I've been talking with my friend A.J. for several weeks about a theme that has been plaguing both of us independently. He's been noticing that in any number of encounters in daily life, the moral judgment we normally employ is too broad-stroked to account for the complex, layer-upon-layer of moral dimensions which truly order reality. For instance, picture a luxury vehicle (I'll leave it generic to prompt your imagination. And also because learning about cars is as exciting to me as listening to the NASDAQ report as narrated by Ben Stein). It's price tag strikes some as Good, as an indication of absolute value (nothing costing that much could possibly be shite). Others see such costs as exorbitant and reflective of obscene individualistic consumerism, blissfully ignoring more substantial possible allocations of said budget such as providing care for elderly, etc.; the motives for buying such an exquisite machine seem laced with selfishness and self-promotion, and the car itself is undoubtedly a first-class polluter, created from materials possibly mined by exploited workers, etc. (Full disclosure: as my comments might imply, I have no love lost for the first perspective). But even though such evils pervade the making, buying and using of such a car, it is undeniable that there is an aesthetic dimension which can hardly be said to erode the human soul – the fine-tuned engine, the pristine paint job, the lumbar-supporting leather seats – all seem to evidence and promote human excellence and well-being. How are we limited creatures to understand and faithfully navigate the complex modes of morality which intertwine in every step of our lives?
C.S. Lewis, in “Miracles”, notes a certain “Principle of Vicariousness” whereby all created things depend on each other. He sees this phenomena as morally neutral: one the one hand, interdependence and symbiosis are reflective of the Trinitarian community and the wholeness which God imparts on his beloved universe. But more ominously, this can also be read as an endorsement of the necessity of evil, because goodness can come from evil (to wit: Joseph's phoenixian rise to glory in the wake of his brothers' enslaving intentions). More tangibly, all life itself lives only at the expense of other life...except, perhaps, plants. Even Jainism, seemingly the most life-conscientious religion (which advocates the continuous donning of breath masks to avoid inhaling and thus killing insects or bacteria) cannot avoid the fact that even vegetarianism, its preferred diet, is the act of consuming other life. Of course, in our pre-packaged culture, we forget that the things we ingest and digest were once breathing creatures. We cannot live without killing other things. So, where does this leave us? Presumably, in a state of ambiguity where our fallen, limited selves can never truly know goodness, because whatever goodness around us is laced with and feeds on evil. How then should we live?
This is why it's important to have a *historical* understanding of God's work and righteousness. We long for paradise, but based on what? The knowledge we have that, once upon a time, God created everything and it was good. Not merely passable, or morally neutral, but absolutely, positively good: every creature lived out of its function perfectly. And then, the foundations of the universe shook under the weight of the Fall, and everything changed.
For me, this is the most powerful objection to natural selection. I think that evolution is entirely compatible with the Scriptures. But natural selection's M.O. presupposes that self-preservation and self-propagation are *necessarily violent*. Nothing that exists today could exist without the Hobbesian mechanism of the universe's natural state, where life is “nasty, brutish and short”. Under the metanarrative of natural selection, the power dynamics and selfishness which characterize human life are due not to a historical rupture in God's unfolding will for the universe, but instead are *built into the very foundations of the history of reality itself*. Constrast this to St. Augustine's “privation theory of evil”, which claims that only Goodness is truly real, because God is the “most real” being; therefore, evil is only an infection on the Good, a distorting and perverting of originally pure intentions and functions. Under this view, it seems to me that the “creativity”of evil, which allows for *seemingly* proactive movements (ex. cancer is an active growth, not a physical withering) is an illusion: evil multiplies diversely only because Goodness is necessarily creative and diverse in its function. Evil only follows Goodness along for the ride, and hijacks it at interesting points. Natural Selection has no original peace, no original goodness. Whatever “goodness” we can acknowledge now is simply too bound up in apparent violence and “evil” to have any meaning, and certainly we have no ground to project an original Paradise.
