The following video has over 4 million views, so you may well have seen it. I’m only putting it up so that I don’t lose it. Noah Kalina is a photographer (he seems to do collages). He took a picture of himself every day from the age of 19. He is now 32. You get to watch him grow (?) from a boy into a man. After watching it, I felt 12.5 years older.
Don Cupitt is my kind of theologian. Of course, I generally like theologians. What I don’t like are apologist. In other words: I’m keen on the search for God, I’m not on the process of trying to shoehorn God into some existing dogma. To Cupitt, God is an invention: first there was Man and He created God. This is discussed in the chapter “Non-Realism About God” in Philosophy Bites.
What I most like about his thinking is the idea that God is an evolving concept. He argues that Christianity managed to evolve well enough up to the 17th century, but it has had trouble since then. This is understandable. After all, life wasn’t all that different between the time of Jesus and the middle of the 1600s. But I have long wondered why it is that people in the modern world continue to cling to a religion that was developed for people 2000 years earlier. Certainly we have very different needs.
Just look at the diversity of our culture. The 2000 year old solution to dealing with neighbors who were gay or worked on Sunday was to stone them to death. Admittedly, modern Christians have chosen simply not to abide by their religion on these points. But they continue to stick with it in less drastic ways. This is what leads to Christian calls to deny gay rights and close liquor stores on Sunday.
There are much more fundamental ways that Christianity fails the modern believer, however. To me, the greatest modern problem is social alienation. And to this, Christianity offers nothing but the shared belief of the one belief people most distinctly do not share. And this leads to things like new age mysticism, which may lack much depth, but at least is devoid of dogma.
I’m not sure why the modern era lacks any important theological movement. A 2000 (or 1400 or 3000) year old religion has little to offer us in concrete terms. But it sure is great for justifying the worst kind of bigotry. And that’s another issue we could use some help on.
If you step back from this for a second, you realize that what they are saying is “we are not for marriage equality, but we are for tolerance.” So, quite literally, what is being suggested is that certain people will be tolerated instead of made equal. And that is the way tolerance has operated for most of its history in the modern West: it is always a kind of substitute for equality, or supplement to equality. Now, again, that is not the worst possibility if the alternative is extinction or persecution or death or exclusion from basic rights. Again, I am not against tolerance, but I do think that our tendency to just get sleepy and happy when we hear the word “tolerance” is a problem.
—Wendy Brown
Interview in Philosophy Bites
Glenn Greenwald sent me to a CNN article from 1 July 2008, Mandela Off U.S. Terrorism Watch List. The first sentence of the article reads, “Former South African President Nelson Mandela is to be removed from a U.S. terrorism watch list under a bill President Bush signed Tuesday.” You’ve got that right: Nelson Mandela was considered a terrorist by the United States until the middle of 2008.
The point here is that when we say “terrorist” in the United States, we don’t necessarily mean anything other than, “someone we don’t like.” In the case of Nelson Mandela, the problem was most likely American corporate interests in South Africa who didn’t like his political work. And that’s very important when we claim that torture is acceptable to fight “terrorism.” We tend to expand the definition of that word to whatever we find useful.
In the end, I truly believe that the use of torture says a great deal about the torturer and very little about the tortured. And when our definition of a terrorist can include Nelson Mandela for almost 7 years of the “war on terror” (when he was in his 80s), it means the United States government is willing to torture anyone.
The following chart was put together by Todd Lindeman at the Washington Post. It shows the top causes of violent death by age group in the United States. The most striking thing is that for people over 35 years old, gun suicide is by far the most common cause of death. And for adults and teens less than that, gun murder is by far the biggest cause of death. It is a sobering chart:
Click on the image to see in at full resolution.
I think it is good when very wealthy people have a certain amount of guilt about economic inequality. I congratulate them on being human. But I don’t give them any extra credit. And that is at the core of my disappointment watching Jamie Johnson’s documentary The One Percent. Johnson is the heir of Johnson & Johnson. He seems to have realized that his position in life owes much to luck and little to any greatness of character or brilliance.
The film contains a number of interesting interviews. The best is with economist Milton Friedman. There were two aspects of it worth note. First, Friedman shows very clearly that his economic ideas are nothing more than religious faith. He argues that progressive taxation is socialism. This goes along with his work with Augusto Pinochet in Chile. As all of Friedman’s “free market” proposals failed, the reason was never the ideas themselves. It was always that the country wasn’t free market enough. This is a typically libertarian view that we saw very often after the financial collapse of 2008: the problem wasn’t deregulation, it was that there was still some regulation that was stopping the markets from working perfectly.
