lethal consequence

Though the fact of death destroys us, the idea of death can save us.

-- Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner

Long ago when I was a professor of theatre, she came to me with a problem. Her project was to direct Antigone, and she didn’t know what to “do with” the chorus. How to deal with their strange lyric interruptions to the action, those choral odes so clumsy in speech, so difficult in tune. This is the most essential question in Greek drama: what do we have to substitute for a convention of song and dance that is utterly lost? Nobody asks what to “do with” a number like “Hernando’s Hideaway” or “O-o-o-klahoma, where the wind comes whistlin’ down the plain;” you sing and dance them in the best Broadway style, silly. But what are the steps and vocal styling for “Zeus hates with a vengeance all bravado”?* You’ll have to make it up as you go, and it had better be good. Few professors have the chops for it. (They think the play will “speak for itself.”)

But this problem was only the container of a deeper one. She couldn’t see what to “do with” the chorus because she couldn’t feel what to do with the play.

Her leading character baffled her. “Why does she do it?” Why would Antigone (a woman about the same age as she) choose to die? Why perform a gesture of respect for one of her dead brothers, no better than the other one, knowing the lethal consequence?

That, I told her, is yours to answer. The answer to that question is your interpretation of the play. If you can’t answer that question, you won’t know what to do.

“I can’t answer the question,” she said. She was young and immortal. And honest.

There’s nothing much good about death as far as I can tell, but it’s not the worst thing that can happen to you. It’s only what we all must do. There are worse things than dying, and discovering what those worse things are is the recovery of soul.

When you know what is worse than death, you know what is better than living forever. 

Which is a good thing to discover, since we shall not live forever.

If you can answer the question, you might understand why a person would choose to die now rather than later, knowing the better thing rather than the worse would happen because of their choice. You might know what it is to live for something, ready to die for something.

Thoreau went to a life in the woods so that, when it came time for him to die, he would not discover that he had not lived. People around us – firefighters for instance, or doctors who take their skill to chaotic countries – put their lives in danger to save lives. It’s not just the lives of others that they save. They save their own lives as well, ensuring that they have lived. Others may jump out of airplanes, or climb mountains. Their insurance brokers would rather they did not.

Speak truth to power. Declare your sexual orientation. Stand in front of a tank. Save your life.

It’s a lot to ask – that a young suburban woman, from a pampered country and class, never subject to violence and unacquainted with grief, should know what is worth dying for. I praise her honesty. She knew her deficiency. She could have pretended to knowledge, like many of her bright-eyed peers. She could have latched on to schools of criticism, ideological slogans of right or left, to cults or theologies eager to explain everything. But she knew her answer had to come from the gut rather than the liturgy.

The interpretation of a play, as of a life or a song, is not a matter for the seminar table. It doesn’t help to be clever. It’s not a matter of getting the right answer, but rather of getting an answer that serves. Can you feel what it’s trying to do? Does it move you? Does it wake you at three in the morning? Does it burn without consuming? Does it resound? If your project resounds, you know what to do.

For the moment, this honest youth wasn’t qualified for her project. She didn’t have the chops. Her play couldn’t be saved. Not till she would begin to recover her soul.

*trans. Robert Fables

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hospital bed

Expect the newly widowed, childless, friendless, or loverless to wail and cry, to fall down on the ground, to gnash their teeth, perhaps to vomit or eliminate.

-- Kate Braestrup, Here If You Need Me

I am a teachable person. Some of my teachers have never met me.

It began softly. It might have been a patient calling her nurse in from the hallway. But she said it again and again. In a cubbyhole laughably called the chaplain’s office where five or six people plug in their laptops and store their junk, the social worker and I looked at each other. Louder, longer grew the cry with each repetition, and more guttural. We heard the word – “Mommy!”

Then we knew who it was. Her brothers had expressed their concern – that she would “go to pieces” when her mother died, that her heart, not metaphorically but literally sewn together just a year before, would break for the last time. That she would die at the breast of death.

“Mommy!” She had tended the dying mom round the clock, driving her siblings away and resenting their absence. She and the mom had been preternaturally bonded, thinking each other’s thoughts and feeling each other’s pains. Now she was bonded to a corpse. No answering beat from that other heart, no matching breath from the open mouth. “MOMMY!” The social worker and I left our cubbyhole.

