Tag Archives: Noah

Solipsistic Oneness

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This essay first appeared on Splice Today.
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One of my favorite recordings is the Hilliard Ensemble’s CD of Perotin’s vocal music. Perotin was a 13th century composer; he’s perhaps the most important pioneer of polyphonic music. In contrast to earlier Gregorian chant, which followed a single melody line, Perotin’s compositions weave, and elongate — time stretches as syllables are pulled out and the voices detach, rising up and rushing down, harmonies wrapping into supple crystal knots. The comparison with cathedrals and their flying buttresses is inescapable; monumental structures which seem to lift miraculously up to heaven. God is as dense as stone and as light as air; His creation is so solid it flies.

Juliana Barwick clearly is a fan as well — or, at least, I’d be surprised if she hadn’t listened to a good bit of medieval choral music at some point. Like plainchant, her songs are obsessively focused on the voice, albeit multi-tracked and abetted with keyboard plinking in her case. The tracks on her latest release, The Magic Place, all slide into each other in a long, slow dream of echoey inhalation and exhalation. As with Perotin, the melodies rise and crest, pushing upwards off the earth towards an explicit transcendence.

The exact nature of that transcendence, though, is a little tricky. I was once discussing the K Records sensation Mirah with a good friend, and he observed acidly that her songs always begin with the sound of the singer taking a breath.

It hurts because it’s true; for Mirah, as for Barwick, the breath, the sound of the voice singing or not, is fetishized. The music attempts to dissolve the body or self in a New Age pantheistic rapture of oneness. But it doesn’t reach outside the self; rather it pumps the self up in an excess of steroidal tweeness. You can hear this in Barwick’s “White Flag,” which, with its repetitions and polyphony, can sound almost like a Perotin number. The difference, here, though, is that the main dynamic tension of the track is provided not by the composition, but by variation in volume. As in the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” different elements are added and looped as the song unfolds; Barwick starts at a whisper and hits an almost painful loudness by the midway mark. Then things disperse again, fading out towards the end. The human voice, technologically multi-tracked, fills the world and then breaks down into nothing. In contrast, the end of “Viderune Omnes” ends as solidly as it began; it does shift to monophony for the last bar or two, but the feeling is of an anticipated and gentle rest, not of dissolution.

In Perelandra, C.S. Lewis comments at one point that what “Pantheists falsely hoped of Heaven bad men really received in Hell.” For Lewis, dissolving isn’t a rapture, but a nightmare; a kind of final, self-immolating triumph of the ego, which in its longing to be everything swallows the world, blotting out the difference between it and other and so turning itself into naught.

There’s a way in which listening to Barwick, then, is less like listening to Perotin, and more like listening to, say, Darkthrone or Emperor. In black metal’s raspy shrieks, there’s a similar emphasis on voice stripped of personality, the celebration of generic life rather than of a particular human. Black metal is also, fairly explicitly, the flip side of Barwick’s gentle paganism — the universe tearing you to pieces and devouring you rather than gently unfolding to dissolve you. Either way, though, the point is a self that vanishes, whether into a chorus or a hail of knives.

Perotin’s apotheosis is different. God in polyphony doesn’t blot out personality; he uses it. At the beginning of “Sederunt Principes” some of the intervals are close to microtones, creating shimmering, rapturous echoes. Yet each voice is still distinct. Individuals are still individuals. It’s just that, in the structure of their communal effort, there’s something else — an additional spirit. In comparison with that mysterious presence, Barwick’s Magic Place seems mundane, no matter how much of herself she puts in it.

Die Hard, the Last Man

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Die Hard (1988) presents itself as a movie sympathetic to feminism. The protagonist, John McClane (Bruce Willis), is estranged from his wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia) essentially because she moved to Los Angeles to take a high-powered corporate job. John, a New York cop, can’t handle her success. The film takes care to show that John’s attitude is ridiculous and stupid — John’s limo driver from the airport calls him on it; Holly handily wins their big onscreen argument which John assholishly starts; and even John himself admits that he’s in the wrong (“very mature, John,” he mutters out loud to himself after Holly stomps out the door.) Throughout the film, Holly is shown to be a competent and successful manager, and it is never suggested that she should, or will, give up her career for her husband.

