He that puts not out his money to interest, nor takes reward against the innocent. He that does these things shall never be moved.

-Psalm 15:5

And now, you rich people, listen to me! Weep and wail over the miseries that are coming upon you! Your riches have rotted away, and your clothes have been eaten by moths. Your gold and silver are covered with rust, and this rust will be a witness against you, and eat up your flesh like fire. You have piled up riches in these last days… Your life here on earth has been full of luxury and pleasure. You have made yourselves fat for the day of slaughter.

-James 5:1-3,5

The detached observer is as much entangled as the active participant.

-Theodor Adorno

*

Introduction: Show me a sign.

It’s what people will say in times of painful indecision.

God, show me a sign.

What do people mean by that?

And does God respond?

And if God does respond, do we always recognize the sign?

It becomes apparent very quickly that this word – sign – may, like Mary Poppins’ handbag, unpack far more than we might believe by outward appearance.

Here’s Google™ on the word “sign:”

• a perceptible indication of something not immediately apparent (as a visible clue that something has happened); “he showed signs of strain”; “they welcomed the signs of spring”
• a public display of a message; “he posted signs in all the shop windows”
• signal: any nonverbal action or gesture that encodes a message; “signals from the boat suddenly stopped”
• mark with one’s signature; write one’s name (on); “She signed the letter and sent it off”; “Please sign here”
• signboard: structure displaying a board on which advertisements can be posted; “the highway was lined with signboards”
• approve and express assent, responsibility, or obligation; “All parties ratified the peace treaty”; “Have you signed your contract yet?”
• sign of the zodiac: (astrology) one of 12 equal areas into which the zodiac is divided
• be engaged by a written agreement; “He signed to play the casino on Dec. 18″; “The soprano signed to sing the new opera”
• (medicine) any objective evidence of the presence of a disorder or disease; “there were no signs of asphyxiation”
• engage by written agreement; “They signed two new pitchers for the next season”
• polarity: having an indicated pole (as the distinction between positive and negative electric charges); “he got the polarity of the battery reversed”; “charges of opposite sign”
• communicate silently and non-verbally by signals or signs; “He signed his disapproval with a dismissive hand gesture”; “The diner signaled the waiters to bring the menu”
• augury: an event that is experienced as indicating important things to come; “he hoped it was an augury”; “it was a sign from God”
• place signs, as along a road; “sign an intersection”; “This road has been signed”
• a gesture that is part of a sign language

No matter what the vast differences between these various definitions of “sign,” what stands out is that these are all media of communication or ideas about media of communication.

Communication… another word pregnant with many offspring. Two separate beings are presumed by the idea of communication; and signs always presume the existence of two subjects. Subjects – unlike objects – do not merely exist. We dwell.

We live in a world that is abuzz with signs and communications; we dwell in a world that is abuzz with signs and communications. We are part of it. In those times when we can grasp that connectedness, we have a sense of embodied transcendence, a moment of dwelling within something that is sacred.

*

Molecules signal to molecules, like species to like species, unlike species to each other, minerals to other minerals and to animals and vegetables, which also sign to each other, and the lion’s share of our own physical activity (brain and somatic activity, etc.) involved in communication with each other is non-verbal, and even non-linguistic.

We leave traces of ourselves wherever we go, on whatever we touch. One of the odd discoveries made by small boys is that when two pebbles are struck sharply against each other they emit, briefly, a curious smoky odor. The phenomenon fades when the stones are immaculately cleaned, vanishes when they are heated to furnace temperature, and reappears when they are simply touched by the hand again before being struck.

An intelligent dog with a good nose can track a man across open ground by his smell and distinguish that man’s tracks from those of others. More than this, the dog can detect the odor of a light human fingerprint on a glass slide, and he will remember that slide and smell it out from others for as long as six weeks, when the scent fades away. Moreover, this animal can smell the identity of identical twins, and will follow the tracks of one or the other as though they had been made by the same man.

We are marked as self by the chemicals we leave beneath the soles of our shoes, as unmistakably and individually as by the membrane surface antigens detactable in homografs from our tissues.

So begins the chapter entitled “Vibes,” in Lewis Thomas’ fine little book, The Lives of a Cell (Penguin Books, 1974).
In all this activity at every scale of existence, how do we discern the signs that hold together our natural universe, our culture, and what we might call our personhood?

Are we exchanging sings right now?

We are.

This is the point-of-view of semiotics. Our talking and especially our writing are but the latest instantiations of sign exchanges, along a continuum from the tiniest microcosm to the most vast macrocosm.

This midrash on money is based on the premise that money – this thing that dominates our lives in so many, often mysterious, ways, is just that: a sign.

At some point I will call money a language. But modern money is much more. Modern money is an extra-linguistic, culturally-and-politically constructed “sign.”

We seem as a species to be driven by a desire to make meanings: above all, we are surely Homo significans - meaning-makers. Distinctively, we make meanings through our creation and interpretation of ’signs’. Indeed… ‘we think only in signs’. Signs take the form of words, images, sounds, odours, flavours, acts or objects, but such things have no intrinsic meaning and become signs only when we invest them with meaning. ‘Nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign’, declares Peirce (Peirce 1931-58, 2.172). Anything can be a sign as long as someone interprets it as ’signifying’ something - referring to or standing for something other than itself. We interpret things as signs largely unconsciously by relating them to familiar systems of conventions. It is this meaningful use of signs which is at the heart of the concerns of semiotics.

(Daniel Chandler, “Semiotics for Beginners”)

Energy-matter flows constitute the universe. So does the flow of signs. Every atoms signals to its neighbor, every photon carries messages, every being – organic and inorganic – is aware and responsive in some way.

If you observe an urban street scene on Saturday night, the streets are filled with people in motion. Yet without much talking to coordinate their motions – in fact, many people are talking to someone else while they navigate the crowds – these flows of people manage to weave in and out of each other. There are millions of flowing signs being passed among the people in these “rivers” of human foot-traffic, most non-verbal, not linguistic at all. Language is just one aspect of signing. That’s why it is very appropriate for someone to say, when they are faced with a dilemma, “Lord, give me a sign.”

God does communicate with us.

*

Anthropologist Alf Hornborg, writing about the destruction of Amazonian rain forests by international commercial interests, said that “ecosystems are constituted no less by flows of signs than by flows of matter and energy.”

…nature and society [are] interconnected systems, both of which are simultaneously material and communicative.

Christians will sometimes say things about “dwelling in Christ.” It’s an old notion, dwelling, and one that we understand viscerally – what philosophers call the dimension of experience that is “being-in-the-world.” When children gleefully enclose themselves in big cardboard boxes, in what appears to be an ancient den-making instinct, they are experiencing – and celebrating – their sense of dwelling-ness.

*

Modern money – global currency, the dollar – is a sign that becomes “hegemonic,” that is, wielding “preponderant influence or authority.”

But what are the effects of this predominance of influence?

One effect we need to emphasize is the effect of general-purpose money on understandings of the Sacred. General-purpose money has the tendency to desacralize (profane, remove from the realm of the Sacred) our relationships with nature and other people. As Hornborg’s own studies in Amazonia showed, money was the sign, the language, the medium, the entitlement… that allowed foreign contractors to mow down vast swathes of rain forest, land that then sprang up with American soft drinks being peddled at stands along the barren landscapes.

“General-purpose money,” said Hornborg, an anthropologist, “is what allows tracts of rain forest to be traded for Coca-Cola.”

Human beings are meaning-makers; and that is how the door is opened between us and God. We are too capable of good to accept an abject servitude to money, or to refuse to take action to direct and limit its flows.

We have learned collectively what “ecology” means in the last few years: the relational, systemic character of biomes. Now we need to get our heads around a less popularized way of knowing: semiotics.

Ecosemiotics can be defined as the semiotics of relationships between nature and culture.

*

Semiotics… is the study of sign processes (semiosis), or signification and communication, signs and symbols, both individually and grouped into sign systems. It includes the study of how meaning is constructed and understood.

“Ecosemiotics” is Hornborg’s way (borrowing the term from W. Noth, 1999) of saying to be aware that Creation is alive and communicating, not the dead thing of the post-Enlightenment. When we see that the universe, the world, is alive, we know how to treat it as sacred. When we treat the world as a dead thing, we profane it.

Money commodifies. Things-for-sale are not seen as sacred.

Creation, whether viewed through scientific inquiry or contemplative retreat, is full of wonder, constantly creating and revealing. One of the reasons Sabbath is such a central notion to our faith tradition is that we need to stop and appreciate that wonder once every seven days without being interrupted by work. Work concentrates our attention on details. Contemplation and open questioning require us to throw open the doors and windows of consciousness and let the breezes blow through.

The itemization of consciousness that is created by the phenomenon of monetary pricing is, likewise, an obstacle to contemplation of wholes; and the attachment of a price to anything profanes it… removes is from the realm of the Sacred. That’s true whether we attach a price to a “nice view” or sell indulgences.

Money Masks

In this midrash we’ll jump from the Book of James to the arcane – to the term “securitized finance”? We are bilingual; we speak past and present.

In the beginning there was money, then money began putting on masks. It puts a mask on itself, and a blindfold on us. It is self-camouflaging.

Money blinds us to the unjust and un-Christian social relations involved in the production of anything. It also blinds us to the fact that money itself is not a constant.

I reach in my wallet and take out a twenty-dollar bill. I give it to the cashier, who bags up my kiwis, my oranges, my stew meat, my bag of sweets.

Neither of us sees the trucks rumbling across a Latin American landscape desiccated by poverty and want, the abattoir or the cruel feedlots, or the broken families of former farmers, or the wreckage of the biome created by the production of high-fructose corn syrup in the sweets. I give the cashier money; the cashier bags up my food. Money puts distance between the consumer and producer; and distance masks reality.

Neither the cashier nor I see the money as anything but routine either. We don’t think about how many times currencies have been drained of value by hyperinflation and economic collapse; and we wouldn’t understand why even if we thought about it. This is not taught in schools, not even to economists.

Do not wear yourself out to get rich; have the wisdom to show restraint. Cast but a glance at riches, and they are gone, for they will surely sprout wings and fly off to the sky like an eagle.

- Proverbs 23:4-5

Insecure Securities

Simple secular math: As of November 2008, the total assets of the Federal Reserve System (the Fed) – the central bank of the United States – were $73.4 billion.

It is difficult to estimate total exchanges in global financial markets; but in the foreign currency exchange market alone, there are almost $2 trillion of exchanges each day. In one day, financial exchanges of currency alone exceed total Fed assets by a factor of 27.

In March of 2009, the Fed announced that it was going to buy $1 trillion in securities, after more than $50 trillion (with a T) had been “wiped out.” We just said that total Fed assets were $73.4 billion. But the Fed is “buying” a trillion dollars of something called “securities.” That is like me buying a $1,000 boat, when my net worth is $73.40.

You sure can’t buy a $50,000 boat with $73.40. And this particular boat is sinking.

This is a stark example of how utterly toothless the Fed – and by inference, the US government – is to salvage a collapsing pyramid of debt built over the last 35 years.

So what are these “securities”? Are they actually secure?

Wikipedia says, “A security is a fungible, negotiable instrument representing financial value.”

Well, that clears everything up.

Let’s try a different tack. Actual, stable wealth is what we call an asset. Cash flow is money that moves into and out of an enterprise. It “flows.” It is not an asset. Securities – composed of odd and impenetrable-sounding things like bonds, equities, investment funds, derivatives, structured finance, and agency securities – have come to be dominated by “instruments” that treat cash flow as an asset which can be sold.

These are paper claims on wealth; but they are not based on real assets. These paper claims have vastly exceeded real wealth. This excess has been usefully called “fictitious capital.”

Fictitious Capital

Whoever loves money never has enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with that income. This too is meaningless. As goods increase, so do those who consume them. And what benefit are they to the owner except to feast one’s eyes on them? The sleep of a laborer is sweet, whether eating little or much, but the abundance of a rich man permits him no sleep. I have seen a grievous evil under the sun: wealth hoarded to the harm of its owner, or wealth lost through some misfortune… Naked a person comes from the mother’s womb, and as one comes, so one departs…

- Ecclesiastes 5:10-15

*

Fictitious capital has far exceeded real wealth through a system ever more dominated by “securitized finance,” the domination of the global economy by speculation in these “instruments.” Securitized finance permits potentially infinite credit, which translates into potentially infinite debt.

This has been accelerating since the Nixon administration; and it has created an inconceivable and unprecedented pyramid of debt… which is now imploding.

You cannot buy a thousand-dollar boat with $73.40. This is not a cyclic problem, but a structural one. The boat that is sinking may cost $100,000.

Captivity

The problem for us all with this fictitious capital is that it is directly connected to money, while we are all dependent on a social grid, one that is navigable only by money. Our most basic needs, which God provided for with the earth, have been captured by a system dominated by money. We cannot eat without money. We have nowhere to sleep out of the weather without money. We cannot clothe ourselves without money.

The all-pervasiveness of the money-grid, which has literally transformed nearly every available space into a commodity – a thing bought and sold, leaves us no choice to be on the money-grid or off the money-grid. We are on it, captured by it.

The formative story in the Old Testament is that of escape from captivity, and reliance on God’s bounty. The first turning away from that freedom was the worship of a gold idol (raised out of fear for the future).

The only time Rabbi Yeshua, or Jesus of Nazareth, is reported to have displayed physical aggression was when he stampeded livestock through the tables of money-changers at the Temple. He constantly warned his followers that money would make them captives, and that money has the power to alienate us from God and God’s Creation.

*

Then there are the seeds which were sown among the thorn bushes. These are the people who hear the message, but the worries of this world and the false glamor of riches and all sorts of other ambitions creep in and choke the life out of what they have heard, and it produces no crop in their lives.

- Mark 4:18-19

Money is a claim on the effort and time of others. If I have the money for a meal at a restaurant, the need of others for that money causes them to serve me, to cook the food, to harvest the food, to grow the food, to make the pots and pans and dishes, to air condition and heat the restaurant, etc. etc. I, in turn, have to work to get the money.

Most of us have to work at jobs where we’d rather be someplace else. Our dependency on money holds us captive there. We are captives to our cars to get us to work, and to the clothes we are required to wear at work, and the insincerities we feel are necessary to keep our jobs… and all this is dependency on money. To relieve the stress of work, we “need” things that require money, and so we are again captives of the money-grid.

On the money we use, it says “legal tender.” What that means is that we have to use money to pay our taxes. The state runs on money, too. In fact, without money, the modern nation-state – as an institution – would collapse. Every institution we know is captive of the money-grid.

Even churches.

Tunnel Vision and Totalities

Tell those who are rich in this present world not to be contemptuous of others, and not to rest the weight of their confidence on the transitory power of wealth but on the living God, who generously gives us everything for our enjoyment. Tell them to do good, to be rich in kindly actions, to be ready to give to others and to sympathize with those in distress. Their security should be invested in the life to come, so that they may be sure of holding a share in the life which is real and permanent.

- 1 Timothy 6:17-19

*

We spoke above about fictitious capital – a concept necessary for us to discern the specificities of our own age. This totalizing perspective, this Big Picture view of the global economy, is not a perspective that is understood by the captains of finance. They are completely focused on what they call their portfolios. That focus made them rich; and that focus acts as set of blinders to the terrible storm approaching. That is why they do not know what to do now. Their “knowledge” is constrained by their standpoint… by the view from where they stand.

They have tunnel-vision. It’s structural.

Those who saw this coming – and they were many – were marginalized, excluded from the inner sanctums of finance and government. People with unrecognizable names like Ellen Hodgson Brown, Michael Hudson, Henry C. K. Liu, Susan Strange, Peter Gowan, Mike Whitney, Loren Goldner – and many, many more – warned about what was about to happen, and explained it in plain language, but that was a language that experts and economists had learned to exclude from their frame of reference.

The captains of Wall Street and all their disciples, however, were too personally invested (no pun intended) in their own orthodoxies, and too focused on an every accelerating cycle of return-on-investment to see the big picture. Ambition, competition, and groupthink blinded them, and continues to blind them.

It blinds us, too, because we are dependent; and because the business class owning the means of production means the business class also owns the means of cultural production (including what and how we “know”).

If we don’t get hold of money fast enough, then we are threatened with homelessness and starvation… or more immediately, with the loss of security for our children – who are hostages of the money-grid.

If we lose the jobs we have, now, at the advent of a long crisis for which we have arrived without any preparation whatsoever, we are more captive than ever to money. We don’t know how to live without it. We might say we are captive to our ignorance.

The first step in overcoming this ignorance is to get the Big Picture. Face the facts. $50 trillion dollars now (and perhaps twice that much at the end of this long road) has disappeared (it never existed, it was a speculatively-raised phantasm); and our plan to replace it via printing press will lead us to something that gives economic historians chills: hyper-inflation.

Too much money circulating against too few goods raises prices. When this happens in periods of closing enterprise and high unemployment, and in the face of crippling household debt, it is a social catastrophe.

The Fed was part of the high-tempo, tunnel-vision sector. The Fed had a singular way of controlling the economy. If inflation was advancing too fast, they raised the prime interest rate to put the brakes on. What this really meant was that they deliberately created an increase in unemployment, in order to lower the going rates for labor.

The Fed treated fictional capital as if it were real, then moved that excess around from one “bubble” to the next. Each time the bubble burst, masses of people were left broken while a small elite feasted: Mexico, East Asia, the dotcom bust, the housing bubble. Each time, Washington made Wall Street whole again.

But when securitized finance blew out this time, the accumulation of vacuity in the system created the ultimate dilemma for the one-trick pony that is the Fed: stagnation combined with inflation – stagflation. Last year, fuel and food prices soared – slamming most people into the financial wall, as the economy – in the oblique metaphorical language of the pundits and economists – “contracted.”

Kenneth Boulding, the Quaker economist and philosopher, said, “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”

But this is part of that Big Picture that is invisible to economists, professional investors, and to politicians. Against this backdrop of the impossibility of infinite growth, first stagflation hit, then the tsunami of the so-called credit crisis. We were… are… utterly dependent, rich and poor, on this elaborate, global financial architecture; and the great wave slammed into it like it was a grass hut in front of the Great Sumatra-Andaman earthquake.

The one-trick pony, the Fed, tried lowering interest rates to stir some activity; but the last time they’d done that – in the wake of the dotcom bust – mortgages were refinanced at the lower rate… and equity loans were encouraged. Houses became ATMs, and household debt exploded into the whole illusion of infinite growth.

The fictional capital bubble was reflated into the housing market.

The wave hit the edifice of finance.

Interest rates hover now at zero; and the wave keeps coming. The one-trick pony has run out of tricks. So it’s printing more money, even as the global basket of commodities to which it is supposed to correspond has not changed.

We know what happened. Or at least we experienced it. We need to know. Because we have to find our own way out.

This is a totality.

Loss of Faith

The belief that money retains value is an article of religious faith. It is an idolatrous assumption; but there it is, nonetheless.

It’s not like the faith that Jesus mandated for his disciples, to “consider the lilies of the field.” His admonition there was to have no fear (and this was specifically about money).

Have no fear. God’s got your back. Radically trust… God.

The false faith that money retains value – even in the face of historical evidence totally to the contrary – is a false faith born of desperate fear, not radical trust. It is denial. It is collective self-delusion.

Self-delusion corresponds to arrogance; and much arrogance is based on the deepest kind of insecurity, the kind of insecurity that needs the security of accumulation as its balm. This kind of security requires domination and control… of people and Creation. Pride and self-delusion are inseparable twins.

Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.

- Proverbs 16:18

It is this self-delusion that led us into this impasse; and now we need to abandon it wholesale. We need to practice the faith that considers the lilies of the field. The faith that God can and will provide when we abandon our captivity, cross the Red Sea, and head into the wilderness of an evermore de-monetizing society.

Give this Vile Idol Back to Caesar

John’s Apocalypse is not a prediction of the future.

Jesus’ encounter with the Herodians and Pharisees is not a call on disciples to pay taxes and obey the government,

And the Parable of the Talents is not Jesus telling disciples to become good investors.

These three heresies – or call them bad scholarship – have become the three-legged milking stool of biblical accommodation to the present worldly order.

To the Heordians and Pharisees, intent on trapping Jesus on the question of paying taxes:

“Whose picture is on that coin?” asked Jesus.

Ceasar’s.

“Well, give it to Ceasar then.”

Rabbi Yeshua knew. The graven image was an idol. The gold was an idol, the very material of the calf-idol constructed by a demoralized people of God who were wandering – disoriented and frightened – out of bondage and into the “wilderness” of freedom.

The very valuation of the gold was idolatrous.

Daily bread. That’s all that’s needed. As a devout and observant Jew, Rabbi Yeshua remembered Proverbs 30:8: “Give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread.”

It’s there in His prayer: “Give us this day our daily bread.”

It is more than a little interesting that Jesus counter-posed food to money. The Kingdom of God is called a meal, a banquet table. Faith is seen as the ability to walk on water; as the ability to renounce one’s fear of living without money.

The faith of the desperate sees living without money as tantamount to walking on water.

You can’t serve God and money at the same time, Jesus said.

The reaction of the disciples: Rabbi, are you nuts? How would we eat, clothe ourselves, find shelter? You can’t live without money!

And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?

- Matthew 6:28-30

Show some trust. God’s got your back. Your fear is lack of faith.

Post-Constantinian Christianity failed to come to terms with this rather obvious and consistent theme in Scripture, Old and New Testament, and especially the teachings of Rabbi Yeshua… a construction worker who had matured and developed in a militarily occupied land seething with rebellions and sectarian bickering, and crushed by Roman enclosure that forced the population into dependency on money.

The moneychangers were in the Temple because Jews were forbidden to use the graven image of Caesar, and so changed Roman money into half-shekels, the only assured-weight silver coinage approved by Jewish religious authorities. The Temple was trying to have its cake and eat it, too. Faith had abandoned that place, driven out by the peculiar character of money that imbricates us into a grid of dependency on the very powers we are commanded to confront.

The powers are not sovereign. God is the only sovereign.

They will wage war against the lamb, but the lamb will conquer them because he is Lord of lords and King of kings. Those who are called, chosen, and faithful are with him.”

- Revelation 17:14

This is not prediction, but prophetic poetry; not prophecy seen as fortune-telling, but prophecy seen as unmasking. “Apocalypse” does not mean “catastrophe.” It means revelation. It reveals.

It says, “That emperor capering down the street is butt naked.”

We non-millenarian Christians should learn to lose our fear of this book that tells us, assertively, that only God is sovereign.

Discernment versus Accommodation

Once the church began making accommodation with power in the 2nd Century – leading to the “conversion” of Constantine, a ruler who slaughtered even his own family members after that so-called conversion, and who profaned the sign of the cross by superimposing it on a sword – that accommodation masqueraded as discernment.

Money is an institution, subordinate to the Powers. What John of Patmos told the so-called “primitive” Christians, a tightly knit and defiant network of believers who proclaimed God sovereign over all, and who shared so thoroughly that none accumulated individual goods, was to hold out in the face of Domitian’s persecutions (Domitian portrayed in Revelation as the re-born Nero).

This gift-economy community was so attractive to many “middle-class” Roman women that they were converting, and giving away their goods to the small, intimate churches spread around the Mediterranean. The “primitive” Christians were not only preaching a gift economy, and the sovereignty of God over the Powers, they were teaching a radical doctrine of spiritual equality between men and women. In Roman ideology, women were not seen as moral subjects. Even in Paul’s most patriarchal epistolary language, the question of moral agency (the test of spiritual fullness, and therefore full humanity) is always implicit in his directions singling out women; and women were co-apostles – apostasy among the Romans.

So while Nero attacked Christians out of political opportunism, Domitian attacked them because they represented an actual political and ideological threat.

With the Constantinianization of the church, however, the discernment of the difference between God’s sovereignty and state sovereignty was effaced, and elaborate scholastic rationalizations were constructed to persuade people that there was a chain-of-command that started with God, passed through the state, and was mediated by the state for the people.

It was inevitable that with the state as mediator, and its money as the solvent that dissolved the bonds of personal relationships and replaced them with dependency on the money-grid of the day, someone would eventually begin selling indulgences.

Perversia optimo est pessima.

The perversion of the best is the worst.

Accommodations were passed off as discernment, the exclusive province of a church authority that no longer structured itself as a human family, but as an authoritarian, patriarchal state.

Acting Our Way into Right Thinking

There is a common saying in 12-step programs: “You can’t think your way into right acting. You have to act your way into right thinking.

It’s counter-intuitive, because we have been taught that actions reflect our thinking, when in actuality the opposite is true.

This is very important for our discernment, and for the practices we choose to live into our faith. What kinds of things do people do that create changes in how they think and feel?

In 1973, Stanford University tried an experiment with college students. They had them play roles, as prisoners and as prison guards. Within days, they had to end the experiment, because the guards had become so utterly sadistic and arbitrary. It was called the Stanford Prison Experiment. Look it up.

The actions implicit in their roles changed their “minds.”

Lived experience is reflected in our consciousness. Experience becomes our frame of intellectual reference, and experience provides us with our stories and metaphors.

First-ness, Second-ness, Third-ness, and so on-ness

To the extent that our lived experience is mediated and abstracted, our perceptions and ideas are mediated and abstracted.

(a) I till the soil. I plant the seed. I tend the garden. I harvest and eat.

(b) I work at the office. I get my weekly paycheck. I drive to the store. I buy something called food.

There is a first-ness to the planter’s consciousness. The experiences are direct, hand-to-ground, hand-to-mouth… unmediated.

There is a third-ness and fourth-ness to the office worker’s experience. Layers of mediation between any possibility of an I-Thou experience, mutual recognition, fusion… communion.

Work gets the money. Money is carried to an institution (a supermarket). Food is sold as a commodity – something created primarily for the purpose of valorizing capital, and only secondarily for its actual use. The food producer doesn’t care if you eat it or throw it away. The producer – a corporation – just cares if you buy it. The exchange takes place between intermediaries, with a cashier who is an alienated worker, working for a manager who bosses for money, performing for a higher boss who holds money over her head… etc. The buyer (you) and the cashier generally don’t know or care about each other. Their relationship is mediated by power and money.

The experience is mediated; so the perceptions and conceptions are mediated, are third-ness and fourth-ness, abstracted and superficial, not first-ness, like the hand in the soil, or the direct gift of the garden’s abundance.

Discernment is the ability to dig down from third-ness and fourth-ness back into first-ness.

The elaboration of rationalizations, that remain in the third-ness and fourth-ness, is accommodation masquerading as discernment, masquerading even to the elaborator.

Economics, for example. Massive, elaborate rationalizations. Book-length riffs on third-ness and fourth-ness.

Money is a sign and an instrument of third-ness and fourth-ness. The fruit of my garden no longer passes from my hand to yours in friendship. The fruit of an “industry” with an absentee-institutional owner is shipped to a chain store, where its exchange is mediated by an abstraction called money.

We need discernment about money; because money – unexamined – locks us into third-ness and fourth-ness, and conceals the first-ness of our own lives and the realities of power.

Money is a universal solvent. It makes everything the same. It replaces the complexity and diversity and richness of Creation with cold simplicity. It dissolves qualities into mere quantity.

This characteristic of money is the most important thing we can know about it. It is why money is so dangerous.

So what is it that we need to understand about money to make good decisions about how we interact with money.

Two Types of Money

Theology concerns itself primarily with our relationship to an original and all-inclusive power. Jesus’ life took on a very political character, which means that Jesus was living into the story and history of a rabbinical Jewish prophetic tradition at a particular time and place in actual human history.

Incarnation means this life – Jesus – was in the world and in history. And He constructed His life to make himself a Rosetta Stone, a translator between the creative God of that prophetic tradition and the actual circumstances of 1st Century Palestine.

The basis of His message was peacemaking – an active verb. The message can only be delivered by someone’s hands… and, not surprisingly, He understood that this message is generally delivered into someone’s stomach.

He identified violence, retribution, and domination as central to the character of the Spirit of Malevolence… the name for this wandering spirit according to Job… is Satan. In Luke 10:1-3, it says:

After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go. He told them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field. Go! I am sending you out like lambs among wolves.

Jesus commands the most perilous way: provocation with peace. Lambs among wolves. Let your fear fall away, and the temptations of Satan – to violence, domination, and retribution – fall away with it.

Luke 10:18-20:

I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy; nothing will harm you. However, do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.

And so Jesus provoked authority, again and again, and refused the temptations of power inhering in his own movement; and that approach led him to the cross, “like a lamb among the wolves.”

How he concretely provoked that power, however, was not a template for all time. He did so in the situated context of 1st Century Palestine. He had to discern the details and trends and contexts of that actual place at that actual time.

We live in a different time and place, inside a different emergent reality from the environment where Jesus lived… as a human being.

So we have to understand our own milieu… zeitgeist… moment… conjuncture… world.

I think that Jesus understood money very deeply – epistemologically, sociologically, semiotically… even when thee concepts were not yet formalized into academic sub-disciplines. He had an intuition from his own experience, focused as it was through his empathy for those on the margins.

Money had then, and has now, a two-fold character: commercial and political.

First, it has a commercial character. Commercial money is used to facilitate exchange of unlike items through a desirable like item. It is, therefore, one degree more abstract than straight barter. It can be gold or corn seeds or cowry shells. It can be, and often is, local. As Manuel DeLanda points out (A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History), in prison, cigarettes become local currency.

Second, money that has begun to universalize based on migrations and overlapping social meshworks is subject to political control. This process moves money further away from spontaneity and toward being “planned.” Planned money is both more political and more abstract.

States and empires use planned monetary systems as mechanisms for population control. As a necessity (to pay taxes, or – in our ultra-dependent case – to live at all), money binds us. Yet as a dead thing, an abstracted thing, an apparently unresponsive thing, money is impervious to our grievances; and it presents itself to us without apparent correspondence to real human beings controlling real political systems.

We recognize money uncritically. It’s “just money.”

And so money facilitates the power of elites even as it keeps elites invisible. Money creates the illusion of choice and freedom; and it makes power invisible.

Planned money is not merely a stimulant to trade. It is a social regulation institution.

“Whose image is on that coin?”

Money Talks

We said at the beginning that “money masks.” Now we need to think about how “money talks.”

Money masks; and money talks.

Money homogenizes everything under its banner. It is a cosmic blender.

We know from the Old Testament that unification through homogenization is a problem. We see that in the story of the Tower of Babel.

The disguised name for Babylon is hardly subtle here.

Egypt. Babylon. Rome.

The great city and the empire are inseparable. In fact, the great city is the embryo of empire. Ferdinand Braudel, in Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800, wrote:

[T]owns… represented an enormous expenditure. Their economy was only balanced by outside resources; others had to pay for their luxury. What use were they therefore, in the West, where they sprang up and asserted themselves so powerfully? The answer is that they produced the modern states, an enormous task requiring enormous effort. They produced the national markets, without which the modern state would be a pure fiction.

Empire needs to be defined. It is difficult to do so without veering into polemics, because naming empire is itself a political unmasking.

But empire can be described empirically (which is not quite synonymous with “abstractly”). Empire is the systematic exploitation of the periphery to support the center; and this exploitation has a two-way dynamic. It draws consumables from periphery to center; and it exports waste and disorder to the periphery.

This is actually a thermodynamic process, and so can be described empirically without resort to moral norms. In our day, for example, we can see quite clearly that the US – with 5% of the total world population – consumes more than 25% of the world’s fossil hydrocarbon energy production.

Exploitation of the periphery by the city-center was well understood by Jesus of Nazareth, who – as resident of a highly exploited and marginal area (Galilee) – saw goods flow toward Jerusalem (the city-center of the Herodian colonial surrogate government) and more generally from Palestine to Rome, even as economic, ecologic, and social disorder were exported from the centers back to the margins.

Jesus’ use of the term “repent,” in meeting with John the Baptist in the countryside along the Jordan River, is extremely significant.

“Repent” means “turn around.” The flow of people, of goods, and even of the of the Zealots’ quests to overturn imperial power, were movements from margin to center… in other words, along the imperial current. But Jesus says to “turn around,” whereupon He himself heads not to Jerusalem, but to the wilderness. And His ministry was not to power, not to the center, but to the marginalized.

In the Tower of Babel story, God’s correction involves not only the destruction of the tower to human hubris, but perhaps even more significantly, the division of peoples into separate, local, linguistic communities.

If money is a language, it serenades the top, it speaks to the center, and it curses the margins.

Language to Describe Language

Christians’ discernment of the process of history unfolding around us ought to speak at least two languages for describing our own epoch – (a) the language of Scripture, rendered intelligible by scholarship as a responsibility of discipleship, and (b) the language of the present.

In our modernist idiom, we might describe money using a physiological metaphor.

Money is a solvent that dissolves the connective tissue of community.

Scripture language:

But Peter said to him, “May your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain God’s gift with money! You have no part or share in this, for your heart is not right before God. Repent therefore of this wickedness of yours, and pray to the Lord that, if possible, the intent of your heart may be forgiven you.”

