live by? It will be clear that he's as much a Babylonian as Saddam is, at least in that respect. And so is every other gun-toting American who thinks he's a Christian.

Lost Charlie

Some quick thoughts on this week's episode, "Fire and Water": Charlie's, like Eko's, is a brother story.  Eko's story with his priest-brother resolved itself when he found his remains in the plane wreckage. Eko's and his brother's stories, intertwined from the beginning, have become  one story, and Eko has assumed his brother's priesthood. We might have more to find out about what happened to Eko after he was left behind on the airport runway as his abducted brother flew off.  My guess is that he went back to his brother's church and continued his work there.

If Eko's story has been resolved, why has he not yet been taken by the Others?   I think it's because he has a role to play in helping the other survivors to resolve their stories.  He has become a kind of bodhisattva figure--he has found redemption for himself; now he stays to help the other survivors to find theirs. 

He is a "priest," and the priest's role is to be a link between two worlds, in this case the world of the survivors and the world of the Others.  If I'm right, that role should become more clearly defined as things progress. Is his baptism of Clair and Aaron, so beautifully and simply presented at the end of this week's episode, a foreshadowing of their imminent departure?  Claire's concern is that she not be separated from her baby, so if Aaron is taken, will Claire go at the same time?

All of the other children have been taken by the Others, so I've wondered why Aaron had not yet been (permanantly) taken.  Probably because of a role that he has still to play in Charlie's story as it unfolds.  It's possible that Charlie's connection with Claire's baby, Aaron, is  a key to his redemption.  How that plays out remains to be seen. I think we have also to learn more about Charlie's brother, which for sure has something to do with why Charlie was on this plane, which departed from Australia.

I think it's interesting that Charlie understands that he's on the island to be tested, and the test for him was whether to start using coke again.  It's left rather ambiguous whether he was using or not. He says he was not--you want to believe him, but he never tells the truth when it comes to his drug habit. He told Locke he intended to destroy the drugs he had stored away, but while a part him sincerely wanted to do that, the addict part of him was never decisively defeated.  So that's a test he's neither passed nor failed.  It's curious that Locke, after taking the drugs from Charlie, did not destroy them but stored them in a vault.  Any bets on whether or not Charlie will eventually find them there?

Drift toward Authoritarianism

Robert Parry has been the best at articulating the implications of the Alito nomination:

Today, Americans have rights only at George W. Bush’s forbearance. Under new legal theories – propounded by Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito and other right-wing jurists – Bush effectively holds all power over all Americans.

He can spy on anyone he wants without a court order; he can throw anyone into jail without due process; he can order torture or other degrading treatment regardless of a new law enacted a month ago; he can launch wars without congressional approval; he can assassinate people whom he deems to be the enemy even if he knows that innocent people, including children, will die, too.

Under the new theories, Bush can act both domestically and internationally. His powers know no bounds and no boundaries.

Bush has made this radical change in the American political system by combining what his legal advisers call the “plenary” – or unlimited – powers of the Commander in Chief with the concept of a “unitary executive” in control of all laws and regulations.

Yet, maybe because Bush’s assertion of power is so extraordinary, almost no one dares connect the dots. After a 230-year run, the “unalienable rights” – as enunciated by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and the Founding Fathers – are history.  Read more.

Is this over-the-top, left-liberal rant?  What if it's not?  Even the neo-con leaning New Republic has come out against the Alito nomination. Not that it will make a difference.  The GOP has marketed itself as the Big Daddy party  who will  keep all the little, scared children safe. The Americans who support this agenda don't want a democracy; they want  strong-man authoritarianism.

Let's face this square on. It's has really become embarrassing to be an American insofar as a majority are happy to abdicate their liberties in a tradeoff for security. Such Americans are scared people who disguise their cowardice with with nauseous, sanctimonious cant about American greatness.   They talk big to hide their smallness.

Five years ago, I knew there  were such people, but I  would never have thought they were a majority.  I really thought we were better. I am sickened to learn how wrong I was.  What do Americans have to see in order tounderstand?  Will it take videotape of Bush or Rove pistol whipping some obsequious Democratic Senator for them to get the point.  It's hasn't happened literally, but it has figuratively.

Cosmogenesis I

I mentioned the other day that I was reading Wink's The Powers that Be in which he talks about the Myth of Redemptive Violence, which he traces back to the  primal, viciously violent battle between Marduk and Tiamat in the Enuma Elish, the Mesopotamian cosmogonic myth. And at some point I want to come back to what Wink has to say about that, but before doing so, I'd like to present my own riff on the Christian cosmogonic myth, which is the creation story in Genesis. This is an exercise in retrieval of that which has been given to us out of the ancient sacred dream time.

When I speak of retrieval I mean two things: First approaching the artifacts of premodern consciousness with a second naivete. Second, making sense of it in terms that help you live a more deeply human life into the future. Second naivete means both suspending our materialistic/rationalistic biases while at the same time refusing to surrender critical consciousness.

I think that one of the biggest problems with the contemporary West lies in its inability to frame a cosmology open to the idea of the sacred.  We look at the starry sky above us and we feel something that science simply is inadequate to explain, and yet we feel silly if we discuss seriously ideas about the cosmos on terms different than those that Carl Sagan would approve of. And when we read about the cosmogonies of the ancients, we sense they were onto something that we have lost the capacity to appreciate, and so we study them and talk about them in a kind of scholarly way so as not to let on that we think that maybe they knew something that we don't.

But my conviction has grown that both have it right—the moderns and the premoderns. The challenge is somehow to integrate in a new synthesis what each knows to be true. This is at the heart of what I mean by 'retrieval'. I think that the postmodern cultural paradigm that will arise in the coming decades will draw deeply from what the premoderns understood but which was rejected as incompatible with modern Enlightenment rationality.

I think think that as we move further along into a globalizing world there is going to be enormous pressure to fuse and differentiate. I'll go into  what I mean by that another time, but one effect will be that as traditional societies absorb modern consciousness, modern societies will start once again to absorb elements of premodern consciousness. To take a fairly trivial example--look at how the martial arts of traditional Asia have come to dominate the action movie genre. But a very interesting book that  documents how this is happening all over the place is Erik Davis's Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information.

And on the other end it will be very interesting to watch developments within Tibetan Buddhism because they have maintained a very powerful link to the premodern and don’t seem particularly threatened by the modern. They know who they are, and they are interested to integrate what the West knows with what they know, and so it will be interesting to see if they become absorbed into modernity as Protestant Christianity has done, or whether they will absorb modernity and use what they absorb to further differentiate.

In what follows I want to make a provisional attempt to think mythopoetically about cosmology in a way that draws upon different strands in the western tradition--some orthodox, some esoteric--that makes sense in our day.  It's meant to begin a discussion, because I'm just working on what intutiively seems right to me, but I'm sure many will find it hard to buy. The myth of modern Enlightenment rationality no longer has power; the Christian myth is dormant, and by default we are regressing into the Myth of Redmptive Violence. My interest lies in doing my part to awaken that which sleeps in the Chrisitan myth. 

