Nicholas Kristof and the Gospel of Mark

In his latest column, Nicholas Kristof once again applies his single master truth of human experience: equivalence. I don’t mean to sound mean: Kristof rightly and bravely emphasizes how little we are willing to do to help the victims of atrocities in Africa and other parts of the developing world, whereas the victims of equivalent events in the West would be the objects of infinitely greater concern,  solicitude, and support.

But unfortunately, Kristof is also painfully simple-minded about equivalence. A very large number of his columns feature a witless compulsion to draw “exact” parallels, delivered in a tone of finger-wagging pseudo-democratic sanctimony redolent of a turn of the last century New England schoolmarm, informing us that whenever we are prone to judge anything as pernicious or false or evil, that judgment should be turned against ourselves, because somewhere or somehow the exact same thing has happened in our own culture, our own politics, our own religion. That we are no better than other human beings as a group of course goes without saying, and that we should tend to the beam in our own eye has a holy pedigree; but often these attempts at precise equivalence are at best very superficial, and often simply false.

And so we come to the Gospel of Mark. Today, Kristof is eager to inform his Christian readers that just as Muslims are allegedly anxious about the rigors and “rigors” of academic scholarship being applied to the Koran (those acquainted with the production of  academic scholarship will understand the need to use the term both with and without scare-quotes), so Christians have been afraid and appalled to discover that the earliest versions of the Gospel of Mark, the earliest Gospel, ends before the account of the Resurrection. Here’s the problem: the Gospel of Mark’s earliest ending clearly isn’t an ending. It ends on an enclitic, a Greek grammatical form that is never the last word ending in a Greek document. The original ending is lost, and the “later” ending was meant to fill in what was obviously missing from earlier copies.

Of course, one could then argue that accounts of the Resurrection were then made up at a later date. But all scholars agree that the letters of Paul precede the Gospel of Mark in historical terms, and the letters assume the Resurrection in correspondence with Christian communities around the Meditarranean in the mid-first century. Furthermore, as Richard Bauckham argues, the other Gospels were likely dependent upon eyewitness testimony, and thus did not depend on a later ending of Mark.

A Christian distressed about the absence of the Resurrection in the earliest copies of the Gospel of Mark would be in need of more complete information, not some liberalizing account of how the Gospels’ aren’t historically reliable, as Kristof implies.

I know very little about the Koran and its history, and I’m simply not qualified to comment on the criticism of the Koran offered by the scholars cited in Kristof’s column. But Kristof clearly accepts the criticism of the Koran’s historical reliability, and to make sure that in doing so he does not sin against his sole master truth, he draws a sloppy and  slightly stupid equivalence to the alleged absence of resurrection accounts in early Christianity. Christians need to point these false moves out when they appear.

Make no mistake about it: I will continue to read and learn from Kristof about the injustices visited upon the poor and disenfranchised. I will also continue to correct him when he ventures into his sloppy equivalence arguments, which are an excrescence upon his sharp and courageous reporting on ongoing crises around the world.

O tempora, O mores: Drug legalization

There is a lot being said these days about American having a more “mature” policy on recreational drugs, and thus vastly reducing the legal penalties associated with using them or legalizing them altogether. I’d dispute the term– I don’t think an advance in maturity is on the horizon so much as a kind of resignation, and they really aren’t the same thing. In general, advocates of  a thoroughly postmodern moral gelassenheit in the name of cultural or personal “maturity” rarely acknowledge how much infantilism is assumed by their notion of maturity.

For example, I remember when throngs of American commentators were impressed by the fact that François Mitterand’s illegitimate daughter and mistress attended his funeral along with his wife, and one ruefully observed (I’m paraphrasing from memory) “it’ll be a long time before America will have the maturity to tolerate that.” This about an elderly philanderer who lied about his life to his family for years, and who, once elected President of France, soon deployed the French security services to spy on the French actresses he found especially hot– either for future seductions, or to just revel in the salacious details of their lives. Is it mature to do such things? Is it equally mature  to find them inevitable and unworthy of criticism?

