Here are a few snippets from his most recent essay in The American Scholar:

Behind every urge to interpret is unease, anxiety. This can be a productive and necessary endeavor, whether it’s literary criticism or theology or even the dogmas and rituals of a religion (since all religion is, ultimately, an attempt to interpret God and numinous experience). Such effort deepens and complicates our initial response, even as it gives us an aperture through which to see our moments of mystery, crisis, and revelation more clearly—to give them “meanings,” to integrate them into our lives. The trouble comes when the effort to name and know an experience replaces the experience itself. Just as we seem to have grasped every level of meaning in a poem, the private and silent power that compelled us in the first place seems to drain right out of it. Just as we plant the flag of faith on a mountain of doctrine and dogma it has taken every ounce of our intellect to climb, our vision becomes a “view,” which is already clouding over, and is in any event cluttered with the trash of others who have fought their way to this same spot. Nowhere to go now but down.

…

AT FIRST, attending to the anxiety of existence can seem like a zero-sum game. Any attention turned toward the truth of the spirit is attention turned away from all we have come to think of as “life.” Thus we parcel out our moments of devotion—a church service here and there, a walk in the woods, a couple of hours of meditation a week—all the while maintaining the frenzy of our usual existence outside of those moments. This is inevitable, for the initial demands of the spirit are intense, but it is not sustainable, for the soul is not piecemeal. We are left with this paradox: only by hearing the furthest call of consciousness can we hear the call of ordinary life, but only by claiming the most mundane and jangling details of our lives can that rare and ulterior music of the soul merge with what Seamus Heaney calls “the music of what happens.”

…

THE FIRST STEP in the life of the spirit is learning to let yourself experience those moments when life and time seem at once suspended and concentrated, that paradox of attentive oblivion out of which any sustaining faith grows. These moments may not be—and at first almost certainly will not be—“meditative.” They are more likely to break into your awareness, or into what you thought was awareness (“inbreaking” is the theological term for Christ’s appearance in the world and in our lives—there is no coaxing it, no way to earn it, no way to prepare except to hone your capacity to respond, which is, finally, your capacity to experience life, and death). This is why we cannot separate one part of our existence, or one aspect of our awareness, from another, for there is a seed of peace in the most savage clamor. There is a kind of seeing that, fusing attention and submission, becomes a kind of being, wherein you may burrow into the very chaos that buries you, and even the most binding ties can become a means of release.

Eyes after set of eyes pass by as I walk these city blocks. Eyes of all shapes, colors and size. Some hide behind darkened glasses, framed by metal or plastic of various colors. Others are uncovered while gazing straight ahead, as if ashamed by such naked exposure in a world on the other side of Eden. Together we glance and dart from steel buildings to concrete floors to fleshy bodies and back to our feet below. Alone we each dance uncomfortable around our own kind, looking anywhere but directly back at those whose attention we have captured, those stranger’s eyes.

It is July in Lima, and I sit under a canopy of the Panza de Burro, or the grey underbelly of a donkey. Such is the Peruvian phrase for the placidly charcoal, winter sky that hovers over the city from May to November. The conditions leave my glances into the foggy Pacific horizon filled with longing for a world washed anew in the light of a resurrected sun. It is not surprising, to me at least, why author Herman Melville once called Lima, “the saddest city on earth, ” a sentiment undoubtedly uttered on a visit during the winter months.

Lima is no different from any other massive city, standing as it is at just under eight million people. At the very least, its similarity lies in that all cities look the same when abstracted away from their idiosyncrasies. Its streets contain residents and tourists mixed uncomfortably together as they walk unintentionally attached on sidewalks and eat in cafes. Its inhabitants, both rich and poorer, live in houses of four walls with roofs thatched together to shield the elements. Such homes nuzzle into neighborhoods built into the rocky coast, or set along flattened, moderately gridded streets. Mixed within these residents are the shops of grocers and cafes peddling the same dishes, albeit prepared by different hands. It is a city, like all others, which grows overwhelming when one takes time to consider its details: details of the 16 million feet who live here and the reasons they walk to places deemed important, details like the 16 million hands who call this place home, the bodies they embrace, and the babies they will hold and then watch grow old.  But such particulars take time to explore, and detailed context blurs out in forward movement.

