I Don’t Want To Know Your Bra Color

There’s a meme going around Facebook of women posting the color of their bras to encourage breast cancer awareness and self-exams.  Breast cancer awareness?  I vote yes.  Regular self-exams?  I vote yes.  Cute, fun, viral memes to encourage both of the above?  In principle, I have no objection.  And maybe it’s just the old curmudgeonly books I’ve been reading lately, but this particular meme raises a red flag for me.

Ladies, you do know that all of your male friends can see your status updates, right?  And you do know that all of your young male friends know the size of your breasts, right?  (Yes, we have noticed, and yes, we do remember.)  And you do know that most such men have keen visual imaginations, right?  And you do know that for many, knowing what the meme means, it’s an uncontrollable instinctive to immediately construct in their heads an image of you wearing a bra of the color you posted, right?  So you do realize that, at least from the point of view of your visually-minded brethren, there is little practical difference between this meme and the kind of exhibitionism most of you would balk at — say, posting a picture of you wearing only your bra — right?

As an observer of culture and a current reader of Libido Dominandi, I also feel compelled to add: And you do realize that, as a cultural force, female exhibitionism encourages men to demand more of you sexually while offering less of themselves relationally, right?

I only want to know about the bra worn by one woman: my wife.  And I don’t particularly want any of you whippersnappers to know anything about it, thank you very much.

I know, I know.  “Shut up, you misogynistic cancer-loving killjoy.”  I’m done now, I just needed to get it off my (proverbial) chest.

Household Remedy

I’m going to take some ideas out for a test drive and see how much weight they can carry.  Bear with me.

Modern “mass media” only works when it has a “mass man” to act on.  Mass man is a disconnected consumer, a credulous and compliant cog in the economic machine of production and consumption.  An important part of the formation of mass man has been his transplantation out of households, catalyzed in part by his migration into the modern industrial city.  This modern city – unlike the heavenly city of Jerusalem, the end of our pilgrimage – is a plausibility scaffold around disconnected individualism, in which mass man is disconnected from his historic faith (by his illiteracy, chronological snobbery, and over-specialization which isolate him from centuries of critical thought), his face-to-face faith community (by his individualistic spirituality and anonymized consumption through inorganic media channels), his extended family (by job-chasing distances and trend-chasing generation gaps), and his immediate family (by invasive non-stop entertainment, furious over-scheduling, and emotional self-absorption reinforced by a cultural exalting sexual selfishness).  A man so isolated is easy prey for advertisers and propagandists, swaying him by every whim of sophistry and tempting him by every appeal to his untamed covetousness.

This world seems bent on concocting as many “-isms” as possible, full of immobilizing deception and moral foolishness, and throwing so many at us that eventually enough will stick, neutering our witness, blunting our testimony, and torpedoing our mission.  However, in looking at the households I am called as a Christian to belong to — local Churches, the Church historic, and my family, immediate and extended — I see these innumerable fads constantly rebuked and shown up for the false passing-away wisdom of the age that they are.

Through the church I have come to know and love people whom my squeaky-clean career path and separated single-family home life would ordinarily keep me from ever encountering: brothers and sisters with Tourette’s, Parkinson’s, MS, MD, Down, and other neurological disorders.  When the libertarian right tries to make me an Ayn Rand-style Objectivist, I remember these dear friends, and remember that their conditions show up “self-ownership”, a man’s axiomatic ownership of his own body, as a fragile illusion, a laughable fiction.

Then the neoconservative right tries to sell me on the glories of American exceptionalism and her proactive military expression through preemptive war.  But I knew my great-uncle, Ken, who stormed a French beach on D-Day and for the rest of his life never really recovered from the experience.  While the almost unmeasurably vast cost of war sometimes must be paid, it is only at the utmost, and the bar for “utmost” is too-easily deflated when veterans are people on television and not dearly beloved and connected family.