So you have to start somewhere. Central to what I want to do is find a coherent way of reintroducing the role of the Divine Feminine, which has very strong roots in the West, even though its importance has been significantly diminished with the disproportionate emphasis given to sense-centered rationality over the last thousand years. 

I am convinced that if I’m right about a coming renaissance, a renewed understanding and experience of the “eternal feminine,” as Goethe called it, will be its central animating impulse. Indeed one can see signs of it all around us already, but the problem lies in distinguishing what is really flaky and superficial from what is deeply alive and true. 

The ultimate criterion, for me at least, about whether something is ultimately accepted as true is in whether it resonates with these deep ancient traditional understandings of the way things are, and in order for resonance to occur, we need to think again analogically, metaphorically, imagistically, or symbolically, that is, to think more in the way premoderns think. Myth comes out of the premodern dream time; mythopoesis is soul thinking, but in a postmodern key.

Those premodern traditions are preserved for us in a variety of ways, but however we have access to them, they are like melodies that we need to learn how to play again, and once that melody has been woven into the fabric of our souls, we need then to learn how to improvise on those melodic themes. Improvisation isn’t really possible until the music is living in you, and I think of the following as a kind of riff on the central Christian melody, which was a riff on the older Jewish melody, and I consider both to be tunes that live very deeply within me. I frame it as a kind of counterpoint melody to Buddhism; in another piece I could instead stress the harmonies.

In Christian thought, especially in early medieval Neoplatonic thought which was most influential until the introduction of Aristotelian rationalism in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there is a stream called apophatic or negative theology. It stresses primarily that since God is not a thing--a No-Thing--nothing meaningful can be affirmed about him.  He is the ground of Being which is not the same as a Being because it transcends all Being.  Whatever Being is, in whatever sense we experience it, God is not that--and so God can be described as not existing by any idea we have about what it means to exist. Which is not to say that there is no God, just that whatever we might think about him as he is in himself has nothing to do with what he really is.

My assumption has always been that Buddhism, insofar as it is considered atheistic, or non-theistic, shares common ground with this apophatic strand of thinking about God in Western thought. If our ordinary consciousness is too comfortable in samsara, the ordinary illusory nature of what we experience, anything it affirms about God with a consciousness that is bound up with illusion has to be illusory. 

So there's this practical aspect to "atheistic" assertions about God. Whatever ideas you might have about who God is, are qualitatively not better than whatever ideas an atheist might have, and probably one's ideas about God are an impediment to really understanding the way things are, especially when it reinforces certain low-level ego/and false identity states. So Buddhism 101: get rid of the idea of God--too many problems. I can accept that as a kind of apophatic practical consideration, but I can't as a metaphysical assertion of truth.
 
The central idea that distinguishes Judaeo-Christian thought from eastern thought--and Western pagan thought, too--is the idea of creation from nothing. It is a difficult idea to grasp.  If we can imagine a time before creation, then all there is is God.  God fills everything.  So how can God create out of nothing when there is no nothing?  Is it possible to even think of a "before the moment of creation"?  If so, how did God occupy himself for the eternity preceding that moment?  And why all of a sudden did he want to change things?  And how could there be an "all of a sudden" if there was no time? 

This is where the apophatic tradition comes in handy because of its practical implication to bracket any consideration of God as he is in himself. But in the West, there is the idea that this God has revealed himself, which means while we may not be able to say anything about who God is in himself, we can say something about who he is for us.  And Christians believe that this revelation was most fully given in the events that unfolded subsequent to the first Christmas. That's a really hard idea for non-Christians to accept, but if it is approached with an attitude of second naivete, it can make sense, profound sense. I do not seek to proseletyze here, only to describe the world as it has come to make sense to me. And thinking about how such a thing could be possible has been a central preoccupation of my life.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. The story begins with creation from nothing, and this idea of creation has two basic implications.  First, it affirms that God is something radically different from what he created--whatever creation is, God is not that--pantheism is not an option. Second, it affirms an intentionality and purposefulness that validates space and time, that the basic matrix of creation is good, that it is not some bad dream from which we must awaken. We may have ideas about it that are distorted and just plain wrong, but that does not mean that it is in itself not good. The earth is supremely important, and its destiny is human destiny.

So let's look at the implications of the idea of creation from nothing. First the idea that God is radically different from his creation, and transcends it completely.  How to imagine such a thing?  As suggested above, the first problem is that before creation there is no nothing to create out of--God is everywhere filling everything.  I think that the most useful idea for understanding creation, even if it's just a metaphor, is the Jewish Kabbalistic idea of the tsim-tsum, which is that God created an empty space within himself, that he hollowed himself out or pulled himself back to create an emptiness. 

In order for God to create out of nothing, first he had to create the Nothing, and so this is the first thing that he creates, the Nothing,  And this nothing is nothing precisely because it is Not God, and yet it is surrounded by, enveloped by God. 

So in the beginning, there is the primal polarity-- fullness/emptiness, or God/not-God.  But emptiness is a relative term, and while it would be our tendency to think of emptiness as we think of outer space with nothing in it, it's better to think of it essentially as not-God and the biblical image for this is the Deep--the primordial waters or Chaos.  This is the Not-God that filled the space that in the tsim-tsum God created within himself. And it is a No-Thing, I think it's a mistake to think about it as inert mass, like some primordial clay. 

I think of it rather as a person, a cosmic spiritual being created in the image and likeness of the God who made her.  She is the first born of all creation that differs in its essence from its creator as created differs from un-created. The Deep is the Divine Feminine, as much a personal being as the spirit which hovers over it in the image given to us in Genesis. She is a cosmic spiritual being who is the primal matrix, the fecund mother/matter out of which all creatures are born and have their being. The story of evolution is the story of the Primordial Chaos, the Divine Feminine, organizing, complexifying, differentiating.   

Pantheists' experience of cosmic oneness with God is in my view a case of mistaken identity.  They experience oneness with the Mother, not the Father. And yet the uncreated Father God reveals himself and his intentions through the Mother in whom and through whom creation came into being. The uncreated Godhead, as active principle, as Yang, works in partnership with the created Cosmic Mother, the Yin principle, who works freely in response to the will of the active Godhead who images or reflects himself in the created reality that is Not God, but with whom he is in intimate communion. This is an idea that leads to the retrieval of the Catholic idea of Mary as the mediatrix of all graces.

Now I realize this probably seems pretty far fetched, but it resonates with the bits and pieces of Marian doctrine Catholics have always held. I'm just putting this out as a kind of thought experiment that, for me at least, pulls together a lot of ideas about Mary that never made much sense. Mary, for Catholics, has always been more than this sweet unassuming Jewish girl who did the right thing. She was always more than that, and that made the Protestants very uncomfortable--they called it Mariolatry. But it's not Mariolatry if we understand Mary as first among created beings. Is it idolatrous to believe in angels and their hierarchies? Well, Mary is Queen of All Angels, who incarnated as Jesus incarnated, who was fully human as Jesus was fully human, but a created being, not uncreated as Jesus was.  Isn't this consistent with the idea and explains the doctrine of Mary's having been herself born without original sin? She pre-existed Adam and Eve.

