But Enough About You

The advice columnist Miss Manners made a curious and, I think, revealing misstep in answering a question on Sunday.  The questioner asked what to say on "learning that a friend has stage 4 cancer," if not "You will be in my prayers."  What if you're dealing with a selfish, unfeeling cancer patient who is "not of the same religious beliefs or is an atheist"?

Miss Manners suggested a good alternative -- "I am terribly sorry.  I'll be hoping for the best.  I hope you know how much I care for you" -- but framed it oddly.

There is the religious angle that you raise, though Miss Manners would think that a nonreligious person could appreciate a religious person's seeking the solace in which he or she believes.

I've read this and its context several times to try to be sure I understand it.  So, when a religious person's friend is terminally ill and the religious person promises to pray, it is for his or her own solace, not for the solace or benefit of the sick person?  I wouldn't be surprised, but I thought that there was usually at least a pretense that the prayer is offered on behalf of the other, not for oneself.  You learn something new every day!

Another of my Facebook friends and I have been disputing something related.  She's about my age, we went to the same high school, she's nominally liberal politically, she hates Trump and likes Hillary.  She likes to post feel-good memes, and last Saturday night she posted one that said "Do good and good will come to you."

We've had some exchanges about karma and related doctrines before.  I commented that I disagree. There are no payoffs, there is no karma. If you do good hoping to receive good in return, you'll soon be embittered. If you don't expect it, you'll often be pleasantly surprised. (And this leaves aside the very difficult question of what "good" is.)

My friend initially replied, "Oh, there IS karma, but you shouldnt liken karma with a fairy godmother.....it doesnt work that way, but there are times when there is such karma with others that its a delight to know about."  This was odd, because the whole point of the meme she'd posted is that karma (or whatever) is like a fairy godmother: do good, and you'll receive good.

We went back and forth a bit on whether "there IS karma," and a mutual FB friend admonished us that no one knows with 100% certainty what happens to us after death.  First, we weren't talking about what happens after death: the meme promises reward in this life.  Second, and more important, we do know with close to 100% certainty that bad things happen to good people and vice versa, because we can see it in the world around us.  That's what's known in philosophy as the Problem of Evil.  People have been grappling with it for thousands of years. To promise blandly "Do good and good will come to you" is to lie.  Even my friend recognizes this on some level, since she tried to backtrack a bit with the "fairy godmother" move.  But she continued to insist that karma is real, and that it works.  Maybe I should press her more to explain how karma works, if it's not a "fairy godmother," but I don't think she could articulate it; her idea of reasoned discussion is to report what a distinguished psychic told her.  Maybe I should press her on it anyway.  

After all, the Buddha is reported to have told a professional soldier who consulted him "that if the latter were to die on the battlefield he could expect to be 'reborn in a hell or as an animal' for his transgressions" (Brian Victoria, Zen War Stories, Routledge, 2003).  The Buddha took the safe path by threatening post-mortem punishment; Jesus of Nazareth, less cautiously, warned that "All who take the sword will perish by the sword" (Matthew 26:52), which is as transparently false as "Do good and good will come to you."  Many professional soldiers have died in bed, and many if not most people who've been killed in war were non-combatants.  But both of these teachers presented karmic justice as a "fairy godmother," if a highly punitive one.

That good people do sometimes flourish and bad ones sometimes suffer isn't evidence for the meme's truth.  The distribution of good and bad fortune could just as easily be random.  I think it probably is, once you look beyond face-to-face personal relations, and even in that very restricted realm, there are no guarantees.  What this means is that pointing to "karma" or "You reap what you sow" (to which I'll return presently) or similar doctrines is not a fact about the world, but a person's interpretation and judgment about the world.  This is of course true of everything we say about the world, but I'm stressing it here because my friend, like so many people who share her attitude, loves to invoke karma when she's feeling Schadenfreude because someone she dislikes has taken a pratfall.

A few months ago while I was among a small group of people waiting for a bus, a young woman began talking to no one in particular about a former boss who'd treated her badly (I don't remember the details). After she left that job she saw in the newspaper that her former boss had been physically attacked for being Muslim. "I guess it was her karma," said the young woman complacently.  No one said anything.  I considered suggesting that working for that woman was her karma, but I chickened out.

