January 17, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

A shield, not a sword

A person in medieval full armor, including noseguard and chainmail. Sword is raised and so is the shield. — Photo credit: Henry Hustava

Aspiring clerical aristocrats debase the idea of religious freedom when they use it as a tool to seek exemptions from the generally applicable laws of the United States—particularly those that prohibit discrimination.

Religious freedom and civil rights are complementary values and legal principles necessary to sustain and advance equality for all.” —Fred Clarkson, January 3, 2017

In her book Enfleshing Freedom, M. Shawn Copeland argues that freedom is an enabling state: it liberates us to step more deeply into community, to interact with other people and with the world around us. It enables us to mutually care, serve, and be served. As free people we are free to live with more vulnerability and less fear.

I’ve been baffled by ongoing Christian attempts to carve out legal permissions to withdraw from community, to reject opportunities to serve people in our society, and to deny calls to hospitality, generosity, and compassion.

I’m also not all that different from the people I’m talking about.

A few months ago I mentioned that one of my recurring clients had folded into his work some text from a church official who had spent the preceding few months campaigning for the continued criminalization of LGBTQ people’s relationships in his country. The official is the kind of person who wants non-heterosexual people to slink away to the edges of society, and as such he’s not the kind of person I would want a client relationship with.

Rather than dumping the project and disadvantaging my client, however, I decided to breathe through it, and not charge them.

I’m not sure whether this is the only possible community-preserving solution I had, and I’d love to hear how others have handled similar scenarios.

But what I did helped me to respect the relationship I’ve had with my client, do something kind for a third party, and apply a few of my beliefs. Community, real community, is awkward, unpleasant, and grey from time to time. It’s not always as clearly defined as it sometimes looks in retrospect, or from a distance. In the moment, a confrontation might absolutely be the right thing. It also might not.

In community, we can vigorously disagree. Some members of my family, for instance, have horrendous beliefs about me and my groups. That has consequences. For a start, it makes fellowship difficult: toxicity isn’t easily repressed.

So whereas I no longer feel compelled to spend all my free time with people who can only digest slivers of my life, I’m also not at peace with doing what some Christians are striving to do—get a government pass to turn the Other away at the door.

There’s something about Christianity that calls me to serve without partiality. And this isn’t even a modern teaching; it’s part of the book of James.

So that’s one area where I part ways with the Christians seeking to carve out state exemptions for themselves and asserting the “right” to refuse to serve.

Here’s another: they’re not evaluating the quality of the relationship between two people who want to commemorate their anniversary with good photographs. They’re looking at the genders and/or legal status of the couple and making assumptions about what those facts mean. In the end they don’t care whether the couple’s relationship is sound; they’re only distressed that the couple has a relationship at all.

I empathize with artists as much as I value my own skills. I’m careful about the projects I apply my skills to and not every opportunity fits for me. But I can’t imagine using someone’s social categories as my basis for choosing. And I can’t imagine asking my government to back me up if I did do that.

The state should have better things to do than facilitate our prejudices. There’s also no turning back now: we’re very firmly post-1964 and living in plural societies with the ability to have neighborly relationships that draw our prejudices from unconsciousness into broad daylight.

We live, study, form families, and work alongside people who may appear vastly different from us, and we also have the blessed opportunity to learn from and with those people. Shutting them not only out of our personal lives but also out of our commercial lives is a bold way to squander connection and to waste the freedom that frees us to be more tender-hearted to one another, not less so in the name of God.

If you really keep the royal law found in Scripture, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’ you are doing right.” —James 2:8

August 2, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Principles of Deep Ecology

A photo of the Grand Canyon, Arizona, from the South Rim. It is an early afternoon, with a deep blue sky. There are few clouds. The canyon shadows are grey and purple. The view is framed by deep green tree branches and brush. — The Grand Canyon, Arizona, late afternoon. Photo credit: Keisha E. McKenzie

I’m learning about deep ecology, a philosophy that argues for the inherent value of life on our planet and argues that once we accept that inherent value we have the responsibility to act in ways that affirm it.

Deep ecology, launched in 1984, has eight principles:

All human and nonhuman life has intrinsic value
This life is naturally diverse and that diversity is also an inherent value.
Survival is the only justification for limiting diversity.
Human and nonhuman flourishing may require fewer people.
Humans have damaged the nonhuman world and continue to do so.
We must change, comprehensively.
Our change can include changing our definitions of what quality of life means.
We are required to act.

So far, the principle I find most troublesome is the fourth.

The Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy explains deep ecology’s religious and philosophical sources, as well as philosophers’ criticisms of it. The entry also notes that deep ecology may have become passé within its first decade.

It seems like the 1980s, 1990s, and very early 2000s were the heyday for grand unitary theories. I’d love to check in with my systems theory friends on when they think that spotlight began to fade, and why. (See, for example, Stuart Umpleby.)

I’ve not yet seen another attempt at the scale of deep ecology to generate a multi-source philosophy for responsible stewardship of life on Earth. People come to a sense of Must Do Something about the climate, the environment, or more local issues of pollution, energy, and resource use, and they come to it from so many different starting points. There isn’t just one faith, ethical tradition, or values system that brings people to concern, and there can’t just be one rational basis for action. We aren’t, after all, all alike, and we don’t have to become so.

If we aren’t willing to compel people into compliance of thought, yet we need people to choose new courses of action than their current disconnected motivators provide, it’s well worth considering the combination of faiths, ethics, and values available to get us all where we need to go.

Incommensurability means that these sources may never be fully coherent. An apple will never be an orange, we love each in part because they aren’t the other fruit, and each one has elements that aren’t analogous to anything in the other. And while some find it threatening that people might choose to use both apple-beliefs and orange-philosophies in a single moral kitchen, our nutritional needs are complex enough that more than one kind of fruit is valuable.

When I visited the Grand Canyon earlier this year, I noticed a combination of state land preservation (via the National Park Service) and religious expressions of awe (via whomever posted a hand-painted verse from Psalm 104).

A paint-lettered wooden plaque mounted on the stone wall, overlooking the brightly lit South Rim, Grand Canyon. — On the South Rim. Photo credit: Keisha E. McKenzie

Perhaps some Canyon visitors take offense to this juxtaposition. I don’t know the history of the plaque or whether it’ll stay mounted where it is. But the more that I think about it, I can’t think of anything more illustrative of all the ways we come to attention, concern, and action, and how little we need to marginalize one way over others.

October 11, 2013 By Keisha McKenzie

Pluralism and Individualism: Links and Videos

Just in time for your weekend viewing: links and videos on leadership, space negotiation, and consumerism in contemporary plural societies.

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Inset from Carrol Grady's "Baby Quilt for Samuel Joseph" (2009) — Inset from Carrol Grady’s “Baby Quilt for Samuel Joseph” (2009)

Nilofer Merchant, in Time and Gawker columns on board-level diversity at social technology companies:

Innovation is a direct result of openness to new ideas. The key is to design for differences of perspective and world views so you can have a better chance at new ideas.

“All innovation is a derivative of ideas and especially new ideas,” added Merchant, who serves on the boards of both public and private companies. “What [the companies are] saying is I’m gonna work under my same old, same old. And same thinking leads to parrot ideas, which ultimately leads to failure.”

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Aryeh Cohen explains why he’s conflicted about Israel’s Women of the Wall, a group of observant Jewish women who’ve been protesting their sometimes forcible exclusion from prayer at the Western Wall of the Temple Mount (the Kotel ha-Ma’aravi):

This is the beginning of the story of the modern Kotel, out of which grows the story of the women of Women of the Wall, who demand equal ritual access to it. The silences in that historic story prevent me from praying at the Wall and from supporting the women who want to wear tallit and tefillin when they pray there. —Aryeh Cohen

Cohen’s concern reminds me of Native American/Indian and immigrant activists in Canada and the US who argue that new immigrants inherit the settlers’ burden to reckon with the cultures that the emergent United States displaced and that remain marginal here.

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Adam Curtis’ four-part documentary, The Century of the Self (2002), charts the evolution of individualism through the 20th Century by describing the influence of Freudian psychology on modern public relations and politics.

Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew led PR to shift toward correlating commercial products and symbols representing consumers’ emotions, desires, and irrational beliefs about themselves.

Adam Curtis: What Bernays had created was the idea that if a woman smoked, it made her more powerful and independent, an idea that still persists today… It meant that irrelevant objects could become powerful emotional symbols of how you wanted to be seen by others.

Peter Strauss: Eddie Bernays saw the way to sell product was not to sell it to your intellect, that you ought to buy an automobile, but that you will feel better about it if you have this automobile. I think he originated that idea, that they weren’t just purchasing something, but they were engaging themselves emotionally or personally in the product or service… That was his contribution.

This Vimeo link contains all four fascinating episodes, “Happiness Machines,” “The Engineering of Consent,” “There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed,” and “Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering.”

Run-time is just under four hours, so budget about an hour for each.

pluralism

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