Love is a wine that flows in the veins of all things, in the dust of the planets no less than the song of the robin.
God is love, is this love, a fire which reaches round the world, given to all without discrimination.
God who is love is a solar flare exploding into space engulfing the planet, sending her signals into every smallest gap of unseen particles, into every shadowed space of human awareness.
But love can only really show itself at the cost of itself, and that cost fools the proud human observer into thinking all there really is is darkness, violence and chance. And normal human perception within a world of violence will no less conclude that the world only gives birth to love exceptionally, as doomed to failure.
In the story of Jesus, the God of love could only revealed be by being thrown out of the world. But in the process of exclusion this love is seen clearly, visibly, by those with eyes.
Subtly that exclusion becomes the most profound entry, overture and overturning, of everything...
Human culture built for the interests of the violent continues to disfigure all concepts of divinity.
In some ways it is worse in official Christianity. The legal payoff and punishment notions of salvation have dulled and disfigured the fire of love out of recognition.
But the bottomless passion of the divine is unconquerable, the beat of its heart, the timeless rhythm of the deep, beyond all quelling. The more intense and intoxicating this divine passion is the more it is deep, hidden, soundless and humble. But its hiddenness and humility are the product not of weakness but exactly of strength, of amazing ultra-strength.
To pay attention to divine love, to plunge to the level of its hiding, is to be amazed beyond words. To be struck dumb and senseless. And to emerge a completely different kind of person.
Friday, August 26, 2011
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Invisible Hand Revealed, Outstretched as Compassion!
"Standard and Poor"--sounds like a run of unimpressive high-school results. It is in fact an august institution which hands out these judgments itself, not on school students, but on business and financial entities, including national economies. (The name does not refer to valuations as such: it comes from Henry Poor who began compiling data on railroad companies back in the 19th century.) As anyone who has not been on a Trappist retreat in the past weeks knows, the US has for the first time slipped into the A- range, judged for lack of credit-worthiness.
The assessment followed the so-called debt-ceiling crisis in which Congress seemed to drive the world economy to the edge of a cliff, only at the last moment to swerve away. The whole performance did not make for confidence and it's not at all surprising that some symbolic authority would wag a reproving finger. But a final judgment on the situation cannot be restricted to the scholasticism of high-finance. Everything here has a theological bottom line. And far from allowing the mysteries of economics to deter comment, theology cries out for a hearing, like the blood of Abel itself.
To get to that we must first give a snapshot of the major players in the field and their ideas.
G.B. Shaw said that if all the economists to the world were laid end to end they would not reach a conclusion, and he was likely thinking of the debate between Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes. Or at least between the division of thought their names have come to represent.
On the one hand, Keynes argued against the idea that supply magically creates its own demand, that if you give capitalists the chance then their spending on investment will create the wealth that leads to buying of goods. He insisted instead that in the midst of recession the government has to stimulate the economy by reducing interest rates, while increasing spending on things like services and infrastructure.
On the other hand, for Hayek, government spending impedes recovery by depriving the private sector of capital for investment, and moreover inevitably restricts human freedom. For Hayek the free price system is what keeps everyone free, but it is itself a bit of a mystery. Prices are a spontaneous order "the result of human action but not of human design."
And, again for people who've not been vacationing in outer space, there are distinct echoes here of the position of some Democrats and the commentator Paul Krugman on the one hand, and the newly minted Tea Party on the other.
So where's the theology in it?
Through the work of Rene Girard theology has discovered the crucial factor of imitative (mimetic) desire: it is a core biblical motif demonstrated at the heart both of human violence (Cain and Abel etc.) and of Christ's power to change us to compassion and love. What would it mean if we applied this anthropological and theological insight to economics? The results could be intensely illuminating and could possibly change the "dismal science" of economics into something filled with the possibility of light!
How is it that things have value? If we begin with this economic question Mimetic Theory can help considerably. It tells us that we always imitate the desire of another in relation to an object. We may think we desire the object spontaneously, but there is always the shadowy present of the other whose prior relationship to the object shows that it is desirable.
When something is brought for sale to market (or shopping mall) we can concentrate on the thing in question forgetting the human hand that has produced the object and/or is offering it for sale. But just because we don't pay attention to that hand doesn't mean it has gone away. In fact it is exerting an even more intense fascination just because it's hidden. The riot of advertizing that takes place around goods for sale simply displaces and amplifies the human relationship to the object in the original production. That beautiful model showing off that diamond ring, she's just a deflected substitute, a glamorous stand-in, for the miner who mined the ring and the dealer who brought it to town! We might think it's her good looks that makes us want to be like her and have her ring, but in fact her body-look, her clothes, everything about her, are themselves held out as desirable by a further chain of other desire-instilling-relationships going on basically for ever.
Consumer desire is a gigantic self-referring universe, a vast self-feeling nervous system with a billion billion synapses, all coming down to that single image that will make us want the ring!
But what happens when there is a breakdown in the system of desire? This is the crucial question Keynes and Hayek were dealing with, writing as they were at the time of the great depression and arguing about its causes and its remedies. Their classic version of breakdown was the boom or glut, the apparent over-production of actual stuff that no one wants and, therefore, no one gets paid for. A year when there is a huge harvest of tomatoes makes those enormous piles at the market less and less salable. In a situation like that no one shows any desire for tomatoes! Of course once you are in a recession the amount of goods goes down precipitously and looks nothing like a glut. But the economists saw that as its initial premise: a boom followed by a bust.
But there is also the situation much closer to home and closer to my argument. The market itself can create the conditions of "glut" by deliberately inflating it with stuff no one can actually pay for, as in the 2008 housing bubble and bad-debts banking crisis. In this instance it is not over-production, but the deliberate manipulation of money and desire to the point where one fuels the other and a moment is reached when people realize there is not enough actual material wealth in the system to sustain it, and the whole thing comes crashing down. It's the inverse of a glut; it is an unsustainable emptiness, a vacuum. And it can only be brought about by phantasmagorical desire detaching itself from the actual universe and expanding to infinity.
You see what I mean? The whole system is complex and fluid but from a Mimetic Theory point of view you can always be sure that desire or the lack of it will influence the value of goods and the overall value of the market in which those goods are traded. Certainly there are objective factors--there is the object! There are actual tomatoes and actual houses. But it's the subjective element of desire that truly drives the system. This is surely what Hayek was referring to in "the result of human action but not of human design." It's human desire which drives the thing but it is not recognized or planned in any way, still less is it willingly surrendered to any principle, rational or spiritual, other than its all-powerful self.
Sooooo, back to our dueling economists. Whatever its cause, when desire bottoms out in the system, and business grinds to a halt, what do you do then?
Simple enough. Each in his own way says you have to get desire working again, you have to get it back in the system. Keynes essentially believes you can cheat desire. You have to introduce more money and stuff into the system so people begin wanting it and working to get it and thus producing themselves. Then everyone will begin to want goods more and more, and so on. In a nutshell, you have to create demand (desire).
Hayek says, no, no, no, that will never work! If you just give people stuff no one will ever desire anything. What you you have to do is actually the reverse. You must stop government spending, you must get rid of easy money, you must stop taxing, in order to free up the capitalists to begin over the making of real wealth. That way goods will be desirable and the great avatar and icon of desire--namely money, mammon--will itself be desirable once more and and the whole system will work again. (Well, he doesn't precisely say this, but his insistence on the sacrosanct freedom of prices and their autonomous character can only mean this.)
Hayek 's viewpoint is currently being applied in Greece, Ireland, Britain and Spain, under the name "austerity", which implies a temporary self-denial for the sake of longer term pleasure. But then lurking in the depths of it all is the greatest inciter, the last infallible fixer of the system, the terrible dragon begetter of desire in its rawest purest state--war! Nothing is more guaranteed to rebirth the order of desire than war, telling us what is really desirable by destroying everything else! Therefore both supporters of Keynes and supporter of Hayek historically agree on this. It was the immense government spending on war industry that truly dragged Europe and the U.S. out of the depression era. And these days no member of the Tea Party seriously wishes to dent the huge share of tax revenue soaked up by U.S. military spending (+ or - 50%) for current and future wars.
What then is the theological conclusion?
Hayek and the Tea Party are essentially on the right side of desire. But they are on the wrong side of history. We cannot continue to run the world in this way. Everyone knows it. Everyone knows there are not enough resources for exponential desire on the part of seven billion people. Alternately you cannot pauperize a large proportion of these same billions in order to protect desire for a privileged few. Most of all, everyone knows that if you precipitate a major war in order to restore the productivity of desire there will ultimately be no productivity at all.
Keynes was right in a better sense . The government has to spend in the midst of a recession. But that cannot be argued for classical economic reasons, as if the argument can be won out of pure mathematics. We have to see that the strange work of desire is more and more exposed for what it is, and because of that be prepared explicitly to invoke a new principle.