Since then I've begun commenting when people on Facebook invoke karma in connection with other people's misfortunes.  None of them have done a good job of justifying their highly selective use of the concept; as with Christian belief in Hell, they don't seem to like to think about the possibility that bad karma might catch up with them, or with people they like, and they consider it very bad form to remind them of it.  Like Hell, karma is for other people, bad people, for Donald Trump -- not for good, nice people like them.

But if "there IS karma," it is no respecter of persons.  But as I've said before, it would be highly offensive to apply it to the drowned Syrian toddler who washed up on a Turkish beach last year.  Or to the victims of the massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, the morning after my friend posted her meme.  Which wouldn't mean that bad karma wasn't involved, only that people are often unwilling to follow their own logic to its unpleasant conclusion.  And there's nothing unusual about that.  I think that people talk about karma or "You reap what you sow" (and Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick did just that when he quoted Galatians 6:7 on his Twitter account on Sunday morning after the massacre) or other similar proverbial bullshit, less because they mean it than as a warding-off of the evil eye, to try to distract karma from their own doorsteps.  It's often women who sniff "What was she doing out alone at that hour anyway?" when a woman is raped, for example.  (The Stanford rape victim must have had bad karma too.  But then so did her rapist, whose apologists whine that his life is ruined by the notoriety he received and the judicial slap he was given on his lily-white wrist.)  My mother used to harumph, "Where are their parents?" when juvenile delinquency was reported on the evening news; if my brothers and I misbehaved, though, it wasn't her fault, she'd done her best with us, etc.

Magical thinking is something we fall back on in situations we can't control or make sense of, as Bronislaw Malinoswki found of Trobriand Islanders who had rigorous, practical, rational lore for sailing in the relatively safe inner lagoons, and magic for sailing on the more dangerous open sea.  But I think we must challenge magical thinking when it takes inhumane forms like belief in karma and "You reap what you sow."  I don't think that the Problem of Evil, insoluble though it is, is too complex for most people to understand.  Sometimes I feel a bit guilty for expecting my less-intellectual friends to inform themselves and learn to think about these matters.  Critical thinking is not just for academic elites; I once disputed with a nice liberal fellow who said that ordinary people don't need to learn to think critically.  Excuse me, I replied, but ordinary people are expected to vote, which requires critical thinking if it's to be done responsibly; just shopping at the supermarket, let alone for a car or a house, involves considering and weighing alternatives.  Ordinary citizens cultivate thinking skills in dealing with spectator sports; as Noam Chomsky has observed, they are often very well-informed and won't defer to the authority of coaches and team owners.  This is permitted because such knowledge and skill has no real social consequences, while thinking about politics and morality might lead to restiveness and rebellion against the legitimate rulers of society.  I don't know how well most people can learn to think critically, but I don't trust the elites who prefer that the proles leave the thinking to them.  After all, the elites have shown consistently that they aren't smart or rational either.

Justice, You've Been Served!

On Monday Democracy Now! rebroadcast a 2006 interview with the late Daniel Berrigan.  It includes his account of an exchange with former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1965 about the Vietnam war, with the unintentionally (I presume) funny aside that Berrigan had to ask a secretary at the magazine he was publishing to transcribe McNamara's response "in shorthand" -- he couldn't write it down himself?  Isn't a Christian supposed to serve rather than be served?

The part that prompted me to write, though, was this, at the end of the interview:

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve continued to get arrested. Do you think these arrests, what you have engaged in, protest, even when people are not being arrested or jailed, have an effect? I mean, you have gone through a number of wars now. Do you think things are getting better, or do you think they’re getting worse?

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: No. No. This is the worst time of my long life, really. I’ve never seen such a base and cowardly violation of any kind of human bond that I can respect. These people appear on television, and the unwritten, unspoken motto seems to be something about "We despise you. We despise your law. We despise your order. We despise your Bible. We despise your conscience. And if necessary, we will kill you to say so." I’ve never really felt that deep contempt before for any kind of canon or tradition of the human.
 
