Reminiscence

"Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end..."

For some reason the truth of this statement has hit home on a number of levels lately. From completing one degree and starting another just days after my thesis defense, to caring for a dear friend whose past had a head on collision with her present, to other new beginnings which are not my own, but which contain the sign of an end, one I know and feel all too well, that is closer to my heart than any other.

There is no easy transition from one to the other.. the articulation of a "beginning" is completely subjective. It is only possible from the perspective of a subject. It is a choice. It is the end of a scene.

We have our stories don't we? You have yours and I have mine. We hear a little of each other's, we sometimes fill in the gaps with our own inventions, our own assumptions. Won't you sit for a while and help clear up the misconceptions? You are after all a brother.. a sister. Will we continue to play host to demons of our own design? We were once friends, we could be still.

Who has had a radical break? Tell me who has lost a multitude of worlds in a moment of time? Whose beginning has been an end? Who has seen that the promises of friends and religion are chaff in the wind? For who has truth been a sword of Damocles? I know a man. When I am old I will know him.

There's no use in raging. In poetry there is a kind of solace.. silence is better.

The Cost of War

This is taken from Steven Pinker's new book.  He provides some interesting comparisons.

*Deaths were calculated against global population at time, then scaled up to mid-20th century level

*Median/mode of figures cited in encyclopaedias or histories. Includes battlefield and civilian deaths

Conflict	Century	Death toll*	Death toll (20C equivalent)	Rank ▴
An Lushan revolt	8th	36m	429m	1
Mongol conquest	13th	40m	278m	2
Middle East slave trade	7th-19th	18m	132m	3
Fall of the Ming dynasty	17th	25m	112m	4
Fall of Rome	3rd-5th	8m	105m	5
Timur Lenk	14th-15th	17m	100m	6
Annihilation of the American Indians	15th-19th	20m	92m	7
Atlantic slave trade	15th-19th	18m	83m	8
Second world war	20th	55 million	55M	9
Taiping rebellion	19th	20m	40M	10
Mao Zedong (mostly government-caused famine)	20th	40M	40M	11
British India (mostly preventable famine)	19th	17m	35m	12
Thirty years' war	17th	7m	32m	13
Russia's “time of troubles”	16th-17th	5m	23m	14
Josef Stalin	20th	20m	20m	15
First world war	20th	15m	15m	16
French wars of religion	16th	3m	14m	17
Congo Free State	19th-20th	8m	12m	18
Napoleonic wars	19th	4m	11m	19
Russian civil war	20th	9m	9m	20
Chinese civil war	20th	3m	3m	21

Source  Steven Pinker, Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011).  Amazon.

Current Reading

In keeping with a practice I began while maintaining an older blog (some of you might remember), every now and then I'll post my current reading material (I've not included journal articles here). I've always enjoyed seeing what others are reading and have found it can lead to some interesting conversations.

School related

On Human Rights, James Griffin

The Law of Peoples, John Rawls

Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark Taylor

Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, Susan Buck-Morss (I've enjoyed reading this one)

Church Dogmatics, Karl Barth

The Wonder That Was India: A Survey of the History and Culture of the Indian Sub-continent Before the Coming of the Muslims, A.L. Basham

Personal Interest (any free moment I have)

What Is A Thing?, Martin Heidegger

Out of Our Heads, Alva Noe

The Fossil Trail: How We Know What We Think We Know about Human Evolution, Ian Tattersall

A day of departure

When a boat is rotting on the strand, the one who pushes it out into the waves may be said to be unconcerned by its loss, but at least not by its destination.

Le Rivage des Syrtes, Julien Gracq

Brain Dead (Fragment of a letter)

The brain is the size of a grapefruit. It weighs about 3lbs (Einstein's was 2.75lbs), and has the consistency of custard. You could scoop it up with a spoon. It is the single most complex system in the universe, perhaps more complex than the universe itself. It has over a hundred billion neurons in it, each with hundreds or even thousands of connections. It has evolved at an incredible rate over approx. 300 millions years, growing in size and complexity. It is here, inside the skull, that all emotion, sensation, all human art and science, all gods and angels are created.. and for the most part we are not even aware of it.

