A List of Virtues Wholly In Your Own Power

Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome from 161-180 AD, wrote a note to himself:

"[The people] cannot admire you for intellect. Granted, but there are many other qualities of which you cannot say, 'but that is not the way I am made.' Display those virtues which are wholly in your own power—integrity, dignity, hard work, self-denial, contentment, frugality, kindness, independence, simplicity, discretion, magnanimity. Do you not see how many virtues you can already display without any excuse of lack of talent or aptitude? And yet you are still content to lag behind. Or does the fact that you have no inborn talent oblige you to grumble, to scrimp, to toady, to blame your poor body, to suck up, to brag, to have your mind in such turmoil? No, by heaven, it does not! You could have got rid of all this long ago, and only be charged—if charge there is—with being rather slow and dull of comprehension. And yet even this can be worked on—unless you ignore or welcome your stupidity."

- From Meditations

The more I learn about the great women and men of history the more I'm convinced that work, consistent and intelligent and humble work, is the only real answer to our problems.

On No Face

I have been haunted by No Face (the wraith pictured on the right) since seeing Hayao Miyasaki's Spirited Away years ago. The wraith drifts to mind whenever I'm in a bookstore and start piling books to purchase that I could just check out from the library, whenever I'm in a mall and start grubbing through new shirts I don't really need, or whenever I'm eating a lovely Becca-prepped dinner and snarf more than I should.

There's not an animated character that has wisped around me like No Face.

No Face is emotionless, stuck out in the rain, when Chihiro (pictured on the left) invites it inside a bathhouse to get warm. When the wraith cautiously enters and offers Chihiro money for the kindness, Chihiro refuses on the basis that she has no need of gold—she already has enough to be happy.

The other staff members in the bathhouse, however, don't share Chihiro's restraint. Their lurid eyes boggle when No Face palms them kernels of gold, and they squirrel away the easy wealth. In a strange fit, No Face starts gorging himself on their food, mirroring their greed, so much that soon the staff of the bathhouse can't afford to keep the wraith around.

They try to cast it out, but No Face, in a slobbery frenzy of hunger, starts digesting the bathhouse staff one by one, until Chihiro soothes its anger by feeding it a magic clod she had been saving to restore her parents to their human form since they'd being turned into pigs (if you haven't seen the movie and this all sounds markedly strange, it is). After eating the clod, No Face coughs up all the junk it had swallowed and returns to normal. Harmless.

Part of the reason the character, and the movie (since greed is a recurring theme), is so compelling is because it nails a central trouble of modernity: the constant allure to take more. The modern world is an unsettling heaven where a majority of humans have access to surplus. The option of excess is no longer just available to kings and queens, who could demand what they wanted (within limits) at will. Now a bloke like me who lives right at the poverty line can make kingly demands: 15 changes of clothing, hundreds of books, a personal carriage, etc. I also have access to splendid food, schooling, and the Internet.

But I could still afford more. I have money saved away and time to spare, and online there's always another wiki hyperlink or haha YouTube video I could rattle my mind with instead doing more important tasks. I try to limit my clicks, to take only what I need at the time, but the urging wraith surfaces, palming out a tiny flashing tangent ("Just watch one more TED video!").
When I snatch the bait it responds with a paralyzing dullness. When I ration the urge it's harmless, kind.

***

The open palm of desire
Wants everything
It wants everything
- Paul Simon

Thumbs Up Thursday

As mlh pointed out in last week's Thumbs Up Thursday, there can be something unappealingly forced about digging to find the good in another human being I generally disagree with. I thought this the whole time I was searching out the Heidegger quote, but I posted it anyway, simply because I wanted to post something.

So I'm changing this running theme of Thumbs Up Thursday a bit: I'll still try to see the good in people I generally disagree with, but if I have to force it I'll just share something that simply deserves a thumbs up.


Here, if you haven't already seen it, is one of the hippest things on the future market: SixthSense technology. Even if you saw Pattie Maes' introduction back in March, this new video is worth watching because Pranav Mistry, the originator of the device (pictured above), shows some startling new things it can do (like let you use your fingers to pinch off text or pictures in a physical textbook and copy them to the digital realm).

Block.

This past weekend, on the plane and the train rides from SLC to Princeton and back, I spent my time wrecking my writing: I read Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, the 2001 winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

Every one of Chabon's sentences was so disarmingly inventive and surprising and right that I've tried to draft three different posts since then and scrapped each one. How can I complete a post when people like Chabon are ou

Thumbs Up Thursday

I spent some time on facebook yesterday bashing my least favorite of philosophers, Martin Heidegger.

So today I went scouring for an admirable quote I could pin up here by the man. I found this, which is really pretty good, despite the strangeness of the language, about the psychology of play:

The "because" withers away in the play. The play is without "why."

That is to say, I think, that play requires no intellectual justification.

Seems true.

Perhaps, then, I should let go of my heady hangups with sports viewing and become a football fan.

If I do, I'll have Heidegger to credit.

Parsing Homophobia

My prior post on gay marriage led me to read up on three martyrs in the gay rights movement: Lawrence King, Matthew Shepard, and Harvey Milk. Prior to reading into these stories I had thought that the murders were motivated solely by homophobia. What I found made the stories much more complex.

Larry King

Lawrence "Larry" King, 15, was murdered by Brandon McInerney, 14, last year at a school in California. According to a Newsweek article written just after the murder, Larry liked to flaunt his femininity and tease others with it. He'd wear makeup and high heels to school and tell boys "I know you want me." When a teacher asked him why he'd do this, Larry replied, "It's fun to watch them squirm."

According to the same Newsweek article, Brandon McInerney grew up in a raging household. His father and mother had a history of brutal fights, one involving his father shooting his mother in the arm with a pistol. Brandon was born shortly after that shooting, but the fighting continued and Brandon was constantly in the middle of custody battles, which consisted, it seems, of arguing over whether his meth-addict mom could raise him properly.

It turns out the angry, drug-infested upbringing affected Brandon. He killed Larry in retaliation for a public taunt Larry had made in front of classmates, a taunt that consisted of Larry asking Brandon to "be his Valentine" on Valentine's Day. Though he was only fourteen years old, Brandon will be charged as an adult and will likely face additional penalties because he committed a hate crime; he'll perhaps spend over half a century in prison.

This is not to say that I think Brandon doesn't deserve a harsh punishment, or that he was innocent. It's just to say that the story might have more to do with meth and junior-high teasing and gun control than it had to do with homophobia, especially since Brandon's anger was likely stirred mostly by being teased by classmates rather than by an irrational personal aversion to homosexuality.

In other words, the story isn't exactly what it might appear to be to the many people who see Larry as a poster child for the gay rights movement (and, considering that last year's day of silence was dedicated to Larry, there were many who bought into the surface of the story).

Matthew Shepard

Matthew Shepard's story also had much more to do with meth than I had known. In 2004 ABC News revisited the story, interviewing the two murderers and others surrounding the case. What they found was that Aaron McKinney, the 21-year-old who led the attack, had just come off a week-long meth binge and had set out to rob a meth dealer of $10,000 worth of meth the night he killed Shepard. When the robbery failed he went to a bar where Shepard, who had for two years been in some of the same drug scene as McKinney had, was getting drunk.

