On being offended

Imagine a depiction of the central figure of a religion in situations diametrically opposed to the way in which that religion depicts and reveres the figure in question. What is the appropriate response? Ought the believers merely to protest those responsible for the depiction? Or, since we are here dealing with something sacred, central to the very belief structures of those who might be offended, is some stronger response mandated? Is a visceral, blasphemous and juvenile, attack on a religious figure the sort of thing that justifies violence? Is a disrespectful depiction of a central religious figure tantamount--as one of the participants in KPBS's These Days this morning, argued--to hate speech against all of those religious believers?

Of course, these are now central questions because of the recent uproar and uprisings caused by the republication of those infamous Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad with, among other things, a bomb as a turban. For the devout Muslim, even the depiction of the Prophet's face (or the face of any other person) is idolatrous, but the depiction of the Prophet in these cartoons goes beyond this, to the level of blasphemy.

So many issues are raised by this situation. Among them, there is an important question about what the role of a free press is, when certain editorial exercises of that freedom are foreseeably likely to cause violence. Was it responsible for newspapers to republish the cartoons when it was obvious that they were going to cause distress and, given the state of the Muslim world and the way in which leaders there seem able to incite frenzy, violence was likely to ensue? Perhaps not. And there was probably no good reason to publish the proposed cartoons that had not initially made the newspaper's cut. The justification that the editors of the paper wanted to see if their cartoonists could be as harsh to Islam as they were to other groups of believers verges on a middle-school mindset.

It's not enough, here, just to point out that much of the Muslim world, and almost all of its religious leaders and scholars have been silent on the terrorism that has been carried out in the name of Islam, the Prophet and Allah in recent years. While this may be true, the fact that others have acted irresponsibly is not a defense for one's own actions.

However irresponsible the editors may have been this episode points out a real difference at some level between much of the Muslim world and a good deal of the so-called Global North. In thinking about the treatment of religious figures in the media, I was not just considering the way cartoonists have depicted Muhammad. For of course, we have had depictions of Jesus in movies such as The Last Temptation of Christ and the upcoming The DaVinci Code that, from a traditional Christian perspective are certainly blasphemous. However, in spite of protests in the case of the former, I don't recall Martin Scorsese's home being burned or attacks on the Greek Embassy, I haven't heard of plans to abduct Tom Hanks for his part in TDC nor has anyone assaulted Dan Brown for writing the book. No violence ensued from the way Mel Brooks depicted Moses in History of the World.

There is something, then, about much of the Muslim world that is importantly different from the world in which I live. In Europe and the Americas, blasphemy causes a reaction but it a more moderated reaction, less violent, more civil. Why is this? Is it that we care less about the status of our religious figures (even when, in the case of Jesus, that religious figure is identified as God Himself)? Is it just a different traditional of public discourse? Is it that we are less likely to be worked into a frenzy or manipulated by public and religious figures?

This I doubt, given the ways in which political and media figures do seem able to manipulate public opinion in the US, causing people to become warriors in culture wars that don't exist, to support economic policies against their own interests, to believe that Christmas is under siege or to think that there was a unified Axis of Evil. (In fact, I worry that sometimes, particularly in the recent much-hyped debate over the "War on Christmas", we in the United States are on the verge of the same kind of angry victimhood that is being expressed in the Muslim world today.) So what is it, exactly, that leaves us differently moved by blasphemy? And how can we export that more laid-back approach to religious offense to the rest of the world?

A thought

We say that everyone is entitled to his opinion; what no one seems to realize is this right comes conjoined with a responsibility to form that opinion well.

Is all intercourse sexual? A thought or two about the Vatican on gay priests

In the recent hullaballoo about the admittance of gays to Catholic seminaries, there is one particular part of the Vatican's new policy that I find particularly striking.

As reported by the Catholic News Service, "the document [states] that the Church, while deeply respecting homosexuals, [quoting the document itself] 'cannot admit to seminaries and holy orders those who practice homosexuality, who present deeply rooted homosexual tendencies or who support the so-called gay culture. The above-mentioned persons find themselves, in fact, in a situation that seriously obstructs correct relations with men and women.'"

Now, of course, there are questions about how deeply you can respect a group of people that you think cannot correctly relate with members of either sex. Is the Church's respect for homosexuals then something like the kind of respect we usually feel for those who cannot correctly relate to others, i.e., those with various affective disorders, and thus a mixture of pity and incomprehension? In other words, it appears that there could be no real respect here at all.

