Western civ.
There's days' worth of fascinating discussion on the
First Things main page, now, of the fallout from
Benedict XVI's University of Regensburg address. A lot can be picked up there about Western Christian thought & its modern development, it seems to me – not that I think of myself necessarily as a good judge of what comes into the scope of the category 'Christian thought'. I recommend in particular a couple of entries that on a quick reading I thought especially useful, as thoroughgoing &/or incisive on the address & its context & implications:
one by Ryan Anderson of
First Things and
the other by Russell Reno, theology prof. at Creighton University. They overlap thematically, but Anderson's is perhaps the more informative, Reno's the more concise & pointed, of the two.
Here's the substance of Reno's, from 3rd paragraph to the end:
Two issues come especially to the fore. The first returns the pope’s listeners back to the question of Islam and the West. Without mentioning the emerging clash of civilizations explicitly, Benedict observes that we urgently need a 'genuine dialogue of cultures and religions.' It is hard to see how Western intellectuals, who have dismissed faith as a subrational, childish piety, can possibly provide leadership in this dialogue. One need not be an Islamic fundamentalist to see their antipathy and feel their condescension.
The second issue was a preoccupation of Benedict XVI’s predecessor. As the post-Christian West renounces its theological heritage and puts aside centuries-long inquiries into the complex relationship between faith and reason, our capacity to provide an ultimate context for reason atrophies, and our ability to defend truth-seeking is diminished.
If I might press the pope’s point still further: Scientific culture is not a perpetual-motion machine, and the larger questions of the possibility, meaning, and purpose of the life of the mind, themselves insoluble by means of experimental method, must be asked and answered. If we fail to do so, then we risk regressing into a clever, technologically sophisticated, and well-armed culture unable to distinguish between power and reason. Indeed, our postmodern prophets tell us they are one and the same.
It is at this point that, perhaps, Pope Benedict wants us to think yet again about what he surely knew was a controversial quotation about violence and Islam. In the twilight of the Byzantine Empire, with the military power of Islam bearing down upon Constantinople, the urbane Christian emperor cast his lot with the power of Christian speech and reason against the might of the Muslim sword. What of our own age and our own supposed guardians of culture? Threatened from without just as it decays from within, I worry that our spiritually undisciplined and intellectually undercapitalized velvet barbarism of God-forgetfulness may turn hard, cruel, and vicious.
The worry Reno underlines is well founded, without a doubt. Can it be merely pessimism to look at these powerful currents of 'God-forgetfulness' and conclude the prospects for Western civilization's cultural integrity are seriously uncertain? But at the same time, this portent of dis-integrity is hardly sudden, and hardly a specifically contemporary (or even modern, really) development. More importantly, our particular moment of uncertainty is in no way the first fact about the state of history that whatever may be called a 'Christian world-view' must orient us toward for response. The
first and essential fact to which Christianity provides for a capacity to respond is the fact that Jesus – divine, incarnate, dead buried & resurrected, ascended – now sits at the Father's right hand, bearing all authority. What emergency can intervene to command our attention? Nothing – so the Church confesses – advances against Christ on his throne, the only true Defender of the Faith, or his kingdom, the eternal domain of all whom he's bound, and goes on binding, to himself.
The
essential fact, then, being recognized: what should we make of what we have, as things stand in history where we are, to worry about? Surely these things, these worries confronting the West, the Pope's concerns & mine & ours, aren't less real as facts than that essential fact. If anything, we establish, actually, not diminish, our worries' reality & meaningfulness upon the premise of that essential fact of Jesus's person & work. (It's plainly not for Christians to suppose that civilization & its conflicts might be, as suggested in for instance
The Matrix, a grand illusion, to be transcended by way of some mind trick even grander.) But in
each eventuality thus established as real & terrible – threats without, decay within, the state of cultural self-obsession & doubt itself with all stirring of civilized nobility & folly that attends it, and so on – we see, no less than in whatever in our situation we count as blessings, nothing less than a facet, an aspect, of the Father's far-reaching providence over and the Son's kingly love toward the Church, who is the bride being readied by the Spirit for a celebration
already announced – a celebration already, as it were, the dénouement of a story that Civilization belongs to, & that it exists only to see unfolded.
