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One Quote Review: After Christendom? by Stanley Hauerwas

How can you not love a book that is sub-titled: “How the church is to behave if freedom, justice and a Christian nation are bad ideas”?!

The crucial question is how we can make the story we believe to be true not only compelling for us but for the whole world – a world caught between such unhappy alternate stories. In short, the challenge is how, as Christians, we can find a way to witness to the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus without that witness becoming an ideology for the powers that would subvert that witness. I think we can do that if we take seriously the very character required of us by the story that we believe to be the truth about our existence – that is, that we be witnesses.

– Stanley Hauerwas, After Christendom?, p. 148.

This is a book that takes this question very seriously. But Hauerwas is not about to instrumentalise the church so that we can increase our growth and maximise our religious market-share by pretending to care about avoiding ideology. This book will be deeply frustrating if you only read books to get answers.

I suppose that isn’t true, really. The answer this book gives is that there are vastly more complicated and more primary problems with wanting to share the story we believe to be true in a compelling fashion than simply “how to achieve that end”. The six essays are premised on the idea that the church is today in an “awkwardly intermediate stage of having once been culturally established but not yet clearly disestablished.” Taking on what it means to be free, what it means to be just, what it means to be a citizen, what it means to learn a craft, what it means to be sexual and what it means to be educated, Hauerwas is always pushing us back to the question “Is it true?”

Your Correspondent, Got more sneakers than a plumber’s got pliers

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One Quote Review: The Twenty-Seventh City by Jonathan Franzen

Clarence addressed his ball and drew his driver back over his head with a studied creakiness. Everything by the book, RC though. Clarence was like that. When he was fully wound up, he uncoiled all at once. His club whistled. He clobbered the ball and then nodded, accepting the shot like a personal compliment.

Which is how I hope Jonathan Franzen accepts paragraphs of vivid description like this when they come out of his typewriter. A sprawling, impressive novel with details in the plot so unusual and so seemingly out of kilter with the times we live in that you can’t help but like it. Can a novel this massive and dense be described as quaint?

Your Correspondent, This I know, his teeth as white as snow

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One Quote Review: The Big Short by Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis is one of the most stylish journalists around. My copy of the Big Short, procured from the local town library is one of the least stylish covers I’ve ever seen.

The Big Short

On the morning that Bear Stearns collapsed, Steve Eisman was delivering a speech at an event due to be attended by no less than Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Fed. Eisman was an investment banker who had for a number of years cultivated a portfolio based on the premise that the mortgage boom was built on fraud and would collapse. As his prophecies were literally coming true, this is what he wanted to say, but ultimately didn’t have the guts to say:

The upper classes of this country raped this country. You fucked people. You built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience. Nobody ever said, ‘This is wrong.’ And no one ever gave a shit about what I had to say.

It is a compelling rant that summarises the shocking fraud, injustice and incompetence that has led us (with many other factors at play) to a situation where almost half a million Irish people are unemployed, Greece is on the edge of anarchy and America is slipping back into recession.

This is a magnificent read and perhaps that is a clue to its major weakness. I kept wondering, “How can a story so compelling be accounting for all the nuances that do justice to reality?” Yet it isn’t an academic treatise on the history of the financial collapse and it doesn’t pretend to be. It is the story of how Eisman and his buddies, three lads in Cupertino and a neurologist with aspergers made a fortune by being some of the only people who were willing to actually call the mortgage boom junk.

I would love two more books by Lewis; a prequel and sequel. The mortgage boom was ultimately a political movement started by Clinton. How can such a noble idea, “Let us make it possible for more people to own their homes” have gone so wrong? And subsequently, why was only Lehmann allowed to collapse? The story of government intervention into a system that had despised social responsibility during the “good times” needs to be unfurled in a similar, accessible fashion.

A superb book.

