Month: May 2014

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Cross-posted on Wondering Fair

Not long ago, Stanley Fish (professor of Humanities at Florida International University and public intellectual) took an opportunity to respond to critics who thought that a recent Coen brothers’ film, “True Grit,” “was dull and uninspiring.” In a reflection titled, “Narrative and the Grace of God” he defends the more muted narrative in this film, which lacks some of the flash or melodrama that moviegoers might wish for. Fish comments:

That’s right; there is an evenness to the new movie’s treatment of its events that frustrates Gagliasso’s desire for something climactic and defining. In the movie Gagliasso wanted to see — in fact the original “True Grit” — we are told something about the nature of heroism and virtue and the relationship between the two. In the movie we have just been gifted with, there is no relationship between the two; heroism, of a physical kind, is displayed by almost everyone, “good” and “bad” alike, and the universe seems at best indifferent, and at worst hostile, to its exercise.

Turning to the book which inspired both the original film (starring John Wayne), and its recent remake, Fish sketches a discussion of grace and meaning, and he notes,

There are no easy homiletics here, no direct line drawing from the way things seem to have turned out to the way they ultimately are. While worldly outcomes and the universe’s moral structure no doubt come together in the perspective of eternity, in the eyes of mortals they are entirely disjunct… In the novel and in the Coens’ film it is always like that: things happen, usually bad things (people are hanged, robbed, cheated, shot, knifed, bashed over the head and bitten by snakes), but they don’t have any meaning, except the meaning that you had better not expect much in this life because the brute irrationality of it all is always waiting to smack you in the face.

Fish’s comments on heroism, grasped from the teeth of the absurdity, are certainly not new. If anything, he represents one of the best versions of a long conversation in modern nihilism which includes Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Camus. The thinking goes: In this world, filled with strife, heroism is not to be pursued in the context of one’s contingency as a creature made by God, but rather in a radical rejection of theological structures of meaning. One should accept instead that this world is filled with absurdity. The true hero accepts this, forges his or her own way, and creates meaning in the midst of the chaos which threatens to overwhelm human society.

While one can appreciate threads that run through this way of thinking – the honesty to not accept the naïve optimism of a secular humanism that grasps at a religious faith emptied of meaning, the affirmation of the wholeness and physical integrity of persons in the midst of adversity, and a recognition that the sublime lies just under the surface of our ordinary experience – one must also note that these are intricately tied to nihilistic understandings of the world and the heroic paradigm that accompanies it (other contemporary examples might be, Fight Club, The Quiet Man, and American Beauty, perhaps). In a world without meaning, we must accept what we find, and make the most of it.

But this is not the only, or even the most obvious, way to read the world. If we sense that there is meaning to be found in human relationships, then it may be more sensible to affirm that this is because we are created, and that this world, though occasionally baffling, is not absurd, but beautiful, and filled with life and intentionality. Situations of violence, cruelty, and strife do not stand out as the norm, but rather stand out in such sharp relied because they contrast what we expect of the ordered regularity of creation. Human violence and injustice appal us not because we are naïve, but because it goes against the grain of the created universe. The world seems absurd if we try to narrate its movements without God, or worse still with a distorted image of who God is.

Jeremy Kidwell

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This morning during Matins I had a “jolt of happiness,” of fullness of life, and at the same time the thought: I will have to die! But in such a fleeting breath of happiness, time usually “gathers” itself. In an instant, not only are all such breaths of happiness remembered but they are present and alive— that Holy Saturday in Paris when I was a young man—and many such “breaks.” It seems to me that eternity might be not the stopping of time, but precisely its resurrection and gathering. The fragmentation of time, its division, is the fall of eternity. Maybe the words of Christ are about time when He said: “… not to destroy anything but will raise it all on the last day.” The thirst for solitude, peace, freedom, is thirst for the liberation of time from cumbersome dead bodies, from hustle; thirst for the transformation of time into what it should be—the receptacle, the chalice of eternity. Liturgy is the conversion of time, its filling with eternity. There are two irreconcilable types of spirituality: one that strives to liberate man from time (Buddhism, Hinduism, Nirvana, etc.); the other that strives to liberate time. In genuine eternity, all is alive. The limit and the fullness: the whole of time, the whole of life is in each moment. But there is also the perpetual problem: What about the evil moments? Evil time? The terrible fear before dying of the drowning man, of the man falling from the tenth floor about to be crushed on the pavement? What about the tears of an abused child?

From The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann 1973—1983, p. 78. Cited in Gallaher, Chalice of eternity: an Orthodox theology of time, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 57:1, 5-35 (2013).

