I want to take a brief detour to answer the classic metaphysical question by a dorm room smarty pants in response to Christian apologetics, “If God created everything who created God?” The question is a clever play on the word “everything” in response to a Christian apologist who says that “God created everything”. Of course, when the Christian apologist says “God created everything”, he is assuming that God is the root, the uncreated thing. Here, dorm room smarty pants is pretending to ignore this assumption and is extracting the idea “everything is created” to turn it back against the premise of God. In this way, smarty pants is challenging the intellectual and philosophical integrity of the Christian apologist.
Friday, March 23, 2007
“If God created everything who created God?”
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Revelation, Geography and the Bible Canon
And it’s not just the follower of LDS. Followers of Bahai and Islam, to name a couple of major groups, also claim to complete the teachings of NT and/or correct severe and drastic failures of the NT to get the message right. LDS, Bahai, Islam and other groups like them all claim that their beliefs operate with some essential connective tissue to the Bible and the NT. For them, Jesus is an important teacher en route to the real goods, which are provided by this person or that who followed after Jesus and who completed Jesus and/or who corrected the serious mistakes of the apostles/bible writers/translators.
It seems clear enough to me from my read of the Bible and the NT and all that Jesus plainly said and didn't say that there is no room for a prophet to follow the NT whose importance is co-equal to Jesus and/or the apostles. If Jesus was who he said he was, then there would be no need for anyone to follow. Jesus affirmed that he was the Messiah, and he said that he fulfilled the Law and the Prophets. Jesus did not say that another prophet of equal authority to him or to his apostles would follow. When there was, in fact, something of salvific importance that was to come in the future that the apostles and/or any and all of Jesus’ future followers would need to know (ie. the coming of the Holy Spirit, the Second Coming) Jesus plainly informed his apostles. This understanding is in conflict with the idea that Jesus and the apostles of the Bible got everything right and that everything has been passed down intact and correct – except that there was more crucial canonical information that needed to be revealed to the world long after Jesus and his apostles.
Due to the conflict that is presented by claiming to add to the words of Jesus while recognizing that his words are intact and correct as presented to us in the New Testament, many canon-adding groups claim that the New Testament is, in fact, not correct or is incomplete due to lost information. Now, if one accepts any idea that Jesus was the messiah and Lord according to words and actions attributed to him, then one must place some degree of trust in those whom Jesus entrusted with his words. If one can't trust Jesus’ apostles to get the New Testament right, one can't trust Jesus to be a Lord who was wise enough to have picked and guided the right disciples. If one accepts the idea that the apostles got it right, but that later translators severely altered the Bible, then one is still left with a Lord who wasn’t wise enough and powerful enough to ensure that his message made it intact to the world. For this one must claim that Jesus’ promises of ongoing guidance by the Holy Spirit were mere fabrications and/or empty promises. If the combined effort of Jesus and the Holy Spirit wasn’t enough to ensure the intact presentation of his message to the world, then Jesus is less than the Lord that he said that he was.
If one were to argue that Jesus of Nazareth was an important teacher/prophet, but that it was merely the Bible writers who got him wrong by conflating him into one co-equal with God, then one is left with the burden of constructing a completely different Jesus that the one in the New Testament, and not merely an altered one.
The bottom line to all of this is that one can't claim to add or correct the Bible with extra canonical revelation without diminishing Jesus' lordship, and one can't diminish Jesus lordship without making him and his apostles to be liars/frauds to one degree or another. Here, Jesus ends up being less than Lord if one is either A) out and out denying Jesus’ Lordship (like the Muslims) or B) claiming to complete Jesus' original mission to communicate new information about the Gospel to the world with extra revelation long after Jesus and the apostles (Like the LDS). It seems clear enough to me that there is no way around it, but it is obviously not clear enough to those who claim to have added/corrected canonical information in regard to the New Testament.
Before I go any further, I want to acknowledge the cessationist/continuationist debate. In regard to revelation, as a continuationist, I don't believe that experiences encountering God, words of knowledge, miracles, gifts have ceased, though they may not be manifested equally among all Christians at all times. A cessationist might ask, "So what then is the nature of the revelation that has ceased if you, the continuationist, believe that these manifestations of the Spirit continue?" I want to simultaneously deal with the non-Christian (or quasi-Christian) groups who are Bible adder/correctors and the Christian cessationist brothers by dealing with arc redemptive history in regard to the nature and purpose of revelation and God's use of geography. I want to construct an argument that deals with the Bible as an indivisible whole and that sews up an answer to the question, "Where does canonical revelation begin and end and why?” in such a way that contextualizes the ministry of Jesus and the apostles within redemptive history.
Redemptive history in the context of the Israelites/Jews is the process of God unfolding pieces that, put together, comprise the complete body of God’s globally necessary salvific knowledge for the world. The Bible contains this in ways that are stated both directly and via example, both as narrative and as precept. When Paul says in Romans 5:20
"The law was added so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more"
in the context of explaining the role of Christ in regard to redemptive history, Paul is explaining a metaphysical reality that is rooted in the real blood, sweat and breath of human history through time. When he discusses the Law in regard to the Jews in Romans 2:23-24
"You who brag about the law, do you dishonor God by breaking the law? As it is written: "God's name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you,"
Paul is in the process of explaining a principle that it took the arc of history through the real blood sweat and breath of the Jews operating in history to be able to explain. These examples in Romans are just two examples of the many ways that the New Testament contains both a narrative and the complete metaphysical and creedal understanding of that narrative and all of the narrative that proceeded it. As such, the New Testament canon is a complete package of teaching that can be presented to the whole world along with the rest of Scripture as that which consummates the rest of Scripture and explains it plainly. In this way, Old and New Testaments combined as the Bible contain both the demonstration and the explanation of the demonstration of this: the salvific truth that is necessary for our foundational understanding of the God who has operated in history and our relationship to Him.
While the Bible represents the completion of globally necessary salvific knowledge, it does not mean those who lived before its completion were incapable of being saved. Rather, it means that there were key pieces of the salvific knowledge of God that were needed to be completed through the story of the Jewish people before the revelation could be complete as a Gospel to the whole world. Before the completion of this globally necessary salvific knowledge, salvation still required an orientation to the Jewish people and, during the era of the temple, to the temple via the outer court. Before the completion of the globally necessary salvific knowledge, the temple is still at the center of the terra firma of the word of God in Zion as both spirit and geography.
It is with the ministry of Jesus and then the apostles that this ends, and something important happens: the revelation is taken out of the bounds of Jewish people and the geography of Jerusalem. The globally necessary salvific revelation is now portable to the ends of the earth: it is now a Gospel. This altered relationship with geography is confirmed by three particular events that happen to the temple after the cross and the resurrection. The ripping of the temple curtain, Pentecost and the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in 70 AD were sequential earthquakes that signaled this altered relationship with geography and the Word of God. It is the dissemination of globally necessary salvific knowledge via direct revelation to a particular man or group of men that has ended, which is why the relationship between the word of God and earthly geography has been altered and the dissemination of God’s word is now no longer within the boundaries of the Jewish people and land.