Superstars
Can't resist posting this pic sent me by great friend David Johnson, showing him as he appeared, pressed into service last week to MC an event for office morale where he works, in character as
Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson with a plastic championship belt from WalMart. There's little comparison between them in life, of course. The Rock is a star of 'World Wrestling' and Hollywood, while Dave's nearest claim to star status is in his church, where he's a well-loved 15-year-veteran teacher of three- and four-year-olds in the sunday school program. But here's something about David Johnson & Dwayne Johnson that a photo might reveal, though this one doesn't: he isn't as The Rock is imposing for sheer size (and can't twist his face into that leering grin either), but I see Dave at my folks' place every week when he's over using the garage to work out (joined, less often than I'd wish these days, by me), and I can tell you The Rock's
enormous arms and shoulders have nothing on Dave's – which given good genes and twenty-five years of body-building are almost astonishing in the impression of power they make, bared, especially on his wiry frame – just about perfect (to this eye trained in youth by images of Arnold, Bruce Lee, Stallone, & so on) in proportion, mass, & line, and absolutely
cut (as the bodybuilders like to say) as if from marble. — Funny in a way, too, incidentally, to observe that the one man's public reputation is built on putting his physique on display, developing it, as image, to establish the 'The Rock' brand; and the other's, in a sense, on keeping his hidden, most of the time, as fitting the idea of self-discipline & sense of propriety.
Comment on architecture
Much as I've learned to admire thoughtful & versatile blogger &
Comment editor
Gideon Strauss (whose blog & its connections represent for me an ongoing intro to & a sort of paradigmatic example of what good may be pursued in this hall-of-mirrors realm of online published &/or quasi-published dialogue) and have generally found the material coming from the
Work Research Foundation of interest, I have to confess my disappointment with the recent
Comment article on the question of architecture's importance for Christians – a question in which I see a variety of my own special concerns reflected. Though I'm not altogether surprised, truthfully, to find myself disappointed. I think it's really a characteristic pattern for framing questions about culture and the role of Christian thought, a pattern fairly firmly established somewhere well below the surface activity of modern Protestant or Evangelical discourse having connection with Reformed or 'Reformational' tradition, that I'm disappointed with – or that I'm gradually discovering resistances to in my own thinking.
But I fear that I'm not up to discussing this disappointment usefully, as things stand with me at present. (Which is then its own cause for disappointment, in a way.) I'd like to find a good foothold for some sort of steady & creditable (which is to say suitable for real dialogue) critical engagement with what sometimes looks to me like a considerable range of the ideas represented in the Neocalvinist body of thought &/or that of various borrowers, imitators, or near relatives. It may be a long time before I see the kind of coherence in my own thinking that indicates such a foothold, though; and for now I am coming to some acceptance of this state of limitation – I think.
What for me it's interesting to draw out here is that the very form my efforts toward more coherent thinking has seemed to assume, circuitously but persistently, over a period of a little more than a decade, is a clear course toward & through some future formal study of architecture. So the problem of what architecture & its study may be is itself pretty thoroughly woven through all my reflections & meta-reflections [whoa!] about the shape & the durable value of that critical engagement with apparently confronting ideas & interestednesses to which I'm trying (ever more warily) to attain.
Well, anyway, there's a good deal in the
Comment article (written by a Christian & experienced architect, David Greusel, who seems well versed in the big-picture issues prominent now for at least a couple of generations in the profession) that I'd like to examine – beginning with its implicit central premise, that architecture (or, more generally, 'design') is a category of human activity or experience whose
importance needs to be explained (biblically or otherwise) to & urged for consideration on Christians, or anyone else. That might seem like an odd place to start objecting, since architectural conditions in the U.S. (at least) have for half a century been so widely, and in many respects so precipitously, in decline. Surely what's called for is improving of architectural sensitivities across the social spectrum, and to that end, among other programs, advancing a well-defined Christian understanding of the problem? I don't say that cultural critiques in this vein don't recognize real & serious failure present in American life, or that public attention to architecture is at a healthy state of development – hardly! But at the same time, the more I hear the problems lofted in puffy ethicalisms like this –
In the United States, especially – the richest country in the world – the standards of acceptable design in the public realm are astonishingly low. Unfortunately, the church is as much to blame for this fact as anyone. Where the church used to be explicitly a center of community life and a benchmark of architectural beauty, North American Christians, especially Protestants, have bought into the spirit of pragmatism that values utility over beauty and economy over excellence.
