This has actually been out for a few days, but I hadn't gotten a chance to post it yet.
Long time readers will recall that I've been following this case for a long time, but I forgive you if you've forgotten the details as I think I'm the only one in my blogosphere who is following it.
If you need a refresher, here you go:
Remember the Corey Maye case?
CC presents the other side on Corey Maye
Wahoo! Cory Maye gets at least part of a new trial
Need something to be outraged about? Click here.
If you've been wondering who this chap Corey Maye is...
Does anybody here know how to open up a legal defense fund?
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Friday, November 14, 2008
In DC? Like to walk? Want to help the homeless?
I'm planning to participate in DC's Help the Homeless Walkathon next week.
Is anyone else participating? I'm fine with walking with Georgetown's team, but it would be fun to walk with some Chalicesseurs, too.
CC
who will probably hit you up for money after she's registered, but right now is merely looking for some walking buddies.
Is anyone else participating? I'm fine with walking with Georgetown's team, but it would be fun to walk with some Chalicesseurs, too.
CC
who will probably hit you up for money after she's registered, but right now is merely looking for some walking buddies.
Paul Krugman kinda scares me.
Not to sure about this "Depression Economics" idea.
Comments?
CC
who is by nature a fairly debt-averse person.
Comments?
CC
who is by nature a fairly debt-averse person.
Michelle the lady, Schools for the Girls and other stuff that isn't really my business.
Maybe it's a Washington thing, but I'm loving all the stories about the Obamas and their transition to Washington DC life. I don't blame George W. Bush for being happy to show them around the White House. If I were he, I would be counting the seconds until I could head back to Crawford.
The Washington Post ran a good article about the DC Public school closest to the White House. It is not, to put it mildly, a typical example of DC public schools.
I'm still pulling for Sidwell Friends, though. I was an extremely strong advocate of public education until I got to know some YRUUers who go to Sidwell Friends. I have a fascination with the place now. My YRUUers who go there, and the friends they have brought to YRUU activities, have been really impressive and all seem so articulate on a wide range of subjects. And they LOVE their school. I really want that for Sasha and Malia.
I find myself thinking about Michelle Obama a lot, too, hoping she's able to find things to do as First Lady that will take advantage of her serious intellectual horsepower. I kinda think I would hate being First Lady. To me, it just looks like eight (knock on wood) years of trying to avoid screwing up. The chances to distinguish yourself and do actual good seem slim, and even if you do distinguish yourself and do actual good, people hate you. (cf. Eleanor Roosevelt.)
That said, Michelle's a good deal more polished and less awkward than I am. Plus she did better than I'm doing at a law school that's harder than mine. I'd say such a person will probably be able to figure something out.
CC
The Washington Post ran a good article about the DC Public school closest to the White House. It is not, to put it mildly, a typical example of DC public schools.
I'm still pulling for Sidwell Friends, though. I was an extremely strong advocate of public education until I got to know some YRUUers who go to Sidwell Friends. I have a fascination with the place now. My YRUUers who go there, and the friends they have brought to YRUU activities, have been really impressive and all seem so articulate on a wide range of subjects. And they LOVE their school. I really want that for Sasha and Malia.
I find myself thinking about Michelle Obama a lot, too, hoping she's able to find things to do as First Lady that will take advantage of her serious intellectual horsepower. I kinda think I would hate being First Lady. To me, it just looks like eight (knock on wood) years of trying to avoid screwing up. The chances to distinguish yourself and do actual good seem slim, and even if you do distinguish yourself and do actual good, people hate you. (cf. Eleanor Roosevelt.)
That said, Michelle's a good deal more polished and less awkward than I am. Plus she did better than I'm doing at a law school that's harder than mine. I'd say such a person will probably be able to figure something out.
CC
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Multiple intelligences quiz
Your result for Howard Gardner's Eight Types of Intelligence Test...
Intrapersonal
41% Logical, 37% Spatial, 29% Linguistic, 51% Intrapersonal, 18% Interpersonal, 47% Musical, 18% Bodily-Kinesthetic and 12% Naturalistic!
"This area has to do with introspective and self-reflective capacities. Those who are strongest in this intelligence are typically introverts and prefer to work alone. They are usually highly self-aware and capable of understanding their own emotions, goals and motivations. They often have an affinity for thought-based pursuits such as philosophy. They learn best when allowed to concentrate on the subject by themselves. There is often a high level of perfectionism associated with this intelligence.
