Step on a Crack, Break Your Mother's Back

It's possible -- no one has proven that it's impossible, anyway -- that the universe is a vast booby trap, designed and constructed by a cosmic practical joker waiting for us to make a misstep so he can jump us while holding us responsible for our doom. It's possible that the universe is set up so that it's possible to kill a human being in such a way that it's impossible for them to go to heaven (78); even cremating a cadaver can prevent the spirit from finding its way to peace (91). It's possible that absolute good and absolute evil are at war in the world, and everything bad that happens to us is just collateral damage in that conflict; sorry about that (86). It's possible that we can persuade absolute good or absolute evil, or their many agents, spiritual and material, to do us no harm (or less harm, at least) for the moment through bribery, sweet-talk, flattery, and appeasement, or at least by burning sage (186) for protection. It's possible that what "white doctors call 'being sick' is more like an accident, like the person went off the road and the [molecules] forgot how to be" (190). And it's possible that if you're going to ask a sacred mountain to take care of a dead friend, you should be "careful not to say the name of the dead" (252).

What I find puzzling is that so many religious believers see the universe just this way, though they'll object to the bald way I've described their worldview here. Officially God is good, but when you listen to what believers say about him, "good" is not the word that comes to mind. And I'm not talking only about the Christian god here. The page numbers in the paragraph above refer to a novel I just finished reading, Going Through Ghosts by Mary Sojourner (University of Nevada Press, 2010), based on Native American cosmology and religious practice. (I should mention that it's not at all a bad book, even if its theology annoyed me.) Try this exchange between a living character and the ghost of a murdered one (124):

"What do your cosmic supervisors think about this place?" Maggie asked.
"They are busy with an earthquake about to happen in the Middle East," Sarah said.

"Busy" how? I wondered. Are they busy trying to prevent it, or busy trying to start it? Do earthquakes happen because the spirits are understaffed, or inattentive, or hungover? This sort of thing is supposed to be spiritually superior to the ways of the whites?

Near the end of the book, Sarah the friendly ghost, now happily "all-the-way-dead", is watching the living with her recently dead teacher Minnie (244).

They had been told they were only to watch, and it had been made clear that they were not to intervene in anything. "Sometimes," their teachers had told them, "we might drop something down in front of a human. We see which way they go. There is something else you can give them; we'll show you when you've learned to watch."

Sure, it's possible that the afterlife is like an American elementary-school classroom with the students gathered around an ant farm, or at best a university psychology rat lab. But is that the best of all possible worlds? What entitles the teachers to test the humans they observe with such smug detachment? Their superiority is assumed by the author, but not recognized by this reader.

To repeat: it may be that the world really is an obstacle course designed by a being with obsessive-compulsive disorder, paranoia, and Tourette's syndrome, with a booby-trap at the end. What I don't understand is why so many people, given the opportunity to invent their own higher power, invent such nasty ones. The only comprehensible reason I can imagine is that the universe is a fairly inhospitable place; our lives are too often nasty, brutish, and short; so it makes a kind of sense to believe that if you're really, really, good -- if you bear up patiently and uncomplainingly under the worst suffering the Beings In Charge can inflict on you -- then they'll finally smile and tell you it's okay, you passed the test, you're a good little human and everything is going to be all right now. And maybe that's reality; who knows? But if it is, the Beings in Charge are still sadistic demons who should be defied, not deified.

But yeah, I know, a lot of people don't see it that way. Anyone else remember the Clerk's Tale from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales?

The Clerk's tale is about a marquis of Saluzzo named Walter. Lord Walter of Saluzzo is a bachelor who is asked by his subjects to marry in order to provide an heir. He assents and decides he will marry a peasant, named Griselda. Griselda is a poor girl, used to a life of pain and labor.

After Griselda has borne him a daughter, Walter decides to test her loyalty. He sends an officer to take the baby, pretending to kill her, and convey it secretly to Bologna. Griselda makes no protest at this. When she bears a son several years later, Walter again has him taken from her.

Finally, Walter determines one last test. He has a Papal bull of annulment forged which enables him to leave Griselda, and informs her that he intends to remarry. He requires her to prepare the wedding for his new bride. Secretly, he has the children returned from Bologna, and he presents his daughter as his intended wife. Eventually he informs Griselda of the deceit, and they live happily ever after.

