Three days into my final undergrad semester here on the Hilltop -- where did the time go? -- I'm behind as usual on my blogging, but here's a collection of observations to start the semester off with...
Live your vocation with joy
For Christmas, I received Fr James Martin, SJ's new book, Between Heaven and Mirth. The book deals with the role of humor in religion (yes, there's a good case to be made for that!) and in life in general. If you're looking for a quick-reading work of popular theology, I highly recommend it; it's flying off bookstore shelves everywhere these days.
Reading it, I was of course heartened by the primary argument: in faith as in life, humor is the key to health. If you can't laugh at it, it's probably worth re-considering whether or not you can believe in it. After all, faith is necessarily concerned with this human project we're all involved in; that project is usually called "life" and we all know we'd better not take it too seriously -- we'll never get out alive, anyway. Humor, Fr Martin argues, is integral to most faith traditions and to healthy faiths. It knocks us down a peg and makes the world (and faith) manageable. It's also where a lot of really good insight happens: humor is deeply embedded in the human psyche, and much of our laughter (Daily Show or Colbert Report, anyone?) is directed at things that tell truth in a particularly ironic way that points out our own absurdity.
Side note: if you're not aware of or up to date on Stephen Colbert's super-PAC, "Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow," Google it. It's terrifyingly hilarious and provides quite a lesson on the mistake that was Citizens United.
But, me being me and the world being a bit larger than Georgetown, I started thinking about the implications of Fr Martin's thesis in national political life. At the risk of repeating Herbert Hoover, I really do think that what the country needs is a good laugh. Americans are a serious lot in general -- as the book points out, we don't extol the "Protestant play ethic" -- and no more so than in times of crisis. Most gloomy of all are folks like you and me: disaffected one- to 10-percenter middle-class liberals, who are age to age convinced that our age really is the worst that's ever been. How many times have you thought to yourself in the last day, week or month This country's going to hell in a hand-basket? Watching the GOP debates and the White House inactivity/ineptitude/immobility, I can't quibble with you: ours actually is the worst age that's ever been. (That's a joke. I think.)
So here's my modest proposal to political leaders of every size, shape and stripe: give a speech that makes us laugh every once in a while. And it has to be on its own merits: we all remember Bushisms and "oops," which were funny, but in more of a "Holy Shit!" sort of a way.
I'm reading Aristotle for a class now, and his Ethics starts from the premise that the end of humanity is happiness. His next assertion is that politics is the highest art of man, since it is how we pursue happiness together. I've banged on about the economics of happiness in this space once or twice before, but I'd like to take a moment and re-frame it in terms of Heaven and Mirth. In his book, Fr Martin recounts an encounter with the former Superior General of the Jesuits, Fr Peter Hans Kolvenbach. Concerned at the low numbers of vocations to the order, the young Fr Martin asked his Superior General what was the best way to set about increasing callings to the Society. Fr Kolvenbach's "answer was as surprising as it was memorable. He said, 'Live your own vocation joyfully!'"
I'd argue that Congress has an approval rating as dismal as it does and the rest of the inside-the-Beltway crowd are as popular as heartburn in large part because I can't think of a politician today that is clearly living his or her vocation joyfully. Yes, money and super-PACs and partisanship and the nature of the system and the fact that we're living in the worst iteration of humanity ever all have a role to play in that phenomenon, but what really scares me is that most of our politicians are motivated more by hatred than joy. Easiest way into the Beltway? Hate on the Beltway. Easiest way to lock up the Gods/guns/gays vote? Spew hatred about Mexicans, poor people, black people (or whatever Santorum called them), Democrats, foreigners, atheist-Muslim-Mau Mau-socialist-communist-Great Apologizer presidents, and whomever else. Of course no-one wants anything to do with a Washington of that culture. Yes, partisanship is bad, but it's natural. What's new and terrifying is the ultra-partisanship of hatred, in which the other side aren't assumed to be fully human, dignified, intelligent, sentient or whatever. That's a step backward in Washington and a really scary step backward for mankind. This November, please send someone joyful to Washington. It's our last best hope to prove the Mayans wrong about the end of the world.
