The Eutychus Perch by Hurricane at Hypocrisy.com

A few days ago I had the distinct privilege of visiting the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, where I learned a few things, as I always do at great museums.  I was puzzled by Goya’s painting of St.  Jerome as an ascetic in the desert, because he depicts that intellectual giant as something of a demented fanatic.  But I was also struck by the description accompanying a 19th-century painting of some peasants.  It pointed out that artists of that period often portrayed peasants because of the notion, current at that time, that the common people possessed some special wisdom.

That idea no doubt had its most immediate roots in the “noble savage” motif of the previous century, and of course with Romanticism came the theme of humankind in its relationship with nature.  The peasant was in closer contact with nature than the elite city dweller in the nature of the case, and nature for the Romantics was something alive and revelatory.  Just think of the “pathetic fallacy,” according to which nature could suffer or rejoice with people.  “It was a dark and stormy night . . . .”

But the theme goes back much farther than that.  Moses spends forty years in the sophisticated court of the Pharaoh, but comes into contact with Yahweh only in the wilderness after forty years as a shepherd.  David is called to be king as a young shepherd who has gleaned great wisdom in the fields around Bethlehem, which is where the New Testament then says the Savior was born, and that to a simple artisan and his wife.  To see what the New Testament thinks of the wisdom of simple folks, just look at Mary’s song in Luke 1:46-55.  It is a masterpiece of literary form, and I would dearly love to see it in what was probably the original Aramaic.  The first two chapters of Luke’s Gospel read as if they were translated from Aramaic or Hebrew, and some serious scholars theorize that Mary wrote them and handed them to Luke.  After that, Luke begins writing the polished Greek that one would expect of a more conventionally learned person.

Nor did the idea of peasant wisdom escape the artists of the Baroque and Counter Reformation periods.  In 1605, Miguel de Cervantes presented us with Don Quixote’s armor bearer, Sancho Panza, who has been called one of the greatest men created by man.  Don Quixote admits that he envies Sancho’s ability to recite the Spanish proverbs that encapsulate the wisdom of the ages for the illiterate (as has been well described by the great Colombian writer Manuel Zapata Olivella), and near the end of his adventures Don Quixote himself utters the famous line, “There are no birds this year in the nests of yesteryear.”

In the United States we have our own tradition of the unlearned but wise thinker.  Abraham Lincoln, among other presidents, came from simple and undistinguished stock, and it wasn’t so long ago that Eric Sevareid brought to our attention our “longshoreman philosopher,” Eric Hoffer, whose ideas I find immensely useful in analyzing today’s sociopolitical situation.

One of my favorite stories I cannot document, but I am assured that it is true.  It has to do with the University of Chicago Divinity School’s annual Baptist Appreciation Day.  One year it featured a picnic on the grass with the great theologian Paul Tillich as speaker.  Tillich, as I understand it, spent two hours proving that it is foolish to believe in the divinity of Christ.  When he was finished, he asked for questions from members of the clergy and their families below him.  An elderly black man stood up munching an apple and asked, “Mr.  Tillich, this apple I’m eating—can you tell me whether it’s bitter or sweet?”

“Of course I can’t,” retorted Tillich.  “I haven’t tasted your apple.”

“Uh, huh.  (Crunch, crunch.)  And neither have you tasted my sweet Jesus.”  The old man received an ovation and Tillich beat a hasty retreat.

It occurs to me, though, that our society may have come up with a dangerous twist on this issue.  A large percentage of the population distrusts, and even holds in contempt, the learning of the universities, and embraces instead whatever comes from the mouths of celebrities.  In one of his superb novels, Christopher Buckley has his protagonist’s car being passed on the beltway by limos occupied by the ambassadors of a couple of Hollywood stars, on their way to advise the president on foreign policy.  So much for peasant wisdom.

Even worse, in my opinion, is the tendency to “dress down,” with that phenomenon’s accompanying behavior, to the point that the young men in television commercials often look and act like blithering idiots who must have been found face down in the gutter in a pool of vomit.  In fact, I have called the tendency “gutter chic” for many years now.  If a man in a commercial, or in a popular sitcom, doesn’t look at least like an escaped convict, I suppose he isn’t credible.  At the same time, the same kind of people claim something like aristocratic status.  How about the T-shirts proclaiming that some uncouth person or group “rules”?  Just a bit hypocritical, wouldn’t you say?

Frustrated over a student who was bewildered on account of her bad grade and even more bewildered upon being told it was because she hadn’t read the text or taken notes in class, a colleague of mine in sociology remarked, “These kids don’t even understand process.”  That was in 1972, and it looks to me as if the phenomenon is a good deal more prominent now.  For that matter, back in 1927 the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (now almost forgotten because he was overly conservative) predicted that succeeding generations would enjoy the benefits of a liberal democracy without taking into account what it had cost their forebears.  Ortega said they would take it for granted that the benefits of democracy were theirs in the course of nature.  Ominously, this was nine years before the unspeakable horrors of the Spanish civil war.

