Three Tries at Thinking about Saints

This piece was written for the Cabrini Communicator, the occasional publication of St. Frances Cabrini parish.

 

I learned this summer that Angelo Amato, with whom I spent a summer at a language camp in 1972, has become a cardinal, an archbishop, an unofficial candidate for Pope, and the Prefect for the Secretariat on the Causes of Saints at the Vatican – the person who oversees the investigations leading to canonization. Angelo was a good guy, a hard-working historian on holiday, when I met him in 1972. Thinking of him in this exalted office humanized the saint-making enterprise for me. Here are three short meditations on saints.

I.

As a confirmation sponsor to someone interested in engineering, I went hunting for a helpful saint, and came up with nothing useful. That seemed important. Did this mean that, in the view of the Roman Catholic Church, engineering is not a path to fulfillment or perfection?

To explore the issues of “which lives matter, religiously?” I started a group, “Engineering and Christian Values.” We began by reading David McCullough’s book The Wright Brothers, trying to understand how values and engineering might come together. McCullough does a selective biography of the Wrights, concentrating on their early lives, on their glider experiments at Kitty Hawk, and on the demonstration flights that established their claim as the founders of modern aviation. In his story, there is much to admire: the health and encouragement of the Wright family, the entrepreneurial spirit of Dayton, Ohio, the bond between the brothers, the good humor and good will that allowed Wilbur and Orville to persevere with their experiments and to prevail in negotiations with corporations and governments. However, one opinion, expressed after a few sessions of discussion, seemed to capture a consensus in the group: there are not values IN engineering. Engineering is neutral; it creates tools. People use those tools according to values they bring to the enterprise. Fun loving people fly for pleasure; warlike people figure out how to make airplanes big enough to drop bombs.

This is surely a respectable position. Some people love to make things. Their values determine how they apply that impulse. They decide to work on missile navigation systems or irrigation equipment or computer games, depending on what they think is important. That’s surely part of the story. It is perhaps incomplete.

Wilbur writes about the experience of flying, “More than anything else the sensation is one of perfect peace mingled with an excitement that strains every nerve to the utmost, if you can conceive of such a combination.” As McCullough tells the story of the brothers’ experiments, they were after an experience like that of the birds. They took years to go from very short flights to flights lasting an hour or longer.  Flying was an art for them: the plane was controlled by the pilot shifting his weight in a harness while distorting the wings with ropes – a three dimensional counterpart to riding a bicycle. They were trying to experience physics in their own bodies, to be up close to the forces that determine what world we live in.

This reminds me of the most under-reflected piece in the Christian gospel: “You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart and your whole soul and your whole mind and your whole strength.” This is pretty extreme, especially for Minnesotans. There are, occasional extravagant love affairs like that. Our dogs model such devotion constantly. It is, in my experience, not the Christian norm. We might strongly approve of God, on principle, but that doesn’t seem to be what the commandment calls for.

For many of us, whatever we feel about God is made up in large part of what we feel about the world, which everyone agrees is quite a mess, though it also has some very good parts. We know that the way the world is made allows both horrors and wonders. If we respond to the world based on the locations available to human beings, our response cannot be entirely positive. The harder thing: to respond to the worldiness of the world, to the way it makes life possible, to the particular universal constants that determine what actions we can do, how hard it is to know things, at what speed time flows, the relationships between our senses and the independent objects that provoke them. We live within a context that sets a level of difficulty for us, that allows certain kinds of achievement, that privileges some spatial and temporal relationships over others. It is possible to approve or disapprove of this set-up, quite separate from approving or disapproving our accidental place in it.  The interest of the Wright brothers seems to me to lie in their attitude toward the world – toward physics -- their desire to celebrate what the basic facts and relationships of this world make possible. (Reading about them, I think of my dogs rolling endlessly in something that smells good. That’s the relation they were seeking. It feels like the right sort of engagement to fit the words of the commandment: whole mind, whole heart, whole soul, whole strength.)

The airplanes that the Wrights initially designed had limited military potential; they carried at most two people, and navigation depended on the strength of the pilot. Within a few years, warplanes, and the massive enterprise of military aviation, became possible. From one value standpoint, one wants to go back and tell the Wrights to stop their experiments at Kitty Hawk, to let the less promising Smithsonian research carry aviation, so that possibly only dirigibles would have been available for World War I. With airplanes, as with most technology, it is hard to foresee how it will be used. Surely, in any canonization proceeding for Wilbur and Orville Wright, the Devil’s Advocate would have a lot of material.

What McCullough’s book tries to get at, in telling this story, is the experience of inventing, the motive or intention or attitude that drove their work. If the Wright brothers are some kind of saints, it is because their desire to physically understand and appreciate the basic forces of the world is some version of the love of God.

So far, the Catholic Church, the major saint-maker, has not seen fit to acknowledge this kind of motive or impulse as a path to sanctity. The patron saint of engineers is St. Patrick, who introduced some useful Roman technology into Ireland. This gives engineers encouragement to be useful, and a special reason to celebrate on March 17, but it doesn’t hold out any particular ideal for them.

Does it matter whether we have enough saints? Does it matter whom we call saints? This might be seen as going along with a kind of spirituality carried on in side altars and pilgrimage churches, something honorable but not quite contemporary.  I think we should not dismiss saint-making as outmoded. The identified saints crystalize kinds of goodness that we might otherwise miss. It seems a tragedy to miss a possibility of goodness in life through sheer ignorance. Lewis Mumford writes about this in a piece from Values for Survival, a book written to think through the next steps after World War II:

If we are to express the love in our own hearts, we must also understand what love meant to Socrates and Saint Francis, to Dante and Shakespeare, to Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti, to the explorer Shackleton and to the intrepid physicians who deliberately exposed themselves to yellow fever. These historic manifestations of love are not recorded in the day's newspaper or the current radio program: they are hidden to people who possess only fashionable minds. Virtue is not a chemical product, as Taine once described it: it is a historic product, like language and literature; and this means that if we cease to care about it, cease to cultivate it, cease to transmit its funded values, a large part of it will become meaningless, like a dead language to which we have lost the key. That, I submit, is what has happened in our own lifetime.”  (Emphasis mine.)

If we lose track of the celebratory, immersive, affirmative potential in science and engineering, they will become simply means to our ends, located outside of what we care about. McCullough’s The Wright Brothers is interesting primarily as a hagiography – that is, as an attempt to hold on to a specific flavor of human goodness.

It also makes me wonder what other neglected varieties of goodness might be lurking at the edges of vision.

II.

At a library book sale the other day, I heard someone say, as she browsed among thousands of books jumbled in heaps, “I am not quite sure what is next.” This is said so often now, and I am saying it too, as retirement and redirection by age and energy become gradual realities. If one can’t jump straight from child-raising to grandchild work or to the demands of home-care for elderly relatives, there’s a gap of possibilities, a rather long scene in the play without much script, like those parts in musical compositions where Mozart tells the violinist, “Here, just make something up for awhile.” The situation of being in reasonable health, with reasonable energy, with some experience of how the world works, but without a job or any real need to get one – as a mass phenomenon, that maybe hasn’t happened as much as it is happening now, ever before.

Of course, one can find things to do. That’s not the problem. But what kind of good is it possible to be, in this trough, this middle period between the end of one set of necessities (career, child-raising, civic engagement) and the beginning of next set, (determined by the increasing demands of one’s body). And who are the patron saints for this interval? Where are the lives that do justice to this peculiar second adolescence?

III.

I always try to sell Cabrini first off as a place to stay ethical. It is valuable to think about being decent because (a) being decent is complicated, and (b) when we stop thinking about being decent, we fall pretty quickly into that other thing. So, most of the time, we preach ethics, and our liturgy reflects a myriad of concerns that would be intelligible to educated Jews and Muslims and Sikhs and disciples of Confucius. We are part of grand human consensus about decency, holding off darkness, about which there is also consensus.