Today, however, it is a city that feels different from others by it’s decidedly winter (dis?)-coloration. The drab sky leaves the landscape of people and places like a photograph faded from hiding in the drawers of dressers tucked in unused rooms. Such darkened images seem to expose our foreignness to each other. I see in these people, these souls, strangers like “the people in old photographs— not … through a veil of knowledge and habit, but simply and plainly, as they were lined or scarred, as they were startled or blank. Like the dead, (I) could consider their histories complete, and… wondered only what had brought them to transiency, to drifting,” (Robinson, Housekeeping, p. 179). Today we are all drifters in these same grayed city streets; strangers both to ourselves and each other.

What do my eyes see when we pass? I see you as unknown, a face with a certain kind and degree of beauty, sketched out with creases from a multitude of smiles and frowns, eyes framed by bags from sleepless nights and the unknown thoughts that whispered you awake. But what I see is clouded by what I miss– the hidden details that make you as you are and as you will be. All I see are still frame snapshots caught in moments of moving time, pictured stories without the words to give birth to meaning and marvel, ecstasy, despair and dullness of heart. Our interior lives remain hidden from each other, as the sun is veiled by the charcoaled belly of the donkey who stubbornly idles above.

After that moment, when our eyes pass on streets, we will move forward in steps to catch other gazes. We will move on for we are unable to consider everyone’s starting point and final destination, or the paths they find plausible to move from A to B. It is but a moment. You must, I am sure, go about your day, and I must hop on a plane, and fly back home to the place where I know more behind the silhouettes of the people I love and loathe.

The sun crawls through the fog, and briefly lights up the city in Peruvian winter sunlight. For an instant, the masses are splashed in color, and all our particularities exposed. Together, we have big eyes and undefined chins, jagged noses and sunken cheekbones, pencil lips and widened hips. For a moment, we can’t easily abstract and blur away from each other in difference. We are exposed as mothers and children, fathers and friends. Our eyes manifest in tear-reddened tints, and the grins that lie beneath the surface give color to our faces and pulse to our souls. But then, just as quickly as it left, the donkey sinks back into place and the glimmer of depth again fades slowly from view.

But is not this space of our passing a touch more personal, at least for that moment? At the very least, don’t we at least stand in the wake of a realization that it should be personal. The details of your story remain mysterious to me, as mine are to yours, but I can at least know that you are a container of details worth knowing. Perhaps this is the moment where you become a Thou rather than an It, to use the language of the philosopher Martin Buber. Perhaps this is as it should be, as our eyes dance together in this jungle of concrete, brick, stone and glass; the two of us, for but a moment– inches away, and miles apart.

The wind is still on top of Machu Picchu today. I look down at this strange mix of wonders of both men and god(s), where stones are set upon rocks which build up to homes, together making a place for the movements of men, women and children now long gone

I walk from terrace to temple to terrace as guides rattle on like broken records about major battles and archeological discoveries– the capital H History lying within the ruins in the sky.

But I feel that the stories which truly give this place depth are left untold, palpable but hidden. These are the tales of men and women falling in love, of jealousy between friends, of families formed, flourishing and dissolved. If you listen closely enough, you can hear the true heartbeat of Machu Picchu.

*          *          *

Fall back to the summer of 1943 to hear the words of the poet Pablo Neruda anew, penned from this same mountaintop. Listen to his moment of transformation in “La Altura de Machu Picchu” (XII):

Look at me from the depths of the earth,
tiller of fields, weaver, reticent shepherd,
groom of totemic guanacos,
mason high on your treacherous scaffolding,
iceman of Andean tears,
jeweler with crushed fingers,
farmer anxious among his seedlings,
potter wasted among his clays–
bring to the cup of this new life
your ancient buried sorrows.
Show me your blood and your furrow;

Is it not the echoes of everyday from these men and everyday that frame our own stories—be they of love, ambition, hopes, and fears– into some larger (insignificant?) context?

*          *          *

My friend Max and I shelve ourselves onto an agricultural terrace overlooking the ruins with some bread and water, and I pull out Annie Dillard’s book “For the time being.” Dillard’s writing contains power in the way it holds in tension the seeming insignificance and prominence of the experience of being human. She notes the irony in which lives can be abstracted into statistics (230,000 dead in a Haitian earthquake) while still holding such singular importance to our experience (like the love-stricken Romeo and his inability to see life beyond Juliet). So which is it? Is Juliet one, or is she one of two-hundred thirty thousand?

