If this is correct, Huckabee–despite his kinder, gentler populist rhetoric–still seems to be singing from the Christian ultra-right hymnal when it comes to foreign policy, especially concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Month: January 2008
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Batman: The Dark Knight trailer
I was a bit skeptical of Heath Ledger as the Joker, but this looks pretty awesome:
(Replacing the boring Katie Holmes with the divine Maggie Gyllenhaal wasn’t a bad idea either.)
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Elvis, rock, modernism, and authenticity
I’ve recently been reading Charles Ponce de Leon’s (awesome name!) biography of Elvis, called Fortunate Son. One of the running themes is that Elvis’ “rebel” image belied an underlying conservatism that was born of his working-class Southern upbringing which emphasized deference to authority in order to earn “respectability.” But also important was Elvis’ love (and encyclopedic knowledge of) music from a variety of genres: country, gospel, R&B, etc. He was a true aficionado, who impressed even Sam Phillips with his wide and deep tastes. All of this combined to make Elvis skeptical of the direction rock took in the 60s, as Ponce de Leon explains:
By 1967 many musicians identified themselves as “artists” in ways that echoed the modernist commitments that poets, novelists, painters, and photographers had expressed in the early twentieth century but that would have been incomprehensible to Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Committed to writing their own songs and displaying their abilities through complex, often pretentious lyrical wordplay or instrumental virtuosity, they rejected many of the pop-rock conventions established in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Because they defined their own work in opposition to the pop mainstream, their inroads onto the pop charts seemed all the more like acts of defiant subversion. The surprising commercial success of much of this music encouraged record companies to sign artists working in the same vein. More important, it led many musicians and fans to believe that the record business–and perhaps all of Western civilization–was in the throes of a major artistic renaissance, a trend being spearheaded by a new vanguard: affluent youth. The rock and roll developed by Elvis and his comrades had morphed into rock, a more varied set of styles that perfectly captured the heady spirit of the late 1960s. In such a milieu, Presley’s records didn’t just sound dated; they sounded like they came from another century.
[…]
But as much as part of Presley might have yearned for such [artistic] freedom, another side of him looked on it with contempt. He was, after all, a child of the working-class South, where music was central to the forging of communities and linked young and old–and, if Presley and Sam Phillips had had their way, black and white. He had grown up enamored of the pop conventions he had encountered in the movies and on network radio. For Elvis, these pop conventions were the ticket to acceptance and inclusion, the basis for the forging of a national community that might transcend class, race, and region. He could never comprehend the desire to move beyond them, much less the belief, derived from the modernism that now influenced rock musicians, that they limited artistic creativity. Elvis loved virtually every kind of music, and he couldn’t imagine making the kinds of value judgments and critical distinctions that were becoming common among musicians and many fans. The concept of authenticity, which had arisen in many fields in response to the commercialism of the culture industries and provided fans and musicians alike with a yardstick for measuring quality and who had sold out, was utterly mystifying to him. He was equally bewildered by the cavalier attitude that artists like Dylan and the Beatles sometimes displayed toward their fans. He was appalled, for example, by Dylan’s decision to “go electric,” which caused a great row among folk music fans and, for Elvis, was evidence of Dylan’s disrespect for the people who had made him a success. (pp. 154-6)
There is something almost Ayn Randian in the “public be damned” attitude of a lot of rock musicians who see themselves as pure artists with no obligations to the wider public. Not to mention the insufferable game of one-upmanship where artists and fans constantly look to identify “sellouts” and establish their credentials as more authentic than thou.
Elvis, by contrast, always saw himself as primarily an entertainer, and he kept recording in a variety of genres until the end of his career. But, as Ponce de Leon points out, Elvis’ desire to please often prevented him from taking creative risks which might’ve led to greater personal fulfillment. He cites Elvis’ frustration as one of the reasons he ultimately retreated into a cocoon of hedonism and drug abuse, surrounded by sycophantic flunkies who couldn’t tell him he was heading for disaster.
