Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

The American Creed

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While I am a Christian and therefore find allegiance to the kingdom of God, the person of Christ, my family, and personal virtue to trump loyalty to a nation or a state, I still really love being American. I went through a brief phase where my interest in Anabaptist theology and concerns for the dangers of statist loyalty and patriotic idolatry caused me to through out any concept of national identity with its abuses. That’s what Seneca and many of the early church fathers did with anger, it’s dangerous, so root it all out. But I do love America. I am, as David Bentley Hart says of himself, something of an american chauvinist. And so this closing salvo from Paul Johnson’s book, A History of the American People was touching to me, if not naive in some respects (I typed it because I wanted the passage to stick in my mind, any errors below are my own). It’s worth reading without my rambling reflections beneath it: 

“…[T]he story of America is essentially one of difficulties being overcome by intelligence and skill, by faith and strength of purpose, by courage and persistence. America today, with its 260 million people, its splendid cities, its vast wealth, and its unrivaled power, is a human achievement without parallel. That achievement-the transformation of a mostly uninhabited wilderness into the supreme national artifact of history-did not come about without heroic sacrifice and great sufferings stoically endured, many costly failures, huge disappointments, defeats, and tragedies. There have indeed been many set-backs in 400 years of American history. As we have seen, many unresolved problems, some of daunting size, remain. But the Americans are, above all, a problem-solving people. They do not believe that anything in this world is beyond human capacity to soar to and dominate. The will not give up. Full of essential goodwill to each other and to all, confident in their inherent decency, and their democratic skills, they will attack again and again the ills in their society, until they are overcome or at least substantially redressed.  So the ship of state sails on, and mankind still continues to watch its progress, with wonder and amazement and sometimes apprehension, as it moves into the unknown waters of the 21st century and the third millennium. The great American republican experiment is still the cynosure of the world’s eyes. It is still the first, best hope for the human race. Looking back on its past, and forward into its future, the auguries are that it will not disappoint an expectant humanity. (History of the American People 976)

Johnson’s remarkable paean to the American people only indirectly references the government. Instead it is largely about the cultural virtues that typify Americans, broadly. Some of his language is nearly numinous in nature, but it need not be taken that way. In a civic sense, America is exceptional. The question is whether his optimism will be proven well-founded or flimsy.

I think it is stupid for us, as a nation, to look to our past and reject it. To do so is to be lost. But many do just that, and like the baptists who reject church tradition they lose their way in the waves of the culture.

An interesting question to ask for Christians who read passages like the one above is this: are there cultural tools for Christian spiritual formation? Just as each culture has unique combinations of vices, so might each have unique combinations of virtues? For instance, certain cultural emphases might coinhere with the gospel in such a way as to help it be understood even more. My suspicion is that American culture focused a great deal on industriousness and problem solving. This can be seen in technological advancements and in the fact that a form of stoic pragmatist individualism seems to have been our chief philosophical contribution (Emerson and James). And so is there a version of the American creed that is naturally ennobling for American Christians without appealing to baser forms of ‘my country is never wrong’ patriotism? I think so. The idea that Christians tend to believe in ‘America: Right or Wrong’ is silly on its face as many Americans fear that abortion is bringing America under God’s wrath precisely because America is wrong to allow it. 

The Pincer Attack

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One of the mostly commonly utilized conceptual weapons in the rhetorical attack on being a normal person is ‘sexual fluidity.’

In a nutshell: “Sexual fluidity is one or more changes in sexuality or sexual identity (sometimes known as sexual orientation identity).”  It’s a favorite concept among third wave feminists, especially those who argue against hetero-normativity (which is another way of saying, ‘reproductively viable intercourse’). It is especially important to these theorizers because sexual fluidity is allegedly very common among women and therefore central to female experience. I suspect it’s actually common due to the difficulty some feminist theorists have finding partners of the opposite sex. 

Anyway, recent findings contradict this notion. One finding inverts a major feminist theory, the other is more sobering.

In the first instance, it turns out that sexual fluidity, if it exists at all, may have evolved due to polygynous household arrangements. The idea is that sexually fluid women were less likely to be competitive if they found one another sexually attractive: 

“…women may have been evolutionarily designed to be sexually fluid in order to allow them to have sex with their cowives in polygynous marriage and thus reduce conflict and tension inherent in such marriage.”

And so women with such propensities supposedly remained in polygynous households longer (see Genesis 16:6), they had more children, and their children survived. Incidentally, unrestrained sexual behavior favors a small number of men in the modern world. So, on college campuses, a much smaller percentage of male students is sexually active with multiple partners from a significantly larger pool of female students who are active with multiple partners. And while this isn’t a polygnous marriage, it would be analogous to the circumstances under which alleged sexual fluidity evolved (multiple female cooperating for the opportunity to have children with resource/charisma rich males). In other words, sexual fluidity is just a way for the patriarchy to have multiple women and for women to have more children. It’s not actually a radical idea against the sexual order. 

In the second place, it appears to be much more rare than previously believed. “The present paper reviews longitudinal studies on sexual attraction which indicate that the great majority of women do not have a fluid sexuality, but have instead stable attractions over time.”

Haha, #science. And etc. 

Remembering: Part 1

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Every year, around the anniversary of his death, I sit and think about a friend. I’ve done this for several July’s in a row. This year I did not. My daughter had been born and I was utterly distracted from my normal habits. 