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, "We despise your Bible"? It is often said it’s done in the name of the Bible.

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: Well, yes, these people are—they’re making a scrapbook out of the Bible in their own favor. And they’re omitting all the passages that have to do with compassion and love of others, especially love of enemies, or the injunction to Peter, "Put up your sword. Those who live by the sword will perish by the sword"—all of that. All of that gets cut out in favor of, well, a god of vindictiveness, the god of the empire, the god who is a projection of our will to dominate.

I respect and honor Berrigan's tireless activism over many decades, but I could never really trust anyone so intellectually and morally dishonest as to say something like this.  Berrigan himself was "making a scrapbook out of the Bible in [his] own favor."  He omitted all the passages that have to do with the killing of those who worship the wrong gods or are living in the wrong territory or simply failed to meet the deity's high standards.  The "god of vindictiveness, the god of the empire, the god who is a projection of our will to dominate" is Yahweh, the god of the Bible, and his son and viceroy Jesus. While Berrigan was correct about others' selective use of the Bible, he himself was constructing a god who was a projection of his own will.  It was perhaps bad luck on Berrigan's part that he grew up in a tradition defined by the Christian Bible, a book full of violence and hatred as well as professions of love and compassion and peace, since in order to oppose war and empire he had to engage in the same cut-and-paste job he condemned (rather self-righteously, I must say) in others.

But at the same time it must be remembered that Berrigan chose to remain in the Christian, and specifically the Roman Catholic tradition, and hamstrung himself by using the fundamentalist assumption of biblical inerrancy: if you interpret the Bible correctly -- that is, if you agree with his interpretation -- it will be true, free from all error, and by remarkable coincidence will agree with Father Dan!  In order to sustain this belief he had to lie about his opponents, by implying that because they conveniently ignored the parts of the Bible that were inexpedient for them, they rejected it entirely.  But the same accusation could be made of him: If cherry-picking the Bible means that you "despise" it, then he despised the Bible no less than the warmakers do.  The difficult thing to do, with the Bible or any other scripture or authority, is to say forthrightly that it is not free from error, that it is wrong and you reject the parts that are wrong, while recognizing that they are there.  If I weren't prone to the same temptation, I'd be amazed that so many people find this non-fundamentalist approach so difficult.  It is difficult, but it can be done.  Once you admit the possibility, it becomes easier.  Instead Berrigan chose to present his own projection as if it were truth.

Even if Christians leave the Tanakh, with its divine commands to exterminate whole populations, out of the picture, they are still stuck with the Jesus of the gospels, whose vindictiveness deserves more attention than it usually gets.  Jesus not only threatened people with eternal torture, he was preaching in the apocalyptic tradition which expects Yahweh to establish his Kingdom on earth (as it is in Heaven) through a cataclysmic war between Good and Evil, reaching a climax as "the wine press was trodden outside the city, and blood came out from the wine press, up to the horses' bridles, for a distance of two hundred miles" (Revelation 14.20; the metaphors get tangled up there, but the meaning in context is clear).  Whether he liked it or not, whether he thought it through or not, this is the Jesus Dan Berrigan followed.

Some Christians I've talked to try to get around this problem by arguing that while God is of course a loving god, he also is a god of justice.  The answer to that is simple enough: punishment is not justice.  As the philosopher Antony Flew declared:

Now, if anything at all can be known to be wrong, it seems to me to be unshakably certain that it would be wrong to make any sentient being suffer eternally for any offense whatever.  Thus a religious commitment which must involved the glorification of such behavior as if it were a manifestation of perfect justice and goodness would be repugnant to ordinary decency and humanity; even if the facts were such that in prudence we had to trample down our generous impulses in a rat-race for salvation [The Presumption of Atheism, 1976, 64].

The fantasy of Hell can't have been invented out of a desire to teach people they've been doing wrong, since part of the fun is that if they do learn anything from their punishment, it's too late, because they're in Hell!  Forever!  Hahahaha!  The apologist C. S. Lewis tried to justify it in The Problem of Pain in 1940.  Imagine, he proposed, 

a man who has risen to wealth or power by a continued course of treachery and cruelty, by exploiting for purely selfish ends the noble motions of his victims, laughing the while at their simplicity ... Suppose, further that he does all this, not (as we like to imagine) tormented by remorse or even misgiving, but eating like a schoolboy and sleeping like a healthy infant ....