And there are some interesting issues that arise from the fact that the document makes exceptions for those for whom homosexual tendencies are only fleeting, while previous Church documents and the most recent Catechism of the Catholic Church have declared that homosexualiy, rather than being a fleeting state is intrinsic (albeit, an intrinsic disorder). Who are these would-be priests who just experimented on their way to the seminary?

What is most striking though is the statement that "the above-mentioned persons find themselves, in fact, in a situation that seriously obstructs correct relations with men and women." Note that these people are not just those who practice homosexuality, nor those who support the so-called gay culture (whatever that may be), but all of those with deep-seated "tendencies". What this is essentially saying, then, is that homosexuals are so ill-formed in terms of their minds, affections and, one wants to say, souls, that they cannot form any proper relationships with any other human beings. This is an amazingly strong statement. What is even more amazing though, is the principle from which this must be drawn.

If I, being a homosexual, cannot thus have any appropriate or correct relations with any men or women, then this must be because all relationships are at their very base sexual. It seems unlikely that this would be because all relationships are for me, qua homosexual, sexual, since after all, there is nothing particularly sexual in my relationships with women. Instead, it must be that all human relationships are essentially sexual.

If this is the case, then Freud has been vindicated (by of all institutions, the Church of Rome). But note, that this means that we must either dilute the notion of a sexual relationship to the point where a relationship is sexual only if there is some notice of the sex of the people involved, in which case there is nothing to the notion; or, we must really believe that all relationships including those one has with his grandparents, his children, people in line at the grocery store are somehow colored by whether or not the others involved with them are of the sex to which he is attracted. It appears that this document of the Church is opting for the latter. And, while to say this is not a refutation of the Church's position, I, for one, will state that this is exceedingly creepy. I'm pretty sure--and I am at least above-average on the self-reflection scale--that I sometimes relate to human beings both of the sex to which I am sexually attracted and to the sex to which I am not sexually attracted in a wholly non-sexual way.

Moreover, if all relationships are, at base, sexual ones, then it would appear that the least plausibly correct human state would be that in which one tries to remove himself from this sex-infused human condition, viz., celibacy. The Church simply cannot have it both ways on this count. Either it's sex all the way down, or one can remove himself from seeing all human beings as falling within or outside of the class of the sexually interesting.

There is another option. The Church might be saying that homosexuals relate to other humans as if they themselves were of the opposite sex. I.e., it might be that gay men relate as if they were women. Perhaps this is the sense in which the relationships are not correct. But this is just still to say that all human relationships are couched in terms of sexual attraction or possible sexual attraction or conceivable sexual attraction. (It's hard to know quite how to put this so that somehow people Donald Rumsfeld or Benedict XVI still fall within the ambit of possible sexual attraction for me--these are good cases of people to whom, though they be male, I feel no sexual attraction and so to whom I think I do not relate sexually--yet the Church seems to be saying that I relate to them in terms of my sexual tendencies or orientation.)

There might be good reasons for keeping practicing gays out of the priesthood, but that's just to say that celibacy is a rule for all priests. If there's a good reason to keep celibate gays out of the priesthood, it cannot be the reason that the Vatican has seen fit to put forward. The reason given is confused in its very conception.

Political terminology: a taxonomy of confusion

In a discussion about paradoxes last week, one of my students asked about the difference between paradoxes and oxymorons. That, combined with recent discussions in the media of various judicial and political ideologies has gotten me thinking about the extremely strange ways in which we use political terms in the modern United States.
"Conservative" is a term that implies that one wishes to maintain the status quo, to conserve the way in which things are done, to respect both tradition and current practice. Yet, conservatives currently wish to dismantle the government as it is and "return" to a version of government that is believed to have obtained earlier. Thus, conservatives are able to be originalists.
"Republican" implies a privileging of the republic, the res publica, the public thing, over the parts, either the people or the states. Yet Republicans now privilege states' rights and libertarian principles over the role of the federal government, at least in their rhetoric. Of course, the rhetoric and the practice don't always match up.
"Federalist" implies a privileging of the federal government over the parts. And, indeed, the original Federalists were those who defended a stronger central government against the Jeffersonians and the advocates of the Articles of Confederation. Yet, now the members of the Federalist Society are precisely those who oppose the federal government's role.
"Democrat" implies a privileging of the people and the states over the central government. And, yet, the Democratic party has become the party least associated with states' rights or libertarian principles, the party least in favor of leaving the people to themselves--except in cases of civil liberties, where the party is actually democratic.
It's not just "compassionate conservatism" that makes no sense as a political term; the American political landscape is rife with misleading and meaningless designations.

