The Captured Perspective

In his novel “The book of laughter and forgetting”, Milan Kundera weaves the following parable to unearth his view on the nature of good and evil:

To see the devil as a partisan of Evil and an angel as a warrior on the side of Good is to accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are of course more complicated than that.

Angels are partisans not of Good but of divine creation. The devil, on the other hand, is the one who refuses to grant any rational meaning to that divinely created world.

Dominion over the world, as we know, is divided between angels and devils. The good of the world, however, implies not that the angels have the advantage over the devils (as I believed when I was a child) but that the powers of the two sides are nearly in equilibrium. If there were too much incontestable meaning in the world (the angel’s power), man would succomb under its weird If the world were to lose all its meaning (the devil’s reign), we could not live either.

In this passage, Kundera seems to be arguing that there are some certain of the moral landscape where there is a clear answer (think of answers like the odd questions in the back of a math text book), and other areas where what is ‘right’ is more ambiguous.

Philosopher/ theologian Paul Tillich makes a similar point:

“The mixture of the absolute and the relative in moral decisions is what constitutes their danger and their greatness. It gives dignity and tragedy to man, creative joy and pain of failure.”

Not only does this make for good stories, I would also argue that there is wisdom in knowing which type of decision is which, lest we become weighted down by the heaviness of all choices, or nihilistic in posture.

Psychologist Dr. Richard Beck makes the following point about applying the wrong type of framework/ standard of judgment in choice:

If we frame life as good/right vs. bad/wrong we are easily tricked into thinking our current stance is True and in no need of correction. I mean, if you are right and they are wrong why listen to them? But ugly/beautiful builds in some slack. I’m not expressing the Truth, I’m expressing how things appear to me. And you are expressing yourself. I think this starts the conversation off on a better foot. We are more likely to tolerate our disagreements and work to appreciate the perspective–an aesthetic term–of the Other. Rather than arguing with people we begin, as we do with all aesthetic learning, with issues of appreciation. The good/bad and the right/wrong frames are zerosum conversations. But ugly/beautiful allows me to start with the aesthetic question: Can you appreciatewhere I am coming from? The ugly/beautiful frame calls us into perseptcive-taking and empathy in a way other categories cannot.

Beck clearly argues that there might be something to gain by approaching certain issues aesthetically.  This is the case, I think one could easily fetish legalism and the need to get things “right,” especially if we mis-identify those areas best approached by absolutes, and those best approached by a relative (personal) framework. (for a philosophical/ historical treatment of the subject, see Jonathan Ree’s recent piece)

To be honest, I have a hard time with the question of how we know what areas ought to be approached like ‘black/white’ absolutes (the angel’s reign), and which one’s out be approached as more ambiguous and subjective choices (the devil’s terrain, in Kundera’s language), and so I cowardly won’t address it . But, if the distinction between areas requiring subjectivity and those requiring consideration of the absolute is helpful, what I do want to write about in the next post is how we might faithfully approach those issues that we determine might be a bit more subjective… how we might be better artists when it comes to ethics and morality.

“Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.”
—DANIEL BURNHAM, CHICAGO ARCHITECT. (1846-1912)

I have a good friend who is doing his final interview for this year’s Rhodes scholarship next week. The other day over coffee, he told me that one of last year’s final interview questions was ‘what is beauty?” Imagine answering that on the fly, in front of 7 former Rhodes Scholar, all with a full-ride to Oxford on the line…

Given the recent dabbling into the philosophical/ existential on this blog, I want to take this question a step further… specifically, what makes for a beautiful life? What does it mean to be a beautiful person?

Though it is a hard question conceptually, I think we often know beauty of this type when we see it, don’t we? We know people whose lives seem worth living, who we want to know better and be around? Isn’t this is some sense a beautiful life?

At the core, maybe beauty is constructing, finding, and building a story with one’s life, a story worthy of the title beautiful. The late French Philosopher Paul Ricoeur wrote: “The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character.” For example, is it not beautiful when we see someone hop out of the normal logic of give and take, or transaction and transaction costs, to pursue something virtuous, however defined. Is that not a beautiful life? As Wendell Berry writes: “Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.” Maybe it is those narrative arcs that give us potential of beauty.

