207. Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori and the Smothers Brothers

 What's the quickest way to get a Christian blessing?  Go to a shallow preacher and be meek, mournful and poor in spirit in front of him or her.  If he doesn't respond get yourself persecuted and reviled.  He'll soon see that the blessing-words apply to you and raise his hand.  You're in.

If you want a deeper, more theological, blessing, and aren't in haste, go to a shallow Pauline Christian preacher.  Say to him, "I believe," or "I have faith."  He'll see that you've met Paul's condition for salvation.  You're in.

Outside of Christianity there are still plenty of people seeking a blessing the quickest and easiest way.  "I am different."  That's enough, often, to get a blessing from a shallow liberal.  "Diversity" is the blessing-word.  Cast it and those inside the net are forever saved. 

We teachers of English Composition have to mock the whole game — the shallow saving the shallow in a simplified world.  We try to get the young to look inside words, both blessing and cursing words, for what they refer to — how they connect to a devilishly complicated world.  You can say that we try to give the young a deep understanding, and claim that it "saves," but the depth lies only in verbal care and the salvation, if there is any, is only from mistakes.  It's the academic game as played in English departments.

The game requires that when we see the word "diversity" used to indicate a vaguely good thing we put "Ref" (reference) or "Mean" (meaning) in the margin and count on the student to look closely at the word. The idea is to get students to be more careful with words, and discriminate among their meanings. If they become lawyers (or jurors) they won't make (or accept) specious arguments.  If they become preachers they won't give shallow blessings.  If they do we're going to be disappointed.

Now a very prominent preacher, Katherine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States, has just (NYT 6-22-13) given a blessing that, judging by the response of some of her fellow churchmen, is about as shallow as a Christian blessing can be.  Speaking in a church in Curaçao she blessed a woman in the Bible (Acts 16:16-34) simply because she was different.  She ignored what the Bible said she was (a fortune-teller), she ignored what she was a vessel of (demons), she ignored what every good Christian listener, beginning with St. Paul, agreed on (that she spoke untrustworthy words).  Those things were to her (we guess) simply part of our "long history of discounting and devaluing difference, finding it offensive or even evil."  That history blinds us to "the spirit of God in her," the "glory of another human being."

The Christians who write the blogs and journals I have looked at can hardly find words for Jefferts Schori's reading of the Bible passage.  I can hardly find words.  This, this, from the leader of one of our most level-headed, most sophisticated, least emotional Protestant churches, my church.  Making the papers.   Just as we were making some progress loosening the label "fuzzy minded" stuck on Christians in universities.

"It's a small thing, a reading of one passage in Scripture."

Small, yes, but it's a window — into a mind, a denomination, maybe a religion.  Is this a reality we have tried to wish away?  Have we Christian academics been kidding ourselves?  About our religion?  The essentials?  Oooh, that's tough.  Let's say it's  the weaknesses of an era.  Better yet, the weakness of a person.  One looks for excuses.  "The poor PB was just trying to get some tolerance and fairness and understanding going and happened to say more than she should have said."  But nobody, at least nobody in my hearing, has offered even that, an excuse for a personal fault. 

Composition teachers deal with public faults, listed in their textbooks, waiting for their red pencils.  With them there can be no doubt.  Jefferts Schori's sermon, word by word, puts on their blackboards a classic case of liberal superficiality.

Is there anybody who would find this sermon acceptable?  I don't know of anyone one now but fifty years ago I knew of one.  His name was Tom Smothers, and for nearly a decade he jousted comically with his brother Dick on television.  What makes me put him at Jefferts Schori's side is just one exchange:

Dick:  Your shirttail's out.

Tom: Why do you hate me?

Tom pays no attention to what your words refer to; he is interested only in what they tell him about your feelings.  Do you hate?  Do you love?