I disagree. I believe there was an original Goodness to creation (whether or not it looked like the Genesis account, or whether such a story is a poetic rendering of the cosmic narrative which moves from perfection to fallenness and ultimately back again). Goodness characterized by God's gratioutous love and grace which can never be tied down to a lelgalistic interchange of works for salvation, but instead an uncalled-for gift. This giftedness of creation is inherently creative. This is the most important claim I'll make in this piece: mercy does not follow disobedience. God's grace does not operate only after the fact, to close the gap between ourselves and Himself; instead, it exists always-already. His love and grace are waiting for us – waiting for us not merely to sin, but to help share in His creative work. Grace's movement of mercy does indeed occur after we sin, but not to bring us back to “normal” with God, but instead to propel us forward, into the world. The purpose of reconciliation is not static, the nature of peace is not neutral, the nature of health is not simply “not-sick” but is a positive state which allows us to be who we were created to be and act accordingly. Being right with God, with one another, with creation is a positive, grace-filled, creative thrust. Each of us is different, rich with different gifts and loaded with different sins and wounds (which exist only because they've hijacked the original creativity of good work, of health, etc).
A.J. doesn't buy the Privation theory of evil – it simply seems too real and necessary in existence. So, he asks, can we really know the true opposite of evil? The problem with evil in our period (and perhaps always) is, as Hannah Arendt noted, its banality. Evil is rarely obvious and ominous: it usually seeps into our lives (like an infection) in seemingly good (or at least tolerable) ways. We justify preemptive war with cries of liberation and democracy; we justify all kinds of immature vices because...well, because 'boys will be boys'; we rationalize deception, however apparently insignificant, at every twist and turn. More troubling, we sometimes *actively* promote evil because it seems good. This is the moral ambiguity has troubled A.J. and myself.
But original Goodness can make no accord with Evil, just as there is no negotiating with cancer. It's always troubled me to read that God *hates* evil: after all, I thought God was love! But it makes more sense if we think of Evil not as a unified Person (the Devil) but instead as a force which pervades all of reality, shattering order and instituting its own infectious growths. It's important to note, I think, that Evil is not necessarily Disorder but a distorted reOrdering. Evil doesn't exist as a Manichean deity, nor as real, but it nonetheless has a logic and purposes of its own: it bends the tendency of creation (the “groaning for redemption”) toward God (the true, absolute reality) to absolute nothingness. Basically, what I'm saying is that Evil is violent, but it is not chaotic – its' only chaotic in relation to the Goodness of Ordered Creation. The style of evil, therefore, is an alternate order which deconstructs and twists the original, righteous order.
What this means, then, (and this is crucial) is that EVIL IS NOT NECESSARY. (For the record, I'm drawing a LOT from the work of Eastern Orthodox theologian/philosopher David Bentley Hart). Instead, evil is/was a potential for rebelling against God, and it has/has had disastrous effects, but God works through evil, using evil. But His use of evil toward His own righteous ends seems to be a different kind of “hijacking” than that of evil upon the Good: instead, He imbues the byproducts of evil with purpose in His kingdom. The Special Olympics is premised on the fact that many disases and accidents have hindered people from living normal lilves, but divine creativity, as displayed in the founders of the Special Olympics, has wrought joy and goodness out of painful and “unnatural” afflictions (a term I use delicately, and only insofar as it relates to God's original and sustained purpose for a whole, healthy creation) which have nonetheless shaped people's lives and identities. The important thing is, this is not logically necessary – people (and by extension, creation) could have been eternally whole and worshipful of their Creator. But His graceful love, which always reaches us before our sin ever does, works in spite of a wholly unnecessary Fall, and beats evil at its own game. But even if that's the case, A.J. rightly asks incessantly, where does that leave us in thinking, discerning, and doing, among such ambiguity and ambivalence, *even if* God is working through it? How can we possibly discern the levels upon levels of reality within which the forces of nothingness prey on Godly upbuilding, and righteousness redeems the byproductsof evil and repurposes it toawrd the divine light? How then should we live?!
To be continued...
(Spoiler alert: there is hope just around the corner!)
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Saturday, December 4, 2010
Do Work, Son
Okay, let's try this again. I just finished my biweekly coffee date with my friend Nate, and a conversation which ran the gamut from concerns with short-term mission trips to classical music. We sat in a hipster coffee shop (or "shoppe", if that's your cup of tea, as it were), the ideal location for rambling discourse among friends. This place is as leisure-filled as it gets (although a number of students are working on finals here), yet we always end up talking about Work. At this point in life, that's understandable – our jobs command 5/7 of our respective weeks, unlike the part-time work which was conversationally marginal in my school days. Anyway, I've been meditating on what Godly work looks like – not a Godly economy per se, nor even the robust Christian sense of vocation which my college went great lengths to promote in us impressionable, starry-eyed youngsters.
