To Speak Positively is No Easy Thing

"[I]n order for this operation constitutive of the symbolic and the social to appear in its full truth and for it to be understood by both sexes, it would be just to emphasize its extension to all that is privation of fulfillment and of totality [...] the break indispensable ot the advent of the symbolic."

(Julia Kristeva, "Women's Time")

"A theology that takes its cues from the parables has no other course than to accept what may appear to be severe limitations--limitations imposed by never leaving behind the ordinary, the physical, and the historical. But these limitations are the glory of parabolic, metaphoric movement, for they declare that human life in all its complex everydayness will not be discarded but that ti is precisely the familiar world we love and despair of saving that is on the way to being redeemed."

(Sallie McFague, "Speaking in Parables")

This is kind of a sequel to the previous post, which I ended by asking this:

[C]an you construct a positive "Christian Worldview" that is in any sense concrete? That is, can you create a worldview of affirmation, one that seeks the good of the city you're in and does not delight in false accusations, hysteria, and witchhunts?

The question was partly rhetorical, as the reader might guess from the quotes I've arrayed like cannons (or canons) above this post. The first is from Kristeva--a typically dense mass of tangled jargon that boils down to this: that our discourse is tied up in separation, in distinguishing this thing from that thing. The creation story in Genesis makes the same point: all things are at first a formless and void mass, with no distinction, and then God speaks (He asserts/inserts distinctions) in order to "make sense" of the world; Adam is called upon to do the same thing when he names the animals.

There is, moreover, a healthy branch of Christian thought that teaches us to be suspicious of any "positive" speech about God--any speech, that is, which seems to tell us what God is. We can only speak in negation--God is not mortal, divisible, temporal. Even to say "God is Spirit" is to say more about what God is not--He is not flesh, fleshy, fleshly--that about what God is (what, after all, is "Spirit" and how can we speak of it apart from pointing to our own physicality and saying "not-this"?).

Now, there are all sorts of interesting questions that arise here about the validity of systems of separation and negation, about power-structure and all that, but I'm not wanting to go there in this post. Instead, let's take these separations as a given, and go from there. It is a far easier thing to speak negatively than to speak positively about the world. And our systems of order incline us toward this, so that when it comes time to define a "Christian Worldview" we almost invariably speak in terms of what it is not. It is not an accident that the "Worldview Weekend" crowd posture themselves as opposing different things: Marxism, Liberalism, Historical Revisionism, and so on. Nor is it an accident that the broader Evangelical culture does the same: "pro-life" means "anti-abortion"; "pro-family" means "anti-gay-marriage"; and so on. It's not even an accident that I am writing this post to distinguish myself from these elements. To make distinctions and take the negative seem to be the natural human responses to the world.

But is this ideal? An is does not an ought make. And even if we conclude that we cannot escape this system of difference, why should we not strain against it? Kristeva suggests that the unformed, unified, in-distinct world can collide with the world of systems and produce new insights, new ways of living, simply by calling the systems we take for granted into question. I submit that this juxtaposition is the heart of the metaphoric movement, that the breaking of semiotic systems is the business of the parabolic mode.

That's where the second quote comes in. I think I am not stretching McFague's point too far when I say that the metaphoric mode not only strains against systems of negation, but accepts this strain as vital to its mode-of-being; if the systems did not exist, there would be no dynamism, no charism when the Divine reveals Itself in (or in spite of) the daily world of this-not-that.

Bringing it all back home to so-called "Christian Worldviews," then, we might think of the Christian as a person who holds a vacillating appreciation for and discontent with a world that forces her to make all positive statements in terms of not-that. And this discontent will force her to seek out new modes of expression, new ways of understanding, and new contexts for discussion, which will all strain against the linguistic world that chains them so solidly to earth.

Of course, this says nothing about specifics--is or isn't the "Christian Worldview" pro-life, anti-Marxist, pro-marriage, pro-poverty relief, and so on? And the Christian, with a smile on her face not so much of knowing as of blissful anticipation of knowledge, will reply, "Yes" in the face of the urge to make distinctions.