- Acts 8:20-22

The Magic Ring

In the classic Tolkein trilogy – now also a movie trilogy – a kind, humble, decent protagonist comes into possession of a magic ring that does two things at once: It renders him invisible to everyone around him when he dons it; but by doing so, he becomes directly visible to the malevolent gaze of the uber-demon, Sauron, and his relentless ring wraiths.

Tales involving invisibility are recurring imaginary constants in many cultures. Because we are all subject to the temptations inside this fantasy – of being invisible, we are alert to the correspondence of invisibility with a moral hazard.

We know what we imagine we would do if we could be invisible.

We are broken, and so we can know broken-ness, temptation. If I were invisible for a day, I would ____ (fill in the blank).

Invisibility-as-moral-hazard cuts two ways: Invisibility of power opens the door to power without accountability; and amoral instrumentality in the individual causes “the least among us” to become invisible.

Money plays a key role in both aspects of invisibility. Like Sauron’s magic ring, money contains a dangerous paradox in its very composition and existence.

The exchange of money in the marketplace puts a retail worker and a buyer in contact with each other. The social networks and character of life of the buyer are invisible – and of little interest – to the retail worker, and vice-versa; and behind the retail worker is also a completely monetized network of relationships – instrumental relationships – relations that would not exist except for a monetary (contractual) interest. This deeper network that, in effect, controls the encounter of the retail worker with the buyer, involves vast and unequal relations-of-production; and the built environment itself in which this exchange takes place is the product of money-“making” enterprise.

I drop by the store and buy a gallon of milk. In-and-out in five minutes.

And that’s what I saw. That’s all. The rest is invisible, even though it is manifest in the most basic and profound way. Power invisible is power unaccountable. Money invisiblizes power.

And the single-mindedness that accompanies a single magic key to survival in our actually-structured society – money – bends our personalities to instrumentalism (even with other people) by constant practice. In that process, we learn not to see the casualties. We know who they are: the ones we have to pretend not to see, and thereby do not see.

Time is money, money time. That’s what “they” say.

I don’t know if we can throw money – like the magic ring – back into the fires of Mount Doom. But we can know that the more general-purpose and de-localized the money, the more effective it is as a solvent eating away at the connective tissue of community. We can not simply dismiss the need for a deep critique of money, even if raising the question can seem more perilous than opening Pandora’s infamous box.

More specifically, we need to take a hard look at the currency that dominates the actual world-system economy, and the currency that is at the heart of the economic crisis we are inside of.

Dollar Hegemony

In 2002, investment analyst Henry C. K. Liu penned an article for Asia Times entitled “Dollar hegemony has got to go.” In the small circle of people who were then paying attention to the widening contradiction between the financial economy and the real one, Liu’s article popularized his term, “dollar hegemony.”

Dollar hegemony is a description of global economics that describes the impact of the dollar as the recognized, universal, international currency, since the dollar abandoned the gold standard in 1971, then decoupled from the fixed currency exchange rates of the post-World War II Bretton Woods agreements in 1973.

In brief, from Liu:

…World trade is now a game in which the US produces dollars and the rest of the world produces things that dollars can buy. The world’s interlinked economies no longer trade to capture a comparative advantage; they compete in exports to capture needed dollars to service dollar-denominated foreign debts and to accumulate dollar reserves to sustain the exchange value of their domestic currencies. To prevent speculative and manipulative attacks on their currencies, the world’s central banks must acquire and hold dollar reserves in corresponding amounts to their currencies in circulation. The higher the market pressure to devalue a particular currency, the more dollar reserves its central bank must hold. This creates a built-in support for a strong dollar that in turn forces the world’s central banks to acquire and hold more dollar reserves, making it stronger. This phenomenon is known as dollar hegemony, which is created by the geopolitically constructed peculiarity that critical commodities, most notably oil, are denominated in dollars. Everyone accepts dollars because dollars can buy oil. The recycling of petro-dollars is the price the US has extracted from oil-producing countries for US tolerance of the oil-exporting cartel since 1973.

By definition, dollar reserves must be invested in US assets, creating a capital-accounts surplus for the US economy. Even after a year of sharp correction, US stock valuation is still at a 25-year high and trading at a 56 percent premium compared with emerging markets… [This was written in 2002. –SG]

… A strong-dollar policy is in the US national interest because it keeps US inflation low through low-cost imports and it makes US assets expensive for foreign investors. This arrangement, which Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan proudly calls US financial hegemony in congressional testimony, has kept the US economy booming in the face of recurrent financial crises in the rest of the world. It has distorted globalization into a “race to the bottom” process of exploiting the lowest labor costs and the highest environmental abuse worldwide to produce items and produce for export to US markets in a quest for the almighty dollar, which has not been backed by gold since 1971, nor by economic fundamentals for more than a decade. The adverse effect of this type of globalization on the developing economies are obvious. It robs them of the meager fruits of their exports and keeps their domestic economies starved for capital, as all surplus dollars must be reinvested in US treasuries to prevent the collapse of their own domestic currencies.

The adverse effect of this type of globalization on the US economy is also becoming clear. In order to act as consumer of last resort for the whole world, the US economy has been pushed into a debt bubble that thrives on conspicuous consumption and fraudulent accounting. The unsustainable and irrational rise of US equity prices, unsupported by revenue or profit, had merely been a devaluation of the dollar.

And so it came to pass.

The moral of this tale, and this extended quote, is that money has consistently been used as a weapon for imperial power; but that the more abstract, universal, and general-purpose the money is, the more destructive its payload.

I don’t agree with the idea that ignorance is like a closed room. Ignorance is unprotected. Ignorance is not matter; it is space.

We are not hurt by ignorance per se, but ignorance leaves the door unlocked to let the devil in. We need to know as much as we can about money, and be fearless in facing the implications of what we learn.

Money and Scripture

Master, I knew you that you are a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter. I was afraid, and went away and hid your talent in the earth. Behold, you have what is yours.

-Matthew 25:24-25

A hard man (like the heart of Pharaoh, hard). Rewarding usury. Money-making as virtue. A man who “reaps where he does not sow.”

Many interpretations read this passage as if it were a tract from Murray Rothbard. Usury was a sin among Jews. In Jesus’ story, the virtuous man, who the Master – an absentee landlord, the kind Palestinian peasants knew well as oppressors – throws into the darkness (unlike the merciful God that Jesus represented), takes this money (a talent was an extraordinary amount for a servant) and buries it.

Money allows many to reap where they do not sow. This is the most basic description of material injustice. The appropriation of the work of another.

Jesus was an observant Jew. The law was no usury between Jew and Jew. The law was no interest more than 12% to outsiders. Yet the servant commended by the master in this story – by this absentee landlord “who reaps what he does not sow” – has cashed out at 100%.

A charismatic Jewish renewalist in 30 AD Palestine, preaching to the poor, does not mean – nor his listeners hear – in this tale of the talents, that a despised figure (the exploitative landowner) is a stand-in for God, the bank manager; nor does he use a clearly-understood violation of Jewish law as an example of the virtue of successful usury.

Jesus told his listeners that discipleship is hard. A warning to his own disciples, Jesus – who will be nailed to the cross – lets them know in this parable that following him will lead the world – represented by this absentee landlord – to throw them into the darkness to wail and gnash their teeth.

Discipleship is not cheap or easy, this parable warns. And the question of money emerges again and again in these examples Jesus provides.

This story of the Parable of the Talents is frequently cited today as Christ’s personal blessing, nay, encouragement, of successful monetary return-on-investment schemes; just as Jesus’ reply to the Pharisees and Herodians is portrayed as a call to obey secular authority.

Both of these wrong ideas have great popular currency; and both are clearly based on the evasion of rigorous scholarship.

Confronting these opportunistic (and anachronistic) interpretations of scripture is a critical task in the struggle to reclaim a church with the Beatitudes as its constitution.

Just as important as the kind of contextualizing scholarship that reminds us of what 1st Century Palestine was actually like, the way social relations were actually structured, and the implications of context on text, is discernment of our own age. We have to understand and deal with money in ways that reflect deep discernment and avoid rationalization and simplification.

Paul Tillich described sin in its structural aspect. Social structures can force us all into complicity; and as Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove pointed out, when the Bible says “you,” the meaning is “y’all.” Not merely a person, but a people.

Out entanglement in structural sin is a function of dependency; and no dependency is so thoroughgoing as dependency on money.
Implications

When I was in the Army, I was trained to use explosives. At least within the ken of the military mindset, there were times when explosives were necessary. But they were used when nothing else would get the job done; and we were taught to use them with great care. The potential for destruction was too high to handle them any other way.

I think we should begin to understand money with the same sense of extreme precaution. Money may be necessary to do some things… now. But our cavalier and undiscerning use of it contributes to massive destruction, so ubiquitous and frequent that we call it part of life, worse… part of God’s plan. We are getting better at naming people who are careless with the lives of others and Creation; but we still haven’t looked deeply into money’s role.

Gun culture is fond of saying that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” True, and a truism. But a partial truth, and an intentionally partial truth, worse than a lie. Put people into bad circumstances and introduce guns and things get a lot worse a lot faster. Guns add that special lethality.

But how often do we pass around money and call it service, and how self-critical do we need to be in light of the deeper dynamics of money, about our advocacy for the poor, for example, when we demand more money instead of more independence from the money-grid and more inter-dependence on the community?

I have lost track of how many times I’ve seen money – funding, it’s called – put service and advocacy organizations into structural antagonism, an economy of scarcity, in which people are talking like Jesus and acting like Hobbes.

Can we at least seek a non-monetary answer first, instead of reaching for the blasting caps and time fuse?

The implications are mind-boggling, because money is so thoroughly imbricated with every aspect of our lives.

I think that Jesus knew this. I think that in the best way it could be said to the peasantry of 1st Century Palestine, He explained it. I think we’ve been running from the implications ever since, because money makes things easier, more convenient… until it doesn’t.

You can’t serve God and money at the same time, He said.

Without the most convoluted rationalizations, how do we explain what he meant? I mean really.

I am not saying that we declare war on the money-form, or that we discontinue giving money to the poor. Jesus told people to do precisely that.

The poor use money for necessities, like a soldier uses explosives when nothing else will do. But do we tell the poor, your salvation (healing) is in a steady income, i.e., money?

I put these thoughts and questions out there to start a conversation. Structural sins may demand structural redemptions.

Last Word

Luke 6:17-49:

17 and he came down with them, and stood on a level place, and a great multitude of his disciples, and a great number of the people from all Judaea and Jerusalem, and the sea coast of Tyre and Sidon, who came to hear him, and to be healed of their diseases;

18 and they that were troubled with unclean spirits were healed.

19 And all the multitude sought to touch him; for power came forth from him, and healed them all.

20 And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said, Blessed are ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God.

21 Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh.

22 Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man’s sake.

23 Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy: for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for in the same manner did their fathers unto the prophets.

24 But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation.

25 Woe unto you, ye that are full now! for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you, ye that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep.

26 Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for in the same manner did their fathers to the false prophets.

27 But I say unto you that hear, Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you,

28 bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you.

29 To him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and from him that taketh away thy cloak withhold not thy coat also.

30 Give to every one that asketh thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again.

31 And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.

32 And if ye love them that love you, what thank have ye? for even sinners love those that love them.

33 And if ye do good to them that do good to you, what thank have ye? for even sinners do the same.

34 And if ye lend to them of whom ye hope to receive, what thank have ye? even sinners lend to sinners, to receive again as much.

35 But love your enemies, and do them good, and lend, never despairing; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be sons of the Most High: for he is kind toward the unthankful and evil.

36 Be ye merciful, even as your Father is merciful.

37 And judge not, and ye shall not be judged: and condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: release, and ye shall be released:

38 give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, shall they give into your bosom. For with what measure ye mete it shall be measured to you again.

39 And he spake also a parable unto them, Can the blind guide the blind? shall they not both fall into a pit?

40 The disciple is not above his teacher: but every one when he is perfected shall be as his teacher.

41 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

42 Or how canst thou say to thy brother, Brother, let me cast out the mote that is in thine eye, when thou thyself beholdest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote that is in thy brother’s eye.

43 For there is no good tree that bringeth forth corrupt fruit; nor again a corrupt tree that bringeth forth good fruit.

44 For each tree is known by its own fruit. For of thorns men do not gather figs, nor of a bramble bush gather they grapes.

45 The good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is good; and the evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth that which is evil: for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaketh.

46 And why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?

47 Every one that cometh unto me, and heareth my words, and doeth them, I will show you to whom he is like:

48 he is like a man building a house, who digged and went deep, and laid a foundation upon the rock: and when a flood arose, the stream brake against that house, and could not shake it: because it had been well builded.

49 But he that heareth, and doeth not, is like a man that built a house upon the earth without a foundation; against which the stream brake, and straightway it fell in; and the ruin of that house was great.

Amen.

Goff (4-2-09)

My thanks to Patricia Willis, who has been tireless in putting together this series, who has been a detailed coordinator, an inspired and thoughtful teacher, an engaged activist, and a friendly voice on the telephone until I had the pleasure of spending a little time with her in person this afternoon.

Gratitude also to Wake Forest University, and to all of you who have taken time out of your schedules to be here tonight. My thanks as well to the other speakers in this series, Catharine MacKinnon – who preceded me, and whose critique of liberal law and its relation to gender is a pivotal work in the larger critique of modern society – and Ann Wright, a personal friend and collaborator in the effort to expose militarism and mobilize resistance against the obscene resource wars that our government is waging against the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Pakistan.

When Dr. Willis asked me to do it, she said she wanted me to talk about the relations between militarism, patriarchy, capitalism, and pornography… which sounds like a socio-political salad. In eating this salad, we have access to a lot of different dressings, or idea factions with names like liberal feminism, radical feminism, womanism, post-constructionism, anti-feminism, Marxist-feminism, ecofeminism, third-world feminism, and on and on.

A point that has to be made, however, is that these ideological dressings and this salad of categories – militarism, capitalism, patriarchy, and pornography – are haut cuisine, served almost exclusively in universities. This taxonomy is not part of the lexicon of most people. It’s the language of high-order thinking that is part of the social ecology of the university – and I’ll acknowledge here and now that calling it “high-order” thinking is an assumption within that same university culture. The university is predicated upon this assumption.

It’s a useful assumption, as long as we recognize the limits of its utility, and the taxonomies of social phenomena — like militarism, patriarchy, capitalism, and pornography — are also useful. We just need to put them back together when we’re done.

This freezing and disassembly of a reality that constantly emerges in a far more complex way is one of the main standpoints of the Academy. Universities subdivide reality as a matter of course, and so people take a course in psychology, or business management, or anthropology, or horticulture, or geography, or physics. This is both a reflection of and reproduction of specialization in the division of labor. And the university itself represents a cultural division of intellectual labor, which is enforced by credentialing, and mid-wived by the rituals of higher education.

Nonetheless, this is a useful taxonomy as long as we understand its limitations and dangers. The greatest difficulty with it is that each of the categories listed — patriarchy, militarism, capitalism, and pornography — is itself contested by the very people who spend a lot of time studying it, those being students, teachers, writers, and activists.

Before I do that, I need to make reference to some polarities, or unified opposites: the polarity of abstract versus concrete, of universal versus local, of public versus private, and of covenental relationships versus contractual relationships.

If I describe pornography, for example, as sexually explicit media, then I have abstracted, or universalized, the category. If I describe it as an industry, then I am somewhat less abstract or universal. If I describe a production process in a specific building and time, with specific people who have specific histories, then I am more local and specific; as I am local and specific if I describe a specific pornographic genre being consumed by a specific 40-year-old man sitting at a specific address on his computer, masturbating.

In fact, an enormous number of men — from teens to late middle age — do predominantly two things during personal, private time on computers: they watch (and masturbate to) pornography, and they play war games. I’ll come back to that in a moment, because it’s a somewhat-abstract, yet somewhat-concrete example of a connection between militarism and pornography.

The instant gratification as a sense of control and power that connects both these online activities is so obvious that I’m surprised there haven’t been multiple books written about that connection.

On the question of public versus private, we need some historical perspective to denaturalize this duality, since it has only fairly recently in the sweep of history been enshrined as a neutral abstraction by liberal law. Historically, this division between the public sphere and the private sphere was a highly gendered cultural norm, wherein men occupied public spaces in male-hierarchies or as abstract equals, and where women were consigned to the private sphere which was a male-over-female domain. The irony that privacy rights law can be used by some women to protect themselves from some men is as inescapable as the fact that the abstraction of the law, pretending that men and women are equal, generally favors the status quo… or male social power over women. Dr. MacKinnon’s book, “Toward a Feminist Theory of the State,” has laid out this contradiction very well.

The distinction between covenental and contractual relationships is even more obscure to us because the notion of contract is so completely embedded in modern culture.

Wambdi Wicasa wrote in 1974, “A CONTRACT is an agreement made in suspicion. The parties do not trust each other, and they set ‘limits’ to their own responsibility. A COVENANT is an agreement made in trust. The parties love each other and put no limits on their own responsibility. Indian Leaders made Treaties with the Great White Father and called them Covenants, sealing them with the smoke of the Sacred Pipe. The trouble began when the Great White Father, his Lieutenants and Merchants, looked on the Treaties and called them Contracts. Thus began — in the basic religious difference — the conflict between Cultures.”

Carole Pateman’s book, “The Sexual Contract,” is canonical on this topic, in particular the implicit contract between male and female sexual partners that traditionally means one woman is protected from all other men by one man, in exchange for fealty to that one man. In contractual relations there is always the expectation that one has to “hold up his or her side of the bargain.”

It’s not surprising that capitalism sprang from the same modernist impulse, with its philosophical axiom being something called a “social contract.” What Pateman points out is that with the waning of the medieval age in the now-dominant culture, and with the rise of modernism, patriarchy changed, too. Women were ruled by fathers in medieval society — what Pateman calles “paternal” patriarchy. With the entrance of contract theory and abstract equality, patriarchy became fraternal… that is, each woman was potentially available — abstractly — to all men. The shift from paternal patriarchy to fraternal patriarchy was accompanied by the development of liberal law, the notion of privacy rights, the contractualization of human relations, a global surge in colonization to underwrite capitalist expansion, and — with consequences that are frighteningly apparent nowadays — the commodification of the biosphere.

The philosophical corollary to this cultural tapestry was Cartesian dualism, with its separation between a so-called objective reality and intellectual or cultural “constructions.” Modernism was defined by the belief that the objective is the last word — and with this word, the apotheosis of science; and post-modernism, which I consider just the latest instantiation of modernism, was a reaction against this objectivist dogma, an instantiation that has drifted into claims that the cultural construction is the last word. This flipped the hierarchy, but it re-embraced the dualism.

Alf Hornborg wrote, as an academic, “It is not a coincidence that postmodern paralysis is a condition that mainly afflicts academics, for it is only at a distance that human meanings assume the appearance of ‘constructions’.”

In his book, “The Power of the Machine – Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and Environment,” Hornborg also points out that knowledge is never simply the apprehension of objective facts. “[M]aterial conditions” — he writes — “never directly determine human behavior, for humans can relate to those conditions only through a specific system of meanings.”

As he suggests, knowledge is constructed within the limits of those meanings, yet upon a so-called objective environment.

Maria Mies noted that the social constructionists had simply re-appointed the same old dualism.

In her book, “Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale,” Mies also identifies a common thread between male domination of women, colonialism, and the destruction-through-commodification of the biosphere. That same common thread appears in the phenomenon of men playing war games on their computers and jacking off to the most overtly woman-humiliating genres of pornography: that common thread between male domination of women, colonialism, and ecocide is the conquest-ideal.

The conquest of women. The conquest of colonies. The conquest of nature. Women are called children; colonies are called children in the same spirit; and nature is seen as a woman to be, as Francis Bacon said, plundered for her secrets.

So with that preface I’ll take note that I am a man. For that reason, I am disqualified from speaking personally about the experience of being female; and for that same reason, I want to focus my talk on the experience of being a male. I cannot speak to or judge too harshly the accommodations that women make in their actual lives to the manifest reality of late capitalist — and still white dominant — patriarchy. I can, however, say what I think men should be doing differently; and I will.

I’ll say it now, in my best Romper Room vocabulary. Remember the DO-bees and DON’T-bees… oh well, I’ve seriously dated myself. Here is the Don’t List for men. Do not dominate. Do not humiliate. Do not retaliate.

That’s a hard don’t list for men, when the culture tells us incessantly and forcefully that to be a man means to dominate, to humiliate, and to retaliate. These are equated with strength; and they are counterposed to all things quote-feminine-unquote. This male norm of masculinity-as-conquest is ruthlessly policed in male culture, which is also a hotbox of probative escalation.

I could ask everyone in this room if you fear unknown men to raise your hand. You see I’m raising mine. Men proving themselves to other men can be the most terrifying thing you’ll ever see. I say that as a military veteran who worked in eight conflict areas, in Vietnam, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa. Men proving themselves to other men is as dangerous as it gets. There are people right here in this room who would be alarmed by the sudden sound of multiple male voices laughing nearby, because that sound can be so pregnant with mischief. Males are bonding. Escalations are possible.

This is male culture that idealizes the conquest of women, the conquest of colonies, and the conquest of nature. It is probative conquest, too; and it requires trophies for the other men to whom you are proving yourself, and as proof of masculinity to display for women.

If you can think back to the time in this terrible occupation of Iraq when Abu Masab al-Zarqawi was the boogy-man — when the media propagated the lie that every attack and every bomb was being made by this one wicked being — and if you can remember when Zarqawi was killed, the Central Command Public Affairs Officer who stood before the breathless media in the Green Zone was backgrounded by a giant photograph of the obviously dead face of Zarqawi.

This was a hunting trophy.

In displaying this most dangerous game, the Central Command was demonstrating its prowess in a war story that has been a social convention for so long that it has become a cultural memory, an axiomatic belief accompanied by deeply enculturated emotional resonance.

The idealization of the military, of the warrior, of the armed defender is so sacrosanct that every politician in the country feels obliged to genuflect as they talk about “heroes in uniform,” and “our brave men and women in the military.” The addition of women to that idealization has not fundamentally changed the fact that warfare is still the testing ground for masculinity; but it is a cultural advance — albeit a contradictory one — by liberal feminism, that public figures have to include women in this sinister idealization at all.

The realities of war are never abstract, no matter how many times pontificating generals announce how much they abhor the reality of war, or no matter how many times sycophant journalists make the idiotic claim that no one dislikes war more than those who fight them… this in reference to officers who sought out every combat opportunity they could find as a means of personal career advancement. While we are taught to praise them for their service-ethic, the reality is much more about naked ambitions combined with a deep desire for male-recognition in the role of conqueror.

The war in Southwest Asia right now is characterized by destabilization of culture and vicious bullying of the local populations, combined with terror attacks from helicopter gunships, bombers, and armed unmanned aerial drones. Our heroes are still mostly non-combatants; and our combatants are obliged by their mission statements to control a population… which translates into dominate, humiliate, and retaliate. Think of Iraq and Afghanistan, and very soon now Pakistan as Obama goes east to get his bones, as captive populations, with our heroes in uniform acting as jailers, and we can make sense yet again of the discoveries of the Stanford Prison Experiment — where playacting the role of prison guard turned average college students into pain-inflicting sadists within a week.

We live into stories. I know that’s not how most sociologists or psychologists explain our meaning-making behavior; only religions seem to have held onto this idea… which goes some way to explaining their persistence, for ill and for good. The fact is, human beings are storied. We receive stories, then we live into them. There is a story about America that we’ve all heard, and the living into that story is called citizenship, because it is a national story, and the protagonist is the citizen. And while the ideal is portrayed as Washington crossing the Delaware or Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation or Rambo fighting the politicians who supposedly stabbed the Vietnam heroes in the back… most of us cannot live directly into the big story that is the idealization of the citizen, so we behave as something called “good citizens” as our way of living into the story that the ideals construct for us.

Stories tell us how we are to be and how we are to know.

Even a one-minute television ad is a story, telling us who we are and how to be and how to know.

Pantene, because you’re worth it; or — mobilizing simultaneous attraction and repulsion — Preparation H, gives relief and doesn’t require surgery. Advertisers know more about the material power of the narrative than most cultural constuctionists. All people in all times and all places are storied people.

Coming back to the issue of capitalism, and being more concrete than that one word - capitalism — can be, I’ll say coming back to imperial-core, late capitalist consumerism; US culture reflects the globally generalized financial architecture, within which the US has been for several decades — until now — the global consumer of last instance, ensuring the so-called virtuous cycle of capital. The fact that it was built on a house of credit cards at home, and the hegemony of a too-big-to-fail US dollar abroad, is not my subject tonight. In our de-localized, ever-more-monocultural, technology-dependent world, we are experiencing a surfeit of stories — most designed to correct the capitalist nightmare of people having enough. When people have enough, capitalism has a crisis. That crisis is held back by demand production. Advertisers create new needs, and sell them into the psychic spaces of our own alienations and anxieties.

Postmodernist recognition of these very-plural narratives is an important challenge to the self-assuredness of a highly technologized society, but postmodernism became too clever by half in its critiques of modernist assumptions. In challenging the metanarratives of capitalist science and development, the critique was aimed at an older, more stable form of modernism.

This widening anachronism left postmodernism vulnerable to the episteme of plain, garden-variety consumerism: the ideology that says choice is freedom, and now even something called “identity” is available for a kind of shopping aisle selection.

I still prefer the term personhood to identity, because personhood — for me — embraces the whole phenomenon of experience without reducing it to identity, and in a way that is more permeable to all the influences of culture and our ecology.

The abstraction and atomization of core-nation consumer culture pretends that is has escaped the inextricable relation between our physical ecology, our culture, and personhood. By that I mean that the ideology of self, of the ever-choosing individual, whether that is Homo economicus or the selection of de-localized, shopping cart identities. It’s liberalism in its slyest form.

It fails to come to grips with issues of real power and privilege, and it fails to acknowledge how our de-localization is tearing down the complexity of a bioshpere that has taken billions of years to develop. Liberalism tells us a story about the abstract equality — equality before the law — of white, black, brown, of native and foreign, of male and female, of rich and poor, gay and straight, and yet we know that concretely that these equalities just ain’t so.

Being more specific still, liberalism tells us that men and women are equal. What does that mean? What do we mean by this equality? We are not the same morphologically — and I don’t mean to exclude those few who fall into neither category. By and large, we are overwhelmingly a sexually dimorphous species, so the equality can’t be physical. I can’t give birth, and I can’t nurse, and I have experienced neither menarche or menopause.

This is an embarrassment to liberalism to say this, because the equality of liberalism is disembodied; so the liberal reply is that we are all equal before the law, or that we are all morally valued equally. But, of course, that’s not true either except as an abstraction. When we point this out, then liberalism shifts premises on us, and says that it means “equal opportunity.”

Game over. Accountability canceled. It’s about something called opportunity, disembodied, floating, ahistorical, waiting to be breathed in out of the ether.

Abstract equality legitimates concrete-power and ends up preserving and even reproducing hierarchies that devalue people.

Patriarchy is a practice and an ideology based on the devaluation of women.

What the great radical feminists pointed out, which seems clear to me at least, is that women-as-a-group are different from men-as-a-group, culturally but also physiologically — and culture and physiology never ever exist apart in the concrete world — but that difference is not grounds for the establishment of oppressive hierarchies. Now we know that these hierarchies exist, and have existed. Basic to those social hierarchies is the male-conquest-ideal… control of women, control of colonies, and control of nature.

We may not like them, but we swim in the actual soup of this system, doing the best we can with what we know and have. Like it or not, our personhood always being permeated by culture-as-it-is, which is in turn always permeated by the ecology, which in turn shapes personhood, and so forth.

Being in the hierarchies means it is difficult – sometimes impossible – to see these big pictures, because life is lived in little pictures.

So the hierarchies themselves are formative of our personhood. This questioning of sexual hierarchy imposed on difference required historical subjects — women themselves — to pose the question; and posing the question was itself a radical political practice carried directly into that ecology where patriarchy was and is practiced with the least mediation — the private sphere.

Let me stop and take a quick survey. How many of you have ever felt humiliated by your own chosen actions while applying for a job, or a scholarship, or a school, or in managing a relationship?

Folks, we make compromises with power every single day. Does that mean we have to come up with some abstract principle that conceals the contingent necessity for compromise?

I bring this up, because I want to inoculate us against the First Amendment.

That got some head-scratching started.

I want to talk about pornography before I’m through tonight; but I have to say this right out of the gate: I am not proposing the criminalization of anything, and the First Amendment falls into that abstract liberal law category. I don’t want to talk about pornography in general; and I haven’t the least intention of raising hypothetical questions about pornography. I am going to critique actually-existing pornography. The First Amendment cannot be used to immunize pornography from critique, any more than it can immunize perfectly-legal Nazi propaganda from critique. What the First Amendment is, is a big red herring.

Three very prominent themes in commercially produced pornography are… are you ready? Can you guess?

Domination. Humiliation. Revenge.

There is such a thing, concretely, in every society, as male-culture. That it is male culture is not disproved by the fact that women can and do sometimes act in ways that are similar to male-cultural norms. These are cultural norms, not laws of physics.

Domination. Humiliation. Revenge.

Folks, this is male-culture ideology; and it is part and parcel of the social hierarchy of men-over-women. These are not merely ideas. These are deeply emotionally resonant norms embedded in patriarchy, and they are highly, highly eroticized.

Now there’s something I hear all the time, and I think it’s silly as hell: Rape is not about sex; it’s about power. Who thought that up? When in knowable history has sex ever been independent of or innocent of power? Of course rape is sexual. It is sexualized force; and it is forcible sex.

The abstraction of sex out of its actual cultural and historical context is a liberal stunt in reaction to conservative prudery. Conservatives say sex is bad; so we say sex is good. Neither of these notions is tenable, because both are uncritically simplified, and each makes a straw man out of the otheer.

People enjoy sex… well, some people do… and some don’t. The critique on the table is not whether sex feels good or not.

People like to eat McDonalds and smoke cigarettes; but that doesn’t mean it’s “good.” And asserting someone’s rights in these regards — when we are simply critiquing it — is a red herring.

I said earlier that If I describe pornography as sexually explicit media — a very abstract way of describing it, then I have drained the content of the category of any tangible reality. The reaction of paternalist patriarchal conservatives, male and female — those who we identify with the religious right, for example — does not challenge the abstraction of the category, sex, but puts a minus-sign next to it. A straw man, of course, because the conservative position is not that simple either.

The liberal reaction to the straw-man conservative reaction has been to put a plus-sign alongside the category, arguing from the rootless, placeless, ahistorical position that - quote - sex is good - unquote.

Both these positions accept the unstated premise that sex can be generalized thus, that it can be abstracted out of history, out of our specific social ecologies, and out of real systems of social power.

Combine this tendency to treat all issues as if history is simply a playground of abstract ideas… combine that tendency with another unexamined two-stage premise — that we must be effective in pursuing political agendas, and that that efficacy is possible only in the arena of public policy — and we have a situation wherein the tail of the political agenda begins to wag the dog of honest criticism.

We have intellectual dishonesty on both sides of a debate.

The debate about abortion is a classic example, where each side of the barricades is driven to simplify, obfuscate, and employ disingenuousness in order to strengthen its own half of the public controversy. A decision that is, in fact, for real people, complicated, situated, unique, and often very momentous, is reduced to two words: life and choice, both polemical simplifications that try to squeeze this visceral, often painful, and always extremely complicated circumstance with real people into some universal principle that is forced to externalize complexity — that is, the specific realities of real people. So, instead of a critical account — one that takes a fearless look at these complexities without the distortions of a long standing policy agenda — we get this polarized and mutually dishonest one. And, of course, we also get an impasse.

Pornography is just as contentious, although the critical debates over it haven’t filtered into the kind of all-consuming policy-agenda struggle as the question of abortion. It has turned into a struggle over an abstract principle enshrined as the First Amendment. The result has been the exclusion of one of the most important critical voices — in my opinion — with regard to actually-existing pornography — not the abstract pornography that is contested in the narrow debate about what is abstractly called “protected speech.” That critical voice has been radical feminism, a standpoint quite distinct from liberal feminism because it has refused to accept the tendency to compartmentalize public discourse in categories that implicitly privilege public policy struggles as the touchstone of critical discourse. Not least, because public policy, and all the dominant ideas about it, are still man-world.

Radical feminism put the challenge out there that made it the skunk at the party. It asked the question whether real sex — in all its manifestations — has ever existed, or can ever exist, in a universe apart from actually-existing social power. This refusal to subordinate critical questions to the unexamined premise of the primacy of public-policy debates created embarrassment on both sides of the pornography debate between conservatives and liberals.

Instead, radical feminists focused on the most direct and sexual form of domination in actual practice: rape… also a favorite porn story convention (as well as being one aspect of the industry’s actual practice).

