Can you say “personality cult,” boys and girls?

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One of the things I missed last week was the creepy little story of New Jersey elementary-school kids being taught songs in praise of Barack Obama. I’m sorry, that’s just un-American; in this country, we don’t venerate our leaders until they’re safely off the stage, and usually dead. This sort of engineered adulation belongs in places like North Korea, not here. I’m with Tyler Dawn—I’d find this just as creepy and just as nauseating if it had been for President Bush, or President Reagan, or anybody else.

Incidentally, for all the folks who were having hysterics and mocking conservatives for their reaction to the President’s school speech—granted that that reaction was in many instances excessive—stuff like this is the reason for it. It wasn’t that the President was speaking to our kids, it was the suspicion that he wanted to politicize them and turn them into Obamabots—and that the public-school system would, in large part, gladly go along with that agenda—that sent so many people up in flames; and garbage like this only reinforces and aggravates those concerns.

Now, obviously, it’s not likely that this was directly orchestrated by the White House; but it’s all of a piece with the politics-by-personality-cult approach Barack Obama and his campaign have taken all along. It’s the sort of thing that prompted even a liberal like Doug Hagler to complain about the messianic tone of the Obama campaign, which went along with the candidate’s apparent messianic view of his own leadership. This isn’t even the first creepy video this has produced—not by a long shot.

The problem of filtered reality

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All hail the Volokh Conspiracy:

I then said something like—“but it does seem like the overall level of defense is improving all over—I see so many great plays these days . . .” before I recognized how stupid a comment that was. Of course I was seeing more great defensive plays than I had 10 or 20 years before—because 10 or 20 years before there had been no Sportscenter (or equivalent). In 1992 (or whenever exactly this was), I could turn on the TV and catch 20 or 30 minutes of great highlights every night, including 5 or 6 truly spectacular defensive plays; in 1980, or 1960, to see 5 or 6 truly spectacular defensive plays, you had to watch 20 or 25 hours of baseball, minimum. [That’s what ESPN was doing, in effect—watching 10 or 12 games simultaneously and pulling out the highlights]. It was just my mind playing a trick on me; I had unconsciously made a very simple mistake. The way in which I was perceiving the world of baseball had, with Sportscenter, changed fundamentally, but I hadn’t taken that into account. . . .

I call it the ESPN Effect—mistaking filtered reality for reality. We do it a lot. All I hear from my left-leaning friends these days is how crazy people on the right are becoming, and all all I hear from my right-leaning friends is how crazy people on the left are becoming, and everyone, on both sides, seems very eager to provide evidence of the utter lunacy of those on the other side. “Look how crazy they’re becoming over there, on the other side!” is becoming something of a dominant trope, on left and right. It is true that we’re seeing more crazy people doing crazy things on the other side (whichever side that may be, for you) coming across our eyeballs these days. But that’s all filtered reality; it bears no more relationship to reality than the Sportscenter highlights bear to the game of baseball. My very, very strong suspicion is that there has never been a time when there weren’t truly crazy people on all sides of the political spectrum doing their truly crazy things. Maybe 1% or so, or even 0.1%—which is a very large number, when you’re talking about a population of, say, 100 million. They didn’t get through the filters much in the Old Days, but they do now. All this talk about how extreme “the debate” is becoming—how, exactly, does anyone get a bead on what “the debate” really is? In reality?

HT: bearing blog, via my wife

I think David Post has an important point here—though I will note one somewhat countervailing point: the people on the right to whom liberals point are generally folks whom most others on the right, and certainly the leading voices on the right, would also disavow, and consider something of an embarrassment; they are truly a lunatic fringe. As the case of Van Jones demonstrated, and as the President’s ongoing campaign organization keeps demonstrating, the folks conservatives point to on the left are usually people whom liberals consider mainstream, at least until there’s some sort of hue and cry to make them pretend otherwise. That’s why Mark Steyn went so far as to say,

what is odd to me, if you look for example at the way Republicans are always being called on to distance themselves from their so-called lunatic fringe, the pattern here is that on the other side of the aisle, there is a lunatic mainstream. ACORN should not be a respectable group, and should not be anywhere near the United States Census. But as we saw with the Van Jones story, no matter how radical you are, on the left, it’s very easy for the most extreme radical to get right up close to the levers of power in the United States. That is where, unfortunately, that is where Obama’s lived most of his adult life, and that is where most of his associations are.

None of this invalidates Post’s point; but I do think it modifies it somewhat.

Honestly?

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My wife has a good post up on honesty, commenting on a post by MckMama; I think she has a lot of good things to say (which would be one of the many reasons I married her), but I particularly appreciated this:

We want honesty, but we’re not prepared for it when we get it. It’s too raw. Too scary. Too boring. Too threatening. We want to think we understand. Honesty shows us we don’t. We want to think we have the answers. Honesty shows us we don’t. We want the world to be a safe, manageable, controllable place. We know that we ourselves are buffetted and thrown about, but we want to think that someday, somehow, we’ll get to a place of answers. But when we really interact with each other, we discover that none of us is one self-help book or one good sermon, or one inspirational song away from having it all together. We discover that giving or receiving a bellyful of honesty requires humility and commitment far beyond what most of us are willing to give most days. It means saying things like “I’d never thought of that before,” and “I don’t understand, but I’d like to.” It means expecting to find that we’re all sinful, complex, broken people in a sinful, complex, broken world.

Too often, when we say we want honesty, we just want to be voyeurs. Too often, when we get honesty, we try to trim off the edges so that it will fit back in the box. But we were made by a God bigger than we are, who placed us in a world too complex for us to understand. And he made each of us unique. Different. Should it be any surprise to us when other’s individual experiences and stories seem alien to us? When our finite interactions with an infinite God seem too big to handle and comprehend?

Read the whole thing.

Shameless plug o’ the week

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Well, things did in fact slow down after Thursday, but not so’s you’d know it by here, since I haven’t really had the time to write the last couple days. I have, however, been able to bring one of the projects I’ve been working on has come to fruition. Our congregation voted last month to change its name, a vote which was confirmed by our presbytery a week ago yesterday; and as part of all the advertising we’re launching to publicize and build off the name change, our Session voted to lay out the funds to build a new website. I’m proud of them for seeing past the cost to the value of that step.

It’s now up; it isn’t completely done (we still need some more pictures up, and another page or two), but it’s pretty close, and I think it looks really good. Most of that isn’t to my credit (I didn’t design it; we purchased the website and the hosting from a company called Clover, with which I’m quite pleased), and my part of the work will no doubt come in for a fair bit of improvement over the next couple months, but for a start, I’m still quite happy with it. In particular, I’m happy that this website includes an integrated calendar, which will be helpful for us, and that it includes a built-in audio player for uploading sermons.

Which means—and I feel rather silly, but this does make me grin—that I now have sermon audio up. Not much as yet, just the first three sermons of my current series on James (I don’t even have this morning’s up at the moment), but the rest will be coming as I can get it uploaded. The quality, alas, isn’t as good as I could wish, since the congregation is still catching up on the technology, but it’s workable. Which is progress, and I’m pleased.

The Law of the Kingdom

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(Leviticus 19:15-18; James 1:9-12, James 1:27-2:13)

One of the great temptations we face in this world is the temptation to go along to get along, to compromise and cut our deal with the powers that be rather than standing up against them for truth. We talked about this back in the spring as we were listening to Isaiah, about the temptation for the Jews in captivity in Babylon to give up on being Jews and just become Babylonians. After all, we don’t want trouble, and if you stand out, you’re likely to get trouble—particularly if you stand out because you’re saying “no” when somebody wants you to say “yes.” Much easier just to tell people what they want to hear and let them do what they want—that’s also why so many families are run by the kids—than it is to stand up for what’s right and face them down.

This is, of course, an age-old issue; as long as there have been rich and powerful people, there’s been the temptation for others to kowtow to them in an effort to curry favor with them. From the world’s perspective, that makes all kinds of sense: you do what you can to try to get in good with the rich and the powerful, doing nice things for them in hopes that they’ll do nice things for you in return, or at least not do bad things to you. From God’s perspective, however, that sort of behavior is nonsense; it’s judging people on the basis of all the wrong reasons, out of all the wrong motives, and you end up allying yourself with your oppressors in hopes of shifting the oppression off your shoulders and on to someone else’s. Which is not only despicable, it’s foolish. That’s why James asks, “Why do you favor the rich? Aren’t they the ones who oppress you? Aren’t they the ones who drag you into court and blaspheme against the name of Christ? Why would you favor them over the poor—why would you join with them in oppressing others?”

Now, I said a few weeks ago that there are two big themes in the book of James. One, there are two ways we can follow, the way of friendship with the world and the way of friendship with God, and they’re mutually exclusive. Two, the way of friendship with God makes no sense to the world; to understand it, we need a new point of view. We need to see ourselves primarily not as people of this world, but as people of the next—as those who belong to God, who are citizens of his country living in this one. In this world, the poor don’t much matter. You can help them, or you can exploit them; one might be more admirable than the other, but in the end it’s no more significant than you want it to be. They just aren’t important to society. The rich, by contrast, matter. They have influence, they have power, they have significance, and so of course you defer to them, and of course you give them special treatment, because they’re the ones who can help you or hurt you. What they think of you matters; what the poor think of you . . . doesn’t.

Such is how much of the world sees things, but it’s not how God sees things; when the church is looking at life that way, something’s wrong, and it needs to be fixed. So James holds up a mirror to them—the mirror of the royal law, which is to say, of the law of the Kingdom of God—to help them see themselves from God’s point of view, from the perspective of faith. We aren’t called to be people of this world, doing what we need to do to get ahead in this world; that’s not what it means to be doers of the word, nor is it any way to live a life that’s even remotely Christian. Instead, we’re called to be people of the Kingdom of God, living out the life of the kingdom in this world, and so bearing witness to Jesus Christ; which means making our decisions not on the basis of what will advance our careers, or make us more money, or give us more enjoyment, or help keep us safe, but on the basis of what Jesus wants us to do and how he wants us to live.

This isn’t easy. We look at the situation James describes, and the fact is, we understand it. Poor people don’t do much for the budget, and they don’t tend to attract people who will, and if you have someone walk in who hasn’t washed themselves in two weeks or their clothes in three—that being the case James is talking about—they aren’t going to be all that pleasant to have around. Most middle- and upper-class folk like the idea of helping the poor—at a distance; sharing a pew with them is often quite something else again. If a rich person shows up, though, that’s a very different matter. After all, if they like you, they just might decide to write you a nice fat check, and boom! your church budget is in the black for the year; and if they really like you, maybe they keep coming, and maybe they bring a friend or two, and maybe all of a sudden there’s money to put in a new audiovisual system, or remodel the basement, or maybe even put up a nice new addition to the building. Granted, that’s a lot of “maybe”s, but still, it’s an appealing vision—one which has sidetracked all too many churches.

To this, James says two things. First, he says, just because these people are poor in the world’s eyes doesn’t mean that’s how they look in God’s eyes, or how we should see them; from the perspective of faith, they’re rich. Why? Because God has chosen them to be heirs of his kingdom. They may not have the wealth of this world, but that’s of no real importance, for worldly riches don’t last; hard times come, and they vanish, or death comes, and they are left behind. “The rich will disappear like a flower in the field,” says James; “in the midst of a busy life, they will wither away.” The poor and lowly, on the other hand, God has chosen to exalt, partly as a display of his power and partly be-cause the poor have less to insulate them from God. Those who are rich can easily come to believe that they don’t need God, that they can do just fine on their own; poverty tends to strip away such illusions. As such, to honor the rich above the poor will often be to dishonor those whom God has honored, and vice versa.

Second, James tells us, “If you favor the rich over the poor, you’re committing a sin. What does the word of God say? ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ When Jesus was asked to summarize the Law, he said, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ And when the Scripture says ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’ part of what it means is, ‘You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but you shall judge your neighbor with justice.’” Religion that plays favorites, and especially that favors the rich over the poor, is worthless, and no thing of God, for it’s directly opposed to the law of love.

Now, in response to this, the temptation is to say, “Well, it’s no big deal—it’s just one little sin; I’m doing everything else OK, so I don’t need to worry about it.” To that, James says, it doesn’t work that way: “Whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.” This is an extraordinary statement, and one which should be taken completely seriously; there is no such thing as being mostly innocent before God. As the Venerable Bede, an eighth-century British saint who was a formidable biblical scholar and medieval scientist, put it, if we practice partiality—if we play favorites between one person and another, one group of people and another—then it’s the same as if we had committed adultery or murder.

The reason for this is that God’s law isn’t just a bunch of disconnected commands, though that’s how we tend to think of it. It isn’t like human laws, where if you get caught breaking a particular law, you’re punished for breaking that particular law, and that law only. Instead, the law of God is a whole, it’s all of a piece—it’s the imperative to love God and others as he loves us, with our whole being—and any sin breaks that whole law. You’ll hear people argue sometimes over whether some sins are worse than others; one side will point to the differing punishments assigned to various sins in the Old Testament, while the other will maintain that we can’t call some sins worse than others because that would mean calling some sinners worse than others. The truth of the matter is, both sides are right; yes, some sins clearly are worse than others, but none of us can claim to be any better than anyone else, because we’ve all broken the law of God, and we’re all accountable for all of it. The weight of the whole law of God rests across all our shoulders, and no strength of ours can lift it.

This is why James commands us, “So speak and so act as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty, for judgment will be merciless to those who have not shown mercy.” We have no hope, except by the mercy of God; we have no hope, except in the love of God. We can’t satisfy his law on our own, but only by the grace of God in Christ, who took on himself the punishment for our sin; it’s only in Christ that there is anything for any of us save the most merciless judgment. And—here’s the key—we need to see ourselves accordingly, and to treat others accordingly. Our lives rest on the love and mercy and grace of God, which we do not and will never deserve, and so we must show love and grace and mercy to others, whether they deserve it or not. We must treat others with love and serve them with grace no matter whether we think they have it coming, or whether they will ever be able to do anything for us in return, because we need to show others the mercy we have received. To those who refuse to show mercy, there remains no mercy, but only the hard edge of judgment; but to those who show mercy, to those who share the love and grace we have received, mercy wins out over judgment.

This isn’t always easy, because it often runs against the grain, not only of our own expectations, but of those around us. James knew that, and he knew what he was saying. He was in Jerusalem, where he was the leader of the church, but he wrote to Christians across the Roman Empire, living in the Roman culture and playing by Roman rules; and for all the advantages we noted to playing favorites in our society, they were far, far greater in that one. You see, Roman society was completely stratified by wealth; everything depended on your rank—where you could live, what you could do, everything—and your rank depended on your net worth. The law specified what your net worth had to be to qualify for a given rank. The rich and powerful would serve as patrons, and their clients would have to show up at the patron’s house first thing in the morning, every morning, to pay them homage and see if there were any tasks their patron wished to assign them. Thus for the rich in Roman society, their wealth automatically meant they could tell people what to do and expect to have it done immediately; because they were rich, they got what they wanted, when they wanted it, and that was all there was to it.

To buck this, then, as James called the early church to do, meant crossing the expectations of their culture, and of their wealthy members, of how the rich were to be treated; it meant rejecting the values of a society that honored people based on how much money they had, and choosing to honor people instead based on a very different standard, one which their culture not only would not understand but in fact would find offensive. It meant rejecting the expectation that service was a duty to be given to the rich and powerful simply because they were rich and powerful, and to hold up instead the Christian responsibility to serve the poor, the powerless and the needy. It meant rejecting the lordship of the proud and the mighty, and honoring as Lord the humble crucified Christ. It meant turning away from a social order that was all about power—as most human social orders are—and embracing a different order, one which is all about love, and mercy, and service. It meant telling their world, “We don’t follow you anymore—we don’t serve you anymore,” turning their back on it to follow Christ instead, no matter what. May we be just as committed.

Just a quick note

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to prove I’m still alive . . . this week has been absolutely crazy; I’ve been head-down in church stuff, and what energy I’ve had left over from that has gone to family. I think after today, things should slow down a bit, though. I feel like the prairie dog crouching in the hole, wondering if it’s safe to stick his head up.

On a random note, one of the businesses I pass on my way to work is a storage company, one of the local places to rent storage lockers. Out front this last week or so they’ve had one of those rented message boards with the built-in arrows; the arrow has been pointing to one of their buildings, and the message reads, “FUTURE HOME OF HIDDEN TREASURES.” Maybe it’s just me, but if I had a storage locker there, I’d be a little worried . . .

On the socialism of big-time sports and the distribution of freedom

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I recently ran across a fascinating article by Brian Burke at Advanced NFL Stats on the power law. He uses it specifically with respect to such things as coaching tenure and distribution of Pro Bowl selections in the NFL, but along the way he uses such things as the financial crisis that hit last fall to illustrate and explain the power law, and that’s what makes the article interesting (at least to me). For instance, Burke writes,

Our current financial crisis was in part caused by a fundamentally wrong assumption about risk distributions in the debt markets. An oversimplified explanation is that investment companies made lucrative but risky investments, and then hedged against their failure by buying insurance in the form of complex derivatives in case they went bust. These companies thought that they had cracked the code and solved the problem of risk once and for all. (One of the reasons the company AIG is central to the problem is that it’s the company that led the selling of all that insurance.)

The problem was that the insurance was priced based on an assumption of bell curve distributions of market risk. A model known as the Correlated Gaussian Copula was developed by a Chinese mathematician named Li, and it was widely used throughout the financial industry for measuring and pricing risk. Unfortunately, financial markets act more like earthquakes than normally distributed phenomena like rainfall or human height. There are lots of minor fluctuations but occasionally the bottom drops out. The power law distribution has a ‘fatter tail’ at the extremes than the normal distribution, meaning extreme outcomes are considerably more likely.

As Burke explains, power law distributions tend to arise with networks, especially complex, self-organizing ones; thus, he writes,

Power law distributions are noteworthy because they are the signatures of mature self-organizing complex systems. It’s also a feature of ‘rich-get-richer’ systems. So when we see power law distributions, we can make some qualitative inferences about the system we’re observing. For example, the BCS system is certainly a rich-get-richer organization. We can even quantify just how hierarchical it is and how difficult it is for second-tier teams to break into the elite.

The problem with the BCS isn’t just that it’s a rich-get-richer system. That’s just the natural way of the world. Even in supposedly ‘egalitarian’ systems like socialism, the rich still get richer. The difference is that initial outcomes in socialist systems are based primarily on one’s political connections, where in a free market they tend to be based on how productive or innovative one is. The problem is that the elite ‘nodes’ of the BCS have colluded to preserve their status on top, preventing a natural churn in who the elite are.

This is, among other things, an excellent succinct explanation of why socialism doesn’t produce the beneficial equality it promises: it actually increases the opportunities for elites to collude to preserve their status on top. The freer the market, the freer the society, the fewer levers they have to do so and the more opportunity there are for upstarts to upstage them and push them out of the way. The more controlled the market, the more controlled the society, the more levers the elites have, and the more ways and opportunities they have to use that control to keep anyone from breaking into their circle and taking their place.

Receive with meekness

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Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. Therefore put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.

—James 1:19-21 (ESV)

The world tells us, if you want to understand yourself, if you want to know yourself, look at yourself—look at your desires, your impulses, your strengths, your weaknesses, and go from there. But while all of that is valuable, the Bible tells us we need to begin not with ourselves, but with the God who made us. If we have indeed been given birth through God’s word of truth, then to know who we are and how we should live, we need to under-stand that word of truth; which is to say, we need to stand under it, to place ourselves in position to receive and accept it. We must be quick to listen and slow to speak; we must receive and absorb the word of God, chew on it and swallow it and let it change us, rather than spitting it out whenever we don’t care for the taste.

Too often, however, we reverse this—we’re slow to listen and quick to speak. Too often we see ourselves not as the receiver but as the judge, standing over the word of truth to critique it. There are, for instance, those who feel they have the right to disregard or reject the parts of Scripture that say things they don’t like; but really, you can’t do that without rejecting all of Scripture, because the Bible itself won’t let you do that. Once you start doing that, you have rejected the word of God as the word of truth, and have instead set it up as something to be used when convenient to support what you already believe, or would like to believe. Others of us, though we might not go quite that far, still have something of that spirit in us as we read the word—we just resist more subtly, is all.

Now, none of this is to say that we have to believe everything anyone tells us is biblical; clearly, there are a lot of bad interpretations floating around out there along with the good ones. It is, however, to say three things. First, even when confronted with a view of Scripture which we think is false, we should listen carefully, to see if perhaps there’s a grain of truth to it which we haven’t considered; which is often the case. It’s only the arguments opposed to our own, after all, which can show us the flaws in our own views. Second, we aren’t free to resolve our issues or problems by throwing out the Scripture, for to do that is to hush the voice of God in our lives. Third, in all of this, we must be slow to anger, as James says, for human anger does not produce the righteousness of God. Anger over disagreements, anger over being challenged, does not lead to right relationships, either with God or with each other, and must be set aside in the normal course of life. Therefore, James says, we must put aside everything in us that resists the word of truth and receive it meekly—we have already been given it, but we must open our hearts and welcome it, and the transformation it brings.

(Excerpted from “The Poem of Your Life”)

Playing politics with the troops

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Check this out:

Escalation is a bad idea. The Democrats backed themselves into defending the idea of Afghanistan being The Good War because they felt they needed to prove their macho bonafides when they called for withdrawal from Iraq. Nobody asked too many questions sat the time, including me. But none of us should forget that it was a political strategy, not a serious foreign policy.

There have been many campaign promises “adjusted” since the election. There is no reason that the administration should feel any more bound to what they said about this than all the other committments it has blithely turned aside in the interest of “pragmatism.”

Jim Geraghty, commenting on this, writes,

The base of the Democratic party is fundamentally pacifist and isolationist and has extraordinary, although not complete, leverage over this White House. They want the rest of the world to go away so we can focus on creating the perfect health-care system. . . .

We now know liberal bloggers never meant what they wrote about Afghanistan. We will soon know if the president meant anything he said about that war on the campaign trail.

On that, the Anchoress is skeptical. Sure, six months ago, the President said that the war in Afghanistan is one we must win and could easily lose, that it would be a Very Bad Thing if we did, and thus that we needed to send more troops and push harder; now, though, he has Secretary of State Clinton telling our military commanders that we don’t need to send more troops because the situation really isn’t that bad. (Umm, politicians with no military training or experience who are half a world away from the combat zones interfering with the military commanders on the scene . . . I thought the idea was not to have another Vietnam. Was I wrong?) As the Anchoress sums it all up,

The Afghan war, the “good” war, the “war that needs winning” was—it turns out—just one more hammer meant to beat up Bush.

Now, the Anchoress sounds mostly resigned about this, I think because she never expected anything better out of the Left. Others, though, are less so; Ace, for one, is utterly furious:

But none of us should forget that it was a political strategy, not a serious foreign policy.

You claimed to support a war in which American soldiers were fighting and dying, leaving friends and limbs on the battlefield, as a cynical political strategy?

You . . . um . . . voiced support of a real serious-as-death war to cadge votes out of a duped public?

We won’t forget, champ. And we won’t let you forget, either.

Again we see a leftist projecting his pathological darkness on to others. They accused Bush of fighting wars for this very reason. And now, when it’s safe to say so (they think), they concede: We supported a war for the reason we accused Bush of doing so for 8 years.

I think Ace is right to be furious at the sickening dishonesty, hypocrisy and cynicism evident here, as these people berated George W. Bush to high heaven for “playing politics with people’s lives” and “using war for political gain” even as—indeed, as the very act of—doing the exact same thing. I agree, if that’s what President Bush was doing (and I didn’t and don’t agree that it was, either by intent or in practice, which is why I supported him), it was reprehensible; but doesn’t that make his critics, who are now admitting to doing so, at least as reprehensible?

Still, I don’t have the energy even to reach, let alone to sustain, Ace’s level of anger; in large part, I suppose, because I too never expected anything better. It would have been nice to believe that President Bush’s critics were all operating out of the degree of moral seriousness and geopolitical awareness they claimed; but in truth, the only ones I ever believed to be sincere were the ones (like Doug Hagler, I believe) who were just as opposed to Afghanistan as to Iraq. I thought (and still think) they were wrong and unwise, but I trusted them to be honest, as I did not trust the posers. As such, I am not surprised, nor even truly dismayed, for the reality merely matches my expectations.