I read some of Sam Harris’ writing today, trying to figure out whether Chris Hedges was totally off base with some of his insinuations about killing.   To be perfectly honest, I was surprised at some of Hedges insinuations because I didn’t remember Harris, for instance, ever condoning a nuclear attack.  Next trip to the library, I’ll try and get a hold of both End of Faith and I Don’t Believe in Atheists to try and figure out exactly what it is Hedges is talking about.

I went back through all of my posts from 2006.  I wrote a ton!  Here they are:

• Letter to a Christian Nation
• End of Faith: Reason in Exile
• End of Faith: A Science of Good and Evil
• The End of Faith
• Experiments in Consciousness

The problem I repeatedly bumped up against was the feeling that Harris was being completely unreasonable in his insistence that we eradicate religion in order to eradicate fundamentalism.  This is psychologically ridiculous.  Pushing fundamentalist belief up against the wall would do nothing more than strengthen unreasonable resolve.  Treat people reasonably, they generally behave reasonably.  But what Harris thinks is reasonable is viewed as completely unreasonable from the fundamentalist perspective.   He makes no effort to communicate whatsoever.  All he wants to do is enforce his reason upon their unreason which can’t work.  The reason fundamentalism exists is because people feel threatened.  And the more you threaten them, the stronger their resolve.

I think I probably found one of the quotes that Hedges used in regards to Harris’ sanction of force:

…the fate of civilization lies largely in the hands of “moderate” Muslims. Unless Muslims can reshape their religion into an ideology that is basically benign - or outgrow it altogether - it is difficult to see how Islam and the West can avoid falling into a continual state of war, and on innumerable fronts….If oil were to become worthless, the dysfunction of the most prominent Muslims societies would suddenly grow as conspicuous as the sun. Muslims might then come to see the wisdom of moderating their thinking on a wide variety of subjects. Otherwise, we will be obliged to protect our interests in the world with force - continually. In this case, it seems all but certain that our newspapers will begin to read more and more like the book of Revelation.

This is completely inane.  Moderate Muslims did not create fundamentalist Muslims.  A much stronger case could be made for atheism having created today’s fundamentalism.  So maybe the atheists should take responsibility for what it is they have created and undo the harm they have bestowed upon the rest of the world through their communicative mindlessness!  OK - I’m just being facetious.  But atheism is at least as much to blame for fundamentalism as is religion.  Maybe more.

Fundamentalism didn’t exist in the form we have it today until after the Enlightenment.  People felt their beliefs were being threatened and so they took steps to protect them.  And some of what they are protecting isn’t totally unreasonable.  That’s what those in the church of reason don’t get because they think themselves so goddamned reasonable so don’t realize how they contribute to the unreasonable behavior of others.

I was watching Thomas Friedman on Charlie Rose, today, and he was talking about how people don’t listen with their ears, they listen with their stomachs.  People react to one another on gut levels, not reasonable levels.  Get someone to trust you, and you don’t have to fill in all the details.  Make someone distrust you, and you are going to have big problems!

If Harris wants to get rid of fundamentalism, he’s going about it in the completely wrong way!  If he truly wanted to eradicate fundamentalism, he’d be more psychologically savvy.  It’s kind of like Bush and his war on terrorism.  Maybe Bush truly believed he was eradicating evil.  But from the outside it seemed clear the goal was to empower U.S. control over the Middle East.  Maybe Harris truly does want to eradicate fundamentalism.  But from the outside it seems obvious that what he really wants to do is empower atheistic control over theism.

When you look at it this way, Hedges accusations don’t seem so far off base!

Reinhold Niebuhr quote used by Chris Hedges in I Don’t Believe in Atheists:

The idea of progress is compounded of many elements.  It is particularly important to consider one element of which modern culture is itself completely oblivious.  The idea of progress is possible only upon the ground of a Christian culture.  It is a secularized version of Biblical apocalypse and of the Hebraic sense of a meaningful history, in contrast to the meaninglessness history of the Greeks.  But since the Christian doctrine of the sinfulness of man is eliminated, a complicating factor in the Christian philosophy is removed and the way is open for simple interpretations of history, which relate historical process as closely as possible to biological process and which fail to do justice either to the unique freedom of man or the daemonic misuse which he may make of that freedom.

