Friday, July 25, 2008

The tenuous, ebbing strength of the American Protestant mainline

"America was Methodist, once upon a time—Methodist, or Baptist, or Presbyterian, or Congregationalist, or Episcopalian," Joseph Bottom writes in First Things. "A little light Unitarianism on one side, a lot of stern Calvinism on the other, and the Easter Parade running right down the middle: our annual Spring epiphany, crowned in bright new bonnets."

There was a time when American mainline Protestantism, with its simple, white wooden churches dotting the hillsides and its pleasant, optimistic theology, had a sense of givenness in American life. It provided the texture that grounded American life. Even if you didn't believe in it—if, say, you were a Catholic who always felt the need to prove oneself as "American enough," or if you were a Jew forced to celebrate Christmas through the magic of Technicolor—you couldn't help but be influenced in the civic traditions that it created.

In the preface of my copy of the Federalist Papers, Garry Wills notes that the Constitution reflects in many ways the Presbyterian—or, more properly, Calvinist—presuppositions of its writers. The system of checks and balances and the emphasis on procedure emerges from the acknowledgement that people's perpetual tendency toward corruption (the political equivalent of original sin) means that they can't be trusted to do the right thing by themselves. The Constitution is a minimalist endeavor that recognizes the latent self-interest in even the most well-meaning of political ideologies. As Reinhold Niebuhr noted, the irony of American history lies in the ability of Americans to do the wrong thing even as they seek to do the right one: Wars to make us "safer" end up making us less so, for instance, and political visions that would "end poverty" sometimes end up increasing the economic marginalization they aim to fight.

Mainline Protestantism promises a quiet, steady approach to public life, in which an awareness of the possibility of human evil is always realistically matched with an awareness of the redemptive possibility of human action. In the twentieth century, Bottom notes, this quiet, steady approach became increasingly confused, and he uses the current presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori as an example:

To be saved, we need only to realize that God already loves us, just the way we are, Schori wrote in her 2006 book, A Wing and a Prayer. She’s not exactly wrong about God’s love, but, in Schori’s happy soteriology, such love demands from us no personal reformation, no individual guilt, no particular penance, and no precise dogma. All we have to do, to prove the redemption we already have, is support the political causes she approves. The mission of the church is to show forth God’s love by demanding inclusion and social justice. She often points to the United Nations as an example of God’s work in the world, and when she talks about the mission of the Episcopal Church, she typically identifies it with the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals.

Her Yahweh, in other words, is a blend of Norman Vincent Peale and Dag Hammarskjöld.
Bottom decries the insouciant, and often elitist, leftward tilt of the mainline Protestant axis, but Ross Douthat, blogging on the website of The Atlantic Monthly, reminds us that the Christian left has no monopoly on Peale's thin theology of positive thinking. "Peale's heirs occupy the pulpits of what remains of the Protestant mainline, but they preach from the dais at numerous evangelical megachurches as well," he says. "The people who read Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyer and The Prayer of Jabez may be more politically conservative then the people who read A Wing and a Prayer, and read certain passages of Genesis and Leviticus more literally, but the theology they're imbibing is roughly the same sort of therapeutic mush."

American religion has always been thus: amorphous, tenuously grounded in spirituality over religion, always interested in the next big thing. While this has been its strength, it is also its weakness.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Are superhero films the westerns of the new millennium?

In today's New York Times, A. O. Scott wonders whether the superhero genre—which has spawned five blockbusters so far this year—has almost run its course. And what with Seth Rogen, of all people, slotted to star as the Green Hornet in 2010, and the big screen adaptation of The Watchmen—the trailer of which I barely understood—set to open next year, he may be right.

I have a hunch, and perhaps a hope, that “Iron Man,” “Hancock” and “Dark Knight” together represent a peak, by which I mean not only a previously unattained level of quality and interest, but also the beginning of a decline. In their very different ways, these films discover the limits built into the superhero genre as it currently exists.
To tell the truth, in watching "The Dark Knight," I pitied Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale, because it really seemed that any sequel, and there will undoubtedly be a sequel, to the film would be completely inadequate in comparison.

Scott's solution to the problem is to urge the genre to move away from the visual and into the moral. The endless cavalcade of action set pieces is tiring, he says, but what is more tiring is how stuffed each film is with themes and ideas that are superficially exposed but never sufficiently treated.

Instead the disappointment comes from the way the picture spells out lofty,serious themes and then ... spells them out again. What kind of hero do we need? Where is the line between justice and vengeance? How much autonomy should we sacrifice in the name of security? Is the taking of innocent life ever justified? These are all fascinating, even urgent questions, but stating them, as nearly every character in “The Dark Knight” does, sooner of later, is not the same as exploring them.

And yet stating such themes is as far as the current wave of superhero movies seems able or willing to go. The westerns of the 1940s and ’50s, obsessed with similar themes, were somehow able, at their best, as in John Ford’s “Searchers” and Howard Hawks’s “Rio Bravo,” to find ambiguities and tensions buried in their own rigid paradigms.
The difference between a classic western shown on AMC and films like the "Searchers" or "Unforgiven" lies in ability of the latter to understand the "rules" of their "game" to such a degree that, like jazz musicians, they find spaces for improvization and exploration. They understand convention—indeed, they have to know the conventions of the genre far more thoroughly than pictures that repeat them by rote—but are not bound slavishly to it.

And they can go deeper than other films because the vocabulary of the genre enables them to invite audiences to treat complex and often controversial problems. During the Iraq War, for instance, the new incarnation of Battlestar Galactica turned around the problem of suicide bombers and insurgency. Can superhero films, which are now almost as ubiquitous as westerns and space operas, manage the same transition?

