NEH Summer Institute on Transcendentalism

How I'll be spending part of my summer.

Secular Liturgy

Last night I attended the Maundy Thursday service at our church.  I admit I'm not a fan of sitting still, of pews in general, or of listening to sermons.  I also haven't got any great love for singing with a small congregation that doesn't really like to sing.

But I've found I need liturgy in my life.  Liturgies help me mark seasons.  More than that, liturgies create seasons.  That's what I really need, because the creation of seasons becomes, for me, a discipline of memory. 

Liturgies help me to count my days, which in turn helps me to make my days count.

I used to chafe at the remembrance of birthdays.  Why should one day count more than any other?  And why should one day seem more a holiday than another?

I'm slowly getting it.  There is nothing special about the day; what is special is the use of the day.  Cheerless debunkers never tire of pointing out to me that western Christmas is celebrated on a Roman holiday, that Easter is *really* some kind of fertility rite because it's celebrated in the springtime, that all my holidays don't mean what I think they mean because someone once celebrated them in another way.  As though the genealogy of the holiday should be its only meaning, as though the celebrations of the past should have magical power over me, as though I had no power to make the days mean something new to me.

And it is true: holidays and liturgies do have power.  As I have said before, what we cherish in our hearts we worship, and what we worship we come to resemble or imitate.  Holidays are always about remembering, and remembering is cherishing.  Of course, we don't all cherish the same things.  Memorial Day is, for some, a remembrance of valor and sacrifice.  For others, it is a good day for a picnic with family.  Both are forms of cherishing, though the thing cherished is quite different.

Much of the difference probably comes from mindfulness and intention, or lack of intention.  Everyone cherishes something, but not all of us think about what we cherish.  Liturgies help me to cherish mindfully.

Which is why every April 4th I read or listen to Dr. King's "I Have A Dream" speech, and weep at his loss.  And why every July 4th I read the Declaration of Independence.  I have set aside days in my year, every year, to read texts like these, texts that have shaped my community. Because these texts aren't done with their shaping.  Texts don't hit us once and do all their work; texts seep into us, their words become our words.

Reading and re-reading and reading aloud in communities - these things are like the pouring of water through leaves or grounds - the reading percolates through the words and picks up the essential oils, the savor, the color and taste of the text, and delivers it to us like tea or hot coffee. We taste the words and then the words enter our guts, our veins, our souls.

I recently read an interview with a woman who said "I don't need to go to church to believe those things," referring to her church's beliefs.  True.  Just as I don't need to go to the gym to get exercise, or to believe that exercise is good for me.  But if I don't make a habit of getting exercise, I find I tend not to get what my body needs.  The urgent matters in life so easily overwhelm the important ones.  Often, when I return from the gym, my wife asks me "How was the gym?"  I always think, "It was hard. Everything I do at the gym is difficult."  But it is worth doing, because it helps me to maintain my health, and to fight my own decline, to fight the slow slipping away of what I want to hold onto as long as I can.  If I do this for my body, why should I not also do it for my heart and mind?

The words percolate through us, and enter our veins.

I'm not writing this to endorse all liturgies.  I'm confident that there are liturgies that celebrate awful things, and that there are participants in liturgies who make poor use of the liturgies they sit through.  As with most of what I write here, I'm trying to sort out what I believe, and why -- as another kind of discipline, one of remembering, and of being mindful of what I believe.

The liturgy of Maundy Thursday is not an easy one, because it reminds me of two things I am capable of: I am capable, like Jesus, of washing others' feet, and of living a life of love; and I am capable, like Jesus' friends, of betraying those people and ideals I most claim to cherish and worship.  If my worship is only worship in words, I find it easy to forget to worship what is best with my body, with my life.  Liturgies - and we all have liturgies - are the ways I remind my whole person to stop and remember what my words claim so easily to believe. 

My Dad Is So Cool

Between 1959 and 1962 my dad worked for NASA.  He was an engineer at IBM, who contracted him out to work on our fledgling space program.  How cool is that?  My dad helped design equipment in the Mercury Control Center at Cape Canaveral.  He wasn't an astronaut; he made astronauts possible.

