Embarrassing Christianity, or Evangelism at Any Cost

I pause from my tedious tromps through postmodernism to bring you yet another edition of "This Week in Embarrassing Christianity."

I'm late to this party, I realize. Certainly by now you've likely heard of Trijicon, Inc. They make rifle scopes, specifically the kind used by the US military in overseas operations. So far, so good--the military needs rifle scopes; Trijicon provides them. It came to light recently, however, that the company provided just a bit more than quality rifle scopes that shine a light to pinpoint targets.

Etched into the Trijicon scopes were a series of letters and numbers, such as 2COR4:6 or JN8:12, which (for those in the know) refer to biblical scriptures. Respectively the verses are as follows: "For God, who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ" and "When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, 'I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.'"

Cute, no? Except that, as we wage two wars in Muslim countries, we're doing our best to dispel the notion that our actions in Iraq and Afghanistan are Christian Crusades against Islam. What better way to undermine that attempt than to inscribe christocentric verse references onto our weapons?

Now, I can perhaps understand soldiers who are Christians wishing to keep a reminder of their faith close to them--a crucifix, a cross, even a reference to some scripture. Let's be clear, though: these aren't comfort scriptures (e.g., "Thy word is a lamp unto my feet" or "When I am afraid I will trust in thee"). These are evangelism scriptures--turn to Jesus, the light of the world. But here's the creepy thing: the references look basically like hidden code, etched right next to other series of numbers and codes. You almost wouldn't know what they mean if you don't know what you're looking for.

I'm not privy to the rationale behind the little easter eggs from Trijicon. I can only guess that someone in the company imagined a scenario in which a backslider or atheist happened to see the reference, recognize it as scripture, and look it up, thereby opening the door to the Holy Spirit's saving influence. Crazy as it may sound, such a narrative resonates exactly with many of the "how-I-got-saved" testimonials of my Baptist childhood.

Instead of converting, however, some soldiers who noticed and recognized the codes notified a group called the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF). Now, at first glance I assumed this group (like many other organizations mobilizing religious freedom rhetoric) supported the Trijicon inscriptions. Quite the opposite turns out to be the case. The MRFF defines religious freedom within the military very strictly, watching for any indication that one religion (i.e., Christianity) be seen as the "official" or "establishment" faith. The MRFF proceeded to contact media groups, who spotlighted the inscriptions. Public outcry (mostly against) followed, followed by military embarrassment (how could they not know this was going on, now?), followed by a declaration by Trijicon that they would cease and desist inscriptions as well as providing "kits" to remove the inscriptions from the 300,000+existing scopes.

Hopefully the foolishness of stamping US gun sights with Christian proselytics goes without saying, and if it doesn't, this first person editorial by Iraqi War veteran Benjamin Busch says it very well. Particularly quotable from Mr. Busch:

"I did not go onward as a Christian soldier. I went forth as an American, a Marine. I was sent by my country to fight a threat, and thereafter with the best intentions of democracy, not theocracy."

Stamping military weapons with Christian scriptures sends a chilling message, twisting a mission intended (ostensibly) to prevent attacks into the opening moves of a Christian holy war. Busch ends with a quote from Matthew, Jesus's command to love our enemies, noting that this quote was not inscribed on the rifles.

Meanwhile, segments the political religious right predictably interprets criticism of Trijicon as yet another attack on Christianity itself. Missing from this article is any inquiry about whether gun scopes are the best place for messages about Jesus. Also missing: if this is supposed to be evangelism (as is now claimed), why hide it? I know that evangelicals seek new ways to get their message out in a world they consider increasingly hostile to conservative Christianity. But at what point does the imperative to witness override considerations about tactics? Nothing about this situation makes Christianity look good. It's slimy proselytics, faith passive-aggressively sneaking a coded sales pitch into a mechanism functionally at odds with the task of spreading a gospel of peace and love.

Oh, Christianity...

More tomorrow,

JF

The Truth About Truth, and Some Secular History as Well

By "I'll address it tomorrow," I apparently meant "the day after tomorrow."

Quick recap: postmodernism (that fiendish enemy of worldview-apologist evangelicals) posits that "truth" changes over time, that it's contingent upon factors like culture and era. Any one human in a particular time and place certainly experiences various "truths" as solid and binding, but none of those truths are consistent enough, universal enough, to qualify as trans-historical or trans-cultural. Humans lack any unambiguous access to Ultimate Truth since the only tools they have to conceive of, identify, investigate, and communicate that Truth are culture-dependent variables like language.

I reiterate that this characterization of postmodern belief is actually agnostic regarding the question of Ultimate, Capital-T "Truth" except to say that such Truths aren't available as such for human consideration. All we have are small-t truths that may be (in the long run) changeable and multiple. A worldview-analysis evangelical would take issue with that on a couple of points, insisting that 1) singular, unchanging Truth does exist and 2) humans can in fact know that Truth. I'm dealing here only with the first criticism.

The criticism, then: what about the postmodern truth about the contingency/multiplicity of truths? Does postmodernism apply its position about truth to itself? In other words truth only flexible or multiple within a postmodern context? Worldview analysis teaches to its evangelists-in-training an ace-in-the-hole comeback to postmodern views that runs along these lines, albeit in a more simplistic form: If you don't believe in Singular, Universal Truth, what about the truth-status of your belief about human's inability to know Truth?

As I see it, I have two obvious answers at my disposal. First, I could deny that postmodern arguments about truth apply to postmodernism itself. I could claim that postmodernism's only Certain Truth is the ever-changing nature of truth as humans experience it. In other words, the only thing certain is nothing's certain (except for this statement about nothing being certain, 'cause that's certain). That's a bit too blatantly circular for me.

I prefer option two: postmodernism does accept the contingency of its own truths about Truths. Paradoxical as it seems, truth at some other point in history/geography isn't (wasn't) contingent and multiple but eternal and singular. Contingency and multiplicity are recent epistemological events (at least in the west).

Traveling back in time past 500 years or so would plop you into a world in which many of the truths we now see as culture-contingent or variable existed only as a Singular Way Things Are. Truth back then was not contingent, not postmodern, but singular and eternal. It isn't that the 500 years ago folk were simply incorrect, not seeing the flexing/changing/multiple truths that must have existed; it's that those other, different/competing truths didn't exist as possible Things To Believe.

I'm reading a book by Charles Taylor called A Secular Age that echoes this line of thought. On its face, Taylor's work is a history of the rise of skepticism (i.e., disbelief in religion, especially in Christianity). Taylor refuses, however, to write either a simple replacement story where Science (or Reason) comes to displace Christianity or a "subtraction story" about how Christianity simply got cut out of culture. Rather, his is a narrative of multiplication. He wants to know how western culture went from a point in c. 1500, when belief in God was a given, to c. 2000, when belief in any religion is seen as but one option among an ever-expanding variety of possible belief/non-belief options.

In other words, in 1500, it was virtually impossible to be an atheist in the same way (and certainly with the same ease) with which it is possible to be an atheist today. Crucially, the lack of widespread atheism wasn't due to churches' waging some widespread campaign of repression against the atheist ancestors of Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins. Certainly there were many repressive campaigns and inquisitions, but these were mainly about heretics--people who were seen as faking orthodox faith in favor of some heterodox faith--not atheists in the modern sense. We have tons of records from such heretics, their heresy trials, their horrendous (and to our eyes unjust) punishments. Repression of that sort produces a lot of historical records, a lot of martyrs whose ghosts (and writings, and followers) cry out.

But none of the ghosts of inquisitions past wail a dirge about how "God is not great." None of them died arguing that scientific reason was a superior alternative to religious faith. In other words, it's not the case that there were tons of atheists back then being held down by church power. The church didn't repress Dawkins-esque atheists on any kind of grand scale because the option to be atheist (or agnostic, or "spiritual" instead of "religious," or anything of that sort) simply did not exist as it does today.

Taylor demonstrates that the situation of Christian faith as one truth among many conceivable options is a relatively new development in western culture. This situation relies upon--developed from--a number of cultural and historical and geographic factors that did not obtain in times past. Religious truth, then, was at one point relatively singular in the West. Now it is multiple, postmodern.

It's tempting to say that past generations were just plain wrong. I could argue, perhaps, that the present range of religious/non-religious options did indeed exist in the past--even if only as theoretical possibilities. Past generations just failed to be aware of them as such, much like past generations failed to apprehend the heliocentric solar system. I suppose that's true, but only in the most abstract, hypothetical sense. It's possible, for example, to imagine that someone back in 1300 imagined a whole profession in which people would be hurtled into orbit so as to explore space. But functionally, really, the option to be an astronaut--the truth of astronautics--only emerged in recent times. Only through an act of anachronistic imagination could we even conceive of astronauts sitting around in 1300s France waiting impatiently for rockets et al. to be invented.

It may be odd to consider secularity (or the notion of multiple/contingent truths) as a recent innovation/invention in the same sense as astronautics. But all of these are, I argue, dependent upon technologies, sciences, ways of thinking, tools, and discourses that are utterly of the here and now. In the past they were not merely as-yet-undiscovered but wholly unimagined.

