EAT PRAY LOVE

Elizabeth Gilbert, Penguin Group, NY, 2010

92

I still can’t say whether I will ever want children.  I was so astonished to find that I did not want them at thirty; the remembrance of that surprise cautions me against placing any bets on how I will feel at forty.  I can only say how I feel now, grateful to be on my own.  I also know that I won’t go forth and have children just in case I might regret missing it later in life; I don’t think this is a strong enough motivation to bring more babies onto the earth.  Though I suppose people do reproduce sometimes for that reason, for insurance against later regret.  I think people have children for all manner of reasons, sometimes out of a pure desire to nurture and witness life, sometimes out of an absence of choice, sometimes in order to hold on to a partner or create an heir, sometimes without thinking about it in any particular way.  Not all the reasons to have children are the same, and not all of them are necessarily unselfish.  Not all the reason not to have children are the same, either, though.  Nor are all those reasons necessarily selfish.

94  [Responsibility    the ability to respond]

95  “It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection.”       -Bhagavad Gita

114

Luigi Barzini, in his 1964 masterwork The Italians (written when he’d finally grown tired of foreigners writing about Italy and either loving it or hating it too much) tried to set the record straight on his own culture.  He tried to answer the question of why the Italians have produced the greatest artistic, political and scientific minds of the ages, but have still never become a major world power.  Why are they the planet’s masters of verbal diplomacy, but still so inept at home government?  Why are they so individually valiant, yet so collectively unsuccessful as an army?  How can they be such shrewd merchants on the personal level, yet such inefficient capitalists as a nation?

His answers to these questions are more complex than I can fairly encapsulate here, but have much to do with a sad Italian history of corruption by local leaders and exploitation by foreign dominators,  all of which has generally led Italians to draw the seemingly accurate conclusion that nobody and nothing in this world can be trusted.  Because the world is so corrupted, misspoken, unstable, exaggerated and unfair, one should trust only what one can experience with one’s own senses, and this makes the senses stronger in Italy than anywhere in Europe.  This is why, Barzini says, Italians will tolerate hideously incompetent generals, presidents, tyrants, professors, bureaucrats, journalists and captains of industry, but will never tolerate incompetent “opera singers, conductors, ballerinas, courtesans, actors, film directors, cooks,  tailors . . .”  In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted.  Only artistic excellence is incorruptible.  Pleasure cannot be bargained down.  And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real.

To devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty, then, can be a serious business, not always necessarily a means of escaping reality, but sometimes a means of holding on to the real when everything else is flaking away into . . . rhetoric and plot.  Not too long ago, authorities arrested a brotherhood of Catholic monks in Sicily who were in tight conspiracy with the Mafia, so who can you trust?  What can you believe?  The world is unkind and unfair.  Speak up against this unfairness and in Sicily, at least, you’ll end up as the foundation of an ugly new building.  What can you do in such an environment to hold a sense of your individual human dignity?  Maybe nothing.  Maybe nothing except, perhaps, to pride yourself on the fact that you always fillet your fish with perfection, or that you make the lightest ricotta in the whole town?

115

. . . the same things which has helped generations of Sicilians hold their dignity has helped me begin to recover mine, namely the idea that the appreciation of pleasure can be an anchor of one’s humanity . . . you have to come here, to Sicily, in order to understand Italy. . . I needed to come here, to Italy, in order to understand myself.

. . . when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of what happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt, this is not selfishness, but obligation.  You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful with life, no matter how slight.

Chapter 37   119

[story of how to introduce a new hen to a brood]  . . . “She must have been here all the tie since I didn’t see her arrive.”   . . . the newcomer herself doesn’t even remember that she’s a newcomer, thinking only, “I must have been here the whole time. . . “

http://www.flickr.com/photos/greenwellies/5006935956/in/pool-849541@N22/

Traveling with Pomegranates

My daughter, Gwen, recommended this book and I've just finished reading it. It was a collaboration between Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees) and her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor...each taking turns writing a chapter describing their travels to Greece, France, Turkey and Crete and each searching for inspiration in their lives. Before I read the book, I googled the various places they journeyed to...Mary's house in Ephesus, Palianis Convent, Eleusis, Chapel of the Black Virgin of Rocamadour and so on. That way, I felt as though I was actually walking along with them at the sites. It was a great read.

http://www.readinggroupguides.com/guides3/eat_pray_love1.asp

From the way Elizabeth Gilbert’s tale begins --- with our heroine in Rome, fawning over a sexy, young Italian --- one could be forgiven for thinking that Eat, Pray, Love might just belong on the chick-lit shelf next to Amy Sohn’s Run, Catch, Kiss. But first blushes can be deceiving, and from the book’s introductory quote --- “Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth” --- we know Gilbert’s not out to deceive. Not her readers and, most important, not herself.