The Perils of intelligent design

Advocates of intelligent design, quite apart from their apparent misunderstanding of the very idea of the physical sciences, are guilty of a pragmatically dangerous theological move. I wouldn’t expect them to realize this, because for the most part, it seems that they are painfully unaware of any currents of intellectual history between the beginning of the second century AD and the rise of fundamentalism in this country in the twentieth.

However, at least as long ago as the waning days of the Renaissance (or the modern period for philosophers) believers and non-believers were extremely exercised about the problem of evil, namely how it could be that an all-good and all-powerful and all-knowing (and all-present) God could have made a world in which there was so much suffering. This, of course, was not a new problem or concern, and thinkers did have recourse to older theodicies relying on the fall of man and the entrance of sin into the world because of human (and angelic) sin.

What is interesting about what happened in this period are the moves that some thinkers were forced to make. For instance, in a move to be much ridiculed by Voltaire, Leibniz (he of the invention of the calculus and after whom those delightful cookies were named) was forced to say that this universe, with all of its suffering was the best of all possible universes. In other words, because of the need to include such things as human freedom, this world was the best that God could do. Of course, he meant by this that this was the best imaginable universe. Now this opens the floor to some interesting questions. For instance, is this universe a better one than a universe identical in all respects but in which one less person is infected with HIV? If so, why is this better? Why couldn’t have God, while maintaining human freedom, have made that universe that was just a little less bad?

This isn’t really where the problem with the intelligent design camp lives though. The real problem is the one pointed out by David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, a book largely concerned with various arguments apart from revelation, for the existence of God. Through one of his characters, Hume notes that when we see a house, for instance, we know that it has had a builder. (In this he reflects the argument from design for God’s existence.) But if the doorways are out of square, if the roof leaks, if some of the doors don’t shut, if the foundations are weak, we don’t praise the builder or the architect. But this is exactly the situation with the world in which we find ourselves.

Humans have back problems because we have spines better fitted to quadrupedal than bipedal movement; viruses and bacteria continually find newer and better ways to infect and damage their intended victims including killing them; hurricanes destroy large swaths of land, killing humans and innocent animals; earthquakes and other natural disasters do the same; and on it goes. (Notice that evolutionary biology explains the first two of these and meteorology and geology/plate tectonics explain the latter, but intelligent design doesn’t explain any of it.)

In other words, if we are led by observation of nature to believe that their must be a creator and we hope to read off of nature facts about this creator, we are forced to see that the creator is either not very skilled or is less than ideally good. Either the God pointed to by nature couldn’t prevent natural evils or didn’t care to. Either He couldn’t keep the flu virus from mutating and becoming more dangerous, He didn’t care if it did, or He intended it to. The God design points to, then, is either unskilled or if skilled and intelligent, morally suspect.

Am I saying that there is no God? No. Am I saying that there might not be some responses to these roughly Humean worries? No, although most offered responses are unsatisfactory at the end of the day. What I am saying is that if advocates of intelligent design believe that they are doing religious faith a service by demanding that students be presented with questions about evolution, they are creating for themselves a group of theists who will not only believe in God for the wrong reasons, but who will have a faith easily defeated by the very same concerns, i.e., facts about nature, that gave them that faith.

Responsibility, freedom and community

Last week I had the opportunity to help a man I had never met before as he vomited a mixture of bar popcorn and vodka and soda. The interesting thing about the situation is that he wasn't in the bar alone; he had come in with a friend. But as he became intoxicated--or as he became more intoxicated since he only had two drinks and that was enough to put him over the edge--he became an inconvenience to his friend, who was busy getting his groove on. At this point the friend informed me that the drunken man wasn't his responsibility. Now, of course part of the implication of this was that he was somehow my responsibility, since I was helping him.

There is a certain amount of truth in what the friend said: the man was responsible for having gotten himself drunk and sick. In that sense, he was only his own responsibility. But, of course, there's another sense in which the friend's response is unacceptable. When a person cannot take care of himself--and that was this man's situation--who is more responsible for him than his friends? In the absence of a friend or when left alone, of course I was responsible for him. This is part of what it is to be human and to form part of a human community.