A few weeks ago, while reading “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe for my friends' book club, it occurred to me that not only the character of work, but also its very purpose in our lives has change in the wake of modern industrial capitalism. Whereas we have a national unemployment level approaching 10%, the very term “unemployment” would be incomprehensible in Achebe's small African village, because there is always work to be done. I imagine that the meaning of 2 Thessalonians 3:10 ("If a man will not work, he shall not eat”) seems to have changed with the coming of the Pilgrims to America: in Biblical times, it was most likely a simple matter of fact that a failure to sow or harvest would spell disaster for a person and his loved ones. But that assumed there was always work to be done – and in a semi-agrarian society like Israel, work would have abounded. Fast-forward 2000 years, where all our material needs and desires can be met...if only we have a *job*. However, the most popular refrain promising to save us from economic despair is “job-creation”. This would have sounded ridiculous in ancient times, because any work that was worth undertaking already existed. I plan to study this further.
In the meantime, I'd like to talk about the mundane rituals of everyday *work*, in and outside my job. Brother Lawrence was a 17th Century French monk who joined the brotherhood because of his acute clumsiness. His understanding of work, or “common business”, was characterized by a profoundly simple principle: every task, no matter how significant, should be done consciously for the glory of God. He spent his days in prayer – not quietly meditating, but actively enjoying God's presence while he cooked and cleaned.
I've heard others, especially my fiancee, referring to an “economy of abundance” as opposed to the prevailing capitalist economy of scarcity. But I only learned recently that this is marked not by naivete as to the material state before us, but instead by a *thanksgiving* for whatever we've been blessed with, regardless of its relative importance. I was reminded of this last night when I finally reached my apartment in a chilly evening (it snowed shortly thereafter) and soon found myself praising God for the miracle of bathroom radiators. I want to live a life full of those thankful moments.
Zen Buddhism focuses on mindfulness, but the purpose of such focus and “at-hand-ness” is not to give each moment and task its due, but instead to lose oneself – not simply metaphorically, but letting go of one's consciousness as a drop in an ocean of nothingness. At least, that's what I've picked up from my cursory readings of D.T. Suzuki. I think Christians have a lot to learn from such mindfulness, but for drastically different purposes: our chief end in life and death is not to cease suffering, but to “glorify God, and to enjoy him forever” (as the Westminster Catechism would have it). Thus, mindfulness for a Christian looks less like forgetting my own conscious presence, and more like remembering God's presence in my life. I've tried to pursue this mindfulness in my day job while tearing out old floors, grouting tile and talking to the guys I work with (“coworkers” sounds a bit too forced a term for these good ol' boys). It's certainly hard to remember every single movement and thought as a potential act of thanksgiving and praise to the Almighty, a la the monastics such as Brother Lawrence. But I think it is vital to viewing work as more than getting by, more than making money, but instead as the task of responding to God's call (or “calling”, in the spiritual or vocational sense). It's important to remember in pursuing one's unique calling that no task is too small or great for us to accomplish in a spirit of gratitude and vigor. Now if only I can remember that when Monday rolls around...
A few weeks ago, while reading “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe for my friends' book club, it occurred to me that not only the character of work, but also its very purpose in our lives has change in the wake of modern industrial capitalism. Whereas we have a national unemployment level approaching 10%, the very term “unemployment” would be incomprehensible in Achebe's small African village, because there is always work to be done. I imagine that the meaning of 2 Thessalonians 3:10 ("If a man will not work, he shall not eat”) seems to have changed with the coming of the Pilgrims to America: in Biblical times, it was most likely a simple matter of fact that a failure to sow or harvest would spell disaster for a person and his loved ones. But that assumed there was always work to be done – and in a semi-agrarian society like Israel, work would have abounded. Fast-forward 2000 years, where all our material needs and desires can be met...if only we have a *job*. However, the most popular refrain promising to save us from economic despair is “job-creation”. This would have sounded ridiculous in ancient times, because any work that was worth undertaking already existed. I plan to study this further.
