Very interesting… and at the same time, not, because it falls into the ‘duh’ realm: he’s a politician, folks. He’s been one since his first Illinois campaign. Politicians don’t like committing to firm positions on hot-button issues. If they can get away with avoiding it, or wording a statement in such a vague way that reaps the practical benefits of taking both sides, they will. Obama follows the wry, epistemic-savvy motto of his presidential model, Abraham Lincoln: “My policy is to have no policy.” It does not endear him to the far left or the far right and carries all kinds of accompanying risks, but it grants him a great deal of flexibility. His ‘policy’ on civil unions has always struck me as a calculated moderate wink in both directions – no, conservatives, I will not support gay marriage because it’s just too far too fast, and yes, liberals, when the time is right, I will back gay marriage because I secretly share your ideals. That said, Obama’s brief speech on the “Ground Zero mosque” is a break from this strategy, even if he waffled on it the next day.
Style Redux
There’s a review of last year’s workshop on style at 4Cs, in which I participated, up at Kairos, which contains a reminder of the approaching August 31, 2010 deadline for the Style=Composition collection.
Mosques, Ground Zero, religious freedom, reading the Constitution, etc
The proposal to build a mosque and Islamic community center a few blocks away from Ground Zero in New York City has gained an increasing amount of media attention in the last few weeks. The mayor supports it vehemently, and now even the President does. The fervent opposition to the idea is happening within the context of a larger, nation-wide opposition to the building of mosques, which itself is largely associated with conservative Republicans and Tea Party associates.
I personally find it amazing that there are Americans in this day and age that are opposed to the building of religious structures – to me it’s sort of like being opposed to the building of schools, or hospitals, or libraries, or parks, or YMCAs, or other such highly useful social facilities, and instead being in favor of mandatory house arrest for all God-fearing citizens.
I can grasp intellectually, though, why this opposition exists. Namely, it rests on a foundational belief that Islam is inherently violent and breeds terrorism. A slippery slope is then hastily constructed that allows the building of a mosque will lead directly (maybe not now, but eventually) to another September 11th. Now, following this logic ad absurdum, we can link the building of Catholic churches to future Crusades, but I don’t really want to attack that line of reasoning as much as present a different context for thinking about the issue.
First, as many blogs and news organizations familiar with the area have been attesting, the three blocks around Ground Zero haven’t exactly been paved by angels since the towers fell, given that the area still hosts two strip clubs and an off-track betting bureau. That doesn’t really sound like something that’s been considered hallowed ground for ten years to me, unless you consider the commercialized objectification of women and gambling to be more sacrosanct than the freedom to practice religion. Additionally, there are several churches in the immediate vicinity – St. Paul’s Chapel (Episcopal), St. Peter’s (Roman Catholic), and John Street (United Methodist), as well as a yet-to-be restored Greek Orthodox church, St. Nicolas, that was completely destroyed on 9/11 and is yet to be restored due to Port Authority snafus. While the fact that St. Nicolas hasn’t been rebuilt is a shame, I don’t see any calls to not repair it or to tear down the other three as sacrilege to hallowed ground. That would make as much sense as tearing down the churches near the FBI building in Oklahoma City because Timothy McVeigh was Catholic.
The proposed site for the mosque and community center is also not mingled with the ashes of thousands of innocent victims, but consists a long-empty former Burlington Coat Factory – again, not exactly most people’s idea of sacred turf. There’s a restaurant next to it called the Dakota Roadhouse (its reviews call it an ‘urban redneck bar,’ and I somehow doubt it, or the parking garage across the street, is filled with saints. I try to reserve that status for cemeteries, battlegrounds, and bona fide historical landmarks – all places where any religious group would have zero chance of building anything.
It also pains me to point this out, but there would not be a fuss if a Protestant evangelical organization was proposing a similar project. This leads very quickly to a charge of religious intolerance, which in turn leads to a charge of denying First Amendment rights. To me this is the most serious objection to not allowing construction. If you wish to defend the Constitution against an idea of evil, terrorist-breeding Islam, denying religious freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution (the very thing you’re concerned about protecting) to citizens and legal immigrants that practice Islam peacefully is a really strange way to go about it.
