Remission

So today, I got to thinking about the contour of ignorance.

And this is not an excuse to bash other folks. I'm talking only about my own ignorance.

Lots of folks wonder about the future. I can't say I spend a lot of time thinking about it. I believe I've reached my very own "End of History," as Francis Fukuyama might say. He was naïve to say it when he did, and maybe I'm equally naïve, but all I'm really saying is that the future isn't that interesting to me. Instead, I wonder about what I don't get.

A lot of folks wonder what tomorrow will bring. If they just hold their horses long enough, they find out. Even quadriplegics in a persistent vegetative state make it to tomorrow in no more than twenty-four hours. It's a singular stream with a single current and fewer surprises than we like to pretend there are.

What interests me more is what I don't get.

I notice that a lot of folks oversimplify matters that I know to be complicated. Here, in Oregon, when people find out I'm from Texas, they oversimplify what Texans think, believe, experience. People of just about any political stripe oversimplify their opponents. People who are scared of any discrete group oversimplify their motives, ideas, behavior. People who aren't sure how to tackle a problem are often the first to oversimplify its essence and the proper solution. And, of course, me being an academic and all, I have this terrible bent toward spotting the complexity in things, sometimes needlessly, so all those oversimplifications stand out to me like signal flares at midnight. Hazard of the trade.

But what I've noticed is, for any human experience, there are those who level it down to something manageable and comforting, and there are those who grapple with it in its endless complexity, usually because they have no other choice. And as I see people around me respond cluelessly to others, to situations, to phenomena, I wonder what it is that I'm clueless about. I have absolutely zero doubt that I have many, many clueless spots; I'm just unsure what they are.

I've taught my students for years that whatever opinions they have about culture, and the typical habits and behaviors of other national/ethnic/racial groups, I can identify another group who has the same reaction to them. A lot of my students are Caucasian and sheltered, so they sometimes report that they think African-Americans are belligerent, hostile, abrasive, and otherwise discomforting. And it startles them when I tell them that some Japanese folks would regard them with identical discomfort, finding them too aggressive, too belligerent, too likely to invade their space, be uncomfortably direct, show overt hostility when it wasn't called for, etc. Instead of thinking of themselves as an endpoint against which others' behavior ought to be measured, what I want them to understand is that they occupy a spot on a continuum, and there are people groups in spots on either side of them.

That truth strikes me as powerful enough that I'm pretty certain that others have much greater insight than I do into the very moments of other people's cluelessness that attract my attention. My gut tells me that the simple distinction between cluelessness and savvy actually conceals an identical geometry of situatedness: I'm not the enlightened one; I'm just further along the spectrum than some, while not as far as others. And I'm sure I display my cluelessness to those others.

My instincts tell me that those who have direct experience can claim a certain gold standard of authentic understanding, but in my less sure moments, I doubt even that is true. People who are outside observers can chip in yet another kind of wisdom, yet another stream of clues, which put experience into its proper perspective, while those who actually live through the experience, who distill it out of their sense data and interpretive filters, are actually at a disadvantage in understanding what their memories have recorded. If I were to sketch a Johari window, I'd now be talking about the blind self.

And the interesting thing about cluelessness is that it's much more multivariate and multidimensional than the future. As I said earlier, the future emerges from the present, even if sometimes we completely overlook the elements of the present that converge to create that future. But overcoming ignorance isn't a simple forward motion. Instead, I think of it as a point in endless space, from which there is the opportunity to push outward, as light from a candle, propagating in all directions. I can be clueless, I can have potential to overcome my limits, in empathy, in aesthetics, in reasoning, in prediction, in ethics, in grasp of natural forces, in any of a literally unbounded set of types of knowledge. The possibilities sprint out in front of my imagination, even in its most febrile explosions.

It's a lot more interesting than the future. And besides, there's no need to worry about tomorrow. Today has evil enough of its own.

Burn Down The Mission

So tonight I watched Rick Warren's Civil Forum on webcast.

John McCain makes it all sound so simple, doesn't he?

Barack Obama's answers to the questions weren't nearly as fluent as McCain's. Obama was very careful with the words he chose. And that was true for every question, not just the questions for which anyone could've predicted that McCain's answer would please the crowd more than his. He weighed his words for the entire hour, and he often cautioned that there weren't simple formulas under which the decisions would make themselves.

McCain, to almost every question, had an answer that would fit on a bumper sticker.

This is nothing new.

