Higher Ground

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Higher Ground (2011), the directorial debut of Vera Farmiga, has become one of my favorite cinematic treatments of Christian faith, along with The Mission (1986), The Apostle (1997), Into Great Silence (2005), Of Gods and Men (2010), and The Tree of Life (2011). The film is admirable for its refusal to judge the characters, its refusal to proselytize or polemicize. With a reverent and respectful tone, which is so rare when Hollywood turns to religion, Higher Ground tells a story about the search for authentic faith––faith in marriage and family, faith in friendships, and, above all else, faith in God. Farmiga, who also plays the protagonist Corinne Walker, describes her as “not broken down, but broken open.” “She’s not ridding herself of faith,” Farmiga adds, “she’s ridding herself of an impoverished faith.” It’s these kind of subtleties that make the film so welcome. I cannot think of another character who more saliently embodies the fragility and fortitude of faith in late modernity more than Corinne. She embodies what Emily Dickinson memorably characterizes as nimble believing: “We both believe and disbelieve a hundred times an Hour, which keeps Believing nimble.”

The lines below are from the closing scene of the film, where Corinne courageously voices her struggle to make an enduring abode for God in her heart:

When I was a little girl my pastor told me that Jesus was knocking on the door of my heart. And, so, I listened real hard and I thought I heard him. I did. I raised my hand and told everyone that Jesus was standing there, and he wanted me. He wanted me. Tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap. So I invited him in. “Welcome,” I said. And I gave my heart outright. I’m standing here today and I’m telling you today that, ahh, I’m still waiting for him to make himself at home. You know, I call and I call. There have been times when I know he answered me––times when I’m sure of it. But other times I got the porch light on and he doesn’t come. And I feel like I live in an empty place. I told God, you know what, I’m not going to let go, I won’t let go until he blesses me. But I’m wrestling with something nameless, without form and void, and I just want it to be solid so bad. I need all this to be real, and I don’t always know how to make it real––I don’t know how to make it real.

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Which community dost thou love?

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To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind. The interest of that portion of social arrangement is a trust in the hands of all those who compose it; and as none but bad men would justify it in abuse, none but traitors would barter it away for their own personal advantage.
– Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution

New York Times op-ed columnist Ross Douthat challenges the facile characterization that liberals are in favor of community while conservatives are in favor of individuals. On the contrary, he argues that conservatives are also in favor of community. The question concerns which communities are better equipped at serving the common good: the federal government or “little platoons” (families, neighborhoods, churches)?

WHEN liberals are in a philosophical mood, they like to cast debates over the role of government not as a clash between the individual and the state, but as a conflict between the individual and the community. Liberals are for cooperation and joint effort; conservatives are for self-interest and selfishness. Liberals build the Hoover Dam and the interstate highways; conservatives sit home and dog-ear copies of “The Fountainhead.” Liberals know that it takes a village; conservatives pretend that all it takes is John Wayne.

In this worldview, the government is just the natural expression of our national community, and the place where we all join hands to pursue the common good. Or to borrow a line attributed to Representative Barney Frank, “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.”

Many conservatives would go this far with Frank: Government is one way we choose to work together, and there are certain things we need to do collectively that only government can do.

But there are trade-offs as well, which liberal communitarians don’t always like to acknowledge. When government expands, it’s often at the expense of alternative expressions of community, alternative groups that seek to serve the common good. Unlike most communal organizations, the government has coercive power — the power to regulate, to mandate and to tax. These advantages make it all too easy for the state to gradually crowd out its rivals. The more things we “do together” as a government, in many cases, the fewer things we’re allowed to do together in other spheres.

Sometimes this crowding out happens gradually, subtly, indirectly. Every tax dollar the government takes is a dollar that can’t go to charities and churches. Every program the government runs, from education to health care to the welfare office, can easily become a kind of taxpayer-backed monopoly.

Read the rest of the column to learn about how Obama’s health care plan intimates “a darker American future, in which our voluntary communities wither away and government becomes the only word we have for the things we do together.”

