∞
Secular Liturgy
Last night I attended the Maundy Thursday service at our church. I admit I'm not a fan of sitting still, of pews in general, or of listening to sermons. I also haven't got any great love for singing with a small congregation that doesn't really like to sing.
But I've found I need liturgy in my life. Liturgies help me mark seasons. More than that, liturgies create seasons. That's what I really need, because the creation of seasons becomes, for me, a discipline of memory.
Liturgies help me to count my days, which in turn helps me to make my days count.
I used to chafe at the remembrance of birthdays. Why should one day count more than any other? And why should one day seem more a holiday than another?
I'm slowly getting it. There is nothing special about the day; what is special is the use of the day. Cheerless debunkers never tire of pointing out to me that western Christmas is celebrated on a Roman holiday, that Easter is *really* some kind of fertility rite because it's celebrated in the springtime, that all my holidays don't mean what I think they mean because someone once celebrated them in another way. As though the genealogy of the holiday should be its only meaning, as though the celebrations of the past should have magical power over me, as though I had no power to make the days mean something new to me.
And it is true: holidays and liturgies do have power. As I have said before, what we cherish in our hearts we worship, and what we worship we come to resemble or imitate. Holidays are always about remembering, and remembering is cherishing. Of course, we don't all cherish the same things. Memorial Day is, for some, a remembrance of valor and sacrifice. For others, it is a good day for a picnic with family. Both are forms of cherishing, though the thing cherished is quite different.
Much of the difference probably comes from mindfulness and intention, or lack of intention. Everyone cherishes something, but not all of us think about what we cherish. Liturgies help me to cherish mindfully.
Which is why every April 4th I read or listen to Dr. King's "I Have A Dream" speech, and weep at his loss. And why every July 4th I read the Declaration of Independence. I have set aside days in my year, every year, to read texts like these, texts that have shaped my community. Because these texts aren't done with their shaping. Texts don't hit us once and do all their work; texts seep into us, their words become our words.
Reading and re-reading and reading aloud in communities - these things are like the pouring of water through leaves or grounds - the reading percolates through the words and picks up the essential oils, the savor, the color and taste of the text, and delivers it to us like tea or hot coffee. We taste the words and then the words enter our guts, our veins, our souls.
I recently read an interview with a woman who said "I don't need to go to church to believe those things," referring to her church's beliefs. True. Just as I don't need to go to the gym to get exercise, or to believe that exercise is good for me. But if I don't make a habit of getting exercise, I find I tend not to get what my body needs. The urgent matters in life so easily overwhelm the important ones. Often, when I return from the gym, my wife asks me "How was the gym?" I always think, "It was hard. Everything I do at the gym is difficult." But it is worth doing, because it helps me to maintain my health, and to fight my own decline, to fight the slow slipping away of what I want to hold onto as long as I can. If I do this for my body, why should I not also do it for my heart and mind?
I'm not writing this to endorse all liturgies. I'm confident that there are liturgies that celebrate awful things, and that there are participants in liturgies who make poor use of the liturgies they sit through. As with most of what I write here, I'm trying to sort out what I believe, and why -- as another kind of discipline, one of remembering, and of being mindful of what I believe.
The liturgy of Maundy Thursday is not an easy one, because it reminds me of two things I am capable of: I am capable, like Jesus, of washing others' feet, and of living a life of love; and I am capable, like Jesus' friends, of betraying those people and ideals I most claim to cherish and worship. If my worship is only worship in words, I find it easy to forget to worship what is best with my body, with my life. Liturgies - and we all have liturgies - are the ways I remind my whole person to stop and remember what my words claim so easily to believe.
But I've found I need liturgy in my life. Liturgies help me mark seasons. More than that, liturgies create seasons. That's what I really need, because the creation of seasons becomes, for me, a discipline of memory.
Liturgies help me to count my days, which in turn helps me to make my days count.
I used to chafe at the remembrance of birthdays. Why should one day count more than any other? And why should one day seem more a holiday than another?
I'm slowly getting it. There is nothing special about the day; what is special is the use of the day. Cheerless debunkers never tire of pointing out to me that western Christmas is celebrated on a Roman holiday, that Easter is *really* some kind of fertility rite because it's celebrated in the springtime, that all my holidays don't mean what I think they mean because someone once celebrated them in another way. As though the genealogy of the holiday should be its only meaning, as though the celebrations of the past should have magical power over me, as though I had no power to make the days mean something new to me.
And it is true: holidays and liturgies do have power. As I have said before, what we cherish in our hearts we worship, and what we worship we come to resemble or imitate. Holidays are always about remembering, and remembering is cherishing. Of course, we don't all cherish the same things. Memorial Day is, for some, a remembrance of valor and sacrifice. For others, it is a good day for a picnic with family. Both are forms of cherishing, though the thing cherished is quite different.
Much of the difference probably comes from mindfulness and intention, or lack of intention. Everyone cherishes something, but not all of us think about what we cherish. Liturgies help me to cherish mindfully.
Which is why every April 4th I read or listen to Dr. King's "I Have A Dream" speech, and weep at his loss. And why every July 4th I read the Declaration of Independence. I have set aside days in my year, every year, to read texts like these, texts that have shaped my community. Because these texts aren't done with their shaping. Texts don't hit us once and do all their work; texts seep into us, their words become our words.
Reading and re-reading and reading aloud in communities - these things are like the pouring of water through leaves or grounds - the reading percolates through the words and picks up the essential oils, the savor, the color and taste of the text, and delivers it to us like tea or hot coffee. We taste the words and then the words enter our guts, our veins, our souls.
I recently read an interview with a woman who said "I don't need to go to church to believe those things," referring to her church's beliefs. True. Just as I don't need to go to the gym to get exercise, or to believe that exercise is good for me. But if I don't make a habit of getting exercise, I find I tend not to get what my body needs. The urgent matters in life so easily overwhelm the important ones. Often, when I return from the gym, my wife asks me "How was the gym?" I always think, "It was hard. Everything I do at the gym is difficult." But it is worth doing, because it helps me to maintain my health, and to fight my own decline, to fight the slow slipping away of what I want to hold onto as long as I can. If I do this for my body, why should I not also do it for my heart and mind?
 |
| The words percolate through us, and enter our veins. |
I'm not writing this to endorse all liturgies. I'm confident that there are liturgies that celebrate awful things, and that there are participants in liturgies who make poor use of the liturgies they sit through. As with most of what I write here, I'm trying to sort out what I believe, and why -- as another kind of discipline, one of remembering, and of being mindful of what I believe.
The liturgy of Maundy Thursday is not an easy one, because it reminds me of two things I am capable of: I am capable, like Jesus, of washing others' feet, and of living a life of love; and I am capable, like Jesus' friends, of betraying those people and ideals I most claim to cherish and worship. If my worship is only worship in words, I find it easy to forget to worship what is best with my body, with my life. Liturgies - and we all have liturgies - are the ways I remind my whole person to stop and remember what my words claim so easily to believe.
∞
My Dad Is So Cool
Between 1959 and 1962 my dad worked for NASA. He was an engineer at IBM, who contracted him out to work on our fledgling space program. How cool is that? My dad helped design equipment in the Mercury Control Center at Cape Canaveral. He wasn't an astronaut; he made astronauts possible.
Aristotle knew it: part of human excellence is pursuing knowledge of the world around us - of the cosmos we inhabit. My father isn't a formally trained philosopher, but he was one of the first people to teach me philosophy. Often, on Wednesdays after work, he'd take me out for pizza and cover napkins with chemical formulas, bits of logic, linguistic information he'd learned from reading Chomsky or from studying Russian and French, the history of circuit design, lessons in physics. And I ate it up as readily as I ate up the pizza. He was - and still is, thanks be to God - a man full of wisdom, and that wisdom is evinced by his desire to know more about the world around him.
If that doesn't convince you that my dad is one of the world's coolest dads, consider this: after pizza, he'd always take me to the local arcade and give me half a roll of quarters so I could play video games. The other half of the roll of quarters? He used it to play alongside me.
Thanks, Dad.
If that doesn't convince you that my dad is one of the world's coolest dads, consider this: after pizza, he'd always take me to the local arcade and give me half a roll of quarters so I could play video games. The other half of the roll of quarters? He used it to play alongside me.
Thanks, Dad.
∞
Is Philosophy Useful?
What can you do with a philosophy major? William James quipped that philosophy "bakes no bread." That is, it is not a discipline one studies in order to learn how to practice a particular craft or trade. Philosophy tries to think about and understand everything, which makes it a discipline that does the opposite of specialization.
This leads some people to assume that philosophy is useless. But that is only partly--and largely irrelevantly--true. As Rémi Brague has said, the study of the history of philosophy is freedom. As he puts it, "Dodging history makes us fall prey to doxa." To put it in other terms, if we don't study the history of philosophy, we forget who we are, and believe what we believe without reasons. To be human is to ask who we are; and asking who we are is philosophical.
Let me put this in simpler terms: if you don't ask philosophical questions - and seek their answers - someone else will do it for you. Here's the thing: asking those questions and seeking those answers might be the thing that makes us most human, and most free.
So the answer to my initial question is another question: without philosophy, how will you remain free?
 |
| What does it mean to be human? |
Let me put this in simpler terms: if you don't ask philosophical questions - and seek their answers - someone else will do it for you. Here's the thing: asking those questions and seeking those answers might be the thing that makes us most human, and most free.
So the answer to my initial question is another question: without philosophy, how will you remain free?
∞
The Pastoral And The Personal In Theodicy
Theodicies, like some virtue ethics and certain ontological arguments, are easy targets for refutation, but much depends on the way they are used.
A theodicy is an attempt to reconcile the apparent evil in the world with the alleged goodness of God, often by showing that the very goodness of God makes some evil necessary; or by arguing that the goodness of God is amplified by a certain amount of evil. In other words, the evil we experience and witness is, in the end, made to serve goodness.
