Check this out—my thanks to Jared for posting this.
Jared’s right, that’s freaky; it’s also a little scary to think that we can be manipulated that easily. I like to believe I can think for myself—but this makes me wonder what influences are shaping my thought processes without my being aware of them. (And everyone else’s, for that matter.)
Have you ever thought about how little we remember for ourselves anymore? Scholars talk about how cultures move from being oral cultures, in which the stories are passed down by word of mouth and held in the collective memory of the tribe, to written cultures, in which they are preserved in books, and now to what they’re calling “secondary orality,” as we move away from the written word; but it isn’t a move back toward a primary reliance on human memory. Instead, we’re simply replacing written media with visual/aural ones—the reliance on technology continues, as we outsource our memories to books, pictures, video, computers, PDAs, and the like. Indeed, a PDA is basically a handheld prosthetic memory; if you have one, and you remember to use it and keep it with you, you don’t have to remember what you need to do, where and when you need to do it, who you’re going to do it with, or what their phone number is—just press the right button, or buttons, and the box remembers it all for you and tells you what you need to remember when you need to remember it.
The advantage to storing so much of our memory outside ourselves, I think, is that less of our brain is needed for that task, which means there’s more of it that we can use for other purposes, like inventing new things. I don’t know if anyone’s ever looked into this, but that might explain the accelerating pace of technological progress. After all, each new invention that frees up a little more of our brainpower from the work of memory gives us that much more brainpower to come up with new ideas and new ways of doing things—and gives us ways to record and store those increasingly more complex ideas, allowing us to interact with them more easily and quickly; and as these inventions enable us, more quickly, efficiently, and completely, to share those with others, that multiplies the effect. So in that sense, maybe the fact that we don’t remember as much ourselves, that we rely on other means to do it for us, is one cause of all the material benefits science and technology have given us.
There are downsides, too, though. Not only can all those things break, or get lost, or simply not be where we need them when we need them, there’s also the fact that our memories tend to be less vivid and immediate, more distant from us—less real, we might even say. Rather than being part of our present reality, they come to us as shadows of another time. To be sure, this would be the fate of most of our memories regardless, and there will always be things we would rather let slide into oblivion—but what about the key moments in our lives, the ones that make us who we are? Consider that to a large part, memory is identity. The more distant our memories become from us—a problem worsened by the speed and busyness of life in the Western world, which leaves us little time to stop and reflect, and remember—the more distant we become from ourselves, and thus from others, and from God.
(Update: I first wrote this, for other purposes, back in the summer of 2006, so I may actually have gotten to this idea first, as I [probably naively] thought I had; but in the interim, David Brooks has gotten here too, from a quite different angle—neither fact of which is surprising.)
So Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, responded to criticism of the paper’s recent piece on John McCain by . . . apologizing? Explaining that they have actual evidence for their contentions, and giving good reasons why they didn’t print it? Retracting the story? No; he responded by blaming the readers.
Frankly, I was a little surprised by how few readers saw what was, to us, the larger point of the story. . . . [that] this man who prizes his honor above all things and who appreciates the importance of appearances, also has a history of being sometimes careless about the appearance of impropriety, about his reputation.
Now, leave aside for a moment whether you believe this defense or not, or indeed whether you believe it qualifies as a defense or not, and just look at what he’s saying. First, Keller says that Sen. McCain “prizes his honor above all things,” which isn’t quite true but is certainly close enough for journalistic work. Then he says that Sen. McCain “appreciates the importance of appearances,” and then that the point of the story is that the senator actually has a pattern of not appreciating the importance of appearances. It would seem, then, that the assertion that Sen. McCain “appreciates the importance of appearances” rests not on the senator’s behavior, but on the preceding statement that he “prizes his honor.”
