Against the Stream

George Harrison and the Weakness of the Flesh

Via Andrew Sullivan, a link to Andrew Furguson's article on George Harrison's relationship with religion. Write's Furguson:

The theme that emerges from this dog’s breakfast involves Harrison’s split personality—or as he might prefer to put it, his dual nature, the yin and yang—as a religious seeker on the one side and a decadent, heedless rock star on the other. If you had even a passing acquaintance with Harrison’s career you know about the religion part, but nobody in the movie or book ever gets specific enough to fill us in on the other half.

“He had two personalities,” Ringo says. “One was this bag of [prayer] beads, the other was this big bag of anger.” Yoko Ono seconds that emotion: “He had two aspects,” she says. “Sometimes he was very nice. Sometimes he was [long pause] too honest.” Paul McCartney, coy as ever, says, “He was my mate, so I can’t say too much. But he was a guy, a red-blooded guy, and he liked what guys like.”

I read such things, and I guess I'm always surprised at the surprise. Whether it's George Harrison or St. Augustine, the fact remains that all human beings have such split personalities. Some of us make lean more heavily on one dimension or the other, but both -- hedonist and spiritual seaker -- are always there.

Sullivan, though, has trouble grasping a different aspect of Harrison's spiritual life.  In light of his early rejection of Christianity, where did "My Sweet Lord" come from?:

So why, one wonders, the explicitly Christian - and ecumenical - lyrics of the song? I have been able to relate to this song both when I was far more tradition-bound in my faith and since. Harrison may not have been an "orthodox" believer - but neither was Jesus.

On the one hand, let me second that final sentiment, but Sullivan makes a mistake in assuming that the "Sweet Lord" Harrison is singing about is Jesus. The Lord being addressed (quite explicitly in fact) in the song is Lord Krishna. That said, I'm always happy as a Christian to appropriate the sentiment for my own religious purposes, and often do so while singing along in the car.

Watching Egypt

Don Ellis at Middle East Mirror says now's the time to do it:

But the future of Egypt will not be represented by the military or the Central Security Forces and certainly not by a dominant controlling Muslim party. If the birth pangs of a new Egypt in Tahrir square are going to bring forth anything viable, than the protesters and the liberal political parties must have sufficient influence when writing a new constitution. The liberal parties want the military to delegate decision-making and to establish a temporary civilian government whose job it will be to put itself out of business; that is, the temporary civilian government will be charged with maintaining order and beginning the process of transitioning to the permanent government.

It will be interesting to see how the new political configurations in Egypt will be organized, and what that may bode for the possibilities for greater liberalism and democracy throughout the Middle East.

Is Fantasy A Christian Genre?

I've been mulling over the question of whether fantasy can be said to be an "inherently" Christian genre for about a week now, since coming across the question on several of my favorite blogs. The question emerged from an editorial at Commentary magazine by D. G. Myers who, riffing on an article last Spring by Michael Weingrad, argues that "Fantasy is ideally suited for Christianity’s kerygma, but it is a bad fit for Judaism." He cites Weingrad's contention that:

if Christianity is a fantasy religion, then Judaism is a science fiction religion. If the former is individualistic, magical, and salvationist, the latter is collective, technical, and this-worldly. Judaism’s divine drama is connected with a specific people in a specific place within a specific history. Its halakhic core is not, I think, convincingly represented in fantasy allegory. In its rabbinic elaboration, even the messianic idea is shorn of its mythic and apocalyptic potential. Whereas fantasy grows naturally out of Christian soil, Judaism’s more adamant separation from myth and magic render classic elements of the fantasy genre undeveloped or suspect in the Jewish imaginative tradition.

For my part, I can't speak meaningfully to what is or is not a well suited genre for Judaism, but I, like several of those who responded to both Weingrad and Myers, am less than convinced by the set of assumptions that seem to underlie the argument.

Several commentators, for example Alyssa Rosenberg, noted that fantasy comes in a variety of flavors, some of which may appear to be more suited for a Christian mythologization than others, but most religious traditions include tales of the super or supra-natural, spirits, pixies, sprites, demons and angels and various forms of black and/or white magic. None of this is unique to Christianity.

