Life in Gray-Scale

Tonight I was going through some of my old stuff and I ran across a diary that I had made last year when I was starting my first (and only) semester as a graduate student at Pepperdine. It was in response to a less than satisfying classroom experience with a pretentious prick professor:

Here it is, almost a year ago to the day:

My first class this morning was Great Books, taught by Professor Kauffman. It was a good experience, overall. We talked at length about defining “the good” as well as the reality or illusion of objective truth. My roommate and I, as if we needed the help, we were immediately dubbed the “thumpers”—though not in so many words. I was directly asked, by Professor Kauffman, to describe the genesis of my morality—where does it come from? My response was faith, my morals are rooted in my faith in God—the morality of the Bible, essentially. He then asked me if I would abortion illegal in America if I had my druthers; I swallowed hard and answered in the negative. My roommate answered the question essentially the same way, although replacing the negative reply with a positive one. The frustrating part of this interplay was the fact that I was not able to qualify my remarks.

I firmly believe that we cannot legislate morality. The problem in this country is not that abortion is legal, but that people increasingly desire the eradication of human life before birth—by majority for the mere sake of convenience. This mindset is one that can never, by policy, be vanquished. Overturning Roe versus Wade will only serve to stimulate the hanger economy in the United States and abroad.

I have to believe in objective morality. More importantly, perhaps, I want to believe in it.

Without objective morality my faith is rendered meaningless.
Things in life are almost never black and white, cut-and-dried. That being said, however, they do, in varying degrees, stem from basic objective principles. These principles are difficult to apply uniformly in all situations—this is the very nature of the ethical binary. This difficulty of application does not, in my mind, contravene the existence of objective morality. While abortion is most assuredly immoral, couldn’t it actually be moral in very specific situations? Probably so. Much in the same way, War is almost always worth eluding; but, it has been necessary at varying times in world history. War is not moral in and of itself, but it could be.

It is only by the strength of objective morality that this world has not fallen into chaos.

What say you?

The Bridge Over the River Styx

P.O. Box 666
Fifth Ring Avenue
Blue Blazes, Hell

The bridge over the river Styx was out today, so I had to wade through it.

I found myself standing in a line of ten or more people today at the south Flint Post Office, wasting away for the purpose of shipping off my hardcover copy of "Public Finance and the Price System" that garned for me enough money to buy a tank of 87 octane.

This experience today, standing in line, was a veritable symphomy of my childhood fears (cello and contra bass section) and my various pet peeves (the strings). No one likes standing in lines, that is a no-brainer. However, I can usually handle standing in line--as an internet bookseller I do it all the time.

Or at least I thought I could.

Today I had the misfortune of standing behind a woman who decided she would eschew a cameo appearance in my own personal hell in favor of the lead role. With the devil and Gene Wilder by her side, this woman started humming the "Oompa Loompa" song from "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory." She did this for five straight minutes before taking a rest.

If only she knew that I absolutely despise that song and everything it stands for. Oompa Loompas are disgusting little creatures that have, throughout recent history, done more to scare kids than clowns and Pee Wee Herman's talking furniture combined.

Her little humming solo brought it all back. You remember the boat scene through Willy Wonka's factory don't you? Or what about the scene where one of those little mutant freaks got sucked into the chocolate river's filtration system? Remember that?

These memories came flooding back with each and every hummed note of that infernal song.

Finally the woman handled her business at the front desk and all was right with the world--and then someone's phone rang.

There is little worse, in my world, than having to listen to people converse on their cell phones in small public settings. You know, places like branch offices of the United States Post Office.

But, in this case it was even worse than that. I had to listen to the insipid musical ring tone that has replaced the "so ten years ago" ring. After regaining my composure, I took notice of a woman, probably in her twenties, busily labelling a package. She had a stumped look on her face and picked up her cell phone and started dialing.

"Hey" she said.

"How do you spell 'inventory'?"

Here's the thing: The voice on the other end of the line was, essentially, her lifeline. He was her ace in the hole. He was the person who she could count on, above all others, to be able to spell this infrequently used word.

He spelled it wrong.

She double-checked it and he spelled it wrong again. She wasn't satisfied, however, until he spelled for her another word that had escaped her.

"Ok, how about the word 'attention'?"

