DID SCALIA DIE BECAUSE OF DEVOTION TO HIS PRINT NICHE?

“Religion Dispatches” is one of the subscription websites that sends out daily messages about what it considers to be religion, mostly the machinery of institutions, the money, the big shots, the controversies and scandals, the dogma, the cattiness, and the whole tangle of worldliness.  At last comes an article that is about my point of view, except that they call it “affect theory” and I call it something more like “deep metaphor.”  You could call it the primal base of religion:  convictions so deep they are invisible.

http://religiondispatches.org/in-the-beginning-was-not-the-word-why-belief-in-the-primacy-of-language-leads-to-a-misunderstanding-of-richard-dawkins-islamophobia-and-politics/?utm_source=Religion+Dispatches+Newsletter&utm_campaign=cb56e5b0d4-RD_Daily_Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_742d86f519-cb56e5b0d4-42405913”

Above is the link to “In the Beginning was not the Word:  Why Belief in the Primacy of Language Leads to a Misunderstanding of Richard Dawkins, Islamophobia, and Politics”  by Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson.

The two authors interviewed Donovan O. Schaefer, who proposes “affect theory.”  I picked out some sentences from Schaefer’s responses that I think are vitally important.

“Somewhere in the history of Western thought in particular, we ended up with this model of subjects as primarily linguistic thinking beings. There’s this notion that the first thing that happens leading to an action is a word.”

“I think that there’s a very strong line of continuity between that notion of sovereignty as coming through language to where we are now, where we see language as fundamentally what power is.”

“Many people think of religion as a set of propositional beliefs that can be written down in a book.”

Dawkins and an ammonite fossil

“You see it right away in someone like Richard Dawkins. He sees God as a hypothesis. He sees it as a propositional statement that is reducible to a set of beliefs. But I think most people don’t really encounter religion in that way. They encounter it as affects moving through them.”

“They’re talking about religion as if it’s a package of beliefs. And talking about science as if it’s exclusively about truth, when it’s actually about the production of knowledge in process.  Human beings experience their worlds very differently. I’m very interested in the phenomenon of disagreement. . .  We can experience the same information in completely different ways.”

A now-jailed twitter troll who threatened rape.

“I think hatred is also something that we need to see as viscerally exciting for all of us, that’s something that we’re always susceptible to, always going to be tempted by.”

To restate this from a slightly different angle, people who love to argue about atheism are using a dogmatic statement about something that they rationally know cannot be true literally, unless only in terms of metaphor, because they KNOW somewhere in themselves that then the argument can’t end.  There is no possible proof. The two sides inhabit different realms.  But this is an advantage. 

People like the argument, not the beliefs in question.  Someone on Aeon (another website that likes to think about “religion” but always innocently discusses it in terms of the Anglican church) asked whether Dawkins and his atheist friends had damaged religion.  My answer was that I doubted the Buddhists even noticed.  The proposition is like saying that since cats have socks and play with yarn, they knit their own socks.  

Cat with white socks, probably athletic

The hatred thing is part of the hominin package we carry around in our bodies, hard-wired responses that we have to work to keep ourselves from swinging from trees, tearing the throats out of rivals, and fucking against their will pretty ladies or gents just because.  The impulses are still there, plenty strong and scary, so no wonder we’d rather pretend that words are the only things that matter, esp. written words and esp. written words given holy patriotic status.  

Yesterday some were recommending a short YouTube video of President Obama’s press conference, demonstrating the calm temperament and generous views of an ideal president.  The appended comments were insane: crazy, obscene, uninformed epithets one would hear in a riot or a bar.  Paleolithic war cries.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDmIdhcQ4Ew&sns=tw  (Some comments may be removed by now, which is an advantage of fungible print.)

Paleolithic rage.

These contrasting styles are constructed “niches”, one based on the ultimate rational word-based manner of thinking that is characteristic of, say, the University of Chicago Law School, and the other based on curse-and-puke culture as modeled in the pop media.  Admittedly, the first is admired and given governing primacy in this country, where we live by the Book, whether it is the town code book or the Bible or the Constitution of the USA.  The second Trumpian attitude is not taken seriously by those people, but in fact it controls their election to office.  We are startled.

An intemperate gesture?