“Guitar Man,” from the 1968 “Comeback” special:
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Blogroll update
Ever since I started using Google Reader I’ve been lazy about updating the blogroll here since one of its purposes was to help me keep track of the blogs I read regularly. But I’ve just done a little housecleaning and added a few links to blogs that I’ve added to my regular diet.
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The end of the world as we know it (6): animals
(Previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
Reflection on the ultimate destiny of animals has not been a central feature of Christian thinking about the eschaton. Most theology in general has been relentlessly anthropocentric, and eschatology as a general rule is no different. This is perhaps especially true of post-Enlightenment theology which, influenced by Cartesian presuppositions, sharply divided the world into spiritual and material realms, with only human beings partaking of the former. Off the top of my head I can think of a few exceptions: John Wesley addressed the issue, as did C. S. Lewis. I think it’s safe to say, though, that the mainstream view has been that only human beings have an eternal destiny, either because they are specially loved by God or because only they possess immortal souls.
Polkinghorne doesn’t spend much time discussing animals, but they do have a role to play in his scheme of cosmic redemption. He balks at the notion that “every dinosaur that ever lived, let alone the vast multitude of bacteria … will each have its own individual eschatological future” (p. 122). But he does allow that representatives of each kind of animal will exist in the world to come, preserving the type if not each token. He also speculates that pets, “who could be thought to have acquired enhanced individual status through their interactions with humans,” might have a share in the new creation. This is similar to a suggestion made by Lewis, who argued that, in bonding with their human masters, pets may acquire a “self” that they otherwise wouldn’t have had.
The question of animal “selfhood” is obviously a vexed one. Some philosophers and theologians have suggested that animals don’t have selves because they lack self-awareness. But this seems wrong: just because they aren’t self-aware (assuming they aren’t) doesn’t mean they don’t have selves to be aware of. The central question, it seems to me is whether animals posses some measure of individuality and interiority. And it seems clear that they do. Modern science indicates that there is a continuity between humans and other animals in capacity for feeling and thought. This isn’t to deny that human beings have capacities that animals lack, merely to say that many animals are in fact “subjects of a life” as Tom Regan puts it. The fact of individual personality among animals is obvious to anyone with a pet, and only dogmatic materialists and behaviorists deny that animals experience sensations like pain and pleasure. The ancients were actually wiser than some moderns here: they acknowledged that animals had souls that gave them the power of self-motion, feeling, and even a measure of thinking.
It seems at least possible, then, that God, if he wished, could preserve animal “selves” in existence beyond death. Certainly if a human soul consists of an “information bearing pattern” similar patterns would exist in the case of non-human animals. But would God have reason to do so? Why would God wish to provide post-morterm existence to individual animals? One reason is simply that God loves all things in his creation:
For you love all things that exist,
and detest none of the things that you have made,
for you would not have made anything if you had hated it.
How would anything have endured if you had not willed it?
Or how would anything not called forth by you have been preserved?
You spare all things, for they are yours, O Lord, you who love the living. (Wisdom of Solomon, 11: 24-26)A related consideration is the question of animal theodicy. Will there be some recompense for the animals who have suffered through no moral fault of their own? And would a world built on such enormous suffering be worth it without restoration for the victims? It would be presumptuous to insist that God has to resurrect individual animals, but at the same time we can hope that the wideness of God’s mercy might make room in his kingdom for all creatures.
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My own personal primary
Say what you will about these internet quizzes, my results have been remarkably consistent:
73% Mike Gravel
66% Dennis Kucinich
56% Ron Paul
55%Chris Dodd
54% John Edwards
54% Bill Richardson
50% John McCain
50% Barack Obama
49% Mike Huckabee
49%Joe Biden
47% Hillary Clinton
42% Mitt Romney
35% Fred Thompson
34%Tom Tancredo
27% Rudy Giuliani
2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz(via Connexions)
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The end of the world as we know it (5): New creation
At the end of the previous post I wrote that Polkinghorne sees embodiment as essential to what it means to be human, partly because of the interrelatedness that is an intrinsic feature of all things. A self existing in isolation is, if not a contradiction in terms, at least living an extremely diminished and attenuated life. Consequently, the biblical image of the “new creation” points toward a very different state of affairs than the ethereal bodiless idea of heaven we sometimes imagine.
