Friday Metal: Protest the Hero, “Blindfolds Aside”

Cannibals

It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with abhorrence; that appears to result, in some way, from the consideration before mentioned: i.e. that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea, and eat it too by its own light. But no doubt the first man that ever murdered an ox was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was hung; and if he had been put on his trial by oxen, he certainly would have been; and he certainly deserved it if any murderer does. Go to the meatmarket of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal’s jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Feejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Feejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy paté-de-foie-gras.

- Moby-Dick, chapter 65

The man show

This is a bit of an easy target, but “Man Church” is at least interesting for what it supposes men want church to be like:

Man Church is church the way a man expects it to be done. No singing, short sermon, time to talk with other guys, no women present, and coffee and donuts. That’s the way men want to do church. The topics of discussion will have a definite manly focus – being the best possible husband, father, employee, leader – being a real man. In fact, every aspect of Man Church is geared for men – not like any other church you have seen. This ain’t your mama’s church!

The idea of “manhood” espoused here is absurdly narrow, consumerist, and America-centric. I can certainly get behind shorter sermons, but no singing? (I like to sing!) Time to talk with other guys? (Um, okaaayy–about what exactly? Sports?) No women present? (!!) Coffee and donuts? (Well, I do like coffee…)

And then there’s the self-help stuff (“being the best possible husband, father, employee, leader…”) without any indication that Christian discipleship might make demands on you that are incompatible with being a “good” husband, father, employee, etc., at least as conventionally defined.

Also, no mention of the sacraments or other things that we feminized Christians typically associate with, you know, worshiping God.

Not only isn’t this your mama’s church, it’s not clear what makes it “church” at all.

(Link from Faith and Theology.)

Gender and God-talk

Derek posted a couple of pieces on the language we use to talk about God, which sparked a good bit of commentary. (See here and here.) Partly, this ended up being about the propriety (or not) of using feminine symbols and pronouns to talk about God.

The best discussion of this I’ve come across is Elizabeth Johnson’s She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse. I blogged about Johnson’s book at some length here, here, here, and here. You can also read a briefer version of her case for “God-she” here.

I think one of the deeper issues at play here is whether or not all our language about God is, to some extent, “constructed.” Johnson writes:

As the history of theology shows, there is no “timeless” speech about God. Rather, symbols of God are cultural constructs, entwined with the changing cultural situation of the faith community that uses them.

Some people are very uncomfortable with this and maintain instead that at least some langague is directly “revealed” and not time-and-culture bound. I don’t think this is a tenable view of how language works, though; even if some set of images or words was directly revealed in the Bible or wherever, the meaning of words is inextricably bound up with the context in which they’re spoken.

Some numbers on immigration

From the New Yorker:

When the topic is illegal immigration, some of our political leaders reliably produce more heat than light. On April 28th, in a letter to President Obama, seventeen members of Congress, most of them from the Southwest, demanded immediate action to increase border security, noting that “violence in the vicinity of the U.S.-Mexico border continues to increase at an alarming rate.” Two days earlier, Senator John McCain, of Arizona, in a floor speech defending his state’s newly passed law requiring local officers to investigate individuals’ immigration status, described “an unsecured border between Arizona and Mexico, which has led to violence, the worst I have ever seen.” He went on to cite numbers for illegal immigrants apprehended last year “that stagger.”

In fact those numbers are surprising: they are sharply down, according to the Border Patrol—by more than sixty per cent since 2000, to five hundred and fifty thousand apprehensions last year, the lowest figure in thirty-five years. Illegal immigration, although hard to measure, has clearly been declining. The southern border, far from being “unsecured,” is in better shape than it has been for years—better managed and less porous. It has been the beneficiary of security-budget increases since September 11th, which have helped slow the pace of illegal entries, if not as dramatically as the economic crash did. Violent crime, though rising in Mexico, has fallen this side of the border: in Southwestern border counties it has dropped more than thirty per cent in the past two decades. It’s down in Senator McCain’s Arizona. According to F.B.I. statistics, the four safest big cities in the United States—San Diego, Phoenix, El Paso, and Austin—are all in border states.

