jabel

Here in the heart of IU country, it would be hard to overstate the excitement about the football championship game on Monday. It’s been building all season. I am perpetually uninterested in sports, but even I started watching as they neared the end of the regular season undefeated.

For those who don’t know: Indiana University has traditionally been a basketball and soccer school. As of two years ago, they had the highest number of losses for any Division 1 football team in history. Apart from a very few years, they’ve always been varying shades of bad. But they got a new coach, Curt Cignetti, two years ago and he initiated a stunning turnaround. Though they did well last year, this year has been amazing. They’re one game away from being the undefeated college football champions.

I was in the dentist’s office this morning and I could hear the hygienists all asking their patients if they’re going to be watching the game. Everyone everywhere is asking everyone they meet if they’ll be watching the game. The answer is, unanimously, yes. At our staff meeting this morning our boss asked us for score predictions, with promises of a prize for the closest answer. Everyone is wearing IU gear. An elementary school child got nationwide attention for writing to the Indiana governor asking him to give schools a two hour delay on the Tuesday morning after the game. He decided to leave it up to individual corporations–and a few are doing it. There are reportedly enormous lines on campus for the free rally towels they’ve been handing out before each game. These are just a few things that have come to my (again, typically uninterested) ears. I’m sure there’s much, much more.

It really is great fun, especially in a time of grim news. I’m glad I’ve been keeping up with it in recent weeks. It’ll be one of those things that people around here will remember for many years to come.

This morning I read a section in The Amish Way discussing the prohibition of business on Sunday and it reminded me of a similar practice in the Holiness churches I grew up in.

The Holiness people lived by a strict set of behavioral and clothing rules they called the holiness standards. Not Amish-level strict, but they made folks noticeable. These were (nearly) universal and violation of the standards was considered sin.

There were also some disagreements between churches about rules considered at the level of holiness standards—wedding rings, for example. Jewelry was universally held to be sinful. Some folks made exceptions, though, for wedding rings. Fellowship was typically continued in the spirit of “agree to disagree.” At the same time, while some of the strictest churches would fellowship with some of the less-strict ones, they might not allow members of those less-strict churches on their pulpit (also known as the “platform” in other churches).

(Aside: Rachel and I were not married with wedding rings. When we left those churches, we bought first a cheap JC Penney set and then a set from a divorced friend. We wore them for a few years but we never had an emotional connection to them. And they were uncomfortable. So for the last several years we’re once again ringless. In all those ringless years, not a single woman has tried to pick me up! So strange!)

So there were universal standards and standards about which there was disagreement. There were also “personal convictions.” These were matters of conscience for an individual, and were not to be imposed on others. Depending on the person and the strength of the conviction, they may or may not have believed that it was a matter of sin if they failed in them. A classic example here is the refusal to eat in a restaurant that severed alcohol.

Another example was “Sunday dealing,” a.k.a., buying or selling on the Sabbath. For people who held this conviction, it also necessarily entailed the refusal of Sunday work. There were also some people who refused to work on Sunday but would certainly go to Long John Silver’s after church. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

The ban on Sunday dealing was always a minority position in my time there and I suspect it is held by even fewer now. I don’t say this with any blame, simply with interest in how these things change over time.

Though taking a day off the money economy probably wouldn’t be the worst thing…

Byung-Chul Han is very quotable. From Psycho-Politics:

Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon isolated inmates from each other for disciplinary purposes and prevented them from interacting. In contrast, the occupants of today’s digital panopticon actively communicate with each other and willingly expose themselves. That is, they collaborate in the digital panopticon’s operations. Digital control society makes intensive use of freedom. This can only occur thanks to voluntary self-illumination and self-exposure (Selbstausleuchtung und Selbstentblößung). Digital Big Brother outsources operations to inmates, as it were. Accordingly, data is not surrendered under duress so much as offered out of an inner need. That is why the digital panopticon proves so efficient.

