I notice that, according to news reports, the Occupy Charlotte movement staged a coup against their self-proclaimed leader - you can't have a leader in a leaderless movement, can you?. In pique, he groused to the local CBS station that they were just a bunch of "rogue kids."
Apparently, the argument that drove us all insane last summer is starting up again here. Who is the grown-up in the room?
Adbusters, the Canadian website that claims to have started it all (and most journalists now agree, especially because they announced everything to the date before it happened), has been sounding a little whiney lately that it's not getting proper credit for everything that's going on. The growing urban legend from the start has been that the "Occupy" movement was simply a spontaneous, accidentally simultaneous, but unscripted, unco-ordinated mass uprising of les enrages first in America and around the world.
The claim may or may not be comparable to Al Gore's famous claim that he invented the internet. But I think Adbusters has more going for them. At least they can get instant PR now in the mainstream media.
Today they got everyone from Salon.com to the New York Times to herald them for stepping in as the grown-up in the room and formulating for the first time one clear, resonant demand - a 1 percent financial transactions tax. It will be interesting to see if this demand, which the mainstream media (or at least the mainstream liberal media) seems to like, catches on.
Now I realize pure participatory democracy doesn't have demands, just like it doesn't have leaders, because demands - well, they can make you sound "political". It compromises the pure utopian idea of non-judgmental, consensus-based, collective desire without politics. But, in fact, that's what democracy means - demands. Demands lead to policy which leads to proposals which leads to legislation and/or elections to elect legislators who will support those policies and demands.
Adbusters is calling it a "Robin Hood Tax." Actually, the notion has been circulating in the economic profession for some time under the name of the "Tobin tax" (after the name of the Nobel prize-winning economist James Tobin who first proposed it).
The Tobin tax is politically controversial, and it is not just opposed by conservatives but also by many establishment liberals. It is sort of a global version of the "fair tax." It's certainly no more squirrely than 9-9-9, which actually makes sense too. The OWS people can call it the "Robin Hood tax" or the "greed tax"; the Tea Party can call it the "let's tax Wall Street and not Main Street tax." Both versions are equally just.
BUT, politically, it may be something that would really focus people's attention - just as 9-9-9 does. Personally, I think it's just what the doctor ordered, though I'm not sure 1 percent on every transaction is the proper formula.
The problem is not really "capitalism". We haven't had real, good, old-fashioned capitalism in a long while, and if we did even the Tea Party wouldn't like it. They still like their Social Security checks.
What we have is a kind of make-believe, simulated, funny-numbers-gone-wild form of virtual capitalism that is not merely (in Frederic Jameson's tendentious phrasing) the "logic of late capitalism." It is post-capitalism. Capitalism requires the transformation, as Marx understood of labor value into "surplus value." But post-Microsoft virtual capitalism - i.e., global, computer-dominated, virtual capitalism - has arisen as the transformation of what was left of surplus value into "fantasy capital."
I've got a good economist friend who has been explaining to me that we've seen the ongoing vanishing of capital since the late 1970s, which is why we're in the current cataclysmic debt mess.
What we have is a hyperreal capitalism and hyperreal ongoing protest against capitalism.
Tax the funny money! That will bring the system down, if you really want to bring it down. Of course, it will bring the government debt, if not the government itself, down.
The "it" is problematic. It doesn't really exist, though corporations who play in this global "casino" (I think the better phrase would be the Great Global Monopoly Game). It wouldn't really mean a redistribution of wealth, because the wealth is all play money to begin with.
But at least we would know where we stand.
We'll see if OWS listens to their putative "mentors," or they throw Adbusters under the bus too. After all, the major sin of the guy who got thrown out in Charlotte was that he claimed to have something to do with starting it all - at least in Charlotte.
I'll bet all those guys in the black, stove-pipe hats twirling their mustaches now, having cackled with glee for years over our misery, are having serious second thoughts. Maybe some are even going to imitate Muamar Gaddafi and grab a golden pistol and hide in a manhole under Zucotti Park until someone finds him and shoots him.
Probably not.
Turns out, according to CNN's stats, you only have to earn about $322,000 in gross salary, royalties, bonuses, occasional income, etc. to be statistically the 1 percent we supposedly all who want a revolution are not.
Note that this amount doesn't cover net worth (e.g., the market value of a house one owns, automobile, savings and retirement accounts, etc.), which isn't taxed directly, only when you draw income on it. If that were the case the 1 percent would be more like 20 percent, and it would be larger if you counted only those over 50. I know an elderly lady who told me she lives on about $20,000 a year for the rest of her life on liquid assets worth about $250,000.
Given her location in New York State, where she has to pay a lot of taxes on that meager $20,000, she technically lives way below the poverty level. And she'll never be able to work again. If the stock market tanks, she'll be even more impoverished. Seems Ben Bernanke, who with the good intentions out of which the road to hell is proverbially paid, kind of screwed her and others like her with QE2 by printing money and pushing interest rates toward almost zero in order to "turn the economy around."
So we're not talking about little old ladies like her, who don't live in Pasadena anymore because it's too expensive. Then about WHO are we talking?
Let's start with my good friend Morris (actually, the only "Morris" I know is the erstwhile cat cartoon character, but I like the name, which is not his real name, though Morris as a human being is most likely real).
Morris is about 56 years, and has two kids in college, for which he's paying a lot for them to go to my very expensive private university, which pays me as a professor around or a little below the national average for my annual salary in a special field that is routinely below the average of all fields, because it's in something they call "the humanities," in which nobody wants to major because you can't graduate with an entry-level, high paying job having specialized in applied, global, Deleuzian semiotics. But at least with their major in applied, global, Deleuzian semiotics they can understand better than that self-important finance major why the world is unjust and needs to be transformed.
Morris, as a member of the 1 percent, makes an annual salary of $325,000 from his business as self-employed CEO of Great Expectations, Inc., an interactive software company targeting English majors with specialties in Victorian literature, which he founded. But his kids, even if they're very bright, can only get a little scholarship, because they - or at least when checking Morris' income - don't qualify for the kind of aid you can get if you parents make $50,000 a year. So Morris shells out at least $50,000 out of pocket annually so his kids, who are both majoring in applied, global Deleuzian semiotics, can get a bachelor's degree from a good university.
BTW Morris also gives about $32,000 a year to churches, Christian causes, and even the United Way because as a Christian he believes in tithing. So after all of the above comes off the top, and he pays the mortgage and high real estate taxes (he lives in California) on a house that is now half its original value, his actual salary is reduced to less than $200,000.
Wait, I forgot, he's self-employed, and his family health insurance premium is about $1500 a month, so there goes another 18K. And since he's a self-employed, small business owner, most of his business expenses pass through the company itself, which is an LLC. So when all is said and done after federal, state, and local taxes as well - and his take of course varies enormously from month to month, depending on whether anyone wants to buy his software - he has about $1000 a month in money he can now spend on the life of luxury.
Let's string Morris up! Maybe we'll have to liquidate his kids too.
Now I don't want to mention any names, but I know a lot of college administrators (even deans) who at more prestigious schools are easily in the 1 percent bracket. And if you total up the very high salaries of a lot of well-known "academic superstars", even in my field, many of whom are out there calling for "communism" while urging on the Zucotti Park protesters and getting national attention, which helps to boost their already very high regular spkeaking fees, consulting fees, book publishing contracts, etc., you may even have outed part of the 0.1 percent.
The only difference is that they don't wear black, stove-pipe hats.
After all this tedious analysis, I can proudly tell you that I am NOT part of the 1 percent, even before taxes. But I have subsidized group health insurance, don't have student loans anymore or kids to put through college, and a mortgage that is getting closer to being paid for.
There IS one stat, however, the article points out. The percentage differential between the top 1 percent and the bottom 10 percent has been growing significantly in the US over the past quarter century. That does need to be addressed. Economists have known for a long time that widening income disparities were the number one cause of the 1929 stock market crash and the great depression. Of course a lot of this disparity has to do with the aging of the population. But to address that problem, many who think they don't have to give a little will indeed have to give a little - more than the 1 percent.
Back in the 1960s our generation was one quarter of the population. The young now, who ARE getting the raw end of the deal economically, are a much smaller minority, primarily because our generation decided that for a variety of reasons they wanted to have far less children.
Developing world nations are the other way around, which is a big part of the problem with global economic imbalances.
I'll now make my statement. We're all going to have to figure out how to get along with less, and learn to graciously share better and be far more productive, even if we're old fs, with what we do have. That takes wisdom, grace, determination, and a willingness to step back from the blame-gaming and finger-pointing. It also takes a deep, spiritual engagement with divine possibilities we haven't encountered perhaps before.
