Epiphany

Today is the Feast of the Epiphany, a major holy day in Western Christianity. It's one of my favorites (right up there with Ash Wednesday and Maundy Thursday). In an ordinary year, which this isn't, I'd attend special services whenever possible.

The word can mean something like manifestation, often of something divine, and the day celebrates the adoration of the Christ child by the Magi in the Gospel of Matthew. I don't take the story literally, but it means the  manifestation of divine revelation to the Gentiles. Other texts associated with the day are those of the Transfiguration of Christ on the mountaintop. 

The word also has grimmer associations. Antiochus IV, self-styling himself Epiphanes, was a Hellenistic king who considered himself divine and initiated a brutal persecution of the Jews in the 160s BCE. That persecution inspired the revolt of the Maccabees, one result of which is the Jewish holiday Hanukkah, which celebrates the cleansing of the Temple after its defilement with idols.

The Irish writer James Joyce borrowed the world from the realm of religion and used it to mean something like insight or inspiration. In that sense, it's kind of like a revelation or uncovering, which is the literal meaning of the Greek-derived word apocalypse.

In that sense, today is going to be a day of epiphany, manifestation and/or revealing in Washington as the fate of constitutional democracy, however imperfect, hangs in the balance. I'm guessing that the things said and done today will long be remembered.

This might be a good time to remember the words of Abraham Lincoln: “in times like the present, men should utter nothing for which they would not willingly be responsible through time and eternity.”

Before the lights go out

A big storm is about to hit Goat Rope Farm, which could mean nothing or days without power and phone. So here's one while the lights are still on, an interview with historian Eric Foner, who has written extensively on the Civil War, slavery and Reconstruction. Incidentally, he'll be coming to WV for a lecture in October.

In lieu of a post

The WV legislature ended (thank God) Saturday at midnight. I've been thinking about all that for the last 60 days and could use a break. In lieu of a real blog post, here's an interesting take at the role of religion in American life and how it's been manipulated.

Sorry for slow posting lately. Between internet troubles, travels and work, it was hard to do.

Taken for Granted

I just finished listening to an unabridged biography of general and President Ulysses Grant titled The Man Who Saved The Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace and I've come away with a renewed appreciation of Grant as president. As a lifelong Civil War dork, I was quite familiar with his achievements in the war but not so much with what came later.

This isn't something a lot of us learned in schools, where Grant's presidency, if addressed at all, is often remembered for this or that scandal. But on the most important issues of his day, defending the rights of former slaves and humane treatment of the American Indians, he was head and shoulders above his contemporaries. There is something remarkable about his unshakable character, both in war and peace. (He even relied on Quakers to help implement his efforts to promote peace with Native Americans, something I missed despite 20+ years of working for AFSC.)

I must have missed this too, but apparently conservatives have recently made an effort to take Grant's face off the $50 bill and replace it with Ronald Reagan (!). While the spirit of fairness compels me to admit that the Gipper may have had his moments,  I can't imagine bumping the savior of the Union in favor of the buster of a union. Here's  a great op-ed in defense of Grant by Sean Wilentz. And here's a sample paragraph of the same about what may be behind the effort to dump grant:

In reality, what fueled the personal defamation of Grant was contempt for his Reconstruction policies, which supposedly sacrificed a prostrate South, as one critic put it, "on the altar of Radicalism." That he accomplished as much for the freed slaves as he did within the constitutional limits of the presidency was remarkable. Without question, his was the most impressive record on civil rights and equality of any president from Lincoln to Lyndon B. Johnson.

There is also something heroic about his last battle, against lung cancer and time, when, with the help of Samuel Clemens, he discovered his gift for writing as he completed his memoirs in an effort to provide for his family.

If you get the chance, try to learn a little more about this decent but unassuming person. I hope Grant once again assumes his rightful place in the American pantheon. And stays on the $50.

THEY SHOOK THEIR GROOVE THING. I'm referring to stubby tailed feathered dinosaurs, of course.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Fits and starts

I was at a conference recently when someone was talking about what it takes to make a difference in the movement towards social and environmental justice. They quoted someone who said something like it takes "constant pressure, constantly applied."

