Readers Without Borders

“The essential point to grasp is that in dealing with capitalism we are dealing with an evolutionary process. . . . The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates.” — Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy

Borders closes this week, after a six-week countdown to bankruptcy, and the selling off, at constantly-dropping prices, of everything from books to bookshelves. This is the fourth local Borders that has closed in the past few months, two in Washington, DC and two in Maryland. I knew all of them well and spent considerable time and money in each one. On the flyleaf of every book I’ve bought from them is my name, the date of purchase, and the location of the store. The last Borders book I bought—a collection of J. G. Ballard’s best short stories—was from the Silver Spring store and it’s closing was duly noted in the flyleaf. 

But it’s a cruel world out there (a doggie-dog world, as my students would say) and Borders is proof that everybody is someone else’s lunch. An independent bookstore in Takoma Park, Maryland, that many of us loved, Chuck and Dave’s, finally succumbed some years ago to the relentless pressure of discount pricing that the local Borders provided. And now Borders itself, Nook-less, and struggling to counteract Barnes and Noble on one side and the gigantic presence of Amazon on the other, has been devoured. There are rumors that the Silver Spring store will be taken over by Books-A-Million, an outfit that could charitably be described as ‘a book distribution outlet.’ Try asking its staffers for books by Auden, Barth, Nabokov, Proust, or Tolstoy, and you may be asked to repeat the question. 

As bookstores go, Borders was formulaic, as befits a contemporary corporate franchise. From store to store you could count on the same titles in the same sections. The effect, I suppose, was a predictability much like that of any major chain from MacDonald’s to Goodyear. But Borders staffers seemed to love books and know quite a bit about them; they had favorites and knew where to find them. If you asked they would drop what they were doing and lead you to comparable titles. It’s true that the reshelving process rarely occurred in some stores so that you’d find Lolita shacked up with Jerome Dickey and Isaac Newton in the Psychology section, but that could simply have been indication of a lively clientele constantly on the move. 

Depending on the location, Borders appealed to the local demographic, but still had a depth in its selection of which Barnes and Noble still seem only fitfully aware. If you wanted Herodotus they had him, along with Tacitus and Livy; if it was Freud you were after they had his works—and Jung’s and Adler’s as well. Jeffrey Deaver? Shelf after shelf, but Erle Stanley Gardener, Dorothy Sayers, Kurt Mitchell, and even George MacDonald could be found. Religion and philosophy were pretty well represented at Borders too, although I couldn’t help notice that Nietzsche invariably occupied more shelf space in every store than any other philosopher. But their selection of Taoist, Confucianist, Buddhist, Hindu, and Jewish philosophy was excellent and far outstripped anything you could find at Barnes and Noble. Again, while B & N gives a lot of real estate to religion and spirituality, most of it seems to run to the lighter variety of “inspirational” works that clutter the waiting rooms of medical offices. 

So Borders is gone and Barnes and Noble has won—for the time being. Yet, I don’t believe that e-readers like Kindle, the Nook, or the Sony reader spell the end of “real” books nor do I think that brick-and-mortar bookstores will completely disappear any time soon. And while the statistics that one hears about American reading habits are appalling if true (a majority of American adults don’t even read one book a year), I’m guessing that places like DC and the Washington Metro area are probably typical of many cities in America with universities, high concentrations of professionals, and diverse populations of people who read a great deal. 

Even so, the small, independent booksellers are quietly dropping out of sight, a fact greatly to be mourned. They simply can’t compete with the buying power of the bigger stores. They offer topical interest (every issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine since 1941!), quietude broken only by the buzz of fluorescent lighting or the flatulence of the owner’s elderly cats, and comfy chairs. Very often there will be a pot of coffee or tea simmering, and a variety of biscuits at hand—the small comforts of a literate society. 

Every breakthrough in technology brings both untold blessings and considerable gnashing of teeth. Gutenberg’s printing press could churn out 3,600 pages per day as opposed to the few that could be produced by hand. Gone was the scriptorium, the rooms full of monks nodding over their copies of the Bible or Christian classics. Now  eager readers of the latest works by Luther and Erasmus could have their own books, thus inciting revolutions in thinking that spread like a virus. 

The transitions between technologies are rarely smooth because they cannot be planned for and their effects remain to be seen. Understanding the changes at first may be like encountering a tsunami at sea—it’s traveling 600 miles per hour but it’s only an inch high. By the time it hits the shallows of public awareness it’s too late to get out of the way. This is what Joseph Schumpeter called the Creative Destruction of capitalism. Every new technology destroys the previous one and sets up the conditions for its own destruction. While we benefit from the innovation we lose the traditions. “This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism,” he said. “It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.”

