A short theatre piece. I saw it produced in late 2007 and was surprised at how well it worked. It was also published here.
Cast of Characters
Stan: an executive
Mom: Stan’s mother
Sarah: a secretary, offstage
Scene
Stan’s office.
Time
The present.
SETTING: An office with a desk.
AT RISE: STAN sits at the desk, working on a laptop computer. He drinks amber liquid from a liquor glass. A telephone sits on one corner of the desk. It rings. STAN presses a button on the phone.
SARAH
Mister Garland.
STAN
Yeah, Sarah.
SARAH
I have your mother on line one.
(Stan does not respond.)
SARAH
Mister Garland?
STAN
Yeah. I’m here.
SARAH
Should I go ahead and take a message?
(STAN pauses, then sighs.)
STAN
No. Go ahead, put her through.
(STAN presses phone button.)
STAN (awkwardly)
Yeah, Ma. Hey!
(A spotlight illuminates MOM, stage left. She is sitting in an armchair with a phone in her lap.)
MOM
Your father’s circling the drain.
(STAN yawns and leans back.)
STAN
Do what, now?
MOM
Your father. He’s circling the drain. Pulling the dirt in over him. Giving up the ghost. You know?
STAN
Are you trying to say he’s dying?
MOM (sarcastically)
You always were my brightest boy, Stanny.
STAN
Yeah, so what’s the old bastard’s problem this time? Ebola? Black plague? Alien anal probe? What?
MOM
He’s in the hospital.
STAN
So he’s graduated from daily doctor visits to inpatient mode? Way to go, Dad!
MOM
He’s decided to starve himself to death. Just decided it was a good idea, you know?
(long pause)
Stanny? You still there?
STAN (stunned, quiet)
Yeah, Ma. Yeah. I’m here.
(long pause; laughs awkwardly)
Well, you have to give him credit. It’s original. The old man thinks he’s Gandhi, or what?
MOM
Have you been drinking, Stanny?
STAN
No, Ma. No. I’m good. Just real tired is all.
MOM
OK. Because you sound like you’ve been drinking, and it’s only two in the afternoon, is why I’m asking.
STAN (a bit peeved)
I’m clean and sober, Ma. Cross my heart and hope to die. OK?
MOM
OK, that’s good. But like I was saying about your father, it’s like he’s set his mind to it, you know? I mean, it’s not like there’s anything wrong with him.
(pause)
He just decided to go ahead and starve himself to death. Just like that.
STAN
Yeah, OK. So why are you of all people breaking a sweat over it?
MOM
I’m not. I just always seem to wind up getting stuck playing messenger boy between your dear old father and you kids every time he does one of his little psychodramas. Why the hell is that, Stanny?
STAN (chuckles)
Simple, Ma. You’re the only one that’ll still take his calls. The rest of us got call screening.
MOM (after awkward pause)
Do you think you should give him a call, Stanny?
STAN (evasively)
No. What for?
MOM
I don’t know. Sort out any unfinished business? Try and penetrate that thick skull of his? Tell him to stop being so melodramatic? Whatever?
(long pause)
Do you think maybe you should call him? Are you there, Stan?
STAN
No.
MOM
No, you’re not there? Could’ve fooled me.
STAN
No, I don’t think I should call him.
MOM
Ah. OK.
(awkward pause)
I mean I’m not saying you should or anything, I’m the last person who’d say any of you should give your father the time of day, you know? I just figured, you know, because of how everything went, and how it all ended up, that –-
STAN
Like I said. I don’t think I should call him.
MOM
Why not?
STAN (after long pause)
Because I don’t think I should call him, that’s all. It’s not complicated. Look, Ma. We both know that as soon as the old man realizes his little drama routine isn’t going to make him the center of attention, he’ll get bored with the whole thing and get back to drinking his Scotch and smoking his smokes and flashing that million-dollar smile.
MOM
I don’t think so. No, I don’t think so this time. I really do believe he means to do it. He seems, I can’t explain it exactly, it’s almost like he’s relieved somehow, like he’s okay with it.
STAN
Come on, Ma. You can’t possibly think he’s serious.
MOM
Stanny, you know how his mind works, if anybody does. I sure as hell never did. Took me a long time to figure that one out, let me tell you. It’s like this. Your father’s going to starve himself to death because he doesn’t have an audience anymore. It’s like your father’s not even there when there’s no people around.
(long pause)
Looking back, I really do think it’s always been that way. Always. If he walks into an empty room, it’s like it’s still empty.
(pause)
You there, Stanny?
STAN (quietly)
Yeah, Ma.
MOM
What? I can’t even hear you, Stanny.
STAN
Yeah, Ma. I’m still here.
(sighs)
And like I said, I don’t think I should call him, that’s all.
MOM
Listen, I’m telling you, Stanny, you need to be the one to call him. It needs to be you. You need to call your father up and you need to tell him it’s wrong. Tell him it’s selfish and melodramatic, and tell him it’s just wrong! He’ll listen to you. If the idiot ever listened to anybody, he listened to you.
STAN (quietly)
I can’t do that to him, Ma.
MOM
God damn these phones! Are you sure you don’t have me on speaker? What did you say?
STAN (louder)
I said, I can’t do that to him, Ma.
MOM
What? Do what ‘to’ him? What are you talking about?
STAN
He decided, Ma. I’m not going to take that away from him. He decided. He did. I’m not going to help him be weak again, now that he’s finally decided. I won’t do that to him.
MOM
What the hell do you mean? You are making no sense to me, Stanny.
(pause)
You are drunk, aren’t you?
STAN (quiet, bitter)
Not yet, I’m not.
MOM
No, I didn’t get any of that. Can you hear me? Stupid phones. Hello?
STAN (almost to himself)
Judge, jury, and executioner. I can’t tell him he’s wrong to be any of those things.
MOM
Look, Stanny, you’re talking insane, you know what I mean? What the hell is this ‘I can’t tell him he’s wrong’ crap? What is that supposed to mean? Yes, you can! You sure can tell him, and you’re going to, you’re going to call him and tell him not to do this. Tell him he’s wrong to do this, God damn it!
STAN (after long pause)
I can’t, Ma. I can’t. (Long pause) Because he’s not wrong, Ma. He’s never been less wrong about
anything in his whole sorry-ass life. Leave it be, Ma. Leave him be. He needs to do this, and he’s right to do this. He’s been waiting most of his life to do this. Just waiting around trying to work up the guts to finally do it and get it over with. The best thing we can do is leave him alone to do this one thing right. Please, Ma.
MOM
Stan.
(pause)
Stan, listen. Please. You have to save him. Stan?
(long pause)
Did I lose you?
STAN (quietly)
I am saving him, Ma.
MOM
I can’t hear you, damn it. I told you a long time ago that these new high-tech phones aren’t worth a damn.
STAN
Yeah, Ma, look. I got calls stacked up like crazy here, and I’m five minutes late for a pretty important meeting. I really do have to get off this phone and get to work.
MOM
Stanny –-
STAN
Love you, Ma. Look, I got to go. I’ll call you later in the month, I think your birthday is coming up soon, I’ll call you then, you know?
