It's 10:09am on February 18th, 2015. My last post in here was on December 10th, 2010. The Packers were on their way to winning their second Super Bowl in my lifetime and I was still lugging sheetrock around to pay the bills. Some things have changed since then, others not so much. I am 37 years old and right now I am three blocks from my house in Chippewa Falls, WI at my office in the St. Charles and St. Peter World Headquarters where I work full-time as the Faith Formation Coordinator. I love it. I have daughters in kindergarten, first grade, and fourth grade. So things do change. However the Packers still have not won another Super Bowl. And I now hate the Seahawks. Interestingly enough, after a quick scan of my old posts there's very little I take back. Maybe this too is a sign that some things aren't changing for me, or that I'm not growing. But it could also be a sign of sustained maturity, right? If it's all the same to you I'll go with the latter.
It took some doing but I finally figured out how to login to this old account and have decided to start it back up. I had actually forgotten about its very existence. My plan is to commit to blogging my way through lent and then see where it goes from there. Today is Ash Wednesday, and I want credit for starting this project on time.
Nobody reads this blog. I'm blogging right now for my own benefit and have no intentions of broadcasting its existence on Facebook or anywhere else. If you've stumbled across this it was by accident. Welcome. I'll try to keep the whining at a minimum.
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
Monday, December 6, 2010
Hammer Time
Not necessarily the coolest encounter of my life but it's too legit to not blog about.
My brother-in-law, Zach, and I went to the Packers-49ers game at Lambeau yesterday. Before the game we were hanging out in row one (our seats were in row 49) and watching the players warm up. Packers President Mark Murphy was near us on the field talking with the niners brass and there was a guy there completely pimped out and occasionally dancing to the stadium music in a white and brown fur coat that it looked like he had stolen off a siberian tiger, brown plaid pants, shades, and a knit hat. No one could figure out who he was but he looked famous and people were having their picture taken with him. I wanted to know so I yelled out something like, 'Hey fur coat!'. He didn't respond. I tried again. Nothing.
A guy next to us thought he looked like MC Hammer. I yelled 'Hammer!' He looked up and I called him over. He motioned for me to hold on a minute and that he would be right over. A few minutes later some niners players ran out of the tunnel and I booed them really loudly. Hammer looked at me and smiled and shook his head. I motioned him over.
Hammer: 'I ain't shakin' your hand if you keep singin' that tune.'
Me: 'Then I'll sing one of yours. Let's get a picture.'
Hammer: 'How we gonna to that?'
Me: 'I'll just lean over the rail.'
Hammer: 'No no no...Here we go...Let's do it this way.'
Then M.C. Freaking Hammer climbs up on a golf cart that was right below us and a kid next to me with a camera phone snaps the pic and emails it to me.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Brett, Brett, Brett...
I've been pretty clear about my animosity toward Brettfavre ever since he left Green Bay. I'm sick of his act, whether it's his off the field diva thing, the interceptions, the lying, the indecision, the media hype, John Gruden, the giant dump he took on Green Bay fans...and the list goes on. But the scandal he's caught up in now makes me sad. Regardless of what I think of the guy now, he was my hero growing up. Even before all of this came out he had already ruined all the memories I have of him, but this one really bothers me for some reason. I don't want to see his family ripped apart. That one doesn't surprise me. The real shocker is that part of me doesn't want to see him get suspended and have his consecutive starts streak ended. 20 years in the NFL and never missing a game is the most astonishing record in all of sports (followed closely by 70,000 passing yards and 500 TDs). If it's broken because of the texts he sent, that asterisk will follow that record forever. Don't get me wrong, if he's guilty he deserves it. But between that and the way he's playing it's like watching your ex-girlgriend ruin her life and the lives of those around her through addiction or any other form of really poor decision making. It makes you sad, but man, you're glad you broke up with her. I'm all about ruined Vikings seasons, but I'm not for ruined lives.
Brettfavre ruined his relationship with the Green Bay fans who adored him for the better part of two decades. He didn't gain any long-term fans in New York. And Vikings are fans the most disloyal, confused, clueless, and delusional fans in professional sports. They're buying up his jerseys, but they won't stick with him on any level. I hope his family survives this mess.
