Iron Maiden is something of a guilty pleasure for me, but their music videos certainly are entertaining. Enjoy!

‘The Final Frontier’

As we probe further into issues of national and international administration in our courses at GSPIA, I have noticed that we are being increasingly exposed to an ideology of the global elite which has become dominant in the international affairs discourse. I am gratified to note that some of my professors are willing – nay, even eager – to entertain contrary views, though I wonder if these views have not yet been formally structured into a logical system which can form the basis for a deep critique of this ideology. One such logical system is derived from the thought of Karl Marx, though Marxism itself has some interesting problems and contradictions of its own (to which various schools of thought have responded differently). George Grant made the penetrating observation that Marx’s initial impulses were traditionalist (even religious!), as he rejected the contractarian narrative of the time and gazed back into human history to grasp at the threads which bound the human condition together (namely, our gregariousness and our ability to alter our environment to create goods of value) and follow them up through the various paradigms of economic division of labour and exploitation of the powerless, and makes an almost Tory-sounding critique of the dominant ‘enlightened’ ideology of his day by saying the licences it grants are made to serve the values and economic interests of the wealthy. So far, so good. But because of the recommendations he wants to make, however, in laying hold of these threads there comes a point where the tapestry he wants to weave begins to unravel. The Russian existentialist philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev laid his finger on that very spot when he asserted that orthodox Marxism divided history into two – the deterministic era of cyclical exploitation, contradiction and collapse composing the entirety of human history to this point, and the liberated era to come when the classless society would take root. He then asserted that this narrative then ceased to be a ‘scientific’ philosophy and became a religious dogma: the only salvation humankind would have from its chains would be through the messianic class of the industrial proletariat, though there is no assurance exactly wherein this liberating power exists.

Interestingly enough, later Marxists and New Leftists seem to have become aware of this contradiction, and have come amazingly close to overcoming it. Among the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth have all done admirable footwork in finding new and creative ways to subvert and critique the social-contract narrative through various adaptations of Anglo-American pragmatism, existentialism, developmental psychology and the philosophy of language. They affirm the intrinsically social nature of human beings, but leave room for liberation through systemic social critique (though for the most part, they thankfully elide the utopian promises of orthodox Marxism).

But I wonder if there might be an alternative all the same, which follows a parallel path and draws inspiration not only from Marx, but also from points of contact in axial, early Christian, mediaeval and classical Tory thinking. I think the interrupted tradition of radical Toryism gives us some tantalising insights:

- Whiggism (the progenitor of most of the dominant ideologies in modern political discourse, both ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’) in insisting on the social contract narrative of the individual’s relationship with society, fails to recognise a.) that human beings are deeply and organically rooted in their social surroundings and b.) that such belonging is a fundamental human need rather than merely an option (even a preferable option)

- Because human beings are so deeply socially situated, there is basis for conversation about a common conception of the Good

- A common conception of the Good requires some articulation not only of norms and formal institutions, but of common governing priorities and values arising out of this social situation

- A common conception of the Good cannot, therefore, refer only to and be measured only by individual happiness and satisfaction of desires (as the more sophisticated Whigs such as Bentham and Mill would have it, and as the modern human rights regime does now), but also to the traditions and obligations both formal and informal which gave rise to the means of expression for these desires

Ironically enough given the respect I have for such insights, I have taken as much inspiration in my left-Toryism from studying Confucius and his followers as I have from reading the radical Tories and Anglo-Catholics of my own adoptive tradition (William Laud, Mary Astell, Samuel Johnson, Jonathan Swift, William Wilberforce, Beilby Porteus, Charles Gore, Frederick Denison Maurice, George Grant and Kenneth Leech). Though Confucius claimed (and I believe him sincere) that he did not invent anything but merely related what he believed in and loved from generations past (述而不作，信而好古), I think in setting forth this relation he has indeed broken new grounds, often neglected, for deep social critique. Even as he defends the forms of the existing order through such principles as the central moral importance of ritual 礼 and the rectification of names 正名, he turns the content and organising principles of the existing order on their heads by insisting the importance of human love 仁 and social justice 义 rather than profit 利 in all relationships (「君子喻于义，小人喻于利。」). (Implicit in these priorities, also, is perhaps embedded a substantive critique of modern capitalism!)

It should be noted, I think, that radical Toryism (like Confucianism) did leave room for a certain level of formal inequality in its emphasis on respecting traditional forms of social organisation (note that even Mary Astell, the first English feminist, was a pious High Churchwoman and a fervent supporter of the Stuart monarchy). But it should be remembered that while many early Whigs did little to resist the slave trade and the ownership of slaves (in the notable cases of Locke and Berkeley, though of course later the Whig party was responsible for passing the act abolishing slavery in the Empire), various Tory and High Church voices – including Johnson, Swift, Porteus and Wilberforce – were among the loudest detractors of the practice. Why is this? If the early Tories believed, as Johnson put it, that ‘subordination… [is] most conducive to the happiness of society’, why then would they object so vehemently to the practice of slavery?

The answer, oddly enough, might be hinted at in Dr Johnson’s dictionary, in his definition of the word ‘caitiff’ wherein he cites a Homeric saying that ‘so certainly does slavery destroy virtue’ – though Johnson meant it not as a thrust at the lack of virtue in slaves but at the lack of virtue in their owners. It is impossible to demonstrate any meaningful kind of human affection to a piece of property; what is demanded is a recognition (in the sense meant by Western Marxist philosopher Axel Honneth) between people, even people of differing social backgrounds, of common humanity and common values. As Johnson demonstrated in his etymology of ‘caitiff’, such shared values simply cannot exist when one person is allowed such total control over another person’s labour, means of sufficiency and dignity. There is a significant distinction made in Johnson’s thinking between belonging to a community as a subject (meant in two senses of ‘subject’: a being with free will and a citizen of a monarchy), and belonging to a person as an object.

It also seems to be the case that the early Tories viewed poisonous inequality and poverty as unacceptable blights. Dr Johnson wrote extensively on the subject, and nearly always came off in solidarity with the poor, and of course Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal likewise scathingly castigates the callous mindset of the English middle and upper classes with regard to the poor of Ireland.

So we have an interrupted tradition of political philosophy in the English-speaking world which combines cultural conservatism, religious piety and deference to tradition with a radical critique of contractarian / propertarian capitalist ideology and the dire inequalities which followed hard on its heels. George Grant attempted, if not to resurrect it then to remind the world of it, by making careful points of contact with mediaeval and Platonist thinking; I am of the opinion that this interrupted tradition shares more than just a superficial kinship with Confucian thinking (whose interruption in China is a lot more recent, and probably far less substantial than radical Toryism has been in the English-speaking West) in their concern for the Good. However, how the similarities are to be reconciled with the belief in the danger of rationalising values upon communities which do not necessarily share them is perhaps a hurdle too high. It is unwise to demand of people more than they can imagine.

Though I personally have found Confucianism both persuasive and an immense wellspring of inspiration, it would probably be better to promote the social-justice values and use the language of the Anglo-Catholic Christianity I espouse, than to attempt to marshal the thought of Confucius to this task.

Elisha refuses the gifts of Naaman, by Pieter Fransz de Grebber, 1637 (from Wikimedia Commons)

For the numerological-minded out there, today is the 10th day of the 10th month of the 10th year of the 21st century (that’s 10.10.10). That ought to be reason enough to celebrate with your beverage of choice. (Had a gin and tonic yesterday which was quite good; for my own part that ought to be enough.)

Just got back from church for the first time in the better part of a month (having been ill, and thus both unable to sing and unwilling to get out of bed by 9:00 on a day off of classes), and the lectionary today was enlightening as it sort of coincided a bit with the sort of thinking I’ve been doing of late. There were two leprosy healing stories: the military commander Naaman by Elisha, and the ten lepers of the border region between Samaria and Galilee by Jesus, and the week’s sermon was on the subject of gratitude.

Speaking of gratitude, Christianity is peculiar among world religions in that it focusses very heavily upon the interpretation of the human condition as sustained. Scientifically, this is a truth we have known for a long time: human beings are highly-sophisticated thermodynamic mechanisms which produce massive amounts of entropy, constantly taking in energy from the environment and using it imperfectly to further our endeavours of living. Other religions do indeed acknowledge this truth and even its importance, yet Christianity in particular tends to be very emphatic that this scientific truth has a very specific theological significance: the universe, and thus God, is pouring itself out that we might continue to live. There is nothing that we can do that does not come first from what we eat and what we drink and what we breathe; all of which is furnished by the extravagantly effusive fusion reactor that is the Sun. We are all of us born into an energy ‘debt’ and remain indebted throughout our lives, sustained constantly by a lavishly generous universe. Christianity teaches that the only appropriate subjective response to the objective truth that our existences are sustained is, indeed, gratitude – and that gratitude is to be demonstrated by both altering the organisation through which our resources are distributed, and spending our own energy to improve the lives of those less fortunate than ourselves.

Yet, in some ways, have we lost sight of this truth somewhere? The morality du jour, courtesy of a contemporary pop-ethics which holds aloft the marketplace as the site of salvation and celebrates the liberation of individual passions (violence, sex and greed), encourages massive concentration of wealth and conspicuous consumption. This pop-ethics, moreover, likes to pretend that as individuals, we are completely self-sufficient and that freedom therefore consists in the indulgence of such passions. Our corporate media consistently venerate the ambitious, the greedy and the extravagant (that is to say, the ungrateful) over the reasonable, the kind and the generous – and when, on the rare occasion that they they do mention the reasonable, the kind or the generous (Martin Luther King, Jr, Dorothy Day, Mohandas Gandhi or Mother Teresa), they always manage to downplay the promise of deep change in their messages for the benefit of the existing complacent imperial order. Very few in our public discourse are willing to speak of or even consider ‘duty’ or ‘responsibility’ unless it is to castigate the poor – those with the least bargaining power or influence in a market economy. Our imperial society generally venerates (to quote Gandhi) pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity and religion without sacrifice.

In such a society, authentic gratitude (and the simplicity and generosity which must follow from it) becomes a profound act of resistance. The Lord’s Prayer – ‘thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven; give us this day our daily bread’ – becomes radically subversive literature.

It is not that I object in the slightest to worldly order: St Paul was quite adamant that those who bear the sword do not do so in vain, that kingdoms and principalities and governments have a positive moral role to play in enforcing and distributing justice. But in my own view, the organising principles of our present order must change; indeed, they must reverse course, in some cases to pre-Enlightenment norms. Though it leaves a foul aftertaste in my mouth to use the now-castrated-with-overuse contemporary language of ‘sustainability’, it and related principles like ‘stability’ are much to be preferred to the blind worship of endless growth and so-called ‘free trade’ by a number of respected contemporary economists. We must replace the blind pursuit and immodest veneration of mammon with an appreciation for what T S Eliot called ‘the permanent things’ – and some creative means of doing so may be hinted at in Western Europe’s current forms of social organisation (where family time is more carefully balanced against work than it is here). Our best physical sciences must once again pay some measure of respect (ideally the Confucian-inspired respect of distance - 敬鬼神而远之) to the transcendental moral order of the universe – and begin to turn away from the destructive and divisive opinions of pop-lit nouveau-atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. We must make some serious, even if unilateral, efforts to solve some of the more pressing environmental concerns of our own making, such as global warming. We must make some attempt to restore some modicum of intelligence, restraint, civility and common humanity to our public discourse (and kudos to those rare public figures like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who make some brave attempts to do something about it from their seats in the claque). And last (but by no means least), we must begin to dismantle the imperial apparatus that has us engaged in extravagantly costly foreign adventures, in which the foremost victims are the civilians of South and Central Asia and the lower-ranking members of our own military (many of whom come from backgrounds of dire economic distress), but in which the general civilian public is made to feel no obligation in terms of finances or lifestyle.

Just a short list of simple tasks, really. In seriousness, though, I do not think we can depend on the existing order to self-correct, not without significant input in terms of social and political behaviour from the bottom (though even there I have some doubts). Just a few thoughts – have a happy 10.10.10, everyone, and try not to get too drunk! Also, I hope to see some of my readers in Washington, DC at the Rally to Restore Sanity.

From left to right: Dr George Parkin Grant, OC, FRSC; Confucius 孔子; and Dr Sun Yat-Sen 孙中山

My apologies again for having neglected my blog for so long – I have been incredibly busy in recent days, and this has not let up at all in view of a dreaded Public Administration midterm on Monday, along with statistics homework and a summary of the Baylis and Smith chapters on terrorism and nuclear proliferation for Global Governance.

My fun-reading, not wholly unrelated to the questions being asked in Global Governance, has been George Parkin Grant’s Lament for a Nation. In it he poses some very hard, very searching questions – it was very similar in effect for me as reading Ched Myers’ Binding the Strong Man in that it made me question very deeply my own place in the universe and how to negotiate it with the social-justice ideals I claim to profess. I am, for better and for worse, a male white upper-middle-class American with a bachelor’s degree – this places me very firmly in a position of privilege, a beneficiary of modernity and empire. Using Ched Myers’ literary-historical method of reading the Gospel as a guide, I would have to read myself into the story in the position of the wealthy young man and in the position of the scribes and teachers of the Law – people who derived benefit from their statuses within the Roman Empire. Likewise, George Grant’s book made me question my own place in the world.

Grant is adamant, having drunk deeply the waters of the Socratic-Platonic well and of the existentialist well also, that we are shaped in our thinking and in our doing by technology, that we are seduced by the promise that we can have final mastery over the workings of the universe. Grant sees this promise as something to resist, since it has a nasty habit of destroying local, grounded modes of being. The promise of technology is wedded to its offspring in corporation capitalism, which itself is the instrument of American imperial influence worldwide, and it is wedded to the ideology of ‘liberalism’ (by which he means the tradition of Locke and Smith more than the tradition of Rawls), which emphasises the liberation of the passions of the individual (defined as a constellation of ‘natural’ negative and property rights) and the inevitable progress of history toward said liberation. Liberalism, Grant argues, places no checks on the desire for imperial dominance and sees no need to offer grounds for any transcendent notion of the Good; as such, it is the perfect ideology for a humanity which wants to divorce itself from nature and pursue its own selfish ends individually without reference to anyone or anything else.

Grant sees Canada succumbing to the dynamic American world empire on all fronts, having given over control of its own foreign and defence policies, having handed over to a corporate elite all of its wealth and culture, and having forsaken its founding Tory values of tradition, of social welfare and of the common good. He sees Canada now occupying the space of the ‘little brother’ in the American imperial project, reaping many of the benefits while shouldering but few of the responsibilities.

So now I’m left thinking – as an American, very few if any traditions make any kind of real claim on me; instead what I have done is cast back much further along a thinner line to a connexion with British traditions and culture and with the kerygmatic Palestinian community of the followers of Jeshua ben Josef of Nazareth through the organic structure of apostolic succession, wilfully subjecting myself to such traditions through my religion (the Episcopal Church USA and the Anglican Communion). Yet this, in many ways, is not enough. Repentance starts with self-searching, and I find that much of what I do (and what I plan to do in the future) is also dependent upon the promise of technology, and also dependent upon the patronage and privileged position empire has given me. What I do now and where I go from here are now questions to which an extra dimension is added, particularly given my interest in working in China.

Now here is a country which historically took as foundational a traditional mode of social thought – fundamentally different culturally but with some striking intellectual parallels to the radical Tory tradition Grant cites as Canada’s founding philosophy. This mode of social thought belongs to one philosopher by the name of Kong Qiu 孔丘, better known as Confucius 孔子, who claimed to be transmitting a tradition of humanist thought going back to the Duke of Zhou 周公旦 for future generations. Confucius’ philosophy was dedicated almost in its entirety to promoting good social relations between people, and building a society in which human beings, rather than wealth or individual gain, held ultimate value. (Notable is one episode in the Analects wherein after a barn fire he asks after the well-being of the servants but not of the horses, which symbolise material wealth: ‘厩焚。子退朝，曰：“伤人乎？”不问马。’)

The tale of China’s recent intellectual history, however, is a highly troubled one. Most Imperial dynasties (with some notable exceptions) tended to favour Confucianism as it was easily adapted into a pro-establishment philosophy, though in many cases in history it also provided grounds for social critique and even ‘revolution’ 革命 wherein an Imperial family which had abused its power and caused people to suffer, having lost the tianming 天命 (the divine mandate), could be overthrown and replaced with a more virtuous and compassionate family. This changed with the most recent revolutions, however, which really were revolutions in that they replaced more than just the reigning family.

The Xinhai Revolution辛亥革命opened China’s intellectual class to Western ideas through the thought of Sun Yat-Sen 孙中山, whose own philosophy was difficult to define – even though he was highly critical of both imperialism and Western market influences, he was nevertheless highly influenced by his own Western upbringing and education. Western ideas and political leverage continued to play a role in China’s politics and economy through both Chiang Kai-Shek and Mao Zedong (though Mao Zedong was borrowing ideas rather from Marx and Lenin). The attempt to oust Confucian thinking and values from the consciousness of the Chinese people, having started with Sun Yat-Sen, was brought to a head under Mao through the disastrous Cultural Revolution 文革. How successful this attempt has been, I do not believe I am the right person to ask, nor do I think it is yet clear. I think it can be argued, however, that Deng Xiaoping’s reforms of the late 1980’s, done in the wealth-first spirit of Western market liberalism, were (ironically) made possible only by the values upset of the Cultural Revolution.

