My Visit to Mecca

So, i experienced what i reckon to be the quintessential experience of hipster-disorientation.

Two weekends ago I was visiting my brother in Grand Rapids, MI and had the chance to go to Mars Hill on Sunday (Rob Bell's church - the Mecca of cool, new-evangelicalism). It actually was awesome, and that was the disorienting part. There i was, in a room full of 2000 people whose style, opinions and ideas were seemingly very in line with my own, participating in a church service where every element was exactly how i would have done it. The interior design was thrifty and mininalist, the screens with the words for the songs were plain black and white, and the text was set in my favorite font. The theology of the songs was solid, the preaching was enlightening and entertaining both, and we all sat there in the congregation, relaxed, with our (free to us) fair-trade coffee in our hands. For the first time in my life, there was no need to define myself by being different from the group. At conservative churches i propound my identity in my liberalism, among pagans or the very-liberal, I define myself by being a dogmatic, orthodox Christian. But there, with the other Mars Hillers (?), my identity was in accord with the group's. And my ego was stuttering - if i went here regularly, how would i ever stick out??? maybe by being MORE badass than others? by being the conservative guy? I had no idea. I realized that this is how hipsters must feel walking in to a hipster party, although - rather than try and engage in a silly game of one-up-manship, i realized that in church - my identity could be found in how invested i was IN the group: In how much i served the church and the community, in how loving i was to others, etc. And in this way I think i realized the christian paradox of losing an identity (a life) to gain it.

I wish i lived closer to Grand Rapids!

although not really, since i have an inherent distrust of the American-Dutch.

Shady, skinny buggers.

Two Vicarious Guest Posts

From a conversation with my brother, Tim:

re: the 'Slug-Bug' (or 'Punch-Buggy') phenomenon -

It must be funny to be the owner of a VW Bug, knowing that everywhere you drive, there follows a wake of people hitting each other in the arm.

From a conversation with a Gentleman at church coffee-hour:

re: people's general dislike and distrust of the police -

The speeding-ticket is to blame for the current public view of the Police. Prior to automobiles (and the speeding tickets which arrived very shortly after their invention) the generally law-abiding citizen had nothing to fear from the police, and so cops were honored and venerated for keeping the peace in the neighborhood. However, now that any average-joe is a possible culprit for doing his 10 over on the freeway, the police have become a source of universal contempt.

also - Teaser Trailer: I am ruminating on and formulating some thoughts on mental illness after observing it first hand for these several months at my current job. Hopefully there will be some good fruit here on this blog.

Buddhism

I hate Buddhism.

Well, to be more precise - western converts to Buddhism*.

For two reasons:

1) The vast, vast majority of people I hear say this are actually saying nothing more than, "I don't like paying attention to all the evils in the world, and i LOVE doing breathing-exercises that help relax me. Oh, and wouldn't it be nice if things didn't die but got to keep being re-incarnated?"

This is not a problematic statement, in itself. However, it doesn't even come close to qualifying as a religious belief, the way adhering to a theistic religion would, and yet it is the retort to, "are you religious?". It might vaguely describe a worldview, but not a religion. It is not asking for any particular devotion, it is not asking for any specific behavior, etc.

2) The few (i have only met one) persons who rigorously investigate and apply the teachings of (for sake of argument) chinese buddhism, are swallowing a pill that, to me, is impossible to swallow. Buddhism asks the seeker to believe ideas about reality that contradict every aspect of lived experience. The denial of differentiation, the negating of the idea of 'real' and 'self', etc. Now, maybe I could believe these things if they were purportedly handed down from some divine being in control of the universe, but in Buddhism, there is no such thing, so we are just supposed to swallow it as an enlightened philosophy. Well, ok, Buddhist philosophy, can you show me how this is THE truth about existence, inductively? Oh, you can't? you can only offer a few vague anecdotes? oh, that's ok, I'll believe it anyways... NOT! It would be just as, if not more sensible to devote one's mind entirely to the teachings of Zeno. A novel idea, but it doesn't satisfy the religious question.

Rant over.

I don't actually get riled up by this very frequently, I just wish people would be a little more self-aware and critical when they are doing the preposterous act many are forced to do in the west: shopping for a Religion.

*from what i understand, in the Orient buddhism is so deeply ingrained in the fabric of the various cultures with which it overlaps, that there is a situation akin to Orthodoxy in Greece or Russia, or Catholicism in Latin America: the people are buddhists regardless of the degree they practice or adhere to dogma. This sort of cultural buddhism i have no beef with, for the mere fact that I have no beef with a particular person being from China, etc.

Quote of the week

How small of all that human hearts endure
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.

-Samuel Johnson

Seriously, Dr. J, how is it that we are not better acquainted?

