Creative Destruction
May 31, 2008
The concept of "Creative Destruction" is at cross-purposes with everything promoted at Old Roads. Our philosophy at Old Roads is to spotlight and preserve past ways of thinking and seeing the world. We are in the midst of almost unimaginable social and environmental changes that are not only restructuring the face of the earth, but restructuring the way we think and feel. The main agent of this change is global capitalism, and it turns out that a crucial theorist of global capitalism is Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950).
In his new biography on Schumpeter, Thomas McCraw cites his important economic work Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy:
The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in. [351-2]
From reading closely the sections concerned with this concept, it is clear that Schumpeter had a fairly limited notion as to how broadly creative destruction should apply. Catholic statements on the nature of capitalism such as Quadragesimo Anno were embraced by him as a path to ease the disturbance of capitalism on social institutions such as the family. But just because Schumpeter conceived of a barrier between economic and social life does not mean that a barrier has actually held. In the conclusion to the biography McCraw notes how widespread the notion of "creative destruction" has become, pointing to the "astronomical" number of hits that come up by Googling the phrase. He writes: "The phrase has also turned up in the titles of books outside of business and economics, including history and literature" (504).
It would even be possible to think of creative destruction as a guiding metaphor for modern American—and increasingly global—life. We could write this in the manner of George Lakoff in his work on the concepts that underlie metaphoric expressions: CREATION COMES BY DESTRUCTION. Understanding this deep background metaphor of modern life will help to make sense of many elements of modern life. The most obvious expression of it is the constant forward march of technology. Our standards for works of the imagination are also influenced by it, as books and works of popular music constantly arrive and get replaced by the next wave of works. Our landscape also reflects this notion as big box stores attempt to erect a building shinier and newer yhan competitors. If we think deeply about the connections between these expressions of modern life we will land on this concept of creative destruction.. which is not a "natural" view of the world, but something that is learned.
The difficulty of arguing with the kind of capitalism advocated by Schumpeter is that it means arguing against the obvious human advancement brought by capitalism. Schumpeter writes about how capitalism "promises a level of satisfaction of economic needs even of the poorest members of society including the aged, unemployed and sick, that would (with a forty hour work week) eliminate anything that could possibly be described as suffering or want" (430-1). And almost anywhere we look in the world people are flocking to urban settings and leaving behind traditional ways of life.
Even cutting down that triumphalist rhetoric by a few notches, it is hard to argue with the notion that people the world over want the goods that capitalism brings. But here is a more pressing question: is this kind of capitalism and the society it constructs able to become established as a sustainable system? Or are we living in what amounts to a giant pyramid scheme? If the latter, then we may someday wish we had been happy living in a traditional economy such as that of medieval Cairo.. and never come across the destructive concept of "creative desctruction."
An American Cooperative
May 30, 2008
image from site "Urban Experience in Chicago: Hull-House and Its Neighborhoods, 1889-1963.
The argument against universal health care often comes down to a more or less elaborately phrased statement of "It's not American." The claim is that somehow collective action goes against our national character and therefore irrespective of the merits of such a plan, it should be avoided. I find it humorous to think about how that argument would sound if applied to my own personal deliberations: "Hmmm, I won't commit to that idea because it is just not a 'Martyn' way of doing things." But the point in important decisions is to act in ways that are beneficial and smart, not to let an abstract definition of yourself get in the way of doing what is best. A set of qualities that are "Martyn-like" might be decipherable in hind-sight, but it would be an oddly sterile way of thinking for me to base decisions off a notion of what "Martyn should do."
But irrespective of my qualms about this way of reasoning, I also find it striking that the American tradition is in fact much broader than people give it credit. To listen to the popular media one might think the individualistic religious/business ethic is the only tradition that counts in the American past.. and everything else is somehow foreign. But actually there are people like Jane Addams, founder of Hull-House in Chicago, who point to a broader American tradition. The book to read in this respect is Twenty Years at Hull-House, a recounting of her experiences in the urban mess of Chicago from 1889 until 1910. The book is filled with cooperative ventures, which Addams recounts with pride. If one reads carefully it is also abundantly clear how closely she is tied to a long tradition of American cooperation.
Addams investigates her own motives in starting up Hull-House and she gives a central place to Democracy.. especially the vision of Democracy communicated by Abraham Lincoln. The urban slums that she encountered in Chicago were horrifying precisely because they represented a breakdown of Democracy:
The policy of the public authorities of never taking an initiative, and always waiting to be urged to do their duty, is obviously fatal in a neighborhood where there is little initiative among the citizens. The idea underlying our self-government breaks down in such a ward. The streets are inexpressibly dirty, the number of schools inadequate, sanitary legislation unenforced, the street lighting bad, the paving miserable... [68]
The idea that government ("public authorities") should "stay out of the way" and let people solve their problems through private industry is thus found lacking. The whole point of a slum is that the resources are not there to allow for concerted private effort, and the situation thus demands external effort on the part of government. Without that external initiative, Democracy will "break down."
