A Brief for the Prosecution

An old friend, a poet herself, linked today to this poem.  Just the part of it that showed in the preview pressed certain buttons in me.  After acknowledging "Sorrow everywhere.  Slaughter everywhere", the poet declared "But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants."  No no no, I thought.  Not today, not this week, not this year, not this century, I will not let this one pass unchallenged.  So I took a deep breath and commented: "'Defense' of what? I'm sorry, but that thing is vile."

(And that was before I'd read the lines "If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down / we should give thanks that the end had magnitude", which confirmed my contempt for the performance: if the locomotive of the Lord runs us down, there's no magnitude in our end, we're just one more caterpillar on the tracks.) 

The person who'd posted the poem on his tumblr (not the poet himself, who died in 2012), replied in a few minutes:

The poem isn't a defense but a kind of preparation. I don't think it is vile. It admits the world is filled with horrors but says we cannot give ourselves over that entirely, that we have to live and love despite ourselves, despite the awfulness in the world.

I'm not sure what "a kind of preparation" is supposed to mean, but his response strikes me as the lowest kind of apologetics.  (Where, after all, does "the awfulness in the world" come from?  Who fills the world with horrors?  That's why I object to the bit about "the locomotive of the Lord" -- it appears that the poet accepted exactly the kind of theodicy I have no use for.)  I also think he's misreading the poem in terms of his own preconceptions -- what Walter Kaufmann called the exegetical fallacy, reading your beliefs into a text and getting them back endowed with its authority.  I replied:

If it's not a defense, it needs a different title. But what struck me as vile was the line "we enjoy ourselves because that's what God wants." Which god? According to every orthodox theology I know of, and most non-orthodox ones besides, suffering is something that God wants, either because we've brought it on ourselves or because God wants to test us, or because God works in mysterious ways, or other such nonsense. If I want to read good poetry about human suffering, I'll read the Book of Job. Or Marge Piercy, who's written some good poetry on this subject over the years.

To which he replied,

Okay, be angry and carry on. Jack Gilbert is one of the great poets of the 20th Century, and this poem is one of his most beloved. But no one is forcing anyone to read it. --- shared it as many people have today.

Great poets have been known to write great garbage.  They are not above criticism, and indeed it's all the more important to criticize them when they say something stupid or evil.

I confess I'd never heard of Jack Gilbert before today. According to his obituary in the New York Times, "Brief for the Defense" (quoted in its entirety there) is one of his best-known poems.  Because I haven't read anything else by him, and I'm not going to start now, I have no context for the statements in this poem, though I find it hard to imagine what context could make them anything but malignant.

Then my poet friend chimed in:

My only comment is to note that the word "risk" is in this poem for a reason.

That's exactly the kind of use of words like "risk" I object to.  (It reminds me of "intervention," which also sets off alarms for me.)  Of course the word is in the poem for a reason; I just don't think it's a good reason.  I think it's posturing, preaching to the choir: like Marilynne Robinson daringly declaring herself a liberal and a Christian, like Greg Louganis telling gay audiences that he knows It's not a choice, like Barack Obama telling his fans that if Wall Street wants a fight, that's a fight he's willing to have, like black conservatives denouncing the Civil Rights Movement in front of white Republican audiences.  Risk without cost, risk without risk.

And what kind of "risk" is involved in "delight"?  I speculate it's the "risk" that it won't last forever but will pass.  Maybe that really does deter some people.  But that delight will pass is not a risk, it's a certainty.  I see the wish to escape transience as one of the main impulses (and errors) behind much religion, born of a wish to achieve bliss that will never end.  I understand that wish -- how could I not? -- but it's never going to be fulfilled.

I'm not surprised that the poem is well-loved by the kind of people who sentimentalize the smiles and laughter of the destitute from a safe distance, admiring and praising the big smile of your ragged shoeshine boy before you go back to your comfortable hotel room and, ultimately, to your suburb.