Indeed, it's far more likely the case that Christianity is well suited to the types of fantasy that Myers and Wingrad are thinking of only to the degree that it has incorporated a great deal of paganism into its own mythology. Much of what Tolkien and Lewis included in their mythopoetic re-imaginings of the world came originally from the pre-Christian era of Great Britain. Indeed, the figure of Merlin, used explicitly by Lewis, and brought in by Tolkien through the back door in the form of Gandalf, is an explicit hangover from the pagan era, which gets baptised and Christianized, but never fully tamed or domesticated by Christianity.

Far from fantasy being "inherently" Christian then, it seems that in its deep lineage, it's more likely to be inherently pagan. But myths and stories are adapted and changed from generation to generation. This is true of pagan myths as with any other story. If they are re-purposed as Christian tales, and then re-re-purposed in the form of modern fantasy, this is, to my mind, all to the good, as it keeps our attention focused on the sense of wonder that stands at the heart of all fantasy.

More Weberian Thoughts

More from Matt Yglesias, channelling a bit of Max Weber, on the ethics of hard work, and whether there's something innately "conservative" about it:

I suppose I agree with Will Wilkinson about the importance of “an ethos of initiative, hard work, and individual responsibility” though I have no real idea why he thinks most progressives are against such an ethos. It strikes me that cultivating such an ethos is sort of integral to making a progressive agenda work. I think back sometimes to the time when I stumbled into a Stockholm Metro station and got the person working the booth to explain what I needed to do to use the city’s bikeshare system. This wasn’t really her job, and the conversation wasn’t in her native language, and obviously no practical harm would have come to her if she’d blown me off but I take it that she took pride in working for Stockholm Metro and had a self-conception as someone who’s a helpful public servant. Any effective public agency from the United States Marine Corps on down is built in pretty profound ways on an ethos of duty and hard work in an even more profound way than things in the for-profit business sector. People who believe in public sector work and public services must believe in the idea of a strong work-ethic.

I think this is quite right. It's a conservative shibboleth that progressives don't believe in hard work, or that progressive political ideas lead to the death of hard work. Often conservatives get to this place by pointing to the Soviet Union, and the lack of incentives within a communist society for striving toward excellence. But of course this elides the vast, VAST differences between Communism as a mode of governance, and more generally applicable progressive policy ideas.

More importantly, within the American situation specifically, the connection between a ethic of hard work and the religious ethos, a la Max Weber, of deferred gratification, actually benefits from progressive policy ideas. To the extent that a solid social safety net can be established as the base of society, the more incentive people will have to take risks, to go out on a limb, and to work hard for some future benefit, knowing that they can take such risks without being in mortal peril of losing their health care or their house. Thus, they may be more willing in such circumstances to work harder, and defer gratification longer, thus supporting a more entrepreneurial form of capitalism, as opposed to the stultified middle management trap that seems to govern much of American working life.

Additionally, as Matt points out, capitalism today is far less about hard work and deferred gratification than about making enormous amounts of money for very little effort. Indeed, this is the entire ethos of the finance industry:

 if I look at America today, what I see undermining any meaningful notion of work ethic is a kind of run-amok ethic of moneymaking. The old Calvinist idea about money, as I understood it, was that hard work, discipline, and prudence were moral virtues. They were also things that are more likely than not to lead to personal prosperity. So prosperity shouldn’t be stigmatized as ignoble, it should be rather seen as something likely to flow from virtuous behavior. But this equation assumes that morally speaking what matters is the hard work, the discipline, and the prudence. Cutting corners, lying, cheating, or stealing to make a quick buck doesn’t fit the bill. Earning a multi-million dollar salary to deliver below-average performance as the CEO of a firm and then take a multi-million dollar golden parachute when you get sacked doesn’t fit the bill. Spending your days and nights dreaming up smart regulatory arbitrage schemes doesn’t fit the bill. In terms of what it says about your personal virtue, if you’re going to earn your keep identifying and exploiting previously unknown loopholes in the legal framework, you may as well just go out and break the law.

Under such circumstances, a bit of socialism may be the best thing for the long term future of capitalism.