Later an imperious adherent of materialism plies me with appeals to “reason untainted by superstition” and “scientific consensus”; when he does, my dear grandmother comes immediately to mind, and her long descent into Alzheimers disease.  And my pity for her low estate toward the end also struck down any rational pretense of a high self-estimation of my own awareness and rationality.  The mind’s grasp upon itself and the world around it is anything but a forgone conclusion; it is full of self-aggrandized self-assessments and corrupting delusions.  Such a mind, of itself, ungrounded, unbounded, and fully subjective, cannot rationally assert its own rationality on its own authority, because it lacks any objectivity with which to make sure an assessment.  And then I recall the dearly departed wife of another great uncle; she fled the Soviet invasion of Hungary, knowing full well the brutality brought by a regime drunk on the arrogance of its own unflinching rationality.

I could go on, but the big idea is this: real connection with real people makes a real difference, by helping us see for what it is the almost limitless fount of foolishness this age spews at us.

Another Dot, For Good Measure

Lest you think my previous post was just an attempt to make hay out of a crisis currently under the popular spotlight, let me toss out another example where efforts to artificially decrease the scarcity of a “good” thing can backfire: Higher Education.

The pattern fits: “Having a college education is good.”  Agreed.  “College educations are expensive.”  Agreed.  “There are well-meaning and hard-working people who would like a college education but can’t afford it.”  Agreed.  “Let’s distort the market by making a college education artificially inexpensive.”

Now, let’s do a quick mental exercise: what can we expect to happen when we try to artificially deflate the cost of a college education?  There are a few ways to do so, each with its own particular side-effects.

If we make a lot of free money available to pay for tuition (grants and scholarships), we have reduced the scarcity of tuition dollars, and thus can expect an inflationary rise in tuition.  (People can still afford the same out-of-pocket cost as they could without the grants, why should the college not extract just as many dollars from them PLUS the newly-minted grant dollars?)

If we create alternative subsidized institutions (city/county/state universities), we can expect for them to be perpetual cost centers in government budgets and for them to need to limit enrollment (demand) by capping class sizes (rationing).  In terms of the price curve, the “state option” doesn’t actually compete with private options because it’s understood that it can hemorrhage money and that the shortfall will be covered by the good faith and credit of the state, so the low tuition at these universities does not actually cause other universities to compete with them on price; nobody is “kept honest” because everybody knows that public tuition is a shell game in which everyone’s contribution via taxation is hidden under the table.

But let’s flip the economics around the other way: is it necessarily a good thing to get everyone into and through college?  The road to a bachelor’s degree in many ways is a poor fit for someone who wants to go into the trades (traditional or modern).  Mass enrollment combined with the incentives of a school’s reputation for achievement naturally drive grade inflation, which in turn drives an overall devaluation of the bachelor’s degree, driving the employers everyone went to college to qualify to work for to demand masters degrees for those positions instead.  And so begins a treadmill: higher education is turned into a commodity; a secularist value-free market then reduces it to the lowest common fungible denominator in order to drive efficient low-cost delivery; higher education’s original value proposition (a competitive advantage) is replaced with factory-floor, cookie-cutter information transfer (once the realm of technical/trade schools) devoid of relationship, character formation, critical thought, and innovation; the resulting certification thus devalued, our beneficient leaders drive to do the same thing to graduate education, and while they’re at it, to impress the same dehumanizing regularity upon earlier stages of education as well to “prepare” students for the mill.

Is it good to have universities?  Yes.  Is it good that many people attend them?  Yes.  Does this necessarily mean that coercive tax policies and tax-underwritten market intrusions are going to be good for the university as an institution or the people whom it intends to serve?  No.

Amplified Bedazzlement

The other day I tweeted that I am more impressed with my savior’s humility than my own pride, and more bedazzled by his faithfulness than my own inconstancy. I just want to amplify that comment a bit.

First, let me say that I take these polarities between the new Adam (Jesus) and myself in the present age as given. He is faithful, I am not. He is wise, I am not. He is humble, I am not. He is shalom, I am a wreck. He is contented and satisfied, I am too-often overwhelmed by hungers and lusts.