The second notable part of the interview gets to the heart of the problem with the whole film. Johnson really doesn’t know what he’s talking about. His arguments come down to nothing more than, “Don’t you think that maybe the rich are too rich?” Friedman pointed out that while the rich may have gotten much more wealthy over the last 30 years, the poor have at least seen some improvement in their standard of living. Johnson countered anemically that the gains should have been more equally shared. Why? He doesn’t seem to have an answer. The truth is that many of the poor have seen their standard of living decrease. But the more important point is not that the poor are better off, it is how much better the poor would be doing if, for example, we still had strong unions in this country. To Friedman it is just a given that if the rich got less there would be no innovation, no productivity growth. But Johnson could not counter him on this because he didn’t understand what he was talking about.
Early on in the film, the Johnson family financial adviser Brian McNally tells Johnson, “You’re making a fool’s argument.” And that’s true. Jamie Johnson seems to think that maybe dividends should be taxed as regular income and maybe we should have an estate tax. But he doesn’t begin to get to the core of the problem. And that core is exemplified by the privilege of Mr. Johnson himself. Normally, no one would take seriously a documentary filmmaker who is so ignorant of his subject. And he certainly wouldn’t have been writing a column for Vanity Fair. So even without his money, he is way ahead in life.
But at least Johnson is vaguely aware of the pure luck that is his life. One of the interviews in the film demonstrates the more typical beliefs of the rich about their wealth. Roy O. Martin is the owner of Martin Lumber Company. He is certain that God chose him. He also has a very curious understanding of Jesus’ claim about rich people and the eye of a needle. Rich people of Jesus’ time were the most moral people, Martin explains. Therefore, Jesus is saying that being rich is not enough to get into heaven, not that they can’t get into heaven. Even though that is explicitly what he says.
I can see that this film does some good in terms of pointing out income inequality. And it does highlight some of the biggest problems. But this issue is much deeper than tax policy. And I hate to see very real problems trivialized by a filmmaker who doesn’t know what he’s doing. I’m glad that Jamie Johnson feels guilty about his wealth. That makes him a human being. It doesn’t make him a knowledgeable truth teller.
Here is the whole 80 minute video, which is not totally without worth:
The St. Louis CBS affiliate reported last Friday that a 61-year-old Best Buy employee was bludgeoned by a couple in their late 30s leaving the story after the employee asked to see their receipt. I’m glad to see that everyone is getting into the holiday spirit. You know: Christmas. Christian. And what no one expects: the Spanish Inquisition![1]
There are two things of note about this incident. First, no one died. It looks like the couple behaved very badly. Had they had guns, who knows what would have happened. Clearly, it would not have made the encounter more “polite.”
The second thing to note here is that this was likely a racial incident. The report noted rather awkwardly, “It’s considered normal procedure by most to be asked for your receipt while leaving a busy store like Best Buy with expensive items.” In fact, my experience at Best Buy is that I am never asked for a receipt. Years ago, when they first started showing up everywhere, they did ask for receipts. I haven’t been asked in 15 years.
I suspect that the couple felt they were being singled out. Clearly, I don’t know if this is true. I don’t know the races of the people involved. But why would people behave like that? I’m not suggesting that their reactions were appropriate. It is never okay to bludgeon someone over something like this. But I think it is understandable.
So if you do any after Christmas shopping: be polite to the employees. And by “polite” I do not mean to bring a gun.
[1] All together in one place—what no one expects:
[As anyone who reads this blog knows, the people who comment around here and very smart and knowledgeable. And opinionated. One of these people is Mike Blottin. And I am proud to offer the following as the first article here by an outside writer. Mike makes an interesting argument about how the (understandably) sanitized news coverage of horrific events—be they mass shootings or drone strikes—allow us to be more accepting of them. I’m not sure what can be done about this issue. But it is food for thought. -FM]
So I imagine folks living in the United States know all about the shooting that left 27 dead a week ago last Friday at Sandy Hook Elementary, in Newtown CT. For those of your who don’t, read this article from that day. [But really? -FM]
It’s fairly safe to assume that, given the details and number of dead, especially children, the elementary school must have been a pretty gory scene. Something I’ve heard time and time again in the news is that emergency response and public safety personal instructed survivors to close their eyes, while leading them out through the carnage. Again, the assumption is that they did so because it was such a gory scene.