Because the truth is, the "Christian Worldview" is simply whatever understanding of things a particular Christian might hold at a given time, whatever arises out of the tension between the Universal and the particular. In the end, it will rebel against any effort to table it, to graph or to chart it, to put it into words that speak in only one sense. Because the Reality we interact with is beyond all distinction, our efforts to cage It will always lead to strain--the kind of strain I pointed out in my last post when I spoke of the need to make the Bible say what we need it to. And when that happens, we can either accept the strain and yield to the metaphoric dance, or else we can run.

For myself, I had rather be alive and dance.

In the Land of the Reality-Challenged

So the other day I got an e-mail from the Christian Worldview Network headlined RED-LETTER CHRISTIANS: NEOMARXISM IN THE CHURCH?--a nuanced view, if ever there was one. Remember, these are the people who administer the test that tells you how Christian your worldview is, based on your opinion of the 2000 election (among other things). Read the link, if you dare, but make sure you don't have any liquids or pointy objects handy, because you'll either want to spit or stab your own eyes out.

I really can't convey how ashamed I am that the Church still has this kind of wingnuttery flapping around in its belfries. To be honest, I'm getting sick of the whole thing--of being even remotely connected to a discourse where we're still arguing over wifely "submission" and whether you can accept the tenants of evolution and still believe in the Resurrection of Jesus. I'm sick of pain-free worship (as I've noted), your-best-life-nowism and (in the other extreme) the sick and sycophantic fetishising of "right doctrine"--as if God cares whether you have the right ideas or have drawn the right lines to keep you away from neo-pagans, marxists, liberals and hippies while over three quarters of the world is living from hand to mouth.

This "Christian Worldview" fetish is, as far as I can see, just another outcropping of the kind of thinking that leads to "conservative" Bible translation (not really conservative, it's what Richard Hofstadter rightly termed "pseudo-conservative" because it's not wanting to conserve but only to break down). At least the people at Conservapedia are honest. They recognize that, in order to maintain their views, they have to outright change the words of Scripture in order to produce the meaning they want. The "Christian Worldview" people aren't so honest. Here's how they deal with it:

[Red-Letter Christians] feel it is convenient to blot out the words of Paul on homosexuality and focus in on the good deeds Jesus talks about. Most are pacifists who reject an "eye for an eye" (Leviticus 24:19-20). They focus on Jesus' words about helping the poor, ministering to "the least of these" (Matthew 25:40), loving our enemies, etc. That justifies abandoning hundreds, even thousands of condemning verses in the Bible they choose to wish away.

Except they don't cite the "hundreds, even thousands of condemning verses." Because (regarding homosexuality) they don't exist; Paul is far more concerned with Christians doing good to each other and policing their own lives than he is with making sure everyone else toes the same moral line. Fact is, most of the condemnation in Scripture is, to the best of my knowledge, in the Prophets, and most of that seems to be less about teh gays and more about idol-worship and failing to take care of the poor and minister to "the least of these." In short, Israel was condemned, not because they let gays marry and women get abortions, but because they didn't do the very things Christ commands in those red letters.

Lean Left has a great take-down of the pseudoconservative Bible translation, and I think it applies well to the busybodies at Worldview Weekend. Here's a snippet:

The problem is not that they want to re-write the Bible. It’s their Bible (as it were) – they can have a wingnut version if they want one. The problem is their general stance toward the world that created this situation in the first place.

The world is simply not a hospitable place for wingnuts. It refuses to conform to their prejudices and preconceptions. Invariably, they respond with anger – everything that’s wrong with their ideological ill-fit with reality is reality’s fault. And reality, being at fault for not being the way they pretend, must bend itself to their pretenses.

That's what all this "Christian Worldview" stuff boils down to, in the end--damage control. They insist, in their facts-free environment, that America was once a "Christian Nation," that the Bible supports Vietnam and the Gold Standard and whatever other idol they find convenient to worship, and because of this they are forced to redact or alter parts of Scripture (even if only by mocking/demonizing people who take them seriously) that they don't find congenial to their narrow and fearful "Worldview."