A few years ago I got a Kindle, a gift from my wife, because it saved on shelf space, the books were cheaper, and ultimately it saved trees. My gain in efficiency and conservation helped to bring about the demise of Borders, a “clean, well-lighted place,” in which ‘real’ books could be lingered over, paged through, bought and carried out. I love the feel, the smell, the texture of a book in hand, and I’ve got the bookshelves to prove it. And while the wheel of innovation turns and brings its own pleasures, I shall, God willing, shuffle off this mortal coil years from now, surrounded by loved ones and books. These are the wistful joys we carry into our temporary futures.

One Two Many

It is neither a universe pure and simple nor a multiverse pure and simple. — William James, Pragmatism

Is the universe one or many? Or to put it another way, are we hedgehogs or foxes? Isaiah Berlin, philosopher, cultural critic, and wise man, wrote an essay years ago about this with the focus on Tolstoy’s view of history. It has taken on a life of its own over the years, known mostly for the first few pages where Berlin sets the context. “There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus,” he writes, ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ " If we take the line figuratively it divides the world up into two groups: those who relate everything to one single, unifying vision, overarching everything and giving meaning to all things, down to the minutest detail. Those are the hedgehogs, and Berlin counts among their august company such figures as Dante, Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Proust. 

On the other side, across the vast chasm that divides the two, are the foxes, those who pursue many ends, related or not, usually contradictory in their purposes, and connected only in some de facto way. Their ideas, notes Berlin, are centrifugal rather than centripetal, flying outward unencumbered by any “fanatical, unitary inner vision.” Shakespeare, according to Berlin, is just such an animal, as is Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Moliere, Goethe, Pushkin, and Joyce. And maybe we could add Woody Allen, John Lennon, Jack Kerouac, Susan Sontag, and Robin Williams.  

The difference between them does not seem to be the presence of a metaphysical ADHD, but rather this view of the universe as either monistic or pluralistic. It’s an old philosophical problem, probably the equivalent of a parlor game at Plato’s Academy. William James, realizing that many in his audience were hardly kept awake at night over such matters, considered it even so “the most central of all philosophic problems.” He believed that “if you know whether a man is a decided monist or a decided pluralist, you perhaps know more about the rest of his opinions than if you give him any other name ending in ist.” Philosophy, he notes, throughout its long history, has taken the search for unity as its default position, so much so that no one really questions it. But what about the variety in things? Doesn’t that matter too? In his usual brisk and humorous manner he asks what practical difference it would make to see all things through a single, unifying lens and goes on to show the presence of unity in our everyday lives. 

For example, even in our ways of talking we assume a oneness to “the world” and trade on this assumption to avoid having to explain the multitude of parts every time we open our mouths. We also find a continuity between the parts such that we believe the whole is made up of the way the pieces hang together. And so on. Through several examples James seems to beat the monistic drum until you realize that he has slyly provided a third option: the world is neither One nor Many but One and Many. 

I don’t toss and turn at night, vexed by this problem. But it’s always there, just at the edge of my peripheral vision, something that if looked at directly seems to float away and yet is constant in its persistence. Standard operating procedure these days seems to force one to choose between the extremes: either conservative or progressive, right or left, all or nothing. But between Rambo and Diary of a Wimpy Kid lies a vast spectrum of degrees of kind, along which we most certainly can claim a rightful place. I’m convinced that as we move through our days and years we instinctively find the Middle Path, an inward moral and cultural gyroscope that guides us through the social terrain. In a number of areas of life we might benefit from our own versions of James’ brooding reflection on this question. 

Religion: Like the barnyard denizens of Animal Farm, we’ve learned to chant in unison, “Four legs good! Two legs bad!”,  except that it usually comes out as “Religion bad! Spirituality good!” Choosing one over the other brings out the worst in both: a sclerotic religiosity leads to self-righteousness and hypocrisy—and that’s just on a good day. Spirituality unattached to communion with others has no reference points; it floats in a vaguely mystical haze unable to communicate with others and with no hope of transcending itself. In the geometry of the soul the ideal state is probably an angle bisecting the vertical axis Godward and the horizontal axis toward others. Jesus did say, after all, that we are to love God and treat others as we wish to be treated. 

