Lost in the Cosmos

August Surge or Retreat?

2007-08-01T11:13:00.000-04:00

The first day of August. The last month of summer. It’s hot and humid. The high temperatures this week will be in the 90s. Today initiates, in a real sense, the countdown to the end of almost three months of freedom from the coercion of work and its schedule. And as I count down the days, they become increasingly unpleasant (hot, humid days and nights). Compared with the open-ended expectancy of June and the immersion of July, August is drudgery. Added to the loss of freedom is the inevitable settling of accounts with The Book. The acknowledgement of failure and inadequacy. I’m forced to come to terms with my shortcomings as an original thinker and a disciplined writer.

At times, I wonder if it’s necessary to fall again into the August pattern that was established several years ago. What if, following the lead of George Costanza in a series of Seinfeld episodes, I did the opposite of what I was inclined to do? The premise of those episodes was: George went against his impulses in a number of situations, and each time things turned out better than they otherwise would have, even leading him to a dream job with the New York Yankees.

What would the opposite of August drudgery mean? Ditching The Book and immersing myself in my final three weeks of freedom-from-work-responsibilities? Or immersing myself in The Book, but in a different way, one freed from separate micro-patterns that stifled my thinking and resulted in a process that was too drawn out and a product that grew out of fear and not creativity. A Literary Surge. The first option holds out the possibility of finally freeing myself from a cruel taskmaster who forced me to throw out months, even years of my life for something that offered few rewards. I could live the life that I have, not the one that Academia told me I was supposed to have but that never really fit. It is a tactical retreat, a move that my political opponents might deride as a cowardly cut-and-run but that my supporters would recognize as policy growing out of a wise recognition of limitations. The second option, the Surge, offers the possibility of vindication at a time in which my approval ratings are at an all-time low. Perhaps, like Harry Truman before me, I will be judged by History as someone who, armed only with the courage of his convictions, looked beyond the conventional wisdom to make what, in the long run, would obviously be the right decision.

The truth, however, is there is no one opposite in my situation. I am not George Costanza. Nor am I Robert Frost. I don’t see two roads diverging, let alone a road-less-traveled. As is the case with current geopolitical questions, neither the Tactical Retreat nor the Surge looks particularly attractive once you get down to the nitty-gritty details. Or perhaps I am not enough of a gambler to bet on either option. Instead, I am more inclined to attempt to cobble together an approach that attempts to combine elements of The Surge and The Retreat in a way ensures, depending on how you at it, either Balance or Mediocrity.

This is my life. This is who I am. Not George Costanza, Robert Frost, Harry Truman. Not even, thank God, George W. Bush.

Oct. 14, 1992

2006-10-04T09:00:00.000-04:00

I was living in Athens, Georgia, and a full-time MA student in the history department at the University of Georgia. My wife and I rented a duplex in a neighborhood of cheap (some of them run-down) duplexes north of town. It was not a hip area of town, but it was affordable, and the house backed up to a state park, and we sometimes walked the park's trails with our golden retriever. Sometimes, the golden retriever walked them alone; she'd wander back to the house, wet from swimming in the creek that ran alongside the trail.

It was nighttime, after 10 p.m., and I was doing my best to digest a reading assigment for a course in Southern intellectual history taught by Eugene Genovese. I don't remember the particular assignment--perhaps one or more of the essays from All Clever Men Who Make Their Way: Critical Discourse in the Old South. Whatever it was, I didn't find it particularly accessible.

What made the task more difficult was the fact that Game 7 of the National League Championship Series, between the Braves and the Pirates, was going on. My wife had it on in our bedroom, and I was checking periodically. I was not optimistic. The Braves' offense was dead, and despite the successes of that year and the previous one--during which they won their division twice and on narrowly missed winning the 1991 World Series--I was conditioned to expect the worst. Years of following the Braves during the '70s and '80s (and Auburn football during the '70s, and the Atlanta Falcons during the '70s and '80s) had led me to expect my teams to lose the big games.

So it's Critical Discourse in the Old South vs. sure disappointment in Game 7 of the NLCS. I was, of course, divided, devoting insufficient attention to the book, but not willing to give in completely to the game.

Until, down 2-0, the Braves began to rally in the 9th, and I ditched Critical Discourse. A good choice. I remember the image of Ted Turner, then still owner of the Braves, and Jimmy Carter giving each other cautious high fives as the Braves began a comeback. The Pirates brought in their closer, Stan Belinda (I had to look that one up; I wouldn't have remembered his name). The Braves loaded the bases, and with two outs reserve catcher Francisco Cabrera lined a hit into left field. Dave Justice scored easily, tying the game, and then slow-footed Sid Bream slid into home plate, narrowly missing the tag. Sean McDonough, the mousy CBS play-by-play man, whom I preferred to his sidekick Tim McCarver (I was sure McCarver favored the Pirates), shouted, voice cracking, "The Braves go to the World Series." It was the last time I can remember jumping up and down over the outcome of a sporting event. I think I went outside, but nobody else in our rundown neighborhood was out. It wasn't one of those communities. I called my parents, who had been watching, but who weren't as taken with the whole thing as I was.

