Upon recognizing the depth of the problem that mass incarceration poses, it may be tempting for many whites, especially those used to positions of influence and authority, to leap into devising solutions. Reading Michelle Alexander’s book certainly brings to mind a litany of anathemas—for instance, discriminatory policing, the senseless drug war, wildly excessive sentencing laws, the broad discretion afforded to prosecutors, the perverse incentives of the private prison industry and chronic underinvestment in communities of color. But the authors of The Scandal of White Complicity do not venture far into policy proposals or political strategizing. Nor do they allude to the many biblical passages about freeing captives that might tempt one to play the liberator. What they offer instead is a call to humility, to accountability to people of color, to solidarity. The task they set for white Americans is to organize themselves and each other as allies, and to follow the lead of their neighbors of color who are already fighting the battle against the new Jim Crow every day.Read the rest at America.]]>
In the national Catholic magazine America I’ve just published a short review of an important new book with a long title: The Scandal of White Complicity in U.S. Hyper-Incarceration: A White Spirituality of Resistance. It’s an effort by three Catholic thinkers to articulate the depth of white complicity in this country’s massive, highly racialized prison system and to outline an approach to resistance grounded in Catholic social thought.
What would a movement against mass incarceration be able to accomplish with the support of the country’s largest religious denomination?
]]>Upon recognizing the depth of the problem that mass incarceration poses, it may be tempting for many whites, especially those used to positions of influence and authority, to leap into devising solutions. Reading Michelle Alexander’s book certainly brings to mind a litany of anathemas—for instance, discriminatory policing, the senseless drug war, wildly excessive sentencing laws, the broad discretion afforded to prosecutors, the perverse incentives of the private prison industry and chronic underinvestment in communities of color. But the authors of The Scandal of White Complicity do not venture far into policy proposals or political strategizing. Nor do they allude to the many biblical passages about freeing captives that might tempt one to play the liberator.
What they offer instead is a call to humility, to accountability to people of color, to solidarity. The task they set for white Americans is to organize themselves and each other as allies, and to follow the lead of their neighbors of color who are already fighting the battle against the new Jim Crow every day.
Religion Dispatches posted a crazy little blog post of mine, "Repentance on Wall Street?" It came to mind after getting the chance to hear yet another rousing talk by Cornel West (along with Judith Butler, Jurgen Habermas, and Charles Taylor) at an SSRC event at Cooper Union. His words and encouragement, such as they are, sometimes feel like my greatest source of hope that thinking hard about religion can be a force for good in the world.
Imagine this: in the middle of the day, all at once, a sea of suits pours out onto the streets of Lower Manhattan. With them come as many somber faces, cast down, but bearing a glint of tranquility not often seen in that neighborhood. No press conference was scheduled, but reporters descend, and something like one materializes out of the crowd, centered around the chief executives of the top investment banks. They, we learn, arranged this together the night before in lieu of their usual cognac and cigars. It has been a year now since the American people rescued the financial industry with gargantuan loans and benevolent takeovers. The Dow is on the upswing again, and some of the biggest banks have paid back what they borrowed. But the executives know that, even as their fortunes turn, employment nationwide continues to plummet. People all around the globe have fallen into poverty as a result of the crisis that their markets engineered. Now is the time, they declare, for a change.Continue reading at RD.]]>
Religion Dispatches posted a crazy little blog post of mine, “Repentance on Wall Street?” It came to mind after getting the chance to hear yet another rousing talk by Cornel West (along with Judith Butler, Jurgen Habermas, and Charles Taylor) at an SSRC event at Cooper Union. His words and encouragement, such as they are, sometimes feel like my greatest source of hope that thinking hard about religion can be a force for good in the world.
Imagine this: in the middle of the day, all at once, a sea of suits pours out onto the streets of Lower Manhattan. With them come as many somber faces, cast down, but bearing a glint of tranquility not often seen in that neighborhood. No press conference was scheduled, but reporters descend, and something like one materializes out of the crowd, centered around the chief executives of the top investment banks. They, we learn, arranged this together the night before in lieu of their usual cognac and cigars.
