Calculating Life Span

I used a life span calculator that someone sent me. After I answered all the questions (stuff about age, height, weight, exercise, health history, smoking, drinking, eating, etc), it computed that I would live to be a hundred. Wow that means I'll still be around in 2038.  I immediately apologized to my kids and grandkids.

But I take this result with grains of salt and pepper since it was by a financial planner who would want me to consider planning for a longer life, but also because of the questions it did not ask. For example, there should be questions that:

1. Relate to cancer--e.g. eating pesticides, breathing or drinking chemicals, exposure to radiation.
2. Relate to gun ownership when we know that people who have a gun have shorter life expectancy because of accidents, suicide, and a fearful attitude toward others.
3. Relate to community when we know that people in a denser, walkable, civic-minded, neighborly community are much safer, drive less, and get more exercise.
4. Relate to education with solid studies linking education to wealth and wealth to longevity--and not just financial wealth, but also intellectual, social, civic and spiritual wealth.
5. Relate to loving friendships. Again solid studies show that coordination.
6. Relate to openness to change and new learning, positive attitude, sense of faith, meaning and hope, for self and others, for community and country. 

So I revised the calculator, adding these indicators, and took the test again.  Now it says I'll live to be 150.

Sorry kids. You'll have to put up with me for a long, long time.

The Contemplative Moment

Contemplation, in my language game (ethics of integrity) is a sense of presence--being here, now, with. It is the point at which the real meets the ideal.

Contemplation is an experience that is always with, in, among us even when we are not reflecting on it. It is background to all other experiences of ourselves, of others, and of the world. As long as we are not brain dead, that contemplative moment exists. Yes even in dreaming (day or night), even in focused, concentrated activity, even in committing acts of love or hate, even in believing or disbelieving.

That contemplative moment comes out of the background into the fore at certain times and places which we call "ecstatic," or "religious" or "transcendent,"or "insightful." Let me point to some of those times in my own experience: upon reaching the top of Half Dome, at orgasm with the person I love, on awaking with the solution to a problem with which I have been wrestling, at a demonstration for justice with a hundred thousand people, in hearing a wonderful concert or sermon, while jogging with an emptying mind, while sitting and paying attention to my breathing, in a team meeting in which everything seems to gel, in a lucid dream in which I overcome gravity, in an experience of a magnificent piece of art, a drama, a dance, a sculpture, in visioning an ideal community while engaging in the real one I inhabit.

The contemplative moment as a fundamental experience of presence is also an experience of transcendence. Since we are at the point of where the past is in tension with the future, where our interior life of thinking struggles with our exterior life of acting, where individuality of the person contends with the sociality of the others, and where the real meets the ideal, we are always passing on and beyond. We discard our beliefs, we surpass our ideas, we make up additional words, we think new thoughts. We transcend. Our experience of our presence is at the same time our experience of transcendence. As the scientist philosopher David Deutsch suggests: all problem solving through inquiry, hypothesis, and evidence (i.e. science) is a perception of the infinite.

And when we try to articulate in words or formulas or teachings our contemplative moment, we both reveal and obscure that moment. There are those of us who are gifted with words, who can use words to lift up those moments. Think of John of the Cross, Hildegard of Bingen, Thomas Merton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, certain Zen Buddhists and Sufis. But most will admit that their words only point to and do not capture the basic experience of human existence and transcendence.

And here is the failure of religions which claim to be final or absolute or complete. Their very claim undermines their validity. They deny transcendence and the infinite in these claims. This is why it important to deny their gods while at the same time affirming them as images, symbols, representations of valid human experiences. The mystic and contemplative is always a heretic and must be condemned by or made over by the established church. The mystic and contemplative is always an atheist who will never let an image or idea of the transcendent be final.

And we are all mystics and contemplatives at least in germ. We all have the experience of presence and transcendence that underlies all we think and do. But we can easily "forget" or at least be unmindful of that fundamental experience of being in between, in tension, in transition by pretending to know, to be saved, to be found, to believe. We pretend or claim that our experience of presence and transcendence as it has been formulated by the church or the state or the culture or our own philosophy is ultimate. It seems easier that way--less confrontational, less painful, less depressing. But I don't think it is.