From the Nature and Destiny of Man

I always recycle my stickies I put all over library books until they are no longer sticky so I know that I used only one less sticky on Chris Hedges, I Don’t Believe in Atheists than I did on Hot, Flat, and Crowded, which was a much longer book.   Hedges book is completely crowded with stickies!

This book touches on so much stuff I’ve been writing over the years in less than 200 pages.   Where do I begin?

With the prologue, I suppose:

• “After all, there is nothing intrinsically moral about being a believer or a nonbeliever.”  So true!  But there are plenty of atheists who say it is immoral to be religious and religious folks who say it is immoral to be atheistic.
• “The agenda of the new atheists, however, is disturbing.  These new atheists embrace a belief system as intolerant, chauvinistic and bigoted as that of religious fundamentalists.   They propose a route to collective salvation and the moral advancement of the human species through science and reason.  The utopian dream of a perfect society and a perfect human being, the iea that we are moving toward collective salvation, is one of the most dangerous legacies of the Christian faith and the Enlightenment.  All too often throughout history, those who believed in the possibility of this perfection (variously defined) have called for silencing or eradication of human beings who are impediments to human progress.  They turn their particular notion of the good into an inflexible standard of universal good.  They prove blind to their own corruption and capacity for evil.  They soon commit evil not for evil’s sake but to make the world better.”  Yes, yes, YES!!!  This is what I’ve been trying to say for years but never said it this well!  This is what Nietzsche’s mad man meant when he ran out into the crowd and exclaimed “God is dead” and then sadly walked away with the realization that nobody realized it yet.  What is dead is the the abstraction of values - they no longer serve us whether they be theistic or atheistic.
• “There is nothing in human nature of human history to support the idea that we are morally advancing as a species or that we will overcome the flaws of human nature.   We progress technologically and scientifically, but not morally.  We use the newest instruments of technological and scientific progress to create more efficient forms of killing, repression, economic exploitation and to accelerate environmental degredation.  There is a good and a bad side to human progress.  We are not advancing toward a glorious utopia.”  I love this guy!  We all possess the Karamazov side!  We are all a mix of good and bad and will never be able to eradicate what we perceive as “bad” in favor of what we perceive to be good.  It is the belief that we can eradicate what is “bad” that creates so much hatred and terror in the world in the first place!   It’s like Kurosawa’s movie I just saw, The Bad Sleep Well.  The main character thinks he’s going to eradicate corruption, but he ends up being corrupt himself in order to accomplish it.   And so it goes.

We are not advancing morally.  Any atheist who claims we need to do away with religion in order to advance morally is every bit as delusional as the theist who claims we need to get rid of atheism in order to advance morally.   This is what the existentialists understood:  abstract values are inherently dangerous, be they theistic or atheistic.  Making the world more rational will not perfect us anymore than will making the world more religious because human beings are what they are:  imperfect!   What we need is compassion.  Not perfection.

All right - let me dig through the stickies and pick out the points I most want to remember for later:

• The belief in collective moral advancement ignores the inehrent flaws in human nature as well as the tragic nature of human history.
• We drift toward disaster with the comforting thought that the god of science will intervene on our behalf.
• The industrial slaughter and genocides of the past century were all products of the Enlightenment and their satellite ideologies (liberal imperialism, communism, fascism…)  It renders all other values subservient to reason and science which divides humanity into superior and inferior species and sanctifies inhumane abuse of the weak to push humanity forward.
• Secular utopians, like Christian fundamentalists, are stunted products of a self-satisfied, materialistic middle class.  They seek moral justification for their own comfort.
• Both atheist fundamentalists and religious fundamentalists perpetuate their belief systems with fear of the other who seeks to destroy us and our way of life.
• The knowledge that we have the capacity to impose indignities on other human beings is the essence of dignity.  When we lose this capacity of empathy, when we see the other as someone who must be “educated” to embrace our values or eliminated, we step back into the world of animals.
• Democratic systems function because they begin from the premises that human nature is corrupt, and absolute power, as well as absolute truth, is antithetical to common good.
• To acknowledge the purposelessness of human history, to refuse to endow it with a linear march toward human perfection, is to give up the comforting idea that we are greater than those who came before us.  It is to accept our limitations and discard intoxicating utopianistic dreams.  It is to become human.
• It was Spencer, not Darwin, who argued that we were progressing as a species that would end with the perfect human being, but the new atheists continue to sanction violence through the argument that natural selection is social selection and that we are moving toward a final good.  This is not supported by human history or evolutionary biology.
• Nietzsche feared this sort of understanding of Darwin when he came up with his “Last Man” (the ultimate couch potato, as Solomon puts it).   Very often, those who are the least fittest to survive in the physical sense have contributed the most to human culture.   We create the “made to last man” and what do we have but a society of rudimentary human beings.
• Darwin wrote nothing to indicate that the human species had risen above its biological composition and he argued that morality was linked to the behavior of animals.  Those who claim, in the name of science, that we can overcome our imperfect human nature create a belief system that functions like religion.  It gives meaning, it gives purpose, it gives hope.  But it is a myth.  It is not true.  And there is nothing, when you cut through their scientific jargon, to support their absurd position.
• Theologists have said for a very long time that creation is the condition of there being something rather than nothing.  It didn’t happen a long time ago.  Creation is a constant in human existence.  New atheists pay little attention to this sort of theology, focusing instead on creationism which is both pseudotheology and pseudoscience.  They reside within the same narrow intellectual boundaries as do fundamentalist Christians.
• The belief that science or religion can eradicate human lust leads to the worship of human potential and human power.  The attempt to deny lust empowers it.
• The consumer culture, as Nietzsche feared, has created tens of millions of “Last Men”.  Atheists such as Harris and Hitchins exemplify these Last Men.   They promote a consumerist Sparta.
• Our failure to judge the limits of our power has resulted in terrible blunders, first in Vietnam and now in Iraq.
• Science, the last century has shown us, has served the darkest and most violent projects of humankind.
• The United States is dependent on other countries, particularly those in the Middle East, for its natural resources.  It is hostage to foreign states which control the country’s mounting debt.  Its infrastructure is crumbling, its social services are in decline, and its education system is in shambles.  It is rotting from the inside out.  And in the midst of this decline, our secular and religious fundamentalists hold our society up as the paragon of human possibility and goodness.  Hedges quotes the same Neibuhr quote Bacevich did:  “One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.”
• We have no right to place ourselves on a higher moral plane than terrorists when we killed 370,000 people, 85 % civilian (many just school children on their way to school) with the Atomic Bomb.   Regretable but necessary?  No - it’s morally indefensible!
• Human evil is not a problem.  It can’t be solved.  It’s a mystery.  The forces of darkness are our own forces.  If we fail to acknowledge them, they will destroy us.  The idea that we can advance morally, that we can achieve human perfection, is itself and evil.  It provides a cover for criminality and abuse, a justification for murder.  It denies our own moral pollution.
• The danger we face does not come from religion, it comes from a growing intellectual bankruptcy that is one of the symptoms of a dying culture.
• The ancient Greeks held in high regard the command to “Know Thyself”.  To know ourselves is to accept our human limitations and imperfections.

I like this (from Pema Chodron via James at The Buddhist Blog):

Nontheism (a.k.a. non-theism) is defined as the Oxford English Dictionary as: “… not having or involving a belief in God, especially as a being who reveals himself to humanity.” The author Pema Chödrön, when writing about Buddhism, states:

The difference between theism and nontheism is not whether one does or does not believe in God. … Theism is a deep-seated conviction that there’s some hand to hold. … Non-theism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves. … Nontheism is finally realizing there is no babysitter you can count on.”

My husband and I saw Religulous today and we laughed all the way through the film even though we realized that much of what we were laughing at really wasn’t funny at all.  Bill Maher is absolutely right.  If we don’t do something about the current state of religiosity, we are going to self-destruct.  We will have holy wars on a scale that makes what went on in the Middle Ages look like child’s play.

And he is also absolutely correct that inherent within religious belief is the desire for death because institutionalized religion assures us that what supposedly awaits us in the future is better than what we are living now.  As Bill Moyer’s wrote in Welcome to Doomsday, this belief is nothing to scoff at.  People are actively bringing on Doomsday because they believe that they will be saved from this world and life will be better for them in the “otherworld”.

It’s the quintessential narcisistic utopia.  If you don’t believe what they believe, you’ll be destroyed in what it is they have set in motion (which is really a sort of suicide mission) while they ride off to paradise on their white horse.  If people genuinely believe we are in the End of Times (and these people include our leaders), what motivation do we have to take care of the world?  I think Maher makes an excellent point!