*               *               *

Given this discussion, it’s interesting to look at the forthcoming NY Times Magazine article on the rise of Megan Fox. In this profile, Laura Hirschberg chronicles the following quotes of the sex-symbol of Transformers fame:

“When I sit down to talk to men’s magazines, there’s a certain character that I play. She’s not fully fleshed out — she doesn’t have her own name — but she shows up to do men’s-magazine interviews. There’s something so ridiculous about always being in your underwear in those magazines, and you know the interview is going to run opposite those pictures. So, there’s a character that talks to all of them.”

“All women in Hollywood are known as sex symbols. You’re sold, and it’s based on sex. That’s O.K., if you know how to use it.” Fox paused. “It’s been a crazy year. I’ve learned that being a celebrity is like being a sacrificial lamb. At some point, no matter how high the pedestal that they put you on, they’re going to tear you down. And I created a character as an offering for the sacrifice. I’m not willing to give my true self up. It’s a testament to my real personality that I would go so far as to make up another personality to give to the world. The reality is, I’m hidden amongst all the insanity. Nobody can find me.”

Fox is clearly living out a narrative which plays to the masses, but one that she clearly is aware lacks a certain kind of beauty worth pursue whole-heartedly (ironic given the ‘beauty’ these magazines celebrate). The rest of the article goes onto show how Fox’s real life constrasts with the images she plays in the magazines (she is relatively mild, she has a long-term boyfriend, etc.). This is a distinction Fox believes she can maintain as seen by the final quote, feeling
“nobody can find (her),” this true self.

I can’t help but wondering whether is it really possible to forever remain distant from the stories we live in, from the world-views we swim deep within? In our own lives, do the roles we play and the narratives we buy into leave some type of lasting imprint on our lives? If these stories are not worthy of a beautiful existence, are we are clearly able to shake them off when we want to pursue such ends?

*               *               *

My favorite song on The National’s 2007 “Boxer” album is Fake Empire. The song ends with the following lyrics:

Turn the light out say goodnight
no thinking for a little while
lets not try to figure out everything at once
It’s hard to keep track of you falling through the sky
we’re half-awake in a fake empire
we’re half-awake in a fake empire

I do not know what the artists were intending lyrically with this song, but I read it as an indictment of the way we often live half-heartedly with stories not worth living for. With our actions, we buy into stories that we only half-heartedly believe, because we think they are the stories that matter to others. They are stories whic we fear, in the depths of our souls and the in the moments of profound vulnerability, do not hold the promise that we ascribe to them. We’re half-awake in fake empires…

It’s an indictment worth letting reverberate deep and long if we desire living lives of beauty.

Lately, I have thinking a good bit about the relationship between the words we speak and the realities we attempt to describe. Not being a trained philosopher, I am not really interested in delving into whether we can be accurate in describing the look of a chair, or the movement of a small animal; rather, I am interested in understanding the way which this dilemma affects our lived experience with complicated and ambiguous realities. So, before you click onto ESPN.com because of having just witnessed the most boring opening paragraph of a blog post EVER, try staying with me for a bit through two more concrete examples.

Let’s start with something like religion, or really any sort of ideological commitment. This weekend, I listened to an old interview on National Public Radio with the late religious historian Jaroslav Pelikan. Pelikan is famous in history circles for his work on religious creeds, and the way such documents have encapsulated religion traditions over the generations. Specifically, he chronicles the way in which religious creeds in the Christian tradition arose historically (often through argumentation, and making a statement in contrast to another interpretation), and the relationship these have to the faith of the modern believer. This relationship can become a point of existential tension for the modern religion person when there are significant differences in understanding across time. For example, while the writers of the creed had a clear three tiered view of the universe where one can descend into hell, and ascended into heaven, much like “a lift in a small building,” the modern believer (and unbeliever) often finds this notion confusing at best, and implausible at worst. So how does this person reconcile their own personal feelings with the historical nature of creeds that they consider and recite at mass or some religious service? How does one reconcile the personal existential faith of a sunday afternoon with friends and the historical rigid faith of orthodoxy?