Careers which suit those with this intelligence include philosophers, psychologists, theologians, writers and scientists." (Wikipedia)
Take Howard Gardner's Eight Types of Intelligence Test at HelloQuizzy
Hat tip to Earthbound Spirit.
CC
Clarifications.
Several clarifications on this church and 501(c)3 stuff and what I think about it, sorry this has been too long in coming, I'm just swamped with work and school.
Suffice to say:
1. I probably spoke too soon about the Mormons. As much as I hate the idea of spending church money on those ads, it was legal for them to do so. Probably it should remain so. I have a basic mistrust of the idea of 501(c)3s using their money to lobby for things and tend to think lobbying groups should be separate from religious and charitable organizations so that you can give to the second without giving to the first. But that's not the way the law is written and I think most people would probably disagree with me.
I know a little bit about lobbying, what works and what doesn't, and I think a vast majority of lobbying money and efforts are for all practical purposes wasted. I think the UUA and the UU organizations that do it could be actually helping people with the money and time they spend on it. If nothing else, it doesn't encourage me to give them any money.
The Mormons spent a lot of money that could have done a lot of good, but their ads were effective in getting the legislation they wanted. Yet at the same time, I wonder if ten years from now even they will consider it a good investment.
2. As much as I hate it when UUs say "People are suffering, clearly we should lobby the government to do something about that" rather than trying to solve the problem themselves, that also is legal. Things do happen in UU churches sometimes that run afoul of the law as written, but we don't make a habit of it. Yes, most of us could string together a few anecdotes and make it SOUND like a habit, but a few anecdotes in a lifetime of churchgoing does not a habit make.
3. The stories written by life-long Mormons who are leaving the church over the proposition 8 issue break my heart and I hate to think we do that to people on the other side politically, though I know we do.
4. I agree with Joel that UUs, particularly President Sinkford, have gone over the line in the past in delineating "good people who agree with me vs. everybody else who is racist/classist/all around stupid/evil." Joel's example of Sinkford writing that those who agree with him on illegal immigration are "people of conscience", and are "called to acknowledge that racism has blinded most Americans" seems a good example to me.
I would never want such statements to be in themselves a violation of our tax status, but I really think they suck and do more damage to the church than most people who agree with them realize.
5. I think lobbying gives us something to point to that "We" are doing to help those in need without actually doing any work.
So I hope that helps. I should have been clearer on some of that stuff from the beginning.
CC
Suffice to say:
1. I probably spoke too soon about the Mormons. As much as I hate the idea of spending church money on those ads, it was legal for them to do so. Probably it should remain so. I have a basic mistrust of the idea of 501(c)3s using their money to lobby for things and tend to think lobbying groups should be separate from religious and charitable organizations so that you can give to the second without giving to the first. But that's not the way the law is written and I think most people would probably disagree with me.
I know a little bit about lobbying, what works and what doesn't, and I think a vast majority of lobbying money and efforts are for all practical purposes wasted. I think the UUA and the UU organizations that do it could be actually helping people with the money and time they spend on it. If nothing else, it doesn't encourage me to give them any money.
The Mormons spent a lot of money that could have done a lot of good, but their ads were effective in getting the legislation they wanted. Yet at the same time, I wonder if ten years from now even they will consider it a good investment.
2. As much as I hate it when UUs say "People are suffering, clearly we should lobby the government to do something about that" rather than trying to solve the problem themselves, that also is legal. Things do happen in UU churches sometimes that run afoul of the law as written, but we don't make a habit of it. Yes, most of us could string together a few anecdotes and make it SOUND like a habit, but a few anecdotes in a lifetime of churchgoing does not a habit make.
3. The stories written by life-long Mormons who are leaving the church over the proposition 8 issue break my heart and I hate to think we do that to people on the other side politically, though I know we do.
4. I agree with Joel that UUs, particularly President Sinkford, have gone over the line in the past in delineating "good people who agree with me vs. everybody else who is racist/classist/all around stupid/evil." Joel's example of Sinkford writing that those who agree with him on illegal immigration are "people of conscience", and are "called to acknowledge that racism has blinded most Americans" seems a good example to me.
I would never want such statements to be in themselves a violation of our tax status, but I really think they suck and do more damage to the church than most people who agree with them realize.
5. I think lobbying gives us something to point to that "We" are doing to help those in need without actually doing any work.