Then there’s the spooky part: the healings and floatings and multiplyings and transformations and – all those things that happen suddenly, and all that stuff that doesn’t make sense. Moses hits the rock one too many times, and he doesn’t get to go into the promised land. Abraham is offered a son he didn’t expect, then commanded to give him back.

The odd thing about an awake Catholic parish is that it is a place for reflection on both ordinary ethics and extraordinary other stuff. The saint stories are generally the place where the other stuff comes spurting up: the bodies that don’t decay, the levitating nuns, the statues that cry real tears, the piles of crutches at Lourdes. We could write this all off as a legacy from primitive times, except that almost everybody has a story that’s odd in that sort of way, that doesn’t fit, that doesn’t make sense, that popped up suddenly – suggesting that something outside of us personally has a more than general interest in our doings. We have sometimes, in addition to all that normal pressure to be decent, the distinct feeling of being nudged along, in some quirky direction.

That’s one of the things we get to talk about at Cabrini.  There aren’t very many other places where it’s safe to go beyond the obvious.  

The Word Team

I am part of a biblical reflection and preaching team at my church. To my surprise, this group has become, over many years, a center of my intellectual life and a model for how thinking matters in the world. This recent piece for the parish newsletter, dated April 15, 2015, gives some idea of the kind of thinking these discussions provoke. 

Persistent Questions

Thursdays, Word Team meets, 9:30 to 11, to help the preacher find something to say about the Sunday readings, ten days out. We’ve been meeting for years, decades maybe, a shifting group with a few regulars. It has been the trip of a lifetime.

We are all different; we gave up trying to find a common purpose, or even a common set of reading questions. Our one firm rule: we go around the circle once for initial thoughts before we get into discussion or any kind of interchange. That has worked for us.

I’d like to report on my persistent questions from this enterprise. They are mostly mine, though I think some team members share them.

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What do we do about our own moral and intellectual maturity?  We are, most of us, older than pretty much anybody writing or reported on in either testament; all of us are older than Jesus. We grew up in the center of something like an empire, as citizens. Most of the voices in the testaments come from the margins. These points are usually taken in a self-critical way: we may have lost our youthful enthusiasm and sense of urgency. We can recover that from these texts. We may have become too comfortable with our astonishing privilege to take good account of the perspectives of the poor and the powerless, to see the urgency of basic social reform. We can recover also that perspective from the texts.

But what do we do with the possibility that we may have learned things in 50 or 80  years that were just invisible to any of those speaking in the Bible? Did the requirements of empire, of large scale government, call forth real values, invisible to those on the margins? Have the discoveries of contemporary science have shown us objects of reverence (and elicited varieties of reverence) unknown to the best thinkers in the First Century or earlier?

Progressives of many denominations routinely make this kind of correction with respect to sexism, saying pretty clearly, “This is an evil and insidious pattern of thought, common and accepted in many enlightened circles in biblical times, now seen to be totally unacceptable – in light of experiences that were unavailable to people in those times.” The shift to inclusive language in scripture readings reflects this idea.

The possibility of such correction doesn’t end with sexism.   Think about the New Testament idea that wealth and true faith are fundamentally at odds. This should frighten a U.S. audience very much, living as we do in what would have passed for palaces in the First Century. But we also know that our personal wealth enables us to do unquestionably good things, to work effectively for all kinds of good results. Further, the amassing of wealth through corporations and large-scale business dealings makes levels of benevolence possible which would have seemed like miracles to people even a hundred years ago. Bill Gates devotes his fortune to eradicating diseases worldwide; could any other entity have concentrated that much wealth on this problem? Steve Jobs, whose management style had elements of cruelty and ruthlessness and sheer perversity, made the company that standardized universal communication for much of the world. We saw the results of this after the North Minneapolis hurricane: relief efforts coordinated through Iphones and Facebook were astonishingly effective.  And, can anyone name a philanthropist who did a hundredth as much for humanity as Nicolai Tesla whose ideas about power transmission made rural electrification possible?

So, when we preach on wealth, we are caught. We recognize that none of us are going to strip down to even “First Century wealthy,” and we also recognize that we have a personal, selfish stake in justifying wealth at a certain level – whatever level we have or aspire to. We are not disinterested thinkers.  At the same time, the New Testament on wealth is over-simple.

There are other issues where this comes up.  In biblical protests against injustice, you don’t find arguments for clearly written laws, an efficient bureaucracy, effective public health safeguards, good roads, the promotion of trade. What one hears are calls for mercy and fairness and basic decency – all reasonable, all part of the mix, but not what inspires those kinds of public service that prevent misery, that tend over time toward prosperity for the poor, that make oppression more difficult. To the extent that we leave all that out, focusing our recommendations on direct service, we channel our children into the Peace Corps, into nursing and medicine,  and leave those with administrative and organizational gifts without a spiritual mandate – left to think of themselves as largely “secular.”

We leave out science as well. I just learned that Saint Patrick is the patron saint of engineers; he introduced some Roman technology into Ireland. He’s better known as an exterminator of snakes and an explainer of the trinity. There is no working engineer in the pantheon of saints. There is no saying of Jesus, “And, when you get done feeding the poor, you might consider trying to invent something cool.” So, where does that leave the kid who wants to become an engineer or an inventor? Do we really want to say to such a kid, Sunday after Sunday, that his or her ambitions are irrelevant to what is REALLY important?

To put it simply, thinking about scripture has to be both: hearing the message and recognizing the unavoidable limits of that message. And preaching has to reflect the same dual understanding.

This is one of the ongoing issues that make Word Team exciting for me.

This first question addressed the possibility that we may know things that biblical writers didn’t know, may appreciate values that they neglected. A second major question for preachers, as I see the matter, goes in just the opposite direction: what insights might be contained in scripture that are not just difficult for us but beyond the horizon of our understanding?

One version of this question points the issue: “How smart was Jesus?” We are accustomed to praising Jesus for compassion, courage, humane-ness. Those are all followable virtues. We have the ideal clearly in mind. We know why it is important. The problem is living up to it. So, we often understand Jesus as caring more deeply about matters that we also care about than anyone before or since, immersing himself more fully in uncontroversial truths. But it is also worth asking, “Was he, in the normal understanding, an intellectual prodigy?” Such people do arise, even in places with limited access to education. The lack of education blocks some manifestations, allows others. Is it possible that Jesus understood connections that we just don’t get, that he had a vision of the fundamental human condition broader than we can imagine?

A quote from Tolstoy’s “What I Believe” shows the urgency of the problem: “To put an engine in position, to heat the boiler, to set it in motion, but not to attach the connecting belt, was what was done with the teaching of Christ when people began to teach that you can be a Christian without fulfilling the law of non-resistance to him that is evil.” Tolstoy’s study of the New Testament  placed pacifism in the center of Jesus’ teaching – and presumably, placed every military enterprise whatever outside of that teaching. One can hardly accuse the author of War and Peace of being naïve about the reasons for going into battle: Napoleon was an enemy worth defeating. Yet Tolstoy eventually adopts a pacifist Christianity.

What does a preacher do, finding in the texts a clear message that runs counter to the moral intuitions of his or her country, and to the moral intuitions of most of the congregation? How much respect does such a message deserve? Was Jesus seeing something that we miss, or was he simply overlooking very hard cases of personal and national self-defense? On the answer to this kind of question rides the whole relationship between the preacher and his or her audience. 

I ran into a simpler example in my early catechism classes in Forest City. I had read the passage in Matthew where Jesus says, “Swear no oath at all.” I asked the priest about it. He denied that the passage was there, saying that Jesus would have said, “Keep your oaths.” He just couldn’t imagine that Jesus could have cared about swearing in court. It is pretty strange to us to. I generally ask judges for the non-religious formula (“on pain of perjury”) because it seems to me it might be worth holding this line. (Jesus didn’t say, “Thou shalt not” all that often.) But I don’t understand what is at stake here. There are some reflections in ordinary language philosophy, coming out of Wittgenstein and Austin, that criticize special or careful speech, technical speech, extra-trustworthy speech in ways that seem to suggest that some very big mistake lies behind this simple act of privileging some utterances as especially serious or especially accurate. This might lead to a different appreciation of what is morally or spiritually important, with oaths, and what other kinds of attitudes go along with the rejection of oaths.