Moreover, Die Hard goes out of its way to ridicule and reject machismo. During the terrorist/hostage standoff that takes up most of the film, the cops and FBI continually act like impulsive dicks — much the way, in fact, we first see John acting in his argument with Holly. The cops and feds all are much more interested in being, as John terms them, “macho assholes” — swaggering around at the top of the pecking order, impressing their male compadres, and kicking terrorist butt. The parodically homosocial FBI agents Agent Johnson and Agent Johnson let out adolescent yawps as they fly around in their helicopter, boasting to each other how they can “live with” 25% hostage casualties. Their cockiness is presented as both idiocy and sin, and the film gleefully executes them for it. McClane survives precisely because he’s more cautious and more intelligent; a feminized action-hero who constantly exhorts himself to “think! think!” before unleashing the inevitable uber-violence.

But despite the critique of traditional action-hero masculinity, Die Hard is in the end extremely ambivalent about the idea of autonomous women. Holly wins the argument with John — but the result of that victory is not that John acquiesces. Instead, the result is that Holly and all her coworkers are immediately captured and held hostage, allowing John to cast aside the role of idiotic, defeated husband, and adopt the much more congenial and testosterone-fueled persona of heroic savior.

Coincidentally, as the plot unfolds, all those against whom John might be presumed to harbor a grudge are systematically and efficiently punished. Holly’s coworkers, of course, are all terrorized. More particularly, Holly’s Japanese boss Mr. Takagi — a fatherly executive whose warmth, manners, and calm all contrast painfully with McClane’s bad temper and working-class manners — is shot through the head by the terrorists. Later, a slick coke-snorting dealmaker who had earlier hit on Holly is similarly dispatched. The terrorists are then, not so much John’s enemies as they are his avatars — the catspaws which eliminate the other men in Holly’s life so that McClane can sweep her off to renewed bliss at the end of the film.

In the way that its feminist trappings concealing male apocalyptic fantasies, Die Hard reminded me strongly of Brian K. Vaughn and Pia Guerra’s “Y: The Last Man.” In that series, too, a relationship crisis (in this case Yorick’s breakup with his girlfriend) is interrupted by unexpected violence which eliminates potential rivals (in this case a sudden disease which kills *all* rivals, as all men on earth but Yorick keel over.) And, like Die Hard, “Y: The Last Man” presents itself as feminist while actually treating the egalitarian relationships, with the concomitant possibility of rejection, as an occasion for anxious and protracted male posturing of a very familiar kind.

I go back and forth on whether I prefer Die Hard or Y. On the one hand, Y is clearly a lot smarter about gender politics; on the other hand, I find the straightforward male violence of Die Hard a good bit less off-putting than the SNAG self-pity that permeates Y, especially at the end. In either case, though, I think the parallels between them are pretty telling. Men, it seems, in different mediums and over several decades, have a tendency to turn feminism into a male growth experience. With guns. Or, in other words, don’t trust the patriarchs, even when they say they love you.

Utilitarian Review 8/27/11

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On HU

Featured Archive Post: Sean Michael Robinson on Choose Your Own Adventure books.

I discuss Rienhold Neibuhr and the egotism of pragmatism.

Erica Friedman on why she loves anime and manga, and the relation of both to Japanese culture.

I talk about the Hernandez Bros, Kirby, Barefoot Gen, and other disappointments in summer reading. A long rambling but entertaining comments thread ensues.

Marguerite Van Cook on Kirby, Lee, class, text, and credit.

I argue that schools should not be prisons.

Qiana Whitted on Blues Comics.

Interviews with J.R. Brown, Lillian Diaz-Przybyl, and Shaenon Garrity on the effect of Borders closing on manga.

Vom Marlowe on Monet and gardening.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice Today I talk about Sly Stone’s disappointing new album.

Also at Splice, I review the mediocre Troll Hunter.

Other Links

Dan Nadel smacks down Grant Morrison.

Jog on his selections for the best comics poll.

And Boing Boing linked our best comics poll. People in comments hate Peanuts. Who knew such sacrilege was possible?