So I hope that helps. I should have been clearer on some of that stuff from the beginning.
CC
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Oh, this is awesome.
I actually started researching my last post on proposition 8 with a plan. After reading about how African-Americans weren't really at fault for the loss in California, I was going to write about how NEITHER African-Americans NOR Mormons were really to blame for the loss.
Mid-post, I read a little more on how much the LDS church had actually done, and I shifted my position to "Hell, yes, it's in a large part their fault, and we should SO be taxing them as a grassroots political organization if they plan to act like one."
It didn't hurt that what the LDS church did to convince me that the LDS church needed to be taxed is pretty much exactly the stuff I've been trying to talk the UUA out of doing for years.
Anyway, there was one thing that really surprised me in all of the coverage I was reading. The term "marriage" aside, the Mormons said they were cool with gay rights.
The LDS Church has articulated it is not “anti-gay” but rather pro-marriage and it “does not object to rights for same-sex couples regarding hospitalization and medical care, fair housing and employment rights, or probate rights.” On November 5th, Elder L. Whitney Clayton stated the LDS Church does not oppose “civil unions or domestic partnerships.”
So EqualityUtah is calling them on it. They are proposing five bills carefully tailored to giving gays rights that the LDS church has said it is OK with in official statements.
So far, the LDS church isn't commenting on the proposed bills.
CC
who really admires people who, rather than just bitching and complaining about something like this, look at the situation and come up with a way to build anew. So many people, CC included, just get stuck on something bad that happens. CC eventually moves on, but not as quickly as she wishes she did.
Mid-post, I read a little more on how much the LDS church had actually done, and I shifted my position to "Hell, yes, it's in a large part their fault, and we should SO be taxing them as a grassroots political organization if they plan to act like one."
It didn't hurt that what the LDS church did to convince me that the LDS church needed to be taxed is pretty much exactly the stuff I've been trying to talk the UUA out of doing for years.
Anyway, there was one thing that really surprised me in all of the coverage I was reading. The term "marriage" aside, the Mormons said they were cool with gay rights.
The LDS Church has articulated it is not “anti-gay” but rather pro-marriage and it “does not object to rights for same-sex couples regarding hospitalization and medical care, fair housing and employment rights, or probate rights.” On November 5th, Elder L. Whitney Clayton stated the LDS Church does not oppose “civil unions or domestic partnerships.”
So EqualityUtah is calling them on it. They are proposing five bills carefully tailored to giving gays rights that the LDS church has said it is OK with in official statements.
So far, the LDS church isn't commenting on the proposed bills.
CC
who really admires people who, rather than just bitching and complaining about something like this, look at the situation and come up with a way to build anew. So many people, CC included, just get stuck on something bad that happens. CC eventually moves on, but not as quickly as she wishes she did.
Before the YRUU advisor meeting
"So, is the inaugural ball you're going to the night of the inauguration?" TogetherBeth asked.
"It's the night of the 19th," I said. "There are inaugural balls all that week."
"Of course," Jana-who-Creates put in "So people can go to MULTIPLE inaugural balls"
"Well, yeah," I said. "That way you can amortize the cost of the dress across multiple events."*
"You think that people who go to MULTIPLE BALLS wear the SAME DRESS?" Jana asks.
"I was planning to, if I went to two," I said.
"Maybe they have friends who are the same size and trade dresses with them." Jana suggested.
Eventually, we started talking about YRUU.
CC
*It's a testament to my nerdiness that when I talk like this, nobody bats an eyelash.
"It's the night of the 19th," I said. "There are inaugural balls all that week."
"Of course," Jana-who-Creates put in "So people can go to MULTIPLE inaugural balls"
"Well, yeah," I said. "That way you can amortize the cost of the dress across multiple events."*
"You think that people who go to MULTIPLE BALLS wear the SAME DRESS?" Jana asks.
"I was planning to, if I went to two," I said.
"Maybe they have friends who are the same size and trade dresses with them." Jana suggested.
Eventually, we started talking about YRUU.
CC
*It's a testament to my nerdiness that when I talk like this, nobody bats an eyelash.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Whom do we blame for Proposition 8?
First off, Not African-Americans.
I know, I saw the CNN numbers, too. And they look pretty scary. 70 percent of African-American voters voted for proposition 8. But at the link above, a writer named shanikka at DailyKos breaks the numbers down, and the assumption that the African-American vote made enough difference to swing that election just falls apart.
