Life, Death, and the Rest

Men's take on evolution

2006-03-18T11:04:00.000-08:00

I remember a children's book by Aleksandr Men' (the Russian Orthodox equivalent of CS Lewis, see http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1879038285/qid=1142707373/sr=1-8/ref=sr_1_8/102-2638075-6464167?s=books&v=glance&n=283155). It was a description of Adam and Eve and the creation of the Garden/the Fall. In Men's story, Adam was the first one to receive Ruakh, the divine breath of life or the sensitive humanizing spirit. He and Eve were cast out of the blissful peace of ignorance, which became in retrospect a dark world only when they realized the higher life of the human soul. The idea of different kinds of spirits activating different degrees of life has a long history in neoplatonism and is not all that revolutionary from Men's perspective.

This was one very pleasant way to combine evolution and God, and it's one that, while not perfect for the traditional LDS, emphasizes Atonement as the answer to spiritual death. This also establishes a parallel between Adam and Jesus that otherwise might be overlooked. Both were born less than they actually were: their physical bodies were no match for the vast spirit which inhabited them.

To borrow polemic jargon, in Men's apparent view, Adam was the first ape with a human soul. Extending points already made on this list, one could argue that the actual onset of death refers to the death of a human soul, ie the potential for that soul to be separated from God, whether terminally or transiently.

My reading of Joseph Smith suggests to me that he personally believed in a mixture that was closer to the religious right than the religious left on this question, but these questions were not really posed directly to him in his lifetime. He was emphatic about the integrity of the (im)mortal body, and I suspect that changes in species would have been heretical to his ear. I say this not to attempt to limit discussion but in the interests of full disclosure.

Men's view also seems consistent with the idea of God as organizer rather than creator which does pervade early and contemporary Mormonism. Evolution can be seen as God's mode for creating a vessel for the eternal intelligences which are his by pneumogenetic association (I'm hinting at a genealogy of spirits as distinct from a genealogy of flesh, and there aren't standard words for it, so pneumogenetic is my stab at capturing this idea of relationship). The death that matters is the death of the soul.

On a vaguely medical note, the current human body is not remotely consistent with the lack of death. The daily turnover of cells in the body is immense, and those cells which refuse to die have a special and frightening name: cancer. Now one can certainly maintain that prior to the Fall the human body had no turnover whatsoever and it was COMPLETELY transformed at the moment of the Fall. But that would emphasize the inability of the body to adapt, progress, and grow rather than the potential to progress eternally. Which may be the truth behind the Fall, this tension between the perpetual stagnation of the immortal, and the anxious rush of growth of the frightened mortal. Elijah (in some Jewish traditions), the Wandering Jew, and the Flying Dutchman are all examples of the tragic immortal, while our beloved vampires are more familiar and a bit less immortal (those pesky skewers and sunbeams).

Necromancy and Family History

2006-02-28T17:14:00.000-08:00

While writing an abstract for a conference, it has occurred to me that the Zelph encounter was an act of necromancy. Joseph Smith took a man's skeleton and revealed some secret insight that was previously unavailable. And what was the content of this necromantic revelation? It was Zelph's genealogy. Whence we spring mattered intensely and mystically to Joseph Smith.

Brieview: Leventhal, The Shadow of the Enlightenment

2006-02-07T17:38:00.000-08:00

In the Shadow of the Enlightenment: Occultism and Renaissance Science in Eighteenth-Century America
Herbert Leventhal
New York University Press 1976.
Out of print and expensive/rare

I had to check my copy out of the library rather than picking up a used copy on alibris.com. This is considered the definitive treatment of occultism and parascientific American belief in the eighteenth century. I was very impressed with the coverage and insight. The book is also quite readable. I would buy it if it were reissued.

Leventhal attempts to map the spread and persistence of Renaissance scientific and parascientific beliefs as well as the occult in the British colonies. Astrology, alchemy, witchcraft, rattlesnake charming (the belief that rattlesnakes and blacksnakes had the power to bewitch prey with their eyes, probably derivative from Native American beliefs about certain potent snakes), the Great Chain of Being are all carefully reviewed.

Tidbits of relevance for Mormons might include a quotation on the Chain of Being (the idea that just as humans are greater than animals, plants, and minerals on earth, there is a similar hierarchy of intelligences above humans) from early Ben Franklin:

“It may be that these created Gods, are immortal, or it may be that after many Ages, they are changed, and Others supply their Places. Howbeit, I conceive that each of these is exceedingly wise, and good, and very powerful; and that Each has made for himself one glorious Sun, attended with a beautiful and admirable System of Planets.”

Ditto Ezra Stiles's reference to a vast chain of "intelligences."

Otherwise I think the book is fascinating history, but beyond establishing a cultural milieu into which Joseph Smith was born, the book is not of primary interest to Latter-day Saints.

Firefly Season 2: I couldn't resist

2006-01-31T10:49:00.000-08:00

http://www.fireflyseason2.com/

I would love to see another season made and am eager to see whether novel funding mechanisms will make it possible to see them.

Brieview: David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism

2006-01-29T18:22:00.000-08:00

Gregory Prince with Richard Wright
U of Utah Press 2005

I decided to take a break from my research and read a much touted biography of a church president about whom I knew relatively little. I'll be brief.

I enjoyed the picture of McKay as a peacemaker and someone whose focus on loyalty and the integrity of his word was paramount. He was very much a gentleman in the old sense of the word. I was heartened by his openness to private beliefs and his interest in souls rather than politics. The approach the authors took was somewhat scrapbookish, necessitated by their research approach which was unfortunately less synthetic than might have been hoped. Their approach also led to occasional repetition and duplication.

Much of the treatment of Wilkinson's BYU and Benson's political activity is familiar material from other venues and adds little to the subjects beyond giving a sense for the complexity of interacting with a charismatic leader in the sense of a burgeoning organizational infrastructure required for an enlarging church.

Overall I was left with the sense that McKay was the most like Joseph Smith Jr. of his successors. I speak particularly to charisma, the focus on personal loyalty, a vast enthusiasm for projects he saw as building the Kingdom, and the complex relationships that surrounded him as a result of his strong emphasis on defining friends and maintaining perfect loyalty to those friends. I was a little surprised by the lack of comment in the introduction or epilogue about these similarities.

And I should note that I felt immensely inspired by McKay, by his incredible love for people and his great elegance. I loved the sense that he touched personal lives significantly by his persistent kindness.

Brieview: Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual

2006-01-28T12:02:00.000-08:00

2d ed., 1991.
Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington
Cambridge University Press

Read the book some months ago, but just finished extracting research notes from it, so there are a few elements that have become slightly hazy with the passage of time, but for what it's worth, this is what I remember of it.

The introduction to the second edition is a long and rather tedious academic debate with the critics of the first edition. I would probably just skip it, although there is some introductory material of use to the student there. From this starting point, they present a reasonable survey of funerary and mortuary ritual, with a focus on the societies they know best in Southeast Asia. They are particularly interested in secondary treatment, those rituals that relate to disinterment of decomposed remains, but they run the full gamut.

The pieces I found most interesting were the discussions of what they call collective immortality (I call it genealogic immortality, emphasing the fan of connections through generations rather than just the coherence of a synchronic society), the complex of rites and propitiations required to enlist the aid of the powerful dead for the newly dead, thus providing guides to the world of the dead, and of course ideas about decomposition and final states.

There are some similarities to Mormon rites that, while not taxonomic by any stretch, are pleasant to consider. I would not take these similarities as evidence of a further Jewish diaspora in the islands of Indonesia, but rather an expression of the surprisingly limited thematic range of human reactions to universal events (whether from apostasy from Adamic preaching or through application of general human cognition, I defer to others to decide).

I think in early Mormonism, collective immortality is of vital importance, though individual immortality also exists. Joseph Smith did claim that he would rather be in hell with his true friends than in heaven alone, and I think that folk expression cuts to the heart of it, subsuming even individual immortality with the confines of the grand human family.

While Mormons may look askance at prayers for salvation to Catholic Saints and would possibly wrinkle their noses at feasts and sacrifices to the dead designed to entice them to escort the newly dead to heavenly realms, I would note that Alvin and Joseph Sr. (as well as Lucy Mack's father Solomon) were escorted by just such angels at the moment of their passing, and the temple work for the dead is in fact necessary to assure salvation.

Finally, in secondary treatments, the idea is that the corpse needs to be purified by the loss of blood and the transient elements. What is left, and what is disinterred for final treatment, is the skeleton and the hair. This reminds me of the idea that blood is left out of the resurrected being. Somehow it's the dark fluid, representative of the transience of life, that must be expunged. The idea of the permanence of hair is also seen in antebellum America as well as Mormonism, and several people retained lockets of hair from Joseph Smith (or canes cut from his initial coffin).

Ultimately this is an engaging and reasonable book, and undertaking, as the authors suggest, an examination of our own funerary ritual in the light of these (largely Indonesian) traditional cultures may prove quite illuminating. I rather enjoyed the book and would recommend it.