The "invisible hand", the "not by human design" are shown for what they are, the endless shell game of imitated human desire. What is at work, and has made things work in an apparently magical way, is the unseen and spontaneous mediating power of the model. But once we reveal the trick, once we see that invisible hand, we are able and indeed called upon to realize the possibility and the promise of something new.
In this very moment, at this very time, because of this growth in human awareness a new generative principle is intruding into the human equation, into politics itself. Unconscious desire progressively is rendered implausible and is displaced by surrendered-to compassion, a changed internal scenery that allows the other to be, to live, by virtue of my being one with her in her humanity. As time goes on this imitated compassion can and will be as neurally powerful and generative as imitated desire.
Sounds impossible, absurd? Not if you see that we have no choice. Human history has been pushed to its crossroads. And those who claim that the Gospel is central to their lives have no other voice that to say, yes, this is possible, this is what our belief teaches us! The Christian churches and Christians in general are called by the very urgency of the time to put our capitalist culture on notice that it will only survive by a new economics of compassion. We say, Blessed are the Poor!, rather than All Hail Standard and Poor!
Tony Bartlett, Theologian-in-Residence
The assessment followed the so-called debt-ceiling crisis in which Congress seemed to drive the world economy to the edge of a cliff, only at the last moment to swerve away. The whole performance did not make for confidence and it's not at all surprising that some symbolic authority would wag a reproving finger. But a final judgment on the situation cannot be restricted to the scholasticism of high-finance. Everything here has a theological bottom line. And far from allowing the mysteries of economics to deter comment, theology cries out for a hearing, like the blood of Abel itself.
To get to that we must first give a snapshot of the major players in the field and their ideas.
G.B. Shaw said that if all the economists to the world were laid end to end they would not reach a conclusion, and he was likely thinking of the debate between Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes. Or at least between the division of thought their names have come to represent.
On the one hand, Keynes argued against the idea that supply magically creates its own demand, that if you give capitalists the chance then their spending on investment will create the wealth that leads to buying of goods. He insisted instead that in the midst of recession the government has to stimulate the economy by reducing interest rates, while increasing spending on things like services and infrastructure.
On the other hand, for Hayek, government spending impedes recovery by depriving the private sector of capital for investment, and moreover inevitably restricts human freedom. For Hayek the free price system is what keeps everyone free, but it is itself a bit of a mystery. Prices are a spontaneous order "the result of human action but not of human design."
And, again for people who've not been vacationing in outer space, there are distinct echoes here of the position of some Democrats and the commentator Paul Krugman on the one hand, and the newly minted Tea Party on the other.
So where's the theology in it?
Through the work of Rene Girard theology has discovered the crucial factor of imitative (mimetic) desire: it is a core biblical motif demonstrated at the heart both of human violence (Cain and Abel etc.) and of Christ's power to change us to compassion and love. What would it mean if we applied this anthropological and theological insight to economics? The results could be intensely illuminating and could possibly change the "dismal science" of economics into something filled with the possibility of light!
How is it that things have value? If we begin with this economic question Mimetic Theory can help considerably. It tells us that we always imitate the desire of another in relation to an object. We may think we desire the object spontaneously, but there is always the shadowy present of the other whose prior relationship to the object shows that it is desirable.
When something is brought for sale to market (or shopping mall) we can concentrate on the thing in question forgetting the human hand that has produced the object and/or is offering it for sale. But just because we don't pay attention to that hand doesn't mean it has gone away. In fact it is exerting an even more intense fascination just because it's hidden. The riot of advertizing that takes place around goods for sale simply displaces and amplifies the human relationship to the object in the original production. That beautiful model showing off that diamond ring, she's just a deflected substitute, a glamorous stand-in, for the miner who mined the ring and the dealer who brought it to town! We might think it's her good looks that makes us want to be like her and have her ring, but in fact her body-look, her clothes, everything about her, are themselves held out as desirable by a further chain of other desire-instilling-relationships going on basically for ever.
Consumer desire is a gigantic self-referring universe, a vast self-feeling nervous system with a billion billion synapses, all coming down to that single image that will make us want the ring!
But what happens when there is a breakdown in the system of desire? This is the crucial question Keynes and Hayek were dealing with, writing as they were at the time of the great depression and arguing about its causes and its remedies. Their classic version of breakdown was the boom or glut, the apparent over-production of actual stuff that no one wants and, therefore, no one gets paid for. A year when there is a huge harvest of tomatoes makes those enormous piles at the market less and less salable. In a situation like that no one shows any desire for tomatoes! Of course once you are in a recession the amount of goods goes down precipitously and looks nothing like a glut. But the economists saw that as its initial premise: a boom followed by a bust.
But there is also the situation much closer to home and closer to my argument. The market itself can create the conditions of "glut" by deliberately inflating it with stuff no one can actually pay for, as in the 2008 housing bubble and bad-debts banking crisis. In this instance it is not over-production, but the deliberate manipulation of money and desire to the point where one fuels the other and a moment is reached when people realize there is not enough actual material wealth in the system to sustain it, and the whole thing comes crashing down. It's the inverse of a glut; it is an unsustainable emptiness, a vacuum. And it can only be brought about by phantasmagorical desire detaching itself from the actual universe and expanding to infinity.
You see what I mean? The whole system is complex and fluid but from a Mimetic Theory point of view you can always be sure that desire or the lack of it will influence the value of goods and the overall value of the market in which those goods are traded. Certainly there are objective factors--there is the object! There are actual tomatoes and actual houses. But it's the subjective element of desire that truly drives the system. This is surely what Hayek was referring to in "the result of human action but not of human design." It's human desire which drives the thing but it is not recognized or planned in any way, still less is it willingly surrendered to any principle, rational or spiritual, other than its all-powerful self.
Sooooo, back to our dueling economists. Whatever its cause, when desire bottoms out in the system, and business grinds to a halt, what do you do then?
Simple enough. Each in his own way says you have to get desire working again, you have to get it back in the system. Keynes essentially believes you can cheat desire. You have to introduce more money and stuff into the system so people begin wanting it and working to get it and thus producing themselves. Then everyone will begin to want goods more and more, and so on. In a nutshell, you have to create demand (desire).
Hayek says, no, no, no, that will never work! If you just give people stuff no one will ever desire anything. What you you have to do is actually the reverse. You must stop government spending, you must get rid of easy money, you must stop taxing, in order to free up the capitalists to begin over the making of real wealth. That way goods will be desirable and the great avatar and icon of desire--namely money, mammon--will itself be desirable once more and and the whole system will work again. (Well, he doesn't precisely say this, but his insistence on the sacrosanct freedom of prices and their autonomous character can only mean this.)
Hayek 's viewpoint is currently being applied in Greece, Ireland, Britain and Spain, under the name "austerity", which implies a temporary self-denial for the sake of longer term pleasure. But then lurking in the depths of it all is the greatest inciter, the last infallible fixer of the system, the terrible dragon begetter of desire in its rawest purest state--war! Nothing is more guaranteed to rebirth the order of desire than war, telling us what is really desirable by destroying everything else! Therefore both supporters of Keynes and supporter of Hayek historically agree on this. It was the immense government spending on war industry that truly dragged Europe and the U.S. out of the depression era. And these days no member of the Tea Party seriously wishes to dent the huge share of tax revenue soaked up by U.S. military spending (+ or - 50%) for current and future wars.
What then is the theological conclusion?
Hayek and the Tea Party are essentially on the right side of desire. But they are on the wrong side of history. We cannot continue to run the world in this way. Everyone knows it. Everyone knows there are not enough resources for exponential desire on the part of seven billion people. Alternately you cannot pauperize a large proportion of these same billions in order to protect desire for a privileged few. Most of all, everyone knows that if you precipitate a major war in order to restore the productivity of desire there will ultimately be no productivity at all.
Keynes was right in a better sense . The government has to spend in the midst of a recession. But that cannot be argued for classical economic reasons, as if the argument can be won out of pure mathematics. We have to see that the strange work of desire is more and more exposed for what it is, and because of that be prepared explicitly to invoke a new principle.
The "invisible hand", the "not by human design" are shown for what they are, the endless shell game of imitated human desire. What is at work, and has made things work in an apparently magical way, is the unseen and spontaneous mediating power of the model. But once we reveal the trick, once we see that invisible hand, we are able and indeed called upon to realize the possibility and the promise of something new.
In this very moment, at this very time, because of this growth in human awareness a new generative principle is intruding into the human equation, into politics itself. Unconscious desire progressively is rendered implausible and is displaced by surrendered-to compassion, a changed internal scenery that allows the other to be, to live, by virtue of my being one with her in her humanity. As time goes on this imitated compassion can and will be as neurally powerful and generative as imitated desire.
Sounds impossible, absurd? Not if you see that we have no choice. Human history has been pushed to its crossroads. And those who claim that the Gospel is central to their lives have no other voice that to say, yes, this is possible, this is what our belief teaches us! The Christian churches and Christians in general are called by the very urgency of the time to put our capitalist culture on notice that it will only survive by a new economics of compassion. We say, Blessed are the Poor!, rather than All Hail Standard and Poor!