But we all owe Ted Thompson a case of beer for trading him.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
20 Things You Should Know About Me
I believe:
1. Jesus is Lord
2. Jimmy Kimmel is the funniest man alive
3. The two best comedy series ever produced are Calvin and Hobbes and Arrested Development (with a slight advantage to Calvin and Hobbs)
4. Peace is better than violence
5. People who don't get it don't get that they don't get it
6. I really like the Packers. Like, REALLY like 'em.
7. I really, really like my wife
8. Despite my abhorrence of any kind of violence, I still wish I were a fighter pilot
9. Things are more awesome underwater
10. I'm on Facebook and my cell phone like a 15 year-old girl
11. The best record ever recorded is Chris Thile's, Not All Who Wander Are Lost
12. The best books I've ever read are The Lord of the Rings books (the movies are also in contention for the top cinematic spot)
13. I hate mediocrity but seem hell-bent on pursuing it
15. My kids are cool as hell
16. Christ is redeeming the whole of creation, including individuals, social structures, economic practices, and the Hudson River.
17. I play the guitar
18. Will Farrell is funny, but his schtick is getting old
19. The Viking will never win a championship. Ever.
20. There are only a few black and white statements that are true and they're all listed above
Monday, July 5, 2010
Catholicism and the Arts
My buddy Phil sent me the following interview from Commonweal Magazine. I find it immensely helpful as an artist struggling to be faithful to my Catholicism and to my craft. Enjoy.
May 13, 2010
Web Exclusive
A Public Catholic
AN INTERVIEW WITH 2010 LAETARE MEDALIST DANA GIOIA
Dana Gioia, this year’s recipient of the University of Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal, is an award-winning poet, a controversial essayist, and the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Although he holds degrees from Harvard and from Stanford, he was born in the tough, blue-collar community of Hawthorne, California, in 1950, the son of a Sicilian cabdriver and a Mexican and Native American mother. He attended a Marianist boys’ high school in Southern California, where less than a dozen out of his two hundred classmates went to four-year colleges.
Gioia has published three full-length collections of poetry, and is now working on a fourth. His last collection, Interrogations at Noon, won the 2002 American Book Award. His influential volume of essays Can Poetry Matter? (1992) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle. He’s been called a “Poet Provocateur,” especially after his 1991 essay in the Atlantic Monthly (“Can Poetry Matter?”) created a firestorm.
Yet Gioia’s years as NEA chairman under President George W. Bush, from 2003 to 2009, brought his more collaborative and harmonious side into the national limelight. Gioia succeeded in mobilizing bipartisan support in the Congress for NEA, and Business Week called him "The Man Who Saved the NEA."
Since leaving the NEA, Gioia has been director of the Aspen Institute’s Harman-Eisner Program in the Arts. He’s also writing more poems after a long silence.
I profiled Gioia for Commonweal in 2003 (“Dana Gioia Goes to Washington,” November 21). At the time he told me, “I think that being proud of your religion, your culture, and your ethnicity is the beginning of revival for Catholic artistic culture. As an individual, I refuse to be ashamed of my faith, my culture, or my family background.” On the occasion of being awarded the Laetare Medal, he continued some of those thoughts in the following interview.
Cynthia Haven: In commending you for this year’s Laetare Medal, Fr. John Jenkins, president of the University of Notre Dame, said you have "given vivid witness to the mutual flourishing of faith and culture.” You have spoken in the past about the need for a Catholic culture–what exactly do you have in mind?
Dana Gioia: What I envision is quite simple. In the diverse social mix of the United States, there would be a recognizable Catholic element in the arts and culture. It wouldn’t be a unified dogmatic block, but a vibrant and varied range of recognizable Catholic activity—rather like Jewish cultural life. This culture would not be the product of the church but of the laity.
CH: You have said that anti-Catholicism remains the only acceptable prejudice among intellectuals in America today. Has the situation improved in recent years?
DG: No, it has grown worse. Much worse. There has been a revival of militant atheism, which views all religion as a hindrance to social progress. This movement hates Catholicism, in particular, because of its size, authority, and continuity. In many circles now, anti-Catholicism isn’t considered bigotry, but a virtue.
CH: You have commented that today’s Catholic writers see their religion "as a private concern rather than a public identity."
DG: Catholic writers and artists have lost any sense of a meaningful cultural community. There is, of course, a meaningful spiritual community, but how do they connect it to their artistic vocations? They rightly feel as if they struggle in isolation without either the support or attention that a vital subculture should afford. Even unfavorable attention would indicate that what they are doing is important enough to argue about.
For most artists and intellectuals, their only havens are the institutions of secular culture, which have grown increasingly anti-Catholic in recent years. This situation compels most Catholic artists and intellectuals either to shed or disguise their core religious identities.
CH: In light of this prejudice, what do writers, artists, and humanists stand to gain from what you have called a “Catholic identity”?
DG: They would gain authenticity, integrity, continuity, and community.
Catholicism is not only a religious identity, it is also a rich range of cultural and ethnic identities—Italian, Polish, Mexican, Irish, Haitian, Vietnamese, Austrian, and so on. Catholicism is a universal without being uniform. I have regularly attended services in Mexican, Polish, and Italian parishes over the years, and each had a different sort of vibrancy.