Paean to Libraries

2006-01-26T16:15:00.000-08:00

Took my kids to the library today for the first time in a while. Spent the morning reading books, placing objects in bins from which they were promptly extracted, and collecting stuffed animals qua book ends from the children's section. For whatever reason this was the time that I chose to notice the library as an institution.

They are public spaces that are quiet. The media are politely silent in the library, unobtrusive despite being the stated reason for the existence of the institution.

Libraries are a rebellion against the market. While I am all for supporting (financially as well as morally) the publication of quality ideas and stories, I am also heartened by the existence of these places that democratize and demarketize access to information and knowledge. Everyone from my toddling child to an aging homeless intellectual has access to the printed information in the libraries, which flagrantly, almost petulantly, refuse to charge their patrons for access to ideas.

Writing this reminds me of my initial adult encounters with a university library. Dim stacks fraught with the sweet scent of glacially obsolescing paper, libidinous stories about mutually conquered virtue late at night in said stacks, the sense that any written argument ever made could be accessed with my own hands within ten minutes. I remember sometimes camping out in the Linguistics reading room, a private study filled with non-circulating ancient volumes and hidden behind a locked door to which I as an undergraduate aspiring linguist had access, sometimes just slipping onto the cold floor, my back against the stacks in the Mormon history section or the Russian literature area. There's an extension to the old library that takes the intrepid scholar deep underground, along a utility hallway filled with huge white tubes like posthuman intestines. Finally, deep underground, stands a concourse of automated stacks that open and shut like rectangular mouths. Fantastic voyage indeed.

God bless the library.

Seeing again: a hidden memorial poem

2006-01-25T10:48:00.000-08:00

I've been reading Joseph Smith's writings closely for some time. There is an entry in the so-called Book of the Law of the Lord referring to Alvin which I have read dozens of times, each time hunting out different words and phrases for use in different settings. Today when I finished reading it (I needed to flesh out a quote in a paper I'm working on), I noticed that Joseph ended with something of a disclaimer. "These childish lines I record in remembrance of my childhood scenes." Wondering why he thought they were childish, I read the lines again and realized that they are actually a memorial poem (I'd call it doggerel if I didn't think people would misunderstand).

Here is his poem written as a stanza of mostly rhymed couplets.

In him there was no guile.
He lived without spot from the time he was a child

From the time of is birth,
he never knew mirth

He was candid and sober and never would play;
and minded his father, and mother, in toiling all day

He was one of the soberest of men
and when he died the angel of the Lord visited him in his last moments

Funny how patterns will elude you for so long. This new approach to reading it confirms Joseph's penchant for amateur poetry and is now a documented example of a memorial poem (these were very popular in antebellum America).

Core vs. Roots of Mormonism

2006-01-23T06:11:00.000-08:00

I was asked to speak at the baptism of a family joining our ward. They have been searching for spiritual direction for their children and their family as a unit, and they have found it in our church. I was pleased to be able to participate in their special day and delighted to welcome them into our church community. As they bore testimony afterwards of the joy at finding a path together, a path that could take them all the way through death on into a glorious afterlife, it occurred to me that I was experiencing the core of Mormonism.

But my avocation is to research the roots of Mormonism. At first I thought about the irony that the core (the experience of a personal and communal salvation) and the roots (intricate ritual and theological structure of the early 19th century) were at odds, that a discussion of the complexities of Nauvoo religion would destroy the sweet atmosphere of the baptismal ceremony. I was struck by a potential insight from my metaphor. The core really isn't the roots, not in a plant. The core is either the seed nucleus which sent the tiny roots into the ground, or it's somewhere deeper within the mature plant. And to have one where the other ought to be is unlikely to be good for the long term fitness of the plant. And of course the plant couldn't survive without either one.

So in the interest of pretending to learn truth from the overapplication of metaphors, I derived a certain pleasure in considering this idea from a fresh perspective. And I'll continue to try to keep my roots and my core in healthy but not overly intimate approximation.

All in Favor...

2006-01-19T10:34:00.000-08:00

Funny little excerpt I noticed in William Clayton's diary (published as Intimate Chronicle by George Smith/Signature). this is on page 240

Elder Kimball moved that no man tell his wife what he has seen. President Young said "all that are in favor of this signify it by holding your tongues when you go away from here." P. P. Pratt, "Contrary mind by the same sign."

Fun to see a sense of humor along with the stress they were experiencing as a result of the rollout of the Nauvoo Temple while they were embattled and preparing their mass exodus along the Mormon Trail.

Brieview: Morain's the Sword of Laban

2006-01-19T09:24:00.000-08:00

American Psychiatric Press 1998.

I should comment that I like William Morain and enjoyed a very pleasant time with him at MHA 2005 where he chaired the panel in which I presented a paper. I mean no offense in my discussion of the book. I also would disclaim that I lack the time necessary to have all the quotations and citations necessary to make this a rigorous review.

To my eye, there are two books combined in one. One of the books is quite intriguing and had my attention from start to finish. The other appears to be simply the latest offering from the Viennese delegation espying and descrying human genitalia in every memory, dream, landscape feature, and striving of the human psyche.

The compelling book is one that seeks to describe the bone debridements of young Joseph's tibia performed by Nathan Smith and colleagues and to think about the possible echoes such horrifying trauma might have had on Joseph the adult. Morain's descriptions are heart-rending and a useful reinterpretation of what transpired around 1812-15 in Joseph Jr.'s life. A less compelling but still intriguing corollary is the attempt to associate the Alvin Smith death and disterment with the trauma of the debridement. Morain's core insight can be productive. I suspect some of Joseph's awareness of the eternities did arise from or respond to intense emotional trauma. I don't envy him those experiences, and it's hard for me to imagine that they would have left no imprint on him. Joseph is open about the effects of Alvin's death but somewhat understated in terms of the debridement, an approach Morain sees as indicative of dissociation as a response to trauma. Overall I enjoyed the opportunity to consider various possible sequelae of these traumatic experiences.

My major complaint about this "first book" is that Morain has attempted to apply contemporary psychiatric theories of childhood trauma, hopelessly muddled by freudian (I refuse to capitalize the adjective) fictionalizations and imaginings and more importantly almost hopelessly culturally conditioned. Morain hopes that human culture has not changed in the ensuring 150 years, but he has neglected the huge changes in American death (and health) culture from around 1830 to around 1940. Pretending that Joseph Jr. was one of the burn victims that Morain (a plastic surgeon) has personally treated in New Hampshire is unlikely to help us understand this early nineteenth-century boy. My second concern about the book is the extent to which these traumas are taken (almost) to be necessary and sufficient. One is left with the impression that any boy who had a typhoid osteomyelitis debrided followed by the death of an older sibling would become the prophet of a new sect. Unfortunately for Morain, those are pretty common occurrences. Nathan Smith was busy operating for years, often on young men, and given mortality rates then, it's hard to imagine anyone surviving to adulthood without losing a sibling along the way. Historically, he has also failed to appreciate the extent to which the corpse was distinctly understood by antebellum Americans vis-a-vis their descendants in contemporary America. Disinterring Alvin I suspect was much more likely to be a relief than a trauma, as it allayed Smith fears of a fate more horrifying than death, the loss of the mortal remains of the beloved.

My own view, informed by my reading as well as Morain's careful treatment, is that the debridement did affect Joseph Smith, but that it was one influence among many and is far from either necessary or sufficient to generate his religious and secular activity.

The "second book" I won't talk much about. Suffice it to say that its climax (I am here aping the freudian prose style of portions of the manuscript to give a sense for how little I like it) is the concept that the granite obelisk (sorry, "shaft") honoring Joseph Jr.'s first centennial (38.5 feet high) is an enormous obdurate penis and is the most fitting monument to Joseph's life. And the stone crypt in which the Nephite relics lay is obdurate genitalia, this time female.

As regards the Viennese delegation, I'm with Nabokov. Enough of this nonsense; let's have some perspective about genitals (ours and others') and get to more important discussions.

As far as recommending the book to fellow Mormons: this book will be seen as heavily anti-Mormon and is unlikely to find a following among faithful Mormons. I personally think it's less anti-Mormon than it is embarrassingly freudian (the generalizations and premature closure and treatment of evidence and statement of theoretical axioms is just as vehemently apologetic of that worldview as the rebuttals I imagine occurred from Mormon apologists) but still would not recommend it for the average faithful Mormon. I enjoyed reading the book for its close reading of the surgeries and their aftermath and because I get a kick out of reading freudian interpretations, primarily for a few good laughs (not "belly" laughs, as the belly is located perilously close to the loins).

Kith and Kin

2006-01-18T11:58:00.000-08:00

I was searching for the word kith without knowing its name then hoped that by its common pairing with kin it had the meaning I intended, basically of "willed (ie non-genetic) family." And that was basically what I found. Kith are close friends and neighbors that are not blood relatives. It's occurred to me that in our current society those relationships are a potential for re-creating the intimacy of the village in the complex of the city.

