Rabbit Is Repulsive

Fearful of losing his scholarship [at Harvard], [John Updike] fretted before every exam and duly recorded the results, even on quizzes, in his letters home. “I seem to be somewhat of a grind,” he wrote in an early letter, adding, “This surprises no one more than it does me.” Since he planned to be a writer, he majored in English to force himself to read classic literature. (His own taste ran to James Thurber.) And though he wanted to master French, he dropped it when he discovered he had little aptitude for languages. He finished ninth in his class but was chagrined when two of his oral examiners, noting his weak grasp of classical literature, hesitated before awarding him summa cum laude distinction.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/21/books/21updike.html?pagewanted=2&sq=updike&st=cse&scp=2

I mean, aside from Updike's relentless sniggery misogynism and unrelentingly nasty suburban downlow sex, says here Harvard thought Updike had no aptitude for language? And the NYT asserts, after examining some of the 170-carton archive His Holiness left Harvard, that Updike's literary go-to guy was that 20th century style titan, James Thurber?

Nobody I know, much less the writers I know, was so callow or frivolous at 18 to prefer Thurber. My teenage years, and those of everybody I know who reads, were the Magellan years of reading, true epic courage and stamina. My go-to guys at 18 were Patrick Dennis, Hardy, and Lawrence Durrell and I'm sure yours were equally hi lo, like Seventeen magazine, Exupery and Steinbeck.

Steinbeck! I read in the TLS a while back his rep is on the rise. Good.

The Veil 3

In modernity, therefore -- the history of the democratization of religious experience as persuasively posited by James -- we may discard as barbaric certain Gods. These James defines as follows:

Nothing is more striking than the secular alteration that goes on in the moral and religious tone of men, as their insight into nature and their social arrangements progressively develop. After an interval of a few generations the mental climate proves unfavorable to notions of the deity which at an earlier date were perfectly satisfactory: the older gods have fallen below the common secular level, and can no longer be believed in. To-day a deity who should require bleeding sacrifices to placate him would be too sanguinary to be taken seriously. Even if powerful historical credentials were put forward in his favor, we would not look at them. Once, on the contrary, his cruel appetites were of themselves credentials. They positively recommended him to men's imaginations in ages when such coarse signs of power were respected and no others could be understood. Such deities then were worshiped because such fruits were relished.
http://www.psychwww.com/psyrelig/james/james11.htm

There is much to quibble with here, starting with the notion of inevitable progress to which the even the eternal nature of God himself is subject.

But this is not what James is talking about.

He is talking about a God whose personality changes as men's power enactments change. In other words, the character of God and his utility morphs with the character of the power relations of men in history. I think we can, all of us, red and yellow, black and white, accept this idea because we can all clearly see that it is true in our own lives and in what little we know of history and the lives of others.

My grandfather, the devout scion of 25 generations of nut-cuttin' Franco-Scots-Irish Protestants and a vigorous Darwinian professor of biology, could do both. And it did not trouble him for more than a minute to solve the problem. As a scholar of Greek and Latin, as all Presbyterian gentlemen born in 1860 in South Carolina were, with some Hebrew and probably Aramaic thrown in just so's you could read your own Bible like a good Presbyterian, Grampa Juice was clearly aware that most of the creationists' (and many other) problem(s) were problems of inaccurate translation of the Bible into English. The earth could have been created in seven "periods of time", I believe, was his argument, seven "days" not being precisely accurate. You know somebody like this in your life, whose point has such "immediate luminousness" -- one of James' criteria for the usefulness of spiritual phenomena -- that it changes the way you live your life permanently. Like the way God is supposed to.

So, then, we are not talking about the character of God, which is eternal, and a mystery, but how the history of power relations among men, and women, changes religion. Scholarship of the canonical texts of Mohammed, and his exegetes, parallels precisely modern scholarship of the Bible in the west. One Moroccan scholar, Fatima Mernissi, has carefully gone through both the Koran and the Hadith searching for Mohammed's own view on the veiling of women, and subsequent incrustations of Hadith misogynism which do not reflect, it is argued, Mohammed's intention but rather the history of the interpretation of the Koran, and the times in which its interpreters lived. I am certain that women throughout the Muslim world are discussing these matters, even as the United Nations imperializes the unveiling of Islamic women by linking it to human rights violations, and thence to World Bank loans. Thus does wearing a veil become, perhaps, a defiance of the U.S. imperialists one can see denounced with ferocity on the feminist website of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. It is RAWA's clandestine photograph of the Taliban's execution of the veiled Zarmina which is the icon for these posts.