Shepard was so drunk that he asked McKinney and his friend Russell Henderson for a ride home, and they obliged. According to McKinney, and who knows if what he says here is true (there were witnesses only to the drug-related events that occurred before this), during the ride Shepard touched McKinney on the leg and then McKinney began to pistol whip him. McKinney demanded that Shepard give up his wallet, which he did, and when McKinney found only 30 bucks inside he went berserk, beating Shepard with the gun until Shepard passed out. Then McKinney and Henderson dragged Shepard's body to a fence and left him there.

When asked if she thought the crime was motivated primarily by drugs, Shepard's mother said, "I'm just not buying into that. There were a lot of things going on that night, and hate was one of them, and they murdered my son ultimately. Anything else we find out just doesn't, just doesn't change that fact."

In other words, she didn't deny that drugs played a part.

Knowing the bit I do about meth, a drug that induces intense paranoia and rampant anger, I have to believe that had the drug been completely absent from the scene, Shepard's death would have been unlikely.

In 1998 the murderers told the jury that they were motivated by their hatred of gays to try to win the jury over to their side. Their plot didn't work, but their words have changed the national landscape, since Obama passed the Matthew Shepard Act two weeks ago, and The Laramie Project, an anti-homophobic play based on these events, has been performed hundreds of times across the nation and even turned into an HBO movie.

It seems the main culprit, meth, got off without a sentence.

Harvey Milk

Another big move for the entertainment industry was last year's Oscar-winning movie, Milk, based on the life of Harvey Milk, America's first gay senator. Since it took place in San Francisco, a city that has had a strong gay presence ever since the gold-mining days when the ratios of men to women in the city were very heavily skewed in favor of men, Milk was a sure-fire hit for critics during the post-Proposition 8 debate.

Dan White, the man who murdered Milk, is frequently perceived as being motivated by a hatred of gays. In this scene from the movie, for instance, White is portrayed as one of those wily supporters of the family:

Dan White: Society can't exist without the family.
Harvey Milk: We're not against that.
Dan White: Can two men reproduce?
Harvey Milk: No, but God knows we keep trying.
(quote lifted from imdb)

It's clever, partisan dialogue. But Ray Sloan, a gay man who worked closely with Dan White during the seventies in various government positions, tells a different story. The author of this article on Sloan's take on Milk claims that "White's character in Milk seems to be a metaphor for a larger cultural and institutional bias against homosexuality that was prevalent in the 1970s."

In opposition to the movie's portrayal of White, Sloan claims that White was accepting of gays, himself included.

According to Sloan, it wasn't until White was pinched for money and Milk voted in favor of a local Catholic church changing a zone ordinance, something White opposed, that White got angry. He resigned from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, but just a few days later, strained for money, he requested his job back. The mayor considered it, but appointed someone else. White fell into a searing anger and one day soon thereafter he shot the mayor and Harvey Milk.

While the trial results were completely inane and most likely motivated by homophobia (White was only given a seven-year sentence for a double murder), it's hard to read the central motive for Milk's death as homophobia, especially since the mayor, the man White killed before he killed Milk, wasn't homosexual.

Parsing Homophobia

Until I read into these stories, I assumed that all three of these murders were motivated solely by homophobia. I simply believed the sound bites I'd heard and pieced together the rest.

In writing this, I'm not turning a blind eye to the atrocities committed against homosexuals throughout history. Nor am I denying that there is still plenty of real pain and struggle surrounding these issues today, or, again, that these murderers were innocent in any way. But I am worried about a non-discerning public transferring their fear of murderers like McInerney, McKinney, and White onto all people who claim that homosexuality is wrong.

I don't think people who are educated about these stories and issues will take this misstep, but, unfortunately, the portion of the population that thinks in simple either/or terms is so large that I worry that the nation will continue to perceive these three people as martyrs for the gay rights movement, despite the evidence that homophobia was only a part of the problem, if it was a part of the problem at all.

I'm hoping that the term "homophobia" can be parsed more carefully. I hope that a non-discerning public doesn't pit members of traditional churches in the same boat as these murderers. I hope that they can discern the difference between someone asserting that homosexuality is a sin and someone ridiculing or physically harming a gay person.

I say this because many people on the fringe of the Proposition 8 debate, the people I'm speaking of when I say "non-discerning public," seem to feel justified in rudeness, rudeness that could only surface once they perceive the "enemy" as irrationally lowly and hate-filled. I'm hoping that people will be able to parse the term "homophobic" more carefully and use it less-readily. If the term isn't parsed more carefully, a non-discerning public is likely to hear only what they want to hear, which may lead them to possibly conflate all traditional church members with the misunderstood McInerney, McKinney, and White.

Is Rhetorology Feasible?

Over the weekend I read a book lent to me by my high school friend, Drew, called Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive. This book, as you well may guess from the cloyingly chipper title, essentially supports rhetorical theories with data.

It's a book filled with a score of poignant studies, enough to make me wonder what, exactly, I'm doing studying rhetoric. If the business sector has the ability not just to opine and theorize about persuasive appeals, but to hire drones to collect data—data that in the end proves more about rhetoric than a rhetorician can in many cases—why am I studying rhetoric?

It's a question I'll have to keep an eye on after graduation, as I try to decide what to do with an MA in Rhetoric.

But what the book really made me think of had more to do with rhetorology, that stuffy neologism Wayne Booth coined—the subject of my thesis-in-progress (or, more accurately, my thesis-should-be-in progress).

When I gave the book back to Drew we spoke of the studies in the book, among other things. I told him that I like the study of rhetoric, but that I find it frequently fraught with one peril: you generally study rhetoric in order to persuade someone that you're right about something, but you—whoever "you" are—are bound to be wrong about some things. In other words, as much as you'd like to persuade someone that your position is the correct position, you're always at risk of persuading someone of a falsehood.

That is why I find rhetorology so appealing. Instead of asking the question, "How can I persuade you to believe me?," it asks, "How can we see eye-to-eye?"

I realize that some people, rhetoricians particularly, already say that rhetoric is about seeing eye-to-eye. But if the public has for decades slapped connotations of manipulation and deceit onto the word, it might be time to concede that the word has soured, no?

What I'm seeking is a book called Agreed! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to See Eye-to-Eye. Or maybe just a book simply titled Rhetorology. Or maybe just a thesis on the subject . . .

The question is, can a book about something like rhetorology ever catch on, or do the reviews for bestselling non-fiction political books have to look like this, with little room for the middle ground?

Love In Hard Times: A Search for Answers in the Gay Marriage Debate

"Marriage is the first bond of society."
- Cicero

"Tut, Faustus, marriage is but a ceremonial toy."

- Mephistophilis

I. D'Souza's Challenge

After he gave a speech at BYU two weeks ago, I had the chance to talk to Dinesh D'Souza, a Catholic from India who speaks and writes about religion and politics. An impressive think-tanker, I decided to get his two cents on the conservative stance on gay marriage.

D'Souza said that if the conservatives don't figure out a way to frame the gay-marriage argument more succinctly and more convincingly, they'll lose the debate. Essentially, we need a slogan (apparently "God hates fags" isn't working).

D'Souza's right. The gay activists' stance is simple and easy to understand: "Gays are human, just like you, so why can't they have the same rights you do?"