I appreciate the sentiment but don't quite agree with the formulation. It seems to imply that these kinds of things take place at a steady pace. It seems to me that life, history and evolution move sporadically in fits and starts--and so do struggles for social justice. A lot of them in my experience involve a lot of waiting and then sudden focused action.

Respectfully, I'd put it this way. It takes constant alertness and punctuated focused action when conditions are right.

Speaking of which, conditions are right for El Cabrero to take a few days off. Goat Rope will continue to appear most days, although without the links and comments. I have a road trip planned, not to mention an attempted rendezvous with certain four legged antlered creatures up on the hill.

A law of nature

Charles Darwin's ideas of evolution by means of natural selection were first taken up (with many misunderstandings) by those on the political right. Part of the reason for this was that early expositions of Darwinism emphasized competition. It would take a while for evolutionary biologists to look at the other side of the equation by investigating cooperation and altruism.

More to the point, in the Gilded Age, robber barons and financial aristocrats found in them a great rationalization for their own wealth and power.

Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie wrote that while capitalist competition may harm some individuals, "it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department."

(That phrase "survival of the fittest," by the way, has its origin in the writings of British philosopher Herbert Spencer rather than Darwin himself.)

In a similar vein, John D. Rockefeller Jr. wrote that

The growth of large business is merely a survival of the fittest...This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working our of a law of nature and a law of God.

As the Church Lady would say on the old Saturday Night Live, "Isn't that convenient?"

SPEAKING OF EVOLUTION, this article suggests that our relationships with animals helped make us human.

FORECLOSURES. Here's Dean Baker and what the government could do about the foreclosure crisis but isn't (so far).

FUN LIST. From The Nation, here's a list of the 50 most influential progressive leaders of the 20th century.

CHARLOTTE'S WEB ON STEROIDS. A spider in Madagascar weaves the world's biggest webs with the toughest natural material yet discovered.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A RELIGION OF THE HEART

Camp meeting, circa 1839, courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme this week at Goat Rope is a paradox of the American religious experience: while the US is among the most religious and religiously diverse countries in the world, many residents measure pretty low on surveys of religious literacy--both of the religions they profess and of those they don't.

One thing that may have set the tone for this was the popularity of revivalism on the American frontier, of which the Second Great Awakening of the first half of the 1800s is a prime example. As the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote,

Long before America was discovered, the Christian community was perennially divided between those who believed that the intellect must have a vital place in religion and those who believed that intellect should be subordinated to emotion, or in effect abandoned at the dictates of emotion...under American conditions the balance between traditional establishments and revivalist or enthusiastic movements drastically shifted in favor of the latter. In consequence, the learned professional clergy suffered a loss of position, and the rational style of religion they found congenial suffered accordingly. At an early stage in its history, America, with its Protestant and dissenting inheritance, became the scene of an unusually keen local variation of this universal historical struggle over the character of religion; and here the forces of enthusiasm and revivalism had their most impressive victories.

Of course, given the hardships of farm and frontier life, this kind of religion provided relief from toil, a chance to socialize, and a welcome form of entertainment. Abraham Lincoln, who was pretty unorthodox in religious matters, enjoyed such spectacles while growing up. He once said "When I see a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees."

The effects of the Second Great Awakening can still be felt in El Cabrero's neck of the woods. I remember many conversations I had growing up about religion with people for whom religion was preaching and who suspected educated clergy to be instruments of the devil. They believed every word of the Bible, even if they were a little hazy on what these might actually be.

As Stephen Prothero notes in Religious Literacy, this religion of the heart was a marked change from the kind that prevailed before when the nation was founded:

As has been noted, religious faith and religious knowledge were inseparable in the colonies and the early republic...But early Americans didn't just know Jesus; they knew the Sermon on the Mount (often by heart). They believed, as the Reverend John Lathrop of Boston's Second Church wrote, that "the connexion between knowledge and faith, is such, that the latter cannot exist without the former."...All that changed, however, with the rise to public power in the early nineteenth century of a new form of Protestantism called evangelicalism. By the end of that century a lack of elementary knowledge of Christianity would constitute evidence of authentic faith. What for generations had been shameful--religious illiteracy--would become a badge of honor in a nation besotted with the self-made man and the spirit-filled preacher.

