Here is the first thaw.

I told my friend Matt today that I have a deconstructionist testimony of Mormonism. For starters, I believe in it because I don’t believe it, because the process of believing that took me toward unbelief brought me more truth than starting with the ‘right’ conclusions ever would have.

But that is not yet deconstruction, and it is also more than that. So let’s get on with it. I am given the Book of Mormon. I am told it is a sacred book, true, the only truth. I start to read it. I find a passage that irks me, but because I think the book is sacred — because I am told to read it again and again and again, and because it is supposed to be “true” and therefore must possess a secret that would satisfy my ire — I do exactly that: I read it again and again, and my reading deepens, and I search out all possible answers. Perhaps I find that my original assumption — this initial feeling that the Book of Mormon is racist, maybe — bends toward a reading that shows that this is simultaneously true and untrue. There are racist ideas in the Book of Mormon, and there have certainly been racist outcomes: people have found verses that were ripe for bad use and used them badly (both the book’s fault and the people’s fault). But because I am reading down, deeper and deeper, I must look at everything, and I discover, too, that for Joseph Smith’s time period it is actually quite progressive: a book about the American continent belonging rightly to the Indians, a book about white people needing brown people to save them. And then I must think the next logical thought — namely, how much was this book influenced by Joseph’s personal history and the larger histories unfolding around him — and I am off to the races again, asking questions about the nature of revelation and its dependability, about the possibility of a non-Platonic truth where there is nothing ‘out there’ and only the tension of all the ‘in here’s’.

It is the exact feeling of ire, of disbelief, of noticing contradiction, that saves. It saves by making you aware of the passage of time.

That sounds strange at first: the knowledge of time saves you? What could that possibly mean? What I mean by it is this: reading centuries’ worth of sacred texts requires you to admit that truth is very different at different times. It also requires you to admit that some things that were formerly ‘true’ to whole cultures are repugnant and grotesque to whole cultures now. Once you have noticed this, you will have to ask yourself a hard question: “What was ‘true’ about the scriptural ideas you now find repugnant and what was cultural? What parts of these grotesque idea actually came from God and what parts are merely the infinitized preferences of people still in the grip of societal- or self-deception? Did God, for example, really want the Israelites to kill men, women, babies and animals to purify the land from wickedness, or was that a great and odious self-deception that the Israelites attributed to their God to give it sanction?”

You will be forced to ask these questions, but then, as every good book requires, you will be forced to turn the question on yourself, ask, “What ideas in my own time are merely zeitgeist playing God and what ideas are true in spite of the culture?” Or, in other words, “If I took my most intense spiritual feelings and froze them into words that persisted in a book for dozens of centuries, and if a person thousands of years from now opened that book and read my frozen thoughts, what would they find to be true and what would they find to be backward and repugnant?”

This, in turn, will lead to a thousand more questions. You will necessarily wonder if there is any truth at all beyond culture, and if God actually tailors his/her messages to a culture or if cultures, being locked in time, simply perennially misunderstand God’s untailored words. And if there is no truth beyond culture, you will have to reassemble your entire concept of right and wrong, of responsibility, and of the function of God and, if you are in earnest, you will have to decide what thing or being or object — in a culture where truth is flush with culture — can counterweigh your tendency toward self-deception. But if you believe that there is some truth beyond culture, you will likely spend the rest of your life deciding your method for extracting truth from culture, of knowing when there is a difference and what it is when there is.

At this point you might start to realize that it doesn’t as much matter if the book is ‘true’ in the historical or correspondent sense, but, rather, if it makes you true by confronting you with the precariousness of your own truth notions and your devastating capacity for self-deception, which is itself a function of both personal and historical time. You will come to perform the most spiritual act, which is to doubt yourself in earnest, to doubt the self-evidence of any of your thoughts and to suspect preferences in the ideas you claim as truths. And this just might save you: It might save you from the rotten self-evidences of your culture; it will certainly save you from flatness of mind. It will require you to radically consider the possibility of truth in everything. But more even than that, it will make you Christian reader of history, both the sweeping histories of cultures and the intricate histories of individual people. To learn to read the world in this way (and you are no longer reading a book, but the world) is perhaps the saving act, making you both generous and wise, mimicking godliness by making you radically Other than Others (even Other than yourself) — a ballast against self-deceptions — and radically synonymous with Others-an empathetic human who can suffer with others in their search for truth. When you read the Old Testament, for example, instead of merely closing it defiantly and persisting in the truths of your time, you will let your anger or outrage guide you through the hard questions: Why did this person think this way, why do I think in my way, and what would God (or any other being who could look on me with the perspective of the future) think about what I think?

You never have to agree with this or that event or fact. That is the great mistake of moralist, rather than process, Christianity, a kind of Christianity all too often perpetuated by Mormonism itself. Faith and goodness are rarely found in agreeing with some proposition or other, but in the freedom to radically decide whether you agree or not. This is no revelation: many liberals have gotten this far, after all. But many liberals have also forgotten that this freedom is dangerous and prone to self-deceived selfishness of all kinds and they easily flatten their world to house their preferences only, calling it freedom. Too often, though, this freedom is often paltry, a desire to do whatever they already want. This is why you must also be generous in your reading. You must be generous in your reading in order to decide wisely what to reject and what to keep.

You will and should ultimately decide what you think of the Old Testament, or this or that commandment, but only after a process (excruciating) of setting yourself at odds with your self-evidences. No one but you — and sometimes least of all you — will be able to tell if you have done this fully, hence the pharisaic tendency: to reduce people to what can be seen and deduce righteousness from that, to make agreement and outward comportment the signs of faith. A testimony induced by a growing awareness of time has nothing immovable to measure itself against, no ultimate confidence in either outside or inside standards. It does not have this luxury because it realizes that everything moves — people, truths, ideas, gods, time. The only spiritual process that truly saves simultaneously uses time to other a person out of self-evidence while allowing a person to conclude something different than has been concluded before.

This is my testimony of scripture. Scriptures are houses of time that freeze old ideas and ask new generations to read them. Their sacredness does not imply that they are true, whatever that would mean, but that they must be taken seriously enough to be read and re-read. Re-reading is the pedagogy of salvation: it requires revision, revisiting, reevaluating everything, every day.

But I am concerned because these thoughts produce uncomfortable consequences. They seem to suggest that authenticity is most likely to occur within an authoritative and often oppressive institution, ideology, or system that appears intent on denying that authenticity. And yet it seems that the strange outcome of rigid authoritarian truth (this is the truth and the only truth) is a complex of truths that vex and vie and verb their way to prominence. Authoritarianism might actually (and quite accidentally) suggest that there is never an original interpretation, both in the sense of God possessing the ‘pure’ revelation or in the sense that one verse is truer than another verse 400 years later, and also in the sense that authoritative revelation — public revelation — can never fully trounce personal, or private, revelation. And this produces a great tension: that authoritarian structures, precisely by emphasizing totality and rigidity and the Truth of certain ideas — by insisting on the high seriousness and high stakes of it all — set the stage for profound subversions performed by people who are becoming truer than the Truth in their testimonies of resistance.

To be fair, Mormonism fails itself in its anemic self-definitions. There are many, including top leaders, who do not see Mormonism in the way I have described and who would in fact like to wipe out all possibility of the interpretation I am giving. But the fact still remains that Mormonism’s authoritarianism, in a strange move, is the precise thing that ensures an explosion of anti-authoritarian interpretations. After all, the very process of canonization is a deeply authoritarian process that begets deeply anti-authoritarian consequences. To canonize is to draw a line, to gather an armful of truth and say, “The world inside my arms is true and the world outside my arms is not.” Many people will accept this notion thoughtlessly and push forward in a happy dogmatism. But anyone listening or reading carefully will see the questions that it begs, will ask: How did you decide that these things were true and these weren’t (off the to the historicity and criterion races), or: These things that are true say different things (off to the nature of revelation and the influence of culture races).

The very margins of canonization, like deconstruction’s obedient child, will ultimately prove more important, house more important texts, than the actual text ever will. The authoritarian move of drawing a line is actually a most fertile subversive act, containing in it all the questions the line was supposed to stop people from asking.

Add to this Mormonism’s most subversive central premise — that of restoration — and you complicate things even more. As in any established religion, the subversiveness of Mormonism’s central tenet has been turned into an event rather than an ever-present gerund: the Restoration (definite article and capitalized word) rather than the restoration-ing (the uncapitalized doing of daily seekers). Mormonism, in its move away from a verb and toward the noun of institution, has swapped the idea of restoration for the event. So it is Joseph Smith who ushered in and accomplished the task of Restoration rather than seeing restoration as the process of finding and gathering in truth from wherever it is found.

At best, mainstream Mormonism uses restoration as a verb only to talk about all the people it will gather into its truth: a move that solidifies the boundaries of Mormonism and privileges the truth inside it. In reality, however, it is clear that a true understanding of restoration is a daily verb and requires porous boundaries between ‘the truth as we know it’ and ‘the truth as we could know it’. If we honestly believe that there is truth everywhere, and it is our job to find it, then we must also believe that we can never use the criterion of the inside to decide the truthfulness of something from outside. In other words, there is no way to use the authoritarian truths given to us by our institutions to perform the most sacred task of our religion: deciding what is true. As I said before, to do that we have to consider the fallibility — or the vulnerability, or arbitrariness, or historicity, or wrongheadedness — of our own beliefs right along with everything else. We have to be constantly alert, considering the radical possibility that each new thing might not only be true, but possibly even truer than what we claim as true.

I don’t blame Mormonism for seeing, and then trying to avoid, the dangerous implications of a restorative religion, particularly one that allows for personal revelation alongside official pronouncements. As Richard Bushman reminds us, the beginnings of institutional Mormonism can be dated to the time when Joseph returned to New York to tell the Saints who were getting their own extreme revelations that he was the authority and that his revelations counted more. This was an authoritarian move, to be sure, but also a necessary one, which is precisely why it interests me. It is precisely because Mormonism is so authoritarian — precisely because its story is so totalizing, its truth claims so sweeping, the stakes so high, the push for conformity so intense — that the profoundest kind of deconstruction can occur. In a sense, Joseph had to trade the central tenets of Mormonism for its health and survival; if he hadn’t severely restricted or devalued personal revelation and radical restoration, Mormonism would never have been anything but a perpetually splintering sect that lacked the gravitas to produce resistance. Deconstruction shares a similar birthright; its great subversions could only occur within an authoritarian language of hierarchy, static differentiation, and an insistence on the totalizing meaning of terms.

So again: What on earth am I saying? Am I justifying the presence of bad things in order to produce the good? Or, worse, am I saying that oppression and repression and the essentializing pronouncements of elites — along with the immeasurable amount of suffering and alienation they cause — are somehow necessary to a system that capable of producing truth? Or am I saying that Mormonism is uniquely equipped to create the highest form of anti-Mormon, a person who uses the deliberate falsehoods of Mormonism to become its antithesis, which is somehow a truer Mormonism than canonical Mormonism itself?

I don’t know. I do know that the Mormons who have learned to read well — instead of ideologically — are inevitably some of the most earnest, complex, and expansive-minded people I meet, often much more so than so-called free thinkers who were born thinking the ‘right’ (for our time) kind of things. These people often strike me as flat, their thinking inherited and lacking history in any of its incarnations — without a sense of time and how they operate in it. They often denigrate ‘religious people’ as being conservative and small-minded, when they are actually performing the most dangerous hypocrisy: believing that the virtue of their conclusions necessarily implies the virtue of their process, or believing that the right conclusions preclude the wrongness of their assumptions. In short, too many liberals condemn themselves in their criticisms of others; their liberalism is simply a puffed-up belief that they have escaped the mistakes common to all humans.

