Quite often, the Creator in Judeo-Christian tradition is referred to as “Father,” but that doesn’t really capture the immense readjustment the character of God goes through in the first books of the Bible. God’s first action is to create the universe, but as the story progresses, he loses quite a bit of control. After all, humans make the choice to eat of the forbidden fruit, and it all goes downhill from there. By the time that Noah has a family of his own, God has a group of teenagers, essentially, destroying his creation. Not exactly an auspicious beginning for something that was created in his image.
The problem, like always, is free will. Really, it’s the same reason that people have problems with the First Amendment today. It’s easy to let someone make decisions when all of their decisions agree with yours, but when that someone else is, say, Westboro Baptist, freedom of speech becomes significantly less appealing, but no less important. Or, if you’d like to look more internationally, it’s easy to not bomb a country when they believe that apple pie, civil liberties, baseball, and the Fourth of July are good things.
But true free will must not be intimidated, if it is to be truly free. When God is confronted with a world that has gone wrong, his first instinct is to destroy (an instinct he repeats several times throughout Genesis, in fact, if we are to look forward to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah). So he gathers his faithful together on the ark with enough supplies to last them for the journey.
When the floods are over, before God renews his covenant with Noah and his family, he says:
“I will not again damn the soil on humankind’s score. For the devisings of the human heart are evil from youth. And I will not again strike down all living things as I did. As long as all the days of the earth— seedtime and harvest and cold and heat and summer and winter and day and night shall not cease.” (Alter, Genesis 8)
First of all, God does not believe that he has eradicated evil through the flood. Rather, he takes the pessimistic view that there will still be evil in the human heart. But he still decides not to “strike down every living thing.” God makes a conscious decision not to overreact, as it were. Alter’s notes in his translation emphasis the oath-like nature of the repetition. I will not again, I will not again. But there is also the promise of the seasons. Here, God is not saying that he will leave the seasons the way that they are, with their ebb and flow. There will be a balance, as the paired phrases suggest, but it will not be interrupted.
In the next chapter, God affirms this silent pledge with Noah:
My bow I have set in the clouds to be a sign of the covenant between Me and the earth, and so, when I send clouds over the earth, the bow will appear in the cloud. Then I will remember My covenant, between Me and you and every living creature of all flesh, and the waters will no more become a Flood to destroy all flesh. (Alter, Genesis 9)
The language God uses here is very much about the excess. It is too much to “destroy all flesh,” and to punish everything for the sins of a few. This is not a lesson that will carry through all of the time, but it is a start. God the character is starting to learn that just because you can blow up the world doesn’t mean you should.
But what do the limits an omnipotent god places on his powers have to do with anything else? For the past seventy years, we have been wrestling with the idea of the atomic bomb. Like the flood, it has an ability to destroy everything in a great deal of excess.
Even the survivors experienced long term effects, especially when it comes to cancer (Kodama et al). Ever since the first bomb, we as a national consciousness have been debating whether it was justifiable, and whether they would ever be a cause to use it again. In the world we live in today, where men wield God-like power, it becomes important for us to look at the lessons of Genesis not only from the vantage point of the follower, but also from the viewpoint of the leader. For, as Genesis 9 points out, we have power over the earth. In this power, we must find the strength to be responsible, however, and to refuse to let what we can do affect our judgment of what we should do.
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Kazunori Kodama, Fumiyoshi Kasagi, Yukiko Shimizu, Nobuo Nishi, Midori Soda, Akihiko Suyama, Toshiteru Okubo. “Long-term health consequences of atomic bomb radiation: RERF Life Span StudyInternational.” Congress Series, Volume 1299, February 2007, Pages 73–80 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ics.2006.09.011
Featured image is “odi et amo” by MyMaSs
Interesting, but it seems as if you’re taking for granted what Steiner spends so much time wrestling with – i.e., whether or not God has the right to destroy his creation, or if he is in any way answerable to man. Between ascribing “God-like power” to man and assuming the constraints of human morality on God, is there anything left to differentiate “God the character” from man?
I read through each person’s blog. For reasons I’ll provide in person, some of them here, I respond to each of you in two principal ways. First, with some general remarks. Here is the first. Second, with remarks informed by your unique contribution thus far. Among those reasons: why we have blogs in the first place, what are blogs doing in a college course, their relation to our learning, reflections on your unique style, command of course texts, facility with sources, your blend of sources, popular and otherwise. General remarks appear on each person’s blogs; they are not consigned to obscurity. That too deserves illumination.
