Why the President doesn't set gas prices (and why we want him to)

Ah Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire

To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,

Would we not shatter it to bits - and then

Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's desire

-Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat, 73                   

  This really isn't going to be about politics, or petroleum, or the President (or feature much more alliteration).  The real thrust of the post is a discussion about a particular problem and what I suppose is a coping mechanism to deal with, but first some site news by way of lengthy disclaimer.
  
   You, dear reader, may not have noticed (because I hardly have), but I haven't been posting much lately.  For awhile I thought, erroneously, that I should wait until I had something worthwhile to talk about to post.  Although I hadn't really used that metric in the past to guide my blogging, this sudden attack of scrupulosity prevented me from putting any passing notions to digital paper, as it were, and launching them forth to bravely make their way in the cold, indifferent blogosphere - an SOS to the world.  The actual effect was that I instead simply thought about things awhile, got bored or forgot them, and never blogged, thus depriving you, the blogee, of anything to read.  I've decided instead to throw caution to the wind: to occasionally ramble on about various things in a public forum - an exciting return to the founding principles of this blog.  None of this should be taken to mean that I think my thoughts so important that, no matter how half-formed or ill-conceived they must find light for the betterment of mankind, rather that I'm bored today and thought I'd write something.  All of this long, tiresome palaver isn't intended to be a guarantee of frequent posting in the future, but rather that all future posts will be of dubious quality.

  With that out of the way, we may proceed in earnest.  A lot of the debates surrounding the coming election concern things that the President has little, if any real influence on.  The price of gas, for instance, has much more to do with the geopolitical situations in other oil-producing countries and their effects on the global market and futures than any decisions the President of the United States may happen to make.  The economy, too, is such a vast complex of relations in both domestic and international markets that even if the White House with all its attached Cabinet positions and advisers could understand it in full (an impossibility), any influence they exert would be a drop in the ocean.  Yet people consistently attribute imagined, almost miraculous influence to the President (for good or ill); this post: which only asserts the first part of its title; i.e. the President doesn't set gas prices, will seek to explore its parenthetical portion (I "buried the lead" in media parlance).

  The most obvious reason, and the most cynical, is that it is a creation of media hype- pure rhetoric to: A) denigrate whomever the President may be based on the prevailing conditions (that is to say that both sides are guilty), B) prop up the President if things (read: the economy) are going good (so both Reagan and Clinton are held up as "good presidents" by their respective partisans because their terms coincided with prosperous times), and C) (most cynical of all) for ratings- "You need to choose the right man or disaster will strike - famine, plague, pestilence! - only our coverage will help you make the informed decision for your family.  Stayed tuned for more after the break."

   But I'm of the opinion that hype, while it does play a role, isn't the end of the story.  Hype is effective because it plays on real desires; the media isn't simultaneously creating the things it sells us, it merely leeches off of them.  Faced with an incredibly complex world filled with mitigating circumstances and obscure causes and divided up into the realms of various experts, the desire is for simplicity and agency- the thought that what I decide matters and, even more, has a tangible effect on the world outside myself.  Someone (although the source escapes me it was likely one of those disaffected 19th or early 20th century philosophers or novelists I'm so fond of reading) said that in an infinite universe, there is no place for finite man.  The terror that that statement arouses is precisely what this desire for either a savior or devil in the White House plays on.  Incidentally, it really doesn't matter to the desire whether you think the President is a savior or a devil, what matters is that he has the influence to be an agent of change for good or ill, that someone, somewhere can lay hold of the whole confusing system and make it move, shape it to his will.  An omnipotent politician is a handle by which we can grapple with reality.  We may not understand, but He does, and has at His call a thousand experts that He can weigh against each other and make earth-shattering decisions with. 

  It is, of course, not so.  The President is a man, and neither the monster nor rescuer we'd hoped.  The world may, indeed, be incomprehensible and our actions inconsequential.  A vision of sin may be our only refuge from despair: even if our actions have no real effect on the outside world, the soul, the inner man is made and unmade by our decisions, the Image marred or perfected, and the line between good and evil, obscured at times in the public sphere, yet runs, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn says through the heart of every man and that the salvation will arrive from somewhere else.