Your Correspondent, Remarried to Lady Liquor

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One Quote Review: Mother Country by Marilynne Robinson

This is a surprisingly little read book that displays Robinson’s wonderful discursive intelligence in a whole new field. It asks why we should be so concerned about the threat of nuclear warfare when plants like Sellafield produce the equivalent destructive force and let it slip out of tubes minute by minute, day by day, no less toxic because it happens over the course of fifty years, not fifty milliseconds?

It is a caustically anti-British book, in a form that is rare. She directly connects the rise of British capitalism through the Poor Laws, the Welfare state and the plutonium industry with the curious emptiness of rigorous thought in British policy formation.

Needless to say, I loved it.

British social thought may as well be imagined as occurring this way. It takes place in a country house built and furnished to accord with conventions polished by use, a house filled with guests, great and minor luminaries, ornaments of literature, the sciences, the church, and of philosophy and politics. Most of them, not coincidentally, are cousins at some remove. They are charmed to find in one another just that streak of intuitive brilliance they had always admired in themselves, and to be confirmed in their sense that they are true members of a group in which there are no impostors, by a very great similarity of taste, of interest, of sympathy. It is a leisurely visit, some centuries in length, and in due course everyone has confessed his weakness for Hesiod, and admired the garden, and regretted the weather. The evenings would perhaps have begun to weigh, if someone had not suggested a game called Philanthropy. The rules of this game are very simple. One must justify things as they are by attacking things as they are. It is a philosophic game, perfectly suited to showing off a fine wit. It has even the thrill of risk, since it invites subversive ideas. But the point is always, of course, to achieve a resolution that will bring the argument right back where it began.

This distinguished party warms to the challenge. And how affecting it is to hear them, one after another, in the language of statesman and moralist, decry the sufferings of the poor, until it seems that the very table they sit around must be made into splints and crutches and the topiary garden planted in potatoes. Then, just when the pleasure of participation in this virtuous fantasy is at its height, that is to say, just when the temptations of virtue are most intense, then the player reveals the illusion: This “virtue” is not virtue at all, but an evil to be scrupulously avoided. A little thrill of relief passes over the company when their world is safely restored to them. But the risk is never as great as it may seem. Any strategy is sufficient in defending the moon from the wolves.

Your Correspondent, Always falling over his many gymnastics trophies

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One Quote Review: Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

There is a scene before the plot really kicks into action, in this novel set in an information-saturated not-too-distant future where one character, seemingly shallow beyond description, toasts the pregnancy of his friends:

“I think they are the only people who should be giving birth, the only peeps qualified to pop one out.”

“Right on!” we call-and-responded.

“The only peeps sure of themselves enough so that, come what may, the child will be loved and cared for and sheltered. Because they’re good people. I know folks say that a lot – ‘They’re good peeps, yo’ – but there’s the kind of plastic good, the kind of easy ‘good’ any of us can generate, and then there’s this other, deep thing that is so hard for us to find anymore. Consistency. Day-to-day. Moving on. Taking stock. Never exploding. Channeling it all, that anger, that huge anger about what’s happened to us as a people, channeling it into whatever-the-fuck. Keeping it away from children, that’s all I’m going to say.”

It is a novel about how we know that we don’t know what we’ve lost. Or maybe lost isn’t the right term because we know our memory of what we had isn’t reliable so it is about how we know that we don’t know what is missing.

Your Correspondent, Has escaped the anxiety of theological influence by never stepping foot inside a church

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One Quote Review: Formations of the Secular

I hugely enjoyed Talal Asad’s Formations Of The Secular, which Eoin O’Mahony has been pressing into my hands since I first met him. It is a worthy ally to Taylor’s A Secular Age. It is one of those books that I suspect I must carefully re-read because even taking close notes, I reckon I got about 30% of what was on offer.