MOM (quietly)
It was four weeks ago.
STAN (laughs awkwardly)
Ah, yeah. Damn it. You know me, I’m an airhead about that stuff. I’ll swing by the mall
and get you something nice for your birthday on the way home tonight.
MOM
Get your secretary to swing by, you mean.
STAN
Ma, look, they’re all standing right outside my office and I’m holding up all these people, so I have to go like right now. Bye, love you.
(STAN pushes the button to hang up. Spotlight over Mom immediately fades to black. Stan sits at his desk, staring, for a long time. STAN presses button on phone.)
STAN
Sarah? What’s my calendar look like for the rest of the day?
SARAH
You have the weekly download meeting in fifteen minutes, then the Mid-Atlantic forecast briefing from four to five-thirty.
STAN
Cancel them all, will you?
SARAH (after long pause)
Sure. No problem. Is everything okay?
(long pause)
Mister Garland?
STAN
Yeah, I’m good. Couldn’t be better. I’m just thinking I’ll take off early today. You’ll take care of all that for me, right?
SECRETARY
Of course. I’ve got you covered. You take it easy for the rest of the day, okay?
STAN (small smile)
Yeah. I will.
(Stan packs laptop in briefcase, drains his drink and exits SL.)
(BLACKOUT)
(THE END)
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Friday, December 12, 2008
Collapse Into Silence: Pirsig, Tao and the 'Parmenides'
Originally published at http://www.rescogitans.sdu.dk/files/RC___Gallagher.pdf
Introduction
American mystic and writer Robert M. Pirsig struggled mightily with the question of
how to interrogate the Unspeakable within the mental constraints of Western logical discourse. This struggle took him on an internal journey far from his Midwest, mid-century home, eventually pushing him into the unknown country of mental illness and involuntary commitment. I believe that what Pirsig was pursuing was not an empty Nothing, a no-thing. It was a full, even overfull Nothing, for which he struggled in vain to find a name and a vocabulary. I have taken to calling it the ‘over-full Nothing’ and will continue to use that term here to indicate when we are speaking of Nothing as an ontological term. Pirsig would come to believe that the closest approach to what he was trying to articulate could be found in the Tao, and indeed the Tao’s mapping to the characteristics of this ‘over-full Nothing’ was quite close. However, he failed to latch onto the full significance of something he noted in passing: the striking similarities between his thought and the system of the important Pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides. We will look in detail at the most influential deployment of the Parmenidean ‘over-full Nothing’, in Plato’s infamously obscure dialogue The Parmenides. Plato’s attempt to wrap it in logical discourse runs aground for the same reason that Pirsig’s attempt to do so ran aground 2500 years later. Both of their attempts to encapsulate the ‘over-full Nothing’ within language and logic eventually collapse into silence in the face of that of which nothing can be said.
American Mystic
There was a man once, who went insane trying to wrap the Unspeakable within the syntax of Western logical discourse. He lived in the seemingly mundane circumstances of Midwestern America, but his thoughts were off in another place, another time. Speaking of himself in the third person in his stunning work Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he tells us that he ‘did not try to use his brilliance for general illumination. He sought one specific distant target and aimed for it and hit it. And that was all.’ As we shall see, the target that he aimed for and hit is what I am calling the ‘over-full Nothing’. A man possessed of (and eventually possessed by) a brilliant and incisive mind, Pirsig spent several years as a teacher of Rhetoric in Montana and Chicago. It was during this time that his mind took what many of his colleagues would come to think of as a somewhat ‘peculiar’ turn. Pirsig stumbles across something that he knows is real, but that all of his logical and rhetorical gifts are unable to encapsulate. Forced to try and at least make an effort at formulating a discourse for describing his findings, Pirsig adopted the mundane and inadequate word ‘Quality’, but he makes it to clear that, within his evolving system, the word is simply a placeholder for something that is full, erupting, but without any logical attributes. He attempts to capture the essence of this ‘over-full Nothing’ in the following formulation:
‘Quality is not a thing. It is an event … It is the event at which the subject becomes aware of the object…Quality is the event at which awareness of both subjects and objects is made possible …. This means that Quality is not just the result of a collision of subject and object. The very existence of subject and object themselves is deduced from the Quality event. The Quality event is the cause of the subjects and objects.’
In short, Pirsig’s Quality ‘is the parent, the source of all subjects and objects.’ To Pirsig this ‘quality event' was ‘the continuing stimulus to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it … He felt momentary fright and was about to strike out the words ‘All of it. Every last bit of it’. Madness there. I think he saw it.’ As this passage suggests, Pirsig understood that he had just stepped outside the logical mythos that is ingrained into the very intellectual DNA of Western civilization, our gift from the Greeks. He was faced with ‘something’ that could not be denied and yet could not be described. Almost in despair, he found a place to anchor his sanity when he came across another attempted description of the ‘over-full Nothing’, this one found in the 2,400-year-old Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu. Listen as the Chinese sage wrestles with his own attempt to describe the indescribable, from within the somewhat more flexible bounds of a non-Western discourse:
Looked at but cannot be seen … listened to but cannot be heard …grasped at but cannot be touched. These three elude all our inquiries and hence blend and become one.Not by its rising is there light. Not by its sinking is there darkness.
Unceasing, continuous It cannot be defined And reverts again into the realm of Nothingness That is why it is called the form of the formless The image of nothingness That is why it is called elusive Meet it and you do not see its face.
Note this description (or, what is the same thing, this non-description), and compare it to what we will discover later when we look at Parmenides’ own efforts to articulate his own encounter with the ‘over-full Nothing’.
Indeed, Pirsig eventually came to suspect that the Greeks may have had a hand in muddying the waters regarding the permissibility of discussing his ‘Quality’, simply by virtue of the fact that the Greeks constructed a mode of discourse that made such discussion structurally impossible. Pirsig realized that the Greeks had loaded the deck right from the get-go: ‘The world of underlying form is an unusual object of discussion because it is actually a mode of discussion itself. You discuss things in terms of their immediate appearance or you discuss them in terms of their underlying form, and when you try and discuss these modes of discussion you get involved in what could be called a platform problem. You have no other platform from which to discuss them other than the modes themselves.’ This importance of Pirsig’s insight into this limiting function of Western logical discourse will become obvious when we get to Parmenides.
We have evidence that Pirsig actually was close to realizing that Parmenides had more to teach him – certainly as a cautionary lesson – than did Lao Tzu, but it appears that Pirsig didn’t really give Parmenides enough attention and never really grasped Parmenides’ critical importance for his project. Here is all that Pirsig was able to get out of Parmenides:
‘Parmenides made it clear for the first time that the Immortal Principle, the One, Truth, God, is separate from appearance and from opinion, and the importance of this separation and its effect upon subsequent history cannot be overstated. It's here that the classic mind, for the first time, took leave of its romantic origins and said, ‘The Good and the True are not necessarily the same,’ and goes its separate way.’ Pirsig spent an enormous amount of time puzzling over this separation, musing about the pre-Socratics: ‘Ancient Greece – strange that for them Quality should be everything while today is sounds strange to even say that Quality is real. What unseen changes could have taken place?’
