The DIGNITY Series: War Stories

by Editors

This is the fifth of a 10-part series examining the loss and possible recapture of dignity in our public lives and political discourse. (Read the series from the beginning here.)

DIGNITY

By Stanley Baran

5. War Stories: Knowing Dignity When We See It and When We Don’t

Physicians regularly debate the value of dignity as a guide for their work, often with little success. American medical ethicist Ruth Macklin, in an essay entitled “Dignity is a Useless Concept,” argued “in the absence of criteria that can enable us to know just when dignity is violated, the concept remains hopelessly vague.” Dignity, she concluded, “is nothing more than a capacity for rational thought and action.” Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of the British medical journal The Lancet, reached for a more instructive definition by combining the ideas of two philosophers, the eighteenth century’s Immanuel Kant and the nineteenth century’s Thomas Hill. Horton produced an argument for the I-Thou definition of dignity, writing, “Kant identified dignity as the absolute inner worth of a person, ‘by which he exacts respect for himself from all other rational beings in the world.’ Dignity and self-respect were instruments for asserting the equality of each person. . .Human dignity is an unconditional and incalculable value, admitting no trade-offs. Hill argues that the choices we make should be decided upon according to the view that no one is a mere means, that human dignity is priceless, and that our decisions can and must be made on the basis of mutual respect, seeing every human being as a source of value.” Nonetheless, Horton eventually had to admit defeat, conceding, “Human dignity is a linguistic currency that will buy a basketful of extraordinary meanings. It is not surprising, perhaps, that some critics describe dignity as a meaningless slogan.”

Still, one solution to defining dignity might reside in Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s strategy for evaluating sexual media content: “I may not be able to come up with a definition of pornography, but I certainly know it when I see it.” So it may be with dignity—difficult to define, but we know it when we see it. We preserve the stories of Joan of Arc, Sir Thomas More, Anne Frank, and Oskar Schindler because they define for us lives lived in dignity. But can dignity be demonstrated only in extraordinary times and circumstances (the Hundred Years War, Henry VIII’s break from the Catholic Church, World War II and the Holocaust)? Thurber believed so. “That which is only sporadically realized can scarcely be called a characteristic,” he wrote. “It is impossible to think of it as innate; it could never be defined as normal. Nothing is more depressing than the realization that nobility, courage, mercy, and almost all the other virtues which go to make up the ideal of Human Dignity are, at their clearest and realist, the outgrowth of Man’s inhumanity to Man, the fruit of his unending interspecific struggle. The pattern is easily traceable, from Christ to Cavell.” The story of Jesus Christ, divine proponent of the I-Thou life (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” both from the Book of Matthew; “That which you do unto the least of mine you do unto me,” from the Sermon on the Mount), is a familiar one; but who is Cavell?

A British nurse serving in Belgium during World War I, Edith Cavell is commemorated by a statue in London’s Trafalgar Square. She helped more than 200 wounded Allied soldiers escape to neutral Holland from the Brussels hospital where their German captors had taken them. For this act she was imprisoned in solitary confinement for 9 weeks and executed by firing squad. And as Aristotle wrote that “dignity consists not in possessing honors, but in the consciousness that we deserve them,” it’s proper that Edith Cavell both possesses (her statue) and deserves her honors.

Today we can recognize dignity in another, more contemporary armed conflict, the war in Iraq. One of its true heroes is a young woman who defines dignity, not because she possesses honors (in fact, she rejected them), but because she deserves them (more so because, feeling others more deserving, she did in fact reject those honors). Private Jessica Lynch’s story may or may not be familiar, although had she behaved as her superiors had wished, she would now be a national heroine, famous and rich. Instead, Ms. Lynch chose dignity.

In the early days of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Pvt. Lynch’s convoy was attacked in the town of Nassiriya. Eleven of her comrades were killed. The Pentagon’s official story had the 19-year-old supply clerk wounded, emptying her weapon at the enemy. Knocked unconscious, she was captured, tortured, and sexually assaulted. Only a daring late-night raid by commandoes representing all branches of our military freed her from her captors. Although there was no video or audio record of the attack in which she had been captured, it was America’s good fortune that the rescue was chronicled on green-tinged night camera video. Almost immediately upon its official telling, non-U.S. media outlets challenged the military’s account. Nevertheless, the American press ran with the story of the “little girl Rambo from the hills of West Virginia who went down fighting.”

But Lynch herself was soon telling all who would listen—network news shows and Congressional committees—that this was all a lie. She never fired a shot; her gun had jammed. She had been treated kindly by civilian Iraqi doctors and nurses caring for her. Her armed rescuers faced no opposition and, in fact, turned back emissaries who offered to bring Lynch to them. “I am still confused as to why they chose to lie and tried to make me a legend when the real heroics of my fellow soldiers that day were, in fact, legendary,” she said. In another interview she added, “That wasn’t me. I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do.” And later, what did Ms. Lynch do with her time in the public eye? After disavowing a network made-for-TV-movie hewing closely to the Pentagon’s disinformation, she convinced the television show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition to build a new house for a fallen comrade’s orphaned children.

