Corporations and New Hearts
August 31, 2008
The place of the corporation is an unacknowledged point of contention in American politics. If we are looking for a single conceptual commitment that marks the Bush administration, it would be the ultimate goodness of the corporation. Regulatory offices have been weakened in order to make life easier for corporations.. and likewise tax policies have been crafted for corporate comfort. This comes out explicitly in conservative commentators. Rush Limbaugh was quoted in the recent profile in the New York Times Magazine as saying: "I consider myself a defender of corporate America."
For obvious reasons it is not easy to challenge the status of corporate America. Too many people make their money.. or aspire to make money.. being employed in corporate America. Barack Obama and Al Gore talk a lot about change, but it is always in the context of the greater economic opportunities that will come by investing in new research and entering new markets.
There is something to be said for this green corporation approach. Two recent examples of corporate losses can serve as object lessons for the use of strong government-designed regulations. Ford Motor Company recently set a record with $1 billion in losses for the second quarter of 2008. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac not long ago had to be rescued by the Fed after mounting losses in mortgage loans. It is built into the DNA of corporations to take profits when they are within reach. That is the way CEO careers are made—not by thinking hard about sustainability. Imagine how much better off both of these corporations would now be if the intensity of their earlier profits (SUV sales and risky mortgages) had been curtailed by regulations. There is an obvious case to be made for more regulatory oversight.
At the same time this mindset keeps us from a deeper discussion concerning where corporations should figure in our society. Last week I went through The Bridge at the End of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability by James Gustave Speth. At one point Speth reviews recent discussion about the nature of the corporation, including this comment from another author:
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the global corporation stands as the dominant institutional force at the center of human activity and the planet itself.... We must dramatically change the publicly traded, limited liability global corporation, just as previous generations set out to eliminate or control the monarchy. [173]
I appreciate the connection between modern corporatism and monarchies. This sets the current situation in a more accurate and critical light. We are dealing with an emerging social and cultural order and not with a footnote to nationalism. In this light the "limited government" philosophy espoused by conservatism is not so much about individualism as vacating spheres of economic life so that they can be taken over by corporations.
Speth sets out a series of proposals for greening corporations in order to arrive at a sustainable economy. Yet the possible cynical answer hangs out there: what if we have moved to a way of life that cannot be controlled? A way of life that has to devour resources to continue? Maybe the corporation is not a social system that can deal with long-term decision making. And if that is the case then our inability as a society to question and discuss the place of the corporation in our lives is disturbing. It is possible that the "right" actions in this case will require sacrifice and new ways of living that are not so congruent with corporate values.
Near the conclusion Speth builds a case for the necessity of a "new consciousness":
What the authors previously cited and many others are now saying is that today's challenges require a rapid evolution to a new consciousness. That is a profound conclusion. It suggests that today's problems cannot be solved with today's mind. [204]
This is a vaguely religious answer.. drawing as it does (ultimately) on biblical passages like Jeremiah 31.31,33: "The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel... I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts." When hopes rest on new consciousness, they are usually disappointed. And so I fear the bridge will not be taken until it is far too late to be able to preserve anything resembling our world.
James Gustave Speth. The Bridge at the End of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability.Yale UP, 2008.
Being an Amateur
August 29, 2008
Edward Said's Representations of the Intellectual contains a thrilling discussion of the need for amateurism. The opposite of this amateurism is a kind of intellectual professionalism that Said defines as follows:
By professionalism I mean thinking of your work as an intellectual as something you do for a living, between the hours of nine and five with one eye on the clock, and another cocked at what is considered to be proper, professional behavior... making yourself marketable and above all presentable, hence uncontroversial and unpolitical and "objective." [74]
Here he gets at a point always bothered me when talking to some fellow grad students back at Emory. Intellectual life should not be about reading complex books during the day and then turning the mind off at night. As if it is not necessary to be critical of everything that we consume: from popular movies to the newspapers. As if critical insights are good only for the interpretation of academic texts. Being an intellectual is a calling to a life of thought. This is not to say that there is no "job" aspect to working in the academy.. one has to read certain things and teach classes.. but the point is to find space within this job for independent critical thought and expression.
Said hits on one of my consistent worries about academic life: that the ways of talking about subjects within fields can come to be a limitation. Currently I am writing up an NEH proposal for summer funding.. and in coming months I will probably be working up some longer proposals for projects. But there are times when I suspect that this process of learning how to talk about projects in ways that are academically acceptable is itself a way of boxing up my horizons. I know there is much that is healthy about placing a project within an intellectual field.. but that can also lead it to become a smooth stone instead of the jagged and edgy stone that I love so much about works from the past.
One way to read this book by Said (a series of lectures, actually) is to understand it as a defense of jagged stones. His notion of amateurism is:
...the desire to be moved not by profit or reward but by love for and unquenchable interest in the larger picture, in making connections across lines and barriers, in refusing to be tied down to a specialty, in caring for ideas and values despite the restrictions of a profession. [76]
He recognizes the need to have professional work.. which one must do well. But then there is necessary striving to take knowledge and apply it as broadly as possible. That striving will always leave one open to ridicule or attacks for getting the proper language or technique wrong.. but that is fine.. in fact, it is what comes with trying to really think.