In other words, if I’m parsing this correctly, Keller’s defense of his paper’s story rests on the assumption that caring about honor means caring about appearances—which is to say, that honor is the same thing as reputation. I’m not surprised to find the NYT thinking this way, but I very much doubt that Sen. McCain makes this mistake; indeed, if he did, he would never have ended up with the public persona he has. You don’t earn the label of a straight-shooting maverick who’ll offend your friends as soon as your enemies if you’re concerned about appearances; that one is earned precisely by caring about the reality of honor so much that you’re willing to let your reputation swing in the wind. As the sci-fi/fantasy author Lois McMaster Bujold has one of her characters say,
Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself. Guard your honor; let your reputation fall where it may.
I think Sen. McCain knows the truth of that; demonstrably, the New York Times doesn’t. We’d be better off if they did.
It’s been interesting reading the avalanche of media commentary on the New York Times‘ would-be hatchet job on Senator John McCain; at bottom, they mostly seem to come down to the conclusion that the Grey Lady just didn’t have the goods, and shouldn’t have let itself be stampeded into running the story without them. At this point, it looks like little harm has been done to the senator’s well-earned reputation as the most difficult man on Capitol Hill. Perhaps more interesting, though, has been watching the McCain campaign’s response, and its sequelae. Almost immediately, they said they were “going to war with the New York Times,” and they have, with deadly efficiency; he was sharp enough to hire Robert Bennett, a veteran of D.C.’s brutal infighting, to represent him, and Bennett has been particularly effective at dismantling the Times‘ case.
The campaign’s goal has been not merely to defuse this story, but to use it to bring the senator’s conservative critics on board. It’s been working, because at the same time as the campaign has been using this to reel them in, conservative pundits like Rush Limbaugh have also been trying to use the NYT’s attack—to pull Sen. McCain in a more conservative direction. The message is clear (and Limbaugh made it explicit): “Stop trying to be liberal enough to keep the media happy with you—if you’re the Republican nominee, they’re going to hate you and try to take you down regardless. Stand up and be a conservative—you might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a goat.” I think it will work to some extent (I’ve argued before that conservatives can expect this, after all); the interesting thing will be to see to what extent, and how quickly. In any case, watching the maneuvering between the campaign and the conservative media establishment, each trying to leverage this story to shift the other, is a fascinating lesson in how you play the game of politics in this country. One more for the textbooks.
Update: David Brooks has an extremely interesting column in today’s Times on a longstanding, deep, and bitter rift between Sen. McCain’s two long-time chief advisors—his campaign manager, Rick Davis, and the one source mentioned by name in the original Times piece, John Weaver. Though it isn’t clear how, it seems very likely that this vicious rivalry played some part in the story.
J. R. R. Tolkien’s estate is suing New Line Cinema for ripping them off: $6 billion for the studio, not one cent for the creator (well, his heirs). The more I see of New Line, the less I like them.
It’s amazing what you can find randomly wandering around the Internet. Usually, you don’t (or at least I don’t), but there are times when Web panning turns up a nugget. I was surfing aimlessly yesterday for a couple minutes while my brain tried to track something down, and I landed at Doug Hagler’s blog, only to find myself in the blogroll. I would not have expected that. Doug’s good people from what I can tell—we’ve never met personally, I only know him from around the blogosphere, and primarily from his comments on Jim Berkley’s blog—but he and I don’t agree on a whole lot. (I would have said we don’t agree on much of anything, but from his blog, it’s evident we agree on Tolkien, anyway.) Doug’s one of those folks in the More Light/Covenant Network stream of the PC(USA), and I’m . . . slightly not. Still (especially these days), one is always grateful for those with whom one can disagree intelligently and civilly, because there can be real value to those conversations; and I’d certainly put Doug in that category. (Besides, you have to like someone who can write, “You’re only allowed to take me as seriously as I take myself. That should serve to restrain both of us.”) As such, I’m happy to return the favor and add him to the blogroll. I’d especially recommend his post on eucatastrophe, which is perhaps my favorite of Tolkien’s concepts. (This all ties in with my earlier post on Alison Milbank’s book.)
I should also note, I’m grateful to Doug for tipping me off to a development I’d missed during the whole packing/moving process: Peter Jackson has settled his legal squabble with New Line Cinema, and he and Fran Walsh are back on board to do The Hobbit (and also a sequel; my wife was wondering if they’re planning to make a movie of the journey back home, which Tolkien completely glossed over). There are legitimate criticisms to offer of the work Jackson, Walsh and Philippa Boyens did with LOTR, but that said, I can’t come up with anyone who would have done a better job. Jackson et al. doing The Hobbit is clearly the best-case scenario, and I’m glad to see it.