It has been a year now since the American people rescued the financial industry with gargantuan loans and benevolent takeovers. The Dow is on the upswing again, and some of the biggest banks have paid back what they borrowed. But the executives know that, even as their fortunes turn, employment nationwide continues to plummet. People all around the globe have fallen into poverty as a result of the crisis that their markets engineered.
Now is the time, they declare, for a change.
Continue reading at RD.
]]>Raised up by parents and teachers of the 1960s, and grandparents who brushed against World War II, I always wondered what crisis and heroism would define my generation after its childhood in the in-between simmer of the ’90s. When my answer came, I was 17, at the start of my last year in high school, and close enough to the Pentagon to see the smoke towering out from it. What my friends and I did that night, more quiet and focused than ever, was play our usual game of tag in the dark, on the comfortable fields around our school. That night, as on others, a police car came down into the parking lot. I won’t ever forget the image of us standing under a light, talking with the officer in stunted phrases, hushed in deference to the state of exception that had come and left the ordinary rules in question. He didn’t make us leave, as the cops normally did. He drove away. Perhaps he recognized the mystery at work in us, which we ourselves couldn’t be sure of, by which we were somehow, in playing, planning our next move as a generation, planning the future of the world, and we should not be bothered.I leave out what has happened since. Too much. So far, my generation has allowed our youth to be defined by two endless wars with little obvious effect at home and spiraling greed unto economic collapse; we have not raised our voices significantly, except for the occasional pop star, aided by microphones. We've spent a lot of time on the internet. Maybe my friends and I shouldn't have been playing that night. Maybe we should have been, really, planning. Read the other essays over at Happy Days.]]>
Raised up by parents and teachers of the 1960s, and grandparents who brushed against World War II, I always wondered what crisis and heroism would define my generation after its childhood in the in-between simmer of the ’90s. When my answer came, I was 17, at the start of my last year in high school, and close enough to the Pentagon to see the smoke towering out from it.
What my friends and I did that night, more quiet and focused than ever, was play our usual game of tag in the dark, on the comfortable fields around our school. That night, as on others, a police car came down into the parking lot. I won’t ever forget the image of us standing under a light, talking with the officer in stunted phrases, hushed in deference to the state of exception that had come and left the ordinary rules in question.
He didn’t make us leave, as the cops normally did. He drove away. Perhaps he recognized the mystery at work in us, which we ourselves couldn’t be sure of, by which we were somehow, in playing, planning our next move as a generation, planning the future of the world, and we should not be bothered.
I leave out what has happened since. Too much. So far, my generation has allowed our youth to be defined by two endless wars with little obvious effect at home and spiraling greed unto economic collapse; we have not raised our voices significantly, except for the occasional pop star, aided by microphones. We’ve spent a lot of time on the internet. Maybe my friends and I shouldn’t have been playing that night. Maybe we should have been, really, planning.
Read the other essays over at Happy Days.
A good artist is a deadly enemy of society; and the most dangerous thing that can happen to an enemy, no matter how cynical, is to become a beneficiary. No society, no matter how good, could be mature enough to support a real artist without mortal danger to that artist.The Partisan Review's final question concerned the "the next world war." It asked, "What do you think the responsibilities of writers in general are when and if war comes?" Of all his answers, here Agee replies the most directly, the most earnestly, and the least aggressively toward the askers. He says he has thought much about the matter—“first glibly … later with more and more perplexity, distress, and immediate interest, fascination, and fear"—and several possibilities have come to him. […]]]>
Three-quarters of the way through his masterpiece Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee takes a pause in his account of a summer spent living among Depression-era, cotton-picking tenant farmers for an “Intermission,” subtitled “Conversation in the Lobby.” The overall thrust of this portion, phrased as a furious response to questions posed to writers by the Partisan Review in May, 1939, is to defend the radicalism of the artist’s vocation.