American Catholicism needs to resist the suburbanization of consumer culture. Keeping in touch with one’s ethnic and cultural roots is an essential form of resistance to social homogenization.
CH: Such a culture used to exist—at least much more than it does today. What happened?
DG: Affluence, assimilation, and social ambition—all aided and abetted by the church’s general indifference to the arts and the secular culture’s distaste for Christianity. The situation is not entirely new. The American Catholic Church has always been an immigrant church populated by the working poor. Consequently, it has never had much social cachet for the upwardly mobile.
Meanwhile, the church has never had much use for artistic culture, which is a serious mistake since great art, especially sacred art, speaks across cultures and classes.
CH: How can individuals foster this culture?
DG: Catholics need to be better stewards of their cultural and intellectual traditions. Too often, they seem either ignorant or apologetic about their own legacy. Catholics also feel they need to cultivate humility and charity at the expense of culture, which is seen as a dispensable luxury. I think many Catholics feel especially virtuous for excluding the arts—as if having better music at services might be a luxurious indulgence that would morally undermine their commitments to homeless shelters and food kitchens. The poor do not live by bread alone.
CH: Speaking of your own resonance with this culture: A recent article by Janet McCann, “Dana Gioia: A Contemporary Metaphysics,” described you as having a "sacramental imagination," where heaven and earth are "closely bound to this world.”
DG: Being raised Catholic makes you deeply aware of symbols. That isn’t bad training for a poet. Catholicism also trains you to ponder the mysterious relationship between the visible and the invisible aspects of the world.
CH: Your poems sometimes presuppose the Christian, if not Catholic, conviction that history has a point, and is not merely a random succession of moments in some Zen-like eternal now—I think of “Song for the End of Time,” “The End,” “The Stars Now Rearrange Themselves,” “Pentecost,” “The Litany,” “California Requiem,” the list goes on.
DG: I am reluctant to gloss the meanings of my poems. If they don’t speak for themselves, no amount of commentary will redeem them. But let me make one general comment: Art craves teleology. It’s not necessarily a theological point. Hegel and Marx say it as clearly as Augustine and Aquinas. Unless one wants to write only impressionistic miniatures, poems need to go somewhere. Human nature also looks for patterns and meaning. If poetry is language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree, then you need to charge it with real meanings large and small. I like to connect small and large things in my poetry, especially to link the mundane and the mysterious.
CH: One of the themes of Interrogations at Noon is the limits of words to reach reality. I tend to agree with your conclusion in “Words”: “To name is to know and remember.” But the same volume ends with “Unsaid”: “the tongue-tied aches / Of unacknowledged love are no less real / For having passed unsaid…” Is the jury still out for you on the relationship of words to reality, and our perception of it?
DG: Words are an imperfect medium through which to understand and express the world. But they are also the best medium we possess as long as we don’t expect them to express everything. Language is probably the greatest achievement of humanity—how can a poet think otherwise?—but reality is greater. Language is vastly expressive, but we should also not forget the eloquence and mysteries of silence—be it human or nonhuman.
CH: In a number of poems—Nosferatu and “My Secret Life,” for example—you write not only the risk of losing love, but the risks of love distorted. In “California Requiem,” a powerful voice-from-the-dead laments environmental plunder: “What we possessed we always chose to kill.” You wrote of Breton in “Elegy with Surrealist Proverbs as Refrain”: “‘Better to die of love / than love without regret.’ And those who loved him / soon learned regret.” Love lost, love distorted—is this Dantesque theme the essence of the darkness that hovers on the edge of your poems?
DG: I don’t think I can briefly answer that large and interesting question, but let me go to the heart of it: Our vices and our virtues are related. Both arise from the same core human energies and impulses. Love, in particular, is such a powerful and dynamic emotion that it can lead us to heaven or hell.
The object of love is crucial. Love and desire the wrong thing, and it can corrupt you. The challenges, responsibilities, dangers, and failures of love are probably the things I’ve written about the most, though they aren’t themes that today’s critics find interesting. But that’s okay. Readers understand.
CH: When did you begin writing poetry?
DG: The first poem I ever wrote was in fourth grade. We had a class contest to write a poem about our guardian angel. Manny Di Benedetto won first place, but I could tell his mother had helped him. A little later, like everyone else, I wrote a few self-pitying poems in high school. At that point music was my chief passion, and I intended to be a composer. By the age of twenty, I discovered that poetry was what most excited me. It’s really not as if I chose poetry. Poetry chose me. I simply recognized my vocation. It took years of study and practice to write anything good, but the hard labor of mastering the craft gave me a great pleasure.