The philosophy implied here is that individual initiative and private enterprise can only be expected from a healthy and educated citizenry. This also matches a quotation about Abraham Lincoln that Addams cites approvingly:
...and as the philosopher spoke of the great American "who was content to dig the channels through which the moral life of his countrymen might flow," I was gradually able to make a natural connection between this intellectual penetration at Oxford and the moral perception which is always necessary for the discovery of new methods by which to minister to human needs. In the unceasing ebb and flow of justice and oppression we must all dig channels as best we may... [32]
To my mind Addams represents one of the finest statements of the American liberal vision: it is an active digging of economic channels in order to enable the private initiative of citizens within a community. Without those public channels to various disadvantaged communities, it will be impossible for them to take part in the vital public life of the nation.. and that in turn will lead to the degrading of public life for all. It would be helpful if we learned to frame modern issues—such as health care—within this liberal vision.
Translating Ancient Religions
May 28, 2008
The last time I read Herodotus I was struck by the ease with which Herodotus could navigate Egypt. Theoretically this was a completely different culture from what he knew in Greece, and he does not tire of pointing out how the Egyptians do things the opposite of the way the Greeks do things, but with respect to the Egyptian religious system he has an easy time. The gods were quite different, but he translates those foreign gods into his own Greek names. This trick of translating names from one religious system into another is an important method for minimizing religious friction.
As I began to read Jan Assmann's Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism I was impressed by the way Assmann had already described and theorized this ancient phenomenon:
The polytheistic religions overcame the primitive ethnocentrism of tribal religions by distinguishing several deities by name, shape, and function. The names are, of course, different in different cultures, because the languages are different... The sun god of one religion is easily equated to the sun god of another religion, and so forth. Because of their functional equivalence, deities of different religions can be equated. [3]
A bit later he will note the "common semantic universe" that was shared among civilizations in the ancient Near East. This is what enabled Herodotus to so easily read Egyptian religion.
The opposition to this system of mutually understandable polytheisms came in the form of monotheism.. which should be thought of as much more than a simple mental switch from many gods to one god. Assmann labels monotheism a "counter religion" since it is not content to be mutually translatable but must actively oppose the dominant religious system: "The decisive feature of the monotheistic movements is their revolutionary, 'idolophobic,' or iconoclastic character" (39).
The first historical example of this kind of iconoclastic monotheism is the solar religion of Akhenaten in the 14th century BC. Its successors are to be found in the traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Assmann sees our own civilization as largely denying and pushing away the polytheism that is exemplified by Egypt.. and embracing the spirit of monotheism. He is keenly interested in tracing the return of this repressed polytheistic system (poststructural philosophy?).
I find Assmann's way of understanding these two opposed forces fruitful but strained. For example there are classical examples of theologians within both Judaism (Philo) and Christianity (Clement of Alexandria) who by means of allegory merged their religious traditions with the classical traditions. Whatever "monotheism" that developed in the tradition of Platonic philosophy (a major influence on Christianity) was able to translate the polytheistic terms of traditional religion into its own way of seeing things (see Plutarch's "On Isis and Osiris" for a tour de force example of this process).
So I am a doubter as to the reality of a radical cognitive distinction between polytheism and monotheism. What I see is that at various historical points it has been useful for a tradition to explicitly counter another tradition. I have no problem seeing biblical Judaism in this light, as it really does seem to be a conscious negation of all things Egyptian (no images, no magic, no afterlife..). But even though Judaism may truly be a "counter religion" in its historical origin, it had within itself the resources to become a translatable religious tradition. Each religion can find within itself principles of translatability when it so desires.
Haile Selassie I and the Rastafari Faith
May 26, 2008
Looking backwards it is easy to understand how the crowning in 1930 of Ras Tafari Makonnen as emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie I, could incite Afro-Jamaicans to perceive in him a divine sign. Afro-Jamaicans were in the midst of extreme economic hardship and lacked a positive heritage of their own. Simmering underneath the surface was resentment toward colonial culture with its correct speech and elevation of all things White.
The crowning of Haile Selassie I made possible a series of mental associations that proved to be powerful. An ancient African culture that claimed descent from King Solomon was now ripe for appropriation. Along with the historic faith of Ethiopia came a tight system of symbols connected to kingship in Ethiopia. These symbols, including the Ethiopian colors and the Lion of Judah, could now be imported into the Jamaican context. By claiming this black emperor as the Messiah the eyes of Afro-Jamaicans could be decisively turned toward Africa and away from European versions of Christianity.
This all has an inner logic to it. But what if Haile Selassie I had never been crowned emperor? Would this unique blend of elements that we know as the Rastafari faith never have come into existence? It is important to recognize just how broken the social system was in Jamaica back in 1930, at least for a sizable portion of the population. Some constellation of symbols had to come together to fill this meaning-vacuum.. and even if Haile Selassie had never been crowned we can assume that something like the Rastafari faith would nevertheless have appeared.