So, in that sense, yes--the postmodern fact of truth's contingent, multiple status is itself contingent and multiple, dependent upon features unique to this time and place. Truth has been different--not postmodern--in the past, and it likely will be different--not postmodern--in the future. Indeed, you don't have to travel far to find places in the present where a postmodern understanding of truth as multiple/contingent simply isn't a viable possibility except perhaps as crazy philosophical science fiction.

More tomorrow,

JF

Devil's Advocating Postmodernism

I've just poured a load of thought-work into a huge administrative project, so I'm suffering from some brain-fry right now. Wugga.

Be that as it may, I wanted to address some common criticisms raised against the postmodern (i.e., antifoundational) view I've been outlining for the past couple of days. The big criticism--the one central to my interests in this blog--of course deals with how I can take a skeptical/agnostic stance toward capital-T truth and/or toward humans' ability to perceive it on the one hand and yet consider myself a practicing Christian on the other. That objection I'll build to addressing in a later post.

For now--I turn to some hard questions about postmodern stances that don't directly deal with faith and which aren't nearly as riddled with straw-man misrepresentations. The first devil's advocate question asks about the truth conditions of antifoundationalism's own claims about Truth. As I've defined it, postmodernist thought considers most of the truths that we as humans deal with as contingent truths, social facts that, while compelling and controlling locally, prove unstable and in flux when considered over epic time-spans. To be sure, some of these facts present themselves simply as facts of existence (e.g., death, eating, breathing). Antifoundationalist theory, however, denies that even these "brute" facts a primacy of place. They may exist, but they aren't capable by themselves of serving as a solid, stable ground of certainty on which any and all humans may build identities or societies.

Why? Because, as I argued yesterday, even the most brutal fact has an undeniably social dimension. Language, for example, is a social fact. Words and their meanings shift over time. Yet words--or, more accurately, signs (which may be spoken words, written texts, body language, images, etc.)--are all we have at our disposal for thinking about, wrapping our minds around, and communicating brute facts like death, eating, or respiration. Certainly we experience moments of trauma, times of extreme intensity (like a car wreck, a sudden shock, or a surpassing joy) in which we freeze in wordless agony (or ecstasy).

But once we start to communicate that trauma--even if only to put the experience into words for ourselves--we're caught in a web of language, of symbols, that never quite captures what it is we've just experienced. Indeed, performance theorist Peggy Phelan argues that all attempts at representation both fall short of expressing exactly what we intend and get received differently than what we intend. Think, for example, of times when you've awaken from a particularly vivid dream, one that you know was immensely complicated and/or incredibly important. Yet the first time you try to sort out exactly what happened in the dream (to tell a partner, to write it down, to remember it exactly), you just know that your words--even if only the words you tell yourself--are betraying the original experience that was the dream. The dream happened, yes. But the only way we have to conceive of that dream in our waking minds is to use words, and language always changes that which it seeks to represent.

So it is with brute facts, elements of existence we generally think of as "real," universally and homogeneously experienced by all humans. Our only way of thinking about such facts occurs through language, and language exerts a distorting effect on our perceptions of reality. We can perceive, for instance, that what goes up must come down (and I'll grant that there's not been any time in recorded history where this is not so without some logical explanation, e.g., space rockets). But the way that different cultures conceive of this fact of life may differ wildly. We in the present know that things fall to the earth due to gravity. Another time and place, though, might think of the earth as a kind of giant organism, constantly inhaling so as to keep objects and creatures sucked down. Or perhaps falling gets imagined as the result of a kind of invisible force pressing down from above rather than a force pulling down from below.

Now, we in the here and now might laugh at these latter two (admittedly hypothetical) views. We know thanks to science that gravity is "right" in a way that the invisible suck-monster is not. I'm betting, though, that not many of us could explain exactly how gravity operates. Theoretical physicists (and here I draw on my extremely limited, pop-science understanding) are themselves still searching for the hows and whys of gravity (e.g., why is gravity so weak relative to other universal forces? does gravity consist of quanta , like gravitons? is what we experience as gravity residue from other dimensions/branes?). It's likely, in fact, that future models of physics (a Theory of Everything, for instance, that blends general relativity with quantum theory) will present us with whole new ways of seeing even such a basic, brute fact as our falling to the ground when not otherwise stopped. Gravity as we know it now seems like the best explanation we have to go on, judging of course by our present-day culture's standards for what qualifies as a "best explanation" (just as other societies past and future have or will judge other explanations by other standards).

And that's the point: to a certain extent, we as humans are caught within our own culture's sign systems. We have only those lenses available to us with which to view "real" things. Other lenses seem foreign to us, either hopelessly naive/primitive (the suck monster theory of gravity) or science-fictionish (brane cosmology, for example). It's not that we're forever stuck or that we can't ever grow or learn new things, but to really swallow one of these other explanations may very well entail our giving up one lens (could we say, one worldview) for another.

Here, finally, is the question: If all truths as we experience them derive at least in part from our position within a particular culture, a particular (and ultimately transient) system of signs--does the same not go for the truths that postmodernism espouses? In other words, to what extent does postmodern incredulity toward eternal truths apply to its own beliefs? Doesn't antifoundationalism, at the end of the day, itself rest upon a set of foundational beliefs about the lack of foundations?

This line of questioning, I submit, is the more nuanced cousin of the worldview evangelists' simplistic ace-in-the-hole reply to postmodernism: "Don't you believe in the truth that there isn't any truth?"

I'll address it more fully tomorrow,

JF

Postmodernism 3: Brute Facts, Social Facts

To recap: one of the more fascinating trends in US evangelicalism today involves "worldview analysis," a mode of apologetics and outreach that classifies human beliefs and philosophies into competing "worldviews." For the evangelical worldview analyst, "Biblical Christianity" serves as the only proper and true (i.e., comprehensive, productive, and non-contradictory) worldview. All others, from Marxism to Hinduism, function as some form of intellectual and spiritual folly.

Particularly vexing for worldview evangelists is the "Postmodern" worldview, which they more often than not define in terms of a refusal to believe in Absolute Truth. Instead (according to much of the worldview literature I've read), postmoderns believe that Truth is what you as an individual make of it and that everyone has the right to make their own truths. Such a view isn't only antagonistic toward biblical Christianity (where God as revealed through the Bible is the very essence of Truth); it's a logical non-starter (i.e., the truth is that there's no truth? But isn't that a truth statement? etc.).

I've suggested that this representation of postmodernism is spurious, a straw man that critics can set up and topple easily so as to win rhetorical points. Moreover, this view dismisses out of hand a whole (and growing) sector of Christian faith that actively seeks to articulate Christian belief alongside and within postmodern views. As a part of that sector, it behooves me to correct what I consider to be an inaccurate view of my beliefs.

When I describe myself as postmodern (I would likely prefer a related-but-more-specific term like antifoundationalist or post-structuralist), I do not suggest that Truth is whatever I want it to be. Obviously this isn't so. I can't ignore gravity and fly around like Superman, no matter how hopeful or deluded I get.

That being said, though, I do have problems with the notion of capital-T Truths, "facts" about the way things are that are presented as simply and incontestably so regardless of when, where, by whom, or in what context they are encountered. My problem isn't so much that Truth doesn't exist. As a Christian, I do at the end of the day affirm a number of Big Truths. My problem lies more with the human tendency (pride, one might say) to think that we have an accurate handle on that capital-T Truth.

Michael Berube, a critical theorist and self-avowed antifoundationalist, once related a question he posed to John Searle (a language philosopher who leans more to the foundationalist side). In a public lecture, Berube recounts, Searle made a simple distinction between "brute facts" and "social facts." Brute facts, he explained, are solid, verifiable realities that simply are whether we like it or not. The sun appears to rise in the east and set in the west. Fire burns you when you touch it. People eventually die. These are simply true things, and believing otherwise doesn't make them not so.

Social facts, by contrast, involve elements of human existence that are context-dependent. The definition of what kind of clothes are most fashionable, for example, depends not upon timeless Platonic ideals of fashion but upon the exigencies of time, place, and culture. Fashion is a social fact. You can't ignore it without consequence (fashion and other social facts obviously matter), but neither can you set a stable description/definition of it without being extremely specific as to time/place/context. They lack the Eternal epistemological status of brute facts.

So far, so good, right? Nothing here requires anything like the postmodernism I've defined. Indeed, you could say that all I've done via Searle is suggest that there are in this world big-T Truths (brute facts) and little-t truths (social facts). Both of them matter, but the latter shift over time and place, whereas the former do not.

I'd agree but for Berube's question to Searle, which I paraphrase here: "What about the distinction between brute fact and social fact?" he asked. "Is that distinction itself a social fact or a brute fact?" (source: Berube, Michael. "The Return of Realism and the Future of Contingency." What's Left of Theory? Ed. Judith Butler, John Guillory, Kendall Thomas. New York: Routledge, 2000: 137-156.).