The triumph had unintended consequences:

In the name of heartfelt faith, unmediated experience, and Jesus himself, they actively discouraged religious learning. To evangelicalism, therefore, we owe both the vitality of religion in contemporary American and our impoverished understanding of it.

LEAVING A RECORD...DEFICIT. President Bush will leave his successor the biggest one yet.

THAT'S JUST SWELL. The US has reassured Israel that it might whack Iran. Here's more on the subject from Scott Ritter.

LOSING TIME. This doesn't show up on official unemployment statistics, but millions of American workers have had the hours of work cut.

IF "SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN" RAN HOROSCOPES, here's what they would look like.

OLD SCHOOL COMPUTING. This is an interesting look at an ancient Greek computational device. Where did they plug it in?

HYPERION TO A SATYR. A professor from El Cabrero's alma mater Marshall University will write a biography of George W. Bush. The author, Jean Edward Smith, has previously written 12 books, including a prize-winning and bestselling biography of FDR--peace be unto him. The contrast between the two is mind boggling.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

"AND I DON'T CARE WHAT IT IS"

Monument celebrating freedom of worship, courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope this week is American religious literacy or the lack thereof (accent on the latter). You'll also find links and comments about current events. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

As mentioned in earlier posts, America is one of the most religious--and religiously diverse--countries in the world, but it's people know surprisingly little about what they profess to believe or what others believe.

It didn't used to be that way. Say what you want about the early colonists, they knew what they believed--even if they were kind of ate up with it, as we say in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia.

Puritan clergy in New England were highly educated, steeped in Calvinist theology and were often fluent in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Anglicans, later to become Episcopalians, drilled their young in the catechism and the intricacies of the 39 articles and stressed a tradition that relied on scripture, tradition and reason. Other religious groups worked it in their own fashion.

The idea that religion was all heart and not a whole lot of head took some time to arrive here. Boston University professor Stephen Prothero, author of Religious Literacy, identifies at least two factors that contributed to the current state of affairs. One was the Second Great Awakening, a religious revival that occurred in the first half of the 1800s, about which more tomorrow.

The other was the American tendency suppress religious differences when confronted with some kind of "alien challenge." For example, from the 1800s, many American Protestants emphasized their commonality in the wake of a growing Catholic population. During the Cold War, the term "Judeo-Christian civilization" became common and expressed a degree of unity against the challenges of Soviet communism.

Over time, a kind of generic religiosity became common, as expressed in a quote attributed to President Eisenhower: "Our government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith-and I don't care what it is."

HOUSING. After all the bailouts, maybe it's time to do something about foreclosures.

THERE'S GOLD IN THEM THERE DUMPS. Garbage could be big business.

MINE SAFETY. This one is a couple of days old (due to a road trip), but it's a good one on MSHA in the waning days of the Bush administration.

STRAP ON THE OLD JETPACK. Somebody actually made one.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

WHERE YOUR TREASURE IS...

Caption: Cats have little need for faith. They're already there.

El Cabrero is musing on the (nonsectarian) nature of faith this week. If this is your first visit, please click on yesterday's post.

Faith is something I have trouble with, although I'm a fairly religious person by temperament. I'm kind of like a car with an old AM radio driving on a curvy mountain road. Sometimes I pick up a signal and sometimes I don't.

Faith is a pretty complicated ball of twine to unwind. Philosophers such as William James (an official Goat Rope patron saint) pointed out that faith can create facts, at least in the sense that believing something is possible can make it so. Psychologists like Erik Erikson have argued that attitudes toward faith are shaped in early infancy, when a baby does or does not learn to develop as sense of "basic trust" in the world around him or her. Faith is even a part of non theistic teachings such as Buddhism, although here it means something like trusting in those who have gone down the path before.

One of the most interesting and compelling non-sectarian treatments of faith I've come across were developed by the great theologian Paul Tillich in his little 1957 book, The Dynamics of Faith.

