WordPlay - Populism, Problems, and Solutions

Beyond Religion: Spirituality in the New Millennium

    Someone who posts (as I did) an appreciation of a movie like 'Henry Poole', grounded in a fairly conventional Catholic background, runs the risk of being mistaken as conventionally religious or even a religious fundamentalist. But I'm not at all. What I do have is an appreciation for faith in all its infinite variety. It seems to me that faith in this day and age has become infinitely more difficult, an infinitely more courageous undertaking, than skepticism.

    All religious experience develops from central phenomenon - the collision of beings finite in time and space, blobs of mud whose fleeting consciousness is numbered from the moment it comes to exist, with infinity. Kant expressed the concept in language of marvelous economical clarity. He said there were two things that made him marvel - the starry skies above [i.e., external infinity, space without limit, time without limit, a number line that never ends) and the moral law within [i.e., internal infinity, the sense of imperishable self, independent of particular identity.] I wrote my own version of this, not nearly as elegant, and will now be so ingratious and egotistical as to quote myself (from the novel Thursday's Child, written under the name Josephine Wurtenbaugh)     

        “Just what are these fundamental mysteries?” she said.
    He shrugged, and spoke now without any hesitation: “What you'd think. What
human beings are, why they are. Why intelligence is. Time – always changing, but
always now. Self distinct from identity – somehow you know you'd still be you, even
if you were someone else. You know some things are right, and some are wrong; it
doesn't matter whether they're useful to you or not, and you know that, but you don't
know why. Dreams about the measureless when everything you experience is
measurable – infinity arising out of finitude. Quantity and quality, wholes and sums,
that they correlate randomly, we talked about that. That such things can be, black
holes in rationality itself, mirrors of the ones in the sky.”

    This sense, of an infinitely at once immediately present and beyond reach, permeates the whole of human experience. It is the raw material of all spiritual experience. Conventional religions attempt to map that sense raw sense onto a set of symbols that can be shared by a community or culture. If they are effective - that is, appeal at both conscious and subliminal level to that sense of the infinite - they become universal. This in essence describes the origin of all the major religions. To state the obvious, a set of symbols that potent are obviously subject to being misused for political purposes, hijacked politically, misused by priests, emperors, commissars - power seekers of all description. Occasionally, someone writes a book braying about this transparent reality, and ignoring (often deliberately) the reason why they became powerful in the first place.

    It is my own view that we live in a pre-religious age. I think all the conventional religions of pre-history began dying150 years ago. Arnold writes of 'an outworn creed', Nietzsche more dramatically proclaims that God is dead. But God is not dead. The sense of infinity that bedevils (sic) all human activity is as alive as it ever was. All that has happened is that the iconography (sorry) with which we used to describe it is no longer effective. A new set of symbols awaits birth. The Great Beast slouches towards Bethlehem again. Such is my belief, anyway.

    Attached for download is a short story I wrote, a variety of what might be called 'preternatural fiction' - science that does not exist just yet. I call it 'The Old Soul' for reasons that will be immediately  apparent to anyone familiar with contemporary speculation about reincarnation. It is an interesting (at least to me) speculation about a natural explanation for the phenomenon of deja vu and visions of other lives. Click on the marked link in this paragraph to download.

    The blog for Thursday's Child is also linked in the right column, if you liked the snippet I quoted.

   

Simple Decency

    I see  a ton of movies, to which I react idiosyncratically. The critical community simply cannot be trusted these days. They all look over each other's shoulders. Every one is worried about what every one else thinks. Consequently, the emperor often has no new clothes. The most recent example of this was the movie 'There Will Be Blood'. Shouts to high heaven for the masterpiece from nearly every critic in the land. But I have yet to meet an actual moviegoer who actually liked it, let alone considered it a masterpiece. It was slow to the point of the tedium, the supporting actors were just terrible, and the protagonist underwent some utterly unmotivated, completely inexplicable character transformation at the very end, apparently for no better reason than to provide some good cinema. It was a dreadful film. But you would never know it from any of the reviews. My intuition was that all of the critics were afraid to be the one to break the ranks. Film reviewers have been living in lemming town for some time now.

    So I will from time to time post my own reviews on this blog, which are very definitely my own, and not beholden to any one - usually to correct some imbalance I perceive.

    In this case, I want to praise a little movie that is barely going to get a cup of coffee in general release - 'Henry Poole Was Here'. It's about a fellow, Henry Poole by name,  diagnosed with a terminal disease, who buys a house in which to die in. But the home had to be replastered, and - take your pick - either a picture of Christ or a bad water stain appears on his back wall. A neighbor notices it, believes she is seeing a vision, and complications ensue. Touching the wall, the face, produces miracles (or maybe not). Henry Poole's wall becomes a modest shrine to the locals around him. Is it a true appearance or just a waterstain? The most conspicuous, militant non believer is Henry Poole himself.