There's a lot we can do in our own immediate spheres of influence. And we need to do it with a vision of the future, like the months of the early dark ages who realized before anyone else that their world was dying. They saved one civilization so it could blossom as another.
I'll start exploring those themes when the time is right.
I said yesterday I was going to write today about the most common and addivctive intellectual Peter Pan pipe dream when it comes to political economy - a worldwide "Communist" revolution that ushers in a worldwide Communist millenium where everyone will, as Marx only aphoristically envisioned, provide "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs."
But the serious upheavals underway in Greece today and some other looming clouds on the global horizon compel me to put that off and offer a little reflection.
What Marx and others captured by this secularist counterpart to the religious anticipation of a future paradise of streets paved with gold really are looking toward is the abolition of the law of exchange, on which all theories of "economy" or "economics" are based.
Notice I did not use the phrase, common to all introductory economic textbooks, "law of supply and demand." That is deliberate. Supply and demand is what regulates "markets," or keeps them in balance. But exchange is what "makes" markets in the first place.
If I grow, gather, or shoot all my own food in sufficient supply to feed myself and my family, and make everything I need from food, shelter, and even "frivolous" stuff like art objects from whatever I easily obtain without relying on somebody else, I don't need a market.
But if I can only grow only pinon, which I use for my housing, and you grow the grain I need to stay alive, but can't get the pinon you need to have a roof over your head, you and I have the making of a market. It all depends on whether you can spare a little grain, and I can spare a little pinon. Then we come to some "exchange value" (e.g. a bushel of one for a peck of the other) that benefits us both, if not equally.
It was Rousseau and Marx who first gave currency to the idea that paleolithic hunter gatherer bands didn't exchange anything with other bands, and that market economies - which is what we really mean when we talk about "capitalism" - only arose when the "state" was created. Anthropologists have successfully proven that hypothesis historically false, but that kind of persists, especially as we increasingly don't have to get the leather to make our own shoes or grow our own food.
What's the difference between Wal-Mart and Mother Nature, except that the former supposedly exploits people to provide us with cheap shoes and food and the latter supposedly beneficently gives us whatever we need? The former is "capitalism" and the latter is "natural and organic."
I'm wondering if all the wild animals who died from starvation as a result of drought in the Southwest this summer would have welcomed the opportunity to go to Wal-Mart. But that's getting off topic. Back to the real subject at hand - greed, capitalism, and income inequality.
Consider Greece. The Greeks are striking, and some are burning their country down, today because the "socialist" Greek government is about to pass legislation that would increase "austerity" and cut public-sector jobs to satisfy the international community that they can solve their runaway sovereign debt problem. The sovereign debt problem, we are told, is caused by too many government sector workers with too high wages and too short working hours who were given that by governments they voted for, because they were tired of all the "austerity" of the past.
That may be too much of a simplification, but it's basically the case, at least from their creditors' perspective.
To appease the Greek street (which the Greek government can't do, even if they wanted to), then, the other less or not indebted EU countries would have to ante up even more than they have, and their wage-earners would have to pay more taxes (which they already pay a lot of anyway).
The ballooning problem globally, especially for the "developed" countries, is not just a shrinking number of "jobs" relative to our income expectations but runaway debt - whether its personal or collective increasingly matters little. That runaway debt is the long-term result of a lot of factors, including very bad behavior on the part of the financial industry, which only four years ago more and more American college graduate wanted a high-paying job in.
But it's also the result of what I would call the "revolution of unrealistic expectations" on the part of a consumption-sated, virtual-world-addicted, emptily idealistic, slogan-addicted Western-cultural elite (hell, we "developed-world" people are the "1 percent" if you compare us Asia, Africa, much of the Middle East, and of course Latin America).
They've ALWAYS thought we were too greedy and capitalistic, and now they've started to play the game finally. It's interesting to me that THEY are not in debt these days - it's us. I won't throw in here the famous line years ago from Pogo (who was that, you say) about meeting the "enemy", which is someone we didn't expect.
History has shown us there are two ways to avoid getting into debt - both "personal" or "sovereign." Live off the land, or live within your means.
Okay, you say, but if only those "millionaires" would pay their fair share. Pay for what?
I'm reminded of something that actually happened to me when I visited Greece in the mid-1970s, when the country was in one of its cylical bouts of "austerity" imposed at that time by a fascist, military dictatorship that had staged a coup about four years earlier. I was invited by a shopkeeper into the back of his modest shop, who recognized me as an American, to drink ouzo with him, because "I love Americans so much" (or so he said).
As we were seated in private he pulled out a long knife, put it to my throat, and said, "ah, you rich American, now give me every dollar you've got."
It turns out he was pulling a prank, for which I then forgave him, but until he let on to his real intentions, the dialogue went something like this.
"But I'm not a rich American. I'm a poor, American student" (I was then just out of grad school with large student loans and no job yet).
"Ah, but all you Americans are millionaires,as far as we Greeks are concerned" he cackled, "so give me all your money - now!"
If you look at who a lot of those "millionaires" we are talking about are, they are often Indians, Chinese, Africans, and perhaps even a Greek here and there.
This morning in Dallas I was listening to FM 104.9 in Dallas, which is part of an Indian-owned media company that caters to the swelling Indian population of North Texas. There were more cheesy buy-buy-buy commercials than you have on AM radio. And, of course, there was the movie "Slumdog Millionaire."
My point is that the quest for global economic justice built around anger, resentment, and "class warfare" (actually, in the global sense it's just as much a "war of the worlds" (as in developed and developing) is self-defeating, if it's simply a comparison of who's got and who thinks they don't got what they deserve because somebody else somehow got more.
We Americans should look at ourselves less as indignatos and more as resentemados, especially if you following Nietzsche's diagnosis of the universal, modern, Western pathology of resenntiment.
I don't care if you're a blue-collar worker who resents all those "illegals" who worked at all those less-than-minimum wage jobs while you were out refusing to pay your taxes while getting high on meth, or a "millennial" with a high-powered grad degree who resents small business owners, the remaining backbone of the American economy, because they don't get all the jokes on "The Big Bang Theory."
We're all in this deep you-know-what as Americans, and I'd like to sit down together to start working together to do what we can to turn this ship around, even if we have to throw all the crystal chandeliers overboard to reduce the weight.
If you were on the Titanic, it was easy to blame to captain (actually, historians say it was a silly screw-up on the part of the first or second mater) for hitting the iceberg. But they were still all going down together.
Anne Applebaum, the staff writer, hits the nail on the head in a lot of ways. Her thesis is quite similar to what I've been saying recently, and she needs to be heard. Let's call it a "reality check."
She says that the reason there "understandably" is no coherent set of policy objectives for what is now a worldwide Occupy Movement (let's not call it OWS, but OM, which sounds more sixtiesh anyway) is that democracies, which since the time of Pericles in ancient Athens have been local, are paradoxically not equipped to deal with global challenges.
Remember the old Eighties slogan popularized by John Naisbitt, which embodied the second wave - we're now in the third - of "participatory democracy", a phrase coined by the New Left of the 1960s. "Think globally, act locally!"
We need to act globally now too, Applebaum says, but we can't really do that effectively because democracy wasn't designed to act globally. Acting globally requires a unified, global, democratic political order, which we don't have. If Europe can't get its act together together even in the midst of a crisis potentially far worse than in the US, how can you expect the world to do so? And to do so right now?
Chanting "democracy now", as we did in the Sixites, is fine if you're directing it at the present occupant of the White House (which we probably don't need to do). But try doing that right now in Beijing, the erstwhile "Communist" Versailles palace of the current global capitalism. See my point?
What Appelbaum notes is obvious. But rather than merely acquiesce to the obvious, which will ensue in instant despair, we need to do more than simply be "aware," which is what OM has already done for us.
Awareness is a good thing, not a bad thing. But awareness is like taking only a few days of your antibiotic to combat a life-threatening strep infection when the prescription calls for two weeks. If you don't go all the way with the prescription, the infection seems to abate for a while, but then comes back with a vengeance.
As speaker after speaker at our conference last spring in Denver on the global plague of human trafficking and exploitation of vulnerable people from Benin to Belarus emphasized, too much "awareness" without a careful analysis and a realistic follow-up for mobilization of people and resources can have the opposite effect in the long run. It can get hopes up with a passion to "do something," only to realize the impossibility of the task, ending in apathy and long-term loss of motivation.
