Next week work will be taking me to LA. The week after that I'll be heading to… well, someplace else. Geez. I hate flying. I have a phobia. It terrifies me. Think "Rain Man." Anyway…

This week I've met a few well-travelled folks, people who are retired and spend their time travelling about the country building homes with Habitat for Humanity. My boss has extended me the luxury of working on a Habitat house in the day, and working my real job at night. I think I'm not wise for assuming this schedule, but I am thoroughly, thoroughly enjoying helping build the house. I get to do physical labor, I meet generous folks, I do something good for another family, and I feel like I'm living like I'm supposed to. And, you know, it's a good thing for one's humility to do something you know little about. I have no idea how many times this week I've been shown what I've done wrong. But there are some really fine, practical, hands-on educators doing this stuff. I've been working with a guy and I'll ask him, "So, how do I do this? What am I doing wrong here? How do I fix this?" He'll show me how to do it, and then have me do it myself. Then he'll say, "Do you want me to tell me you why?" and if you answer in the affirmative, he'll explain the reasoning behind the action. I am always fascinated that there's a reason behind pretty much everything, and that a zillion little things are discovered throughout history, preserved and passed down and taught, becoming common knowledge in a particular community. Anyway, I like this approach to teaching. Tell somebody how to do something. If they're happy with that, so be it. But then offer to explain why that's how it's done. If they want to know, tell them. Either way: easy, efficient, done.

One of my kids asked me why I'm doing this. So I explained, again, that everything we have, and everything we can do, has been given to us for a reason: to help other people. Hopefully, one of these days it will stick. And hopefully, one of these days I'll do a better job of living up to it myself.

Here's the interesting theoretical aspect to the experience: you've got the two poles of American socioeconomic political theory coming together in a way that works very well. The company sponsoring this house is a big-business capitalistic enterprise which just so happens to have invested one and a half million dollars into Habitat, and on this gig is pitching in big time. On the other hand, there's an element going on concerning the haves and the have-nots, about socioeconomics and about what's fair and what's not, and about people who aren't worried about getting their hands dirty and their knuckles busted. It's a really interesting mix of various ideologies coming together both in theory and in individual people. The frameworks battling it out silently and far behind the scenes are enormously complex. But, I like my version: everything we have, and everything we can do, is to help other people.

This basic understanding and agreement is part of what I'm preaching in life.

It is useless and even laughable to base political thought on the faint hope of a purely contingent and subjective moral illumination in the hearts of the world's leaders. But outside of political thought and action, in the religious sphere, it is not only permissible to hope for such a mysterious consummation, but it is necessary to pray for it. We can and must believe not so much that the mysterious light of God can "convert" the ones who are mostly responsible for the world's peace, but at least that they may, in spite of their obstinacy and their prejudices, be guarded against fatal error. — New Seeds, chapter 16

If I am to be "holy" I must [be] something that I do not understand, something mysterious and hidden, something apparently self-contradictory; for God, in Christ, "emptied Himself." He became a man, and dwelt among sinners. He was considered a sinner. He was put to death as a blasphemer, as one who at least implicitly denied God, as one who revolted against the holiness of God. Indeed, the great question in the trial and condemnation of Christ was precisely the denial of God and the denial of His holiness. So God Himself was put to death on a cross because He did not measure up to man's conception of His Holiness. … He was not holy enough, He was not holy in the right way, He was not holy in the way they had been led to expect. Therefore he was not God at all. […But] in reality this manifestation was the complete denial and rejection of all human ideas of holiness and perfection. — New Seeds, chapter 8

As noted previously, when I was typing my post on Plato's Dilemma, I got to the two words "be humble" and was suddenly struck by the idea of my religious faith being a metaphor for the issues surrounding Plato's Dilemma. The parallel runs something like this:

God exists. God is truth. God is knowable, but only as something unknowable; what we ultimately come to know of God is God's ultimate un-knowable-ness. So, we acknowledge that there is Truth, we acknowledge that somehow it can/should/does guide our lives, but we also acknowledge we cannot fully ascertain nor articulate it. We must address the idea of God, of relationship with God. We must decide notions of faith for ourselves. But doing so involves making claims. It involves abiding in an ideology. We cannot/should not/must not make absolute claims. We cannot say our faith is superior to another person's faith without claiming to be God ourselves, which we most certainly are not. We must not judge another. In the face of this, we form a faith of our own (as Paul said, we work our salvation "with fear and trembling") and we hold it in the utmost of humility. We know it is frail because we have worked it out. We know it is precious because God has made it so. The key comes down to holding our faith in deep, profound humility before God and other human beings.

