Author Archives: Julian O. Long

ask not what your country . . .

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Well . . . my guy is in trouble, and maybe I have to own up to having been naive about Jeremiah Wright. It’s too bad, but I’m not alone. Both Eugene Robinson and Bob Herbert have disowned Wright in op-ed essays today, both of them (interestingly) making use of the ‘throwing somebody under a bus’ metaphor. Here’s Robinson.

It’s understandable, given how Wright has been treated, that he would want to attempt to set the record straight. No one would enjoy seeing his 36-year career reduced to a couple of radioactive sound bites. No preacher would want his entire philosophy to be assessed on the basis of a few rhetorical excesses committed in the heat of a passionate sermon. No former Marine would stomach having his love of country questioned by armchair patriots who have done far less to protect the United States from its enemies.

Given Wright’s long silence, I thought he had taken to heart Jesus’s admonition to turn the other cheek. Obviously, I was wrong.

I’m through with Wright not because he responded — in similar circumstances, I certainly couldn’t have kept silent — but because his response was so egocentric. We get it, Rev. Wright: You’re ready for your close-up. […] Historically and theologically, he was inflating his importance in a pride-goeth-before-the-fall kind of way. Politically, by surfacing now, he was throwing Barack Obama under the bus.

Like Robinson, Bob Herbert finds a good deal of ego in Pastor Wright’s current speaking tour and suggests that Wright is paying Obama back for speaking critically of him.

All but swooning over the wonderfulness of himself, the reverend acts like he is the first person to come up with the idea that blacks too often get the short end of the stick in America, that the malignant influences of slavery and the long dark night of racial discrimination are still being felt today, that in many ways this is a profoundly inequitable society.

This is hardly new ground. The question that cries out for an answer from Mr. Wright is why — if he is so passionately committed to liberating and empowering blacks — does he seem so insistent on wrecking the campaign of the only African-American ever to have had a legitimate shot at the presidency. […] My guess is that Mr. Wright felt he’d been thrown under a bus by an ungrateful congregant who had benefited mightily from his association with the church and who should have rallied to his former pastor’s defense. What we’re witnessing now is Rev. Wright’s “I’ll show you!” tour.

Consequently and predictably, George Will gloats in this morning’s Washington Post as he urges his media buddies and the pols to hound Obama about Wright.

When North Carolina Republicans recently ran an ad featuring Wright in full cry, McCain mounted his high horse, from which he rarely dismounts, and demanded that the ad be withdrawn. The North Carolinians properly refused. Wright is relevant.

He is a demagogue with whom Obama has had a voluntary 20-year relationship. It has involved, if not moral approval, certainly no serious disapproval. Wright also is an ongoing fountain of anti-American and, properly understood, anti-black rubbish. His speech yesterday demonstrated that he wants to be a central figure in this presidential campaign. He should be.

All this is distressing enough on its face, but George Will “in full cry” is almost too much to take. My disclaimer about Wright does not in any way endorse Will’s petty and self-righteous presumption to instruct the rest of us about what is “properly understood, anti-black rubbish.”

But Wright surely understands pushback. He has to be highly intelligent, and he couldn’t have had the career he has had without considerable savvy in regard to how race games are played in the political arena. I’m reminded, as I was in an earlier post about Wright, of Shelby Steele’s characterization of the good pastor.

Racism is this minister’s great strategic advantage; it gives him an almost demagogic power and a racial moral authority that distinguishes his church from his competitors. He offers his parishioners as much racial redemption as religious redemption . . . effectively, he defines the black identity as a faith in the pervasiveness of white racism.1

Wright, himself, may believe in the pervasiveness of white racism. If so, he would not be alone in experiencing frustration at the persistence and stubbornness of institutional racism and white privilege. I have believed that his more strident language is to be understood as an attack on racism institutionalized. But I think Wright’s recent speeches have rendered such considerations moot.

So, what to do?

I think my guy has to take this on. Regardless of what anybody may have hoped, this presidential election is now as much about race as it is about anything else — whether events, or the media, or the Clintons, or Republicans, or Obama himself, or all of the foregoing are responsible. I’m inclined now to think that this doesn’t benefit the Clinton campaign, though I’m sure Clinton’s advisers are searching for a way to use it.