But while I think it is always important to retrieve one's original sense of presence and transcendence over against the words in which it is being expressed, I do not think that contemplation is a matter of authenticity or being "true to oneself" because I think the sense and acceptance of presence and transcendence excludes an authentic or true self or Self to whom we are to be in conformity. The acceptance of presence and transcendence is the acceptance of unknowing, of un-finality, of in-transition, of tension and intention, of contingency, of irony and humor. This is the contemplative way in all we think and do.

The Commons

Three works are dominating my recent thinking.

They are: The Tragedy of the Commons by Garret Hardin (1968, updated 2005); Governing the Commons by Elinor Ostrom (1990), and Reclaiming the Commons by Al Fritsch (2009, updated 2013. Also Naomi Klein, David Bollier, and Brian Donahue)

According to Ostrom, a discussion of the commons is part of a larger discussion on the theory of collective action which is vital to our economy and our politics. Those of us who promote community organizing as an essential component of a free and open society for democratic social change will want to pay close attention to this discussion. I would go so far as to say that much of the polarization in our politics in regards to our economy is due to a lack of critical thinking about how humans access and use the commons meaning "common pool resources" (CPR). 

These resources include land (farms, homes, parks, fisheries, wilderness), water (the seas, lakes, rivers, groundwater basins), the atmosphere (air for breathing, radio waves, wind, climate), wildlife (fish, meat, plants and timber), energy (oil, gas, heat, wind, water), minerals (gold, silver, diamonds, uranium, tantalum, tin, tungsten), people (workers, consumers, students), culture (history, intellectual work, tradition, information)--all a part of the earth itself as a common pool resource. Sustaining these resources is obviously vital to sustaining humanity. "Devising property regimes that effectively allow sustainable use of a common-pool resource requires rules that limit access to the resource system and other rules that limit the amount, timing, and technology used to withdraw diverse resource units from the resource system." (Ostrom)

The tragedy as identified by Hardin and others is that we are on an inevitable trajectory to using up all our CPR and so to extinction especially with the exponential increase in population. It is simply a matter of how human nature has evolved to individually seek short term advantage especially when one cannot be assured of long term profit based on others not acting for their short term advantage. Hardin demonstrates this through mind experiments of herders grazing their cows on a limited common use meadow, by mathematics of game theory especially the prisoners' dilemma, and by general observation. 

The way out of his tragedy is through Leviathan or privatization. To avoid us killing each other competing for resources or totally using up the resources that keep us alive, we give ourselves to the State (Hobbes) which has a monopoly on the means of violence (Weber). Big government owns or controls the resources and makes the rules by which they are used on behalf of the "general welfare" or on behalf of those who run the government. 

Or we destroy the "horror of the commons" by eliminating it entirely through private ownership of everything and allow individual decisions for self-interest to constitute the social order (Adam Smith). However the rights of private ownership and its rules must be monitored and enforced by some mechanism, whether or not it is called "government," that will be set up and controlled probably by those who have the most property. 

Whether through Leviathan or privatization, external intervention, therefore, is the only way out of the tragedy. But because of this neither will ultimately solve the issue because external intervention will be controlled by some party which is subject to the same natural law. Rational individuals will put their self-interest over some long term general welfare.

Along comes Ostrom with a second generation theory of collective action based on her analysis of communities which governed their commons without external intervention; i.e. without relying on a controlling government or on privatization.  New evidence challenges a theory which must either be rejected or expanded to account for the new evidence. And Ostrom spent her academic life (and received a Nobel Prize in Economics) discovering and accumulating this evidence and adjusting her theory of self-organizing communities that were able to govern and manage resources in a sustainable way--sometimes with and sometimes in spite of government and the private sector.

She identifies circumstances and conditions for this third way between government control and privatization. She also shows that the self-organizing model is not only possible, but preferable in that the people developing it "buy into" it as it develops. This model indicates that humans are motivated by more than self-interest even in economic decisions. Affiliation developed in working relations (not just tribal or cultural) and values developed in association are also motivators. This expansion of the theory of human nature beyond that of the first generation theory of collective action is in accords with recent findings by evolutionary psychologists and neuroscientists regarding empathy, social identity, and memory.  