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Over the course of several years of doctoral research, I’ve been reading the Christian Scriptures closely to see what we might responsibly say about the relationship between our everyday work and the New Creation. Along the way, I was struck by a strange prohibition that ends the book of Zechariah: ‘and there shall no longer be traders in the house of the Lord of hosts on that day’ (14:21, NRSV). On my first reading, I thought it strange that merchants might be singled out for exclusion from God’s holy kingdom. However, as I have reflected on this text and read more widely in the prophets, I’ve come to see a startling, if forgotten biblical critique of a danger that lies in business. Let me begin by providing a bit of context before I note how this may be relevant to our contemporary context.

The closing chapter of Zechariah offers an ‘apocalyptic’ description of the age to come. There, the writer describes the new kingdom as a sort of impenetrable bulwark in the midst of violent conflict and collapsing political order. In the midst of this, Zechariah 14 describes a pilgrimage of the nations who come to offer worship to the King, by bringing their wealth to the Lord of Hosts (similar to Isaiah 60, from which Adam Smith derived his title ‘The Wealth of Nations’). One of the theological trajectories of Zechariah is the democratisation of holiness. To this end, Zechariah uses a remarkably mundane lexicon, noting how horse’s bells and cooking pots (related to predominant ancient forms of work: warfare and subsistence) become ‘Holy to the Lord’ (vs. 20–21). Then comes that strange final verse, ‘and there shall no longer be traders in the house of the Lord of hosts on that day’.

The Hebrew word kena’ani, which the NRSV renders as ‘traders’, is a possible reference to ‘canaanites’. Some interpreters have suggested that this is meant to carry forward the ‘dissolution of boundaries’ as Carol Meyers puts it, which is a major theme in Zechariah. The thinking goes: rather than Israel becoming like Canaan, the reverse will be the case, Canaan will be culturally absorbed into Israel, and this will serve as a sign of the triumph of God’s holiness in this kingdom. However, this interpretation of Zechariah neglects a wider critique of merchant-activity which one finds with surprising regularity in the Old Testament. We find more obvious hints at this in Hosea 12:7 which warns of ‘a trader (canaanite), in whose hands are false balances, he loves to oppress’. As Ralph Smith notes, fraudulent scales ‘became symbolic in OT literature of unscrupulous dealings’ (and we find condemnations of such fraud in Deut. 25:13, Prov. 11:1, 20:23, and Micah 6:11).

The text of Zephaniah 1:11 parallels Zechariah in offering a wholesale dismissal of merchants. Here the problem is not related merely to dishonest merchants (as in Hosea), but rather ‘all who weigh silver are wiped out’ (JPS). We can only assume that, in the age of these prophets, the activity of merchant middle-men had gained such a reputation that the term for ‘merchant’ or even the more generic designation of ‘canaanite’, could be used to connote deceptive business activity without clarification. The honest merchant was an exception to the rule.

While it may be tempting to argue that our contemporary situation is categorically different, I think this misses the way in which certain forms of business carry a latent moral risk – they can carry a predisposition towards dishonesty which is embedded in their very structure. I think that the conditions under which the dishonest ancient merchant profited are not so different from the present: they capitalised on knowledge asymmetry from an established position. Seen in this way, we may appreciate how manipulating scales is similar to many contemporary covert business activities which seek to manipulate the representation of value and exploit the trust of unwitting customers. Just as ancient customers questioned whether merchants added value to the goods which they sold, today’s Christians have good reason to question similar tactics used by modern firms.

Some of my American friends like to poke fun at this ambiguity by referring to the posh eco-grocer, Whole Foods, as ‘Whole Paycheck’, but expensive groceries are hardly the worst instance of mark-up without value. A far more troubling example lies in the reliance of so many contemporary firms on massive marketing budgets. It is hard to justify as moral behaviour the manipulation of customers to believe that a product will provide intangibles such as status or sex appeal. Perhaps the worst recent practice has been the tendency towards ‘greenwashing’, where manufacturers leave the contents of their products unchanged but change product labelling to emphasise meaningless descriptors such as ‘all-natural’ or add terms like ‘eco’ or ‘green’ to a product’s name.

One insufficient response to the problem I’ve posed is the Amazon or Walmart solution, where a retailer cuts profit margins to such a bare level that one must deal in massive volume to make any profit at all. Yet this avenue does not escape the merchant’s quandary, as these retailers fail to bring value, and instead they obscure the immoral business practices (such as outsourcing labour and exporting externalities) which are latent in the goods they sell. In my discussions with various local makers where I live in Edinburgh, they always note how difficult it is to survive in the midst of such proactively distorted consumer expectations.

Described in this way, I worry that much of our business emulates the merchant activity which Zechariah proudly expects a holy God to destroy. The recent turn towards amateur craft and locally-made well-crafted goods is encouraging, but very fragile. These prophets, and indeed many people in the ancient world, noted that, as the maker of all good things, God cares about truthfulness in the way we represent value in business. There has never been a more urgent need for Christian leaders to provide a counter-cultural example of honesty in business, and I would argue that such action is explicitly commanded by Christian scripture.