When theodicies are spoken publicly and authoritatively, there is a real danger that they will be used to justify further evil. If evil serves good, and evil is easier to accomplish directly than goodness, why not practice evil?
There's also the very real danger that theodicies will isolate us from one another. Sometimes some perversity in us makes us inclined to tell someone who is experiencing fresh grief that "it's all for the good," or "it will all work out well in the end," or "your loved one is now in a better place." I would guess we do this because we do not know what else to say, and because we want the discomfort of grief banished from our presence. In which case we speak those words like an incantation, using magic to make the unpleasantness disappear. But the grief is not detachable from the griever, so to will the banishment of the mourning is to will the death of the mourner. In simpler terms, when we invoke thoughtless theodicies, sometimes we are committing human sacrifice - throwing out the mourner - in order to comfort ourselves.
In spite of this, I think there is still a place for theodicies - just as there is a place for ontological arguments - provided they originate with the believer and are not forced upon her. The mourner who chooses to believe that the dearly departed have gone to well-earned rest may believe that. That belief may be the germination of the seeds of honor and love, or the expression of grief combined with commitment to the flourishing of the memory of the beloved - it may be the fruit of the idea that the cosmos has no right to bring this love to an end. You may destroy the body, but the soul you shall not take from me.
Of course, the mourner's grief should not turn into fixed doctrine for the rest of us, either. Some things we simply don't know. Death is a horizon we pass only once, a boundary that few - if any - signs are allowed to pass over. But precisely because we do not know what comes after - because we do not even know ourselves much of the time - we may allow others what they need to endure their losses, neither forcing our justifications of evil upon them, nor denying them the explanations that may give them the comfort their hearts need.
A theodicy is an attempt to reconcile the apparent evil in the world with the alleged goodness of God, often by showing that the very goodness of God makes some evil necessary; or by arguing that the goodness of God is amplified by a certain amount of evil. In other words, the evil we experience and witness is, in the end, made to serve goodness.
 |
| Roman tombs in southern Crete. |
There's also the very real danger that theodicies will isolate us from one another. Sometimes some perversity in us makes us inclined to tell someone who is experiencing fresh grief that "it's all for the good," or "it will all work out well in the end," or "your loved one is now in a better place." I would guess we do this because we do not know what else to say, and because we want the discomfort of grief banished from our presence. In which case we speak those words like an incantation, using magic to make the unpleasantness disappear. But the grief is not detachable from the griever, so to will the banishment of the mourning is to will the death of the mourner. In simpler terms, when we invoke thoughtless theodicies, sometimes we are committing human sacrifice - throwing out the mourner - in order to comfort ourselves.
In spite of this, I think there is still a place for theodicies - just as there is a place for ontological arguments - provided they originate with the believer and are not forced upon her. The mourner who chooses to believe that the dearly departed have gone to well-earned rest may believe that. That belief may be the germination of the seeds of honor and love, or the expression of grief combined with commitment to the flourishing of the memory of the beloved - it may be the fruit of the idea that the cosmos has no right to bring this love to an end. You may destroy the body, but the soul you shall not take from me.
 | ||
| My great aunt and great uncle. Here lie their bodies. |
∞
A Gift Of A Sponge
My father bundled us into our hats and coats and then into his little red VW and drove us to the Caldor store in Kingston. The first Christmas I can now remember was fast approaching, and he wanted my brother, my sister and me to choose gifts for our mother.
I had no idea how to shop, of course, so my father asked me to think about what my mother liked. The only thing I could think was that I often saw her cleaning things: washing dishes, cleaning floors and windows, doing laundry. Obviously, she must like cleaning quite a lot.
So I decided to buy her a sponge.
My father balked at this, but I insisted. This is what she likes, this is what I want to buy.
Two events that followed have imprinted themselves forever on my memory, have made me forever grateful to my parents.
First, Dad let me buy it. It's not at all what he would have chosen. But he gave me the gift of letting me decide, the gift of the long, slow welcome into responsible adulthood.
Second, mom loved it. Let me clarify that: she loved the gift, and she thanked me warmly and genuinely, smilingly. And so she gave me a gift as well, the gift of teaching me how to receive the offerings of others with grace; the gift of her love that consecrated my poor offering.
Both of them gave me another gift as well, of course: I had no money to buy the sponge, so I used theirs. I took their money and spent it on what they did not need, on a gift that, coming from another person or from me at a different age, would have been offensive. They gave me the gift of ennobling my shabby token into a gift of great worth.
No year of my life has passed in which I have not thought of that kitchen sponge. It reminds me that no act of kindness towards a child is wasted. It reminds me of my parents' love for me, love that I fumblingly attempt to pass on to my children as I seek to give them the difficult gift of autonomy.
And my parents, in that Christmas, gave me hope that the poor offerings of my worship - in which I spend what is not really mine in order to give a gift that is not really needed - might really matter, not because they are intrinsically great, but because of the love and grace with which they might be received, and consecrated.
I had no idea how to shop, of course, so my father asked me to think about what my mother liked. The only thing I could think was that I often saw her cleaning things: washing dishes, cleaning floors and windows, doing laundry. Obviously, she must like cleaning quite a lot.
So I decided to buy her a sponge.
My father balked at this, but I insisted. This is what she likes, this is what I want to buy.
Two events that followed have imprinted themselves forever on my memory, have made me forever grateful to my parents.
 |
| Dad and Mom were young once, too. |
Second, mom loved it. Let me clarify that: she loved the gift, and she thanked me warmly and genuinely, smilingly. And so she gave me a gift as well, the gift of teaching me how to receive the offerings of others with grace; the gift of her love that consecrated my poor offering.
Both of them gave me another gift as well, of course: I had no money to buy the sponge, so I used theirs. I took their money and spent it on what they did not need, on a gift that, coming from another person or from me at a different age, would have been offensive. They gave me the gift of ennobling my shabby token into a gift of great worth.
No year of my life has passed in which I have not thought of that kitchen sponge. It reminds me that no act of kindness towards a child is wasted. It reminds me of my parents' love for me, love that I fumblingly attempt to pass on to my children as I seek to give them the difficult gift of autonomy.
 |
| A gift from my students; it means more to me than words can easily say. |
And my parents, in that Christmas, gave me hope that the poor offerings of my worship - in which I spend what is not really mine in order to give a gift that is not really needed - might really matter, not because they are intrinsically great, but because of the love and grace with which they might be received, and consecrated.
∞
Love One Another: Prisons and Devotion to Enemies
In his first book, Stride Toward Freedom, Dr. King wrote "We adopt the means of nonviolence because our end is a community at peace with itself." Paraphrasing Gandhi, he added a word for those who considered themselves his enemies, "In winning our freedom we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process."
This is a radical idea, one that is like the ideas of Jesus and St Paul that we should love our enemies. If your mind does not stumble over those words, you might be a saint; or you might not be listening to them.
King's argument is that we need our enemies. They need us to make them into the kind of people who embody love, not hatred. And we need - in the depths of our souls - the work of loving them in such a way that we win them over to the side of love and away from the crippling hatred that owns them.
It is easy to say "that's fine for church," or "I will love my enemy in my heart but in my life I will punish him." But what would happen if we thought of our worst enemies - I have in mind criminals and terrorists, the people we most seem to fear - as people with a "heart and conscience" that could be won. As people without whom we are incomplete.
We're good at finding ways to make people pay for their wrongdoing. We have great technology for warfare, and a brilliant system of criminal investigation and prosecution, perhaps the best history has ever seen. I don't propose eliminating those things. Instead, I am asking this: what if we decided that we would put the same creative energy and financial resources that have gone into creating our fine military, police, and courts into winning the consciences of our enemies?
When it comes to our anti-terror policies, I don't see what we can do to win terrorists' consciences, other than living our lives in such a way that anyone who supports our would-be enemies must feel shame at hating such virtuous people. That sounds to me like an end worth pursuing for its own sake, after all.
As for our prisons, our prisons seem to be good at exposing non-criminals to criminals; and to exposing criminals to more criminals, breeding gang culture. Violent criminals surely merit our censure, extraction from society, and punishment. But that doesn't mean our hearts need to be full of a desire for vengeance.
I'm not good at this, but I'm trying to become the kind of person who regards criminals as people I need, who need me to love them, who need me to win their consciences.
I believe a society needs to be prepared to use force against those who would forcefully harm others. But increasingly I am coming to believe that individuals in each society also need to be prepared to fight fire not with fire but with the healing waters of love, waters that overflow from hearts that daily struggle to regard the people we most hate and fear as the people we also most need to love. It's not easy. But it may be the only way to become "a community at peace with itself."
This is a radical idea, one that is like the ideas of Jesus and St Paul that we should love our enemies. If your mind does not stumble over those words, you might be a saint; or you might not be listening to them.
King's argument is that we need our enemies. They need us to make them into the kind of people who embody love, not hatred. And we need - in the depths of our souls - the work of loving them in such a way that we win them over to the side of love and away from the crippling hatred that owns them.
It is easy to say "that's fine for church," or "I will love my enemy in my heart but in my life I will punish him." But what would happen if we thought of our worst enemies - I have in mind criminals and terrorists, the people we most seem to fear - as people with a "heart and conscience" that could be won. As people without whom we are incomplete.
We're good at finding ways to make people pay for their wrongdoing. We have great technology for warfare, and a brilliant system of criminal investigation and prosecution, perhaps the best history has ever seen. I don't propose eliminating those things. Instead, I am asking this: what if we decided that we would put the same creative energy and financial resources that have gone into creating our fine military, police, and courts into winning the consciences of our enemies?
When it comes to our anti-terror policies, I don't see what we can do to win terrorists' consciences, other than living our lives in such a way that anyone who supports our would-be enemies must feel shame at hating such virtuous people. That sounds to me like an end worth pursuing for its own sake, after all.