Lynch’s reward for these acts of dignity? Hate mail instead of plaudits. Obscurity instead of fame. A seat at West Virginia University in Parkersburg instead of fortune. “I want people to remember me as being a soldier who went over there and did my job. Nothing special. I’m just a country girl at heart,” she said three years after her capture. How many of us remember her?

Read Part 6: Protecting Ourselves from Dignity’s Demands

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Stanley Baran is Professor of Communication at Bryant University. A Fulbright Scholar, he is the author of Introduction to Mass Communication: Media Literacy and Culture and Mass Communication Theories: Foundations, Ferment, and Future. He writes frequently on the media, popular culture, and our understanding of ourselves and our world. He will happily provide citations for this series’ quotations and statistics. Simply e-mail him at sbaran@bryant.edu.

Image: Public domain photograph of Edith Cavell (Wikipedia)

Text copyright 2009 Stanley Baran

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The DIGNITY Series: I-Thou vs. I-It

by Editors

This is the third of a 10-part series examining the loss and possible recapture of dignity in our public lives and political discourse. (Read the series from the beginning here.)

DIGNITY

By Stanley Baran

3. I-Thou vs. I-It

A third use of the word dignity, perhaps its most common contemporary application, is its invocation in verbal combat. We say, “I won’t dignify that comment with a response.” Dignity here connotes a judgment—our judgment. It no longer represents something that is intrinsic or even a quality that people can earn through their contribution to something outside themselves; it is something we have the power to recognize or discount.

Twentieth century German Jewish philosopher and theologian Martin Buber characterized this as the distinction between “I-Thou” and “I-It” relationships. In I-Thou relationships each person is fully present in the other. This was the central sentiment of the Obama family’s 2007 holiday greeting, “We all have a stake in each other, in something larger than ourselves.” In I am the Walrus, the Beatles voiced I-Thou as “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.” In I-It relationships, others are objects, means to various ends. When we “dignify that comment with a response,” we enter an I-Thou relationship, admitting that although we might disagree with another, we recognize the worth of that person (after all, we share a common humanity). We strive to explain or otherwise move that other to our position. Again quoting the Beatles, we “come together right now.” But in America we’re more Bachman-Turner Overdrive than Fab Four, so we “keep looking out for number one.” When we “refuse to dignify that comment with a response,” we reject it (and its speaker) because it deflects us from our individual end. Dignifying the other’s response requires that we reflect on our own assumptions and therefore ourselves. It’s simpler to have an I-It relationship. Deny the worth of the other. We owe no explanation. Move on.

Living an I-Thou rather than the I-It life makes demands on us that are difficult to easily meet. We claim dignity as our own, yet we reserve the freedom to decide who among others is worthy of dignity. But dignity demands that if our worth is to be acknowledged, we must acknowledge it for all—people unlike ourselves, the poor and working class, and yes, even those people whose ideas might get in the way of what we want. But why?

Thurber’s 1939 ruminations on dignity offer a hint. He wrote, “Instinct has been defined as ‘a tendency to actions which lead to the attainment of some goal natural to the species.’ In giving up instinct and going in for reasoning, Man has aspired higher than the attainment of some natural goals; he has developed ideas and notions; he has monkeyed with concepts.” Humans created dignity to become human. In “giving up instinct and going in for reason,” we opted to value I-Thou over I-It. But I-Thou has become old school, and it’s been on the path to irrelevance ever since advertisers and marketers learned they could sell us more stuff by convincing us that what we had was more important than who we were.

This shift began with the introduction of mass consumer marketing around the turn of the 20th century, but hit high gear in the immediate post-World War II years. The factories, technology, and science that helped win the war had to keep making something, and the new marvel, TV, was the perfect advertising medium to reach the emerging middle class with word of all those newly-made things. In 1947, two years after V-J Day, Edward Bernays, who believed that Americans were “fundamentally irrational people. . .who could not be trusted,” formally presented his idea, the engineering of consent. In other words, “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it.” He added, “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

Bernays’s business partner, Paul Mazur, however, wanted to rule not how people were governed by others, but how they were perceived by themselves. He argued, “We must shift America from a needs to desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality.” A little over a decade later, with television in 90% of all U. S. homes, Volume 1, Number 1 of Advertising Age reported, “The biggest business in America is not steel, automobiles, or television. . .It is the manufacture, refinement, and distribution of anxiety. Packaged as advertising and measured in dollars, the total volume of ‘anxiety’ circulating in America as 1960 dawned was worth more than $11 billion.” In the U. S. alone, the anxiety business now annually expends more than $500 billion helping us be all we can be, because we simply can’t be the new generation in our father’s Oldsmobile despite the fact that we deserve a break today. It’s difficult to worry about Thou when I need It, and I need It now. And we need It now so badly that we show no outrage and even less reflection on who and what we have become when a store employee is crushed to death and a pregnant woman trampled into miscarriage by an onslaught of 200 Long Island Wal-Mart shoppers hungry for stuff to buy in honor of the holiday that celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ. Those same people laughed, jeered, and complained when the victims’ medical assistance impeded their Holiday shopping. Like many Americans, they knew the price of everything but the value of nothing.

Read Part 4: Dismissed Warnings

_________________

Stanley Baran is Professor of Communication at Bryant University. A Fulbright Scholar, he is the author of Introduction to Mass Communication: Media Literacy and Culture and Mass Communication Theories: Foundations, Ferment, and Future. He writes frequently on the media, popular culture, and our understanding of ourselves and our world. He will happily provide citations for this series’ quotations and statistics. Simply e-mail him at sbaran@bryant.edu.