To use big fancy words, the portability of the Gospel beyond the terra firma of the temple mount has particular pheumotological, cristological and ecclesiastical ramifications. Having a different relationship with land, the church now also has a different relationship with human mediators. It is now Jesus, the king and high priest who communicates directly with all believers, as lesser priests, via his Spirit to all ends of the earth to accomplish the goal of establishing his Kingdom in the transformation of believers. It is in the administration of this that Christ betows gifts and fruits to advance it. The church, as an ecclesiastical institution, is merely a container and shell of loosely held, locally operating and very conditionally held institutional authority that is placed by God to guide the establishment of God's Kingdom. As Jesus has commissioned the Gospel to be spread to the whole world, it is the province of the church, as the collective, organic body of individual Christians each operating as individual agents whose job it is to disseminate the body of completed salvific revelation presented in the Bible as it is understood in the context of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
So, to answer the cessationists, the revelation that has ceased is any new revelation of globally necessary salvific knowledge of God which must be disseminated via one man to the whole earth. If a cessationist insisted that I was I partial "cessationist" and therefore not a pure continuationist, I would concede that I was a "cessationist" for that particular nature and purpose of revelation. As a continuationist (in the meaning of the term in the cessationist/continuationist debate), God's low-level revelation aka illumination (a word that is used to keep "revelation" distinct) is ad hoc, supplemental or is individually necessary or locally necessary or temporarily necessary or useful to advance God's kingdom across the globe.
As I have attempted to explain in my posts on "house building" and "will teach you all things" part 1, part 2 and part 3, Jesus and the apostles claimed their role as completing the dissemination of the “truth” of revelation/ aka. the Foundation, but also explained that there was to be an ongoing dissemination of ad hoc wisdom from the Holy Spirit to believers. It is in the space of this ongoing illumination that Jesus interacts directly with believers, affecting their transformation with the intervention of the Holy Spirit, and thereby guiding them to complete the work of the Gospel.
Jesus did not say that this process of illumination via the Holy Spirit would end, and I don’t believe that it will end for the reason that I stated in paragraph 3 of this post – I believe that which Jesus plainly opened is open, that which Jesus plainly closed is closed, and that which Jesus plainly says will come in the future will come in the future. Believing that the illumination of the Spirit has ended would require having extra-biblical knowledge that the promise of ongoing illumination has closed when Scripture has not plainly said so and has said many things plainly to the contrary.
Another way to think metaphorically of the divide that separates the revelation of the Bible canon from the low-level ad-hoc revelation/illumination that follows is to think of a tree. One can understand that canonic revelation is contained within a "trunk building" dispensation of God's revelation and what is now the branch building dispensation of God's illumination. (I don't normally like to use the word dispensation because "dispensationalists" too often emphasize divisions in history and not continuity of God's truth and word). The NT written by the apostles represents the authoritative writing connected to the final "trunk" revelation of God. The NT ministry of the apostles is just where the trunk is becoming branches. It is Bahai, Islam and LDS who all claim some sort of "trunk" quality revelation, some new canon for some new globally necessary salvific knowledge coming though one prophet requiring a new commissioning of missionaries to spread it to the ends of the earth.
In regard to the cessationist who might say that any modern believer’s claim to a special, conscious experience of having special communion with God puts him at risk of being seen as co-equal with the Prophets and Apostles. It is my assertion that we believers can experience the existential faith of God’s leading as an experience of God’s illumination with the same intensity and claim to God's direction and call on our lives that Abraham experienced as God’s revelation, and that we modern believers can use Abraham as an example for our journey in God’s illumination without being accused of making ourselves co-equal as prophets to Abraham. This is because Abrahams place in history makes him part of the "trunk" narrative, as Abraham's faith was necessary to advance the nation of Israel. This, so that Paul and the author of Hebrews could later look back on Abraham’s example as a way to communicate the reality of faith for the benefit of the all in the context of God's revelation in history. Only if I were to claim new, foundational, globally necessary salvific knowledge as a result of my journey with God in 2007, then I would be in problematic territory in regard to the prophets and the apostles and I would be in danger of adding to the canon as the cessationists so often fear.
I will say that I have an affinity with Catholics as brothers in Christ in a way that I do not feel with LDS or with Bahia or Islam (though some Catholics would consider me a heretic). However, the problem I have with these aforementioned groups is a similar problem that I have with the idea of "apostolic succession" of the Catholic church (and to some extent in the Anglican church). While the Catholic church leadership does not claim any new salvific knowledge after the Bible canon, they do claim a centralized illuminatory authority that emanates from God to one man and/or group of men in one corner of the world. It is the tendency of LDS, Islam and to a lesser extent the Catholic Church to try to re-orient the Word of God as something that is oriented toward a particular man at on a particular piece of terra firma. While God can certainly use the institution of the Catholic church for good and to spread the Gospel, it is its centralizing tendency in regard to geography that makes it regressive in their relationship to revelation and the geography of the Gospel. This tendency toward valuing a particular piece of terra firma is also found to one degree or another in all of the Bible canon-adding sects and religions.
In sum, it is my assertion that God's altered use of geography away from needing to by tied to the land ended any formal centralized revelatory/illuminatory ecclesiology. That the church, now free to go to the ends of the earth with the Gospel, is no longer ecclesiastically bound to the globally necessary teachings of one man or group of men. Instead, Christians operate as the "priesthood of all believers" relating directly with Christ and operating within their local church as they complete the mission of His kingdom to the ends of the earth.
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Hook-up Positive Feminists
Intro
This blog part of a series where I am going out on a limb to confront certain destructive aspects of feminism and of the dessicated sexual values that are out there in our culture. While I am critical of the phalanx style culture war techniques that rely on politics, I do think that there is a role to play for Christians to confront destructive ideas that lie beyond the jurisdiction of explicitly Christian dialogue, wherein Biblical authority is agreed upon as a point of reference. I am still letting my thoughts gel on the ground rules for this sort of dialogue and how it fits in with Christian evangelism and the role of Christians in the world at large. So allow me to bracket that for a bit, while I examine some things.
These past couple of weeks have had many zeitgeist moments in regard to the sexual culture at large that I see as interconnected.
1) The American Psychological Association study on the ill effects of over-sexualization of young girls
2) Britney shaved her head and demanded that people stopped touching her.
3) The Delta Zeta sorority at
4) a new book called Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose At Both by Laura Sessions Stepp came out that follows in the footsteps of Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the rise of Raunch Culture by Ariel Levy, and
5) An Independent lens documentary called HIP-HOP: Beyond Beats and Rhymes by Byron Hurt on PBS explored the reality of misogyny in gangsta hip-hop.
Confronting Katie Dobie of the
I always like to read the Week magazine to get the pulse of the current zeitgeist. I read their review of Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose At Both, which is a summary of several reviewers from periodicals from around the country. I have yet to actually read the book. Nonetheless, I have a take on what the issues are that one reviewer Katie Dobie of the Washington Post is reacting to. Katie Dobie is but one of many of the “hook-up positive” crowd now criticizing Stepp. Here is Dobie’s review of “Unhooked”. Please read it and then you’ll know what I’m talking about.