However, I also recognize that it would be unbiblical of me to make such statements and follow them with a period, full stop. This is most emphatically not how Paul spoke to his struggling flocks, and I’m beginning to lose patience with some of my brothers and sisters in Christ who seem content to wallow, in word, thought, and song, in recognition and confession of their failings without always proceeding to the essential next step: “Such was your old life. But do you not know what Christ has done? Therefore, live a new and different life in Him!” (see Romans 6, 1 Cor 3, 1 Cor 6, 1 Cor 9, Colossians 3, Ephesians 4, etc)

Now, some theological neatniks will invariably misunderstand me and say that I am downplaying sin in general or my own sin in particular, but in so doing they demonstrate that they have missed the point and are straining at gnats.  I am acutely aware of my own faithlessness; however, if I am not even more acutely aware of Christ’s faithfulness, I have proven that I am still a self-worshiping idolater who would rather fix his eyes upon himself than upon his savior.  If my consciousness is overrun by my own foolishness more so than awe at the depths of the riches of the mind of Christ, both at and with the generously-given wisdom of God, then I truly remain the worst kind of fool, unrepentant, unregenerate, untransformed by the glorious redeeming grace which has been offered to me in Christ.  In Christ: a new creation.

Hypocrisy

PZ Myers has his panties in a wad because a so-so apologist and his former-child-actor friend wrote a critical introduction to an abridged version of Darwin’s Origin of Species.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/06/for_dedicated_bibliophiles_onl.php

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/09/foil_the_depraved_designs_of_a.php

Lest anyone forget: this is the same guy who offered a bounty for a duly-blessed communion cracker so he could desecrate it.  Apparently it’s only reprehensible to speak ill and tamper with his holy things.

Nobody Plays “Connect The Dots” Anymore

In the 90s, the federal government of the United States tried to promote a “culture of ownership” by promoting banking and HUD policies that lower the bar for individuals and families to acquire credit to purchase residential real estate.  By unnaturally inflating the number of dollars available to purchase homes, these policies produced an unnatural inflation of housing prices, and encouraged the development of a whole collection of financial innovations (securitized aggregated leveraged mortgage derivatives and the like) to manage the massive influx of both dollars and risk into what had previously been a relatively stable system.  And, for a time, all was well.

Then, the proverbial bubble burst.  Too much inflation had been absorbed into the housing market, and commodity sellers – particular petroleum – called the bluff and ran their own prices up.  The sheer mass of risk aggregated in mortgage securities wasn’t properly quantified because it was never properly understood, and when the assumptions undergirding those securities proved not only to be false but to be delusionally optimistic, we saw a precipitous crash in worldwide credit markets from which we have not yet recovered.

So, follow me here and see if this makes sense.

It’s 1993.  “Home ownership is good.”  Agreed.  “Home ownership is expensive.”  Agreed.  “There are well-meaning and hard-working people who would like to own homes but can’t afford to.”  Agreed.  “Let’s distort the market by making credit artificially inexpensive.”

It’s 2009.  “Access to top-notch health care is good.”  Agreed.  “Top-notch health care is expensive.”  Agreed.  “There are well-meaning and hard-working people who would like access to top-notch health care but can’t afford it.”  Agreed.  “Let’s distort the market by making top-notch health care artificially inexpensive.”

The experts in the 90s assured us that greater home ownership will be good for banks, construction, commerce, employers, families, retirees, and everyone else.  Here it is in 2009, and many of those same experts are assuring us that this new adventure in market tinkering can’t possibly have a serious down-side to quality or availability of care, to medical education or employment, to the insurance companies shareholders, to those who are insured through their employer, to employers, to the unemployed, and to everyone else.  So forgive me if I’m skeptical about this cadre’s ability to project all of the economic side-effects of their little experiment.