Aristotle knew it: part of human excellence is pursuing knowledge of the world around us - of the cosmos we inhabit.  My father isn't a formally trained philosopher, but he was one of the first people to teach me philosophy.  Often, on Wednesdays after work, he'd take me out for pizza and cover napkins with chemical formulas, bits of logic, linguistic information he'd learned from reading Chomsky or from studying Russian and French, the history of circuit design, lessons in physics.  And I ate it up as readily as I ate up the pizza.  He was - and still is, thanks be to God - a man full of wisdom, and that wisdom is evinced by his desire to know more about the world around him.

If that doesn't convince you that my dad is one of the world's coolest dads, consider this: after pizza, he'd always take me to the local arcade and give me half a roll of quarters so I could play video games.  The other half of the roll of quarters?  He used it to play alongside me. 

Thanks, Dad. 

Is Philosophy Useful?

What can you do with a philosophy major?  William James quipped that philosophy "bakes no bread."  That is, it is not a discipline one studies in order to learn how to practice a particular craft or trade.  Philosophy tries to think about and understand everything, which makes it a discipline that does the opposite of specialization.
 

What does it mean to be human?

This leads some people to assume that philosophy is useless.  But that is only partly--and largely irrelevantly--true.   As Rémi Brague has said, the study of the history of philosophy is freedom.  As he puts it, "Dodging history makes us fall prey to doxa."  To put it in other terms, if we don't study the history of philosophy, we forget who we are, and believe what we believe without reasons.  To be human is to ask who we are; and asking who we are is philosophical.

Let me put this in simpler terms: if you don't ask philosophical questions - and seek their answers - someone else will do it for you.  Here's the thing: asking those questions and seeking those answers might be the thing that makes us most human, and most free.

So the answer to my initial question is another question: without philosophy, how will you remain free?

The Pastoral And The Personal In Theodicy

Theodicies, like some virtue ethics and certain ontological arguments, are easy targets for refutation, but much depends on the way they are used.

A theodicy is an attempt to reconcile the apparent evil in the world with the alleged goodness of God, often by showing that the very goodness of God makes some evil necessary; or by arguing that the goodness of God is amplified by a certain amount of evil.  In other words, the evil we experience and witness is, in the end, made to serve goodness.

Roman tombs in southern Crete.

When theodicies are spoken publicly and authoritatively, there is a real danger that they will be used to justify further evil.  If evil serves good, and evil is easier to accomplish directly than goodness, why not practice evil?

There's also the very real danger that theodicies will isolate us from one another.  Sometimes some perversity in us makes us inclined to tell someone who is experiencing fresh grief that "it's all for the good," or "it will all work out well in the end," or "your loved one is now in a better place." I would guess we do this because we do not know what else to say, and because we want the discomfort of grief banished from our presence.  In which case we speak those words like an incantation, using magic to make the unpleasantness disappear.  But the grief is not detachable from the griever, so to will the banishment of the mourning is to will the death of the mourner.  In simpler terms, when we invoke thoughtless theodicies, sometimes we are committing human sacrifice - throwing out the mourner - in order to comfort ourselves.

In spite of this, I think there is still a place for theodicies - just as there is a place for ontological arguments - provided they originate with the believer and are not forced upon her.  The mourner who chooses to believe that the dearly departed have gone to well-earned rest may believe that.  That belief may be the germination of the seeds of honor and love, or the expression of grief combined with commitment to the flourishing of the memory of the beloved - it may be the fruit of the idea that the cosmos has no right to bring this love to an end.  You may destroy the body, but the soul you shall not take from me.

My great aunt and great uncle.  Here lie their bodies.  

Of course, the mourner's grief should not turn into fixed doctrine for the rest of us, either.  Some things we simply don't know.  Death is a horizon we pass only once, a boundary that few - if any - signs are allowed to pass over.  But precisely because we do not know what comes after - because we do not even know ourselves much of the time - we may allow others what they need to endure their losses, neither forcing our justifications of evil upon them, nor denying them the explanations that may give them the comfort their hearts need.

