yorker article Posts

A recent article on the art and science of taste and smell in the New Yorker had a paragraph that stood out for me. The author John Lanchester had just shared a moment where he suddenly understood the meaning behind "grainy," a term that had previously been an esoteric wine descriptor. He then writes:

The idea that your palate and your vocabulary expand simultaneously might sound felicitous, but there is a catch. The words and the references are really useful only to people who have had the same experiences and use the same vocabulary: those references are to a shared basis of sensory experience and a shared language. To people who haven't had those shared experiences, this way of talking can seem like horse manure, and not in a good way.

How might this apply to Quakerism? A post-modernist philosopher might argue that our words are our experience and their argument would be even stronger for communal experiences. I once spent a long afternoon worrying whether the colors I saw were really the same colors others saw: what if what I interpreted as yellow was the color others saw as blue? After turning around the riddle I ended up realizing it didn't matter as long as we all could point to the same color and give it the same name.

But what happens when we're not just talking about yellow. Turning to the Crayola box, what if we're trying to describe the yellowish colors apricot, dandelion, peach and the touch-feely 2008 "super happy". Being a Crayola connoisseur requires an investment not only in a box of colored wax but also in time: the time needed to experience, understand and take ownership in the various colors.

Religion can be a like wine snobbery. If you take the time to read the old Quaker journals and reflect on your spiritual experiences you can start to understand what the language means. The terms stop being fussy and obscure, outdated and parochial. They become your own religious vocabulary. When I pick up an engaging nineteenth journal (not all are!) and read stories about the author's spiritual up and downs and struggles with ego and community, I smile with shared recognition. When I read an engaging historian's account of some long-forgotten debate I nod knowing that many of the same issues are at the root of some blogospheric bruhaha.

Of course I love outreach and want to share the Friends "sensory experience." One way to do that is to strip the language and make it all generic. The danger of course is that we're actually changing the religion when we're change the language. It's not the experience that makes us Friends--all people of all spiritual persuasions have access to legitimate religious experiences no matter how fleeting, misunderstood or mislabeled. We are unique in how we frame that experience, how we make sense of it and how we use the shared understanding to direct our lives.

We can go the other direction and stay as close to our traditional language as possible, demanding that anyone coming into our religious society's influence take the time to understand us on our terms. That of course opens us to charges of spreading horse manure, in Lanchester's words (which we do sometimes) and it also means we threaten to stay a small insider community. We also forget to speak "normal," start thinking the language really is the experience and start caring more about showing off our vocabulary than about loving God or tending to our neighbors.

I don't see any good way out of this conundrum, no easy advice to wrap a post up. A lot of Friends in my neck of the woods are doing what I'd call wink-wink nudge-nudge Quakerism, speaking differently in public than in private (see this post) but I worry this institutionalizes the snobbery and excuses the manure, and it sure doesn't give me much hope. What if we saw our role as taste educators? For want of a better analogy I wonder if there might be a Quaker version of Starbucks (yes yes, Starbucks is Quaker, I'm talking coffee), a kind of movement that would educate seekers at the same time as it sold them the Quaker experience. Could we get people excited enough that they'd commit to the higher costs involved in understanding us?

The current war talk against Iran is hopelessly short-sighted. A successful US military action would only delay Iran's getting nuclear weapons by another ten years or so but it would greatly increase the chance that they'd want to use them. A war would justify Tehran's paranoia and legitimize a strike-back against the US or our allies when they finally do perfect the bomb.

It is widely rumored that the top US civilian leadership wants to use "tactical" nuclear weapons to destroy the underground labs where Iranian scientists are refining the uranium. The US military is reportedly very against this, and this is most likely why we're seeing all of these retired US generals calling for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Although a dozen-or-so countries have nuclear weapons, no one has used them since the US bombed Japan fifty years ago. No country wants to be the first to use them again, knowing there would be an incredible international backlash against them. If the US did launch even a limited nuclear attack against Iran, it would make the use of atomic weapontry more acceptable.

Nuclear weapons are a fact of life now. Iran is going to get them, sooner or later. Many of the countries in the region have bombs--Pakistan, India, Israel, China. The US can't put this genie back in the bottle. We need to build an international consensus that their use in unacceptable in any circumstance. Which means we need to stop planning on using them ourselves.

Seymour Hersh's article on US war preparations has a great quote in it from an unnamed "European official":

Iran is no longer living in the Stone Age, and the young people there have access to U.S. movies and books, and they love it. If there was a charm offensive with Iran, the mullahs would be in trouble in the long run.

We have two choices: bomb Iran now, which would possibly hold off the threat another ten years but would certainly turn younger Iranians against us for generations to come. Or we could manage the situation as best we can, using international inspectors to delay atomic weapons if possible but launching not bombs but the "charm offensive." We need to think about what the Iranian-US relationship will look like ten and twenty and fifty years from now. Even a "small" war now would lead to a huge war then.

All wars start decades before the bullets start flying. The seeds of World War II were in the debilitating reparations the victorious allies forced on a defeated German twenty years before at the end of World War I. By 1938 the war was all-but-inevitable. We can only stop wars if we look to the future and build friends of our enemies now. Iran will change. United States actions now will shape the future of Iran. Let's not muck it up.