In Reclaiming the Commons, Fritsch is writing to the Church and by extension I think to all congregations within the Judeo-Christian tradition. He develops a theology and a spirituality,  founded in that tradition for living and acting in a way that will use and sustain resources equitably. He provides a clear definition of the problem confronting each of our major resources including a critique of the mindset and morality of the politics and economy at the root of the problem. He offers to the churches ways within their own religious traditions to deal with the issues humanity is now confronting. It is a work that I wish every leader and member of a congregation would read. Fritsch's book like the work of Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Berry, and Jim Conlin in the Catholic tradition offers an eco-spirituality and theology for a new sustainable economics.

Religious congregations within all traditions are themselves self-organizing communities often within or sponsoring other self-organizing communities. Washington Interfaith Network in which my congregation conspires and acts for social justice with many other congregations, neighborhood groups, and other non-governmental, non-profit organizations is itself a means to "reclaim the commons." There are also experiments in urban agriculture, shared transportation systems, and communication of information and knowledge. 

A few days ago I listened to a team led by Mark Warren and Karen Napp describing their findings of six case studies on local community organizing achievements in school reform (see Match on Dry Grass). Brian Donahue provides other excellent experiences of self-organizing groups reclaiming the commons to stop urban sprawl and promote community farms. 

This certainly relates to my own work with Keith Bergthold in creating a strategy for smart growth in the Central Valley of California. Keith, as the chief planner for the City of Fresno, gained the trust of the local neighborhood communities to support a general plan for Fresno that would strengthen existing neighborhoods, encourage infill commercial and housing development, and save farmlands. He is presently working with 14 cities in the Central Valley to do the same so that the urbanization of the Valley coincides with preservation of natural resources and rural and agricultural growth. In order to achieve this, congregations and community organizations have to organize themselves into a powerful network to press political decision makers to constrain private housing developers into a framework of sustainable resources. The State of  California in its efforts to mitigate the carbon emissions that effect climate change has recognized that the City of Fresno and the Central Valley of California is integral to its project but is powerless to make it happen without community action.

One of the lessons of the study of the commons is the understanding that government is not to be identified with the commons nor with the public.  Organization and action through non governmental organizations can create or constitute publics that reclaim the commons and achieve the sustainability of the common resource pool. Public education need not be government run or supported schools. The same for public parks, libraries, recreation centers, TV, news stations, internet, utilities, electric power, community centers.

A government that is constituted by and responsible to publics would be an ally in reclaiming the commons over against both privatization and government control (Leviathan). But for this to be realized means an organization of publics through non-governmental self-organizing communities. This is the vocation of the community organizer who is supported by local churches, neighborhood centers, non profit community development and housing organizations, and cooperatives.

Naomi Klein advances a strategy of linking these local community organizing efforts with regional, national, and international organizations and foundations working to reclaim the commons through conservation, development, alternative economies, and advocacy. This will coincide with a new integration of both "liberation" and "eco" theology and spirituality. This also will result in a political discourse that neither demonizes government nor the private sector but fosters true publics that can hold both accountable in using, maintaining, and restoring the commons.

Spirituality of Integrity

Yesterday I discussed the three Christian mysteries of Creation, Incarnation, and Resurrection and their corresponding spiritualities.

In my own reflection on the historical research, I think that Jesus of Nazareth probably exercised a creation spirituality, but was received by his companions as a unique expression of the divine (incarnation) and by reformers and the establishment as a radical transformer (resurrection). While persons I named in the previous blog may show a more dominant spiritual trait, all those with deeper spirituality do integrate all three.

I said that the three spiritualities complement each other and correct their distortions. To show this I return to my integrity ethics in which I identified three dimensions of human existence or presence: spatial, temporal, communal; being here, now, with.

Creation spirituality corresponds to the communal or "with" dimension: the tension between person and community, the individual and the whole. It is the sense of relation to and among all persons and all things. God, the holy, transcendence consists in the whole fabric or relationships that hold us, the universe, the multiverse together. It denies a universal or absolute viewpoint beyond the integration of all viewpoints. Such a viewpoint would be the abdication of community responsibility and culture.

Incarnational spirituality corresponds to the spatial or "here" dimension: the tension between inner and outer, spirit and body, interiority and externality at the same point. God, the sacred, transcendence consists in universal consciousness, the wonder of nature, the emerging pattern in chaos. It denies a separate space outside from which a deus ex machina can intervene to fix things.  Such a supernaturalism is the abdication of critical thought and science.