The argument is basically an extension of the civil rights rhetoric of the 60s, and except for a few dismal wackos, most people today (myself included) believe that the extension of those rights was a good thing.

By framing the debate this way, the gay rights activists label anyone who opposes them a bigot, a label I'd like to avoid.

So I've been trying for the past two weeks to frame the conservative side of this argument succinctly and with love, but I've found it near impossible. D'Souza said that he didn't have an answer either.

What I mean is that I can think of no way to talk about this issue without having someone call me out as condemning a certain kind of sexual love. Sure, I believe that God doesn't condone gay intercourse, but my personal belief on this matter is useless in a public debate since it is an internal evidence—coming from conscience, the Holy Ghost, etc.—and the public square (rightly) only permits external evidence.

So when it comes to explaining why gay intercourse is wrong in secular terms, I'm in the same spot as D'Souza is: a dead end.

II. What My Stance Is Not

Perhaps I must back up and define my stance not by what it is, but by what it is not. My stance—which is synonymous to the official LDS stance as I understand it—is not a call akin to Islamic Sharia law, a law that imprisons and kills homosexuals.

Such laws promote only cruelty, which is the exact opposite of the LDS stance on the issue. Here is the plea Church leaders sent to all California Mormons last year:

"We ask that you do all you can to support the proposed constitutional amendment by donating of your means and time to assure that marriage in California is legally defined as being between a man and a woman."

That one sentence, which connotes no cruelty, was the sentence that caused thousands of Mormons to donate millions of dollars to the cause.

If President Monson, someone Slate magazine says is the world's most powerful person over 80, could send a one-sentence plea to church members and thousands of us donated, think of what he could have done if he were truly motivated by a visceral hatred of gays. He could have called for the Church to support anti-sodomy laws, could have told us that God won't condemn us for mocking gay people. (In contrast we believe God condemns the mocker. See my personal stance on compassion here.)

In addition, if they wanted, the LDS apostles could focus general conference speeches on gay marriage. As it is, something like 0.001% of recent talks have addressed the issue, and when they do, the approach is one of love.

It might not be widely known, but inside the Church we focus mostly on things like scripture reading, staying out of debt, teaching and nurturing our children, attending the temple, or supporting our neighbors. Gay marriage isn't a focus.

What I mean to say is that if President Monson simply hates gays, he's doing a very poor job of showing it.

Therefore, even if you don't believe that the LDS plea on Prop 8 came from God through a prophet, even if you believe that the plea was un-inspired, you'd be wrong to assert that it was grounded in hate.

So while I still haven't found a succinct way to frame my stance positively, I know what it is not.

III. Civil Unions and Religious Rights

The LDS stance is also not, if I can say one more thing in this vein, opposed to governments granting more rights to gays than they currently have in most states. Here is a message that came out at the same time as the plea sent to California Mormons:

"The Church does not object to rights (already established in California) regarding hospitalization and medical care, fair housing and employment rights, or probate rights, so long as these do not infringe on the integrity of the family or the constitutional rights of churches and their adherents to administer and practice their religion free from government interference."

The acceptance of these five major rights answers affirmatively the simple question gay activists ask: "Gays are human, just like you, so why can't they have the same rights you do?" That is to say, we don't posit that governments should deny gays these rights.

So why is the LDS Church so opposed to gay marriage?

When the LDS church first spoke out about Proposition 8, I heard a fellow BYU student question why. If the sole reason for speaking out centered on religious rights, as the Church claimed it did, why bring gays into it?

This is a worthwhile question, a question I harbored throughout the Prop 8 debates. Even after listening to recent speeches from President Obama and LDS apostle Dallin H. Oaks I was still left wondering why gay marriage would necessarily eclipse religious rights.

Since that time I've scoured several sources, some of which, such as The Meaning of Marriage (edited by Robert George, a conservative Catholic law professor at Princeton) and The Conservative Soul (written by a gay conservative, Andrew Sullivan), I'll have to address in later posts.

The more I read about this issue, the more I'm convinced that civil unions wouldn't infringe on religious rights.

I believe advocating for civil unions is an option open for Latter-day Saints who agree with the official LDS stance. I also think it is the best option for affirmatively answering the question gay rights activists ask about rights.

I've seen protesters claim, "I didn't ask her to 'civil union' me," as though civil unions were a resurfaced case of "separate but equal." A fellow graduate student at BYU, Vilja Johnson, refutes this point solidly here. The marrow of her argument is that since marriage is currently tied up in religious rites (and has been for centuries), calling the union "marriage" creates a conflict between religion and state that civil unions wouldn't.

"If a church refuses to perform a civil union," Vilja argues, "it is because they do not believe in that specific rite from a religious perspective. It is an action which is outside of the practice of their religion, and so they have no obligation to comply with it."

She then goes on to argue convincingly why civil unions are not synonymous with "separate but equal."

My reading has led me to believe that civil unions are simply the best middle ground on this issue. Civil unions still allow gays to openly commit to fidelity, but civil unions also ensure that no affronts to religious rights will ensue, affronts that run contrary to the notions of love and freedom and security.

I think those who support civil unions are in the best position for affirmatively answering questions about rights for all people. The supporter of civil unions pushes at once for rights for gays and religious believers.

If gay rights activists are looking for a verb that could express what it means to be have the government recognize a civil union, I'd offer the verb "commit."

In my mind this is what a civil union would represent: "I'm done looking for other partners. This day marks the day I commit to fidelity."

How to Change a Culture? Shifting Blame from President to Community

Last week I read Scott McClellan's What Happened:Inside the Bush White House and the Culture of Deception. While the whole book was fascinating, I found the recap of Bush's 2000 campaign particularly riveting, since I mostly ignored the campaign when it was unfolding. (I was a sophomore in high school, after all.)

According to McClellan, Bush touted in 2000 that he "would change the tone in Washington," that he would be "a uniter, not a divider." In his campaign Bush said he valued "trust over cynicism."

McClellan makes no nods towards Obama's campaign rhetoric, and since the section I quote from here makes up only three paragraphs in the book's 320 pages, I don't think McClellan was trying to malign Obama in any way. But it's obvious that "unity" is an effective campaign catchphrase, given that the past two presidents pushed for it at the outset.

Bush, according to McClellan, bought into a win-at-all-costs culture only after becoming president, when he fell to the allure of the permanent campaign—the drive to keep one's party in power.

I think Obama is falling to the same allure. I really believe, despite having been spanked hard in the butt (literally) by a rabid Limbaugh listener for saying so, that Obama is not evil. I think that both Bush and Obama were and are well-intentioned, and that they generally had and have good motives. But I have to agree with McClellan that Washington's penchant for campaigning and lobbying is a weight that sinks presidents down to secrecy.

Obama's transparency has been better than Bush's, but Obama has still fallen short of his own over-noble promises. This article reveals, for instance, that in his first 100 days in office he posted only 1 of 14 bills online for public viewing, contrary to his promise that he'd do so for every non-emergency bill.

I'm wondering as well why the upcoming health care bill, if passed, won't really be enacted until 2013. Not only does this allow the CBO to include three years of minor changes in their 10-year-estimate, likely making the estimate lower, but it comes (suspiciously?) after an election year (see here, here, and here.). Is this delay in place so that if the changes flop they'll flop after Obama wins in 2012?