Read Katie Dobie’s article here
Now that you’ve read it, I want to deal with two of her points up front:
1) Sex in teens and 20’s, unlike sex for adults, is a path to understanding humanity not a path to true intimacy with another
2) The quality of one’s sexuality is not diminished by too much use
At the end of her article we get a glimpse how of a one night stand might increase one’s understanding of one’s humanity.
Why bring someone into your bed? Maybe because she is brilliant and has a whimsical sense of humor, or he is both sarcastic and vulnerable, and has beautiful eyes.
Is the sheer act of “going all the way” without any strings attached is somehow a path to humanity as Katie Dobie believes? Is sex intimate or isn’t it? If sex is intimate, how is treating is as though it were not intimate a path to some sort of enlightenment about one’s humanity? In truth, sex is the highest transcendent experience that many secular people have, and so having lots of sex is the closest thing that many people get to a religious experience, whereby they then turn fornication and adultery into a religion of self realization.
In truth, sex without love is not enlightenment. It is an act of seeking its pleasure and avoiding its gravity. In the realm of sex, a disposable sexual experience leaves one with the subconscious scars that the most intimate part of one’s self has been treated with less than the honor that it requires. Those scars are not felt consciously, but are sublimated because to recognize them would be too painful. Instead, one feels lust, which is the desire for sexual pleasure extruded through pain and numbness. It is a sadomasochistic impulse to conquer another sexually to validate oneself as a result of latent pain and rejection. Where is the humanity involved in this?
“The girls adopt the crude talk of crude boys: They speak of hitting it, of boy toys and filler boys, "my plaything" and "my bitch."
It is girls aping and trying to one-up the culture of sexual conquest established by cad boys and men.
The powerful pleasure of sex is powerful because it is connected to the core of our being. One cannot experience the power of sex without the core of one’s self being affected either for good or for bad. One cannot experience the high of a sugar rush without either being nourished with good sugars or being overloaded with bad sugars.
A jolt of serotonin in the brain can either be the result of an accomplishment or it can be the result of the drug ecstasy. The former experience of the high is constructive and the latter is destructive. The former experience of the high will bond one to the act of seeking more accomplishments and the latter will bond one to the act of seeking pseudo-wonderful hits of ecstasy. This is the nature of powerful emotions – they bond us to their source. That is why the beauty of sex happens when the pleasure bonds one to the best and highest expression of one’s self for another person in committed love, or else the pleasure will bond one to the quest for disposable sexual highs.
3) Love and sex do not necessarily co-exist
In Katie’s world, there is nothing lost if you have all sorts of sex and then decide that you want to have it with love. Here, the physical act means nothing in and of its self – it only has the meaning/consequences that people choose to subjectively apply to it if and when they are ready. If sex has no inherent gravity, why should a wife not be perfectly comfortable when her husband discusses with her the process of his exploration of his humanity through sex with other girls/women in his youth? Why should she be offended if he continues to have sex to explore his humanity with other women but he insists that he loves his wife. Or the porn star who says that she has sex for her job but makes love to her husband. This attempt to divorce sex from love is a wishful sense of mastery over sexuality that actually helps people to avoid the gravity of sex and the potency and symbolism that is encoded into the profound physical and emotional danger of sexuality. It is the danger of sex that is connected to its pleasure, as the pleasure of sex is the adrenaline rush of being placed in proximity to all of its risks.
As for the married couple who don’t have sex very frequently, this does not negate the special role that sex has as part of the bond of marriage, as people who profoundly trust each other. So it is with the appetite of food, that the pleasure of food is part of the drive to nurture our bodies that we consummate with out knowledge of nutrition so that we seek nutritious food that tastes good. Having nutritious food that tastes good and that we enjoy in the company of others is the highest expression of food that is rooted in all of the biological and primal realities of food. To only seek good tasting food without regard to nutrition is self-destruction through food. As with food, sex is an appetite, wherein the pleasure of sex has a primal and biological dimension that is connected to our needs to bond and to trust and to procreate. The highest expression of sex brings all of these needs together in an experience that encompasses both the pleasure and the gravity of our sexual appetite.
Hook-up sex is banal, reality porn that no one gets paid for. A hook-up is an attempt to have sex without vulnerability and trust, which can only be established in commitment. It is un-examined pleasure stripped of beauty and extruded though the accressions of latent pain and numbness that increase as people continue in it. Hook-up sex is a drug, an opiate among many others, and it is sexual narcissism in its purest form. It is no coincidence that the hook-up generation is the most self-centered and narcissistic (see the recent study on this) because our sexuality cuts to the core of our being and our sexual choices cut to the core of how we shape our character. Dobie is concerned that if such shaming statements are made concerning hook-ups, then girls will just rebel, but that’s not excuse not to call a spade a spade.
Hook-up sex and hook-up fashion is devoid of the mystery and allure that defined sexiness according to older secular-consistent ideas of sexiness. It is a disposable experience to be forgotten en route to the next disposable sexual experience, or it is merely remembered as a notch in the belt of sexual conquest and vapid sexual validation. The highest expression of sex treats it as an appetite, uniting together the pleasure and gravity into a beautiful relationship. Hook-up sex is the cynical abandonment of that beauty. It is the junk-food, fast-food version sex and is just as unhealthy, if not more, as its food counterpart.
As for marriage, there are indeed conditional elements for a marriage to work that require the ongoing mutual commitment of both parties, which Katie Dobie is right to recognize.
However hook-up culture has an idea of marriage that marriage is a pleasure that one can indulge in among other forms of sexual expression. This version of marriage is more like an extended conditional hook-up that can end at any time within an idea of commitment that is ever more vulnerable and flimsy and subject to the whim of narcissistic people as our music and cinema celebrities so often demonstrate.
4) Hook-ups are a Darwinian response to a broken culture or a path to something new.
The Darwinian culture bit is the closest to the truth that Dobie gets, and if true, supports what I have been saying and helps negates her points that I have been summarizing in this post as points 1, 2 and 3. Hook-up is the fast food version of sex for people who cannot or will not stop to commit. In the Darwinian world, the preciousness of sex is diminished not due to exploration but for crasser reasons (why cook a meal at home with your family when you can stop by Jack-In-The-Box). Dobie insists that hook-ups are not a cause of the Darwinian world but merely an effect. In actuality, the same reasons that people hook-up are the same reasons that people have home-wrecking the affairs.
Exploring our humanity and our sexuality, when taken as an intellectually honest endeavor, is a life long process, and there are not neat divisions between youth and older adulthood. As a man gains power and status in his life he will be exposed to the availability of women who were unavailable in his youth. As he gets old and gray he may feel the need to validate his sexuality with a PYT. All this to say that if one does not establish a pattern of honestly and deeply exploring one’s humanity without using other people sexually before one is married, one won’t be in a position to do it after one is married. The higher the position of authority that a person has, the more the consequences will extend beyond the marriage (just as Bill Clinton). Shallowly exploring one’s humanity because of another’s nice eyes before one is married will set one up to do it, eventually, when one is married. To fail to recognize this is to treat sexuality as a toy and not as the potent, gravity laden thing that it is.