A love letter to Europe
Lest you think the Georgetown Jesuits have completely captured my mind and my bookshelf, I'd like to briefly highlight another book I got for Christmas, The Prague Cemetery, Umberto Eco's latest novel. Like his other books, this one is popular fiction that reads like a college course in semiotics. Small wonder, given its author, but the really crazy thing about this one is that it's fiction, but with only one fictional character. The book is set in the late 1800's as Europe roils and republicans fight monarchists, the fallout of the revolutions of 1848 shakes the Continent, Masons and Carbonari and sundry devil-worshippers real and imagined pull the strings behind the scenes, and the fictional protagonist concocts the sine qua non of modern forgeries, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
The Protocols is an entirely fictitious document published first in Russia around the turn of the 20th Century that tar the Jews with the worst batch of slander since the "blood libel" of the Crusading era. Although recognized in relatively short order for the forgery that it was, the Protocols proved persistent enough in the collective imagination to be cited seriously by the Nazis, the Soviets and many other persecutors great and small of 20th-century Jewry the world over. Eco's genius is to take this document, around which so much suspicion and intrigue has swirled, and ascribe it to his fictional narrator, who spends 400-some pages meandering the Continent encountering people who really existed speaking words they actually spoke while he nurses his hatred of the Jews and builds his argument against them.
The point is this: the Europe I got to know and love last year is an historical anomaly that is, if anything, vastly under-appreciated. Think about it: on the world's most fought-over piece of real estate, modern democracy didn't emerge till the mid-19th Century, was secured west of Germany a century after that, and wasn't really a sure thing until 20 years ago. Nazis and Soviets were butchering millions only 65 years ago; the Soviet Union collapsed within my own lifetime; and former Yugoslavians of all sorts were tearing hell out of each other as recently as the mid-1990s. Circa 2010-2011, I could move about the vast majority of the Continent without ever showing a passport and could withdraw money from a Bank of Ireland ATM and use it in 16 other countries.
Doubtless you see already where this is going. Considering the history of Europe, the Continent I travelled last year is nothing short of a miracle. The Euro and the Schengen Zone, for all their many faults, have been instrumental in making the blood-soaked plain of Europe the oasis of peace it is today. Even a recently-downgraded France is not about to go to war with Germany (God forbid!), but both -- with a little help from their friends -- are perpetuating economic war against the peripheral PIIGS countries, and that's casting the future of the Euro and in some ways the Schengen Zone into deeper and deeper doubt.
Yes, massive mistakes were perpetrated by the PIIGS countries. They committed fiscal "original sin" by denominating their debts in someone else's currency; they (especially the Greeks) treated the Euro as a credit card with no limit and no payment date; and to a greater or lesser extent they allowed informal economies, lax regulations and shameful political cultures to persist out of habit. But the core countries aren't blameless. As a Times op-ed pointed out a while back, Germans holiday in Greece precisely because it's a place where they can get away from their Protestant work ethic for a few weeks a year. They could have demanded that Greeks become Germans before or shortly after the cradle of European civilization went on the European currency (a move made largely out of culturo-historical sentiment rather than fiscal realism in the first place), but the Germans still wanted a relaxing beach destination. Someone could have told Italy that keeping Berlusconi and his bunga-bunga simply because that's the way things had always been might be a bad deal, but no-one seemed to bother himself too much over that country in the boom days, either.