And there's the rub. I know, I know--it sounds like a too-clever-by-half wordplay, but think about it: how ultimately do you know whether a fact is social or brutal? Do you ultimately know? Can you?

To be sure, I can be utterly convinced that X is brute-fact True--unalterably, objectively so regardless of time or place or culture. I can live my life out on the basis of that conviction. What I cannot do, however, is guarantee that others will, after considering my case, agree with me about X's brute-truthfulness. To believe with me as strongly as I do in fact X, others would have to buy all my reasons for believing in X. They'd have to agree to the terms, the meta-arguments, the criteria, by which I define and verify X as true (e.g., empirical evidence, lived experience, sincerity of belief, miraculous powers, survival of ordeals). I have not only to present a cogent, convincing argument; I have to make sure that others share the same ideas of proof and argument as I do.

All of that meta-argumentation implies work (imagine trying to convince a medieval European peasant to accept string theory). Moreover, the necessity of convincing people opens the door to the possibility that others may not buy into my criteria of truth. Even if they do buy my criteria, they may not navigate the evidence/argument to my same conclusion. In short, others may disagree with me. I would think (I would know!) they are wrong, of course (delusional, heretical, immoral, stubborn, whatever), but nothing I can do as a human lets me tap into some reservoir of Veracity and display Proof so universally obvious that other humans have no choice but to agree with me. Even the most brutal fact must ultimately have a social dimension, and yes--this includes the brute fact/social fact distinction, which relies on a whole set of assumptions about culture, science, epistemology, etc. (imagine trying to convince a medieval European peasant of the fine difference between brute and social facts).

The sick, sad truth is that even if we believe in brute facts, even if we accept that some capital-T Truths exist, we as humans lack any reliable means to establish with 100% certainty whether X fact enjoys such a capital-T status. Certainly we can be 99.999999%+ sure about a whole host of facts (e.g., gravity, cellular mitosis), but as any philosopher of science will tell you, even "scientific" statements remain technically open to the possibility that they may be refuted, disproved, qualified, modified, articulated differently, etc. in the face of other discoveries or new paradigms. Indeed, one of science's strengths is not that it arrives at or uncovers final Truths and holds on to them dogmatically but that it offers a useful, consistent system for investigating and constantly modifying "truths" of nature.

But of course I'm not a scientist, and this isn't a science blog. Consider a statement like this, then: "X is the will [or, we could say, the Word] of God." Brute fact? Social fact? Capital-T True? Here's where we wade merrily into some of the choppiest waters in twenty-first century Christendom. Navigating these seas, I argue (pace Stanely Fish), makes the question of foundational versus antifoundational commitments quite relevant.

More tomorrow,

JF

Postmodernity II: Pluto and the Third Umpire

Yesterday I began a nutshell description of what I mean by postmodernism in the hope of addressing and refuting the suspicion in evangelical circles that postmodernity essentially stands opposed to any meaningful configuration of Christian belief.

I attempted this description by means of a baseball analogy involving three hypothetical umpires discussing their role in calling strikes or balls. "There are balls and there are strikes," states the first, "and I call 'em as they are." "There are balls and there are strikes," states the second, "and I call 'em like I see 'em." "There are balls and there are strikes," says the third, "but they ain't nothing until I call 'em."

I suggested that the first umpire corresponds roughly to a foundationalist view of Truth and Reality, where an objective Real exists in a way that can be perceived, investigated, and communicated more or less accurately by human beings. I should note that this foundationalist view underlies not only most forms of evangelicalism (where the objective Real is of course God) but also many of the more popular conceptions of post-Enlightenment science.

Attacks on postmodernism emerge from both of these foundationalisms (either separately or jointly), and much of the time (though by no means universally) such attacks characterize postmodernism as some version of the second umpire, who apparently relies on personal feeling or subjective opinion in place of an as-is re-presentation of the facts. This mischaracterization imagines postmoderns as dangerous fools who take juvenile ruminations too far ("Dude, how do you know that everything you think is 'real' is not just some super-real hallucination?"). Reality gets replaced by personal whim, and any opinion about life or morals is as good as any other. Thus propped up, this straw man provides endless fun for secular and religious foundationalist critique.

I prefer, however, to think of postmodernism in terms of the third umpire's view, a view I would characterize not as subjective but as discursive. I take this latter term from the work of Michel Foucault, a French philosopher and historian whose name appears both in libraries of respected post-structuralists and in worldview evangelism's hit-lists of postmodern villains. In his work (The Archeology of Knowledge for instance), Foucault offers the idea of discourse.

It's not that unusual a term, to be honest. When teaching about postmodernism, I often ask my undergraduates what a discourse is. "A conversation, a debate," they answer, and they're right. I ask them to imagine discourse as a grand, ongoing conversation among, within, and between groups of people in societies, a conversation that takes place not just in speech but in writing, in images, in actions--really in any kind of communicative medium. For Foucault, however, this special kind of society-wide conversation, however, effectively creates the things (the topics, the objects, the subjects) it deals with. Foucault writes about the discourses that create/define madness, punishment, and sexuality differently in successive historical eras.

Closer to our time, though, I like to explain discouse via reference to the example of Pluto, the little planet that was-but-is-no-longer. Insofar as astronomy (or more specifically planet-ology) functions as a discourse--an ongoing conversation among people who practice astronomy--then the Pluto Affair demonstrates the extent to which the objects of astronomical discourse (e.g., planets) aren't so much described neutrally by astronomers as they are defined or even created by astronomers. Is Pluto a planet? Yes (in 1930). Then no (in 2006).

It's as if the umpires changed the rules for what counts as a ball or a strike mid-game, rescinding a previous call based on the new definition. All of this is to demonstrate that balls and strikes as such don't have any independent existence outside of the context of a particular game. Absent the game's rules, the distinction between a ball and a strike--and indeed, the whole scenario of someone in an odd costume swinging an oddly shaped stick in the hopes of smacking an oddly constructed ball--become nonsensical. Umpires' roles in calling balls or strikes highlights that baseball is a game whose conditions are determined at least in part by the definitions and calls of umpires. (To add a another wrinkle: umpires are themselves artifacts of the game and its rules. No baseball game? No umpires.)

It seems dismissive to call something like astronomy (or medicine, or science, or ethics, or politics, or theology) a game, but to a certain extent any discipline operates by virtue of discipline-bound, context-bound rules and definitions that define what it is to do said discipline.

None of this is to say, of course, that there isn't really a ball of rock and ice orbiting (usually) beyond Neptune out there. That heavenly body didn't suddenly shrink in size after being downgraded from planet to "dwarf planet" any more than it suddenly winked into existence after being first identified in 1930. In that sense, almost no one would argue that there isn't something "real" or "objectively there" that we now call Pluto the dwarf planet. The actions or calls of astronomical umpires don't literally create or destroy that body, just as the umpires' calls don't literally manufacture objects and players out of thin air.

At the same time, though, the redefinition--the umpire's "call"-- does have undeniable effects; the line between "planet" and "dwarf planet" isn't just semantics. Seventy years' worth of astronomy texts, posters of the solar system, educational curricula--all of those documents are now suddenly outmoded. Children have to memorize eight planets instead of nine. Mnemonic devices have to change. A spacecraft, New Horizons, got funding to travel to and take pictures of Pluto back in 2003 (it will reach Pluto in 2015). I remember hearing the scientists in charge of the New Horizons mission saying that, had the redefinition occurred prior to 2003, they would likely not have gotten funding for the project. These consequences aren't minor, and they certainly aren't the product of some individual person's whim.

The point?

To say that postmodernity doesn't believe in capital-T truth is only half right. Very few postmodern philosophers (maaaaaybe Jean Baudrillard in some of his weirder writings) would seriously suggest that there isn't some kind of brute reality in which humans live and move. But acknowledging that a brute reality exists doesn't necessarily equip humans to perceive, communicate about, and move through that reality in exactly the same way. Humans have to filter reality through senses, cognition, and expression (i.e., language), and these filters distort and/or mediate brute reality, limiting it to the sensible, the thinkable, and the expressible. Moreover, the filters and their processes get re-made and re-invented constantly. The way that the ancient Chinese imagined cosmology was vastly different than how Ptolemy imagined it, which was again different than post-Gallileo's cosmology, etc., etc.

In other words, postmodernity doesn't deny that an objective reality exists, but it takes the focus away from that objective reality per se (away from questions like What is really, eternally true?) and puts it squarely on a specific, local representation of that reality (What is "the true" as configured in X time/place?). Note the difference here between a purely subjective, straw-man postmodernity and a discursive postmodernity. The former suggests that truth and reality are whatever you individually want or think it to be. The latter suggest that ideas of truth and reality change radically over long timescales but often seem quite solid and powerful in any one time-place. A discursive formation is not a personal opinion, but neither is it The Way Things Really Are.

More tomorrow,

JF

Defining and Defending Postmodern part I

Within many evangelical circles, few epithets are more damning than postmodern. On the one hand, evangelical writers sometimes use the label to conjure images of ivory-tower nerds engaged in self-aggrandizing contest to see who can say the least with the maximum number of syllables. "Postmodern" thus serves as code for hipper-than-thou, leftist elitism coupled with essential vapidity.