As for our prisons, our prisons seem to be good at exposing non-criminals to criminals; and to exposing criminals to more criminals, breeding gang culture. Violent criminals surely merit our censure, extraction from society, and punishment. But that doesn't mean our hearts need to be full of a desire for vengeance.
 |
| "Peace." Over the head of the angel of peace in Bruton Parish, Williamsburg, VA. |
I believe a society needs to be prepared to use force against those who would forcefully harm others. But increasingly I am coming to believe that individuals in each society also need to be prepared to fight fire not with fire but with the healing waters of love, waters that overflow from hearts that daily struggle to regard the people we most hate and fear as the people we also most need to love. It's not easy. But it may be the only way to become "a community at peace with itself."
*****
I have written two other posts about prisons, and Charles Peirce's reasons why our current system is a mark of insanity--or at least that it evinces a serious lack of love--here and here.
∞
A number of times in the last few years I've read statements by prominent scientists about the irrelevance of philosophy, echoing Richard Feynman's famous quip that "Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds."
Feynman was just talking about philosophers of science, which is just one narrow slice of the philosophic pie. More recently others, like Freeman Dyson, have made broader indictments of philosophy, or like Lawrence Krauss, of the humanities generally.
Dyson, in an article he wrote for the New York Review of Books, described today's philosophers as "a sorry bunch of dwarfs. They are thinking deep thoughts and giving scholarly lectures to academic audiences, but hardly anybody in the world outside is listening. They are historically insignificant." Yes, we have a technical vocabulary that outsiders often have trouble understanding. But that's true of every discipline. And yes, we don't seem to have anyone in our discipline who is writing the next Job or Republic right now, but that's been true almost always. No discipline consistently produces nothing but geniuses. Many of us in every discipline live our careers out bearing the gifts of the past forward to another generation so that they might benefit from them and add to them. And many of us are content to be forgotten as long as the books of wisdom entrusted to us are remembered.
In his recent book A Universe From Nothing, Krauss seems to be at pains to point out that without the sciences, the humanities are virtually useless, and that even with the sciences, the humanities are still virtually useless. His introduction pushes the humanities back at arm's length and invites them to clear out while science handles all the real heavy lifting.
What stands out for me as I read these scientists and some others writing in a similar vein is that they write like they're on the defensive and feeling embattled. My guess is that they see themselves or their disciplines as being engaged in an important fight about cultural values, science education, and research funding. The outsized reaction to Thomas Nagel's recent Mind and Cosmos - with its inflammatory subtitle, "Why The Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False" - suggests that many advocates of the sciences worry about any book that might give comfort to the enemy.
A siege mentality can make us distrustful of everyone, and especially of our critics, no matter how friendly. Dyson, Krauss, and others inclined to sideline the humanities would do well to remember that the humanities give them the tools with which to reason and write about the discoveries of science. If those of us in the humanities seem critical of the sciences, this doesn't mean we're unfriendly. The funny thing about Feynman's dictum is that as long as birds and people try to live together, birds actually do benefit from ornithologists. After all, ornithologists study the birds and their environments, and work to ensure that others see how important it is to preserve them. Of course, the birds in their daily lives will likely never know it.
I should add that philosophers like me benefit from ornithologists, too. I am especially grateful for the ornithologists at Cornell University for putting so much helpful information on their website for bird-watchers and ornithophiles like me.
The bird I have identified as a Cooper's hawk might be a sharp-shinned hawk; I often have trouble distinguishing them. We live on the migration path for ruby-throated hummingbirds, so we see them for two brief seasons, once in the spring and again in the fall. Mourning doves are notoriously poor parents, and we often find they've laid eggs in silly places. Fortunately for their species, they can produce multiple clutches each year.
If you're interested in both birds and philosophy, let me recommend Charles Hartshorne's book Why Birds Sing. Hartshorne suggests that maybe birds sing because they enjoy it. This may seem so obvious as to be silly, but it is a helpful addition to the usual claims that birds sing because singing is useful for mating, staking territorial claims, self-defense, and so on. Hartshorne doesn't allow us to reduce birds to bird-making machines. Which is helpful, because it's a reminder that we, too, are more than human-making machines. It's also good to be reminded that it's okay to sing for the sheer enjoyment of singing.
Do Birds Need Ornithologists?
 |
| Cooper's hawk in my backyard. |
Feynman was just talking about philosophers of science, which is just one narrow slice of the philosophic pie. More recently others, like Freeman Dyson, have made broader indictments of philosophy, or like Lawrence Krauss, of the humanities generally.
Dyson, in an article he wrote for the New York Review of Books, described today's philosophers as "a sorry bunch of dwarfs. They are thinking deep thoughts and giving scholarly lectures to academic audiences, but hardly anybody in the world outside is listening. They are historically insignificant." Yes, we have a technical vocabulary that outsiders often have trouble understanding. But that's true of every discipline. And yes, we don't seem to have anyone in our discipline who is writing the next Job or Republic right now, but that's been true almost always. No discipline consistently produces nothing but geniuses. Many of us in every discipline live our careers out bearing the gifts of the past forward to another generation so that they might benefit from them and add to them. And many of us are content to be forgotten as long as the books of wisdom entrusted to us are remembered.
 |
| Female ruby-throated hummingbird. |
In his recent book A Universe From Nothing, Krauss seems to be at pains to point out that without the sciences, the humanities are virtually useless, and that even with the sciences, the humanities are still virtually useless. His introduction pushes the humanities back at arm's length and invites them to clear out while science handles all the real heavy lifting.
What stands out for me as I read these scientists and some others writing in a similar vein is that they write like they're on the defensive and feeling embattled. My guess is that they see themselves or their disciplines as being engaged in an important fight about cultural values, science education, and research funding. The outsized reaction to Thomas Nagel's recent Mind and Cosmos - with its inflammatory subtitle, "Why The Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False" - suggests that many advocates of the sciences worry about any book that might give comfort to the enemy.
 |
| Mourning dove eggs in one of my flower pots. |
******
I should add that philosophers like me benefit from ornithologists, too. I am especially grateful for the ornithologists at Cornell University for putting so much helpful information on their website for bird-watchers and ornithophiles like me.
The bird I have identified as a Cooper's hawk might be a sharp-shinned hawk; I often have trouble distinguishing them. We live on the migration path for ruby-throated hummingbirds, so we see them for two brief seasons, once in the spring and again in the fall. Mourning doves are notoriously poor parents, and we often find they've laid eggs in silly places. Fortunately for their species, they can produce multiple clutches each year.
If you're interested in both birds and philosophy, let me recommend Charles Hartshorne's book Why Birds Sing. Hartshorne suggests that maybe birds sing because they enjoy it. This may seem so obvious as to be silly, but it is a helpful addition to the usual claims that birds sing because singing is useful for mating, staking territorial claims, self-defense, and so on. Hartshorne doesn't allow us to reduce birds to bird-making machines. Which is helpful, because it's a reminder that we, too, are more than human-making machines. It's also good to be reminded that it's okay to sing for the sheer enjoyment of singing.
∞
Drones and Virtue
My latest article, on UAV (drone) warfare and virtue ethics, co-authored with John Kaag. It's behind a paywall, but your local library might have a subscription to the Chronicle of Higher Education where you can see it in print (in the Chronicle Review, March 11, 2013) or through their library website.
∞
So, How's The Sabbatical Going?
That's a question I've been hearing a lot this year, and understandably so. Most of my friends and my students have never experienced one. I hope that all of them have a chance to take a sabbatical someday so they can see for themselves what a gift it is. Since so many of my students wonder what I am doing when I'm not on campus, I'm writing this mostly for them. Many of them have (very sweetly!) told me they miss me. Let me assure them: it's mutual. But it has also been very good for me to take this year away from the classroom.
Sabbaticals and Long Service Leaves
By coincidence, a handful of my friends were on some sort of sabbatical last summer. Mostly they work for tech firms that recognize that sabbaticals make for more creative, more productive workers. One of them was enjoying a long service leave that Australian law mandates.
Most jobs in the United States don't offer sabbaticals, but I'm fortunate enough to have one that does. Sometimes my kids chide me for choosing a job with relatively low pay, but self-regulated time is something money can't easily buy. I think I chose my career pretty well.
I say "self-regulated time" because my sabbatical isn't early retirement or a long vacation. My job as a college professor has three basic components: teaching, scholarship, and service. A sabbatical frees me from the first of those components, and from parts of the third. More precisely, it frees me from the daily tasks of teaching and service, but I expect that at the end of this year I will be a better teacher because I've had time to do research and to tear down and rebuild some of my classes. And any college capable of taking the long view knows that faculty who take sabbaticals can render better service over the long haul.
What I've been doing
To the casual observer it probably looks like I've spent a lot of time in coffee shops and airports, and not much else. For the last three years I've devoted myself to teaching and service, giving only a little of my time to scholarship. So when I began my sabbatical my scholarly life felt like deep waters pent up behind a strained dam. Over the last few years I've sketched out five books and seven articles and book chapters. Over my sabbatical I hoped to get maybe one book and a couple of articles done. That may not sound like much, but it's fairly ambitious, given how much time it takes to do the research and to write well.
Since my job description breaks down into the three parts I mentioned above, let me say a few words about what I've been doing this year in each of those areas.
Writing: As for academic writing, so far, I've completed one book (on brook trout), and made significant progress on two others (both on the philosophy of religion). Once I get them done, books four and five are ready to go, too. I've submitted one book chapter for someone else's book, and I'm about to submit another. I've written a few book reviews for popular and scholarly journals, too. Last week I gave a lecture at the College of William and Mary on war and evil. Now I'm preparing that lecture for publication as a journal article. By the time this sabbatical is over, I hope to have at least one book under contract and two more articles sent off for review. I've also done some more popular writing, including a couple of articles on virtue ethics in the Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review - one on guns and one on the ethics of drones or UAVs. Perhaps most importantly, I've been writing every day. As you can see, I've been trying to write quickly here on this blog a couple of times a week, and I've been writing in a lot of other places as well. Like any other skill, it comes more fluidly with practice.
