A nice coincidence that the Unitarian magazine UU World is featuring a church that has a series of portraits of liberal saints (such as Gandhi, at right), just at the same time that Tikkun is featuring a different one. Both sets of saints include people from other religious traditions. The Christian one in San Francisco by Mark Dukes is a much larger project and so includes a wider range. The difference is styles is striking.
This article by Atul Gawande in the New Yorker is the single best thing I have read on how we should do healthcare. He makes a very strong case that it is not ultimately who pays (private or public insurance) that matters: it’s whether the delivery of health services is coordinated for the good of the patient, and with accountability. It’s actually about putting the care back into healthcare: in detail, with examples.
Gawande compares the most expensive city for healthcare in the country (McAllen, Texas) with places that give equally good or better care at half or even a third the cost. The most distressing angle in the story is the degree to which doctors have identified maximizing their own income as a primary goal, and the discovery that this culture only really took off in McAllen 15 years ago. The best parts are the descriptions of locations where doctors have got together to make sure that it is the patients who benefit, as in Grand Junction, CO. It is clear that an ethic of care shared by the medical providers in an area is the critical factor that both reduces healthcare costs and improves outcomes.
In McAllen the government is already the biggest payer for healthcare. But a great of deal of the “care” is care for the doctors’ incomes not the patients’ health. In Grand Junction the doctors got together and agreed on a system that evens out fees from different payers (private insurance or government) and shares information about patients. At the Mayo clinic all the docs are on salary, so they don’t personally benefit from providing more operations or tests: the docs are paid as a team to provide the best results for patients.
I am a supporter of single payer, because it seems much the most rational way to go, but how to find the most caring way to go is actually another whole issue. It’s a mistake to focus healthcare reform entirely on single payer, rather than on the quality of care and on the creation of a culture among health care professionals that prioritizes providing care over increasing incomes. Gawande has great examples about how that has been done locally and so could be done nationwide.
I found it fascinating that another article in that New Yorker on the psychology of the banking sector quoted Richard Posner saying that Greed had not been the problem. Posner is one of the most prominent conservatives to admit that deregulation of the economy went way too far. But he doesn’t like the idea of tagging the mice who played while the cat was away with the Greed word. “Greed” seems such a big slavering ghastly description of someone that I can see how people avoid using it. Does “Greed” with a capital G adequately describe the profit-maximizing docs in McAllen? No: they are concerned about their patients, they deliver very fine medical services, they take pride in their work. But compared to the way the Mayo Clinic or Grand Junction docs operate it becomes clear that concern for the patient is not as strong, and concern for their own profit is much stronger. A culture of profitmaking can overwhelm a culture of service: it’s happening all over, and it’s no wonder that banking and medicine are becoming dysfuntional: both should be ways to serve the people, not to make you much richer than other people. But it takes a good description of a Grand Junction system to see just how greed has made a McAllen system cost three times as much, and it would take a good descritpion of service-oriented banking to show just how greedy our bankers have become.
President Obama has reportedly dropped the word “empathy” from his speeches about the Supreme Court, likely in response to conservatives’ claims that empathy has no place in our justice system.
How strange. The president is expected to end each speech with a religious invocation: “God bless America.” But he gets smeared for seeking to infuse our public institutions with empathy, one of the most spiritual human impulses.
Since my post last week about this issue, the empathy debate has continued to boil on, and has even taken a few unexpected turns.
Yesterday Charles Krauthammer delivered a fairly routine argument against Obama’s invocation of empathy, saying “empathy is a vital virtue to be exercised in private life” and in legislation, but not in the justice system.
Today, however, David Brooks took an unexpectedly strong stand in defense of empathy, describing it as a basic force in all human decision-making and suggesting that Sonia Sotomayor “will be a good justice if she can empathize with the many types of people and actions involved in a case, but a bad justice if she can only empathize with one type, one ethnic group or one social class.” In other words, the more empathy the better.
Stanley Fish succeeded in cutting to the heart of the debate in his op-ed this past weekend. The empathy controversy, he explained, is rooted in the fissure between justice and legality:
You might think that “legal” and “just” go together, and sometimes they do; but in the real world “just” and “legal” can come apart. A decision is just when it reflects an overarching vision of what is owed is to each man and woman. A decision is legal when it can be said to follow from established rules, statutes, precedents.
In this framework, an empathetic judge is one who rules on legality with an eye toward justice.
Fish goes on to explain that influential lawyers have criticized the Brown v. Board decision as lacking a strong legal basis. Only empathetic judges (rather than those rigidly obsessed with precedents) could have made that ruling, which we now see as so basic and foundational to our society.
