The Abraham Story

[Oh look, a new blog! The following are some thoughts, old and new, I've had on the Abraham story. I imagine that this will be either the outlines or one small part of an eventual paper. As it is, it doesn't have the conceptual flow that I want, but, for the blog medium, it will do.]

Kierkegaard brings us to the foundation of faith. If one has any concern for the implications of our leaps of faith, of our affirming particular proposition (religious or otherwise) in the face of ethical/rational norms, one need not go further than what Kierkegaard has so vividly displayed for us. Others have similarly furrowed their brow and pleaded with their God for understanding when it comes to the commandment thrust upon Abraham - the commandment to sacrifice "thy" son. But what Kierkegaard manifests for us puts a different sort of weight on such a story. For it is not just that we must sacrifice our offspring if God decides; moreover, Kierkegaard tells us that it would be the right thing to do.

Using Kierkegaard’s terminology, this means that the theological trumps the ethical – that God can choose at any point to overthrow any ethical norm and make what is right change. So, the Abraham story, in simple – and, in all reality, extremely brief - fashion, establishes the necessary divide between what is ethical and what is commanded by God (Sidenote: Here is where faith enters the picture; for faith is not where one ends up, it is where one begins).

Now let’s look at a more contemporary (and less erudite) source for a nuanced take on the Abraham story: the Hollywood movie “Year One”. Jack Black and Michael Cera are the co-protagonists in the film and at one point in their journey come across Abraham raising the knife over his son Isaac (they meet a variety of characters, such that it is obvious chronological consistency is not exactly a goal of the film). Here is the non-verbatum exchange [I’m making a educated guess that Black intensionally means murder when using the word ‘kill’] :

Black: “hey! What are you doing?!?!”
Abraham: “I’m…. uh, we’re playing a game. Its called cutty cutty, burny burny.”
Black: “This doesn’t look like much of a game. You were going to kill him!”
Abraham: “No I wasn’t! I was going to sacrifice him. There’s a difference.”
Black: “Not to him there isn’t.”

What Year One beautifully exemplifies in its telling of the Abraham story (to spite its weak humor in this scene) is what a change in perspective can illuminate for us. It is hard enough to put ourselves in the shoes of Abraham (and agree to sacrifice our son), and it is another thing to be Isaac, but it is altogether another story to be Jack Black's character, who represents the public. In other words, what do “we” do when someone else is murdering their son? This is why Black says that from his own perspective, the distinction Abraham makes (explicit in the movie, but implicit in the biblical version) between killing and sacrificing doesn’t existing. Either way, Isaac is going to die at the conscious hand of his father and we should starting thinking about how we the public should respond to such an event.

Kierkegaard focuses the energy of his book on this idea. For him, it is a question of whether something commanded by god can go against something as established as “don’t murder” and still be right. A quick defense would be to say what Abraham does in the movie: “I’m not murdering him, I’m sacrificing him.” In other words, make the ethically weighted act, a religious act. And this is precisely what is at stake. Can what is an act of murder for the public, be a right and indeed holy act when I carry it out, so long as god commands it?

The former option, concerning the public, simply says that not just anyone can go out and kill another person – we call that murder and incriminate that person. But the latter option, concerns only the (or an) individual, who presumably was told by god to kill. So at what point do we or can we accept as a justified/legitimate reason the exclamation that “god told me to?” In other words, when do we, as a public, upon seeing some guy kill his son, say that it was the right thing to do? Is it right if he says god told him to? I think this is a perfectly legitimate weight to attribute to the Abraham story. So here is where we should invoke the perspective change.

So often, we nobly thrust ourselves into the Abraham story, as Abraham! This is what Paul asks us to do later on: look to the father of faith. Indeed, we want to be the protagonist - we want the fate of our community on our shoulders - we want our faith to bear out the most austere of consequences! (and psychoanalysts would say: we want to be the father). But what Kierkegaard wants us to do (which Year One illustrates), is to put yourself into the 2nd person perspective, the ‘we’. Don’t be Abraham, don’t be Isaac (who really never thought anything through all this) but be Jack Black. What do “you” do when you are on the outside of this story? What do you do when this story isn’t your godly story?