Read more.

The Right and guilt-by-association

Saying that the Right has been employing McCarthyite tactics seems almost redundant at this point, since virtually the entire repertoire of the Right since the 2008 election seems to consist of guilt-by-association.

Still, Robert Wright’s analysis of the ludicrous ginned up controversy over the proposed mosque to be built near the Ground Zero site in New York shows just how preposterous these tactics have become. In this case, it’s not even guilt-by-association so much as a geopolitical version of six degrees from Kevin Bacon.

Inflamed, distracted fury

Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the white curds of the whale’s direful wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal.

– Moby-Dick, chapter 41

Questioning growth in Asia

I thought this article in the NYT was very interesting: not only are some Asian economists questioning whether their countries’ economies can continue to grow at a double-digit clip, they’re questioning whether growth should even be the ultimate object of economic policy.

In considering this risk and the increasing evidence of the toll that rapid economic development is already taking on Asia’s environment, economists and other experts in Asia have taken up the call to re-examine the prominence of economic growth as a measure of policy success, particularly the use of gross domestic product.

[...]

economists … warn that even with greener development, the result may still be the same if the goal remains an American-style standard of living.

It seems to be virtually a truism that the earth can’t support a world full of people who aspire to the American standard of living, despite the fact that most of our economic and much of our foreign policy rests on the opposite assumption.

Even in developed countries, environmental thinkers like Herman Daly have argued that “growth” is no longer a suitable proxy for progress in human well-being.

Interestingly, some of the economists mentioned in the article are coming to the same conclusion:

Asia may instead need to carve out a vastly different vision of prosperity that does not rely on ever-increasing levels of material consumption.

And in what represents a bit of strange casting, some economists say the answer may lie in drawing on Asia’s religious traditions — Shinto, Taoism, Buddhism and Hinduism — with their emphasis on harmony with nature and self-denial.

“Is there any commandment from the heavens that one must have one’s own swimming pool?” [economist Bhanoji] Rao said. “That one must have 10 bedrooms?”

To illustrate, he cited Mahatma Gandhi’s comment about the Earth’s providing enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.

One would like to think that for us in the West, Christianity would provide similar resources for shifting away from a growth-and-consumption-oriented lifestyle. That’s assuming it hasn’t become fatally compromised by its connivance with the economic status quo.

Friday Metal: Mastodon, “Blood and Thunder”

The perfect soundtrack to my current Moby-Dick obsession.

Split your lungs with blood and thunder
When you see the white whale
Break your backs and crack your oars men
If you wish to prevail

This ivory leg is what propels me
Harpoons thrust in the sky
Aim directly for his crooked brow
And look him straight in the eye

Debating conscientious carnivorism

Mother Jones has a roundtable on whether vegetarianism is always better for the environment than omnivorous diets, featuring Jonathan Safran Foer, Joel Salatin, and Anna Lappé, among others.

It seems possible that at least some meat-containing diets can be on an environmental par with, or even superior to, some vegetarian diets (particularly those containing lots of highly processed foods).

But that hardly seems like a representative way to look at the issue. For instance, my diet doesn’t lean particularly heavily on processed “fake-meat” products. Sure, I like a Boca burger as much as the next guy, but there are plenty of less- or non-processed sources of protein (tofu, nuts, beans and other legumes) that play a much larger role in what I eat.

And besides, this is an extremely specialized debate among a very tiny segment of the population. The vast majority of the meat consumed in the U.S. (upwards of 90 percent) is factory-farmed and thus horrible for the environment by any objective measure.

The bottom line is that the standard, meat-heavy American diet and the industry that supplies it are bad for the environment, bad for human health, and absolutely require cruel treatment of billions of animals. (See here for a recent discussion of the environmental impacts of confined animal feeding operations, or “CAFOs.”)

If we get to the point where the main debate about food is between vegetarians and selective, conscientious omnivores, we’ll have arrived at a virtual utopia by comparison.