Try this thought. Barack Obama has been presented with a challenge to practice leadership, not as a candidate, but as the presumptive heir to executive leadership of this country, a position he could lose if he fails to rise to the demands of this moment. Call it a racialist moment, if you will. That doesn’t matter — he has to deal with it. God knows he’s got to be exhausted and perhaps angry and frustrated. But he has to put these things aside.

I don’t know what he has to say, but I know he has to make another speech. Oratory is his great strength. By this means he has almost begun a serious reformation of our politics, and it is the present means he has at his disposal. He shouldn’t debate another time; that will just give Clinton another opportunity to bait him.

Then again, maybe I do know a bit of what he has to say. Perthaps, as Shelby Steele puts it, Obama should let us know “who he is–what beliefs he would risk his life for.”2

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1A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win, (New York, 2008), p. 70.
2Ibid., p. 134.

Uncertainty, aporia, and Benedict

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Nicholas Knisely has kindly noted my reaction to his blog about relativism, science, and Pope Benedict.

. . . Julian is asking a basic question of any one who tries to connect the insights of modern physics and theology (and/or philosophy); “Should an understanding of the nature of reality in one field have to be accepted in another?”

The short is answer is that I believe they need to be.

I don’t disagree, but that doesn’t mean that I agree entirely. I don’t know of any requirement that one field’s insights be accepted by another. Moreover, it’s been almost an article of faith in the humanities and social sciences, since the so-called linguistic turn, that academic discourses, like cultures, are incommensurable.1 I’ve mostly thought incommensurability a wrong-headed notion, but there are cases that argue otherwise. If there weren’t, epistemology might be reducible to psychology or vice versa. On the other hand, postmodern literary criticism has owed much to Marx (especially as understood by Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Herbert Marcuse, et al.), to Freud (especially as understood by Lacan), to Heidegger (especially as understood by Derrida, Sartre, Gadamer . . .).

I also said I think uncertainty in physics and epistemological uncertainty have different bases. They come together in Kuhn’s critique and in the spate of theorists who have followed Kuhn, but one is grounded in a famous series of experiments with light and the other is grounded in a discourse that includes Kant and Hume but goes back to the beginnings of philosophy. These thoughts leave me with the partially unsatisfying observation that it is sometimes useful and possible to think across disciplines and sometimes not. Sometimes différance is not only inevitable but desirable.

I teach a course these days in which students read a variety of modern and postmodern classics in an exercise I hope will enable them to make connections between ideas they have encountered in separate domains. Recently we discussed Eliade’s Myth of the Eternal Return, wherein the author tells how an ethnographer, traveling in the Balkans in the 1930s, discovered a story to the effect that a particular young man had been enticed off the face of a cliff by a jealous mountain fairy. Shepherds found his body and returned it to his village, whereupon his human intended, the source of the fairy’s jealousy, uttered a formal lament in verse, “full of mythological allusions, a liturgical text of rustic beauty,” which was quoted as part of the tale.

When the ethnographer discovered that the intended was still alive, though now elderly, he visited her. She gave a prosaic account of the tragedy that differed materially from the tale the ethnographer had heard and most particularly did not include the mountain fairy, though she did say that she and other women of the village “had repeated the customary ritual lamentations” at the funeral. When the ethnographer confronted the villagers with the intended’s account of the death as an ordinary accident, “they replied that the old woman had forgotten; that her great grief had almost destroyed her mind.”

I asked my students to suppose that the ethnographer had tried to interpret this tale of the unfortunate young man and the jealous fairy princess to the villagers who told it by reference to Eliade’s theory of myth. Suppose he said to them something to this effect: “Here’s what you’re doing. You’re defending yourself against the novelty and irreversibility of history and the finality of death by preserving a memory of this young man not as a particular, personal, historical being, but as the mystical, transpersonal hero of a tragedy, fusing the individual with an archetypal category.” If the ethnographer had said this to the villagers, don’t you suppose they would have thought him strange, perhaps a little crazy, just as they thought the elderly intended senile?