China’s modern society, as a result, contains a broad mixture of deep organic tradition and cooptation of technological modernity (and the resulting logic of empire). Given the amount of control their society has, I’m not sure Grant would be over-quick to lament the death of their nation in spite of this creeping homogenising influence. I hope – and would very much like to think – that China’s recent spiritual shift toward Buddhism is indicative of a desire to return to a deep organic tradition that can provide a sense of meaning and stability and humanity in a world run amok with the pursuit of wealth at the expense of people. But that is certainly not for me to decide; and if I should choose to work in China, I need to gain a deeper awareness of this history while continuing to ask myself the really hard questions. What are my own purposes? What do I want to accomplish, and for whom? Can I accomplish this in ways which are mindful and respectful of the depth of tradition where I am?

Next up on my fun-reading list: A Dream of John Ball by English socialist author and high-fantasy pioneer William Morris, and hopefully something by Richard Hooker.

Full text of the Holy Father's address here.

It is certainly quite a diplomatic piece of writing in the first few paragraphs, managing to establish common ground with his hosts on their own historical terms while still asserting the mythology associated with martyrs such as S. Thomas More; Prince Metternich would indeed be proud. However, one sees here the sheer driving power of this Pope's considerable academic intellect at work as he addresses the mutual need of social systems for the leaven of moral norms - in his case, arising from Christian thinking and those norms associated with Catholic social teaching. I'm certainly happy that the Pope is devoting his attentions to the need not only for humanitarian aid but also for effective implementation of that aid. It's a message to which I am immensely sympathetic, and which I think needs to be heard on a much broader scale.

One of the problems - and I say this as a party sympathetic to the Roman Church - is that the Pope's own moral voice (and this Pope's in particular) has been compromised by the grievous ethical breaches that have taken place within the Roman Church over the past several decades. For evidence of this one need only examine the protests against the papal visit. There is certainly a great measure of just cause in those protests emphasising the child abuse scandals, and I would like to think that the Pope, in beginning to actively cooperate with secular authorities to bring the criminals in the clergy to justice, is making an earnest and wholehearted endeavour at repentance. I say this because I want the Pope to be recognised for the worthy message he has to offer here about the need for a fairer and more egalitarian economic playing field in which labourers and small landowners are not subject to the avaricious whims of big investment banks, and I want him to be recognised for his contributions outside the clique of his own faithful (as his predecessor Pope John Paul II was).

Anyway, just a loosely-organised collection of thoughts here. I'll probably have more to add later.

Who is ‘I’ without a past?

A river without a source?

An event without a cause?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yk5iESM4vgs

HOLMGÅRD AND BEYOND!

That’s where the winds will us guide!

For fame and for gold,

Set sail for those lands unknown!

Apparently there's an old Internet meme called Wikipedia names your band that I came back to recently during a study break. The rules are as follows - do a random search on Wikipedia; the first page you come to will be the name of your band. (This was what I got.) Then do a random search on quotationspage.com and take the last few words of whatever quote comes up at the bottom of the page (which turned out, for me, to be this quote from Sr Mary Corita Kent). Finally, take a look at the past seven days on Flickr and use the third image you come across as your album cover. I can't link again to the photo I'm using, but I can display the finished product:

Turned out sadly well, actually, since it actually suggests the sort of band I might listen to in real life.

Choir went pretty well today, actually. First Sunday in choral vestments - I forgot how sweaty those things could get... but the songs we were singing were fun: William Byrd in The Oxford Book of Tudor Anthems.

(American) Labour Day’s an interesting time in Pittsburgh, that’s for sure. The buses are infrequent this weekend – certainly understandable, but it meant yesterday that I missed church and the first hour of WMA / heavy weapons practice. It should be noted that I don’t object to being grounded as much on a Monday.

Just in time for ALD, though, came a report from the Freedom House on labour rights in the countries of the world. The United States comes in as a ‘Mostly Free’ country with regard to labour rights (lagging somewhat behind most of the countries of the European Union, Norway, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea), but the report makes note of the substantial and alarming weakened state of American trade unions (from 35% of employed labourers to below 8% over the past 50 years), the steady judicial erosion of collective bargaining rights, the measures taken against managers who violate labour laws which amount to little more than slaps on the wrist, and the public hostility toward any manifestation of labour activism or civil organisation. As an industrialised society with great power and wealth, more ought to be expected of us in both generosity and in concern for the common good, particularly as we run up against problems of resource scarcity in a rising multipolar era.

I wasn’t able to get out and take a great number of photographs, but here are some that may be of interest within my own neighbourhood:

The house I live in, currently. Overall a fairly nice place.

The five-way intersection at Liberty and Baum where I catch my bus most often. Note the Cathedral of Learning in the distance in the first photo, as well as the no-pedestrian-crossing sign which is conveniently ignored by drivers and pedestrians alike.

The centre of Morrow Triangle, with a monument to those who lost their lives in the Second World War.

The First United Methodist Church on Centre Ave and S Aiken Ave. Not the best example of the sooty patina on old buildings, but you can tell the stones used to be a lighter colour, particularly on the tower and beneath the windows. Oh yes, and they do spell ‘Centre Ave’ correctly. Just one of the things I love about this place!

See; wouldn’t lie to you!

Some better examples of the Pittsburgh patina effect: Evaline Lutheran Church (top) and another house on my block (bottom). Evaline Church in particular is quite striking; makes it look quite ancient, in fact.

And here’s a modest example of the terrain in Pittsburgh. I’m taking this shot from the top of a slight incline (Penn Ave), looking downhill and then up toward the cemetery.

That's all the photos I have for now; I’m sure I’ll be back with more soon!

I wouldn’t say that I’m very much acclimated at all yet to the city – I’m sure I shall be eventually, but I’m still in my honeymoon stage of culture shock yet with the cliff of the distress-disorientation phase looming on the horizon. I exaggerate here somewhat – the culture here actually is refreshingly similar to my farther-Midwestern roots; but unlike the Midwest or Rhode Island, there’s terrain in Pittsburgh. Terrain which does not accommodate itself easily to city planning, that is. There are hills and valleys which require overpasses and sharp climbs (the busways and train tracks all require bridges of some sort – in this sense it reminds me almost of Beijing, except the necessity of such bridges is natural rather than synthetic, and the oppressive all-pervading road traffic is missing here), the roads seem to change names, disappear, bend in excess of 180 degrees while crossing themselves, &c. to appease the landscape. My own neighbourhood is in a rhombus-shaped ‘grid’ of roads, the vertex at which my daily bus ride arrives being home to a six-way intersection (only four of which have usable pedestrian crossings). That said, much of the city is still very accessible thanks to the extensive public transport system. So getting around is tricky but inexpensive; the same cannot be said of buying groceries (the local Giant Eagle is very nearby, but prices are a bit higher than I imagined they would be).

The air here is supposedly some of the most polluted in the country, but the only evidence of this that I have experienced in any depth is in the black patina of coal-soot that coats a certain number of the city’s edifices. (My gold-standards for air pollution are still Beijing and the major cities of Shaanxi Province in China.) That said, I have been exposed to some aspects of the city’s culture: I have gone to a game in PNC Park to watch the Bucs go up against the Marlins (the park was beautiful; the game was… less than inspiring), and I have gone to numerous restaurants and pubs in the area and tried the Yuengling (the local lager, which is quite good) and the German-inspired fares at the Hofbräuhaus (where I met some of my fellow GSPIAns – they seem like a good group, all told). As far as local history goes, the (not-so-)little Anglophile in me fell head-over-heels in love with Pittsburgh when he learned that it was among the only cities to resist the Americanisation of place-names at the turn of the century by the US Board on Geographic Names, restoring the name from ‘Pittsburg’ to the more correct (Scots-)English ‘Pittsburgh’ in 1911. I still have yet to visit old Fort Pitt, the redoubt from the Seven Years’ War, but that’s certainly on my list of things-to-do here.

As readers of my blog and other Episcopal blogs may be aware, the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh was pretty much Ground Zero for the late unpleasantness regarding the controversy over inclusion of homosexuals in Church life, and the schism which followed. The Church I am currently attending – Calvary Episcopal Church on Shady and Walnut – came down fairly firmly on the side of the established Episcopal Church, though in spite of such a catholic leaning the liturgy was a bit Lower than I would have hoped. All the same, I enjoyed the sermon immensely (on the countercultural aspects of keeping the discipline of the Sabbath as a day of rest); more to the point, though, I was welcomed with open arms and promptly invited to join choir practices by three separate parishioners. I think I’m going to greatly enjoy worshipping and singing there.

Started doing some readings for classes, and I’ve cracked open a few of my ridiculously-expensive textbooks, but mostly I’ve been doing fun-reading while I still have the opportunity: Athens and Jerusalem, a collection of essays by and about the Canadian political philosopher and theologian George Grant. I certainly appreciate many of his views on the shortcomings of modernity, technology and capitalism, particularly in their relation to education and the national character of Canada. It’s also interesting to see different authors paint very different views of the man: some see him as a socialist or a social democrat making common cause with the CCF / early NDP over the welfare state, economic egalitarianism and opposition to militarism, while others see him as an arch-conservative attempting to reclaim the nomenclature of ‘conservatism’ for the interrupted tradition of political philosophy which includes Jonathan Swift, Dr Samuel Johnson and the High Romantics, and away from the progeny of John Locke, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. The interesting thing is that they both appear to be true.

… So, that’s what I’ve been up to the past few days. Orientation tomorrow; classes start Monday.

It is incredibly rare that I read a New York Times article that sends cold shivers down my spine the way no horror movie can, but the recent one about how the Wikipedia model might be changing the rules of peer review in academic journals made me literally cringe.

When I think back on my post-high school career, and how differently I thought as I left high school from when I left college, and how AmeriCorps and even Peace Corps changed even those views as I was continually exposed to more and deeper knowledge in communities of people who were struggling with the very same questions and issues (even if I completely disagreed with those people), I’ve come to understand how vital it is from a purely intellectual point-of-view to form those connexions. The sciences and the academic disciplines function similarly – you present a piece of work to your peers: people who have both experience with and an interest in the academic question or the scientific hypothesis you are posing; people who know your real name and who are willing to give you criticism (constructive or otherwise) under their own real names.

There are downsides to the process, naturally. Egos get involved. Academic battles and enmities arise. Though I do not know the specifics of the debate in geochemistry in which my father is primarily concerned, his views are immensely unpopular within his own circles and have extreme difficulty gaining traction. But the downsides of having academic debates contained within communities of people who have an understanding and a material interest in the field are vastly outweighed by the benefits. Criticisms are civil, for the most part. Criticisms conform to accepted standards of logic and reasoning. Criticisms are based in fact and according to the best understandings we have within the field.

Transferring these academic debates out of peer circles and onto the Internet is thus a monstrously terrible idea. Perhaps Dr Cohen, the George Mason University professor interviewed in the article who advocates such measures, would care to instruct himself in the subject beginning with this public service announcement (provided by a group of entertainers with a very clear and cogent understanding of how the Internet works to promote civility, rationality, community and factual debate).

A number of good points to be made here. Wikipedia editors are free to edit anonymously – with some exceptions, they don’t even need usernames, just IP addresses. The only reason Wikipedia is not a total wasteland is because they have bots and an active and dedicated team of professional editors who keep it relatively sane by reversing malicious edits and refereeing flame wars between interested parties on their discussion pages, but even Wikipedia is not really reliable for anything more than the most superficial information on any given subject, unless it is extensively sourced – and if you’re going to keep a dedicated team of professional editors who do just such selection of criticism, you might as well give them a break and keep your articles peer-reviewed anyway.

The deeper issue, though, is that of academia willingly subjecting itself to creationists, global-warming deniers and other such ignoramuses. Thankfully, the article was referencing only a certain number of journals in the humanities (the sciences so far seem exempt, and it is my sincere hope that they are wise, secure, sincere and self-aware enough never to attempt such a misguided stunt as this), but it is troubling all the same. The humanities are ostensibly academic disciplines which pose questions about what it means to be human; God help us all if we allow authority over such questions to fall into the hands of people who are insecure enough in their own humanity to spew vitriol and ignorance anonymously over the Internet.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

I’ve finished packing for Pittsburgh, for the most part – I leave for the iron city on Tuesday morning. I am glad, though, that before I had to leave I was able to stay for the Feast of the Assumption at S Stephen’s – I enjoyed the Mass immensely, particularly the procession through Our Lady Chapel to pay our respects to the Blessed Virgin. At times before I had criticised Catholic Mariology as giving Mary too great a Docetic gloss, paying too much attention to her divinity and perfection, and not enough to her humanity; I found, though, that (on the contrary) the Catholic devotions we use in the High Church tradition put me for one in greater mind of her very human vulnerability. The story of the revelation to Mary of her role in the grand design, even her song of praise in the Gospel of St Luke, is brimming with both the existential wonder and terror of her humanity before a God who had placed her very firmly ‘on the spot’. Part of the conceit of asking for Mary’s intercession, as well, is the emphasis on her closeness to us as the ‘advance representative’ of humanity in a state of salvation (as Fr Alexander put it in his sermon today). Of course, the socialist in me is quick to point out that God chose as the vehicle for bearing humankind’s salvation the teenage peasant bride of a lowly working-class woodworker – a socially marginal figure in multiple respects.

Actually it was a bit hard for me to ask her prayers of intercession even today; I feel blessed at the opportunities I do have now with grad school before me, in spite of my own past failed endeavours, and I thought it fit only to seek after just a small portion of the Blessed Virgin’s strength in the event that I too am placed ‘on the spot’. I’m simply grateful for being put in mind of that.

Tuesday: I plan to move in, get settled in, perhaps see a Pirates game with my dad before he goes up to take my sister Catherine back to Beloit College for her junior year. Then to get acquainted with the city and with my future classmates! So far, they seem like a good crew. I’ll be sure to keep my gentle readers in touch with my impressions of Pittsburgh.

It is incredibly strange to me exactly how much irrational sentiment has been stirred up by the proposed building of the Córdoba House at the Park 51 site in Manhattan. Nate Silver makes some good factual points in his blog post on the subject: Park 51 is not at Ground Zero but rather two city blocks north on a parallel street, nor is it even visible from Ground Zero; and a plurality of Manhattan residents support the project (though majorities of New York residents and American citizens, for one reason or another, oppose it). For my own part, I honestly think it shouldn’t be a controversial issue at all. I can see why some might be upset about it, but the Córdoba Initiative has legal title to the land, and they are guaranteed under the Constitution the right to build a religious community centre there, full stop. So much the better if they want to use their community centre to promote interfaith dialogue between the Abrahamic faiths; I’m always game for that, particularly if there are caffeinated beverages involved.

But sadly, as is so often the case in our political culture, the issue has blown up into a complete drama fest. Radical-right gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino said he would use eminent domain to halt the project even as NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg leapt to its defence; the ADL came out publicly against the project because it might potentially offend the sensibilities of New Yorkers; Fareed Zakaria went on CNN eloquently defending the centre and then announcing that he would return the ADL’s Hubert Humphrey Prize awarded to him in defence of First Amendment freedoms (kudos for integrity, but not for discretion); Abraham Foxman of the ADL declared himself ‘saddened’ and ‘stunned’ by Zakaria’s return of the prize; and so on and so forth.

As amusing as all this political theatre is, may I make a suggestion à la Alan Tudyk that we as a society please start showing some rudiments of maturity and class and start talking about some real foreign policy issues relating to outreach to Islamic nations rather than doing all this pointless posturing over a completely legal religious project at home?

EDIT: Oh, and let’s start reading mediaeval Spanish history properly, what say? (Hat-tip to Michael Bérubé at Crooked Timber.)

Okay, my geekiness being obvious by this point I figure I may out myself entirely - I must admit to a fascination with entirely useless, trivial and superficial computer programmes that serve no other purpose than entertainment. In this case I'm not talking about a computer game - I've recently discovered a tool called Super Analyser, a programme which takes your iTunes library, breaks it down and spits back out statistical trivia about what your listening habits are like, information such as: which genres, years and decades are best-represented in your library; which genres, years and decades you most like to listen to; which artists and albums are your most-played; what file-types your library uses (by percentage); even what times of day you tend to listen to music most and what the most popular words in titles of songs in your library are. Not really a time-waster, but kind of fun to see how it breaks down.

Some samples from my own library, for the interested:

Which genres are best represented in my library - by far and away dominated by soundtracks and rock music (I guess I shouldn't be surprised, many of my soundtracks are multi-disc affairs), and I do have a fair bit of rock music. It does gratify my High Tory sensibilities that classical music is so well-represented, but at the same time I'm all too aware that classical albums can be just as long as soundtracks. On the other hand...

By this account, I'm a fairly devout metalhead - specifically a symphonic, nü and gothic metalhead. A bit mortifying, actually, that classical music fell to seventh place below dance music (but Daft Punk's just that good). Speaking of which:

No surprises here. Nightwish, SLOT, Edenbridge, Ozzy. And (guilty pleasure) Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Kinda makes sense that I listen most between 8 and 9 PM, though apparently I don't rock out all night - I do need my sleep, after all. Anyway, cool statistical toy.

Once again, Bernie Sanders at his best, marshalling his impressive logical skills and mastery of fact to the pressing economic issues of our day. It's actually kind of a shame that he's one of the very few who is willing to really broach and engage with the issue of the broadening wealth gap between the richest 1% and practically everyone else, rather than ignoring it or pretending it doesn't exist. His solutions for infrastructure and health-care are partial, certainly not silver bullets when we consider some of the cultural factors relevant to our health-care expenses (our unhealthy social priorities and general consumerist lifestyle, for example), but I think we would do well to consider them seriously. And you have to admire a guy who expresses the level-headed common sense common to the Champlain Valley in an unapologetic Leafer accent.