I am definitely not as anti-religious as Maher, and throughout the movie I was wondering what it would be like to have a conversation with him.  I imagine he’d lump me into a category in which I don’t belong.  But maybe not.  There is just a bit of irony in his claim that he doesn’t know because he states it with such conviction.

I agree with him - if there is a God out there, we can’t know it, so it makes no sense whatsoever to discuss the facts about God or even argue the existence or non-existence of God.  It’s a ridiculous argument that can only go in circles.  Whether you believe God exists or doesn’t exist only points to the starting premise of your belief system.    It’s a mute point.  Who cares????   Lots and lots of people, unfortunately.

But I think Maher is preaching to the choir with this film.   Maybe he’d make some moderate religious folks re-think their beliefs, but if people are scared, they are going to come out shooting and I think this sort of film will make the scared even more scared.

I think the reason we have so much fundamentalism right now is because people are severely afraid and the worst thing we can do is add to their fears.  The “us and them” thing needs to end and we need to start being able to talk to one another.  Can’t say I’m exactly sure how to go about this, but inciting the 16% of non-believers to rally against the believers is probably going to make things worse, not better. But maybe I’m wrong?

Go see it!   Perhaps it will spark more dialog than hatred.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB8fPJ6zds8]

I really like the introduction to Nausea by Hayden Carruth which made me do some web surfing and allowed me to read some more of his essays. It seems as though he came to some of the same conclusions Sartre did about art in his later years. At one point, he thought art (his poetry and writing) could help people, but now he realizes it can’t. In Suicides and Jazzers, he writes that artists yearn to be connected through their art, but eventually will discover their defeat.

People say that a society which neglects its arts and artists will be impoverished, but this society is so impoverished already–and from hundreds of quite other causes–that the neglect of art can’t make the situation any worse. Artists know this. They know that if they work simply for themselves, or even for some abstract ideal of Art, they and their work will become attenuated and parched. They yearn to be connected. But they can’t be, and they are defeated, they are in a condition of unending degradation.

But doesn’t this sort of thinking reject the idea of freedom Sartre purports? If you are going to make demands on others (that they be helped by your art, for instance), then you are seeking to limit their freedom. So of course you are going to end up feeling degraded. We are connected. We don’t have to demand connection. To make that demand is to reject the freedom “we have been condemned to”.

Yes, in one sense, we are utterly alone and everything is meaningless, including our attempts to help others and everything we’ve ever held “sacred”. If we can accept this, then we can realize we are never alone and that nothing is ever meaningless. That’s the paradox and I don’t think it requires believing in God or an Absolute to realize it although perhaps it does require a sort of “leap of faith”. But that leap of faith need be nothing more than a willingness to imagine beyond the limits of our current perceptual biases. I don’t mean hoping for anything in specific like wanting the world to conform to what it is we want it to be. But hope in the more general sense - that we can never step into the same river or universe twice because it’s undergoing constant change and there is no way we can possibly imagine where that change may take us. But, if we insist on the reality of our circumstances, we are likely to stay stuck in the same old circumstances.   Our circumstances do not exist in reality because reality is forever in flux.

(What I liked about Carruth’s Introduction on Nausea to follow…)

From Robert C. Walton, Charts of Church History (Zondervan, 1986), p. 41.

My thoughts:

Authority: I was raised Methodist which has a twist on the Sola Scriptura thing. The Wesleyan Quadrilateral says that Scripture, Reason, Tradition and Experience all must be used together to come to theological conclusions. It’s Sola Scriptura but with a twist.

Results of Fall: The Methodism I grew up with wasn’t as big into the depravity of man thing as a lot of the other mainstream churches. I actually didn’t even recognize that this was my orientation until I became Catholic. I think it can be difficult to realize we hold this notion in the U.S. because much of our culture was born out of the Puritan work ethic which is directly linked to the belief in the depravity of man. (The harder you work, the more you are blessed. Competing for goodness, worth, etc.)

I started going to my husband’s church in the late 1980s, early 1990s so times have definitely changed since then. I think mainstream religions are all becoming more and more ecumenical and most definitely the similarities are far more vast than are the differences. But the differences are striking.

