“If, in trying to do the will of God, we always seek the highest abstract standard of perfection, we show that there is still much we need to learn about the will of God. For God does not demand that every man attain what is theoretically highest and best. It is better to be a good street sweeper than a bad writer, better to be a good bartender than a bad doctor, and a repentant thief who died with Jesus on Calvary was far more perfect than the holy ones who had Him nailed to the cross….The Pharisees had kept the law to the letter and had spent their lives in the pursuit of a most scrupulous perfection. But they were so intent upon perfection as an abstraction that when God manifested His will and His perfection in a concrete and definite way they had no choice but to reject it.”
-Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island, page 70
If you have never read Thomas Merton, do it. I do not care what faith, belief system, or non-religious position you subscribe to. Passages like this go beyond any religious doctrine and address a central problem that many of us are prone to. So many times in my life I have struggle with getting the “right” solution to questions like “How should I live?”, “What is acceptable?”, and “What is the right opinion on this issue?” rather than seeking humility in my daily life and responding to what I see in front of me with compassion and action.
What is the Godliest morality? Or, for those non-theists out there, “What is the highest good?” I am beginning to think these are the wrong questions, not because they are invalid, but because they promote a state of inaction. We see it in our government, when we spend more time arguing over what is the most philosophically correct form of governance than we do dealing with the key problems we face as a society. We see it in academia, where we spend all our time trying to get the right theory on why inequality exists instead of practicing an attitude of equality towards others.
When we take speculation on what is right or good or true to the highest level of abstraction, we lose perspective. People become cases, personality traits become criteria for judgment. I’ve noticed that it is often the people I expect the least from who surprise me the most with one great act, insight, or kind word. And if I judge such persons by an abstract system of value, I cut myself off from all that those people are and can be.
When we try to figure out what is perfect and imperfect, we kill everything and everyone around us. Nothing is completely one or the other, and it is constantly in motion. Someone who is a bigot may also have a passion for serving the poor. (Yes, this seems contradictory, but I have seen it). Someone who engages in a sex lifestyle we disagree with may be the one who saves your life on the operating table. And you (I) could miss all the beauty in the world while trying to get the right answer, the moral truth, the holiest viewpoint.
Everyone has a part to play “for good or for ill” as the wizard Gandalf said of Gollum in the Lord of the Rings. And if you decide before it is all said and done who is good or right, you might not stick around to see what happens.
That thief played an important role in the story of the Gospel, and I doubt anyone would have guessed it until the last minute of his life.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Monday, November 15, 2010
Tellin' Stories (Instead of Debating)...
It's been a while since I last posted anything substantive. Semesters have a way of doing that to me. It's not that I haven't had any thoughts or ideas, but I haven't been getting them down before they find a way to disappear or become uninteresting to me.
Then last Tuesday happened. I got argumentative...I got righteously indignant...it happens from time to time. (Though quite frequently as of late)
It is so difficult for me to be passionate, to love the things I believe in wholeheartedly and feel sure that they have some value to the world, and also be gracious towards others. I don't know exactly why it is that way, perhaps it is that ideas sometimes become such a part of my identity that I feel an urge to defend them. Or maybe I just get self-esteem from "feeling" right. I don't know, but I think about it a lot and hope to grow in that area.
Another fellow, who I have confidence is a caring, compassionate person, and I had some disagreement about the gay/lesbian thing. It's (in my opinion) an argument we just shouldn't be stuck on in the church, and I feel like it hurts people and pushes them away from God. For the record, I tend towards the side of thinking there is nothing wrong with loving whoever you want to love. How you love people seems like more of an issue worth wrestling with than who you can and cannot love. But I know a lot of really loving people who have been so kind and gracious with me who are absolutely certain that being gay or lesbian is just plain wrong, and I don't think I'll ever convince them otherwise. It's like a litmus test thing with some folks (myself included, I tend to get pretty judgmental with people who think there is something morally wrong with "gay thing," its a convoluted mess of judgmentalism). But I've been thinking this week that maybe the conversation about what is and is not sinful is the wrong conversation. Especially when I looked back through the Gospels, and realized Jesus virtually never gives a straight answer to anything. He does tell stories that change our perspective on those issues though. So, I put my thinking cap on and starting working on my own modern day parable. And so, for your consideration, the tale of the Gay Life-saver (credit to the Good Samaritan for inspiration).