We must be careful at this point.  The least indulgence of the passion for revenge is very deadly sin.  Christian charity counsels us to make every effort for the conversion of such a man ... But that is not the point.  Supposing he will not be converted, what destiny in the eternal world can you regard as proper for him?  Can you really desire that such a man, remaining what he is (and he must be able to do that if he has free will) should be confirmed forever in his present happiness ...?  And if you cannot regard this as tolerable, is it only your wickedness -- only spite -- that prevents you from doing so? ... You are moved, not by a desire for the wretched creature's pain as such, by a truly ethical demand that, soon or late, the right should be asserted, the flag planted in this horribly rebellious soul, even if no fuller and better conquest is to follow.  In a sense, it is better for the creature to know itself, even if it never becomes good, that it should know itself a failure, a mistake.  Even mercy can hardly wish to such a man his eternal, contented continuance in such ghastly illusion [122].

Of course Lewis made things too easy for himself by supposing that there were only two possible options: Heaven or Hell.  An infinitely wise and omnipotent Creator could do better than that.  But even accepting Lewis's terms, I would send his wicked man to Heaven.  I assume that Heaven is a place without suffering, so that he will be able to make no one else suffer.  If this will curtail his free will, everyone's free will must be curtailed in Heaven if there's to be no suffering there.  In Heaven the man's "continued course of treachery and cruelty" would give him no advantage, as it did on earth.  (Which raises the question why Lewis's god arranged his creation so that bad people can flourish.  In what sense, given that arrangement, is the wicked man's bad behavior "a failure, a mistake"?)  Since Lewis represents his complacency as based on his worldly success and happiness, which would mean nothing in Heaven, is it accurate to say that he could 'remain what he is'?  But even if he could, so what?  The important thing would be that he couldn't hurt anyone else.  Lewis assumed that the only way that "soon or late, the right should be asserted" is by stomping on it for all eternity; it never seems to have occurred to him that rebellion might be quelled by mercy as well as by punishment.  One thing we know is that punishment is not an effective way of changing people's behavior; if Yahweh has such a thing for punishment, why did he create us so that it would be ineffective?

I like to quote Michael Neumann's remark that "Where ‘respect’ means not beating people or putting them in jail or driving them from their homes, it is a fine idea. But you shouldn’t do those things even to people you hold in contempt."  I think this should be extended: you shouldn't do those things even to bad people.  I think that many people would disagree, even Christians who, according to orthodox teaching, believe that we are all bad people.  But then it's also orthodox teaching that God is entitled to beat or jail or torture all of humanity, and only tempers "justice" with mercy by letting some of us off; again, I deny that punishment is just in the first place. This is a matter of judgment, of course, not of fact or even of logical demonstration.  But the same is true of the mindset that demands infinite retaliation for "rebellion," and that indeed sees harm done to others are primarily an offense against a deity rather than against the people actually harmed.  And I ask what good is achieved (other than the "passion for vengeance" Lewis rejected while still clinging to it) by punishment at all.

Going back to Daniel Berrigan: I don't object to his rejection of the wrathful aspects of Christianity.  What I do object to is his pretense that those aspects aren't a core part of the religion, and of Jesus' teaching in particular.  It's not only dishonest to denounce those who believe in a "god who is a projection of our will to dominate" (though that is reason enough to reject his projection), but it will be ineffective as long as Christians refer to the New Testament and the teachings of Jesus.  Jesus believed in, and taught, a god of vindictiveness and empire and a projection of our will to dominate.  The only way to correct that teaching (assuming it is incorrect) is to confront it head-on, and reject it directly rather than by projecting it onto the bad Other, as Berrigan did, and so many other Christians do.

