Sunday at home

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It’s a wet, dreary Sunday as hurricane Isaac plays itself out over the midwest. The RNC has played itself out as well. Good riddance to both, though we need this rain. Another academic year has begun. I met new groups of students this week, new to me anyway, and enjoyed them. When I turned 75 a week ago I wondered if my mind would turn again to Montaigne’s question, que sais-je? But I guess not. I’m still far too engaged with he world to stop and take stock.

Here’s the entrance to the Missouri Botanical Garden as we saw it over the fourth of July weekend this year during the Lantern Festival, a collaborative effort between the garden and a group of Chinese artists. There’s a video here, if you want to see more of what it was like at night, a magical experience. And here’s a picture I took of the Gateway Arch that same weekend. We went for a boat ride on the river with out-of-town guests one morning and in the afternoon attended a naturalization ceremony at the old court house (slideshow here).

As I write today, my beloved is talking with her sister in Phoenix in the next room. I’ve just been invited to a fund raiser for a friend of a friend who has been stricken with leukemia. That will take place after a trip we will make to Texas the first weekend in October to attend my 57th high school class reunion. We’re having them every two years now, reunions that is, we being the geezers in the class of 1955 at Abilene High School. As soon as things dry out I’m planning a comprehensive effort of home maintenance. We need some concrete work and tuckpointing here at the old house. A deal of clearing out and discarding needs to be done as well.

There’s a great deal to be said for ordinary life in the city: buying and preparing food, mowing the grass, sleeping and waking, work. I look forward to sitting on my back porch and watching the sun set as fall draws on. The view out my back way is a cityscape and not a very romantic one at that, lots of wires and the poles that carry them, other people’s back yards—but I love it. We live in a neighborhood of row houses. I like to wonder what it was like a hundred years ago when our house was new and women swept their sidewalks in the early mornings.

There’s a wonderful 1876 map of the city that shows our area before it was built up. Henry Shaw‘s Tower Grove Park is there, and the early Botanical Garden; but the residential areas in the surrounding environs are yet to be built. Our street, a major north/south artery then and now, runs a block past the Compton Hill Reservoir and stops. Our area, half a mile south, is open fields. A map of 1911 shows our street and our block, where our house had been built in 1904.

I expect our immediate neighborhood housed brewery workers in those early days. Pestalozzi Street, immediately to the north of us, runs right down to the old brew hall at Anheuser Busch, no longer locally owned. After a long decline, our neighborhood is regentrifying. Our block is now almost entirely rehabbed. We no longer sweep our sidewalks; there are no more coal furnaces or fireplaces

Our house was piped for natural gas from the beginning and seems to have had at least one gas light, although it was originally wired for electric lighting as well. An old gas outlet has been capped at the top of the front stairwell, the original entrance to the second-story flat. My beloved hangs a wreath on it. We have the original gas units in the upstairs and downstairs fireplaces, though we’ve never tried to use them. I keep thinking I’d like to have modern gas units, but the old ones are beautiful. Here’s the downstairs fireplace as it looks today.

So it’s good to be breathing in and out and able to savor these good things. We may even go to the pumpkin patch outside Iowa City next month after we get back from our other adventures.

town

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I attended church today, and while I enjoyed seeing my friends and loved the eucharist as always, I found the lessons a bit edgy. We’re at the end of the sixth chapter of John’s gospel in the lectionary, and in today’s lesson Jesus protests that his way is the only way a bit heavy handedly with the result that many of his followers leave him and only the few most faithful remain. The epistle lesson was Paul’s injunction to the Ephesians that they put on the whole armor of God, language that I as a boy in the fourth grade was required to memorize in my public school class.

Perhaps it was that memory, or perhaps it was that we sang “I am the Bread of Life,” with its strong assertion of the exclusivity of the Christian way, as a communion hymn—whatever the specific trigger, I found myself thinking (as I often do these days) that we need a bigger tent. In a recent post I used Churches as a generic term for religious houses of all sorts. When I realized the error of my usage I decided not to edit myself and to talk about it. Having attained the age of 75 I often find myself thinking and sometimes speaking the language of my youth before I learned from my old friend Martha Webb that there are some women who really don’t like being lumped in with men as the linguistic default and further came to realize by reading Abraham Heschel and James Carroll that Judaism gets a bad rap in the gospels. Some Christian apologists draw a distinction between anti-Semitism and the anti-Judaism of the New Testament, but that seems to me to be interested pleading claiming a distinction that doesn’t count for much.