Politics: Democracies demand commitment; politicians will settle for your vote and your cash. Since commitment can’t be bought, and many don’t vote, this democracy seems both anemic and volatile. There’s a rage just under the surface, like a persistent fever that drains our energy and spikes our resistance to what we don’t understand. And there’s a lot we don’t understand, like how grownups can act like children fighting in a schoolyard, all sweat, threats, and wounded egos. Wasn’t politics the ‘art of compromise’? Isn’t it possible to hold convictions, recognize the convictions of others, and yet find a way to do the good thing in the right way? 

Communication: We are social animals, clearly not ourselves without others. Through patience, practice, and a gracious humility, we can learn to communicate with others quite different from ourselves. But it doesn’t come naturally; it’s a learned response. Much of the tutoring is carried on through the media, odd creatures that have heads like humans and the backsides of. . . . horses. Lately, the view of those who follow the media has been of jostling backsides with precious few heads in sight. Perhaps we need to be out in front where we can put our heads together. 

As for me, I’m perpetually betwixt and between. I’m a fox with a hedgehog headache. So many interests, so little time—wouldn’t it be nice to synthesize all this into a simple Rule of Life. I shall, for the moment, leave the last word to Bono: we’re one but we’re not the same.

Did You Feel That?

There's a 100 percent chance of an earthquake today. Though millions of persons may never experience an earthquake, they are very common occurrences on this planet. So today — somewhere — an earthquake will occur. — The United States Geological Survey

This week a most unusual thing happened: the East Coast “suffered” an earthquake registering 5.8 magnitude. This is unusual because earthquakes rarely happen here. The last one originating in Maryland was in 1990 and was a magnitude of 2.5, barely enough to rattle the windows. The last one in Virginia of any note was in 2003 and hit 4.5, somewhere in the median range of magnitude between zero and nine—nine being of epic, apocalyptic proportions, like the one that hit Sendai, Japan this year.

Nevertheless, the one that hit Washington, D.C. shortly after 1:51 pm on Tuesday, August 23, tipped over a couple of coffee cups and dropped a few stone blocks from the Washington Cathedral. That was the extent of the damage, but you wouldn’t have known it by the media firestorm that erupted within minutes. As Howard Kurtz, writing for The Daily Beast, pointed out, the Libyan rebels were closing in on Gaddafi (choose your spelling), certainly a significant event on the world stage, but here in Washington, the earthquake blew everything else off the screen. The Washington Post the next day featured a front-page story and photograph of three panic-stricken women apparently fleeing for their lives down Connecticut Avenue. The local news faucets featured “man-in-the-street” interviews round the clock of the generic type such as,  “I was in my office near the Capitol when the windows starting rattling. . . At first I thought it was a truck going by, then I thought we were being bombed, so I ran out of the building. . .” And so on. 

Some of us reacted differently. When a friend recounted how she had fled her building in terror and asked what I had done, I hesitated and then said, “Well, I grew up in California, so. . . .” I probably came off as insufferably smug, but it really wasn’t that big of a deal. For me the interest is two-fold: how rare earthquakes are in this region and how much people overreacted. No doubt the two are linked. I checked the U. S. Geological Survey online tonight and found that there were dozens of earthquakes all over California today, all up the coast to Washington State, with Alaska’s Aleutian Islands pocked with many also, most of them over 4.5 magnitude. I’m fairly certain none of them got more than a passing notice in the media.

This week alone Vanuatu took nine earthquakes in one day between 5.0 - 7.0. An earthquake with a magnitude of 7 shows up in red on the USGS website as “significant.”  The Vanuatuans had three days in a row of such tremors, then they took a day off, and resumed with vigor, finishing out the week with enough earthquakes of significance to last Maryland for three centuries at least. You’re wondering where Vanuatu is, I bet. I looked it up on the map thoughtfully provided on the website and found that it’s a couple of dots several hundred miles off the northeast coast of Australia. I don’t know if anybody lives there but if they do they probably have other things to worry about besides their lawn chairs tipping over. 

Scanning a list of earthquakes world-wide so far this year (1,747 between 5 and 5.9 alone) one place appeared with alarming frequency, an area referred to as “east of Honshu, Japan.” That’s the fault line that slipped and sent a 23-foot tsunami into Sendai and other towns in the Honshu prefecture in March, with the death toll unofficially at 10,000. It makes the list more than any other place, but there are several other hot spots around the Pacific Rim that are offering some tough competition for first.   