Or consider something like love. What does it mean to say you love someone, especially when ‘feelings’ and ’sentiments’ can be hot and cold, hitting high and low points? Imagine an old married couple and the way their relationship and feelings have changed over the course of their committment. Is love in this relationship infatuation in the same way that it was when they first laid eyes on each other? And is it inauthentic for this couple to say “i love you” when they are frustrated with the personality traits of the person they chose to spend their life with, or upset at a set of actions this person portrayed? Was it inauthentic in earlier times?
In both cases, there is a distinct difference between one’s feeling at specific moments, and the limited supply of words which capture their feelings. What does one do in these situations? The person of faith must either move long in reciting this statement, or they could not state their creed, move away from tradition, and attempt to forge their own existential path forward. Similarly for the couple, they must either state their love and feel the tension, or state the feeling as it is at the moment (“my love is contingent on your being a certain way”).

The interview with Pelikan rang home on this dilemma range true to me for several reasons, but I want to address two in particular. First, sometimes asserting something is more about showing your commitment and belonging to a certain community, or a certain person, than it is about perfectly accurately describing one’s sentiments. So for the person of faith, reciting the creed is not so much as asserting what they think at one specific moment in time (though it could be this), but rather about aligning oneself with a complicated community, deep tradition, and specific way of being, even when there is dissonance. And for the lover, asserting love is about rehashing a commitment, and speaking to something that ideally transcends the conditionality which we most easily fall into when living. In making such statements, we are compelled to moving beyond statements which hedge feeling and belief. This is the ‘absurd‘ at the core of faith for Kierkegaard, a point which one should note does not pull him away from such tradition even given some unorthodox interpretation. On the love front, we resonate with love stories in their assertion of (implausible, improbably, beautiful) statements such as “I will love you no matter how you look someday, or how you change,” even if we struggle with these sentiments ourself. Perhaps we say these things because we believe in the power of language to transform, and its formative role in our own dispositions. The couple grows in love by asserting it. The person grows in faith by aligning himself with a community and an (absurd?) statement of belief.

The second clear take away from Pelikan’s interview is that certain things require an enmeshing in words, no matter how limited that language is. Saint Augustine, at the end of his long treatise on the foundation of the trinity and its relationship to the human soul, states “we have said this, not in order to say something, but in order not to remain all together silent.” Similarly, with love, though it brings up potentially inaccurate connotations at both deep (unconditional commitment) and shallow levels (infatuation), in some ways it is the only way two people can assert their feelings, and assert their commitment. And though there is risk and vulnerability in such statements (what if I am wrong, what if I am not ready, isn’t there something between like and love), they must say something so that they do not remain silent, and that they can forge a path to move forward in vulnerability.

In this way, both situations bespeak to the acute concern of people in our generation of the ‘vulnerability’ and felt ‘inauthenticity’ by a lack of alignment between language and reality. It is a tendency which draws us to the sciences and makes us uncomfortable (or uncertain) with the way in which poetry can speak of truth. This is not to say that when there is enough of a misalignment we shouldn’t move away from such traditions (for the person that loses faith) or such relationships (for the person who falls out of love), but reality is sometimes complicated and thus requires traversing ambiguity, and living with the risks involved even if a lack of perfect correspondence. I think CS Lewis said it best on the role of vulnerability in living and loving in the following quote:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless–it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”

Language, though limited, is all we have, and as such it stands as the most frightening and beautiful tool we could possibly hold.

… for the slowness around the blog as of late. Busy time for us all. Hoping to finish the series on moral decision-making soon!

Peter

I attended the Leadership Summit on Thursday and Friday last week and was really (really) impressed. This annual event is put on by Willow Creek Church and broadcast around the world for 120,000 conference attendees. The speakers included Tony Blair, Bono, Tim Keller, Gary Hamel, and David Gergen to name a few, and the constant marketing of books and the emphasis put on reading by these individuals has finally inspired me to share my “favorites” reading list. Let’s just say if books affected your BAC, I’d be a bumbling, stumbling alcoholic.

These books, in my opinion, all meet a high thought provocation standard while also being immensely readable. What can I say, I like to have my book and read it too.

Economic Development

Banker to the Poor/Mohammad Yunnus
The Bible of microfinance; I dare you to not be moved by his pragmatic, diligent, and experiential approach to organization development and problem solving.