As it turns out, the stark and disturbing lens of rape reveals several dimensions of our social relations. The domination of women-as-women by men-as-men has long served as a metaphor, and therefore a model, for other forms of domination. And this is the juncture at which I need to take notice of something I’ve left unsaid so far.

Our standpoint now, in this talk, is eurocentric, core-nation… imperial. I’ve already made several references to the conquest of women corresponding in our minds to the conquest of nature. And I’ve already made reference to the construction of masculinity being centered on the conquest ideal. Now I have to fess up, that this is not the whole story. While emulated within the 20th Century by non-Europeans during the heyday of “development,” the conquest of nature notion has its deepest historical roots in the Atlantic, where hydrocarbon industrialism took off and facilitated European, then American, colonialism.

The conquest-ideal I’ve described is something available only to males in the imperium. The men in the periphery, in the colonies, formulate masculinities, even oppressive masculinities; but they are not identical with masculinity that is constructed from a standpoint near the apex of the inter-national pyramid. Concomitantly, femininity is constructed differently in colonized communities. These differences are not an outcome of chosen identities in a diffuse social plurality, but determined to a significant extent by the relations between the colonizer and the colonized.

And colonization is always racialized.

We needn’t go across the ocean to find our examples. We live in North Carolina, where we are still largely segregated by race… separated spatially — with, of course, consumer spaces as our primary cross-racial shared space — and separated residentially, culturally, socio-economically, and ecologically.

If we want to see a snapshot of the racial divide, one that has been layered over with new contradictions since the 1991 peso collapse and the wave of immigration from Latin America, we can simply think back on the variant reactions between white and Black, as well as between white and Black women, to the OJ Simpson murder trial.

That difference is accounted for by two dramatically different standpoints: one group with colonial privilege, and one living as the colonized. White women share Black women’s fear of men; but Black women also fear the police because Black people have good reason to fear the police. So white folk put the burden of proof on OJ; but Black folk put the burden of proof on the police. History matters; and so does standpoint.

Another lens though which we can explore this standpoint variance is through rape. It’s a dense, complicated intersection, this race and rape; so I’ll only sketch it here and leave you to reflections on your experience. I’ll start with prison figures, just to reiterate the coloniality of the white-Black — and more and more white-Brown — relation… Barack Obama’s presidency notwithstanding.

More than 60% of the people in prison are now racial and ethnic minorities. For Black males in their twenties, one in every eight is in prison or jail on any given day. Until the economic collapse hit and forced states to halt increasing prison population — which they are just trying to figure out now, for fiscal reasons — one out of every three Black males could expect to spend time incarcerated in his lifetime. It’s a stunning figure, and it is based on laws adopted to end-run the abolition of Jim Crow, as well as huge sentencing disparities.

The interesting thing about prison, in this context however, is how we – white, non-incarcerated men in particular — think about prison. In any all-white-male gathering, when the topic of prison comes up, the topic of rape nearly always comes up too… usually as a form of humor that has the character of someone whistling past the graveyard.

Men’s concern about rape — a source of constant threat and subliminal fear for women — is generally not very acute; but when the possibility of being raped themselves is brought forward, then it becomes scandalous and terrifying.

Part of that white-male terror is associated with the dread-laden fantasy of being raped by Black men, which maps directly onto an old Southern colonial standby meme: the notion of the Black satyr, of Black men as predisposed — moreso than other men — to commit rape. This notion has been trotted out by every demagogue in the South during the most vicious anti-Black pograms; and it is still central to the world-view of the white-male conservative political base in the South, but also now more generally.

It was a proprietary standpoint, with women as property and men as embodying the actual people, wherein the dominant male was protecting His women from contamination by the male Other.

Black men have historical experience of being persecuted, using the feared or alleged rape of white women; and Black women have been involved as the sisters, mothers, aunts, grandmothers, friends, and spouses of the very Black men who were persecuted using trumped-up rape charges. As Andrea Dworkin wrote:

“In the United States, with its distinctly racist character, the very fear of the dark is manipulated, often subliminally, into fear of black, of black men in particular, so that the traditional association between rape and black men that is our national heritage is fortified. In this context, the imagery of black night suggests that black is inherently dangerous. In this context, the association of night, black men, and rape becomes an article of faith. Night, the time of sex, becomes also the time of race–racial fear and racial hatred. The black male, in the South hunted at night to be castrated and/or lynched, becomes in the racist United States the carrier of danger, the carrier of rape. The use of a racially despised type of male as a scapegoat, a symbolic figure embodying the sexuality of all men, is a common male-supremacist strategy. Hitler did the same to the Jewish male. In the urban United States, the prostitute population is disproportionately made up of black women, streetwalkers who inhabit the night, prototypical female figures, again scapegoats, symbols carrying the burden of male-defined female sexuality, of woman as commodity. And so, among the women, night is the time of sex and also of race: racial exploitation and sexual exploitation are fused, indivisible. Night and black: sex and race: the black men are blamed for what all men do; the black women are used as all women are used, but they are singularly and intensely punished by law and social mores; and to untangle this cruel knot, so much a part of each and every night, we will have to take back the night so that it cannot be used to destroy us by race or by sex.” END QUOTE

Colonizers always racialize the colonized, which is to say, subtract an element of the colonized person’s basic humanity.

What white men fear in their fantasies about prison is that the tables will be turned. They already have been taught — as men — that sex has an aspect of domination and vengeance. The language we hear in pornographic conventions, language that has been tested for its marketability, includes “Take that, you bitch,” or “I’m gonna make you squeal.”

It drips with aggression, no pun intended.

We all know that many men see having sex with a despised man’s wife, daughter, mother… is seen as pure vengeance. We are all familiar with the use of sexual language to describe extreme aggression…. part of the will to dominate. Men already see this, and we have already internalized it, and white men who haven’t been to prison, but who fantasize their dread of prison, also already see prison as a place where the protection of their privilege will disappear, and where the Black rapist of the white imagination will have the opportunity to get revenge.

This notion of a frontier between safe-world and dark-dangerous-world – a frontier that has to be guarded and policed – is fundamental to the narrative of every prison, and of every war.

One of the major difficulties of reforming prisons is that many people see the possibility of rape in prison to be a legitimate part of the convicted person’s comeuppance. We, as a society, have legitimized sexual revenge, rape as revenge and domination, every time we celebrate the notion that one of the bad guys — however we define that — will get what’s coming to him in prison.

If you misbehave, this trope tells us, your comeuppance will be that you will become like a woman. You will become subject to rape.

Sexual humiliation is understood very well for its power. We saw that in the photos from Abu Ghraib. We see it in our literature and films. It is acted out explicitly in much pornography.

The intersection of race and sex brings two taxonomies of power together; and the mix has proven volatile in more ways than one. The Black man-white woman pair — in reality or imagination — is still the trigger for white masculine insecurity… and rage. Proprietary rage, fueld by the fear of contamination spilling across one of those sealed frontiers.

One of the ways that rage is eroticized — and made manageable — is in a pornographic film convention that features a white woman with one or more Black men.

As culture has evolved in the US, younger folks have become less scandalized by interracial pairing, not surprisingly at the same time that younger people tend to get less exercised by same-sex erotic affinities; and many of us are tempted to see this as progress of a sort. I am. It is.

But this hasn’t been the whole story of our newfound tolerance of sexual diversities; and let me say for the record that I celebrate that the world has become a somewhat less hostile place for many members of our human family.

A critical concern with the actual culture of tolerance described here is that the tolerance is embraced not for its political content — which is potentially subversive of power — but because this tolerance is part of a live-and-let-live attitude of disengagement… or rather, I might call it a permanent state of irony, a flirtation with meaninglessness, or — what Richard Rorty called approvingly — light-minded aestheticism.

If that light-mindedness, and the un-named imperial privilege that is its precondition, is challenged critically, that challenge has met with defensive rationalizations, the most pernicious of which is that the mere act of transgressing norms is somehow — and magically — subversive.

On the contrary, the transgression of boundaries — and this applies erotically as well as counter-culturally — validates the boundaries themselves; because the crossing of the boundary is the kick. Nancy Hartsock writes, in her book, “Money, Sex, and Power”:

“In pornography, the body — usually a woman’s body — is presented as something that arouses shame, even humiliation, and the opposition of the spirit or mind to the body — the latter sometimes referred to as representing something bestial or non-human — generates a series of dualities… Pornography is built around, plays on, and obsessively recreates these dualities. The dichotomy between spiritual love and “carnal knowledge” is re-created in the persistent fantasy of transforming the virgin into the whore. She begins pure, innocent, fresh, even in a sense disembodied, and is degraded and defiled in sometimes imaginative and bizarre ways.

Transgression is important here: Forbidden practices are being engaged in. The violation of the boundaries of society breaks its taboos. Yet the act of violating a taboo, of seeing or doing something forbidden, does not do away with the forbidden status. Indeed, the way women’s bodies are degraded and defiled in the transformation of the virgin into the whore simply crosses over and over again the boundary between them. Without the boundary, there could be no transformation. And without the boundary to violate, the thrill of transgression would disappear.”

I tend to agree with Dr. Hartsock that transgression, then, as a value in and of itself, ends up promoting self-indulgence and self-involvement as magical antidotes to social boundaries, while having the opposite, or at least no, effect on the structural conditions that constituted the boundaries in the first place.

It has the character of trying to shock one’s parents to get noticed.

Without an analysis of power, we might fail to see that dominant groups always transgress boundaries… that this transgression is a prerogative of power.

Now let me remind us that — in this respect, especially — imperial militarism — IN PRACTICE — is the same as the aspect of pornography that Hartsock describes, and moreso now in the information age.

Near the beginning of this talk, I painted the picture of a core-nation, middle-class male, sitting at a computer. This male was either watching porn and masturbating, or he was playing war games — that is, entertaining himself by pretending he was killing human beings. In both cases, this man at the monitor was engaged in a kind of voyeurism, the voyeurism of sex and the voyeurism of war.

In some ways, our zeitgeist might be characterized as voyeurism… as participation from an anonymous distance in transgressive-thrills.

Our man at the monitor can participate at a safe distance in a gang-bang or a firefight. Anyone who might happen to see him and not his monitor — and maybe not his lap — would see a man sitting at a computer, who is outwardly very different from the intra-psychic imaginings of that same man.

A liberal political description of this empirical picture — the man sitting in front of the monitor — is that he is not bothering anyone, and that whatever he is doing on that computer is his choice. Fair enough.

But a critical political description requires us to ask questions about that intra-psychic space, about the physical ecology and the ideational ecology and the historicized culture that all impinge upon and constantly re-determine the whole gestalt of this man at the computer. Who are the real people caricatured in the porn flick? What happens in real wars? When the game is over, what real lives are resumed, and how have those real lives been affected?

Near the beginning, I posed a few polarities: abstract versus concrete, universal versus local, public versus private, and covenental relationships versus contractual relationships. Now I want to come back to these polarities to close.

Men who are trapped in the mind-numbing and anodyne grid of core-nation middle-class existence, and simultaneously trapped in the expectations of male personhood — based still on the idealization of conquest — live into stories or recreations of that conquest vicariously. Concretely, there are billions of dollars being made to satisfy the market for vicarious fucking and killing, and the development of these vicarious-thrill commodities uses real people for their development. Porn uses so-called models or actors, but also producers and directors and pimps. War game developers rely heavily on the experience of people who have actively participated in killing people in actual wars… still extant.

The objectification of women and enemies, one to reduce her to a sex toy and one to reduce him or her to a corpse, is abstract to the imaginary person watching the man at the monitor. The actual consequences of objectification that is part of the everyday experience of women and so-called enemies is not abstract in the least. These objectifying consequences involve rape kits, body bags, funerals, addiction, captivity, and fear. Plenty of fear.

Enemies are always feminized and racialized. The American soldier calls the Iraqi a “hadji” when the Iraqi is at a distance, and “bitch” when the soldier has a boot on the Iraqi’s neck.

When women told us that the personal is the political, they were telling us that we — as men — were pretending that power was an issue only in the polis, in the town square or work site where men pontificated.

Women told us that there was a power dynamic at home, too, where the violations of good will and good faith are deep and hurtful because this is where we men most liked to pretend that we were in covenental, not contractual, relationships.

Our violations of good will and good faith in the private sphere were not contract violations, but betrayal of a covenent of friendship, again as Wambdi Wicasa said, “an agreement made in trust [wherein] the parties love each other and put no limits on their own responsibility.”

Militarism, capitalism, patriarchy, pornography…. these are the tendencies of power in one-single emergent reality; and we have our day-to-day, concrete, local, and even private practices to negotiate a system that holds us all within it. And the best I can offer is that simple challenge to men, that might give our sisters, all members of the human family, and ourselves a breathing space to figure out how to move toward a story and a world of covenants, not contracts. That challenge is the don’t-list.

We can do this a day at a time, so it isn’t overwhelming. Today, we can say as men, I will pay attention. Today, I will not dominate. Today, I will not humiliate. Today, I will not retaliate. Not even vicariously.

Thank you, and God bless you for your patience and attention.

“Apocalypse Now” Small Group
For Lent — from February 25 (Ash Wednesday) to April 11 (Easter is the 12th)
All Saints United Methodist Church

Part Four — The Book of Revelation

Notes on Revelation

Note (1)

There is only one way to read John’s Apocalypse. Aloud, will full dramatic inflection, preferably with a good view of the sky. Minimum, aloud with that inflection. If you have to be alone to do this without being self-conscious, then do it. When you do it, remember that this is how it was written to be read, to committed groups of early Christians who were in a condition of extremity — systematic persecution.

As you read, note the repetitious use of words and phrases for emphasis, as well as correlative words and phrases (”looked,” “heard” — senses). That is an emphasis that must be said aloud with stress on its repetition for the emotional intelligence of Revelation to come through.

(Revelation 14) Then I looked, and there was the Lamb, standing on Mount Zion! And with him were one hundred forty-four thousand who had his name and his Father’s name written on their foreheads. 2 And I heard a voice from heaven like the sound of many waters and like the sound of loud thunder; the voice I heard was like the sound of harpists playing on their harps, 3 and they sing a new song before the throne and before the four living creatures and before the elders. No one could learn that song except the one hundred forty-four thousand who have been redeemed from the earth. 4 It is these who have not defiled themselves with women, for they are virgins; these follow the Lamb wherever he goes. They have been redeemed from humankind as first fruits for God and the Lamb, 5 and in their mouth no lie was found; they are blameless. 6 Then I saw another angel flying in midheaven, with an eternal gospel to proclaim to those who live on the earth–to every nation and tribe and language and people. 7 He said in a loud voice, “Fear God and give him glory, for the hour of his judgment has come; and worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water.” 8 Then another angel, a second, followed, saying, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great! She has made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication.” 9 Then another angel, a third, followed them, crying with a loud voice, “Those who worship the beast and its image, and receive a mark on their foreheads or on their hands, 10 they will also drink the wine of God’s wrath, poured unmixed into the cup of his anger, and they will be tormented with fire and sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. 11 And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever. There is no rest day or night for those who worship the beast and its image and for anyone who receives the mark of its name.” 12 Here is a call for the endurance of the saints, those who keep the commandments of God and hold fast to the faith of Jesus. 13 And I heard a voice from heaven saying, “Write this: Blessed are the dead who from now on die in the Lord.” “Yes,” says the Spirit, “they will rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them.” 14 Then I looked, and there was a white cloud, and seated on the cloud was one like the Son of Man, with a golden crown on his head, and a sharp sickle in his hand! 15 Another angel came out of the temple, calling with a loud voice to the one who sat on the cloud, “Use your sickle and reap, for the hour to reap has come, because the harvest of the earth is fully ripe.” 16 So the one who sat on the cloud swung his sickle over the earth, and the earth was reaped. 17 Then another angel came out of the temple in heaven, and he too had a sharp sickle. 18 Then another angel came out from the altar, the angel who has authority over fire, and he called with a loud voice to him who had the sharp sickle, “Use your sharp sickle and gather the clusters of the vine of the earth, for its grapes are ripe.” 19 So the angel swung his sickle over the earth and gathered the vintage of the earth, and he threw it into the great wine press of the wrath of God. 20 And the wine press was trodden outside the city, and blood flowed from the wine press, as high as a horse’s bridle, for a distance of about two hundred miles.

Note how the key images concentrate to form the meaning toward the end. This is how stories are read to listening audiences. Think of how a good storyteller reads to kids.

Note (2)

Ivan Illich, in teaching the 12th Century to students tried to show that…

…contemporary ideas of conscience, citizenship, technology, text, individuality, and marriage all began to emerge in that era… at the same time, the twelfth-century world remained utterly foreign to a modern sensibility…

(Cayley)

How does the past bear on the present, and at the same time stand strangely off from it?

The Apocalypse of John — for us, at least — is a very strange document.

And what are some of the ways in which we can distort and misinterpret the past, including past literature?

One example might be Scripture that refers to Jesus’ “healing.” For us, healing has to do with disease, an idea that is associated with things like pathogens and immune systems. It is a medical idea. And it didn’t exist in the mind of anyone until after Pasteur. So it is very easy for us to do something called “retrojection,” that is, to inject our current epistemology into the past — an error. Jesus’ touching the “sick” was, above all else, violating the Purity Code — disease was considered a spiritual condition that put a person outside her or his community — a terrible and painful condition for people who lived before the elevation of the individual above community. This healing was a ritual cleansing that was only authorized for priests to conduct… so Jesus was, in fact, provoking the authorities by “practicing without a license.” That’s far different from our miracle-notion of these healings and exorcisms. But our retrojections, and the retrojections of some theologians, have created a very fundamental distortion.

The Apocalypse of John, while strange to us, was very accessible to his contemporaries — as accessible as the plot conventions of LA film noir is to us (think Chinatown or Devil With a Blue Dress). But, for us to get it, we have to take two steps instead of one. We have to study and grasp the epistemology of the day, and only after grasping that way of knowing and being in the world, we can really read the primary material.

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Note (3)

Historical setting for 1st Century Palestine — though John of Patmos was in 2nd Century Asia Minor (Turkey), so circumstances were constantly evolving even then, albeit at a slower pace and smaller scale than now. We need some idea of the strangeness, to us, of what human life was then.

These figures were cribbed heavily from The Economy of First-Century Palestine: State of the Scholarly Discussion, by Philip Harland:

* 90% of Palestine’s largely Hebrew population lived as peasants. That term needs fleshing out to make it real. A peasant is someone who lives directly off the land. The peasant practices subsistence agriculture. In addition to subsistence agriculture, many peasants have historically served large landholders (so the peasant is a “tenant,” not an owner. Large landholders have typically protected their collective interests through direct of proxy state power — through government of some kind. Peasants who own their own land paid no taxes except to the state… mostly in tribute, not money. A portion of the crops, that is. Tenant farmers pay taxes to the state and to the large landholder. In 1st Century Palestine, these peasants also paid the priestly class through revenues collected via the Temple. In Haiti today, 70% of the population lives as peasants. In many respects then, Haiti is far closer to the reality of 1st Century Palestine than the places with which most of us are familiar — like Raleigh or Durham. Similarly, the Palestine of Jesus was one where the peasant was overtaxed, overworked, and kept on the margin of survival by the rich, the priestly class, and the state — three parasitic social formations whose livelihoods were completely based on the subjugation and exploitation of the peasant. This parasitic strata lived in the city, which itself vacuums up the resources of the countryside.

* In addition to peasant production, urban Palestine practiced a good deal of trade — including imports and exports.

Applebaum’s survey of archeological and literary evidence for imports and exports, for foreign or international trade, is illustrative of the situation, though his conclusion that “[e]conomic activity was predominantly internal” is debatable (1976:669-680, largely followed here). Regarding imports, Egyptian grain was, from time to time, imported in times of shortage or famine (e.g. Josephus, Ant.15.299-316 [25 BCE], 20.51-52 [46-47 CE]), but Palestine was largely self-sufficient for such food staples. The Temple cult required considerable imports, as I discuss below. With respect to clothing, later references in rabbinic literature to sandals from Tyre and Laodicea, goat-hair from Cilicia, and fine linens from Pelusium and India are suggestive of possibilities in the 1st century. Among the most common items in daily use in antiquity was pottery, so it is significant that archaeological excavations at Samaria, Schechem, Ptolemais and Ashdod uncovered red glaze both from the east (in the Hellenistic and Roman eras) and from Italy and Gaul (in the Roman era); a stamped jar from Colonia Hadrumetum in North Africa found at Joppa (2nd century or earlier) is also suggestive of such imports. As Applebaum notes, Palestine was lacking in metals (except copper) and we can assume the import of all necessary metals. The principal exports from Palestine were olive oil (cf. Josephus, B.J. 2.591; Vita 74-76), dates, opobalsam and spices. The [519] Jericho region was renowned for its dates and date-wines, which were in high demand in Rome (cf. Strabo, Geogr. 16.763.41; Pliny the Elder, Nat. 13.44-49). Products from the opobalsam bush, grown in the Dead Sea area, were exported, including the sap, twigs and bark, which were used as medical remedies for headaches and problems with eye-sight. By the 4th century, Gaza and Ascalon became well-known for their wines. Long-distance luxury items from East Africa, Arabia, India and the Far East would also pass through Palestine following the usual trade routes. (Harland)

* When urban centers form, they generate economic satellite activity in smaller communities, neither elite nor peasant. The retainer class for the elite (like Matthew, a tax collector before his discipleship) lived in smaller communities sometimes, as did artisans — skilled labor — like Jesus and Joseph, who were carpenters in the town of Nazareth, or like small commercial fishermen — Simon, for example. So while they are privileged in comparison to the peasants, they are by no means admitted among the elite. This middle strata in 1st Century Palestine was not like our middle class — which is substantial and politically powerful; it was very small. Remember, 9 out of ten people were peasants… illiterate and destitute. Slavery itself was a contractual institution, most commonly befalling its victims when they fell deeply into debt. The retainer class and the artisans were a small sliver between the small elite and the ocean of the peasantry. The retainer class works directly for the elite; and so it is privileged but totally dependent on the elite. The artisans, on the other hand, while still dependent on the overall system ruled by elites, had more autonomy in their lives than any other non-elite group. Historically, during times of great social agitation, these in-between classes are the ones who have the autonomy from power and the autonomy from paralytic poverty; so it is from these in-between classes that movement leaders emerge.

Jesus was a tekton, sometimes interpreted as carpenter, though divisions of labor weren’t as specialized then. The closest meaning would be construction worker, which was skilled labor — an artisan, possibly employed in the massive construction of Sepphoris, a spectacular Herodian project only four miles from Nazareth.

* In a peasant economy that is also under imperial control — as Palestine was under the Romans — there is always a group among the elite who act as the colonial servants and liaisons for the imperial elite. Herod was such a figure — ruling his population with an iron hand on behalf of the Romans in exchange for the ability to himself exploit his own people.

* Zealotry was more and more common… a term referring to guerrilla-like resistance of the occupied Palestinian Jews against the Roman occupiers. Officialdom referred to these people as “bandits” and “thieves.” This kind of state agitprop is still used by repressive regimes to describe any opposition. In fact, they were not bandits, but political activists who had given up on peaceful resistance. Many speculate that the two “thieves” crucified alongside Jesus were, in fact, Zealots. Crucifixion, after all, was a sentence set aside for political crimes. There is good evidence that several of the disciples were former Zealots.

* There was no concept of disease. Afflictions, like leprosy (though this term appears to have covered a lot of skin disorders), were not understood — as we think of them — as physical pathologies, but as a state of spiritual disrepair. Ritual purity, not health in the way we have only understood for the last 150 years, was the desired state. There were no “germs,” no contagion, no “insanity.” I, for one, think that demonic possession is at least as accurate a diagnosis as most of the stuff in the DSM-IV. I’d wager that anyone reading this probably has at least two demons themselves… I certainly do.

*

Note (4)

John of Patmos was writing around 90 AD, as best we know from exile. The literary form, “apocalyptic,” was handed down from Jewish writers who began the genre during the Babylonian Exile (586-538 BC). The exilic period ended when Cyrus of Persia defeated the Babylonians and allowed the Hebrews to return to Judea (where the Temple that the Babylonians had destroyed was rebuilt by 515 BC). Because of close contact with the Persians — being now under Persian rule — Persian ideas penetrated and combined with Hebrew ideas, one of them being the dramatic convention of a cosmic struggle between good and evil.

Hebrews were so poor that it took 100 years to rebuild Jerusalem.

In 331 BC, Alexander defeated Persia and took control of Palestine for the Greeks.

Hebrew theology at the time included the “Deuteronomic” idea that God rewarded good collective behavior and punished bad collective behavior. Hebrews believed that their infidelity to God had led to the Babylonian exile. As time went on, and this tit-for-tat relation became less credible, a rethinking began of the relationship between the Hebrews and God. This rethinking, which was more nuanced and subtle, was eventually named “the Wisdom Movement.” The Books of Job and Ecclesiastes were both Wisdom Movement literature.

After many years of continued general misery, the Wisdom Movement — influenced by the Persian convention of a cosmic struggle between Good and Evil, in which Good would finally triumph — gave rise to the “apocalyptic mindset,” in which the good suffered during periods of Evil’s advantage in this cosmic battle.

Apocalyptic literature has two important components: (1) the use of comparative opposites, growing out of this idea of a cosmic battle between Good and Evil, and (2) the idea of two ages (the present and the age to come). In troubled times, the present age was one in which Evil had the apparent upper hand in battle. The age to come would reverse this.

Though this Persian convention influenced John’s Apocalypse, the basic content of the visions is decidedly Christian. The battle has been won, once and once only and absolutely, in cross and resurrection. Evil is simply thrashing in a death throe. It is conquered and that conquest is manifest as we live into it by Christ’s example. This is the core proclamation of John’s Apocalypse.

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Note (5)

Apocalyptic literature is not literal. It uses symbols that — while strange to us now (because our language and epistemology has changed so dramatically) — were widely and readily recognizable to John’s contemporaries. Images, numbers, and colors had specific meanings. Here are some of them that are important in readingRevelation:

White - victory or victor (morally neutral — could be good victor or bad victor)

Black - lack or loss (famine, pestilence, bad health, etc)

Red - bloodshed, especially war

Gray-Green (”pale”) - death (color of a corpse)

3 - spirit world

3 1/2 - the amount of time (not everyday time) God allowed Evil to advance before He said, “enough is enough”

4 - created order — a taxonomy of sensible life included (1) humans, (2) wild beasts, (3) birds of the air, and (4) domestic animals.

7 - maturity or completeness… all of something (NOT literal)

10 (and multiples of ten) –inclusiveness

12 - the people of God

Beast - a nation

Horn or head - a head of state, ruler

Another symbolic practice then was called gematria. This is the use of a number obtained by adding alphabetic-numerical values to represent a word. If — and this is not a literal example — S = 19, t - 20, a = 1, and n = 14, then my first name could be represented as 54. This is particularly important in unraveling the meaning of 666 (or variously 616) as the “number of the beast.” In fact, these sums represented two spellings of the same name: Nero Caesar, or Neron Caesar… Nero, the first Roman persecutor of the Christians. The beast (a nation) is Rome, and the head of the beast is numbered 666.

It is not the sign of some anti-Christ in the future.

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Note (6)

Christianity was not yet a separate faith, but a sect of Judaism. There were no churches as we know them; the churches were gatherings that met in people’s houses. There was a sharing of blood, body, and spirit — which meant wine, bread, and a greeting kiss (that exchanged “breath,” then synonymous with “spirit”). The latter was scandalous to many, because the meetings breached class, ethnic, and gender boundaries. Scriptures were meant to be read aloud, and originated in oral traditions (that were maintained by women, as a rule). The Apocalypse of John is doxological. That is, praise-giving… a form of proclamation.

It is not a prediction.

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Note (7)

Apocalypse 5:7-10

[5] Then one of the elders said to me, “Weep not; lo, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals.”

[6] And between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders, I saw a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain, with seven horns and with seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth;

[7] and he went and took the scroll from the right hand of him who was seated on the throne.

[8] And when he had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, each holding a harp, and with golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints;

[9] and they sang a new song, saying, “Worthy art thou to take the scroll and to open its seals,
for thou wast slain and by thy blood didst ransom men for God
from every tribe and tongue and people and nation,

[10] and hast made them a kingdom and priests to our God,
and they shall reign on earth.“

From John Howard Yoder’s The Royal Priesthood:

To see history doxologically meant for John’s addresses that their primordial role within the geopolitics of the Pax Romana was neither to usurp the throne of Nero or Vespasian, Domitian or Trajan, nor to pastor Caesar prophetically, but to persevere in celebrating the Lamb’s lordship and in building the community shaped by that celebration. They were participating in God’s rule over the cosmos, whatever else they were or were not allowed by the civil powers to do. That is was not given them to exercise those other more blatantly “powerful” roles — whether assassinating Trajan or becoming his chaplain — was not for them either a renunciation or a deprivation. They considered themselves to be participating in ruling the world primordially in the human practices of doxological celebration — perhaps in Ephesus? — of which Johns’ vision of the Heavenly Throne Hall is the projection. Some would take John’s vision to mean “if we keep the faith through these tough times, in a century or two the tides will turn and we can dominate the Empire the way Domitian does today.” Others would think it meant: “if we keep the faith, the world as we know it will very soon be brought to a catastrophic end, and a new nonhistorical state of things will be set up, with us on top.”

Yoder is paraphrasing other theologians’ notions about what the Apocalypse means to its storyteller and the original story-hearers. But pay attention.

Some would favor this latter interpretation because they are themselves enthusiasts, believing themselves to be on the brink of the final saving catastrophe, as its beneficiaries. Others would ascribe that meaning to John’s vision in order to discredit it, since, after all, that catastrophic victory did not happen.

What then did the vision mean? “Neither of the above,” we must respond. Each of these restatements is incompatible with the hymnic text. The line about “serving God [the priestly role] and ruling the world [the royal one]” is found in the second strophe sung in the Heavenly Hall, the one concerned with the present age. The hymn of verse 4:11 was about the past, the praise of creation. The strophe of 5:12ff. is about the future universal consummation, when all the creatures chime in. Our strophe, the “new song” elicited by the work of the Lamb, describes the seer’s present, the same age in which the people of every tribe and tongue are being called into a new community. It is not about a future, either organic and therefore distant, or immanent and therefore catastrophic. It has to be taken as a statement about what they were then involved in doing. What then could it mean? What could it mean then?

Strophe - a choral verse-construction code.

Strophe 4:11 –

“Worthy art thou, our Lord and God,
to receive glory and honor and power,
for thou didst create all things,
and by thy will they existed and were created.”

Strophe 5:11-12 –

Then I looked, and I heard around the throne and the living creatures and the elders the voice of many angels, numbering myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands,

saying with a loud voice, “Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!”

Now go back and read the 5:7-10 at the beginning of this note.

Once you’ve re-read it, let’s continue with Yoder’s riff:

Some readers of the New Testament think that early Christians were all poor. Another set say that not all of them were. But no one thinks that taken all together they were socially significant. How then could they think — even in ecstatic flights of worship that they were involved in governing the world? That seems odd to us because we forget that what we have taken metaphorically they took realistically, that is to say, doxologically [as praise-giving proclamation of a New Life in Christ -SG]. For them to say “Jesus Christ is kyrios” was a statement neither about their subjective psychic disposition (as pietism would say) nor about their sectarian belief system (as scholasticism would assume) but about the cosmos, the way the world really is. “Sitting at the right hand of the Father,” the eighth article of the Apostle’s Creed, designated a role of cosmic viceroy, invisibly in charge of history, sovereign over the principalities and powers. That royal rule of Jesus at the Right Hand is “the service to God and rule over the world” in which they confessed themselves to be participants.

A Note further along will explain “dispensationalism,” a 19th Century distortion of John’s Apocalypse that is widely subscribed to today by churches we tend to describe imprecisely as “fundamentalist.” (The only thing fundamental about their interpretation of Revelation is that it is fundamentally and demonstrably wrong.) The true fundamentalists were the early, pre-Constantinian Christian communities — those kissing-communities that met in houses, and that heard this Apocalyptic read aloud. Here is an excerpt from a writing by philosopher Aristides (A.D. 125) who was a Christian convert, explaining why he admired this sect:

They walk in all humility and kindness, and falsehood is not found among them, and they love one another. They despise not the widow, and grieve not the orphan. Those that have distribute freely to those who have not. If they see a stranger, they bring that stranger under their own roof, and they rejoice over him as if he were their own brother: for they call themselves sisters and brothers, not after the flesh, but after the Spirit of God. When one of the poor passes away from the world, and any of them see it, then he who sees it provides for the burial according to his ability; and if they hear that any of their number is imprisoned or oppressed for the name of their Messiah, all of them provide for the prisoner’s needs, and if it is possible for the prisoner’s delivery. And if there is among them anyone who is poor and needy, and they have no abundance of their own, they will fast for two or three days to ensure that hungry one is fed.

These folks took the “fundamentals” of “abiding in Christ” very seriously.