– the more I'm inclined to think there's some kind of intellectual tail-chasing, especially in the context of explicitly Christian dialogue, going on behind all this concern with culture & 'excellence'. 'Standards of design', 'utility vs. beauty', sepia-toned notions of community life, &c. – ideas like these are not nearly as graspable in substance, to my thinking, as their plugging-in in exhortative language of this kind suggests. In fact I suspect that glib & connectionless usages like this are more likely to confirm people, broadly speaking, in what come finally to architecturally insensitive & inattentive mindsets than they are to lead to meaningful revival in attitudes toward the potentials of significance & the particulars of form of buildings & places – even while, perhaps, repetition of the phrases encourages more spending on design services (& design academia & so on).
Of course, suspicions aren't arguments. But that's where I'll have to leave things for now.
Taking sides
Prospect's
feature article this month is an interesting Conservative (which is to say .. er .. liberal) treatment of the enduring contest between political right and left as the contest between
liberté and
égalité for the hand of
fraternité.
Liberté, according to author Danny Kruger
* *, 'special adviser' to Conservative leader David Cameron, has the rightful claim (in Britain, at all events).
He gives some space up front to a useful discussion of the terms of conflict.
Fraternity has always been the submerged object of politics, while the battle between equality and liberty raged overhead. Every time that politicians invoke 'community,' every time they celebrate 'tradition' or 'solidarity,' they are talking about fraternity. And yet there has been a general failure to admit or understand the place of fraternity in our politics. Equality and liberty are abstract terms, easily conceptualised. They can, in principle (and they work better in principle than in practice), be translated directly into law. Fraternity, however, representing the diffuse business, the multiple relationships of society itself, is harder to comprehend.
... [T]he left imagines that fraternity is just another word for equality, and the right imagines that fraternity will be taken care of by liberty. Yet these days fraternity is moving above ground. Francis Fukuyama has conceded that the premise of his book The End of History is limited only to economic and political structures. History has not 'ended' in the sphere of culture – indeed, Fukuyama agrees with his antagonist Samuel Huntington that, as he puts it, 'the chief issue in world politics henceforth will be the cultural issue.'
Should it appear to constituencies that Right and Left represent ideological opposition whose significance may be fading, Kruger wishes to free them from illusions:
The language of fraternity – of community, solidarity, civic obligation – is not exclusive to the right. New Labour has said similar things. But the widespread sense that both parties now inhabit a soggy centre ground derives from the poverty of our political language, and our persistence in seeing things only in terms of equality and liberty, of statist left and individualist right, so that any move by Labour or Conservative away from their core principle must be a move towards the other and a betrayal of their philosophy.
In fact, the leaderships of both parties are being true to their party's principles. They are approaching the subject of fraternity from opposite directions, and the point of departure determines their approach to the subject.
Thenceforward, a 21st-century Conservative apologetic in summary, drawing out evidences of New Labour's statist core commitments, distancing Cameron's conservatism from any distasteful memories of Thatcherism, weaving together localist & libertarian themes, &c.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Commonwealth, Darrell Reimer
can be observed tripping lightly about the notion of liberalism, with footwork that might leave the most confident up-&-coming political adviser a little dizzy. : )
An excerpt
From Susanne Langer,
Philosophy in a New Key, Chap. 6, 'Life-symbols: the roots of sacrament':
[A]s soon as an expressive act is performed without inner momentary compulsion it is no longer self-expressive; it is expressive in the logical sense. It is not a sign of the emotion it conveys, but a symbol of it; instead of completing the natural history of a feeling, it denotes the feeling, and may merely bring it to mind, even for the actor. When an action acquires such a meaning it becomes a gesture.
Genuine acts are completed in every detail unless they are forcibly interrupted, but gestures may be quite abortive imitations of acts, showing only their significant features. They are expressive forms, true symbols. Their aspect becomes fixed, they can be deliberately used to communicate an idea of the feelings that begot their prototypes. Because they are deliberate gestures, not emotional acts, they are no longer subject to spontaneous variation, but bound to an often meticulously exact repetition, which gradually makes their forms as familiar as words or tunes.