Understand, I was once a hard-core, far-right conservative. In 1979, when I was in fifth grade, I made up my own pro-Reagan flyers and handed them out. I chose Baylor for college, thinking, among other things, that I'd fit right in politically. And six years later, when I left, I'd done a complete pendulum swing, and it was because of exactly what I saw tonight in the contrast between McCain and Obama. I'd realized that the scale of the problems that the president and Congress address gives them a density of complication that absolutely rules out reduction to slogans. I might forgive a parent for explaining these things to very young children in short words and sentences, but the president of the United States is not my parent and I am not a child.

Now, I will admit, some of the difference I saw tonight had to do with the questions, the questioner, and the venue. Rick Warren's questions were always going to be a downhill fight for McCain and an uphill fight for Obama. Everyone knew that. Points to Obama for braving it, and points to McCain for visiting the NAACP convention this year, after Bush boycotted it for the first umpteen years of his political career. Very rarely is a speaking situation, or an audience, a level playing field. Part of McCain's fluency and part of Obama's caution had to do with the tilt of the subject matter. But that was far from all of it.

The Republican Party is running on a long historical cycle of providing easy answers. The Democrats have, for this century and much of the last, been the party that described problems as multivariate and complex, and offered cautious, complex responses that were often not very comforting. That, I think, is what we saw tonight out of McCain and Obama. Nothing has changed. The parties are playing to type.

And after the last eight years, it just dumbfounds me that anyone on earth can still find simple solutions attractive. What is it going to take? How many ham-handed, clumsy moves are going to have to blow up in our face before we accept that perhaps governing this country is harder than it looks? That a governing strategy can't fit into five words, and if someone manages to do it, then what they've just produced isn't substance, but spin? Is the past five years of the Bush administration not enough to show people that incompetent government by the incurious and the unprepared, by people who are caught off guard by what they didn't stir themselves to think about, has real consequences? Consequences that don't go away overnight?

In my darker moments, I sometimes think very hateful thoughts. I think thoughts that prominently include the word "stupid," repeated over and over again. I compare people who would swallow this kind of appeal to dog food. To furniture. To breakfast cereal. To a bag of hammers. To dirt. Brain damaged dirt. But once my frustration cools off, I remember once again how wrong I am to think such things.

It's not stupidity, it's fear.

The electorate puts me in mind of a cancer patient. Barack Obama fits the role of a skillful, educated and supremely ethical doctor. The very best doctors, when talking to cancer patients, have to dance their way through a minefield. They have to accentuate the positive, but it's horribly wrong, even wicked, to eliminate the negative. They have to hedge, they have to point out risks, they have to admit what isn't understood. Their ethics require that they seek out informed consent. That, I assert, is what Obama had to offer tonight: a diagnosis. Diagnoses aren't clear-cut, because human bodies are unpredictable and idiosyncratic, and treatment is often painful, carries risks, and bears no guarantee of success.

John McCain is a pharmaceutical sales rep. He's got some pills to sell. His claims about the pills are power-worded. Whether he's right or not, and even if in the back of our minds we know that the doctor is probably closer to the truth, it's very appealing for us to think about swallowing a pill and watching all that bad, scary cancer just vanish as the magic medicine spreads through us and wipes it out like an eraser. We want to believe it. And so many Americans have talked themselves into a defeatist funk when it comes to understanding any of these issues, or either party's position on them, that investing the discipline to make a truly rational decision seems to them to demand a much higher cost than they think they can afford.

I used cancer patient as my example, rather than any other ailment, because I've known too many cancer patients who let fear, frustration and the temptation of despair turn them to irrational silliness: "alternative" medicine that amounted to voodoo. People whose fear is that powerful may as well be drowning. They'll grab at the explanation that ends in more hope, no matter how transparently foolish it may be.

I still have nagging, stubborn, possibly even indelible objections to Barack Obama's bid for my vote. But I am not on the fence when it comes to who is making the stronger case. I still expect I'm going to write someone in. But I have no illusions about what John McCain is doing. As much as his negative ads aggravate me, after he made lofty promises to stay entirely away from such campaigning (and while he makes the jaw-dropping claim that his campaign hasn't been negative), that's not my biggest grievance with his argument set. My biggest gripe is with its dishonest, violent, condescending simplicity.

Intermission

To teach by Socratic
Is enthymematic.

Commission

So this morning, I got to thinking about the geometry of emendatory claims. Partly, this comes out of my academic work, and partly it comes out of yesterday's Sunday school lesson.

