A Thinking Reed

Month: September 2008

  • Friday metal–Death and resurrection

    I’m not really capable of being objective about Metallica. I first heard them when I was, I think, 14 and on a school trip. A friend of mine passed me a badly copied cassette of Master of Puppets, I popped it into my wakman, and my world was completely and irrevocably rocked when I heard the immortal opening riffs of the title track:

    We’re talking about a kid who, prior to this encounter with these gods of metal, would’ve named the Monkees as his favorite group. (n.b.: I was not cool.) This paradigm-altering experience opened a whole new world of music for me: I eagerly devoured Metallica’s other albums (…and Justice for All had recently been released at the time), and soon I was branching out into the other big names of thrash metal: Anthrax, Megadeth, Testament, Slayer, Suicidal Tendencies. And beyond that there was the whole world of punk, hardcore, “college rock,” and even some forms of rap. Basically, an entire universe of non-mainstream, loud, and aggressive music.

    All of this is a long-winded way of saying that Metallica will always hold a special place in my heart. Not that they can do no wrong. Their first four albums are still the gold standard for metal as far as I’m concerned, and I liked the “black album,” and even a good number of tracks from Load and Re-Load, but I’ll admit to thinking that the band’s creative juices had pretty much dried up. 2003’s mostly atrocious St. Anger and the accompanying documentary Some Kind of Monster–which showed a band in the throes of a complete meltdown–pretty much confirmed it for me.

    How happy I am to say, then, that with the release of Death Magnetic Metallica has, if not regained their former glory, then at least erased most of the bad memories of the last 15 years. Combining elements of all its past incarnations, Metallica has managed to record an album that is fast, loud, and aggressive while maintaining some of the pop sensibility and rock swagger that infused their post-Justice work.

    The album opens with the faint sound of a heartbeat, as though a long-slumbering beast was about to spring back to life. And that’s just what the first track, “That Was Just Your Life,” delivers: an uptempo riff-fest reminiscent of past album openers like “Battery” and “Blackened.” The following two numbers, “The End of the Line” and “Broken, Beat & Scarred” hark back to the Load era, with their dirty rhythms and crunchy riffs, while “The Day that Never Comes” is a ballad in the mode of “One” or “Fade to Black” that quickly turns into a satisfying all-out aural assault. “All Nightmare Long” is a menacing romp and possibly the high point of the album.

    Though not bad, “Cyanide” and the probably-unnecessary “Unforgiven III” are, in my opinion, the weakest tracks on the disc. But things quickly pick up toward the end with “The Judas Kiss,” “Suicide and Redemption,” an instumental epic the likes of which we’ve not seen since Justice‘s “To Live Is to Die,” and the album closer “My Apocalypse,” an Bay Area-style thrasher that compares favorably with nearly anything from Metallica’s classic era.

    Not that there aren’t problems with the album: the muddy production, the inaudible bass (new member former Suicidal Tendencies bassist Robert Trujillo deserves better!), and the occassionally cringe-inducing lyrics. But these are mostly minor complaints and almost completely outweighed by the fact that lead guitarist Kirk Hammett has finally been let off the leash to solo like crazy all over the album.

    Metallica is never going to make another Master of Puppets, or even another black album, in the sense of a genre-defining masterpiece. But that’s probably an unrealistic standard for a band at this stage of its career. U2 is never going to make another Joshua Tree, and REM is never going to make another Document either. What they have made is an album full of well-crafted heavy metal that is distinctively Metallica. Modern metal wouldn’t be what it is without these guys, and with this album they’ve shown that they can still shred with the best of ’em.

    Overall grade: B+

    “The Day that Never Comes”

  • The Groaning of Creation 6: Priests of creation

    Having offered an account of why God permits the suffering and frustated lives of so many non-human animals, Southgate turns to the question of what role humans might play in alleviating their plight.

    Key to his understanding once again is the notion of creation in travail, or “groaning.” Creation is good, but it’s destined to be redeemed, to be made into something better.

    Southgate’s touchstone biblical passage is from Romans 8:

    I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. (vv. 18-23, NRSV)

    Southgate suggests that we can understand “futility” here as the evolutionary process with its attendant death, suffering, and frustration. Yet this process has led to the incarnation of the Son of God and the new age that his dying and rising inagurates. New possibilities for transformed living have been made available, and humanity is called to participate in God’s redeeming work.