Tony Bartlett, Theologian-in-Residence
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Sign Of The Human
I am more used to my backyard than perhaps any other space on God's earth. Five years ago we put a picture window in the back wall of the kitchen providing an uninterrupted view. I see trees and plants, squirrels, groundhogs, deer, once or twice a fox, a turkey, and one night I swear there was the yowl of a coyote!
Nothing could be more natural.
At the same time I sit at the table in front of this window and I look at words and images on my computer screen, speeding their way across hyperspace. Inches or thousands of miles in seconds or less, it doesn't seem to matter. What could be more artificial? The leaves on the trees bud, mature and die in one narrow fixed space over a whole season. My thoughts and the signs that carry them fly about their electronic universe like winged silicon gods, without any solid body to hold them.
But wait...
This distinction between natural and artificial, between solid and electronic, is it so real, so assured? That leaf up there, quivering at the end of a branch, is it not just as much a product of complex information transfers, of enzymes, gravity, photons?
For sure, we see and describe these things in terms of quantifiable energy, but energy states are not actually different from information states once we get down to subatomic physics and how particles move and shift at that level. For example, in photosynthesis a packet of light (photon) is absorbed by the leaf to make it grow, but in a slightly different form (i.e. at a different wavelength) it is the means by which we see!
The only final difference with information, therefore, is the "mirror" of the human brain which captures things in images and signs. It is the fact of the human observer.
Today we are so intensely aware that in the midst of all the small particle transfers of energy there is this incredible fact of human meaning achieved through signals in and around us. The world of computers and media has enormously increased my sense of the flow of energy/information. It has plugged me into an exploding world of signs and shown me how everything human is wonderfully made out of communication. What we call a human being is something like a center of communication through signs, like the arrivals and departure screens at airports but not just for planes....it's for everything!
Another way of saying the same could be that a human being is the tipping point of the universe where creation begins to reflect back to itself its own energy/information process and and it does so as signs. The universe has become the scene of meaning as human sign...
Enter John's gospel and "In the beginning was the Word..."
Wow! How cool is that, that two thousand years ago the "theological gospel" understood that everything begins with signal, sign, word, Word? John of course is not talking just any sign or word. He is talking Jesus. He is talking the nonviolent Crucified and Risen One. Here is the sign or meaning that starts everything over and starts it for the first time. But it also establishes thereby the general principle that the human world is composed of the sign, and does so long before computers made it factually obvious. In my opinion, this one liner and everything it means have been a pivotal factor in bringing forth our world of hyper-communication.
The gospel is communication. It is good news. And with that outbreak of information the modern age was truly born (and inside that its wilder child, the postmodern age). Gone is the thick mythic world of gods and demons, heavens and hells. Gone is the lofty world of ideas belonging to a pure realm of thought. Gone even is the comforting fate of inevitable death. Instead we have the explosion of communication, of talk and story. And at the heart of talk and story there is the endless concrete choice between killing and forgiveness, retaliation and life. And within that, and because of it, there is the nagging insistence that even beyond death the word of life will pursue us, not allowing any complicity with fate and its violence.
What a stunning word! What a sign! And now because of this singular Word, because of the way it has shifted the character of actual culture, it means a crucial amount of the sensed information of our world is full of God. The God of compassion and forgiveness known in and through the sign of Jesus is broadcast through the actual contemporary sign system in all its immense variety and vitality.
The spiritual human consequences are immense. Anyone anywhere knowing her world through its signs is necessarily impacted by this God. The impact may not be powerful, it very probably will not be conscious. And, equally probably in many, many cases, it will be resisted, opposed, even hated. But anyone with an eye and a heart of compassion will pick up all around them this wonderful new human reality.
In the past this kind of experience has often called contemplative and indeed that is what it is. But the word contemplation has a tone of heavenly truths--the framework of Greek thinking which sees truth as abiding in a perfect place beyond this world, or, at least, belonging purely to a spiritual order and accessed in a purely spiritual way. But the fact of the matter is that Christian contemplation has always been very concrete and sensuous, awakened by historically concrete signs and images. The "visions" of the mystics testify to this.
However, what I am talking about is much more general and diffuse than a saint's pure-hearted love and identification. It really is a cultural condition: one mixed in with a great deal of other stuff, some of it neutral, much of it negative, but in the last analysis it is the constant presence of Christ at the heart of our concrete world.
Our world is under the pressure of Christ at an internal generative level. Once again this is not any kind of mathematically obvious fact; it does not impose itself by force. But it does mean that a Christian does not and cannot look outside of her actual human world for the truth of Christ. It means that the human world is itself the stuff of the divine, that God has become an organic part of the human system. It means your neighborhood, your city, your mall, it's all a virtual church! It means that despite the contradictions, the killings, the betrayals and the danger, Christ indeed has the victory. It means that forgiveness and peace have become the one and only true meaning of the world: Satan has indeed fallen like lightning and the semiotic reign of violence is collapsing.
It means love is the normal and constant sign of being human. It fills my backyard just as much as my computer, my computer just as my backyard...
Tony Bartlett
Nothing could be more natural.
At the same time I sit at the table in front of this window and I look at words and images on my computer screen, speeding their way across hyperspace. Inches or thousands of miles in seconds or less, it doesn't seem to matter. What could be more artificial? The leaves on the trees bud, mature and die in one narrow fixed space over a whole season. My thoughts and the signs that carry them fly about their electronic universe like winged silicon gods, without any solid body to hold them.
But wait...
This distinction between natural and artificial, between solid and electronic, is it so real, so assured? That leaf up there, quivering at the end of a branch, is it not just as much a product of complex information transfers, of enzymes, gravity, photons?
For sure, we see and describe these things in terms of quantifiable energy, but energy states are not actually different from information states once we get down to subatomic physics and how particles move and shift at that level. For example, in photosynthesis a packet of light (photon) is absorbed by the leaf to make it grow, but in a slightly different form (i.e. at a different wavelength) it is the means by which we see!
The only final difference with information, therefore, is the "mirror" of the human brain which captures things in images and signs. It is the fact of the human observer.
Today we are so intensely aware that in the midst of all the small particle transfers of energy there is this incredible fact of human meaning achieved through signals in and around us. The world of computers and media has enormously increased my sense of the flow of energy/information. It has plugged me into an exploding world of signs and shown me how everything human is wonderfully made out of communication. What we call a human being is something like a center of communication through signs, like the arrivals and departure screens at airports but not just for planes....it's for everything!
Another way of saying the same could be that a human being is the tipping point of the universe where creation begins to reflect back to itself its own energy/information process and and it does so as signs. The universe has become the scene of meaning as human sign...
Enter John's gospel and "In the beginning was the Word..."
Wow! How cool is that, that two thousand years ago the "theological gospel" understood that everything begins with signal, sign, word, Word? John of course is not talking just any sign or word. He is talking Jesus. He is talking the nonviolent Crucified and Risen One. Here is the sign or meaning that starts everything over and starts it for the first time. But it also establishes thereby the general principle that the human world is composed of the sign, and does so long before computers made it factually obvious. In my opinion, this one liner and everything it means have been a pivotal factor in bringing forth our world of hyper-communication.
The gospel is communication. It is good news. And with that outbreak of information the modern age was truly born (and inside that its wilder child, the postmodern age). Gone is the thick mythic world of gods and demons, heavens and hells. Gone is the lofty world of ideas belonging to a pure realm of thought. Gone even is the comforting fate of inevitable death. Instead we have the explosion of communication, of talk and story. And at the heart of talk and story there is the endless concrete choice between killing and forgiveness, retaliation and life. And within that, and because of it, there is the nagging insistence that even beyond death the word of life will pursue us, not allowing any complicity with fate and its violence.
What a stunning word! What a sign! And now because of this singular Word, because of the way it has shifted the character of actual culture, it means a crucial amount of the sensed information of our world is full of God. The God of compassion and forgiveness known in and through the sign of Jesus is broadcast through the actual contemporary sign system in all its immense variety and vitality.
The spiritual human consequences are immense. Anyone anywhere knowing her world through its signs is necessarily impacted by this God. The impact may not be powerful, it very probably will not be conscious. And, equally probably in many, many cases, it will be resisted, opposed, even hated. But anyone with an eye and a heart of compassion will pick up all around them this wonderful new human reality.
In the past this kind of experience has often called contemplative and indeed that is what it is. But the word contemplation has a tone of heavenly truths--the framework of Greek thinking which sees truth as abiding in a perfect place beyond this world, or, at least, belonging purely to a spiritual order and accessed in a purely spiritual way. But the fact of the matter is that Christian contemplation has always been very concrete and sensuous, awakened by historically concrete signs and images. The "visions" of the mystics testify to this.
However, what I am talking about is much more general and diffuse than a saint's pure-hearted love and identification. It really is a cultural condition: one mixed in with a great deal of other stuff, some of it neutral, much of it negative, but in the last analysis it is the constant presence of Christ at the heart of our concrete world.