I can understand why they’d tell a young child to do this. Seeing dead bodies, bleeding out, especially of kids their own age who they each might have known personally if not intimately, would almost certainly be traumatic. Likewise, I can understand why they told adult survivors to do so, especially considering that some must have had quasi-parental relationship to a number of the children. But I have a question.
Our culture seems to, if not glorify, normalize violence. Not just physical violence, but emotional and psychological as well. Do you think it would have been better to not have closed the rest of our eyes—the eyes of all of us on the outside? With our eyes closed we block out much of the horror of the event, in addition to those little yet poignant details that impart the most striking impressions. Such details could serve as a powerful motivational force, driving all of us to do whatever it takes to forestall such events from happening again—to make the conditions leading up to them less and less potent.
Those who lived through the Sandy Hook tragedy saw enough of the horrors. But the rest of us? I wonder if it is right to spare ourselves from the full impact of such cataclysms. We’re shocked and saddened by the statistics (26 killed, 20 children), but that’s as far as it goes. And as a result, we don’t actually do anything remotely significant about it.
This is something like willful ignorance: ignoring the preconditions leading up to such a massacre. Instead, we rationalize them. The shooter was crazy; the exception not the rule; a bad apple… And in doing such we end up de facto contributing to them, in one way or another.
Before we begin to meaningfully deal with these events, as individuals and a society, perhaps we must first take our blinders off. We need to get past our own misunderstanding, fears, and hatred—the tunnel vision, that stops us from seeing the world as it really is. And given that, who would argue that what happened at Sandy Creek had to happen? That it is the price we pay for freedom or some other abstract concept?
There are, of course, problems with this “truth by focus group” approach. For instance, polling data show that a majority of Americans do not know that electrons are smaller than atoms. The diffusion of knowledge would be greatly impeded if science teachers were expected to adjust their ideas accordingly. Moreover, recent history suggests that such an approach can be politically self-defeating. Conservatives hammered for years on the idea that welfare perpetuated and even caused poverty, in spite of the overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary. Those who wanted to preserve the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program (AFDC) as a federal entitlement grew tired of challenging these misconceptions and came to accept the argument that the welfare system needed “reform.” Their idea of reform, of course, was different from that of their conservative opponents: they wanted child care, health care, job training, and, most important, access to employment that paid enough to lift a family formerly receiving welfare out of poverty. But accepting the basic premise of welfare’s opponents—that welfare was a cause, rather than a result, of poverty—proved to be more costly than they had anticipated. Within a couple of years President Clinton had signed a bill abolishing what had been, at least since the 1960s, a major federal entitlement for poor children.
—Dean Baker & Mark Weisbrot
Social Security: the Phony Crisis
Back in the early 1990s, Tom Tomorrow published a cartoon with a series of people in different situations, all with guns in hand. He was making fun of the saying, “An armed society is a polite society.” In each panel, this was indeed the case. The last panel was a man standing over a dead man on the ground, “I said after you!” It was a great cartoon because it gets to the heart of this myth. An armed society is a polite society until it isn’t.
WCMH-TV in Columbus, OH just reported on a case which shows the lie to this kind of gun apologetics. People were celebrating Christmas Eve at a nightclub in Columbus, the Breeze. Someone sprayed a group of people with champagne. It doesn’t say whether it was intentional, but I don’t doubt it. People are like that. Big deal. Well, one of the people in the group thought it was a big deal. He or she pulled out a gun and started shooting. One man was shot twice in the chest and a man and a women were injured by flying debris. They are all now in the hospital in stable condition.
It looks like the shooter is not in custody. The police aren’t saying. But they are saying that they don’t have the gun. I would think if they have one they have the other. But that isn’t really the point. The shooter isn’t likely any great menace to society. Instead, he or she is just some drunk who shouldn’t have a gun.
I’m sure there are situations where it is best that everyone have a gun. A war, for example. But in general, I just don’t see that having more guns is going to make a situation safer. Even in a situation where there is a shooter, having a gun has various disadvantages. It makes it more likely that you will become a target. And it might make you attack when you should just run. But the main thing is that in the overwhelming number of cases, there is no shooter. And having a gun is most likely to turn you into a perpetrator rather than a hero.
For years I’ve thought that there was something very obvious under the complaints of (mostly conservative) Christians when people say “happy holidays” rather than “merry Christmas.” But I never took the time to work it out. Well, I spent some time this morning. And it turns out to be about as awful as I had suspected.
