Empiricism, the Word of God, and Community

As I fly to my new employer’s location to do some training and pitch some ideas about how to implement and craft this Master’s degree I’m the instructional designer for, I’m spending my time reading Pragmatism: An Introduction. In his chapter on Rorty, Bacon includes this juicy quote concerning the anti-authoritatian nature of Rorty’s pragmatism:

We treat a claim as addressed to us, in our capacity as members of a social practice governed by shared norms.

  • Scientists [plural] are required to test their claims through experiments and are expected to give up a hypothesis in the face of conflicting evidence;
  • judges decide cases based on case law and precedent;
  • poker players take the pot depending on who has the best hand

In all cases, the decisions of communities of inquiry constitute the last word. “Empiricism’s appeal to experience is as inefficacious as appeals to the Word of God unless backed up with a predisposition on the part of a community to take such appeals seriously.” (Rorty, 2007:11)

- Bacon, Pragmatism: An Introduction loc. 2132

The “Sexualization” of Men – A Breakdown of the Abrams Defense

I’m on vacation, so this will be a quick write-up of something I found fascinating this morning.

Abstract Equality

A while back we talked about the Sexualization of Men in media and popular discourse. David Arinder, in the comments, expressed concern over the uptick of the objectification of men in media and wanted to not loose sight of this while we talked about the much more common objectification of women in our media.

A Sense of the Grand Picture

While I wanted to grant David’s concerns, prima facie, the genealogy of the power relations between the sexes gave me pause. Given that I only have a sensitivity towards these issues and not expertise in their analysis, I didn’t have much to say other than a call for awareness towards the drastic imbalance of objectification of the sexes in media and popular discourse.

Concrete Analysis

Today, I came across a fantastic analysis of two objectifying scenes from Star Trek: Into Darkness by Rachael Kelly that shows how the male body is not subjected to the Gaze in the same manner as the female body.

Homoerotics, Heteroperformance, and the Gaze in Star Trek Into Darkness: Why the Abrams Defense Doesn’t Work

Here are some choice quotes to sketch out her argument. Be sure to head over to Rachael’s site and read the article closely, especially if you disagree with what I say she is arguing.

Traditionally, the woman has functioned at two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen.” This is precisely the function of Marcus’ bodily display in this sequence: she is erotic object for both the audience and for Kirk.

Male bodily display, however, is more complex. That the Gaze is gendered male (or at least masculine) is a cornerstone of film and gender theory, and it is borne out by a consideration of those generic forms that display the male body to the Gaze.

If the Gaze is male/masculine and hegemonic masculinity is, per Donaldson (1993: 646) exclusively heterosexual, then the fetishisation of the body connoted by the gaze can be seen to engender a homoerotic anxiety that must be denied. “In a heterosexual and patriarchal society,” explains Steve Neale, “the male body cannot be marked explicitly as the erotic object of another male look: that look must be motivated in some other way, its erotic component repressed” (1983: 13).

Kirk’s “balancing” shirtless scene, therefore – setting aside, for the moment, the fact that he is accompanied on screen by two women in a similar state of undress – is not only informed by a dialogical construct that does not appeal to the same power/non-power discourse, it is also informed by a mechanism that actively seeks to disavow the feminising (disempowering) gaze, through “re-masculinising” him via a consensual sexual encounter.

Two consensual sexual encounters, in fact. At the same time.

It is, therefore, vastly unequal, in terms of power dynamics, to Marcus’ scene, in which she stands, half-naked and displayed for the camera’s objectifying eye, and in which her instruction not to look is violated not only by Kirk, but by the audience as well.

Rachael goes on to describe how Harrison’s cut shower scene would not have had a mechanism to protect against the threat of the Gaze and was therefore cut.

Final thoughts

What I love about Rachael’s analysis, beyond her immediate argument, is how she makes explicit how patriarchal media protects against the threat of the Gaze when it is turned towards the male bodily form.