    In light of this, Southgate goes on to consider what role humanity has with respect to the rest of creation and non-human animals in particular. Human beings can’t bring in the eschaton–that’s God’s job–but they can anticipate it to some extent and live as signs of the dawning age. And this includes “having some part in the healing of the evolutionary process” (p. 96).

    What does this mean, specifically? Southgate suggests that humanity actually has several different roles in respect to creation:

  • First, we are responsible for the well-being of the entire biosphere, simply because our actions can affect and profoundly change it (as in the case of climate change). So, we’re called to preserve the biosphere’s ability to support and nourish a wide diversity of life.
  • Second, we are called to make room for wilderness, for parts of the Earth that serve no utilitarian human purpose. These serve as a reminder that creation doesn’t exist solely for our sake and that other creatures have a right to live flourishing lives in our shared world.
  • Third, we need to find ways of living with our fellow creatures that are respectful of their God-given natures and existence. Our occupation of much of the Earth’s surface requires us to live alongside with–and make use of–our fellow creatures, but this isn’t a license for exploitation. Southgate quotes Wendell Berry: “To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such a desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want” (quoted on p. 106).

    • Southgate proposes two ethical concepts to illuminate these duties: ethical kenosis and priesthood. Ethical kenosis means just what it sounds like–a kind of self-limitation; we have to limit our own desires and will to mastery to make room for the flourishing of the rest of creation. This includes

  • kenosis of aspiration–or the desire to grasp at a role for ourselves that fails to respect other creatures;
  • kenosis of appetite–our seemingly bottomless desire for the good things of this world; and realtedly
  • kenosis of acquisitiveness–our desire for the material trappings of life (see pp. 101-102).

    • Priesthood is a way of understanding our role in God’s world that stands somewhere between anthropocentric views of creation as existing solely for humanity’s sake and the radically egalitarian perspective of “deep ecology” that sees humans as merely one species among others.

    Against the second view, Southgate points out that humans are the de facto stewards of creation simply in virtue of our ability to understand and affect the workings of nature, and that, contrary to deep ecologists, the workings of nature can’t provide us with ethical prescriptions.

    While the notion of priesthood doesn’t offer any neat ethical prescriptions, it does suggest some broad themes in our relation to the non-human creation (Southgate is drawing here particularly on Eastern Orthodox theology):

  • Humans can reshape the world in certain ways, through agriculture, culture, scientific understanding.
  • Humans can bless creation and offer it back to God in contemplation and worship.
  • Humans can sacrificially offer themselves for the good of creation.

    • There is a tension here between a more passive and activist stances. To the extent that creation is good, we receive it and contemplate it with awe and thanksgiving. But to the extent that it is “groaning” we may be called to a more activist intervention in light of the norms of God’s promised new creation. In the next post I’ll discuss what Southgate thinks this might look like in particular cases.

    Index of posts in this series is here.

  • Peter J. Gomes on Colbert

    Video here. (HT: Chris)

    I saw him preach once at the Harvard chapel “lessons and carols” Christmas service. His preaching was much more full of Jesus than I expected a service at Harvard to be.

  • Come on in, conservatives; the water’s fine

    For whatever reason, this post, A Conservative for Obama, has been getting a lot of traffic recently. Are there still disaffected conservatives out there who haven’t drunk the McPalin kool-aid and are looking for a reason to vote Dem?

    Here’s a good place to start: conservative historian–and self-described “Obamacon”–Andrew Bacevich on NPR’s Fresh Air. Among other things, he argues (convincingly, IMO) that the current GOP is anything but conservative if your idea of conservatism includes things like a realistic view of the world, foreign policy prudence, and fiscal sobriety.

  • The Groaning of Creation 5: Heaven can wait

    As we saw in the previous post, Southgate affirms some kind of afterlife as an eschatological recompense for non-human animals who were deprived of the opportunity to flourish in this life, a strategy taken by many theodicies that focus on human suffering.

    But, as Southgate recognizes (and as we’ve discussed here before), “if an altered physics makes possible an altered and pain-free cosmos, why did God not create this in the first place?” (p. 90)

    His response is another variation on the “only way” argument–that such a process, full of suffering and frustration as it may be, was the only (or perhaps best) way available to God to create finite creaturely selves:

    We know that, in the physics with which we are familiar, self-organization–and hence the growth of complexity, and the origin of complex selves–depends on so-called dissipative processes, in turn based on the second law of thermodynamics. This is the way creaturely selves arise. Since this was the world the God of all creativity and all compassion chose for the creation of creatures, we must presume that this was the only type of world that would do for that process. In other words, our guess must be that though heaven can eternally preserve those selves, subsisting in suffering-free relationship, it could not give rise to them in the first place. (p. 90)

    I think there’s something to this if we specify that what we’re talking about are biological selves of the kind we’re familiar with. Creatures not embedded in a biosphere like ours, with similar evolutionary histories, would be radically different from life as we know it, assuming that it’s even possible. Animal selves (both human and non-human) are indelibly shaped by their embodiment, which is a function of this biospheric embeddedness and history. If God wanted to create selves like that, then it’s very difficult to see what other way was available.

