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Thinking back over a week that included national politics and the death of a much-adored retired professor who was mentor to many of my minimal number of friends, I realize anew just how much and how desperately we long to cling to a single consistent and simple story.
“Consistent” is good; “simple” is not. That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it, but the story has a lot of pre-modern paradoxes and postmodern plot twists.
The mentor in question had, I’m sure, an immensely complex inner life that translated into a fairly small number of publicly expressed virtues and vices. As was said at Robert Detweiler’s memorial service, he was a deeply generous and in many ways selfless “hedonistic Mennonite” who transformed the lives of his students in fundamental ways, from scholarly approaches to entire life trajectories; someone who was capable in the 1960s of taking television and contemporary novels equally seriously, on levels that wouldn’t be academically respectable for another quarter-century, and without denying the existence of levels of aesthetic complexity. He simply thought that fiction could be profitably discussed in terms of camera angles, and TV shows in terms of deeply serious theology. He invited us to consider the depths in the apparently silly, and the silliness in the apparently deep. The world was never as we believed it was, or as we believed it wasn’t.
Of course, he fully acknowledged, and pointed us to, the writers who had already thought similar things and who were pushing the ideas forward, but Detweiler was advancing the multidiscipline-to-be right before our eyes and ears. (And had he and we been born a few decades later, he would have added our noses and tongues and fingers in the same playfully analytical way. It was implicit in his practice and in his theory, but he never quite figured out how to make the links that we today still have not quite managed. As an earlier figure whom I often quote put it, “We cannot yet manage such simultaneities.”)
Paul Tillich had some of the same virtues and vices all those decades ago, but Bob Detweiler was already worlds and leagues beyond Tillich in terms of taking the language of literature as a mode of revelation; and Detweiler’s appreciation of the world at large was flawed, if it was, only by his failure to internalize the deepest implications of his transmutations of moral earnestness into a fondness for jokes and really good restaurants.
Like other of my mentors, Detweiler typically expressed his multitude of insights unsystematically in personal encounters and classroom sessions, and what he put down on paper was even less a representation of his full intellectual contribution than is the case with teachers who said outright, “I’m not a writer.”
Detweiler did write, and often, but what he wrote (I originally typed in error, “we wrote”) is far less than what he thought, explored, and often left for others to explore more deeply, as he himself lost interest and went on to the next topic he didn’t yet understand. As he said of one graduate seminar, sometimes he was about two weeks out in front of his students.
But he was always out in front or right there beside us, nudging us along in our own insights, and to my knowledge he never declared, as another graduate professor did at the end of a difficult seminar, that he had decided that the whole hypothesis with which we had struggled all semester was actually nonsense. For Detweiler, there was always some kind of sense to be made even out of seeming absurdity.
I bring this up in a forum in which some of my handful of readers never encountered Detweiler, because thinking about how his story has been told in this past week, and how political stories have been told in the past week, has given me new insight into the politico-mystical groups that interest me and about whom I have written so often (and obliquely).
A few of the groups in question seemed to embrace politically progressive agendas that were far ahead of their respective centuries (or at least their decades), heterodox religious beliefs that justified or simply existed adjacent to the progressive social beliefs, and a welter of contradictory statements and actions that suggest that they couldn’t possibly have meant what they said, or believed what they claimed, or actually done the marvelous things that men (and sometimes one or two women) say that they did.
And because (as we know) each one of us offers opinions filtered through our permanent hidden prejudices, the socialists insist that they were proto-socialists pretending to be mystics, the mystics that they were mystics living out the deep implications of traditional religious beliefs, the psychologists that they were really psychologists avant le lettre, the artists that they were artists and poets making up artworks that included philosophy, and we could go on and on and on.
So why are we so enamored of the single consistent story? Why couldn’t these people be at least as comprehensibly inconsistent as our own mentors were? Why couldn’t a great mystic be sometimes in contact with something real out there, sometimes self-deluded, often blinkered by his own upbringing, and sometimes in possession of truths about humanity that wouldn’t become academically respectable for another three or ten centuries? Why couldn’t a great religious teacher sometimes be transmitting something genuinely transcendent and sometimes be a total idiot?
Why couldn’t a mystical group simultaneously hit upon the truths of mutual aid, a few intuitions of the physical sciences to come, a couple of real transmutations of ossified religious views of their time, and a lot of sheer, utter nonsense?
Why are we eternally wedded to binary views of the universe? Choose ye this day, which ye will serve…well, yes, one often has to, unless one sits it out as with Karl Kraus’s “If I must choose the lesser of two evils, I shall choose neither.”
But apart from service to historical forces already underway, there are few enough unambiguous crossroads in a garden of forking paths where the road less traveled often circles right back to the main highway.
And sometimes “a plague on both your houses” makes no difference to the outcome, though sometimes it gets dictators democratically elected.
But I wonder why we so readily insist a complex movement or a complex personality must either be a mask for a hidden agenda, or hypocritical rather than unable to reconcile the usual mix of noble and ignoble motives. (It ain’t hypocrisy if you never claimed to be the thing other folks think you are.)
This could lead to my commentary on the American presidential election, but I won’t go there, except to express my irritation with the absolutists who say “there is no difference at all between the parties.” There is remarkably little difference between their rhetoric, yes, because both are appealing to the same unconscious fears and hopes and desires of the undecided electorate. And both are already bought and sold in ways that ensure that their respective promises will not be fully delivered, or delivered in ways that benefit the folks who helped win the election.
But idiotic absolutism masquerading as moral purity irritates me regardless of the political tendency from which it emanates. One doesn’t have to be wedded to Realpolitik to see that the recognition of mixed motives does not result in the dreaded “moral equivalency.” As with cakes and cocktails, some mixes are more palatable and sophisticated than others.