Getting redundant now, but I believe that the central problem of existence is the tendency toward self-deception. This tendency is a human problem, not a religious or a political or ideological one. The difference is not that religions increase self-deception while, say, democracy limits it. The difference is that every institution increases self-deception in uniquely dangerous ways. The converse of this is hopeful, however: If institutions can foster self-deception, they must also have unique ways of diminishing it. I accept that religion fosters self-deception in uniquely dangerous ways. But I must also insist that religion challenges self-deception in uniquely marvelous ways. Right now I am in the strange position of realizing that in my experience of Mormonism, the former sponsored the latter.

I don’t think this needs to mean that only authoritarian structures can produce proper resistance-proper resisters. I do think, however, that it is immeasurably valuable to have ideas with high stakes, to have ideas that cannot simply be rejected but must be understood, and to cultivate in people a sense of the sacred. This would cure people by introducing an Other that can fight against their false notions, their impatience, their wrong-headed ideas. And it creates this Otherness precisely by demanding communion: true understanding between humans that erases all Otherness. I suppose I believe that religion is the house where the radically Other not only meets the radically familiar, but becomes the same thing. The love taught by good religion, good reading, good democracy, whatever, divides people untidily between doubt and self-doubt, between the boundaries of their skin and the beginning of someone else’s, and between the critical distance of judgment and the immanence of intimacy.

This is my deconstructionist testimony. Everything unravels itself in the attempt not to, and that’s the point. There is always unraveling somewhere on a smooth string, unraveling faster the tighter the smooth string squeezes. The truth is the unraveling: the unraveling of self-deception, of authority, perspective. The need is for something to unravel against.

The myth I had been given, the myth of America — the founding fathers standing around proudly in massy unity — did not prepare me for and could not accommodate singular death. In my myth, the Founding Fathers lived lives posthumously imposed on them, lives of order and swelling, purposeful inevitability, and consequently must have died all together — their story finished — according to the law of common consent. To have to know that they died singly, at different times, in the unfinished loneliness of their wish, was too much for my myth to bear. It died that night in the awareness of death.

It was one of those strange things that make you weep. It is one of those strange truths that everyone knows, so that when you know it and try to say it you have only the words that everyone knows, and you fret because you can’t distinguish words-of-the-bones from words-of-the-mind.

I will die, possibly this next second, but then again, maybe not (I lived for 26 years on this ‘then again’). But what is worse is that everyone has, or will.

Sometimes a name is enough to pen me inside a pressing terror; today, I was supposed to write a check to Angela Archer, and the fact that Angela Archer existed, that I had never met her but that she had in spite of that managed to find a respectable job at the Department of Workforce Services-that she may or may not know yet that she will die-that she was just one of a grotesque number of people who had decided their lives had significance and who would die in grotesque anonymity: well, I did not write the check. It seemed like a vulgar thing to do.

I remembered Annie Dillard talking about the dark behind every beauty: If the question of existence is a meditation on loveliness, it is also a meditation on the horror of a purposeless infinity, of-Annie’s words-a hatch of bugs that swarm each other and the mind. We do not like that existence. Our desire to matter makes it ugly.

And a text from a friend: “I am starting to believe in God. The multiverse requires it. Everywhere there is a God to beings who are Gods to others. The universe is a fractal of Gods within Gods. Does that make me Mormon?”

I wrote back: Yes, and me too.

I used to not care about ‘doctrine’. What minutiae. Now it is the difference between a fractal and a fraction, 1 over 6 trillion-trillion, in other words, me: the top of a fraction that will die with no consequence to the final math, a casualty of plus or minus 2 degrees accuracy. And for whom? For what? To iterate back on itself, an elegant fractal of meaninglessness?

Perhaps a desire for afterlife is the most deformed of man’s multiple vanities. But vanity itself is a form of salvation, as any serious artist will know.

I do not know physics; I know only the mad math of desire where 1 always equals infinity: the mad, madding math of religion.

And maybe it is as revolting as a swarm of bugs crawling on top of each other to reach heaven. And maybe a God is someone who writes the story of the grotesque, the terrible delusion of being an individual rather than a placeholder in the common denominator of death.

Right now I am thrall to the grotesque. I hope it is nothing so serious as loss of bravery, a refusal to look hard in the eyes of an inconsolable loneliness, an insatiable wail that can never fill enough indifferent space.

But I know it’s true: I want a God, and desperately. And that is why I must understand this person, Joseph Smith. And it is also why I can’t enlist in the march, the moving-on.

I know from reading Survival in Auschwitz that the human mind is a trick of evolution: a thing that must destroy itself with its own desires, that finds itself always in the middle of a Gordian knot of longing that both undoes it and tangles it more tightly together, a knot it refuses to cut because it needs the mystery.

The desire to keep living in spite of the peace of death, the ability to look at the chaos of infinite dying and believe in reconciliation is insane, a perjury against reality that even art won’t commit thoroughly. In the end there is some restraint, some resignation amidst the fury, that will make it art and not religion. Religion is pure insanity, pure egotistical want that trades in infinities of decreasing terror: immortality for anonymity. To survive it at all takes the faith of an atheist or a saint or else an idiot so cajoled by the closeness of things that he closes his eyes.

At any rate, once you feel it, you’re done. You’ll feel it everywhere. You’ll wonder how you can live, and if you go to the symphony to hear Mozart’s Requiem, you will wonder how he had the strength to tell the terror straight. You will no longer be good at living, the bland, presumptuous self-evidence of it. And then you will start to read the oldest books again.

I have been nesting, too, because the words I want to say seem too dangerous to say. I have been seized upon by a desire to revive an old conservatism that has never released me; I have been compelled to ask questions and then to ask for help-a dangerous proposition; I have wanted to let loose with a thorough agnosticism, with stifling doubt, and then with joy in the stifling doubt, a phrase that says: Rejoice! For doubt is all there is; I have known a great shrinking at the content and the sound of my own voice; a great silence before I speak words that are my own to speak, and all the terror of that silence; a feeling of preparation, great despair, foolishness, and above all, fear that I am about to be utterly myself and that this ‘myself’ will be utterly incomprehensible to others. I have sat, wooden, unable to write. But under the wood, a secret fungal decomposition, dreadful and dark, remaking the inside and moving out.

In short, I have never had such a cacophony of contradiction to offer before, never had so much good to say about the Institution, never so much forgiveness, never so much disbelief in God but never so much delight in the metaphor.

I have been drawn, in this great racket, to the lamentation of old stories and the spells they cast far beyond their happenings. I have been drawn to the stories of Beats everywhere, of the explosive, prophetic, misunderstood human wherever he or she has appeared. I am learning the meaning of Jack Kerouac’s confession: “I am not a beatnik. I’m a Catholic.”

This is why I finally opened Richard Bushman’s Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. I guess I was finally ready for it. After reading the flat ethical histories of the flatly ethical, and the exposes of the expositors, and all the dear and necessary versions of the truth, and after, finally, re-reading Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia and falling in love again with the problem of history-of ever knowing what really happened-and after considering for months the real function of history as narrative, as a window on the narrator and the present: after all that good blood and fine sweat I realized I was ready for the compassionate historian, the kind that sees men and women as they saw themselves, beyond all ethics and exposes, as stories-as characters in some wondrous unfolding, characters who fought darkness and detractors, whose secret braveries were never visible, whose lives cried out for a loving explanation. In other words, I was ready for characters who would could never be understood as they were without the deliberate falsehood of writing-of something that brought their disparate parts and their secrets and their reasons together into something much larger than what the events actually afforded, of a fiction that got closer to the truth than living. I was finally ready to see Joseph and others as narrators who were compelled to tell and retell old stories and who themselves would be told and retold as long as they were useful to their readers. And so it was not surprising that I was ready for a historian who understood both the danger and the necessity of history as fiction, of the historian as interpreter and storyteller, of the historian who knew, above all, that the Joseph we believe in is not and could never be the Joseph who lived-that Joseph is true precisely because he gave us a story that could be endlessly revised, because he gave birth to a truthful fiction. Above all, I saw that Joseph Smith, to put it crassly, was of enormous and beautiful use to me because he contained, both as original and apocrypha, the content for all questions I could hope to ask. And I was ready not just for criticism, but for the whole study of a human being in the grip of the fantasy that he could mean something beyond death.

All this can be contained in Joseph’s most tragic condemnation of his friends: “You never knew my heart.” Bushman included that line in the introduction, probably to break the machine in people’s hearts-to make them capable of good reading. It broke the machine in mine. In five words, Joseph provided the whole lament of religion. Is it possible, after all the ecstasy, all the seeking and all the blessings, to escape the fundamental alienation, the cosmic loneliness, of being a living human being-a living human being who will die? Does the discovery of truth and the love it breeds compel you to draw close to others while widening the distance between you and them? Does anyone-even a prophet or a God-escape the writer’s desire to be loved, cherished and understood? Or is that what God- and prophet-hood is: the willingness to remain in that need forever? Can anyone, even in scripture, give a proper accounting of another person, or even their own ecstasy? Is friendship a fumbling through the noise of history and fallibility to find a person inside all of it, noising back? Is learning how to read the scriptures or write an honest history the same as being saved? As saving others? Are we saved, not in the content of our reading, but in learning how to read-how to approach the fundamental mystery of another? Does acknowledging this mystery combine with our knowledge of time to radically revise our notions of truth? Are the scriptures history books because coming to know God is the same as writing a history of both him and you-not a biography, or an autobiography, but an amicography: the history of a friendship?

After reading my friend Jake Wilhelmsen’s piece on the Beats, I cannot stop wishing I could have given Kerouac a copy of Rough Stone Rolling. I think he could have cried. More than anything, I am driven to consider the mysterious crossroads where friendship, ecstasy and writing meet to make the only fiction worth reading. I am even more distracted by Dean Moriarty’s idea that a good beatnik “knows time”-that they know that the mystery of understanding any person is compounded by understanding them across time, and that the act of writing-especially the act of writing scripture-means that people will have to understand your ecstasy from the other side of time, and that this is the double reason why they will never “know [your] heart.” So if you are a beat-if you have let your desire for overmuchness take you into ecstasy, and if the loneliness of that ecstasy left you with the impossible need for true friends-then you will hope your posterity are historians who will forgive you for your time and save themselves in their own through forgiveness.

I am indebted to Jake for his insights, and for this quote by George Dardess, a compassionate reader if I have ever known one and someone who inadvertently condensed my thoughts on scripture, religion, Joseph Smith, history and the process of knowing as a friendship with time-in other words, the historian’s salvation:

To have responsibility for your friend means not only providing him with companionship or with money, not only defending him before a jury of his peers; it means also-and painfully-maintaining a sense of how your friend sees himself apart from the way you see him.  But, perhaps more painfully, it means maintaining a sense of how the friend sees you apart from the way you see yourself.  Maintaining such difficult senses is an act of generosity few people care to perform unless they are in love.  And if they are in love, they are people-like Sal Paradise-susceptible to the wild contradictory splendors of human behavior.

History saves.

More next time…

I am sure I will be mistaken here by people who will think that I mean a Church or a specific religion or even a belief in a particular God. I do not. What I mean by ‘religion’ is that rupture, that impulse, that demands to be universalized but cannot be codified-that contains within it both the radical prescription for equality and the moment-to-moment-ness of mercy. And by religion I also mean the requirement that someone believe in something more than can be codified, something more than the infinitization of their preference. Because the desire to codify allegiance and infinitize preference is exactly the sinister impulse that produces a State. The opposite-the demand to universalize the subjective by extenuating its circumstances-is the impulse of religion. It is precisely by believing in something more than ourselves that we allow a demand that is larger than our own preferences to be placed on us. Just as the State functions to guard against a too-rapid assimilation of any preference, a God works against and finesses one’s belief in the self-evidence of his preferences.