(And that's not my pro-Vermont bias talking at all. Nope.)

One of the most fascinating (and at the same time most dangerous) aspects of language is that you can have two people or two groups of people using the same lexeme and yet ascribing to that lexeme two different sets of meaning and connotation such that they mean completely different things. When I use words like ‘orthodoxy’ or even ‘religion’, it can conjure up for different groups of people very different assumptions, impressions and images. Sadly, for too many people in the Western world, ‘orthodoxy’ means a set of inflexible, intractable, exclusionary dogmas imposed tyrannically upon a body of believers, and ‘religion’ is too often automatically associated with the most violent, mindless, poisonous and destructive excesses of the Abrahamic faiths, including Christianity. But as someone who considers himself ‘religious’ – specifically Christian – and as someone who tries to be ‘orthodox’, this isn’t what I mean when I use these words. It would probably be best if I first describe some of the connotations I bring to the term when I use it.

1.) Orthodoxy is historical. By this, I mean both that orthodoxy makes reference to its own history and that it has an awareness of the historical conditions in which it is rooted. To use just one example from the Christian faith, in the Anglican tradition, we identify ourselves by the elements of the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral: the Holy Scriptures, the Nicene Creed, the Sacraments of Baptism and the Holy Eucharist and the Episcopate as defined through Apostolic Succession. Through these elements, we can assemble a cogent narrative about who we are as a community, what our role has been through history and what it ought to be moving forward.

2.) Orthodoxy is communicative. By this, I mean that orthodoxy is a dialogue between us believers and our sources of authority, rather than a monologue of inflexible dogmas upon us. This is actually true of any healthy faith – the most valuable insight of religious existentialism is that no matter what we do, we always bring ourselves to the task; no matter what the text is saying, we have to treat it as though it is speaking to us and to our own conditions. Without a reader the text is meaningless; without dialogue between the text and the reader, the text is dead. (What is interesting to note, also, is that the central question within the early Gospels, particularly the Gospel of St Mark, is exactly this sort of existential poking at the reader: ‘Who do you say that I am?’) Though Holy Scripture is primary to our faith, we also require the communicative mediations of Church tradition and our own faculties of reason and personal experience.

3.) Orthodoxy is dialectical. The Gospel provides us with no easy answers to the pressing existential question it poses – even St Peter’s answer, that Jesus is the Messiah, earns him a stern rebuke from the asker. Looking back also at the debates in the Early Church about (among other things) the nature of Christ, it actually somewhat startled me to discover how reluctant the Church Fathers were to leap to the quick and easy answers, to the glib explanations which may have made the faith more palatable or simple to explain. The extremist Christologies were both ultimately rejected in orthodox thinking – that is, Docetism (which denied Jesus’ humanity in favour of his divinity) and Arianism (which denied Jesus’ divinity in favour of his humanity). Instead, Athanasian Christology, with its dialectical emphasis on the both-and, held the day; we are left even today with a Trinitarian belief system which rests on a set of paradoxes which do not lend themselves easily to simplistic answers, but rather to the reflection of the believer.

4.) Orthodoxy is humane. One of the inescapable suppositions of the Gospel, of Trinitarianism and of the Sacraments seems to be that there is the potential for salvation within the world generally, and within humanity specifically. That God was capable of taking on our human existence, able not only to relate to us but to participate fully in our shared experience – even that aspect which most disquiets us, namely death – points to a conclusion that we human beings do have an element of intrinsic value and dignity in our existence that must be encouraged. It is upon this ground, as Jürgen Habermas acknowledged, that such worthy ideals as social egalitarianism, human rights and democracy were built.

5.) Orthodoxy is subversive. Another inescapable supposition of the Scriptures is that, even though we human beings were meant for a more dignified existence, we nevertheless participate in a domination-system which keeps us in bondage, and from which we require salvation. One of the functions of orthodoxy, in its historical communicative dialectical humanity, is to challenge and resist that system. Orthodoxy is a continual reorientation of values: it challenges such unhealthy and broadly-accepted idols as the pursuit of wealth and the pursuit of power, and it challenges us to renounce and subvert them where we see them.

Note that these connotations of ‘orthodoxy’ would not seem to lend it easily to the service of its abusers. Oftentimes, fundamentalists and violent exploiters of religion who cloak what they do and how they behave in the language of ‘orthodoxy’ will overlook the humanistic and paradoxical aspects of orthodoxy. From my view, it would be a mistake to think that ‘orthodoxy’ consists primarily in systematically stigmatising and excluding women and homosexuals from the life of the Church.

However, it is also worth noting that orthodoxy doesn’t really lend itself easily to any of our modern political projects or systems, having both radical-egalitarian and conservative tendencies. Though Christian orthodoxy is by nature ‘conservative’ in the sense that it is conserving a historical narrative in Scripture and in Church tradition, it offers grounds for devastating critiques of modern American conservatism (which in its values and priorities is completely oriented toward the idolatrous worship and concentration of power) and libertarianism (which in its values and priorities is completely oriented toward the idolatrous worship and concentration of wealth). However, orthodoxy also offers grounds for a deep, if not as devastating, critique of modern American cultural liberalism, which a.) offers us only a few relatively weak and ‘top-heavy’ means of resisting these dehumanising trends in the culture and b.) has incredibly few safeguards against the debasement of the human body through the treatment of sex in the culture as a mere consumer commodity (or as a means of selling consumer commodities).

Anyway, just a few loosely-organised thoughts here. I’ll likely try to expand on it a bit more later.

This blog is not quite dead, sir. I'm not throwing it on the cart just yet.

I did have quite a few weeks of inactivity on account of being in upstate New York on family business and generally trying to get ready for grad school. Sadly haven't made much progress at all on my reading list, though I have gotten electricity and rent and insurance sorted out for my move to Pittsburgh - now all I have left is packing, a task at which I am (I believe understandably) baulking. (The sole criterion would seem to be, what can be fit in the back of the truck?)

Quite a bit happened while I was out, it would seem. On the 12th, the Church of England passed legislation which will clear the way for women to be consecrated as bishops. My initial reaction is that this is very much a step in the right direction for the Church, even though it still has some ways to go (the Parliament having to approve the legislation first, before any women are permitted to be consecrated). I pray that the Mother Church will not suffer further division and loss because of this legislation, though it naturally depends upon the wills of those who opposed the measure, whether or not they will remain faithful to the Church.

Also, one of my old Anabaptist friends from Madison linked me to a story wherein Archbishop Williams delivered an address to the Lutheran World Federation Assembly, which was convening to address, apologise and seek forgiveness for the deadly wrongs which had been done by Lutherans and by other magisterial Reformed groups to the Anabaptists during and after the Reformation. He proceeded to highlight two concerns, both of which are very close to me on an intellectual level: the dark side of the legacy of European colonialism and religious proselytisation in East Asia, and the dark side of the historic mistreatment of Anabaptists by the churches in the Magisterial Reformation. He very astutely articulates, through the imagery of the Holy Eucharist, what we need to comprehend in how we offer ourselves and our wrongs for forgiveness by those by whom we have done wrong. It isn't simply an act of meaningless collective guilt or score-settling, but rather a way of realistically approaching our shared history so that we may learn how to better approach the social and theological problems which we approached wrongly in the first place. It's an address well worth reading; it may be found here.

I think I'll go for a walk now...

In general, I'm not a fan of remakes. Almost by virtue of their existence, they lack in originality and creativity, and as homages it would be far better to use the original as moral or artistic inspiration for something different than to simply pour new wine into old wineskins. That said, sometimes remakes can be fun, entertaining and even original (like Batman Begins, Casino Royale or the Star Trek reboot).

The A-Team was certainly the first two, if not the last. Hat tips to the original TV show and cast are very nice to catch if done subtly and in moderation, but The A-Team went well over the top with them, from the van to the reel of the original TV show shown to the wards of the psychiatric unit in Germany (where Murdock was sent after his wrongful sentencing). Actually, come to think of it, The A-Team kind of went well over the top on everything, and the pinnacle moments of the movie were those when it realised that it was over the top, and turned around and winked at you for it. (The scene where they fly a tank into a Swiss lake using its main gun and a failed parachute - after which they roll out of the lake asking for directions from an old woman who just watched the whole thing - is a perfect example of this.)

It really was a big, noisy mess of an action film, though - and given to the kinds of tropified plot twists you could spot coming well in advance (the return to life and betrayal by someone thought dead, for example). The characters were well-done; I liked Copley's Murdock particularly well; Jackson's BA Baracus and Neeson's Hannibal were also very deftly done. Cooper's Face was smarmy and annoying for the most part, but since that was the way he was portrayed in the original TV show, I didn't have too much of a problem with that. I did enjoy the none-too-subtle backhanding of private military contractors (Blackwater having undergone a fictive name change to Black Forest), but as Ben 'Yahtzee' Croshaw pointed out in his review of Tom Clancy's HAWX (I do seem to enjoy linking his videos; can hardly imagine why), the private military contractor is indeed the most popular all-purpose bogeyman of our time in both cinema and video games. Also, as dastardly as the CIA has been in real life, why would the CIA need one of their operatives to steal treasury plates? As one arm of our opaque and jumbled mess of a national security state, wouldn't their coffers already have all of the money they can possibly find a use for, and then some? What would they do, paper their walls and wipe their bottoms with funny hundreds? And even if Lynch was a rogue agent, why would the CIA be trying to cover his arse at the end of the film instead of plausibly denying his affiliation with them? As with most action films nowadays, it's probably best if one doesn't ask too many deep questions about the plot and accept that it's going to be four guys causing massive crashes and explosions. All in all, it earned a solid 'meh' from me - entertaining, but not likely to go down in the same breath as Batman Begins and Casino Royale as far as remakes go.

***

My updated reading list is as follows: Mirror dance by Lois Bujold, Doctrine of the mean by Confucius, On being a Christian by Hans Küng and The liberation of theology by Juan Luis Segundo. I'm looking forward in particular to reading the Küng and Segundo - getting two ends of the modern Catholic perspective, both New Theology and classic Liberation Theology. Even where they agree they will probably also have vastly different things to say given their different backgrounds, trainings and philosophical proclivities.

I'm probably going to be taking a break from my blog for another week or so - I'm going to be visiting family out in Western New York and the internet there will likely be quite spotty. Sorry also for being so long with my latest update; I hope to be writing more regularly when I return.

The story itself is about two weeks old: as our church’s Presiding Bishop, the Rt Rev Katherine Jefferts Schori, delivered a thoughtful sermon at Southwark Cathedral on 13 June, it turned out she had been forbidden in a display of ‘theatrical discourtesy’ (as the Guardian blogger Andrew Brooks put it) from wearing the rightful symbols of her office – the mitre and the crozier – by the Archbishop of Canterbury. It produced the sadly inevitable flurry of media speculation and microanalysis, and (in my opinion) sent precisely the wrong message at the wrong time.

(As a brief aside, allow me to gripe about the use of the appalling descriptor ‘Mitregate’ for this event and the following disputes. This event has absolutely no analogical connexion with the Watergate break-ins – there is no scandal, no visible abuse of power as yet, only differing paradigms of theology and church polity. Despite the obvious rhyming similarities of the words ‘water’ and ‘mitre’, it’s simply a mark of how facile and shallow the corporate media treating this story are that they seem unable to forbear from attaching the old-meme ‘-gate’ suffix onto any kind of controversy, even if that controversy is wholly contrived, trivial or nonexistent – as it was in the completely fictional scandal over UEA’s climate research team after an e-mail archive theft in what came to be known as ‘Climategate’.)

All that aside, though, there have been several interpretations of the Rt Rev Rowan Williams’ action which (to my view) fall into two broad categories: that it is a snub of the ECUSA by the Mother Church on account of our political behaviour or that it is somehow connected with Bishop Schori’s gender and the Mother Church’s current internal discussion on whether or not women are fit to be consecrated as bishops. If the last, I’m afraid, it seems to be either a wholly political conciliatory measure or an attempt to appear even-handed to the traditionalists in the C of E: both the Rt Rev Rowan Williams and the Rt Rev John Sentamu have been active in the recent reform efforts in church polity which would allow for women to become bishops. I personally feel that it is more likely to be the former.

If it is a political snub against the ECUSA (as the decision to discontinue the memberships of five ECUSA members in certain ecumenical dialogues certainly was), it is probably nothing we don’t deserve, for all we’ve been behaving toward the Mother Church like spoiled children who always want their own way. Our disregard for the opinions of the other churches with which we are in Communion in light of our self-proclaimed ‘prophetic witness’ runs contrary to the catholic nature of our Church – even if (as I certainly believe) the left-leaning clerics of the ECUSA have the full right of the matter on the issues of the ordination of women and the inclusion of homosexuals in the life of the church, it still leaves us no excuse as Christians to simply write off those members of our Communion who are genuinely struggling with such issues. At the same time – to extend the prior metaphor – this is a family argument, to be kept within the family. The public nature of this affair does not reflect well on the Mother Church, nor on the traditionalists whom the discourtesy toward the Rt Rev Schori was probably meant to appease. It also sends entirely the wrong message, a message that risks accelerating and worsening the schism between the mainstream as represented by the Church of England and the ECUSA, and the новых расколников (new Raskolniks) of the type which make up ACNA.

I take it as given that we of the Episcopal Church, for all the current tension we have with the Church of England, do truly value our place in the Anglican Communion and will fight to keep it. We value the organic traditions that continue to tie us to the Church of England. I believe that, at our best, we value a concept of orthodoxy similar to that Fr Kenneth Leech began to articulate in his excellently-written series of essays, Subversive orthodoxy: an orthodoxy which maintains a healthy dialogue between the past and our present condition, between scripture and the traditions of our Church and the questions of our present day through the light of reason, and an orthodoxy which articulates a direction toward life in Christ (rather than a laundry list of ossified dogmas about Christ). We ought to be engaged in articulating and cultivating the former definition of orthodoxy, rather than encouraging those opposed to ordaining women to adopt their own heterodox self-definitions.

Another late-game discovery on my part - the Taiwanese band Seraphim 六翼天使, who blend Chinese and English lyrics with operatic power metal in a style very similar (to my ear) to Tristania. They use the 'beauty and the beast' vocal style which I've come to appreciate greatly (the lead vocalist's voice is quite haunting).

Anyway, enjoy - I certainly did!

Just finished Lois McMaster Bujold’s novel Barrayar - probably my favourite book in the series so far, followed closely by A civil campaign. It follows the travails of Cordelia Vorkosigan née Naismith as she attempts to adapt to the culture of Barrayar while retaining her sanity, through her pregnancy, through various attempts on her and her husband’s life, and through civil war. The planet Barrayar in Ms Bujold’s saga was based on several 19th-century military aristocracies, primarily post-Napoleonic Prussia and post-Petrine Russia. Though Ms Bujold is very much an American who lends very American sensibilities to her main heroine, to me it seemed as though Russian literary devices were being worked into the story. The planet Barrayar itself is as much a character in the book as Cordelia, Aral Vorkosigan, Illyan, Koudelka or Droushnakovi. It is in many ways Cordelia’s primary antagonist, in much the same way the Russian novels and movies taking place in St Petersburg make St Petersburg itself the antagonist (the un-Russian city of stone and crime and urban decay which grates on the protagonist’s soul and ultimately causes the protagonist’s downfall).

SPOILER ALERT: Without trying to give away too much of the plot, much of the book is devoted to Lady Cordelia’s struggles both to protect her marriage and her unborn child from the intrigues of Barrayar’s noble caste, and to retain her Betan sensibilities in the face of a culture based on what she considers systemic insanity. Her defeat at Barrayar’s hands is an existential one – she rages at the planet, at her father-in-law, at the rest of the nobility, at the Imperium itself (even going so far as to burn down part of the Imperial Residence), but by the end her struggles are futile: she has become as much a Barrayaran as her husband is, and is a respected member of the Vor caste.

END SPOILERS

I suppose it is a self-inflicted curse that I come late to amazing cultural artefacts to which my friends and family try desperately to introduce me and I place them on a back burner. It was that way with Nightwish, and it is this way with Bujold. She is an amazingly talented and creative writer, who even though she sketches out these vast space operas and political dramas never fails to make them human and relatable through her characters. I’ve read four of them so far and I’m well into my fifth – if all are even half as enjoyable as these first few have been, I know I won’t regret the time spent.

~

Just got back from the PawSox / Clippers game – and it turned out amazingly. One thing I hope I will never do from now on is walk out before a game is over; I’m glad my family stayed this one out. The first part of the game was brutal for the Sox; they had only one run, and the fielders for the Clippers just kept catching out the fly balls and nailing their slow base runners, while the Clippers racked up four runs in the bottom of the sixth. By the top of the 8th the score was 6-1 Clippers. And then the Clippers pulled Laffey out and the Sox went in hard, with Bubba Bell hitting an amazing double that finally tipped the balance, followed by a couple of single base hits that left the score at 7-6 Sox. The top of the ninth was incredibly tense – the Sox pitcher (I forget his name now) struck out two of the Clippers batters rather easily, but it took him a couple of tries with two strikes to each batter (with the entire stadium cheering him on at the tops of their lungs) to get the third out the Sox needed to win the game.

The last inning of this game was pure drama, and I’m glad we got to watch it. Half the stadium had walked out by the 8th inning, to their loss.