I suspect that this oath matter is important. If one takes it seriously, as the early Quakers did,  one is obliged to make a fuss on occasions when nobody wants fuss; imagine the President refusing to take the oath of office. Further, one is obliged to make a big deal out of something that most people regard as no deal at all. These are very difficult acts, for the normal Minnesotan. As a preacher, one hesitates for a long time to recommend such acts. One also hesitates to say that this was likely just some trivial Jesus-opinion, out of the mainstream of Jesus’ fundamental teaching, which we, of course, fully understand, because it isn’t rocket science. (It’s just all about love, you know.) Well, maybe some of what Jesus had to say IS rocket science, and maybe he had the brain to think such thoughts, and it’s our job to catch up as best we can.

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I like Word Team because it does important intellectual work in a regular and orderly way, over a long enough time to get something accomplished. I can imagine, in the Church I hope for, every parish providing an open forum for people to struggle with the large questions of loyalty to a sacred tradition. Such a conversation needs many sorts of specialized knowledge, particularly historical and linguistic knowledge, and also the sense of priorities and proportion that come from having had experiences and made mistakes and suffered. It is close to the perfect meeting place for minds of very different formation. It comes close to realizing that line from Paul, “There are many gifts but the same spirit.”

 

Oral History and Interviewing More Generally

I was part of a panel with oral historians because of the television show and archive I do. The appearance forced me to think about the relationship between my strategies and also my ethic and the strategies and ethics of oral historians. What emerged is pretty rough, but it is the best I have done so far in defining the historical dimension of my work. I cleaned up the transcript substantially.  This is the whole panel discussion.

Heritage Collaborative:  Oral History Workshop and Panel

March 28, 2014

Peter Shea

Panel discussion on Oral History Theory and Practice

About 20 years ago I wanted to do a television show that would put out to a million people, many of whom were asleep, the lives of creative and thoughtful people, who would also model civil, long conversations.

I held onto the tapes, but that was my mission, that was how I presented it: you’re talking to a million people, and you’re telling them about your life.  And then as I worked with the Institute for Advanced Study, a couple of things happened.  One, these things clustered a bit.  I started getting 40 electronic musicians, or seven interviews with the same art historian.  I began to get some things that were really exciting clusters and the archival possibility emerged, the streaming possibility emerged.

And so I find myself providing a service to history as I produce primary source material, but I don’t take responsibility for it in the same way that oral historians do, because I‘m not writing about it, I may never write about it. That’s not my game. 

So I’m sort of weird. And I want to give some advice from a weird perspective, and then let people hit me.  Because I’m not them. They’re not doing what I’m doing; I’m not doing what they’re doing, but I still want to give people advice, even though.  So I’m going to give some advice under three headings:  prepare, preserve, and personalize.  Or if you prefer, get ready, get it all and get serious.  You can fill in the other letters yourself.

Prepare. 

I come into a room and there’s a woman sitting here, and I say: “What do you do?” and she says, “I’m the premier Haydn scholar in Canada”, and I recall  that Canada is to the north - I was there once for a few hours - and that Haydn did a symphony about a clock.  Now it is possible in that situation to do a decent interview.  You just have to make sure that you let the person talk long enough, and you’ve got to make sure that they see themselves as talking to ignorant people, yourself first among them.

So they begin telling you what their story is: “How did you come to do what you’re doing?”  After about 10 minutes, you begin to get some ideas that you can work on. I want to say the scary thing, that it isn’t necessary to prepare: it’s nice. I certainly prepare when I can, and as much as I can. Sometimes I end up being very prepared, because I have worked in exactly the area that someone is working in, but it isn’t a prerequisite.  One day I do Asian film, and the next day I do Haydn, and the next day I may do the deputy zoo keeper at Como Zoo.

So, where does this go?  You don’t have to prepare.  It’s great to prepare. It’s great to know what’s out there, so that you can know that you’re adding something.

 

Here’s the odd piece of advice I will give you.  Have something going on in your head, around about your interview.  I think is more important actually than being prepared.  Be thinking about something.  Have Dickens’ Hard Times playing in the car, or McCullough’s biography of Truman, or something that gives you a train of thought.  Life really is interconnected, and if you’re thinking about something, it will give you an immediate connection, in weird ways.   It will give you ways of getting what they’re saying, ways of making what their saying interesting.

Preserve

I think in oral history we are basically where archeology was just at the cusp of radio-carbon dating.  We know that there is an immense amount of information contained in these interviews. We don’t quite have the technology to get it out yet. But someday we will.  You can imagine an archeologist saying “I think I’ll go and excavate this mound; if people don’t like how I do it, they can come re-excavate it --  no big deal.”  Well it’s a huge deal, because once you’ve moved stuff around, they’ll never find that fine-grade information that we know is necessary.   Or an archeologist says “Lots of people are really fussy about documentation, but I believe in simple things.  There was a hole; there were some pots. Some were red; some were white. There were some bones. It was all kind of jumbled up, and it was about a foot and a half down.”   Nobody in archeology would do that now, because we know what you can do if you know exactly where something was and exactly how deep it was and exactly what it was in relationship to.  Well I think we are at that stage where we know there is something there in interviews but we don’t have information to get at it.  For example, Ekman’s stuff on micro-expressions tells us that there is huge information to be obtained in how someone speaks and gestures.

Communication theory stuff says that there is information contained in the dance that goes on in a group like this, between our various gestures, and all of that requires analysis: it takes a very long time to do 120 seconds, but it’s out there.  And that means, preserving responsibly means you’ve got to get video, probably from a couple of cameras. And you’ve got to get audio, and the audio has got to be available together with transcripts.  Not because what you do may need it, but because you’re the person who got the shot at this person, and you don’t want to be cursed into eternity by more sophisticated investigators a hundred years from now for not having preserved the important stuff.  I think you just have to do that.  I’ve been to some extent a sinner with audio; at least I’ve been better with video.

I’ll give you a couple of examples of why it’s important.  One of the guys I interviewed was John Davis.  He was probably the best administrator that Minnesota has ever seen, and the evidence  of that is that Macalester College still exists, the Children’s Theatre still exists - I think Minnesota State Mankato was another one of those organizations that was about to go down for the third time until he came along.  The Minneapolis public schools woke up to integration a whole lot earlier than they might have otherwise when he was superintendent.  Everyone who knows him says this guy is a hero.

He comes in, he does these things, he leaves.  He doesn’t stay around and weight down the institution.  What’s up with this? I got the interview. He comes to the door wearing one of those Harvard bow ties, and I think I understand in a certain way how he can pull it off.  He’s got something I would call “Brahman courtliness.”   “Brahman”’s important; he’s from the upper class and you will never miss that fact.  And he’s also giving you the most intense attention you’ve probably have ever gotten since you were courted.  He moves with incredible grace. And those things have got to be part of what your audience sees.  And only video would capture it.   If you don’t like “Brahman courtliness,”  the video’s on the IAS web site. You’ll see what he does.

Anybody who’s trying to run an organization needs a blood transfusion from the guy.  He died of mad cow a couple of years ago, so he’s not around to help anymore.

Or another one that moved me: I interviewed a very smart farm couple in southwest Minnesota, and they  had done something every farm couple in southwest Minnesota wants to do but hasn’t been able to pull off.  They had gotten their kids, their boys to come back to the farm.  They’re there for supper most of the time. Most weekends anyhow. Some of them are there all of the time.  

How did they do it?  They built the damndest diversified enterprise you’ve ever seen. If a nuclear bomb hits that place, they’ll be selling souvenirs three years later. It’s that strong. Each of the kids has his own workshop within a very large building that has fiber optic cable.  It’s got bays for cars.  It’s just a magnificent setup.  They were totally killed by a tornado a few years ago.  They used the insurance money plus sweat equity to build this very complex structure that is like an economic model for holding a family of diverse interests together.