After much deliberation, successful and less successful experiments in/with writing, after sharing with a small upper level seminar the possibilities of course writing on wordpress.com, I spoke with you of what we could do in our course, neither an introduction nor a seminar, were we to take a similar route. Criticisms of our endeavors surely abound, whether we are in the vicinity of them or not. Let us enumerate them. These aren’t college essays. To which we might ask in response, what is? Are we in agreement about the form of an essay in English, politics, classics, philosophy, religion, economics, and biology? Is that form academic? If so, what does that mean? How does one write academically? For the majority of you this is not inconsequential. You are not going to be academics, though surely you will be in one way or another informed by what takes place in universities. In a blink of an eye, you’ll be sending your kids to college. And where might that be?
Let us take the in academy. No blog by nature of being a blog precludes the academic. That a blog goes “live” and to an audience of non-academic changes the voice, tone, and feel of writing. Granted. No longer is the “college essay” a private transaction between one student and his or her professor. We are each responsible to an audience. Not everyone. We do not write for everyone. We do write for one another, we members of our classes. We write in the context of a college course and thus for our peers. We write for other teachers quietly looking in. Administrators. Friends and family. Alumni. Prospective students. No longer the transaction of one student and one teacher, ventilating our prose may help us write deliberately.
We wonder what social media is doing to “students.” What could it do for “teachers.” Well, here is a response to essays that would have remained private. That is not altogether true. Would a professor comment publically in the same way as he might privately? Remember, no one is saying that everything goes public. There is a place for private commentary. For meetings during office hours. For comments that are for your eyes only. We simply ask whether there is a virtue in having professor think through the proprieties that attend to their response of students’ “work.” Again, sometimes silence is golden. Not always.
Let us remain with academic for a moment. Often said of blogs is that they are personal. Academic means, what? That writing is impersonal? Is that true? Some change in perspective is necessary to see things as they are. Too close and we are blind. Too far and we are blind. We need the right distance. The right lens. The right focus. Let the metaphor be what you wish. I know you know what I say.
Now, let us now ask if there is an objective gaze of college prose. Is there? Is there such a gaze? Were we attending to the rules of grammar, I suppose so. This piece is an example of incomplete sentences. It is filled with quite deliberate and some no so deliberate mistakes. By those mistakes alone should we say that this is poor writing, bad prose? Could we make this into good writing by correcting my grammatical mistakes? Style? Good writers who are read by literary publics are not usually college professors. Plato would not get tenure for his Republic, Jane Austen for her Persuasion, Friedrich Nietzsche for his Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Words that change our perception of the universe are usually written by freaks in freakish ways. Some might protest: “They are the greats!” You aren’t. Without a doubt, true. Understanding my own persistent and indubitable mediocrity does not obscure the fact that the “great” were never great in their own lifetime. Most of them did not make a living by their prose. Not a few were vilified by the established authorities. No one knows his or her own worth in a lifetime.
Leaving aside for the moment the objective gaze at the idea of “college essay,” let us ask whether there is a virtue having students express their own point of view? We college professor and administrators say we want students to “think for themselves.” What does that mean? How do they “think for themselves?” Occasions for a chat sipping a beer with friends, or coffee with a professor, intimate moments of carefree talk are among events small schools such as ours provide. You don’t need a small school for that. We encourage them and going “live” is not to make a small college into a MOOC. Schools such as ours will remain, changed to be sure, but remain for precisely those features that no technology can wholly capture or duplicate.
But to return. Self-knowledge and self-awareness are some part of what it means to think for “our-selves.” Those parts aren’t whole. Aren’t we often mistaken. Deluded. Say right now? And not infrequently by our own thinking, right? Writing our errors howsoever understood – be they truths, opinions, conjectures, and other events we call “thinking,” – may allow us to see what we had not seen in the absence of making them seen. Circular reasoning is not without purpose. Maybe public speaking – and let us make no mistake, writing as we do is public speaking – might we pause sufficiently to take stock of ourselves before putting word to computer screen? If not, could we “leverage” the blog to that end? And when we err in the “personal” we have others there to guide us back to some truth about ourselves.
Or maybe there is truth worth expressing in error. We ought to know where we are, where we stand, what we are, and surely these are personal. To experience one’s point of view is not the same as to indulge it. Awareness is not the same as thinking. Herein lies one of the important contributions of contemplation to learning. Not one bit of contemplation is self-indulgent. We don’t just simply divest ourselves of ourselves and by so doing write come up with the Truth. Along the way we ought to find our mode of thinking, our habits of thought, of mind, see them in the pattern of our words, stand back, reflect, discover our relation to things that we think are not “me,” and re-establish the right relationship to “them.” Dangerous and pernicious, is it not, to say to students at the outset: “divest yourselves of your cares, of your longings, of your hopes, of all sensibilities, and all sensations, for only then are you thinking?” Really? The most rigorous sciences do not uphold “a view from nowhere.” To allow students to come back to themselves is not to counsel, “A view from anywhere you wish.” We owe each other a humane acknowledgement of one another’s person and point of view. That is only a beginning, undoubtedly the beginning.