In the meantime, I'd like to talk about the mundane rituals of everyday *work*, in and outside my job. Brother Lawrence was a 17th Century French monk who joined the brotherhood because of his acute clumsiness. His understanding of work, or “common business”, was characterized by a profoundly simple principle: every task, no matter how significant, should be done consciously for the glory of God. He spent his days in prayer – not quietly meditating, but actively enjoying God's presence while he cooked and cleaned.
I've heard others, especially my fiancee, referring to an “economy of abundance” as opposed to the prevailing capitalist economy of scarcity. But I only learned recently that this is marked not by naivete as to the material state before us, but instead by a *thanksgiving* for whatever we've been blessed with, regardless of its relative importance. I was reminded of this last night when I finally reached my apartment in a chilly evening (it snowed shortly thereafter) and soon found myself praising God for the miracle of bathroom radiators. I want to live a life full of those thankful moments.
Zen Buddhism focuses on mindfulness, but the purpose of such focus and “at-hand-ness” is not to give each moment and task its due, but instead to lose oneself – not simply metaphorically, but letting go of one's consciousness as a drop in an ocean of nothingness. At least, that's what I've picked up from my cursory readings of D.T. Suzuki. I think Christians have a lot to learn from such mindfulness, but for drastically different purposes: our chief end in life and death is not to cease suffering, but to “glorify God, and to enjoy him forever” (as the Westminster Catechism would have it). Thus, mindfulness for a Christian looks less like forgetting my own conscious presence, and more like remembering God's presence in my life. I've tried to pursue this mindfulness in my day job while tearing out old floors, grouting tile and talking to the guys I work with (“coworkers” sounds a bit too forced a term for these good ol' boys). It's certainly hard to remember every single movement and thought as a potential act of thanksgiving and praise to the Almighty, a la the monastics such as Brother Lawrence. But I think it is vital to viewing work as more than getting by, more than making money, but instead as the task of responding to God's call (or “calling”, in the spiritual or vocational sense). It's important to remember in pursuing one's unique calling that no task is too small or great for us to accomplish in a spirit of gratitude and vigor. Now if only I can remember that when Monday rolls around...
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
My Unwanted Fling with Dionysus
After accompanying my fiancee to work on a conversationally-contentious CTA jaunt, I rode the Red and Brown lines for a few hours, alternately napping and slowly working through Nietzsche's "The Birth of Tragedy". Now this is a short book, and one I've skimmed before (I was supposed to actually read it for class, but you know how these things go), and Nietzsche is as gripping as philosophers get. But I was just crawling through it, maybe because of the L's lurching and leaning, or maybe because I'm trying to figure out what order looks like in my own life.
Ol' Friedrich sets up the characters of two ancient Greek gods against each other - Apollo, marked by dreams, language and order, versus Dionysus, marked by drunkenness, music and chaos. To Nietzsche, the dreamlike Appolonian attitude pervaded Greek poetry and literature, imposing a distant, abstracted sense of order. The Greek chorus in a typical classical play reminds the audience to suspend their disbelief, a device which nevertheless reinforces the artificial nature of the onstage proceedings. Nietszche contrasts the Appolonian distance (which is still self-conscious even as it leans backwards out of subjectivity to recognize a play as a play, or to view a painting as a painting) with the Dionysian self-forgetful orgy of the many into a primal unity (which is viciously subjective in the vein of Kierkegaard's Aesthetic mode of being, yet nonetheless cedes its very individuality in the act of pursuing its id-like desires, which empties one into others like the indiscriminate hooking up at a frathouse binge party). Anyway, Nietzsche priveleges music over language, claiming that speech and text (which embody Apolloniasm) are always a copy or shadow of the eerie primeval melodies (which convey Dionysianism). Somehow, I suspect that Derrida would disagree. The really interesting thing about this is not that Nietzsche attaches opposing metaphysical qualities to two fairly similar mediums (music and drama) pitting them against each other; instead, he subtly differentiates between them in order to present two alternate metanarratives: one grounded (or rather, "ungrounded") in chaos and random particularity, and one grounded in order and an almost ironic sense of the real. These two metanarratives have different ways of explaining each other - each assumes its own authority, and that the other is a two-bit ripoff of itself (Nietzsche himself claims that the Dionysian preceded the Appolonian, however).