In other words, faith involves living according to a personal ideology concerning Truth, one that we must value, therefore live by, and therefore in some way espouse for it to be a faith worth having. Yet, we cannot universally verify or validate a given faith in human terms. And, since we cannot verify or validate it, we understand that each person's humble faith is just as valid as our own. Yet from a particular point of view, to say that every faith is valid is to negate the idea of Truth, and therefore the value of faith. Plato's Dilemma.

However, after years of wrestling with this issue in terms of faiths, I have resolved it to my satisfaction with this idea of humility; with this idea that it is not the intellectual particulars of faith which make it faith. Rather, it is the heart, the spirit, the humility of the faithful which is the key. The view needs to be elaborated upon to explain well, but it is a workable solution. I like to say in metaphorical terms that we religious folks spend a lot of time arguing over what kind of clothes (causal, dress, business) we are supposed to wear in the sight of God, but God only cares about the fabric; not the style or cut of the garments. Likewise, God cares about our heart, our humility, our submission and devotion to him at a deeply personal level. I don't think God is interested in doctrine and dogma.

And so. Reading Gee's work on Plato's Dilemma, when I understood Gee's point intuitively, as if it were a long lost friend suddenly formally introduced, and when I recognized that (contrary to Gee's claim) a solution exists, and it rests in intellectual humility, I was thunderstruck by the parallel to my personal view of faith. And I had to ask myself, which is the chicken, and which is the egg? As a born existentialist, have I worked out my faith as a response to a pre-existing intuition of Plato's Dilemma, or is my intuitive grasp of Plato's Dilemma, and the solution to it that I see as perfectly natural, born of my pre-work performed in working out my faith?

An interesting question, and one that could be asked more directly by asking if my view of God, Man and faith is based largely (merely?) in my existentialist mind. At present, I would wager that both my faith, and my grasp of Plato's Dilemma, are based in my existentialist nature. Which gets back to my posts of this year regarding belief, reality, and faith. We truly believe only what are minds of capable of truly believing; we can do nothing else.

A closing point? A takeaway? I left it sitting on a doorstep in my previous post: be humble. To read, to hear, to interpret, to speak is to take a stand. Our stand may not be superior to any other. Or perhaps it may be. We may never know. This doesn't make our stand unimportant. But it does mean that we should stand humbly in a humility that recognizes it may be wrong, and in an even greater humility that recognizes it may be right.

AH HAH! So now I understand my hand-wringing and vacillation about posting my opinions on debatable matters. Now I understand in a simply-stated way what for years I've been fussing with and dancing around. Now I know that this middle ground has a name. Now I've seen it in print. In an academic work. And everybody knows that makes it official: Plato's Dilemma. Yep. Plato's Dilemma.

Literacy scholar Dr. James Paul Gee briefly describes what he terms Plato's Dilemma, and my summary of his brief description follows presently. Plato's argument against the written word was that it could not answer back to a questioning reader. A reader could not ask the text itself, "What do you mean?" and receive a newly phrased answer, as could be done in oral dialogue. Furthermore, a text could make no decision as to whom it presented itself; crudely meaning, somebody too ignorant to have any business reading it. On the other hand, if one simply presented texts with an official interpretation that was unquestionably authoritative, this was no better than the history of oral myth (which is to say, Homeric myth) which blindly guided the society of Plato's time and place. The dilemma in short is this: (1) To force an interpretation upon a text is to exercise mind control, authority, etc. over the people and dupe them as fits your needs rather than theirs, but (2) to allow every reading of a text to be considered legitimate is to at once say no reading of the text is legitimate, and therefore have no need of the text.

I realized immediately as I read Gee's presentation that this paradox plagues us on many levels. Consider that "text" is not necessarily a written sheet of paper, but can be any discourse. One can see that if we look at religion, the same point arises. If "anything goes" as far as views of Man and God, then there is not much point in talking about Man and God, for there is no Truth. On the other hand, to claim a view as "correct" or "incorrect" or more or less one or the other is to align oneself with an ideology and claim its supremacy over others. It is to privilege oneself implicitly; and who has this right, to claim to know the Truth?