As I read more about Joseph Smith's vision of the afterlife, I am also struck by the extent to which kith were integrated into his kinship networks. Whether via formal temple adoption or by involvement in the Quorum of the Anointed or the Priesthood infrastructure of the eternal hierarchy, Joseph had a way of bringing the people he loved into the world traditionally inhabited by the family.

There is of course some tension there. How do we mediate conflicts between kith and kin? How do we apportion our time among all of the people to whom we felt bonded? Can we support this fuller idea of kith without neglecting our kinship duties?

Whatever the solution, it occurs to me that Joseph Smith had in mind a broad understanding of the celestial networks that would valorize the celestial community. My inclination is to embrace this expanded notion of family by creating kith networks of longstanding significance, particularly if it can be done without adverse effects on kinship networks. I believe that Mormonism has significant potential in this regard, even though several of Joseph's original innovations have been phased out.

Brieview: The Nauvoo Endowment Companies

2006-01-14T11:17:00.000-08:00

Compiled and edited by Devery Anderson and Gary Bergera. Published 2005 by Signature Books.

Anderson and Bergera have done a thorough job of collecting available documentation related to the ritual work of the Nauvoo Temple during the dizzy two months of its actual usage. I have found the process of reading about this period both spiritually exciting and academically useful.

Though a large portion is republication of the journals of William Clayton and Heber Kimball, there are a variety of previously inaccessible sources made available here. The book is essentially bifurcate. On the one hand there are seemingly interminable lists of people who received any of the relevant ordinances. On the other there are firsthand accounts, most of them contemporary, of the experience of the temple during the winter of 1845-6. These range from the familiar and pleasant (eg Brigham Young evading the police by dispatching William Miller in Young's overcoat; the fact that Brigham Young left the temple once a week and slept about 4 hours per night) to the unfamiliar and sometimes unsettling (the swearing of blood oaths to avenge the loss of the beloved Prophet, the threat to exclude women temporarily from the endowment if they disturbed the peace). In places there are also excerpts that would never have been intended for publication by their writers, as they were recording details of the function of the temple in their private diaries, right along with an awareness of the penalties for publishing this information.

I should make this clear by reiterating: portions of this book include specific reference to temple rites that the diarists whose work is reprinted here would have rejected as an unholy sacrilege. I do not recommend this book or its companion volume to readers who are not comfortable with reading this material in a published format outside the walls of the temple. If your experience of the holy rites of the temple does not include reading about the structure of the endowment or the early implementation of it, then I would avoid this book.

I personally found the book immensely inspirational, and I had an image of the intense and loving commitment of an entire people to receiving the blessings of heaven in the way prescribed by their martyred prophet. Arising before dawn to stoke the stoves that would warm the sagging structure of the Nauvoo temple during a bitter midwestern winter, dancing together for an hour near midnight, then collapsing exhausted onto sofas and floor for a few hours of rest before gearing up for the next day. All this while their leaders were on the lam for charges of counterfeiting (apparently related to a counterfeiting ring within Nauvoo that was not directly affiliated with the church, although sceptics may disupte Brigham Young's answer to the charges as the Mormons felt themselves robbed by a fallen nation and in desperate need of funds to emigrate and care for their poor).

I have a rekindled admiration for Brigham Young and his colleagues. They amaze me. I'm grateful for the compilers for bringing this material to me, though I would only recommend the book to non-Mormons or those Mormons whose experience of the temple does not exclude perusing events recorded in private diaries and not intended for publication.

Love and Hygiene

2006-01-14T10:05:00.000-08:00

Took the kids to McDonalds for a treat (nothing like the dollar menu to make America feel royal) and had a confusing encounter with another customer. Closer to fifty than seventy, I had seen him before. Homeless, alcoholic, probably mentally ill. Sitting quietly, almost statuesque in a gothic way, he only moved when one of the kids danced toward his table, then he uncoiled his arm quickly to pat her head. Another man had done a similar thing after they had made playful eye contact. My initial reaction was a common one, revulsion. Then I tried to be both charitable and rational about it. This worked for the few seconds for me to remember that in fact scabies and body lice can be shared in this way. Then I was just resentful.

It occurred to me (however theologically inept this may be) that Jesus definitely didn't have his own biological children as he would never have spent his ministry preaching among the homeless and dissolute. He'd have been constantly worried about whether his children were going to get infected: leprosy, tuberculosis, lice, what have you.

After trying to get the kids ready to brave the rain outside for a couple of minutes, the man charged our table, his hand outstretched, muttering something foreign-sounding. I stared back, struggling with my conscience but wanting to shield my kids from another possible scabies encounter. It didn't help that I noticed a piece of toilet paper hanging from his pants' waist. Finally I understood that he was saying "it's good" and wanting to shake my hand, so I extended mine limply into his fierce grasp. The skin was dry and weathered but felt intact. I covered the kids and rushed into the rain.

I remember the comment from a homeless patient of mine a couple years back, which I will paraphrase for lack of an exact memory. "People here are all sorts of friendly until you try to shake their hand. Jesus was the only one ever shook hands with the homeless."

Evolution and the Chain of Being

2006-01-04T18:45:00.000-08:00

Read a fascinating comment by Elijah Lovejoy in his Great Chain of Being. The Chain of Being was the idea that the universe is filled with a continuous spectrum of intelligent existence that ranges from angels (somewhere near God) down to the tiniest little flake of dust. In a complex sense this was a response to the awareness of the vastness of creation, the recognition, at least as old as Aristotle, that there are similarities across different species, suggesting a nearly infinite gradation from one type of existent being to another. Lovejoy argues that in the 18th century this idea came to have a somewhat denigrating aspect for humans. Specifically, given the infinitessimal gradations in existent beings, we are little higher than whatever it is that comes next to us.
Evolution seems to have the same influence. It both places us in a complex taxonomy and suggests that we are little better than everyone else in the system (though we are certainly better).
I had a flash of insight that these really do end up being fairly similar ideas. One was designed to show the great bounty of God and the other to show his complete absence. But the fact that people were (and are) trying to get their minds around is the complexity of existence and the place of humanity within it. Seems to me that on a microcosmic scale we engage in some pursuits in our own lives.

I have no particular huge conclusion to draw, only a certain comfort in seeing how different ideas have responded to the same problems over the years, and to borrow from the Biblical pessimist of Ecclesiastes, "there is nothing new under the sun." (At least I hope I'm remembering the allusion correctly.)

Brieview: Peterson's (1995) Story of the Book of Abraham

2005-12-23T18:03:00.000-08:00

Just finished this book, part of my research on the dead in early Mormonism. This book is a metafictive discovery, the posthumous publication of the three-decades-in-preparation study of the origins of Joseph Smith's Book of Abraham by a BYU religion professor. Abraham is the posthumous publication of the work of Joseph Smith, Jr., an inspired translation of a text which was wrested from the arms of a corpse and a record of that man and his ancestry.
A few quick thoughts from this intriguing, informal scrapbook of material on the origin of the Lebolo mummies and related papyri.
First, I caught a glimmer of the reason why BYU exists. No one else would undertake such a book but a relative amateur who had the flexibility to devote his energy and professional career to gathering affectionate trivia about scripture. No one else would give someone like that an academic job, and how sad and flat would the world be if there weren't para-academic researchers whittling away at the corners of big issues, if everyone publishing were fully credentialed, scholastically grounded theoreticians? That will sound like satire, but I actually mean it. Whether I would like to consume it or not, I think there ought to be a place in the world for para-scholarly research. I don't think it belongs in the hard sciences, nor do I think it belongs in public schools, but in the right setting, as in this case in a church-owned school, I think it ought to be appreciated as part of the diversity of human responses to the worlds of nature and supernature.
Second, I received an image of the workings of the church in this chatty manuscript. There is one particularly strange image when a secretary to the First Presidency resists showing a devoutly faithful apologist a relevant passage from a minute book that was over one hundred years old, finally, at the insistence of his superior, allowing the inspection, but under pretty strict conditions: all other portions of the material was covered with books, and the secretary hovered during the entire inspection. Such earnest secrecy.
Third, I finally found the portly figure of the devoted Brother Peterson in a wide variety of geographical and social environments--almost a BYU professor Where is Elmo collage of images--rather affecting. I have developed an image of this sweet man trotting the globe in search of the further light of revelation that he thought might arrive if only additional fragments of the original Chandler/Lebolo/Smith papyri could be found. Those of us interested in the truth business could take an example from his assiduous pursuit of detail, regardless of whether we agree with his ultimate assessment of the papyri, their contents, and their translation.

Brieview: Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People

2005-12-16T15:12:00.000-08:00

Jon Butler, Harvard Univ Press, 1990.

This is a brieview given personal time constraints. I finally made it around to this much-lauded text. Butler writes a controversial but compelling story of the process of making America Christian. He challenges a lot of traditional ideas (the Puritan legacy, Puritan coherence, the persistence of early African spiritual traditions, the existence of the two Great Awakenings as coherent periods, the "great Christian past" of America) and does so in a way that will draw complaints of revision and liberalism, but I think he does so in an intriguing and well-documented way.