If I sound angry, it's because I am. Because this narrowness isn't confined to a small section of crazies at the fringe of the Christian far-right; it's systemic across Evangelical America. Read what Michael Spencer has to say about an friend of his who recently left the faith when his convenient Christian world came tumbling down in the face of reality. Spencer's reflections are dead-on, I think. Here's another meditation on the iMonk's post. The end result of the kind of intricate house-of-cards building characterized by the "Worldview Weekend" crowd, by "Guitar Praise" and "Answers in Genesis" can only be a fearful (and therefore paranoid and combative) huddling, or else a final break with a faith that flies in the face of reality.*

So yes, I'm angry at a systemic cancer that destroys the faith of so many people. I'm also angry that it seems impossible to be (relatively) theologically conservative without becoming tied to the know-nothing pseudoconservativism typified by these people. It's not impossible, I know that. But it seems so at times.

The question, then, is this: can you construct a positive "Christian Worldview" that is in any sense concrete? That is, can you create a worldview of affirmation, one that seeks the good of the city you're in and does not delight in false accusations, hysteria, and witchhunts? I suspect that many Christians live like this, but I suspect as well that the more fully it is realized, the less like a systematic "Worldview" it looks--that it approaches more the slantways, parabolic, maddening protagonist of Scripture. It's less like something you believe and more like something you do. As such, it is a project of living prayerfully in the world, not a matter of constructing a world in which to live. It is an exercise in inhabiting the metaphoric.
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*I don't mean "flies in the face of reality" in the sense that it is too hopeful. I mean that it is demonstrably false to say that America is the greatest nation, that "praise" music is a good substitute for "secular" music or that the earth is less than 6,000 years old.

The Present in 1964

Photo source.

"The distinguishing thing about the paranoid style is not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regard a "vast" or "gigantic" conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is a conspiracy, set in motion by forces of almost transcendent power, and what is felt to be needed to defeat it is not the usual methods of political give-and-take, but an all-out crusade. The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of this conspiracy in apocalyptic terms--he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He's always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point: it is now or never in organizing resistance to conspiracy."

--Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, first published in 1964. Here's an abridged version, as it appeared in Harper's.

Crashing into Being

"[Metaphor] is the basis of social and political revolution, which relies on the dreams of the imagination to propel us from where we are to where we might be."

(Sallie McFague, "Speaking in Parables")

I've been reading Sallie McFague, "Speaking in Parables" lately, and am shocked and disappointed that I didn't have this book to hand when I was writing my senior paper for Covenant. McFague says so much that I thought, or intuited, or wanted to say at the time, and she says it with the backing of a tremendous battery of thinkers, from Ricoeur to Marcuse to Tillich to Barth. She even makes a movement similar to that which I wanted to pursue--from metaphor as a linguistic construct to metaphor/parable as a means of seeing the world (in her case, the world of Theology). The quote above puts McFague squarely in the tradition of the Apocalyptic. She views metaphor as exploding the dead systems through which we look and exposing new possibilities of being. And she argues that this explosion forces us to pursue new ways of living and looking at the world.

Throughout all this reading, I am growing more and more convinced that there is an interconnectedness between my previous 'blog posts and my larger interest in metaphor and parable as a means of conveying truth. Metaphor is the language of the really-real, the world as-it-should-be, the Apocalyptic denial of systems of power and oppression. It's also maddening because it refuses to be neat.

McFague argues that metaphor is the way humans think--not an ornament or an elaboration, but the basic way we encounter the world. Based on this, McFague is able to draw up several characteristics of human knowledge:

"it is tentative, relativistic, multi-layered, dynamic, complex, sensuous, historical, and participatory."

It is, in short, messy. And imprecise. It distrusts the desire to make things too easy, to systematize and graph the world, to roll it into a ball and bite it off with a smile and shake of the head. Metaphor cannot be reduced to a proposition saying "what it means." Like Elvis Costello said--if it could be said in a sentence, we wouldn't need a song.

But it is precisely this open-endedness that gives the metaphor its power. Again, McFague argues that metaphor transforms reality, moving it forward from what it is to what it should be:

"Metaphorical language...does not take us out of everyday reality but drives us more deeply into it, de-forming our usual apprehensions in such a way that we see reality in a new way.... As genuine metaphors, parables could do no other than turn us toward reality...."