The autonomy of the text

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Philosopher Merold Westphal:

Central to the hermeneutical theory of Paul Ricoeur is the thesis of the autonomy of the text. . . . This autonomy is not a total independence. It does not banish the author, and by implication the original context and original audience, to irrelevance. Ricoeur is quite explicit about this:

Not that we can conceive of a text without an author; the tie between the speaker and the discourse is not abolished, but distended and complicated. . . . The text’s career escapes the finite horizon lived by its author. What the text says now matters more than what the author meant to say, and every exegesis unfolds its procedures within the circumference of a meaning that has broken its moorings to the psychology of the author.

Indeed, “the ‘world’ of the text may explode the world of the author.”

* * *

If we ask why meaning “escapes” the immediate context of the author and the original audience, Ricoeur gives us two reasons beyond the obvious empirical fact that legal, literary, and religious texts are regularly interpreted differently by different interpreters in different circumstances. One is the polysemy of language, even ordinary language. By polysemy, Ricoeur means simply that meaning is contextual, that words have different meanings in different contexts. The meaning of a text cannot be determined by a passive, merely mirroring intuition but only by an active interpretation. The role of the author’s context is not “abolished” but “complicated” by the role of the reader’s context, which inevitably becomes part of the hermeneutical circle in which interpretation occurs. While this is true of ordinary discourse, it is especially true of metaphorical language.

The second reason is at least as important as the first. . . Meaning is contextual in the sense that the meaning of parts of a text is dependent on the meaning of the whole, and the meaning of a whole text is dependent on various larger wholes––linguistic and cultural––to which it belongs. Interpretation is construal rather than intuition for the simple reason that no one, neither the author nor the reader, is in actual possession of the whole that would give fully final and determinate meaning.

* * *

Does this mean that anything goes, that a text can mean whatever any audience takes it to mean? Hardly! Ricoeur has already insisted that the role of the author is not “abolished” but only “complicated” by the plurality of invisible readers. Nothing in his analysis suggests that Dad might rightly hear Mom’s “Only two more days till Christmas” as the announcement that she has just won the lottery and he will soon be driving that long-coveted Porsche. . . Ricoeur writes:

If it is true that there is always more than one way of construing a text, it is not true that all interpretations are equal. . . . The text is a limited field of possible construction. . . . It is always possible to argue for or against an interpretation, to confront interpretations, to arbitrate between them, and to seek for an agreement, even if this agreement remains beyond our reach.

Ricoeur’s hermeneutics develops a dialectic of belonging and distanciation. By belonging he means the embeddedness of (human) author and reader alike in contingent and particular horizons, contexts, and perspectives to which the meanings they put or find in a text are relative. . . By distanciation Ricoeur means the adoption of methods of testing interpretations that render the reader as objective as possible and that treat the text as an object to be explained. . . . Ricoeur thinks that objectifying methods are an indispensable “guardrail” to interpretation, a necessary protection against lapsing into an “anything goes” attitude. But he also thinks they should be the tail wagging the dog. To make the text an object to be explained with the help of some method for the sake of objectivism in interpretation and to identify this task as the whole hermeneutical task is to treat the text like “a cadaver handed over for autopsy” and to act “as though one were to give the funeral eulogy of someone yet alive. The eulogy might be accurate and appropriate, but it is nonetheless ‘premature,’ as Mark Twain might have put it.”

– Whose Community? Which Interpretation? Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church

The death of the author?

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Philosopher Merold Westphal:

According to familiar versions of theism, God is Creator, and the world has all and only those features that God (intended to) put there; if there is a certain indeterminacy due to creaturely freedom, that is only because God (intended to) put creaturely freedom in the world. Similarly, according to the view our trio [Roland Barthes, Michael Foucault, Jacques Derrida] wishes to dispute, the author is Creator of the text; it has all and only those meanings that the author (intended to) put there. In other words, it is a very particular kind of human author whose death is being announced, namely, one who never existed in the first place. Real authors do not create meaning in the way God created the world. They are neither the Alpha (pure, unconditioned origin) of meaning nor the Omega (ultimate goal) of interpretation. For this reason interpretation cannot be understood as deciphering, for in deciphering the meaning is already there, fixed and final (author as Alpha), though disguised by code, and the task is to discover and reproduce the author’s meaning (author as Omega).

