I'll see you all on Twitter.
]]>If I were really honest, Christmas was my favorite holiday, too. I loved our family’s observation of advent for four weeks leading up to Christmas, I loved the Christmas pageants, I loved the season-specific music, and I loved the special services at church. I even loved the particular smells of Christmas: the scents of gingerbread or egg nog give me shivers even in memory. In recent years when I became heavily involved with the Anglican church I attended here in DC, the rituals of the church became the center of Christmas observance, rich as they were with beauty and meaning.
These rites were filled with their own scents and sights and sounds, but artistically unified, binding up the disparate things that made Christmas such a complicated and abundant rush of experiences toward the religious center that motivated them all: the coming of a savior.
]]> This is my first Christmas as a non-believer. Last April during the Great Vigil--the grandest and most important service of the year--I stopped believing that Jesus was who Christians say he was. I took six months to try to figure out how to deal with this before I went public and resigned as a member of my church’s Vestry. One year ago I was frequently spending three to four evenings during the week at church activities, and around four hours at church on Sundays, just to give you an idea of how much of my life was involved in my religion.My conversion was not exactly a decision, and I didn’t agonize that much over the decisions I made as a consequence, though the stress caused by the effects of those decisions on people with whom I had close relationships was tremendous. All of that seemed essentially inevitable, and I don’t regret it. But the costs of this change did not descend all at once: instead, they filter down piece by piece, and I’m not always prepared for them. This year is a year of ritualized grief, as each religious event becomes my first on the outside. And it’s a grief in which I am essentially alone.
Christmas is a grief I’m not prepared for. I let my wife conduct private Advent services on her own, I look at treasured family objects like the nativity scene my parents gave us and see symbols for something now alien. Every sign of Christmas reminds me of what I’ve had to give up. And I wonder: how do nonbelievers make their peace with Christmas? I know that Christmas has a long non-religious tradition, but those are the parts of the holiday that always seemed least appealing to me. What I feel most is a fresh stirring up of anger and hostility toward Christianity: there’s little in me ready to have a benevolent acceptance of the myriad trappings of a Faith whose falsity I was only able to accept after years and years and years of persistent erosion of its core arguments.
Is there a Christmas worth resurrecting from Christianity’s ashes?
]]>I've recently become a prospective partaker in the form of immortality that the girl falls back on. Almost all humans can take part in this one sort of immortality through having children, and while the idea is a little misapplied by the organ donor example, it's towards this goal that the girl reaches when she chooses to have her arrangement persist, if only a little bit thereof, past the destruction of her presently whole arrangement. The immortality of reproduction is a powerful and considerable thing, not to be discounted. It has a less potent--and scarcely immortality-bestowing--but still noteworthy cousin, which she choose at that particular moment.*
]]> No doubt the claim that arrangements--including human beings--simply disappear when they're disassembled feels bold and transgressive to this author. Setting such things aside, our ultimate destructibility remains a powerful thought when confronted plainly. It can cause us to question many things, such as whether arrangements, like that of the house, really exist. Some people can be tempted to think that all things that we might unify in speech, such as houses, justice, the soul, are simply arrangement--that is, mere juxtaposition. To those who argue thus, arrangements are frail things, not causes of anything, and certainly without any independent being in themselves.It seems to me that, for Aristotle, the destruction of an individual soul is a given. To paraphrase him in the Ethics, death is most of all to be feared, because it is the end of everything. Further, the first type of soul he identifies implies the naturalness of death of individual souls: the nutritive soul, such as is possessed by plants (that's all they have) and by all other souls (as triangles are contained within quadrilaterals) is that thing capable of growth and wasting away. Growth, in the very notion of it, requires movement towards a certain thing; a growing plant isn't just a heap getting larger, and the problem with a decaying plant isn't simply that it's losing mass. Rather, the nutritive soul grows towards being something, and then falls away from that something. Obviously this implies a notion like form, as I'd like to rename "arrangement" at this point: the maple seed isn't just taking in food to gain mass; it's also moving it around into, and because of, a certain shape, namely that of a maple tree. It's further doing so for a certain reason or purpose, namely for respiration and photosynthesis. The Latinate term for the shape cause is formal, and for the purpose cause is final; Sachs translates the first sometimes as thinghood, because it's by that shape that we can call a maple leaf thing, namely a maple leaf; and the second as that-for-the-sake-of-which, which is somewhat painfully self-explanatory. The formal is how we can call a something a this. The thing for the sake of which something is done is the final cause.