An example of this is in Ennis Barrington Edmonds' description of how dreadlocks came to be associated with Rastas:
The dreadlocks hairstyle began in the 1940s. It was apparently inspired by the appearance in the Jamaican press of Africans wearing a similar hairstyle. Those whose pictures appeared have been variously identified as Gallas, Somalis, Masais, or Jomo Kenyatta's Freedom Fighters. [59, Rastafari: From Outcasts to Culture Bearers]
Such was the hunger for a connection to Africa and a positive identity that a photo in the local paper of an unknown group of Africans wearing something like dreadlocks could inspire an immediate copycat response. This style was adopted by Rastas and explained by the desire to take on the nature of the powerful lion (thus dreadlocks). There are also Bible passages to explain dreadlocks (Nazirites from the Torah). But it is essential to recognize that these are after-the-fact rationalizations of an immediate grasping hold of a style that appeared to be native to Africa.
One should not put too much weight on the event of the coronation of Haile Selassie I. Many of the African symbols and associations used now by the Rastafaris could have been adopted and provided with some other, unknown rationalization. The hunger for a positive African identity was going to create out of the stuff of Africa a system of symbols. This process was clearly already at work when Selassie assumed the throne. In fact, that is to me the oddest aspect of the Rastafari faith: how Haile Selassie is such a passive Messiah! But his value is not in himself, but in the associations and connections that his image allowed Afro-Jamaicans to make.
The Interior of Amenemope's Instruction
May 25, 2008
I like to imagine the study of literature as a sub-field of anthropology. This sub-field would proceed with a close analysis of literary texts as a means to understand the cultural frame by which people in the past gave meaning and value to their world. In other words the reading of literature would cease to be dominated by the present enjoyment of a text and become instead focused on teasing out the interior world that could produce such a text.
Wisdom literature would make for an interesting place to start on this project since it deals so forthrightly with categories of thought. The Maxims of Ptahhotep, a wisdom work from the Middle Kingdom or possibly earlier, is caught up with the niceties of social position. A succession of the maxims are introduced with a situation that is socially defined:
2. If you come up against an aggressive adversary (in court),
One who has influence and is more excellent than you...
3. If you come up against an aggressive adversary,
Your equal, one who is of your own social standing...
4. If you come up against an aggressive adversary,
A man of low standing, one who is not your equal...
Ethical action is thus presented as largely a matter of knowledge of how to respond within certain social settings. Everything depends on a correct reading of the situation.. and then the personal response can be calibrated.
In the New Kingdom we find another famous book of wisdom, the Instruction of Amenemope. Although by the setup of this work we can guess that the author understood himself as working within the line of traditional wisdom literature, he introduces some new structures to his traditional wisdom formulations. Most notably a reliance on ethical types:
The hot-headed man in the temple
Is like a tree grown in an enclosed space;
In a moment is its loss of foliage.
It reaches its end in the carpentry shop;
It is floated away far from its place,
Or fire is its funeral pyre.
The truly temperate man sets himself apart,
He is like a tree grown in a sunlit field,
But it becomes verdant, it doubles its yield,
It stands before its owner;
Its fruit is something sweet, its shade is pleasant,
And it reaches its end in a grove.
This is obviously an antecedent of Psalm 1, with its images of two trees with two destinations—although that biblical version has its own distinct emphases. For our purposes what is interesting is the elevation of moral types: the "hot-headed man" and the "truly temperate man." (These terms are repeated in surrounding sections of the Instruction, confirming the impression given by this one.) The earlier emphasis on moral situations has given way to a sense of ideal ethical types. Between the Middle Kingdom and the New Kingdom, then, we can begin to measure a real change in ethical point of view.. which is not announced by bells and whistles within the text, but by subtle matters of emphasis. And when we discover these changes we are beginning to trace the changes in the way people experienced and understood their world. Literature, in other words, can be a ticket into the private world of experience (not necessarily that of the author, but of the society that accepted and valued this text).
If we want to know more about the interior world of the New Kingdom as reflected in the Instruction of Amenemope, we can look further to passages that emphasize a new commitment to interior truth:
Do not converse falsely with a man,
For it is the abomination of God.
Do not separate your mind from your tongue...
The concern is with matching up the inner and the outer. This and other such passages allow us to glimpse a growing respect for interior truth..
The history of humanity, one would think, should include something of this internal journey.. not just the political and institutional remains. We can add to these concerns an interest in the identity commitments of historical peoples, commonly used conceptual metaphors, and popular life- narratives. Putting this information together (and supplementing it with physical remains) we would begin to preserve a unique cultural frame.. and finally a library of such human points of view. The only path I know to this kind of knowledge is the study of texts through the tools of literary analysis.
V.S. Naipaul on Writing Schools
May 21, 2008
I have begun V.S. Naipaul's new A Writer's People. It is a genre that I particularly enjoy: the biographia literaria. The point is not to give an autobiographical narrative, but rather to discuss a life in letters and the springs of the imagination. So far the most curious move on the part of Naipaul is in his disowning any notion of the "republic of letters." Yes, it is a book that recounts his reading, but only to swear off the actual influence of this reading! The idea of a self-made writing persona is fundamental to Naipaul's understanding of himself.. and this is evident everywhere in this new book.