I’m surprised I haven’t seen anything on the Thinklings yet about this—I really expected Quaid to be all over it—but Mike Huckabee rocked Leno last night. Literally.
I should note, I only tripped across his appearance, since I’ve been pretty sick and haven’t been following much of anything the last week or two; I knew Law & Order‘s season premiere (which also rocked, btw) was last night, though, so I watched that, and thus saw the ads for Leno’s return, and Huckabee’s appearance. I was interested to see what Leno would have to say about the writers’ strike, and just as interested to see Huckabee, so I stayed up to watch.
I was quite impressed. Of course, as I’ve noted here earlier, I’d already been worked around to supporting Huckabee, so it’s not like I was predisposed against him; but still, as compared to a guy like Fred Dalton Thompson, or other pols I’ve seen on Leno, Huckabee seemed very natural and relaxed, poised but at his ease. He talked very freely and naturally about his faith and some of his policy positions—among other things, he made hands-down the best case I’ve ever heard for replacing the national income tax with a national sales tax, an idea about which I’m now actually somewhat less dubious than I was; he also talked about his decision not to go negative on Romney in Iowa and told some of his own story, including his early rock-and-roll ambitions. At that point, Leno asked him, “Are you good enough to play with the band?” and he answered, “No, but I’d like to anyway”—and when they came back from the commercial break, there he was on bass guitar, next to Kevin Eubanks. Granted, it was a pretty standard walk-it-up bass riff, nothing real challenging, but still, it was obvious that he and everyone else was having a grand old time; he got a high-five from Eubanks as he headed back to the couch.
All in all, I have to think Mike Huckabee won himself some votes last night; I suspect there are also a number of us out there who are rather more firmly in his camp now than we were. Not a bad night’s work, Governor; not a bad night’s work at all.
My wife and I had an interesting experience while watching NUMB3RS tonight (as I’ve noted before, I like mysteries, and the writers are doing a good job with that one). Just past the teaser, up came Lynn Redgrave, looking regally and serenely into the camera, declaring, “I want to die from eating too much chocolate. Or from exhaustion, dancing the tango. I want to die of laughter, on my 87th birthday. But I refuse—I refuse—to die from breast cancer. I want to die from something else.”
I’m not ordinarily much of one for commercials (that one was for Bristol Myers Squibb), but that was truly cool. Part of it, of course, was that Lynn Redgrave is a woman of great presence. More than that, however, I really liked the attitude she expressed. There was no fear of death, nor any effort to avoid the fact that she, like all of us, will at some point die; that much, she accepted as a given (which far too many people don’t). It was simply the determination not to let that beat her, not to die that way.
I realize, certainly, that there’s a danger here, that of coming to believe that we can die on our own terms; I realize that that way lies a great many dangers. And yet . . . there is still something noble and honorable in the refusal to accept defeat at the hands of a dishonorable enemy; when paired with the acceptance that death will come at some point, and the understanding that it really is beyond our control, to stand and fight and refuse to give in is admirable, as long as it isn’t taken too far.
It reminds me of Harvey Mansfield’s recent article in First Things titled “How to Understand Politics,” in which Dr. Mansfield (a professor of government at Harvard) insists on the importance of the Greek concept of thumos. He defines thumos as “the part of the soul that makes us want to insist on our own importance . . . Sometimes translated as spiritedness, it names a part of the soul that connects one’s own to the good. Thumos represents the spirited defense of one’s own characteristic of the animal body, standing for the bristling reaction of an animal in face of a threat or a possible threat. . . . Thumos, like politics, is about one’s own and the good. It is not just one or the other . . . It is about both together and in tension.” Like almost any good, we can become unbalanced in pursuing it; but we can also become unbalanced in undervaluing it. Lynn Redgrave, in that commercial, is expressing thumos; and I say, good for her—and thanks for letting us see it.