Mary is not God--she is a created being--but she was an essential partner with God in the creation of the cosmos. She is the apotheosis of the created divine human--and that's what the doctrine of her Assumption into heaven points to. She, born without original sin, because a primal partner with the Father in the creation of creation, is the instrument through whom the Godhead is incarnated in the world. But she is not "just" an angelic being; she too was truly human, and as such a proleptic image of what we shall all become when we become inwardly transformed into the image and likeness of the Godhead, an image and likeness that was never shattered in her as it was in the sons of man after the fall. Her body, after the Christ's resurrection, became itself a resurrection body, and that's what makes her apparitions at Fatima, Lourdes, Medjugorje, and so many other places, similar to the post resurrection appearances of Christ to the Apostles before Pentecost. For me there in no doubt whatsoever that those Marian apparitions were authentic. That doesn't make any sense to the modern imagination, but it can and will make sense in a kind of postmodern imagination that is now developing.

These are big, big issues, and they are hard to address with the thoroughness that  a book length treatment of them could give. I can refer you to the work of some of the Russian Sophiologists like Soloviev, Bulgakov, Tomberg as sources for these ideas, but my point here is not to argue for their truth, but rather to illustrate what I mean  by mythopoetic retrieval and second naivete. Others I'm sure can do it at a level that is far more satisfying that what I've attempted here. This is the kind of thing we will be seeing, not from theologians and in official church pronouncements, but in movies, fiction, maybe even TV.  ("Lost", I would argue is an exercise in retrieval and fusion in this sense. Someone should do a riff along these on the significance of Mr. Eko's dope-filled Mary statues.) It will develop in the popular imagination, and after a while we will all take for granted ideas that seem impossible now. In the  postmodern imagination, anything goes.

I also want to make the point that the telos or goal of Christian practice is not one of melting into the cosmic pleroma, but of a call to differentiation and freedom--and to love.  But there is progressive love, the love of the future, and regressive love, the love of the past. And once this idea is grasped, so many other things fall into place, at least they do for me.

When I have time in the next week, I'll try to push this further, and eventually I want to work my way round to Wink's Myth of Redemptive Violence.  As he points out, the Christian myth is its counter-myth. But his explanation of the Christian myth for me comes up short. In the Christian myth, it's not Marduk going to war with Tiamat, but the uncreated Divine Father working in a loving partnership with the created Divine Mother:

The LORD possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old.
I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was.
When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water.
Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth:
While as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world.
When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth:
When he established the clouds above: when he strengthened the fountains of the deep:
When he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of the earth:
Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him;
Rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth; and my delights were with the sons of men.  (Proverbs 8:22)

See also Cosmogenesis II

Lost This Week

I've been told by several people that the Purgatorio hypothesis that I proposed last week had been quashed by the writers and producers long ago. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe not. The producers can't confirm that all the survivors are really dead because it would be the same as letting it be known before the movie's release that Bruce Willis was dead in "Sixth Sense."  It's ok for people like me to speculate; but all speculation ends as soon as they confirm one theory or another. They have an interest in keeping us guessing.

But this week's episode reinforced my idea about the Others being agents of a higher justice while at the same time being made to appear malevolent.  In the story Michael, gun in hand, goes off to find Walt. Jack sets off to bring him back because he's convinced that if he doesn't, that they'll never see him again. Locke asks, rightly, what right Jack has to prevent Michael from doing what he wants to do?  Why does Jack always think he knows better? Anyway, the search for Michael leads to a campfire confrontation between Jack and Zeke(?), the "pirate" who kidnapped Walt and shot Sawyer on the raft, and who now presents himself as the spokesperson for the Others .

In this confrontatation we get some important information about the Others: they control the island; they seem to know everything about the survivors, they  control whether the survivors live or die on the island, they have Walt who is doing fine, and in Zeke's opinion is a special boy, and Michael will fail to find the Others (and Walt). 

This is all information that can be taken either positively or negatively.  My bias leads me to see Zeke, despite his rough manners, as fundamentally good, and it's clear that Jack's bias leads him to see Zeke and the Others as evil. In the closing scene Jack speaks to Ana Lucia--the other violence-prone control freak in the group--about training an army. "Evil," in Jack's mental universe, must be defeated by force of arms.

Jack is a case study in the kind of  mentality which is inclined to become a neoconservative. He's the kind of person who fights desperately to be in control lest someone else be. To trust others or to work multilaterally is simply not in the realm of possibility for him. He's got to be giving the orders, and it absolutely galls him that the Others are in control, and he's going to do everything in his power to change that--or die trying. 

Locke understands his foolishness, and my guess is that a bigtime conflict between a Locke party and a Jack party will develop that will split the island. It's a split that in large part will reflect our current political situation in the U.S. today. The doves who side with with Locke will be branded as soft and cowardly, and the doves will see the hawks as powermad nutcases.

Whose side are you on?  I'm sure lots of viewers feel a strong link to the kind of strength and leadership that Jack and Ana Lucia represent. They are in many ways attractive, complex, sympathetic characters. And it's a tough world, and you don't surivive unless tough leaders emerge to keep you safe.  To me they're fools. It will be interesting to see which side Eko chooses.

This brings to mind a theme I want to address that is very nicely developed in Walter Wink's book, The Powers That Be, in which he talks about the Myth of Redemptive Violence.  Thanks to  MC for putting me onto it.  But more on that later.

 

Is Alito a Wingnut?

Alito's appointment worries me because of the way his appointment fits into the larger trajectory of the right wing agenda. I don't know that he's a wingnut, but I'm satisfied from what I've read and heard that he is an ideological power conservative who follows the law when it is clear, but when there is any ambiguity or wiggle room, he leans toward the interests of state and corporate power. The primary purpose of a supreme court justice is to resolve ambiguities in the law. Is there any real doubt about which way he will lean?  He could surprise us, but you don't confirm someone on the basis of his possibly doing something we don't expect of him.

The consolidation of state and corporate power is the trend in our national life that threatens us most. I don't think there's a conspiracy required to accomplish this; it's the inevitable result of powerful people building strategic alliances with one another to promote their interests. Our problem now is that there is no countervailing power to inhibit or restrain the powerful from becoming more powerful. The Abramoff comedy is just the gaudy excess of a system that is so bent toward serving the needs of the already rich and powerful that you have to wonder if there is any hope of redeeming it.

Whatever role Alito may have played in developing doctrine around the unitary executive, he's clearly inclined toward promoting a broad definition of executive powers. His inclinations are therefore precisely the kind of thing that I see as problematic in our national life. He may not himself be an "authoritarian personality", but we have good reason to believe that he's the kind of jurist who will enable the emergence of others who are. 

It should be clear that whatever their rhetoric, the  GOP is not being driven by "small-government," principled conservatives. Power is the only principle that motivates the people driving policy in this administration. Most everything this administration does is motivated by power considerations--increasing it and consolidating it.