One place where I cheer him on is his attack on writing schools in America. Just after his contention that all writing is a product of "a specific historic and cultural vision" he veers to the topic of writing schools:
But the self-serving "writing schools" of the United States and England think otherwise. They decree that a certain artificial way of writing narrative prose (which is a general way now and in twenty of thirty years will almost certainly appear old-fashioned) is the correct way. [41]
The connection of ideas here would seem to be that writing schools perpetuate the notion that a writer can gain a style that is not an organic outgrowth of a particular niche in this world. A writer who attends such a school is presumably trying to pick up a style that is transferable and common. If this were possible there really would be a "republic of letters".. but for Naipaul we are all on our own.
He goes on to mockingly describe the style he imagines is to be found in a writing school ("You begin... with language of simplicity (like Hemingway), enough to draw attention to your style"). On he goes but at the end of this paragraph we get to something more substantive:
Chinese and Indian and African experience sifted down into this writing- school mill comes out looking and feeling American and modern. These writing-school writers are all given the same modern personality, and that is part of their triumph. [42]
That is a striking point. The notion that there is a common modern style for prose has the inevitable result of taking the experience of outsiders and shrinking it to fit a pre-fabricated box. The style with which a writer develops his or her ideas is directly related to the experiences themselves.. and if the writing is pre-fab, the experience will come across that way also.
The alternative is to just write and slowly discover the style appropriate to one's experiences. This is exactly the path that Naipaul is working to outline in his new book.. and who would want to claim that he has not succeeded in conveying something original and actual about the corner of the world from which he came?
Same Words, Different Sheriff
May 19, 2008
My discovery of the week has been the difference between two version of "I Shot the Sheriff." The first version is the original one by Bob Marley and the second is the cover by Eric Clapton which went to #1 in 1974. It is fun to see an example of two artists using the same words but yet those words meaning something completely different.
Here is Bob Marley performing the song in concert:
Even the verbal inflections betray its rootedness in Rastafari beliefs and values: "they're trying to track I down".. using "I" to displace the objective case "me." By means of a broadly painted story of Sheriff John Brown's attempt to keep a man in his place, Marley communicates key concepts of Rastafari faith: direct oppression on the part of Babylon (through the police), the justification of rebellion against oppression, and the sure decline of the system ("one day the bottom a-go drop out.."). In its ambiguities and faux western setting the song owes much to the work of Bob Dylan on John Wesley Harding, but the message of "I Shot the Sheriff" is distinctively.. unmistakably.. Rastafari.
The Eric Clapton version—as it is represented in the following music video—manages to completely ignore the Rastafari content of the lyrics.
We see an early video featuring a kid who has a cap gun and is watching old westerns on TV. The Old West placement of the song, as hinted at by "sheriff" and "getting out of town," are played up and literalized. The figure Sheriff John Brown becomes an animated comic strip.. making him not an oppressor but a standard fake "bad guy." When the mom opens the bedroom door at the end the game is up and it all looks silly, that shooting and controversy.
I won't use this as a chance to complain about Clapton, I just want to point out how fascinating it is that the same words can mean something so different when they meet a new historical context. It is a phenomenon that's not new, going back to the beginning of rock as white performers took over the words and music of blacks. This cultural crossover is sometimes approached as a uniquely American situation, but actually nothing is more common in the history of culture. The same factors are at play whenever a work that has an original historical meaning is applied to a different context. The Christian use of the Psalms, for example, is analogous as the original historical use of the Psalms and their political content is lost in the process of giving them spiritual meaning that could satisfy the heart of a Platonist.
What's the Good of Traveling?
May 17, 2008
I do wonder about that question. I would label myself a historical traveler since my avid hope is always to catch sight of places from the past.. and to note how ruins are worked into modern landscapes. But travel can be depressing as it quickly becomes obvious that the past really is gone (contra Faulkner, no matter how many people think his comment is amazing).
Israel is a great example. I remember my shock as I crossed the land border from Egypt into Israel and was suddenly confronted by a road lined with shiny SUVs. It was a sunny Friday morning in early spring and everyone seemed to be at the Red Sea.. or at least Israel's small slice of it near Elat. I remember my bus trip back to Elat and a brief stop at a resort along the Dead Sea.. and the people with mud plastered faces (good for your skin). It was weird to be in a land that I had been reading about since grade school, but now transformed into the setting for a culture that was a lot like what I knew growing up in America. It is cool to say that I have been to Israel and Jerusalem, but it is not clear to me how that experience would lead me to a better understanding of Hebrew Scripture.
The past couple of days I have been reading a book called The Israelites by B.S.J. Isserlin. The book is a neat overview of what we know about the Israel of the Bible. I am looking forward to reading the chapters on town planning and the economic system. This will all be information that is better to learn from a book than from actual travel to Israel.. with the possible exception of someone who is participating in an archeological dig. But even then the real interest will come from time spent in a library comparing particular finds with the generality of finds and interpretations of ancient Israel. A visit to a past archeological site is difficult to make heads to tails of without written interpretation.