My two cents on this whole thing are, well, worth about two cents. My only thought is that too often people invoke the Abraham story in their own sacrificial way, in the sense of slaughtering something, not in the sense of something selfless. In fact, it is exactly opposite of selfless; it is entirely selfish! It puts “you” in the center of the story. “You” are the one whose decision will change the fate of the world! But when we are selfless and let someone else be the protagonist, the story is an altogether different one. There is a phrase that I’ll invoke here: violent narrative. A violent narrative is one that overlooks all the “others” of the story and focuses only on the decisions of the protagonist (whether it’s one person or a community). It is violent because, for the sake of the story (and usually the image of the main character(s), the narrative marginalizes and completely overlooks everyone else in the story and how the consequences bear out for them. I worry that this happens too often when the Abraham story is retold.

Royal Weddings

Since my news channels have been inundated with Britain royal family wedding coverage, and haven't been able to help coming up with various one-liners making fun of it as well as general points about the frenzy, I’ve decided to make a running list of them in a blog.

Some Jokes
- a red tuxedo is pretty tacky for a wedding
- how can you feel good about your purpose in life if you're a news reporter, stationed in london, discussing the rumors of the possibilities of a honeymoon for a couple and how they might have been transported there.
- William is such a man that he changed her first name too.
- Sucks to be Kate’s sister… (but then again, some other rich white guy will probably want the fame of marrying her, so she’ll be ok)
- The only way 2 billion people watched this was if china forced all of its citizens to watch.

And the finale-
- Apparently, they could be going to Australia, Africa, or a private Caribbean island for the honeymoon... Ironically, 150 years ago, all three of those places would have been "private islands" for the British...

Some Thoughts
- We have a show called (and a pervasive phenomenon of) “bridezillas” because so many women watch royal weddings.
- The idea that “every wedding is a royal wedding” is simply false. I actually am sympathetic to the idea that these ideal (or paradigmatic) weddings provide a way to make our own non-ideal weddings meaningful, but this wedding was not meant to idealize every wedding. Obviously, you cut out all non-protestant weddings, then all non-Christian religious weddings, then all non-religious weddings. I would even go further and say that all non-white, non-Britain weddings shouldn’t treat this as the ideal wedding either. They have the pageantry they do due to a couple centuries of colonization. And if you want that wedding as your ideal wedding, then you should take note that all of that history is written in to many of the images, rituals, and ideals constituting that whole day.

Feel free to add more jokes or thoughts.

Technology and Humanness

Technology intends to provide a more agreeable means to some end we desire. Whether it is the steam-engine, the spoon, an anti-biotic, or the iphone, I take the definition stated above to capture the general idea of what we describe as technological.

In what follows I will begin by discussing the nature of technology and some of the problems concealed within it. Then I will discuss our relation to efficiency and the erasure of our humanity, which I take to be our main concern when it comes to the technological realm. Lastly, I discuss what technology means for “choice.” Throughout this essay, I will use either personal experience or t.v. commercials to help support these perhaps abstract points. I’d love to hear feedback on this; its something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, and, after reflection, is something I’ve subconsciously been concerned with for a while now.

Technology’s goal (our goal in producing it) does not involves its own existence. When a technology is nascent, its existence is painfully obvious. The first computers were bulky, taking up entire rooms. Then, with the advent of the personal computer, they only took up half the surface-space of a typical office desk. Now, they can be hidden in our pocket. So what is created in light of a desire for some end is then discarded and replaced by something better, something less ugly, less in the way. What this shows is the obvious fact that we want the end-product, not the device itself. We want to improve our communication, not have a cumbersome phone on our person for the sake of the item.

There is an Xbox Konnect commercial that simply states: “You are the controller”. This shows that the game consol is literally destroying itself. It is also interesting that our computers, tv’s, phones, computers and gaming consols are all becoming the same thing. A corollary is that ‘technology,’ whatever it is, is not the pieces of technology, nor the aggregate of all the pieces across time; rather, it is a particular human method of achieving ends.