In what could be construed as a coming-of-age story for thirtysomethings, Gilbert leaves behind an excruciating divorce, tumultuous affair, and debilitating depression as she sets off on a yearlong quest to bridge the gulf between body, mind, and spirit. Part self-deprecating tour guide, part wry, witty chronicler, Gilbert relates this chapter of her life with a compelling, richly detailed narrative that eschews the easy answers of New Age rhetoric. In the book’s early pages, a flashback finds the smart, savvy, successful Gilbert on her knees on the bathroom floor of the Westchester house she inhabits with her husband, wailing and wallowing in sorrow, snot, and tears (“a veritable Lake Inferior”), awkwardly embarking on her first conversation with God.

During the interminable wait for her divorce, Gilbert accepts a magazine assignment in Bali, where she meets a ninth-generation medicine man “whose resemblance to the Star Wars character Yoda cannot be exaggerated.” He evaluates her palm, forecasting her return to Bali --- a prediction that resurfaces when she hatches an escape plan from pain: “to explore the art of pleasure in Italy, the art of devotion in India, and, in Indonesia, the art of balancing the two.”

Drawn by the beauty of its mother tongue, Gilbert arrives in Rome dead set on a self-restoration remedy rooted in pleasure and chastity, a peculiar pairing she describes as the antidote for decades spent sublimating herself to lovers with the dedication of “a golden retriever and a barnacle.” For Gilbert, luxuriating in simple pleasures means sounding the curtain call on personal demons --- in this case a good-cop, bad-cop routine starring loneliness and depression --- and allowing her own desires (gelato for breakfast!) to take center stage.

Pleasure triumphs, and our protagonist is prepared for the next leg of her journey: an ashram in India, where racing thoughts eventually yield to successful meditation and a cast of supportive characters, including a plumber-poet from New Zealand, an ever-amiable, sage Texan, and the Indian tomboy she scrubs the temple floors with as part of her devotional duty.

By the time Gilbert arrives in Indonesia, she has shed her grief, realizing her own ability to control her reaction to life’s events. She is strong, enjoying a succession of simple days spent with the medicine man, a Javanese surfer dude, and a woman healer. Bicycling around Bali, she finds balance and, as the title suggests, love. Happiness, Gilbert comes to realize, “is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it.”

1. Gilbert writes that “the appreciation of pleasure can be the anchor of humanity,” making the argument that America is “an entertainment-seeking nation, not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one.” Is this a fair assessment?

2. After imagining a petition to God for divorce, an exhausted Gilbert answers her phone to news that her husband has finally signed. During a moment of quietude before a Roman fountain, she opens her Louise Glück collection to a verse about a fountain, one reminiscent of the Balinese medicine man’s drawing. After struggling to master a 182-verse daily prayer, she succeeds by focusing on her nephew, who suddenly is free from nightmares. Do these incidents of fortuitous timing signal fate? Cosmic unity? Coincidence?

3. Gilbert hashes out internal debates in a notebook, a place where she can argue with her inner demons and remind herself about the constancy of self-love. When an inner monologue becomes a literal conversation between a divided self, is this a sign of last resort or of self-reliance?

4. When Gilbert finally returns to Bali and seeks out the medicine man who foretold her return to study with him, he doesn’t recognize her. Despite her despair, she persists in her attempts to spark his memory, eventually succeeding. How much of the success of Gilbert’s journey do you attribute to persistence?

5. Prayer and meditation are both things that can be learned and, importantly, improved. In India, Gilbert learns a stoic, ascetic meditation technique. In Bali, she learns an approach based on smiling. Do you think the two can be synergistic? Or is Ketut Liyer right when he describes them as “same-same”?

6. Gender roles come up repeatedly in Eat, Pray, Love, be it macho Italian men eating cream puffs after a home team’s soccer loss, or a young Indian’s disdain for the marriage she will be expected to embark upon at age eighteen, or the Balinese healer’s sly approach to male impotence in a society where women are assumed responsible for their childlessness. How relevant is Gilbert’s gender?

7. In what ways is spiritual success similar to other forms of success? How is it different? Can they be so fundamentally different that they’re not comparable?

8. Do you think people are more open to new experiences when they travel?  And why?

9. Abstinence in Italy seems extreme, but necessary, for a woman who has repeatedly moved from one man’s arms to another’s. After all, it’s only after Gilbert has found herself that she can share herself fully in love. What does this say about her earlier relationships?

10. Gilbert mentions her ease at making friends, regardless of where she is. At one point at the ashram, she realizes that she is too sociable and decides to embark on a period of silence, to become the Quiet Girl in the Back of the Temple. It is just after making this decision that she is assigned the role of ashram key hostess. What does this say about honing one’s nature rather than trying to escape it? Do you think perceived faults can be transformed into strengths rather than merely repressed?