Certainly each generation recasts history in its own image, and it's not surprising that a relatively recent work on American Christianity would explore issues of pluralism and diversity, ideas about the conflict between notions of Republicanism and Democracy and various aspects of institutional Christianity. Having said that, I think each generation has something to offer an understanding of the whole human family, and I rather enjoyed his work.

In his descriptions of several American syncretic movements (early Methodists, resurgent African American Christianity, spiritualists, and chez nous, the Saints of the Latter Days) he spends a few pages glancing off Mormon history, largely by reference to Quinn's _Magic_. Within his overall framework of the interactions of lay occultism, magic, astrology, spiritual fatalism, and actual institutional Christianity, I think his picture of the early Mormon church is useful. This approach does open up some parallels with other groups trying to navigate the spiritual complexities of life in a tumultuous (dare I saw terrestrial?) environment, though it is easy to quibble with his characterization of Mormonism as inaccurate or poorly fleshed out.

While the work on Mormonism seemed superficial, the overall arc of his discussion was coherent and intriguing. In a personal, presentist vein, I thought of current attempts to boost global activity rates of 20-30% (I hear 10% but who knows?) within Mormonism. Up until the Christian explosion in the century after the Civil War, christianizing this here country of hooligans and free thinkers was a thankless and only intermittently successful task.

The emblem of a distorted America

2005-12-13T12:52:00.000-08:00

I tried to buy some soap for our soap dispenser today and when I finally found the right shelf I discovered that there were no liquid soaps available without an antimicrobial additive, in this case triclosan. I didn't want the antimicrobial additive, but there was no choice. We have an alcohol handrub for those circumstances where we actually need to sterilize our hands; I just wanted some soap to get grime off.
I remembered an editorial in a CDC journal discussing the antibacterial craze and mentioning what I have now taken as the emblem of America: antimicrobially impregnated plastic children's toys.
I should explain.
First, antimicrobials only work when they're dissolved in water, so an antimicrobial plastic is fully useless; it provides no protection.
Second, antimicrobials express a fear of the natural world, ever lurking to destroy, and they are a false reassurance, as even if we constantly used antimicrobials, we would still be constantly beset by microorganisms.
Third, there is mounting evidence that excessive sanitation may underly a variety of complex immune phenomena, including a condition as familiar and frustrating as asthma. We have spent many millennia with microbes; we are biologically familiar with them in important ways that the fear of microbes has in part interfered with.
Fourth, there is something horribly safe and faddish about the proliferation of antimicrobial products in America. Individual consumers are not addressed--the market dictates what everyone will use.

It's all there: distrust of nature, a capitalism that provides faulty products based on faulty premises in a positively reinforcing response to manipulation of public sentiment, fear of the malignant world outside and the potential of death and decay, and populist misapplication and distortion of science. Can there be a more American product than that?

I'm thinking about asking that an antimicrobial impregnated Big Wheel be added to the current flag. I'll be taking signatures for my petition soon.

Disclaimer intended for whatever organization is currently providing surveillance for ideological purity: this is intended as a loving reproof of the cultural corruption rampant in the nation currently rather than a rejection of my American homeland, which I love dearly and would never betray. My thoughts on this subject are heavily informed by my Christian faith.

Beware antibiotics

2005-12-03T10:31:00.000-08:00

I don't normally use this venue for medical information, but this week there's an early release of some articles on clostridium difficile colitis that are quite sobering (www.nejm.org). This is meant as social commentary rather than medical advice, and though I am a physician this is in no way meant to replace or function as the advice of a medical professional, and this should only serve as secondary information to be discussed with your own physician. Refusing needed antibiotics can be dangerous or even deadly; only you and your doctor can determine whether antibiotics are truly needed in any given circumstance.

With that caveat,

Basically there's a new form of an old bug on the prowl in North America (and we assume the world soon if not already) that's ultra-resistant to antibiotics and in fact gains power from them. In a series of elderly patients in Quebec, 10% of those infected died, despite treatment.

Sobering. I'm hoping someone will publish something in the Enquirer about "Whole community killed by antibiotics" or something like that, something for a reality check. Refusing to prescribe unnecessary antibiotics may be an act of great kindness and compassion on the part of your physician.

Luzhin's looks

2005-12-03T10:22:00.000-08:00

Last night was a slow night at the hospital, so I read Luzhin's Defense for several hours before dawn. We saw the movie a few years ago and remember the earnest Italian actor (the poor guy from Quiz Show, can't remember his name), rail thin, playing the madman/chess genius.

What impresses me is the difference in the physical character of Luzhin. Nabokov paints Luzhin as a man who has lost all contact with the outside world and in the course of his loss, rather than becoming the stereotypically cachectic artist he becomes a corpulent madman. Such different phenotypes of insanity for us. There is one, the classic neurotic or schizophrenic who is thin as a rail (as the actor was): this is the madman we relish. The obvious refusal to eat seems to separate the madman from human experience, as if s/he were an ascetic refusing human pleasures for a higher cause in this case madness.

Then there is the torpid madman, the fleshy, bejoweled slob. His body mirrors his dissolute mind. No control, no energy or spirit from above to shave off those extra pounds in pursuit of higher consciousness. I suspect we feel more revulsion for this madman than for the other.

I interact a great deal with both types during my work as a physician, and I sense that this is true of many of our interactions. To a certain extent (confounded by various aspects of personality and social skills) the morbidly obese mentally ill are if possible less respected than the cachectic ones. Perhaps the cachexia reminds us of cancer patients who elicit almost universal sympathy, while the obese seem less well controlled or less tragic.

I think there's more than just the anorexia-obsession of Hollywood at work in the casting of someone so physically different from the protagonist. Though in a fitful alliance with the postmoderns, I suppose I don't really care, as the point is a fascinating one regardless.

Righteousness of the Self

2005-12-03T10:16:00.000-08:00

Reading P Greven's Protestant Temperament and thinking about self-righteousness. For Puritans and then 18-19th c. American evangelicals Arminianism (the idea that the human will was free and by extension the human could accumulate the necessary righteousness required to enter heaven) had the potential to represent quite a threat. In some writings evangelicals identify self-righteousness with Arminianism, that is a righteousness born of the self.

What fascinates me is the change in the semantic content. Nowadays, we seem to mean by self-righteousness either a righteousness that is self-emphatic as opposed to externally focused ("Those self-righteous conservatives preach Christianity but don't think for a moment about those who suffer"), or we mean someone who uses righteousness or religious identity to the exclusion of others, or we mean someone who looks down on others for failure to measure up to their standard of righteousness or piety.

These are all focused on human communities, whereas the original was focused on God vs. human, the self meant the independent human self as opposed to the personality swallowed up in the munificence of God. It is now possible for an anti-Arminian (eg current "evangelicals" or Charismatics) to be seen as self-righteous even though they are adamantly opposed to the very notion of the self as opposed to the grandeur of God.

Brieview: Living in the Shadow of Death

2005-12-01T11:44:00.000-08:00

Sheila Rothman wrote a reasonable history of the experience of TB, though the book ends up being a few things mixed together. She gives a protracted account of Deborah Fiske's death which feels somewhat Victorian but is still illuminating, and then she talks about sanatoria and the settling of eg Colorado Springs. Fascinating to realize how much of Colorado was settled by consumptives seeking a climatic cure.

Ultimately readable if a little light theoretically. I learned a few things. Fairly quick read.

Negotiating Certainty

2005-11-29T19:43:00.000-08:00

There is a disease called thrombangiitis obliterans, also known by its eponym, Buerger's Disease. It's one of a couple of well-known diseases (a subtype of interstitial lung disease, RBILD, is the other) that are direct, generally reversible complications of smoking tobacco. Buerger's is by far the worst. Slowly digits--fingers, toes--are lost to inflammation in the small arteries. If the patient continues smoking, the next to go are the feet usually, then the legs, and finally, sadly and ultimately, the pelvis and arms.

These are the unlucky few who are forced to deal with the certainty of tobacco's curse. What amazes me about both of them are the number of times I see patients continue to smoke. This isn't the same thing as the patient with emphysema who continues to smoke through the tracheostomy incision in his neck--these patients can actually reverse their disease, often with complete remission as soon as they quit smoking.

But somehow the certainty of watching your limbs fall off is too overwhelming to be correlated with actual behavior change, and they continue to smoke. As if certainty is too much to process, and it has to be actively and stridently ignored. These people are the poster children of our poorly tamed wills, and though they are dramatic I'm never quite sure how different they are from the rest of us except that they are decidedly unlucky.

This type of behavior seems so persistent that I wonder whether it's a trait of human consciousness.

Ecclesial vs. Genealogic Mormons

2005-11-27T14:00:00.000-08:00

This arose in response to a thread at Times and Seasons trying to expand the old dichotomy between Liahona and Iron Rod Mormons.