A good artist is a deadly enemy of society; and the most dangerous thing that can happen to an enemy, no matter how cynical, is to become a beneficiary. No society, no matter how good, could be mature enough to support a real artist without mortal danger to that artist.
The Partisan Review‘s final question concerned the “the next world war.” It asked, “What do you think the responsibilities of writers in general are when and if war comes?” Of all his answers, here Agee replies the most directly, the most earnestly, and the least aggressively toward the askers. He says he has thought much about the matter—“first glibly … later with more and more perplexity, distress, and immediate interest, fascination, and fear”—and several possibilities have come to him.
- Enlist in that part of the war which seemed most dangerous, least glamorous, least relevant to any choice I might have through “education,” “class,” “connections,” or personal craftiness. This either for personal-“religious” reasons or out of an “artist’s” curiosity, or more likely both.
- Join the stalinist party and do as I was told or Bore from Within it. [A page earlier he writes, “‘I find, in retrospect,’ that I have felt forms of allegiance or part-allegiance to catholicism and to the communist party. I felt less and less at ease with them and am done with them.”]
- Stay wherever I happened to be, mind my own business, refuse every order, and take the consequences.
- Stay wherever I happened to be, and write what I thought of the War, the Pacifists, etc., wherever I could get it printed.
- Escape from it by whatever means possible and by the same means continue to do my own work.
For those of us hoping to plant Agee in a particular position or camp, either for or against this war or war in the abstract, he is evasive. Even the pacifist crowd, so radical in its way, he considers also a “society” into which an artist cannot afford to blend. Answer 1 offers a very Christ-like self-sacrifice, venturing among the least to reveal the truth for all. But, unlike number 3, and possibly numbers 2 and 4, it seems a perfectly anti-political position to take. So also is number 5. Taken together, though, the options offer little assurance to the partisan.
A footnote appended later seems to be some encouragement for radical nonviolence:
I would now (fall of 1940) have to add to this belief in non-resistence to evil as the only possible means of conquering evil.
Only to equivocate in the very next sentence:
I am in serious uncertainty about this belief; still more so, of my ability to stand by it.
If you’re tempted to dismiss Agee as simply a political weakling, a dilettante making games out of serious business, the last sentences of this section are worth hearing out. They spell out a cosmic reversal, an insistence that The War everyone talks about is in fact a game, an absurdity when viewed from the truly serious business of making art and meaning for the human race.
Or, in other words, I consider myself to have been continuously at war for some years, and can imagine no form of armistice. In that war I feel “responsible.” I doubt any other form of war could make me more so.
This artist, he insists, cannot be the partisan that the Review wants to drum out concerning the coming war. He refuses to accept the war being declared by politicians and generals—and all manner of those who consider themselves informed—as the real war most worthy of his attention. Especially when no one else does, the artist can look past her or his society’s present means of mass suicide and murder, into the deathless questions that, by being ignored, so provoke the rest of us.
During World War II, Agee devoted himself to reviewing films for Time and The Nation. The draft board passed him over. He had a son who died soon after being born, and he married his third wife.
]]>This week there has been a bunch of buzz about a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association which noticed that the more religious people are, the more they reach for extreme medical treatments in their last days, refusing to give up the ghost. They are also less likely to have prepared ahead of time for dying by drawing up wills and arranging for healthcare proxies.
Any study about religion and health is sure to push some buttons. There’s a whole collection of foundations out there (Templeton, Pew, Lilly, etc.) looking to give out money to scientists who are, as Richard Dawkins put it, “willing to say something nice about religion.” This particular study received money from one of those, the Fetzer Institute.
In the media coverage, however, there’s been an interpretive tug-of-war-going on. The original paper, whose lead author is Andrea Phelps of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, makes mention of the “heroic measures” that these dying religious folks call for—it’s a bit of medical jargon, meant not necessarily to bespeak actual heroism. Run a Google search on “heroic measures religious” today, and the first thing you get is a cheery article in the Desert News, the Salt Lake City paper.