For these reasons, and for some others, I thought I’d repost a piece I wrote just after I began this blog. I’ve edited a bit, and I’m going to leave it up for a while because I constantly find myself reaching out for some spiritual balance as my country slides deeper into a slough of hateful sectarian partisanship. I can’t be any smarter than I was in this piece from five years ago.

. . .

Here’s a story. It begins in the parking lot of the Denton (TX) Islamic Society, a tiny congregation named so as to claim standing in the world outside the traditional Islamic realm. It was Sunday, the Christian Sabbath. Three hundred or so local citizens, Muslims, Christians, Jews, and others gathered in the back parking lot of the society’s tiny mosque in order to express our solidarity after someone had fire bombed the place. I didn’t visit the interior of the building because I didn’t know whether I should take off my shoes, and I don’t know today whether the Sabbath has any standing in Islam.

Tuesday the week before—I won’t put the date down—a thing occurred that I never dreamed I would live to see when terrorists crashed two hijacked airliners into the main towers of the World Trade Center in New York and destroyed them, together with other buildings nearby and the lives of several thousand souls. I should set it down that other terrorists also hijacked airplanes that were crashed into the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania countryside. These terrorists were almost immediately identified with Islamic fundamentalism by government and press–hence the bombing of our little mosque in Denton.

I’d been stunned since the destruction of the World Trade Center. Our very young President (he seemed so at the time) had told us we were at war. I had resisted that conclusion in my own heart since I watched the first news reports and believed them to be true. I couldn’t find any anger in myself, though perhaps it was there and I didn’t recognize it. What I remember now is that as the Imam began to chant the prayer with which we began the little service that afternoon, I wept.

Bishop James Stanton was with us, having come to town for a confirmation service at my church. His preaching had urged the proposition that we all needed to touch one another in the aftermath of our communal loss. Those of us who remained alive needed to touch, I think he meant. I thanked him for his sermon and his presence at the mosque, felt close to him for a moment and was surprised because I disagree with him more often than not. I was struck too by a dear old friend’s comment as we walked around the parking lot together, exchanging greetings after the service, when he said to me that he didn’t want to go to war without God (without something he could pose to himself in his own mind as God—those were his words). I can go along with Bishop Stanton that we seek to touch what grounds us in times of great crisis. I’m not sure I understand my friend’s anxiety about going to war without God.

The Imam chanted and then translated. His prayer expressed gratitude to God for his beautiful creation. ‘This is my Father’s world,’ as we sang in the Methodist Sunday School of my childhood, I thought—I will take the memory of that prayer, which I didn’t initially understand, as a symbol of our struggle to find community with inadequate language and inadequate minds as we stood there in the hot sun on that concrete parking lot, greeting one another with words expressing our knowledge that we are not one people. I believe we stood in grace there, however much God may have turned his attention from his beautiful creation as the World Trade Center exploded. The next evening I opened my class at the university with the statement that I’d be glad to hear thoughts and expressions in regard to our country—we’d been asked to do this by the president—and I let my students talk for an hour and a half. There was a variety of expression, including that of one student who left the room because the discussion disturbed him. Later I put my arm around him, and the other students welcomed him back for the remainder of the evening.

I can now report that my eldest child, who is 45 years old, is as likely to have another birthday as I am. He worked in the World Trade Center–when there was a World Trade Center. Fortunately for him and his coworkers and their families and friends including yours truly, his office didn’t open until 10:00. St. Paul says ‘here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come.’ I’ve always loved that sentiment; somehow, it suggests to me the kindness of strangers. Maybe that’s why I felt at church the next week that our processions and triumphal evocations of God were not just pretentious but wrong headed. I thought of a Quaker meeting house I know and wondered if real piety waits upon grace without asking any questions.