~

The recent back-and-forth wiffling over Beijing’s currency valuation seems to me to make a good deal of sense, actually. The general attitude of Beijing – an attitude that is fairly well-received at home, it seems – is to take a hard line on anything that smells like foreign meddling. Even though Mr Cui Tiankai’s press-conference comment that the renminbi exchange rate was not a valid topic for international discussion seemed groundless to American ears, it was actually a very clever move politically. A day later, the People’s Bank seemed to volte-face on this hard stance and issued a statement that it would be loosening the RMB’s peg on the dollar.

Surprising? I’m not convinced. I think that, pragmatically, Beijing may have come to the realisation that China cannot viably sustain its huge trade surpluses and essentially position itself as an entropy sink for the developed world’s labour market without hitting the kink in its aggregate demand which would cause massive systemic inflation. At the same time, I think it was quite prudent of China’s government to take a tough stance against criticism of its low currency exchange rate and not visibly keel to foreign pressure to float it.

So what we’re seeing, it seems, is that China wanted to advertise its tough line against foreign powers seeking control over its own currency while quietly allowing the value of the renminbi to rise – neither of which should come as much of a surprise. (Note that the English version of People’s Daily Online as of 19 June has placed the currency debate headlines at the top of the page; while the Chinese version places the story rather further down the page, in small print.) We’ll see how the situation develops.

Just came back from an academic symposium on Modern China up at Brown - it was enjoyable and actually quite informative, though I found I learned more about American cultural and academic perspectives than I did about modern China per se. I had to leave early, sad to say. It was still a good opportunity to acquaint myself with some of the problems and issues I'll be dealing with in graduate school.

I was most struck by the talk given on the influence of American pragmatic philosophy on modern China by Dr Chen Yajun. His approach was mostly comparative, though he dug pretty deep into the meta-level issues of how Chinese philosophers and political thinkers read pragmatism, and how they have tended to drift between two poles (associating it with a radical empiricist methodology on the one hand and epistemic subjectivism on the other). Dr Chen went into some detail about how a lot of the Chinese interpretation of pragmatism was linguistically-based, since many of the issues and concepts in Western thought which pragmatism criticises don't occupy the same space in Chinese thought. When a classical Chinese philosopher talks about 自然, for example, or 信, or 道, it would be rather naive to assume that he is defining the concepts in the same way as a modern Western-influenced philosopher who talks about 'nature' or 'truth' or 'reason'.

(A brief aside: in my view, the concepts of 自然 and 道 occupy a broad space in Chinese philosophy which covers the space occupied in Western philosophy by both the concepts of subjective / existential 'authenticity' and 'nature' in the post-Enlightenment sense, in addition to a moral law when the same concepts are used by Confucians. This is what irks me most about ersatz pop-philosophers like Alan Watts and ideologues like Friedrich Hayek when they try to read Laozi or Zhuangzi - they apply either a vapid or a bigoted and ideological hermeneutic to the original texts, which destroys the meaning such that they can twist it to their own political ends.)

The response, by Dr Paget Henry of the sociology department, was even more enlightening about the history of American philosophy and pragmatism's place in that narrative. Dr Henry, though he was impressed by Dr Chen's writing, felt that an accounting of pragmatism's influence was incomplete without an accounting of the dialogue within American philosophy which brought it about. Firstly, Dr Henry's argument went, pragmatism arose as a response to scientific positivism, which claimed that verifying or falsifying hypotheses about the natural world was simply a matter of designing the right experiment to test the hypothesis. Pragmatism countered this claim by positing that a community of interpreters was required to make any useful sense of the data - thus, the conduct of scientific inquiry is governed not only by a purely constative methodology but also a set of professional ethics and norms.

The second major point that Dr Henry brought up was that pragmatism arose as a response to a dialogue which was already going on within American philosophy, between the 'canonical' political theorists of American history (Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson and so forth) and the unsung African American voices who have contributed heavily to the dialogue on political theory, critiquing and shaping American political thought as much as their white counterparts did (Lemuel Haynes, Frederick Douglass, Martin Garvey, all the way up to Cornel West). The view of the traditional pragmatists toward its African-American interlocutors was more or less imperialistic, and the relation of the work of pragmatists like John Dewey to Chinese philosophy would be better understood, Dr Henry argued, in this context: there was an element to Dewey's work in China which was monological rather than dialogical. Dewey expected to fix problems in China without noticeably believing that China had anything to offer in return.

It wasn't an aspect of philosophy I expected to encounter at this symposium, but I'm grateful I went, certainly. Something to think about, pray about and be affected by, as I prepare myself to learn how to go off into the world and fix problems.

Not much needs to be said for Nightwish's 'Nemo' - awesome song; awesome video.

This past weekend I watched The Young Victoria (starring Emily Blunt, Rupert Friend and Paul Bettany) on DVD. Before I begin what promises to be another of my highly-belated movie reviews, I would like to make a couple of warning notes. Firstly, I had previously seen the 2001 BBC miniseries of Victoria & Albert, which deals with many of the same events. Secondly, the last movie adaptation of the subject of a BBC miniseries (in this case, a Jane Austen novel) I found myself loathing with a burning passion – to wit, the 2005 version of Pride & [sic] Prejudice with Keira Knightley and Matthew MacFadyen.

Thankfully for my sanity, The Young Victoria was nothing at all like the 2005 Pride & Prejudice, in that it managed a modicum of respect for its source material and overall proved a soulful and satisfactory film. It also employed Handel’s ‘Zadok the Priest’ in its opening scene, which instantaneously endeared it to me. But it threw me for a definite loop – it was a far different performance again than Victoria & Albert, so in a sense it was like watching the remake of Star Trek: I knew and loved all of the characters, but it was like gazing into an alternate universe where they say and do different things for different reasons. Emily Blunt’s Victoria is far more self-assured, far less visibly vulnerable, far more comfortable growing up and growing into her role as queen than Victoria Hamilton’s Victoria. Rupert Friend’s Albert is a romantic, idealistic individual who despite his introversion quickly befriends and falls in love with his intended, while the source of the growth in Jonathan Firth’s Albert rises from his hard-nosed realism, from his devotion to his duty and from his impatience with the lifestyle he has taken upon himself, only falling in love with Victoria once he has established his own routine. Melbourne as played by Nigel Hawthorne is a gentle, empathetic father-figure to Victoria; Paul Bettany takes ‘Lord M’ and makes him a wryly seductive, cynical, self-interested politico. C F von Stockmar also undergoes a similar transformation: though he was undoubtedly shrewd, calculating and manipulative in the 2001 version, he also provided a lot of paternal advice to the young Albert and cared deeply for the happiness of the young couple once they did marry. In the 2009 version, Stockmar is marked by all of the calculation (plotting the potential political alliance of England with Leopold of Belgium through Albert) and none of the warmth. Instead, Stockmar’s place in the story is taken (with aplomb) by Harriet Walter’s Adelheid von Sachsen-Meiningen, widow of King William IV and friend and mentor to the young Queen Victoria.

I realise, of course, why they did what they did with this movie. From a purely practical standpoint, this film did not have the time or the scope to tackle the entirety of Victoria’s youth, marriage and reign with Albert. Victoria (and certainly Albert!) have a lot more growing up to do in a lot less screen time. It is still unclear to me why they keep Mark Strong’s John Conroy around as long as they did – one of the first things the historical Victoria did upon her ascension to the throne was to summarily dismiss Conroy. And then there is the blatant dramatic licence they took with the Edward Oxford assassination attempt. (Actually, both versions are guilty of historical inaccuracy with regard to this incident, but I confess to liking Jonathan Firth’s cane-fu better than Rupert Friend’s melodramatic bullet dive.)

The characterisation of Lord M, setting him up as the foil and potential romantic rival of Albert, was jarring at first but quite effective. It certainly helped to express the Bedchamber Crisis in convincing dramatic terms, and meshed well with the historical Lord M’s troubled personal life. The opposition of Lord M to Victoria’s desired economic reforms also helps to draw together the characters of Victoria and Albert on one of the central moral points of the story – that the political class have an obligation to care about and act in the interests of the entire nation, particularly the downtrodden and marginalised, even if it comes at the cost of their own comfort and pride. The 2001 version did this too, albeit in more subtle ways (we see it peeking out here and there occasionally), and not by placing Lord M as the primary antagonist.

The rest of the movie was well-done on the whole - if I had to describe this film in one word, that word would doubtless be (to shamelessly borrow the Whedonese vernacular) ‘shiny’. I approved of the music, and I certainly approved of the costume and set design. The effects were also good for the most part, but there was one wince-inducing cinematographic moment where the set slides back from Victoria on the dance floor – after which, I half-expected Michael Jackson to start playing and Albert and the rest of the dance extras to break out Thriller. There were subtle touches which demonstrated the relatable common humanity behind all the royal and political goings-on: Ernst teasing his younger brother over his interest in Victoria, or Queen Adelheid smiling knowingly as Victoria recounts her political and personal struggles to her.

I do regret not having seen this movie on the big screen, but that seems to be a curse I’m under. It’s still very much watchable (and commendable) on DVD.

It's been a busy week. I got back from my second (vastly exhausting but also very rewarding) trip to Pittsburgh this past weekend, and I started another class at RIC - Bridge to Advanced Mathematics, in which we basically learn how to do proofs. I think I'll describe first my second trip to Pittsburgh, since that's been the most enlightening aspect of my past week.

We flew out on the morning of 21 May, not ridiculously early but early enough to leave its mark on my energy levels, rented a car, reserved a hotel room and basically went exploring several small-apartment options with the ultimate aim of trying to pin down a lease, but also doing some exploring of the environs of the East End (where the local shops are, where local churches are, where the bus stops are, how far it is walking from campus, &c.) in the rain, which was on and off pretty much our whole trip out. The apartments I looked at were primarily in the Friendship and Squirrel Hill neighbourhoods on the East End - I finally set up a lease on an apartment which is currently being renovated, but which will be done by the time I move back in August. Here is one of the houses in the same neighbourhood:

Looked good once, and will again once it's done being rebuilt, most like. But it looks like fire damage was pretty widespread among these houses (which is strange because a lot of them, like this one, are brick) - a supposition corroborated somewhat by the insistence of the landlords on fire-safety precautions and fire-related liability waivers in the lease agreements. These are old houses (maybe even as old as the Victorian my family currently owns), probably going back to when Pittsburgh was a steel town. When I'm there next I'll be sure to read up on my local history and lore; it's sure to be engrossing. It is, after all, Mr Rogers' Neighbourhood (although Mr Rogers produced his show out of Oakland rather than Friendship)!

The closest Episcopal Church (and pretty much the only one in what I would consider walking-distance) is Calvary Church, which also has some significant lore (and, indeed, current importance) attached to it, as well as being a very physically impressive edifice (all the more so being an almost ur-Gothic church building shot on a rainy day):

It was the first church in the United States, actually, to do a service by radio broadcast in 1921; more recently, it was one of the more prominent Episcopal churches on the loyalist side of the unfortunate schism in the Diocese of Pittsburgh. I admit to being impressed with the sermons (those of them that I've had the time to read); it will be good to visit this church and get a fuller impression.

Unfortunately, we didn't get to stay long - we left the morning of 23 May back for Providence, and I had to prepare for my summer course in advanced mathematics. Basically, the first chapter was all review of my freshman Logic and Reasoning course at Kalamazoo College; my thanks to Prof Steve Petersen for making that class not only enjoyable but also highly applicable here - I'm starting to get the feeling you've made my life infinitely easier. Now we get to put the rules of formal logic into writing up mathematical proofs! Even though the class has by this point only just begun, I nevertheless am beginning to empathise strongly with Aaron (my math-major roommate from senior year at K) for having to do basically proof-writing for a significant chunk of his time there. It being logic, it makes sense, but at the same time it is a lot of grinding, a lot of trial-and-error, and it is beginning to strike me that it requires the occasional flash of artistic creativity that leads to the application of axiomatic statements in unexpected ways.

I mentioned in my earlier post that I was reading CS Lewis. I'm currently about three-quarters of the way through Mere Christianity, and I must confess to being deeply impressed by it thus far. Though I was heavily critical of his view of pacifism in my series of blog posts on Protestantism a while back, and though I continue to disagree with his stance there, I have a much more profound intellectual appreciation for the man's work on a closer reading. He's very conventional, not an original thinker or an innovator by any means - indeed, it almost strikes me that he would be insulted by such a label, were it to be applied to him! - but he applies his remarkable creative and intellectual energies into articulating an interpretation of Christian teaching which speaks strongly to the condition of the reader. Naturally, there are parts of his vision which I find more rigorously articulated than others; his chapters on sexual morality and Christian marriage were solid right up until the point where he began arguing for a complementarian view of the relationship between husbands and wives (my own experience has been that how well or how fairly one makes decisions has very much more to do with personal temperament than with physical gender; in Scripture also the issue is not so cut-and-dried). He's at his best, though, when he is discussing a topic from his own experiences, and he is certainly not one to shy away from discussing hard topics (particularly like forgiveness, given the spirit of the time in which he was writing). I certainly hope that the Screwtape letters is as solid a read as this book has been.

Huzzah! Finals are done, and I have my marks for both micro and macroeconomics. I did well, thankfully, in both - and now I have a week before my maths summer course begins, during which I will likely be looking at apartments in Pittsburgh. And reading. A lot of reading.

Currently on my list is The epistle to the Romans (chapters I-VIII) by Bishop Charles Gore (the Founding Father, as it were, of modern Anglo-Catholicism), and I'm about three-quarters of the way through that. Next up on my immediate reading list are Komarr and A civil campaign by Lois McMaster Bujold, Evolutionary socialism: a criticism and affirmation by Eduard Bernstein, 《中庸》 by Confucius with a translation by James Legge, Mere Christianity and The Screwtape letters by C S Lewis, and Saving Adam Smith by Jonathan Wight - a good mix of fiction and non-fiction, Fun-reading and Important Books-reading; we'll see how far I get through this revised list before next week...

I often think our Ozzy's quite a bit deeper than we give him credit - if you actually listen to the lyrics of the song, he really does seem to be talking about the fragmentation of consciousness and the neuroses that develop from the rationalisation of our lifeworlds away from their intended purposes and their colonisation by social media that want to strategically use them to sell us a bill of goods that we don't necessarily want. Of course, the truly tragic irony of this song is that its own purposive rationality has been colonised these past two decades by Blizzard Entertainment and the corporate patrons of the Superbowl to sell us World of Warcraft (among various other kinds of rubbish we don't need).

Of course, Heidegger might have a thing or two to say objecting to the limiting dasein of the title and refrain of the song 'Crazy Train', but that's another commentary entirely!

In this political climate, one all too often hears appeals to patriotism from fairly strange sources – or finds one’s own patriotism called into question (often none-too-subtly) by one’s political opponents, who deem themselves the only ‘real’ Americans while laughably declaring the duly elected President of the United States ‘un-American’. Thus the question arises, far from a new one, as to whom one might call a ‘patriot’ – or what the term even means in the first place. As with many things, the poor noun itself has been so badly abused and contorted that it has become nearly meaningless. (For example, while I quite enjoyed Ben Croshaw’s now somewhat-dated review of MOH: Airborne, is it fair of him to cede the territory of patriotism to the purveyors of the jingoistic sentiments he quite properly mocks, declaring at the end that ‘patriotism is for twats’?)

With all respect to Mr Croshaw, I might call to the gentle reader’s attention the thoughts of another Englishman of sharp wit on the subject, namely Dr Johnson. Dr Johnson in his 1774 brief (appropriately entitled ‘The Patriot’) noted all the marks of those who call themselves ‘patriots’ but do not behave as such. For example:

He that has been refused a reasonable, or unreasonable request, who thinks his merit underrated, and sees his influence declining, begins soon to talk of natural equality... As his political melancholy increases, he tells, and, perhaps, dreams, of the advances of the prerogative, and the dangers of arbitrary power; yet his design, in all his declamation, is not to benefit his country, but to gratify his malice.

Or:

To instigate the populace with rage beyond the provocation, is to suspend publick happiness, if not to destroy it. He is no lover of his country, that unnecessarily disturbs its peace. Few errours and few faults of government, can justify an appeal to the rabble; who ought not to judge of what they cannot understand, and whose opinions are not propagated by reason, but caught by contagion. The fallaciousness of this note of patriotism is particularly apparent, when the clamour continues after the evil is past.

Given the anger and threats of violence, the racial animus, the counterfactual conspiracy theories and the palpable malice which underlies so many of these recent tax protests – against a general tax rate which indeed has hit a 60-year low! – I believe Dr Johnson’s colourful descriptions of false patriotism absolutely apt in these cases. More, he eviscerates the pretensions to patriotism of the very jingoistic pro-war attitudes that Mr Croshaw skewers in his own review (albeit in a different context):

It may, therefore, be safely pronounced, that those men are no patriots, who, when the national honour was vindicated in the sight of Europe, and the Spaniards having invaded what they call their own, had shrunk to a disavowal of their attempt, and a relaxation of their claim, would still have instigated us to a war, for a bleak and barren spot in the Magellanick ocean, of which no use could be made, unless it were a place of exile for the hypocrites of patriotism.

But if we can so easily identify examples of such false patriotism in our own time, whether they are stoking the irrational resentments and insecurities of the rabble, whether they are making untenable promises or whether they are waving the flag the louder to clamour for war, are we then to give up any notion of a true patriotism? Though Dr Johnson spends less time on this question, he does give us some tantalising hints as to what he comprehends in his notion of a true patriot:

He considers himself as deputed to promote the publick good, and to preserve his constituents, with the rest of his countrymen, not only from being hurt by others, but from hurting themselves.