    Still, Christian tradition, along with many others, has long held that there are finite selves who don’t require a physical biosphere–at least not one like ours–to exist. I’m talking, of course, about angels and other finite spirits that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have seen as intermediaries and messengers from God and fellow-citizens in God’s kingdom. If God can, as these traditions hold, create finite non-embodied spirits by fiat, then it was possible to bring creaturely selves into existence without the evolutionary process.

    So, a critic could maintain that a heaven populated by such never-embodied spirits who aren’t heirs to the frailty of flesh would be superior to one populated by creaturely selves brought into existence by a long evolutionary process with its attendant suffering and frustration.

    The only way to deflect this criticism that I can see is to maintain either 1) that God couldn’t create finite, non-embodied spirits (thus contradicting the tradition) or 2) that, even if God could create such never-embodied spirits, the specific goods of embodied creaturely selves outweigh the disvalues of the evolutionary process.

    I’m inclined to favor option 2, though, to put it mildly, it’s not clear how you would weigh up the relevant values and disvalues. That said, however, one line of thought suggests itself. It’s been said about the communion of saints that each saint reflects, in his or her own unique way, the glory of God. By analogy, then, we could say that each kind of embodied creature reflects in its own unique way, and perceives from its own unique perspective, that same glory.*

    To use an over-familiar metaphor, a universe of diverse kinds of creatures is like a stained glass window that refracts white light into different colors. Similarly, the multiplicity of creatures “refracts” God’s glory in ways that would be unavialable if there were far fewer, or even just one, kind of finite spirit in existence. Or, to revert to the terminology of an earlier post, the variety of species resemble, participate in, or give expression to different facets of the divine logos.

    Index of posts in this series is here.
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    *If memory serves–and it’s been a while–Leibniz says something along these lines: that each finite spirit (“monad”) is its own unique reflection of the divine being.

  • The Groaning of Creation 4: There’s a wideness in God’s mercy

    In Chapter 5, Southgate directly takes up the question of an afterlife for non-human animals. This is another main plank in his evolutionary theodicy, alongside the “only way” argument. Even given that the evolutionary process is necessary to give rise to the values of finite creatures, countless animals still lead lives best described in Hobbes’ terms–nasty, brutish, and short.

    An example Southgate returns to repeatedly is the pelican’s “insurance chick”–the “extra” chick that is hatched but which in most cases is pushed out of the nest by its sibling and subsequently ignored and left to perish by its parents. “Its ‘purpose’ is merely to ensure that one viable chick survives. It has only a 10 percent chance of fledging” (p. 46). This is an animal that has virtually no chance of living a flourishing life according to its kind, but is a byproduct of the process that gives rise to the possibility of flourishing life in the first place. What can be said, in terms of theodicy, for such victims of the evolutionary process?

    Southgate marshalls three general considerations for positing an afterlife for non-human animals:

  • Passages from the Bible that suggest a redeemed future for all creation, not just humanity
  • The Bible pictures humans themselves as existing in a deep relationship to the surrounding creation
  • God’s goodness suggests that the Lord in his infinite mercy would not condemn his beloved creatures to permanent frustration

    • Once again Southgate recognizes that he’s on speculative ground here; neither the Bible, nor tradition, nor reason provide knock-down arguments for animal heaven. And yet, taken together, these considerations provide, at the very least, hope that God will provide a chance at ultimate fulfillment for all God’s creatures.

    Southgate considers various versions of what eschatology for animals might consist of, such as species immortality vs. individual immortality and “objective” immortality in the mind of God vs. “subjective” immortality for individual creatures. He tentatively comes down on the side of some form of subjective, individual existence.

    Picking up on the previous discussion of creaturely self-transcendence, Southgate admits that heaven for animals might seem to require a radical transformation of their natures. “It is very hard to imagine any form of being a predator that nevertheless does not ‘hurt or destroy’ on the ‘holy mountain of God’” (p. 88). He suggests that predators and prey might enact a playful version of their relationship that doesn’t involve pain or death, but admits this is, again, sheer speculation.