Although it is only a small beginning.. part of the point of this blog is to keep me thinking on a daily basis about the ideas and life. And contrary to many academic blogs, the goal is not to burrow into a specialty, but to keep pushing out and applying critical principles to everything I encounter in life.
Edward Said. Representations of the Intellectual. Vintage Books, 1996.
Obama's Acceptance Speech
August 28, 2008
I can't let the Obama acceptance speech go by without a comment. That was a great speech. As others have noted, it was a speech whose goals were definitely political: counter McCain attacks, sketch concrete proposals, acquaint voters with his story. But it was a beautiful piece of craftsmanship.. and beyond that, I don't understand how anyone could watch it and deny that it was a deeply felt speech. There was nothing fake up there on the stage.
The wonder of it is that Barack Obama largely wrote that speech for himself. His election might actually bring about a demand that presidents be able to articulate their ideas and plans for themselves. A roll back of speech writer-ese would be appreciated by many, I'm sure. Obama followed some pretty heavy hitters in terms of speeches, and came out looking like the leading statesman.. but more impressively, like the leading mind of the Democratic Party.
What McCain has to run on is symbolism. Does Obama wear a lapel flag? Is there some way that Barack or Michelle Obama failed to praise America enough? Is Obama too much like a celebrity? Is Obama too popular abroad? Did he vacation in the wrong place? Is there something vaguely "not us" about him? Is he a "liberal"? All these attacks work in the realm of symbolism.. in the part of peoples' minds that root for a favorite sports team and not the part that coolly analyzes an issue. "Liberalism" is just a word.. and it is telling that Obama is not engaged by McCain on the substance of his ideas (health care, social security, tax cuts for wealthy, college tuition help) but over his identification with that word liberalism. But what is so bad about about being a liberal if most people agree with his actual policies?
This is not to say that I don't have problems with the American exceptionalism laced throughout the speech (America as "last best hope"). And it is not as if I imagine Obama will take on corporations in the sharp way I would like. But I do believe Obama is about as good as we can pragmatically hope for in American electoral politics.. and someone who will do immense good for America were he to be elected president.
Narrative Battle Grounds
August 26, 2008
The other day I finished what has turned out to be my big reading project for the summer: the two volumes of A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period by Rainer Albertz. I can't speak too highly of these works. Albertz manages to place most of Hebrew Scripture within a convincing sociological framework. He does not waste time working through abstract theology or pretending that somehow there is a single message in these works, rather he guides the reader through the changing social situation in ancient Israel that led to the development of the religion in this particular way.
In class I often try to explain how religion is not an iron train moving intact from point A to point B in history, but should be thought of as a river flowing through different terrains and therefore changing form.. sometimes becoming a lake and other times rushing rapids. (I developed this idea earlier in a critique of Sam Harris.) The different terrains that the river passes through represent different historical and social conditions. This book by Rainer Albertz presents the story of Israel and its scripture fully within this developmental understanding of religion.. and what emerges over the two dense volumes is an intense drama of meaning construction.
This drama is particularly evident in one passage that I never lingered over in the book of Jeremiah. An assembly of women respond to Jeremiah and his pointed critique of their practice:
We used to have plenty of food, and prospered, and saw no misfortune. But from the time we stopped making offerings to the queen of heaven and pouring out libations to her, we have lacked everything and have perished by the sword and by famine. [44.18]
We get a glimpse here of an alternative historical narrative. The reforms of Josiah came and people were told that they had to worship YHWH alone. But after this reform the Babylonians came and destroyed Jerusalem. One could interpret this disaster as the revenge of the pagan gods on the people who stopped making offerings to them.
Jeremiah offers a different narrative to explain the disaster: the reforms were too little too late. Jeremiah responds:
As for the offerings that you made in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem... did not the LORD remember them? Did it not come into his mind? [44.21]
As is evident since the book of Jeremiah is present in the Bible, Jeremiah won the argument.. at least among those who counted when it came to setting the tradition. His version of events became the lens through which the people of Israel could understand what had happened. We customarily talk of a prophet like Jeremiah as analogous to a theologian, but it is better to think of him as a historical lens-maker.. the person who crafts the way the world is perceived.
The challenge in presenting the history of a religion in this fashion is that the demands of particular time periods can be made to over determine the outcome. Everything is not set by social context. The concepts and values of a religious tradition get deployed to meet the new conditions, and those concepts and values have a degree of continuity with the past. Rainer Albertz does fine work pointing out how the historical nature of liberation and the value of equality that began within a loose confederation continue to function and get "switched on" as the tradition moves through history. So even as Israel came up against particular historical situations, it responded to these situations in ways that were unique and organic to its own past. It is because of this reliance on a set of tropes and values that any history of a religious tradition makes sense.
Global Warming Doubters:
Possible Roots
August 23, 2008
It has been a relatively cool summer here in Wisconsin. Emily has been complaining (!) about how cool it is when she gets out for a jog in the morning. We know we're in the midst of global warming, but current temperatures are a reminder that changes in global weather will influence different regions in different ways. I found the above map of global average temperatures for May 2008 to be quite enlightening on this topic. Sure enough, there we are in Wisconsin sitting under a wave of cool blue dots. But then looking north toward the Arctic Circle and over to Africa and Asia it is clear there are plenty more places that are exceptionally hot.