He was so close to finding a Western kindred spirit here, but he didn’t even know it. There is nothing in his writings or any of his public statements subsequent to the surprising success of Zen to suggest he ever suspected how close he had come to a precursor. He concluded that ‘further study there was unlikely to uncover anything concerning an apparently mystic term.’ How wrong he was. He blew right past it. All he had to hang on to, at the end, was his belief that ‘the mythos that says the forms of this world are real but the Quality [‘over-full Nothing’] of this world is unreal is insane…’ He apparently never expected that if he had scratched harder at the pre-Socratics, he would have found that one of the most significant of them was saying essentially the same thing.
And what became of Pirsig, as his pursuit of the ‘over-full Nothing’ tapered out into a collapse into philosophical silence, then eventually into a literal silence? ‘Destroyed by an order of the court, enforced by the transmission of high-voltage alternating current through the lobes of his brain…in a process known technologically as ‘Annihilation ECS’.’ I believe that a large part of what drove him insane was living with the knowledge of ‘the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and rule the world in terms of dialectical truths, had lost.’
We now need to look at one of the first struggles between this dialectical truth and the ‘over-full Nothing’.
Plato Fights for His Life
A battle took place shortly before the birth of Plato, a battle on the nature of ‘what is’. The protagonists in this battle exchanged broadsides that read like the pronouncements of sun-addled Zen Masters. Heraclitus makes oracular pronouncements that induce perplexity and challenge us to make sense of them. Parmenides and his followers argue, or seem to, in a long, strung-out series of what seem to the naïve eye to be logical propositions.
Parmenides insists, obscurely, that one must choose between the way of ‘It Is’ and the way of ‘It Is Not’. We are literally incapable of conceiving of something as ‘not’, so our ‘over-full Nothing’ ‘is’ by default, and perhaps in its essence as well.
If one cannot think ‘Is Not’, then one will need to accept the ‘over-full Nothing’ that is ‘reality’ as containing no change, no generation or destruction, no difference, no imperfection. Why? Because – and this is key for Parmenides -- it is ‘full of what is’. For our purposes, the attack on Parmenides found in Plato’s immortal dialogue The Parmenides demands much more attention. It is a strange dialogue, unlike any other that Plato wrote. It comes at the end of his vaunted ‘middle period’, and indeed after the travail of wrestling with the issues in The Parmenides, Plato apparently steps away from writing for several years.
The Parmenides is the only dialogue in which Socrates is unequivocally beaten. Pimp-slapped, not to put too fine a point on it. Also important for us to understand is that, in this dialogue, Plato is defending himself. More, he is defending the cornerstone of his entire philosophy: the theory of Forms. Without the theory of Forms, Plato’s ethical and political philosophies collapse for lack of a structure to prop them up – and the followers of Parmenides, the clever Zeno, deploys a set of arguments that leave the theory of Forms in pieces on the floor. In this part of the dialogue, Zeno demonstrates, with a light touch and a flair for the absurd, that logic cannot be trusted because it is insufficient to encapsulate his master Parmenides’ Being, the One, the ‘over-full Nothing’. Zeno, and then Parmenides, use dialectic to tie Socrates up in precisely the sort of logical knots Socrates would inflict on so many interlocutors later in his career.
I do not propose to drill down into the part of the dialogue in which Parmenides slices and dices the Forms; suffice it to say that most scholars agree that Parmenides lands several blows, most of them serious, on the Forms. As we will see, Plato’s goal in the rest of the dialogue is so say, in effect, ‘OK, my beloved Forms may be discredited, but look at the sort of incoherent Parmenidean madness you’ll have to contend with if you give up the Forms! If we want to remain rational beings, the Forms are all we have to work with!’ He uses the rest of the dialogue to demonstrate the logical absurdity of Parmenides and his followers. As we shall see, this is not difficult to do, since the Parmenidean system stands outside of dialectical discourse.
After verbally overpowering young Socrates, Parmenides is invited to expound on his own ideas. Of course, he is asked to do so using dialectic. As Pirsig noted, this was a clever trap on Plato’s part: ‘How the hell do you ever justify, in terms of reason, a refusal to define something? Definitions are the foundation of reason. You can’t reason without them.’ Which is precisely the problem we run into in the second half of the dialogue. We are treated to 20 pages of an absurdist, Bizarro-World imitation of Socratic dialectic,
as Parmenides is shown forcing the ‘over-full Nothing’ onto the Procrustean bed of dialectic. Plato is being mean-spirited and vengeful here, as could be expected from a man who is quite literally fighting for his philosophical life. Plato’s goal is to make Parmenides look absurd, but what he winds up doing, unintentionally, is making dialectic and logic look absurd as a technique for encapsulating the ‘over-full Nothing’.
When we read Plato’s funhouse filter of Parmenides in the second half of the dialogue, we find ourselves confronting something that reads almost exactly like the Tao as Pirsig encountered it. Look at this, and tell me if you don’t agree with me that Parmenides’ worldview looks more and more Asian, not really ‘Western’ at all.
Plato has Parmenides telling us that the One ‘will have neither beginning, middle, nor end’, it ‘cannot be anywhere, either in itself or in another’, and let us make no mistake that ‘if one be the same with itself, it is not one with itself, and will therefore be one and also not one’.
On a couple of levels, this is a delightful farce. The very density and duration of this kind of gibberish (and it goes on like this for over twenty pages) is a big part of the comedic value. Plato is working hard to make Parmenides look completely absurd, and Parmenides is happy to oblige. On another level, one certainly unintended by Plato, Parmenides is having his way with Plato as well: his long, bizarre deployment of ‘dialectic’ in the service of explaining his ‘over-full Nothing’ serves the unexpected purpose of demonstrating that dialectic, logic itself, has surprising and damaging limitations.
Socrates’ new invention, the dialectic, breaks up against Parmenides’ extended koan, reducing the attempt to articulate Parmenides’ ideas to broad comedy. Parmenides is using dialectic as a cudgel to beat dialectic itself to a bloody pulp. To embarrass logic into silence, in effect.
On yet another level – and The Parmenides may well be the most multi-layered of Plato’s dialogues -- we are given a stunning demonstration of the fact that, in the face of the ‘over-full Nothing’, language itself begins to collapse. All that ‘is’ is not real. Anything you can describe is not real. The One, Being, the ‘over-full Nothing’ ‘is’. But not really, not in any sense we can imagine. It is unthinkable, unspeakable, and unknowable. Inside this singularity, nothing is preserved; it is a naked opening-upon.
We try and apply Plato’s beloved dialectic, his clever little parlor trick of categorizing and discriminating, and we find ourselves sinking, and fast. We see:
‘over-full Nothing’ is.
But we can’t even say ‘is’ in this context, because we could then also say ‘not-is’, and that not-is would be equally ‘true’. So we are reduced to being able to say:
‘over-full Nothing’.
But even that is too much discrete ‘content’, and dialectic sets itself up for a situation where all dialectic allows us to say is:
.