A ‘patriot’ in Dr Johnson’s terms is willing not only to entertain the notion of but promote a ‘publick good’, and to care for the well-being of ‘the rest of his countrymen’. Such a patriot would be a rare thing indeed to encounter in modern American society! We now have very few among our leadership who are bold enough to ask us to make any kind of sacrifice, or bear any burden at all for the sake of promoting the common good, who ask us to be generous with our time and our money and our service without first stroking our egos and assuring us of our unmitigated (supposedly Constitutional) entitlement to do with our own property whatever we please (and damn the consequences!). Whither Kennedy, who implored his fellow Americans to ‘ask not what the country can do for [them, but rather what they] can do for [their] country’? I can certainly appreciate that President Obama may be attempting to move the needle back in that direction – and though he still weighs it down pretty heavily with a form of exceptionalist rhetoric which I feel is not entirely honest, I hope he meets with some level of success.

I tend to (optimistically) agree with Johnson rather than with Croshaw – I think it is possible that there might be an honest form of patriotism, one which isn’t just ‘for twats’. But I feel it requires a far more highly-developed civic sensibility than is being presently encouraged, and a far less polarised society.

Well, for a midnight rant, I hope that was at least partially coherent. I may have some more time to flesh them out better in the future.

On with finals week!

I would highly recommend reading Professor Russell Arben Fox's comments on Jonathan Rauch's review of a sociology of the culture wars by Naomi Cahn and June Carbone, since it explores one of the major 'sticking points' in the national discourse which makes courtesy and understanding so difficult. Why is it that the regions and cultural climates which show the highest amount of popular support for conservative social norms (stances against homosexuality, premarital sex, &c.) display a lifestyle which runs completely counter to those norms (higher rates of divorce, teen pregnancy and births out of wedlock)?

Professor Fox presents Rauch's sociological analysis as 'plausible', but at the same time he tends to fault it for ignoring the formative factor of religion. His analysis tends to privilege the Hegelian model (ideological paradigm shifts preceding economic and social behaviour paradigm shifts) over the Marxist model (economic paradigm shifts preceding ideological ones) while Rauch's does the inverse, but he has a good point. As religious institutions have lost their place in the social fabric as the loci of community and as the voices of community conscience advocating for concrete social change, religion has become something hyper-personalised, a hobby or an accessory rather than a source of existential grounding and self-definition. On the one hand, one sees the liberalising element shying away from challenging parishioners to open themselves to Scripture, to reflect, to discuss and to decide matters of political and social importance for the society (out of seeming fear of causing offence), and on the other hand you have an element of fundamentalist reaction monologically dictating the meaning of Scripture, discouraging open discussion and making stringent demands upon its followers in order to change society to its own political will. Both aspects would appear to be outgrowths of a tendency which I began to sketch from within my own adoptive Church tradition, what Fr Alexander of St Stephen's Episcopal Church terms 'self-defining orthodoxy'.

The question, though, is when and how the mainline churches lost their positions of prophetic witness with solid moorings in the community life, and it might be the case that Rauch (and Cahn and Carbone) have the right of it after all. One might easily imagine an increased physical and social mobility, the result of higher levels of industrialisation in the economy, being a cause of this decline, rather than a consequence. In which case, it becomes incumbent on the Church to reimagine its role within this advanced industrial social paradigm, and find ways to articulate an affirming, responsible Christian progressivism which provides deep meaning and 'a safe place to land' to a hypermobile generation.

Thanks to Professor Fox for bringing it to attention - it is indeed good food for thought.

Many Easter blessings to my readers! Yet another campus visit come and gone - though this time I went to American University and George Washington University in Washington DC. I stayed with one of my father's childhood friends and fellow Scouts, Russ Damtoft, and his family (his wife Linda, and his sons David and Eric) in Bethesda - they were very kind to put me up on such short notice, and were very good hosts. (Russ even gave me some pointers on entering the foreign service, if that's what I decide to do after getting my MA, and David's a history major with an interest in Europe, so we got along pretty well.) Actually getting there was a bit more of a chore - due to the torrential rain and flooding we've had up here, 95 was closed and getting to the airport was, shall we say, an adventure. I did get there in good order, though.

I had positive impressions of both universities - obviously either one would be an amazing place to go to school. But American University, strong though their programme is and as helpful as their CRS representative was, didn't seem like a great fit for me; not a lot of emphasis on team-building or community, and a bit removed from the main city, which was a bit unfortunate. It seemed fairly self-contained, and the class size of the lecture I got to sit in on was on the larger side (more than 20 students). Sadly, I forgot to take pictures of the campus, which is a shame because it was actually quite beautiful when I went there.

George Washington University, on the other hand, was a different beast entirely! A very colourful campus (figuratively speaking, sadly; a lot of the buildings reminded me of some of the newer Syracuse fixtures and the Sci Li at Brown), right in the middle of the city - a short walk away from the World Bank, from the Washington Monument (visible from the Elliott School), from the State Department and (of particular interest to me) from St Paul's Church on K street. I was impressed by the students that I met there - even the ones who were just out and about rather than leading tours were friendly and helpful, as were the staff. I was also impressed by the flexibility of the programme (most of the students work at least half-time, with the graduate classes in the evening, and the registrar is willing to bend over backward to help students design a programme that works for them) and by the emphasis on community and collaboration with other students. The Elliott School struck me, though, as a school undergoing a bit of an identity crisis: their capstone project was a fairly new addition, but it indicates that they're moving in about the same direction I am, more toward the professional world and away from the academic. I got the feeling that I would be quite at home there - the only problem I can see at this point is the cost, both of the school and of the dreaded Washington living expenses.

Anyway, here are some photos of DC and the GWU campus:

The train station at Fort Totten, DC Metro red line

The Elliott School of International Affairs itself, on E street in Foggy Bottom

The General himself - or rather, a statue of him - on GW's quad

Two of the necessities of life: food (at GW Deli, above) and drink (at Quigley's Pharmacy / Tonic, below), though there is of course food and drink elsewhere in DC

I'm continuing to read Dr Johnson's The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia and should be done before I head off to GSPIA in Pittsburgh, at which point I intend to pick up Bishop Gore's commentary on the Epistle to the Romans for fun-reading. Classes are going well; just got my second paper assignment for micro, which involves reading a soft sci-fi novella by Frederik Pohl. Seems like some this month's going to be fairly fiction-heavy...

In the meanwhile, onward to Pittsburgh! I'll try to be better about photos this time, but I don't think I can promise much. And then after I come back, I'll have some very hard decisions to make...

Well, now that I've had some time to catch my breath after my couch-surfing excursion to Syracuse this past weekend (which was the welcome weekend for prospective grads at the Maxwell School) I can start writing a bit about it. It was a fairly long trip, by train there and by bus back (the train having been delayed six hours). When I got into Syracuse, I was picked up by my host student, Andrea, and her significant-other Karsten, and immediately taken to a party which uncannily resembled an undergraduate party (complete with drinking games and mixed drinks of dubious origin and composition). I quickly found, though, that the students were a congenial and welcoming group on the whole - not just at the party, but afterward as well (when we finally got back to Andrea's flat, which she shared with three other students).

Friday I spent up on the main campus, at the Maxwell complex (second photo down). I admit to being impressed with the school - it was set a bit apart from the rest of Syracuse, but they had some cool old buildings (and newer ones which looked like bunkers, in the brutalist 1960's reinforced concrete - but I'm used to those, since I did go to Classical High School for a year). The Maxwell staff in charge of the welcome weekend were very welcoming indeed; they fed us and then gave us a few lectures / forums / q-and-a sessions with staff and current students. I was a bit surprised, though, to find that the Washington schools were not held in very high repute there - though their Washington semester (which they do in concert with U Pitt-GSPIA and a couple of other schools) was very highly touted.

The campus felt very Midwestern in character (even though New York State is kind of a bridge between the Mid-Atlantic East Coast and the Midwest, and where Syracuse lies between those regions, loosely-defined, really depends on whom you ask). There was a lot of emphasis on the student community, which was readily apparent. The students were very helpful and eager to talk about their projects - though for much of the weekend we were just kind of goofing off together (which is fine too), they assured me that they did do a substantial amount of work. In all, I was strongly reminded of the Kalamazoo College student body. That might be an endorsement, but I keep hearing that master's programmes are not undergraduate programmes, and what I should look for should be, to some extent, much different. The Washington schools are still in the running for me, since they have the greatest opportunity for internships, building professional skills and finding job offers in my area - but they are also significantly more expensive.

Some photos I took of the campus:

The train station at Albany-Rensselaer, where I spent a good portion of my trip inland

The downhill view from the Maxwell Complex - not taken from the best time of day, I'm afraid

A side shot of the famous statue of Honest Abe in the Maxwell courtyard, with Tolley Hall's orange brick in the background

Evening shot of nearby Lyman Hall

As my gentle readers may be aware, I applied to graduate schools (specifically master's programmes in international relations) this past winter, and have now heard back from them all. Long story short, I was admitted to six of them: the University of Minnesota, Syracuse University, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Washington, American University and George Washington University. Overall, I'm incredibly happy with my results! Now I have some majorly tough decisions to make (like blue and buff, blue and red, blue and gold)...

Over the next few weekends I'll be going out to Syracuse, DC and Pittsburgh to visit a few of these schools; after doing so I may have a clearer idea of what my preferences ought to be, or at least what I want to look for in the courses of study I've been admitted to. So far, the certificate option at Pittsburgh and area studies concentration at American look the most flexible when it comes to fashioning a course of study involving foreign relations in both Central Asia and China, but the career services and professional development and training courses at GWU look amazing...

Also, weather around here has been on the warm side of comfortable, perfect for walking, and as of yesterday (20 Mar 2010) it is now officially spring. That can only mean one thing:

From the album Epic 《演義》 by Tang Dynasty (唐朝). An oldie but a goodie - video quality's not the best, though. A bit more subdued than other brands of metal, but that's definitely not a bad thing here!

Just to bolster the point that 'social justice' is a biblical mandate which has been passed down to us in the traditions of the Holy Church and carried forth by many throughout its history, here are just a few relevant figures in the Christian narrative (with a particular emphasis on, but by no means limited to, the English Church - thanks to this fine website for many of the pointers and resources used herein) who have been associated with the struggle for economic equality throughout the centuries:

JESUS OF NAZARETH (6 BC - 30 AD) - not (strictly speaking) a Christian, but rather a Jewish radical whose doctrine, ministry to the poor and ill and civil disobedience campaign against the Roman Empire led to his death by crucifixion in the year 30 AD. He spoke up on behalf of the widows and orphans, and on behalf of those considered 'unclean' by the Temple authorities (lepers, prostitutes and tax-collectors). To us he is the Messiah, the Human One as prophesied by Daniel and the Son of God, of one substance with the Father.

Blessed SIMON KEPHAS, later known as PETER (1 BC - 68 AD) - apostle of Christ and controversial early leader of the Church who demanded the equal sharing of property among followers (Acts 5), and (though originally opposed to the idea) ended up ministering to the Gentiles. Later executed in his mission to Rome, being crucified on an inverted cross.

Blessed SAUL OF TARSUS, later known as PAUL (5 BC - 67 AD) - early convert to the Way, and much misunderstood by later historians, both those favourable and those hostile to his contributions. He made it his mission to include believing Gentiles in the community of Christ, facing down and resisting debt and purity codes and taboos against the 'unclean'. In the seven letters definitively attributed to his authorship, he proclaimed equality between Jews and Greeks, rich and poor and men and women (Galatians 3), defended the authoritative role of women in the Church (Romans 16) and exhorted wealthy believers to manumit their slaves and treat them as brothers (Philemon). Decapitated in Rome in 67 AD.

Blessed JOHN CHRYSOSTOM (= Golden-Mouth), Church Father and Bishop of Constantinople (347 - 407 AD) - so named for his eloquent public speaking (which probably means today he might be considered an 'elitist'?). Was outspoken against the practice of lending at interest and in favour of the equal distribution of property, which he thought was the social extension of the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist to the wider society:

Week by week you come to the Lord's table to receive bread and wine. What do these things mean to you? Do you regard them merely as some kind of spiritual medicine, which will purge your soul, like a laxative may purge your body? Or do you sometimes wonder what God is saying in these simple elements? Bread and wine represent the fruits of our labor, whereby we turn the things of nature into food and drink for our sustenance. So at the Lord's table we offer our labor to God, dedicating ourselves anew to his service. Then the bread and the wine are distributed equally to every member of the congregation; the poor receive the same amount as the rich. This means that God's material blessings belong equally to everyone, to be enjoyed according to each person's need. The whole ceremony is also a meal at which everyone has an equal place at the table.

Also (according to the scholarship of current Pope Benedict XVI!) vehemently believed that almsgiving was not enough to fulfil God's plans for a more just society, but that egalitarian social programming was required, according to his Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles. Was banished from Constantinople to modern-day Abkhazia and died en route; canonised shortly thereafter.

Blessed BASIL OF CAESAREA (330 AD - 379 AD), Church Father and Bishop of Caesarea Mazaca - renowned for his sympathies to the poor, for his ascetic lifestyle and for his opposition to Arianism. Made a scathing critique of the drive for the acquisition of material wealth as an obstacle to the commonwealth of God:

While we try to amass wealth, make piles of money, get hold of the land as our real property, overtop one another in riches, we have palpably cast off justice, and lost the common good. I should like to know how any man can be just, who is deliberately aiming to get out of someone else what he wants for himself.

Blessed HILDA OF WHITBY (614 AD - 680 AD), Abbess at Whitby of the Celtic monastic tradition - though she was often sought for advice by wealthy and powerful men, she was nevertheless famed in Bede's history for her strict obedience to monastic rule, for her advocacy of holding in common all goods and property and for her generosity to the poor. Most famously, she encouraged and supported the cowherd Cædmon to take up the discipline of holy music.

Blessed ÆLFHĒAH OF CANTERBURY (954 AD - 1012 AD), Archbishop of Canterbury - known for his life of simplicity and service to the poor, and for his dedication to just peace. Negotiated a peace with the invading Danes in 994, a peace which resulted in the conversion of Olaf Tryggvason (along with his promise that he would no longer attack the English). In a later invasion, Ælfhēah was captured, and a ransom of 3000 pounds sterling was demanded. Ælfhēah refused the ransom, and was beaten to death by the Danes.

Blessed WULFSTAN OF WORCESTER (1008 AD - 1095 AD), Bishop of Worcester - advocate for the rights of the Saxon peasantry after the Norman conquest and leader of a campaign of civil disobedience against the slave trade. Made a discipline of washing the feet of 12 poor people every day, and held a banquet at which he insisted that the Norman dignitaries serve the hundreds of poor he had also invited.

Blessed FRANCIS OF ASSISI (1182 AD - 1226 AD), deacon of the Church and founder of the Franciscan Order - dedicated himself to a life of simplicity and service to the sick and poor, and to the care of nature. One story has it that he was scolded by his father for giving all he had to a beggar who asked for alms. Undertook a famous mission to the Middle East during which he sought a resolution to the Crusades and a peaceful accommodation between Muslims and Christians.

HUGH LATIMER (1487 AD - 1555 AD), Bishop of Worcester and one of the Oxford Martyrs burnt at the stake for his faith under Queen Mary's reign - worthy successor to Wulfstan, Bishop Latimer inveighed heavily against the exploitative economic practices of the landowners and lords of his time, both Catholic and Protestant. Once said that '[t]he poor man hath title to the rich man's goods'.

Blessed WILLIAM LAUD (1573 AD - 1645 AD), Archbishop of Canterbury and martyr - often remembered as an apologist for High Church practice and for Blessed Charles I, the Martyr King, he was also an implacable opponent of the privileges of the wealthier classes, in particular of the practice of enclosures (which allowed wealthy landowners to 'privatise' lands once farmed by the poor, driving them in starving masses into the cities). This placed him at odds with both the landed upper classes and the growing proto-capitalist urban middle class. A full treatment of Archbishop Laud's agrarian social-justice activism may be found here.

MARY ASTELL (1666 AD - 1731 AD) of Newcastle, Anglo-Catholic author, philosopher and activist for women's rights - known for her book A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest (1694), in which she advocates broader education and equal rights for women in English society on the grounds of Christian principles. Her work was not treated kindly by the supposedly-liberal Protestant society in which she lived, but she is (thankfully) enjoying a rediscovery by contemporary feminist thinkers and theologians.

OTTOBAH CUGOANO (1757 AD - ???? AD), Ghanaian abolitionist and member of the Sons of Africa - author of Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787, 1791) and friend and contemporary of OLAUDAH EQUIANO, GRANVILLE SHARP and WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, highly active in the movement to abolish slavery and to promote the emancipation of all slaves in the British Empire. His anti-slavery stance was motivated both by his personal experiences and by his Christian convictions.

Naturally, I understand that this is list is limited in scope, highly Anglocentric and by no means representative of the entire Church or the entirety of the ongoing movement for social and economic justice. But I hope that the point is clear - the label of 'social justice' Christian ought to be worn as a mark of pride, in defiance of the insults of our persecutors in the wider culture. We stand in a proud tradition which has sought and is still seeking to transform society in the image of Christ, in the service of 'the least of these' - not just in modernity, but in antiquity as well. We will not abandon it at the whim of an idolatrous culture obsessed with the acquisition of wealth and power.

I wish I could say with absolute certainty, for Slot's sake, that no ducks were harmed during the filming of their music video - but given all the feathers flying around, you never know. Anyhow, приятного аппетита!