Paula held onto the rail of the hospital bed, her face turned upward as the song came out of her gut. MOMMEEE! No stopping her. No telling her not to cry. No shame of the orphaned body. This was something that had to happen. I put my hand on her back. As if to say, but not saying, we feel your pain. We’re here. You can fall into us.

Her legs quivered and failed. She settled toward the floor, climbing down the side of the hospital bed as if it were a rock-face, grabbing each bar and lever like a piton. “MOMMEEE!” She shuddered, and I feared she would get caught in the apparatus, cut herself on an edge or bruise on a knob. I got on the floor. I wrapped around her from behind. Not to restrain but to join her. You are not alone. As she held you, you are held.

What should one say?

Not, “It’s all right,” because it’s not all right. And if it’s ever going to be all right, we’re not the ones to know when or how.

Not, “She’s in a better place,” because here she is in this place, dead. And if there is another place, I’m not the one to visualize it.

What did I say?

I think I said, maybe, something like, “You’ve done a good job. You loved her. She knew you loved her. You’re a good child. You did everything you could. Let us take care of you now.”

One might wish to say that she relaxed in my grasp, that her wailing subsided, that there was peace and reconciliation in the room. Cue the violins.

What actually happened is that she held on to the bed and kept wailing. We brought her water. We brought her Kleenex. We got her to sit in a chair. Her brother came to console her, and we took them to a private room. We let them console each other.

No, our response wasn’t perfect. What wasn’t awkward was utterly stereotypical. But grief is an imperfect thing. It reduces us to clichés of reflex and body fluid.

I have been taught by people whom I’ve never met. There’s a chaplain in Maine, widow of a cop, who became a minister to game wardens. She goes with them on searches for people who have disappeared. Sometimes the news for those who love the missing is good; but a lot of the time it’s bad. She has held people together as they break apart. She has been on the other side of the transaction. She has broken apart, as someone held her together.

As I walked down the hallway to the room where Paula’s mother died, my teacher walked with me. She said, it isn’t always a matter of esthetics. Or of your pastoral presence. Life, love and death sometimes exceed the textbook.

When they’re breaking apart, you hold them together. When they’re hitting the floor, you don’t stay on your feet. You join them where they are alone.

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darkest valley

Wo Es war, soll Ich werden.

-- Sigmund Freud, “Dissection of the Personality”

Freud’s aphorism is best left in German, where it is so brief, and means so many things. “Werden” is both an auxiliary and a verb in itself. To say “Ich wird gehen” is to say that I will go; but to say “Ich wird Mensch” is to say I am becoming a human being. So what do we mean if we say that something “soll werden”? That it “should become,” or rather, it should come into being. But what exactly should come into being? “I” should.

Freud capitalized the common pronouns es and ich, making them into proper names for parts of a personality, technical terms of psychoanalysis. In English we separate indifferent pronouns (I, it) from the psychiatric terms (Id, Ego) by medical Latin. But Freud’s theory in common language is poetry, unparaphrasable. “Where id was, there shall ego be.” But also “Where It used to be, I should come to be.” And “The ego shall dislodge the id.” And “There where it was, it is my duty to come to be.” What had seemed to be something else, I must see face to face, no longer darkly.

Or as Socrates said in his Apology, “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

The id must have what it wants right now, knowing no time or contradiction. The ego wants to choose a good outcome, aligning with reality and consequence. Id is the power and ego the wisdom. Id is the horse and ego the rider. Id is the impulse and ego the strategist.

This is no zero-sum game. I do not win by extinguishing the Other. If I kill the horse I die. If I contain the horse in a secret corral, it will leap the fence and trample my chessboard, leaving me to wonder what it was and whence it came. If I am to become whole, I must come into right relationship with it. I must accept and authorize its power.

I want to talk about the afterlife, she said. How many can get into heaven?

I’m not Catholic, I said; so perhaps you know your church’s teaching better than I do. 

There’s heaven and hell – and then there’s purgatory, so they tell me, where lots of people spend lots of time getting cleansed of their sins. Have I got it right?

That’s what the priests say. But what do you think?

You don’t trust your priests?

They’re not here. You are. What do you think?

I’m torn, I said. I have to think that God wants all of us with her, and my religion says she didn’t make us all in order to damn most of us.

But what?

I didn’t say “but.”

You might as well have.

All right then. But I also have to think there is judgment.

What does that mean?

If I arrive at the Great Banquet, should I pass the potatoes to Slobodan Milosevic?