I think people have given short shrift to liahona and iron rod distinction. Remember that this was meant to be a description of people actively committed to the Gospel. If the schemata were superimposed, liahona would be caffeinated and iron rod would be obediac. The original dichotomy was not meant to address “cultural” Mormons. So the actual contribution of this new schema is that we include as “Mormon” people who are not at core committed to the spiritual basis of the faith. While I think that’s reasonable to do, I don’t know that it’s a huge leap in our understanding of approaches to being Mormon.

I do think the antagonisms are a fascinating idea, but I don’t know how well they hold up. At some level, I think the obediac would like the caffeinated to abjure any claim to spiritual commitment. The problem is that for the “obediac” (or equivalent Mormon archetype) the belief is that the spirit, true spiritual commitment will yield a uniformity of belief, and when someone says “I believe deeply in the Church, and I think George Bush is the anti-Christ,” it’s harder for the obediac to believe that his social beliefs spring directly from his religious faith. the thought of compromise over this topic as a milder form of conflict does not seem to me to be philosophically sound.

Another group not yet carefully considered by either schema is the deeply spiritual group who feel a profound attachment to the faith community of Mormonism, to key aspects of its teachings, to the religious experience of being Mormon, but who have not found adequate evidence to support a “testimony” in, for example, the Book of Mormon. This group, something like Unamuno’s San Miguel, Buen Martyr, are not really “caffeinated.” Their distinction from traditional believers is relevant, as is their distinction from the stereotypical “signaturi” (I know and like many people who work for or publish with Signature and mean no disrespect–I think it’s a useful emblem even if it’s not actually true of the publishing house represented) who are eager to reform their cultural faith tradition but at some important level are not committed at all to the spiritual essence of Mormonism. I think of Marquardt and Metcalf as poster-children of this extreme.

Finally, I think a useful schema will need to include more explicitly the interface between Mormon and non-Mormon society or between dominant and minority society. Posts have talked about it, as did the accompanying paragraph, but perhaps it could be more explicit. The conciliation with secular society (or academic or whatever), the attempt to hammer away at the “kosher” walls that separate some from others is an important impulse within Mormonism, and it’s no accident that “caffeine” as the shibboleth of ultra-kosher Mormonism should come up.

I wonder whether a reasonable spectrum might have something to do with the distinction between family and community of the blessed. Some could see the church as family and have an attachment to Mormonism as instinctive and non-religious as to one’s own cousins and grandparents. It denotes associations without ideology.
On the other hand the community of the blessed is hand-picked and can easily leave out wicked family members. There are tests of membership other than simple genealogy, and the commitment required is much higher. There is also more a sense of a patriarchal system in which God, via priestly messengers, directs the criteria of membership in important and taxing ways, whereas in the family view membership is forever independent of behavior or belief. The “ecclesial” Mormon might then be in favor of excommunication, while the “genealogic” Mormon would be more likely to favor counseling with at most disfellowshipment. An ecclesial Mormon might care more about state restrictions on marriage or reproduction, while the genealogic Mormon might focus more on nourishing ties of any description. an ecclesial Mormon might cherish caffeine/R-movie anathemata as signs of blessedness to be cherished, while the genealogic Mormon might not.

Second Coming as Death of the Peopled Earth

2005-11-06T13:39:00.000-08:00

Our Sunday School lesson was on the Signs of the Times and the Second Coming.
I was reminded of a comment that Philippe Aries made about the way that the early vision of the deathbed was a time of intense spiritual contest, when the soul and fate of the dying hung in the balance. Angels and devils were battling, and the faithful sick had primarily to stay calm and accepting of God's will, but it was considered supremely difficult, a time fraught with much danger. To Aries' eye this model was the individualized version of the Last Judgment and Second Coming.

It's not clear to me that history has followed any particular line in the development and codevelopment of these various approaches. In both, there is the death agony (these splitting rocks and earthquakes and fires and cataclysms all seem to me to be the earth's version of the pain and gasping of a human's death agony), in both there is an attempt to purify out the evil from the organism (whether a human or a society), in both a judgment is pending, and in both there is no longer any time to get things done. It is that sense of mortality, that there will never be enough time, that we cannot know, however much we think we would like to, the moment of our death (or of the earth's death).

For Mormons there are tantalizing comments such as Joseph Smith's belief that the earth will truly die and be resurrected. Hard to get more literal than that.

Theologically, I think this perspective provides some insights otherwise unavailable, and it's possible--though I will admit it is a difficult scientific problem--to believe that some of the anxiety about death that must be sublimated in light of clear teachings about the beauty of the afterlife and the impuisance of death has found its expression in the anxiety about the Signs of the Times.

The Wilful Child

2005-11-05T09:05:00.000-08:00

Was reading in Greven's _Protestant Temperament_ about a cleric who decided to destroy the wilfulness of his child, a fairly common idea in branches of Puritanism. Basically ended up starving his son until his son would come to him and request the simple food he offered. He wrote about his behavior as if it were other than child abuse. In fact, he saw it as analogous to the experience of God with his own children, that it is only when the will has been fully extinguished, swallowed up in the Will of the Father, that true growth can ensue.
Today at gymnastics, my first daughter wouldn't participate in any of the activities, and I thought about all the over-indulged snotty little kids that populate my vision of Northeastern affluence. I of course also think about the drug addicts that I see at the hospital all the time. And I fear for my daughter.
But do I have cause to do so? That's what's not so clear. This fear of wilfulness, which can of course have severely poor outcomes, makes a conformist of me. The kid who still can't seem to hear anyone else's drummer now has children, and he's surprised, even worried that they aren't hearing the drum beat that he can't hear either.

I decided to let her run around and throw Hula hoops over my head. Then I gave her a hug and a kiss.

Calling Good Evil

2005-10-27T15:51:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking recently about fiction and religion. I've also been enjoying thinking through Nabokov, in part triggered to the exploration by Brian Boyd's reanalysis of Pale Fire and associated reinterpretation of Pnin and Lolita. Basically in these books good people (Hazel Shade, Tim Pnin, Dolores) are distorted into hideous or pitiable or laughable objects, and part of what makes Nabokov so masterly is his capacity to do that in a powerful way. In complex ways Hazel Shade is the slickest job, taking this noble soul so eager for love and turning her into an anti-climactic suicide while simultaneously writing a "novel" that is ultimately all about her.

In this case, Nabokov has made good appear evil, and I was the richer for it.

I think about American dirty realism and historical revisionism (to my eye two facets of a similar movement), and I see the contrary impulse, the hunger to make the good appear evil, either through reinterpretation of goals (proselytism, racism, sexism) or by adducing evidence of excessive humanity, foibles and the like. A story about a dog-murdering preacher is so much more compelling than a story about a sweetly pious preacher (a la Mitford) because of the dramatic tension, because of the dangerous presence of good with evil. Ditto Brodie's biography versus prior hagiographic attempts.

I thought about how unpopular such tense artistic choices can be (Brian Evenson sells much less than Mitford; the general anathema of Brodie's biography).

I've also been thinking about how the Great Chain of Being integrates with the Mormon world-vision (http://hobro.blogspot.com/2005/10/great-chain-of-being.html). One version of the chain suggested that the links above humanity (angels and similar personages) brought God closer by spanning some of the vast gap between created and creator with familiar beings. Instead of the awesome chasm there were angels like stepping stones making humans feel a part of God in an important and tangible way.

In modern Mormonism, there is something like this in the clear hierarchy of church government. On a mission the sequence is clear, from Junior Comp through Assistant to the President (the President being a bigger jump), at home, the sequence rises from home teacher to elders quorum president to high councilor to stake presidency to minor GA to 2d 70 to 1st 70 right up to the ruling quorum of the church. Each is valorized by the others; each works as part of a grand whole.

In the Chain of Being, each higher level had to be a higher organism, or there was no progress on the route to God. One way of understanding traditional Mormon hagiography and the ongoing hagiography of living church authorities is in analogy to this chain. If each higher level is peopled by a higher type of person, this organization, in its chain of command, has a chance at making the way back to heaven. In important ways this chain of command mirrors exactly the patriarchal afterlife so simply outlined by Orson Hyde.

In this way of approaching life's greater order, attempts to make higher nodes less sublime threatens the entire system. If angels are only dead men in robes, the chasm separating humans from God is no smaller. If church authorities and founders are either evil or simply human, the same problem can arise.

On a related theme, the Chain of Being arises from the Platonic philosophy of the self-sufficient idea of the Good. It has occurred to me recently that the way many if not most people interact with ideas and constructs is through concrete human interactions. Character traits, ideas about community, the "fruits" of various ideology are experienced through interactions with other human beings. Many if not most people have a hard time negotiating abstract notions or accessing Platonic ideals directly. But if this is the case, people may need human instances of given traits or ideas in order to find them accessible. To engage in the very behavior I'm describing, Joseph Smith (and by extension his heirs at the helm of the church) is our experience of personal revelation and holiness. To remove that, to revise his biography, is to threaten what is for many the instantiation, the incarnation if you will, of revelation and holiness.

I wonder whether this set of themes could possibly underly the rejection of contemporary fiction and revisionist history. Certainly seeing proponents of this view in this light makes them somewhat more comprehensible and perhaps sympathetic (I suspect it is clear that I prefer, in my fiction at least, the complex interplay of Good and Evil), even if they are not ultimately compelling.