A person has a heart attack and lives, they get shot in the liver and survive. Throughout they maintain their consciousness, their personality, their sense of "me." But then they get shot in the brain. They either die instantly or live. If they live, and depending on where the bullet strikes, they are no longer the person we used to know. Their personality is radically different. Anyone who has known a person with Alzheimer's understands how a disease that effects the brain can erase a person's former personality, in a sense, killing the person we loved so dearly, leaving a body that on the surface looks like our loved one, but essentially is a different person, sometimes not recognizing who we are as if they had never known us, even ill treating us.

What implication does this have for any notion of an afterlife? A philosopher once said: "If we can be dead when we're alive (the complete loss of who we psychically are due to disease or injury), we can be dead when we're dead." In other words if physical damage to the brain can erase our personality, what makes us think that the physical damage of brain death and decay once we die is any different? It seems clear that there is no continuation of personality or awareness after death. It will be the end.

Someone once asked me, but what do you believe happens after we die? I asked them "what was it like before you were born?" Here is the answer.. It will be a radical nothingness that we cannot be aware of. Somewhere, sometime in the universe, a new consciousness will be born from a young mother.. the light at the end of the tunnel is in a sense the light at the end of the birth canal.. a new beginning.

The Church (fragment of a thought)

[...] One is reminded here of Jesus’ reinstatement of Peter. Jesus asked Peter three questions regarding whether Peter loved him or not, which were then quickly followed by the statement “feed my sheep/lambs.” Here community love is inseparable from the call to action, to “come follow me.” It is perhaps no accident that when Peter was about to follow Jesus and asked about one of his comrades who lingered behind Jesus responded with “what is that to you,” somewhat reminiscent of his response in the incident with the man who wanted to bury his dead relative but was quickly told by Jesus that the “dead can bury their own dead.” It is as if he was saying “Do not forget your task. Your subjectivity is not composed of worrying about another’s status, but your fidelity to the mission.” Here then is the proper way to understand communitas: not as an intimate community in which we get to find out each other’s deepest feelings and personal life stories, eliminating every perceived distance between one another. Communitas must include Jesus’ “what is that to you” element... Is this not also what many community churches and communist totalitarianisms have in common: the similar drive to know each other’s private thoughts, a refusal to grant any private “inner” space, making every personal idiosyncrasy or desire part of the commons (and then often collectively punished in some way)? The Christian subject’s proper response to the injunction to confess or share some inner part of oneself is therefore: “what is that to you?” The greater truth here is the task of the Church, i.e. the task set before the emancipatory collective.

Is it possible to detect here the difference between a kind of outward objective truth and a more inward subjective one? In other words, is the striving for “understanding-each-other” not a reflection of the recognition of the truth of subjective inner experience, versus another understanding of truth not located primarily in subjective experience, but in action and in an Idea? I wonder how much the former is a reflection of a kind of Schleiermacherian influence on religious subjectivity, and indeed post-modern culture, forced no doubt by the Enlightenment and modernity, and as such is more of a symptom perhaps than an influence. When the conception of an objective yet personal God was being severely called into question by science and modern reason, the move inward was a logical one. One should, however, refer to Wilhelm Dilthey here who suggested this inward move was already present in Christianity from the beginning, against the objectification of truth by the ancient Greeks:

For the Greek mind, knowing was mirroring an objective thing in the intelligence. Now [i.e., in Christianity], experience becomes the focal point of all the interests of the new communities; but this is just simple awareness of what is given in personality and in consciousness of the self.... With the enormous interest they generate, experiences of the will and of the heart swallow up every other object of knowledge.... If this community faith had immediately developed a science perfectly appropriate to it, that science would have to rest on the foundation ultimately resting on inner experience.

It was only the necessary institutionalization of the Church for the sake of administering a fallen Roman Empire and preventing anarchy that led to the suppression of this inward move: “Indeed the remnants of the ancient social institutions, and the culture they expressed rested on the shoulders of the Church.” What if, however, one were to read this situation from a Zizekian perspective? What if this outward rigidity of the Church was indeed its very necessary political expression? It is not that “oh no, the early Church lost its true inward character, exchanging rich inward experience for cold institutional control,” but rather that the institutional Church was the direct expression of Christianity’s kingdom self-understanding. Here the Church made precisely the move from “social movement” to Universal Singular, seizing the opportunity to relate to the social totality. For this reason the Church could never make the “Cincinnatus” move and dump the Empire at first opportunity after restoring security. Its program was total and all-encompassing. It could only be forced out by other political players, and indeed it slowly was, until finally succumbing at the political level at the very moment its objective foundation was greatly undermined: i.e. the Enlightenment and the death of the objective God, the Schleiermacherian move towards inward authenticating religious experience.