As they say, “let’s be clear”: we haven’t even worked out the side-effects of the $1B that’s been dumped into the “cash for clunkers” program.  We know that there’s been an uptick in new car purchases, but we also know that a significant chunk of that was people who deliberately deferred buying new cars in recent months in anticipation of this program.  We know that the program has taken lots of late-model used cars off the road, and thereby out of the used car market, decreasing supply without doing anything to correspondingly decrease demand, which (if you learned anything in econ 101) tells us that the price of used cars will be on its way up, possibly leading to stifled demand (and, therefore, market stagnation).  On top of that, it’s not yet entirely clear where all of those $1B went; there were cries for audits and accountability for last year’s bank bailouts (and rightly so), but we can’t shovel more money into this program quickly or indiscriminately enough.  And nobody but nobody outside of the “fringe media” is bothering to even ask the question (publicly, anyway).  So, again, count me as skeptical when the White House assures me that their proposals will somehow work out as “market neutral”, let alone “deficit neutral”.

Looking forward to my new life on the flag@whitehouse.gov blacklist.

Effing the Ineffable

Recently attended a debate on the existence of Satan. Two of the panelists were Mark Driscoll (of Mars Hill Church in Seattle) and Deepak Chopra (famed new-age guru). I have many thoughts about the debate, but I wanted to write down this one small reflection fairly quickly since it’s both simple and essential to the heart of my disagreement with Chopra and much of what passes for “spirituality” in our age.

Several times in the course of the debate, Chopra described “god” as “transcendent and ineffable”. With the first adjective, I have no problems; assuming we are talking about the same God and using the same (western) meaning of “transcendent”, the statement stands in agreement with the heart of Evangelicalism, Puritanism, Lutheranism, Roman Catholicism, Augustine, and the church fathers. My complaint is with the second adjective.

“God is ineffable” is a popular saying in present-day “spiritual” circles. The compact OED gives us only two (only two, a paltry sum indeed!) meanings for ineffable: “too great or extreme to be expressed in words”, and “too sacred to be uttered”. Let’s consider each of these in turn.

If God is completely and truly ineffable in the first sense, then — catch this, it’s subtle — even calling Him “ineffable” is a contradiction, because it expresses something about Him in words. Similarly, if we call Him ineffable in the second sense, we have similarly contradicted ourselves, because — again, this is subtle — we have attached a word to the sacredly unutterable Identity and uttered it, thereby demonstrating that we think it is not ineffable after all.

Now, these critiques only apply if we treat “ineffable” as a first-class property of Divinity. It is quite a different matter to speak, as Christians often do, of the ineffable ages of God’s eternity, the ineffable depths of His love or compassion, or His ineffable power and mercy. With this we are saying something substantial, that God actually and truly possesses particular attributes and abilities and traits, but that He possesses them in measures which defy expression. There is no contradiction (with the first definition, anyway) in calling God ineffably Holy. It is only the “ineffable god” of vague spirituality which is, literally, nothing but nonsense.

Why is this important? For starters, the reason the “ineffable deity” meme is so popular today is that its own meaninglessness and nonsensicality invites its adherents to embrace equally irrational ideas about everything else. You are free to judge and condemn those who argue for an objective standard of justice. You are free to speak of rehabilitating that which you call irredeemably evil. You can champion education as the cure for wickedness even as you rail against any attempts to include efforts at moral formation in public education. You can adopt nonsensical spatial metaphors (“beyond” right and wrong, “beyond” liberal and conservative) to evade uncomfortable questions about the glaring inconsistencies in your own thinking or the dastardly ethical implications of your vacuous worldview.