 

I got the wife and the camera in front of me and had a wonderful conversation, had it transcribed. I looked at the transcription and was appalled because she sounded stupid.  It was wandering and rambling: what’s going on?  This has to be one of the smartest people I’ve met, and she’s sounding stupid.  Then I listened to the interview again.  She doesn’t use grammar; she uses other devices to hold her discourse together.  She uses music; you’d have to put her speech on a musical scale to get straight what she’s doing because the lengths and the shortnesses and the pitches are what hold it together. When you read it, it looks like a mess.  So it’s a tribute to a kind of intelligence that you don’t see very often.  It’s absolutely invisible in writing.

So you’ve got to preserve what you’ve got. And you’ve got to start with a non-intrusive interviewer.

The third point is: you‘ve got to personalize.

Scholarship is important, but it’s not very important. What is more important than scholarship is having a soul, if you don’t have one; saving your soul, if you do.  Those are the big things.  Scholarship is secondary to that.   The question that matters when you’re talking to people and asking for their stories is: what voices do I need to have in my head to become the person I want to be? Who do I need to hear from to balance things out, to inspire me, to warn me. 

  

My own experience, one last point. 

I took 26 years to get a PhD. It set a record. And during that time I developed a certain animosity toward graduate students, reflected in the way I used the words “graduate student.”  It had a kind of poison on it, by the time it got out of my mouth to the other student, it had poison on it. Also, assistant and associate professors bothered me. And I had images about them - of course you do when you’re outside a club - you have all kinds of images about the people in the club. That’s just natural. But I decided that it was important to get beyond that by actually talking to a bunch of them.  And some of them are just as trivial as I thought they were, and some of them are just as confused and out of it as I thought they were. And a great many of them aren’t. A great many of them are just what you want in the community as leaders. So now I know. I can’t speak that way anymore.  I tried to meet my fellow panelists before I came here today, because I knew I would say something offensive, but I thought I would be offensive in an ignorant way if I didn’t actually like the people I was sitting next to. That’s the important thing. It’s an important thing for me. You can always make a salary.  I would really like to die with a soul.  It would be nice if they could put it on my tombstone, “had a soul.”  Don’t tell anyone you’re doing it. It’s probably good, if the cameras are running, to speak angrily and forcefully against the denigration of scholarship.  Get yourself quoted.  But never forget that scholarship is a very dicey game, and that you’re basically here to figure out who you are, and that means who you are in relationship to a some other people on the planet.

 

What it Means to Be Introduced to Ethics

Every time I teach an ethics course, I try to say what we can hope to accomplish. These statements have changed substantially over 40 years. Here is one promising effort from 2006.

 

Ways of Understanding “Introduction to Ethics”

It is natural to be somewhat puzzled at the beginning of a course like “Introduction to Ethics.” The title suggests that the course is about matters that are immediately important, and yet the approach is indirect and historical. We don’t start out talking about abortion or open marriage or the war in Iraq. We start out with Plato and Socrates, people whose issues seem quite different from ours.

Yesterday, I went to Charles Schwab Investments to talk about how to manage some stock I had inherited. The broker suggested that I turn the management of the stock over to Schwab, for a fee of one half percent per year. They would take the stock I had inherited as a starting point, buying and selling according to complex formulae designed to promote profit while limiting risk. They earned profits of 18% last year, with their management formula.

I am a novice in investment; this looked pretty good to me. I wouldn’t have to watch the market or re-decide each month how much risk I wanted to carry, and the experts would handle my affairs, for a small fee. The downside, as I thought about it later, is just that Schwab will put my money into whatever looks profitable, regardless of the stink. So companies that make anti-personnel land mines, companies that rip the government off for billions of dollars, companies that lobby to prevent effective safeguards on dangerous drugs, companies that pollute the water and air – all of these would be potential investments. I would be a partner in all sorts of projects I find disgusting.

Later, other thoughts occurred to me: my holding my little bit of money back from a bad company isn’t going to slow it down. And I am already supporting many enterprises I find disgusting, by my consumer choices. I draw some lines, but not all that many. So, is this a big deal? Couldn’t I just respond to my conscience by putting some of the money I made into groups working to protect the environment, to ban land mines, or to promote campaign finance reform (to make legislators less vulnerable to corporate lobbyists).

I was facing a moral dilemma. One way to structure an “Intro to Ethics” course would be to discuss a sequence of such dilemmas, developing the arguments on each side. That is a natural approach, and, by contrast, the approach taken in this course is roundabout, unnatural. It needs an explanation. Here are some ways of understanding the relation of this course to practice.

Confronting the Basic Issues -- We don’t approach moral dilemmas with a clean slate, without moral ideas. Our approach is conditioned by some very basic decisions we have made, or are in the process of making, about what is important to us in life, what ideal picture we strive to make real and what horrors we seek to avoid. We can surely listen to arguments about moral matters, but our choice of sides will be heavily influenced by our development at some much more general levels. We will simply be unable to hear some kinds of argument.

In this course, we spend time and attention on those fundamental decisions that shape our responses to particular dilemmas. Laches shows us one such decision: what we think courage is, and how much we care about it. The person who doesn’t value courage, or who values only a very limited sort of courage, will take one approach to life; the person who finds many different kinds of courage deeply admirable will take another approach entirely.

In Republic, we are again in very fundamental territory. Plato asks, “Why should we care about this code of inter-personal decency (truth-telling, promise-keeping, debt-paying) in any circumstance in which indecency pays better and the indecent person is not likely to get caught?” This question is prior to talk about the right thing to do; it is really about why one should even bother to care about the right thing to do.

Developing A toolkit – It is widely believed that there are no methods available for settling moral questions.  People often think that moral views, views about value, obligation, and virtue, are just expressions of feeling, without intellectual foundation. This view coexists uneasily with the view that these are the most important matters in human life. One task of an intro course is to show that there are reasonable and plausible ways of thinking about moral matters, starting points for developing and criticizing one’s own views and those of other people. So, for example, in this course, we begin by looking at Socrates’ method for thinking about moral matters: give a definition or account, then see whether that account will cover what it is supposed to cover – whether it stands up to criticism. If it doesn’t, revise the account and start over. This is a powerful strategy for thinking generally: you begin where you are and make progress by criticism and revision.

The next method we examine is Plato’s trick in the Republic: to imagine a world that is ideal in some respect, in order to get clarity about matters that are confused in the real, everyday world. Plato seeks to define “justice” in his made-up republic in order to get light on what justice might mean in Athens. Our first writing assignment is a variant on Plato’s trick: we see what we can learn from our own ideal experiences, what we can take back to our normal, less than ideal lives.

Throughout the course, we practice a third method: setting our stories side by side in order to gain insight into the moral realities we all believe in: friendship, justice, courage, authenticity. Words sometimes become empty and light through over-use; this exercise helps us to see the realities that our words address.

As the course progresses, we will add to our list of methods or starting points for moral thinking.

Understanding what it is to come to know one’s own life – Plato spent much of his mature philosophic career trying to understand huge events in his early life: the loss of the war with Sparta and the execution of Socrates. He returns to these events again and again, probing them. Laches is an attempt to understand how philosophy might have helped to prevent the military disasters that led to the loss of the war. It is also a picture of the limits of Socrates’ power to influence events, and so of the limits of Socrates’ way of working in Athens. Plato explores many different perspectives on Socrates’ activity, sometimes picturing him as a noble hero misunderstood and rejected by those he came to help, sometimes taking a critical perspective: Socrates’ approach was doomed to failure, and he should have known this. Clearly, the execution of Socrates is the central event in Plato’s life; it becomes his personal and intellectual destiny to think about and learn from that event.

In a similar way, each of us have events or circumstances in our lives that define our fundamental problems and possibilities, that are the sources of our insights and power, and also of our blind spots and inhibitions. One goal of this course is to help people find their own individual moral work, by turning friendly, civilized, and informed attention on the central incidents and facts of their lives. Ideas from other people can be useful, but, in the end, we have to do our own work.