It isn’t clear why these patients pursue more aggressive treatment, said Andrea Phelps, a senior medical resident at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and the study’s lead author. It may be that people with a strong sense of faith are more optimistic or are more satisfied with their quality of life, Phelps said. Doctors should be sensitive to religious beliefs and help plan care accordingly, Phelps said.
Look through three other reports from less theocratic points of origin—the Economist, the Boston Globe, and Scientific American—and, quite to the contrary, they paint the religious folks as somewhat more like crazed and desperate souls whose supernatural worldviews crumble at the threat of natural demise. The Darwin-loving Economist compares the poor believers’ behavior to the pre-conversion hypocrisy of Augustine:
Saint Augustine of Hippo, one of Christianity’s most revered figures, famously asked God to help him achieve “chastity and continence, but not yet”. When it comes to meeting their maker, many religious people seem to have a similar attitude.
Points out SciAm, the poor suckers (who all died) hold out hope against hope:
“Religious copers may choose aggressive therapies because they believe that God could use the therapy to provide divine healing, or they hope for a miraculous cure while intensive medical care prolongs life,” the scientists speculate in the study.
But let’s take the final word from none other than Watergate-conspirator-cum-theological-statistician Chuck Colson. He has a point worth noting:
The “vast majority” of the patients–some 90 percent of those who were religious and 97 percent of those who were not–did not want “heroic measures,” such as mechanical ventilators or CPR, to be used in their cases.
Based on that seven percentage-point difference the New York Times proclaimed “Religious Belief Linked to Desire for Aggressive Treatment in Terminal Patients.” Please.
Do a little more math and you will realize that sweeping generalizations like “far more likely to seek aggressive, life-prolonging care” are based on the responses of approximately 25 people.
And what, exactly, are we supposed to make of his conclusion?
Religion can be a problem if it makes people want to stay alive longer. As we nationalize healthcare, as Smith warns, the sick and infirm will soon be told they should do the patriotic thing: go quietly.
Are we about to lose our God-given freedom to cling on to dear life futilely, painfully, and at the expense of our brethren?
For some time, I've been hearing talk of "warriors" or "warfighters," rather than "soldiers," in my casual observation of the U.S. military. You hear this at all levels, from infantrymen referring to themselves, to the "warfighter standardized equipment" discussed at the highest echelons of the military-industrial mafia. At a recent talk in New York, the British journalist Robert Fisk brought home what this little switcheroo of words means. He compared the "Soldier's Creed," composed after the atrocities in Vietnam, to the "Warrior Ethos," adopted in the early months of the Iraq War, apparently with Donald Rumsfeld's blessing.
The difference between the two is a haunting reminder that, by 2003, the U.S. military had exorcised the lessons of Vietnam from its memory, paving the way for Abu Ghraib and so much else. […]]]>For some time, I’ve been hearing talk of “warriors” or “warfighters,” rather than “soldiers,” in my casual observation of the U.S. military. You hear this at all levels, from infantrymen referring to themselves, to the “warfighter standardized equipment” discussed at the highest echelons of the military-industrial mafia. At a recent talk in New York, the British journalist Robert Fisk brought home what this little switcheroo of words means. He compared the “Soldier’s Creed,” composed after the atrocities in Vietnam, to the “Warrior Ethos,” adopted in the early months of the Iraq War, apparently with Donald Rumsfeld’s blessing.
The difference between the two is a haunting reminder that, by 2003, the U.S. military had exorcised the lessons of Vietnam from its memory, paving the way for Abu Ghraib and so much else.
Both versions are on Wikipedia, at least right now. Or else look at the dramatic animated versions on the Army website, here and here. You see it is pretty clear from the visuals which one they consider more important nowadays.
Here is the first, evoking the responsibility and honor that our country expects from its people in uniform:
I am an American Soldier.
I am a member of the United States Army—a protector of the greatest nation on earth.
Because I am proud of the uniform I wear, I will always act in ways creditable to the military service and the nation it is sworn to guard.I am proud of my own organization. I will do all I can to make it the finest unit in the Army.
