Fixed!

The RSS feed is fixed again, LiveJournal pals. My trademark happy letter to a “fine cereal maker” broke it.

Interpret This

The dirty little secret that not even the biblical literalists will admit to is that even the biblical literalists do thier share of interpreting the Bible.

F’rinstance, they seem to pay a lot of attention to Leviticus 18:22, which excoriates homosexuality, but completely ignore the large chunks of that book devoted to how unclean pork and menstruating women are. The biblical literalists love “an eye for an eye,” but seem to forget all about “thou shalt not kill” much less that other bit about turning the other cheek. They focus on all the things deemed sin and very little on all the ways to get forgiven.

Selecting which verses are more worthy of repeating than others is interpretation, plain and simple. The so-called biblical literalists, then, only take literally that which is politically or personally expedient, so they can resume their pork-eating-living-with-menstruating-women-non-jubilee-observing ways guilt-free.

But the Bible is a difficult document. Contrary with what the (so-called) biblical literalists claim, as a moral guide, the Good Book is sketchy at best, at worst full of downright bad examples. Incest, cowardice, deceit, pillage, and double-dealing are common–and that’s just among those God has chosen to do His work. The rest of the text can be contradictory, abstruse, opaque, and just downright out-of-line with all that we now think is holy, like the destruction of Jericho, which looks a lot like genocide to me.

Under the influence of contemporary scholars like Marcus Borg of the Jesus Seminars, religious historians like Karen Armstrong, and the late student of mythology Joseph Campbell, as well as retired professor of religion Paul Wiebe, I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that the Bible represents part of the history of the Jewish people’s debate about the nature of God. These ideas and arguments were expressed in stories, law, histories, rhetoric, poetry–the full panoply of literary devices.

Such a view not only explains the division and contradiction within the Bible itself, but turns it into a document full of struggle and confusion, full of politics and philosophy, poetry and high-minded invective. In other words, the Bible by this view is a distinctly human document that happens to concern spiritual issues. And I can relate to that. I myself am human: flawed, contradictory, in constant struggle with issues of meaning and soul. It may sound heretical, but I’m beginning to think that the only way for the Bible to be truly inspired is for it to be a flawed, difficult, human document.

Women of High Society

I recently finished a pile of books from the Book Nook that I bought last summer, all of which ended up being about upper-class (or appearing to be upper-class) women who have extramarital affairs. I guess I should have guessed, coming from a place whose Romance section comprises four aisles and half the store.

D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover shares utopian visions with Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and, perhaps because it is written further along in the Industrial Revolution’s progress, tries to be smarter (read: more fatalistic) about its philosophy. Both feel that upper-class society is responsible for the pervasiveness of evil fakery and immoral living. However, individuals like Levin from Karenina view low class laborers as inherently more wholesome, incapable of corruption, and a source of all goodness. The objective then, is to eliminate Russia’s urban society and give power to the common people. The English cronies who gather around Mr. Chatterly have a slightly different perspective—they easily condemn Bolshevism as hog-wash and note that that the workers of Chatterly’s coal mill are irreverant and somewhat lazy ignorants. They become posturally deformed and, therefore, un-human through the toils of their “unnatural labor.” The danger in both approaches lies in typifying a whole class of people as good or bad, especially when the leading character in both is an expeption to that rule. Lawrence believes that if we dumped all our technology into the depths of the ocean, humans would return to equilibrium. Since that obviously can’t happen, the only practical course for Connie and Mellors is to isolate themselves as much as possible and work within the law to free themselves.

Lawrence is also working for a sexual revolution here, portraying the sex between the two lovers as cathartic, freeing, and ultimately child-like. Descriptions are frank rather than scandalous, openly shared rather than salacious, even though both are breaking marriage vows to fulfill sexual lust. This is unexpected and even kind of lovely. Who doesn’t appreciate two people subverting the system? But there is one blaringly obvious misstep–sexual compatibility does not a lifelong relationship make. This is the same dilemma I faced with Steven Shainburg’s movie Secretary. Lee, the secretary, and E. Edwards, the lawyer, find unorthodox delight in each other sexually but are otherwise complete strangers. What they do know about each other is gleaned from observation; Edwards has a tenderness for horticulture and Lee cuts herself. There is never a point where one resorts to confiding in the other about anything, however. Even the scene that is supposed to depict the acceptance and devotion to the other person’s quirks is expressed sexually. That wouldn’t be bad except that they never relate to each other in any other way than sex. In Lady Chatterly’s Lover Connie is repulsed by Mellors’ callused attitude towards his daughter, his affected colloquial speech, and his rough mannerisms. But everytime she needs satisfaction he’s willing, and so these misgivings are never resolved.