I do take the intemperate often-emotion-drunk constituency seriously as a force, but words can have their dark side. I want to mark what giving rational word-based primacy does in terms of creating a niche, using Scalia as an example.  Previously, I said there should be an autopsy to eliminate the sort of ambiguity that continues about the deaths of prominent people.  Autopsy, a legal document, is being denied on grounds that he was already so sick (health too fragile to risk an operation on his shoulder) that his sudden death was no surprise, a given.  He had been to his doctor twice in the preceding week, not feeling well, and at the resort he was too “tired” to hunt.  One wonders what opiates he was taking for his shoulder pain.  And why he didn't retire gracefully much earlier. 

He died leaving the court with a huge pile of work where he was the crucial figure in the balance between liberal and conservative. (Meaning in his case the radical — root-based — conviction that the Constitution meant only what it meant to the men in the 18th century who composed it: “originalism,”)  By default, this means liberals, the alternative, are people (both men and women) responding to contemporary issues, but short of amending the words of the original document.  These are issues of print-based thinking, which holds things frozen.  For Scalia to retire would have meant political consequences, but they would have been far more orderly than the emergency reactions caused by his death.

He occupied the social niche of the CEO, intimidating and patronizing, but reliable for the purposes of business as usual, meaning profit-making.  “House of Cards,” not “Game of Thrones.”  For years we’ve known what this will do to a person’s health.  When I rode the elevator with him thirty years ago, his face was always red and damp, his repartee also choleric but masked by joking.  It seemed “normal.”  But it is not a temperament we associate with Supreme Court justices.  We were all children to him and he protected us — on his terms, which were in writing.  His clerks confirm this by first-hand experience.

Always the teacher.

Scalia’s niche empowered him, overrunning the more deliberate judges, but it held him in the position that killed him with high blood pressure and a bad heart, obviously beyond the power of medicine to “cure” him.  The question is how much it distorted his decisions.  In a world that demanded a good heart (in both senses), how much mortality did his patriotic elitism impose on children, women, minorities, the stigmatized, and other disadvantaged demographics, while supporting oligarchies so wealthy they must be managed by corporate lawyers.

It is often pointed out that the framers of the Constitution were slave-owners.  Then Lincoln is interpreted as a President who set the black people free with a written Emancipation Proclamation.  But now, only slightly rearranged terms, favorable to the "haves," have economically enslaved people of every origin, gender and age, even under a black president.  Written laws have incarcerated a shockingly high proportion of the population.  

We need a new way of doing business that doesn’t kill our Supreme Court justices through their own pride because they will not give up power. Scalia died in a privileged enclave based on killing, if "only" birds for victims, where his own written death confirmation was phoned in from many miles away.   (CSI would NOT approve.)  One quite realistic resistance to autopsy may be that it could reveal dementia.  But then, it is confirmed that Reagan was president while suffering from Alzheimers, and President Wilson's decisions were made by his wife.  We don't seem to object.

In the beginning the invention of writing, and the stable logic it made possible, was enabling and ennobling. But in a democracy, the curse-and-puke crowd controls the deliberations.  Hopefully, they’ll forget to vote. 

SCALIA

ANITA HILL FOR THE SUPREME COURT !!

Anita Hill

Just at bedtime, checking for late messages, I ran my eye over the headings of this-and-that and saw “Scalia dies in his sleep.”  I went right on.  It didn’t hit me.  I couldn’t grasp it.  But when it did I was gob-smacked.  Backing up, it took another hour of reading stories to really understand what had happened.  I confess that my first reaction was what some are already labeling “racist,” that is, how will Clarence Thomas know how to vote?  Then, I thought, without his shield and guide, maybe he’ll just resign. At least I strongly suspect he went to bed drunk.

U of Chicago Law School

For a living in the school year of 1981-82 I typed out transcriptions of dictated-to-tape law professors’ papers.  This was at the U of Chicago Law School where Scalia was parked while he waited for the Supreme Court and Cass Sunstein was hurtling down hallways and into his office because a thought was nudging to be born.  I never typed anything for him because he went straight to the keyboard himself.  Sunstein was fifteen years younger than me, Scalia was three years older.  They were both very intense, but so were all the other professors, especially the three or four women who comported themselves like nuns.