I have been thinking lately about what evolution debaters and climate change doubters have in common. One obvious point is an unwillingness to listen to experts. I don't mean the talking head labeled as "expert" on television.. but someone with genuine academic credentials and peer-reviewed publications. There is a breathtaking willingness on the part of evolution debaters and climate change doubters to call into question the thought and experience of people who have dedicated a large portion of their lives to understanding an issue. It is an armchair critical spirit that assumes experts are guided by some deep bias and can therefore be dismissed.
There is a general pattern of attacking expert positions by means of "hole punch" arguments. That is, a counter construction of evidence and events is not offered, rather doubters feel confident pointing out an anomaly here and a counter-fact there in order to call into question the big picture put forward by experts. Both evolution and climate change are complex processes that scientists are doing their best to figure out.. and nobody claims to have all the answers. For climate change there are multiple models about how all that carbon in the atmosphere will change global temperatures. It is not enough to point out problems in this or that model.. because everyone can do that. The point is to present a model that makes sense of what happens when all that carbon sits around in the atmosphere, and the people working on models are unanimous that change is coming.
But there is a meta-point to be made here. We live in a complex world in which it is impossible for anyone to be an expert on multiple topics. The expert is a necessity of our ever-ramifying structures of knowledge. The modern world is based on acceptance of these structures. Just stop and think about all the places in life where we listen to experts! I do lots of things and accept lots of facts concerning which I have no direct knowledge. That does no make me a fool, that makes me a modern person. We exist by a sort of faith in the properties of electricity, the binary code, radio waves, and metal. We know that people have worked on these things—people we call experts.
When evolution and climate change are debated it feels to me almost like the rending of a social contract. The level of skepticism suddenly grows exponentially when one of these two issues comes up. People who move through life with unconscious acceptance of expert opinion now toss out objection after objection. But if this level of skepticism concerning expert opinion was generalized, life would become unlivable.. since we can't master every topic in order to evaluate what we should and shouldn't do.
I wonder sometimes if the long term legacy of the evolution debate will not be climate catastrophe. Whether young Bill in rural Georgia learns evolution instead of creation science is not in the long run a big deal. But to stop climate change will take the buy-in of a large segment of the American public, and that means what young Bill in Georgia thinks about climate change does matter. The problem is that the intellectual water has been polluted by the irrational levels of skepticism directed over the past century at the theory of evolution. The fight against evolution has been waged by assigning liberal and secular biases to working scientists, effectively calling into question the nature of expert scientific opinion. The resulting generalized doubt has been used by corporations, whose interests are in continuing the status quo, to keep the public confused. It may be a great misfortune for the world that the evolution debate played out the way it did.
Penguin Crisis
August 21, 2008
Thanks to Rory's embrace of the animated film Happy Feet, I have watched hours and hours of computer designed penguins dancing. Rory these days signals that she wants to see Happy Feet by doing a little tap dance with her feet.. similar to Mumble. Anyway, one has to think about something.. even when watching Happy Feet for the hundredth time. And I am struck by the religious implications of this environmental tale.
The emperor penguin community faces shortages in fish.. and the more respectable types, led by Elder Noah, blame the new fangled dance moves of Mumble. Their belief is that the Great Wind is punishing them for backsliding. Meanwhile Mumble tries to explain that the fish shortage is being caused by aliens (humans). Mumble is right, and at the end humans arrive and the entire community begins to do the Mumble dance.
In this snippet of video you can see the whole community dancing.. and you will notice that repressive Elder Noah even starts to awkwardly bop and dance. The idea is that now that the "aliens" have appeared on the scene, his religious explanation is shown up as wrong, and therefore he abandons it and joins with the "hippety-hoppers."
The problem is that this is not the way religious communities actually respond to disappointments. The clearest historical examples come from religions that are foolhardy enough to make actual predictions about the world. The Millerites predicted a specific day for the return of Christ.. and were wrong! But does the sect go away? No, they reinterpret the debacle and go on to become the Seventh Day Adventists. Similarly, Christian Scientists deny death and sickness but then have to deal with the fact that they die and get sick. What should be an opportunity to question one's notions about the world become only an opportunity to cling more closely to faith.
So I am just saying that Elder Noah's sudden joining-in with the dancing is historically unrealistic. Like so many other groups and leaders, Elder Noah would find a rational excuse for rejecting this new reality.
Actually, there are very few times in which any system of thought is shown to be wrong. We love to create fantasies in which one religious tradition triumphs over another.. such as the story in 1 Kings 18 of Elijah confronting the prophets of Baal and calling down fire from heaven. Elijah prays:
Answer me, O Lord, answer me, so that this people may know that you, O Lord, are God, and that you have turned their hearts back. [18.37]
Then the fire comes down from heaven and consumes the altar. And all is clear! And Elder Noah starts to dance!
It is a fantasy, just like the scene in Annie Hall when Woody Allen is in line at a movie theater and overhears someone blathering on and on about a director. And when Woody Allen begins to argue with the blowhard he calls the director himself from the wings and the director confirms to the other guy that he was completely off base in the interpretation of his work. In reality no one is ever truly boxed in.. and it is easier to reinterpret your own tradition than to admit your tradition was completely wrong.