As iraq slides ever more incontrovertibly into civil war, President Bush looks elsewhere to secure his legacy. Seymore Hersh writes in the New Yorker of The Iran Plans

There is a growing conviction among members of the United States military, and in the international community, that President Bush’s ultimate goal in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change... A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was "absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb" if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do "what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do," and "that saving Iran is going to be his legacy."

A lot has been written about Intelligent Design (creationism without the G-word) because of the trial in Pennsylvania's Dover Area School District. An excellent New Yorker article about it a few weeks ago mentioned that one of the school board members pushing Intelligent Design is a Quaker. Who would have guessed? But should I be so surprised?

Now, I absolutely don't think it should be taught in science classes at all. I'm with the judge that the ID argument is religious and not scientific. Students shouldn't be forced to listen to Christian propaganda in a public school. But what if we take the debate out of the schoolhouse and bring it into the meetinghouse? A core principle of Friends is Fox's opening that Christ has come to teach the people himself. The era of divine agency in human affairs didn't end in the early 30s A.D. but continues. When we pray for discernment in our business meetings, we're asking for a very real presence (common metaphors are the still small voice and a "nudge from the Spirit"). If God guides us as individuals and a Society of Friends into the mystery of a direct, Christ-centered contact, then it's not much of a stretch to suppose God at least occassionally tips the scales on the evolutionary front as well.

We are a religious people who believe in God's active agency in our lives: isn't that pretty much the Intelligent Design argument? As a science geek, I don't buy it at all but as a Friend it seems to make sense. Is anyone else out there struggling with this seeming-contradiction?

ps: yes I know there are some liberal Friends who don't buy into anything dealing with God, which seems to be to be a different issue. What are those of us who do look for direct guidance to make of Intelligent Design?
pps: Things so Small Sarah skirted by this issue last week in a great post.

One of the reasons I like "nonviolence" as a catch-all organizing principle is that it let you range across to some of the root issues that need to be addressed. One of these is the climatic effects that humans are having upon the Earth. The New Yorker has been running some articles: check out part one of Elizabeth Kolbert's The Climate of Man (part two is here).

One of the more useful set of links and discussions I've read lately comes from a post titled Climate Change Activism on a blog called The Public Quaker. It's not enough to know that the climate is going to hell in a handbasket and shouting the warnings out from the rooftops is often ineffective. The PQ talks about how we can help get a movement together that motivates people to build the world we want. Cool stuff and she has links to the work of others as well.

President Four More Years, George W. himself, thinks the best pick for the nation's top law-enforcement official should be a lawyer who advocated throwing away the Geneva Convention. The U.S. Attorney General nominee, Alberto Gonzales, working as a senior White House lawyer said in January of 2002 that the war against terrorism:

in my judgment renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners.

The man who would enforce U.S. laws thinks that the most important international law in human history should be chucked. In arguing that the law against torture of enemy soldiers was now irrelevant, Gonzales helped set the stage for the Abu Ghraib prison atrocities. Instead of being tried in international criminal courts as a war criminal, Gonzales is being promoted to a senior United States cabinet position. When liberty for all fails, destroy their cities: watch Falluja burn. When justice for all fails, torture the bastards: away with the Geneva Convention.

What? Forgotten what torture looks like? The folks at antiwar.com have a collection of Abu Ghraib images

Seymour Hersh, in the New Yorker, claims that the Abu Ghraib torture was an extension of a secret torture program designed for high-level Al Qaeda leaders

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focused on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in iraq.

It reminds me of the pacifist-dilemma questions. You know them: "you're a pacifist, heh?, well what if your grandmother was being brutally attacked in front of you, you'd use violence then right?" (or "what if you could go back to 1936 and kill Hitler," etc., etc.) The questioner isn't actually concerned about your grandmother (and they don't have a time machine standing by). The questions are meant to test the boundaries of one's pacifism with impossible or highly-unlikely scenarios. If you admit you might consider physical force in a specific situation, the question is expanded and the scenario made more abstract as the force is made more likely. The questioner is leading one down the slippery slope: pretty soon you've signed up for the Army and are killing someone else's grandmother in a foreign land.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld played the pacifist dilemma game in Afghanistan and extended it to iraq. He asked what we should do if we captured a high-level Al Qaeda informant or leader. He probably built up some juicy Tom Clancy scenario: an imminent attack on New York, a close-mouthed Al Qaeda lieutenant, what wouldn't we do to save those thousands of people? It's a tough question, certainly. Rumsfeld answer:

he authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate “high value” targets in the Bush Administration’s war on terror.

Like all pacifist dilemma games, this one too has a slippery slope. Inhumane interrogation techniques set up for "high value" Al Qaeda leaders are now used for taxi drivers in Baghdad. Most of the inmates at Abu Ghraib prison were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Few have been charged with anything. But they are being subjected to the worse kind of "interrogation" (read: torture) the U.S. military can cook up.

Related: David McReynolds talks about the "What about Hitler" question in part four of The Philosophy of Nonviolence.

An article in The Guardian reports that detainees at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay are also being beaten and argues that "brutality against detainees has become an institutionalised feature of America's war on terror." One freed British prisoner said 'They tied me up like a beast and began kicking me.'