With the formalization of overt behavior in the presence of the sacred objects, we come into the field of ritual. This is, so to speak, a complement to the life-symbols; for as the latter present the basic facts of human existence, the forces of generation and achievement and death, so the rites enacted at their contemplation formulate and record man's response to the supreme realities. Ritual 'exposes feelings' in the logical rather than the physiological sense. It may have what Aristotle called 'cathartic' value, but that is not its characteristic; it is primarily an articulation of feelings. The ultimate product of such articulation is not a simple emotion, but a complex, permanent attitude. This attitude, which is the worshipers' response to the insight given by the sacred symbols, is an emotional pattern, which governs all individual lives. It cannot be recognized through any clearer medium than that of formalized gesture; yet in this cryptic form it is recognized, and yields a strong sense of tribal or congregational unity, of rightness and security. A rite regularly performed is the constant reiteration of sentiments toward 'first and last things'; it is not a free expression of emotions, but a disciplined rehearsal of 'right attitudes'.
(Ahmm ... In which it should be evident that Langer's uses of terms that have ancient & continuing theological import in addition to varieties of modern anthropological import aren't necessarily to be confused with my own ordinary usages.)
Opening his mouth, a little
Günter Grass, whose most famous book I'm in the middle of
listening to on tape (in English translation), answers – sort of – a few of the questions that have met his late-in-life acknowledgement that he'd been in Hitler's SS in the last year or so of WWII, in front of an audience as part of a reading event for promotion of his new autobiography. The interview's published (yesterday) on
Spiegel's site
here.
Suri
I'm cynical – surely no one will be surprised to read it here – about celebritydom and attendant press. I rarely go to movies, never watch the award shows, more often than not find actor interviews & profiles worthless, etc. – confirmed to the point of curmudgeonry in my distaste for Hollywood. Moreover, since of course I do manage a more-than-adequate intake of standard Hollywood fare in spite of all my high-mindedness, I can say that I usually find the sort of movies that actors like Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes appear in unappealing (especially if I'm paying to watch). And still much less am I interested in Tom Cruise & Katie Holmes as public figures, individually, or as private individuals, figurally (or even literally), than in their movies.
That being said, I'm happy, with all sincerity, for this Hollywood couple, as for anyone into whose keeping the Lord gives a beautiful little girl. In fact it happens I'm – like a
sap – very taken tonight with
a few photos, featuring their new daughter, that have just hit the press for the vindication of Cruise & Holmes, & their inevitable full restoration to checkout-line favor. I feel strange fellow-manly warmth right now toward the ridiculous Mr Cruise. What a beautiful baby he's got!
So, I'm a sap. But I've always been something a fool for babies (& not only for the pretty ones), of course, as people who know me well know well enough.
Here, then, a prayer against Hollywood & the Devil (and their envy toward all real beauty), that this celebrity pair might somehow hold out & be good parents for their celebrity child. A daughter is a very precious thing.
An excerpt
From Günter Grass's
The Tin Drum, Book 1, Chap. 9 'The Rostrum':
We met in the menagerie. Mama and her two cavaliers were letting the monkeys make monkeys of them. Hedwig Bronski, who for once had come along, was showing her children the ponies. After a lion had yawned at me, I foolishly became involved with an owl. I tried to stare him down, but it was the owl that stared me down. Oskar crept away dismayed, with burning ears and a feeling of inner hurt, taking refuge between two blue and white trailers, because apart from a few tied-up dwarf goats, there were no animals here.
He was in suspenders and slippers, carrying a pail of water. Our eyes met as he was passing and there was instant recognition. He set down his pail, leaned his great head to one side, and came toward me. I guessed that he must be about four inches taller than I.
"Will you take a look at that!" There was a note of envy in his rasping voice. "Nowadays it's the three-year-olds that decide to stop growing." When I failed to answer, he tried again: "My name is Bebra, directly descended from Prince Eugene, whose father was Louis XIV and not some Savoyard as they claim." Still I said nothing, but he continued: "On my tenth birthday I made myself stop growing. Better late than never."
Since he had spoken so frankly, I too introduced myself, but without any nonsense about my family tree. I was just Oskar.
"Well, my dear Oskar, you must be fourteen or fifteen. Maybe as much as sixteen. What, only nine and a half? You don't mean it?"
It was my turn to guess his age. I purposely aimed too low.
"You're a flatterer, my young friend. Thirty-five, that was once upon a time. In August I shall be celebrating my fifty-third birthday. I could be your grandfather."
Oskar said a few nice things about his acrobatic clown act and complimented him on his gift for music. That aroused my ambition and I performed a little trick of my own. Three light bulbs were the first to be taken in. Bravo, bravissimo, Mr. Bebra cried, and wanted to hire Oskar on the spot.
