HCS Seniors.

Listen!

Are indeed quite intriguing. I have long admired their unique class, and now more than ever, I feel as though I have a duty to share my experiences with them. Though I have met, and taught quite a few people in my time, I’m quite convinced that each and every one of the seniors just rocks my socks.

I must also admit, I am a bit anxious about their “Senior prank.” I fear they will strike when, and where I least expect, so I’m constantly on my guard, for they are certainly terrifying in their sheer ingenuity!
Also, I’d Like to recommend a fabulous movie to all of you: “Whats Up Doc?” Its really a confusing movie, but wonderful.

Thats all for now.

-Ammo

The (Not So) Glorious Revolution

“The diminished and impoverished Crown could no longer stand. It fought against the new wealth the struggle of the Civil Wars; it was utterly defeated; and when a final settlement was arrived at in 1660 you have all the realities of power in the hands of a small powerful class of wealthy men, the King still surrounded by the forms and traditions of his old power, but in practice a salaried puppet. And in that social world which underlies all political appearances, the great dominating note was that a few wealthy families had got hold of the bulk of the means of production in England, while the same families exercised all local administrative power and were moreover the Judges, the Higher Education, the Church, and the generals. They quite overshadowed what was left of central government in this country.”

~ Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State, pp. 67-68.

Capitalism as Moral Anarchy

“For a society in which the determinant mass of families were owners of capital and of land; for one in which production was regulated by self-governing corporations of small owners; and for one in which the misery and insecurity of a proletariat was unknown, there came to be substituted the dreadful moral anarchy against which all moral effort is now turned, and which goes by the name of Capitalism.”

~ Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007), p. 52.

The Art of the Ironist

Absurdity is an intrinsic quality of so many things that they only have to be touched to reveal it. The deadliest way to annihilate the unoriginal and the insincere is to let it speak of itself. Irony is this letting things speak for themselves and hang themselves with their own rope. Only, it repeats the words after the speaker, and adjusts the rope…. The ironical method might be compared to the acid that develops a photographic plate. It does not distort the image, but merely brings clearly to the light all that was implicit in the plate before…. Similarly the ironist insists always on seeing things as they are. He is a realist whom the grim satisfaction of seeing the truth compensates for any sordidness that it may bring along with it. Things as they are, thrown against the background of things as they ought to be, this is the ironist’s vision.

~ Randolph Bourne, The Radical Will: Selected Writings 1911-1918 (Berkley: Univ. California Press, 1977), 32.

Identity Politics, You Just Got Served!

For each identification (the creation or cobbling together of identity) creates a figure that provides a material for its investment by the market. There is nothing more captive, so far as commercial investment is concerned, nothing more amenable to the invention of new figures of monetary homogeneity, than a community and its territory or territories. The semblance of non-equivalence is required so that equivalence itself can constitute a process. What inexhaustible potential for mercantile investments is this upsurge — taking the form of communities demanding recognition and so-called cultural singularities — of women, homosexuals, the disabled, Arabs! And these infinite combinations of predictive traits, what a godsend! Black homosexuals, disabled Serbs, Catholic pedophiles, moderate Muslims, married priests, ecologist yuppies, the submissive unemployed, prematurely aged youth! Each time, a social image authorizes new products, specialized magazines, improved shopping malls, “free” radio stations, targeted advertising networks, and finally, heady “public debates” at peak viewing times. Deluze put it perfectly: capitalist deterritorialization requires a constant reterritorialization. Capital demands a permanent creation of subjective and territorial identities in order for its principle of movement to homogenize its space of action; identities, moreover, that demand anything but the right to be exposed in the same way as others to the uniform prerogatives of the market.

~ Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundations of Universalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2003), 10-11.

Getting to the Bottom

I want to offer a quotation sandwich. When I read these quotes Barak Obama came to mind as he appears to be running on the Jim Wallis “Religious Values Matter” campaign (check out Obama’s speech “Call to Renewal”). I have to be honest, I am very intrigued by Obama, but for all his talk of a change, I’m not at all convinced he is really proposing something that Christian radicals can sink their teeth into.