Летит моя душа

на красный свет, на чёрный день;

солнца белый шар:

закрыл на мне, от крыльнев тень!

Эй, ну как ты мог, мой ангелок?

From Слот's 2009 album, 4ever.

I write this in part as a response from a High Church perspective to Revd Eugene Cho's excellent question about the role of 'social justice' and 'economic justice' in the Church. Though we may be very much on opposite sides of the liturgical spectrum, I suspect we are very similar in our social priorities.

The Four Propositions of the Right Revd Charles Gore, from his 1927 Halley Stewart Lectures:

In these lectures I am seeking, not for the first time, to advance the influence of certain ideas, already perhaps familiar to those I am speaking to. They are these --

(1) That the present condition of our society, our industry and our international relations, though it presents encouraging features, yet, on the whole, must inspire in our minds a deep sense of dissatisfaction and alarm, and a demand for so thorough a reformation as to amount to a revolution, though one which the teaching of experience, no less than the teaching of Christ, leads us to believe can only be brought about by gradual and peaceful means.

(2) That the evils which we deplore in our present society are not the inevitable results of any unalterable law of nature, or any kind of inexorable necessity, but are the fruits of human blindness, willfulness, avarice, and selfishness on the widest scale and in the long course of history; and that therefore their alteration demands something more than legislative and external changes, necessary as these may be: it demands a fundamental change of the spirit in which we think about and live our common life, and conduct our industry, and maintain our international relations. The cry must be "Repent ye -- change your minds," if "the kingdom of heaven" is to come as a welcome gift of God and not as a scathing and destructive judgment.

(3) That we should not look for such change of spirit to arise from any simultaneous conversion of men in masses. If we accept the teaching of past experience, we should expect the general alteration to arise from the influence in society of groups of men, inspired probably by prophetic leaders, who have attained to a true vision both of the source of our evils and of the nature of the true remedies; and who have the courage of faith, which can bind them together to act and to suffer in the cause of human emancipation, till their vision and their faith come to prevail more or less completely in the general mind and will . . .

(4) That Jesus Christ is really the Saviour and Redeemer of Mankind, in its social as well as its individual life and in the present world as well as in that which is to come: and that there lies upon those who believe in Him a responsibility which cannot be exaggerated to be true to the principles which He taught, and by all available means to bring them to bear upon the whole life of any society of which they form a part, especially when it professes the Christian name.

As members of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, we are first and foremost followers of Christ and members in his Body, and because we believe that Christ truly was God Incarnate in this world, of one being with the Father who is in Heaven, and because we believe he came not to condemn this world but to save it, we are irrevocably committed both to the idea that this world is worth saving, and to the methods and priorities exemplified in the life, ministry and death of Our Lord. Just as Our Lord dined with prostitutes and tax collectors and lepers, rode into Jerusalem among a crowd of the disenfranchised on a young donkey, healed the blind and lame, fed the hungry and generally directly served 'the least of these' on the social pyramid, so must our efforts as his followers be directed to such service.

And there are trends in today's world which systemically disenfranchise and exclude 'the least of these' from full participation in society, which must indeed inspire in our minds 'a deep sense of dissatisfaction and alarm', in our spirits repentance, and in our actions resistance. A few of these destructive trends are suggested and explored by the group Progressive Christians Uniting in their excellent series of essays:

a.) consumerism

b.) economic neoliberalism

c.) American imperialism

d.) materialistic reductionism

e.) the factors contributing to climate crisis

To these I might add 'incivility', but otherwise resistance to these trends is a very good place to start. Underwriting all of these trends is the reactionary and deterministic tendency to see human beings as atomised and separate constellations of negative rights and property, rather than as embodied souls dependent upon and responsible for the environmental and social conditions in which they live. This philosophical tendency (which orients our society to the worship of Mammon) leaves us and our ecology vulnerable to exploitation by the powerful, the greedy and the violent, and to despair of meaning in our existence. This is a tendency which is opposed readily by orthodox Christian belief and praxis, and a Gospel which in this cynical age seems paradoxical: the commonwealth of God has come near, and God himself is incarnate among us, in particular among the most lowly and poor and despised of us - for example, the victims of human trafficking in Southeast Asia, the single working mothers on welfare, the uninsured sick with pre-existing conditions and the small farmers afflicted by an increasingly unstable climate.

So is there a place in the Church for 'social justice', so defined? My answer is that there had better be, if we truly do take Jesus of Nazareth to be the Saviour of this world.

For me, it's another case of 'I like your reasoning, but not your conclusion', with regard to Evan Thomas' article in this week's Newsweek.

I think Mr Thomas is completely on the right track when he diagnoses one of our nation's foremost problems as the 'I got mine' entitlement culture, and he lays out its anatomy quite nicely. The idealism of the 1960's, admirable as it was, also contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction. The very real gains and improvements within our society, and the creation of a more egalitarian social order, particularly for minorities, was a noble goal and we have the philosophy of modern leftism very much to thank for it. But in the later 1960's, a more militant and less respectful element emerged, less likely to engage in civil disobedience than to riot or to bomb science buildings (like the tragic Sterling Hall incident in Madison). Ironically, the same self-serving victimhood mentality, irrationality, disrespect for rightful authority, incivility and violent Jacobin-style radicalism we once saw on the far left we are now seeing on the far right, in the virulent, insidious and eliminationist Tea Party movement. Though Mr Thomas does not make these parallels explicitly, he follows an acceptable line of logic toward them.

Where he loses me, though, is on the subject of compromise. Compromise, in itself, is not something we have lost in our political system on account of our culture of entitlement. On the contrary, we notice that (on the Democratic side of the aisle, anyway) our leaders are too willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater in order to accommodate the other side. (Nothing is better testament to this than that the public option was originally supposed to be the compromise between a government-run single-payer insurance plan and the current profit-driven insurance model, yet thanks to the Overtonian nature of our political media, those Democrats now pushing for the public option are now seen not as the compromising wing of the party but as the partisans!)

That said, some level of tort reform would be a welcome change, though its economic benefits are negligible in the context of our total annual health-care costs and it would have to be carefully constructed to keep doctors accountable (as Sen Durbin of Illinois pointed out, referencing the CBO estimates). It may be the case that we may make some headway in terms of both the health-care issue and in terms of partisanship by compromising over tort reform, but to some extent that isn't really relevant to the problem Mr Thomas has highlighted.

Compromise in the political scene is not the remedy for which we have to strive if we want to create and maintain a healthier and more accountable culture, since it is all too easy to call for 'compromise' when you don't have any great stake in the discussion or when you are not held to account for the results beyond the next election. As Mr Thomas aptly noted, our politicians are a mirror for the society: here, we are discussing a problem which impacts our economic health as a nation and our collective health (in both the literal, medical sense and the figurative, moral one) as a society. Thus, the remedy must be one which makes demands not just on our politicians, but on us, the problem (guilty as charged)!

Perhaps there are things that we can begin doing in the political culture that may help, but I have my doubts that any procedural changes or compromises undertaken on any given piece of legislation on the floor of the Senate will have any great lasting impact on the entitlement-zeitgeist. Personally, I would like to see moves made to encourage not short-range temporary political compromise so much as respect for rightful authority, for the sovereignty of fact and - dare I hope? - civility in the wider culture; for example, a new Fairness Doctrine with the teeth to hold the memetic, self-absorbed news media to account for both what they say and how they say it.

Probably too much to hope. But such a change would be of greater benefit to our political culture than a tort-reform passage in the health-care bill.

Just 'cuz Paradox Interactive is possibly the most awesome nerd-based company ever, except possibly BioWare.

My gentle readers, I have a confession to make (though I've been out of the closet arguably since high school). I am a nerd. And, apparently, despite being a pragmatic pacifist, a militant goody-two-shoes. I'm just surprised that my CON attribute was higher than my INT - guess going to Classical and getting a 3.8-ish GPA in college didn't outweigh my lack of allergies and my resistance to cold and alcohol. Also, somewhat troublingly, I seem to have lawful-neutral tendencies. (Good thing my Lenten discipline doesn't include silly online quizzes or blogging, by the way, or I'd be in real trouble.)

I Am A: Lawful Good Human Paladin (4th Level)

Ability Scores:

Strength-13

Dexterity-11

Constitution-16

Intelligence-14

Wisdom-13

Charisma-11

Alignment:

Lawful Good A lawful good character acts as a good person is expected or required to act. He combines a commitment to oppose evil with the discipline to fight relentlessly. He tells the truth, keeps his word, helps those in need, and speaks out against injustice. A lawful good character hates to see the guilty go unpunished. Lawful good is the best alignment you can be because it combines honor and compassion. However, lawful good can be a dangerous alignment because it restricts freedom and criminalizes self-interest.

Race:

Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.

Class:

Paladins take their adventures seriously, and even a mundane mission is, in the heart of the paladin, a personal test an opportunity to demonstrate bravery, to learn tactics, and to find ways to do good. Divine power protects these warriors of virtue, warding off harm, protecting from disease, healing, and guarding against fear. The paladin can also direct this power to help others, healing wounds or curing diseases, and also use it to destroy evil. Experienced paladins can smite evil foes and turn away undead. A paladin's Wisdom score should be high, as this determines the maximum spell level that they can cast. Many of the paladin's special abilities also benefit from a high Charisma score.

From Easydamus' D&D Quiz

Anyway, my first paper in microeconomics is due tomorrow, and I've made some good progress on it. The choice of topic was a marginal cost/benefit analysis of either legalised sex work or legalised weed - my micro professor seems to love controversy. He seemed appreciative when I spoke up against the health insurance industry in class; though he was already in agreement with me about the social destructiveness of wholly-privatised profit-driven health insurance I got pretty thoroughly schooled. Important life lesson: don't argue insurance with a guy who's worked in it for twenty years unless you've got all your facts really well-organised.

Speaking of insurance, kudos to Sheldon and Jack for fighting the good fight: signing the Bennett letter and taking a principled stand for a strong public option. You've both earned my vote!

Blessed King Charles I 'the Martyr' of England

In my previous posts in this series, the soul of Protestantism (10, 12, 20 July 2009), I explored some of the historical and cultural roots of the Germanic ‘image’ of Jesus Christ, and how that has shaped the Protestant project across the centuries. As I recall, I finished by taking a few hints from Ched Myers’ reading of the Gospel of Mark as a corrective to the liberal Protestant narrative, in an attempt to escape its proclivities toward religious apathy and toward Romantic triumphalism while at the same time affirming the egalitarian social-justice, resistance and barbarian personal-honour aspects of the liberal Protestant tradition.

Perhaps I ought to fill in a bit with my own religious wanderings. For awhile, I was attended the Providence Friends’ Meeting. It was, as I said before, a quieting safe haven for my troubled soul, and I thank them sincerely for providing that. The philosophy (they don’t really call it theology) of the Quakers was very attractive to me; they do have this very strong emphasis on social justice, equality and resistance. The people in the Meeting were very welcoming and my peers at the Young Adult Friends group also; my thanks to all of them for their kindness, their hospitality and their support as I continue my search.

At the same time, I have felt a very deep and abiding connexion (even if only on an intellectual and cultural level, rather than on a personal one) with the English tradition and with English history (if it were not already apparent from my history on this blog); to a significant degree, it is what brought me to the Friends in the first place. And from a religious perspective, I want to belong to and be accountable to a community which takes Jesus Christ as its historical, philosophical and moral centre. The Religious Society of Friends does, to its immense credit, take the nonviolent example of Christ as their moral centre, but I feel that there is a philosophical disconnect, in that the conscience in communal meditation takes the place of meditation on his revelation in history through holy Scripture and through the historical traditions in which that nonviolent example is grounded. The Quakers do - also to their immense credit - have a strong sense of history, but it is somewhat an interrupted history: a history of their own tradition, not situated within the rest of Christianity.

The Quakers, to me, represent the best and most admirable in a liberal Protestant tradition which has taken individualism to an unchecked extreme. They represent a single corrective - that of greater emphasis on the workings of the Holy Spirit in community and greater involvement in the wider society - to a problem in modern American Christianity which goes far deeper, and is manifested in what the writers at The Christian Century are now calling ‘moralistic therapeutic deism’ - a faith summarised by H Richard Niebuhr (though well before the term was minted) as ‘a God without wrath [who] brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross’.

The alternative so often presented in modern American Protestantism is infinitely worse, however. By this I mean fundamentalism: a God who is all wrath who keeps men of inherent sin out of a kingdom without mercy using an ineffectual Christ without grace. In my view, both are characterised by a heretical, Emersonean over-emphasis on the salvific self-sufficiency of the individual. The focus is on personal piety, on upbuilding personal conduct in line with the pursuit of personal happiness and self-fulfillment in the former example, and the personal assent to an inflexible set of absolutist constative dictates in the other. The centre of the moral universe is not the community of Christ and the Kingdom of Heaven but the spiritual state of the atomised individual, divorced from any awareness of history (or irony or paradox, to use the Niebuhrian language – Reinhold, not necessarily Richard).

Healthier to my view (at least in this respect) are the traditions, Protestant and otherwise, which have committed themselves to a discipline of maintaining an authentic, organic connexion with a history centred in Jesus of Nazareth. I think that there are a number of things that Protestantism has gotten right, but the cost of cultural amnesia and the political apathy (or perversity) it creates is in many cases prohibitively high. I cannot help but laugh at myself for my choice to swing from one end of the liturgical spectrum all the way to the other – from the Lowest of Low churches to the Highest of High – but from my (admittedly limited) experience at St Stephen’s, I feel that the Episcopal Church tends to be less deafened to their responsibilities and their historical place within the wider body of Christ than the Quakers, and certainly less so than the Calvinists-in-denial of the Congregationalist tradition!

The personal irony here, far from being lost on me, is that a Midwestern boy who spent his formative years in a peace church in the countercultural tradition which pretty much founded Christian Anarchism has – because of the very pacifist and communitarian values taught him by the Mennonites – taken up an eclectic mixture of Euroconservative, High Tory and socialist views and has begun attending Mass at a Catholic parish in communion with an establishment Church of the Magisterial Reformation that recognises King Charles I Stuart as a martyr and saint. But I feel called, uplifted, challenged there – reminded that Church isn’t just about feeling good about yourself, but also about being of service in our present and being existentially grounded in a real and remembered past.

SACRAMENT OF WILDERNESS!

College is going well. Should probably get on my econ homework sooner rather than later, but for now I'm enjoying it. I fear I'm earning the reputation as the doomsaying latter-day prophet of Thomas Malthus in my macro class, but hopefully that won't last long. I still find it rather ironic, though, that it is taken as a principle in economics that all resources are limited and our wants unlimited, yet we talk about growth and equilibrium as though they are achievable or viable in perpetuity.

Oh well. It's pretty easy math, and I'll learn - hopefully enough to better appreciate what I don't yet know.

EDIT: I didn't realise Nightwish had added a riff from Dschinghis Khan's 'Moskau' to 'Sacrament'. But it actually works - rock on!

This is an old post of mine from The Anvil, the blog of my closest friend from college on which I occasionally posted, describing my mixed feelings about the Firefly series and the Serenity movie.

I am not unique in that I fell in love with Joss Whedon's Firefly from the first episode, nor in that I came late to Firefly fandom, having seen it on the DVD's. I felt, as most people did who love the show, that it was solid science-fiction that didn't require too drastic a suspension of disbelief and that even if it had it would have made up for it in spades with its characters. I got involved with the characters such that I was angry enough to bash something with my head when a certain character died in the movie (I won't spoil it for those of you who haven't seen it). It was not a serial; each episode stood on its own and on the strength of the development of its characters. It simply oozed style as a gritty space-western complete with shootouts, last stands and train robberies. It was, all in all, a wonderful piece of science fiction that deserves to be remembered alongside Star Trek.

There is, however, one problem that particularly stands out. I cannot bring myself to agree with the primary messages of the series.

The story centres itself around a chevalier-mal-fait named Mal who, six years ago, fought on the side of the Independent Faction against the Union of Allied Planets (known informally as the Alliance and by the derogatory Purplebellies) in a planetary Civil War of sorts. Suffice to say, the Independents lost, and now the survivors must pick up the pieces and find work where they can (often as pirates or smugglers), on the border planets. Mal bought a small freighter (the titular Firefly) and acquired a crew, which are the foci of the TV show.

There is firstly the issue of the rather unsubtle sympathy with the historical Confederacy and Reconstruction-Era South which I find reprehensible (a country founded on the primary basis of institutionalised racism and exploitation is nowhere near deserving of this kind of sympathy in my book - this aspect goes ignored in the allegorical history of the series). But behind this there is another, deeper issue. I would describe myself as a lower-case 'd' democrat, but I believe that if democracy is going to work, it is going to have to entail some kind of communitarian ethic in which the citizens recognise their responsibilities both to each other and to the rule of law. Firefly's romanticisation of what I call the 'cowboy ethos' is, of course, understandable given the tenor of the series, but at the same time, it is something I see as the Achilles' heel of American-style democracy. As a society, we tend to emphasise the individual rights as sovereign, sometimes to the detriment of the realisation that no man lives in a vacuum - he lives among a community of other people and in a natural environment, both of which should have his respect. The language of independence and rugged self-sufficiency is, of course, a staple of American historical and political rhetoric and practise (and embodied in the mythos of the lone American cowboy), but, in general, very little attention is paid to the aspects of responsibility, of community-building and of interdependence which must also be primary realities of democratic practise.