CH: How has your Washington post as National Endowment of the Arts chairman affected your poetry—besides obviously limiting your time to write it?
DG: Not writing was the essential thing. It’s not an altogether bad thing for a poet to stop writing for a while when the rest of life becomes engrossing. The unconscious works all the time. The poems will come eventually and probably be better for the wait. There is a silly pressure on American poets to publish constantly. So much new poetry seems dilute and underpowered.
Running the Arts Endowment for six years also reminded me of the larger purposes of art—both for individuals and communities—I never thought deeply about art’s communal role before coming to Washington.
At the Arts Endowment, I had a very simple goal—to bring the best art and arts education to the broadest audience possible. I tried, in other words, to be true to both art and democracy.
CH: Any indication of what your new poems will look like, how they have changed?
DG: Poetic inspiration is an involuntary process. I never know what a new poem will look like till it arrives, and I am often astonished by what appears.
I just finished a long narrative poem—a sort of short story in verse. I would never have predicted writing a psychological ghost story dealing with themes of wealth, ambition, and destructive sexual attraction. But one day the first three lines popped into my head, and suddenly the story and the characters were almost fully visible.
What will my future poems look like? Who knows! I just hope that poems keep coming. Poetry is a more mysterious art than writing workshops would lead us to believe.
CH: Given last year’s events at Notre Dame, with President Barack Obama being awarded an honorary degree and Mary Ann Glendon declining the Laetare Medal, do you feel under more pressure or scrutiny this year?
DG: I always feel under scrutiny. It’s a sort of psychological disability. And no occasion brings out more anxiety than speaking at a large college commencement. But these worries have nothing to do with Barack Obama and Mary Ann Glendon.
The problem is practical: How does one avoid being pompous and boring and manage to say something of value while addressing a large, restless audience who has other things on its mind?
The only harder gig is talking about poetry to sixth graders.
Monday, June 21, 2010
Why I Am A Catholic
Why I Am A Catholic
By G. K. Chesterton
From Twelve Modern Apostles and Their Creeds (1926)
Reprinted in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, Vol. 3 Ignatius Press 1990
The difficulty of explaining "why I am a Catholic" is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true. I could fill all my space with separate sentences each beginning with the words, "It is the only thing that . . ." As, for instance, (1) It is the only thing that really prevents a sin from being a secret. (2) It is the only thing in which the superior cannot be superior; in the sense of supercilious. (3) It is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age. (4) It is the only thing that talks as if it were the truth; as if it were a real messenger refusing to tamper with a real message. (5) It is the only type of Christianity that really contains every type of man; even the respectable man. (6) It is the only large attempt to change the world from the inside; working through wills and not laws; and so on.
Or I might treat the matter personally and describe my own conversion; but I happen to have a strong feeling that this method makes the business look much smaller than it really is. Numbers of much better men have been sincerely converted to much worse religions. I would much prefer to attempt to say here of the Catholic Church precisely the things that cannot be said even of its very respectable rivals. In short, I would say chiefly of the Catholic Church that it is catholic. I would rather try to suggest that it is not only larger than me, but larger than anything in the world; that it is indeed larger than the world. But since in this short space I can only take a section, I will consider it in its capacity of a guardian of the truth.
The other day a well-known writer, otherwise quite well-informed, said that the Catholic Church is always the enemy of new ideas. It probably did not occur to him that his own remark was not exactly in the nature of a new idea. It is one of the notions that Catholics have to be continually refuting, because it is such a very old idea. Indeed, those who complain that Catholicism cannot say anything new, seldom think it necessary to say anything new about Catholicism. As a matter of fact, a real study of history will show it to be curiously contrary to the fact. In so far as the ideas really are ideas, and in so far as any such ideas can be new, Catholics have continually suffered through supporting them when they were really new; when they were much too new to find any other support. The Catholic was not only first in the field but alone in the field; and there was as yet nobody to understand what he had found there.
Thus, for instance, nearly two hundred years before the Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution, in an age devoted to the pride and praise of princes, Cardinal Bellarmine and Suarez the Spaniard laid down lucidly the whole theory of real democracy. But in that age of Divine Right they only produced the impression of being sophistical and sanguinary Jesuits, creeping about with daggers to effect the murder of kings. So, again, the Casuists of the Catholic schools said all that can really be said for the problem plays and problem novels of our own time, two hundred years before they were written. They said that there really are problems of moral conduct; but they had the misfortune to say it two hundred years too soon. In a time of tub-thumping fanaticism and free and easy vituperation, they merely got themselves called liars and shufflers for being psychologists before psychology was the fashion. It would be easy to give any number of other examples down to the present day, and the case of ideas that are still too new to be understood. There are passages in Pope Leo's Encyclical on Labor [Also known as Rerum Novarum, released in 1891] which are only now beginning to be used as hints for social movements much newer than socialism. And when Mr. Belloc wrote about the Servile State, he advanced an economic theory so original that hardly anybody has yet realized what it is. A few centuries hence, other people will probably repeat it, and repeat it wrong. And then, if Catholics object, their protest will be easily explained by the well-known fact that Catholics never care for new ideas.