5) Hook-ups make sex less a commodity, while being worried about what you can offer a guy by saving your body makes sex a commodity.
Nice try Dobie. Hook-up sex does indeed make sex a commodity. It is reflected in the marketplace that both mirrors and encourages the social marketplace. Here, the realm of business makes “hook-up” fashion, advertising, and sexual products that accessorize the “hook-up” social realm where disposable sex is a “coin of the realm”.
On the topic of guys, I included hip-hop documentary in my zeitgeist list in the Intro. I recognize that there is much, much more to say on the larger topic of hip-hop. The documentary explored where the sexual culture of hip-hop where hooking-up and the mutual objectification of men and women as sex objects goes hand in hand. The documentary featured women in both hip-hop music videos and at a hop-hop spring break where flashing and groping were de rigueur. In these environments, women were shown willingly or self-deceivingly participating in a culture that is based on men validating their masculinity by scoring hook-ups. This vision of hip-hop
The hook-up apologists might like to believe that this hip-hop groping is an aberration on the beautiful possibilities that lie in the youth hook-up culture. In fact, when one does not pursue commitment with another person, one will not pursue respect. It is the difference between being a lover and a player, and hook-up culture is the culture of players. The hook-up realm of sexual conquest is as antithetical to men being encouraged to unite pleasure and gravity in commitment to and respect of women as it is for women to do so for men. This is true, even, as Unhooked and other studies have explored, there may be some unique emotional consequences for women.
The sorority kicking out the un-hot women is the compliment to the hip-hop gropers. More specifically it is a compliment to the culture of male sexual conquest and disposable sexual experience of the fraternities that that sorority was trying to impress. The culture of wealthy/middle male sexual conquest is, by the way, intimately connected to that of the hip-hop realm. As the documentary explained, the purchasers of gangsta hip-hop are largely white middle class young people.
6) The hook-up generation might find its way to intimacy is no less probable that that they will be relationally stunted
While it is possible that certain individuals will stumble into lasting love from having hook-ups, I think that these will be the exceptions more than the rule.
PROLOGUE
To believe that the advancement hook-up sex in our society is “progress” is to subscribe to a belief system that I call “continuous revolution”, which is an aspect of a belief that I have discussed called Primalism. “Continuous revolution” is the triumphalism that says that anything that is new is better than anything that is old. As part of Primalism, continuous revolution says that more and more diverse forms of latent and primally existent human expressions must be always continually brought into the fold of social acceptance. In the realm of sexuality, continuous revolution says that marriage is but one form among many equally wonderful sexual expressions.
For Dobie and those who think like her, there are no amount of studies that will ever convince her otherwise. It’s one thing when the Heritage Institute funded study concluded a couple of years ago that a large fraction of sexual active teen girls have contemplated suicide. The Heritage Institute study was dismissed by the hook-up positive crowd as being partisan. It’s another thing when the American Psychological Association says something along the same lines about the effect of over-sexualization of young girls. As it is true of the recent Unhooked, any study that confirms an old fashioned idea of sex and commitment will always be old-fashioned even if the study is fresh and recent. In regard to sexual values, “hook-up positive” feminists will assert continuous revolution ethics even in the face of a plethora of contrary scientific and empirical data and over anecdotal cultural data. Here is the NY Times book review of Unhooked by Stephanie Rosenbloom who, discussing Stepp’s critics says,
But no studies draw a line between the hookup culture and either clinical depression or a lifetime of remaining single, the critics point out.
They will look to any other external existing failure of society as alternative to looking at neurotic sexual expression that has gone off the rails. They will assert continuous revolution sexual ethics even as a sorority does less to hide its shallowness, even as the hip-hop groping continues, and even as the poster girl for hook-up goes off the deep end and shaves her head.
Monday, February 26, 2007
Bus Stop On the Way to Eternity
(another poem about transportation for your amusement)
Waiting for a bus on a schedule that yawns
Even speeding on unknown freeways,
it moves like a lazy burro.
“2:30 at
is written somewhere on a scroll.
And chronos is bent into inertia in my mind,
where split moments and infinity are united
by an unknowingness that defies all plans.
And rationality is pressed beyond the mundane,
beyond philosophy even, to where
all meaning converges at the bus stop –
by now, a pulsating icon
and a portal to other momentums.
All this, lest bus and bus stop
become a mortar and pestle
that turns recycled plastic benches into destiny
(or a long walk becomes a long wait with the illusion of motion).
Saturday, February 17, 2007
The Freeway
What a fertile, paradoxical name,
where the idea of a promised land,
of dreams fulfilled
and of a charmed and gilded path to get there
is so profaned by the experience
of actually driving on the Freeway
Its lanes,
beaten and frayed,
are pummeled endlessly
by those who are now harnessed to their dreams
and can't easily turn around and go back.
And as it takes, it gives.
Trannies slowly give of their lives in metal shavings,
oil burns and drips like blood,
and every hairpin turn is a memorial to a tragedy.
And concrete,
cracked and carmelized,
reflects the glitter of dreams
only for those who can see it from a great, great distance.
For those who are stuck on the freeway,
the glitter is subsumed
under the grime of daily, gladiator commuting.
I resolve that the next time I am caught in traffic
I will reach down
and pick up a piece of loose concrete as a souvenir
to be held in the hand
of a dreamer thousands of years from now,
long after the freeway has crumbled into ruin
and ancient Los Angeles
is remembered only in myth and relics.
By then its glitter will have turned into pure gold.
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Drunken Peasant Feminism
It is palpably undeniable from her editorial that Barreca is expressing a catharsis of released pent up rage and frustration toward men on behalf of women. The question is, is Barreca’s catharsis valid? As I said in so many words in last weeks post, the problem is that contained in Barreca's catharsis is a sweeping assessment of men that doesn't even try to sift out the cross section of men who need to stop taking their wives for granted on account of the long-on-the-wane stigma for women to be un-married from all of the other men. In this sweeping and flippant assessment of men, Barreca is not trying to deal with that cross section of men and male behavior in a way that is precise enough to truly invite men and women to better relate to each other.
Now let's assume for the sake of argument that the 51% statistic is true. In reality, there are many reasons why people are not staying in marriages, and why marriages fail, and why people never get married. In other words, there are many sundry reasons why a 51% majority of women un-married statistic may have occurred. As for the stigma of remaining unmarried, I was born a generation later than Barreca was. Most of the stigma of being non-married that I have observed among women in my generation is one that women apply to themselves for running out their biological clock. The pressure for women to measure their worth by being married was felt to a greater degree in Barreca's generation. It is clear that for Barreca the 51% majority of women un-married statistic is something that she reads as a benchmark of progress for an issue that she felt in her generation, and which she now takes as permission to publicly vent her feelings in this generation. It is also likely that Barreca's personal experiences with men and her close knowledge of her friends’ relationships have been dominated by a particular experience of men in marriage.