At the time of John’s Apocalypse, they were under active persecution by Roman Emperor Domitian — who objected in particular to the “unnatural” Christian doctrine of the spiritual equality of women with men. Nero’s persecution two administrations earlier had been political opportunism. He had burned down a section of Rome that supported a political rival, and when that gambit backfired on him, he blamed the Christians — then a small sect, whose strangeness made them an easy target. John of Patmos was called that, because he was exiled to Patmos (now coastal Turkey)… a political punishment. The reason Nero is invoked in Revelation is that the originator of persecutions often comes to personify similar acts in the future. We still invoke Hitler to describe campaigns of Genocide, for example, even when the circumstances are distant in time and space from post-Weimar Germany. Any time we dislike a leader who is cruel, we call him a Hitler. With them, it was Nero… ergo, the mark of the Beast, Nero, or in gematria, 666 or 616.

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Note (8)

It is easy — given our modern empirical habits of mind — to dismiss this proclamation of “victory” as pure mysticism, or as just “sour grapes.” But John’s Apocalypse does not predict the future. It proclaims the past… the victory announced by resurrection.

*

Note (9)

We lack patience. This is not a result of industrial capitalism, like our acquisitive individualism is. It is a refinement of that individualism that has grown since World War II in core nations, especially the United States: “convenience consumerism.”

As the tempo of our lives has been ramped up, the giant hawkers of convenience goods have created greater and greater demand for “time-saving” goods and services. The term “time-saving” is very sly, since we know that time proceeds steadily and inexorably in one direction. We don’t save time, we appropriate more material and space in order to do more things in the same periods of time. This has dramatically shortened our attention spans, increased the need for more direct sensual feedback, abbreviated our reflection, and placed us under the command of clocks and pocket organizers.

Consequently, we have also been weakened in the face of setbacks. We are easily demoralized, disoriented, and overwhelmed. We have forgotten how to wait. That is the epistemological reality — corresponding to our highly abstracted economic reality — that has placed us in front of the runaway train of household debt, among other things, even as we face the specter of a long and arduous deflationary epoch. Lack of patience has real consequences.

So when we read about the victory already having been achieved, of the power of meekness, we need an example that can help us to face up to this tendency to become demoralized in the face of setbacks.

I want to use Martin Luther King’s discipleship as that example. John Howard Yoder wrote (in 1988) — again on the subject of the process of history:

To see history doxologically is to own the Lamb’s victory in one’s own time… Martin Luther King, Jr., [was] one of the victims who in our century have enabled us to keep talking about the power of meekness. The power of his vulnerability taught us again something about about the weakness of Caesar. The provisions of the United States Constitution and its amendments and the solemn oaths of office of generations of White officeholders had been powerless, for ninety years after emancipation, to keep the promise of letting Blacks into the civil community. It took the principled non-cooperation of America’s Black minority to enable elite powerbearers, whether the shrewd pragmatist Johnson or the more programmatic Kennedys before him, to make small steps toward being honest with the American dream. It took the churches of the underdogs to move the churches and the synagogues of the comfortable — and then only some of them — to support the most modest steps toward the most elementary public morality in matters of race.

[P]rogress in history is borne by the underdogs.

This is a strange message indeed — contemporary as it is — when we are inundated with cultural productions that glorify violence, domination, acquisition, egoism, and power. The strangeness of John’s Apocalypse — aside from its language and symbolisms — is that its readers and hearers actually believed in the power of meekness — in the victory of the slain Lamb — and that this was an embodied practice, this belief, here on earth; not something in a cosmically separated realm of pure spirit.

Note (10)

Notes from James Efird’s Revelation Bible Study guide:

Written as a series of self-contained visionary units. Each describes something going on at that time and place with descriptions of the events given in symbolic (but not secret) terms… [some listed above] …

Essential to read apocalyptic text with understanding of these symbols and images to discern the message.

As Jews left Palestine and Christian movement became basically a Gentile group, apocalyptic style of writing fell away and early Church lost understanding of apocalyptic symbolism.

By end of 2nd Century AD, the church fathers already were puzzled by symbols of apocalyptic literature.

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Note (11)

Efird’s Notes (paraphrased)

Rev. 1-3

7 churches, stars (angels), lampstands, etc. Jewish menorah is a seven-branch candelabra. Seven indicates completeness. There were more than seven churches in Asia Minor; but John lists 7, in order along a well-known postal route, just as the New Testament lists 12 disciples, though there are far more… because 7 means complete or total, and 12 means the people of God (12 tribes of Israel).

Seven churches, each with its own angel (also a popular convention then).

Letters to the seven churches, each contains praise and censure, and each is encouraged to keep the faith. Ephesus (2:1) is told that it is in danger of allowing sanctimony to cast a shadow on love. Nicolaitans (2:6) is warned that it is slipping toward a Gnostic heresy (an elaborate cosmology of intermediate beings between humans and God, with ascetic and “libertine” sects. Pergamum (2:12) is cited for its steadfastness even as it is co-located with “Satan” (Roman worship temples). Sardis (3:1) is moribund and in danger. Laodicea (3:14) is called “lukewarm,” an accusation of cheap grace, smugness, an excess of comfort… and a word play since a warm stream from an upstream hot spring was famous in Laodicea.

Rev. 4-5

Rainbow is an Old Testament reference, when God promised Noah that God would not destroy humanity again. This was a necessary reminder under the stern circumstances of Domitian’s persecution.

24 is multiple of 12 (4:4), people of God, and two 12’s is two groups, one the old community and one the new community.

Four: an apocalyptic number representing created order (wild beasts, domestic animals, birds, humans). These visions are to be attended by all created order. (Interpretations that the four refers to the gospels were the result of the loss of ability to “decode” apocalyptic numerical references.)

The scroll (Rev. 5) is written on both sides (normal scrolls had a smooth and rough side — recto and verso), usually only written on the recto side. Writing on both sides means that the document is extremely important.

Opened by the slaughtered lamb… a paradoxical figure of Jesus the Christ, since this whole set of visionary units proclaims a great “victory.” Thousands (multiples of ten — inclusion) praise the lamb. (5:11)

Rev. 6

Seven cycles recapitulate the lamb’s triumph, each ending very badly for the enemies of God’s people.

Et cetera.

This is how one can go through Revelation — reading aloud — getting the sense of how dangerous this literature was for its author, and how defiant. “Imprison us, torture us, kill us… but out proclamation stands. Christ is sovereign, no other, not even Caesar.”

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Note (12)

Now that we know what Revelation is about — the proclamation to a community suffering persecution — and what it is not — a prediction of the future, and now that we have some basic examples, as well as “Mickey” Efird’s scholarship, to help us make the jump back into 90-95 AD, we can re-claim Revelation from the Darbyist (dispensationalist) accounts and proudly acknowledge that this Book is part of our canon.

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Note (13)

I strongly urge readers to at least read the Preface of Harry Maier’s Apocalypse Recalled, linked here.

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Note (14)

Read all of Ted Grimsrud’s Revealing a New World: Power According to Biblical Apocalyptic, linked here.

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Closing Quote

One night the Lord said to Paul in a vision, “Do not be afraid, but speak and do not be silent; for I am with you, and no one will lay a hand on you to harm you, for there are many in this city who are my people.”

- Acts 18:9-10

Closing Link from César J. Baldelomar (no relation to that other Caesar)

“Apocalypse Now” Small Group
For Lent — from February 25 (Ash Wednesday) to April 11 (Easter is the 12th)
All Saints United Methodist Church

Part Four — The War of the Lamb

Notes on The War of the Lamb

One rendition of historical Jesus (long hair was not the custom of the day for men, and Jesus is here portrayed as a fairly typical Palestinian Jew, circa 30 AD)

Note (1)

In the section for Week 5, when we are reading the Book of the Revelation of John, we will spend a fair amount of time unpacking the historical context, and interpreting both Greek language nuances and genre-specific symbolism for Jewish apocalyptic writing. Chapter 12 of John Howard Yoder’s book, The Politics of Jesus, the chapter entitled “The War of the Lamb” (reprinted below, Note 7), will not prepare us for that kind of scholarly investigation, but will deal in advance with the modern ideas with which we are more familiar — treating the series of visions described in John’s Apocalypse as if we have already accomplished the scholarship.

Yoder’s chapter will look into John of Patmos’ (”the seer of Patmos” — one who “sees visions”) visions for what they mean to us — now.

This reversal of the usual academic sequence — working out from the original source and finally into our own experience… we are doing the opposite — is a reversal of that method. Instead of jumping into the deep end and swimming back to shore, so to speak, we have been wading into the shallow end and taking steps toward the deeper water, getting used to the water as we go.

First, we used a B-movie, an entertainment commodity, that attaches itself to certain familiar cultural conventions, and which we normally consume passively… light-mindedly, participating in the story uncritically; and we tried to become critical about the film Volcano as a way of practicing critical thinking about these cultural conventions. We were knee-deep.

Then we studied a film that was more innovative — an independent film — and one that was a good deal less light-minded: 28 Days Later. Character development was more nuanced. The imagery (as we will see in Revelation, too) is more violent and disturbing. The direction and editing is edgier. The moral dilemmas are more stark (Selena killing Mark, for example). The intermediate themes are more “controversial” (military as rape culture, for example, or science and the attempt to control nature, as far less benign than Volcano’s portrayal of the Man-conquers-Nature trope).

By the time we studied this film, we had already begun to familiarize ourselves with some epistemological questions. Those questions bear on the ethical dilemmas raised in these conditions of extremity; and we had already “practiced” looking through our heuristic device of the Ecology-Culture-Personhood Triangle, as a way of giving ourselves a “dislocative jolt” out of the passive acceptance of our day-to-day, 21st Century way-of-knowing. By now, we were waist-deep in the water.

Finally, we watched Children of Men, a film based on a dystopian novel written by a Christian author, a film with very original production values, and a film with cristological overtones that were very apparent, beginning with the title (a play on Jesus’ title, the Son of Man — meaning “the human one” in the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek), and ending with a miraculous birth (of hope) in the midst of an extremely broken and seemingly hopeless world.

Here we stepped further away from the familiar shore. We are in the water to our chests.

Yoder will hold our hand as we wade out to our necks, and we begin to let our feet release the bottom a bit as we experience our own buoyancy.

*

Note (2)

Theologian Ivan Illich — who we have also followed in this study — said that modernity (and its stepchild, postmodernity) and its vagaries were not anti-Christian, but that they are the outgrowth of a perversion of Christianity… a distortion of the call to discipleship exemplified by the Samaritan as friendship across social boundaries (in the case of the Samaritan, a member of an enemy people) and a constant choice of fidelity or infidelity to that friendship.

This distortion of the message of the Samaritan began with the Constantinianiztion of the church (an alliance with the Powers) and the “criminalization of sin.” It culminated in the depersonalization of “service,” and the creation of a new personhood — one characterized by alienation from one’s own body, and by incessant attention to our own “needs” with respect to that divorced body.

This loss of the sense of our own carnality (fleshiness) is reflected in an idea of Christ that is no longer incarnational… no longer wet, warm, throbbing, alive, centered in our skins, experiencing suffering and joy that is physical and in the world. This depersonalization corresponds to an instrumental and objectifying approach to both culture and ecology. We stand apart from ourselves, looking in from the outside; and we stand apart from our dis-enchanted environment (reducing it to a supply of “resources”), and we stand apart as a culture. We become a culture of abstraction, of general laws, of categorical imperatives, of conformity, and all the boundaries that were effaced by love when the Samaritan took the beaten Jew off the road and into his home… all these boundaries that were broken on the cross, are redrawn. We begin to talk about “values” (a rather abstract concept) in place of “right” and “wrong” — “good” and “evil.” We go down the endless and pointless path of relativism (relativistic being far different from “relational”).

[Illich also said that we have entered a new period, post-instrumentalist, wherein we conceive of everything — including our own selves and bodies — as systems… an array of “feedback loops,” or an “immune system.” Treating others instrumentally, however, seems not to have passed, but become more and more normative and malignant. All others are seen as a means to some self-serving end… in the medicalized language of psychoanalysis, narcissism.]

Yoder takes on the same subject — Christianity versus Christendom… the latter being that alliance of the church (and its perversion) with the Powers (e.g., the state and-or its dominant classes) and with the instrumentality that plays the chicken to the Powers’ egg.

In Stanely Haeurwas’ book, After Christendom?, in an essay entitled “Why There Is No Salvation Outside the Church,” he notes, anticipating our reading of the visions of “the seer of Patmos”:

God in Jesus has defeated the powers so that as disciples we can confidently live as a cruciform community in a world that has chosen not to be ruled by such love. Thus as John Howard Yoder suggests, “The Church precedes the world epistemologically. We know more fully from Jesus Christ and in the context of the confessed faith than we know in other ways. The meaning and validity, and limits, of concepts like ‘nature’ or a ’science’ are not best seen when looked at alone but in the light of the confession of the lordship of Christ. The church precedes the world as well axiologically, in that the lordship of Christ is the center which must guide critical value choices, so that we may be called to subordinate or even to reject those values which contradict Jesus.”

If we say, outside the church there is no salvation we make a claim about the very nature of salvation — namely that salvation is God’s work to restore all creation to the Lordship of Christ. Such a salvation is about the defeat of powers that presume to rule outside God’s providential care. Such salvation is not meant to confirm what we already know and/or experience. It is meant to make us part of a story that could not be known apart from exemplification in the lives of people in a concrete community.

(emphasis added)

Something to ponder: the word “sovereignty.” An exclusive right to control. What Yoder and Illich emphasize in their writings, that comes directly from the scriptures, is that God alone is sovereign. To claim, as Rome does (as the United States of America does), sovereignty, sets us up to recognize that claim, and therein become idolatrous. To claim, as classical liberalism does, that the lone individual (the “self”) is sovereign is idolatry.

*

Note (3)

Leo Hartshorn has written a nice summary of key points from The Politics of Jesus, reprinted here to help us understand what preceded Chapter 12, “The War of the Lamb”:

John Howard Yoder’s classic book The Politics of Jesus (Eerdmans,1972; reissued 1994) has had a profound impact on how many Christians read the Bible and understand Jesus. James Wm. McClendon, Jr., a theologian within the Anabaptist tradition, was highly influenced by the book. McClendon describes its impact as being like a “second conversion.” In turn, as Jim’s friend and pastor, I was influenced by his passion for Anabaptism and subsequently became a Mennonite.

The Politics of Jesus taught Christians how to read the Bible and Jesus “politically.” By that I mean it opened up a way to read Jesus as a nonviolent revolutionary who confronted the religious and political powers of his day and had an explicit social agenda grounded in a vision of God’s reign [emphasis added — that agenda was “jubilary” -SG].

Since The Politics of Jesus was published, many others have read the Bible through the lens of the social sciences, political theory and new understandings of the social situation of first-century Palestine under Roman occupation. New studies have brought to the foreground even more political implications of the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

I have tried to compile and simplify a number of the implications of these political readings of the Gospels. These readings make it difficult to deny that Jesus and the Gospels have a social and political vision. These insights into the Gospels and Jesus provide the peacemaker and justice-seeker with a vision and model of social and political engagement.

The birth of Jesus

* Jesus’ birth is presented in royal images to intentionally contrast with the violent rule of Roman political leaders (Matt. 2).
* Jesus’ mother, Mary, proclaims his coming in the Magnificat as subverting and inverting the politics of injustice (Luke 1:46-56; a song of the anawim or “poor ones”).
* Jesus’ birth is heralded as the reign of peace and witnessed by shepherds, social outcasts (Luke 2:8-14).

The life and teachings of Jesus

* Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness (Matt. 4:1-11)

Jesus resisted the devil’s temptation to rule the nations, which in the context of first-century Palestine under Roman colonial domination could only be practically and politically achieved by means of violent revolution (insights from Yoder).

* Jesus’ preaching/teaching ministry

Jesus’ first hometown “sermon” was a definitive moment for his continuing mission (Luke 4:16-30). It was based upon Isaiah 42: 1ff. The Spirit was upon Jesus for the purpose of proclaiming good news to the poor (i.e., a suggestion of economic transformation, not simply “pie in the sky”), release to the captives (such as those in “debtor’s prison”), recovery of sight to the blind (i.e., resulting in the restoration of the dependent and marginalized to economic self-sufficiency and community [emphasis added]), freedom for the oppressed (i.e., the victims of injustice), and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. Scholars suggest this last may be an allusion to the year of Jubilee, a time of restorative economic justice; see Lev. 25. Jesus ends his “sermon” with a prophetic challenge to ethnocentricity that almost gets him killed!

In Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, which reveals some of Jesus’ core teachings, Jesus blessed the peacemakers (5:9) and taught love of enemies (5:43-48), as well as a way of nonviolent challenge to injustice over retaliation (5:38-42).

Jesus’ central teaching was the reign or kingdom of God (Matt. 4:17). This was a social and political metaphor that spoke to, among other things, a covenant, or faithful way of life among God’s people.

Jesus’ parables, which reflect the unjust social conditions of first century Palestine, frequently served as social commentary and critique (e.g., The Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus in Luke 16, or The Parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10, which uses a person from a despised social group as its “hero”).

Jesus taught the way of nonviolence and peace (e.g., Jesus rebuked James and John’s desire for revenge and the violent destruction of a Samaritan village, in Luke 9:51-55).

* Jesus’ healing ministry

Jesus made healing contact with the “unclean” and social outcasts (e.g., lepers). The Temple purity system kept the unclean from social interaction and in economic dependence. In his healing acts Jesus brought back into the community the socially marginalized. His healings had wider social implications.

Jesus’ healing freed many from financial dependence.

Jesus offered healing free from its brokerage by an unjust Temple system.

Jesus’ exorcism, in the symbolism of Mark’s gospel (5:21), points to an overcoming of Roman political oppression (i.e., pigs=the unclean; possession=physical occupation; demon=Legion=Roman military unit).

* Jesus’ prophetic ministry

Jesus challenged the religious and social boundaries of his society, which defined holiness as separation, by having table fellowship with “tax-collectors and sinners” (labels for a distinct social group of outcasts deprived of certain civil rights). This prophetic act got Jesus labeled as a social deviant, a “friend of tax-collectors and sinners.” Meals can be seen as a microcosm of the larger culture’s views on social boundaries (who’s in and who’s out). Jesus’ act of table fellowship was a form of social protest, symbolically proclaiming that the Reign of God included the disenfranchised (Matt. 9:11-13).

Jesus challenged the purity/holiness system of his society, which ostracized those who could not observe its detailed regulations.

Jesus juxtaposed “justice, mercy and faith(fulness)” over against meticulous observance of ritual law (Matt. 23:23).

Jesus broke down socially constructed gender barriers by associating with women (e.g., the Samaritan woman in John 4) and having women as disciples (e.g., Mary in Luke 10:38-42).

Jesus challenged Roman occupation and tribute/allegiance to Caesar and Rome with the bigger issue of tribute/allegiance to God (Matt. 17:24-27).

Jesus prophetically critiqued the injustices of the Temple system and its elite leaders (e.g., the story of the widow’s mite, which must be understood in its immediate context of Jesus’ critique of Temple officials, who “devour widow’s houses,” and his saying on the destruction of the Temple; see Mark 12:38-13:2). Jesus questioned the Temple tax (Matt. 17:24-27). He carried out a public protest, or “political street theater,” in the tradition of the symbolic acts of the prophets, by overturning the tables of the moneychangers, which represented the economic injustices of the Temple system (Matt. 21:12-13). This act may have been the precipitating event of his crucifixion.

The death and resurrection of Jesus

* Jesus intentionally headed for Jerusalem, the seat of the coalition of religious and political power, to confront the injustice of the system and its leaders (Matt. 20:17-19).
* Jesus entered Jerusalem with “political theater” lampooning the people’s expectations of a violent, military messianic kingship by riding in on a donkey instead of a warhorse (i.e., re-enacting Zechariah’s vision of a coming king who would bring peace among nations; see Zech. 9:9-10).
* When he was arrested, Jesus told Peter to put away his sword, for “those who live by the sword will die by the sword” (Matt. 26:51-53). Jesus could have called upon a heavenly army to protect him, but violent resistance to Rome was not on Jesus’ political agenda.
* Jesus was crucified as a political criminal, as an enemy of the state, between two bandits (most likely social bandits, who violently resisted economic injustices; Matt. 27:38). He was accused of political subversion: 1) refusing to pay taxes to Caesar (Luke 23:2; if we are to give to God what is God’s, as in Matt. 22:17-21, what is the implication for Caesar’s tribute?); 2) threatening to destroy the Temple (Matt. 26:61 and Mark13:1-2); and 3) claiming to be a messianic king (Matt. 26:63-64).
* At Jesus’ trial, the people are given a choice between Jesus “bar Joseph,” the nonviolent revolutionary, and Jesus bar Abbas, the violent revolutionary (Matt. 27:16-17).
* On the cross, a Roman political instrument of torture for revolutionaries and insurgents, Jesus identifies with the forsaken and abandoned.
* God’s resurrection of Jesus is a vindication of his life, including his way of peace and social justice.
* In John’s gospel (14:26), the resurrected Christ leaves his disciples with his way of peace, unlike the world gives (e.g., the Pax Romana, the Roman “peace” through violent suppression). Finally, Jesus offers his peace and breathes his Spirit, his way of life, forgiveness and peace, upon the group of disciples, the prototypical Church (John 20:19-23).

*

Note (4)

In preparation for Good Friday and Easter, as we go through Lent, we have pointed to the subject of renunciation, and we have made the claim — through Illich first — that renunciation is an exercise of freedom.

A while ago, I wanted my dog to go outside. My dog is a sensible being, like us. But if he is reluctant to go outside (it’s cold today), all I have to do is wave a biscuit in front of his face, then throw it outside, and he will follow. He is powerless to choose, moreso because he doesn’t recognize he has a choice. The difference between that dog and us is that we can choose, and we are therefore inescapably moral beings.

The degree to which we are controlled by fears or by appetites — once we have been shown that we can “renounce” them — is the degree to which we might fail morally.

Everything in modern society tells us differently, because fears and appetites are marketable… and we live in a society that has raised the market as an idol, from “be all that you can be,” to “Pantene, because I’m worth it,” to a popular magazine entitled “Self.” This ideology has led to a culture, an ecology, and a personhood characterized not by choice, but by addiction. Addictions are our new rulers. The market throws a biscuit out the door, and we run outside after it.

What Yoder explains in “The War of the Lamb” is that Jesus three times in a row renounced the temptation to dictate and dominate. When he goes to be tempted, the temptation is political power. When the crowd cheers his entry into Jerusalem, he could have taken power, but he didn’t. When he again whips up the crowd by running the bulls through the tables of the moneychangers at the Temple, he stands down. Then Jesus shows us what the renunciation of power looks like… on the cross. He renounces the appetite for power; and he renounces the fear of death.

Here is Yoder from “The War of the Lamb, referring to the visions of Revelation and meaning:

What Jesus renounced was thus not simply the metaphysical status of sonship but rather the untrammeled sovereign exercise of power in the affairs of that humanity amid which he came to dwell. His emptying of himself, his accepting of the form of servanthood and obedience unto death, is precisely his renunciation of lordship, his apparent abandonment of any obligation to be effective in making history move down the right track.

But the judgment of God upon this renunciation and acceptance of defeat is the declaration that this is victory. “Therefore God has greatly exalted him and given him the title, which every creature will have to confess, the Lord“. “Lord” in the earliest Christian confessions was not (as it is in so much modern piety) a label to state a believer’s humility or affection or devotion; it is an affirmation of his victorious relation to the powers of the cosmos [italics added]…

…this text affirms a philosophy of history in which renunciation and suffering are meaningful…

…The renunciation of the claim to govern history was not made only by the second person of the Trinity taking upon himself the demand of an eternal divine decree; it was also made by a poor, tired rabbi when he came from Galilee to Jerusalem to be rejected.

Jesus did not show us the freedom of God in his renunciation. He showed us the possibility of our own freedom, and in that showing He gave us a new being.

A question to provoke a closer reading of Yoder here: How does this explanation of renunciation relate to Yoder’s pacifism, his renunciation of violence?

*

Note (5)

In the first section of “The War of the Lamb,” Yoder critiques the idea of a “thread” or “handle” on history, by calling into question three assumptions:

1. It is assumed that the relationship of cause and effect is visible, understandable, and manageable, so that if we make our choices on the basis of how we hope society will be moved, it will be moved in that direction.

2. It is assumed that we are adequately informed to be able to set for ourselves and for all society the goal toward which we seek to move it.

3. Interlocked with these two assumptions and dependent upon them for its applicability is the further postulate that effectiveness in moving toward these goals which have been set is itself a moral yardstick.

If we look critically at these assumptions we discover that they are my no means as self-evident as they seem to be at first.

Another question to ponder: What is the significance here of the term “effectiveness”? Does that mean Yoder eschewed taking action in the world?

*

Note (6)

Yoder and Illich talk much about “primitive” Christianity, that is pre-Constantinian Christianity, wherein people’s churches were simply homes, where Christians met and ate and worshiped together. They greeted each other with conspirato a mouth-to-mouth kiss that “exchanged breath,” breath being seen as spirit. This is the community of communities that John of Patmos addresses, and these churches are not great edifices… but private homes.

As a way of shifting out of our current epistemology, listen to this NPR broadcast on ethnomusicologists rendition of the kind of music that Jesus and the early Christians likely listened to: Click here to listen. Note what the ethno-musicologists have to say about how language was constructed, and enjoy the music.

*

Note (7)

THE TEXT (initially broken into individual sentences for the purpose of close and careful study, with asterisks to indicate paragraph changes):

Jesus and Paul have been the foci of our exposition.

They must represent the centers of any New Testament theological synthesis, due to both their originality and to the amount of material that makes them knowable to us.

But there are four other figures, other minds at work.

A thorough treatment would demand that we test there as well the reading we have taken already.

There would be the thought of the author of Matthew or of the writer to the Hebrews; there would be the mind of Peter, of John, of Jude, or of the seer of the Apocalypse.

There is a reason to trust that the reading there would confirm the orientation already sketched.

Here, however, I must renounce the further cross-referencing and leap ahead to a summary, rooted nonetheless especially in the last-named Apocalypse.

I shall seek briefly to characterize the stance of that book, as it might by contrast throw some light on our contemporary agenda and at the same time draw together the argument of the entire book. [covered in Note (3), above… SG]

*

One way to characterize thinking about social ethics in our time is to say that Christians in our age are obsessed with the meaning and direction of history.

Social ethical concern is moved by a deep desire to make things move in the right direction.

Whether a given action is right or not seems to be inseparable from the question of what effects it will cause.

Thus part if not all of social concern has to do with looking for the right “handle” by which one can “get a hold on” the course of history and move it in the right direction.

For the movement called Moral Rearmament, ideology was this handle; “ideas have legs,” so that if we can get a contagious new thought moving, it will make its own way. For others, it is the purpose of education that ultimately determines the character and course of the civilization; whoever rules the teachers’ colleges rules the world.

*

Rambunctious students believe that the office of the dean or the president is the center of the university and therefore they occupy that office.

Che Guevara believed the peasant to be the backbone of the coming Latin American revolution, so he went to the hills of Bolivia.

The Black Economic Development Conference directed its Manifesto to the administrators of the denominations because it believes that when the individual heart is turned in another direction the rest is sure to follow.

For still others it is the proletariat or geopolitics that explains everything.

CRITICAL NOTE: Yoder’s writing can be difficult because his diction is unusual, and because he doesn’t tell you when he’s being ironic or expounding a different point of view from his own. Obviously, he is very critical of this whole notion of a “handle” on history. He is neither confirming nor denying any of the approaches listed, but simply showing that they hold a “handle on history” assumption in common, even when each describes a different handle.

Whichever the favored “handle” may be, the structure of this approach is logically the same.

One seeks to lift up one focal point in the midst of the course of human relations, one thread of meaning and causality which is more important than individual persons, their lives and well-being, because it in itself determines wherein their well-being consists.

Therefore it is justified to sacrifice to this one “cause” other subordinate values, including the life and welfare of one self, one’s neighbor, and (of course!) of the enemy.

We pull this one strategic thread in order to save the whole fabric.

We can see this kind of reasoning with Constantine saving the Roman Empire, with Luther saving the Reformation by making an alliance with the princes, or with Krushchev and his successors saving Marxism by making it somewhat more capitalistic, or with the United States saving democracy by alliances with military dictatorships and by the threatened use of the bomb.

*

If we look more analytically at [a] way of deriving social and political ethics from an overview of the course of history and the choice of the thread within history that is thought to be the most powerful, we find that it involves at least three distinguishable assumptions.

1. It is assumed that the relationship of cause and effect is visible, understandable, and manageable, so that if we make our choices on the basis of how we hope society will be moved, it will be moved in that direction.

2. It is assumed that we are adequately informed to be able to set for ourselves and for all society the goal toward which we seek to move it.

3. Interlocked with these two assumptions and dependent upon them for its applicability is the further postulate that effectiveness in moving toward these goals which have been set is itself a moral yardstick

If we look critically at these assumptions we discover that they are my no means as self-evident as they seem to be at first. There is for one thing the phenomenon Reinhold Niebuhr has called “irony”: that when people try to manage history, it almost always, it almost always turns out to have taken another direction than that in which they thought they were guiding it.

This may mean that we are not morally qualified to set the goals toward which we would move history.

At least it must mean that we are not capable of discerning and managing its course when there are in the same theater of operation a host of other free agents, each of them in their own way also acting under the same assumptions as to their capacity to move history in their direction.

Thus even apart from other more spiritual considerations, the strategic calculus is subject to a very serious internal question.

It has yet to be demonstrated that history can be moved in the direction in which one claims the duty to cause it to go.

*

The other question we must raise at the outset about the logic of the “strategic” attitude toward ethical decisions is the acceptance of effectiveness as its goal.

Even if we know how effectiveness is to be measured — that is, even if we could get a clear definition of the goal we are trying to reach and how to ascertain whether we had reached it — is there not in Christ’s teaching on meekness, or in the attitude of Jesus toward power and servanthood, a deeper question being raised about whether it is our business at all to guide our action by the course we wish history to take?

*

It is, however, not the concern of our present study to deal logically or systematically with this kind of question within the traditional or contemporary idioms of theological debate.

In recent centuries debate around the question of the meaning of history, and the place of Christian decision within that meaningfulness, has generally been a conversation of the deaf, [emphasis added] with some so committed to pre-Enlightenment understandings of the stability of the proper social order that any sense of movement is only a threat, and others committed with an equally unquestioning irrationality to the progressivist assumptions of post-Enlightenment Western thought, according to which the discernible movement of history is self-explicating and generally works for good, and therefore is the only terrain of significance from which ethics should self-evidently be derived.

From neither direction has there been any expectation that light might be thrown upon the question by the New Testament.

What medieval Christendom, with its vision of the divine stability of all the members of the corpus christianum, has in common with post-Enlightenment progressivism is precisely the assumption that history has moved us past the time of primitive Christianity and therefore out from under the relevance of the apostolic witness on this question.

*

The earlier portions of this book have sought to spell out in considerable detail the elements of a vision of the Christian’s place in the world that can claim rootage in the thought of Jesus and Paul.

It remains, we have seen, to test the concordance of this approach in the remaining sections of the canonical literature.

This literature (the General Epistles and the Apocalypse) is less unified, less easy to understand,and there is also less of it; so we can not ask for the fullness of delineation toward which we have pointed in the earlier sections of the study.

We can, however, ask whether that which it is possible to discern in these writings is concordant with the other strands of apostolic witness we have been pursuing; and it is fitting to center this question upon the concern for history’s meaning.

*

For a sense of the apostolic perception of the meaning and curse of history and especially of the interplay of trust and coerciveness within history, we shall find that the most immediate resource comes from that segment of the biblical literature from which we are least accustomed to learn, namely from the liturgical literature which is embedded in the New Testament at certain scattered points, but which especially dominates in the book of the Revelation of John.

*

In the first vision (Rev. 4-5) the seer of Patmos is presented with the image of a sealed scroll in the land of the “one that was seated upon the throne” (a circumlocution for God himself, who cannot be looked at directly, but whose presence is known as Light).

*

The question laid before John by his vision of the scroll sealed with seven seals is precisely the question of the meaningfulness of history

This is a question that, the vision says dramatically, cannot be answered by the normal resources of human insight.

Yet it is by no means a meaningless question or one unworthy of concern.

It is worth weeping, as the seer does himself, if we do not know the meaning of human life and suffering.

*

Speaking more generally we can affirm, as numerous historians of philosophy are arguing, that to be concerned about history, to assume that history is meaningful, is itself a Judeo-Christian idea.

The concern to know where history is going is not an idle philosophical curiosity.

It is a necessary expression of the conviction that God has worked in past history and has promised to continue thus to be active among us.

If God is the kind of God-active-in-history of whom the Bible speaks, then concern for the course of history is itself not an illegitimate or an irrelevant concern.