As I wrote in this blog, I would have voted for Roberts' confirmation. I would have done so uneasily for many of the reasons elaborated above. But it also comes down to my thinking more highly of Roberts than I did of Rehnquist. I saw Roberts' appointment as an upgrade for that particular seat. (Time will tell--Roberts' siding with the minority dissents of Scalia and Thomas in the Oregon v. Justice Dept. case about assisted suicide is not a good sign, and was a surprise.  Rehnquist would have voted with the majority.  It's federal power vs. local power, and Roberts sided with the Feds. This kind of thing should be dealt with, pro or con, on the local level.)

So taken in isolation, you could make the case that Alito, like Roberts, is qualified for the court. But this court, even with the moderate S.D. O'Connor on it, is already very right leaning. Its throwing the election to Bush in 2000 is a decision I believe will  be perceived by historians as grossly partisan and a gross miscarriage of justice that had (is having) disastrous consequences. 

And so because Alito's confirmation will throw the court even further to the right for years to come at a precarious time in our national history, I feel no ambivalence in hoping that his nomination will be vigorously opposed by the Democrats. This is not some  glowing endorsement of the Democrats and their program. I just don't want things to become more unbalanced than they are already.

The Price of Stepping Up

The other day I criticized the Democrats for their ineffectiveness and bloviating during the Alito confirmation hearings. I said that the hardliner conservatives are correct in stereotyping liberal Democrats as weak. They prove themselves right every day when the Democrats roll over for them. And the few that actually stand up they can safely isolate and ridicule because they know the Dems will run away from them as soon as things get too hot. 

Now we have the case of Al Gore. I heard parts of his speech last night about the warrantless wiretaps on C-Span, and it's remarkable really how far he's come in the last year or so. I'm sure after the election in 2000, he thought he was doing the noble, magnanimous thing in conceding to Bush, but he should have fought harder to get things straight in Florida, and his not fighting reinforced my misgivings about him at the time. But he's not the same guy now, and I like him a lot better for reasons that, like Dean, now make him unelectable.

We forget, too, that Gore was "swiftboated" before he or most of the rest of us knew the depths to which the GOP was willing to go to negatively brand their opponents. Jack Murtha is now getting his dose of it.  Robert Parry points out that Gore actually was one of the first to challenge the idea of the "Bush Doctrine" and reminds us how he was savaged in 2002 after his speech about it:

This domestic “politics of preemption” has a covert side, including surveillance of U.S. anti-war groups, but the largest part is out in the open, using right-wing media and sympathetic columnists to denounce, ridicule and drown out critics.

A test run of this propaganda operation occurred in early fall 2002 when Bush was starting a war fever among the American people and former Vice President Al Gore delivered a tough-minded critique of the “Bush Doctrine.”

“I am deeply concerned that the course of action that we are presently embarking upon with respect to Iraq has the potential to seriously damage our ability to win the war against terrorism and to weaken our ability to lead the world in this new century,” Gore said in a speech on Sept. 23, 2002.

“To put first things first, I believe that we ought to be focusing our efforts first and foremost against those who attacked us on Sept. 11,” Gore said. “Great nations persevere and then prevail. They do not jump from one unfinished task to another. We should remain focused on the war against terrorism.”

Now – with more than 2,200 Americans soldiers dead in Iraq along with tens of thousands of Iraqis – Gore’s comments sound prescient. In early fall 2002, however, Gore’s speech received scant media attention, except for denunciations from pro-Bush commentators.

Some epithets were hurled by Bush partisans. Republican National Committee spokesman Jim Dyke called Gore a “political hack.” [Washington Post, Sept. 24, 2002]

Other slurs came from conservative opinion-makers on editorial pages, on talk radio and on television chat shows.

“Gore’s speech was one no decent politician could have delivered,” wrote Washington Post columnist Michael Kelly. “It was dishonest, cheap, low. It was hollow. It was bereft of policy, of solutions, of constructive ideas, very nearly of facts – bereft of anything other than taunts and jibes and embarrassingly obvious lies. It was breathtakingly hypocritical, a naked political assault delivered in tones of moral condescension from a man pretending to be superior to mere politics. It was wretched. It was vile. It was contemptible.” [Washington Post, Sept. 25, 2002]

“A pudding with no theme but much poison,” declared another Post columnist, Charles Krauthammer. “It was a disgrace – a series of cheap shots strung together without logic or coherence.” [Washington Post, Sept. 27, 2002]

At Salon.com, Andrew Sullivan entitled his piece about Gore’s speech “The Opportunist” and characterized Gore as “bitter.”

While other writers followed Sullivan in depicting Gore’s motivation as “opportunism,” columnist William Bennett took an opposite tack, saying Gore had committed political “self-immolation” and had banished himself “from the mainstream of public opinion.”

“Now we have reason to be grateful once again that Al Gore is not the man in the White House, and never will be,” Bennett wrote. [WSJ, Sept. 26, 2002] [For more details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Politics of Preemption.”]

More than three years later, Bush’s “politics of preemption” have advanced along with the complementary theory of the “unitary executive,” a notion espoused by right-wing jurists who argue that the President has virtually unlimited powers in a time of war.

But don't dare to point this out, because you'll be swiftboated, and your typical career pol would rather would rather not have to deal with that.  Be like Joe Lieberman instead; he's a nice housetrained Democrat. Behave yourself, like Joe, and nobody gets hurt.

Dean, Feingold, Murtha, and Gore have been the only prominent Democrats (I suppose the paleo-liberal Kennedy should be thrown in there, but I don't like to think about him) who have tried to provide some leadership in reisting the GOP machine. Problem is nobody's following.

 

Wretched Performance by Dems

I don't know what's worse, the GOP agenda to move the country toward the right or the Democrats supine compliance. The primary effect of the  Democratic senators' questioning  in the Alito confirmation hearings this week was to reinforce the public's stereotype of Democrats as formulaic, pompous jackasses. It was depressing. Bob Parry puts it well when he says the Democrats "looked as prepared to confront Samuel Alito as FEMA chief Michael Brown did in responding to Hurricane Katrina."  He goes on:

The Democrats must have realized that the mainstream media would focus on the most trivial aspects of the hearings – as well as on the windiness of the senators’ long-prefaced questions. The only hope to change those dynamics would have been to present a strong alternative narrative.

That alternative narrative could have been how the Right has spent three decades steadily building its infrastructure and clout to consolidate ideological control around an Imperial Presidency held tightly in Republican hands and endorsed by a restructured Supreme Court.

The Democrats could have built the drama by spotlighting the stakes involved in Alito’s nomination, that the final check and balance in the U.S. political system – the courts – would be locked down by ideologues who have long boasted of their determination to gain one-party dominance in Washington.

By undergoing rhetorical liposuction, the Democrats also might have trimmed down their flabby speechifying and instead posed pointed question after pointed question to Alito, eventually making his refusal to answer questions the central issue of the hearings, not their own bloviating.

Read more here.