11. Sitting in an outdoor café in Rome, Gilbert’s friend declares that every city --- and every person --- has a word. Rome’s is “sex,” the Vatican’s “power”; Gilbert declares New York’s to be “achieve,” but only later stumbles upon her own word, antevasin, Sanskrit for “one who lives at the border.” What is your word? Is it possible to choose a word that retains its truth for a lifetime?

God’s Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion In Politics

Stephen L. Carter, Basic Boooks, 2000

 

1

[God’s Name in Vain] argues two interrelated theses: First, that there is nothing wrong, and much right, with the robust participation of the nation’s many religious voices in debates over matters of public moment.  Second, that religions, although not democracy, will almost always lose their best, most spiritual selves when they choose to be involved in the partisan, electoral side of American politics.

2

Only by looking at politics through the lens of faith, rather than faith through the lens of politics, will we be able to comprehend the nature and resilience (and the sensible limits) of the involvement of overtly religious organizations and individuals in our public life.

3

. . . why is it more “fanatical” for parents to tell their children that the creation story in Genesis is literally true than for the public schools to tell the same children, required by law to attend, that the religion of their parents is literally false.  Or why is it more “fanatical” to criticize the culture for not reflecting a particular religious view on, say, the role of women than to criticize a religion for not reflecting the culture’s views on the same thing.  In short, the danger, if there is one, is mutual.

4

A nation that truly values religious freedom, . . . a nation that truly values the constitutional separation of church and state, must welcome the religious voice into its political counsels.  To do otherwise is one sure way to accomplish the task of alienating the religious from democracy, for it places official imprimatur on the cultural message that religion is an inferior human activity.

5

Relligion is what we profess and morality is what it moves us to do.  Politics needs morality, which means that politics needs religion.  In a nation grown increasingly materialistic and increasingly involved in urging satisfaction of  desire as the proper subject of both the market and politics, the religious voice, at its best, is perhaps the only remaining force that can call us to something higher and better than thinking constantly about our own selves, our own wants, our own rights.  Politics without religion must necessarily be, in today’s America, the politics of me.

16-17

. . . when God-talk mixes with the partisan side of politics: More than likely, for too many people with causes to push and desires to fulfill, the name of God will collapse into a mere rhetorical device.  Instead of maintaining the sacred character guaranteed by the Third Commandment, God’s name becomes a tool, a trope, a ticket to get us where we want to go.

18

. . . the erroneous assumption that it you discredit the messenger you discredit the message. 

19

If history has taught us anything, it is that religions that fall too deeply in love with the art of politics lose their souls, very fast.

22

Sects that were hierarchical and dogmatic in Europe surrendered most of that character upon reaching these shores.  Thus the most successful sermons of the early nineteenth century featured “the Jeffersonian notion that people should shake off all servile prejudice and learn to prove things for themselves.”

When a religious community becomes too regularly involved in politics, the community loses tough with its own best self and risks losing the power, and the on lobligation, to engage in witness from afar, to stand outside the corridors of power and call those within to righteousness.  [This is called] the Integrity Objection.

When a religion decides to involve itself in the partisan side of politics, in supporting one candidate or party over another, it not only runs a high risk of error; it also, inevitably, winds up softening its message, compromising doctrine to make it more palatable to a public that might remain unpersuaded by the Word unadulterated. 

23

Too many religious groups, however, want to influence electoral politics, a danger not to politics or democracy but to faith.

. . . to be involved in public dialogue without becoming involved in partisan politics will require a delicate balancing act, for it is very easy to stumble. 

25

From the traditional Christian point of view, and certainly from the point of view of many other faiths, religion is not merely an aspect of life, to be divided from its other parts.  Belief in God is a totality. 

To the faithful, there is no part of the day that is outside of God’s view.  . . . very few religionists anywhere in the world live lives quite as faithful as they believe they should.  But our religious faith helps most of us to see the road we should be traveling, even if our human weakness often makes us travel it poorly.

Human life is characterized by the search for meaning.  . . . there is, to each thing, a purpose it must fulfill.  . . . most humans still believe that we are somehow connected to something transcendent, something larger and wiser than we are.  Thus religions, too, provide meanings to their adherents, meanings of a deep and transcendent sort.  What is religion, after all, but a narrative a people tells itself about its relationship with God, usually over an extended period of time?  And if the narrative is truly about the meaning God assigns to the world, the follower of the religion, if truly faithful, can hardly select a different meaning simply because the state says so.

28

Humphrey wanted to talk about policy (ending racial discrimination).  [Fannie Lou] Hamer wanted to talk about religion (establishment of the Kingdom).

The biblical prophets rarely called upon the nation to choose new leaders.  Instead, they called upon the leaders themselves to change their hearts, often predicting doom if they did not.

29-30

Indeed, the very idea that God’s will is both different from and higher than the will of fellow humans, even humans with the power to create binding law, is one of the signal contributions of Judaism to civilization.  In the Jewish tradition, the idea of this difference is illustrated by the prophets calling Israel to account for failing to adhere to the will of God.  Christianity, founded as a prophetic religion, squandered much of this wisdom during its thousand-year effort to meld the spiritual and temporal powers into one.