I tend to think the moral universe is a human creation, more like a town than like the vast reaches of interstellar space. What I believe in outside that is grace and the human struggle for community, a version perhaps of what we used to call in my church ‘the summary of the law.’ I remembered my son’s words as he looked from his apartment in midtown Manhattan and described the smoke and the smell of the great explosions at the World Trade Center. That awful thing caused many New Yorkers to remember their town and to become citizens behaving like citizens in countless ways that filled the news reports in the aftermath. Perhaps something similar happened to us in Denton; perhaps we remembered our town, and remembering, perhaps we transcended our differences for a while.

And I’m remembering now a notion of Karl Jaspers’s, in a little book entitled Die Schuldfrage, that in the aftermath of the Nazi terror perhaps all who remained alive felt a sense of what he termed metaphysical guilt, a sense of estrangement from the body of humanity. I have felt and talked with others who have also felt, in the aftermath of the terror of what we now call nine-eleven, a sense of alienation from the body of humanity and the world, not guilt but something that makes us reach out for one another. Was God in those terrible explosions that destroyed so many innocent? Was God absent? I don’t know. I can’t believe God caused them in the sense that some religious zealots have claimed. To my mind the question is something like asking if God was in the Tsunami of 2004. All fear and trembling is not hierophany. Some of it, even the unthinkable, is the ordinary terror of the world. This makes us feel uneasy in our skins sometimes, to experience ourselves as painfully other. Some say that Jesus undid our alienation just as he healed the eyes of the man born blind; and perhaps it is significant that the mud Jesus placed on the blind man’s eyes is mixed with spittle, earth and human stuff.

The blind man’s answer when he is asked what occurred is enigmatic: ‘I only know that before I was blind and now I can see.’ The wind of God blows where it will. But in the interstices of the world, where we are who mostly lead ordinary lives, it often seems good that we touch each other, that we love as much as we can and do what we can to make the world better than it often manifestly is. We’d like to think that the world as God made it is as fresh as we’d like to find it on Easter morning. We’d like to think that the prophets and poets who have taught us to love our father’s world were right and that it is indeed a good and joyful thing to give thanks for it, even on a hot Texas parking lot in the aftermath of a fire bombing.

Habits of the Heart

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I need to append a disclaimer to the beginning of this essay. It isn’t my intention in what follows to attempt a move out of politics or to pretend that I am making an analytical and apolitical rhetorical gesture. What I argue is political through and through, a point to which I return at the end of the essay.

It’s a cliché of political theater to claim that an argument is merely political, as though there were some form of the argument or some similar argument or some site of the same or a similar argument that is free of the taint of politics. There’s no such place, no such argument. It’s politics all the way down; and moreover, politics isn’t a taint. It’s the queen of sciences according to Aristotle. It’s the means by which we are able to act together in groups of all sorts, the index jointly of how we differ and of our solidarity. It’s the creator of the public space in which we reason together, as Lyndon Johnson was fond of saying, or do not.

And there’s the rub. Politics is by nature adversarial, the alternative to war and tyranny in civilized societies who take seriously the perception that persuasion is superior to force as a means of settling all but the crudest of disputes. And a corollary is that the cruder our everyday disputes become, the more the public space shrinks as a space for reasoned argument and the closer we come to war and tyranny. The public space has all but disappeared once in the history of the United States of America, and we fought a bloody war as a result. I’m thinking we’re very close to a similar near disappearance in our present public life.

That the present right-wing insurgency in this country is a rejection of politics ought to be very clear by now. Consider just a few phenomena. Since the beginning of President Obama’s term in office, the chief goal of the right has been to ensure the failure of his presidency. Just a year ago Republicans in congress held the entire country hostage and brought us to the brink of public insolvency in pursuit of this goal. Many Republicans now speak openly of overturning the voting rights act and of the partisan intention of current voter ID laws. Republican Mike Turzai”s claim that Virginia’s voter ID law would allow Romney to win in that state has been widely circulated, but other Republicans have made still broader claims for the rash of voter ID laws being passed by state legislatures.1 As conservative columnist Matthew Vadum put it:

Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote? Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery. Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals.