Teaching: I've also had the pleasure of planning some new classes, including one I plan to co-teach on environmental science and ecology, and a course for alumni I'll teach in Greece this summer with another Classics professor. And I have a whopping stack of books I've wanted to read that I've been devouring hungrily. When you're the professor, it's also good to be the student as often as possible.
Service: Even though I'm away from campus, my heart is still there. Everything I do as a professor winds up leaning back towards the classroom, which means towards my students. Nothing I do matters more than the people I do it with and for, I think. I must have written sixty letters of recommendation for students this year (which is more time-intensive than one might think). Sabbatical has also given me the chance to help some colleagues here and at other universities. I've been helping half a dozen friends who teach Classics, Philosophy, and Biology at other universities by reading and commenting on drafts of their essays and books. And I've done a lot of "double-blind" reviewing for six or seven academic publishers who want advice on whether to publish certain books or journal articles. Best of all has been time to collaborate with colleagues in far-off places, corresponding with professors and graduate students around the world about philosophy, ecology, Scriptural Reasoning, Henry Bugbee, Charles Peirce, C.S. Lewis, and other matters close to my heart. I list this as "service" but I could just as well call it "ways I've learned from other people far away."
But Have You Taken Some Time To Rest?
Yes. The word "sabbatical" has its roots in a Hebrew word, shabbath, meaning "to rest." It would be a shame not to use the time to get some rest. Last summer I spent two weeks in a writing retreat sponsored by Oregon State at their Shotpouch Creek Cabin with my friend and co-author Matthew Dickerson. We were working, but what restful work it can be to live, think, and write quietly with a friend. We spent half of each day writing, and the other half talking, hiking, fishing, wading in the ocean. We borrowed some hymnals from an Episcopal church in Eugene and spent part of each evening singing as the sun declined behind the coastal range.
On my way to Oregon, I drove my sons to the coast last summer to look at colleges, to go whale-watching, and to watch some professional soccer matches. When I got home to Sioux Falls, I joined a gym and I became my son's rec league soccer coach. This is his last year of living at home with us, and I can't tell you how grateful I am to have this time with him before adulthood takes him off on the next leg of his life's journey. Despite all the work, and travel, and writing, I've had more time with my wife and my kids, and more time for self-care. I feel much healthier and fitter now than I did a year ago. I have a feeling my family is better off for that, too.
I wish everyone, regardless of their line of work, could have an experience like this every few years. It might remind us all what matters. It's expensive, I know. I took a hefty pay cut from an already modest salary to have this year off, and thankfully our savings have been enough to get us through. (And writing and lecturing makes me a few extra ducats to send to my daughter in college from time to time or to spend on my boys at home.)
No doubt some people will read this and wonder why my college is willing to pay me anything at all when I'm not showing up to work. The answer is that some colleges still take the long view. You have to put aside your monthly planner and get a calendar that measures time and value "not by the times but by the eternities" (pace Thoreau), that looks down the years the way a carpenter holds a plank to her eye and looks down the full length of the board rather than seeing only the grain of what is nearest. Money has been spent on me this year by people who thought it worthwhile to let me stretch from my cramped pose. They have let me drink from distant streams so that I can come back nourished not just by the Big Sioux and the Missouri but by the waters of Oregon and New York and Virginia - and in some sense by the Hippocrene itself.
So that's what I've been doing. I'm sorry I haven't been around campus much. In the long run, what I've been doing should make my return to campus a very good one indeed. I can't wait to tell you more about what I've learned this year once I return.
Sabbaticals and Long Service Leaves
 |
| Sabbaticals can be seasons of letting dry husks bear new life. |
Most jobs in the United States don't offer sabbaticals, but I'm fortunate enough to have one that does. Sometimes my kids chide me for choosing a job with relatively low pay, but self-regulated time is something money can't easily buy. I think I chose my career pretty well.
I say "self-regulated time" because my sabbatical isn't early retirement or a long vacation. My job as a college professor has three basic components: teaching, scholarship, and service. A sabbatical frees me from the first of those components, and from parts of the third. More precisely, it frees me from the daily tasks of teaching and service, but I expect that at the end of this year I will be a better teacher because I've had time to do research and to tear down and rebuild some of my classes. And any college capable of taking the long view knows that faculty who take sabbaticals can render better service over the long haul.
What I've been doing
To the casual observer it probably looks like I've spent a lot of time in coffee shops and airports, and not much else. For the last three years I've devoted myself to teaching and service, giving only a little of my time to scholarship. So when I began my sabbatical my scholarly life felt like deep waters pent up behind a strained dam. Over the last few years I've sketched out five books and seven articles and book chapters. Over my sabbatical I hoped to get maybe one book and a couple of articles done. That may not sound like much, but it's fairly ambitious, given how much time it takes to do the research and to write well.
Since my job description breaks down into the three parts I mentioned above, let me say a few words about what I've been doing this year in each of those areas.
Writing: As for academic writing, so far, I've completed one book (on brook trout), and made significant progress on two others (both on the philosophy of religion). Once I get them done, books four and five are ready to go, too. I've submitted one book chapter for someone else's book, and I'm about to submit another. I've written a few book reviews for popular and scholarly journals, too. Last week I gave a lecture at the College of William and Mary on war and evil. Now I'm preparing that lecture for publication as a journal article. By the time this sabbatical is over, I hope to have at least one book under contract and two more articles sent off for review. I've also done some more popular writing, including a couple of articles on virtue ethics in the Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review - one on guns and one on the ethics of drones or UAVs. Perhaps most importantly, I've been writing every day. As you can see, I've been trying to write quickly here on this blog a couple of times a week, and I've been writing in a lot of other places as well. Like any other skill, it comes more fluidly with practice.
 | ||
| Snail shells grow by slow accumulation, as habits do. |
Service: Even though I'm away from campus, my heart is still there. Everything I do as a professor winds up leaning back towards the classroom, which means towards my students. Nothing I do matters more than the people I do it with and for, I think. I must have written sixty letters of recommendation for students this year (which is more time-intensive than one might think). Sabbatical has also given me the chance to help some colleagues here and at other universities. I've been helping half a dozen friends who teach Classics, Philosophy, and Biology at other universities by reading and commenting on drafts of their essays and books. And I've done a lot of "double-blind" reviewing for six or seven academic publishers who want advice on whether to publish certain books or journal articles. Best of all has been time to collaborate with colleagues in far-off places, corresponding with professors and graduate students around the world about philosophy, ecology, Scriptural Reasoning, Henry Bugbee, Charles Peirce, C.S. Lewis, and other matters close to my heart. I list this as "service" but I could just as well call it "ways I've learned from other people far away."
 |
| The license plate on the rental car I had at a recent conference. |
Yes. The word "sabbatical" has its roots in a Hebrew word, shabbath, meaning "to rest." It would be a shame not to use the time to get some rest. Last summer I spent two weeks in a writing retreat sponsored by Oregon State at their Shotpouch Creek Cabin with my friend and co-author Matthew Dickerson. We were working, but what restful work it can be to live, think, and write quietly with a friend. We spent half of each day writing, and the other half talking, hiking, fishing, wading in the ocean. We borrowed some hymnals from an Episcopal church in Eugene and spent part of each evening singing as the sun declined behind the coastal range.
On my way to Oregon, I drove my sons to the coast last summer to look at colleges, to go whale-watching, and to watch some professional soccer matches. When I got home to Sioux Falls, I joined a gym and I became my son's rec league soccer coach. This is his last year of living at home with us, and I can't tell you how grateful I am to have this time with him before adulthood takes him off on the next leg of his life's journey. Despite all the work, and travel, and writing, I've had more time with my wife and my kids, and more time for self-care. I feel much healthier and fitter now than I did a year ago. I have a feeling my family is better off for that, too.
I wish everyone, regardless of their line of work, could have an experience like this every few years. It might remind us all what matters. It's expensive, I know. I took a hefty pay cut from an already modest salary to have this year off, and thankfully our savings have been enough to get us through. (And writing and lecturing makes me a few extra ducats to send to my daughter in college from time to time or to spend on my boys at home.)
No doubt some people will read this and wonder why my college is willing to pay me anything at all when I'm not showing up to work. The answer is that some colleges still take the long view. You have to put aside your monthly planner and get a calendar that measures time and value "not by the times but by the eternities" (pace Thoreau), that looks down the years the way a carpenter holds a plank to her eye and looks down the full length of the board rather than seeing only the grain of what is nearest. Money has been spent on me this year by people who thought it worthwhile to let me stretch from my cramped pose. They have let me drink from distant streams so that I can come back nourished not just by the Big Sioux and the Missouri but by the waters of Oregon and New York and Virginia - and in some sense by the Hippocrene itself.
So that's what I've been doing. I'm sorry I haven't been around campus much. In the long run, what I've been doing should make my return to campus a very good one indeed. I can't wait to tell you more about what I've learned this year once I return.
∞
The Purpose of Profits
Today I spoke with a young entrepreneur I know. He has built a thriving business that provides income for half a dozen people, and now he is thinking about what to do with his business. His plan, he says, is to use it as a source of income for non-profits.
This entrepreneur -- let's call him Tom* -- believes that the purpose of profit is to do good for others. He seems to be a deeply religious man, and he sees this as a way of sharing the gifts he has received from God with others. Says he doesn't see why any CEO needs to make more than enough, which he defines as being about $70,000 a year.