In a post I wrote back in November I predicted that the Alito confirmation would be a bellwether of Democratic strength. We would find out whether the weakened position of the GOP president and Congress would provide an opportunity for an organized, concerted effort by Democrats in the Senate to deny Alito this position on the supreme court. Well it looks like we're finding out that as weak as the GOP has become, the Democrats are even weaker. 

It's not over yet.  Maybe we'll be surprised by what happens when the proceedings shift to the full Senate.  We'll see.

The bottom line here is that the American right is correct in its caricaturing of the Democrats--they are weak and ineffective. They are unable to protect the country from danger. The only thing is that the danger is posed by the American right.   

And the right has it all set up so that when a fighter like Howard Dean emerges, he's branded as an over-the-top wacko. The mainstream Democrats, rather than rallying around him or encouraging others to do what he does more effectively, distance themselves from him. 

I have my problems with Dean, but at least the guy is standing up. It would be better to support him than to do nothing. The other Dems are afraid they won't be taken seriously. And yet here we are taking seriously ideas like the unitary executive that should have been laughed out of the public discussion years ago.   

These formal proceedings in the Senate are rather like warfare in the 18th Century. The French Army lines up in battle formation to shoot at the English army, which is all neatly lined up nearby to take the French bullets. And then the English take their turn to shoot back at the French who politely stand by to take their share of the bullets.

I know it's more complicated than that, but the point is that when you're outnumbered, you can't win. So it seems pointless to just stand there and take it. The Democrats don't seem to have figured out that they need to develop alternative strategies. But that would require imagination and courage.

Lost Eko

[Ed. note: For commentary on third-season episode "The Cost of Living" in which Eko is killed by the Smoke Monster go here.  For commentary about other lost episode browse here.  The following commentary is about The 23rd Psalm, the second-season episode in which we first learn about Eko's story. From the perspective of the series finale, I think I was wrong in some of the particulars (the survivors are not dead), but correct regarding the general thrust of what the writers were trying to do. For my thoughts on the series finale, see this post.]

This post will make sense only to those of you who have been following the TV series "Lost", which seems to be getting weirder, deeper, and more interesting with each successive episode. I was intrigued by it at first because it struck me as a kind of a stylish, surreal drama along the lines of David Lynch's "Twin Peaks," and it is that, but there's something more going on here that is quite remarkable.

Like "Desperate Housewives" it is a  series I avoided when it started to air, so I've missed a lot of it, and there are story strands that I don't know about. So I may be a little slow on the uptake to catch on to what's going on there in a way some of you are not.  So I'd be interested to hear any theories you may have about what's going on, but this week's episode bowled me over. This is prime-time TV?

Maybe my expectations are too low, but I have to say I was deeply impressed by the story of how Eko's and his brother's lives intertwined, and of its grasp of the complex and mysterious way in which good and evil are intertwined as well. For me it was a poignant illustration of what the Christian mystic Charles Williams called substitution within the web of exchange.  He believed we could and should take on one another's burdens, even their pain and illnesses. Eko first takes on the burden that was given to his little brother; his brother in turn took on the burden that weighed down his brother. It was beautifully told, rich with symbolic allusion, and deeply affecting. 

So who are these writers and what are they up to? Here's my preliminary theory. It's a first stab at trying to connect the dots here, so if you think differently let me know why you think I'm wrong. What cannot be explained by this basic framework?  Here's my hypothesis:

Although they are not aware of it, everybody on the Island is dead; they all died in the plane crash. The viewing audience sees things from the perspective of the "survivors" who recognize they are living in a non-ordinary place even though in most respects it follows the normal rules of the natural world. 

But the weirdness on the Island cannot be explained unless we recognize it as a kind of after-death Purgatorial zone like that inhabited by Bruce Willis in the "Sixth Sense."  It's an antechamber for heaven or hell--the world seems normal in most respects, but this is clearly not the normal world.  In fact it's a place of purification and ultimately of judgment.  The "good" people are presented as those who, from the point of view of those who "survived," have either died in the crash, die later, or like the children, have been taken away by the "Others,"  who are agents of divine justice. They have been judged worthy and have passed on to become themselves the Others. (Although the "survivors" fear the Others, and the viewers are led to believe that they are the bad guys, they are not.  They just appear to be malevolent from the limited point of view of the survivors.)

Those who have 'survived' are people with a lot of bad karma, so to speak. As the series progresses, we learn that these ordinary, often very nice people with whom we've developed a bond are murderers, torturers, drug lords, drug addicts, and are carrying a lot of nasty baggage of one sort or another.  What struck me in this week's episode, entitled "The Twenty-Third Psalm, was that the Island is where they are being given the opportunity to put themselves right. Each is being tested, and if he passes, he "dies" or gets taken away, to the dismay of the survivors who fear death and think about it as tragic. 

The stories we are watching are mostly stories of redemption. As Locke suspects, there's nothing to fear from the Others. At the end of the first season, he seemed to want very much to be taken away. But apparently he's not ready; he more than any one is caught up in the authority experiment which requires the typing in of the numbers every two hours or whatever. He thinks he's saving the world. I think he's being conned. We'll see how that curious strand plays out. 

But if redemption is a possibility, so, it would seem, is damnation.  That's what the "monster," the smokey, snakelike thing that shows up from time to time represents.  It too is an agent of divine justice, and that's exactly what Eko confronted when he came face to face with it in this week's episode. It was a moment of judgment, and he was judged not ready yet to be taken away, which is a good thing, because the monster does not take you where the Others take you. 

Michael's son, Walt, was taken by the Others. We are led to believe that he is with bad guys, but he's not; he's ok.  Michael's search for his son is the path of his redemption--his commitment to that task is his test. Walt is now one of the Others. His appearance to Shannon was a sign that it was time for her to go, and now too. She was killed accidentally while frantically trying to find him. It's too bad for Sayyid, but she was ready, and he is not.

Michael will eventually find Walt when he's judged ready. That's when he will leave the show, not when Walt comes back to the show. If we see Walt again it will be as Shannon saw him just before she died, or in the messages Michael sees on the computer monitor in the bunker.  That monitor is an interface between the world of the Others and the world of the Lost. The best thing that can happen to those who are still Lost is for them to be found, and it's the Others who do the finding. 

I have to wonder--who are these people writing this series?  Anybody know?

The Unitary Executive

This is a phrase that's making its way now into the public consciousness, and it puts a tag on something that we've been witnessing for the last four or five years, which is our drift toward authoritarianism.  The "unitary executive" is code on the authoritarian right for the legal argument justifying the president's doing pretty much as he pleases without any legislative or judicial oversight. 

Alito said in his testimony this week that the president is not above the law, but if he believes it's constitutional for the president to ignore laws enacted by congress, then he's not above the law; he's within his constitutional rights as he believes the constitution defines executive powers.  In other words, the supreme law of the land embodied in the constitution exempts the president from following the law as it might be legislated.  Jurists like Alito think that the constitution justifies this interpretation of executive powers, and that's pretty scary.  See here and here for a good explanation of the "unitary executive" argument, especially with regard to the importance of "signing statements," most recently used by Bush to exempt himself from the restrictions of the McCain Amendment banning torture.

