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By Nathan Bierma


Content & Context

The Books & Culture Weblog

March 2003

This Week:

RESONANCE

Responses, footnotes, and follow-ups to pieces from the print version of B&C and to items in this weblog:

• In the Jan./Feb. 2003 issue of B&C, Douglas Groothuis' article "Jesus the Philosopher" raised the question of whether then-candidate George W. Bush's statement that Jesus was his favorite philosopher was valid (and concluded that first part of his answer was, the second part wasn't). 

In a response at the Christian news portal Xnmp.com entitled "Jesus the Nonphilosopher," independent scholar Albert Gedraitis delves into a history of logic and philosophy and concludes that Jesus was a teacher, but not a philosopher.

Yes, the Church, since Irenaeus, has long recognized and used formulaically the expression Xristos Pedagogos (Christ the Teacher). Philosopher? No. Teacher? Yes. Good at reasoning and rhetorical cleverness? Yes, as Doug Groothuis so refreshingly points out. … Bush's answer was reasonable, but Jesus was not a philosopher. He belonged to and pursued strenuously a quite different all-demanding profession.

To which Groothuis responds that Gedraitis' essay is more digression than debate, and defends his definition of philosopher.

Mr. Gedraitis does point out something of Jesus' unique identity and work as "Lord and Savior," but that doesn't make Jesus any less of a philosopher. Jesus, as God Incarnate, is not only a philosopher. Jesus doesn't search for the truth in the sense that Socrates did. Nor does Jesus change his mind or repent of intellectual errors as do merely human philosophers. … Nevertheless, Jesus employs arguments and engages in rational disputes that reveal his philosophical prowess on what matters most. He used logic to lead people into truth.

Read the two responses:
http://www.xnmp.com/gedraitis.htm
http://www.xnmp.com/groothuis.htm

• My story in the Nov./Dec. 2002 B&C referred to one of the most interesting political figures in the world: Václav Havel, former dissident playwright and first-ever president of the Czech Republic. In the debut of this weblog I linked to Slate's report on Havel's sloppy political exit. Last month in the New Yorker, David Remnick submitted this lengthy dispatch from Prague on the last days of Havel's presidency. The piece is well worth a read for its treatment of Havel's attempt to integrate the arts into political life.

Related:
Read a PDF of the U.S. House of Representatives' statement honoring Havel as an artist and champion of democracy, from the Czech embassy's Web site.

• The Valentine's Day edition of this weblog contained variations on the theme of romantic love. Since then, a few interesting articles related to roses and romance have proven click-worthy:

- There's a thorny side to the seemingly tender rose business, says the New York Times. This article is regrettably unfocused, but it does provide a look into labor conditions in Ecuador, which has quickly become the fourth-leading international producer of roses. 

- Is there a genetic explanation for our kissing style? From the Toronto Star.

- Of the volumes that have been written about the witty but vapid Sex and the City, the best essay, bar none, is this one from the New Republic (the site's registration system can be quirky and sometimes requires e-mail verification; try entering "bcread" for both user name and password, and e-mail me if you still have problems). The piece quotes main character Carrie Bradshaw's question, "Have relationships become the religion of the nineties?" and steps in to point out that the very individualistic urban setting the show worships could lie at the root of the relational dysfunction it portrays:

Having a "relationship," of course, is not the same as being together. Just as an attitude toward labor only hardened into an ideology called Marxism when the worker got cut off from the product of his labor, so erotic bonds only hardened into Relationshipism when people started, for a million familiar reasons, getting cut off from each other. A "relationship" is not to be confused with a union. It is an ongoing argument between two stubbornly sovereign selves about the possibility of a union.

The show lets us down, this review says, by asking good questions about the wrenching emotional element of sex in what amounts to a post-Seventh Commandment context—questions that at times border on moral philosophy -"how do you live a good life" in this context?—and then blithely refusing to address them.

- Speaking of Sex and the City, popular culture is awash with the sometimes-sappy sagas of single women, but what about the bachelors? The Boston Globe says bachelors are suffering from a surplus of peers and face the hardest road to romance in America—not that you'd know it from our culture's ignorance on the subject.

• Last month I linked to two essays (see sixth item here) on global McCulture—the threat of dominance and dilution of world cultures by mass-produced American culture. I should have included a link to this provocative piece in the Boston Globe. The authors question the reigning "McDonaldization thesis" that says fast food is a metaphor for the homogenization of cultural life. In fact, they argue, McDonald's is surprisingly adaptive to local cultures. The question they ignore is this: is local culture, as expressed through the Golden Arches, really authentic if it is produced by a global corporation, its identity determined by (and profits funneled to) McDonald's American headquarters?