One out of two isn't bad.

Poll the audience next time, girlfriend. Fifteen heads are better than one--or some combination thereof.

So not only was this woman comfortable with having a phone conversation that everyone could hear, but she seemed ok with the fact that half the people in the post office would think that she was a bird brain.

She must have been compelled by the same force of nature that drove the hummer in front of me to do what she did. I guess pet peeves would not be pet peeves were they not continual annoyances.

And so it goes.

"Listen to the Blues, people. Listen to what they're saying." B.B. King

Why Israel?

The Land and the Holy City

Those of us who have grown up in the Christian church are all too familiar with the Holy Land of antiquity, Israel. It is the home of our most cherished landmarks and shrines. Christ was born in Bethlehem in the land of Israel in what is now modern-day Palestine. Jerusalem, the “holiest city in the world,” is the home of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre which rises up from Golgotha, the hill of Calvary. It is said that in the first Christian Crusade in the 11th century, Christian fighters were assured that they could better prepare themselves for the afterlife by showing contrition for the atrocities being committed within the confines of the Old City. In other words, prayers emanating from Jerusalem had a force of recognition that no other locale could boast.

The city of Jerusalem and the land of Israel are important not just to the ancestors of the ancient Israelites and to millions of Christians, however. Jerusalem is, depending on who you ask, the second or third most venerated city in the world for Muslims. Consider that one of the greatest events in Islamic lore is Muhammad’s “Night Ascension” in 621 CE in which he, as it is claimed, traveled from Mecca to the “farthest” Mosque, presumably in Jerusalem, and from there ascended into Heaven with Gabriel—the Al-Agsa Mosque. The rock from which Muhammad is said to have ascended was enshrined several decades after Muhammad’s death and is now, arguably, the most recognizable landmark in the world—The Dome of the Rock.

The land of Israel and the city of Jerusalem is at the historic epicenter of roughly half of the world’s adherents to religion, generally. For centuries Jews, Christians and Muslims have been wrestling for control of the Holy Land. Even to this day, the “Walled City” of Jerusalem is divided along ethno-religious lines. In spite of the continuing turmoil in the Holy Land, Israel still remains the destination of choice for pious Jews and Christians. For Jews, Jerusalem is Zion and for Christians it is the backdrop of the scriptures.


Origins of American Support

As American Christians, Israel is not our land; it is the land of the Jews; it is the land of “God’s chosen people.” I remember, as a child, hearing my Grandfather defend Israel--the state, that is--in the wake of the first Palestinian Intifada. And in my older years, I’ve heard him speak with equal amounts of pride about the potency of the Israeli Defense Forces and the United States’ support of it. (Even as I write this I am staring at the Star of David hanging from my wall.)
Many explanations have been given for my country’s devotion to Israel, but they often do not match the reasons that I’ve been given by my Grandfather. American diplomats, in spite of the Arab-friendly nature of the State Department, often cite the panacea of democracy and how it must be supported in a volatile part of the world. Still others cite the Holocaust as the thoroughgoing reason for the unfettered American support of the state of Israel since 1948. There was a lot of support in the West for the Zionist movements in the early 1940s on account of the atrocities that had come to light.

The support of the American government of the state of Israel, financially and diplomatically, since Harry Truman is indicative of both a tradition of selectively supporting democracy abroad (one that is certainly problematic) and of the prominence of Evangelical Christian thought in the last 60 years of American foreign policy.

Biblical Underpinnings

GENESIS 12:1-3
GOD told Abram: "Leave your country, your family, and your father's home for a land that I will show you.

I'll make you a great nation
and bless you.
I'll make you famous;
you'll be a blessing.
I'll bless those who bless you;
those who curse you I'll curse.
All the families of the Earth
will be blessed through you."

1 Kings 8:16
"Since the day I brought my people Israel out of Egypt, I have not chosen a city in any tribe of Israel to have a temple built for my Name to be there, but I have chosen David to rule my people Israel."

Roman 15:27
“They were pleased to do it, and indeed they owe it to them. For if the Gentiles have shared in the Jews' spiritual blessings, they owe it to the Jews to share with them their material blessings.”