While technology has solved many issues, it almost never is the case that some invention does not bring other undesired aspects along with it. As a result, we have new issues, which require new means of being dealt with. An easy example for this is cords. Our devices first needed cords to stay charged and be connected. But cords are ugly and cumbersome. So now we have battery-based, wireless everything. Cordless charging now exists for cell phones and cordless power for our wall-mounted, flatscreen t.v.s is only a few years out.

There is a Microsoft commercial advertising a “simplified” touch-screen phone that won’t bog you down when trying to find a contact, phone number, or app. In an information age, we want ALL the information; thus, technology did what we asked of it and we ended up with phones/internet devices with conceivably thousands of apps (the Droid slogan is: When there’s no limit to what Droid gets, there’s no limit to what Droid does). The perceived problem is that we now don’t know what to do with all this information and all those apps! We have a new hurdle, so we invent a new device. But what is significant is that Windows suggests to us that the only way out is to buy their phone, which only uses a few, big (easy-to-press) buttons. We end up feeling like we “need” to buy more and more stuff to take care of these new problems technology always seems to bring with it, even if the new devices had little to do with the initial desired end (technology and consumerism are symbiotic to say the least). What is worth noting is that there is always a residue. A new device does not simply resolve some problem, but also exists in its own right, creating some new sort of relation. And given enough time, this technological residue clings so tightly, we think it is a part of us, a part of our being human.

A quite serious consequence which emanates from this technological residue is that it is not too difficult to prefer the technological realm to the reality. For instance, there is a Vizio t.v. commercial that has a man choosing the t.v. version of Beyonce over the real Beyonce right in front of him. Or take note of the Microsoft commercial where a woman photoshops her family portrait so that it can be “presentable,” which presumes that how her family actually looks is something to be hidden or done away with. While these are meant to be jokes, there are many instances like this that aren’t so ridiculous, nor so laughable. For instance, think about the number of people who would rather talk on-line than in person, or the person who would rather masterbate to pornography than have any sort of intimate relation with a fellow human being. What’s worse, in some cases, the person’s mind is so altered by the cyber-sex that even when they do have human contact, it isn’t enjoyable (or they can’t even do it) because they’d much prefer to do it alone, illuminated by the pornography whose reality is in their control. Technology’s residue, in this instance, turns our sexuality into something we can’t enjoy without it.

Per my definition of technology, efficiency is built in to what technology essentially is. If technology is the creation of a means to an end we can’t readily achieve on our own, then technology is our vehicle of efficiency (or method as stated earlier).

The most striking commercial that openly displays what technology implies for us is a Droid phone commercial. In the commercial, a businessman is at a meeting, seated at a conference table surrounded by a host of fellow-business-types. While a presentation is being given at the head of the table, the man is texting on his Droid phone. As he types, his fingers move at an increasing speed. Slowly, starting with his fingertips, which are rapidly tapping at the phone screen, his arms turn into what appears to be a machine-like system of metal and joints. The voice for the commercial, in a deep, assertive tone, states that, with Droid, you too can become a “model of efficiency”.

Notice what happens: the human becomes replaced. While the Droid doesn’t actually turn your arms into machine pistons, firing away as you text, the implication is very real. Prior to the conceivable reality of having our physical bodies become machines (which isn’t that unrealistic), we have a very near reality where our human-ness is destroyed; instead of a machine displacing our body, it is efficiency which displaces our humanity.

When thinking about the Droid commercial, notice the statement the voiceover pronounces as a selling-point: “a model of efficiency.” It is an assumption of the commercial that we would choose to give up our hands (not necessarily a metaphor here) in order to text more quickly. While we achieve efficiency, we revoke our humanity. Is it bad that we want to text more quickly? Not necessarily. Is it problematic when, slowly, we find ourselves more often than not, detached from our body, removed from our daily situations that help constitute our human-ness? Yes. One point I have not mentioned is that in this board meeting, he is obviously not paying attention, which is of course the purpose for his presence at the meeting in the first place. But what he chooses (and what so many of us already choose) is to digitally transport his person elsewhere. We disengage from our surroundings; we transport ourselves elsewhere. But that elsewhere isn’t quite a ‘here’ (another example of the residue). Thus, we are no longer here nor are we quite there. And through this process, we no longer can find our place (our being) in the world.