Text copyright 2009 Stanley Baran

Striving for In-Betweens

by Editors

NEW VOICES

Striving for In-Betweens:
Rationality versus Intuition in our Post-Secular World

By Kristine Williams

In many contemporary academic conversations, the topic of religion is avoided. Ever since Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God, such conversations have emphasized science and rational thought. This has left little room for perspectives traditionally associated with religion.

Recently, however, this has started to change. There has been a new interest in individual intuition and spirituality. Many people are moving away from the almost fundamentalist version of rationalism that was an initial response to the scientific age. More than a simple resurgence of old ways of thinking, however, a new perspective called post-secularism is emerging that has elements of both religious and scientific thought.

The term post-secularism has been coined within the past decade. It refers to this renewed openness to spirituality. It is a way of thinking that moves away from both strict secularism and from rigid adherence to rationalist-logical systems.

The power of the post-secularist perspective is that makes it possible to understand many beliefs. By stepping away from strict religious and scientific dogmatism, it becomes easier to connect and communicate with others. The post-secular perspective allows us, at least temporarily, to break free from our own boundaries. In some ways, it brings us back to our original state of “unknowing,” raising questions about our understanding and our comfort with the unknown.

This post-secularist perspective has developed as science evolves faster and faster, throwing out its own past certainties. Interestingly, a perspective that is more open to spirituality is also emerging in within science. Running parallel to post-secularism, it opens the possibility for new spirituality, one which breaks free from the limiting historical connotations of that term.

An episode of the WNYC radio show Radiolab, for example, raised similar ideas. (WNYC, “Choice” Radiolab, November 14, 2008. ) The story reported about a study in which choices were categorized as either emotional or analytic. In the test, a psychologist gave one subject a long number to memorize, and the other just two digits. They were both told to walk down the hall to recite the number in another room. Before reaching the destination though, they were met by a woman holding a platter of chocolate cake and another of fruit. In almost every case, the person with the shorter number took the fruit while the one holding onto the long number chose the cake. The outcome demontstrated that those using their pre-frontal cortex more actively (subjects with longer number), were unable to hold any more rational thoughts, and chose the cake through intuition. The person remembering only two digits was able to think clearly and make the “smarter” choice of choosing the healthy option. The people who had only intuition left to draw upon chose the cake, as that was what they truly craved.

Later in the episode, the speakers told of a man who lost his ability to make emotional, or intuitive, choices. After having a brain tumor removed, the man began to seem devoid of expression. One day at work he sat at his desk trying to decide whether to use black or blue ink to sign a document. He thought about which pen was lower on ink, the color of the type, whether the blue pen would stand out more, and so forth. This took him half an hour. As he became increasingly analytical, he became incapable of making choices or expressing his
feelings. Neurologists later realized that an area of the brain that allows for intuitive decision-making was disrupted.

The story of the inexpressive man seems to show that intellect alone is not enough for survival. Our minds carry information from past circumstances in our subconscious that later help us make intuitive choices. The Radiolab story concluded that intuition is an over-looked tool in the decision-making process and that it is of equal value to rationality. The human compulsion to make meaning out of experience is innate, and intuition helps us to project meaning onto the world around us.

People usually don’t like to admit they “do not know”. We often feel that we have to have a clear answer for every question that arises. However, in a world where religion is called into question and science is unable to provide the answers to our ontological questions, we can find ourselves back at a “primordial unknowing face to face with the universe”. (Gottlieb, Annie, OUTSIDE: Spiritual Nomads and the Way Beyond Religion. Open Source Spirituality: The Democratization of Revelation, http://www.ambivablog.typepad.com. ) We are forced to admit that we don’t understand the transcendent and perhaps never will.

Looked at rationally, post-secularism is a highly idealist concept. Those who adhere to rigid religious and scientific perspectives are unlikely to be satisfied with what it has to offer. But by searching for a balance between intuition and rationality — between faith and reason – we can gain the strength to strive beyond the limits of what seems rationally possible. However quixotic it may seem, it inspires us.

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Kristine Williams, contributing writer, is a student at Montserrat College of Art and is interested in making and writing about art, among other things.

NEW VOICES is a Bread and Circus Magazine feature in which emerging writers share their views on aspects of contemporary culture.

Devotio Moderna

by Editors

RELIGION

Devotio Moderna: Ted Neeley’s Passion Play

By Kimberlee A. Cloutier-Blazzard

There was something strangely sweet about this Christ, a sadness that was not divine, but human.  You sensed He was weeping, dying like a human being, and thus the faithful who knelt before Him shuddered at the sight, for they felt it was they themselves who were suspended upon the cross, convulsed with pain.

- Nikos Kazantzakis, Saint Francis

What is a Passion play?  What effect is it meant to have on the viewer?  What, if any, effect might it have on the actor who plays Christ?  These are the questions that I would like to answer, turning attention towards how the answers to those questions have changed over time—in history and our own modern time.