In order to immunize ourselves against long-term despair, we need to do something first (and I realize, it's not immediately gratifying or glamorous), which is to do our own kind of "consciousness raising" - see, I threw in another generationally unfamiliar Movement term which Marx actually invented. To raise our own consciousness about the real reality - not the "hyperreality", the pure Truman Showish, totally virtual, Baudrillardian, "more real than real" reality of our slogans and significations - of our plight, we need to do something different than we are thoroughly addicted to doing, which is either one of the following:
Blame some vague, generic, Other (i.e, "the rich" or "the government") or some vague, generic form of emotionally-laden Otherness (i.e., "capitalism" or "the liberals" qua "socialists")
Once we realize the impossibility of solving anything by doing that, or after we have done just-enough-to-be-dangerous "consciousness raising" on ourselves, start blaming ourselves for our consumerism, our complicity in the "system", our laziness, our inaction, all our misguided choices since we first put our baby fingers on that hard stove, etc., etc.
The blame game, as we've had psychologists tell us for a long time but not of course politicians who we both blame and vote for simultaneously, is just a sophisticated form of denial.
What we need in this new era of or conscousness raisining, or CR (fashioning acronyms is not sixtiesh but au courant, ), is what I would call a new, more sophisticated, self-organizing method of the name game. Psychologists tell us that if we can name it, we can really deal with it. That's probably, anthropologists tell us, human beings most likely invented language in the first place.
Naming involves also the development of definitions, synonyms and their definitions, a new grammar of discourse, etc. It does not involve using what the psychologists call "thought-stopping cliches," which satisfy emotionally (like crack) but leave us ultimately worse off, and which is what we're all, on the right and on the left, doing.
You know, "back then" before we mobilized we had something called "teach-ins." They weren't just for the academe crowd, they were theoretically for everybody.
Teach-ins are about the substance of what is going on. The "why are we in this flix?" question ultimately flows into the "what ought we to do?" question.
Hopefully, this blog is the beginning of a serious teach-in about the global crisis we're all caught up in.
I know, I know, we're all afraid that we'll just end up "talking", not doing. But if you have a severe and baffling disease, would you just treat it yourself without first at least coming up with a tentative diagnosis, having a physician do that perhaps just to confirm or disconfirm what you already thought, then reading everything you can about it, then joining or creating a "support group", etc., etc? Of course you wouldn't.
But with social media we're talking all the time. We now live in the digitally networked age of instant and complex information.
We didn't have any of that in the Sixties.
Tomorrow I will write about why we shouldn't listen to the false prophets who tell us "all you need is communism (whatever that means), da, da, da, da, tum."
It all started when a 14-year-old daughter of a pastor of mine came up two weeks ago and gushed, "I'm really into the Sixties now." I smiled. I wasn't sure why, but I went through the Sixties (actually what we mean by the "Sixties" were really the years 1967-1973) in all its headiness, hopefulness, giddy idealism, muddiness, dashed hopes, and personal dysfunctions that affected an entire generation.
Then Occupy Wall Street started a week later, and to cite the now trite Yogi Berra remark, it was deja vu all over again. The only difference was that it came on with full fury much more quickly (that's accelerating "change" timeline Alvin Toffler in Future Shock wrote about forty years ago), it "went viral" (a phrase we didn't have then) much more quickly thanks to social media, and it was about something far more complex than it was at the time (the Vietnam war and the repression of civil rights had been concrete things that could be addressed by simple policy options, whereas the slow global economical unravelling we are now experiencing is transnational and impossible to turn around with straightforward, national political initiatives).
I still fondly remember the Sixites now, because what happened then brought about real and important changes (if only sometimes indirectly and through the long haul), although with serious, long-term collateral social and cultural damage that in retrospect could have been avoided. At the time everyone exulted in what the French called "the events", while no one anticipated the collateral damage. How can you when you're intoxicated with promise?
To say you're wiser now, of course, doesn't help or do anything at all for the younger generation. But you can offer advice, even if it's bound to be disregarded.
In the Sixties the slogan was "you can't trust anyone over thirty." The sentiment behind that slogan was based on the supposition that no over thirty would understand the way we did what was actually going on, and if you took their advice you would end up being compromised or manipulated. Since our elders at the time had created the mess we were all protesting against, why were they worth listening to? Will anyone today listen to a banker about how to solve the global problems of banking? You've gotta be kiddin'?
But I didn't really anticipate the fierce pushback from the twenty-somethings that are on my Facebook page as well as in personal discussions when I dared to suggest that maybe they ought to step back and twice twice a little bit about "the events" that started in Manhattan and now are happening most places around the world. I cited numerous somewhat ambivalent or even skeptical articles from my older contemporaries, but the general response I received was - as in the Sixites - if you're not with us, you're against us!
I avoided talking about the Tea Party while it was receiving all the media attention, because it obviously had a different genesis, and in the academic world no one wants, or still wants, to understand the Tea Party because it is considered merely to be part of what H.L. Mencken disparaging referred to as the latest incarnation of America's "boobocracy" - small-town, small-minded, narrowly focused people who just work, go to church, hate diversity, hate ideas, and of course hate change.
In retrospect I realize the difference between the Tea Party and the fledgling OWS movement parallels the difference between the "cultural revolutionaries" of the Sixties and the George Wallace for President movement about the same period. If George Wallace, who was clearly more "reactionary" than the TPers are today, had not been brought down by an attempted assassin and, although he didn't actually die, rendered politically ineffective for the rest of his life, the 1970s might have turned out quite differently.
But then what if John or Bobby Kennedy hadn't been shot either?
What I myself learned in the 1960s is that history matters. I didn't learn it after the fact. I saw history in the making (I did get an MA in "historical studies" at Berkeley, and almost went on to get a history rather than a philosophy of religion PhD) , and I learned the lessons at that time, which quickly changed my attitude about what was then happening. Most of my contemporaries then, as well as my younger contemporaries now, still believe history sucks. Or if it doesn't, it's because at least for ideological reasons you can use your own, carefully selected metaphors to justify what you already wanted to believe anyway.
No, this is not the Sixties redux - actually! How do I know? I lived through it, I analyzed it through education at the time, and I've continued to do so ever since. I'm doing it right now.
Nor is it a "new civil rights movement." Nor is it The Revolution finally and decisively on a global scale - finally and decisively - as people who read Zizek all the time might want to believe. Nor is it HOPE! Remember, we voted someone into office decisively only three years ago, and now we've supposedly lost hope. Go figure.
I'll spend time in this slot explaining what not only is happening. I will also explain, not with the meaning of Lenin's phrasing early in the last century that had more than a whiff of menacing subtext for which we now know the horrible implicatons, but with a certain tentative irony, the following: "what is to be done."
What is to be done? Don't get ahead of me.
I'm going to write this regular blog even if you are sure, as we did, you know what is happening and what needs to be done.
Except we got a lot of it wrong, and I'm not convinced you're going to get any more right.
But what do I know? I passed the thirty mark years ago.
Plato's famous observation in The Symposium that both progeny and publishing can be considered gestures toward creating something immortal has always been insightful. As unquestionable founder of Western arts and letters (and I'm not talking here about the Bible which can hardly be termed "belletristic"), Plato was probably on to something. And I'm sure he considered flesh-and-blood productions "ontologically" inferior to books, or literary works, that "live forever." Plato was an "idealist." The Symposium was not about learning how to, as Stephen Stils might say, "love the one you're with" or the kid(s) you've got, but about transmuting base metals into gold, so to speak through art.
But what if art and life in the Platonic sense become not so much indistinguishable as interchangeable? What if your own progeny makes the same gesture by publishing something "immortal" himself? And what if he is immortalizing someone, or something, that isn't simply either "real" or "ideal", but (as Jacques Derrida would call it) impossible. The Derridean "impossible," as the now immortal philosopher of postmodernity and so-called "deconstructive" readings of texts employs the term, has nothing to do with not being able to do or accomplish something. It has to do with discerning the presence of a space of meaning and signification that is neither here nor there, neither within nor without, neither internal nor internal, neither physical nor spiritual, neither (to use big philosophical words) "immanent" nor "transcendent".
The impossible is, as Derrida suggests, a specter. It haunts us. Like all specters, it is a force that impinges constantly on our lives without ever really manifesting, or materializing. Like the ghost of Hamlet's father in Shakespeare's "immortal" (I won't keep pushing that trope, I promise) play by the same name, Derrida's specter "manifests" at times of transition, confusion, doubt, "in-betweenness", when the "times are out of joint." Derrida develops the notion of the "specter" in his book from the late 1980s entitled Specters of Marx. The specter haunts us because it vaguely reminds us of the past, but also intimates something which we can feel in the air, which is both now and therefore, as Derrida would say, "messianic." The Kingdom of Here is both now and not-yet. It is both present and "to come."
The impossible haunts us at in such ways in such in-between and out-of-joint-times, at "such a time as this". And this book is definitely haunting at this time.