It’s disappointing that despite Obama’s strong words about empathy, he appears nevertheless to have picked a nominee who seems inclined to hew narrowly to precedent, rather than taking a more expansive view of the courts’ role in advancing equality.
It’s all here, succinctly stated. No wonder this commencement address got a standing ovation. Rabbi Lerner at the Pacific School of Religion. This is why I work here and count myself unbelievably fortunate to do so, despite the fact that we are underfunded, understaffed and as stressed as most other social change activists.
Capitalism is primarily about profit, as we know, and we are in desperate need of a New Bottom Line, which is all about creating a loving and sustainable commonwealth. But let’s first give capitalism its due, and understand why it is so appealing to our spirits as well as our pockets (if we are doing well). If we don’t, we won’t understand its strength.
For a minute, think about the past not the future: the ways the rule of the merchant and moneylender was better than what came before. Comparing capitalism’s bottom line with that of traditional societies dominated by religion, it’s clear the pragmatism of the $ opened up new space.
Example: it was commercial freedom that enabled gay bars, baths, magazines and districts to grow in the relative freedom of great cities (made huge and anonymous by the industrial for-profit economy), which enabled gay culture to flourish. Then it was Disney (of all companies) and IBM who were among the first big institutions to give spousal benefits to same sex partners. Societies run by traditional ideology would not have countenanced that. But a growing number of businesses run by straight people were so unmoved by traditional morality in their business lives, so given over to Mammon, that they actually rented space to gay enterprises, or sold paper to, or advertised in, gay publications (though they wouldn’t have been seen dead in the Castro, San Francisco’s gay district, in their personal lives, nor would they have let gay people into their church).
Substitute any minority status for “gay” above and the same kind of argument can be made. Wages (as opposed to subsistence farming), cities, commercial freedom to expand one’s own meeting places and speech, plus access to the education a commercial society requires: those gave the oppressed a few dollars in the marketplace and space to use them to grow their own cultures. Desire for crass monetary gain by straight white businesspeople helped break down aspects of traditional patriarchy and white privilege. We owe them thanks, don’t we?
Now it’s increasingly clear that the marketplace in religion is breaking down traditional religion itself. People are shopping for elements of religion. Yoga from here, meditation from there, weddings and funerals in church, kabbala for spice. Clark Strand laid it all out this week in a post called “i-Religion: Spirituality as Playlist.” Apparently, it’s all about what religion can do for me, not what I have to do to meet the requirements of my religion.
Me, I don’t know if that’s self-centered and bad, or self-actualizing and good. Most revolutions are paradoxical and two-edged.
But it does all sound similar to the long slow break-up of patriarchy to me: positive in what it makes possible, but depressing in so far as commercial values become the long-term winners. Why did the capitalists allow traditional patriarchal morality and privilege to break down? Could it be because their bottom line didn’t really need it? Was it just a set of prejudices they had that they were actually better off (in dollar terms) without? Yes, they had to be brought into the more equal world kicking and screaming–they are only human after all. But gradually, have they not understood that a true commercial commodification of every part of the people’s life, and absorption of all the smartest business types into running it, is only possible if everyone is equal before the dollar, and equally in thrall to it?
The liberation movements (whether black, gay, feminist, whatever) in their early stages typically embrace ideals of solidarity and dreams of a better world where all people care about each other as worthy for their own sake. But over time as they get their place at the table, and start eating all the goodies on the table, a lot of newcomers tend to mute their wholesale critique of the table, and start looking more and more like the people who were at the table all along. That’s fair: newcomers should not be expected to be more elevated in their ideals and lives than oldsters. I’m a straight white male, one of the oldsters, and hardly a paragon of spiritual activism, so who am I to preach?
But once all the passengers are the same class on the Titanic, it doesn’t mean the Titanic isn’t going down. So after capitalism, we need the caring commonwealth, to save the ship and our souls. And for that, we need to prioritize real caring and other centered and interdependent values in our lives. Will marketed spirituality and i-religion enable that? Or will the market values win, not the spiritual or caring values?
The most inspiring book on personal change I have read in years is Sunny Schwartz’s Dreams from the Monster Factory: A Tale of Prison, Redemption and One Woman’s Fight to Restore Justice to All (co-author, David Boodell): because it is about the hardest most violent prisoners figuring out how to change their lives.
We will write about it in Tikkun but I was thrilled this week that the New York Review of Books has a long and enthusiastic review. About one child abuser in the program who was afraid of what he would do when released, the reviewer writes:
She [Schwartz] knew that some men, perhaps including this one, were beyond rehabilitation, but she also knew instinctively–and correctly, it turned out–that most could change if they were given the chance, but they would need powerful emotional assistance to do it. What this assistance would consist of was not obvious at first.