If one is interested in the past it is more important to have access to a good library than to visit a site. But I will note one exception to this: the "sense of a landscape" that comes from being there. In the Isserlin book the first chapter is dedicated to geography, and I was reminded of how Israel slopes upward from a low fertile plain to the low foothills of the Shephelah to the Judean Hills in which Jerusalem is located. When I was in Israel I never got over to the coast, so I have no real way to imagine this. But this is something that would actually be valuable about visiting.. this sense of the movement of the landscape and how it looks.. even if one only sees it from the window of a car.
The cultural contacts made by a traveler are mostly overblown. There is too much water under the bridge for a visitor to England to believe that anything he or she hears in England is a window into the world of Chaucer. So why should anyone be confident about being able to learn about medieval Islam by living with Muslims in contemporary Iraq?
GOD and Culture
May 16, 2008
I often note just how convenient certain beliefs are for various cultures. I know that cultural systems build over time and are not the product of an individual sitting down and deciding: "Let's make this our official story since it will be believable and provide us with a strong sense of identity." These stories and beliefs only look as if they were created by a single guiding mind.
Today it struck me that natural scientists are in a similar situation when they try to talk about natural selection, another process that works automatically as time passes and various traits are selected. The end product looks amazingly as if there were a guiding consciousness. Science writers have to decide how to portray this process.. and they often land on a literary device that allows them to talk as if there were a guiding consciousness.
Here is Matt Ridley explaining himself on this question:
Since I have an aversion to the passive voice, I intend to avoid that problem throughout this book by pretending that there is indeed a teleological engineer thinking ahead and planning purposefully. The philosopher Daniel Dennett calls such an artifact a "skyhook," since it is the rough equivalent of a civil engineer hanging his scaffolding from the sky, but for the sake of simplicity I shall call my skyhook the Genome Organizing Device, or GOD. [The Agile Gene, pg. 40-1]
This also allows him to sidestep religious questions by almost prodding religious-minded readers to understand "God" in this construction.. and I find that a cop-out.
Useful, however, is the notion that an unconscious natural process can arrive at a rational looking result. I think this concept is underutilized when thinking about culture and religion. For example, this week my class was reading a section of the Kebra Negast, the Ethiopian expansion of the story of Solomon and Sheba. It is exactly the kind of story that a person would make up. It draws from an ambiguous or at least incomplete story in Hebrew Scripture and uses those loose ends to attach the nation of Ethiopia to the story of Israel. It creates an ancient identity for Ethiopia almost out of whole cloth and establishes political legitimacy for a line of kings.
There may well be someone who fabricated a portion of this story.. but fabrication is almost always too crude a word for the social process that leads to a filled-out historical identity. These identities begin with a seed idea and then individual members of the community, without even thinking about what they are doing, add to that seed. This is the kind of unconscious creativity that animates culture. Take Islam. The tradition begins with a series of at times vague revelations to Muhammad, and then individuals proceed to connect the dots and fill in the stories.. and pretty soon there is an amazingly durable group of stories about God's people in pre-Islamic Arabia. Take Coptic Egypt. There is a brief mention in Matthew about the Holy Family going down to Egypt to escape Herod.. but then through visions and local detective work the entire itinerary of the Holy Family is mapped out.
These large scale creations of identity and history are obviously not the creation of an individual.. they are the brave efflorescence of cultures that hunger for identity and meaning. In order to avoid the passive voice it might be useful to refer to this social process as the Concept Organizing Device (COD). It works slowly but surely in every culture to create a complex system of meaning out of the rough stuff of life and history. The COD is so good at what it does that it will be tempting to refer to this process as having a consciousness.
Academic Literature
May 14, 2008
What would happen if we began to think about academic writing in the humanities as akin to literature? I ask this because I've been looking back over Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization by Barry Kemp. The book summarizes a lifetime of work in Egypt.. but more than that it is the product of a finely critical mind. It is a book that I would nominate for the top 100 non-fiction books of the century.
Kemp's book is on ancient Egypt.. which I study, so this is a convenient work to reference and re-read. But why should I be constrained by books in my field? I would get more out of a great book on a city in China or South America than I would out of the next mediocre book to cover Cairo. In other words: the fineness of an author's perceptions and creative presentation largely trumps the bare information conveyed by a book closer to my subject area.
Given the barriers between academic disciplines it is difficult to know the texts that would be most stimulating for me to read about other cities and civilizations. This is not a problem when it comes to literature. We choose novels based on the excellence and insight of the author.. and not so much on a narrow field of research like "southern short stories." The literature-phile looks everywhere for authors who can present the world in a surprising way. Why couldn't those in the humanities begin to conceptualize their reading in a similar manner?
I know this would require re-thinking the way journals and conferences work. But if that is impossible a website such as this one can be a start at highlighting creative academic work.. work that is startling and lasting in the way that a great novel is.