I have no vendetta for Obama as a person, and I think that he carries a more nuanced and intelligent worldview than Bush did. I almost can't fault either president for making loads of promises impossible to keep. But I worry that the culture of Washington is so concerned with power that it currently makes transparency and real bipartisanship impossible. I'm left wondering, What can be done to change the culture not just in Washington but in America at large so that presidents have the incentive to be open and candid?

Square Two

I was just tipped off to an online journal called Square Two, a forum for Latter-day Saints to engage in political conversations. Today the journal published a series of essays on why America shouldn't legalize same-sex marriage. (here)

I haven't read the essays yet, but since I'm working on a similar piece, I'm looking forward to entering the conversation.

Seeking for Solutions Outside the Court

Becca started writing an anti-pornography series on her blog.

And check out this site started by some BYU students.

Perhaps a campaign from the private sphere is the best way to go about this.

Thumbs Up Thursday

I've spent the past two weeks drafting a post in response to recent speeches from President Obama and LDS apostle Dallin H. Oaks, with the intent to show how the conservative position on gay marriage can be one of love. It's been quite difficult, but I think I'm gradually getting closer. Becca and I are flying to Princeton in a few weeks to attend a scholarly conference on marriage, so hopefully I'll have more to say about it then.

In trying to understand the issue more fully I've been reading some of the smarter arguments from the proponents of gay marriage—specifically those from Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Rauch. I want to applaud the fact that these two proponents take marriage seriously. They both endorse the idea of a community coming together to celebrate lifelong fidelity, something that is absent when a couple decides to cohabit (an act generally done without formal announcement or open community support). I like their ideas of commitment and responsibility and communal support, in part because these ideas all denote a healthy limitation of individual freedom and rights.

I believe that I'm seeking for a political stance that promotes communal responsibility, but one that also doesn't grant any single group (whether it be a single business or the federal government or one religion) too much power. That's why I also like Rauch's position that the decision of legalizing gay marriage shouldn't go to the national level (which would grant power to the fed); it should remain a state-by-state decision.

The Drain of Jail Time

I had a piece published in the BYU political review.

Can Apple Save Health Care?

"We come on the ship they call the Mayflower,
we come on the ship that sailed the moon,
we come in the age's most uncertain hour,
and sing an American tune."

- Paul Simon, 1973

The more I think about our health care crisis the less I think that any single government solution is going to fix our problems. This doesn't mean that we should stop talking about reforming legislation (which I've done here and here and here); it just means that there might be better solutions.

It seems to me that unhealthy Americans could break even the very best health care system.

One thing we need is a change in mindset. Movies like Food, Inc. and books like The Omnivore's Dilemma have made healthy strides in this direction. Perhaps we need an ad campaign against fast food in the vein of the Montana Meth Project.

But ads of obese people in the ER may be over the top—laughable to skinny people who eat fast food daily / insensitive to obese people who, despite healthy eating, wrestle against their genes. We should keep changing the culture, in other words, but it may take a while.

That is why I think that we should array our national talent to quickly improve medical technology.

When JFK told Americans that he wanted us to sail to the moon by the end of the 60s, Americans responded. I think we could leap again if we chose to. We need a leader (Steve Jobs?—he's a genius and a cancer survivor, after all) to demand that we invent a mobile machine that can accurately read diseases in a human body. Getting it by 2022 would be nice.

We know that if diseases like cancer can be caught early enough the likelihood of being cured is higher and the likelihood of needing very expensive procedures like chemotherapy is much, much slimmer.

I'm pulling at straws here, brainstorming ideas that would solve the solution: What we need is a mobile machine that will allow us to scan ourselves in our homes, a machine the size of a hand-held grocery store scanner, a machine that can plug into a laptop's USB slot.

It might seem absurd, but we moved relatively quickly from 10,000 pound computers to computers that can fit in envelopes, and it seems that in the case of technology we're still moving at an exponential rate. Innovation, perhaps, is the American tune.

If we were to pour every penny of cancer research into developing a technology smart enough to discern false positives, we could possibly knock some of the largest expenses from our national health care bill.

Two Temptations: Money Grubbing and Knowledge Grubbing

To riff off a post on welfare, I want to briefly wrestle against a common temptation of students and scholars in the humanities: snootiness.

I should say, it's a temptation I feel as a student of the humanities—one I have to keep my eye on always, like it's a pecking peacock in a corner of a yard, winding up to lunge as I make my way to the front door of the ivory tower.

The thoughts come whenever I pit myself against rich people, or against students who are studying something that will earn them lots of money.

Perhaps other scholars of the humanities can relate to this. When we're asked, for instance, "what can you do with English?," it may seem like something of an affront, as though we must present a flow chart of future wages to satisfy the pragmatic inquirer.

The common response from scholars is to find a different value than money by which to measure success. This isn't a bad thing in itself, but it can lead to trouble when our minds fill with the hot air of prejudice against businessmen, bankers, and accountants—"those empty, sell-out professions." (I'm thinking of, though I love many of his arguments, the recurring snobbery of Hugh Nibley.)

While I've felt this nudge to proclaim that my scholarly motives are nobler than monetary motives, I don't buy it. To be fair, most scholars of the humanities I've met, particularly at BYU, don't buy it either. We meet too many good businessmen, bankers, and accountants to proclaim with any honesty that they're all heartless money-grubbers.

Two Parables

It's true that people in money-oriented professions are more likely motivated by money than people in the humanities are, but that doesn't mean that people in the humanities aren't tempted to be greedy. We're just tempted to be greedy in a different way. Instead of feeling the allure of money-grubbing as strongly, we might feel the allure of knowledge-grubbing.

Picture this: A man works tenaciously his whole high school career to get into Harvard Business School. He works tenaciously to graduate summa cum laude, and then he works tenaciously to get hired by one of the best firms in the country. As a young employee he works later than the other men and women and goes to work earlier too. After twenty years he ends up making millions. How hard would it be for him to part with half his fortune? Probably a lot harder for him than it would be for me (since my bank account is nothing to brag about).

Now picture the same story with a student of the humanities, someone hoping to be a scholar. She works just as tenaciously, studies later and smarter than all the other PhD students, and she lands a job in one of the top schools in the nation. After twenty years she's set to publish a ground-breaking book, one that will canonize her name in literary circles for decades. How hard would it be for her to sacrifice her research project and instead take a full time job teaching freshmen writing, a job she personally despises because it has no lasting scholarly notoriety? Probably a lot harder for her than it would be for me (since my academic record is nothing to brag about, and since I like teaching freshmen composition).

Perhaps you think that one of these situations sounds markedly easier than the other. That might be an indication of which temptation you wrestle with. Or perhaps you think both situations are bunk, which is okay; I don't intend to reduce all human temptation to a simple dichotomy.

Christ and the Scribes

We speak often (but not often enough, I think) about how Christ berates money-grubbers. He speaks about it so often that it seems, from my reading of the Gospels, that he was more concerned with how the people in his day used their money than he was with their sexual sins. (Which is to say he was very worried about money-grubbing.)

He spoke of money, but my reading of the Gospels leads me to believe that Christ disdained the smug scribe just as much as he disdained the pompous pharisee.

Look at Christ's view of puffed up scholars and look at their self-serving questions, which always have the underlying proclamation of "aren't I a smart one to think of this?"

"Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayer."

"the scribes sought how they might take him by craft"

"But there was certain of the scribes sitting there, and reasoning in their hearts, Why doth this man thus speak blasphemies? who can forgive sins but God only?"

"Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou?"

"Why walk not thy disciples according to the tradition of the elders, but eat bread with unwashen hands?"

"Which is the first commandment of all?"

"Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men."

That last one is to the ivory tower, a kingdom that in its worst imaginings is filled with academics who could solve real-world problems but who insist instead on parading jargon and specialized discourse in front of each other. (In this imagining the pecking peacocks are running freely through the halls of the ivory tower.)

In that vein I ask, What if a business man who makes money for the central purpose of supporting a family is more ecumenical than a scholar who disdains his nagging kids or who chooses not to have kids at all in his pursuit of knowledge? Who is the better man?

I ask that without a thought to any professor I've met in person, since every time I see a BYU professor interact with one of their children I'm impressed with their sincere generosity. In fact, I'm continually impressed with the sincere generosity of all BYU professors in any interaction.

This is not an attack on any individual, then, since I have no one in mind as I write this. I speak only as a warning to me: An academic must read Christ's words in two ways: "Sell all that you own and distribute the money [knowledge] to the poor."

That is to say that money and knowledge can both be used for self-aggrandizement, or they can be used to diminish the Self and strengthen the Other.

To see it done right, see TED.

Thumbs Up Thursday

Following a tradition I started last week on this blog, where I said I'd try to find a voice I generally oppose and without criticism support them for a post (a practice in rhetorology), I want to highlight Obama's talk on service at Texas A & M last Friday (the last four minutes, particularly).

I like Obama best when he comes down hard on young people, telling us that we can't expect greatness by being lazy, that we need to get out and serve in our local communities. I think that Obama speaks and young people listen. I hope that he continues to make this idea of responsibility and service the major theme of his administration. If he does we may see a healthy cultural shift away from feelings of entitlement to feelings of gratitude. And I don't know what could help us more.

Reading Christ as a Liberal

Liberal Christianity vs. Fundamentalism

Upon recommendation from a friend on a previous post I recently read Marilynne Robinson's article “Onward, Christian Liberals: Faith is not about piety or personal salvation, but about helping those in need.”

That subtitle represents the thrust of her article quite well.

Robinson traces two versions of Christianity through the history of America, proving how a Christianity that serves the poor has consistently been healthier for our democracy than a Christianity persnickety about which groups will roast in hell and which will flutter in heaven.

Robinson pulls a lovely quote from John Calvin, a quote that succinctly summarizes the article's central assertion:

"We ought to embrace the whole human race without exception in a single feeling of love; here there is no distinction between barbarian and Greek, worthy and unworthy, friend and enemy, since all should be contemplated in God, not in themselves. When we turn aside from such contemplation, it is no wonder we become entangled in many errors."

It's a striking bit of a sermon, and it nails the woes of fundamentalism on the nose. I'd like to think that Calvin's quote reflects the Christianity I am trying to, or at the very least hoping to, practice daily.

I can walk with Robinson while she says that a liberal Christianity, defined as a Christianity that centers on serving the poor, is healthier than a conservative, selfish Christianity. But Robinson makes a key error in judgment when she conflates, all throughout the article, fundamentalism with conservatism.

This conflation is fallacious, a hasty generalization: I do not believe the arrogant claim that scripture is inerrant (the key claim of fundamentalists), and yet my politics lean conservative. Fundamentalism is not a synonym for conservatism, just as militant atheism is not a synonym for liberalism.

It's true that the ransacking of the Republican party by bigwig fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell and Robert Grant cracked the party's sense of humility, but not all conservatives fell for Falwell. Last Friday I had the chance to talk with Dinesh D'Souza, an influential conservative commentator, and I learned that he regrets the conservative move to reduce all social issues to two: abortion and gay marriage.

I agree with D'Souza's conservatism. Abortion and gay marriage should be on the docket, but I believe that conservatism offers real solutions on all social issues (poverty, racism, sexism, pollution, crime, war, etc.). Conservatism, after all, doesn't require one to adhere to whatever values have been traditional. Were this the case, then if gay marriage becomes a "traditional value" I will immediately be by definition a progressive liberal, since I oppose that value.

Conservatism isn't rooted in all traditional values, but it is rooted in the traditional value that government should be limited. It is rooted in the brilliant opening phrase of the Constitutional amendments, "Congress shall make no law . . ."

It is a phrase that is in no way antithetical to liberal Christianity. Indeed, it is a phrase that gives life to liberal Christianity.

Charity vs. Welfare

After Robinson channels Christ's famed commandment, "Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor" she says, in an uncharacteristic moment of feeble-mindedness, "How on earth his teaching is to be reconciled with social conservatism I cannot imagine."

Such a reconciliation only requires one to look cursorily at the context. For some unexplained reason, Robinson reads this biblical story as though Christ were speaking to a government official, or perhaps as though Christ were telling the rich young man to pay all his money in taxes and let the government distribute it to the poor. In either case Robinson misreads.

Christ wants the man to voluntarily give of his money not just because the poor were in desperate need of it, but because the rich young man was in desperate need of voluntarily giving. You'll note that the next verse about the camel and the needle is not as concerned with the poor as it is with the salvation of the rich young ruler.

Which isn't to say the story promotes hoarding at the expense of the poor. Such hoarding is antithetical to true conservatism. Barry Goldwater speaks to this idea in his seminal text on conservatism and morality, The Conscience of a Conservative. He says, in 1960,

"Suppose I should vote for a measure providing for free medical care: I am unaware of any moral virtue that is attached to my decision to confiscate the earnings of X and give them to Y.

"Suppose, however, that X approves of the program - that he has voted for welfarist politicians with the idea of helping his fellow man. Surely the wholesomeness of his act is diluted by the fact that he is voting not only to have his own money taken but also that of his fellow citizens who may have different ideas about their social obligations. Why does not such a man, instead, contribute what he regards as his just share of human welfare to a private charity?"

Following Goldwater's view of the welfarist position, the story of Christ and the rich young ruler would read, "Sell all that you and your neighbor own and have the state distribute that money to the poor."

It's an absurd misreading of the biblical story, a misreading reflected in one of the silliest campaign videos of the 2008 primaries, an ad showing Hillary Clinton gently placing labels like "Universal Health Care" and "Middle Class Tax Breaks" and "Alternative Energy" on Christmas presents—as though she had a host of elves baking up goodies for the American people and she was going to slide down our chimneys to save us. It's a lame analogy, one I think both sides of the political spectrum can see through. The government never gives gifts. It only redistributes gifts.

Which isn't to say that all redistribution is inimical. Fundamentalist conservatives are blind to assert that Americans don't need some form of welfare, especially in big cities where anonymity and nonchalance for the poor reigns in the streets. We need organizations, both public and private, to help the poor—organizations like the United Way, or the Boys and Girls Club, or Catholic Charities.

Conservatism at its best embraces and supports these institutions. But it pushes against federal government involvement, because conservatism knows that the federal government seldom understands local needs. Conservatism at its best supports charities by granting tax breaks to donors (liberalism pushes the opposite direction). Conservatism at its best limits federal involvement, transferring the power of the fed to states and cities (players who best know the needs of citizens).