Dillard writes:

Are we ready to think of all humanity as a living tree, carrying on splendidly without us? We easily regard a beehive or an ant colony as a single organism, and even a school of fish, a flock of dunlin, a herd of elk. And we easily and correctly regard an aggregate of individuals, a sponge or coral or lichen or slime mold, as one creature– but us? When we people differ, and know our consciousness, and love? Even lovers, even twins, are strangers who will love and die alone. And we like it this way, at least in the West; we prefer to endure any agony of isolation rather than to merge and extinguish our selves in an abstract ‘humanity’ whose fate we should hold dearer than our own. Who could say, I’m in agony because my child died, but that’s all right: Mankind as a whole has abundant children?

The words ring poignant on this mountain. The similarity of my stories with those long gone make me wonder whether this resonance makes my world important or insignificant. I see the stories of men long-gone stand together with those of my present—my own feelings of love tenuously held and lost, of evolving hopes and fears, of the ambiguity of my story mid-writing. Similarly, I sense the resonance of my present with those lives of future others who will till the land on this side of Eden. I strain to hear their wisdom, cringe to hear their critique.

How terrifying, this similarity, as though we are but a pixel on a painting, a spec of sand in a desert! “What meaning does anything have” we protest in the trek towards nihilism, “if my (love/life/journey) is not in some fashion different, if I am not in some fashion different?”

Or is it perhaps freeing, this notion of you and me as a hive of bees? For can I really handle the pressure that comes with an over-prominent story? Poet and essayist Christian Wiman recently writes, “Anxiety comes from the self as ultimate concern, from the fact that the self cannot bear this ultimate concern: it buckles and wavers under the strain, and eventually, inevitably, it breaks.”

Time is strangely held together in these moments, on these mountains. It is as if the past, present and future cannot be authentically separated. It is almost as if they move together by way of dance in the air– memory’s melody allowing the past to inform the present, the harmony of dreaming as the sound of the future calling the present into action.

*          *          *

I hear the echoes of Machu Picchu, for to be conscious of these stories is to see my own stories, in both triviality and beauty, in a different light. Maybe to feel my own anxieties in context is to know, but for a moment, the way we are all a part of this harmonious time. It is to know that we are bit players nestled among larger stories, which will be told again and again, around fires, and in novels and on stages. Perhaps this is what it is to feel as a flock of humanity.

In writing on our modern state of anxiety, Wiman points to James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” suggesting its greatness, “is partly in the way it reveals the interior chaos of a single mind during a single day, and partly in the way it makes that idiosyncratic clamor universal. However different the textures of our own lives may be, Bloom’s mind is our mind; the welter of impressions he suffers and savors is a storm we all know.”

Likewise, on this particular day, in this particular moment, the whisper of Machu Picchu is that while we are all containers of the same stories, they are still worth telling, that they are all worth living. Perhaps our moments are meaningful, despite their triviality, in that we are all children of god. Or, if you must, consider this same sentiment with less conventionally religious language… a necessity if our language must sometimes be, “stripped of (its) religious meaning… (in the same way that) faith itself sometimes needs to be stripped of its social and historical incrustations and returned to its first, churchless incarnation in the human heart” (Wiman).

The wind is still today on Machu Pichhu. It is as though the trees were asked to remain motionless while they receive a painting from the rising sun. We should be grateful for this silence. For it is in here, among these ‘ancient buried sorrows,’ and amidst the tales of “blood and… furrow,” that Machu Picchu truly begins to speak in its pregnant silence.

One technology wave that I hopped on in abandonment was internet social networking: I have a blog, I have a website, I have Gmail account and I use gchat with regularity, I have a synced Google calendar, I have used Google wave, I work on shared Google docs, I ‘tweet,’ and I have a Facebook account with far too many ‘friends.’

But, having crossed to the other side of the early adoption wave, I say with some confidence that I might have crested the peak of benefits from this world and am now reaping its dark-side.

And so, Facebook… while I hate to say this after all we have gone through… I am sorry, but I think we need a break. And though it may be hard for you to believe me on this, its really not you, it’s me!