It's been 5+ years since I had statistics, but her numbers look good to me.
The lack of support among African-Americans didn't help, I'll grant you, but it wasn't a deciding factor. All other things being equal, I'd rather think low things about people of my own color, so I'm regarding this as good news.
Besides, the "I voted for your civil rights so you should vote for mine" is about a two on Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development and I prefer to make my voting decisions at roughly a five.
The other favorite bad guy is the Mormon Church**, and I'm having a lot more trouble letting them off the hook, at least partially because I don't even like MY church meddling in politics even when I agree.
I really, really, think the Mormon Church, and indeed any church that takes a stand on a specific candidate or bill, should be taxed as a political organization.
Katy-the-Wise and I had an argument about this a few days ago, and I don't even feel like I lost*. She argued that taxation gave the government a level of control over the church that they shouldn't have. IMHO, lobbying just isn't a spiritual or charitable practice and non-spiritual and charitable practices of churches need to be taxed.
Also, I don't want to hear any more about politics in church than I have to. I don't want the candidates to have to pander to religion any more than they have to. I don't want candidates feeling that they need to suck up to ministers and I don't want ministers tempted with the sort of earthly power that asskissing politicians would be offering.
CC
*If you don't know her, trust me on this, to argue with Katy-the-Wise is pretty much always to lose.
**FWIW, there are approximately 750,000 members of the Church in California (including those members who are not old enough to vote). The population of California is approximately 36,553,200, making Mormons about 2% of the population. That said, even if every Mormon of voting age voted yes on Prop. 8, they would only have been responsible for about 4% of the total number of voters who voted yes.
Cool, weird buildings
I've been off-and-on rereading Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead recently. It's a very strange book that does some odd things to make its points. The one that gets me the most is a newspaper columnist who writes about architecture who is a fairly recent college graduate and the daughter of a partner in a famous architecture firm but is widely regarded as both an expert and an impartial judge of architecture for reasons I haven't grasped yet. Also, she spends much of the book with the theory that the foolish public would never, ever accept what is essentially modern architecture. (Though she thinks it's great.) The Fountainhead is set at a time when modern architecture was still a fairly new thing in America, but had been thriving in Europe for decades, which one would think even a reviewer fresh out of college would have known, to say nothing of an expert. And the book was written in the forties, when modern architecture was pretty well established even in America. And of course, the style she is so certain the public could never accept, or one very much like it, became the dominant architectural style for the rest of the century.
I get that we're supposed to see the folks who like modern architecture as visionaries that are ahead of their time, but the sheer pervasiveness of modern architecture by even the time the book was written serves to make the characters who say it's never going anywhere come off as crazy* (or at least a little stupid) to my reading, though I get that they're not supposed to.
But one of the things I can appreciate about the book is that everyone is tremendously passionate about architecture one way or another in an unrealistic but at least fairly logical way.
I would not say that I'm passionate on the subject, but I know a little bit about it because the history of architecture tracks art history to some degree, also I tend to hang around with engineers.
Anyway, I really enjoy when some website throws together a long list of cool-looking buildings around the world, and a few that are just plain funny-looking. The only one of these I've ever actually been to is one of the less cool ones, the Luxor Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.
So go, look, enjoy, and feel free to clue me in about what's going on with the Fountainhead, if only to tell me to improve my willing suspension of disbelief.
CC
*She believes that greatness, such as the main character's architecture, is doomed to fail and will be destroyed by the 'collectivist' masses around them. So she feels she has to destroy him herself so he will be destroyed by someone who loves him, since his destruction is inevitable. I have known a couple of women who let love make them so incredibly axe crazy that they might well have found this logic acceptable, but it just seems so silly given the subsequent ubiquity of modern architecture.
Sunday, November 09, 2008
Optimism all over the place
I was in the lay service, so I attended both services this morning and was delighted that nobody crowed about the election at Joys and Concerns. I have to say that people have been much more respectful this election season than I have seen before. Gives me a bit of hope.
Though I'm not generally a fan of Joys and Concerns, I was pleased that today we asked those who had served in the armed forces to stand and gave them a round of applause in honor of Veteran's Day.
I had an interesting argument over politics in church the other day with Katy-the-Wise. I hope I held my own, but one usually doesn't in arguing with her.
I'm glad the lay service is over, as much fun as it was. Now I just have to write the Murder Mystery Dinner Theatre show for next year.