There's always been disagreement among readers about how to understand this story (and Chaucer himself sent mixed signals in the text), but it "was an enormously popular one, included in virtually all of the adaptations of Chaucer done for children and juveniles in the 19th and early 20th centuries". A lot of people evidently get off on this sort of thing; Story of O is considered unwholesome, but not the Clerk's Tale.

I also recall Albert Brooks's movie 1991 Defending Your Life. Brooks, who also wrote and directed, plays a guy who's killed in an auto accident.  His spirit goes to Judgment City, where you must defend your life before a cosmic court, who decide whether to send you back or promote you. He meets and falls in love with the saintly Meryl Streep, but of course the court separates them -- she'll move up, he'll be sent back. Brooks desperately runs after the tram she's on and braves even electroshock to follow her; the cosmic judges beam smugly at this proof of his merit and (as I recall -- it has been years since I saw it) change their verdict in his favor. Incomprehensibly to me, Defending Your Life got good reviews and is still a cult favorite. I prefer Kore-eda Hirokazu's non-sadistic 1998 fantasy After Life myself, but I must recognize that many people like to fantasize about being tested, even cruelly, and coming through the test successfully.

But I know this is a matter of temperament; for me, as I've said before, the universe feels less unpleasant if no one is out there watching all the horrors but doing nothing about them. That's leaving aside the thought that someone is out there making the horrors happen. No doubt my preference is as much wish-fulfillment as the belief that someone is testing us, "sending us the disaster to overcome", but I think the wishes we make reveal a lot about us.

Chickens with Their Heads Cut Off Coming Home to Roost

Stop me if you've heard this one before: Under capitalism, man exploits man; under socialism, it's the other way around. (Hah - too late!)

Anyway, this comment by Jonathan Versen on a good post by Jonathan Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution. (Sorry -- as usual, no links to individual comments there.) It ties in with what I wrote the other day about Obama's "increasingly urgent political plight."

But if the democrats lose a lot of seats in November it will be interpreted by the corporate mediabots as proof that the phoney-baloney healthcare reform legislation was a big liberal boondoggle. And if they don't it will be spun as proof that the phoney-baloney healthcare reform legislation was successfully repackaged as being far more fiscally sound than it was in its original form.

Or to put it another way, when the democrats stumble, the people on the teevee will say it's because they're too liberal, and when they are successful (i.e., successful in the polls and elections) it will be because they successfully persuaded voters into believing they're not so wacky and liberal after all. So they can't win for losing, or they can't lose for winning-- I forget which.

These seem to me like hermetic scripts, already written and essentially impervious to adjustments due to unforseen events, like story-boards for the play's action.

I'm sorry, I can't quite make any sense of this. Am I supposed to weep great salt tears because the Democrats can't win for losing? Am I supposed to worry about the Democrats stumbling? Am I supposed to worry that the corporate media will interpret political events in conformance with their predictable line?

The "health care reform" bill is a boondoggle, but it's a boondoggle designed to shovel massive amounts of money into the accounts of Obama's corporate donors. Oh, I know there are a few crumbs in there which will help a relatively few of the people who really need help, but that doesn't mean that the bill isn't overwhelmingly and deliberately a boondoggle. Maybe they were put in to provide cover for the primary mission of subsidizing the insurance industry, but we'll probably never know and it doesn't matter. How the corporate media will spin the outcome of this November's elections is of no importance; anyone who's been paying attention will know that it is meant to obscure reality, not cast light on it.

I'd say that Jonathan Versen's response is itself a "hermetic script, already written and essentially impervious to adjustments due to unforseen events". (And I'd say that with all due respect for Mr. Versen, who's one of the saner commenters at ATR, certainly saner than your Promiscuous Reader.) If the Democrats lose seats in Congress in November, and that's quite possible but it's too early to say, liberals and progressives will raise up their hands before their weeping eyes, cast dust in their hair, and make loud lament in roughly the same terms: O waily waily waily, the only hope of the American people has been cast down! O waily waily waily! Huruu huruu huruu!

But if there's one thing that ought to be obvious by now, it's that it makes no difference whether the Republicans or the Democrats control Congress and the Oval Office: man will still exploit man, and vice versa. And our great two-party system ensures that nothing can be done about it electorally. Vote the rascals out! chortle the advocates of the system. But who do you put in the rascals' place? Why, more rascals, what did you think? This isn't solely an American problem, of course: South Koreans soundly rejected the bumbling and corruption of the Roh administration, voting for the opposition party -- and they got the plutocratic corruption of the Lee administration in its place.

