Good-Friday, 2013, Looking Backward (20 March 2013)

 And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back

where all those people and their homes had been.

But she did look back,

and I love her for that, because it was so human.

So she was turned into a pillar of salt.

So it goes. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five

            Jesus of Nazareth was not the only one crucified at that "place called Golgotha."

            Matthew speaks of "robbers who were crucified with him," and who "reviled him" (27.44). Mark writes of "Those who were crucified with him" in noting the reviling (15.32). John in his Gospel looks to the moment when sunset approached, and "Since it was the day of Preparation, in order to prevent the bodies" of those executed that day "from remaining on the cross on the sabbath (for that sabbath was a high day)" — in itself and for falling on the Passover — "the Jews asked Pilate that [… the victims'] legs might be broken," speeding their deaths, "and that they might be taken away" (more on leg-breaking below). "So the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first, and of the other who had been crucified with him," but not of Jesus, since he'd already died (19.31-34), an important theological point: the Lamb of the Sacrifice has to be whole, unbroken.

            Luke develops the crucifixion scene more fully: "Two others also, who were criminals, were led away to be put to death with him. And when they came to the place which is called The Skull, there they crucified him and the criminals, one on the right and one on the left." In Luke's version, only one of the "criminals who were hanged" reviles Jesus, "But the other rebuked him," the first criminal, "saying, 'Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we received the due reward of our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong" — and this "Good Thief" asks, "Jesus, remember me when come in your kingly power," to which Jesus responds, "Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise" (23.39-43 [all Biblical quotations: RSV]).

            The executions involving Jesus wasn't the mass crucifixion of, say, the savage suppression of the Spartacus rebellion — some 6000 prisoners of war crucified — or the end of Monty Python's Life Of Brian; but the Gospels have Jesus crucified along with two others, definitely criminals under Roman law, possibly guilty of robbery.

            It's these other two I'd like to look back on.

            In discussing the past as "A Foreign Country," the title of chapter 1 of his 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker quotes from "a forensic investigation of the death of Jesus Christ, based on archeological and historical sources," one published in 1986 in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

            The JAMA article describes a full-out crucifixion, with scourging and nails, and I suspect nothing quite so elaborate was done for the usual executions of slaves or for mass executions such as that ending the slave uprising under Spartacus. As the Wikipedia "Crucifixion" article notes, crucifixion served "to provide a death that was particularly slow, painful […], gruesome, humiliating, and public, using whatever means were most expedient for that goal. Crucifixion methods varied considerably with location and time period." Still, the Jesus of the Gospels was crucified at Jerusalem, a provincial capital, in a major case considered by the Sanhedrin, King Herod, and Pontius Pilate, the resident Roman Prefect; we're told explicitly that he was whipped and mocked (e.g., Matthew 27.24-31) — so it's likely Jesus and the other two condemned suffered the horrors of the entire crucifixion process.

            The prisoners were stripped naked and scourged with "a short whip made of braided leather embedded with sharpened stones. […] The prisoner's arms would then be tied around a hundred-pound cross bar, and he would be forced to carry it to a site where a post was embedded in the ground. The man would be thrown onto his shredded back and nailed through the wrists to the crossbar. The victim was hoisted onto the post[,] and his feet were nailed to it, usually without a supporting block." Especially without support, "The man's rib cage was distended by the weight of his body pulling on his arms, making it difficult to exhale unless he pulled his arms or pushed his legs against the nails. Death from asphyxiation and loss of blood would come after an ordeal ranging from three or four hours to three or four days. The executioners could prolong the torture by resting the man's weight on a seat, or hasten death by breaking his legs with a club" (12; ch. 1, section on "The Roman Empire and Early Christendom").

            Pinker is appalled by crucifixion, which he wouldn't inflict even on Hitler.

            And yet this is the method not only of The Sacrifice of the Christ — a unique event in history — but, in the Gospels, for punishing two men who were guilty indeed (so the "Good Thief" says on the cross) but may have been guilty of no more than robbery. And, of course, crucifixion was standard for slaves.
            Consider, though, a worst-case possibility.