These lines are two of ten Johnson contributed to his friend Oliver Goldsmith's poem "The Traveller."* I think it reflects well on the literary culture of the age, or perhaps (more likely) on Johnson and Goldsmith's friendship, that something like that could happen. That a literary behemoth like Johnson would give away some pretty classic lines (though it's not like there was any great dearth of them with SJ), or that Goldsmith would let--no, request him to do so, and then use them to end the poem, is kind of bewildering to me. Certainly it's not uncommon for poets to ask each other for advice, but they're also a vain bunch and it's hard to imagine, say, T.S. Eliot asking Ezra Pound to pitch him a few lines to help finish "Preludes." I'd be curious to know how common such a thing was, or even is now.

*Thanks, Project Gutenberg!

In Praise of Great Men, part III

"He was so commanding a presence, so curious and inquiring, so responsive and expansive, and so generous and reckless of himself and of his own, that every one said of him, 'Here is no musty savant, but a man, a great man, a man on the heroic scale, not to serve whom is avarice and sin.' "

- William James of his teacher Agassiz.

The description has also been applied to James himself.

also, 4 posts in one day! That has to be a record around here. (i've been saving them up for a while)

In Praise of Great Men, part II

"[Henley is] a great, glowing, massive-shouldered fellow with a big red beard and a crutch; jovial, astoundingly clever, and with a laugh that rolled like music; he had an unimaginable fire and vitality; he swept one off one's feet"

- Lloyd Osbourne, Robert Louis Stevenson's stepson, on William Ernest Henley, author of the poem Invictus

The Manly Ideal -

"A young soldier in an English regiment had been promoted from the ranks and given a commission in another regiment. Before joining his new command he was, according to custom, invited to a farewell dinner by the officers of his old regiment, placed, as the guest of the evening, on the right of the colonel, and helped to all the dishes first. He was a fine young fellow, but little used to the ways of the polite world and the manners of other dining-tables than the humble mess of those days in the ranks. The colonel, one of the truest types of gentlemen, did his best to put his guest at ease.

The soup was served, and then came a servant to the guest's side, holding a large bowl which contained simply lumps of ice. The weather was hot, for this happened in India, and cold drinks were an unspeakable boon. The new made officer started at the bowl. The servant asked: 'Ice, sir?' The colonel chatted merrily to him on his left. Others of the party began to see the dilemma.

'Ice, sir?' again asked the waiter.

The guest, in ignorant desperation, took a portion of the ice and put it in his soup. A smile played lightly on the faces of some of the younger officers, when the bowl was offered to the colonel, who went on chatting with the guest, and without moving a muscle of his face also dropped a piece of ice into his soup. Those who came afterward however took their cue from their colonel or let the bowl pass; and the young man breathed a sigh of relief as he thought that after all he had done the right thing."

-Abram Smythe Palmer The Ideal of a Gentleman, 1892.

A very Wheatonite thought on Freud, but still -

Despite Freud's lack of popularity amongst praciticing clinicians today, his ideas still have real currency in the popular mind. I am specifically recalling the frequency with which people reference the so-called oedipus complex whenever romance and mothers come remotely close in a conversation. And here is something I was thinking: The general form of this idea - which is Freud par excellance - that what we seek in our adult life are merely shadows and approximations of our true, real childhood yearnings, is deeply atheistic. That's sort of an boring statement; what is exciting is the converse: what we experience in childhood merely sets the stage for the adult experience, which is MORE true, more real; the love I receive from my mother opens up my world to connect romantically with a woman in the future. The foreknowledge that such a set-up requires is none other than the christian idea that there is something of a plan to the piece of work that a human is. Put another way - it is the scientific notion of causes always precedes effects that governs Freud's way of thinking. Throw some authorial (God's) intent in there, and all of the sudden there can be a narrative where incident # 1 is just a set up for Incident # 2. I like this idea, because it reifies the world we experience as adults, rather than demeans it the way Freud seems to.

agreed.

I believe in clear-cut positions. I think that the most arrogant position is this apparent, multidisciplinary modesty of "what I am saying now is not unconditional, it is just a hypothesis," and so on. It really is a most arrogant position. I think that the only way to be honest and expose yourself to criticism is to state clearly and dogmatically where you are. You must take the risk and have a position.

-Slavoj Žižek

hear, hear

Masters of suspicion

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins."

-Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense"

Ricoeur names Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud the 'masters of suspicion', thinkers who abandoned the idea of truth, or saw it as plastic and not absolute and dominating. They are suspicious of truth claims in part because the use of truth is so tied up with the use of power, and rightly so. (EDIT: I'm not totally sure how to phrase this, what I wrote makes it seem like they think truth is still a "thing," is still out there in some form. Which, as that Nietzsche bit above will tell you, they most certainly did not.) From what little I've read of Nietzsche and Marx, that seems pretty accurate. What I question is Ricoeur's inclusion of Freud with these other two. Psychoanalysis abandons truth on a micro scale, saying that we lie to ourselves all the time, but from a macro perspective it has a surprisingly barefaced and even naive faith in truth. Truth not only exists but is codified, "fixed, canonical, and binding," particularly when we head in the direction Jung took Freud's ideas (not that that's Sigmund's doing, or fault). It's a sophisticated, modernist version of phrenology: we no longer believe that physical features correlate to the truth, but the revelatory medium has been shifted to feelings, actions, dreams. Those things, while complex, still correspond to some truth, one so bedrock we don't even know it's there—they only need to be prodded and questioned in just the right way to reveal themselves. Freud still believed in a nature that could be read like a book, only this book is dense and convoluted to all but the sharpest, most skilled interpreter. (I don't know how connected Freud was to his Jewish roots, but it's interesting to think about the similarities between his method and Talmudic interpretation and tradition.)