I digress. My problem with the legalization of drugs is as follows. Most cultures have one or two or at any rate a very small number of widely used intoxicants, and their use is normally at least partially ritualized. So for example, pot may well have fewer social costs than alcohol, and if we could make that our intoxicant of choice and partially ritualize its use, in the abstract that might well be a sound reform of our drug laws. But alcohol is too deeply furrowed in our culture to go away.  And it’s not simply a question of legalizing pot; many want many, many recreational drugs to be legalized. So I have no doubts that a culture can have different intoxicants as part of its culture without any grave harm, and that some of of them might well be less damaging than alcohol. What I do doubt is that you can have ten or fifteen or twenty widely-used intoxicants in a culture, largely divorced from formative or limiting rituals, without incurring serious social and personal problems. And that is the real choice before us.

The Weakness of our Strength (Which is Ultimately a Weakness): Scott Boras Edition

Reading up on free-agent signings in preparation for the upcoming baseball season, I’m struck by how poorly the über-successful super-agent Scott Boras played his hands the past few months. He’s managed to put some of his older players in terrible contract situations (Jason Varitek, Manny Ramirez, and others), losing them millions of dollars because he made daunting contract demands– making obviously hyperbolic claims about their abilities to deliver team success –as the economy collapsed. It’s all the more remarkable because these errors are not based on a kind of moonlighter’s presumption, i.e., like Boras’ bizarre and hilarious proposals to turn the World Series into an Academy Awards-like celebrity event a couple years ago. They are egregious mistakes in the very domain where he is supposed to be, dare we say, sans pareil.

It strikes me that like a great many of us, Boras has the flaws associated with his most conspicuous strengths. He has shown himself to be a virtuoso of playing teams against one another, always dauntlessly assuming they had more money to spend on players than they would willingly  admit, and forcing them to commit to players for years rather than see than sign with other teams if at least a part of their prime was yet to come (that is, even if the player was almost a statistical certainty to start decling two or three years into the contract, Boras could get a club to sign for four years, so that they wouldn’t miss out on those last two prime years– or suffer through them in the form of a still top-tier player making a special effort to defeat them 10-20 games a year).  Boras had a con-man’s  fascimile of righteous certainty; he was willing to lie, manipulate and bluff his way into  contracts for his players, and he was very good at it.

But Boras apparently believed that lying, manipulation and bluffing had been so perfected in his person that he could produce astonishing and extended results for his players regardless of circumstances.  So even if his players were clearly already past their prime, even if teams really did have less money to spend in the midst of a severe economic crisis, he assured his players that they should reject generous offers in favor of the spectacular offers his huckster-magic was sure to conjure for them in the next week or month. It’s only with the approach of spring training that Boras has apparently had to tell several of the players he represents that an extended spectacular will not be forthcoming, and a mere interval of plenty will have to do.

That Boras attributed his past success not to his adroit adaptation to or exploitation of reality in a time of exceptional general prosperity, but his ability to create realities ex nihilo, is a sadly familiar tale in American life over the last ten years (see: early-term Bush staffer on background, “we’re an Empire now. We create reality” for more details).  But this delusion is more than an American failing; for not all strengths are created equal, and clever,  adroit exploitation of others tends ultimately to produce destructive illusions of creative power in a way that genuine virtue does not. Boras reminds us that there is a price for assuming our success in a jostled and harried world is entirely a function of our very own glibly deployed but superabundant genius: we pay for it with an increasing estrangement from reality. And that is a price still steeper than the lost millions of Messrs. Varitek and Ramirez.

The Day in Reductive Materialism

The New York Times, long a purveyor of very favorable or at best bemused, shoulder-shrugging reports about the putative materialization of all human experience, provides two new reports. The makers of botox have developed a new technique to stimulate the growth of long eyelashes. Yesterday, the Times reported that oxytocin and vasopressin are responsible for love and monogamy among prairie voles, and thus people (e.g., voles deprived of oxytocin and vasopressin ceased to be monogamous).