It goes hand in hand with the best unmasking of the hetro-male’s revulsion at the mention of homosexuality I’ve ever come across (and I came across it recently):

Homophobia explained. From Big Ole's Google+ post

Homophobia explained. From Big Ole’s Google+ post

This totally explains the reaction of seemingly irrational concern and disgust that I’ve seen displayed in heterosexual males at the mention of acceptance of homosexuality. It does not seem to be an explicit logic, but an implicit one.

Communitas

My friend, Aaron Arinder, recently posted a series of really great questions and postulates concerning community, so I’m reposting this post from a couple of years ago. I think that using Gemeinshaft and Gesellschaft are helpful categories of analysis here.

Two Views of Community:

We find ourselves not independently of other people and institutions but through them. We never get to the bottom of ourselves on our own. We discover who we are face to face and side by side with others in work, love, and learning. All of our activity goes on in relationships, groups, associations, and communities ordered by institutional structures and interpreted by cultural patterns of meaning

We are part of a larger whole that we can neither forget nor imagine in our own image without paying a high price.

If we are not to have a self that hangs in the void, slowly twisting in the wind, these are issues we cannot ignore.

- Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. P. 84

We often stress the the need for community in our religion. I want to spend a little time discussing what this community might look like.

A Brief Excursus on Individualism

One can speak of contemporary Western society as heir to two traditions, the liberal individualist and the communitarian, each of which brings along with it a distinctive set of values. More than anywhere else in the Western world, the American Psyche has been forged in the fires of liberal individualism but tempered with a keen awareness of the importance of community.

We see American Individualism run amok in the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand. When it is scaled back from egoism, the individualist tradition elevates the human person above everything and sees the contract as the basis of all social interactions. This tradition promotes such values as personal freedom, self-improvement, privacy, achievement, independence, detachment, and self-interest. Living these values may put people into contact with one another, the central focus is not upon these others, or upon the group as a whole, but upon the rights and needs of the individual separate from their relationship with those others.

There is much more we can say about individualism and more specifically, American Individualism, but our purposes lie elsewhere.

Community

In good communities the members ask not, "What is the minimum my contract requires?" but “What will make this group good?”

The notion of community strongly contrasts with the notion of individualism because its emphasis is upon the social nature of humanity. The self, communitarians say, is formed by its relationships, roles, attachments within traditions and institutions. Accordingly, communitarians elevate the group instead of the human individual as the center of society. Its core values are intimacy, benevolence, fellowship, belonging, dependence, social involvement, and the public good.[1]

So, how do we see, how do we describe this community? It is most helpful to talk about two types of community, Gemeinshaft and Gesellschaft as they are constructed by Ferdinand Toennies in Community and Society. At first the use of two very similar German words might throw you off, but just think of them as containers for ways of speaking about community.

Gemeinschaft refers to social groups that involve:

relationships encompassing human beings as full personalities rather than single aspects of human beings. These are relationships characterized by high degrees of cohesion, communality, and duration in time. What is essential is the quality of strong cohesiveness of persons to one another and the quality of rooted, persisting collective identity.[2]

Gesellschaft refers to social groups that

engages the individual in only one of the aspects or parts of his or her total being, or at most, only a few aspects. From the individual’s point of view his relationship with other in Gesellschaft is more tenuous, loose, and less deeply rooted in his allegiances or commitments. Gesellschaft is commonly founded around a few specific interests or purposes, whether religious, economic, recreational, or political.[3]

You can think of Gemeinshaft as a tight-knit family whereas Gesellschaft is more akin to working in a factory.

The Community vs. the Individual

One of the classic arguments running through American political and ethical thought is the supposed war of the interests of the individual against those of the community. Working from a post-Enlightenment liberalism, we (as a historical people) have worked hard to protect the interests of the individual (or sub-communities) from the demands of the community. We see this thread running all throughout our laws. We see the dangers of not guarding against this in the pain the Jim-Crow laws inflicted upon the Ante-Bellum Black community. The situation (at least legally) was finally remedied through the Civil Rights movement.