(Ok… extended footnote…. That may be harsh, but I don’t think I am being too outlandish here. I know no one really buys the whole, “it’s not you, its me” line… but let me try to clarify. I want to make it MORE THAN clear that my analysis of Facebook is not applicable to everyone and that my concerns come in large part out of my own personality and the situations I find myself within. In other words, if I wasn’t so damn quirky, if I was a bit less socially needy, if my yet-undiagnosed OCD was a tad less extreme, or if I didn’t have a job that puts me in charge of my own time with a significant amount of flexibility taking place in front of a computer, Facebook and I might still have a future).

But, it is what it is. So, here we go.

Facebook,

I want to start this out by saying I really love you for the way you help me connect with people. I have been able to better stay in touch those who otherwise would be off my grid. You help me stay connected with people I meet on the fly. Even friends from my past who I otherwise would have forgotten I can now FB chat, direct message or even gift with a witty wall post. You have made me seem like a better friend when I remember birthdays. For that I will be forever grateful. Facebook, I love you… in theory.

But, I can’t lie… I really struggle with you in practice. Too often, I find myself starving by trying to feed on other people’s digital crumb traces. Lives of friends, ex-friends, acquaintances, girlfriends, interests, ex-girlfriends, colleagues, and friends of friends are constantly updated in my newsfeed. Picture updates of these lives flood me with a sense that I ‘know’ them more than I do, and often leave me with a sense that I am missing out on something. It’s like watching The Bachelor… alone!  Too often, I feel like staying in touch this way is a worthy supplement to real communication…. I know you didn’t tell me to do this, but it is who I have become!

Facebook, I want you to know that I don’t think you are evil. You are a GREAT technology, and I know there is the right match out there for you (probably billions of great matches, you player you). You are an amazing technological advancement, and it’s possible to develop healthy or destructive relationships with you. You are like today’s nuclear energy—on one side, making possible the nuclear bomb (oops), while also being a potential way around problems of energy dependence, and the decreasing supply of easy-to-reach oil. Ok, that might be extreme, but you get the idea.

I know that many people have found the way to reap your benefits, all the while avoiding the problems of being too seamlessly integrated into our lives. Many people like how you are an awesome, fluidly updating address book (I am one of those), and don’t feel too pulled into your digital hurricane. I envy these people because they get to use you for what you can be in all your potential: a social technology that makes us a small step away from almost anyone else in the world.

But I also fear there are others just like me, people who have been shaped by this technology in ways that they might not see as ideal. I wonder if anyone else feels too dependent on being “in the know,” of needing the affirmation of wall posts or message responses, and not liking the way that it takes so little effort to stay in touch with friends. I wonder if there are others who feel like something might have been lost in the gain of accessibility.

I am sorry Facebook, but, I just need a break.

I guess I have learned that I am too easily and unintentionally shaped by my daily actions. I am not some floating mind that gets to decide who I am, what I value, what resonates with my sensibilities, and then act accordingly. I am embodied as a creature, and my day-to-day practices shape who I am and what I want to be. I might be in part a mind who thinks and chooses how to act apart from external stimuli, but even that is shaped by my thinking’s deep embedding in a physical, neurological system, connected by synapses to a body that moves, eats, sees, touches, feels and is seen. My actions matter in that I cannot stay unchanged and stay on the straight and narrow. And that has implications, whether those actions be on the internet, in the sports I play, how I approach eating and playing, or how I physically interact with friends, lovers, enemies and strangers.

Facebook, I need you to know that you have done everything right. I saw your note the other day, about the changes that you made to privacy for me. That was really sweet of you… but know it was never about that for me. Its not that I need my information to be secret, it’s just that I just need a little space from everyone else’s day-to-day. But … please please please don’t change anything about yourself… you are wonderful and I need you to know that.

I guess I have just realized that there is a future Peter out there that I really want to grow into — a thoughtful, social, engaged person who lives with just enough simplicity. And this is in tension with the ways I am being shaped and molded by my hanging out with you in the day-to-day. Facebook, you have become a daily ritual of a quasi-religious form, and I think I am becoming a bit too fundamentalist for my own good. I want to be less in need of affirmation, more genuine in social interactions, and a bit less voyeuristic… and I’m going to need your support in giving me some space. I really hope you understand.

And so with that, I say goodbye, for now. Maybe I’ll see you when I am a bit more able to resist your charm.

Always your friend, just not currently in a Facebook variety,

Peter

Anyway, because I may never have the chance to give a real commencement speech, I thought I would put down some words in a venue I know I can be published (immediately)… this blog!