Empathy and Partializing

I  use Carol Bly's anthology Changing the Bully Who Rules the World at every plausible teaching opportunity. One of her suggestions for encouraging moral growth finds its way even into classes for which the anthology is no appropriate: the practice of empathy and partializing. Basically, to empathize is to respond to someone's statement by saying, "I understand you to say:" with a non-parroty summary of what the person said following the colon. The original speaker then either agrees that the paraphraser got it right or tries again. The exercise continues until the speaker is satisfied that he or she is understood.

Partializing is a response to one kind of glitch in this process: the utterance of quite general statements which the responder cannot without idiocy paraphrase or summarize. If someone says, "I hate cats," there isn't much for the partner to do except "It sounds like you have negative affect towards cats," and that is stupid. So one says instead, "What is it about cats that you hate?" In general, to partialize is to invite someone to break up a large generalization into something that one can get one's head around. After partializing, one goes back to empathy.

This exercise seems to me extremely helpful in classrooms. I sometimes devote the first ten minutes just to this, with students exchanging statements and then changing partners. Partly, this is powerful because it makes sure that the first voice people hear in the class isn't mine. (One of my professional mantras: if you once take the ball, you will never be able to give it away.) Also, people begin class by forming a relationship to another student. Also, people begin class with the experience of being heard and hearing somebody else.

Ultimately, the reasons why this works are pointless. It works. The only way to know it works is to try it a few times. Something in people's psychology makes this an important thing to do.

One needs prompts to start the process: topics about which to produce a good sentence. Sometimes, I write prompts appropriate to the day's reading. Sometimes, at the beginning, the prompts are more general. I often send them out by email the day before, asking students to write on three of the ten -- one or two substantial sentences. 

Here is one such set of prompts:

1. I like some places better than others because…

2. I get really unhappy when

3. Happiness requires

4. As we get more mature, we..

5. Big houses

6. Rural landscapes

7. People who use big words

8. Politicians

9. Shopping malls

    10. My  local public library

 

My Spiritual Journey - 20 Years Ago

One learns from speaking engagements, large and small. In the mid-90s, the Twin Cities Friends Meeting in St. Paul asked me to do a session of a series called, "My Spiritual Journey." Recently, my friend Kate did a transcript of the tape. I cleaned it up a bit, since it was not a written presentation. It doesn't necessarily reflect my attitudes in 2015, but it reflects a coherent attitude I have to take seriously.

My Spiritual Journey – Peter Shea

Circa mid 1990’s

A talk with Twin City Friends Meeting

It would be immensely easier to do this talk if I didn’t know you folks, or if I knew you and didn’t have much respect for you.  There are difficulties occasioned by knowing you.  I know what levels, what kinds of experience, I’m confronting.  And I also know how profound in some ways my disagreements are with some of you. I have some guesses with others.  You did ask, and it is one of my unbreakable rules that I always accept speaking engagements on any matter I know anything about, and I think I know something about myself.

Every speaking engagement I accept changes my life, in astonishing ways.  Some years ago I was asked to talk to the people who maintain audio-visual equipment in the public schools.  I gave about an hour’s worth of talk on Zen and the art of maintaining slide projectors.  And the ideas from that talk were a resource for about two years, ideas I never would have pondered if someone had not asked me to talk about slide projectors.

I wanted to start out with a story that might put anybody’s talk on themselves in some kind of perspective. Observatories have trouble resolving distant objects.  For many years it was believed that the problem there was the miles and miles of air between us and the stars.  So the idea was that if we put a telescope in space and we don’t have the air, you can see the stars just fine.  I think around the time that the Hubble space telescope became such a disaster, somebody actually took a closer look at what the problem was, and determined that it wasn’t the miles and miles of air in the upper atmosphere that was screwing things up, it was the few feet of air in the observatory between the lens of the telescope and the window.  The turbulence in the observatory was most of the problem, so if you just temperature control the observatory, you get very much better images. The same way I think that whenever you try to get perspective on your life, a kind of broad view, you have to keep an eye on the bit of air between the lens of the telescope and the window, however much you might think you are getting a broad view.

It has been an unquiet week in Lake Wobegon, and I think I want to start with that.  On Monday I learned that I had been given a $10,000 grant from the Minnesota Humanities Commission to implement a project to bring philosophy to embattled inner city schools -- one in particular, but if it works we’ll replicate it.

This project is the fruit of probably ten years of fooling around with different models of teaching philosophy to kids and getting schools to do serious philosophical discussion.  If it works it will be a victory; if it flops, it will be a rather large flop.

On Tuesday I finally connected up, after better than a year of trying and thinking about it, with the list serves in philosophy, this incredible electronic community of people talking about Kant and medical ethics and all sorts of things.  I finally got myself to the point of receiving messages from all of these very strange philosophic communities and thereby realized something that I have wanted for a long time: a sense of a kind of global support community, unlimited by institutional boundaries and to a certain extent unlimited by status. 

On Wednesday, I taught probably the best philosophy class I have ever taught.  It was a class devoted to issues of respect, questions of what it is to respect someone, when one can respect someone.  The audience was student mothers, many of whom have been subject to significant physical abuse, and the issue was: can one respect despite such abuse. And it was simply wonderful, cathartic. 

On Thursday, I went back and talked to the same group in a session which I can only describe as the ante-chamber of hell.  For 20 of the 40 minutes, four students were talking as loudly as possible to talk, simultaneously, on topics significantly to the left of the ice people myth, if you understand the racial issues here.  At the end of this time, I ventured to bring things back on track with a question which was taken by all concerned, most concerned anyway, to be a totally inappropriate racist attack on my students.  The students demanded an immediate apology and I said I don’t apologize for things I didn’t say, and that’s the sort of issue one stake’s one’s job on.

On Friday I had a meeting with the principal of the special programs for the Minneapolis public schools and the multi-cultural concerns folks connected with that, and my students to try to work this all out, and I would say we were on the order of 70% successful.

On Saturday I taught a class on purification myths in Phaedo and the relation between those and the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius. I somehow or other allowed or prompted a group of adults to develop at a fairly deep level the fundamental dialog between Marcus Aurelius and the gnostics, which is the fundamental dialogue between someone who in some limited sense affirms the world and the folks who want to get out of it as quickly as possible with as little connection. 

So as I say, it has been an unquiet week in Lake Wobegon and anything I say from here on out will be filtered in various ways through somewhat turbulent air.

I worried about giving this talk, partly because there are some things that haven’t happened to me that have happened to some of you that matter.  I’ve never had anybody significant die. I haven’t had a clear failure, lots of little ones, but nothing horrendous, or a clear success.  I’ve never gone to jail.  This is the only context in which one can be embarrassed about never having gone to jail.  In the entire Twin Cities, this is the only context in which one confesses that. So I feel that anything I say is provisional.  Things will change.

I also want to confess right at the beginning that with a couple of exceptions about which I’m not willing to say anything, my experience has been entirely ordinary, entirely common.  I do not talk to angels, I do not walk with Jesus, and the power of the Most High does not overshadow me, neither do I stand in showers of gold.  Most of my experience can be captured very well on a tape recorder and video camera.  And I think that is a distinction between me and at least some and perhaps most of the people in this room. That may be a limitation that means that I should wait until I’m 50 to do this talk, but you asked.

I also worry a little bit because any time you do a talk like this you set yourself up for something.  You put on your best suit, and this is the closest I have to a best suit, and you pretend that you spend a lot of time doing high-minded things.  Just please allow for the fact that there is as much soul crud in me as there is in anybody, probably more, and that anything I say represents a fairly small slice of what I actually do, a slice of what I’m actually fond of .

There is one other thing that bothered me about giving this talk, the whole business of spiritual journey.  I have no memory for time in any very decent way, so the idea of reconstructing a journey is hell.  How do I go back? 