Anyway, this metaphysical interpretation may not be warranted - maybe he indeed simply writing a history of Attic tragedy. But I think it's much more interesting as a way of thinking about order in my own life. If order is of the (ahem) order of language, then there are definite rules for how life is to be arranged. (I would argue that music is as equally ordered as language - both modes of 'communication' are certainly willing and able to bend or break such rules, but let's ignore that for the moment). Because Nietzsche associates language with drama (he mentions lyrics when discussing Dionysian music, but claims that music absorbs lyrics because it is more primeval, therefore any focus on language itself must be in a medium of lesser emotional power - apparently, that is how he views the stage. I think he's right - as pretentious as music can be (I read somewhere once that song is the place where we sing the kinds of things that are too cheesy to ever be spoken, not to mention that its harmonies are preconcieved), it certainly doesn't match the pretense of the stage (costumes, script, props, etc).
So, if order is a veil over an original disorder, then my attempts to live according to the Text (Scripture as the script for the good life: patterning my life after Christ's incarnational reinterpretation and fulfillment of OT law) is never more than a shadow play. Conscious attempts to live into sanctification (to say my lines and play my part with unique excellence) always exist under the clutch of a constant Ordering (a script, a director, a limited stage with designated props), yet this Ordering is always imposed (like a play setpiece) atop the stage of a prior chaotic dithyramb (dissonant melody). Order can never overturn Chaos, it can only ever cover it up. If true, thios is extremely depressing. And yet our messy world runs on the principle of Entropy: creation seems to be groaning to return not to Paradise, but a pre-BigBang nothingness. To wit: cities built atop fault lines cave back into the earth which had upheld them. With every passing medical advancement, nature seems to develop new ways to kill us (AIDS, new variants of cancer, a panoply of mutating influenza strains, etc). Even Styrofoam, the most durable of un-decomposable materials, has a half-life, and will someday turn back into the carbon chains which had congealed to form it. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Perhaps most tellingly, Jacque's famed monologue from As You Like It waxes on the very themes of The Birth of Tragedy, beginning with "All the world's a stage" and commencing with the entropic return to the carbon-based chaos known as death, as evidenced by the nearly-dead antiquarian "sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything". Of course, it might be argued that primal chaos is a far cry from nothingness. An old toothless man can hardly function as an active participant in a drunken orgy (although his senility certainly fits the bill of Bacchic drunken forgetfulness). But although the tones of Taps are a sullen afterthought to the life-giving nuptial strains of Pachelbel's Canon in D, it is not a stretch to think of death as a dreary Aristotelian end, in the Freudian sense of the Death-Drive.
I guess I'm really trying to find a way to deal with my own latent (and unwanted!) nihilism, and Nietzsche is raising his hand, squirming in his seat, and squealing, "Oooh! Pick me!" At least once a week, I pray to my Savior to purge the nihilism from my soul, and I'm scared to think how deeply its dusty talons still reach into my being. I'm not talking about a (dare I say) "metaphysical" commitment to nothingness and meaninglessness. Instead, it's more of a pragmatic nihilism (how Zizek characterizes ideology): how am I actually living, despite my professed beliefs? This is a question which I'm sure will take many more posts to answer. In the meantime, beannachd dia Dhuit.