The Braves went on to lose the World Series, to the Blue Jays. The next year, they lost in the playoffs to the Phillies, who themselves went on to lose the Series. By now, we were living in New Orleans, and I knew few other people cared about the Braves like I did. Then came the '94 strike season, followed by the Braves' only World Series title. I missed the final game, because we went out to dinner with friends. After that, the vivid memories are gone. More division titles, followed by playoff disappointments. A move to Richmond. A decision not to get cable TV. Following the Braves went from watching every game to checking the score the next day, to checking once or twice a week. All of this driven by a number of forces--sure, continued disappointment with the Braves' postseason (mis)fortunes but also, more precisely, "adult" responsibilities and a growing sense of the triviality and corruption of professional sports.

I now casually follow baseball (and college football), but it's as much out of habit as anything, and it's always accompanied by a sense of underlying disappointment. I feel old when I do it, like I'm trying to reclaim something that's gone. And I don't expect ever to feel the unmitigated joy that I felt fourteen years ago when I ditched Intellectual Life in the Old South to watch a baseball game.

Day 2

2005-04-29T17:13:00.000-04:00

Every field or discipline has its own celebrities. I remember attending my first annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association and almost swooning when I saw THE C. Vann Woodward. Two years before, I -- like most people -- wouldn't have known who he was. But anyone who spends any time reading about the history of the American South quickly learns that Woodward practically defined the field. In the context of a meeting of historians studying the South, he is a celebrity (by the way, Woodward died a few years ago).

One of the celebrities in the field of "white privilege" (if there is a field -- perhaps it would be more correct to refer to it as a network of antiracist activists) is a woman named Peggy McIntosh, who is a professor at the Center for the Study of Women at Wellesley. Some years ago, she wrote a paper titled "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack," a more or less autobiographical article in which she explores -- and actually lists -- the unearned advantages she has simply because she is white. It is concrete and convincing and, I suppose, for that reason it is a starting point in many diversity-training courses.

McIntosh was a presenter at this year's conference. Her workshop was on white teachers teaching white privilege, and since I had read the article and am a "white teacher" who has made a stab at teaching "white privilege," I thought I'd go. So did a lot of other people. The room filled 20 minutes before the session was to start, and we ended up moving to a much larger room.

It was an excellent session that provided some good, practical advice. McIntosh encouraged teachers not to preach, not to shame and blame, but instead to create activities that emphasized students' own experiences. At times, she seemed to take what I would call a "Deweyan" (at least as I understand the ideas of John Dewey) approach to teaching the subject. Experiences, not opinions, should be the building blocks of these courses. Opinions, she said, lead to futile debates and over-generalizations, which are not productive. What is needed is an environment in which student and teacher are analytical (she actually used the word "arithmetic") in their approach. We need to think about race, not feel about race.

After the session, I went to lunch in the dining hall, where I got my food and buried myself in an article, much like the main character in The Accidential Tourist who carries a dull book with him on an airplane in order to avoid awkward conversations with people. (Yes, I realize that I'm supposed to be "networking," but I hate that verb and the action to which it refers.) Up walks Peggy McIntosh, who sits down at my table and asks me, "What did you get out of the session? I noticed you furrowing your brow." Yikes. Well, I told her who I was, why I was there, and why I liked the session so much, and we had a nice conversation. She gave me a packet of material on a seminar that her center sponsors, and then she moved on, pulling behind her a red, rolling suitcase full of materials, looking for the next conversation.

Live, from Pella

2005-04-28T16:36:00.000-04:00

I’m at a white-privilege conference in Pella, Iowa. I just finished listening to a white, evangelical Christian asking me and others in the audience to help him make white evangelicals forces for justice and racial unity. He encourages people in the audience to "Open the Bible with an evangelical Christian and say, why don’t you become more like this?"

I’m looking out on a crowd of people – mostly white. Many of them – most of them? – wear hip eyewear, the kind that makes one look like a Dutch architect, which is appropriate, because Pella was settled by Dutch people. Signs around town tell me that Pella offers “A Touch of Holland.”

When I told people during the past week that I was heading off to Pella, Iowa to a white privilege conference, they generally responded, “Where? What?”

When I tell people here that I’m from Richmond, Virginia, they generally respond, “Where? Wow!” Wow is said with a puzzled look, not an excited one.

People who attend white privilege conferences seem not to have good impressions of Richmond. Our city fathers (a phrase, by the way, with patriarchal – and probably white – connotations) have some PR work to do with the white-privilege-conference-attending constituency.

Now I'm trying to imagine a scene in which one of these Dutch-architect anti-racists from Seattle (a city that is very well represented here in Pella) opens up a Bible with Dr. James Dobson and says to him, "Why can't you become more like this?"

This, you see, is the challenge of open dialogue on difficult issues like race in the United States today. Last night, I compensated for my lack of cable television at home by mainlining Bill O'Reilly and preachers on the Trinity Broadcasting Network. I was bowled over by the assured self-righteousness. This morning, I've heard more than a few comments from the opposite end of the politico-cultural spectrum that contained that same tone of righteous indignation.

To be fair, though, I believe there are also a decent number of attendees and presenters who are not here simply to reassure each other that they are right while others are hopelessly wrong. The evangelical antiracist (whose name is Doug Schaupp) is one example. I found myself reeling as this guy constructed sentences that contained -- in the same sentence, undivided by periods, mind you -- phrases such as "the Lordship of Jesus" and "justice and racial unity." And in a tone and with cadences that would be very famliar to the people at Milford Baptist Church in Marietta, Georgia. I'm not sure the Dutch architects knew how to take him.