Tom is one of those people who make me pause and reconsider my own financial goals, hopes, and fears. When I think about investing and saving, I admit I'm worried about not having enough someday. What if I lose my job, or suffer an injury that keeps me from working? Will we have enough for us to provide for our kids and to retire on?
Tom's view is peculiar: he would rather have a rich community than a rich savings account. He's trying to embody the lesson of the "parable of the unjust manager," who decided it was better to have friends than money; or of the stories of the early church in the Book of Acts. If I remember right, those stories inspired Karl Marx as well.
My friend Tom is no St Francis, and he's not taking a vow of poverty. He's just drawing a line and refusing to let the clamor of financial fear drown out the song of hope. Like so many religious people, his hopes are as extravagant as they are counter-cultural. And they're prophetic, at least in the way Cornel West uses that word. At least, that's what I heard in Tom's story today: he wants to do good with his money, and some of that good will be reminding us that fear is not a good master.
A few years ago a friend who taught in the business school at Penn State was engaged in a study of businesses that were trying to bring together the ideals of for-profits and non-profits - businesses like Nutriset - that were trying to generate profits by producing good things at reasonable prices. I have to say that dreaming about this way of combining capitalism and social good inspires me.
*I'm not giving out his name or his business name because I don't want to cause him to be flooded with funding requests.
This entrepreneur -- let's call him Tom* -- believes that the purpose of profit is to do good for others. He seems to be a deeply religious man, and he sees this as a way of sharing the gifts he has received from God with others. Says he doesn't see why any CEO needs to make more than enough, which he defines as being about $70,000 a year.
 |
| Can't buy me love. |
Tom is one of those people who make me pause and reconsider my own financial goals, hopes, and fears. When I think about investing and saving, I admit I'm worried about not having enough someday. What if I lose my job, or suffer an injury that keeps me from working? Will we have enough for us to provide for our kids and to retire on?
Tom's view is peculiar: he would rather have a rich community than a rich savings account. He's trying to embody the lesson of the "parable of the unjust manager," who decided it was better to have friends than money; or of the stories of the early church in the Book of Acts. If I remember right, those stories inspired Karl Marx as well.
My friend Tom is no St Francis, and he's not taking a vow of poverty. He's just drawing a line and refusing to let the clamor of financial fear drown out the song of hope. Like so many religious people, his hopes are as extravagant as they are counter-cultural. And they're prophetic, at least in the way Cornel West uses that word. At least, that's what I heard in Tom's story today: he wants to do good with his money, and some of that good will be reminding us that fear is not a good master.
A few years ago a friend who taught in the business school at Penn State was engaged in a study of businesses that were trying to bring together the ideals of for-profits and non-profits - businesses like Nutriset - that were trying to generate profits by producing good things at reasonable prices. I have to say that dreaming about this way of combining capitalism and social good inspires me.
*****
*I'm not giving out his name or his business name because I don't want to cause him to be flooded with funding requests.
∞
Empire and Total War
I just read an article that asks why there is a rise in suicides among members of the U.S. military in recent years.
Of course I don't know, but it makes me think of a passage in the prophet Samuel. King David sends his army to fight, "in the season when kings go off to war," but he does not join them. He stays behind and winds up having an affair with a married woman, then arranging for her husband to die on the front lines to cover up David's dalliance. (By the way, David is remembered as one of the good kings.)
The bold passage above tells us something about the history of warfare: small states cannot afford total war. They can only go to war when their crops are in the ground, and must return before the crops are to be harvested. Not so with empires. Large states can draw soldiers from many places and so can afford to field an army year-round.
While King David's state was small enough that it was still bound by the growing season, he was enjoying a period when his state had grown large enough that he could send his troops out without joining them, without committing himself to sharing in their triumphs and losses. And this detachment of the leadership from the fighting forces led to deep tragedy, and even to a kind of human sacrifice, wherein the king was willing to sacrifice one of his men to cover up the king's own error.
So while I don't know why the suicide rate is increasing right now, I am not surprised to learn that our troops are suffering. We commit them to long tours of duty, not just for part of a growing season but for years on end with only short rests. It is lamentable that they are often so far from us it is hard to even imagine what they endure, much less to share in it with them.
See my earlier post on the cost of war here.
Of course I don't know, but it makes me think of a passage in the prophet Samuel. King David sends his army to fight, "in the season when kings go off to war," but he does not join them. He stays behind and winds up having an affair with a married woman, then arranging for her husband to die on the front lines to cover up David's dalliance. (By the way, David is remembered as one of the good kings.)
The bold passage above tells us something about the history of warfare: small states cannot afford total war. They can only go to war when their crops are in the ground, and must return before the crops are to be harvested. Not so with empires. Large states can draw soldiers from many places and so can afford to field an army year-round.
 |
| Sometimes you're just in the right place to capture the photo. The Blue Angels soar past Walmart. |
While King David's state was small enough that it was still bound by the growing season, he was enjoying a period when his state had grown large enough that he could send his troops out without joining them, without committing himself to sharing in their triumphs and losses. And this detachment of the leadership from the fighting forces led to deep tragedy, and even to a kind of human sacrifice, wherein the king was willing to sacrifice one of his men to cover up the king's own error.
So while I don't know why the suicide rate is increasing right now, I am not surprised to learn that our troops are suffering. We commit them to long tours of duty, not just for part of a growing season but for years on end with only short rests. It is lamentable that they are often so far from us it is hard to even imagine what they endure, much less to share in it with them.
*****
See my earlier post on the cost of war here.
∞
Guns and Aesthetics
A number of times in the last few months the issue of aesthetics and firearms has arisen, notably in connection with the recently proposed ban on what are called assault weapons. I say "what are called assault weapons" because it's difficult to decide which weapons should be included in that category. The assault weapons ban tries to categorize them by asking whether they meet at least three out of a short list of criteria.
Many guns are semiautomatic - that is, each pull of the trigger fires a round and then loads the next round - without being assault weapons. Most of the duck hunters I know use semiautomatic shotguns, for instance. Their guns only hold three rounds (as stipulated by the law that governs the hunting of migratory waterfowl) but those three rounds can be fired in rapid succession, and most of the guns can be quickly made to hold more than three rounds - usually up to five. Some small-game guns that fire .22 caliber rounds (one of the smallest and least powerful bullets commonly available) are also semiautomatic; and I'd guess most of the handguns sold today are semiautomatic as well. But few of these guns qualify as assault weapons.
Critics of the ban point out that for this reason (among others) the criteria for assault weapons are merely aesthetic. Banning guns on the basis of aesthetics will do little or nothing to solve the problem of gun violence, they say.
I haven't looked into the statistics, but I would guess that most gun deaths in the United States involve semiautomatic handguns and not assault weapons.
Which leads me to the question of whether the aesthetics of guns matters.
My answer is not about what laws we should enact, but about whether aesthetics matters anywhere. And the answer is that every one of us knows that aesthetics always matters. It affects the kind of car we drive, the clothes we wear, the way we wear our hair. Even those who profess that they don't care about these things almost certainly do care. Everyone who studies advertising and marketing knows; songwriters and filmmakers know; everywhere we turn we find a human environment in which we have made important choices on the basis of how the visual aspect of our belongings and edifices makes us feel.
The Best View In Warsaw
When the Nazis were retreating from Warsaw they dynamited the city, block by block, leveling nearly every building in the city. After the war, the proud Poles gathered photos and paintings and rebuilt the city, brick by brick, to look just as it had before the war. No doubt this was much harder than simply rebuilding, but they knew: aesthetics matters. It is the expression of people who will not be put down. Visual culture can be used to rally a nation, to embolden hearts, to renew hope.
Years ago, when I was working in Poland, one of my students offered to take me to the top of the Palace of Science and Culture in Warsaw. The building was a "gift" from Moscow, and the building rises from a huge footprint to a soaring tower that overlooks all of Warsaw. When we reached the top and gazed out on the city, Tomek said to me "This is the best view in all of Warsaw."
"Because the tower is so tall that you can see everything?" I asked.
"No," he quickly replied. "It's because this is the only place in Warsaw where you can't see this damned tower!" The building was a "gift" but it was also a visible reminder of Russian Soviet power. Everything from the wide footprint to the dizzying height to the architectural style was an aesthetic expression of domination. The Soviets knew: aesthetics matters. Visual culture can be used to intimidate and oppress.
You Are A Sign
Regardless of what you think of the proposed ban on certain kinds of guns, this should be obvious. Go to a gun shop or a gun show sometime and ask yourself whether aesthetics matters in guns. It might not matter enough to inform our laws, but the guns we make and buy for ourselves ought to tell us something about what is in our hearts. The thing we hold in our hand, like the car we drive and the clothes we wear, is something we project to others, a word we are silently and visibly speaking. As I have written before, the gun is not a neutral element in this speech. It is a word we speak, but it can be a word that speaks us, too. Let me tell you what every polyglot knows: some words in some languages open up new thoughts that you didn't think to think in your native tongue. The technologies we deploy may be the same; as may the visible aspect of those technologies. Nothing is ever neutral; as Peirce said, everything - everything - is a sign, and we ourselves become signs as well.
This doesn't answer the question of what kind of laws we should have. I think that question is secondary to this question: what kind of people should we be?
Many guns are semiautomatic - that is, each pull of the trigger fires a round and then loads the next round - without being assault weapons. Most of the duck hunters I know use semiautomatic shotguns, for instance. Their guns only hold three rounds (as stipulated by the law that governs the hunting of migratory waterfowl) but those three rounds can be fired in rapid succession, and most of the guns can be quickly made to hold more than three rounds - usually up to five. Some small-game guns that fire .22 caliber rounds (one of the smallest and least powerful bullets commonly available) are also semiautomatic; and I'd guess most of the handguns sold today are semiautomatic as well. But few of these guns qualify as assault weapons.
 |
| Which ones are the dangerous ones? |
I haven't looked into the statistics, but I would guess that most gun deaths in the United States involve semiautomatic handguns and not assault weapons.