That is essentially all Jefferts Schori wants to know about us when we look at the slave girl.  Look, not listen.  For signals, not substance.  What the girl is saying might be anything — demonic lure, polytheistic error, folk wisdom, animistic abomination, dark truth, soothing nonsense, who knows — but none of it matters for the blessing.  What matters is that she is different.  And how you feel about that. 

206. The Good-Evil Scale vs. the Cost-Benefit Scale

  

Last week The Economist called Syria's Assad regime "loathsome."  This week it's "vile."  That is so unhelpful.  The vileness of the Assad regime has nothing whatever to do with the interests of the United States. 

Get yourself on the verbal scale that has "gentle, kind, nice, good, noble" at one end and "rotten, evil, unrighteous, loathsome, vile" at the other and you can only do dumb things, dumb where dumbness hurts, down where people shoot guns.

In the late nineties Georgia's Mikheil Saakashvili was an enlightened, democracy-favoring, corruption-discouraging advocate of human rights — by Western standards about as gentle, kind, nice, honest, and noble as an old Russian could get — but our admiration for his goodness could have committed us to war with Russia.  Trouble here is very close.  Say we show our admiration by backing Georgia's admission to NATO, as George W. Bush wanted to do.  Georgia joins NATO.  We have to go to war when NATO members go to war.  Georgia goes to war with Russia. And there we are, having to decide whether to renounce our treaty obligation or start shooting guns.  (We could still get into a dumbhead pickle like this.)

Saddam Hussein was vile.  His people needed the goodness of freedom and democracy.  We didn't take time to find out (as nearly all the rest of the realistic world was urging) if he was really a threat to our security.  No, good people bring goodness to people, so we, through war, would bring our two best things, freedom and democracy, to the Iraqi people.  One of the dumbest moves, in real terms (like "cost" and "benefit"), a people ever made. 

Of course we have people in government, smart people, who can calculate cost and benefit and risk, but we are a democracy, and those calculations do no good if the media people get the voting people worked up using words like "vile" and "loathsome."  People who live their lives on the good-evil scale are easily worked up.

The cost-benefit scale runs from "prohibitive" to "priceless."  In early WWII loss of an aircraft carrier was "prohibitive."  No operation was worth it.  In the American Revolution loss of any number of spies was acceptable.  Freedom was "priceless." 

Moving from the good-evil scale to the cost-benefit scale can be very helpful.  If you think that something is bad and aren't sure how bad, the smart people who measure on the cost-benefit scale can tell you.  Say you think killing people is bad.  One killer, or way of killing, kills 10,000 people. The other killer, or way of killing, kills 70,000 people.  "The latter," the smart number-crunchers tell you, "is greater than the former by a factor of 3.5."  You know just how worked up to be.

What's hard is making risk calculations.  I can imagine that with Syria that calculation is driving the smart people crazy.  What are the chances that a moderate rebel faction (the only kind the voting people will support) will win out over other factions and then (with what degree of support?) win out over Bashar al-Assad  (with what degree of support from Russia?)? 

Answer that and they still have to project possible cost.  What a nightmare history turns that into!  How many deaths resulted from the secessions the West encouraged in the Balkans ("Self-determination!  Freedom! They must have diplomatic recognition!")?  Who could have guessed the eventual cost in Iraq?

You can imagine what it would be like, if you're a smart person, to have a media person, or the people he has worked up, butting in saying, "Oh, but this killer was vile, and that way of killing is loathsome." 

I don't want to say that the buttinskies are wrong.  They could just be saying there's something here not measurable in numbers, something priceless.  But I do want to say that before they break in on the smart people's calculations, or demand that they (I'm obviously thinking of Obama people) take action, they ought to break in on their own vocabulary: "What do I mean by 'vile'?  Something absolute, or something that admits comparisons?"  Until they do that I don't they ought to, I don't think they can, enter into conversation with the careful calculators at all.  And I don't think they ought to work people up without getting into such a conversation.