I’m arguing that there is a common sense that belongs to positivist ethnographers and a common sense that belongs to Balkan villagers and that they are not the same, though both seem in this case to employ a category we might call matter of fact. But I don’t mean this story as an illustration of incommensurability. I see it rather as an illustration of the perils of translation. I have no doubt that ethnographer and villagers could have sat down and smoked, shared draughts of the local brew, and found commonality. Doubtless there would have been stories for them to share (tales for them to swap), and at some point the conversation could have become like that reported by a Greek folklorist I heard speak years ago as he was traveling in Oklahoma looking for correspondences between native American music and his own native folk ballads. He described a meeting with an elderly Choctaw chief in which he (the folklorist) drummed and sang a song (which he also sang for us). Upon hearing the song, the old chief’s face broke into a thousand smiles, and he exclaimed “Indian song!” “No, Greek song!” countered the scholar. Nevertheless, there had been a meeting across incommensurability. The old chief had found that a foreign song was not Greek to him.

But there’s another lesson. In rejecting our hypothetical ethnographer’s theorizing of their story, the Balkan villagers would have been more right than wrong. It has been a dream of the geisteswissenschaften to construct a metalanguage into which the languages of common sense can be translated, a dictionary of culture like the key to all mythologies that George Eliot parodies in Middlemarch. I personally think this idea is a hangover from the culture of Latin learning, but whether it is or not an English double negative is reducible neither to Latin grammar nor to simple algebra. Resort to the dictionary produces what translators call a trot. Real translation calls upon the same sometimes tedious negotiation required by other human attempts at understanding across cultural boundaries, carried out for the most part at the level of common sense (translation is theoretically impossible, but we translate).

Which brings me to Benedict.

In the essay on relativism to which Dean Knisely refers, the Pope argues against positivist reductionism in much the same way I have here. Reductionist science naively substitutes its own categories for the categories of discourses and phenomena it rediscribes. But Benedict, in this essay, unfortunately does something very similar in claiming that a naive relativism must of necessity be the philosophical foundation of democracy. American democracy is pluralist, not relativist.

However, Benedict’s real target is relativism with respect to religion and ethics. Here, tolerance and freedom are to be mistrusted as the enemies of the supremacy of Jesus Christ, and a distinction between relativism and pluralism is meaningless. Moreover:

In the relativist meaning, to dialogue means to put one’s own position, i.e., one’s faith, on the same level as the convictions of others without recognizing in principle more truth in it than that which is attributed to the opinion of the others. Only if I suppose in principle that the other can be as right, or more right than I, can an authentic dialogue take place.

Thus, the very practice of democratic discourse becomes what Benedict calls “[t]he relativist dissolution of Christology, and even more of ecclesiology.”

I almost wish I could take Benedict’s point that reason and faith must inform one another to be the primary argument of this essay, but I can’t. I rather think the point is to defend a traditional understanding of the church, that is the Roman church, against its competitors in modern life: Kantian skepticism, secular democracy, eastern religion, new age philosophy, pragmatism, protestantism (Benedict’s chief exemplar of bad theology is Presbyterian), modernism (as exemplified by Bultman, Barth, et al.), and most particularly liberation theology. He argues in order to confound those whom he takes to be his opponents, but with respect to his own position Benedict does not argue. Rather, he proclaims.

In short, in the revelation of God, he, the living and true One, bursts into our world and also opens the prison of our theories, with whose nets we want to protect ourselves against God’s coming into our lives.

He doesn’t proclaim more than this in the essay on relativism, but he hints at the rest of the proclamation by reference to the dissolution of ecclesiology, and in one of his American homilies, he spells it out entire.

In the exercise of my ministry as the Successor of Peter, I have come to America to confirm you, my brothers and sisters, in the faith of the Apostles (cf. Lk 22:32). I have come to proclaim anew, as Peter proclaimed on the day of Pentecost, that Jesus Christ is Lord and Messiah, risen from the dead, seated in glory at the right hand of the Father, and established as judge of the living and the dead (cf. Acts 2:14ff.). I have come to repeat the Apostle’s urgent call to conversion and the forgiveness of sins, and to implore from the Lord a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the Church in this country.

