Saturday, November 15, 2003
(4:34 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Taking Down the Democrats
I just read The New Yorker's piece on Wesley Clark, and all I could think is, "Man, maybe this guy had better not be president." This month's Atlantic also has a piece that seems designed to provoke that feeling, except this time it's about John Kerry (the cover implies that Kerry became a callous murderer in his time in Vietnam).
I wonder if the high-brow literary/political magazines all drew lots to see who would take down which candidate. I'd hate to be the one who had to bother with taking down Al Sharpton, but whichever candidate was drawn by Harper's would probably get off easy, with a bizarre essay by Lewis Lapham comparing, say, Howard Dean to someone from classical Rome.
The best political position probably comes from Robb, from some comments below:
I'm rather lost in which candidate to back, and really have grown rather politically agnostic (as in..I believe political forces are out there, but am unsure if they really will ever affect or be affected by me, or in any other way acknowledge my presence).
The best quote from the Wesley Clark article is probably this one:
Shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Clark said, he visited the Pentagon, where an old colleague, a three-star general, confided to him that the civilian authorities running the Pentagon—Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his team—planned to use the September 11th attacks as a pretext for going to war against Iraq. “They made the decision to attack Iraq sometime soon after 9/11,” Clark said. “So, rather than searching for a solution to a problem, they had the solution, and their difficulty was to make it appear as though it were in response to a problem.” Clark visited the Pentagon a couple of months later, and the same general told him that the Bush team, unable or unwilling to fight the actual terrorists responsible for the attacks, had devised a five-year plan to topple the regimes in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Iran, and Sudan.
That pretty well silences the anti-war nay-sayers who ask why we don't topple every terrible regime. I'm sure once we have confirmed our control over the New Caliphate of America, we will head right for North Korea.
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(1:12 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Future of an Allusion
Since no one is going to guess it, "the sophistry of despair" is from Soren Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death (available in a couple different editions from Amazon.com -- at a substantial discount from the publisher's list price!).
Let me tell you what I've done the last couple evenings. Thursday was spent almost entirely on the book of Psalms, except for a brief break for Survivor and South Park. Back in the day, monks used to go through all the psalms in one day, and I found that even with my busy American lifestyle, I was able to get through 106 in an evening. That left me with 44 more, plus Song of Songs, plus Lamentations, plus selections from The Women's Bible Commentary and Old Testament Parallels (both books are available at Amazon.com).
Thus I ended up staying up until 2:30 AM on a Friday night reading the Bible -- but that's not the low point! My real tour de force of loserdom was spending the bulk of Friday evening, from approximately 6:30 to 10:30, cleaning my house, while having an intermittent theological debate with my sister (via the AOL Instant Messenger service, for which I use Trillian -- a highly recommended product). I moved the furniture in my bedroom, consolidating a considerable segment of free space that was previously spread haphazardly throughout. I vacuumed under my bed, in the hope of cleansing it of cat hair and thus assisting my allergies. I dusted. I vacuumed the furniture more thoroughly than it's ever been vacuumed. In the end, I even cleaned the vacuum cleaner itself. I am truly Danny Tanner incarnate.
At one point, I thought I had accidently let the cat outside, and I got to have a fun conversation with Tara Smith about how one handles such a situation. It turns out the cat was just hiding from my disinfecting fury, as I discovered shortly after hanging up the phone.
So far this morning, I have slept, taken the dog for a walk (and now I just learned that he will exhibit puppy behavior for three years -- good luck, Richard and Kari), eaten Golden Grahams and sour cream glazed donuts, and planned to go to a party at the home of the lovely and talented Anthony Smith, the most frequently mentioned non-combatant on this weblog.
Oh, I also wasted a ton of time on Google trying to come up with a clever link for every second word I said.
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Friday, November 14, 2003
(2:59 AM) | Robb Schuneman:
And You Give Yourself Away..
I'm a pretty generous guy, or so I like to think. So, tonight, as Kotsko has been kind enough to honor me, I'd like to give a little something back. It is also because I can't sleep and am bored. However, it is my aim now to give to you enough "stuff" to make your friday pass quicker.
That's right folks! It's a Link-Down!