Of course there are the obvious ones - like Protestant Bibles are different than Catholic Bibles. And what’s even stranger from a Protestant perspective is that it is possible for a Catholic to have gone to church every Sunday for the entirety of his life and not know all that much about the Bible except the readings he has heard on Sunday. It’s the reading of the Bible within the tradition of the Catholic Church that is important. For a Protestant, the Bible is important period. Possibly more important than Church. If a Protestant has gone to church all of his life, he likely knows the Bible backward and forward.

Protestants don’t typically pray to Saints unless they are new agers. Protestants tend to be very skeptical of the whole Sainthood thing altogether. That was actually probably the most dificult part for me to get used to when I converted to Catholicism. I’d feel like running for the door whenever I saw someone genuflect before a statue of a Saint. It just seemed so pagan. Of course now I border on neo-Paganism, but at the time it was really difficult for me to get used to. Catholicism held on to a lot of pagan ritual that Protestantism denounced as evil.

I think what has made me so interested in the Existentialists I’ve read so far is that they’ve held on to the idea of individualism that came about with the Enlightenment (Protestantism is a product of the Enlightenment). What they have rejected is this individualism in terms of a Supreme Being (either Reason being Supreme or God). They saw how dangerous that was going to be for our future. It’s one thing for a long standing tradition to say - this is our collective truth. It’s another for a bunch of individuals to try and come up with a collective truth. And it’s especially dangerous if these individuals are going to hold on to their individual beliefs as Absolutes.

It was likely a natural progression that the individual started gaining more power than it held under the power of the Catholic Church. It doesn’t really matter if this movement away from the collective and toward the individual was a “good thing” or not because the shift happened. (Shift happens?) We understand ourselves as individuals now and have a very difficult time trying to relate to what it would be like to think of ourselves in the same terms our ancestors did. I think we had to become more grounded in our individuality in order to usher in a Global Community. It’s very unlikely the Catholic Church will ever hold the sort of power it had pre-Enlightenment. That’s not to say it won’t be important, just not as powerful. Our relationship to the whole and to one another has changed. And it will change again. (If we don’t destroy ourselves before it has a chance to shift again.)

The existentialists claim that what has been problematic is that we haven’t yet dropped our addiction to the idea of a universal abstract truth that was adopted from the Greek philosophers and was perpetuated by the Catholic Church and was carried forth through the Enlightenment and Protestantism. That makes so much sense to me!  And this is where I have an issue with Sam Harris saying there needs to be an End of Faith.  That sort of belief can only come from a belief in a Universal Abstract Truth. (What’s good for me is good for all.) We don’t need to call for the End of Faith or the End of Religion. I agree with the existentialists. What we need to do is directly address our addiction to abstract truth. The atheists are every bit as guilty as far as this goes.

The most recent volume of Spiritual Cinema Circle includes a short film by Scott Cervine entitled The Miraculous Collision. The basis of the short film is Woody Allen’s film Match Point which greatly troubles Cervine’s character (who always dreamed that one day he would single-handedly wipe out world hunger) in the film. He claims the movie is all about chance; that life is just full of chance, nothing more. And we can’t handle that. So what we do is make things up and pretend we create our own reality to make ourselves feel better about it. He said he walked out of the movie theater thinking maybe that’s what he had done with his belief that all is right with the world. He just made it up. And more, he made up an encounter with his dead father because the rest of life just wasn’t happening for him.

At the beginning the film, he dreams his dad is on the ceiling writing something like, “Your only limitation is the voice of fear”. When Scott (I can’t remember his character’s name) goes on a quest, he experiences the voice of fear personified as himself. This voice tells him - “It is all chance. If you could truly impact your day to day existence, it would be heaven, not earth. Life just is. Your only chance for peace is to accept your limitations.”

The rest of the film is about Scott slashing through this voice of fear and reconnecting with his father which is apparently metaphorical for “all is right with the world”. It’s not just about chance - we can trust that all is right with the world.

So - after watching the short, I went back and watched Match Point (which I briefly reviewed previously. It’s the current film for the Analogical Imagination Group.

***Contains spoilers***

It begins,

“The man who said I’d rather be lucky than good saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependant upon on luck. It is scary to think so much is out of one’s control. There are moments in a match when a ball hits the top of a net and in that split second it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck, it goes forward and you win or maybe it doesn’t and you lose.”