A Gift Of A Sponge

My father bundled us into our hats and coats and then into his little red VW and drove us to the Caldor store in Kingston.  The first Christmas I can now remember was fast approaching, and he wanted my brother, my sister and me to choose gifts for our mother.

I had no idea how to shop, of course, so my father asked me to think about what my mother liked.  The only thing I could think was that I often saw her cleaning things: washing dishes, cleaning floors and windows, doing laundry.  Obviously, she must like cleaning quite a lot.

So I decided to buy her a sponge.

My father balked at this, but I insisted.  This is what she likes, this is what I want to buy.

Two events that followed have imprinted themselves forever on my memory, have made me forever grateful to my parents.

Dad and Mom were young once, too.

First, Dad let me buy it.  It's not at all what he would have chosen.  But he gave me the gift of letting me decide, the gift of the long, slow welcome into responsible adulthood.

Second, mom loved it.  Let me clarify that: she loved the gift, and she thanked me warmly and genuinely, smilingly.  And so she gave me a gift as well, the gift of teaching me how to receive the offerings of others with grace; the gift of her love that consecrated my poor offering.

Both of them gave me another gift as well, of course: I had no money to buy the sponge, so I used theirs.  I took their money and spent it on what they did not need, on a gift that, coming from another person or from me at a different age, would have been offensive.  They gave me the gift of ennobling my shabby token into a gift of great worth.


No year of my life has passed in which I have not thought of that kitchen sponge.  It reminds me that no act of kindness towards a child is wasted.  It reminds me of my parents' love for me, love that I fumblingly attempt to pass on to my children as I seek to give them the difficult gift of autonomy.

A gift from my students; it means more to me than words can easily say.

And my parents, in that Christmas, gave me hope that the poor offerings of my worship - in which I spend what is not really mine in order to give a gift that is not really needed - might really matter, not because they are intrinsically great, but because of the love and grace with which they might be received, and consecrated.

Love One Another: Prisons and Devotion to Enemies

In his first book, Stride Toward Freedom, Dr. King wrote "We adopt the means of nonviolence because our end is a community at peace with itself."  Paraphrasing Gandhi, he added a word  for those who considered themselves his enemies, "In winning our freedom we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process."

This is a radical idea, one that is like the ideas of Jesus and St Paul that we should love our enemies.  If your mind does not stumble over those words, you might be a saint; or you might not be listening to them.

King's argument is that we need our enemies.  They need us to make them into the kind of people who embody love, not hatred.  And we need - in the depths of our souls - the work of loving them in such a way that we win them over to the side of love and away from the crippling hatred that owns them.

It is easy to say "that's fine for church," or "I will love my enemy in my heart but in my life I will punish him."  But what would happen if we thought of our worst enemies - I have in mind criminals and terrorists, the people we most seem to fear - as people with a "heart and conscience" that could be won.  As people without whom we are incomplete.

We're good at finding ways to make people pay for their wrongdoing.  We have great technology for warfare, and a brilliant system of criminal investigation and prosecution, perhaps the best history has ever seen.  I don't propose eliminating those things.  Instead, I am asking this: what if we decided that we would put the same creative energy and financial resources that have gone into creating our fine military, police, and courts into winning the consciences of our enemies?

When it comes to our anti-terror policies, I don't see what we can do to win terrorists' consciences, other than living our lives in such a way that anyone who supports our would-be enemies must feel shame at hating such virtuous people. That sounds to me like an end worth pursuing for its own sake, after all.

As for our prisons, our prisons seem to be good at exposing non-criminals to criminals; and to exposing criminals to more criminals, breeding gang culture.  Violent criminals surely merit our censure, extraction from society, and punishment.  But that doesn't mean our hearts need to be full of a desire for vengeance.

"Peace."  Over the head of the angel of peace in Bruton Parish, Williamsburg, VA. 

I'm not good at this, but I'm trying to become the kind of person who regards criminals as people I need, who need me to love them, who need me to win their consciences.