No mystical or existentialist or spiritualistic deprecation of preoccupation with the course of history is justified for the Christian.

*

But the answer given to the question by a series of visions and their hymns is not the standard answer.

“The lamb that was lain is worthy to receive power!”

John is here saying, not as an inscrutable paradox but as a meaningful affirmation, that the cross and not the swoard, suffering and not brute power determines the meaning of history.

The key to the obedience of God’s people is not their effectiveness but their patience (13:10).

The triumph of the right is assured not by the might that comes to the aid of right, which is of course the justification for the use of violence and other kinds of power in human conflict.

The triumph of the right, although it is assured, is sure because of the power of the resurrection and not because of any calculation of causes and effects, nor because of the inherently greater strength of the good guys.

The relationship between the obedience of God’s people and the triumph of God’s cause is not a relationship of cause and effect but one of cross and resurrection.

*

We have observed this biblical “philosophy of history” first of all in the worship life of the late New Testament church, since it is here that we find the most desperate encounter of the church’s weakness (John was probably in exile, Paul in prison) with the power of the evil rulers of the present age.

But this position is nothing more than a logical unfolding of the meaning of the work of Jesus Christ himself, whose choice of suffering servanthood rather than violent lordship, of love to the point of death rather than righteousness backed by power, was itself the fundamental direction of his life.

Jesus was so faithful to the enemy-love of God that it cost him all his effectiveness; he gave up every handle on history.

The rest of the text for “The War of the Lamb” is linked here. Continue to read the text carefully, one sentence at a time, to let the meaning soak in. Page 237 is also excised from the Google Books layout, so I’ll reproduce it here (normally formatted) to fill in the blank:

This is significantly different from that kind of “pacifism” which which would say that it is wrong to kill but that with proper nonviolent techniques you can obtain without killing everything you really want or have a right to ask for. In this context it seems that sometimes the rejection of violence is offered only because it is a cheaper or less dangerous or more shrewd way to impose one’s will upon someone else, a kind of coercion which is harder to resist. Certainly any renunciation of violence is preferable to its acceptance; but what Jesus renounced is not first of all violence, but rather the compulsiveness of purpose that leads the strong to violate the dignity of others. The point is not that one can attain all of one’s legitimate ends without using violent means. It is rather our readiness to renounce our legitimate ends whenever they cannot be attained by legitimate means itself constitutes our participation in the triumphant suffering of the Lamb.

This conception of participation in the character of God’s struggle with a rebellious world, which early Quakerism referred to as “the war of the lamb,” has the peculiar disadvantage — or advantage, depending upon one’s point of view — of being meaningful only if Christ be he who Christians claim him to be, the Master. Almost every other kind of ethical approach espoused by Christians, pacifist or otherwise, will continue to make sense to the non-Christian as well. Whether Jesus be the Christ or not, whether Jesus the Christ be Lord or not, whether this kind of religious language be meaningful or not, most types of ethical approach will keep on functioning the same. For their true foundation is in some reading of the human situation or some ethical insight which is claimed to be generally accessible to all people of good will. The same is not true for this vision of “completing in our bodies that which was lacking in the suffering of Christ” (Col. 1:24) If Jesus Christ was not who historic Christianity confesses he was, the revelation in the life of a real man of the very character of God, this this one argument for pacifism collapses.

Accepting Powerlessness

We thus do not adequately understand what the church was praising in the work of Christ, and what Paul was asking his readers to be guided by, if we think of the cross as a peculiarly efficacious technique (probably effective only in certain circumstances) for getting one’s way. The key to the ultimate relevance and to the triumph of the good is not any calculation at all, paradoxical or otherwise, of efficacy, but rather simple obedience.

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No homework, except to think and think hard.

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Closing quote:

Then I looked and heard the voice of many angels, numbering thousands upon thousands, and ten thousand times ten thousand. They encircled the throne and the living creatures and the elders. In a loud voice they sang:
“Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain,
to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength
and honor and glory and praise!” (Revelation 5:11-12)

]]> http://www.insurgentamerican.net/2009/03/15/apocalypse-now-small-group-section-4-the-war-of-the-lamb/feed/ http://www.insurgentamerican.net/2009/03/15/apocalypse-now-small-group-section-4-the-war-of-the-lamb/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/InsurgentAmerican/~3/G7qoQfXHvtY/ http://www.insurgentamerican.net/2009/03/02/apocalypse-now-small-group-section-3-children-of-men/#comments Mon, 02 Mar 2009 13:34:52 +0000 stan http://www.insurgentamerican.net/2009/03/02/apocalypse-now-small-group-section-3-children-of-men/

“Apocalypse Now” Small Group
For Lent — from February 25 (Ash Wednesday) to April 11 (Easter is the 12th)
All Saints United Methodist Church

COMMENTS

Apocalypse Now Links:
Introduction
Part One - Volcano
Part Two - 28 Days Later
Part Three - Children of Men
Part Four - “The War of the Lamb”
Part Five - “Revelation”

Part Three — Children of Men
Showing at the All Saints UMC Ministry Center, 7 PM, Friday, March 20

Directed by Alfonso Cuarón

Produced by Marc Abraham, Eric Newman, Iain Smith, Hilary Shor, Tony Smith, Thomas Bliss, Armyan Bernstein

Written by — Novel: P. D. James, Screenplay: Alfonso Cuarón, Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, Clive Owen (uncredited)

Starring Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Charlie Hunnam, Clare-Hope Ashitey, Pam Ferris, Danny Huston, Peter Mullan, and Michael Caine

[All quotes and images are employed under Title 17, “Fair Use” law, and no portion of this study is for profit.]

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Note (1)

Before reviewing the film itself, let’s hear what Ivan Illich (from The Rivers North of the Future) had to say about “renunciation,” a key theme for Lent as we prepare ourselves at the end of Lent to re-live into the story of the Passion.

…I think I would start a little bit too high if I began now to speak about Jesus’ absolute request that, if you come from the solid, middle-of-the-road, practicable Judaism into this little sect, you renounced the freedom to separate from your wife. You renounced an opportunity which the Jew had [in the parable of the Samaritan]. You renounced the need to belong to the “we” in order to fine your “I.” The place outside of Jerusalem, Golgotha, where the cross was put up, became the symbol of this renunciation. As in the Temptation, he renounced changing the world through power. Christians who imitate him soon discover that little practices of renunciation, of what I won’t do, even though it’s legitimate, are a necessary habit I have to form in order to practice freedom.

What a beautiful, innocent world it was when people could still practice this renunciation by not eating chicken soup on Friday. I still remember that world. It made no sense in Europe during the Second World War when meat was rationed anyway, and I forgot about it. But when I came to New York, I found that people really were concerned about not eating meat on Friday. And, during the six weeks of Lent, they would give up something that was hard for them in order to learn how to give up other things. I remember my boss on the first days of the first Lent which I spent in the United States. When we sat down for breakfast, and he was grouchy as anything. And I asked him twice, Sir, did I do something wrong? No! Did I offend you? No! Do you feel badly? Yes, it’s Lent, and I’ve given up my cigar. Well, punishing me was a funny way of going about his renunciation, but I love to think of it because it reminds me of the things which, in the modern world, we can give up — not because we want a more beautiful life, but because we want to become more aware of how much we are attached to the world as it is and how much we can get along without it. These unnecessary tings have now multiplied to such an extent that you can’t easily give a social shape to them. Some people will give up writing letters on a computer — not because it’s bad, and not because they don’t like to have to answer letters at the speed of email. Others will give up the services of physicians or, as somebody whom I know has done, guaranteeing that each of his children will get a college degree.

The certainty that you can do without is one of the most efficacious ways of convincing yourself, no matter where you stand on the intellectual or emotional ladder, that you are free. Self-imposed limits provide a basis and a preparation for discussion of what we can renounce as a group of friends or a neighborhood. I have seen it, and I can witness to it. For many people who suffer from great fears and a sense of impotence and depersonalization, renunciation provides a very simple way back to a self which stands above the constraints of the world.

And such renunciation is especially necessary in the world in which we live. Tyranny of old was exercised over people who still knew how to subsist. They could lose their means of subsistence, and be enslaved, but they could not be made needy. With the beginning of capitalist production in the spinning and weaving shops of the Medicis, a new type of human being was being engendered: needy man, who has to organize a society, the principle function of which is to satisfy human needs. And needs are much more cruel than tyrants.

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Note (2)

Movie Review

By Gregg Tubbs (for the United Methodist Church - link here)

(UMC.org)—The Bible says, “faith is the assurance of things hoped for” (Hebrews 11:1, NRSV). But what is left to believe in when you remove all hope? What is there to strive for when there is no future ahead? In director Alfonso Cuarón’s dark and dazzling futuristic thriller, Children of Men, we see the results of a world stripped of hope. Here, the death of a single 18-year-old is devastating world news, not because he was a prince or pop star, but because he was the youngest person on the planet. The film introduces us to a future without children or the hope of children in a world where all women are infertile and where just one birth could change everything—even the soul of man. This is definitely a nativity story of a different kind.

Based on P. D. James’ dystopian novel, and directed and co-written by celebrated filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), Children of Men transports us one generation into the future when mass infertility has plunged the world into despair, paranoia and chaos. Rioting and anarchy have overtaken the globe, with the exception of England. Although wracked by violence between warring political and racial factions, Britain has marshaled on by instituting a series of progressively repressive measures. The government installs a brutal Homeland Security force, closing borders and detaining foreign refugees (derisively called “fugees”) in squalid, dangerous compounds.

As the film opens, disillusioned political activist Theo (a beautifully understated Clive Owen) is in a London coffee house watching the news of the death of the earth’s youngest person at only 18. News of this unexpected death sends a grim ripple throughout the world, adding a final punctuation mark to humankind’s death sentence. Theo, like millions in England, sleepwalks through a hopeless, meaningless existence. As one character eloquently put it, “Once the sounds of the playground faded, the despair set in.”

Then Theo is confronted with the one thing he could never have expected—a lone pregnant woman named Kee (newcomer Clare-Hope Ashitey).

Kee is a wanted woman, pursued by groups determined to claim her and the miraculous child for their own political purposes. She’s also a hated “fugee” from Africa, and Theo knows that the wildly nationalistic government would never accept that the child who could restore meaning and hope to the world could be anything but British. Theo and his aging, hippie friend Jasper (Michael Cane) must wage a desperate race against the clock, and perhaps even fate, to deliver Kee to safety with the mysterious “Human Project.”

Despite its sci-fi trappings, Children of Men succeeds by portraying a fully realized and completely believably alternate reality, one that echoes current reality. Cuarón eschews Hollywood’s current penchant for frenetic editing and instead builds his action around intricately staged, extended shots where the camera never cuts, weaving in and out among the characters, putting the audience in the center of the action. Far from empty showmanship meant to impress film buffs, this technique has a startling, visceral impact and helps add to the story’s almost overpowering emotional wallop.

No empty-headed action flick, this film is rife with social and spiritual subtext. Its theme is hope: how we thrive in its presence and wither in its absence. Theo undergoes rejuvenation—even redemption—when his hope is restored through the promised new birth. The change in his character is powerful, as is the change in everyone who encounters the pregnant woman, Kee. Her very presence-the tangible symbol of a future—restores their faith and inspires them to kindness, courage and sacrifice. The symbolism is not lost, as she walks, Christ-like, through a crowd and the people clamor to touch even the hem of her garment.

The film explores a number of societal and social ills. Mass infertility functions as a catalyst for the story, representing any cataclysmic event that shakes a society loose from its principles and shared humanity. We see how a climate of fear and despair can drive a society (and individuals) inward, erecting walls in its desperation for protection and sacrificing true freedom for perceived security. We are shown how easy it is to slip into “us and them” thinking-dehumanizing and demonizing those who are different in appearance, speech or beliefs. Issues of immigration, racism, terrorism, the environment and rampant nationalism all come into play.

It was fitting that this film opened on Christmas day because it represents a kind of post-apocalyptic nativity story—a rebirth of hope and new life for a lost people. And although it focuses on the birth of one miraculous human child, Children of Men also powerfully reminds us that we are all children of God.

Gregg Tubbs is a freelance writer living in Columbia, Md.

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Note (3)

The ECP Triangle, ecology-culture-personhood, is on stark display in this film. In the human ecology of fascism and civil war, we see how each of the characters has her or his personhood bent or broken, how each person has adapted within the cultural role available or assigned or chosen out of this milieu. As a mental exercise, choose three characters, and for each of them imagine what they might have been like had the infertility and social chaos not happened. How is each affected by the impending extinction of humanity? Is this condition of extremity re-creating them into something they were not, or is it magnifying something that was latent in each personality?

What about that dissipated character, Nigel, Theo’s cousin the bureaucrat, who arranges for the travel papers? What do you make of the scene in which is ensconced in a palatial suite, with his pharmaco-cyborg son, surrounding himself with iconic world-renowned art, exotic animals, and extravagant furnishings? Does his character say anything pertinent to our own actual condition? Are there Nigels among us? What makes them?

Try another mental exercise. Describe the culture, as culture: what is the music, the economic activity, the religion(s), the fashion, the media, etc.? Then, describe the ecology, as a physical surrounding — objectifying and externalizing it — describing other people as simply another species that has “behaviors.” How does this kind of dissociation, this objectifying detachment, do to you as you practice it? Does it give you some relief, some distance from the implication of responsibility that resides in empathy? Some rest from the effort of concern?

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Note (4)

The original author of the novel upon which the movie is based is Phyllis Dorothy James, Baroness James of Holland Park, P. D. James being her nom de plume. The Wiki entry for her says:

James began writing in the mid-1950s. Her first novel, Cover Her Face, featuring the investigator and poet Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard, was published in 1962.

Many of James’s mystery novels take place against the backdrop of the UK’s vast bureaucracies such as the criminal justice system and the health services, arenas in which James honed her skills for decades starting in the 1940s when she went to work in hospital administration to help support her ailing husband and two children. Two years after the publication of Cover Her Face, James’s husband died and she took a position as a civil servant within the criminal section of the Department of Home Affairs.

James worked in government service until her retirement in 1979, and her experiences within these bureaucracies add a complex stratum of insider’s knowledge to her writing. Her 2001 work, Death in Holy Orders, displays a grasp of the inner workings of church hierarchy: she is an Anglican and a Lay Patron of the Prayer Book Society. Her later novels are often set in a community closed in some way, be this in a publishing house or barristers’ chambers, a theological college, an island or a private clinic as with her latest work. Her prose is very clear and precise. Her new Adam Dalgliesh novel, The Private Patient, was published in August 2008 in the U.K. by Faber & Faber and in November 2008 in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf.

During the 1980s, many of James’s mystery novels were adapted for television by Anglia Television for the ITV network in the United Kingdom. These productions have been broadcast in other countries, including the USA on its PBS channel. These productions featured Roy Marsden as Adam Dalgliesh. In 2003, the BBC adapted Death in Holy Orders for a one-off drama with Martin Shaw as Dalgliesh.

Her 1992 novel The Children of Men served as the inspiration for Children of Men, a feature film released in 2006, directed by Alfonso Cuarón and starring Clive Owen, Julianne Moore and Michael Caine. Despite its substantial changes from the book, James was reportedly pleased with the adaptation and proud to be associated with the film.

James once said of writing Children of Men, “When I began The Children of Men, I didn’t set out to write a Christian book. I set out to deal with the idea I had. What would happen to society with the end of the human race? At the end of it, I realized I had written a Christian fable. It was quite a traumatic book to write.”

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Note (5)

Ralph Wood, writing for “Theology Today,” said:

The key to P. D. James’s fiction, especially her later work, is her Christianity. She regards our cultural malaise as having theological no less than ethical cause. The murder in A Taste for Death occurs in a church, for instance, and the murderer is not only a sadist but also a nihilist who revels in the god-like power inherent in the threat of death. He kills in order to prove that the cosmos is empty of divinity. Like Dostoevsky, James is determined to ask whether, if there be no God, all goodness is vacated and all evils unleashed. As a Christian, James knows that the answer is yes. But as a novelist, she has sought to make her faith implicit rather than overt. . . . James is an artist whose moral instruction is conveyed indirectly through aesthetic appeal, not a prophet who seeks our conversion by directly declaring the divine Word.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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Note (6)

In director Alfonso Cuaron’s words:

[I]nfertility we use just as a metaphor. In a science fiction movie you would have gone into the whys and the mystery of infertility. We decided to not even care about it and just take it as a point of departure. So based upon that, taking that as a point of departure, to try to make an observation about the state of things. [Someone mentioned the story in terms of its connection to] Homeland Security and stuff, but the movie is not about that. That is part of the observation of the reality that we are living. The whole idea with that is to try to bring the state of things, what is happening outside the green zones that we happily live in and what happens if we bring the world into the green zones. We experience for an hour and a half the state of things, and then try to make our own conclusions about the possibility of hope.

What does Cuaron mean by “Green Zones”?

Here is an article I wrote two years ago about Suburbia as Green Zone, though not in those terms, but as “Dark World and Safe World.” This was before my conversion, but definitely well down this present path. A short excerpt:

The media have assumed a totalizing role in our lives. Evidence of how effective this role has been is the fact that most of us still believe that the “reputable” media (NYT, Washington Post, CNN, etc.) merely reflect (imperfectly) the realities about which they “report.” Yet the Finkel hagiography is a perfect example of fitting a narrative to cultural conventions (especially the conventions of the film script) in ways that actively participate, and invite the audience to participate, in the reproduction of the racism and patriarchy inherent in those conventions. The Safe-World is somewhere in the suburbs, ringed with layers of defense: lawns, fences, homeowners associations, bands of strip malls, interstate highways, contract security, cops, the oceans, the aircraft carriers and nuclear armed submarines….

Outside the layered defenses of Safe-World, surrounding it, are dark, unpredictable, primitive Others. Inside Safe-World, when stability reigns, men can provide and rest at the hearth. But the real rite of passage for Men is to leave the safety of the hearth to confront this Dark Otherness outside Safe-World. Having done their duty disciplining the teeming periphery, they can return to the hearth, where Woman stands by, waiting, appropriately grateful for her security to this bloodied Man. In exchange for his security (also against other men), she is dutiful.

And one more excerpt for the media who still feign surprise at our current financial debacle (remember, this was written two years ago when “reputable” economists still denied the existence of a “housing bubble”):

As our cultural distinctions have collapsed under the onslaught of megamerger monoculture, we have seen wholesale uniformity imposed on our constructed environment. All the distinct cultural meanings of past communities have gone under the wheels. But human beings cannot live without meaning.

Meaning-making is a distinctly human need. We are the only species that can see the cosmic abyss that surrounds our incandescent islets of awareness. With the enclosure of Middle America™ into the constructed spaces of the work cubicle, the strip mall and the suburban living room, meaning-hunger is being answered in exactly the same commodified way as actual hunger: with taylorized, mass-produced cultural meanings, disseminated as “entertainment.” Journalism has been swept up in this process, now obliged by The Market™ to be “entertaining.” (Big-money journalism has always been generally obedient; it’s the adoption of glitz that has changed it.)

Life, at last, must imitate art. And with only one monocultural art, we will be truly one in our imitation.

That’s the danger to stability of cultural criticism. It identifies the patterns, mapping and deconstructing them until they are drained of their authority.

The durability of these norms and conventions is the constant Nemesis of social change agents. They still think a simple, well-constructed argument should be enough to “change one’s mind,” such a pale linguistic marker for what this proposes. Enough to begin demolishing the foundational structures of one’s entire worldview, and with it every decision taken on behalf of that worldview, every emotional attachment developed within its framework, and every single thing that gives them meaning as a safety rail along the Abyss. The Big Dark-World. Infinity that swallows us up. This is always the preoccupation of those who understand themselves as simply … individuals…

…The beauty of this new Panopticon is not that it simply takes our eyes off the real war, the real plunder, the real system; it is that it stations a pernicious little watcher inside our individual brains. We become aware that we are under surveillance all the time, and this surveillance constitutes not the one discipline of the edict, but the implanted discipline that a complex society requires of its subjects to police themselves.

Finkel is not a dupe, any more than Judith Miller or Wolf Blitzer. They are all active agents of the war establishment. They are collaborators. It is this disciplinary process with which they collaborate. They teach us that Dark-World is real, and there we might be, but for … our protectors: the cop, the soldier, the mercenary, the prison guard, the surveillance camera—the rat mentality that urges some of us to police others for conformity.

But suburbia is not safe. This is the central illusion.

While suburbia has had its eyes fixed on threatening images of Arabs and Persians and Latinos and deepest, darkest African America, the same establishment that makes war and builds prisons and gazes into our lives has picked suburban pockets with one hand and gripped the ‘burbs as loan sharks with the other.

Suburbia is not being protected; it is being saved for dessert.

It is this sector with its fragile, technological, disembodied living standard that will now come under attack. In the short term, that is already happening through financial manipulation and the further disappearance of living-wage jobs. The tremendous personal debt burden that is mounting in the American “middle class,” fueled by past low interest rates and cash-out equity loans, was the latest maneuver to prop up this sector’s role as global consumer—a time bomb that will explode directly under Suburbia’s feet.

Meanwhile, the liquidation of the commons—from Medicare to Social Security to public services—constitutes a massive transfer of wealth saved by these working people directly into the speculative money pit that is Wall Street. Suburbanites are workers in the truest sense, even though they seldom stand on the factory floor now. They don’t know it, but they are weak, dependent, high-maintenance workers in a consumer mill.

The bill for the United States from Treasury loans to other nations—already impossible to pay—grows exponentially to support the cost of the military now conducting the war, those we see as the guardians of civilization. Our children are inheriting this impasse. We have witnessed what happens when the suburbanites are fleeced; with the taxpayer bailout of the savings and loan criminals, the Long Term Capital Management hedge fund, these burdens will invoke the “too big to fail” principle. From Chrysler to Enron, the so-called middle class will pick up the tab.

The real threat will not appear as an Arab with a bomb or a 16-year-old with brown skin and a Glock. It is already present. It has appeared as pension funds disappearing in strategic bankruptcies. It has appeared as sub-prime lending and subsequent foreclosures.

“Thank you for buying all these houses,” the banks are already saying. “Now we can take them back and rent them to you.” [and the government will bail us out, because we are “too big to fail”]

As Suburbia works harder and faster to keep up with the mounting debt, as it is forced to further ingratiate itself to Suburbia’s employers, as it learns to kiss more ass, get personality makeovers to fit itself heart-and-soul to the boss, it is obliged first and foremost to purchase the bare minimum of status markers (like stage props) that validate this new personality. To call narcissism in this age a “disorder” is a cruel pun. It is a cultural mandate—the norm.

Outside the ‘burbs, the treatment of the others as Dark-World has become a kind of local self-fulfilling prophecy. Blending of police and military functions corresponds to an increasingly uniform (urban, unemployed, young) and crisis-ridden global human ecology. Nonetheless, the imposition of a garrison state on people who have been previously privileged as a core political base (like Suburbia) is no simple matter.

If an openly warlike state is to impose control without the middlemen, it requires Spectacle as camouflage.

Soldier and SWAT spectacle … soldier and SWAT reality. They are not the same, the spectacle and the reality.

Spectacle conceals reality.

Spectacle requires publicity and amplification.

What better publicity, what better amplifier, than Finkel’s crude reduction of this war to an adolescent docudrama for The Washington Post? Ever since the neocons came to power, most of the so-called reputable press has been so craven in its collaboration with our government that it might as well be assigned a formal position on the Pentagon staff.

The Dark-World set of establishment publicists like David Finkel and political consultants like Karl Rove is like a movie in one other respect. The light you see is on the screen. The story you see is framed in shadow. Remain passive. All will be well.

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Note (7)

Since the financial crisis hit this year, calls to suicide prevention centers have risen by 40%. In Children of Men, there is a ubiquitous ad in the background with a Madison Avenue-style ad campaign for Quietus, a pharma-corp engineered suicide pill, available on demand. How might the very original (in two senses) story of Children of Men be an aspect of new (and very old) cultural conventions that simultaneously (1) look fearlessly at the depth of brokenness of the world and (2) maintain a disciplined hope in the midst of it?

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Note (8)

In our last biological apocalypse film, 28 Days Later, there was a small band surviving in a world where society disappeared in very short order. Tempo tasks drive the film’s action from the very beginning. In Children of Men, humanity remains by the billions, now to slowly die off into a hopeless future. Protagonist Theo (played by Clive Owen) is not involved in any tempo task at all. On the contrary, he seems a resigned, cynical bureaucrat riding out the end time with a bottle in his pocket (and some good ganja from his friend) and a caustically foul mouth. His involvement in the intrigue of the plot comes only when he is offered money. His emotional investment — an investment he has avoided since the death of his own child — happens only when he finds out the shocking truth that a woman has been discovered who is pregnant.

It is interesting that Theo does not display courage — as Jim did in 28 Days Later — through some form of redemptive violence. In fact, the “fishies,” the revolutionaries who are harboring Kee (the pregnant women), are devotees of redemptive violence (even as absurd as it seems in the face of human extinction) and will become his hostile pursuers.

Remember the scene where Theo uses the contents of his precious bottle of booze to sterilize his hands for the baby’s delivery? This is one of those turning points (Theo has several). How does this compare with Jim’s turning point in 28 Days Later, where he resorts to the violence he had heretofore eschewed?

When we read Revelation critically, we will find that the core message of that series of visions is for Christians — then a persecuted sect — to hold fast to their non-violent mission of proclamation in the face of a hostile world.

Yet the images in Revelation are brutally violent… thousands of corpses being eaten by vultures in the fields and the like.

How does Children of Men compare to this message of proclamation (of the sole sovereignty of God)? Does the violence of Children of Men serve to contextualize any such message? Is Theo — in the end — a saint?

In the stories of saints, it is quite common for them to be extremely dysfunctional and broken characters who are called by extremity to perform a service for God. Martyrdom is frequently part of those stories.

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Note (9)

Jasper (played by Michael Caine) develops a touching relationship with Kee in a very short time. What does each of them see in the other that makes this a credible relationship inn the story? Is Jasper himself a kind of saint? After all, he grows and smokes weed and farts after having people pull his finger.

He also cares lovingly for his catatonic wife.

What is a saint? We belong to a church called All Saints. Our pastor frequently calls members of the congregation “saints.” Is this hyperbole?

What if we define saint simply as “a human being who has been called to holiness”?

What can we possibly mean by the word “holy“?

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Note (10)

From “The War of the Lamb,” our next study section:

For a sense of the apostolic perception of the meaning and course of history and especially of theinterplay of trust and coerciveness within history, we shall find that the most immediate resource comes from that segment of the biblical literature from which we are least accustomed to learn, namely from the liturgical literature which is embedded in the New Testament at certain scattered points, but which especially dominates in the book of the Revelation of John.

In his first vision (Rev 4-5) the seer of Patmos is presented with the image of a sealed scroll in the hand of the “one that was seated upon the throne” (a circumlocution for God himself, who cannot be looked at directly, but whose presence is known as Light).

The question laid out before John by his vision of the scroll sealed with seven seals is precisely the question of the meaningfulness of history. (emphasis added) This is a question that, the vision says dramatically, cannot be answered by human insight. Yet it is by no means a meaningless question or one unworthy of concern. It is worth weeping, as the seer does, if we do not know the meaning of human life and suffering.

There is a scene in Childen of Men, between the time that Theo’s friend/ex-wife, Julian (played by Julianne Moore), is killed and Theo’s discovery of Kee’s pregnancy, where he is seized by a bout of weeping — which he tries to hide, because his coping pose is that of the cynic who has abandoned concern in the face of apparent meaninglessness.

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HOMEWORK (optional)

(1) Hope, in this film, has disappeared; and in its wake comes fascism and nihilism (pronounced NYE’ - ILL - ISM). Hope reappears with a pregnancy and birth, but it is a very fragile hope. What gives us hope? Write a paragraph on this. Hope… for what? From what? How scary can these questions get? Now you have entered the wilderness of philosophy.

Stanley Hauerwas says that many fail to appreciate “the wildness of the God we worship.” When we call something “wild,” do we mean anything about what is beyond our control?

(2) Make a list of five things that scare you because they are beyond your control.

(3) How do the issues of hope and control relate to to our need to control nature (ecology), and our sense that we are threatened with chaos? What does the need to control do to our personalities (personhood)? How many of our cultural values are dictated by the “need” to control?

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Closing quote:

From “The War of the Lamb,” Chapter 12, The Politics of Jesus, by John Howard Yoder (our next assignment):

If we look more analytically at [a] way of deriving social and political ethics from an overview of the course of history and the choice of the thread within history that is thought to be the most powerful, we find that it involves at least three distinguishable assumptions.

1. It is assumed that the relationship of cause and effect is visible, understandable, and manageable, so that if we make our choices on the basis of how we hope society will be moved, it will be moved in that direction.

2. It is assumed that we are adequately informed to be able to set for ourselves and for all society the goal toward which we seek to move it.

3. Interlocked with these two assumptions and dependent upon them for its applicability is the further postulate that effectiveness in moving toward these goals which have been set is itself a moral yardstick

If we look critically at these assumptions we discover that they are my no means as self-evident as they seem to be at first. … [W]hen people try to manage history, it almost always turns out to have taken another direction than that in which they thought they were guiding it. This may mean that we are not morally qualified to set the goals toward which we would move history. At least it must mean that we are not capable of discerning and managing its course when there are in the same theater of operation a host of other free agents, each of them in their own way also acting under the same assumptions as to their capacity to move history in their direction. Thus even apart from other more spiritual considerations, the strategic calculus is subject to a very serious internal question. It has yet to be demonstrated that history can be moved in the direction in which one claims the duty to cause it to go.

REMINDER: This is not a study that requires anything. The depth of participation is your choice. It can be an occasional pastime, or a a college course. It is also free to share with anyone and everyone; and it is not restricted — obviously — to Lent. Comments sections are also now open (but will be moderated, so comments will not go up immediately). CHANGE TWO with apologies — Comments are disabled here, and will all go to the Feral Scholar web site linked here. Click it on, and comment away. Again, apologies while I work out the glitches.

]]> http://www.insurgentamerican.net/2009/03/02/apocalypse-now-small-group-section-3-children-of-men/feed/ http://www.insurgentamerican.net/2009/03/02/apocalypse-now-small-group-section-3-children-of-men/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/InsurgentAmerican/~3/P-ABgN8ZDME/ http://www.insurgentamerican.net/2009/02/25/stay-in-love-with-god-%e2%80%93-wesley-haiti-and-the-withered-hand/#comments Wed, 25 Feb 2009 12:14:49 +0000 stan http://www.insurgentamerican.net/2009/02/25/stay-in-love-with-god-%e2%80%93-wesley-haiti-and-the-withered-hand/ a report for All Saints United Methodist Church on my attendance at the Bartimaeus Institute

Stan Goff
January 26, 2009

In 1991, the United States Central Intelligence Agency worked behind the scenes with members of a mafia-like organization in Haiti called the FRAPH to organize a coup d’etat against the popularly-elected government of Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The President of the United States at the time was George Herbert Walker Bush, père of the recently retired. At that time, I was working as a military adviser to a Peruvian infantry battalion that was attacking Indians and political dissidents around Huaichipa.

In 1994, as the operations chief for a Special Forces A-Detachment of nine men, I went to Haiti as part of a US invasion force, ostensibly to restore President Aristide to his rightful office and to end the bloody regime of Raul Cedras, the U.S. client who had become the de facto head of state after the 1991 coup.

Between the lines of the carefully crafted double-speak of the Department of Defense – a dialect I understood very well after 15 years in Special Operations – we understood that this benevolence was a mask for the very real concern that the Cedras regime’s depredations were about to cause a popular uprising in Haiti that would escape the control of the U.S. State Department. The return of the legitimately-elected Aristide – a key demand being made by popular movements there – was being choreographed to tamp down popular ire, at the same time ensure that Aristide was hemmed in by the United States in such a way that he could not pursue his original agenda of national self-determination for Haiti.

This is, of course, a much longer story, about which I have written volumes over the years, including a memoir of my participation in the 1994 invasion, entitled Hideous Dream – A Soldier’s Memoir of the Invasion of Haiti (Soft Skull Press, 2000).

The title of that memoir comes from Brutus’ line in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (2.1.63-69):

Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma or a hideous dream;
The genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council, and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.

This line is the interior monologue of a man about to step past the point of no return in a dangerous political act – the assassination of a head of state, and his former ally. Brutus compares his mental state – the inescapable anxiety of a dangerous act to which one has committed – to the anarchy of a political state suffering an insurrection. The irony, of course, is equally inescapable.

Oddly enough, I found myself in a similar position while in Haiti during the 1994 invasion, ergo the title of the book.

At the end of a military career that started in Vietnam in 1970, I had been exposed to enough of my country’s foreign policy as an insider to know how perfectly cynical it was, and I was in a state of moral turmoil about my own participation in this history. This included fairly extensive experience in the Reagan-Bush-era predations against Latin America.