But she worked out how to do it so well that,
In 2004, the psychiatrists James Gilligan and Bandy Lee of New York University and Yale, respectively, evaluated RSVP [Schwartz's program] and found that it sharply reduced recidivism rates. The longer the men stayed in the program, the better it seemed to work. Among those who took the full sixteen-week course, 82 percent fewer ended up back in jail a year later, compared to a control group of men who had not been through the program.
I had just read a submission to Tikkun in which a long term committed activist writes of the extent to which leaders and led in every Left organization he has participated in lost public effectiveness because they had first lost connection with solidarity and love, and had reverted to cultural norms of competitive self-seeking. I thought, what Left organizations need is some of Schwartz’s “powerful emotional assistance.” We need to make personal transformation an expected part of every organization that’s trying to change the world, because we all sure need that powerful assistance. If it’s strong enough for murderers maybe it’s strong enough for politicos. Many long term activists have turned to therapy, drugs or spiritual disciplines to deal with their own burnout, but these remain personal fixes, not expectations that political movements build into their norms and for which they develop practices that can sustain and heal the activists and build their solidarity. Then I came to this point in the review:
Perhaps surprisingly, the greatest resistance to programs like RSVP comes from some well-intentioned but doctrinaire leftists who maintain that it is absurd to expect people to change their behavior when they continue to be subject to racism, unemployment, bad schools, and the long legacy of inequality in America. The circumstances in which many African-Americans grow up are indeed traumatic. But the idea that violent crime, drug abuse, AIDS, and other health problems that disproportionately affect blacks can’t be addressed until these schematic leftists are satisfied that we are all living in an age of equality is itself a form of racism, based upon the patronizing assumption that people are powerless to bring about personal and collective change in their own communities.
At dinner on Tuesday I read this out to a group of activists who had got together to talk about how to build powerful social change movements that embody love in their practice as well as in their principles. An African American woman who leads a community regeneration program focused on young people said “Yes!” when I got to “a form of racism.” Working with kids on the street, she knows that personal change has to be part of systemic change. We should all understand that: neither can be done well without the other.
So why are the two seen so often as opposites? And why is it not understood that programs to provide everyone with “powerful emotional assistance” to become the people we would like to be have to be undertaken consciously: designed, developed, evolved. Of course “What this assistance would consist of was not obvious at first.” Sunny Schwartz worked it out for some of the most violent people in America. I hope this NYRB review helps spread her program to every prison in America. But an even bigger hope is that we work it out for every organization in America, and especially every social change organization.
Am I talking religion? Not in the sense of creedal belief. Schwartz’s program is not evangelical or based on any other creed. It does not invoke a “higher power” even as vaguely as AA does. But it is based on empathy, on offenders helping each other to understand the impact of their violence on others, to work out in detail where that violence came from in their lives. It promotes a person’s sense of responsibility, respect for self and others, and it does so in a group setting, where people help each other. It nurtures and celebrates the good in people. When people change dramatically, there is often a sense of mystery about it, for the person and the onlookers: it may well be the power of the group, of deeper regenerative powers in human psychology than we expect, or it may be something more, which people label in different ways, from the “collective subconscious” to the divine. But whatever the labels, promoting empathy, regeneration, and social responsibility are among the functions of a good religion. And religion is way more than belief and may not even involve belief as an atheist understands it. As pastor Lynice Pinkard said in church on Sunday (remarkably for a Christian!) “I don’t care what you believe, I care what you experience.”
Activist movements need to take regeneration seriously, for us activists and for society. We won’t get over Left enervation or the narcotic depression of consumerism until we do. This will be the hardest and most creative work for the social change activists in the next decades. “What this assistance would consist of was not obvious at first.” So let’s get to it. Let’s collect all the examples we have of activists who are already doing it. Please send them to me! dave@tikkun.org.
Here’s Sunny Schwartz in person:
Here’s a story to warm your soul on a Friday morning. A girl and her family got the ACLU’s help to combat the harassment that staff as well as students were subjecting her to.
“All I ever wanted was to be able to go to school and just be myself. But I couldn’t do that when the people I was supposed to be learning from were judging me and telling me something was wrong with me. How was I supposed to learn when I was constantly scared?” said Rochelle Hamilton, a high school student who came out as a lesbian when she was 13.
They won. You don’t change behavior overnight but a school-district-wide set of policies, mandatory training for teachers and students, and grievance procedures, is a huge start. Norms change from personal inner change and from social expectations promoted and enforced by institutions.