And Minnesota Republican Kurt Zellers has been quoted as saying:

I think [voting is] a privilege, it’s not a right. Everybody doesn’t get it because if you go to jail or if you commit some heinous crime your [voting] rights are taken away. This is a privilege.

My point here isn’t to argue against these actions and claims (I think they are beneath contempt) but rather to present them as examples of the extent to which today’s right-wing insurgency rejects the most basic aspects of our republican tradition, and deeper still rejects politics itself. The ability of citizens to engage in political action depends in large measure on a shared sense of the common good. This is what present-day Republican strategies seem determined to destroy. Moreover, nobody should believe the right-wing insurgency’s claim to speak and act in defense of traditional American liberties. Quite the opposite is true—the right speaks and acts in an orchestrated effort to engineer the appearance of consent and thereby to restrict liberty.2

Republicans will shortly nominate Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan as their party’s candidates for the higest offices in the land. Both come from inherited wealth. Romney represents America’s most privileged class; Ryan is less wealthy but still much better off than most middle class Americans. The idea that Romney and Ryan are self-made individuals is equally ludicrous with respect to both men.3 Indeed, it is President Obama who has a reasonable claim to being a self-made person in the traditional sense (problematic for some voters who are sure he has been the recipient of some sort of afirmative action privilege).

Still, in the coming weeks the Republican ticket will attempt, indeed is already attempting, to draw upon a fund of populist support. They may have figured out something that progressives haven’t. In a recent New York Times piece, Binyamin Appelbaum and Robert Gebeloff describe the ressentiment that this Republican ticket attempts to enlist. Here’s one anecdote they present:

Ki Gulbranson owns a logo apparel shop, deals in jewelry on the side and referees youth soccer games. He makes about $39,000 a year and wants you to know that he does not need any help from the federal government.

He says that too many Americans lean on taxpayers rather than living within their means. He supports politicians who promise to cut government spending. In 2010, he printed T-shirts for the Tea Party campaign of a neighbor, Chip Cravaack, who ousted this region’s long-serving Democratic congressman.

Yet this year, as in each of the past three years, Mr. Gulbranson, 57, is counting on a payment of several thousand dollars from the federal government, a subsidy for working families called the earned-income tax credit. He has signed up his three school-age children to eat free breakfast and lunch at federal expense. And Medicare paid for his mother, 88, to have hip surgery twice.

“I don’t demand that the government does this for me. I don’t feel like I need the government,” says Gulbranson.

Appelbaum and Gebeloff focus on Chisago County, Minnesota, where “Mr. Gulbranson and many other residents who describe themselves as self-sufficient members of the American middle class and as opponents of government largess are drawing more deeply on that government with each passing year,” pointing out that Rick Santorum won 57 percent of the vote in the recent Republican caucuses there with his rhetoric about “the narcotic of government dependency.” Not all Chisago residents share Mr. Gulbranson’s views or his frustrations, as some of Appelbaum and Gebeloff’s other interviews illustrate. Still, the weight of Appelbaum and Gebeloff’s researches seems to justify this conclusion:

[A]s more middle-class families like the Gulbransons land in the safety net in Chisago and similar communities, anger at the government has increased alongside. Many people say they are angry because the government is wasting money and giving money to people who do not deserve it. But more than that, they say they want to reduce the role of government in their own lives. They are frustrated that they need help, feel guilty for taking it and resent the government for providing it.
………………………………….
But the reality of life here is that Mr. Gulbranson and many of his neighbors continue to take as much help from the government as they can get. When pressed to choose between paying more and taking less, many people interviewed here hemmed and hawed and said they could not decide. Some were reduced to tears.