Resurrection spirituality corresponds to the temporal or "now" dimension: the tension between past and future, history and innovation in the same moment. God, the infinite, transcendence is the coming, becoming, intentionality to the new in the old, possibility in actuality. Radical transformation negates both the nostalgia of reaction and the fantasy of utopia out of which salvation comes. Reaction and apocalypse is the abdication of transformative action and politics

When creation spirituality fixes on a single viewpoint or idolizes a human institution, incarnation thinking says "transcend by going deeper" and resurrection thinking says "pass on to the new."

When incarnational spirituality gets stuck in a certain place, creation thinking says "consider its relations to others in the dynamic whole" and resurrection thinking says "open new possibilities and transform."

When resurrection spirituality exalts a utopian new order, resurrection thinking says "remember where you came from" and incarnational thinking says "nothing is pure and perfect."

A spirituality of integrity integrates not only the terms of each of the tensions: self and other, inner and outer, past and future.  It integrates the tensions themselves so that the real is always in the ideal and the ideal in the real.  The holy/sacred/infinite in transcendence is the dynamism of the whole of creation, life, and history revealed in our presence--being here, now, with.  In a spirituality of integrity, the religious, science, and politics are all present and accounted for.

And to refer back to and follow up on my previous reflections on humor, the best sign of an integral spirituality is a sense of humor.

Three Mysteries

Bernie and I love English mysteries--whodunits where unknown killers are revealed by clever (but usually flawed) detectives.

Mystery originally meant "secret"; and in the mystery religions of Roman times, mysteries were secret rites, key doctrines, unknown at least by rational means, that opened the door to human meaning and salvation.

Christianity has three central mysteries, each leading to a special "spirituality" or existential stance towards reality.  Each also has a dark side or distortion. They are: creation, incarnation, and resurrection. Simularities I think can be found in other spiritual traditions.

Creation:

Creation is the doctrine of why there is something rather than not nothing; how we got here and why; the purpose and meaning of the universe, our earth, and us. The latest edition of our creation story includes the big bang, cooling inflation, separation of elements in dense gasses, development of large structures galaxies, stars, planets, including the sun and earth, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen and the evolution of life, mammals, homo, homo sapiens, development of culture, economics, and politics.

When I consider creation spirituality, I think of St. Francis Assisi, Meister Ekhardt, Thoreau, Thomas Berry, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and indigious religion.  Some of its marks are: a sense of unity with the universe, reaffirmation of the feminine principle, relationship with all living beings, a respect for the earth, assumption of the role as caregiver and gardener, and original blessing. The Christian writings that embody a creation spirituality are found in Matthew and Mark.

But the creation story and its spirit also has its distortions: humanity as dominator of nature, original sin and sacrifice, mastery over the woman and the earth, foundation and authority by a male architect and ruler. This is loss of a sense of comedy in tragedy.

Incarnation:

Incarnation is the doctrine of the incorporation of divinity in humanity, spirit in matter, transcendence as immanence.  This doctrine runs contrary to the Platonism of ancient times and the Cartesianism of modern times. Scholarship indicates that Jesus probably did not teach incarnation, he was more of a creationist.  And he certainly did not teach it about himself. But that is what he meant to his earliest followers. He became a direct way to encounter the Transcendent without the need of middle men, whether kings or priests. The latest nuance in this doctrine is the discernment of the sacred in the secular. Action with others for the just city is where we are linked to the divine act of creation.

Some of the marks of incarnationism are: engaging in the world, immersion into the messiness, chaos, indeterminacy of matter, holy sexuality, respect for science, transcendence in, not apart from, material reality.

St Ignatius Loyola promoting contemplation in action, affirming the importance of liberal education in the humanities, and daring to intervene in politics of church and society is an incarnationist. Kierkegaard, the discoverer of the religious in human existence, consider the Incarnation as the central doctrine. We also think of Thomas Aquinas, Gallileo, Teilhard de Chardin, Gabriel Marcel, Reinhold Niebuhr, Harvey Cox, Riane Eisler, Luce Irigaray. In Christianity, the Johanine writings best illustrate this doctrine and spirituality.

The distortions: incarnation as a dropping out of and back to another place and time, separation of matter and spirit, Machiavellian politics, suffering/matter/flesh as evil, utilitarian ethics, disenchantment of nature, the one dimensionality of consumerism, personal self-interest over or constituting the public sphere, material gain as divine favor. I think this is the loss of a sense of contingency.