The main character is Chris Wilton who, in the beginning of the film, tells Chloe (Chris’s love interest) that he wants to do something special, to make a contribution. Nola (Chris’s lust interest) claims that Chris is aggressive but Chris says he is simply naturally competitive. I had the sense throughout the film that the ball keeps going forward for Chris but that this isn’t because of luck. It’s because he is controlling.

During a dinner conversation, Chloe brings up the fact that she doesn’t believe in luck, she believes in hard work. Chris makes the comment that science is confirming that all existence is here by blind chance - that there is no purpose or design. Chloe responds by saying that she doesn’t care - she loves every minute of it. Chris claims he envies her for this.

This is sort of a typical Woody Allen theme. The naive people of “faith” in his films are those whose lives are the happiest. Allen himself has said that he wishes he could have their faith but doesn’t think it is a reality. He considers being bestowed with faith as “luck”. In Crimes and Misdemeanors, he says of the rabbi who is going blind, “He’s blessed and lucky because he has the best gift anyone could have. He has genuine religious faith.” While Chloe isn’t necessarily religious, she does have religious sensibilities and talks about doing “the right thing” just as the blind rabbi did in Crimes and Misdemeanors. (Allen himself claims the universe is at best indifferent. And reiterates, “At best!”)

In continuing the conversation, Tom (Chloe’s brother and Chris’s friend) quotes their pastor: “Despair is the path of least resistance”. Chris counters this by saying “I think faith is the path of least resistance”. Chloe immediately changes the subject.

Clearly, despair is very attractive to Chris. He loves tragedy and is dumb struck by Nola who is almost the personification of despair (the despairing actress) and has the tragic life history to go with her despair. As the film plays out, it does appear he is correct. There is a sort of predictability that exists within the faithful that does not exist within those who are despairing. The truly faithful will most likely do “the right thing”, but there is no telling what someone in despair will do. Nola, in her despair, threatens to break up Chris’s marriage and becomes uncontrollable. Chris, in his, commits premeditative murder. And again, according to Allen, if you are bestowed with faith, it’s simply because you are lucky. While Chloe absolutely loves life, Chris sees life as tragic.

Chris is calculating. I had the sense throughout the film that everything was sort of like a poker match or something. That Chris is continually playing people and calling their bluff in order to insure that luck stays on his side.

So here is where Cervine might be on to something. If you believe all is right with the world, then there is no need to control events. You can simply experience them. And if it is all about experience, might as well focus on the positive (which he discovers is not the same as denying the negative). On the other hand, if you think life is all about luck, this is likely going to make you extremely controlling (or despondent). It’s more about making things go your way than about trusting that all is as it “should” be.

When Nola gets pregnant, Chris explains that it is incredible bad luck. Nola says it is a child conceived out of passion and that she is pregnant and Chloe isn’t because he doesn’t love Chloe. But when confronted with the ghost of Nola about having killed his own child, Chris quotes Sophocles - “to never have been born may be the greatest boon of all.” (I had to look up boon. It means blessing.)

After Chris kills Nola, he does feel incredibly guilty for what it is he’s done. But part of that guilt is associated with “luck”. (He makes the side comment that he just hasn’t gotten lucky yet). The officer investigating the crime assumes that Nola was just in the wrong place at the wrong time and got in the way of a robbery. He says that Nola simply picked the wrong time to come up - that some people don’t have any luck. But the reality is her murder wasn’t “bad luck”. Her murder was premeditated, not accidental. Chris killed her because she threatened to break up his marriage (which would end the lifestyle he had grown accustomed to).

When Chris encounters the ghost of Nola and the old woman, Nola tells him that he will pay the price - that his scheme is full of flaws. Chris replies that would be good because it would offer a small justice, some small measure of hope for the possibility of meaning.

But in the end, when Chris is throwing out all of the old women’s jewelry he took to make the motive look like robbery, her wedding band “hits the net” and falls back rather than forward. It falls backward. And a man who later commits a murder in the same neighborhood is found with the ring in his pocket and Chris is off the hook. That the wedding band fell backwards when Chris threw it seems to indicate that Chris is unlucky.

I saw this differently the first time I watched it and Kristin referred me to her post after she saw it at the theater. At first I thought it was like Crimes and Misdemeanors - where you commit murder and get away with it - both in terms of nobody finding out and in terms of your own conscience. Just give it a little time and life goes on just as it was. That the ring falls backward does seem to indicate that Chris hasn’t gotten by with it. But I’m not sure that what he regrets is having committed murder. I think what he regrets is that he received no proof whatsoever that life is anything but luck. But maybe that’s the same thing? Chris loves tragedy and this is truly tragic.