RAPID STYLE! WITH RANDOMLY PLACED LINKS!
- George W. Bush might have killed some girl who he might have raped.
- The Onion fantasizes my worst nightmare...if my life weren't so bland and dull.
- Here's a nice story about how The Government went over the cap Bush recently set. Is it like the NBA where they now get hammered hard by the luxury tax, and the proceeds go to help out the poorer teams/countries?
- If only I had ITunes, I could finally be cool, as wired reports people are forming cliques based off playlists. Sadly, I am only on a network with my sister, who'd merely be upset that I have some albums with cuss words in them.
- Well, Scooby Doo and the Goonies are going to be getting sequels that will undoubtedly further ruin the childhood love we all have for them.
- I scored 4385 on this Shockwave game. Can you beat me? I wish I had time to somehow get good enough to top "FUK", oh well. (Wow..I just realized this is the first internet game link on this page..we are so efficient here).
- Here's the King-sized crap we're all going to be force fed for the next 12 months.
- This blog is posting NY Times articles written about the occupation of Post-Nazi Germany after WWII, and its scary contrasts to Iraq..
- Fox was literally laughed out of court with their suit against Al Franken, here's the transcript.
- I have no idea how they figure this out, but in the 2-5 year old age group, Fear Factor was the number one primetime show watched. It was closely followed by Survivor: Pearl Island, and in third was The Wonderful World Of Disney.
- President Clinton was offered millions to endorse a clothing line in China, but the short-people clothes made his ass look big.
- Schwarzenegger is working really, really hard on his new administration that takes control on Monday. Yeah, not so much. He's been on vacation in Maui for at least a week. Isn't becoming governor of California something you, like..need to prepare for?
- Since we're not, like, at war or anything, it's probably good that more than a few key US Senators are working to draft legislation making sure people who have pre-release movies on their hard drive go to jail for 3 years.
And that's all. I'd like to thank various friends who sent me some stories, and of course, FARK, and the various other "here's some strange link" sites I used.
I'm really pathetic. Not just because I think this qualifies as an actual "post," but because I played a little game here, that I find humorous. And now I'm playing another game by not telling you my little game.
Tee Hee!
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(12:04 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Robb's Greatest Hits
In honor of Robb Appreciation Day, I have assembled the following list of my six favorite posts by Robb (excluding the one I linked as his biography above, which is arguably his very greatest hit, at least in terms of sheer impact).
- By way of introduction
- The Favorite Bands
- Robb receives a rude note on his car.
- A serious one about Catch-22
- My personal favorite: the Superman ice cream tirade
- Okalahomophobia
I also liked the one where he was getting other people's messages on his cell phone, but that seems too recent to be canonized.
Let's give him a round of applause.
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Thursday, November 13, 2003
(6:56 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Dennis Kucinich is a serious candidate
As such, he needs a woman. If Geri from Massachussets doesn't win his heart, I'm available.
I got this from Bob Harris, Tom Tomorrow's fellow-traveller. It's always fun when blogs have guest bloggers (except for when Atrios was gone, because I still maintain that those people sucked balls). I always enjoyed Neal Pollack's (sniffle) site more when it was a guest, and Bob Harris certainly has more "attitude" than his more respectable main blogger. One reason I wanted to have a group blog (named entirely after me) was that I wanted to have that feeling all the time.
I officially declare that tomorrow, Friday, November 14, is Robb Appreciation Day. I'll be assembling a "Robb's Greatest Hits" post for tomorrow morning.
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(11:29 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Everything in its right place
Sometimes I wonder what this part of the Bible means:
You have heard that it was said, "You shall not commit adultery." But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. (Matthew 5:27)
It might be weird to wonder. Everybody knows what it means:
- Never have a dirty thought.
- If you have sex before marriage, you are committing adultery against your future spouse, and/or your partner's future spouse.
- You must ignore a woman's body and focus only on her soul.
I think these readings are stupid. I think this verse has something to say to us in the contemporary "crisis of sexual difference," and the stupid readings make thinking people just ignore the verse as hyperbole.