30

A religion that makes no difference in the life of the believer is not really worthy of the name.  The difference religion makes, the way in which believers deviate from the cultural norm, is the measure of its subversive power.  At its best, religion in its subversive mode provides the believer with a transcendent reason to question the power of the state and the messages of the culture.  That is the reason that the state will always try to domesticate religion: to avoid being subverted.

30-31

Any state will try to control the forces that might upend it, because a state, as though organic, will do whatever it must to survive.  Religion is a potential threat to that survival.  The domestication of religion is the process through which the state tries to move3 religion from a position in which it threatens the state to a position in which it supports the state.  And that was the purpose of Hubert Humphrey’s negotiation with Fannie Lou Hamer [chair of the Mississippi Freedom Party at the 1964 Democratic National Convention], to move her from a relatively radical position, in which she threatened his political prospects, to a domesticated position, in which she became a supporter.  For there is a lesson every politician knows that too many religionists involved in politics forget:  Once you take sides in an electoral contest, you are stuck with your candidate, warts and all.  If it turnes out that your candidate actually holds positions antithetical to your religion, well, if you want to be serious about your politics, you ignore or explain away or even lie about this inconvenient fact.  Hamer, to her credit, refused to become a supporter.

31

. . .  this battle between the insiders who run the state (and perhaps the culture) and the prophetic outsiders who are moved by their faith to call the insiders to account?  It is a battle about the meaning of our very existence.

31

A democracy hat lacks the moral force of religious understanding is likely to be a democracy without purpose, in which politicians promise to allow citizens simply to satisfy their own wants, whether for money, power, or sex, will little regard for the needs of others; in which the measure of success in war is how small a sacrifice the nation’s citizens are called upon to make, as the enemy’s dead, including civilians, pile up, unmourned, at least by Americans, they are, after all, merely the enemy; in which the worst off are allowed to languish and often die in their segregated urban prisons, while the elite live in safe high-rises and safer suburbs.  And if that description sounds much like the America we actually have, either religion is being insufficiently prophetic or a selfish society has decided not to listen, or both.

31-2

Religion, at its best, is subversive.  Religion resists.  It often resists, in particular, the values of the dominant culture.  It resists because religious people sometimes feel called by God to stand for something different that what everybody else believes, nomatter how radical the vision they are pressing might seem to others. 

33

If religion at its best is subversive, politics at its best proposes that the nation stands for something. Humphrey was arguing, in effect, that the nation should stand against racial exclusion, and that politics, working for the election of the Democratic ticket, was the best way to achieve that stance. 

[But Hamer] sought a somewhat different goal.  . . . She wanted more than an end to racial segregation: By calling for the establishment of the Kingdom, she was proposing a radical restructuring of American society, and a radical reordering of its priorities.

The reason Humphrey could not give Hamer what she wanted was not, really, because her vision was religious; it was that her religious vision was too radical to be considered in politics.  Which is not the same as saying her vision was wrong.

Politics is the art of the possible; bargaining and compromise are its life’s blood.  Of election campaigns this is particularly true.  No candidate ever comes before the voters clothed entirely in authenticity.  Candidates who want to win are constantly shifting, shading, spinning, softening, omitting, emphasizing, sometimes even reversing field.

34

“When I [John Maynard Keynes] get additional information on a subject, I now and then change my mind/  What do you do?”

35

The civil rights movement, in Mrs. Hamer’s day, the middle years of the 1960’s, was still characterized by a remarkably radical energy, a vision of a nation fired by love and commitment rather than profit and self-seeking, a nation in which the very meaning of life was defined by the Gospel commandment to love one’s neighbor.  That vision was explicitly Christian, and it was doomed from the start, doomed in the sense that it could not possibly be realized through politics.  The flaw lies in politics, not in religion, which is no knock on politics; but religion, at its best, is a higher path to some of the truths that politics dimly perceives.

37

Our political system does not exactly screen radicalism out; very often, it invites radicalism in, in order to tame it, to take energy that might have been devoted to the restructuring of the culture or the economic system, and twist that energy instead into the gaining of minor triumphs in the political system. Social movements are domesticated, softened, absorbed.  Radical challenges to the status quo morph into demands for a moderately larger piece of the pie, and the basic social structure remains unchanged.