I saw video shot in a grocery store in Japan during that devastating quake. Customers do not scream or run, instead, they steady the grocery shelves and as the camera vibrates with the tremors, they bend down to begin to clean up the mess. I guess it’s all about what one gets used to. 

As a species humans are wonderfully adaptable. Drop us into a wretched situation and within days, sometimes hours, we will have figured out a way to cope. But coping as a mechanism for dealing with the unexpected seems to vary from culture to culture. For example, cultures that emphasize the community over the individual often pull together more quickly in crises than cultures where individualism is the priority. So Japan, high on the collectivistic scale, handles these situations of genuine devastation and horror with more patience and equanimity than we in the US (top of the list in individualism worldwide) seem to do. They’ve certainly had more practice. On the other hand, the natives of Joplin, Missouri, hit with a tornado on May 22 that killed 153, a record number of tornado-related deaths in many years, bore up resolutely under the strain and opened their schools on time this August, one of them in an abandoned former big-box store. 

It’s tempting to indulge in generalizations about these things, especially those relating to cultural differences. But here is a truth, one that I hold as self-evident, that occurred to me as I reflected on our “all-earthquake-all-the-time” mentality. The American media, especially in the major markets, is addicted to drama and that message seeps into our unconscious to the point that we find danger everywhere. In fact, we seem to revel in our manufactured paranoia. Paul Watzlawick, a leading psychiatric researcher at Stanford for many years, says “Any idea, when firmly held, nurtured, and cultivated, will eventually create its own reality (The Situation is Hopeless, But Not Serious, 57).” We seem to be living in what Gever Tulley calls a culture of “dangerism.” Since perception is so often reality, we have to respect the fears of others, however silly they might seem to us. But we don’t have to share them. I’m opting for an attitude that says by God’s grace we’ll endure whatever happens, we’ll try not to whine about it, and we’ll help one another. A lot of people, no doubt, will do without the first phrase while admirably living up to the other two. Personally, I’m hoping that more of us who believe in God’s grace can exemplify the courage of that modest group. 

Simply Jesus

“We, the modern readers who search the figure of Jesus down the years of Christian history and through the tangles of Christian mythology, have a sentimental tendency to believe that if only we could have known members of this original Judaean Church, we should have a clearer picture of what the historical Jesus was actually like. I think that this is a yearning which, had it been granted, might have proved illusory.” — A. N. Wilson, Jesus: A Life.

One of the advantages to being a professional Christian, i.e., a theologian, is that there is no end to the material at hand written about the Christ. You can specialize, focus, narrow the search, just like any good scientist on the hunt or literary critic looking to tie up the loose ends. A living can be made, a career sustained, research performed and curiosity indulged. All this because—and we can be grateful for this—the subject, Jesus, is elusive in the extreme, slipping in and out of the light, always just out of reach. 

By now, all these centuries later, the Jesus business is an immense industry. One can spend a lifetime inside the organizational machine, faithfully tinkering with the gears, rewriting the operating manuals, and offering tours of the plant. Rarely would the occasion arise to question the mission statement or, in the case of some variations on the theme, to ponder the profits won in the name of a first-century Jewish rabbi. There is simply too much at stake, too many events interpreted, innumerable private moments captured, diverted and sluiced through a corporate filter, too much memory and ego involved to ever hit the emergency switch and bring the whole train to a shuddering halt.

Reports of the imminent demise of religion are greatly exaggerated; those who predicted its passing so confidently back in the 60s are now rewriting their scripts to reflect the upsurge in passionate intensity. In America, every serious candidate for the presidency must pledge his or her allegiance to god and country, and find the born-again moment or a good facsimile of it, before being taken seriously for fund-raising and politicking. The fact that this was the first country to honor private belief by separating church and state provokes an equal and opposite reaction that chafes at the very freedom which guarantees its existence.

Where to begin with understanding Jesus? Who to believe? Which side to take in the wars of faith? If we are not to drown in the tide of scholarship or be sucked down in the maelstrom of fundamentalism we need to just. . . stand still and imagine. The great payoff of all the archeology, the historical and linguistic criticism of the Bible, the socio-political analysis of life as a Galilean peasant under the heel of Roman oppression is that we’ve caught clear glimpses of Jesus’ times. That is of immense value to organization and individual, scholarship and devotion, professional and pilgrim. But all that apparatus may not help to a quite simple end—imagining with the mind’s eye what Jesus must have been like from moment to moment. 