In fact, such a strategy invites the charge that you don’t understand the document you’re trying to defend, or that you have a version of it in your head that bears little relation to the actual document. Admittedly, it is not an easy read, written as it is in what I sometimes call ‘full contact English,’ in a time when it was permissible and even expected, usage-wise, to stuff seven clauses into a typical sentence. Putting on my English professor hat for the moment, I’d say, safely, that it demands a level of reading skill beyond most undergraduate students I’ve encountered. But even then, the First Amendment is only one sentence:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The most overlooked aspect of this sentence is the double-edged sword quality of the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause working together. The most common misinterpretation is that all they do is prevent religion – namely, Protestant Christianity – from being the only religion of the land (or in the text’s original context, the Church of England) – and as such, it denies those mythic ‘Judeo-Christian values’ from being asserted freely. Equally important, though, is how the ‘or prohibiting the free exercise thereof’ part is a shield that protects religious groups from the government. Your religion will never get government endorsement as the One True Path, but it can’t have laws passed against it, either. Rather, it is on equal footing with all other faiths. Engel vs. Vitale is one of the more accessible (and important) Supreme Court decisions that does a good job of outlining how two powerful little clauses work together.
I can’t see any real legal challenges to the construction of the mosque – the property is privately owned and the zoning seems in order. What I can see is this becoming an election year issue that allows the GOP to rally around religion again with those that value their religious beliefs about Islam over what is a remarkably cut and dry constitutional value of freedom of religion. I can also see the opening of this mosque becoming highly politicized and even dangerous. So, all in all, this is an inconvenient incident for a certain brand of liberal. Then again, the insistence on basic freedoms is always dangerous and inconvenient until they become fashionable enough.
I don’t think the Democrats are up for this kind of public fight right now; in an off year with a tanked economy, this is a open-and-shut seeming non-issue that can gain traction. I wish the President’s short speech on it had been more publicized, as well as more abstract, linking the controversy to a larger call for religious tolerance and pluralism that is in turn linked to our military actions. He could have pointed out, for example, that it hardly makes sense to defend the largely Muslim citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan from terrorist attack yet get upset over a mosque in New York; if anything, we should be celebrating an alliance with peace-loving Muslims willing to co-exist in a democratic state. He could also have challenged that particularly American brand of hospitality and indifference; how many opponents of the mosque know Muslims, have any meaningful interaction with someone that practices Islam, or even know where the closest mosque to them is? My guess is very little. Also, where are Americans getting their information on Islam? You’re going to get a vastly different take on Islam from a post-9/11 book written in a month by an alarmist right-wing author or from a random website, than from an actual Muslim or a book by an Arabic-fluent scholar in a department of religion. Furthermore, even given for the sake of argument that two blocks away from Ground Zero is too close, what isn’t? Three blocks? Five? Ten? Fifty? The imam of the proposed mosque currently heads a mosque that meets a mere twelve blocks from Ground Zero. Another mosque is a mere four blocks away. What’s the spiritual and political difference between three and twelve blocks? What about three and four?
In short, it seems to me that there was an opportunity here to make something useful and good and powerful out of this issue, to recast the debate and promote actual dialogue. Maybe, even, some kind of compromise would have been worked out – a different site, a smaller development, or even better, a multifaith organization. But that moment has largely passed, and now it will become just another powder keg for talking heads to riff on.
Thinkpad
I got my new dual core Thinkpad X100e yesterday. It is a replacement for my ancient yet beloved Thinkpad X31, which H accidentally left on the top of her sister’s car two weeks ago in Memphis. This new Thinkpad, direct from Lenovo, is slightly smaller and a lot faster; basically it’s a dual core netbook – not quite a laptop but definitely not an Atom-powered netbook. I used it to finish off an article revision last night and it performed rather well.
It also came with Windows 7 Professional, which I’m a bit torn about. I have avoided Vista entirely – my cantankerous, Frankenstein-assembled quad desktop and my work desktop still have XP – so this has been, oddly enough, my first extended experience with a new Windows version. H has gone Apple and has a MacBook Pro, so I am familiar with a more modern interface and the various bells and whistles, but I have to say that there is something really screwed up with how 7 handles file permissions. As elegant as everything else is, why is something so basic and fundamental left in such an annoying state?
Slightly less annoying is figuring out how to get old games to work in 7. The X31 didn’t have the graphics to do much; the X100e does. I got the dual core version as the single core Neo processor that comes in the base X100e is pretty much the same as the old Pentium M processor that was in my X31; that speed was hot for a laptop in 2003, but not anymore. The big test was to see if it would run EU3: In Nomine, which it did, surprisingly, without any intervention. I also managed to get it to run Thief 2 only using processor affinity; it just ignored the usual graphics problems I have with that game. I suspect this little thing is powerful enough to do a lot more.
