Stranger than Fiction

My son and I saw Stranger than Fiction this past Saturday. Will Ferrell was great in his role as Emma Thompson's main character, but the character I loved the most was Dustin Hoffman's English professor. Constantly drinking coffee (even while at the urinal), Hoffman got away with the use of stereotypical tics by somehow transcending them through a blend of subtle satire and feverish aplomb. One of his best lines, given as an excuse for why he can't help Ferrell, goes something like, "I'd really like to, but I'm teaching five classes this semester and working as a lifeguard at the pool on weekends." Another comes when Ferrell explains how everything went awry when he heard (from Thompson's narrator) a voice in his head saying, "Little did he know..." and an incredulous Hoffman responds by stopping him and saying "I've written papers on `Little did he know'."

The World Around Me

It is amazing how the prevailing atmosphere of a place can affect one's subjectivity and sense of self. When I was at Michigan State, to vote Republican was almost akin to declaring your devotion to ritual child sacrifice. Now that I am in Grand Rapids, to vote Democratic is to declare one's alliegance to Satan and his array of dark forces. This is not just sociology. It is a definite atmospheric affect on all psyches within the range of the influence. Related to this is the intense feeling of being a Christian that I had while at MSU which has entirely left me at Cornerstone, where being a Christian is taken for granted, with the result I don't really feel like one anymore.

Without friction there is no feeling, I guess.

Me and Republicans

My wife gets mildly irritated at the tone in my voice when I talk about Republicans nowadays. She doesn't know why I have to be so nasty. Especially since I have almost always voted Republican (except in 2004, when I left my presidential ballot blank). She will probably still vote Republican next week because of the abortion issue, but the empty rhetoric they spew on this topic is no longer a reason to reward the GOP at the ballot box, in my mind. I am still as pro-life as ever; I just don't think that I am doing much about it anymore by voting Republican. Some of the other reasons I am in no mood to reward Republicans include the following:

* The party's absolute cheerleading in 2003-04 of the President's Iraq policy. The Dems may have voted for it, but by and large they resisted propagandizing for it. And I am sick of everybody saying that NO ONE knew there were no WMD's in Iraq prior to the invasion. In fact, the burden of proof was on the wrong side. There was actually no proof of WMD's in Iraq going back to 1998, but somehow this lack of evidence was taken for evidence that we couldn't find them without an invasion. A pox on both parties for buying into a simple logical fallacy. But the Republicans positively gloried in their lack of logic and thoughtfulness.

* The gerrymandering of districts across the country by Republican-controlled state legislatures is absolutely shameless (though seemingly nobody cares that much).

* The shenanigans surrounding the elections of 2000 and 2004 has left a near-majority of African-Americans distrustful of voting fo the near future...

* All the scandals that have actually showed disdain for people outside one's family circle.

* The mendacious support for torture, unwarranted searches, and other travesties to the Constitution.

* Katrina and New Orleans.

* The Foley cover-up.

* Continued (self-serving) belief in trickle-down economics.

* The cynicism towards education created by the "No Child Left Behind" program.

* The irresponsible unwillingness to face up to the facts of global warming.

That's enough for now.

No matter how many reasons there might be for doing so, I cannot give up my New York Times habit. I must have it every morning, and if for some reason I don't get I feel like the world is going on without me. The habit started when I moved back from Canada in 2000 and started adjuncting at Michigan State. In Canada I had gotten into the habit of reading the Toronto Globe & Mail every morning at Tim Horton's, and when I came back it seemed like the best equivalent in the States was the NYT. Though people from around here, evangelically-oriented Grand Rapids, tend to look down their noses at it, I have gained an invaluable education from my daily perusal of its pages. Its supposed liberal bias is much exaggerated by the Fox News folks, and though it has declined in some areas, and has had problems with journalistic malfeasance in recent years, I think that I could make a pretty good argument that it still at least tries to hold to the highest standards in of journalistic ethics and comprehensive coverage. In other words, it is far from perfect, but it is still the best we've got (admittedly I do not look at such papers at the LA Times on a regular basis). The San Francisco Chronicle is good in certain ways, but not as consistently readable as NYT.

Anyway, today's paper is just one example of what I am talking about. Fridays are my favorite NYT days, but this morning was just superb: A "Listening With Ornette Coleman" piece in the Weekend Arts section (I didn't know he was still alive!); a very balanced review (more balanced than I would have been) of the new movie "Jesus Camp"; an essay by William Grimes on the latest books about reading, e.g., Francine Prose's "Reading Like a Writer"; and continuation of a series on the relationship between political campaigns and churches in America. The op-ed page is always a mish-mash of points of view, with David Brooks taking the bourgeois-conservative angle, John Tierney representing Libertarians, Thomas Friedman covering international issues in his sometimes off-putting but always thought-provoking way, Paul Krugman smashing the Bush administration for one thing or another, and Maureen Dowd being alternately too-cute and piercingly acute. What more can one ask for in a daily newspaper that is always available by 6:30 in the heart of the heartland?