Singularity. No content. No thing. Dialectic has failed – miserably, one should note – to enable us to come to terms with the ‘over-full Nothing’. Beyond the rim of this singularity, logic has no place and dialectic will not stand. Plato knows this, which helps explain his fury at Parmenides. Plato understands that his theory of Forms has been skewered on his own dialectic, but he turns away from the Parmenidean alternative with the same shudder of instinctive revulsion with which the Greeks reacted to the concept of the Unbounded. Plato forces us to confront the brute fact that Parmenides’ ontology is logically absurd. Parmenides (who either reinvented or encountered the same ontological concepts that fed into the Tao), was not really Western at all, and was in fact trapped in the straitjacket of Western reason.
‘We’ve a real intellectual impasse. Our reason, which is supposed to make things more intelligible, seems to be making them less intelligible, and when reason thus defeats its own purposes something has to be changed in the structure of our reason itself.’ Reason has failed us, indeed language itself has failed us, and at the end of any attempt to penetrate the Parmenidean ontology, our discourse suffers a catastrophic collapse into silence.
Time Tunnel
Imagine with me a long temporal tube, a tunnel. In places it is poorly lit, but in other parts of it we see bright, cold, fluorescent lights. Occasionally, the tunnel pulls a sudden sideways turn or dead end, but for the most part it is as straight and as forthright as a mathematical proof. At one end of this tunnel sits Plato, shouting the good news of the birth of Reason into the tunnel’s maw. At the far end of this tunnel lurks Pirsig, gazing in horror at Reason’s death. Pirsig pursued the ghost of this dead Reason ‘because he wanted to wreak revenge on it, because he felt he himself was so shaped by it.’ After Pirsig, facts become fables again. Looking at Parmenides and Pirsig, do we not get the suspicion that the long reign of dialectic and logic was perhaps just an interlude?
The ‘over-full Nothing’ will always remain absurd and inarticulate within the confines of logical discourse. Parmenides didn’t make any serious attempt to wrap the ‘over-full Nothing’ in logical discourse, and Pirsig went mad trying. Perhaps the ‘over-full Nothing’ should be simply left alone.
Introduction
American mystic and writer Robert M. Pirsig struggled mightily with the question of
how to interrogate the Unspeakable within the mental constraints of Western logical discourse. This struggle took him on an internal journey far from his Midwest, mid-century home, eventually pushing him into the unknown country of mental illness and involuntary commitment. I believe that what Pirsig was pursuing was not an empty Nothing, a no-thing. It was a full, even overfull Nothing, for which he struggled in vain to find a name and a vocabulary. I have taken to calling it the ‘over-full Nothing’ and will continue to use that term here to indicate when we are speaking of Nothing as an ontological term. Pirsig would come to believe that the closest approach to what he was trying to articulate could be found in the Tao, and indeed the Tao’s mapping to the characteristics of this ‘over-full Nothing’ was quite close. However, he failed to latch onto the full significance of something he noted in passing: the striking similarities between his thought and the system of the important Pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides. We will look in detail at the most influential deployment of the Parmenidean ‘over-full Nothing’, in Plato’s infamously obscure dialogue The Parmenides. Plato’s attempt to wrap it in logical discourse runs aground for the same reason that Pirsig’s attempt to do so ran aground 2500 years later. Both of their attempts to encapsulate the ‘over-full Nothing’ within language and logic eventually collapse into silence in the face of that of which nothing can be said.
American Mystic
There was a man once, who went insane trying to wrap the Unspeakable within the syntax of Western logical discourse. He lived in the seemingly mundane circumstances of Midwestern America, but his thoughts were off in another place, another time. Speaking of himself in the third person in his stunning work Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he tells us that he ‘did not try to use his brilliance for general illumination. He sought one specific distant target and aimed for it and hit it. And that was all.’ As we shall see, the target that he aimed for and hit is what I am calling the ‘over-full Nothing’. A man possessed of (and eventually possessed by) a brilliant and incisive mind, Pirsig spent several years as a teacher of Rhetoric in Montana and Chicago. It was during this time that his mind took what many of his colleagues would come to think of as a somewhat ‘peculiar’ turn. Pirsig stumbles across something that he knows is real, but that all of his logical and rhetorical gifts are unable to encapsulate. Forced to try and at least make an effort at formulating a discourse for describing his findings, Pirsig adopted the mundane and inadequate word ‘Quality’, but he makes it to clear that, within his evolving system, the word is simply a placeholder for something that is full, erupting, but without any logical attributes. He attempts to capture the essence of this ‘over-full Nothing’ in the following formulation:
‘Quality is not a thing. It is an event … It is the event at which the subject becomes aware of the object…Quality is the event at which awareness of both subjects and objects is made possible …. This means that Quality is not just the result of a collision of subject and object. The very existence of subject and object themselves is deduced from the Quality event. The Quality event is the cause of the subjects and objects.’
In short, Pirsig’s Quality ‘is the parent, the source of all subjects and objects.’ To Pirsig this ‘quality event' was ‘the continuing stimulus to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it … He felt momentary fright and was about to strike out the words ‘All of it. Every last bit of it’. Madness there. I think he saw it.’ As this passage suggests, Pirsig understood that he had just stepped outside the logical mythos that is ingrained into the very intellectual DNA of Western civilization, our gift from the Greeks. He was faced with ‘something’ that could not be denied and yet could not be described. Almost in despair, he found a place to anchor his sanity when he came across another attempted description of the ‘over-full Nothing’, this one found in the 2,400-year-old Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu. Listen as the Chinese sage wrestles with his own attempt to describe the indescribable, from within the somewhat more flexible bounds of a non-Western discourse:
Looked at but cannot be seen … listened to but cannot be heard …grasped at but cannot be touched. These three elude all our inquiries and hence blend and become one.Not by its rising is there light. Not by its sinking is there darkness.
Unceasing, continuous It cannot be defined And reverts again into the realm of Nothingness That is why it is called the form of the formless The image of nothingness That is why it is called elusive Meet it and you do not see its face.
Note this description (or, what is the same thing, this non-description), and compare it to what we will discover later when we look at Parmenides’ own efforts to articulate his own encounter with the ‘over-full Nothing’.
Indeed, Pirsig eventually came to suspect that the Greeks may have had a hand in muddying the waters regarding the permissibility of discussing his ‘Quality’, simply by virtue of the fact that the Greeks constructed a mode of discourse that made such discussion structurally impossible. Pirsig realized that the Greeks had loaded the deck right from the get-go: ‘The world of underlying form is an unusual object of discussion because it is actually a mode of discussion itself. You discuss things in terms of their immediate appearance or you discuss them in terms of their underlying form, and when you try and discuss these modes of discussion you get involved in what could be called a platform problem. You have no other platform from which to discuss them other than the modes themselves.’ This importance of Pirsig’s insight into this limiting function of Western logical discourse will become obvious when we get to Parmenides.