Personal transformation–becoming who you are, being your deepest and most joyful self–just is not possible without social and political change. That’s the lesson of all the liberation movements. Most of us don’t want to be political, we just want to lead happy lives. But we have to become political activists in order to create a society in which we and those we love can lead those lives.
Spiritual movements for personal transformation often disparage political work. It’s easy to feel hopeless about institutions, politics, the compromises and corruption. But a coherent, spiritual, compassionate life in this world is not possible without structural change. If we all realized that, the need for a life of meaning and joy would become the largest driving force for political change. It will in the end anyway. But it would be good if the political left was savvier about understanding that, and it would be good if the personal transformation movements understood it: then we could get more traction going. Traction like Rochelle Hamilton and the ACLU got going in Vallejo City.
Rev. Rayfield Burns calls for health care reform in Kansas City, Missouri. (Photo from www.piconetwork.org.)
The Religious Left is alive and kicking!
The latest evidence? A group of pastors and priests have launched a national radio ad campaign calling on the government to ensure affordable health care for all.
The ads hit the airwaves today in Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Missouri, and Nebraska, and they’re set to continue airing on Christian and mainstream radio stations throughout the Memorial Day congressional recess.
The parties involved might not all self-identify as members of the Religious Left, but their rhetoric has distinct echoes of liberation theology’s call to attend to injustice and need in this world, rather than focus on the afterlife.
This morning Rev. Rayfield Burns of Metropolitan Missionary Baptist in Kansas City, Missouri, told reporters:
Jesus was concerned about more than just the souls of men and women — he was concerned about the whole man. We should be concerned, as well…. We don’t have to become victims of bad government. We don’t have to settle for emergency rooms as a means for taking care of our health care needs.
Gordon Brown of PICO said 586 clergy from 42 states and 38 different religious denominations have agreed to preach on health care in their congregations as part of this campaign. A number of imams are involved in the PICO network, which has also worked closely with the Union for Reform Judaism, he said, but this weekend’s ad campaign is Christian-focused.
It’s a bit frustrating how uncontroversial the radio ads are. The sponsoring coalition (composed of the PICO National Network, Faith in Public Life, Faithful America, Sojourners, Gamaliel Foundation, and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good) has opted not to weigh in on specific policy debates about public vs. private insurance plans, instead issuing a very general call for “affordability.”
Nevertheless, it’s exciting to see pastors lending their charisma to the fight for universal health care, framing it as an urgent moral issue.
I’m doubly lucky this week that my friend Be Scofield, who interned a while back at Tikkun, is now at Starr King seminary and invited me to hear Rev. Wright on Tuesday and Chris Hedges today.
I hadn’t realized that the former war correspondent and current hard-hitting opponent of both the Religious Right (or the heretical Christian Fascists as he would prefer that we think of them) and the New Atheists, one of the stars of the spiritual progressive world, had himself gone to seminary (Harvard Divinity School).
His talk to the seminarians today was alarming, about:
Much of this sounded convincing to me, and he had wise words about what to do about it. Our question should never be “How can we elect good people?” but always “How can we limit the damage done by mediocrities in power?” This to me is the essence of democracy, from Magna Carta onwards. Noone ever bothered to organize democracy, with all the conflict that entails, to deal with good rulers, only with mediocre and bad ones.
But I started to get confused when Hedges said, approvingly, that Dan Berrigan (the famous radical Catholic priest) had not been interested in the Obama/McCain election struggle last year because, Berrigan said, quoting his brother Phil, “If voting was that effective it would be illegal.” Hedges went into a riff about how the 60s Left failed because it was secular and therefore was seduced by power. It takes a religious Left to hold onto the ethical core. It’s not our job to attain power, he said, our loyalty is to another Power. He quoted Paul Tillich to the effect that all institutions are demonic.
This was too much for me. Hedges had already spoken approvingly of habeas corpus, slavery abolition and something he called “functioning democracy.” But history teaches us that those were achieved by the exercise of power, by people who thought it worth acquiring power in order to hold the mediocrities in power to account. To say that institutions, which are ubiquitous in human society, are demonic, is too close to saying human beings are demonic, for me. There is a power dimension to everything we do, every penny we spend, every speech we give to students, every relationship in our lives: if we can’t have a theology or psychology of the good use of power, then we are lost as a social species.