For worldview apologists, "postmodern" is even worse. It's a cynical, amoral philosophy that jettisons the notion of Truth altogether--including and especially the Truth of Christianity--in favor of self-centered pleasure-seeking. "Eat, drink, and be merry, for nothing really matters." Postmoderns, in this view, disbelieve in moral absolutes, which (for worldview-trained evangelicals) must therefore mean that they have no morals and are incapable of ethics.

Since I identify as a postmodernist myself, I take some issue with the idea that Christianity and postmodernity necessarily conflict.

What is postmodernism, anyway?

Postmodernism, a term originally used to describe a particular style of architecture, designates a general trend (or array of trends) in culture, art, politics, scholarship, and philosophy emerging roughly in the later twentieth century. Like many such labels (including evangelical), postmodern gets mobilized in the service of so many descriptions by so may different people that it's arguable whether it really describes anything specific at all. As is the case with evangelical, attempts to draw clear lines around postmodernism as a set idea or group inevitably fail.

That being said, when it's considered within particular contexts (I myself draw mainly on post-structuralist critical theory within the humanities), postmodern does usefully name a roughly identifiable set of assumptions about reality and truth. A quick analogy that I use in my classes might illustrate how I imagine these assumptions.

During his confirmation hearings, Chief Justice John Roberts claimed that he would, if confirmed, operate as an umpire, calling strikes and pitches honestly without intentionally interfering in the game. His depiction, though, ignores the fact that umping can be conceived of in any one of (at least) three ways. Imagine three umpires talking about how they call balls and strikes (I confess I misremember exactly where I first heard this illustration).

"There are balls and there are strikes," says the first umpire, "and I call 'em like they are."

The second shakes his head. "There are balls and there are strikes," says he, "and I call 'em like I see 'em."

The third umpire thinks a bit, frowns, and says, "There are balls and there are strikes, but they ain't nothing until I call 'em."

Brutally simplifying centuries of complex debate, I'll characterize the first umpire as advocating an objective view of Truth and Reality, one roughly coincident with the predominant mindset of Euro-American modernity (i.e., the Renaissance until the twentieth century). Truth exists objectively and is discoverable by humans, primarily through empirical means. Humans may either represent that Truth faithfully or they may misrepresent it (intentionally or unintentionally).

The second umpire represents the ostensible opposite of the first view, a subjective philosophy where the Truth isn't really known (or perhaps doesn't exist) and is therefore totally open to human interpretation. Subjective impression and personal opinion hold equal status to empirical fact. This view is often the one attributed to postmodernity, painting a picture of jejune academics insisting on the legitimacy of any old crazy notion they can come up with.

I would argue, however, that a totally subjective view of reality and truth such as that doesn't actually exist as a serious philosophical or theoretical position. It's a straw man of postmodern thought that exists mainly so that critics of postmodernity can knock it down. No one really argues that reality is only a matter of individual opinion, just as no one (outside of some mentally disturbed person, perhaps) seriously argues that she could, for instance, ignore gravity or walk through walls by virtue of her beliefs about physics.

My take on postmodernity lies closer to the third umpire's statement, a view I call (after Michel Foucault) discursive rather than subjective.

More on that tomorrow,

JF

Hashing Out Fish's Argument

Wuff! What a depressing week in politics this has been. The Massachusetts upset equals health care in trouble, the state legislature/governor slashes education funding, the university slashes jobs/programs in response, and now the Supreme Court overturns a hundred years of precedent to enable mega-corporations to donate unlimited funds to campaign advertisements.

I'm a bit heart-weary right now to pursue the question Stanley Fish poses (well, poses and answers, really), but here I go anyway. Maybe it will cheer me up.

Does philosophy matter? By philosophy, Fish means a comprehensive, all-informing belief in the nature of Truth. For instance, you could believe that Truth--the capital-T, it's really there Truth--exists in terms of things like morals or God or the meaning of life. One might call this brand of beliefs foundationalism, since it asserts the ultimate existence of a foundation, a moral-ethical-theological-what-have-you grounding for a host of other, smaller beliefs.

Alternately, you could believe that there's no such thing as Truth, at least no Truth that we as humans can perceive in any unadulterated way. This, of course, would be something like a postmodern antifoundationalism, which would point out that the ideas and ideals a particular time/place/society reveres as absolute, couldn't-be-more-obvious Truth turn out to be bounded to that time/place/society. Other times, other places, other peoples turn out to have their own unique foundations.

Now, the foundationalist might say that those other times simply got it wrong,or perhaps, vice-versa, that they got it right while we in the here and now have it wrong. Either way, the Truth actually exists. Moral Absolutes exist as certainly as planet Pluto does. (See what I did there?) Being trained in postmodernist historiography, I lean more toward the antifoundationalist side of things. Historical study can be awfully hard on notions of transcendent or universal Truths of humanity. The more you search the breadth of human experience through history and geography for a universal Truth of homo sapiens, the more likely you are to find exceptions to just about any Truth you can assert beyond, well, mortality (and even then, any anthropologist can tell you that how cultures conceive of dying and death varies radically across time and space).

But does being a foundationalist or an antifoundationalist really matter? Fish says, more or less, "Not really." At least, he clarifies, your position on Truth generally exists without the world-shattering consequences many would attribute to it. To quote from his "Truth but No Consequences" article I cited in yesterday's post:

"That is to say, whatever theory of truth you might espouse will be irrelevant to your position on the truth of a particular matter because your position on the truth of a particular matter will flow from your sense of where the evidence lies, which will in turn flow from the authorities you respect, the archives you trust, and so on" (Fish 390).

Thus, argues Fish, it's specious for foundationalists to point to antifoundationalists and say (for instance), "Well, since you don't believe in absolute truths, why don't you step out of a window since gravity's just a socially contingent construction" or (and this is a favorite) "So, since you don't believe in absolute truth, on what grounds would you be able to take a moral stand against someone like Hitler?" Beliefs on particular matters like the persistence of gravity or the wrongness of genocide, notes Fish, don't require the backup of an unquestioning faith in Universal Truths. One needn't be a professional physicist, in other words, to not want to fall out of a window (nor does one have to be an ethicist to express a brute-level disgust at the idea of hurting or killing other people).

Nor, Fish continues, is it any better for an antifoundationalist to claim superiority over a foundationalist via some comparison to cultish fundamentalism: "You just believe X because you aren't smart enough or brave enough to question your core beliefs. Anyone who doesn't agree with you in every detail must be an infidel." Plenty of people would dispute such a characterization, actively making an argument about the need for constant self-reflection by referring to Foundational Truths like the goodness of tolerance or liberty. One needn't be antifoundationalist, in other words, to be critical, ethical, or nuanced.

Indeed, Fish concludes, the metaphysical position on truth (foundationalist or antifoundationalist) is by definition a general metaphysical position, detached from "mundane and empirical" matters of a particular situation. Governing such mundane/empircal matters (Fish's examples: how can God exist in the face of the Holocaust? and what are the contingent historical situations that gave rise to the Holocaust?) are not metaphysics but the requirements of a particular discipline--theology (theodicy, to be specific) for the one example and history for the other. Each discipline has its own set of investigative methods, its own rules for defining questions and finding answers, and none of these flows necessarily from one or the other position, antifoundationalist or foundationalist. You can do good or bad historical work, good or bad theodicy, good or bad just about anything regardless of whether or not you believe in Transcendent Truths or in contingent truths.

It's a provocative argument Fish unfurls, especially as he does so in his signature grumpy-old-iconoclast mode. I don't always agree with Fish--I don't totally agree with him in this line of argument, for example--but I nearly always find him a bracing read. He makes me think more carefully about the assumptions that underlie my scholarship, my activism, and of course my faith.

More tomorrow,

JF

Stanely Fish, Truth, and Worldview Apologetics

To recap from yesterday: Stanley Fish, riffing on Barbara Hernstein Smith's new book on science/religion conflicts, highlights a recurrent theme of his thought--the surprising irrelevance of Absolute Truth to human life and thought. This is an argument he's made before (see "Truth But No Consequences: Why Philosophy Doesn't Matter." Critical Inquiry 29 (2003): 389-416. Print.), but it's not one he's applied to the science/religion theatre of the culture wars.

I'm fascinated by Fish's arguments because I see them as posing an intriguing challenge to evangelical worldview analysis. As I've written about before, worldview analysis is a somewhat new (or at least resurgent) trend in some corners of evangelical thought. Drawing loosely on 1930s-style presuppositionalist apologetics, worldview evangelists posit that human beings move through the world with the help of worldviews, founding philosophies that on conscious and unconscious levels shape values, actions, assumptions, and reactions. Within worldview evangelism, Christians (a particular variety of Protestant Christian, at least) live within the "Biblical Christian" worldview. This worldview competes with other philosophies, be they alternative religions (e.g., the Hindu worldview, the Islamic worldview) or secular belief systems (e.g., naturalist materialism, marxism, postmodernism).