The question is, how much do we grant someone like Barreca the largess of having her catharsis in a public media and how much do we hold her accountable to holding her catharsis in check to seek balance? The Philadelphia Inquirer would not print something written by a man that openly and flippantly dissed all women like Barreca has openly and flippantly dissed all men. It is the province of populist media, like the editorial pages of the Philadelphia Inquirer, wherein the "You go girl!" zeitgeist has been given its voice, allowing women like Barreca to have their catharsis of pent of rage and frustration in public space.
Of course, I don't take TV to be a clear picture of the essence of real men and women, but the views on TV do provide a window into the popular gender caricatures that are reflected in many people’s attitudes. It is ironic that Barreca sees the TV as portraying a retro-grade view of women who are beholden to "Homer Simpson" men. In my view, the picture of men and women on these shows is a part of “You go girl!” but in a slightly different form than the “men need to get out the woks” feminism that Barreca discusses. In TV land, women settle for Mr. Less as an opportunity to be nagging and condescending. These comedy shows offer female viewers a reversal of the I Love Lucy riff in which the wife was the bumbling one and butt of jokes. In this TV milieu, feeling superior is the consolation prize for having a man who is chronically under-achieving in his ability to jump through the hoops that Barreca wants men to be jumping through, lest women drop them at the drop of a wish. As I observe what’s on TV, it is strong male characters like Horatio Caine (CSI Miami) and Jack Bauer (24) and Gil Grissom (CSI), etc…who are un-married and weak men like those on King of Queens and Everybody loves Raymond who are married.
In TV land, the “You go girl!” attitude is most perfectly impersonated in the character Ally McBeal. In the realm of fashion, “You go girl!” is manifested in many women partially baring intimate parts with blatant disregard for boundaries of time and place (it was Ally McBeal who jumpstarted a trend of micro-mini skirts in the mid 1990’s with a particular “You go girl!” episode in which she castigated men for criticizing her). In regard to relationships, “You go girl!” is summed up by a T-shirt that a man wore that said “When I married Ms. Right, I didn’t know that her first name was ‘Always’”.
As for Barreca and other “You go girl!” feminists, if Barreca recognizes the end of an era when many women felt socially pressured to remain married even when their husbands behaved like Homer Simpson, is Barreca happy with Promise Keepers? It is Promise Keepers that makes a serious attempt to confront Homer Simpson behavior in men and their marriages. Too often, "You go girl!" feminists are threatened and frightened by Promise Keepers, and smear it as an attempt to return to re-construct a pre-feminist gender apartheid past rather than recognize it as an attempt to take the truth of feminism to heart in regard to the behavior of lazy husbands. This part of the larger “You go girl!” attitude that has more room for the sycophant committed man and the uncommitted strong man and than it has for the strong committed man.
This "You go girl!" zeitgeist that is represented on TV and in other parts of our culture and that is influencing an attitude that many women have to one degree or another in relationships with men is the feminist aspect of a belief that I call primalism. Primalism popular is a form of postmodernism, what I call “street postmodernism”, that is based on a postmodernist rejection moral metaphysics. Primalism reduces moral questions to questions of power equilibrium among people with competing desires with the belief that the greatest social good is for people to express their feelings and desires as they operate in power equilibrium with others.
In primalism, since nothing is ever transcendently morally true beyond power equilibrium, things are merely temporarily correct so that social codes can be continually adjusted to advance the “expression privileges” of “underdog” groups that have had less power from a historical perspective. As such, primalist social codes are organized around the need for "underdogs" to have their catharsis of overcoming their “underdog-ness”. Here, underdogs are given the “expression privileges” so that they are allowed to "burn the wick", to express their rage until it is burnt out and they are ready to move on. It is the application of primalism within postmodernism that is the basis for many things that are politically correct. To illustrate the relationship between primalism and PC, often what is politically correct in our society is merely the bright, visible area of a moon, while primalism is the whole rest of the moon.
It is the ethic of primalist PC that “You go girl!” catharsis privileges are granted to women coming out from under various oppressive social structures. While the feminist movement is more than a century old, and modern feminism began in the late ‘60’s, the primalist PC “you go girl” attitude of feminism entered the zeitgeist in full form about 20 years ago. By a primalist PC ethic of power equilibrium, the past 20 years is a drop in the bucket compared to the long history wherein women were socially pressured to find worth by being married. By a PC ethic, women who want to express their outrage for this history will be granted "catharsis privileges" for a long time to come.
Darby Crash of the Germs once sang that “…evolution is a process too slow to save my soul”, and primalist PC feminism left to its own devices does not offer me a process that will result in any gender reconciliation in my lifetime. In fact, primalist PC feminism is leading the opposite way. There is a certain point at which a catharsis of rage needs to be reigned in, and if it doesn't it only begets destruction. A conflict resolution counselor will encourage an individual person in a confrontation to be accountable to being as balanced and as reasonable as possible so that the ultimate goal is not to vent rage but to advance the relationship. An individual who vents his/her anger without having the serious goal of advancing a relationship with another person will merely instigate a fight that will go back and forth. And what is true on a small scale is also true on a large scale. The lack of disciplined conflict resolution between large groups of people not only affects the relationships between groups, it leaches into the attitudes of people on the small scale and affects individual relationships.
Twenty some years and counting is a long time to pollute the waters of gender relationships a great deal by promoting confrontation is that is more interested in fighting/one-upping than in truly reconciling. It is the wisdom of Proverbs that confronts the un-fettered id that primalist ethics allows by saying "only a fool gives full voice to his anger". The wisdom of Proverbs can be amplified specifically to the realm of gender politics by saying, “only a fool allows his/her anger to be the basis of promoting destructive caricatures of men and women”. To explain the same principle with a different metaphor, Martin Luther spoke of the drunken peasant who gets on one side of the horse only to fall off the other side. One way that this imbalance occurs is when one does not make any effort to harness one’s hurt feelings into a sound course of action for reconciling with another, but rather allows the anger to completely dominate the dialogue.
The "You go girl!" form of feminism that has made it onto editorial pages, that has made no attempt to sort out caricatures and reality, and that has flippantly dissed men has become the "drunken peasant" version of feminism that only offers undisciplined euphorias of rage and new double standards to replace the old double standards. This “You go girl!” feminism has its compliment in men who express their misogyny by sexually objectifying women and who advance “You go stud!” attitudes as the blow-back to the prevailing “You go girl!” attitudes, and so the hatred and mistrust and cynicism between men and women grows. It is the deviant strength of men like radios hosts Howard Stern and Tom Leykis who operate in the wedge that the "You go girl!" attitude has helped to promote in our society between male strength and male commitment and respect toward women.
Feminism has been, and will continue to be, an important social movement. Feminism needs to be held to the standard of promoting good relationships between men and women as its goal, and the valid critiques of society that are contained in feminism need to be brought increasingly into the fold of a greater understanding of men and women. To the extent that feminism is infected with a “You go girl!” attitude, feminism needs to be saved from itself. We've long reached a point where drunken peasant feminism that is not interested in what is actually best for men and women to get along is polluting the bloodstreams of people's attitudes with bile. We've reached the point where "You go girl!" shoot from the hip feminism needs to be accountable when it shoots from the hip.