Which leads me to the question of whether the aesthetics of guns matters.
My answer is not about what laws we should enact, but about whether aesthetics matters anywhere. And the answer is that every one of us knows that aesthetics always matters. It affects the kind of car we drive, the clothes we wear, the way we wear our hair. Even those who profess that they don't care about these things almost certainly do care. Everyone who studies advertising and marketing knows; songwriters and filmmakers know; everywhere we turn we find a human environment in which we have made important choices on the basis of how the visual aspect of our belongings and edifices makes us feel.
 |
| They aren't just vehicles for our bodies, but for all the other things we wish to convey as well. |
The Best View In Warsaw
When the Nazis were retreating from Warsaw they dynamited the city, block by block, leveling nearly every building in the city. After the war, the proud Poles gathered photos and paintings and rebuilt the city, brick by brick, to look just as it had before the war. No doubt this was much harder than simply rebuilding, but they knew: aesthetics matters. It is the expression of people who will not be put down. Visual culture can be used to rally a nation, to embolden hearts, to renew hope.
Years ago, when I was working in Poland, one of my students offered to take me to the top of the Palace of Science and Culture in Warsaw. The building was a "gift" from Moscow, and the building rises from a huge footprint to a soaring tower that overlooks all of Warsaw. When we reached the top and gazed out on the city, Tomek said to me "This is the best view in all of Warsaw."
"Because the tower is so tall that you can see everything?" I asked.
"No," he quickly replied. "It's because this is the only place in Warsaw where you can't see this damned tower!" The building was a "gift" but it was also a visible reminder of Russian Soviet power. Everything from the wide footprint to the dizzying height to the architectural style was an aesthetic expression of domination. The Soviets knew: aesthetics matters. Visual culture can be used to intimidate and oppress.
You Are A Sign
Regardless of what you think of the proposed ban on certain kinds of guns, this should be obvious. Go to a gun shop or a gun show sometime and ask yourself whether aesthetics matters in guns. It might not matter enough to inform our laws, but the guns we make and buy for ourselves ought to tell us something about what is in our hearts. The thing we hold in our hand, like the car we drive and the clothes we wear, is something we project to others, a word we are silently and visibly speaking. As I have written before, the gun is not a neutral element in this speech. It is a word we speak, but it can be a word that speaks us, too. Let me tell you what every polyglot knows: some words in some languages open up new thoughts that you didn't think to think in your native tongue. The technologies we deploy may be the same; as may the visible aspect of those technologies. Nothing is ever neutral; as Peirce said, everything - everything - is a sign, and we ourselves become signs as well.
This doesn't answer the question of what kind of laws we should have. I think that question is secondary to this question: what kind of people should we be?
∞
Proofs of God's Existence
Every time we encounter a proof of God's existence or non-existence, we should use it as an opportunity to ask: why is this proof being offered?
Too often I have seen Anselm's "ontological" argument abstracted from its context, as though the fact that his Proslogion begins with a prayer were inconsequential to the argument; or Descartes' proofs abstracted from his Meditations, as though it were not important that "God" serves an instrumental purpose for Descartes, allowing for the re-establishment of the world after he doubts its existence.
Anselm already believes when he writes his argument. He has arrived at his belief in some way other than argumentation, and there is no shame in that. Most of us arrive at most of our beliefs in less-than-purely-rational ways, and as William James has argued, we have the right to do so. It looks to me like Anselm is writing not in order to defeat all atheism (though that may be one of his aims) but in order to see if his faith and his understanding can be in agreement with one another.
Descartes might believe or he might not; I don't know how I could know. God matters in his Meditations because God offers an "Archimedean point," a fulcrum on which to rest the lever of reason, allowing Descartes to lift the world anew from the ruins of doubt. Whether or not Descartes believes in God's existence, God is useful to Descartes.
My point is that it is mistaken to assume that arguments about God - for or against God - are detached and detachable from other concerns, and when we neglect those concerns we might just be missing the most important aspect of those arguments, namely the human aspect. When we argue about God, we are usually also arguing about something else.
Too often I have seen Anselm's "ontological" argument abstracted from its context, as though the fact that his Proslogion begins with a prayer were inconsequential to the argument; or Descartes' proofs abstracted from his Meditations, as though it were not important that "God" serves an instrumental purpose for Descartes, allowing for the re-establishment of the world after he doubts its existence.
Anselm already believes when he writes his argument. He has arrived at his belief in some way other than argumentation, and there is no shame in that. Most of us arrive at most of our beliefs in less-than-purely-rational ways, and as William James has argued, we have the right to do so. It looks to me like Anselm is writing not in order to defeat all atheism (though that may be one of his aims) but in order to see if his faith and his understanding can be in agreement with one another.
Descartes might believe or he might not; I don't know how I could know. God matters in his Meditations because God offers an "Archimedean point," a fulcrum on which to rest the lever of reason, allowing Descartes to lift the world anew from the ruins of doubt. Whether or not Descartes believes in God's existence, God is useful to Descartes.
My point is that it is mistaken to assume that arguments about God - for or against God - are detached and detachable from other concerns, and when we neglect those concerns we might just be missing the most important aspect of those arguments, namely the human aspect. When we argue about God, we are usually also arguing about something else.
∞
C.S. Lewis On Astro-Ethics
The field of ethics in astrobiology and space exploration is small but growing. Does anyone own the rights to the moon? Who may profit from resources found on asteroids, or on other planets? What obligations, if any, do we have to other species we may one day encounter?
C.S. Lewis was well ahead of his time in considering these questions. As Matthew Dickerson and I have discussed at some length, Lewis's novel Out Of The Silent Planet takes up questions like these. Lewis worried that our stories and myths about space exploration made aliens into monsters and made us into conquering heroes, when the facts could really be quite the reverse. He was not sanguine about the likelihood that we would treat other species ethically:
His prescription must have seemed wildly impractical, namely that we begin preparing ourselves to encounter other sentient species by teaching ourselves that they may be every bit as worthy of life and God's love as we. One need not believe in God to see the significance of such a decision, since it amounts to deciding that other species have claims to rights that are every bit as strong as our own. Here is Lewis again:
Astro-ethics isn't the same as astropolitics, though Lewis's prediction is that if we ever find another sentient species, the two studies would come together quickly. If this all seems impractical and irrelevant - as even astrobiology does to some people - let me insist that this is not idle ivory-tower speculation. Astrobiology and exobiology help us to understand our own home better by forcing us to rethink the boundaries of life, which helps us to look for life in places we previously thought there could be no life, like deep-sea vents, deep underground, and under Antarctic ice. Out of the Silent Planet was the first of a trilogy; the third book brought the ethical issues home again. Thinking through a fantasy of meeting alien species can provide a proxy for meeting others here on earth, and for beginning to recognize the importance of treating the other inhabitants of this terrestrial ball ethically.
*(“Religion and Rocketry,” available here)
**(“Shall We Lose God In Outer Space?” Great Britain: SPCK, 1959. 10) Emphasis added.
C.S. Lewis was well ahead of his time in considering these questions. As Matthew Dickerson and I have discussed at some length, Lewis's novel Out Of The Silent Planet takes up questions like these. Lewis worried that our stories and myths about space exploration made aliens into monsters and made us into conquering heroes, when the facts could really be quite the reverse. He was not sanguine about the likelihood that we would treat other species ethically:
“We know what our race does to strangers. Man destroys or enslaves every species he can.Civilized man murders, enslaves, cheats, and corrupts savage man. Even inanimate nature he turns into dust-bowls and slag-heaps….I therefore fear the practical, not the theoretical, problems which will arise if ever we meet rational creatures which are not human.”*
 |
| We often make ethical decisions based on appearances, but resemblance to us shouldn't be the basis for considering other species to be rational agents or patients. |
His prescription must have seemed wildly impractical, namely that we begin preparing ourselves to encounter other sentient species by teaching ourselves that they may be every bit as worthy of life and God's love as we. One need not believe in God to see the significance of such a decision, since it amounts to deciding that other species have claims to rights that are every bit as strong as our own. Here is Lewis again:
"What I do know is that here and now, as our only possible practical preparation for such a meeting you and I should resolve to stand firm against all exploitation and all theological imperialism. It will not be fun. We shall be called traitors to our own species. We shall be hated of almost all men; even of some religious men. And we must not give back one single inch. We shall probably fail, but let us go down fighting for the right side. Our loyalty is due not to our species but to God. Those who are, or can become, his sons, are our real brothers even if they have shells or tusks. It is spiritual, not biological, kinship that counts.” **
 |
| "Even if they have shells or tusks" |
*****
*(“Religion and Rocketry,” available here)
**(“Shall We Lose God In Outer Space?” Great Britain: SPCK, 1959. 10) Emphasis added.
∞
The Other Drones Problem: The Tragedy of the Unexplored Commons
John Brennan's nomination hearings brought about a slew of articles about drone warfare. On the one side, people like William Saletan in Slate argue that drones (or UAVs) minimize civilian casualties while safeguarding American soldiers. Others, like John Kaag and Sarah Kreps in the New York Times remind us that the technological advances come with moral hazards we might not have anticipated.
But there is another ethical issue related to UAVs that doesn't have to do with war. Or, if it does, it has to do with a "war against crude nature."
The technologies we invent in wartime don't go away when the conflicts end. Already, UAVs are being deployed for a number of other uses, and we can expect their uses to increase. I'm no flag-waving Luddite here. The things we invent can be put to diverse uses, some helpful and some harmful. But if we care about promoting the helpful uses, we'll need to be intentional about that.