Polkinghorne thus suggests “a destiny for the whole universe beyond its death” (p. 113). To create a suitable environment for a resurrected humanity, God will transform the entire physical cosmos into a new form. Just as the matter of Jesus’ dead body was transmuted into the stuff of his glorified risen body, so the humble material of the cosmos will be taken up into an everlasting destiny.
Just as the matter of our present universe possesses specific properties that allow for the development of life, the matter of the new creation will be specially suited to life there. And moreover, the entire cosmos will be “transparent” to the divine presence: “The new creation will be wholly sacramental, suffused with the presence of the life of God” (p. 115). And the “laws” of this new universe will, unlike our present world, be adapted to unending life rather than intrinsically involving the cycle of life and death.
Polkinghorne insists that there will be both continuity and discontinuity between the old and new creations, in keeping with his central principle. The new creation is not another creation ex nihilo, but a redemptive act that draws the new out of the old. The old creation provides the “raw material” for the new creation, one that will continue to be constituted (though in a new way) by space, time and matter. Polkinghorne denies that the new creation will be an eternal (timeless) state of being; instead, he says following Gregory of Nyssa, we will spend everlasting ages moving more and more deeply into the inexhaustible mystery of the divine nature.
One of the consequences of Polkinghorne’s view that the old creation is, in some sense, the raw material of the new is that it gives some account of why God created this world in the first place:
The pressing question of why the Creator brought into being this vale of tears if it is the case that God can eventually create a world that is free from suffering, here finds its answer. God’s total creative intent is seen to be intrinsically a two-step process: first the old creation, allowed to explore and realise its potentiality at some metaphysical distance from its Creator; then the redeemed new creation which, through the Cosmic Christ, is brought into a freely embraced and intimate relationship with the life of God. (p. 116)
What makes this an explanation of the sufferings of the present world? The idea seems to be that, in order to allow creation to develop freely, God had to hide, or at least dim, the divine presence. This allowed creaturely freedom, but also introduced the possibility of sin. At the same time, the laws that govern the development of the cosmos seem to intrinsically involve the possibility of suffering. “Its unfolding process develops within the ‘space’ that God has given it, within which it is allowed to be itself” (p. 114).
This is a question we’ve tackled here before: is suffering an intrinsic feature of life in this universe because of the constitution of the laws that govern it? Or is the world as we experience it fallen from a primeval state of perfection? Polkinghorne opts for the first answer, but with the proviso that the universe is on its way to being something different. His proposal has the virtue of investing what we do here and now with a certain importance: there are aspects of the present world that will persist in the world to come. If we foster beauty, harmony, and excellence in this world, we can hope that they will be drawn up into the next and reflect the divine glory.
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The end of the world as we know it (4): Human nature
As we’ve seen, Polkinghorne is developing an eschatological vision that takes the findings of modern cosmology seriously, but is consonant with the deepest insights of the biblical tradition. The key principles are: that any hope for life beyond this world must be rooted in God’s faithfulness and that the shape of this hope will be determined by the kind of discontinuity-in-continuity. This is displayed preeminently in the resurrection of Jesus.
Polkinghorne believes that the view of human nature that is most consistent with modern biology and neuroscience is one that sees human beings as integrated wholes rather than soul-body compounds. The language of “the soul” can be maintained, he thinks, but we should think of it as the “information-bearing pattern” which makes me the unique individual I am. Polkinghorne sees this as an updating of the traditional Thomistic-Aristotelian language of the soul as the “form” of the body. “It would be altogether too crude to say that the soul is the software running on the hardware of the body–for we have good reason to believe that human beings are very much more than ‘computers made of meat’–but that unsatisfactory image catches a little of what is being proposed” (p. 106).