For worldview evangelists, of course, only the Christian worldview enjoys epistemic validity. It is True in a way that other worldviews are not. The task of the Christian, according to the worldview approach, involves 1) becoming conversant with the Christian worldview, learning to live it out more fully; 2) learning about competing worldviews, including how and why they are untrue; and 3) becoming adept at engaging people living within other worldviews, hopefully guiding them to a realization of the inferiority of their native worldviews relative to Christianity.

Fish--by no means a worldview analyst--presents a potent challenge to worldview analysts' assumptions. On one level, he is what most worldview evangelicals would call (or dismiss) as postmodern. That is, Fish does not (at least in his public writings) endorse the idea of Grand Truths that transcend particular times and places. One can believe in them with all one's heart. One can kill for them, die for them, and/or base one's whole life's work (artistic, political, philosophical, religious, what have you) on them. But what one cannot do is demonstrate once and for all that such Grand Truths really are Grand Truths. (Fish clarifies that he is actually referring to grand, philosophical truths and not to specific, mundane facts like "the sky is blue"). The point is that humans lack access to some Unambiguous Guarantor of Truth whose intervention and judgment would convince any and everyone of the truthiness of the Truth.

Worldview analysists tend to simplify such postmodernist beliefs: "Postmoderns don't believe in truth at all." The core of the worldview version of Biblical Christianity, see, is that Truth does exist, it comes from God, and is revealed more or less clearly and completely in the Bible. Other belief systems are flawed ultimately to the extent that they depart from, modify, or deny altogether Biblical Christianity's foundational truth.

Postmodernity, then, is especially scandalous, claiming not only that the Biblical Christian lacks the Ultimate Validity it claims, but that no worldview has such Ultimate Validity. Why? Because either such Ultimate Validity doesn't exist, or (at least) humans lack the ability to access the core of Transcendent Truth in an unmediated way.

Worldview evangelism departs at this point from other forms of Christian outreach and apologetics by refusing to go down the obvious avenue of direct engagement. Faced with a challenge like "I don't believe in Ultimate Truths" (or perhaps "Moral Absolutes"), worldview evangelists do not say "Well, they exist, whether you believe them or not!" Rather, worldview tactics train evangelists to ask questions, to probe the unbeliever's unbelief, catching them finally in a logical contradiction. The favorite for postmoderns? "Isn't the claim that there's no Ultimate Truth itself an Ultimate Truth?"

That's clever enough as it goes, but Fish's arguments are more radical than "there's no truth." At the end of the day, Fish contends, it really doesn't matter whether you believe, deep down, in Absolute Truth or in non-absolute, contingent little-t truths. Why? Because humans don't move through life double-checking every action, reaction, or thought for its conformity to some grand philosophy or worldview. Instead (I quote from Fish, who in turn is quoting Smith), "the sets of beliefs held by each of us are fundamentally incoherent — that is, heterogeneous, fragmentary and, though often viable enough in specific contexts, potentially logically conflicting" (qtd. in Fish, "Must").

In other words, most people live by doing and believing what seems to work, what proves "true," in localized contexts--not by fidelity to specific, all-encompassing philosophies. Science--operating empirically, deductively, via hypothesis and experimentation--works very well for some areas of life. Faith (or art, or sports, or love) works well in other areas. The fact that science and faith are mutually incapable of addressing each other's areas does not prevent people from drawing on both of them (sometimes at once, as when I pray while waiting for a medical test's results). This is as true, Fish insists, for postmodernists as it is for non-postmodernists. Holding and living by (at least potentially) logically contradictory sets of beliefs are just part of human existence.

For worldview analysts, though, logical contradiction within a worldview equals a death-blow for that worldview. Ditto non-comprehensiveness. Biblical Christianity (properly interpreted, of course) has no contradictions, explains everything exhaustively, and is therefore a superior worldview. The worldview evangelist assumes that, being brought to face a logical contradiction within their native (non-Christian) worldviews, nonbelievers will be shocked and disconcerted (and thus ready for the Holy Spirit to guide them into belief in Christ).

To be fair, many atheists place a similar trust in the power of their rhetoric to force believers into looking at the logical contradictions in Christianity (e.g., an all-powerful, loving God who allows earthquakes to devastate Haiti).

Fish, on the other hand, suggests that both die-hard atheists and die-hard evangelicals who make this assumption are in for a shock: most people are actually OK living in paradox, living without the unity of an all-encompassing, utterly harmonious philosophical system.

All this is not to say I agree totally with Fish. I do think there are reasons why faith or non-faith in Ultimate Truths do matter.

More tomorrow,

JF

Stanely Fish, Religion, and Science

Apologies: this again will be a short-ish post. I have a lot on my mind this evening, from funding cuts and termination notices for non-tenured faculty at my university to the Democrats' upset in Massachusetts (and the threat that poses to health reform hopes) to my first of teaching tomorrow.

I bracket all of these worries, however, to point you to a stimulating blog post by Stanley Fish on his New York Times blog. There Fish reviews (positively) and ruminates on (extensively) a book by Barbara Hernstein Smith, Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion. Smith (in Fish's view) effectively identifies and dismantles some of the common arguments that crisscross debates about the conflict between science and religion (e.g., science is but a kind of religion, religion is nothing more than cultish and anti-intellectual hogwash).

Both of these arguments, she contends--indeed, the whole framing of science and religion as locked in some winner-take-all struggle--are flawed. The argument against science (or perhaps, against materialist naturalism) involves science's inability to prove the ultimate epistemic validity of its own preconceptions. Science, like logical positivism, begins with axioms that cannot themselves be ultimately validated.

Fine, Smith says, but that doesn't make science any less valuable. Its value, she explains, lies not in our unshaken faith in the capital-T Truth of science but science's effectiveness at explaining, predicting, and controlling certain aspects of existence. We value science, in other words, not because we have Absolute Faith in its Eternal Truth (we don't) but because science allows us to meet and overcome particular challenges. Got a broken leg? Science can help. It matters not at all if the patient (or even, come to think of it, if the doctors) actually have Utter Faith in the power of casts and medicine. When it comes to fixing broken bones, science (i.e., medical techniques substantiated with science) works.

For other challenges--how ought we to behave? what kind of laws make for the best society? how can I live in the face of X suffering?--science works less well. For those kind of questions, other human endeavors (perhaps religious faith) work.

As some of Fish's commentators posted (see those under the "highlights" tab), Smith's case appears to echo that made twenty-odd years ago by Stephen J. Gould. Gould famously described religion and science as "nonoverlapping magisteria"--different enterprises differently suited to different tasks. They ask different questions, and they only come into conflict when they are mobilized in the service of tasks for which they are not intended (e.g., creation science).

I sense, however, that Smith's work goes beyond Gould. Fish certainly does. The piece of Smith's book he finds especially enticing isn't only the "they're not really in conflict" conclusion but her contention that contextualized pragmatism (does it work? for what does it work?) and not epistemic certainty (is it True?) ought to form the distinguishing characteristics between science and religion. This rationale offends some aligned with science (the first highlighted comment exemplifies this). The new scientism would argue that science isn't just different but better because it is in fact True. It describes Reality in ways that religion does not and cannot. Moreover, science willingly submits itself to proofs, ever ready for Reality to smack down X or Y hypothesis via experimentation. Religion, goes this line of thinking, fails because it doesn't similarly submit to falsification.

Of course, philosophers of science have moved beyond pure Popperian faslificationism as the sine qua non of science for some time now. The old canard of reflexivity still works: at what point or by what test does falsificationism itself become open to falsification? Historians of science point out that, were strict falsificationism the criterion for science, many of the most famous and influential scientists would fail the test. So too would many quantum physicists or string theorists, whose work is effectively (at this point at least) untestable yet still valid qua scientific work. Other philosophers point out that falsificationism declines to define exactly what constitutes a "test" or a proper "falsification"; one can nearly always attribute a failed test to a bad test ("We just don't have the technology to test this properly") rather than to a bad hypothesis.

Smith's argument is that A) science simply doesn't have access to some objective viewpoint from which one can adjudicate its Truth relative to religion; and B) it doesn't need such access. Why? Because humans don't operate by determining what system of thought (dare I say worldview) is transcendentally true or false; we care more, evolutionarily speaking, about what works in a particular situation. A longish quote:

What this means, among other things, is that the various projects we pursue and engage in may not all cohere in a single intelligible story. We may not be unified beings. In fact, Smith says, “the sets of beliefs held by each of us are fundamentally incoherent — that is, heterogeneous, fragmentary and, though often viable enough in specific contexts, potentially logically conflicting.” The potential for logical conflict, however, exists only under the assumption that all our beliefs should hang together, an assumption forced upon us not by the world, but by the polemical context of the culture wars.