Another speaker described a course that he teaches at St. Bonaventure College in New York State. It's a course on oppression and privilege, taught at a predominantly white, Catholic institution, and students are often resistance to the curricular goals of the course (the primary one being to get students to engage, at a cognitive and emotive level, the idea that oppression and privilege are two sides of the same coin). He seemed geniunely motivated by the desire to find ways to reach students, not with a goal of beating them about the head and body with his righeousness, but instead to engage them in an dialogue in which they would open themselves up to other perspectives.

The Bible, Violence, and the Law

2005-03-29T09:09:00.000-05:00

This weekend, probably as a result of our attendance at a children's Good Friday service and Easter observances in general, Katie got interested in her Bible. She pulled it out Sunday night, and then again Monday morning, and asked me to help her find several stories with which she is familiar.

First, we read the Easter story. I picked John's version, and we read and discussed -- with some considerable discomfort on my part -- the crucifixion and resurrection. My discomfort grew from a combination of the violence of the story and the disconnect between my tendency to view the story as metaphorical and a child's tendency to read it more or less literally.

Then, we moved on to a couple of other stories for which she wanted the "primary source." First, Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt. She's been hearing in school about Harriet Tubman, the "Moses" of her people, and I suppose she wanted to hear about the Harriet Tubman of the Israelites. But, again, yikes. God kills the Egyptians by drowning them in the Red Sea. More violence.

On to the Noah story, in which God kills humankind by flooding the world (I actually skipped that part -- we just read about Noah and family getting on the boat in order to avoid mental images of people vainly scratching on the outside of the ark as the waters rose).

At some point in all this reading, Katie asked why God would kill so many people. I stumbled around an answer that involved people writing these stories to explain things they had a hard time understanding, including death. I don't think it resonated. I have a difficult enough time getting 15-year-olds to seriously consider this approach to ancient texts.

But what resonated with me was a reminder that the Bible, despite all the sanitized children's versions floating around out there, is a somewhat troublesome children's book. And reading it with a child produces the same kind of discomfort that reading old fairy tales of the Hansel-and-Gretel variety is capable of generating. They, too, often contain at least implicit violence. Can kids handle this stuff? Is it developmentally appropriate? I don't know. I understand Bruno Bettelheim believed that fairy tales were not only appropriate but effective tools in a child's psychological development. I'm not sure what, if anything, he wrote about Bible stories. Intuitively, I tend at least to speak very carefully when I talk to my 7-year-old about death.

All of this came to mind this morning when I read saw this story about a death sentence being thrown out because some jurors requested a copy of the Bible during their deliberations. At least one of the passages they wanted to see was the "eye for an eye" reference in Leviticus. The controversy, of course, would pit those who wish to maintain a truly sequestered jury against those who would argue that jurors should have access to the scripture that provides the foundation for some jurors' morality.

I, myself, am more than a little frightened by people who use the Bible as a sort of handbook for daily living. Moreso by people who would search it at a time when someone's life is on the line. Death or life in prison? Let me check my Bible.

But, some would argue, Judeo-Christian beliefs are fundamental to American law and society. So too, I would reply, are the writings of John Locke and the Earl of Shaftesbury and a bunch of other things. Should jurors be allowed to consult them, or other religious texts that underpin people's morality, as well? The Qu'ran? The Book of Mormon?

It's not that I have anything against the Bible. It's a rich and complicated thing. And, frankly, as ancient religious texts go, I prefer the Biblical flood story to the similar one from the Epic of Gilgamesh, in which gods decide to destroy humankind because they are too loud.

But our next tempest in a teapot is before us. Somewhere, someone is shouting: Secular humanists are taking our Bible away!

The Second Great Intellectual Train Robbery

2005-01-23T11:08:00.000-05:00

Thinking further about the inaugural address -- and especially about the difference between reading the text and hearing GW Bush read it . . . and thinking also about a post I read on the History News Network (but which I can't find now and so can't link to) . . .

How would the meaning of the inaugural address change if read by Woodrow Wilson or Jimmy Carter or even Bill Clinton?

When a nominally conservative president uses the rhetoric of liberal interventionism (employing American might to promote democracy and human rights), should one interpret this as a victory for the liberal interventionists or a hijacking of liberal internventionist language to further conservative interests?

When a nominally conservative president praises the New Deal as he proposes to fundamentally restructure (some would say scrap) its cornerstone program ("And now we will extend this vision by reforming great institutions to serve the needs of our time."), should one view this is a victory for domestic liberalism or a hijacking of liberal language to further conservative interests?

Here is Bill Moyers on the turn of the last century -- the heydey of Mark Hanna, the Karl Rove of the 1890s:

The historian Clinton Rossiter describes this as the period of "the great train robbery of American intellectual history." Conservatives – or better, pro-corporate apologists – hijacked the vocabulary of Jeffersonian liberalism and turned words like "progress", "opportunity", and "individualism" into tools for making the plunder of America sound like divine right.

To Serve Man

2005-01-22T18:20:00.000-05:00

There once was an episode of The Twilight Zone in which aliens, called Kanamits, land on Earth. They go to the United Nations to announced their presence. A representative of the Kanamits (played by the guy who later played Jaws in the James Bond movies) asks earthlings to trust them. He says they come intending to make things better: to make the deserts into gardens, to disband armies. As a symbol of their noble intentions they leave a book.

The book is not in English -- nor is it in any language from Earth -- so decoders begin work and soon decipher the title: To Serve Man. But progress beyond the title is slow, and people begin signing up to travel to the home of the Kanamits in a space-age exchange program. One decoder, in fact, gives up on the translation effort and signs up for the trip. Another continues until finally cracking the code. She rushes to the point of departure, where her colleague waits in line.