. . . co-opting radical energy is only possible, however when radicals are willing to be co-opted.  Religious radicals are, or should be, harder to co-opt, because although politics heals with compromise and negotiation, religion, at least in the Western experience, tends to deal in absolutes.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in his never-completed Ethics that compromise is the enemy of the Word.  He was writing in the context of the struggle by many German churches to resist the orthodoxy being imposed upon them by the Nazi regime, which wanted to control the content of the Christian message.  But his point may be generalized.  Religion that is not pure in its fidelity to its vision of truth, religion that is unfaithful, begins to lose its distinctively religious character and becomes much like everything else.  When a religion enters politics, it at once finds itself bombarded with demands for compromise.  The message must be softened, or hardened, or omitted altogether.  . . . the risk is especially great when a religion enters electoral politics.  Candidates, as we have seen, will do what they must in order to win.  They will likely welcome religious supporters as they would welcome anybody who might be able to raise money, ring doorbells, or generate votes.  But that support, as we shall see, always leads to infidelity, infidelity of religious to its own best self.

38

The theologian James Cone has written about the risks of a black theology too wrapped up in Marin Luther King, not because Cone has no respect for King, whom he calls the most important theologian in American history, but because emphasizing King to the exclusion of the more radical thinkers “makes it easy for whites to ask for reconciliation without justice and for middle-class blacks to grant it, as long as they are treated specially,” a reference, presumably, to affirmative action.  Cone, like West, wants black leadership, especially the church leadership, to focus on justice understood more broadly than ensuring that the proper number of black students are admitted to the best colleges.

39

Once the decision to become electorally active was made, the power of prophetic ministry was lost.  If you are in the business of endorsing candidates and pushing for their election, you can hardly pretend to stand outside the corridors of power to call the nation to righteousness.  You are far more likely to soften the message, reinterpret the Gospels, and do what is necessary to retain the status of the insider.  Cone complained, correctly, back in 1976 that too many black churches “adopt their value system for the American capitalistic society and not form Jesus Christ.”  But the villain may not be capitalism alone.  The villain may be politics itself.

174-5

Evolution does not, however, mean the surrender of sacred truths.  To say that a faith must change its most precious values because the values of the world have changed, a claim heard, for example, in the mainline Protestant churches from the end of the nineteenth century up to the present day, invites the skeptic to conclude that the moral lessons a church tries to teach emerge not from the mind of God but from the imagination of fallible humans.  Unfortunately, a growing number of religious leaders write and speak as though they view religious truth in precisely this way.  For example, the theologians who constitute the so-called Jesus Seminar argue that we must begin our understanding of the Gospels by excluding all claims that are supernatural.  The retired Episcopal bishop Shelby Spong of my own Episcopal Church, author of a book claiming that Christianity must “change or die.” Has suggested, among other ideas, that Jesus may have been married and that Mary did not become pregnant with the baby as a result of the intervention of the Holy Spirit but was, perhaps, a victim of rape.   It may be that Bishop Spong was merely engaging in theological speculation, peculiar speculation though it may be, and that the members of the Jesus Seminar were merely offering helpful hints to non-Christians who might nevertheless gain from a study of Christ’s moral teachings.  I certainly hope so.  Otherwise, Christianity is already changing, in ways that might ensure its death.  When leaders of a faith decree, in effect, that their faith is a human invention, they have lost the right to call their activity religious, for they have surrendered the transcendence that marks religion as distinct among human activities.  After that point, there is no longer a reason for anybody to pay attention to them.

175

The space carved out for religious liberty by the separation of church and state as it should b e understood is a space for the religious, working in community, to engage in prayer and discernment about God’s will, and to strengthen each other to stand against the cultural forces trying to breach the wall.  [The wall of separation of church and state, “the garden and the wilderness.”]

A religion cannot call the world to account once it has decided that its own traditions are wrong and the world is right.

178

[expansion of public education – the period of the development of Progressive ideology between the Civil War and WWI]

184

. . . the very idea that we can aggregate these costs [of the errors the state will make if it is the central source of meanings will be smaller than the aggregate costs of the errors the parents will make if the family is the central source of meanings], or for hat matter, that we have measured them correctly, rests on the assumption that the dominant paradigm will remain undisturbed, that no subsequent shift, perhaps led, as so often, by a radically subversive religious vision, will undo what we have thought to be settled moral and even scientific knowledge.  Once we kill off the ability of the religious to create centers of meaning in serious opposition to the meanings of the state, we are left without the possibility of future prophets calling us to righteousness.  Perhaps some would prefer an America without any truly subversive, and truly effective, prophetic voices.  But how do we know that the system established today to promote liberal hegemony by wiping out opposing centers of meanings will not be captured tomorrow to promote racist or fascist hegemony?  How do we know, in other words, that the good guys will always, or even usually, be on top?  Nothing is the history of the state as an entity, or of humanity as a species, justifies so extraordinarily optimistic an assumption.

185-6

. . . even if we create these spaces for the nurturing of religious resistance, they will, in the long run, be useless, unless religions resist.  So much of American religion today has become so culturally comfortable that one can scarcely find differences between the vision of the good that is preached from the pulpit and the vision of the good that is believed by the culture.  If a religion wants to be just like everything else, it needs no guarantee of religious liberty.  After all, both breakfast cereal manufacturers and automobile companies manage to transform themselves constantly into images acceptable to the culture without the benefit of a constitutional right to do it.