No Place for Children

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An edited version of this article appeared in the Chicago Reader.
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Prisons are not the ideal venues for education. Therefore, it is not a great idea to turn schools into prisons. As a corollary, treating children as if they were hardened criminals does not imbue them with the joy of learning. If you brutalize students and treat them with contempt, they will not buckle down to their work with renewed vigor and enthusiasm. On the contrary, they will start to react to school the same way that prisoners react to prison. Which is to say, they will want to get. out.

In short, schools should not be prisons. Surely that shouldn’t be controversial. And yet, controversial it is, as Annette Fuentes documents in her dismally depressing book, Lockdown High: When the School House Becomes a Jail House. Since the 1980s, and especially since the Columbine shootings in 1999, the U.S. has experienced a rolling moral panic, sparking increasingly draconian security measures in schools across the country.

Fuentes’ prose is fairly flat, and structurally her book is investigative journalism boilerplate — description of outrageous exemplary incident, generalized problem illuminated by incident, report from convention devoted to evil-doers who profit from generalized problem, highlighting of inspirational activists promulgating inspirational solutions. But the very banality of the form adds to the despair. Metal detectors, random drug testing, SWAT teams busting kids’ heads, zero tolerance, suspensions, racism…it all tromps by in a numbing parade of idiocy and futility. Violent homicides in school are vanishingly rare; study after study shows that kids are less likely to be harmed in school than at home; study after study shows that violence in schools has been falling since the early ‘90s; study after study shows that heightened security measures do little if anything to reduce violence or drug use. And yet, the militarization of schools goes on, oblivious to argument or logic. If you didn’t know better, after reading this book you might come to the conclusion that, as a society, we are looking for an excuse to torture our children.

Indeed, Fuentes provides a certain amount of evidence that schooling has always been about torture. Her first chapter, titled “A Brief History of School Violence,” begins, not with school shootings, but with a discussion of corporal punishment. As she notes:

“as long as there have been public schools…there has been chaose and control, crime and punishment in the classroom…. The rhythm of switch and ferule — even the cat-o’-nine-tails — provided the meter by which the early schoolmaster or –mistress imparted the three Rs and obedience to misbehaving youngsters.” (page 1)

Fuentes adds that such violence involved not only teacher’s beating students, but often students fighting back; older boys tossing the teacher out of the classroom was almost a ritualized right of passage. Thus, from the first, schools in America trafficked in, and taught, violence.

This violence, according to Fuentes, was often entangled with class and racial animosities. She points out that the first compulsory schooling laws in 1852 were aimed at dumping the children of Boston Irish immigrants into reform schools — the connection between prison and school written into law from the very beginning. And of course, in the 60s and later, “school violence” was most often associated with racial tensions around desegregation. Fuentes doesn’t even mention one of the most shocking incidents, the Kanawha County textbook wars of 1974, in which the adoption of controversial reading materials led irate rural West Virginians to bomb school buildings and shoot at school buses.

Fuentes’ aim in highlighting this history is, I think, to show that violence is not in fact on the rise in schools. Kids aren’t worse than they used to be; school aren’t more dangerous than they used to be. The increasingly hysterical approach to security in schools is, therefore, not a response to a real problem, but rather a self-reinforcing exercise in ideological hysteria.

Fuentes hopes that parent activism can help end that hysteria, which in turn will mean an end to the lockdown high phenomena. She points hopefully to examples like Chicago Public School’s decision in 2006 to move away from zero tolerance policies. Chicago, she notes, is “modeling positive change.”

It seems like I’m always hearing that Chicago schools are at the forefront of something or other. As a Chicago father, I suppose this should make me happy. And yet, somehow, my warm fuzzy feeling is limited. And not just because of the incident Fuentes relates about the five-year-old being taken out of a CPS school in handcuffs.

The problem is, the history of discipline and violence which Fuentes discusses does not give me a lot of hope. On the contrary, it leads me to suspect that the lockdown high phenomena is a not an aberration, but a logical extension of longtime public school philosophy. School has always been a prison, though it is, as George Bernard Shaw says, “in some respects more cruel than a prison….. In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don’t understand and don’t care about….” Nor, to update Shaw slightly, are prisoners subjected to unending, compulsive, mindless testing. Fuentes presents evidence that schools are relatively safe places for student’s bodies, but she doesn’t address the issue of what they do to their souls.