In Five Points, on a certain night, there was a waiter walking to his car after a busy night serving food to hungry patrons. On his way through an alley, a group of men ambushed and robbed the waiter, and beat him savagely, leaving him badly bruised with no shortage of broken bones.
Now a minister and his family happened to be leaving a local church after a late evening worship service, and saw the waiter lying in the street. The minister wanted to help, but he was afraid to bring a stranger into his van with his wife and kids. So the family went on their way, praying some compassionate person would help the man.
Not long after this, a member of another church was leaving a long and difficult budget meeting, which he had been chairing as he was a prominent leader in his congregation. He saw the waiter in the street, but was so tired and mentally exhausted that he told himself "surely someone else will help." So he passed by, careful to avoid looking at the waiter, as this might have made him uncomfortable.
A few minutes passed by when a local artist and his long-term boyfriend passed by after leaving a local art show. Though they were carrying thousands of dollars of the artist's work, they were so moved by the plight of the waiter that they immediately dropped everything to help. The artist put the man in his own car, and drove him to St. Vincent's Hospital, where he found out that the man had no health insurance. The artist told the attending doctor to put him down as the responsible party, and send him a bill for whatever care was needed. He and his boyfriend left the hospital, after making sure the waiter's needs were being attended to. Until he was discharged, they visited every day to see how he was doing and keep him company.
Now, I ask you, who was righteous when it mattered most?
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
What I do for a living...
So I haven't posted a real faith oriented post recently, which I apologize for if anyone has missed such things. I've been busy with my occupation as of late, which is being a sociology graduate student. So, I've decided to offer up a piece of what I do to bring home the bacon. If you don't understand some of the obscure terminology, it's okay. Neither do most academics who are supposed to understand this stuff (me included about 95% of the time) But for what its worth, behold the insanity that is evaluating and discussing social theory.
Many academics would categorize Bauman and Bordieu as having developed opposing theories. Bauman’s theory of liquid modernity dismisses the idea of stable structures and empirical social truth, opting for perceived structures and the creative agency of the individual, while Bordieu posits that social structures are essentially stable and self-sustaining, and largely limit the agency of the individual.(cite?) Bauman insists that empirical research, and especially statistical analysis, is largely irrelevant to investigating the social world, while Bordieu demands that theory be affirmed by empirical evidence. (cite?)
I would argue that any stated dichotomy between Bordieu and Bauman is not only misleading, but defeats the possibility of a rich social theory that incorporates the best intellectual contributions of both. The greatest goal of an adequate sociological theory is to explain the relationships between social structures and social actors, to account for the role of agents in forming society and society in shaping agents. Both Bordieu and Bauman provide a wealth of ideas on this topic, but there are deficiencies in the theories of both that can be addressed the other. Bordieu theory‘s greatest strength is its integration of structure into the behavior of individuals through the habitus, but it has been accused of not providing a deep explanation of the ability of agents to alter society. Bauman’s theory is rich with ideas regarding how the actions of individuals are capable of altering the social structures in which they take place, but it has a difficult time accounting for the tendency of certain features of those structures to persist. My position is that, rather than being in conflict, the ideas of these two theorists are complementary to one another, and that their theories are actually converging from different directions towards a more complete picture of a mutual feedback system of agency and structure, in which the relationship between the two is not linear but rather circular in nature.
The diagrams represent three configurations of structure and agency, all of which allow for agents to impact structure and vice versa. In the first model, which is representative of Bauman’s theory, structure has a weak but present impact on agents, while agents have a robust impact on structure. In the second model, representative of Bordieu’s theory, agents have a noticeable but rather weak impact on structure, but structure has a concrete role in shaping the behavior of agents. The third model, which incorporates features of both but does away with hierarchy between the two, represents a mutual feedback system of social phenomenon. Here, the impact of agents on structures and structures on agents are both quite strong, and both are impacted constantly by the process. The focus however, is not on the position of one in terms of its dominance over the other, but on the processes by which each shapes the other in a circular system. There is consistency in the process by which each is shaped, but both the social structure and the individual actors are constantly evolving and adapting to one another.
