To recap--I'm dubious of well-meaning calls to "agree to disagree" in ongoing debates about the status of GLBT people. This sentiment often cloaks itself in the authority of the "silent majority" or "massive middle" of people wanting just to get back to things as usual, unperturbed by squabbles about whether lesbians can be ordained or two gay men married. But such standoffish neutrality all too often bespeaks privileged disinterest, not consensus-finding. The people who call for fighting to stop are the ones who have the least stake in the battle.
This is not, however, to baptize extremism as the ideal route. I see a difference between the kind of "moderation" that results from disinterest and a moderation that results from careful, ongoing thought. Someone who thinks carefully and empathically about both sides of a debate and finds herself unable to side fully with either side occupies a wholly different position from one who simply shuts himself off from the appearance of conflict. The former's nuance contrasts starkly with the latter's simple-mindedness.
The tricky thing is, however, that nuance and standoffishness often look the same. This is never more apparent to me than in those situations where I find myself standing on the outside of a conflict looking in.
The late Brazilian theatre artist and theorist Augusto Boal created a form of social-change performance he called "the Theatre of the Oppressed." His goal, initially, involved helping people who were oppressed (economically, politically, culturally) to be able to use theatrical techniques to express and think beyond the situations in which they found themselves. Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) techniques typically take the form of workshops for non-trained people (i.e., not professional actors) moderated by a trained artist known as the Joker. Through a series of simple games, the Joker helps the people to use staged images (e.g., frozen tableaus) to create pictures of various aspects of their lives. Feedback from other participants (in TO, everyone is called a spect-actor--watching and doing at once) help the group to see how images and, later, scenes may be sharpened to communicate clearly.
The signature TO technique is "forum theatre," in which a person stages a scenario from her life in which she felt oppressed. Perhaps the scenario replays a time when a boss told her she had to work overtime without pay, and the person felt powerless to stand up for herself. Spect-actors from the group re-create the key scene (where the boss tells her to stay late), playing it out once. The Joker then leads the group into a conversation about whether the scene seems real, who the oppressed person is, and who the oppressor seems to be.
The scene then re-plays, but with one difference: any spect-actor may call out "stop" at any point and "tap out" the person playing the oppressed person. After the switchout, the new spect-actor re-starts the scene from the stop point, but this time the new actor tries out a different strategy. The spect-actor portraying the boss must react realistically--not playing overly evil or overly lenient. Different spect-actors tap out the protagonist, trying and re-trying different techniques.
At the end, the past situation hasn't changed, but--such is the hope--the person who shared the story now sees that she has more choices available to her than she felt like she had before. Powerlessness, in Boalian theory, equates to a lack of choices. Boal's theatre does not offer a clear Key To Revolution beyond critical examination of situations that appear to have few choices. By multiplying possible choices, the person can in the future better navigate situations in which she might feel powerless.
Boal's TO (and the numerous spin-off techniques inspired by him) works like gangbusters in certain situations, particularly those in which relationships of oppression are clear and sharp. When Boal began touring and working more in "industrialized" nations (the "first world"), however, he found that his audiences often balked at identifying clear oppressor/oppressed relationships. Part of the trouble, Boal discovered, was that the people attending his workshops in, say, France or the United States often felt that classically TO scenes such as a corrupt military officer bullying a peasant were the purview of "other" nations. The "first world," went the sentiment, rarely offers such black-versus-white scenarios.
More common, Boal found, were scenes in which the spect-actors described themselves as helpless bystanders, third parties to scenes of, say, racial injustice or gender/sexuality discrimination. The struggle in those cases involved whether to intervene and how best to do so...
How, in other words, does nuance keep from stagnating into inaction?
More tomorrow,
JF
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Idealism and Privilege
On the topic of "agreeing to disagree" about GLBT issues int the church and the less-than-positive undertones of such a suggestion: In one of my courses I had students read a play by a African-American performance artist named Robbie McCauley. The play--I should say "performance piece"--is Sally's Rape, and it concerns McCauley's great-great-grandmother Sally, who was a slave and was raped.
I call it a "performance piece" to indicate that it's not a play in the sense of presenting a self-contained story with characters (and actors pretending to be those characters). Rather, the piece features Robbie as herself and a younger white woman named Jeannie, who in the piece seems to be a particularly close student of Robbie's. Robbie and Jeannie, one gathers, have worked for some time on the history of Robbie's family. Much of the play consists of their testing out different ways to imagine, enter, and explore Robbie's family history, a process that inevitably raises present-day issues about race.
Both performers address the audience directly, walking out into the audience at times. They divide the audience into three parts: one section they tell to yell encouragement and affirmation ("That's right!" "Yes, indeed!"); one section they charge with expressing disagreement; and one section they challenge to offer dialogue, observation, and commentary. Such a request leads to frequent improvisation; much of the script contains provisos to the effect of "this scene is always different in performance; here's how it worked one night."
Such interactive, presentational (as opposed to the fourth-wall-style representational) dramaturgy charges the performance with a sense of danger and possibility. The people--not characters, but people--on stage are of two different races and are having explicit conversations about how to talk about racism's past and present. And the audience can't simply watch and listen; they have to participate--and the people on stage talk right back.
Nor do they sugarcoat the difficulties of having a conversation about white privilege and continuing racial minoritization. One particularly brutal (as in brutally honest) scene features Jeannie and Robbie having, well, an argument of sorts. They face each other and tell each other hard truths. Jeannie is sure that Robbie thinks she's too idealistic, that she's not getting something vital about Robbie's position. Robbie expresses frustration that the language they use has trouble capturing this sense.
One section of this scene stood out to me. Jeannie, challenged by Robbie to say in her own words what it is that Robbie finds troublesome about Jeannie, suggests this: "About my idealism. I have some idea of humanism. Something that we share, something more than our differences."
Robbie responds, "Let me see if I can use the language to say what I feel about your idealism. I think it covers over something in your history that makes your idealism still a whim. It angers me that even though your ancestors might have been slaves—because they did have white slaves . . . only made Black slavery mandatory for economic reasons, so they could catch us when we ran away—that history has given you the ability to forget your shame about being oppressed by being ignorant, mean, or idealistic . . . which makes it dangerous for me."
That line resonates with me: "something in your history makes your idealism still a whim." I might say, in reference to the GLBT debates ripping denominations apart currently, that something about the seemingly idealistic push to "just stop fighting and get along" signals a serious underestimation of the stakes of the debate. If you can choose whether or not to fight--if your idealism is a whim, an equally viable choice among many others, then you may not be in the best position to dictate to those for whom concern about the issue in question is not a choice.
I get annoyed, actually, when the call to stop fighting about GLBT issues from some spot of moderate higher ground. "I'm not on either side," goes such a call, "I just want us to get back to [X activity of the Chruch]. It's those on the extremes who are making this an issue. I just don't care about it. Can't we get back to what's important? We moderates just want to be Methodist (or Episcopalian, or what have you)."
McCauley's line highlights how this moderate position, the we're-really-all-the-same-so-stop-fighting, depends upon a great deal of often unacknowledged privilege. To be unconcerned about a major issue takes effort. It's not easy to be uninterested.
To be sure, often the work involved is someone else's. A spoiled adolescent, for instance, may experience life as a worry-free succession of distractions, never realizing the hard work that someone (parents, grandparents, household staff, etc.) has to go through in order to achieve for the child that work-free environment. But work there is.
I do not mean that those calling for an end to debate, a "let's just agree to disagree" on GLBT issues, are spoiled; I think their intentions are often sincerely peace-loving. But that idealism, as McCauley argues, spings from the soil of a particular historical and cultural situation, a situation that lets some people and not others off the hook of having to grapple with such issues.
I cannot, as a gay man, simply ignore the reality that many in my Church believe me unfit to take communion. I cannot ignore the fact that I may not pursue ordination or get married to my partner. And I hear those on the other side of the issue saying similarly that they could not simply "live with it" were gay couples allowed to be married or were a lesbian to be ordained as a pastor.
As much as I disagree with people from that latter perspective, I feel even more frustration toward those who instead of listening carefully to the debate decide that the entire discussion is unimportant and make a virtue of their disinterest.
That, I submit, is detrimental to everyone.
More tomorrow,
JF
I call it a "performance piece" to indicate that it's not a play in the sense of presenting a self-contained story with characters (and actors pretending to be those characters). Rather, the piece features Robbie as herself and a younger white woman named Jeannie, who in the piece seems to be a particularly close student of Robbie's. Robbie and Jeannie, one gathers, have worked for some time on the history of Robbie's family. Much of the play consists of their testing out different ways to imagine, enter, and explore Robbie's family history, a process that inevitably raises present-day issues about race.
Both performers address the audience directly, walking out into the audience at times. They divide the audience into three parts: one section they tell to yell encouragement and affirmation ("That's right!" "Yes, indeed!"); one section they charge with expressing disagreement; and one section they challenge to offer dialogue, observation, and commentary. Such a request leads to frequent improvisation; much of the script contains provisos to the effect of "this scene is always different in performance; here's how it worked one night."
Such interactive, presentational (as opposed to the fourth-wall-style representational) dramaturgy charges the performance with a sense of danger and possibility. The people--not characters, but people--on stage are of two different races and are having explicit conversations about how to talk about racism's past and present. And the audience can't simply watch and listen; they have to participate--and the people on stage talk right back.
Nor do they sugarcoat the difficulties of having a conversation about white privilege and continuing racial minoritization. One particularly brutal (as in brutally honest) scene features Jeannie and Robbie having, well, an argument of sorts. They face each other and tell each other hard truths. Jeannie is sure that Robbie thinks she's too idealistic, that she's not getting something vital about Robbie's position. Robbie expresses frustration that the language they use has trouble capturing this sense.
One section of this scene stood out to me. Jeannie, challenged by Robbie to say in her own words what it is that Robbie finds troublesome about Jeannie, suggests this: "About my idealism. I have some idea of humanism. Something that we share, something more than our differences."
Robbie responds, "Let me see if I can use the language to say what I feel about your idealism. I think it covers over something in your history that makes your idealism still a whim. It angers me that even though your ancestors might have been slaves—because they did have white slaves . . . only made Black slavery mandatory for economic reasons, so they could catch us when we ran away—that history has given you the ability to forget your shame about being oppressed by being ignorant, mean, or idealistic . . . which makes it dangerous for me."
That line resonates with me: "something in your history makes your idealism still a whim." I might say, in reference to the GLBT debates ripping denominations apart currently, that something about the seemingly idealistic push to "just stop fighting and get along" signals a serious underestimation of the stakes of the debate. If you can choose whether or not to fight--if your idealism is a whim, an equally viable choice among many others, then you may not be in the best position to dictate to those for whom concern about the issue in question is not a choice.
I get annoyed, actually, when the call to stop fighting about GLBT issues from some spot of moderate higher ground. "I'm not on either side," goes such a call, "I just want us to get back to [X activity of the Chruch]. It's those on the extremes who are making this an issue. I just don't care about it. Can't we get back to what's important? We moderates just want to be Methodist (or Episcopalian, or what have you)."
McCauley's line highlights how this moderate position, the we're-really-all-the-same-so-stop-fighting, depends upon a great deal of often unacknowledged privilege. To be unconcerned about a major issue takes effort. It's not easy to be uninterested.
To be sure, often the work involved is someone else's. A spoiled adolescent, for instance, may experience life as a worry-free succession of distractions, never realizing the hard work that someone (parents, grandparents, household staff, etc.) has to go through in order to achieve for the child that work-free environment. But work there is.
I do not mean that those calling for an end to debate, a "let's just agree to disagree" on GLBT issues, are spoiled; I think their intentions are often sincerely peace-loving. But that idealism, as McCauley argues, spings from the soil of a particular historical and cultural situation, a situation that lets some people and not others off the hook of having to grapple with such issues.
I cannot, as a gay man, simply ignore the reality that many in my Church believe me unfit to take communion. I cannot ignore the fact that I may not pursue ordination or get married to my partner. And I hear those on the other side of the issue saying similarly that they could not simply "live with it" were gay couples allowed to be married or were a lesbian to be ordained as a pastor.
As much as I disagree with people from that latter perspective, I feel even more frustration toward those who instead of listening carefully to the debate decide that the entire discussion is unimportant and make a virtue of their disinterest.
That, I submit, is detrimental to everyone.
More tomorrow,
JF
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Pro- and Anti-GLBT Inclusion
Neat as it may be to think ethics as a response to a demanding situation, an acknowledgment of an event, it doesn't quite dodge the problem of how or by whom a demanding situation gets recognized as such. In Alain Badiou's philosophy, Events (the transformative experience that creates the demanding situation) are either simply and obviously there to be recognized plainly or they are fought for by die-hard, no-compromise true believers whose work makes the Event a capital-E affair (e.g., Paul making Christ's death/resurrection an Event that demands a whole new ethical way of life).
But which response to the Event is the ethical one?
It strikes me that the really difficult disagreements--the fundamental fractures I've been interested in--have to do precisely with how gets to define a response to an Event (or a demand) as such. In the near-schism-level conflicts over the status of GLBT people that plague mainline denominations now, the Event in question seems to be the realization that GLBT people exist, that they are, as it were, "self-avowed, practicing," and insistent that they are not by virtue of their sexuality in any way incompatible with the Way of Christ.
For the pro-inclusion side, the response to this Event seems obvious: just as similar recognitions of racial and gender diversity within the body of Christ demanded (and received) transformations in church stances, so too does the recognition of differing sexual orientations and gender identities demand that the church adapt to this understanding. Part of this change involves polity: gays, lesbians, bisexual, and transgender people should be accepted as equal members of the church and granted the same rights and responsibilities as heterosexuals (e.g., becoming members, receiving communion/baptism, pursuing ordination, getting married). The deeper change involves theology; passages of scripture that decry same-sex erotic behavior are, like passages allowing slavery or approving of lesser status for women, considered as culturally and historically bound rather than eternally constraining.
The anti-inclusion side often gets represented doing little more than obstructing this inevitable response to the Event. Given the advent of GLBT people coming out as members of the church, the anti- side can seem like it's sticking its fingers in its ears and going "lalalalalala--I don't hear you!"
While I'm sure there are some in the church who are being willfully ignorant, I don't think this depiction accurately captures the anti-inclusion side. In fact, the narrative of GLBT people in the church as an Event is common throughout conservative Protestant discourse. Anti-GLBT sides on the Christian right regularly portray the GLBT issue as a recent and unwelcome challenge to the Body of Christ. Joe Dallas, a spokesperson for the "ex-gay" movement, has said that same-sex sin is not technically any more or less sinful than any other behavior. But the GLBT movement--the Event of GLBT people making a claim to equal membership--presents a challenge that requires a specific response. No other sin, Dallas argues, has so elaborated its own theology. Practitioners of this particular sin, in other words, have created a whole new way of being a Christian around the framework of GLBT inclusion.
In conservative Christian thinking, the Event that is the GLBT movement's transformational demand itself demands a response: retrenchment and revival. Churches and denominations must risk drawing their historical boundaries of orthodoxy ever more clearly and ever more carefully. That is (and of course I'm synthesizing here), Churches have to realize that following Christ and His Word requires them to resist cultural imperatives for wide-open inclusivity. The Christian message broadcasts universally, but the path that message lays out is singular and exclusive. Christians have to accept that their Way is narrow even if their love is wide. Many behaviors and attitudes we would like to declare non-issues simply cannot co-exist with fidelity to the Word of God. To be sure, the orthodoxy borders need to be drawn and maintained with sensitivity and love; the new revivalists of the anti-GLBT-inclusion movement are often quite honest about how the church has failed to present a loving face in the past. But against the Event of GLBT-inclusive theology, the church must say "no."
For Badiou, saying "no" to an authentic Event can constitute the very essence of unethical behavior. But here I would point out that "no"--the stereotypically "conservative" gesture--does not have to be stagnant or unproductive; "no" does not mean denying the event happened but responding to the Event as a challenge or threat. History offers multiple instances where a "no" to an Event produces new structures and organizations. The Protestant Reformation was surely an Event--an unignorable transformation that demands a response--yet the Catholic Church's "no" wasn't a refusal to respond but a robust Counter-Reformation that reformatted church practice and doctrine.
Now, of course the Protestant Event did drastically alter the Christian landscape. Instead of merely being "Christian" one (in Western Europe) now had to be a particular kind of Christian. It was not possible simply to pretend that the Event had not happened or that it was dismissible. But neither was it the case that the response to the Event of Luther et al. took only the form of full approval.
Here's where I feel that the push for the pro-inclusion and anti-inclusion sides of the GLBT debate "agree to disagree"--suspend or mute their arguments in favor of peace--runs into problems. To suggest that this disagreement is minor enough that it can be suspended is in a sense to deny the Event as such. Like it or not, the fact that GLBT people are making a claim that polity and theology have to change to include them is a move of great magnitude.
Paradoxically, both sides of the debate would agree that anyone who believes in the ephemerality of the argument isn't paying attention. It is not, for example, within the privileges I enjoy to be able to ignore debates about GLBT status in my church. If my church denies openly gay individuals the right to pursue ordination, that affects me. And--while it's difficult for me to see this sometimes--if my church were to openly affirm the right of GLBT folk to be ordained, the anti-GLBT side would feel similarly compelled to respond and unable to ignore this change.
It worries me, however, to think of the two sides to the GLBT issue as similar (though to a lesser degree) to the Counter-Reformation and Reformation. Divergent responses to an Event often presage intense and bloody conflict.
If "agreeing to disagree" is untenable, can there at least be a way to agree on how to disagree?
