Respite from a few days of the stomach flu is a relief. I am grateful for being able to eat threa meals a day, to do yoga, and to sit comfortably again while following my breath. A little reward of illness that will soon -- no doubt -- fade.
cold and flame
ice cubes and candles
the toys of an idle wallflower
The conclusion of my last entry about traditions resistant to corruption no doubt sounds odd -- at least to those not familiar with the idea of memes. Fortunately, I can explain this concern by way of a larger issue and a concrete example.
The larger issue is one of wisdom: that marvelous, rare, and ineffable quality whose supply is never sufficient to the world's demands. We try to develop and teach wisdom, but I sometimes suspect this is a futile task. (Though I've seen some intriguing proposals for research programs on wisdom that are cognizant of the challenges.) Consider the recommendations of a wise teacher, like Neil Postman, to throw away all syllabi and means of evaluation in the classroom. This is probably fantastic advice for charismatic geniuses -- but what of the workaday folk trying to earn a living in a troubled school system? While I am optimistic enough to think there is room for improvement in most any facet of any life, I'm not so optimistic to think that we can simply follow the examples of the exceptional few in their extraordinary circumstances. So, we train, write down policies, and administer bureaucracies so as to do the best we can. And wisdom is often lost in the process.
As an example, consider the recent news about Islamic protests against Wikipedia because of images of their Prophet. I think Muhammad was wise to discourage images of himself because he recognized how slavish devotion to the surface contours of faith can obscure its genuine practice. But in a sad irony, his iconoclasm became its own idol. Some Muslims now murder others over the display of any image. Consequently, even wise religious norms, when detached from reason and justified by recourse to the supernatural, often become abusive dictates wielded by their righteous idolaters who fetishize the letter of the law over its spirit.
I just finished Shane Claiborne's book "The Irresistible Revolution: Living As an Ordinary Radical." I think if more people were like him the world would be a better place. Yet he would resist any claim of saintliness on the part of his community, as that distances what he might call "Christ's revolution of love" from everyday people: Jesus did not minister to or call upon saints, but ordinary folk.
I almost envy the richness he has in Christian sources to support his arguments for brotherly love, peace, simplicity, and community. On this point I am sympathetic to those who make an argument that this language has been an important part of discourse about progressive change. As Barack Obama said relative to American history "if we scrub language of all religious content, we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice." (Barack Obama is the only prominent politician who I think has spoken reasonably and honestly about the role of religion in American politics.) Of course, those same biblical sources are used for all sorts of objectionable and horrid arguments as well. Such is the dilemma of the devout atheist: to find traditions of wisdom without superstition and without a susceptibility to co-option and corruption that are unfortunately all too common.
__
Copyright 2008 NrrrdBoy. All Rights Reserved. https://goatee.net/