She was full of questions. How long might it take to purge one’s sins? Were there sins that could not be purged? Can one do the work in advance? Is purgatory a place of suffering? Or of tedium? Might it be a sort of classroom, where one writes “I will not . . .” a billion times on the blackboard?

Good questions. This was all very intellectual. I was in over my head, and outside my expertise. She was agitated. We weren’t getting anywhere.

Marjorie, I said, are you feeling fear?

She stared at me. The knot in her forehead unraveled.

Are you afraid of dying?

She grinned more widely than I thought possible.

Yes, she said. That’s what I’m feeling. Fear. I’m afraid.

We sat for several moments in glory.

Thank you, said she.

You’re welcome, said I.

Pastoral counseling isn’t always this easy. She had done most of the work, painted herself into a corner from which only the power of a name could extricate her. She had to make the unconscious conscious.

Not for nothing did Yahweh bring the creatures of the garden before the universal father, so that he could name them. When he had thought of their names, Adam had dominion; he was now responsible for the garden and its inhabitants. They (except perhaps the serpent) had no corresponding name for him. They did not have dominion. They were not responsible for him. Like it or not, that’s the way it is. We’re supposed to take care of the least of these (and not they of us), but we cannot tend and keep even our interior garden without naming its members.

Marjorie was still afraid, but now had named it. She had a handle. She was riding the horse that might have trampled her. When she named the beast, she put the bit in its mouth. It might still get away from her. She might send it in the wrong direction. But now she could watch and keep herself.

I will die later than she: I cannot tell her, have no right to tell her, not to be afraid. To live with her fear until she dies, she must know she is afraid. Though I walk through the darkest valley, your rod and your staff they comfort me. I must hear her fear and help her name it. I must protect her from those who would shame her for it. I must bless her fear. I must travel with her, in the steps of her fear. Where It had been, there was now only Marjorie.

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stanislavski's cat

What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

-- Mark 8:36 (KJV)

Some say that life is an opportunity to grow a soul. If the soul is something we have to grow through a lifetime, then it follows that we start with only the dry seed and not the thing itself. Garrison Keillor, pastor to the largest congregation of liberals, says that if you’re planning to sell your soul, you should nurture it a while so it will go at a good price.

The organization that trains me, judges my work and declares me fit for my ministry has pledged itself to “Recovery of Soul.”* This pledge presumes that soul has been lost. Lear said that “the first time that we smell the air we waul and cry.” Something is always already missing – not on the world’s first day but on the first day of our sentience.

Our cry of birth, the sign of new life, cues our parents’ joy. They celebrate our loss, and we seek our restitution from them. When they disappoint us we go into the world, assuming that somewhere out there we’ll find the missing part of us. We try out our various toys, loves, works and deeds. Some of them are worth living, perhaps even dying for. But none of them is the thing missing. When we think that one of these obsessions is our soul, that’s what’s called idolatry.

Stanislavski loved to watch his cat relax, leaving a round full imprint on the pillow. He wished his theatre students could do the same, but of course they can’t. They’re human, and they’re in the theatre, and they leave a jagged imprint where they lie. We actors and human beings are split by definition, so our weight comes down to earth irregularly. It’s not our fault. It’s our paradoxical blessing, that we’re not cats but human beings. We’re not made for spherical oblivion on the counterpane. Our great opportunity begins with the bum’s rush, flaming sword behind us, nostalgic for what we can’t remember because it isn’t memorable, yearning to be again in the place where we didn’t know where we were, each of us free malgré lui.

Before we managed our appearance before God – before we donned our fig-leaves, corsets, cravats and tuxedos, rags and uniforms, spectacles and lab-coats, bikinis and little black dresses – we had no knowledge of ourselves. To know ourselves is to know that we are missing something. They’re watching us, and we forgot to get dressed. We wish we were better, or at least better-looking; but we’re not, and so the costume parade commences, the greatest show on earth.

We’re not born bad. The notion that we are infernally blotted because our first ancestor didn’t stay in the womb is one of those fantasies engendered by idle, idol theology – faith with too much time on its hands, envious of house-cats. We’re not created evil, but rather with something missing, all of us like Macduff untimely ripped, because there is no time for such a word.

I talked to a man of business who suffers unbearable pain. Every year or so he comes back to treat the pain again. What is the reason of this torment? Is God trying to tell him something?

For that matter, is suffering the slang of God? Is the slaughter of Haitian innocents a kind of singing telegram, a way of getting our attention?