Augustine on Cultural Change
May 10, 2008
For the last couple of years in my Intro to Religious Studies course I have had the class read Augustine's On Christian Teaching. It is not as well known as the Confessions or City of God, but it manages to nicely define a Christian frame for interpreting and understanding scripture. It turns out that scripture should be interpreted as supporting love of God and neighbor and abhorring lust and sin. Any biblical material that apparently goes against that rule must be interpreted as figurative or allegorical in nature. Such a rule in no time will lead to a contradiction with the obvious historical import of a passage.. and that is what I think is important to see: interpretive frames govern what we get out of a biblical passage.
Another issue that Augustine highlights is cultural change. He addresses this issue in an attempt to justify the actions of the Old Testament patriarchs in committing actions that would later be considered sins. Case in point: polygamy. In defending the patriarchs Augustine outlines a theory of cultural difference. We should not judge another culture by our own standards:
We must therefore pay careful attention to the conduct appropriate to different places, times, and persons, in case we make rash imputations of wickedness. [78]
The patriarchs could carry on polygamous relationships but were not sinning (as we would be today if we tried the same) since they were following their own culture's practices.. and expressing love of God through those practices.
This leads Augustine into radical territory:
Whatever accords with the social practices of those with whom we have to live this present life—whether this manner of life is imposed by necessity or undertaken in the course of duty—should be related by good and serious men to the aims of self-interest and kindness, either literally, as we ourselves should do, or also figuratively, as is allowed to the prophets. When those who are unfamiliar with different social practices come up against such actions in their reading, they think them wicked unless restrained by some explicit authority. They are incapable of realizing that their own sort of behaviour patterns, whether in matters of marriage, or diet, or dress, or any other aspect of human life and culture, would seem wicked to other races or ages. [79]
That extended passage can almost be left to stand without comment. It allows for the notion that external ethical standards will be different at different times and places. And although Augustine would have disapproved of gay marriage, it is easy to see how his ideas here could be used against him as an argument in favor of this practice.
What I find fascinating in this passage is the unspoken static view of culture. Each person takes his or her place in life with a group of people who follow X system of social practices. Christianity (defined as love for God and neighbor) is capable of being expressed in every such cultural system (this is made even more explicit in the sentences after my already long quotation). But what first jumps into my mind is what to do about cultural change. What if someone is born into a group of people who are in a transition from x system to y system. What side should this Christian fall on? Should he or she stay with the old ethics or transition to the new one?
That is an obvious question to us because we understand culture as constantly changing, either progressing or declining. Those two dominant metaphors for cultural change in fact might even be said to underlie our entire political system! But Augustine sees culture (which he also casts as "race") as being largely static. A person should fit in to a cultural pattern. And while it is true that cultures separated in time or space are quite different, every culture remains its own unique system. I am curious how this works out elsewhere in Augustine.. and I will keep my eye out for a similar instance.
The Woodmans Experience
May 9, 2008
We recently shifted our weekly grocery store trip from Copps to Woodmans. Neither of those two names meant anything to us until we moved to Appleton, Wisconsin. Our weekly Woodmans experience, however, never fails to make me think about the changes in American shopping patterns. The unfailing pattern is to choose stores that privilege price and to a lesser extent choice over the experience of shopping.
There is nothing fancy about the layout of Woodmans. Often a product is presented still in the box:
The point would appear to be: look, we got this big shipment that we are offering to you at the lowest price possible. We are not going to waste our time or your money stacking this up into some fancy pyramid!
Bulk is the name of the game. Keeping overhead cheap is the best way to deliver all this bulk food. The Wikipedia article on Woodmans gives a sense of the size of these stores:
Woodman's works on a warehouse model, operating stores in the 200-250,000 square foot range, as opposed to the 50-75,000 square foot size of typical grocery stores. Stores are built with a minimum level of amenities, usually with the cheapest materials available at the time.
Nobody comes looking for an aesthetically pleasing experience. This is about getting the food and getting out.
Big box stores have steadily eaten into other forms of retail. Even with respect to air travel, we choose overwhelmingly the cheapest option and as a result the comfort of traveling on an airplane is plummeting (meals anyone?).
Why is this our direction? My guess is that as the earnings of most Americans steadily erodes our tendency is to maintain lifestyle and habits.. which means steadily sacrificing comfort and pleasure for bulk and price. Stores like Woodmans cater to this economic pinch. We want to keep telling ourselves: "things are still the same. I can afford the same things." Now imagine the situation if Americans broadly were feeling like they had more money and spending ability. My guess is that the trend would be toward improving the experience and quality of stores. Instead of seeing air travel become harder and harder to stand, we would see corporations work to improve it. American economic expectations are clearly falling.. slowly and slowly, but steadily.
The other side to this trend is Whole Foods and flying first class. This past decade has seen the rise of specialty stores and luxury options on a grand scale. Those signs at the airport for "elite boarding" always burn me up. This trend points to the existence of a class of people in America who are living quite well and upping their quality demands while the majority of Americans are preserving their lifestyle by bargain shopping.
Fans and Scholars
May 8, 2008
What would it mean to study baseball in an academic setting? There are thousands of people who are baseball fans and who could reel off batting averages, ERAs, and golden glove awards without even thinking. Even casual fans have an immense amount of institutional knowledge.. and the person who really follows a team likely spends a good part of each day digesting bits and pieces of information. So what is a scholar to do?