In the sequence of activity that unfolded during the Haiti invasion, and in the chaos of poor planning by the task force that oversaw the invasion, I found myself for almost three months with an unprecedented degree of autonomy to take decisions on my own. The intersection of this autonomy with my destabilizing personal and moral fault lines created the conditions for a series of actions that I could be fairly sure – on my more rational days there – would lead to a collision with my own chain of command.

I began to intentionally-interpret the intentionally-vague language of our mission statement – “to create stability” – in a very specific way that I knew very well was inconsistent with the between-the-lines meanings of my government. I bent a Special Forces A-Detachment to my imperfect understanding of the popular will of the Haitian poor.

The outcome is not what I’m getting around on here, but for the record, my efforts were rewarded with summary relief from my position of authority and came within a whisker of landing me in a federal penitentiary.

One of the points I am sneaking up on is a living image, for my fellow first-worlders, of what Haiti was like.

That is, what Haitians were like, are like, as a peasant society, under the debilitating parasitic pressure of co-located urbanization resulting from extra-territorial, imperial domination. That’s a mouthful, but it’s a summary with an analogy that we’ll get to by-and-by.

Let’s start with what’s different in the daily lives of Haitians – different, that is, from what we generally know.

Daily life is daily. What I mean is, the direct struggle for survival for the majority of the population is renewed each morning with an immediate concern for water and food.

Kinship bonds are critical in this day-to-day struggle. Family ties are extended and Byzantine to the unpracticed foreign eye.

There is little of what we call infrastructure – vehicular roads (the overwhelming majority has no gas-powered transport), electricity, potable or even running water, sewage systems, medical facilities, etc.

The main construction method for houses is called the kay-pay (grass house), a method of interlaced bamboo or wood, plastered in with mud, and roofed with long-grass. People are packed into these houses at night, where they sleep on woven reed mats. Bathing is accomplished with a bucket and cup. Food is prepared – with rice and beans as staples – on fires, fueled by deadfall in the countryside, and by more energy-consumptive (and deforesting) charcoal in the city slums. Babies remain at the breast as long as possible.

Chickens, goats, pigs, bony horses, oxen and cows, donkeys and mules, and semi-feral dogs are ubiquitous.

The best land is used for export crops to get dollars to service US-based debts; and though Haiti could easily be self-supporting, they are forced to rely on expensive goods – including food – often produced in the United States.

People are thin, a consequence of strenuous life, little food, and gastrointestinal parasites, the latter responsible for the pot-bellies on most of the otherwise skinny children, many naked until they are 8-10-years old.

People are also very talkative, loud, and sometimes verbally combative.

Gossip is a major pastime, and the means of distributive communication. Perhaps the two most important means of general information sharing are street markets and riversides. Washing clothes at the riversides is a culture of women, who see this activity as far more than utilitarian. As children play in and around the water, this is where women talk with each other, take off their shirts to cool down, and to rage and laugh together about life.

Haitians are largely poor and illiterate, but their knowledge of their environment – physical and cultural – is manifold and deep. During my 21 different visits to Haiti (I returned often after I left the military), my own ineptitude at pretty much everything was always a source of amusement – especially to women and children. They are illiterate for the most part; but they are far from stupid.

Now with this snapshot as a backdrop, I want to describe a couple of incidents during the invasion.

Not long after we arrived, a handful of teams was sent to the port city of Gonaives. When I arrived on the second lift of helicopters, a crowd of easily 10,000 people had pressed in from all sides, and our teams were incapable of traveling the 200-or-so meters to the police caserne where we were to encamp. The crowd was curious and emotional, sometimes breaking into spontaneous political songs with African rhythms that set the place dancing.

Desame lame… nou mande nou mande… desame lame (”Disarm the army, we demand.” I can still hear it.)

The crowd had smeared its face with lemon juice from local trees to kill the sting of the teargas that the Haitian police had used on them moments before our arrival, and the helicopter blade wash had blown dust onto the lemoned faces, which stuck, making it appear that everyone had painted their faces pale gray – like a strange scene from a bad imperial film. Our teams were suddenly and fully occupied holding crowds back enough to maintain the circle of space necessary to land our supply helicopters.

Now inside this circle were a dozen or so of the hated Haitian FAdH (Force Armee d’Haiti, police), the very ones who had teargassed the crowd, and – as we would learn – who had been beating the population down throughout the last three years of the Cedras regime, including a massacre in the nearby slum of Raboteau. The FAdH carried four-foot wooden batons, thick as the neck on a baseball bat. I had seen the film footage, before we left Port-au-Prince, of FAdH troops wading into civilian assemblies with these batons and mercilessly beating men, women, and children.

On an impulse, while I was part of the perimeter of US troops holding the landing zone, I stepped over to one of the FAdH, snatched the baton out of his hand, and threw it on the ground, precipitating one of the most memorable and startling experiences of my entire life.

With that little action, the collective voice of the crowd exploded with an expression of approval for my action and high-pressure rage against the FAdH, and the crowd spilled past our perimeter, advancing almost instantaneously to within few feet of the now terrified FAdH soldier. Thirty or so men were now pushing back against an agitated mass of ten thousand, and had we not barely contained this, the FAdH soldier’s body would have been distributed amongst that mass in an orgy of longstanding hurt, humiliation, and vengeance.

What was also revealed by this action and reaction was that our puny numbers with our guns were protected more than anything else by psychological barriers — a truth that is a source of anxiety to ruling classes everywhere and at all times.

While barely contained in that instance, this incident made me a kind of popular hero among the Haitians, and that friendly disposition followed me to Fort Liberte in the Northeast, near the Dominican Republic, where I would spend the next three months.

I had seen with my own eyes what popular discontent in a peasant society looks like when it is let loose, and gained an idea of how deep the anger and resentment of systematic humiliation goes even when it is not manifest. It seethes under the surface, tamped down by the weapons of the authorities and the dependence on the system and its money, until an opening appears, whereupon the psychological barrier crumbles, and the rage erupts like a volcano.

When we finally got settled and the crowd went to bed that night, a U.S. officer rebuked me, calling my action a stupid stunt. And I sensed that I had jumped off onto a dangerous path in demonstrating this solidarity with the Haitian crowd… a poor crowd, an uneducated crowd, the kind of crowd that all authorities find extremely frightening and dangerous. My own authorities included.

I had a real sense now of that anxiety described by Brutus, of preparing to enter the unknown yet inexorable consequences of that “first motion” in an insurrection. And what would put me in the spotlight – so to speak – was the fact that I was using large assemblies of the unwashed – mobs, to the authorities – to do what I was doing.

I did so again and again over the next few weeks, first in Ouanaminthe, a border town, and finally in Fort Liberte; and I had learned to manage crowds – manipulate them even — which gave me little pause, even as they continued to scare the crap out of Haitian policemen and rich people.

I was charged with creating and maintaining stability, and with nine people left by the time we arrived in Fort Liberte, my calculation was that we couldn’t control a million people without the most draconian methods or without re-arming and re-empowering the hated FAdH… unless we simply put the majority on our side. That majority was overwhelmingly the Lavalas movement of Father Aristide.

Not to be disingenuous, I was also already in a state of insurrection, because I was refusing to read between the lines. When the task force commanders dictated that we should re-arm the remaining FAdH and put them back in their casernes and on the street, I gave them their weapons, but refused to give them ammunition and threatened them with dire consequences if they so much as looked cross-eyed at anyone without clearing it through us. The FAdH in Fort Liberte then spent three months playing dominoes under a big shade tree.

I’ll only burden the reader with one other description of an event there, then I will get to the main point – which is a report on my attendance for a bible study last week (January 19-23, 2009) at the Bartimaeus Institute in Oak View, California.

After arriving in Fort Liberte, and summarily arresting the chief Cedras thugs in town, as well as the former ambassador to France under Francois Duvalier (for which I was later reprimanded), I had made contact with the partisans of Aristide – organized loosely as the Comite du Lavalas – and informed them that I would hold a public meeting with them, with the de facto (Cedras) local officials, and with the FAdH commander, at the small public library (not what you might imagine, but a large two-room cinder block facility with a couple dozen books).

In that meeting, we would hear all the grievances from popular representatives against the de facto officials and their bullies, and we would then announce the reinstatement of Aristide-era officials, including the mayor, a woman with whom I would become close friends, named Adele Mondestin.

This announcement was met with trepidation by the de facto officials and their allies, and with skepticism and not a little fear by everyone else – so accustomed had they become to the power of the de facto regime and the well-placed mistrust of any representative of the U.S. government… which I was. On this account, in a town of perhaps 2,000 souls, about 3,000 jammed up against the library on the appointed day to push and shove for a view and a listen through the open-air windows of the cinder-block building.

We had to fight our way through, two of us from the team, Adele and her cohort, the FAdH commander, and several anti-Aristide representatives who were selected by a process that remains opaque to me to this day.

The room, of course, was packed, also using a protocol that I left to Adele and those who understood the social hieroglyphics of Haiti.

The temperature, as it is every day in Fort Liberte, was in the 90s. The mass of bodies pressed in and cut off the ventilation. The air was still and stifling inside. All of us stank, me in particular because I was wearing a full uniform with all my “battle-rattle,” and sweating as only a blan can sweat in the tropics. The chatter of the mass was a kind of constant din, and we had to interrupt the proceedings again and again to temporarily quiet the rowdy onlookers. The FAdH commander, an overfed crook named Pierre Ulrich, had the aspect of a man about to be led to the electric chair as he surveyed the hostile sea of aggrieved faces now looking him smack in the eye.

Picture this, and you begin to appreciate how dangerous anyone can be who can mobilize a crowd of the oppressed.

This had been Aristide’s unforgivable sin, this ability to connect with the Haitian poor, and no policy concession would ever divest him of that sin. That’s why, after he won another fair election, he was again deposed in a coup blatantly organized by the U.S. in 2004, orchestrated for the Haitian independence bicentennial as a special form of humiliation, with Colin Powell presiding over the process. (I was there until the day before the coup, and I can report that every mainstream media outlet in the U.S. was knowingly complicit in this coup… another story.)

Returning to the library meeting, when we concluded the grievance session – a process that ground on for hours, punctuated by raucous affirmation from the entire crowd inside and out – I announced, like a little Caesar from the north, that heretofore the officials of the Aristide government were to resume all duties, and that any interference from the old armed actors, both FAdH and FRAPH (a right-wing death squad network, in the pay of the CIA) as well as a network of thugs called attaches, would be met with ominous consequences from my detachment and implicitly by the entire task force as far as the Haitians there knew.

Of course, that implication was a lie, and I was the liar.

The response to this announcement was riotous and celebratory; and it touched off three consecutive days of demonstrations, street theater, music, dancing, drinking, and satirical provocation against the former oppressors, who cowered in the caserne as my own team “guarded” them by sittingon the front porch of the caserne to be entertained by the parade of festivities.

For that time, at least, the old order had fallen. And my gut told me that I was further and further out on a limb.

Eventually, my team rebelled against my agenda, the task force got wind of my foolishness, and I was paid a surprise visit by a Humvee one morning that packed me off as a detainee in something called an Article 15-6 investigation, where among other things, it was suggested that I had become “seditious.”

* * *

Back to the present…

For some time over the last year, Steve Taylor, Director of Mission for the North Carolina United Methodist Conference, had been insisting that I attend the Bartimaeus Institute – a biblical study forum under the auspices of Bartimeaus Cooperative Ministries in Oak View, California.

I will say this now, and with emphasis, I recommend this institute for anyone and everyone who can go; and I suggest that every congregation routinely solicit scholarships to fund these trips to bring Bartimaeus’ special insights back into our congregations.

The intellectual parent of Bartimaeus is theologian Ched Myers, who I had seen speak here in Durham less than three years ago at the Hayti Heritage Center – an African American cultural center. I still identified as a secular activist then, and my main efforts were then directed against the bloody occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan by U.S. armed forces.

Ched did a riff on Luke 7:36-50, the story of Jesus having his feet wept upon and kissed by a woman described as “a sinner,” much to the chagrin of his hosts and even his disciples. In this riff, Ched did what the original authors of the Gospels meant to have done: He narrated the story aloud, with the proper dramatic inflections and gestures to bring the story to life; and he contextualized the story with some socio-economic background history.

I had been earnestly studying feminism in order to write my third book, Sex & War, a study of gender and militarism, and I was thoroughly taken aback by the radical feminist content of this Bible story, given the social conditions that prevailed with regard to gender in 1st Century Palestine.

In the crux of the story, which we have generally and mistakenly taken to be simply at attention-getting clause, Jesus asks those around him, “Do you see this woman?”

Do you see this woman?

I had been writing for the last two years about the invisibility of The Inconvenient Other in systems of social domination, and here was that entire theme packed into a single question… 2,000 years ago, by a man who would eventually be executed for his ability to stir up crowds. And I had walked through life, including an activist’s life dedicated to fighting oppression, with Bibles lying all around me unread.

That turned out to be one of the key moments that would lead me to my own baptism on Easter Day 2008. I didn’t know it at the time, but there is a name for this kind of reading of the Scriptures: biblical animation.

So now, at last, let me get to the experience at Bartimaeus and what it has to do with my title, which includes the surname of John Wesley, the founding parent of Methodism. Wesley’s way of living has been condensed in a little booklet by Bishop Reuben Job, called Three Simple Rules – A Wesleyan Way of Living, which is widely circulated among Methodists. Those three rules are: Do no harm. Do good. Stay in love with God.

And ever since I read that little pamphlet, I had found the first two fairly easy to understand, and the last one very difficult. Because God is incomprehensible to me, not simply because I am a personhood formed within skeptical modernism, but because God doesn’t show her face. (In the Aramaic and even in the Muslim appellation Allah, the term that has been rendered as Father for us is actually a non-gendered noun that translates very roughly to the origin, or the “womb” of the universe.) When even a scientist like Stephen Hawking says that the origin of the origin, the precursor to the “singularity” of modern cosmology, is the point at which all theories collapse, and that if we could know that, only then would we “see the mind of God,” then how is an ex-soldier supposed to understand, much less “love,” God?

This is really a testimony to how obtuse I can be; and I’ll explain why.

When we were together, 13 of us, at the Bartimaeus Institute, Ched facilitated an acting class for the translation of the story of Jesus and the man with the withered hand.

For two days, we had poured over the similarities between the ministry of Jesus and the non-violent ministry of Dr. Martin Luther King – not for the apotheosis of King, but as a living and recent example of discipleship. And we had compared the circumstances of the Judeans under Rome with African Americans under legal apartheid in the U.S. South. We had been introduced to maps and pictures and descriptions of the social system into which Jesus was born, in order to contextualize the Gospel of Mark – our subject of study.

As we went along, I came to think of Herod Antipas as Cedras, because even more than the segregated South, the culture of 1st Century Palestine was a peasant culture deformed and oppressed by an imperial project, and overseen by a colonial surrogate ruler. Palestine was a dusty, broken place populated by the same kinds of animals, the same kinds of houses, the same pot-bellied, naked babies, the same kind of people as Haiti – with the same kind of unnamed but explosive discontent gnawing at their guts alongside the parasites.

I could write a book about the parallels, but I’ll leave it at this just to say that Jesus suddenly came to life for me. The passage we used to have participants in the classroom “act out” the story was Mark 3:1-6

Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand. They watched him to see whether he would cure him on the sabbath, so that they might accuse him. And he said to the man who had the withered hand, “Come forward.” Then he said to them, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent. He looked around at them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.

To set the stage, we had gotten our heads around the fact that the scribes and Pharisees were lawyers and priests (who also were the doctors of the day, given that “disease” was then a spiritual defect, and the medical ideas we have now didn’t exist). Only scribes could interpret scripture as law, and only priests were authorized to “heal.” This intellectual division of labor was no less understood than we today understand the credentialing process for doctors and lawyers and teachers, et al. And this “licensing” was every bit as important to the maintenance of social order and social power as it is today.

By teaching and interpreting scripture (in public debates with the scribes before crowds of people), and healing, Jesus was openly and provocatively and intentionally challenging the legitimacy of the whole intellectual division of labor, and by inference, of the whole social order itself. He was brazenly practicing without a license, with an approving (and dangerous) crowd at his back.

The scribes and Pharisees must have felt very much like old Pierre Ulrich did in that “library” at Fort Liberte.

As Ched Myers had us stand and play our parts through this vignette in the synagogue, this is what came alive for me. This was my animation of the bible.

For anyone who wants to read the full exegesis of Mark, I can’t recommend too strongly the book, “Say to This Mountain” – Mark’s Story of Discipleship, by Ched Myers, Marie Dennis, Joseph Nagle, Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, and Stuart Taylor, from Orbis Press.

For my own part in how this relates to the “three simple rules” for Methodists, I’ll just remark on the dramatization of this one scene that was my personal gift from our gathering, as my co-participants did thespian readings.

Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand.

“Again,” of course, because he had already begun his alternating provocations between priests and lawyers. Now the crowd had gathered outside the synagogue (which may have been a building, but the word means “gathering.”), and they were watching the proceedings as the Haitians watched the meeting in Fort Liberte. I can hear the chatter, the collective sense of anticipation that something, somehow, is happening… and as Bob Dylan said, “if you ain’t got nothin’, you ain’t got nothin’ to lose.” Sometimes the mere word “change” is pregnant with hope, as we saw in the last election.

They watched him to see whether he would cure him on the sabbath, so that they might accuse him.

The credentialed officials are joined at the hip, unlike the average Jewish peasant, so their fates are tied to the establishment. They are following this dangerous pretender to see what he’ll do next… and waiting for the pretext to pounce. Their mere presence is a threat.

And Jesus is a human. He experienced this burning empathy that has mobilized him on the side of the oppressed, and he certainly also understood the possible consequences of these provocations. I think that Jesus was afraid, and that he was acting in the face of his own fear; because I know from my own experience that thing that Brutus describes as the “hideous dream” of anxiety that any insurrectionist feels as she or he prepares to cross the line… to pass the point of no return wherein the consequences may pass from possible to probable to certain.

A kind of hush would then fall on the crowd as the gauntlet is thrown down.

And he said to the man who had the withered hand, “Come forward.”

And so with two words, the line is crossed.

Mark doesn’t tell us what the crowd is doing, but Mark wrote for someone to narrate, and his contemporaries (Mark, it turns out, may have well been written by a woman or women) already took this background for granted.

I think I know what the crowd did. It started to buzz, like a great beehive preparing to swarm.

Then he said to them, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?”

Now he has challenged both scribe and priest. The tensions ratchets up a notch. The buzz increases in that dangerous mob of the unwashed and illiterate. Power unmasked is power neutralized. This is a profound escalation.

The man with the withered hand is now standing in front of Jesus. The crowd leans in. The priests and scribes have one eye on Jesus and one on the crowd.

But they were silent.

Of course they were, meaning the Pharisees. Power has just shifted, and their bowels are feeling active. They are awash in adrenaline.

He looked around at them with anger;

Now I can see this man Jesus… and this is where this wretched old soldier has found someone who we will call “God” who I can, and do, love. The reason I said I had been obtuse is that I was trying to learn to love an abstraction; and Jesus had to embody God in a form I know how to love: a human being.

I see this young tekton, a construction worker with calloused hands, who has grown up among the poverty and humiliation and slaughter, and in a milieu where revolt is latent in the air like a parched prairie waiting for a match. He is leading the angry and the humiliated, and he stands before the very members of his own people who are the retainer class of the occupier, and his black eyes are smoldering with the effort to hold his anger, and his anxiety, and the burden of his newfound responsibility together as one nameless thing.

he was grieved at their hardness of heart and said to the man,

With that phrase, Mark has called the accusers “Pharoah” (the last accused of “hardness of heart”), an unspeakable insult to any Jew.

“Stretch out your hand.”

I see Jesus saying this calmly, in contrast to the stormy anger of his gaze.

He stretched it out, and his hand was restored.

Pandmonium! That Haitian crowd, or should I say that Palestinian Jewish crowd, would have raised a riotous roar; and the Pharisees would have tasted the copper-tongued fear of this dangerous mob as they wended their way to safety, and then to Jerusalem.

The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.

Guys, we have a big-ass problem in Galilee.

That’s how I read this story now. This is the story where I learned how to follow that third Wesleyan rule… and it’s easy now. Stay in love with God.

But that’s where the analog breaks down from my own life. I weaseled and maneuvered my way out of a court martial, or should I say the chain of command had so many of its own secrets that it could have been hoisted on its own petard.

With Jesus of Nazareth, there was no such maneuvering. Tempted again and again with power, and with his own followers believing in their hearts that they were headed for some martial confrontation that would leave the Romans on a field for the vultures, Jesus would follow this anxious path – asking God to please “take this cup” from him in the final hours – to a bloody and ignominious stumble through the scattered bones around Golgotha.

God is visible to me in the person of this man, because this was an angry and frightened and loving human like me. God is only available to this wretch in the exemplary, 1st Century Palestinian, Jewish, embodied Jesus.

On that cross, he showed us how to deal with the fact that, broken casks that we all are, we can each retain a drop of the divine.

* * *

Epilogue

Dr. Martin Luther King is the figurehead for a popular struggle, a struggle led on the principle of non-violence, and an explicitly Christian non-violent struggle, that led to the overthrow of legal apartheid in the United States. During my time with Bartimaeus, there was a suggestion that more and more of us who have embraced non-violence actively identify as “Kingian” Christians.

D’accord.

While I was there, we also witnessed the historic moment of the first Black President of the United States being inaugurated.

So I find myself – as others do – in the conflicted position of acknowledging this election of a Black man as evidence of a fundamental and positive change in our society (which was critically made by Kingian Christians); but also knowing that Jesus showed us a way in which we do not rely on the Powers, and in fact we are obliged to unmask them… and Obama is now the steward of an unthinkable power, making him – if he chooses pragmatism, which he appears to be doing – the least free person in the world in many respects.

If church means to collectively follow Jesus, then our place is not within Power, and not even as Power’s occasional conscience. We are witnesses; and we are called to walk the hard path of exemplars.

Last Friday, two days after Obama became the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of the United States, those armed forces – with his full knowledge and consent – attacked a group of people in Pakistan, using unmanned predator drones. Though it is not clear how many were civilians it is pretty certain that some were; and at least 20 human beings were killed (I do not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants when our government occupies other nations.). When you use bombs, you accept in advance that you will kill the “innocent.” There is no way to sugarcoat this except with warlike rationalizations that make a mockery of Jesus’ or of King’s ministries. President Barack Obama now has blood on his hands.

In days to come
the mountain of the Lord’s house
shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
and shall be raised above the hills;
all the nations shall stream to it.

Many peoples shall come and say,
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob;
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.”

For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,
and the word of the Lord
from Jerusalem.

He shall judge between the nations,
and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.

-Isaiah 2:1-5

How do we live into the story of Jesus, into the peculiar and foolish triumph of the cross?

Do no harm.
Do good.
Stay in love with God.

Amen.

]]> http://www.insurgentamerican.net/2009/02/25/stay-in-love-with-god-%e2%80%93-wesley-haiti-and-the-withered-hand/feed/ http://www.insurgentamerican.net/2009/02/25/stay-in-love-with-god-%e2%80%93-wesley-haiti-and-the-withered-hand/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/InsurgentAmerican/~3/WfNjnGJxpmA/ http://www.insurgentamerican.net/2009/02/20/apocalypse-now-small-group-section-2-28-days-later/#comments Fri, 20 Feb 2009 10:57:37 +0000 stan http://www.insurgentamerican.net/2009/02/20/apocalypse-now-small-group-section-2-28-days-later/

“Apocalypse Now” Small Group
For Lent — from February 25 (Ash Wednesday) to April 11 (Easter is the 12th)
All Saints United Methodist Church

Part Two — 28 Days Later

Showing at the All Saints UMC Ministry Center, 7 PM, Friday, March 6
CHANGE - THE FILM WILL BE SHOWN AT STEPHANIE AND JEFF NELSON’S HOUSE -contact me at stan@stangoff.com for directions

Directed by Danny Boyle
Produced by Andrew Macdonald
Written by Alex Garland
Starring Cillian Murphy (Jim), Naomie Harris (Selena), Megan Burns (Hannah), Christopher Eccleston (Major Henry West), and Brendan Gleeson (Frank)

[All quotes and images are employed under Title 17, “Fair Use” law, and no portion of this study is for profit.]

Notes on 28 Days Later

Note (1)

Something to think about

History is a process. One of the theologians we are using to study apocalyptic stories is John Howard Yoder.

The usual way we think of history is as a chronolog of facts and dates and names. So when we hear the word “history” in this section or later, we need to bear in mind that we are not talking about history in the usual way, but in the same way as John Howard Yoder; because that is how the word is being used here.

Yoder — in the same way as many theologians — sees history as the actual, located process of human existence, a process with which theology must struggle. The idea that human society has the freedom to sin (and its corresponding burden of responsibility) is not compatible with the idea that God moves us around like we’re a puppet show.

Yet theologians like Yoder — confident that God didn’t write us like a stage play — continue to insist that the process of human history is inextricable from the cosmic direction leading to a final, great attractor — telos is the Greek word. What Yoder’s point of view says about discipleship is that it is active, and that discipleship happens historically — in identifiable and unique times and places and forms.

Think for a moment about time.

We need to get philosophical for a second.

We can think of it as an unraveling universe — the terminal entropy idea. Or we can think of it in synonyms: past equals regrets, future equals anxieties. Or as emergent forms that enter and leave like ghosts — leaving no visible footprints.

One way that we can try (a heuristic device, again) is to plot time along one horizontal line, and form intersecting at any point along that line. The historical process is such that at any intersection there was or is a total form for the known universe. As far as we know, every instant along this time line is absolutely unique; yet the present never leaps over the past into something New. We are creatively unique, yet we are also all vestiges of a specific, located history (a process that includes past and present).

Existence is the Now — the totality of forms at the absolute present.

^FORMS
^
^ >>>>>>>> TIME >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
^
^

So time and history move together, and never apart. When people take a bird’s eye view of history as process they frequently find certain apparently stable forms that bind together chunks of time. We can identify something called the American Civil War. We have time brackets for something called The Enlightenment. Others will date something called the age of industrialism, the Han Dynasty… and so forth.

If we think of history as traveling in a kind of “trajectory,” we can also identify certain periods wherein some dramatic change actually alters that historical trajectory. The inertia of chronological time and chronological history is knocked off course by these transformative interruptions of what we can call — thanks to the Greeks again — kairos time. Kairos time irrevocably bends the trajectory of history. Kairos is also called “God’s time.”

These kairos shifts were recorded by people in the time of John of Patmos as marking the beginnings and ends of “ages.” Telos is the unfathomably distant point to which all things are being drawn.

The telos is further down the road than a mere age. Yoder says that the church is to be a community apart, an exemplary community, and a teleological community. Our particular connection to all other kairos periods is through our story, a story in which we believe and a story that takes place in a particular time and place… because it is the story of God crashing through infinity to become flesh.

In our own day, and in our own lives, we do not always record time chronologically. We record periods between events, whether it was “while Grandpa was alive,” or “during this administration,” or “when we still had the kitchen yellow.” This is closer to a kairos conception of time than a chronological one, because the events are more prominent than metered time.

In 28 Days Later, we reiterate that we are using the heuristic standpoint of the Ecology-Personhood-Culture Triangle. With the introduction of time as something to observe in unpacking these stories, we put that triad in motion. In discerning the historical process now (and by strong inference, in the past), we have to be aware of the ways in which the past was dramatically, almost inconceivably different. Then, and only then, we can begin to try and understand the how of that difference.

I have made many trips to Haiti. Anyone from the industrial metropolitan cultures of the US, Western Europe, and Japan that spends even a few days living with Haitian peasants, far from the road, has glimpsed the different-ness — the asymmetry of history’s contingent forms. We were together once (about 50 Haitian peasants and me), sharing the same actual social space. Yet, it constantly occurred to me as I looked around, our universes — in personhood, the experience of being an embodied individual — were very distant from one another in place and time. Their ecology, their culture, and the personhoods that derive from that ecology and culture, are not miniatures or embryos of us.

The modernist perception of historical time includes the myth of “progress.” This “progress” is seen as the telos of history (making it an idol!). Contained within this ideology of progress is the notion that Haitians — or whomever — are just “backward,” under-developed, a more adolescent form of the our very own very adult culture, inevitably — and with proper instruction from we adults — becoming like we are.

Not actually the case. Everything those Haitians do — the day-to-day actions that make them who they are — are completely different. Yet we co-exist in 2009 as part of the same Now. Not so the past. If we are to see into 1st Century Palestine, for example, we may have to find a Haiti now to remind us how far we live from the people we study in the past. Because both are peasant cultures. The ecology is different — way different — for us.

No particular central point here… just placing a few landmarks for later.

Quote from Sondra Higgins Matthaei, author of Making Disciples - Faith Formation in the Wesleyan Tradition:

Christian identity and vocation are shaped not only by God’s work in us and participation in our faith community but also by our culture and the events in the world in which we live. We are Christian in a particular place and a particular time. The way we see ourselves as Christian is affected by our cultural inheritance, including family of origin, the region or country of our birth, racial or ethnic identity, gender, class, and age. We are affected by the events of the world in which we live, especially those events that raise questions about what it means to be faithful disciples.

This was true in 100 AD, too.

*

Note (2)

The opening scene of 28 Days Later is a montage of newsreels of the most horrific kind of mimetic violence. The newsreel montages of police riots, lynching, and other disturbingly realistic mayhem — we discover — are being broadcast on multiple television sets to captive chimps in some kind of lab… the plot leads us to suspect a bioweapons lab. The chimps’ biochemical reactions to the mimetic-violence images is used somehow to create an actual virus, to be named simply “Rage.”

The virus will soon escape the lab — as you have seen or will see — where it spreads in seconds from person to person, placing them in a total and irreversible state of vicious schizoid aggression. The episodic (mimetic) violence that was being portrayed in the newsreels of mob violence directed at the laboratory chimpanzees is no longer transitory. It’s a biological uber-bomb that hits humanity like a nuclear war.

28 Days Later is a quantum leap from Volcano, the idealized apocalyptic with the Hollywood conventions. 28 is a Girardian nightmare — mimetic violence transformed into an unstoppable biological epidemic.

Rene Girard is a Catholic theologian who calls the spirit of the accuser in a lynch mob a Satanic spirit. But in this leap from mimesis to biological catastrophe, we only get our first glimpse of the Satanic in the fact that the lab exists at all — that anyone would engineer such a thing as a lethal hyper-epidemic. Satanic in that such a real application of science would be an attempt to substitute our own sovereignty over that of God.

I think you can steer clear of most trouble by never (1) retaliating, (2) dominating, or (3) humiliating. The central message of the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth was peace. Peace requires more than chanting peace. It implies a lot of do-s and don’t-s. The don’t-s are a good way to start. They are not easy just because they are don’t-s.

*

Note (3)

Our heuristic standpoint for the study is the relation between personhood — the experience of being an individual person, the culture — shared language, art, symbols, ideas, and cultural production (film is a cultural product), and ecology — the physical setting (of which we are ourselves a part) — different from “environment,” in that ecology attaches a special focus on relationships instead of “parts” of that physical reality.

The outbreak of the rage-virus smashes the story’s ecology by transforming most of the humans — with whom we cooperate to make our survival and our culture — into dangerous carriers of a terrifying, dehumanizing death. Biological catastrophe has wiped out the future of culture (art, law, institutions, markets, governance, everything). Left behind are a few survivors as the remaining carriers of a culture now rendered artifactual. The ecological basis for the old culture has been destroyed (by the scientific hubris of the culture that created the virus, and inadvertently by a subculture of militant resistance to it).

Look at this picture.

What is the culture? What is the ecology (especially the technology)? What is the personhood?

We, the audience, are now led through a journey with Jim — the film’s first protagonist. It is obvious that we are supposed to identify with Jim; and therefore that this is a male-produced film. .. think about it. The film also does a little gender-bending by giving us Selena, the female lead — and a black female lead at that. We will see these two exemplars — people who serve as examples of something — struggle with each other over the definition of personhood in their new and disorienting circumstances.

Exemplary characters are also called archetypes.

One of the several reasons 28 Days Later was recognized as more than a bloody zombie film (to which we could reduce it if we were being disingenuous) is that every performance by the actors in this film carries the intensity and authenticity of the characters in a way that allows us to identify with them, identify in an unstrained and unembarrassed way.

I want to start with Selena because her character is the one that undergoes the most significant change in personhood. Selena has a moral conversion.

Selena appears on the scene as a killer-savior, one of two unknown, masked rescuers of Jim. She fends off the infected with Molotov cocktails.

She is unmasked (literally and figuratively) by the story when they enter their little kiosk-refuge. She is a stern, non-nonsense countenance (as opposed to her colleague, Mark, who indulges grim humor as his way of coping with extremity). Selena is direct, methodical, and more than anything in charge — a natural leader, wielding a machete instead of a sword. This natural leadership is acknowledged by Mark — and Jim — in their unquestioning acquiescence to her tactical decisions. She has judgment — the cool, instrumental rationality of a military commander, or a scientist (she turns out to have been a scientist before the catastrophe — a chemist).