Don't go, she says. I've decoded the book. To Serve Man is . . . a cookbook.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

"The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world. . . .

So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world. . . .

America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling. Our goal instead is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way. . . .

From all of you, I have asked patience in the hard task of securing America, which you have granted in good measure. Our country has accepted obligations that are difficult to fulfill, and would be dishonorable to abandon. Yet because we have acted in the great liberating tradition of this nation, tens of millions have achieved their freedom. And as hope kindles hope, millions more will find it. By our efforts, we have lit a fire as well - a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world. "

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I intentionally did not watch the inauguration last week. I'm still "grieving," "mourning," "feeling my feelings," "pissed off." I did, however, hear snippets on the radio and TV, and I watched a discussion between Zbigniew Brzezinski and Walter Russell Mead on Jim Lehrer, during which Brzezinski commented on the speech's lack of clear-eyed realism Mead talked about it as if God Himself had spoken the words.

From the snippets I heard, it sounded to me like a bunch of platitudes strung together by a speechwriter who was casting about for any phrase that might sound good in history books. But I finally got around to reading it a while ago, and I have to say that at times I had arguments with myself about whether the unabashed optimism was moving or, I don't know, cute. I kept thinking, if Jimmy Carter had read this, I probably would find it compelling, but given our track record in Iraq, and coming from this speaker's mouth, the words ring hollow. Or worse.

To people in other parts of the world who judge us based on our track record, do phrases such as, "The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world," sound like some kind of Orwellian doubletalk? Ironic? Cruelly misleading?

Like, say, "To Serve Man"?

Social Security has me all shook up

2005-01-11T08:32:00.000-05:00

Received in the mail yesterday:

Your reading public implores you to hold court in the cyberspace on the S.S. debate!
(Don't make me come up there!!)

Hugs, Elvis Presley

Well, he is the king. So, E, here goes . . .

I see this Social Security debate occurring on two levels. At the surface, it is about a practical problem -- at some point, the number of people eligible for benefits will begin to outstrip the resources available to pay those benefits. This situation has given rise to two questions: 1) How serious a problem is it? 2) What should we do to solve it?

Are we, as Elvis might say, "caught in a trap"?

If only political debates were about what they are supposed to be about . . . I suspect our nation's leaders could solve this problem and still have some time for a round of golf and a couple of martinis.

But political debates, at least in this country, are never about what they are about. Because this isn't just Social Security we're talking about, just as anticommunism during the era of Joe McCarthy wasn't simply opposition to communism. Here's Richard Hofstadter, from Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, on McCarthyism:

The deeper historical sources of the Great Inquisition are best revealed by the other enthusiasms of its devotees: hatred of FDR, implacable opposition to New Deal reforms, desire to banish or destroy the UN, anti-Semitism, Negrophobia, isolationism, a passion for the repeal of the income tax, fear of poisoning by fluoridation of the water system, opposition to modernism in the churches. (42)

For dyed-in-the-wool, ideological conservatives, the effort to privatize Social Security is an important item on an agenda that has existed since the 1930s -- one that seeks to dismantle the reorientation of the government's role that began during the New Deal and was furthered during the Great Society. Social Security is the cornerstone of that reoriented government, one that, as Franklin Roosevelt phrased it, took the responsibility to provide security "against the hazards and vicissitudes of life."

The interesting thing about Social Security, though, is that it was always a hybrid sort of welfare-state program. When it was created, it was decided that it would be funded through a separate payroll tax specifically tagged to Social Security. Roosevelt wanted this kind of funding mechanism (rather than, say, simply increasing taxes) for political, not fiscal reasons. "We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program (emphasis added)." (quotation from Who Built America? Vol II, p. 428) This method partially disguised the redistributive effects of the program, which made it possible for SS to survive in the face of generations of conservative charges of "socialism." But to those conservatives Social Security was always, as Elvis might say, "the devil in disguise."

The irony, of course, is that it is the payroll tax -- and the illusion that the 6.2 percent of income that we pay in is going to a personalized fund that will come back to us when we retire -- that is making it possible for politicians to scrap Social Security. Now it's possible for conservatives to say to people: Just think what you'd have if you had put that 6.2 percent in a mutual fund. Of course, that's not how it works, and transitioning from the current system to "mutual-fund" type accounts is going to cost trillions of dollars. But that illusion of investment rather than redistribution, which helped SS to survive, might ultimately be its undoing. I love irony!

At the surface level, I think Paul Krugman in his recent columns has logical answers to the two surface questions mentioned above, and they don't involve scrapping Social Security. But to a certain extent, this debate won't be about logical arguments, but about faith (and, Elvis might add, about "suspicious minds").

On one side will be a well-funded group selling faith in markets instead of a government that protects against the vicissitudes of those markets.

On the other side are those who see the move to privatization as a big gamble. As Elvis might say:

Got a whole lot of money that’s ready to burn,
So get those stakes up higher . . .
Viva Las Vegas
Viva Las Vegas

More on the evangelical mind

2004-12-15T09:30:00.000-05:00

Warning: This is pretty muddled.

I just read this Bill Moyers piece, forwarded to me by several people. The essential argument Moyers makes is that the environment is in trouble, and the eschatological beliefs of the religious right are preventing much-needed government action. The most stunning anecdote is this old quote from James Watt, former secretary of the interior during the Reagan administration: "[A]fter the last tree is felled, Christ will come back."