And so we must do what we should not do. In my terms, this is the dilemma restated. Where does a person place her or himself vis-à-vis this situation? Is there no truth to be rightly claimed anywhere, or do we risk the arrogance to claim that we, few or one among many, possess it? Gee states there is no way out of this dilemma; to "read" a "text" is to instantly form an opinion and align with an ideology. Certainly, as Gee points out, Plato was not innocent. His solution, offered in The Republic, was that texts should be limited in distribution and always "correctly" interpreted by philosopher-kings; people like… Plato, of course. The issue comes down to how we deal with this; what do we do in facing the fact that our choice is either nihilism or privileging ourselves above others?

In two words: Be humble.

… … …

[*cough.* It just struck me that my faith-based, existentialist thinking views (uses?) religion as a giant metaphor built upon this basic problem of human existence. *cough. * ]

Every one of us forms an idea of Christ that is limited and incomplete. It is cut according to our own measure. We tend to create for ourselves a Christ in our own image, a projection of our own aspirations, desires and ideals. We find in Him what we want to find. We make Him not only the incarnation of God but also the incarnation of the things we and our society and our part of society happen to live for.

Therefore, although it is true that perfection consists in imitating Christ and reproducing Him in our own lives, it is not enough merely to imitate the Christ we have in our imaginations.

[…] Therefore if you want to have in your heart the affections and dispositions that were those of Christ on earth, consult not your own imagination but faith. Enter into the darkness of interior renunciation, strip your soul of images and let Christ form Himself in you by His Cross. — New Seeds, chapter 21

I'm a little tired, and I skimmed it pretty quickly, but this seems like a pretty useful presentation of Jesus' injunction to not judge others.

Clichés, almost by definition, are oversimplifications: "There are two sides to every coin," or "There's good and bad in everything." But, for the purposes of this post, I will make use of such an oversimplification.

This week I was reading a news article about creativity and mental disorders. According to whatever the latest studies are, there seems to be some sort of link between the two. Really? Wow. I never would have guessed that. What I found interesting in this article was that it claimed not that one causes the other, but rather that the two are linked by sharing one or more precursors in one's brain/mind. I take that to mean that one or more traits in a person results in some particular type(s) of creativity and some particular type(s) of mental disorder. A small distinction, but one I find interesting.

If a shrink asked me the classic, "Are you troubled by persistent, nagging thoughts?" I would answer with something like, "Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah I am. Definitely. I am. I'm troubled by persistent and nagging thoughts. It's like they're stuck, in my brain. I can feel them, right here (*pointing to some place on my skull, and pressing my finger down hard*). What's up with that? What does that mean? Should I be troubled by the fact that I'm troubled?" And, fifteen minutes later, "Can I ask a question about the persistent and nagging thoughts again…" and, days/weeks/months later, "I was wondering if we can talk about persistent nagging thoughts. I've been thinking about them constantly, and, uh, is there like a persistent meta-nagging meta-thought about persistent nagging thoughts, 'cause I've been thinking constantly about it since the moment you mentioned it…" Yeah. And of course there's worry. Anxiety. Guilt. All that stuff. I like the official word for it: Rumination. Having thoughts go over and over in your mind, never being settled. It's like your brain isn't satisfied, refuses to be satisfied, unless it's grinding its gears on something it knows it shouldn't be worried about. It's a very hungry monster who serves no purpose but to produce fuel and then consume it in a tight and never-ending cycle that produces nothing but pollution. It's not very fun. I often wish I wasn't this way. But then again, how else would I be? If I were different, what would I gain, and what would I lose?

I remember writing once many years ago in a journal something to the effect of: "My mind has never been empty. Not once has it been without thought. Perhaps this is my strength. Perhaps this is my weakness." So, it's not like I haven't thought of this stuff before (and yes, that statement is both ironic and unsurprising). The core of the issue, for me, is that not all of the activity in my mind is an endless loop of fear/worry/anxiety/guilt. A lot of it is composed of those things, but on the other hand a lot of my mind's behavior results in outside-the-box, inspiring, emotionally moving, compassionate, extremely positive perceptions of the world. So one has to ask, if me, would getting rid of the former result in losing the latter? If so, would the loss be worth it? Would getting rid of mental "disorder" be worth giving up the way one sees and dwells upon beauty? I tend to think, over and over and over and over and over again, not. Which leads, because I say so, to part two of this post.