We are shocked by this icy instrumentality when Selena unhesitatingly slaughters Mark after he’s been bitten by one of the infected — perhaps the grisliest scene in the movie. At the same time, she looks out for Jim, protects and nurtures him (as when she treats his headache with sugar and painkillers). She becomes a kind of Joan of Arc archetype (no pun intended).

He archetype is simultaneously discerning and physical. But she walks on a tightrope — as any medieval theologian will tell you — over the abysmal sin of sins: despair, the true danger lurking within her warfighting practicality. The loss of hope.

Jim is the lead character in the film, and — as we said — the one that the audience is “attached” to for the journey through the story. But in revelatory stories, what is revealed is generally revealed in a moral dimension. There is an exemplary shift in some character’s moral compass, or — more importantly — that of the audience.

“Staying alive is as good as it gets,” she tells Jim. Selena’s philosophy for the new reality. Her leadership is based on the fact that in this radically changed world she has proven effective. But her telos has become stunted. It amounts to “staying alive,” a task so all-consumingly urgent in this dangerous new world that anything else is difficult to grasp. Selena is “modern,” in the sense that Selena is a utilitarian. She is, above all, effective.

Two separate quotes from Yoder here, one on “stories” and one on “effectiveness”:

Stories

When modern Christians approach the Old Testament with the question of war in mind, our attitude tends to be a legalistic one and the questions we ask tend to generalize. We ask, “Can a Christian who rejects all war reconcile his position with the Old Testament story?” If the generalization that “war is always contrary to the will of God” can be juxtaposed with the wars in the Old Testament, which are reported as having been according to the will of God, the generalization is destroyed.

This approach hides from us the realization that for the believing Israelite the Scriptures would not have been read with this kind of question in mind. Rather than reading with the modern question in mind, whether it confirms certain moral generalizations or not, the Israelite read it as his or her own story, as the account of his or her own past throwing light on who he or she was. A story may include a moral implication or presuppose moral judgments, but it does not necessarily begin at this point.

Effectiveness (Yoder writing on John of Patmos’ “Revelation” and “the meaningfulness of history”)

[T]he answer given to the question by a series of visions and their hymns is not the standard answer [to what makes history meaningful]. “The lamb that was slain is worthy to receive power!” John is here saying, not as an inscrutable paradox but as a meaningful affirmation, that the cross and not the sword, suffering and not brute power determines the meaning of history. The key to the obedience of God’s people is not their effectiveness but their patience (13:10). The triumph of the right is not assured by the might that comes to the aid of the right, which is of course the justification of the use of violence and other kinds of power in every human conflict. The triumph of the right, although it is assured, is sure because of the power of resurrection and not because of any calculation of causes and effects, nor because of the inherently greater strength of the good guys.

Selena’s efficacy threatens to dehumanize her.

The plot progresses toward its own telos. Selena become enamored (in a big sister way) of the teenage Hannah and her charming working-class dad, Frank. In a key scene — significantly after a communal breaking of bread — Selena is walking with Jim and talking.

SELENA: You were thinking you’ll never read a book that hasn’t already been written; see a film that hasn’t already been shot.

JIM: Aw, that’s what you were thinking.

SELENA: What I was thinking was that I was wrong.

JIM: ‘Bout what?

SELENA: All this shit. It doesn’t really mean anything to Frank and Hannah, because they’ve got each other. I was wrong when I said that staying alive is as good as it gets.

JIM: Ya see, that’s what I was thinkin’. You stole my thought.

SELENA: (stopping to kiss his cheek) Sorry.

JIM: ‘S’alright. You can keep it.

This is Selena’s conversion moment. She abandons the instrumental self. She abandons the absoluteness of her utilitarianism. In observing the (exemplary) love of Frank and Hannah, Selena is herself “infected” by that love.

In an earlier scene, Frank calls the survivors to watch a group of vibrantly healthy horses cavorting around a riverside pasture. This scene is a divine-vision interruption in the scenes of horror. Frank blows the horses a kiss. The audience does so with him.

Stories often tell us how to be, how to feel. We participate in the story; and the story then participates in our lives. Culture shapes personhood.

Yoder calls Christian love a “foolish” love. It is not instrumental.

*

Note (4)

28 Days Later was critically well-received, and a surprise to many that the seemingly unlikely premise could be treated with an element of seriousness. There were masterful techniques on several accounts — the inspired editing, the edgy musical background, the excellent performances.

It is in looking at Jim’s character, however, that we will come to discover how the film managed to contradict itself. The contradiction is not apparent because it is a common contradiction about the issue of redemptive violence. In this contradiction, we will see something remarkably conventional and conservative at the center of the plot.

Jim is an Everyman — a bicycle courier, working class, and someone with church in his upbringing. When he begins to grasp what he’s awoken to (after being left unconscious and wasted in a hospital bed for days) is the post-infection dystopia of a quiet, empty London. Jim ends up where others have apparently come to die in the face of the disaster — church. When forced to club down an infected priest that attacks him there, he runs away, muttering, “I shouldna done that! Oh, I shouldna done that.” It reveals something to the audience who knows nothing about Jim yet. Jim has some enculturated ethical scruples.

Jim’s first revelation upon being rescued by Mark and Selena is that institutions (an anchoring aspect of culture) no longer exist… no church, no hospitals, no government, etc. Selena and Mark tell Jim there’s no government, to which Jim almost cries out, “Of course there’s a government! There’s always a government! Their in a bunker or plane somewhere!”

Jim has joined his new colleagues after a tectonic shift of their ecology– a biological catastrophe. Culture is destroyed — except for what remaining culture is “carried” by a handful of survivors. They are uprooted persons. Refugees.

Jim is shocked by Selena’s bloody dispatch of Mark after Mark is bitten by one of “the infected” (a term that counterposes them to humans… Jim insists on calling one of the dead “infected” by his name and states that he lived four doors away).

Selena rationalizes/explains her actions as she and Jim are walking back into the city.

SELENA: “If someone gets infected, you’ve got between ten and twenty seconds to kill them. It doesn’t matter… staying alive is as good as it gets.”

(Remember the “tempo task” from Part One?)

Jim disagrees with this thesis during a conversation with Selena at Frank and Hannah’s apartment, and Selena’s coming around to Jim’s way of thinking happens in her aforementioned conversion-scene.

So Jim is the film’s carrier of a charitable morality in the face of Selena’s military efficiency. The moral message is that love transcends the general encroachment of death brought about by the catastrophe.

The evil is the virus itself, even the creators of the virus. This charitable morality is asserted in the story at a point where the survivor band is facing only the consequences of evil (the zombified “infected” bear no moral responsibility). It is only when they meet Major Henry West and his small squad of surviving soldiers that they are confronted directly and actively by evil.

*

Note (5)

Whether by intent or by cultural osmosis, one unusually controversial and revelatory theme occurs in this film… the military as a rape-culture.

For anyone wanting to explore this theme in a more systematic way, I have linked to Sex & War, a pdf book on this subject.

We are introduced to the soldiers as “saviors” when they gun down Frank, Hannah’s father, right before her eyes. Frank has been infected, and was going to die at any rate, but the scene is prescient in unraveling the earlier expectations of our protagonist band — that the soldiers represented safety.

When Selena first hears the military unit’s recording on the radio, she replies with skepticism. The radio recording promises that “the answer to infection is here. Salvation is here.” (interesting choice of words, no?) Selena notes, “There is no answer to infection. It’s pretty much done as much damage as it can do.” It’s Hannah who says, “If there are soldiers there, they could protect us.” Obviously, Hannah’s logic carries the day, because the next scene has the newly formed band-of-survivors setting out with a car to find the soldiers.

This is relevant for us, today, this idealization of the military; perhaps the most dangerous idealization of our time.

Enter Major Henry West (after Hannahs’ father is infected and killed). He is the embodiment of British military reassurance, the hope of the restoration of civilization and a stable culture (the beginning of a new age in the apocalyptic). In Major West’s first appearance in the flesh, after having debuted as a disembodied, drone-like radio voice, he greets survivors Jim, Selena, and Hannah with a crisp, chirpy hospitality that seems strange in the face of Hannah’s distress at having seen her father infected then shot to death minutes earlier. He banters cheerfully about hot water being the basis of civilized life.

A further foreshadowing of the debacle of this “salvation” is when the survivors watch their soldiers playing with Frank’s car — only a short time after Frank was killed — like drunken frat boys.

As the story reveals, Major West is quite insane, a man playing at self-deification. West predicates his social engineering project on female sexual slavery, and this relation of men over women forms the basis of male solidarity among the soldiers. This is a true phenomenon in the actual military; and it is pervasive. That’s what makes this aspect of the film both controversial and realistic.

The film’s attentiveness to the link between militarism and rape-culture is commendable in my view. But here is where I have to point out the most embarrassing thing about the film, and why it is deeply conservative.

The oppressive gendered power of the soldiers is called out by the film; they are beyond the moral pale because they were plotting to rape — by the most defensible legal definition. This is actually very easy to see, and the audience is very clear that this is rape about to happen, and we are at a point in our moral evolution where we have at least begun to see how blame-the-victim is an inappropriate response to rape. So the moral equation surrounding the soldiers is very clear to the audience. That, at least, is not controversial; while the representation of military as subject to rape-culture is certainly controversial (and important).

The evil of Major West is revealed, from his dinner-table reduction of the historical process to “people killing people,” of murder as a “state of normality,” to his concealment of the fact of their quarantine to his own subordinates. He has to destroy hope in order to make himself a creator of worlds. He is, in a word, a beast of the apocalyptic variety. A personification of evil.

West invites Jim to “join us” in the New Covenant of Captive Women — a distinctly male-to-male encounter. Jim demurs. West orders him put to death.

But then the film articulates a deeper oppressive cultural belief about gender — one so naturalized that we can hardly see it all around us — and that is the male being defined and differentiated by violence… in this case, what we call “redemptive violence.”

When you strip away the fine directing and editing, the fine acting, the fine writing, the great music, and the edgy social commentary, what you encounter is a damsel-in-distress narrative, in which some violent male essence is released onto the scene as God’s own juridical instrument.

The film’s attention to gender was, in the end, superficial and liberal, which is why I call it deeply conservative. (Classical liberalism contains both these minor polarities inside it.) Selena has to be converted to love (to become a complete female); and Jim has to be converted to violence (to become a complete male). And there is nothing more conventional these days than the sexual contract, the gendered acceptance of protection in exchange for obedience.

One man to protect one woman from all other men, which is at the root of the damsel-in-distress narrative, and remarkably literal in this film. That Jim doesn’t demand obedience, nor would Selena’s character accept the terms of this sexual contract, the circumstances wherein the male actualizes himself fully in an act of violence are the archetypical circumstances that our culture tells us to associate with male social power over women.

The liberal appeal to disembodied, abstracted notions of “equality” between men and women — clearly different than each other in more ways than one — leads the writers to simply make Selena a general — an honorary male, who is herself only actualized as she becomes “softer.” I’m not disrespecting Selena’s conversion; that’s what the movie got right. What is troublesome is the way this moral decision is embedded in some broader cultural assumptions that relate to the exact thing that Jesus renounces again and again: violence and domination.

So Selena’s conversion to love over instrumentality feminizes her; while Jim’s conversion from gentleness to raw violence (where he actually gouges out the eyes of an “enemy”) masculinizes him and that masculinization saves the day. Isn’t it interesting that the Gospels tell a story that moves in exactly the opposite direction. A devout Jewish construction worker, immersed in a culture on the brink of armed rebellion against occupier and its imperial surrogates, eschews the violence of armed resistance, and preaches for the conversion of all to service and unconditional love.

A bit on gender (and something called the “sexual contract”).

The broad cultural assumption is that since men and women are different, then men are entitled to demand obedience out of the situations emerging from that difference. The modernist (liberal) reply is that women and men are not really different; but they have to limit what they mean by this “equality” to a very legalistic universe. But we can acknowledge difference — and in easy community and mutuality between the sexes– if we constantly police ourselves in refusing to impose hierarchy on that difference.

For the record, I liked this film. That doesn’t mean (1) that I have been duped into supporting its gender conventions or (2) that liking the film means I can’t simultaneously have negative criticisms of it. That means that if you liked it, that doesn’t signify that you have been duped into supporting its gender conventions, nor does liking the film mean you can’t simultaneously have negative criticisms of it.

*

Note (6)

Utilitarianism

A Yoder reflection on utilitarianism, unpredictability, and faith (from The Royal Priesthood, pages 123-125)

In other times and places, other accepted commonplaces would need to be combated; but for our present subject matter it will have to suffice to concentrate on what for the past two generations has called itself “realism,” a kind of creeping utilitarianism that does not quite avow the systematic narrowness of the utilitarian philosophical tradition but operates largely within its limits. It is assumed that we all share a common knowledge of what is possible and what is not, of what makes things happen, so that we know what kinds of power need to be applied at what points in the global social system to make events come out for the best. For some critics, this “realism” is to be challenged because it implicitly denies transcendence by accepting social science analyses, which themselves assume the world to be an enclosed system. For other critics, the shortcoming of “realism” is its failure to let both the analysis and the prescription be illuminated more normatively by revealed value standards. Both of these criticisms have some value, but for now it suffices to identify one internal limit of this kind of approach, namely its failure to be fully realistic, because it posits a degree of both actual analysis and ability to predict, to say nothing of ability to control, which are not, in fact, present in any important social conflict.

This is not simply a matter of ignorance due to the bluntness of our present tools of observation, analysis, and prediction, which could be one away with with greater refinement. It is rather an intrinsic limitation of the very nature of our self-understanding as social animals, like Heisenbergian uncertainty in the realm of small scale physics. We can never know with precision everything about a system that we ourselves are interfering with in the very process of trying to know about it; even more is this the case to the extent to which our trying to know about it includes trying to take charge of it…

…our choice of means sets its own ends, or the way the ends we set transform themselves in the course of our seeking to reach them. This is the least ideological of the reasons that lead political practitioners from Mohandas Gandhi to George Kennan to say that an ethic of means is the only globally responsible way to be honest with our stated ends. The kind of calculus that will sacrifice the legitimacy of immediate, manageable means for the greater value of projected ends that it hopes to produce is itself a denial of the limits of the human condition, however attractive that trade-off may seem in a given situation. The limits of our ability to trade means for ends is not thus a mere limitation in the accuracy of our present measurements but rather an intrinsic quality of all genuinely social decisions.

And more bluntly from Ivan Illich:

To hell with the future. It’s a man-eating idol.

That word again. Idolatry.

In differentiating church as “believing community, ” Yoder says, “Something structurally different is going on when the priority of the believing community is seen not as lordship but as servanthood, not as privilege but as pointer, not as achievement but as promise.”

Yoder was very critical of the the predominance of the cosmic Jesus that emerged from the process of “Constantinianization” of the church — the merger of church-institutional (ecclesial) power with the power of the state. Yoder insists that Jesus — an historical figure who lived in an actual time and place — is more than Savior; his life is meant to be exemplary. The Example of how we are to practice discipleship now in the world — “not as lordship but as servanthood, not as privilege but as pointer, not as achievement but as promise.”

There’s a lot to consider in this note, even though it’s short.

Q: How do you eat an elephant?
A: One bite at a time.

*

Note (7)

We have talked about a triad, ecology-culture-personhood. These are, however, abstractions. What are we really looking at in the film among two groups — the surviving band, and the soldiers? What is it that we call the living, actual embodiment of social groups? Community.

Yoder says that communities are carriers of meaning.

In 28 Days Later, out of the ashes, two communities emerge; then one has to destroy the other in self defense.

What meaning does this film — this cultural product — carry about us, about how we see ourselves, and about how we “know?”

*

HOMEWORK (optional)

(1) This is a terrifying movie for some, a very scary story. Think and-or write about whether we have forgotten that the story of Jesus — when its really studied — is intense and frightening.

Is there a difference in film between fear-and-violence and gratuitous-fear and gratuitous-violence?

How do we think about nonviolence as our mission in a world that still manifests terrifying violence without disengaging from the world?

How do we talk to kids about violence?

Can we shield them from the world?

We tell a scary story in Sunday School — a very scary one with corpses on crosses at a hill called The Skull.

What is our criteria for our kids with regard to “violence” in media? What do we and they need to understand about it to live in the world?

(2) Compare and contrast Volcano with 28 Days Later.

(3) Though 28 Days Later is an interesting, well-directed, well-acted, and very thought-provoking film — in addition to being frighteningly violent at times — its plot is resolved in a very standard way: male vengeance/rescue, or “redemptive violence.” The core message of Christ is nonviolence; yet we know from living in the world that this theme of redemption through violence is continually attractive to human beings, and very salable as a drama commodity. Make two lists:

(a) First List: all the film titles you can think of that qualify as a male revenge fantasy.

(b) Make a list of all the derogatory terms you can find for women, that are also used in phatic language by men to insult or challenge other men. Example: bitch, broad, sissy, ho, et al.

These lists correspond to a reality that is factored into nearly every woman’s life as fear… constant, if often sub-clinical, fear. In this film. Selena will be happy with Jim, no doubt, by film’s end. Jim protected her and rescued her out of love; and Jim will not become Selena’s oppressor. But how often is this the case in real life? How many women feel obliged to seek the lesser of evils in many (not only sexualized) relationships with men?

(3) In how many ways can one identify gendered themes (including some gender transgressions) in this film? Make a list.

(4) Write a bit about how the background music in this film enhanced and channeled your emotional participation of 28 Days Later.

(5) Think and-or write about this and other films or stories that are set in a catastrophe created by humans dabbling too much in the business of God… that is, scientific hubris. (I think immediately of Jurassic Park.)

Closing quote:

Why do you call Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?

-Luke 6:46

REMINDER: This is not a study that requires anything. The depth of participation is your choice. It can be an occasional pastime, or a a college course. It is also free to share with anyone and everyone; and it is not restricted — obviously — to Lent. Comments sections are also now open (but will be moderated, so comments will not go up immediately). CHANGE TWO with apologies — Comments are disabled here, and will all go to the Feral Scholar web site linked here. Click it on, and comment away. Again, apologies while I work out the glitches.

“Apocalypse Now” Small Group
For Lent — from February 25 (Ash Wednesday) to April 11 (Easter is the 12th)
All Saints United Methodist Church

Part One — Volcano
Showing at the All Saints UMC Ministry Center, 7 PM, Friday, February 27

As we enter into the season of Lent we are called to reflection, repentance, and [renunciation]. Lent is a time of preparation when we look beyond human frailty and the brokenness of the world to resurrection, hope, and new life. We are reminded that our faith does not rise and fall with the financial markets but resides in the enduring love of God who is present with us as we struggle and strive to love God and our neighbors. This Lent can be a time when we recommit to practice every day the Wesleyan values to do no harm, do good and stay in love with God.

-Council of Bishops, UMC

Reflect - pay attention and think
Repent - turn around (from Jerusalem - the city - back into the wilderness)
Renounce - compulsions, empty pleasures, and addictions; renunciation demonstrates that you are free

[All quotes and images are employed under Title 17, “Fair Use” law, and no portion of this study is for profit.]

REQUEST FOR PARTICIPANTS - You decide whether you want to watch the movie first, then review one, some, or all of the Notes; or whether you want to review Notes then watch the movie afterward. Then share a bit about whether and how the order of viewing and reading might differ.

Notes on Volcano

Note (1)

The idea for viewing Volcano, which is neither the worst nor best of the genre, came about because it placed such emphasis on Los Angeles as its setting. Several years ago, I picked up a copy of Mike Davis’ superlative book Ecology of Fear — Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. This book comes with a strong endorsement for both content and style. Peculiar at first, the book is a mesmerizing page-turner of revelation about the reality and the myths of the effects of urbanization (an ecology) on culture and personhood.

Note within a note: Though Davis and others (like Matthew Lassiter, who wrote about Southern suburbanization, another facilitator-recommended book, The Silent Majority), would call themselves radical urban theorists (RUT), their actual research and publications place them in a more prophetic role in society today.

(A must-read for anyone who lives in the suburbs and wants to know how we got here.)

Reviewer Walter Kern wrote of Davis’ book,

Davis’ sixth chapter “The Literary Destruction of Los Angeles,” explores LA’s destruction in novels and film by hordes, nukes, quakes, cults, monsters, bombs, pollution, gangs, terrorism, floods, plagues, riots, aliens, volcanoes, sandstorms, mudslides, freeways, distopias, and more (pp. 280-281). I took the significance of Davis’ account this way: the fiction is an obsessive exploration of unconfronted dangers in fantastic terms, and it perhaps reflects a desire to break through the denial locking LA in a system of doom.

Here is a key point about many extremity stories; they are a public imagination of breaking out of inertia — inertia experienced as a “system of doom.”

*

Note (2)

From: A Dictionary of Sociology |
Date: 1998 |
Author: GORDON MARSHALL |
© A Dictionary of Sociology 1998,

originally published by Oxford University Press 1998.

heuristic device Any procedure which involves the use of an artificial construct to assist in the exploration of social phenomena. It usually involves assumptions derived from extant empirical research. For example, ideal types have been used as a way of setting out the defining characteristics of a social phenomenon, so that its salient features might be stated as clearly and explicitly as possible. A heuristic device is, then, a form of preliminary analysis. Such devices have proved especially useful in studies of social change, by defining bench-marks, around which variation and differences can then be situated. In this context, a heuristic device is usually employed for analytical clarity, although it can also have explanatory value as a model.

Using films, readings, and cultural criticism to study social phenomena is employing them as heuristic “devices.”

*

Note (3)

Volcano is a Hollywood production. It follows Hollywood formulas. It’s story contains a handful of pretty standard film conventions. It idealizes many aspects of reality, and it reproduces idealized archetypes, characters polished and idealized to give us some recognizable essence as viewers and participants in the film.

*

Note (4)

Hollywood produces films that are generalized cultural commodities. Cultural because they are expressions of our social life, generalized because they are now almost universally available in American society, and commodities because the primary motive for making them is to accumulate monetary wealth.

(This does not mean that these films are reducible to any one of these characteristics, or that there are not elements of the films that have to be described independently of these three categories… this is a “heuristic” breakdown.)

The scale of the industry which makes these cultural commodities has made it into an effective transmission belt of social values. Not necessarily an originator of values, but certainly a transmission belt. (There is, however, a value-degradation inhering in the production of film-as-commodity. Like the competition to produce junk food for kids, the competition at the heart of market relations creates an arms race of over-stimulation and sensationalism that makes jaded emotional junkies of us consumers.)

What differentiates the disaster or apocalyptic genre(s) of film from other films is the condition of extremity that is the setting and background.

So in addition to, and often mixed with, the transmission of social values — which may be diverse and situational, there is a circumstance that forces greater moral questions to the forefront of the story, often presented as ethical dilemmas confronting the protagonist(s).

*

Note (5)

Before the film begins, there is the well-known 20th Century Fox intro, with the skylights and triumphal trumpets. Can we think about these recognizable corporate logos in any way as idols? If yes, then what does that mean for us, as church? How do we define idolatry?

*

Note (6)

Background music and emotional intelligence.

Linda Kintz wrote a book called Between Jesus and the Market - The Emotions that Matter in Right-Wing America. Kintz is an alumnus, that is, from a right-wing evangelical (dispensationalist) family of origin; and she is not interested in demonizing the right, but in understanding people with whom she still retains powerful attachments of love.

She speaks of an emotional (or “affective”) intelligence that is inextricable from other dimensions of intelligence, of an enculturated emotional response — what she calls “resonance” — that undergirds an elaborate, emotionally-resonant belief system that “might be visualized as a closed set of concentric circles stacked one on top of the other and ascending heavenward: God, property, womb, family, church, free market, nation, global mission, God.”

Intelligence recognizes; and emotional intelligence recognizes patterns of thinking because a pattern of thinking is simultaneously associated with a pattern of experiencing, or “feeling.”

Our affective intelligence operates, even in our most instrumental and impersonal relations, in the same way background music operates in a film. Background music cues us on how we are to participate, as a member of the audience. Background music mobilizes a targeted “feeling.” It helps us know how to behave (even if it is our psychic behavior as viewer-participants). The emotional resonance of our own beliefs, in a similar way also cues us how to behave.

An experiment: Watch one scene from Volcano, whichever whole scene. When you’ve finished, switch to English subtitiles and mute the sound. Watch the same scene again. You’re still getting all the information, but the absence of the background music — that seems in the “background” when we watch uncritically — is dramatically apparent, and even felt as a minor kind of loss.

Resonance leads us places; so we’d be well advised to investigate to whose tuning fork we are responding.

*

Note (7)

During the opening scenes of Volcano, there is a revealing series of social conflicts represented. [Think again of revealing — revelation — as a process of unmasking.] In “the business,” these are called, oddly enough, “reveal scenes.”

There is protagonist Mike Roark’s marital conflict; he is separated from his teenage daughter’s mother.

There is racial conflict in the confrontation between the young Black man who is seeking assistance for his neighborhood and a white policeman.

There is class conflict depicted in the public transportation demonstration and counter-demonstration, where Norman Calder (played by John Corbett), a wealthy financial speculator, confronts a Latina maid over the proposed route of a commuter train. Further along, Norman abandons his wife, the higher-minded emergency room physician who refuses to submit to Norman’s directive: “I don’t want my wife treating gunshot wounds. I want her treating tennis elbow.”

There is even gender conflict, though they softballed it more than the other social contradictions by having it played off with stoic humor by female protagonist, Amy Barnes, the government geologist, played by Anne Heche. Tommy Lee Jones’ “Mike” takes a very mildly (and therefore easily forgivable) macho tone with Barnes in their second encounter. (More on gender further along)

The almost bulleted precision of these conflicts — obviously part of a writer’s checklist of social contradiction — present this list of conflicts as constitutive of a general state of conflict, perceived as impending, like doom. This is an aspect of extremity used in apocalyptic (revelatory) literature and film, extremity to reveal (unmask) the characters’ true selves and the correct answers to the terrifying moral questions. The other aspect is for the condition of extremity to be understood as necessary to break up the doom of inertia… moral sloth… atomization… oppression… sin.

The serial presentation of these conflicts in the set-up phase of the film is foreshadowing the kairos moment that is about to interrupt this condition.

We know that; because we’ve seen many movies before. Someone with a different history in a different place, untrained as a participant in the movie experience, might not recognize all the ideas that we recognize in common, nor the emotional reactions to those ideas. We have all, as persons, learned in our interaction with culture and our own ecology, to experience the same resonance in reply to the same ideas.

*

Note (8)

“Apocalypse” is Greek for “revelation.”

One of the most memorable and culturally inscribed reveal scenes in film for us is in The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy’s dog, Toto, sniffs out the pathetic man behind the machine that was The Great Oz.

In Revelation we will see a similar reference to actual idol-machines used by the Romans in the time of John of Patmos.

The process of revealing is the process of unmasking, unveiling. Every society we know uses stories to reveal how we are supposed to be. The stories themselves can be radically different, because stories are part of culture, and culture is determinative of and determined by personhood and our surroundings (ecology). That’s why local stories have such richness of detail; because a de-localized (cosmopolitan) ecology is abstract — and so personhood is abstracted, as well as the culture being homogenized.

Personhood, ecology, culture.

Stories are a universal cultural production, even though there is wide difference between stories. Stories are universal in spite of the fact that some stories are organic and some are commodities. The stories you tell about something that happened within the family, like the stories told at family reunions, funerals, and weddings, are stories told inside the family. These stories are never conceived of as anything except the preservation of the story itself. That’s an organic story. When a story is a means to make money, then that story is being commoditized. A commodity is a thing-for-sale. The objective of the commodity is not what the commodity does — that’s only an intermediate concern for the producer — it’s that the commodity will produce a return on a monetary investment.

No matter whether some stories are organic, some are commoditized, and many are both or somewhere in between, the central fact remains that stories are part of the formative process (of personhood, culture, and ecology) in every society. Many stories may be wrong; and many may even be stupid; but the story-itself is powerful because it has this proven formative ability.

Volcano is a Hollywood commodity. A car is a commodity, too; but that doesn’t mean that I don’t use my own car for what it does — transport me to places way beyond my walking ability at outrageous speed. This movie is also a story that does what stories do, like a car does what a car does. This story tells us how to be when we participate as a non-critical audience. To the critical viewer, however, the story tells us a good deal about who we think we are.

The story we live into as followers of Jesus is one of selflessness, sacrifice, and forgiveness.

The story in a television ad for women’s depilatories is that you are unhappy, but that with the acquisition of this product you can make yourself more valuable… and without it, you will continue to be un-valuable.

Each of these stories tells us how to be.

*

Note (9)

The story presented in Volcano, in a very contradictory way, contains strong elements of a specifically Biblical understanding of the world.

The formative story for the Hebrews was captivity. The unique thing about the story in that place and time was that the captives themselves, and not the conquerers, were the protagonists of the story.

This begins what culminates with the Incarnation — the preferential option for the social underdog. With the “primitive” church, this anti-oppression bias was potently combined with a doctrine of spiritual equality (between master-slave, man-woman, Jew-Gentile).

In Volcano, this essentially Christian message of spiritual equality (though few people understand or acknowledge it) is mixed in with a fair amount of modernism (what Illich calls “perverted Christianity”) and a lot of patriarchal archetypes. The important thing to understand, however, is that the elements of selflessness, sacrifice, and forgiveness are not completely effaced in Christianity’s encounter with modernism.

This core belief in redemption through love — however it has been tortured in the service of agendas — has shown a remarkable resilience, even though epochs of absolute horror.

In this film, the savior is not the “shabby little shaman from Nazareth with the burning empathy for everyone he met.” The savior in Volcano is a government man; and his disciples are bureaucrats and technocrats, along with uniformed armed services.

The gospels spell out the exact opposite message — that the powers have been supplanted by the Kingdom of God, in cross and resurrection. Jesus of Nazareth was executed precisely because he refused to acknowledge the sovereignty of the principalities and powers. His was a political — not a religious — crime. But solely taking Volcano to task is inadequate. What can we find of the good? There is another grain of Christian sensibility (service) even in the disingenuous language about politics and government, called public service.

One apocalyptic theme in this film is the “good” of human solidarity. Another well-known theme within that is the theme of money becoming useless or meaningless. The unhesitating plot line crushes cars and explodes superstores in order to save a living humanity.

Remember the scene where the little boy, ash-stained in the opening scene of the film’s denouement. He looks for his mother among the similarly ash-stained and scrupulously diverse rescue workers. “Look,” he says, pointing. “They all look the same.” This highly manipulative scene is the commoditization process tapping into a shared and resonant belief in the “good” of human solidarity, and in equality before God of every human being — spiritual equality –

–once a violently divisive claim, especially as it had to do with gender. The most emotionally resonant scenes in this film are all — without exception — about the transformative power of human love and solidarity.

That the film industry — in the real world — operates on an absolute opposite, Spencerian, dog-eat-dog ethos, is not an embarrassment to the story’s representation of solidarity-as-good. It is a contradiction. It is an embarrassment to the industry establishment — and dominant classes of people more generally — in the face of an un-erasable Judeo-Christian communitarianism… the vision of which industry producers must admit into the story to achieve an emotionally resonant participation by the buying audience. The audience is a consumer; but the audience is also still human, still in search of meaning, and that meaning abides in the holy spirit that we believe to be manifest in authentically caring human fellowship.

This little boy’s scene is a story convention with its origins in antiquity; but alongside these ancient beliefs in “good,” the film’s story gives us conventions that are only recent reflections of the human condition. That is, there are conventions that are reproducing beliefs that are distinctly modern.

Man-Conquering-Nature is a huge (MODERNIST) cultural thought-cluster in this film, of course;

as is Man-of-Action as Savior; and Manly Men Fighting Fires and Crime. (One redeeming aspect of this film is that no one shoots anyone else, a huge relief these days, when wet and multiple murders are almost obligatory in films rated above G.)

There’s also a “real men don’t cut and run” thought-cluster in this film, when Roark tells the woman-scientist that he can’t follow her advice to order a general evacuation.

” I can’t do that, not ever!” he says.

Certainly, the film does a blunt portrayal of the government as a benevolent protector — facilitated by a Father-Protector figure who exercises absolute power… benevolently; but more importantly, as a tempo-task.
“Tempo-task” is a story convention. It’s a situation, imagined or described by the writer, that throws questions of huge necessity directly in front of a protagonist, forcing a dramatic reduction of time for the protagonist to make decisions. If s/he sees a situation that must be dealt with because failing to do so could have unthinkable consequences, then the protagonist has to suspend procedure, process, law.

Emergency is a very very common story line; and that’s why its so manipulable.