Last year I wrote about "the eternal unofficial (and gleeful) campaign slogan of the Dems: What are you going to do, vote for a Republican?" It just occurred to me that many (most?) Democrats would rather lose to a Republican than vote against the corporate agenda. Why should I deny them their druthers?

Versen's comment was followed by this one, from another ATR regular:

I think that's accurate. I sometimes get discouraged about this play, because the MICFiC ... works so damn well. For me, there was some appeal to Naomi Klein's thesis in The Shock Doctrine that all disasters are exploited by elites to make everything worse, but lately I've been drawing some hope from Rebecca Solnit's remarkable book A Paradise Built in Hell. I may write Solnit a "thank you" note for that book, because hope needs all the sustenance it can get, and she has been feeding it while I have been wasting time brooding.

The systems of control that seem to keep us running on a wheel like hamsters while the world goes steadily to hell to are are not infallible. They have evolved over time, until at present they operate all too well, but that has been true of other systems of control across the ages, and this too will pass. Solnit's gift to her readers is renewed hope, and not the phony type sold to the desperate and feeble-minded. She makes a very compelling argument that we have more human potential than we have come to believe, and that disasters don't destroy us. I only wish that we could come together without them.

Excuse me -- "the systems of control that seem to keep us running on a wheel"? What do you mean "us", paleface? One notable thing about the whole health-reform debacle was that it showed that "the systems of control" don't operate that well. Yes, the propaganda system is effective, but only for things that seem far away from most people's lives. For example, most Americans buy the corporate propaganda line that America's public schools are terrible -- except for their own schools, which most think are doing all right. Most Americans seem to have opposed the Bush-Obama bailout of the financial system, despite the media / government blitz that pushed it. Most Americans think they'd be better off with a government-run health care system, despite a corporate / government propaganda campaign that has gone on for decades to convince them that government health care equals Sweden equals suicide. Most Americans seem to have opposed NAFTA despite a similar propaganda campaign in its favor, and even though most liberals didn't care because their jobs weren't affected by it. That came back to bite Clinton in the ass in the 1994 elections. And so on.

But most Americans also know that the people in charge aren't listening to them. They know that people who protest in the streets get gassed and beaten and arrested; if they're scornful of the dirty hippies and radicals who get their heads broken, it's partly as a way of warding off the danger a la Room 101 -- let those dirty hippies get beaten up, not me! They know from their grandparents about America's very violent labor history. You could say, I suppose that they're stuck on a treadmill by the system of control, but they aren't fooled by it, and they're restive. Only nice middle-class, college-educated liberals are fooled by it. If you look at the rest of that comment thread at ATR, you'll see that such people are still fretting that John Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA because he was trying to bring world peace and domestic justice, and resist our shadowy overlords in the pay of the Rockefellers. Maybe so, maybe not; it really doesn't seem to matter much to me.

And ah, "hope" -- I've heard that one before, and quite recently. Hope was the last evil to emerge from Pandora's box, as the philosopher Walter Kauffman liked to say. I haven't yet read Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell, partly because so far what I've read by her on her own hasn't impressed me much. But I did like the book she and her brother David just published, The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle, which I wrote about last month. And though I learned a lot from Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine and found it depressing, Klein also has written a lot about what can be done about the situation, notably in the pieces collected in Fences and Windows. Listening to my fellow Americans whine about brooding always annoys me to the point that I start channeling my mother, or a version of her: You think you've got problems? Think of the starving Hondurans who got beaten and killed in the streets for protesting against the coup! Think of Palestinians being tortured in Israeli dungeons for throwing rocks at Israeli tanks!

I know, we Americans are supposed to be able to fix things by the sheer power of the vote. But as I've said before, the best thing about Obama may turn out to be that he's laid that canard finally to rest. It takes a very well-trained memory to believe it now, but my fellow libs and progs are nothing if not well-trained. It's better to put hope aside along with other childish things, think about what has to be done, and then, if possible, start doing it. To quote Dorothy Dinnerstein again:

And in either case, to fight what seems about to destroy everything earthly that you love – to fight it not passively and autistically, with denial; and not unrealistically, with blind force; but intelligently, armed with your central resource, which is passionate curiosity – is for me the human way to live until you die.