Twenty years ago the idea of the "unitary executive" would have been dismissed by most thoughtful Americans as a crank theory by some wingnut from the Federalist Society.  Oh, guess what? That's where Alito first proposed the signing-statement strategy in 1986.  Now we have Alito, one of the chief proponents of the unitary executive argument, taking a spot on the Supreme Court.  That should be chilling, but for most Americans it's a threat too abstract to worry about, so they don't.

Even if the American electorate votes this dangerous GOP power block out of their various offices in the next couple of elections, it will be back.  Americans' memories are short, and the militarism and authoritarianism that are at the heart of the right's agenda resonate positively with an anxious electorate in troubled times.  Its fears, as we've seen since 9/11, are discouragingly easy to manipulate. We have a court now that is building a legal infrastructure that will facilitate a further drift to the right, and any president inclined toward authoritarianism will find it perfectly legal to do his authoritarian thing.

Putting Alito on the supreme court is an important piece in the authoritarian right's  long-term strategy.  As I've said time and again, these Bush supreme court nominations are not about abortion.  Abortion is a smokescreen. The primary agenda is power consolidation.

What we're seeing unfold in the Beltway with regard to Abramoff and Delay is facetious.  They're both larger-than-life comic-book villains.  Abramoff, with his black hat even dresses for the role. But what we're witnessing with Alito is harder to grasp because of its abstractness and banality.  It doesn't fit into the collective perceptual frame that recognizes evil.  It puts me in mind of Hannah Arendt's famous phrase, "the banality of evil."  I don't think Sam Alito is an evil man any more than the rest of us are.  He strikes me rather as a little man who wants to play with the big boys. 

I'm sure he's very smart and knowledgeable, but it's not what's in a man's brain that I care most about, but what are the inclinations of his soul.  I don't have a problem with principled, small government conservatives.  But that's not the same thing as being a man of the authoritarian right.  The authoritarian right wants a strong, powerful central government.  It wants unlimited police powers.  It is obsessed with security. It favors the strong against the weak.  There has been so much evidence that Alito's soul is inclined in this direction. 

But in the final analysis this nomination is not about what Sam Alito thinks; it's about what the big boys think, and believe me, they're up to no good.  People who are inclined toward authoritarianism are little people who follow orders who do so in the hope someday to be a big boy who can  give orders.  The Bush government is full of little people, their incompetence often overlooked, and the whole drift of our national life is in the direction of letting this kind of person take over and run our governmental institutions into the ground.  Often their competence is less important than their willingess to do as they're told.  With Alito, competence is not the issue, but he gives me the impression of being the good soldier.

This nomination is not about Alito as an individual or about his qualifications for the court; it's about how his nomination is a piece of a much larger picture that we have trouble bringing into focus.  And we're in big trouble if we don't soon find a way to bring it into focus.  So many terrible things have happened since the Bush administration took office, but the seating of this single, banal little man on the supreme court might turn out to be the most terrible.

Late Update: Robert Gordon at TPM Cafe here and here makes the case against Alito that I would make if I were as knowledgeable as he.  Closing grafs:

Alito tends to looks reasonable and moderate because of his style. But his style conceals a strategy. In his Justice Department days, Alito was up front about this. He often advised his superiors not to seek direct overruling of the cases they disliked, such as Roe v. Wade, but to pursue an incremental strategy -- to whittle away, case by case, at the surviving legal legacies of the liberal period. In the current political stalemate, where neither side can muster the votes to significantly amend legislation, whoever controls executive agencies and the courts can accomplish repeal of liberal policies, even those that command widespread public support, by stealth. At present the stakes in this battle are about as high as they can be, because the courts are assigned an essential role in preserving the Constitutional balance of power and the rule of law, against an executive that claims for itself dictatorial discretion. In particular, if the courts will not protect the liberties of unpopular subjects, such as those accused of aiding terrorists, no one will. 

John Roberts played for Democratic votes in the Senate simply by asserting his independence from factions and patrons and declaring, "I am not an ideologue". This seemed to work in his case, and now only time will tell if it is true. Clarence Thomas told the Senate the same thing, that he had an open mind and no agenda. In his case it turned out not to be true. In Alito's case, unfortunately, almost nothing indicates that he has the independence to deviate from the causes that impelled him into law and a lifetime of federal service as a soldier in the conservative movement. If he is unwilling firmly and forthrightly to declare his independence from the ideologies and executive authorities he has served his entire career, the Democrats should try to keep him off the Court by filibuster.

Amen.

 

Some Post-Secularist Thoughts

I've believed for some time that the religious right is fighting an enemy in secularism that is now a paper tiger. The culture war between the religious right and the secular left has more to do with the past than the future--it was a modern battle, and we are no longer moderns. It seems to be a fight that people who undertake it enjoy because it makes them feel as though they stand for something, but it's as pointless as standing for monarchy. You can make all the eloquent arguments you want about this position or that, but it's all hot air unless it has some grounding in the spirit of the times.

We are entering an era in which anything goes--we're already in it. It's an era in which there will be no consensus about anything, and people will believe pretty much whatever they want, whatever suits them. The human mind is ingenious and endlessly inventive.  It can come up with the cleverest ways to justify the most absurd ideas. All any argument needs is a splinter of truth, and with it an elaborate fortress of delusion can be built.

And yet there is something in all of us that, despite our proclivity toward delusion, knows the real thing when we find it.  And we are more likely than not to find the real thing in those elements in our culture that, even if a little tattered and worse for wear, have withstood the test of time. 

That's where we find the ballast that keeps things on an even keel, and one such invaluable source of  ballast is the world's great religious traditions, east and west. It doesn't matter what the officials of these traditions say or how they try to control things, because they cannot control the uncontrollable. Everything we need is available to us or is implied in these traditions; the question only remains whether we have the will to undertake the quest to find there what will do us any good. 

The definition of authority is changing. Too great a proportion of the world's population is now and will continue to be too well informed, to have too easy access to too much information. People will not consent be told what to believe, but they will hearken to those who have found a way to live deeply, authentically from that which has been retrieved from that which sleeps in the tradition. The new authorities will be those who live something that demonstrates that a robust alternative exists that is plausible to the mind, resonant with conscience, and refreshing to the soul. 

There will always be the people who want things in black and white, and while they can cause a lot of trouble, they are not the future. Even if their influence is strong for awhile, it will be short-lived. They are not the ones who are searching out a way forward.  The future lies with others who can no longer be satisfied by the rationalist/materialist straitjacket of the cultural left or the dead, abstract fundamentalism/dogmatism of the cultural right. They will demand something real, something that lives, that's intellectually honest and yet warm and fertile. 

The way forward requires that we look back with a second naivete. This avoids the problems associated with Lot's Wife Syndrome, because it is not motivated by a desire to retreat.  Rather it is motivated, as was our father Abraham, by a longing to move forward into an unknowable future yet trusting in a promise whose fulfillment lies in the far distant future. We must travel lightly, but not without bringing along essential gifts that were bequeathed to us from the ancestors.   