The day arrived. I believed it would. Contemplation is such power. Not as we want it. Nor can we have it. Contemplation is a curious form of trust. Out of the silence we come. We … in other words, none other than existence. I heard the words of a meditation teacher yesterday. Not as eloquently as he, his words as I remember them. The mind takes an object. By some necessity mind needs an object. Mind in its nature cannot hold two objects together simultaneously (proposition needing no epistemology but your own experience, practice). Mind becomes the object. Which is to say, I become what is in “my” so-called mind. Contemplative Studies is so exciting. The life-of-the-mind so-called now includes room for mind, for our observation of mind, for awareness uncluttered by thoughts and theories about awareness.
The day arrived. The Pol 265 and 266 trains arrived. Out came each of you. Finding each other in the busy Grand Central Station of the liberal arts and sciences, spontaneous conversations, greetings, laughs, smiles and hugs erupted on these our http://www.wordpress.com experiments. So happily have I given up on mastering this or that pedagogy. The seductions of methods and models. Teaching is listening. A signpost offered here and there. Accepting the full range of emotions that come from a class of students stirred, curious, and then out spoken. So often confined by “student.” We “teachers” too no less confined. Let us not forget that, everything that happened and we made happen sprung on this soil, in these buildings, in our conversations, only because the conditions made it possible. Again, we shall not flatter ourselves. Learning of the kind we are devoted too takes courage. We won’t huddle in a corner and protect some “contemplative” corner. Doing so breeds distrust. Distrust anger. Anger hate. And then contempt. No one is left unscathed when contempt reigns. Of the torments that afflict us, perhaps no other makes us suffer as much as this. I know. Who doesn’t?
Keeping pace with twenty essays set these achy bones alight. I will run and run with you until I cannot run anymore. Your exertions no less than mine, I discovered that as much as I hoped to write for, with, and to each of you (and I will, trust me, in due course), I have not done so because it takes weeks to become well acquainted with another’s word. To tell the truth, years. Never. We so easily give a paper over and so easily return it. Let us pause. Let our writing emerge, fragmentary if need be. Let us return to it. Allow disparate parts to be. Blogs are not the sum of our writing, testing, studying, learning. One useful way or form whose possibilities in academic setting are as yet unpracticed.
Those harboring doubts of our social media + liberal arts and science union should know. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Storify, Spotify, Paper.li … oh my, we are everywhere, social media as we have practiced it has not created a less cohesive class, less humane, less attentive to “communication” (such an infelicitous word for the liberal arts, as infelicitous as “human resources”). To the contrary. We know each other’s songs, share pictures, articles from this vast new frontier of digitized text, not a single pixel of “academic integrity” lost. These are not tools. We are in the midst of a transformation — changing knowledge itself, how we “use” it, and more importantly, how we receive and embody it. Which is to say, I change, you change. We are a species of technology irreducible to synapses though assuredly in need of synapses.
I trust our endeavor. Public speaking of this kind is a delicate art. To reflect on what we know and turn that into something known to another. Educating and edifying, our readers now not the “prof” huddled away in some corner of an office, slashing here and there with red pen. No writing for that sole “prof” alone, he or she the only authority of the class, texts, and contexts. Print our the blog. Add another “paper.” Myriad forms combined. Each adapted to its place and context. No course has to be some other course. Slavish assessments of our productivity will kill creativity. If we want to get in the business of counting what we’re doing here, I say count office hours. Yesterday from 10 a.m. to 4:20 p.m. An hour of mediation, then home. Family dinner, and a card game. We played “B.S.” and for the record I lost. Sauntering up steps to my study at 9 p.m. (I start my days at 3 a.m.) to pictures of our day at the Commons. Refreshed.
We’ll meet often over the weeks to come, more now that these essays come to life. I will do as I am able, say what needs to be said for our eyes and ears only, and prompt you here to write, write, live, enjoy, and to remember the paradox of our endeavor. Teaching is if it is as Socrates said it is, is midwifery. Teachers don’t plant. The seed is yours. The conception is yours. The labor pains too. Bear them well. I’ll be there taking pictures of snowmen and dancers.
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