In this kind of sociological theory, the object of study is not effect of structure on agents or agents on structure, but the processes by which they interact. This framework expands our gaze beyond the configuration of society, which Bordieu visualizes quite well with his geography of social spaces, as well as the mutability of contemporary social structures, which Bauman describes in rich detail through his work on liquid modernity. These are valuable, valid contributions to the field, but to progress the study of the social world, we need to look further into how we observe and describe the “motion” present in the relationship of agents and social structure. We should look for the points of initiation where structure transforms or reinforces particular social behaviors in individuals (i.e. what kind of social phenomenon encouraged and maintained popular support for state sanctioned segregation?), as well as the specific characteristics and circumstances of individuals at the point where changes in their social worlds begin. (i.e. what are the characteristics and beliefs that allowed individuals to end state sanctioned segregation?)
The challenge to such sociology is that it is extremely demanding. We should not, as individual researchers, choose correspondence analysis and neglect ethnographic research if we are to get a fuller picture of the interaction between agents and social structures. We should do both with the same intensity for all subjects of research, and thus come away from our research with the fullest picture of that subject that we can. This is responsibility not only to the field of study we have chosen, but also to the public we claim to serve through our scholarship.
Integrating Agency and Structure:
An Exploration and Expansion on the Theories of Pierre Bordieu and Zygmundt Bauman
Many academics would categorize Bauman and Bordieu as having developed opposing theories. Bauman’s theory of liquid modernity dismisses the idea of stable structures and empirical social truth, opting for perceived structures and the creative agency of the individual, while Bordieu posits that social structures are essentially stable and self-sustaining, and largely limit the agency of the individual.(cite?) Bauman insists that empirical research, and especially statistical analysis, is largely irrelevant to investigating the social world, while Bordieu demands that theory be affirmed by empirical evidence. (cite?)
I would argue that any stated dichotomy between Bordieu and Bauman is not only misleading, but defeats the possibility of a rich social theory that incorporates the best intellectual contributions of both. The greatest goal of an adequate sociological theory is to explain the relationships between social structures and social actors, to account for the role of agents in forming society and society in shaping agents. Both Bordieu and Bauman provide a wealth of ideas on this topic, but there are deficiencies in the theories of both that can be addressed the other. Bordieu theory‘s greatest strength is its integration of structure into the behavior of individuals through the habitus, but it has been accused of not providing a deep explanation of the ability of agents to alter society. Bauman’s theory is rich with ideas regarding how the actions of individuals are capable of altering the social structures in which they take place, but it has a difficult time accounting for the tendency of certain features of those structures to persist. My position is that, rather than being in conflict, the ideas of these two theorists are complementary to one another, and that their theories are actually converging from different directions towards a more complete picture of a mutual feedback system of agency and structure, in which the relationship between the two is not linear but rather circular in nature.
The diagrams represent three configurations of structure and agency, all of which allow for agents to impact structure and vice versa. In the first model, which is representative of Bauman’s theory, structure has a weak but present impact on agents, while agents have a robust impact on structure. In the second model, representative of Bordieu’s theory, agents have a noticeable but rather weak impact on structure, but structure has a concrete role in shaping the behavior of agents. The third model, which incorporates features of both but does away with hierarchy between the two, represents a mutual feedback system of social phenomenon. Here, the impact of agents on structures and structures on agents are both quite strong, and both are impacted constantly by the process. The focus however, is not on the position of one in terms of its dominance over the other, but on the processes by which each shapes the other in a circular system. There is consistency in the process by which each is shaped, but both the social structure and the individual actors are constantly evolving and adapting to one another.
In this kind of sociological theory, the object of study is not effect of structure on agents or agents on structure, but the processes by which they interact. This framework expands our gaze beyond the configuration of society, which Bordieu visualizes quite well with his geography of social spaces, as well as the mutability of contemporary social structures, which Bauman describes in rich detail through his work on liquid modernity. These are valuable, valid contributions to the field, but to progress the study of the social world, we need to look further into how we observe and describe the “motion” present in the relationship of agents and social structure. We should look for the points of initiation where structure transforms or reinforces particular social behaviors in individuals (i.e. what kind of social phenomenon encouraged and maintained popular support for state sanctioned segregation?), as well as the specific characteristics and circumstances of individuals at the point where changes in their social worlds begin. (i.e. what are the characteristics and beliefs that allowed individuals to end state sanctioned segregation?)
The challenge to such sociology is that it is extremely demanding. We should not, as individual researchers, choose correspondence analysis and neglect ethnographic research if we are to get a fuller picture of the interaction between agents and social structures. We should do both with the same intensity for all subjects of research, and thus come away from our research with the fullest picture of that subject that we can. This is responsibility not only to the field of study we have chosen, but also to the public we claim to serve through our scholarship.
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