Conservatism at its best is more giving than liberalism. According to studies done by Arthur Brooks, studies I'd love to see replicated, "if liberals and moderates gave blood at the same rate as conservatives, the blood supply in the United States would jump by about 45 percent."

While wedding Christ's teachings to Christian fundamentalism is an impossibility, imagining how Christ's teachings and social conservatism can be reconciled is not so hard a task. Conservatism just needs to drop the fundamentalist cranks to prove the reconciliation is viable.

The Mormon Ethic of Civility

"The Church views with concern the politics of fear and rhetorical extremism that render civil discussion impossible. As the Church begins to rise in prominence and its members achieve a higher public profile, a diversity of voices and opinions naturally follows. Some may even mistake these voices as being authoritative or representative of the Church. However, individual members think and speak for themselves. Only the First Presidency and the Twelve Apostles and their designated representatives speak for the whole Church."

Full article here.

Are Conservatives Misanthropes? Part I

Last week I overheard a left-leaning acquaintance bemoan that contemporary conservative principles are born out of a sense of misanthropy.

Rawr.

I see where the comment comes from—contemporary conservatives are generally anti-affirmative action, anti-gay marriage, anti-welfare, and anti-public health care. It's true, whenever a conservative wants to keep the status quo—conserve a tradition—they'll get pinned by some as antagonists. Is this modern resistance to liberal change always born out of misanthropy, though? I hope to wrestle through this issue on this blog, with the purpose of parsing when conservatism is born from hate and when it is born from love (because I think that there are mixed motives behind most current policies from both parties).

The accusation that contemporary conservatism is misanthropic should be taken seriously by conservatives. After all, if conservatism breeds hate then it's not the party of Christians. Despite all the goodness conservatism could offer the world, if it fosters hate above love it is not for me, since I am trying, most of all, I keep telling myself, to find out how to love.

I will return to this idea in future posts, starting with a post about whether conservatives are really the money-grubbers they are portrayed to be.

Thumbs up Thursday

Since I reacted prematurely a few days ago with my Noble Prize post, and since the goal of this blog is to promote rhetorology (whether my written attempts show the usefulness of following such tenets or the embarrassment that ensues from ignoring them), I'm going to start making a small post each Thursday by giving a thumbs up to a party or person or idea I've opposed. (It's a hokey title, I know, but it will keep me in check.)

"Thumb" rolls better with "Thursday" than "Tuesday" but I can't even wait until Thursday to post this, so here it goes for this week.

I want to re-iterate how impressive Obama's acceptance speech was this past week, especially when I read it now playing what composition professor Peter Elbow calls "the believing game" rather than "the doubting game" (i.e. reading something through the eyes of a believer rather than through the eyes of a doubter). Obama's immediate shift of focus from himself to a movement, his inclusive language (the frequent "we"), and his crackdown on nuclear proliferation were evidence of a fantastic maneuvering of a tricky situation. He was walking a tightrope, knowing that he would be mocked for receiving the prize prematurely. The fact that I've seen no one make a substantive poke at his speech is proof once again that Obama has a fantastic understanding of rhetorical situations, an ability we need from a president.

Also, his website is classy.

How to fix this?

Today Greg Mankiw points out Obama's equivocation on "no new taxes unless you're rich." Since nearly every contemporary politician (Romney, Bush I, among many) has equivocated in similar ways, I'm left to wonder if a contemporary politician can survive without the padding of equivocating. How can the system change to fix this?

Also: How should the public react? Should we ignore it? Accept it? Protest?

Perhaps the public could help by allowing room for needed tax increases while still being hawks about spending.

Friedman

Thomas Friedman, author of the endlessly interesting (though sometimes seemingly endless) The World is Flat, wrote a response about Obama's Prize that was far and away more pointed than mine, but in the same tenor. He also asserts that sometimes armies can lead to peace.

Two Links about America, Two about Health Care

I don't know if all these thinkers would label themselves as conservatives or not, but they write frequently from a conservative position. It's a shame these writers aren't the face of modern conservatism.

Dinesh D'Souza - 10 Things to Celebrate (About America)

"As an immigrant who has chosen to become an American citizen, I feel especially qualified to say what is special about America. Having grown up in a different society—in my case, Bombay, India—I am not only able to identify aspects of America that are invisible to the natives, but I am acutely conscious of the daily blessings that I enjoy in America."

D'Souza is coming to BYU on October 16th!

Charles Krauthammer - Decline is a Choice: The New Liberalism and the End of American Ascendancy.

A lengthy and intelligent look at the downsides, or at least trade-offs, of Obama's foreign policy.

Thomas Sowell - Obama's Rhetoric Vs. Common Sense

Sowell claims Obama can't insure more people without either raising taxes or adding to the deficit.

Greg Mankiw - Marginal Tax Rates from Health Reform

Mankiw shows how Obama has gotten around adding to the deficit.

Toned Down, But Still Somewhat Incredulous.

I wrote that previous post at 9:00 am, just after hearing that Obama had been given the Nobel Peace Prize. Now that it's 12:30 at night (morning?) and I've had a day to think about it, I realize that I was too harsh toward the president (especially after embarrassingly learning that the nomination had come long before Obama did any of the things I harped on). I also think that some of the comments I've read from defenders of the award choice have been useful (though, most, when it comes right down to it, were just as empty on evidence as were the outbursts from conservatives—I remain wholly unconvinced that liberals have the monopoly on logic as they so often seem to assume when they mock Republicans wholesale).

After reading my friend Anthony's viewpoint, in which he applauds Obama's efforts to shift America from the central player to one of the central players (a valid point), I've toned down my position even further. (Such is the case, I find, when I spend some initially-unwelcomed time reading the opposing view.) That said, I still have gripes about yesterday morning's choice. I spoke my mind on Anthony's blog, but I'll also speak it here:

The central reason the Prize choice was poor is that it de-legitimizes the award for people who have and will receive it. If the prize becomes a symbol for a particular political ideology rather than an award that recognizes strident and ecumenical efforts towards peace, the prize will become a symbol not of peace but of polarization. It won't be an award given to people who can be admired by people from all religious or political perspectives (as Muhammed Yunus and Craig Kielburger are). It will instead become, especially in cases when it is given prematurely, a laughable award.

What happens if Iranians find Obama's threats quite soft (which I'm sure many of them do) and they end up tossing a nuke towards Israel? Obama's moves towards diplomacy in that case may not have made the world any more peaceful. I realize that it's much too early to tell what Obama's foreign policy will lead to, but isn't that the point conservatives are making? Finding the right move for a nuclear Iran is a horribly complex issue, and while I don't know the answers, I like the intricate discussion that has gone on for several posts here.

I agree with Anthony that Obama is making some moves towards humility that are astronomically better than the American-centric stuff Bush pulled, but I think there are certainly instances where drawing a hard line and following through on that line lead the world towards peace (think Chamberlain vs. Churchill). What I mean is that just because Obama promised more diplomacy in his campaign doesn't guarantee that we'll see increased peace. Diplomacy can foster tyrants and tyrants can lead troops to war. And if diplomacy can lead to war, why award it prematurely?