But to return to the question of Jesus and its political relevance, I must say that it was not enough to simply admire him. One had to believe in him. And I think that still holds, if not in the particular (we do not have to believe in Jesus per se) than in the general sense: first, that we must be transformed rather than convinced by an idea to be powerful and second, that we must see a difference between the idea and ourselves. That gap between ourselves and our ideas is what is powerful about believing in something rather than respecting something. Respect can easily bend toward respecting anything that already accords with our preference. Believing in something other than ourselves requires us to reckon with the difference between what we would like to be true and what is stated as true. Sometimes the former truth will win out, sometimes the latter. That is not necessarily important. What was important-what was true-was the process of reckoning the gap, not the content of the conclusion. A State allows people to line up with ideas that they respect and creates partisanship, gulfs between people that are irreconcilable because they admit no gaps. Religion requires each person to radically examine both the alterity of another person and the possibility of radical similarity (that the same impulses, motives and trials that mold us mold others, too) that allows for union amidst difference. It also requires that we allow every person her archeology-that we try to discover the manifold reasons someone became the person that they are, with the opinions that they have.

And this is my final point-one that will chastise me more than anyone else. I believe that most of the time the political conversation is the wrong conversation, and disagreement-the battles in the so-called marketplace of ideas-is the wrong method. It is the wrong method because it does not ask for the other person’s archeology but argues, instead, against their most recent belief as if a flat sentence could accurately stand in for a complex human. It is the wrong conversation because it believes that facts and arguments change peoples’ minds, and it allows people to assume that their motives are somehow different than other people’s motives. I have thought of this often as I have listened to the fights over Prop 8, and felt that most of us were having the wrong conversation-not, mind you, that the conversations weren’t vital and emotionally necessary to the people making them, but that by pretending the issue was a political issue rather than a human issue both sides made arguments that were completely inaccessible and foreign to the other. I believe that the religious impulse is the desire to discover another person’s archeology so that you can speak in the language that their experiences happened in. I also believe that religion recognizes (and this is where I condemn myself) that history is psychological, not structural. The consequences of history might be structural: they might be bigoted, racist, sexist, imperialist. But religion says that the chances are high that the motives of history are psychological-that they arise from needs that are common to everyone that we distort with insecurities that are common to everyone. Religion requires that we see our own hypocrisy in every bad act, and that we forgive it-not because it is foreign and repulsive to us, but because it is so familiar, because we were there inside it somewhere. Religion requires that we see history as a thousand-million acts of human frailty and alienation that we try, sometimes horribly, to overcome. And so religion must speak differently about justice than politics because it knows that speaking in structural terms is to already misunderstand the human. That is why religion’s response to suffering is guttural: it grieves for the perpetrator and the victim in the same sorrowful sigh.

Religion must confront structural injustices. That was Bonhoeffer’s point. But it must also achieve real peace by wreaking a transformation in every single individual. And this transformation will produce a person who radical knowledge of her own capacity for sin allows her to forgive other sinners without leaving the side of their victims. That was John Thomas’ point.

So what does this all have to do with Elizabeth’s post? What does it have to do with religion being of use or the tension between bottom-up and top-down politics?

Everything.

John Thomas and Dietrich Bonhoeffer were both essentially wondering if religion was, by its nature, necessarily complicit in the structural horrors of the modern world. For example, they might wonder if religion, with its emphasis on radical forgiveness, demands that we forgive-and thereby indirectly endorse-structural crimes? But they were also wondering if religion, by its nature, was capable of solving for that cruelty in ways that politics could not. Thomas’ suggestions about how we can reclaim religion to solve for structural violence in the world might seem laughable to other people. Reclaim our imaginative power? Revive the true meaning of the Eucharist? Many would find these solutions to be delusional and beside the point. They would argue that we must do something more than just that-that we need to demand real justice politically.

So far, my response has been an essay on politics, particularly the way that we have misunderstood politics and reduced it to consensus democracy. Now I want to focus on religion. Specifically, I want to decide whether or not religion is uniquely capable of doing what the State cannot-namely, to usher in and universalize the politics of beauty, joy, and mercy.

Any self-respecting liberal is already well-trained in the appropriate response to religion. It is dangerous, they will say. It can’t be trusted. It is the agent of oppression. It should be separated from the State.

Let’s forget, momentarily, that these criticisms are myopic and hypocritical-that they fundamentally miss the fact that the State is a religion that requires faith, that initiates members, that converts and that does real violence. Let’s forget, too, that their epistemological criticism is wrong, too, and that they have forgotten that there is paradox (and, consequently, faith) at the bottom of all knowledge systems.

What we should not forget is that these people have fundamentally misunderstood the purpose and role of the State-particularly its limitations. The State, as we have discussed, is entirely incapable of ushering in its own logical ‘rights’ revolutions because ‘rights’ are radically unassimilable, subjective claims that cannot originate or be adequately accommodated by a government. The State cannot legislate extenuating circumstance, but the politics of beauty, joy, and mercy is the politics of the extenuating circumstance. The demands for ‘rights’ are actually deeply religious demands. I use the word ‘religion’ broadly to mean the feelings that are based on sacredness, subjectivity, and a non-consensus-based ethic. (The word anarchism could also apply, and does, except I believe that any anarchism that is not rooted in the deeply religious principle of mercy and humility will itself become a State.) A subjective demand originates in an experience of radical emotion or alterity, and it speaks in the language of that happening. It does not speak about money or statistics or codes; it speaks the language of radical equality and effulgence-in the language of what we already are and what we live for. The State can eventually accommodate this impulse into its operations, provided that it gut the ‘happening’ out of it and replace it with legalese. But even when it does that, it cannot ensure rights or freedoms. The only thing that can ensure that is if people continue to radically experience that happening and speak in its merciful language. Rights are only as good as the continual transformation of individuals who then believe in them-whose daily reawakening to that belief keeps the rights strong and real.

Thinking of all this has caused me to revise my notion of Jesus. Once again, the Left comes ready with its accolades: They do not believe in Jesus, but admire him as a radical. They see him as a revolutionary who could have toppled the State.

But I have begun to wonder if there isn’t some necessary reason that Jesus couldn’t have come as a revolutionary in a traditional sense-if there is something inherent in true revolution that makes it utterly different from the State. Reading about Jesus’ life, it is obvious that he did not come to call for any uniform code, but the abolishment of one. His demands on people and his reactions changed with every person because each person was radically singular and each situation demanded a different response. That is why in some stories he bellows against the rich like an organ but, in other moments, allows a woman to buy and ‘waste’ expensive oils on worshipping him. In the former instances, he knew the people were selfish and must become radically unselfish, and so he demanded their money. In the latter circumstance, he knew the woman needed an object of reverence and allowed her a moment of extravagance-of beauty. He was not the grim enforcer of a bland, State communism, but a prophet of an expansive communalism-of people in extenuating circumstances communing with each other.

Jesus’ demands could never have been codified because they were radically singular, mercurial and situational. He knew that making a State that demanded change from people would not guarantee that change but would, rather, ruin it. It would enforce outward obedience, but it would not radically transform a person. But he must also have know that there were other limitations. He must have known that the State, qua State, cannot speak in the language of effulgence and mercy and remain a State. That revolution would have to come from the bottom up, in a series of individual acts that together overpowered the State entirely-a series of voluntary acts of kindness and cooperation and radical recognitions of equality that would eventually render the State useless, non-existent.

But any person who has confronted real suffering feels the obligation not to just personally end it, but to universally end it. The desire to end suffering does not show up in the langue of compromise but in the language of a radical equality that exists before and despite all evidence to the contrary. And that is why Katy and Wilberforce were not human ‘rights’ advocates, but, rather, unassimilable revolutionaries demanding a radical equality that outstripped the language of rights with its attendant freedoms ‘to’ and ‘from.’ In the language of radical equality, there is no freedom ‘from’ the radical obligation to end suffering and hierarchy; the freedom to recognize suffering is simultaneously the obligation to end it.

What I am wondering, essentially, is how we can politically accommodate the subjective. I am wondering, specifically, if we can have a politics of what we live for rather than merely a politics of what we are trying to protect against. Right now we say that we can’t-that the subjective, by definition of being subjective, is dangerous because it cannot find a common language that could be fairly applied to everyone, and consequently should stay quietly in the domain of the personal and not stray into public discourse. But what we forget when we say such things is that the subjective impulse is the universalizing impulse. It is easy to talk of justice without moving anyone. That is because talk of justice uses a language that, by virtue of being common to everyone, is not very compelling. This language is almost always the language of law, statistics and money. But anyone who has heard a person inveigh against war, say, by talking about how much it costs or how many people have been injured know that this is a fundamentally unpersuasive way to speak. It will enrage people who are already enraged and do nothing to people who aren’t. This is precisely because money, statistics, and law are not the language that things actually happen in. They are diversions; they are the ways we attempt to objectify experiences that were deeply subjective. The subjective experience is what compelled us to care in the first place, and what would compel others to care. The whole apparatus of law is the objective extension of our subjective impulse toward mercy. We objectify the subjective because we are afraid to impose our subjective experiences-which could, we worry, be just preferences-on people who might not agree. But when we objectify these experiences to make them fair, we make them common but uncompelling, and we conflate real politics-the politics of beauty, joy, and mercy-with the politics of justice.

I’ll give an example. I loathe urban sprawl, subdivisions and big box stores. I loathe them for many reasons, but the most basic is that I think they are ugly. Since I was very small, the sight of a sprawling, nameless city made my soul cry out. This was not the result of methodical thinking, or even, at first, the result of knowing how much water they required or how many species they destroyed. I simply felt a rupture in my heart, an incontrovertible ‘this is wrong’-or, more specifically, ‘this is ugly’. I have struggled with these feelings for obvious reasons. I was worried that what I found to be ‘ugly’ was just a temperamental preference-a taste-that would be wrong to impose on others. How would I feel, I reasoned, if a person who loved cookie-cutter houses made a law demanding me to build a house according to their preferences? Clearly, I would find that repulsive but, since the whole thing would boil down to preference, I would be unable to argue with the person and the matter would be decided by whoever was most powerful. I didn’t want that. And so I spent years trying to discover an objective grounds for what I already hated. I read book after book about the economic costs of sprawl, the water it required and the quantifiable pollution it produced. I read about how little Target paid its workers and how that affected taxes that people paid to support welfare. I learned and learned until one day, Wal-Mart announced it was going to build in my neighborhood. I couldn’t stand for that! So I organized a group to fight it. And we did. But the basic problem nagged at me: How could I stand up and say what I actually meant-that big box stores were ugly, in their looks and in their treatment of others, and that that is why I didn’t want one in my city. How could I say that what I actually wanted was not to lower taxes or preserve property values but to repaint the city in bright colors, curve the straight lines, and grow gardens on all the rooftops? Because that is what I wanted. I was an artist trapped in a democracy, a wailing pastor trapped in a courtroom. I wanted beauty and mercy in a government that allowed only law and justice.

So we had a big meeting to convince people to vote against the Wal-Mart. I made, of all insulting things, a PowerPoint (my concession to the Way Things Are). This PowerPoint was the average of all my feelings: I included facts about property values and tax codes and zoning laws, but I started with information on sweatshops, sprawl, and pollution. In the middle of talking about the latter, I put up a picture that showed two Chinese people riding bikes out of a black cloud of smog outside a Wal-Mart factory. On the other half of the screen was a picture of Chinese teenagers working in a sweatshop producing thousands of cheap toys. I was talking about sweatshop abuses and environmental violence when a woman raised her hand: “Can’t we get to the point?” she said. Horrified, I told her that yes, we could get to the point if she would kindly tell me what she thought the point was. “You know,” she said, “How our properties will be affected and how much traffic will increase.” And then: “This stuff is nice and all, but it is never going to convince the City Council.”

I have not been able to stop thinking of this experience. I felt devastated. How was it that we could not talk about ugliness and cruelty in politics? How had those been excised out of the political discourse, and why had we agreed to sell our robust ethics for a technocracy? And why was a technocracy-the constricted language of traffic and property values-the only acceptable kind of government? Simply by virtue of being common to everyone?