Exodus 19:3-6
As Moses went up to meet God, GOD called down to him from the mountain: "Speak to the House of Jacob, tell the People of Israel: 'You have seen what I did to Egypt and how I carried you on eagles' wings and brought you to me. If you will listen obediently to what I say and keep my covenant, out of all peoples you'll be my special treasure. The whole Earth is mine to choose from, but you're special: a kingdom of priests, a holy nation.

Deuteronomy 7:6-8
Do this because you are a people set apart as holy to GOD, your God. GOD, your God, chose you out of all the people on Earth for himself as a cherished, personal treasure. GOD wasn't attracted to you and didn't choose you because you were big and important—the fact is, there was almost nothing to you. He did it out of sheer love, keeping the promise he made to your ancestors. GOD stepped in and mightily bought you back out of that world of slavery, freed you from the iron grip of Pharaoh king of Egypt.

Isaiah 11:11
Also on that day, the Master for the second time will reach out to bring back what's left of his scattered people.

Ezekiel 37:20-24
"Then take the sticks you've inscribed and hold them up so the people can see them. Tell them, 'God, the Master, says, Watch me! I'm taking the Israelites out of the nations in which they've been exiled. I'll gather them in from all directions and bring them back home. I'll make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel, and give them one king—one king over all of them. Never again will they be divided into two nations, two kingdoms. Never again will they pollute their lives with their no-god idols and all those vile obscenities and rebellions. I'll save them out of all their old sinful haunts. I'll clean them up. They'll be my people!”

The overwhelming spirit of the scriptures represents the relationship between God and the Jewish people as being at worst original and at best transcendent. The promise that God made to Abraham still rings true for many evangelical Christians, and to my Grandfather, to this day. Since a significant bloc of the conservative Christian movement in this country is comprised of evangelical Christians, it is no wonder that the historic relationship between my country and Israel has been guided by these sentiments.

Millions of Christians around the world believe that safeguarding the state of Israel is a requisite condition of the second coming. Others simply are resigned to the fact that a sovereign and powerful state of Israel for the Jews is a net positive for Christians in the Middle East—something that is certainly arguable. Still others simply retain positive feelings for the Jews because of the original Covenant.

Some Orthodox Christians and Catholics, however, subscribe to the belief that the Jews surrendered their claim to the title of “God’s chosen people” when they did not accept Jesus as Messiah. This was the sentiment expressed to me by a South African missionary who came to our church a few months back.

Conclusion

Tradition often has the force of inertia in the realm of politics. I find, more often than not, people are either confused or simply ignorant of why our country unabashedly supports the state of Israel even to the extent that our support surrenders any chance of diplomatic credibility in the region.

In sum, the support that the state of Israel has received from the United States for nearly 60 years is imbued with the forces of geopolitics as well as simple loyalty reserved for Jews by Christians that is rooted in the scriptures.

Rank Over Race?

Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire by David Cannadine; pp. xxiv + 264. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Edward Said’s seminal work, Orientalism, set off an academic firestorm in the late 1970s—one that still burns today. His book argued that the nature of imperial thought in Europe was borne out of a doctrine of racial superiority that eventually colored all Western scholarship of the East. David Cannadine, a staunch opponent of this “simplistic” argument, characterizes it in this way: “Britons saw society in their ‘tropical’ and ‘oriental’ colonies as enervated, hierarchical, corporatist, backward—and thus inferior.” (p.7) And, while Cannadine does not dispute the fact that racist ideologies were in play in the making of the British Empire, he presents an argument that is different but equally compelling.

Cannadine undermines the arguments of Said—and other noted historians—not by trashing their merits, necessarily, but by questioning their historical scope. Cannadine writes that “it is the argument of this book that these attitudes, whereby social ranking was as important as (perhaps more important than?) colour of skin in contemplating the extra-metropolitan world, remained important…for the British long after it has been generally supposed they ceased to matter.” (p. 8) Class distinctions, he argues, were at least as important as racial distinctions—an argument that would certainly draw the ire of adherents to Said’s Orientalism. This is not to say that the British Empire was in any way affiliated with a broad-based movement toward a more equal society; much to the contrary, British society was notably inegalitarian. His contention, however, seems to be that their fashioning of imperial societies abroad was based upon the assumption of graded upward mobility—that, with a little help, everyone could be British. And so, he sets out writing what amounts to a brief history of the rise and fall of British hierarchical society at home and abroad.