If the Constitution or the culture or the two in combination do manage to carve out the spaces in which religionists can freely build communities preaching meanings sharply at odds with those that dominate our era, religion must take advantage of that opportunity.  In America today, so many traditions are politically identifiable.  In the Protestant churches, the problem is especially acute.  Denominations that make common cause with the Right have learned to mute the Gospel message about the dangers of wealth.  Denominations that make common cause with the Left have learned to cast aside New Testament teaching about sex.  . . . the pull of political involvement, if it is heeded, invariably alters the content of the message.  The Integrity Objection holds firm. 

American religion needs more time in the garden, less in the wilderness, more time for prayer and discernment, more time for renewal, more time for community, more time to discover what it is that God is calling it to be.  Prophetic witness, the distant, transcendent voice that calls on the nation to repent and return to righteousness, is impossible if religion is comfortable.  The religious voice is destroyed when religion yields to the temptation to be important, to shape the outcome of elections, to fit snugly into the culture, to make filling the seats on the Sabbath day the highest goal.  And without the religious voice, our politics will be nothing, which means, in a democracy, that our nation will be nothing.

And religion:  Without renewal, without a retreat from the wilderness and a return to the garden, without more time spent listening to the voice of God and less time spent drafting position papers or fighting over who gets to be in charge of what, without these necessities, religion will be nothing too.

A TIME TO FIGHT Reclaiming A Fair and Just America

Webb. Jim,  Broadway Books, NY

 

111  Capter 7               “Strategy Is Not A Board Game”

            Strategy is a much-beleaguered word these days, often used so carelessly that it has lost much of its academic meaning.  In very general terms, a strategy is a comprehensive plan of long-term action, while tactics involve the specifics of how that plan is actually implemented.  In military terms, a strategy lays out the commanding general’s (or admiral’s) overriding goals, concept of action, and the end point the military action is designed to achieve.  In the American military, such a strategy must begin with the goals and the specific direction of our national political process, which under our Constitution is the precursor for setting military action into motion.

            A clearly articulated, agreed-upon national strategy can be difficult to obtain in a democracy.  This is particularly true here in the United States, where we rightly value our constitutional system of checks and balances, as well as the open arena of free debate.  Presidential administrations come and go, bringing with them new teams of national security advisers and differing economic priorities.  The makeup of the Congress constantly changes, not only between political parties but also in its leadership, which puts into play different personalities and sometimes alternative views of America’s role around the world.  A freewheeling media often forces sensitive deliberations into public debate.  Well-financed think tanks bankroll the careers and publications of resident scholars, who inundate the process with adversarial arguments.  And just as important, this nation derived from many nations is itself constantly in a state of competitive abrasion when it comes to where our national resources should best be placed.

            But without a clear national strategy our system is capable of manipulation, and the result can be the misguided use of military force, in a way that does not advance our national interest.

            Historically, the concepts of a nation’s “grand strategy” has been used to lay out its interests around the world, and to offer a framework with which to both protect those interests and encourage their growth.  Grand strategy involves far more than military power.  In fact, the investment that a democracy makes in it military is but one small part of a properly constituted grand strategy, something of a insurance policy designed to ensure that a nation’s overall well-being is not interrupted by those who wish it ill.

            The first requirement of a grand strategy is that a nation’s leaders carefully define its economic, cultural, political, and security interests around the world.  The second challenge is to examine the threats to those interests, both real and potential, and the threats to the vital interests of other countries with whom a nation has developed alliances.  And the final step is to develop a formula that will advance the nation’s interests on all fronts.  This step includes trade policies and agreements, bilateral security arrangements, membership in international compacts such as the United Nations, NATO, the Association of South-east Asian Regional Forum (ASEAN), and the World Trade Organization, to name a few, along with a national security program that includes a military system capable of both deterring hostile activities and counteracting them if they do occur.

127  Chapter 8             “The Armpit of the World”                    (overview of recent history)

152      “How Not to Fight a War”   (9-12-01 Journal editorial not published but on Jim Webb’s web site

156      With many key people in this administration wanting a war from the outset, and soon convincing the President himself of the validity of their views, there were few tools to be used from outside the process to stop them.  The great failure of our endeavor in Iraq, other than that it should never have taken place at all, was that the debate occurred in the absence of a declared strategic vision.  The national transition away from Cold War thinking was partially to blame, but a greater aspect of that failure was deliberate.  Absent an agreed-upon strategy, the intellectual advocates for war in Iraq were able to push a long-held agenda into the vacuum.  Tellingly, as the movement toward war gained momentum, the President and his administration never clearly defined the strategic objectives that were calling for war, and never outlined a firm set of benchmarks that, once obtained, would bring an end to the fighting, including a withdrawal of our military from Iraq.