Smile.
Oh yeah, and work and study.
CC
Though I'm not generally a fan of Joys and Concerns, I was pleased that today we asked those who had served in the armed forces to stand and gave them a round of applause in honor of Veteran's Day.
I had an interesting argument over politics in church the other day with Katy-the-Wise. I hope I held my own, but one usually doesn't in arguing with her.
I'm glad the lay service is over, as much fun as it was. Now I just have to write the Murder Mystery Dinner Theatre show for next year.
Smile.
Oh yeah, and work and study.
CC
CC's lay service
Delivered by Chalicechick this morning as part of a lay service on "Technology and the Human Spirit"
One time when I was a kid, my mother casually mentioned that once I graduated from high school, I would probably never see my friends again. She explained that it was a part of life, you moved to college and wouldn't have time to write letters. Long distance phone conversations were expensive.
I'd get over it, she reasoned. I'd make new friends.
At the time, this conversation really upset me.
If I could go back and tell my twelve-year-old self a few things, I would explain how by the time I graduated from high school in 1996, e-mail would have revived letter writing to some degree and long distance would be cheap.
I see the internet and the cell phone as the two most important technological revolutions of the last 50 years, and it's interesting to me that they are both technologies that relate to connecting people to one another. There has been plenty of other innovation in almost every imaginable arena of American culture, but what has really changed lives is the ability to contact one another at virtually any time and the ability to exchange and collaborate on information over the internet. Cell phones, and particularly the internet, have been a defining technology that has changed the world much as the car and the printing press changed the world before.
If the degree of change is hard to get your head around, consider that, for example, soldiers in remote battlegrounds learning instantly of a peace treaty is for all practical purposes a brand new thing. For a famous example, the Battle of New Orleans was fought a full two weeks after the treaty of Ghent was signed in Belgium.
Anyway, the internet is a new medium for human expression, and I tend think most of the praise and criticism it gets is misplaced for that reason. While a sad book can make me cry, I don't have any illusions that the book itself is doing that. It is merely a medium for human expression. The internet, like any medium, simply reflects aspects of human culture back on us. For example, I'm confused by people who are concerned about violent video games given that executions were a form of public entertainment for thousands of years in a huge number of cultures.
But one can, with admittedly some oversimplification, put the idea of an entirely new medium of near-universal communication into a framework of human history and scientific progress that explains a lot of the cultural weirdness of the late 20th century and a lot of human behavior now.
For me, at least, the explanation starts with an apple.
(Thow apple into the air, let drop)
We all knew when I let go of the apple, it was going to do that. But why?
A few thousand years ago, the average person would have said that it was love that attracted the apple to earth, the center of the universe. At that time, most of human interaction was face-to-face or in letter form. With the written word, people were able to transmit ideas across distances, though a public speech remained the most efficient means of getting a message to spread widely in a local area.
By the 9th century, Persian and Indian scientists had some idea of Newtonian physics, but until the Renaissance, for the rest of the world the universe was a place that we assumed was ruled by love and God's will. It must have been a comforting existence to be a part of a massive symphony with God as a conductor.
It's probably not a big surprise that when both the printing press and the Newtonian view of the universe came into being that there were a whole lot of revolutions and the idea of democracy seriously started to take root.
Newton's explanation for the apple was different. He took love out of the picture totally, explaining that the apple fell because all matter in the universe attracts all other matter in the universe, and indeed, the same force that might bring an apple down on Newton's head is impacting the orbit of the moon. In Aristotle's vision, the ethereal heavens had their own unending circular motions, totally unworldly and separate from our world of earth, air, fire and water. Newton showed that the same laws of nature apply to earth and sky, to apple and moon. A mechanistic universe.
The newly invented printing press was the medium of that era, and the sudden rise of cheap publication took Newton's ideas of a world where everything followed rules and the universe functioned like an extremely sophisticated machine all over Europe, and indeed the world. Of course, it also produced pamphlets that suggested Marie Antoinette was having lesbian affairs with the ladies of her court, rumors that historians deny but that at the time fueled the hatred for the French monarchy and likely made the French revolution a good deal bloodier than it had to be. Far be it from me to suggest that a more sophisticated view of the world necessarily makes us more reasonable. The printing press' contemporary critics understood that much.