I was struggling with these thoughts precisely because I realized that democracy, by depending on a common language and placing consensus above even ethics (since its ultimate ethic is consensus)-must ultimately be reduced to a technocracy, where its moral claims are legislated so long in the language of the common that they lose the moral power that democracy was supposed to safeguard. I was wondering if the politics of beauty was impossible just as I knew that for me it was not a choice but a demand made on my soul.

The problem for Katy, Wilberforce and me, then, is that our desire to universalize mercy compels us to universalize that mercy via the apparatus of the State. And that is problematic because the State, dependent on Classical restraint, rules, and uniformity (aka, justice) is capable of universalizing our requests precisely by being that structure that could not possibly accommodate them.

What Katy, Wilberforce and I want is to universalize our preferences into what democracy calls ‘rights’, which should obviously throw some suspicion on the concept of rights itself. We have been trained to thing that rights are either objectively deducible or self-evident when, in fact, they are neither. A right is not objectively self-evident. What we mean when we say ‘right’ is that it was actually only self-evident to one person-a person who felt some rupture in her being that made an incontrovertible demand on her. That demand itself, precisely by being deeply subjective, demanded to be universalized, and that person’s success at universalizing that deeply subjective demand became what we call a right. If that is true, self-evidence is not a ‘logic’ in the traditional sense but a ‘logic’ in the necessary, subjective sense. A ‘right’ simply means universalizing a preference so that people are not free to go back and argue beyond the starting point. Very few people now, for example, would want to have a conversation about whether or not Blacks are equal to Whites, but that is not because their equality is any more certain or logically self-evident than it was before. It was simply that enough people felt a radical subjective rupture that required them to fight for Black equality, and that this fight-a fight that fought against and threatened consensus democracy in its radical demands-convinced enough other people to experience the same radical subjective rupture that the ‘right’ became collectively inevitable. It became a ‘right,’ in other words, which means nothing but this: that we decided to stop acknowledging that it was actually a preference by drawing a line-the line of ‘rights’-that could keep us from re-entering a dangerously subjective conversation. And we should remember this. A right is actually an aberration in democracy that we misguidedly laud as the logical expression of democracy itself.

(But I also believe that Politics-the top-down institution-is necessary. We cannot simply say that politics should be the sum of our subjective demands. Institutional politics acts a ballast that the subjective person must resist in order to universalize demands, and the act of resistance produces and finesses the real revolution. So yes, the State is a protection against the ‘wrong’ subjective demands, but that protection is not -as we want to say-the point itself. The State is a frustrater of rights, not the guarantor of them. That is, ironically, its value. But any time we begin to believe that the State is actually capable of granting rights, we have missed the revolution.)

First, I have been agonizing about what I a politics of mercy would look like. I have spent months in the belly of the political beast (Washington, DC) working on a political campaign-albeit, a very atypical political campaign-and I have seen again and again the limits of top-down politics.

I remember being in a rhetoric class a few years ago, discussing the differences between Romanticism and Classicism. We were talking about Classicism and its effects on the structures and values of America’s political system. (In case you haven’t read your Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance lately, a Classical worldview is one of order and limits, uniformity and law. A Romantic worldview is one marked by subjectivity, irrationality, sublimity and erratic emotion-all things we can’t codify.)

We were in the middle of discussing how these temperaments have influenced politics when it occurred to me: Classicism is the politics of limitation and restraint; it keeps people free from others’ excesses so that everyone can pursue what is actually important to them-the Romantic acts of creativity, love and meaning. Classical, top-down politics is not an end in itself, then, but a structure that tries to prevent one person from gaining so much power that they keep others from pursuing their real aspirations. Classical politics is the answer to this question: What if we are trying to live in harmony but one person abuses the general trust and expectations of living in a group? Classical politics attempts to restrain individual excess to allow for the individual extravagance of love and art. Romantic politics, on the other hand, is what we live for. It is the point itself. It is the freedom to create-beauty, meaning, trust, etc. It cannot be codified because it is the politics of the extenuating circumstance, where every person is singular and deserves a singular reaction.

I am having a difficult time lately, because I work for a presidential candidate who is, for me, the paragon of what is best in top-down politics: justice, righteous indignation, and the desire for equality. But working for a political campaign has also led me to despair over the limits of Classical politics.

This occurs on multiple levels. For example, I often think about radical reform and how it happens. In Classical politics, even the most progressive politician is restricted to saying what is authorized by the consensus of common sense. Ralph Nader can say something that is radical to some people-can say, for example, that we need to shift power from corporations to the people-but he can only speak up against the frontier of what we have decided is possible. This is a problem because I believe that true reformers are actually language-benders, that they are quite literally pushing the bounds of language by speaking in a language that has never been heard before. They are revolutionaries because they are asking for something new in the language-for some noun to be included as a noun (Blacks, women, slaves) or for some kind of discourse to be approved of (speaking in the language of the personal or the sacred). I believe movements begin when the agony of the unvoiced breaks through in the form of a demand-a demand to be radically included as nouns or as speakers in a language that has never been thought before.

I think we make a mistake when we look back on reformers of the past and say that they were ‘radical’, since, looking back, we don’t actually see their radicalism as what it was but fit it retroactively into what has, thanks precisely to that radicalism, become ‘self-evident’ to us. I just posted an article on this blog about the first white people to see the Grand Canyon and what that seeing did to their minds. It was literally a sublime experience; it shattered the concepts in those explorers’ brains. It was agonizing to behold because it could not be categorized using the available concepts. I believe that the demands of previous radical reformers worked on people in the same way: they were actually unassimilable; they exploded the concepts that were lying around. We are the inheritors of those ideas and so, just as people who have been conditioned by photographs and new concepts to view the Grand Canyon without pain, we too can accept the equality of women, Blacks, and slaves with equanimity-and we place the reformers who instigated these painful ideas within the realm of the normal. What they did was brave, we think, but must have been at least possible. The public resisted it, we say, but was partly ready for it.

I disagree. Learning about people like William Wilberforce, for example, I have had the inescapable realization that he was asking for things that weren’t even comprehensible. He was not merely casting his moral arguments in terms of economic arguments, saying that we should slowly stop the slave trade in a way judicious to all parties. That would have been hard enough. He was demanding that people acknowledge the radical singularity of all slaves as human beings who suffer-and, consequently, their radical and singular obligation to them. As a result, his demand defied the political language: he wanted all slaves to be free and equal. We have inherited these concepts of free and equal, and so we are retroactively able to understand people like Wilberforce. What this retrospect keeps us from understanding, however, is how his demands would have looked in the moment that they occurred-namely, unspeakable.

I try sometimes to think of a comparison. I keep thinking of several examples, all related somehow to my friend, Katy Savage. Katy is ardently against what she calls speciesism-any hierarchy between species whatsoever. For her, there is no moral justification for making a distinction between the rights of humans and the rights of other animals. She fundamentally rejects the notions that animals and plants derive their worth merely as objects for our use. As a passionate biologist, she runs into problems when she refuses to kill animals to study them. Katy’s reaction to the suffering of animals is as real and natural to her as someone else’s suffering for the pain of a family member, precisely because she believes that we would naturally feel that kind of empathy for all species if we had not been seduced by false categories and dangerous separation myths.

But Katy has a problem:  most people think she is crazy. Perhaps the people who think she is craziest are the very people pushing for animal rights reform. That might sound odd at first. Isn’t Katy an animal rights activist? Well yes, in one sense of the word. But the traditional animal rights activist, pushing for reform within the current political landscape and language, is actually quite threatened by Katy. The traditional animal rights activist has accepted the fundamental hierarchy and violence in a speciesist system, and has decided merely to lessen its excesses. This might be regarded as radical by a society that refuses to recognize the violence of its assumptions, but in fact it is not. As a friend pointed out the other day, most animal rights advocates are arguing for better treatment for animals before they are killed. Isn’t that strange, said my friend, that even the “extreme” animal rights advocates have no problem with the final consequence-that animals are killed? If we were talking about human beings-if we said they should be treated well but ultimately killed simply because we liked the taste of them-people would revolt with the obvious answers: These are human beings! You can’t just kill them because you want to, and any so-called ethical treatment is completely contradicted by the ultimate act of killing.

With animals, however, we accept the argument. The current political discourse does not include radical species equality in its language of the possible, and so reforms will be just that: efforts to ease pain in a system that depends on pain, rhetorical pronouncements of compassion in a system that depends on fundamental hierarchy.

I bring this up not as a lecture on species equality (although that is a worthy topic), but to address a problem with top-down politics of justice. I have said that real radicals did not just introduce hard ideas, but changed the language of the politically possible altogether. I bring up Katy and animals to illustrate what kinds of claims William Wilberforce might actually have been making when he demanded not just the humane treatment of slaves or a slow end to the slave trade, but the radical equality of slaves as human beings. Looking at Katy’s demands for species equality helps us to understand what Wilberforce was actually asking, and why the responses to him were not ones of mere hostility but outright ridicule. At this point, the top-down political discourse can only accommodate talk of easing pain (and rebels even against that). To even speak of radical species equality is almost incomprehensible. But to try to legislate it? Downright absurd! Sure, I could introduce ethical animal policy in Congress, but it would be bound by the limits of the current political discourse and would largely rest on violence. But the idea of introducing legislation requiring all people to be vegans, for example, would be both figuratively and literally unthinkable.

If I were to decide to introduce the latter idea-which I believe is proportionate to what Wilberforce was attempting against slavery-people would, amongst stronger complaints, probably tell me that my ideas did not belong in politics. If I wanted to be a vegan on my own time, I could go ahead, but it would certainly not be something I deserved to demand of everyone.

In other words, my fight would be relegated largely to the domain of bottom-up subjective politics, particularly the domain of the religious or the spiritual. If I had felt personally moved to become more merciful in my relationship to other species, I would have the right to act accordingly. I would not have the right to ask it of others in the common language of justice because people would essentially believe that I was speaking in the language of extenuating circumstance-of mercy-that was binding only on me. Since my feelings would be regarded as subjective, I would have no common language to legislate in and, consequently, no ‘right’ to do so.

And so we run up against the limits of a Classical politics that exerts undue power over the expressions of Romantic politics that it was supposed to safeguard. In other words, Katy’s (and Wilberforce’s) Romantic expression of mercy was actually frustrated by the politics of rights and freedoms-first, because Classical politics was not ready for it but second, because Classical politics-dependent on codification and uniformity-could not universalize what was essentially a request for radical mercy.

Elizabeth:

As is always and forever the case with me, I refuse to write when I have the most to say. I have spent the last two weeks on a speaking tour for the Nader campaign, and I have had the fantastic fortune of getting to visit friends in New York and Yale. After approximately forty hours of 5-AM-type conversation, my brain is literally screaming for writing relief, but I am so overwhelmed at all the things I want to say that I don’t know how to begin.

I thought I would start by posting some randomalia that might help to frame the ensuing and sure-to-be several posts. Then I promise to brave up and write tomorrow!

The first is this Gmail chat (don’t judge me if you wouldn’t have done it and don’t envy me if you don’t have it) between me and my friend Russel. Read it as a preface to things I will surely write concerning metaphor versus truth and god-the-feeling versus god-the-person. I will post the second in a little while.

Russell: So I have a different question while you’re pondering over the first question. You know my general schtik…and my general approach to the Church, its history, etc. What is your general response to it? Am I just willfully blinding myself? Blinding others?

Me: I think it is good apologetics but it offers no means by which you could find it to be untrue. So it finds beauty, grace and wisdom in the ideas, and wrangles compromises between disparate ideas, but it can explain away too much. Finding meaning in something is not the same as saying that it is true.

Russell: What determines what “explaining away too much” is?

Me: Well I too have a knack for apologetics, and I can write a post like the last one I wrote, which essentially says, “Okay, if God exists this is what I think he would be like,” or, at least, explains such and such phenomenon. But that is not the same as me saying, “I know God exists and I can explain why he commands what he does and believe in the righteousness of what he commands.” It is not the same as an existential argument, or an ethical one.

Russell: are you proposing that I fall into the latter camp?