As the centerpieces of my project, I have chosen the modern Passion play Jesus Christ Superstar, and its iconic lead actor, Ted Neeley, who famously played Christ in the motion picture. Aside from his widely-acclaimed ability to channel Christ’s essence, Neeley is a natural choice as he has a unique perspective on the subject among performers; he has played the role of Christ for three-and-a-half decades: first in the Broadway and LA productions, then in the feature film and in two subsequent stage revivals.

The rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar (by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber) was first introduced as a concept album in 1970.  A year later the “brown album” became the best-selling record in the US, the same year the play made its debut on Broadway. The movie adaptation, directed by Norman Jewison, was released a couple of years later in August of 1973.

The narrative covers the last seven days of Jesus’ life, from the preparation of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem to his Crucifixion. This follows the traditional construct of the Passion play as a story which depicts the trial, suffering and death of Jesus. The Superstar version is completely sung, told predominantly from the viewpoints of Judas Iscariot, Pontius Pilate, Jesus, Mary Magdalene, Caiaphas, Annas, Herod and a few others. Singing the story and using such a small cast are unusual in recent Passion plays.  However, it was very typical of early liturgical Passion plays in which the lines of the key characters (including the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene) were written as church hymns, voiced by the clergy.

The earliest desire for Passion dramaturgy arose in the Eleventh Century, with the writings of such men as St. Bernard of Clairvaux and St. Anselm.  These clergymen were at the fore of a Christocentric Piety movement that radically humanized the figure of Christ, focusing acutely on his Incarnational aspects. Later, in their wake, some desired to make the contemplation of Christ’s humanity a more vivid visual experience.  With a creative combination of emotive, evocative art and music, the Passion play was born.

Hitherto, there had been Easter plays in the church, joyful celebrations of the Resurrection, but no Passion plays.  The Mass and communion, it seems, were deemed a sufficient reenactment of the Passion.  In fact, early Medieval commentators refer to the Mass as an authentic drama, with the Church as the theater, and the priest the tragic actor. (Sandro Sticca, “The Montecassino Passion and the Origin of the Latin Passion Play,” Italica, Vol. 44, No. 2, [Jun., 1967], 211.)

Over time, the original liturgical concert pieces, known as oratorios (without theatrical accoutrements), were staged as operas.  At that point, they came to include costumes, props, and additional, non-clergy cast members.  There was even the startling innovation of placing women in the female roles (though this practice remained unconventional until the Seventeenth Century). Eventually, wildly popular late Medieval Passion plays left the confines of the church for the streets, and their expanded cast included the whole town (sometimes numbering in the hundreds). There were actors, singers and stagehands, drawn from every class and profession.  Historical accuracy had not yet been invented, so all the costume was contemporary dress. These elaborate productions could last for up to seven days. Participation in the religious play was considered to be a form of worship.

Eventually, because these plays took place in the village square, and were community-driven, they began to incorporate greater levels of extraneous narrative and humor. Though both high and low forms of art were blended in Medieval Christianity, over time dogmatic church officials increasingly came to see the “secularized” Passion plays as farcical, coarse and undignified.  This was an unfortunate change from the serio-comical nature of earliest Christian theater traditions: a break with the past that culminated in our own largely humorless post-Enlightenment modern culture.

Though it had come full-circle to its historical roots (intentionally or not), when Jesus Christ Superstar first arrived on the scene in the Seventies, it was considered controversial for its use of contemporary costume, modern vernacular and its humanization (sometimes called “secularization”) of its characters, including a singing, emotional Christ and an unmediated, close rapport between Christ and the other leads.  Few critics then, for instance, seemed ready to believe that Mary Magdalene sought a loving, Platonic relationship with her rabbi, Christ.

In the post-Sixties period, an age sensitive to ‘identity politics’, Superstar was also closely scrutinized for political agendas. For example, when Norman Jewison cast Carl Anderson, an African American, to play Judas, his choice unintentionally sparked controversy about the demonizing of Blacks in popular culture. Jewison strongly responded that he chose the actor based solely upon his merits as a performer. And, as with most Passion plays, anti-Semitism was also read into the script.  This, too, Jewison vehemently denied.  An anti-war agenda was also read into the use of machine guns, Israeli tanks and fighter planes.

Together with Carl Anderson, Jewison chose another Hollywood-unknown: Ted Neeley. This prescient choice arguably accounts for much of the film’s and stage production’s continuing success.  Neeley’s penetrating, other-worldly glance—with his wide-set hazel eyes—and his impassioned voice—with its remarkable ability to venture into the soprano range—give his performance a mesmerizing, even “mystifying” power.

Making a Mountain Out of an Anthill

by Editors

RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY

Making a Mountain Out of an Anthill: The Inner Drive for a Social Contract

By Kimberlee A. Cloutier-Blazzard

I have been reading Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man (NY: Harper and Row, 1975), and gotten as far as his third section, “Thought.” His premise is fascinating, that consciousness underlies all matter. Consciousness is thus omnipresent, and ever-increases with biological complexity. It flows from geosphere to biosphere, then—with the advent of intelligence—the noosphere. On its evolutionary journey it rises from elemental chance to reasoned choice. Père Teilhard attempts to reconcile divinity with evolution, teleologically pointing life towards what he terms the “Omega Point:” a sort of Mobius strip for life whereby all life eventually folds back and returns to its origins in God.