Humility is needed, not ignorance. Knowledge in the service of faith, faith seeking understanding—all of that is to our advantage. And yet, for all that we know about Jesus and the Gospels I don’t think we’d feel at home in Jesus‘ world. In fact, I’m not so sure we’d be at ease around Jesus. Our modern phrase, “I’m not comfortable with that,” might get us a quizzical look and a shake of the head. He did not come to make it easy on us; after all, he was an offense and a stumbling-block to almost everyone. 

Garry Wills, eminent historian, classicist, and Catholic lay theologian, writes in his devotional What Jesus Meant, “He was a mystery in his own home. Other members of his family will be at a similar loss in coping with this disturbing person in their midst.” After all, he shocked and terrified his parents early on by slipping away from their homeward processional to argue and debate the priests in the temple. When Jesus is invoked as an example of love and obedience to parents, it’s usually meant in a restrictive and conformist sense. “But there are many indications,” notes Wills, “that Jesus was more like those restive and resisting children who have all the idealism and absolutism of youth—young people who chafe against the boundaries of the past and are panting to explore new horizons.” Such young people often stir up resentment and anger. In Jesus’ case it was extreme: his own childhood friends and neighbors tried to kill him one Sabbath after synagogue. It gives new meaning to the practice of roasting the pastor at the Sabbath potluck. 

But the point here is not to do what Jesus did. He had his life and purpose; we have ours. It would be misguided and wrong, I believe, to examine his actions in order that we might reproduce them in our time and context. In many Christian bookstores you can find bracelets, T-shirts, headbands, license-plate frames, mugs, belts and rings with the acronym WWJD—What Would Jesus Do? As well-intentioned as the sentiment might be (and I do mean sentiment) it completely misses the point. It reduces the complexity of a human life to a trite recitation of middle-class platitudes. It avoids the hard truth that there are many things that Jesus did that we wouldn’t and couldn’t do because of who he was, where he was, and the urgency of his singular mission in life. 

What I am struggling to say is that the kind of radical change that Jesus called people to comes from the inside and works outward. It does not work if it’s imposed from the outside, a mere aping of the motion without the underlying emotion. Behind the emotion lies understanding and motivation, two pillars that may be grasped in a blinding flash (remember Saul’s ‘Damascus road’ experience?), but are built up over time like the growth of coral or the layers of a pearl. We want the shortcut to glory without the small gestures that come from a deepening union with Jesus. 

Here is where I’ll stop because the cliches so easily come to mind. That way leads to paralysis. What is needed is the eloquence of simplicity, something truly easier said than done. As for Jesus, well, he is still there, the piece of our puzzle that never fits and in the end remakes us around his own mysterious form. 

“There is much else that Jesus did. If it were all to be recorded in detail, I suppose the whole world could not hold the books that would be written.”

Captain Courageous

And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort and advancing on Chaos and the Dark. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

As a child I was not allowed to read the comics because they were, by definition, comical and thus trivial and a waste of precious time. Furthermore, they drew the mind away from loftier themes and indulged the imagination, rendering the loftier themes. . . well, boring. The theory was that reflection on the signs of the times and the coming apocalypse should be enough to sanctify the imagination and result in good behavior. 

This led to a personal and a professional interest in the apocalyptic mindset, the psychological and social conditions that make people think the world is going to end in their lifetime. It also made me ask myself if such beliefs, on balance, had brought more good into the world than not, and if such a perspective could be reconciled with a love for life and for this Earth—extravagances that I associated with enjoyment of the Sabbath.

The mining of the archives of DC and Marvel comics and the upsurge of superheroes in film over the last few years has given me opportunity to test the theory. Why do we find them so fascinating? Do they answer some primal need for reassurance? Does their very presence become another sign of the times? One thing we can say for sure: these films make a ton of money, always a good sign in these times. And they’ll keep coming at us for the foreseeable future. They tap into the huge audience of Boomers who grew up with them and they’re bringing new generations up to speed by keeping them running breathlessly after the sequels, the prequels, and the remakes. 

These films frequently break box office records because they both reflect and shape our response to these chaotic times. Conventional dogma is that people go to the movies to escape their boring lives. This is nonsense. People go to the movies to make sense of their lives because film has become the most powerful form of social education in our time. The movies unveil the mysteries of sex, they give us models of how to raise children, why we should get married, get divorced, or have affairs. They teach us the subtleties of conversation, the morality of money, the lure of power and the bitterness of revenge. They tell us what’s funny, how to regard the suffering of others, the current standards of what’s hot or not, and when all else fails, how to win through intimidation. And they are the most prolific channels for myth in modern history. 