Judgment for Thee, But Not for Me

I've noticed that some of the same people who reacted to the Charleston shootings by waving the Confederate battle flag and whining that their "heritage" was being slandered, are now waving around the Stars and Stripes.  Whatever else you can say about it, there's a contradiction there.  The Confederacy sought to tear apart the Union; for those who now try to defend the CSA to claim that they support the Union is absurd hypocrisy, to put it gently.  If I were a jingo of their stripe, I could rant that they are spitting on the fine young men who gave their lives to preserve the Union against the Confederate rebellion and treason -- not too strong a word in this case, since the Confederacy was a declared enemy of the United States, so defending and supporting it is giving aid and comfort to an enemy -- a defeated one, true, but one that has never ceased to continue the rebellion ever since it was defeated.

Even pretending to take such a stance makes me giggle uncomfortably, so I don't take it very far.  I have been hammering at one person in particular who's been simultaneously posting memes that flaunt the battle rag and memes that posture moistly about Our Flag.  Unfortunately I didn't make notes on everyone I know who posted pro-Confederate material so I could hammer on all of them; this person has just had the bad sense and bad faith to go on doing it.  You can't serve two masters, I've told her, wondering if she'd get the biblical allusion.  Since she's a Christian who also posts religious memes, I doubt she does.

To celebrate the Fourth of July, the programmers on our local community radio station have been choosing songs that reflect the occasion.  One of the best, to my mind, was the one who played Jello Biafra's version of "Love Me, I'm a Liberal" this morning.  This afternoon, a guest DJ announced that he'd googled "cool patriotic songs" for the upcoming set.  One of these was "The Bumper of My SUV" by the country singer Chely Wright.  In one sense I'd never heard it before; in another sense, I'd heard it thousands of times before.

I've got a bright red sticker on the back of my car
Says United States Marines
And yesterday a lady in a mini-van held up a middle finger at me
Does she think she knows what I stand for
Or the things that I believe
Just by looking at a sticker for the U.S. Marines
On the bumper of my SUV

... But I guess I wanna know where she's been
Before she judges and gestures to me
'Cause she don't like my sticker for the U.S. Marines
On the bumper of my SUV

So I hope that lady in her mini-van
Turns on her radio and hears this from me
As she picks up her kids from their private school
And drives home safely on our city streets
Or to the building where her church group meets
Yeah, that's why I've got a sticker for the U.S. Marines
On the bumper of my SUV

The first question I had as the words whimpered past me was whether this incident had actually happened; Wright says it did, in mid-2003 right after Bush's criminal invasion of Iraq, and that the woman "screamed 'Your war is wrong. You're a baby killer.'" You can never go wrong vilifying and defaming opponents of The War, as the inventors of the "hippies spat on Vietnam veterans" myth knew.  But suppose some woman did flip a bird at Chely Wright and call her a baby killer because of her bumper sticker.  One of the recurring memes that annoy me most are those which accuse others of being judgmental, like this one:

No doubt the people who judge these whiners also have reasons why they do the things they do, and why they are who they are.  It might be that whoever made this meme, and those who share it, couldn't handle half of what their judges have dealt with.  I'd have to hear both sides, and then cross-examine them, as I'd love to do with Chely Wright and Our Lady of the Finger.

Chely Wright, if she were willing to walk a mile in another's shoes and see the world through her eyes, might find that the woman in the mini-van had what she considered very good reasons to be angry at people with US Marine bumperstickers on their SUVs.  Maybe the woman had lost relatives or friends in other US wars of aggression.  Maybe she had spent time in countries that had been devastated by US violence, trying to help our victims there.  Or maybe not: maybe she just had sufficient empathy to be upset by the suffering Wright's military relatives had inflicted on innocent people far away.  I would not give the finger to Wright, or anyone else with such bumper stickers on their vehicle, but I don't know what drove the woman to express her anger that way.  Neither does Chely Wright; I doubt she knows that the woman sends her children to a private school, or what kind of church group she belongs to.

I know more about Wright, since she proceeds to tell more about herself and reveals her own bad faith.  She's been to Iraq, she says, and to Hiroshima and the DMZ.