We have evidence that Pirsig actually was close to realizing that Parmenides had more to teach him – certainly as a cautionary lesson – than did Lao Tzu, but it appears that Pirsig didn’t really give Parmenides enough attention and never really grasped Parmenides’ critical importance for his project. Here is all that Pirsig was able to get out of Parmenides:
‘Parmenides made it clear for the first time that the Immortal Principle, the One, Truth, God, is separate from appearance and from opinion, and the importance of this separation and its effect upon subsequent history cannot be overstated. It's here that the classic mind, for the first time, took leave of its romantic origins and said, ‘The Good and the True are not necessarily the same,’ and goes its separate way.’ Pirsig spent an enormous amount of time puzzling over this separation, musing about the pre-Socratics: ‘Ancient Greece – strange that for them Quality should be everything while today is sounds strange to even say that Quality is real. What unseen changes could have taken place?’
He was so close to finding a Western kindred spirit here, but he didn’t even know it. There is nothing in his writings or any of his public statements subsequent to the surprising success of Zen to suggest he ever suspected how close he had come to a precursor. He concluded that ‘further study there was unlikely to uncover anything concerning an apparently mystic term.’ How wrong he was. He blew right past it. All he had to hang on to, at the end, was his belief that ‘the mythos that says the forms of this world are real but the Quality [‘over-full Nothing’] of this world is unreal is insane…’ He apparently never expected that if he had scratched harder at the pre-Socratics, he would have found that one of the most significant of them was saying essentially the same thing.
And what became of Pirsig, as his pursuit of the ‘over-full Nothing’ tapered out into a collapse into philosophical silence, then eventually into a literal silence? ‘Destroyed by an order of the court, enforced by the transmission of high-voltage alternating current through the lobes of his brain…in a process known technologically as ‘Annihilation ECS’.’ I believe that a large part of what drove him insane was living with the knowledge of ‘the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and rule the world in terms of dialectical truths, had lost.’
We now need to look at one of the first struggles between this dialectical truth and the ‘over-full Nothing’.
Plato Fights for His Life
A battle took place shortly before the birth of Plato, a battle on the nature of ‘what is’. The protagonists in this battle exchanged broadsides that read like the pronouncements of sun-addled Zen Masters. Heraclitus makes oracular pronouncements that induce perplexity and challenge us to make sense of them. Parmenides and his followers argue, or seem to, in a long, strung-out series of what seem to the naïve eye to be logical propositions.
Parmenides insists, obscurely, that one must choose between the way of ‘It Is’ and the way of ‘It Is Not’. We are literally incapable of conceiving of something as ‘not’, so our ‘over-full Nothing’ ‘is’ by default, and perhaps in its essence as well.
If one cannot think ‘Is Not’, then one will need to accept the ‘over-full Nothing’ that is ‘reality’ as containing no change, no generation or destruction, no difference, no imperfection. Why? Because – and this is key for Parmenides -- it is ‘full of what is’. For our purposes, the attack on Parmenides found in Plato’s immortal dialogue The Parmenides demands much more attention. It is a strange dialogue, unlike any other that Plato wrote. It comes at the end of his vaunted ‘middle period’, and indeed after the travail of wrestling with the issues in The Parmenides, Plato apparently steps away from writing for several years.
The Parmenides is the only dialogue in which Socrates is unequivocally beaten. Pimp-slapped, not to put too fine a point on it. Also important for us to understand is that, in this dialogue, Plato is defending himself. More, he is defending the cornerstone of his entire philosophy: the theory of Forms. Without the theory of Forms, Plato’s ethical and political philosophies collapse for lack of a structure to prop them up – and the followers of Parmenides, the clever Zeno, deploys a set of arguments that leave the theory of Forms in pieces on the floor. In this part of the dialogue, Zeno demonstrates, with a light touch and a flair for the absurd, that logic cannot be trusted because it is insufficient to encapsulate his master Parmenides’ Being, the One, the ‘over-full Nothing’. Zeno, and then Parmenides, use dialectic to tie Socrates up in precisely the sort of logical knots Socrates would inflict on so many interlocutors later in his career.
I do not propose to drill down into the part of the dialogue in which Parmenides slices and dices the Forms; suffice it to say that most scholars agree that Parmenides lands several blows, most of them serious, on the Forms. As we will see, Plato’s goal in the rest of the dialogue is so say, in effect, ‘OK, my beloved Forms may be discredited, but look at the sort of incoherent Parmenidean madness you’ll have to contend with if you give up the Forms! If we want to remain rational beings, the Forms are all we have to work with!’ He uses the rest of the dialogue to demonstrate the logical absurdity of Parmenides and his followers. As we shall see, this is not difficult to do, since the Parmenidean system stands outside of dialectical discourse.
After verbally overpowering young Socrates, Parmenides is invited to expound on his own ideas. Of course, he is asked to do so using dialectic. As Pirsig noted, this was a clever trap on Plato’s part: ‘How the hell do you ever justify, in terms of reason, a refusal to define something? Definitions are the foundation of reason. You can’t reason without them.’ Which is precisely the problem we run into in the second half of the dialogue. We are treated to 20 pages of an absurdist, Bizarro-World imitation of Socratic dialectic,
as Parmenides is shown forcing the ‘over-full Nothing’ onto the Procrustean bed of dialectic. Plato is being mean-spirited and vengeful here, as could be expected from a man who is quite literally fighting for his philosophical life. Plato’s goal is to make Parmenides look absurd, but what he winds up doing, unintentionally, is making dialectic and logic look absurd as a technique for encapsulating the ‘over-full Nothing’.
When we read Plato’s funhouse filter of Parmenides in the second half of the dialogue, we find ourselves confronting something that reads almost exactly like the Tao as Pirsig encountered it. Look at this, and tell me if you don’t agree with me that Parmenides’ worldview looks more and more Asian, not really ‘Western’ at all.
Plato has Parmenides telling us that the One ‘will have neither beginning, middle, nor end’, it ‘cannot be anywhere, either in itself or in another’, and let us make no mistake that ‘if one be the same with itself, it is not one with itself, and will therefore be one and also not one’.
On a couple of levels, this is a delightful farce. The very density and duration of this kind of gibberish (and it goes on like this for over twenty pages) is a big part of the comedic value. Plato is working hard to make Parmenides look completely absurd, and Parmenides is happy to oblige. On another level, one certainly unintended by Plato, Parmenides is having his way with Plato as well: his long, bizarre deployment of ‘dialectic’ in the service of explaining his ‘over-full Nothing’ serves the unexpected purpose of demonstrating that dialectic, logic itself, has surprising and damaging limitations.
Socrates’ new invention, the dialectic, breaks up against Parmenides’ extended koan, reducing the attempt to articulate Parmenides’ ideas to broad comedy. Parmenides is using dialectic as a cudgel to beat dialectic itself to a bloody pulp. To embarrass logic into silence, in effect.
On yet another level – and The Parmenides may well be the most multi-layered of Plato’s dialogues -- we are given a stunning demonstration of the fact that, in the face of the ‘over-full Nothing’, language itself begins to collapse. All that ‘is’ is not real. Anything you can describe is not real. The One, Being, the ‘over-full Nothing’ ‘is’. But not really, not in any sense we can imagine. It is unthinkable, unspeakable, and unknowable. Inside this singularity, nothing is preserved; it is a naked opening-upon.