I don’t have a narrative memory.  I don’t put events in that kind of order.  And I don’t really see myself as being on a journey.  Nobody’s called me, nobody’s sent me a ticket, I just kind of wander around.  I really think that what I’m doing so far is what I do when I walk the dog.  Since my neighborhood is a little dangerous, I always walk the dog down the same street, go about the same distance, and come back.  But sometimes there’s snow on things, and sometimes there’s not, and sometimes I see a rabbit, and sometimes I don’t.   It’s a walk around the same objects over and over again, we’ve been living there about 8 years now.  That’s how I see it: it’s not a journey, it’s a walk.   I’m going to invite you on a walk around some objects. 

While I don’t have a narrative memory, I suppose there are some things I should say about myself, just because it’s helpful for you to locate me in traditions and so forth. My father was a North Dakota Catholic. This is pretty primitive stuff.   This is farm Catholicism.  This is my grandfather going up to communion, standing just at the rail, and looking up.  You can imagine this, looking up, “Father I cussed my cow this morning, is it OK?”.  And father looks down and says “Sure Matt, sure”, and he goes to communion. 

My father got the unenviable job once of taking around something called the rosary pledge, a pledge to say the rosary in various contexts.  A lady said, “Nope, won’t sign.  My husband told me before he died ‘Don’t sign anything, you might lose the farm.’”   And there’s a lot to be said for it.  I have deep respect for it. It’s also funny. 

My mother was a Utah Mormon, a renegade from the Utah Mormons .  I think she couldn’t remain a Mormon in any context in which there were Mormons within 200 miles because it is a tremendously paternalist and patriarchal operation, and she gets into fights real easy with that sort of stuff.  But in Minnesota among Catholics she could be a Mormon. For both of them, I think, the coming to Minnesota was an escape from their roots, a kind of way of starting fresh, so we were sort of not in a community but odd ducks making our own way.  Our nearest neighbors were a quarter of a mile away and Norwegian, which means we visited them four times a year.

So there was a certain isolation in my life.  I was sort of raised Catholic, you had to, you know, that’s the only way Catholics would marry you and otherwise you would go to hell.  I was sort of raised Catholic, the “sort of” is far more important than the “raised”.  I mean, I had the Mormons, I knew that my mother’s folks believed six impossible things before breakfast that were quite different from the six impossible things my father’s folks believed before breakfast.

There was some distance.  I mean I still grew up being terribly afraid of going to hell.  I confess to this day of being terribly afraid of going to hell, and I have more reason now than I did then to be fearful.  But it was moderated.   There were two things to balance that fear: I had the counterpart from my mother’s side, and the other thing I had was the great blessing of being taught by ignorant people. 

I was taught by nuns a little bit, and I think the pathology of rural nuns in Minnesota is a study in itself, something that somebody ought to do some time: the incredible bitterness that people carry toward their Catholic education.  But mostly I was taught by rather ignorant farmers who could read, and who were handed a book at the beginning of the term by the priest, and told do this.  So they read the book the night before and tried to talk it through.  So there was a sense that the Catholic tradition was something we were all sort of trying to figure out together. And that helped a lot.  It was quite non-dogmatic.  Also we had a young priest who was trying to figure things out for himself and decided that we were the folks he could talk to, so he spent half of his life in our kitchen.  And that helped.

So I had this kind of inoculation to Catholicism.  I think that if I had ever gotten it straight, I would have run away.  But I got it so attenuated in so many ways, by this priest who wasn’t quite sure what he was up to, that I could kind of hold on to it.  Also I got to be an altar boy. I had ownership in the whole business. I was never just people.  I never wanted to be just people.

But I naturally, very naturally, I grew up worrying a lot about the status of belief, what it is to believe. Because, according to my mother’s folks, what I was supposed to grow up to do was to be god and run a planet.  You don’t really know that; the Mormons don’t tell you straight off, but that’s what it comes down to. You’re supposed to grow up to be god and run a planet.  That was kind of appealing, if a bit daunting.  I had megalomaniac fantasies, but being a Mormon kid is a difficult matter.  My father’s folks said, if I can get the catechism right, that my purpose in life was to know, love and serve God on earth and to share with Him the happiness of heaven.  That’s quite a different mandate.  It’s also rather perplexing to try to love somebody, especially somebody invisible.    It becomes more perplexing when one knows that this person has at some point or other going to make the decision about whether you go to hell or not.  I think this is an intolerable emotional thing to try to sort out for a kid.  My first exposure to the tradition was much easier and more earth centered.  The first thing I learned about God was that God was the Supreme Bean who made all things.  And I think I could have pretty much done the Gaia stuff out of that. I could have really developed a theology based on the Bean. I would have been fine. But as I had to sort it out later, it became harder.

So I worried a lot about the status of belief. What kinds of grounds belief needed, how these farmers who were in other respects totally modest (if you asked them how many cows they had, they went out and counted  before they told you) could be saying things in the Nicene creed like “Christ is begotten , not made, one in being with the father through whom all things were made.”

Of course the Mormons were equally strange; they both relied on holy books.  So I never had the luxury or curse of simple faith.  But I also felt sort of obliged to believe things, and that was nutty stuff.  Another problem was that during my “obliged to believe things” period, I took Jesus at his word about pacifism, and people beat on me a lot.  My parents suggested maybe I should fight. This is good Irish stuff, also good Mormon stuff.  So I counter suggested that if I was going to fight I should take a knife and win.  I didn’t propose that it makes very much sense to fight to lose, and given my opponents’ size that was what was going to happen.  My parents then locked up the knives and didn’t make any more suggestions.  But the issues around pacifism, the issue around really hating people, long term deep, and feeling rather guilty for doing it, was something that was with me and is still with me.  And also a sense which I have only begun to erode, that conflict is an irresolvable black fact. Once conflict of any such sort happens, there is nothing, nothing, nothing that can be done about it.  You might as well kill the person in terms of the possibility of any relationship of any substance.

After Elizabeth Barnard’s talk a couple of weeks ago, I thought maybe I would cast this talk as “The things I believe that aren’t true.”  This I believe, subset, the things that I know not to be true.  But one of the things that I quite deeply believe that isn’t true is that conflict is irresolvable and eternal.  I’m getting a little better about that.

I grew up trying to think about the word Christianly and wondering how you could justify that.  I spent a lot of time, spent years not making any significant progress, connecting with people or much of anything.  Being very isolated, country life is not what it’s cracked up to be.  Somewhere along the line I came to the thing which has become a passion, which I call the serious communal Investigation of difficult matters by talking a lot.  The way I write it here is something I really want to put out:   I found my way to a country where all citizens were equal provided only that they said what they thought and experienced, listened and didn’t pretend to understand what they didn’t understand. I liked the air there.  I liked that kind of freedom, and talking that went somewhere became my chief pleasure. I wanted every conversation to be a voyage of discovery, after I found out that this was possible.  I became a nuisance, obviously, and came to think of most people as for all practical purposes dead from the neck up, and in need of my particular brand of therapy.  I was much more annoying than I am now.  However I’ve been doing philosophic work and teaching, trying to live in the country where saying what you experience and think is enough for about 20 years.

I want to say some things on topics now and not be too narrative.  First of all, I want to talk a bit about philosophy and why it’s important to me and how it’s important to me and how it ends up being spiritually central to the extent that I have a spirituality.  I might find in conversation with you folks over enough years that I really don’t have one and ought to get one. This is a possibility.  

Socrates is the major figure by far. There is nobody that touches him in terms of influence on me, centrality in my life.  The idea that you can go anywhere from the thoughts you happen to have, if you just follow them out, and that the world is deep in the sense that any topic of substance that you talk about will lead you to discoveries and especially the discovery of your own ignorance vis a vis that topic, not ignorance in the sense of butting your head against a brick wall, but ignorance in the sense of, what’s the line from Pope, “… Alps on Alps arise”.  