The End of Poverty/Jeffery Saches
Incredible story of how the author became a leading voice in economic development. His work in the economies of Eastern Europe around the fall of the Soviet Union, Peru during it hyperinflation crisis, and Asia are fascinating. His message though, about how more aid will solve the world’s problems is seriously misguided. Be sure to read White Man’s Burden afterward.

The White Man’s Burden/William Easterly
Don’t you love a good contrarian? Read Easterly’s book immediately after The End of Poverty. He pretty much shreds Saches arguments to bits and focuses on small, non-government controlled solutions to problems. While I don’t agree with everything he says, the spotlight he puts on the hubris of the West has deeply affected how I think about aid and intervention in other countries.

A Thousand Hills/Stephen Kinzer
Detailed account of Kagame’s controversial but economically effective turnaround of Rwanda. Additionally, it provides a detailed history of the country which elucidated for me what lead to the genocide.

Honorable mentions: The Age of Turbulence (Alan Greenspan), The Blue Sweater, and Confessions of an Economic Hitman

Opening Your Heart and Mind to the Needs of Others: Incredible Personal Stories

Three Cups of Tea/ David Oliver Relin, Greg Mortenson
Greg Mortenson overcame incredible odds to build schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He began this quest after a failed attempt at summiting K2 so it is a great study of how to accomplish amazing things when you’re completely unequipped. Everyone should read this book. Period.

A Long Way Home: Memoirs of a Boy Solider/Ishmael Beah
The story of how a boy became a solider in Sierra Leone during a civil war. If you’ve ever thought you could never commit war atrocities, read his story and challenge yourself to question how you would react. The most difficult book I’ve ever read. It is a blessing that he survived and shared his story with the rest of us.

Leap of Faith/Queen Noor
Queen Noor of Jordan is a fascinating figure. American by birth, she ended up marrying the much older King Hussein of Jordan. This is the story of their deep relationship and the Jordanian perspective of Middle Eastern events over a 30 year period.

Gang Leader For A Day/ Sudhir Venkatesh
This book answered a lot of questions for me about how the Projects operate and why gangs exist in these communities. A graduate student stumbles upon an up-and-coming gang leader on the south side of Chicago and is given an unprecedented view into a gang leader’s life and the “business” of gangs over a 6 year period.

Infidel/Ayaan Hirsi Ali
A first hand account of a Somalia girl raised in a fundamentalist Muslim family. She made a daring escape to Holland to avoid an arranged marriage and ended up a member of Dutch parliament. While a highly controversial figure, her story and view points are worth considering.

Mountains Beyond Mountains/Tracy Kidder
The story of Paul Farmer’s crusade to improve the health of Haitians and others worldwide. There is just no one like Paul Farmer and his experiences caring for the poor are informative as you think about health issues and the needs of the poor.

Same Kind of Different As Me/ Dawn Hall, Denver Moore, Lynn Vincent, Ron Hall
A story about faith, service, homelessness, sickness, transformation, friendship and death. I was incredibly moved by each one of the characters. Highly relatable and a quick, powerful read.

The Glass Castle/ Jeannette Walls
A short book with serious literary punch. What happens when a now acclaimed journalist grows up in a dysfunctional yet loving home marked by poverty but also fantastic adventure? This book.

The Soloist/Steve Lopez
Addresses mental illness as well as the challenges of serving the homeless. Helped me understand why it can be difficult to get homeless people into housing, even if it’s free. Fans of classical music will love it.

Honorable Mention: River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze/Peter Hessler

Other Great Leadership Books

Autobiography of Ben Franklin/Ben Franklin
The Man Who Listens to Horses/Monty Roberts
Team of Rivals/Doris Kearns Goodwin
American Creation/Joseph Ellis

I have read most of these books in the last 12 months and have been changed in some indelible way by each one. I find these stories, especially the personal accounts of transformation, more useful than all the business books I’ve read. I encourage you to add additional book suggestions. Happy reading!

Alan Jacobs has a fascinating post on the future of memoir in a Facebook age at his blog, Text Patterns. Reflecting on his teaching of the memoirs of Augustine, Richard Rodriguez, and Marjane Satrapi’s, he writes:

All three of these authors are, in their varying ways, displaced persons — displaced from homeland, or upbringing, or culture, or language, or some combination thereof — and that displacement is one of the major prompts for memoir and other forms of self-narration. The person taken out of the environment in which he or she was formed is almost forced to reconsider the self and its components, is almost forced into redefinition. And one of the classic ways to achieve a successful redefinition is by telling one’s own story, in large part because through telling it one discovers what it is.