In Jesus' time, as in much of the world today, women had an ambiguous status. On the one hand, they were obviously human beings, but on the other hand, they were also obviously very useful to the more powerful men in terms of providing children and sexual pleasure (which likely amounted more to the pleasure of dominance than simply genital pleasure). When Jesus prohibited looking at women with lust in one's heart, certainly some in his audience wondered why one would look at a woman at all.
In sharp contrast with the utilitarian approach to women, Jesus (who never married) sought fellowship and conversation with women. Except for the story of the gentile woman who has to convince him to heal her son, he consistently approaches women as equals -- which was likely bewildering to the women themselves.
Beyond that, in the gospel of Matthew, from which the saying in question was taken, prostitutes have a privileged role -- that is, the women who are most aggressive about advertising and enhancing their beauty. Although we tend to assume he must have, Jesus is never recorded as telling a prostitute to retire. This stands in stark contrast to women in our modern days who are aggressively frumpy, thinking in this way that they will weed out all opportunistic suitors who are "only after their bodies." This promotes the same exploitative logic in reverse -- instead of bracketing the "personality," now men are supposed to bracket the body, which leads to decisions that are every bit as arbitrary and every bit as based on fulfilling one's needs. We can read Jesus' saying on adultery of the heart as prohibiting all exploitative approaches to women, just as we can read his prohibition of divorce as a way of preventing ways of thinking that render women disposable when they stop fulfilling their promised functions. This is directly applicable in our day, when people divorce when the partner turns out not to have been the "soul mate" after all -- that is, not to meet all the emotional needs they thought the person would meet.
We might edit Jesus' saying to say, "Whoever looks at a woman with emotional neediness in his heart...." I know that I am guilty of thinking of marriage in this way -- more than just a more consistent sex life, marriage seems to provide a way to finally get those emotional insecurities behind me. Finally, I'll always have someone to hang out with, someone who is required to like me. Yet simply balancing out physical and emotional attractiveness is not the answer, either. We must never forget Jesus' deep suspicion of the institution of marriage, and we must not pretend that "our" way of doing marriage avoids the sinful, dehumanizing, utilitarian patterns that Jesus perceived.
To follow the traditional interpretation of "adultery of the heart" is not only to invite neurosis and despair through the imposition of an impossible demand, but even more seriously, it is to continue the utilitarian logic that Jesus denounces in this verse and throughout his teaching and practice. The way out of the logic of "adultery of the heart" is found in a description of Jesus' own practice:
Jesus, looking at him, loved him... (Mark 10:21)
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Wednesday, November 12, 2003
(12:42 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Some notes on Nazarene intellectualism
Yeah, I know I posted ten minutes ago, and I know that Anthony is disappointed that I'm posting so much -- but I press on.
I won't pretend that this has been a uniform phenomenon across the Nazarene church, but I have noticed a distinct inhospitality toward deep thinkers at Olivet and also at other Nazarene institutions I have heard about from reliable sources. Certainly we all know that A Certain Dynamic and Caring Professor Who Shall Remain Nameless's life was made a living hell at Olivet, and we also know how that has alienated a substantial group of young theologians and philosophers whom he helped to educate. If the Nazarene church were more hospitable to deep, challenging thinkers, the Nameless Professor being only one, then the next generation of Nazarene thinkers could include people like Tony Baker, Nate Kerr, Chad Maxson, Dave Belcher, Jodi Anglin, and others. As it stands, even if someone like that were to decide she was going to stand in the line of fire, there's a good chance that at least Olivet would not have her. (Point Loma is apparently different, and I hear that NTS would be much more hospitable if not for the stonewalling tactics of some general superintendants.)
I don't think it's a matter of politics. At least one person who I know has been screwed over in detail by the Nazarene college system seems to be generally "conservative" on a variety of issues -- but he's a passionate thinker who asks the wrong kind of questions. If education is going to be about passing down all the right answers and keeping the questions under control, then no one is really going to want to do it -- those who are passionate and who want to challenge people will simply go elsewhere. In the end, a denomination that wants to make sure that people come out of religious colleges with all the right answers in hand and without even an inkling of the right kind of questions is basically going to have to start hiring failed pastors who happen to have a PhD.