In short, Cannadine argues that the British saw their empire as merely an extension of their society back home. That is, during the 100 or so years after the British regained control of India following the Sepoy Rebellion, Imperialists took special care to fashion the Empire on the basis of a very familiar rubric. This rubric was replete with hierarchical class distinctions that, for all intents and purposes, remade British society in their far-flung colonies. This, as Cannadine argues, was not the simple “us versus them” mindset that has been represented in a great deal of the scholarship on Imperial Britain post-Orientalism. This wholly visible attempt to order colonial societies by structuring the preexisting unequal social gradations under the control of the Monarchy is, in a nutshell, Cannadine’s Ornamentalism. In this way, the monarchy came to be the source of unity amongst many in the colonies.

Cannadine’s uniquely descriptive prose allows the reader to fully grasp the extent to which British Imperialists took pains to, at varying times, place rank ahead of race in their structuring of colonial societies. One way in which Cannadine supports his argument hits pretty close to home. He makes the point that in the post-revolutionary colonies, colonists set up their fledgling societies not on the imperial structure of Britain, but on “constitutional republicanism and egalitarian social perceptions.” (p. 15) Cannadine here makes the claim that it was this lesson of history, the American Revolution, that provided British Imperialists with the impetus to fashion colonies along hierarchical lines in order to stave off further revolutions. (p. 15)

Another major theme that follows throughout the course of this book is involved in the projection of British grandeur in the colonies—the Pomp and Circumstance March of the Empire. In this way, the power of the throne of Britain was exported to the colonies to reinforce their budding social hierarchies. The famous durbars in India and jubilees in Africa had the affect of making empire seem more real to the new subjects of the Crown. This was the British honors system writ large. But, even beyond these regal ceremonies were the day-to-day projections of British Imperialism that attempted to create in their colonies the effect of oneness: “An amalgam of names, places, buildings, images, statues, rituals and observances…made it impossible for anyone to forget or ignore the fact that they were subjects of a sovereign rather than citizens of a republic.” (p. 105) This, it should be noted, would have been impossible to pull off in an intrinsically racist society. However, the extent to which individuals in the colonies felt a connection to the British Monarchy is certainly debatable.
This concept of hypothesizing perception is why Cannadine’s scholarship is somewhat less scholarly, in my view, than many who have come before him. Perceptions, obviously, are more difficult to account for in any truly empirical manner. One could compose a similar critique of Said in that his argument for “otherness” as the thoroughgoing modus operandi of empire was generalized to the point of being destructive.

Another argument that is made by Cannadine, and others, involves the use of preexisting social relations in the colonies to reinforce monarchical control of the Empire. In order to achieve this, the emirs, sheiks, Indian princes and tribal leaders who had already some level of endemic legitimacy were accorded a great deal of prestige in the imperial structure of Britain. In this way, a native tribal chief in New Zealand or South Africa could achieve—or exceed—the status of many high ranking Britons. It was Britain’s universalist approach to governing its empire; an approach which, at times, left many Britons who stayed home during the age of imperialism wondering if colonial life was actually superior to that of the homeland—this was, perhaps, an unforeseen consequence of indirect rule.

Cannadine’s arguments, on the whole, seem reasonable in that they present a legitimate second way of looking at the British Empire. But, inasmuch as Said’s arguments are stereotypical, Cannadine’s seem to be incomplete. The projection of British power in the colonies, with the aim of creating Neo-Britains, can certainly not be accounted for solely on the basis of ideologies and ornaments. The use of force, military, economic and social, seems to have been overlooked in the creation of colonial hierarchies—or at least underreported. This could have the effect of trading one stereotype for another—or at the very least downplaying the complexities of the relationship between the British Crown and it colonies.
Cannadine’s work is hardly post-modern in its presentation or conclusions. Not only is the simplification of rank versus race not particularly helpful, but his use of the term “British” with respect to how they perceived their Empire seems a bit problematic. With the term he appears to be only referring to the landed aristocrats in Britain—and certainly not the majority of Britons. This certainly prevents him from making an earth-shattering theory of one perception of one empire by one people. If only his analysis were as graded as British society; then he might be on to something.

Jared Field