My interaction with Scalia was of two sorts: accidentally riding the elevator with him (never alone) and delivering the mail to his office.  To him I was clearly furniture only.  He never smiled at me or said thanks, or gave any sign that I existed.  (I was middle-aged, white, and about the same percentage of overweight as he was.)  In the elevator the other men, some of them professors, loved to tease Scalia about his ambition and opinions, which he always parried cleverly, laughing.  It was assumed that he was going to be on the Supreme Court.  

It was a little as though they were teasing the Bishop of Boston.  That is, under the joking was pandering and under that was a consciousness of great power and secret understandings.  The whole place was like that, even the espresso bar where the young aspiring pre-law men created exquisite cappuccino, the first I’d ever consumed and very welcome to jet-propelled academia, fated to interfere with justice in America.  And elect conservative presidents.

Sara Benincasa

https://medium.com/@SaraJBenincasa/on-the-death-of-a-

brilliant-public-servant-fe2a7b6fcd5c#.ky0tuj2tx

Much is made of Scalia’s friendship to the Supreme Court women, whom he invited to his home on secular holidays (New Year’s) and took shooting.  I see it as the generosity of the father to his daughters, even if — like Cheney’s gay daughter — they don’t stick to Papa’s program.  

Someone should write a comic dialogue between Scalia and Thomas, sitting by a fireside with whatever elite alcohol they preferred, demonstrating the total cultural mismatch between them that made true communication impossible.  One of the principles of good narrative is dialogue in which two people talk past each other, each believing he is persuasive and on target.

publicity still from "Agnus Dei"

There is nothing in anything I’ve read since Scalia's death that mentions his rumored connection to Opus Dei.  But just now at Sundance there is a movie called “Agnus Dei.”  It is about Polish nuns who have been raped by soldiers and are about to give birth.  That is, cruelty to draped women who respond as human beings variously rather than dogmatically.  There is irony in the timing.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2016/january-web-only/dispatch-from-sundance-agnus-dei.html  

http://deadline.com/2016/01/agnus-dei-trailer-sundance-anne-fontaine-1201686737/

Quotes from Wikipedia, therefore anonymous:

Opus Dei is a clandestine Catholic organization based in Chicago, Ill. In size, it is insignificant, a mere 85,000 members (only 3,000 members in the US) compared to the one billion Catholics worldwide. But, its membership boasts of some of the most powerful and wealthy people in the country. The group catapulted to national attention when spymaster, Robert Hanson, was arrested and convicted.  . .    Navarro-Valls was particularly important as a press liaison during the last few years of the reign of Pope John Paul II (reigned 1978–2005). . . .With the election of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI — and with the new pope's approval — Navarro-Valls continued in his post for almost two years. . .Navarro-Valls was devoted to the Catholic prelature Opus Dei (The Work of God) as a secular member. His involvement with this organization dates back to 1970-75, when he lived in the central headquarters with Msgr. (later Saint) Josemaría Escrivá, the founder of Opus Dei.

John Paul II and Navarro-Valls

The secrecy, the pomp and circumstance of power, the rumors of self-mortification, and writers’ use of the group as a presumed cult with a secret near-magic agenda are easy to attach to Scalia.  This is a link to a sensational article.  http://www.counterpunch.org/2004/01/17/radicals-on-the-high-court/   One wonders what the autopsy will record in terms of scars: “CSI Vatican” or rather "CSI Washington,DC."  Scalia’s will asks for cremation.  Autopsy may be resisted by the family, but as a matter of national concern, assassination must be ruled out.  Shadows of S/M, spy torture, and the Spanish Inquisition lurk.

Besides Opus Dei, Scalia (like Cheney) loves shooting.  NRA owes him big-time.  He doesn’t exactly project John Wayne, but he certainly has protected the Second Amendment.

Some stories are noting that lately he has become more cruel in his joking, more impatient and intolerant in other ways.  As a fellow septuagenarian, I understand that one can become a little slip-shod in self-monitoring.  A little inclined to flare when irritated.  I will not be surprised if autopsy reveals organic deterioration and possibly a stroke as the cause of death.

Since I’ve been considering the impact of thinking that is produced and recorded as “writing” (not just ink on paper, but in all forms that are composed and valorized as law or religious precepts), I note that both our justice system in America and the international Roman Catholic system rest on written law, with the primary status of the Bible and the Constitution of major importance.  Scalia was right in enforcing the stability of these documents, but he was wrong in thinking there was any inviolable content that only he could recognize and that could accommodate such radical changes as our cultures are enduring.  He was another of the Old Testament Christians.