We try and apply Plato’s beloved dialectic, his clever little parlor trick of categorizing and discriminating, and we find ourselves sinking, and fast. We see:
‘over-full Nothing’ is.
But we can’t even say ‘is’ in this context, because we could then also say ‘not-is’, and that not-is would be equally ‘true’. So we are reduced to being able to say:
‘over-full Nothing’.
But even that is too much discrete ‘content’, and dialectic sets itself up for a situation where all dialectic allows us to say is:
.
Singularity. No content. No thing. Dialectic has failed – miserably, one should note – to enable us to come to terms with the ‘over-full Nothing’. Beyond the rim of this singularity, logic has no place and dialectic will not stand. Plato knows this, which helps explain his fury at Parmenides. Plato understands that his theory of Forms has been skewered on his own dialectic, but he turns away from the Parmenidean alternative with the same shudder of instinctive revulsion with which the Greeks reacted to the concept of the Unbounded. Plato forces us to confront the brute fact that Parmenides’ ontology is logically absurd. Parmenides (who either reinvented or encountered the same ontological concepts that fed into the Tao), was not really Western at all, and was in fact trapped in the straitjacket of Western reason.
‘We’ve a real intellectual impasse. Our reason, which is supposed to make things more intelligible, seems to be making them less intelligible, and when reason thus defeats its own purposes something has to be changed in the structure of our reason itself.’ Reason has failed us, indeed language itself has failed us, and at the end of any attempt to penetrate the Parmenidean ontology, our discourse suffers a catastrophic collapse into silence.
Time Tunnel
Imagine with me a long temporal tube, a tunnel. In places it is poorly lit, but in other parts of it we see bright, cold, fluorescent lights. Occasionally, the tunnel pulls a sudden sideways turn or dead end, but for the most part it is as straight and as forthright as a mathematical proof. At one end of this tunnel sits Plato, shouting the good news of the birth of Reason into the tunnel’s maw. At the far end of this tunnel lurks Pirsig, gazing in horror at Reason’s death. Pirsig pursued the ghost of this dead Reason ‘because he wanted to wreak revenge on it, because he felt he himself was so shaped by it.’ After Pirsig, facts become fables again. Looking at Parmenides and Pirsig, do we not get the suspicion that the long reign of dialectic and logic was perhaps just an interlude?
The ‘over-full Nothing’ will always remain absurd and inarticulate within the confines of logical discourse. Parmenides didn’t make any serious attempt to wrap the ‘over-full Nothing’ in logical discourse, and Pirsig went mad trying. Perhaps the ‘over-full Nothing’ should be simply left alone.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Book Review: Prince of War
Prince of War: Billy Graham’s Crusade for a Wholly Christian Empire, by Cecil Bothwell, Asheville: Brave Ulysses Books, 2007, 213 pp. softcover
“Billy Graham represents a basic kind of patriotism in this country – an unquestioning, obeying patriotism, a loyalty to the authority of the President. Billy was always uncritical, unchallenging, unquestioning.” --- Bill Moyers
“I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B and C. Just who do they think they are? --- Barry Goldwater
A power-hungry moral coward. A vicious racist and Jew-baiter. A man with an almost uncanny ability to always be on the wrong side of history. A craven climber and groveller at the feet of power. An “unabashed nationalist and advocate for American empire.” If Cecil Bothwell is right – and he marshals a lot of evidence in support of his thesis – then “America’s most beloved pastor” is all these things, and more. Bothwell gives us the opportunity to see the other side of Billy Graham, the man who was seventh on a recent Gallup poll’s list of the most admired people of the 20th century. Graham is a man with a history, a man who must be called to account. Bothwell lays out his bill of particulars with subtlety and skill.
The first leitmotif in Graham’s life story is his obsessive scrounging after power. From the very beginning, he has sought access to the corridors of power with an almost touching desperation. Graham was the first evangelist to conduct a religious service on the steps of the Capitol building, and the first to conduct a full-blown crusade inside the walls of the Pentagon. But Graham has always known that the real center of power in America was the White House, and has proven to be a “constant suppliant seeking presidential attention.” The more intelligent and responsible presidents (Truman, Kennedy, Carter) kept Graham at arm’s length, while other, lesser men utilized Graham for whatever they could gain from the association.
Truman apparently despised Graham from the get-go, describing him to a close friend as “one of those counterfeits I was telling you about,” the sort of man who is only interested in “getting his name in the paper.” But in a bit of pure luck, Graham suddenly found himself being groomed as the darling of the Hearst media empire, which built up the persona of the “simple preacher” and turned him loose to rage against godless Communism to crowds of up to 350,000 rapt believers. Graham was becoming an influential player in the toxic politics of 1950s America – and he was learning to love it.
Graham’s increasingly high profile brought him to the attention of Senator Joseph McCarthy, eventually “becoming one of his most loyal and enduring allies.” Documents reveal that Graham was eager to out-do McCarthy in his rabid commitment to exposing “the pinks, the lavenders, and the reds who have sought refuge between the wings of the American eagle.” As McCarthy ratcheted up the rhetoric with his demand that suspected Communists be stripped of their Fifth Amendment protections, Graham was right there with him, proclaiming, “Let’s do it!” Never one to hitch his wagon to a single star, Graham was simultaneously voicing his strident support for “the red-scare tactics of Senator Lyndon Johnson and a young congressman named Richard Milhouse Nixon.” Give the man credit: he had a knack for spotting talent early on and currying favor with the people who would run the country for the rest of the century, and beyond.
While Graham’s most infamous association was of course with Nixon, he nevertheless racked up a pretty good track record with subsequent tenants at the White House. It is a tribute to Jimmy Carter’s canny instincts that he wanted nothing to do with the man and kept him out of the White House during his term, but most of Carter’s successors warmly embraced Graham and his values. He wooed Reagan and George H.W. Bush with great success. He had somewhat less success with Bill Clinton, but he was there to give solace to Hillary Clinton (whose religious associations in Washington were uniformly “conservative and fundamentalist”) during the Lewinsky scandal.
I was continually amazed at Graham’s ability to insinuate himself into the centers of power, given some of his more unsavory views. For if Bothwell is to be believed, Graham is a life-long racist and the worst sort of bigot. It is tempting to fall back on the old, old alibi and say that Graham was a “product of his environment.” As a very young many, Graham fell under the influence of “holy roller Mordecai Ham,” a man notorious as “one of his era’s most gaudy and livid anti-Semites,” a man who fulminated against “apostate Jewry and the wicked Jews who killed Jesus.” While it was not unusual for a youngster coming of age in the Jim Crow south to be bombarded with this sort of vicious rhetoric, it is notable that Graham never shook off these baleful influences. We would hear echoes of Mordecai Ham’s rants in Graham’s infamous “off the record” conversation in the Oval Office with Richard Nixon.