I was amused by her friend's dismissive "be angry and carry on" -- as if anger were a bad thing.  But then a lot of people think it is.  (At least, other people's anger is a bad thing; their own is worn with pride.)

Of course I wasn't forced to read the poem.  But I respect my friend, which means I take what she puts on Facebook more seriously than I do what many other people I know post.  (Except for the cat-related material.)  I'm not saying she should not have posted the poem, but having seen it and read it, I won't be told I should not respond to it.  (And to be fair to her, let me stress that it was not she but her friend who got all spitty about my reaction.)

That's always a difficult question in a place like Facebook.  On one hand, you've got people who have conniptions at seeing anything they dislike.  On the other, you've got people who think that freedom of expression means no one is entitled to disagree with anything they post.  My friend is a librarian as well as a poet, and committed as most librarians are to freedom of expression, even when it's offensive or disturbing or unpleasant.  Most of what I disagree with on Facebook I don't respond to.  When I do comment, I do so carefully and I hope thoughtfully.  Often I decide not to comment after all, and cancel what I began to write; sometimes I bring my complaints here.

According to my friend's friend, it would seem that "Brief for the Defense" is being used to express the feelings of a lot of people lately; perhaps because of Robin Williams's suicide, because of the summary execution by police of a young black man in St. Louis and the subsequent repression of community objections to the slaying, perhaps because of the latest Israeli blitzkrieg in Gaza, perhaps because of the renewed civil war in Iraq, perhaps the combination of all these things and so much more.  It was because of all these things and more that I found the poem a wrong-headed statement, and chose to say so.

I suspect that my reaction to this poem and all that it represents is a matter of temperament.  I would prefer that there's no god, No One out there, rather than Someone watching the world and doing nothing about it except shedding great salt tears.  I know that there are many who'd disagree with me, and I suppose "Brief for the Defense" speaks to them.

It's probably not out of place to add that I agree with part of the poem, the idea that people somehow find reasons to go on living and celebrating their lives in the face of the horrors they suffer.  Where I differ is in the poet's declaration that God wants them to do so.  I don't believe in gods, but if they exist, their wishes don't determine what I think or do.  If we "risk delight," it's not because of the gods, but despite them.  (The "risk," if any, in most theologies would be that the gods don't want us to be happy, and will punish us for daring to be so.  Compare C. S. Lewis's very orthodox claim that Yahweh makes people suffer because they've had it too easy, and "The creature's illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature's sake, be shattered.")  It would be altogether right to go on living in flat defiance of their wishes, and to curse them and the locomotive they rode in on.

The Problem of Pain

The great singer Merry Clayton was seriously hurt in a car accident a week ago, and her friend and fellow-singer Darlene Love wrote this on her Facebook page:

I'm just hearing about this now and in tears. We all need to pray for Merry. Dear Lord, please place your hands upon Merry and heal her body and soul. Please bring her to a full recovery - AMEN! Love you! xoxoxo

I also hope Clayton recovers, of course, but this is the sort of thing that turns me off to popular religion.  I say "popular" and not "mainstream" or "institutional" religion, because the respectable leaders of respectable religion tend to be careful to caution the laity not to expect any real results from prayer, even as they encourage them to pray.  We shouldn't try to pressure God, to make him do what we want, all that matters is what He wants.  The lively, vivid faith of the Common People tends to be a lot less cautious, though no less wrong for that.

Very seriously: the accident must, according to orthodox Christian theology both popular and respectable, have been the result of the Dear Lord placing his hands upon Merry and bringing someone else's car together with hers, in order to humble her and teach her Who is in charge around here.  That's a harsh way of putting it, but it's essentially what the popular Christian writer C. S. Lewis said about "the problem of pain" seventy years ago.