The young hero of The Book of Samuel (a book about a kid named "Samuel," Samuel Gerard) is himself an "in-betweener," or "tweener" for short. The book adopts the actual title of an in-between book of the Bible, which is about the time in-between the golden age of ancient Israel's tribal democracy and the worldly and increasingly corrupt monarchy. The book is set in an aging, lower middle class, almost exclusively white, pre-gentrified neighborhood of Denver, Colorado during the early 1980s, in the salad days of what conservatives nowadays nostalgically dub "Ronald Reagan's America."
We used to refer to tweeners as "pre-teens," but now we know that this age for both boys and girls is equally about being "pre-" and "post-." It is also post-childhood. The no longer and not yet. That's why a little over a generation ago we started renaming every "junior high" as a "middle school." This strange combination of "pre-" and "post", this no longer yet still to come, or "to become", is often described as the time of "coming of age." Indeed, that's how many of the somewhat formulaic blurbs or reviews of this book online have described it - a "coming of age novel."
What exactly does it mean to "come of age"? Usually, it's about losing one's innocence and discovering sex. It can also involve a sense of being suddenly marginalized in terms of emotions and physical appearance, of entering "the awkward age," to employ a threadbare and quite inconsequential standard descriptor. But it's not merely coincidental that pre-literate - and sometimes even highly literate - societies have ancient ceremonies performed at this time of life for "coming of age," what are known as rites of passage. The very concept of "passage" implies transition, in-betweenness.
The famous anthropologist Victor Turner characterized these ceremonies as accentuating what he called the "liminal space" of life at this time. The word "liminal" derives from the Latin limen, which can mean "threshhold" or "boundary line." In this space of in-betweenness it is sometimes almost impossible to distinguish order from chaos, and the confusion is deliberately and strategically enshrined in the rites themselves.
In the Roman empire the word referred to the invisible boundary line (usually a river) between "civilization" and the "barbarian" realms. Roman legions were garrisoned there (modern European cities such as Frankfurt and Vienna were originally such outposts) in order to prevent order from absorbing chaos, or barbarism from penetrating the limina that marked the boundary of civilization. It is the very nature of a limen, however, to be temporary, to collapse in the face of penetration by the threatening "other" from "over there", beyond the limen. In The Book of Samuel the liminal "river" is what the middle schoolers term "the gulch" (actually, the Harvard Gulch, which is not a river so much as a drainage area that separates certain neighborhoods in South Denver), and the "other" are what the boys deliberately refers to, both generically and provocatively, as "the Mexicans."
The gulch is where Samuel and his two young friends, Jesse and Jonathon, go to enjoy the "innocent" sport of bike jumping, in which they've engaged throughout grade. It is a place all their own that is betwixt and between, away from school, away from parents, away from the dysfunctionality of white, working class family life which the book often portrays, humorously as well as poignantly, in the manner of the old "Archie Bunker" series from the same era. But the gulch is haunted with the specters of change. Jonathon is the angry and the defensive one, the one that senses the change, who acts as the garrison against the growing onslaught. Jonathan goes to the gulch routinely not just to have fun, but to "fight" the onslaught.
"I'm sorry about today," he said, finally. "You're like my best friend. You don't want to fight. Some things you can't change. You don't want to fight. Okay."
"He stood.
"Where are you going?"
"This doesn't feel like my gulch anymore."
"Why? Because of the Mexicans." (p. 256)...
There were so many Mexicans now, all gathering around. More and more. Gravitating.
'Jonathon.'" (p. 257)
In the book "the Mexicans", a phrase that will grate on the politically correct and hypersensitive but is necessary to underscore the rigidity of the false sense of "otherness" that occupying the limen without any awareness of its liminality fosters, are the specter of how this in-betweeness comes to be resolved in the surprise ending, in a powerful way.
But The Book of Samuel has far less to do with the sociology of transition, and the intractability of race prejudice, than it does with the "liminality" of the spiritual rites of passage of our age - from Jesus-freak, reformed-hippie, Bible-quoting, evangelical Christianity to one which is now and not yet, that is avenir (in French-speaking Derredese) "to come." It is the passage of the Christianity which, culturally speaking founded the Reagan era and reached its apogee in the age of George W. Bush, but now finds itself awash in a strange, culturally diverse, globalized, world-flattened, increasingly upside-down, spectrally threatening, morally ambiguous, and increasingly violent environment.
It is an "impossible" Christianity, which Samuel at first and rather unsuccessfully seeks to find in the mutterings - somewhere between prophetic and purely apocalyptic - of his post-Sixties, Jesus-freak father, who has quite his job as a psychology professor to "save the world", but in the end discovers unintentionally and in an unforeseen way through his own unplanned "apocalypse."
I will have more to say about this kind of Christianity in a soon-forthcoming, follow-up post as well as in a future meditation about what the novel says about my generation, and the generation that is supposed to now succeed it. I've always been a critic of my own generation - the Boomers and self-righteous post-Vietnammers - but I've also been a critic of the much vaunted "millennials", who were supposed to save the world too. The author, my son, is neither a boomer or a millennial. He's an "X"er, that undesignated "liminal" generation that we can't easily make sense of. The Xers are now approaching middle age, another "in between" time, so whatever wisdom they can offer to us has to be read between the lines of the always-to-fail conventional wisdom.
The Book of Samuel was designated by the publisher as a "teen novel," but it really goes beyond that. It's really an "in-between" novel that can be read with relish by 20-somethings, 30-somethings, and 40-somethings alike. It's easy to read. And it compels. Furthermore, it grows on you, and you have to re-read it. Your kids can read it and perhaps chuckle at the pure juvenalia of it all, as in that other Colorado creation known as "South Park." Or you adults can read it and begin to unpeel the deeper layers of irony and meaning.
Samuel Gerard is indeed a present day, postmodern Huck Finn. And like Mark Twain's immortal character (shoot, I said it again) he is not only a mischievous, irrepressible, hormone-saturated argonaut of his own times, but the secret conscience of our age. I'm not sure what the "religious" people of our day will do with the book (none of the "Christian" publishers were remotely interested in it). Nor am I sure what the fashionably non-religious will do either (it doesn't glorify any of our stock, identity-political victim heroes, nor villify any of our stock, identity-political, "oppressor" bad guys). There's no theology in the book, just truth. It's only in those in-between spaces that truth, God, or the meaning of life can be genuinely discovered.
But what do I know? I'm just in-between the book and the author - somewhere.
It's been a long while since I posted anything - a little over nine months.
Blogging is supposed to be a routine, if not an obsession. Yet as a result of certain uncalculated eventualities that turned into an unscripted rationale, I have not really committed anything this this space since last fall. I find that it is time to start anew, and with a renewed determination. More will follow.
Blogging is supposed to consist in a kind of holy routine, a ceremony of tossing incense before the Zeitgeist. The economic and political events of last autumn were without doubt and by everyone's reckoning at the time - how would the old German philosophers say it - epochal. The world has changed significantly in eight months. I won't offer any kind of signature flourish with the all-too-familiar phrases "for the better" or "for the worse."
That is not the point. Things are different, and now it is time to harvest - at least cerebrally - the first fruits of these changes. In American people did not vote for a candidate so much as for some ubiquitous vapor they understood as "change." Change they now have. When it comes to the financial apocalypse, we are still experiencing the effects. Some say it is improving. Others say it is growing worse. But that's not the point either.
The point is that the past nine months have shown us it's not all about America any more. It's about planetary shifts taking place that even the trendiest and edgiest of us seem only dimly aware. So much of the American press - and I would add the American public - seem focused on the odyssey of the Obama administration.
The electric "messianism" of Obama's election in November, and his high-flying inauguration this past January, has faded into a brutal "reality check" of what it means to govern a nation riven by ferocious regionalisms, the cancerous politics of ethnic and cultural identity, narcissistic consumerism, and clueless educated elites who have never let go of the modernist fantasy that human history and human destiny can be "intelligently" engineered. Whenever messianism becomes the immanent politics of the moment, it tragically fails.
The "postmodern moment" looks increasingly like a senior moment. A widely distributed dementia of which there are current, but not entirely clear, indices!
The culture wars are over in America, and so for that matter is "emergent" Christianity as we know it. It is time to rethink the entire "postmodern" scene, particularly the way in which it has been redefined generationally and praxis-wise according to the American fixation with hailing the new, the cool, and the marketable rather than globally, structurally, and historically.
The end of the Thirty Years War in 1648, it has been said, marked the end of the Reformation, which was essentially about the reform of the state church, but devolved into a form of Christian ethno-regionalism (cuius regio cuius religio), one branch of which lapsed even further into pietism and the sectarianism of popular Protestant Innerlichkeit, the other into the fashionable theological insouciance we remember as the Enlightenment.