He was right.  This postmodern generation tends to reject history in general, and is thereby in danger of fulfilling the prophecy of Will Durant:  “Those who do not know history are forever condemned to repeat it.” History is written by the winners, we’re told, and the implication is that it is therefore invalid.

Colombian author Gustavo Alvarez Gardeazábal once said, “History is written by the winners.  We losers write poetry.”  Shortly thereafter he was thrown into prison on a trumped-up charge and barely escaped with his life.  I’m anxious to see how the winners, i.e., the Colombian oligarchy, write that up, and what his “poetry” on the issue looks like.

So for this generation the lessons of the past are not lessons at all.  As a San Francisco high school instructor put it, “We don’t teach facts.  We teach concepts.”  The problem is that in such a case any idea of the past whatsoever is as good as any other.  A mind-boggling case in point is that of a graduate student at the University of California at Santa Barbara who remarked to my hypocrisy.com colleague Richard Cochrane that he was going to vote for Obama because he could be counted on to change the policies that caused us to drop atomic bombs on Japan so Japan had to retaliate by bombing Pearl Harbor.  These, he said, were the same policies that led England to invade Germany and cause World War II to break out in Europe.

Well, at least the chowderhead believes in cause and effect.  Just has it backwards is all, but you can’t expect too much these days.  Many in his generation have lost touch with that esoteric concept.  (Why doesn’t someone put billiards in the curriculum?)  Also in Santa Barbara, I noticed a large banner in a private school that read, “Actions have consequences.”  What a novel concept to teach the kids!  Living in the South as I now do, I marvel at the number of people, and mostly people who can’t afford it, who smoke.  The facts are out there:  cause, smoking; effect, early death.  But facts don’t have much impact on this generation.  As another professor put it, there are no facts.  There are only opinions.  That goes for process and cause and effect as well, one presumes.

Perhaps this is why a writer in the Atlantic a few years ago introduced the term “apocalyptic nihilism” to the magazine’s readers.  He had heard it voiced by social workers dealing with a rash of senseless teenage killings in Vermont around that time.  The kids said they were murdering people just to get their names in the news.  They felt that the world has no future, and therefore they have no future, so why not at least attract some attention?

We’re getting chillingly close to the attitude of Albert Camus’s protagonist, Meursault, in The Stranger.  Meursault sees no continuity, no process, no cause and effect in one’s acts.  He makes love to the same woman once a week, but is mystified by the question whether he loves her.  He is equally bewildered when people are offended by his lack of emotion at his mother’s wake.  Finally he kills a man in cold blood on a beach, and when he is put on trial he has no idea why.  But then, a couple of decades later, Thomas Pynchon’s narrator in Gravity’s Rainbow deals with the case of the classic paranoiac, who feels everything is connected and organized with regard to him- or herself.  Then he offers, “There is . . . also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.”

I’m not so sure.  In this election campaign it looks as if millions are in love with one image or another, without considering what the real issues might be, which means a lack of consideration for the effects that might follow the cause of electing only an image.  Both presidential candidates are promising change, but that’s just a bit hypocritical.  It’s a little like saying, “I promise that if you drink Liquid Plum’r you’ll get a real flavor sensation.”  In either case you just might not like it.

Me?  When I’m watching the World Series on television and a manager goes out to confer with his pitcher and catcher I’m afraid they’re talking about me.

“Calvinist by Free Choice” is a sign illustrating my last entry at this website. It’s a clever little piece of tomfoolery, because everyone knows Calvinists don’t believe in free choice, right?

Wrong.

As the conundrum is expounded by Jonathan Edwards, whom many even in the secular world hold to have been the greatest of all American philosophers, we humans have freedom, but not free will.

Got that? Think it’s double-talk? I once angered a hyper-Calvinist pastor by challenging his statement, “You don’t have any choice about whether you’re saved or not.” The fact that John Calvin was abundantly clear on the biblical doctrine that “whosoever will may come” failed to move him.

In any case, Calvin only wrote about a page and a half in his Institutes of the Christian Religion on predestination, which comes as a shock to many who, never having read him, take him to be the ogre of determinism. Calvinism might be the most misunderstood ideology in the world. Calvin’s view, as expounded by Edwards in his masterful Freedom of the Will, holds that every person has the ability to make choices, in other words, possesses the freedom to choose, but that each choice is determined by all the influences working on that person.