Growing artificial eyelashes permits human beings’ undying vanity a tiny advance in a new direction, but that is all. Expanding the scope of vanity is not a good thing, and it may be that a certain opening for relating to others without regard for self will be just a single micron smaller because our vanity has come the smallest bit closer to encircling our moral and spiritual sight. But in truth even that is uncertain, since a certain modest pleasure in our appearance sometimes brings us out of ourselves. Besides, a daily tendency to turn personal conversations to ourselves or complain about the pettiest of grievances makes an almost infinitely greater contribution to our narrowness of vision than our eyelashes, purchased from purveyors of botox or no.

The leap from monogamy among prairie voles to people is more consequential and more telling. The article naturally  discounts the role of reason, will, moral responsibility and other notions that at once refine, constrain and extend our stubbornly and elusively human nature past that of prairie voles, with one crucial exception.  The author uges us to anticipate a time when we can prudentially manipulate these chemical balances to deepen, extend or end our attachments to others.

But the scope of our reason, will and morality goes further than this kind of interested chemical manipulation, you say; that is obvious. Indeed it is; but the Times rarely scruples about giving the shortest of shrifts to precisely these points. Is it because these differences are so obvious that the paper of record need not mention them to its educated readers? Probably not; the Times is hardly above pointing out or even belaboring the obvious when the obvious comports with its aspirations. But the Times very much wants to present our experience in terms reducible to (penultimately) social science and (ultimately) natural science. So the differences between a human being and a prairie vole are either tersely acknowledged or altogether ignored, and their alleged similarities lingered upon with a solicitude at once relentless and faintly creepy.

Let us, for the sake of argument, stipulate that were we to ingest oxytocin and vasopressin, we too would become more monogamous, or perhaps fall in love with new people who elicited our interest when the chemical effect of our doses crested in our brains. Would that be love? It might be in a sense, since it would differ from a satiable, transient lust or from indifference. But is love merely the absence of indifference and the duration of lust with nuturing feelings? Or would love be this reaction unbidden by chemical intervention? And whatever its origin, would the decisions and actions prompted by this biochemical circumstance, and the reciprocal decisions and action by a beloved, creating still new relations and possibilities and hardships and hopes, beyond any anticipated by the glow of anticipatory fantasy induced by chemicals? Is love what we feel, or is it an existential expression of who we are? Or what we commit to become and to live by? And if we abjure the work involved in maintaining this ongoing contrapuntal reciprocity in order to “feel” the intial prompt with which it began, is that love? Or just a lazy parody of love?

These questions imply my own answer, of course. But even if you disagree, by that very disagreement you participate in a reflection about the meanings, reasons, and responsibilities of love that articulates how and why you love– none of which has ever occurred to the estimable prairie vole.

Branding Life redux

As many of you know, I’m fascinated by the ways in which the language of capitalism– and a kind of provisional contractual mobility associated with capitalism– have become ubiquitous in the language of postmodern culture. It’s become increasingly difficult to talk outside the market, even to name experiences that were long thought to be sanctuaries from or alternatives to the market.

One can see this tendency in relatively subtle changes, i.e., the turn to “lover” and worse, the truly ghastly “partner” as our common terms for the person we love romantically. “Beloved” is now an archaicism, or at the least a starchy and literary turn of phrase, redolent of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with its pretensions to permanence and dogged preference for being over becoming. Our affections are more naturally expressed in the language of active mobility (“lover”) or contract (“partner”).

Similarly, dog people no longer refer to themselves as “masters.” They prefer “owners.” I assume that “master” sounds too hierarchical and arbitrary, whereas “owner” sounds contractually legitimate. But is it really an improvement to own a creature rather than to be its master? Doesn’t “owner”— perceptibly more than “master”— imply that the creature is utterly at the disposal of the being that owns it?

No matter. As any dog person knows, the owner and the master designations are honorary titles, half-truths at best. A scent hound on the trail is its own master, as is a retriever once a ball is thrown, as is a dog wrestling with a canine friend, as is any dog I’ve known within a twenty-food radius of meat, cheese, and peanut butter. For those who are sensitive to words and culture, there is real joy in watching the wayward recalcitrance of life when language comes calling it to heel.

Quote for the Day

“Was Moses right, or Xenophanes? Did God make man in his image, or is it not rather man who has made God in his?