More tomorrow,
JF
But which response to the Event is the ethical one?
It strikes me that the really difficult disagreements--the fundamental fractures I've been interested in--have to do precisely with how gets to define a response to an Event (or a demand) as such. In the near-schism-level conflicts over the status of GLBT people that plague mainline denominations now, the Event in question seems to be the realization that GLBT people exist, that they are, as it were, "self-avowed, practicing," and insistent that they are not by virtue of their sexuality in any way incompatible with the Way of Christ.
For the pro-inclusion side, the response to this Event seems obvious: just as similar recognitions of racial and gender diversity within the body of Christ demanded (and received) transformations in church stances, so too does the recognition of differing sexual orientations and gender identities demand that the church adapt to this understanding. Part of this change involves polity: gays, lesbians, bisexual, and transgender people should be accepted as equal members of the church and granted the same rights and responsibilities as heterosexuals (e.g., becoming members, receiving communion/baptism, pursuing ordination, getting married). The deeper change involves theology; passages of scripture that decry same-sex erotic behavior are, like passages allowing slavery or approving of lesser status for women, considered as culturally and historically bound rather than eternally constraining.
The anti-inclusion side often gets represented doing little more than obstructing this inevitable response to the Event. Given the advent of GLBT people coming out as members of the church, the anti- side can seem like it's sticking its fingers in its ears and going "lalalalalala--I don't hear you!"
While I'm sure there are some in the church who are being willfully ignorant, I don't think this depiction accurately captures the anti-inclusion side. In fact, the narrative of GLBT people in the church as an Event is common throughout conservative Protestant discourse. Anti-GLBT sides on the Christian right regularly portray the GLBT issue as a recent and unwelcome challenge to the Body of Christ. Joe Dallas, a spokesperson for the "ex-gay" movement, has said that same-sex sin is not technically any more or less sinful than any other behavior. But the GLBT movement--the Event of GLBT people making a claim to equal membership--presents a challenge that requires a specific response. No other sin, Dallas argues, has so elaborated its own theology. Practitioners of this particular sin, in other words, have created a whole new way of being a Christian around the framework of GLBT inclusion.
In conservative Christian thinking, the Event that is the GLBT movement's transformational demand itself demands a response: retrenchment and revival. Churches and denominations must risk drawing their historical boundaries of orthodoxy ever more clearly and ever more carefully. That is (and of course I'm synthesizing here), Churches have to realize that following Christ and His Word requires them to resist cultural imperatives for wide-open inclusivity. The Christian message broadcasts universally, but the path that message lays out is singular and exclusive. Christians have to accept that their Way is narrow even if their love is wide. Many behaviors and attitudes we would like to declare non-issues simply cannot co-exist with fidelity to the Word of God. To be sure, the orthodoxy borders need to be drawn and maintained with sensitivity and love; the new revivalists of the anti-GLBT-inclusion movement are often quite honest about how the church has failed to present a loving face in the past. But against the Event of GLBT-inclusive theology, the church must say "no."
For Badiou, saying "no" to an authentic Event can constitute the very essence of unethical behavior. But here I would point out that "no"--the stereotypically "conservative" gesture--does not have to be stagnant or unproductive; "no" does not mean denying the event happened but responding to the Event as a challenge or threat. History offers multiple instances where a "no" to an Event produces new structures and organizations. The Protestant Reformation was surely an Event--an unignorable transformation that demands a response--yet the Catholic Church's "no" wasn't a refusal to respond but a robust Counter-Reformation that reformatted church practice and doctrine.
Now, of course the Protestant Event did drastically alter the Christian landscape. Instead of merely being "Christian" one (in Western Europe) now had to be a particular kind of Christian. It was not possible simply to pretend that the Event had not happened or that it was dismissible. But neither was it the case that the response to the Event of Luther et al. took only the form of full approval.
Here's where I feel that the push for the pro-inclusion and anti-inclusion sides of the GLBT debate "agree to disagree"--suspend or mute their arguments in favor of peace--runs into problems. To suggest that this disagreement is minor enough that it can be suspended is in a sense to deny the Event as such. Like it or not, the fact that GLBT people are making a claim that polity and theology have to change to include them is a move of great magnitude.
Paradoxically, both sides of the debate would agree that anyone who believes in the ephemerality of the argument isn't paying attention. It is not, for example, within the privileges I enjoy to be able to ignore debates about GLBT status in my church. If my church denies openly gay individuals the right to pursue ordination, that affects me. And--while it's difficult for me to see this sometimes--if my church were to openly affirm the right of GLBT folk to be ordained, the anti-GLBT side would feel similarly compelled to respond and unable to ignore this change.
It worries me, however, to think of the two sides to the GLBT issue as similar (though to a lesser degree) to the Counter-Reformation and Reformation. Divergent responses to an Event often presage intense and bloody conflict.
If "agreeing to disagree" is untenable, can there at least be a way to agree on how to disagree?
More tomorrow,
JF
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
The Demand to Choose
To recap: I hate conflict. I hate when people get angry or upset in reaction to something I've done or left undone. And I think that, thanks in no small part to the Western dramatic tradition, conflict as a virtue can too easily be overrated. I just don't buy the "If you're making everyone angry, you're doing something right" line of thinking.
Nevertheless, I do believe that ethics--Christian ethics particularly--necessarily involves the risk of conflict. Philosopher Simon Critchley, in a gloss on Alain Badiou's theory of ethics, writes about ethics not (as Badiou does) as fidelity to an Event but as the recognition of a demand. Here he means a demand not in the sense of authoritarian bossiness thundering down from on high but demand a situation that imposes the responsibility of response. Seeing a child drowning in a river, for example, produces a sense of demand. Once apprehended, the situation presents an undeniable reality. The drowning child can't be un-apprehended.
Our action or inaction to this un-un-apprehendable reality inevitably acquires an ethical dimension. If we leap in to the river to save the child, risking our own life (as is probably the case--it's not recommended that untrained, unassisted folk leap into a rushing river to save someone drowning)--our act is an ethical response to the demand. If we do nothing, turning back to our own affairs--this too carries an ethical charge. The situation, the demand, colors every act subsequent to it.
Departing from Critchley's specific argument, I would venture that what makes the demand ethical is that the demand doesn't dictate a specific response. Suppose someone holds a gun up to your head and says, "Dive in and save that child, or I'll blow your brains out." Alternately, to move us closer to certain strains of Christianity, suppose someone presents you with the threat of Eternal Hell and says "Dive in and save that child, or you'll burn in unending fire for all of forever." In both these cases we're dealing with something other than an ethical demand of the kind I'm talking about. In the former case, we're dealing with a threat, a force imposed on us. We have no choice, really, but to dive in. Ethics has little or nothing to do with the decision. In the latter case, we're dealing with a subtler but nonetheless still dictatorial kind of force.
Ethics, as I'm using it, suggests a less straightforward, more inquisitive process than the simple application of a moral law. The Ten Commandments, in this sense, represent a kind of morality--here's what to do. The Golden Rule, on the other hand, presents a general guideline to be adapted to different situations in different ways. It is not quite a relativist, there's-no-right-or-wrong philosophy; neither, however, is it a comprehensive instruction manual for navigating each and every situation.
Ethics, in other words, implies a zone of uncertainty about the right thing to do. It's the exploration of that zone in the face of a demand that constitutes the risky ethics I'm interested in here. But--and here's the rub--the demand imposes a kind of time limit on ethical exploration.
Let me retreat to a realm I'm more comfortable with. One of the first things you have to learn as an actor, designer, or director in the theatre is the necessity of making a choice. The director Ann Bogart, for example, speaks of the need for directors to "choose death" (a notion she borrows from aikido, if I remember correctly). In deciding how to stage a scene, she explains, a director has an infinity of choices. The chair could go here, or there, or there, or there--or there could be no chairs or a hundred chairs. At the end of the day, though, the director has to make one single choice: the chair goes here and nowhere else. By making that one choice, the director essentially "kills off" all of the other multitude of possible choices that were available. This can be painful, especially when on opening night the director realizes, oh, the chair should have gone THERE, not where I put it. Nonetheless, it is impossible not to make a choice. The reality of opening night exerts a demand.
There's little in the way of strict guidelines about where to put the chair; no rulebook will explain to you where chairs go. The choice is open, and there's no guarantee that the choice you make will be "right." In this demand-situation, though, the wrong thing is to not make the choice. If a director is too frightened of criticism, too afraid of risk to make a choice, then the director should reconsider careers.
How, then, might the ethical demand perspective reframe the GLBT issue debate I've been writing about?
More tomorrow,
JF
Nevertheless, I do believe that ethics--Christian ethics particularly--necessarily involves the risk of conflict. Philosopher Simon Critchley, in a gloss on Alain Badiou's theory of ethics, writes about ethics not (as Badiou does) as fidelity to an Event but as the recognition of a demand. Here he means a demand not in the sense of authoritarian bossiness thundering down from on high but demand a situation that imposes the responsibility of response. Seeing a child drowning in a river, for example, produces a sense of demand. Once apprehended, the situation presents an undeniable reality. The drowning child can't be un-apprehended.
Our action or inaction to this un-un-apprehendable reality inevitably acquires an ethical dimension. If we leap in to the river to save the child, risking our own life (as is probably the case--it's not recommended that untrained, unassisted folk leap into a rushing river to save someone drowning)--our act is an ethical response to the demand. If we do nothing, turning back to our own affairs--this too carries an ethical charge. The situation, the demand, colors every act subsequent to it.
Departing from Critchley's specific argument, I would venture that what makes the demand ethical is that the demand doesn't dictate a specific response. Suppose someone holds a gun up to your head and says, "Dive in and save that child, or I'll blow your brains out." Alternately, to move us closer to certain strains of Christianity, suppose someone presents you with the threat of Eternal Hell and says "Dive in and save that child, or you'll burn in unending fire for all of forever." In both these cases we're dealing with something other than an ethical demand of the kind I'm talking about. In the former case, we're dealing with a threat, a force imposed on us. We have no choice, really, but to dive in. Ethics has little or nothing to do with the decision. In the latter case, we're dealing with a subtler but nonetheless still dictatorial kind of force.
Ethics, as I'm using it, suggests a less straightforward, more inquisitive process than the simple application of a moral law. The Ten Commandments, in this sense, represent a kind of morality--here's what to do. The Golden Rule, on the other hand, presents a general guideline to be adapted to different situations in different ways. It is not quite a relativist, there's-no-right-or-wrong philosophy; neither, however, is it a comprehensive instruction manual for navigating each and every situation.
Ethics, in other words, implies a zone of uncertainty about the right thing to do. It's the exploration of that zone in the face of a demand that constitutes the risky ethics I'm interested in here. But--and here's the rub--the demand imposes a kind of time limit on ethical exploration.
Let me retreat to a realm I'm more comfortable with. One of the first things you have to learn as an actor, designer, or director in the theatre is the necessity of making a choice. The director Ann Bogart, for example, speaks of the need for directors to "choose death" (a notion she borrows from aikido, if I remember correctly). In deciding how to stage a scene, she explains, a director has an infinity of choices. The chair could go here, or there, or there, or there--or there could be no chairs or a hundred chairs. At the end of the day, though, the director has to make one single choice: the chair goes here and nowhere else. By making that one choice, the director essentially "kills off" all of the other multitude of possible choices that were available. This can be painful, especially when on opening night the director realizes, oh, the chair should have gone THERE, not where I put it. Nonetheless, it is impossible not to make a choice. The reality of opening night exerts a demand.
There's little in the way of strict guidelines about where to put the chair; no rulebook will explain to you where chairs go. The choice is open, and there's no guarantee that the choice you make will be "right." In this demand-situation, though, the wrong thing is to not make the choice. If a director is too frightened of criticism, too afraid of risk to make a choice, then the director should reconsider careers.
How, then, might the ethical demand perspective reframe the GLBT issue debate I've been writing about?
More tomorrow,
JF
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Conflict and Activism
Reading over my post from yesterday, I'm struck by how odd it is that I'm in the field I'm in, studying the things I study--yet I dislike conflict.
Drama, at least in many Western traditions, depends upon conflict for its existence. One popular narrative about the origins of Western theatre identifies the first actor as the ancient Greek choral performer, Thespis. Thespis (according to ancient accounts) stepped out from his fellow performers as they sang/chanted a choral ode and began impersonating the characters mentioned in the ode. With his act of impersonation (mimesis), he essentially invented acting. It takes the playwright Aeschylus (working a bit after Thespis), however, to invent drama, which he did by adding a second actor. With one character, this narrative concludes, you have acting. With two, you have conflict, and therefore drama.
Now, this narrative has some technical problems. Aside from its historical sketchiness (we don't know that much about Thespis), it ignores the fact that plenty of theatrical traditions create fine drama using only one character. But--in the Intro to Theatre classes in which I relate this narrative--it gets a point across: Western drama likes conflict. A play where everyone agrees and everything works out is, well, boring. Some kind of challenge--ideally an interpersonal challenge--needs to spice things up.
So too with democratic theory, another aspect of my scholarship. If everyone in a community thinks exactly alike and agrees completely--or if their disagreements mean nothing (e.g., they're kept utterly secret and private)--then you don't have democracy. Democracy, as I've written before (citing people like Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Ranciere), depends upon disagreement, especially fundamental disagreements, about how best to order and run society (or about who best decides to run society). To be for democracy is not to be for some touchy-feely utopia of consensus or in some paradise where the True and the Good appear with perfect clarity to all; it's to be in a society where truth and goodness are in perpetual contest. No contest, no democracy.
Worse yet--I deal specifically with performances that play out democratic conflicts: street protests, demonstrations, rallies, sit-ins, direct actions, acts of civil disobedience, and the like. In history, I'm most excited by those theatrical movements that created or manifested intense social conflict. The first-wave European avant-garde, for instance, shattered theatrical conventions of the time, invading audience spaces, throwing out the rule for polite entertainments, challenging people's sense of distinction between life and art. The performance artists of the 70s and 80s did similarly daring experiments with the boundaries between life and art. These are some of my favorite works to study and teach.
Yet--as an audience member, I hate being made to feel implicated or uncomfortable. I'm savvy enough to know usually where to sit in a theatre so that I can appreciate the performance but avoid the "splash zone" of performer-audience interaction. In activism, I likewise hate producing such confrontations. As I mentioned yesterday, disruption-for-disruption's sake frustrates me. Many's the time when I've seen actors think up some marvelously disruptive public act ("let's all start singing a song about revolution in this public building!" or "let's go to the mall, pretend to be newspaper interviewers, ask people penetrating questions about how they're spending their money in the mall when there are so many people dying of starvation in other countries!"). Inevitably, such acts make people angry, and all too often the actors return full of a mixture of consternation and righteous indignation: "They yelled at us! Can you believe it? Our questions were so threatening to them! People just don't know how to handle it when their 'routine' gets disrupted."
Of course they got angry! What did you expect? I'm annoyed when artists produce work intended to provoke extreme reactions and then complain about the extreme reactions their work provokes. (I should specify that by "extreme reactions" I do not mean physical violence). Moreover, I'm deeply suspicious of activists who rate their efficacy by the number of people they anger or annoy though their public demonstrations. To be sure, there are times and places where people need to be made angry or annoyed, pushed from a stand-0ff-ish neutrality into making a choice. Disruption can be part of effective activism, but it is not by itself evidence of effective activism. Indeed, insofar as activism is a matter of winning hearts and minds, disruptive acts can be counterproductive.
Worse, disruptive, conflict-provoking acts can be self-serving. It's all too easy to mistake the high of "being civilly disobedient for a higher cause" as "actually doing something that advances that cause." Consider Jackass, Punk'd, Scare Tactics or similar shows. Formally, very little separates the acts recorded and replayed on such programs from some of the public performance experiments of the avant-gardists or performance artists. But in the latter case, the artists involved had a specific agenda; the medium (i.e., the rule-breaking) was determined by the message they wished to send. In the former case, it's a stunt, a prank, or an adrenaline rush.
I'm not automatically impressed, then, when performance activism (and I include many modes of public evangelism under this umbrella term) causes a reaction. Causing a reaction--sparking yells of protest or disgust--that's pretty simple, actually. "Strangle a kitten onstage," I tell my students, wringing an invisible kitten's neck, "and you're guaranteed to provoke a reaction. That doesn't make kitten-strangling an artistically or politically responsible act." (For the record: I fully oppose kitten-strangling).
The difficult thing is not creating conflict but navigating conflict.
More tomorrow,
JF
Drama, at least in many Western traditions, depends upon conflict for its existence. One popular narrative about the origins of Western theatre identifies the first actor as the ancient Greek choral performer, Thespis. Thespis (according to ancient accounts) stepped out from his fellow performers as they sang/chanted a choral ode and began impersonating the characters mentioned in the ode. With his act of impersonation (mimesis), he essentially invented acting. It takes the playwright Aeschylus (working a bit after Thespis), however, to invent drama, which he did by adding a second actor. With one character, this narrative concludes, you have acting. With two, you have conflict, and therefore drama.
Now, this narrative has some technical problems. Aside from its historical sketchiness (we don't know that much about Thespis), it ignores the fact that plenty of theatrical traditions create fine drama using only one character. But--in the Intro to Theatre classes in which I relate this narrative--it gets a point across: Western drama likes conflict. A play where everyone agrees and everything works out is, well, boring. Some kind of challenge--ideally an interpersonal challenge--needs to spice things up.