We cannot live as the ancestors lived, but the rationalist prejudices of the moderns caused much that our premodern ancestors valued to be discredited and lost.  Our job now is to retrieve the lost gifts, and to adapt it to our life now lived in circumstances unimaginable to the premoderns.  And the place to start is in a reverent recovery of much of that which modernity has rejected in the great religious traditions, all of which have premodern origins. 

We no longer can maintain a "first naivete", which is the state of the believer before critical consciousness.  We must search out what has been forgotten or lost with a second naivete, which is the attitude toward  the suprarational that is childlike in its receptivity, but, because we must travel lightly, shrewd in its judgments about what is necessary and what superfluous. 

Secularism and the materialism that is associated with it is on its last legs, but they will continue to have their partisans. Secularism/materialism was for a short time the spirit of the age, and it excited those who were among the age's most influential thinkers from the French philosophes through Marx, Darwin, Freud, and to their followers now on the cultural left. I don't begrudge them their day in the sun; I learned much from them. But their day is done.

[12/16/23: An expanded version of this post can be found here, "A Post Secular Age."]

meaningoflifetv

If you have some time  for catching up with some of the best thinking on all the big questions, check out this new site with video interviews by put together by Slate's Robert Wright.  Very interesting overview.  More from me on it later. 

Believing II

Earlier this week I tried to make the case that "believing" is what we all do when we give value, meaning, and purpose to our experience and to our work in the world.  Believing is fundamentally an irrational act.  It draws upon resources that transcend what the brain/sense system can give us with certainty. The scope of what the brain/sense system can give us with certainty is very, very limited. 

And if we were to live our lives only within the scope of what is certain on that level, our lives would be very limited and poor.  They would revert to lives lived on a purely instinctual level as animals live them, doing their bull and cow thing.  There are indeed plenty of people who "believe" that human beings are talking animals, and that they are simply more clever than those animals which don't  talk.  For such people any belief system that imputes a spiritual dimension to the human being is delusional, and such beliefs lead to alienation and repression.  That's a pretty common attitude among the educated during the twentieth century.

But this view of the human being is aberrational.  99% of the human beings who ever lived would take for granted that they are spiritual beings. I would argue that the instinctualism/materialism characteristic of a certain kind of person who has became rather common during the modern period is the result of an atrophying of the soul that directly correlates with the hypertophying of the eye that came with widespread literacy after Gutenberg.  This is a McLuhanite idea, and I go into it in some detail about it in a piece I have previously posted entitled  "The Hypertrophied Eye." (Go to fifth paragraph.)

The result is that the data available to such atrophied souls is much more limited. Moderns are to the spiritual what the deaf are to the world of sound and music.  And  it is understandable that they should think that people who have experiences that they don't have are delusional.  But it's not just a problem of deafness, but one of knowing how to listen.  That's the challenge:  The song is playing but we're not paying attention enough to hear it.

The challenge is to make some sense of the world as we experience it, and that starts with taking the world seriously as it is given to us and listening for the song that will help us understand what it means and what we are to do about it.  It means taking seriously the accounts given of broader ranges of experience this song, and that includes the experience of the East and that of primitive, shamanic cultures.  That experience provides important data that we have to take seriously if we are to break out of the materialist straitjacket in which we now find ourselves. 

Taking 'experience' seriously is the starting point for any such project. Otherwise  discussion about religion is for the most part pointless palaver. And spiritual experience is rather more common than we suppose; it's not necessarily something extraordinary (although it can be).  It's more a question of recognizing it for what it is, and you have to have the right perceptual frame to do so, and that requires having a belief system that provides the mindframe to recognize what is otherwise unremarkable. And you have to have a belief system which enables the habits of mind to work with these experiences to make them fruitful. 

People have experiences all the time which are wasted on them, and these experiences are like the seed in the gospel parable that falls on barren ground that sprouts and shrivels.  It's not necessarily the individual's fault, because there is no nurturing context for such individuals to help them understand what's going on and to work with it to become fruitful.  That's the spiritual dilemma of our time:  We're having the experience, but missing the meaning.  We have no interpretive framework that is really all that helpful in that regard. The old interpretive frames are not without value, and we have much to learn from them, but they are poorly adapted to our circumstances as postmoderns.

The most important things we know are not facts that have been established with scientific rigor, but rather deeper truths that we recognize with the faculties of the soul that open us up to dimensions that transcend the world of sense.  This is not brain knowledge; it's soul knowledge.  We hearken to such truths, and surely we have to learn the rules of true hearkening, just as we have to learn the rules of true love.  Actually the rules are quite similar because we only truly know what we truly love.

Bush's Walk on the Dark Side

As you push the limits, wherever they may be, to create a situation in which all control rests in your hands, the odds are that you will create an uncontrollable situation as well. From torture to spying, such acts, however contained they may initially appear to be, involve a deep plunge into a dark and perverse pool of human emotions. Torture in particular, but also unlimited forms of surveillance and any other acts which invest individuals secretly with something like the powers of gods, invariably lead to humanity's darkest side. The permission to commit such acts, once released into the world, mutates and spreads like wildfire from top to bottom in any command structure and across all boundaries. You may start out with a relatively small program of secret imprisonment, torture, spying or whatever, meant to achieve limited goals while establishing certain prerogatives of power, but in no case is the situation likely to remain that way for long. This was, perhaps, the true genius of the American system as imagined by its founders -- the understanding that any form of state power left unchecked in the hands of a single person or group of people was likely to degenerate into despotism (or worse), whatever the initial desires of the individuals involved.  --Tom Englehardt

There is no general principle to justify torture; it should always be a morally repugnant taboo, an illegal act with severe penalties.  Well then, what about the hypothetical situation in which you've captured the terrorist who knows the location of the nuclear bomb that is going to blow New York City off the face of the map?  What if torturing the information out of this man gives the only possible hope of finding and defusing the bomb?  Isn't torture justified then? 

If I had the authority in such a situation, I could see ordering whatever it takes to get the information from the man, even if it required ordering him to be tortured.  But after ordering such a thing,  I would surrender myself to be arrested and tried, and leave it to the mercy of a court to exonerate me or condemn me based on the particularities of this situation. 

I broke the taboo, and the seriousness of my breaking it should not be minimized.  I would be guilty and should be prosecuted. At the same time it would be reasonable to expect leniency because of the special circumstances.  But such situations are extraordinary and rare, and no general principles can be drawn from them.

The same would be true of ordering a wiretap without a warrant, which should also be perceived as a profoundly serious taboo in a free society.  Perhaps there are extraordinary situations in which it might take too much time to get the warrant, and a decision had to be made to authorize a wiretap without it.  The same procedure should pertain.  Whoever authorizes the warrantless wiretap should  submit himself to a court to determine if such a breach were justified.  This kind of thing should never be allowed to go unchecked, and going unchecked is exactly what this administration is demanding.

