Articles of Faith

Things as I see them.

There is no God.

There is no Heaven, no Hell, no Devil. There are no angels or demons or ghosts. There are no miracles.

There is no afterlife, no reincarnation. Whatever the "soul" can be said to be, it dissipates when the body dies.

There was no Original Sin, no Fall, and thus nothing to redeem. There was no Incarnation. Whatever the truth about his sayings and doings, Jesus was an ordinary human being. His mother was not "conceived without sin" any more or less than everyone else, nor was he the product of "virgin birth." He did not "die for our sins," he was not resurrected, nor will he return.

The universe is not concerned with our existence. In fact, even to say that it is "indifferent" is to engage in indefensible metaphysics. The universe is not capable of having an attitude towards our existence or its own. It simply exists. Why and how there is something instead of nothing is a question that neither theologian nor scientist is capable of illuminating.

Morality and ontology have nothing to do with each other. A godless universe is no more or less moral than a universe with a god in it. I once heard an Episcopalian priest, in the aftermath of one human-produced atrocity or another, say that if he thought for one moment that what had happened was God's punishment for our sins, he would put aside his priestly garments and walk out of the church forever. And so, in his place, would I.

The only true "sin" is cruelty, and the most fundamental virtue is compassion. There are more virtues than sins, because all sins ultimately come down to the same thing.

Religious institutions and religious leaders are susceptible of the same virtues and failings as everyone else. Many do good work, but many are corrupt and hypocritical. Much of the cruelty in the world is the outcome of religious belief, but much is not.

If religion gets you through the night, keeps you off the sauce, and maybe makes you a slightly kinder person, then more power to you, but if it serves as a cover for hatred and oppression, you'll get no respect from me.

Notes Against a Manifesto

What is to be done? Is there anything more exasperating than the cycle of analysis regarding our political situation? How did we get here? Whose fault is it? The implicit argument too often seems to be that there is no dilemma, no reason to trade off one thing for another and not have it both ways, as long as you listen to me. I'm neither a prophet nor a political scientist — and no one listens to me (nor would I expect them to) — but at a fundamental level all of this profound wisdom seems to me to miss the point.

The manipulation, the lies, the social and economic and cultural anxieties, to which we all have been subjected are amply documented, and all of it takes its toll, warps our understanding and our better natures, makes us putty in the hands of demagogues. Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner, wrote Tolstoi, and that is true for the novelist but not satisfactory to the moral philosopher. If we're nothing more than the sum of our influences — and perhaps we're not, we can't prove the contrary — then we're not moral agents at all.

The social sciences are concerned with the study of causes; literature (of the best kind, something I insist on the existence of, Literature-with-a-capital L) is about freedom. Not freedom as the absence of chains or bars (not all of us have that luxury), but freedom as the consciousness of the ability to be a moral agent, in whatever sphere, even in the most constrained of circumstances.

Stalin supposedly commanded writers to be "engineers of human souls," but no writer worthy of the name is capable of doing any such thing. (Milan Kundera, among others, has said all of this better in his writings on the novel.) Engineers of the soul are, in any case, a dime a dozen. Nevertheless, writers can, and do, interrogate the world, and no sphere can be barred to them, politics least of all. Writers have (or don't have) responsibility because we all do (or don't).

The symbol of moral freedom is not, in my view, the broken chain but the absence of a net, the high-wire act with nothing to fall back on. A single false step will be relentlessly exposed. Anything else, all the deadly sins, can, in time, perhaps be forgiven, but not bad faith.

For the pious of various stripes there is rarely any dilemma; their convictions will always protect them from the pitfalls of freedom. But such security is itself highly contingent, for if the net that protects them is whisked away where are they then? (The argument that the net must necessarily exist because we need it is pure sleight-of-hand.) Some, it is true, manage to maintain something that amounts to faith without believing there is a net beneath them, and with them I have no quarrel. I'm not really interested in how people get to virtuous action, or what flags they wrap themselves in to justify its opposite. But at some point you need to be able to look in the mirror and recognize what you see.

In the end the overriding issue at the moment is comfortingly binary: Fascism, yes or no?

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More information on DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program, can be found here.