In the maple example, then, the thing that the plant grows towards and decays away from appears to be a form. Moreover, the thing by which we call it a maple, as opposed to a blade of grass, appears to be a certain look. The plant must contain within it this form (what we’d formerly called the Lego house and analogue for soul), and it must contain it in some way actively, throughout its growth and decay. That is, it must somehow hold together and arrange itself during its growth; it must maintain this form while it is flourishing; and must still hold together at least in some fashion as it decays but has not yet died. Somehow it holds that form within itself, or perhaps holds itself to this form. If it didn't, we wouldn't be able to say that it grows or dies. Likewise wouldn’t be able to call it as this, at all. The thing that holds this form together, actively, in some way, would then be the soul, or as it has somewhat familiarly been translated, the soul is the being-at-work-staying-itself of the body as a body.
The girl, and thus the comic, recognizes the soul’s role as, in some way, the form of the body. She wants her body to continue on past death, even if it’s only the subordinate parts, and she has a part in some immortality if a part of that body in that particular form persists for a time. Which is to say, contra certain accounts: the body matters, and you can't have a soul without it. But it’s also to say, contra certain other accounts: you can't have a body without having a soul.
The soul in this account isn’t a source of salvation, and it definitely isn’t what’s commonly meant as a self, two sources of confusion to the author of this comic. But it does appear to have a different status, a different kind of being, from other forms, and from mere arrangement. You can fault the girl for sentimentality if you want; but she’s definitely hit on something.
*Clearly freezing eggs would be one solution to the problem of an organ's not reproducing your particular arrangement in a body with the potency to reproduce that arrangement again. Or, having children, if you’re not so into being a “geek.” But I nitpick.
Also note that the title is a joke about Method's own reaction to this comic and its illustrating why he hates Thomism (which is "all about making excuses for why the soul outlasts the body").
]]>Without, perhaps, the Riot
But graphicker for Grace --
As finer is a going
Than a remaining Face --
Departing then -- forever --
Forever -- until May --
Forever is deciduous --
Except to those who die --
I've decided it's time to face up to the facts: 99% of the people who are good at things are good not because goodness showed up at their door, rang the doorbell, and left a basket with blanket-wrapped goodness on the welcome mat, but because they learned how to work at it. Sure: 1% of these people are just naturally talented in the way that my voice just changed one day when I was 14. But screw those guys: they're the freaks, the outliers. Normative human excellence is not about talent, it is about the art of practice.
Talent gets conflated with excellence a lot of times because talent can be the boost that gets us practicing. My facility with language made me like reading at a young age, but it was the habit of constant reading that deposited me in my AP English class in High School with a broad vocabulary and intimate familiarity with language's power of expression. Sadly, I chose to credit myself with talent when I found myself one of the best writers in an unusually poor public High School. I thought I had a spark, an alchemical fountain of inspiration bubbling inside my soul that turned my words to gold as I set them on paper. As a result, not only did I fail to develop the habits of reading that had given me a relative excellence, I wasn't even aware of the existence of those habits, let alone their importance. As a result, while many of my peers were working hard at their writing in college, developing habits of greater attention and diligence in composing their thoughts, I was wasting time doing whatever pleased me, assuming that I was a Good Writer. As a result, my essay scores steadily declined and after I graduated, I read much of the writing of my peers and wondered, brow furrowed in self-pitying consternation, when they had all gotten so goddamn talented.
Happily, there were some habits of practice that I developed without realizing it. A student job as webmaster at college helped drive my hobby of making personal webpages. The thing about webpages is that you can produce something interesting and personally rewarding at virtually any level of skill. My designs went from bloody awful to awful to pretty damn bad to pretty bad and on up, but it didn't feel that way to me: every design made me feel like I'd expressed something. This habit of practice has ended up being one of the most significant aspects of my life: it has determined my career.
If talent was involved in this process, it was involved in a minor way: it helped me enjoy putting together a webpage even when I could only make something that was, objectively, very poor. Perhaps it was talent that let me derive pleasure from the details of HTML, tedium that another person might have to push through and therefore do less often, but that I returned to regularly.
I am tempted, now, to call myself a born-again believer in practice. I'm terrible at nurturing the ability to practice. I think many people are, to some degree, but I ask you to believe me when I say that I possess a particularly acute lack in this regard. I can't help but feel optimistic, though, the more clearly I articulate this to myself. It means I can stop riding the ego roller coaster as I go from things I'm good at to things I'm bad at: it's not about my talent. Talent is bullshit. It does mean, however, that the next step on anything I want to improve is just work.
Here, again, though, it's not so bad: the main thing is not to exert tremendous effort, it's to exert continuing effort over time. Which is easy to say. How do I do it?
All this is why I'm spending time these days thinking about what I call the Art of Practice. It's learning the ability to work continuously at things, to put aside the ridiculous desire for immediate, effortless results, to learn to seek and find the quotidian rewards in self-improvement.