Appearances, certainly, are on the side of Xenophanes– yet it is Moses who is right. And at bottom Xenophanes agrees…  in fact, Xenophanes has no intention of denying the divinity; on the contrary, his purpose is to recall man to the divine when he loses himself among the gods he has fashioned.”

Henri de Lubac, Sur les chemins de Dieu

Christianity and Liberalism (postscript)

Perhaps our moment in American history is leading Christians to recognize that while they can and should continue to engage a more general public culture, and to participate in it in various ways (helping people, laughing with people, enjoying the company of others in diverse settings), I think that it is no longer wise to make (or feel) themselves responsible for this culture as a whole or its public life. Life issues should continue to inspire vigorous intervention (on questions of life and death like abortion and euthanasia and torture, some form of public advocacy whether within and without the political realm cannot be optional). On a variety of other issues, however, community consensus is clearly moving away from Christian sensibilities and imperatives towards a kind of strange philosophically liberal mysticism (see preceding post). The attempt to arrest or reverse this movement has not only not been successful, it has often embroiled Christians in some very dubious alliances in which their own goals were not met or even advanced, even as their support was used by others for distinctly non-Christian ends.

It may be that a kind of partial divergence of ways is coming that requires Christians to live in a larger culture that is quite explicitly distinct from their own, as they did for several centuries in late Antiquity, or as fairly large Christian communities did in the Islamic world for hundreds of years. Christian life and the example of Christian living can burn bright, sustain itself,  and more than that,  flourish. But increasingly, the idea of Christendom (even in its quite reticent and minimalist American form), is no longer tenable. To return to the posts of the last couple days, I think in various ways Father Neuhaus thought that individual voters, persuaded of the rightness of Christian ideas, could elect (in a couple different senses of the world) to restore a traditional notion of a broad, tacit American Christendom.  The last eight years should teach Christians something about the costs of pursuing that end in direct political terms, and its real prospects for success in a postmodern culture.

Liberalism and Christianity in America: The Curse of Clarity

Amidst all the comment surrounding the death of Father Neuhaus, Damon Linker, responding to Ross Douthat, raises the most  important politico-theological question of the moment, one that will last far longer than the more obvious immediate questions about whether Neuhaus went way too far in the direction of arguing that a serious Christian is morally obligated to support the GOP (he certainly did), and whether he sometimes indulged in Manichean readings of complex and ambiguous cultural and political phenomena (he did).   The question is this: what is the true nature of the relationship between liberalism and Christianity?

Neuhaus regularly argued that Christianity was the ultimate underwriter of a stable, enduring liberal order, because Christian anthropology and its account of secular and sacred realms sustains the virtues, assumptions and practices associated with liberal society, above all the dignity of the individual person and an equal right to life and liberty for all human beings. He was sensitive to the “death of man” he saw emerging beneath the emphasis on a late modern bio-political freedom of choice and desire and with it a purely contractual, utilitarian morality corrosive of pre-liberal institutions (like the family and the right to life from beginning to end)– institutions that liberalism had always assumed so instinctively that it felt no need to defend them.

Linker believes that there isn’t any necessary relationship at all between Christianity and liberalism– indeed that as a “religion” Christianity, like other religions, has to be quite vigilantly set apart from politics for liberalism to function. I assume that Linker would be prepared to concede that there is a historical relationship between Christianity and liberalism, but that even this historical relationship would, in his view, give ample testimony to the need for religions, including Christianity, to be kept at a safe distance from our common, public life. He may well go farther, and argue that to some extent, religion should not be comprehensively entwined with the moral and cultural sensibilities of liberal citizens (or at least their governing elites), lest volatile and potentially violent religious passions disrupt the practical, sober deal-making and ultimately irenic this-worldliness of liberal politics.

Linker and Neuhaus address themselves to two very different questions, yet come up with the same answer. Neuhaus wanted to ask: what deep implicit assumptions has liberalism historically made about human beings that are not themselves drawn from liberalism? Where did these deep assumptions come from, and are they necessary for the health and flourishing of liberal politics? Linker asks: what are (and have been) the deepest and most persistent threats to the ongoing functioning of  developed liberal institutions and their pragmatic orientation, at least at their point of origin? They answers move in the same direction: toward religion, specifically Christianity.