* * *

. . . the author banished is only the (fictitious) author who is owner of language, the author who in godlike sovereignty is the creator of language but is not conditioned by the language(s) that have always preceded, made possible, and limited the work of the author.

* * *

. . . the finitude of the author will be mirrored in the finitude of the reader, who will be no pure origin of meaning but will be conditioned by prior meanings, including those that stem from the author as well as those that stem from the reader’s own grammatical-historical location.

Here the author and reader are cocreators of textual meaning. This is a genuine threat to hermeneutical objectivism, for there are many readers (including the same reader at different times and in different circumstances) and many traditions of reading, so the notion of the meaning of the text becomes highly problematic. When the text is understood as giving rise to meaning at the site of conversation between author and reader, there will be different meanings because there will be different conversations.

* * *

Having let the reader get a camel-like nose in the tent, let us now ask if we are on a slippery slope to a relativism where “anything goes” and where the text becomes a wax nose that can mean anything to anyone. Undoubtedly so, if that is the only alternative to allowing the author to be Absolute Monarch of Meaning or Divine Dispenser of Determinacy. But we have already learned in Logic 101 not to infer authorial irrelevance from the denial of authorial sovereignty. Or, to use a political analogy, the president of the United States does not rule by divine right with unconditioned authority. He is under constraints by Congress and the courts. But only a muddle-headed monarchist would complain that as president he has been banished to utter irrelevance and plays no significant role in the enactment and enforcement of laws in the United States.

Hermeneutically this means that the death of the absolute author is not the absolute death of the author. Authorial meaning is still important. Although interpretation is not deciphering as the mere reproduction of a prior, fixed, encoded meaning, there will be a reproductive aspect to interpretation. . . . “Not just occasionally but always, the meaning of a text goes beyond its author. That is why understanding is not merely a reproductive but always a productive activity as well” [Hans-Georg Gadamer].

– Whose Community? Which Interpretation? Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church

A moratorium on the objection of “anything goes” relativism

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Philosopher Merold Westphal:

Just for the record, except for a recent pizza ad, I can’t find anyone who espouses an “anything goes” philosophy. Nietzsche, for example, whose perspectivism is a radical version of relativism, surely doesn’t think Platonism or Christianity are just as good as his will-to-power naturalism. So I propose that we recognize the “anything goes” objection as the bugaboo it is and practice a fifty-year moratorium on the use of that phrase.

– Whose Community? Which Interpretation? Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church

Lectio divina: rehydrating the words of Scripture in our lives

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Spiritual theologian Eugene Peterson:

There is a sense in which the Scriptures are the word of God dehydrated, with all the originating context removed – living voices, city sounds, camels carrying spices from Seba and gold from Ophir snorting down in the bazaar, fragrance from lentil stew simmering in the kitchen – all now reduced to marks on thin onion-skin paper. We make an effort at rehydrating them; we take these Scriptures and spend an hour or so in Bible study with friends or alone in prayerful reading. But five minutes later, on our way to work, plunged into the tasks of the day for which they had seemed to promise sustenance, there’s not much left of them – only ink on india paper. We find that we are left with the words of the Bible but without the world of the Bible. Not that there is anything wrong with the words as such, it is just that without the biblical world – the intertwined stories, the echoing poetry and prayers, Isaiah’s artful thunder and John’s extravagant visions – the words, like those seeds in Jesus’ parable that land on pavement or in gravel or among weeds, haven’t take root in our lives.

Lectio divina is the strenuous effort that the Christian community gives (Austin Farrer’s “formidable discipline”!) to rehydrating the Scriptures so that they are capable of holding their own original force and shape in the heat of the day, maintaining their context long enough to get fused with or assimilated into our context, the world we inhabit, the clamor of voices in the daily weather and work in which we live. But it takes more than an hour in the bucket to accomplish what is needed. Lectio divina is a way of life that develops “according to the Scriptures.” It is not just a skill that we exercise when we have a Bible open before us but a life congruent with the Word made flesh to which the Scriptures give witness. The Letter to the Hebrews tells us that the word of God originated when “long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son. . . . Therefore we must pay greater attention to what we have heard . . .” (Heb. 1:1-2; 2:1; emphasis added). These are spoken words delivered to us by “so great a cloud of witnesses” (Heb. 12:1) and now written in our Holy Scriptures. It is the task of lectio divina to get those words heard and listened to, words written in ink now rewritten in blood.

– Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading (pp. 88-89)

The Snow-Storm by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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"Snowy Landscape at Sunset" (1873) by Charles-Francois Daubigny

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

Come see the north wind’s masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn;
Fills up the farmer’s lane from wall to wall,
Maugre the farmer’s sighs; and, at the gate,
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.

The Individual and Social Benefits of Living Alone

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Smithsonian magazine recently interviewed Eric Klinenberg, author of Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone. Here are some excerpts:

How prevalent is living alone in America today?
In 1950, there were about 4 million Americans living alone, a little less than 10% of all households were one-person households. And back then, it was most common in the sprawling Western states, like Alaska, and Montana, and Nevada, because single migrant men went there.

Today, there are more than 32 million people living alone—according to the latest census estimates, 32.7 million—and that’s about 28% of all American households. This is an enormous change. Instead of being most common in the West, it’s now most common in big cities, and it’s common in big cities throughout the country. In Seattle, and San Francisco, and Denver, and Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., and Chicago, there are between 35 and 45% of the households have just one person. In Manhattan, where I live, about 1 of every 2 households is a one-person household.

* * *

You argue that the widespread assumption that living alone is a negative trend is flawed. What are some benefits you’ve noticed for people living alone?
Well, one thing is that we need to make a distinction between living alone and being alone, or being isolated, or feeling lonely. These are all different things. In fact, people who live alone tend to spend more time socializing with friends and neighbors than people who are married. So one thing I learned is that living alone is not an entirely solitary experience. It’s generally a quite social one.

The next thing, I would say, is that we live today in a culture of hyperconnection, or overconnection. If we once worried about isolation, today, more and more critics are concerned that we’re overconncted. So in a moment like this, living alone is one way to get a kind of restorative solitude, a solitude that can be productive, because your home can be an oasis from the constant chatter and overwhelming stimulation of the digital urban existence. It doesn’t need to be—you can go home and be just as connected as you are everywhere else. That’s one of the stories of my book—the communications revolution has helped made living alone possible, because it makes it a potentially social experience. Certainly, the people we interviewed said that having a place of their own allowed them to decompress, and not everyone can do that.

What factors are driving this trend?
The first thing to say here is that living alone is expensive, and you simply can’t do it unless you can pay the rent, or afford your own place. But we know that there are many things that we can afford but choose not to do, so it’s not enough to say it’s simply an economic matter.

I would say that the four key drivers that I identified were, first, the rise of women. Women’s massive entry into the labor force during the last half century has meant that more and more women can delay marriage, support themselves, leave a marriage that’s not working for them, and even buy their own home, which is a big trend in the real estate market. Marriage is just not economically necessary for women anymore, and that wasn’t true 50 or 60 years ago.

The next thing is the communications revolution. Today, living alone is not a solitary experience. You can be at home, on your couch, talking on the telephone, or instant messaging, or doing email, or many, many things that we do at home to stay connected. And that certainly was not as easy to do before the 1950s.

The third thing is urbanization, because cities support a kind of subculture of single people who live on their own but want to be out in public with each other. In fact there are neighborhoods in cities throughout this country where single people go to live alone, together, if that makes sense. They can be together living alone. That helps to make being single a much more collective experience.

Finally, the longevity revolution means that today, people are living longer than ever before. But it’s been an uneven revolution, with women living longer than men, most of the time, and often one spouse outlives the other by 5, 10, 20 years or more, which means that there’s a big part of life—the last decades of life—when it’s become quite common for people to age alone.

* * *

Since the trend is often thought of as a private matter, you argue that its impact on civic life and politics is overlooked. What are some of its effects in the public sphere?
In the book I argue that the spike of living alone has played a large and overlooked role in revitalizing cities, because singletons are so likely to go out in the world, to be in cafes and restaurants, to volunteer in civic organizations, to attend lectures and concerts, to spend time in parks and other public spaces. They have played a big role in reanimating central cities. People who study cities tend to believe that the way to revitalize cities is to create a better supply of public spaces and amenities.