My Baptist businessman and I agree that God doesn’t massacre babies or torture a man’s spinal cord to prick the conscience. Nature follows her courses, and from agony and outrage a conscience may arise, but that is our accomplishment not God’s. Rain falls and buildings collapse on the just and on the unjust alike. Pain recurs to this man in spite of his faith and prayers, in no discernable relation to his balance of good and bad deeds. If this is the divine message, then God is a poor communicator.

The world is what it is, not what it would be if . .

And so my Baptist becomes a Stoic. “The world is what it is,” he says, “but I have my grandmother in my pocket.”

His grandmother was wise. She had seen many idols exposed. She could bring him back to himself, from the worship of what his hands could make, and she gave him an icon, a little cross he carries on his keychain. When the world that is what it is goes into deathly spiral, he can put his hand on wisdom. Grandma reminds him to wait here incomplete, and to resist the lust for sirens of completion.

Seductive are these demons, born of our dearest hopes. The financial industry is our most recently burst pustule of idolatry, but liberals must remember that wealth is not the only corruption. If only I could publish this book, or get this body pregnant, or found this church, or cure this disease, or change this unjust law, or get this child of mine into the correct pre-school, or win this woman’s love . . . All these projects are born of the life instinct. All of them can, without appearing to change, turn deathly. We should ask of the priest, the politician, the doctor, the social worker, the protester, the parent, the lover, what we long to ask of the banker: is your dream the means to a greater end, or has it become the end itself? Are you its master, or has it eaten your soul?

When Moses saw God in a burning bush, the bush was not consumed, and the flame that was not a flame carried the voice of a God who was not there. When Isaiah saw God, the hem of God’s garment filled the temple, which was the prophet’s way of saying that, though he heard the voice there, God was not in the temple but somewhere else.

“It is in your power, whenever you shall choose, to retire into yourself,” wrote the stoic emperor Aurelius.** To recover the soul is to take Grandma out of the pocket. Which is to come back to ourselves. Which is to remember our mortal incompletion. To be full and round, leaving an even imprint on the pillow, is to be dead before we die.

The soul is recovered when we know its absence.

*Covenant of the College of Pastoral Supervision and Psychotherapy, www.cpsp.org

**Meditations IV.3 (trans. George Long)

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many musics

The true path to innovation and invention is not forward but through the past.

-- Garrison Keillor, interview for BBC World Service, Jan. 10, 2010

What has been is what will be,

and what has been is what will be done;

there is nothing new under the sun.

-- Ecclesiastes 1:9 (NRSV)

When I went to college, my fellow students wanted “relevance.” By this they meant their studies should engage the world right now, as they presently knew it. Political Science was a fashionable major, but they didn’t want to learn the theory of politics so much as to intervene against politics. On a certain morning, at an intersection on the corner of the main square of our small Ohio town, some of them got noticed by Huntley and Brinkley because they resisted – passively – the arrival of a Navy recruiter on the campus. They were relevant. As best I can figure out, I was in a Philosophy class at the opposite corner of that square while they got themselves on the evening news. Or maybe not, but I might have been. I spent four years at the opposite corner.

I didn’t understand this demand for relevance. Somebody was paying $3,000 per year for me to go to school. (In those days $3,000 was real money.) At that price, why study what I already knew? For that kind of money I should learn things I had no clue about, things that I would never have heard of unless I had gone to college. For that kind of money, I should demand Irrelevance.

Nowadays professors of “Popular Culture” (no kidding!) get to say smart things on smart radio programs. (I once thought that “Popular Culture Studies” was a chimera dreamed by post-modern novelists, but now I know it’s real). Why should my taxes, or my tuition checks, pay the salary of a professor of popular culture? Hello! It’s popular. Get it? Whatever you’re talking about, doc, we already know. We already get the message. A rock band, a techno gadget, a sitcom, a t-shirt, a video game, an SUV, a millionaire pretending to be a gangsta, a new way of broadcasting forever to the universe what you’ll some day regret that you’re “doing right now.” Whatever it is, it doesn’t need a Ph.D. to explain it. The thing has already interpreted itself, has already come to light and power, and the brave professor hitches his toboggan to a sure thing for a free ride. What a scoop!