The Moyers speech prompted some thinking that went off in a number of directions. Caffeine-induced, to be sure. The purpose of this posting, then, is to organize some of these thoughts. In particular, I want sort out some of my ideas on the political activism of that subset of evangelical Christians who might be labeled Fundamentalists and move toward a tentative answer to this question: Can liberals -- theological and political -- ever hope to engage the folks who might be inclined to agree with statements like the above Watt quotation? Or are we looking at a political struggle between irreconcilable groups?

First, a definitional question (or series of questions):

1. What's an evangelical? What's a fundamentalist? Are all evangelicals fundamentalists? All fundamentalists evangelicals? It strikes me that I often use the words interchangeably, but to do so is to be dangerously imprecise. So, here are my working definitions:

a. Evangelicalism is a tendency within the Christian faith that consists of several elements. One is an emphasis on a conversion experience (to be "born again"). A corollary is the emphasis on the cross and Jesus' sacrifice, made necessary by original sin. From that conversion grows the idea of a "personal relationship with Jesus" -- a sort of interactive religious experience that can only occur after one has been born again. A final element is biblicism -- an emphasis on the importance of scripture as the revealed word of God. Evangelicalism goes back a long way. According to my definition, Luther would be one. So would people like Charles G. Finney, William Jennings Bryan, Jimmy Carter, and Jerry Falwell.

b. Fundamentalism is also a tendency within American Christianity (perhaps other places too, but I don't know). As a discrete, self-conscious movement, capital-f Fundamentalism emerged in the 1910s and 1920s as a reaction to modernism, biblical criticism, scientific and intellectual trends, things of that ilk. The original Fundamentalists actually published a multi-volume work titled The Fundamentals. They argued for "old-time religion," with a heavy emphasis on biblical literalism, and they achieved their highest profile during the Scopes Trial of 1925, where they were represented by William Jennings Bryan, former Democratic presidential candidate and secretary of state during the Wilson administration. After that trial (it might be argued that they won the case but lost the public-relations war), the movement sort of went underground, only to resurface in the 1970s. Since then, it's been going gangbusters, of course.

Before capital-f Fundamentalism developed, I think one could argue that a lowercase-f fundamentalism existed. More on that soon. First, another question:

If one were to draw a vin diagram, would evangelicalism and fundamentalism be separate circles that occupy some common territory? Are they, in other words, separate but often interconnected things? My tentative conclusion, based on what I know about American history, is yes. And, at times, that common territory has been larger than at other times.

During the early 19th century, the big religious event was the Second Great Awakening, a monstrous religious revival that affected both South and North. It was an evangelical event, emphasizing the need for personal conversion. But it took different paths in the North and South, in part because of slavery. In the South, evangelicalism, which actually served as a sort of socializing agent on the southern frontier, became enmeshed in the southern social order, which itself was profoundly influenced by the institution of slavery. As the antislavery movement picked up steam during the 1830s, white southern evangelicals became increasingly sensitive about attacks on the peculiar institution. As late as the early 1800s, the major denominations had been opposed to slavery, but by the 1840s, white southern Christians had actually begun to construct biblical defenses of the institution. Given the attacks on the southern social order by abolitionists (who often found biblical support for their positions), southerners were disinclined to apply their religion to society -- to find biblical justifications for social change. So they turned inward, developing an insular religion that focused on personal conversion.

This inward focus eventually gelled quite nicely with a view of the end times that came to be known as dispensational premillennialism. The question this doctrine sought to answer was this: when will Christ return? Dispensational premillennialists thought (and think -- this is widely accepted idea among fundamentalists today) that Christ will return before a thousand-year period of peace, the millennium. At the end of that, there will be a great battle between good and evil -- with good winning -- and then the last judgment. But reforming society won't prompt Christ to hurry back, so why bother? Best to concentrate on your own eternal future.

Meanwhile, up north, the Second Great Awakening actually fed into a variety of reform movements, including the movement to abolish slavery. And there, not coincidentally, end-times interpretations were more likely to be postmillennial. In other words, northern Christians were more likely to believe that the millennium would precede Christ's return. Thus, anything they could do to hasten the thousand-year period of peace would actually hasten Christ's return.

OK, so what do we have so far? We have, in the South, the makings of the Bible Belt and small-f fundamentalism as early as the mid-1800s. And, in particular, we have a regional difference emerging over the role religion might play in social reform.

But to stop here would be to oversimplify. Was there no room in the South for a southerner with reformist tendencies? Not necessarily. And in the late 1800s I suspect that there was more room for this kind of stuff. For example, before William Jennings Bryan was defending creationism in Dayton, Tennessee, at the Scopes Trial, he was a populist-leaning candidate for president who sought to reorient the government toward the needs of dispossessed farmers. Was it possible to be a southern evangelical (Bryan was not a southerner -- he was born in Illinois and made his name in Nebraska -- but he carried the South overwhelmingly in 1896) and to favor some sort of activist government that sought to alleviate injustice in this world rather than waiting for the next? Yes.

So we're back to the question I asked at the beginning of this monster, but phrased in a different way. Are evangelicals so hung up on premillennialism that it would be impossible to build a pro-environment coalition that included evangelical Christians? Does their premillennialism preclude them from accepting responsibility for this world and not seeing it instead as some precursor to the next? Tentatively, I'd like to think that the evidence suggests that, since premillennialism is not fundamental to evangelicalism, it is possible to imagine some softening on the subject. It's not like one can't make a biblical argument for stewardship of the earth.