Heavenly Romance

2005-10-24T17:35:00.000-07:00

Regarding a thread on AML list talking about the complexities of romantic/spousal attachments in the Mormon afterlife.

It's interesting to see how we recapitulate some of the arguments of our predecessors. The idea of heaven as a lover's garden or as a place of free exchange of romantic partners was percolating through American Christianity around the time of JSJ. Swedenborg had a vision of fairly complex romantic relationships that weren't limited to mortal spouses, and for the Romantics there was a vision of heaven being the attachment of lovers rather than married couples.

My reading of JSJ is that he had a vision of heaven that had a lot less in common with the Romantic view than we'd ever guess. I don't get the sense that the identity of his wife was so important to him, the standard saw about "precious Emma" notwithstanding. When you read what he wrote about celestial family, he spends a lot more time talking about his natal family and his children than he ever did about his wife. Unless my memory is fading (a possibility I admit), Emma doesn't even warrant an entry in the Book of the Law of the Lord. Couples in JSJ's afterlife don't spend a lot of time feeding each other grapes or enjoying gentle love-making. They create offspring.

So I suspect that JSJ's response to the difficult pairings discussed on the list would have been similar to BY's: "get over it."

Which to me is quite upsetting, frankly, as a huge part of my vision of the afterlife is my wife. I love my kids to death and want to be with them always, but that is also true of my wife, and I have very little interest in having that dynamic changed at death, though I suspect we have less power over the afterlife than we think.

So there are a couple of options, it seems to me. (a) this is a living church, and the gentle social cues and the emphasis on monogamy maintained by the current church updates JSJ's original teachings on the topic, (b) it doesn't really matter. I myself am hoping for (a).

PS some of this alienation from spouse that I see in JSJ or BY has an interesting parallel in contemporary alienation. I'm remembering an old friend who said, shortly before leaving his wife, "you can divorce your wife, but you can never divorce your children."

Great Chain of Being

2005-10-17T07:52:00.000-07:00

Posted in response to something at timesandseasons.org

I’ve been reading a fascinating book, Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being, History of an Idea, and this has been my first careful exposure to this idea of a chain of being. Some people believe that the patriarchal order is a reflex of this idea; others feel that the PGP/Abraham multitude of existences is a reflex of it.

The basic idea, which takes a long time to disentangle, is that Plato believed in something called the Good or the Idea of the Good. This entity, certainly non-corporeal, was held to be perfect. Not the perfect instance of the good, but that of which a perfect instance would be the instance.

Because it was perfect (and here the reasoning gets complicated) a) it would never be envious of the existence of something else, and b) it excelled in self-sufficiency to such an extent, that in an imaginative if not entirely logical leap, it took self-sufficiency beyond the lack of dependency to the creation of dependencies upon itself. Thus creation occurred (whether by a demiurge that sounds vaguely like Abraham’s vision of Jehovah/Michael or otherwise depends on the philosopher) almost to prove that God would never envy anything and because, without needing to (this Good by definition could never need anything), the Good naturally created a system that depended on it like the sun shedding its rays on the earth.

People then realized that the world is a complicated place with many hierarchical gradations of existence, with some overlap between the gradations (the favorite was Aristotle’s zoophyte, stuff like coral and seaweed and anemones that seem half plant/half animal). This hierarchy extended below humans (most of the natural world) AND above humans (angels, spirits, inhabitants of other worlds). By the arguments, God’s perfection required that everything be present, that everything that could exist to fill a niche in creation would be because (check this out) for God to have refused to create it would imply that he was envious of its existence.

This system provided something of a theodicy as well. The argument goes that even something that is evil or ugly is created because it is part of the chain of being which would be diminished by its absence. One way to get evil created from the good is to argue that it is necessary in the balance of the created world. One example they used is carnivores—why would God create something that ate another of God’s creations?

This system heated up during the gallileo/Copernicus controversy, when other populated worlds (and indeed the system of celestial bodies) was advanced as scientific fact, supported by the Chain of Being.

Later the system was used to justify dominion of one culture over another—Indians and African Americans were seen to be lower on the Scale of Being, thus logical objects of domination.

It was still present and recognized in the time of Joseph Smith among Protestants. At that point, aside from the complexity of racism, it was used, as far as I’ve been able to tell, to provide people a meaningful reference regarding their place in the world. No matter how small we feel, we are in fact a part of the great chain of being that extends via the angels up to God. Our specific place in creation is intensely meaningful.

That’s what I’ve been able to figure out. As far as the Mormon overtones, I see a couple.

First, the “laws of the universe” (complexly related to the DC 88 intelligence of God) sound an awful lot like Plato’s Idea of the Good. It is those laws that stipulate the course of God’s creative activity, just as they guide the demiurge or the creative impulse in neoplatonism.

Second, and this is NOT a straightforward analogy, each human being in Mormonism has an idea/ideal standing behind them in the upper perfect world. It is the intelligence which has been embodied for mortal experience. Plato had these ideals existing, as far as I can tell, as a species exemplar. On Platonic reasoning, this would probably be an Adam (whose name even just means “man”), of which we are all specific instances (could this be some of what was implied in this “Adam-God” stuff?).

Third, the great chain of being appears to have been altered by JSJ to become a genealogical tree. For neoplatonic/mainstream chain of being, we are related to angels only by token of fitting in a descending hierarchy of perfection. They are not our grandparents, they are our lords. For Joseph Smith, this chain exists (and serves the same emotional need), but the angels are our grandparents as well as being our lords (I’m using lord in a feudal throwback, not LORD, and with this comment I have in mind the idea of different, nested priesthood stewardships described in Joseph Smith’s writings). I’m not saying that JSJ was twisting the great chain of being, I’m just saying that one way to understand the vast network of eternal family that he revealed is as related conceptually to the great chain.

Fourth, JSJ did preach that everything has a spirit, even the earth and trees and animals. Bearing in mind my second point that neoplatonists had in mind a species exemplar rather than a spirit for each, there is some apparent conceptual overlap.

Finally, all those worlds full of other organisms is almost verbatim the same as the astronomical neoplatonist argument that God would not have created an empty Universe because what does that prove? Brigham Young’s apparent speculation that Adam and Eve may have been transferred from another existence could be interpreted in that light (though neither the speculation nor its explanation are required).

Sorry this was so long. Most of the background I got from the Lovejoy book which is a fascinating read. The Mormon stuff is from my own research.

The Seedy Image of the Homeless Stewardess

2005-10-17T07:24:00.000-07:00

I was thinking as I rode a budget airline the other day about the image of the stewardess. I've chosen the obsoleted term because I think it represents best the residual folk understanding of the "flight attendant." I was thinking, as one particularly young and flighty girl wandered the central aisle in her conservative uniform, about how stewardesses are portrayed in media and imagination.
It seems to me that they tend to be represented as objects of sexual fantasy or as promiscuous and free. While it's tempting to see this as simply the sexism of objectifying slender women in uniforms (there is a current that sees nurses in the same light) or of parallels with maids and domestic servants as they move about the cabin distributing drinks and pretzels (and in the old days, packets of cards, vomit bags, airline insignias, etc.), or as a class issue--that poorer women (presumably those who would pursue a job with so little obvious intellectual reward or who can't afford to travel without employee discounts) make themselves available to those wealthy enough to fly, I think that there is perhaps another dimension.

It seems to me that "stewardesses" are transients, vagabonds, gypsies. They personify the ephemeral associations that we make with the earth. Whereas we once might have known a village, its soil, its trees, the twists and turns of its roads, the location of the cemetery and the church in which we were baptized, our identities are strained by our location-lessness. And they epitomize that disruption. Not only might they sleep in a new hotel/tavern every night, they make their journeys separated from the land as their planes hurtle through the atmosphere, as far as reasonably possible from the earth that localizes us.

But family relationships have historically and dramatically been defined with home. Home location has indicated where ancestors are buried, where kin networks are convenient, and they have represented the common ground--to draw attention to an idiom whose history appears to have been ours--that valorized and edified interpersonal relationships. "Stewardesses" are far from this connection with place or people. Each day as they make their way several miles above the surface of the earth, they interact primarily with complete strangers from many other places. On multiple levels they are divorced from standard modes of family creation, and in some sense this anomie of locationlessness speaks to or releases or disregulates, some of the appetites and instincts that are otherwise well grounded in established family relationships.

Disclaimer: I make no representation of the promiscuity of any flight attendant or even the class of flight attendants. I'm attempting to understand the social phenomenon of their image because I think it clarifies some otherwise unnamed tensions.

Flushing Little Mermaid

2005-10-11T18:08:00.000-07:00

Think alligators in the sewage.
My daughter brought her children's book version of the Little Mermaid to me to read tonight.
A prince falls in love with an essentially topless woman who doesn't speak (how convenient for him).
Her only desire is to be his bride.
The fat woman? A HORRIBLE WITCH.
The salvation of the mermaid? The kiss of a rich boy and the approval of her father.
I got embarrassed that I was teaching my daughter to think that way.
If I didn't know the caliber of our drainage pipes (I had to fix our toilets wax seal last winter), I would have chucked the 5X5 inch book into the porcelain font of libations.
Instead I'll settle for the garbage can.