Theological Thought (an excerpt)

On a broader level Zizek and Badiou’s engagement of theological material raises another question. What is the status of theological thought? Who “owns” it, i.e. who has the right to engage in and utilize it? Is it the special possession of faith traditions, somewhat like the knowledge and apparatuses of various scientific disciplines, or can non-faith participants legitimately comment on religious theology? In other words, does it have the same status as communist egalitarianism, as pointed out by Rancière a propos failed communist communities:

They did not fail, as the opinion goes, because individuals could not submit to the common discipline. On the contrary, they failed because the communist capacity could not be privatized. The sharing of the capacity of anybody could not be turned into the virtue of the private communist man.

Insofar as egalitarianism, ethics, and the Event (in the sense of creative novelty) are concerned, can the Church (or any other monotheistic tradition) not admit that in the past it has “privatized the capacity of anybody,” has made these categories virtues of the religious community as if without the Church everyone would only do “what was right in his/her own eyes,” as if there could be no new subjective creation without the coming of the new person in Christ? It was Alan Watts, that once Anglican minister cum Zen Buddhist who summed up the state of homily during his time in the Church: “So much of the preaching we hear on Sunday morning comes down to this: ‘My dear people, be good!’” So much should be admitted. Does this not reflect, however, a kind of theology that is little more than humanism? If so it is merely a reflection of a kind of contemporary theology concerned with seeming relevant, having given up on the more problematic core of Christian thought, what Badiou refers to as a “fabulation:” the historical status and meaning of the Resurrection. The Church too is not without its reactionaries here. For them the Resurrection is not a historical category but like Badiou, merely provides a hermeneutical substrate for further thought regarding the human subject/community. This too is so obviously a compromise with modernity, one that would cause the one who said “if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” to roll over in his grave. It reflects a certain cultural type, or because we are speaking of Badiou and Zizek we might properly say “class,” that as a result of a life of relative comfort can no longer identify with the words that follow those just quoted: “If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.” In short, it reflects a decadent class theology.

Here then is the limit set upon the appropriation of theology. In so many instances, all of its resources are of the category “capacity of anybody.” It becomes privatized at precisely the point one can say “I have hope in Christ not just in this life only,” i.e. the Resurrection hope theology of the world’s destitute.

End of the World May 21

I usually don't spend too much time thinking about end of the world predictions, but this one has garnered such a large number of supporters (some who have sold everything they own to go out and preach to others), that I can't let it slip by without comment. Earlier this year I gave a lecture touching on the topic of apocalyptic Christianity. During the lecture I talked about Harold Camping, a pastor originally from Colorado. He has made the prediction, based on "sound" biblical evidence, that the world will forever be changed on May 21st, 2011.. that's right, two days from now will be Judgment Day. The international news agencies have started to pick up the story. It can't get much better than this. Think about it, here is a story about a fair sized organization spending oodles of money putting up billboards all around the world predicting the end of life as we know it, and when it doesn't happen, what will Camping and his followers do? What will the couple do who has given away all their money, and add to that the fact that this young lady is due to have a baby in June (link here)? From one perspective this is obviously sheer stupidity; from another, faith.

Just this morning I was speaking with a group of Jehovah Witnesses about the place of philosophy ("worldly wisdom") in faith. Their take was that it is basically of the devil and misleading. They would do well to consider Camping and his followers. There is some irony here, however, that makes our equation Faith=Stupidity more problematic. Camping arrives at the date he does based on mathematical calculations concerning Biblical numbers, i.e. rationally! (To see how he does it, and how he gets around some other issues click here and here). This is why the facile opposition Science/Reason vs. Faith/Irrational is simply misguided. Camping's work has a rationalistic framework. What an odd result takes place when modern thinking is applied to ancient scripture and prophecy.

Where will you be when the world ends? I'll be camping with a couple of Christian guys in the middle of nowhere. If I wake up May 21st to an empty campsite after a post-meal nap (around 6pm to be precise!), will I feel a sudden panic? No, I'll assume either they got lost somewhere, or are playing a little joke on me, both possibilities (especially the former) that are much more likely to happen than the prediction made by our rather aged gentleman Camping, who, it must be said, will have to meet his own judgment day May 21st.