This is an old argument of Fish's, but it's well put here. Humans simply don't work via fidelity to all-encompassing, fully articulated, internally non-contradictory belief systems. We operate, instead, through an ever-shifting hodgepodge of cobbled-together beliefs that we keep or discard based largely on how well they work in helping us move through life. I needn't be convinced of the Theory of Gravitation to know I don't want to step out of an open fifth-story window. Were a wholly different explanatory model of falling things to come about that replaced gravity entirely, I'd still avoid open windows in high buildings.

Why does all of this spark my interest? I feel it captures some of my problems with worldview analysis and worldview evangelism.

More on that tomorrow,

JF

Caveat Emptor

Short post today, as classes start tomorrow.

Not that I've been procrastinating on class planning--most of my courses are prepped and ready to go. In fact, I thought initially that I could devote this evening to doing some reading for my book proposal. See, I got a religion book whose review I had read and appreciated in the Christian Century from waaaay back in 2008.

The book's author spoke of how faith in the present was changing. No longer could religion--Christianity in particular--assume that it held an assumed position of importance in life and culture. Now Christianity, and indeed faith in general, has become one option among many others. One can be non-Christian today and not be arrested or shunned as a heretic (generally, of course--I'd not want to declare myself atheist in certain back-woods small Oklahoma towns, for instance).

This book, I thought, is just what I need to frame my investigation into twenty-first century evangelical outreach. Part of the sea-change in evangelical techniques (so goes my thinking) involves the shocking realization among evangelicals that the preeminence of the gospel isn't simply The Way Things Are In The West.

The rise of worldview analysis (i.e., identifying and taxonomizing non-Christian systems as all-encompassing, wholly different ways of viewing the world) exemplifies this realization. Rather than dividing the human world into two groups (the "One True Way" and "lies"), worldview evangelism recognizes whole grids and tables of different value lenses. Moreover, it situates "the Biblical Christian worldview" on that same table. To be sure, worldview evangelists believe that the Christian view is in fact the correct one, but (I would argue) the modification from duality (true/false) to grid/table isn't just cosmetic.

So--I needed this book. The trouble is, I had difficulty recalling the name and author; I could only remember the subject. With my Christmas gift of a Barnes and Noble card, I purchased what I thought was the book. Cracking it open for the first time this evening, though, I realized that I had in my hands a book sort of like but not quite the book I needed. had the unfortunate experience of realizing I'd bought the wrong book.

I bought The Future of Faith by Harvey Cox. After some reading and finally some long searching through Christian Century archives, I figured out that the book I actually wanted was A Secular Age by Charles Taylor.

By then, of course, I'd wasted much of my evening. I'll get the Taylor from the library tomorrow. Ah, well. It's not as if I could have read it all anyway. The Cox (which is fine on its own) is a doable-in-a-few-days 200 pages or so. Taylor is almost 900 pages.

Caveat emptor--or should I say, caveat lector.

More tomorrow,

JF

Leaderless Activism and the Tea Party Movement

OK--one more Tea Party post, and I'm done for a while. Maybe.

Frank Rich, one of the New York Times's more liberal pundits, devoted his Sunday opinion piece to--well, let me specify. I read it because the headline was "The Great Tea Party Rip-Off." In actuality, the piece was mainly about Michael Steele's recent tirade against Harry Reid's ill-chosen words about President Obama's race as a factor in the last election. The Tea Party gets mentioned a bit at the end.

Rich, predictably, uses the Tea Party as a platform from which to launch further attacks on Steele and other conservatives. More interesting, though, was his link to this post by Erick Erickson of RedState.com, "I'm Afraid Sarah Palin Might Be Ruining Herself Unintentionally." Erickson writes specifically the upcoming "National Tea Party Convention" in Nashville, which charges $500 (that's just the registration fee). Like many commentators right and left, Erickson notes a bit of a tension between the idea of an organization ostensibly dedicated to advocating for not-so-rich folk to charge such exorbitant prices. But Erickson takes a harsher tone, admitting that he thinks the convention (and not, as Frank Rich intimated, the tea party movement in general) "smells scammy":

"Let me be blunt: charging people $500.00 plus the costs of travel and lodging to go to a 'National Tea Party Convention' run by a for profit group no one has ever heard of sounds as credible as an email from Nigeria promising me a million bucks if I fork over my bank account number."

I'm a little vague on just who exactly organized this convention. As far as I can tell from the Convention web page, it's a group called Tea Party Nation, which seems to restrict access to info beyond its home page (even stuff like FAQs or Resources) to members only. I guess the only way to find out if you agree enough with the group to join it is to join it to see if you agree with it. Not exactly a scam in itself, but frustrating and fishy all the same.

Erickson's larger point, though, concerns his cooling passions for the tea party movement in general. He touches on one of the features of the movement--its "leaderless" quality--that continues to fascinate me.

The progressive left has for some time been playing around with less top-down models of activism that might be called "leaderless." The more sophisticated cases for such tactics tend to invoke an idea like Barbara Epstein's "prefigurative community," in which groups adopt a guiding principle that their activist tactics--planning, organizing, implementation--all mirror the features of the "better society" they wish to create. They seek, in other words, to make the means and ends resemble each other.

For many of these progressive activists (most visibly in the world-wide anti-globalization movement), the "better society" looks like a voluntary, anti-capitalist, and non-violent anarchism in which small groups make decisions via consensus, share property, resist individual profit at the expense of others, etc. Activism built on this model tends to involve a number of otherwise distinct groups who join together around a common cause on a contingent basis, pooling resources to mobilize peaceful protest against a visit of the World Trade Organization meeting, for example. It's a "movement of movements" that highlight the spectacle of mass, non-violent direct action over more long-term, single-focus movements whose work often calls for working within the extant system (e.g., lobbying, electing candidates, fund-raising, letter-writing).

In my scholarly work, I've argued that the "movement of movements" trend offers a novel way of intervening in/resisting globalized capitalist oppression as well as presenting a productive challenge and critique to more "traditional" forms of social change organization. I question, however, how effective the movement of movements can beyond producing a singular event (i.e., a protest). Grounding myself in more old-school political theorists like Antonio Gramsci, I am incredulous toward the tactic of opting out of traditional politics entirely. A dream of utopia, of a better world, may be necessary for social change, but the dream alone isn't sufficient to realize that change.

Tea Party advocates, always eager to tout their leaderless, grassroots qualifications, are thus in my view latecomers to this tactic. They are also, from what I've seen and heard, less interested in the kind of meta-awareness of their movement that lets them see the plusses and minuses of quasi-anarchist structures.

The Convention offers an intriguing case in point here. On the one hand, tea partiers want to be leaderless--the better to criticize the elected leaders (politicians) in Washington. Yet in order to make any political gains, they must by necessity offer up, rally behind, and elect leaders themselves. Yet elected leaders eventually have to define themselves on the basis of any number of political decisions; a senator or representative is obliged to be a great deal more specific about her beliefs than "less spending and fewer taxes and more rights!" Inevitably, these specifics will reveal internal divisions: "You mean you're for X program and against Y legislation? What about Z issue? You've betrayed us!"

Indeed, you can see such divisions already, as "leaders" struggle to explain this or that frightening or racist or otherwise wackadoo stance or sign or slogan that appears at a tea party rally. The numerous references to violent action (e.g., openly displaying firearms, calling for a second American revolution) are particularly striking. I do not suggest that everyone or even that most people at a tea party gathering say such things. But enough do at enough tea parties that I think partiers disingenuous when they simply deny the existence of such sentiments. "Well, we're a leaderless movement," stammer the leaders (odd how tea partiers at once identify as and disavow the existence of leaders and spokespeople), "so we can't control who comes to our rallies. I can assure you, though, that the sentiment there doesn't represent us."

But there's the rub, no? A leaderless, totally grassroots organization has no "us" to speak of. It's a mass of people--powerful in its destructive force but less effective at getting anything productive done (Jose Ortega y Gasset famously compared masses to lava--powerful, destructive, directionless). I side with Gramsci here, who argues that masses eventually have to become parties, obliged to play the game of politics, where definitions of in and out have to be devised and where appeals to the base have to balance with concessions to other groups.

Complicating all of this consideration, for me, is the question of where evangelical or otherwise Christian-identified motivations and groups figure in the tea party setup.

More tomorrow,

JF

The What About Me Ethos: Tea Parties, Health Care, Haiti, and Avatar

Odd, isn't it, how seemingly unrelated bits of information, when juxtaposed, often resonate?

This last week I've written about three almost completely unrelated news items: 1) the Haitian disaster and Christians' response to it; 2) the Tea Party movement; and 3) some evangelical leaders' queasiness at the James Cameron movie Avatar. I had really no notion that these would link to a common theme at all until today, when I read news reports about the Massachusetts election on Tuesday to replace Sen. Ted Kennedy.

In a traditionally true-blue state, a Republican candidate, Scott Brown, now seems neck-and-neck with the Democratic candidate, Martha Coakley. At stake in this election is the Democrats' tenuous hold on capitol hill power. Should the Democrats lose this seat, the upset will widely be interpreted as a watershed moment in politics, where President Obama's ambitious domestic agenda is put in check by a more-conservative-than-he-bargained-for public.