He said at one point that there could never be a moral institution in the same sense that there could be a moral individual. That rang purity warning bells in my head. I don’t think there can ever be an entirely moral institution OR individual: we are humans–clever, conscious, selfish, cooperative animals–neither perfect nor perfectible. Nonetheless some individuals are kinder than others, and some institutions are more accountable than others. Hedges talked a lot about kindness at the start, but this emphasis on some kind of purity of moral individuality that is spoiled by trying to gain power, that to me is all about purity and has nothing to do with kindness. Purity and kindness can and often are opposites, enemies.
I fear that his speech could be taken to be so apocalyptically doom laden about America, about our world, about all our institutions and about the very concept of trying to gain power to promote a kinder world, that kind-hearted idealists would wonder why on earth it would be worth taking part in public life, except to make symbolic stands that preserve their purity. That was not how habeas corpus, slavery abolition or functioning democracies were created, nor any of a thousand reforms that make life in some countries and institutions better than life in others.
So I was thoroughly confused. Did I misunderstand him? I’ll send him this blog, and ask for clarification.
Rev. Wright speaks at Starr King Seminary, which is awarding him an honorary doctorate tonight
I was privileged Tuesday to attend a seminar at Starr King, the Unitarian Universalist seminary, addressed by Rev. Wright, Obama’s famous or, in the eyes of the media, notorious pastor. Wright entertained the seminarians with tales of how he took a church in Chicago that was dying because it was a white church in blackface that had no appeal to the nearby projects, and turned it into a black church that brought people in by the thousands. Much of his talk centered on music: how the German Lieder and Negro Spirituals (which he dissed as black music made fit for European audiences so it was no longer black music) were replaced with gospel, blues, and jazz, which his first choir director dismissed as folk music. Clearly he is a churchman of great accomplishment and courage, and one who is more than willing to admit faults. He described his early homophobia frankly, and the pay off for people’s lives once he came around and congregants came out of the closet.
At question time we got around to Obama and the media. Wright had no compunction in laying out the truth as he had experienced it, that a man he thought of almost like one of his children had had to disown him in order to achieve the presidency. He laid the blame first on the media, for distorting his record and opinions, and using selectively cut clips of his sermons that tboroughly distorted his views. Obama dismissed one sermon as lacking hope, and later apologised in private that he had done so before reading the sermon. Wright asked him why he was apologising in private for something he did in public. But he also said he was on record in 2007 as saying that Obama would have to disown him. The forthrightness of a man who had laid bare the racism and homophobia of his own church came out in an equally blunt assessment of the prostitution involved in political success. No one in the room dissented. It appeared too obviously true.
I asked if he believed politics without prostitution was possible. He said it was harder for politicians to be truthful than pastors, but he still could not understand what a politician must feel when he or she performs some necessary compromise and sells their supporters down the river. This was the greater sadness of Jeremiah Wright to me, beyond the personal hell he and his family have been put through. It is the sadness of all of us.
Unless, that is, a time could come when politicians can indeed be honest with us. Michael Lerner has been arguing that Obama could tell us now that he believes that Bush and co broke the law over torture, or that single payer healthcare is best, but for this and this pragmatic reason he is not going to prosecute the Bush team nor go for single payer: that would be honest. I agree. It would be a much better way.
But in the election campaign, could Obama have said “Rev. Wright is being misrepresented by the media but for these pragmatic reasons I am leaving his church and cutting off contact so that the election becomes about me and not him?” Given the media circus, that might not have been enough. Sometimes honesty may still lead to political defeat.
An Obama administration, for all its faults, is so much better than a McCain one would have been, are we then to be thankful that the man did what he had to be elected? Yes, we are. But still the prophets, the Wrights and Lerners, are right to tell the truth and raise our expectations. Rev. Wright admitted his difficulty in forgiving Obama (despite, he said, his wife giving a sermon recently on forgiveness–I found this another very attractive aspect of the man, that he admitted he was having difficulty with what is, after all, often considered a Christian obligation), but perhaps one day he will be able to do so. I am not one of those people who thinks forgiveness is always a decision, something one can decide to do and ought to do, because in my experience it is more of a grace, something one is given if one is fortunate. But I hope Rev. Wright receives this grace, not just for his own sake but because it might enable him to start offering a vision to the president of ways he could redeem himself, ways he could be honest in public about the compromises he is making. Vision is a different prophetic function than blame. I didn’t see any of it as regards our political life in Wright’s seminary talk. Perhaps Obama was right that he lacked hope about politics. But perhaps he has good reason to lack hope, and like all of us needs some extra grace, some oomph from some mysterious and unreasonable source, in order to hope.