Still, I'm sure you can imagine the comforts of a mechanistic universe. Everything happened because of something else, with God as a master engineer. There was a finite amount of stuff to figure out about the universe, and once we figured out on giant explanation, we would really know what was going on. Further, with the spread of all this knowledge and the rise of the middle class, common people were suddenly equipped to lead. Thus the rise of democracy and the reformation.
As if the loss of the idea that love was the force that ruled the universe wasn't enough, at this point we've figured out that the universe does not run totally like a machine and that we may never reach a point where we've figured things out.
That's scary, y'all.
Einstein showed that Newton was wrong, at least partially because his theories didn't properly predict the orbit of Mercury. Thus general relativity was born, and the idea that what scientists had thought were certainties were now strong probabilities. Now, Einstein was working on this stuff a hundred years ago, but it takes awhile for these things to seep into our cultural consciousness. And indeed, nothing has made humanity truly understand the idea that things we thought were certain aren't like the increasing speed of news. Sometime after 9 p.m. on Wednesday, October 22, 2008, Ashley Todd told police that she had been attacked by an Obama supporter. By Thursday morning, the whole country knew about the attack, both candidates had put out press releases. By Friday, the whole country knew that the attack had been a hoax and reporters were busy analyzing how the story had fed on itself and how the campaigns had reacted.
One thinks of Marie Antoinette and wonders how much damage Ms. Todd's lies could have done in a world without a 24-hour news cycle. Maybe a world with non-mechanistic, chaotic aspects that we are increasingly coming to accept needs a medium that gives us 24-hour access to information and resources that let us check our facts.
But much as the ancient world had personal Gods that spoke to prophets and oracles and the Renaissance had Luther declaring "let no priest come between a man and his God," our age also will offer new spiritual directions. It stands to reason that if we have new options for relating to information and new ways of relating to one another, new ways of thinking might be applied to spiritual ideas as well.
Our lay service committee spent a lot of time discussing people's fears about technology. To be honest, I don't really have any. The internet doesn't scare me any more than the printing press does. I think this digital age of ours gives us more choices. And even if some make self destructive or even evil choices, having choice is better than not.
But while the technology itself doesn't scare me, a couple of the possible theological responses to the technology do.
The more obvious of the two is fundamentalism. It seems to me that the world has for some time been in the grip of another iteration of the Great Awakening. People find the choices too scary and want to be told what to do and what to believe, so they reach out for fundamentalism. I'm sure you can think of examples of people who have fled for the comforts of certainty, but I'm guessing that no one in this room considers him or herself particularly susceptible to that.
My other concern is a little harder to explain.
In Norton Juster's delightful mathematical romanace "the Dot and the Line," it's said of the Dot "And she suddenly realized that what she thought was freedom and joy was nothing but anarchy and sloth." Freedom and Joy, and Anarchy and Sloth can easily be confused. I call that confusion "Whateverism", and I am very nervous about people using our chaotic, option-filled universe as a justification for adopting it as a theological approach.
"Whateverism" seems a real possibility for those of us who have accepted the Chaotic as a reality. Unitarian Universalism is based on the freedom of the individual to come to his or her own religious conclusions, a basis which builds in toleration of other religious beliefs. However, it also requires of us that we refuse to tolerate oppression - the refusal to allow that freedom to others. That is the proper limit of toleration.
The limit of toleration is not, on the other hand, the limit of criticism. I think we tend to confuse legitimate criticism with intolerance. It is important to be willing to make a distinction between toleration and approval, to choose between the bad and the good, the better and the best. Tolerance is good and necessary in this shrinking, diverse and chaotic world we live in, but we must not give up our freedom to judge wisely in its name.
I realize that what I'm asking here is for us to live an unambiguous life in an ambiguous universe.
I get that it's a lot to ask.
But the human spirit asks, indeed, demands it of us.
One time when I was a kid, my mother casually mentioned that once I graduated from high school, I would probably never see my friends again. She explained that it was a part of life, you moved to college and wouldn't have time to write letters. Long distance phone conversations were expensive.
I'd get over it, she reasoned. I'd make new friends.
At the time, this conversation really upset me.
If I could go back and tell my twelve-year-old self a few things, I would explain how by the time I graduated from high school in 1996, e-mail would have revived letter writing to some degree and long distance would be cheap.
I see the internet and the cell phone as the two most important technological revolutions of the last 50 years, and it's interesting to me that they are both technologies that relate to connecting people to one another. There has been plenty of other innovation in almost every imaginable arena of American culture, but what has really changed lives is the ability to contact one another at virtually any time and the ability to exchange and collaborate on information over the internet. Cell phones, and particularly the internet, have been a defining technology that has changed the world much as the car and the printing press changed the world before.