Theories of Homosexuality:
Ibn Khaldun and Paul
August 19, 2008
Ibn Khaldun's Al-Muqaddimah ("The Introduction") presents a system of historical development. In the 14th century, before writing his larger standard history, he wrote this theoretical introduction to the study of history. The waxing and waning of cities and civilizations is given a cyclical underpinning. The city begins like a youth with lots of energy and violence, matures into a wealthy middle aged man, and then declines into old age.
Why do cities and civilizations decline from their earlier strength? Ibn Khaldun sees luxury as the origin of decline. Basically, they lose the "eye of the tiger" and begin to grow fat and listless in the midst of their wealth and arts. It is in this context that he brings up homosexuality:
[Corrupt sedentary culture] leads... to diversification of the pleasures of sex through various ways of sexual intercourse, such as adultery and homosexuality. This leads to destruction of the species... When civilization reaches that goal, it turns toward corruption and starts being senile, as happens in the natural life of human beings. [288]
This is a sidebar in the midst of his ideas about civilization, but it amounts to a theory of homosexuality that could be restated as follows: homosexuality occurs in a civilization when the period of youthful 'naturalness' passes and pleasure is sought in various novel ways." As it happens, that theory of homosexuality does not hold up to scrutiny. There are many examples of homosexual behavior in tribal or traditional cultures.. all one needs to do is consult the anthropological literature (click here for a previous post on the topic). Homosexuality cannot be explained as the result of a decadent and leisured search for pleasure.
Presumably Ibn Khaldun developed this theory from two separate assumed points: 1) cities and civilizations invariably decline and 2) homosexuals were perceived as being numerous in court cultures. Putting those two points together, a causal relationship could be inferred.. but with a broader base of knowledge, we see there is no such relationship.
A similar movement of thought is clear in the book of Romans by the Apostle Paul. Paul was concerned to explain the human fall from true knowledge of God to the state of lawlessness that he perceived around himself. He sketches a trajectory of decline: rejection of God--> creation of false gods--> God leaving humans to the worst of sins. Homosexuality comes up as a banner example of that last stage:
For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men... [Romans 1.26-7]
This is not my favorite part of Romans, since it gets plenty of rather ugly use nowadays. But what is important to see is that this is a theory. Homosexuality is used by Paul as an example within his religious view of moral development. As a theory it is also possible to test and falsify, as was the case with Ibn Khaldun.
Paul's theory depends on a couple of unspoken points: 1) the purity of God's original relationship with human beings, 2) the 'naturalness' of the man-woman sexual relationship. Both of those points can be examined.. and turn out to be false. The first point is based upon a construction of Israel's history that was back-written into Hebrew scripture.. and which does not line up with what we can learn historically about religion in ancient Israel, which only slowly evolved toward the pure monotheism we see in Hebrew scripture. The second point is being questioned from numerous angles today.. and the idea of bracketing off sexual relationships as "natural" and "unnatural" looks untenable.
It is possible to read Ibn Khaldun and the Apostle Paul and appreciate how they are putting together what they see into a theory.. which is why it is worth reading them today. The problem comes when in the contemporary world a theory is taken as a simple statement of fact.. and the theory is therefore not examined as to whether it is true or not.
Vive Le Tour: Documentary Thoughts
August 17, 2008
Watching the French documentaries by Louis Malle, I can see that he has one cardinal point figured out: it is possible to turn the camera on almost anything and if it is edited critically it will be valuable. In the above picture we have Louis Malle filming people at a single location in Paris (Place de la Republique).. a project he continues over several weeks in 1972.
It is fascinating to see the questions that he brings to this project. The documentary goes on for over an hour and a half, and that time is filled to overflowing with people. At no point does he give a location shot that allows the viewer to imagine where we are.. nor is there information about where in Paris this place is located. We get scene after scene of people walking by and interviews with individuals from that crowd. As we should have guessed, people are surprising and spirited.. and rarely play the part we assume they will. This is all amply demonstrated with real insight on the part of Malle. But I longed for some disengagement from all the people so that I could look at buildings or look into a shop window or just take my bearings. I think that is the academic in me—wanting the filmmaker to adopt a more defined critical view of this world.
So much for Place de la Republique. I admired Vive Le Tour (1962) much more. At about 19 minutes in length it functions as an excellent model in my own effort to develop a style for the short documentary. Malle more or less documents the Tour de France, with an eye not so much for the sport as the event of the tour.
Again, he does not ask the questions that I am trained to ask, but concentrates entirely on the social world around the tour. Many of these scenes are charmingly old-timey.. such as the above family picnic. It is not as though everything is perfect, as we learn that doping has become a problem, but the global corporate presence that we expect at any major sporting event is absent. It is hard to imagine Lance Armstrong in this crowd of bikers.. and that is good! Contemporary sports events have been taken up into the symbolic world of global corporations.. and the character of events from the Tour to the Olympics to the World Series will never be like it once was.
In the above picture a tour helper passes out lunches to the passing bikers. They have to eat on the road or they will lose time. It is almost comical to see the riders chomp on bananas and other normal foods. Today it would be all about power bars, protein gels, and scientifically formulated drinks.
Riders farther back would sometimes get some assistance from onlookers, who came behind them and tried to help the bikers along. It was a different world.. but that is exactly the strength of this short documentary. It leaves us thinking not so much about a competitive race (we don't even learn the names of the winners) but instead about a different time with its different values. I can only hope that I someday create a documentary that so clearly captures the world around me.