Interestingly, this morning’s NY Times ( July 15, 2008 ) carried a somewhat related story about the Harvard scientist, Edward O. Wilson, who studies ant social behavior and extrapolates lessons for humanity. Wilson is currently writing a treatise on “social evolution,” a controversial argument that connects of social behavior and genetics.

Wilson sees an evolutionary impetus for cooperative, selfless behavior that favors the group over the individual. The Times article states, “In humans, these may include genes that underlie generosity, moral constraints, even religious behavior.” It goes on to say, “Morality and religion, [Wilson] suspects, are traits based on group selection. ‘Groups with men of quality — brave, strong, innovative, smart and altruistic — would tend to prevail, as Darwin said, over those groups that do not have those qualities so well developed,’ Dr. Wilson said.”

Wilson and like-minded colleagues have come under fire from others in the Sciences, such as Richard Dawkins (author of The Selfish Gene [Oxford U. Press, 1976] and The God Delusion [Bantam Books, 2006]). Dawkins and his camp narrowly see genetics, the “survival of the fittest” and natural selection in individual terms, as an organism’s single minded (”take no prisoners”) drive to survive and reproduce at all costs. Wilsonians, on the other hand, believe that natural selection works on many levels, including “multi-level or group-level selection”: in essence, an evolutionary process favoring the survival of the group over the needs of an individual.

For many reasons, I am most tempted to agree with Wilson’s view, not Dawkins’, as I’ve made abundantly clear elsewhere in other articles, such as “Turtles All the Way Down” and “Krishna’s Dictum.”

I’m not yet sure how closely Père Teilhard’s thesis overlaps with Wilson’s, but if Wilson can prove an evolutionary theory of morality, his work would certainly seem to harmonize with Teilhard’s belief that something greater than mechanical evolution is “afoot in the world.”

When I complete The Phenomenon of Man, I will surely have further observations to add. Stay tuned.

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This item originally appeared in the blog Percyflage.

Kimberlee A. Cloutier-Blazzard, Ph.D., is a senior contributing writer & contributing editor of Bread and Circus Magazine and an Independent Scholar of Art History, Specializing in Northern Renaissance and Baroque. Click here to send her email.

Image (above): Cover of Pierre Teilhard De Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man (Harper Colophon, 1976 edition), available at  Powells.com and other online booksellers.

An Updated Answer for Job

by Editors

RELIGION

An Updated Answer for Job: Modern Religion and the New Pivot Point of History

By Kimberlee A. Cloutier-Blazzard

Why do humans believe in God? As the Biblical Job sat on the dung pile, covered in sores, a broken man, he earnestly questioned his friends. How is it I got here? Why does God allow suffering? At the end of the story, for his trials, Job receives a reinstatement of all his prosperity. Finally explaining his role in this fiasco, God gave Job a similar equivocal answer to the one he gave Moses on Mt. Sinai, “I am that I am.” Or, in other words, “It is not for you to ponder or understand.” For some probing mortal minds, therefore, Job’s important questions were never adequately answered.

In our evolving secular age, we often find that this traditional image of a distant deity is not appealing. Like Job, we have questions, and we want them answered in detailed ways. We are not unlike our more recent ancestors in this respect, beginning perhaps with members of the “Axial Age”, the period spanning 800-200 BC—the exact historical moment philosophy was invented as a discipline.

The so-called “Axial Age” was termed by Karl Jaspers in his book, The Origin and Goal of History (1949). Since its publication scholars have debated his far-reaching concept whereby unconnected philosophers in China, India, Mesopotamia and the Occident created similar revolutionary thought, expanding human understanding and spurring the full blossoming of the world’s great religions: Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, reformed Judaism, and Christianity.

What caused this coeval world-wide paradigm shift is not clear, but Jaspers noted that each of the cultures in question were in inter-imperial lulls, when quiet moments of liberty allowed philosophers to wander about small principalities and exchange their developing ideas about the meaning of life and man’s place in the universe.

Roughly forty years after Jaspers, in her book A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (1993), former nun Karen Armstrong built upon Jaspers’ foundation, elaborating the connecting strings between the big three Mono-theistic traditions—a hot topic in today’s fractious world. In a rare feat of detached, historical criticism, Armstrong demonstrates how these religions have developed over time to reflect the very real fears, insecurities, triumphs and aspirations of their mortal followers. Sometimes these shifts privilege one group over another, the male sex over the female, one “chosen” tribe over its local neighbor, but Armstrong is careful to make clear that extreme, sometimes violent pendulum swings are more often outweighed by periods of peaceful understanding of commonalities.

Particularly striking to me, as a member of the twenty-first century, was her poignant statement that each of the historical religions have periodically gone through revolutionary “atheistic” moments, when the mantle of their forefathers’ religious practice had begun to feel ill-fitting. Putting lie to the Modern chestnut that Nietzsche killed religion, or, on the other hand, that “God” is unchanging and a-temporal, it seems that throughout human history a limited, human concept of “God” has routinely been retooled by successive generations in a cyclical process of shedding an old cultural form in preparation for a new paradigm. In essence, the eternal spirit was always there, but as human ideology changed, its earthly reflection necessarily adapted.