*          *          *          *          *

Class of 2010, before I say anything else, let me say this… Congratulations! Yours is an accomplishment worth savoring!

Congratulations on spending four plus years of your life accumulating knowledge, theories, and various ways of parsing the world. Congratulations on leaving that weird microcosm called high school and entering another especially unique place in college. You formed and dissolved relationships. You made hard choices about what paths are worth pursuing in a career. You learned to learn, you separated from your parents (to varying degrees of success), and you captured new ways of seeing the world and your place within.

Class of 2010, I say with confidence that you have more knowledge today than when you first came to this university nearly four years ago.

But as proud as you should be of those accomplishments, I hope you know this as well: this knowledge is a potentially necessary, but clearly insufficient condition of success in the game of life. And that which you DO NOT YET KNOW will be that which you will most need to survive what is to come.

This is a hard for me to say and be heard, because whether you admit it or not, there words will fall on deaf ears. They did for me at least. It is not that I did not listen, though that may be true as well. Rather, it is that I did not understand what was being said… the words could not grow into a personal understanding because they needed the nourishment only found in the mud, rain and sun of the world in all its starkness and strangeness… something I cannot give you from a podium on this May afternoon. They needed to grow into an understanding in the wilderness that we all enter when we walk out of these hallowed halls.In some real way, you won’t know what I really mean until you stand naked, broken and face-to-face with the world as it is and as it could be.

But let’s move closer to that understanding by playing a bit of a mind game. Let’s think of all that you might go through in the next stages of your life:

You will make friends, and will feel yourself grow away from those  you cannot imagine being apart. You will have success in your jobs, and you will have days when you wish you were 16 again because of the frustrating reality of bureaucracy, intellectual stagnation, and catty colleagues. You may not be able to have children even if you want them, and you may lose them in tragedy. If you are fortunate enough to see them grow, you will be simultaneously more disappointed and more proud than you can ever imagine in this moment. You will fall madly in love, and you will grow disillusioned as that person comes to light both in the reality of their glory and ugliness. You will question the beliefs of your parents. You will question your own deepest convictions. In the next few years you will enter a world that is much more like a blank canvas than the linear path you forged to get here– elementary to middle to high school filled with ACT prep, graduation requirements, all bathed in tangible metrics of success.

Hearing this should be both exciting and scary as hell.

But do you want to know the real scary part? Try telling me what the knowledge you accrued so far will do for you in those moments? Economics majors… you know how to beautifully model behavior with econometrics, and you know of a positive relationships between supply and demand. But what does your knowledge do in the moments of choice where answers don’t flow neatly from description? Psychologists out there, you know of dual process models of cognition, and ways to isolate causality by way of controlled labratory experiments. But do you know how to live, cry and continue to dream through, in-spite of, and because of future moments of desolation? Literature majors, you have read the great novels, and you can explain their themes by way of marxism, post-modernism, post-structuralism, any of the various -isms. But what happens when you become like the character that you studied from afar, when it is not so easy to move from the events you experience to a clear plot, and it feels impossible to see obvious meaning amidst pain?

In these moments, our knowledge falls sadly short of our high expectations. But if it is not this knowledge that helps us– at least not directly– how will we respond?

While I hate oversimplifications, there is one I learned in the few short years after college that I think is helpful for understanding our common dilemma. I have come to see that there are two types of people in the world– the romantic and the realist– and neither posture is sufficient for making it through all we will face.

The romantic sees the beauty in life. She continually sees the upside. While the romantic often has an over-inflated sense of the importance of their own story, this can be comforting in that the story is woven beautifully. He is a dreamer, and these dreams become so interwoven with one’s vision of the future and experience of the present that they often cannot be separated.  I have a bit of the romantic in me.

But the problem with the romantic view is that it is an abstraction, a move away from reality. Take love, one place where this view is exceedingly obvious. Sometimes relationships work out and sometimes they do not, but in either case you are breaking bread with people who are far from perfect, those who stand on the far side of Eden. While romantic films cloak the imperfection of another in a cute quirkiness, if you ever get to know real people who let you see themselves in vulnerability, you will realize that this view of the world ignores the fact that people and their personalities sometimes (often?) rub us the wrong way, and we them.  The romantic view of work is also flawed. I have had several romantic friends in Teach for America who expected the world of education to change immediately upon their arrival. But they have left  disillusioned upon bumping up against the structures of injustice, and the inertia of inaction. Romanticism is flawed in that it is an escape from reality.