The end of the culture wars, which was originally about the preservation of Christian spiritual discipline amid what Christopher Lasch in 1978 termed the "culture of narcissism," has meant the total exhaustion of Christian identity politics - whether it be conservative or progressive, "foundational" or "postmodern". We are only beginning to experience the fallout. If we have abandoned promiscuous consumerism in the economic sphere after the collapse of the banks, we are only beginning to abandon the promiscous spiritual consumerism that both the megachurch and the microchurch ("smells and bells" versus "candles and sandals") have presented to us as an unholy Hobson's choice.
This past winter I spent two months on the European Continent according to the plan of my European sabbatical. Most of the time I was in Austria, where I have close friends and university connections. But I also did some traveling around and lecturing at some small colleges, seminaries, and community Christian groups - specifically in the Black Forest, Prague, and Amsterdam. I'd been with these people and to these places (Prague is the exception) in the past, but because it was part of a concentrated and intentional journey with certain identifiable "research objectives", I came back with some insights I had never had before.
It's taken me quite a few months to digest these insights in the maw of ongoing current events to come up with some theses, or observations, that I believe would stick. But here they are:
The kind of highly Americanized, consumer-driven, "postmodern church" that we have all been promoting, celebrating, and cooing about in many respects is flying into some devastating headwinds, especially in this country, and is going to have to change or perish. So that critics such as D.B. Carson don't get too overwrought with Schadenfreude at this pronouncement, let me point out that the same headwinds are buffeting American Christianity as a whole, and that the older, Seventies-style, "family-values and Biblical inerrancy" package that dominated evangelicalism for several decades is even more imperilled.
The action for Christian transformation in the West is shifting from America to Europe, specifically Continental Europe. The epicenter of this transformation will be Germany, where the original Reformation began in 1517. The real changes, which have to happen so that the irreversible "postmodern turn" in Western culture can lead to what I have called The Next Reformationin Christianity, will be theological and intellectual, and they are more apt to happen, ironically, where it all began in the first place. Look to movements like the Novavox alliance in Karlsruhe, Germany, which this October will be hosting a major conference with Alan Hirsch as keynote speaker(the site's all in German, but you get the idea). We are not talking about any sort of "new Eurocentrism" here. Europe in general, and Central Europe in particular, is becoming the kind of multi-cultural gateway region for the waves of globalization that the new world Christianity - Philip Jenkins' "next Christendom" will ride upon.
"Global postmodern missional Christianity", which I have described as the future of the faith in GloboChrist, comes down to this: a serious commitment of the so-called "Christ follower" to engage the stranger in our midst rather than the exotic in the faraway, as "foreign missions" and most of today's church "mission trips" are set up to do. That is the argument, at least, of David Boyd in his new book.
More on all of the above in future blogs!
The reason American Christianity is slowly expiring, as a faith if not as an institution or organization, is that it bitten into the poisoned apple of identity Christianity with all the self-destructive machinations that what we call "identity politics" entails. That is why it is becoming increasingly irrelevant to the world at large.
The only identity that any Christian genuinely has is "in Christ", and that involves dissolving boundaries, not carefully refining them. "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3:28).
We could also add that in Christ there is no young or old, institutional or entrepreneurial (church), megachurch or microchurch, Euro-American north or global south, white or non-white, privileged or marginalized. "If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise" (v. 29)
Wherever Christianity distinguishes itself in terms of worldly, ethnic, or political identity, it is commiting sin against the body of Christ, the GloboChrist. Interestingly, Paul writes the above lines as his ultimate challenge to the legalism of the Judaizers, those who vest the Christian witness in terms of the privilege of special election.
Europe has long memories of its own disasters that emanated from the pride of particularism and the elevating of collective identities, whether excluded or "dominant", over the promise of the Kingdom. Read Bonhoeffer. That is why spiritually it is now sufficiently broken for genuine revival. America remains prideful and is still not broken.
The postmodernism of Christian identity politics and the endless culture wars is dead! Long live the the genuine "emerging" church of the global, relational church, the true postmodern or community that breaks down the boundaries not only of culture, but of identity, even identity based on these "cultural differences." That is the authentic form of "emergent" Christianity.
The transformation is coming in the midst of what was once a radically broken nation!
We are in the midst of an apocalypse - άποκάλυψις or apokalypsis. Whoa, you say, there he goes. It's the well-worn doom-and-gloom, "the world is ending" sort of folderol that has been the staple for both religious wack-jobs and cartoon spoofers for a long while now. Even though we've got a global financial crisis, G7 leaders in an emergency meeting in Washington DC to try to agree to historically unprecedented joint measures to keep the entire global financial system from self-incinerating, and serious talk in the West about a draconian imposition of a new political and economic order, it's no big deal. We're always talking about "apocalypses" - nuclear armageddon, eco-catastrophe, a war to end all wars in the Middle East. All we've missed in recent years is the announcement of a Pleistocene-style, dinosaur-terminating asteroid hurtling toward North America.
Well, yes it is, and I'll tell you why. But first, let me explain why I am non-theatrically, deliberately, and strategically using the word. We'll start with root meanings. While in the modern era the word "apocalypse" has come to mean some event of dramatic and perhaps world-wide destruction, that's not its original connotation (though, of course, even in that sense we are in an "apocalypse", because some global leaders are actually talking about a world-wide collapse of the system). In its ancient usage the word referred to a "lifting of the veil", laying bare what in the past had been undisclosed and hidden. It was often employed in the context of the rites of the mystery religions, when the blindfold was pulled off the initiate and some profound, unspeakable vision or knowledge was imparted. As in all initiation rituals, confusion and disorientation in a dark place preceded a sudden and enduring revelation of absolute truth of some kind. In Jewish and early Christian "apocalypses" - most notably the Apocalypse of John, or what is commonly known as the Book of Revelation - the veil that lifted was ordinary or apparent history with the consequent laying bear of God's heavenly and covert purposes, especially the destiny of the elect.
In GloboChrist I do not write so much about apocalypse as "eschatology." In discussing eschatology - theologically and domatically considered - I make the case that what we fashionably today characterize as "incarnational" and "missional" ministry can be regarded on a global (or a "GloboChristian") scale points us toward the depth of the Christian revelation itself. That revelation is the Johannine (albeit seemingly "counterintuitive")realization of the Word made flesh. It is the revelation that directs us in faith and anticipation toward the parousia or "final" disclosure - in effect, our "apocalypse" - that we refer to as our own "end of the age." Thus eschatology, or apocalypsis, is not really so much about violent destruction and the wiping away of everything perceptible to us as it is about fulfillment of anticipation.
I have been reading 1John very carefully these days. 1 John is not so much the "love"epistle as it is about what distinguishes the Christian revelation from all other revelations, and Christian truth from all "false teachers," which abounded in the first century as much as today.
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have
seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have
touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The
life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to
you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we
have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And
our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our[joy complete. (John 1:1-4)
As Christians our "fellowship" - our genuine communio sanctorum - is not grounded in socio-organizational theory, our generational demographics, our lifestyles, our postmodern sensibilities, our theological self-definitions, our concern for the marginalized, etc. Our fellowship is the embodiment of what Hugh Halter calls the "tangible kingdom." The kingdom is tangible, because Christ was tangible. "From the beginning" (en archai) Christ is what we have seen, heard, touched. And in fellowship with one another, as Christs to one another, we are seeing, hearing, touching Christ as did the disciples themselves, and as Christ saw, heard, and touched them.
But 1 John is not some archaic instance of "touchy feely" theologizing. It is about "incarnating" Christ at every moment. Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did.(1 John 2:6). At the same time, the author of 1 John warns about false teachers. He identifies false teaching with "anti-Christ," not a singular individual of world history but as a lying spirit that finds itself instantiated in world history, that teaching which makes Christ more than this very incarnational, transformational, relational reality that the very word itself signifies. It is not about "saving the world" or "making the world better." Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. (1 John 2:15).
In GloboChrist I wrote that we could give a name to "anti-Christ"; it was global consumerism. Right now in the death throes of the global consumer economy there is a longing for a global worldly solution, perhaps even a messianic solution, perhaps even a messianic leader to right the world's wrongs. The contemporary passion of so many pomo Christians, youthful pomo Christians, for global "justice" in a rage against the collapsing architecture of a system driven by Deleuze's "desiring machines" is but one version of the madness that the author of 1 John warns against. It is the rage for a new, comprehensive, and transcendent worldliness that harbors even more capacity for evil than what was raged against.