Thirty years ago a team of social scientists led by Robert Bellah published a book entitled Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life.5 The aporias that Appelbaum and Gebeloff detail remind me of some of the interviews recounted in first part of Habits of the Heart, narratives whose subjects encounter difficulty in resolving issues of commitment and relationship because they are trapped in a “culture of radical, privatized autonomy.”4

Bellah and his colleagues characterized the two large political discourses of modernism as welfare liberalism and neocapitalism. The problem with both as visions of our public life is that they share investment in an individualism that is empty of any conception of civic virtue and offers a vision of the good life based entirely upon accumulation and consumption. Ki Gulbranson wants to think of himself as a self-reliant individual, but his individualism cannot cope with the fact that he relies on elements of the welfare state in order to survive. As he puts it, “I don’t demand that the government does this for me. I don’t feel like I need the government.” But he does need the government, and his individualism gives him no ground for self-respect given that need. Nor does his individualism help him when he tries to think in terms of civic virtue. “You have to help and have compassion as a people, because otherwise you have no society, but financially you can’t destroy yourself. And that is what we’re doing,” he says mournfully.

Both modern political discourses reify individualism, the left primarily in terms of therapeutic self-actualization or traditional civil rights, the right primarily in terms of economics. We have come to see individualism as the only alternative to tryranny in contemporary social life. The left accuses the right of fostering a tyranny of wealth, and the right accuses the left of fostering state tyranny. Both are partly and sometimes right and partly and sometimes wrong, but the corrective is not to be sought in either, any more than it is to be sought in a retreat from politics.

Bellah and his colleagues claimed, I think rightly, that we Americans need to renew our civic life by reviving those habits of the heart which Alexis de Tocqueville long ago experienced as the foundations of our society. Tocqueville defined such habits loosely, as collections of notions and mental habits, but also as habitual practices involving religious, civic, and economic life. What is missing in our present social life is the understanding that such habits are public. For Tocqueville, indeed for his age, the notion of a private citizen would have been an absurdity. We are spouses, farmers, teachers, physicians—above all we are citizens. These roles and many others like them, together with the habits of mind and practice that shape them, are the forms of our public life, not items of reified private identity. Habits of the heart attach to our shared humanity, something we still experience (or at least some of us do) in “communities of memory and hope”6 such as churches, schools and universities, where vestiges of mutuality and shared obligation remain.

Churches, schools and universities are communities too small to effect a renewal of our social life. Tocqueville’s conception of American life was tied to a small-town, agrarian culture that hasn’t existed in this country since the late nineteenth century. Much of our American mythology nostalgically evokes images of that culture, but if we are to reconstitute a large-scale American community of memory and hope, it will surely possess outlines far different from the community Tocqueville experienced in the 1830s. One thing is certain, however. If we do seek to renew our social life, we will do so by a return to politics. It’s the only means we have. Part of any such return will inevitably involve the perception that present social and economic dislocation proceed (at least in part) from, and are exacerbated by, our present structures of inequality as well as by the level of incivility that characterizes our popular culture. As I write this my beloved is listening to President Obama’s press conference in the next room as she works on a syllabus for the coming school term. It is refreshing to hear the civil tone of the president’s conversation with reporters. Time will tell.

Notes

1The linkage beetween the broad Republican effort to restrict voting and the American Legislative Exchange council (which claims to be non-partisan), the Koch brothers, and other rightist foundations and corporations is now well known. See here, and here, and here.
2Noam Chomsky makes this point forcefully in a recent essay at the Huffington Post, “Destroying the Commons: How the Magna Carta Became a Minor Carta.”
3About Romney and Ryan’s relative wealth see this. On Ryan’s inherited benefits see this and this.
4For the quotation see “Individualism and Commitment in American Life,” a lecture delivered by Robert Bellah at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1986.
5Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. A new third edition has been available since 2007.
6The term occurs pervasively in Habits of the Heart.

It’s not just about Darwin

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We’re back from vacation and facing the consequences of the August 7th primary election. Missouri doesn’t allow early voting, but we voted absentee on July 23rd because we anticipated being in Wisconsin on election day. Among other votes I cast a vote against a Missouri ballot initiative hyped as the “prayer amendment” and am disappointed that it passed by an overwhelming margin.

Among those who voted for the amendment was Senator Claire McCaskill, who has attempted to deflect criticism of her vote by claiming that the amendment merely affirms what is already in the state constitution, cavalierly saying she is all for prayer and adding:

I hope everyone is praying for me, I’m going to need a lot of prayers between now and November. I’m not kidding.