On the other hand, we have realists. The realists see the world as it is. They do not pull away even if it is hard. They sing of the naivety of graduation speeches that tell them they will change the world. They cringe at romantic movies, and they often see the religious, the idealists and the artists as sadly delusional. I have a bit of the realist in me.

But the problem with the realist is exactaly the opposite.  If the romantic fails to see the world as it is, the realist cannot view the world as anything but broken, bruised, and bleeding. Cognitively, when people are in the midst of depression– negative realism to the extrem– their brain lacks a stability of serotonin and norepinephrine, which shapes the way they interpret events in their experience. We see a bit of what this looks like experientially in Vincent Van Gogh’s famous 1890 painting “At Eternity’s Gate.” In it, an old man sits in pale blue pajamas and weathered leather boots, head drooped in his hands. His eyes do not turn towards good memories, nor can they see the beauty of the crackling fire next to his chair. He does allow himself to dream of what may be. His focus is singular, blinding, and selfish. If romanticism is an escape from reality, realism, in a very real sense, is a narrowing of reality.

A friend of mine, and the head of the catholic student center at Washington University put it this way: all relationships move in three stages, from infatuation to disillusionment to choice. This being said, the romantic lives for infatuation, and their world seems most true when this vision comes into focus. But when the world becomes more complex than our rosy views of it, the disillusionment can become harrowing. The realist on the other hand cannot see enchantment in the world, its flattened, as the philosopher Charles Taylor writes. While the highs of their infatuations and lows of their disillusionment might be less extreme, I think they lose a depth in life that comes from seeing it not just as it is but also as it can be.

Class of 2010, know that while these are the two paths of least resistance, dispositions towards which we might naturally gravitate one way or another, they are not the ways of wisdom. If there is anything I have learned since I walked across the stage at my own graduation, flipping my tassel from right to left, it is that it is not enough to be a realist or a romantic alone, and that the way of wisdom must be forged somewhere in between.

But what stands between realism and romanticism, towards what goal shall we march on? Only unconditional love. Only a posture of seeing which cannot turn away from flaws (in ourselves, in others, in our goals), but also knows that this is not the end of the story.

Life is a series of relationships– with ideals, with communities, with friends, with jobs and with lovers. Do not believe the stories of the romantics who try to obscure these relationships from their complexity, who cannot stand the messiness. See the world as it is, and move courageously towards moments and people and experiences that will shatter your expectations. All the same, do not believe the pessimistic rants of those who narrow reality to what is currently, or even a view of what in the deterministic space where our dreams and the actions they inspire have no consequences. See the world in its fullness, but know that fullness is more than what is here now, that words matter, and that the transcendent has to be named as such to be made living and dancing among us. Do not love in these varying relations on conditions that they are easy, in the very least because you know that you are not easy to love. Move towards the world in a belief that there is beauty in complexity, and wisdom forged in pain.

Class of 2010, go knowing that while you leave with knowledge, you must be prepared to search for the narrow space between naive romanticism and narrow realism if you are to find wisdom. Move slowly towards loving in relationship of all forms (the world, your passions, your friends and loves) without conditions. Pour yourself into impossible passions, knowing that you can fail because the world, at the end, does not rotate on your axis. Live as the poet whose words do not pull them away from reality, but more deeply into it, into a “complete saturation of the actual” as Christian Wiman writes. Class of 2010, while I know that you go forth in knowledge, I hope you hold out your hands ready to reap the wisdom found when you engage what is real and what is hard with dreams of what will be and what does matter.

Peter

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.

in the latest entry, you have phrases like “the ethical life,” “the artist,” and “the legalist”… I know this may seem rather silly, but your article caused me much confusion. First, because I have a (traditional? conservative?) concept of the definition of “ethical” – meaning pursuit of what is fair/ just/ right, etc. Second, because I always thought pursuit of beauty was something different (termed “aesthetic” or “vanity” or…beauty leading to pleasure being “hedonism”). And finally, because if the terms “artist” and “legalist” mean ‘ artist’ and ‘lawyer,” I interpret your entry as presupposing that the lawyer never does anything based on emotion, but rather blindly follows laws….but I don’t want to delve into a discussion of the legal system because I’m not even sure if I’m interpreting this correctly.