It takes guts to interpret what nobody can figure out how to use, at least for now. Nobody knows, no one can predict, what tomorrow we’ll really need to know. The really brave ones are the professors of Sanskrit, and classical Latin and Hebrew, and Arabic and Bantu and Xosa and Urdu and Pashtun and Gullah; the artists who discover how castrati really sang; the imaginers of galaxies and molecules; delvers in medieval marriage contracts; trash-divers under walls of ancient cities; historians of Moldova and Mongolia; logicians of non-Euclidean space; speculators in things not there yet, theorists of resonating strings, and all the others who preserve our possibilities.

The Preacher says there’s nothing new under the sun, there are only new iterations of what’s been said before, but said where no one thought before to say it. A radical is not a person who grows a new branch of knowledge. A radical is one who finds the root of the tree. Originality is only better imitation.

My relevance-demanding generation, college graduates of 1968 and the years that followed, have declared the music of Enlightenment irrelevant. Our radio network, born in preservation during the ascendancy of garage-bands, has fled its arriére-garde duty. When I came to work in New York City and to live nearby, the place was well-known for its several classical music stations; now the last one has sold itself to public radio, where it operates on a weaker frequency. I cannot receive it on my home radios. I have come to the center of American culture and cannot hear my music.

But the music should die, say my fellow liberals, leaders of my church and professors of my seminary; it’s the music of “dead white men,” and its preservation is unjust and oppressive. My friends, those are fighting words. I take this personally. Look me in the eye and say them. Look yourself in the mirror. Like many of you who say these things, I am a white man and in a geological moment I shall as well be dead. These words, in the mouths of so many dying white men who went to college in my day, are words of self-hatred.

Awake, comrades! Grow up before you die. Own your social location. Bear the guilt that was planted there, but carry as well the virtues there conceived. Accept the bitterness of your parents’ sour grapes, but accept as well the sweetness of the fig tree that they left in trust for all of us, for all our brothers and our sisters. If you’re not a reactionary marching for divine right of tyrants and bankers, then Enlightenment is your mother or at least your auntie, and her music is your lullaby. There are many now decrying Enlightenment who owe to her their rostrum and their voice. Adolescence isn’t just for teens.

The world has many musics, and most of them can support the voice of God. Dr. King wasn’t singing Beethoven in Birmingham Jail, it’s true. It was a different kind of song that led those marches. And Sibelius didn’t write the anthem of South Africa. But on the day when that new Republic was born, amidst the sacred songs and dances of many languages and cultures, they called in a European ringer.

I shall pray for forgiveness whenever I betray the dream that alle Menschen werden Brüder, but I shall never apologize for the dream. Almost any music can accompany those words of Schiller, but I know of only one genre that can enact it. Only one music learned how to journey from one place to another, stating a theme, uncovering its contradictions, inciting and surviving its conflicts, and bringing us out in a new place that looks back to where it came from. Only one music learned in a single breath to progress through many tempos and rhythms, tunes and tones, keys and modes, loudnesses and silences. A song is a short-lived thing, done in half a minute, prolonged only by repetition, leaving us where it started. But the music of Enlightenment, though it may contain songs, is not a song. It’s something else. A something else created to embody new life rising on the death of the old, to incarnate Brüderheit growing in the flesh of hatred, to play the leading role of freedom as it throws off slavery’s bonds. If there is another genre that attempts this mission, let me know about it. I’m not jealous. Then there will be two such musics, and they will both deserve preservation.

This “something else” has a social location. It was invented by educated rebels against the aristocracies of eighteenth century Western Europe. Like the rest of us, these inventors could sin, and they did so. Their sin was to draw too small a circle, keeping others out of the dream. Thomas Jefferson, American founder and second Unitarian president, said that all people are created equal, while owning and exploiting human beings. We honor what he said, and condemn his violation of it. Excluded others have kept drawing larger circles, demanding admission to the power. That’s why Beethoven and his Mighty Ninth Symphony were invited to the Republic of South Africa at its birth. Old walls had been blown up, and an oppressed majority, denied for centuries their human dignity by sinners against Enlightenment, now stood within a greater circle, their Menschenheit established beyond appeal.

I fear that on the next great day of human liberation, amidst the many songs and celebrations, an enactment of the New Jerusalem will be sought, and they won’t be able to find it. That’s the kind of moment when dreams go bad – when dreams come true, that is, and we forget the dreaming. My activist college classmates should be praised for their interventions in a sick world dying of lies. But they did not invent truth, or beauty, or virtue. These things are always to be discovered again, hidden in plain sight, at the root of things. I stand on my personal barricade. Vive l’Irrelevance!