So too with democratic theory, another aspect of my scholarship. If everyone in a community thinks exactly alike and agrees completely--or if their disagreements mean nothing (e.g., they're kept utterly secret and private)--then you don't have democracy. Democracy, as I've written before (citing people like Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Ranciere), depends upon disagreement, especially fundamental disagreements, about how best to order and run society (or about who best decides to run society). To be for democracy is not to be for some touchy-feely utopia of consensus or in some paradise where the True and the Good appear with perfect clarity to all; it's to be in a society where truth and goodness are in perpetual contest. No contest, no democracy.
Worse yet--I deal specifically with performances that play out democratic conflicts: street protests, demonstrations, rallies, sit-ins, direct actions, acts of civil disobedience, and the like. In history, I'm most excited by those theatrical movements that created or manifested intense social conflict. The first-wave European avant-garde, for instance, shattered theatrical conventions of the time, invading audience spaces, throwing out the rule for polite entertainments, challenging people's sense of distinction between life and art. The performance artists of the 70s and 80s did similarly daring experiments with the boundaries between life and art. These are some of my favorite works to study and teach.
Yet--as an audience member, I hate being made to feel implicated or uncomfortable. I'm savvy enough to know usually where to sit in a theatre so that I can appreciate the performance but avoid the "splash zone" of performer-audience interaction. In activism, I likewise hate producing such confrontations. As I mentioned yesterday, disruption-for-disruption's sake frustrates me. Many's the time when I've seen actors think up some marvelously disruptive public act ("let's all start singing a song about revolution in this public building!" or "let's go to the mall, pretend to be newspaper interviewers, ask people penetrating questions about how they're spending their money in the mall when there are so many people dying of starvation in other countries!"). Inevitably, such acts make people angry, and all too often the actors return full of a mixture of consternation and righteous indignation: "They yelled at us! Can you believe it? Our questions were so threatening to them! People just don't know how to handle it when their 'routine' gets disrupted."
Of course they got angry! What did you expect? I'm annoyed when artists produce work intended to provoke extreme reactions and then complain about the extreme reactions their work provokes. (I should specify that by "extreme reactions" I do not mean physical violence). Moreover, I'm deeply suspicious of activists who rate their efficacy by the number of people they anger or annoy though their public demonstrations. To be sure, there are times and places where people need to be made angry or annoyed, pushed from a stand-0ff-ish neutrality into making a choice. Disruption can be part of effective activism, but it is not by itself evidence of effective activism. Indeed, insofar as activism is a matter of winning hearts and minds, disruptive acts can be counterproductive.
Worse, disruptive, conflict-provoking acts can be self-serving. It's all too easy to mistake the high of "being civilly disobedient for a higher cause" as "actually doing something that advances that cause." Consider Jackass, Punk'd, Scare Tactics or similar shows. Formally, very little separates the acts recorded and replayed on such programs from some of the public performance experiments of the avant-gardists or performance artists. But in the latter case, the artists involved had a specific agenda; the medium (i.e., the rule-breaking) was determined by the message they wished to send. In the former case, it's a stunt, a prank, or an adrenaline rush.
I'm not automatically impressed, then, when performance activism (and I include many modes of public evangelism under this umbrella term) causes a reaction. Causing a reaction--sparking yells of protest or disgust--that's pretty simple, actually. "Strangle a kitten onstage," I tell my students, wringing an invisible kitten's neck, "and you're guaranteed to provoke a reaction. That doesn't make kitten-strangling an artistically or politically responsible act." (For the record: I fully oppose kitten-strangling).
The difficult thing is not creating conflict but navigating conflict.
More tomorrow,
JF
Monday, October 26, 2009
Moderation and the Ethical Event
Yesterday I ventured that the request to "agree to disagree" can in certain contexts foster an unjust status quo. A plea for moderation, in other words, isn't always as innocent as it would seem. For example, in my dissertation research into the women's suffrage movement (specifically, the 1913 Suffrage March in Washington, DC), I ran into the surprising fact that the Washington Post, now generally considered a fairly liberal newspaper, published editorials that were--well--less than the all-for-women's-right-to-vote one would expect or hope. Some of the editorials from that period attempted to stake out a "middle ground" between what they portrayed as two sides that had gone too far: the anti-suffragists and the suffragists.
Now, it should be remembered that the suffragist movement had its share of militants. Indeed, a few British suffragists engaged in a bit of property destruction to advance their cause. And although no US suffragists engaged in such activities, many of them made no secret of the fact that they trained with British activists. And certainly, by the standards of the time, the very fact that women were marching in public in spectacular display of their own agency had more than a tinge of scandal about it.
Nevertheless, it's difficult from our perspective to extend much sympathy to the Post for its waffling, sort-of support for an issue we consider a basic and uncomplicated matter of justice. How can anyone be not for women's right to vote? How, moreover, can anyone be less than adamant that women must be allowed to vote? As I've written about previously, the suffrage issue at present so basic to our conceptions of democracy that it isn't even political--that is, it's not a contestable issue. Debates about whether or not women should or shouldn't vote are ipso facto invalid. From this present perspective, then, to look back and see someone asserting their even-handedness as the most moral stance highlights just how immoral even-handedness can be.
Of course, that judgment I just leveled at the Post of a century ago is historiographically self-serving. I prove my democratic bona fides by castigating those who would question the present's dominant configuration of democracy. In other words, hindsight is 20/20. The real question is how I would feel were I a 30-something male citizen of Washington, DC, in 1913, having lived all my life without the benefit of a hegemonic ideology that defines women's suffrage as integral to US democratic practice.
I would like to think that I would, like many "liberals" of the day (who were often, it should be mentioned, socialists) support suffrage. But I don't know. Like I said, I dislike conflict and disagreement. I have a low patience threshold for spectacular mass political actions that fail to meet my rather high standards for thoughtfulness and efficacy. Those who would dispense with or disrupt social order casually or "just because," in my view, have little moral authority to tell others how to create a better social order. Disruptions and attention-getting spectacle, in other words, need to be very well-considered before I support them.
The problem is that most in-the-moment activist decisions happen without the hindsight necessary to judge them as well-considered and efficacious. The turn-of-the-century social theorist Georges Sorel argued that authentic revolutions can be distinguished from temporary or abortive uprisings only by historians who look back at the events from a future date.
Similarly, in the present, political philosopher Alain Badiou bases his ethical philosophy around the idea of the Event--a transformative occurrence that alters forever the standards of existence, rendering everything that came before the Event moot. Einstein's theory of relativity, for example, constitutes an Event in that it utterly invalidated whole swaths of scientific thought that had gone on before. It's impossible to subscribe to Newtonian physics as absolute truth after the Event of Einstein. Badiou suggests that various kinds of Events exist. Falling in love, for example, is an Event on a personal level; nothing after the fall is the same as before. Authentic revolutions can be Events, transforming forever political realities that had been known and stable prior to them. Ethics, for Badiou, consists of fidelity to the Event. It is unethical, he argues, to shut one's ears and eyes to the transformation wrought by Events on personal or social levels.
The problem I've had with Badiou is that he offers very little by way of guidance about how to distinguish authentic Events from inauthentic or false Events. The Nazi movement, he asserts, based itself on a false Event--the advent of the new Aryan ascendancy, etc. But surely this is also a case of historiographic 20/20 vision, no? Surely--as repugnant as it seems to us--Hitler's dream of a new Germany struck many Germans, at least, as an Event that reformatted the world. What besides a process called "ethics" helps one in determining the authenticity of an Event? Like my time-traveling hypothetical about the Suffrage Parade, how would I recognize an authentic Event surely enough to justify investing fidelity to it?
Badiou, for his part, largely ignores the authenticity question in favor of a focus on fidelity. Strikingly for Christians, one of Badiou's main works describing his theory focuses on Saint Paul, whom Badiou (an atheist) sees as creating Christianity though his assertion of fidelity to the Event of Christ. Not for Paul endless debates about whether Christ actually died and rose--Paul is on this point utterly convinced. The only question Paul poses is this: how will you respond to the Christ Event? Will you be faithful to it or will you live as if its authenticity were in doubt?
I must say this example gives me pause, revealing as it does the "faith" aspect of the word fidelity. I am reminded of the old adage about how absolute proof of God would invalidate faith since faith is precisely investment of commitment and effort in the absence of absolute compulsion or assurance. "You believe because you have seen me," the risen Christ told Thomas, "Blessed are those who have not seen yet still believe." Blessed are those who are faithful to the Event without certainty of its Event-ness?
I don't know. I'm not yet ready to dispense with deliberation and analysis prior to action; indeed, I would resist a vision of ethics that implies fully committed action based on every hunch of Event-ness one has.
But Badiou does give a new perspective on the "agree to disagree" impulse. It is possible to be unethical by not acting, by stubbornly hesitating to act when the situation (the Event) calls for it. The impulse to moderate, to not make trouble, to agree to disagree--there are times when living by this impulse would be the ultimate betrayal. Ethics for Badiou--and I think for Christians--necessarily involves a degree of risk.
More tomorrow,
JF
Now, it should be remembered that the suffragist movement had its share of militants. Indeed, a few British suffragists engaged in a bit of property destruction to advance their cause. And although no US suffragists engaged in such activities, many of them made no secret of the fact that they trained with British activists. And certainly, by the standards of the time, the very fact that women were marching in public in spectacular display of their own agency had more than a tinge of scandal about it.
Nevertheless, it's difficult from our perspective to extend much sympathy to the Post for its waffling, sort-of support for an issue we consider a basic and uncomplicated matter of justice. How can anyone be not for women's right to vote? How, moreover, can anyone be less than adamant that women must be allowed to vote? As I've written about previously, the suffrage issue at present so basic to our conceptions of democracy that it isn't even political--that is, it's not a contestable issue. Debates about whether or not women should or shouldn't vote are ipso facto invalid. From this present perspective, then, to look back and see someone asserting their even-handedness as the most moral stance highlights just how immoral even-handedness can be.
Of course, that judgment I just leveled at the Post of a century ago is historiographically self-serving. I prove my democratic bona fides by castigating those who would question the present's dominant configuration of democracy. In other words, hindsight is 20/20. The real question is how I would feel were I a 30-something male citizen of Washington, DC, in 1913, having lived all my life without the benefit of a hegemonic ideology that defines women's suffrage as integral to US democratic practice.
I would like to think that I would, like many "liberals" of the day (who were often, it should be mentioned, socialists) support suffrage. But I don't know. Like I said, I dislike conflict and disagreement. I have a low patience threshold for spectacular mass political actions that fail to meet my rather high standards for thoughtfulness and efficacy. Those who would dispense with or disrupt social order casually or "just because," in my view, have little moral authority to tell others how to create a better social order. Disruptions and attention-getting spectacle, in other words, need to be very well-considered before I support them.
The problem is that most in-the-moment activist decisions happen without the hindsight necessary to judge them as well-considered and efficacious. The turn-of-the-century social theorist Georges Sorel argued that authentic revolutions can be distinguished from temporary or abortive uprisings only by historians who look back at the events from a future date.
Similarly, in the present, political philosopher Alain Badiou bases his ethical philosophy around the idea of the Event--a transformative occurrence that alters forever the standards of existence, rendering everything that came before the Event moot. Einstein's theory of relativity, for example, constitutes an Event in that it utterly invalidated whole swaths of scientific thought that had gone on before. It's impossible to subscribe to Newtonian physics as absolute truth after the Event of Einstein. Badiou suggests that various kinds of Events exist. Falling in love, for example, is an Event on a personal level; nothing after the fall is the same as before. Authentic revolutions can be Events, transforming forever political realities that had been known and stable prior to them. Ethics, for Badiou, consists of fidelity to the Event. It is unethical, he argues, to shut one's ears and eyes to the transformation wrought by Events on personal or social levels.
The problem I've had with Badiou is that he offers very little by way of guidance about how to distinguish authentic Events from inauthentic or false Events. The Nazi movement, he asserts, based itself on a false Event--the advent of the new Aryan ascendancy, etc. But surely this is also a case of historiographic 20/20 vision, no? Surely--as repugnant as it seems to us--Hitler's dream of a new Germany struck many Germans, at least, as an Event that reformatted the world. What besides a process called "ethics" helps one in determining the authenticity of an Event? Like my time-traveling hypothetical about the Suffrage Parade, how would I recognize an authentic Event surely enough to justify investing fidelity to it?
Badiou, for his part, largely ignores the authenticity question in favor of a focus on fidelity. Strikingly for Christians, one of Badiou's main works describing his theory focuses on Saint Paul, whom Badiou (an atheist) sees as creating Christianity though his assertion of fidelity to the Event of Christ. Not for Paul endless debates about whether Christ actually died and rose--Paul is on this point utterly convinced. The only question Paul poses is this: how will you respond to the Christ Event? Will you be faithful to it or will you live as if its authenticity were in doubt?
I must say this example gives me pause, revealing as it does the "faith" aspect of the word fidelity. I am reminded of the old adage about how absolute proof of God would invalidate faith since faith is precisely investment of commitment and effort in the absence of absolute compulsion or assurance. "You believe because you have seen me," the risen Christ told Thomas, "Blessed are those who have not seen yet still believe." Blessed are those who are faithful to the Event without certainty of its Event-ness?
I don't know. I'm not yet ready to dispense with deliberation and analysis prior to action; indeed, I would resist a vision of ethics that implies fully committed action based on every hunch of Event-ness one has.
But Badiou does give a new perspective on the "agree to disagree" impulse. It is possible to be unethical by not acting, by stubbornly hesitating to act when the situation (the Event) calls for it. The impulse to moderate, to not make trouble, to agree to disagree--there are times when living by this impulse would be the ultimate betrayal. Ethics for Badiou--and I think for Christians--necessarily involves a degree of risk.
More tomorrow,
JF
Sunday, October 25, 2009
The Privilege of Agreeing to Disagree
Just what does it mean, to agree to disagree?
Yesterday I sketched out a few salient aspects of the disagreement between churchgoers (at least, those in the United Methodist Church) over the issue of homosexuality. The differences are fairly stark and passionately held; indeed, my own overview of the two sides slanted considerably to the side I personally support (i.e., inclusivity).
I've had occasion to see this debate played out in literal terms both at Annual Conferences and General Conferences (that is, state-level and national/international-level legislative gatherings of the UMC). Inevitably, after various advocates of both sides have made impassioned pleas to the body as a whole, someone else stands up and requests (generally in an exasperated tone) that the whole issue just be dropped, that it's decisive and distracting, and that most of the church is simply uninterested in this quagmire of an debate. Let's just agree to disagree, in other words.
While I appreciate the irenic, can't-we-all-just-get-along intentions of such a sentiment, I can't help but suspect some deeper motives at work in these kind of requests. Basically: conflict makes me uncomfortable. So does homosexuality. Let's drop it.
I can relate; conflict makes me uncomfortable, too. On stage or on screen it's the heart of the Western-European dramatic tradition. In life it can be plain awkward and misery-inducing.
And I can understand that a red-hot issue like GLBT behaviors and identities can also make people uncomfortable, partially because it's foreign and vaguely threatening to many people and partially because, in a UMC Conference setting, it signals--you guessed it--conflict.
My sympathy with the let's-just-avoid-it question has limits, though. Part of what I teach my students in coursework about gender and sexuality is that differences in human identity nearly always get arranged into privileged and no-so-privileged categories. The privileged categories currently include white (rather than non-white), male (rather than non-male), well-off (rather than not-so-well-off), educated (rather than not), heterosexual, and non-disabled. Now, at this point, my white-male-straight-etc. students often get a little antsy, feeling like they've been cast as the villain in some melodrama of social justice. If left unaddressed, antsy-ness can morph into defensiveness.
The remedy involves specifying what privilege is--or, rather, what it's not. Privilege is not, first off, the same thing as active prejudice or bigotry. Nor is it the same as personal responsibility for others' oppression. As a white male, I have a degree of privilege due to my gender and my skin color. This is not to say, however, that I am consciously, intentionally involved in an agenda to keep down non-white and non-male people.
What does privilege mean? Well, answering that question fully would fill up a book (at least). A few key aspects of privilege I point out to students, though: for one thing, I enjoy (as a white male) the privilege of default status. When there is talk of "a person" in general, with no identifying features, most likely image most people imagine (or the image the talk intends people to imagine) looks more or less like me. If it were otherwise, the "person" would need some qualifiers to be distinguished from the white-male default. "A police officer came to the door," for example, is generally taken to describe a white, male police officer. Of course, this is not universally true; it's a general tendency rather than an always-everywhere certainty.
Another privilege I enjoy is visibility. I don't have to flip around TV for long to find a show that features a cast of people predominantly my race, my gender, and speaking my language. The most popular and prevalent characters in TV and movies are white. Exceptions of course exist, but they are, well, exceptional. That there needs to be a channel for black people (BET), for Latino/a people (Univision), for women (Lifetime), or for GLBT people (Logo) points to the fact that most channels are for "everyone"--meaning the generic "everyone," i.e., white males.
Neither default status nor high-visibility are indications of personal prejudice. I didn't choose to be white and male; I didn't play a personal part in the historical and cultural processes that made those identities privileged. These are for that reason often described as unearned privileges. But I recognize that, regardless of my personal causative role (or lack thereof) in their creation, these realities exist.