This conversation, which was captured on one of the legendary White House tapes, was not the momentary lapse or attempt to curry favor, as the Graham apologists attempted to claim. On the contrary, the conversation lasted an hour and a half, had rarely strayed from the denunciation of the Jews, and had sometimes been led by Graham. “The Bible says there are Satanic Jews, and that’s where our problem arises,” Graham pontificates at one point, to mumbled agreement by Nixon. Amazingly, twenty additional minutes of this conversation had been redacted before being released to the Watergate committee. What could possibly have been in those redacted twenty minutes that was worse than what wound up being released? Many years later, when the tape was released to public shock and dismay, Graham would do what he has always done when confronted with evidence of his own failings: he would claim that his clear, unambiguous words simply did not reflect his actual views. Inevitably, whenever Graham used this alibi, the big implication remained discreetly unspoken: Graham was either a liar or a moral coward.
Another aspect of Graham’s history is his unequivocal record of racism. Like many from the South (and not a few from the North), Graham inherited a significant bigotry against African-Americans. When a friend suggested to the young Graham that they stop off and get a haircut at a “colored barbershop” where a haircut could be gotten cheap, Graham declared, “Long as there’s a white barbershop in Charlotte, I’ll never have my hair cut at a nigger barbershop! Never!” Many people inherit this sort of vicious thinking, and many people eventually grow up to shed such primitive, mean-spirited attitudes. I kept looking for some point in Graham’s history where he had grown beyond this sort of thinking, but I kept coming up empty handed. The public record demonstrates that Graham was always on the wrong side on the racial issue. Always.
Over the years, there have been a number of attempts to portray Graham as being on the “progressive” side of the civil rights struggle that began in earnest in the 1950s. In fact, as Bothwell documents at length, this “progressive” history has been manufactured out of whole cloth. This is a man who, as late as the 1960s, was holding “separate but equal” crusades for black audiences. Graham would claim, “It wasn’t his decision but that of the organization.” And whenever segregationists would slam him for showing even an inkling of a progressive idea, he would immediately backpedal, claiming he was only there to preach the Bible, not to “enter into any local issues.” While the whole world was watching the battle for human rights in Selma, Graham was vacationing on the beach in Hawaii. Indeed, Graham was notable by his absence from every decisive moment in the civil rights struggle. When M.L. King was gunned down, Graham pointedly failed to attend the funeral, an event attended by over 200,000 people. On those rare occasions when Graham would even acknowledge that something called “the civil rights struggle” was taking place, he would limit his pronouncements to cautioning others to “put on the brakes a bit,” opining that “only when Christ comes again will all the little white children of Abraham walk hand in hand with little black children.” He seemed genuinely puzzled by the unwillingness of black Americans to wait for the Second Coming to claim their rights as human beings.
One might suggest, in Graham’s defense, “that was then, this is now.” Sadly, he does not appear to have grown over the years. As late as 1991, Graham was a member of the whites-only Biltmore Country Club. When called on this by local activists, Graham’s spokesman trotted out the old standby: Graham “didn’t have time to involve himself in local issues.” And in 1993, Graham publicly asked the rhetorical question, “Is AIDS a judgment of God?” His answer: “I could not say for sure, but I think so.” Needless to say, Graham’s remarks brought down a torrent of outrage, in the face of which Graham promptly did what he always did: “I remember saying it, and I immediately regretted it and almost went back and clarified the statement.” He “almost” went back and clarified the statement. Almost. Graham’s entire life, it would seem, is one long chain of moments of truth in which he “almost” did the right thing.
As an elder statesman whose mental and rhetorical powers are rapidly fading, Graham did not play his usual role as panderer to the powerful in the George W. Bush administration. While one should be grateful for this small mercy, Graham’s son Franklin delivered the inaugural sermon at Bush’s 2000 inauguration, and went on to become a close Bush confidant. And so the torch was passed, and so the disease was propagated. Billy Graham’s uniquely intolerant form of fundamentalist rhetoric, centered on the twin messages of fear and hate, continue to worm their way deep into the fabric of American discourse. It is to Bothwell’s enormous credit that he forces the reader to confront Billy Graham raw, unfiltered, as he really is. To the droves of Graham apologists and “clarifiers,” Bothwell offers a simple challenge: “Perhaps we should pay heed to what Graham has actually said.”
“Billy Graham represents a basic kind of patriotism in this country – an unquestioning, obeying patriotism, a loyalty to the authority of the President. Billy was always uncritical, unchallenging, unquestioning.” --- Bill Moyers
“I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B and C. Just who do they think they are? --- Barry Goldwater
A power-hungry moral coward. A vicious racist and Jew-baiter. A man with an almost uncanny ability to always be on the wrong side of history. A craven climber and groveller at the feet of power. An “unabashed nationalist and advocate for American empire.” If Cecil Bothwell is right – and he marshals a lot of evidence in support of his thesis – then “America’s most beloved pastor” is all these things, and more. Bothwell gives us the opportunity to see the other side of Billy Graham, the man who was seventh on a recent Gallup poll’s list of the most admired people of the 20th century. Graham is a man with a history, a man who must be called to account. Bothwell lays out his bill of particulars with subtlety and skill.
The first leitmotif in Graham’s life story is his obsessive scrounging after power. From the very beginning, he has sought access to the corridors of power with an almost touching desperation. Graham was the first evangelist to conduct a religious service on the steps of the Capitol building, and the first to conduct a full-blown crusade inside the walls of the Pentagon. But Graham has always known that the real center of power in America was the White House, and has proven to be a “constant suppliant seeking presidential attention.” The more intelligent and responsible presidents (Truman, Kennedy, Carter) kept Graham at arm’s length, while other, lesser men utilized Graham for whatever they could gain from the association.
Truman apparently despised Graham from the get-go, describing him to a close friend as “one of those counterfeits I was telling you about,” the sort of man who is only interested in “getting his name in the paper.” But in a bit of pure luck, Graham suddenly found himself being groomed as the darling of the Hearst media empire, which built up the persona of the “simple preacher” and turned him loose to rage against godless Communism to crowds of up to 350,000 rapt believers. Graham was becoming an influential player in the toxic politics of 1950s America – and he was learning to love it.
Graham’s increasingly high profile brought him to the attention of Senator Joseph McCarthy, eventually “becoming one of his most loyal and enduring allies.” Documents reveal that Graham was eager to out-do McCarthy in his rabid commitment to exposing “the pinks, the lavenders, and the reds who have sought refuge between the wings of the American eagle.” As McCarthy ratcheted up the rhetoric with his demand that suspected Communists be stripped of their Fifth Amendment protections, Graham was right there with him, proclaiming, “Let’s do it!” Never one to hitch his wagon to a single star, Graham was simultaneously voicing his strident support for “the red-scare tactics of Senator Lyndon Johnson and a young congressman named Richard Milhouse Nixon.” Give the man credit: he had a knack for spotting talent early on and currying favor with the people who would run the country for the rest of the century, and beyond.