“We are called to be global Christians with a global vision, because our God is a global God.”
—John Stott
It occurred to me today, all of a sudden, that I’ve never blogged about Words of HOPE. I’ve served on the Board of Direction since September 2005, but I’ve never so much as mentioned the organization here, nor did I have the link to our website up. (That’s now been rectified.) That’s really too bad, because Words of HOPE is a remarkable and wonderful ministry, and one which should really be much better known around the church in America.Our purpose is captured quite well in our mission statement:
For more than 50 years Words of HOPE has pursued a single, well-defined mission: To proclaim Jesus Christ through broadcasting in the languages of the world’s peoples, seeking with our partners in ministry to build the church by winning the uncommitted to faith in Christ and by encouraging Christians in the life of discipleship.
The only major thing that leaves out is our unblinking focus on working with the indigenous church in the hardest places in this world to reach with the gospel. We don’t go in as missionaries per se; instead, we partner with our brothers and sisters in Christ in places like Iran, Bhutan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia—places where the church is small, where the work of spreading the gospel faces great difficulties, and in many cases where Christians face great resistance and even persecution—to equip and empower them to reach their own people with the good news of Jesus Christ.
We are committed to serving international Christians throughout the world, working with them to enable them to use broadcasting to communicate the gospel to their own peoples, with the goals of winning individuals to faith in Christ, strengthening believers in the life of discipleship, helping existing churches to grow, and establishing new churches where there were none before. In partnership with other mission agencies, we seek to work with and through indigenous organizations and churches, rather than establishing our own.
Broadcasting, and principally radio broadcasting, is our niche, and it’s what we bring to the table for the global church. We do produce significant printed materials, and the Internet is becoming an increasingly important part of our ministry, but radio remains, as it has always been, the main part of our work. As our mission statement puts it,
Our goal is to enable international Christians to produce and air biblically-focused radio programs in their own languages. . . .Our principal focus from the beginning has been the use of radio to communicate the gospel. Radio is universally available; it reaches large numbers of people, including those who are illiterate or living in “closed” areas of the world; and as a word-centered medium it is uniquely suitable for conveying the message of the Bible and its implications for all of life.
For penetrating closed societies (like most Islamic countries), and reaching the poorest parts of the world, where illiteracy is nearly universal (such as Niger), there is no better tool than radio broadcasting, especially as radio is easily the most trusted source for news and information in many places around the world.Words of HOPE is a ministry which grew out of my home denomination, the Reformed Church in America, and is unabashedly Reformed in its founding theology; equally, we’re unabashedly evangelical, committed to proclaiming
the good news that Jesus Christ died for our sins and was raised from the dead according to the Scriptures, and that as the reigning Lord he now offers the forgiveness of sins and the liberating gift of the Spirit to all who repent and believe,
as the Lausanne Covenant (1974) puts it. Finally, we’re committed to an ecumenical and non-sectarian approach,
to the positive proclamation and propagation of what C. S. Lewis called Mere Christianity; that is, the large body of truth that all believing Christians hold in common.
We aren’t interested in reinventing the wheel; rather, we want to find what God is doing around the world by his Spirit, and join in, working with whomever God has raised up to accomplish his purposes, seeking to enable and empower them in the work he has given them. Thus our mission statement concludes,
We totally and gladly depend upon the gracious sustaining and energizing power of the Holy Spirit to be fruitful in this ministry. We gratefully recognize that the Spirit is choosing to work through us, our partners and supporters. We recognize even more our limitations, inadequacies and failures. At the same time we rejoice with firm hope in the sovereign God who blesses our efforts and causes his word to bear fruit.
We’re currently at work in over 40 countries, strengthening the local church around the world in its witness, serving the work of the Kingdom of God in some of the most resistant nations on Earth; and we do it all with a paid staff of twelve and a budget of less than $3 million. It has been said by others familiar with our ministry, and I completely agree, that if you want to put your money to work to reach the world for Jesus Christ, there is no more cost-effective way than to support Words of HOPE. “Good news—no boundaries.” That’s what we’re all about.
