Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 250

the whole of the law

Sanders comments on family separations at the border: “It is very biblical to enforce the law” https://t.co/5DiL1C4FHt

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics)

June 14, 2018

Attorney General Jeff Sessions makes a similar argument: “Persons who violate the law of our nation are subject to prosecution. I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order.”

But when Obama was president the relevant biblical passage wasn’t Romans 13:1, it was Acts 5:29. The goalposts have moved — and when there’s another Democratic president and/or Congress, they’ll move again. Conservative Christians would never have countenanced electing a president who has been divorced — until Reagan came along. When Bill Clinton was president, character in the occupant of the Oval Office was everything; now it’s nothing, or, really, less than nothing.

The lesson to be drawn here is this: the great majority of Christians in America who call themselves evangelical are simply not formed by Christian teaching or the Christian scriptures. They are, rather, formed by the media they consume — or, more precisely, by the media that consume them. The Bible is just too difficult, and when it’s not difficult it is terrifying. So many Christians simply act tribally, and when challenged to offer a Christian justification for their positions typically grope for a Bible verse or two, with no regard for its context or even its explicit meaning. Or they summarize a Sunday-school story that they clearly don’t understand, as when they compare Trump to King David because both sinned — without even noticing that David’s penitence was even more extravagant than his sins, while Trump doesn’t think he needs to repent of anything. But hey, as a Trump supporter once wrote to me: “Now we are fused with him.”

And that’s it, that’s the law, that’s the whole of the law.

But I think Jeff Sessions actually knows that the position he and Sanders articulate is inadequate. In his statement he lets slip one dangerous word: “I do not believe scripture or church history or reason condemns a secular nation state for having reasonable immigration laws. If we have them, then they should be enforced.”

Ah, you shouldn’t have let that word sneak in there, Mr. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III.  It might lead people to ask questions, to wit:

Are our immigration laws reasonable?
What do you mean by “reasonable,” anyway? In different contexts the word might mean “appropriate” or “in accordance with reason.” Which is the right one here?
If it is reasonable to separate asylum-seeking parents from their children, perhaps even forcibly taking a baby from a breast-feeding mother, would it also be reasonable to turn fire-hoses and police dogs on them?
If not, why not?

Start going down this road and you could end up sitting at your kitchen table trying to parse the way Martin Luther King Jr. distinguishes just and unjust laws in his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.” And we wouldn’t want that, would we? Better simply to say “Romans 13:1 says it, I believe it, and that settles it” — at least until the Democrats get back in power.

cashin’ in the bonds

Why Lorrie Moore Writes | The New Republic:

“How to Become a Writer” begins with the urge to write and ends in the desert to which such a desire may deliver the writer — not once, as ending or punishment, but daily, as a kind of side trip, between sentences. (Among the reader’s final instructions: “Quit classes. Quit jobs. Cash in old savings bonds. Now you have time like warts on your hands.”)

Every time I see this well-known line by Lorrie Moore I wonder what it must be like to live in a world where people who want to be writers have savings bonds to cash in.

VR for bear attacks

This sounds really useful! Unless, well, you happen to read Bill Bryson: 

Now imagine reading a nonfiction book packed with stories such as this—true tales soberly related—just before setting off alone on a camping trip of your own into the North American wilderness. The book to which I refer is Bear Attacks: Their Cause and Avoidance, by a Canadian academic named Stephen Herrero. If it is not the last word on the subject, then I really, really, really do not wish to hear the last word. Through long winter nights in New Hampshire, while snow piled up outdoors and my wife slumbered peacefully beside me, I lay saucer-eyed in bed reading clinically precise accounts of people gnawed pulpy in their sleeping bags, plucked whimpering from trees, even noiselessly stalked (I didn’t know this happened!) as they sauntered unawares down leafy paths or cooled their feet in mountain streams…. 

Black bears rarely attack. But here’s the thing. Sometimes they do. All bears are agile, cunning, and immensely strong, and they are always hungry. If they want to kill you and eat you, they can, and pretty much whenever they want. That doesn’t happen often, but — and here is the absolutely salient point — once would be enough. 

No worries, though! VR to the rescue! 

credit and debt

David Bentley Hart:

The Law not only prohibited interest on loans, but mandated that every seventh year should be a Sabbatical, a shmita, a fallow year, during which debts between Israelites were to be remitted; and then went even further in imposing the Sabbath of Sabbath-Years, the Year of Jubilee, in which all debts were excused and all slaves granted their liberty, so that everyone might begin again, as it were, with a clear ledger. In this way, the difference between creditors and debtors could be (at least, for a time) erased, and a kind of equitable balance restored. At the same time, needless to say, the unremitting denunciation of those who exploit the poor or ignore their plight is a radiant leitmotif running through the proclamations of the prophets of Israel (Isa 3:13-15; 5:8; 10:1-2; Jer 5:27-28: Amos 4:1; etc.).

So it should be unsurprising to learn that a very great many of Christ’s teachings concerned debtors and creditors, and the legal coercion of the former by the latter, and the need for debt relief; but somehow we do find it surprising—when, of course, we notice. As a rule, however, it is rare that we do notice, in part because we often fail to recognize the social and legal practices to which his parables and moral exhortations so often referred, and in part because our traditions have so successfully “spiritualized” the texts—both through translation and through habits of interpretation—that the economic and political provocations they contain are scarcely imaginable to us at all.

the mission

“We men have an important but-as-yet-unknown mission.” Can’t wait to find out what it is.

proportion

When a famous person commits suicide, there are roughly ten million words of sympathy and pity for that person to every one word of sympathy and pity for the family, friends, and lovers left behind. It would be nice if that proportion could be adjusted just a little. Even if you think (as I do not) that our lives are our own to dispose of as we wish, and even if you believe (as I do) that people who take their own lives are often in a state of horrific agony, suicide is very rarely a victimless act.