He forgets that Jesus didn’t arise from an elite in palaces, but rather from the village life of fishermen and craftsmen.  We don’t even know whether Jesus was literate.  It was Paul who was the scribbler.  (If he’d been in an elevator with a woman, he would have tried not to notice.)

Francis I

Now that Scalia’s death has changed the politics of deadlock and polarization into something much more practical and far-reaching, I hope it kindles a cleansing fiery discussion that can lift us to a much higher level of concern.  And I pray for the health of Francis I.  But I was already doing that.  

DO YOU COUNT?

This is actually my younger brother's class.  

Since I’m 75, my elementary education preceded television.  My BS was library- and practicum-based.  (My degree was in speech/theatre.)  It was the last of the Fifties and we were seeing the very beginnings of the third-wave psych theories as well as the very beginnings of what turned into post-modern thought.  (Hayakawa’s semantics)  The Peace Corps was barely invented and I was ahead of the curve by taking a job teaching on the Blackfeet Reservation.

By the time I “retired” and came back here, I was out-of-step with everyone in many ways, a hybrid person.  Fifteen years after returning, I sit at my computer all day pretty much as I did before, but I’m more profoundly out of step.  Techies do not believe I exist and if they did, they wouldn’t care.  My demographic has no money.  

“Outlier,” “long tail,” are both statistical terms meaning that I’m in the part of a bell curve that’s at the far end where the numbers are very low.  Our society at present is based on commerce  and believes that profit comes from making a little money from a lot of people.  Even in the arts the newspapers don’t report the qualities of content anymore.  Instead they talk numbers of people who attended, money it cost, profit it made, scores, market shares.

Sunstein had hair in those days.

In 1981 I was a transcriber at the U of Chicago Law School while finishing up my degrees at the University of Chicago Divinity School.  The Law School was cutting edge technically -- had to be -- but the Div School was all about content.  At the Law School about the only profs who typed directly into their computers were Jim White and  Cass Sunstein.  Everyone else, including Scalia, I think, did some kind of workaround, like dictating. We were all connected to a massive mainframe somewhere, but everyone worked independently.  Still, we transcribers smiled when we heard the muted sounds of “Asteroids” coming from offices with closed doors.

For six years in the nineties I worked for the City of Portland doing data entry, sitting at the computer all day.  I still sit at my computer, a free-standing desktop with internet access.  It’s a “mini” Apple a little larger than a sandwich.  I keep a second one that is NEVER attached to the Internet.  I mean, there is NO physical connection.  My last computer (eMac), even when it was turned off, was connected to the Apple techies, who turned it on by remote control in the night and rummaged around making “improvements.”   Even on my connected mini, which is on all day so I can get email and do research, can be accessed by my provider, so I cut the power at night.  I shut off Blue Tooth when I began to see my neighbor's computer content.

Social sites do not interest me.  I’m connected to only a few and only so I can follow the people who are halfway between being friends and being co-workers.  I dumped Facebook when they cut off those people without notice, destroying a whole backlog of videos they had made.  Also, we have all begun to realize that social sites, including Wikipedia, are ways of building mailing lists and “hit” records that are valuable to marketers, the government, and covert operators.  No longer do we have to depend upon self-reporting to see what people care about -- we can call up the bell-curves and the bar charts to find out which porn they watch, what medicines they take, who they talk to and what about.  Even where they were at the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KYugpMDXAE   This is a vid discussion.

Marketing departments love connection.  Buy one thing from Dr. Leonard and you will never get them back out of your life without some kind of confrontation.  (I ended up screaming on the phone.)  My Medicare contractor (Silverscript) is owned by a drug store chain (CVS) which began with a soft sell, a discount card, and escalated until I get regular phone calls and mailings saying that they’ve noticed that I’m not ordering my meds on time and demanding to know why not.  I write across the letter in red fibertip,  “STOP NAGGING ME!” and send it back. It does no good.  They own my butt.  Or at least my oral intake.  They assume I’m demented or I'd be compliant.