What the friend's response makes clear is a deep problem with contemporary society. It might be peculiar to American society; it might be peculiar to modern society; it might even be peculiar to gay society (although this I doubt). The problem is the psychological assumption of a kind of libertarianism. It is an unspoken and unconsidered assumption that we are all responsible for ourselves in a way that means that when we get into trouble we are wholly on our own. Or, that if one is partly or wholly (or even not at all) responsible for a situation in which he finds himself, it is a morally and socially acceptable move to allow him to suffer all of the consequences of the situation. Presumably, the friend thought it would be okay to allow his friend to vomit, to drive home intoxicated or to be mugged on the street; after all, he had gotten himself into it.

This view also underlies the general appeal for a cutting back of government assistance programs, often with an allusion to the early days of the Republic and Tocqueville's account of the early American civic experience. But, of course, in the early days of the American experiment people were deeply involved in numerous networks of social connection: their churches, fraternal organizations, extended families, grange societies, unions, sports teams, etc. This is no longer the case (see, for an analysis of the death of such organizations, Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone). Instead we are more and more isolated (I write as I sit in front of a great isolator, the web-connected computer) and still we feel that each individual is wholly responsible for himself.

In other words, we live in a country that fails to be a nation and in communities that are really no more than collections of individuals. We have fulfilled the claim of Margaret Thatcher that there is no such thing as society. Inasmuch as we are social animals, by nature and of essence, it may just mean that we are ceasing to be human.

As, Aristotle said, the man who lives outside society must become either a god or an animal. I doubt many of us are heading to divinity.

The Church of the Sexual Animals

The Catholic Church’s recently floated suggestion that all homosexual men be barred from preparation for the priesthood, while not quite as bad as the suggestion the current Pope made as Cardinal Ratzinger that it might actually be impossible for a gay man to be a priest, reflects a trend beginning at least with Paul VI’s decision to bar all contraception over the objection of the best moral theologians of the day. This trend is none other than to see human beings, in all questions of sexual morality, as nothing more than animals.

In barring all faithful Catholics from the use of contraception, the Church opted for the narrowest possible reading of the natural law tradition with respect to sex, seeing intercourse not just as directed to reproduction and the consummation of the conjugal union, but as consummatory only insofar as it was (possibly) reproductive. This is, of course, to remove the human dimension of human sexuality, to say that the primary and essential purpose of sex is the purpose to which other members of the animal kingdom put it, the preservation of the species. It also profoundly misunderstood the very moral tradition that it supposedly drew upon, that of natural law, derived ultimately from the Stoics, which sees morality as based in the human nature implanted in us by God. As essential part of that natural law has always been seen as the way that human activities lead to the formation and continuation of human relationships. Seen in this light, sex has an essential role in the preservation of the marital (and, perhaps, other) relationships, not just as reproductive.

Barring gay men from the priesthood again views gay men as little more than animals in the realm of sex. It assumes that gays cannot possibly control their own sexuality, although presumably heterosexual men can. Now, of course, this move is largely a response to the recent coming to light of the massive pedophilia problem within the Church. This problem itself, much to the chagrin of conservatives, is not a result of their being more self-identified gay men in the priesthood. By and large, the perpetrators identify themselves as straight men and entered the priesthood before the much-derided liberalization of the Church during and following Vatican II. I’ve argued elsewhere that the real problem is men who have no fully human and adult respect for their own sexuality and what to do or not do with it. Treating humans as uncontrolled animals in need of controlling by the institutional Church will not solve the problem; it will only exacerbate the problem.

Benedict is noted for claiming that the Church may need to get smaller in order to stay true to the Faith. I predict that he will get the smaller Church he seems to desire, but it will not be one stronger or closer to the Church, nor will it resemble the medieval Church in its mindset—that was, in many ways, a celebratory and fruitful time for the Church—it will instead resemble a dying sect, more like the Amish than anything else. It will, if more respect for the humanity of its members does not arise, become ever more irrelevant to the world in which it is supposed to be leaven and which it is supposed to evangelize. Christ did not come to save animals nor to convince humans that they were little more than animals. (Nor, for that matter, to oppose the deliverances of science.)

The Truth, Christ said, will set us free. Ingrained, unjustified opinion has no such power.