Right now I've got a white belt: I attend my drawing classes every week and have shouting, brawling chaos going on in my head most of the time. GOD, YOU SUCK AT THIS -- THIS IS TOO HARD -- I WISH I WERE AS GOOD AS THAT GUY -- GIVE UP, MAN, YOU'RE EMBARRASSING YOURSELF, followed by NO SHUT UP IT TAKES A WHILE -- FAILURE IS OKAY -- OF COURSE IT'S HARD, THINGS WORTH DOING ARE HARD -- THE GOAL IS NOT TO BE AWESOME NOW BUT TO PUT YOURSELF ON A PATH OF IMPROVEMENT.
In other words: it's no kind of graceful balance as of yet. But I've made some progress. I've flossed every day for the last four months. Remembering to do that's gotten pretty easy. And you know what? I'm proud of myself.
]]>Novels need not present "constructive suggestions" to be good art. Nor need novelists be voices for social reform. In fact, Dickens's status as one of them interferes with his art. The man was a little too enthusiastic for his own good, and part of the harm it did him was to leave him open to this criticism by George Orwell: "He believed in the power of changing hearts, and that’s what you believe in, Orwell says, if you 'do not wish to endanger the status quo.'" Orwell's insistence on seeing Dickens, a different and at times explicitly political novelist, as an advocate of the status quo, does not translate to Lee or her protagonist being such advocates. Gladwell implies as much, however. "But in cases where the status quo involves systemic injustice this is no more than a temporary strategy. Eventually, such injustice requires more than a change of heart." But that's a critique of Finch or Lee only if you misinterpret their purposes!
]]> Finch is a defense lawyer. This means that he has a duty to a particular client in a particular situation. He does not owe a duty to the structures of Alabama, or the structures of racism or sexism. It would be unethical of him to abandon the best defense of his client because it was related to a different prejudice in the jurors' mind. Thus, it is not "as a Jim Crow liberal" that he "dare[s] not challenge the foundations of [the juror's] privilege," but as a good lawyer of any age or political persuasion. His defense doesn't tell us about liberalism, Jim Crow or otherwise, but about justice: it must be enacted in particulars, and can only come to light through particulars. Harper Lee's story cannot be about fixing the racism, sexism, and classism of Alabama precisely because it's about a particular defendant tried by a particular lawyer. She's a novelist, not a politician or activist; she's telling a story, not advocating systemic change. And Atticus's limitations in court are not formed by liberalism, but by law.Gladwell's big test of Finch's and Lee's ability to "tell us about life," comes when Finch decides not insist on the Sheriff punishing Boo Radley for murder. But mightn't justice include treating folks like Boo Radley different from folks like Bob Ewell? Even if one's triumphant non-Jim-Crow liberalism, which is apparently much stronger, more "principled," and effective than its cousin, recoils at this notion, shouldn't we pay attention to the common opinions on this one? Police use discretion very much like the Sheriff's all the time, even if we're not comfortable saying that it's in the context of murder investigations (although of course it's exercised there, too). Would we not want them to do so?
I wonder what Gladwell thinks about arresting people for disorderly conduct. Surely arresting every person who violates the law would not result in perfect justice. Gladwell says this scene shows us that Finch is just a guy trapped by Jim Crow liberalism because Finch's "response is to adopt one set of standards for respectable whites like Boo Radley and another for white trash like Bob Ewell." I don't think it's at all honest to say that the Sheriff's decision is based on class: Bob Ewell is a guy who just tried to kill two children, never mind his history as an incestuous rapist, whereas Radley is a deformed recluse, who for this reason may not be trustworthy, no?, by 1930s Alabama's unspeakably ignorant standards. Determining how to react to this set of facts requires complicated balancing that is in no way reducible to Ewell's living in poverty and Radley's not. In truth, exercising this discretion requires lawmen, in all times and places, to make the judgments on whom to arrest, charge, and prosecute based at least partly on character. Setting aside the entire poetic point of this scene--comparing such an act to the monstrous killing of a creature that only brings beauty to others--how the hell is this situation not telling us about "life," then, but instead solely about some parochial political view?
Finally, if Gladwell's going to call Harper Lee a misogynist and eugenicist, why doesn't he just come out and say it? His critique of her portrayal of Mayella Ewell approaches that line and might as well cross it. But, instead, mightn't it be the case that, in this novel's town, such a person as Mayella exists? That, in the real world of the Great Depression, such terrible poverty, ignorance, and suffering were present among poor whites? That such poor whites did seek to blame their misfortunes on blacks? That juries in the 1930s would plausibly be persuaded by pointing out the existence and habits of such people? Eugenics is wrong, and using such a defense to a rape charge is morally perilous. But the poverty that inspired eugenics can be pointed out (in the 1960s, no less, after we've already seen eugenics in operation) without one being a eugenicist, and the only sort of defense that might persuade a 1930s Alabama jury to acquit a black man might be employed (to no effect) without one being a misogynist. To paint such a wretched character as Mayella is not to endorse, or even fail to challenge, the "structures" that brought her low, and to imply that Lee's description of white poverty is an endorsement of some of the 1930s' errors on that score is, at best, negligent.