            Luke talks only of "criminals," and in it's possible that the crime was rebellion: crucifixion was also standard for rebels, and one or both of the criminals might have been insurrectionists, early Zealots. In that case, they'd be religious-nationalist extremists, dedicating to murdering Roman occupiers and Jews who cooperated with the Roman oppressors. That is, from the point of view of the authorities — both Roman and Jewish — and, undoubtedly, of many ordinary Jews, they'd be terrorists.

            But, again, they might have been just thieves: the English regularly hanged thieves well into the 18^th century, and hanging into the Victorian period (until 1866) was "short drop": i.e., letting the condemned person strangle for ten to twenty minutes.

            So Jesus "was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried, and the third day he rose again[…], and ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father" and "shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead," as the Creed saith.

            If you believe, and if you accept Luke's version, the "Good Thief" is in Paradise with the Christ and can look forward to resurrection and "the life of the world to come."

            But if Luke's right, the Good Thief gets his salvation as part of a formula not only accepting Jesus as Messiah but also accepting that he is being tortured to death "indeed justly," he and the other criminal having "received the due reward of our deeds."

            The bad thief is a real putz for reviling Jesus on the cross; both criminals are bad in this way in the Gospels by Matthew, Mark, and John.  If anyone can and should say "I feel your pain," it would be someone also undergoing that pain. So there's a serious failure in empathy and sympathy if these guys mock Jesus.  And it's a really, really, really imprudent failure if Jesus is the Christ and, in orthodox doctrine, therefore not just a suffering man but also God.

            Still, I think I'd be in a bad mood spending time on the cross waiting to die, and if the guy next to me may be God, I think I'd want help, and I don't think — whatever I'd done wrong — that I deserved to be stripped and humiliated and publically tortured and hanged naked with nails through my wrists and pissing and shitting for any passer-by to see, and then, as an act of relative mercy, getting my legs broken so I wouldn't violate Shabbat and spoil Passover by continuing to live after sundown.

            In Slaughterhouse-Five (1969; ch. 5), Kurt Vonnegut has his fictional author, Kilgore Trout tell his story "about a visitor from outer space [who] made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low." However, in the story of Christ's passion, "the Gospels actually taught this: 'Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected.'" Jesus may not have looked like much but he was "actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought...: / Oh, boy — they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time! / And that thought had a brother: "There are right people to lynch." Who? People not well connected."

            In Trout's retelling, the Jesus figure actually is a nobody, just a bum who says wise things; but at his death, "The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of the Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: / From this moment on, He will punish anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!"

            That's a good re-telling of the story, and with it and Steven Pinker in mind, I'm going to return to the Gospels and ask you to believe the worst about the two criminals: that they were followers not of Jesus of Nazareth but of the other Jesus of the story, that "notorious prisoner, called Barabbas" (Matthew 27.15-26). Let's say the two criminals were insurrectionists and religious fanatics: zealous murderers, assassins, thugs … terrorists.

            "Jesus who is called Christ" most directly died for Barabbas; and Steven Pinker says he would not crucify even Hitler.


            Zealots, thugs, and assassins must be removed from society, maybe even killed. But in 2013 and following we should look back on the two criminals on the cross and resolve never again to torment a bum or torture even terrorists. 

"I and Thou" / "I and You" / "I and It" (10 Oct. 2013)

CAUTION 1: I'm going to steal from and then seriously over-simplify Martin Buber here, so if you're sophisticated, and strict, about philosophy or theology, you might want to stop reading right now or risk getting really pissed off.

CAUTION 2, and here I'll get into something I know about — There's a good chance even sophisticated English-speakers, for example many of my readers, have exactly the wrong understanding of the English word "thou."


            Most readers encounter "thee's" and "thou's" in old translations of the Bible or reading Shakespeare, and most, I suspect understand "thou" as a formal word: The way we wretched, finite, mortal sinners address God. That's wrong. "Thou" is the English cognate of the Germanic "du" and is like Spanish "tu" plus similar words in the Romance languages: it's the informal second person, used for addressing one's social inferiors, assuming one has social inferiors, or for addressing children or friends. "Thou" is for people and other beings with whom one can be informal, truly friendly.

            I'll modernize "thou" to "you-my-friend, or quite possible friend" and note that one of the nicer things about old Biblical translations is "Thou" for God: God not as Creator and Lord and King but as, at least potentially, friend or lover — or one's opponent in a wrestling match (Genesis 32.22-32).