John Calvin, who had been expected to become one of the greats of French jurisprudence, laid down a principle for winning an argument:  Determine the most essential point of the issue under dispute and hammer away at it until your opponent has nowhere left to stand. In Freedom of the Will, Edwards does exactly that. The entire text consists of a close examination of a single act of the will. Edwards asks whether the person in question can be said to choose A or B without anything influencing that choice. In other words, is that will absolutely free to choose either alternative, without being moved in one direction or the other by anything at all, internal or external? He attempts to demonstrate that an affirmative answer is patently absurd because the free will advocate is postulating an effect without a cause. It is fairly obvious to most of us that any decision is moved by all the factors within the chooser’s psychological makeup.
Nevertheless, the person facing a choice is free to make that choice, and as such is responsible for it. Yes, says Edwards, this leaves us in an unresolvable mystery involving how a person can be condemned for making a choice determined by all the factors that have influenced his or her tendencies, but any other approach to the problem leads to difficulties which are as bad or worse.
Recently an individual with apparently solid credentials as an American historian made the statement that Calvinists are the most insecure of people because they believe it is impossible for anyone to know whether he or she is among the elect.  Curiously, Roman Catholics have traditionally faulted Calvinists for believing the exact opposite. To the Catholic it appears that the true Calvinist is arrogant in declaring his or her assurance of salvation. The truth is that Calvin taught that the appropriation of salvation by faith on the part of an individual constitutes proof that the individual is among the elect. Furthermore, he answered his Catholic critics, there is no arrogance to the acceptance of such an assurance, because the believer has done absolutely nothing to merit that salvation.
Still, the truth is that in colonial times in America the Calvinism that the Puritans and Separatists had brought from England decayed into what we call hyper-Calvinism, in which people really did believe they had no choice, and that no one could know who was among the elect. They came to believe that one had to prove one’s election to oneself and the community by being a diligent, hard-working person. Since such an attitude normally led to a certain affluence, that theory in turn deteriorated into a belief that the rich were good and the poor were bad. Needless to say, an enormous amount of damage was done by this ideology, because many came to believe the poor were unworthy of being helped or even treated with dignity.
Ironically, Marxism eventually crept into American thinking by degrees, with the result that quite often we are confronted with the idea that the poor are good and the rich are bad. The film Titanic is an excellent example. About the only upper class individual who is viewed in a positive light is the one who symbolically descends to steerage and dances and celebrates with the pure and innocent proletariat.
Neither of these extremes is anything but false and dangerous, of course, and Calvinism in its genuine form rejects them. I recall my first sight of a Presbyterian church in Bristol, Tennessee, a traditional one in that its membership was largely upper middle class. As I drove up I noticed that a very poorly dressed man was walking up the stairs. He was warmly welcomed and ushered in, as I recall, by the vice mayor, a judge and the CEO of the local Coca Cola bottling plant. That is genuine Calvinism in practice.
As an Orthodox Presbyterian friend wrote yesterday, “I’m thankful that God chose me and then freed me and empowered me to choose him.”

A few years ago I visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem with a group of Presbyterians.  “God’s frozen people” or not, a lot of tears were shed by those Calvinists, especially as we walked through the room dedicated to the children who were killed, whose names were continuously read through the speakers.  I dreaded hearing the name Samelson because I had heard from an older brother how their mother had chosen to go and die with her five-year-old girl rather than let her die alone at Treblinka.

One of the first “Righteous Gentiles” to be honored at the memorial was a Polish lady named Irena Sendler.  She had been a public health official in Warsaw during the Second World War, and so had access to the ghetto on account of an outbreak of tuberculosis or typhoid; sources differ.  She convinced many of the Jewish families to let her smuggle their children out and place them with Catholic families or in Catholic institutions, removing them in burlap sacks, caskets or whatever came to hand.  (Just imagine the terror of those children.)  She gave them new names and identity papers, but papers with their true identities were hidden under an apple tree in her yard.

Unfortunately, in the nature of the case not many of the parents survived to find those children.

Eventually—no doubt inevitably—she was caught by the Gestapo, imprisoned and mercilessly tortured, yet she refused to reveal the names of those working with her.  She managed to escape when a sympathetic organization bribed some guards.  One wonders how those guards managed to elude execution for letting prisoners go.  In all she managed to save some 2500 Jews, but she confessed that every day of her life she agonized over not having saved more.

One of the beautiful things that came out of her dedication was that when she was in a hospital later in life she was cared for by one of the people whose lives she had saved.

To my knowledge, hypocrisy first entered the scene when, in 1965, she was asked to visit Jerusalem to be honored at the Yad Vashem Memorial, and the Communist government of Poland refused to let her go.  Only years later was she finally able to travel there and receive the award.  Perhaps more tellingly, she was nominated for a Nobel Prize.  She did not win the prize.  It was won by Al Gore for a film he made of a slide show.

Those of us who work with the literature of Latin America are accustomed to hearing of such injustice by the Nobel Committee with regard to the prize for literature.  Sometimes it has been won by third-rate writers, and we wondered why.  Then we realized that several Latin American authors in a row who won the prize had exactly one thing in common:  they had attacked the United Fruit Company.  Yes, there were a couple of excellent writers in there, namely Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez.  But who in his or her right mind would award the Nobel Prize for Literature to a Miguel Angel Asturias when Jorge Luis Borges, who influenced the literature of much of the world, was ignored?

The fact is that Borges was relatively conservative in his political views, and thus was among those essentially blacklisted by the committee.  The same is true of a writer I have mentioned before in this column, Alvaro Mutis, who, according to García Márquez, has been writing better than he has for a couple of decades now.  Mutis, as I have noted, is a monarchist.  Don’t ask for Vegas odds on whether a snowball has a better chance in hell than Mutis has of winning a Nobel.

At some point one might come to believe that the prestige of a given prize just might be compromised by its consistent political bias when dealing with artists.  Or one of the greatest of the real heroes of World War II, for that matter.