UAVs are a brilliant platform for remote-sensing technologies. They can cover a lot of ground and stay aloft for a long time. Drone aircraft are adding to our ability to conquer unknown spaces. If you've used Google Maps to explore places you've never been before, you know what an aesthetic boost and letdown this can be: it's a boost to see what you've never seen, and at the same time, we find ourselves sharing Aldo Leopold's lament in "The River of the Mother of God": the unknown places are being replaced by maps, and our deep genetic need to explore runs up against the feeling that everything has already been seen. When I lived in Madrid, I tried to make places like the Retiro park my places of natural exploration and solitude, but I couldn't escape the feeling that I was treading where millions of others had already trod.
But that is a small worry compared to the bigger issue of the world's oceans and natural resources. For the whole history of our species we have been able to act as though the world contained unlimited resources. Our species is an explorer species. We have "restless genes," as a recent National Geographic article put it.
Gone is the age of Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea. We no longer take to the seas in small craft and fish commercially with handlines. The last century has pushed fishing fleets thousands of miles from the places where they will ultimately bring their catch to market. We can no longer treat the oceans as limitless resources; we are fishing them out, and some species may collapse under the pressure and never come back.
In the race to find the last remaining schools of fish, we are beginning to use UAVs to scour the seas. Where fishermen once looked for birds circling schools of sardines, robot airplanes now skim the waves and do the searching for us.
Ethicists and game theorists refer to this as the "tragedy of the commons": if we each only take resources in proportion to what we can use, the resources can be shared indefinitely. But if some of us take more than our share of the "commons" or the resources, they will have a short-term gain at the expense of the long-term gain of everyone.
The STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) are brilliant, and wonderful. New technologies give us new access to the world, and they can save and improve lives. But they lack the ability to regulate themselves, which is why as the STEM fields grow, we need the humanities (and their critiques of technology) to grow with them. If we are not careful, new technologies can also permit us to do great harm to our common world - and to ourselves. If fish seems cheap and plentiful, stop to ask where it came from, and whether that source is sustainable. If it's not, vote with your dollars and eat something else.
But there is another ethical issue related to UAVs that doesn't have to do with war. Or, if it does, it has to do with a "war against crude nature."
The technologies we invent in wartime don't go away when the conflicts end. Already, UAVs are being deployed for a number of other uses, and we can expect their uses to increase. I'm no flag-waving Luddite here. The things we invent can be put to diverse uses, some helpful and some harmful. But if we care about promoting the helpful uses, we'll need to be intentional about that.
UAVs are a brilliant platform for remote-sensing technologies. They can cover a lot of ground and stay aloft for a long time. Drone aircraft are adding to our ability to conquer unknown spaces. If you've used Google Maps to explore places you've never been before, you know what an aesthetic boost and letdown this can be: it's a boost to see what you've never seen, and at the same time, we find ourselves sharing Aldo Leopold's lament in "The River of the Mother of God": the unknown places are being replaced by maps, and our deep genetic need to explore runs up against the feeling that everything has already been seen. When I lived in Madrid, I tried to make places like the Retiro park my places of natural exploration and solitude, but I couldn't escape the feeling that I was treading where millions of others had already trod.
 |
| We have a deep need for exploration, and so we need places that feel unexplored. |
But that is a small worry compared to the bigger issue of the world's oceans and natural resources. For the whole history of our species we have been able to act as though the world contained unlimited resources. Our species is an explorer species. We have "restless genes," as a recent National Geographic article put it.
Gone is the age of Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea. We no longer take to the seas in small craft and fish commercially with handlines. The last century has pushed fishing fleets thousands of miles from the places where they will ultimately bring their catch to market. We can no longer treat the oceans as limitless resources; we are fishing them out, and some species may collapse under the pressure and never come back.
In the race to find the last remaining schools of fish, we are beginning to use UAVs to scour the seas. Where fishermen once looked for birds circling schools of sardines, robot airplanes now skim the waves and do the searching for us.
 |
| At the crossroads |
Ethicists and game theorists refer to this as the "tragedy of the commons": if we each only take resources in proportion to what we can use, the resources can be shared indefinitely. But if some of us take more than our share of the "commons" or the resources, they will have a short-term gain at the expense of the long-term gain of everyone.
The STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) are brilliant, and wonderful. New technologies give us new access to the world, and they can save and improve lives. But they lack the ability to regulate themselves, which is why as the STEM fields grow, we need the humanities (and their critiques of technology) to grow with them. If we are not careful, new technologies can also permit us to do great harm to our common world - and to ourselves. If fish seems cheap and plentiful, stop to ask where it came from, and whether that source is sustainable. If it's not, vote with your dollars and eat something else.
*****
Here is one of my favorite sources of fish news.
∞
Happy Praise
I recently read this line in the Book of Common Prayer, in the BCP's translation of the Phos Hilaron prayer. The Phos Hilaron is one of the oldest Christian hymns:
I'm preparing a scholarly article on St Paul's response to Epicurean philosophy, one I hope to publish soon. For now, I will summarize one of its points: Christians and Epicureans disagree about the imperturbability of the divine (Christians disagree among themselves about this as well) but they agree that if something can't be praised with gladness at least sometimes, then it's probably not worth praising at all.
This is not just abstract philosophy or theology; it matters for all of life. We are all always engaged in worship, as David Foster Wallace once said. We don't get much choice about that. We do have a choice about what we worship - what we ascribe worth to. We do that all the time when we vote, when we spend and invest our money, when we decide what our laws should be and what our children should learn. We constantly make decisions about ends that should be pursued, and these are all acts of worship.
** Diogenes Laertius, 10.139; from The Epicurus Reader, Brad Inwood and Lloyd Gerson, translators. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994) p. 32.
"Thou art worthy at all times to be praised by happy voices, O Son of God, O Giver of Life..."It needn't be translated that way, by the way. It could be translated as "reverent voices" or "opportune voices." I like this translation, though. The sentiment is positively Epicurean. Consider the opening line of Epicurus's Kuriai Doxai*:
"What is blessed and indestructible has no troubles itself, nor does it give trouble to anyone else..."**In Epicurus's view, a god that is petulant or demanding is a god that is needy and manipulative. Such gods may force us to make sacrifices, but they won't earn our praise so much as our derision and scorn. A god worthy of the name is one that needs and demands nothing for itself.
I'm preparing a scholarly article on St Paul's response to Epicurean philosophy, one I hope to publish soon. For now, I will summarize one of its points: Christians and Epicureans disagree about the imperturbability of the divine (Christians disagree among themselves about this as well) but they agree that if something can't be praised with gladness at least sometimes, then it's probably not worth praising at all.
This is not just abstract philosophy or theology; it matters for all of life. We are all always engaged in worship, as David Foster Wallace once said. We don't get much choice about that. We do have a choice about what we worship - what we ascribe worth to. We do that all the time when we vote, when we spend and invest our money, when we decide what our laws should be and what our children should learn. We constantly make decisions about ends that should be pursued, and these are all acts of worship.
*****
* We usually translate this "Principal Doctrines." The word "kuriai" or "kurios" means "principal" and has the same breadth of resonances and meanings as that word: princely, first and foremost, primary, authoritative. The word "doxai" or "doxa" has a similar breadth of meanings, ranging from opinion or estimation to reputation and even glory. The Epicurean title kuriai doxai would have sounded familiar to early Greek-speaking Christians, for whom it would have sounded like "Lordly glories." The familiar prayer Kyrie eleison is related to the word kurios or kyrios. ** Diogenes Laertius, 10.139; from The Epicurus Reader, Brad Inwood and Lloyd Gerson, translators. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994) p. 32.
∞
Have We Met?
This weekend I found myself standing next to an older woman I've met a number of times before. For a moment, I struggled to remember where we'd met, then it hit me: she has taken a few of the classes I've offered for senior citizens from time to time. As I recall, she's always been a great student, though I confess I'm having trouble remembering her name right now, and feeling a little sheepish about my memory.
As it turns out, she has it even worse. When I greeted her, she asked me with her usual winning smile, "Have we met?" I told her we had, and where we had met. She said she had no recollection, and I thought she must be joking. Then she added that she has recently suffered a head injury and has lost her memory. She remembers that she once had such a powerful memory she was reluctant to tell people how much she remembered, lest she appear to be boasting.
Now she has very little of that memory left. She was cheerful, as always, but I thought maybe a little sad at what she had lost.
A little earlier in the day I had been speaking about C.S. Lewis and ecology to a church group. There I spent some time reflecting on a passage in Lewis's novel Out Of The Silent Planet where Hyoi cannot understand Ransom's culture. What kind of people would insist on having a pleasant experience again and again, Hyoi asks. Isn't that like wanting to hear a single word from a beautiful poem over and over, but not the whole poem? Isn't memory a part of the pleasure?
I have often taken comfort from that passage, since Hyoi's position is that growing old is not a loss but a gain, just as it is a gain to listen to a full symphony and not just the overture. Perhaps this is why we fear losing our memories: as the symphony of life approaches the finale sometimes we forget the overture.
As my former student turned to go, I told her "It's nice to meet you - again." She smiled, and walked away.
As it turns out, she has it even worse. When I greeted her, she asked me with her usual winning smile, "Have we met?" I told her we had, and where we had met. She said she had no recollection, and I thought she must be joking. Then she added that she has recently suffered a head injury and has lost her memory. She remembers that she once had such a powerful memory she was reluctant to tell people how much she remembered, lest she appear to be boasting.
Now she has very little of that memory left. She was cheerful, as always, but I thought maybe a little sad at what she had lost.
A little earlier in the day I had been speaking about C.S. Lewis and ecology to a church group. There I spent some time reflecting on a passage in Lewis's novel Out Of The Silent Planet where Hyoi cannot understand Ransom's culture. What kind of people would insist on having a pleasant experience again and again, Hyoi asks. Isn't that like wanting to hear a single word from a beautiful poem over and over, but not the whole poem? Isn't memory a part of the pleasure?