Because of this criticism, I decided to defriend her on facebook. However, after stewing in it a bit more, I thought better and decided to clarify some terminology and concepts.

Let me start by staying that, at the core, I am really wondering whether our concepts of beauty (or an intuition of what is involved in living a beautiful life) might have something to say when the law fails to be normative. I wonder whether this intuition might be a reliable guide when the law is not clear about how to act, or in some cases appears to be advocating for a less beautiful (ugly?) way of being?

Let me identify three situations where these questions might become salient.

Let’s start by taking the top photo of the montage on this post– a beautiful scene of Patagonia in the South of Chile. Let’s assume for a moment that this part of Patagonia is not legally protected by the Chilean government. In addition, you come to find out there is a gigantic supply of oil which could satisfy that natural resource need for the entire world for the next 50 years. From an ethical standpoint, the question here is whether your conception of this land as ‘beuatiful’ should factor into how you see this land and whether you end up drilling?

Now, take the second photo down of a couple in love– in this case an engagement photo of my brother John and future sister-in-law Ashley. The legal system clearly has something to say about how they should behave towards each other from a contractual standpoint– the binding nature of the marriage contract and/or plans for how to deal with resource allocation in the  case of a breach. In addition, the law dictates how they should or should not treat each other just by virtue of bering human, such as is the case with laws against physical abuse. But what should they do with regards to the nuance of their relationship with each other– how they interact when they really don’t want to be around each other, what it looks like in practice to see and treat another person as fully human, or ‘little’ things like how and when they should forgive.

Finally, take a look at the third photo. Here we have a picture of a Haitian man following this year’s earthquake. What does the law say about how one should treat this man? Does he deserve medical treatment? What about if he does not have health insurance, as is the case with the majority of Haitians? From a personal standpoint, should we, in a quasi- ‘good Samaritan‘ decision moment, go out of our way to treat this man… or possibly text in money to support the cause? What if we know that no one would ever know if we walked by (or texted)… or if we know that our treatment would not be effective… would our answers differ?  In this situation — very much like the other two– there is little in the way of legal constraint to guide our behavior, yet action is still possible and choices are still made. How should our conception of beauty, and specifically the nature of a beautiful/ ethical life shape our behavior?

Thus, to answer Stacey’s question, what I am trying to get at is how we act ethically either in lieu of the law… and whether this system (whatever it is, ethical, aesthetic, religious, intuitive) ever warrant taking behavior explicitly opposed to the law? In other words, when our conceptions of ‘fair/ just/ right’ are often muddier than we would like, how should we act?

I’ll try to flesh this out a bit this weekend…

ciao

Outside of these accolades, one of the more intriguing phenomenon associated with the film has been the relatively large number of individuals experiencing depression and/or suicidal thoughts following the film. In general, some people seem to be captured by the beauty of this world that ‘earth’ as we know it feels drab, and something only worthy of escape.

One viewer, Ivar Hill, wrote of this experience on a Avatar message board saying:

“When I woke up this morning after watching Avatar for the first time yesterday, the world seemed … gray. It was like my whole life, everything I’ve done and worked for, lost its meaning. It just seems so … meaningless. I still don’t really see any reason to keep … doing things at all. I live in a dying world.”

We are all drawn towards the beautiful in some fashion or another. No doubt, we all pursue this beauty… whether that be in romantic relationships, in the work or life we find appealing, or even in a draw towards music that resonates with our sense of what is true. But can beauty be a way to orient the ethical life? Can one seek after beauty and call this ethical?

In other words, is the ethical life best pursued by a legalist or an artist?

Part of me hopes that the answer to my question is the artist. I tend to think that the person who does something because they think it is a beautiful way to act conveys a more appealing picture of ethics than the tactician following a set of laws. But is this just a personal pipe-dream?

To be honest, I don’t know the answer to this question, but I want to try to flesh something out in the next post. Three question that might start the discussion… chime in as you feel appropriate.

1. Does our experience of beauty make our experience of the ugly depressing and leave us with a posture of an escapist (e.g. Avatar), or might it spur us on to create beauty when it is lacking?
2. How are our senses of what is beautiful conditioned by things which might make this intuition unethical or untrustworthy (e.g. Nazi’s perceiving the beauty of a pure Arian race, and thus the ethical act becoming genocide)?
3. In what ways is the subjectivity of beauty a benefit and a drawback from the rigidness or objectivity of a ‘law’ based morality?