So, as a tourist and once-and-future resident (I hope) of that part of the world, I would like to issue my little cri de coeur to Europe's leaders to keep a good thing going. These are the good old days on that continent, and they will rue the day they let the common-currency and borderless-society experiments fail for lack of backbone or a better idea, should it ever come to that. Going off the Euro for want of some spine and a bit of imagination and compassion would do terrible, awful, no-good, very bad things to the world economy as well as the European project. We know that. What's less talked-about -- and what really worries me, even though it appears less immediately threatening than a Euro collapse -- is the back-tracking and potential revocation of the Schengen Agreement, which removed border controls within the Continental EU. Should that fail, or should countries like Denmark be allowed to unilaterally back down from or even out of the treaty, that would spell the end of the socio-cultural-political dream of modern Europe. Countries aren't likely to flip-flop very much or often as to whether or not they want to secure their borders; if the Schengen Zone starts to crumble, that will mark a huge and probably irrevocable step back from the unprecedented integration and concomitant peace and prosperity enjoyed in Europe over the last few decades.
"The politics of envy"
Here's Charles Blow's weekly column from today's Times: "The bitter politics of envy?" As always, I encourage you to read it every week, but this one's particularly good. It's not Mitt Romney's Mormonism or his flip-flopping that worries me -- heaven forbid we ever elect a president secure enough to change his mind once or twice over the course of a lifetime -- it's his disconnection from the everyday reality of too many Americans. In a society with deeper poverty and and less social mobility than any of our peers -- particularly the "socialist" neighbors to the north and east that we make so much fun of -- it is beyond unconscionable to joke about how gratifying it is to be able to fire someone. It's a shame the community organizer currently residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. hasn't been organizing this community of ours to change that lately, but at least he has some practical experience with people who don't think taking a picture with their pals wearing tuxedos and $100 bills is self-deprecating humor.
As you read, note how the Elizabeth Warren quotation is educational as opposed to inflammatory: the hallmark of good politics is that it gets people to succeed themselves by educating them towards the "better angels of our nature," as Lincoln put it. Everyone says President Obama is "professorial," but he hasn't been doing a good job actually teaching the country anything. That's why us liberals think the end is nigh instead of celebrating universal-ish health care, two wars wrapped up (also -ish), and a full-blown economic depression avoided. Let's hope Warren, an actual Harvard professor with a relatively hard-scrabble background, a) gets elected and b) doesn't end her teaching career when she does.
Happy long weekend:
"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." -- MLK
"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." -- MLK
"Whatever your life's work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead and the unborn could do it no better." -- MLK
We shall overcome.
Live your vocation with joy
For Christmas, I received Fr James Martin, SJ's new book, Between Heaven and Mirth. The book deals with the role of humor in religion (yes, there's a good case to be made for that!) and in life in general. If you're looking for a quick-reading work of popular theology, I highly recommend it; it's flying off bookstore shelves everywhere these days.
Reading it, I was of course heartened by the primary argument: in faith as in life, humor is the key to health. If you can't laugh at it, it's probably worth re-considering whether or not you can believe in it. After all, faith is necessarily concerned with this human project we're all involved in; that project is usually called "life" and we all know we'd better not take it too seriously -- we'll never get out alive, anyway. Humor, Fr Martin argues, is integral to most faith traditions and to healthy faiths. It knocks us down a peg and makes the world (and faith) manageable. It's also where a lot of really good insight happens: humor is deeply embedded in the human psyche, and much of our laughter (Daily Show or Colbert Report, anyone?) is directed at things that tell truth in a particularly ironic way that points out our own absurdity.
Side note: if you're not aware of or up to date on Stephen Colbert's super-PAC, "Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow," Google it. It's terrifyingly hilarious and provides quite a lesson on the mistake that was Citizens United.
But, me being me and the world being a bit larger than Georgetown, I started thinking about the implications of Fr Martin's thesis in national political life. At the risk of repeating Herbert Hoover, I really do think that what the country needs is a good laugh. Americans are a serious lot in general -- as the book points out, we don't extol the "Protestant play ethic" -- and no more so than in times of crisis. Most gloomy of all are folks like you and me: disaffected one- to 10-percenter middle-class liberals, who are age to age convinced that our age really is the worst that's ever been. How many times have you thought to yourself in the last day, week or month This country's going to hell in a hand-basket? Watching the GOP debates and the White House inactivity/ineptitude/immobility, I can't quibble with you: ours actually is the worst age that's ever been. (That's a joke. I think.)