For Tillich, faith is a state of being "ultimately concerned." We all have relative concerns, like food, human relationships, work, etc. But the deepest concern that abides when all others have been met or foregone is the ultimate concern.

Another way of putting it might be to say that regardless of the things one professes to believe or not believe, one's real faith is the core value around which one's life is built. As Jesus is quoted as saying in Matthew and Luke, "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."

Faith for Tillich is the centered act of the whole person. It's not a purely intellectual thing such as subscribing to the truth of the tenets of some creed, Nicene or otherwise. Nor is just an act of will or an emotional state, although it gets confused with those quite a bit these days too. It can't be coerced by external or unconscious forces. If either of those is the case, the result is despotism or obsession/compulsion, not faith:

For faith is a matter of freedom. Freedom is nothing more than the possibility of personally centered acts.

Faith also implies risk and even doubt. It is always possible that the foundation on which one builds a life is a false one. When something of relative importance is elevated to an absolute status--such as one's own sect, race, a political creed, nation, money, or anything else--faith is idolatrous or, in Tillich's own term, demonic. By "demonic," he didn't mean little supernatural bad critters with horns but rather what happens anytime something relative is treated as an absolute.

Even the highest religious traditions and the most exalted human ideas can become demonic and idolatrous when they are regarded as absolute rather than limited and conditioned. To use an expression from the Buddhist tradition, all teachings are a finger pointed at the moon, not the moon itself.

Alas, there's an awful lot of finger worship in human history...

SPEAKING OF IDOLATRY, as Paul Krugman noted yesterday, the Reagan-as-God hypothesis is weighed in the balance and found wanting. (GR trivia question: to what book of the Bible does that allusion refer?)

IN KEEPING WITH YESTERDAY'S observation of Martin Luther King Jr. Day observations, here's his famous Riverside address. The more things change, the more they stay the same...

FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS. It tolls for thee and for tens of thousands of Iraqis.

WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN. Here's an item on what could have been done with the wealth squandered on the unnecessary war in Iraq.

TO SLEEP, PERCHANCE TO DREAM. Here's something from Science on the functions of sleep.

ZOON POLITIKON. Check out this item on animal politics. Hint: some of them may be better at it than we are.

TWO COOL WEBSITES that will show up here in the future are bookforum.com and History News Network.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

MEANING

Photo credit: everystockphoto.com.

El Cabrero has a special respect for things, people and ideas that have proven themselves in tough situations. The ideas of the late Viennese psychologist Victor Frankl would certainly qualify. He developed these in the crucible of Nazi concentration camps but found they had applications in less extreme conditions as well.

Frankl found that people who had a sense of purpose or meaning in their lives were better able to bear up to unbearable conditions and keep a sense of their humanity in the face of dehumanizing treatment. He also believed that people always retain a degree of inner freedom:

Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress....

Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him--mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp. Dostoevski said once, "There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings." These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost.

Some things that helped people retain a sense of purpose were love for others, a desire to accomplish certain things, a sense of accomplishment for past achievements or even the determination to bear suffering with dignity. But

Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost.

END GAME. Apocalyptic religious types can't get enough war these days.

NAFTA AND EVERYTHING AFTER. Here's a good one from the Boston Globe about the downsides of "free trade" agreements. Congress is considering extending a NAFTA-style agreement to Peru.

MORE ON HEALTH CARE. According to the Economic Policy Institute, employer-provided health insurance continues to decline. According to the author of the report, “A universal health care system would provide Americans with access to the type of health care appropriate for the most prosperous nation in the world.”

AMERICANA. Here's a lengthy but good piece from the New Yorker about how America modernized. There's a cool Thoreau thread running through it.

HOW'S THAT NEXT WAR COMING? According to the McClatchy papers,

Despite President Bush's claims that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons that could trigger "World War III," experts in and out of government say there's no conclusive evidence that Tehran has an active nuclear-weapons program.

Of course, the great thing about this administration is that they've never let facts get in the way of an unnecessary war.

MONKEY BUSINESS. It looks like they can rationalize too.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED