Measuring religious decline is a tricky business.  How can we measure abstract ideas, principles, and so on?  Well, one helpful guide is to try and see if anything makes a move to displace an idea.

Some interesting but disheartening stuff from Marginal Revolution confirms that politics may be so divisive because politics is becoming a new religion.  By that I mean, politics is becoming the bell-weather by which many make their most important decisions.

In 1960, 5 percent of Republicans and 4 percent of Democrats said that they would feel “displeased” if their son or daughter married outside their political party. By 2010, those numbers had reached 49 percent and 33 percent. Republicans have been found to like Democrats less than they like people on welfare or gays and lesbians. Democrats dislike Republicans more than they dislike big business.

To test for political prejudice, Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood, political scientists at Stanford University, conducted a large-scale implicit association test with 2,000 adults. They found people’s political bias to be much larger than their racial bias. When Democrats see “joy,” it’s much easier for them to click on a corner that says “Democratic” and “good” than on one that says “Republican” and “good.”

To find out whether such attitudes predict behavior, Iyengar and Westwood undertook a follow-up study. They asked more than 1,000 people to look at the resumes of several high-school seniors and say which ones should be awarded a scholarship. Some of these resumes contained racial cues (“president of the African American Student Association”) while others had political ones (“president of the Young Republicans”).

Race mattered. African-American participants preferred the African-American candidates 73 percent to 27 percent. Whites showed a modest preference for African-American candidates, as well, though by a significantly smaller margin. But partisanship made a much bigger difference. Both Democrats and Republicans selected their in-party candidate about 80 percent of the time.

These findings remind of Toynbee’s words,

A crushing victory of Science over Religion would be a disaster, for if Science succeeded in expelling the Higher Religions from the human heart, she would not be able to prevent the lower religions from taking their place (Matt. 12:43-45).

We need not call politics part of the “victory of Science” per se to see the similarities.

If we continue the trends outlined in the study above, politics will become almost tribal, and little will then separate us from barbarism.  De Tocqueville’s fears about the tyranny of the majority may then come fully home to roost.

The two greatest (in my opinion) theologians of the Church, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, had different visions of political life for Christians.  Augustine believed the “City of God” operated along different lines than the “City of Man.”  While Christians can potentially live at peace with the City of Man, the two really have nothing to do with each other.  Christians should not fool themselves into thinking that they can accomplish meaningful redemptive acts operating within the City of Man.  He writes,

When these two cities began to run their course by a series of deaths and births, the citizen of this world was the first-born, and after him the stranger in this world . . .

Accordingly, it is recorded of Cain that he built a city, (Genesis 4:17) but Abel, being a sojourner, built none. For the city of the saints is above, although here below it begets citizens, in whom it sojourns till the time of its reign arrives . . .

And again,

. . . it has come to pass that the two cities could not have common laws of religion, and that the heavenly city has been compelled in this matter to dissent, and to become obnoxious to those who think differently, and to stand the brunt of their anger and hatred and persecutions, except in so far as the minds of their enemies have been alarmed by the multitude of the Christians and quelled by the manifest protection of God accorded to them. This heavenly city, then, while it sojourns on earth, calls citizens out of all nations, and gathers together a society of pilgrims of all languages, not scrupling about diversities in the manners, laws, and institutions whereby earthly peace is secured and maintained, but recognizing that, however various these are, they all tend to one and the same end of earthly peace. It therefore is so far from rescinding and abolishing these diversities, that it even preserves and adopts them, so long only as no hindrance to the worship of the one supreme and true God is thus introduced. Even the heavenly city, therefore, while in its state of pilgrimage, avails itself of the peace of earth, and, so far as it can without injuring faith and godliness, desires and maintains a common agreement among men regarding the acquisition of the necessaries of life, and makes this earthly peace bear upon the peace of heaven; for this alone can be truly called and esteemed the peace of the reasonable creatures, consisting as it does in the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God and of one another in God.

Aquinas saw more hope for integration of the Christian and political life.  With Aristotle, he saw governments as natural to life together.  We would still have something akin to government even if we lived without sin, for government is mainly about rightly ordering our life together, just as God rightly orders the orbits of planets.

Aquinas and Augustine complement each other in some parts and appear exclusive in others.  Their visions of government differ fundamentally, but the Church can take counsel from both.  Perhaps the model we adopt should depend on the context.  Augustine wrote in the waning days of the Roman Empire when a stark contrast between pagan and Christian could easily be seen.  Official power in Rome came with all the necessary attendant pagan trappings.  Rome dedicated itself to earthly glory.  In this environment more spiritual and even physical separation of Christians from government might be warranted.

Aquinas wrote in a much different time, when the overwhelming majority of people accepted key Christian doctrines and exceptions.  Some kings and nobles may not have been Christians themselves, but the hypothetical possibility of applying Christian principles to governance existed.  Thus, Christians could “use” the state more effectively and with less spiritual risk in his day.

We should ask which of these two contexts most fits our current situation.*

I recently attempted to read Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks.  After Book III or thereabouts I put in down in frustration.  I just could not keep up with all of the Hingest’s killing the Umvold’s marrying the Griselda’s.  I got lost in the maze.  I mentioned my frustration to a colleague and superior medievalist.  He replied along the lines of, “Of course those parts are confusing — Gregory doesn’t care about politics.  He’s really interested in what’s happening with the Church.  That’s where he focuses his attention and does his best writing.”  With this insight I plan on trying Gregory again sometime.

The time may have arrived for the American Church to follow Gregory’s lead, not just for our sake, but for the sake of those around us.

*We should think that Augustine preached a withdrawal from civic life altogether, or that he advocated for Christian “holy huddles.”  Rather, I see Augustine advocating an approach that would help the Church maintain its salty taste.  We shouldn’t enter games where the rules are by design stacked against the God’s command to love one another, to consider others better than ourselves.  Every Congressman, Senator, and President must think primarily of their base.  Every negotiation, every law (so it appears) is formed not from trust but from negotiating partners that start with an untenable position and then give grudgingly.

Looking back on my childhood, it appears I grew up in the golden age of Redskins fandom.  From 1981-1992 we won 3 Super Bowls, played in another, and had many other playoff runs.  But that whole period seems to be not just a golden era for me and my team but the entire NFL.  During that time (especially if we extend it a bit deeper into Paul Tagliabue’s term as commissioner) the NFL rose from second fiddle to domination of the sports landscape.  But these days I’m nowhere near the rabid fan I used to be, and I’m sure many factors contribute to this.  I know I’m not the only one. Grantland’s Bill Simmons wrote a strange article calling the NFL all kinds of evil and comparing it at one point to slavery.  But then he also expends thousands of words and numerous podcast hours discussing, analyzing, and enjoying the game.^  We seem to occupy an uncertain place.  What exactly do we think the NFL is?  What do we want it to be?  I thought about this from a perspective of Greek and Roman historians and wondered if we might find some parallels.

We can start classical historiography in some ways with Aeschylus.  He wrote no histories, but his plays interpreted the history of Athens and gave them a mental framework for them to view their place in the world.  I have not read many but it appears that they all celebrate the glory that is Athens.  His work has all the admirable confidence/lack of perspective of a 20 year old ready to tackle the world.

By Aeschylus’ death ca. 445 B.C. we have the Father of History, Herodotus, on the scene.  His curiosity leads him to travel far and wide.  He too praises Athens, but it comes within a more muted, almost ecumenical context.  Amongst all the different people Herodotus sees hubris always lurking, even for Athens itself.  By the time Thucydides writes (ca. 410 B.C.?) he openly questions the whole Athenian project.  Xenophon, though a lesser writer than anyone aforementioned, continues that demolition process in his work after the Peloponnesian War (404 B.C.).

Roman historians have similar patterns.  Polybius writes his histories ca. 140(?) B.C. and most everything in his work highlights Rome’s meteoric rise and superiority between 264-146 B.C.  But even he hints at the potentially inevitable cycle of change within civilizations may catch up to Rome at some point.  Livy comes next, and the glory of Rome dominates his work. But for him Rome’s greatness lay in the past, not the future.  Tacitus (ca. 90 A.D.) gives Rome some tough questions in his “Annals” and other works. Then Appian (ca. 130? A.D.) looks back at Rome’s past not as a golden age but as an era prone to violence and greed.  Perhaps some might have called him a “revisionist” historian in his day.  By the time we get to Ammelianus (ca. 375 A.D.) no one buys into Rome anymore.

I think the NFL may reside somewhere in the Polybius/Livy period.  Most commentators have an uneasy sense that a cold wind blows, but others still talk of football as “America’s game, a man’s game,” and so on.  Others might put it in the Tacitus/Appian phase, where perhaps primarily because of concussions we call our whole past into question.  Our confusion over football might mirror  our confusion evidenced in other aspects of our culture.  In many action movies either a) our own government (or some part of it), or b) one of our corporations is the main enemy.  Strategically, Obama perfectly typifies our confusion about our role internationally that persists long after Bush era.

Once we figure out football, will other political and cultural questions will fall into place?  Most likely not, but one can hope.

Dave

^In this article Simmons (whom I usually like) displays a common lazy habit of mind we often apply to major powers.  We exaggerate their reach and blame them for everything, assuming that they can fix anything they wish.  We see some other countries having this attitude towards the U.S.  The powerful only have to will it, and it is so.  Some feel that having power magically absolves anyone of human finitude, human folly, and so on.  I call this habit lazy because it prevents us from looking at other causes — it’s too easy, and it often absolves us of personal responsibility.  So Simmons blames Goodell for a gaffe made by one announcer regarding a sponsor.  Simmons naturally assumes that Goodell must not have been clear enough to the announcers in his instructions. Is it possible that he did communicate clearly and someone either forgot or paid no attention?  I don’t like Goodell either but this goes too far.  He can’t be blamed for everything.

I’m glad I don’t teach American Literature for many reasons, one of which is that I never have to teach Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter.  I have no problem going on record stating that the book is not great literature.  I would go so far as to say in fact that it is bad literature.  I suppose some might argue that we should teach it nevertheless in order to get a flavor of the time-period.  Now, I am no literature teacher, but as I say on occasion, ignorance of subject is no excuse for not having an opinion about it. So I’ll make another hapless decree and say that if you want to get a flavor of the times, many better ways exist than to waste your time reading bad literature.

For the Scarlet Letter Hawthorne picked a theme and perhaps even a plot worthy of great literature.  But his overblown style and the obsessive introspection of his narration make the reading laborious.  Different folks have different strokes, but I would have hard time relating to someone “who just loved the Scarlet Letter.”  As my wife stated, who also teaches literature, “Hawthorne writes with a hammer, not a pen,” and, “He writes like a lawyer, not a novelist.”  As with Oswald Spengler, I did the “random page” experiment and found this at the beginning of chapter six:

Governor Bellingham, in a loose gown and easy cap,–such as elderly gentlemen love to indue themselves with, in their domestic privacy,–walked foremost, and appeared to be showing off his estate, and extirpating on his projected improvements. . . . The impression made by his aspect, so rigid and severe, and frost-bitten with more than autumnal age, was hardly in keeping with the appliances of worldly enjoyment wherewith he had evidently done his utmost to surround himself.  But is an error to suppose that our grave forefathers–though accustomed to speak and think of human existence as merely of trial and warfare, and though unfeignedly prepared to sacrifice goods and life and the behest of duty–made it a matter of conscience to reject such means of comfort or even luxury, as lay fairly within their grasp.

I hope you are not as tired reading it as I am typing it.  One critic wrote that, “If the reader isn’t careful, a character can be changed dramatically in two or three pages . . .” and I don’t think she meant it as a compliment.

I recently read Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy and found myself struck by some similar feelings as when reading the Scarlet Letter.  Especially in “The Agamemnon”  (the first part of the trilogy) we have the same somewhat restless overdone style.  For example . . .

Oh welcome, you blaze in the night, a light as if of day, you harbinger of many a choral dance in Argos in thanksgiving for this glad event!  What ho!  What ho!  To Agamemnon’s queen I thus cry aloud the signal to rise from her bed, and as quickly as she can to lift up her palace halls a shout of joy in welcome of this fire.  And I will make an overture to with a dance upon my own account; for my lord’s lucky roll I shall count to my own score, now that this beacon has thrown me triple six.

So yes, perhaps he adds too much mustard, but the language has something spirited about it (instead of Hawthorne’s superior snootiness), and I can’t help but smile at the translator’s great “triple six” phrase.  But then later the language still remains the same no matter who talks, no matter the reason . . .

Loud rang the battle-cry they uttered in their rage, just as eagles scream which, in lonely grief for their brood, rowing with the oars of their wings, wheel high over their bed, because they have lost the toil of guarding their nursling’s nest.

And so on, throughout the whole play.  The language stirs the blood at first, and then the blood begs to rest a while.

Just as Hawthorne wrote at a time when the concept of “American Literature” just was taking shape, Aeschylus wrote at a time when Greek drama had just began in any formal sense, and this may account for some of their similarities.  Aeschylus’ continuous use of the heroic style may rob his characters of depth, but at least he enjoys his craft and his story.  Many vastly superior Greek dramas exist, but I suppose one must start somewhere.

Perhaps when a person starts out, one can’t help but exaggerate for effect.  And perhaps the same holds true for literature as well.  But Hawthorne had plenty of other examples of great writers at his fingertips, whereas Aeschylus pioneered new ground.  If we considered no other reason, this makes the Oresteia a much greater work than The Scarlet Letter.  I easily forgive and even applaud Aeschylus, but even after all these years I can’t say the same about Hawthorne.

For possible similar themes in Chinese films, see here.

I am reposting the original post on traffic cameras from several months ago based on events in Ferguson.  But one does not have to agree with the violence to understand that what happened has a deep context.  I do think that Alex Tabbarrok of Marginal Revolution is on to something when he links the uprising in Ferguson in part with the problem of ciies using criminal activity to fund their budgets.

He writes,

Ferguson is a city located in northern St. Louis County with 21,203 residents living in 8,192 households. The majority (67%) of residents are African-American…22% of residents live below the poverty level.

…Despite Ferguson’s relative poverty, fines and court fees comprise the second largest source of revenue for the city, a total of $2,635,400. In 2013, the Ferguson Municipal Court disposed of 24,532 warrants and 12,018 cases, or about 3 warrants and 1.5 cases per household.

As Tabarrok comments,

You get numbers like this from %$!@ arrests for jaywalking and constant “low level harassment involving traffic stops, court appearances, high fines, and the threat of jail for failure to pay.”

The full post is here, and worth 3 minutes of your time.  I think the link between traffic cameras and Ferguson are the inherent problems embedded within governments seeking to profit from crime.  It opens the door to a whirlwind of abuses and unintended consequences.

And now, the original traffic camera post . . .

I have never been a fan of traffic cameras.  I suppose that they might hypothetically serve a good purpose at a very limited number of places, such as schools and dangerous intersections.  Maybe.  Hypothetically.

But I find their proliferation, along with the growth of the security-through-technology trend, disturbing for a variety of reasons.

Many hope and believe that the cameras will make our roads safer, but we should realize that the stated purpose may also involve raising revenue.  While I have no love for D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray’s assertion that he would like to see many more cameras in D.C., he at least had the openness to admit that the traffic cameras would go a long way towards balancing the budget.

There is a baseness, a dullness (for lack of a better word), and a real potential for the state to become the ultimate prig* when it uses people’s misdeeds to raise money.  Can we not create or build anything anymore?   Granted, this argument is in the end an “aesthetic” one and can’t be measured.  You feel it or you don’t.  But there are some parallels in other areas of life.  We know that lotteries tend to work against the poor, but states use them to raise money for schools or other social programs.  The state must ask itself, “Do we want people to play the lottery or not?”

We know the detrimental impact of institutionalized gambling but many states use slot machines to raise revenue.  I remember visiting a casino years ago, and there are few sights more depressing in my memory than seeing the blank faces of the “slot jockeys” mechanically pulling the lever time after time.  Maybe the state shouldn’t ban such behavior, but I am not comfortable with them profiting from it either.

The whole idea of a “vice tax” is a very old one, but seems to cut against the very idea of civil government’s purpose in creating a social order that discourages bad behavior.  Perhaps there is some room for a detterence role in these kinds of taxes.  Yet there is the very real possibility that states who rely on such things to raise money and actually balance budgets may want people to engage in those behaviors.

If counties want to use traffic cameras to help their budgets, do they want motorists to speed or not?  Do they, in fact, need motorists to speed to balance the books?  If we answer “yes,” then we only have a small leap to envision the state manipulating speed limits, roads, intersections, etc. to make sure they meet their quota.

But many will say that these arguments reside in the pure hypothetical and will want more concrete objections.

The ACLU has a good and brief piece here detailing their objections to speed cameras, arguing among other things that they violate the principle of “innocent until proven guilty.”  Traffic cameras automatically suppose that the owner of the car is driving the car, a reasonable though not absolute assumption.  But it you are not driving the car the burden is upon you to prove your innocence.  This burden would be quite unjust especially for someone from out of town.  If the fine was, say, $60 it would cost much more than that for the car owner from another locale to come to court and prove he was not driving.  He will simply pay the fine.  We understand that no perfect criminal justice system exists, and that some innocent people will be convicted unjustly.  But we should not set up a system where an unjust result is practically guaranteed on occasion.

Debate also exists as to how much safer traffic cameras actually make roads.  Wired Magazine cites this study showing how cameras at intersections have actually increased accidents.  Others counter that we can accept an increase  of “fender-benders” to decrease fatalities.  I agree, but that that assumes a false dilemma.  Increasing the length of time for yellow lights, for example, might accomplish the same purpose, and while a reckless drunk driver might not heed a longer yellow, neither would they heed traffic cameras.  Marginal Revolution

I trust I am no conspiracy theorist, but my final objection does involve the slippery-slope.  The Washington Post’s Michael Rosenwald  wrote a piece about Prince George’s County response to vandalism of its cameras:

They put up a cameras to monitor the camera.  

And from Marginal Revolution, this recent piece tells of some places shortening yellow lights for cash.

For the cost of the cameras the county could have instead hired a police officers to monitor the intersections instead.  And this gets to my final objection.  We should have no interest in contracting out our security to machines.  One can appeal to a police officer, and police often come from the communities in which they work.  Their judgments are fallible, yes, but when they make poor judgments they can be held accountable, unlike machines.

Thus ends my mild attack.  But maybe both sides are wrong when it comes to solving traffic problems.  Maybe we need an entirely new approach. . .

*Some years ago a friend of mine was driving south on Rt. 29 at night in a county that will remain nameless.  He received a citation for “Failure to Dim” (!) his headlights.   Of course the ticket itself was about $30, but add a $55 processing fee, and you have a very expensive “Failure to Dim.”

It turns out that this county raises a good portion of its revenue through traffic citations.  Considering that he was driving a rental car (he lives in the mid-west) and would certainly not return to challenge the citation in court, well, things begin to add up.

The new James Brown biopic debuted recently.  I don’t have much interest in the movie, as on the surface it looks a lot like Ray and Walk the Line.  Steven Hyden encapsulated my thoughts when he wrote,

Like all biopics, Get on Up inserts the idea of a famous icon into a classic melodrama story line. It’s like making Terms of Endearmentabout Batman. It never really works, but Hollywood never tires of trying anyway, in part because audiences always seem to show up, in spite of already having seen this movie many, many times.

My interest in James Brown got renewed, though not so much by the movie itself, but a particular review I read.

I usually like what Grantland’s Wesley Morris has to say about film, but not this time.  In reviewing the film Morris reduces Brown’s music and stage act to, “the sex, basically.”  Now I won’t deny that an artist who had a hit album/song called “Sex Machine” wasn’t talking about sex in his songs.  But I strongly object to reducing his music to sex, even the song “Sex Machine.”

I can easily forgive Morris’ mistake because it’s so common to our culture.  We have elevated the physical experience of sex as the proper “end” of human experience, and this has cast us adrift on a host of issues plaguing our society.  We miss the transcendent pointers in sex when we make it our stopping point.  N.T. Wright put it succinctly when he wrote about sex and marriage (frequent readers will note I quote this in another post — forgive me),

It’s all about God making complementary pairs which are meant to work together. The last scene in the Bible is the new heaven and the new earth, and the symbol for that is the marriage of Christ and his church. It’s not just one or two verses here and there which say this or that. It’s an entire narrative which works with this complementarity so that a male-plus-female marriage is a signpost or a signal about the goodness of the original creation and God’s intention for the eventual new heavens and new earth.

Back to James Brown (almost) . . .

I remember hearing an interview with pianist Jeremy Denk some years ago when he recorded his album of pieces by Ligeti and Beethoven.  Denk talked about the repetitive nature of the pieces from both composers on the album.  But he didn’t see monotony, he saw Beethoven and Ligeti both grasping at the reaches of space and eternity.  They strove for transcendence.  Denk commented,

“The last Beethoven sonata seems to me [to be] one of the most profound musical journeys to infinity ever made,” he says. “The whole piece seems to want to bring us from a present moment into this timeless space where everything is continuous and endless.”

But of course Beethoven and Ligeti are classical musicians and we expect them to think about these things.  We don’t naturally assume the same of James Brown,* though perhaps we should.

Most pop/soul/rock/swing music emphasizes the “2” and often the “4” of a four-beat phrase.  On multiple occasions Brown talked about how his shift of emphasis to the downbeat, the “1” of a musical phrase, permanently changed his music.  Instead of, for example, “Gonna’ HAVE a  funky-GOOD time,” he sang, “GONNA have a funky-good time.”  This “cleared the decks” for Brown’s musical phrasing in the rest of the measure/multi-measure phrase — it gave him a lot more room to maneuver — a kind of “timeless space,” to quote Denk.

We can hear this in one my favorite Brown songs, “Mother Popcorn.”  Listen for a start to the rhythm like, “and-ONE-and.”  By the time we get to the “and” of beat four we have lingered so long in the space Brown creates that it hits us like a coiled spring.  Because the song gets built around a two measure phrase, after the “and” of beat four we have a whole measure of “space” until the downbeat comes again.

A lot of Brown’s music in the late 60’s/early 70’s (my favorite era of his) devolves into rhythm almost exclusively, and his downbeat emphasis allowed for extended rhythmic exploration.  Brown discovered he had no real need for melody.  This meant that the songs had a repetitiveness to them, but it also meant that Brown could then make his bid for something in the great beyond.  He was free to “explore the space” unfettered by beats two and four.

Brown had a string of failed marriages.  His friend Rev. Al Sharpton described him as a lonely person with few real friends.  This should not surprise us, considering that both of his parents abandoned Brown as a child.   Given the facts about his life and music, are his songs really just about sex, or even primarily about sex?  It can’t be. What was “The Hardest Working Man in Show Business” working for?   When we listen to “Cold Sweat” we have other things to contemplate besides sex.

His dancing adds to the transcendence. Watching him I can’t help but laugh in amazement.

The quality of my laughter is easily placed.  It is, to borrow a song title from Over the Rhine, a “Laugh of Recognition.”

Every night we always
Led the pack
There and back
And we never could do anything half
Oh you have to laugh
You just gotta laugh . . .

It’s called the laugh of recognition
When you laugh but you feel like dyin’

You’re not the first one to start again
Come on now friends
There is something to be said for tenacity

To quote the late, great, Mr. James Brown, “Ain’t it Funky?”

Or perhaps we should say, “AIN’T it funky?” (go to ca. 4:30-5:30 mark for some fun).

Dave

*In comparing these three I don’t mean to assert their musical equality. For the record, I’ll take Beethoven over Brown by a long shot.  But I’m guessing many of you will join me in taking Brown over Ligeti in a rout.

I enjoyed thumbing through Leonard Mlodinow’s Euclid’s Window, a book about the development of math and science from ancient to present times.  Mlodinow praises the discoveries of the Egyptians and Babylonians, but focuses on the significant advances of the Greeks from Thales down to Pythagoras and Euclid.  Their key discovery, their “leap of consciousness,” was abstract thought.  Previously civilizations saw only isolated parts or formulas. They knew certain things worked but had no idea of the connections between different ideas.  After the Greeks, we gained the ability to make generalizations, to group similar ideas under larger ones, and create systems.

Good stuff to be sure, but I hoped Mlodinow would offer speculation on how this happened. Why did abstract thought begin with the Greeks and not the Babylonians?  Did abstract thought in general (rather than just in math) come from the Greeks?  He did not touch on the question.

This frustrated me, so what follows is my own speculation.

Abstraction requires a certain view of creation itself.  Logically one must see order and pattern in creation before one could see it in math, for example.

Initially I thought that it makes sense that abstract thought did not show itself first in either Babylon or Egypt.  Babylon’s creation account reveals a haphazard universe.  Creation happens due to conflict between the gods.  Sorcery and power determine the winner.   We don’t see principle, justice, and so on.  In such a theological environment we would not expect them to think of general governing principles of thought.  At the the time of Thales, for example, Babylonians obsessed over the minutiae of dream interpretations.

The Egyptian creation account bears more similarity to Genesis 1-3, which should have given them an advantage in the “race” to abstraction.  However magic also plays a strong role in Egyptian society and myth.  It seems that in a society where nature can be manipulated on a whim one would not learn to see the forest for the trees.

So far so good.  In this triumphal ascent we should then see how Greek creation accounts most resemble Genesis and how this helped them.  But . . . Greek creation accounts might resemble the Babylonians more than the Egyptians.  True, magic doesn’t really have the role in Greek myth and folklore that it did in Egypt, but we do see the occasional frustrating randomness of the gods’ actions.  Perhaps Zeus and the others sometimes act in accord with “Fate” and a larger plan, but Fate remains mysterious and inaccessible to both gods and men.  There appears little in Greek religion on which to build the foundation of abstract thought.

Indeed, how did abstract thought arise in a polytheistic culture at all?  We might guess at some special revelation of God, perhaps.  What source did Thales and others draw on to develop it?  I am at a loss for ideas.  Perhaps this is why those who really took abstract thought seriously (like Pythagoras and Plato) end up breaking from Greek religion and starting “heretical” faiths.  Standard Greek religion had no category for such things.

I also wonder why the Greeks beat out the Israelites.  The Israelites had all the advantages in place.

As I mentioned, Genesis gives all the foundation for abstract thought one needs.  God creates everything, and does so in an orderly and purposeful way.  Yes, in the Old Testament as a whole God shows his omnipotence, love, and justice, by intervening in miraculous ways at times.  But in stark contrast to other contemporary faiths, the Old Testament has none of the fanciful/whimsically “miraculous” about it.  Throughout Scripture in fact, miracles get concentrated at key points in redemptive history (i.e. the founding of Israel, the beginning of the prophetic era with Elijah/Elisha, with Jesus Himself, and the beginning of the apostles’ ministry).  Today missionaries report miracles in areas where the gospel first gets introduced.  When looking at other ancient religions we may understand more why Jesus showed reluctance at times to effect miracles.  Reliance on them at our whims hinders the development of wisdom.*

We can say that the Israelites did develop, or we should say, had revealed to them, the “abstract” reality of God’s creation of all things, and His rule over and care for all things.  Certainly this is a far more important truth to have then imaginary parallel lines.  Though Biblical critics of the modern school say that Jewish belief in God’s universal dominion comes only with the later prophets (and then they often date them much later than most orthodox commentators) you have it “early” in Jewish history not just in Genesis, but in 1 Samuel 5, Psalm 19, Psalm 82, and so on.  The term “abstract” in this context has its problems, however.  We define abstract as “existing in thought but not having a concrete or physical existence.”   God exists in more than just thought.  He is real reality.

But the Greeks limitations in theology should not diminish their mathematical achievement.  Nor does it explain why the Israelites apparently did not take the general truths about God and the universe and apply them in other areas besides theology and ethics.  Nor again, does it explain how the Greeks developed their abstract mathematical ideas within their own context.

I intrigued, and I am stumped.

*All this to say — God forbid we start thinking along the lines of, “God, please do no miracles and keep to yourself, as your involvement will hinder the development of abstract thought!”

Every so often I enjoy switching gears with my reading, and I found my reading of Leonard Mlodinow’s Feynman’s Rainbow quite pleasant.  I got introduced to a few scientific ideas, and some interesting insights into the brilliance and insecurities of the top physicist’s in the world.

Among other things, Mlodinow delves into the rivalry between Richard Feynmann and Murray Gell-Mann, each brilliant in his own way, each a Nobel Prize Winner, and each with a very different approach to physics. Gell-Man represented what Mlodinow called the “Greek” school of physics, Feynmann the “Babylonian.”

He describes them this way:

The Babylonians made western civilization’s first great strides in understanding numbers and equations, and in geometry.  Yet it was the later Greeks–in particular Thales, Pythagoras, and Euclid–whom we credit inventing mathematics.  This is because Babylonians cared only whether or not a method of calculation worked–that is, adequately described a real physical phenomena–and not whether or not it was exact, or fit into any logical system.  . . . To put it simply, the Babylonians focused on the phenomena, the Greeks on the underlying order.

Both approaches can be powerful.  [“Greek”] physicists are guided by the mathematical beauty of their theories, and it has led to many beautiful applications of mathematics.  The Babylonian approach lends itself to a certain freedom of imagination, and allows you to follow your “gut feeling” about nature, without worrying about rigor and justification.  In fact, physicists employing this kind of thinking sometimes violate the formal rules of math, or make up a strange new (and unproven) math of their own based on their understanding of experimental data.

In the book, Feynmann occupies our attention and captivates it.  Gell-Mann’s extraordinary demand for rigor makes him a bit socially awkward, among other things (today would we consider him autistic?).  But which is the right approach?  I can’t say much about either approach in science, but historians come in Babylonians and Greek forms as well.  Herodotus, the “Father of History” was “Greek,” but subtley so.  Thucydides would have been “Greek.”  Other “Greeks” might include Polybius, St. Augustine, Gibbon, H.G. Wells, Spengler, and Toynbee.  But most modern historians react strongly against the “Greeks.”  I strongly dislike some of the “Greeks” I mentioned (Gibbon for one) and love others.  Where to take a stand?

Well, the issue needs settled, and I thought I would write a Socratic dialogue to hash it out, with apologies to Plato.

Greek and Babylonian Views of History

Babylonian (B): Before we discuss historical knowledge, I suggest that first we discuss the foundation of all knowledge, the knowledge of God.

Greek (G): Agreed!  An order of operations!  How very Greek of you to suggest it.

B: I concede the point, but we’re just getting started.  You haven’t won yet.  I argue that God cannot be systematized, and so knowledge of God will also lack a system.

G: Yes, God cannot be “put in a box,” as you say.  I agree that God is beyond a system.  He is of course, Personal (and Beyond Personality), and so an approach to God that attempts to dissect via a formula will fail.

B: Well if knowledge of the Highest is attained without a system, it follows that knowledge of lesser things, i.e. mankind itself, should also avoid systems.  So “systematic” historians like Toynbee err in their approach.  Ha!

G: Another great example of Greek logic!  I’ll have you yet.  You would agree, I’m sure that reason has its place in life?

B: Yes.

G: No doubt you would also say that knowing God means going beyond our reason.

B: I couldn’t have put it better myself.  Now you’ve conceded the victory to me!

G: Not yet . . . Knowledge of God is beyond our reason but is not against our reason.  In the same way, God stands above our finite human capacity to fully know everything, but we do know some things.

B: Yes – we know some things.  But we have only a few pieces of the puzzle.  We’re not God, you know, and so can’t create the rest of the puzzle out of nothing.

G: Yes, but we’re not making it out of nothing.  God has given us some things for us to know, and more than “some things.”  He has given us knowledge of Himself!  And He calls us to make sense of what we know.

B: Agreed, but He calls us first to humility.  Let us not overreach, let us appreciate the mystery.

G: Let us also not be lazy.  How can we make sense of what we know if we don’t give it some kind of order in our minds.  You would have it so we know nothing besides isolated facts.  And if all we know is isolated facts, then we really know nothing, for nothing can be known without context.  But always in Scripture the authors draw conclusions based on what they know.  One thing leads to another.

B: And what are these conclusions?  Are they a system?  You said that “we give it some kind of order.”  Just because “we” give it order doesn’t make it true.

G: Ok . . . new approach.  I say we have a template for knowing God in Jesus Himself.  “He who has seen me has seen the Father.”

B: Jesus shows us the Father, yes.  But the picture He gave on Earth was not the full picture.  He Himself admitted to not knowing the date of His return.  And surely, Jesus hid things as well.  He did not tell even His disciples everything He thought and felt at every moment.  I love Chesterton’s comment at the end of his Orthodoxy: “There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.”

G: Ok, Mr. Babylonian, what can we know, then?  Out with it!

B: God reveals enough for us not to fall afoul — we have markers and signposts. We can know that we are in the right ocean.  But we do not have enough eternal perspective to make systems of the signposts.  We can’t know where we are in the vast ocean.

G: But God’s commands surely make sense!  Do not murder, for example.  And Jesus “spoke plainly.”  I once had a professor say that, “Scripture is shallow enough so a baby can wade and deep enough so an elephant to swim.”  I grant you the elephant, but you throw the baby out.  You think, Babylonian, that you’re all open and mystical for your approach.  But actually, you’re more closed than I.  I love the part in Chesterton’s Orthodoxy (which you know so well), where he describes how fences give us more, not less freedom.

B: Do you suppose there will be such fences in Heaven?  They are temporary expedients for finite creatures.  The key word there is expedients.  They are temporary, not eternal, and thus, not rooted in Truth.

G: You see again that you cannot avoid an order of thinking.  You will admit defeat soon, I hope.  But if you wish to talk of finite creatures, let us do so, for History is primarily a study of mankind and only indirectly a study of God.

B: Yes, for it here that you will meet your match.

G: Oh?  Let us leave aside to what extent God can be known for the moment.  But you and I are both men.  And we know each other.  Finite man can know something about himself, surely?

B: Oh yes, he can know something.  He can know enough to know He is a mystery.  All this modern talk of “looking within yourself” has given us not just terrible Disney movies, but also a terribly confused generation of people.

G: Don’t you try and link me to those wretched movies!  But yes, man too is a mystery.  But imagine a man driving down the road.  He reaches a fork and can turn right or left.  He can know why he turns one way or the other, and he can communicate that to us.

B: No — not even he would know all the reasons for his choice.  He might delude himself into thinking one thing and it’s really another.  And if he can’t really be sure, what can he tell us?  If he can’t tell us, how can we know?

G: You confuse the issue again.  In a purely individual and isolated case you may be right.  But the “Greek” historian never deals with such isolated moments in time in a vacuum.  He has a whole field of action at His disposal.  Like in physics, each atom has lots of empty space and unpredictability, but if you put a bunch of them together, you can build bridges.  Because you can build bridges doesn’t mean you know everything about matter, but you enough to consistently build bridges.  So too with people. Yes, mystery exists in humanity.  But we know something of what it means to be made in His image. We know something of what it means to sin and fall short of the glory of God.  We can observe thousands of years of human activity and see that we tend to act in certain ways in certain times.

B: Yes, but you, “Mr. Look at me I’m so Open to Everything,” are closing God out of the picture.  Supposing God steps in to change something?  That alters your equation.  And God may intervene and we would not know if He did or not.  So how can we really predict?  How can we create any system at all with an actual “God in the machine?”  What we can do is stand back and admire the mystery.

G: Well how does God work then?  His intervention does not make men non-men.  God is always there — “in Him we live and move and have our being.”  But He does not take one thing and make it another. So we are still studying “mankind,” in every case, when looking at History.  Look at Pharaoh.  Yes, God hardened his heart, but He did not fundamentally alter Pharaoh’s character.

B: “He does not take one thing and make it another?”  How about changing water into wine?  How about making a dead man come alive again?

G: Well, water is a vital part of wine.  And in raising Lazarus, he raised Lazarus, not some new and different man.  The Church rejected gospels where Jesus’ miracles seemed random or non-sensical. God gave us brains to use them.  If He directly intervenes He will do so to enhance our understanding, not confuse it.  This is why we need “Greek” historians.

B: But Greek historians are always wrong at least in part. Toynbee’s last volume of A Study of History retracted and corrected parts of his earlier work.  You can say, “No one is perfect,” but that’s the point. No system works perfectly because no man works perfectly.  If we know it contains errors, what value can it have as a system?

G: Toynbee showed the very humility you seek in his retractions.  But I won’t argue for any particular system.  Instead I’ll claim victory on your own turf by looking at any individual man.  In truth, we all practice a form of “Greek” history all the time in our daily lives.  We interpret and synthesize from our experience.  We must, for we cannot view life as random and seemingly meaningless.  Without this continual synthesis, no one would gain any wisdom.  And you  must concede God calls us to gain wisdom?

B: But wisdom is not a system.

G: Agreed, but . . . it is a form of synthesized and applied general knowledge, and that, my friend, clinches it.

B: And so this means that I’ve lost?

G: Yes, but you lost right away, as I told you, when you rightly imposed an order of how to think about the question.

B: Phooey.

G: Victory!  I am so smart!

What about Babylonian and Greek science?  Shall we debate that?

No.  I would look even more silly than usual.

But if I wrote it I would give the victory to the Babylonian, or at least for the moment.  Do we even know what matter is?  Are we even sure that matter, if we define matter as an irreducibly small and purely physical entity, even exists?  Here the Christian may have more caution in imposing a system, at least for now when our knowledge remains quite incomplete about the most basic things.  Perhaps I should slightly temper my affection for  the “Greek” historian.  But in the end, I will side with Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, St. Augustine, and the like even if it means inviting Gibbon to the party.

It seems like the battle over same-sex marriage is nearly over in the culture-at-large.  How the edifice of marriage in the West fell so swiftly deserves fuller treatment at some point by someone.  Though I grieve for the culture, my main concerns now lie with the Church, that She will maintain a firm witness that can one day draw the world back.  One mistake we perhaps made was getting drawn into a “proof-texting” debate.  Freed from larger context, critics could manipulate certain passages at will and inject their own meaning.

For this reason I rejoiced to see N.T. Wright give a succinct resetting of the issue in a recent First Things interview.  When asked about the crisis surrounding marriage, Wright commented,

With Christian or Jewish presuppositions, or indeed Muslim, then if you believe in what it says in Genesis 1 about God making heaven and earth—and the binaries in Genesis are so important—that heaven and earth, and sea and dry land, and so on and so on, and you end up with male and female. It’s all about God making complementary pairs which are meant to work together. The last scene in the Bible is the new heaven and the new earth, and the symbol for that is the marriage of Christ and his church. It’s not just one or two verses here and there which say this or that. It’s an entire narrative which works with this complementarity so that a male-plus-female marriage is a signpost or a signal about the goodness of the original creation and God’s intention for the eventual new heavens and new earth.

If you say that marriage now means something which would allow other such configurations, what you’re saying is actually that when we marry a man and a woman we’re not actually doing any of that stuff. This is just a convenient social arrangement and sexual arrangement and there it is . . . get on with it. It isn’t that that is the downgrading of marriage, it’s something that clearly has gone on for some time which is now poking it’s head above the parapet. If that’s what you thought marriage meant, then clearly we haven’t done a very good job in society as a whole and in the church in particular in teaching about just what a wonderful mystery marriage is supposed to be. Simply at that level, I think it’s a nonsense. It’s like a government voting that black should be white. Sorry, you can vote that if you like, you can pass it by a total majority, but it isn’t actually going to change the reality.

The full article is here, and worthwhile for those interested.

I recently also purchased Jeremy’s Denk’s recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and now glimpse why it has the reputation for being one of the great keyboard works of all time.  With the music Denk includes several videos of him playing and explaining elements of the piece, which made the decision to buy easy.  I always love seeing musicians talking as they play.  I know little about classical music, but after listening, and especially hearing Denk explaining certain elements of it, Bach clearly had this concept of “binaries in Genesis” and their ultimate unity understood, and employed that understanding often in his work.  Here is Denk . . .

Wright speaks truly that our confusion on marriage has roots in the Church’s failure to fully live out what marriage means.  We should see that the current marriage debate goes beyond homosexuality, beyond marriage, and into our understanding of creation itself.  If we abandon the “binary” witness of marriage, this will spill over into our ideas about Creation in general.  Will then our ability to create anything at all start to diminish?