  "The opposite of sin is not virtue, but faith." -Søren Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death

St. Anselm goes to Rehab

Here's something I've been working out as I lay down and try to go to sleep at night, it has been a remarkably good cure for insomnia.  This will probably end up being a pretty long and, for most people, uninteresting post- just so you're warned.


I'd like to discuss a little bit the ontological argument for God.  Now before you go, "Whaaa??" and click away, let me explain what it is in a nutshell.  The argument, first put forward by St. Anselm, is basically:
1. We can conceive of perfection (or that which no greater can be thought)
2. This perfection is an attribute of God.
3. Part of this perfection is existence (because existence is good)
4 God exists.
This idea has been poo-pooed by various philosophers ever since it was first published, including by this fellow Gaunilo of Marmoutiers, a Benedictine monk more popularly known as the "Island Guy".  His refutation was basically that he could conceive of a perfect island, the existence of this island was part of its perfection, so the perfect island must exist, right?  I'll be honest, the ontological argument just doesn't "do it" for me; if true, the argument only gets us to some vague philosophical conception of God, like Aristotle's Unmoved Mover, not necessarily Yahweh, much less addressing the truth of the Resurrection.  But, all that said, I've never felt the isalnd think really cut it as a refutation.  Thats right, this blog is about to weigh in on philosophical controversies from the 11th century.  I can feel my readership exploding as I type; it don't get no more relevant than this.

  The problem with the island is that an island can not be judged in the same terms as a being.  We can discuss rational beings in terms of their ethical/religious character an evaluate them on such terms.  One island, however can not be said to be morally superior to another (well I mean you could, it just wouldn't make sense).  The island or anything else without rational intellect (a dog for example), can only be judged on aesthetic or utilitarian terms- it's beautiful, trashy, it has resources we can use, ect. and affirmed as good in it's createdness (but this is an act of faith rather than a philosophical position).  It does not make sense to talk of it's perfection because any perfection would be aesthetic one.  I don't know that we can speak of aesthetic perfection, because an aesthetic judgment is necessarily subjective, rely both on the object being considered and the observer.  For example a perfect engine may need to be frictionless (for maximum efficency, which would ostensibly be part of its perfection) but the perfect tire obviously would not be frictionless as it must grip the road.  The tire's (and the road's) "imperfections" that cause friction are in fact a function of it's usefulness.

Plato believed that there was a realm of ideas which was superior to the material plane, so that we could judge say, a desk, based on the extent to which it conform to the ideal standard of desks that exists in the realm of ideas.  This system of thought influenced the Gnostic heresy, that plagued early Christianity (and I think still infects a lot of Christian circles today, but that is another post), basically that matter was bad and spirit good, which at it's far end led to the belief that Christ could not have become incarnate, but instead only appeared to be.  I say all that to show clearly what dangerous ground I am on here when I say that we cannot, I do not think, conceive of perfection in material terms.  Two reasons for this, first because materiality implies some sort of aesthetic judgment as part of its perfection, and second because of the corruptibility of the flesh, because of its susceptibility to death.  So, before the question is asked, this means that we cannot I think talk about Jesus as being perfect as touches His manhood.  This is a part of what  the poem in Phil. 2 is talking about when it says He emptied Himself, He took on the frailties of man including death.  This is why as Kierkegaard says, we cannot argue from the greatness of Christ or the effects of His life that He is God.  There is, as he says, an infinite qualitative distinction between man and God, which is a technical way of saying that man does not exist on a continuum with God; God is essentially different than man.  Which brings me nicely back around to the point I made at the outset, we cannot make an argument for God that is meaningful ultimately; faith requires an act of faith, not argumentation.