Punk Professors

Matt Yglesias makes an intriguing point about the intersection of punk rock and academia:

I think the punk scene and the humanistic branches of the academy have some important things in common. They both involve a kind of deep rejection of the logic of market exchange.

I sort of see Matt's point. Academia does serve as a refuge for a great many people who aren't really eager to submit to the demands of ordinary life in capitalist society. Academics don't keep the same schedules that people with "real jobs" typically do. We often produce work that is of little to no inherent commercial value, and we often speak meaningfully and forcefully about the need to "keep our integrity, man!"

On the other hand, as some of Matt's commentors point out, Academia, like punk rock, depends for its rejection of a capitalist ethos on the tolerance and largesse of precisely the capitalist system that, either implicitly or explicitly, we are engaged in the process of rejecting.

On the other, other hand, the liklihood that I'll have a chance to compare myself to Joe Strummer again any time in the foreseeable future is exceedingly unlikely (except in the sense of "Joe Strummer was a really good guitarist, as opposed to Scott Paeth, who isn't"), so I'll take my opportunities as they come!

How Radical Can An Established Church Be?

Thus the question is posed over at Religion Dispatches regarding the internal turmoil in London around the presence of Occupy protesters at St. Paul's Cathedral:

The cathedral was faced with an unenviable dilemma—as Dan Shultz noted in these pages, we should not be too quick to cast the Dean and Chapter as Pharisees, for the right to protest should not trump all other considerations about the use of public space. The Church of England has genuinely been trying to foster discussion about reform of the banking industry—in fact St Paul’s has been leading such discussion. But how radical can an established Church be? Don’t its huge financial commitments mean that a certain realism is inevitable? This rather abstract question was suddenly tested by the protest.

One of the more amusing dimensions of this story is the revelation that apparently St. Paul's gets a pretty good revenue stream out of the mandatory admissions fee that they pay in order to let people into their church. Let that just marinate for a second: a mandatory admission fee. I'm just going to go ahead and say that it is impossible for any church to take a radical stand that has at the center of its pastoral model the idea that you can only attend if you've got enough money.

But regarding the larger issue: It's always instructive to see how religious hierarchies are likely to respond to movements for social change. Religion is often, though not always, a conservative force in society, so that militates against the possibility of Anglican officialdom siding with the Occupy movement. But beyond that, it seems that religious leaders only really start to lead when they're forced to follow the most radical implications of their traditions. And it's fortunate that there are many Christians in the square outside St. Paul's who are more than happy to remind the men in the great big building behind them that the building itself was erected in honor of a man who overturned the tables at the temple, who preached good news for the poor, and who died horribly at the hands of the representatives of the official party line.

And now, Woody Guthrie:

Why A Corpulent Magician May Not Be Your Best Guide to Theology

Steve Wiggans at Religion Dispatches has a good review of Penn Jillettes new(ish) book God, No! Signs You May Already Be An Atheist And Other Magical Tales. I should note before beginning that I have always been a big Penn & Teller fan. I love their deconstruction of the practice of performance magic. Particularly the way that they will describe a trick to you, tell you how its done, explain exactly how they are about to deceive you with it, and then still manage to amaze you.

That said, what makes someone like Penn a great magician doesn't necessarily lend itself to writing a good book about something (say, religion) about which he does not have an equivalent level of expertise. I have not read the book, although in light of Wiggans review I may pick it up in any event, since it does sound hilarious. But while it would indeed be interesting to read a deconstruction of religion that accomplishes something akin to what Penn does in his magic act, the approach he takes in his book is more that of an interested amateur, who knows a (very) little about his subject, and pretends to be an authoritative voice.

As Wiggans points out, one of Penn's rhetorical strategies in the book is to define atheism in a very expansive way:

As the subtitle indicates, Jillette believes atheism is more prevalent than many Americans would care to admit. This may be due to the definition of atheism he provides in the book’s preface: “If god (however you perceive him/her/it) told you to kill your child—would you do it? If your answer is no, in my booklet you’re an atheist.” He later qualifies this a bit, asserting that anyone who can’t answer a solid “Yes” to “Does god exist?” is an atheist. Religious specialists, however, tend to be sticklers for precise definitions. Those who don’t know about the existence of god are agnostics. Toward the end Jillette has a few choice words about those who refuse to give a clear answer. Either you believe, or you don’t. Agnosticism is for cowards.