I’m a fan of mystery stories, going back a very long way. I remember as a kid sitting in my grandparents’ home reading Grampa’s collection—he had an omnibus edition of Sherlock Holmes, scads of Agatha Christie novels, and probably everything Erle Stanley Gardner and Rex Stout ever wrote. He also had this big blue-dust-jacketed book of true crime stories—it seems to me it might have been a Reader’s Digest book; in retrospect, I’m not sure a child as young as I was should have known who Sam Sheppard was, but at least I turned out OK. (Mostly. I think.)
Anyway, when it comes to reading mysteries, I tend to prefer the Great Detective sort of stories, authors like Christie, Dorothy Sayers, P. D. James, G. K. Chesterton, and (to name someone a bit more obscure these days) Melville Davisson Post; but on TV, I enjoy the current ascendancy of police procedurals quite a bit. (Though I would say that in my book, the CSI series are really more akin to R. Austin Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke stories than to the classic procedural.) One of my favorites—though I don’t think it’s lived up to the promise of its first season—is Cold Case, in part because the show’s premise allows them to move throughout history, and in part because of a superb cast and generally good writing.
That said, I wasn’t all that pleased with last Sunday’s episode, “The Good Death.” It was an agenda episode, pretty much intended as a commercial for euthanasia, and that posed two problems for me. First, it was pretty unsubtle about its agenda; I don’t mind if a story tries to make a point, but I dislike being bludgeoned, even if I agree with the message. Second, in this case, I don’t agree with the message, since I consider euthanasia a barbaric and anti-human practice, even if many who support it do so out of compassionate motives.
In this particular instance, I especially disliked the episode’s subtext, which is that we should allow euthanasia because hospitals just let patients suffer. As a former hospital chaplain, that blindingly white TV hospital with nary a caregiver in sight (except for the nurse who’d been arrested for euthanizing patients, and the doctor whose only function was to give the diagnosis) doesn’t look anything like any of the hospitals I know. In point of fact, the depiction was a shameful libel on our nation’s caregivers. I don’t say all hospitals are perfect, and I would imagine there are those out there that do fall down on the job, but by and large, the doctors and nurses in this country put a great deal of effort into caring for their patients—and in cases of extreme pain, that doesn’t merely include pain control, it begins with it. Clearly, the writers of this episode know little or nothing about hospice care and comfort care—either that or they suppressed what they know in order to make the case for their agenda seem stronger.
The funny thing is, though, that they actually did a pretty good job of defeating their own argument—which is perhaps evidence of the grace of God working its way through the cracks in human intentions. There was, for instance, the closing song (Paul Westerberg’s “Good Day”), which declares, “A good day is any day that you’re alive”—a remarkable affirmation of the value of life in itself to conclude an episode which tried very hard to make a very different point. More significantly, though, the entire structure of the episode undermined its argument. The case for euthanasia rests, philosophically, on the assumption that suffering is an unmitigated evil, unrelievedly bad. Given that, if you aren’t going to be able to live without significant suffering, life isn’t worth living, and you should be allowed to kill yourself—or someone should be allowed to kill you. And yet, over the course of this episode, we were shown a very different reality, as the suffering of the deceased protagonist (whose death Lily Rush and the rest were investigating) proved in fact to be powerfully redemptive. The pain and other effects of a severe brain tumor transformed one of the most selfish and unpleasant characters I’ve ever run across—well, not to put too fine a point on it, back into a human being—bringing him to the point of reconciling with several people he’d hurt, most notably his wife.
It’s not too much to say, looking at this episode, that the cancer was the best thing that ever happened to this guy. His suffering was redemptive; his life was better for the pain he had endured; and yet, from the perspective of the episode, better to kill him (at his request, it must be noted) than to let him suffer any longer. Never mind that had he lived, he might have fully reconciled with his son, thereby allowing the son to heal much sooner from the damage his father had done him through their lives; never mind any of that. Pain hurts, hurting is bad, anything is justified to end it. Except that in that case, wouldn’t it have been better if he’d never gotten sick?