When I talk to my kids, the ones I teach, I say, “Imagine that you’ve inherited a large house, something huge.  But somehow or other, the word hasn’t gotten to you, but by some odd coincidence you’re without a place to live, and you sneak into just that house by an unlocked back door, go down in the basement and set up housekeeping in the wood room. So you have a little cooker there and a little bed, and you sort of sneak out every night, every so often, and gradually you become more familiar, and nobody bothers you, and you begin to look around the laundry room and maybe check out the basement.  And the oddity of the whole thing is that the house is yours. And the problem exactly is to wake up to the fact that the whole damn house is yours, all of the rooms.  That’s my sense of life.  That’s what I’m fundamentally doing as a teacher is to serve that image. That’s what I have to say, in a nutshell.

I very firmly believe that if common sense is right, we are all in deep trouble, and I do not have an experiential alternative myself to common sense.  There is a sense in which I worship spookiness.  I don’t find the motivational psychology based on ambition, power, affection and sex implausible; I just find it intolerable.  I don’t find common sense physics at the level I understand it an inadequate explanation of the world,  although I do think that time can’t quite be the thing that people say it is if we can see the future, and we do in certain non-inductive ways.  But I find the strictures of physics intolerable.  I find the conception of life based on ordinary assumptions not intolerable enough that I would kill myself.  That’s dying swan Wagnerian dramatic, and I don’t like that kind of stuff.  But it’s just not something I want.  If that’s the way the world is, it’s cleverness, it’s nice playground, I can diddle around for 70 years. I hope it’s not that way.  I hope common sense is just the foreground.  I hope that the world is a lot deeper than common sense thinks it is.  I hope that it’s deeply spooky, that there’s a ground, that there’s this sort of light under this whole thing.   I don’t feel any particular need to believe that’s true.  Belief is a precious commodity.

I don’t believe much, and I don’t feel a need to believe much, but I understand people who do, and I understand something of why.  I think our whole issue religiously, my whole issue religiously, is where I direct my attention, where I direct my hope.  The only things that matter are very fundamental matters to me, on which one has to vote. 

Thinking about the Our Father the other day: I’ve had trouble with the Our Father all my life.  Every line of it has been the object of endless controversy.  Simone Weil taught me a bit about how not to do that anymore.  So start out with our father, and of course mother, or maybe not a mother, maybe some sort of cosmic paramecium.  But leave that. The minimal content of the Our Father is that one’s addressing someone not oneself, about whom one knows very little, who is in some sense the source of one’s life. The alternative to that is that one is in some sense one’s own source of one’s life, or that somehow the molecules did it.  I’ll vote for something I can talk to.

“Who art in heaven”.  I worried a whole lot about heaven, because there are so many images.  There are Hebrew images, which is essentially a kind of perpetual restaurant reviewing party, where you don’t get full. Plato’s image is like sort of a gigantic movie, it’s sort of a movie, but the movie is, I don’t know what kind of movie to bring in there, it’s one of those slow stately things where nothing much happens. But it doesn’t really matter, what matters is that the thing one wants to talk to isn’t here.  It’s someplace else.  It may be here too, but at least part of it isn’t here. That’s important.  That’s fundamental. 

“Hallowed be thy name”.   The name of God, the one name that doesn’t have a reference, the one name that refers out.  The only thing that can be sacred really is the name out.  If you’re trapped, and I believe that common sense is a trap, that physics is a trap, that ordinary motivation is a trap, the only thing that is sacred is the exit sign. That’s why the name of God is sacred.  And that’s the way it’s sacred.

“Thy kingdom come.”  I worried a lot about the kingdom.  Here’s the king who does the Job trick.  Here’s the king who pretty much ordered the butchery of the Canaanites.  I worried a whole lot about how you conceive the kingdom. I’ve come to think that it doesn’t much matter.  The important point is the Kingdom isn’t here either but there is one.  The place I want to be a citizen of isn’t here or isn’t here yet. And the will to which I want to subordinate myself isn’t my own. Whatever that will might be, it isn’t my own.

“Give us this day our daily bread”.  Doesn’t much matter what you take bread to be, the whole point is there’s something I need I can’t provide, end of story.  That’s the minimal content.

And on and on, you can do the rest.  That’s the level at which I believe anything I believe.  It’s direction of attention, it’s a vote on some very basic matters, and the dogmatic intricacies don’t interest me very much.

It’s very odd to live a life in which one isn’t very sure of much of anything. I find that very odd.  My favorite story is about a guy who went out searching for wisdom and went to various holy people, expended his substance and found no answer.  Finally, with his last bit of funds, he goes to the last Tibetan mountain, climbs over the obligatory rocks and glaciers, arrives at the obligatory cave with the old wizened man sitting on his bed of nails and says to him “Master what is the secret of life ?”   And the fellow says “Life, my son, is a fountain.”  The guy thinks about it a little and says “A fountain?” and the fellow on the bed of nails says “You mean it isn’t a fountain?”  Very odd. 

If I were going to do a flag for myself, what I would put on the flag is the following motto at least this week: “Almost nothing is almost enough.” 

I spent a lot of time talking myself out of needing to believe things I didn’t believe.  I say it’s taken me 20 years not to have an agenda.  But only to try to figure out how we are situated, what realities we confront, and where the particular arguments we give might take us.  It’s an odd thing to be a philosopher.  I don’t think other people, who don’t have a professional interest, find themselves as much in the situation as I do of having arguments take them where they don’t want to go. You wish the best argument you can find didn’t have a conclusion you don’t want to believe. 

I should tell you about my road to pacifism, I think that might give you an idea, because early on in my life, it was one of the first few chains.  I woke up one day to realize that what war really is about is people who were too dumb or too honest to avoid the draft in various countries, generally farmers and laborers, attempting to kill each other in support of some policy or other. And when I realized that, I immediately said, “I don’t want to kill a bunch of poor farmers. I may not like my neighbors, but I don’t dislike them that much. It’s just poor farmers of various sorts in all different countries getting together to kill each other.  If I’m going to kill anybody, I wanted to kill the bastards who started the mess and I had some idea of who those were on all sides.”  

In other words, I don’t want to be a soldier, but I don’t rule out being an assassin.  And so I lived for quite a while thinking that being an assassin would be really A-Ok and probably actually a pretty good life, drawing up my own better-dead list.  And then at some point, that whole business just repelled me, the whole idea of taking it upon oneself to decide not just that one should kill, but that this particular person ought to die. Out of that revulsion, I sort of ping-ponged ball back to being a sort of pacifist, this week anyway.

I think I have an allergy to finishing a PhD. I’m not quite sure why that is. There is lot of neurosis there, I could furnish a yacht for a good psychiatrist sorting that stuff all out.  The only honorable thing I can find in it is that I never want to lose track of what I care about, in some sort of fit of buckling down.  I’ve watched that happen, and I’ve seen that described by very good scholars: Gregory Vlastos in his last book, his very late book on the Socratic ironist.  I’m very scared of tying things up in a knot, tying things up in such a neat package so that somehow I can’t get at what it was that made me work on this stuff to begin with.  And whenever I get close to tying it up that way, I bounce back.  Nevertheless I think I’m probably destined to have a PhD as I have no manual skills and at some point I might get hungry.

I’ve got to say a few words about the fact that I’m Catholic, and you folks by and large are Quaker. And how it is that I stay Catholic and you stay Quaker and I don’t think I’m going to become Quaker and you sure as heck aren’t going to become Catholic.  Point 1 - I don’t think I could ever imagine joining the Catholic church.  First of all I can’t imagine not being Catholic, which is the first thing you have to imagine to imagine: being Presbyterian or Unitarian or Isaac Asimov or somebody and then coming to say “Gee Catholicism is wonderful”.  Somehow I can’t imagine doing that, and that probably fortunately for me wasn’t the situation I was born into.  And so the issue would be leaving, and I expect for some of you, if you really interrogate your hearts, you will find that you think that I have and anybody has simply an obligation to leave. 