This is traditional Papal rhetoric, expressive of solidarity with the ages,2 and the claim to be Peter’s successor is neither accidental nor without special significance for contemporary Americans who for whatever reason do not share the Roman faith. I am remembering a Catholic funeral I attended here in St. Louis recently, in which the priest, just before the offertory, explained that non-Catholics were not welcome at the altar and advised us to remain in our pews and pray for the eventual restoration of God’s church.

Americans lionize celebrities. Benedict has come and gone, having more or less poked his finger in the eye of American public life which just gave him more visibility as a public figure than he is likely to encounter anywhere else in the world. He has articulated a view of the church that recognizes neither my baptism nor Dean Knisely’s ordination. And he has proclaimed again the historic claim of the Roman church uniquely to hold the keys to the kingdom of God. His absolutism is not Kantian, but an absolutist he is; and though he seems to be trying to reinvent himself as Pope by distancing himself from the role he played as John Paul II’s grand inquisitor, he is chiefly concerned, I believe, to proclaim and maintain the authority of the church and particularly the authority of the priesthood, in a time of scandal and other stresses. His apologies to victims of sexual abuse did not criticize any bishop. Indeed, he seemed primarily to be bent upon shaping and refining a theory of American life that gives special prominence to the Roman church.

The readings of today’s Mass invite us to consider the growth of the Church in America as one chapter in the greater story of the Church’s expansion following the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

And with respect to the future:

Young people need to be helped to discern the path that leads to true freedom: . . . The challenges confronting us require a comprehensive and sound instruction in the truths of the faith. But they also call for cultivating a mindset, an intellectual “culture”, which is genuinely Catholic, confident in the profound harmony of faith and reason, and prepared to bring the richness of faith’s vision to bear on the urgent issues which affect the future of American society.

In another homily, Benedict decries the diminishment of the church’s authority in American society, “which rightly places a high value on personal freedom.” Personal freedom, that took literally ages to acomplish for ordinary persons like me and even longer for other citizens of my country, a condition whose absence continues to signal death and destruction in the world, one of the chief accomplishments of the Christian west, Benedict dismisses as paltry, even while he seems to praise it, contrasting it with real freedom, “God’s gracious gift, the fruit of conversion to his truth, the truth which makes us free.”

One might dismiss this last claim as conventional sermonizing but for it’s context. Here is a Pope, standing on an American stage yet speaking for the ages; but the message sounds a lot like Richard Neuhaus. It’s impossible to hear it without being aware of the political baggage it carries. I live in a Catholic Archdiocese whose Archbishop has excommunicated two women for having the effrontery to be ordained Roman catholic womenpriests, who has excomunicated the board of a local Polish congregation in a property dispute, who forced a local high school to cancel a scheduled commencement speech by Claire McCaskill, whose daughter was to be in the audience as a graduate, who has threatened to deny communion to John Kerry and other politicians whose views conflict with Catholic teaching. I expect him to be elevated to the college of cardinals any day now.

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1The best single defense of incommensurability I know is Stanley Fish’s Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change, (Cambridge, MA, 1999). Renato Rosaldo and Paul Feyerabend have argued persuasively on the other side. See Feyerabend’s review of Rosaldo’s Culture and Truth (Boston, 1993), in Common Knowledge 3 (Fall 1994) 16-22.
2Kathleen Hall Jamieson has written a good deal about Papal rhetoric. Her analysis of the language of Paul VI is especially useful to me here. See “The Metaphoric Cluster in the Rhetoric of Pope Paul VI and Edmund G. Brown, Jr.,” (The Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980) 51-72.

. . . about snakes

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A greater part. There are good reasons to regard the style manual of the American Psychological Association as the best academic style manual around these days. Chicago is more comprehensive and probably should be everyone’s manual of last resort, but the APA Manual is elegant and practical. I started using it with the third edition back in the 1980s. It’s now in the fifth, and I suspect a sixth edition isn’t far off. Here’s a short section from its guidelines regarding gender bias in language.