Which is maybe the reason I don't really care for Freud. It's one thing to say there is no absolute truth—that at least levels the playing field—but it's quite another to make yourself its gatekeeper. There is in Freud the tang of elitism, of knowledge-as-password, knowledge-as-phallus, which is one of my biggest academic pet peeves. And it seems that that's exactly what Ricoeur's other "masters" were calling out.

Ben, I know you're on a Freud kick and have read much more than I, what do you think? Am I right here?

Captured

Auden sums up precisely my unease about photography:

"Normally, when one passes someone on the street who is in pain, one either tries to help him, or one simply looks the other way. With a photo there's no human decision; you're not there; you can't turn away; you simply gape. It's a form of voyeurism. "

Paris Review "Writers at Work" interviews, 1972

In Praise of Great Men, part I

For some time now I have relished finding articulate praise of great men. I love the humility it takes to praise another, and the sporting nature of it. And it is such a more difficult task to be articulate in praise; articulate detraction is much easier. The other day i thought it would be good to gather the quotes that i have found over the years, and thought that here might be a good place to do so. So I shall try and find some of them again. To begin this recurring theme, a quote by Robert Whittington (1520) on Saint/Sir Thomas More:

"More is a man of an angel's wit and singular learning. I know not his fellow. For where is the man of that gentleness, lowliness and affability? And, as time requireth, a man of marvelous mirth and pastimes, and sometime of as sad gravity. A man for all seasons."

Yes.

Long Live Oral History!

I just realized the other day:

At the time of the crusades (11th - 13th centuries), there existed no maps (in the sense of an actual lay of the land) of europe or the levant. It wasn't until the late 15th century that Fra. Angelico produced his rough outline, and even then it only circulated among the elite (and many of the crusades were 'grass-roots' movements), and only a handful of copies were made. Furthering the lack of geographical knowledge was the fact that migration and trade were limited to very small local areas, and so contact with foreigners would have been near unknown. And YET - tens of thousands of peasants and knights made their way to the holy land to fight their zealous battles. How did they know which way to go to get there???
and then i realized: all churches of the time were built facing east - to face jerusalem and the rising sun/son which that signified. This knowledge would have been passed down from bishop to bishop and church architect to church architect, and it is the only way i can figure the crusaders knew which way to go. And so via oral history from the first apostles to the poor english peasants a thousand years later - knowledge of where the holy lands were was passed down, allowing the zealous to have a vague idea of where they were headed.
Cool!
Made me realize that it would have felt a lot more like a crazy treasure hunt than my GPS-oriented mind had previously painted the picture.

my new mantra:

"I am a part of all that I have seen."

- Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Once again - I read only the Introduction of a book -

So, the other day i picked up a copy of Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
Besides being once again astounded at the punctilious nature of german thinking, I was struck by a way of thinking he offered:
Weber begins by defining his terms, the first of which is 'capitalism'. To my great satisfaction - for I have been wondering this for a while - he makes very clear that wanting to accumulate as much wealth as possible, and to turn a profit from business exchanges, is NOT unique to the ideology of capitalism, but is in fact a sentiment found across almost all peoples and times. To have such a stalwart name as Weber lay this out clearly was a salve to the irritation i have felt when surface-liberals tirade against the nebulous, evil beast whose name is the C-word. Weber goes on to say though - and this is what I mean to highlight in this post - that although the desire for wealth is not unique to capitalism, the degree to which we see this ideology infiltrating every facet of both public and private life today in the West, renders the phenomenon different than the hitherto seen desire. I.e. we call it differently: capitalism. And what struck me is the form of this thinking: that as a thing changes by degrees, eventually it can change so much it changes into a different thing.
For instance, a moped is just a small motorbike, but is small enough that we give it a different name. It is different from a motorbike, even though it shares all the same characteristics. A tangentially related example that set this whole idea rolling in my head: A friend of mine was relaying to me the events of a party the night before, and said how he had been hung over that morning, but had just "turned the corner" and was now better. This struck me: how often I think of progression happening in a single direction, but the truth is: sometimes things 'turn the corner'. It is just one step past where one was one step ago, and yet - it is an entirely new direction. To awkwardly force it into the language i just a moment ago established: after 'turning a corner', one has only progressed one degree further than one has before, and yet one is upon an entirely new "thing".

This seems less profound in writing than it does in my head, but i have a sense that this concept will be useful to me as i analyze things in the future.