            In other words, we were moving cavalierly toward a war that could change our entire geopolitical focus, without a clearly articulated worldview, without specific, long-term guidance e from which the military could properly define a war strategy, and with no clear referent from which h the American political process could garner a sense of predictability about the war’s outcome.  In the congressional hearings that led us into war, the President’s witnesses, particularly among the political appointees at the Department of Defense, were repeatedly asked how long we would be in Iraq if we invaded.  They repeatedly answered, in an arrogant, prerehearsed litany, that we would be in Iraq “as long as it necessary, and not one day more.”

            For the average soldier, this meant three months.  For the average neoconservative, this meant fifty years or perhaps forever.

On the back of the book jacket:

            The one connecting dot in all of my experiences has been a passion for history and a desire to learn from it.  Not the enumeration of monarchs and treaties that so often passes for academic knowledge, but the surging vitality from below that so often impels change and truly defines cultures.  The novelist Leo Tolstoy wrote vividly about war and peace, showing us the drawing rooms and idiosyncrasies of Russia’s elite.  But in reality, he was telling us that great societal changes are most often pushed along by tsunami-deep impulses that cause the elites to react, far more than they inspire them to lead.  And this, in my view, is the greatest lesson of political history.  Entrenched aristocracies, however we may want to define them, do not want change; their desire instead is to manage dissent in a way that does not disrupt their control.  But over time, under the right system of government, a free, thinking people have the energy and ultimately the power to effect change.

FEINGOLD: A New Democratic Party

Sanford D. Horwitt, Simon and Schuster, NY July 2007

 

16-7   Previously, the city fathers’ governing philosophy, such as it was, was “the epitome of fiscal conservatism,” and that government should do “as little as possible.”  Janesville’s teachers were often among the lowest paid in the state, schools were overcrowded and the city streets and sidewalks were frequently in bad repair.  All of this changed in the new, post-GM Janesville when Janesville adopted a city manager form of government and hired Henry Traxler as its first city manager, in 1923.  He served in the post for twenty-eight years, the longest of any chief administrator in Janesville history.

            Traxler, a Jew born in Milwaukee in 1899, was trained as a civil engineer.  His engineering background helped when Janesville embarked on long-delayed public works projects, but he also brought to Janesville a view of government that was typical of the Wisconsin progressive tradition.  Improved public services were high priorities, but so, too, were carefully managed, parsimonious (Webster’s: frugal to the point of being stingy) budget.

96-7     For millions of Americans, Robert M. La Follette, more than Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson, was the most inspirational leader and personification of the Progressive Era in the first two decades of the twentieth century.  Muckraking journalists such as Lincoln Steffens portrayed and promoted La Follette as nothing less than the savior of American democracy.  After La Follette’s first two historic terms as governor, the title of a Steffens article in 1904 captured the adoring attitude:  “Enemies of the Republic: Wisconsin: A State Where the People Have Restored Representative Government.”  Indeed Wisconsin under the gubernatorial leadership of La Follette and his successor, Francis McGovern, helped make Wisconsin arguable the most progressive state in the country by 1911.

106-7   Russ Feingold was anointed as the new progressive torchbearer by non other than the esteemed editor of the Capital Times, Dave Zweifel.  “State Senator Russell Feingold has been in the office less than three years,” Zweifel began, “but already he as demonstrated the kind of dedication to the progressive tradition of this state that sets him apart.”  And what set Feingold apart, Zweifel saw, was the same combination of political values and personality traits that had set La Follette apart: an affinity for the underdog, for smallness over bigness, for community over anonymity –and all supported by a sometimes “stubborn determination” to go against conventional thinking, majority opinion and to stand up, alone if necessary, for a worthy cause.

162-164           While Feingold was in Clinton’s corner during the big budget fight, he was soon a fervent opponent of the president when it came to a vote on a big trade issue in 1993, the North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA, Clinton’s predecessor, George Bush, had negotiated the trade agreement with Canada and Mexico, but it had yet to be approved by Congress.  It called for creating a free market trading zone among Canada, Mexico and the United States and had the strong backing of major American corporations, congressional Republicans and the Clinton administration.  Labor unions opposed NAFTA because they feared jobs would be lost to Mexico and wages depressed in the United States.  In Congress, Democrats were divided.  In November when the Senate approved NAFTA, twenty-seven Democrats were in favor, twenty-eight opposed.  For Feingold, the split reflected not merely differences about trade issues per se, but it also symbolized a fundamental difference over the direction of the Democratic Party.

            He was angered by the growing influence of corporate campaign contributions in his party –and those contributions, he believed, were a big factor behind the Clinton administration’s support of NAFTA.  For him and other progressives and liberal Democrats, the influence of big money was a dispiriting trend that had started in the aftermath of Democratic election defeats in the early 1980’s, when moderate and conservative Democrats launched the pro-business Democratic Leadership Council.  The corporate-backed DLC’s motto might have been, “If you can‘t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”

            By 1993, the DLC, in collaboration with the Clinton administration, was a leading player in a massive public relations campaign to sell NAFTA in Congress.  Feingold said: “I see the DLC as, to some extent, taking the soul away from the Democratic Party.  And I see the DLC as having sold American workers down the river.”