To contextualize this type of change, the beginning of Armstrong’s book firmly underlines the intrinsic human need for the spiritual, a finding echoing the important work of Joseph Campbell and others. This thread gives Armstrong the sure foundation needed to frame the vicissitudes of historical rejections of religion as particular moments in an ageless, metaphysical continuum. Necessarily, she is careful to delineate between the practice of religion and its underlying functions, much like Joseph Campbell when he separated the traditional roles of the priest versus the mystic in The Power of Myth (1988). The former is in charge of the social spectacle, the temporal form of the deity, and the latter channels the infinite spirit, or source of the archetypal myth.

This kind of sensible, cyclical understanding of our human need for spirituality allows us to see the current diapodes of the religion argument with the utter rejection of “God” on one side, and its counter-balance, zealous fundamentalism, as two extreme reactions to a moulting culture. In both, there remains a disconnect between past and present. In essence, the atheists renounce the old vision of “God” as childish and outmoded while the fundamentalist embraces an equally untenable a-historical understanding of religion. It seems that both are short-sightedly bound to the temporal, historical transmitters of the spiritual message, while the universal message of compassion is itself lost in transmission. Neither patiently attend the present rebirth of the spiritual in its new, unique mode.

In previous posts, like Turtles All the Way Down, I’ve discussed the theologian Harvey Cox’s vision for a new religion, one that privileges festivity and fantasy. While current forms of religion often stifle jubilation and creativity, in Cox’s vision, the uniquely human inventions of festivity and fantasy must be part of any religious endeavor. We might call this Job’s dilemma: finding bliss in our human state of suffering and practical concerns. According to Cox, if developed, this new religion could eradicate “crippling literalism,” the incapacitating fault he sees as the central attribute of both fanatical Atheism and Fundamentalism. This new religious mode would transcend the commonly held post-Enlightenment (often scientific) view that to know something is to see it, or at least to measure it. This would mean the feet of Positivism held to the flame of an ingrained human yearning for celebration and the spiritual.

Trying to fathom where religion is presently headed, Karen Armstrong, the French scholar Yves Lambert and others have posited that we are now in a new axial age. In 1999 Lambert wrote an article, “Religion in Modernity as a New Axial Age: Secularization or New Religious Forms?” (Sociology of Religion, 60/3, 303-33) which, to my mind, raises the question of whether or not the predictions made in Cox’s groundbreaking Secular City (1965) will come to pass. Thirty years after Cox, Lambert believes that the great traditional religions have adapted to modernity, though he also sees Fundamentalist reactions to this and the spread of new religious forms. Though Lambert effectively charts shifting public opinion on matters of religion, the question of how our global community will construct rituals and myths to frame our current “super-empirical” understanding remains cloudy. Will humanity be able to put aside old-fashioned tribal (or nationalistic) rhetoric in favor of an ecumenical religion of mankind? Will humans embrace what we share rather than what we see differently?

The findings of the neo-Axial Agists are nonetheless tantalizing. They may help to bridge the seeming gulf between the cultural warriors we see battling it out in the public arena. If only these polemicists could see that the broad middle has already beat the path to the future, and it is neither Atheism nor Fundamentalism. To solve the problems of the environment, social inequality and sectarian conflict, the broad middle of humanity will have to define our reflexive modernity in positive, humanist terms, assessing the excesses and dangers of unbridled consumption, science and technology through a lens of respect and harmony with our planet and our neighbors.

Luckily, with Post-Modern democratization and globalization (thanks, in part, to the Internet) we cannot go back to the earlier paradigm of “temple, palace and hut”, or “church, castle and cottage” (as Campbell aptly put it). Today every human being is endowed with global presence and power and our old symbolism of hierarchical organization (priest, president, and pop star) have systematically and cynically been dismantled.

In conclusion, contrary to Jaspers’ contention, I still believe de-mythologization remains a myth, as others have eloquently stated. As humans, we need stories to center us and help us forge our way into the future. Indeed, this ritualization of time and space as a metaphor for the infinite seems hardwired in humans. As Joseph Campbell has shown in his work, there can be no disintegration of temporal duality, the so-called “collapse of dualism” as coined by R.N. Bellah (Beyond Belief, 1976). Phenomenology (the first-person, intuitive experience of consciousness) requires this interpretation of the world; it is only in the complimentary, super-empirical / mystical realm beyond relativity where we can experience divinity. Admittedly, contemplating that sphere will always be an imperfect, human endeavor requiring faith. But, answers to life’s unanswered questions are always yearned for, and always well worth the effort. That’s human nature.

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Bread and Circus contributing writer Kimberlee A. Cloutier-Blazzard, Ph.D., is an Independent Scholar of Art History, Specializing in Northern Renaissance and Baroque. Click here to send her email.

The Courage to Laugh

by Editors

SOCIETY

Neo-Grobianism and the Courage to Laugh

By Kimberlee A. Cloutier-Blazzard

Serious political debate is seemingly impossible nowadays. Politicians are beholden to the upcoming 2008 election, held hostage by the current sanctification of all things military and, in general, hog-tied by our money-driven political system.