Nevertheless, the man who made that remark about Catholics meant something; and it is only fair to him to understand it rather more clearly than he stated it. What he meant was that, in the modern world, the Catholic Church is in fact the enemy of many influential fashions; most of which still claim to be new, though many of them are beginning to be a little stale. In other words, in so far as he meant that the Church often attacks what the world at any given moment supports, he was perfectly right . The Church does often set herself against the fashion of this world that passes away; and she has experience enough to know how very rapidly it does pass away. But to understand exactly what is involved, it is necessary to take a rather larger view and consider the ultimate nature of the ideas in question, to consider, so to speak, the idea of the idea.
Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes. The Catholic Church has for one of her chief duties that of preventing people from making those old mistakes; from making them over and over again forever, as people always do if they are left to themselves. The truth about the Catholic attitude towards heresy, or as some would say, towards liberty, can best be expressed perhaps by the metaphor of a map. The Catholic Church carries a sort of map of the mind which looks like the map of a maze, but which is in fact a guide to the maze. It has been compiled from knowledge which, even considered as human knowledge, is quite without any human parallel.
There is no other case of one continuous intelligent institution that has been thinking about thinking for two thousand years. Its experience naturally covers nearly all experiences; and especially nearly all errors. The result is a map in which all the blind alleys and bad roads are clearly marked, all the ways that have been shown to be worthless by the best of all evidence: the evidence of those who have gone down them.
On this map of the mind the errors are marked as exceptions. The greater part of it consists of playgrounds and happy hunting-fields, where the mind may have as much liberty as it likes; not to mention any number of intellectual battle-fields in which the battle is indefinitely open and undecided. But it does definitely take the responsibility of marking certain roads as leading nowhere or leading to destruction, to a blank wall, or a sheer precipice. By this means, it does prevent men from wasting their time or losing their lives upon paths that have been found futile or disastrous again and again in the past, but which might otherwise entrap travelers again and again in the future. The Church does make herself responsible for warning her people against these; and upon these the real issue of the case depends. She does dogmatically defend humanity from its worst foes, those hoary and horrible and devouring monsters of the old mistakes. Now all these false issues have a way of looking quite fresh, especially to a fresh generation. Their first statement always sounds harmless and plausible. I will give only two examples. It sounds harmless to say, as most modern people have said: "Actions are only wrong if they are bad for society." Follow it out, and sooner or later you will have the inhumanity of a hive or a heathen city, establishing slavery as the cheapest and most certain means of production, torturing the slaves for evidence because the individual is nothing to the State, declaring that an innocent man must die for the people, as did the murderers of Christ. Then, perhaps, you will go back to Catholic definitions, and find that the Church, while she also says it is our duty to work for society, says other things also which forbid individual injustice. Or again, it sounds quite pious to say, "Our moral conflict should end with a victory of the spiritual over the material." Follow it out, and you may end in the madness of the Manicheans, saying that a suicide is good because it is a sacrifice, that a sexual perversion is good because it produces no life, that the devil made the sun and moon because they are material. Then you may begin to guess why Catholicism insists that there are evil spirits as well as good; and that materials also may be sacred, as in the Incarnation or the Mass, in the sacrament of marriage or the resurrection of the body.
Now there is no other corporate mind in the world that is thus on the watch to prevent minds from going wrong. The policeman comes too late, when he tries to prevent men from going wrong. The doctor comes too late, for he only comes to lock up a madman, not to advise a sane man on how not to go mad. And all other sects and schools are inadequate for the purpose. This is not because each of them may not contain a truth, but precisely because each of them does contain a truth; and is content to contain a truth. None of the others really pretends to contain the truth. None of the others, that is, really pretends to be looking out in all directions at once. The Church is not merely armed against the heresies of the past or even of the present, but equally against those of the future, that may be the exact opposite of those of the present. Catholicism is not ritualism; it may in the future be fighting some sort of superstitious and idolatrous exaggeration of ritual. Catholicism is not asceticism; it has again and again in the past repressed fanatical and cruel exaggerations of asceticism. Catholicism is not mere mysticism; it is even now defending human reason against the mere mysticism of the Pragmatists. Thus, when the world went Puritan in the seventeenth century, the Church was charged with pushing charity to the point of sophistry, with making everything easy with the laxity of the confessional. Now that the world is not going Puritan but Pagan, it is the Church that is everywhere protesting against a Pagan laxity in dress or manners. It is doing what the Puritans wanted done when it is really wanted. In all probability, all that is best in Protestantism will only survive in Catholicism; and in that sense all Catholics will still be Puritans when all Puritans are Pagans.