And up to a point, they are both right. Not only are they both (partially) right, but it has been the unique genius of America’s formal and informal Constitution that both truths have been honored and recognized. American society was long imbued with a less than comprehensive but still broadly and deeply religious sensibility, as Tocqueville and countless others have observed. Yet for that very reason, the state could function without religious factionalism and passions manifesting themselves in ongoing and ever-deepening political divisions, as they did with generally awful consequences in modern France, Belgium, Spain and Germany, for example.  As American society (at times “from below,” at times through the action of secular-identified “elites”) has become less and less imbued with religious ideas and sensibilities, the wonderful, blessed ambiguity about the relationship between Christianity and liberal order in America has started to require “clarity.” Neuhaus and Linker have both made contributions to this clarification, a tendency that I firmly believe to be dangerous, since this very process of clarification undermines both the healthy, practical secularity of American politics and the permeable but pervasively Christian atmosphere of American society, which indeed does underwrite several assumptions that permit the flourishing of liberal order.

Charles Péguy famously wrote that “everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.” In contemporary America we are watching this apothegm at once confirmed and turned upside down. Our Christian mysteries have become increasingly, foolishly, trivially and tragically politicized in everything from campaign bumper stickers to apologias for an aggressive foreign policy. Yet at the same moment, our regnant, resolutely anti-mystical political philosophy (based on consent, contract, enlightened self-interest, and the resistance to comprehensive accounts of the good life) has achieved the status of a kind of mysticism, one that holds sway over large swaths of American society, and that eagerly labels its critics intolerant and reactionary in its pursuit of ever-greater “choice” in an ineffably individual quest to define the “sweet mystery of life” for themselves alone. History often rewards a highly-developed sense of irony, but this moment in America is one of the more exquisite (and excruciating) historical ironies I can call to mind.

Yet in immediate terms,  how can America best preserve the gifts of an ambiguity that is vanishing before our eyes? More on that anon.

Father Neuhaus

There have been several reports indicating that Richard John Neuhaus is not long for this world. His illness brings into focus the remarkable trajectory of his life, from his friendship with Martin Luther King and furious opposition to the Vietnam War to his at times pugnacious neo-conservative work at First Things. At his best, Father Neuhaus has been a writer able to write both charitably and with great rigor and sharpness (no easy feat).  On political issues, I am often well (sometimes very well) to his Left, and I have been more than a little frustrated at his unwillingness to take issue with the Bush administration on torture and preemptive war. That said, like many others I have been impressed and edified by his work on life issues, and above all, by his writing on contemporary Catholicism. His body of writing also expresses a more personal achievement:  as a man of the Sixties Left, he refused to drift into being a kind of senescently benign, undiscriminating beautiful-soul progressive, and that is a brave and difficult thing, whatever my disagreements with his present politics. It is not easy to break with one’s youth, and all the friendships and loyalties it comprises. It takes rare courage and intellectual integrity to stay faithful to one’s sense of the truth against the grain of one’s life and loyalties, and even more difficult to remain faithful to this love of the truth without becoming a misanthrope or a scold.

The challenge of Christian writing on contemporary life is learning how to precisely, sharply, vigorously tell the truth in love. Whatever their virtues, contributors to Commonweal and First Things struggle to achieve this unity, though each has its own distinctive struggle. I’ll write more about that later. But for now, I join others in thanks and appreciation for the good work of Father Neuhaus.

Traditionalism vs. Technology

I’ve read quite a bit of Patrick Deneen’s work, and I admire it for its bracing clarity. He rightly takes aim at the roots of the modern technological project and its call to “conquer nature” (Bacon) or for humans to become “masters and proprietors of nature” (Descartes, though similar sentiments can be found in Hobbes and Locke as well).  This conquest was promoted as a way to overcome violence, unhappiness, and sometimes mortality itself. I agree with Deneen that in the infancy of our new millennium, the pathologies in this way of thinking are beginning to make themselves felt in environmental degradation, economic volatility and demographic imbalances that give silent testimony to the notion that whatever real advances it has secured on its way, the goal of “conquering nature” without qualification or constraint is a violent, and in a certain sense, both a cowardly and imprudent enterprise.