A vital aspect of privilege, though, involves the privilege of non-awareness. It's a mark of unearned privilege that those who hold it can go through life oblivious to the fact that they enjoy those privileges as such--and that other people don't enjoy that privilege. I can, as a white male, for the most part go through my life without having to think actively or critically about race or gender status. I can enter just about any store in this nation (with some obvious exceptions, of course) without having once to think of how my skin color might make me seem dangerous or dishonest to those in charge. I can walk across campus without having to worry that I might be sexually assaulted. I can apply for a loan without having to worry about "sounding white" for the bank teller. And most of all, I can do all of those things without ever viewing them as special or unique to people like me. It's just The Way Things Are.
Indeed, the only times I would really have to think about the issue would be when someone from an unprivileged status makes the privilege deficit an issue. If someone accuses me of hoarding all the visibility on TV shows, I have to suddenly look at my default status and greater visibility as contingent--changeable--rather than Just The Way Things Are. Moreover, I have to consider that The Way Things Are might be wrong or unfair, that I may actually have to share or (more likely) give up some degree of default status or visibility in order to equalize statuses between myself and others.
In other words, awareness is disturbing because it leads to responsibility. As soon as I become aware that I enjoy unearned privileges over others, I become responsible for how those privileges play out. It becomes my problem that women aren't hired for X job at equal rates to men, my problem that black people have a harder time getting good loans than white people, my problem that a taxi will stop for me rather than for the Latina standing next to me. Again, responsibility isn't the same as fault. I didn't personally cause those situations. But it does behoove me to do what I can to remedy them. Otherwise, if I sink back into willful non-awareness, I do more than enjoy unearned privileges; I perpetuate them.
For this reason, I tell my students, we have to be very careful when we assert that the proper course of action in a particular situation is to "agree to disagree" or stop arguing or "be neutral." We have to be careful that the peaceful status quo we seek to restore or preserve isn't just a way to keep ourselves safely unaware of the unearned privileges we hold (and therefore ignorant of the unearned deprivations that others suffer). After all, to silence debate about a privilege issue is primarily to ask those who suffer to shut up and accept their lot in life.
Now--to what extent does this privilege reflection bear on the GLBT debate in the UMC and the desire to "agree to disagree" or stop talking about it? This very question, it turns out, forms part of the debate itself.
More tomorrow,
JF
Yesterday I sketched out a few salient aspects of the disagreement between churchgoers (at least, those in the United Methodist Church) over the issue of homosexuality. The differences are fairly stark and passionately held; indeed, my own overview of the two sides slanted considerably to the side I personally support (i.e., inclusivity).
I've had occasion to see this debate played out in literal terms both at Annual Conferences and General Conferences (that is, state-level and national/international-level legislative gatherings of the UMC). Inevitably, after various advocates of both sides have made impassioned pleas to the body as a whole, someone else stands up and requests (generally in an exasperated tone) that the whole issue just be dropped, that it's decisive and distracting, and that most of the church is simply uninterested in this quagmire of an debate. Let's just agree to disagree, in other words.
While I appreciate the irenic, can't-we-all-just-get-along intentions of such a sentiment, I can't help but suspect some deeper motives at work in these kind of requests. Basically: conflict makes me uncomfortable. So does homosexuality. Let's drop it.
I can relate; conflict makes me uncomfortable, too. On stage or on screen it's the heart of the Western-European dramatic tradition. In life it can be plain awkward and misery-inducing.
And I can understand that a red-hot issue like GLBT behaviors and identities can also make people uncomfortable, partially because it's foreign and vaguely threatening to many people and partially because, in a UMC Conference setting, it signals--you guessed it--conflict.
My sympathy with the let's-just-avoid-it question has limits, though. Part of what I teach my students in coursework about gender and sexuality is that differences in human identity nearly always get arranged into privileged and no-so-privileged categories. The privileged categories currently include white (rather than non-white), male (rather than non-male), well-off (rather than not-so-well-off), educated (rather than not), heterosexual, and non-disabled. Now, at this point, my white-male-straight-etc. students often get a little antsy, feeling like they've been cast as the villain in some melodrama of social justice. If left unaddressed, antsy-ness can morph into defensiveness.
The remedy involves specifying what privilege is--or, rather, what it's not. Privilege is not, first off, the same thing as active prejudice or bigotry. Nor is it the same as personal responsibility for others' oppression. As a white male, I have a degree of privilege due to my gender and my skin color. This is not to say, however, that I am consciously, intentionally involved in an agenda to keep down non-white and non-male people.
What does privilege mean? Well, answering that question fully would fill up a book (at least). A few key aspects of privilege I point out to students, though: for one thing, I enjoy (as a white male) the privilege of default status. When there is talk of "a person" in general, with no identifying features, most likely image most people imagine (or the image the talk intends people to imagine) looks more or less like me. If it were otherwise, the "person" would need some qualifiers to be distinguished from the white-male default. "A police officer came to the door," for example, is generally taken to describe a white, male police officer. Of course, this is not universally true; it's a general tendency rather than an always-everywhere certainty.
Another privilege I enjoy is visibility. I don't have to flip around TV for long to find a show that features a cast of people predominantly my race, my gender, and speaking my language. The most popular and prevalent characters in TV and movies are white. Exceptions of course exist, but they are, well, exceptional. That there needs to be a channel for black people (BET), for Latino/a people (Univision), for women (Lifetime), or for GLBT people (Logo) points to the fact that most channels are for "everyone"--meaning the generic "everyone," i.e., white males.
Neither default status nor high-visibility are indications of personal prejudice. I didn't choose to be white and male; I didn't play a personal part in the historical and cultural processes that made those identities privileged. These are for that reason often described as unearned privileges. But I recognize that, regardless of my personal causative role (or lack thereof) in their creation, these realities exist.
A vital aspect of privilege, though, involves the privilege of non-awareness. It's a mark of unearned privilege that those who hold it can go through life oblivious to the fact that they enjoy those privileges as such--and that other people don't enjoy that privilege. I can, as a white male, for the most part go through my life without having to think actively or critically about race or gender status. I can enter just about any store in this nation (with some obvious exceptions, of course) without having once to think of how my skin color might make me seem dangerous or dishonest to those in charge. I can walk across campus without having to worry that I might be sexually assaulted. I can apply for a loan without having to worry about "sounding white" for the bank teller. And most of all, I can do all of those things without ever viewing them as special or unique to people like me. It's just The Way Things Are.
Indeed, the only times I would really have to think about the issue would be when someone from an unprivileged status makes the privilege deficit an issue. If someone accuses me of hoarding all the visibility on TV shows, I have to suddenly look at my default status and greater visibility as contingent--changeable--rather than Just The Way Things Are. Moreover, I have to consider that The Way Things Are might be wrong or unfair, that I may actually have to share or (more likely) give up some degree of default status or visibility in order to equalize statuses between myself and others.
In other words, awareness is disturbing because it leads to responsibility. As soon as I become aware that I enjoy unearned privileges over others, I become responsible for how those privileges play out. It becomes my problem that women aren't hired for X job at equal rates to men, my problem that black people have a harder time getting good loans than white people, my problem that a taxi will stop for me rather than for the Latina standing next to me. Again, responsibility isn't the same as fault. I didn't personally cause those situations. But it does behoove me to do what I can to remedy them. Otherwise, if I sink back into willful non-awareness, I do more than enjoy unearned privileges; I perpetuate them.
For this reason, I tell my students, we have to be very careful when we assert that the proper course of action in a particular situation is to "agree to disagree" or stop arguing or "be neutral." We have to be careful that the peaceful status quo we seek to restore or preserve isn't just a way to keep ourselves safely unaware of the unearned privileges we hold (and therefore ignorant of the unearned deprivations that others suffer). After all, to silence debate about a privilege issue is primarily to ask those who suffer to shut up and accept their lot in life.
Now--to what extent does this privilege reflection bear on the GLBT debate in the UMC and the desire to "agree to disagree" or stop talking about it? This very question, it turns out, forms part of the debate itself.
More tomorrow,
JF
Saturday, October 24, 2009
GLBT Issues: Two Sides, Two Views
Can't we just agree to disagree?
This is the question I implicitly raised in reacting to Episcopalian Bishop Spong's recent Manifesto about giving up trying to debate or talk to people who don't believe GLBT folk deserve equal status in church and civic life. I myself have written about the GLBT question in relation to fractures afflicting my own United Methodist denomination. Lutherans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists--nearly all the "mainline" denominations are facing possible schisms over this issue.
As I've mentioned before, I see the GLBT issue largely as a sock puppet for a deeper conflict about Biblical inerrancy and authority. Scripture seems fairly clear, in a "plain sense" sort of reading, about its prohibitions regarding same-sex erotic behavior. Spong and others have been quite active in deconstructing such plain sense readings of verses like Leviticus 18:22 ("Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable"), but for a great many people of the old "Bible believing" tradition of plain-and-simple-ism, such critical efforts look like chicanery by effete intellectual snobs desperate to weasel their way out of hard truths. Some weaseling and deconstruction they've had to accept--re-interpreting or un-interpreting verses supporting slavery and segregation or passages prohibiting women's ordination--but on the GBLT issue they (the conservatives) have had enough. The slippery slope of re-interpretation stops for them at the reclassification of homosexuality as a non-sin.
The other side--Spong's side, and mine--offers an equally passionate, frustrated reply. Namely, that the church's attitude toward GLBT people is morally wrong and theologically bankrupt. On the latter point, my side argues that the "plain sense" of scripture is at least as full of shenanigans and weaselly interpretive maneuvers as any other hermeneutic--only it's a lot less honest about it. No one reads the Bible totally in its "plain sense." There's always an interpretive consensus--a meta-interpretive framework--that tacitly defines the "sense" that is supposedly "plain."
Take the newish conservative argument that asserts that the Bible promotes--with perfect consistency--a single ideal plan for human living: one man, one woman, for life, in holy matrimony. That's simply preposterous, given the numerous Biblical heroes who had multiple wives (e.g., David, Solomon, Jacob). or no wives at all (e.g., John the Baptist, Jesus, Elijah). Paul is fairly explicit in defining marriage as a last resort for those unable to overcome their lustful natures (I Corinthians 7:9). The only way to read the Bible and come to the conclusion that God specifically and specially ordains non-polygamous, heterosexual marriage as the Ideal and Only Path for Humans is to read with an interpretive lens that blocks out all of the numerous counter-examples and magnifies the verses that seem best to support the hetero-marriage view.
One only has to glance at the history of debates about slavery, women's suffrage, and segregation in this country to see loads of verses quoted with plain-sense fervor in the service of points of view we would now consider repugnant (to be fair, the "good" sides of these debates had their share of Bible-quoters as well). Christianity relies on the Bible, but the Word we worship isn't paper and ink but the living, dynamic Christ whose Spirit moves among us this day.
But--beyond decrying the Biblical chicanery of "plain sense" hermeneutics--my side sees the anti-GLBT side as unloving and un-Christlike. Nothing about same-sex eroticism violates the imperative to love God and to love one's neighbor. The multiple and ongoing campaigns by various conservative religious forces to paint GLBT people as inherently--and solely because of their sexuality--sick, disordered, immoral, or damaged all lose viability when confronted by the example and witness of actual GLBT people. Worse, the vitriol and, frankly, dishonesty that characterizes many of these campaigns bespeak a raw sort of prejudice, a cultural or personal distaste for same-sex behavior and identities that lacks any foundation in logic or the Spirit.
What won the day in struggles about women's rights or racial equality wasn't a superior collection of powerhouse verses but a holy conviction that it is wrong to use non-maleness or non-whiteness as a reason to restrict the full exercise of membership in civic or church life. It is wrong, argue mainline churches, to view women as unfit for ordained ministry even though the scripture literally says otherwise. It is wrong to have slaves, to execute a woman who defends herself from rape though violence, to segregate races, to forbid interracial marriage--to do a host of things the Bible either allows or commands when read in its "plain sense." We believe it's wrong despite the plain sense scriptures to the contrary because the Spirit overcomes the letter.
Why? Because love wins. That's the overriding pattern of Jesus's ministry on earth. If he encounters a person that religious law (the "plain sense" of scripture) would forbid him to touch or speak to, he breaks the law to reach the person. "Lord," begs the leper in Matthew 11, "if you're willing, you can make me clean." Christ reaches out and touches the leper--an explicit violation of Biblical law: "Of course I'm willing. Be clean." Christ's power cured the leprosy, but I think it was the touch that healed.
And again in Acts: "But God, these animals you tell me to eat [i.e., the Gentiles you tell me to preach to] are unclean according to your Law," protests Peter in Acts 10. "Do not call unclean what I have called clean," God responds, "I am changing the rules."
Thus it is, my side argues, with the GLBT issue. It does no good for Christ-followers to hide behind rules when those rules seem to justify unfair treatment or unloving attitudes. Love demands we weigh the good of the person in balance with orthodoxy to a culturally bound rule. The church's attitude toward GLBT people hurts those people and hurts the witness of God (see Kinnaman and Lyon's book Unchristian, where their research identifies the primary adjective that young non-believers link to Christianity as anti-homosexual). It may be in certain interpretations technically Biblical, but it's unChristian.
If those are the two sides (and of course, I've simplified a great deal), is co-existence possible? Can those two sides agree to disagree?
More tomorrow,
JF
This is the question I implicitly raised in reacting to Episcopalian Bishop Spong's recent Manifesto about giving up trying to debate or talk to people who don't believe GLBT folk deserve equal status in church and civic life. I myself have written about the GLBT question in relation to fractures afflicting my own United Methodist denomination. Lutherans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists--nearly all the "mainline" denominations are facing possible schisms over this issue.
As I've mentioned before, I see the GLBT issue largely as a sock puppet for a deeper conflict about Biblical inerrancy and authority. Scripture seems fairly clear, in a "plain sense" sort of reading, about its prohibitions regarding same-sex erotic behavior. Spong and others have been quite active in deconstructing such plain sense readings of verses like Leviticus 18:22 ("Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable"), but for a great many people of the old "Bible believing" tradition of plain-and-simple-ism, such critical efforts look like chicanery by effete intellectual snobs desperate to weasel their way out of hard truths. Some weaseling and deconstruction they've had to accept--re-interpreting or un-interpreting verses supporting slavery and segregation or passages prohibiting women's ordination--but on the GBLT issue they (the conservatives) have had enough. The slippery slope of re-interpretation stops for them at the reclassification of homosexuality as a non-sin.
The other side--Spong's side, and mine--offers an equally passionate, frustrated reply. Namely, that the church's attitude toward GLBT people is morally wrong and theologically bankrupt. On the latter point, my side argues that the "plain sense" of scripture is at least as full of shenanigans and weaselly interpretive maneuvers as any other hermeneutic--only it's a lot less honest about it. No one reads the Bible totally in its "plain sense." There's always an interpretive consensus--a meta-interpretive framework--that tacitly defines the "sense" that is supposedly "plain."
Take the newish conservative argument that asserts that the Bible promotes--with perfect consistency--a single ideal plan for human living: one man, one woman, for life, in holy matrimony. That's simply preposterous, given the numerous Biblical heroes who had multiple wives (e.g., David, Solomon, Jacob). or no wives at all (e.g., John the Baptist, Jesus, Elijah). Paul is fairly explicit in defining marriage as a last resort for those unable to overcome their lustful natures (I Corinthians 7:9). The only way to read the Bible and come to the conclusion that God specifically and specially ordains non-polygamous, heterosexual marriage as the Ideal and Only Path for Humans is to read with an interpretive lens that blocks out all of the numerous counter-examples and magnifies the verses that seem best to support the hetero-marriage view.
One only has to glance at the history of debates about slavery, women's suffrage, and segregation in this country to see loads of verses quoted with plain-sense fervor in the service of points of view we would now consider repugnant (to be fair, the "good" sides of these debates had their share of Bible-quoters as well). Christianity relies on the Bible, but the Word we worship isn't paper and ink but the living, dynamic Christ whose Spirit moves among us this day.
But--beyond decrying the Biblical chicanery of "plain sense" hermeneutics--my side sees the anti-GLBT side as unloving and un-Christlike. Nothing about same-sex eroticism violates the imperative to love God and to love one's neighbor. The multiple and ongoing campaigns by various conservative religious forces to paint GLBT people as inherently--and solely because of their sexuality--sick, disordered, immoral, or damaged all lose viability when confronted by the example and witness of actual GLBT people. Worse, the vitriol and, frankly, dishonesty that characterizes many of these campaigns bespeak a raw sort of prejudice, a cultural or personal distaste for same-sex behavior and identities that lacks any foundation in logic or the Spirit.
What won the day in struggles about women's rights or racial equality wasn't a superior collection of powerhouse verses but a holy conviction that it is wrong to use non-maleness or non-whiteness as a reason to restrict the full exercise of membership in civic or church life. It is wrong, argue mainline churches, to view women as unfit for ordained ministry even though the scripture literally says otherwise. It is wrong to have slaves, to execute a woman who defends herself from rape though violence, to segregate races, to forbid interracial marriage--to do a host of things the Bible either allows or commands when read in its "plain sense." We believe it's wrong despite the plain sense scriptures to the contrary because the Spirit overcomes the letter.
Why? Because love wins. That's the overriding pattern of Jesus's ministry on earth. If he encounters a person that religious law (the "plain sense" of scripture) would forbid him to touch or speak to, he breaks the law to reach the person. "Lord," begs the leper in Matthew 11, "if you're willing, you can make me clean." Christ reaches out and touches the leper--an explicit violation of Biblical law: "Of course I'm willing. Be clean." Christ's power cured the leprosy, but I think it was the touch that healed.
And again in Acts: "But God, these animals you tell me to eat [i.e., the Gentiles you tell me to preach to] are unclean according to your Law," protests Peter in Acts 10. "Do not call unclean what I have called clean," God responds, "I am changing the rules."