Me: No, not necessarily. I think that you can make the idea of Mormonism beautiful and reasonable, but that is not the same thing as saying it is true, in the sense that God actually exists.

Russell: ah yes

Me: Or that the Mormon church is worthy of being believed in because its doctrines are true. Composting the richness and complexity of Joseph’s life to make new metaphors for the world is not the same as saying that Joseph was a prophet who was what he claimed to be–who founded the true church, etc.

Russell: Hmmm. I suppose I see those ideas in a more compatible light…the former, for me, provides sustenance for the latter idea.

Me: But I feel that if you were a Catholic, you would spend your life defending Catholicism–finding ways for it to be beautiful and productive and consistent, and that there wouldn’t be a breaking point or a criteria that would allow you to move from belief to disbelief.

Russell: But to me, that denies my own sense of empowerment…as though my faith were like the color of my hair.

Me: I don’t know what your grounds are for staying or leaving. What could make something untrue for you?

Or something truer than something else? What would convert you?

Russell: These are good points. So you’re saying that my beliefs are not particularly scientific…they aren’t falsifiable? So if I were to tell you how convinced I am that the idea of Mormonism is not at all the same as the Church of Mormonism you would generally respond that this is a rhetorical technique to silence discussion? Am I correct in that?

Me: well I think they are different, too. But it makes me very leery because I think it dodges the way the question usually shows up existentially, which is: Is there actually a God and is this his/her church? Rather than: Is this a good metaphor that can enrich my perspective? Because if God makes sense of my world for me and enriches it, but there is not actually a God and I don’t live after I die, then I got some great poetry out of the bargain but it wasn’t existentially true.

Russell: The “terrible questions,” you mean. Pascal’s wager? I mean…it sounds to me that your major beef is whether we have the capacity to understand and even know truth.

Me: Not necessarily. I want to know what the difference is between apologetics, which teases meaning out of any big idea, and the idea that something is actually true–that you can stake your life on it, that it has consequences.

Russell: Right. So let’s take postmodernism as an example of a “big idea.” Is that an idea worth staking one’s life on? Does it win in Pascal’s wager? Suggesting that postmodernism is a kind of secular god…are we getting a win-win situation out of the deal?

Me: Well, you have to define what you mean by postmodernism.
Russell: Hahaha. Touche. Good luck to me on that one. Let’s say for the sake of discussion 1) that words are utterly incapable of conveying Truth, 2) that symbols are incapable of conveying Truth, and 3) we are incapable of comprehending Truth, that the very best we can do is know society-based truths. I use this as an example because I’m planning on addressing it quite explicitly in a panel discussion.

Me: Well for me the question is, ironically: Is that a true representation of the facts ‘out there’? Is it true that you can’t know truth? Because that is my whole point.

Russell: That’s why I say “good luck on defining postmodernism”

Me: I know that is misusing postmodernism, to judge it by a correspondence theory of truth. But I want to know if there is a ‘there’ there.

Me: If the theory of postmodernism actually comports with the facts–because if there actually was a God than postmodernism would not be a fact, it would be a good metaphor. (I know it does not claim to be a ‘fact’, but I am simply saying that there would be a way for it to be outstripped by a fact ‘out there’ that bested its claims.)

Russell: So is this incessant questioning actually helpful? Is it worth staking one’s life on?

Me: No, I simply want to know that if I am saying something is true,  it is at least partly because it corresponds to a fact out there. And if there is nothing to correspond to, then postmodernism is ‘true’–its claims at the meaninglessness of symbols is ‘true’. (I know that word makes a good postmodernist rightfully mad.)

Russell: But postmodernism insists that even that truth has a small t.

Me: I know, but it gets itself into a bind, because in a way it is still making a systematic claim that there is no capital T truth.

Russell: Right, and that becomes a truth! So is this approach worth it?
Me: i don’t care yet!

Russell: Ha ha. Okay, okay.

Me: Because the other way is just as bad. There are lots of ways to make the symbol of God meaningful. But I also want to know if my belief in god

Russell: but notice, we still have a common symbol…

Me: actually corresponds to a God who does live, and who does hear prayers, and who can grant me immortality. And for all my nice english-majoring around, I can’t say that I know that, even though I can still get lots of mileage out of the metaphor, and I know that the word corresponds to a feeling
I have felt. But assigning the word ‘God’ to that feeling–or Mormonism for that matter–is not the same, however rich, as making the existential claim, “There is a God.”

Russell: Then even a postmodernist would ask: Under what circumstances you felt that feeling?

Me: It is the difference between a descriptive word and an existential claim

Russell: right

Me: The difference between ‘god’ being the feeling that you get when you pray and “There is a God”–which is the existential claim you make when you have felt the feeling ‘god’ enough times when you have prayed  –is always a leap. It is always a leap to connect descriptive words for feelings with existential claims.

Russell: Totally understand. Kierkegaard. So is it a worthwhile endeavor trying to give expression to these feelings?

Me: What do you mean?

Russell: So we have feeling X…let’s not even try to describe it–not yet. What are we to do with this feeling?

Me: I am confused

Russell: Sorry. So you talked about having a feeling, right?

Me: What feeling is that?

Russell: “I know that the word corresponds to a feeling.” (Your words.)

Me: Okay, yes. So when I pray, I feel warmth and love and I am able to reconcile things that were impossible to reconcile before.

Russell: Right. But you’re submitting that we should be leary of ascribing an existential claim to those feelings?

Me: No. Well, kind of. My original point was that I think you are very thoughtful and smart, but sometimes I think that you would be a thoughtful and smart apologist in whatever religion you were born into. My point was that if there is not something “true” about mormonism, then it is just a lot of beautiful defenses that give meaning to the world, but are not the same as a grounds for an existential claim.

Russell: How would you reconcile that with my own crisis of faith?

Me: Well I would like to know what prompted it, what it was about, and how you resolved it.

Russell: World problems prompted it. Nihlism. Musty old documents can’t hold a light to the reality of starving children and cancer-ridden patients. And how I resolved it? Well, I was basically teetering on a postmodernish philosophy, where history would become my God. Empiricism, in a sense. But then, thanks to the help of (and I PROMISE you this is the honest, hard-nosed truth) G.K. Chesterton and your grandfather…
And I had read MUCH by apostles on theodicy, and nothing touched me.

Me: And why were you on the brink of this? What factors pushed you toward it–whether they be negative (the Church did something negative or did not answer a question you had) or positive (postmodernism was compelling for such and such reasons).

Russell: A realization of tremendous suffering in the world…of the frailties of man (I had just started my history degree at BYU). Postmodernism was not compelling, but it seemed the only way out.

Me: Explain.

Russell: Actually, not postmodernism precisely. I would entertain it, but empiricism would have been my guiding philosophy. In any case, I could handle documents. I could quantify them. I could trace them.

Me: Okay, I need you to explicate this more. You saw how cruel human beings are to each other, and then what? The Church did not adequately address it? You could not believe in God?

Russell: Well, i knew the old answers.

Me: because he allowed suffering? And then what? Take me through it.

Russell: Okay. So I’m getting this steady diet of slavery, of naturalism. Add to this that I’m being made more and more aware of joseph’s plural marriages, and of possible deception on his part. So something that I have vehemently defended is being undermined by credible documentation–not scholars, but the documents themselves. I didn’t even know Joseph was physically intimate with his wives until the mission. And the old cliche: “Man has his agency” simply was not cutting it. And the old cliches of how “no matter what, Joseph is still a prophet” was REALLY not cutting it. I was thinking, “If Joseph really was like another person and didn’t have the morals that the Church now teaches and would disqualify anyone from being a bishop, then why believe him?” So I began to read. Soaked myself in the literature. Read Daynes’ “More Wives than One,” read Todd Compton’s article “A Trajectory of Plurality,” read the GOOD FARMS material (I read the snide stuff too, but that was more entertaining than helpful…I needed DOCUMENTS), read Bergera’s conflict in the quorum, Barringer-Gordon’s work on polygamy, read Bushman several times, knocked out a chunk of Donna Hill. You get the idea. And then something Bushman wrote struck me. An article called, “A Joseph for the Twenty-First Century.” You see, the landscape of American history is STREWN with visionaries, mystics, odd sects. Joseph should have been another casualty in the landscape. He was a radical. Luther, however, was remarkably conservative–put down the Peasants rebellion, at least rhetorically. Calvin, Zwingli…the Reformers in general had little influence on doctrine…no major questioning of assumptions about the nature of God and man…only tweaking assumptions about such academic questions about faith and works. Actually, don’t trust that bit about Calvin and Zwingli…I’m not a Reformation scholar, so I might be opening up a can of worms unduly.

Me: Okay.

Russell: But there was definitely no questioning of assumptions. So, in spite of the ambiguities of Joseph’s life (which have since found some resolution elsewhere for me), a major step in the process has been to see Joseph as someone who shook things up, who could be a city-builder/visionary–a seeming paradox at least historically, but he did it with some success…in spite of all hell breaking loose on him (the Kirtland Safety Society should have destroyed him). So here I am…looking seriously at a man who could shake up the landscape…but I still have no good theodicy. I’m still wondering why empiricism isn’t the way to go. I could still respect Joseph through it. But then my friend, Doug, G.K. Chesterton, and your grandfather changed that. They helped me to cast empiricism, post-modernism as -isms in the same way that Mormonism is an -ism: -isms in which I placed a religious faith. Indeed, I realized that I was placing faith in my own mind’s capacity to reason, to comprehend reality. So what made my mind better than Joseph’s mind? Better than the pioneers’ minds? because I could speak Hmong? Because I could read?

Me: Define empiricism and what allure it had for you. How could it help or save you? What problems did it address or resolve?

Russell: It didn’t help solve problems as much as it helped me isolate myself from them. I told mysef, “We all have eyes. We all have ears.” (I’m not counting the blind and deaf, of course…so I must qualify my statement.) So whether right or wrong, it’s something we can all relate to. So if we’re wrong, we’re all wrong together, and if there be a God, he can’t hold us too accountable for just trusting the eyes and ears he gave us. And in some ways, I still believe that. I believe the secularists will have a few breaks given them provided that they were humble about their disbelief. So yes, empiricism provided me a way out of ambiguity, but it ultimately would just isolate myself from other people, from any sense of meaning. Here’s a trite question that is asked w/o thinking, but I find it valid: “What explanation do documents, HARD documents, HARD data (not just philosophical treatises) offer us about the terrible questions or Christian orthodoxy, for that matter? That we are creatures, beloved creatures, that have only the most oblique connection to the divine–how does the famed “unbridgeable gap” show us an all-loving God? Rather, it makes God look like a pompous king who feels a sense of noblesse oblige and must pity the poor fools who find themselves in that pathetic existence called mortality. What a hopeful vision of human relations! (Sarcasm.) So while I can’t speak for others about the truthfulness of Mormonism, I believe that inability to speak for others is Mormonism’s brilliance. I can’t declare MOrmonism to be existentially true, and that’s how it was intended to be! It must be EXPERIENCED. Experience, unlike existence, is not a static idea. I’m talking too much, methinks.

Me: But wait! What is the failure of empiricism? I didn’t catch it. And how does belief in god or Mormonism solve for the limits of existentialism?

Russell: Copied from above: What explanation do documents, HARD documents, HARD data (not just philosophical treatises) offer us about the terrible questions?
Me: Okay, so you can’t document truth–at least the terrible truth. But then you say the belief is experiential.
Russell: Can you document experience even? Now I will admit…I’m not very good at the “experience” end of things. So in some ways, I put on my empiricist hat to act as the Lord’s bouncer, if you will.

Me: Ha ha. No, I am saying what if you have documents that someone was not what they claimed? That they lied? Or what if you had lots of contrary experiential or conceptual evidence that some claim was dubious or false?

Russell: I would need to use all the historical criticism available to analyze those documents. And believe it or not, we have that kind of documentation already. But there is competing documentation.