I have often taken comfort from that passage, since Hyoi's position is that growing old is not a loss but a gain, just as it is a gain to listen to a full symphony and not just the overture. Perhaps this is why we fear losing our memories: as the symphony of life approaches the finale sometimes we forget the overture.
As my former student turned to go, I told her "It's nice to meet you - again." She smiled, and walked away.
∞
Pragmatist Scripture: Peirce and The Book of Acts
A few months ago a friend who is interested in both scripture and philosophy asked me which scripture mattered most to Charles Peirce. One obvious answer would be the writings of John, the gospeller of agape love, since agape plays such a great role in Peirce's philosophy.
The Book of Acts has recently come to mind as another strong candidate, for several reasons. I plan to write about all this in more detail soon, but I'll use this space to jot down my thinking quickly, in order to make it available to anyone who might be interested, in the Peircean spirit of shared inquiry.
The Greek title of the Book of Acts is Praxeis Apostolon, or the Deeds of the Apostles. We guess that the author of the text was the same as the author of the Gospel attributed to Luke. The title might well have been added after the book was in circulation for a while, but that's probably inconsequential. It occurred to me recently that this text begins with reminding us that the author wrote a previous book about "the things Jesus began to do and to teach," and then it narrates, without further introduction, the things that the first Christians did after Jesus' death and resurrection.
In other words, it is a book of acts, of deeds. It is a book of narratives about what people did.
Which is to say that it is not primarily a book of prayers, or of songs, or of doctrines. It tells a story, without much attempt to interpret that story. And it is the story of a community learning to work together, and learning how it must adjust its doctrines in light of the community's expansion across and into cultures, and in light of the surprising things they find the new community is empowered to accomplish.
This is appealing to Pragmatists like Peirce, who are more concerned with the way decisions lead to actions than with fixing metaphysical doctrines and whose notions of truth, ethics, and metaphysics are more experimental and transactional than systematic and permanent. Pragmatists are given to the idea that it is good for communities to work with tentative, revisable and fallible tenets, ever striving to improve their practices as the community grows.
*****
Peirce is not exactly easy to read, which helps to explain why most of what he wrote remains unpublished even a century after his death. Nevertheless, the patient reader of Peirce is often rewarded by a writer who took words very seriously.
Some of the words he used to great effect in his lectures and essays are derived from the Book of Acts. Among these phrases are a phrase he uses in his 1907 essay "A Neglected Argument For The Reality Of God," and one that comes at the end of his Cambridge Conference Lectures of 1898. The phrases are "scientific singleness of heart," and "things live and move and have their being in a logic of events." See Acts 2.46 and 17.28 for the sources of these two phrases. (The first one might also have come to Peirce through the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, as I have argued elsewhere.)
Two such phrases are not enough to make the case that Peirce was dependent on the Book of Acts, but thankfully that's not the case I'm trying to make. Peirce was well read and he cited other portions of scripture and, of course, many other books, after all. I only want to suggest that Peirce might have found the Book of Acts to be a scripture that resonates with his Pragmatism.
*****
That being said, I wish to point to one figure in the middle of the Book of Acts who might be taken to be a kind of Pragmatist saint: Epimenides.
I won't belabor that point here, as I have already written about it elsewhere. I'll only add that Epimenides appears to be the unnamed source that St Paul appeals to and cites in Acts 17.28.
The Book of Acts has recently come to mind as another strong candidate, for several reasons. I plan to write about all this in more detail soon, but I'll use this space to jot down my thinking quickly, in order to make it available to anyone who might be interested, in the Peircean spirit of shared inquiry.
The Greek title of the Book of Acts is Praxeis Apostolon, or the Deeds of the Apostles. We guess that the author of the text was the same as the author of the Gospel attributed to Luke. The title might well have been added after the book was in circulation for a while, but that's probably inconsequential. It occurred to me recently that this text begins with reminding us that the author wrote a previous book about "the things Jesus began to do and to teach," and then it narrates, without further introduction, the things that the first Christians did after Jesus' death and resurrection.
In other words, it is a book of acts, of deeds. It is a book of narratives about what people did.
Which is to say that it is not primarily a book of prayers, or of songs, or of doctrines. It tells a story, without much attempt to interpret that story. And it is the story of a community learning to work together, and learning how it must adjust its doctrines in light of the community's expansion across and into cultures, and in light of the surprising things they find the new community is empowered to accomplish.
This is appealing to Pragmatists like Peirce, who are more concerned with the way decisions lead to actions than with fixing metaphysical doctrines and whose notions of truth, ethics, and metaphysics are more experimental and transactional than systematic and permanent. Pragmatists are given to the idea that it is good for communities to work with tentative, revisable and fallible tenets, ever striving to improve their practices as the community grows.
*****
Peirce is not exactly easy to read, which helps to explain why most of what he wrote remains unpublished even a century after his death. Nevertheless, the patient reader of Peirce is often rewarded by a writer who took words very seriously.
Some of the words he used to great effect in his lectures and essays are derived from the Book of Acts. Among these phrases are a phrase he uses in his 1907 essay "A Neglected Argument For The Reality Of God," and one that comes at the end of his Cambridge Conference Lectures of 1898. The phrases are "scientific singleness of heart," and "things live and move and have their being in a logic of events." See Acts 2.46 and 17.28 for the sources of these two phrases. (The first one might also have come to Peirce through the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, as I have argued elsewhere.)
Two such phrases are not enough to make the case that Peirce was dependent on the Book of Acts, but thankfully that's not the case I'm trying to make. Peirce was well read and he cited other portions of scripture and, of course, many other books, after all. I only want to suggest that Peirce might have found the Book of Acts to be a scripture that resonates with his Pragmatism.
*****
That being said, I wish to point to one figure in the middle of the Book of Acts who might be taken to be a kind of Pragmatist saint: Epimenides.
I won't belabor that point here, as I have already written about it elsewhere. I'll only add that Epimenides appears to be the unnamed source that St Paul appeals to and cites in Acts 17.28.
∞
The Cost of War
What is the true cost of war? It is not the cost of the materiel, training, salaries, and post-war reconstruction. It is not factored in costs of healthcare, in the rise or fall of GDP or due to manufacturing losses or gains. The true cost of war - which I cannot begin to calculate - must be in the dreams of those who survive.
My grandfather wore a .45 caliber pistol at his hip when he fought in the Pacific theater in WWII. The trigger guard was shot off. He kept that pistol until he died. It was a kind of reverse sacrament, an outward and visible sign of an inward, invisible wound, of a bullet that nearly ended his life, of the bullets and bombs that ended so many others. To me, he was a hero, but I wonder if he was ever able to see himself that way.
As a young child I asked him, in wonder, if he had ever seen a man die in war. I did not know what I was doing. He was a good man, and a kind one, but that question drew from him the most anger I ever saw in his eyes or heard in his voice. "Of course I have!" he shouted. He got up from his chair and left the room, leaving me with my firmest impression of war, of anger and pain stored up for thirty years, like the shrapnel in his back that set off airport metal detectors until his death in the late 1980s.
My neighbor Bob died a little while ago. His father fought in the first World War, and when Bob wanted to sign up to fight the Germans, Bob's father begged him not to go. Bob went, and entered the war at the Battle of the Bulge, "my baptism by fire," Bob once told me. When Bob's son signed up to fight in Viet Nam, Bob begged him not to go. Jim went anyway. Three generations of men survived wars, each one eager never to see it again.
I sat next to Bob at a Christmas party ten years ago. On his other side sat another veteran of the Great War. They huddled close and whispered loudly, as old men do, thinking I could not hear. I looked away to preserve their imagined secrecy, but could not help hearing bits of the stories they could speak of only with one another. The war was sixty years behind them, but their voices still trembled as they unburdened themselves in that moment only brothers in arms can share. I recall Bob saying this:
"...I checked on my men, and they were fine. I turned and began to walk away when the shell fell, right between them in their machine gun nest. All three were killed instantly. I had been speaking to them just a moment before, and now they were gone...." Both men were silent for a while after that. The men were gone, but their deaths lived on and on in Bob's dreams.
*****
My grandfather wore a .45 caliber pistol at his hip when he fought in the Pacific theater in WWII. The trigger guard was shot off. He kept that pistol until he died. It was a kind of reverse sacrament, an outward and visible sign of an inward, invisible wound, of a bullet that nearly ended his life, of the bullets and bombs that ended so many others. To me, he was a hero, but I wonder if he was ever able to see himself that way.
As a young child I asked him, in wonder, if he had ever seen a man die in war. I did not know what I was doing. He was a good man, and a kind one, but that question drew from him the most anger I ever saw in his eyes or heard in his voice. "Of course I have!" he shouted. He got up from his chair and left the room, leaving me with my firmest impression of war, of anger and pain stored up for thirty years, like the shrapnel in his back that set off airport metal detectors until his death in the late 1980s.
*****
I sat next to Bob at a Christmas party ten years ago. On his other side sat another veteran of the Great War. They huddled close and whispered loudly, as old men do, thinking I could not hear. I looked away to preserve their imagined secrecy, but could not help hearing bits of the stories they could speak of only with one another. The war was sixty years behind them, but their voices still trembled as they unburdened themselves in that moment only brothers in arms can share. I recall Bob saying this:
"...I checked on my men, and they were fine. I turned and began to walk away when the shell fell, right between them in their machine gun nest. All three were killed instantly. I had been speaking to them just a moment before, and now they were gone...." Both men were silent for a while after that. The men were gone, but their deaths lived on and on in Bob's dreams.
*****
That cost, that's what I find impossible to calculate: the cost of asking men to carry in their hearts and in their dreams all of the deaths of other men. I do not know how they carry it all. I do not know how we can lightly ask others to carry it anew.
*****
If you don't know his work, let me recommend Brian Turner's book Here, Bullet. He's a young veteran and a brilliant poet who writes about his experience as a soldier in Iraq.