As a little postlude here, I do want to leave open the possibility for material perfection in the finally redeemed Creation.  The Resurrected Christ was an anticipation of what is to come when, "God's dwelling place is with man".  Now we don't really know exactly what it will be like, but then we could perhaps speak of perfections, because the diversity which God has created and so deemed good will certainly still be in place I would think.  I'm totally stealing this from somewhere in the writings of Lewis, but I forget where precisely, so I'll just roll with.  Goodness expresses itself in diversity, while evil is always monotonously the same.  The  remarkable variety of the saints when contrasted to the how incredibly similar evil men are in the end, is a case in point.  N.T. Wright has some good stuff about this, and I found a pretty solid (at least based on my skimming of it) summary of some of the main points of his book Suprised by Hope here on the Relevant magazine website (but you should still read the book).

I'll end with a few lines from W.H. Auden that sum up my feelings about arguments for the existence of God.

And must put up with having learned
All proofs or disproofs that we tender
Of His existence are returned
Unopened to the sender.
-Friday's Child, W.H. Auden

Evolution and Genesis (Now there's a loaded title)

First let me preface this by saying that this post will be wildly speculative; I will just be throwing alot of stuff out there and seeing if any of it sticks.  Second, let me say that I feel there are ways in which this post is completely unneccessary.  The main point is man was created somehow (through evolutionary processes or not) and suffered some kind of fall by choosing the knowledge of good and evil rather than the knowledge of God and life with Him.  All that said, time to jump in.  Let the controversy begin.

Before going in to the theology of all this, let me first speak to the science- and the limits of science.  A confession here is in order first though, I haven't taken biology since my sophomore year in college- and then I napped in class on occassion and borrowed a textbook that I have yet to return; so I am not by any means up to date on the science behind all this.  But as far as I can tell, and based on what some smart fellow Christians have said on the subject, the science points to evolution as the cause for the diversity of life on Earth.  Otherwise, God has placed a lot of fairly compelling evidence for evolution, presumably in an attempt to dupe a bunch of scientists into atheism.  So our options seem to be either accepting the theory of evolution as the best explanation of the available data, critique the science behind it (which many try to do, with little success), or accuse God of acting against His character by tricking us into belief in an evolutionary explanation (by hiding fossil remains in the earth for instance, so that when we found them we would interpret them as signs of man's predecessors and so be fooled).  Maybe I making strawmen out of the other two options, but anyway looks like evolution is the most likely to me.  So what does that give us, if anything?  A means of Creation.  Science cannot say anything positive or negative about the existence of God or the truth of the Resurrection.  It is an approach to truth, it however cannot acknowledge something as true or not; the scientific method only rejects or fails to reject hypotheses, it is by nature (fancy theological word) apophatic.  This however is not sufficient, it is not how men live their lives.  An example that will perhaps help segue into the theology behind all this is our use of images in describing God.  In Christian thought there have been two main ways of approach to the Truth of God in Himself which, as Paul says, we now only see "through a mirror darkly"  (little explanatory aside here- back in the day they had different mirrors, made out of shiny metal rather than glass; in Paul's day it would be more like checking yourself out in whatever kitchen appliance is handy rather than walking all the way to a bathroom - you get the general idea of what's going on, but you can't pick out all the details).  The two ways of approaching this truth have been through the use of images (the way of affirmation as Charles Williams used to call it)- God is a Father, Christ is a Husband, ect. and through the way of negation (apophatic theology)- God is not a Father as we conceive of fathers, not husband like we think of husbands, ect.  Both ways are neccessary however, the way of affirmation so that we can think of God in human terms and the way of negation so that we do not make an idol out of our conception.  As C.S. Lewis said once, "We must desire God more than we desire our conception of God."

Well it seems I have continued my habit of ballooning introductory paragraphs into such lengthy affairs.  Good to be consistent I suppose.  So then question becomes, "Given evolution as the most probable explanation for the origins of life on earth, what do we do with Genesis 1-3?"  First let me say we should not on the one hand throw it out, or on the other be scared that it does not speak of evolution.  The latter is more briefly addressed, so I'll turn to it first.  The Bible is, primarily, a record of God's revelation of Himself to man and is itself a part of that revelation.  He must either speak in terms sensible to man (as our Jewish friends like to say "The Torah speaks in human language") or reveal centuries of scientific knowledge and terminology to the Israelites as a preface to the Genesis account to satisfy our conceptions of what the Bible should be (which would make for an even longer introduction than the one accompanying this post).  So instead the Bible uses sensible terms for its original audience (Joshua commanding the sun to "stop" being the most famous example), regardless of our satisfaction with those terms.  But still the question, "What to do with Genesis?"