Me: I mean, isn’t any party of your testimony based on whether or not Joseph actually saw god? And wouldn’t it then be disturbing if, for example, you realized he changed the first vision story multiple times, or if you charted the trend of Joseph…
Russell: Well, I’m quite, quite familiar with the “changed the first vision” charge…
Me: …getting convenient revelations right when he need something to consolidate his power, or to get someone to agree with him.

Russell: wait a minute. I’m sensing a definite shift in tone. I don’t find his revelations to be very convenient. No one sought to carry them out more quickly than he did, and most of them involved tremendous suffering for him and his family. As for being a power-hungry tyrant, he certainly was a little too willing to broadcast his faults (as seen in the 116 pages revelation).

Me: I am simply trying to understand where your testimony is located–what its grounds are.

Russell: To quote Farrar: Evidence does not create faith, but it clears out room where faith (read: experience) can grow.

Me: Is there then any evidence that would make you lose your faith?

Russell: There’s some, but it can only exist in the hypothetical at this point.

Me: What do you mean?

Russell: I can suppose that a signed confession from Joseph would shake it, but I don’t know that for certain. There are so many other things that Joseph himself can’t account for. Even saying that he got a hold of metal to make plates, that he was high when he had the first vision…I know people who are delusional…and there’s a divide between them and rational people. Yet so many reasonable people were empowered by what Joseph said. I have found that the same criticisms that have been laid on Joseph have been laid on Jesus (Celsus, in particular).

Me: Okay so you are a phenomenologist partly? Meaning, if the phenomenon is powerful over time–if it has the power to produce meaning over time–then it is true? Because it makes the world show up as true?

Russell: In part

Me: Okay, so here is my question. How would you determine if something is true if you are a contemporary to its outing? If you lived in the early 1800s, how would you decide? For example, there is supposedly a man in Lehi…

Russell: I would like to think that I would have gone through the same thought process

Me: …who has declared that the world will end soon. He is gathering people on his farm and asking them to deed land to him…
Russell: but there’s more to Joseph than that…

Me: …Everyone I talk to thinks he is a farce, and I am talking about Mormons here!

Russell: That’s my whole point. Joseph was not just some rural visionary.

Me: …and you know, despite whatever staying power Joseph had and despite differences, that many many people saw him that way, that the law of consecration was an attempt to manipulate people into deeding their property. n retrospect, we vaunt it.

Russell: But was Joseph JUST “the law of consecration,” even at the time?
me: No, I am bringing up a broad point with specific examples. I am asking why you don’t believe that guy in Lehi, but you do believe in Joseph.

Russell: But that’s the problem with specificity here…
Me: If you can only decide in retrospect, according to how much phenomonelogical staying power the doctrines have–how rich they are, and versatile and adaptive–that gives you no criterion for deciding in the moment what is and isn’t true.

Russell: How rich are this guy’s doctrines? Joseph’s were rich at the time. Otherwise, he couldn’t have maintained the base he did. Brigham Young joined the church without even meeting Joseph. He thought Joseph was a weirdo when he met him.

Me: Okay, but what is your point? I am asking you a broad question. What is your criterion for deciding, in the moment, if something is true?

Russell: I understand. Let’s see…For one, does it make people happy? They might weep, cry, feel pain–but do they feel more content with life based on the doctrine? (Content in a good sense, not a status quo sense.) Two, do they speak to the issues of the time?

Me: Okay, so let’s talk about me. I don’t feel that the Church speaks to the issues of the time, and I don’t feel content. So you can say “go ahead and leave, if it isn’t for you”…

Russell: Note: I didn’t talk about the Church.

Me: …but the problem is that the doctrines say something very different. Okay, so forget the church. Let’s talk the doctrines. Joseph Smith revealed a gospel that radically, as you said yourself, revised old notions–or revisited them. But these doctrines themselves say that Christ is the only way to salvation, that God does exist and that he will judge our souls, that we are immortal, that there are prophets who will guide us, that the Church is the true Church, etc etc. So now, according to you, I am in a situation in which my experience of the gospel/religion makes me want to leave it but the doctrines put me in jeopardy for doing so.

Russell: Well, I don’t think we can identify “this is the true church” as a doctrine…
that’s circular reasoning. As far as “this is the true church” goes, we have only one way to realize that and that is through subjective experience. I like what Kathleen Flake noted. She believes in Mormonism because of the God it points her to.

Me: Okay, so it is preference?

Russell: She wouldn’t say so. But honestly, sure. Preference.

Me: I want to insist that what you have articulated–while I personally agree with it–is not at all what the documents of the Mormon religion or gospel suggest about themselves–not at all the self-descriptions they use to define themselves.

Russell: …and preference, incidentally, IS orthodoxy.

Me: The Book of Mormon does not suggest that I choose what feels good and that that might be personal preference. It posits a very correpondence-based notion of truth and which church is true.

Russell: Actually, “we are our own judges.” And where does it say that?

(Conversation ended there, but I would have said that it is supremely odd and dangerous to suggest that one’s experience of religion leads you to suggest that it is preference and metaphor while the documents and edicts of the religion demand a very document-based, history-dependent, correspondence-esque notion of truth that depends on its claims being based in true, historically actual documents that correspond to the truth “out there,” and that is why–whatever my personal convictions–I refuse to confuse the idea of a religion being metaphorically powerful with a religion being true in its own claims and its claims to correspond to the ‘fact’ of a living God and his power to grant salvation.)

I’ll start by admitting something. I have put off writing this response post because I keep on failing my own challenge. I have tried to so hard to do what Ann made possible, but–for reasons I will explain–I keep falling short. My decision to simply report, then, without being perfect first, might actually represent for me a greater victory than if I had done everything I had wanted to and ended with a flourish.

The most difficult part of this challenge for me was getting myself to the grocery store. A friend told me that she had not gone to the grocery store for five months, and I could understand what she was saying even though it made me sad. She was busy and she hated errands, so she ate takeout all the time. I think that I despise errands more than anyone I know. I will do almost anything to avoid them. Shopping is my least favorite errand of all. I think there are several reasons for this. First, I am such a crazy purist that I have to find a co-op instead of a grocery store, get there by bike instead of car, remember my cloth bags, do research on the food to make sure it is from a local farm with sustainable practices, buy everything without spending too much, and bike home. Second, I tend to get very overwhelmed about food. I feel like I don’t know how to make it, I don’t know what to buy, and I don’t know where to get it.

Strange, then, that the food challenge also made me confront a lot of other things in my personality. I don’t think it is healthy to be so stressed out about doing no harm that you can’t enjoy the beauty of food, but I am also frustrated because I feel that forces bigger than me have created such a harmful world that average people are required to compensate for them. It makes me frustrated that I have to spend hours researching what food is not harmful (to me or to animals and the environment) and spend so much money and time simply because people’s desire to earn astronomical profits compelled them to create a world dependent on cars, bad food and sprawling towns with big box groceries.

So that is the first thing the challenge made me confront–namely, how can normal people live ethically in a largely unethical world without becoming so strident or stressed that they lose their ability to enjoy the world they are saving?

My second confrontation was with the pace and demands of the American office. Granted, I work for a political campaign–and that is always going to be crazy–but I am astounded at the way our concept of “work” has divided us from our concept of “living.” The two have been almost entirely compartmentalized, and people are suffering so much from it. One reason I love the philosophies of environmentalism and, incidentally, anarchism so much is that those philosophies refuse to compartmentalize things that “get us to where we want to be” from the things we want to be. A true green or anarchist philosophy strives to make those things the same thing; instead of earning money to then have a good life, you have a good life by changing your definition of life, good, and money. You don’t slave long hours to come home and have some liesure; you make work a home that honors everything that people need. The getting there is the there.

In many ways, the work problem is just like the problems I was describing earlier. Driven by profit and the wrong idea of happiness, forces and people stronger than we are have created a work “reality” that we must either join or spend hours fighting. In Washington, D.C. for instance, there is now almost no such thing as even a 9-5 job. It is all 9-7. This occurred slowly, as big shots demand more and more and people, afraid of being fired and with nowhere else to go, allow it. After a while, it becomes reality, and there is no longer even an option to fight it.

I particularly noticed the consequence of this mentality as I was trying to fulfill Ann’s challenge. My work is so demanding and so obsessed with “productivity” that it does not allow people to live good lives. I look around and see so many good people staring at their computer screens, hunkering lower and lower in their chairs and getting more and more anxious. The other day, thinking about Ann’s challenge, I snapped. I said “Okay everybody, stand up. Follow me.” Three people did. I marched us down to the park by the river. I said: “We are going to run until we cannot run anymore. Go!” And we ran. We sprinted across the field, we touched the fence at the other side, and we sprinted back. We stopped, breathing hard, smiling. We had actually lived for five minutes.

So you see, this challenge did not stay in its little box, precisely because it is a challenge about putting nothing in boxes, being gentle and healthy everywhere. I failed being vegan for a week because my work was so stressful. I at so many things from take-out bags and threw away unacceptable amounts of trash. Each time I did, I mourned for the waste and mediocrity of our culture and promised to do better.

But I did make almost all the recipes Ann gave us. I would come home at night, excited, and make them. I would make myself turn off all the computers, etc, that usually distract me, and then I would turn on music and sing at the top of my lungs. I would try to always share what I made with at least one person, and then I would go and sit on the couch and pray for the food and eat without any noise. That was very hard. To be honest, it made me panic to not have distractions. It made me face my own loneliness and made me wonder if making good food would ever conquer that feeling of loneliness. It made me feel all the things I didn’t want to feel, as I ate a good meal in silence. In the end, I think it made me into a semi-conquerer of things I finally faced.

Today, I am making the banana muffins. I am bringing them to people at my work. I will try to use food to make the world a home.

Thank you Ann. Thank you.

I once saw people that way, and I am learning to see them that way again.

I have spent the night with my dear friend, Thelma. We talked about loneliness–the loneliness at the bottom of things. I told her that for the last two weeks, I have looked my loneliness in the eyes, and that is has been devastating and relentless but also sanctifying. For two weeks, I have not protected myself with old stories. I have read myself right, for once, and have seen myself like a god in a Greek myth: desperate for greatness, desperate for love, divine in the greatness of my folly and human in the ardor.

The world that I thought was the world has gotten smaller and smaller until it is just one thing, a robin’s egg that you find in the grass and carry, gently, to show to others. It is the desire, on a train or a bus or an anywhere-sidewalk, to stop a person and say, “The person who you think does not love you? They love you.” And walk away.

I believe that is all I want to hear, and so I have to believe it is what others want, too. I believe it is the want underneath the million-million words we do say. And I believe religion is learning to accept that we want to hear it and that we have to say it to others in order to hear them say it to us. I don’t believe God’s judgment is a yay or a nay; I think it is a very simple statement: I know what you survived. I know that the barely-enough person you are is a great triumph over the sorrow that almost made you nothing.

Everyone is lonely. I should say it five times every day; it is a better prayer than most. My friends are lonely. My parents are lonely. Some of this loneliness I can assuage, which makes me into a God. But the strangest thing is, I know my God is lonely, too. And that is the most precious truth of all. My God needs me. My parents need me. My friends need me. We need each other in the great desperation of individuality. That is the loneliness that should never go away, the inconsolable longing that sends us hungry through eternity, that makes us every moment a God–a being with great longings and offerings.

Chris Nielsen told me once: God is the only thing that can make something new. I didn’t understand what he meant. Now I do. There are facts, arrangements, traps that will never be anything but those things until you say the word God–say it five or seven times in the darkness of your room. And then, when the last word has fallen to a hush, you are something other than the being that said it. You are new. You can love people you never could have loved. You can be a person you never could have been. Forgiveness is the word for this newness–an immanence of a self returning all at once to itself. And the word God is just another way of saying, “I am lonely” and then listening to hear the world say, “I am, too.”