            Jacob wrestling with the angel is a primitive dumb-ass story taken literally; as an image out of a healthy relationship with the divine, it's pretty profound.

            Anyway, an I-thou relationship is a personal one, as with a friend, including a friend with whom one wrestles or makes love: a relationship that's face-to-face, hand to hand: human-to-human, person-al.
            As I interpreted Buber for literary-critical purposes — it's a long story and irrelevant here — my "take-away" from Buber is that human relationship with God, the great and Eternal Thou, allows significant relationship with humans and other creatures, with the Others in our lived worlds. Whether through God or "immanent Being" or something totally mundane, there is always and necessarily a potential for human relationship with other humans, and that potential is of central importance.

            It's just a potential however, and that, too, is important.

            Look, last estimate I heard was that we humans can "maintain stable social relationships" with maybe 150 other people. Back when I was in a fraternity, our estimate was that a guy could associate fairly closely with maybe fifty other guys; so I think "Dunbar's number" of 150 is about right for a maximum. Obviously the great majority of us live and deal with far more than fifty to 150 other people, so the great majority of those relationships will not be "I-thou."

            Most will be I-it relationships — dealing with Others instrumentally, as if they were things — and that's okay.

            Here's a thought experiment. You go to a bank and deal with a clerk. You are polite to her — quite likely a "her" — and she back to you. Still, next time you go to the bank you may decide to use an ATM: an Automated Teller Machine, which we often redundantly, but usefully here, call "an ATM machine." In the colloquial sense of the word, the essence of your relationship with the teller was I-it: a machine clould replace her. Indeed, if she said to you, "Good morning! And how are you today?" And you said "Fine." And she said, "No, really: you look miserable. How are you?" and waited for a serious answer — if she switched to I-thou communication, it would be indecorous, improper, rather impolite.

            Similarly, back when I taught college, I saw my students as human beings, and at least on occasion I think they saw me that way as well. Still, they were to me primarily generators of papers to grade, and — given the limits of what they wanted to talk to me about — I think I appeared to them mostly as a generator of grades, eventually course credit, and, intermittently, of information that might prove useful, at least useful for getting a desired grade and course credit.  

            If one of my students walked into my office and said, "Hey, how are you?" and I didn't feel fine and gave an honest and detailed answer — I suspect I'd have gotten into trouble. Our relationship wasn't really "I-thou" and an "I-thou" answer wouldn't have been, as they say (often euphemistically), inappropriate.
            But sitting face-to-face in the office, our relationship wasn't exactly I-it. It was, or I think should have been, I-you: a relationship that might develop into friendship, in other contexts, and which might allow, in emergencies, intimate conversation, but was now more formal. It was an interaction not totally instrumental —our just using one another like things — but not quite personal either.

            I'll try to clarify that with three stories and a quotation, and then repeat my point. (Hey, I taught for a long time; trust me: repetition can get annoying, but it's useful.)

            Two of the stories are background, and all can be told quickly.

            On my first day of teaching at Miami University, Oxford, OH (my first job out of grad school), I had my students write writing samples, and for the rest of the week I had tutorials with them, and I graded and discussed with them what they had written. On my second day of teaching, the first day of the tutorials, the second student talked about the essay for a little bit and then started crying, telling me "This is about me!" and he told me how he'd knocked up his girlfriend … and wanted to know, in a sense, "What are you going to do about that?!"

            Uh, huh. Welcome to the Ed Biz, Rich; and welcome to a bit more I-thou than I was ready for, though I gave what advice I could. (And if in my writing I return to the subject of condoms fairly frequently, it's not only because I worked a summer in a public health lab and know the dangers of STDs.)

            On another occasion, I had become friendly with a former student — repeat: former student — and offered him a lift, and he asked if he could talk to me, and we talked, human to human, and his crying there in my car was not an imposition. He asked for advice, and I gave it, and he fairly quickly followed it: I advised him to get out of a relationship where he could not help a woman in great pain but was only hurting himself. Or, more exactly, allowing the woman and her friends to hurt him, repeatedly, systematically.