(Perhaps this is pointing to a post soon to come about my recurring disappointment when liberals assert that conservative policies are born out of misanthropic motives, something I know is not the case, as I know my motives.) [I'm not referring to Anthony's post here, which doesn't make this accusation.]

Honestly, now that the day is over and I've had more time to think about it, I feel most sorry for Obama. Anthony's right: he didn't ask for the award and doesn't deserve (all) the gripes. He certainly doesn't deserve the high expectations placed on him, especially if Iran nukes a neighbor, despite his very best efforts.

I think someday Obama may be worthy of such a prize. I hope he will be.

[An article that mirrors something of what I was going for this morning, here.]

Nobel Partisan Prize?

Craig Kielburger, 27, founded a service organization called Free the Children when he was 12 years old. In the fifteen years since he founded the organization it has grown into a world-wide phenomenon that has built over 500 schools and brought fresh water to several countries in need of help. The website shares that "Free The Children is the world's largest network of children helping children through education, with more than one million young people involved in our programs in 45 countries."

With the help of his brother Marc, summa cum laude graduate at Harvard and a Rhodes scholar, Craig wrote a book in 2007 called Me to We, a treatise on how to get involved in serving your local community. The whole book and the entire Free the Children project is a riveting effort for peace and collaboration.

While the Kielburgers have been tirelessly promoting peace for the past fifteen years, the Nobel Peace Prize committee has been promoting a partisan agenda, presenting the award to Al Gore in 2007 and, today, presenting the prize to Barack Obama.

While it's true that Obama was a community organizer in his teenage years, I've seen nothing that indicates that he accomplished anything above the call of the average community organizer during that time. And while Obama is perhaps the best campaigner the world has ever known, in the past 10 months he's done nothing above what the average president has done (think of Bush's frequent, but largely unnoticed, help in Africa) to promote peace.

Not only has the heavily partisan stimulus bill largely failed us (according to this Harvard Economist), not only have Obama's health care efforts garnered nearly no bipartisan support (the Democrats, in fact, can't even agree about the bill amongst themselves enough to pass it), but Obama's foreign policy efforts have been completely (is this too strong?) weak sauce. Even the French president, the president of a nation known for its weak stances on war, mocked Obama's recent moves to tell Iran off. Sarkozy uses the words, "utterly immature." And, unlike the hopes of many liberals during the campaign, we're in Iraq until 2011, and will likely still be Afghanistan for many years to come. In sum, Obama's done little to sooth the bipartisan anger in America and little to promote peace around the world.

The Nobel Peace Prize committee had the chance to let the world know about a spectacular grass-roots effort. Instead they seem bent on promoting a partisan agenda.

[*edit: Though I still think the committee could have done better, after reading comments from friends online and after two hours to cool down, it's clear that saying "completely weak sauce" is indeed incorrect. See Obama's acceptance speech, wherein he defends his position, here.]

[And a more comic take here.]

Rhetorology: A Brief Introduction

I've spent the past week deep in the throes of sketching up a proposal for a graduate thesis and now I'm thinking ahead to how to flesh it out for the final product (an article length—25-30 pages). The basic project is an attempt to find a way to foster genuine understanding in contemporary democracies. To do this I hope to bring back Wayne Booth's neologism, rhetorology. The word, first introduced in 1981, hasn't caught on. A search for the word on Google yields just over 1,000 hits, and a search on Google Scholar yields only 41. JSTOR yields nine hits; comppile.org yields only two. It’s clear, in sum, that Booth’s neologism is dead.

This death may be proof to some people that the word should be dropped. I can concede that it's a mouthful—rhetorology, rhetorology, rhetorology—but I think the usefulness of the concept makes the word worth keeping around. Booth defines rhetorology as

not rhetorical persuasion but rather a systematic, ecumenical probing of the essentials shared by rival rhetorics in any dispute . . . Rhetorologists do not just try to discover the rival basic commitments and then "bargain." Nor do they just tolerate, in a spirit of benign relativism. Instead, they search together for true grounds then labor to decide how those grounds dictate a change of mind about more superficial [i.e. external, outward] beliefs. Any genuine rhetorologist entering any fray is committed to the possibility of conversion to the "enemy" camp.

Booth presents rhetorology not as a replacement for rhetoric, but as a rhetorical practice that leads people to focus on similarities rather than differences. In other words, while rhetoric is perhaps most commonly defined as the study of persuasion, rhetorology is the study of how to listen. Persuasion may come later, but it comes, for the rhetorologist, only after he or she has systematically tried—really tried—to find common ground.

The reason we need a word for this concept is because it is a way to foster reverence in contemporary democracy. Picture this: Glenn Beck invites a liberal on his show and for a full ten minute interview he and his opponent focus exclusively on finding common ground. All disagreements are off the table, reserved for another night.

It doesn't seem likely to happen anytime soon, since all big-name political pundits seem obsessed with what Booth terms "win-rhetoric" (the desire to win at all costs), but I think that if we need anything in our current political discourse, it is rhetorology (literally, from the Latin roots, "the [objective] study of the speakers"). If we spent as much time probing for common ground as we spent disagreeing we'd see more civility and genuine progress.

Wayne Booth and Reverence

Over the past two years I've grown enchanted with Wayne Booth's scholarship. I keep returning to book after book and article after article, and I keep quoting him throughout this blog. It seems that every essay and chapter of his resonates with me.

I find this connection somewhat strange. It's true that Booth also grew up in Utah—but there are many people here I do not connect with so easily. It's true that Booth also graduated from BYU—but that was about 60 years ago, and so much has changed. It's true as well that I share an interest, as he did, in rhetoric—but there are many scholars of rhetoric that do not move me the way his work moves me.

I think I'm drawn to one of Booth's great moral traits: reverence. As I look again at Paul Woodruff's wonderful book, Reverence, I cannot help but think of Booth:

Reverence begins in a deep understanding of human limitations; from this grows the capacity to be in awe of whatever we believe lies outside our control—God, truth, justice, nature, even death. The capacity for awe, as it grows, brings with it the capacity for respecting fellow human beings, flaws and all.

Booth was, as he reveals in his tell-all autobiography, a pretty flawed human being. But he was reverent. He seemed to never let belief in the rightness of his stance or even belief in the rightness of the tradition he was raised in (1930s Mormonism) eclipse his reverence. A possible fault here is that he valued reverence too much, perhaps to the point of over-diluting his faith. But I cut Booth some slack; he was reacting against a more narrow-minded version of Mormonism, a version that seemed more adamant about conflating culture with absolute truths, a version that likely made it harder to strike a healthy balance between faith and reverence.

Above all, Booth seemed to maintain respect for his fellow human beings, Mormons and non-Mormons, and he seemed to never lose his sense of awe for the pursuit of truth. His great message, when all his writing is boiled to the simplest point, lies in what he terms rhetorology—a "systematic probing for common ground." Rather than a win-at-all-costs rhetoric, Booth taught a version of rhetoric that was, in essence, a plea for communal reverence. Booth focused on teaching us how to communicate with respect—teaching us, in other words, how to get along in communities (since all communities rely [exclusively?] on communication). What he taught is a way to find genuine understanding. What he taught is an exercise in human love.

In Search of the Writing/Literature Major

I chose English, and I chose it because I wanted to teach students the way my better teachers were teaching us—that is, with a passionate commitment to ideas, to thinking things through, and to doing the thinking in the best, most precise and powerful language possible.