I had initially hoped to send my child to CPS because…well, it’s free, mostly, and within convenient walking distance. What dissuaded me was not the story about the five-year-old in handcuffs (which I hadn’t heard) but two other factors. First, most Chicago public schools don’t have recess. Second, when I went online to read about Murray Language Academy, the school my son was thinking of entering, the first thing I saw on the website was that all students (presumably meaning kindergartners too) would have homework every night. This was presented as being a good thing.

I’m not sure that even Fuentes would consider a lack of recess or ubiquitous homework to be aspects of the lockdown high phenomena. But to me it all seems to be of a piece. If you were kind, you could say that public schools have always struggled to balance the desire to control kids with the desire to teach them. If you were more cynical, you might say that the balancing has never been all that difficult, because the desire to teach has always been easy to stifle.

So my seven-year-old does not go to CPS. Instead he goes to a Waldorf private school where they have no metal detectors, no hand-cuffs, no homework, and two recesses a day. I’m lucky to be in a financial position to send him there; obviously, for many people, public schools are the only option. For their sake, we as a society have, as Fuentes indicates, a moral obligation to roll back the worst excesses of lockdown high. Even if we manage to do that, though, our public schools in general, and Chicago schools in particular, will still be no place for children.

Hiroshima Tit Nepotism Summer Reading

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I spent last week at my brother’s. While my son frolicked with his cousins, I raided my sibling’s library. So here’s a series of brief reviews:

Barefoot Gen, Volume 1 by Keiji Nakazawa A story of world-historical import and great human tragedy is always improved by warmed-over melodrama, poignant irony, and random fisticuffs. Stirring speeches about the horrors of war are feelingly juxtaposed with scenes of anti-militarist dad beating the tar out of his air-force-volunteer son. On the plus side, though, drill-sergeant brutality set pieces are apparently the same the world over. Also, to give him his due, Keiji Nakazawa stops having his characters beat each other up for no reason every third panel once the bomb drops. Tens of thousands of civilians running about shrieking as their flesh melts is enough violence for even the most impassioned pacifist adventure-serialist. It’s okay to have Gen rescue the evil pro-war neighbors from their collapsed house and to have the evil pro-war neighbors refuse to help dig out Gen’s family and to have the sainted Korean neighbor help carry Gen’s mom to safety as long as you don’t have Gen and the Korean pummel the evil pro-war neighbors with a series of flying kicks as the city burns. It’s all about restraint.

High Soft Lisp by Gilbert Hernandez
Hernandez tells us several times over the course of this searingly human graphic novel that his protagonist, Fritz, has a genius level IQ. And how would we know if he didn’t tell us? Also, she was probably sexually-abused as a child, and therefore the fact that she fucks anything that isn’t nailed down is a sign of her profound psychological thingy, and not a sign that Hernandez likes to draw balloon-titted doodles fucking everything that isn’t nailed down. In this, of course, the comic is profoundly different from past works like Human Diastrophism, in which there were big tits and gratuitous fucking, but interspersed with paeans to the human interconnection of all of us who are bound together by empathy and profound meaningfulness and also by a love of big tits and gratuitous fucking.

Whoa Nellie! by Jaime Hernandez If you adore female Mexican wrestling and girls’ fiction about the ups and downs of friendship — then I still can’t really see why you’d want to read this.

But, you know, it’s “fun” and “enthusiastic”. “Buy it now.”

Ghost of Hoppers by Jaime Hernandez Alternachicks drift through their alterna-lives with quirky poignance and poignant quirkiness. Plus, bisexuality.

To be fair, to really understand the subtle characterizations here, you need to take the entire Hopey/Maggie saga and inject it into your eyelids weekdays 8:30 to 5:30 and weekends 12-6. Only when you’re blind and destitute and wretching blood in the sewer with the ineradicable taste of staples glutting your tonsils will you truly understand the blinding genius of layered nostalgia.