I bring attention to the dichotomy of the main characters' views in Firefly regarding their situation in the system: on the one hand, you have the former Independents, struggling to survive on the fringes of the system, looking out for number one, exercising their right to live free from Alliance meddling. On the other side you have the Alliance: bureaucratic, heavy-handed, its citizens living in comparative comfort and closer contact with one another under (what appears to be) an oppressive, 1984-esque regime. The main characters (particularly Mal and Zoe)stand in complete support of the former and complete rejection of the latter, no doubt in part because they are still seen as the enemy.

Yes, the Alliance seems quite sketchy from Firefly's perspective. Many of the officials are corrupt in the vast bureaucracy, there are strong corporate ties with megacorps straight out of a cyberpunk novel (the logo of the 蓝日 'Blue Sun' company appears in many places), it dabbles in abduction, assassination and human experimentation (as the backstory of River Tam shows). But the Alliance is also run by a Parliament (perhaps in name only, but even so), its citizens are by and large happy and well-off (and more civilised), and the attitudes portrayed by characters in the series who have a strong Alliance background (Inara, Book, Simon and River Tam) display without a doubt that they have no trouble expressing their own opinions on touchy issues (a good, democratic quality). Joss Whedon even made parallels in the commentary between his Alliance and Gene Roddenberry's more optimistically-portrayed Federation, and admitted that the Alliance was being portrayed from a very specific point-of-view.

In jest, I asked a fellow fan of the series whether she thought me a total fascist for having more sympathy for the Alliance than for the former Independents. She pointed out many of the same points in the Alliance's favour I've made here. It strikes me that if the democratic dream is to come to full fruition, it is going to have to establish a dialectic between individualistic ideals of independence and more communitarian ideals of mutual respect, support and social capital. We should build a democratic society on the twin pillars, to borrow Dr. Amitai Etzioni's metaphor, of individual rights and responsibilities to one's community.

For more good ideas from a radical-centrist with his head screwed on straight, allow me to recommend his weblog: http://www.amitai-notes.com/blog

Here's to finding a balance:

Long Live the Alliance! 同盟万岁！

In retrospect, my views on the political stance of Firefly have been a little bit better fleshed-out. (Certainly my writing style is better now than then!) The Civil War parallels and its apparent sympathy with the Confederate 'Lost Cause' are still as problematic and as dismaying as ever in my view, as is the 'cowboy ethos' which Firefly celebrates. But my view of American democracy has changed significantly, thanks in no small part to the election of Barack Obama, and also thanks to Alexis de Tocqueville, whose amazingly insightful book Democracy in America changed many of my preconceptions of the American potential for progress. In addition, my tastes in science fiction in film and television have taken a more recognisable shape due to greater exposure since then: Battlestar Galactica, Blade Runner, Total Recall - and particularly Deep Space Nine.

Yes, Firefly is politically problematic, and these problems tend to infect the rest of the show and the movie after it. The knee-jerk libertarian objections to any kind of notion of common values or the common good manifest in strange ways, particularly in Serenity, where when Mal's crew objects to turning Serenity into a facsimile of a reaver vessel, he pretty much says straight out 'if you get in my way I will gun you down'. But more than being morally problematic, it makes the ethical 'verse of Firefly Manichaean and mind-numbingly boring. Whedon asserted it as an artistic and moral criticism of Star Trek, but as such it doesn't get a lot of mileage. The moral centre is always Mal - that's the guy we're always expected to root for - and his enemy is always The System (whether represented by the Hands of Blue or by the Operative or by nameless captains of nameless Alliance vessels). The stories are all more or less variations on the same archetypical story, in which the Underdog must outwit The System to keep flying another day. Artistically, it tries to make use of a 'grungy' Western look, but fails to transcend the Bat Durston stereotype with it. (Excuse me? Cattle in the cargo hold?)

By comparison, Deep Space Nine takes Gene Roddenberry's utopian vision of the Federation and systematically subverts it in remarkably ingenious ways. Firstly, Cdr (later Capt) Sisko is not a perfect human being or even a model Starfleet officer. The first episode sees him struggling with his past and with his assignment, which is a source of tension between him and the Federation (as voiced by Capt Picard in the pilot episode, 'Emissary'). He finds himself embroiled in a volatile political situation on Bajor, which has managed to successfully overthrow the dictatorial Cardassian Union and erect a shoddy provisional government, which it is his job to prepare for entry into the Federation.

The secular-humanist universe of Star Trek is fractured in DS9 to make room for a thoughtful critique of religion. (Firefly doesn't do this at all and Serenity only marginally; despite Mal's outspoken atheism and Book's past as a preacher, it often ends in a 'let's agree to disagree' cop-out or doesn't resolve itself full stop.) We watch Sisko's struggle with the religious leaders on Bajor and with his own CO's, trying to come to grips with his own commitments and often stumbling - as when the Prophets sent the first Emissary to the station in an attempt to figuratively smack some sense into him (in the episode 'Accession').

Further, Deep Space Nine anticipates the critiques of Firefly, and it handles the central premises of Firefly with much better balance and insight than Firefly itself does. It talks about the lives of the ordinary people on the frontier, light-years away from Starfleet Command. It presents the colonists on the DMZ with Cardassia, who feel that they have been ill-served by the Federation (which signed a treaty that put them in Cardassian space). Many of them join the Maquis, a rebel group which is fighting for its own 'Lost Cause'. Even the character of Mal Reynolds was anticipated in Michael Eddington.

Sisko and Eddington

Only, the relationship between Eddington and Sisko is far more interesting than that between Mal and (for the most convenient example) the Operative. Capt Sisko is a believer in the Federation in the same way the Operative is a believer in the Alliance, but he is not a nameless, one-dimensional villain who subverts his conscience completely to his government. Sisko knows the colonists have been screwed over by the Federation. He rails against his superior officers' demands of him in dealing with the Maquis:

On Earth, there is no poverty, no crime, no war. You look out the window of Starfleet Headquarters and you see Paradise. Well, it's easy to be a saint in Paradise, but the Maquis do not live in Paradise. Out there in the demilitarized zone, all the problems haven't been solved yet. Out there, there are no saints. Just people. Angry, scared, determined people who are going to do whatever it takes to survive, whether it meets with Federation approval or not!

But Sisko is a realist - that's what makes his character so interesting. He commits to Federation ideals, but often shows himself capable of seeing the other side of the argument, and often demonstrates his capacity to bend the rules when the occasion suits, as in 'In the Pale Moonlight' (which I still think is one of the finest pieces of serial television ever made, ever). This is contrasted with the doctrinaire, romantic idealism of Eddington, who considers himself a Robin Hood or a Jesse James (even drawing an explicit parallel between himself and Jean Valjean of Les Miserables in 'For the Uniform'). As the hero of his own melodrama, Eddington gives himself licence for all manner of excess and crime - in much the way Mal does. (The difference is, Serenity wants us to buy into the idea that Mal is the Plucky Hero, that the Alliance is the Evil Empire, and that the setting of Firefly is the Grand Arena.)

Mal and Operative

But Deep Space Nine is consistently sceptical of such idealism, in ways that very much echo the critiques of Reinhold Niebuhr. The idealism of Eddington is ultimately a self-destructive fantasy (as Sisko points out in 'For the Uniform' when he notes that the colonists are victims not of Starfleet or of the Cardassians, but the Maquis themselves), and leads him ultimately to a revenge-obsessed nihilism against a universe that saw fit to dash his hopes (in 'Blaze of Glory'). This is mirrored to some extent in Mal's character, but it is never explored, examined, tested or resolved; he retains it unquestioning throughout the series and the movie, and we're just called to accept it. Firefly's idealism is just as unleavened and as unabated as the original Star Trek's idealism was - and every bit as dangerous - but it is a negationist and reactive idealism.

Visually, Deep Space Nine retains the sterile cleanliness of Star Trek, something which Firefly did succeed in challenging (for better or for worse). Technically, it is fairly unsophisticated, though the makeup work is significantly better than in Star Trek's previous incarnations. But in terms of story and philosophical exploration of ethical issues, there is simply no comparison.

I kind of feel like a Niner fanboy going 'DS9 good, Firefly bad', but really that's not my intent. I do think that DS9 gets fairly consistently overlooked as a solid (if flawed) work of science fiction, while a number of comparative pipsqueaks (Firefly among them) get praised well out of proportion to their merits - generally for the wrong reasons.

EDIT: for a fuller historical treatment on Firefly, here's Anarquistador.

Firstly, went to S. Stephen's again today, in the morning for Solemn High Mass and again in the evening for a concert of sacred Renaissance music given by the a cappella group Convivium Musicum. It was an absolutely stunning performance - most of the music was in Latin or French, but a couple of English pieces were thrown in for good measure; it was perfectly-rounded four-part harmony. It's a sad fact that that kind of music isn't often heard anymore, even in Protestant churches which value such polyphonic choral music as part of their tradition - being rapidly displaced by CWM, follow-the-bouncing-ball hymns and other such pop-spawned monstrosities. (Is it any wonder I'm - without leaving Protestantism entirely - pulling for the highest of High Churches, on the baritone line?) Anyway, Mass was awesome - this one was a first for S. Stephen's newest priest, Fr. Michael Tuck. A lot of the students were back, so I got to meet a lot more parishioners my own age, which was also cool.

A minor setback - my poor Lenovo laptop completely gave up the ghost after contracting the Google redirect virus and my ham-fisted attempts to try and cure it on my own. I have to get the HD reformatted and Windows XP Pro SP2 reinstalled; thankfully most of my data has been backed up. As they say, though, 'an ounce of prevention'... I'm getting the full version of Symantec and a third-party firewall on my next go-round, and I'm going to be a lot more careful about surfing the web.

Also - I was accepted at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University for the IR master's programme, one of my top choices! I'm so overjoyed about that piece of news it's getting ridiculous! We'll see what kind of options I have as I go, but at least I know I have one, and a truly decent one at that.

RIC classes start tomorrow: all three of them (Micro, Macro and Russian). Chances are I'm going to feel slightly overwhelmed by the sudden transition back to academic work, but again, we'll see.

Also, basic fact of life: Terry Pratchett is teh awesome.

This is pretty much typical me: a computer game comes out which is way too advanced for my hardware, so I file it away in my brain that I want to play it someday. Then, somewhere down the line, a new game which reminds me of the older game that I wanted to play pops up, and I go out and get the older game which, miraculously, my current system can handle with ease. In this case, Mass Effect 2 comes out in five days, and I’ve just finished playing the first installment, which was released over two years ago.

Mass Effect is Knights of the Old Republic in the Unreal engine. Seriously. It’s got a tremendously similar storyline – the main quest is for the player character, Cdr Shepard of the human Systems Alliance Navy to save the galaxy from a shadowy external threat whose nature is never made really clear even by the end, by following a previous hero (Spectre, or Special Tactics and Reconnaisance Agent of the Citadel – roughly a galactic version of the UN) who has apparently turned traitor and allied himself with a race of evil machines (‘geth’) which look suspiciously like the Advanced Sith Droids of the original Knights, having the same curving ‘heads’ and single robotic eye.

SPOILER WARNING

The story is a bit more satisfying than Knights, since the game isn’t wrapped up in so much of Lucas’ extended Star Wars universe – you kind of get the feeling that this is the story BioWare wanted to do with Knights. It’s certainly better at creating this sense of cosmic dread with various doomsayers and indoctrinated cultists placed appropriately throughout the game. Ultimately, though they are completely insane, they are proven right, since just beyond the galaxy (in ‘dark space’) are a race of immensely long-lived dystheistic Lovecraftian ‘reapers’ who – for reasons unknown to the rest of us – build up organic space-faring civilisations with advanced technology and then completely and brutally annihilate them every few hundred thousand years or so before retreating back into dark space. The Sith, though they did have the entire ‘destroyer of worlds’ thing down pretty much pat through their first incarnation in the Star Wars movies, are still very much human-scale villains. When you’re facing down a massive Cthulhu-faced monster-ship parked outside, reveling in the power to twist minds and bodies beyond recognition, it becomes a bit of a different ball game.

End spoilers

The plot is pretty straightforwardly linear, but there’s a lot of freedom to explore dozens of ‘uncharted’ worlds in your tank (which handles like a hippopotamus on a skating rink). A lot of locations are variations on the same three or four maps, but I suppose the excuse in-game is that colonial equipment and buildings are pretty much prefabricated, and most ships of the same class look the same inside. That said, there’s still a lot of creativity put into this game – the graphics are polished and the environments beautiful. The Citadel (kind of a home base after the introductory mission) is immense and elaborate, and (without the rapid transit) really difficult to navigate the first time through.

Combat is where the game at once satisfies and frustrates. It’s purely RTS territory (despite being mostly in third-person), but there’s still a ‘pause’ screen and you can still issue orders. Your allies, however, prefer to think of your orders more as guidelines, since generally they just follow you around. Enemies also, for some reason, just randomly charge in at you despite being fired at from three sides and you can only tell friend from ally by using the targeting HUD, which leaves me in complete agreement with Ben Croshaw (Zero Punctuation) when he claimed with regard to the combat that ‘the word “clusterf**k” ceases to be adequate’.

I disagree with Mr Croshaw on the issue of dialogue, though – his main gripe being that Mass Effect’s dialogue is needlessly excessive. He does point out that a lot of the dialogue and codex entries are skippable (and I thank him for that), but generally I found there was less conversation per actual gameplay in Mass Effect than in Knights; that might be, however, because I actually did play all the sidequests. Mostly, the sidequests summed up are: the Systems Alliance Navy is too busy bickering with their frenemies in the Citadel to actually do anything about their problems, so your ship turns out to be The Only Ship In The Sector and you personally are saddled with the responsibility of settling all these problems – all of which take place, as said previously, on the same three or four maps.

Speaking of sidequests, &c., one of Mass Effect’s big selling points was the romance subplot, which was apparently enough to earn it an ‘M’ rating. Honestly, folks – nothing here you won’t see on prime-time television. True, Knights just had the fade-to-black, but when the ESRB says ‘Partial Nudity’ and ‘Sexual Themes’, they mean about fifteen tastefully-done seconds of bare thighs and flanks, and some more bare shoulder with the pillow-talk, but that’s pretty much it, really. My version of Cdr Shepard ended up romancing the blue alien scientist, albeit with a bit more discretion than Capt Kirk.

Voice talent features some pretty familiar names: Jennifer Hale, Raphael Sbarge and Kimberly Brooks from Knights, Lance Henriksen from The Terminator, Marina Sirtis of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame and Seth Green from Family Guy and The Italian Job.

Not much more to say, other than that it was an enjoyable ARPG and that I’m looking forward to the sequel.

I’m young. I realise this. I have a long way to go before I know enough to find a place of rest in this beautiful, mad universe. But that’s not going to stop me searching for it.

Peace Corps was a blow; that much is true – in that I thought I had found a place where I belonged but ultimately a false sense of security did me in. The Friends meeting was a quiet site of solace and peace; I have already described my family ties and my attraction to the Quaker philosophy and discipline of meditative silence. But I can’t help but feel that some things still need to be said, sometimes again and again. What’s more, some things need to be sung, in joy!

So I find myself going in circles; once a member of an Episcopal Church, I decided to return. Today, I went to S. Stephen’s Church in Providence the high-church community up near Brown, to hear Solemn High Mass. The church building was beautiful in itself, with great Gothic architecture and massive stained-glass windows. The service was mostly sung by a choir and by the celebrant and rector, and processions were done at the call to worship, at the Gospel reading and at the benediction, complete with burning incense. The entire service was elaborate and ornate, taking place mostly up in the choir before the altar (which was not screened off from the congregation). It reminded me strongly of Alexandrovski Russian Orthodox Church in Saimasai, while I served there as a Trainee; but the hymns and the liturgy were familiar, and I took the opportunity by the throat (as it were) to sing. Ecstatically. It was good to be able to do that again.

The sermon was greatly enjoyable. Fr. Alexander talked about theology and symbolism intelligibly but without talking down to us, describing the differences between miracles (in the synoptic Gospels) and signs (in John). He dropped the name of William Willimon (the Methodist bishop and former chaplain at Duke University), but the theology he preached was much more in line with a liberal interpretation of Thomas Aquinas than with Willimon (in a good way!). The sign of Jesus turning the water into wine at the wedding feast at Cana was the matter of Fr. Alexander’s sermon: a deeply symbolic narrative ‘place’ in Jesus’ ministry, with the feast as the recurring analogy for the Kingdom of Heaven, or God’s covenant with humanity (likened to that between a bridegroom and a bride!). And the wine has run out. Something, somewhere, has gone wrong for this wedded couple, God and us. But Jesus brings forth new wine – not from nothing, but from the water that was already there.

Fr. Alexander’s interpretation – which I thought very highly of – was that Jesus had not come to destroy the old creation and replace it from nothing. The world is not beyond redemption; the water has the potential to be transformed into something worthy – the new wine. This is not Resident Aliens theology; this is a few turns in the opposite direction. We are in the world that Christ has come not to condemn, but to save. As members of Christ’s body, it is upon us to carry forth his will with our fallible and imperfect abilities, to bring forth what is worthy in the world. That is something I feel must be said – and heard! – again and again.

I’ll go a few more Sundays; keep going in this circle, see where it takes me.

Back to college for me, I guess. You know the rules, and so do I.

I’ve already enrolled in Microeconomics and in Beginning Russian at Rhode Island College, and am still awaiting confirmation on Macroeconomics from the professor of that course. These courses are going to be necessary for my future career in international relations, and it’s better to do them sooner rather than later. I’ve completed all my applications to master’s programs in public policy and international studies; now all I have to do for them is keep my fingers very tightly crossed and see what kind of choices I have by March and April.