Resurrection:

Resurrection is the doctrine of salvation and redemption and also of hope. In the face of death which all creation undergoes and which is encountered in the incarnation, persons and communities and nations can achieve life. This is the doctrine of radical transformation symbolized by the caterpillar, the cocoon, and the butterfly. It is the desire for justice in a situation of injustice.

Some of the marks of resurrection are hope in a desperate situation, commitment to liberation in an oppressive social order, action with others in the work of transformation, organization of publics--spaces of freedom and actualization.

In Christian writings, it is Luke and Paul that emphasize resurrection. I think of the great reformers Luther, DiFiori, John XXIII, the liberation theologians from Boff to Cone, feminist and civil rights advocates.

But there are distortions of a resurrection spirituality.  A discontinuation in time, revolution as an engineered force, a morally superior vanguard, judgment by a new order of higher beings, apocalyptic thinking that denies history and the material universe. I think this is a loss of the sense of irony.


These three mysteries and their spiritualities complement and correct the distortions or idols of each other. I explain next.

The Church and Secularism

The Pope's resignation has stimulated many news articles about the Roman Catholic Church.

Last Sunday there was an article about Cardinal Archbishop Whurl of DC who, perhaps waging his own campaign for office, said that the next Pope must be able to evangelize Fallen Away Roman Catholics to renounce the secularism into which they have tumbled and return to the Church.

Bishop Whurl just doesn't get that many of us FARCs have left the RC Church precisely because we wanted to deepen our spirituality. As I argued earlier, Whurl, like other religious leaders, misunderstands the meaning of the secular.  We FARCs see that the RCC in its doctrine, its ritual, and especially its authority 1) puts off radical transformation to some other time and space, e.g. assumption into heaven or spiritual body resurrection, and 2) separates the sacred from the secular, spirit from body, father sun from mother earth. So doing, it supports a political economy that encourages a consumer culture that is destroying our habitat and each other.

We who have left the authority structure of the RC Church have not abandoned the sacred in life, action, and creation. Nor have we left the universal congregation of the faithful. We place ourselves in and ally ourselves with many congregations, including many secular and religious communities of women and men (in and out of affiliation with Roman authority) which are seeking cultural, economic, and political justice.

Most of us who have left the RCC authority structure have so done because we want to be part of a congregation that exemplifies solidarity, integrity, inclusiveness in the path of Jesus and his earliest desciples (which I learned in catechism are the marks of the true ecclesia). These are congregations that exclude no one from the table, that act in concert to ensure that people of color, women, immigrants, gay and lesbian persons, and the poor have equity, and that place no priestly or patron class over or between persons and the fulfillment of their potential here and now.

Bishop Whurl cannot see, much less accept, that.  His identity and his power are totally wrapped up in the organization of authority of the RCC.

Perhaps Joe Ratzinger now does see that. Perhaps this is why, like us FARCs, he resigned. I pray so.

__
Update: Just learned that Joe is keeping his Popename, the white dress, and staying in the Vatican. So my prayers were not answered.

Humor and Politics

So (notice how everybody starts talking with "so" these days)...

In the last blog we followed Lippit treating humor from an incongruity that stimulates a psychic release (e.g. laughter) to an attitude of human existence.  Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche point to humor as signifying the highest human achievement (the religious for K, transcendence for N).

Homo sapiens is the only species we know that can both speak and laugh at least in the highly and increasingly complex way that we do. And evolutionary psychologists like Terrence Deacon trace that to our developed ability to use symbolic forms. That is, imagination, designing images which represent things; or objectification, cutting out of our sensual field objects which stand apart from us; or abstraction, making symbols that include other symbols or groups of them; or thought, putting forth ideas to understand things in a way that they can be criticized and transformed to better understand things.

The use of symbols in imagination, thinking, and just accommodating to our environment means a distancing, a setting apart, a taking of a higher viewpoint.

Let's consider some great humorists.  I think of: Aristophanes portraying the women of Greece who stop war by witholding sex from their increasingly horny husbands and lovers. Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales of the foibles of medieval royalty, church people, tradesmen. Cervantes and his unwitting Don Quixote with lance drawn giving the coup de grace to chivalry. Mark Twain's story of Huck deciding to go to hell rather than betray slave friend Jim. Charlie Chaplin on the assembly line. George Carlin on his Catholic upbringing; Bill Cosby and Dick Gregory stories of their black heritage. Woody Allen as the Jew in psychotherapy.