Cool It by Bjorn Lomborg Better than the movie Lomborg argues convincingly that it would be better to cure malaria and HIV than to wreck our economies by failing to reduce greenhouse emissions. Which largely confirms my suspicion that global warming is less a real policy priority than it is an apocalyptic fad — a rapture for Prius-owners.

Marvel Masterworks: Jack Kirby There’s been a lot of debate in comments here as to whose prose is more tolerable, Stan Lee’s or Jack Kirby’s. After trying and failing to read the Marvel Masterworks volume, I think I have to say, who gives a shit? Lee’s hyperbolic melodrama is slicker and Kirby’s more thudding, but the truth is that if you put the two of them together in a room with an infinite number of monkeys and a typewriter and gave them all of eternity you’d end up with a pile of monkey droppings and a lot of subliterate drivel. The ideal Jack Kirby would be a collection of his illustrations of giant machines and ridiculous monsters and weird patterned backgrounds with all the dialogue balloons excised. Short of that, you look at the pretty pictures and you try your best to skip the text.

Captain Britain by Alan Moore and Alan Davis It’s hard to believe anyone was willing to publish such an obvious Grant Morrison rip off, but I guess comics are shameless like that. It’s all here with numbing inevitability — the multiple iterations of our hero (Captain U.K. of earth 360b, Captain Albion of earth 132, etc. etc.), the goofily foppish reality altering villain, the cyberpunky organic/computer monster. Throw in a standard kill-all-the-superheroes plot and a bunch of high-concept powers (abstract bodies! summoning selves from further up the timeline!), add some borderline-satire of the square-jawed protagonist and you’ve got everything Morrison’s written for the last two decades. To be fair, though, Moore and Davis seem to be on top of their derivative hackitude, and as a result there’s none of the pomposity that can infect their prototype. Captain Britain doesn’t die for our sins and he isn’t an invincible icon; he’s just some dude in spandex swooping through the borrowed plot with equal parts bewilderment and bluster. Sometimes imitation works better than the real thing; maybe Morrison should try ripping off these guys next time.

The Defense by Vladimir Nabokov Nabokov’s characters sometimes seem more like chess pieces than like people; Nabokov pushes them here and pushes them there about the page, forming patterns for his own amusement. There’s no doubt that it is amusing, though, and while I don’t pretend to understand all the ins and outs of the game, I enjoyed watching the patterns expand and dilate, moving in black and white through their silent hermetic dance. There’s one passage, which I wanted to copy out but now can’t find again, in which our protagonist, the corpulent, hazy chess master Luzhin, types a string of random phrases at the typewriter and then mails them to a random address from the phonebook. If any book makes me laugh that hard even once, I consider myself well-recompensed for my time.

The Real the True and the Told by Eric Berlatsky Eric printed an excerpt of his book on HU here, but I hadn’t gotten a chance to read the whole thing till now. Despite his daughters’ review (“Why are you reading Daddy’s boring book?”) I really enjoyed it. The basic thesis is that post-modern texts like Graham Swift’s “Waterland” or Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” don’t actually deny the reality of history. That is, history in such works is not just text. Rather, postmodern lit tries to approach the real through non-narrative means. The emphasis on the textuality and artificiality of historical narratives is a way of reaching through those narratives to reality, not a way of denying the existence of reality altogether. Basically, for Eric, post-modern fiction rejects, not reality, but simplistic narrative, suggesting that the first can only be accessed by rejecting or resisting the second.

I think it’s a convincing argument about the goals of post-modern fiction, though I question whether the tactic is as successful as Eric seems (?) to want it to be. There are two problems I see.

First, as Eric’s book kind of demonstrates, the anti-narratives and non-narratives Eric discusses are themselves, at this point, narrative tropes. When Artie in Maus laments the insufficiency of narrative, for example, he’s voicing long-standing clichés intrinsic to accounts of the Holocaust; when Kundera talks about Communists rewriting history, he’s voicing long-standing clichés about totalitarian regimes which go back to Orwell, at least, and probably before him. Self-reflexive, alternative narrative structures are their own genre at this point…they’re well-established narrative traditions in their own right. It’s hard for me to see, therefore, how those narrative traditions really effectively escape their tropeness and encounter the real in a way that’s diametrically opposed to the way that more traditional narratives encounter the real. Which is to say, Eric’s argument seems to be that the Book of Laughter and Forgetting is through its form closer to the real than Pride and Prejudice — and I don’t buy that.