Why even write such an article? Hubris, entitlement, smugness, and false security come to mind.
]]>The brown-burnt taste of roast coffee
lingers on my tongue like the sharp spice
of woodsmoke from a wooded cottage,
the linger of boiled water and warmed kitchen
and sizzled bacon lending pleasure and verve
to swinging axe or driving plough -- work!
toil transformed by fire, by the offering of
leaf limb trunk, bud pit bean
burnt to god Desire: a prayer to want our lot.
How abundantly answered! How daily
it is given to us to want to live--
how miraculously, how joyfully.
The things we burn are holy
rams placed in thickets--Abraham!
Take your hand from Isaac:
God himself has provided
the sacrifice.
Andrew Sullivan is getting strangely dismissive about the enterprise. I can't help but wonder: did he even see The Reader?
The Reader has been the subject of at least mild controversy. Ron Rosenbaum of Slate writes:
This is a film whose essential metaphorical thrust is to exculpate Nazi-era Germans from knowing complicity in the Final Solution. The fact that it was recently nominated for a best picture Oscar offers stunning proof that Hollywood seems to believe that if it's a "Holocaust film," it must be worthy of approbation, end of story. And so a film that asks us to empathize with an unrepentant mass murderer and intimates that "ordinary Germans" were ignorant of the extermination until after the war, now stands a good chance of getting a golden statuette.
I'd like to zero in on one part of this statement: "...a film that asks us to empathize with an unrepentant mass murderer..." (italics mine). Many of Rosenbaum's other claims are straightforwardly dispensible via remotely responsible textual analysis, but what are we to make of Rosenbaum's emphasis on empathy? The strangest thing about The Reader is how many people insist on calling it redemptive, a phenomenon that I think is rooted in this idea of feeling for another human being.
We humans have many stories of redemption, but The Reader is not one of them. Not remotely. It is, however, undeniably full of the subject of empathy, of fellow-feeling. Kate Winslett's Hanna Schmitz is clearly and unarguably guilty of the particular crime recounted in the film; not only does she not seek forgiveness for it, she willfully accepts the blame and punishment for a greater responsibility in the crime than she actually had. The story does not in any way ask us to forgive Schmitz, but it does challenge us to feel with her. This is, I believe, what most people believe redemption to be.
If you can feel with a person, you do not morally censure her. If you acknowledge a villain to be a human being, you deny her evil.
This is a troubling, Manichean view of evil, as if evil is a substance that is incommensurate with humanity and feeling. It places sympathy as the standard for good, a troubling enough assertion. What bothers me most, though, is the way it places evil so profoundly outside of our own experience. We are, by definition, in sympathy with ourselves: what does it mean that this formulation of good and evil makes it impossible to see our own actions as evil, to feel all the complexities of our own experience without the possibility of that result being ultimately wrong?
The Reader deals with these ideas more subtly, more truthfully, and wrestles with issues of cross-generational guilt that are too relevant to us as Americans and inheritors of the legacy of American-Indian genocide and African slavery. It is in no simple way just another Holocaust movie, nor is Winslett's performance in it anything less than astonishing. She deserves to be taken seriously, as does the film.
]]>Without a care in this whole world,
Without a care in this life
It's what you take that makes it right.
Before I began attending my church--Ascension and St. Agnes--I couldn't have given you a proper definition of the word liturgy. I had a vague sense of its high-churchiness, something I was both attracted to and repelled by. I was drawn to the beauty of churchly pomp, but hostile to the perception I had of its lack of authenticity, of its focus on form over substance.
Slowly, ASA began to redeem the notion of rite for me. Even the first Mass shook me with a particular, repeated phrase: Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldst come under my roof, but speak the words only and my soul shall be healed. These words were directly before communion itself, acknowledging the insufficiency of our efforts and intentions in approaching the eternal mystery, making that infinite gap a part of the rite.
At the first church leadership retreat I attended, the facilitator, Father Martin Smith, talked about ritual in a way I'll never forget. There are three tiers of religious experience, he said. In the first tier, we have the source: Truth, Good, and Beauty. In the second tier, religions attempt to point to, or recreate, the experiences of these first-order things. They try to point to truth with doctrine, to good with morality, and to beauty with ritual. The shadow side of this second tier, however, is the third: doctrine, severed from its proper orientation toward the first tier, becomes dogma; morality, severed from its proper orientation, becomes moralism; ritual, wrapped up in itself, becomes ritualism.
