At some point, all of us have run up against policies that, in our concrete circumstances, simply don’t seem to make any sense. I’m not talking about bad laws, like the forced conversion of minorities — large-scale policies have been around for as long as there have been large-scale political arrangements. Rather, I’m talking about running headfirst into a procedural wall that was designed to be helpful, but in certain contexts seems to thwart the good.
Ars Publica
“God’s Truth”, the Politics Within Theology
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In a previous post, I addressed the potential undesirable social consequences of putting too much weight on the particularity of narrative and political language for God, at the expense of more philosophical and metaphysical language to clarify it and make it universal. My concern there was that the narrative and political, when left alone, would lead to factionalism or sectarianism, and might breed either misanthropy or else a contempt for a very large out-group.
At the popular level, this can be a greater problem than at the more elite levels, but the elite levels are not at all immune. The importance of this was driven home to me in one of my visits to Facebook. There were two events of note.
Mary Midgley, “Against Humanism”
There is a delightful article by Mary Midgley that’s been on New Humanist for several years now. You would benefit from taking a few minutes to read it.
William T. Cavanaugh’s Torture and Eucharist
$40 for a paperback often feels more like torture than the Eucharist, but not this time.
William Cavanaugh is currently Professor of Catholic Studies at DePaul University. He completed his BA (Theology) at Notre Dame, received both a second BA in Theology and Religious Studies at Cambridge University as well as an MA from the same, and finished his Ph.D. (Religion) at Duke University, under Stanley Hauerwas. Together with Hauerwas, he is associated with the Ekklesia Project [1] (under whose aegis he is an editor for two book series). The Ekklesia Project is a confederation of Trinitarian Christian communities, including both Catholics and Protestants, who see allegiance to the Kingdom of God as fundamental for Christians, and as exercising a critical function on what other kinds of allegiances and affiliations a parish and an individual Christian should have. This includes commitments that might suggest that inflicting violence is compatible with Christian discipleship (simply speaking: this project claims they aren’t). [2]
Cavanaugh is also connected to the Radical Orthodoxy movement most often associated with John Milbank [3] (who is mentioned several times in Cavanaugh’s Torture and Eucharist). Radical Orthodoxy is known for its attempts to critique modernity’s “pre-theological” categories, to reaffirm theology –and not any secular discourse– as the foundation and true basis and description of the Church’s vision and ecclesial practices, and reinstitute theology as the queen of the sciences (this concern to veto the total reduction of the Church to sociological analysis is articulated explicitly in several spots in Torture and Eucharist [4]).
Cavanaugh writes and lectures on a wide range of topics, some on the Christian tradition but mostly within the umbrella of political theology – the intersection of politics and religion, the rise of the nation-state, the legitimacy and genealogy of “religion” as a category, the nature of torture, &c. [5] There is an understanding of the modern nation-state as atomizing and intrinsically violent (even “founded on violence” [6]) in the background of Cavanaugh’s work, as founded upon a false myth of violence. [7] To varying degrees, these topics are all touched upon in Torture and Eucharist.
For seventeen months, from July 1988 to December 1989 [8], Cavanaugh “lived in a slum area of Santiago Chile during the military regime,” and “knew people there who had been tortured”. [9] He returned afterwards to Notre Dame as a Research Fellow for six months in 1990, to develop “a computer data base for researching human rights abuses using the microfilmed archives of the Vicariate of Solidarity”. [10] After this experience, it became a focus for his subsequent Ph.D. work. Cavanaugh returned to Chile in 1993 to conduct further research. [11] Torture and Eucharist is based on his doctoral dissertation. [12]
In Torture and Eucharist, Cavanaugh describes and analyzes the horrendous effects of silent abduction (being “disappeared”) and especially torture as a strategy employed by modern nation-states to dissolve the various social bodies that individuals are embedded within. Once citizens are torn away from these larger bodies, the state gains direct and unmediated access to each and all of its own, without the possibility of encountering resistance to its authority or facing the alternative claims of any rival. In Torture, Cavanaugh looks at this dynamic as it was in play in Chile during the Pinochet regime from 1973-1990.
Machines for Eating and Humans for Feeding
Or: What I Learned from Working at Dunkin’ Donuts.
The view from the bottom is really quite spectacular, but those who have always lived there rarely see clearly. They’re not stupid –they know roughly where they are– but they’re trapped by so many tethers they find elusive, and they have no map for how to get out. The rest of us cannot see the truth about ourselves until we have dealt with the truth about them. I worked with them for two months. In immediate hindsight, here are six observations:
1: “Minimum Wage” really means that your employers would likely pay you less, but that they can’t legally get away with it.
This gives a whole new meaning to the phrase, “human resources.” Resources: like oil or coal. When people are paid only enough money to fund some small entertainments, or to pay their cell phone bill, then what does that say about the way that their employer values them? –as better coal, or as worse coal, but always as coal. This demotivates. One is sensitive to this, even if one is not aware of it.
It’s true that good help is hard to find; it’s also true that good help is impossible to retain or appropriately incentivize on what is approximately an $8.50/hr. minimum wage: employees become as disposable as the coffee filters, and care about their job as much.
Of course, these jobs are not designed as career jobs, and high turnover is expected, so a critical reader may waive this all away as so much whiny cavaliering. Employees are seen as deluded for trying to turn a temp gig into a permanent one.
Into the Clarities 