Related:
My essay on McDonald's as culture at NBierma.com

Skip to Dialogue / Skip to Digest

PLACES & CULTURE

From the New York Times:

VENICE, Feb. 25—November was actually the cruelest month. For about two-thirds of it, the water that usually edges and lattices this improbably liquid city sloshed amok, turning Piazza San Marco into a gargantuan puddle and other low-lying areas into shin-high wading pools. January was bad, too. Right at the start, the lagoon rose, the canals swelled and Venetians slipped back into their galoshes, while tourists teetered atop makeshift boardwalks that had been set up to bridge the dry patches, too few and far between. … This month provided a fresh illustration of how slowly and uncertainly Venice is paddling toward a solution.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/26/international/europe/26ITAL.html*
• Earlier: NYT on enforcing the speed limit on Venice's waters*
QUARTZSITE, Ariz.—Desert or not, traffic along the busiest one-mile stretch of Main Street here can take half an hour to pass. Motor homes towing pickup trucks choke gas station entrances. Septuagenarians in shorts amble fearlessly between busy intersections. Waits for a table at Silly Al's restaurant stretch to an hour. … Approached on Interstate 10, Quartzsite unfolds as a surreal sandscape of metal boxes packed side by side in town and scattered like buckshot over thousands of acres of Sonora Desert. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/10/national/10QUAR.html*

DIALOGUE: WHAT IS A 'WEAK ECONOMY'?

We are, we're told time and time again, in a weak economy. But what exactly does that mean? After all, we haven't been in a recession for a while—not if you define a recession as two straight quarters of negative growth (and refuse the ambiguity of Merriam-Webster's definition of "recession" as "a period of reduced economic activity"). Officially, we've been out of a recession for almost a year and a half (see the graph in this story), and the economy actually grew slightly in 2002.

But our national anxiety about the economy remains deep, especially if you judge by the job market, which is the worst it's been in two decades. According to the Federal Reserve, we're in a "soft patch." So how should we rate the economy: by the Dow Jones, the Gross Domestic Product, consumer confidence, or the job market? The four are often used interchangeably to signify economic sputtering. As a journalist, I've caught myself inserting "weak economy" and "economic downturn" into my stories as though on auto-pilot, without a specific antecedent in mind. The confusion is reflected in the seemingly contradictory term starting to gain currency: "jobless recovery."

To try to clear things up, I called Dr. Ernie Goss, Jack A. MacAllister Chair in Regional Economics at Creighton University and manager of the Web site www.outlook-economic.com, and Dr. Alan Blinder, former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, who now teaches economics at Princeton. Last summer Blinder wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, "Stocks are only part of the story," cautioning us not to equate a bad stock market with a bad economy.

Ernie Goss: The recession of the 90s was much like this one; with earlier recessions, when you had a recovery in the economy, you had a recovery in the job market. … The early 90s recovery was somewhat the same [as now]; jobs weren't really there at first, but it wasn't this bad.

We have had a recovery in the economy—growth for 2002 is going to be about 3 percent—yet every month last year we lost jobs, so how can you call that a recovery? What's happening, of course, is a rise in productivity. Because of such strong productivity, you can get more output with fewer workers. … They're increasing the number of hours, calling them on the cell phone, getting them to work from home. Another factor is the use of temporary workers and part time workers; there's a reluctance of the employer to take on new [full-time] employees until they're sure this is a recovery. …

You're right in the sense that we normally think of a down economy when unemployment is rising and GDP is going down. It's not true in this case—GDP is growing, employment is not. I guess we do need to say, Wait, we really need to think [about which one we're referring to]. It's a difference in how economists look at it—we look at it as GDP, the public looks at it as job opportunities. If it's the case that a recession is when you're neighbor loses his job and a depression is when you lose your job, who's looking at it depends on how bad it is. For the employed, this is a recovery.

Alan Blinder:  Whether the economy is "weak" or "strong" is strongly colored by the state of the job market. I'd characterize the economy now as pretty weak. … The current economic situation is decidedly weaker than last year, when consumer demand was looking good. Investment demand is not perking up.

Basically [economists] look at the markets for goods and services—what people and businesses are buying—the level of industrial activity, and the strength or weakness of the job market. … Sales, productivity, and employment. And of course, all three are related. Right now all three are weak, with the labor market being the weakest. … It's almost impossible for the economy to do strong in every area except the job market. …

The one major point [of my op-ed] was that people are too fixated on the stock market. … If all those three [indicators] are growing at pretty good rate, but the stock market is declining, you still have a strong economy. Conversely, if all those three are in a slump and the stock market is going up, it's a weak economy. Normally, if the stock market does well, the rest of the economy does well. But not always. In 1987, the stock market crashed, but the economy was fine.  … I think [the term "weak economy"] is too commonly identified with the stock market. I watch CNN Headline News, and at 19 minutes after the hour or whatever, you hear the music playing, and it's "Business and the Economy," and what I see is the New York Stock Exchange bell ringing, it's about the stock market.

Related:

DIGEST

For links with an *, you can enter "bcread" for both member name and password

• In an age of downsizing, perhaps it was inevitable that someone would try to shave the Seven Deadly Sins down to six. A French petition to the Pope to exonerate the word gourmandise from immoral status has raised a series of questions, says the New York Times. First, what exactly does gourmandise mean? More broadly, how sinful is gluttony? Most practically, when will the Academie Française weigh in, since they revise their dictionary at a glacial pace and they're currently on "M"?