My reading list right now is pretty long; I’m currently reading a selection from Dr. Samuel Johnson’s collected works. It’s funny – the more I read the guy’s work, the more I admire him. It’s not just that he was a cat person and a teaholic, though both are excellent qualities. Here’s a guy who was decades (if not centuries!) ahead of his time in his thinking on racial and sexual equality and on treatment of the poor and socially-outcast, who spoke out stridently against war in the Falklands and against empire in the Americas. And yet, in every line he conveys a deep sense of respect for tradition, for his country and for the social order. Despite his witty jabs at journalists, authors and critics (some of which are more light-hearted and teasing than others – his cautions to authors were done quite obviously tongue-in-cheek given his own profession), you read a man who entertains a lot of serious thought on a number of issues. Reading some of his Idler essays and his Thoughts on the Late Transactions Respecting Falkland’s Islands, I feel as though much of what he said is as applicable now as it was back in the mid-18th Century!

Also on my reading queue are the letters, essays, prayers and speeches of Elizabeth I Tudor of England (who had the fortune – whether good or ill depends on one’s perspective – of being born a royal and thus a preordained claim to fame which exceeded her literary and scholastic talents), Hints to a Quaker by Frederick Denison Maurice and The Death Trilogy by Terry Pratchett (a much-appreciated Christmas gift from my sister).

Will keep posted as events merit.

This is an immense and shocking tragedy, the more so since it appears the Haitian government is so hard-put to handle any relief and recovery efforts. My prayers go out to the people of Haiti, to those who have suffered injuries and lost their homes and members of their families.

I'd like to encourage my readers briefly to give to a suitable charity. One Day's Wages (to which I have given my most recent donation), a Seattle-based charity run by Eugene and Minhee Cho, has set up an emergency relief fund in conjunction with World Concern for the earthquake survivors in Haiti. Dr. Russell Arben Fox has suggested Partners in Health, and the folks at Sadly, No! have recommended Doctors Without Borders.

Why is it that even when Ross Douthat is right, he gets it completely wrong?

His concluding point in this week’s New York Times column is quite sound. We should be talking about theology as a society, because theology does matter, and we weren’t always as squeamish about God-talk as we are now. The grand, venerable tradition of social-gospel Protestantism, with its roots in the Continental philosophers (Hegel and Schleiermacher) and high-church English theologians such as Frederick Denison Maurice, used to be a powerful voice for progressive social change. To this tradition belonged such great thinkers and public men of God as Henry Ward Beecher, Henry Emerson Fosdick, Borden Parker Bowne, James Cone and Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. It’s a tradition of prophetic Christianity that has sadly fallen out of favour and replaced on the one hand with an effete pseudo-liberalism lacking in discipline and on the other with a crude, spiteful and radical fundamentalism, but it’s a tradition that shrewd, good-hearted religious leaders like Dr Robert Allan Hill (Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University) are attempting to resurrect.

Theology – and the humanities in general – should have a place in politics and in the national discussion, and Mr Douthat is exactly right about why. How we approach this business of living in the universe, how we impose our own meanings on a seemingly-meaningless world is the basis for all of our political proclivities, for all of our human interactions. We shoot ourselves and our political discourse in the foot if we block off one entire mode of thinking from discussion in the public sphere in a misguided spirit of laicism. We don’t want to be Iran or pre-Westphalian Europe, but we also don’t want to be modern France, where one is forbidden from any expression of faith in the public square, whether a headscarf or a cross, a rosary or a yarmulke.

But Mr Douthat, positioned as he often is as defender of the indefensible, has made this point by doing exactly the wrong thing with it. It’s well and good to have a national discussion about religion – Lord knows we don’t take it seriously enough anymore. But as the author of Ecclesiastes puts it, ‘[f]or everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under Heaven’. Brit Hume’s crude assault on Buddhism vis-à-vis Tiger Woods on (what is in actuality a shoddy excuse for) a news programme was inappropriate to say the least. The ‘knee-jerk outrage’ Mr Douthat dismisses was in some partial measure justified, since this was not the ‘freewheeling religious debate’ that Mr Douthat claims it was. There was no serious or respectful discussion about how Buddhists and Christians should relate to each other, no exploration into what it actually means to be Buddhist and no good representation of the Christian faith at all other than Hume’s crude and facile characterisation of Christianity as therapeutic, redemptive and forgiving. (Ironically, the judgmental attitude of Brit Hume and the rest of the news media toward Mr Woods – and toward celebrities in general when their worse behaviour inevitably hits the light of day – has been neither therapeutic, nor redemptive, nor forgiving. St Paul had some harsh words, if I recall correctly, in his letter to the Romans about this kind of idle gossip.)

If we’re going to have the kind of productive debate about religion that I assume Mr Douthat wants, we have to get away from this kind of unilateral sanctimony. I am a Christian – a devout one who is not likely to give up trying to follow Jesus anytime soon – but I’d like to see a little more respect and civility from my fellows. Buddhism is a great and enduring tradition of faith that has brought meaning to many millions of people over the past twenty-five centuries; rather than dismissing it wholesale in a couple of sentences we might, with some measure of humility, inquire as to why and how it has succeeded for so many and for so long. Though I struggle to understand its teachings on karma and the non-reality of the self, it nevertheless has many valuable things to say on righteousness in thought, word and deed (the Eightfold Path) and seeks to promote moderation in all things.

I think sometimes we Christians could stand to benefit from a little of that.

I have always suspected I’ve been a Tory at heart. My first inkling was when I was in eighth grade, taking Mrs Angela Abbott’s American history course – when, for contrariness’ sake with regard to the rest of my classmates, I enthusiastically took up the Loyalist position on the War of American Independence. But it has been a long and winding road in the Tory direction, and I’d like a chance to see if I can’t retrace my steps.

I think a significant part of my left-Toryism may be attributed to my fascination with history and with old ways of doing things. I learned from my parents to have a deep respect for the Navajo and Puebloan peoples of the American Southwest, who proudly kept their traditions alive and who took pride in having done things pretty much the same way for eight hundred years, despite the disruption caused by the Spaniards and later by the Americans. I learned to respect for my own Germanic-influenced culture when I lived in Wisconsin: Midwesterners take care of the people in their neighbourhoods, and have a community ethic which other parts of the country sometimes lack – they take seriously their roles as their brothers’ keepers. I think I saw this as being very much a transplanted Old World phenomenon rather than a truly New World one, and that may have shaped much of my future leftism.

And I loved the aesthetics of European high culture. Thanks to my best and closest friend in elementary school (a self-described hopeless romantic and frantic half-Greek geek), I was introduced to the Moomin books by Tove Jansson – or at least, the Farrar, Straus and Giroux translations of them – and the British spelling and grammar rubbed off considerably on me, turning me into a staunch Anglophile. My list of favourite authors of fiction has consistently featured some fairly prominent Englishmen and -women: Thomas Malory, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, William Blake, Edith Pargeter, Jane Austen, Jo Rowling, Dorothy Sayers, J. R. R. Tolkien, Terry Pratchett. I was even an honest-to-God monarchist for a long while, and routinely defended the aesthetic merits of the Anglo-Catholic high-church tradition to my parents when we were members of an Episcopal church after moving to Rhode Island.

This may seem like a bit of a strange retrospective, but I think it has a significant bearing on my current political proclivities. What frightens me most about the Republican Party and the right in this country is precisely that they are not conservative in any meaningful sense of the word, but rather, they are radical. George W. Bush pursued policies which were actively and blatantly disruptive to the social order at home and to the global order abroad. He prided himself on his vulgarity and his anti-intellectualism, and he cultivated a politic of disrespect, impropriety and incivility which has carried itself into the current Republican Party and into the Tea Party movement – the current standard-bearers of this flaunted incivility are former governor Sarah Palin and representative Michele Bachmann, and its lasting icon is likely to be Senator Joe ‘You Lie’ Wilson. The language and tactics with which they rally their supporters is increasingly crude, increasingly ugly and increasingly bellicose. Those who promote respectful, meaningful debate, professional courtesy and fact-driven policy are dismissed as ‘thought police’ and doctrinaire agents of ‘political correctness’ and are routinely compared to fascists.

This should be nothing new. David Neiwert and the people running the blog Crooks and Liars have done an admirable job researching and reporting on the growing radicalism of the modern right. But sadly, the responsibility for this state of affairs in American politics lies also with the modern American left of the late 1960’s. I was not around during the 1960’s, but my father was in Washington while it was burning due to the riots that had replaced the civil, composed and courteous demonstrations of Martin Luther King, Jr. Something went wrong – a polarising lack of civility and respect crept into American politics in the 1960’s that we still haven’t been able to dislodge. The vital centre politics of Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Kennedy had been shattered. The radical left-wing Trotskyites for whom the ends justified any means transformed into neoconservative war-hawks while the advocates of the hedonistic, individualistic counter-culture suddenly became born-again neoliberals and Reagan supporters. Both have carried forward this total disrespect for expertise, for the rule of law and for legitimate authority which have gotten us into such deep trouble now in our foreign policy, in our environmental policy and in our economic policy.

This disrespect now runs rampant across all levels of society. Children don’t feel obliged to respect their parents. Parents don’t feel obliged to respect educators or academics. Teachers and professors don’t feel obliged to respect school administrators or parents. The society thrives on confrontation, promotes narrow self-interest and thrill-seeking at the expense of the environment and the community, and panders to the most vulgar and aesthetically unattractive aspects of our consumeristic drive with teenybopper music, Transformers and Twilight.

What we need is a new kind of socially-responsible, affirming communitarianism, analogous to the One Nation Conservative school among Great Britain’s Tories, as articulated by Phillip Blond. I think President Obama is on the right track in this regard, opening up discussion about civility, community and volunteer service, civic tradition, real family values (meaning: not thinly-disguised homophobia or misogyny), organic society and what T S Eliot called the ‘permanent things’. He may not get very far in implementing policies which will help bring about the kind of society we want, but I think the ideas he’s bringing forward may be enough to build a platform for a new kind of Democratic Toryism.

Many happy returns, gentle readers, for the upcoming new decade. My prayers are that it will be more enlightened and sensible than the last.

And one of the things that I did since the new year has been to watch Guy Ritchie's newest film, an original take on the Holmes Mythos. I had been steeling myself for the worst, but the one Guy Ritchie movie I've had the privilege of seeing (Snatch.) was incredibly entertaining, with an ingenious caper plot, a dry and morbid humour and plenty of action sequences. Ritchie definitely knew how to bring the best acting he could out of Brad Pitt and Jason Statham in that work, even though the range of both actors is fairly limited.

The same cannot be said of Robert Downey Jr, whose range is quite wide, but whose performance as Sherlock Holmes I did not find wanting. Devastatingly brilliant yet lacking in social graces and patience for civility, Downey brings to Holmes a highly authentic intensity. Jude Law's Dr Watson was similarly authentic and convincing, and I enjoyed what they did with the dynamic between Holmes and Watson. The screenwriters (and Law, I suppose) interpret Watson as the primary humanising force on Holmes, kept around not so that Holmes can feel superior but so that Holmes can stay sane. (This was the interpretation Laurie R King brought to the Holmes Mythos, but 'Uncle John' was quickly replaced in her rendition by her character Mary Russell.) True enough, this does have some basis in the books, but what I did not particularly enjoy was the interpretation of Holmes as a brash street fighter / action hero.

(I can understand why they did it, though. I don't think critics like A O Scott give Ritchie due credit for his reading of Holmes - I think he saw in Holmes the self-destructive tendencies brought about by his cynicism and ennui, which Ritchie expresses in the boxing matches, but which were expressed in the novels through opiate abuse and lack of sleep. I can imagine that these would be difficult to express visually, and our culture being what it is the MPAA might have increased the rating due to the presence of drugs... but this is not an excuse, more a postulation of the screenwriters' thinking more than anything else.)

Rachel McAdams' femme fatale interpretation of Irene Adler was likewise entertaining, though she seemed at parts to be channelling a Helena Bonham Carter character. I'm a bit surprised and vexed at what they decided to do with her, making her a love interest for Holmes and a pawn of 'The Professor' rather than a worthy adversary in her own right - but again, it seems to be what a modern movie-going audience would expect.

I enjoyed what they did with Mark Strong's character, Lord Blackwood, and the story they put him at the centre of was remarkably well-done. I greatly enjoyed the steampunk-influenced aesthetic of the whole thing, two parts Verne and three parts Dickens. Though I appreciated the little steampunkish in-jokes (‘Radio-wave transmitters! That’s the future, Watson!’) it seemed like the movie couldn’t decide which side of the Crisis of Modernity it wanted to represent: siding with the triumphalists or the sceptics of Victorian industry and empire. (Sometimes, it did both simultaneously, as with the climactic scene atop the Tower Bridge.) Despite its stylistic indecision, the theme of the movie was nevertheless highly political, and had a lot to do with the political power of fear, and how easily it can be exploited by those with imperial ambitions. In that, it reminded me of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight (and even V for Vendetta), but on the other side of the coin. This may be a bit of a stretch, and probably not what the Holmes writers intended, but I read Lord Blackwood as a Bruce Wayne gone terribly, terribly wrong. Rather than using his reputation, his knowledge of engineering and chemistry, his mastery of subterfuge and the power of fear against those who prey on the fearful (as the Batman of the Nolan re-boot does), he uses them all to manipulate and exploit his peers and the greater British populace. The difference is that he does not share Bruce Wayne's agony and moral ambiguity, already having chosen his way and willing to sacrifice anything and anyone in it (a missed opportunity on Ritchie's part, maybe?). Sherlock Holmes represents (however imperfectly) the powers of rational inquiry against his adversary, a larger-than-life agent of fear and superstition. In that, I think, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle might have taken pride in this interpretation.

Was it a faithful interpretation of the beloved character? Perhaps; I am not the best to judge, having at best a passing familiarity with the original Holmes canon. Did it do justice to him? I’d say it did, at least part-way – as might any interpretation which saves Holmes from becoming a perennial detective-fiction cliché. Was it enjoyable and entertaining? Certainly – it’s a movie I could very well watch again.

Here's a case I have mixed feelings on - the execution of Akmad Shaikh in Xinjiang yesterday is indeed a thorny problem involving international politics, social justice and the continuing fallout from the bloody legacy of imperialism in East Asia. Some background on the case may be found here: at People's Daily, Auntie Beeb and MSNBC.

On the one hand, I am - as a Christian and convinced Friend - philosophically opposed to the death penalty in any form. The execution of a man who had a history of mental problems and whose responsibility for his actions under the law may be gravely doubted is doubly heinous on the Chinese government's part, and I deplore the cavalier attitude they displayed toward not just the man's life and dignity but also the complexity of the legal questions involved.

But speaking of complex questions, there is also the long and sordid history of western imperialism in China to contend with - and the fact that this case concerns a Briton smuggling opiates into China alone changes the flavour of the entire discussion. Note the editorial use of language in the People's Daily article as compared to MSNBC or the BBC: while we in the West are concerned with the individual human rights of the accused (and now departed), the Chinese government spoke of 'judicial independence' and interference in what it considers its 'internal affairs'. Interesting choice of words. Even more interesting when one considers the argument to the effect that '[h]ow could a criminal be exempted from the death penalty only because he was British?' (an argument made by legal professor Wang Mingliang of Fudan University).

This mode of argument is meant to evoke the historical memory of the humiliating Treaty of Nanjing, with the implication that Britain is now again trying to impose not only its legal system and values upon China but also a new form of extraterritoriality for its citizens. It is unquestionably reprehensible for the Western media to ignore the historical wrongs the nations they represent have perpetrated upon China and, in so doing, prevent any meaningful discussion of a sensitive and accountable response to the government's actions in this case. But the reaction to the Shaikh execution is merely symptomatic of a larger problem - the West's collective amnesia with regard to its imperial projects, particularly when it comes to dealing with third-world nations like China and India. I touched on one form of this amnesia / deliberate naivete previously in this post (with regard to Afghanistan, Pakistan and India). In order to build the kind of trusting, communicative relationship with China and India that we need right now, as a nation we must come to grips with the realistic argument that we are not morally superior to other nations merely by our exceptional virtue or our values, and that we cannot escape the consequences of our own history through wishful thinking.

We are still paying for the sins of our fathers; they have certainly been visited upon Akmad Shaikh, at the cost of his life.

Can the prey be taken from the mighty,

or the captives of a tyrant be rescued?

But thus says the LORD:

Even the captives of the mighty shall be taken,

and the prey of the tyrant be rescued.

for I will contend with those who contend with you,

and I will save your children.

I will make your oppressors eat their own flesh,

and they shall be drunk with their own blood as with wine.

Then all flesh shall know that I am the LORD your Saviour,

and your Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob.

- Isaiah 49:24-26

Who has believed what we have heard?

And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?

For he grew up before him like a young plant,

and like a root out of dry ground;

he had no form or majesty that we should look at him,

nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

He was despised and rejected by others;

a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity;

and as one from whom others hide their faces

he was despised, and we held him of no account.

Surely he has borne our infirmities

and carried our diseases;

yet we accounted him stricken,

struck down by God, and afflicted.

But he was wounded for our transgressions,

crushed for our iniquities;

upon him was the punishment that made us whole,

and by his bruises we are healed.

All we like sheep have gone astray;

we have all turned to our own way,

and the LORD has laid on him

the iniquity of us all.

- Isaiah 53:1-6

Good tidings of hope and of liberation to all!