As economist Stan Liebowitz brilliantly analyzes in his article "Anatomy of a Train Wreck," it was not "greed" so much as the "good intentions" with which the road to hell is always paved with - murmurs going back almost three decades for righting wrongs - that triggered this year's spectacular collapse. As Reinhold Niebuhr used to remind us, there are many forms of greed and the destructive will to power. The greed for wealth is no less odious than the greed for political control that plays upon collective spite toward the "greedy" and what Nietzsche termed ressentiment. "Justice" in this sense is the most insidious of greedy and "worldly" cries, and for Christians to cry it, or to echo the same cries, is to attest that this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is
coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is
the last hour. They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. (1 John 2:18-19)
There is no "political" solution to the current crisis. It is a world crisis and it requires as much as a stepping back from the temptations of worldly messianisms, which are the messianisms of anti-Christ. They are of anti-Christ because they prove to be tangibilities that are far from the "tangible kingdom" of Christ in our midst. They substitute the "word" of political messiahs for the "word of life."
That word we have seen, heard, and touched, and we are called to reach out into the space of those who are immediate to us - to reach across all generational, educational, socio-economic, cultural, and gender barricades - and incarnate what we have ourselves seen, heard, and touched.
Many younger Christian leaders in recent days have spoken out about how the crisis itself may be a worldwide wake-up call to presumed "Christ followers" to examine their lives and the existential commitments that underlie what they regard as their "faith." It is time to go beyond cheap politics and even cheaper political posturing, as so many of our contempories seem accustomed to doing. Vince Lombardi's famous line about "when the going gets tough the tough get going" should surely apply to those who claim they are following the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Guys, it's more than getting the latest cool and progressive-conscience-massaging podcast about "engaged" Christianity.
When the "veil" is lifted, what do we see? We see our own self-delusions and lazy as well as willful substitution of the random sputterings of our own "desiring machines" for obeying God's will. We see both ourselves, and our own complicity in the making of that world, which doesn't call for us to "speak out against the system," or whatever other cultural-Marxist-marinated stupidities frequently roll off our tongues, but for metanoia, repentanace. I once heard repentance defined as "seeing things from God's point of view." That works. If we say how we are all involved in the making of this mess, we might finally see some real "change." Now that's apocalypse! Among other things apocalypse is a meltdown of all the idols.
Dear children, keep yourselves from idols. (1 John 5:21).
Tom Scott, 27, who calls himself a "postmodern Christian", was born in Leicester, England, grew up in
Peterborough, England and went to the Nazarene Theological College,
University of Manchester. He spent a year studying English Literature in London before returning
home to reconsider his degree choice. He then spent a year as a Christian
Schools Worker on a volunteer basis with The CROPS Trust, Peterborough,
England, which involved working trips to South Africa, Ecuador, Romania
and the Ukraine. Tom currently lives in Ireland with his wife Nina and children. He works as a Special Needs Assistant in St. Anthony's Primary School,
Kilcoole, Co. Wicklow, as well as running his own photography business called
Scottvision (www.scottvision.ie). He can be reached at tomcscott@mac.com
European Christians need to learn to become culturally relevant? Why? Because although we could do well in embracing the current changes in the US regarding the nature of Christian communities, there is a real need to appreciate how any such change in Europe must reflect the indigenous population. A population so close, but so far apart from, that in the US requires a careful, intentional approach from those hoping to instigate something of the positive reformatory ideas currently growing in other parts of the globe, especially in the US.
Europeans have a love hate relationship with Americans. Many have been on holiday there, absorbed its media in all its forms, duplicated its fashions, consumed its style of food and so on. Many also ridicule the stereotypical picture of the overweight, overzealous, overstressed and, in a nutshell, over-the-top, American. Then, just for good measure, Europeans have ‘the Christian thing’ to add to the picture. This cuts a Deep South figure, funny accent, "turn or burn" theology, fundamentalist views, and, unfortunately at present, is embodied in the President of the entire country – the most powerful political figure in the world.
European Christians have a similar relationship with the US. The books, films, programmes, church-models, worship music – they all come primarily from the US, every month, every year since Evangelicalismi found its feet in the European context. This is a problem. As Europeans juggle their way through what they like and what they don’t like about American influences, the European Christian juggles also, but with the added ball of a particular brand of Christianity. The point is to ask questions as to how aware we are as European Christians that we are juggling at all. You see, when we take anything from the Christian ‘scene’ in the US and try to plug it into our churches and communities here in Europe we are taking teachings and songs and styles and influences that are being practiced in a specific time and a specific space.
Don’t get me wrong, some things transcend the differences that remain between cultures – just as indeed differences between European countries are transcended. The line of questioning explored here relates to how aware we are as European Christians and what issues our questioning will highlight. America is a very different place. Different to anywhere else. Just like any country. All countries have an image. All countries have an image problem. All countries continually define their image, every day, of every year. The American image is one of opportunity, safety, power and patriotism. The American image problem is a perception of arrogance, violence, greed, fear and corruption. At the moment the definition it is giving itself is doing little to promote a positive image and much to exacerbate the image problem.
The American Christian image is one of large, healthy and influential churches which are led by charismatic men. It's nice. The American Christian image problem is one of the born again, damnation driven, moralising, self-involved and hypocritical church-goer. Not so nice. America is a different place. An American Christian has a different profile. American churches are different. And that’s great! The fact that I am having to use the word different here is key. I’m having to use it because I am writing about a place that is … not here.
Here, by the way, is Europe. More specifically, its Ireland. As citizens of countries we all choose to adopt or deny certain values from other countries, other cultures … from those that are different from me, from us. As European Christians I think we are less discerning than the average citizen when it comes to the adoption of new, foreign ideals. As European Christians we take a book from the shelf, a recording through the post, a programme from the next-big-thing, and we live it – instantly. Without thinking about where something has come from, why it worked in certain places, who it helped in specific ways – we take it, snatch it, hold it as our own.
What are we dealing with here? The most recent Britney album, the latest style of Levi Strauss jeans, the newest iPod? No. Yet we treat the latest interpretation of Jesus’ teachings in the same way. You want purpose, here’s how. You want growth, here’s how. You want apple pie Jesus? (makes you warm and mushy inside), here’s how. Take it. Snatch it. Hold it as your own. This picture defines what things have been like since the upsurge of Evangelical activity from America into Europe over the last 30 years.
Things are changing. Changing for the better. The growth of the emergent conversation in the US since the start of the new Millennium is offering (but not giving definitively) something new to the Christian faith. It is practicing this in the US, with success and failure and praise and criticism. So, is this the next trend to copy? Take, snatch, hold – all over again? I don’t think it is. Yes, there is scope for this to happen. Yes, the fact that so many different bodies are aligning themselves with emergent thought does make the ground difficult to assess. Yes, there are more questions than answers (Amen?!).
But what matters here is the approach. Intentional, authentic, gracious, open, inclusive – you get the picture – and if this can be continued there could be much to gain for the European Christian and the communities they represent.If difference is now defining the Church, then difference can be embraced and translated across all borders.Those who seek to learn from their brothers and sisters can do so in unity but without denying who they really are.
Who we really are really matters. As soon as a person, or a group of people, feel that they cannot be who they really are (in the full sense of reality, of God) they are trading on something false. When we trade on something false, something that is not true, we are in a dangerous place – especially if we are exposing ourselves as Christians – especially if Christ is who we live to serve and embody. Think of a time when you really wanted something. You wanted it so bad. You dreamt about it. You had to have it. Then you got it. And you felt nothing.In fact, you felt worse than nothing, you felt empty. The thing that had been so important in your head was in fact very little in reality. The idea meant more than the actual object or possession.
We all do this. But what’s worse is that we all do this with ourselves. We seek to be a certain way, to adopt a particular trait, to achieve this, or succeed in that – and sometimes we get … there.And we feel … nothing. In fact, we feel worse than nothing, we feel empty.You see, when we look to the next programme, the next big thing, the next revolutionary idea, the next … the next … the next. When we do this we end up with a momentary emptiness and then we seek the next fill, asap.
Like fast food. We hunger for it. We consume it. It fills us up … for a while. Then we want some more. This is not God, this is fast food.The God of slow food. God is a God of slow food. The meal he has prepared for us all had taken time, it has a history, and it will continue to take time. And as with any appreciation of where we are today, where are heading tomorrow, we have to know where we were yesterday.
And yesterday here doesn’t just mean 24 hours ago. No, history here refers to the story we are all a part of, the grand-narrative, the over-arching reality of Creation, of God. Can you consume the Scriptures in one go? Can you wrestle the complexities of God in one sitting? Can you deal with the realities of Christian living through a shake in the morning, one for lunch and a proper meal in the evening?
No.No you cannot. You have to chew. And chew. And chew. Chewing transcends difference. Fast food is not available everywhere. But wherever there is food (which I think Jesus would hope is everywhere), there is chewing.