(image source)

Wishin’ and Hopin’ and Thinkin’ and Prayin’

(The wedding imagery here reminds us that the Church is the Bride of Christ, and if you imagine the third-person pronouns with initial capitals [“Wear your hair just for Him … You won’t get Him thinkin’ and a-prayin’ …] you have quite a kinky little hymn on your hands.)

My text today, dearly beloved, is from H. Allen Orr’s review of Philip Kitcher’s Living with Darwin, on marketing strategies for atheists:

Too often, the New Atheism forgets to make its humanism humane.

Wow. Where did Orr (or Kitcher) get the idea that religion is humane? One objection I have to Dawkins and the other “New Atheists” (as I’ve said before, I’m always suspicious of talk about “New” anything) is that they are basically secular avatars of the old-fashioned hellfire and brimstone preachers. Orr quotes Kitcher from Living with Darwin:

Often, the voices of reason I hear in contemporary discussions of religion are hectoring, almost exultant that comfort is being stripped away and faith undermined; frequently, they are without charity. And they are always without hope.

Orr agrees with Kitcher in criticizing the New Atheists for the lack of hope in their message, for their apparent glee in, as they imagine, stripping away other people’s illusions; but such has always been the method of revivalist religion, and these boys are revivalists. Theoretically there is hope of salvation for those who heed the Christian message, but the congregation members who reportedly fainted on hearing Jonathan Edwards’s 1741 sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” don’t seem to have been reassured. The gospels’ Jesus taught (Matthew 7:13-14) that only a few would find the narrow path to salvation, so the overwhelming majority of humanity would be damned, and there is no hope for those who die unsaved. The parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) is striking in its callousness toward the damned. I think it was the historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith who wrote somewhere that the Good News of Christ was, and is, Bad News for most people.

Christianity, the religion I know the most about, has never been concerned with the tender feelings of believers in competing sects. Whether the competition was Jews, pagans, or (ever since the beginnings of the cult, as the New Testament shows) other Christians, the rhetoric has been vitriolic and unforgiving. Hatefulness is endemic to Christianity, though not specific to it, and the New Atheists tend to come across as reincarnations of the ancient Christian heresiarchs, seeking out and denouncing those who wickedly stray from their version of truth, only with the sectarian elements (and learning) stripped away. I see little to choose between Jonathan Edwards and a sodden, bleary-eyed Christopher Hitchens.

Kitcher is evidently trying to play the Good Atheist Cop to Dawkins’s, Harris’s, Dennett’s, and Hitchens’s Bad Atheist Cop. I doubt it will work, since despite his Christian upbringing Kitcher doesn’t seem to understand or really empathize with religious believers any more than the Bad Cops do, nor does he really offer any hope. Maybe he thinks that someday, someone will come up with some from somewhere. Maybe they’ll cook it up in a lab, a newer genetically-modified Enlightenment^TM hope that will enable people to get over the death of a loved one or the diagnosis of a painful terminal disease without the troublesome, addictive side effects of the old pre-scientific religious hope.

I’m not saying that I understand religious folk either. I’d think it would be easier for atheists like Kitcher, who were raised in religious families and only later broke away. I had no religious upbringing, and realized fairly early in life that I felt no need to believe in gods. I suspect that some of my attitude is temperamental (meaning that I have no idea where it comes from). Somewhere I read about a movie, Pete’n’Tillie, based on a Peter DeVries novel, in which a married couple (played by Carol Burnett and Walter Matthau) suffer through their child’s death of leukemia. One of the parents says something to the effect that it’s less painful to believe that there is no god, that no one is watching Up There, than to believe that Someone is watching but does nothing. That's exactly what I think, but I know that many other people, perhaps most, would rather believe that Someone is up there, weeping great salt tears over our pain and feeling it with us. (And no, I'm not talking about this guy.)

Yet religion is not synonymous with hope. Many atheists have died without fear, and many theists have died in terror of what might await them. Nor does every religion even offer the hope of an afterlife. Judaism, for one, has never been much concerned with the idea; reincarnation, while it promises some kind of survival, doesn’t offer the happy dream of reunion with one’s loved ones in an eternal Sunday afternoon. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in his Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (6.4312), and again I agree:

Not only is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle solved by my surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life?