It is probably bad form to use as a quote, something that he quotes but I’ll do it anyway. Footnote 65 on page 47 lets us into a brilliant conversation Asad begins. When I talk with people about secularism, the Christian usually thinks it is about politically laying the ground for mass persecutions to follow and the non-Christian usually thinks it is about fostering reasonable conversation and secure freedom in the face of faith-based irrationalism. Cutting through this shite, Asad asks us (as one of many perplexing and illuminating questions) instead to consider whether pain has a meaning or not. Secularism won the day not when it drove prayer out of schools but when it stripped our owies of certain kinds of metaphysical explanations. Thus:

Their pain became totally secular since pain as well as illness were seen as nature’s punishment for omissions in one’s regimen, while mental illness was perceived as a sign of conflict between the demands of each individual character and the constraints of the social order; this interpretation called for a fundamental social reorganization when its standards (chastity in particular) went against nature. This explains why, as a leitmotiv, the physician of the Enlightenment maintained that in order to be a good moralist, one must first be a good physician, thus reversing the traditional relationship between medicine and morality.

– Roselyne Rey, The History of Pain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 107.

Your Correspondent, Is off home to think of a lie

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One Quote Review: Divine Economy by D. Stephen Long

A popular textbook of introductory economics illustrates abstract equivalence and formal substitutionability. First, ‘opportunity costs’ are explained: they are the costs incurred by someone for forsaking one choice in favour of another. Then a question is posed based on the following example: ‘Mrs Harris spends an hour preparing a meal.’ However, she is also a ‘psychologist in private practice, and can obtain $50 per hour for her services.’ Thus, we must ask: what are the opportunity costs involved in her preparing the family meal? This seems a harmless enough question. The situation is a nice way of explaining that for every action chosen, another opportunity is sacrificed. The facts seem incontestable. No matter what our values might be concerning family, work, religion, politics, etc., when Mrs. Harris makes dinner she forgoes the opportunity of generating $50.

But this description is misleading. While it appears to give us merely the facts, it gives us much more. It invites us to construe our lives, primarily our lives as family members, in terms of the activities of producers and consumers. The family meal loses all incommensurable status with other consumable objects. All such objects are placed before the individual and he or she is asked ‘Which objects will you forego for the sake of the others? How long will you continue to exchange until you have sufficient xs and adequate ys? How many xs will you forego for the sake of how many ys?’ The question assumes a form of rationality, known as ‘marginalism,’ that inevitably reduces all forms of life to ‘utility’ and ‘interest’.

To pose the question this way assumes already the legitimacy of viewing all human action in terms of ‘opportunity costs’. In fact, this putatively harmless example contains a complex metaphysics that assumes all human action and language takes place in a tragic world of scarcity. The ability to ask this question entails acquiescence to that metaphysics. Any action that I take will be inscribed in a world of lack wherein my choice is made possible only by the other options I choose against. Rather than viewing human action as arising out of a plenitude, this metaphysics assumes it is ensconced in scarcity. Death, violence, and antagonism become the source and end of such a metaphysics.

What could not be substituted into the calculation of opportunity costs? Let us suppose that Mrs Harris engages in sexual intercourse with her husband. And let us suppose that he could hire a prostitute at fifty percent of the opportunity costs incurred for the time they spend together. Although our values might be shocked by such a calculation, the economic facts are clear. It costs this couple $25 per hour for sexual intercourse. If he utilized the services of a prostitute and she worked the hour, the economic index of productivity would increase by $75.

These so-called facts are no more settled than the values one putatively chooses. For the principle of formal substitutability treats all human action as if it were a disconnected or isolated event. The fact of the matter is not that Mrs. Harris’ husband saved the family $25 and increased the productivity by $75. The fact is that he committed adultery and thus denied God’s purposes for marriage. This fact has much more concrete or empirical reality than the putative economic facts mentioned. We can point to the concrete historical embodiment of something called ‘adultery’ much more readily than something called ‘opportunity cost’. Yet in a social reality determined primarily by marginalist rationality, the latter is called a ‘fact’ and the former a ‘value’.

– Stephen D. Long, Divine Economy: Theology and the Market, p. 4-5.