We are perplexed to see misfortune falling on decent, inoffensive, worthy people -- on capable, hard-working mothers of families or diligent, thrifty little trades-people, on those who have worked so hard, and so honestly, for their modest stock of happiness and now seem to be entering on the enjoyment of it with the fullest right. How can I say with sufficient tenderness what here needs to be said? ... Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for a moment, that God who made these deserving people, may really be right when He says that their modest prosperity has not made them blessed; that all this must fall from them in the end, and that if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched. And therefore He troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover. The life to themselves and their families stands before them and recognition of this need; He makes that life less sweet to them. ... The creature's illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature's sake, be shattered. ... And this illusion ... may be at its strongest in some very honest, kindly, and temperate people, on on such people, therefore, misfortune must fall [The Problem of Pain, Macmillan, 1940, 96-98].

On second thought, I'm not sure I was being harsher than Lewis.  I hope I'm less smug and complacent -- as he admitted he'd been, after his wife died of cancer twenty years later; but in the end he retreated to an exhausted and weary submission to his lord's will.

And then a little while ago, just after the Mexican soccer team beat the Croatian team 3-1, a Mexican acquaintance posted to Facebook:

Gracias Diosss pude ver los 3 golazos aunque aki mi raza no me crelleron soy vidente

Roughly: Thank you Goddd that I could see the 3 goals although my people didn't believe me I'm a prophet

So it's presumptuous to expect Yahweh to place his hands on Merry Clayton when he had more important matters like the World Cup to handle.  (As I've pointed out many times, this attitude is widespread among sports fans and athletes alike: His eye is on my team, or on Me Me Me.)

The victim-Christianist writer Rod Dreher kvelled yesterday about a "miracle in Philadelphia" (yes, I know, he's alluding to another "miracle") in which a Ukrainian Orthodox church in the City of Brotherly Love "burned to the ground -- but its icons were unharmed."  Well, "a few of the icons," anyway; or maybe "a lot of" them, or maybe "Not one of those pictures caught on fire" -- the firefighter quoted isn't very consistent.  It would be a nice coincidence if none of the icons was damaged, but I'm not sure what it would prove, since of course Yahweh could just as easily have spared the church altogether.  Maybe it's like the man who was blind from birth in the gospel of John: Jesus explained to his disciples that the blindness wasn't due to any sin by the man or by his parents, but "so that the works of God might be displayed in him" (9:3).  So Yahweh set the church afire, but spared the icons to show his power and glorify himself.  Just the kind of god people like, apparently -- at any rate, very few Christians seem to stumble over a doctrine like this.

Last week another writer at The American Conservative, Alan Jacobs, asked, "What Does Atheism Do for Atheists?" in reply to an article by Susan Jacoby on the blessings of atheism.  I haven't read Jacoby's article yet, though I know I should; she's not the sharpest pencil in the box.  But I do want to try to answer Jacobs's question sometime.  My first thought, though, is to counter: What does religion do for the religious?  It seems to me, from what I've observed, that its comforts are not very reliable, and require the cultivation of doublethink to work at all: to remember Yahweh's omnipotence selectively, so that you beg him to repair an injury while forgetting that, according to your own doctrines, he himself inflicted it.  I can't believe that the strain of leaving that contradiction unresolved doesn't take a toll of some kind.

Atheists in general don't do any better with such questions.  That whatever answers we come up with are not satisfactory doesn't mean that theists' answers are correct, of course.  More soon, I hope.

What Is God's Last Name Again?

There's a person on Facebook who has the account named "God."  His or her postings consist of snark aimed mainly at conservative and fundamentalist Christians, who are excellent but easy targets.  The assumption underlying the account appears to be that this God is preferable to the God of the Bible thumpers; I don't agree, and I have my fun by posting my own snark at the Facebook God, with a good deal more hostility than I usually express in that venue.

I don't really have any idea who Amanda Bynes is.  But when did God, any God, help those millions of starving people out there?  He could help them and Amanda Bynes.  I'm constantly surprised at how shallow the critics of conservative religion are.  And yet, when they put on their God masks, they can't imagine anything but a lazy do-nothing slacker god at best, and a cosmic sadist at worst.  ("Yahweh, how many times I have told you to clean up your planet?"  "Aw, Mom, let me alone, I'm busy playing Grand Theft Auto!")