And here, of course, is the heart of the problem when amateurs act like authorities. As Wiggins points out, it's not like there aren't categories to describe degrees of belief, or that there isn't a very real difference between the stance of the agnostic and that of the atheist.

But the core issue is Penn's suggestion that any form of religious doubt, any questioning of the tenets of one's religion, any consideration of the possibility that one may be wrong makes one an atheist. Again, rhetorically, it's a shrewd move, but it makes absolutely no sense to anyone with any sense of the actual subject matter of theology. Penn would have us group in the category of atheists not only folks like himself, his fellow neo-atheists like Dawkins, Dennett, and Hitchens, and even Bertrand Russell and Lucretius, all of whom can be easily understood to be one sort or another of atheist, because they make an overt assertion of the idea that God, in whatever relevant form, doesn't exist.

But Penn would also have us include Martin Luther King, Mother Theresa, Dorothy Day, Kierkegaard, St. John of the Cross, St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Augustine. Actually, insofar as his definition of atheism includes anyone who has entertained the slightest shadow of a doubt about the existence of God, it includes virtually the whole of humanity across time and space.

And this of course is the point. In casting such a wide net, Penn is attempting to show that atheism is the default position, and religion is the outlier, applicable as a term really only to those on the radical fringe of society. For Penn, if you think God probably exists you're an atheist. If you believe God must exist, you're a fanatic.

This is of course the same kind of strategy commonly used by the neo-atheists. But it doesn't bear genuine scrutiny. Faith is not, despite what they may believe, the absolute certainty in the existence of God. Rather it is a trust in the existence of God, and as importantly in the goodness and love of God, even in light of the possibility that God may not exist.

But this definition of faith allows for far too much leeway for the Penn's and the Hitchens's of the world. Only those willing to strap a bomb on themselves and commit mass murder are really religious by their lights. But this is attempting to say far too much, and allow far too little by way of genuine perplexity in the life of faith.

Theologians from Aquinas to Calvin to Tillich have understood that doubt is not the opposite of faith, but rather a constitutive element of faith. The capacity to consider the possibility that one may be wrong, that other points of view have validity, and that knowledge comes through a fearless inquiry into the nature and structure of those things that we believe are part and parcel of both what makes us human, and what makes us religious. Entertaining as I'm sure Penn's book is, I suspect that it won't be of much use to anyone who is looking for a sincere engagement with the question of God's existence or non-existence.

Weberian Insights

Matt Yglesias considers the Weberian implications of the fact that many French businesses take November 1 off for All Saints Day. He extends the discussion to other Catholic European areas:

The ECB turns out to have a new paper (PDF) on precisely this, which looks at Switzerland and compares Catholic jurisdictions to Protestant ones. They find more inequality in the Protestant areas and also harder working people: “Our empirical results suggest that ceteris paribus in a Reformed Protestant electorate support for increasing leisure time will be about 13 percentage points lower than in a Catholic electorate, and that support for government intervention will be about 11 percentage points lower.”

At first blush, this would seem to support the Weberian reading on the relationship of Protestantism and Capitalism. No doubt Michael Novack would disagree.

The Importance of Banking Reform in One Sentence

Via Kevin Drum at Mother Jones:

Banks are going to have to actually compete on fees now, and in the end that should benefit consumers by producing lower overall banking costs.

And this, as opposed to the enormous con game the banks have been playing on their customers for the past several decades, is the way it's supposed to work. Put your fees out there, and let me decide for myself.

What Dodd Frank did -- partially, and imperfectly -- was begin the process of opening up banking practices that had been rendered more and more opaque over the past forty years to the harsh light of day. And when people see just what these banks are really up to, they genuinely don't like what they see.

What the financial crisis of 2008 did was reveal just had tenuous the economic structures of modern capitalism really are. And when cowboy financiers and cleptocratic banking practices are allowed to run amok, these disasters become inevitable.