On the grand scheme of things, this doesn't really matter, and as an insider/outsider, I certainly have the option of not caring anymore -- but a weird little fringe group of dedicated people, which certainly describes the Nazarene church at its best, could certainly do a lot more good in the world if they were more hospitable to those who want to turn their minds toward God (not to mention those who are guilty of certain offences that I'm increasingly convinced aren't even prohibited at all in the New Testament -- though that's another post). If a church cannot be hospitable to those members who have the greatest gifts and who want very much to use those gifts in the service of the church, then I think that's a sign of a deeper failure and a deeper sickness.
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(12:15 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Somewhat damaged
Tom Tomorrow links to a correspondence between him and a military blogger who somehow maintained his blog (!) while major combat operations were going on. This is in response to the latest installment of This Modern World, in which Tom makes fun of those who act as though they're fighting the Iraq war by having a blog. Apparently the fact that a handful of pro-war bloggers were actually serving their country while they were maintaining their blog (!) completely discredits this damn cartoon! Come on! Personally, I'll admit that the military blogger "has a point," although it's not quite the point he's making -- I think that it's not always simply stupid or useless to be intellectually involved in a process in which one is not directly physically involved. But I also think it's important to make fun of people who carry it a little bit overboard, from Andrew Sullivan on down. I don't think that a person who has flags all over their car looks any less ridiculous just because some other person with flags on their car happens to have been in the military.
On another note: There is a patient at the chiropractor's office who actually looks like an elf. She's of above average height, but her facial features and hairstyle both remind me of those lovable fantasy creatures. I think she's already married, but if she wasn't, she might want to look into Lord of the Rings-oriented singles groups.
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(8:53 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
A day that will live in infamy
Neal Pollack is retiring as a blogger. Let us observe a moment of silence for the passing of a great blog.
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Tuesday, November 11, 2003
(11:39 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Sophistry of Despair
Identify the reference in my title, dear readers.
A few disjointed remarks:
- On my way home, it was incredibly foggy out. On several occasions, I was convinced that I had somehow made a wrong turn and that I would never make it home. One of my classmates remarked this evening that it smelled like snow, but it turned out to smell like fog. The smells are similar.
- I have no desire to sentimentalize or promote CTS as an institution, but I have to say that after a fairly rough weekend during which I witnessed myself attempting to tear down the latest in a long chain of certainties (I'm going to be a Nazarene pastor; the Roman pontiff is God's voicebox; the Great Books of the dead white males are of paramount importance; the only true theology is a bizarre mixture of Soren Kierkegaard, John Wesley, and Karl Barth) -- it was good to go to a place where I felt like it was all okay. It was good to go to a place where no one expected me to come up with any particular answer. It was good not to feel trapped by my own past. That's probably not CTS-specific, and I don't want to imply that I haven't had the same experience in other places and times in my life or that the feelings I've felt are anyone's fault but my own -- but it was nice.
- Just so you guys know, I'm full of crap: I'm almost certainly not taking Marion's class next semester. There are several reasons. The first is that I don't know if it's even being offered, due to Marion's failing health; I e-mailed U of C to find out, and they haven't responded. Second, I found out that the class will cost significantly more than all the rest of my classes put together, including books and probably gas money to get up there. Third, I have not yet learned German and do not foresee spending significant time with it before mid-December. Finally, there were already more classes next semester than I could take that I wanted to take (if you guys think of a better way to word that particular thought, let me know), so it didn't seem like a big priority anymore. Next year, though, when I finally move up there full time, along with my Iraqi mail-order bride, I will hopefully be able to pencil in a couple Renowned Scholars to round out my resume.
- Finally, I'd like to congratulate contributor emeritus Michael Schaefer on his impending move away from Flint, into the Chicago area.
Thank you for your time.
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(9:35 PM) | Robb Schuneman:
While You Were Out...
Recently my cellular telephone has been a magnet to the file shavings of random wrong numbers. This has lead to many messages meant for other people being left on my voicemail. I'm not really sure why this has happened so much recently when it's happened maybe twice before in my life. Actually, I take that back, I do know. It's because I'm too lazy to actually put a message on the voice mail, so anyone who gets the wrong number is not made aware of their mistake.
Anyway, in case they happen across this page, I thought this might be a good venue to get this week's messages out to their intended audience.