To be sure, these are sobering times. An unending war in Iraq, constant warnings from Washington about impending terrorism, rising murder rates, domestic surveillance, tazered college students and plummeting markets have all taken their toll on our collective American psyche. Why, then, do seemingly frivolous comedy shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report serve as one our country’s greatest pastimes? Is it pure folly to laugh at our situation? Not if we survey the long history of transcendent laughter.

Comedy, it seems, is the human way to survive another day against the odds. The gift of laughing at what is a horrible situation has roots as old as history itself. As Conrad Hyers has written in And God Created Laughter: the Bible as Divine Comedy (1987), examples of humor from the Bible abound. He cites a “stinging satire” by Amos against the greedy wives of Samaria who encouraged their husbands to squeeze the poor harder for their personal gain:

Hear this word, you cows of Bashan,
who are in the mountain of Samaria,
who oppress the poor, who crush the needy,
who say to their husbands, ‘Bring that we may drink!”
The Lord God has sworn by his holiness
that, behold, the days are coming upon you,
when they shall take you away with hooks,
even the last of you with fishhooks. — Amos 4:1-2 (Hyers, p. 7.)

Centuries later, in the Renaissance, Rabelais’ churlish epic Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532) was written both as ribald entertainment and as a humanist’s weapon to combat increasing cultural restrictions on the freedom of both language and the body.

Rabelais is but one example of a carnivalesque, liberal tradition. On the opposing side, the emerging middle classes of the early modern period marshaled satirical humor to constrain expression. In contrast to Rabelais’ comedic overthrow of strictures though the use of grotesque realism, conservative intellects contrived of a pale derivative—prudish Grobianism: pithy literary descriptions of revolting peasant behavior used to shock its audience into good manners. While “Grobiana” usually focused on table manners (like not blowing your nose over the plates or defecating), eventually all anti-social behavior came under the auspices of the totalitarian Grobian style. This included: failing to greet people and being generally offensive, bragging and telling indecent stories and even using physical violence if there is anything to be gained. Methinks those burghers didst protest too much. Like their conservative descendants, they worked awfully hard at proving their own separation from their boorish, peasant roots.

So, here is my suggestion for Stephen Colbert: With the lack of civility and excess of swagger and bravado on the part of our public servants (especially the schoolyard rules of military engagement), we should enlist the power of ancient forms of comedy to dose them with their own authoritarian medicine and shatter their glass houses. Since our elected officials haven’t yet learned civility, perhaps we could use a bourgeois Neo-Grobianism to satirize their boorish antics. Although this traditional type of social ostracism and shaming of excess might not change the actors, it may yet make us feel better to turn them into public effigies and exercise our atrophied freedom of speech.

Even better than derisive biting satire, however, one could paint a truly comic picture of every self-serving politician as Lucius in Apuleis’ Golden Ass (the Metamorphoses, ca. 170 AD). In the picaresque Latin novel Lucius was a Roman country aristocrat magically transformed into an ass and forced to spend time as a member of the downtrodden lower classes he claims to serve. (The guise of a donkey being a wonderful metaphorical cross for Republicans in particular to bear.) In the happy ending, Lucius has a religious epiphany and rights his erring ways. Maybe we could similarly pen our politicians into New Orleans where they meet their constituents and humbly help to bear their burdens? Survivor-New Orleans-Mule Nation? Now there’s a plot line.

This type of comic levity might help buoy distraught souls who despair of America’s future, people like Naomi Wolf. In her new book, The End of America: A Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot (2007), Wolf outlines the ten steps that fascists typically follow in overtaking governments and connects them to the actions of the current White House administration. Considering reality, she quite understandably strikes one as a woman profoundly haunted and disturbed by the echoes of past dictatorships found in contemporary events. One can see how she cares deeply about liberty.

I have one simple message for her and any empathetic readers:

What we can laugh at, we cannot fear.

This is the core principle of Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose (1980) and of the celebrated Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s irreverent masterpiece, Rabelais and his World (1965; Indiana U. Press, 1984)—his compelling critique of Stalinist Russia through the lens of the Renaissance. As he wrote:

For fear can only enter a part that has been separated from the whole,
the dying link torn from the link that is being born.

(Bakhtin, Rabelais, p. 256.)

For Bakhtin, nothing in culture exists in a vacuum, history is cyclical and death is always followed by birth. Indeed, as the old saying goes, as one door closes another always opens.

Though we cannot be sure of what the future holds for “Truth, Justice and the American Way,” we can face it knowing that America is not simply its current Government, it is—more importantly—the timeless “We the People,” and regardless of our current predicament “We” can learn from our past mistakes. Reconciling laughter will help us to ease the transition to a brighter future. For, as Michael Hoyle states poignantly in his prologue to Bakhtin: “Necessary to the pursuit of liberty is the courage to laugh.” (Rabelais, p. xxiii)

Postscript –

There must be a new wind blowing. Since I sent this article off to my Bread and Circus editors, comedian Stephen Colbert was quoted in the (9/23/2007) Parade section of Sunday’s Boston Globe as saying:

“Not living in fear is a great gift, because certainly these days we do it so much. And do you know what I like about comedy? You can’t laugh and be afraid at the same time—of anything. If you’re laughing, I defy you to be afraid.” (As interviewed by James Kaplan, p.7.)

I kid you not.