If God is ineffable, then categories like “God’s justice” or “God’s will” or even “God’s existence” are likewise nonsensical. The mind consumed with the ineffable delusion reflexively dismisses such notions without regard for their merit. Consumed with vanity at having grasped the ungraspable, of having effed the ineffable, they exalt their own understanding and become futile in their own thinking, which (if we are willing to think Biblically) are the immediate forerunners to folly, idolatry, and judgement. “God is ineffable” is a cop-out, a word game played by those lacking the humility to allow that God might speak and that His words might mean something.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit

And not, as some in the mainline are fond of saying, “Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier”. God is not an abstract amalgam of roles, no matter what the Sabellianists and Modalists say. God does act in those roles, but He has not invited us to know him only by narrow functional titles; we are made to meet face-to-face, not face-to-nametag.

But, of course, “Father” and “Son” hit us too close to home; we cannot hold someone called “Father” or “Son” at arms length without doing violence to our own humanity. We can love or we can hate, but the one thing we are incapable of doing is not caring. A “Creator”, however, can safely be observed from afar, or (more likely) simply ignored.

And, lest there be any confusion: That’s the God and Father or Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Spirit of Jesus Christ.

But I will give them this: at least it’s linguistically artful, which is more than can be said for ecclesiastical abominations against our noble tongue like “God Godself”.

More Seattle Cognitive Dissonance

A few months ago Seattle had a series of severe winter storms. By “severe” I mean, of course, that enough snow fell to not melt instantly when it hit the ground. Anyway, those of you fortunate enough to have visited Seattle when such events occur will know that the city is absolutely crippled by them. We have a lot of arterial roads that run up and down very steep grades, and our four snowplows and two road graders just can’t keep up.

Well, those of us from cities that actually know how to handle winter weather invariably chirp up and complain that Seattle DoT needs to get its act together. To which a predictable cadre always reply “Why should Seattle make that huge capital outlay for an event that happens once a decade?”

Now, there are ways to have substantial snow-handling capabilities with minimal capital outlay by the city, but let’s set that point aside for the sake of argument.

The interesting part comes a few months later when a debate about Anthropogenic Climate Change comes up, and this same predictable cadre of people shout from the rooftops that we should expect more dramatic seasons (hotter/dryer summers, colder/snowier winters) because of it.

So, stick this in your pipe and smoke it: If these fine folks (with their very high estimations of their own intelligence) actually believe that the current theories of anthropogenic climate change are “good science”, that means that those theories give rise to highly reliable predictions of things which have not yet happened. One of those predictions, and it is the “consensus” of the current majority opinion-holders, is that (statistically, of course) we’ll be getting a lot more snow a lot more frequently in places like Seattle. So it would seem to follow logically that these same people would be clamoring for us to build a massive snowplow fleet before the coming anthropogenic uberwinters devastate our fair city.

The Answer I Need is Not to a Question

“My head is filled with questions and I can assure you no answer to any one of them has ever brought me one iota of happiness.” (Arthur Dent, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, 2005)

I have read more Christian books than any reasonable human should hope, expect, or dread to have read.  I am well-studied in apologetics, Biblical theology, and theodicy.  I am blessed with numbers of friends far beyond my own social graces who bear wisdom beyond their years.  I possess an unusually keen gift for finding information on the web.  I have no doubt that, were my real problem ever an actual question, I could find an answer to it.

No, my real problem is not a question, and there is no truism, lemma, proposition, evidence, observation, argument or proof that can address it.  The answer I need is a new way – to think, to work, to labor, to suffer, to pray, to celebrate.  The answer I need is a new truth – grounded and unassailable, not subject to my own tepid indecision and wandering interests.  The answer I need is life afresh, because I can’t even hold death at bay as it eats away at everything in this world I thought I cherished.

I believe, emphatically, that Jesus Christ is “the way, the truth, and the life”.  He is not merely the exemplar of a new kind of humanity (although he is truly that), not merely the correct response to a theological inquiry (although he is truly that), not merely the agent of my eventual bodily resurrection (although he is truly that).  I believe, dogmatically, that Jesus Christ is the answer – not to my questions (foolish and ill-framed as they usually are), but to my actual need, the real problem and paradox of living a condemned man’s life amid this sin-decayed fraternity.