Lesbian and gay male are preferred to the word “homosexual” when used as an adjective referring to specific persons or groups, and lesbians and gay men are preferred terms over “homosexuals” used as a noun when referring to specific persons or groups. The word “homosexual” has several problems of designation. First, it may perpetuate negative stereotypes because of its historical associations with pathology and criminal behavior. Second, it is ambiguous in reference because it is often assumed to refer exclusively to men and thus renders lesbians invisible. Third, it is often unclear.

Having said that, I’d like to say as well that Fr. Mark Harris has recently posted the best statement about human sexuality I have yet to read. It too is elegant and practical, entitled “We rise to play a greater part.” It is also pious, in the best sense of that term. Here’s Fr. Harris’ powerful conclusion:

In an age of great venality and greed, in a time in which governing begins by inducing fear, in a country that has tamed the Lord Jesus and domesticated the Scriptures and bought the silence of the churches, I see no virtue or even moral efficacy in the condemnation of committed relationships in which there is some comfort, companionship, joy and sexual delight, simply because those relationships are between two persons of the same sex. Indeed making something of relationships, let us call it making love, is the only adequate response to an age that attempts to reduce everything to owning, grasping, greed, power and war.

Read the entire statement here.

Relativism. Nicholas Knisely has written an incisive piece a few days back about the bugbear of relativism and how shrub and the press misunderstood and mischaracterized Pope Benedict’s statement in regard to relativism as “The Central Problem for Faith Today.” As Dean Knisely puts it, “Apparently the President’s people based the President’s remarks on the title of [this] essay and not the actual text.” An old dig at English professors has it that they know more than you do and if you wait long enough they’ll tell you about it. As a now-superannuated English prof, I’ve always been convinced that physicists really do know more than the rest of us. Still, I’m not sure that uncertainty in physics and epistemological uncertainty have the same basis, though I accept them both as facts. I’m working on some thoughts about some of the Pope’s teaching statements, and I’ll publish them in a bit.

Read the rest of Dean Knisely’s essay here, or here.

Lambeth. I’m grateful to Susan Russell for catching me up with the ABCs plans for tea at Lambeth Palace. Dr. Williams’ statement–read it here–seems mostly benign, calling as it does for a time of prayer and fellowship which he hopes will make all the attendees “better bishops.” And since Bishop Robinson has let all his colleagues off the hook and urged them to attend, I guess I should be grateful that the thing seems to be going forward. But there’s some language about covenants that disturbs me in the ABC’s talk. Here’s part of it.

We don’t want at the Lambeth Conference to be creating a lot of new rules but we do obviously need to strengthen our relationships and we need to put those relationships on another footing, slightly firmer footing, where we have promised to one another that this is how we will conduct our life together. And it is in that light that at this year we are discussing together the proposal for what we are calling a covenant between the Anglican Churches of the world.

This disturbs me because it begs a good many questions. I’d like to know who decided that we need the things Dr. Williams says we need. I told my own Bishop recently that I didn’t want a covenant, any covenant. He said he didn’t either but that one might be forced on us. I don’t want to have to confront that eventuality. Pastor Russell notes the ABC’s admission that Lambeth “has never been a legislative body.” I’m not sure I should take any comfort there, after the Windsor Report.

Moreover, I can’t see what use it will be for the Bishops who attend the Lambeth conference to spend solemn hours discussing a putative covenant when the Bishops who have forced the issue are boycotting and apparently well on their way to organizing a rump third world church that will continue to stick its finger in the eye of the Americans and the British. A covenant, unless it stigmatizes gays and lesbians, is unlikely to make this writer happy. And if Lambeth is indeed “a lost cause for the orthodox,” what’s the point?

no whining from David Brooks

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The fact that David Brooks had already published “three quick points” in a piece entitled “No whining About the Media” defending the conduct of Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos in last night’s democratic debate almost before the debate was over, indicates how bad the debate really was and how miserably Gibson and Stephanopoulos performed. This morning, Sister Toljah opined that today’s top story is “about how liberals in the blogosphere and the punditocracy feel that last night’s ABC News debate was poorly moderated and didn’t contain nearly enough policy questions, and focused too much on side issues,” when actually “Barack Obama had to face some tough questions last night, and they didn’t like it.”