Quite a Character

I just finished reading Isherwood on Writing, Christopher Isherwood's lectures from the 1950s and 1960s, and it was entertaining stuff.  I don't think I learned much that was new from it: Isherwood recycled most of the anecdotes in his later published writing, such as Christopher and His Kind, or in interviews.  But it's still an entertaining read, and I envy those who were in the audiences for the original performances.

Not too surprisingly, I find Isherwood weakest when he talks about religion.  I don't consider Vedanta to be much of an improvement on Western religion.  If Agehananda Bharati is correct, Vedanta was influenced by Christianity, if only to react against it.  But that wouldn't matter if Isherwood made something interesting artistically out of his Vedanta; artists can and do make beauty out of junk.  But as with (for example) Madeleine L'Engle or C. S. Lewis, Isherwood's attempts to use his religion in his fiction ended up distorting the story and the characters.  At best, in A Single Man, Vedanta provided a frame for the character's life, a metaphor for his death.

In the lectures Isherwood is a bit more successful.  His vocation as a writer predated his religious conversion (or reversion), and that fact may have kept him grounded, since his lectures are mostly about writing from his own perspective.  One lecture is devoted to "The Writer and Religion," but in "What Is the Nerve of Interest in the Novel?" he talks about the double vision a writer (and a reader) must have:

In other words, ... however apparently sordid or distressing or tragic or grim the circumstances of a novel may be, underneath all of this there is a great lift of exhilaration in reading about it.  Let us try to think why this is so.  The saints have almost all been unanimous insofar as they've expressed themselves on the subject in saying that in some way which the rest of us can't understand everything is finally all right.  It is marvelous.

In one of the Hindu scriptures is the saying "In joy the universe was created, in joy it is sustained, in joy it dissolves."  Now of course on the level of our everyday experience this is a hard saying and seems to be an unfeeling saying, a saying which expresses a kind of indifference toward human suffering.  And what I meant to point out is that this is not at all the case.  But the fact remains that some of these great men of compassion and mercy did in fact, in the midst of terrible suffering which they were working all through their lives to alleviate, nevertheless rejoice.  There is a charming anecdote in the life of Ramakrishna of one of the wandering monks tho used to visit the temple at Dakshineswar on the Ganges, where he lived.  He used to come out of his cell twice a day and sit on the edge of the Ganges as though he were a spectator in the theater, and clap his hands and say, "Bravo! Excellent!" as though the whole universe were an enormous theatrical performance [65].

I think Isherwood would have done better to say that it is not necessarily the case that the saying he quotes expresses a kind of indifference toward human suffering -- not "not at all the case."  It depends on how it's used, and by whom.  Some teachers have used this doctrine specifically to express not merely indifference but callousness to human suffering -- that of other people, at least: they take their own very seriously, and report that the Universe agrees.  (Mother Teresa apparently took a similar view, but when she got sick she utilized all the soul-sucking materialistic resources of modern Western medicine.) 

In The Karma of Brown Folk (Minnesota, 2000), Vijay Prashad told how the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi -- probably still most famous as the Beatles' onetime guru -- viewed the poor.

In 1967, during the Summer of Love, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi gave a revealing press conference in New York City.  "The hungry of India, China, anywhere," he noted, "are lazy because of their lack of self-knowledge.  We will teach them to derive from within, and then they will find food." ...Some reporters found the Maharishi's statement to be unacceptable, and one asked, "Do we have to ignore the poor to achieve inner peace?"  The Yogi answered, "Like a tree in the middle of a garden, should we be liberal and allow the water to flow to other trees, or should we drink ourselves and be green?"  "But isn't this selfish?"  "Be absolutely selfish.  That is the only way to bring peace, to be selfish, and if one does not have peace, how is one to help others attain it?" [60-1]

The Maharishi was not unrepresentative of Hindu (or other) saints, from what I can tell.  I think statements like his should be borne in mind when reading Isherwood's "terrible suffering which they were working all their lives to alleviate."  I also remember how the Reverend Jesse Jackson defended himself against allegations of indifference to AIDS by explaining "that he had spent nights in AIDS hospices in Texas and California during his 1984 presidential campaign, a move he compared in symbolic value to the way Jesus just before his crucifixion, stayed with Simon the Leper" (Cathy Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics [Chicago, 1999], 347).