Here we have an organization that, I think one could plausibly say, is bad on war, bad on women, bad on sex and quite bad on intellectual freedom.  Now if you take the long view, as Catholics are wont to, the 2000 year view, you want to say that if Europe’s confrontation with these matters had been left to the Marcus Aurelius Roman types, and the Vikings and the Druids, Europe would probably be lots worse on war, worse on women, worse on sex, and intellectual freedom wouldn’t even have come up as an idea, but nevertheless the current pope and the kinds of things that come out of the Vatican sometimes make outsiders and insiders sometimes think that membership in the church is rather similar to membership in the American Nazi party.  It’s the sort of thing that, if you find yourself in it, that you should take yourself out of it.

I have a few things to say about this and some of this is at least rather controversial if not unpleasant.   The church is an immensity.   One of the things that I think keeps me out of Quakers is that at some very fundamental level I reject the teaching about simplicity.   I really think that’s it very important to have a basement full of useless things that you might need someday.  And the church is the largest basement full of useless things that humanity might need someday in the entire cosmos, to my knowledge. It’s gargantuan.  And whatever may come out of Rome is the tiniest fraction of one percent of what’s there.  I’m Catholic for the same reason that I chose the broadest possible major in college:  you never know what you might want to commit to someday. You never know what you might need.

I find also that Catholics and Quakers have a great deal in common in a sort of odd way.  They have something in common that is not what at least a lot of Protestants believe.  Catholics and Quakers both believe that there is something quite spooky at the heart of things.  They are circling spookiness.  That’s why you have at the center of the Mass, you have the transubstantiation, this celestial magic trick, which nobody can make any sense of and nobody can leave out.  And at the heart of the meeting you have the silence and light, and they are just the same thing.   They’re like black holes. They’re like the name of God. They’re like the exit sign.  OK, you understand exit, this is the way out of the mess I do not want to stay in. This is the name of god. 

I think the Catholics are anthropologically right.  I think it is very very valuable to have an inventory, a mnemonic, a memory house for all the things that are important in life.  And that’s what the Mass is.  It’s a weekly reminder of all the things you ought to care about, that you ought to think about, that you ought to worry about.  And the Catholic Church year is a yearly reminder in the same fashion. You leave that and you’re thrown back on your own resources.  It’s not a bad thing, but not everybody can do it.  You can go real crazy if you get fixed ideas, if you begin obsessing on this or that or the other piece of the puzzle. And one of the things that Catholicism represents is fundamentally sanity.  That is: fundamentally you always do the whole damn inventory every Sunday.

I also want to say that I think Quakers need to be careful of a couple of things.  Here I’m talking to my betters, but I realize that.  I think they have to be careful of thinking of their institution as uncompromised, whereas Catholics are of course deeply compromised and so are lots of other people.  I’m afraid you’re not.  I mean, the biggest problem I see with Quakers , the thing I think they really need to wrestle with, is their involvement with the magistrates. I think that’s a terrible problem. And if Clinton manages to redescribe the US army as a police force, you’re going to have a dickens of a time maintaining conscientious objection as a Quaker teaching. There isn’t as much difference as one might want to think between the police and military.

I remember how it struck me one day when I saw my  home was broken into. I called the police because I wasn’t sure if the robbers were still there, and I saw people entering my house with drawn guns.  I wouldn’t have entered my house with a drawn gun to chase somebody out, but I found myself quite glad they were.  And I think that’s a problem.  I’m not saying that’s a reason to give up anything; I’m just saying that’s an incredible moral tension. And it stretches not just to involvement with the police but to involvement with the entire legal system, which puts incredible obstacles it seems to me against any absolute commitment to straight speaking.  Also, of course, the involvement with the American prison system, which Quakers to some extent invented, or helped to invent.  It’s a real difficulty. It’s just to say that any institution that’s been around for more than five years runs into moral tensions and moral compromises. When an institution has been around for 2000 years, it’s picked up a lot of them, but I think Friends have picked up some.

I also want to warn you about the attic business.  Let me just give you one example of what I’m worried about.  I think that Friends are implicitly iconoclastic, although it’s not really clearly in front of your minds.  That is, I think that images will never be a very big part of this meeting house.  There are dippy little attempts here and there. But there isn’t anything serious as an image here, and I don’t think there will be.   That’s fine for some psycho-physical types and rather dangerous for others.  Because I think that a good bit of the real thinking that has been done about the human beings’ relationship to God has been done in the context of the visual arts tradition of Western Europe, the accessible tradition.  I’m sure there are Buddhist traditions that are somewhat less accessible.  But the visual art tradition of Western Europe is full of stuff we need, and especially it’s full of stuff that some of your kids need. I think it’s very important to realize that the attic has to belong to you, whether or not you want to be Catholic, the attic of western religious culture has to be accessible to Quakers or some of your kids are going to be in trouble. Some kids aren’t of the right type to connect to as spare and uncompromising and abstract a religious view as Friends is.  So my warning.

Again, I’m very very fond of Friends. I’m very fond.   I find the Catholic Mass runs far too fast for me with far too little time to concentrate and I end up far too conscious of the pimple on the priest’s nose. Meeting is immensely more powerful and sometimes also more dangerous.  I think I’ll remain, I may, ask me again when my father dies, I may end up, I may move, but at present I think I am at the edge of this wonderful place.

I have to finish on a bad note just because it’s the last piece of my thing.  I think what I have to say wouldn’t be complete without saying something about my politics. I think people are interested in politics and some people think that politics is sort of religion.

I’m afraid I’m kind of desperate about that.  I’ve studied the math on the doubling rate of the population. By 3770, I think, at the rate of population growth we are currently at, the human flesh on this planet will equal the mass of the planet.  About 3000 years later, it will equal the mass of the universe.  This can’t continue. And I don’t think the message, any message, that would slow it down is going to get to anybody fast enough.  Barbara Ward is Pollyanna:  the rich nations and the poor nations.  You can’t be hopeful about Barbara Ward unless you assume that information travels very much faster than it in fact travels.  So on natural assumptions I think a lot of projects that people invest a lot of their lives in amount to saving one group of people at the eventual expense of another group of people.  I don’t have contempt for that for a moment, I think it’s terribly important to vote on the side of life, but I see it as a rather symbolic matter in a lot of cases.

Two things to gain from this, again I renew my commitment to the spooky, to the supernatural.  On natural assumptions there is no hope for most of the things, political projects we are undertaking.  Unless common sense is wrong, things are going to get very very very bad.  I just hope it’s wrong, and I keep pushing to try to get people to hope it’s wrong.  That’s most of what I do in class, is to try to get people to say things they didn’t expect to say, and to think things they didn’t expect to think.  Because  the only way we can get out of the political messes we are in is to press some of the boundaries of common sense.  I’m also inclined to think that one of the things we need to look at carefully as politically thinkers is autocratic government.  I think we need to look at models of autocratic government that are controllable, because I think that as life gets more complicated on this planet, participatory stuff is not going to be possible.  These are thoughts I wish I didn’t have, and if anybody can talk me out of them, I would be very happy. For most of the things, I’ve kind of come to a point where I very much wish somebody could talk me out of them. But for what it’s worth, it’s what I think.

I think, in closing, there is a kind of power in a certain sort of modesty if one can hold onto it.  If one goes over the fairly simple things one thinks, slowly try to see what they mean, if one tries to believe the things that one knows for certain are true, if one tries to do the obvious things, if one tries to keep one’s hands off those levers, those machines that multiply force beyond one’s sense of where it goes. The great temptation with modern people is to get involved with either bureaucratic levers or technological levers, which are sort of the equivalent of shooting an arrow into the air with your eyes closed.  If you can stop doing that as much as possible, if you can watch to make sure you know something about where your actions are going when you set them off,  and if you do the obvious things, you’ll find that there is quite enough to do.  If you think the obvious things, there’s quite enough to think. I don’t think almost nothing is quite enough. If Jesus wants to talk to me, I suppose I’m willing to listen, although I probably will finally get myself to a psychoanalyst the day after.  But one can live with almost nothing.  That’s what I have to say.