While Graham’s most infamous association was of course with Nixon, he nevertheless racked up a pretty good track record with subsequent tenants at the White House. It is a tribute to Jimmy Carter’s canny instincts that he wanted nothing to do with the man and kept him out of the White House during his term, but most of Carter’s successors warmly embraced Graham and his values. He wooed Reagan and George H.W. Bush with great success. He had somewhat less success with Bill Clinton, but he was there to give solace to Hillary Clinton (whose religious associations in Washington were uniformly “conservative and fundamentalist”) during the Lewinsky scandal.
I was continually amazed at Graham’s ability to insinuate himself into the centers of power, given some of his more unsavory views. For if Bothwell is to be believed, Graham is a life-long racist and the worst sort of bigot. It is tempting to fall back on the old, old alibi and say that Graham was a “product of his environment.” As a very young many, Graham fell under the influence of “holy roller Mordecai Ham,” a man notorious as “one of his era’s most gaudy and livid anti-Semites,” a man who fulminated against “apostate Jewry and the wicked Jews who killed Jesus.” While it was not unusual for a youngster coming of age in the Jim Crow south to be bombarded with this sort of vicious rhetoric, it is notable that Graham never shook off these baleful influences. We would hear echoes of Mordecai Ham’s rants in Graham’s infamous “off the record” conversation in the Oval Office with Richard Nixon.
This conversation, which was captured on one of the legendary White House tapes, was not the momentary lapse or attempt to curry favor, as the Graham apologists attempted to claim. On the contrary, the conversation lasted an hour and a half, had rarely strayed from the denunciation of the Jews, and had sometimes been led by Graham. “The Bible says there are Satanic Jews, and that’s where our problem arises,” Graham pontificates at one point, to mumbled agreement by Nixon. Amazingly, twenty additional minutes of this conversation had been redacted before being released to the Watergate committee. What could possibly have been in those redacted twenty minutes that was worse than what wound up being released? Many years later, when the tape was released to public shock and dismay, Graham would do what he has always done when confronted with evidence of his own failings: he would claim that his clear, unambiguous words simply did not reflect his actual views. Inevitably, whenever Graham used this alibi, the big implication remained discreetly unspoken: Graham was either a liar or a moral coward.
Another aspect of Graham’s history is his unequivocal record of racism. Like many from the South (and not a few from the North), Graham inherited a significant bigotry against African-Americans. When a friend suggested to the young Graham that they stop off and get a haircut at a “colored barbershop” where a haircut could be gotten cheap, Graham declared, “Long as there’s a white barbershop in Charlotte, I’ll never have my hair cut at a nigger barbershop! Never!” Many people inherit this sort of vicious thinking, and many people eventually grow up to shed such primitive, mean-spirited attitudes. I kept looking for some point in Graham’s history where he had grown beyond this sort of thinking, but I kept coming up empty handed. The public record demonstrates that Graham was always on the wrong side on the racial issue. Always.
Over the years, there have been a number of attempts to portray Graham as being on the “progressive” side of the civil rights struggle that began in earnest in the 1950s. In fact, as Bothwell documents at length, this “progressive” history has been manufactured out of whole cloth. This is a man who, as late as the 1960s, was holding “separate but equal” crusades for black audiences. Graham would claim, “It wasn’t his decision but that of the organization.” And whenever segregationists would slam him for showing even an inkling of a progressive idea, he would immediately backpedal, claiming he was only there to preach the Bible, not to “enter into any local issues.” While the whole world was watching the battle for human rights in Selma, Graham was vacationing on the beach in Hawaii. Indeed, Graham was notable by his absence from every decisive moment in the civil rights struggle. When M.L. King was gunned down, Graham pointedly failed to attend the funeral, an event attended by over 200,000 people. On those rare occasions when Graham would even acknowledge that something called “the civil rights struggle” was taking place, he would limit his pronouncements to cautioning others to “put on the brakes a bit,” opining that “only when Christ comes again will all the little white children of Abraham walk hand in hand with little black children.” He seemed genuinely puzzled by the unwillingness of black Americans to wait for the Second Coming to claim their rights as human beings.
One might suggest, in Graham’s defense, “that was then, this is now.” Sadly, he does not appear to have grown over the years. As late as 1991, Graham was a member of the whites-only Biltmore Country Club. When called on this by local activists, Graham’s spokesman trotted out the old standby: Graham “didn’t have time to involve himself in local issues.” And in 1993, Graham publicly asked the rhetorical question, “Is AIDS a judgment of God?” His answer: “I could not say for sure, but I think so.” Needless to say, Graham’s remarks brought down a torrent of outrage, in the face of which Graham promptly did what he always did: “I remember saying it, and I immediately regretted it and almost went back and clarified the statement.” He “almost” went back and clarified the statement. Almost. Graham’s entire life, it would seem, is one long chain of moments of truth in which he “almost” did the right thing.
As an elder statesman whose mental and rhetorical powers are rapidly fading, Graham did not play his usual role as panderer to the powerful in the George W. Bush administration. While one should be grateful for this small mercy, Graham’s son Franklin delivered the inaugural sermon at Bush’s 2000 inauguration, and went on to become a close Bush confidant. And so the torch was passed, and so the disease was propagated. Billy Graham’s uniquely intolerant form of fundamentalist rhetoric, centered on the twin messages of fear and hate, continue to worm their way deep into the fabric of American discourse. It is to Bothwell’s enormous credit that he forces the reader to confront Billy Graham raw, unfiltered, as he really is. To the droves of Graham apologists and “clarifiers,” Bothwell offers a simple challenge: “Perhaps we should pay heed to what Graham has actually said.”
Monday, December 1, 2008
Chemical Bags and Dinner on the Grounds
What does atheism have to offer human beings in place of the rich, warm, familial cultural milieu that religious people have? I’ve recently found myself thinking about this question a lot, and there is a definite problem here if the secularist community is honest in its desire to bring more people into the secular fold. Secularists seem not to understand that the religious community is not exclusively about belief in the middle-eastern sky god. In fact, I’d say in my experience here in the American South, that is sometimes almost incidental. It’s an entire social structure: you have a communal celebratory meal at church ("dinner on the grounds"), you see friends and extended-family members at church, you pursue your hobbies at church, you perform your good works and your charitable efforts at church. Heck, a lot of people even get involved in church because it’s a (relatively) safe place to meet potential romantic partners! So it’s an entire social structure, something religions have provided as far back as we can see. And what do secularists offer as an alternative? “You’re just a walking bag of chemicals, evolved to do certain hard-wired things you can’t control. You have no ‘spiritual connection’ to any of the other walking bags of chemicals you encounter. You are truly ‘an island’, you’re on your own, everything is about the naked selfish will-to-live. Oh, and did we mention? When you die, your brain is extinguished and your body rots, and buh-bye, no more you!” I happen to believe that all those statements are 100% true, but I have to acknowledge the obvious fact that secularists have a bit of, shall we say, a “public relations problem” if this is all they bring to the table as an alternative to what the religious bring to the table. Would most people rather relax and lean back into the warm communal embrace of “dinner on the grounds,” or would they rather ponder the existential meaninglessness of an absurd world? Humans beings seem to have an innate need for community, celebration, and purpose, and until the secular community can address those human needs, it will remain what it is now: small, marginalized, and incapable of influencing events on any level.
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