In short, the prophet, the madman, and the metaphor-maker are all going about the same task. They are each in their way pointing outward and upward to a better world that in their visioning comes crashing through into the world of becoming. The poet creates the world, not by offering a game plan, but by offering a vision of a better order of things--and it is in the clash between the two that the world as-it-should-be slowly, painfully, comes into existence.

Expect more in this vein in the weeks to come.

EDIT: Here's an example of movement toward a new reality. Impractical, impossible dreaming? Or is it a faith in Something beyond our man-made systems of power?

"Life as it should be" is really "life as it is"

"I've been a soldier and a slave. I've seen my comrades fall in battle or die more slowly under the lash in Africa. I've held them in my arms at the final moment. These were men who saw life as it is, yet they died despairing. No glory, no brave last words, only their eyes, filled with confusion, questioning "Why?" I don't think they were wondering why they were dying, but why they had ever lived. When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? To surrender dreams - -this may be madness; to seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness! But maddest of all - -to see life as it is and not as it should be."

I've been thinking a lot about this scene from "The Man of La Mancha." I have an odd relationship with it--sometimes I think it's sheerest Romantic swill, an empty elevation of unreality over reality. It sounds like a rejection of the clear-eyed vision advocated by, for instance, Flannery O'Connor. It sounds like the kind of starry-eyed idealism that is used to keep the enslaved in chains and doom the uneducated to a neverending existence in the intellectual backwaters. It sounds, in some deep sense, wrong.

Of course, it also sounds right. The things named off by Cervantes are all undeniable evils; we are warned in Scripture about seeking the Living One among the dead, the ultimate Treasure among the trash. And yet, Moloch tells us that this is the only sane course. And I suspect that we speak with the voice of Moloch ourselves when we assert (as I myself have done) that injustice and dehumanization are the condition of the world, and that there is no hope of changing things until Jesus comes back. It sounds sane; it avoids the woolly-thought straw liberalism so rightly despised by the Evangelical and Conservative right. But at what cost? I suspect we are giving up more than we know when we surrender the world (in its political or social or environmental forms) to the forces of chaos that currently hold it in thrall.

We're involved in old-world thinking. It reminds me of N.T. Wright's assertion in "Surprised by Hope" that the central fact of the Christian faith is Resurrection as the sign of the New Creation.

"[T]he resurrection of Jesus offers itself, to the student of history of science no less than the Christian or the theologian, not as an odd event within the world as it is but as the utterly characteristic, prototypical, and foundational event within the world as it has begun to be [read: the world as it should be--N.T.B.] It is not an absurd event within the old world but he symbol and starting point of the new world."

Wright argues later that Christian Ethics are not simply a way of continuing in this present evil age; rather, the Christian life is the lifestyle of the New Creation. And as such, it is (as Paul assures us) foolishness to those who are still bound up in the dead and dying world-forms of chaos. We throw our lot in with a Jewish peasant who was killed by the Romans over two thousand years ago. We hang our hope on a resurrection that no-one now around could have witnessed, attested to in books that no-one now around can verify. We already live outside of reality in this; that our forms and creeds derive from the teachings of a long-unseen Messiah.

So to assert this staggering bit of unreality (I speak now as one still in the old world) and then to claim that it is unrealistic to expect change seems to me a bit of a double-speak. To base our values on what the old world holds precious (fame, money--or even solvency--respect) is to speak with the voice of Moloch. I speak with this voice every time I insist that my status (if I have any)be respected. I speak with it whenever I judge my own success or failure in a given area based on how others deem it or how much money it makes. I speak--most bitingly--with the voice of Moloch whenever I dismiss the weak or simple things of this world in favor of the wise.

No, the Christian faith is one of Apocalypse (to use David Dark's terminology). It asserts--in the face of "life as it is" that life-as-it-is is in fact a self-deception. It holds that the world that bases value on a useless yellow rock or a parchment or a glib tongue is lying to itself desperately, trying to create meaning arbitrarily where none exists. It holds that the real reality--life "as it should be" is a world where the weak are made strong, where the poor are rich, where everything is upside-down and all distinctions are leveled. And this new-world thinking demands a very different kind of living. I'm not talking about pious refusal to be associated with the culture; I'm talking about bearing witness to the new creation's presence among the ruins of the old; I'm talking about living in a world that isn't measured on supply-and-demand or the unthinking mechanisms of the marketplace, but by love.