Thus, for instance, Catholicism, in a sense little understood, stands outside a quarrel like that of Darwinism at Dayton. It stands outside it because it stands all around it, as a house stands all around two incongruous pieces of furniture. It is no sectarian boast to say it is before and after and beyond all these things in all directions. It is impartial in a fight between the Fundamentalist and the theory of the Origin of Species, because it goes back to an origin before that Origin; because it is more fundamental than Fundamentalism. It knows where the Bible came from. It also knows where most of the theories of Evolution go to. It knows there were many other Gospels besides the Four Gospels, and that the others were only eliminated by the authority of the Catholic Church. It knows there are many other evolutionary theories besides the Darwinian theory; and that the latter is quite likely to be eliminated by later science. It does not, in the conventional phrase, accept the conclusions of science, for the simple reason that science has not concluded. To conclude is to shut up; and the man of science is not at all likely to shut up. It does not, in the conventional phrase, believe what the Bible says, for the simple reason that the Bible does not say anything. You cannot put a book in the witness-box and ask it what it really means. The Fundamentalist controversy itself destroys Fundamentalism. The Bible by itself cannot be a basis of agreement when it is a cause of disagreement; it cannot be the common ground of Christians when some take it allegorically and some literally. The Catholic refers it to something that can say something, to the living, consistent, and continuous mind of which I have spoken; the highest mind of man guided by God.
Every moment increases for us the moral necessity for such an immortal mind. We must have something that will hold the four corners of the world still, while we make our social experiments or build our Utopias. For instance, we must have a final agreement, if only on the truism of human brotherhood, that will resist some reaction of human brutality. Nothing is more likely just now than that the corruption of representative government will lead to the rich breaking loose altogether, and trampling on all the traditions of equality with mere pagan pride. We must have the truisms everywhere recognized as true. We must prevent mere reaction and the dreary repetition of the old mistakes. We must make the intellectual world safe for democracy. But in the conditions of modern mental anarchy, neither that nor any other ideal is safe. just as Protestants appealed from priests to the Bible, and did not realize that the Bible also could be questioned, so republicans appealed from kings to the people, and did not realize that the people also could be defied. There is no end to the dissolution of ideas, the destruction of all tests of truth, that has become possible since men abandoned the attempt to keep a central and civilized Truth, to contain all truths and trace out and refute all errors. Since then, each group has taken one truth at a time and spent the time in turning it into a falsehood. We have had nothing but movements; or in other words, monomanias. But the Church is not a movement but a meeting-place; the trysting-place of all the truths in the world.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Some Thoughts From Wendell Berry
The Failure of War |
by Wendell Berry |
| If you know even as little history as I do, it is hard not to doubt the efficacy of modern war as a solution to any problem except that of retribution—the “justice” of exchanging one damage for another. Apologists for war will insist that war answers the problem of national self-defense. But the doubter, in reply, will ask to what extent the cost even of a successful war of national defense—in life, money, material, foods, health, and (inevitably) freedom—may amount to a national defeat. National defense through war always involves some degree of national defeat. This paradox has been with us from the very beginning of our republic. Militarization in defense of freedom reduces the freedom of the defenders. There is a fundamental inconsistency between war and freedom. In a modern war, fought with modern weapons and on the modern scale, neither side can limit to “the enemy” the damage that it does. These wars damage the world. We know enough by now to know that you cannot damage a part of the world without damaging all of it. Modern war has not only made it impossible to kill “combatants” without killing “noncombatants,” it has made it impossible to damage your enemy without damaging yourself. That many have considered the increasing unacceptability of modern warfare is shown by the language of the propaganda surrounding it. Modern wars have characteristically been fought to end war; they have been fought in the name of peace. Our most terrible weapons have been made, ostensibly, to preserve and assure the peace of the world. “All we want is peace,” we say as we increase relentlessly our capacity to make war. Yet at the end of a century in which we have fought two wars to end war and several more to prevent war and preserve peace, and in which scientific and technological progress has made war ever more terrible and less controllable, we still, by policy, give no consideration to nonviolent means of national defense. We do indeed make much of diplomacy and diplomatic relations, but by diplomacy we mean invariably ultimatums for peace backed by the threat of war. It is always understood that we stand ready to kill those with whom we are “peacefully negotiating.” Our century of war, militarism, and political terror has produced great—and successful—advocates of true peace, among whom Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., are the paramount examples. The considerable success that they achieved testifies to the presence, in the midst of violence, of an authentic and powerful desire for peace and, more important, of the proven will to make the necessary