One of the most pervasive themes in film is the battle between good and evil, waged endlessly at every Cineplex every day. Without belaboring the obvious we need only mention Star Wars and Harry Potter, film series that manage to both caricature evil on a grand scale while exemplifying the virtues of courage and loyalty on a personal level. It’s fascinating to watch these stories for the social mores portrayed in the retelling of ancient myths.

Which brings us to Captain America, the latest superhero to make the leap from page to screen. I went, not expecting much, not knowing the story, mildly interested but wary of fist-pumping jingoism. I needn’t have worried. I’ve since found myself turning scenes over in my mind, pulling up associations and parallels, finding the mythic threads: in short, enjoying it far beyond the actual viewing. 

Captain America is the idealized image of what we thought our heroes should be back in 1942—courageous, self-deprecating, fair, almost to a fault, and chivalrous. As Steve Rogers, the original 97-lb. weakling, goes through basic training his characteristics of self-sacrifice, determination, and courage come to light. 

“So,” asks the camp doctor at one point, “do you want to kill Nazis? 

“I don’t want to kill anybody,” Rogers says, “I just don’t like bullies.”

Rogers is most certainly not the choice of the project’s colonel, played with brisk efficiency by Tommie Lee Jones. But Doctor Erskine (Stanley Tucci), Project Rebirth’s scientist, prevails. “He’s smart and he’s got compassion,” he says.

After his transformation into Captain America he confounds military planning and strategy by simply driving in the front door of the enemy’s castle. His square-jawed unblinking fearlessness inspires others to do more than they thought they could in the circumstances—the very embodiment of charismatic leadership.

“Trust thyself,” says Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay, Self-Reliance. "Every heart vibrates to that iron string.” How American, both in its iconoclasm and in its confidence that everybody thinks that way! Emerson demands that we stand out, away from the herd. “Whoso would be a man,” he says, “must be a nonconformist. . . . Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” 

Captain America is the quintessential man of action whose motivation is virtue rather than ideology. His opponent, the demonic Nazi, Johann Schmidt (aka Red Skull), intends to rule first Europe, then America, and soon the world. His megalomania runs to the blood-and-earth variety: even though he is a brilliant scientist he also believes he can conjure up the ancient Teutonic gods. Rogers couldn’t care less about such insanity. He has answered the call of duty and will not be distracted. 

“It is the harder,” says Emerson, “because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

After Rogers defies an order to stay put and single-handedly breaks up Schmidt’s military headquarters, freeing captured American troops and bringing back secret weapons in the process, he is hailed at the American camp. The contrast between Rogers and Schmidt, between democracy and totalitarianism, couldn’t be starker. Captain America wins over the doubters through guts, courage, and defying the odds. Schmidt just kills those who oppose him.  

The other theme that rings through the film is the fascination with technology. At one point, Howard Stark, the best engineer in America (and the father of Iron Man Tony Stark) shakes his head in wonder. “Their technology is several generations better than ours.” But that doesn’t put a crimp in American ingenuity. Stark simply comes up with a MacGyver-like solution to everything that Red Skull throws at Captain America. But the lesson here is that while Red Skull apparently has a budget that would stagger the Pentagon and enough firepower to destroy the world, what finally wins the day is courage and heart. 

Although there are moments when disbelief must be suspended, when tongues are firmly in cheek, the film never descends to parody or campiness. Steve Rogers, the weakling who becomes Captain America, doesn’t forget where he came from and who he is, despite his strength and daring. He’s the one who stands up for the little guys because it’s the right thing to do—not because he gets off on kicking ass. 

However idealized, it’s an ideal worth striving for.

The Self, Finally

I wish I could explain why it oppressed me to tell about myself, but so it was, and I didn't know what to say. . . . That I had ruined the original piece of goods issued to me and was traveling to find a remedy? Or that I had read somewhere that the forgiveness of sins was perpetual but with typical carelessness had lost the book? — Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King

I have often been mistaken for someone else. It no longer surprises me—'I wonder who we are today?' I've been taken for a guy named Clif (yes, only one "f"), a Bill, a Kris, and my favorite—Grosboll. On that occasion I was stopped by a red-faced young man in the campus store who hissed through clenched teeth about a woman dear to him whose honor had been besmirched. He asked me what I had to say for myself. I said I didn't have much to say but neither did I  know the lady in question. "What?" he yelped, straightening up. "Aren't you Grosboll?" I had to admit I was not. "Oh," he mumbled, "sorry about that."