What is common to all is their making fun of themselves and the groups that define them. That implies a distancing--an ability to look down on themselves as silly mortals from the viewpoint of the gods. A sense of humor is a sense of contingency. Humor means not taking ourselves too seriously as if we know the truth, are righteous, are at the top of the heap. In fact nothing is funnier than seeing the righteous, top dog, aristocrat slip on the banana or get a pie in the face especially if we can see ourselves there as well. Think Marx Brothers or Monty Python.

I am reminded of my favorite line in Genet's Balcony. After the revolutionaries capture the power elite (the general, the bishop, the president, the industrialist), they bring them to the brothel and ask the Madame what they should do with them. She doesn't say kill them. She says: "Take off their clothes!" Once when some black folk were going to have a meeting with Chicago Mayor, Saul Alinsky told them to imagine him without any clothes on. At the meeting you would hear chuckles and know that some were taking Alinsky's advice.

A sense of humor is a political virtue and laughter is a political act. Humor puts us all in the same situation--no one better than anyone else and all of us are prone to silly mistakes. Comics laugh with, not at. The do not ridicule by reducing someone to less than a person.

Compare Jon Stewart to Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh and his kind ridicule their opponents. They are mean. They turn other persons into objects of hatred or evil aliens. They objectify and distance the other without any means of reconciliation because they do not include themselves in the joke. Ridicule polarizes by making the other totally other without the possibility of a relationship in which one laughs together at common foibles. Notice how often the Limbaugh kind argue ad hominem--not by countering an argument through evidence, but by labeling the person as stupid or evil or enemy.

This is true on the left as well. I have heard tirades by revolutionaries who label people with whom they disagree politically, economically, culturally as fascists or ignorants to be done away with. Stalin and Pol Pot were revolutionaries without a sense of humor. I remember the Weather Underground when they lost their sense of humor and got serious--and destructive.

Jon Stewart makes fun of all of them right, left, and center but without the meanness. He exposes silly opinions and beliefs, contradictions and hypocrisies, without demonizing the people who hold them. Most important he includes himself in his humor. We laugh with Jon Stewart because we are not taking him or ourselves seriously. We snarl with Rush Limbaugh because we take ourselves and him very seriously.

Look at Cervantes and his treatment of Don Quixote. Don Quixote is a caricature, fantasizing the silly waning ideal of medieval knighthood foiled by the practical, realistic Sancho Panza. But Quixote is a sympathetic and even tragic figure whom we with Cervantes come to love. True humor links comedy and tragedy because it is the consciousness of contingency in all human affairs. It would not be humorous if Don Quixote were just a fool to be ridiculed and dismissed. Nor would it be one of the greatest pieces of literature ever produced.

The righteous true believers without a sense of humor, who get their kicks by putting down their opponents, polarize and so diminish politics. Stewart, Colbert, Capitol Steps, Saturday Night Live get us to laugh at ourselves, help us to acknowledge the tension of life and create a space of free speech and interaction.

Classically the definition of our species has been "speaking animal" or "laughing animal" or "political animal." All those definitions go together. Our ability to use symbols makes it possible to distance ourselves and laugh. Without humor there is no solidarity with our contingent companions on the journey and therefore no politics.

Ideology and Humor

The liberal press was laughing at the seriousness with which the conservative media took a journalist's sarcastic inquiry as to whether Senator Hegel, nominee for Secretary of Defense, ever spoke before Friends of Hamas and the Junior League of Hezbollah. Without checking whether such organizations even exist (they do not!), the rumor shot round conservative talking heads and internet sites of a new concern about Hegel taking money from foreign terrorist organizations.

A New York times article and a Huff News analyst indicated that this is why Republicans are so behind in using the internet. But a commentator on this article proffered that their real problem was not technical but "epistemological." These folks simply cannot recognize humor.  And I think he is right.

Remember Colbert and President Bush's perplexity at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.

But then I don't think it's a Republican or Democratic, nor a Liberal or Conservative matter.  GK Chesterton and William Buckley were great conservative humorists. And I sure know a number of people on the Left who take themselves too seriously. I think it is a matter of a fundamental attitude towards human life and existence.