sacrifices. But so far as our government is concerned, these men and their great and authenticating accomplishments might as well never have existed. To achieve peace by peaceable means is not yet our goal. We cling to the hopeless paradox of making peace by making war. Which is to say that we cling in our public life to a brutal hypocrisy. In our century of almost universal violence of humans against fellow humans, and against our natural and cultural commonwealth, hypocrisy has been inescapable because our opposition to violence has been selective or merely fashionable. Some of us who approve of our monstrous military budget and our peacekeeping wars nonetheless deplore “domestic violence” and think that our society can be pacified by “gun control.” Some of us are against capital punishment but for abortion. Some of us are against abortion but for capital punishment. One does not have to know very much or think very far in order to see the moral absurdity upon which we have erected our sanctioned enterprises of violence. Abortion-as-birth-control is justified as a “right,” which can establish itself only by denying all the rights of another person, which is the most primitive intent of warfare. Capital punishment sinks us all to the same level of primal belligerence, at which an act of violence is avenged by another act of violence. What the justifiers of these acts ignore is the fact—well-established by the history of feuds, let alone the history of war—that violence breeds violence. Acts of violence committed in “justice” or in affirmation of “rights” or in defense of “peace” do not end violence. They prepare and justify its continuation. The most dangerous superstition of the parties of violence is the idea that sanctioned violence can prevent or control unsanctioned violence. But if violence is “just” in one instance as determined by the state, why might it not also be “just” in another instance, as determined by an individual? How can a society that justifies capital punishment and warfare prevent its justifications from being extended to assassination and terrorism? If a government perceives that some causes are so important as to justify the killing of children, how can it hope to prevent the contagion of its logic spreading to its citizens—or to its citizens’ children? If we give to these small absurdities the magnitude of international relations, we produce, unsurprisingly, some much larger absurdities. What could be more absurd, to begin with, than our attitude of high moral outrage against other nations for manufacturing the selfsame weapons that we manufacture? The difference, as our leaders say, is that we will use these weapons virtuously, whereas our enemies will use them maliciously—a proposition that too readily conforms to a proposition of much less dignity: we will use them in our interest, whereas our enemies will use them in theirs. Or we must say, at least, that the issue of virtue in war is as obscure, ambiguous, and troubling as Abraham Lincoln found to be the issue of prayer in war: “Both [the North and the South] read the same bible, and pray to the same God, and each invokes his aid against the other… The prayers of both could not be answered — that of neither could be answered fully.” Recent American wars, having been both “foreign” and “limited,” have been fought under the assumption that little or no personal sacrifice is required. In “foreign” wars, we do not directly experience the damage that we inflict upon the enemy. We hear and see this damage reported in the news, but we are not affected. These limited, “foreign” wars require that some of our young people should be killed or crippled, and that some families should grieve, but these “casualties” are so widely distributed among our population as hardly to be noticed. Otherwise, we do not feel ourselves to be involved. We pay taxes to support the war, but that is nothing new, for we pay war taxes also in time of “peace.” We experience no shortages, we suffer no rationing, we endure no limitations. We earn, borrow, spend, and consume in wartime as in peacetime. And of course no sacrifice is required of those large economic interests that now principally constitute our economy. No corporation will be required to submit to any limitation or to sacrifice a dollar. On the contrary, war is the great cure-all and opportunity of our corporate economy, which subsists and thrives upon war. War ended the Great Depression of the 1930s, and we have maintained a war economy—an economy, one might justly say, of general violence—ever since, sacrificing to it an enormous economic and ecological wealth, including, as designated victims, the farmers and the industrial working class. And so great costs are involved in our fixation on war, but the costs are “externalized” as “acceptable losses.” And here we see how progress in war, progress in technology, and progress in the industrial economy are parallel to one another—or, very often, are merely identical. Romantic nationalists, which is to say most apologists for war, always imply in their public speeches a mathematics or an accounting of war. Thus by its suffering in the Civil War, the North is said to have “paid for” the emancipation of the slaves and the preservation of the Union. Thus we may speak of our liberty as having been “bought” by the bloodshed of patriots. I am fully aware of the truth in such statements. I know that I am one of many who have benefited from painful sacrifices made by other people, and I would not like to be ungrateful. Moreover, I am a patriot myself and I know that the time may come for any of us when we must make extreme sacrifices for the sake of liberty—a fact confirmed by the fates of Gandhi and King. But still I am suspicious of this kind of accounting. For one reason, it is necessarily done by the living on behalf of the dead. And I think we must be careful about too easily accepting, or being too easily grateful for, sacrifices made by others, especially if we have made none ourselves. For another reason, though our leaders in war