Once a balding man at the Y called me Dan, did the double-take and then apologized. When I laughed and said something about having a generic face he said, "Actually, I think it's the hair, sir," and returned to his newspaper. I checked the mirror, but I'm still not sure what he meant. Yet, there are some advantages to having a face that people think they know, however mistakenly. I can assume a new identity, if only for a few seconds; I can imagine what this named person might be like; and I may once again ask myself who I think I am. It's a question I've been turning over and over in my hand most of my life, like a stone that is smooth to the touch but has a rough patch somewhere on it.

We can't help but wonder who we are. Walter Truett Anderson writes in The Future of the Self that the modern view of the self as a distinct person, separate and bounded from other beings, is threatened in the postmodern age. At the same time he points out that such a view is not the norm in much of the non-Western world. "They do not think of themselves as unique, but rather as more or less identical to others of their kind; and they do not think of themselves as neatly integrated, but rather as invaded by strange spirits and forces that may pull them in many different directions."

The fact that we here in the West agonize over this, that we spend ourselves trying to find ourselves, probably marks us as unique in the world. Most people don't have the leisure to worry about such things, let alone fret about their social standing. That our self-identity, our persona, is an amalgam of biology and culture is fascinating to us but may not occur to millions of people who are just trying to wear their face for yet another day.

But the question, 'Who am I?' stops many in their tracks no matter the century. Jesus asked his disciples, 'Who do men say that I am?' I don't think it was a rhetorical question. I think he really wanted to know. His own quest to understand who he was had driven him into the wilderness to fight the demons of fear, pride, and power; he had emerged stronger, lighter, more pliable, but God-haunted. In everything he did he could not help but gauge the reaction of the crowds around him. On a good day, after healing and comforting, calling and casting out, delivering up and drawing in, he must have thought, 'This is who I am: the one who is to serve without ceasing. I can do this, but only through the Father.' On a bad day, with some around him burning with jealousy and others throwing themselves at him, he may have longed for a clear, cool night of stars and prayer.

Anderson traces the idea of the self through history, pointing out that individuality is a fairly recent invention, as is the notion of privacy. For most of human history people took for granted that the space around them was not exclusively their own nor was their self separate from others. That's not to say that they couldn't see where their bodies ended and another's began; it was rather that they understood themselves to be a part of the whole.

It's ironic that our media-produced mass societies sweep us into any number of demographic groups, but without a sense of belonging. We think we have a persistent self that anyone could pull out of a lineup at will, yet the feedback we need from others is missing or sometimes mocking. Are we a collection of selves, bonded by a body, or do we live our lives exposed "like a candle in the wind," constantly at risk of losing ourselves?

I was taught as a child to put Jesus first, others second, and yourself last. That would bring you joy and teach you a selfless way of life. It's a good teaching, far more sophisticated than its simplistic approach would suggest. The wisdom is in the order—and the purpose. Like a few other profoundly important things in life discovering who we are cannot be approached directly. We find out who we are by doing other things: truly worshiping God by living truthfully in this world, listening more than speaking, trying to understand before putting in the knife, learning reverence for the world. Then, in those moments when we cross some line into a new territory of courage we might catch a glimpse of ourselves as we run to catch up, thinking 'That's the kind of person I'd like to be.'

The epigram is from Saul Bellow's novel, Henderson the Rain King, a story about a brusque, volatile, ham-fisted millionaire who travels the world in search of a cure for his empty soul. Something in him cries out, 'I want! I want! I want!,' and it will not be stilled until it's filled. Read the book. It's a picaresque journey of faith, so I like to believe. In the end Henderson  does find himself, the true self that remains when the dross is burned away. It was there all along, of course, visible only at the edges of a vision that draws the eye forward.

The Geography of Thought

Oh East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet. . . — Rudyard Kipling, The Ballad of East and West 

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world. — The Dhammapada

The world is orderly and simple; the world changes constantly and is immensely complex. These two ways of thinking have shaped human behavior and culture for millenia—and lately they have been tested in the laboratories of cultural psychology. 

Richard Nisbett’s book, The Geography of Thought, builds the case that Westerners and Easterners differ in their fundamental beliefs about the world. As one of his graduate students from China said to him, “You know, the difference between you and me is that I think the world is a circle, and you think it’s a line.” Nisbett, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, was skeptical but intrigued. He’d always thought of himself as a universalist, someone who believed humans perceive and reason in the same way. While their cultural practices may vary widely, he thought, their ways of perceiving the world are generally similar. 