McCaskill faces a popular conservative opponent in the general election, and she may need more than prayers if she is to survive that test of her popularity; but I very much wish she had not voted for this ballot initiative, which read as follows:

Shall the Missouri Constitution be amended to ensure:
• That the right of Missouri citizens to express their religious beliefs shall not be infringed;
• That school children have the right to pray and acknowledge God voluntarily in their schools; and
• That all public schools shall display the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution

I wrote about this proposition in a recent post. It is (I think, intentionally) broad and vague. And I’m sure there will be orchestrated attempts in the Missouri public schools to establish religious exemptions from standard school assignments. Initially, I thought this amendment was just about Darwin, but I fear I was wrong. Here’s some language from the platform of the Texas Republican Party that explains why:

We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

Years ago I attended a service club meeting where the speaker talked about the controversy that eventuated in Wisconsin v. Yoder, the United states Supreme Court Decision that allowed Amish children to finish their education at the eighth grade.

I had attended this service club meeting with a friend who was also my priest at the time. I said to him, “Why don’t we just let these harmless people do as they wish?” His answer surprised me. He said, “It depends on who you think is the citizen.” The cognitive dissonance between my question and my priest’s answer informs my thinking about matters of this sort to this day. The Amish won their case, as I then thought they should have done, but my thinking has changed. Back in the early nineteen seventies I wasn’t paying sufficient attention to what I have termed public reason in a recent post.

My thinking then was something like this: the Amish do no harm (at that time I had no idea how much good Anabapbists, Amish and Mennonites, do; I just thought of them as benign), and since they do no harm, why must we seek to control how they educate their chiildren? My priest had brought me up short by reminding me that all children in the United States of America have a certain birthright, which one could claim is the right to be educated for citizenship, as human individuals; and that this right supersedes all claims on their attention made by merely cultural factors, religion, parental authority, loyalty to a social class or ethnic group, etc. It’s the rock-bottom claim of American public education—that the truth will make you free. Additionally, this is the fundamental assumption of Brown v. Board of Education, that all children, equally, have an entitlement to learn. Justice Douglas made this point as part of his dissenting opinion in Wisconsin v. Yoder:

While the parents, absent dissent, normally speak for the entire family, the education of the child is a matter on which the child will often have decided views. He may want to be a pianist or an astronaut or an oceanographer. To do so he will have to break from the Amish tradition.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
It is the future of the students, not the future of the parents, that is imperiled by today’s decision. If a parent keeps his child out of school beyond the grade school, then the child will be forever barred from entry into the new and amazing world of diversity that we have today.

Unfortunately, we have extended (and still extend) this entitlement rather crudely, by generally requiring that all children attend school until the age of 16, and more recently with laws requiring bussing and other measures designed to promote equality of access. Still more recently we have added a crude (some would say mindless) emphasis on standardized testing to the enforcement mix in response to growing demands for school accountability (so called). Thus the entitlement to learn has morphed from a right that belonged to students as individuals into a cultural imperative enjoined upon schools and teachers that students must succeed in ways that are statistically measurable.

Still, the ideal of universal education is something Americans seemed more or less in agrement about over time, until fairly recently. What has changed is that public education is now widely regarded as part of a liberal establishment that has been partially undermined by postmodern academic critiques of science and evidence based thinking, particularly rhetorical critiques such as that of Stanley Fish, and that has come to be portrayed in popular culture as effete, elitist, and self-serving by creationists, opponents of global warming such as George Will, antifeminists, opponents of gay rights, religious fundamentalists, and others. This is a vast oversimplification, but I think it’s a fair claim that a now substantial backlash against the liberal establishment of the modern era is in full swing.

This backlash is not so much conservative as it is anti-liberal. Texas Republicans, and now the citizens of Missouri, however much they may look nostalgically towards parts of our history we would do well to forget (i. e. the Texas republic and the antebellum south), are now on the march against what Justice Douglas called “the new and amazing world of diversity that we have today,” using the language of individualism and the guarantees of the first amendment, as Paul Ryan frequently does, to deny legitimacy to the fundamental impulses behind those guarantees.