“Consistent” is good; “simple” is not. That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it, but the story has a lot of pre-modern paradoxes and postmodern plot twists.
The mentor in question had, I’m sure, an immensely complex inner life that translated into a fairly small number of publicly expressed virtues and vices. As was said at Robert Detweiler’s memorial service, he was a deeply generous and in many ways selfless “hedonistic Mennonite” who transformed the lives of his students in fundamental ways, from scholarly approaches to entire life trajectories; someone who was capable in the 1960s of taking television and contemporary novels equally seriously, on levels that wouldn’t be academically respectable for another quarter-century, and without denying the existence of levels of aesthetic complexity. He simply thought that fiction could be profitably discussed in terms of camera angles, and TV shows in terms of deeply serious theology. He invited us to consider the depths in the apparently silly, and the silliness in the apparently deep. The world was never as we believed it was, or as we believed it wasn’t.
Of course, he fully acknowledged, and pointed us to, the writers who had already thought similar things and who were pushing the ideas forward, but Detweiler was advancing the multidiscipline-to-be right before our eyes and ears. (And had he and we been born a few decades later, he would have added our noses and tongues and fingers in the same playfully analytical way. It was implicit in his practice and in his theory, but he never quite figured out how to make the links that we today still have not quite managed. As an earlier figure whom I often quote put it, “We cannot yet manage such simultaneities.”)
Paul Tillich had some of the same virtues and vices all those decades ago, but Bob Detweiler was already worlds and leagues beyond Tillich in terms of taking the language of literature as a mode of revelation; and Detweiler’s appreciation of the world at large was flawed, if it was, only by his failure to internalize the deepest implications of his transmutations of moral earnestness into a fondness for jokes and really good restaurants.
Like other of my mentors, Detweiler typically expressed his multitude of insights unsystematically in personal encounters and classroom sessions, and what he put down on paper was even less a representation of his full intellectual contribution than is the case with teachers who said outright, “I’m not a writer.”
Detweiler did write, and often, but what he wrote (I originally typed in error, “we wrote”) is far less than what he thought, explored, and often left for others to explore more deeply, as he himself lost interest and went on to the next topic he didn’t yet understand. As he said of one graduate seminar, sometimes he was about two weeks out in front of his students.
But he was always out in front or right there beside us, nudging us along in our own insights, and to my knowledge he never declared, as another graduate professor did at the end of a difficult seminar, that he had decided that the whole hypothesis with which we had struggled all semester was actually nonsense. For Detweiler, there was always some kind of sense to be made even out of seeming absurdity.
I bring this up in a forum in which some of my handful of readers never encountered Detweiler, because thinking about how his story has been told in this past week, and how political stories have been told in the past week, has given me new insight into the politico-mystical groups that interest me and about whom I have written so often (and obliquely).
A few of the groups in question seemed to embrace politically progressive agendas that were far ahead of their respective centuries (or at least their decades), heterodox religious beliefs that justified or simply existed adjacent to the progressive social beliefs, and a welter of contradictory statements and actions that suggest that they couldn’t possibly have meant what they said, or believed what they claimed, or actually done the marvelous things that men (and sometimes one or two women) say that they did.
And because (as we know) each one of us offers opinions filtered through our permanent hidden prejudices, the socialists insist that they were proto-socialists pretending to be mystics, the mystics that they were mystics living out the deep implications of traditional religious beliefs, the psychologists that they were really psychologists avant le lettre, the artists that they were artists and poets making up artworks that included philosophy, and we could go on and on and on.
So why are we so enamored of the single consistent story? Why couldn’t these people be at least as comprehensibly inconsistent as our own mentors were? Why couldn’t a great mystic be sometimes in contact with something real out there, sometimes self-deluded, often blinkered by his own upbringing, and sometimes in possession of truths about humanity that wouldn’t become academically respectable for another three or ten centuries? Why couldn’t a great religious teacher sometimes be transmitting something genuinely transcendent and sometimes be a total idiot?
Why couldn’t a mystical group simultaneously hit upon the truths of mutual aid, a few intuitions of the physical sciences to come, a couple of real transmutations of ossified religious views of their time, and a lot of sheer, utter nonsense?
Why are we eternally wedded to binary views of the universe? Choose ye this day, which ye will serve…well, yes, one often has to, unless one sits it out as with Karl Kraus’s “If I must choose the lesser of two evils, I shall choose neither.”
But apart from service to historical forces already underway, there are few enough unambiguous crossroads in a garden of forking paths where the road less traveled often circles right back to the main highway.
And sometimes “a plague on both your houses” makes no difference to the outcome, though sometimes it gets dictators democratically elected.
But I wonder why we so readily insist a complex movement or a complex personality must either be a mask for a hidden agenda, or hypocritical rather than unable to reconcile the usual mix of noble and ignoble motives. (It ain’t hypocrisy if you never claimed to be the thing other folks think you are.)
This could lead to my commentary on the American presidential election, but I won’t go there, except to express my irritation with the absolutists who say “there is no difference at all between the parties.” There is remarkably little difference between their rhetoric, yes, because both are appealing to the same unconscious fears and hopes and desires of the undecided electorate. And both are already bought and sold in ways that ensure that their respective promises will not be fully delivered, or delivered in ways that benefit the folks who helped win the election.
But idiotic absolutism masquerading as moral purity irritates me regardless of the political tendency from which it emanates. One doesn’t have to be wedded to Realpolitik to see that the recognition of mixed motives does not result in the dreaded “moral equivalency.” As with cakes and cocktails, some mixes are more palatable and sophisticated than others.