The second problem I have is that the real in many of these books (and in Eric’s discussion) ends up being linked to trauma. The Holocaust and pain and suffering is more “real” than love or marriage. Eric also notes that the quotidian, or unnarrataeable is often figured as the real too…which would mean that the real is either trauma or boredom. I’m as pessimistic as the next Berlatsky I think, but I’m not really sure why bad or neutral is more real than good.

Which brings me to my second second (and last) problem…which is that I think it’s quite difficult to theorize the real without theorizing the real. Or to put it another way, can you talk about the real while bracketing theology? If you’re at a place where the real is either the Holocaust or tedium, it’s hard to see how exactly that’s different in kind from nihilism — and if you’re a nihilist, what are you doing talking about the real in the first place?

Anyway, the book was great fun to argue with, and probably the thing I read on vacation that I most enjoyed. It’s amazon page is here in case you want to raise the fortunes of the extended Berlatsky family.

Christianity for Atheists

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This article first appeared at Splice Today.
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Why Niebuhr Now? asks John Patrick Diggins as the title of his brief, borderline hagiographic discussion of theologian Rienhold Niebuhr’s ethical and political thought. Why does everyone from Barack Obama to John McCain to Andrew Sullivan cite Niebuhr as an influence and an inspiration? Diggins’ answers are more or less what you’d expect—Niebuhr is profound, Niebuhr is thoughtful, Niebuhr’s analysis of power and evil and morality remains relevant.

All of which is no doubt true, but I wonder if Niebuhr’s ongoing popularity doesn’t rest on other sources. I think this passage from Why Niebuhr Now? is more to the point than Diggins quite intended:

Is the ethic of Jesus sufficient for mankind? It is noteworthy that Niebuhr’s own ethical teaching does not rely on it. Indeed, the theologian appeared at times compelled to remind the Savior not to forget that there is sin in the world… Niebuhr further diminishes the love ideal by suggesting in the politest terms that Jesus who died on the cross cannot be expected to offer useful instruction to humankind on how to live.

Niebuhr is a Christian theologian who believes that Christ is insufficiently realistic, and that those who follow Christ need to be taught “lessons about life.” In other words, he’s a Christian theologian who sounds like an atheist. In particular, he sounds like the atheist Nietzsche, who, Diggins says, Niebuhr read and appreciated.

The answer to “Why Niebuhr now?” therefore, could well be that Niebuhr is not all that Christian. In a secular society, a theologian of secularism is likely to be beloved. Certainly, as an atheist myself, Niebuhr’s skepticism of Christianity and tolerance of other viewpoints was one of the things I found most appealing in his writings. For example, in his essay “Can the Church Give a Moral Lead?” Niebuhr argued that Christians have no more access to the truth than anyone else—unless that access is the knowledge that they have no more access. “…the Christian faith gives us no warrant to lift ourselves above the world’s perplexities and to seek or to claim absolute validity for the stand we take,” Niebuhr maintains. Instead, Christianity “encourage[s] us to the charity, which is born of humility and contrition.” He concludes, “If we claim to possess overtly what remains hidden, we turn the mercy of Christ into inhuman fanaticism.” He drives this point home in “The Catholic Heresy,” in which he argues, “Nothing but embarrassment can result from the policy of commending Christ by pointing to the righteousness of the believers and the sins of the ungodly.” Christians are as much in need of repentance as non-Christians. All are steeped in sin.

Diggins argues that a consciousness of sin, and of human imperfectability, is at the heart of Niebuhr’s theology. This is so much the case that, as noted above, Niebuhr suggests that Christ himself did not take sufficient account of sin. Christ commanded human beings in this world to build their lives on love— a noble goal, but, Niebuhr says, not an actual possibility for sinful creatures.

For Niebuhr, sin is not primarily identified with desire, but with pride. Pride leads humans to believe that they know the mind of God and that they can perfect the world and themselves. It is pride that makes liberal reformers, Christian and otherwise, think that science and reason will solve the problems of inequality and prevent the misuse of power. It is pride that leads Christians to believe that they have the key to human happiness and salvation. And, conversely, it is pride that leads atheists to believe that, without religion, the world would be perfected. In what is perhaps Niebuhr’s most famous formulation, it is pride that leads to pacifism.

