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Peter and the Other, 2006

Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples returned to their homes.

John 20:3-9

Amends

There is something telling, I think, in the fact that my imaginations of marriage mostly preclude verbal language. In daydreams and also the night ones, the sort of intimate relationship I envision myself enjoying one day is itself a sanctuary from rhetoric, where there are no self-serving plays on another’s emotions, no departures from logic to serve dubious ends, nor any need for the dull recounting of a day’s tedium or recitation of irrelevant facts just to make the talky. The images involve a lot of looking and showing versus explaining, being with versus rushing out. In general, very slow and quiet, which in the matter at hand connote a sustained, disciplined patience and forgiveness.

These are visions — sustained visions — of the heaven I want in the midst of life. That they rely on a negative description without extensive positive content is not lost to me: they’re reactive. In this sense they’re expressive of my longing for a mutuality. This mutuality, in the first place, does not demand an explicit accounting of every thought and movement. In the second place, it does not exploit the intimacy in order to extract limited truths or oaths which satisfy a (needless to say irrational) suspicion that faithfulness can only operate through the media of contracts and total, involuntary disclosure. My longing to avoid untrusting relationships has definite root, and I need only divulge that the root touches more than one substratum of my experience in the world.

Of the positive aspect of my vision it might be enough to say I am talking about covenant. To contrast it with contract I quote H. Richard Niebuhr (the other Niebuhr), who in his article on “Covenant and American Democracy” defines covenant as “the binding together in one body politic of persons who assumed through unlimited promise responsibility to and for each other and for the common laws, under God.” In other words, a promise that parties make without definite term or end, through means of a thoroughgoing and — this is important — voluntary honesty. Whereas contracts suppose breach, the basis of covenant is trust. For those willing to both accept and provide trust, the covenantal relationship by its nature entails a “going forward” into whatever follows.

I don’t have the privilege of living in a covenantal society. The society into which I was born is one of contracts. In fact, it’s a society where regardless of whether these contracts are implied or explicit, optional or compulsory, they’re often broken. They’re easily broken. In my experience these things are commonplace: a voided warranty, a violated privacy policy. Further, the society I inhabit gives credence to forms of argumentation through which contractual breaches flourish, so as to almost render the original documents meaningless the moment they’re drawn up. In an environment that places no premium on accountability and fair dealing, one finds few venues where one may seek to represent oneself honestly and expect to be received in kind.

I am conscious of the connection between my society and my vision of a right relationship. For so many years of my still young life, I fought a cynicism that coaxed me toward willing the destruction of everything that exists on account of a culture that misrepresents, misconstrues, and mistrusts its members, as a rule, in its laws, courts, markets, media, education, and so on. By my own heart and the grace of God, I was not given to the violence that erupted in Littleton, Colorado, mindful as I was and remain that violence by all means affirms the offense and by no means precludes subsequent destruction. Whatever peace a person intends to achieve by violence becomes impossible through the enactment of violence. It’s a contradiction, through and through. Peace must be sought by peaceful means.

It occurs to me that I have been reckless in my own representations on this web site. Verbal violence remains by definition violence. A midnight visitation by the Spirit of means and ends prompted me to remove from this site an especially virulent treatment of a matter that likewise causes me great unrest. If I am going to work toward a greater good my criticism must conform to that end. Dr. King, I hear you loud and clear.

In closing I’ll note that I’m also aware how vulnerable I make myself in divulging my desires. In the event that you haven’t been paying attention: that is the point.

The internet will not save us from the internet.

It may come to a recital of the Miranda warning on waking, if only to remind us that every electronic transaction and interaction can be recorded and saved into perpetuity. If in fact we still have the right to remain silent.