A couple of pages later:

Neoliberalism makes citizens into consumers. The freedom of the citizen yields to the passivity of the consumer. As consumers, today’s voters have no real interest in politics – in actively shaping the community. They possess neither the will nor the ability to participate in communal, political action. They react only passively to politics: grumbling and complaining, as consumers do about a commodity or service they do not like. Politicians and parties follow this logic of consumption too. They have to ‘deliver’. In the process, they become nothing more than suppliers; their task is to satisfy voters who are consumers or customers.

The transparency demanded of politicians today is anything but a political demand. Transparency is not called for in political decision-making processes; no consumer is interested in that. Instead, and above all, the imperative of transparency serves to expose or unmask politicians, to make them an item of scandal. The call for transparency presupposes occupying the position of a shocked spectator. It is not voiced by engaged citizens so much as by passive onlookers. Participation now amounts to grievance and complaint. With that, the society of transparency, inhabited by onlookers and consumers, has given rise to a spectator democracy.

This “spectator democracy” is entirely different from the politics described by Teddy Macker in which political thought is (in the words of Wendell Berry) “a continuous asking how best to conduct oneself as a member of a community or a polity.”

Currently reading:

• The Amish Way by Kraybill, Nolt, Weaver-Zercher

Finished reading:

• Against the Wind: Eberhard Arnold and the Bruderhof by Markus Baum. Engaging biography. Will be reading more about the Bruderhof.
• Becoming Anabaptist by J. Denny Weaver. Focused on the Reformation era. Historical books often lose my interest (my fault, not theirs) but this one did not.

Future plans:

• More by Kraybill
• The Politics of Jesus by John Howard Yoder. My reading log says I read this in February 2011. Around the same time I read Nonviolence by Kurlansky, An Ethic for Christians by Stringfellow, A Confession by Tolstoy, and some others that tell me what was on my mind fifteen years ago.

Abandoned:

• The Naked Anabaptist by Stuart Murray. Wasn’t what I was looking for.
• The Anabaptist Story by William Estep. Nothing wrong with it. It’s just that Becoming Anabaptist grabbed my attention and two books on Reformation-era Anabaptists would be overkill for my purposes.

Why am I doing this? Now and then (once a year or so?), I feel a surge of new, loosely-connected interests. Sometimes this results in some new ideas and sometimes it just adds to my store of useless knowledge. I’ve learned to go with it.

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

• Profile of Jack Baumgartner in Plough: “Downstairs, I start the hot water for coffee. I stir the coals in the wood stove we heat our home with, remove some ashes, and place two mulberry logs on the embers to ignite. This is priestly work and an art near to my heart, maintaining a fire for my family. It is a part of my worship.”
• “Farming the Universe.” Much the same material as above, but written by Jack himself.
• Baumgartner websites: Baumwerk and The School of the Transfer of Energy

Today I learned about the tolstoyans. I knew about Tolstoy’s beliefs here but I was unaware that there were attempts at building a movement specifically based on Tolstoy. Reproducing Markus Baum’s footnote:

Regarding the tolstoyans: Count Leo Tolstoy, the great nineteenth-century Russian novelist and thinker, taught that the meaning of life could be found through the literal application of Christ’s teachings, especially the Sermon on the Mount. Tolstoy sought to rescue the true teachings of Christ from what he perceived to be the irrelevant, irrational doctrines of faith. He emphasized the creed of absolute nonresistance (thus, incidentally, Tolstoy made a profound impression on Gandhi). This creed included the abhorrence of physical force, detestation of legalized exploitation of the poor, condemnation of private property (because ownership was secured by force), and a rejection of government (since it existed primarily for the sake of the rich and powerful). Many of Tolstoy’s followers banded into colonies, but Tolstoy himself distrusted such organized efforts, and most colonies did not last long.

Tolstoy’s distrust of organized efforts reminds me of another writer who distrusted movements. The same guy who said:

When they asked me to join them I wouldn’t,
and then went off by myself and did more
than they would have asked. ‘Well, then,’ they said
‘go and organize the International Brotherhood
of Contraries,’ and I said, ‘Did you finish killing
everybody who was against peace?’ So be it.