Yesterday, the Sunday school lesson was over Genesis 1. From about verse 4 to the end of the first chapter, God does a lot of dividing: light from dark, dry land from water, water above from water below, vegetation and animals each into their own kind, and so forth. One of the points I made was that a lot of the Old Testament is based on an understanding of God as the One who decrees boundaries. We then talked about Christ's critique of the Pharisees, about His complaint that their traditions had entirely missed the point of the Torah, and I explained it this way: whenever parents lay down boundaries for their kids' behavior, what do the kids immediately do? One person said "Cross them!" That was somewhat true, but another person had an answer I liked better: "Push them." If you tell kids, "This is the line between what is permitted and what will get you in trouble," they will become loophole-seeking missiles. They will edge closer and closer to the line, displaying amazing creativity at cooking up circumstances that the original line didn't enclose, doing as much as they can get away with without being demonstrably outside the line. And the Talmudic hyperinterpretation of the Torah strikes me as exactly the same thing: we obsess over the precise square nanometer of territory that is bad territory, ostensibly so that we can stay off it and on the safe space. And Jesus said to the scribes and Pharisees, "Instead of killing entire forests to overanalyze the point at which you move outside God's will, why not work on being in the center of His will?" And an interesting corollary: in Genesis 1, all those boundaries and divisions that God made corresponded to natural laws, but throughout the Gospels, Jesus broke natural law whenever He had a reason to do so, and promised us that anyone could ask God to suspend natural law, even to make mountains fly through the air, and if we were within His will, He would grant those requests. So here too, the boundaries don't matter nearly as much as the center.

The analogous tidbit from my academic work goes something like this: in too many professional fields, one of the biggest problems is finding an effective way of teaching ethics to new initiates. One big, glaring flaw in the prevailing understanding of ethics is exactly what I've described above: too many people understand ethics only as a line between the conduct that is ethical and the conduct that is unethical. Unethical conduct brings consequences: punishment, loss of status, even just internalized guilt. Therefore, people rationalize and hair-split and plead special circumstances to try to dodge the injury of being judged unethical. Instead, a lot of folks say, we ought to stop thinking of ethics as a floor of behavior below which we must not fall, and think of it instead as a ceiling, as a body of ideas to which we aspire. Instead of being afraid of ethics charges, we ought to hope someday that we can be fully ethical. Instead of worrying about drifting too near the edges, we ought to turn our attention to how to reach the center. And that turn of thought is tied a great deal to identity, to thinking of proper behavior as tied in with who we are. When we treat ethics only as a raised guillotine, we apply it to our conduct, and we have all sorts of incentives to dissociate that conduct from ourselves. But instead of dissecting my sentences to argue that something I said was not technically a lie, maybe I should turn my treatment of truthfulness around and say instead that I want to be, to myself and others, an honest person, so I want to go the extra mile and sacrifice expediency to carve myself into that shape.

To take that back to Biblical teachings, it seems plain to me that a wrong understanding of what God expects is a fear of judgment of individual deeds, and a proper understanding is that He expects us to embrace an identity as His children, as followers and loyalists of His. And that's a completely different strategy for daily life. I don't want to be near the edges, I don't want to keep my attention focused on a floor that I'm in danger of falling through. Instead, I want to dig in deeper toward the center, to stretch higher toward completeness, all the while knowing that anytime I make any progress, it's because my stretching pleases Him, and He gives me, as a gift, what brings me nearer.

Omission

So this is part two of what I wrote about yesterday. I got carried away by the momentum of a rant, and I left out entirely the bit of an idea that had originally spurred me to write.

I'm definitely not sold on Barack Obama, and the chief reason is the capital punishment deal-breaker I mentioned yesterday. He's reluctant, he supported the moratorium in Illinois, he thinks it should be reserved for the "most heinous" crimes, but that's simply not enough. I'm over a decade into refusing to vote for candidates who support capital punishment, and it doesn't feel right to abandon that just because the Greens were lame-brained enough to nominate an utterly unacceptable candidate. The other day, it struck me that I could write in Sister Helen Prejean, or something. But what interests me most is one of the little eddying dynamics that McCain's line of attack may be generating. He's making Obama actually look more acceptable as a president than I'd previously found him. It's not going to overcome my big issue, but I suspect it might actually win Obama more votes than it loses him. Here's why I think that.