The most important story that I don't understand

2004-12-07T09:05:00.000-05:00

To-do list:

1. Read this story now. It is the most important story you'll read today. I promise.
2. Explain it to me, because I don't think I understand it.

The problem is, although I was generally a conscientious student in college, I didn't expend my best efforts in Econ. The class met in a large lecture room, after lunch, in the springtime. I remember little (except that I "studied" for the final at the beach). Alas, education is often wasted on the young. Since then, I've been faking all kinds of stuff. Like being a business reporter for two years. And, since then, the entire field of economic history.

So I'm ill-equipped to understand this NYT piece, which is about the Japanese finance minister, who is responsible for overseeing the largest portfolio of American government securities in the world. It is he, along with the finance ministers from China and Taiwan and a handful of other Asian nations, who has made it possible for our government to spend a lot more money than it takes in without suffering any repercussions (so far).

The "so far" part is especially important right now, because the value of the dollar has been sliding in recent months. And so (and this is where my knowledge begins to get iffy) holders of huge portfolios of American securities are watching the value of those portfolios decline. At this point, the Japanese minister is not making any moves to sell off American securities, or even to stop buying more, in part because to do so would signal a lack of confidence in the United States, which might trigger a bigtime sell-off and destroy the Japanese portfolio. It would, in other words, be tantamount to financial suicide. (All of the preceding, especially the last part, might have been completely wrong. You be the judge, and please tell me if I've explained it incorrectly.) So Japan is "staying the course." But China is diversifying a bit, in part by buying bonds that back American mortgages, which has helped keep our home-loan rates low.

The really scary prospect seems to be this: For years the American dollar has been solid as a rock, and the United States has been able to do whatever it wants, to spend whatever it wants, without having to worry about the people who have financed the spending calling in their debts. But what if they did? What if they stopped investing in United States securities and began investing in Europe? Or in Asia?

Or, at least, that's what I think the scary prospect is. Because I don't really understand the world financial system. I don't understand Bretton Woods, nor what happened in the early 1970s to end it. I don't understand currency markets.

In the words of Bobby Dylan, "Something is happening, but you don't know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones?"

Wisdom from Dad; psychoanalyze at will

2004-12-06T10:01:00.000-05:00

Excerpt from an e-mail from my father, to whom I sent an article about his favorite college football team. The team went through a rough patch last year and is undefeated this year.

Just shows you that things are never as bad as they seem at the time. I will quickly add, they are never as good as they seem either. That was my philosophy at USG [ed.'s note: his employer] for 36 years.....tried not to get too high or too low.

Trolling for evangelicals

2004-11-30T11:27:00.000-05:00

I've been trolling the evangelical websites since the election -- places like Doctor James Dobson's Focus on the Family and Rick Warren's Purpose-Driven Life. Nominally, I'm doing a kind of informal research in an effort to understand the evangelical mind. (The phrase prompts me to recall Henry James's comment that "strictly, the Southerner has no mind; he has temperament." It was grossly unfair, and as a southerner I take exception. But I also kind of like it.) But there's probably more than a mere academic or even political interest that compels me visit these websites. After all, I consume evangelical television programming like others consume soap operas or reality programs or trash-tv talk shows. I watch them like some people watch the aftermath of car accidents. They fascinate me, but not in the way that, say, political mobilization in the 1960s South fascinates me. If there were sex involved, my interest would be prurient (and given the scandals that have visited the likes of Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker, maybe it is).

Already, you might have detected a tone of condescension in my attitude toward evangelicals. It would, I suppose, be easy to dismiss me as yet another elitist, New Yorker-reading gawker who approaches the subject of evangelicalism as an anthropologist might approach a tribe of pygmies.

It's not that simple. I grew up in an evangelical household. And I wasn't just a passive receptor of evangelical beliefs; I was an evangelical geek. I was the kid at my church who knew who all the cutting-edge Christian musicians were. I wandered through the stacks of Christian bookstores and read authors like Francis Schaeffer, Tony Campolo, Chuck Colson, C. S. Lewis, John R. W. Stott.

But I always had a foot in two worlds. There's a strong sentiment among some evangelicals (or at least there was when I had a foot in that world) that one should, to the extent that he can, abstain from "secular" sources of entertainment and information. I never bought into that, even when I was a heavy consumer of "Christian" entertainment and information. I remember declaring to friends my distaste for the clearly drawn line between secular and Christian.

My decision to leave the Southern Baptist church was not based on any one thing (working that one out would take a long post), but this secular/Christian thing was surely part of the mixture. Many of the evangelicals I knew were fond of clear catergories, and the tendency to draw distinctions -- to, as the parable goes, separate the sheep from the goats -- was highly transferable. For example, if it's possible to dismiss musicians and artists because they are outside the fold, then it is also possible to dismiss politicians and political persuasions because they are outside the fold. I vividly remember, at some point in college, bringing my guitar to church and being confronted by another college student about a sticker on the guitar case. It was a bumper sticker for Wyche Fowler, who at the time was a Democratic senator from Georgia. "Don't you realize that he is a liberal?" The meaning of the l-word was clear; he might as well have inserted the phrase "godless communist."

There is no monolithic "evangelical mind," but based on this anecdote, I'd suggest that one all-too-common evangelical formulation might look something like this:

Democrat = liberal = secular = secular humanist = not Christian = keep away.

And yet, as I said before, it's not that simple. Take the "Christian" authors listed above, for example. A fairly diverse crew. Other than Lewis, I haven't looked at their writings for years. But my memory of them (except Colson -- the Watergate hit man to born-again prison minister thing makes me suspicious) is 1) that they were fairly challenging, and 2) that they honestly and respectfully engaged the "secular" world in their writings. I remember reading a book by Campolo titled something like We Have Met the Enemy and They are Partly Right, which weighed the argument of critics of the Christianity, or religion in general, like Nietzche and Marx and argued that their criticisms had some merit. As I understand it, Campolo got in some trouble among conservative evangelicals for hobnobbing with Bill Clinton in the '90s and speaking approvingly of Clinton because he showed concern and took action for poor people. (I just did a little web search and found this fascinating discussion between Campolo and his wife about homosexuality. He argues that scripture should be read to condemn gay sex. She argues that it shouldn't. But they both are critical of the Church for its homophobia.)

The point of all of this is an obvious one -- really, a stupid one. Evangelicals are not all Menckenesque boobs. I could give a hundred more examples of evangelicals who are not narrow-minded but rather thoughtful people. Oh, sure, there are a bunch of Jerry Falwells among them, but Falwell doesn't define them. He is, though, part of the mixture, and he represents a powerful strain of evangelical thought (or temperament).

Which brings me, finally, to this David Brooks column from November 30. Brooks argues that the aforementioned Stott (a thoughtful and eloquent man), and not Falwell, is more authentic representative of evangelical Christians. I think Brooks overstates his case. If I went back to my home church, I'd bet you that few if any have ever read Stott. But there'd be a bunch of Jerry Falwell fans. Which makes sense, actually. Falwell is a Baptist (though, last time I checked, not a Southern Baptist); Stott is an Anglican minister from London. But Brooks, who by the way is Jewish, makes the altogether legitimate point that Falwell doesn't define evangelical Christianity.

Ultimately, evangelicalism is not about conservative politics. Nor is it about styles of music or entertainment. Evangelicals are evangelicals because they take a particular approach to the Christian faith, one that begins with a salvation experience and something they call "a personal relationship with Jesus Christ." I ultimately moved in a different direction because that approach ceased to have meaning for me. But I am still fascinated with many manifestations -- from the Falwell to Campolo to Stott and everything in between -- of evangelicalism.

A post-election state of mind

2004-11-23T14:20:00.000-05:00

As I think about the war question(s) below, one thing that keeps popping up is the fact that post-election thinking on this issue, for me, is somewhat different than pre-election thinking. I have to confess that before the election (though my superego or conscience or better angels or whatever did try to rein in this tendency) I was gripped with the tendency to view bad news in Iraq as good news because it tended to weaken Bush's credibility and confirm my longstanding opinion that the invasion was wrong. In the back of my mind, I allowed myself the thought that if Kerry were elected, he would have a hell of a mess on his hands. But the filter through which I viewed all news was the election.

I'm sure the same was true for Kerry and Bush and their advisers and maybe even you (whoever you are). Because we all had election fever. We were all temporarily insane.

Now that the problem is no longer something to be manipulated for election or re-election but now just a problem, how does that change our thinking?

I especially wonder what Karl Rove is thinking right now. I mean, here's a guy -- seemingly behind all major decisions by Bush -- whose every moved was dictated by Nov. 2. Now, Nov. 2 is gone, and there's no re-election to work for. Bush has said he has political capital and he's going to spend it. And at the same time, there's all kinds of news from Washington about Republicans going this way and that -- disagreeing on the Delay rule, disagreeing on the 9-11 bill, etc. And this mess in Iraq. Does Karl now get to say to W, "Well, that's your problem. I got you re-elected. Handle it."? I mean, at some point, somebody's gotta govern, right?

There are times in which partisan thinking can help clarify (I can't think of any right now, but I'm sure there are), and there are times in which partisanship can delude. Of course, partisanship won't go away -- there are always elections on the horizon -- but I wonder how our understanding of things will change as we (all of us, us and them) wake up from our long national nightmare of an election.

The War

2004-11-23T12:57:00.000-05:00

The seven-minute drive from home to work, accompanied by 7-year-old Katie, is frequently an opportunity for high-level cognitive dissonance. Usually, I'm semi-frantic, anticipating the day's challenges, worrying -- basically doing all those things that make life less pleasant in the short run and probably shorter in the long run. And Katie, perhaps sensing this, often launches in to one of her meaning-of-life interrogations, to which I have a difficult time responding even when I'm thinking clearly.

So, this morning, as we drove down Grove Avenue, Katie began talking about John Kerry again. She recalled that when she was three (in 2000), the presidential election didn't seem like such a big deal. But now, well, now she understands how important the president is. And what a good man John Kerry is.

"Yes," I replied, "it's too bad he didn't win." (And thanks so much for bringing up this painful topic.)

"That's right," she said, "because he would have brought our soldiers back home and ended the war."

"Uh, well, I suppose he eventually would have done that."

And, of course, at this point I'm thinking, well, who the hell knows what Kerry would have done? Get multilateral on their asses, I suppose, and bring the soldiers home in four years or so. But there was no time to work this one out, because another question was on the way:

"Why are we fighting the war?"

Well, there's no need for a play-by-play, but you can rest assured that by the time I had pulled up to the carpool line, I was overwhelmed with the sense that my antiwar position makes little sense: Yes, Saddam Hussein was a bad guy, but there are lots of bad guys in the world. He didn't have dangerous weapons, and we shouldn't have invaded, but now that we're there we have a responsibility to clean things up. (You should have heard the clever analogy about my barging into her room and messing things up. Wouldn't I then have a responsibility to clean up? Score! Except that our cleaning up includes things like levelling what used to be a city of 300,000 people. And presiding over a rate of malnutrition in children of biblical proportions.)

Cognitive dissonance, indeed.

I was already troubled, and then I found this Michael Kinsley column from Sunday, which points out the contradictions in my antiwar position, which I suppose is Kerry's antiwar position, and the position of most of the 57 million people who voted for him.

Read it, and then answer these questions for me:

1. Is American involvement in Iraq accomplishing anything?

2. Is it possible that we would accomplish more by leaving?

Look, these are genuine questions, posed by someone with absolutely no power to effect change and no inside information (other than what I read online). They are not rhetorical questions. I am not a pacifist (at least not today . . check again tomorrow). And I am ready to be surprised by peaceful, smooth elections in January.

But if peaceful, smooth elections don't happen in January, how long should I wait before adopting the rallying cry, "Out Now"?

The end of certainty

2004-11-10T12:03:00.000-05:00

About a month before the presidential election, I spent several days telling myself and others that I was tired of bearing the burden of being right.

I was kidding, of course. Or at least I tried to say it in a self-deprecating way, to send the message that I didn't really think I was right and the other side wrong about everything. But beneath the facade of self-deprecation was an exhaustion, an overload of righteous indignation.

In the short term, what happened during the month of October was that I got fired up about the election again. My righteous indignation went into overdrive around the time of the debates, and it stayed there until last Wednesday morning. Then commenced a period of complete dejection. And now, well, I don't know yet.

But I thought about September's certainty crisis yesterday while rereading a speech given by Benjamin Franklin in 1787. Franklin was speaking in support of the adoption of a new Constitution, and the gist of his message was something along the lines of: Sure, it's not perfect, but it's not going to get much better than this. In the course of making this argument, he said some funny things about people who think they're right about everything:

But though many private persons think almost as highly of their own infallibility as of that of their sect, few express it so naturally as a certain French lady, who, in a dispute with her sister, said, "I don't know how it happens, sister, but I meet with nobody but myself that is always in the right . . ."

Look, I still think I was right about Kerry. To paraphrase Franklin, he wasn't a perfect candidate, but in that particular election, he was as good as we were going to get. But I also know enough history to know how oddly things turn out sometimes. In 1932, during the depths of the Depression, Americans chose between two candidates -- a self-made man from a modest background with experience in relief work during the First World War, and a rich dilletante. Fortunately, they chose the rich dilletante. (Yeah, I know the story is more complicated than that, but it's my friggin blog).

We weigh the evidence, we make the best choice we can, and then we wait for the unexpected things to happen that cast doubt on our former certainties.

Calhoun reconsidered

2004-11-08T18:47:00.000-05:00

My cat once vomited on a volume of John C. Calhoun's writings. The book was called "The Essential Calhoun," edited by a man whom I understood to be a sort of neo-Confederate admirer of Calhoun's constitutional theories. It (the vomit) was a disgusting mess to clean up, and I was angry at the cat. But I remember thinking that I was relieved, at least, that he didn't throw up on a writer whom I admired.

Calhoun, himself a South Carolinian, was the man who provided the intellectual ammunition for the secession of southern states in 1860, after the election of a detested and feared Republican named Abraham Lincoln. By that time, the dominant issue was slavery and its expansion. Calhoun had been dead for ten years, but his idea that the United States was a compact of states that could be dissolved by any of the states was still alive. A proponent of a strong national government early in his career (Calhoun was one of the "war hawks" who pushed for what became known as the War of 1812) Calhoun had grown concerned with the power of the national government in the 1820s. The proximate issue was a monumental tariff (the "Tariff of Abominations"), and Calhoun argued that states should be allowed to negate such offensive federal laws.

The idea, known either as nullification or interposition, was a crock, and the Civil War effectively made the idea obsolete, though this did not prevent defenders of segregation from exhuming the idea in the 1950s.

Since then, conservatives have tried to divorce the idea of state rights from the racists who endorsed it as a response to everything from Brown v. Board of Education to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And until last Wednesday, I dismissed state rights as code for intransigence in the face of a progressive federal government that gave us victory in World War II, desegregation, and a War on Poverty that might have done something had not Johnson also insisted on fighting a war in Vietnam.

Now, I wonder if Calhoun didn't have a point. Not about slavery (nor did the the racists have a point about segregation and southern "folkways"), but instead about a governmental system that makes it possible for the rights of political minorities -- even significant minorities -- to be trampled upon. In our winner-take-all system, it is now possible for 48 percent of the electorate to be effectively shut out of participation in the federal government. The only recourse for Democrats concerned about, say, John Ashcroft on the Supreme Court . . . or an amendment telling people who can marry whom . . . or legislation that tells women what they can and can't do with their bodies . . . or a dramatic retooling of the tax code that would shift the burden down the class ladder . . . is to launch an obstructionist filibuster. Otherwise, with a president who claims a 51 percent vote as evidence of having "the will of the people" at his back and a Senate and House with clear Republican majorities, Democrats and their supporters are merely observers.

It's enough to make one look for any shelter in a storm, even if it's a discredited constitutional theory in a book that is uncrusted with cat vomit.