Again, anyone who believes in God would be hard put to justify this feminist veiling (or unveiling) as God's will, or Mohammad's, when deployed in defiance of western imperialists. I think we can agree, red and yellow, black and white, that it is not God's will to make war with something you wear on your head. It is P.R.. I think we can agree that aligning ourselves with the will of God is an inside, and possibly a secret and humble, job that no amount of posturing or physical effacement will achieve. Veiling for war is rather another move in the long history of human power relations. For believers in God, the question of the veil as a nationalist and war-mongering symbol rather than the will of God -- Arafat folded his keffiyeh over his right shoulder in the shape of Palestine -- is a serious matter.

to be continued
arafat's keffiyeh, the guest workers, and the quakers' hats
women's literacy, islamic canon system and protestant reformation

The Veil 4

Whether or not God is at work in the history of men's power relations, and whether or not it is incumbent upon us, as God's children, to enact politically his will for us, is a matter of debate among people of good will. The agenda of Islamists is to make the law of Islam, sharia, the law of the nation, a project much discussed among Muslims of good will explicitly along the lines of a liberal and democratic Islamic state.

I appreciate the degree to which the Protestant ethic has formed capitalism, and vice versa, as well as the codes and imperialisms of the liberal democracies, and the varying degrees to which liberal democracies morph as theocratic constituencies vote their agendas into power. But this is fair; it is the dictatorship of the proletariat as required by the tenets of democracy.

Islamist theocracies, and their agenda to unite in a new world-wide caliphate, may come down to this: if Osama bin Laden relies upon the internet to organiz eJihad, kidney dialysis machines and cell phones, as he is alleged to do, he must also accept the political -- and not just the technological -- results of the scientific method, capitalism and the protestant reformation, the combined force of which now impels liberal democracy. Or, to deploy a more demotic commodity, if the newly sexualized soap operas of Turkey, and their stars, are the cynosure of the Arab world, in which some people are not aware that kissing may be a part of married love,* then the democratic impetus for sex as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness cannot be halted. It has long been a Catholic joke that the Protestant reformation started when Luther wanted to marry a nun -- a Taj Mahal built on a fuck, in Lawrence Durrell's immortal phrase. The struggle to regulate men's -- or is it women's? -- sexuality may be the fulcrum of power relations through history, with Luther's right to take the nun in marriage as the first stone thrown against the Bastille of Roman-Christian hegemony. Was the Holy Roman Empire itself -- and thus the caliphate -- just basically the droit de seigneur? This insight may be the great contribution of queer theory to the pushing out of the light inch by inch against the darkness.

It is not a matter of debate, among people of good will, that the enfranchisement of racist national policy -- for example, the Gush Emunim argument that victory in the 1967 war meant God wants Israel to settle the west bank, or the U.S. government's decision to "kill the Indian and save the man" by forcible transfer of Indian children to government boarding schools, or the fatwa against Salman Rushdie who, no matter how bad a writer he is, must be allowed to do so -- often borrows awful power and compels obedience by the conscription of God's will to political expediency.

If there is a God, people of good will may agree that there is only one, not one who hates Jews, and another who hates Palestinians, and a third who hates Christians and the godless Chinee.

There is one who loves us all, and if this is not true, then a God who hates my enemy is not worthy of worship by me. The exact nature of the debate in Islam over whether or not Mohammed requires war, and precisely what that word means, is unknown to me. I suspect it mirrors that of Christendom -- because religion, as opposed to God, is about human emotion; even the universally-documented sensation of the presence of God is said to be a biochemical event. Jesus says we are to love our enemies as ourselves, because they are close relatives, and to fight evil -- not our enemies -- without ceasing. It is certain that Mohammed's reputation for war and Jesus' for pacifism are much obscured by text provenance, politics and interpretation, and that even the actual revelation direct from God that his avatars experience must be conformed to the time and place in which the experience was undergone. We can only recall James' three criteria for pragmatic spiritual practice: a revelation itself, the direct experience of the prophet, must have immediate luminousness, philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness for it to have any bearing on the systems of ethics by which people of good will seek to conduct and console themselves two thousand years after one man's revelation.

Quite independent of perplexities on the existence of God, one may take note that fashions in what God requires of his ministers on earth change. It was thought to be God who ordered the 19th and 20th century Protestants and Catholics to torture Irish orphan and Indian children in their care, in the name of extirpating the demons in them. If God today requires the torture of Muslim women, he will cease to do so tomorrow and the Islamist governments will award women, as the Canadians recently did the survivors of the Indian schools, $2 billion in reparation for genocide. The United Church of Christ, whose medical missionaries were in the forefront of torturing Indian children, is working on an apology in the wake of being accused of genocide by the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the native Canadian residential schools. We can look forward to the Taliban's apology in God's time.

What we believe God requires of us is often wrong, frequently genocide, and it changes, as every scholar of Islam, the hadith, and sharia understands.

Back to the idea that you can wage war with what you wear on your head.

to be continued
arafat's keffiyeh, the guest workers, the blackwomans guide to understanding the blackman, and the quakers' hats
women's literacy, islamic canon system and protestant reformation

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/rwright.htm liberal democ and prot ref
http://www.drsoroush.com/English/On_DrSoroush/E-CMO-20040314-1.html souroush, mu'tazilites


( *NYT 6/17/10 on Turkish Soap Operas )