Yes, I do have questions
I get to ask them because I'm free
That's why I've got a sticker for the U.S. Marines
On the bumper of my SUV

If Chely Wright is "free," it's not because of any war the US has fought since 1945.  All of them were wars of aggression, against countries and people who had not actually attacked the US.  And in fact she (along with all the rest of us) is less free because of George W. Bush's wars, which were used to increase already intolerable government surveillance of all citizens, to make sure we don't hold or express unacceptable political stances.  That's standard operating procedure for wars: the government uses the national peril as an excuse to curtail civil liberties, and the current war, which is intended to last forever, is no exception. 

Wright sings, "But that doesn't mean that I want war / I'm not Republican or Democrat."  What does party affiliation have to do with it?  Both parties want war, though like Wright they deny it.  The question to put to partisans and to self-proclaimed non-partisans like Chely Wright is: What wars have you ever opposed, and did you oppose them on principle or because a President of the wrong party was in office?  Opposing war, or specific wars, on principle, is totally uncool; so is objecting because of the suffering Our Boys and Girls will bring to innocent civilians in the country we attack.  If all Wright can do is talk about her allegiance to the people she knows, then give me Natalie Maines, even if she's "vulgarly anti-war." 

I don't know nearly enough to judge the woman who yelled at Chely Wright, though on the face of it I think she acted without knowing enough about Wright.  But Wright has told the world more about herself (and I'm not talking about her 2010 coming out as lesbian): she's vulgarly pro-war, and I feel no discomfort about judging her for that.  "A gay American hero"?  Hell, no.

The Buck Stops Here

I wrote "I find this offensive" as a comment on my friend's repost of this meme on Facebook today.  Not just because she herself posts lots of material that is offensive to various people -- it goes without saying that what is meant here is "Speak without offending me; if I offend you, you deserve it for not sharing my opinions."  Not just because being offended is one of the inevitable consequences of freedom of expression.  Not just because I think it is important to offend many people, nor do I break when I'm offended.

But the other principles here strike me as no less wrongheaded.  Pretending, for example, is an essential part of human life, from childhood to adulthood.  We pretend by imitating what we imagine adults do; we try on various selves and possibilities; and among the harder forms is trying to put ourselves in others' shoes -- which ironically enough, is another platitude beloved in these memes.  Or one might pretend to be a sane, rational, healthy person and try to become that person by practice -- another popular meme.  I suppose the meme-maker had some more specific and limited sense of "pretending" in mind, but I don't know what it was.

"Love without depending" is tricky.  Children, of course, depend on others simply to survive.  It's an unfortunate fact that many people can't be depended on, as we find when we become adults, but we still find people we can and do depend on . For many people (especially, I suspect, women) the dependable ones are friends.  Still, letting others -- and by extension, ourselves -- off the hook for keeping their word and their commitments is not a good way to live.  Here again, a reasonable caution is universalized until it becomes a counsel of fear.  To say nothing of blaming the victim: you broke your promise to me, therefore I was at fault for believing you.

"Listen without defending" is another exhortation that has limited value but shouldn't be universalized to every situation.  The other day I was seated in a restaurant next to a table where two heterosexuals were having their lunch.  The butch one was haranguing his femme for various failings; she was mostly weeping, but quietly.  This is a pattern I've seen too often over the years.  One complaint he kept repeating was that she insisted he should accept her as she is, which for some reason offended him greatly.  I only eavesdropped intermittently, but it was hard to ignore them altogether.  It is important to be able to listen to another person, but not to make yourself into a passive vessel with no needs of your own.  Especially when someone is criticizing you, it's necessary to be able to evaluate the criticism, and defend yourself if necessary.  A few years ago I realized that under attack I first apologize, then realize that I've done nothing to apologize for, and go on the offensive against the criticism.  I suppose that's not such a bad approach, but I'd fallen into it without thinking about it, too ready to assume that I was in the wrong.

One of the really hard parts of becoming an adult, I think, is that you have to learn the necessity of judgment.  You have to learn that no principle or rule fits every situation, and that you have to decide for yourself whether a given rule fits a given situation.  And the decision is yours -- one (but only one, and not universal) of the functions of religion is to enable the believer to pass the buck of moral responsibility upstairs to the higher power.  But this meme is just wrongheaded all the way.