Worse, for the Democrats at least, is the fact that the health care reform bill so painstakingly advanced to House/Senate negotiations phase will almost certainly tank, as Brown vocally opposes the administration's reform efforts.

While I've been less than pleased with some of the deals (I think that's a generous word) cut with various Democratic senators to garner their support, I support the health care bill as mainly a good and necessary step. The thought that the months of anxious work on the bill could be undone by a narrow state election bothers me.

How does this all link back to the Tea Party/Avatar/Haiti intersection? It all came together for me with this quote from Mary Beth Cahill, John Kerry's former campaign manager who was queried by the Washington Post about the impact of a possible Republican victory. Like most of the other experts the paper asked, Cahill doubted that Brown would end up winning. If he does, however, Cahill predicts that Democrats will have a round of finger-pointing followed by some grim soul-searching, trying to figure out what things need doing before the midterm elections. Cahill offers one pressing reform: "We will have to provide an answer to voters who think, 'What about me?"

Cahill means that Democrats will have to be better about articulating how and why various administration policies will benefit Americans in the short term.

What about me? This, it seems, is the question roiling about in the many Tea Party protests, most of which identify and vilify any number of Big Red Devils (government, illegal immigrants, other countries, elites, liberals, the poor) portrayed as snatching away the benefits and rights and privileges that should be, well, mine. Enough with entitlement programs! Enough with taxes for foreign aid, universal health care, or welfare! What about me? That question serves as the beating heart of populist libertarianism today, the driving force of free market capitalism.

It is also the antithesis of what I understand to be the agape spirit of Christ. I am depressed beyond measure that an angry, petulant what about me? characterizes so much of the US spirit today. I'm frustrated that the answer to high-level greed of CEOs seems to be an argument that appeals to the lower-level greed of the middle classes: it's my turn for a piece of the pie. I'm upset, as well, that the Democrats--and frankly President Obama--have largely capitulated to these baser instincts in the health care reform process. All through the debates, I hear arguments about how health care reform will or will not lower my personal cost or quality of care. Absent entirely is the deeper question about the kind of society we want to create: one that cares for its members or one that does not. I hear no calls to sacrifice, no appeal to the ideal of a society in which those with care for those without.

Part of the popularity of Avatar, I'm gathering, involves Cameron's presentation of a sci-fi world in which all lifeforms are literally, biologically connected. All animals and many plants have biological "plugs" (a cluster of neuron tendrils) that allow any two of them to connect and share feelings, thoughts, etc. I found the plot device a bit silly, to be honest (the blue-skinned alien heroes have their tendril-things emerging from the ends of their ponytails, so there's a lot of hair-plugs--ha!). But apparently this notion of mutual co-existence and its ethical ramifications have caught many people's attention and passion.

Cameron has created a (for many people) compelling world in which the individual cannot be the prime unit of political or social consideration. In his world, What about me? becomes impossible to answer apart from What about everyone? By contrast, the villains of the film are overtly (one might say one-dimensionally) painted as selfish capitalists: they work for "The Corporation," they destroy nature in order to mine "unobtainium," they worry about profits and personal motives above all. (I should note here there are other aspects of Avatar that I feel undermine such a reading, but I'll deal with these later).

Only rarely do we see something like that trans-individual, others-first ethos in action. And this brings me to the Haiti disaster, which--comments by Pat Robertson et al. aside--appears to be an example of most of the world dropping everything and sending money/supplies/people to help a country in trouble. It's the What about everyone overtaking What about me, and no giant blue CGI figures are needed.

But of course Haiti is an exception, not the rule, and the world's attention to it is certain to be short-lived. It's only a matter of time until someone here begins wondering how and why we spent X millions of dollars to help a perpetually impoverished country (I mean, can't they just pull themselves up by their own bootstraps?) when Y US segment of the population is suffering from Z trouble. Governmental assistance means taxes. And while I've heard many a conservative Christian spokesperson wax lyrical about the virtues of private charity (a check to the Red Cross or something), heaven help anyone who suggests that perhaps a tax could be levied or increased to make sure that no one goes without adequate medical care.

"Rescue the perishing" transforms to "Don't tread on me" faster than a lightning strike. How is this logic change possible? How can Christians consider them selves other-directed in all things except in civil society? I hear constantly from the Christian right how one's faith should dictate one's political orientation in terms of culture-war issues. Why then is it so hard for me to see how Christian faith directs the economic policies the right supports?

I am not, I have to say, a fan of Avatar for a number of reasons. But to the extent that it taps into and cultivates an ethos that disrupts what about me?, I think there's some hope there.

More tomorrow,

JF

Avatar and Worldviews

First, a follow-up note on Haiti:

Well, the blogosphere's reaction to Pat Robertson's statements about Haiti seems to be fairly unified: how dare he?! Among the more creative reactions are a letter to Robertson from "the Devil" and this segment from John Stewart's Daily Show:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Haiti Earthquake Reactions
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

Just beautiful, really, Stewart's Bible-based rebuttal.

So consonant is the chorus of voices condemning Robertson (and Rush Limbaugh) that I feel safe in moving on to other things to discuss (though the Haitian crisis is ongoing--our prayers support ought not cease).

Anyone seen Avatar, James Cameron's latest mega-blockbuster? Silly question, really; it's been topping box office charts for the past month or so. I saw it with my father in 3-D. I found it entertaining enough at the time, but I wasn't blown away. Cameron dresses up a thin melodrama (aptly described as Pocahontas meets Ferngully) with $300 million (or is it $500 million?) in special effects animation. Half a billion dollars does buy some impressive images.

Wikipedia provides an adequate plot synopsis if you've missed it thus far. Basically: the capitalist military-industrial complex gets bested by we're-all-connected, back-to-nature primitivism. Jake, the disabled main character, finds new life by downloading his consciousness into an "avatar"--a genetically crafted hybrid of human and alien (i.e., the tall, blue natives of the planet being plundered by above-mentioned military-industrial complex).

Two reactions to this film have caught my interest. First, not surprisingly, some evangelicals take issue with the film's worldview. Alex McFarland, a Christian evangelist and president of Southern Evangelical Seminary, has raised concerns about the film's pantheistic worldview and anti-capitalist critique.

Second, more surprising to me, is that some people are really, really, really, really into this film. The same escapist, back-to-nature pantheism that McFarland cautions against proves to many fans so enticing, so much better than drear reality, that the Avatar movie website's forums have a number of threads dedicated to dealing with the disappointment that Pandora doesn't actually exist (see here, for example). The posts on there range from the light (e.g., "gee, I wish I could hang out on Pandora") to the sad (e.g., "my life is so boring here. I wish I lived there on that world.") to the worrisome, as in people becoming clinically depressed after watching the film. This CNN article on Avatar blues quotes one forum poster:

"Ever since I went to see 'Avatar' I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na'vi made me want to be one of them. I can't stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it," Mike posted. "I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and the everything is the same as in 'Avatar.' "

Yeek.

What's odd is that I had nothing remotely like that reaction to the film. It was a movie with big, loud effects and big, loud dramaturgy (much like Cameron's Titanic, really). Something, however, clearly and strongly touched a great many people watching the film. I'm curious as to whether this something is similar to the elements that triggered McFarland's alarm bells...

I suspect that some of McFarland's unease has to do with Avatar's spirituality.

More tomorrow,

JF

Pat Robertson Embarrasses Christianity Yet Again

I fear I was a bit harsh on Fred Phelps in my posting a few days ago about Haiti. Reviewing some of the Christian responses to massive tragedies that I find problematic, I referenced briefly the "they had it coming" argument. X catastrophe happened because Y victim was either personally or corporately guilty of Z sin. I dismissed that whole argument as too obviously vile to address seriously, writing that only someone like the Rev. Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps would ever seriously advance it.

Then I hear about Pat Robertson's little theory. I quote from the Time story about Robertson, which relates this passage he offered up on an episode of his 700 Club (thanks to my father for the link):

"And you know, Kristi, something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, you know, Napoleon the Third and whatever, and they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, 'We will serve you if you'll get us free from the French.' True story. And so the devil said, 'O.K., it's a deal.' "

Because of this, Robinson concludes, Haiti has ever since been awash in catastrophe (except, of course, the catastrophe of enslavement by French colonialism. That they got rid of pretty successfully).

Video of the segment can be found embedded with the Time story. The article explains that Robertson refers here to an apocryphal tale of Haitian Voodoo (aka Vodou) priest sacrificing a pig in 1791 to jump-start the Haitian revolution (not, of course against Napoleon the Third, who lived in the mid-to-late 1800s).

Sigh.

A statement from Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network insists that "Dr. Robertson never stated that the earthquake was God’s wrath." It goes on to assert Robertson's humanitarian concern with Haiti's plight, citing the ministry's work in helping those afflicted.

OK, I grant that Robertson did not literally say that the earthquake was God's wrath against Haitians. . . . but exactly what other conclusion are we to draw? Haiti (in Robertson's historical view) made a covenant with the devil (it's worth mentioning, of course, that the Christian devil plays no role in Vodou theology). Now they suffer disaster after disaster.