Tonight, Thelma showed my an interview she had done with a monk who had helped lead the Saffron Revolution against the Burmese junta. He described the day the revolution started, when they went to pray at a temple but were stopped by a military man with a gun. “Please,” said the monk, “Do not harm us. We are simply praying for love for all creatures. We are praying that everyone will receive love, even you.” The military man was taken aback by this expression of singular generosity, but then he remembered his role and his gun. “I do not understand,” he said, and the military attacked. Retelling the story, the monk was devastated–not by the attack, but by the man who could not understand that someone was praying for him. “How do you think I felt as a Buddhist monk, knowing this man did not understand?” The monk was surprised because he saw the world like a God. His sorrow was for the great forgetting of his children.

To the lonely: The person you do not believe loves you does.

Monday

Breakfast: Fruit Smoothie & Banana Wheat-Germ Muffin

Lunch: Southwest Salad

Snacks: Fresh fruit or nuts (almonds, cashews, anything you like)

Dinner: Zucchini Pasta

If you have a sweet-tooth like me, you can have a couple squares of fine dark chocolate for dessert. Make sure to read the label and avoid buying any dark chocolate with dairy products.

Tuesday

Breakfast: Homemade granola, fresh berries, and homemade almond milk

Lunch: Raw Pesto Salad

Snacks: Fresh fruit, veggies, or nuts

Dinner: Black Bean Vegetable Soup

Wednesday

Breakfast: Fruit Smoothie & Banana Wheat-Germ Muffin

Lunch: Southwest Salad

Dinner: Zucchini Pasta

Thursday

Breakfast: Homemade granola, fresh berries, and homemade almond milk

Lunch: Beet & Green Bean Salad

Dinner: Black Bean Vegetable Soup

Friday

Breakfast: Fruit Smoothie & Banana Wheat-Germ Muffin

Lunch: Black Bean Vegetable Soup

Dinner: Acorn Squash & Black Bean Empanadas

Saturday

Breakfast: Bowl full of fruit with almond milk

Lunch: Acorn Squash & Black Bean Empanadas

Dinner: Learn a new recipe…a family tradition or someone else’s tradition. If dairy products are a must, make sure they are from happy cows from happy land.

vegan_recipes

grocery_list

Here is Ann’s manifesto. Our joint challenge to you is to eat vegan for a week–to have a compassionate diet and to learn to make good, healthy food for yourself. To help you out, Ann has written a piece about why she cares about health, compassion and food and has taken serious time to give you a week’s worth of recipes and even a shopping list. We know that lots of people want to change their food habits but get overwhelmed at the prospect, so our goal was to make this experiment as easy as possible to accomplish.

Write back in a week and tell us how it went.

Take it away, Ann! (I will post in sections since the recipe section is long):

An Almost-Vegan Mormon’s Manifesto

“Granted there are different levels and degrees that exist within as well as between species, still it is the privilege of every form of life to multiply in its sphere and element and have joy therein. Adam’s dominion was a charge to see to it that all went well with God’s creatures; it was not a license to exterminate them.” (TGG, p. 21) Hugh Nibley.

Day to day I follow a mostly vegan diet—not because I believe milk will kill you. I avoid eating meat and avoid consuming animal byproducts because, as Hugh Nibley explains it well, my dominion over animals requires that I make sure they are well-taken-care-of so that they too may multiply in their sphere. Our dominion does not give us license to abuse and exploit animals.

Since we do not have license to exterminate animals, then I definitely don’t have the right to eat them when they are treated cruelly and as machinery. I am often baffled when people tell me it’s okay to eat meat because animals were created “for our use”. Why is it that eating animals or their byproducts is to be the only way in which to use animals? Quoting Hugh Nibley again, “Lordship and dominion are the same thing, the responsibility of the master for the comfort and well-being of his dependents and guests; he is the generous host, the kind pater familias to whom all look for support. He is the lord who provides bread for all.” (NTT, p. 87-77) Could it also be possible that our dominion over the animals is useful to us in teaching us how to properly nurture and take of God’s creations? I think it would be beneficial for everyone to think of all the things that animals can provide for us, and how we can better act as lords providing bread for all.

I will, on occasion, eat ice cream, enjoy homemade banana cream pie, or partner savory parmesan cheese with a fresh pasta dish. In these cases I do make sure the dairy products used in these recipes are from “happy” cows: truly free range, are grass-fed, and hormone-free. These “special” dairy-eating occasions are usually days or events full of tradition and culture. There was a time when I was strictly vegan. After some research and thought I felt that food is at the heart of most traditions, and is something to be preserved. Don’t get me wrong, just because a food is a “tradition” does not warrant that I’ll eat it. Oh, how to explain? I will not consume a bag of Doritos at your Super Bowl XXXVIXXIVXX party because you have done it every year. Why not? Because Doritos are a food-like substance, and not a food. I will not eat a beef hamburger at your annual fraternity barbeque because the animal was actually killed, and who knows where you got the meat? I will, however, eat my family’s traditional homemade ice cream every Pioneer Day, and I will eat fresh mozzarella cheese when I visit Italy. Why? Because both those are made with actual food products (no processed anything), I make sure the dairy products come from “happy” cows, and these recipes are deeply imbedded in culture. I am making a return to food culture, and moving farther away from food science.

The science of nutrition is relatively young, and, as we all know, changes every day. One day eggs are bad for you, and the next they are the miracle food. Some will tell you that bread is killing you (well, it probably is if it’s full of those trans-fats that were at some point in time supposed to lower your chances of suffering a heart-attack, right?).

Here are some of my personal food/health rules:

1. Eat mostly fruits and vegetables. Being almost-vegan has forced me to eat food that is naturally soaked with good nutrients.
2. Make/buy real bread: flour (whole wheat, not enriched), salt, yeast, water. That’s it.
3. Buy food at farmer’s markets when possible. Make sure it’s organic and locally grown. (I was a little disappointed when I was visiting SLC that there were figs from California at the market. I hope we learn to celebrate our local and regional cuisines!)
4. Make things from scratch whenever possible. Make time for it. The more time you spend with your food, the nicer it will be to you. If you live with roommates and are too busy to cook, take turns, cooking one night a week to get started.
5. Eat less. Most of us eat too much. Eat slower and enjoy it so that you actually know when you are full. Plus, eating less saves a ton of money!
6. Take time to cook with your grandmother and/or great-grandmother before traditions and knowledge leave the earth when they do.
7. If you are totally vegan, PLEASE stay away from imitation meats and too much soy. I have a few vegan cookbooks and I avoid the recipes that call for tofu or soy milk…why? Because there’s too much soy in our diets already and we need more variety for our health and the earth’s health, the soy crops are devastating to the soil, and most imitation meat products are super processed and scientific. Eat REAL food.
8. Leftovers are your best friend…cook a lot at one time, but don’t eat it all in one sitting. Use it throughout the week when you’re too tired to cook all over again.
9. Share your food. Never eat alone. Participate in lively conversation as you eat.
10. Always say a prayer of gratitude for the farmers who grew and harvested the food, for the weather and rain that contributed to delicious meals, and for the soil that supported it all. Blessed be.
11. Practice yoga. When you do, you’ll get it. It’s all connected, yes?

I have created a weekly menu for you to see how easy it is to be vegan. Recipes and a grocery shopping list are also conveniently here for your aid. Note: I’m a big fan of leftovers…hope you are too.

I remember when I was little I wanted to be a woman who wore brocade scarves across loose-fitting linen ensembles; I wanted bright square glasses with beaded strings to hold them put and white, wild hair that said “What?” and, “So there!”

Terry Tempest Williams is one of those people, and when she walked into our classroom three months ago it was like the air pulled toward her and hung, shimmery, around her face. She sat down with impeccable grace and she was not afraid. She did not apologize for the air following her or for being there or for what she wanted to know–which was, she said as she peered around the circle, what kept us up at night.

It started five people to the left of me and I panicked, mostly because I already knew I was going to cry. Because there was something that kept me up all night, and then all day and then the next night and day, too. 

It got to me. I cried. People stared. After a good five minutes, I said: “I would like to know what the place of the revolutionary and the reformer is in our society, and I want to know how to act with love when you are in a society that doesn’t yet think what you think is wrong is wrong.” This was the question that had suffered and sweat me all summer, a question I had gone mad trying to corner.

 And Terry Tempest Williams said the loveliest thing. She said: when you have become as brittle as the thing you are fighting, you must return to yourself. Find one wild word and follow it to the next place.

I haven’t succeeded at forgetting that, even though for the last several months my heart has been as small and hard and shiny as a nut and I have become a dogmatic shrill fighting the dogmatic shrills. Even though my heart has been so very hard.

Finally the other day, I got on a plane. I had decided that I hadn’t done much right in the last two years of my life. I felt like a textbook tragic figure who had made a few key mistakes at the beginning and now found that even the right things would end in pain. I felt like my heart was a very long way away from my brain.

 I sat down next to two women, elves in their own right, really, and radiating. They greeted me with such warmth I paused in the middle of sitting down.

We talked about everything. I told the elf on the left my entire philosophy. I said things that were so far from the normal presentation, so deep within me–I took dark words to daylight, and the woman nodded wisely and asked me more. 

After one hour we were in the middle of a conversation about gratitude and soft hearts, and the elf on the right grabbed my hand and said, “I want to tell you something. I want to tell you that years ago, for three straight months, the whole world showed up to me as God. I didn’t ask for it. It simply descended on me. It descended on me and for three months everything, everything I saw was God. Sometimes a mere face would make me weep; the mundane was a vision.” She stopped. “And then one morning it stopped. It just stopped. I have been looking for that feeling for the rest of my life. I would do anything to feel that again. I didn’t know, and could never have known, that that was how it felt to have a heart.”

I am sharing this because I count it as one of the most beautiful experiences I have had as a human, and because somewhere in the middle of her saying it the great casing on my heart broke and my heart shrugged it off. I remembered for fifteen minutes what it was like to have a heart. I couldn’t say anything. I just put my hand on the woman’s hand and said thank you. The plane landed and I said thank you, thank you. I ran to the bathroom and wept.

The wild word is God. It is the only word that does not turn you into what you are fighting. It was in the beginning with the father and it was in the beginning with us, and our life is a hunt, a goodly retracing to find the wildest word.

The wild word ran through me and then out. I have not found it like that in the five days since. But I have a memory of it, a scripture and an engraving. I remember it by staring at the masses of people, on the train or on the street, and knowing that it is somewhere in them. In these moments I know with a knowing that words don’t fit: God is not ugly or punitive or a taker of sides. He is simply a person who sees the wild world down deep in the heart of everyone, and who says until he is love-hoarse: remember.

Maybe the plane woman and I will never find it again but, as she said her preacher said, we ought to be amazed that it was possible to feel at all. All of our lives should be great works of memory–a soft walk through a forest, stalking God, until we happen upon him sleeping in the thicket where we started. 

 Please write in about going without cars a la Micah. I will write more tomorrow about my own.

All I really want is for someone to hear me describe a problem and then to say (if they agreed): “You are right. What you are describing is wrong, and the Church should not get any unwarranted defense just because it happens to be the Church and can ask for our unending apologetics. We should do something about it, for the sake of the disenfranchised, who according to Christ matter every bit as much as the powerful.” Instead, my critiques of both Church and State (in the form of a critique of Obama and support for Nader) are almost always answered with this: “Yes, I can see how you think that is wrong, and it probably is. But you’ve got to be (patient, faithful, meek) and wait for (authoritative pronouncement, slow change, the right moment).” They admit that it is wrong and then strip me of my right to be outraged, to make a difference, to call for a change. They manipulate personal virtues to perpetually defer right action.

I no longer accept this.

I also believe that this kind of manipulation exploits not just human conscience but also harms people psychologically. Tristan Call and Katy Savage have recently introduced me to the ideas of Gregory Bateson, who has developed a theory called the Double Bind to explain, among other things, why people become schizophrenics. While I have not read Bateson, Tristan’s explanation in his own Sunstone talk articulated the very problem I have been trying to pinpoint in Mormonism (and elsewhere).