The 2012 Election: Waiting for Godot

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When I listen to the smart guys out there, I realize that America is still waiting for Godot in the 2012 presidential election. Ross Douthat of The New York Times argues that “a successful presidential campaign calls on a trio of talents that only rarely overlap”: management, persuasion, and demagoguery. In the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama “out-managed, out-inspired and out-demagogued both Hillary Clinton and John McCain. But the presidency, unexpectedly, has exposed his limits as a communicator. Now when Obama demonizes, it seems clumsy; when he tries to persuade, it falls on deaf ears. Unlike Reagan and Clinton, the two masters, he seems unable to either bully or inspire.”

Obama has lost the magic touch. His mostly likely opponent, Mitt Romney, is “managerial to the core,” unable, so far, to persuade the conservative base of the Republican Party and constitutionally adverse to demagoguery. Therefore, Douthat says “the 2012 election is shaping up to be the most wearying sort of American presidential campaign: a clash of two managers, slogging their way toward a prize that a stronger candidate might have taken in a walk.”

Newt Gingrich, the Lazarus candidate, who has been resurrected from the dead at least twice, currently excels because of his congenital demagoguery. He acts as a conduit to Tea Party rage against political and media elites. A virtue in the primary season can be a severe liability in the general election. Gingrich would have trouble persuading independents, particularly women and minorities, and trouble managing his campaign, which is already under-funded and disorganized. Those who know Gingrich best – Congressional Republicans from the 1990s – describe his managerial style as undisciplined and erratic.

I am mostly in agreement with Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, who articulates the four-point agenda of his ideal candidate:

I want to vote for a candidate who advocates an immediate investment in infrastructure that will create jobs and upgrade America for the 21st century — ultrafast bandwidth, highways, airports, public schools, mass transit — and combines that with a long-term plan to fix our fiscal imbalances at the real scale of the problem, a plan that could be phased in as the economy recovers.

On the latter point, I am talking about the Bowles-Simpson bipartisan deficit reduction plan — or something equally serious and with a chance of bipartisan support. President Obama has proposed smart infrastructure investments, but he has not paired them with a credible long-term deficit-reduction plan, and the only chance of passage in Congress is to have both. Mitt Romney is not even close.

Christina Romer, the former chairwoman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, put it best when she told this newspaper on Dec. 31 that the U.S. “faces two daunting economic problems: an unsustainable long-run budget deficit and persistent high unemployment. … Over the next 20 to 30 years, rising health care costs and the retirement of the baby boomers are projected to cause deficits that make the current one look puny. At the rate we’re going, the United States would almost surely default on its debt one day. … We already have a blueprint for a bipartisan solution. The Bowles-Simpson commission hashed out a sensible plan of spending cuts, entitlement program reforms and revenue increases that would shave $4 trillion off the deficit over the next decade. It shares the pain of needed deficit reduction, while protecting the most vulnerable and maintaining investments in our future productivity.  

“But we can’t focus on the deficit alone,” added Romer. “Persistent unemployment is destroying the lives and wasting the talents of more than 13 million Americans. Pairing additional strong stimulus with a plan to reduce the deficit would likely pack a particularly powerful punch for confidence and spending.”

Second, I want to vote for a candidate who is committed to reforming taxes, and cutting spending, in a fair way. The rich must pay more, but everyone has to pay something. We are all in this together.

Third, I want to vote for a candidate who has an inspirational vision, not just a plan to balance the budget. People will sacrifice to make this country great again if they think you have a real plan for American success in the 21st century. And that plan is obvious. We’re not going to be about launching one big moon shot anymore. We need to be building a country where everyone in the world wants to come to launch their own moon shot — their own company, their own start-up — because we have the best immigration policies, regulations, schools and incentives. We can’t tax or cut our way to prosperity and jobs. We have to invent our way there. We need both more “Made in America” and “Imagined in America.”

Finally, I want to vote for a candidate who supports a minimum floor of public financing of presidential, Senate and House campaigns. Money in politics is out of control today. Our Congress has become a forum for legalized bribery. Americans are losing faith in the instruments of government because they think the game is rigged by big money — and they’re right.