I believe a society needs to be prepared to use force against those who would forcefully harm others.  But increasingly I am coming to believe that individuals in each society also need to be prepared to fight fire not with fire but with the healing waters of love, waters that overflow from hearts that daily struggle to regard the people we most hate and fear as the people we also most need to love.  It's not easy.  But it may be the only way to become "a community at peace with itself."

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I have written two other posts about prisons, and Charles Peirce's reasons why our current system is a mark of insanity--or at least that it evinces a serious lack of love--here and here.

Do Birds Need Ornithologists?

Cooper's hawk in my backyard.

A number of times in the last few years I've read statements by prominent scientists about the irrelevance of philosophy, echoing Richard Feynman's famous quip that "Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds."

Feynman was just talking about philosophers of science, which is just one narrow slice of the philosophic pie.  More recently others, like Freeman Dyson, have made broader indictments of philosophy, or like Lawrence Krauss, of the humanities generally.

Dyson, in an article he wrote for the New York Review of Books, described today's philosophers as "a sorry bunch of dwarfs. They are thinking deep thoughts and giving scholarly lectures to academic audiences, but hardly anybody in the world outside is listening. They are historically insignificant."  Yes, we have a technical vocabulary that outsiders often have trouble understanding.  But that's true of every discipline.  And yes, we don't seem to have anyone in our discipline who is writing the next Job or Republic right now, but that's been true almost always.  No discipline consistently produces nothing but geniuses.  Many of us in every discipline live our careers out bearing the gifts of the past forward to another generation so that they might benefit from them and add to them. And many of us are content to be forgotten as long as the books of wisdom entrusted to us are remembered.

Female ruby-throated hummingbird.

In his recent book A Universe From Nothing, Krauss seems to be at pains to point out that without the sciences, the humanities are virtually useless, and that even with the sciences, the humanities are still virtually useless.  His introduction pushes the humanities back at arm's length and invites them to clear out while science handles all the real heavy lifting.

What stands out for me as I read these scientists and some others writing in a similar vein is that they write like they're on the defensive and feeling embattled.  My guess is that they see themselves or their disciplines as being engaged in an important fight about cultural values, science education, and research funding.  The outsized reaction to Thomas Nagel's recent Mind and Cosmos - with its inflammatory subtitle, "Why The Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False" - suggests that many advocates of the sciences worry about any book that might give comfort to the enemy.

Mourning dove eggs in one of my flower pots.

A siege mentality can make us distrustful of everyone, and especially of our critics, no matter how friendly.  Dyson, Krauss, and others inclined to sideline the humanities would do well to remember that the humanities give them the tools with which to reason and write about the discoveries of science.  If those of us in the humanities seem critical of the sciences, this doesn't mean we're unfriendly. The funny thing about Feynman's dictum is that as long as birds and people try to live together, birds actually do benefit from ornithologists.  After all, ornithologists study the birds and their environments, and work to ensure that others see how important it is to preserve them.  Of course, the birds in their daily lives will likely never know it.

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I should add that philosophers like me benefit from ornithologists, too.  I am especially grateful for the ornithologists at Cornell University for putting so much helpful information on their website for bird-watchers and ornithophiles like me.  

The bird I have identified as a Cooper's hawk might be a sharp-shinned hawk; I often have trouble distinguishing them.  We live on the migration path for ruby-throated hummingbirds, so we see them for two brief seasons, once in the spring and again in the fall.  Mourning doves are notoriously poor parents, and we often find they've laid eggs in silly places.  Fortunately for their species, they can produce multiple clutches each year.

If you're interested in both birds and philosophy, let me recommend Charles Hartshorne's book Why Birds Sing. Hartshorne suggests that maybe birds sing because they enjoy it.  This may seem so obvious as to be silly, but it is a helpful addition to the usual claims that birds sing because singing is useful for mating, staking territorial claims, self-defense, and so on.  Hartshorne doesn't allow us to reduce birds to bird-making machines.  Which is helpful, because it's a reminder that we, too, are more than human-making machines.  It's also good to be reminded that it's okay to sing for the sheer enjoyment of singing.