And as for the "You go girl!" excuse that men are supposed to be "tough enough to handle it", this is the part of the "You go girl!" idea that traffics in the inclinations of men to be chivalrous. Here, chivalry is mutated from a social code on the part of men to physically protect women into a social code to protect women from being openly criticized and confronted by men. It is a social code that has conflated the protection of women with primalist PC ethic that values the unreconstructed and unchallenged comfort of women to express their id. This idea that men are supposed to be strong enough to "handle it" is an intellectually lazy way of approaching relationships that works backward from a caricature of male strength. The long and short of it is that all of the various form of “You go girl!” male bashing are, in the end, relationship bashing, and that's bad.
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Examining Cute Poison
An editorial, The Single Majority, was written recently by Gina Barreca and published in the Philadelphia Inquirer on January 19, 2007 in response to a recent survey that found that 51% of women were living without a spouse.
So here is the link to her article. If you read it first, you’ll understand what I’m commenting on. It’s not long. I would post all of it right here for the sake of convenience, but I’m trying to respect copyright laws.
Now that you’ve read it, allow me to put it’s flippancy under a microscope and explain why it matters. These flippant remarks listed below are by no means an exhaustive list, they are just some choice flippant remarks that I want to examine specifically before looking at the editorial as a whole.
Flippant remark #1: The question, far as I can see, isn't why more women aren't marrying; the question is why they marry at all.
Why do women marry" could be an honest question if it were couched within a larger context of honestly questioning why people marry, including why men marry. In the absence of this context, Barreca intends the question, “…why they marry at all” rhetorically. In English, “…why (pronoun) (verb) at all” is an idiom that is intended to disparage what is being questioned. “…why they marry at all” has a conclusion encoded into it: that marriage is a drag, and why would women want to bother with such a drag?
Flippant remark #2: Fact is, there are better gigs than marriage out there for women these days
If you treat marriage as merely a gig, then, yes, there are better gigs than marriage. Barreca has a view of marriage that it is a disposable thing when it is uprooted from the realm of financial dependence.
Flippant remark #3: Maybe that's because women grew up singing, "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow" while men grew up singing, "We've Got Tonight (Why Don't You Stay)."
Notice this line, “…while men grew up…” Again, while many men may have operated like this, or still do, it is in no way representative of all men. Barreca could make the distinction between the zeitgeist and the realm of all men but chooses not to.
Flippant remark #4: (either a red gravy for pasta, which they refer to as a "Bolognese" sauce, or a stir fry made in a wok they got from their last girlfriend)
Who are the “they” in her parenthetical comment on cooking, all men or some men? Again, Barreca is too busy being cute to make a distinction. I’ll explain in more detail why this is a problem
Flippant remark #5: Once the culture at large accepts this - that we marry, and stay in marriages, only if we wish to - perhaps husbands will once again get out the woks and work to woo their wives.
Here Barreca is trying to confront the premise that women need to be married to men to be socially accepted more than men need to be married to women, and, therefore concludes that men as a group have taken womens' commitment to them for granted after the men have wooed the women into marriage. While the cultural idea of marriage and social acceptance may have been true in the past, and while many men may have used this cultural idea as an excuse to be lazy husbands, Barreca is drawing a sweeping conclusion about what is at the root of people's relationship/marriage failures that is based on a mis-understanding of the actual relationship that exists between real people in marriage and the fashionable cultural ideas of marriage that surround them. Of course there are some men who need to "get out the woks" to help their marriage, but in the absense of any perspective or balance in regard to all men and all marriages, "get out the woks" is Barreca's jab at men and not a serious effort to help people in their marriages.
Of course, we men stay in marriages only if we “wish” to. And now here’s the problem with the word “wish”. While it is true that it is possible for one to have a meaningful and fulfilling life as a single person, we humans are compelled to seek marriage and deep relationships with the opposite sex to meet deep needs that both sexes have for each other. While it is true that marriage is, and should be, a choice, the idea that the drive to bond deeply with opposite sex is merely a “wish” makes the drive seem weaker than it actually is.
Flippant remark #6: Marriage, like dessert, is wonderful if you choose to indulge, but it isn't essential. Remember, too, that when the Bible declared it "not good for man to be alone," it didn't say anything about woman.
The Bible reference here is cute. It is part of a false idea of men and women, that men are the needy ones and that women aren’t, and therefore since women don’t need men financially in the way that they used to, women are the less needy ones in a relationship, and therefore women are more powerful and can call the shots and get men to jump through hoops if men want to be graced with the companionship of women. In sum, Barreca is saying that men are stuck in need, while women have graduated to “wish".
Now allow me to react to some anticipated reactions to my comments to these flippant remarks.
If I give Barreca the benefit of the doubt, she is trying to say that those men who are inclined to use past cultural ideas in regard to a woman's need for a man as an excuse to be a bad husband no longer have those cultural ideas available as a premise to base their behavior on. She is trying to say that the statistic of 51% is an indicator of this cultural change.
The problem is that the tone of Barreca’s article is both cute and triumphalist. Here, Barreca wants to be both fun and serious. That way, if the reader takes her seriously and disagrees with her, he can be dismissed as being humorless. Here, cuteness and triumphalism are being alloyed together to create smugness to reinforce the smugness of those who are already inclined to agree and quell those who disagree. I can almost hear Barreca responding to these comments in the same flippant manner that she has written the editorial. “Oh come on don’t be so serious. It’s just a little editorial! Surely you don’t think that I’m advocating GPS devices”.
I can hear another response to my comments, “My readers are smart enough to know that I’m not talking about all men”. In regard to a topic as sensitive as gender, one needs to carefully separate real men and women from the fashionable “zeitgeist” notions about men and women come and go. Each zeitgeist, taken in whole cloth, is a distorted caricature of men and of women. In any given zeitgeist, men are noble warriors or lazy slobs and women are fragile flowers or man-killers. Each zeitgeist notion has some claim to some piece of truth about men and women, but no zeitgeist can be confused with the essence of real men and women or even necessarily the behavior of most men and women. While it is often true that culture notions hold sway over many people's thought and behavior, sometimes the cultural zeitgeist is merely a loud, vocal minority, while the quiet majority wait for it to pass.
Any serious attempt to arrive at a prescription to help people in their relationships needs to work backward from a serious attempt to understand the essence of men and women, and not work backward from caricatures. While Barreca has identified some of the caricatures of women in the past in regard to marriage that have had serious consequences on women, she is glad to embrace a fashionable “Homer Simpson” and/or “Don Juan” caricature of men. It is this caricature of men that is complimented by her promotion of another caricature of women – the "You Go Girl!" caricature that women, unlike men, are the smart, powerful and independent ones who have the right to call the shots in a relationship. It is operating from these caricatures that Barreca tosses out her flippant prescriptions for keeping marriages together.