This articulation reconciled and redeemed much of religious practice for me: it articulated much of what repelled me about religion and connected it to things that are healthy and human. Rite, in particular, became a powerful word for me: the recreation of beauty, making a vast, abstract thing into activities, into dances and stories and songs and poems that can be performed and delighted in and lived in.
The Smashing Pumpkins are, for me, fundamentally liturgical: their songs are pathways to elevation, rites of transcendence that are filled with irrepressible insistence upon paradoxical combinations of the fleshly and the spiritual. I can describe the experience of seeing them in concert last year best by pointing you to my church's Mass. Porcelina of the Vast Oceans is my last gospel.
]]>1 There are a lot of personal, subjective factors involved in the ranking, I should confess.
]]>I've been looking back over my posts this year. I was surprised to remember that it all started with the Democratic Primaries; politics occupied my attention earlier and more fully than it ever has before. Though the relevance of the twists and turns of that season seem diminished in consequence, the aggregate result of it is no less important and marvelous now than it was then: Barack Obama secured the party nomination and then the presidency by adroitly winning over countless people, like me, not naturally inclined toward the Democratic party. And in the short time since his win, he has shown himself to be a measured, confident, cautious leader. I'm very grateful for him, honestly: I wouldn't want to be President of the United States now for the world. I'm also grateful because I suspect that McCain wanted to be President, period. If he had to be President during a crisis like this one, so be it. Obama, though, has persuaded me that he actually wants this opportunity. As he told Jon Stewart, if you got into politics because you wanted to make a difference, now is the time to be President.
The big story of the year for me as a blogger is that despite having an unfocused, not-terribly-active blog, Andrew Sullivan linked to two (Comparing Abortion and Torture, Are Video Games Too Easy?) of my entries on the Daily Dish, one of the most highly trafficked political blogs in the world. It's a rare (for me, unique) privilege to have a writer whom I admire as much as I do Sullivan read things that I've written and pay me the compliment of finding them interesting.
As usual, however, the best writing on this blog has been by commenters. The eloquence and insight of the many visitors to the site is my favorite aspect of my blog, and the quality of the comments here has gone remarked on many times by others, particularly in the many blogged responses to the two posts of mine that got unexpected exposure. As such, I'd like to open up nominations for Comments of the Year. Every comment has an anchor icon right after the date and time it was posted that is a link to the permanent URL for that comment; if you can, please provide that link along with any quoted text in your comment. I will not be selecting a winner; the idea is to create a list of particularly notable and worthwhile comments. The purpose is just to have a chance to be reminded of some of the best thoughts and arguments that have been made here, and to give the nominated commenters the pleasure of knowing that their efforts are appreciated.
]]>This is why it's not enough to say we're "being inclusive" by allowing homophobia to remain part of the national dialogue. Because as long as it's perfectly socially acceptable for someone to say horrible things about gay people, to equate homosexuality with bestiality and pedophilia, there are those who will inevitably take the next step and think it's perfectly socially acceptable to do violence against them.
I infer from the above that the author condemns bestiality and pedophilia. Am I to infer from the rest of her argument that the author feels that such condemnation leads inevitably to personal violence against people who commit pedophilia or bestiality and that, moreover, there's nothing wrong with that? I suspect that the author believes, rather, in a system of law for dealing with wrongdoing, and that she believes there is a humane and just way to deal with pedophiles that does not involve personal violence in the streets. I suspect that she would vehemently condemn someone who beat to death a pedophile in the street while maintaining, at the same time, that this in no way compromised her stance against pedophilia. Aren't people who believe homosexuality to be equivalent to other sexually immoral acts capable of a similar stance? Aren't they capable of the belief that personal violence is wholly, unequivocally wrong, no matter whom it is directed toward?
]]> I can't be sure what the author means by "horrible things". I can think of plenty of horrible things one could say that I don't think should be socially acceptable, either, such as verbal threats, names that are essentially hostile, and so forth. As surely as terms like "nigger" carry the legacy of lynchings and other acts of violence, terms like "fag" carry the legacy of brutal murders and torture. It reads to me, however, like she means that anyone who equates homosexuality with pedophilia and bestiality is saying what she means by "horrible things", and that this is what she means by "homophobia".Homophobia is one of the most rhetorically dishonest terms in our common lexicon, as villainous and blatantly hostile a term as "baby killers" when used to refer to those who oppose the prohibition of abortion. Homophobia is certainly a real phenomenon: many people are repulsed by homosexuality, and many people react to things they are repulsed by with fear. But while some of those who believe homosexuality to be immoral are homophobes, many are not. Many have clear, articulable reasons for their beliefs, whether they be right or wrong. Many of those people, could they be convinced those reasons were false, would happily convert to the belief that homosexuality is moral. To assert that there is no possible reason for disagreement aside from homophobia is to declare simple war on these people's beliefs, to deny their status as rational human beings to be engaged with rather than suppressed.