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Bread and Circus contributing writer Kimberlee A. Cloutier-Blazzard, Ph. D., is an Independent Scholar of Art History, Specializing in Northern Renaissance and Baroque. Click here to send her email.

Image (above): Steve Colbert of The Colbert Report. Comedy Central image used according to Fair Use guidelines.

Odds Bodkins

by Editors

Odds Bodkins: Reflections on God’s Body, or Lack Thereof

By Kimberlee A. Cloutier-Blazzard, contributing writer

This semester, I’m teaching two sections of Art History Survey One—what I like to call “Caves to Cathedrals.” Of late, my lectures have been teeming with references to historical conceptions of whether or not God, Christ, the angels and saints should be depicted with naturalistic bodies. As Joseph Campbell and others have rightly pointed out, in surveying the major world religions (Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) one can find elements of both: the ephemeral, or immaterial (Neo-Platonic), school of thought and its opposite, the more material (Aristotelian) school. In other words, some philosophers frame God as a divine mystery—invisible and seen only through a murky, worldly veil. Conversely, others believe that God is part and parcel of every living being on Earth, that our divine souls are truly manifest in our humble, yet sanctified bodies.

In the classroom, reaction to this philosophical and artistic dialectic has been interesting. Mostly, students are excited that they can make sense of the duality of highly abstracted imagery of divinity on the one hand, and its antipode, corporeal realism, on the other. Some even seem to have used this age-old question to embrace their “inner art historian.”

On a recent exam, for example, one student referred to a stern, abstracted Byzantine image of Christ Pantocrator (Christ as “divine judge”) against a golden, heavenly field as “his ass up there looking down on us.”

Perhaps like most academics, my knee-jerk reaction was to think, “Whoa! How crass!” Then, it occurred to me that while admittedly the response was completely un-Byzantine in its sentiment, the very corporeal metaphor for God or Jesus just might have some legs in another context—the context of Western European sacred parody.

Such happenstance is extremely useful to me as I’m concurrently busy preparing a paper proposal on “Holy Laughter”. Isn’t it funny when serendipity strikes? In my research for that project, I’ve been reading about the incarnation of Christ as a truly bodily event—a celebration of “God as mud” as it were. Instead of thinking of the holy as something intangible, as the Eastern Orthodox Church fathers did—or the whole of the Protestant Reformation, for that matter—some medieval Western European philosophers, and most common folk historically have thought of our humble selves as worthy of the description, “just a bit lower than the angels.” After all, to them the mystery of the incarnation in Christianity requires that one come to grips with God made flesh. And, imagine what fun it would be to consider a supreme being clothed in humanity with all of its physical functions and limitations. What a philosophical conundrum! What an opportunity for festive humor concerning the lower bodily strata!

As many scholars (such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Harvey Cox and M. Conrad Hyers) have written, Medieval Period bawdy festivity and parodic inversion of divinity were heartily embraced as part of the human quest to understand past, present and future, to grapple with change and to find his place in the cosmic order. Such play and release of energy required the temporary inversion of high and low social and cultural strata, much like the true expression of communitas as described by the anthropologist Victor Turner. According to Turner, communitas is the very spirit of community demonstrated by equality, solidarity and togetherness. Communitas is most acute in periods of inversion and change, as in a rite of passage, one that brings common understanding and transient humility.

These rites of passage have been likened to the ancient tradition of carnivalesque feast days in the Catholic Church—for example, the feasts of Epiphany and Easter when earthly kings are toppled in favor of poor babes, or physical death is overcome by a miraculous physical resurrection. (Deeply resonant themes, incidentally, shared by many world religions both East and West as enumerated by Joseph Campbell in The Mythic Image.) These inversions made God substantive and present to each and every person, be they noble, priest, merchant or peasant.

Implicit in these parodic, sacred celebrations are the shared dualities of human existence each person must come to know: hunger and satiety, wealth and squalor, power and powerlessness, birth and death. These are distinctly human concerns. Indeed, it seems human beings have constructed ritual and festivity to make sense of the impenetrable, the unknowable and the unfair. And, yet, many cultural leaders have tried to disassociate from the physical, from revelry and excess, especially our Puritan forefathers to whom we owe much of our current distaste for fun and release.

In his recent book God is Not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything (2007), Christopher Hitchens has hitched his own wagon to a flippant, broadly dismissive, secularist viewpoint. As a monolithic whole, he categorizes “religion” as wish-fulfillment, imposed sexual repression, maximal servitude and solipsism, and a deliberate misrepresentation of the origins of man and the universe. As I’ve mentioned, it wasn’t always so. His picture of “religion” as a grand larceny of personal freedoms and intellect is a short view, mostly informed by post-Enlightenment thought.

Like most Post-Modernists, Hitchens has thrown out history and spirituality without plumbing the valuable resources of traditional festivity and comic ritual; in past generations such parodic festivity served to remind us of what we share—who we are and where we come from, and how we might properly proceed.
Only since the iconoclastic Enlightenment movement came on the scene in Western Europe have human beings have found reason to ponder whether or not “God is dead.” If humanity cannot begin to belly-laugh at its pathological seriousness, so, it would seem, are we.

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Kimberlee A. Cloutier-Blazzard, Ph. D., is an Independent Scholar of Art History, Specializing in Northern Renaissance and Baroque. Click here to send her email.