    It is hard to make a good movie about faith. Faith, by definition, is a belief in what is beyond  rational proof or disproof - and film is the art of making fantasy appear real. (The pictures don't actually move, you know. Movies are the ultimate optical illusion.) So there is an oil-and-water aspect to the undertaking. It is a much easier task to make an audience believe a man can fly than make it believe a man can believe - particularly in an age as wedded to secular materialism as this one is.

    (My nominee for the best movie ever made about faith might surprise you. It isn't a religious picture, but the 1950 comedy Harvey, about Elwood P. Dowd and the large white rabbit that is his invisible friend and protector. The dramatic action, to be sure based largely on the stage play, manages to catch the essence of doubt and belief. Late in the play, the secondary characters rush into the bar where Elwood hangs out.

    Character: "Is Elwood Dowd here?"

    Bartender: "Yes, he's in a booth in the back."

    Character: "Is he alone?

    Bartender: "Well, there are two schools of thought on that."

    Exactly the point - as well as one of the best throwaway lines ever written.)

    Henry Poole managed to get the 'two schools of thought' aspect of faith nearly pitch perfect - as well as show ordinary human beings behaving decently to each other - not a dramatic phenomenon that occurs often these days in most films targeted at adult audiences. So I liked it quite a bit, much more than The Dark Knight, the latest beneficiary of the critical lemming phenomenon.

Torture; or, Moral Cowardice

    Someone I respect, a near relation with completely different politics, advises me to look up an NPR podcast of an interview with the author of a new book, The Dark Side of Dick Cheney or something. (A book on a  Bush Administration figure with the title  'The Light Side of So-and-So' would really be something, but I am not holding my breath.) In any case, the gist of the book is how Cheney and Rumsfeld authorized torture of interogatees, bamboozling the American people and even George Bush himself in the process. It sounds from the gist of it like a pretty shrill indictment.

    The only problem is that's not history the way I remember it. What I remember is a nation that was close to terrified after September 11th.  There was no way of knowing how many other terrorist cells had organized within our relatively free borders, or what they do. I remember almost a fatalistic certainty that there would be other, possibly even more serious, incidents of mass murders within these borders. I remember the chameleon law professor Alan Dershowitz suggesting the creation of a 'torture warrant' in Op-Ed columns in the New York Times and elsewhere. I remember reading an Atlantic Monthly cover article entitled 'The Dark Art of Interrogation', discussing the means and methods - quite forcible - by which information is obtained from detainees. I don't remember any big secret at all about what was going on. I am not at all surprised that Nancy Pelosi on the Congressional oversight committee pressed for harsher methods. Such were the temper of the times in the immediate aftermath.

    I don't want to be misunderstood on this point. Don't go running out of the room, but I am a fairly strict Kantian on these points - meaning that torture and the undermining of free choice is always wrong, except in situations in which the greater good is so obvious that they are self-defining. If there actually is a child who is going to suffocate in a matter of a few moments, or a bomb about to detonate, and some smiling bad guy knows the location, you will find out the information, or I will, or so will Mother Theresa. A categorical imperative comes into play. We will do what we have to do. If not, we have to answer to the child's parents, the bomber's victims, and so forth. As interesting as these situations are dramatically - great stuff for television and the movies - they are absolutely uninteresting ethically.

    There was probably a brief window for forcible methods immediately after 9-11, when the full dimensions of the threat were unknown and the real well-being of real people was at stake. I have not forgotten, and never will forget, real people leaping hand in hand to their deaths rather than being roasted alive - people who came to work on an ordinary morning in September. But that window passed soon enough. What might have been specific information that would save lives quickly morphs into background detail that helps to create the lawger picture. Torture, forcible methods, call it what you will, is completely abhorrent in these circumstances.

    But this was not something that a few secretive members of the Bush Administration inflicted on the now-appalled editorial staff of the New York Times. It was widely known throughout our society. If there is guilt, it is collective guilt. But truth be told, I don't feel much like moralizing about it. I call myself a Populist, and I mean it. Essentially, I trust the good will of both the public at large and individuals. But the public can be stampeded by large and violent events, no question. That's why ultimately you only give two cheers for democracy, and why - to paraphrase the Churchillian joke that's no joke - it's only the best form of government because all the others are worse.

    People are no better than they should be. What happened was that the large, genial, good natured American public was driven temporarily a couple of paces off center by these spectacularly violent incidents. It recovered in a remarkably brief period of time, having inflicted remarkably little harm, and became itself again. We want to do better than this, of course. We should do better. We have to strive for a society that is immune to panics of any kind, that believes in itself and its future no matter what - but not with any excessive breast beating or scapegoating. There is a real danger here of undermining the bona fides, our belief in ourselves, that is the ultimate glue of this democracy. If there is guilt to be assessed, fingers to be pointed,  point them at the ones who created the terror, not the larger public that reacted to it. 