The X31 was more or less indestructible save for a few pressure points that cracked over time. I disassembled dozens and dozens of them and their predecessors, the X20s, when I was a tech, so I knew it would age well. The X100e is even easier to take apart, with a huge bottom panel, and it also feels far better made – very little flex. Hopefully, it will last me five years or more, like the last one.
Bowersock’s Fiction as History
Summer reading continues. I am behind on summaries so I’m not even going to pretend to catch up with the backlog, but start with the most recent. I read Bowersock’s Fiction as History: Nero to Julian this afternoon, a series of lectures given in 1991.
I know why it was recommended to me – it offers a sort of alternative interpretation of the relationship between the gospels and Greek-Roman fiction of the period. Namely, Bowersock’s thesis, which is first only hinted at before being given in earnest in the last lecture, is that the gospels (or, rather, the narrative they contain) started a literary fad of sorts during the reign of Nero. Greek novels like Chaereas and Callirhoe and similar ilk are not merely contemporaries, but reflections of the influence of the singular Christian narrative, which represents something unique, coming out of a Jewish narrative tradition that is intellectual and has a scripture, rather than ritualistic like the pagan polytheism absent of scripture that marks Hellenistic and imperial religion. By the second century there has been enough cross-pollenation that Celsus recognizes the gospels for what they are – the same sort of fanciful tales he’s seen elsewhere.
I have some problems with this picture. Now there is little to argue with when it comes to his emphasis on context and time period, and complex rather than simple this-was-first-and-this-was-later literary relationships. That’s all good. However, the timeline is really fuzzy, and the extent of Christian influence seems overstated.
Let me explain that, in reverse order.
It is important to realize that there weren’t that many Christians in the first century. By Nero’s reign (54 to 68 CE) I see little reason to think there are more than five to six thousand Christians in the entire West, if that, including larger populations in Jersusalem, Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch, and if Revelation and Paul’s letters are any indication, a mess of cities in Asia Minor and Syria. By 100 CE, there /might/ be twice that. They were certainly growing quickly – if Stark’s estimates are right, 40% or 50% a decade – but in 54 they were still a minor cult of the larger Jewish religion, not really even a blip on the imperial radar. Pliny the Younger, early in the second century, a young, well educated administrator, doesn’t seem to have even heard of them before the occasion of his letter, and he was ruling over a fair number of them.
Far more important, though, is that the gospels hadn’t been written yet. The consensus dating for Mark these days is 65-70. I vote 70 or 71 myself, but let’s say it’s 65 for argument’s sake. Is that enough time for a gospel intended for a Christian audience to start a sweeping literary trend, three years until 68 and Nero’s end - not to mention a gospel that got an aggressive edit and expansion with the intent of replacing it, within 10-15 years in the form of Matthew, not to also mention the next two gospels? One thing Bowersock doesn’t mention is the cult of personality surrounding Nero’s death, which is a more likely culprit for resurrection/divinity tales. Nero was the Elvis of the 1st century - there was a widespread belief for a time that he was going to return to the building/empire and ruthlessly take care of business, thank you very much.
In any case the Christian ‘gospel’ before Mark, let’s say around Nero’s rise to power in 54, is a sketchy affair. There’s a resurrection but no empty tomb, some liturgy but only the roughest sort of theology (Paul seems to invent his on the fly from letter to letter) though it is unusually scripture-based, and some sort of passion narrative, but it’s quite short, not nearly as developed as Philoctetes’ tale, and doesn’t have all of the wonderful ironies that Mark will introduce to it later and which offer the real parallels to contemporary Greek fiction. So it surprises me that Bowersock doesn’t center his theory on Mark – perhaps because much of that territory has already been covered by Frank Kermode? Maybe he feels out of place in source criticism? Both? Don’ t know.
This leads to the dreaded SO WHAT question. What comes out of this thesis? Most of us, I think, know that Celsus had the better argument on the gospels in the second century, linking them to fiction and mythology, but Origen in the third century, regardless of the tank-sized holes in his apology, won hands down and along with the general robustness of his religion, set the stage for the domination of his basic system of interpretation for the next, oh, 1600-1700 years. For my part, I am more interested in how Origen ‘won’ and Celsus ’lost’ in the big historical p[icture than on who was right about the nature of the gospels – I want to know why and how they were persuasive. But then again, I’m a rhetorican and we don’t care about truth, even abstractly, as a general rule (though there are notable and stubborn exceptions). Lucian and Celsus, Bowersock’s initial examples, are in good company in my relative-truth-welcome discipline. So I have to ask – if Bowersock is right, and the gospels started a literary trend, how did the gospels come to be scripture? Why aren’t churches offering readings from Chaereas and Callirhoe instead of Matthew? The answer, unfortunately, involves genre (a word Bowersock doesn’t seem to like at all), audience, and by extension, the nature of the imbedded claims. C&C offers entertainment. Matthew offers a way to rethink your grubby earthly existence and rationalize your upcoming grisly death. If you’re like Celsus, of course, they’re BOTH entertainment, but how many humans are like Celsus? Even today, there aren’t many, but there are always plenty of Origens.