205. The Dangerous Humanity of the Intelligentsia

 

In the New York Times (May 5) Bill Keller begins his case for intervention in Syria thoughtfully and moderately, in a way no neutral academic could fault.  But in no time, as David Bromwich has just shown (New York Review, June 20), he is using words, and leading other writers on his newspaper to use words, that would take our country where the least thoughtful and moderate would take it.

Bromwich is good at showing what New York Times tendentiousness shares with Republican hawkishness: vagueness about the details.  John McCain says, "We could train and arm well-vetted Syrian opposition forces."  Bromwich asks, "'Vetted' by whom?"  McCain says, "We could destroy artillery and drive Assad's forces from their posts."  Bromwich asks, "All without ground forces?"  NYT editors pass an innocent-sounding headline, "Whitehouse Sticks to Cautious Path on Syria."  Bromwich says that's telling us that "the common sense of the well-informed now favors intervention."

That may be over-reading, but you don't have to over-read to see the tendentiousness in the case The Economist (May 18) makes.  Doing nothing could "even result in a victory for the loathsome regime of Bashar Assad."  "Loathsome" tells us that the common morality of the humanely moved favors intervention in Syria — as George Bush's "evil" told us that common Christianity favored intervention in Iraq. 

I don't see manipulation in this tendentiousness.  I see the genuine transmission of the humanity of the Enlightenment, and find flowing in these journals the stream the journals of Paris opened up.  It's what we count on them for, and are grateful for.  But it's not the whole Enlightenment.

Part of the Enlightenment is analysis which requires complexity to be acknowledged and not over-simplified.  Both the Times and The Economist show that they are doing that with the Syria problem.  "None of the options are risk free," the one the Times recommends "must be carefully choreographed and accompanied by... diplomacy," and still "it might well be that the internal grievances are too deep and bitter to forestall a bloody period of reprisals." "All options for the West" are "fraught," we could be "dragged into a quagmire," and the best choice is "imperfect," says The Economist.  The two newspapers could hardly do more to reassure the skeptical, high-information reader.  And still they do the things that Bromwich nails them for.

But there's still another part of the Enlightenment, trust in the common man, or (these days), the low-information reader. He's the man we all rely on to carry out our policies.  But he's the joker in the Enlightenment deck, and I'm not sure these editorialists understand him or know how to play him.

Say our nation is "enforcing a no-fly zone."  In an editorial room that's going to be different from waging war.  If you listen in a debriefing room, though, you won't detect much of a difference.  "I shot that son of a bitch right out of the sky."  Among common warriors, in the air or on the ground, the difference between enforcing a zone and waging war lies only in the number of sons of bitches.

Ah, but The Economist's no-fly zone will be set up "on humanitarian grounds."  There's the humanity the intelligentsia wants to see.  The common warrior, maybe played by a Jon Stewart, will see it too.  "Well, at least I got shot out of the sky on humanitarian grounds."  Not shot down by a son of a bitch?  "No, he was a good American human being."

The fact is that the process of killing, any kind of killing, turns the people who are trying to kill you into sons of bitches.  And the things you can do to a son of a bitch are different from the things you can do to a fellow human being.  War, bless Clausewitz for telling us, is an irreversible extension, on both sides, of what can be done to sons of bitches and an inexorable escalation of their number.  Technology, as in drones, may slow this process, or dull our awareness of it, but I don't think it can stop it.

That's a danger, letting your nation get into killing, but there's a prior danger: letting your nation get into a contest.  It's a danger heightened in the United States by the common American man's hatred of losing, as can be observed in any stadium.  If you start losing in a contest he'll want you to do more.  If you don't, manager or coach or President, he'll make trouble for you.  He hates losers.  And he, in the Enlightenment's most significant gift, has the votes.  He can throw losing presidents out.

Uncommonly bright Americans, editors, need to fix this on their walls, so they don't forget it: The American common man hates losing.  So a president who wants to stay out of war will avoid putting the country into win-lose situations.  And the uncommonly bright ought to help, not hinder, him.