Even Thomas Aquinas made a distinction between gluttony and what the French know as gourmandise, saying that gluttony denotes not a desire for eating and drinking but an inordinate desire. Dante, circumnavigating purgatory, didn't think gluttony as bad as, say, envy or pride. "Until the late 18th century, gourmandise was not connected solely with food," says Mr. Fayard, the historian. "Watteau said one must look at a painting with gourmandise."
http://nytimes.com/2003/03/06/arts/06GLUT.html*

• Even when we disagree with them, we try to grit our teeth and pray for our political leaders in Washington. But how often do we pray for our cultural leaders in Hollywood? Nun-turned-screenwriter Barbara Nicolosi is preaching a message of constructive engagement with Hollywood, says syndicated religion columnist Terry Mattingly. It's not enough for Christians to rant about the sex and violence in movies, Nicolosi says—it's time for Christians to witness through quality screenwriting. To that end, she's started a screenwriting seminar for Christians called Act One: Writing for Hollywood.

The entertainment industry needs diversity. It needs new talent, viewpoints, passion and stories. But [Nicolosi says] a creative sea change will not occur until churches grasp Hollywood's importance in American and global culture and—yes—even begin praying about it. She is part of a growing nondenominational effort to convince schools and ministries to get serious about creating real entertainment for real audiences, instead of cranking out Christian products that preach to the choir. http://tmatt.gospelcom.net/column/2003/02/26

Related from B&C:
My B&C review of David Dark's book on looking for illumination in popular culture
Earlier in this weblog: Chuck Colson on a theology of aesthetics for Christian marketing (second item here)
Book excerpt: Christians don't care for Christian entertainment, observes William Romanowski.

• Music was the discourse of boomer-dom in the 60s and 70s, and now that baby boomers are pushing 50 and 60, they're again finding their cultural voice in music. And it's the same music. Years after "oldies" stations proliferated on the radio dial, golden oldie artists are topping the charts in significant numbers, says the Washington Post. This nod to nostalgia is profitable for record executives, the Post says; boomers are less likely to circumvent the music industry via Internet downloads.

After years of focusing almost exclusively on the 25-and-under crowd, record labels are now marketing to the AARP set as never before, repackaging artists from the 1960s and 1970s, like Cat Stevens and Chicago, and pushing new projects by performers who supposedly peaked decades ago. And it is working. In the past 12 months, artists who have not had hit albums in a long time, among them James Taylor and Elton John, have been sharing the top of the charts with performers young enough to be their children.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14256-2003Feb15.html

• Society frowns on people who aren't outgoing. But introverts—those who find social interaction draining and thrive on solitude and contemplation—are people, too. They suffer from a lack of social awareness about introverts, says the Atlantic, which inserts a tongue-in-cheek comment about how being an introvert isn't a "choice" or a "lifestyle," but an "orientation."

Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? … If so, do you tell this person he is "too serious," or ask if he is okay? Regard him as aloof, arrogant, rude? Redouble your efforts to draw him out? If you answered yes to these questions, chances are that you have an introvert on your hands—and that you aren't caring for him properly.
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/03/rauch.htm

• Last week I commented (sixth item here) that although I think the case for war in Iraq is dubious, I thought the case against it was made too weakly by Stanley Hauerwas in a recent Time point-counterpoint. I was going to make up for that with this Anna Quindlen column in Newsweek, but then I found another decently-argued pro-war piece by the New York Times' William Safire, so this will be another point-counterpoint. But I will note my disappointment with President Bush's prime-time press conference on Iraq last week; his answer to many of the questions, no matter what they were, was a repetition of his profession of faithfulness to the U.S. Constitution and a reminder that Saddam once gassed his people. Not only was such sloganeering and evasiveness less than the public deserves at a truly complex moment in our foreign policy, but they are a poor way to improve on the legacy of slippery presidential communication left by Bill Clinton.

Quindlen: What is required of a nation that is not only the greatest democracy on earth at this moment, but the nation by which all other democratic attempts have been measured, the petri dish of individual freedom? That answer is clear: it must live up to its principles, not down to its enemies. The danger in having enormous power is that the ambition to use it for good can so often be subverted by the temptation to use it for dominance. The leader who occupies the high ground, or the bully wearing blinders: I am waiting to see to which nation I belong.

Safire: We are launching this attack, already too long delayed, primarily to defend ourselves. This is a response to reasonable fear. We know Saddam is developing terror weapons and is bound on vengeance; we know he has ties to terror organizations eager to use those weapons for more mass murder; we know he can bamboozle the U.N. inspectors again; we know Americans are terror's prime targets. That's plenty of reason to take him out.

Related:
NYT on a timely new periodical: the Journal of Military Ethics*

• Browsing: The occasionally unreadable Harper's scorns the readability of the NYT Magazine; the New Yorker examines how the John Walker Lindh case fell apart, and more from Slate's "In Other Magazines."
http://slate.msn.com/id/2079555

Nathan Bierma is editorial assistant of Books & Culture.

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