From the viewpoint of someone writing narrative, however, Isherwood was pointed in the right direction.  A novelist will probably write about bad people, and about terrible things that happen to innocent people.  In order to write good fiction,

it seems to me that the novelist works simultaneously on two levels and that he must, as it were, succeed and come through to us on both of these levels if he produces work of a first magnitude.  On the level of human suffering and struggle the novelist obviously has to be involved, engaged.  He has to mind that people suffer, he has to condemn the bad and rejoice in the good ... But, surely, in a great novel, there's something else again.  While all this struggle is going on the novelist is not only down there, covered with mud and blood, fighting and suffering with his characters, but he is also up above.  He is also the eternal, who looks down upon everything, and enjoys it.  Because, of course, in the world of art if something well done it is enjoyable.  One has to face the fact that the most dreadful descriptions of agonizing death are, artistically speaking, just as enjoyable as great love scenes or charming scenes of domestic happiness with children.  It is quite, quite immaterial.  This sense of joy, contact with life, can be related to any set of circumstances or characters you choose to name [66].

Though I basically agree with this, it reminds me of something I heard years ago in a philosophy class I audited.  The professor said that someone had suggested that when we speak of the goodness of God, we're talking not about moral goodness but technical goodness, as we might say that Shakespeare was a good playwright even though he wrote about murder, treason, and other immoral things.  He gave a reference, but I wasn't able to track it down.  The obvious objection I see to this suggestion is that it's false: when people (whether laypeople, clergy, or philosophers) talk about God's goodness, they almost always mean moral goodness. (Of course "moral goodness" also means "righteousness" or "justice" much of the time, which in Christian and some other traditions primarily involves the spectacular punishment of sinners, for the edification of the good.  This ought to be mitigated somewhat by the Christian doctrine that we are all sinners, but in practice those Christians who bay for blood on the sidelines never consider that they deserve the pitchforks and burning brimstone too.)

The world is not "an enormous theatrical performance."  For that matter, the creepy monk who clapped and cheered the show at the Ganges was not a spectator but part of the "show" himself; Alan Watts, who explicated a form of this doctrine, always understood that.  Is it useful, perhaps, to think of the universe as such a performance?  I don't think so; as I've said before, drawing on Peter DeVries's fiction, I'd much prefer that there is no one watching the horrors that happen in the world -- and not only to us -- than that there is a Cosmic Spectator, applauding or weeping as the story demands, but doing nothing about it.  Many people, I recognize, take the opposite view: it comforts them to think that God sits in Heaven, wiping away tears over their suffering but doing nothing about it.  Just his sympathy is enough for them, though they also pray for his intervention, inconsistently enough.

I think Isherwood had it backwards.  Gods are characters in the stories people invent about them.  Those stories are an enormous cycle of folk art, to which all believers contribute.  (And even non-believers: The poems I wrote thirty-odd years ago on Biblical and religious subjects were my additions to the canon, since as a human being and a product of Western "civilization" they are part of my heritage.)  We tell these stories, as we tell most stories, partly to create an imaginary world where "the good end happily, and the wicked unhappily; that is what fiction means"; partly to imagine how things might be better or might be worse, to put our wishes and fears into words in order to try and master them; and much more.  These stories, like any others, can be analyzed and criticized.  Believers generally want the stories of their tradition to be exempt from criticism, though retelling with adaptations is a form of criticism.  But they feel the same way about secular stories they love: they don't want them picked apart, though they'll happily trample on stories they dislike that other people value.  Nobody's stories are or should be exempt from criticism, and I've previously discussed my own bewilderment over the kinds of stories that many other people find edifying.