Andrew Sullivan has an excellent post on this subject:
My long conflict with some parts of the gay left is precisely about this distinction, and Virtually Normal was an attempt to construct a theory for gay civil rights which rests on as much freedom and as little power as possible. I want to live in a free society alongside people who genuinely believe I am a sinner destined for hell - and I want to get along with them. I am concerned (but not obsessed) with changing their minds, but totally repelled by the idea of coercing or pressuring them to do so. I am simply interested in having the government treat me as it would treat them. Once we establish that, we can all believe and say and argue for precisely what we want. May a thousand theologies bloom.
My unequivocal opposition to torture does not make me a supporter of terrorists. Similarly, my opposition to the suppression of speech and dialogue does not make me a supporter of the kind of horrible people who commit acts of violence and terror against gay men and women. Honest debate about the nature of homosexuality is winning the national dialogue. Every time someone uses the word homophobe dishonestly, however, that progress is pushed back.
]]>One day, my wife brought home Virtually Normal, a book written by someone she said was a conservative and a Roman Catholic. The book purported to explain what the author saw as the four major camps of opposition to homosexuality, to explain their arguments, and to refute those arguments.
My response, though I would have hastened to deny it at the time, was very simple: assured that the book was somehow safe--the author shared my conservatism to some degree, and was speaking from a position of sympathy with religion--I began to read the book far less guardedly than I might have done otherwise. Though it shames me to admit it, I often need arguments to be made to me by friends, rather than enemies.
The author, Andrew Sullivan, described in frank terms his childhood experience of sexual self-discovery:
"I remember vividly--perhaps I was five or six--being seated in the back of a car with my second cousin, a tousle-headed, wide-grinned kid a few years older, and being suddenly, unwittingly entranced by him. It was a feeling I had never felt before, the first inkling of a yearning that was only to grow stronger as the years went by."
Reading his passage, I remembered a pair of dreams I had when I was maybe nine or ten. The only details that stand out are that they involved princesses: I, in turn, was a hero, who was struggling terribly to rescue them from peril. When I woke up, I felt like my insides were tied in knots: I longed for those girls, to protect them and hold their hands and--possibly--to seal it all with a kiss.
This was something of a reversal for nine-year-old Nate. I had proudly led a playground war that very year against the girls of our class. I was our general: I made aluminum-foil badges to designate various ranks for the other boys. During recess the planned war was carried out--with the cooperation of the girls--though, as I remember, there was some confusion when the time finally came as to how, exactly, we were going to fight. (I think we settled on hurling kickballs at each other.) I proudly, haughtily detested girls, and would often declare to my mother that I would never be married to a woman. I said, once, to my mom, "I really like the show Saved By the Bell, but I hate all the stuff with girls! When I grow up, I'm going to make a show just like it, but only about boys." She laughed and replied, "What, they're all going to be homosexuals?"
I was mortified. I certainly couldn't have articulated it, but I seem to myself now to have been enacting some kind of last-ditch battle against sexuality in unconscious reaction to my inevitable puberty. I hated it, I abhorred it, I wanted the universe expunged of it. I didn't really know much about sex--I knew about sperm and ova years before I learned anything about genital contact--but, somehow, I was revolted by its very suggestion.
]]> But waking up after those dreams, I found my whole being transformed. I remember walking around in a kind of daze, regretting the mean things I'd said to the girls in my class, amazed that the whole world could seem so starkly different than it had the previous day. "Longing" was really the only word for it, as it was very much romantic, rather than physically sexual, quite unlike the explicit sex dreams that came years later with adolescence.I realized that my memory of my transition into a sexual being had been warped by my focus on sex itself: in my story about my ability to choose my sexual orientation, I was fixated on sex acts. My physical transition to sexuality during puberty was such a terrifying, crazy, revolutionary change that I had forgotten about its true beginning, years before. I had wanted to argue that sexual orientation was more like choosing between using pornography or sex with one's spouse, a choice of avenue for one's sexual impulse. But now, it seemed, there was a memory that argued powerfully that, for me, women had been at the very beginning of it all, before sex: that my own sexual orientation was not chosen at all.
