6/27/23

 Wednesday, June 27, 2023

In bed at 11:30, up at 6:10 from a bad dream of a disagreement of some sort with Steve.  57℉, high of 73, mostly sunny and more Air Quality Alert, index at 226, Very Unhealthy category, worse than yesterday which was very bad.   The wind is SW at 4 mph, 1 to 10 during the day, and gusts up to 17 mph.  The sun rose at 5:14 and will set at 8:35, 15+21. 

Rita's delayed arrival, Geri's attempt at pickup.  When I returned home from a trip to Sendik's to pick up some brat buns for tonight and chopped spinach for rolled lasagna tomorrow night, Geri's car was gone and I realized she must be on the way to Mitchell Field hoping to find Rita who had been incommunicado.  I was right but Geri returned home some time later and said she got a call from Rita while on the freeway saying she was still in Chicago.  We don't know the reason for the delay but will find out when she arrives later.  I thought to myself, however, what a good and faithful friend Geri is, heading out on her mission of mercy, thinking Rita had forgotten her telephone, was unable to make a connection, and driving to the airport 'just in case.'  It is no wonder Geri has so many friendships and of such long durations.

Morning Headline: Milwaukee's Air Quality is One of the Worst in the World, "Very Unhealthy."   EMS calls for respiratory distress have doubled, situation is worst for Blacks and the elderly.  Asthma, COPD, pre-existing conditions.  Ozone and particulates are both present in abundance.  Warm, dry, summery Spring + wildfire smoke from Canada+proper winds=AQI firestorm.

What then must we do? and Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.  I'm reminded of these New Testament lines by an essay I've been reading by Christopher Hitchens on the time he spent interviewing Saul Bellow in Chicago in 1983.  The essay is the concluding one in a collection of his essays titled The Moronic Inferno.  At one point during the interview, Hitchens wrote that he asked Bellow "What then must we do?" undoubtedly referring, without saying so, to either the line in Luke 3:10-14 or to Leo Tolstoy's nonfiction book of that title (or something like it, depending on the translation.)  The other line - Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner - is also from Luke, but in ch. 18:13.  The first line was uttered by people seeking baptism by John the Baptist, Jesus' first cousin (who today we would call a lunatic) as he was scaring the shit out of them about the coming doom and damnation - 'the axe lies ready at the root of the tree . . .'.  They were asking how to avoid the terror to come.  The second line was uttered by a despised tax collector on the margin of a crowd of Pharisees who were bragging about how observant/holy they were with Jesus saying saying the tax collector "went home justified, for he who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted."  I think of both of these lines in connection with Reinhold Niebuhr's An Interpretation of Christian Ethics and its chapter entitled 'The Relevance of an Impossible Ethical Ideal."  In Luke 3:10-14, John answered his questioners that they should share all that they have with the poor, anticipating Jesus' teaching in Matthew 25: 31-46 and elsewhere.  Niebuhr points out that this Christian ethical ideal of subordinating one's own interest to benefit others runs counter to human nature, i.e., that it is impossible to follow. 

I think about those followers of John the Baptist asking 'what then must we do?'  These people had to be a little nuts to begin with.  Why else would they be down at the River Jordan seeking answers about the meaning of life from John in his camel hair tunic and diet of locusts and honey?  Who are their counterparts today?  I think too of that loathed tax collector, who he was, why he was so conscious of his sins, why Jesus said he was 'justified,' and who are his counterparts today.  I suspect today's Jordanaires (not the backup singers for Elvis and Patsy Cline, but John's groupies) are the whacko followers of whacko evangelical prophets of all sorts, but mostly of the fraudster/grifter sort, the likes of Jimmy Swaggert, Jerry Falwell, Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson, Joel Osteen and on and on.  They believe that we are doomed, that Armageddon is on the way, and that they need salvation and that if they do what is required they will be 'saved' while those who aren't in the know and who don't do "what then must be done" are doomed to perdition.   

On the other hand, the penitent tax collector is Modern [Hu]Man and his  progeny are the many people who are troubled by their own inadequacy to live a 'clean' life in the society and culture in which they live, conscious of their own moral and ethical frailness, their own complicity in what they see as life's depravity, those who are kicked in the stomach by the lines in Yeat's Vacillation:  

"Responsibility so weighs me down.