Your Correspondent, Everyone but economists call things that grow without ceasing “cancer”

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One Quote Review: Girl Land by Caitlin Flanagan

I am a huge fan of the writing style of the Atlantic columnist Caitlin Flanagan and her latest book about the emotional geography of the female adolescent has me thinking alot about what it means to be a pastor and in time, perhaps, a parent.

Here’s a slice, that is typically muse-worthy:

But make no mistake: the mass media in which so many girls are immersed today does not mean them well; it is driven by a set of priorities largely created by men and largely devoted to the exploitation of girls and young women. Even a teenage girl who doesn’t seem particularly interested in the current culture is not safe from it, because the culture is interested in her. It encourages her to think of herself as a creature who lives to please men, to post revealing or undignified photographs of herself online, to develop a persona on Facebook and Twitter that is highly sexual. It wants her to live her private moments in public, to expose every aspect of her interior life for all to see, to dress and behave in ways that will draw the most heated reactions from boys and men. The question parts of girls must ask themselves is to what extent they want to raise them within a counterculture that rejects the commercialization of sexuality, the imperatives toward exhibitionism and crudeness. Creating a counterculture is hard work, but it can be done, and it is my strong belief that the young women who emerge from Girl Land having been protected from the current mainstream values are much stronger and more self-confident than those who have been immersed in it throughout their adolescences.

– Caitlin Flanagan, Girl Land, p. 182.

Your Correspondent, From hell’s heart he stabs at thee.

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One Quote Review: A Visit From The Goon Squad

A novel that sits perfectly as a summer read, or an on-the-bus-commute-companion and was endorsed by the Richard and Judy book-club and yet still won the Pulitzer is a curious proposition. A novel that does all this and has a chapter that is a powerpoint presentation and that ends in a dystopian vision of a technologised society that can only be described as sci-fi is definitely a tantalising prospect.

A Visit From The Goon Squad deserves its acclaim. Whether it is a novel or a short story collection is something more skilled readers can dispute. While the chapter that apes and surpasses Coupland is impressive, the one that does the same in homage to David Foster Wallace is audacious and the slide show is going down in history as epic, the thing I liked most about the book is the consistently insightful and real descriptions of the internal lives of human beings, especially as they are buffeted around by time that refuses to be eternal.

One such section has an art history scholar approaching middle-age ruminate on how he ruined his marriage because he was scared of love.

Yet each disappointment Ted felt in his wife, each incremental deflation, was accompanied by a seizure of guilt; many years ago, he had taken the passion he felt for Susan and folded it in half, so he no longer had a drowning, helpless feeling when he glimpsed her beside him in bed: her ropy arms and soft, generous ass. Then he’d folded it in half again, so when he felt desire for Susan, it no longer brought with it an edgy terror of never being satisfied. Then in half again, so that feeling desire entailed no immediate need to act. Then in half again, so he hardly felt it. His desire was so small in the end that Ted could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it, and this gave him a feeling of safety and accomplishment, of having dismantled a perilous apparatus that might have crushed them both.

– Jennifer Egan, A Visit From The Good Squad, p. 217.

 

 
Your Correspondent, Has already reached his all-final end and is already off on his new-starting future.

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One Quote Review: The Original Revolution by John Howard Yoder

A supremely influential text on Christian non-violence that sits behind much of the best theological thinking of our age, this book also seemed eerily relevant reading it as Thessaloniki rioted and America continued its decline.

For example, it is not true in an unqualified sense that the person on top of the social pile is powerful. Such a person is very often the prisoner of the intrigues and “deals” whereby he has reached that position, and of the consensus he is attempting to maintain. Often the bargains he needed to make to get into the office are the very reasons why, once firmly established there, he is not in the position anymore to help those truly in need – for whose sake he first sought to achieve power.

That quote will more than suffice for my take on the great James Fallows article in this month’s Atlantic:

Obama, Explained

Your Correspondent, Can’t start the day without that fresh from the circus feeling