Wherever there is something joyful, loving, upsetting, something true - then there is chewing. There is the wrestling (steak), the doubting (muscles in garlic butter!), the celebration (phish food), the pain (indigestion). Chewing contradicts everything around us. Chewing takes time, helps us to digest, keeps our teeth sharp, helps us taste the flavours, keeps us quiet for a minute (!), it requires the food to be prepared for this experience, it is not cheap, easy or modified.
Fast food is cheap. It is wasteful. It pays poor wages. It is everywhere and yet nowhere at the same time. It’s chewed, but chewing requires something of substance, not substandards. As I just said, chewing transcends difference. Listen. It really does.I can start talking to someone who doesn’t want to chew and immediately we’re in a situation where the meal will be short. Short on subject, short on time, short.
But you know, if I sit down with someone who wants to chew, something’s going to happen. It has to – we’re chewing.You can’t chew something and not have a reaction or a response. Does it taste good, does it taste bad? Does it fill you with passion, does it make you want to vomit? Chew, chew, chew – what are you getting? And sometimes this is uncomfortable – ever see a child spit out the chewed contents of their mouth onto their plate? Not pretty. But why did they do this?
Think of the relationships we value most. At some point I bet there was a spitting on the plate episode. You’d tried to chew something for so long but you just couldn’t do it any longer, and so, with the person you trust present, you spat it out. There is was. On the plate. Bare, ugly, chewed.
But how much better you felt! How you were joyful just because you had stopped trying to digest the indigestible and you had expelled what was harmfully within! You had trusted in someone and they had not run a mile. You had discovered something poisonous to your soul and you had been cleansed. And this was just one meal. What about the others? So much that is good, that is bad, that is ugly, that is painful, that is harmful – what are you getting? Mealtime.
The problem here is not the food, i.e. the realities of life, the problem here is the meal – the venue, the company, the menu.
If I were to set up a restaurant here in Ireland I’d have to think about some very specific details before opening up for business. Most important in all of this would be who I was seeking to serve. If no one around here is willing to travel to a certain place, eat a certain food, pay a certain price, then questions have to be asked, problems overcome, solutions found.
And it’s the same when we as Christians, American or European (or from anywhere else for that matter), seek to create environments for chewing. I shouldn’t ask an Irish person to consume the American way, no more than an Irish person should force an American to cut peat for the fire or drink Guinness (although it beats a Bud any day!).Now, maybe the Irish person is happy to consume the American way, and so they do. And maybe the American wants a pint of Guinness, great. They adopt this way and that is fine for them, so they continue.
But here we’re not primarily dealing with those that are already consuming a certain way, we are looking to those that are not yet at the table to experience mealtime. Mealtime is beautiful. Mealtime is social, is laughing, is crying, is sharing, is open, is generous, is hospitable, is spacious, is family, is opportunity to chew in delight of all the senses, all the time. This is a time for agenda to sleep and for the Spirit to unravel. This is hearts opening, trust building, reflection happening, mystery embracing, and all in the quest for the deepest levels of reality, for God.
For too long the problem has been of one foreign company, distributing one menu, no choice, no variety, no change. For too long mealtime has been controlled, from the preparation to the after dinner mint, everything has been strangled by institutional diets and the Christian penchant for blandness.
Nobody wants a food fight. Well, that’s not actually true, some people do. But not everyday, at every mealtime. What we’re talking about here is not just a free-for-all, its not about more unnecessary clearing up. The key here is getting creative in the kitchen.No, even better, both in the garden and the kitchen.
We all have this garden to go into and search, its called the history of God. But so few of us venture into this space, so few hunt its undergrowth, or climb its trees. But its there, all the time, through all time. And what we find here needs to be brought back to the kitchen, we cannot afford to just throw the things we find in the garden onto a plate and serve it up. The kitchen is key. It is in the kitchen that we find our instruments and our preparation for chewing to take place.
But you know what, people don’t just need to have their meal brought to them without knowing anything about it. This is going to have to be a special kitchen. In our local town there is a restaurant that serves many kinds of Asian food. For a price, you can request a special table in the restaurant where the chef cooks your food in front of you and you are a part of the preparation of the meal.
This is something like the mode of practice we need to adopt. We need to get those waiting for their food … into the kitchen. Hey, blow it! Once there in the kitchen, take them to the garden, show them where the produce came from. Let them know this is their garden, their kitchen, their mealtime too. But whatever you do, let them try everything as they feel compelled – its their choice, its their right under God (especially in the garden, right?!).
When you’re walking the garden guide them around. Everytime you go – I guarantee this will happen – you will see something new as well. And when you do, you too can bring it back to the kitchen with them, work something out together, experience it at mealtime in unity, beautiful. Maybe it’ll taste great. Maybe you’ll vomit. There’s only one way to find out. Chew.
While we’re on the subject of transcendent aspects of the Christian faith it would be helpful to consider what it is we can offer those around us. What is it that we can offer the materialist, the atheist, the fundamentalist, the disillusioned Christian? In 2004 the Old Testament scholar Walter Bruggemann set out 19 theses (or convictions that he had) in his address to those in the Emergent Theological Conversation event of that year.ii
A summary of his ideas may read something like this:
Everybody lives by a script, whether they are aware of it or not. This script is adopted as we grow in our respective cultures and sub-cultures. The script teaches us that what is most important is the technology we rely on, the therapeutic treatments we indulge in, the military means we rule by and the consumerist profile we seek to escape through.
It is Bruggemann’s argument that this script promises to make us safe and happy, and, that this script has failed. If we are to see progress in our societies this script needs to be given up, turned away from, in the pursuit of an alternative script. And who is responsible for introducing an alternative script? Those in ministry. It is their role to patiently unravel the old with the intent of introducing the new.
The alternative script is found in the Bible and is put into action through the action of the church. If authentic, this counter-script, or counter metanarrative, will offer something alternative to the self-satisfying script that the majority live by. The key character in this counter-script is the God of the Bible, who we name Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This counter-script is not one seamless account, but a ragged collection of divinely inspired accounts. As such, there are many who have argued and continue to argue in their pursuit of smoothing over the ragged tears, it is here that the main claims of the counter-script are missed and abused.
In denouncing the old script and seeking the new script a gulf is created between the two. In this gulf there are questions and uncertainties and doubt and courage. It is here in this gulf between the two scripts that faith is adopted and working together in the uncertainties of life should then define the Christian practice of Christian people who are empowered by the spirit. For it is in these uncertain environs that the spirit is needed, responds and is exalted to the glory of God.
My son has a book that he’s has since he was a baby. Its called ‘Yes. No.’ Its one of those small, hard paged children’s books that baby’s seem to like chewing. The content of the book is not complicated. Each page contains a word and an image, on the next page is the opposite. Yes, no, fast, slow, alive, dead, in, out, under, over, off, on, light, heavy, young, old, up, down, before, after. And that’s it, end of book.
If you ask a Christian what the opposite to a Christian is what will they say? A non-Christian, a secular person, a sinner … the damned?! Yet, is there such thing as someone who is opposite to a Christian? Opposed maybe, but opposite? Surely if we understand what God’s purposes are then we are looking at a very warped picture if we are trying to see differences between us and them, the saved and unsaved, the found and the lost.
One writer refers to ‘the lost’ when he’s recounting something he saw in Jesus doing.iii The lost. Traditionally this has been associated with those that have no direction. Lost. Yet there is something worse than not having a direction, isn’t there? Have you ever thought you knew where you were going only to find out that you were going the wrong way? Frustrating isn’t it?
That feeling, turning back on yourself, retracing your steps, setting out again. Its hard. Pride swallowing is hard. Drawing extra reserves of energy is hard. Being lost is one thing. Thinking you were in a certain place and finding out that you’re … lost, that’s quite another. The writer Luke gives an account of Jesus meeting a man called Zacchaeus. Zacchaeus is straining to see Jesus through the crowd because he is short, so he climbs a tree. When Jesus sees him he calls him by his name and invites himself to Zacchaeus’ house. Zacchaeus was very excited by this.
Now I think when Zacchaeus woke up that morning he thought he was in a certain place. I don’t think he thought of himself as being lost.Zacchaeus was a tax-collector – or sinner as everyone else referred to him! When Jesus went to visit him all the other people present were displeased. In the presence of Jesus Zacchaeus felt compelled to renounce his corrupted ways to date. What’s more he said that he’d give away half his wealth and repay anyone he has wronged four times the amount he conned out of them.
Jesus responds by announcing that salvation has come to Zacchaeus’ home and tells everyone that he came to seek and save those who are lost. Save is such a great word – I think here ‘save you the hassle of living how you’re living’ would be appropriate! (Especially for a tax collector, brilliant!) But, at the end of this event, who is the lost Jesus refers to? Zacchaeus is no longer lost, why would Jesus need to mention it after seeing this change in the tax-collector’s life?