The stories with tempo-tasks are not just action novels or films; we have also seen tempo-tasks employed by political storytellers — the ones who told us that if we failed to attack Iraq, nuclear detonations might be expected soon in New York. Tempo-tasks are seldom used to portray the virtues of patience or peace. In fact, tempo-task scenarios are used to shut down any discussion of patience and peace.

“We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud over New York.”

Remember that one?

*

Note (10)

One device I particularly liked in this film was the setting of the La Brea Tar Pits as the first eruption site.

The statues of the Columbian mammoths (?) over the pits, with the sinister rumblings of inner-earth — that the audience is in on while the characters are not — gives a sense of time shifting from chronos-time, the time we measure (then enslave ourselves to) with clocks, into kairos-time, or God’s time… epochal event time, historical pivot time, something that doesn’t happen often, but when it does… well, a big change is coming. As an audience member, I see the mammoth with all the resonance of a small boy who was fascinated by enormous extinct species, like dinosaurs and giant mammals. One’s imagination reaches out to grasp time as containing these highly significant, and meaningful, punctuations… interruptions… macroforces.

Force majeure is the legal term for forces beyond the control of contractees. The vernacular for this concept is “an act of God.” One can almost experience a sweet surrender in the imagination of kairos-time. This is one of the attractions of this genre. It is an imaginary surrender on the part of the audience to a kairos event.

TIME

Further note (10)(a) from Ivan Illich on “devices,” epistemology, and the need to shift epistemology in order to understand the dead (from The Rivers North of the Future, Chapter 18, “From tools to systems”:

A little while ago, I spoke about Father John Considine, the Maryknoll priest who convinced John XXIII to enlist the Church in the Alliance for Progress. The idea of these missioners was to help these poor people, and to help meant to provide those people with means, with tools, that they didn’t have — with electricity, penicillin, decent legal devices, instrumentally conceived knowledge. This was taken for granted. It’s as difficult to put an epistemic parenthesis around concepts like instrument, tool, device, technique, as it is to put a parenthesis around norms or rules in ethics. As soon as we speak about conscience, someone will invoke norms according to which a conscious man ought to act. As soon as we speak about help, as a result of my love for you, my benevolence towards you, we will think about empowering you by providing you with some device or technique… [T]he very idea of the tool as a special type of causality has an historical beginning, that the idea of the tool takes mature shape in Scholasticism in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Almost absurdly, but correctly, we then spoke about the discovery that angels who are pure spirits require tools, which are planets, in order to act as God’s governors in the ordering of the world. We can consider time between the century in which I am so much at home, the twelfth century, and today, by speaking of it as the epoch of technique, or tool-making — “tool” being something that incorporates, materializes, or formalizes a human intention, and can be picked up, or not picked up, by a person who wants to pursue the goal that corresponds to this intention. It is marked by the omnipresence of instruments: eyes are instruments for seeing like cameras, concepts are epistemic devices, laws are tools for the ordering of society.

How much of what happens in Volcano involves the use of instruments, tools, technology?

Can you better relate this notion of epistemology — how we know — by reading Illich’s interview remarks, then returning to the film to watch the role of instruments? What does it mean about our differences with people who lived, say, in the tenth century, when this conception of a tool — as an ever-more-abstract category — did not yet exist. A hoe was a hoe, not the same as a scythe. Calling them both “tools” is adding one degree of abstraction to the language, and so to our thinking.

How do our tools, and our conceptions of tools, as represented in the film, represent our (1) ecology, (2) culture, (3) personhood? A traffic jam is part of a physical environment. Look for all the cultural artifacts in any scene of the film — billboards, television, radio, automobiles, roller-blades… And how much does one’s personhood now depend on what one “does” (that is, does for pay); and to what degree is that identity associated with the “knowledge” of particular technologies (tools)?

*

Note (11)

Love the comic cutaway scene (comic cutaways relieve us in the audience of any anxieties that the story’s tension will be unbearable) with two working-class employees of the museum that’s hosting an exhibition of Hieronymus Bosch. The two working stiffs are hauling out paintings and loading them in a truck to rescue them from the erupting volcano.

The first worker says, “This Hieronymus Bosch is heavy.”

“That’s because he deals with man’s inclination to sin, ” replies his partner, “in defiance of God’s will.”

To which the first worker — grunting as he loads the “heavy” picture — replies, “I didn’t mean it that way.”

Ha ha.

Some clever script writer weaseled that cutaway scene into the film, and we should deeply appreciate it. Never hurts to put some theology in the story; and Bosch’s paintings depicting Hell are a must-see. Hieronymus Bosch was an important medieval Christian artist; and his artistic themes represent a now bygone idea about the cosmos… the world. Bosch’s depictions of Hell retain their powerful creepiness even to this day.

Bosch is part of our religious tradition, but in order to understand him, his paintings, and his audience when he was making his art, we have to figure out how he and his audience knew things. We have to study the context, a context of which we have no firsthand experience… in fact, a context we know little about at all.

One of the words suggested for a look or re-look in preparation for this study was “epistemology.” Epistemology is “how we know,” and its not dictated by “reason,” but in the totalizing experience of the non-linear relations between personhood, culture, and ecology.

Hieronymus Bosch was enculturated into a different epistemology than we are. If we try to know Bosch on our terms (modern terms), we are lost. Bosch is dead, and the direct memories of his time are all dead with him. We, as the living, are obliged to seek to understand the episteme — the world view — of Bosch and his contemporaries. That’s the only way we can hope to understand what the painter wanted to say, and how his own medieval European audience participated in saying it.

The difficulty of understanding “how we know” things is that the term knowledge contains an element of misleading certainty around with it.

“We are — at last — the possessors of real knowledge.” How many times has this particular form of hubris popped up in history?

This misleading certainty is compounded with semantic confusion when, for example, people are translating ancient, and not so ancient, texts. Even in the same language, words acquire new meanings, and new experiences engender new words. Imagine you are living 100 years ago, 1909. Now let’s play you a few lines of dialogue from Volcano:

(1) “I don’t want my wife treating gunshot wounds; I want her to treat tennis elbow.”

(2) “I’m sure you’re aware that the continents are like giant rafts, floating on a sea of molten lava.”

A mental exercise: Pretending that you are a 30 year old person living where you are right now in 1908, in how many ways are these two snippets of dialogue very, very strange to you?

Dead. All. A common symbol on medieval Christian art was a skull.

As you are, I once was. As I am, you shall be. Be ever mindful of death.

(The skull was Adam’s.)

For we the living, the meanings of the dead require us to seek them by studying their context, their way of knowing. It requires an “epistemological shift.”

The last step of this study group is to critically read the Book of Revelation. It was written, to the best of our knowledge (no pun intended), around 96 AD, in Asia Minor (now Turkey and Greece). Very different time. Very different place. For us, that would be as if the crucifixion had happened at the end of World War II. People were still alive from when it happened.

*

Note (12)

Other biblical/Christian references in the film:

The literal self-sacrifice of Stan Olber (played by John Carroll Lynch), the public servant who fatally leaps into flowing lava in order to rescue a subordinate, is a scene of special gravity while Stan is walking toward his certain death breathlessly and tearfully reciting “Hail Mary.”

In one scene, Mike Roark and Amy Barnes are catching a breather, when she states that Los Angeles is finally reaping what they’ve sown in foolishness (a direct example of the Los-Angeles-comeuppance theme that Mike Davis cites). Roark responds by saying, “It’s a foolish man that builds his house upon the sand.” To which a pleased Amy Barnes responds, “Matthew 7:26, a favorite of geologists.” And so the two characters signify their intersubjectivity with a bible verse.

*

Note (13)

Excerpt from David Cayley’s Introduction to Rivers North of the Future - The Testament of Ivan Illich:

…Illich makes a … convincing evisceration of the myth of the secular when he claims that contemporary Western societies are in no sense post-Christian but rather constitute a perverted form of Christianity. He shows … that a whole constellation of modern notions, most too obvious even to raise a question in most minds, are distortions of Christian originals — from “the citizen” on whose shoulders the state rests to the services which are its raison d’etre, from the planetary “life” that right-thinking people want to conserve to the technology that threatens it. And he further claims that these notions would have been unthinkable without their Christian originals. They owe their very existence, in other words, to the ancestry which they distort, deny, and conceal.

Illich, with admitted trepidation, calls this view “apocalyptic.” His hesitancy is understandable, since this word, as it is now used, tends to evoke fundamentalist fantasies of divine vengeance or the gruesome cataclysms that have become a staple of popular cinema. But Illich uses the word in its literal meaning of “uncovering” or “revelation.” For him, the contemporary world reveals an evil that can only be grasped when it is understood as an imposture, or simulation, of the Samaritan’s unforseen and unforseeable response to the man in the ditch. Evil, traditionally, was an absence, a forgetfulness of the good. Illich points to a new kind of evil that appears only when the good is replaced by “measurable values” and transmogrified into an “institutional output”. (quotation marks added for emphasis)

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HOMEWORK (optional):

Write your thoughts — any format or style that is comfortable for you — on what we’ve discussed so far with regard to one of the following:

(1) The Ecology-Culture-Personhood Triangle.
(2) Unacknowledged Christian themes in Volcano.
(3) Epistemological shifting in the study of the dead.
(4) Chronos versus karios time in Volcano.
(5) Revealing as unmasking.
(6) Extremity, ethics, and tempo-tasks.
(7) Apocalyptic art and the theme of comeuppance.
(8) The Christian ethic culturally reproduced (in performance) in an industry that operates with an anti-Christian ethic.
(9) Art as commodity.
(10) Viewing the film Volcano as if you are living in 1908 (to show ideas that were not yet available to understand Volcano).

Closing Quote:

The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

- John 1:9-13

REMINDER: This is not a study that requires anything. The depth of participation is your choice. It can be an occasional pastime, or a a college course. It is also free to share with anyone and everyone; and it is not restricted — obviously — to Lent. Comments sections are also now open (but will be moderated, so comments will not go up immediately). CHANGE TWO with apologies — Comments are disabled here, and will all go to the Feral Scholar web site linked here. Click it on, and comment away. Again, apologies while I work out the glitches.

“Apocalypse Now” Small Group
For Lent — from February 25 (Ash Wednesday) to April 11 (Easter is the 12th)
All Saints United Methodist Church

Apocalypse Now Links:
Introduction
Part One - Volcano
Part Two - 28 Days Later
Part Three - Children of Men
Part Four - “The War of the Lamb”
Part Five - “Revelation”

No, it’s not the Francis Ford Coppola war movie. But yes, there are movies. A good part of this small group’s activity is watching and thinking about and talking about movies.

This small group will organize an online and face-to-face series of comparative studies for three contemporary films and two readings (one somewhat contemporary and one from Scripture).

The genre of the contemporary films is variously called science fiction, catastrophe, or apocalyptic, depending on who’s talking. The latter two are also called dystopian.

The films are:

Volcano,

28 Days Later,

and Children of Men.

The readings are (1) the last chapter of The Politics of Jesus, by late theologian John Howard Yoder, the chapter entitled “The War of the Lamb”;

and (2) the Book of the Revelation of John (from the New Testament).

By viewing and reading these cultural productions in this order, and following brief cultural critiques (analyses) of each, we hope to develop an understanding of how storytellers and story-hearers participate in meaning-making together.

Since our own direct experience is contemporary, we will study how we “participate” as an audience in these three films, how values and norms are magnified and transmitted in these stories of “extremity,” and how stories of extremity are used to present then resolve big ethical questions.

We will also study the films for ethical norms that have Christian origins, even in contemporary stories that are not explicitly Christian.

With the Yoder chapter, we will read about the Revelation of John as an “apocalyptic genre” used by John of Patmos to reiterate the proclamation of Christ’s good news for his contemporaries (in 2nd Century Asia Minor) in the face of actual extremity. Yoder provides us with contemporary language to unpack past meaning-making in literature; and provides a perfect seg — at last — to reading and understanding the most misunderstood and often misinterpreted Book of the New Testament.

This study, during Lent — which traditionally emphasizes penitence and reflection on mortality — hopes to develop among its participants a shared basis of understanding of the experience of our own culture, the experience of the culture of the early church, and how this emphasis on mortality and penitence came into the world as a direct response to conditions of actual and intense extremity. This is important to us, in particular, because our daily lives in our own suburban culture have in so many ways been insulated from real austerity and extremity. Like Lent, extremity of circumstance often demands renunciations.

Ivan Illich said:

The certainty that you can do without is one of the most efficacious ways of convincing yourself, no matter where you stand on the intellectual or emotional ladder, that you are free. Self-imposed limits provide a basis and preparation for discussion of what we can renounce as a group of friends or a neighborhood. I have seen it, and I can witness to it. For many people who suffer from great fears and a sense of impotence and depersonalization, renunciation provides a very simple way back to a self which stands above the constraints of the world.

And such renunciation is especially necessary in the world in which we live. Tyranny of old was exercised over people who still knew how to subsist. They could lose their means of subsistence, and be enslaved, but they could not be made needy. With the beginning of capitalist production in the spinning and weaving shops of the Florence of the Medicis, a new type of human being was being engendered: needy man, who has to organize a society, the principle function of which is to satisfy human needs. And needs are much more cruel than tyrants.

We are those “needy” ones. And one form of renunciation for Lent is to renounce our disengagement by looking into our own culture and into scriptures with the real intent of better understanding who and whose we are.

It is also our hope that this small group will finish the study with a far keener appreciation and clearer understanding of the Revelation of John, as well as a deeper understanding of our own culture and how it interprets — and misinterprets — Scripture. There is no requirement to read the phenomenal exegesis on this Book of Scripture that has been done by “Mickey” Efird, one of our own nearby at Duke Divinity School, but he needs to be acknowledged up front as the thinker whose critique of dispensationalist accounts of Revelation was extremely helpful for the latter part of this study.

* * *

Materials required:

Books — (1) The Politics of Jesus, by John Howard Yoder. (2) The Bible

Films — (1) Volcano, (2) 28 Days Later, (3) Children of Men.

NOTE: The reading from Yoder’s book is only one chapter. For those who do not have or do not purchase the book, we will make hard copies of the single chapter.

* * *

Method:

The method of the group facilitator does not restrict or oblige any particular approach by other participants. I will make suggestions about the sequence and forms of participation; but you will determine what works best for you, how deeply you delve into the subject, and how to fit your participation into the other tasks and obligations of your lives.

We will view three films first, one per week. Buying or renting the films (Netflix anyone?) to view at home is sugggested, so the film can be viewed more than once. We will also have a group showing of the film at the Ministry Center. The order of viewing is Volcano, 28 Days Later, and Children of Men.

* * *

PREPARATION

The Ecology-Culture-Personhood Triangle — a different kind of lens

Throughout this small group program, participants are challenged to keep the idea of a Ecology-Culture-Personhood Triangle in the back of their minds. This triangle is a notion I am borrowing from anthropologist Alf Hornborg, author of a very good albeit academic book called The Power of the Machine. The idea of the triangle is that three macro-forces in our lives are in constant interaction — ecololgy, culture, and personhood — and that each reciprocally influences the development of the other. Our personhood — the experience of being one person — is shaped by our general physical environment (ecology), which in turn is changed (and often abused) by culture (technology, economics, art, religion, language, et al), which is shaped by place (an aspect of ecology), etc, etc, etc.

In reality, these”parts” of the triangle never exist independent of one another and are inextricable from one another. But we can break them down to provide us with a particular analytical perspective… a way to think “outside of the box.”

Three Basic Terms

In addition to using the ECP Triangle as an analytical standpoint, there are three terms that are not universally familiar, standing for three ideas, that participants need to understand: epistemology, heuristics, and cultural criticism.

Epistemology: Theory of knowledge; also, the way we think we “know”.

Heuristics: Methods that help in problem solving in turn leading to learning and discovery.

Cultural Criticism: Analyzing and describing aspects of culture from one or more critical perspectives.

How It Works

You figure out how to acquire and view the films. Ideally, you will watch the films in sequence, and have each of them available for possible re-viewing throughout each film’s respective week. During that week, I will post something called just “Notes,” e.g., Notes on Volcano. Read over the Notes before, during, or after one or more viewings, as works best for you. We all have different schedules and learning strategies. One evening a week, those who can will meet any place agreed upon to watch the films together. Tentatively, that will be Friday night at the Ministry Center (not etched in granite yet).

Feb 27 - Volcano (showing - discussion through comments section of web site)
March 6 - 28 Days Later (showing)
March 13 - Discussion
March 20 - Children of Men (showing)
March 27 - Discussion
April 3 - War of the Lamb Discussion
April 10 (Good Friday) - Revelation Discussion

We may supplement with Sunday discussions before services, if people want to.

REMINDER: This is not a study that requires anything. The depth of participation is your choice. It can be an occasional pastime, or a a college course. It is also free to share with anyone and everyone; and it is not restricted — obviously — to Lent. Comments sections are also now open (but will be moderated, so comments will not go up immediately). CHANGE TWO with apologies — Comments are disabled here, and will all go to the Feral Scholar web site linked here. Click it on, and comment away. Again, apologies while I work out the glitches.

Much has happened in the last couple of years, including the necessity for me to look for, take, and hold a job… not a position, a job. Even then, when I started searching at 55, after a decade of politics and all the infighting, and all the inflammatory statements, and all the travel, and all the public stuff…even before the great burst of the great bubble, the non-profit world was not looking for a middle-aged man with things like sniper and communist tucked away in his CV. No craft experience, not even a clue about the latest cubicle-work divisions of labor, no accounting experience, no nothing…55 mattered, too, and 57 matters now. Having a couple books on one’s resume then creates the “overqualified” stigma, because people think writers earn good money. So there were three tries before I settled into the job I have now.

I worked with a landscaping crew for $10 an hour, the only Anglo besides the boss. On the first day, I cut around 15 very large, well-landscaped lawns, running the mower in neat rows to give them the striped effect. We pulled weeds, raked, shaped fill dirt, hauled and scattered mulch, shoveled and mattocked through clay… grunt work. Plenty of it. I admit I hated it; and I was learning fast to resent the very people without whom we’d have no jobs – the people in the big houses who could afford landscapers.

Then I was given a job for the same pay by a stone mason – a damn good stone mason, Brooks Burleson, old school, who I believe could cut stone with a claw hammer if need be. Another hard job, and one that went through summer before last when we had three straight weeks of triple digit temperatures. By 10 AM each day, I was soaked in sweat all the way down to my cuffs, sun-poisoned, with blackening nails from hitting them with stones, and inflamed hand joints from the hammering. I would go home, eat a full meal, and follow it with a half-gallon of ice cream, and still my weight barely stayed above 165 pounds (I was 180 a year before).

Then I found a job, this time with bennies (I had some dental problems that were giving me fits), working with a deconstruction crew (we take buildings apart to salvage materials for re-use). That’s where I am now. And it’s not the drudgery of landscaping, nor does it have the plain physical intensity of stonewalling, but still it’s a hard, dirty job that leaves me pretty emptied out at night and pretty stiff when I get up in the morning.

A lot of folks from my pre-laboring past are asking why they hear so little from me these days, and there are a number of reasons for that – including burn-out – but one big reason is that when I’m not working now, I am really just tired. Mornings were always my best writing times, my head unscrambled by the discharge of dreaming and my circuits lit up with caffeine. Now, if I get up at 5:30, along with preparing my breakfast and lunch, packing up for work, and driving my beater across town to get there, I can squeeze in 30 minutes to answer mail, moderate the Feral Scholar blog, and maybe read a bit of news.

Prior to this proletarian interlude, I was lucky enough to have a few people paying me to write and speak and organize, so I had been freelancing for about three years, and during art of that time Mike Ruppert’s online publication, From The Wilderness, was sending me a living-wage check each month to produce exactly the kind of thing that I most enjoy doing anyway – synthesizing news and events into a kind of intelligence analysis, something that satisfies the undead Special Forces intelligence sergeant that still resides in my head, the wannabe academic that missed the boat a long time ago, and the writer still trying to grow up.

In that time, however, I also became obtuse about day-to-day reality (particularly what was going on in my own family), sectarian at times, inappropriate with people I liked and didn’t like, and a wee bit bipolar (a descriptive not diagnostic term in this context). So, in a very real sense, I needed to be brought down to earth by grit and grunt work and fatigue and the economy of time that starves most of us in “civilization” these days.

I also started to find a lot more time to spend with someone I’d been missing: my spouse, Sherry.

I set Sundays aside for church and family (always including Sherry) now; which is one reason I don’t even consider going out of town anymore for speaking gigs, even though I was making from $500-$1,000 a day when I did that (for the trip, the rate drops considerably when you factor in the travel preparations, working on a presentation, and catching up after you’ve left town). My pay now amounts to around $390 a week, after the tax collectors take their cut.

If I were calculating my circumstances from a shopkeeper’s perspective, I suppose this “withdrawing” from that public sphere could look foolish; from the perspective of my old political colleagues, the criticism has been explicit – I have abandoned “the struggle.” These are serious concerns. I do not like being in debt (and we are); and the state of history and politics on a day-to-day basis assaults my sensibilities and conscience in some way nearly every waking moment.

On October 26th, however, I had a very good day. We, Sherry and I, had a good day. I think that day merits a description, because were it not for all of the above circumstances, October 26th wouldn’t have happened. I didn’t remember that it was my dad’s birthday until later (October 26, 1906).

Sherry and I went to church, which is a rented elementary school gym actually. All Saints United Methodist Church, in the exurban borderlands between Raleigh and Durham, along the approach and take-off azimuths of Raleigh-Durham International Airport. It’s dead in the heart of an upscale and immensely destructive development called Brier Creek (These developments always take the name of the nature they destroy, like army helicopters take the names of slaughtered nations – Apache, Blackhawk, Kiowa – cruelly stealing the names to retain some essence of what was lost by “developing” or waging wars of conquest).

Across the street from the building that houses the gym/church, there is a scene I have called a Hieronymus Bosch landscape. Bosch did paintings depicting a surreal vision of Hell. He did peaceful kingdom paintings, too, but his Hells are more memorable. Bosch paintings are a peek into the religious psyche of Central Europe in the late 15th early16th Century period. What remains so striking in Bosch now – with his emphasis on the “un-naturalness” of evil, depicted in monstrous combinations of life – is that we too are seeing landscapes devoid of any natural process… except that we needn’t visit our own imaginations to see this un-naturalness… we live in it. We’ve actually accustomed ourselves to them, at some terrible cost.

So maybe the comparison with Bosch is overdrawn, but that scarred ex-forest across from the school/community center/gym is where we do church, so you can see some deep-down brokenness as you walk out the front door.

Around 25 acres has been bulldozed down to the red clay and rock, pancake flat where the wooded watercourses formerly provided a fractally curvaceous elevation and relief. The lots have been slabbed, and the PVC sewage inlets stick up out of the ground like a field of white plastic stumps. When the ground was freshly skinned and fleshed, what stood out from this landscape was the silence.

There are no birds singing here, an acoustical void that jars me. But here on the outer limits of this country club community, the economic crash that’s been cooking away since the latter years of the Vietnam occupation came to its head, several trillion dollars of fictional value suddenly evaporated, and the construction halted on those lots.

Now, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower” (Dylan Thomas’ great phrase for a universal creative essence underlying life) has begun its re-encroachment. Weeds, so-called, have taken root… small phalanxes really of biome reconnaissance troops that are reorganizing the complexity that was sheared off the skin of the earth here by the bulldozers. With the new overgrowth, and the cessation of the machines, some of the birds’ voices have returned.

Resurrection is always in the offing; but we have to leave things be for it to happen. I think we surely need to turn off all the machines from time to time, but that’s a minority view.

Greg Moore and Laura Fine Ledford are the pastors at All Saints. Emily Scales is the intern pastor. Here in the middle of Consumer Mecca, across the street from where the plants and birds are trying to reanimate the land of the dead, we talk with others during Sunday School about the challenges of marital cohabitation. We rise and sit and rise and listen and sing our way through the liturgy. Then Greg does his sermon.

Greg is young, 30-ish, white, a former athlete with a haircut that would pass muster in the Marines. He was a philosophy major and a soccer player. He is recharged with enthusiasm from some event this week, and the Spirit is on him, riding him the way Haitians say a ti loa rides a human like a horse. He channels Yoder and Hauerwas today, because he gives a sermon – here in the middle of Privilege and Alienation Central – that proclaims the church to be “a movement.” Few in the congregation understand the implications of what he is saying, I suspect, but he puts it in their heads like an earworm, simple and memorable, this notion that the church participates in history… that is, that the church is as political as it gets.

Some get it. I see the heads nodding; I see some faces that register the impact.

He is suborning treason in the ‘burbs.

He cites Jesus’ story of the vineyard workers – wherein the last shall be first, and the first last – here, with the Land of the Dead across the street, speaking directly to the inhabitants of Consumer Mecca. The Spirit passes through me; the hair on my body stands up; I almost shudder. He has invoked the sovereignty of God against the sovereignty of the powers.

After forgiving, we eat the body and drink the blood; we “send forth,” and we put away the chairs.

Sherry and I have decided that we are going to Umstead State Park nearby. It is a fine October day, with the leaves just turning, highs in the 60s, filled with benevolent sunlight. Armed with two bottles of water and the leftover communion bread, we get a couple cups of cappuccino at a gas station, and we drive into the park.

Sherry has her drawing pad and pencils; and I’ve agreed to take her on a trail with a great many opportunities to sketch.

This trail reminds me always of Haiti, for an idiosyncratic reason.

Since 1994, I have visited Haiti 21 times. On some of those trips, I stayed with country people – peasants – who lived vary far up in the mountains without roads, necessitating a brutal hike (at night, for security, after the last US-engineered coup) over some 13 kilometers straight-line distance, albeit along the serpentine line of rocky footpaths follow not lines-as-seen-from-above (the abstraction and deception of a map) but the actual geologic contours and fractures of a steep mountain landscape. This is a very challenging walk for a middle-aged blan, and I had to prepare before these trips.

Umstead State Park is where I did that.

The park is full of trails, well-marked ones that are nonetheless left mostly to themselves to form under the foot traffic – making the trails themselves a rich mixture of granite and quartz and hardwood roots lined with deep, long-term accumulations of crackling leaves. The whole park has retained a high tree canopy with a lot of biological diversity. So the sky is a kind of vast, illuminated overhead kaleidoscope. Sycamore Trail can actually be walked continuously – in a great teardrop on a string – for almost eight miles.

Near a bridal trail in the park, also near the highest ground in the park at all, Sycamore Creek Trail is accessible from a gravel road. Around half a mile from that entry point, there is a precipitous plunge in the trail from a heavily wooded ridge down into Sycamore Creek valley, with rocky switchbacks along a short stretch of steep terrain.

In addition to the Sycamore Trail loop, when I was “training” at Umstead Park, I would go up and down this steep stretch ten times in a row to get as accustomed as possible to climbing with weight on my back (a 30-pound pack). I switched up routes and directions to diversify my time there – from little Pot’s Branch Trail, to Company Mill Trail, Sal’s Branch, Loblolly… names that evoke the passages of time in these particular places.

This is how I learned this park, using it as a training ground for a bunch of political business that kept me for months out of my own home and away from my family. In learning a thing, however, one learns to love it. And Umstead State Park is very lovable.

I prepare to take Sherry to the bottom of this steep trail, the off trail for a brief distance to settle in below one of the small dams on Sycamore Creek. She interrogates me before we go.

“Jessie [her son, my stepson] told me that you walked seven miles in here just to find a fishing hole. Are you about to do something like that to me?”

It’s a joke… I think. Jessie exaggerates. It wasn’t more than three miles, tops. Jessie and I occasionally go to Umstead, and have since not long after we moved to Raleigh twelve yeas ago, to fish. We know a crappie hole on Big Lake and one below the dam along the southeastern turn of Big Lake. We have found bass all through Sycamore Creek, and sun fish, and bluegill, and channel catfish.

Sherry and I park near the equine trail head, and strike off east and south to intersect Sycamore Trail… marked by discrete little blue plastic triangles tacked into the trees at inter-visible points along the way.

Before we traverse the first couple of hundred meters, she begins commenting on various things in the park to sketch. She likes the fallen, weathered trees, and the knotty-rope designs emerging as tree roots along the path. Even puddling along as we were, the descent into Sycamore Creek Valley was accomplished by the time we warmed up.

Below the dam at the southeastern point of Sycamore Lake, there is a giant cascade of stone blocks and ledges – stones the size of buses, airplanes, whales – that layer themselves like a piece of the earth’s spinal column along a turn from the spillway to the resumption of Sycamore Creek below. The creek restarts itself as a 500-square-foot pool that flashes with ravenous bream. Across the pool from the trail side, there is a very old, dry-stacked stone wall, bonded together now by great masses of moist moss, lichen, insect dens, roots…

In the wall there is oldness; but in the rocks there is direct contact with the ancient, time measured in millions of years.

Sherry settles in at water’s edge, at the end of a long whaleback of gray stone, decorated by quartz seams from half an inch to a foot wide. The pool forms a big mirror of the sky that backlights her, even though her back is now to me. I climb up higher to look quietly down; and when I get as high as I can, right at the dam’s edge, Sherry forms this painter’s image, her seated form punctuating the smooth stoniness of smooth stone and the reflective wetness of a pool right where they come together. The same light hits everything. She looks new to me right that moment. We never have time to get to places that have the kind of space where we can see one another from a distance… new.

Sitting above her like that, I looked closely – with my reading glasses on – at a bright lichen pattern on a boulder. It looked like a Mandelbrot design, repeating boundary designs on smaller and smaller scales, until I realized that a single line tracing the border of this lichen might stretch out for a mile. Right there, lit up in the middle of the day, and all I had to do was walk out there, sit down, and put on my glasses.

I had Sherry – washed in a new light – and this place where a serene complexity is still a manifestation of God’s voice. I ate a little bread. Then I got the notion of feeding fish.

Sherry and I started rolling dough-balls and tossing them into the pool, where the fish would rise up into view and attack the crumbling bread.

I remember reading Norman Wirzba on the subject of Sabbath… recently, in fact, so some things were fresh in memory. The bread ran out. Sherry sketched, and I meandered around, even climbing a wooded hillside to pretend I was spying on her… her down there, at water’s edge, sharing the light with everything, apparently alone and apparently content. She was paying attention to rocks jutting out of the creek; and they were in turn paying attention to her. Wirzba said that Sabbath is a time set aside to just be in Creation. God, in the first book of the scriptures, says that Creation is good. The Rule is… remember the Sabbath. Let everything and everyone rest for a day, just one day out of seven. Interrupt yourselves.

Now I find myself out here, laying back and looking through the leaves at the sky, or gazing down through the vegetation at Sherry and the pool and the old stone wall… at peace.

Wirzba also emphasized another aspect of Sabbath: “Sabbath observance is what we work toward.”

And a lot more… interrupting is important on its own account.

“So what is at stake,” says Wirzba, “in Sabbath observance is not simply that we manage to pause and refuel enough to continue in our frantic and sometimes destructive ways. The real issue is whether we can learn to see, and then welcome, the divine presence where we are. Can we link up as servants of God’s covenantal love and see in that service our unending joy? …If we can do this truly, without the anxiety, worry, fear, competitiveness, and aggression that otherwise punctuate our life patterns, then we will have caught a glimpse of heaven…”

Nowadays, with the financial sword of Damocles hanging over us, we are witnesses to the pain and injustice at the end of a period of unceasing and completely restless competition. Everyone talks about policy in these historic pre-election days; but now the association of Sabbath and Jubilee are clearer than ever… as a way of life, as the embodiment of the kingdom of God. God said to interrupt things, frequently – every seven days, every seven years, every seven-times-seven years; and it seems pretty apparent to me that there were some very good reasons for this constant interruption. Without it, all manner of evil becomes joined with power. Sabbath and Jubilee are an embarrassment to those of us who live in this time as Jews and Christians, with secular modernism’s apotheosis of wealth accumulation. Sabbath and Jubilee, for human beings, is designed to place tight limits on hyper-accumulation as an evil in itself.

What party do you belong to?

The Sabbath and Jubilee Party. Does that make me a theocrat?

We have to start somewhere. Here I suppose. Sherry and I will be checking weather reports on Sundays. We want to do this every time we get the chance. We need to practice at creating interruptions. If we learn to make these little interruptions, then maybe we’ll figure out how to make the big ones.

When we got ready to leave, we decided to climb a small bluff to take a shortcut. Two old fifty-somethings about to do some dumb stuff. We survived the ascent, after sacrificing our dignity to scrabble for hand-holds on tree roots, grunting and laughing like hyenas.

Along the shortcut, smartass Sherry starts on the mendacious seven-mile story of Jessie’s… “you’re not walking me seven miles, too, are you?” It’s easy to be goofy out here in the woods.

That evening, we did something – for us — odd. We laid down together and watched three consecutive episodes of the documentary, “The History of Rock and Roll.” The content was not the important thing, even though it was fun and interesting and nostalgic. We had stepped into Sabbath, into a mode of reception that requires interruption of the rest of life’s obligations and obsessions; and we weren’t ready to come back yet.