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new york

And when I have to give the world a last farewell,
And the undertaker starts to ring my funeral bell,
I don't want to go to heaven, don't want to go to hell.
I happen to like New York. I happen to like New York.

-- Cole Porter

The writer of Apocalypse, imagining the end of history when all would be made new and tears wiped away, described a New Jerusalem as it descended from heaven. A city. Not a farm, or a nomad’s tent, or a village. Though scripture honors these other places, the final Word does not mention them, nor does it describe a suburb or a “gated” community (meaning that the gate is always closed).

The New Jerusalem would have twelve gates, a remarkable number, open to all points of the compass. The peoples of the world are invited in from their various locations, social and geographical. We can approach her golden streets and crystal towers from any direction. In this final vision, each will meet all the Others, and our human differences will bless not kill us. Instruction in community shall go forth from Zion, which is not a desert mountain like Horeb or Sinai but a hill in the midst of a city. That’s what the purpose of a city is.

I’ve lived in a place called Michigan, where the substance and idea of City have been destroyed with prejudice and without remorse. Detroit was one of the first American cities to uproot its public transportation, to rip out neighborhoods of the poor and build over them aptly named “depressed expressways” to distant uncommunities, where only the white and successful would be admitted, and even they would seldom have to meet each other. This anti-social engineering has for decades been racially glossed, but it was born of a different fear – the terror that some sentient being, somewhere, might not be forced to own an automobile.

The elements of a living city are known, except in Michigan. Efforts to revive the place encounter not only physical but mental devastation as well, from generations of insult to the notion of urbanity. A chapter in the programming of modernity has been extracted from the public mind. During the time I lived there, the people of southeast Michigan turned down an arts tax because they couldn’t understand why museums and concert halls, theaters and galleries, should be “down there” rather than in their own sparsely populated, traffic-choked outer-ring suburb. The last great effort to re-create the city centered on stadiums and casinos, places that provide few jobs and foster no communities. The Renaissance Center is a fortress entrenched against its neighborhood, concealing the waterfront that should have been the center of revival.

In my life’s current phase I work in a city that could not be destroyed, though Robert Moses tried to reduce it to a shopping strip. He won the battle of Penn Station, but the city beat him in the battle of Grand Central. It’s still a place for people, not for cars. Manhattan exerts its enormous daily force against the owners of automobiles.

A tourist lady with two kids in tow asked me, as I hopped the bus to visit a client, how to get to the Metropolitan and Natural History Museums. I told her what buses to connect with, and that the one museum was just a walk across the park from the other. She raised her eyebrows. “Is it safe?” Yes, my dear, it’s safe. Safer than many a stroll in your manicured suburban grove.

We’re safe here. Hundreds of nationalities and language groups live jammed together in a tiny space. They do not know or understand each other, yet seldom resort to violence – there’s greater risk on many a farm. My associates, male and female, go home by themselves at night in safety. People come from all over the world for the privilege of working; that Urdu-speaking cabdriver may have been a physician in his former life. They work with commitment and with style; they live in separate ethnic neighborhoods, but their children will assimilate, and their grandchildren won’t even know the language of the old country. Hope rules. We take care of each other.

As a woman walks out a subway car, a mass of papers, clearly a creative project, falls out of her carry-all. All together now: a woman sitting opposite the door calls to her, a man sitting by the door puts out his hand to prevent it from closing, another man gathers the paper and hands them to her as she turns around. Catastrophe averted. The door closes. Enough said.

It’s raining, and I’m going down the subway steps (southeast corner, 50^th and Broadway). People are going both ways, we’re in a hurry. Just for a moment my foot slips, my rhythm is staggered. Hands are reached out to me from above, below, from my left. “You all right?” “I’m good, thank you.” I’ve been cared for. I never see their faces. We don’t miss a step. We stay on the course of our separate business, and we’re all in it together. If only America could remember that. It’s not grab everything that ain’t bolted down and run. We’re all in this together.

It ain’t perfect, but this is one place where the dream survives. Work hard. Learn something. Make a noise. You can make a life.

Those who call themselves Christians and revile the cities should read the scripture closer. In the final word it’s not on a farm, or in a village, or in a gated community, that the tears shall be wiped away. All things shall be made new in a city. And this one is the nearest thing human beings have made to a City of God.

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essential liberty

They shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees,

And no one shall make them afraid.