Our world is under the pressure of Christ at an internal generative level. Once again this is not any kind of mathematically obvious fact; it does not impose itself by force. But it does mean that a Christian does not and cannot look outside of her actual human world for the truth of Christ. It means that the human world is itself the stuff of the divine, that God has become an organic part of the human system. It means your neighborhood, your city, your mall, it's all a virtual church! It means that despite the contradictions, the killings, the betrayals and the danger, Christ indeed has the victory. It means that forgiveness and peace have become the one and only true meaning of the world: Satan has indeed fallen like lightning and the semiotic reign of violence is collapsing.
It means love is the normal and constant sign of being human. It fills my backyard just as much as my computer, my computer just as my backyard...
Tony Bartlett
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Three W's and Three Anthropologies...
What is happening to us? I mean the U.S. (Yes, the U.S. is us! I couldn't have said that five weeks ago..)
It seems we are morphing into the domestic population of a 21st century Super-Rome, kept happy and stupid by a dole of bread and circuses, while the elite live on secluded estates and our armies trample across the world, fighting off barbarian hordes?
Sound vaguely right? The only major difference in the terms of comparison--a weird but totally crucial difference--is that in ancient Rome there was something called Christianity. It was a small subversive movement, frequently despised and persecuted, which did not believe in killing...
Huh?
Yes, that's right, there's a huge disconnect, because now we also have Christianity, and it not only not small and subversive, it has become imperial Western society's dominant religious institution and its traditional worldview. How can that make any sense?
How can this thing called Christianity have effectively allied itself with its own great symbolic opposite? And not just allied, but over time produced its own unique and mighty hybrid?
Responding to this disconnect demands some kind of framework of understanding. And my hope is to present that, to provide a handle on this most extraordinary contradiction and conundrum for believers. What follows, therefore, is a somewhat longer blog, an attempt to gain traction in what feels like a vertical free-fall of two related identities: Christianity and America, America and Christianity.
I want to say ultimately there are three different "anthropologies" at work in Christianity and America. I think anthropology is a better core concept than theology, because an anthropology is about how you relate at a primary level to other humans, whereas theology is so often what you think about God. Thought about God is so easy to lose track of, and quickly become meaningless. Whereas how we relate to others is always concrete. Anthropology, therefore, determines theology, and is more primary than theology. Good theology grounds itself in anthropology as, I believe, Jesus taught, showed and lived.
x x x
This is an over-achieving blog for sure, but worth it if you consider what's at stake and you follow it through to the end! It continues in two main parts; the first is context, the second response. I admit I will be hugely summarizing and condensing. But the benefit of summarizing is concentration. And concerted reflection is so badly needed today in contrast to the mind-emptying blur of information we normally live within.
First then, the contemporary context which will help set up the framework. I want to talk about the WWW.
No, I'm not referring to the World Wide Web, but rather Weather, War and Wealth.
To begin then with Weather...it's impossible to deny climate change. The only real question posed is whether the change is critical and whether humans are the cause. As regards the first half of the question the sheet ice in Greenland and Antarctica is visibly decreasing. As a result of these and other factors the International Panel on Climate Change estimates that the global average sea level will rise between 0.6 and 2 feet (0.18 to 0.59 meters) in the next century (IPCC, 2007).
The tiny mid-Pacific nation of Tuvalu can serve as the canary in the mine. As the sea level has risen, Tuvalu has experienced lowland flooding, saltwater intrusion affecting its drinking water and food production, coastal erosion and increasingly destructive storms eating away at its land mass. Its leaders are now asking Australia and New Zealand to accept their whole population as environmental refugees--so far to no avail. What is happening to Tuvalu today can happen to the U.S. barrier islands tomorrow, including Long Island...(http://www.earth-policy.org/plan_b_updates/2001/update2) And its landlocked mirror inverse--ferocious wildfires from California to Arizona--is already happening.
As regards the human causation here is the verdict of the United States National Research Council. "There is a strong, credible body of evidence, based on multiple lines of research, documenting that climate is changing and that these changes are in large part caused by human activities. While much remains to be learned, the core phenomenon, scientific questions, and hypotheses have been examined thoroughly and have stood firm in the face of serious scientific debate and careful evaluation of alternative explanations.” (United States National Research Council, Advancing the Science of Climate Change.)
But then expressly at this point other voices will be heard, questioning the figures of studies like this, or citing other studies, loudly claiming that anthropogenetic climate change is a hoax. In other words what is happening to the people of Tuvalu is just part of standard cycles of geological and meteorological shift. To attempt to take on a sense of human responsibility, and thus a regime of good environmental practice, is a plot to restrict freedom and to deny the inevitable tough truths of earthly nature and suffering.
Exactly! In this response we are dealing with ideology and theology, modes of thinking which shape the world in advance for us before we even open our eyes on particular situations. In this case they assert that we are each of us free in a supremely isolated legal sense while we all live in a physically fallen world. And any attempt to think and act otherwise is to deny the true message of individual salvation in another world, and corollary supreme rights of the individual!
Next up, War.
The U.S. is now engaged in three, four or five wars, depending on how you keep count. The conflict in Iraq has cost $3 trillion plus (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/03/AR2010090302200.html), a mind-boggling sum which I fully believe: the hidden costs of war are exponential and always exceed any audit. As of the end of May this year 4457 US soldiers have been killed and over 32,000 seriously wounded. Iraqi "extra deaths" are not reliably recorded but are conservatively in the region of half a million (the famous Lancet report put them 654, 965 in 2006, and the Opinion Research Business in London put them at 1.2 million plus in 2007). Refugees are in the region of 2 million plus. As we all know the initial justification for these terrible events-- the presence of WMD (weapons of mass destruction)--has proven perniciously and perfidiously false. But this was the bill of goods that was sold us, and once again individuals and websites can be found still arguing the case. And that is to say nothing of the popular association of Sadam with 9/11, which was fully denied by none less than G.W. Bush, but for many remains fixed as dogma.
Which again strongly suggests there is some kind of ideology or theology shaping these assessments and the actions that flow from them.
The motive for the war in Afghanistan involved toppling the Taliban and yet now it seems the U.S. is in dialogue with yes, the Taliban! Don't get me wrong. I support this wholeheartedly, but then what was it all for in the first place? Is there such a thing as a good Taliban, different from a bad one, and how do we tell them apart? Moreover, a lot of this war has been prosecuted via aerial drones and rockets unleashed on people and territory with which we are not legally at war, i.e. in the Tribal Territories in the north of Pakistan. Once again it is a question of the extremely fluid facts related to our chosen war-making and the way an overall ideology or state of mind persuades us to continue to engage heedlessly in these murky, murderous undertakings.
Yemen/Somalia/Libya take your pick, we have some sort of armed engagement going on in these places. The CIA, an organization founded in 1945, has taken on a largely unaccountable role where it can engage in lethal actions at the behest of the president. It begs into play yet again a comparison to Rome: the Praetorian Guard loyal to the Emperor alone!
The overall conclusion here is that war for the U.S. has taken on a life of its own. It is not only justified ideologically but becomes its own self-justification, reinforcing in turn the violence in our spirit and theology. As Heny Giroux says, "War, violence and death have become the organizing principle of governance and culture in the United States as we move into the second decade of the 21st century."
Finally, Wealth. The facts here are pretty straightforward. Since 1980 the U.S. economy has doubled in size but the average person's wages, adjusting for inflation, have remained more or less flat. Before 1980 the top 1% of U.S. earners took home 10% of total income. Now they take home over 20% and own over 40% of the nation's entire wealth. Before 1980 the top tax rate for the wealthy was 70%. It's now 35%. And if you add in capital gains they end up paying only 17%. (Watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTzMqm2TwgE&feature=player_embedded). It means that the present generation has witnessed an unprecedented transfer of wealth to a very small minority.
This can only have happened if the population was in some way prepared to accept the transfer. And they could only be so willing--who gives up wealth for no reason?--if ideology and theology had told them it was necessary. There was an episode of the Colbert Report in which Stephen Colbert was interviewing Michael Moore who had just presented these facts. Colbert in his faux right-wing manner retorted that the money belonged to the wealthy as a matter of right, because they had earned it. There was nothing faux about the automatic credibility of the argument he echoed. It "rang true" because so many people have accepted it as true, that wealth, even vastly increased wealth as a share of the national pie, belongs to the individual as a simple matter of personal right.
The point of this example, as in all the others, is not so much to argue the particular case--although it is obvious where my own sympathies lie. What is essential is the way a set of preconceived notions or attitudes bends critical thought in a certain direction.
x x x
This leads to the second and crucial part: the response.
I have used ideology and theology almost interchangeably. One of the established meanings of the first is a political way of thinking resistant to factual contradiction. Theology is not so often seen in these terms. It can certainly be understood as resistant to factual contradiction, but because of the device by which it is conceived as separate from politics, i.e. it belongs to a supposed internal, spiritual, private area of human existence, it is not so often blamed. But Christian theology because it is as much to do with the world as it with God can in fact easily create and feel like an ideological position. It is in fact the major ideological undergirding of the present power structure in the U.S.