Education in the Balance

A trailer from Brave New Films regarding our prospective Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, who sounds like she'll fit right in with the rest of the grifters who are preparing to run the country.

More information about DeVos is available here at the Nation.

Hour of lead (2)

Citing no evidence, our president-elect — and how ashamed, how defiled one feels, personally and as a citizen, having to call him that — has proclaimed himself the legitimate winner of the 2016 popular vote, alleging that millions of votes for his opponent were fraudulently cast. That no one worthy of respect takes his claim seriously makes no difference; we're in a post-truth condition and it suffices to merely make an assertion, no matter how implausible. Those who believe him can fall back on a simple syllogism: America is a country of and for white Christians, the Republican candidate positioned himself as the candidate of that country, therefore he must have won the popular vote. Being non-white, or non-Christian, and calling oneself an American, is, so the logic goes, itself fraudulent, so the technicalities of whether there was actually any significant voter fraud (there wasn't) are quite beside the point. Those with a vested interest in believing this argument — or pretending to — will be untroubled by doubt.

It's going to be a long four years.

Previous post:
Hour of lead

Image: Jasper Johns.

On Horned Beasts, and Dilemmas

Teju Cole:

Evil settles into everyday life when people are unable or unwilling to recognize it. It makes its home among us when we are keen to minimize it or describe it as something else. This is not a process that began a week or month or year ago. It did not begin with drone assassinations, or with the war on Iraq. Evil has always been here. But now it has taken on a totalitarian tone.

"A Time for Refusal," The New York Times, November 11, 2016

1.

Teju Cole's essay on the recent election, Eugène Ionesco's Rhinoceros, and the dangers of accommodating oneself to evil seems to me both brilliantly framed and right on the money, but if the new president-elect has even heard of the late Romanian-born French playwright he certainly doesn't care about him (or about Teju Cole), and the same is undoubtedly true of the bulk of his supporters. So in a sense this will no doubt be viewed as just one more laughable example of the cluelessness of the intellectual elite, who amuse themselves with literary allusions while middle-class Americans seek to lift the stone off their backs (or at least, shift it to the other side).

It raises, though, the more general question of what the response of artists and intellectuals should be to these events, and how we need to "frame our discourse" (to fall once more into the alienating jargon) to reach beyond our own rarefied sphere. What is our responsibility in the face of a state of emergency? Do we politicize art and inquiry, perhaps channel it into digestible mass-propaganda, or do we insist on the inviolability of our domains, on the pursuit of art for art's sake? (And let's not forget that those who are likely to be seizing the reins in Washington have little use for art or education at all, except of the most banal kind.)

It seems inescapable to me that we are going to have to live with the tension between the two impulses. We cannot blind ourselves to what is happening and to our responsibilities, but neither can we debase our work. We shouldn't be arrogant about what we've studied or created, but we also shouldn't be apologetic for it. (Nor should we make the all-too-frequent mistake of assuming that blue-collar Americans, or people who don't have college diplomas, are necessarily unsophisticated or incapable of originality and insight.) We will need new energies and new ideas; we can't afford to be complacent.

2.

Attempting to maintain that this past election wasn't in part about race and other cultural issues strikes me as inadequate as attempting to maintain that it was only about those factors. History doesn't come packaged in neat little narratives to suit our need for self-justification. Political scientists will and should, of course, sift through the results to try to determine what really happened and why, but public life isn't a controlled experiment, nor is there any way to easily disentangle the complex influences of the past on our present ideologies and behavior. It seems to me, nevertheless, entirely defensible to reserve some of the focus for what might be called either the moral or the individual level, that is, to examine the ways in which individuals both prominent and ordinary have spoken and acted in bad faith (not just in one party or faction, to be sure). Given that the president-elect largely owes his entry into politics to a lie — the suggestion, eagerly embraced by those who view America as a country fundamentally for and of white people, that Barack Obama wasn't eligible to serve as president at all — there seems to be much to consider in this light. Since I'm neither an organizer nor a street-fighter it's an avenue of particular interest to me.

3.