Another example of our humanness being erased is found in an Xfinity commercial which, in promotion of their On Demand catalogue of shows and movies, portrays their t.v.-viewers as becoming 2-d screens or cut-outs of the shows they’re watching. The people are erased by their shows; they “become” the endless shows they’re watching.

Keeping in mind the 2nd definition of technology, e.g. that it is a vehicle of efficiency, I continue with the theme of ‘efficiency’ and focus on the resulting problems of choice and decision (or lack thereof). Almost comically, there is now an app for Robitussen that helps you pick the right medicine for whatever ails you… because Robitussen now has so many medicines tailored to individual symptoms that you simply couldn’t know which one to pick on your own (this also relates to the “only technology can save us from technology” idea). This hopefully brings to the surface an issue that pervades our world today.

If part of getting what we want is being able to find the thing that best fits our desire, then part of technology’s task is to provide us with the most options (internet shopping is a more than sufficient example). But at some point, our world becomes saturated with choices, both in the number of possible options constantly being presented to us and in our incessant decision-making acts those options require of us. What this means in our present age then, is that our choices are everywhere. Choice used to be a privilege, or a moment of joy. Imagine the excitement when a person could first choose between his thousandth coconut and fresh fish, which he could acquire due to his invention of a spear. Fast-forward to now, and most restaurants have menus so big they cover an entire table if each person has one.

We have gotten to the point now that at almost every moment, we have a choice to make. DirecTV boasts of over 6,000 shows and movies. Rhapsody has a commercial promoting a 60-day trial use of their vast, online song collection. They point out that, if you use their product, your whole day can have a soundtrack and each moment is filled with “infinite possibilities.” Everything has become available to us. But, as technology progresses, all choices become equal in value. The ‘cons’ kind of disappear and all we see are ‘pros’. Thus, not only are we bombarded with choices, but, piled on top of them, we also have the weight of making the right choice (if I had all the options in front of me, why didn’t I pick the right one!?!?!). This leads to a disabling effect. We see here that technology no longer gets us to our end more efficiently; to the contrary, it turns our end back in on itself and blocks our access to what we really wanted in the beginning.

We end up not with an acquisition of our end, but with efficiency working only for efficiency’s sake. As an example, I once spent 30 minutes in a video store! I spent a third of the length of the movie I eventually watched, just trying to pick the movie itself! Suddenly, my goal of watching a movie becomes an obsession with picking one. What we are left with is a deep uncertainty about our choice. And when our life is filled with choice after choice, we quickly find ourselves uncertain a lot of the time. And uncertain people are anxious, full of self-doubt, and lack contentment.

What began as a desire for some end, becomes an obsession with achieving our ends more quickly. Our logic: Ok, I can get what I want, now how can I get it in the best way? But notice this conflates the end with the means; we no longer focus on the end, but on the process by which we get there. Part of our end becomes the means. Soon enough, our obsession overcomes us, and we lose our goals (not to mention ourselves) in the process. This really hits home for me. I have noticed that I’ll spend so much time planning and weighing options, that I end up wasting more time than if I just went with a plan of action and worked it out as I went along. The “model of efficiency” becomes nothing more than that; it consumes the human, just like the Droid commercial depicts it. Somewhere between having a goal and working it out, we destroy our ability to get there. Consequently, our life becomes filled with either the achievement of ends that quickly become obsolete and thus meaningless, or with a series of goals that we never reach, because we’re too “busy” figuring out how to get to them. Our human-ness is not enhanced, but replaced by this “model of efficiency”.

What I find most shocking is that the aspects of technology I find so problematic turn out to be the explicit selling-points for the various devices.