Immediately you say this, however, you create all sorts of roadblocks in people's minds. If Christian theology is a matter of private faith how can it be public ideology? If Christian theology is about a transcendent God how can it be tied to a given political structure?
The way through is to turn to anthropology. Any theology carries with it an anthropology and to think of it as somehow pure of one effectively masks the anthropology and makes it that much more inevitable. Indeed it turns theology into ideology. Unmasking its hidden anthropology will demonstrate theology as ideology. Revising the anthropology in light of the gospel can make it authentic theology.
We may therefore say there are three major brands of anthropology today competing for the voice of Christian theology.
The first is the one at work in all the examples above and that I have in many ways already described. It may be summarized as follows. Every human is individual both in his/her own eyes and in God's eyes. As individuals in collectives they are also rule-bound, but this impinges on freedom.. So we must always remain free to reject the rules and to settle our affairs with violence. The single rule for Christianity is to accept Jesus as your Savior and then his blood cleanses you in the sight of God. You can refuse, but if you do you will be sent to hell. If disputes arise between individuals we have lawyers or guns which can sort things out. If disputes arise between nations we have war, lots of it. Finally God as the supreme individual settles everything with supreme violence.
The second anthropology is very different. It can be illustrated in terms of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Jesus led his hearer to the question "Who was a neighbor to that man?", i.e. to a moment of disclosure where there is no given limit to being a neighbor. And this is possible not because there is a rule, but because there is disclosure of compassion as the core human relation. "Love your neighbor as yourself" is not a rule but a disclosure of the truth that the neighbor is the self, and vice versa. We are free but our freedom is poised between two radical alternatives. If we do not link to others through love we will link necessarily through violence and it will always get worse. Thus, in respect of the first anthropology, its invocation of violence as sanction brings about the very crisis Jesus is warning us against.
This is also authentic evangelical anthropology because it is grace not works. The first anthropology is works because it invokes law and violence which are supremely human products. (See summary at Romans 4:15, "The law works wrath!") It is only this anthropology that introduces something radically new into the human equation: the possibility of relating to the other in self-abandoning love.
The third anthropology can contain elements of both the first two and is hard to pin down. What is distinctive about it is the way it idealizes things, removes them to the level of mind, essence, idea. It loves the "Cosmic Christ" because that provides the sense that everything is already perfect and the perfection can be accessed by our minds. It idealizes "the church" as the symbolic space of salvation already achieved. Because essence and symbol are at its core it can easily slip into a facile universalism where "all paths are equal" and there is no recognition of the generative violence at work in human culture. Because of this it is also prepared at certain moments to concede the case to violence as regrettably necessary--it has no radically alternative anthropology. At the same it idealizes love and peace so long as they come in more-or-less-achieved symbolic form. I will say at once that many "progressives", including myself, generally inhabit this twilight anthropology and migrate back and forth to the second as they feel able.
To conclude, therefore, the first anthropology is fundamentalism, the third is liberalism, and the second is something new. It should not have a name beyond that because it has to be created each time anew. It is not law or ideal. It is love. And it is generative. Anything lively and good in the third lives by virtue of it. And even in the first those who accept the law of love can and will discover it for themselves. It is this generativity that puts it at the heart of anything truly emerging and which promises, even and especially at a moment of crisis, to bring something radically new to U.S. identity.
Plainly also this new thing stands in profound contrast with the first anthropology of violence, the one that has haunted the soul of Christianity beginning from the 4th century and has continued to invite ever more demons in through the course of the Middle Ages, the Reformation, and up to the present. The three W's of Weather, War and Wealth are simply the latest marching orders of this ancient Legion. It is high time, and past time, to speak in the liberating voice of Jesus, "Come Out!"
Tony Bartlett
It seems we are morphing into the domestic population of a 21st century Super-Rome, kept happy and stupid by a dole of bread and circuses, while the elite live on secluded estates and our armies trample across the world, fighting off barbarian hordes?
Sound vaguely right? The only major difference in the terms of comparison--a weird but totally crucial difference--is that in ancient Rome there was something called Christianity. It was a small subversive movement, frequently despised and persecuted, which did not believe in killing...
Huh?
Yes, that's right, there's a huge disconnect, because now we also have Christianity, and it not only not small and subversive, it has become imperial Western society's dominant religious institution and its traditional worldview. How can that make any sense?
How can this thing called Christianity have effectively allied itself with its own great symbolic opposite? And not just allied, but over time produced its own unique and mighty hybrid?
Responding to this disconnect demands some kind of framework of understanding. And my hope is to present that, to provide a handle on this most extraordinary contradiction and conundrum for believers. What follows, therefore, is a somewhat longer blog, an attempt to gain traction in what feels like a vertical free-fall of two related identities: Christianity and America, America and Christianity.
I want to say ultimately there are three different "anthropologies" at work in Christianity and America. I think anthropology is a better core concept than theology, because an anthropology is about how you relate at a primary level to other humans, whereas theology is so often what you think about God. Thought about God is so easy to lose track of, and quickly become meaningless. Whereas how we relate to others is always concrete. Anthropology, therefore, determines theology, and is more primary than theology. Good theology grounds itself in anthropology as, I believe, Jesus taught, showed and lived.
x x x
This is an over-achieving blog for sure, but worth it if you consider what's at stake and you follow it through to the end! It continues in two main parts; the first is context, the second response. I admit I will be hugely summarizing and condensing. But the benefit of summarizing is concentration. And concerted reflection is so badly needed today in contrast to the mind-emptying blur of information we normally live within.
First then, the contemporary context which will help set up the framework. I want to talk about the WWW.
No, I'm not referring to the World Wide Web, but rather Weather, War and Wealth.
To begin then with Weather...it's impossible to deny climate change. The only real question posed is whether the change is critical and whether humans are the cause. As regards the first half of the question the sheet ice in Greenland and Antarctica is visibly decreasing. As a result of these and other factors the International Panel on Climate Change estimates that the global average sea level will rise between 0.6 and 2 feet (0.18 to 0.59 meters) in the next century (IPCC, 2007).
The tiny mid-Pacific nation of Tuvalu can serve as the canary in the mine. As the sea level has risen, Tuvalu has experienced lowland flooding, saltwater intrusion affecting its drinking water and food production, coastal erosion and increasingly destructive storms eating away at its land mass. Its leaders are now asking Australia and New Zealand to accept their whole population as environmental refugees--so far to no avail. What is happening to Tuvalu today can happen to the U.S. barrier islands tomorrow, including Long Island...(http://www.earth-policy.org/plan_b_updates/2001/update2) And its landlocked mirror inverse--ferocious wildfires from California to Arizona--is already happening.
As regards the human causation here is the verdict of the United States National Research Council. "There is a strong, credible body of evidence, based on multiple lines of research, documenting that climate is changing and that these changes are in large part caused by human activities. While much remains to be learned, the core phenomenon, scientific questions, and hypotheses have been examined thoroughly and have stood firm in the face of serious scientific debate and careful evaluation of alternative explanations.” (United States National Research Council, Advancing the Science of Climate Change.)
But then expressly at this point other voices will be heard, questioning the figures of studies like this, or citing other studies, loudly claiming that anthropogenetic climate change is a hoax. In other words what is happening to the people of Tuvalu is just part of standard cycles of geological and meteorological shift. To attempt to take on a sense of human responsibility, and thus a regime of good environmental practice, is a plot to restrict freedom and to deny the inevitable tough truths of earthly nature and suffering.
Exactly! In this response we are dealing with ideology and theology, modes of thinking which shape the world in advance for us before we even open our eyes on particular situations. In this case they assert that we are each of us free in a supremely isolated legal sense while we all live in a physically fallen world. And any attempt to think and act otherwise is to deny the true message of individual salvation in another world, and corollary supreme rights of the individual!
Next up, War.
The U.S. is now engaged in three, four or five wars, depending on how you keep count. The conflict in Iraq has cost $3 trillion plus (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/03/AR2010090302200.html), a mind-boggling sum which I fully believe: the hidden costs of war are exponential and always exceed any audit. As of the end of May this year 4457 US soldiers have been killed and over 32,000 seriously wounded. Iraqi "extra deaths" are not reliably recorded but are conservatively in the region of half a million (the famous Lancet report put them 654, 965 in 2006, and the Opinion Research Business in London put them at 1.2 million plus in 2007). Refugees are in the region of 2 million plus. As we all know the initial justification for these terrible events-- the presence of WMD (weapons of mass destruction)--has proven perniciously and perfidiously false. But this was the bill of goods that was sold us, and once again individuals and websites can be found still arguing the case. And that is to say nothing of the popular association of Sadam with 9/11, which was fully denied by none less than G.W. Bush, but for many remains fixed as dogma.
Which again strongly suggests there is some kind of ideology or theology shaping these assessments and the actions that flow from them.