So here's my modest proposal to political leaders of every size, shape and stripe: give a speech that makes us laugh every once in a while. And it has to be on its own merits: we all remember Bushisms and "oops," which were funny, but in more of a "Holy Shit!" sort of a way.
I'm reading Aristotle for a class now, and his Ethics starts from the premise that the end of humanity is happiness. His next assertion is that politics is the highest art of man, since it is how we pursue happiness together. I've banged on about the economics of happiness in this space once or twice before, but I'd like to take a moment and re-frame it in terms of Heaven and Mirth. In his book, Fr Martin recounts an encounter with the former Superior General of the Jesuits, Fr Peter Hans Kolvenbach. Concerned at the low numbers of vocations to the order, the young Fr Martin asked his Superior General what was the best way to set about increasing callings to the Society. Fr Kolvenbach's "answer was as surprising as it was memorable. He said, 'Live your own vocation joyfully!'"
I'd argue that Congress has an approval rating as dismal as it does and the rest of the inside-the-Beltway crowd are as popular as heartburn in large part because I can't think of a politician today that is clearly living his or her vocation joyfully. Yes, money and super-PACs and partisanship and the nature of the system and the fact that we're living in the worst iteration of humanity ever all have a role to play in that phenomenon, but what really scares me is that most of our politicians are motivated more by hatred than joy. Easiest way into the Beltway? Hate on the Beltway. Easiest way to lock up the Gods/guns/gays vote? Spew hatred about Mexicans, poor people, black people (or whatever Santorum called them), Democrats, foreigners, atheist-Muslim-Mau Mau-socialist-communist-Great Apologizer presidents, and whomever else. Of course no-one wants anything to do with a Washington of that culture. Yes, partisanship is bad, but it's natural. What's new and terrifying is the ultra-partisanship of hatred, in which the other side aren't assumed to be fully human, dignified, intelligent, sentient or whatever. That's a step backward in Washington and a really scary step backward for mankind. This November, please send someone joyful to Washington. It's our last best hope to prove the Mayans wrong about the end of the world.
A love letter to Europe
Lest you think the Georgetown Jesuits have completely captured my mind and my bookshelf, I'd like to briefly highlight another book I got for Christmas, The Prague Cemetery, Umberto Eco's latest novel. Like his other books, this one is popular fiction that reads like a college course in semiotics. Small wonder, given its author, but the really crazy thing about this one is that it's fiction, but with only one fictional character. The book is set in the late 1800's as Europe roils and republicans fight monarchists, the fallout of the revolutions of 1848 shakes the Continent, Masons and Carbonari and sundry devil-worshippers real and imagined pull the strings behind the scenes, and the fictional protagonist concocts the sine qua non of modern forgeries, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
The Protocols is an entirely fictitious document published first in Russia around the turn of the 20th Century that tar the Jews with the worst batch of slander since the "blood libel" of the Crusading era. Although recognized in relatively short order for the forgery that it was, the Protocols proved persistent enough in the collective imagination to be cited seriously by the Nazis, the Soviets and many other persecutors great and small of 20th-century Jewry the world over. Eco's genius is to take this document, around which so much suspicion and intrigue has swirled, and ascribe it to his fictional narrator, who spends 400-some pages meandering the Continent encountering people who really existed speaking words they actually spoke while he nurses his hatred of the Jews and builds his argument against them.
The point is this: the Europe I got to know and love last year is an historical anomaly that is, if anything, vastly under-appreciated. Think about it: on the world's most fought-over piece of real estate, modern democracy didn't emerge till the mid-19th Century, was secured west of Germany a century after that, and wasn't really a sure thing until 20 years ago. Nazis and Soviets were butchering millions only 65 years ago; the Soviet Union collapsed within my own lifetime; and former Yugoslavians of all sorts were tearing hell out of each other as recently as the mid-1990s. Circa 2010-2011, I could move about the vast majority of the Continent without ever showing a passport and could withdraw money from a Bank of Ireland ATM and use it in 16 other countries.