This love is not the shallow B.S. love that shows up in "Thank You for Smoking," which ultimately means nothing but whatever the reader wants. This love is the love of Christ for all people, the staring-at-in-affection that declines to accept the end of humanity.* It is the love that reaches out to help, the love that asks us to change our way of caring about others and ourselves. It is love that insists that Aldonza the whore is really Dulcinea del Toboso, just as it is love that says that every sparrow has a place in the Eye of God.

All of this is to further explain my previous post, and specifically the last bit where I insist that the dream-world is to be preferred over the sane one. It's not so much that I can't deal with reality, or believe that reality should be rejected. I simply don't think that what we call reality is really-real; that the demands of commerce and coercion are or should be in any way ultimate to our way of thinking. It's my own little way of pushing back against the culture of death in favor of the Culture of Resurrection.

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*I think I am not out of line when I impress William Faulkner to help my case; his speech seems of-a-thought with that of Cervantes in the clip above, or with Prince Mishkin in "The Idiot" who insists that "Beauty will save the world."

Moloch!

"Corporatism's rituals are as reverentially and unquestionably observed in daily behavior as those of ancient Egypt's theocracy or the blood sacrifice of the Aztecs. The Aztecs thoroughly believed their world would end if the gods were not fed enough still-beating human hearts. We believe that the world turns on employment figures, stock prices, our jobs, productivity and consumption. Hourly, we receive reports from the media priesthood on the health of an aggregate god known as the economy. The masses pause to listen, then ask inside their heads, "Will my job, my only source of family sustenance, disappear? I must try harder."

And so, fearfully, we render tribute to Moloch in the form of increased toil, more sheaves of what they alone produced (for it is labor that produces all authentic wealth) in the form of bailouts and sons sacrificed on the altar of war."

(Joe Bageant)

"Another example [...] is the ultimate concern with 'success' and with social standing and economic power. It is the god of many people in the highly competitive Western culture and it does what every ultimate concern must do: it demand unconditional surrender to its laws even if the price is the sacrifice of genuine human relations, personal conviction, and creative eros. Its threat is social and economic defeat, and its promise--indefinite as all such promises--the fulfillment of one's being. It is the breakdown of this kind of faith which characterizes and makes religiously important most contemporary literature."

(Paul Tillich, "Dynamics of Faith").

These quotes came to my attention this morning within thirty minutes of each other, through one of those weird syncronic happenings that come along every so often. It seems to me that Bageant (and, many many years before him, Tillich) has his finger on something of which we need to constantly remind ourselves--that if we allow ourselves to live by the dollar, we will die by the dollar.

More and more, this society we're living in weirds me out. Forgive the valley-girl speech, but I think it's significant in that, in some sense, we seem to be partaking literally or metaphorically or symbolically in a dark rite designed to conjure up lucre. So, yes, it weirds me out. It weirds me out, more and more, that our health care system is so overwhelmingly for-profit. Now, don't get me wrong, I admire doctors and believe that they should make a living like anyone else. But doesn't it strike you as somehow wrong, somehow fundamentally wrong, that life-saving procedures can be so expensive? That to repair a lung costs an arm and a leg? I'm not talking about nose jobs; I'm talking about the cost of cancer. Nose jobs (unnecessary, not essential ones like this) should be expensive--it's a luxury item that caters to our too-narrow standards of beauty. But cancer treatments, AIDS treatments, life-saving surgeries? All, all run for profit?*

Or what about death? According to this NPR interview, the number of unclaimed bodies in L.A. County has spiked because people can't afford to bury their dead. It costs the deceased's family $900 to cremate them; the government's struck a deal to get it done "at cost"--cost being $150 a body. Someone's making a profit off death. This, too, weirds me out. It's like plundering the dead's grave and then their family, to boot. It's like necrophilia.

This kind of ghoulishness is all over the place; you can look at the educational-industrial complex, the oil complex, the way music and art and literature are packaged and sold--even the way for-profit invariably means "me against you" and not "the benefit of us all." And we go along, accepting it and nodding and arguing, even, that there is no other way for a nation or society to be viable unless it turns a profit, unless it generates ever-larger masses of capital.