I’m not sure I agree that Woody Allen had a change of heart since Crimes and Misdemeanors, however. I don’t think Chris’s regret points to any sort of justice. Just the opposite, actually. I think Woody Allen would claim that the reason people believe Chris’s regret points to justice is because they are attempting to create meaning where there is none. I don’t necessarily agree with this, of course. But on a second watching of the film, I didn’t come away with any sense that Woody Allen has come to believe the universe cares. I definitely could be wrong, however.

Crimes and Misdemeanors

This is one of my all-time favorite movies and I appreciate it even more after having completed Brothers Karamazov (I read Crime and Punishment about 10 years ago). Dostoevsky takes for granted that anyone who commits a crime will suffer for it. They create for themselves an existentialized Hell. But Woody Allen isn’t so sure Dostoevsky is correct in this regard. It might be possible for some people to commit a horrible crime and get over it.

Woody Allen says, “There’s a real life and there’s a film life. In real life high ambitions don’t mean anything, only success does. People commit murders, and they get away with them. They’re not punished. Good people go blind. But there’s also a fantasy life that people live by and escape into all the time, and it juxtaposes against reality.”

Part 2 of my notes from Charles Guignon’s introduction to The Grand Inquisitor ….

Alyosha, at the end of Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor, says that Christ “gave his innocent blood for all and everything” and seems to think that this resolves the problem of suffering. It’s perfectly sensible to a devout believer, perhaps, but completely misunderstands Ivan’s attack on faith. If the problem is how God can allow the suffering of innocents, then the suffering of one more innocent is not going to make things better. Ivan is suggesting that Christianity has worsened the human condition by placing intolerable demands on humanity. It holds up two sets of irreconcilable and unattainable ideals which has increased suffering in the world.

The irreconcilable and unattainable ideals Ivan is talking about are the opposition between the Inquisitor and the figure of Christ in the story. Guignon says that because the story is placed in the 16^th century when Protestantism emerged, the Grand Inquisitor represents Roman Catholicism and Jesus represents Protestantism (according to Ivan not Dostoevsky). These are two opposing but equally fundamental interpretations of the significance of Christianity. Roman Catholics have been dedicated to achieving happiness and well-being for all. Protestantism, on the other hand, stresses the freedom and dignity of the individual. The glorification of freedom that the Grand Inquisitor attributes to Christ is in line with the Protestant emphasis on the individual. Martin Luther (leader of the Protestant reformation) abolished the priesthood and denied the existence of miracles in the contemporary world. Martin Luther said that people have to find faith in the solitude of their own hearts without any worldly intermediaries or supports. The harsh demands of Protestantism mean that only an elect will achieve salvation. And as the Inquisitor noted, this puts an overwhelming burden on people.

It’s important to keep in mind that Ivan is presenting an “either/or” way of thinking. The Grand Inquisitor is like Ivan. He’s an atheist who claims to love humanity and has dreams of achieving paradise on earth through reworking human society on rational principles. Like Ivan, the Inquisitor thinks of himself as a “great idealist” who is willing to live as an ascetic in order to become a superior human being. And like Ivan, his protestations of humanitarian love mask his deep contempt for people.

Ivan rightly recognizes that his own humanitarian aims are rooted in Christian heritage. But, because he tears them out of the context of faith in which they make sense, the ideals of happiness and freedom are inconsistent with one another and therefore, according to Ivan, cannot be realized. Either we follow the Catholic dream of happiness and peace for all in a vast totalitarian state and abandon our desire for freedom and dignity (turning people into slaves), or we accept the Protestant demand of individual freedom and responsibility without worldly supports and condemn the vast majority of humanity to a life of abject misery in a war of all against all.

All the unsolved contradictions of human nature (as Ivan puts it) are embodied in these oppositions: those between Utilitarian and Kantian ethical theories, between welfare liberalism and free enterprise conservatism, and between Marxist-Leninist collectivism and Western rights-based individualism. The problem of reconciling the ideal of the greatest good of the greatest number with the ideal of individual responsibility and dignity is as pressing today as it was a century ago.