Begging the sister’s pardon, the questions weren’t tough, they were cheap. They were sleazy. Even the policy questions were oversimplified and rhetorically dishonest, designed to create false dilemmas and trap the candidates in false choices. ‘Yes or no, will you promise not to raise taxes? Can you really keep your promise to withdraw from Iraq, when General Petraeus says it can’t be done and that doing so will create chaos?’ etc., etc., ad nauseam. Of course the answers were bad, but they were bad because the questions were gotcha questions, and the candidates, both of them, tried to answer them as though they were serious. Here’s what David Brooks offers in defense of those questions:

The journalist’s job is to make politicians uncomfortable, to explore evasions, contradictions and vulnerabilities. Almost every question tonight did that. The candidates each looked foolish at times, but that’s their own fault.

No, it’s the fault of a media team (I won’t say press corps because that implies some journalistic integrity) so full of its own arrogance as to give Gibson and Stephanopoulos higher billing than the candidates in the show’s introduction and intermission material. “Here are Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos!!” while the candidates stand there with their hands in their pockets. It was about as serious as a Stephen Colbert spoof, where a standard shtick involves Colbert running about the stage taking bows as the audience applauds a guest appearing on his show.

I don’t care about Clinton’s difficulty last night, though I think on the whole she did a better job kicking the shit that was thrown at her than Obama did. But I do care about my guy’s difficulty, and to the extent that any of it is of his own making, I offer these observations. First, Jeremiah Wright is a perfectly legitimate religious and political voice. Obama should simply say so, take back his denunciations and disownings and take his stand with the leaders of his church, most of whom are white, who have gone on the record in defense of Wright and of their church.

Both Obama’s association with Dr. Wright and his association with Bill Ayers (also the business about the flag pin–they brought that up too) are being played in the press in the time-honored tradition of McCarthyism, and the subtext in both cases is racial. The implicit claim is that Obama is a stereotypical liberal and underneath his polished exterior an angry black man. I understand why the Clintons and the Republicans are trying to trap Obama in this fashion, but I don’t understand reporters doing it, except to score with cheap shots. These are not important symbolic issues, as David Brooks claims. In fact, they are not issues at all. They are a kind of political pornography aimed at jingoist and nativist titillation, retailed at worst by charlatans such as Pat Buchanan and Lou Dobbs, whose condescension makes Obama’s seem benign. Obama should continue to point out that he is running against this sort of political rhetoric and has tried to avoid it, himself.

Finally, Obama has twice resorted to ethnic stereotypes in the public sphere, once when he characterized his grandmother as ‘a typical white person,’ and more recently in his now infamous comments about ‘bitter’ working class voters. In the last instance, the more he tries to spin his comments, the worse it gets. He should stop the spinning and apologize frankly and completely for having spoken in ways that are unworthy of his campaign. When he does this he should not indulge in any rhetoric of self-exculpation as Clinton did when she apologized last night for lying about her visit to Bosnia. He should simply say, ‘I’m sorry. I did a bad thing. I regret it, and I hope never to do such a thing again.’ I not only think he should do this, I also think it will work in his favor.

A Los Angeles Times piece from later in the day notes that the overwhelming majority of some 14,000 viewer comments posted on the ABC News website were “critical of the debate moderators.” The same piece also documents criticism of ABC News by representatives of the press and other media outlets. Tom Shales, in The Washington Post argues as I do, saying that “Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, turned in shoddy, despicable performances.”

For the first 52 minutes of the two-hour, commercial-crammed show, Gibson and Stephanopoulos dwelled entirely on specious and gossipy trivia that already has been hashed and rehashed, in the hope of getting the candidates to claw at one another over disputes that are no longer news.

Fair enough. If the producers of ABC News make a corporate decision, as apparently they did, to upstage the candidates and turn a presidential debate into something like a gladiatorial free-for-all, it’s only fitting that some of their own people’s blood get spilled in the outcome.