The relation between art and the world, reality and fantasy, is vexed and disputed.  It's not surprising that people should believe that because we can tell stories that resemble real experiences, that stories are themselves "real."  I don't propose to try to settle that here.  It's when people try to give stories priority, to imagine that they are real and the world is their shadow, that I object.

If I remember correctly (it has been years since I read Beyond Theology), Alan Watts explained that in Hindu doctrine the universe is the stories God tells himself for his own entertainment and edification, to scare and amuse himself, and he loses himself in them the better to suspend disbelief and be carried away by his stories -- even to the point that he forgets that they're his stories, and believes that they are "real."  I learned a lot from Watts, but here I think he too had it backwards.  What he described was human beings and the stories we tell, not the gods.  I suppose that's why his metaphor (or allegory?) worked as well as it does: mythopoesis, the making of myths, is a familiar activity, and we create the gods in our own image, so of course they'd do it too.

A Fool's Theodicy

John M. Chernoff's Hustling Is Not Stealing: Stories of an African Bar Girl (Chicago, 2003) has a 118-page introduction, but unusually for such matter, it's worth reading all the way through.  I like Chernoff's approach to mapping out the problems of describing African society -- or any society, really -- but 80 pages in, I'm starting to notice a pattern.  He starts off well, then wanders off in what seems to me a wrong direction.  Then he takes up a new subject and repeats the pattern.  For example:

… Maybe in some situations, the purpose of knowing about something is not to understand it. Maybe in some times in places, the purpose of building and sustaining our knowledge is merely like that of a sermon, or even an incantation, in which Western social thought and social science function theologically as a bulwark against chaos, drawing boundaries to keep chaos away or to project it outward. If one assumes that there are things we will never understand, then chaos is another word for the limitations of our knowledge and capability, a word like nature or uncertainty or irony or fate or mess. Perhaps disorganization is part of the system, a regressive part that is beyond what we know and work with every day, yet nonetheless is a part that is serving the system or helps in a mysterious way, something like the imagination of the system. At least, for some philosophers and most fools, chaos represents the capacity to make fun of self-evident knowledge and of people who claim to know what is happening. Faced with a mess, the narrator of this book and her acquaintances do not need a teleology grounded in social policy or social theory. They need a theodicy grounded in a comic vision, a pathway to redemption, or at least an assertion of hope [21-2].

What I like is his initial speculation that understanding isn't necessary for knowledge, and even more, that "Western social thought and social science function theologically as a bulwark against chaos, drawing boundaries to keep chaos away or to project it outward."  I mean, I thought that was obvious, and I don't think it's just "social science" that has this function; so does physical science.

But I don't think it's necessary to "assume that there are things we will never understand," though it depends on what conclusions Chernoff wants to draw from that assumption.  We can't know in advance which things we will be able to understand and which we won't, so we might as well take on whatever problems look interesting.  It's not like we're in any danger of running out of questions we can't answer in the foreseeable future.  Mainly, though, we can't know in advance which things we will or won't understand.  The horizon of knowing all we can possibly know is still too far off to worry about.  And so often we don't even know what it is that we don't know.

I agree that Hawa (the name Chernoff gave to his narrator) and her acquaintances don't need a teleology, but I didn't know that anyone does.  But a theodicy isn't needed either.  The word means "justification of God", and in practice refers to any "defense of God's goodness and omnipotence in view of the existence of evil."  But what if God is in the wrong? What if God is guilty?  What if there is no "pathway to redemption"?  Can one live without it?  I don't see why not.  Hawa probably believes in God, and so do her acquaintances, but they don't need Chernoff to justify Its ways to them.

Maybe Chernoff recognizes this.  In his discussion of AIDS (which is not very good, I'm afraid -- it's the weakest part of the introduction so far), he writes (page 83):

An African proverb says, "When a river is dry, it is God Who is in shame, not the river."  And truly, as for this case, God really should be ashamed.