What is a mental "disorder?" As I understand it, a "disorder" is something that affects the quality of life of a person or those around him or her. In other words, a person is disordered if he or she feels disordered, and/or a majority of people close to him or her feel it to be the case. So, if a guy firmly believes he's a parakeet, eats grain all day, sits on a perch instead of a couch, and chirps a lot, but neither he nor anybody in his life is bothered by it, he doesn't have a disorder. He has aberrant behavior traits, but not a "disorder." (I should say at this point that I am not legally nor professionally—nor educationally—qualified to make any of these statements, in case one of you readers might have inferred something other than the obvious. I'm just stating my personal take on the issues.) Conversely, if a gal is pretty much "normal," but is somehow so displeased with herself that she can't function, then she has a disorder. She may even appear to others to be the most well adjusted person in the world, but still be disordered. So there is a whole lot of grey wiggle room here. My point? I think we call a lot of people "disordered" who aren't. We don't like their behavior traits, or they themselves think they are disordered because people tell them they are, but they aren't disordered in actuality; we just decide they are. We take our personal feelings and opinions, and reify them by claiming, as if it's concrete, "That dude over there has a serious problem." Maybe we shouldn't be so harsh and arrogant. Maybe the breadth of what is "normal" is much, much wider than we think. Maybe there is a large continuum of human psychology, and the continuum itself is what is normal; not just a narrow, boring band in the middle of it. And on the other hand, maybe some of the folks we consider normal are actually quite disordered.

And finally, there is good and bad in everything. There are two sides to every coin. Perhaps nearly all of us are normal and judged too harshly. Perhaps we are all disordered in some sense—all of us broken in some way or another. But I prefer this view: that both are true. That being broken, being disordered, being in some way impoverished, is normal. Heads or tails? You get both when you hold a coin. I suggest we pray to understand and see that the two are inseparable, and that this is what makes us human—worthy of being, and able to be, loved. "Normal", "well adjusted", and "perfect" are in no need of Love and Grace—but disorder, brokenness and poverty are. In this way, the latter are greater than the former. This is a Grand Mystery the Kingdom, and I choose to live within its walls. That's my view. And I think about it all the time.

Here are some observations from Thomas, which I borrow in the moment to comment on the upcoming election, with no more nor less cynicism directed at either candidate:

A revolution is supposed to be a change that turns everything completely around. But the ideology of political revolution will never change anything except appearances. There will be violence, and power will pass from one party to another, but when the smoke clears and the bodies of all the dead men are underground, the situation will be essentially the same as it was before: there will be a minority of strong men in power exploiting all the others for their own ends. There will be the same greed and cruelty and lust and ambition and avarice and hypocrisy as before. — New Seeds, chapter 20

I caught most of the Biden/Palin debate. Or, if you prefer, Palin/Biden debate.

The most useful thing for me in the debate was that it touched on one of my favorite examples of politics in action. When asked about rights for homosexuals, Biden of course was quick to make it clear that his team supports the same rights for couples, regardless of orientation. Palin was of course quick to make it clear that marriage in her opinion is between a man and woman. Fair enough. But notice that when pressed, Palin's team admittedly supports the rights and Biden's team admittedly doesn't support redefining the word marriage. None of this should come as a surprise, since rights are rights and (I tend to think) nobody at the federal level is in any way interested in redefining marriage since it would be a serious legal nightmare. And as far as I can tell, the same was true for Bush and Kerry; two candidates with the same stand on each side of the issue—when pressed to say so.

This is the concise, clear example of one way politics functions. Imagine a rock held in each hand. One rock gets held behind the back, while the rock which appeals most to the emotions of one's base is waved around as if it were a diamond in the rough, possessed by only one party. Slight of hand, smoke and mirrors. Something from nothing. And it works. With respect to a great many issues, this trickery works. And for that reason and that reason alone, that it works, politicians employ it.

This slight of hand is so unsophisticated that there is only one general reason it works, which is that the voters are already biased and willing to believe that the rocks brandished by their respective candidates really are diamonds. This step is accomplished by convincing the voters that the other candidates are liars, the implication being that they lied once, so they're lying now, but (by gawd!) there must be truth somewhere, so by elimination it must belong to us (or, at least, we're the only shot you've got). To put it a little more brutally, you know the other side has no diamonds. They don't even have rocks. They have fistfuls of turds. So, hey, even if I don't have a diamond, at least I've got a rock. You don't want to vote for some party that deals poop, do you? Of course not. Rocks are better than poop. So, uh, check out this nice shiny rock. Could be a diamond, don't you think? Maybe? No? Well, just forget that. Instead, just think about how bad poop smells.

Slight of hand, smoke and mirrors. Something from nothing. And it works.

Amazing.