Performance Prophecy
August 15, 2008
The Bible commentary is the genre of choice for biblical scholars. They write journal articles, but a commentary on a biblical book for a prestigious series is the top. The demand for commentaries is fueled by an abiding audience of English speaking pastors and religious lay people. There are umpteen books that could use a commentary more than, say, Ephesians.. but that's life. People preach sermons every week on Ephesians.. and all those other books, not so much.
There is a religious market for biblical commentaries, but this also points to the type of commentary that will be produced: tending toward piety and suggestions for sermons. The commentary writer will be a product of seminaries and graduate programs in Hebrew Bible or the New Testament.. which earn their bread and butter by catering to the religious. What I find chiefly frustrating about biblical commentaries.. they are not usually written by someone with genuinely synoptic cultural interests.
As I re-read the prophets I am struck by the use of the body to convey a message. We think of prophets as using the "Thus says the Lord" formula and delivering powerful messages, but also common is the reliance on more symbolic forms of communication.
Some examples. Isaiah 20 in which the prophet is told to "loose the sackloth from your loins and take your sandals off your feet" and then goes walking naked and barefoot. This is to be a sign of hte exile that is coming for Egypt and the Ethiopians. Then Jeremiah 27 where the prophet is told "make yourself a yoke of straps and bars, and put them on your neck.." Jeremiah wears this yoke in the temple to better get across to the king and officials of Judah that they should submit themselves to Babylon. Then Ezekiel 5 where the prophet is told "take a sharp sword; use it as a barber's razor and run it over your head and your beard." The hair that he shaves off was then to be divided as a sign for the fate of Jerusalem and its inhabitants.
This resembles performance art. It is the kind of message-making that we have come close to de-legitimizing in the United States. Nothing is more laughable than the thought of silly artists thinking they are accomplishing something by pulling off some symbolic stunt! But the biblical prophets turn out to be quite similar in their choice of method. And if these prophets are read closely it turns out that they were not listened to in their own time. It's only with hindsight that they are the messengers of God.
So why not a commentary that addressed not just the particular historical situation of the prophet, but also the theoretical discussions that have grown up around performance art and the body? Other similar expansions of scholarly interest could be envisioned. The result would be a commentary that made clear how radical the work of these prophets could be.
So when we look around and think about where prophetic acts are today, where should we look? Recalling Ezekiel, one could probably do worse than John Lennon and Yoko Ono and their bed-in for peace in 1969.. and "bagism." It has the symbolic literalism and questionable legitimacy that made the message of the biblical prophets what it was.
Historical Analogies and Wisdom
August 14, 2008
A few days back Matt Yglesias had a post beating back one of the historical analogies being trotted out for Russia's military intervention in Georgia:
The trouble with appeasement at Munich wasn’t that Hitler followed up the absorption of the Sudetenland with a campaign of low-level subversion aimed at the remaining parts of Czechoslovakia. It’s that he followed it up with a full scale invasion of Prague, the dismemberment of the country, and then a new round of war aimed at Poland all of which was part of a deranged scheme of world conquest. If people don’t mean to conjure up images of tanks rolling into Kiev — or at a minimum, bombers in the sky above — when they talk about future Russian pressure on Ukraine, then they shouldn’t use inflammatory language about Munich and appeasement. Writers choose these analogies for a reason — they’re intended to shut down consideration of costs and benefits in favor of creating an emergency mentality. The fact that some other, radically scaled-back version of the claim might be true doesn’t make the initial claims any less irresponsible and inaccurate.
One of the best reasons for reading Yglesias is his willingness to challenge these automatic historical analogies that purport to explain contemporary situations. Something similar happened a while back with the widely viewed challenge by Chris Matthews of a conservative blowhard to explain what Chamberlain did wrong at Munich:
If you watch that video you are guaranteed to laugh! But the seriousness behind it is that it demonstrates the way historical analogies take on a life of their own.
There are people willing to point out bad historical analogies, but I think what is happening here needs a closer theoretical analysis. We can begin by asking what is Munich and Chamberlain—clearly a powerful historical analogy since it gets called into service for virtually every current event. The bad word to come from this is "appeasement".. meaning that efforts to cajole or nicely contain a threat are bound to failure in the face of a true menace. This historical analogy could actually be restated as a proverb, abstracted from any historical reference:
Never play defense when confronted by an evil force
In fact, the appeal to Munich and Chamberlain functions like a proverb. The actual historical references just add a souped-up sense of authority to the proverb.. as if to demonstrate: look, here's an occasion where this proverb was definitely true!
Proverbs are remarkable for the ease with which they can be applied to life. They define simple abstract relationships and our analogy-seeking minds easily discern places where these relationships can be matched up with events. In this case the elements are simple: an evil Hitler, a perceived threat, and the question of a response. The frame provides an answer to any situation that has these elements.
What needs to be remembered is that these frames are not innocent. In the process of their application they subtly change the nature of the debate. This can be visualized easily with a graph:
As events unfold in real time they are indeterminate. No one really knows what is happening. But through the identification of analogies the events begin to form a narrative that is comprehensible and even predictable. But for all that we gain in ease of understanding, we lose more in accurate perception as the analogy comes to define the new events.
The leader in the new situation may not be completely savory, but once Munich is invoked "evil" seems to be the only label. A situation of unclear relevance suddenly is elevated into a crucial world-historical decision. And the proper response is no longer to be debated, but simply mapped onto the new situation: an offensive move—or else it is appeasement.