- Steve McNutt, yourself and (assumedly) the rest of the crew at Johnny Carino's had a staff meeting on saturday at 8:30 am before open. Sorry if you missed it and lost your job due to my fear of doing yet another too long voice mail greeting. Also, your last name made me chuckle, especially how your manager was all like "Yes, this message is for Steve...McNutt? with that "I'm 19 and a manager at franchise sit-down restaraunt #423" questioning assurance.
- Travis, Trisha called to let you know she found 5 more welding jobs in the paper. She's going to cut them out and mail them to you. If you have any questions, you can call her or just talk to her at work tomorrow. I think your main question might be why she doesn't just bring the ads to work tomorrow instead of mailing them, but I guess now that question will never be answered.
- Finally, whoever you were who somehow dialed my number without knowing that your phone was on - after the 55 seconds of mumbling and strange wind noises, I'm sorry to say I overheard your argument with your significant other. Really, it wouldn't have been that big a deal to have the kids ride with you, even if your wife was being pretty illogical in unloading them from her car into yours. She was wrong, but in the tone and volume of your voice, I really think you overreacted to something that, seriously, is not that big of a deal. Also, growing exasperated and snapping at one of the kids when they asked you a question was probably not needed either. Sorry for listening to the full 4-5 minute accidental message and invading your privacy.
It really is pretty strange though, hearing snippets of people's lives under the guise of knowing them pretty well. It further emphasizes how strange the fact is that there are 6-8 billion people in the world, and I only know a few.
That's all,
-Robb
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(7:26 AM) | Robb Schuneman:
Starcastic
Rolling Stone recently interviewed Dennis Kucinich, who I think I like. There's some commital for you, eh? I feel uncomfortable liking the furthest left of the democrats..but, heck, he's the only one of the candidates who voted against Iraq - it's funny to see Gephardt, Dean and crew as the most vocal about it now that it's trendy when they all fell in line back when "patriotism" and "uniting behind the president's policies" was in style.
I haven't really done like..massive research into his positions, as there's probably a 0% chance he'll win, so I'm still trying to see if it is worth the time or if he'll get pressured into dropping out with a few months to go. So please don't roast me on this one yet, I'll certainly do more research later on. All I know is I've read about 6-7 interviews, and seen several of the debates, and I like what the guy says. Plus, he looks funny, which makes me feel better about myself.
Oh, and the title has nothing to do with anything, it was just the name of the song I was listening to at the time I thought "I should post a link to this on the blog."
Yes, this vague and uninformed political post was made explicitly to try and set the site-record for most comments. Those seem to be the ones that get the most out of people on other sites, so I thought I might try it here..
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Monday, November 10, 2003
(9:51 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
A good joke based on a quote from John Locke
I am reading Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer right now (it's available at a significant discount at Amazon.com, but I'm going to buck the convention whereby every book mentioned has to include an Amazon link). I just read the following quote from John Locke: "In the beginning, all the world was America." By that, he meant that the New World represents for him the state of nature that precedes civilization proper (law, sovereignty, clothing, etc.). George Soros notwithstanding, we could respond to Locke with the good old catholic proclamation: "as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end."
(I wanted to link to the George Soros article in the newest issue of the Atlantic Monthly, which I received in the mail today, but it's not online yet, and may never be. In it, the wealthy currency speculator speculates about whether the current overwhelming power of America might be just another "bubble" along the lines of the tech bubble back in the happy days of my youth. In an interesting aside, did you know that Thales, widely regarded as the first philosopher, quit the philosophy business in order to increase his credibility by making a ton of money? I read it somewhere. If I track down the source, I'll let you know. In any case, the source also said that the dual philosophical and economic meaning of the word speculation is not an accident -- it was there from day one.)
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(7:10 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Conservatives are wimps
I know the world is crying out for me to stop trying to take down God, so here's a nice link to follow. The article that will appear on your screen shortly after you "click" the link discusses the various ways in which conservatives are whiny little bitches who don't seem to understand that they control everything (except for the department of comparative literature at Berkeley) and thus ostensibly have nothing to complain about and should just get on with the task of making our country great.