The New Brings the Old
Text-obsessed as I am, I hadn’t realized until very recently that YouTube is filled with wonderful old things, such Cream playing Tales of Brave Ulysses, Sunshine of Your Love, and White Room, or Jay Leno driving around in his delightfully loud 1970 Challenger R/T – “It’s using gas right now,” or the best six seconds on YouTube (don’t watch with your sound way up).
What is Rhetorical Criticism, Anyway?
I get asked this question a lot, and as it pertains to some manuscript revisions I’m making, I thought I’d take a informal stab here first.
I need to revise the question a little, though, and change it to “What makes a good rhetorical critic?” or even, “What do I think, personally, makes a good rhetorical critic?” Just talking about the criticism itself as some objective, free-floating entity seems a bit of a cop-out to me – reasons forthcoming shortly.
A good rhetorical critic starts with several bedrock epistemological assumptions. Ignore or sidestep them at your peril.
The first assumption is that all meaning worth talking about is an artifact of human perception, and thus limited by the boundaries of our particular physiology, evolutionary processes, personal experiences, sociocultural forces, etc, etc. Meaning outside of human perception is not worth talking about because, quite honestly – and quite ironically – we can’t talk about it in any meaningful way. We can, however, analyze our perceptions and the perceptions of others to our heart’s content.
The second assumption builds directly upon the first. If all we have is human perception to play with, and our perception is limited, flawed, and problematic as Hume astutely put it, then the grand bulk of human communication will necessarily have to be a series of arguments about the nature of the world. We will constantly be trying to communicate our perceptions – or at least what we want others to think are our perceptions – to others, who, limited by their own perceptional filters, will try to communicate back to us, and will be forced to deal with exactly the same problem in reverse. Imagine the human race as a giant room filled with brains in vats, who can do little more than send each other a constant barrage of garbled text messages and then argue over the contents of these messages using precisely the same medium. The simplified medium in this metaphor stands for the whole human sensory suite – sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing, vesticular system, etc. In other words, all communication, all our efforts to communicate in this perpetually confused state, is rhetorical and epistemic by nature. As such, rhetoric is a kind of applied philosophy and vice versa.
The third assumption builds on the second. The observation that all communication is rhetorical and epistemic is not terribly useful by itself. Our order-seeking, category-hungry brains prefer simpler fare in order to avoid overload, confusion, and general insanity. And so we are drawn inexorably to classify the communication that we use and encounter by genre, by tone, by purpose, by anything, really – the taxonomic urge, the pleasure of stereotyping, is quite powerful. With this comes the realization that while all communication might be rhetorical, some of it seems really, really rhetorical, whereas other texts are far less so. This is a byproduct of our preference for simpler fare; effective rhetoric is almost always hidden in some way, for if it is noticeable, then it becomes suspicious and challenges our worldview. Remember, we don’t want to fully acknowledge the extent of how all communication is rhetorical and epistemic – it’s just not possible to live with such a fundamentally bleak assumption second-by-second. So we simplify. Naked persuasion becomes undesirable as it exposes the constantly refreshed epistemological white lie that allows us to get through a simple conversation without going nutters. The good rhetorical critic, therefore, knows that much of what seems at first to be bereft of persuasion will turn out, with close attention, to be rhetorical, though there is no telling in many cases until some careful reading of the text in question is performed. But there is a necessary limit to this where insanity lurks and we start theorizing about the rhetoric of bowling. Good rhetorical critics lurk near the edge, but they don’t go over.
The fourth assumption might be the most important: rhetorical critics cannot escape from this strange communication system with anything like objectivity. The good rhetorical critic knows he or she is embedded and complicit in whatever medium and text that he or she chooses to study. There is no magical scholarly impartiality; those who pursue it like the Holy Grail, interestingly enough, tend to end up the most compromised, trapped within their own methodology. This corruption is everywhere, and everyone knows about it; a good rhetorical critic, however, embraces it like an old friend, shines a light on it, and reminds everyone about it, all the while noting and admitting their own complicity. This is why talking about ‘rhetorical criticism’ absent of its agent feels a little dishonest to me; there are as many flavors of this activity as there are practitioners. The term is useful shorthand, but it has limits.