60 some years ago, Heidegger had his own issues with technology, some of which I’ve most likely restated above. The most jaw-dropping part of his work on the subject, in my opinion, is that he PREDICTED the invention of “stand-by” flying… No joke. Over 60 years ago, he pointed out that, in a world of technology, the technology will eventually lose its tool-ness for us, and the relationship of human and tool is lost. In his words, “[e]verywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering.” No longer are the planes existing for us to get from city to city, but now, we will fly “stand-by” and wait for when a plane next flies… all in the name of efficiency. What a brilliant, sobering prognostication.

What should we do? Good question. Heidegger suggests we focus on what Hubert Dreyfus phrases as "the saving power of insignificant things". I think this isn’t far off. Don’t treat your walk in the park as a time to make a phone call you’ve been meaning to make. Don’t use your commute as a good time to eat breakfast. Don’t read that next book just to say you’ve read it.

Life without weekends

Imagine life without weekends. Not a life where one worked 7 days a week, but where there was no identifiable distinctions between what you did on weekends and what you did during the week.

As it is, our lives are framed into 7 day segments – specifically due to the business/work week. As a result, the “main” part of our weeks are the weekdays, with the minor portion of our weeks being the week-ends. Because we spend the main part of our weeks working, we usually spend the minor part of our weeks recuperating or doing small tasks that we had put off during the energy-exhausting weekdays. Actually, colloquially, the term ‘weekdays’ can be and typically is replaced by the word ‘week’. For instance, I can say “I go to school during the week” and no one (at least in America) will take me to mean that I attend school all 7 days of the week. We turned what was once a 7-day week – it technically is still 7 days in length - into a 5-day (business) week, which contrasts the week-end.

Thus we have a week and a week-end, with the technical meaning of ‘week’ coming to only be used in reference to larger categories of time such as months and years. We still say there are 4 weeks in a month and 52 weeks in a year, but we do not (in most cases) take ourselves to mean that there are only 20 business days in a month.

Obviously, business/job realities are not the only things structuring our frames of time. Church and sporting events have found themselves to become defining aspects of our weekends. Just imagine a Friday night without high school football or basketball, or a Sunday without the NFL, or a Sunday morning without droves of cars heading for their respective sanctuaries. Just as our jobs define our weeks, so too do our expectations of weekend activities. Of course, I would not be unwarranted in positing that most weekend activities have found the sacred week-end days they have due to the Monday through Friday business-week.

What can be problematic about such a framed understanding of one’s time on earth is the fact that it allows these partitions in time to be boundaries, things to be endured or overcome. How often have you heard someone (including yourself) desperately assert that “if I just get through this week, I’ll be in the clear”? What results though, is that many of our weeks become the object of such outlooks. In fact, for those who do not particularly enjoy their job or classes, almost every set of 5 week-days become this. And not only is the main part of the 7-day week something to be endured, but that also means that your weekend becomes two days to do nothing. If you spend 5 of 7 days “surviving”, you aren’t going to want to spend the other 2 days of your life doing a whole lot. Thus, the 2 days between your 5-day weeks become determined themselves, become a time to decompress, and to prepare for the upcoming week. Thus we find ourselves spending 5 days of our lives doing something we (often) would rather not be doing, and the 2 “free” days of our lives determined, or limited, by those 5 days. So after a year of "getting through" this week and "getting through" that week, you realize you have indeed "survived" those weeks, but at the same time, you also wonder what happened to your year.

So what would life look like without this 5-day/2-day structure? What would our experience of life be if we did not segment them into 7-day spans? Sure the sun and moon would still rise and fall on the horizons, but those sunrises wouldn’t have the significance, positive or negative, that they have for us now. Without weekends, the days can no longer be distinguished as either a week-day or a weekend-day. Everyday becomes the same day. It would be much more difficult to have this structured view of time where days or weeks become things-to-be-gotten-through. So while the days lose their distinction and significance, suddenly, our human activity takes on its own significance. It now becomes our choice as to what structures our life.