I remembered the Danish minister and philosopher Sõren Kierkegaard had a lot to say about humor and human existence.  And in googling him I found British Philosopher John Lippit and his wonderful treatment of humor in a series of four papers. He first considers humor as incongruity following Kant and Schopenhauer; then as superiority following Hobbes; then following Freud as psychic release.  While all these provide some insight into humor, none or all of them do not really provide a verifiable theory. So he drops the quest for theory and, in his fourth paper, deals with Nietzsche and Kierkegaard to consider humor and its affiliates irony, sarcasm, ridicule as existential phenomena.

K and N have decidedly different vocabulary and belief systems.  Just notice their different takes on "Christianity," "morality," and "religious." Yet as Lippit indicates, both see irony and humor as positive expressions of human existence. Both see in humor "expressions of the limitations of human possibility" and the "limits of all human objects of desire" (Lippit). Both would see humor not as a divergence (mere entertainment), but more as an existential attitude to all things human including oneself and even one's beliefs.

K speaks the language of the leap of faith through the contradictory situation of finding enjoyment in the suffering of limitations. N speaks the language of never giving up the critique and the search for a higher human condition (Ubermensch) which is more a dimension than a state of being; and I think should be translated "transcendence" rather than indicating some man of steel or the Kurzweilian Singularity. K speaks of a place and time of rest in God, but without certainty and even without ever giving up search or contradiction. His God seems very close to the Ubermensch, i.e. transcendence achieved here and now through faith, not belief.  In other words: the mystery of the Incarnation: the sacred not beyond, but in the secular; spirit not separate from, but of matter.

The ideologue, Hoffer's "True Believer," whether left, center, or right, whether liberal or conservative, whether Democrat or Republican cannot distinguish, must less relativize, his beliefs through faith or transcendence. The ideologue has one path and cannot envision another, one doctrine and cannot understand another, one language, one god, one absolute. Lacking imagination, he cannot laugh at himself, his products, his nation, his world. He can laugh at others to whom he feels superior as long as it does not include himself or his kind. He confuses ridicule which is mean and damning with humor which is jovial and redemptive.  

More to come on the humorist.

Revolution or Reform

Am I a Revolutionary or a Reformer?  Well, maybe neither.

I once wrote an article that Martin Marty published in his New Theology series—my 15 minutes of fame. I distinguished “revolution,” as in the stars, as cyclical time in which creation all starts over again from “rebellion” as Camus described it as more historical but never totally resolved time.  So I still associate revolutionaries in the manner of Pol Pot who would totally remake the cosmos by destroying all that came before.  I like Trotsky’s notion of “perpetual revolution” better—but still it seems to not only throw out all the bathwater, if not the baby, when even some of the bathwater might be preserved—although filtered.

As for “reform,” it sounds too wishy washy—tinkering around the edges without making fundamental changes.  I.e. changing form but not substance. Though I liked Pope John’s call to “semper reformendum” and the notion of institution (i.e. form) change.

So I guess I don’t want to refer to myself as a revolutionary or a reformer—my idiosyncrasy.  Politically I would like to describe myself as a republican in the sense of creating and sustaining publics—spaces of freedom where people can act and achieve power.  Unfortunately that wonderful word has been totally discredited by the US Party.

Incidentally, I often describe myself as culturally a libertarian, economically a socialist, and politically a republican—with the political limiting any of the excesses of economics (including socialism) and politics and economics limiting any of the excesses of culture (including libertarianism).  In my mind, all the institutions of culture including church and university, all the institutions of economy including the market and corporation, and all the institutions of politics including government and its agencies should be accountable to the public(s) and their interest(s).  “Social justice”—a phrase still important to me includes political, economic, and civil/cultural justice.  But to me, mentored by Arendt and Dewey, the political (including but not limited to accountable government) is primary.

Not sure how revolutionary that is. Such republican moments have been found throughout human history and I think can be justified in human existence and nature.  Arendt did call them revolutions—all of which were betrayed by the economic and cultural. Those republican moments need to be continually organized and sustained.

Presently I do see the American state as a plutocracy in democratic or populist form, not a republic. And to achieve its republican ideal might indeed be a “revolutionary” action.