-- Micah 4:4 (NRSV)

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

-- Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

It’s clear that Franklin, the apparent author of an aphorism oft-quoted both in liberal and in conservative culture, never experienced basic insecurity. If he had, he would have known that people who lack even “a little temporary safety” never arrive at the discussion circle about liberty.

As an American, I am a child of Enlightenment in my political life. As a Unitarian Universalist, I am a child of Enlightenment in my religious life as well. The tradition of restricted government and individual liberties, first hinted in the Magna Carta and rumbling through the British Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is the noblest creation of humankind; but like all human creations it has a blind spot, right in the middle of its retina.

The Bill of Rights does not include a right to eat. Nor does it include freedom from random violence. But without basic security the very notion of individuality cannot form, and those who lack a notion of individuality will also lack imagination of any rights to privacy, liberty of conscience or freedom of expression. Essential safety is presupposed in all American political discourse. Individual life has a necessary infrastructure of physical nourishment, spatial separation and secure boundary, without which the words of our founding documents are so much scholastic jaw-wagging. The American documents were created by a class of people who, though they risked the penalty of treason against the greatest power of their day, took daily safety for granted. King George might have hanged them, but they did not expect to be shot in their homes by street gangs. Not everyone however is essentially safe, and there is therefore a profoundly mute under-underclass whose interest, despised by left and right alike, cannot even be spoken.

Fareed Zakaria wrote that new democracies lacking liberal institutions, whose per capita GDP is less than $3,000, are doomed to failure and tyranny.* When ignorant and brutalized people vote, even under the supervision of international agencies, they elect demagogues and terrorists in a culture of “one man, one vote, one time.” There really are, he would say, occasions when a good king is better for the world than a bad democracy; and our virtuous efforts to make the world safe should focus less on written constitutions and voting rights than on broad prosperity and distribution of wealth, and on fostering the culture and institutions that could lead a democracy toward freedom – the school, the law, the press and the university. “First, a government must be able to control the governed, then it must be able to control itself. Order plus liberty.” A would-be democratic people must be trained for the maintenance of democracy, or there’s no telling what they’ll do. We are more afraid these days of failed states than of evil ones.

Tyranny is too often popular. Even our own nation, once the world’s model of liberal democracy, now seems susceptible to tyrannical charms. What our infantile selves really want is not elected representation but a good king – the father/ruler (Arthur, Charlemagne, David or Stalin) who will beat down our enemies and render us safe. In a culture of liberal democracy, we are trained to put down that infantile voice; we know that no one is worthy to save us, that the stooge we elect is the least of evils, and that the least of evils is much better than the worst. But such mature calculations require a certain patience, which desperate people lack. That’s why it’s in the interest of democracy to prevent large-scale desperation; and why it’s in the interest of demagogues and tyrants to create desperation, and proclaim it widely.

We’re in the season when, according to Christian culture, the Prince of Peace arrives. The metaphorical light that Isaiah hoped would shine on a benighted people is Israel’s anointed warrior/king, who will break “the rod of their oppressor,” so the people can celebrate their freedom “as people exult when dividing plunder” (9:3-4).

In Micah’s analysis of peace, it’s his second clause that seals the deal. Not hard to see that before peace can come, everybody must have a life-support system. That each shall sit under a vine and a fig tree that he owns, and that provides food and shelter, shade and leisure. But although this infrastructure is necessary, it cannot suffice, because it is inherently unstable. Oppressed people who have just received their little bit of property are susceptible to fear, easily manipulated into monstrous acts against real or imaginary enemies – the newest immigrants, the racial minorities, the gays or the Jews. That’s why, if peace is to prevail, “no one will make them afraid.” No one can be permitted to take away their vine and fig tree. No one can be permitted to threaten to take away their vine and fig tree. And most important, no one can be permitted to tell the lie that someone else – the immigrant, the black man, the gay person or the Jew – will take away their vine and fig tree. Invoking that fear in the hearts of the marginal, of people who have just obtained their little bit of sustenance, is the timeless strategy of rising dictators.

All realms owe their people safety, and when they fail to provide it they cannot expect to survive. We liberals, classical or contemporary, don’t like to be reminded that, if the people are unsafe in their houses, under their fig trees and on the streets in front of them, they will hear our talk of liberty as a song of privilege, sung by over-educated aristocrats who despise them, about rights whose meaning they will never know. We cannot then expect their gratitude or their votes. Law and order is the first freedom that we owe the people. Once that’s provided, we can discuss the Bill of Rights with proper humility.

*The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003)

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