Also from the Times this week is an article by Kirk Semple, entitled "Fleeing Gangs, Central American Families Surge Toward U.S.," about the reasons that have led not just individuals but entire families to leave their native countries and head north. One wonders if those — and they are many — who will show little sympathy for the plight of these refugees would have been equally indifferent to those who fled for their lives from Russian pogroms or famine in Ireland in the past. But no, one doesn't wonder; of course they would have.

Hour of lead

From the New York Times:

[Expletive deleted] said he would quickly cancel a program Mr. Obama put in place by executive action that gave protection from deportation and work permits to about 800,000 undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children. They will lose jobs and scholarships that allowed many to attend college and start careers, and they will become vulnerable to deportation.

One of the things that we're going to have to come to terms with in the near future, in addition to understandable concern about our individual and collective well-being, is the feeling of shame for being in some way collectively responsible for this kind of cruelty (proposed, we should note, by a man who, among countless other examples, openly mocks disabled people), in the sense that we all implicitly agree to abide by the same social and political compact that makes such things possible. One of the other things we're going to have to come to terms with, of course, is that millions of our fellow citizens won't be troubled by this in the least.

Image: Jasper Johns.
Title: Emily Dickinson

Resources:
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New York Immigration Coalition

Bad Faith Blues

Well that’s that. We've succumbed to the attractions of someone who was not only a transparent con artist and buffoon but who chose to position himself as little short of an actual fascist, a man who was willing to throw open the doors and invite it all in, the bigotry, the misogyny, the hatred, the violence, all the swirling dark matter of our “civilization,” all for a taste of power. It would be nice to believe that the American people have simply lost touch with reality, but I'm afraid that's too charitable. We knew what we were doing. Any illusion that we the people are now somehow different from — more enlightened than — our predecessors who seized a continent and put millions to suffer and die as slaves for their own material gain is dispelled, for once and for all. We are the bullwhip, the noose, waterboard. I could say that I’m ashamed to be a white man, but that’s letting those responsible off way too easy. Race and gender are not destiny — specific individuals chose to do this, and I was not one of them.

I have zero patience for what-ifs and should-have-dones. In the end, we had a sufficiently clear choice — even if for many it was an unappetizing one — and we made it. And I frankly don’t give half a fuck about what political scientists, historians, and biographers may have to say about how what got us to this pass and what it all means, which I’m sure will all make fascinating reading for future generations when we’re safely dead. My only interest is a moral one. What does this election, in both senses of the word, say about us, about how we square our consciences with what we do?

Of course if free choice is just an illusion or democracy is just a charade then none of this matters. Turn the page, shoot up, and move on. But that’s a cop-out and I don’t buy it. If the human spirit means anything at all — and hey, maybe it just doesn’t — then it includes the ability to formulate and act upon moral obligations, however they are arrived at (and of course they will be arrived at differently by people depending on their circumstances and backgrounds), and to do so even — perhaps especially — in the face of great difficulty. I’m convinced that at the heart of our failure to do what is right, in this instance as in others, is a fundamental question of bad faith. We hide our own vested interests and guilty consciences, we mold evidence to our preconceptions, we ignore plain facts, because it suits us to do so. It suits us, always, to believe that other people are the problem. No one is willing to admit that the problem is us, that we act as we do because we benefit, unjustly, from our actions or our failure to act. And our lack of curiosity, our impatience with complex issues that require serious and nuanced consideration, our inability to see beyond our own limited frames of experience, these failures of imagination are, I’m convinced, also profound moral failures, because imagination is not simply a native faculty but also an act of will. We can’t imagine other possibilities because we aren’t telling the truth, either to others or to ourselves, about our real motives.

So why say any of this? (Who, in any case, listens to me?) And who am I to preach? What do I do that gives me the right to lecture others on their moral obligations, other than trot down to the polls every few years like a good boy and shoot my mouth off on extremely rare occasions? Is it somehow more morally admirable to recognize what is right and fail to act on it in any serious way than it is not to recognize what is right at all? The truth is that I consider myself morally utterly ordinary — perhaps not the worst, but definitely no saint — except in this one regard: that I refuse to “praise what is no good.” (The phrase is Paul Goodman’s, who also talked — and this was fifty years ago, before much else would happen — about how the United States was “like a conquered province,” except that we ourselves were responsible for the actions of the conquerors.) What has happened here is not right.

End of screed. Take it as you will.