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(12:16 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Failure of the Church
Bonhoeffer claims that the church is "Christ existing as community." When I hear this, I am always tempted to assume that he must be talking about some other church. And in point of fact, the context of his later work is not so much the established Lutheran church of Germany, but rather his smaller groups -- the ad hoc Confessing Church, the students at the underground seminary -- in the same way that Wesley's "church" eventually became identified with the splinter group that he was forming in distinction from the Actually Existing Church. Both attempt to get behind the compromise and apathy of the dominant forms of Christianity in order to get at the "good stuff" of the gospel, which is presumably the "truth" of the gospel.
But what if already in apostolic times we see both the good stuff (radical social critique, attention to economic matters, sexual equality) and the bad stuff? The most visible manifestation of this has to be the letters attributed to Paul -- in the early, "authentic" letters, we get all the radical ideas, but in the later, "pseudonymous" works, we get all the commendations of family values, female submission, and hierarchical rule. Indeed, to take it back a step further, what do we do with the fact that in the Old Testament we find truly amazing economic justice coupled with, to take just one example, divinely ordained genocide? Are we really supposed to take the good stuff and explain away the bad? Was this whole thing set up as a game, where we had to pick out all the materials that were really God's will and abstract out the all-too-human interpolations?
What if the Actually Existing Church does have it right about God? What if the fundamentalist nuts are right? We chant the mantra of "remember the cross" -- but what does that really do? Remember a God-ordained act of extreme violence on the cross? Remember God's impotence in the face of gross injustice? Remember that it's supposed to be okay because after you die...? We're talking about a religion where God himself was confronted with one of the most totalizing and oppressive social structures in world history and he just laid back and took it. We're talking about a religion that virtually deifies those who go quietly to their deaths. We're talking about a religion where the really elite and really spiritual thing to do is to renounce all earthly needs and desires, where for a thousand years, every image of an exemplary Christian looked like a corpse.
This is supposed to be subversive? This is supposed to embody God's justice? I'm supposed to take as my hermeneutical and ethical principle -- the cross? What the fuck? All for the sake of this cross, I put myself and a few different girls through emotional torture over my own sexual desires, and I spent years upon years wasting my intellectual energies arguing against people who can hardly be bothered to read a book and are proud of it, and I went to a school where publicly advocating the viewing of R-rated movies is very nearly grounds for dismissing a full professor. And I'm one of the lucky ones! I got off easy, because I'm a straight white male! What about all those battered women who stayed in their destructive relationships because God disapproves of divorce and because we're supposed to turn the other cheek? What about all those teenagers who are afraid they might be gay and think they'd be better off dead? What about those millions of slaves whose oppression was justified by an appeal not just to an obscure story in Genesis, but to Paul? What about the fact that half of the Jews in Europe were easily disposed of, against the background of two thousand years of anti-Semitism, promoted by such figures as Martin Luther? What about the wars and the gross economic inequality and the indifference toward the poor that are all openly and proudly advocated by Christians in our nation today?
What am I supposed to do with that? Am I supposed to be proud of myself for sticking with it? Am I supposed to talk about the fact that the group that has most often proved an insuperable obstacle to any feeling of community or openness toward others... is the only true source of community? Am I to say that a religion that has consistently tolerated and even enforced injustice... is the only true standard of justice? Am I supposed to be proud of myself because I belong to a religion in which very little is ever actually accomplished, but at least I'm not "just a liberal"? Or am I just a coward for staying? Did I learn the lesson of turning the other cheek a little too thoroughly, such that I'm going to keep turning and turning and waste my entire damn life among people who will never care about me and will never appreciate me and will always want to find a way to get rid of me?
Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord!
Oh, yes, congratulations -- by sticking with this, I'm following God's example! I will get my reward! Every other satisfaction (academic achievement, satisfying romance, a feeling of beloning and importance) pales in comparison with the satisfaction of martyrdom! Here in the torture chamber is where real life happens -- in fact, I envy those Palestinians, and those Congolese Christians, and all those who suffer, because man! That's the life! Oh, but wait -- for it to count, they have to be thinking about Jesus at the time. Sucks to be them. They don't realize how good they have it.