Alan’s explanation of the power in memoir is succinct and deeply true. It is for primarily for this reason that I keep coming back to memoir as a genre in my own free reading, attempting to find certain self-narrations that help me make sense of my own life, goals and desires. On my night stand right now is Christian Wiman’s Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet, a book of which I hope to write more on in a later post.

Jacobs continues on in this post to reflect on the future of memoir for people from the Facebook generation, questioning:

Does Facebook make self-narration less compelling, less necessary? In a much talked-about essay, Peggy Orenstein has speculated that Facebook denies to young people “an opportunity for insight, for growth through loneliness”; it makes it harder for them “to establish distance from their former selves, to clear space for introspection and transformation.” Maybe it also eases — or hides from us — our displacements, and creates a false sense of seamlessness in lives that have actually undergone significant ruptures

While Jacobs’ outlines a fascinating theory here, I don’t know if I completely buy it. To help flesh out some thoughts, I went back to Orenstein’s original article in the Times. In this piece, she writes of her concern that her necies will not have the space for necessary self-development in their upcoming journeys to college; specifically, she questions whether they will be able to explore and redefine their adult identities with “450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam (their) present self?” Point taken, and it especially resonates with me given my tendency towards fulfilling the identity expectations that others have for me.

Orenstein goes onto argue that, “something is drowned in that virtual coffee cup — an opportunity for insight, for growth through loneliness.” In essence, Facebook circumvents loneliness and introspection for the individual. It is here where I think Orenstein and Jacobs misdiagnoses the role of Facebook on youth psychology. Loneliness is not removed in Facebook; if anything, it is amplified. Nothing makes one feel more alone than seeing a constant stream of self-selected photos from another person’s life, the parties they attend, and the new friends they are making. Nothing makes one pain of disintegrating high school friendships more acute as being a distant (but seemingly present) observer of their transformations. Though Facebook as a communication medium provides space for connection, as a voyeuristic space, it is more likely to cultivate existential isolation.

So, if as Orenstein seems to argue, Facebook make life into a “virtual coffee shop,” it is closer to the coffee shops I experience on a day-to-day basis than any sort of social ideal. We do not walk into Starbucks and see good friends at every table. Rather, we see familiar but nameless faces, and are known only by the snapshots they have of what we do in that place. In overhearing snippets of conversations between friends we do not know, we are surrounded by people but profoundly alone. If that does not cultivate a breeding ground for self-reflection and self-narration, I do not know what will.

I want to identify three forces that I find interesting and perhaps related: 1) American society is guided by the self-regulating market and a culture of individualism; 2) We are the most Christian and religiously devout nation in the west; and 3) Americans, both men and women, have gotten steadily less happy over the past 100 years despite living in one of the most opulent nations in modern history.

I recently picked up the Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell in which he writes:

I was not born happy. As a child, my favorite hymn was: “Weary of earth and laden with my sin.” In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics. Now, on the contrary, I enjoy life; I might almost say that with every year that passes I enjoy it more.

This is due in large part to a diminishing preoccupation with myself. Like others who had a Puritan education, I had the habit of meditating on my sins, follies, and shortcomings. I seemed to myself – no doubt justly – a miserable specimen. Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to center my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection. External interests, it is true, bring each its own possibility of pain: the world may be plunged in war, knowledge in some direction may be hard to achieve, friends may die. But pains of these kinds do not destroy the essential quality of life, as do those that spring from disgust with self.

This speaks strongly to both my life experience and frustration with the church, but also hints at a potentially inherent antagonism between capitalism and Christianity.

The primary religion of our culture emphasizes the depravity of the human nature. The institution that has largely guided American social transformation for the past two-hundred years, market capitalism, is centered in the primacy of self-interest. With our economics leading us to focus on ourselves, and our religion on how fallen and broken we are, is it surprising that we aren’t getting any happier?

Despite my frustrations, I am a Christian and believer in the usefulness of markets – seeking an alternative way to understand faith and society through a lens of human flourishing, not depravity and selfishness.