Let’s go back to those grumbling on the side-lines – the crowds who heard Jesus invite himself into Zacchaeus’ house. Do you think they were still hanging around? The self-righteous, waiting for a moment to seize, and prove, and be vindicated in their disapproving ways. Can you see it? The lost?
The tax-collector is not lost. He saw the tree, he ran ahead, he climbed the tree (committed hey), Jesus saw him, they spoke, they cleared a few things up, Jesus left. Ever have a relative do that trick on you, they point to your chest and ask ‘What’s that?’. You look down, ‘What?’. They flick your nose, ‘Gotcha!’. We’ve all had it done to us. We’ve all done it! Its too easy … isn’t it? Those that were crowding Jesus, those thought they knew where they were going, the sin spotters. What’s that? What? Gotcha!
The lost? Who, me? Surely not!
Notes
i For a concise but clear explanation on the difference between evangelicalism and Evangelicalism See McClaren, Brian D., A Generous Orthodoxy, Zondervan 2005. ii The full recordings from this event can be downloaded via the link at www.emergentvillage.com
His 19 theses, or convictions, were as follows: 1. Everybody lives by a script – implicit or explicit, recognised or unrecognised 2. All of us are scripted through the process of nurture, formation and socialisation 3. The dominant scripting in our society is a script of technological, theraputic, military, consumerism (TTMC) that socialises us all liberal and conservative 4. That script promises to make us safe and to make us happy 5. That script has failed. It cannot make us safe and it cannot make us happy 6. Health for our society depends on disengagement from and relinquishment of that script of TTMC. 7. It is the task of ministry to descript that script [… more here] 8. The task of descripting, relinquishment and disenegagement is accomplished by a steady patient intentional articulation of an alternative script 9. The alternative script is routed in the Bible is enacted through the tradition of the church. It is an offer of a counter metanarrative, counter to that of TTMC 10. That alternative script has as its most distinctive feature its key character, the God of the Bible, who we name as Father, Son and Holy Spirit 11. That script is not monolithic, one dimensional, or seemless, it is ragged and distjunctive and incoherent, partly because it has been crafted over time by committees (J, E, D and P!), and because the key character is illusive and irrasibile in freedom and in sovreignty and in hiddenness and, I’m embrarrased to say, in violence, which is a huge problem for us 12. The ragged, distjunctive and incoherent quality of the counter script to which we testify cannot be smoothed or made seamless because when we do that (systematic theology) it gets flattended and domesticated and it becomes a weak echo of the dominant script of TTMC. Whereas the dominant script of TTMC is all about certitude, privelege and entitlement, this counter script is not about these things, thus care must be taken to let this script be what it is, which entails letting God be God’s irrasible self 13. The ragged disjunctive character of the counter-script to which we testify invites its adherents to quarrel amongst themselves (liberals and conservatives) in ways that detract from the main claims of the script and so to debilitate the force of the script 14. The entry point into the counter-script is baptism, whereby we say in the old liturgies, ‘Do you now renounce the dominant script?’ 15. The nurture, formation and socialisation into the counter-script with this illusive, irrasible character is the work of ministry. We do that work of nurture, formation and socialisation by the practices of preaching, liturgy, education, social action, spirituality and neighbouring of all kinds 16. Most of us are ambiguous about this script. Those with whom we minister, and those of us who minister, most of us are not at the deepest places wanting to choose between the dominant script and the counter-scirpt. Most of us in the deep places are vascilating and mumbling in ambivalence 17. This ambivalence between scripts is precisiely the primary venue for the spirit, so that minsitry is to name and enhance the ambivalence that liberals and conservatives have in common that puts people in crisis and consequently that evokes resistance and hositility 18. Ministry is to manage that ambivalence that is equally present among liberals and conservatives in generative, faithful ways in order to permit relinquishment of old script and embrace of new script 19. The work of minsitry is crucial and pivotal and indepensible in our society precisely because there is no one, see if this is an overstatement, there is no one except the church and the synagogue to name and evoke the ambivalence and to manage a way through it. The role of minstiry then is as urgent as it is wonderous and difficult.
I had the rare opportunity this past week to sit in on a special, intensive one-day conference in Dallas titled "Voices of the Missional Movement" sponsored by Leadership Network. If you're a megachurch pastor, I probably don't have to tell you what Leadership Network is. It's like telling a computer geek why Redmond, Washington is a significant place. But if you're not an "MP," it might need a little explanation. Actually, what probably needs a bit more explaining is why it's so significant that Leadership Network sponsored such a conference to begin with.
Leadership network - we'll use shorthand here on and dub it LN - is without doubt the trend-spotter, trend-setter, and trend-supporter when it comes to everything that is new, powerful, and effective (even if it's not always pomo and "cool") in American evangelical Christianity. LN, for example, launched the emergent church movement as an identifiable future force with an identifiable leadership at the beginning of the decade , even though the movement had a different name then and it did not end up what its sponsors had hoped it would do. But if it weren't for LN, "emergent" probably would have never emerged.
Within the candles-and-sandals crowd LN has a somewhat ambivalent reputation. They know it's got clout, let alone savvy, but there is also the feeling, which is probably not wholly justified, that when LN has hold of you you've somehow "sold out." That's of course a paradox - in Derrideanese we'd call it an "aporia", or undecidable - of America's media-obsessed, reputation-driven, commercial-success-seeking culture, even among the wholly hip - notice I didn't say "holy hip." Having a "press agent" and getting visibility and influence is what everyone strives for, and no one knocks it necessarily if they really get there, only perhaps if someone else does. LN has a publishing arrangement with Jossey-Bass, and if you're part of their publication operation, you're sure to become well-known and well-regarded fast.
At any rate, by doing a conference with three well-known "missional" authors in the flesh to hear and talk with (with others who have just recently made their debut in attendance), I was really, really impressed. Moreover, I was thinking, okay, next time I hear the smarmy muttering that LN only favors big churches with big money, I'll smile and say, "wrrrrong."
I rarely go away (or as we are asked to do, "take away") from a conference with such a sense of can-do-ness and encouragement about the American church changing as I did this week. I've got all the books of LN's major missional players now - Reggie McNeal, Neal Cole, Milfred Minatrea, and Hugh Halter/Matt Smay. (the newcomer who in my estimation has the most powerful and relevant, if not the slickest, message of them all). I'm really encouraged when LN, undetected even by this trend-sniffing hound dog here, decides to "go missional" with such a shock-and-awe display of confidence.
The one thing I did miss in all of them was a real consciousness that American missionality crucially depends on network linkups with global missionality (although Minatrea kept mentioning it without elaboration and my good buddy Hugh has had his own scales-falling-from-eyes experience, subsequent to writing his book with Matt Smay, in England, the Netherlands, and Lebanon this past summer). But that step is not as hard to take as Frost and Hirsch's now well-honed characterization of passage from "attractional" to "incarnational." In reading some of the earlier published books, I get the feeling at times that "incarnational" is still in the minds of the targeted audience, if not the authors, a way of saving your attractional church from becoming too self-absorbed or too-irrelevant. Missionality and incarnationality is not like going to the gym regularly when you turn 40 in order to ensure that you don't get too fat, too fast. It's more like deciding to go back to school and become a coach and physical trainer. You have to "go all the way" in the good sense of the word, although I grant that use here of the old 1950s euphemism about what some people end up doing in the back seat of a car, after they've both convinced themselves they will get married in two years while remaining virgins and "only" necking, can be quite misleading, and perhaps not so appropriate. However, I'm not condoning in any way, let alone winking at, setting up the temptation to pre-marital sex, but I do think some church planners - and perhaps even planters - ought to sit in the back seat of their own churches, where the people who come in late to avoid the greeters and having to fill out a guest card sit, might actually benefit from the experience. That's where the first aha moment of missional Christianity in an attractional church environment can really occur.
Going all the way could mean that church as we know it is on the way out. At the conference two well-known speakers did say without mincing words that becoming missional can really mean making pastors as we know them "expendable." They themselves were pastors, or pastor-trainers, who are at the same time major stakeholders in what one actually termed "the church industry." Even Jeff Bezos, founder and tutelary genius of Amazon.com, would never talk about making bookstores "expendable."
At LN you could say that. Wow! The church really must be changing. But after all, when Jesus was asked by his disciples in Matthew 24 what would happen to the Jerusalem Temple, which they were awed by, he replied without batting an eye: "Every stone will be thrown down."
As I looked out the window at the downtown skyline of Dallas from my vantage point in the LN conference room on the ninth floor of a building right down the street from the beginning of Turtle Creek, where the wealthiest of the wealthy and the most powerful of the most powerful dwell, I could only say to myself: "Well, if they can say something in this place like 'we're here to make ourselves expendable', they've got to be serious.
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