Tolkien and the possibility of healing

This is a typically rich Adam Roberts post, bubbling over with a range of wonderful ideas, any one of which blazes a trail that it would be delightful to follow and extend. I just want to take up one theme here.

This is the passage I’m especially interested in:

This is part of a much larger project for Tolkien. He saw the world as broken, but his interest was in trying to making it whole again. He believed healing is possible (specifically, he believed healing is possible through Christ, because his Catholic faith was a central part of who he was) and he wrote his fantasy to explore that conviction. This is the core thing that separates his art, and therefore the promiscuous body of commercial fantasy written in imitation of his art, from the High Modernist stream. And it’s this that brings me back to Greek tragedy, and the reason why it so captured my spirit back when I was young: an individual broken, in my various unexceptional if painful ways, as I was and am; living in a society fragmented in a larger and more dangerous manner as we all are. The thought that healing might be possible evidently spoke to me profoundly, as it continues to do.

I would say that healing is not only possible for Tolkien but inevitable — and yet inevitable in a very curious way. That magnificent moment in The Lord of the Rings when Sam, having expected to die on Mount Doom, awakens to find that he is alive and so is Frodo and so is Gandalf, cries, “Is everything sad going to come untrue?” — surely this is the most perfect embodiment in his writings of what Tolkien calls “eucatastrophe”:

The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially “escapist,” nor “fugitive.” In its fairy-tale — or otherworld — setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

I think the key phrase here is “fleeting glimpse” — fleeting, not lasting. The Prologue of LOTR, “Concerning Hobbits,” tells us that hobbit were “more numerous formerly than they are today,” and that they “avoid us with dismay and are becoming hard to find.” Then, in the second chapter, after the description of Bilbo’s disappearance, we’re told that “eventually Mad Baggins, who used to vanish with a bang and a flash and reappear with bags of jewels and gold, became a favourite character of legend and lived on long after all the true events were forgotten.” So right from the beginning Tolkien is emphasizing that he is telling a story about a world long-forgotten and cultures long in decline, that even the people most affected by the titanic events he’s about to relate eventually lost all memory of them.

Then, near the end of the book, Gandalf reminds his colleagues that, should Sauron triumph, his rule will be “so complete that none can foresee the end of it while the world lasts.” Yet, should they manage to defeat him, their triumph cannot possibly be so permanent:

Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.

That all victories over evil are contingent and limited and temporary is a strong theme here — and the forgetfulness of all the races of Middle Earth tends to reinforce those limits, make the return of evil more likely even among those who start out with “clean earth to till.” This is why Galadriel says of herself and Celeborn that “together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat” — a phrase that Tolkien adopted for himself, as in this letter: “I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ — though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.”

There will be, then, a “final victory,” but that will be (to return to the quotation from “On Fairy Stories”) “beyond the walls of the world.” Within the walls of the world all victories, all healing, will be temporary and imperfect — eucatastrophic only in the short term. In the longer term the effects of even the most heroic and righteous deeds will seem to narrow and brief that they will scarcely seem worth doing.

Which is why, for Tolkien, the best impetus to heroic and righteous deeds comes from some intuition of a final victory not in history but beyond history. To lack that intuition while seeing the “long defeat” of history clearly is the curse of Denethor — not a person, for all his wisdom, to envy. For Tolkien, without the suspicion that there is some perfect righteousness “beyond the walls of the world” is what prompts righteousness and generosity in the here and now. It’s what might make some of us strive to “uproot evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after might have clean earth to till.” It’s what might make someone pity Gollum and be kind to him, an act which, as Tolkien says in another letter, can be seen only as “a piece of folly, or a mystical belief in the ultimate value-in-itself of pity and generosity even if disastrous in the world of time.”

It’s a tricky thing that Tolkien is asking: neither to succumb to despair (like Denethor) nor indulge the presumptuous delusion that one’s victories can be everlasting, but rather to live, simply, in hope.

how Rebecca West set fire to everything

Sam Jordison on Rebecca West:

She had written troubling accounts of the Nuremberg trials, spoken up about repression under communist regimes (and had done the same for fascist ones in the decades before the second world war) and taken to the streets with suffragettes (later falling out with many of their leaders). She had set down hundreds of thousands of sparkling words in novels, non-fiction books, reviews and journalism. And throughout it all she had demonstrated an enviable ability to set fire to everything.

Facebook wants to matter

Siva Vaidhyanathan:

There’s no one to punish Facebook if Facebook fails. Facebook’s trying to head off regulation by doing this, this transparency effort. But ultimately, transparency doesn’t matter. The same practices will occur. Facebook is committed to being a factor in global politics. And it not only wants to make money off it, more importantly, it wants to matter. Facebook wants to be the place where we conduct our politics.

Here’s what I don’t understand: Vaidhyanathan says this and much worse about Facebook, but also, in the same interview and elsewhere, discourages people from leaving Facebook. “By removing yourself from Facebook, you remove yourself from the concern. If you are active on Facebook and you watch how people relate to each other and how it affects you, you can be sensitive to the larger condition.” I don’t see how this follows. I don’t see why you have to be on Facebook to critique Facebook, or to see the damage it does. I ditched Facebook in 2007 but that hasn’t “removed me from concern” about the social and political damage it’s doing. Is Facebook really going to be responsive to people who stay on it no matter how foul it becomes? 

Zona