Even if you are naive enough to believe that the people in this administration are people of good will who have the best interests of the American people in mind, they are laying the groundwork for future governments to exercise abuses of power that most Americans refuse to believe could ever happen to them.  It could, and it will if it's not nipped in the bud.

Do you see the point?  If someone breaks the taboo, he is guilty until proven justified.  That's the way we have to think about torture and other repugnant acts of state-mandated violence. The extraordinary case does not justify an argument that if it's ok in one situation, there is a general category of situations in which torture is morally or legally acceptable. This is what the Cheney/Bush torture advocates are trying to argue. Torture is a morally abominable act even when its victims are morally abominable human beings.  The horror and ugliness of the act should never be minimized, and the full weight of public opinion should always be against its use.  Because once you make the argument that it is justifiable in some situations, then the limits which at first might seem reasonable are easily pushed, and we find ourselves walking on the dark side.

The Cheney/Bush legacy of torture in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib is repugnant, and there is no moral justification for it.  This administration is walking on the dark side, and all its self-justifying casuistry about torture and surveillance in the name of national security cannot cover up how fundamentally disgusting it is, how deeply complicit in the corruptions of power it has become.  These people are odious and their actions and their justifications for them must be repudiated.  It's not yet too late, but  soon it could be.

Believing I

We take for granted the solidity of world around us, and yet we also understand, even if only abstractly, that the way we experience it is profoundly shaped by our acculturation.  The world we see is a social construction, and while this doesn’t mean that the world is arbitrary, it does mean that it is a lot more malleable than we ordinarily suppose. When the construction changes, as it did when the medieval construction broke down to make way for the modern, our experience changes. This is not a process that moves quickly. It happens slowly from generation to generation. 

We're now living at a time when the modern construction has broken down, and we live with it out of habit rather than thriving with it.  And so now we have a special opportunity and responsibility to frame something new.  But it can't simply be something that is made up out of one's fantasy.  It has to make sense.  It has to have plausibility.  It has to have  "cultural legitimacy."

One of the main consequences of the shift from matter to mind consequent to the fall of the modern rationalist/materialist narrative is that “believing” no longer has the pejorative connotations it once had. It’s possible now to entertain metaphysical questions in a way that it was not even thirty years ago. 

Since Kant metaphysics has been suspect; it was perceived by the mainstream of western thought to be about believing something rather than really knowing it, and “believing” until recently was considered a weakness of mind.  And for lots of people whose habits of mind are still modern, it still is.  But one of the pillars of the postmodern critique of modern rationality has been that most of what we think we know is really only what we believe.  Our truths—even scientific facts like our model for the atom—are just provisional metaphors that have meaning only insofar as they fit into a larger metanarrative which we have assimilated unconsciously or which we have chosen in a kind of leap of faith. 

We might take the leap of faith into communism, feminism, positivism, or any number of other isms if we think it provides the most compelling narrative to give our life meaning and purpose, or to provide a coherent frame to organize our experience and our longings.  But just as modern physics has taught us that there is no there there at the heart of the atom, there is no objective, rational grounding for accepting any particular meaning narrative. 

Nihilism and Materialism are as much belief systems as trinitarian monotheism. Different people have different criteria that confer legitimacy on their chosen or acculturated belief systems, but ultimately they are subjective criteria that one "believes" are more valid than others, and so everything depends on the quality of the soul which makes the subjective judgment about legitimacy. What is obvious or self-evident to the Amerindian shaman is quite different from what is obvious to the M.D. treating your kidney stones.  I would argue that both see things that are true that the other does not see, and what they see or don't see is determined by what they believe.

Most people accept unthinkingly the meaning frameworks that are implicit in the social world to which they belong, even when the values of one contradict the values of another.  I'm sure there were at least a few executives at Enron who accepted the implicit or explicit Social Darwinian corporate narrative that directed policy there and then went home to their families where a fundamentalist Christian narrative was dominant. One set of beliefs for work; another set for home and family.

Others of a more thoughtful temperament might carefully examine the undergirding assumptions of the narratives that organize their various worlds and choose to live a life without contradiction by adapting one side of the contradiction so it can work more in tune with the other.  Or by just rejecting one or the other.  But in doing so he's making a choice that involves a leap of faith of one kind or another.  There are no purely rational choices, only choices for narratives that are more or less plausible.

The postmodern thinkers recognize this, and while I don't buy into the nihilism that many of them think is the ineluctable consequence of their critique, I find what they are saying interesting nevertheless because their mood of "deconstruction" reflects accurately the spirit of our decomposing age. I have the same relation with Marxism.  I find much value in its critique of capital, but I reject the materialistic metaphysics.  It's one thing to diagnose the illness; it's another to prescribe a healthful remedy.

So the question for me is whether a saying No as the Marxists and postmodernists say is possible to join with a Yes which the Christians have said.  And it starts with the acknowledgment of the opportunity now being afforded to us because we are at a new stage of cultural development in which believing has become rehabilitated—it’s at the heart of the Romantic impulse as it continues to operate in the popular culture.  ‘Believing’ is one of the best things you can do. “You gotta believe” is a commonplace in our sports and pop psychological worlds. We are constantly admonished to believe in ourselves and to believe in one another. And the assumption that lies beneath these admonitions is that our believing it’s so will make it so if we have enough faith. Believing is what gives life meaning and purpose. It doesn't matter really what you believe, just so long as you do it one way or the other.

Now I don’t want to equate this popular idea of believing with the deeper and more mysterious phenomenon we recognize as religious faith, but it bears a family relationship to it. The practical benefits of belief have a long heritage from St. Augustine’s De utilitate credendi, to Pascal’s “wager” to the pragmatism of William James, to the prescriptions of our current health care professionals who have noticed that people who have religious practices live happier, healthier lives. 

This is just another way of saying that the metanarrative precedes the ethical.  What we believe shapes how we live, whether our beliefs are superficial or profound.  The narrative we choose opens up certain possibilities and closes off others; it shapes what we can see and what we are blind to.  But most important, the narrative we choose points to and defines that which we most deeply long for. Every narrative is shaped in one way or another by hope. Even nihilism. If you live with a materialistic narrative, your longing focuses on materialistic goals; if a spiritual narrative, spiritual goals.

And so what we believe is pretty much all we have when it comes to meaning, and we see now a huge marketplace of conflicting belief possibilities. In politics there is a blue state cosmopolitan narrative, and in red states a traditionalist narrative that is quite different, and both define the divide which is at the heart of a culture war that has been going on at least since the Scopes trial in the twenties.  The structure of these two narratives is something that I've been trying to understand over the last couple  of years.  Neither works for me, but there is far more potential, because more flexibility, in the cosmopolitan  group than in the traditionalist group.  Flexibility and adaptability  are essential values in a culture undergoing the shift we are now suffering.

So I hope  I can count on the flexibility and adaptability of my readers as I try to make my case for the plausibility of my beliefs.  And I hope I've made the  case to day for the idea that there are worse things that you can do than to believe something.  The bottom line is whether your beliefs lead you to  live a fruitful life or one that is sterile and puerile.

See also Believing II and Mythos and Logos.