When addressing the tension between individualism and communitarianism, it is helpful to note that in Gesellschaft communities, the individual exists and is important only insofar as the individual is useful to the group. However, in Gemeinschaft communities, on the other hand, a group focus does not necessarily mean that the individual is subsumed underneath the group and that a uniformity of through and practice is necessary. Robert Bellah describes the argumentative nature of good Gemeinschaft communities:

A good community is one in which there is argument, even conflict, about the meaning of shared values and goals, and certainly about how they will be actualized in everyday life.[4]

We may draw a parallel with ancient Rome. Being Roman is not necessarily the wholesale adoption of Roman Reinkultur, or pure culture, which may or may not have actually existed, as much as it was entering into a debate about what Roman Reinkultur consisted.

This is why “Roman identity remained so attractive to those within the empire, yet failed to enchant those beyond it.”[5] Additionally, Romanization did not consist of an adoption of one ideal type, as if there was only one idea and way of being Roman. Rather, there were so many kinds of Romans to become that becoming Roman meant “acquiring a position in the complex of structured differences in which Roman power resided” instead of “becoming more [like] the other inhabitants of the empire.”[6] It is likewise with good community.

Likewise, when we join good communities, our selves don’t melt-away, Borg-style; instead, we become something like the X-men, where we bring our whole selves to the game and we only succeed through contested teamwork.

Conclusion: Intentional Community is needed and Messy, but that’s OK

In sum, while some communities are tyrants lording over their members and must therefore be protected against, not all communities are thus constructed.

In good communities the members ask not, “What is the minimum my contract requires?” but “What will make this group a good group?” The Masses ask not “How can we gain more power?” but “What is good for all of us?”

What are some good communities you’ve been a part of?  What aspects have made them such?


[1] Fergusson, Community, Liberalism, and Christian Ethics,p. 139.

[2] Nisbet and Perrin, Social Bond, 98-99

[3] Ibid.

[4] Bellah, Habits of the Heart. P. 333.

[5] Woolf, Becoming Roman, 98-105.

[6] Ibid., 245 and 242.

Iced Coffee, a How-To

This is a repost of a blog post from several years ago and from a different blog. Since I’ve gotten several requests for the post in the last week or so, I thought I would repost it here.

I don’t have the time right now to update the guide, but I highly recommend using a french press with coarse grind to mix and filter the grounds-water solution. That way you don’t strip out all of the oils that make the coffee so good. (Never use a paper filter).

DSCF0001When I think of enthusiasm and food, I always go to Randy “the Machoman” Savage and his heartfelt enthusiasm for Slim Jims. I share Randy’s enthusiasm for food products, but I direct mine towards coffee, not salted animal purée, as you can see ( –>)

Yesterday I rediscovered instructions for making Iced Cold Press Coffee and decided to make some.  I love the stuff that Dunn Bros makes, but I don’t wanna pay $3.30 for a glass or $10 for a gallon.

The instructions that I found were kinda sparse (but more than adequate).  So, here is what I did with as many pictures as possible.

[Read more...]

Piper, Austerity, Divine Retribution, and Tolerance #WhatToRead

The abusive theology of “deserved” tragedy… – John Piper has a problem, he can’t seem to stop tweeting horrible things whenever a natural disaster strikes. Rachel looks at why this might be the case. Excellent read.

Is God Out to Get You or Forgive You? Retributive Violence and the Gospel/ – Peter Enns, one of my favorite OT scholars, begins to problematize the nature of God in the Old Testament as it is contrasted with the nature of Jesus. Suggested hashtag? #MarcionWasRight. Just kidding. However, he ends his post with some excellent

How the Case for Austerity Has Crumbled – This piece is a fascinating look at the macro-economics of Europe and America’s response to the global economic crisises of the last decade and how two severely flawed economic papers justified incredibly damaging austerity policies. As the cultural theorists say, all knowledge is political.

The Gospel of Tolerance and the Gospel of Tolerance Part II – Lana writes about her journey with the fundamentalist reaction against tolerance and challenges us to think hard and clearly about how we engage with the truth-claims of the Religious Other (which is really the Religious We).