Literally. Over 5,000 Muslims in the British Army died liberating Italy in WWII. I learned of a research article on this from a post by Musab Bora on altmuslim today. There has been so much about “Islamofascism” since 9/11, and much has been made of isolated incidents of Muslim support for Hitler, but how much have you read about Muslims who died fighting the Nazis and Italian Fascists? Imam ZaidShakir has an excellent article rebutting the “Islamofascist” meme in Tikkun this issue.
The controversy over President Obama’s search for an empathetic Supreme Court judge continues to rage on, with many people arguing that empathy has no place in our justice system.
It all started when Obama announced that he intends to replace Justice Souter with someone who understands that “justice isn’t about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a case book” but rather about “how our laws affect the daily realities of people’s lives.” Here’s the sentence that landed him in the fire:
I view that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people’s hopes and struggles as an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes.
At this point, numerous conservative leaders have taken high-profile stands against empathy in the courtroom, including Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), and John Yoo (the former Justice Department official who drafted the torture memos during the Bush administration).
To me, the most disturbing aspect of the anti-empathy argument is the claim that it’s impossible to simultaneously feel empathy for multiple parties in a conflict. Wendy Long, the legal counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network, told Fox News, “If you have empathy for both sides then that’s the same as having no empathy at all.”
For real?
The world would be frighteningly bleak if empathy actually canceled out in this way. The fact that empathy doesn’t cancel out seems foundational to the pain and beauty of life in community.
When two children are fighting, empathy for both sides is what allows a parent to mediate with an eye to reducing harm overall. And in the struggle against domestic violence, empathy for both sides — or in other words, the ability to recognize the humanity, woundedness, and potential for good in all the parties involved — is what enables anti-rape groups to set up functional rehabilitation groups for abusers, even as they channel the rage and pain felt by survivors of abuse.
The harm reduction approach to drug users offers an inspiring model of what empathy-based justice can look like: it calls us to reduce the pain and damage to all parties rather than siding with some and punishing others.
I spent a summer observing custody and domestic violence cases at the Philadelphia Family Court, and it’s clear to me how positive it would be to have empathetic judges in a setting like that. The judges were constantly ruling on ambiguous questions like whether a person was in imminent danger or whether a person was fit to be a parent. They would have reduced more harm if they had actively sought to empathize with all the different parties that came before them. As it was, it seemed that they unconsciously gave more credence to the litigants who were more familiar to them — litigants who looked and talked the most like them — while claiming total impartiality.
Envisioning what empathy would mean at the Supreme Court level is more complicated, since the court is ruling so specifically on the constitutionality of specific policies or actions, rather than on messy family affairs. I haven’t totally worked it out.
I saw Stardust again last night, and if you want a stunningly good fantasy movie and you missed it the first time, see it. I read my first Neil Gaiman novels last year (American Gods and Neverwhere) and we saw and loved Coraline recently: one of the year’s must see movies. I hadn’t realized Stardust was made from a Gaiman novel, and when that came up in the credits this time and I now recognized his name, it explained to me how a movie that has so many trappings of fantasy froth could actually be a decent, intelligent, totally enjoyable movie. It’s Gaiman, I said to my son, that explains it, and he agreed.
Stardust is a light and humorous as Coraline is dark, but both have heart and soul. Stardust has very English humor, it seems to be made by people who grew up on Monty Python and were visually educated by Terry Gilliam, but it is just a better film than anything from those sources, with the exception of Time Bandits. The story holds together better. And the humor has point, including De Niro as the gay pirate captain, who alone is worth getting the movie for.
Maureen Dowd’s excuse about her plagiarism in yesterday’s op-ed was very weak–not the kind of thing she would accept from anyone else. It’s only because she is so ungenerous in print that readers like me are prone to a little schadenfreude on seeing her plead for a generous interpretation for herself. She gave Biden short shrift for plagiarism back in the day. More here.
I read Dowd because she does often play the role of the child who says the emperor has no clothes, and she is often acute, and because she is an equal opportunity eviscerator: I don’t only want to hear the people I dislike trashed, it’s too easy to live in a bubble on the internet, hearing only opinions you agree with. But I get just as fed up with Dowd as with many I do agree with on the Left who, in Van Jones’ words (in an interview I keep going back to) have been amassing “this incredibly rich taxonomy of the pain” by showing up everything that is wrong. I wish Dowd would have the even greater courage to be inspirational (she does do it very rarely).
I would much rather believe that she is such a word pro she can reproduce a longish quote word for word when spoken by a friend and make one intelligent change to it without looking up the original than that she is consciously borrowing from a well known blog without giving attribution (and why would she do that?). Maybe her friend was reading the quote out and Down records her phonecalls with her friends so she doesn’t miss choice bon mots? But she might not want to admit to that either. It’s hard work to think the best of people…
Is Pelosi privately wishing that she had not so pusillanimous on torture back in 2002-3, now that her silence then has lost her the moral high ground now? Or does she still believe that her caution then helped her get to her majority now? The public still seems mostly pro torture, we learn again today.