The motive for the war in Afghanistan involved toppling the Taliban and yet now it seems the U.S. is in dialogue with yes, the Taliban! Don't get me wrong. I support this wholeheartedly, but then what was it all for in the first place? Is there such a thing as a good Taliban, different from a bad one, and how do we tell them apart? Moreover, a lot of this war has been prosecuted via aerial drones and rockets unleashed on people and territory with which we are not legally at war, i.e. in the Tribal Territories in the north of Pakistan. Once again it is a question of the extremely fluid facts related to our chosen war-making and the way an overall ideology or state of mind persuades us to continue to engage heedlessly in these murky, murderous undertakings.
Yemen/Somalia/Libya take your pick, we have some sort of armed engagement going on in these places. The CIA, an organization founded in 1945, has taken on a largely unaccountable role where it can engage in lethal actions at the behest of the president. It begs into play yet again a comparison to Rome: the Praetorian Guard loyal to the Emperor alone!
The overall conclusion here is that war for the U.S. has taken on a life of its own. It is not only justified ideologically but becomes its own self-justification, reinforcing in turn the violence in our spirit and theology. As Heny Giroux says, "War, violence and death have become the organizing principle of governance and culture in the United States as we move into the second decade of the 21st century."
Finally, Wealth. The facts here are pretty straightforward. Since 1980 the U.S. economy has doubled in size but the average person's wages, adjusting for inflation, have remained more or less flat. Before 1980 the top 1% of U.S. earners took home 10% of total income. Now they take home over 20% and own over 40% of the nation's entire wealth. Before 1980 the top tax rate for the wealthy was 70%. It's now 35%. And if you add in capital gains they end up paying only 17%. (Watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTzMqm2TwgE&feature=player_embedded). It means that the present generation has witnessed an unprecedented transfer of wealth to a very small minority.
This can only have happened if the population was in some way prepared to accept the transfer. And they could only be so willing--who gives up wealth for no reason?--if ideology and theology had told them it was necessary. There was an episode of the Colbert Report in which Stephen Colbert was interviewing Michael Moore who had just presented these facts. Colbert in his faux right-wing manner retorted that the money belonged to the wealthy as a matter of right, because they had earned it. There was nothing faux about the automatic credibility of the argument he echoed. It "rang true" because so many people have accepted it as true, that wealth, even vastly increased wealth as a share of the national pie, belongs to the individual as a simple matter of personal right.
The point of this example, as in all the others, is not so much to argue the particular case--although it is obvious where my own sympathies lie. What is essential is the way a set of preconceived notions or attitudes bends critical thought in a certain direction.
x x x
This leads to the second and crucial part: the response.
I have used ideology and theology almost interchangeably. One of the established meanings of the first is a political way of thinking resistant to factual contradiction. Theology is not so often seen in these terms. It can certainly be understood as resistant to factual contradiction, but because of the device by which it is conceived as separate from politics, i.e. it belongs to a supposed internal, spiritual, private area of human existence, it is not so often blamed. But Christian theology because it is as much to do with the world as it with God can in fact easily create and feel like an ideological position. It is in fact the major ideological undergirding of the present power structure in the U.S.
Immediately you say this, however, you create all sorts of roadblocks in people's minds. If Christian theology is a matter of private faith how can it be public ideology? If Christian theology is about a transcendent God how can it be tied to a given political structure?
The way through is to turn to anthropology. Any theology carries with it an anthropology and to think of it as somehow pure of one effectively masks the anthropology and makes it that much more inevitable. Indeed it turns theology into ideology. Unmasking its hidden anthropology will demonstrate theology as ideology. Revising the anthropology in light of the gospel can make it authentic theology.
We may therefore say there are three major brands of anthropology today competing for the voice of Christian theology.
The first is the one at work in all the examples above and that I have in many ways already described. It may be summarized as follows. Every human is individual both in his/her own eyes and in God's eyes. As individuals in collectives they are also rule-bound, but this impinges on freedom.. So we must always remain free to reject the rules and to settle our affairs with violence. The single rule for Christianity is to accept Jesus as your Savior and then his blood cleanses you in the sight of God. You can refuse, but if you do you will be sent to hell. If disputes arise between individuals we have lawyers or guns which can sort things out. If disputes arise between nations we have war, lots of it. Finally God as the supreme individual settles everything with supreme violence.
The second anthropology is very different. It can be illustrated in terms of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Jesus led his hearer to the question "Who was a neighbor to that man?", i.e. to a moment of disclosure where there is no given limit to being a neighbor. And this is possible not because there is a rule, but because there is disclosure of compassion as the core human relation. "Love your neighbor as yourself" is not a rule but a disclosure of the truth that the neighbor is the self, and vice versa. We are free but our freedom is poised between two radical alternatives. If we do not link to others through love we will link necessarily through violence and it will always get worse. Thus, in respect of the first anthropology, its invocation of violence as sanction brings about the very crisis Jesus is warning us against.
This is also authentic evangelical anthropology because it is grace not works. The first anthropology is works because it invokes law and violence which are supremely human products. (See summary at Romans 4:15, "The law works wrath!") It is only this anthropology that introduces something radically new into the human equation: the possibility of relating to the other in self-abandoning love.
The third anthropology can contain elements of both the first two and is hard to pin down. What is distinctive about it is the way it idealizes things, removes them to the level of mind, essence, idea. It loves the "Cosmic Christ" because that provides the sense that everything is already perfect and the perfection can be accessed by our minds. It idealizes "the church" as the symbolic space of salvation already achieved. Because essence and symbol are at its core it can easily slip into a facile universalism where "all paths are equal" and there is no recognition of the generative violence at work in human culture. Because of this it is also prepared at certain moments to concede the case to violence as regrettably necessary--it has no radically alternative anthropology. At the same it idealizes love and peace so long as they come in more-or-less-achieved symbolic form. I will say at once that many "progressives", including myself, generally inhabit this twilight anthropology and migrate back and forth to the second as they feel able.
To conclude, therefore, the first anthropology is fundamentalism, the third is liberalism, and the second is something new. It should not have a name beyond that because it has to be created each time anew. It is not law or ideal. It is love. And it is generative. Anything lively and good in the third lives by virtue of it. And even in the first those who accept the law of love can and will discover it for themselves. It is this generativity that puts it at the heart of anything truly emerging and which promises, even and especially at a moment of crisis, to bring something radically new to U.S. identity.
Plainly also this new thing stands in profound contrast with the first anthropology of violence, the one that has haunted the soul of Christianity beginning from the 4th century and has continued to invite ever more demons in through the course of the Middle Ages, the Reformation, and up to the present. The three W's of Weather, War and Wealth are simply the latest marching orders of this ancient Legion. It is high time, and past time, to speak in the liberating voice of Jesus, "Come Out!"
Tony Bartlett
Sunday, May 29, 2011
The Oath
On May 19th I went down to the Federal Court House and became a US citizen. Instead of God Bless America the Spirit of Syracuse women crooners should have been hitting Subterranean Homesick Blues, Dylan's caustic rap on being American and young in the sixties. That song, and others like it, shaped how I felt about the US back in the day, and would have made a much better soundtrack to the occasion. I always imagined myself right there with Dylan ducking between some crooked Cold War spy and a frontier-scout dealing who-knows-what, all the while hounded by a guilty sense of fate. Coming now to America for real, was I still dodging destiny or was it truly an offer of something new?
Johnny’s in the basement
Mixing up the medicine
I’m on the pavement
Thinking about the government
The man in the trench coat
Badge out, laid off
Says he’s got a bad cough
Wants to get it paid off
Look out kid
It’s somethin’ you did
God knows when
But you’re doin’ it again
You better duck down the alley way
Lookin’ for a new friend
The man in the coon-skin cap
By the big pen
Wants eleven dollar bills
You only got ten
Mixing up the medicine
I’m on the pavement
Thinking about the government
The man in the trench coat
Badge out, laid off
Says he’s got a bad cough
Wants to get it paid off
Look out kid
It’s somethin’ you did
God knows when
But you’re doin’ it again
You better duck down the alley way
Lookin’ for a new friend
The man in the coon-skin cap
By the big pen
Wants eleven dollar bills
You only got ten
I stood there with all the other immigrants (thirty odd from twenty one nations, places as diverse and distant as Uzbekistan and Argentina) pledging my allegiance to the flag and the United States which it signifies. I had done my best to condition my oath to an intentional lifestyle of nonviolence and, fair enough, the federal officer at the interview had accepted, without skipping a beat, the conscientious refusal to bear arms. But the oath continued... "to perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law," and I had agreed to that. At the time I felt "noncombatant" was the key word which allowed me to go along in conscience. But this morning it struck me, there in front of the judge and the flag, that I was pledging myself to a nation that saw itself for ever and always on the brink of war. Nothing about pledging yourself to peace or the welfare of your fellow human being.....