always assume that there is an acceptable price, there is never a previously stated level of acceptability. The acceptable price, finally, is whatever is paid. It is easy to see the similarity between this accounting of the price of war and our usual accounting of “the price of progress.” We seem to have agreed that whatever has been (or will be) paid for so-called progress is an acceptable price. If that price includes the diminishment of privacy and the increase of government secrecy, so be it. If it means a radical reduction in the number of small businesses and the virtual destruction of the farm population, so be it. If it means the devastation of whole regions by extractive industries, so be it. If it means that a mere handful of people should own more billions of wealth than is owned by all of the world’s poor, so be it. But let us have the candor to acknowledge that what we call “the economy” or “the free market” is less and less distinguishable from warfare. For about half of the last century, we worried about world conquest by international communism. Now with less worry (so far) we are witnessing world conquest by international capitalism. Though its political means are milder (so far) than those of communism, this newly internationalized capitalism may prove even more destructive of human cultures and communities, of freedom, and of nature. Its tendency is just as much toward total dominance and control. Confronting this conquest, ratified and licensed by the new international trade agreements, no place and no community in the world may consider itself safe from some form of plunder. More and more people all over the world are recognizing that this is so, and they are saying that world conquest of any kind is wrong, period. They are doing more than that. They are saying that local conquest also is wrong, and wherever it is taking place local people are joining together to oppose it. All over my own state of Kentucky this opposition is growing—from the west, where the exiled people of the Land Between the Lakes are struggling to save their homeland from bureaucratic depredation, to the east, where the native people of the mountains are still struggling to preserve their land from destruction by absentee corporations. To have an economy that is warlike, that aims at conquest and that destroys virtually everything that it is dependent on, placing no value on the health of nature or of human communities, is absurd enough. It is even more absurd that this economy, that in some respects is so much at one with our military industries and programs, is in other respects directly in conflict with our professed aim of national defense. It seems only reasonable, only sane, to suppose that a gigantic program of preparedness for national defense should be founded first of all upon a principle of national and even regional economic independence. A nation determined to defend itself and its freedoms should be prepared, and always preparing, to live from its own resources and from the work and the skills of its own people. But that is not what we are doing in the United States today. What we are doing is squandering in the most prodigal manner the natural and human resources of the nation. At present, in the face of declining finite sources of fossil fuel energies, we have virtually no energy policy, either for conservation or for the development of safe and clean alternative sources. At present, our energy policy simply is to use all that we have. Moreover, in the face of a growing population needing to be fed, we have virtually no policy for land conservation and no policy of just compensation to the primary producers of food. Our agricultural policy is to use up everything that we have, while depending increasingly on imported food, energy, technology, and labor. Those are just two examples of our general indifference to our own needs. We thus are elaborating a surely dangerous contradiction between our militant nationalism and our espousal of the international “free market” ideology. How do we escape from this absurdity? I don’t think there is an easy answer. Obviously, we would be less absurd if we took better care of things. We would be less absurd if we founded our public policies upon an honest description of our needs and our predicament, rather than upon fantastical descriptions of our wishes. We would be less absurd if our leaders would consider in good faith the proven alternatives to violence. Such things are easy to say, but we are disposed, somewhat by culture and somewhat by nature, to solve our problems by violence, and even to enjoy doing so. And yet by now all of us must at least have suspected that our right to live, to be free, and to be at peace is not guaranteed by any act of violence. It can be guaranteed only by our willingness that all other persons should live, be free, and be at peace—and by our willingness to use or give our own lives to make that possible. To be incapable of such willingness is merely to resign ourselves to the absurdity we are in; and yet, if you are like me, you are unsure to what extent you are capable of it. Here is the other question that I have been leading toward, one that the predicament of modern warfare forces upon us: How many deaths of other people’s children by bombing or starvation are we willing to accept in order that we may be free, affluent, and (supposedly) at peace? To that question I answer: None. Please, no children. Don’t kill any children for my benefit. If that is your answer too, then you must know that we have not come to rest, far from it. For surely we must feel ourselves swarmed about with more questions that are urgent, personal, and intimidating. But perhaps also we feel ourselves beginning to be free, facing at last in our own selves the greatest challenge ever laid before us, the most comprehensive vision of human progress, the best advice, and the least obeyed: Wendell Berry, poet, philosopher, and conservationist, farms in Kentucky. © Wendell Berry |
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