The techies of the world, the ones who grew up on game theory and have brains that know everything about systems and whatever technical terms they use, have almost no humanities background, no understanding of content or even metaphor except math.  They have no canon of shared reading, no valuing of the past.  Their morality is success-based, their empathy is for their pets.  All is innovation, more bells and whistles, more automatic spelling since they can’t do it alone.  All is templates assuming you want everyone to be your buddy so you can sell them something.  (If you don't mind piggy-backing.) I find my writing sometimes wrenched out from under my hands because it doesn’t agree with what the computer “thinks” I should do in terms of spelling or even sentence construction.  It is anti-creative with its little red and green lines.  

But worse, these sources have no intention of providing content.  They have convinced the public to do that for them.  “Send us your photos,” say the newspapers.  “Post your best writing here,” they direct.  “Twitter the news,” say the reporters, even though they know better than anyone else that their editors (who are from a different generation) will censor and reframe the reports anyway to make them appealing to the advertising bell curve.  To get news that isn’t mainstream vanilla, one must go to a foreign country.  I like The Guardian, but Al Jazeera is always interesting.

Demonized stuff is always interesting.

First Netflix just provided movies.  Then they began to want us to rate them.  Then they began to recommend movies they think I will like.  (I don’t find it useful since I respond to quality instead of genre.  They think the awards are indicators of quality, but remember that my original degree was earned with a bunch of theatre people -- I know better.)  Netflix and Amazon want us to write reviews.  We figured out how to game that in a hurry so all the reviews disappeared.  Now we have “author platforms.”  You can’t sell without confining yourself to something with edges.  

You can’t read some websites or join some orgs without allowing cookies.  If you clean off your cookies now and then, which I do, you lose function.  For a while we were assured that if we stored things in the Cloud, a massive computer warehouse someplace, they would be safe.  Now it turns out they can be searched, and if the website goes down -- maybe because of power loss or maybe because of a legal directive -- you’re down, too.  In spite of claimed redundancy.

Some "free" websites are demanding your VISA number "just in case."

Num num num num.

Automatic ads like those on blogspot respond to algorithms developed by people with no worldly knowledge, so that one's profound reflection on Buddhism gets followed by some crass ad for fundy Xianity.  One's careful essay on the forming of ministers is followed by an ad for instant ordination by mail.  It's all part of that religion blob.

But the providers give us metrics so we know exactly who, where, and how many people are reading us.  Just not their names.  (Do you watch the little maps in the right hand column?  I do.)  Best if they start comment “wars,” politely called discussions.  Whatever drives up traffic.  Now, after I've watched a movie, Netflix wants me to send recommendations to my friends.  I used to do that via email anyway, but they were paragraphs of analysis.  I resent being TOLD to do it.  It turns out that most of my friends don’t like the movies I like anyway.  We don’t watch the same way because I care about technical stuff far more than they do.  They want immersion; I want enlightenment.

Nurses want to be needed.

Very few of the people I know are as willing as I am to venture into the youth fascination with muck, darkness, sex, loud unintelligible noises.  Most adults prefer their SM with the romantic veneer of a movie like “Outlander” which they fancy to be true history of their own people.  They assume that if I watch XXX content, I must be a XXX person.  Because they don’t watch it, they assume it’s somehow corrupting, that there is nothing technical to think about.  There is no "real" content.

I have no laptop, no smart phone, no tablet, no iPod.  (Well, I think there's a little green iPod somewhere.) An occasional sign-up will DEMAND my cell phone number or prevent me from going farther.  There's no way to check "ain't got one."  In fact, some online mail order retailers will prevent me from going further if I don’t provide a physical address for mail delivery, though there is no home delivery here.  In the even smaller village thirty miles away, the streets have no names which REALLY upsets those Manhattan-based people.  At the moment you cannot use a Verizon-based cell phone in town -- only ATandT.  

On the highway the only places where a person can get cell reception are marked by turnouts and signs.  Not a lot of them around here.  GPS is not dependable.  The whole area is at the end of the bell curve.  We don’t even have fiber-optic service to our houses.  Our streets may not be paved.  The electricity surges and fades and sometimes is just missing.  We are invisible in many ways.  That’s why I like it here.  Sometimes.

One more thing, since this will mostly be read on a Sunday.  Religion is being forced into the same context of institutions and numbers: church as business, paying members, butts in the pews, number of self-identified believers, number of clergy -- all handy for designing bell curves.  Nothing about spirituality.  If you can’t number it, it doesn’t exist.  Cookies in the religious world will get you appeals for donations.  You don't have to pay for sunsets.

Light a candle?