I find politics a mystery. I have little idea how leadership can turn public opinion around. I never understood how industry lobbying turned the public and the Congress (or was it only the Congress?) decisively against universal health insurance in the first Clinton goverment. I understood war fever after 9/11, and going into Afghanistan, but I never understood why the Democrats supported the Iraq War and torture. Courage then would surely have paid off in a much bigger majority for Pelosi now–wouldn’t it? The progressive in me says yes, the historian in me says I don’t know. It’s a mystery. I don’t know if Obama is pusuing a wise strategy that will turn out to lay the foundations for a longterm progressive majority, as some imagine, or if he is blowing it, as I and many others think he is.
I am grateful to Frank Rich for saying strongly that Obama has to deal with the crimes of the Bush administration: he cannot pursue his agenda by turning a blind eye. I agree. Interesting that Maureen Dowd came round to agreeing yesterday as well.
This looks cool. From the film blurb:
“Fierce Light” is a feature documentary that captures the exciting movement of Spiritual Activism that is exploding around the planet, and the powerful personalities that are igniting it.
Fueled by the belief that “another world is possible,” the film portrays stories of what Martin Luther King called “Love in Action,” and Gandhi called “Soul Force”; what Ripper is calling “Fierce Light.”
It is a power that radiates from the heart and outwards. It is that same grass roots spirit that swept Barack Obama into the White House, in a spirit of community–undeniably hopeful, and full of possibility.
Acclaimed filmmaker Velcrow Ripper (Scared Sacred) takes an insightful look at change motivated by love, featuring interviews with spiritual activists Thich Nhat Hanh, Desmond Tutu, Daryl Hannah, Julia Butterfly Hill, and more.
So the predictions were all wrong. This is a fascinating article.
“At the turn of this century, the conventional wisdom among demographers was that the population of Europe was in precipitous decline, the Islamic world was in the grip of a population explosion, and Africa’s population faced devastation by HIV/AIDS. Only a handful of scholars questioned the idea that the Chinese would outnumber all other groups for decades or even centuries to come. In fact, however, the latest UN projections suggest that China’s population, now 1.3 billion, will increase slowly through 2030 but may then be reduced to half that number by the end of the century.”
India’s population will overtake China’s around 2030. But by 2050 amost as many babies will be born in the United States as in China.
Meanwhile there will be more Muslims and Christians in Africa than anywhere else: Africa the monotheistic center of the world. This is due to the stunning decline in birthrates in most Muslim countries. In 30 years Iran’s fertility rate has dropped from 6.5 children per woman to 1.7.
Northern Europe’s fertility rate has suddenly gone up: the French and English are breeding faster again.
And in China and a number of other countries, abortions of female fetuses (identifiable thanks to sonograms) means there are going to be a large number of young men unable to find a mate: maybe 15% in some places. This is typically a recipe for disaster, since unattached young men are prone to risk taking.
But will all these predictions be proved wrong in their turn? As climate change accelerates, they will be.
I posted last week about going to stand with protesters outside someone’s home because the sheriff was due to evict her. I was thrilled to learn that the effort worked, at least for now. Here’s a report from Ulysses Hillard, a young activist at the Unitarian church who was there:
“This past Thursday I woke up punishingly early (for me) and drove over to West Oakland… All in all about 20 to 30 people gathered. We put made signs and put up banners and we listened to the homeowner tell her story.
“The short version is that she bought the house three years ago at $550,000. The same person acted as seller, realtor, and loan broker. She had no job at the time, no experience with home ownership, did not know there was anything wrong with the arrangement, and little idea how horrible a situation she’d put herself in.
“She got into trouble after six months and started asking for help and got nothing from the lender, First Franklin. Her loan has since changed hands at least twice. The current lender’s plan was to kick her out on the street and re-sell the house for $140,000. In other words, their plan was to create another ghost-house in West Oakland when they could have somebody living in the house taking care of it by negotiating with the owner for a modified loan at that same $140,000. Instead, they intended to send the sheriff’s department out to evict her that morning.
“Somebody posted the phone number for the lender and we all started calling. We got kicked around through about seven phone numbers all over the country before we fond the person in charge of the loan. I was the first person to get through to him and he was almost polite as I told him what was up. Thanks to the right wing hijinks during the election I think, the word “ACORN” seems to inspire a real reaction now. He got less polite as more people called.