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Why would anyone get a Ph.D. in geography?

I've been around academia for, well, a long time, but for some reason I never heard of graduate programs in geography until a few months ago. At the time, I thought that geography was something that you studied in grade school, so that you would remember where Uganda is on the map, in case you ever wanted to go there.

But in reality, geography is one of those hybrid social sciences that tries to get at the relationships among geographical place, environment, economics, and culture. It seeks to understand—in a general sense—how human life happens on earth and, drawing from this understanding, make practical proposals about how humans can live on earth in more sustainable ways.

People who study geography are interested in many things. The University of Iowa, for instance, has specializations in environmental studies (which blends the harder research of environmental sciences and economics and public policy), geographic information science, health, and international development.

Clark University in Massachusetts offers a broader set of offerings, including feminist geography (how the environment shapes the experiences and needs of women), global economic change, the relationship between the environment and development, urban development, political and cultural ecology (how cultures and political systems interact), and sustainability and natural resources, among other things.

I started thinking again about geography this morning, as I started to read Jeffrey Sachs's Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet. Sachs works at The Earth Institute at Columbia University. Perusing the site shows geography in practice. The discipline of geography is more than finding blotches on a map; it is one of the most important, and perhaps neglected, fields today.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

They don't call it SUNY Stoner Brook for nothing

Apparently, a Ph.D. candidate somewhere at a division one research university has found that marijuana use is necessary, if not essential, for the successful completion of a doctorate.

I'm an analyst of imaginative literature instead of a producer of it. But I would lay claim to a modest form of drug-induced insight. For example, I took a demanding seminar in my first year of graduate school and wanted to impress my professor with a stellar paper.

Naturally, I came down with a bad case of writer's block shortly before the paper was due. For two hours I did nothing more than use the cut-and-paste function, treating my essay like a Rubik's Cube: "If I just move this section here, it will all make sense."

Finally I thought, "Screw this." I decided to shelve the project for a few hours and toked up instead. Of course I immediately began thinking about my paper again. But now it seemed like a privilege to consider economic globalization and its relation to British poetry. Instead of frantically rearranging sections of text, I started to imagine the theoretical basis of my essay in holistic terms, and saw a connection between arguments that I hadn't noticed before.

Now, I do remember that some of my best philosophy papers sounded as if I had dropped acid. (The first line from one of them: "Sometimes, when I'm watching television, the Gordon's Fisherman comes to visit me." I got an A.) But is marijuana really a study aid? Admittedly, the author has a point that, in some ways, his recreational drug use is perhaps less problematic than, say, binge drinking or ectsasy-fueled raves. Yet, he still seems just as neurotic:
I'm an insomniac who averages four to five hours of sleep a night. The best way to deal with a sleeping problem is with regular exercise. But it's nice to have a secret weapon to knock me out on days when I can't make it to the gym. I'm certainly better off than peers who have flirted with Xanax addictions, or who waste their stipends on genuinely worthless stuff like Ambien or Lunesta.
Is this really what it takes to "make it" in academics? If it is, doesn't that mean that academic life is somehow fundamentally broken, dysfunctional, and unhealthy? If so, what can be done to make academia more suitable for human habitation?

Monday, July 21, 2008

Another day, another rupee

When I see photos like this, as I saw last week in the New York Times, I get nervous. No, the image isn't from the latest Batman or Indiana Jones movies but from Pakistan, which also happens to be on the way to something of an economic meltdown.
A key ally in the region, Pakistan is a desperately poor country—the story in the New York Times quotes a man who had just lost his life savings, which for him was about $4,175—but it has been growing steadily since a recession in 1951, most recently rate of about seven percent per year. However, the political dischord surrounding the government of Pervez Musharraf and the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in 2007 rattled the economy greatly.
In January, Reuters reported that Pakistan's central bank downgraded its yearly projections for the country's economic growth from a robust 7.2 percent to somewhere between 6.6 and 7 percent. But the problem isn't simply short-term political termoil, because Pakistan's economy, like ours, is a consumer economy driven by credit. A few weeks after the Bhutto assassination, the Voice of America reported that:
Economist Qaisar Bengali says the strong performance was not sustainable, partly because on the consumer side of things, it was the result of easier bank credit. That made it possible for more people to borrow to buy big items such as cars. Bengali says when consumer financing is removed, bank profits decline, automobile sector growth declines, and gross domestic product growth declines.
Such reliance on credit means that the Pakistani economy is open to the same pressures that the American economy is. Even in January, Reuters reported that "the central bank also sounded a warning about the country's widening current account deficit and fiscal shortfall, saying they exposed the country to funding risks at a time when the U.S. subprime crisis was troubling global credit markets."
This suggests, once again, that the pocketbook issues of the American economy have implications for international security. But Time reports that for Pakistanis, the troubled economic forecast also suggests a staggering level of incompetence within the country's fragile coalition government.
Since the new government took office, there have been alarming levels of capital flight. Foreign investors began to pull out in the days after former prime minister Benazir Bhutto's assassination. "But mainly it has been due to the weakening of the rupee," says M. Ziauddin, a specialist writer on economic affairs for Dawn newspapers. "People clearly wanted to save their dollars." "Right now there seems to be a crisis of confidence," says Nazar, the economic commentator. "There are serious questions about the leadership. The president is disinterested, and the political leadership [Zardari and Sharif] is out of the country. But it is also a question of competence. The crisis over the sacked judges [which sped protests that led to Musharraf's downfall] and the coalition's internal disputes have left the economy ignored."
As Musharraf clung onto power, I remember his saying that he mistrusted civilian governance because of the high levels of incompetence and corruption that were associated with the regimes of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. At the time, his comments were dismissed. But what if he was right?