I will be loyal to those under whom I serve. I will do my full part to carry out orders and instructions given to me or my unit.As a soldier, I realize that I am a member of a time-honored profession—that I am doing my share to keep alive the principles of freedom for which my country stands.
No matter what the situation I am in, I will never do anything, for pleasure, profit, or personal safety, which will disgrace my uniform, my unit, or my country.
I will use every means I have, even beyond the line of duty, to restrain my Army comrades from actions disgraceful to themselves and to the uniform.I am proud of my country and its flag.
I will try to make the people of this nation proud of the service I represent, for I am an American Soldier.
And then, the 2003 Warrior Ethos. The difference is stark. It seems custom-built for John McCain’s insistence on the terms of victory and defeat rather than any subtler option. Destruction is held above honor.
I am an American Soldier.
I am a Warrior and a member of a team. I serve the people of the United States, and live the Army Values.
I will always place the mission first.
I will never accept defeat.
I will never quit.
I will never leave a fallen comrade.
I am disciplined, physically and mentally tough, trained and proficient in my warrior tasks and drills.
I always maintain my arms, my equipment and myself.
I am an expert and I am a professional.
I stand ready to deploy, engage, and destroy, the enemies of the United States of America in close combat.
I am a guardian of freedom and the American way of life.
I am an American Soldier.
According to Wikipedia, “Some soldiers shout ‘hooah’ at the conclusion.” Doesn’t this feel like a mistake?
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I guess Cicero was the original flip-flopper. Since following him in a recent boat of watching the HBO/BBC TV series, Rome, I've been reading up on the guy who before I've mainly known from heresay—from the pens of Augustine, Montaigne, etc. It was disappointing to see that the show had no interest in Cicero's (or anyone else's) life in ideas, but its depiction of him as politician still caught my eye. Though it seems that there are the inevitable historical inaccuracies (such as his role in the Senate during the rule of Julius Caesar), Rome's general gist of the man seems right: he was easily swayed and never convinced, and he didn't stand up for his convictions—which is a thing people, and particularly politicians, are supposed to do. […]]]>I guess Cicero was the original flip-flopper. Since following him in a recent boat of watching the HBO / BBC TV series, Rome, I’ve been reading up on the guy who before I’ve mainly known from heresay—from the pens of Augustine, Montaigne, etc. It was disappointing to see that the show had no interest in Cicero’s (or anyone else’s) life in ideas, but its depiction of him as politician still caught my eye. Though it seems that there are the inevitable historical inaccuracies (such as his role in the Senate during the rule of Julius Caesar), Rome‘s general gist of the man seems right: he was easily swayed and never convinced, and, besides the lost dream of the republic, he didn’t seem to have convictions—which is a thing people, and particularly politicians, are supposed to have.
Cicero switched sides at a crucial moment, and in ignominy—he transferred his allegiance from Pompey to Caesar, begging forgiveness from the new emperor. He could never quite commit himself to any position.
I suspect, indeed, that Cicero’s flip-flopping cannot be understood without his philosophy—which is why he is such a strange character in the TV show. An eclectic skeptic, skeptical even of skepticism, the richness of his ideas seem to have undermined his political career.
Another case of a similar thing arises in a passage from Michael Novak’s forthcoming book about New Atheists, which I am currently in the process of reviewing:
In times of stress, distinguished intellectuals such as Heidegger and various precursors of postmodernism (including deconstructionist Paul de Man) displayed a shameless adaptation either to Nazi or to Communist imperatives—or to any other anti-Hebraic relativism. Even elites may lose their moral compass. (No One Sees God, p. 53)
It is a terrifying thing in Cicero and in folks like Heidegger, something I can only call a sin, and yet a sin I want so much to transform into a workable virtue.
No great conclusions from me tonight. These examples touch on issues that I’ve been toying with a lot lately: The Politics of Cowardice | Different Sorts of Skepticism | Becoming a Person — and so on. The problem is this: how does a person keep an open mind and see truth in different sides while remaining a coherent person, and more, a fighter for good?
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