            And if I sometimes point out that survivors of horrors can move on to do damage themselves, it isn't only because I absorbed that lesson from Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker (1964), Art Spiegelman's Maus (1991), and, preeminently, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). The woman hurting my former student and (now) apparently former friend survived a plane crash that killed her family. The main point of the story for this essay is that my conversation with the former student was an I-thou interaction that was decorous, appropriate. If you think my advice cruel, a secondary point is that a moment of truly human communication is just truly human communication: if you've dealt seriously with any humans, you know we often fuck up, sometimes in the form of giving bad advice. This advice I'll stand by, however; and if you're a woman reader who dislikes such insensitive advice, please imagine yourself with a woman friend in an abusive relationship with a guy who has suffered and/or is suffering horribly; now consider the question, Can she really help him, or is she mostly just getting hurt herself? I-thou, person-to-person, truly intimate human relationships — sometimes suck; and one should run, not walk, away from some of them.

            The last story leads to the quotation and back to my point.

            For a long time I was "Student Mediator" for the good-sized English Department at Miami U. Most of the time, I just shuffled paper in this job and helped students through a fairly complicated complaint process; every now and then, though, I actually mediated. In the relevant case, the student, teacher, and I got together, and I couldn't quite figure out at first what the issue was; and then it became clear, and I said something like, "Oh, you two dislike each other."

            Neither was comfortable with my observation. The teacher was far, far too professional to react emotionally to a student; and the student was much, much, much too good a good Catholic boy to dislike an authority figure.

            Right.

            I told them, "You don't have to like one another. You just have to get along for a few hours a week for the next ______ [whatever] weeks." And I explained to them one form of what I'm calling here an I-you relationship, with a "you" being "a 'somebody' but not somebody I like" — but in a neutral sense of not liking.

            And here I'll throw in the quotation.

            In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, the highly-flawed protagonist, Brutus — yeah, he's the protagonist; like, are you going to pay money to see a play called Marcus Junius Brutus the Younger? — Brutus asks his messenger Lucilius how Lucilius had been received by Cassius, a main co-conspirator in the assassination of Caesar, and Brutus's current ally in the following civil war. Lucilius says he was treated "With courtesy and with respect enough" but without the little touches of easy-going friendship he was used to when dealing with Cassius. Ever the analyzing intellectual, if not good at it, Brutus tells Lucilius that Lucilius has described "A hot friend cooling" — i.e., a close friend growing more distant (and that's all; Brutus was a puritanical republican Roman, not an aristocrat from the Empire who'd hump most anything mammalian and breathing). "When love begins to sicken and decay," Brutus continues, "It useth an enforced ceremony" (4.2).

            If Brutus's attitude here is a good indication, and it is, cool correctness wasn't much appreciated in Shakespeare's time, and Shakespeare makes plausible that even ancient, aristocratic, republican Romans would feel the same way. We Americans, strongly into friendliness, have a problem with not liking someone — which is a big problem since there is no reason you should feel one way or another about the vast majority of human beings; there are very few you will actually like, actually know and like as individuals.

            I'm suggesting that a little "enforced ceremony" can be a damn good thing: cool correctness to people we actively dislike but must deal with, a warmer courtesy to those whom we might potentially like and where we can move beyond an I-it relationship to something a bit more personal and humane: I-you.

            As a practical matter, I'd eliminate the friendliness gestures of asking people, "And how are you this morning?" when we don't give a rat's ass and would barely hear an answer like, say, "Depressed, but not quite suicidal" (a great line I heard from the son of a friend). A generalized wish of "Good morning" is fine for now, although it'd be nice to go to something like aloha, or shalom or as-salam alaykum or "Peace, you-all" or "Hi; I'm _______" and state your name. As a practical matter I'd have us admit that the potential for intimate I-thou relationships is crucial — but that it's just a potential. We can have honest I-it relationships with people — coolly correct with enemies or those we just don't take to — and behave more warmly neutral to most.


            I-it, I-you, and, at least on occasion I-and-thou. "Love one another" when you can; rest of the time, let's try be polite and mildly cordial — and let it go at that.

"Squeamishness," "Manliness" ... Brutality (13 Aug. 2014)

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“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." 

The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. 

It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. 

But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) 

in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars 

and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. 

Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like 

 the bureaucracy of a police state or the office 

of a thoroughly nasty business concern. —

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Preface

 

I'm still stewing over the line in an editorial in The Ventura County Star (our local paper in "south-central-coastal California") on President Obama's "squeamishness about the use of force" in Iraq, a sequeamishness he's partly overcome as I write in early middle-ish August of 2014.

Let's go back to a war ambiguous enough to keep a conference of ethicists at work for a few years, but relatively straight-forward as wars go and certainly compared with most wars currently and lately: "The Big One," "WWII," "The Last Good War" (on the side of the Allies).

The people of Dresden and Hamburg were, generally and undoubtedly, "Good Germans," supporting their duly elected Leader. Did they — or the people of Tokyo — deserve to be blown apart or burned to death or asphyxiated as the firestorms destroyed their bombed cities? Did they deserve to have their children killed — or their children to die, often horribly?

To ask such questions is to answer them, and it is rare for politicians or others to justify carpet-bombing cities in terms of deserve. The questions either aren't asked, or justifications are presented in terms of "speed the end of the war."

Air-power advocates had a theory: "strategic bombing," as it was called, would remove the means of making war at their sources by destroying factories, communication networks, and stores of war materiel; would break the morale of the Enemy by terrorizing the civilian population and killing family members of fighters; and (usually spoken very quietly, if at all), kill off many in a rising generation of potential opponents.  Or, as Winston Churchill is said to have put it back in the days before accurate bombing — deny housing to Enemy workers, since if the bombers could get their bombs onto a city, they'd be sure at least to destroy a bunch of houses.

Back when I was studying such things, the war wonks were still arguing whether or not strategic bombing worked, and my Army teachers were dubious. For sure, however, we can say that warfare from the beginning has involved killing civilians and killing them in large numbers: intentionally as part of a terror campaign and/or "business as usual," or, more recently, as "collateral damage," where noncombants are not killed (wounded, maimed, rendered homeless) as a primary objective but as a more or less unfortunate unintended —  but inevitable — consequence.

Similarly for weapons of mass destruction other than strategic bombers, e.g., massed artilley a fleet showing up in  your harbor with large numbers of naval guns and/or, nowadays, missiles.
I don't know whether President Obama was right or wrong in ordering air attacks in Iraq, and right about now I'm too disgusted with both the Israelis and Palestinians to take sides (although I'm Jewish and old enough to know what "Good Germans" of many nations could do to Jews rendered stateless — and the survival of Israel is important to me). What I can do now is repeat yet again a couple ideas drawn from George Orwell on language, Kurt Vonnegut on warfare, and C. S. Lewis (see above) on the nature of modern evil.

There are always men in the world  — mostly men —who have set up "ends," goals they are convinced will justify "any means necessary" to achieve. These people, generally, are fanatics, often fanatics operating from religious assumptions that involve values of infinite worth: saving souls, e.g., establishing The Kingdom of God, as they see it, doing what "God wills" (Deus vult!). There are other men — mostly men — less lofty in their worldviews for whom "War is a mere continuation of policy by other means," or who pursue the Mafia idea of "Business is business," just on vaster and bloodier scales than Mafia dons and soldiers.

 Such folk can do a lot of damage, as can decent people resisting evil or frightened people who will do unto others before those others do unto us — or people understandably out for revenge.
And many such people are armed and dangerous, and sometimes heavily armed.

This has been the way of humankind and in less sophisticated forms (quite likely) the way of many of the ancestors of humankind. So be it. Let us at least, however, face honestly what it is we do.

Contemplating the destruction of Dresden by US and UK aerial bombing during World War II, Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Slaughterhouse-Five, "I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.”

I can't be quite that much of a pacifist, so my advice to the hawks calling for US "assertiveness" and "use of force" is (1) to put in specific, concrete terms just what they are calling for, (2) think about Vonnegut's actually rather extreme position — as the world goes — and (3) apply the more limited rule, "Only kill when you really, really have to," and, if we're talking about killing people, maybe not even then.

And, while we're engaging in such relatively idealistic behavior, perhaps we can reduce the "massacre machinery" in its nuclear varieties to levels where our willingness to kill one another doesn't get so out of hand that we take down our civilization, if not our species (and maybe vertebrate life and complex plants).

 That may be unmanly talk, but, then, I'm endorsing some varieties of squeamishness.