And no, the reference to “high fives” isn’t just cute editorial fun either. Barreca doesn’t think that the Homer Simpson/Don Juan caricature of all men and the Homer Simpson/Don Juan behavior of some men is cause for any alarm or sober mourning. If this editorial is any indication, Barreca does not arrive at “high fives” from a deep longing for men and women to actually reconcile, nor does Barreca arrive at "high fives" out a valid need to celebrate the end of an problematic cultural system. If this editorial is any indication, Barreca arrives at “high fives” because it is an opportunity for her to encourage women to feel superior to men. She might respond. "Ah" but my quip about the Bible was all in good fun". Actually it is part of a string of flippant remarks in her editorial that has consequences beyond "good fun", because it is “fun” that has its roots in cynicism.
As an anticipated response to my criticism, “My readers are smart enough to know that I’m not talking about all men” seems on the surface to be trying to protect the readers from having their intelligence questioned. What it actually does is avoid the uncomfortable reality that the people who make a zeitgeist powerful are those who are not committed enough to the quest for intellectual honesty and precision to try to carefully sort out distortions from reality. If they were, there wouldn’t be all those pesky zeitgeists. The truth is that many people absorb what they hear directly into their bloodstreams, especially when they are itching to hear it. It is the responsibility of writers to try to guide people beyond this tendency and into a higher realm of understanding.
The current “You Go Girl!” zeitgeist is real, pervasive and destructive. By eschewing precision and trying to be cutely provocative, the tone of Barreca's editorial feeds this zeitgeist and is a part of this zeitgeist. The "You Go Girl!" attitude is the female counterpart to ways that men have hurt women. “You Go Girl!” is an attitude of turning the tables on men, not of inviting men and women into serious relationships. As with the “You Go Stud!” attitudes that do not invite men to reckon with the depth of their needs for women and manage those needs well, “You Go Girl!” does not call women to reckon with the depth of their needs for men (not to mention the needs that children have for adults in covenanted relationship). “You Go Girl!” seeks to give women a phony sense of emotional independence from men that is based on a phony idea of strength and non-need in regard to men and an over-all flawed idea of human nature, both male and female.
The “You Go Girl!” is based on the simplistic narrative: that we women are the victims, but now we have the power. It is this “You Go Girl!” narrative that confuses the just cause of overcoming some specific oppressive clichés of women in our society in regard to marriage with the idea that women have been the lesser participants in the failure of marriages and relationships. This confusion is based on the phony feminist-originated idea that women are not capable of evil in the way that men are, and that evil originates from bad men and is merely imitated by the nobler sex who will return to being noble when they are freed from bad men and can operate with the power balance tilted toward them. This mis-apportionment of the capacity for evil across gender lines is the result of a feminist tendency to downplay the differences between men and women to where women are only allowed to be recognized as being distinct from men when women are seen as being better than men. Barreca’s "You Go Girl!" editorial is the part of the dross that has risen to the surface from this overall viewpoint.
Specifically in regard to marriage, women have always been just as capable and just as culpable of wrecking relationships as men. Even as the culture has changed and the zeitgeists have come and gone and will continue to, in the intimate spaces where men and women interact with their needs for each other, there have always been ways in which women and men have hurt and used each other and loved each other and profoundly blessed each other. A “You Go Girl!” attitude toward marriage and relationships does not invite women into a truly adult and clear understanding of relationships with real men but, rather, coddles women into remaining resentful toward men and relationally stunted, just as much as “You Go Stud!” causes men to be relationally and emotionally stunted. The truth is that both men and women can be lazy, bullying and manipulative in a relationship, and that there are some uniquely feminine and masculine ways to be destructive, and that men and women both need to learn to avoid destructive behavior in all the forms en route to better relationships.
Saturday, January 20, 2007
"I'm fine. How are you?"
Of course, there is slacker way of saying “’Tsup?”, which is short for “What’s up?”. The different between “’Tsup?” and “How are you today?” is that “’Tsup?” has become just another word for “Hi” and doesn’t demand a response. (Those from older generations might not know this and respond to “’Tsup?” with “Oh, I’m doing just fine how ‘bout yourself?”)
My problem with someone asking me “How are you doing today?” when I am in motion and therefore not able to sit still with them, is that I am a person who is often melancholy and ruminating on sundry problems in life and in the world. As such, I always feel that I am being dishonest by saying “I’m fine” without being able to elaborate on how I’m actually doing. Each thing that I write about is the product of having spent a great deal of time ruminating about it, and I have organized my life around the need to ruminate, and I go to great lengths to give myself the time and space to ruminate. When I am placed in a social situation where the only acceptable reply is “I’m fine. How are you?” or “Doing just fine, thank you”, I feel boxed into a situation where I am required to be less authentic than I want to be. I feel that a one-size-fits all idea of politeness is being foisted upon me that doesn’t allow me a gracious way to avoid having to reciprocate.
While some people will know exactly what I’m talking about, there are many people, including some Christians, who will read this and think that I’m being ungracious for feeling this way, and that I am being rude and un-curteous, or worse, un-Christian when I do not respond to "How are you doing?" when I am being asked while in motion by a stranger. For the Christians in this category, they have a high value for a particular idea of Christian hospitality that they have projected into what they consider to be polite social practice. It is these Christians who consider it an essential act of hospitality to ask someone how they are doing, even if it is being asked “on the run” where the only possible non-rude reply from the other person is “I’m fine. How are you?” or “I’m doing fine, thank you”. For these Christians, someone who does not reply with one of these two replies is being anti-social, and from a Christian perspective, is expressing inhospitality and ingratitude toward the other’s hospitality.
I have known Christians who take it a step further, who consider it a mark of ingratitude to God to not be able to say “I’m doing great!” when asked. To these Christians, if one is truly living in the knowledge of all the blessings that the Gospel has endowed him with, he should be able say “I’m blessed!” anytime, anywhere. Furthermore, “I’m great!” is supposed to elicit a reply from another person, “Great? Why are you great?” as a way to invite him into an evangelistic conversation.
Needless to say that I am not among that group of Christians. While our need to be grateful to God is a very important truth that we Christians must meditate on, it is by no means an aspect of truth that we must dwell on to the exclusion of other aspects of truth. Turning one’s gratitude toward God into a code of politeness can be used to question the gratitude of those Christians who have a different rhythm of relating to God that does not fit the social code. While I don’t begrudge Christians for their practice of expressing their gratitude toward God in the context of a code of social politeness, I am wary of it.
I have a supreme value for being totally honest to a degree that can offend the sensibilities of certain Christians who have a premium on being nice. As for being polite, I do value politeness and courteousness, but I don’t believe that love, truth and politeness are necessarily the same thing all the time, though they do overlap. I hold that politeness must be balanced with the need to be totally honest and constantly reckoning with all truth. It is from this value system that I have a looser idea of how “politeness” fits in with Christian love. For me, I have a value for being polite, but it needs to be flexible construct for different people and situations, and cannot be done in a formulaic, one-size-fits-all sort of way.