Obama does, indeed, have a problem with seeming too good to be true, and for that reason he sets off a lot of people's healthy skepticism. We've been through enough rounds of highly respected, highly accomplished, seemingly upstanding and virtuous public servants tumbling from their pedestals, especially in the past few years, that the arrival of someone with as many obvious plusses as Obama is bound to make people brace themselves, to snap into place as the first chapter of a depressingly familiar story. But McCain's charges against him, most of them venial, (and I almost wrote "niggling," before deciding that would be a really unfortunate choice of words) actually serve to give him a third dimension, to help him step off the page and into reality. They give him balance. And they give me this feeling of relief: if those are his downsides, I can live with them.

I've seen this kind of thing happen with the hiring of new faculty members. During the interview process, and for the first few days, new folks are on their best behavior; they guard against letting any trace of their character flaws slip out. But after the honeymoon's over, after the first impression is made, then they settle in and get broken in, and you start to see them at less than their best, and that's the phase at which I hold my breath: is this going to be a nightmare colleague, or is this going to be an occasionally annoying, once-in-a-while disorganized, on-certain-issues clueless, human being? Once I've seen most of the weaknesses they're carrying, almost all the time I wind up telling myself "This isn't so bad. This is a lovable person, flaws and all." On a handful of occasions, that's not been the case, and the person's downside is something I really can't live with: an explosive and violent temper, or a constant cycle of playing people against one another, or a deeply-rooted contempt for the students, etc. But that's uncommon.

I've heard about Obama that he's ambitious, and sometimes climbs over people to get to his next strategic foothold. True, I find that pretty unattractive, but I also find it pretty unattractive that surgeons, some of them, actually enjoy the sight of blood. I think that's downright creepy. If I knew it was true of someone who was in the room with me, I really think I'd find an excuse to get up and leave. But when I apply a coldly rational perspective to it, it becomes clear that this is not only a helpful trait for a surgeon, but is almost a necessity. I don't suppose they have to like blood, but they've got to be unbothered by it. And in the same way, out of the universe of all presidential candidates who will ever exist, I defy anyone to conceive of one who was free from ambition, one who didn't have to juggle an incredibly complicated, nationwide, web of relationships, and therefore to downplay closeness to some people when the larger objective demanded it. I don't like to think of friendships and working relationships being moved around a chessboard like that, but anyone who thinks they can explain to me how a person can go from anonymous to nominee to the Oval Office without doing it is welcome to try. I don't think it's possible.

I've heard that Obama's inexperienced, and I think he's already had the best answer to that: Rumsfeld and Cheney were two of the most experienced members of the Bush administration, having served at the top level of the executive branch as far back as the nineteen seventies, but the work product they left behind is not exactly anything to brag about.

I truly wonder if McCain wouldn't have been better off putting all, and I mean all, of his focus on answering the question, "What does a McCain presidency have to offer this country?" The fact that Obama was a pretty picture, but utterly two-dimensional, could have helped McCain out a lot, but only if he called as little attention as possible to it. Yesterday, I was listening to NPR in the evening, and they played a clip of Obama responding to the past couple of weeks of McCain attacks, and I thought his response was pitch-perfect: "That's the best you can do?" That's exactly how I feel. That's the best you can do? That's all you found? You put your best strategic heads together, and you came up with a comparison to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears? Wouldn't putting that airtime into your own strengths as a war hero, as a multi-decade leader in national security, as the one who wrote the textbook on crossing party lines and speaking painful truths to one's own party, have been a better investment?

Stephen King wrote in Danse Macabre about the impossible hurdle that horror writers face: you can make the unseen terror more and more nightmarish, more and more blood-chilling, but sooner or later you have to throw the door open and show it, and then you lose every time, because the reader (or audience member) will say "That's scary all right, but imagine how scary it could have been." You throw open the door to show a ten foot tall cockroach, and the reader says "That's horrible, but what if it was a hundred feet tall?" I don't think the analogy applies perfectly to politics, because there are plenty of imputed horrors that do stick, and are deal-breakers, and that do sink a candidacy, but in this case I really think that's what's happening. The charges against Obama are irritating, if true, but on the scale of presidential failings that could doom a candidate, they're pretty piddly, and that may have something of a boomerang effect of making him less of an image, less of a carefully manicured brand, and more of a recognizable human being, complete with body odor and morning breath and the occasional bad mood. Those things aren't damning; they're the sharp details that transform a photograph into a presence.