    Nevertheless, he returns to his three lines of consideration for animal immortality: Biblical promises, the interrelatedness of humans and the rest of creation, and the goodness and mercy of God. We might add that it’s not much less difficult to imagine what heaven for humans will be like and how our natures and environment would have to be transformed to make it possible. For Christians, the hope for such immortality–or, better, resurrection–depends not on anything intrinsic to our natures, but on the faithfulness of God. Should we hope for anything less for our animal kin?

    Index of posts in this series is here.

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  • The Groaning of Creation 3: God so loved the world

    In Chapter 4, Southgate develops a trinitarian “theology of creation,” an admittedly speculative enterprise that seeks to shine some light on the relationship between the triune God and an evolutionary process that operates according to Darwinian principles.

    Taking up the theme of kenosis, Southgate suggests that God’s self-emptying love is foundational both to intra-trinitarian relationships and to the relationship between God and the world. God the Father pours out his love, the essence of his being, giving rise to (begetting) God the Son, who, in turn, returns all that he is to the Father. And this intra-divine relationship of self-emptying love constitutes God the Holy Spirit.

    Southgate suggests that this inherently self-emptying, or kenotic, character of the divine love is the ground of God’s desire to create the genuinely other. And this desire is realized in the creation of the world and in the evolutionary process where God “lets be” a great variety of creatures.

    Following Irenaeus, Southgate calls the Son and the Spirit God’s “two hands” in creation. The Son, or Word, provides the intelligible pattern for species, which, in tune with modern biology, Southgate sees not as static essences, but as “points and peaks” on an ever-shifting “fitness landscape.” The Spirit, meanwhile, both provides creatures with their “thisness,” or particularity as unique individuals, and lures them onward toward new possibilities of fulfillment and self-transcendence.

    At any given time living creatures are in one of four states:

  • fulfilled (flourishing as the kind of creature they are)
  • growing toward fulfillment
  • frustrated (prevented from flourishing)
  • transcending themselves (either by chance mutation or some new learned capability)

    • While God takes delight in fulfilled creatures, there always remains an ambiguous note in creation. As Southgate observes, the divine love may be kenotic, or self-emptying, but Darwinian pressures require organisms to be self-assertive, if not downright aggressive. So, while the creatures praise God simply by flourishing as the type of creatures they are, there is a tension between their self-assertive fulfillment and the kind of selfless love that God is.

    This is where the element of self-transcendence comes in: Southgate sees God as luring creation– through the messy, ambiguous, and painful evolutionary process–toward a point where genuine self-giving love becomes possible: love of the other for its own sake. We see traces of this love in some of the higher animals, perhaps, but only in humanity, Southgate maintains, does this kind of love become a permanent possibility (though one that is all too infrequently realized).

    As God draws creations forward toward self-giving love, however, God endures the persistent self-assertiveness of creatures. If flourishing as the type of creature it is can be seen as the creature’s “Yes” to God, the “No” is a refusal of God’s invitation to self-transcendence, rather than selfish and preferential behavior:

    God suffers not only in the suffering of myriad creatures, each one precious to the Creator, and the extinction of myriad species, each a way of being imagined within the creative Word, but also the continual refusal–beyond creation’s praise–of God’s offer of self-transcendence, the continual refusal, beyond all creation’s flourishing, to live by the acceptance of the divine offer that would draw the creature deeper into the life of the Trinity itself. It will be apparent anew how paradoxical the theology of evolutionary creation must be, given the Christian affirmation that a good God has given rise to a good creation, and yet as we have seen the creation is shot through with ambiguity. The purposes of God are, and are not, realized in the life of any given creature. God delights in creatures in and for themselves, and yet longs for the response of the creature that can become more than itself, whose life can be broken and poured out in love and joy after the divine image. (p. 68)

    This creaturely “no” is experienced by God most powerfully on the cross of Jesus. In sketching a theology of the Atonement, Southgate says that the cross is God bearing the brunt of creation’s “no,” and taking responsibility for the pain and suffering etched into the process of life. In becoming incarnate in Jesus, God identified not just with humanity, but with all creaturely suffering, loss, and failure. “The Incarnation is the event by which God takes this presence and solidarity with creaturely existence to its utmost, and thus ‘takes responsibility’ for all the evil in creation–both the humanly wrought evil and the harms to all creatures” (p. 76)

    Southgate calls this “deep incarnation”–“the Christ-event takes all creaturely experience into the life of God in a new way.” In dying and rising, God in Jesus inaugurates a new age in which creation will be freed from its travails–humans freed to love selflessly, and non-human animals freed from the ambiguous nature of the evolutionary process in which they are caught up.