Thus it is, my side argues, with the GLBT issue. It does no good for Christ-followers to hide behind rules when those rules seem to justify unfair treatment or unloving attitudes. Love demands we weigh the good of the person in balance with orthodoxy to a culturally bound rule. The church's attitude toward GLBT people hurts those people and hurts the witness of God (see Kinnaman and Lyon's book Unchristian, where their research identifies the primary adjective that young non-believers link to Christianity as anti-homosexual). It may be in certain interpretations technically Biblical, but it's unChristian.
If those are the two sides (and of course, I've simplified a great deal), is co-existence possible? Can those two sides agree to disagree?
More tomorrow,
JF
Friday, October 23, 2009
Polarizations and Organic Intellectuals
So--to pick up from yesterday's theme--Bishop Spong recently released a manifesto in which he resolves not to debate any more on the issue of GLBT inclusion in church and society. He considers that battle won (i.e., that GLBT people should enjoy the same rights and opportunities as straight people) and further debate counterproductive.
The problem is, first, that debates of that sort aren't won simply by one side's saying so. I can respect that Spong himself is weary of fighting; he has, after all, invested much of his time, energy, and reputation over the years into advocating for GLBT rights. But regardless of the weariness of the participants, the debate about GLBT people in the church continues (should they be members? should they be allowed to marry their same-sex partners? should they be ordained). Winning this argument--realizing a day in which GLBT members aren't categorically treated differently in terms of the life of the church--simply isn't up to the will of single person or a single side.
Another problem with the Spong manifesto tactic is that one could just as easily imagine a manifesto from a spokesperson from the "other side," a manifesto that declares the debate settled once and for all. Indeed, such statements are common in my own denomination's ongoing struggle over the status of GLBT people. Inevitably, after every General Conference in which some compromise or pro-GLBT resolution gets defeated, the more conservative partisans on the GLBT issue release a statement to the effect of "Well--now that that unpleasantness is over, we can finally move on. Case closed." But conservative "mission accomplished" manifestos don't end debate any more than progressive ones.
I'm sure that Spong himself is under no illusions that his statement actually reflects reality; the fact that the manifesto enumerates so many people and institutions (including the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury) who continue to support less-than-progressive stances belies Spong's claim that GLBT inclusion is fait accompli. Nor do I buy that Spong actually believes that his preemptive withdrawal from the fight will end the fight.
I remain curious, then, just what effect he's going for. If he's withdrawing due to purely for-my-own-sanity reasons, why release a public statement--more than that, a manifesto--about it? Why not simply withdraw and be done with it? What's the point, in other words, of a manifesto?
Manifestos summon an audience and aim for a particular rhetorical effect, generally either solidarity ("Yes, that's just what I believe, too!") or anger ("How dare he say that! What a rebel!"). Many of Spong's full-length studies (Why Christianity Must Change or Die, for example) could be considered manifestos, attracting the like-minded and repulsing the opposition. He's a polarizer.
Not that I'm knocking polarization per se. Sometimes it's valuable and necessary. In defining the "sides" of this debate, Spong, performs a function similar to what Antonio Gramsci calls an organic intellectual. In his explorations about about how and why certain political parties achieve dominance (hegemony) in particular states, Gramsci spends time discussing how parties form in the first place. They don't just spring into being ex nihilo. Most people--even those who would ostensibly be unified under a certain banner or issue--simply exist together without any political organization. They are a mass, not a party.
For a party to form, a organic (as in "organizing") intellectual must emerge--someone with the power to frame for the mass a new vision of themselves as unified by a commonality--generally some kind of shared injustice. Moreover, the organic intellectual gives to the people a vision of the state as it could be, a "concrete fantasy" or myth of the possible community (usually a situation in which the key injustice is rectified). Once a mass of people internalize this concrete fantasy, they can begin the logistical/educational processes necessary to reform themselves as a party.
Similarly, Spong's work has provided many in the progressive Christian church with an intellectual and moral support structure for pro-GLBT (and, more broadly anti-fundamentalist) reform movements. Like any organic intellectual, Spong defines an activated movement of progressive Christians by identifying both what the movement is for (a concrete fantasy of a church-that-can-be) and what the movement opposes.
Clarity, however, comes at the price of consensus. It's useful to remember that Gramsci formulated his theory keeping in mind the life-and-death struggle between Communists and Fascists in Italy during the 1920s. It was vital, in his view, to make neutrality an untenable position. Or, more precisely, Gramsci's analysis implies that Mussolini's party proved so successful not only through its bullying tactics but also through the concrete fantasy of a masculine, revived, respected/feard Italy--a fantasy that caught on with many Italians who had been disaffected since World War I. As this fantasy gained traction among more and more people, the Fascists ratcheted up the polarization, making those who felt ambivalent about or opposed to the fantasy of New Italy under Il Duce not only "people who hold a different opinion" but active traitors, agents of the foreign governments intent on keeping Italy firmly under Western Europe's thumb. Thus, the Fascists gained power by making "not being a Fascist" unthinkable and unattractive. For or against--you choose.
Beneath the ongoing disagreements about the proper status of GLBT people in the church is a deeper debate, a meta-disagreement, about how the church ought to frame and navigate its differences on this issue. To whit: is the GLBT issue an either/or question? Is polarization inevitable or necessary?
Or, as one study about the United Methodist Church's conflict put it, the GLBT question can be parsed not only into pro-inclusion and anti-inclusion sides but also into the side of those who see it possible for pro- and anti-GLBT folk to co-exist in the same denomination and the side of those who see pros and antis as so divergent that schism is the only logical or ethical solution.
In his manifesto, Spong adds little that is new to the pro/anti-GLBT debate. But to a greater degree than in previous work, Spong establishes himself as firmly on the "there's no way to agree to disagree" side.
More tomorrow,
JF
The problem is, first, that debates of that sort aren't won simply by one side's saying so. I can respect that Spong himself is weary of fighting; he has, after all, invested much of his time, energy, and reputation over the years into advocating for GLBT rights. But regardless of the weariness of the participants, the debate about GLBT people in the church continues (should they be members? should they be allowed to marry their same-sex partners? should they be ordained). Winning this argument--realizing a day in which GLBT members aren't categorically treated differently in terms of the life of the church--simply isn't up to the will of single person or a single side.
Another problem with the Spong manifesto tactic is that one could just as easily imagine a manifesto from a spokesperson from the "other side," a manifesto that declares the debate settled once and for all. Indeed, such statements are common in my own denomination's ongoing struggle over the status of GLBT people. Inevitably, after every General Conference in which some compromise or pro-GLBT resolution gets defeated, the more conservative partisans on the GLBT issue release a statement to the effect of "Well--now that that unpleasantness is over, we can finally move on. Case closed." But conservative "mission accomplished" manifestos don't end debate any more than progressive ones.
I'm sure that Spong himself is under no illusions that his statement actually reflects reality; the fact that the manifesto enumerates so many people and institutions (including the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury) who continue to support less-than-progressive stances belies Spong's claim that GLBT inclusion is fait accompli. Nor do I buy that Spong actually believes that his preemptive withdrawal from the fight will end the fight.
I remain curious, then, just what effect he's going for. If he's withdrawing due to purely for-my-own-sanity reasons, why release a public statement--more than that, a manifesto--about it? Why not simply withdraw and be done with it? What's the point, in other words, of a manifesto?
Manifestos summon an audience and aim for a particular rhetorical effect, generally either solidarity ("Yes, that's just what I believe, too!") or anger ("How dare he say that! What a rebel!"). Many of Spong's full-length studies (Why Christianity Must Change or Die, for example) could be considered manifestos, attracting the like-minded and repulsing the opposition. He's a polarizer.
Not that I'm knocking polarization per se. Sometimes it's valuable and necessary. In defining the "sides" of this debate, Spong, performs a function similar to what Antonio Gramsci calls an organic intellectual. In his explorations about about how and why certain political parties achieve dominance (hegemony) in particular states, Gramsci spends time discussing how parties form in the first place. They don't just spring into being ex nihilo. Most people--even those who would ostensibly be unified under a certain banner or issue--simply exist together without any political organization. They are a mass, not a party.
For a party to form, a organic (as in "organizing") intellectual must emerge--someone with the power to frame for the mass a new vision of themselves as unified by a commonality--generally some kind of shared injustice. Moreover, the organic intellectual gives to the people a vision of the state as it could be, a "concrete fantasy" or myth of the possible community (usually a situation in which the key injustice is rectified). Once a mass of people internalize this concrete fantasy, they can begin the logistical/educational processes necessary to reform themselves as a party.
Similarly, Spong's work has provided many in the progressive Christian church with an intellectual and moral support structure for pro-GLBT (and, more broadly anti-fundamentalist) reform movements. Like any organic intellectual, Spong defines an activated movement of progressive Christians by identifying both what the movement is for (a concrete fantasy of a church-that-can-be) and what the movement opposes.
Clarity, however, comes at the price of consensus. It's useful to remember that Gramsci formulated his theory keeping in mind the life-and-death struggle between Communists and Fascists in Italy during the 1920s. It was vital, in his view, to make neutrality an untenable position. Or, more precisely, Gramsci's analysis implies that Mussolini's party proved so successful not only through its bullying tactics but also through the concrete fantasy of a masculine, revived, respected/feard Italy--a fantasy that caught on with many Italians who had been disaffected since World War I. As this fantasy gained traction among more and more people, the Fascists ratcheted up the polarization, making those who felt ambivalent about or opposed to the fantasy of New Italy under Il Duce not only "people who hold a different opinion" but active traitors, agents of the foreign governments intent on keeping Italy firmly under Western Europe's thumb. Thus, the Fascists gained power by making "not being a Fascist" unthinkable and unattractive. For or against--you choose.
Beneath the ongoing disagreements about the proper status of GLBT people in the church is a deeper debate, a meta-disagreement, about how the church ought to frame and navigate its differences on this issue. To whit: is the GLBT issue an either/or question? Is polarization inevitable or necessary?
Or, as one study about the United Methodist Church's conflict put it, the GLBT question can be parsed not only into pro-inclusion and anti-inclusion sides but also into the side of those who see it possible for pro- and anti-GLBT folk to co-exist in the same denomination and the side of those who see pros and antis as so divergent that schism is the only logical or ethical solution.
In his manifesto, Spong adds little that is new to the pro/anti-GLBT debate. But to a greater degree than in previous work, Spong establishes himself as firmly on the "there's no way to agree to disagree" side.
More tomorrow,
JF
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Of Manifestos, Hegemony, and Women's Suffrage
Finally--the editorial is done (well, done until revisions, that is).
Funnily enough, my focus in that piece touched on some of the issues that Bishop Spong raised in his manifesto. There he declared that he is done with arguing, debating, discussing, and defending his stance that GLBT people and behaviors are no more or less acceptable to God, that they are no more or less deserving of equal opportunities to participate in civic and ecclesiastical life, than straight people are. He resolves to view the issue as closed, a moot point not worthy of serious debate.
In a sense, that resolution captures the wish of every practically every political cause. Activists paradoxically work to render their activism unnecessary. The women's suffrage movement in the US, for example, dissolved after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified. Abolitionists in the US had to move on to other issues after the Civil War (well, after the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, technically). The successful activist is ideally the out-of-work activist.
Success in this sense consists of convincing enough people that your side of a particular issue is so compelling that it is the default way of seeing things. Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Communist jailed by Mussolini, called this kind of success hegemony. Gramsci had been in the 1920s the president of Italy's Communist Party, a role which to post-Cold War US ears might sound like I'm describing him as Darth Vader's right-hand man. In post-World War I Italy, though, it was the Communist Party more than any other that posed the greatest domestic resistance to Mussolini's Fascism. Gramsci and the other Communists fought hard to prevent his rise, but as was the case in other European countries, their effort did not succeed.
During his years in prison, years which in fact ended up killing him, Gramsci reflected long and hard on how it could be that such a despicable bundle of ideas as Fascism could so achieve victory, winning power not only through force (the brownshirts) but also by gaining popular support. Through a collection of writings that came to be known as The Prison Notebooks, Gramsci looked to history and to foreign affairs for clues and examples as to why and how dominant political parties achieve and maintain their dominance.
One of his main insights is that it isn't enough simply to have superior force on your side. Even in non-democratic states, a dominant power must eventually win the consent (if not the wholehearted support) of its populace. Otherwise the overpowering force simply creates martyr after martyr, fomenting dissent while burning up the leadership's energy and resources stamping out rebellions. In democratic states where multiple parties vie for power, winning this popular consent takes a great deal of work. It basically consists of convincing most of the relevant (i.e., voting) population that your party's idea for the country is in fact in their (the populace's) best interests. You make your idea of the Good and the people's idea of the Good conform. It may be that you convince people to support your ideals wholeheartedly, but it would also work simply to convince people that your ideals, while not perfect, are simply better than any other alternative and that no other choice is really viable.
The ultimate goal would be to make your case was so convincing that your party's particular idea of the Good gets seen by most everyone as The Way Things Are And Should Be. You win when your take on an issue gets installed so deeply and permanently into the machinery of what it means to be Italian (or, perhaps, American or Christian) that no one really considers it to be one take among other possible choices.
Hegemony in other words, is when your take on things is the only game in town.
Part of the reason I love teaching theatre history is that I get to introduce students to past moments where the "game in town" was very, very different. To read a suffrage play from the 1910s, for example, is to tap into a world in which the question of whether or not women should be allowed to vote was considered up for debate. It's a bizarre experience to read a play that stages a realistic debate between characters of differing opinions on the suffrage issue (Charlotte Ann Perkins Gilman wrote several good ones along these lines). There's an odd sense of familiarity to the tone of the discussions--the worries about going too far, the call for moderation, the rationally stated resistance to the idea of women voting (voiced often by women themselves), and the desire to let the matter drop.
Plays like this highlight the extent to which present-day US convictions about women's rights are historically specific. We may affirm in 2009 the idea that women naturally have a right (as in, the endowed-by-their-creator natural right) to vote. But the naturalness of this right is a historical fiction, by which I mean not that it is fake or false but that it is the product of human effort. Suffragists worked for over half a century in this country to win people over to the idea that women have the same civil right to vote as men. That their effort was successful is evident in the fact that women's suffrage is now hegemonic. It has ceased to be a political issue in the US at all. No one (well, I'm sure you could find a few isolated voices) seriously suggests that this issue be re-opened, that somehow people should be presented with both sides of "the argument" and allowed to decide for themselves. "The argument" as such does not exist.
It is this state that Bishop Spong wishes to realize with his manifesto about GLBT status in civic and ecclesiastical life. Indeed, his argument is that the debate is already over, that continuing to discuss whether same-sex couples should be married or whether an openly GLBT person may be ordained is as silly as debating whether a woman should be allowed to vote because she's a woman.
But here's the rub: hegemony doesn't happen just because you want it to. Indeed, that Bishop Spong has to write a manifesto to say the debate is over proves that the debate isn't over. It's a common tactic--perhaps the most common tactic--for one side or party in a hegemonic struggle to declare preemptively that its side of things is The Way Things Are rather than one possible way out of many to see things. In critical theory parlance, that tactic is called naturalizing the argument; you frame your way of seeing things as natural, as not open to debate.
But issues that really aren't open to debate--well, they aren't debated. No one debates whether gravity is good or bad; gravity simply is. No one debates whether blood needs to flow through blood vessels in living humans; it simply does. These issues qualify, as far as we are able to imagine, as legitimately naturalized and out of the realm of moral-political debate. Issues about rights and inclusion simply lack that level of naturalness. The closest humans can come to making such issues seem as natural as gravity or blood is hegemony, and hegemony only happens--if it ever does--through loads of work and loads of time.
As much as I'd like to believe otherwise, debates about GLBT issues remain debated--and therefore debatable. Neither my side (which is similar to that of Bishop Spong) nor the "other side" has the privilege of hegemony or naturalization. I question, then, the value of pretending--or, rather, forcefully declaring--otherwise.
More tomorrow,
JF
Funnily enough, my focus in that piece touched on some of the issues that Bishop Spong raised in his manifesto. There he declared that he is done with arguing, debating, discussing, and defending his stance that GLBT people and behaviors are no more or less acceptable to God, that they are no more or less deserving of equal opportunities to participate in civic and ecclesiastical life, than straight people are. He resolves to view the issue as closed, a moot point not worthy of serious debate.
In a sense, that resolution captures the wish of every practically every political cause. Activists paradoxically work to render their activism unnecessary. The women's suffrage movement in the US, for example, dissolved after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified. Abolitionists in the US had to move on to other issues after the Civil War (well, after the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, technically). The successful activist is ideally the out-of-work activist.
Success in this sense consists of convincing enough people that your side of a particular issue is so compelling that it is the default way of seeing things. Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Communist jailed by Mussolini, called this kind of success hegemony. Gramsci had been in the 1920s the president of Italy's Communist Party, a role which to post-Cold War US ears might sound like I'm describing him as Darth Vader's right-hand man. In post-World War I Italy, though, it was the Communist Party more than any other that posed the greatest domestic resistance to Mussolini's Fascism. Gramsci and the other Communists fought hard to prevent his rise, but as was the case in other European countries, their effort did not succeed.
During his years in prison, years which in fact ended up killing him, Gramsci reflected long and hard on how it could be that such a despicable bundle of ideas as Fascism could so achieve victory, winning power not only through force (the brownshirts) but also by gaining popular support. Through a collection of writings that came to be known as The Prison Notebooks, Gramsci looked to history and to foreign affairs for clues and examples as to why and how dominant political parties achieve and maintain their dominance.