In high school he was an atheist. We often argued about God’s existence (despite being in debate class I found political debates boring). In college, he had a break from reality connected to several bad habits he’d developed in high school.

Before he graduated, classmates gave him a dose of real-talk about the probable results of his excessive drinking. He had been one of the brightest guys I’d ever met, and I tried to surround myself only with people I thought were very bright, he rose to the top. He excelled, especially, at music theory and debate. He was two years older than me. At this point we were not friends.

Anyway, out of the blue, he contacted me when I was in college. He claimed to have become a Christian as a result of his apparent breakdown. He wrote a bunch of music. He even offered to help my brother’s band produce an album, presumably as a kindness to me. His conversion experience seemed sincere, though some of our mutual friends told me that they weren’t sure he wasn’t pulling an elaborate prank.

We spent the weekend with my roommates and I. We attended some concerts, debated Scripture, and talked about stupid high school antics. From this point on, he would regularly call me. He eventually asked me to baptize him, so I did. This took place over about 2 years, with the baptism somewhere in the middle. I slept so little from 2003-2010 that anything within that time frame seems almost simultaneous. 

From 2008-2010, we stayed in touch, grabbed food a few times when he was in town. Sometimes, I ignored his phone calls. It was never personal and he knew he usually contacted me in what could only be described as hypermanic states.

In 2010, he died. Causes were never made public. I have my suspicions, but they don’t matter. Since then, I go to his MySpace music page and listen to the good songs once a year. I used to go to the funeral home webpage to reread his obituary, but two or three years ago, it went down. Eventually, the MySpace page will be gone. I checked it last week and none of his old songs would play. That’s a shame because my brother and I both lost his album. 

I don’t like being sad. I don’t reminisce to make myself sad. I accept the ancient belief that it’s important to remember the dead so that they remain active in history. I don’t mean animism, but that specifically remembering people brings their words and actions into history anew. That feels especially true to me if they never had children. There are men and women whose deaths go unremembered every day. Christ remembers them. But, it just seems intuitively right to try to hold those who were close to you in your heart if you can. And it’s not that I don’t believe in heaven or the resurrection from the dead. I do. I just believe that history matters and people are supposed to remain in it longer than 28 years or so.

I similarly call to memory two other friends. One died when I was in high school. My last words to him were when I was tutoring him in geometry and he was refusing to grasp the concept (we played soccer together so the harshness is playful): Don’t be such a f*cking idiot. Remembering him reminds me to be circumspect with my words. Going to a funeral for a Christian brother and soccer teammate while remembering that as your last conversation is sobering. 

The other isn’t known to have died, but he has disappeared. 

Now, I wrote this short reflection for personal reasons. I never meant to post it. But the months-off timing of my recollections was bizarre this year.

 

 

National Men’s Day: A Stream of Consciousness about Masculinity

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To be a man is first to be human:

  1. To be a man is to seek virtue.
  2. To seek virtue, a man must seek adventure. Courage requires risk.
  3. To be a man is to build.
  4. To build is to restore the past or to create the future. 
  5. To be a man is to destroy and incorporate that which opposes building. The fur of the predator becomes the pelt of the hunter. The cave of monsters becomes a home. The fire becomes a tool.
  6. To build is to reason. To be a man is, therefore to seek truth.  

To be a man is inherently sexual:

  1. To be a man is to love women.
  2. To be a man is to find a woman.
  3. To be a man is to be desirable to women.
  4. To be a man is to be desirable, in particular, to the woman. 
  5. To be a man is to not be a woman.
  6. To be a man is to be strong, durable, and steady.
  7. To be a man is to fight. Man builds and destroys, woman builds and sustains.
  8. To be a man is to need the company of men apart from women.

To be a man is tribal:

  1. If a man needs the company of other men, then their families become a tribe.
  2. To have a tribe is to have honor.
  3. To have honor is to know shame. Men shame other men when their behavior is unbecoming of their status, family, the group norms, or the truth. 
  4. To have a tribe is to be wary of danger.
  5. To be a man, then, is to preserve the old ways. For just as to be human is to build the future, to be a man is to ensure that the progress of the past is not lost. 

Thomas Sowell and Our Ridiculous Culture

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Thomas Sowell observes:

The real war — which is being waged in our schools, in the media, and among the intelligentsia — is the war on achievement. When President Obama told business owners, “You didn’t build that!” this was just one passing skirmish in the war on achievement.

The very word “achievement” has been replaced by the word “privilege” in many writings of our times. Individuals or groups that have achieved more than others are called “privileged” individuals or groups, who are to be resented rather than emulated.

The length to which this kind of thinking — or lack of thinking — can be carried was shown in a report on various ethnic groups in Toronto. It said that people of Japanese ancestry in that city were the most “privileged” group there, because they had the highest average income.

What made this claim of “privilege” grotesque was a history of anti-Japanese discrimination in Canada, climaxed by people of Japanese ancestry being interned during World War II longer than Japanese Americans.

If the concept of achievement threatens the prevailing ideology, then real achievement in the face of obstacles is a deadly threat. That is why the achievements of Asians in general — and of people like the young black man with no arms — make those on the left uneasy. And why the achievements of people who created their own businesses have to be undermined by the President of the United States.