226      The New York Times called the passage of McCain-Feingold “an extraordinary victory.”  It was also something of a miracle because the legislation was not only opposed by the Republican Party leadership, but also by much of Washington’s lobbyist-business establishment, the AFL-CIO, and potent advocacy organizations such as the National Rifle Association and the American Civil Liberties Union.  On the other side, much credit went to the indefatigable Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, Meredith McGehee at Common Cause, and many other who sustained grassroots and newspaper editorial support over many years.  But in the Senate, a leading opponent of reform, Phil Gramm of Texas, believed the key to success was not popular pressure but McCain’s and Feingold’s tenacity.

249      …there is his [Feingold] identification with Fighting B ob La Follette and Progressive Era reformers.  Much of the major domestic agenda of that era continues to resonate because it addresses timeless tensions and challenges in American democracy –issues of corporate power and big-money influence on the political system; income inequality and support of workers’ rights; investment in public education, health and infrastructure; conservation and environmental protection; government efficiency, transparency and the rule of law. 

The End of History and the Last Man

Francis Fukuyama,  Avon Books, NY 1992

xvi

[The Desire for Recognition]

According to Hegel, human beings like animals have natural needs and desires for objects outside themselves such as food, drink, shelter, and above all the preservation of their own bodies.  Man differes fundamentally from the animals, however, because in addition he desires the desire of other men, that is, he wants to be “recognized.”  In particular, he wants to be recognized as a human being, that is, as a being with a certain worth or dignity.  This worth in the first instance is related to his willingness to risk his life in a struggle over pure prestige.  For only man is able to overcome his most basic animal instincts, chief amoung them his instinct for self-preservation, for the sake of higher, abstract principles and goals.  According to Hegel, the desire for recognition initially drives two primordial combatants to seek to make the other “recognize” their humanness by staking their lives in a mortal battle.  When the natural fear of death leads one combatant to submit, the relationship of master and slave is born.  The stakes in this bloody battle at the beginning of history are not food, shelter, or security, but pure prestige.  And precisely because the goal of that battle is not determined by biology, Hegel sees in it the first glimmer of human freedom.

The desire for recognition may at first appear to be an unfamiliar concept, but it is as old as the tradition of Western political philosophy, and consitiutes a thoroughly familiar part of the human personality.   It was first described by Plato in the Republic, when he noted that there were three parts to the soul, a desiring part, a reasoning part, and a part that he called thymos, or “spiritedness.”  Much of human behavior can be explained as a combination of the first two parts, desire and reason; desire induces men to seek things outside themselves, while reason or calculation shows them the best way to get them.  But in addition, human beings seek recognition of their own worth, or of the people, things, or principles that they invest with worth.  The propensity to invest the self with a certain value, and to demand recognition for that value, is what in today’s popular language we would call “self-esteem.”  The propensity to feel self-esteem arises out of the part of the soul called thymos.  It is like an innate human sense of justice.  People believe that the have a certain worth, and when other people treat them as though they are worth less than that, they experience the emotion of anger.  Conversely, when people fail to live up to their own sense of worth, they feel shame, and when they are evaluated correctly in proportion to their worth, the feel pride.  The desire for recognition, and the accompanying emotions of anger, shame, and pride; are parts of the human personality critical to political life.  According to Hegel, they are what drives the whole historical process.

By Hegel’s account, the desire to be recognized as a human being with dignity drove man to the beginning of history into bloody battle to the death for prestige.  The outcome of this battle was a division of human society into a class of masters, who were willing to risk their lives, and a class of slaves, who gave in to their natural fear of death.  But the relationship of lordship and bondage, which took a wide variety of forms in all of the unequal, aristocratic societies that have characterized the greater part of human history, failed ultimately to satisfy the desire for recognition of either the masters or the slaves.  The slave, of course, was not acknowledged as a human being in any way whatsoever.  But the recognition enjoyed by the master was deficient as well, because he was not recognized by other masters, but slaves whose humanity was as yet incomplete.  Dissatisfaction with the flawed recognition available in aristocratic societies constituted a “contradiction” that engendered further states of history.

Hegel believed that the “contradiction” inherent in the relationship of lordship and bondage was finally overcome as a result of the French and, one would have to add, American revolutions.  These democratic revolutions abolished the distinction between master and slave b y making the former slaves their own masters and by establishing the principles of popular sovereignty and the rule of law.  The inherently unequal recognition of masters and slaves is replaced by universal and reciprocal recognition, where every citizen recognizes the dignity and humanity of every other citizen, and where that dignity is recognized in turn by the state through the granting of rights.