Things said or done long years ago,

Or things I did not do or say

But thought that I might say or do,

Weigh me down, and not a day

But something is recalled,

My conscience or my vanity appalled.

. . . . 

But for Jesus' tax collector and today's progeny, it's not just the acts and omissions 'long years ago' that beset their consciences, it's everyday wrongs, everyday compromises, all the moral and ethical problems that Niebuhr recognizes as permanently grounded in human nature.  They never feel innocent because they know they are not innocent.  They are not sure of how to assess individual guiltiness because they know they have been born to live in a guilty world, a guilty society, a guilty culture.  While they would like to feel like victims of this wicked, nasty, world, this society, this culture, they know full well that they are also sustainers of those systems, beneficiaries of them, "limousine liberals" and NIMBYs.

And speaking of Niebuhr, there is a very interesting op-ed piece in this morning's NYT by Thomas Edsall titled "This Is Why Trump Lies Like There’s No Tomorrow."  Excerpts:

-- "In 2008, Kang Lee, a developmental psychologist at the University of Toronto, published “Lying in the Name of the Collective Good” along with three colleagues:  Lying in the name of the collective good occurs commonly. Such lies are frequently told in business, politics, sports, and many other areas of human life. These lies are so common that they have acquired a specific name, the “blue lie” — purportedly originating from cases where police officers made false statements to protect the police force or to ensure the success of the government’s legal case against an accused.

-- "In a 2017, a Scientific American article building on Lee’s research, “How the Science of ‘Blue Lies’ May Explain Trump’s Support,” by Jeremy Adam Smith, argues that Lee’s work highlights a difficult truth about our species: we are intensely social creatures, but we are prone to divide ourselves into competitive groups, largely for the purpose of allocating resources. People can be prosocial — compassionate, empathetic, generous, honest — in their group and aggressively antisocial toward out-groups. When we divide people into groups, we open the door to competition, dehumanization, violence — and socially sanctioned deceit."

This 'modern, scientific' insight seems to come directly from Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society which was published in 1932.

Niebuhr and God.  I've wondered for some time about Niebuhr's faith, i.e., his belief in God.  What "God" means to him.  How he understands "God" to be.  How he feels, e.g., about Thomas Aquinas' notion of the "All"s: all-good, all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful, all-this and all-that.  While looking for something else in my LOA edition of Niebuhr's major writings, I found his "Notebook of a Tamed Cynic" and this entry from some unstated day in 1026:

"I had a letter from a young preacher today who told me how he was suffering for truth's sake.  He had merely been telling his congregation that Jesus was a great spiritual teacher, as was Confucius and Laotse, and that the Christ idea was the product of Greek legend and ancient mythology.  His good people were so ignorant, he thought, that they failed to show proper appreciation for his learning and resented his iconoclasm."

. . . . 

"It is not easy to define the God idea.  Scientifically I suppose God is "the element of spirituality which is integral to reality," but for all practical and religious purposes I find it both helpful and justified to define him by saying that "God is like Jesus."  The ultimate nature of reality cannot be grasped by science alone; poetic imagination is as necessary as scientific precision.  Some of the supposedly ignorant peasants against whom my youthful friend is drawing his heroic sword may have more truth on their side than any fresh young theologue could possibly realize."

I don't dare compare myself in any way with Reinhold Niebuhr, but I have shared at least one thought with him, i.e., the poetic imagination is necessary to even begin to address 'the God idea' just as it may be to address any significant idea of 'Reality.'  I wonder what Einstein meant by "God" when he said (supposedly) 'God doesn't play dice with the universe.'  He has written that he didn't believe in a personal God and he was almost certainly using the term (or idea of) 'God' metaphorically.  What did Niebuhr mean by "God"?  What does the term refer to?  If not the Thomistic "all-this all-that guy", what are we left with?  Was it the best he could do to "define him by saying that "God is like Jesus."?  There are times I think I could spend much of the rest of my limited days on earth exploring this question if only I had better vision, more energy, more this, and more that.  Excuses, excuses, pity parties . . .