Two major implications are how do we tie what seems to be the narrative of a historical event, The Fall, involving two people to a species that arose and presumably arose as a species rather as two individuals and secondly how do we account for death and its existence before the Fall.  Again let me reitirate that this is going to involve some speculation and is in the end, I think, unimportant; that is to say the theological importance of the fall and the explanation it provides for the human condition are vastly more important than tying the Fall to a historical event involving two historical individuals named Adam and Eve.  It is much easier to for instance turn the story of Noah into an adventure on a boat or to argue the architectural viability of a boat that large made without modern materials, it is much harder to grapple with God being so distressed by humanity that he wished to destroy the creation (you could in fact translate the verb in Gen 6:6 I think it is as God repented of having created man).

The Eastern Orthodox (or at least our old friend Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov) have this idea of the universal culpability of man; that is, that as far as I am guilty of sin, I am responsible for all the sin in the world.  I hear that they interpret Paul's talk of Adam in Romans 5 as being representative of all mankind.  Since I am guilty of sin, I can no more blame Adam for the Fall than myself; we are all responsible and we are responsible for each other.  Now let me say two things about this before relating it back to our main topic.  First, that I like this idea very much.  It explains things, shows our interconnectedness- a guy struggles with lust, a girl with body issues or eating disorders and we think these things are unrelated.  It puts us in a position of responsibilty and shows how damaging sin it to the world and the impossibility of it being truly private.  Second, this does not sit easily with the Augustinian doctrine of Original Sin.  It shifts the blame from an inherited propensity to sinfulness to the personal sinful act.  But I find it impossible to judge between the two.  Human memory functions in such a way that we seem to begin life in media res, the story is already in progress by the time we get to it; that is to say, I can't remember myself not being or my entering into conciousness, neither can I remember my first beginning to sin.  So whether we sin because we inherit the taint of Original Sin or we just start sinning early on, on our own steam so to speak, the result is the same- a loss of fellowship with God.

Now if I remember right, in the opening chapters of Genesis, Adam is referred to as "the adam"- the man or the dirt-guy (adamah the Hebrew word for earth is where we get adam from) and Eve is called the woman, they don't have proper names.  So then perhaps the story becomes instead of a historical account of specific people, a general account of what man and woman always choose to do- desire to be God and fall out of fellowship.  This then is where our idea about universal culpability comes into play, we all are Adam choosing to fall.  After the Fall is when they receive their proper names I think, after that we can talk of historical people in what we can recognize as historical settings.  The first chapters of Genesis are unique in that they portray a mode of being that is different from what we experience.  As far a part as my life is from say, Abraham, I can imagine myself in his setting, dealing with the same problems; I can not imagine life in the Garden.  This is why I don't see the point in tying Adam and Eve to individual people in a recognizable setting, we could not relate to them before the Fall anyway.  The theological truth, that we are fallen and that we carry some sort of guilt over are exile is what is important. 

The other big question is death before the Fall, a big subject.  But I have written for far too long by now anyway and will leave that, for now, to a later post.