The temptation for a scholar would be to compete with the knowledge of a diehard fan. The reason this is a temptation is because the wider public expects it from you. Try walking into a bar and mentioning that you are researching a book on the Dodgers or Brewers. Chances are you will find someone who knows a lot more than you about players and history.. and that person will feel vaguely dissatisfied to learn that you really do not know as much as he does about the team you are writing on. This person may even go home to his wife and complain that he really should be the person writing a book about the team.
The scholar can never compete with a fan in terms of general knowledge because what he/she does for fun is likely not related to the subject being studied. The amount of time a scholar has to put into baseball is far more limited than the person who goes to all the home games of a team and reads the newspaper every morning.
What the scholar has is a critical frame of reference. Because of the critical tools acquired during study and from reading other books of history, the scholar is able to bring to bear on the data of baseball a frame of reference that allows for conclusions and comparisons that are far outside the realm of possibility for a fan. Questions about marketing, about narrative construction, about relations with the press, about perceptions of athletes.. these are the sorts of things that a scholar can ask but which a fan cannot.. because a fan is by definition someone who is a participant in a system.
This same group of issues is present in many other areas of scholarship. The one that mostly concerns me is the case of teaching the Quran. There are literally millions and millions of people in the world who could better call up a Quranic verse and explain its accepted significance.. but that is not really the point. There happen to be very few people who can apply a historically informed critical framework to it, and that is why I teach the Quran while millions of other people memorize it. But it would be a false path for me to decide to compete with all these people in general knowledge of the Quran.. after all, they devote a major percentage of their time to this pursuit and since the Quran does not express my own religious views, I have only a fraction of that kind of time. If I were to compete with this kind of knowledge I would have not time for other interest.
Colleagues who study the Civil War, the Bible, film, popular music, or even cars will run into something similar. The prize for the scholar is to see cultural meaning in specific actions and social patterns, which often can be had without encyclopedic general knowledge. Fans experience social meaning but they do not have the chance to reflect upon its workings or constructed nature. Scholars lose out on social meaning.. but they do manage insight into human patterns. I'd take the latter.
Ozu's Presence in Lust Caution
May 7, 2008
Lust Caution seems more familiar than it really is. The time is World War II and we are in an occupied country. The resistance battles the collaborators. But we are not in Paris or anywhere else in Europe.. we're in Shanghai and the occupiers are Japanese. Ang Lee introduces a different part of the world into our cinematic vision.. and demonstrates how beautiful the results can be.
Toward the end of Lust Caution the collaborator (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) has his mistress and secret member of resistance (Tang Wei) brought to the base of the Japanese occupiers. The mistress has to walk through a complex filled with private rooms entered by sliding doors. I am not sure what to call this kind of entertainment complex, but it brings to mind similar scenes in the films of the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. This is exactly the environment in which Ozu brings his characters together for social occasions.. especially his groups of men. Now this typical Ozu scene takes on scary overtones: the soldiers are drunk and the theatrical painted singers look and sound hollow. It has a nightmarish quality.
The collaborator and his mistress finally sit alone in the traditional Japanese setting. Although it is the type of scene that we know from Ozu, it is now occupied by two internally conflicted Chinese. The temptation to switch into an Ozu-like visual style is rejected by Ang Lee as he keeps the camera moving and avoids internally framed scenes.
The collaborator (responsible for the torture and killing of Chinese rebels) describes the scene:
They sing like they're crying. Like dogs howling for their dead masters. These Japanese devils kill people like flies, but deep down they're scared as hell. All our days are numbered since the Americans entered the war, yet here we are with our painted faces, listening to their off-tune songs.
The ideas of "Japanese devils" and "off-tune songs" puts a whole new interpretive frame on this traditional scene.. making us think back to those still and quiet Ozu scenes, and wonder if we did not miss something. In this setting the collaborator and his mistress feel most unified. Among a foreign people both must hide themselves. Both are now genuinely closer to each other than to those around them.
It is at this point, as these two Chinese lovers are settled within a quintessentially Japanese setting, that the mistress sings a beautiful and traditional Chinese song. The message seems clear: Ang Lee is colonizing the setting for his own version of international film. It is a style that will be at the same time more historically skeptical and emotionally searing. This will not be allowed to turn into an homage to the master craftsmanship of Ozu.. in the way that a film like Yi Yi by Edward Yang is. It is an appropriation of a setting but with the application of a modern cinematic style that takes control of the space as masterfully as the traditional song in the midst of those off-tune songs.
Stamping out Violence
May 4, 2008
An article in the New York Times Magazine addresses the issue of how to ease the levels of violence that continue to plague some inner city neighborhoods. The article focuses on the efforts of Gary Slutkin, epidemiologist and founder of CeaseFire:
He says that violence directly mimics infections like tuberculosis and AIDS, and so, he suggests, the treatment ought to mimic the regimen applied to these diseases: go after the most infected, and stop the infection at its source. “For violence, we’re trying to interrupt the next event, the next transmission, the next violent activity,” Slutkin told me recently. “And the violent activity predicts the next violent activity like H.I.V. predicts the next H.I.V. and TB predicts the next TB.”