If the degree of change is hard to get your head around, consider that, for example, soldiers in remote battlegrounds learning instantly of a peace treaty is for all practical purposes a brand new thing. For a famous example, the Battle of New Orleans was fought a full two weeks after the treaty of Ghent was signed in Belgium.
Anyway, the internet is a new medium for human expression, and I tend think most of the praise and criticism it gets is misplaced for that reason. While a sad book can make me cry, I don't have any illusions that the book itself is doing that. It is merely a medium for human expression. The internet, like any medium, simply reflects aspects of human culture back on us. For example, I'm confused by people who are concerned about violent video games given that executions were a form of public entertainment for thousands of years in a huge number of cultures.
But one can, with admittedly some oversimplification, put the idea of an entirely new medium of near-universal communication into a framework of human history and scientific progress that explains a lot of the cultural weirdness of the late 20th century and a lot of human behavior now.
For me, at least, the explanation starts with an apple.
(Thow apple into the air, let drop)
We all knew when I let go of the apple, it was going to do that. But why?
A few thousand years ago, the average person would have said that it was love that attracted the apple to earth, the center of the universe. At that time, most of human interaction was face-to-face or in letter form. With the written word, people were able to transmit ideas across distances, though a public speech remained the most efficient means of getting a message to spread widely in a local area.
By the 9th century, Persian and Indian scientists had some idea of Newtonian physics, but until the Renaissance, for the rest of the world the universe was a place that we assumed was ruled by love and God's will. It must have been a comforting existence to be a part of a massive symphony with God as a conductor.
It's probably not a big surprise that when both the printing press and the Newtonian view of the universe came into being that there were a whole lot of revolutions and the idea of democracy seriously started to take root.
Newton's explanation for the apple was different. He took love out of the picture totally, explaining that the apple fell because all matter in the universe attracts all other matter in the universe, and indeed, the same force that might bring an apple down on Newton's head is impacting the orbit of the moon. In Aristotle's vision, the ethereal heavens had their own unending circular motions, totally unworldly and separate from our world of earth, air, fire and water. Newton showed that the same laws of nature apply to earth and sky, to apple and moon. A mechanistic universe.
The newly invented printing press was the medium of that era, and the sudden rise of cheap publication took Newton's ideas of a world where everything followed rules and the universe functioned like an extremely sophisticated machine all over Europe, and indeed the world. Of course, it also produced pamphlets that suggested Marie Antoinette was having lesbian affairs with the ladies of her court, rumors that historians deny but that at the time fueled the hatred for the French monarchy and likely made the French revolution a good deal bloodier than it had to be. Far be it from me to suggest that a more sophisticated view of the world necessarily makes us more reasonable. The printing press' contemporary critics understood that much.
Still, I'm sure you can imagine the comforts of a mechanistic universe. Everything happened because of something else, with God as a master engineer. There was a finite amount of stuff to figure out about the universe, and once we figured out on giant explanation, we would really know what was going on. Further, with the spread of all this knowledge and the rise of the middle class, common people were suddenly equipped to lead. Thus the rise of democracy and the reformation.
As if the loss of the idea that love was the force that ruled the universe wasn't enough, at this point we've figured out that the universe does not run totally like a machine and that we may never reach a point where we've figured things out.
That's scary, y'all.
Einstein showed that Newton was wrong, at least partially because his theories didn't properly predict the orbit of Mercury. Thus general relativity was born, and the idea that what scientists had thought were certainties were now strong probabilities. Now, Einstein was working on this stuff a hundred years ago, but it takes awhile for these things to seep into our cultural consciousness. And indeed, nothing has made humanity truly understand the idea that things we thought were certain aren't like the increasing speed of news. Sometime after 9 p.m. on Wednesday, October 22, 2008, Ashley Todd told police that she had been attacked by an Obama supporter. By Thursday morning, the whole country knew about the attack, both candidates had put out press releases. By Friday, the whole country knew that the attack had been a hoax and reporters were busy analyzing how the story had fed on itself and how the campaigns had reacted.
One thinks of Marie Antoinette and wonders how much damage Ms. Todd's lies could have done in a world without a 24-hour news cycle. Maybe a world with non-mechanistic, chaotic aspects that we are increasingly coming to accept needs a medium that gives us 24-hour access to information and resources that let us check our facts.