Why even try to spin that? After all Robertson has hardly been shy in the past about pinning blame for tragedies like Hurricane Katrina, 9-11, and the AIDS epidemic on specific groups of sinners (mainly gays and feminists). His belief in natural disasters as God's Whupping Stick is well-established. Why deny it now?

I get that Robertson probably does sincerely and simultaneously believe that A) most victims of the earthquake need help, prayer, and care; and B) the earthquake and other Haitian misfortunes are the result of that ritual of 1791. Haitians--corporately if not personally--are victims of a curse they brought upon themselves (the history of enslavement, colonialism, and impoverishment was all incidental, apparently). As victims they should be cared for, but it's worth remembering (and reminding everyone about) the source of their victimhood--themselves.

That logic flabbergasts me, and I could rail against it, but whatever. Even if you believe that logic, though, here's the question I want answered: is bringing it up right now the Christian thing to do? Right now--as people are digging through rubble and rock with their bare hands to find their loved ones--this is the time to say, however sheepishly, I know you don't want to hear this, but this is what you get for making a deal with Satan over three centuries ago... Really?

As my counselor sister says, "What do you want me to do with this information?" Exactly what should the Haitians--many of whom are devout Christians themselves and none of whom sacrificed a pig to anything in 1791--exactly what should they do with Robertson's vicious little lagniappe? How does this help them? How does that so-very-sad-tongue-clucking demonstrate the love and solidarity of God With Us?

[Or, in a less generous reading, perhaps Robertson's audience wasn't the victims but those of us here in the US at a remove (not a big one, mind) from one of the poorest countries in the world, a country in whose history the West (and especially the US) has played a large role? What does Robertson's message say to us except "Not our responsibility. They brought it on themselves. We can help, but it's above-and-beyond for us, and it'll never do any real good in the long run anyway. The Haitians will always be Haitians..." Somehow a pig sacrifice historiographically eclipses centuries of slavery before it and centuries of exploitation and intervention after it, absolving non-Haitians of any and all responsibility for the country's economic difficulties.]

I get that Robertson's ministry is on the ground in Haiti helping people. Good for them. But you know what? So are dozens of other organizations, religious and secular, and somehow--somehow--they've managed to render assistance without assigning blame, however far removed historically, to the victims of plate tectonics.

And this is nothing new for Robertson! I mean, he's practically trademarked foot-in-mouth evangelicalism. Remember when he called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez? Or when he intimated that Dover, PN would face destruction because of a court decision involving intelligent design? Or when he--well, heck, there's a whole Wikipedia entry about Robertson's controversies (including this one).

Inevitably, Robertson comes out expressing shock at the extremely negative reaction his comments caused--rarely if ever actually apologizing, mind you. Wait for it--he'll come out doddering about how shocked--shocked!--he is about how badly some people have misunderstood his remarks, doubtless because of the liberal media... Yet he continues to be respected as an authority for Christians. Never have I been a fan of Robertson or his organization, but really: how much longer can any Christian treat him seriously as a beneficial spokesperson for the faith? How many horrible, spiritually tone-deaf gaffes does he have to make before he's declared Unfit For Christian Representation?

I think a lot about evangelicals' concern about how Christianity is seen as mean-spirited, hypocritical, and judgmental by non-believers. So long as someone like Pat Robertson gets credit as a respected mouthpiece of the faith, we can hardly be surprised that this is so.

It's time he stepped away from the petty pulpit.

More tomorrow (and continue to give to/pray for Haitian relief!),

JF

Tea Party Politics

Brief note: News of Haiti's suffering continues to pour in. Please take a moment to pray and contribute what you can to a reputable relief agency (I gave to UMCOR).


Meanwhile, in less traumatic topics, I listened today to a podcast of On Point with Tom Ashbrook, an NPR-affiliated radio talkshow. The topic? The Tea Party, the populist, grassroots (some would quibble with that descriptor), diverse, and widespread movement of fiscal and social conservatives agitating for a variety of reforms to US policy and government. Given my research interests in the performance of conservative activism, it's perhaps surprising that I've avoided doing much work on this most visible and powerful of political protest movements on the right.

This show served as a good introduction to some of their beliefs and operations. Ashbrook (the host) devoted most of the show to two guests, themselves leaders of local Tea Party-affiliated groups. Throughout the dual interview/call-in, Ashbrook maintained a pretty fair tone throughout, pushing gently when a guest or a caller made an unclear or contradictory statement but never becoming cable-talk-showy (i.e., aggressive, interrupting, belittling, etc.).

For all the conversation, though I remain in the dark about the Tea Party's core ideals. Certainly "less government spending" and "less taxation" appear to be common themes. But the rationales underlying these slogans, as well as the related political/cultural philosophies linked with them, remain inchoate. Both guests tended to speak in rather vague terms about personal liberties or the values of the founding fathers. Beyond such language, however, their worldviews seemed to diverge sharply.

One guest, Lorie Medina from the Dallas Tea Party, cited some relatively specific grievances, instances in which she feels the government has overstepped its bounds by, for example, dictating the leadership of this or that corporation. She was careful to keep her arguments restricted to economic policy, advocating a Reganesque "no big government" libertarianism (though she did not use that latter term). The other guest, Jeffrey McQueen, founded a group (or, perhaps, a website) called "USRevolution2." Its main offering at present appears to be a modified flag available for purchase:



Asked by Ashbrook about the flag's design, McQueen explained that the thirteen stars reference (of course) both the original thirteen colonies of the original American Revolution and the thirteen guests at the Lord's Supper. The second revolution the flag alludes to implies a coming reform of government along general lines of fair tax, fair trade, limited government, and the right to bear arms.

McQueen's rhetoric ranged more widely than Medina's did. The show's more extreme comments came from him, as he at one point drew comparisons between the health care reform bill and the Holocaust (solemnly referring to Jewish relatives of his who died in Nazi camps) and openly described the President as a socialist. Toward the end of his time, he said something to the effect that Americans have "four boxes" to use in order to express themselves: the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box--and the "bullet box." Ashbrook stopped him, asking him to elaborate. Did he really mean an armed revolution? "Just look at ammunition sales," McQueen answered. "They're way up."

Medina tactfully distanced herself from that particular line. She also strained to distance herself from overtly racist images that a caller reported were being sent to him and defended by Dallas-based Tea Party people. Both Medina and McQueen vehemently denied that either they or their fellow Tea Partiers were racist simply because they disagreed with Obama, castigating what they saw as critics' easy recourse to "the race card." As for the racist images and alarming/violent slogans circulated at Tea Party rallies, Medina fell back on the fact that the Tea Party is a leaderless grassroots movement that does not police its members. (Oddly, she coupled this argument with firm assurances that her Tea Party group would never allow such images in its communications).

One caller picked up McQueen's reference to the Last Supper, challenging McQueen to explain how the passionately anti-socialist Tea Party could reconcile its pro-capitalism with the practice of the early church as described in Acts (I think he referenced Acts 4: 32-35--"All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had. . . . There were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need.").

Here my ears perked up. Pace Max Weber, the collusion between capitalism and Christianity baffles me since passages like the one above seem utterly at odds with the profit/property/individualism values of the "free market." Is not the sharing all things with everyone and giving the needy everything they need more socialist? Medina swooped into rescue McQueen, claiming authority as the daughter of a Baptist pastor. The Acts passage, she explained, described the believers' actions toward each other. They did not, she argued, give their money "to Ceasar" and then ask Ceasar to redistribute it. That would be socialism. Christians give their possessions on their own, not via government.

I've heard this interpretation before, and, forgive my bluntness, but what self-serving tripe! It's the height of hypocrisy for a Christian-right political conservative to hide behind separation of church and state when the bulk of their agenda blatantly pushes US government to mirror supposedly Christian values. Would it be socialism for the US government to adopt and enforce strictly Christian notions of, say, marriage? Would it be socialism for the government to adopt Christianity as its official religion? The Christian right (broadly speaking) consistently holds that the US is a Christian nation. Shouldn't a Christian nation adopt Christian values--not just culturally but economically?

Moreover, Medina's exegesis conveniently dodges the caller's main criticism. Even if the example in Acts 4 doesn't advocate a socialist economic system, no stretching can possibly distort that passage into a Christian case for supporting capitalism, particularly the corporate-freedom capitalism Medina praises. Where exactly does Jesus or the early church throw their support behind trickle-down economics?

But I digress...

Clearly the Tea Party is a diverse movement in the throes of defining itself. Certainly its members have a great deal of passion, but (as Elinor Clift mentioned in a subsequent show segment) passion isn't enough to create meaningful political change. At some point they will need to cohere around a leader who articulates their passion in terms of a distinct platform of policy proposals. And the tricky thing about articulation: it dissolves the illusion of unity conjured by hurrah-words like "freedom" and "values" and "normalcy."

I wait to see how and if the Tea Party confronts and navigates its own internal differences.

More tomorrow,

JF