I am a person who wants to make sure there is room for people to be melancholy. I am convinced that joy is the union of truth and pleasure, and that one must frequently go through the difficult process of grappling with truth in order to get to the pleasure that is joined with truth at the other end. I am convinced that this is part of what it means for one to “pick up one’s cross daily” to find joy that lies on the other side of the cross. Even as I believe that this is true, I need to be mindful of not wanting to shame Christians into being melancholy and more than I want un-melancholy Christians to shame me out of being melancholy. I recognize that delving into the realm of the melancholy is a different journey for every person.
This puts me at odds with a culture wherein “happiness” is not understood as being something related with the task of coming to terms with difficult truth. The “pursuit of happiness” as “happiness” is understood by many in our culture is a pursuit that does not have room for melancholy. The pursuit of joy, however, does involve the experience of the melancholy. In the context of continually seeking the union of truth and pleasure, joy and melancholy are like two halves of an oscillating sine wave one giving way to the other continually. By my reckoning, the act of placing another person in a situation where the only socially acceptable reply is "I'm fine" is an act of prosecuting a particular view of the nature of happiness that is at odds with the rhythm of being melancholy. This is true quite apart from whether the person asking "How are you doing?" as good intentions.
Dennis Prager, a Jewish conservative talk show host who I frequently listen to, says that we have a moral obligation to be happy. To Dennis, projecting unhappiness into the world is equivalent to having bad breath. While I accept this idea in regard to one who is cronically complaining, I don’t accept this idea in regard to one who is not smiling or not replying “I’mfinehowareyou?” while being asked on the run. Having written a book, Happiness is a Serious Problem, Dennis Prager presents an idea of happiness that is much more in the realm of joy as I have defined it than the idea of “happiness” that most people harbor. Dennis’ idea of happiness is one that recognizes the role that squarely facing difficulty has in ultimately being happy.
That said, I am not capable of projecting a smile everywhere I go. Perhaps this is a matter of personality. Some people ruminate less that others and some can keep their ruminations more hidden. Perhaps Dennis Prager is among those who can operate publicly with a smile much of the time. As for me, I am an introverted person who needs room for melancholy and I wear my ruminations on my sleeve.
When I am around certain chipper people I feel as though I have stepped into a “melancholy free zone” where I feel that claims are being made on my emotions. When someone at the check-out line asks “So how are you doing today?”, I often feel as though I am being presented with an imposing form of peppiness that is openly challenging me to match that peppiness, putting my melancholy on the spot and challenging me to reply properly, lest I be exposed as a shmuck who responds with a shrug of silence. I also know that the checkout lady doesn’t intend her question to be taken in this way, but her intent on the matter does not negate the effect – my melancholy is still being put on the spot.
One could argue that I need to be kind to the people who need to perform those tough custormer service jobs and honor the good intentions of the check-out lady, even if I don't agree with the philosophy of happiness from which "How are you doing?" emanates. I, however, do work a day job that requires customer service, so I know it from the inside. Whenever I see the "high beams" presented to me when I am the customer, I can hear the echoes of the same customer relations seminar that I had to listen to as an employee. It is for this reason that there is a strong inclination in me, when I am operating a customer, to affect the climate that I must operate in as an employee. As an employee and as a person, I’m a fan of being professional and courteous, but I dislike the practice of what I feel is the act of imposing peppiness on others.
There is also a slightly sinister element that I sense when employer is trying to create an environment that demands grinning smiles and that judges employees on how well they turn on the “high beams” when they greet and smile. At work, I went through a seminar recently where they emphasized projecting happiness and smiles and the practice of asking “how are you doing to today?” type questions to people as they entered and exited. Needless to say, this seminar made me queasy. As a person inclined to melancholy, I am acutely aware that it takes an extra level of emotional organization for me to produce a smile – I must first believe that everything is right with the world. Sometimes I really believe it and I’m able to smile. However, most of the time I can’t put out of my mind all that I see that is wrong with the world. When I feel the pressure to smile against my melancholic inclinations, I’m feel that I am being made to force my thoughts into the “happy worldview” in order to produce the “happy emotions” in order to produce the smile. As this happens, I feel a pressure to ignore/suppress the part of my consciousness that is ruminating on difficult things. That is where my conscience steps in, and will not allow me to have those difficult things shoved out of my mind.
I can understand the therapeutic benefit that suppressing dark thoughts and imposing a “happy worldview” on one’s psyche can have for some people some of the time. In the best sense of this idea, having a “happy worldview” is the practice of putting a positive spin on things and looking at the bright side. While this can be a good practice, it would violate me to have to do it apart from the rhythm of dealing with the melancholy side of life. Maybe this sounds a tad strong, but as a melancholy person who needs to ruminate on difficult things, I feel that being made to smile against the inclinations of my conscience is like being subjected to a form of brainwashing. I feel that I am being forced to organize my emotions into the “happy worldview” at the threat of losing my livelihood.
So as a consumer buying groceries at the check out line, my act of not replying “I’m fine thanks, how are you?” is my attempt to using my power – albeit in a very small way -- as a consumer to thwart a system that is built on a one-size-fits-all view of politeness, which is based on a view of happiness that I am at odds with. I feel that I if I can help establish different expectations of management in favor of melancholy while I am a consumer, I can affect the expectations of management in favor of melancholy as an employee. Perhaps the checkout lady thinks that I am being a curmudgeon and that I’m being militant in my melancholy. I’m not trying to be rude to her, rather I’m trying to make a statement against a system that is pressuring her to behave in a certain way to conform to a certain idea that is in vogue in the frantic effort to attract customers. Perhaps she doesn’t feel this instruction from management as “pressure” because she doesn’t have a melancholic personality, but I do.
I can understand the point that enforcing a code of over-achieving peppiness among employees is a way to prevent employees from being overly rude and obnoxious (as in karate, one must aim beyond the brick to break the brick). I can also understand the argument that the majority of the culture is not melancholy and enjoys being asked “how are you doing today” by strangers. I can also understand the point that asking an un-melancholy person to be aware of when they are in the presence of a melancholy person and “tone down” the peppiness is often asking too much. However, I react to over-achieving peppiness because underneath it is the whiff of economics-induced conformity, and I don’t want the marketplace to make conformist demands on my emotions. I want to at least try to influence the management trend of promoting over-achieving peppiness in customer service towards something that is a little more subdued and that more openly recognizes diversity in personalities.
As for my job, I do an impeccable job in every other way so that I can get away with out having to gush and smile all the time. For me, I must convert the pressure that exists in my workplace to not be overly melancholy into an impetus to aggressively think and process my thoughts and observations so that they do not continue to weigh on me. For me, being able to organize what I am feeling and observing is the path to emotional freedom—it is the “half of the sine wave” of joy that comes out of embracing the melancholy in a disciplined way. As I’m able to do this, I am able to find the joy that is necessary to project an air of quiet confidence as an alternative to a grinning smile.
While I recognize that a certain amount of this pressure is unavoidable at work, it is this pressure that my introverted, melancholic self needs to be free from on my day off while at the grocery store. So to the checkout lady out there who asks “How are you doing today?” you will understand where I come from when I don’t respond.