What’s more, if there is no weekend, then there are no 7-day weeks, and that means the calendar year now becomes a foreign organizational system to us too. Days are still days, defined by the rotation of the earth and years are still years defined by the orbiting around the sun, but the significance of how we spend those indistinguishable moments is up to us.

I’m not sure whether such a life is possible these days, and I’m not even sure whether such a way of living is any better than the one we currently have. But I wouldn’t mind trying it some time.

Rhetoric in Real Life: Sarah Palin and the Bush Tax Cuts

I believe I've hit on this before, but if a particular piece of legislation is scheduled to end, then it is not permanent. Further, if that particular piece of legislation was a non-permanent reduction of a certain number, then, when that legislation ends, the reduction will cease to be in effect and thus, the "original" number will be reinstated, not established. So, not creating new legislation that would maintain the current reduction would not seem to be an increase or "hike". According to her tweet on the eve of the congressional debate, Sarah Palin thinks differently. What is of notice is that she initially, using a non-loaded adjective, refers to the issue as the "tax changes". I gather from this that she views it as only her opinion, of which she entreaties her readers to agree with, that they are "hikes".

Sidenote: who is she tweeting to? I don't think the public has a say in the debate that is taking place this morning, as it is up to our elected officials to decide. So do our representatives read the tweets of ex-governors who quit in the middle of their term to professionally campaign, give speeches across the nation (including one at a private Christian primary school in Pennsylvania?), "write" two books, go on national book tours for both of those books, be a remunerated guest on Fox News, and have his or her family star in an 8-episode reality cable-tv show?

McCain

On Meet the Press two Sundays ago, they played a clip from 2004 where Senator John McCain is saying the exact same thing, in regard to the Bush Tax Cuts, as Obama is saying now (viz. to not extend the tax cuts for the top 5% or so). McCain defends his own discord by saying that those were different economic times than now and that we shouldn't raise the taxes on anyone when in a recession.

What he meant to say is that him saying what he said in 2004 helped him out politically, and that what he says now, which is in opposition to his 2004 view, helps him out politically (because it is against Obama). Take a look at Stewart's onslaught of McCain flip-flops here. I can't seem to find it, but Stewart also has a shocking clip where McCain mentions that "the system is broken" and "Washington needs changed" about 15 times over the course of 1992-2010. It's sickening really; A politician can spout the same empty phrase over and over and continue to get reelected. McCain is more concerned with reelection than having his stay in Washington, however lengthy it is, be valuable to the American people. If the system does need fixed, perhaps we should have a new senator from AZ. in office...

Race in Rhetoric: Body-scans and Race

In regards to an alternative to the much talked about body-scans that he so opposes, Steve Doocy says “I like the idea of profiling”.

Shortly thereafter, he says: “I’ve read some websites” that have said that when 3 year olds and nuns get patted down, the terrorists have won because our 4th amendment rights have been taken away (sidenote: this is exactly what I’m talking about when I say that today, facts only require the mere allusion to “some” speculation). But who is the “we” (whose rights are being taken away) in this statement? If he wants profiling, then he wants particular ethnic groups searched (read: “profiled”), and of course, their 4th amendment rights don’t matter in this. The rights that matter are the rights of white people.

On the same subject, Ann Coulter is in favor of checking “foreign” people, because all terrorists have been foreign. She is just as outraged as Doocy that her whiteness is not being enough to prove that she’s a safe person. (She is also the women who, within the past year, said that Christians are "perfected-Jews")

In the world of the Bush-signed Patriot Act, why wouldn’t they welcome such an invasion of privacy? Oh right, because its “our” freedom, not “their” freedom. As if that points out any thing but English-speaking, white-skinned people. Now if we can just get rid of a few unwelcomed, pesky ethnic groups that fit that criteria, this free land of ours will finally be pure… [← sarcasm!]

I understand that body-scans aren’t the best option, but if we’re so paranoid about our planes being blown up, measures must be taken. And if that means my body is seen for a few seconds, I’ll take that. I’ll take that over limiting the freedom of AMERICANS, who happen to have skin of a different color.