Pacifists, Niebuhr argues in “Why the Christian Church Is Not Pacifist,” have:

absorbed the Renaissance faith in the goodness of man, have rejected the Christian doctrine of original sin as an outmoded bit of pessimism, have reinterpreted the cross so that it is made to stand for the absurd idea that perfect love is guaranteed a simple victory over the world… This form of pacifism is not only heretical when judged by the standards of the total gospel. It is equally heretical when judged by the facts of human existence.

The last two sentences are quintessential Niebuhr. Christianity for him is not a challenge to “the facts of human existence,” but a profound description of them. It is not a utopian vision, but a chastening of utopian visions. Humans are flawed, but their own false pride tells them they can control destiny and achieve happiness. Christianity is the path to humility, because it knows that power, pride, and sin are humankind’s lot on earth.

Niebuhr’s philosophy is convincing; he’s a thoughtful, profound thinker, and his warnings about utopias, fanaticism, and modernity’s delusions of perfectibility remain relevant and telling. But when I see the eagerness with which he’s embraced by Neocons or Barack Obama, I wonder if his theology is really quite as opposed to pride as Diggins insists. Not to impugn Obama, but anyone who gets his butt behind the desk in the Oval Office is unlikely to be overly afflicted with humility.

In fact, I think that, despite pointing out the mote of pride in his neighbor’s eye, Niebuhr has a beam or two in his own. After all, you’ve got to have a fairly high opinion of yourself to tell God he doesn’t understand sin. Niebuhr saw clearly the pride inherent in optimism and utopian perfectionism. But he was less aware of the pride of pessimism and, indeed, of realism. Understanding the dirty, dark secrets of how the world works, understanding the ubiquity of power and the corruption of your fellow human beings—there’s a rush there, as there always is in being the one-who-knows. Obama can have a tragic sense of the limitations of humanity and of the inevitable imperfect consequences of his actions—and with that sorrowing Shakespearean insight, he can drop bombs on Libya and shake his head sadly at those who critique him for failing to understand the necessary compromises of power. Is that really less egotistical than George Bush exclaiming “Hyuk! Axis of Evil!” and sending the planes into Afghanistan? And, if we’re going to talk about pragmatic realism, what practical difference does it make exactly to the folks on the ground that they’re being bombed by a chastened realist rather than by a vaunting idiot?

Everybody complains about the religious right, but the real religion in America today, the faith of our rulers, is not in Christianity or utopia. It’s a faith in reality and pragmatism. If we only look at the world clearly, these rulers tell us, without rose-colored glasses or unnecessary ideological baggage, we can manipulate results in a bipartisan fashion approved by experts and arrive at solutions that, while not ideal, are the best that can be hoped for. Faith, hope and love allow us to better appreciate and tolerate the painful necessities of our pragmatic decisions. They certainly don’t challenge us to question those necessities. There are no miracles, which is another way of saying that we know how the world works.

Jesus died on the cross to tell us to carefully weigh power relationships and choose the least bad option. That’s a moderate, non-utopian message that technocrats can get behind. Which perhaps explains “Why Niebuhr now,” and why Niebuhr later, and why Niebuhr as long as serious people want to tell themselves they are behaving seriously when they exercise power, tragically or otherwise.

Utilitarian Review 8/19/11

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On HU

This week we finished up the Best Comics Poll with Robert’s concluding essay and the rest of the participant lists.

With the poll roll out finally completed, this seems like a good moment to thank Robert Stanley Martin. Robert put in an obscene amount of work organizing the polls, the essays, and the lists. It’s been an enormous undertaking, and I’ve been honored to help with it, and to have it hosted on HU. It’s been a great experience, and (if HU is still around then!) I’d be thrilled to do it again in 2021.

Other Links

Sean Witzke with some thoughts on his best of list.

Martin Wisse on the lack of women on the best of list.

John Porcellino with some thoughts on his best of list.
 
 


Robert Stanley Martin