Even today I am occasionally sorry that I declined. I talked myself out of it, saying: "You know, Mr. Bebra, I prefer to regard myself as a member of the audience. I cultivate my little art in secret, far from all the applause. But it gives me pleasure to applaud your accomplishments." Mr. Bebra raised a wrinkled forefinger and admonished me: "My dear Oskar, believe an experienced colleague. Our kind has no place in the audience. We must perform, we must run the show. If we don't, it's the others that run us. And they don't do it with kid gloves."
His eyes became as old as the hills and he almost crawled into my ear. "They are coming," he whispered. "They will take over the meadows where we pitch our tents. They will organize torchlight parades. They will build rostrums and fill them, and down from the rostrums they will preach our destruction. Take care, young man. Always take care to be sitting on the rostrum and never to be standing out in front of it."
Hearing my name called, Mr. Bebra took up his pail. "They are looking for you, my friend. We shall meet again. We are too little to lose each other. Bebra always says: Little people like us can always find a place even on the most crowded rostrum. And if not on it, then under it, but never out in front. So says Bebra, who is descended in a direct line from Prince Eugene."
Calling Oskar, Mama stepped out from behind a trailer just in time to see Mr. Bebra kiss me on the forehead. Then he picked up his pail of water and, swaying his shoulders, headed for his trailer.
Mama was furious. "Can you imagine," she said to Matzerath and the Bronskis. "He was with the midgets. And a gnome kissed him on the forehead. I hope it doesn't mean anything."
Culture, nature
'Sustainability' enjoys lofty buzzword standing these days, and it's very prominent especially in architecture-related talk, of course. There certainly seems to be reason to hope that a lot of good may be done through it in the realm of architecture & planning. For my part, although I cherish a silly wish that we might dispense with buzzwords generally – and though I worry that 'sustainable' is far too slight & particular a word to do the work expected of it in the current environment, and that the concepts meant to be established could be weakened, in the big picture, for the sake of selling it – I'm very interested in the trend, and would like, with time, to become more involved in seeing a number of the aims it represents pursued.
Here are a couple of clips of not necessarily well-articulated but nevertheless thoughtful & perhaps representative expression on the theme, from an interview in the
AIA's new podcast catalogue. The
interviewees are architects Dan Williams and Henry Siegel, both associated with the AIA's Committee On The Environment. The interviewer is Kira Gould, the committee's present Vice Chair.
Gould: I'm just wondering if ... getting to that knowledge and those deeper understandings – some of which we used to have, as part of the profession, and maybe just need to reinvestigate – but if that involves conversations with a broader set of people than we're used to talking to.
Williams: Absolutely, great point. One of the things that's critical is the study and understanding of ecology; and we spend, uh – like for example if we're doing urban design, we spend a tremendous amount of time on how people walk and move, and transportation systems and all of that – but very little time, you know, really looking at what community means, in the larger sense. And the community is, you know, the animals and the critters and microclimates, and all those really dynamic pieces. So one of the things ... that we think is really critical is ... for architecture students and ... architecture professionals and ... all people in the sustainability movement to really look deeply into ecology – you know, read a book, read several books, take some courses, get an understanding of how this home that we live in works, and then apply that to your design.
Gould: Become a nature nerd.
Williams: There you go. Yeah, we – we are nature, there's no separation. One can think they can separate themselves, but ... it's actually a pretty wonderful planet and when you call it home, it's a very different approach.
And Siegel's summary statement at the end of the interview:
A lot of people are talking about [sustainable design], and I don't think anybody quite knows what it means yet. But I think we're headed in the direction of really thinking about whole systems. And what that means to me is – is taking away the separation between nature and culture. So, what happens when you think about your building as part of a whole system that involves a site and a community and a region, and how do you think about all those much broader issues when you're designing just one building that's just a piece of that – ... it's not just an object that sits on a site, it's a piece of a much broader system. And how does that affect the way you design buildings.
There's little argument to be made
against conceiving of building as a matter of involvement in communities as 'whole systems'. But the approach made in argument
for thinking ecologically here might be too generously abstract for its apparent ends. I wonder, in particular, how far this provocative & undoubtedly useful 'no separation between nature and culture' language can be worked before it gets architects into troublesome territory (if, as things go, it should turn out to be language that has any real endurance). How sustainable, the question might be, are our ways of talking about 'sustainability'?