Polkinghorne’s suggestion, then, is that our destiny beyond death consists of God “re-embodying” our “information-bearing pattern” in a new form:
It is a perfectly coherent hope that the pattern that is a human being could be held in the divine memory after that person’s death. Such a disembodied existence, even if located in the divine remembrance, would be less than fully human. It would be more like the Hebrew concept of shades in Sheol, though now a Sheol from which the Lord was not absent but, quite to the contrary, God was sustaining it. It is a further coherent hope, and one for which the resurrection of Jesus provides the foretaste and guarantee, that God in the eschatological future will re-embody this multitude of preserved information-bearing patterns in some new environment of God’s choosing. (p. 108)
Polkinghorne addresses the objections that some philosophers have had to this notion of “re-embodiment” or “replication.” The concern is that such a replicated person living in the eschaton would not really be me, but merely a new person who resembled me with respect to certain psychological traits. This has sometimes been expressed by the hypothetical scenario in which two replicated individuals with the same “information pattern” are brought into existence – which one is the authentic “descendant” of the deceased person?
Polkinghonrne argues that this is a pseudo-worry. “The answer is surely that only God has the power to effect such re-embodiment and divine consistency would never permit the duplication of a person” (p. 108). But this seems to me not to do justice to the objection. The problem isn’t that there’s any reason to believe that God would actually bring about such a state of affairs. It’s that the mere logical possibility of post-mortem “twins” shows that this kind of resemblance is an insufficient criterion for continuity of individual identity.
It’s actually somewhat surprising that Polkinghorne invokes St. Thomas in trying to articulate the relation between body and soul. For, though Thomas certainly employs Aristotle’s “form/matter” terminology, he also clearly believed in a substantial soul that survives the death of the body. Whatever qualifications he makes, Thomas is clearly a kind of dualist. (Though Thomas is clear that a human soul without a body is fundamentally “incomplete” and that we will be re-joined to our bodies at the final resurrection).
Polkinghorne admittedly is treading a middle ground between outright dualism and a pure replication theory. He’s not entirely clear what type of subjectivity a disembodied “soul” has in the “intermediate” state. So, there may be room for him to assert a degree of continuity that is sufficient to guarantee personal identity. There’s support for this in Polkinghorne’s suggestion that there will be a kind of purgatorial “healing” in the intermediate state.
Wherever one comes down on this particular issue, Polkinghorne is right, I think, to insist that our hope for resurrection is grounded in the love of God, and that God intends to save us in our entirety, not as disembodied shades. This point is reinforced by Polkinghorne’s insistence on the fundamental importance of relationality in constituting our selves. The people we become are formed by our relationship to the world around us, and these relationships are mediated by our bodies. To exist without bodies of some kind would to be cut off from any kind of relationship. And these relationships extend beyond other human beings to all of creation.
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Iowa
My two cents, for what it’s worth: I was happy to see more or less “anti-establishment” candidates win, continuing to undermine the “inevitability” theme that had been running through the campaign. Neither Huckabee nor Obama are my ideal candidate by any stretch, but I’d much rather see a match up between those two than, say, a Giuliani-Clinton race.
Huckabee continues to present an interesting challenge to conservative orthodoxy with his populist themes. I still don’t see these as translating into any very coherent policy positions, and I’m not sure I’d particularly like them if they did. But there’s something refreshing about his candidacy compared to the others. I still have a sneaking suspicion that the Republicans will work their way back to McCain before it’s all said and done, but then again, I also predicted that Al Gore would be the Democratic nominee.
I have so far been less impressed by Obama than some of my friends; his vaunted oratory which seemed to promise to magically transport us to a post-partisan, post-race, post-conflict happy land always struck me as so much hot air. I don’t need or want messianism from politicians. I’m also unsure about where exactly he stands on crucial issues, foreign policy in particular. That said, I’ve always found him preferable to Hillary Clinton, so I can’t be too unhappy about his win.
A Thinking Reed 