Lawrence, in making a social point, abandons believability and treats his characters as types. Connie, we are told, has had a quite Bohemian upbringing. She values intellectual discourse, which she can find pretty much only in other men, but sees sex as a little absurd. Lawrence puts these two qualities in a causal relationship. If Connie enjoys philosophy and other activities that foster the mind, she cannot enjoy activities that foster the body. In order to be sexually free, Connie has to come to detest intellectualism and education for herself as a vanity and submit her very will to Mellors, who is good enough for her because he’s an educated man even though he chooses to physically labor for a living. We are never given direct dialogue of her intellectual conversations, but we are subjected to her desperate reliance on Mellors. “Do you love me? Do you really love me? Really? Say you love me! Say you’ll love me forever!” This is the kind of mental state to which Connie’s character is reduced. Is this really a sexual fruition? Mellors is not depicted as needing this kind of affirmation. In fact, his attitude is mostly to “take it or leave it,” even when he feels (I think justly so) that Connie is using him for sex.

In many ways Lady Chatterly’s Lover is a better crafted book than, say, Madame Bovary, and contains important ideas. It is not the kind of absurd mockery Vanity Fair offers–a universe of wily, weedling, conniving, extravagant, vapid people with the exception of a pure, saintly woman and a pure, saintly man who are repeatedly taken advantage of. Connie and Mellors at least have enough sense to see that they live in a world with conventions and societal dictates rather than unchallengable laws of Truth. It is unfortunate, then, that Connie is flaky and fitful in a way that reminds me of Emma Bovary, who lacks the wit and irony Thackeray gives to the despicable Rebecca Sharp.

This is a disappointing statement to make about Lawrence’s novel. Previously to this, I read a volume of short stories. The short stories exhibited the same frankness about male and female sexuality but more easily portrayed a wide variety of characters of all ages in an interesting, complicated, and believable manner. Maybe it was because the reader of the short stories discovers his view that sex is not a guilty pleasure, just a pleasure, wholly by the behaviors of the characters without extraneous expositional passages by the narrator.

On the Limitations of the Free Market 1.0

I’m going to say a few things that those who believe in the free market as a sort of religion are not going to want to hear.

1. There is no “Invisible Hand.” That was just a figure of speech Adam Smith used to make a point. The free market is really just a collection of individuals making choices within a culturally-created system of punishments and rewards. There’s no magic, no ju-ju, just people looking at what other people are doing and trying to make money off it. The market is not “intelligent.” It is
not a collective Borg. It is just as prone to making bone-stupid decisions as really smart ones. For every tech boom there’s a tech bubble.

2. Enlightened self-interest sometimes isn’t. As often as not it’s just pure, unadulterated greed. If left unchecked, it will always feed the bottom line at the expense of resources, employees, investors, even the market itself. This is why the U.S. passed anti-trust legislation at the turn of the last century.

3. Jesus was not a capitalist. In fact the Bible, especially the New Testament, is awfully hard on the rich. Remember that camel-and-an-eye-of-a-needle business? Remember that bit where He turned over the tables of the money changers in the temple? All that stuff against usury and for the jubilee in the Old Testament?

4. Democracy and the free market are not synonymous. Historically, they have often coincided. But ask India about a certain British tea company and see what they have to say about the alleged link between the free-flow of capital and the freedom of The People. Note also that the fastest growing economy in the world right now is not the ostensibly free U.S. but the repressive and authoritarian “red” China. When it comes to keeping employee costs down, nothing beats a dictatorship. The stampede of American business away from the “free” American worker demonstrates that.

I know, it hurts to hear. But then, we were warned against false profits.