Jacques Ellul and Morality

I have been reading Jacques Ellul's "The Subversion of Christianity" lately, and one of the most striking points he makes is that Christianity is not a system of morals, and that it is in fact opposed to all mere "systems" of morality. All systems of morality, he says, arise from mankind's attempts to order themselves apart from God's Law and Kingship. Thus morality is a human attribute, but not a specifically Christian one. Or, in other words, people (like Muslims!)can be moral apart from Christianity. The puzzling part of this is that he does not say that moral systems should be entirely done away with. I guess he has a pragmatic approach and believes that people basically work out the best morality for themselves among themselves, and that this is a necessary part of being human. Living as a disciple of Christ, though, he says, requires one to maintain an ironic distance from all such human systems of behavior-ordering, since one might be required at any time to do something that goes against the accepted morality. God's righteousness (which transcends all moral systems) calls us to a higher purpose than merely being moral. Thus, Christ did not die in order to give us a better moral system. He died in order to give us new lives -- lives characterized by freedom, creativity, and (oftentimes) dissent from the prevailing systems.

More on this in a later post.

Good to Use as Tinder

Glenn Tinder has written the following in his book, The Political Meaning of Christianity:

“If one could love others without judging them, asking anything of them, or
thinking of one’s own needs, one would meet the Christian standard. Obviously,
no one can. Many of us can meet the requirements of friendship or erotic love,
but agape is beyond us all. It is not a love toward which we are naturally
inclined or for which we have natural capacities. Yet it is not something
exclusively divine, like omnipotence, which human beings would be presumptuous
to emulate. In fact, it is demanded of us. Agape is the core of Christian
morality. And even though we cannot aspire to and attain it, as we can a virtue
such as temperance, it appears occasionally in many lives…Perhaps agape has to
be given by God, by grace. If so, there is more grace in human relations than
one might at first suppose, and it is not Christians alone who receive it. Nor
is agape confined to personal relationships…it is a source of political
standards that are widely accepted and even widely, if imperfectly, practiced.”

If anyone knows of a more confused statement on the relationship between love and politics by a published writer, please let me know. Unfortunately, this is fairly typical of mainstream Christian discourse on the topic

Stanley Hauerwas is an important thinker for me to muse upon as I continue to formulate my thoughts regarding the connections between philosophical anarchism and contemporary Christianity. His pacifist views are well known, but I think it is sometimes lost that these views are dependent on his ecclesiology. Or rather, the ecclesiology comes first. This gives the pacifist views much of their depth and substance. However, it is also possible to see Hauerwas as an anti-institutional thinker first, in the sense that certain historical anarchist formulations underly his ecclesiology.

To wit, one of the main points I am developing is the idea that anarchism is most useful as a standpoint of critique rather than as an explicit ideology or political action program. Its philosophical or political standpoint of critique is based on its view of "institutionalism" as a continual temptation towards worldliness (in the Christian sense) that only arises when people organize together to maintain certain ideas about religion, the economy, education, and government. For examples of each of the above, one could think of the Pharisees of the gospels, Wall Street, free-market universities, and the modern state. The "worldliness" of institutionalism lies in the tendency, or temptation, of institutions to implicitly place self-preservation above all other values, even its originating ones. In other words, whereas most institutions are created in order to perpetuate a certain ideal or pragmatic method, they often reorient themselves fairly quickly towards the assuaging of the collective anxieties arising out of institutionalization itself, and moreover, end up justifying certain forms of violence that would not be condoned on an individual level. All in the interest of maintaining the viability of the institution itself, not the originating ideals or practices. Thus, the state creates militaries not primarily to protect constituencies, but to more specifically protect the existence of the state apparatus itself (of which constituencies are the superficial raison d'etre).

I see Hauerwas as being extremely sensitive to how the Christian church in America gives in to the temptations of institutionalism, especially in regard to how the church sees itself allied to the institution of the state in ways that cause it to support the self-preservative violence of the state and call it patriotism. Hauerwas calls it paganism, and he is right to the extent that paganism has always been the irrationally superstitutious (i.e., anxious) response to threats imagined and real.

I obvously need to unpack and clarify these thoughts a bit more before I try to publish them in a longer form. However, I do not think I am wrong about claiming Hauerwas as a philosophical anarchist, at least in terms of his underlying spirit, if not in all the particulars of his writings.