The substitution of “happy holidays” implicitly relegates Christmas to the level of all other seasonal holidays. Christians want to be told that Christmas is more than just their holiday—an expression of their religious belief. They want to be told that Christmas is true—an expression of what God really is and not just their opinion.
A moment’s thought on this issue will show that this is true. But notice how the deconstruction lays bare the absurdity of the request. It is not enough to include Christmas in a greeting, the greeting must single out Christmas because, you know, unlike those other religions, it’s true! Now, I’m as deluded as the next man, but I don’t require that others pander to my delusions.
Another aspect of this is the use of majority status to silence the minority. The argument goes something like this, “Most people in the United States are Christians, so why not just say ‘merry Christmas’?” This would be a strong argument if anyone were avoiding a discussion of the holiday. But “happy holidays” does not exclude Christmas, while “merry Christmas” does exclude others. The truth is that minority groups are, for a number of good reasons, insecure. So if anyone is unhappy it ought to be the Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, and so on. With almost 80% of Americans being Christians, what do they have to worry about?
The whole issue is made worse because the very Christians who hate “happy holidays” want to “put the Christ back in Christmas!” This creates a problem for those of us who think that Christmas is a secular holiday having nothing to do with religion. We have no problem with “merry Christmas” because it is just that federal holiday when you are expected to give everyone gifts and cook a lot of food. But if somehow people manage to turn Christmas into a religious holiday, then we will have a problem with “merry Christmas.”
Regardless, I don’t think it matters. Either Christmas is a religious holiday, in which case most people won’t pay it much attention—certainly not clerks at Safeway. Or it is a secular holiday, in which case who cares what we call it? Regardless, it is special pleading for Christians to ask us to think any more of their religion than anyone else’s.
As a practical matter, I no longer use “happy holidays” or “merry Christmas.” I don’t use “merry Christmas” because I think it is exclusive and I don’t want to exclude anyone. And now I don’t use “happy holiday” because I don’t want to piss off some angry Christian looking for a fight on the eve of the celebration of his savior. So now I just say, “Have a good day off!” And isn’t that what we all really want: a good day off?
Last night I watched The Bicycle Thieves again. It is a remarkable little film. Its storytelling is so crisp that it is impossible not to be carried away with it. Of course, it must be; there isn’t much of a story. The hero, Antonio, is just about at rock bottom when he gets a job. To have the job, he must have a bicycle. On the first day of work, his bike is stolen. He spends the rest of the movie looking for the bike. Finally, he tries to steal a bike and gets caught.
Thematically, the film is about empathy, mercy, and the context of our actions. We see the story of two bicycle thieves. First, there is the man who steals Antonio’s bike. He is a villain because we see him from the outside. Second, there is Antonio whose desperate act we understand because we’ve seen what leads up to it. Just as we, in our own lives, manage to justify our transgressions, so we can easily justify his. After all, it isn’t just a bicycle, it is his very life.
The other thief is portrayed as more a professional. He certainly does a better job of stealing the bike. He grabs it on a steep hill and rides down so he is impossible to catch. Antonio, on the other hand, rides up a hill and is easily caught. But it is clear that the original thief is poor. He certainly didn’t steal the bike for the malicious thrill of it. We understand why Antonio eventually steals a bike, but it is clear that there is a string of injustices that have led to Antonio’s crime. It is not the case that the injustice started with the theft of Antonio’s bicycle.
There is no justice in the world. We try, of course. We certainly get the illusion of justice. If Antonio had the other thief arrested, what justice is that? He would not get the bike back—it has surely been sold. Instead another poor soul who is likely no less deserving of sympathy would go to jail. How does that make the universe any more right? But there can be mercy.
One of the key moments in the film comes when the crowd is taking Antonio to the police. His son, Bruno, is following along crying. The man whose bike Antonio stole decides not to press charges. He is clearly touched by the desperation of the father and the sadness of the child. This gets to the core of why I so love this film. None of the characters in it are particularly good or noble. But they are at their best when they empathize with each other.
The film ends with Bruno giving his father his hat that had fallen on the ground after being caught by the crowd. Then, Bruno takes his father’s hand. They are both despondent—sadder than they’ve been the whole movie. We see them walk away from the camera, and soon they are subsumed in the crowd. Their personal tragedy is just one of many. Life goes on. Justice is denied. And we feast on the crumbs of each other’s mercy.