- Wayne Booth

I've never thought seriously about studying anything other than English, never doubted my decision to be an English major. Trouncing other grade-school kids at reading contests (thank goodness the teachers had no way of tracking my poor comprehension) made me feel flat-out terrific, and books like The Prydain Chronicles, Ender's Game, and Stargirl were enough to help me see the value of reading at a young age. Not only that, but Paul Simon was an English major. How could I not follow suit?

But, as important as it is, I didn't just want to become a good reader. I also wanted to learn how to write well. And writing, somewhat to my surprise, has seldom been a major focus of my experience in English studies. Other than a very few courses I've taken on writing, most of my English classes, from my high school freshman honors class on, have centered on reading.

This was perhaps most evident in the 300- and 400-level literature classes I took as an undergraduate. While my grade for each of these classes was based mostly on writing a good final paper, the in-class time was centered exclusively on discussing stories. That kind of thing is hugely important and delightful, but I soon found that making good comments and writing a good paper were often two entirely different things. (I struggled with both.) Sometimes I questioned whether the in-class time had any tie at all to what the grade was reflective of.

I still think that getting a degree in English literature was the best thing for me, but I do wish we could see one major shift in the field. BYU English majors are required to take a freshman writing course and an advanced writing course—Writing about Literature. But taking two classes does not make someone a good writer. I believe the craft deserves at least nine or ten courses. We should shift the mindset, I think, to re-imagine every literature class as a writing about literature class. We'd see better undergraduate writing if we did.

A year ago I read a post on an anonymous literature professor's blog complaining about incompetent student writers. I knew my fledgling style well enough to know that s/he could have very well been talking about my stuff. But I had to wonder why, then, did this teacher not spend a bit of class time each period teaching us how to write better about literature? Why was the only instruction we received on how to write made in the marginalia of our three class papers? And why, above all, as was the case in every one of my 300- and 400-level literature classes, did we only receive feedback on our largest project, the final paper, after the class was over?

Since English departments are about the business of creating students who can publish their work, and since the more work students can publish the better the university looks, I think that writing instruction should be threaded through the English major, that it should receive the same attention as discussions about stories, history, and theory. I think that one of the central reasons for reading the fantastic crafters of the sentence (Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Nietzsche, Bill Bryson, Robert Frost, and, okay, James Joyce [though he gets nearly everything else wrong]) is to learn how to imitate their cadences. But this isn't something we talk about in literature courses. We talk mostly about stories and history and theory, and while none of these topics are bad to wrestle with (though sometimes theory can seem so distant from literature one must wonder why we don't just go ahead and study Home Ec and literature), wrestling with them isn't the quickest way to learn to write well. In sum, I think we do a disservice to students if they graduate with an English degree and, as the anonymous professor I spoke of bemoaned, they still don't know how to write a coherent sentence.

I shouldn't berate my alma mater too harshly. They offer several elective writing courses, and every one I took was fantastic. Can't say enough about how they revamped my writing, forcing me to rethink how I string words together. The best of these were two courses that had us imitating the style of the great crafters of the sentence. I should include Paul Simon in that list of the best of the lot (1. Shakespeare 2. Jane Austen 3. Paul Simon). Who else?

***

Locked in a struggle for the right combination
of words in a melody line,
I took a walk along the riverbank of my imagination.
Golden clouds were shuffling the sunshine.
- Paul Simon

Upon Reading the Qur'an, Part Three: Why Ancient Beauty Still Matters

There is a power in these ancient holy stories and sermons that goes largely ignored today, to our detriment. Even Wayne Booth, a scholar of rhetoric and a skeptic of religion, recognized the power of biblical stories:

"The authors of the Bible chose mainly to be storytellers, narrators rather than mere exhorters. They did not just lay down bare codes, like a list of ten flat commandments . . . Those authors 'knew,' perhaps without knowing what they knew, that serious stories educate morally—and they do so more powerfully than do story-free sermons."

As a Mormon I cannot help but agree with Wayne Booth's claim here. A Mormon meeting without storytelling is a rare thing. We tell stories about what happened to us in the past week or month, or we recount the stories of central Book of Mormon or Bible characters. General Conference is rife with stories, and after the general priesthood meeting it was always the stories and jokes from the session that I was able to recount to my mom and sisters. Mormon culture is a storytelling culture.

But this isn't the case with Mormon culture alone; I think was the case with both the post-print Western Christian culture and the post-paper Middle-Eastern culture. The post-print West took stories from the Greeks and the Jews; they were hungry to add what we could to those traditions. What would Shakespeare be, for instance, without Greek and Biblical influence? What of Milton? Dante? And who more foundational in furthering the Western story than those three? Western culture is so intertwined in these stories that one might say our culture is these stories.

And that is why I believe that we do ourselves a disservice when we fear good storytelling—because when we do we're working against culture, against community. You see this in the awful censorship of al-Qaeda and fundamentalist Christians. You see this whenever fearful citizens (including some Mormons) hold exclusively to easy, chicken-soupy stories. You see it as well when militant atheists promote only edgy or crass books at the expense of praising the beauty in these ancient texts. Such moves are simply a more deceptive, and to me equally ugly, form of censorship.

Above all it is a final, willing ignorance that makes the contemporary human dangerous.

***

Whether fictional or historical,

in prose or in verse,
whether told by mothers to infants
or by rabbis and priests to the elderly and dying,
whether labelled as sacred or profane
or as teaching good morality or bad
—stories are our major moral teachers.

- Wayne Booth

Upon Reading the Qur'an, Part Two: Storytelling and Communal Morality

Had Allah willed, He could have made them one community,
but Allah bringeth whom He will into His mercy.
- Sura 42:8

The history of two Golden Ages—first in the Middle East and then in the West—speaks to the fact that democratic ideals are fragile, that they're held together largely by the stories a community tells and the debates that surround those stories.

The Qur'an had been spreading to Middle-Eastern eyes and ears for 50 years when paper was first introduced from China to the Middle East, and the area was ripe for Arabic writers to pen fresh stories and sounds. The imaginative verses in the Qur'an spurred the art and ideas and debate, the moral framework, necessary for a thriving civilization: a Golden Age.

A Golden Age, I must admit, I know little about. I look forward to learning more, but I now know only of the bloody Crusades and Mongol rampages that came hundreds of years later and made the Age of Islam stumble slightly. I know of fields of burning libraries never to be rebuilt, of a new religious fever causing some to hold fiercely in fear to what was left of Middle Eastern culture. There was something of a break, as far as I can find, in the great storytelling of the Middle East.

At the same time widely-published Middle-Eastern stories started to freeze and the Islamic Golden Age began something of an eclipse, the West thought for the first time in over a thousand years.

The Bible, everything considered, was born with Gutenberg, and the synthesis of biblical and Greek stories led to the fantastic tradition of Western storytelling we enjoy today. Just as paper and holy stories sparked the imagination of the medieval Middle East, printing and holy stories sparked the imagination of the renaissance West.

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Here is one of my favorite stories from the Qur'an: Sura 18:66-82. Moses follows a man (angel?) through a serious of initially incomprehensible actions. The story points to the trying ambiguities inherent in moral decision making.