The theory is basically this: You have a person who is in a relationship that she can’t easily leave or reject—with her parents, God, a church, or a country. The authority figure in this relationship—parents, God, church, country—make a rule and impose it on the person. The cost of breaking the rule is punishment. Later on, they make another rule that partly or entirely contradicts the first rule. The cost for breaking this rule is punishment, as well. Often, the second rule (or the overarching rule) is that the person is not allowed to ask for clarification about which rule is more important, or that the person cannot point out the inconsistency between the two, or that punishment cannot be seen as a punishment and, if it is, the person who sees it that way will be punished. This analysis is obviously pertinent to so many of the things I have been talking about: the honor code, for instance, which sets up a situation in which I would feel forced to civilly disobey (against the honor code) to be honest about what I believe (required by the honor code); Mormonism, which often pits love of the neighbor with acceptance of US policies that hurt the non-US neighbor, etc. The more important point, however, is not that there are contradictory rules, but that asking a clarifying question about those inconsistencies—or questioning them at all—is now included in what ought to be punished, and that seeing this as a punishment—rather than an act of righteous judgment or love—is also punishable.

This is the power structure in the Church that has the power to psychologically damage dissidents and minorities. As Bateson points out, the fall into schizophrenia is really a fall into not being able to distinguish between the intent of different claims but fearing to ask a clarifying question. I believe that the psychological manifestations of this structure are not restricted to schizophrenia, but to the loneliness, bitterness, and anger of many people in the Church who, to use Tristan’s paraphrase, have been punished for correctly discriminating the kind of message (the class of communication) that is occurring. These manifestations are, sadly, used to reinforce the claim that these people were unrighteous, dubious or deviously-intentioned in the first place. This retroactive condemnation—to use someone’s anger at being mistreated as proof that they had bad or angry intentions to start with—completes the circle and totally absolves the majority from listening to the “unstable” minority (think D. Michael Quinn as ‘embittered historian’, a insult that has nothing to do with respect for history and everything to do with our distaste for his discrimination between kinds of messages). Additionally, their meta-critique—a critique of structural inequity—is confused with object-level sin and communication, with the prescribed antidote being an object-level forgiveness and an abandonment of the meta-critique.

To quote Tristan again:

“The point is that messages are generally sent through multiple orders of communication. The message might be, ‘I am not punishing you,’ but the second-order message, conveyed by body language or context, is ‘I will punish you.’ This is precisely why you are not allowed to ask for clarification, because you would be revealing the deception between levels of communication, a deception that is intended for you to understand, but unacceptable to explicitly acknowledge.”

The phenomenon functions much like the public opinion criticized by de Tocqueville and Mill, a pervasive force understood by everyone but inappropriate to acknowledge or question—a force that is infinitely more powerful than argument because it is illegal to recognize and because it is not posed as an argument but as something utterly proven, something beyond even fact.

I reject the circle that keeps dissidents from expressing themselves as human beings with legitimate, and often vital, things to say. I believe that a church that rejects its dissidents will ultimately reject more than that—will reject the truth and caution that dissidents bring. I believe that the psychological damages of circular arguments are real, and that we should prevent more of this damage by frankly acknowledging injustices, mourning for them, and doing something about them.

I have felt this way innumerable times since I was young, and each time it feels worse. Every time I believe I have found an honest, fair way of thinking about something, I need only to go to church or watch General Conference to find it not only discredited, but annihilated by an argument that cannot possibly be wrong and assures that its detractors cannot possibly be right. Reading the histories of BYU made that old anger and loneliness come back in waves. To see a person stand up and say: “Blacks should be equal and our arguments against them are sacralized bigotry,” and then to see the Church not only disagree with them but to include a caveat in their virtues list that made these people voiceless—and absolved others of having to listen—merely because they disagreed. When an ideology includes a virtue that condemns questioning or correcting the ideology, it has become dangerous and destructive.

I bring this up in conjunction with minorities because the situation I am describing is not unique to dangerous ideologies, but to the problem of being a minority itself. The whole time I was presenting at Sunstone, I kept thinking—and this is not intended as a self-aggrandizing analogy—about civil rights leaders, immigrants, and homosexuals. Specifically, I thought of the psychological wear that comes with having to fit your big idea into the small discourse around you—to know that you are making a basic moral argument but to have to defer to arguments that are insane and immoral but backed by mere virtue of being institutionalized. It is disgusting to be trying to say nothing more than that you should be treated like a human, but to have to hold it all inside while the majority gets the benefit of assuming their ideas are self-evident. I think it can destroy a person to be part of an indecent culture that is so powerful that the idea of its injustice does not even come up. This kind of situation can easily lead to a person trying to interject their ideas (since they will never simply come up), being silenced by a flippant counter-comment (that does not have to argue its own assumptions but merely reject the intrusion of a new idea), try again, be silenced again (by the majority demanding things—like hundreds of sources or reasons for anger—that they do not demand of themselves), try again, be subject to epithets and hypocrisy (the majority questioning the minority’s sanity or character and smugly applying requirements of peacefulness and forgiveness to keep the minority from making a structural argument), feel angry, lose legitimacy for being angry, and, giving up, prove all the built-in majority arguments about them being motivated by all the wrong reasons and not tough enough to face the truth. It is a no-win situation, particularly because the whole rhetorical discourse is rigged against a minority ever simply wailing, expressing a profound anger or pathos at injustice.

The problem is this: should a minority fighting against an immoral or impermeable majority be allowed to do and say things that the majority should not be allowed to do and say? For example, should Mexican-American author Gloria Anzaldua be able to say, in one of her post-colonial novels, that she hates the white man? Many would tidily term this reverse racism, but—while I can understand their concern—I think that minorities are routinely denied their psychological fury at having to live in an unjust world that, furthermore, does not recognize or care to address its injustices. I believe that minorities are justified in doing certain things that they are arguing that the majority should not be able to do—that the majority does without any compunction but is shocked when the minority dares to do.

A few more examples from the Sunstone experience. For one of the panels, I had arranged a mediation between parents, young people, and church leaders so that they could discuss their differences openly and try to understand each other better. In the dialogue, the mediator told us several times that it was important to be honest about how we were actually feeling, to allow conflict so that we could move toward a real conversation. I had tried so hard to peacefully explain what I thought some problems were in the Church, but the second night—after reading the BYU histories—I tried to take the mediator’s advice seriously and admitted that I was very angry and sad about the way faith was defined in the Church and the injustices that definition sponsored. I gave what I thought was a very calm but honest explanation of the problem and asked if anyone felt differently. Later, one of my friend’s parents—who had participated in the discussion—told my friend: “I think Ashley is a very angry and bitter person.” As my friend pointed out, all my effort to organize a peaceful discussion, all my intelligent and calm articulation, had been delegitimized precisely because I had tried to follow the dialogue rules in good faith and admit that I was angry. (I hadn’t even acted angry; I had simply said that I was!) Also, the inherent anger in making blacks, women, and homosexuals into second-class citizens was, apparently, not anger simply because the anger was diffused within an institution.

Later, in one of my talks on dissent at Sunstone, I brought up the case of Reverend Jeremiah Wright and the grief he had gotten for simply applying scriptural commandments to the United States. Because he had dared to wed the personal and political and actually be angry about the rampant injustices perpetrated by the United States (instead of allowing them in the name of being a political realist or because they were institutionalized), he was emotionally crucified. I could hardly find a single comment in all the millions of youtube inanities that could even imagine that what he was saying was true and that, if true, was cause for anger and indignation. I finished the talk with a defense of righteous anger and of dissent in general, saying that dissent was necessary to separate religion from dangerous culture.

In the Q and A session later, I was asked if it was difficult for me to go to church and not feel like I could speak my opinion. I decided to break with arm’s length analysis and admitted, feelingly, that it was so difficult that I rarely felt up to going.

After I was done, lots of well-meaning people approached me and said the same stuff as always. “The Church needs you,” they said. “You’ve got to stay.” Instead of smiling and accepting something I had heard a million times before, I continued my structural critique and said, honestly, “If the Church needed people like me it would treat us better.” They did not like that. They said I should forgive the weaknesses in the Church and do as much good as I could. I replied that I was happy to forgive the Church if that forgiveness was not exploited to get me to stop issuing structural critiques of real problems. I said that the request for forgiveness has historically been used for precisely that purpose, so that, for example, millions of slaves forgive their masters in a true Christian manner but are prevented, in the process, from questioning the structure of slavery itself. I said that this kind of ‘forgiveness’ created a hierarchy of peoples, which required the perpetual forgiveness of the powerful at the expense of the weak, and that I would not support that kind of false forgiveness.

One person standing nearby said, archly, that I seemed very disheartened. It was clear from his tone that he meant this as a criticism, that being disheartened was yet another strike against my character. I said yes, I was very disheartened, and that I couldn’t understand why it was an epithet to be disheartened at great injustices, or to apply a critique consistently even if it travelled into hallowed territory.

And indeed, that was what happened: One person stood up and condemned my descriptions as totally fallacious and generalized (forgetting that any criticism is necessarily a caricatured warning but does not necessarily lose criticism for being such); another man told me and the other panelists that he was “charmed” that we were still surprised at injustice; while the responses to the Salt Lake Tribune article included the 150 inevitable comments suggesting that I knew what I was getting into when I went to BYU, that it was a private university and could do whatever it wanted, and that if I didn’t like it I could stop wasting the Church’s tithing money and get the hell to Berkeley. I wanted to tell the first commentator to do a rhetorical analysis of the billboards from Salt Lake to Provo and then maintain his contention that Mormons do not equate righteousness with money, modesty and self-satisfied provincialism. I wanted to tell the second man that I was not ‘surprised’ at injustice, but actively concerned, and that it disturbed me if sorrow for sufferers was now a charming idiosyncrasy of youth. And I wanted to ask the hundreds of Salt Lake Tribune commentators if the qualification for belonging to a school, church or country was unadulterated acceptance of whatever those institutions decided to champion, and if they thought that the definition of “private university” exempted all of us from a discussion about the morality of that school’s principles. Just as in modern political discourse, religious strategy now not only outweighed but utterly eclipsed the ethical or substantive conversation that should be occurring. Punditry and presentation has replaced the moral polemic.

The experience made me think, as I often do, about the problem of minorities. I am sure there are many definitions of “minority,” but mine is this: a person or group that must bear the consequences of the majority’s lifestyle—that, being necessarily ‘removed’ from reality, keeps the majority from having to see those consequences; a person or group that will be eternally discredited because the things they suggest are not institutionalized and the things they decry—no matter how insane or wrong— always are; a person or group that realizes that the conversation is not about right or wrong but about inside and outside, that the majority’s smug, self-serving morality is simply a polemic of insides; a person or group that the majority will try to contain by prescribing personal morality in response to its structural critiques—that will say ‘forgive this leader or that injustice’ rather than admitting the consequences of those structural, built-in atrocities; a person or group that gets progressively angrier at the bullheaded unimaginativeness of the majority—at their smug cruelty encased in arguments that make that cruelty necessary, inevitable, or even invisible—but whose anger disqualifies them from participating in the conversation, whose anger will offend the politeness of the cruel majority that sees anger at its cruelty as the only impropriety (that refuses to acknowledge the diffuse anger of a system built on inequalities); a person or group that will, if practicing the virtues of the majority, be defined only in the negative (if they are persistent they are egotistical, if they are Christian they are extreme, if they fight injustice they are complainers, if they admit unpleasant truths they are whiners); a person or group who can never, never say how they feel when they are subjected to cruelty or injustice, if only because the whole system of discourse is designed to prohibit and profane the honest expression of personal pain.

At least, this is how I have felt as a minority in my religion and at BYU. Every time I have tried to say that something was frightfully wrong, I got a load of strained apologetics, a prescription for PR, and a blight on my character for getting mad at injustice in the first place. Worse still, though, my criticisms were neatly folded into the everywhere-system I was criticizing.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPbJY2rs0QI