The problem is that there are millions of historical situations and there are undoubtedly situations in which every response from utter appeasement to all out war have worked out.. and in retrospect been the right move. So in the act of decision making the use of historical analogies should be avoided as far as possible.. in favor of a rigorous analysis of the actual situation. That may be logical, but the fact is that human beings make decisions with conceptual frames in their heads. And when it comes to the chattering classes, this sometimes seems to be all that exists: a head full of proverbial historical analogies.
One thing that has stuck with me from my class on Wisdom Literature at Fuller Seminary is the way proverbs are meant to be applied judiciously.. not as laws. In current terms we can think of proverbs such as "Look before you leap" and "He who hesitates is lost" (a list of some contradictory proverbs). Both proverbs are bouncing around in our head and define possible responses to a common situation. The essence of wisdom (skill in life) is knowing which frame to apply to a given situation. Insisting that "Look before you leap" is the only legitimate response to a type of situation would be the height of folly. Similarly the analogy of Chamberlain and Munich should be recognized as a proverb that cannot define every instance of a type of situation. We could use a little more wisdom out there.
The Beijing Games
August 12, 2008
We are watching a little bit of the Olympics on television each night. Strangely this has meant two consecutive evenings of synchronized diving. We did not even know such a sport existed! But the Chinese were awesome in both the men's and women's competitions, which seems to be the general trend. The announcers liked to give some personal details about how the diving duos paired up. There are different stories, but for the Chinese pair it was noted that the divers were paired by the sports administrators because of their similar size and build. That was a telling detail about China's press to succeed in this forum.
Looking at the amazing structures that house the various games, and thinking about how incredibly expensive this was to put on, I would bet that this turns out to be more than a regular Olympiad. There were lots of World's Fairs, but the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 was much more. It became the kind of epoch-making symbolic event that people still write books about. This Olympiad is going to go down in history as a similar event. It is the official global media presentation of China to the world as a major civilization and modern nation. The buildings, the singing, the athletic victories.. these are all messages to the world.
The commercials that litter the sports events on prime time television are fascinating. The actual sports coverage is mind-numbingly American in orientation. There must be interesting sights and sounds related to smaller nations, but they will not be seen on our televisions. The commercials, on the other hand, press a global message without end. The idea, as could have been guessed, is that we are all alike and that various corporations are succeeding at making the world a smaller place. The following Visa "Go World" commercial is an example:
To summarize: there are six billion people.. we all have different opinions.. but for a couple of weeks every four years we put that aside and "come together".. forgetting what divides us and remembering all the things that make us the same.
I love the way the actual story of the Olympics (national symbolism projected in a big way) is muted in the interest of putting forward a myth of six billion human beings equal and united. Nations are in the background and the individual is competing for him/herself. The armchair American viewer of the Olympics gets to enjoy a narrowly nationalistic view of the events but bask in the good feelings of the corporate creed of globalization.
Celebrating the Man Mound
August 10, 2008
Yesterday I made the two hour drive to Baraboo, Wisconsin to attend the 100 year anniversary of the creation of Man Mound Park. As can be seen from the video, this small park includes one very unique effigy mound in the shape of a walking human figure. This is the third video we have released on the topic of Native American sites in Wisconsin. We are also hoping to begin a longer documentary project relating to the Indian Mounds of Wisconsin.
Making It Count
August 9, 2008
For the July 4th edition of Digital Campus (audio here) at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University there is an interesting discussion about how to make digital scholarship count for academic promotion. The two main voices in this discussion are Dan Cohen and Mills Kelly, the latter expanding on his series of blogs covering the same topic (here, here, and here).
The point made by Mills Kelly is that digital scholarship should be scholarship. He defines scholarship as being 1) a product of research, 2) embedded in conversations, 3) peer reviewed, 4) public, and 5) an argument. This is the standard for books and articles.. and it will continue to be the standard for Web-based work. In the conversation this led to a distinction between digital scholarship and digital work. That last term is used to refer to all kinds of archival and database oriented projects. These may be popular and useful.. but they are not scholarship.
Dan Cohen agrees with much of this, but brings up the notion of standard narrative format for historical scholarship. The academy loves nothing more than an important book sketching a history of something that hasn't been carefully examined. This book will take a wide range of primary sources and distill them into an argument that (hopefully) changes the way people view this topic.
Everyone appears to agree that if a scholar produces for the Web a text that is a lot like a book.. then there are no serious issues with Web scholarship. The rub comes when we apply the narrative techniques that are opened up by the Web (by the nature of the medium) to the material of scholarship. So, say I do research on a topic, but then begin to consider how best to present this research on the Web. I may well choose to take advantage of the almost unlimited number of photos and maps that can be published (something many authors would kill to have available in their books but can't because their publishers won't let them) and my newfound ability to not just cite primary texts but actually supply them in full. Taking those two points into account, the product of my scholarship might well look different than a standard book.
An example. Someone is working on Jane Addams' Hull House in Chicago. The traditional researcher would go through early articles, manuscripts of speeches, and historical photographs.. and then produce a book that traced a narrative line through this material and verbally described the contents of documents and photos. A Web researcher might instead think more like an anthologizer and choose a range of illustrative material and then break the material down into browsable categories. If a reader is like me, this last approach is refreshing because it allows for a lot more interpretive freedom as I move through the material. The authorial hand is weaker, but the product is at least equally informative.