The book opened with the following quotation:
"Thinking, according to the analogy of the Theaetetus, is a process of catching not wild birds, not what is outside experience, but tame birds already within the cage of the mind." --Michael Oakeshott
This quotation, which referenced a Platonic dialogue I had read in college but not remembered terribly well, struck me with significant force. I had scorned the argument that so many homosexuals reported that they had not had a choice in their sexual orientation; people misunderstand themselves all the time, and to use personal testimony as an excuse to abandon the rigors of real argument struck me as reason to be skeptical of the claim that people were "born that way". But the Oakeshott quotation was a gentle, succinct reminder that there is a very real level at which all of our thought must be understood as exploring the concepts we have been given. We are not gods, able to stand with one foot on our own experience and with the rest of us plucking divine, incontrovertible, pristine truths from amidst the stars.
Hadn't I argued more times than I could remember, quoting Immanuel Kant, that everything we ever experience is formed by our faculties? That we experience things in space and time because they are grounds for possible experience, not because we can say anything with certainty about space and time in and of themselves? Or, for that matter, anything in and of itself?
Sullivan went on to deal with the various Christian arguments against homosexuality. The Old Testament prohibition was done away with tidily, for reasons I mentioned earlier. But Sullivan's take on Paul was something I'd never considered. The problem with using Paul's condemnation of homosexuality was that defining homosexuality is anything but straightforward, as a quick survey of sexual mores around the world and throughout history will testify. In Mexico, for instance, a man may have sex with a male prostitute and, so long as he is not "the woman" in the sexual position, no one would think to say anything about his identity. The Ancient Greeks, too, as I myself knew, saw no conflict between marriage to a woman and simultaneous sexual affairs with men. In fact, it was a distinctly modern phenomenon, Sullivan argued, for there to be widespread understanding of the possibility of innate homosexuality, "someone who is constitutively, emotionally and sexually, attracted to the same sex", to use his words.
Sullivan wrote, "It's essential to ask what the reason is for Paul's condemnation of this clearly homosexual behavior. The reference is an analogy to the way in which Romans, having had the opportunity to follow the one true God, persist in polytheism. Paul uses the example of heterosexuals, who have the capacity to be engaged in authentic heterosexual conduct, who yet decide to spurn the "natural use" of their bodies in order to "burn in their lust" for members of the same gender. ... This is not a crime against "nature" as such; it's a crime against the nature of individual heterosexuals. ... Could this condemnation apply to people who are by their own nature homosexual? Unfortunately, Paul never explicitly addresses this point, since he seems to assume that every individual's nature is heterosexual."
Many Christians will balk at this point. My dad certainly would. For the Evangelical Protestants I grew up with, scripture is sacred. It was, as I had been taught in Confirmation class, "the only perfect rule for faith, doctrine, and conduct". It was written by the Holy Spirit through its various scribes, the authors of the individual books themselves.
Arguing that Paul did not have any idea that some people might be naturally homosexually oriented was mistaking the true authorship of Romans: Romans was the Word of God, and God is the source of all truth. So for people like my dad, Sullivan's argument holds no water. God inspired the book of Romans, God knew everything that ever was or could be, and God meant his meaning to be clear, regardless of how much Paul understood of it.
I, however, had undergone a significant conversion with respect to scripture a few years prior: while I was still a Christian and took the Bible seriously, I no longer believed in the inerrancy of scripture. I will leave that story for another occasion, but the Oakeshott quotation resonated with the reasons I had for rejecting the idea of people as scribes for a dictating Holy Spirit. I did not believe that the writers of the Bible had sat in trances, eyelids fluttering, shoulders shaking, as their hands wrote down words that came into their heads. Forget the implausibility, the books of the Bible just weren't written that way. They were filled with personality, specificity, and actual human relationships. The authors were writing from their understanding, clearly, and even if they were inspired someway, they, like me, were not standing with one foot on experience, plucking truths from the stars. They were dealing with the tamed birds already in the cage.
And if Paul did not seem to even have a notion of homosexuality in the way we now debate it, his words could not be used to determine its morality.
I had the urge to tell everyone about my conversion, rather like Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas morning. I couldn't, of course, for my joy at my own change served to highlight how much easy, devastating power I held as a man of accepted, normative desires. "I've decided to approve of you all!" How lovely, how generous of me, I might have thought, sarcastically, were I a homosexual informed that I'd recently been granted moral legitimacy. I still can't fully shake this desire to tell gay people proudly about how I accept them. It's hard to do: I still feel drunk with freedom, with the ability to participate in the joys of the gay couples I know, and desire to babble about it irrepressibly.
I suspect that some of my joy comes from the way I was convinced to reinterpret the story of my own sexuality, with the way dreams of chivalric romance now marked the opening chapter of my life as a sexual being rather than unexpected wet dreams. It had begun with a sudden amour for women, rather than with personal physical sensations. Before, I had been treating sex as a problem, a problem with only one containment solution, where marriage was a kind of cage to prevent sex from destroying us. Now my own story was a much better fit for the idea of sex as a tool for the end of love, a part of it that, when rightly ordered, brings abundant joy in the service of its proper end. That proper end was something divinely granted to us, something--to be less poetic--natural, as opposed to artificial.