This is a better analogy for violence than my own previous comparison of violence to a bad cough (OK, not a great metaphor). But the import is the same: violence should not be allowed to rage out of control in the hope of "getting it out of our system," but should be stifled as soon as it appears ready to flare up. This approach to violence can be mapped onto the way disease is fought.. which is another effort that is never conceptualized as a purge or cleansing.
This post is already bogged down in metaphors.. which is fascinating. We might discuss rooting metaphors out of the discourse on violence, but that will not change the fact that our leaders see violence through the lens of dominant metaphors. With shocking consistency the Bush administration has talked about violent flare-ups abroad as clarifying moments and opportunities (most recently in conflict in Basra with Mahdi militia). This reliance on an underlying metaphor of the healthiness of conflict is one of the most frightening aspects of our current leadership.
A person who grows up in a violent neighborhood (in Iraq or inner city Chicago) is like a person who walks into a bathroom stall covered with graffiti. In such a situation there is little psychological resistance to adding yet another scribble on the wall. But if every day that wall is cleaned thoroughly and one is confronted with a clean wall that bears no evidence that people have written on it, there will be an added barrier to marking that wall up. The work of combating violence is in every day making that bathroom wall look as new and untouched as possible. This is a principle that can be applied to foreign policy as well as beating violence in American cities.
Clinton on "Elites"
May 3, 2008
I understand why some people would vote for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. If I were voting solely on who I judged would deliver health care, I might well vote for Clinton. Ditto if I were choosing someone who would be a fighter against Republican attempts to reward the wealthy at home and make a sham of our historic values abroad. What I can't stand is the increasing tendency of both Hillary and Bill Clinton to use Republican culture-war tactics to smear the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
Here is Bill Clinton talking about Obama and his "elite" supporters:
Former President Bill Clinton was in West Virginia on his wife's behalf. In Clarksburg, he called her a scrapper and contrasted her appeal among working-class voters with the elitists he said support Obama.
"The great divide in this country is not by race or even income, it's by those who think they are better than everyone else and think they should play by a different set of rules," he said. "In West Virginia and Arkansas, we know that when we see it."
I know exactly who Clinton is referencing in the second paragraph: people like me. Republicans have gotten a lot of mileage by proclaiming candidates like John Kerry elite and out of touch.. not the kind of person one wants to have a beer with. Their followers get easily lumped into the same "elite" category. Then laughably we get "average Joes" like Bush and McCain, both more wealthy and privileged than most Americans can imagine. The deliberate enflaming of suspicion toward a group of people who are educated and engaged is sickening.. and a tactic I had previously believed was the special territory of Republicans.
Even more worrisome than the attack itself is the apparent moral blindness of a couple that had the Rolling Stones play as part of Bill Clinton's 60th birthday party, and whose satisfaction with American celebrity culture is obvious, calling Barack Obama an elitist! Maybe the logic here is that if the people in question have made the cover of People magazine then they are not really elites? But I will take any day someone who has consistently chosen instead to engage with local organizations and community building efforts.. even when it brought him into contact with people who are not People celebrities and who don't show up well on Fox news.
Writing As One Without Authority
May 2, 2008
Every now and then I peak at Technorati, the king-maker of the blog world. A long time ago I signed up Old Roads so that it would show up on the service.. and perhaps have subjects appear on keyword searches. Every return trip to Technorati reminds me of why I never spend much time there: the use of "fans" or popularity as a gauge for ranking blogs is inane. In fact, this way of conceptualizing the blog world leads to a kind of enforced ephemerality as everyone is chasing round and round to be the first to say something snarky or spot something hot. Equally depressing are the top searches, more evidence that blogs for the most part serve as an extension of popular culture.
My model for blogging is far more inward looking than the ones that make the Top 100 Blogs list on Technorati. The blog does not have to be a space for instant comments on the latest celebrity or political events. It can also serve as a vehicle for reflection and measured thought. Or, as I like to think of these posts: reviews that come too late. That is, too late for the pulsing crowd of up-to-the-minute news hounds.. but perhaps just right for people who operate in a longer time frame. At Old Roads we strive for the longest possible time frame.. and don't worry about being first or last.
It Was All Said 4000 Years Ago
May 2, 2008
Preparing for my Ancient Egyptian Religion course I was struck by the opening paragraph of the Lamentations of Khakheperre-Sonbe from Middle Kingdom Egypt:
Would that I had unknown speeches, erudite phrases in new language which has not yet been used, free from the usual repetitions, not the phrases of past speech which our forefathers spoke... For indeed whatever has been said has been repeated, while what has (once) been said has been said. There should be no boasting about the literature of the men of former times or what their descendents discovered! [212]
It struck me as odd that at the dawn of literary production there is already the complaint that everything worth saying has already been said. This is echoed over 1000 years later by the writer of Ecclesiastes when he notes: "There is nothing new under the sun."