One of his main insights is that it isn't enough simply to have superior force on your side. Even in non-democratic states, a dominant power must eventually win the consent (if not the wholehearted support) of its populace. Otherwise the overpowering force simply creates martyr after martyr, fomenting dissent while burning up the leadership's energy and resources stamping out rebellions. In democratic states where multiple parties vie for power, winning this popular consent takes a great deal of work. It basically consists of convincing most of the relevant (i.e., voting) population that your party's idea for the country is in fact in their (the populace's) best interests. You make your idea of the Good and the people's idea of the Good conform. It may be that you convince people to support your ideals wholeheartedly, but it would also work simply to convince people that your ideals, while not perfect, are simply better than any other alternative and that no other choice is really viable.
The ultimate goal would be to make your case was so convincing that your party's particular idea of the Good gets seen by most everyone as The Way Things Are And Should Be. You win when your take on an issue gets installed so deeply and permanently into the machinery of what it means to be Italian (or, perhaps, American or Christian) that no one really considers it to be one take among other possible choices.
Hegemony in other words, is when your take on things is the only game in town.
Part of the reason I love teaching theatre history is that I get to introduce students to past moments where the "game in town" was very, very different. To read a suffrage play from the 1910s, for example, is to tap into a world in which the question of whether or not women should be allowed to vote was considered up for debate. It's a bizarre experience to read a play that stages a realistic debate between characters of differing opinions on the suffrage issue (Charlotte Ann Perkins Gilman wrote several good ones along these lines). There's an odd sense of familiarity to the tone of the discussions--the worries about going too far, the call for moderation, the rationally stated resistance to the idea of women voting (voiced often by women themselves), and the desire to let the matter drop.
Plays like this highlight the extent to which present-day US convictions about women's rights are historically specific. We may affirm in 2009 the idea that women naturally have a right (as in, the endowed-by-their-creator natural right) to vote. But the naturalness of this right is a historical fiction, by which I mean not that it is fake or false but that it is the product of human effort. Suffragists worked for over half a century in this country to win people over to the idea that women have the same civil right to vote as men. That their effort was successful is evident in the fact that women's suffrage is now hegemonic. It has ceased to be a political issue in the US at all. No one (well, I'm sure you could find a few isolated voices) seriously suggests that this issue be re-opened, that somehow people should be presented with both sides of "the argument" and allowed to decide for themselves. "The argument" as such does not exist.
It is this state that Bishop Spong wishes to realize with his manifesto about GLBT status in civic and ecclesiastical life. Indeed, his argument is that the debate is already over, that continuing to discuss whether same-sex couples should be married or whether an openly GLBT person may be ordained is as silly as debating whether a woman should be allowed to vote because she's a woman.
But here's the rub: hegemony doesn't happen just because you want it to. Indeed, that Bishop Spong has to write a manifesto to say the debate is over proves that the debate isn't over. It's a common tactic--perhaps the most common tactic--for one side or party in a hegemonic struggle to declare preemptively that its side of things is The Way Things Are rather than one possible way out of many to see things. In critical theory parlance, that tactic is called naturalizing the argument; you frame your way of seeing things as natural, as not open to debate.
But issues that really aren't open to debate--well, they aren't debated. No one debates whether gravity is good or bad; gravity simply is. No one debates whether blood needs to flow through blood vessels in living humans; it simply does. These issues qualify, as far as we are able to imagine, as legitimately naturalized and out of the realm of moral-political debate. Issues about rights and inclusion simply lack that level of naturalness. The closest humans can come to making such issues seem as natural as gravity or blood is hegemony, and hegemony only happens--if it ever does--through loads of work and loads of time.
As much as I'd like to believe otherwise, debates about GLBT issues remain debated--and therefore debatable. Neither my side (which is similar to that of Bishop Spong) nor the "other side" has the privilege of hegemony or naturalization. I question, then, the value of pretending--or, rather, forcefully declaring--otherwise.
More tomorrow,
JF
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
The Spong Manifesto
Still (!) working on that dang editorial.
Nonetheless: I ran into a fascinating piece today, a manifesto by the Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Spong. Spong is well-known in progressive Christian circles (and reviled in conservative Christian circles) for books like Why Christianity Must Change or Die and Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism. There he takes an unabashedly liberal view of some of the main tenets of Christian doctrine, challenging believers to relinquish views he considers fundamentalist, e.g., the Bible as inerrant, the narratives in scripture as literal histories, and the substitutionary atonement of Christ. He has been a particularly vocal advocate of GLBT inclusivity in church and society and bitter critic of faith-based rationales for denigrating GLBT people.
The manifesto ("A Manifesto! The Time Has Come!") continues this latter trend. Well--I say continues. Bishop Spong himself presents the manifest as a kind of final word on the subject, his "I will fight no more forever" statement.
A quote is in order:
"I have made a decision. I will no longer debate the issue of homosexuality in the church with anyone. I will no longer engage the biblical ignorance that emanates from so many right-wing Christians about how the Bible condemns homosexuality, as if that point of view still has any credibility. I will no longer discuss with them or listen to them tell me how homosexuality is "an abomination to God," about how homosexuality is a "chosen lifestyle," or about how through prayer and "spiritual counseling" homosexual persons can be "cured." Those arguments are no longer worthy of my time or energy."
He continues with further personal resolutions regarding not listening to debates, reading or listening to views "from the other side," or bothering to respond to them in person or in print. He mixes in other resolutions about dismissing those in breakaway factions of the Episcopal church (who are leaving to align themselves with other bodies in the Anglican Communion), ignoring religious leaders like the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury on matters relating to human sexuality, and--in a gutsy move--criticizing various "third-world" ministers who foster "killing prejudice" against GLBT people and get away with it by virtue of their origins.
The battle, he argues, is over. Inclusion is the way of the future, and the church can either get on board or move out of the way. Spong makes it clear that he views the topic of GLBT sexuality as closed, just as most of Christendom views questions of whether segregation is right or whether wives are their husbands' property as no longer debatable. He resolves, finally, to turn his energies and attention elsewhere.
A bold statement, to be sure.
I have questions, however, as to its purpose and ends...
More tomorrow,
JF
PS--100th post! Yay blog! (even though the last few posts have been quite slim).
Nonetheless: I ran into a fascinating piece today, a manifesto by the Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Spong. Spong is well-known in progressive Christian circles (and reviled in conservative Christian circles) for books like Why Christianity Must Change or Die and Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism. There he takes an unabashedly liberal view of some of the main tenets of Christian doctrine, challenging believers to relinquish views he considers fundamentalist, e.g., the Bible as inerrant, the narratives in scripture as literal histories, and the substitutionary atonement of Christ. He has been a particularly vocal advocate of GLBT inclusivity in church and society and bitter critic of faith-based rationales for denigrating GLBT people.
The manifesto ("A Manifesto! The Time Has Come!") continues this latter trend. Well--I say continues. Bishop Spong himself presents the manifest as a kind of final word on the subject, his "I will fight no more forever" statement.
A quote is in order:
"I have made a decision. I will no longer debate the issue of homosexuality in the church with anyone. I will no longer engage the biblical ignorance that emanates from so many right-wing Christians about how the Bible condemns homosexuality, as if that point of view still has any credibility. I will no longer discuss with them or listen to them tell me how homosexuality is "an abomination to God," about how homosexuality is a "chosen lifestyle," or about how through prayer and "spiritual counseling" homosexual persons can be "cured." Those arguments are no longer worthy of my time or energy."
He continues with further personal resolutions regarding not listening to debates, reading or listening to views "from the other side," or bothering to respond to them in person or in print. He mixes in other resolutions about dismissing those in breakaway factions of the Episcopal church (who are leaving to align themselves with other bodies in the Anglican Communion), ignoring religious leaders like the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury on matters relating to human sexuality, and--in a gutsy move--criticizing various "third-world" ministers who foster "killing prejudice" against GLBT people and get away with it by virtue of their origins.
The battle, he argues, is over. Inclusion is the way of the future, and the church can either get on board or move out of the way. Spong makes it clear that he views the topic of GLBT sexuality as closed, just as most of Christendom views questions of whether segregation is right or whether wives are their husbands' property as no longer debatable. He resolves, finally, to turn his energies and attention elsewhere.
A bold statement, to be sure.
I have questions, however, as to its purpose and ends...
More tomorrow,
JF
PS--100th post! Yay blog! (even though the last few posts have been quite slim).
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Oy! Yet another tired ramble!
Bleg. Writing is just plain hard. People who say otherwise don't write themselves, as a rule.
Alas, another day finds me just as swamped by multiple assignments as yesterday. My brain is not quite at the melted-plastic-thing state--but it's close. I imagine tendrils of smoke and an alarming mechanical grinding are coming from my head... It will be a blessing to have this week and its many writing/grading pressures behind me.
Part of the problem is that I'm writing that dang editorial statement (still!). It will never be finished. Never. It's odd to switch from the loose-personal voice on this blog to the minding-my-manners voice of scholarship, particularly as I'm grappling there with similar issues as here on this blog. I must say I miss the ease of a continuing rumination that I enjoy when writing here. The inevitability of being edited looms.
It's evil of me as a critic and professor to admit this, but I despise critical feedback on my work. If it isn't "that was great! tell me more!" I don't want any, thanks. Nothing stymies the writing process like the back-seat driver of What Will The Editor [or teacher, or audience] Say?
I envy people who love honest criticism. I think at times my critical voice rankles them, as I try to phrase my criticism as if I were the one receiving it. It leads to very hand-hold-ish, constant-encouragement, conversational comments. "Why don't you try...?" "I'm getting a little lost here..." "What if you said...?" The honest criticism folk see this as passive-aggression: just tell it like it is!
Comments like that, of course, are the very type of criticism (meta-criticism?) I don't like.
Well, I'm afraid I'm going to beg off again this evening. Hopefully tomorrow's entry will see me bright-eyed and new-brained.
More then,
JF
Alas, another day finds me just as swamped by multiple assignments as yesterday. My brain is not quite at the melted-plastic-thing state--but it's close. I imagine tendrils of smoke and an alarming mechanical grinding are coming from my head... It will be a blessing to have this week and its many writing/grading pressures behind me.
Part of the problem is that I'm writing that dang editorial statement (still!). It will never be finished. Never. It's odd to switch from the loose-personal voice on this blog to the minding-my-manners voice of scholarship, particularly as I'm grappling there with similar issues as here on this blog. I must say I miss the ease of a continuing rumination that I enjoy when writing here. The inevitability of being edited looms.
It's evil of me as a critic and professor to admit this, but I despise critical feedback on my work. If it isn't "that was great! tell me more!" I don't want any, thanks. Nothing stymies the writing process like the back-seat driver of What Will The Editor [or teacher, or audience] Say?
I envy people who love honest criticism. I think at times my critical voice rankles them, as I try to phrase my criticism as if I were the one receiving it. It leads to very hand-hold-ish, constant-encouragement, conversational comments. "Why don't you try...?" "I'm getting a little lost here..." "What if you said...?" The honest criticism folk see this as passive-aggression: just tell it like it is!
Comments like that, of course, are the very type of criticism (meta-criticism?) I don't like.
Well, I'm afraid I'm going to beg off again this evening. Hopefully tomorrow's entry will see me bright-eyed and new-brained.
More then,
JF
Monday, October 19, 2009
Random Ninja Love!
I'm afraid my back-on-track will have to wait. Today was Midterm Grades Are Due day, so I'm up late calculating.
I will say just this: today, as I was giving a midterm, a colleague walked by the open door of my classroom. He saw my students hunched over my beast of an exam and me hunched over a stack of papers. He passed by.
And then suddenly he slipped in, quiet as a ninja, went up to me, and gave me a quick little hug.
And then he was gone.
It was the very best thing that happened to me today.
Random ninja love. Practice it!
More tomorrow,
JF
I will say just this: today, as I was giving a midterm, a colleague walked by the open door of my classroom. He saw my students hunched over my beast of an exam and me hunched over a stack of papers. He passed by.
And then suddenly he slipped in, quiet as a ninja, went up to me, and gave me a quick little hug.
And then he was gone.
It was the very best thing that happened to me today.
Random ninja love. Practice it!
More tomorrow,
JF
Sunday, October 18, 2009
An Interruption--Sex and Spirituality
As is often the case for me, my non-blogging life is derailing my plans for today's blog topic (the bogeyman of postmodernism in evangelical apologetics).
This time the kink in the track has to do with sex, specifically: the intersection of sex and faith. I'm guest editing a special issue of a journal dealing with religion and theatre, an issue about spirituality and sexuality. I'm charged with writing an editorial statement (due, like, yesterday) about those intersections, and right now that topic is using up all available brainpower.
I mean, where do I start? Well--I'm past the starting point, actually. I started with "don't!" Specifically, I related how sex in my Southern Baptist childhood seemed like the opposite of faith. Thou shalt not...commit adultery, fornicate, look with lust, lie with a man as one lies with a woman, dwell on fleshly things... not a sex-positive book on first glance. None of the Bible heroes I learned about seemed particularly defined by (or even possessed of) a sex drive, and those that did (I'm looking at you, David and Solomon) fell from grace through the tragic flaw of--that's right--lust.
I remember early on characterizing sex along with basic excretory functions. Sex was like using the bathroom: a necessary fact of life, but nothing you talk about in church.
Certainly popular culture seems to share my childhood impression of What God Thinks of Sex. There's no easier way for a TV show or movie to signal "this character is squeamish about sex" than to let the audience know that he or she is religious. The alienation from sexuality can manifest as charming niavete (e.g., the nuns from Sister Act) or stern authoritarianism (John Lithgow's character from Footloose). More often than not, the more pious the religious anti-sex crusade, the greater the crusader's comeuppance, as the character typically is either revealed to be a hypocrite or a secret sexpot. Either way, the revelation/reversal coincides with a relinquishing of the character's faith. Sex and religion just don't go together.
Of course, both my childhood impression of sex and the pop culture stereotype prove untenable on closer examination. As I grew older--as I became aware of what sex actually was, in other words--I gained a new appreciation for the sexual themes and metaphors that run throughout my faith tradition. The passion of God for humanity may technically be agape rather than eros, but the language Christ and the scriptures use to describe God's relationship to humanity is starkly sensual: God coming for his bridegroom the church (i.e., us), God feeling a cheated lover's sense of betrayal (see Hosea and Gomer),
The very act of incarnation, Divine becoming flesh, bespeaks a promise of intimacy (in Greek and Roman religion, remember, gods become flesh to have dalliances with mortals). We don't need to endorse extrabiblical slash fiction about Christ and his followers to see that such intimacy persists even in acts and images we take to be non-erotic. Consider the Eucharist--take, eat, this is my body. Christ rubbing his spit on men's eyes so they might see. Christ speaking with the woman at the well. Christ allowing Mary to wash his feet with her tears, perfume, and hair. Christ allowing John to recline against him.
Or look at Caravaggio's take on The Incredulity of Saint Thomas:
Stunningly intimate and borderline pornographic--yet there undeniably in the faith tradition.
Indeed, the whole notion that my faith is anti-sex seems... childish. Even the most ostensibly anti-sex sectors of Christianity--medieval monks with their vows of celibacy and cloistered life--become, on closer inspection, quite conversant about matters libidinal. I take my cue here from the last work of philosopher-historian Michel Foucault, a man who famously wrote a three-volume History of Sexuality. The fourth volume, Confessions of the Flesh, was near completion when he passed away of AIDS-related diseases in 1984. His lectures and interviews from around that time, however, point to his interest in monastic practices not as a denial of sexuality but an elaboration of a different kind of sexuality.
Such an approach represents an extension of Foucault's general theme throughout the History of Sexuality--the critique of what he calls "the repressive hypothesis," the notion that certain older cultures (the Victorians in England, particularly) were so nervous about sex and sexuality that they repressed all discussion about it and became willfully ignorant about a whole dimension of human existence. Nonsense! says Foucault. What seems to us like repression is, on closer examination, an explosion of sex-talk. This was, after all, the period in which medical science (especially the nascent field of psychology) turned its attention to matters of desire. It's in this period--the late 1800s--that we get words like homosexual and heterosexual, the very notion that people are a particular kind of person by virtue of the gender of their sexual objects. Sex talk moves out of domestic spaces and into medical spaces, where doctors and scientists begin asking deep and probing questions, performing deep and probing experiments, and creating whole new vocabularies as a result. This is not to say, of course, that standards of polite public discourse weren't a great deal different than they are now. Nor is it to deny that rules against sexual behavior labeled "deviant" were by our standards quite draconian.
But Power, for Foucault, is never merely repressive. It also creates new ways of living. From one doctor's new pathological category of homosexuality, we get a whole new way of thinking about our own identities (gay, straight, bi, etc.).
So too with the medieval celibate monks. It wasn't merely that they decided not to have sex 'cause it's dirty. They found themselves having to confront their desires, to name them, to explore and map out the boundaries and cartography of their lusts and temptations, and to create rules and ways-of-life to manage them. Monastic celibacy is a lot of work, a day-to-day, moment-to-moment habit of awareness, seeking, conviction, confession, penance, and regulation. So long as you have an unhindered sex drive, you have to know more about your own sexuality to be any good at celibacy. It is a way of life, an ascesis--an art of self-creation.
Toward the end of his life, Foucault actually began defining spirituality in general as a kind of ascesis--an art-of-self made up of moment to moment gestures and awarenesses great and small. I find that kind of view of faith life intriguing, exactly what is meant by discipline in the spiritual sense.