Alyosha correctly sees that Ivan has only laid out the tenets of Western forms of Christianity. Dostoevsky tries to work out an alternative understanding of the significance of Christianity through that of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

It’s easy to see that the Grand Inquisitor is motivated by pride more than by love of humanity. His show of brotherly love is really a desire for power. As Alyosha puts it, “It’s simple lust for power, for filthy earthly gain, for domination – something like a universal serfdom with them as masters – that’s all they stand for.”

Dostoevsky draws on a central tenet of the Christian tradition: God has given us a proper place in the scheme of things and any attempt to be more than what we are makes us less than human. Augustine said that God has placed us midway between the angels and the beasts and that any attempt to deny our creatureliness, to be like the angels, will leave us no better than the beasts.

In Russian spirituality, kenoticism as a way of life is considered to be of immense importance. Kenosis refers to Christ’s act of self-emptying – his submission to the most extreme humiliation and suffering in order to do the will of the Father. To live the kenotic way of life is to follow the example of Christ, accepting suffering in meekness and humility. The image of Christ shows us that we should embrace our concrete being on earth, with all its suffering and joys, without trying to be more than what we are. Dostoevsky wrote: “Christ walked on earth to show mankind that even in its earthly nature the human spirit can manifest itself in heavenly radiance, in the flesh, and not merely in dream or ideal.”

The only way to achieve release from egoistic individualism is through an act of surrender. This is the image of dying to oneself in order to be reborn into God’s grace which is fundamental to the entire Christian tradition. It’s a paradox. Victory is achieved through surrender. It is only through total release of the ego that one finds true fulfillment.

Ivan assumes that humans are isolated individuals with no real bonds to one another living in an essentially meaningless, value-neutral mechanistic universe, motivated solely by self- interest. If there is a God on such a view, he would have to be an entity located outside the world having no real connection to life on earth. So there are two choices. We either follow the path Ivan attributes to Christ and learn to live with our isolation accepting that the vast majority of human beings are condemned to a life of misery, or we follow the Grand Inquisitor and dedicate ourselves to bringing happiness and security to the masses of humans. But the only way to get people to buy into what the Grand Inquisitor offers is to superimpose the trappings of religion onto life – create an aura of “miracle, mystery and authority” – in order to give people a sense of shared purpose and community of worship. But the dilemma Ivan presents is inescapable only if we accept western assumption.

The West interprets happiness as the pleasurable feeling we get from having our desires filled, and it imagines true happiness to be the instant gratification of every desire. But as the Grand Inquisitor sees, this sort of “pleasure principle” threatens to lead to conflict among individuals who are in competition for limited resources, and for this reason he concludes that happiness is only possible within a totalitarian state.

Dostoevsky suggests that genuine happiness is found in the inner peace that comes from accepting life, together with all its joys and sufferings, on life’s own terms. It is by coming to understand that life is suffused with simple mysteries like those Zosima mentions – “it’s the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy” - that we find true happiness and freedom.

Ivan’s dilemma only works if we assume that humans are fundamentally isolated individuals. From the standpoint of a primordial sense of the connectedness of life, the Western image of isolated individuals motivated only by self-interest looks like a deformation of human nature rather than the bedrock “truth” about who we are.

Our aim in life is not to get into another world, but to work toward the deification of the world in which we find ourselves. Salvation is the process of not just individuals becoming divine, but of the entire world becoming divine. The divine is experienced as permeating all creation and filling everything with spiritual significance. As Zosima says, “If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.” Ivan, because of his lacerated stance, is incapable of the kind of love that would enable him to comprehend the mystery in all things.

Ivan tells Alyosha prior to the telling of his Grand Inquisitor story that the only way to be free of having dirty hands in the suffering of the world is to commit suicide. But what Zosima says is that we are all accomplices in the world and so we are all responsible and guilty for what occurs. This recognition of responsibility does not point to suicide but to taking action. We are our brothers keepers. We have to embrace our own responsibility for what happens in the world and to own up to it by acting to change things. As Zosima says: “There is only one means of salvation, then: take yourself and make yourself responsible for all men’s sins,… for as soon as you sincerely make yourself responsible for everything and for all men, you will see at once that it really is so, and that you are to blame for everyone and for all things.”

The answer to the problem of suffering is not reached through theoretical insight, but through action that flows from the realization of connectedness and spiritual significance.