I had, in a certain way, surrendered the apple, surrendered my replication of original sin in demanding to be god of my own universe, to have willed the direction and nature of my own sexual desire. I was able to be humble, to grant that I loved my wife--and was attracted to women more generally--because that was how God had made me.
I became persuaded, too, that my attempts to justify differences between the sexes were too simplistic. Faced with the obvious falsehood that there were no differences between the sexes, I was trying to find a clear, true articulation of the fundamental difference between men and women. But any individual difference--assertiveness, strength, how nurturing one was--could be instantly shattered by counter-examples. If there were gender-specific qualities (which my experience argued for, as I understood it) they were overlapping circles on a Ven diagram, or even, frankly, identical circles, with different distribution percentages. How could this kind of data support the idea that heterosexual marriages were universally moral and homosexual marriages immoral based on gender attributes?
I began to feel the absurdity of trying to describe gendered behavior prescriptively, rather than descriptively. The balances of complementarity created by couples throughout time and space must be so infinitely rich in their diversity! The ways I matched my wife, for instance, had something to do with gender, honestly, but had far more to do with us, and we were very different from other successful heterosexual couples. Could I articulate one single thing that separated us, phenomenologically, from every homosexual couple? That bound us together with every heterosexual couple? There is one thing: genitals. Chromosomes. Physical sex characteristics. That was it.
Had the writer of the creation story in Genesis had divine inspiration, a manuscript straight from a God who knew full well about the possibility of homosexuality as we understand it today, one that was intended by our creator to give sanction to one kind of human coupling and exclude it from any other kind? (If so, why was so much of the history of the Jews polygamous?) Or was it more likely that the writer, describing truths--perhaps miraculously inspired--using his understanding of the world he knew?
Much more recently, another piece has fallen into place. In the wake of the approval of Proposition 8 in California, a measure to amend the state's constitution to prohibit gay marriage, there was a significant controversy about the fact that a significant percentage of blacks had voted for Proposition 8, the same blacks whose turnout had been tremendously boosted by the candidacy of Barack Obama. Atlantic blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote, to account for what seems to many liberals like a contradiction in this: "...No group, anywhere, ever was ennobled by oppression."
He meant, I believe, to explain why there should be no surprise that American blacks are not miraculously tolerant and open-minded simply because they have been the objects of intolerance. This may sound like a simple observation, but I believe that the myth that suffering makes one righteous is lodged deep in our collective psyche. It was certainly exacerbated in me by the countless films about the civil rights era and the Holocaust I had watched as a child. Oh, the noble blacks! The noble jews! I felt frequently resentful, honestly, of the fact that I was a white Prostestant, and not black or jewish. Why did I have to have a legacy of utter assholes, whereas they got to fight the noble fight against the bad guys of history?
Andrew Sullivan dealt with this, too, in Virtually Normal, in what he called the culture of the closet. Much of the visible gay male culture that so horrified me could be ascribed due to the exclusion of gay men from the redemptive institutions and rituals of larger society, most notably marriage. Marriage as an institution helps teach sexual virtue, it's not a reward for it. Hadn't I gone through countless public rituals of practice mating in the dating I'd done as a high schooler in bringing home different girls to meet my family? Much of the process had been supervised, guided, and formed by my parents, my church, and my culture. The sexual excess of gay male culture was not necessarily the sign of the fundamental disorderedness of homosexuality any more than promiscuous college students are a sign of the fundamental disorderedness of heterosexuality.
Milk begins with a shockingly casual sexual encounter, but the two men involved end up moving across the country together, living with each other, and trying to support each other as they struggle to figure out what on earth they're here to do. Though the hookup was part of a lifestyle I would describe as flawed, they ended up pursuing a life much closer to one of fidelity and maturity. Harvey Milk himself tries harder than anyone to step out into the open, to engage with society as a whole, and ends up making a stand on the issue of openness. In one riveting scene, Milk explained to a group of campaign supporters that straight people "who know one of us" broke 2 to 1 against the bill that they were rallying against. He challenged anyone who had family or friends who didn't know he was gay to pick up the phone, then and there. Shocked silence fell.
I was on the other end of that phone. I was on the other end when my friend Patrick told me he was gay. I was on the other end of the phone when Andrew Sullivan told me that I did not know the truth about my own sexuality, about the love of my friends in church, my neighbors in my country, and thousands and thousands of humans all over the world.
Virtue is not separate, independent, a posture we can assume in isolation, in perfect independence from the world around it. We are given ourselves by God, and we join together with the rest of mankind to learn best how to, as one people, mirror the image of God.
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