The fifth assumption is a bit more mundane than the rest; this is where “methodology” finally creeps in (you might have been wondering when it was going to make an appearance). Holding the previous assumptions, the good rhetorical critic realizes that genre and its ilk, playing off of the brain’s propensity for order in an inherently chaotic world, are the key to understanding how texts persuade. The reason for this is that it is impossible to do good rhetorical criticism without knowing what kind of text you are examining. If the initial classification is poor, then the resulting analysis is near useless. This means, fortunately or fortunately, that rhetorical criticism is an art, not a science; that initial classification is made more by gut instinct and experience than by evidence, especially if evidence is hard to come by. Furthermore, that initial classification cannot be fixed in stone. It has to have some serious give. If you kick it, it should shift an appreciative amount. Otherwise, all your analysis can ever do is prove your initial assumption and you are reduced to pronouncements, not arguments, when you choose to tell others about texts. The sciences know this, generally, but not always the arts.
The sixth and last assumption is more obviously a special topic or a value than the others: namely, a good rhetorical critic thinks rhetorical criticism is worth doing, much like Ebert thinks talking about films does wonders for humanity. Calling attention to how the previous assumptions apply to certain texts – namely, that persuasion is going on – is a good idea. And it’s a good idea because rhetoric tends to be hidden, misunderstood, and used for nefarious purposes as much as for good ones; understanding how it is used, how it works, and what the ethical dimensions are contributes to the general human enterprise. It also makes it far easier to teach speaking and writing if the teacher knows how to deal with rhetoric on an abstract level that is not wedded to any specific genre or context. And it’s certainly a good idea to promote more effective communication between human beings.
So that’s it, really: all meaning is limited by human perception, all communication is rhetorical and epistemic, some texts are more rhetorical than others and rhetoric tends to be hidden for effectiveness as well as general sanity, subjectivity needs interrogation, genre identification is key, and examinations of rhetorical texts promote better understanding of human communication. That’s rhetorical criticism in a nutshell. I suppose I could go on to talk about specific things to look for in texts, reading strategies, terminology, etc, but these assumptions, at least to me, are far, far more important.
Wish I knew Arabic
This article on al-Qaeda in Yemen contains an interesting analysis of one of their propaganda videos and how it plays in a country with an incredibly corrupt government.
Both behind and ahead
June is almost over. Houston is getting hot. And I am at least a month behind in writing, but I did finish my new spring semester article and get it out, and my long-suffering prose rhythm article finally found a good home. So I am both behind and ahead in the game.
I had a rough trip to the dentist this month – the first in quite awhile given my former non-insured status for nearly a decade. I convinced myself to stop drinking sodas of all kinds, even the diet stuff that I’d switched to. My diet could still use improving, but I do feel better. I’ve swore off caffeine before, but kept drinking tea; I dropped even tea this time, drinking only water, most of it filtered. Two weeks so far. At least three times a day I desperately, desperately want one. I have never smoked cigarettes, so I wonder if nicotine works the same way. Ultimately, I am sure I will give in to this minor vice, perhaps as early as tomorrow morning, but I don’t think I will ever view it as anything but an occasional treat, because something has changed; I’m getting older.
And it is very curious, getting older. Most everything works fine – in some ways I am in better shape than I was ten years ago – but some things have changed. I can’t seem to drop weight very quickly anymore – it takes more effort. Part of this is a minor struggle to lose the survival instincts that kept me from starving in my undergraduate years – eating few and cheap meals in huge portions and taking maximum advantage of any free food. Part of it, too, is the struggle to maintain a non-sedentary lifestyle when my most productive and valuable time is spent sitting in front of a computer screen or reading a book. There is heart disease on one side of the family, which I fully anticipate suffering at some point. I do have a chance, though, in that the other side is robust; fifty-fifty, I suppose, maybe better as I don’t smoke and my body index is fine.
Oh, yes, another thing about getting older – there’s an increasing amount of morbid thoughts.
The founding fathers preferred Dodge
That I’m considering buying one doesn’t hurt, but it’s still a really, really funny commercial.
The ‘making of’ video is also hilarious, with the shots of the sepia-toned, scowling Washington standing in front of an black SRT.