    Questions and considerations:

  • Does it make sense to say that creatures who aren’t capable of self-transcendence are frustrating God’s intentions for them?
  • How does Southgate’s theology of creation relate to a scientific explanation of the evolutionary process? Are there “gaps” in the process that require divine intervention to move it forward? Or does it operate according to purely naturalistic laws? And, if so, what explanatory power does the theological description add?

    • Regarding the first point, Southgate acknowledges that, of course, no moral blame attaches to creatures for failing to transcend themselves. However, he says, it still makes sense to speak of a certain “recalcitrance” in nature as it presently exists that resists the shape of the “peaceable kingdom.” This is in keeping with his general emphasis on creation’s “groaning”: of being in process toward something that will be fully transparent to God’s will and is foreshadowed in some of the eschatological passages in the Bible.

    In response to the second concern, Southgate says in a footnote that “theology of creation is a different sort of discourse from scientific explanation […], so the two can coexist without there necessarily being conflict between them” (fn. 56, p. 161). This needs to be fleshed out more, however. Does he mean that the two “discourse” are just two ways of describing the same phenomena? In which case, why prefer one or the other? Or does he mean that the theological discourse gets at an aspect of the total process that the scientific discourse leaves out, and is therefore necessary to give a complete account?

    Index of posts in this series is here.

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  • Friday metal – the boys are back in town edition

    I’m about one-third of the way through the new Metallica disc, “Death Magnetic,” and so far I’m very pleased. I had abandoned hope that there would be another good album from them in my lifetime.

    I might write up some more thoughts later, maybe with a broader appreciation of the band I started listening to about 20 years ago (ulp!) and who turned me on to heavy music.

    But in the meantime:

  • “Idolatry and fear”

    Wonderful post from Kim Fabricius at “Connexions.”

    UPDATE: See part II, prompted by a comment from yours truly.

  • Why I won’t vote third party

    Looks like Ron Paul, whom some of his supporters hoped would make a third-party run for president, is urging people who are sick of war, assaults on civil liberties, and, er, the Fed to vote for a third party–any third party!

    I appreciate the arguments that the two major parties and their candidates are either too close in policy or fall unacceptably short on certain key issues. Indeed, I’ve made some myself (see the previous post, in fact). I personally find Obama’s backpedaling on FISA and his disinclination to challenge head-on the Bush/GOP paradigm for foreign policy the most troubling. It’s also clear to me that Obama just doesn’t share my views on, say, the scope of U.S. interventionism.

    Nevertheless, I’m not going to vote third-party, even though I live in about the safest “state” in the Union. For one thing, none of the third-party candidates particularly appeal to me: Ralph Nader, much as I like him, seems to have passed his sell-by date; Bob Barr, the Libertarian, while staking out good positions in some areas, is still, after all, a Libertarian, and I’m not; Chuck Baldwin appears to be a bit of a far-right xenophobe; and Cynthia McKinney is, well, Cynthia McKinney.*

    I think third-party advocates, while often correct in pointing out that the major parties are actually quite similar in significant areas (e.g. the “Washington consensus” on everything from foreign intervention to broadly neoliberal economic policies), often understate the dramatic difference that seemingly “minor” policy differences can make for people’s lives.

    For instance, in the broad sweep of things, there may not be much difference philosophically between a neoconservative and a liberal internationalist, but it sure as shootin’ makes a difference whether or not we, say, go to war with Iran (for us and the Iranians). And means matter too; even if Obama and McCain both want to meddle excessively in the rest of the world, it matters a great deal which one is more likely to resort to military force to do it. And Obama is clearly the more dovish candidate. Just saying “They’re all interventionists!” papers over real differences with significant, real-world consequences. (And I haven’t even mentioned domestic policy, environmental policy, etc.)

    At the end of the day, I’m just not neutral (or even particularly ambivalent or conflicted) in this election. I want Barack Obama to win, and I want John McCain (and, more broadly, the GOP) to lose. I feel like it would be dishonest for me to root so heartily for one side while trying to float above the fray.
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    *I would be interested in a viable Green Party (I voted Green in 2004), but the actually existing U.S. Green Party seems more like a dumping ground for every far-left pet cause under the sun than a party with a coherent philosophy and stance focusing on environmental issues, like European Greens tend to be.