And, while I do not care to copy the ascetic practices of medieval monks, I think that imagining God and Christ as with me as I submit all aspects of my life to that discipline is in a way as intimate as Saint Thomas reaching into the body of Jesus.
Now to write all that down in academicese...
More tomorrow,
JF
This time the kink in the track has to do with sex, specifically: the intersection of sex and faith. I'm guest editing a special issue of a journal dealing with religion and theatre, an issue about spirituality and sexuality. I'm charged with writing an editorial statement (due, like, yesterday) about those intersections, and right now that topic is using up all available brainpower.
I mean, where do I start? Well--I'm past the starting point, actually. I started with "don't!" Specifically, I related how sex in my Southern Baptist childhood seemed like the opposite of faith. Thou shalt not...commit adultery, fornicate, look with lust, lie with a man as one lies with a woman, dwell on fleshly things... not a sex-positive book on first glance. None of the Bible heroes I learned about seemed particularly defined by (or even possessed of) a sex drive, and those that did (I'm looking at you, David and Solomon) fell from grace through the tragic flaw of--that's right--lust.
I remember early on characterizing sex along with basic excretory functions. Sex was like using the bathroom: a necessary fact of life, but nothing you talk about in church.
Certainly popular culture seems to share my childhood impression of What God Thinks of Sex. There's no easier way for a TV show or movie to signal "this character is squeamish about sex" than to let the audience know that he or she is religious. The alienation from sexuality can manifest as charming niavete (e.g., the nuns from Sister Act) or stern authoritarianism (John Lithgow's character from Footloose). More often than not, the more pious the religious anti-sex crusade, the greater the crusader's comeuppance, as the character typically is either revealed to be a hypocrite or a secret sexpot. Either way, the revelation/reversal coincides with a relinquishing of the character's faith. Sex and religion just don't go together.
Of course, both my childhood impression of sex and the pop culture stereotype prove untenable on closer examination. As I grew older--as I became aware of what sex actually was, in other words--I gained a new appreciation for the sexual themes and metaphors that run throughout my faith tradition. The passion of God for humanity may technically be agape rather than eros, but the language Christ and the scriptures use to describe God's relationship to humanity is starkly sensual: God coming for his bridegroom the church (i.e., us), God feeling a cheated lover's sense of betrayal (see Hosea and Gomer),
The very act of incarnation, Divine becoming flesh, bespeaks a promise of intimacy (in Greek and Roman religion, remember, gods become flesh to have dalliances with mortals). We don't need to endorse extrabiblical slash fiction about Christ and his followers to see that such intimacy persists even in acts and images we take to be non-erotic. Consider the Eucharist--take, eat, this is my body. Christ rubbing his spit on men's eyes so they might see. Christ speaking with the woman at the well. Christ allowing Mary to wash his feet with her tears, perfume, and hair. Christ allowing John to recline against him.
Or look at Caravaggio's take on The Incredulity of Saint Thomas:
Stunningly intimate and borderline pornographic--yet there undeniably in the faith tradition.
Indeed, the whole notion that my faith is anti-sex seems... childish. Even the most ostensibly anti-sex sectors of Christianity--medieval monks with their vows of celibacy and cloistered life--become, on closer inspection, quite conversant about matters libidinal. I take my cue here from the last work of philosopher-historian Michel Foucault, a man who famously wrote a three-volume History of Sexuality. The fourth volume, Confessions of the Flesh, was near completion when he passed away of AIDS-related diseases in 1984. His lectures and interviews from around that time, however, point to his interest in monastic practices not as a denial of sexuality but an elaboration of a different kind of sexuality.
Such an approach represents an extension of Foucault's general theme throughout the History of Sexuality--the critique of what he calls "the repressive hypothesis," the notion that certain older cultures (the Victorians in England, particularly) were so nervous about sex and sexuality that they repressed all discussion about it and became willfully ignorant about a whole dimension of human existence. Nonsense! says Foucault. What seems to us like repression is, on closer examination, an explosion of sex-talk. This was, after all, the period in which medical science (especially the nascent field of psychology) turned its attention to matters of desire. It's in this period--the late 1800s--that we get words like homosexual and heterosexual, the very notion that people are a particular kind of person by virtue of the gender of their sexual objects. Sex talk moves out of domestic spaces and into medical spaces, where doctors and scientists begin asking deep and probing questions, performing deep and probing experiments, and creating whole new vocabularies as a result. This is not to say, of course, that standards of polite public discourse weren't a great deal different than they are now. Nor is it to deny that rules against sexual behavior labeled "deviant" were by our standards quite draconian.
But Power, for Foucault, is never merely repressive. It also creates new ways of living. From one doctor's new pathological category of homosexuality, we get a whole new way of thinking about our own identities (gay, straight, bi, etc.).
So too with the medieval celibate monks. It wasn't merely that they decided not to have sex 'cause it's dirty. They found themselves having to confront their desires, to name them, to explore and map out the boundaries and cartography of their lusts and temptations, and to create rules and ways-of-life to manage them. Monastic celibacy is a lot of work, a day-to-day, moment-to-moment habit of awareness, seeking, conviction, confession, penance, and regulation. So long as you have an unhindered sex drive, you have to know more about your own sexuality to be any good at celibacy. It is a way of life, an ascesis--an art of self-creation.
Toward the end of his life, Foucault actually began defining spirituality in general as a kind of ascesis--an art-of-self made up of moment to moment gestures and awarenesses great and small. I find that kind of view of faith life intriguing, exactly what is meant by discipline in the spiritual sense.
And, while I do not care to copy the ascetic practices of medieval monks, I think that imagining God and Christ as with me as I submit all aspects of my life to that discipline is in a way as intimate as Saint Thomas reaching into the body of Jesus.
Now to write all that down in academicese...
More tomorrow,
JF
Saturday, October 17, 2009
The Cul-de-Sac of Autonomous Human Reason!!
Continuing my reading of the Creation Museum's walkthrough tour: having defined to its satisfaction both creationism (the young-earth variety based on a literal interpretation of Genesis) and evolutionary theory (as well as all other science that points to a billions-of-years-old universe) as interpretations based on worldviews, the Museum then proceeds to compare the two interpretations' worldviews. Thus: the Bible versus "autonomous human reason."
Guess which one comes out on top?
To a certain extent, the Museum tips its hand with the "Same Evidence, Different Starting Points" displays, which end up asking philosophical questions about the nature of evil that evolutionary theory--surprise, surprise--proves ill-equipped to address. Already evolution fails one of the worldview tests that evangelicalism puts to non-Christian philosophies: is it comprehensive? Clearly not, if it can't jump the hurdle of Why-Is-There-Suffering.
But things get more explicit as the tour shifts form the theoretical to the historical. The next scenes feature a sort of history of the Bible. Life-sized dioramas exhibit various Biblical writers hard at work scribing Hebrew or Greek on parchment and scrolls. A text-heavy well display informs visitors that the Bible has been under nearly constant attack by critics and heretics, but that throughout history, God has preserved God's Word. As if to prove the point, the next room discovers a mannequin Martin Luther hammering his 95 Theses to the Wittenberg door (signaling tacitly the Museum's Protestant-evangelical orientation). Opposing this display is a stylized representation of the Scopes Trial--a key defeat for fundamentalist creationism and a watershed moment in an ongoing cultural decline. Underlining this point, a line graph slopes downward, dotted with particular historical events, representing the ever-weakening regard for the Bible by rebellious humanity. A special display for Charles Templeton, a former evangelist-turned-atheist, pictures a dark cemetery with "God is Dead" on a gravestone.
The next room arrives at the present, represented by a run-down urban alleyway strewn with trash and (fake) rats. Graffiti and torn newspaper/magazine clippings cover the walls (samples: "Modern World Abandons Bible," "Today Man Decides Truth [with Truth crossed out with spray paint and replaced with "Whatever"]"). The darkened alleyway opens up into a cul-de-sac. On one side, three looped video monitors play scenes of cultural decay: a boy looking at pornography, a teenage girl learns she is pregant, and a minister preaches that evolution and Christianity can co-exist. Across from these movies is a huge facade of a dilapidated church. Through a broken stained-glass window visitors can see the family (the same featured in the videos) sitting in the pew. A massive wrecking ball with the words "Millions of Years" engraved on it hangs from the ceiling, frozen in the act of smashing into the church's walls as the creationist scientist from the beginning totes a wheelbarrow full of bricks (the words "God's Truth" are emblazoned on the wheelbarrow) in a futile act of repair.
Clearly the Museum sees the "autonomous human reason" as a ruinous starting point that ends up in a hot mess of relativism, dysfunction, and urban blight. At stake, again, isn't merely evolution or creationism per se but the worldview underlying each: the Bible (certain Truth) or not (no truth).
The rest of the Museum drops the compare-contrast and focuses entirely on the Creationist case, beginning with a "time tunnel" festooned with glowing stars that leads to a "Six Days Theatre," where sonorous narration of the first chapter of Genesis accompanies a multi-screen movie of the first six days. The walkthrough really takes off soon after, as visitors stroll through an immersive recreation of the Garden of Eden.
The worldview battle, though, catches my attention most, as the features of that argument--here's where autonomous human reason leads--forms the basis for a lot of evangelical apologetics today. Of course, most worldview analysis from the evangelicals is more nuanced than the Museum's one-or-the-other focus. Worldview Analysis books and curricula typically go through seven or eight alternative worldviews to "Biblical Christianity," from Hinduism to Islam to "New Age" to Postmodernism. Increasingly, postmodernism gets the most attention from evangelical apologists, as its major threat--relativism--mirrors that staged in the hell-of-the-present cul-de-sac.
Indeed, it wouldn't be wrong to say that much of present-day evangelical outreach in the US operates in reaction to postmodernism.
More tomorrow,
JF
Guess which one comes out on top?
To a certain extent, the Museum tips its hand with the "Same Evidence, Different Starting Points" displays, which end up asking philosophical questions about the nature of evil that evolutionary theory--surprise, surprise--proves ill-equipped to address. Already evolution fails one of the worldview tests that evangelicalism puts to non-Christian philosophies: is it comprehensive? Clearly not, if it can't jump the hurdle of Why-Is-There-Suffering.
But things get more explicit as the tour shifts form the theoretical to the historical. The next scenes feature a sort of history of the Bible. Life-sized dioramas exhibit various Biblical writers hard at work scribing Hebrew or Greek on parchment and scrolls. A text-heavy well display informs visitors that the Bible has been under nearly constant attack by critics and heretics, but that throughout history, God has preserved God's Word. As if to prove the point, the next room discovers a mannequin Martin Luther hammering his 95 Theses to the Wittenberg door (signaling tacitly the Museum's Protestant-evangelical orientation). Opposing this display is a stylized representation of the Scopes Trial--a key defeat for fundamentalist creationism and a watershed moment in an ongoing cultural decline. Underlining this point, a line graph slopes downward, dotted with particular historical events, representing the ever-weakening regard for the Bible by rebellious humanity. A special display for Charles Templeton, a former evangelist-turned-atheist, pictures a dark cemetery with "God is Dead" on a gravestone.
The next room arrives at the present, represented by a run-down urban alleyway strewn with trash and (fake) rats. Graffiti and torn newspaper/magazine clippings cover the walls (samples: "Modern World Abandons Bible," "Today Man Decides Truth [with Truth crossed out with spray paint and replaced with "Whatever"]"). The darkened alleyway opens up into a cul-de-sac. On one side, three looped video monitors play scenes of cultural decay: a boy looking at pornography, a teenage girl learns she is pregant, and a minister preaches that evolution and Christianity can co-exist. Across from these movies is a huge facade of a dilapidated church. Through a broken stained-glass window visitors can see the family (the same featured in the videos) sitting in the pew. A massive wrecking ball with the words "Millions of Years" engraved on it hangs from the ceiling, frozen in the act of smashing into the church's walls as the creationist scientist from the beginning totes a wheelbarrow full of bricks (the words "God's Truth" are emblazoned on the wheelbarrow) in a futile act of repair.
Clearly the Museum sees the "autonomous human reason" as a ruinous starting point that ends up in a hot mess of relativism, dysfunction, and urban blight. At stake, again, isn't merely evolution or creationism per se but the worldview underlying each: the Bible (certain Truth) or not (no truth).
The rest of the Museum drops the compare-contrast and focuses entirely on the Creationist case, beginning with a "time tunnel" festooned with glowing stars that leads to a "Six Days Theatre," where sonorous narration of the first chapter of Genesis accompanies a multi-screen movie of the first six days. The walkthrough really takes off soon after, as visitors stroll through an immersive recreation of the Garden of Eden.
The worldview battle, though, catches my attention most, as the features of that argument--here's where autonomous human reason leads--forms the basis for a lot of evangelical apologetics today. Of course, most worldview analysis from the evangelicals is more nuanced than the Museum's one-or-the-other focus. Worldview Analysis books and curricula typically go through seven or eight alternative worldviews to "Biblical Christianity," from Hinduism to Islam to "New Age" to Postmodernism. Increasingly, postmodernism gets the most attention from evangelical apologists, as its major threat--relativism--mirrors that staged in the hell-of-the-present cul-de-sac.
Indeed, it wouldn't be wrong to say that much of present-day evangelical outreach in the US operates in reaction to postmodernism.
More tomorrow,
JF
Friday, October 16, 2009
Science, the Bible, and Worldviews in the Creation Museum
The Creation Museum's reasoning presents some complex problems.
Briefly: the Creation Museum's main display tour side-steps the traditional evolution/creation battleground of "who has superior evidence," essentially redefining both creationism and evolutionary theory as worldviews that frame particular interpretations of more or less neutral scientific data. A creationist scientist examines the fossils of a dinosaur and, due to her presuppositions, arrives at one conclusion. The evolutionary scientist examines the same fossils and arrives at a different conclusion--again based on her own presuppositions.
I must repeat here that I do not endorse the Museum's redefinition. As most scientists would point out, the second scientist in the example above arrives at whatever conclusion she does (e.g., the bones are of an animal that lived 100 million years ago and not 4,000 years ago) based not on pure presuppositional faith but on particular methods and knowledges that have themselves been developed, substantiated, and refined by many people over time. She could, if necessary, give a detailed account of how and why she arrived at the conclusions she did. Moreover, she would be open to the possibility that her conclusions might themselves be flawed; if she were presented with superior methods or supporting theories, she would revise her conclusions accordingly (assuming she's an ethical scientist).
This would, crucially, even be the case were tests by her and by other scientists to prove conclusively that the bones came from an animal that died only 100 years ago. To be sure, such a conclusion would be shocking and would challenge many long-held theories of dinosaurs. But, so long as the data were multiply, reliably, and repeatedly substantiated, the shocking conclusion would eventually be accepted. Scientific conclusions change in response to data.
The creationist scientist (following the model of creation science proposed by the Museum), on the other hand, explicitly begins her study of the bones by knowing the conclusion ahead of time. The bones cannot be more than X thousands of years old because the Bible (which is utterly without error), when read literally, suggests that existence itself is no older than 6,000-10,000 years. Any evidence or method that points to the contrary is cause not to doubt the conclusion but to doubt the evidence or method. Creationism, seen in this light, fails the disciplinary test of science not because it isn't detailed or careful or thoughtful (in its own way, it is all of these things) but because it does not arrive at conclusions based on data but expects data to line themselves up behind already-certain conclusions.
The Creation Museum passes over these key distinctions by rendering both creationists and evolutionists mute in terms of their respective scientific rationales. In place of evidence to arrive at their respective conclusions (suggests the Museum), evolutionists and creationists arrive at conclusions due primarily to their respective worldviews. The creationist starts from the assumption that the Bible is God's Word, utterly and literally accurate in every description of reality. The earth, the universe, and all life therein were created in six literal days. God brought into being distinct animal kinds (which later perhaps split off into species, e.g., canines became wolves, dogs, coyotes, etc.).
And the evolutionist? Now, of course, "evolutionists" would themselves answer the question of starting point in a variety of different ways. Many are Christians themselves, affirming that God is indeed the ultimate force behind all of the extant universe. Such Christian evolutionists might credit God with installing within creation the ability to self-develop, essentially making evolution the motor of life on earth. Or they might say that their starting points as religious believers are necessarily different--grander--than their starting points as scientists. Science, they might argue, isn't a worldview but a methodology brought into play in particular circumstances for particular ends. When doing scientific things, the Christian scientist does her best to bracket biases and preconceptions, focusing on empirically accessible data or experiments as well as the logical/mathematical connections and predictions that flow from those. One does not look to science to determine the existence of God or the soul or human rights because those things aren't amenable to empirical investigation.
In the Creation Museum's portrayal, however, that act of bracketing off unprovable biases--actually the act of considering "a belief in the inerrant Bible" as one of those biases--is itself a worldview-based, worldview-generative gesture. That is, if you believe it possible or wise to so categorize the inerrant-infallible-literally true view of the Bible as a consideration to be excluded from science--you're already playing in a different sandbox from young-earth creationist Christians.
And although I consider the Museum's definition of science to be tendentious, I think they score a point here. If you base your approach to all of reality on the foundation of the Bible as literal/inerrant Truth, then to bracket off or ignore Biblical testimony at any time is to break with that worldview. Worldviews are in this sense similar to Thomas Kuhn's scientific paradigms; they determine not only what counts as a conclusion but what counts as data. A definition of science as little more than careful observation of facts fails in that it assumes a kind of pre-agreement among observers about what a fact is. Part of scientific training--indeed, part of any discipline's training in observation, investigation, and analysis--involves absorbing what counts as significant. An archeologist working in the field knows, for example, what dust or dirt to brush away as unimportant and what bit of grit to value as, say, ash from an ancient cooking fire. An astronomer peering through a telescope knows to separate the dots of light that are celestial bodies from those that are optical illusions, reflections, or scratches on the lens.