        What does disturb me is the moral cowardice implicit in books of this NPR type. Seven years ago, the need to obtain information from terrorists was openly discussed, and no one said nay. Now seven years have passed without incident, the Bush administration is one of the most unpopular in history, and authors of this type creep out of cover and are shocked, SHOCKED! to learn that torture was used on suspect terrorists in that place and in that time. So a scapegoat is found. In so doing, he/she absolves the American public of its guilt (not all that much, in my opinion, but not insignificant, something as a society we must remember)  and fixes blame on one of the most disliked public figures in the world - whoop-de-doo.

    Of course, if, God forbid, some major incident does occur, the books will be remaindered, the pious editorials written on the subject quietly ignored, and Alan Dershowitz or his like given free reign to write op-eds about the need for torture. So it will remain, for five or so years pass, and the author feels safe again. Not a pretty picture.

   

Obama and JFK: or, Running on the Bloody Flag

    (1) I turned 14 the summer JFK was nominated for President. I remember the excitement well. Whatever the shortcomings his biographers have enlarged upon since, he had a flair and a genuine charm.  The  nomination was still slightly contested as I recall, and my devout Catholic family watched in genuine suspense until he was confirmed as nominee. Even the choice of vice-president was discussed and dramatic. It was a much more innocent time.

    JFK was the junior Senator from Massachusetts. He was the first minority President, it is useful to recall. There was a huge buzz in the Catholic population as a result, and he got a disproportionate amount of Catholic votes. Critics assailed him as all style and no substance, a pretty boy riding a wave of celebrity and glitz to the White House. His political connections were dubious, being related to the Boston political machine of Curley and 'Honey' Fitgerald, from whence he derived his middle name.

    Is any of this starting to sound familiar?

    (2) I call myself a Populist, and I mean it. That to me means not merely accepting as a general rule the the superiority of broad public judgments over narrow elites, but also the basic good will and good faith of individual persons. I am waiting for someone in public life to draw attention to the fact that there has been no major shift in public policy or policy direction in the last four years. The Democrats seize control of both houses of Congress, the Presidential rating slips to an all time low, the main stream media finds a new scandal weekly - and nothing of substance changes.

    I have a friend who is a True Believer. He is frustrated beyond all endurance. The candidates he supported won, running on the platform in which he believes. He gets dunning letters from the Party, which are articulate with the resentment he shares, and he sends them money. Nothing happens. . He expected the US to be withdrawn from Iraq about 60 days after the last Congress to be seated, the Patriot Act to be repealed, communications companies to be sued, etc., etc. He is convinced a combination of slimy cowardliness and sinister Republican machinations - perhaps even on of those Taylor Caldwell master conspiracies - has combined to prevent the necessary changes

    "Has it occurred to you," I asked him, "that maybe the problem is that what you believe is nonsense? That when the men and women you vote for get to Congress and actually sink their hands into the nitty-gritty of what's going on in the world, that they come around to enacting (and reenacting) these laws?  And these appeals to your sense of outrage because they know damn well it is misplaced, but they want your votes and money?"

    This thought shocked him, and he rejected it immediately. He prefers conspiracy theories. We remain friends, though.

    (3) For forty years after the Civil War, Republican politicians ran on what came to be known as 'the bloody flag', the Republican investiture in the Civil War. Real issues were secondary. The thought has occurred to me that Democratic politicians having been doing that, at least in the last three elections - running on a platform of 60's rhetoric that is as long outdated as the Civil War was a century ago, but that their constituency, mired in arrogance and self-righteousness, continues to gobble up like trained seals. Baby Boomers (of which I am on the leading edge) are not famous for rigorous self-criticism.

    (4) Obama's style, like JFK's, and later Ronald Reagan, does not preclude considerable shrewdness and practicality. To me, the last eight years have put a footprint on the times that is so huge and heavy that the policy choices of the next Presidency are going to be foreordained. There are (1) the continued challenge of Islamic fundamentalism, that Bush met with great determination, (2) the need for energy independence (the present administration has done something but not enough), and (3) maintaining economic stability with the pressure the Baby Boom demographics are going to put on social services (nothing). 

     I trust Obama to deal with all these issues sensibly. Not to mince words, I think he is running on that 60's version of the bloody flag. I believe he will adopt sensible and prudent policies - as noted, the tenor of the times is going to limit alternatives, far more than the Clinton Administration in the 90's. What I am also hoping is that Obama's style can make the solutions palatable and even popular to his following. The United States and the world have real problems - it is no solution to them to conclude that It Is All Bush's Fault, which is pretty much the level of thought (or reflex reaction) to which the Left has sunk to.

     It would be wonderful to have a President who is truly popular both in this country and abroad.