But much as the ancient world had personal Gods that spoke to prophets and oracles and the Renaissance had Luther declaring "let no priest come between a man and his God," our age also will offer new spiritual directions. It stands to reason that if we have new options for relating to information and new ways of relating to one another, new ways of thinking might be applied to spiritual ideas as well.
Our lay service committee spent a lot of time discussing people's fears about technology. To be honest, I don't really have any. The internet doesn't scare me any more than the printing press does. I think this digital age of ours gives us more choices. And even if some make self destructive or even evil choices, having choice is better than not.
But while the technology itself doesn't scare me, a couple of the possible theological responses to the technology do.
The more obvious of the two is fundamentalism. It seems to me that the world has for some time been in the grip of another iteration of the Great Awakening. People find the choices too scary and want to be told what to do and what to believe, so they reach out for fundamentalism. I'm sure you can think of examples of people who have fled for the comforts of certainty, but I'm guessing that no one in this room considers him or herself particularly susceptible to that.
My other concern is a little harder to explain.
In Norton Juster's delightful mathematical romanace "the Dot and the Line," it's said of the Dot "And she suddenly realized that what she thought was freedom and joy was nothing but anarchy and sloth." Freedom and Joy, and Anarchy and Sloth can easily be confused. I call that confusion "Whateverism", and I am very nervous about people using our chaotic, option-filled universe as a justification for adopting it as a theological approach.
"Whateverism" seems a real possibility for those of us who have accepted the Chaotic as a reality. Unitarian Universalism is based on the freedom of the individual to come to his or her own religious conclusions, a basis which builds in toleration of other religious beliefs. However, it also requires of us that we refuse to tolerate oppression - the refusal to allow that freedom to others. That is the proper limit of toleration.
The limit of toleration is not, on the other hand, the limit of criticism. I think we tend to confuse legitimate criticism with intolerance. It is important to be willing to make a distinction between toleration and approval, to choose between the bad and the good, the better and the best. Tolerance is good and necessary in this shrinking, diverse and chaotic world we live in, but we must not give up our freedom to judge wisely in its name.
I realize that what I'm asking here is for us to live an unambiguous life in an ambiguous universe.
I get that it's a lot to ask.
But the human spirit asks, indeed, demands it of us.
Friday, November 07, 2008
Thursday, November 06, 2008
I love this.
Now that Michelle Obama is a fashion plate, people are clamoring to design her Inaugural Ball Gown.
The Daily Beast decided to let some Project Rumway alumni give it a shot. Of course, they couldn't make it too easy, so the designers could only use Laura Bush’s 2005 Inaugural Ball dress, an American flag, burlap potato sacks and $10 worth of trims
Anyway, the results are here.
CC
who was kinda dissappointed that her big Gay Boyfriend didn't take the contest a little more seriously. No, wait, lots of his serious designs still kinda look like that.
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Sleepiness and hope
The building engineer gets into the elevator the same time I do this morning. I yawn.
“Obama?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say, smiling.
“It’s a good day.” He said.
“Yes, it is.”
The elevator doors open and my workday begins.
CC
“Obama?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say, smiling.
“It’s a good day.” He said.
“Yes, it is.”
The elevator doors open and my workday begins.
CC
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
10pm -Current liveblog
9:55 IMHO, it's over. Congrats, President Obama. FWIW, he's ahead in the popular vote now.
10:00 Still watching the Senate races...
10:01 Katie Couric is now talking about the race in the past tense. (And she's not wearing pinstripes.)
10:28 CBS just went to Howard University, DC's traditionally black University, where at least hundreds if not thousands of students are cheering and crying and now I'm crying a little too. This is so awesome.
10:58
WAHOO!!!! Thank you, Virginia!!!
11:14 Sniffle. I'm a happy girl.
11:23 I didn't like the beginning of McCain's speech, where he talked about race. But the later part of the speech still seems fine.
Honestly, I've been weepy since CBS showed the students at Howard.
McCain gave a good speech, focusing on Unity. For awhile, I could see the guy whose hand I shook that time.
TheCSO observes "this is NOT the time to give Palin the mike"
They didn't.
11:46 Oh, and come next year, there will be 17 women in the US Senate. Not too shabby.
Students from George Washington University are gathered outside the White House, jumping around and cheering.
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