So in light of the upcoming elections and the buzz that is mounting about Obama, particularly from Christians, I wanted to offer some choice quotes from McCarraher and McCabe:

But as we look at a country frenzied and fatigued by the race for riches, armored and overextended in its expansive rage and fear, we will need, for lack of a better term, a new New Left, a movement of people who combine, in Alasdair MacIntyre’s wonderful couplet, “Trotsky and St. Benedict”; and I suspect that many of us, knowing in our marrow that business as usual cannot be allowed to continue, are more than ready for a militant renewal of the urge to make all things new (Eugene McCarraher, “The Revolution Begins in the Pews: Trotsky and St. Benedict” Books and Culture ).”

[The revolutionary] proposes to change not merely this or that detail within society, but the structure, and hence the values of the society itself. The revolutionary does not propose something that in terms of this society is better; he wants to change [t]he terms. He wants history to advance not [s]imply further along the established lines, but along new lines (Herbert McCabe, Law, Love and Language, p. 28).”

At a minimum, that means a metamorphosis in the ethos and curricula of business and professional schools at Christian colleges and universities. Christians should be pioneering a whole new economics, not just tacking “values” onto capitalism. They should be affirming abundance, not scarcity, as the primary ontological fact of economics. They should be offering courses, not in management, but in how to do without management as a distinct class. They should be offering courses and training in union organization, or in dispossessing those useless people otherwise known as stockholders and putting firms into the hands of people who actually work in them (Eugene McCarraher, “Britney Spears and the Downward Arc of Empire” in The Other Journal).”

Both McCabe and McCarraher use the word ‘values’, but they use it differently. I see the way McCabe is using it to denote a paradigm or ideological shift. McCarraher, on the other hand, is talking about the invertebrate Christian “values” we tack onto our inherently un-Christian political economy. In this regard, both McCabe and McCarraher would argue the the radical or revolutionary Christian will not settle for surface sentiments that we infuse our system with. Rather, what we need is to change our system from the bottom up.

Obama, on the other hand, is comfortable with tacking values onto the American political economy. And while I think Obama (and Wallis) are to be applauded for getting Christians who do not identify with the Religious Right to care about the relationship between religion and politics, my question remains:

For the radical Christian, is tacking Christian values onto our current system enough?

Humility

I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.”

This quote from Groucho Marx has served me well through the years. I take it as a fundamental reality of human life that we are determined to deceive ourselves about ourselves. As such one of the most basic and fundamental Christian virtues is humility, and more specifically, the humility to be shown where we are wrong. Among other things, this means I cannot assume that where I’m at is the place that I, or anyone else, ought to be.

That humility is a Christian virtue is very interesting in light of the fact that we Christians are often so certain that we are right. For many of us, our faith in Christ means that we are on the right side of a cosmic struggle between good and evil. But if we are truly humble, won’t we have to face the fact that we are often quite capable of evil ourselves? In fact, if Christians were more eager to really see and own their propensity for and complicity in sin wouldn’t we be less eager to draw hard lines between us (the saved) and them (the unsaved)?

This “us” vs. “them” line-drawing is very evident with many of the young Christian students I teach. For myself, I can remember as a young high school student being very concerned to demonstrate how my faith was true and how everybody else’s was false. Things certainly have not changed much in the past decade or so, as many of my students are still very sure that they are “in” with God, while unbelievers are “out” and need to either turn or burn.

I recognize that the flip side of the “us”/”them” dichotomy is often a tolerant relativism that reduces the distinctions between Christians and non-Christians to matters of perspective or taste. While I am not at all advocating this sort of liberal demolition of Christian boundaries, I think it is important that we approach the “other” with deference and humility, if for no other reason that the outsider might be the one through whom God is calling us to repentance.

Thus, it stands to reason that our humility before Christ will require we be humble before our neighbors, regardless of whom they worship. If Christ is Lord of all, then it must be possible that he may come to us in ways outside of the traditional Christian boundaries we have established. After all, without humility, I may just write him off as another lost outsider.