Here's an idea. It's radical, it's unheard-of, and I may be totally offbase here, but perhaps GDP isn't the sole measure of success. Perhaps it's possible to imagine a society in which the bottom-line isn't the bottom-line. Perhaps--just perhaps--if we all turned our backs on these death-dealing systems, on Moloch, and focused on something else (like art or actually looking our neighbor in the face) we might find that their power over us is phantom and dissipates with the morning sun. If we look away from the golden bull, it might dissolve into dust. We might even wake up, if we opened our eyes.

Impractical, too, too impractical--the dreams of someone who worked three years on a Bachelor's degree in Philosophy and Religion only to find that his employment opportunities in this economy are nonexistent. The smoke-dreams of a raw youth who has no understanding of how the world works. I know, I hear it too, in my own head--that aridly practical voice that informs me that this is the way the world is, and we can do no other. Fine. I like my dream-world better than the sane one.
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*Yes, I know doctors don't really make that much. I'm not blaming them--not really blaming anyone--just pointing out some stuff that bothers me. Although, really, the amount in loans doctors exit school with points to another systemic weirdness in the educational-industrial complex.

Some Disjointed Reflections on "The Third Man"

[If you've not seen "The Third Man," feel free to continue, but be aware I will discuss spoilers. And you should really see it, regardless.]

There's something iconic about the image of Harry Lime caught for a moment in the light of an upstairs window. The drunken Holly Martins has just begun to come to terms with the understanding that his old school-friend, the charismatic figure he idolized as a youth, was in fact a criminal of the most sordid kind. He has resolved to leave Vienna, is walking into the darkness and--this happens.



In a way, "The Third Man" is Martins' coming-of-age (about a decade or more too late); his image of Harry Lime is part of an adolescent dream-world, of a piece with his gaudy Westerns and easy assumption that the British military police are idiots who can't see the obvious superiority of Harry Lime to any other mortal crawling on the earth. He is disabused by the evidence offered by Major Calloway, but there is still this figure in the doorway of his mind--the mysterious, the inscrutable, the endlessly charming and magnetic Harry Lime. But he's not convinced, not really; from the moment Martins sees Lime in that doorway, his soul becomes a battleground between Lime and Calloway. The struggle only ends when he is finally exposed to the actual children hurt by Lime's criminal behavior, and is consummated with an understanding nod and a shot in the Vienna sewers.




I'm not really sure where I'm going with this one. I could say something easy about shucking off the past, about putting away childish things (and the very real sacrifice involved therein), about the dangers of the personality-cult--and all of these would find points of resonance in the film itself. They would also be a bit too easy, would simplify the complexities of Martins' relationship with Lime, as well as ours (both to Welles' character and to the Limes in our own life, be they people or memories). Even in the end, Martins cannot quite bring himself to leave Vienna or give up the hope of winning over Lime's lover.

Even the audience couldn't get rid of Lime. After "The Third Man," Lime's popularity led to a radio show and, later still, a television series. Lime was tamed into a lovable rogue
more related to Martins' fantasy of him than the character we see onscreen who coolly calculates how many human lives he can afford to spend in order to get rich. It's as if Lime is a part of ourselves that we can't look straight out without toning him down; he is the romantic, unrealistic, unrealized and unrealizable ideal. He is us as we would like to be--the devil may care, but we won't. We wanted Robin Hood, and we got Al Capone.

Perhaps this is what makes "The Third Man" work so well for me; it pretends to let us have and eat our cake--the romantic Harry Lime that Martins is convinced must exist is still there, even under the grinning, affably evil face presented by the man himself. And then, we're forced to denounce this dream even as Martins denounces it at last in the sewer. It's quite a clever trap. We are forced to put the old man (ironically, Lime's pet expression for Martins!) to death, to kill our darlings, to renounce childish things in the most violent way possible. We must hold the gun with Martins.

No wonder killing Lime proved too much for the audience. No wonder they had to bring him back and assure us that Harry Lime had many lives. Harry Lime was (and is!) too much a part of ourselves.