With the cost of data storage falling and the speed of data processing rising, the future promises more data collection and preservation than less. Credit cards, cell phones, transit cards and toll devices, company IDs, and so on, can be made to (i.e. already do) collect and analyze data of virtually any type desired by the issuing agency — for example, place, date and time, duration, frequency, and amount. Over time, the activity of particular human beings can become a positively quantifiable thing. Routines and habits emerge, preferences and prejudices show in crystal clarity, yielding a picture of an individual in his or her private exercise of will. The knowledge of such data itself becomes a tool in the hands of anyone capable of wielding it toward any number of ends.

I am not alone in thinking that this future — which given the pace of technological development seems more probable than not, and in which the lines between one’s multiple public and private identities blur — will force a drastic redefinition of human identity. Or perhaps definition at all. I will have to write more about this another time.

For now, a problem and a possible reponse. First, internet anonymity may no longer be taken for granted, as Ars Technica reports on two researchers “Pulling back the curtain on ‘anonymous’ Twitterers”:

[T]he data isn’t nearly as “anonymous” as those releasing it appear to think it is, and it can easily be cross-referenced to other data sets to expose user identities.

It’s not just about Twitter, either. Twitter was a proof of concept, but the idea extends to any sort of social network: phone call records, healthcare records, academic sociological datasets, etc.

Anonymity is the exact topic of John Dyer’s post, “Internet Anonymity, Like Loin Cloths and AA, Can Be a Means of Grace,” on “Don’t Eat The Fruit.” He muses on the benefits of creating, in effect, online safe zones.

In a similar way, the counseling office and the confession booth introduce “artificial” walls which make us feel safe enough to expose the areas of our life that need healing. Like the protective cloth in a operating room that covers every part of the body except that which needs surgery, these environments provide us a safe place where others can work on what’s broken.

Theological disagreements aside, Dyer’s comments read with uncanny familiarity. I’ve thought about Genesis 3 a lot over the last few years — many of those years overlapping employment in advertising and marketing, an industry ravenous for targeted user data. In specific, I’ve marveled at the serpent, who seems to me the archetypal ad man, calling God on a lie and twisting the truth to his own ends. Having eating the fruit, Adam and Eve covered their bits and hid, as if all of a sudden they knew they were themselves known — intimately known.

It is clear to my mind that we who enjoy such impressive communication technology as the internet makes possible are on the verge of losing the fig leaves we’ve worn since man and woman first covered their nakedness. We will be known in our faults, our lies, our intimate habits, and perhaps even our thoughts. I think we must remember in our technological enthusiasm that, in this headlong rush toward more tech, we’re not running back into the garden, where exposure is not a concern. We’re still banished from paradise, wearing less, and facing thousands of serpents: each dying to know just how to speak to us.

Safe spaces? Without question. On the internet? Probably not.

Paul Dryasdust Tillich

That’s all.

A 15 minute walk to the bus stop then 15 minutes back home in shoes twice their weight with slop too wet to be snow and too viscous to rush the gutters. Inside I peeled off my socks and raised my bare feet to a radiator that doesn’t reason the conditions worth counterbalance, but a draft from the windows does the work of drying me off, knees to toes.

The apartment stays dark even with the blinds raised. The windows all face east — not the lake or trees or a street but the windows of the apartment 25 feet away, and the identical windows of the four floors above and four below.

So many of the buildings are tall and so few of them hold interesting things beside people who don’t go anywhere but campus, because there’s nowhere else to go. It’s as though the buildings stand against things like light, air, and each other, but not for things to compensate for what they take up.

One CTA fare card kiosk at the Museum of Science and Industry serves me and my thousands of neighbors. The Metra tracks end in the Loop and its fares don’t transfer to CTA lines. The choice is expense or inconvenience.

It’d be enough for Hyde Park to be narrow without also being self centered, but it’s both. And it’s like the powers that be don’t know there are prospective students coming to campus on Friday and that my honesty is blunt and unsparing when I’m in a foul mood. I’ve tried to get somewhere this morning and the neighborhood as designed — and it has been designed — does its best to prevent that.