“At about 8:15 word came around that the sheriffs had been called off. We had done it! We saved her home for at least one day. Imagine being able to do such a thing before even getting into the office. It was quite a morning. With hope and faith,” Ulysses. (he also took the photo).
Just came across this wonderful piece by Eboo Patel about finding his spiritual home in Islam through first being attracted to the work of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement. (Thanks to Islamicate).
This made me think of a metaphor Brian McLaren quotes in a recent Radical Grace, about the phenomena Christians are calling the Emerging Church: “we aren’t dealing with a new slice of the pie, so to speak, a new segment or sect or division of the church. Instead, what we’re dealing with is more like the outer ring or layer of a tree. If the northwest side of the tree is Roman Catholic, and the northeast side is Eastern Orthodox, and the southwest side is Evangelical and Charismatic, and the southeast side is Traditional Protestant, what we’re dealing with is a conversation among people who find themselves on that outermost ring. They’re discovering that they have more in common with someone also in the outermost ring from the other side of the tree than they may have with their neighbors on their own side, a few rings further in.”
Only the tree is bigger than that. The outer ring includes Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews and others who find they have more in common with each other and with likeminded Christians than with hardliners of their own religions. If you doubt me, read Tikkun. What other magazine brings them together so well? What do these outer ring types share?
Karen Armstrong writes in The Great Transformation that most of the “Axial Age” philosophers — such as Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, Jeremiah — “had no interest whatever in doctrine…. What mattered was not what you believed but how you behaved. Religion was about doing things that changed you at a profound level…. The only way you could encounter what they called “God,” “Nirvana,” “Brahman,” or the “Way” was to live a compassionate life. Indeed religion was compassion.”
That’s what Eboo found in the Catholic Worker and then in Islam.
I wrote this in 2008 before the election, and it appeared in the newsletter of my former congregation. I feel it expresses better than anything else I have written what I am doing at Tikkun.
I used to think that the left / liberal tradition was all about struggle, anger, and righteous indignation. That was what fueled generations of oppressed and marginalized people to fight the status quo to free the slaves, reform the factories, gain the vote, enforce standards for safe food and medicine, combat racism, sexism and homophobia, and win all the democracy, rights and social safety nets so far gained. But I have realized that, even more than angry struggle, its success has been borne out of empathy. You only get ready to give rights and respect to others if you still the insistent voice of your own ego and self-absorption long enough to put yourself in their shoes and feel what they are feeling. It’s about imagination and compassion.
And while I thought the key to democracy and rights was empowerment of the powerless, I now wonder more about what the newly empowered use their power for: to be empathic and caring, or to be simply powerful: my group on top? When we are empowered, how do we come to create a sense of family and responsibility for each other — and “each other” means everyone!, including the poor, the gender-different, the people who believe differently, and even the powerful. How do we become responsible for our ecosystems, so we extend empathy and respect even to the creatures who cannot speak in human terms? Those are not only rational things to do — given our interdependence — they are more than that, they’re relational: love comes into it.
What words do we have for this desire to be more empathic, to feel our interdependence with other people and all of life, to be globally responsible and caring? I am no believer in God or supernatural spirits (as an agnostic I find them neither proven nor disproven) but the word I have come to use is “spiritual.” I didn’t like it a few years ago but now I do. I thought it wishy washy, unscientific, woo woo. Now I understand that rationalism is not enough, science is not enough. It pleases me to know that neuroscientists have found that reason is built upon empathy: the mirror neurons enable both. To say we need to be “philosophical” or “ethical” seems too cerebral and dry, when I am talking about glorying in the night sky or the spring leaves, or weeping at the terror we loosed in Iraq in response to terror loosed by others (not Iraqis) on us.
Most people on the Left know that religious and spiritual people were deeply involved in all the progressive movements in America: abolition, trade unions, early feminism, civil rights, peace. I have heard secular progressives say that those peoples’ religion was just the language of their time and we don’t need it now. That is a serious mistake. I don’t myself think we need beliefs about supernatural entities, but we do need to bring the spiritual to the center of our lives — and our politics — and find the language to do it. If that language for you is traditionally belief-based, so be it: we can all work together.
Separation of church and state does not mean separating the state from spiritually-based values. How could it? What other values should run the state? By treating our spiritual lives as private, we liberals have not “kept religion out of politics.” We have just ensured that the only spiritual appeal in the public square is made by the Religious Right. The spiritual basis of our politics has been invisible. We have to talk up the spiritual foundation of our politics if we are to change hearts as well as minds… and win elections.
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