Ol' Friedrich sets up the characters of two ancient Greek gods against each other - Apollo, marked by dreams, language and order, versus Dionysus, marked by drunkenness, music and chaos. To Nietzsche, the dreamlike Appolonian attitude pervaded Greek poetry and literature, imposing a distant, abstracted sense of order. The Greek chorus in a typical classical play reminds the audience to suspend their disbelief, a device which nevertheless reinforces the artificial nature of the onstage proceedings. Nietszche contrasts the Appolonian distance (which is still self-conscious even as it leans backwards out of subjectivity to recognize a play as a play, or to view a painting as a painting) with the Dionysian self-forgetful orgy of the many into a primal unity (which is viciously subjective in the vein of Kierkegaard's Aesthetic mode of being, yet nonetheless cedes its very individuality in the act of pursuing its id-like desires, which empties one into others like the indiscriminate hooking up at a frathouse binge party). Anyway, Nietzsche priveleges music over language, claiming that speech and text (which embody Apolloniasm) are always a copy or shadow of the eerie primeval melodies (which convey Dionysianism). Somehow, I suspect that Derrida would disagree. The really interesting thing about this is not that Nietzsche attaches opposing metaphysical qualities to two fairly similar mediums (music and drama) pitting them against each other; instead, he subtly differentiates between them in order to present two alternate metanarratives: one grounded (or rather, "ungrounded") in chaos and random particularity, and one grounded in order and an almost ironic sense of the real. These two metanarratives have different ways of explaining each other - each assumes its own authority, and that the other is a two-bit ripoff of itself (Nietzsche himself claims that the Dionysian preceded the Appolonian, however).
Anyway, this metaphysical interpretation may not be warranted - maybe he indeed simply writing a history of Attic tragedy. But I think it's much more interesting as a way of thinking about order in my own life. If order is of the (ahem) order of language, then there are definite rules for how life is to be arranged. (I would argue that music is as equally ordered as language - both modes of 'communication' are certainly willing and able to bend or break such rules, but let's ignore that for the moment). Because Nietzsche associates language with drama (he mentions lyrics when discussing Dionysian music, but claims that music absorbs lyrics because it is more primeval, therefore any focus on language itself must be in a medium of lesser emotional power - apparently, that is how he views the stage. I think he's right - as pretentious as music can be (I read somewhere once that song is the place where we sing the kinds of things that are too cheesy to ever be spoken, not to mention that its harmonies are preconcieved), it certainly doesn't match the pretense of the stage (costumes, script, props, etc).
So, if order is a veil over an original disorder, then my attempts to live according to the Text (Scripture as the script for the good life: patterning my life after Christ's incarnational reinterpretation and fulfillment of OT law) is never more than a shadow play. Conscious attempts to live into sanctification (to say my lines and play my part with unique excellence) always exist under the clutch of a constant Ordering (a script, a director, a limited stage with designated props), yet this Ordering is always imposed (like a play setpiece) atop the stage of a prior chaotic dithyramb (dissonant melody). Order can never overturn Chaos, it can only ever cover it up. If true, thios is extremely depressing. And yet our messy world runs on the principle of Entropy: creation seems to be groaning to return not to Paradise, but a pre-BigBang nothingness. To wit: cities built atop fault lines cave back into the earth which had upheld them. With every passing medical advancement, nature seems to develop new ways to kill us (AIDS, new variants of cancer, a panoply of mutating influenza strains, etc). Even Styrofoam, the most durable of un-decomposable materials, has a half-life, and will someday turn back into the carbon chains which had congealed to form it. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Perhaps most tellingly, Jacque's famed monologue from As You Like It waxes on the very themes of The Birth of Tragedy, beginning with "All the world's a stage" and commencing with the entropic return to the carbon-based chaos known as death, as evidenced by the nearly-dead antiquarian "sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything". Of course, it might be argued that primal chaos is a far cry from nothingness. An old toothless man can hardly function as an active participant in a drunken orgy (although his senility certainly fits the bill of Bacchic drunken forgetfulness). But although the tones of Taps are a sullen afterthought to the life-giving nuptial strains of Pachelbel's Canon in D, it is not a stretch to think of death as a dreary Aristotelian end, in the Freudian sense of the Death-Drive.
I guess I'm really trying to find a way to deal with my own latent (and unwanted!) nihilism, and Nietzsche is raising his hand, squirming in his seat, and squealing, "Oooh! Pick me!" At least once a week, I pray to my Savior to purge the nihilism from my soul, and I'm scared to think how deeply its dusty talons still reach into my being. I'm not talking about a (dare I say) "metaphysical" commitment to nothingness and meaninglessness. Instead, it's more of a pragmatic nihilism (how Zizek characterizes ideology): how am I actually living, despite my professed beliefs? This is a question which I'm sure will take many more posts to answer. In the meantime, beannachd dia Dhuit.
The Obligatory Theme Verse
"I have placed wisdom within every skilled craftsman in order to make all that I have commanded you." [Exodus 31:6, HCSB]
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