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Sunday, November 09, 2003
(10:44 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Christ of the Philosophers
My title is a variant on Pascal's "God of the philosophers," a mythical creature who is very different from the "God of the Bible" -- you know, the God who orders the death of thousands, who hardens the hearts of rulers so as to have an excuse to punish them, and whose demand for justice is so insatiable that it can only be satisfied by having himself put to death. I am, however, embarrassed to refer to Pascal, because he is too obviously Christian. I am embarassed to refer to C. S. Lewis, as well, because he is a favorite reference-point for Christians, and Kierkegaard just barely makes the cut of "secular-seeming enough," and that's only because he supposedly fathered existentialism. If I am going to refer to any distinctly Christian figures, I prefer to pull out people whom the commoners have never heard of -- I'll throw out Karl Barth or Jurgen Moltmann, because their German names make them sound like some long-forgotten, newly avant-garde German Idealist.
Why is it that young, intelligent Christians want so badly to read philosophy? Is the desire to change Jacques Derrida into a theologian of the cross qualitatively different for a desire for a Christian version of Limp Bizkit? Why is it that I instinctively turn to the ideas of Slavoj Zizek in theological debate, even though he is a confessed "fighting atheist"? Why do I prefer to gloss over those portions of the Bible that are incompatible with Marxism? If I'm going to do philosophy, why not just do philosophy and give up on this Jesus thing?
I think part of the problem is the collapse of the Christian cultural heritage. The thought of Luther or Aquinas is no longer as formative as the thought of Dobson or LaHaye -- two pseudo-theologians with questionable training and with little use for past traditions or historical knowledge. Part of the problem is assuredly the complete secularization of education, such that anyone hoping to provide children with any kind of serious engagement with religious thinkers must opt out of the school system altogether (in contrast to many other Western cultures that don't so rigorously enforce separation of church and state). That problem is only a subset of the larger problem of an evacuation of history in education -- both the conservative and liberal approaches to education hollow out the past and transform it into a march forward to either greater military and economic dominance or greater equality and moral uprightness, respectively.
Thus a certain subset of the smart Christians prefer to engage with contemporary philosophy, a field in which they have at best a fragmentary background, and thus tend to hold disproportionately strong opinions on philosophical matters -- Hegel is evil; Kant is full of crap; Plato is the root cause of all society's problems. Some kind of vaguely Christian set of ideas is supposed to ground this critique, but the Christian ideas in question are rather shallowly developed, sometimes consisting of "the opposite of what I've always heard about Jesus must be the truth about Jesus." (I only feel that I can say these things because I have been and continue to be guilty of the offenses I outline.)
And then there are the radically orthodox, who advocate a return to the sources. Back to Augustine and Aquinas! Of course, here, too, the postmodern collapse of history does its dirty work, leading to an "application" of Augustine in a vacuum, where a citation (sympathetic or unsympathetic) of Foucault or, better still, Negri is a substitute for creative cultural analysis.
We parse out the various puns inherent in the word differance, and then say either, "Don't you see? That's exactly what's going on in Luther!" or "Don't you see? That's exactly what Aquinas was fighting against!" It's no mistake that the radical orthodox movement contains both John Milbank and Graham Ward -- both the hater and the lover of contemporary philosophy.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this, especially given the following uncomfortable facts:
- I prefer contemporary philosophy to theology.
- I am currently writing a blog post instead of engaging with a work of theology.
- I am making a bunch of generalizations that I cannot adequately back up with "actual knowledge."
I'm sure, though, that once I finish my PhD, I will have managed to get over all these pitfalls and will become a truly rigorous and historically informed thinker. I'll get over my ingrained "postmodern" laziness and willful ignorance and be fully equipped for the task to which God has called me: to point out the ways in which I am right and everyone else is wrong.
Still, even though my field of experience is limited, I get the distinct impression that the basic phenomenon I'm talking about is a real one and it does warrant some explanation.
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(5:06 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The New York Times is no longer credible
Read, with increasing horror, the Times' negative review of the most important novel of the decade. We will be hearing about this from Neal Pollack Monday morning, I'm sure.
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(3:49 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Military Service and Clinical Depression
I got this post by Tacitus through CalPundit. Since I've made a habit of commenting on clinical depression despite having only the most basic knowledge of psychology, I felt I should probably link to him.
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