He summarizes this tradition in four general principles. First, everyone has the same basic thinking processes when it comes to memory, categorization, inference, and causal analysis. Second, when people from different cultures have different beliefs it’s because they have been exposed to different aspects of the world, not because they actually think differently. Third, reasoning rests upon logic: a proposition can’t be both true and false. And fourth, our reasoning is separate from what we are reasoning about. You can think about a thing many different ways—and you can use your reasoning to come up with wildly different results. Such was the tradition that could be traced back through the Enlightenment to the Greeks. Surely everybody thought in the same way.

But that turns out not to be the case at all. In test after test, Western subjects focused on the objects in the foreground of a video while Eastern subjects took in the whole background. That’s consistent with another finding that Westerners regard objects as most important and Easterners emphasize relationships. Following Greek thought, Westerners think of themselves above all as free agents, individuals who act upon the environment around them, changing their circumstances to match their ambitions. Easterners, following Confucian thought, see themselves as part of a harmonious whole, experiencing the links between people and their environment as continuous. One does not so much wrest control away from Nature as align oneself with it. 

Independence, practically a virtue in Western societies, begins at an early age as we teach our children to “stand on their own two feet,” “think for themselves,” and “grow up.” Interdependence, the way of many in Eastern cultures, helps children to understand the reactions of others. One of Nisbett’s research partners, a 6 ft. 2 inch football-playing graduate student from Japan, was dismayed to discover, at his first American football game, that University of Michigan football fans thought nothing of blocking his view of the game by standing up in front of him. “We would never do anything to impair the enjoyment of others at a public function like that,” he said to Nisbett. It seems that compared to the Japanese wide-angle view Americans have tunnel vision.

Sensitivity to others’ emotions provides Easterners with a different set of assumptions about communication also. Whereas Westerners take responsibility for speaking directly and clearly, a “transmitter” orientation, Easterners adopt a “receiver” orientation in which it’s the hearer’s responsibility to make sure the message is understood. Nisbett notes that Americans sometimes find Asians hard to read because Asians make their points indirectly; Asians, on the other hand, may find Americans direct to the point of rudeness. 

The differences extend to how we think about causality and how we deal with historical events. Japanese teachers, says historian Masako Watanabe, begin a history lecture by setting the context. They then proceed chronologically through the events, linking each one to the proceeding event. Students are encouraged to put themselves in the mental and emotional states of the historical figures being studied and to draw analogies to their own lives. Students are regarded as thinking historically when they are able to see the events from the point of view of the other, even Japan’s enemies. Questions of “how” are asked about twice as much as in American classrooms.

By contrast, American teachers usually begin with the outcomes and ask why this result was produced. The pedagogical process often has the effect of destroying historical continuity and reversing the flow to effect-cause. This reflects the Greek heritage of the West in which we have the liberty to find our goals and define the means to attain them. 

“Easterners,” says Nisbett, “are almost surely closer to the truth than Westerners in their belief that the world is a highly complicated place and Westerners are undoubtedly often far too simple-minded in their explicit models of the world. . . . But Aristotle has testable propositions about the world while the Chinese did not. . . . The Chinese may have understood the principle of action at a distance, but they had no means of proving it.” 

No one is making value judgements about these varying perspectives. They are different ways of being in the world and viewing the world. But if this research is true or even close, we should pay attention to it for it could change how we communicate with  millions and millions of people. 

Occasionally in life we stumble across something that opens a window into our own interior castles. That is the experience I’ve had reading The Geography of Thought. Time and again, as I followed the tests scattered throughout the book, I was taken aback at my unconscious affinity for Eastern thought. More often than not, when I was absolutely honest with myself, I realized how often they are my default positions. That might explain why I found it so difficult to be the ‘answer man’ when working in faculty development at a research university. While some thought I should provide techniques that would work in every classroom—universals in effect—my tendency was to see each teacher and each classroom as distinct. Instead of developing objectives for all to reach my thought was to develop each teacher’s own style to fit their context. Context and background. . . instead of rules and foreground. At the time I lacked the analogies to talk about it, although pushing against that instinctual feeling made me feel off balance much of the time.

Thus we live and learn and discover coves and bays along our spiritual shoreline we did not know were there until we put in to port.