Doubtless you see already where this is going. Considering the history of Europe, the Continent I travelled last year is nothing short of a miracle. The Euro and the Schengen Zone, for all their many faults, have been instrumental in making the blood-soaked plain of Europe the oasis of peace it is today. Even a recently-downgraded France is not about to go to war with Germany (God forbid!), but both -- with a little help from their friends -- are perpetuating economic war against the peripheral PIIGS countries, and that's casting the future of the Euro and in some ways the Schengen Zone into deeper and deeper doubt.
Yes, massive mistakes were perpetrated by the PIIGS countries. They committed fiscal "original sin" by denominating their debts in someone else's currency; they (especially the Greeks) treated the Euro as a credit card with no limit and no payment date; and to a greater or lesser extent they allowed informal economies, lax regulations and shameful political cultures to persist out of habit. But the core countries aren't blameless. As a Times op-ed pointed out a while back, Germans holiday in Greece precisely because it's a place where they can get away from their Protestant work ethic for a few weeks a year. They could have demanded that Greeks become Germans before or shortly after the cradle of European civilization went on the European currency (a move made largely out of culturo-historical sentiment rather than fiscal realism in the first place), but the Germans still wanted a relaxing beach destination. Someone could have told Italy that keeping Berlusconi and his bunga-bunga simply because that's the way things had always been might be a bad deal, but no-one seemed to bother himself too much over that country in the boom days, either.
So, as a tourist and once-and-future resident (I hope) of that part of the world, I would like to issue my little cri de coeur to Europe's leaders to keep a good thing going. These are the good old days on that continent, and they will rue the day they let the common-currency and borderless-society experiments fail for lack of backbone or a better idea, should it ever come to that. Going off the Euro for want of some spine and a bit of imagination and compassion would do terrible, awful, no-good, very bad things to the world economy as well as the European project. We know that. What's less talked-about -- and what really worries me, even though it appears less immediately threatening than a Euro collapse -- is the back-tracking and potential revocation of the Schengen Agreement, which removed border controls within the Continental EU. Should that fail, or should countries like Denmark be allowed to unilaterally back down from or even out of the treaty, that would spell the end of the socio-cultural-political dream of modern Europe. Countries aren't likely to flip-flop very much or often as to whether or not they want to secure their borders; if the Schengen Zone starts to crumble, that will mark a huge and probably irrevocable step back from the unprecedented integration and concomitant peace and prosperity enjoyed in Europe over the last few decades.
"The politics of envy"
Here's Charles Blow's weekly column from today's Times: "The bitter politics of envy?" As always, I encourage you to read it every week, but this one's particularly good. It's not Mitt Romney's Mormonism or his flip-flopping that worries me -- heaven forbid we ever elect a president secure enough to change his mind once or twice over the course of a lifetime -- it's his disconnection from the everyday reality of too many Americans. In a society with deeper poverty and and less social mobility than any of our peers -- particularly the "socialist" neighbors to the north and east that we make so much fun of -- it is beyond unconscionable to joke about how gratifying it is to be able to fire someone. It's a shame the community organizer currently residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. hasn't been organizing this community of ours to change that lately, but at least he has some practical experience with people who don't think taking a picture with their pals wearing tuxedos and $100 bills is self-deprecating humor.
As you read, note how the Elizabeth Warren quotation is educational as opposed to inflammatory: the hallmark of good politics is that it gets people to succeed themselves by educating them towards the "better angels of our nature," as Lincoln put it. Everyone says President Obama is "professorial," but he hasn't been doing a good job actually teaching the country anything. That's why us liberals think the end is nigh instead of celebrating universal-ish health care, two wars wrapped up (also -ish), and a full-blown economic depression avoided. Let's hope Warren, an actual Harvard professor with a relatively hard-scrabble background, a) gets elected and b) doesn't end her teaching career when she does.
Happy long weekend:
"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." -- MLK
"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." -- MLK
"Whatever your life's work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead and the unborn could do it no better." -- MLK
We shall overcome.
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