In fact, such a research project exists.. in the Urban Experience in Chicago: Hull House and Its Neighbors, 1889-1963 website. I assign this as a textbook in my intro class.. and I find this site more helpful than most books would be. So, why not make a book out of the contents of this website? Because—and this is important—there is no market for a thick book of ordered source material about Hull House! The Web is not limited to nearly the same market forces that publishers (and therefore academic authors) have to think about.. and the Web can thus give scholars breathing room to work out their own research interests in creative ways. And they can be more ambitious than they could be in the book format.
We only lose if we take this new medium and try to replicate the book market.
Old Roads Philosophy
August 7, 2008
It is useful every now and then to restate the values of this project. I would settle for three major values:
1) The necessity of grasping culture and symbolic frames if we are to make sense of human actions in our world.
2) The enrichment and growth in self-understanding that comes from an engagement with other cultures.
3) The importance of a critical mindset in evaluating past and the present human actions. In the end this critical mindset is the only way to break free of the culture and symbolic frames that we were born into.
I came across a passage from Clifford Geertz in which he discusses the effect that an engagement with another culture should have:
Whatever use the imaginative productions of other peoples— predecessors, ancestors, or distant cousins—can have for our moral lives, then, it cannot be to simplify them. The image of the past (or the primitive, or the classic, or the exotic) as a source of remedial wisdom, a prosthetic corrective for a damaged spiritual life—an image that has governed a good deal of humanist thought and education—is mischievous because it leads us to expect that our uncertainties will be reduced by access to thought-worlds constructed along lines alternative to our own, when in fact they will be multiplied. [44-5]
That is a passage directly consonant with our values. Engagement with other thought-worlds will not answer questions or provide a true path. This engagement multiplies uncertainties. The classical poets, the Hebrew prophets, Sufi poets.. they are not sources of enlightenment; they are individuals who expressed a particular symbolic response to their world. As such they are not models so much as examples of the rich complexity of the human response to the world. They may reveal fresh possibilities of symbolic response, but they do not have any answers.
Clifford Geertz. "Found in Translation: On the Social History of the Moral Imagination" from Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books, 1983.
Liner Notes for the Digital Age
August 6, 2008
A recent article in the Chronicle Review (sorry, behind pay wall) notes recent changes to the genre of liner notes for pop music albums. I still remember the fun of listening to an LP and perusing all the details on a record sleeve. These liner notes made an uneasy transition into the age of CDs.. and we got long unfolding sheets of cascading pictures and lyrics. But now with the iPod it could be said that the age of liner notes has hit a dead end.
Not too long ago I came across a great example of the way Web distribution of music could actually be a boon to the imaginative presentation of a band's vision.
My example is the "interactive booklet" that comes with the eponymous album by The Good, The Bad & The Queen (a side project put together by Damon Albarn formerly of Blur). The interactive booklet is actually a digital book, given a Victorian look, complete with engraved cover. One could hope that as books themselves migrate more toward online settings, that liner notes would merge with books.
What keeps this project from being just a mockup of a book is the use of specifically digital functions. So for example there is a map of Victorian London that comes right after the table of contents:
The map has ten markers on it, along with labels. If you click on one of these markers you are taken to the page of the song that contains that place reference. This organization of the lyrics allows the geographic specificity of the album and its songs to stand out in a way that it would not otherwise.
For a closer look at how this "book" looks we can look at one of its regular pages:
Here we see the lyrics printed on the left with a picture illustrating them on the right. The fiction of the book is strictly maintained with the old binding in the center of the pages. You may notice the reference in the second stanza to "Goldhawk road".. which is one of the places marked on the Victorian map of London.
The current state of music favors live shows and single hit songs. But Damon Albarn (with his Gorillaz project too) appear intent on using the current state of flux to introduce new musical personas and to find innovative ways of presenting his material.
Here is a video from The Good, The Bad, & The Queen. Awesome.
Max Weber on the Prophets
August 4, 2008
Reading through The Sociology of Religion I have been thinking about what I like and dislike about Max Weber. Two turns of thought I find particularly useful: 1) the notion that patterns underlie the ways that human beings respond to their world, thereby making generic comparisons between distant cultures relevant, and 2) the idea that specific cultural traits are formed by historical social situations. My own work feeds on those two turns of thought.
What I dislike about Weber stood out as I read his chapter on "The Prophet." despite dealing with a topic that calls out for analysis of texts, he is happy dropping historical facts here and there to buttress a point. Sometimes we get a veritable storm of instances. But there is no interpretation anywhere. It is clear he has read all the relevant secondary source material, and can therefore make broad comparisons between cultures, but the kind of insight that comes about through close work with texts is missing.
Also evident in this work is Weber's perverse desire to make counterintuitive definitions. In the case of this chapter on prophets he writes:
It is noteworthy that the real theoretician of social reform, Ezekiel, was a priestly theorist who can scarcely be categorized as a prophet at all. [51]
Now, it seems to me that it won't do to define Ezekiel out of being a prophet. He is one of those towering guys that any definition of the prophet has to incorporate. Weber does something similar in his definition of the city when he tosses out of his city definition Middle Eastern population centers. Damascus or Cairo not a city?? But that is Weber..