Yet I am deeply unconvinced by the defense of “tradition” by Deneen and others (e.g., Rod Dreher in his less compromising moments). Liberals are right to be suspicious of tradition that does not have to justify itself except as an inheritance, because some of what is inherited is indeed monstrously oppressive (yes, most certainly including racism, not educating or respecting women, et.al., but also some teachings about work and its purpose, etc.). What needs to be thought through is how to develop a basis of moral judgment for evaluating our common inheritance that moves neither towards a quasi-fideistic defense of tradition and precedent (which really just becomes an oppressive traditionalism), nor toward an exaltation of the desiring, interested self as the source and arbiter of all or orders of meaning and value, an exaltation that ultimately achieves a nasty, selfish, materialist parody of human freedom and equality that does not honor the “human” that precedes and conditions the call to freedom and equality alike.

These criteria of moral affirmation and judgment could take several possible forms. One, defended by a long line of English moralists from the Scottish Enlightenment to twentieth-century Christians like C.S. Lewis, calls for the recognition of a universal moral sense that issues in a universal code of moral duties evident from world history and personal observation. Our interventions in nature would support rather than subvert that frame. I share this goal, but when it is phrased crudely so that it invites universal empirical confirmation in history, it is presumptuous and misguided.  I do not think this method will survive the historicist acid bath that surely awaits it if it dares offer itself for contemporary application. Nearly all cultures and historical epochs (and individual persons) uphold recurrent and persistent moral truths, but inevitably suppress and occasionally disdain others in the interests of power and domination, and many a gleeful postmodern will seize upon these variations to dismantle the claim to a necessary or ubiquitous universalism.

The more promising path, to my mind, is to proceed by way of aesthetics and anthropology. The desire for argument and indications of historical persistence and good consequences from a certain path of thinking will be respected; the desire for universal proof will not be honored, however, since it is one more symptom of the desire for mastery (i.e., “prove to me that what you claim is truly necessary and universal, and furthermore, that I risk nothing and gain everything by accepting your way of thinking before I take even a single step in its direction”).

The task will be to show that, as Rousseau and Hamann presciently understood in the mid-eighteenth century, the project of conquering nature is an enterprise of cumulative and consuming ugliness and existential despair. It presents itself as the sum of human desire, but after three centuries of so of frantic searching it is clear that as an ultimate ambition and preeminent rationale for human activity, it has only the power to seduce, not to fulfill. Even on its own terms, it is increasingly difficult to claim that nature can be conquered without destroying ourselves with it. In this way, the critique of unlimited technology does not proceed from a universal historical counterpoise, but from the failure of this project to deliver on its own terms.

Yet on its way through the modern age,  the turn towards technology and its dissemination to the “small he’s” (and she’s) of the world has done much good to affirm the well-being and flourishing of human beings. The enemy is thus not technology and the investigation and application of its possibilities for lives well-lived, but the ugly dream of unlimited conquest that underwrites its many abuses and its increasingly oppressive, global sweep. An anthropology that placed technology in service of our desire for happiness, for beauty, and for full human flourishing could sustain itself and ourselves. This anthropology would affirm the egalitarian ethos and the affirmation of individual dignity in modernity (in which technology plays an important supporting role), but would affirm that these very goods, which remain fair criteria for judging the worth of both tradition and anti-tradition, demand that human beings become the masters of technology, rather than aspiring to be the master of nature itself.  The legitimate sphere of human mastery is our own activity, including technological activity, not nature as a whole, as if we were divorced from it and did not depend on it. There are forms of technological investigation and intervention that diminish our humanity, and these must always be proportioned to the humanity they serve.

This way of thinking obviously lends itself to theological reflection as well as anthropology, and while it can be plausibly sustained on secular grounds, to my mind its aesthetic and moral fullness requires theology. More on that thought anon.