(PS I realize this is all quite PC, but my gosh, at some point you just have to draw the line.)

I don't believe in Southern California

2005-10-08T10:55:00.000-07:00

I saw a notice on the web advertising the possible establishment of a Chair of Mormon Studies at a southern California college. I thought how nice that would be but then remembered that I don't believe in Southern California.

As I chewed on those words, I realized that the double entendre was one pregnant with meaning for my own belief. I of course believe in the existence of Southern California. I see its garbage strewn over the byways of our nation on a daily basis. I have no reason to doubt; I have in fact been gridlocked on the smoggy LA freeway and imbibed the faux culture of Orange County and San Diego in physical possession of my senses. But I don't believe in it in the sense of affirming its existence, of wanting its goals to be realized, of identifying myself with it.

Perhaps the more important aspect of belief is that latter aspect. That's the aspect that depends most on us, on our identity and personhood, and that can be the hardest to maintain.

Of course the implicit question is what it means when we have belief in the latter sense without belief in the former sense. This could apply to our belief in Santa Claus, for instance. For some it characterizes their overall religious belief or institutional affiliation.

Artifice and Nature, Take 1

2005-09-30T14:12:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me as I shredded the nearly homogeneous matter that constitutes a hot dog for my daughter that we have come full circle. Remember the stories about the American Indians who were so frugal that they found a use for every milligram of each carcas they killed? It occurs to me that the hot dog, Sinclair notwithstanding, is our monument to that practice.

Funny to think how often the Amerind culture is held up as a highlight and the hot dog is held up as terrible by the same people. Granted one is mass-produced, but good for them for getting us to eat garbage you wouldn't feed a dog.

My daughters and I love hot dogs.

Religion and the Decline of Magic

2005-09-25T17:42:00.000-07:00

I've finally got around to reading Keith Thomas's (I was going to say magisterial, but then that makes it sound like a master's thesis, which it decidedly isn't, and masterful at least sounds less pretentious--I think magisterial is the opposite of an auteme--the use deprives the speaker of the quality of the word) work on the decline of magic in England with the slow onslaught of the Protestant (and Anglican particularly) Reformation of Catholicism. This work, describing in impressive and stimulating detail, the extent to which Protestant worked to root out the magical/heathen/pagan elements of Catholicism, has clarified for me just how Catholic I like my Mormonism. I don't like the Mormonism of business suits and Weber's work ethic. I like the Mormonism of the temple rite, the Urim and Thummim, the near magical power of the body, the belief that healing power can traverse the lubricating salve of sanctified olive oil.

I wonder, idly I admit, whether there's any fruit to be borne by thinking about Catholic and Anglican/Puritan instances of Mormonism and its culture. Certainly the Protestants have won in America currently, but I sense a bit of Catholicism lurking, even as Jerry Springer and his mind-maggots exploit the tragedy of pederasts in priest's clothing.

Huron death feast

2005-09-22T19:11:00.000-07:00

Found a discussion of Huron death customs in a paper I was reading. Per this report (Seeman, Erik R., Reading Indians' Deathbed Scenes: Ethnohistorical and Representational Approaches. The Journal of American History 88.1 (2001): 80 pars. 22 Sep. 2005 . ), the Huron decedent would dress in his burial robes (it seems to have been primarily a male or patriarchal prerogative, hence the pronoun) and then have his loved ones to a feast at which he gave speeches and said his farewells.

While I'm sure this is a gross oversimplification of a rich rite (pardon the wordplay), I love that image, so different from the one I tend to see as a physician of a cachectic and mostly insensate patient drifting into opium's gentle delirium as the life force escapes in a modular hospital bed.

I think I want to have a death feast when the time comes (not that I'm in any hurry).

Libraries as Cemeteries

2005-09-21T05:40:00.000-07:00

I tracked down a mid eighteenth-century collection of meditations that included the stroll of this English cleric through a country churchyard. As he free associated from the different grave markers, I thought to myself how like a cemetery the library is. The gravemarkers are stamped in leather, but these are the voices of people who have gone before, their bodies now locked in the dark silence of the grave. And the transmission of their words, some modicum of their personality is something not unlike immortality.

So my aphorism from the experience. Libraries are chatty cemeteries with paper tombstones.

Reclaiming Adulthood

2005-09-08T05:16:00.000-07:00

I've complained about this before, but the recent review of Pamela Paul's book reminded me that I'd like my adulthood back.
When I think of adult books or movies, I mean a piece of dense literary criticism or a brooding novel filled with pain and suffering, however redemptive. I don't mean trashy porn. Ditto movies. I think of A Man for All Seasons as an adult film. I don't mean the garbage that slops down the cataract of adolescent depravity.

And what exactly do people mean by saying "mature" about the same kind of garbage? There seems to me to be a distinct lack of maturity vis-a-vis one's peers that motivates the use of pornography.

The more appropriate "adolescent", which I think more accurately reflects the mindset, would be misleading because the last thing we want is to deluge our adolescents with this garbage.

Candidates for the appropriate euphemism so far are "The Dark Side of Civil Liberties ," "trash," "garbage," "vulgar," "philistine."

Just not adult, and not mature. They don't deserve the respect those euphemisms imply.

In fact I'm starting to imagine a change in our language. Conversations: "yeah, the wreck happened near that garbage bookstore on Fifth Street"; Headlines: "Local residents protest location of Trash Entertainment Store"; letters to the editor, "Hey, we think that like we should have the right to whatever Dark Side of Civil Liberties Garbage we want" and so on.

Disclaimer: I'm not saying that all pornography should be illegal, and I'm not claiming aggressive limits to the First Amendment. But whether we allow some forms of pornography, we shouldn't kid ourselves that they in themselves have some value because they are considered civil liberties. The point if we make the argument is that allowing certain types of horrifying garbage in our society, that act, is somehow good, not the actual garbage that's being permitted.

Possible new class of words

2005-08-20T08:47:00.000-07:00

I've been struck for some time by the fact that there are certain words, the use of which somehow indicates the semantic aspect of the word itself, or at least the social dimensions of it. The two words that first come to mind are poseur (french spelling, usually italicized as a foreign reference rather than the more pedestrian calque probably spelled 'poser') and pedant (as opposed to pedantic, which is a reasonably non-pedantic way to refer to a pedant). By incarnating the social dimensions of the words, these words either indicate or perform a status change for the speaker, in a sense like a shibboleth.

I initially thought 'autolect' would be a reasonable shot since idiolect is used by linguists to refer to the actual language spoken by an individual (where dialect is spoken by several individuals), but google reveals that a self-styled musician who proudly proclaims a single named "Lubrication" has already appropriated the name, and I'd hate to impinge on the semantic dynamics of his professional persona.

Autolexicant or autolexoma or autolegomenon or similar clumsy hellenization doesn't really fit the bill either, so I wondered about the fact that there appears to be a transitive or transformative component, in which uttering the word declares or modifies the speaker, a kind of magical reference, not exactly to the self, but to the speaker, in which case 'translect' comes to mind. Of course TransLect is a commercial trademark. I then decide to investigate -eme as an option (lexeme, phoneme, etc.), starting with 'auteme,' which seems fairly sanitary by google standards, or 'transeme,' which has unfortunately been appropriated by the antispam computer scientists in their attempts to emasculate those warriors of the free market (and maggots of the mind), the e-mail direct marketers.

So I'm stuck with auteme at the end of the day, unless someone comes up with a better name. Other examples of the same phenomenon would also be interesting, as would related items, such as, for instance, a synonym for palindrome that was in fact palindromic. Onomatopoiea doesn't really count, though it probably is in some sense connected.

Brieview of Marquardt's Joseph Smith Revelations

2005-08-19T12:17:00.000-07:00

I don't have time to do a thorough review, but I thought it was worth mentioning a few key points.

First, I'm delighted that he did the work necessary to present the manuscript versions of the Joseph Smith revelations. I've found the collection quite helpful in my own research and salute the work required.

Second, several of his correction of text appear idiosyncratic: reward for rereward in a setting where rearward seems more appropriate, fluid for flud where flood seems more appropriate, and a variety of other examples.

Third, it's a little frustrating that manuscript versions of sacred writings and church history are so often polemicized. Why can't we just have the texts without the anger (echoing O. Cowdery's contemporary frustrations with modifications to the revelations, admittedly) about alterations and the church structure that has inherited and canonized these writings? While Vogel's Joseph Smith biography partakes of similar polemics, his five-volume collection of early mormon documents is well-balanced and appropriately annotated. It's a shame that Marquardt didn't follow Vogel's lead in that respect in this book.

Ultimately, I recommend the book for people who need access to original manuscripts of Joseph Smith revelations, but I suspect the causual Mormon reader will find the tone somewhat upsetting, and the casual non-Mormon will have a hard time caring that much about the nitty gritty of Joseph Smith's canonical ouevre.