Weber deserves credit for his willingness to abstract "the prophet" from particular contexts and find a place for this figure within the broad development of religions. The prophet for Weber is the charismatic figure who speaks personally and with divine authority. It makes no difference whether this prophet brings about a renewal movement or founds a wholly new religion (so George Fox can be as much of a prophet as Muhammad). The prophet is defined against the priest who gains authority through tradition and a defined position.
That abstraction of the prophet is helpful, but perhaps he does not go far enough in that direction? Weber ties down the prophet to a specifically religious settings. He writes:
But the prophet, in our special sense, is never to be found where the proclamation of a religious truth of salvation through personal revelation is lacking. In our view, this qualification must be regarded as the decisive hallmark of prophecy. [54]
First of all I am not sure what "proclamation of a religious truth of salvation" even means. I don't see how Amos, for example, with his message of social justice and judgment, could fit into this model. The Hebrew prophets are not especially oriented toward salvation.. although maybe Weber could talk about a kind of national salvation?
But my real problem here is that the prophet is made into a religious figure. I am inclined to think about the prophet as a someone who can pop up within any social system. Religion is just one more social system.. to which we could add nationalism, tribalism, or even corporatism. Each social system builds up natural checks against hearing outside opinions and counter narratives. They have ways (if you know what I mean) of silencing contrary voices and making their own narrative seem obviously correct. The prophet is a figure that within such a social setting expresses a counter message. The upshot here is that we could imagine a prophet to the United States (and not just someone with a message to religious-types).
To my mind this expansion of the notion of the prophet is methodologically true to Weber.. and still informed by his vocabulary such as charisma and routinization. There is something else here also. I am not so comfortable with the method of racking up historical particulars.. preferring close interpretation of individual cases. Must be the anthropologist in me..
Redemption Song - Bob Marley
August 2, 2008
"Redemption Song" was the last song on the final album released by Bob Marley—Uprising. Its lyrics have a clear "summing up" sense to them. Marley appears to provide a frame of reference for his career:
All I ever had:
Redemption songs:
These songs of freedom,
Songs of freedom.
He is inviting us to look back on his body of work in these terms.
The other lyrics to the song work best when we think of them as a vehicle for Marley to set out his vision of history and life. He begins by recounting history:
Old pirates, yes, they rob I;
Sold I to the merchant ships,
Minutes after they took I
From the bottomless pit.
But my hand was made strong
By the hand of the Almighty.
We forward in this generation
Triumphantly.
The language needs some explanation. That use of "I" can look strange. It is an expression used by Rastafari to avoid reference of the self as an object. The "correct" way to say these things would be: "...they rob me" and "...sold me to the merchant ships.." Rastafari are unhappy with the way that makes them sound like non-persons.. whose actions are determined by other people. In the face of this non-agent status they habitually use "I" even when it is used "incorrectly" as an object. The history alluded to here is obviously the history of slavery and oppression, but Marley is careful to assert personhood and agency even as he recounts that past.
The merchant ships refer to the slave traders that brought Africans to the new world. Although they operated legally under various national flags, Marley calls them "pirates." Although the slave trade is in mind, there is a second reference that's easy to miss: the bottomless pit. Here we need to remember that just before the biblical Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers he was cast down into a pit. From the pit he was sold to merchants heading to Egypt.
The story of Joseph is thereby mapped onto the history of slavery.. and that is important to understand if we are to follow the next development: "But my hand was made strong/ By the hand of the Almighty." We recall that Joseph eventually found honor and power in Egypt with the help of God. Marley claims that same divine assistance for himself.
Although the first person has been used throughout these opening lines.. and it seems that Marley is recounting a personal story.. he finally reveals that this is the story not of an individual but of a people: "We forward in this generation/ Triumphantly." The story of Joseph and his honor and power in the land into which he was sold will now be repeated in the story of a people. There is also an implicit claim here on the part of Marley that the consciousness coming from his music and the Rastafari message is contributing to this triumph.. a theme that is evident from the cover art for the album Uprising (see above).. contributing to the career summarizing character of this song.
The next lines move away from history and capture Marley giving advice on life directly to his audience:
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery;
None but ourselves can free our minds.
Have no fear for atomic energy,
cause none of them can stop the time.
How long shall they kill our prophets,
While we stand aside and look? ooh!
Some say it's just a part of it:
We've got to fulfil de book.
The opening lines come from William Blake.. another railer who spoke of "mind forg'd manacles" and wrote: "I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's..." Marley has nicely combined these into his own formulation. It amounts to a clarion call for internal redemption. We should not miss here the important transmutation of historic slavery into "mental" slavery. The most devastating aspect of slavery's legacy is the mental world it leaves behind in those who suffered under it.. but Marley addresses this past with confidence and urges people to free themselves.
The next few lines offer comfort and exhortation.. telescoped into two brief statements. First, comfort: the greatest destructive power created by human beings should stir up no fear. Second, exhortation: get involved and stop acting as if everything is pre-ordained.
Then come the magisterial lines:
Won't you help to sing
These songs of freedom?
The audience is invited to join in, by implication beginning to liberate themselves and change their world. Marley reveals himself as someone who not only sings redemption songs, but allows others to join in with him.
It is a brilliant song..