Through my twenties the US was in Vietnam. It seemed that war went on for ever. I identified with the students at the time who saw the far eastern engagement as a piece of brutal militarism in the cause of capitalism, waged against Vietnamese peasants who wished simply to live and work in a country governed by themselves. Plus it seemed that many young Americans felt they had no stake in the fight and wanted out. It always seemed the young people were the good guys on both sides of the big pond.
But then we were all getting older and the Cold War shifted focus from the far east to Afghanistan and the build up of nuclear weapons in Europe. Even though it seemed anti-war had been victorious in response to Vietnam the battlefield had simply morphed and moved location, and the dangers had become more acute and terrible. Thatcher and Reagan were remaking the world economically and politically and the voice of protest seemed effectively neutered. It was more or less at that time that my own life changed dramatically and, as I concentrated on survival, "Power to the People" sounded like nothing so much as on old hippie rant....
I would dream about far away places. I would go constantly on these dream trips up through the mountains, or on a long train journey, but I never thought it would be the USA. Essentially I was trying to get away from a previous life, and any place would have done. Yet it was the USA it turned out to be.
And, of course, that makes sense. The USA is the single most evident place in the world where people who wish to start over have sought to come. America is the place where the whole Western world started over back in the sixteenth century and it's been rebooting the universe every since. I really am grateful to get to be a part of this country and its immense sense of possibility. But pledging allegiance, especially with all those references to arms, well it doesn't sit easy, and, in point of fact, what private personal sense can it have?
So I have to say for the sake of self, and any integrity I might claim, that when I made the pledge I did so in a way that went deeper than militarism, far deeper. As a kind of apologia to the past and promise to the future here then is what I do mean.
I do not pledge loyalty to the US in the Enlightenment sense that supposedly moved the framers of the constitution, the belief in effortless rationality, in self evident truths. Neither do I do so in the popularly believed frontier sense, the manifest destiny to conquer all that stands in the way, leaving no stone unturned.or enemy unconquered. Nor at all did I do it in the Holywood movie sense, of the belief that anyone with half a brain and willingness to work hard can become as rich as Bill Gates..
I take the oath of loyalty to the USA in a sense which I believe underpins all these expressions of human self-projection. I am committing myself to something which in fact gives life and breath to the whole exceptionalist and expansionist mood even as it is almost completely unrecognized and constantly distorted and disfigured by it. What is at work in America is the spirit of deep freedom and boundless possibility communicated by the Christian gospel and instilled in the veins of Western culture. There are two things that can push men and women out into the unknown. One is greed for conquest and the other is faith and hope. And the third is a profoundly muddied mixture of the two.
This last state is what characterizes the US and its history but that should not blind us to the authentic presence of the gospel in the mix. Pledging myself to the US is really pledging myself to the work of the gospel in human culture. It means promising myself (with apologies to Dylan) to a "subterranean life-quick news" that knows no ultimate boundaries of state or race, of politics or party, of pride or past. For me the US is the land of Holywood in the core sense of imagination, the land of fluid and constantly re-envisioned self-image. It is the place where a dynamic idea can take hold and sweep all before it, and that is so because the most dynamic idea of all---of God-made-flesh--is at the root of its borderless self- meaning. The US is a long difficult work of human transformation. Ranged against its positive outcome are all the risks of wealth and war, of paranoia and anger, and now in addition climate change and environmental breakdown. But the boundless horizons of the US are encompassed finally in one world because they are radically shaped by the hope and love of the gospel.
I am o.k. to take this oath, therefore, because it is a spiritual error waiting to correct itself (which is par for the course for just about any other oath I have taken). All our words, just like the whole earth, are under the long slow arc of divine possibility and one day that one great Word will make all those other, lesser ones true. "Look out kid. It’s somethin’ you did. God knows when, but you’re doin’ it again!"
Tony Bartlett
Tony Bartlett
Friday, April 22, 2011
Holes
Anyone who writes (or is driven to write) has some single big thing around which his or her writing is always turning, always navigating. It's an unavoidable bump in the road which the individual's work comes up against, goes over, or simply crashes into, perhaps sometimes breaking down completely.
In good writers, the best writers, this bump is hugely productive. There is enormous skill and discipline exercised in returning to the bump again and again and making the writing do the most amazing things, sailing over the bump, screeching round it, even dislodging the bump entirely and carrying it off like a trophy impaled on the front of the hood. I think of themes of "affliction" and "the void" in Simone Weil, the continual dissolution or disillusion of the ideal in Orwell, the vast undertow of sensuality held in check by Augustine's relentless tide of thought.
I am not putting myself in any way in this company, just simply recognizing the community of the bump: And I have to say, in my case, it something to do with space. More precisely, the lack of it. My bump is really a big hole in the road.
Probably many people lack space. Perhaps even most people on the planet are prisoners of worlds not their own, where they don't actually belong. But it was my poor fortune to be exiled from space in a very particular way, one in which the sucking away of space reached into the depths of my personal being. I was chosen to be a Roman Catholic priest from an extremely tender age by a combination of genuine spiritual instinct and an upbringing that saw the surrounding culture as, in so many words, evil, with the Roman Catholic church as the only viable social alternative. Add the default Platonism of RC discourse back in the fifties and what resulted was the vacuuming away of a huge amount of the earth and its actual territory.
Because of this I used to love travel to foreign countries. As all the signs and symbols were strange I didn't have to assume automatically this was bad space, and it was possible briefly to relax. Now at a point in time when I am about to become a U.S. citizen I rejoice in a perception of the basic neutrality of U.S. landmass for me. It's not native soil, but neither is it alien like my actual land of birth was.
But then what is truly good space? What would it be to experience space as life? It is the possibility of breathing freely. It is moments and occasions when your being and person flow seamlessly into the surrounding environment and you are at one with your world. It is connectedness to everything because the signs and signals of grace have filled the world with peace, joy, love.
Here is Simone Weil, and I have to say I feel a certain affinity with this particular writer's bump!
"All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass."
She is talking about empty space and how it can be experienced as grace. I am talking about something somewhat different, the denial of space completely. But then they are related, because if at a certain point the lack of space can be accepted voluntarily as an emptiness, a letting go, a desert waiting to be filled, then in line with what she is saying--but widening the frame to the full scriptural dimensions-- it can make real world transformation begin.
The tension of Christian existence is never toward annihilation--it does not produce Nirvana, the blowing out of the real. Rather it is toward an astonishing reconstitution of the real, the recreation or refreshing of our world by love, with and in all its variety and splendor. To believe in Christ in a world of violence is never simply a vague wishing away of the human space. There is always the concrete witness of the Spirit as love which is a strange physical ability or power to accept the disassembly of the present real and connect it at once to the assembly of the final real. And in fact the only way to reach the final real is to undergo this disassembly which is the overturning and undoing of all our human violence.
In the present Holy Week and Easter time what better description could there be of the cross and resurrection? Crucifixion is the ultimate denial of space: unable to move, to go anywhere, to hide yourself from shame, your own body your intolerable fixed point. But then in the unfathomable depths of the Christ exactly this non-space became an endless space of grace, the inexhaustible sign of love for the real. How could this infinite space of love not be raised up in deathless life? How could it not become the new creation witnessed by Mary of Magdala on one ordinary first day of the week back in first century Palestine?
As for all those holes in the road? Really, perhaps just openings to an empty tomb...
Tony Bartlett
In good writers, the best writers, this bump is hugely productive. There is enormous skill and discipline exercised in returning to the bump again and again and making the writing do the most amazing things, sailing over the bump, screeching round it, even dislodging the bump entirely and carrying it off like a trophy impaled on the front of the hood. I think of themes of "affliction" and "the void" in Simone Weil, the continual dissolution or disillusion of the ideal in Orwell, the vast undertow of sensuality held in check by Augustine's relentless tide of thought.
I am not putting myself in any way in this company, just simply recognizing the community of the bump: And I have to say, in my case, it something to do with space. More precisely, the lack of it. My bump is really a big hole in the road.
Probably many people lack space. Perhaps even most people on the planet are prisoners of worlds not their own, where they don't actually belong. But it was my poor fortune to be exiled from space in a very particular way, one in which the sucking away of space reached into the depths of my personal being. I was chosen to be a Roman Catholic priest from an extremely tender age by a combination of genuine spiritual instinct and an upbringing that saw the surrounding culture as, in so many words, evil, with the Roman Catholic church as the only viable social alternative. Add the default Platonism of RC discourse back in the fifties and what resulted was the vacuuming away of a huge amount of the earth and its actual territory.
Because of this I used to love travel to foreign countries. As all the signs and symbols were strange I didn't have to assume automatically this was bad space, and it was possible briefly to relax. Now at a point in time when I am about to become a U.S. citizen I rejoice in a perception of the basic neutrality of U.S. landmass for me. It's not native soil, but neither is it alien like my actual land of birth was.
But then what is truly good space? What would it be to experience space as life? It is the possibility of breathing freely. It is moments and occasions when your being and person flow seamlessly into the surrounding environment and you are at one with your world. It is connectedness to everything because the signs and signals of grace have filled the world with peace, joy, love.