Something I probably should've thought about more before posting

Back probably six months ago or so, I read a book by Walter Miller (not the guy that wrote The Crucible, that's Arthur) called A Canticle for Leibowitz (which I'm pretty sure is supposed to be that strange sounding of a title.) The novel was written during the 60's at the height of fears of a nuclear holocaust, which probably would concern us in the United States more today if we didn't own the majority of the nukes left (but of course we'd never use them right? I mean what we did to Japan aside, surely our government wouldn't do anything illegal or immoral, right? Seems I've wandered on to a soapbox somehow, time to step down). Anyway, the book opens some hundreds of years after a nuclear holocaust has sent the world back into the Dark Ages and follows in the first part a young novice in the fictional Order of St. Leibowitz. The Order, much like the monastic orders of the Middle Ages, has tasked itself with preserving not only Scripture and other religious writing, but also general knowledge works like scientific texts and even blueprints. The problem is that the loss of the intellectual context in which the scientific knowledge was understood has rendered much of what they are preserving unintelligible. For example, would preserving a mathematical formula like E=mc2 still mean anything if we lost what those variables stood for? Would it still constitue knowledge? If society loses the cultural and intellectual context that previously allowed the language to express truth, how is it regained?

The point, that I've have come such a long way roundabout in making, is that today's society is largely losing the context in which the key ideas of Christianity (not that Christianity is by any means a set of ideas)- sin, redemption, resurrection- make sense. The evangelist seems to be stuck in what is really preparatory work in the convicting of sin, rather than the true work of an evangelist preaching the evangelion, the Good News of the coming of the Kingdom of God through Jesus. So what do we get? We get a reduced Jesus, an abbreviated Jesus. (good I-monk post here) "You have a specific problem, sin, (I have convinced you youre a sinner, I trust) well here's the solution, Jesus! Just plug Him in and you'll be alright." We talk a lot about that "Jesus-shaped hole" and we end up with a hole-shaped Jesus; wherever I am weak and I need help, that's where Jesus gets let in, the other stuff I can handle. So we get this whole wacked-out concept of the Gospel as a specific answer to the a few distasteful habits. And if we can't convince people that they have a problem, then obviously they have no more need for Jesus; we've plugged Him into an equation and none of the terms surrounding Him make sense to them anymore, He has not come to them as Immanuel, God with us, but as a symbol without any referent.

There used to be an old hymn, "I Love to Tell the Story", and it went, "I love to tell the story of Jesus and His Mercy of Jesus and His Love..." The problem is, we aren't telling the story anymore. We are telling them something else, something more expedient. If I hear, "salvation is as simple as A(dmit), B(elieve), C(ommit)," one more time I think I'm going to scream. If Jesus' life boils down to alot of traipsing around Galilee and Judea with a group of flunkies and rednecks telling odd little stories before He went to the Cross and has no significance other than that, I feel that, first of all the Gospel writers wasted a lot of time and could have whittled it all down to a pamphlet or tract. But we don't bring them Jesus living and incarnate, we sell them our little problem-solvin' Jesus, who was you know a really cool guy and stuff and then He died so your life would be alright. Now I am not saying we can't talk about sin to people because they won't understand, but when Jesus is not shown as He is, when He is simply an answer to a sin problem we are putting seed on shallow soil. Because if Jesus is supposed to make us just stop sinning, it won't take long to realize that our equation doesn't seem to work. If Jesus is not a man, if He just is an answer, then what do we with our life when we mess up- walk an aisle again, try and believe harder? In Dostoevksy's Brothers Karamazov a story is told about Jesus coming back to Toledo during the Spanish Inquisition, He heals some people and is worshiped before being arrested and brought in for questioning by the Grand Inquisitor. When He comes in, the Inquisitor asks, "Why have You come to disturb us? What right do You have to return?" The Church had so institutionalized salvation as what it may bestow on the world, that it had no need for Jesus incarnate; our systems can't bear much reality.

I realize that this has been a pretty long, rambling post. My fault I guess for blogging late at night. But I'd like to put out two quotes before I go, the first from Thomas Merton a twentieth century Trappist monk, that comes from Confessions of a Guilty Bystander, basically a notebook of his that was published. "Faith is by no means a mere act of choice, an option for a special solution to the problems of existence. It is birth to a higher life by obedience to the Source of Life: to believe is thus to consent to hear and obey a creative command that raises us from the dead." The second is from the British novelist Graham Greene, whom I've yet to read, I've no idea where it's from, I saw it in a book of readings for Lent, Bread and Wine, "You can't conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God." This is what is needed, the mystery of Grace and Mercy in Christ confronting us, baffling us, and inviting us in.