Insanely Safe

2005-08-15T06:03:00.000-07:00

Another idea I've been toying with in terms of book projects I may never get to. I was reminiscing with a friend, another parent, the other day, and remembering what it was like to grow up even in the 70s. No car seats to speak of, no particular worry about sleeping with your children in the bed or in whatever position they wanted, no concerns about how to wipe their bums when they soiled themselves, no particular worry about how their education was progressing beyond knowing that the teacher was neither on drugs nor propositioning your children.

Now, as parents, we are continually taught, based on epidemiologic data which detail the relative risk but not absolute risk of a variety of conditions (relative risk is by what percent of total risk the risk will drop, while absolute risk is the more useful measure, as it tells you the percent of actual risk reduced. As an example, if making your child wear a hat were proved to decrease the risk of a rare cancer by 80%, most of us would be quite impressed with this relative risk. But if the cancer only happens in one in one million children, then the absolute risk would only decrease by an incredibly small amount (from 1/10,000 to 2/100,000 of a percent), and maybe, at the end of the day, if Susie didn't want to wear her hat, maybe we wouldn't force her to do so), that our children will die unless we are extremely vigilant.

For those of us who are quite conscientious about (and frightened by) the responsibility of parenthood, these reminders have become quite traumatic. We end up as a result, in hopes of preventing some real death and dismemberment, enacting quite a toll on our increasingly cautious children. I have the impression that the next generation, contra Gen X images, will all have some version of OCD, tiptoeing through life with a relative risk-meter sutured into their foreheads. Is that really what we want?

I'm not sure of the answer. There is no doubt about the public health utility of these measures. When you look at populations, people live longer and with fewer injuries if they comply with these parameters. Why not enact policies that reinforce them, overcoming the human tendency to be lazy or indifferent (dare we say fatalism?) thereby ensuring the longevity of a particular society?

I have two concerns. One is that we live our lives not in statistical probabilities but in daily (admittedly sometimes obscure and vacillating) certainties. We do or do not take actions at given times, we do establish relationships with just a handfull of people. We do not (unless we are severely socially deranged) perform social experiments on the people we care about. While we will occasionally have our approaches informed by pop psychology (as almost all attempts to move psychology outside the reductionist setting of the laboratory are prone to be), but even then we will be interacting with a single person, having single encounters. To believe that application of statistical techniques in one's daily life is natural strains credulity.

On a related note, we don't understand statistics in any reasonable way and can't really be expected to. We recognize intuitively that if 1% of unprotected babies will die in automobile accidents (manufactured data), that 99 of 100 will do just fine, and we are sometimes confident that we will be in that group of 99. And frankly, 99 of them will in fact do just fine. The only ones who ultimately are likely to care are the custodians of the society, and the unfortunate parents of the 1.

The problem is that more and more of us are internalizing these risks in an unhealthy way. Rather than just zipping the kid into the car seat, we are becoming increasingly concerned that the world is waiting to destroy us at every turn (the fact that it will actually destroy every one of us at some point isn't entirely relevant here). The 30-second rule for windfall victuals is moving toward a zero-tolerance policy, depriving kids of perfectly tasty, if slightly dirty, tater tots and Vienna sausages. And then, in a paradox that sets the teeth to chattering, the Germans demonstrate that farm kids who are more contaminated with manure and the like are less likely to develop asthma, as if our conscientious in preventing suffering is in turn destroying our children. I have animage of an urban parent dressed in a CDC bio-containment suit rubbing manure over 2 layers of SPF 50 sunblock to a child triply belted into the latest electronic car seat, while the child vaguely wants to just be chewing on carpet remainders.

What's the answer? No real idea. I want both things: I want kids not to grow up with traumatic brain injuries that could easily have been avoided, but I don't want us to suffer through our parenting (and childhood development) racked by present and potential guilt for failing to comply fastidiously with epidemiologic recommendations. I want to make sure that in maintaining life we do not forget to live.

Relics in Mormonism

2005-08-13T10:26:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking more about relics today. The group I'm studying as part of this book project, my own faith group, has a quirky history of relics. The founding prophet used objects perhaps more as talismans, as for example the famous silk handkerchiefs that he used in his ministrations to his malarious coreligionists on the Mississippi. Later church members and leaders dated most of their relics (canes formed from initial coffins of the Smith brothers, a watch, a cloak, some of those very same silk handkerchiefs) from their murdered leader (though there is some strange evidence that they may have preserved in at least one instance the actual bones of deceased Amerindians).

While I'm certain the situation is more complex than this, at first pass this seems to suggest something about the profound significance of touch. For early and contemporary Mormons (as for a variety of faith groups and belief systems), the basis of a divinely sanctioned/supervised interaction is the "laying on of hands," this touching of human skin to human skin, sometimes mediated through a drop of sanctified olive oil. These relics I've mentioned are also about touch--how people must have wondered at the smooth silk across their foreheads as their charismatic prophet spoke words of reassurance and testified to divine attention to their corporeal plight.

Smith appears to have been, among other things, fascinated, even compelled by, physical touch, and I've been pleased with this rediscovery (on my part) of a rich legacy of physical contact in my faith tradition, perhaps maintained by certain aspects of the temple cultus as well.

I'd say something about the biomedical undergirding of tactile sense or of the apparently documented need for human touch (as in the neurocognitive development of abandoned babies, for example), but I'm getting a little tired of the omnipresence of folk science and folk applications of science. I have enough religion and religious culture in my life without also engrafting popular science.

Greet each other with a holy kiss, indeed.

Where America's Soul Goes To Die

2005-08-11T07:33:00.000-07:00

I read about a protest from ranchers whose irrigation water was threatened by the expansion of Las Vegas, which has outstripped its local water supply and is currently attempting to create a water pipeline to supply its ever-growing needs.

I still remember the patient with a life-threatening health problem that I had to coax back into his hospital bed--he had tickets to Vegas, and he wasn't going to miss that trip for anything, even longer life. I think, with a carefully straightened face, that I persuaded him that if he died he wouldn't be able to go to Vegas anymore at all. He finally acquiesced.

I have been, once or twice, and I can't tell which is more revolting to me: the frank vice--drugs, prostitution, gambling--or the more moderate philistinism--casinos built as miniature replicas of world artifacts, large quantities of horrible food and drink offered to stupefy visitors into staying and gambling, the entire illusion of neon life in the middle of uninhabitable desert.

How I wish that who goes to Vegas would stay in Vegas and never return. Perhaps then it could implode under its own weight like a supernova that has become too massive. I wish there were a way to simply forbid any more water to that section of desert which appears to have become a nauseating mirage of an oasis. When you reach it, instead of finding only shimmering sand and physicial death, you find neon trees and ethanol instead of water, and then your soul begins to die.

Declining Excellence

2005-08-11T07:15:00.000-07:00

Considering working on a memoir about our excellence-permeated culture, about the sacrifices that we are willing to make (at least in the Blue States; I can't speak for Red States, though I have my suspicion that in a more philistine way there is the same surge toward excellence--plasma television and mini-vans with automatic pilot rather than prestigious publications or academic posts) for success and excellence. Spending the last fifteen years in Cambridge, I've been privy to these machinations on all sorts of levels. Haven't worked out many details, yet, but I thought that was a catchy title and the whole topic was worth considering.

This of course speaks to my current research interest: genealogical interactions, and early Mormon understandings of the connections between the living and the dead, as well as to questions about the structure of the traditional family. Specifically, there are two ends of a broad spectrum, the one is complete devotion to parenting the next generation, the self-sacrifice of one's own excellence in exchange for a devoted and healthy progeny (think of the Italian Catholic matriarchs with fifteen children each). The other end is complete self-absorption (think Bill Clinton--I think he was a great president and would vote for him if he ran again, but his personal life is a shambles, and I doubt much that his young Chelsea and her offspring will amount to anything; as much as I believe George Bush is a horrible president, it's not clear to me that he has his eye on excellence in the same sense that others do. I think he remains quietly as surprised that he's elected as we are).

In traditional (ie neo-Victorian) American family structures (as in many other family systems), those two ends of the spectrum were divided along sex/gender lines: the woman ensured genealogical continuity, while the man attempted to garner success/excellence, some indication that his particular node on the genealogical tree was particularly important/distinctive/fruitful.

It's not clear to me that either extreme is particularly fruitful, nor is it clear to me that the division along gender lines is correct. I have found myself increasingly stretched by this tension as it is invested into each individual life, and increasingly I have wanted to integrate into the family tree more completely, to give myself over to my daughters and my wife, to building their lives into rich and compelling entities. And still there is that nagging sense that my prestigious education ought to count for something "more" than that, that in some sense I am not being responsible to my commitments to the greater human family. Surely with my set of academic skills I could make important contributions in basic science or public policy, the little voice says.

Introduction

2005-02-06T14:39:00.000-08:00

This will be the initial foray into blogging. Primarily intended for friends and focusing on interests.