Here is Simone Weil, and I have to say I feel a certain affinity with this particular writer's bump!
"All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass."
She is talking about empty space and how it can be experienced as grace. I am talking about something somewhat different, the denial of space completely. But then they are related, because if at a certain point the lack of space can be accepted voluntarily as an emptiness, a letting go, a desert waiting to be filled, then in line with what she is saying--but widening the frame to the full scriptural dimensions-- it can make real world transformation begin.
The tension of Christian existence is never toward annihilation--it does not produce Nirvana, the blowing out of the real. Rather it is toward an astonishing reconstitution of the real, the recreation or refreshing of our world by love, with and in all its variety and splendor. To believe in Christ in a world of violence is never simply a vague wishing away of the human space. There is always the concrete witness of the Spirit as love which is a strange physical ability or power to accept the disassembly of the present real and connect it at once to the assembly of the final real. And in fact the only way to reach the final real is to undergo this disassembly which is the overturning and undoing of all our human violence.
In the present Holy Week and Easter time what better description could there be of the cross and resurrection? Crucifixion is the ultimate denial of space: unable to move, to go anywhere, to hide yourself from shame, your own body your intolerable fixed point. But then in the unfathomable depths of the Christ exactly this non-space became an endless space of grace, the inexhaustible sign of love for the real. How could this infinite space of love not be raised up in deathless life? How could it not become the new creation witnessed by Mary of Magdala on one ordinary first day of the week back in first century Palestine?
As for all those holes in the road? Really, perhaps just openings to an empty tomb...
Tony Bartlett
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Sunday Bomb and Second Sowing
Sunday morning and it's like a bomb's gone off.
The streets are deserted. No survivors.
I sit at my desk, part of the aftermath, resolutely unable to go to church. And why should I? The arena in which the gospel must now be sown has moved on from those medieval landscapes, Catholic or Protestant, in which all the churches were born. This is now the postmodern world, the bombed out world.
The post-Christian world. The apocalyptic world.
Moreover, it is exactly the kind of world which the more it sees itself as post-Christian the more it is uniquely Christian.
The truth is all the people wiped off the streets by the Sunday bomb are floating in some strange comfortable Jesus-loving space, without gods, without shame, and with a world fully harnessed for their good, for their proper human narrative. Certainly, yes, there are growing threats and crises to terrify us--and that is another reason why it's correctly called the Sunday bomb--but if that should drive people back into church they could only go with a built-in sense of cynicism that would quickly drive them right out again.
It is a European world and increasingly a North American world. A world brought about by long exposure to the gospel and an equally long exposure to the church and its multiple fatal compromises with violence, with war, with hierarchy and its uses. So the streets are empty because, simply put, you can be a better Christian staying in bed than going to church.
And, emphatically, that's not just a negative reaction. The streets are empty because they are also full, thick with human meaning, a meaning gradually put in place by the relentless spread of the authentic Christian spirit of community and brotherhood under the rational guise of Greek democracy and rights. And now there's also the internet, a technical explosion of communication that does and can only mimic the communion of love dreamed of in the scriptures.
For sure there are churches that remain open. There are the traditional gangly spires and faux facades dotting the landscape, offering the comfortable persuasion that nothing really has changed. God is in his heaven and these are his chosen means of preserving the divine order here on earth as in heaven. Even so they uphold a Sunday ideology that has less and less credibility and is little more than a cultural relic, a kind of Sunday vacation from lived-world reality. Fundamentalists understand this and carry the old-time Sunday fight to the rest of the week, invoking their Sunday fantasy against all-comers. Only the community churches and mega-churches really get it. With their rock bands, multi- media, sports clubs, kids spaces and general Starbucks ambient they make Sunday as much like the rest of the week as possible. But of course in the process they strengthen the Sunday bomb. People can just as well stay at home if it works better for them!
The Sunday bomb is an exhausted Western post-Christendom basking in the irradiated glow of the Christian gospel that can never be unannounced, never un-exploded. God has become one of us, the ordinary everyday human, leaving all the gods undone and all their empires exposed. Everyone feels it, lives in it. Christianity has in fact won while the churches have lost, because they grew up battling the gods and doing deals with the empires. And, connected exactly to that, the Sunday bomb now leaves us an intensely dangerous world, full of failing empires armed to the teeth.
What is needed then is a second sowing of the Christian message, a fresh seeding in a soil that has been hybridized and prepared by the gospel itself. (With its own epistemology--of uncertainty and hope, its own strange metaphysics--of relationship, its own psychology--of desire affirmed as love.) Now is the time for an ekklesia that is faithful to the full radicalism of the gospel, for it is the only thing that can truly take root in a bombed-out irradiated world.
Communities of this ekklesia are not identified by Sunday worship, because they belong to the Sunday bomb not the Sunday of heavenly order. They belong to a world full of the anxiety and chaos of the absence of the gods, to a world where war has become the only mode of public existence. Taking root in this world they can show the way on the impossible path of forgiveness, the only path there is left. And the world itself understands this. It is haunted by the possibility of the impossible, and cannot believe in any Christianity short of this. The world itself is looking for communities of a second sowing, intentional gatherings of nonviolence, contemplation and common life, full of hope and truthfulness in an irradiated world.
And, oh, I can agree, it's not impossible that such communities also meet on Sunday. But I haven't found one near me.
Tony Bartlett, T&P Theologian in Residence
The streets are deserted. No survivors.
I sit at my desk, part of the aftermath, resolutely unable to go to church. And why should I? The arena in which the gospel must now be sown has moved on from those medieval landscapes, Catholic or Protestant, in which all the churches were born. This is now the postmodern world, the bombed out world.
The post-Christian world. The apocalyptic world.
Moreover, it is exactly the kind of world which the more it sees itself as post-Christian the more it is uniquely Christian.
The truth is all the people wiped off the streets by the Sunday bomb are floating in some strange comfortable Jesus-loving space, without gods, without shame, and with a world fully harnessed for their good, for their proper human narrative. Certainly, yes, there are growing threats and crises to terrify us--and that is another reason why it's correctly called the Sunday bomb--but if that should drive people back into church they could only go with a built-in sense of cynicism that would quickly drive them right out again.
It is a European world and increasingly a North American world. A world brought about by long exposure to the gospel and an equally long exposure to the church and its multiple fatal compromises with violence, with war, with hierarchy and its uses. So the streets are empty because, simply put, you can be a better Christian staying in bed than going to church.
And, emphatically, that's not just a negative reaction. The streets are empty because they are also full, thick with human meaning, a meaning gradually put in place by the relentless spread of the authentic Christian spirit of community and brotherhood under the rational guise of Greek democracy and rights. And now there's also the internet, a technical explosion of communication that does and can only mimic the communion of love dreamed of in the scriptures.
For sure there are churches that remain open. There are the traditional gangly spires and faux facades dotting the landscape, offering the comfortable persuasion that nothing really has changed. God is in his heaven and these are his chosen means of preserving the divine order here on earth as in heaven. Even so they uphold a Sunday ideology that has less and less credibility and is little more than a cultural relic, a kind of Sunday vacation from lived-world reality. Fundamentalists understand this and carry the old-time Sunday fight to the rest of the week, invoking their Sunday fantasy against all-comers. Only the community churches and mega-churches really get it. With their rock bands, multi- media, sports clubs, kids spaces and general Starbucks ambient they make Sunday as much like the rest of the week as possible. But of course in the process they strengthen the Sunday bomb. People can just as well stay at home if it works better for them!
The Sunday bomb is an exhausted Western post-Christendom basking in the irradiated glow of the Christian gospel that can never be unannounced, never un-exploded. God has become one of us, the ordinary everyday human, leaving all the gods undone and all their empires exposed. Everyone feels it, lives in it. Christianity has in fact won while the churches have lost, because they grew up battling the gods and doing deals with the empires. And, connected exactly to that, the Sunday bomb now leaves us an intensely dangerous world, full of failing empires armed to the teeth.
What is needed then is a second sowing of the Christian message, a fresh seeding in a soil that has been hybridized and prepared by the gospel itself. (With its own epistemology--of uncertainty and hope, its own strange metaphysics--of relationship, its own psychology--of desire affirmed as love.) Now is the time for an ekklesia that is faithful to the full radicalism of the gospel, for it is the only thing that can truly take root in a bombed-out irradiated world.
Communities of this ekklesia are not identified by Sunday worship, because they belong to the Sunday bomb not the Sunday of heavenly order. They belong to a world full of the anxiety and chaos of the absence of the gods, to a world where war has become the only mode of public existence. Taking root in this world they can show the way on the impossible path of forgiveness, the only path there is left. And the world itself understands this. It is haunted by the possibility of the impossible, and cannot believe in any Christianity short of this. The world itself is looking for communities of a second sowing, intentional gatherings of nonviolence, contemplation and common life, full of hope and truthfulness in an irradiated world.
And, oh, I can agree, it's not impossible that such communities also meet on Sunday. But I haven't found one near me.
Tony Bartlett, T&P Theologian in Residence
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