And that puts me in a pretty foul mood. This was to be one last day of rest before the new quarter. I can tell you it’s not just winter that’s threatened to spoil it.

"either self-evident . . . or is, frankly, irrelevant"

Jazz vocalist and former Div School student Kurt Elling reflects on his time at UofC and the “influence” of his studies on his work.

I was there to try to answer deep level questions of meaning that were gnawing at me. While these questions were not answered ultimately, as many of the most important cannot be until death, I did arrive at some satisfactory working answers.

. . .

[A]ny “influence” the prolonged discussion of metaphysical questions has had on my work is either self-evident in the work itself or is, frankly, irrelevant to public discussion of my current work. As Saul Bellow put it, “[the artist’s] inwardness should be, deserves to be a secret about which nobody needs to get excited.”

I’ve been pressed before to give satisfactory justification for attending the Div School, beside explaining the seeming disparity between the “education” and “experience” halves of my resumé. To my mind, there’s no disparity and no need for apology.

Thanks for your words, Mr. Elling.

Future Proof

The copyright from a Routledge Classics text, reprinted here in flagrant violation of said copyright (emphasis mine):

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Field Trip

A tiny raven-haired twig stopped before a Gauguin and called out, “Emma, come here! Emma!” But Emma did not come, so the tiny twig illustrated her point with her hands and whispered across the room, “Her boobs!”

Real Green

“So is it, like, green? Or is it real green?”

“Oh no, it’s, like, real green.”

“Oh, that’s cool.”

The Entitlement Generation

The problem with the social web is not that everyone who uses it thinks they’re an expert and an authority. Not everyone does, and for those who do, that expertise and authority may be valid, in a narrow sense.

The problem with the social web is, first, that the virtually immediate transition from web-based form input to permanent global publication serves as a mechanism to reinforce the presumed validity of one’s opinions. Given the immediate opportunity to publicize those opinions, one is liberated from the moderating effects of time and editorial oversight. Time may soften or alter those opinions, and editorial oversight might restrain or challenge them. Such constraints reward patience and well-reasoned thinking, while clumsier and sometimes flippant forms of argumentation flourish in their absence. When such logic or reaction is reinforced, the reinforcement emboldens one to lend one’s opinions greater value than they may deserve.

A secondary problem, one that I think has graver implications, is that being so convinced of the value of one’s opinions, those opinions can be leveraged as a means of exacting special attention, treatment, and favors which one wants and presumes to deserve. Entitlement, in other words.

The chef gets especially annoyed when diners arrive and announce they are reviewing for Yelp.

“That tends to rub us the wrong way, and I won’t hesitate to call people out,” he says. “This doesn’t apply to all Yelpers, just the slimy ones that flat out say they will be ‘reviewing’ us. I think there has to be a certain respect between both parties in the customer-restaurant relationship.”

“Chicago proprietors add to Yelp allegations”

Irrespective of the factual basis of the expertise one professes, it is a fundamentally offensive move to employ to one’s own advantage the presumed authority attending expertise. To announce one’s presumed authority at the beginning of a transaction is, in effect, to threaten the party with whom one conducts business with a penalty if the transaction does not occur to one’s satisfaction. That penalty may be disproportionate to the perceived offense — in this case, the durative effects of a negative review on a popular web site versus the temporary dissatisfaction (or at worst, illness) of a bad meal. Having announced in punitive terms the nature of the transaction prior to the transaction actually happening, one upsets the relationship between the parties before it begins, asserting power over the other party. The consequence is that the threatened party is forced to make up the difference by catering to the one which threatens.

So “a certain respect between both parties” becomes impossible, or at least difficult, to achieve when one of those parties feels entitled to more than parity. That is, when one finds cause to make demands of the other at the onset of their relationship. The social media that reward entitled feelings, by reinforcing one’s presumed expertise and authority, are responsible for the social fallout of that loss of respect — respect inhering to a presumption of parity between parties.