Similarly, a creationist begins by assuming that a belief in the Bible as Utter Truth is inseparable from any other data she might consider. An evolutionist assumes the opposite, that such a belief is better separated from the investigation of data, at least initially. Crucially, neither of these assumptions are themselves justifiable or provable by appeal to scientific reason. They are pre-scientific, metaphysical.
And, as long as it has its druthers, the Museum is happier to argue metaphysics than evidence.
More tomorrow,
JF
Briefly: the Creation Museum's main display tour side-steps the traditional evolution/creation battleground of "who has superior evidence," essentially redefining both creationism and evolutionary theory as worldviews that frame particular interpretations of more or less neutral scientific data. A creationist scientist examines the fossils of a dinosaur and, due to her presuppositions, arrives at one conclusion. The evolutionary scientist examines the same fossils and arrives at a different conclusion--again based on her own presuppositions.
I must repeat here that I do not endorse the Museum's redefinition. As most scientists would point out, the second scientist in the example above arrives at whatever conclusion she does (e.g., the bones are of an animal that lived 100 million years ago and not 4,000 years ago) based not on pure presuppositional faith but on particular methods and knowledges that have themselves been developed, substantiated, and refined by many people over time. She could, if necessary, give a detailed account of how and why she arrived at the conclusions she did. Moreover, she would be open to the possibility that her conclusions might themselves be flawed; if she were presented with superior methods or supporting theories, she would revise her conclusions accordingly (assuming she's an ethical scientist).
This would, crucially, even be the case were tests by her and by other scientists to prove conclusively that the bones came from an animal that died only 100 years ago. To be sure, such a conclusion would be shocking and would challenge many long-held theories of dinosaurs. But, so long as the data were multiply, reliably, and repeatedly substantiated, the shocking conclusion would eventually be accepted. Scientific conclusions change in response to data.
The creationist scientist (following the model of creation science proposed by the Museum), on the other hand, explicitly begins her study of the bones by knowing the conclusion ahead of time. The bones cannot be more than X thousands of years old because the Bible (which is utterly without error), when read literally, suggests that existence itself is no older than 6,000-10,000 years. Any evidence or method that points to the contrary is cause not to doubt the conclusion but to doubt the evidence or method. Creationism, seen in this light, fails the disciplinary test of science not because it isn't detailed or careful or thoughtful (in its own way, it is all of these things) but because it does not arrive at conclusions based on data but expects data to line themselves up behind already-certain conclusions.
The Creation Museum passes over these key distinctions by rendering both creationists and evolutionists mute in terms of their respective scientific rationales. In place of evidence to arrive at their respective conclusions (suggests the Museum), evolutionists and creationists arrive at conclusions due primarily to their respective worldviews. The creationist starts from the assumption that the Bible is God's Word, utterly and literally accurate in every description of reality. The earth, the universe, and all life therein were created in six literal days. God brought into being distinct animal kinds (which later perhaps split off into species, e.g., canines became wolves, dogs, coyotes, etc.).
And the evolutionist? Now, of course, "evolutionists" would themselves answer the question of starting point in a variety of different ways. Many are Christians themselves, affirming that God is indeed the ultimate force behind all of the extant universe. Such Christian evolutionists might credit God with installing within creation the ability to self-develop, essentially making evolution the motor of life on earth. Or they might say that their starting points as religious believers are necessarily different--grander--than their starting points as scientists. Science, they might argue, isn't a worldview but a methodology brought into play in particular circumstances for particular ends. When doing scientific things, the Christian scientist does her best to bracket biases and preconceptions, focusing on empirically accessible data or experiments as well as the logical/mathematical connections and predictions that flow from those. One does not look to science to determine the existence of God or the soul or human rights because those things aren't amenable to empirical investigation.
In the Creation Museum's portrayal, however, that act of bracketing off unprovable biases--actually the act of considering "a belief in the inerrant Bible" as one of those biases--is itself a worldview-based, worldview-generative gesture. That is, if you believe it possible or wise to so categorize the inerrant-infallible-literally true view of the Bible as a consideration to be excluded from science--you're already playing in a different sandbox from young-earth creationist Christians.
And although I consider the Museum's definition of science to be tendentious, I think they score a point here. If you base your approach to all of reality on the foundation of the Bible as literal/inerrant Truth, then to bracket off or ignore Biblical testimony at any time is to break with that worldview. Worldviews are in this sense similar to Thomas Kuhn's scientific paradigms; they determine not only what counts as a conclusion but what counts as data. A definition of science as little more than careful observation of facts fails in that it assumes a kind of pre-agreement among observers about what a fact is. Part of scientific training--indeed, part of any discipline's training in observation, investigation, and analysis--involves absorbing what counts as significant. An archeologist working in the field knows, for example, what dust or dirt to brush away as unimportant and what bit of grit to value as, say, ash from an ancient cooking fire. An astronomer peering through a telescope knows to separate the dots of light that are celestial bodies from those that are optical illusions, reflections, or scratches on the lens.
Similarly, a creationist begins by assuming that a belief in the Bible as Utter Truth is inseparable from any other data she might consider. An evolutionist assumes the opposite, that such a belief is better separated from the investigation of data, at least initially. Crucially, neither of these assumptions are themselves justifiable or provable by appeal to scientific reason. They are pre-scientific, metaphysical.
And, as long as it has its druthers, the Museum is happier to argue metaphysics than evidence.
More tomorrow,
JF
Thursday, October 15, 2009
The Creation Museum and the Creation/Evolution Battle
Just in case there was any doubt, let me declare that I endorse theories of evolution as articulated and studied (and revised and deepened) by mainstream science. I do not believe in a literal rendering of the Genesis narrative as the truth of the universe's origins. Nor do I see my convictions about evolution as in any way incompatible with my Christian faith. I join a host of other believers past and present in affirming my belief in a creating God alongside a belief in the Big Bang, a billions-of-years-old universe, the evolutionary development of life, etc.
Were I an anti-evolution creationist, though, I'd probably try to take my cues from the Creation Museum and Answers in Genesis. [True confessions: some of what follows appears in slightly altered form in some articles about the Museum I'm writing currently].
Departing from the attack rhetorics of the creation-evolution data wars (i.e., barrage of specialized and often misconstrued data vs. consensus of scientists), the Museum's main walkthrough tour beings with an irenic scene, a life-sized diorama of two scientists at work. Against a photorealistic backdrop of the Grand Canyon, two scientists (mannequins, of course) perch on a dusty outcropping of rock, brushing dust away from the partially exposed bones of a dinosaur. TV displays on the walls of the diorama room play looped videotape of the two scientists the mannequins represent, each amiably explaining his work.
"I'm an evolutionist," declares the younger one. "I interpret these bones as belonging to a dinosaur who lived millions of years ago."
"I'm a creationist," says the other. "I see these bones as only a few thousand years old, buried in the Great Flood described in Genesis."
Neither scientist shares his rationale or supporting evidence. Nor does either one of the scientists attack his colleague's interpretation. They simply come to divergent conclusions based on their (apparently equally rigorous/well-informed) study of the plain evidence before them.
There's more going on here than a simple scene of collegial disagreement. Theorist Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett argues that museums do more than merely show; they participate in the creation of knowledge in particular fields. A display of pre-Colombian Native American pots, for example, does more than merely show off some old kitchen implements. Behind that display are a number of predecessor actions, acts of selection (choosing this pot rather than that one from an archeological site), displacement (removing the pot from its original place buried in a cave), and re-situation (placing the pot in an exhibit, with a caption, alongside other such items). These acts collectively transform the pot from "just a pot" to an artifact, a stand-in for a whole culture, a whole history. Through "artifact-ing" objects, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett concludes, museums help to establish what "counts" as (in this case) pre-Colombian Native American culture.
Patterning itself after a mainstream science museum, the Creation Museum likewise creates an artifact in this first display. But the artifact in question isn't the half-buried fossil; it's the scientists. Or, more accurately, it's the sterilized snapshot of what it is to "do" science. Science, implies the display, is nothing more than looking carefully at evidence. By dis-placing the scientists from the context of real-world creation/evolution battles (really, in what context would two such scientists be working together?), by scrubbing the dig site scene clean of any hint of acrimony, legitimation challenges, or detailed rationales, the display presents both creationists and evolutionists equally as scientific.
Right at the beginning of the tour, then, the Creation Museum basically brackets off from consideration the whole data war over "who's more scientific?" that characterizes so much of the creation/evolution debates. What, then, if not legitimate science explains the difference between creationists and evolutionists? What, moreover, makes creationism preferable to evolution if not superior scientific support?
The Museum itself raises and answers those questions throughout the next section of the walkthrough, tellingly entitled "Same Evidence, Different Starting Points." Using a series of wall displays, the Museum strives to present an even-handed, comparison/contrast of evolutionary and creationist accounts of the origin of the universe and of life on earth (evolutionist, for the Museum, covers any scientific theory, biological or not, that posits a billions-of-years-old universe).
The wall displays replicate the pattern of the initial diarama: here's some observational data; here are two conflicting conclusions about that data. Again, the displays banish from consideration any detailed data, scientific theories, or rationales. The only real difference, it seems, between the evolutionary and creationist views concern their "starting point." The evolutionists, argue the displays, begin from a place called "human reason." The creationists start out from a place labeled "God's word."
Now, to an inerrantist--one who comes to the Museum already certain of the literal truth of the Genesis account--the side-by-side explanation presents a no-brainer of a decision: clearly only the Biblical account is true. Case closed. Yet the Museum does not itself immediately make this case. These displays remain decidedly neutral compared to the biased, straw-man presentations of evolutionary theory commonly found in anti-evolutionist literature. To be sure, the Museum's decision not to include the supporting data for non-creationist accounts of prehistory could itself be interpreted as a dishonest act; any mainstream scientist would argue that it is simply not the case that the two theories are coequal in terms of data-based support. But the Museum's choice to mask the data support (or lack thereof) in this section also keeps the museological focus on the starting points.
This focus proves vital as the walkway displays shift from comparing/contrasting views of pre-history to comparing and contrasting evolutionist and creationist views of human life in the present. Questions about how fossils form or how species emerge fade away, replaced by questions like "Why is there suffering?" or "How ought humans behave toward each other?" These latter inquiries are not scientific questions, to be sure. But that's the point: science, in the Museum's logic, is merely the looking at. The conclusions--evolutionary or creationist--are based on starting points, aka worldviews. Creationism and evolutionism are not themselves scientific doctrines to be proven or supported purely through data; they draw instead on essentially unprovable metaphysical presuppositions about what truth is and how humans gain knowledge. Accepting the Bible as literally true isn't a conclusion made on the basis of evidence and reasoning; it's the foundation that defines the nature of evidence and rationality. The interpretation of data (aka science) depends upon one's original worldview.
As worldviews, creationism and evolutionism are amenable to qualitative (rather than merely descriptive) evaluation. To the basic questions of present-day life--why do we live? why do we love? why do we suffer? why do we die?--evolution has no answers, or at best only the brutal, soulless rationale that we are all animals and that suffering/dying is the way of the world. Creationism, however, not only provides a comprehensive view of humanities origins (a view, imply the displays, that enjoys just as much material support as evolution); it also gives an answer to the nagging questions of human existence.
This, then, is the Museum's brilliance. It changes the nature of the creation/evolution debate. Rather than being a battle of data, a battle of science, the Museum re-casts the debate as a battle between worldviews. As a worldview, contends the Museum, evolution simply fails. Creationism wins, in the Museum's displays, not by out-evidencing the competition but by out-religioning it.
More tomorrow,
JF
Were I an anti-evolution creationist, though, I'd probably try to take my cues from the Creation Museum and Answers in Genesis. [True confessions: some of what follows appears in slightly altered form in some articles about the Museum I'm writing currently].
Departing from the attack rhetorics of the creation-evolution data wars (i.e., barrage of specialized and often misconstrued data vs. consensus of scientists), the Museum's main walkthrough tour beings with an irenic scene, a life-sized diorama of two scientists at work. Against a photorealistic backdrop of the Grand Canyon, two scientists (mannequins, of course) perch on a dusty outcropping of rock, brushing dust away from the partially exposed bones of a dinosaur. TV displays on the walls of the diorama room play looped videotape of the two scientists the mannequins represent, each amiably explaining his work.
"I'm an evolutionist," declares the younger one. "I interpret these bones as belonging to a dinosaur who lived millions of years ago."
"I'm a creationist," says the other. "I see these bones as only a few thousand years old, buried in the Great Flood described in Genesis."
Neither scientist shares his rationale or supporting evidence. Nor does either one of the scientists attack his colleague's interpretation. They simply come to divergent conclusions based on their (apparently equally rigorous/well-informed) study of the plain evidence before them.
There's more going on here than a simple scene of collegial disagreement. Theorist Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett argues that museums do more than merely show; they participate in the creation of knowledge in particular fields. A display of pre-Colombian Native American pots, for example, does more than merely show off some old kitchen implements. Behind that display are a number of predecessor actions, acts of selection (choosing this pot rather than that one from an archeological site), displacement (removing the pot from its original place buried in a cave), and re-situation (placing the pot in an exhibit, with a caption, alongside other such items). These acts collectively transform the pot from "just a pot" to an artifact, a stand-in for a whole culture, a whole history. Through "artifact-ing" objects, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett concludes, museums help to establish what "counts" as (in this case) pre-Colombian Native American culture.
Patterning itself after a mainstream science museum, the Creation Museum likewise creates an artifact in this first display. But the artifact in question isn't the half-buried fossil; it's the scientists. Or, more accurately, it's the sterilized snapshot of what it is to "do" science. Science, implies the display, is nothing more than looking carefully at evidence. By dis-placing the scientists from the context of real-world creation/evolution battles (really, in what context would two such scientists be working together?), by scrubbing the dig site scene clean of any hint of acrimony, legitimation challenges, or detailed rationales, the display presents both creationists and evolutionists equally as scientific.
Right at the beginning of the tour, then, the Creation Museum basically brackets off from consideration the whole data war over "who's more scientific?" that characterizes so much of the creation/evolution debates. What, then, if not legitimate science explains the difference between creationists and evolutionists? What, moreover, makes creationism preferable to evolution if not superior scientific support?
The Museum itself raises and answers those questions throughout the next section of the walkthrough, tellingly entitled "Same Evidence, Different Starting Points." Using a series of wall displays, the Museum strives to present an even-handed, comparison/contrast of evolutionary and creationist accounts of the origin of the universe and of life on earth (evolutionist, for the Museum, covers any scientific theory, biological or not, that posits a billions-of-years-old universe).
The wall displays replicate the pattern of the initial diarama: here's some observational data; here are two conflicting conclusions about that data. Again, the displays banish from consideration any detailed data, scientific theories, or rationales. The only real difference, it seems, between the evolutionary and creationist views concern their "starting point." The evolutionists, argue the displays, begin from a place called "human reason." The creationists start out from a place labeled "God's word."
Now, to an inerrantist--one who comes to the Museum already certain of the literal truth of the Genesis account--the side-by-side explanation presents a no-brainer of a decision: clearly only the Biblical account is true. Case closed. Yet the Museum does not itself immediately make this case. These displays remain decidedly neutral compared to the biased, straw-man presentations of evolutionary theory commonly found in anti-evolutionist literature. To be sure, the Museum's decision not to include the supporting data for non-creationist accounts of prehistory could itself be interpreted as a dishonest act; any mainstream scientist would argue that it is simply not the case that the two theories are coequal in terms of data-based support. But the Museum's choice to mask the data support (or lack thereof) in this section also keeps the museological focus on the starting points.
This focus proves vital as the walkway displays shift from comparing/contrasting views of pre-history to comparing and contrasting evolutionist and creationist views of human life in the present. Questions about how fossils form or how species emerge fade away, replaced by questions like "Why is there suffering?" or "How ought humans behave toward each other?" These latter inquiries are not scientific questions, to be sure. But that's the point: science, in the Museum's logic, is merely the looking at. The conclusions--evolutionary or creationist--are based on starting points, aka worldviews. Creationism and evolutionism are not themselves scientific doctrines to be proven or supported purely through data; they draw instead on essentially unprovable metaphysical presuppositions about what truth is and how humans gain knowledge. Accepting the Bible as literally true isn't a conclusion made on the basis of evidence and reasoning; it's the foundation that defines the nature of evidence and rationality. The interpretation of data (aka science) depends upon one's original worldview.
As worldviews, creationism and evolutionism are amenable to qualitative (rather than merely descriptive) evaluation. To the basic questions of present-day life--why do we live? why do we love? why do we suffer? why do we die?--evolution has no answers, or at best only the brutal, soulless rationale that we are all animals and that suffering/dying is the way of the world. Creationism, however, not only provides a comprehensive view of humanities origins (a view, imply the displays, that enjoys just as much material support as evolution); it also gives an answer to the nagging questions of human existence.
This, then, is the Museum's brilliance. It changes the nature of the creation/evolution debate. Rather than being a battle of data, a battle of science, the Museum re-casts the debate as a battle between worldviews. As a worldview, contends the Museum, evolution simply fails. Creationism wins, in the Museum's displays, not by out-evidencing the competition but by out-religioning it.
More tomorrow,
JF
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